year. She vowed eternal love, cried and begged me to take her away with
me. I repeatedly took her to the window to look at her face in the
moonlight, and she seemed to me a lovely dream, and I made haste to hold
her tight to convince myself of the truth of it. It was long since I had
known such raptures. . . . Yet somewhere far away at the bottom of my
heart I felt an awkwardness, and I was ill at ease. In her love for me
there was something incongruous and burdensome, just as in Dmitri
Petrovitch's friendship. It was a great, serious passion with tears and
vows, and I wanted nothing serious in it--no tears, no vows, no talk of
the future. Let that moonlight night flash through our lives like a
meteor and--basta!
At three o'clock she went out of my room, and, while I was standing in
the doorway, looking after her, at the end of the corridor Dmitri
Petrovitch suddenly made his appearance; she started and stood aside to
let him pass, and her whole figure was expressive of repulsion. He gave
a strange smile, coughed, and came into my room.
"I forgot my cap here yesterday," he said without looking at me.
He found it and, holding it in both hands, put it on his head; then he
looked at my confused face, at my slippers, and said in a strange, husky
voice unlike his own:
"I suppose it must be my fate that I should understand nothing. . . . If
you understand anything, I congratulate you. It's all darkness before my
eyes."
And he went out, clearing his throat. Afterwards from the window I saw
him by the stable, harnessing the horses with his own hands. His hands
were trembling, he was in nervous haste and kept looking round at the
house; probably he was feeling terror. Then he got into the gig, and,
with a strange expression as though afraid of being pursued, lashed the
horses.
Shortly afterwards I set off, too. The sun was already rising, and the
mist of the previous day clung timidly to the bushes and the hillocks.
On the box of the carriage was sitting Forty Martyrs; he had already
succeeded in getting drunk and was muttering tipsy nonsense.
"I am a free man," he shouted to the horses. "Ah, my honeys, I am a
nobleman in my own right, if you care to know!"
The terror of Dmitri Petrovitch, the thought of whom I could not get out
of my head, infected me. I thought of what had happened and could make
nothing of it. I looked at the rooks, and it seemed so strange and
terrible that they were flying.
"Why have I done this?" I kept asking myself in bewilderment and
despair. "Why has it turned out like this and not differently? To whom
and for what was it necessary that she should love me in earnest, and
that he should come into my room to fetch his cap? What had a cap to do
with it?"
I set off for Petersburg that day, and I have not seen Dmitri Petrovitch
nor his wife since. I am told that they are still living together.
A WOMAN'S KINGDOM I
Christmas Eve
HERE was a thick roll of notes. It came from the bailiff at the forest
villa; he wrote that he was sending fifteen hundred roubles, which he
had been awarded as damages, having won an appeal. Anna Akimovna
disliked and feared such words as "awarded damages" and "won the suit."
She knew that it was impossible to do without the law, but for some
reason, whenever Nazaritch, the manager of the factory, or the bailiff
of her villa in the country, both of whom frequently went to law, used
to win lawsuits of some sort for her benefit, she always felt uneasy
and, as it were, ashamed. On this occasion, too, she felt uneasy and
awkward, and wanted to put that fifteen hundred roubles further away
that it might be out of her sight.
She thought with vexation that other girls of her age--she was in her
twenty-sixth year--were now busy looking after their households, were
weary and would sleep sound, and would wake up tomorrow morning in
holiday mood; many of them had long been married and had children. Only
she, for some reason, was compelled to sit like an old woman over these
letters, to make notes upon them, to write answers, then to do nothing
the whole evening till midnight, but wait till she was sleepy; and
tomorrow they would all day long be coming with Christmas greetings and
asking for favours; and the day after tomorrow there would certainly be
some scandal at the factory--some one would be beaten or would die of
drinking too much vodka, and she would be fretted by pangs of
conscience; and after the holidays Nazaritch would turn off some twenty
of the workpeople for absence from work, and all of the twenty would
hang about at the front door, without their caps on, and she would be
ashamed to go out to them, and they would be driven away like dogs. And
all her acquaintances would say behind her back, and write to her in
anonymous letters, that she was a millionaire and exploiter --that she
was devouring other men's lives and sucking the blood of the workers.
Here there lay a heap of letters read through and laid aside already.
They were all begging letters. They were from people who were hungry,
drunken, dragged down by large families, sick, degraded, despised . . .
. Anna Akimovna had already noted on each letter, three roubles to be
paid to one, five to another; these letters would go the same day to the
office, and next the distribution of assistance would take place, or, as
the clerks used to say, the beasts would be fed.
They would distribute also in small sums four hundred and seventy
roubles--the interest on a sum bequeathed by the late Akim Ivanovitch for
the relief of the poor and needy. There would be a hideous crush. From
the gates to the doors of the office there would stretch a long file of
strange people with brutal faces, in rags, numb with cold, hungry and
already drunk, in husky voices calling down blessings upon Anna
Akimovna, their benefactress, and her parents: those at the back would
press upon those in front, and those in front would abuse them with bad
language. The clerk would get tired of the noise, the swearing, and the
sing-song whining and blessing; would fly out and give some one a box on
the ear to the delight of all. And her own people, the factory hands,
who received nothing at Christmas but their wages, and had already spent
every farthing of it, would stand in the middle of the yard, looking on
and laughing--some enviously, others ironically.
"Merchants, and still more their wives, are fonder of beggars than they
are of their own workpeople," thought Anna Akimovna. "It's always so."
Her eye fell upon the roll of money. It would be nice to distribute that
hateful, useless money among the workpeople tomorrow, but it did not do
to give the workpeople anything for nothing, or they would demand it
again next time. And what would be the good of fifteen hundred roubles
when there were eighteen hundred workmen in the factory besides their
wives and children? Or she might, perhaps, pick out one of the writers
of those begging letters-- some luckless man who had long ago lost all
hope of anything better, and give him the fifteen hundred. The money
would come upon the poor creature like a thunder-clap, and perhaps for
the first time in his life he would feel happy. This idea struck Anna
Akimovna as original and amusing, and it fascinated her. She took one
letter at random out of the pile and read it. Some petty official called
Tchalikov had long been out of a situation, was ill, and living in
Gushtchin's Buildings; his wife was in consumption, and he had five
little girls. Anna Akimovna knew well the four-storeyed house,
Gushtchin's Buildings, in which Tchalikov lived. Oh, it was a horrid,
foul, unhealthy house!
"Well, I will give it to that Tchalikov," she decided. "I won't send it;
I had better take it myself to prevent unnecessary talk. Yes," she
reflected, as she put the fifteen hundred roubles in her pocket, "and
I'll have a look at them, and perhaps I can do something for the little
girls."
She felt light-hearted; she rang the bell and ordered the horses to be
brought round.
When she got into the sledge it was past six o'clock in the evening. The
windows in all the blocks of buildings were brightly lighted up, and
that made the huge courtyard seem very dark: at the gates, and at the
far end of the yard near the warehouses and the workpeople's barracks,
electric lamps were gleaming.
Anna Akimovna disliked and feared those huge dark buildings, warehouses,
and barracks where the workmen lived. She had only once been in the main
building since her father's death. The high ceilings with iron girders;
the multitude of huge, rapidly turning wheels, connecting straps and
levers; the shrill hissing; the clank of steel; the rattle of the
trolleys; the harsh puffing of steam; the faces--pale, crimson, or black
with coal-dust; the shirts soaked with sweat; the gleam of steel, of
copper, and of fire; the smell of oil and coal; and the draught, at
times very hot and at times very cold--gave her an impression of hell. It
seemed to her as though the wheels, the levers, and the hot hissing
cylinders were trying to tear themselves away from their fastenings to
crush the men, while the men, not hearing one another, ran about with
anxious faces, and busied themselves about the machines, trying to stop
their terrible movement. They showed Anna Akimovna something and
respectfully explained it to her. She remembered how in the forge a
piece of red-hot iron was pulled out of the furnace; and how an old man
with a strap round his head, and another, a young man in a blue shirt
with a chain on his breast, and an angry face, probably one of the
foremen, struck the piece of iron with hammers; and how the golden
sparks had been scattered in all directions; and how, a little
afterwards, they had dragged out a huge piece of sheet-iron with a
clang. The old man had stood erect and smiled, while the young man had
wiped his face with his sleeve and explained something to her. And she
remembered, too, how in another department an old man with one eye had
been filing a piece of iron, and how the iron filings were scattered
about; and how a red-haired man in black spectacles, with holes in his
shirt, had been working at a lathe, making something out of a piece of
steel: the lathe roared and hissed and squeaked, and Anna Akimovna felt
sick at the sound, and it seemed as though they were boring into her
ears. She looked, listened, did not understand, smiled graciously, and
felt ashamed. To get hundreds of thousands of roubles from a business
which one does not understand and cannot like--how strange it is!
And she had not once been in the workpeople's barracks. There, she was
told, it was damp; there were bugs, debauchery, anarchy. It was an
astonishing thing: a thousand roubles were spent annually on keeping the
barracks in good order, yet, if she were to believe the anonymous
letters, the condition of the workpeople was growing worse and worse
every year.
"There was more order in my father's day," thought Anna Akimovna, as she
drove out of the yard, "because he had been a workman himself. I know
nothing about it and only do silly things."
She felt depressed again, and was no longer glad that she had come, and
the thought of the lucky man upon whom fifteen hundred roubles would
drop from heaven no longer struck her as original and amusing. To go to
some Tchalikov or other, when at home a business worth a million was
gradually going to pieces and being ruined, and the workpeople in the
barracks were living worse than convicts, meant doing something silly
and cheating her conscience. Along the highroad and across the fields
near it, workpeople from the neighbouring cotton and paper factories
were walking towards the lights of the town. There was the sound of talk
and laughter in the frosty air. Anna Akimovna looked at the women and
young people, and she suddenly felt a longing for a plain rough life
among a crowd. She recalled vividly that far-away time when she used to
be called Anyutka, when she was a little girl and used to lie under the
same quilt with her mother, while a washerwoman who lodged with them
used to wash clothes in the next room; while through the thin walls
there came from the neighbouring flats sounds of laughter, swearing,
children's crying, the accordion, and the whirr of carpenters' lathes
and sewing-machines; while her father, Akim Ivanovitch, who was clever
at almost every craft, would be soldering something near the stove, or
drawing or planing, taking no notice whatever of the noise and
stuffiness. And she longed to wash, to iron, to run to the shop and the
tavern as she used to do every day when she lived with her mother. She
ought to have been a work-girl and not the factory owner! Her big house
with its chandeliers and pictures; her footman Mishenka, with his glossy
moustache and swallowtail coat; the devout and dignified Varvarushka,
and smooth-tongued Agafyushka; and the young people of both sexes who
came almost every day to ask her for money, and with whom she always for
some reason felt guilty; and the clerks, the doctors, and the ladies who
were charitable at her expense, who flattered her and secretly despised
her for her humble origin-- how wearisome and alien it all was to her!
Here was the railway crossing and the city gate; then came houses
alternating with kitchen gardens; and at last the broad street where
stood the renowned Gushtchin's Buildings. The street, usually quiet, was
now on Christmas Eve full of life and movement. The eating-houses and
beer-shops were noisy. If some one who did not belong to that quarter
but lived in the centre of the town had driven through the street now,
he would have noticed nothing but dirty, drunken, and abusive people;
but Anna Akimovna, who had lived in those parts all her life, was
constantly recognizing in the crowd her own father or mother or uncle.
Her father was a soft fluid character, a little fantastical, frivolous,
and irresponsible. He did not care for money, respectability, or power;
he used to say that a working man had no time to keep the holy-days and
go to church; and if it had not been for his wife, he would probably
never have gone to confession, taken the sacrament or kept the fasts.
While her uncle, Ivan Ivanovitch, on the contrary, was like flint; in
everything relating to religion, politics, and morality, he was harsh
and relentless, and kept a strict watch, not only over himself, but also
over all his servants and acquaintances. God forbid that one should go
into his room without crossing oneself before the ikon! The luxurious
mansion in which Anna Akimovna now lived he had always kept locked up,
and only opened it on great holidays for important visitors, while he
lived himself in the office, in a little room covered with ikons. He had
leanings towards the Old Believers, and was continually entertaining
priests and bishops of the old ritual, though he had been christened,
and married, and had buried his wife in accordance with the Orthodox
rites. He disliked Akim, his only brother and his heir, for his
frivolity, which he called simpleness and folly, and for his
indifference to religion. He treated him as an inferior, kept him in the
position of a workman, paid him sixteen roubles a month. Akim addressed
his brother with formal respect, and on the days of asking forgiveness,
he and his wife and daughter bowed down to the ground before him. But
three years before his death Ivan Ivanovitch had drawn closer to his
brother, forgave his shortcomings, and ordered him to get a governess
for Anyutka.
There was a dark, deep, evil-smelling archway under Gushtchin's
Buildings; there was a sound of men coughing near the walls. Leaving the
sledge in the street, Anna Akimovna went in at the gate and there
inquired how to get to No. 46 to see a clerk called Tchalikov. She was
directed to the furthest door on the right in the third story. And in
the courtyard and near the outer door, and even on the stairs, there was
still the same loathsome smell as under the archway. In Anna Akimovna's
childhood, when her father was a simple workman, she used to live in a
building like that, and afterwards, when their circumstances were
different, she had often visited them in the character of a Lady
Bountiful. The narrow stone staircase with its steep dirty steps, with
landings at every story; the greasy swinging lanterns; the stench; the
troughs, pots, and rags on the landings near the doors,--all this had
been familiar to her long ago. . . . One door was open, and within could
be seen Jewish tailors in caps, sewing. Anna Akimovna met people on the
stairs, but it never entered her head that people might be rude to her.
She was no more afraid of peasants or workpeople, drunk or sober, than
of her acquaintances of the educated class.
There was no entry at No. 46; the door opened straight into the kitchen.
As a rule the dwellings of workmen and mechanics smell of varnish, tar,
hides, smoke, according to the occupation of the tenant; the dwellings
of persons of noble or official class who have come to poverty may be
known by a peculiar rancid, sour smell. This disgusting smell enveloped
Anna Akimovna on all sides, and as yet she was only on the threshold. A
man in a black coat, no doubt Tchalikov himself, was sitting in a corner
at the table with his back to the door, and with him were five little
girls. The eldest, a broad-faced thin girl with a comb in her hair,
looked about fifteen, while the youngest, a chubby child with hair that
stood up like a hedge-hog, was not more than three. All the six were
eating. Near the stove stood a very thin little woman with a yellow
face, far gone in pregnancy. She was wearing a skirt and a white blouse,
and had an oven fork in her hand.
"I did not expect you to be so disobedient, Liza," the man was saying
reproachfully. "Fie, fie, for shame! Do you want papa to whip you--eh?"
Seeing an unknown lady in the doorway, the thin woman started, and put
down the fork.
"Vassily Nikititch!" she cried, after a pause, in a hollow voice, as
though she could not believe her eyes.
The man looked round and jumped up. He was a flat-chested, bony man with
narrow shoulders and sunken temples. His eyes were small and hollow with
dark rings round them, he had a wide mouth, and a long nose like a
bird's beak--a little bit bent to the right. His beard was parted in the
middle, his moustache was shaven, and this made him look more like a
hired footman than a government clerk.
"Does Mr. Tchalikov live here?" asked Anna Akimovna.
"Yes, madam," Tchalikov answered severely, but immediately recognizing
Anna Akimovna, he cried: "Anna Akimovna!" and all at once he gasped and
clasped his hands as though in terrible alarm. "Benefactress!"
With a moan he ran to her, grunting inarticulately as though he were
paralyzed--there was cabbage on his beard and he smelt of vodka--pressed
his forehead to her muff, and seemed as though he were in a swoon.
"Your hand, your holy hand!" he brought out breathlessly. "It's a dream,
a glorious dream! Children, awaken me!"
He turned towards the table and said in a sobbing voice, shaking his
fists:
"Providence has heard us! Our saviour, our angel, has come! We are
saved! Children, down on your knees! on your knees!"
Madame Tchalikov and the little girls, except the youngest one, began
for some reason rapidly clearing the table.
"You wrote that your wife was very ill," said Anna Akimovna, and she
felt ashamed and annoyed. "I am not going to give them the fifteen
hundred," she thought.
"Here she is, my wife," said Tchalikov in a thin feminine voice, as
though his tears had gone to his head. "Here she is, unhappy creature!
With one foot in the grave! But we do not complain, madam. Better death
than such a life. Better die, unhappy woman!"
"Why is he playing these antics?" thought Anna Akimovna with annoyance.
"One can see at once he is used to dealing with merchants."
"Speak to me like a human being," she said. "I don't care for farces.''
"Yes, madam; five bereaved children round their mother's coffin with
funeral candles--that's a farce? Eh?" said Tchalikov bitterly, and turned
away.
"Hold your tongue," whispered his wife, and she pulled at his sleeve.
"The place has not been tidied up, madam," she said, addressing Anna
Akimovna; "please excuse it . . . you know what it is where there are
children. A crowded hearth, but harmony."
"I am not going to give them the fifteen hundred," Anna Akimovna thought
again.
And to escape as soon as possible from these people and from the sour
smell, she brought out her purse and made up her mind to leave them
twenty-five roubles, not more; but she suddenly felt ashamed that she
had come so far and disturbed people for so little.
"If you give me paper and ink, I will write at once to a doctor who is a
friend of mine to come and see you," she said, flushing red. "He is a
very good doctor. And I will leave you some money for medicine."
Madame Tchalikov was hastening to wipe the table.
"It's messy here! What are you doing?" hissed Tchalikov, looking at her
wrathfully. "Take her to the lodger's room! I make bold to ask you,
madam, to step into the lodger's room," he said, addressing Anna
Akimovna. "It's clean there."
"Osip Ilyitch told us not to go into his room!" said one of the little
girls, sternly.
But they had already led Anna Akimovna out of the kitchen, through a
narrow passage room between two bedsteads: it was evident from the
arrangement of the beds that in one two slept lengthwise, and in the
other three slept across the bed. In the lodger's room, that came next,
it really was clean. A neat-looking bed with a red woollen quilt, a
pillow in a white pillow-case, even a slipper for the watch, a table
covered with a hempen cloth and on it, an inkstand of milky-looking
glass, pens, paper, photographs in frames-- everything as it ought to be;
and another table for rough work, on which lay tidily arranged a
watchmaker's tools and watches taken to pieces. On the walls hung
hammers, pliers, awls, chisels, nippers, and so on, and there were three
hanging clocks which were ticking; one was a big clock with thick
weights, such as one sees in eating-houses.
As she sat down to write the letter, Anna Akimovna saw facing her on the
table the photographs of her father and of herself. That surprised her.
"Who lives here with you?" she asked.
"Our lodger, madam, Pimenov. He works in your factory."
"Oh, I thought he must be a watchmaker."
"He repairs watches privately, in his leisure hours. He is an amateur."
After a brief silence during which nothing could be heard but the
ticking of the clocks and the scratching of the pen on the paper,
Tchalikov heaved a sigh and said ironically, with indignation:
"It's a true saying: gentle birth and a grade in the service won't put a
coat on your back. A cockade in your cap and a noble title, but nothing
to eat. To my thinking, if any one of humble class helps the poor he is
much more of a gentleman than any Tchalikov who has sunk into poverty
and vice."
To flatter Anna Akimovna, he uttered a few more disparaging phrases
about his gentle birth, and it was evident that he was humbling himself
because he considered himself superior to her. Meanwhile she had
finished her letter and had sealed it up. The letter would be thrown
away and the money would not be spent on medicine--that she knew, but she
put twenty-five roubles on the table all the same, and after a moment's
thought, added two more red notes. She saw the wasted, yellow hand of
Madame Tchalikov, like the claw of a hen, dart out and clutch the money
tight.
"You have graciously given this for medicine," said Tchalikov in a
quivering voice, "but hold out a helping hand to me also . . . and the
children!" he added with a sob. "My unhappy children! I am not afraid
for myself; it is for my daughters I fear! It's the hydra of vice that I
fear!"
Trying to open her purse, the catch of which had gone wrong, Anna
Akimovna was confused and turned red. She felt ashamed that people
should be standing before her, looking at her hands and waiting, and
most likely at the bottom of their hearts laughing at her. At that
instant some one came into the kitchen and stamped his feet, knocking
the snow off.
"The lodger has come in," said Madame Tchalikov.