shown into the aristocratic part of the house--that is, upstairs. After
the priests, Nazaritch, the manager of the factory, came to pay his
visit, and then the factory doctor; then Mishenka announced the
inspector of the elementary schools. Visitors kept arriving.
When there was a moment free, Anna Akimovna sat down in a deep arm-chair
in the drawing-room, and shutting her eyes, thought that her loneliness
was quite natural because she had not married and never would marry. . .
. But that was not her fault. Fate itself had flung her out of the
simple working-class surroundings in which, if she could trust her
memory, she had felt so snug and at home, into these immense rooms,
where she could never think what to do with herself, and could not
understand why so many people kept passing before her eyes. What was
happening now seemed to her trivial, useless, since it did not and could
not give her happiness for one minute.
"If I could fall in love," she thought, stretching; the very thought of
this sent a rush of warmth to her heart. "And if I could escape from the
factory . . ." she mused, imagining how the weight of those factory
buildings, barracks, and schools would roll off her conscience, roll off
her mind. . . . Then she remembered her father, and thought if he had
lived longer he would certainly have married her to a working man--to
Pimenov, for instance. He would have told her to marry, and that would
have been all about it. And it would have been a good thing; then the
factory would have passed into capable hands.
She pictured his curly head, his bold profile, his delicate, ironical
lips and the strength, the tremendous strength, in his shoulders, in his
arms, in his chest, and the tenderness with which he had looked at her
watch that day.
"Well," she said, "it would have been all right. I would have married
him."
"Anna Akimovna," said Mishenka, coming noiselessly into the drawing-
room.
"How you frightened me!" she said, trembling all over. "What do you
want?"
"Anna Akimovna," he said, laying his hand on his heart and raising his
eyebrows, "you are my mistress and my benefactress, and no one but you
can tell me what I ought to do about marriage, for you are as good as a
mother to me. . . . But kindly forbid them to laugh and jeer at me
downstairs. They won't let me pass without it."
"How do they jeer at you?"
"They call me Mashenka's Mishenka."
"Pooh, what nonsense!" cried Anna Akimovna indignantly. "How stupid you
all are! What a stupid you are, Misha! How sick I am of you! I can't
bear the sight of you." III
Dinner
Just as the year before, the last to pay her visits were Krylin, an
actual civil councillor, and Lysevitch, a well-known barrister. It was
already dark when they arrived. Krylin, a man of sixty, with a wide
mouth and with grey whiskers close to his ears, with a face like a lynx,
was wearing a uniform with an Anna ribbon, and white trousers. He held
Anna Akimovna's hand in both of his for a long while, looked intently in
her face, moved his lips, and at last said, drawling upon one note:
"I used to respect your uncle . . . and your father, and enjoyed the
privilege of their friendship. Now I feel it an agreeable duty, as you
see, to present my Christmas wishes to their honoured heiress in spite
of my infirmities and the distance I have to come. . . . And I am very
glad to see you in good health."
The lawyer Lysevitch, a tall, handsome fair man, with a slight
sprinkling of grey on his temples and beard, was distinguished by
exceptionally elegant manners; he walked with a swaying step, bowed as
it were reluctantly, and shrugged his shoulders as he talked, and all
this with an indolent grace, like a spoiled horse fresh from the stable.
He was well fed, extremely healthy, and very well off; on one occasion
he had won forty thousand roubles, but concealed the fact from his
friends. He was fond of good fare, especially cheese, truffles, and
grated radish with hemp oil; while in Paris he had eaten, so he said,
baked but unwashed guts. He spoke smoothly, fluently, without
hesitation, and only occasionally, for the sake of effect, permitted
himself to hesitate and snap his fingers as if picking up a word. He had
long ceased to believe in anything he had to say in the law courts, or
perhaps he did believe in it, but attached no kind of significance to
it; it had all so long been familiar, stale, ordinary. . . . He believed
in nothing but what was original and unusual. A copy-book moral in an
original form would move him to tears. Both his notebooks were filled
with extraordinary expressions which he had read in various authors; and
when he needed to look up any expression, he would search nervously in
both books, and usually failed to find it. Anna Akimovna's father had in
a good-humoured moment ostentatiously appointed him legal adviser in
matters concerning the factory, and had assigned him a salary of twelve
thousand roubles. The legal business of the factory had been confined to
two or three trivial actions for recovering debts, which Lysevitch
handed to his assistants.
Anna Akimovna knew that he had nothing to do at the factory, but she
could not dismiss him--she had not the moral courage; and besides, she
was used to him. He used to call himself her legal adviser, and his
salary, which he invariably sent for on the first of the month
punctually, he used to call "stern prose." Anna Akimovna knew that when,
after her father's death, the timber of her forest was sold for railway
sleepers, Lysevitch had made more than fifteen thousand out of the
transaction, and had shared it with Nazaritch. When first she found out
they had cheated her she had wept bitterly, but afterwards she had grown
used to it.
Wishing her a happy Christmas, and kissing both her hands, he looked her
up and down, and frowned.
"You mustn't," he said with genuine disappointment. "I have told you, my
dear, you mustn't!"
"What do you mean, Viktor Nikolaitch?"
"I have told you you mustn't get fat. All your family have an
unfortunate tendency to grow fat. You mustn't," he repeated in an
imploring voice, and kissed her hand. "You are so handsome! You are so
splendid! Here, your Excellency, let me introduce the one woman in the
world whom I have ever seriously loved."
"There is nothing surprising in that. To know Anna Akimovna at your age
and not to be in love with her, that would be impossible."
"I adore her," the lawyer continued with perfect sincerity, but with his
usual indolent grace. "I love her, but not because I am a man and she is
a woman. When I am with her I always feel as though she belongs to some
third sex, and I to a fourth, and we float away together into the domain
of the subtlest shades, and there we blend into the spectrum. Leconte de
Lisle defines such relations better than any one. He has a superb
passage, a marvellous passage. . . ."
Lysevitch rummaged in one notebook, then in the other, and, not finding
the quotation, subsided. They began talking of the weather, of the
opera, of the arrival, expected shortly, of Duse. Anna Akimovna
remembered that the year before Lysevitch and, she fancied, Krylin had
dined with her, and now when they were getting ready to go away, she
began with perfect sincerity pointing out to them in an imploring voice
that as they had no more visits to pay, they ought to remain to dinner
with her. After some hesitation the visitors agreed.
In addition to the family dinner, consisting of cabbage soup, sucking
pig, goose with apples, and so on, a so-called "French" or "chef's"
dinner used to be prepared in the kitchen on great holidays, in case any
visitor in the upper story wanted a meal. When they heard the clatter of
crockery in the dining-room, Lysevitch began to betray a noticeable
excitement; he rubbed his hands, shrugged his shoulders, screwed up his
eyes, and described with feeling what dinners her father and uncle used
to give at one time, and a marvellous matelote of turbots the cook here
could make: it was not a matelote, but a veritable revelation! He was
already gloating over the dinner, already eating it in imagination and
enjoying it. When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-
room, he tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his
mouth; he positively purred with pleasure. He munched loudly,
disgustingly, emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily
and rapacious.
The hors d'oeuvres were superb; among other things, there were fresh
white mushrooms stewed in cream, and sauce provençale made of fried
oysters and crayfish, strongly flavoured with some bitter pickles. The
dinner, consisting of elaborate holiday dishes, was excellent, and so
were the wines. Mishenka waited at table with enthusiasm. When he laid
some new dish on the table and lifted the shining cover, or poured out
the wine, he did it with the solemnity of a professor of black magic,
and, looking at his face and his movements suggesting the first figure
of a quadrille, the lawyer thought several times, "What a fool!"
After the third course Lysevitch said, turning to Anna Akimovna:
"The fin de siècle woman--I mean when she is young, and of course
wealthy--must be independent, clever, elegant, intellectual, bold, and a
little depraved. Depraved within limits, a little; for excess, you know,
is wearisome. You ought not to vegetate, my dear; you ought not to live
like every one else, but to get the full savour of life, and a slight
flavour of depravity is the sauce of life. Revel among flowers of
intoxicating fragrance, breathe the perfume of musk, eat hashish, and
best of all, love, love, love . . . . To begin with, in your place I
would set up seven lovers--one for each day of the week; and one I would
call Monday, one Tuesday, the third Wednesday, and so on, so that each
might know his day."
This conversation troubled Anna Akimovna; she ate nothing and only drank
a glass of wine.
"Let me speak at last," she said. "For myself personally, I can't
conceive of love without family life. I am lonely, lonely as the moon in
the sky, and a waning moon, too; and whatever you may say, I am
convinced, I feel that this waning can only be restored by love in its
ordinary sense. It seems to me that such love would define my duties, my
work, make clear my conception of life. I want from love peace of soul,
tranquillity; I want the very opposite of musk, and spiritualism, and
fin de siècle . . . in short"--she grew embarrassed--"a husband and
children."
"You want to be married? Well, you can do that, too," Lysevitch
assented. "You ought to have all experiences: marriage, and jealousy,
and the sweetness of the first infidelity, and even children. . . . But
make haste and live--make haste, my dear: time is passing; it won't
wait."
"Yes, I'll go and get married!" she said, looking angrily at his well-
fed, satisfied face. "I will marry in the simplest, most ordinary way
and be radiant with happiness. And, would you believe it, I will marry
some plain working man, some mechanic or draughtsman."
"There is no harm in that, either. The Duchess Josiana loved Gwinplin,
and that was permissible for her because she was a grand duchess.
Everything is permissible for you, too, because you are an exceptional
woman: if, my dear, you want to love a negro or an Arab, don't scruple;
send for a negro. Don't deny yourself anything. You ought to be as bold
as your desires; don't fall short of them."
"Can it be so hard to understand me?" Anna Akimovna asked with
amazement, and her eyes were bright with tears. "Understand, I have an
immense business on my hands--two thousand workmen, for whom I must
answer before God. The men who work for me grow blind and deaf. I am
afraid to go on like this; I am afraid! I am wretched, and you have the
cruelty to talk to me of negroes and . . . and you smile!" Anna Akimovna
brought her fist down on the table. "To go on living the life I am
living now, or to marry some one as idle and incompetent as myself,
would be a crime. I can't go on living like this," she said hotly, "I
cannot!"
"How handsome she is!" said Lysevitch, fascinated by her. "My God, how
handsome she is! But why are you angry, my dear? Perhaps I am wrong; but
surely you don't imagine that if, for the sake of ideas for which I have
the deepest respect, you renounce the joys of life and lead a dreary
existence, your workmen will be any the better for it? Not a scrap! No,
frivolity, frivolity!" he said decisively. "It's essential for you; it's
your duty to be frivolous and depraved! Ponder that, my dear, ponder
it."
Anna Akimovna was glad she had spoken out, and her spirits rose. She was
pleased she had spoken so well, and that her ideas were so fine and
just, and she was already convinced that if Pimenov, for instance, loved
her, she would marry him with pleasure.
Mishenka began to pour out champagne.
"You make me angry, Viktor Nikolaitch," she said, clinking glasses with
the lawyer. "It seems to me you give advice and know nothing of life
yourself. According to you, if a man be a mechanic or a draughtsman, he
is bound to be a peasant and an ignoramus! But they are the cleverest
people! Extraordinary people!"
"Your uncle and father . . . I knew them and respected them . . ."
Krylin said, pausing for emphasis (he had been sitting upright as a
post, and had been eating steadily the whole time), "were people of
considerable intelligence and . . . of lofty spiritual qualities."
"Oh, to be sure, we know all about their qualities," the lawyer
muttered, and asked permission to smoke.
When dinner was over Krylin was led away for a nap. Lysevitch finished
his cigar, and, staggering from repletion, followed Anna Akimovna into
her study. Cosy corners with photographs and fans on the walls, and the
inevitable pink or pale blue lanterns in the middle of the ceiling, he
did not like, as the expression of an insipid and unoriginal character;
besides, the memory of certain of his love affairs of which he was now
ashamed was associated with such lanterns. Anna Akimovna's study with
its bare walls and tasteless furniture pleased him exceedingly. It was
snug and comfortable for him to sit on a Turkish divan and look at Anna
Akimovna, who usually sat on the rug before the fire, clasping her knees
and looking into the fire and thinking of something; and at such moments
it seemed to him that her peasant Old Believer blood was stirring within
her.
Every time after dinner when coffee and liqueurs were handed, he grew
livelier and began telling her various bits of literary gossip. He spoke
with eloquence and inspiration, and was carried away by his own stories;
and she listened to him and thought every time that for such enjoyment
it was worth paying not only twelve thousand, but three times that sum,
and forgave him everything she disliked in him. He sometimes told her
the story of some tale or novel he had been reading, and then two or
three hours passed unnoticed like a minute. Now he began rather
dolefully in a failing voice with his eyes shut.
"It's ages, my dear, since I have read anything," he said when she asked
him to tell her something. "Though I do sometimes read Jules Verne."
"I was expecting you to tell me something new."
"H'm! . . . new," Lysevitch muttered sleepily, and he settled himself
further back in the corner of the sofa. "None of the new literature, my
dear, is any use for you or me. Of course, it is bound to be such as it
is, and to refuse to recognize it is to refuse to recognize --would mean
refusing to recognize the natural order of things, and I do recognize
it, but . . ." Lysevitch seemed to have fallen asleep. But a minute
later his voice was heard again:
"All the new literature moans and howls like the autumn wind in the
chimney. 'Ah, unhappy wretch! Ah, your life may be likened to a prison!
Ah, how damp and dark it is in your prison! Ah, you will certainly come
to ruin, and there is no chance of escape for you!' That's very fine,
but I should prefer a literature that would tell us how to escape from
prison. Of all contemporary writers, however, I prefer Maupassant."
Lysevitch opened his eyes. "A fine writer, a perfect writer!" Lysevitch
shifted in his seat. "A wonderful artist! A terrible, prodigious,
supernatural artist!" Lysevitch got up from the sofa and raised his
right arm. "Maupassant!" he said rapturously. "My dear, read Maupassant!
one page of his gives you more than all the riches of the earth! Every
line is a new horizon. The softest, tenderest impulses of the soul
alternate with violent tempestuous sensations; your soul, as though
under the weight of forty thousand atmospheres, is transformed into the
most insignificant little bit of some great thing of an undefined rosy
hue which I fancy, if one could put it on one's tongue, would yield a
pungent, voluptuous taste. What a fury of transitions, of motives, of
melodies! You rest peacefully on the lilies and the roses, and suddenly
a thought --a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought--swoops down upon
you like a locomotive, and bathes you in hot steam and deafens you with
its whistle. Read Maupassant, dear girl; I insist on it."
Lysevitch waved his arms and paced from corner to corner in violent
excitement.
"Yes, it is inconceivable," he pronounced, as though in despair; "his
last thing overwhelmed me, intoxicated me! But I am afraid you will not
care for it. To be carried away by it you must savour it, slowly suck
the juice from each line, drink it in. . . . You must drink it in! . .
."
After a long introduction, containing many words such as dæmonic
sensuality, a network of the most delicate nerves, simoom, crystal, and
so on, he began at last telling the story of the novel. He did not tell
the story so whimsically, but told it in minute detail, quoting from
memory whole descriptions and conversations; the characters of the novel
fascinated him, and to describe them he threw himself into attitudes,
changed the expression of his face and voice like a real actor. He
laughed with delight at one moment in a deep bass, and at another, on a
high shrill note, clasped his hands and clutched at his head with an
expression which suggested that it was just going to burst. Anna
Akimovna listened enthralled, though she had already read the novel, and
it seemed to her ever so much finer and more subtle in the lawyer's
version than in the book itself. He drew her attention to various
subtleties, and emphasized the felicitous expressions and the profound
thoughts, but she saw in it, only life, life, life and herself, as
though she had been a character in the novel. Her spirits rose, and she,
too, laughing and clasping her hands, thought that she could not go on
living such a life, that there was no need to have a wretched life when
one might have a splendid one. She remembered her words and thoughts at
dinner, and was proud of them; and when Pimenov suddenly rose up in her
imagination, she felt happy and longed for him to love her.
When he had finished the story, Lysevitch sat down on the sofa,
exhausted.
"How splendid you are! How handsome!" he began, a little while
afterwards in a faint voice as if he were ill. "I am happy near you,
dear girl, but why am I forty-two instead of thirty? Your tastes and
mine do not coincide: you ought to be depraved, and I have long passed
that phase, and want a love as delicate and immaterial as a ray of
sunshine--that is, from the point of view of a woman of your age, I am of
no earthly use."
In his own words, he loved Turgenev, the singer of virginal love and
purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape; but he loved
virginal love, not from knowledge but from hearsay, as something
abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured himself that he
loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ideally, though he did not know what
those words meant. But he felt comfortable, snug, warm. Anna Akimovna
seemed to him enchanting, original, and he imagined that the pleasant
sensation that was aroused in him by these surroundings was the very
thing that was called platonic love.
He laid his cheek on her hand and said in the tone commonly used in
coaxing little children:
"My precious, why have you punished me?"
"How? When?"
"I have had no Christmas present from you."
Anna Akimovna had never heard before of their sending a Christmas box to
the lawyer, and now she was at a loss how much to give him. But she must
give him something, for he was expecting it, though he looked at her
with eyes full of love.
"I suppose Nazaritch forgot it," she said, "but it is not too late to
set it right."
She suddenly remembered the fifteen hundred she had received the day
before, which was now lying in the toilet drawer in her bedroom. And
when she brought that ungrateful money and gave it to the lawyer, and he
put it in his coat pocket with indolent grace, the whole incident passed
off charmingly and naturally. The sudden reminder of a Christmas box and
this fifteen hundred was not unbecoming in Lysevitch.
"Merci," he said, and kissed her finger.
Krylin came in with blissful, sleepy face, but without his decorations.
Lysevitch and he stayed a little longer and drank a glass of tea each,
and began to get ready to go. Anna Akimovna was a little embarrassed. .
. . She had utterly forgotten in what department Krylin served, and
whether she had to give him money or not; and if she had to, whether to
give it now or send it afterwards in an envelope.
"Where does he serve?" she whispered to Lysevitch.
"Goodness knows," muttered Lysevitch, yawning.
She reflected that if Krylin used to visit her father and her uncle and
respected them, it was probably not for nothing: apparently he had been
charitable at their expense, serving in some charitable institution. As
she said good-bye she slipped three hundred roubles into his hand; he
seemed taken aback, and looked at her for a minute in silence with his
pewtery eyes, but then seemed to understand and said:
"The receipt, honoured Anna Akimovna, you can only receive on the New
Year."
Lysevitch had become utterly limp and heavy, and he staggered when
Mishenka put on his overcoat.
As he went downstairs he looked like a man in the last stage of
exhaustion, and it was evident that he would drop asleep as soon as he
got into his sledge.
"Your Excellency," he said languidly to Krylin, stopping in the middle
of the staircase, "has it ever happened to you to experience a feeling
as though some unseen force were drawing you out longer and longer? You
are drawn out and turn into the finest wire. Subjectively this finds
expression in a curious voluptuous feeling which is impossible to
compare with anything."
Anna Akimovna, standing at the top of the stairs, saw each of them give
Mishenka a note.
"Good-bye! Come again!" she called to them, and ran into her bedroom.
She quickly threw off her dress, that she was weary of already, put on a
dressing-gown, and ran downstairs; and as she ran downstairs she laughed
and thumped with her feet like a school-boy; she had a great desire for
mischief. IV
Evening
Auntie, in a loose print blouse, Varvarushka and two old women, were
sitting in the dining-room having supper. A big piece of salt meat, a
ham, and various savouries, were lying on the table before them, and
clouds of steam were rising from the meat, which looked particularly fat
and appetizing. Wine was not served on the lower story, but they made up
for it with a great number of spirits and home-made liqueurs.
Agafyushka, the fat, white-skinned, well-fed cook, was standing with her
arms crossed in the doorway and talking to the old women, and the dishes
were being handed by the downstairs Masha, a dark girl with a crimson
ribbon in her hair. The old women had had enough to eat before the
morning was over, and an hour before supper had had tea and buns, and so
they were now eating with effort--as it were, from a sense of duty.
"Oh, my girl!" sighed Auntie, as Anna Akimovna ran into the dining-room
and sat down beside her. "You've frightened me to death!"
Every one in the house was pleased when Anna Akimovna was in good
spirits and played pranks; this always reminded them that the old men
were dead and that the old women had no authority in the house, and any
one could do as he liked without any fear of being sharply called to
account for it. Only the two old women glanced askance at Anna Akimovna
with amazement: she was humming, and it was a sin to sing at table.