sugary sweetness. "Our precious jewel! The people, the people that have
come to-day to look at our queen. Lord have mercy upon us! Generals, and
officers and gentlemen. . . . I kept looking out of window and counting
and counting till I gave it up."
"I'd as soon they did not come at all," said Auntie; she looked sadly at
her niece and added: "They only waste the time for my poor orphan girl."
Anna Akimovna felt hungry, as she had eaten nothing since the morning.
They poured her out some very bitter liqueur; she drank it off, and
tasted the salt meat with mustard, and thought it extraordinarily nice.
Then the downstairs Masha brought in the turkey, the pickled apples and
the gooseberries. And that pleased her, too. There was only one thing
that was disagreeable: there was a draught of hot air from the tiled
stove; it was stiflingly close and every one's cheeks were burning.
After supper the cloth was taken off and plates of peppermint biscuits,
walnuts, and raisins were brought in.
"You sit down, too . . . no need to stand there!" said Auntie to the
cook.
Agafyushka sighed and sat down to the table; Masha set a wineglass of
liqueur before her, too, and Anna Akimovna began to feel as though
Agafyushka's white neck were giving out heat like the stove. They were
all talking of how difficult it was nowadays to get married, and saying
that in old days, if men did not court beauty, they paid attention to
money, but now there was no making out what they wanted; and while
hunchbacks and cripples used to be left old maids, nowadays men would
not have even the beautiful and wealthy. Auntie began to set this down
to immorality, and said that people had no fear of God, but she suddenly
remembered that Ivan Ivanitch, her brother, and Varvarushka--both people
of holy life--had feared God, but all the same had had children on the
sly, and had sent them to the Foundling Asylum. She pulled herself up
and changed the conversation, telling them about a suitor she had once
had, a factory hand, and how she had loved him, but her brothers had
forced her to marry a widower, an ikon-painter, who, thank God, had died
two years after. The downstairs Masha sat down to the table, too, and
told them with a mysterious air that for the last week some unknown man
with a black moustache, in a great-coat with an astrachan collar, had
made his appearance every morning in the yard, had stared at the windows
of the big house, and had gone on further-- to the buildings; the man was
all right, nice-looking.
All this conversation made Anna Akimovna suddenly long to be married
--long intensely, painfully; she felt as though she would give half her
life and all her fortune only to know that upstairs there was a man who
was closer to her than any one in the world, that he loved her warmly
and was missing her; and the thought of such closeness, ecstatic and
inexpressible in words, troubled her soul. And the instinct of youth and
health flattered her with lying assurances that the real poetry of life
was not over but still to come, and she believed it, and leaning back in
her chair (her hair fell down as she did so), she began laughing, and,
looking at her, the others laughed, too. And it was a long time before
this causeless laughter died down in the dining-room.
She was informed that the Stinging Beetle had come. This was a pilgrim
woman called Pasha or Spiridonovna--a thin little woman of fifty, in a
black dress with a white kerchief, with keen eyes, sharp nose, and a
sharp chin; she had sly, viperish eyes and she looked as though she
could see right through every one. Her lips were shaped like a heart.
Her viperishness and hostility to every one had earned her the nickname
of the Stinging Beetle.
Going into the dining-room without looking at any one, she made for the
ikons and chanted in a high voice "Thy Holy Birth," then she sang "The
Virgin today gives birth to the Son," then "Christ is born," then she
turned round and bent a piercing gaze upon all of them.
"A happy Christmas," she said, and she kissed Anna Akimovna on the
shoulder. "It's all I could do, all I could do to get to you, my kind
friends." She kissed Auntie on the shoulder. "I should have come to you
this morning, but I went in to some good people to rest on the way.
'Stay, Spiridonovna, stay,' they said, and I did not notice that evening
was coming on."
As she did not eat meat, they gave her salmon and caviare. She ate
looking from under her eyelids at the company, and drank three glasses
of vodka. When she had finished she said a prayer and bowed down to Anna
Akimovna's feet.
They began to play a game of "kings," as they had done the year before,
and the year before that, and all the servants in both stories crowded
in at the doors to watch the game. Anna Akimovna fancied she caught a
glimpse once or twice of Mishenka, with a patronizing smile on his face,
among the crowd of peasant men and women. The first to be king was
Stinging Beetle, and Anna Akimovna as the soldier paid her tribute; and
then Auntie was king and Anna Akimovna was peasant, which excited
general delight, and Agafyushka was prince, and was quite abashed with
pleasure. Another game was got up at the other end of the table--played
by the two Mashas, Varvarushka, and the sewing-maid Marfa Ptrovna, who
was waked on purpose to play "kings," and whose face looked cross and
sleepy.
While they were playing they talked of men, and of how difficult it was
to get a good husband nowadays, and which state was to be preferred--that
of an old maid or a widow.
"You are a handsome, healthy, sturdy lass," said Stinging Beetle to Anna
Akimovna. "But I can't make out for whose sake you are holding back."
"What's to be done if nobody will have me?"
"Or maybe you have taken a vow to remain a maid?" Stinging Beetle went
on, as though she did not hear. "Well, that's a good deed. . . . Remain
one," she repeated, looking intently and maliciously at her cards. "All
right, my dear, remain one. . . . Yes . . . only maids, these saintly
maids, are not all alike." She heaved a sigh and played the king. "Oh,
no, my girl, they are not all alike! Some really watch over themselves
like nuns, and butter would not melt in their mouths; and if such a one
does sin in an hour of weakness, she is worried to death, poor thing! so
it would be a sin to condemn her. While others will go dressed in black
and sew their shroud, and yet love rich old men on the sly. Yes, y-es,
my canary birds, some hussies will bewitch an old man and rule over him,
my doves, rule over him and turn his head; and when they've saved up
money and lottery tickets enough, they will bewitch him to his death."
Varvarushka's only response to these hints was to heave a sigh and look
towards the ikons. There was an expression of Christian meekness on her
countenance.
"I know a maid like that, my bitterest enemy," Stinging Beetle went on,
looking round at every one in triumph; "she is always sighing, too, and
looking at the ikons, the she-devil. When she used to rule in a certain
old man's house, if one went to her she would give one a crust, and bid
one bow down to the ikons while she would sing: 'In conception Thou dost
abide a Virgin . . . !' On holidays she will give one a bite, and on
working days she will reproach one for it. But nowadays I will make
merry over her! I will make as merry as I please, my jewel."
Varvarushka glanced at the ikons again and crossed herself.
"But no one will have me, Spiridonovna," said Anna Akimovna to change
the conversation. "What's to be done?"
"It's your own fault. You keep waiting for highly educated gentlemen,
but you ought to marry one of your own sort, a merchant."
"We don't want a merchant," said Auntie, all in a flutter. "Queen of
Heaven, preserve us! A gentleman will spend your money, but then he will
be kind to you, you poor little fool. But a merchant will be so strict
that you won't feel at home in your own house. You'll be wanting to
fondle him and he will be counting his money, and when you sit down to
meals with him, he'll grudge you every mouthful, though it's your own,
the lout! . . . Marry a gentleman."
They all talked at once, loudly interrupting one another, and Auntie
tapped on the table with the nutcrackers and said, flushed and angry:
"We won't have a merchant; we won't have one! If you choose a merchant I
shall go to an almshouse."
"Sh . . . Sh! . . . Hush!" cried Stinging Beetle; when all were silent
she screwed up one eye and said: "Do you know what, Annushka, my birdie
. . . ? There is no need for you to get married really like every one
else. You're rich and free, you are your own mistress; but yet, my
child, it doesn't seem the right thing for you to be an old maid. I'll
find you, you know, some trumpery and simple-witted man. You'll marry
him for appearances and then have your fling, bonny lass! You can hand
him five thousand or ten maybe, and pack him off where he came from, and
you will be mistress in your own house--you can love whom you like and no
one can say anything to you. And then you can love your highly educated
gentleman. You'll have a jolly time!" Stinging Beetle snapped her
fingers and gave a whistle.
"It's sinful," said Auntie.
"Oh, sinful," laughed Stinging Beetle. "She is educated, she
understands. To cut some one's throat or bewitch an old man-- that's a
sin, that's true; but to love some charming young friend is not a sin at
all. And what is there in it, really? There's no sin in it at all! The
old pilgrim women have invented all that to make fools of simple folk.
I, too, say everywhere it's a sin; I don't know myself why it's a sin."
Stinging Beetle emptied her glass and cleared her throat. "Have your
fling, bonny lass," this time evidently addressing herself. "For thirty
years, wenches, I have thought of nothing but sins and been afraid, but
now I see I have wasted my time, I've let it slip by like a ninny! Ah, I
have been a fool, a fool!" She sighed. "A woman's time is short and
every day is precious. You are handsome, Annushka, and very rich; but as
soon as thirty-five or forty strikes for you your time is up. Don't
listen to any one, my girl; live, have your fling till you are forty,
and then you will have time to pray forgiveness--there will be plenty of
time to bow down and to sew your shroud. A candle to God and a poker to
the devil! You can do both at once! Well, how is it to be? Will you make
some little man happy?"
"I will," laughed Anna Akimovna. "I don't care now; I would marry a
working man."
"Well, that would do all right! Oh, what a fine fellow you would choose
then!" Stinging Beetle screwed up her eyes and shook her head. "O--o--oh!"
"I tell her myself," said Auntie, "it's no good waiting for a gentleman,
so she had better marry, not a gentleman, but some one humbler; anyway
we should have a man in the house to look after things. And there are
lots of good men. She might have some one out of the factory. They are
all sober, steady men. . . ."
"I should think so," Stinging Beetle agreed. "They are capital fellows.
If you like, Aunt, I will make a match for her with Vassily Lebedinsky?"
"Oh, Vasya's legs are so long," said Auntie seriously. "He is so lanky.
He has no looks."
There was laughter in the crowd by the door.
"Well, Pimenov? Would you like to marry Pimenov?" Stinging Beetle asked
Anna Akimovna.
"Very good. Make a match for me with Pimenov."
"Really?"
"Yes, do!" Anna Akimovna said resolutely, and she struck her fist on the
table. "On my honour, I will marry him."
"Really?"
Anna Akimovna suddenly felt ashamed that her cheeks were burning and
that every one was looking at her; she flung the cards together on the
table and ran out of the room. As she ran up the stairs and, reaching
the upper story, sat down to the piano in the drawing-room, a murmur of
sound reached her from below like the roar of the sea; most likely they
were talking of her and of Pimenov, and perhaps Stinging Beetle was
taking advantage of her absence to insult Varvarushka and was putting no
check on her language.
The lamp in the big room was the only light burning in the upper story,
and it sent a glimmer through the door into the dark drawing-room. It
was between nine and ten, not later. Anna Akimovna played a waltz, then
another, then a third; she went on playing without stopping. She looked
into the dark corner beyond the piano, smiled, and inwardly called to
it, and the idea occurred to her that she might drive off to the town to
see some one, Lysevitch for instance, and tell him what was passing in
her heart. She wanted to talk without ceasing, to laugh, to play the
fool, but the dark corner was sullenly silent, and all round in all the
rooms of the upper story it was still and desolate.
She was fond of sentimental songs, but she had a harsh, untrained voice,
and so she only played the accompaniment and sang hardly audibly, just
above her breath. She sang in a whisper one song after another, for the
most part about love, separation, and frustrated hopes, and she imagined
how she would hold out her hands to him and say with entreaty, with
tears, "Pimenov, take this burden from me!" And then, just as though her
sins had been forgiven, there would be joy and comfort in her soul, and
perhaps a free, happy life would begin. In an anguish of anticipation
she leant over the keys, with a passionate longing for the change in her
life to come at once without delay, and was terrified at the thought
that her old life would go on for some time longer. Then she played
again and sang hardly above her breath, and all was stillness about her.
There was no noise coming from downstairs now, they must have gone to
bed. It had struck ten some time before. A long, solitary, wearisome
night was approaching.
Anna Akimovna walked through all the rooms, lay down for a while on the
sofa, and read in her study the letters that had come that evening;
there were twelve letters of Christmas greetings and three anonymous
letters. In one of them some workman complained in a horrible, almost
illegible handwriting that Lenten oil sold in the factory shop was
rancid and smelt of paraffin; in another, some one respectfully informed
her that over a purchase of iron Nazaritch had lately taken a bribe of a
thousand roubles from some one; in a third she was abused for her
inhumanity.
The excitement of Christmas was passing off, and to keep it up Anna
Akimovna sat down at the piano again and softly played one of the new
waltzes, then she remembered how cleverly and creditably she had spoken
at dinner today. She looked round at the dark windows, at the walls with
the pictures, at the faint light that came from the big room, and all at
once she began suddenly crying, and she felt vexed that she was so
lonely, and that she had no one to talk to and consult. To cheer herself
she tried to picture Pimenov in her imagination, but it was
unsuccessful.
It struck twelve. Mishenka, no longer wearing his swallow-tail but in
his reefer jacket, came in, and without speaking lighted two candles;
then he went out and returned a minute later with a cup of tea on a
tray.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked, noticing a smile on his face.
"I was downstairs and heard the jokes you were making about Pimenov . .
." he said, and put his hand before his laughing mouth. "If he were sat
down to dinner today with Viktor Nikolaevitch and the general, he'd have
died of fright." Mishenka's shoulders were shaking with laughter. "He
doesn't know even how to hold his fork, I bet."
The footman's laughter and words, his reefer jacket and moustache, gave
Anna Akimovna a feeling of uncleanness. She shut her eyes to avoid
seeing him, and, against her own will, imagined Pimenov dining with
Lysevitch and Krylin, and his timid, unintellectual figure seemed to her
pitiful and helpless, and she felt repelled by it. And only now, for the
first time in the whole day, she realized clearly that all she had said
and thought about Pimenov and marrying a workman was nonsense, folly,
and wilfulness. To convince herself of the opposite, to overcome her
repulsion, she tried to recall what she had said at dinner, but now she
could not see anything in it: shame at her own thoughts and actions, and
the fear that she had said something improper during the day, and
disgust at her own lack of spirit, overwhelmed her completely. She took
up a candle and, as rapidly as if some one were pursuing her, ran
downstairs, woke Spiridonovna, and began assuring her she had been
joking. Then she went to her bedroom. Red-haired Masha, who was dozing
in an arm-chair near the bed, jumped up and began shaking up the
pillows. Her face was exhausted and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had
fallen on one side.
"Tchalikov came again this evening," she said, yawning, "but I did not
dare to announce him; he was very drunk. He says he will come again
tomorrow."
"What does he want with me?" said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her comb
on the floor. "I won't see him, I won't."
She made up her mind she had no one left in life but this Tchalikov,
that he would never leave off persecuting her, and would remind her
every day how uninteresting and absurd her life was. So all she was fit
for was to help the poor. Oh, how stupid it was!
She lay down without undressing, and sobbed with shame and depression:
what seemed to her most vexatious and stupid of all was that her dreams
that day about Pimenov had been right, lofty, honourable, but at the
same time she felt that Lysevitch and even Krylin were nearer to her
than Pimenov and all the workpeople taken together. She thought that if
the long day she had just spent could have been represented in a
picture, all that had been bad and vulgar--as, for instance, the dinner,
the lawyer's talk, the game of "kings" --would have been true, while her
dreams and talk about Pimenov would have stood out from the whole as
something false, as out of drawing; and she thought, too, that it was
too late to dream of happiness, that everything was over for her, and it
was impossible to go back to the life when she had slept under the same
quilt with her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.
Red-haired Masha was kneeling before the bed, gazing at her in mournful
perplexity; then she, too, began crying, and laid her face against her
mistress's arm, and without words it was clear why she was so wretched.
"We are fools!" said Anna Akimovna, laughing and crying. "We are fools!
Oh, what fools we are!"
A PROBLEM
THE strictest measures were taken that the Uskovs' family secret might
not leak out and become generally known. Half of the servants were sent
off to the theatre or the circus; the other half were sitting in the
kitchen and not allowed to leave it. Orders were given that no one was
to be admitted. The wife of the Colonel, her sister, and the governess,
though they had been initiated into the secret, kept up a pretence of
knowing nothing; they sat in the dining-room and did not show themselves
in the drawing-room or the hall.
Sasha Uskov, the young man of twenty-five who was the cause of all the
commotion, had arrived some time before, and by the advice of kind-
hearted Ivan Markovitch, his uncle, who was taking his part, he sat
meekly in the hall by the door leading to the study, and prepared
himself to make an open, candid explanation.
The other side of the door, in the study, a family council was being
held. The subject under discussion was an exceedingly disagreeable and
delicate one. Sasha Uskov had cashed at one of the banks a false
promissory note, and it had become due for payment three days before,
and now his two paternal uncles and Ivan Markovitch, the brother of his
dead mother, were deciding the question whether they should pay the
money and save the family honour, or wash their hands of it and leave
the case to go for trial.
To outsiders who have no personal interest in the matter such questions
seem simple; for those who are so unfortunate as to have to decide them
in earnest they are extremely difficult. The uncles had been talking for
a long time, but the problem seemed no nearer decision.
"My friends!" said the uncle who was a colonel, and there was a note of
exhaustion and bitterness in his voice. "Who says that family honour is
a mere convention? I don't say that at all. I am only warning you
against a false view; I am pointing out the possibility of an
unpardonable mistake. How can you fail to see it? I am not speaking
Chinese; I am speaking Russian!"
"My dear fellow, we do understand," Ivan Markovitch protested mildly.
"How can you understand if you say that I don't believe in family
honour? I repeat once more: fa-mil-y ho-nour fal-sely un-der-stood is a
prejudice! Falsely understood! That's what I say: whatever may be the
motives for screening a scoundrel, whoever he may be, and helping him to
escape punishment, it is contrary to law and unworthy of a gentleman.
It's not saving the family honour; it's civic cowardice! Take the army,
for instance. . . . The honour of the army is more precious to us than
any other honour, yet we don't screen our guilty members, but condemn
them. And does the honour of the army suffer in consequence? Quite the
opposite!"
The other paternal uncle, an official in the Treasury, a taciturn, dull-
witted, and rheumatic man, sat silent, or spoke only of the fact that
the Uskovs' name would get into the newspapers if the case went for
trial. His opinion was that the case ought to be hushed up from the
first and not become public property; but, apart from publicity in the
newspapers, he advanced no other argument in support of this opinion.
The maternal uncle, kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch, spoke smoothly,
softly, and with a tremor in his voice. He began with saying that youth
has its rights and its peculiar temptations. Which of us has not been
young, and who has not been led astray? To say nothing of ordinary
mortals, even great men have not escaped errors and mistakes in their
youth. Take, for instance, the biography of great writers. Did not every
one of them gamble, drink, and draw down upon himself the anger of
right-thinking people in his young days? If Sasha's error bordered upon
crime, they must remember that Sasha had received practically no
education; he had been expelled from the high school in the fifth class;
he had lost his parents in early childhood, and so had been left at the
tenderest age without guidance and good, benevolent influences. He was
nervous, excitable, had no firm ground under his feet, and, above all,
he had been unlucky. Even if he were guilty, anyway he deserved
indulgence and the sympathy of all compassionate souls. He ought, of
course, to be punished, but he was punished as it was by his conscience
and the agonies he was enduring now while awaiting the sentence of his
relations. The comparison with the army made by the Colonel was
delightful, and did credit to his lofty intelligence; his appeal to
their feeling of public duty spoke for the chivalry of his soul, but
they must not forget that in each individual the citizen is closely
linked with the Christian. . . .
"Shall we be false to civic duty," Ivan Markovitch exclaimed
passionately, "if instead of punishing an erring boy we hold out to him
a helping hand?"
Ivan Markovitch talked further of family honour. He had not the honour
to belong to the Uskov family himself, but he knew their distinguished
family went back to the thirteenth century; he did not forget for a
minute, either, that his precious, beloved sister had been the wife of
one of the representatives of that name. In short, the family was dear
to him for many reasons, and he refused to admit the idea that, for the
sake of a paltry fifteen hundred roubles, a blot should be cast on the
escutcheon that was beyond all price. If all the motives he had brought
forward were not sufficiently convincing, he, Ivan Markovitch, in
conclusion, begged his listeners to ask themselves what was meant by
crime? Crime is an immoral act founded upon ill-will. But is the will of
man free? Philosophy has not yet given a positive answer to that
question. Different views were held by the learned. The latest school of
Lombroso, for instance, denies the freedom of the will, and considers
every crime as the product of the purely anatomical peculiarities of the
individual.
"Ivan Markovitch," said the Colonel, in a voice of entreaty, "we are
talking seriously about an important matter, and you bring in Lombroso,
you clever fellow. Think a little, what are you saying all this for? Can
you imagine that all your thunderings and rhetoric will furnish an
answer to the question?"