brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister's presence, and grew irritable when
he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the
sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the
past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with her. Every evening she
complained of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and
those who are in the rut of tradition. Carried away by her new ideas,
Vera Semyonovna proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed
in was conventional, that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to
preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the
scene of action. She made no end of comparisons. She compared her
brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who
would sooner die than listen to reason. By degrees there was a
perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying
on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a
cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong
faith. She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and
tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at
her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work, which
was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained
and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected. And knowing
he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her
like a schoolboy.
"You won't resist evil, but you resist my having servants!" he taunted
her. "If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That's
inconsistent!"
He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when his
sister began doing odd things before strangers.
"It's awful, my dear fellow," he said to me in private, waving his hands
in despair. "It seems that our ingénue has remained to play a part in
the farce, too. She's become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I've
washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she
talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to
listen to her. What I feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to
support her errors by blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ! It
chokes me! It makes me hot all over to hear my sister propounding her
doctrines and trying to distort the Gospel to suit her, when she
purposely refrains from mentioning how the moneychangers were driven out
of the Temple. That's, my dear fellow, what comes of being half
educated, undeveloped! That's what comes of medical studies which
provide no general culture!"
One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found his
sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing
her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks. The critic's
good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he
longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to
live as they used to before. . . . He knelt down and kissed her head,
her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled, smiled bitterly,
unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped up, seized the magazine
from the table and said warmly:
"Hurrah! We'll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God's blessing! And
I've such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the occasion
with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid, wonderful thing!"
"Oh, no, no!" cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
"I've read it already! I don't want it, I don't want it!"
"When did you read it?"
"A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it, I
know it!"
"H'm! . . . You're a fanatic!" her brother said coldly, flinging the
magazine on to the table.
"No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!" And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into
tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering
shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness
endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of
the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the
outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author's vanity.
From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he
endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old
women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off disputing
with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a
condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.
One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed him
on the forehead.
"Where are you going?" he asked with surprise.
"To the province of N. to do vaccination work." Her brother went out
into the street with her.
"So that's what you've decided upon, you queer girl," he muttered.
"Don't you want some money?"
"No, thank you. Good-bye."
The sister shook her brother's hand and set off.
"Why don't you have a cab?" cried Vladimir Semyonitch.
She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her rusty-
looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched along,
forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a feeling of
regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger
to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.
Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the
table and began to work at his article.
I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know. And
Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths on
coffins, singing Gaudeamus, busying himself over the Mutual Aid Society
of Moscow Journalists.
He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for three
months--at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn Hospital. An
abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought to be sent to the
Crimea, and began getting up a collection for him. But he did not go to
the Crimea--he died. We buried him in the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the
left side, where artists and literary men are buried.
One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars' restaurant. I mentioned
that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen Vladimir
Semyonitch's grave there. It was utterly neglected and almost
indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had fallen; it
was necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in order.
But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and I
could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He
was utterly forgotten.
MIRE I
GRACEFULLY swaying in the saddle, a young man wearing the snow-white
tunic of an officer rode into the great yard of the vodka distillery
belonging to the heirs of M. E. Rothstein. The sun smiled carelessly on
the lieutenant's little stars, on the white trunks of the birch-trees,
on the heaps of broken glass scattered here and there in the yard. The
radiant, vigorous beauty of a summer day lay over everything, and
nothing hindered the snappy young green leaves from dancing gaily and
winking at the clear blue sky. Even the dirty and soot-begrimed
appearance of the bricksheds and the stifling fumes of the distillery
did not spoil the general good impression. The lieutenant sprang gaily
out of the saddle, handed over his horse to a man who ran up, and
stroking with his finger his delicate black moustaches, went in at the
front door. On the top step of the old but light and softly carpeted
staircase he was met by a maidservant with a haughty, not very youthful
face. The lieutenant gave her his card without speaking.
As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see on it
the name "Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky." A minute later she came back
and told the lieutenant that her mistress could not see him, as she was
not feeling quite well. Sokolsky looked at the ceiling and thrust out
his lower lip.
"How vexatious!" he said. "Listen, my dear," he said eagerly. "Go and
tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for me to speak to
her--very. I will only keep her one minute. Ask her to excuse me."
The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.
"Very well!" she sighed, returning after a brief interval. "Please walk
in!"
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously
furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large and
lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed by the
abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy
fragrance of jasmine. Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the
walls, screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed
over the corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse than a
place to live in. Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirruped among the
green leaves and fluttered against the window-panes.
"Forgive me for receiving you here," the lieutenant heard in a mellow
feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not without charm.
"Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I'm trying to keep still to
prevent its coming on again. What do you want?"
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair, such
as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown, with her
head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow. Nothing could be seen behind
the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed,
somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown
concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her
voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
"Forgive me for being so persistent . . ." began the lieutenant,
clinking his spurs. "Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I come
with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov, who . . ."
"I know!" interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. "I know Kryukov. Sit down; I
don't like anything big standing before me."
"My cousin charges me to ask you a favour," the lieutenant went on,
clinking his spurs once more and sitting down. "The fact is, your late
father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and a small
sum was left owing. The payment only becomes due next week, but my
cousin begs you most particularly to pay him--if possible, to-day."
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
"Surely I'm not in her bedroom?" he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and tallest,
under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed not yet made,
with the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on two arm-chairs lay
heaps of crumpled feminine garments. Petticoats and sleeves with rumpled
lace and flounces were trailing on the carpet, on which here and there
lay bits of white tape, cigarette-ends, and the papers of caramels. . .
. Under the bed the toes, pointed and square, of slippers of all kinds
peeped out in a long row. And it seemed to the lieutenant that the scent
of the jasmine came not from the flowers, but from the bed and the
slippers.
"And what is the sum owing?" asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
"Two thousand three hundred."
"Oho!" said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. "And you call
that--a small sum! However, it's just the same paying it to-day or paying
it in a week, but I've had so many payments to make in the last two
months since my father's death. . . . Such a lot of stupid business, it
makes my head go round! A nice idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep
forcing me to attend to these silly things. Vodka, oats . . ." she
muttered, half closing her eyes, "oats, bills, percentages, or, as my
head-clerk says, 'percentage.' . . . It's awful. Yesterday I simply
turned the excise officer out. He pesters me with his Tralles. I said to
him: 'Go to the devil with your Tralles! I can't see any one!' He kissed
my hand and went away. I tell you what: can't your cousin wait two or
three months?"
"A cruel question!" laughed the lieutenant. "My cousin can wait a year,
but it's I who cannot wait! You see, it's on my own account I'm acting,
I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my
cousin hasn't a rouble to spare. I'm forced to ride about and collect
debts. I've just been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I'm now calling
on you; from here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that
until I get together five thousand roubles. I need money awfully!"
"Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief. Why,
have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards? Or are you
getting married?"
"You've guessed!" laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from his
seat, he clinked his spurs. "I really am going to be married."
Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face, and
sighed.
"I can't make out what possesses people to get married!" she said,
looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. "Life is so short, one
has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!"
"Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . ."
"Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things . .
. . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are you
passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why won't
four do, or three?"
"What a tongue she has!" thought the lieutenant, and answered: "The
difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till he is
twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the Service or
else pay a deposit of five thousand."
"Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has his
own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiancée is some one
special and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly unable to understand
how any decent man can live with a woman. I can't for the life of me
understand it. I have lived, thank the Lord, twenty-seven years, and I
have never yet seen an endurable woman. They're all affected minxes,
immoral, liars. . . . The only ones I can put up with are cooks and
housemaids, but so-called ladies I won't let come within shooting
distance of me. But, thank God, they hate me and don't force themselves
on me! If one of them wants money she sends her husband, but nothing
will induce her to come herself, not from pride--no, but from cowardice;
she's afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I understand their hatred very
well! Rather! I openly display what they do their very utmost to conceal
from God and man. How can they help hating me? No doubt you've heard
bushels of scandal about me already. . . ."
"I only arrived here so lately . . ."
"Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother's wife,
surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young man
come to see such an awful woman without warning him--how could she? Ha,
ha! . . . But tell me, how is your brother? He's a fine fellow, such a
handsome man! . . . I've seen him several times at mass. Why do you look
at me like that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To
an educated person externals matter less than the idea. . . . That's so,
isn't it?"
"Yes, of course . . ." smiled the lieutenant.
"Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother. You are
handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking. There's
wonderfully little likeness!"
"That's quite natural; he's not my brother, but my cousin."
"Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?"
"My furlough is over in a few days."
"Well, what's to be done with you!" sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. "So be
it. I'll give you the money, though I know you'll abuse me for it
afterwards. You'll quarrel with your wife after you are married, and
say: 'If that mangy Jewess hadn't given me the money, I should perhaps
have been as free as a bird to-day!' Is your fiancée pretty?"
"Oh yes. . . ."
"H'm! . . . Anyway, better something, if it's only beauty, than nothing.
Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make up to her husband
for her silliness."
"That's original!" laughed the lieutenant. "You are a woman yourself,
and such a woman-hater!"
"A woman . . ." smiled Susanna. "It's not my fault that God has cast me
into this mould, is it? I'm no more to blame for it than you are for
having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its
case. I am very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a
woman, I begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I'll dress.
Wait for me in the drawing-room."
The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep
breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to
irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.
"What a strange woman!" he thought, looking about him. "She talks
fluently, but . . . far too much, and too freely. She must be neurotic."
The drawing-room, in which he was standing now, was richly furnished,
and had pretensions to luxury and style. There were dark bronze dishes
with patterns in relief, views of Nice and the Rhine on the tables, old-
fashioned sconces, Japanese statuettes, but all this striving after
luxury and style only emphasised the lack of taste which was glaringly
apparent in the gilt cornices, the gaudy wall-paper, the bright velvet
table-cloths, the common oleographs in heavy frames. The bad taste of
the general effect was the more complete from the lack of finish and the
overcrowding of the room, which gave one a feeling that something was
lacking, and that a great deal should have been thrown away. It was
evident that the furniture had not been bought all at once, but had been
picked up at auctions and other favourable opportunities.
Heaven knows what taste the lieutenant could boast of, but even he
noticed one characteristic peculiarity about the whole place, which no
luxury or style could efface--a complete absence of all trace of womanly,
careful hands, which, as we all know, give a warmth, poetry, and
snugness to the furnishing of a room. There was a chilliness about it
such as one finds in waiting-rooms at stations, in clubs, and foyers at
the theatres.
There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except,
perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau. The lieutenant
looked round about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his
strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of
talking. But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady
herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her
figure looked as though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the
lieutenant saw not only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a
head black and as curly as lamb's-wool. She did not attract him, though
she did not strike him as ugly. He had a prejudice against un-Russian
faces in general, and he considered, too, that the lady's white face,
the whiteness of which for some reason suggested the cloying scent of
jasmine, did not go well with her little black curls and thick eyebrows;
that her nose and ears were astoundingly white, as though they belonged
to a corpse, or had been moulded out of transparent wax. When she smiled
she showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that
either.
"Anæmic debility . . ." he thought; "she's probably as nervous as a
turkey."
"Here I am! Come along!" she said, going on rapidly ahead of him and
pulling off the yellow leaves from the plants as she passed.
"I'll give you the money directly, and if you like I'll give you some
lunch. Two thousand three hundred roubles! After such a good stroke of
business you'll have an appetite for your lunch. Do you like my rooms?
The ladies about here declare that my rooms always smell of garlic. With
that culinary gibe their stock of wit is exhausted. I hasten to assure
you that I've no garlic even in the cellar. And one day when a doctor
came to see me who smelt of garlic, I asked him to take his hat and go
and spread his fragrance elsewhere. There is no smell of garlic here,
but the place does smell of drugs. My father lay paralyzed for a year
and a half, and the whole house smelt of medicine. A year and a half! I
was sorry to lose him, but I'm glad he's dead: he suffered so!"
She led the officer through two rooms similar to the drawing-room,
through a large reception hall, and came to a stop in her study, where
there was a lady's writing-table covered with little knick-knacks. On
the carpet near it several books lay strewn about, opened and folded
back. Through a small door leading from the study he saw a table laid
for lunch.
Still chatting, Susanna took out of her pocket a bunch of little keys
and unlocked an ingeniously made cupboard with a curved, sloping lid.
When the lid was raised the cupboard emitted a plaintive note which made
the lieutenant think of an ?+olian harp. Susanna picked out another key
and clicked another lock.
"I have underground passages here and secret doors," she said, taking
out a small morocco portfolio. "It's a funny cupboard, isn't it? And in
this portfolio I have a quarter of my fortune. Look how podgy it is! You
won't strangle me, will you?"
Susanna raised her eyes to the lieutenant and laughed good-naturedly.
The lieutenant laughed too.
"She's rather jolly," he thought, watching the keys flashing between her
fingers.
"Here it is," she said, picking out the key of the portfolio. "Now, Mr.
Creditor, trot out the IOU. What a silly thing money is really! How
paltry it is, and yet how women love it! I am a Jewess, you know, to the
marrow of my bones. I am passionately fond of Shmuls and Yankels, but
how I loathe that passion for gain in our Semitic blood. They hoard and
they don't know what they are hoarding for. One ought to live and enjoy
oneself, but they're afraid of spending an extra farthing. In that way I
am more like an hussar than a Shmul. I don't like money to be kept long
in one place. And altogether I fancy I'm not much like a Jewess. Does my
accent give me away much, eh?"
"What shall I say?" mumbled the lieutenant. "You speak good Russian, but
you do roll your r's."
Susanna laughed and put the little key in the lock of the portfolio. The
lieutenant took out of his pocket a little roll of IOUs and laid them
with a notebook on the table.
"Nothing betrays a Jew as much as his accent," Susanna went on, looking
gaily at the lieutenant. "However much he twists himself into a Russian
or a Frenchman, ask him to say 'feather' and he will say 'fedder' . . .
but I pronounce it correctly: 'Feather! feather! feather!'"
Both laughed.
"By Jove, she's very jolly!" thought Sokolsky.
Susanna put the portfolio on a chair, took a step towards the
lieutenant, and bringing her face close to his, went on gaily:
"Next to the Jews I love no people so much as the Russian and the
French. I did not do much at school and I know no history, but it seems
to me that the fate of the world lies in the hands of those two nations.
I lived a long time abroad. . . . I spent six months in Madrid. . . .
I've gazed my fill at the public, and the conclusion I've come to is
that there are no decent peoples except the Russian and the French. Take
the languages, for instance. . . . The German language is like the
neighing of horses; as for the English . . . you can't imagine anything
stupider. Fight--feet--foot! Italian is only pleasant when they speak it
slowly. If you listen to Italians gabbling, you get the effect of the
Jewish jargon. And the Poles? Mercy on us! There's no language so
disgusting! 'Nie pieprz, Pietrze, pieprzem wieprza bo mozeoz
przepieprzyé wieprza pieprzem.' That means: 'Don't pepper a sucking pig
with pepper, Pyotr, or perhaps you'll over-pepper the sucking pig with
pepper.' Ha, ha, ha!"
Susanna Moiseyevna rolled her eyes and broke into such a pleasant,
infectious laugh that the lieutenant, looking at her, went off into a
loud and merry peal of laughter. She took the visitor by the button, and
went on:
"You don't like Jews, of course . . . they've many faults, like all
nations. I don't dispute that. But are the Jews to blame for it? No,
it's not the Jews who are to blame, but the Jewish women! They are
narrow-minded, greedy; there's no sort of poetry about them, they're
dull. . . . You have never lived with a Jewess, so you don't know how
charming it is!" Susanna Moiseyevna pronounced the last words with
deliberate emphasis and with no eagerness or laughter. She paused as
though frightened at her own openness, and her face was suddenly
distorted in a strange, unaccountable way. Her eyes stared at the
lieutenant without blinking, her lips parted and showed clenched teeth.
Her whole face, her throat, and even her bosom, seemed quivering with a
spiteful, catlike expression. Still keeping her eyes fixed on her
visitor, she rapidly bent to one side, and swiftly, like a cat, snatched
something from the table. All this was the work of a few seconds.
Watching her movements, the lieutenant saw five fingers crumple up his
IOUs and caught a glimpse of the white rustling paper as it disappeared
in her clenched fist. Such an extraordinary transition from good-natured
laughter to crime so appalled him that he turned pale and stepped back.
. . .