along her hip with her clenched fist for her pocket. Her fist struggled
convulsively for the pocket, like a fish in the net, and could not find
the opening. In another moment the IOUs would have vanished in the
recesses of her feminine garments, but at that point the lieutenant
uttered a faint cry, and, moved more by instinct than reflection, seized
the Jewess by her arm above the clenched fist. Showing her teeth more
than ever, she struggled with all her might and pulled her hand away.
Then Sokolsky put his right arm firmly round her waist, and the other
round her chest and a struggle followed. Afraid of outraging her sex or
hurting her, he tried only to prevent her moving, and to get hold of the
fist with the IOUs; but she wriggled like an eel in his arms with her
supple, flexible body, struck him in the chest with her elbows, and
scratched him, so that he could not help touching her all over, and was
forced to hurt her and disregard her modesty.
"How unusual this is! How strange!" he thought, utterly amazed, hardly
able to believe his senses, and feeling rather sick from the scent of
jasmine.
In silence, breathing heavily, stumbling against the furniture, they
moved about the room. Susanna was carried away by the struggle. She
flushed, closed her eyes, and forgetting herself, once even pressed her
face against the face of the lieutenant, so that there was a sweetish
taste left on his lips. At last he caught hold of her clenched hand. . .
. Forcing it open, and not finding the papers in it, he let go the
Jewess. With flushed faces and dishevelled hair, they looked at one
another, breathing hard. The spiteful, catlike expression on the
Jewess's face was gradually replaced by a good-natured smile. She burst
out laughing, and turning on one foot, went towards the room where lunch
was ready. The lieutenant moved slowly after her. She sat down to the
table, and, still flushed and breathing hard, tossed off half a glass of
port.
"Listen"--the lieutenant broke the silence--"I hope you are joking?"
"Not a bit of it," she answered, thrusting a piece of bread into her
mouth.
"H'm! . . . How do you wish me to take all this?"
"As you choose. Sit down and have lunch!"
"But . . . it's dishonest!"
"Perhaps. But don't trouble to give me a sermon; I have my own way of
looking at things."
"Won't you give them back?"
"Of course not! If you were a poor unfortunate man, with nothing to eat,
then it would be a different matter. But--he wants to get married!"
"It's not my money, you know; it's my cousin's!"
"And what does your cousin want with money? To get fashionable clothes
for his wife? But I really don't care whether your belle-soeur has
dresses or not."
The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange house
with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He
strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his
waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes by
her dishonest action, made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.
"The devil knows what to make of it!" he muttered. "Listen. I shan't go
away from here until I get the IOUs!"
"Ah, so much the better," laughed Susanna. "If you stay here for good,
it will make it livelier for me."
Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna's laughing,
insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and grew
bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU he began
for some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin's stories of
the Jewess's romantic adventures, of her free way of life, and these
reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity. Impulsively he sat
down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of the IOUs began to eat. .
. .
"Will you have vodka or wine?" Susanna asked with a laugh. "So you will
stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and nights you
will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won't your fiancée
have something to say about it?" II
Five hours had passed. The lieutenant's cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his
dressing-gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window. He
was a tall, sturdy man, with a large black beard and a manly face; and
as the Jewess had truly said, he was handsome, though he had reached the
age when men are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and bald. By mind and
temperament he was one of those natures in which the Russian
intellectual classes are so rich: warm-hearted, good-natured, well-bred,
having some knowledge of the arts and sciences, some faith, and the most
chivalrous notions about honour, but indolent and lacking in depth. He
was fond of good eating and drinking, was an ideal whist-player, was a
connoisseur in women and horses, but in other things he was apathetic
and sluggish as a seal, and to rouse him from his lethargy something
extraordinary and quite revolting was needed, and then he would forget
everything in the world and display intense activity; he would fume and
talk of a duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister, gallop at
breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly "a
scoundrel," would go to law, and so on.
"How is it our Sasha's not back yet?" he kept asking his wife, glancing
out of window. "Why, it's dinner-time!"
After waiting for the lieutenant till six o'clock, they sat down to
dinner. When supper-time came, however, Alexey Ivanovitch was listening
to every footstep, to every sound of the door, and kept shrugging his
shoulders.
"Strange!" he said. "The rascally dandy must have stayed on at the
tenant's."
As he went to bed after supper, Kryukov made up his mind that the
lieutenant was being entertained at the tenant's, where after a festive
evening he was staying the night.
Alexandr Grigoryevitch only returned next morning. He looked extremely
crumpled and confused.
"I want to speak to you alone . . ." he said mysteriously to his cousin.
They went into the study. The lieutenant shut the door, and he paced for
a long time up and down before he began to speak.
"Something's happened, my dear fellow," he began, "that I don't know how
to tell you about. You wouldn't believe it . . ."
And blushing, faltering, not looking at his cousin, he told what had
happened with the IOUs. Kryukov, standing with his feet wide apart and
his head bent, listened and frowned.
"Are you joking?" he asked.
"How the devil could I be joking? It's no joking matter!"
"I don't understand!" muttered Kryukov, turning crimson and flinging up
his hands. "It's positively . . . immoral on your part. Before your very
eyes a hussy is up to the devil knows what, a serious crime, plays a
nasty trick, and you go and kiss her!"
"But I can't understand myself how it happened!" whispered the
lieutenant, blinking guiltily. "Upon my honour, I don't understand it!
It's the first time in my life I've come across such a monster! It's not
her beauty that does for you, not her mind, but that . . . you
understand . . . insolence, cynicism. . . ."
"Insolence, cynicism . . . it's unclean! If you've such a longing for
insolence and cynicism, you might have picked a sow out of the mire and
have devoured her alive. It would have been cheaper, anyway! Instead of
two thousand three hundred!"
"You do express yourself elegantly!" said the lieutenant, frowning.
"I'll pay you back the two thousand three hundred!"
"I know you'll pay it back, but it's not a question of money! Damn the
money! What revolts me is your being such a limp rag . . . such filthy
feebleness! And engaged! With a fiancée!"
"Don't speak of it . . ." said the lieutenant, blushing. "I loathe
myself as it is. I should like to sink into the earth. It's sickening
and vexatious that I shall have to bother my aunt for that five
thousand. . . ."
Kryukov continued for some time longer expressing his indignation and
grumbling, then, as he grew calmer, he sat down on the sofa and began to
jeer at his cousin.
"You young officers!" he said with contemptuous irony. "Nice
bridegrooms."
Suddenly he leapt up as though he had been stung, stamped his foot, and
ran about the study.
"No, I'm not going to leave it like that!" he said, shaking his fist. "I
will have those IOUs, I will! I'll give it her! One doesn't beat women,
but I'll break every bone in her body. . . . I'll pound her to a jelly!
I'm not a lieutenant! You won't touch me with insolence or cynicism! No-
o-o, damn her! Mishka!" he shouted, "run and tell them to get the racing
droshky out for me!"
Kryukov dressed rapidly, and, without heeding the agitated lieutenant,
got into the droshky, and with a wave of his hand resolutely raced off
to Susanna Moiseyevna. For a long time the lieutenant gazed out of
window at the clouds of dust that rolled after his cousin's droshky,
stretched, yawned, and went to his own room. A quarter of an hour later
he was sound asleep.
At six o'clock he was waked up and summoned to dinner.
"How nice this is of Alexey!" his cousin's wife greeted him in the
dining-room. "He keeps us waiting for dinner."
"Do you mean to say he's not come back yet?" yawned the lieutenant.
"H'm! . . . he's probably gone round to see the tenant."
But Alexey Ivanovitch was not back by supper either. His wife and
Sokolsky decided that he was playing cards at the tenant's and would
most likely stay the night there. What had happened was not what they
had supposed, however.
Kryukov returned next morning, and without greeting any one, without a
word, dashed into his study.
"Well?" whispered the lieutenant, gazing at him round-eyed.
Kryukov waved his hand and gave a snort.
"Why, what's the matter? What are you laughing at?"
Kryukov flopped on the sofa, thrust his head in the pillow, and shook
with suppressed laughter. A minute later he got up, and looking at the
surprised lieutenant, with his eyes full of tears from laughing, said:
"Close the door. Well . . . she is a fe-e-male, I beg to inform you!"
"Did you get the IOUs?"
Kryukov waved his hand and went off into a peal of laughter again.
"Well! she is a female!" he went on. "Merci for the acquaintance, my
boy! She's a devil in petticoats. I arrived; I walked in like such an
avenging Jove, you know, that I felt almost afraid of myself . . . . I
frowned, I scowled, even clenched my fists to be more awe-inspiring. . .
. 'Jokes don't pay with me, madam!' said I, and more in that style. And
I threatened her with the law and with the Governor. To begin with she
burst into tears, said she'd been joking with you, and even took me to
the cupboard to give me the money. Then she began arguing that the
future of Europe lies in the hands of the French, and the Russians,
swore at women. . . . Like you, I listened, fascinated, ass that I was.
. . . She kept singing the praises of my beauty, patted me on the arm
near the shoulder, to see how strong I was, and . . . and as you see,
I've only just got away from her! Ha, ha! She's enthusiastic about you!"
"You're a nice fellow!" laughed the lieutenant. "A married man! highly
respected. . . . Well, aren't you ashamed? Disgusted? Joking apart
though, old man, you've got your Queen Tamara in your own neighbourhood.
. . ."
"In my own neighbourhood! Why, you wouldn't find another such chameleon
in the whole of Russia! I've never seen anything like it in my life,
though I know a good bit about women, too. I have known regular devils
in my time, but I never met anything like this. It is, as you say, by
insolence and cynicism she gets over you. What is so attractive in her
is the diabolical suddenness, the quick transitions, the swift shifting
hues. . . . Brrr! And the IOU-- phew! Write it off for lost. We are both
great sinners, we'll go halves in our sin. I shall put down to you not
two thousand three hundred, but half of it. Mind, tell my wife I was at
the tenant's."
Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and broke
into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another, and
again subsided into their pillows.
"Engaged! A lieutenant!" Kryukov jeered.
"Married!" retorted Sokolsky. "Highly respected! Father of a family!"
At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another, and,
to the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with laughter
into their dinner-napkins. After dinner, still in the best of spirits,
they dressed up as Turks, and, running after one another with guns,
played at soldiers with the children. In the evening they had a long
argument. The lieutenant maintained that it was mean and contemptible to
accept a dowry with your wife, even when there was passionate love on
both sides. Kryukov thumped the table with his fists and declared that
this was absurd, and that a husband who did not like his wife to have
property of her own was an egoist and a despot. Both shouted, boiled
over, did not understand each other, drank a good deal, and in the end,
picking up the skirts of their dressing-gowns, went to their bedrooms.
They soon fell asleep and slept soundly.
Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow. The shadows
lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time to time the
wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature, too, could
lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity of these people.
Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said nothing. Both of them felt,
somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it
and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had
unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be
pleasant to recall in old age.
On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov was
sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory letter to
his aunt. Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro near the table
in silence. The lieutenant had slept badly that night; he woke up
depressed, and now he felt bored. He paced up and down, thinking of the
end of his furlough, of his fiancée, who was expecting him, of how
people could live all their lives in the country without feeling bored.
Standing at the window, for a long time he stared at the trees, smoked
three cigarettes one after another, and suddenly turned to his cousin.
"I have a favour to ask you, Alyosha," he said. "Let me have a saddle-
horse for the day. . . ."
Kryukov looked searchingly at him and continued his writing with a
frown.
"You will, then?" asked the lieutenant.
Kryukov looked at him again, then deliberately drew out a drawer in the
table, and taking out a thick roll of notes, gave it to his cousin.
"Here's five thousand . . ." he said. "Though it's not my money, yet,
God bless you, it's all the same. I advise you to send for post-horses
at once and go away. Yes, really!"
The lieutenant in his turn looked searchingly at Kryukov and laughed.
"You've guessed right, Alyosha," he said, reddening. "It was to her I
meant to ride. Yesterday evening when the washerwoman gave me that
damned tunic, the one I was wearing then, and it smelt of jasmine, why .
. . I felt I must go!"
"You must go away."
"Yes, certainly. And my furlough's just over. I really will go to-day!
Yes, by Jove! However long one stays, one has to go in the end. . . .
I'm going!"
The post-horses were brought after dinner the same day; the lieutenant
said good-bye to the Kryukovs and set off, followed by their good
wishes.
Another week passed. It was a dull but hot and heavy day. From early
morning Kryukov walked aimlessly about the house, looking out of window,
or turning over the leaves of albums, though he was sick of the sight of
them already. When he came across his wife or children, he began
grumbling crossly. It seemed to him, for some reason that day, that his
children's manners were revolting, that his wife did not know how to
look after the servants, that their expenditure was quite
disproportionate to their income. All this meant that "the master" was
out of humour.
After dinner, Kryukov, feeling dissatisfied with the soup and the roast
meat he had eaten, ordered out his racing droshky. He drove slowly out
of the courtyard, drove at a walking pace for a quarter of a mile, and
stopped.
"Shall I . . . drive to her . . . that devil?" he thought, looking at
the leaden sky.
And Kryukov positively laughed, as though it were the first time that
day he had asked himself that question. At once the load of boredom was
lifted from his heart, and there rose a gleam of pleasure in his lazy
eyes. He lashed the horse. . . .
All the way his imagination was picturing how surprised the Jewess would
be to see him, how he would laugh and chat, and come home feeling
refreshed. . . .
"Once a month one needs something to brighten one up . . . something out
of the common round," he thought, "something that would give the
stagnant organism a good shaking up, a reaction . . . whether it's a
drinking bout, or . . . Susanna. One can't get on without it."
It was getting dark when he drove into the yard of the vodka distillery.
From the open windows of the owner's house came sounds of laughter and
singing:
"'Brighter than lightning, more burning than flame. . . .'"
sang a powerful, mellow, bass voice.
"Aha! she has visitors," thought Kryukov.
And he was annoyed that she had visitors.
"Shall I go back?" he thought with his hand on the bell, but he rang all
the same, and went up the familiar staircase. From the entry he glanced
into the reception hall. There were about five men there--all landowners
and officials of his acquaintance; one, a tall, thin gentleman, was
sitting at the piano, singing, and striking the keys with his long, thin
fingers. The others were listening and grinning with enjoyment. Kryukov
looked himself up and down in the looking-glass, and was about to go
into the hall, when Susanna Moiseyevna herself darted into the entry, in
high spirits and wearing the same black dress. . . . Seeing Kryukov, she
was petrified for an instant, then she uttered a little scream and
beamed with delight.
"Is it you?" she said, clutching his hand. "What a surprise!"
"Here she is!" smiled Kryukov, putting his arm round her waist. "Well!
Does the destiny of Europe still lie in the hands of the French and the
Russians?"
"I'm so glad," laughed the Jewess, cautiously removing his arm. "Come,
go into the hall; they're all friends there. . . . I'll go and tell them
to bring you some tea. Your name's Alexey, isn't it? Well, go in, I'll
come directly. . . ."
She blew him a kiss and ran out of the entry, leaving behind her the
same sickly smell of jasmine. Kryukov raised his head and walked into
the hall. He was on terms of friendly intimacy with all the men in the
room, but scarcely nodded to them; they, too, scarcely responded, as
though the places in which they met were not quite decent, and as though
they were in tacit agreement with one another that it was more suitable
for them not to recognise one another.
From the hall Kryukov walked into the drawing-room, and from it into a
second drawing-room. On the way he met three or four other guests, also
men whom he knew, though they barely recognised him. Their faces were
flushed with drink and merriment. Alexey Ivanovitch glanced furtively at
them and marvelled that these men, respectable heads of families, who
had known sorrow and privation, could demean themselves to such pitiful,
cheap gaiety! He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and walked on.
"There are places," he reflected, "where a sober man feels sick, and a
drunken man rejoices. I remember I never could go to the operetta or the
gipsies when I was sober: wine makes a man more good-natured and
reconciles him with vice. . . ."
Suddenly he stood still, petrified, and caught hold of the door-post
with both hands. At the writing-table in Susanna's study was sitting
Lieutenant Alexandr Grigoryevitch. He was discussing something in an
undertone with a fat, flabby-looking Jew, and seeing his cousin, flushed
crimson and looked down at an album.
The sense of decency was stirred in Kryukov and the blood rushed to his
head. Overwhelmed with amazement, shame, and anger, he walked up to the
table without a word. Sokolsky's head sank lower than ever. His face
worked with an expression of agonising shame.
"Ah, it's you, Alyosha!" he articulated, making a desperate effort to
raise his eyes and to smile. "I called here to say good-bye, and, as you
see. . . . But to-morrow I am certainly going."
"What can I say to him? What?" thought Alexey Ivanovitch. "How can I
judge him since I'm here myself?"
And clearing his throat without uttering a word, he went out slowly.
"'Call her not heavenly, and leave her on earth. . . .'"
The bass was singing in the hall. A little while after, Kryukov's racing
droshky was bumping along the dusty road.
NEIGHBOURS
PYOTR MIHALITCH IVASHIN was very much out of humour: his sister, a young
girl, had gone away to live with Vlassitch, a married man. To shake off
the despondency and depression which pursued him at home and in the
fields, he called to his aid his sense of justice, his genuine and noble
ideas--he had always defended free-love! --but this was of no avail, and
he always came back to the same conclusion as their foolish old nurse,
that his sister had acted wrongly and that Vlassitch had abducted his
sister. And that was distressing.
His mother did not leave her room all day long; the old nurse kept
sighing and speaking in whispers; his aunt had been on the point of
taking her departure every day, and her trunks were continually being
brought down to the hall and carried up again to her room. In the house,
in the yard, and in the garden it was as still as though there were some
one dead in the house. His aunt, the servants, and even the peasants, so
it seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch, looked at him enigmatically and with
perplexity, as though they wanted to say "Your sister has been seduced;
why are you doing nothing?" And he reproached himself for inactivity,
though he did not know precisely what action he ought to have taken.
So passed six days. On the seventh--it was Sunday afternoon--a messenger
on horseback brought a letter. The address was in a familiar feminine
handwriting: "Her Excy. Anna Nikolaevna Ivashin." Pyotr Mihalitch
fancied that there was something defiant, provocative, in the
handwriting and in the abbreviation "Excy." And advanced ideas in women
are obstinate, ruthless, cruel.
"She'd rather die than make any concession to her unhappy mother, or beg
her forgiveness," thought Pyotr Mihalitch, as he went to his mother with
the letter.
His mother was lying on her bed, dressed. Seeing her son, she rose
impulsively, and straightening her grey hair, which had fallen from
under her cap, asked quickly:
"What is it? What is it?"
"This has come . . ." said her son, giving her the letter.
Zina's name, and even the pronoun "she" was not uttered in the house.
Zina was spoken of impersonally: "this has come," "Gone away," and so
on. . . . The mother recognised her daughter's handwriting, and her face
grew ugly and unpleasant, and her grey hair escaped again from her cap.
"No!" she said, with a motion of her hands, as though the letter
scorched her fingers. "No, no, never! Nothing would induce me!"
The mother broke into hysterical sobs of grief and shame; she evidently
longed to read the letter, but her pride prevented her. Pyotr Mihalitch
realised that he ought to open the letter himself and read it aloud, but
he was overcome by anger such as he had never felt before; he ran out
into the yard and shouted to the messenger:
"Say there will be no answer! There will be no answer! Tell them that,
you beast!"
And he tore up the letter; then tears came into his eyes, and feeling
that he was cruel, miserable, and to blame, he went out into the fields.
He was only twenty-seven, but he was already stout. He dressed like an
old man in loose, roomy clothes, and suffered from asthma. He already
seemed to be developing the characteristics of an elderly country
bachelor. He never fell in love, never thought of marriage, and loved no
one but his mother, his sister, his old nurse, and the gardener,
Vassilitch. He was fond of good fare, of his nap after dinner, and of
talking about politics and exalted subjects. He had in his day taken his
degree at the university, but he now looked upon his studies as though
in them he had discharged a duty incumbent upon young men between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-five; at any rate, the ideas which now
strayed every day through his mind had nothing in common with the
university or the subjects he had studied there.