constitutional government? Or sturgeon and horse-radish?"
"Very well, I am a worthless, trivial, silly woman with no convictions.
I have a mass, a mass of defects. I am neurotic, corrupt, and I ought to
be despised for it. But you, Volodya, are ten years older than I am, and
my husband is thirty years older. I've grown up before your eyes, and if
you would, you could have made anything you liked of me--an angel. But
you"--her voice quivered-- "treat me horribly. Yagitch has married me in
his old age, and you . . ."
"Come, come," said Volodya, sitting nearer her and kissing both her
hands. "Let the Schopenhauers philosophise and prove whatever they like,
while we'll kiss these little hands."
"You despise me, and if only you knew how miserable it makes me," she
said uncertainly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. "And
if you only knew how I want to change, to begin another life! I think of
it with enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm actually came into her
eyes. "To be good, honest, pure, not to be lying; to have an object in
life."
"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said
Volodya, and an ill-humoured expression came into his face. "Upon my
word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple people."
To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending
herself, and forced herself to smile to please him; and again she began
talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem of her life
and to become something real.
"Ta-ra-ra-boomdee-ay," he hummed. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!"
And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without
knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a
minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical
face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.
"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed to him,
and she blushed painfully, and felt that her lips were twitching with
shame. "I love you. Why do you torture me?"
She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for a
long while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though she knew
it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a
servant might come in.
"Oh, how you torture me!" she repeated.
When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was sitting
at lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him, gazing
greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a little dog
waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his
knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:
"Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay." And when he was getting
ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper:
"When? To-day? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as though
she wanted to seize his answer in them.
"To-day it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's thought.
"To-morrow, perhaps."
And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to see
Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter somewhere
over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's and found that
he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about
the streets till evening. And for some reason she kept thinking of the
aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace
anywhere.
And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out
of town and listened to the gipsies. And driving back past the nunnery
again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought
that for the girls and women of her class there was no solution but to
go on driving about and telling lies, or going into a nunnery to mortify
the flesh. . . . And next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna
drove about the town alone in a hired sledge thinking about her aunt.
A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on as
before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising. The
Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet, Rita told
anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya Lvovna went
about alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband to take her
for a good drive with three horses.
Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining of
her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that she
brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby. And
Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote,
that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass and God
would forgive her.
THE TROUSSEAU
I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and old,
built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a very vivid
memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house--a tiny
cottage of one story, with three windows, looking extraordinarily like a
little old hunchback woman with a cap on. Its white stucco walls, its
tiled roof, and dilapidated chimney, were all drowned in a perfect sea
of green. The cottage was lost to sight among the mulberry-trees,
acacias, and poplars planted by the grandfathers and great-grandfathers
of its present occupants. And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard
stands in a row with other similar green courtyards, and forms part of a
street. Nothing ever drives down that street, and very few persons are
ever seen walking through it.
The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not
care for sunlight--the light is no use to them. The windows are never
opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who spend their lives
in the midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for
nature. It is only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye
for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in
profound ignorance of the existence of such beauties. People never prize
what they have always had in abundance. "What we have, we do not
treasure," and what's more we do not even love it.
The little house stands in an earthly paradise of green trees with happy
birds nesting in them. But inside . . . alas . . . ! In summer, it is
close and stifling within; in winter, hot as a Turkish bath, not one
breath of air, and the dreariness! . . .
The first time I visited the little house was many years ago on
business. I brought a message from the Colonel who was the owner of the
house to his wife and daughter. That first visit I remember very
distinctly. It would be impossible, indeed, to forget it.
Imagine a limp little woman of forty, gazing at you with alarm and
astonishment while you walk from the passage into the parlour. You are a
stranger, a visitor, "a young man"; that's enough to reduce her to a
state of terror and bewilderment. Though you have no dagger, axe, or
revolver in your hand, and though you smile affably, you are met with
alarm.
"Whom have I the honour and pleasure of addressing?" the little lady
asks in a trembling voice.
I introduced myself and explained why I had come. The alarm and
amazement were at once succeeded by a shrill, joyful "Ach!" and she
turned her eyes upwards to the ceiling. This "Ach!" was caught up like
an echo and repeated from the hall to the parlour, from the parlour to
the kitchen, and so on down to the cellar. Soon the whole house was
resounding with "Ach!" in various voices.
Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the
drawing-room listening to the "Ach!" echoing all down the street. There
was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay
on a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were
geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies.
On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the
glass broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors
with lemon-coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a
reel of cotton, and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a
black blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room
two alarmed and fluttered old women were hurriedly picking up similar
patterns and pieces of tailor's chalk from the floor.
"You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy," said the little
lady.
While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other
room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too,
seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.
"What's the matter?" said the little lady, addressing the door.
_"Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m'avait envoyé de Koursk?"_
asked a female voice at the door.
_"Ah, est-ce que, Marie . . . que_. . . Really, it's impossible . . . .
_Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous._ Ask Lukerya."
"How well we speak French, though!" I read in the eyes of the little
lady, who was flushing with pleasure.
Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen,
in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a
mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson.
Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red
first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.
"My daughter," chanted the little lady, "and, Manetchka, this is a young
gentleman who has come," etc.
I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper
patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.
"We had a fair here at Ascension," said the mother; "we always buy
materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the
next year's fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made.
My husband's pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit
ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves."
"But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of
you?"
"Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be
worn; they are for the trousseau!"
"Ah, _mamam_, what are you saying?" said the daughter, and she crimsoned
again. "Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don't intend to be
married. Never!"
She said this, but at the very word "married" her eyes glowed.
Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries
and cream. At seven o'clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses,
and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I
looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only
come from a man.
"That's my husband's brother, Yegor Semyonitch," the little lady
explained, noticing my surprise. "He's been living with us for the last
year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an
unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a
monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the
disappointment has preyed on his mind."
After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch
was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the Church.
Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the tobacco-
pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be
greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something
in her mother's ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go
with her to the store-room. There I was shown five large trunks, and a
number of smaller trunks and boxes.
"This is her trousseau," her mother whispered; "we made it all
ourselves."
After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable
hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.
It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my
first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence
in a case that was being tried there.
As I entered the little house I heard the same "Ach!" echo through it.
They recognised me at once. . . . Well they might! My first visit had
been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long
remembered.
I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and
was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out
some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.
There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns,
the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change.
Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and
the ladies were in mourning. The Colonel's death had occurred a week
after his promotion to be a general.
Reminiscences began. . . . The widow shed tears.
"We have had a terrible loss," she said. "My husband, you know, is dead.
We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to.
Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They
would not have him in the monastery on account of--of intoxicating
beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am
thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would
you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . .
taken Manetchka's trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken
everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my
Manetchka will be left without a trousseau at all."
"What are you saying, _mamam_?" said Manetchka, embarrassed. "Our
visitor might suppose . . . there's no knowing what he might suppose . .
. . I shall never--never marry."
Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and
aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.
A little bald-headed masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes
instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared.
"Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose," I thought.
I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much
older and terribly changed. The mother's hair was silvered, but the
daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken
for her elder sister, not more than five years her senior.
"I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal," the mother said to me,
forgetting she had told me this already. "I mean to make a complaint.
Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up
for the sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau."
Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.
"We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well
off. We are all alone in the world now."
"We are alone in the world," repeated Manetchka.
A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.
Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black
with heavy crape _pleureuses_, she was sitting on the sofa sewing.
Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes
instead of boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.
In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:
_"Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur."_
"What are you making?" I asked, a little later.
"It's a blouse. When it's finished I shall take it to the priest's to be
put away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would carry it off. I store
everything at the priest's now," she added in a whisper.
And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on
the table, she sighed and said:
"We are all alone in the world."
And where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did
not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning. And
while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka came out
to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep. . .
.
I understood, and my heart was heavy.
THE HELPMATE
"I'VE asked you not to tidy my table," said Nikolay Yevgrafitch.
"There's no finding anything when you've tidied up. Where's the
telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It's
from Kazan, dated yesterday."
The maid--a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression --found
several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed them to the
doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams from patients. Then
they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga Dmitrievna's room.
It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be
home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her,
and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the
same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and
her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley
which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused
the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house. On such
nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that
it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the
day before from his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas
greetings.
On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a
telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care
of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The
doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign
language, apparently English.
"Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother?"
During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being
suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times
occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become
an excellent detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect,
he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year
and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school-fellow, a civil
engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a
young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovitch, with
rather a curious short surname--Riss. Two months later the doctor had
seen the young man's photograph in his wife's album, with an inscription
in French: "In remembrance of the present and in hope of the future."
Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law's. And
that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent
and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning, and was
constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept
refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him
feel ashamed to face the servants.
Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into
consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to the
Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much
alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring
him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and that he had much
better go to Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse
him, look after him, take care of him.
Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to
Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.
He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing
their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I
drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a
thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." He pictured
the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to
Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and
began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great
agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted.
Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the
son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain,
straightforward man, a surgeon by profession--how could he have let
himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak,
worthless, mercenary, low creature.
"'Little foot'!" he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram;
"'little foot'!"
Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven
years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory
was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet,
which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed
as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and
silk upon his hands and face--and nothing more. Nothing more--that is,
not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies--brazen,
treacherous lies. He remembered how in his father's house in the village
a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house
and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset
things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into
his life and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had
been spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and
turned into a mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their
atmosphere as a cocotte's, and of the ten thousand he earned every year
he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village,
and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It seemed that if a
band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have
been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this
woman.
He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed
and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat
down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling
mechanically on a paper.
"Trying a pen. . . . A little foot."
By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It
seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one else who
might have had a good influence over her--who knows?-- she might after
all have become a good, straightforward woman. He was a poor
psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart; besides, he was
churlish, uninteresting. . . .
"I haven't long to live now," he thought. "I am a dead man, and ought
not to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange and stupid to
insist upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with her; let her go to
the man she loves. . . . I'll give her a divorce. I'll take the blame on
myself."
Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank
into a chair just as she was in her white cloak, hat, and overboots.
"The nasty, fat boy," she said with a sob, breathing hard. "It's really
dishonest; it's disgusting." She stamped. "I can't put up with it; I
can't, I can't!"
"What's the matter?" asked Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.
"That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and
there was fifteen roubles in it. I borrowed it from mamma."
She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only
her handkerchief, but even her gloves, were wet with tears.
"It can't be helped!" said the doctor. "If he's lost it, he's lost it,
and it's no good worrying over it. Calm yourself; I want to talk to
you."
"I am not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he'll pay it
back, but I don't believe him; he's poor . . ."
Her husband begged her to calm herself and to listen to him, but she
kept on talking of the student and of the fifteen roubles she had lost.
"Ach! I'll give you twenty-five roubles to-morrow if you'll only hold
your tongue!" he said irritably.
"I must take off my things!" she said, crying. "I can't talk seriously
in my fur coat! How strange you are!"
He helped her off with her coat and overboots, detecting as he did so
the smell of the white wine she liked to drink with oysters (in spite of
her etherealness she ate and drank a great deal). She went into her room
and came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her
face, though her eyes still showed traces of tears. She sat down,
retreating into her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of
billowy pink her husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had
let down, and her little foot wearing a slipper.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked, swinging herself in a
rocking-chair.
"I happened to see this;" and he handed her the telegram.
She read it and shrugged her shoulders.
"Well?" she said, rocking herself faster. "That's the usual New Year's
greeting and nothing else. There are no secrets in it."