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 Æolian 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. . . .
And she, still keeping her frightened, searching eyes upon him,
felt 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?"