‘Of course, of course! How could you know her! Musotchka ... Take note,
my dear sir, this girl’s name is Musa--and it’s not a nickname, but her
real name ... Isn’t that a predestination? Musotchka, I want to
introduce you to Mr. ... Mr. ...’
‘B.,’ I prompted.
‘B.,’ he repeated. ‘Musotchka, listen! You see before you the most
excellent, most delightful of young men. Fate threw us together when he
was still in years of boyhood! I beg you to look on him as a friend!’
I swung off a low bow. Musa, red as a poppy, flashed a look on me from
under her eyelids, and dropped them immediately.
‘Ah!’ thought I, ‘you ‘re one of those who in difficult moments don’t
turn pale, but red; that must be made a note of.’
‘You must be indulgent, she’s not a fine lady,’ observed Punin, and he
went out of the shop into the street; Musa and I followed him.
* * * * *
The house in which Punin lodged was a considerable distance from the
Gostinny Dvor, being, in fact, in Sadovoy Street. On the way my former
preceptor in poetry had time to communicate a good many details of his
mode of existence. Since the time of our parting, both he and Baburin
had been tossed about holy Russia pretty thoroughly, and had not
long--only a year and a half before--found a permanent home in Moscow.
Baburin had succeeded in becoming head-clerk in the office of a rich
merchant and manufacturer. ‘Not a lucrative berth,’ Punin observed with
a sigh,--‘a lot of work, and not much profit ... but what’s one to do?
One must be thankful to get that! I, too, am trying to earn something by
copying and lessons; only my efforts have so far not been crowned with
success. My writing, you perhaps recollect, is old-fashioned, not in
accordance with the tastes of the day; and as regards lessons--what has
been a great obstacle is the absence of befitting attire; moreover, I
greatly fear that in the matter of instruction--in the subject of
Russian literature--I am also not in harmony with the tastes of the day;
and so it comes about that I am turned away.’ (Punin laughed his sleepy,
subdued laugh. He had retained his old, somewhat high-flown manner of
speech, and his old weakness for falling into rhyme.) ‘All run after
novelties, nothing but innovations! I dare say you, too, do not honour
the old divinities, and fall down before new idols?’
‘And you, Nikander Vavilitch, do you really still esteem Heraskov?’
Punin stood still and waved both hands at once. ‘In the highest degree,
sir! in the high ... est de ... gree, I do!’
‘And you don’t read Pushkin? You don’t like Pushkin?’
Punin again flung his hands up higher than his head.
‘Pushkin? Pushkin is the snake, lying hid in the grass, who is endowed
with the note of the nightingale!’
While Punin and I talked like this, cautiously picking our way over the
unevenly laid brick pavement of so-called ‘white-stoned’ Moscow--in
which there is not one stone, and which is not white at all--Musa walked
silently beside us on the side further from me. In speaking of her, I
called her ‘your niece.’ Punin was silent for a little, scratched his
head, and informed me in an undertone that he had called her so ...
merely as a manner of speaking; that she was really no relation; that
she was an orphan picked up and cared for by Baburin in the town of
Voronezh; but that he, Punin, might well call her daughter, as he loved
her no less than a real daughter. I had no doubt that, though Punin
intentionally dropped his voice, Musa could hear all he said very well;
and she was at once angry, and shy, and embarrassed; and the lights and
shades chased each other over her face, and everything in it was
slightly quivering, the eyelids and brows and lips and narrow nostrils.
All this was very charming, and amusing, and queer.
* * * * *
But at last we reached the ‘modest nest.’ And modest it certainly was,
the nest. It consisted of a small, one-storied house, that seemed almost
sunk into the ground, with a slanting wooden roof, and four dingy
windows in the front. The furniture of the rooms was of the poorest, and
not over tidy, indeed. Between the windows and on the walls hung about a
dozen tiny wooden cages containing larks, canaries, and siskins. ‘My
subjects!’ Punin pronounced triumphantly, pointing his finger at them.
We had hardly time to get in and look about us, Punin had hardly sent
Musa for the samovar, when Baburin himself came in. He seemed to me to
have aged much more than Punin, though his step was as firm as ever, and
the expression of his face altogether was unchanged; but he had grown
thin and bent, his cheeks were sunken, and his thick black shock of hair
was sprinkled with grey. He did not recognise me, and showed no
particular pleasure when Punin mentioned my name; he did not even smile
with his eyes, he barely nodded; he asked--very carelessly and
drily--whether my _granny_ were living--and that was all. ‘I’m not
over-delighted at a visit from a nobleman,’ he seemed to say; ‘I don’t
feel flattered by it.’ The republican was a republican still.
Musa came back; a decrepit little old woman followed her, bringing in a
tarnished samovar. Punin began fussing about, and pressing me to take
things; Baburin sat down to the table, leaned his head on his hands, and
looked with weary eyes about him. At tea, however, he began to talk. He
was dissatisfied with his position. ‘A screw--not a man,’ so he spoke of
his employer; ‘people in a subordinate position are so much dirt to him,
of no consequence whatever; and yet it’s not so long since he was under
the yoke himself. Nothing but cruelty and covetousness. It’s a bondage
worse than the government’s! And all the trade here rests on swindling
and flourishes on nothing else!’
Hearing such dispiriting utterances, Punin sighed expressively,
assented, shook his head up and down, and from side to side; Musa
maintained a stubborn silence.... She was obviously fretted by the
doubt, what I was, whether I was a discreet person or a gossip. And if I
were discreet, whether it was not with some afterthought in my mind. Her
dark, swift, restless eyes fairly flashed to and fro under their
half-drooping lids. Only once she glanced at me, but so inquisitively,
so searchingly, almost viciously ... I positively started. Baburin
scarcely talked to her at all; but whenever he did address her, there
was a note of austere, hardly fatherly, tenderness in his voice.
Punin, on the contrary, was continually joking with Musa; she responded
unwillingly, however. He called her little snow-maiden, little
snowflake.
‘Why do you give Musa Pavlovna such names?’ I asked.
Punin laughed. ‘Because she’s such a chilly little thing.’
‘Sensible,’ put in Baburin: ‘as befits a young girl.’
‘We may call her the mistress of the house,’ cried Punin. ‘Hey? Paramon
Semyonitch?’ Baburin frowned; Musa turned away ... I did not understand
the hint at the time.
So passed two hours ... in no very lively fashion, though Punin did his
best to ‘entertain the honourable company.’ For instance, he squatted
down in front of the cage of one of the canaries, opened the door, and
commanded: ‘On the cupola! Begin the concert!’ The canary fluttered out
at once, perched on the _cupola_, that is to say, on Punin’s bald pate,
and turning from side to side, and shaking its little wings, carolled
with all its might. During the whole time the concert lasted, Punin kept
perfectly still, only conducting with his finger, and half closing his
eyes. I could not help roaring with laughter ... but neither Baburin nor
Musa laughed.
Just as I was leaving, Baburin surprised me by an unexpected question.
He wished to ask me, as a man studying at the university, what sort of
person Zeno was, and what were my ideas about him.
‘What Zeno?’ I asked, somewhat puzzled.
‘Zeno, the sage of antiquity. Surely he cannot be unknown to you?’
I vaguely recalled the name of Zeno, as the founder of the school of
Stoics; but I knew absolutely nothing more about him.
‘Yes, he was a philosopher,’ I pronounced, at last.
‘Zeno,’ Baburin resumed in deliberate tones, ‘was that wise man, who
declared that suffering was not an evil, since fortitude overcomes all
things, and that the good in this world is one: justice; and virtue
itself is nothing else than justice.’
Punin turned a reverent ear.
‘A man living here who has picked up a lot of old books, told me that
saying,’ continued Baburin; ‘it pleased me much. But I see you are not
interested in such subjects.’
Baburin was right. In such subjects I certainly was not interested.
Since I had entered the university, I had become as much of a republican
as Baburin himself. Of Mirabeau, of Robespierre, I would have talked
with zest. Robespierre, indeed ... why, I had hanging over my
writing-table the lithographed portraits of Fouquier-Tinville and
Chalier! But Zeno! Why drag in Zeno?
As he said good-bye to me, Punin insisted very warmly on my visiting
them next day, Sunday; Baburin did not invite me at all, and even
remarked between his teeth, that talking to plain people of nondescript
position could not give me any great pleasure, and would most likely be
disagreeable to my _granny_. At that word I interrupted him, however,
and gave him to understand that my grandmother had no longer any
authority over me.
‘Why, you’ve not come into possession of the property, have you?’
queried Baburin.
‘No, I haven’t,’ I answered.
‘Well, then, it follows ...’ Baburin did not finish his sentence; but I
mentally finished it for him: ‘it follows that I’m a boy.’
‘Good-bye,’ I said aloud, and I retired.
I was just going out of the courtyard into the street ... Musa suddenly
ran out of the house, and slipping a piece of crumpled paper into my
hand, disappeared at once. At the first lamp-post I unfolded the paper.
It turned out to be a note. With difficulty I deciphered the pale
pencil-marks. ‘For God’s sake,’ Musa had written, ‘come to-morrow after
matins to the Alexandrovsky garden near the Kutafia tower I shall wait
for you don’t refuse me don’t make me miserable I simply must see you.’
There were no mistakes in spelling in this note, but neither was there
any punctuation. I returned home in perplexity.
* * * * *
When, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time, next day, I began
to get near the Kutafia tower (it was early in April, the buds were
swelling, the grass was growing greener, and the sparrows were noisily
chirrupping and quarrelling in the bare lilac bushes), considerably to
my surprise, I caught sight of Musa a little to one side, not far from
the fence. She was there before me. I was going towards her; but she
herself came to meet me.
‘Let’s go to the Kreml wall,’ she whispered in a hurried voice, running
her downcast eyes over the ground; ‘there are people here.’
We went along the path up the hill.
‘Musa Pavlovna,’ I was beginning.... But she cut me short at once.
‘Please,’ she began, speaking in the same jerky and subdued voice,
‘don’t criticise me, don’t think any harm of me. I wrote a letter to
you, I made an appointment to meet you, because ... I was afraid.... It
seemed to me yesterday,--you seemed to be laughing all the time.
Listen,’ she added, with sudden energy, and she stopped short and turned
towards me: ‘listen; if you tell with whom ... if you mention at whose
room you met me, I’ll throw myself in the water, I’ll drown myself, I’ll
make an end of myself!’
At this point, for the first time, she glanced at me with the
inquisitive, piercing look I had seen before.
‘Why, she, perhaps, really ... would do it,’ was my thought.
‘Really, Musa Pavlovna,’ I protested, hurriedly: ‘how can you have such
a bad opinion of me? Do you suppose I am capable of betraying my friend
and injuring you? Besides, come to that, there’s nothing in your
relations, as far as I’m aware, deserving of censure.... For goodness’
sake, be calm.’
Musa heard me out, without stirring from the spot, or looking at me
again.
‘There’s something else I ought to tell you,’ she began, moving forward
again along the path, ‘or else you may think I’m quite mad! I ought to
tell you, that old man wants to marry me!’
‘What old man? The bald one? Punin?’
‘No--not he! The other ... Paramon Semyonitch.’
‘Baburin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it possible? Has he made you an offer?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t consent, of course?’
‘Yes, I did consent ... because I didn’t understand what I was about
then. Now it’s a different matter.’