"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."
"You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it;
but I have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to
the health of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let
us leave that," the doctor went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least
want to reproach you or make a scene. We've had scenes and reproaches
enough; it's time to make an end of them. . . . This is what I want
to say to you: you are free, and can live as you like."
There was a silence. She began crying quietly.
"I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,"
Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you love that young man, love
him; if you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy,
and I am a wreck, and haven't long to live. In short . . . you
understand me."
He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and
speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Riss,
and used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms,
and now she really did long to go abroad.
"You see, I hide nothing from you," she added, with a sigh. "My
whole soul lies open before you. And I beg you again, be generous,
get me a passport."
"I repeat, you are free."
She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression of
his face. She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his
secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous
were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble
motive or selfish object in them. And when she looked searchingly
into his face, it seemed to him that there was a gleam of green
light in her eyes as in a cat's.
"When shall I get the passport?" she asked softly.
He suddenly had an impulse to say "Never"; but he restrained himself
and said:
"When you like."
"I shall only go for a month."
"You'll go to Riss for good. I'll get you a divorce, take the blame
on myself, and Riss can marry you."
"But I don't want a divorce!" Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly,
with an astonished face. "I am not asking you for a divorce! Get
me a passport, that's all."
"But why don't you want the divorce?" asked the doctor, beginning
to feel irritated. "You are a strange woman. How strange you are!
If you are fond of him in earnest and he loves you too, in your
position you can do nothing better than get married. Can you really
hesitate between marriage and adultery?"
"I understand you," she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful,
vindictive expression came into her face. "I understand you perfectly.
You are sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me, to force
this divorce on me. Thank you very much; I am not such a fool as
you think. I won't accept the divorce and I won't leave you--I
won't, I won't! To begin with, I don't want to lose my position in
society," she continued quickly, as though afraid of being prevented
from speaking. "Secondly, I am twenty-seven and Riss is only
twenty-three; he'll be tired of me in a year and throw me over. And
what's more, if you care to know, I'm not certain that my feeling
will last long . . . so there! I'm not going to leave you."
"Then I'll turn you out of the house!" shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch,
stamping. "I shall turn you out, you vile, loathsome woman!"
"We shall see!" she said, and went out.
It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table
moving the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically.
"My dear Sir. . . . Little foot."
Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph
taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it
for a long time. It was a family group: his father-in-law, his
mother-in-law, his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and
himself in the rôle of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a
clean-shaven, dropsical privy councillor, crafty and avaricious;
his mother-in-law, a stout lady with small predatory features like
a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in
everything; if her daughter were strangling some one, the mother
would not have protested, but would only have screened her with her
skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small predatory-looking features,
but more expressive and bolder than her mother's; she was not a
weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And Nikolay Yevgrafitch
himself in the photograph looked such a guileless soul, such a
kindly, good fellow, so open and simple-hearted; his whole face was
relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile of a divinity student, and
he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of beasts
of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give him
romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student
he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the
heart is cold and loveless."
And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a
village priest, with his democratic bringing up--a plain, blunt,
straightforward man--could have so helplessly surrendered to the
power of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature
was so utterly alien to him.
When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the
servant came into his study.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five roubles
you promised her yesterday."