On a Saturday in November Anton Rubinstein was conducting in a
symphony concert. It was very hot and crowded. Laptev stood behind
the columns, while his wife and Kostya Kotchevoy were sitting in
the third or fourth row some distance in front. At the very beginning
of an interval a "certain person," Polina Nikolaevna Razsudin, quite
unexpectedly passed by him. He had often since his marriage thought
with trepidation of a possible meeting with her. When now she looked
at him openly and directly, he realised that he had all this time
shirked having things out with her, or writing her two or three
friendly lines, as though he had been hiding from her; he felt
ashamed and flushed crimson. She pressed his hand tightly and
impulsively and asked:
"Have you seen Yartsev?"
And without waiting for an answer she went striding on impetuously
as though some one were pushing her on from behind.
She was very thin and plain, with a long nose; her face always
looked tired, and exhausted, and it seemed as though it were an
effort to her to keep her eyes open, and not to fall down. She had
fine, dark eyes, and an intelligent, kind, sincere expression, but
her movements were awkward and abrupt. It was hard to talk to her,
because she could not talk or listen quietly. Loving her was not
easy. Sometimes when she was alone with Laptev she would go on
laughing for a long time, hiding her face in her hands, and would
declare that love was not the chief thing in life for her, and would
be as whimsical as a girl of seventeen; and before kissing her he
would have to put out all the candles. She was thirty. She was
married to a schoolmaster, but had not lived with her husband for
years. She earned her living by giving music lessons and playing
in quartettes.
During the ninth symphony she passed again as though by accident,
but the crowd of men standing like a thick wall behind the columns
prevented her going further, and she remained beside him. Laptev
saw that she was wearing the same little velvet blouse she had worn
at concerts last year and the year before. Her gloves were new, and
her fan, too, was new, but it was a common one. She was fond of
fine clothes, but she did not know how to dress, and grudged spending
money on it. She dressed so badly and untidily that when she was
going to her lessons striding hurriedly down the street, she might
easily have been taken for a young monk.
The public applauded and shouted encore.
"You'll spend the evening with me," said Polina Nikolaevna, going
up to Laptev and looking at him severely. "When this is over we'll
go and have tea. Do you hear? I insist on it. You owe me a great
deal, and haven't the moral right to refuse me such a trifle."
"Very well; let us go," Laptev assented.
Endless calls followed the conclusion of the concert. The audience
got up from their seats and went out very slowly, and Laptev could
not go away without telling his wife. He had to stand at the door
and wait.
"I'm dying for some tea," Polina Nikolaevna said plaintively. "My
very soul is parched."
"You can get something to drink here," said Laptev. "Let's go to
the buffet."
"Oh, I've no money to fling away on waiters. I'm not a shopkeeper."
He offered her his arm; she refused, in a long, wearisome sentence
which he had heard many times, to the effect that she did not class
herself with the feebler fair sex, and did not depend on the services
of gentlemen.
As she talked to him she kept looking about at the audience and
greeting acquaintances; they were her fellow-students at the higher
courses and at the conservatorium, and her pupils. She gripped their
hands abruptly, as though she were tugging at them. But then she
began twitching her shoulders, and trembling as though she were in
a fever, and at last said softly, looking at Laptev with horror:
"Who is it you've married? Where were your eyes, you mad fellow?
What did you see in that stupid, insignificant girl? Why, I loved
you for your mind, for your soul, but that china doll wants nothing
but your money!"
"Let us drop that, Polina," he said in a voice of supplication.
"All that you can say to me about my marriage I've said to myself
many times already. Don't cause me unnecessary pain."
Yulia Sergeyevna made her appearance, wearing a black dress with a
big diamond brooch, which her father-in-law had sent her after the
service. She was followed by her suite--Kotchevoy, two doctors
of their acquaintance, an officer, and a stout young man in student's
uniform, called Kish.
"You go on with Kostya," Laptev said to his wife. "I'm coming later."
Yulia nodded and went on. Polina Nikolaevna gazed after her, quivering
all over and twitching nervously, and in her eyes there was a look
of repulsion, hatred, and pain.
Laptev was afraid to go home with her, foreseeing an unpleasant
discussion, cutting words, and tears, and he suggested that they
should go and have tea at a restaurant. But she said:
"No, no. I want to go home. Don't dare to talk to me of restaurants."
She did not like being in a restaurant, because the atmosphere of
restaurants seemed to her poisoned by tobacco smoke and the breath
of men. Against all men she did not know she cherished a strange
prejudice, regarding them all as immoral rakes, capable of attacking
her at any moment. Besides, the music played at restaurants jarred
on her nerves and gave her a headache.
Coming out of the Hall of Nobility, they took a sledge in Ostozhenka
and drove to Savelovsky Lane, where she lodged. All the way Laptev
thought about her. It was true that he owed her a great deal. He
had made her acquaintance at the flat of his friend Yartsev, to
whom she was giving lessons in harmony. Her love for him was deep
and perfectly disinterested, and her relations with him did not
alter her habits; she went on giving her lessons and wearing herself
out with work as before. Through her he came to understand and love
music, which he had scarcely cared for till then.
"Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!" she pronounced in a hollow
voice, covering her mouth with her muff that she might not catch
cold. "I've given five lessons, confound them! My pupils are as
stupid as posts; I nearly died of exasperation. I don't know how
long this slavery can go on. I'm worn out. As soon as I can scrape
together three hundred roubles, I shall throw it all up and go to
the Crimea, to lie on the beach and drink in ozone. How I love the
sea--oh, how I love the sea!"
"You'll never go," said Laptev. "To begin with, you'll never save
the money; and, besides, you'd grudge spending it. Forgive me, I
repeat again: surely it's quite as humiliating to collect the money
by farthings from idle people who have music lessons to while away
their time, as to borrow it from your friends."
"I haven't any friends," she said irritably. "And please don't talk
nonsense. The working class to which I belong has one privilege:
the consciousness of being incorruptible--the right to refuse to
be indebted to wretched little shopkeepers, and to treat them with
scorn. No, indeed, you don't buy me! I'm not a Yulitchka!"
Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would
call forth a perfect torrent of words, such as he had often heard
before. She paid herself.
She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady who
provided her meals. Her big Becker piano was for the time at Yartsev's
in Great Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day to play on
it. In her room there were armchairs in loose covers, a bed with a
white summer quilt, and flowers belonging to the landlady; there
were oleographs on the walls, and there was nothing that would have
suggested that there was a woman, and a woman of university education,
living in it. There was no toilet table; there were no books; there
was not even a writing-table. It was evident that she went to bed
as soon as she got home, and went out as soon as she got up in the
morning.
The cook brought in the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea, and,
still shivering--the room was cold--began abusing the singers
who had sung in the ninth symphony. She was so tired she could
hardly keep her eyes open. She drank one glass of tea, then a second,
and then a third.
"And so you are married," she said. "But don't be uneasy; I'm not
going to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart.
Only it's annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible
as every one else; that what you want in a woman is not brains or
intellect, but simply a body, good looks, and youth. . . . Youth!"
she pronounced through her nose, as though mimicking some one, and
she laughed. "Youth! You must have purity, _reinheit! reinheit!_"
she laughed, throwing herself back in her chair. "_Reinheit!_"
When she left off laughing her eyes were wet with tears.
"You're happy, at any rate?" she asked.
"No."
"Does she love you?"
Laptev, agitated, and feeling miserable, stood up and began walking
about the room.
"No," he repeated. "If you want to know, Polina, I'm very unhappy.
There's no help for it; I've done the stupid thing, and there's no
correcting it now. I must look at it philosophically. She married
me without love, stupidly, perhaps with mercenary motives, but
without understanding, and now she evidently sees her mistake and
is miserable. I see it. At night we sleep together, but by day she
is afraid to be left alone with me for five minutes, and tries to
find distraction, society. With me she feels ashamed and frightened."
"And yet she takes money from you?"
"That's stupid, Polina!" cried Laptev. "She takes money from me
because it makes absolutely no difference to her whether she has
it or not. She is an honest, pure girl. She married me simply because
she wanted to get away from her father, that's all."
"And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been
rich?" asked Polina.
"I'm not sure of anything," said Laptev dejectedly. "Not of anything.
I don't understand anything. For God's sake, Polina, don't let us
talk about it."
"Do you love her?"
"Desperately."
A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up and
down, thinking that by now his wife was probably having supper at
the doctors' club.
"But is it possible to love without knowing why?" asked Polina,
shrugging her shoulders. "No; it's the promptings of animal passion!
You are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body, that _reinheit!_
Go away from me; you are unclean! Go to her!"
She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled it
at him. He put on his fur coat without speaking and went out, but
she ran after him into the passage, clutched his arm above the
elbow, and broke into sobs.
"Hush, Polina! Don't!" he said, and could not unclasp her fingers.
"Calm yourself, I entreat you."
She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an
unpleasant waxy colour like a corpse's, and Laptev still could not
unclasp her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up carefully,
laid her on her bed, and sat by her for ten minutes till she came
to herself. Her hands were cold, her pulse was weak and uneven.
"Go home," she said, opening her eyes. "Go away, or I shall begin
howling again. I must take myself in hand."
When he came out, instead of going to the doctors' club where his
friends were expecting him, he went home. All the way home he was
asking himself reproachfully why he had not settled down to married
life with that woman who loved him so much, and was in reality his
wife and friend. She was the one human being who was devoted to
him; and, besides, would it not have been a grateful and worthy
task to give happiness, peace, and a home to that proud, clever,
overworked creature? Was it for him, he asked himself, to lay claim
to youth and beauty, to that happiness which could not be, and
which, as though in punishment or mockery, had kept him for the
last three months in a state of gloom and oppression. The honeymoon
was long over, and he still, absurd to say, did not know what sort
of person his wife was. To her school friends and her father she
wrote long letters of five sheets, and was never at a loss for
something to say to them, but to him she never spoke except about
the weather or to tell him that dinner was ready, or that it was
supper-time. When at night she said her lengthy prayers and then
kissed her crosses and ikons, he thought, watching her with hatred,
"Here she's praying. What's she praying about? What about?" In his
thoughts he showered insults on himself and her, telling himself
that when he got into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking
what he had paid for; but it was horrible. If only it had been a
healthy, reckless, sinful woman; but here he had youth, piety,
meekness, the pure eyes of innocence. . . . While they were engaged
her piety had touched him; now the conventional definiteness of her
views and convictions seemed to him a barrier, behind which the
real truth could not be seen. Already everything in his married
life was agonising. When his wife, sitting beside him in the theatre,
sighed or laughed spontaneously, it was bitter to him that she
enjoyed herself alone and would not share her delight with him. And
it was remarkable that she was friendly with all his friends, and
they all knew what she was like already, while he knew nothing about
her, and only moped and was dumbly jealous.
When he got home Laptev put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and
sat down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at home.
But within half an hour there was a ring at the hall door, and he
heard the muffled footsteps of Pyotr running to open it. It was
Yulia. She walked into the study in her fur coat, her cheeks rosy
with the frost,
"There's a great fire in Pryesnya," she said breathlessly. "There's
a tremendous glow. I'm going to see it with Konstantin Ivanovitch."
"Well, do, dear!"
The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror in
her eyes, reassured Laptev. He read for another half-hour and went
to bed.
Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she had
borrowed from him, all his letters and his photographs; with them
was a note consisting of one word--_"basta."_