Laptev lived in one of the turnings out of Little Dmitrovka. Besides
the big house facing the street, he rented also a two-storey lodge
in the yard at the back of his friend Kotchevoy, a lawyer's assistant
whom all the Laptevs called Kostya, because he had grown up under
their eyes. Facing this lodge stood another, also of two storeys,
inhabited by a French family consisting of a husband and wife and
five daughters.
There was a frost of twenty degrees. The windows were frozen over.
Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with an anxious face, took twenty
drops of a medicine; then, taking two dumb-bells out of the bookcase,
he did gymnastic exercises. He was tall and thin, with big reddish
moustaches; but what was most noticeable in his appearance was the
length of his legs.
Pyotr, a middle-aged peasant in a reefer jacket and cotton breeches
tucked into his high boots, brought in the samovar and made the
tea.
"It's very nice weather now, Konstantin Ivanovitch," he said.
"It is, but I tell you what, brother, it's a pity we can't get on,
you and I, without such exclamations."
Pyotr sighed from politeness.
"What are the little girls doing?" asked Kotchevoy.
"The priest has not come. Alexey Fyodorovitch is giving them their
lesson himself."
Kostya found a spot in the window that was not covered with frost,
and began looking through a field-glass at the windows of the house
where the French family lived.
"There's no seeing," he said.
Meanwhile Alexey Fyodorovitch was giving Sasha and Lida a scripture
lesson below. For the last six weeks they had been living in Moscow,
and were installed with their governess in the lower storey of the
lodge. And three times a week a teacher from a school in the town,
and a priest, came to give them lessons. Sasha was going through
the New Testament and Lida was going through the Old. The time
before Lida had been set the story up to Abraham to learn by heart.
"And so Adam and Eve had two sons," said Laptev. "Very good. But
what were they called? Try to remember them!"
Lida, still with the same severe face, gazed dumbly at the table.
She moved her lips, but without speaking; and the elder girl, Sasha,
looked into her face, frowning.
"You know it very well, only you mustn't be nervous," said Laptev.
"Come, what were Adam's sons called?"
"Abel and Canel," Lida whispered.
"Cain and Abel," Laptev corrected her.
A big tear rolled down Lida's cheek and dropped on the book. Sasha
looked down and turned red, and she, too, was on the point of tears.
Laptev felt a lump in his throat, and was so sorry for them he could
not speak. He got up from the table and lighted a cigarette. At
that moment Kotchevoy came down the stairs with a paper in his hand.
The little girls stood up, and without looking at him, made curtsies.
"For God's sake, Kostya, give them their lessons," said Laptev,
turning to him. "I'm afraid I shall cry, too, and I have to go to
the warehouse before dinner."
"All right."
Alexey Fyodorovitch went away. Kostya, with a very serious face,
sat down to the table and drew the Scripture history towards him.
"Well," he said; "where have you got to?"
"She knows about the Flood," said Sasha.
"The Flood? All right. Let's peg in at the Flood. Fire away about
the Flood." Kostya skimmed through a brief description of the Flood
in the book, and said: "I must remark that there really never was
a flood such as is described here. And there was no such person as
Noah. Some thousands of years before the birth of Christ, there was
an extraordinary inundation of the earth, and that's not only
mentioned in the Jewish Bible, but in the books of other ancient
peoples: the Greeks, the Chaldeans, the Hindoos. But whatever the
inundation may have been, it couldn't have covered the whole earth.
It may have flooded the plains, but the mountains must have remained.
You can read this book, of course, but don't put too much faith in
it."
Tears trickled down Lida's face again. She turned away and suddenly
burst into such loud sobs, that Kostya started and jumped up from
his seat in great confusion.
"I want to go home," she said, "to papa and to nurse."
Sasha cried too. Kostya went upstairs to his own room, and spoke
on the telephone to Yulia Sergeyevna.
"My dear soul," he said, "the little girls are crying again; there's
no doing anything with them."
Yulia Sergeyevna ran across from the big house in her indoor dress,
with only a knitted shawl over her shoulders, and chilled through
by the frost, began comforting the children.
"Do believe me, do believe me," she said in an imploring voice,
hugging first one and then the other. "Your papa's coming to-day;
he has sent a telegram. You're grieving for mother, and I grieve
too. My heart's torn, but what can we do? We must bow to God's
will!"
When they left off crying, she wrapped them up and took them out
for a drive. They stopped near the Iverskoy chapel, put up candles
at the shrine, and, kneeling down, prayed. On the way back they
went in Filippov's, and had cakes sprinkled with poppy-seeds.
The Laptevs had dinner between two and three. Pyotr handed the
dishes. This Pyotr waited on the family, and by day ran to the post,
to the warehouse, to the law courts for Kostya; he spent his evenings
making cigarettes, ran to open the door at night, and before five
o'clock in the morning was up lighting the stoves, and no one knew
where he slept. He was very fond of opening seltzer-water bottles
and did it easily, without a bang and without spilling a drop.
"With God's blessing," said Kostya, drinking off a glass of vodka
before the soup.
At first Yulia Sergeyevna did not like Kostya; his bass voice, his
phrases such as "Landed him one on the beak," "filth," "produce the
samovar," etc., his habit of clinking glasses and making sentimental
speeches, seemed to her trivial. But as she got to know him better,
she began to feel very much at home with him. He was open with her;
he liked talking to her in a low voice in the evening, and even
gave her novels of his own composition to read, though these had
been kept a secret even from such friends as Laptev and Yartsev.
She read these novels and praised them, so that she might not
disappoint him, and he was delighted because he hoped sooner or
later to become a distinguished author.
In his novels he described nothing but country-house life, though
he had only seen the country on rare occasions when visiting friends
at a summer villa, and had only been in a real country-house once
in his life, when he had been to Volokolamsk on law business. He
avoided any love interest as though he were ashamed of it; he put
in frequent descriptions of nature, and in them was fond of using
such expressions as, "the capricious lines of the mountains, the
miraculous forms of the clouds, the harmony of mysterious rhythms
. . . ." His novels had never been published, and this he attributed
to the censorship.
He liked the duties of a lawyer, but yet he considered that his
most important pursuit was not the law but these novels. He believed
that he had a subtle, æsthetic temperament, and he always had
leanings towards art. He neither sang nor played on any musical
instrument, and was absolutely without an ear for music, but he
attended all the symphony and philharmonic concerts, got up concerts
for charitable objects, and made the acquaintance of singers. . . .
They used to talk at dinner.
"It's a strange thing," said Laptev, "my Fyodor took my breath away
again! He said we must find out the date of the centenary of our
firm, so as to try and get raised to noble rank; and he said it
quite seriously. What can be the matter with him? I confess I begin
to feel worried about him."
They talked of Fyodor, and of its being the fashion nowadays to
adopt some pose or other. Fyodor, for instance, tried to appear
like a plain merchant, though he had ceased to be one; and when the
teacher came from the school, of which old Laptev was the patron,
to ask Fyodor for his salary, the latter changed his voice and
deportment, and behaved with the teacher as though he were some one
in authority.
There was nothing to be done; after dinner they went into the study.
They talked about the decadents, about "The Maid of Orleans," and
Kostya delivered a regular monologue; he fancied that he was very
successful in imitating Ermolova. Then they sat down and played
whist. The little girls had not gone back to the lodge but were
sitting together in one arm-chair, with pale and mournful faces,
and were listening to every noise in the street, wondering whether
it was their father coming. In the evening when it was dark and the
candles were lighted, they felt deeply dejected. The talk over the
whist, the footsteps of Pyotr, the crackling in the fireplace,
jarred on their nerves, and they did not like to look at the fire.
In the evenings they did not want to cry, but they felt strange,
and there was a load on their hearts. They could not understand how
people could talk and laugh when their mother was dead.
"What did you see through the field-glasses today?" Yulia Sergeyevna
asked Kostya.
"Nothing to-day, but yesterday I saw the old Frenchman having his
bath."
At seven o'clock Yulia and Kostya went to the Little Theatre. Laptev
was left with the little girls.
"It's time your father was here," he said, looking at his watch.
"The train must be late."
The children sat in their arm-chair dumb and huddling together like
animals when they are cold, while he walked about the room looking
impatiently at his watch. It was quiet in the house. But just before
nine o'clock some one rang at the bell. Pyotr went to open the door.
Hearing a familiar voice, the children shrieked, burst into sobs,
and ran into the hall. Panaurov was wearing a sumptuous coat of
antelope skin, and his head and moustaches were white with hoar
frost. "In a minute, in a minute," he muttered, while Sasha and
Lida, sobbing and laughing, kissed his cold hands, his hat, his
antelope coat. With the languor of a handsome man spoilt by too
much love, he fondled the children without haste, then went into
the study and said, rubbing his hands:
"I've not come to stay long, my friends. I'm going to Petersburg
to-morrow. They've promised to transfer me to another town."
He was staying at the Dresden Hotel.
X
A friend who was often at the Laptevs' was Ivan Gavrilitch Yartsev.
He was a strong, healthy man with black hair and a clever, pleasant
face. He was considered to be handsome, but of late he had begun
to grow stout, and that rather spoilt his face and figure; another
thing that spoilt him was that he wore his hair cut so close that
the skin showed through.
At the University his tall figure and physical strength had won him
the nickname of "the pounder" among the students. He had taken his
degree with the Laptev brothers in the faculty of philology--then
he went in for science and now had the degree of _magister_ in
chemistry. But he had never given a lecture or even been a demonstrator.
He taught physics and natural history in the modern school, and in
two girls' high schools. He was enthusiastic over his pupils,
especially the girls, and used to maintain that a remarkable
generation was growing up. At home he spent his time studying
sociology and Russian history, as well as chemistry, and he sometimes
published brief notes in the newspapers and magazines, signing them
"Y." When he talked of some botanical or zoological subject, he
spoke like an historian; when he was discussing some historical
question, he approached it as a man of science.
Kish, nicknamed "the eternal student," was also like one of the
family at the Laptevs'. He had been for three years studying medicine.
Then he took up mathematics, and spent two years over each year's
course. His father, a provincial druggist, used to send him forty
roubles a month, to which his mother, without his father's knowledge,
added another ten. And this sum was not only sufficient for his
board and lodging, but even for such luxuries as an overcoat lined
with Polish beaver, gloves, scent, and photographs (he often had
photographs taken of himself and used to distribute them among his
friends). He was neat and demure, slightly bald, with golden
side-whiskers, and he had the air of a man nearly always ready to
oblige. He was always busy looking after other people's affairs.
At one time he would be rushing about with a subscription list; at
another time he would be freezing in the early morning at a ticket
office to buy tickets for ladies of his acquaintance, or at somebody's
request would be ordering a wreath or a bouquet. People simply said
of him: "Kish will go, Kish will do it, Kish will buy it." He was
usually unsuccessful in carrying out his commissions. Reproaches
were showered upon him, people frequently forgot to pay him for the
things he bought, but he simply sighed in hard cases and never
protested. He was never particularly delighted nor disappointed;
his stories were always long and boring; and his jokes invariably
provoked laughter just because they were not funny. Thus, one day,
for instance, intending to make a joke, he said to Pyotr: "Pyotr,
you're not a sturgeon;" and this aroused a general laugh, and he,
too, laughed for a long time, much pleased at having made such a
successful jest. Whenever one of the professors was buried, he
walked in front with the mutes.
Yartsev and Kish usually came in the evening to tea. If the Laptevs
were not going to the theatre or a concert, the evening tea lingered
on till supper. One evening in February the following conversation
took place:
"A work of art is only significant and valuable when there are some
serious social problems contained in its central idea," said Kostya,
looking wrathfully at Yartsev. "If there is in the work a protest
against serfdom, or the author takes up arms against the vulgarity
of aristocratic society, the work is significant and valuable. The
novels that are taken up with 'Ach!' and 'Och!' and 'she loved him,
while he ceased to love her,' I tell you, are worthless, and damn
them all, I say!"
"I agree with you, Konstantin Ivanovitch," said Yulia Sergeyevna.
"One describes a love scene; another, a betrayal; and the third,
meeting again after separation. Are there no other subjects? Why,
there are many people sick, unhappy, harassed by poverty, to whom
reading all that must be distasteful."
It was disagreeable to Laptev to hear his wife, not yet twenty-two,
speaking so seriously and coldly about love. He understood why this
was so.
"If poetry does not solve questions that seem so important," said
Yartsev, "you should turn to works on technical subjects, criminal
law, or finance, read scientific pamphlets. What need is there to
discuss in 'Romeo and Juliet,' liberty of speech, or the disinfecting
of prisons, instead of love, when you can find all that in special
articles and textbooks?"
"That's pushing it to the extreme," Kostya interrupted. "We are not
talking of giants like Shakespeare or Goethe; we are talking of the
hundreds of talented mediocre writers, who would be infinitely more
valuable if they would let love alone, and would employ themselves
in spreading knowledge and humane ideas among the masses."
Kish, lisping and speaking a little through his nose, began telling
the story of a novel he had lately been reading. He spoke
circumstantially and without haste. Three minutes passed, then five,
then ten, and no one could make out what he was talking about, and
his face grew more and more indifferent, and his eyes more and more
blank.
"Kish, do be quick over it," Yulia Sergeyevna could not resist
saying; "it's really agonizing!"
"Shut up, Kish!" Kostya shouted to him.
They all laughed, and Kish with them.
Fyodor came in. Flushing red in patches, he greeted them all in a
nervous flurry, and led his brother away into the study. Of late
he had taken to avoiding the company of more than one person at
once.
"Let the young people laugh, while we speak from the heart in here,"
he said, settling himself in a deep arm-chair at a distance from
the lamp. "It's a long time, my dear brother, since we've seen each
other. How long is it since you were at the warehouse? I think it
must be a week."
"Yes, there's nothing for me to do there. And I must confess that
the old man wearies me."
"Of course, they could get on at the warehouse without you and me,
but one must have some occupation. 'In the sweat of thy brow thou
shalt eat bread,' as it is written. God loves work."
Pyotr brought in a glass of tea on a tray. Fyodor drank it without
sugar, and asked for more. He drank a great deal of tea, and could
get through as many as ten glasses in the evening.
"I tell you what, brother," he said, getting up and going to his
brother. "Laying aside philosophic subtleties, you must get elected
on to the town council, and little by little we will get you on to
the local Board, and then to be an alderman. And as time goes on
--you are a clever man and well-educated--you will be noticed
in Petersburg and asked to go there--active men on the provincial
assemblies and town councils are all the fashion there now--and
before you are fifty you'll be a privy councillor, and have a ribbon
across your shoulders."
Laptev made no answer; he knew that all this--being a privy
councillor and having a ribbon over his shoulder--was what Fyodor
desired for himself, and he did not know what to say.
The brothers sat still and said nothing. Fyodor opened his watch
and for a long, long time gazed into it with strained attention,
as though he wanted to detect the motion of the hand, and the
expression of his face struck Laptev as strange.
They were summoned to supper. Laptev went into the dining-room,
while Fyodor remained in the study. The argument was over and Yartsev
was speaking in the tones of a professor giving a lecture:
"Owing to differences of climate, of energy, of tastes, of age,
equality among men is physically impossible. But civilised man can
make this inequality innocuous, as he has already done with bogs
and bears. A learned man succeeded in making a cat, a mouse, a
falcon, a sparrow, all eat out of one plate; and education, one
must hope, will do the same thing with men. Life continually
progresses, civilisation makes enormous advances before our eyes,
and obviously a time will come when we shall think, for instance,
the present condition of the factory population as absurd as we now
do the state of serfdom, in which girls were exchanged for dogs."
"That won't be for a long while, a very long while," said Kostya,
with a laugh, "not till Rothschild thinks his cellars full of gold
absurd, and till then the workers may bend their backs and die of
hunger. No; that's not it. We mustn't wait for it; we must struggle
for it. Do you suppose because the cat eats out of the same saucer
as the mouse--do you suppose that she is influenced by a sense
of conscious intelligence? Not a bit of it! She's made to do it by
force."
"Fyodor and I are rich; our father's a capitalist, a millionaire.
You will have to struggle with us," said Laptev, rubbing his forehead
with his hand. "Struggle with me is an idea I cannot grasp. I am
rich, but what has money given me so far? What has this power given
me? In what way am I happier than you? My childhood was slavery,
and money did not save me from the birch. When Nina was ill and
died, my money did not help her. If people don't care for me, I
can't make them like me if I spend a hundred million."
"But you can do a great deal of good," said Kish.
"Good, indeed! You spoke to me yesterday of a mathematical man who
is looking for a job. Believe me, I can do as little for him as you
can. I can give money, but that's not what he wants--I asked a
well-known musician to help a poor violinist, and this is what he
answered: 'You apply to me just because you are not a musician
yourself.' In the same way I say to you that you apply for help to
me so confidently because you've never been in the position of a
rich man."
"Why you bring in the comparison with a well-known musician I don't
understand!" said Yulia Sergeyevna, and she flushed crimson. "What
has the well-known musician to do with it!"
Her face was quivering with hatred, and she dropped her eyes to
conceal the feeling. And not only her husband, but all the men
sitting at the table, knew what the look in her face meant.
"What has the well-known musician got to do with it?" she said
slowly. "Why, nothing's easier than helping some one poor."
Silence followed. Pyotr handed the woodcock, but they all refused
it, and ate nothing but salad. Laptev did not remember what he had
said, but it was clear to him that it was not his words that were
hateful, but the fact of his meddling in the conversation at all.
After supper he went into his study; intently, with a beating heart,
expecting further humiliation, he listened to what was going on in
the hall. An argument had sprung up there again. Then Yartsev sat
down to the piano and played a sentimental song. He was a man of
varied accomplishments; he could play and sing, and even perform
conjuring tricks.
"You may please yourselves, my friends, but I'm not going to stay
at home," said Yulia. "We must go somewhere."
They decided to drive out of town, and sent Kish to the merchant's
club to order a three-horse sledge. They did not ask Laptev to go
with them because he did not usually join these expeditions, and
because his brother was sitting with him; but he took it to mean
that his society bored them, and that he was not wanted in their
light-hearted youthful company. And his vexation, his bitter feeling,
was so intense that he almost shed tears. He was positively glad
that he was treated so ungraciously, that he was scorned, that he
was a stupid, dull husband, a money-bag; and it seemed to him, that
he would have been even more glad if his wife were to deceive him
that night with his best friend, and were afterwards to acknowledge
it, looking at him with hatred. . . . He was jealous on her account
of their student friends, of actors, of singers, of Yartsev, even
of casual acquaintances; and now he had a passionate longing for
her really to be unfaithful to him. He longed to find her in another
man's arms, and to be rid of this nightmare forever. Fyodor was
drinking tea, gulping it noisily. But he, too, got up to go.
"Our old father must have got cataract," he said, as he put on his
fur coat. "His sight has become very poor."
Laptev put on his coat, too, and went out. After seeing his brother
part of the way home, he took a sledge and drove to Yar's.
"And this is family happiness!" he said, jeering at himself. "This
is love!"
His teeth were chattering, and he did not know if it were jealousy
or something else. He walked about near the tables; listened to a
comic singer in the hall. He had not a single phrase ready if he
should meet his own party; and he felt sure beforehand that if he
met his wife, he would only smile pitifully and not cleverly, and
that every one would understand what feeling had induced him to
come here. He was bewildered by the electric light, the loud music,
the smell of powder, and the fact that the ladies he met looked at
him. He stood at the doors trying to see and to hear what was going
on in the private rooms, and it seemed to him that he was somehow
playing a mean, contemptible part on a level with the comic singers
and those ladies. Then he went to Strelna, but he found none of his
circle there, either; and only when on the way home he was again
driving up to Yar's, a three-horse sledge noisily overtook him. The
driver was drunk and shouting, and he could hear Yartsev laughing:
"Ha, ha, ha!"
Laptev returned home between three and four. Yulia Sergeyevna was
in bed. Noticing that she was not asleep, he went up to her and
said sharply:
"I understand your repulsion, your hatred, but you might spare me
before other people; you might conceal your feelings."
She got up and sat on the bed with her legs dangling. Her eyes
looked big and black in the lamplight.
"I beg your pardon," she said.
He could not utter a single word from excitement and the trembling
of his whole body; he stood facing her and was dumb. She trembled,
too, and sat with the air of a criminal waiting for explanations.
"How I suffer!" he said at last, and he clutched his head. "I'm in
hell, and I'm out of my mind."
"And do you suppose it's easy for me?" she asked, with a quiver in
her voice. "God alone knows what I go through."
"You've been my wife for six months, but you haven't a spark of
love for me in your heart. There's no hope, not one ray of light!
Why did you marry me?" Laptev went on with despair. "Why? What demon
thrust you into my arms? What did you hope for? What did you want?"
She looked at him with terror, as though she were afraid he would
kill her.
"Did I attract you? Did you like me?" he went on, gasping for breath.
"No. Then what? What? Tell me what?" he cried. "Oh, the cursed
money! The cursed money!"
"I swear to God, no!" she cried, and she crossed herself. She seemed
to shrink under the insult, and for the first time he heard her
crying. "I swear to God, no!" she repeated. "I didn't think about
your money; I didn't want it. I simply thought I should do wrong
if I refused you. I was afraid of spoiling your life and mine. And
now I am suffering for my mistake. I'm suffering unbearably!"
She sobbed bitterly, and he saw that she was hurt; and not knowing
what to say, dropped down on the carpet before her.
"That's enough; that's enough," he muttered. "I insulted you because
I love you madly." He suddenly kissed her foot and passionately
hugged it. "If only a spark of love," he muttered. "Come, lie to
me; tell me a lie! Don't say it's a mistake! . . ."
But she went on crying, and he felt that she was only enduring his
caresses as an inevitable consequence of her mistake. And the foot
he had kissed she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for
her.
She got into bed and covered her head over; he undressed and got
into bed, too. In the morning they both felt confused and did not
know what to talk about, and he even fancied she walked unsteadily
on the foot he had kissed.
Before dinner Panaurov came to say good-bye. Yulia had an irresistible
desire to go to her own home; it would be nice, she thought, to go
away and have a rest from married life, from the embarrassment and
the continual consciousness that she had done wrong. It was decided
at dinner that she should set off with Panaurov, and stay with her
father for two or three weeks until she was tired of it.