She stepped away to the window, fearing these caresses, and both of them already regretted this declaration and were asking themselves in embarrassment:
‘‘Why has this happened?’’
‘‘If you only knew how unhappy I am!’’ she said, pressing her hands together.
‘‘What’s wrong?’’ he asked, going up to her and also pressing his hands together. ‘‘My dear, for God’s sake, tell me, what is it? But only the truth, I beg you, only the truth!’’
‘‘Don’t pay any attention,’’ she said and smiled forcedly. ‘‘I promise you, I will be a faithful, devoted wife... Come tonight.’’
Sitting with his sister later and reading a historical novel, he remembered all that, and felt bad that his magnificent, pure, broad feeling had met such a puny response; he was not loved, but his proposal had been accepted, probably only because he was rich; that is, the preference was given to that which he valued least in himself. It might be allowed that Yulia, pure and believing in God, had not thought once about money, but she did not love him, did not love him, and obviously had some calculation, though maybe not fully conscious, vague, but a calculation all the same. The doctor’s house was repulsive to him with its bourgeois furnishings, the doctor himself seemed to him like a fat, pathetic niggard, some sort of operetta Gaspard from The Bells of Corneville,6 the very name of Yulia now sounded vulgar. He imagined how he and his Yulia would go to the altar together, essentially complete strangers to each other, without a drop of feeling on her part, as if they had been betrothed by a matchmaker, and there was now only one consolation left him, as banal as this marriage itself, the consolation that he was not the first nor the last, that thousands of people marry that way, and that with time Yulia would get to know him better and might come to love him.
‘‘Romeo and Yulia!’’ he said, closing the book and laughing. ‘‘I’m Romeo, Nina. You can congratulate me, I proposed today to Yulia Belavin.’’
Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but then believed him and wept. The news did not please her.
‘‘Well, then I congratulate you,’’ she said. ‘‘But why is it so sudden?’’
‘‘No, it’s not sudden. It’s been going on since March, only you didn’t notice anything... I fell in love back in March, when I made her acquaintance here in your room.’’
‘‘And I thought you’d marry one of our Moscow girls,’’ Nina Fyodorovna said after a pause. ‘‘The girls from our circle would be simpler. But the chief thing, Alyosha, is that you should be happy, that’s the chiefest thing. My Grigory Nikolaich didn’t love me, and there’s no concealing it, you see how we live. Of course, any woman could love you for your kindness and intelligence, but Yulechka is a boarding-school girl and a gentlewoman, for her intelligence and kindness aren’t enough. She’s young, and you, Alyosha, are no longer young, nor are you handsome.’’
To soften these last words, she stroked his cheek and said:
‘‘You’re not handsome, but you’re a sweetheart.’’
She became all excited, so that a slight blush even came to her cheeks, and she spoke with enthusiasm about whether it would be fitting for her to bless Alyosha with an icon; for she was his older sister and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to persuade her mournful brother that the wedding had to be celebrated in the proper way, festively and merrily, so that people would not condemn them.
After that, he began to visit the Belavins as a fiancé, three or four times a day, and no longer had time to take turns with Sasha reading historical novels. Yulia received him in her own two rooms, far from the drawing room and her father’s study, and he liked them very much. Here the walls were dark, and in the corner stood a stand with icons; there was a smell of good perfume and icon-lamp oil. She lived in the farthest rooms, her bed and dressing table were partitioned off by a screen, and the doors of the bookcase were covered from inside with green curtains, and she walked about on rugs, so that her footsteps were not heard at all— and from that he concluded that she had a secretive character and liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded life. At home she was still in the position of a minor, she had no money of her own, and it happened during walks that she would be embarrassed not to have a kopeck with her. Her father gave her small amounts for clothing and books, no more than a hundred roubles a year. And the doctor himself had hardly any money, even despite a very good practice. He played cards at the club every evening and always lost. Besides that, he bought houses from the mutual credit society with transfer of mortgage and rented them out; the tenants did not pay regularly, but he insisted that these operations with houses were very profitable. He mortgaged his own house, in which he lived with his daughter, and with the money bought a vacant lot and began to build a large two-story house on it, in order to mortgage it.
Laptev now lived in a sort of fog, as though it was not he but his double, and he did many things he would not have ventured to do before. Three times or so he went with the doctor to the club, had supper with him, and offered him money for building; he even visited Panaurov at his other apartment. It happened once that Panaurov invited him for dinner at his place, and Laptev unthinkingly accepted. He was met by a lady of about thirty-five, tall and lean, with slightly graying hair and black eyebrows, apparently not a Russian. There were white blotches of powder on her face; she smiled mawkishly and shook his hand with such zeal that the bracelets jingled on her white arms. It seemed to Laptev that she smiled like that because she wanted to conceal from herself and others that she was unhappy. He also saw two girls, aged five and three, who resembled Sasha. At dinner they were served milk soup, cold veal with carrots, and chocolate—it was sweetish and untasty, but to make up for it, there were gleaming gilt forks on the table, flacons of soy sauce and cayenne pepper, an extraordinarily fanciful cruet stand, a gilt pepper pot.
Only after he finished the milk soup did Laptev realize how inappropriate it actually was for him to have come there for dinner. The lady was embarrassed, smiled all the time, showing her teeth; Panaurov explained scientifically what falling in love was and why it happened.
‘‘We have to do here with one of the phenomena of electricity,’’ he said in French, addressing the lady. ‘‘In every person’s skin sit microscopic iron strips which contain currents. If you meet an individual whose currents are parallel to your own, there’s love for you.’’
When Laptev returned home and his sister asked where he had been, he felt awkward and did not answer.
All the while before the wedding, he felt himself in a false position. His love grew stronger every day, and Yulia appeared poetic and sublime to him, but all the same there was no mutual love, and the fact of the matter was that he was buying and she was selling herself. Sometimes, as he brooded, he was simply brought to despair and asked himself whether he should not run away. He now spent whole nights without sleeping and kept wondering how, in Moscow after the wedding, he would meet the lady whom he referred to, in his letters to friends, as the ‘‘individual,’’ and how his father and brother, difficult people, would regard his marriage and Yulia. He was afraid his father would say something rude to Yulia at their first meeting. As for his brother Fyodor, something strange had been happening to him lately. In his long letters, he wrote about the importance of health, about the influence of illness on one’s mental state, about what religion is, but not a word about Moscow and business. These letters annoyed Laptev, and it seemed to him that his brother’s character was changing for the worse.
The wedding took place in September. They were married in the Peter-and-Paul church, after the liturgy, and the newlyweds left for Moscow the same day. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a train—no longer a girl, by the look of it, but a real lady—were taking leave of Nina Fyodorovna, the sick woman’s whole face went awry, but not a single tear came from her dry eyes. She said:
‘‘If, God forbid, I should die, take my girls to live with you.’’
‘‘Oh, I promise you!’’ answered Yulia Ser
geevna, and her lips and eyelids also began to twitch nervously.
‘‘I’ll come to you in October,’’ said Laptev, deeply moved. ‘‘Get well, my dear.’’
They traveled in a private compartment. Both of them felt sad and awkward. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat and pretended to doze, and he lay on the seat opposite her, troubled by various thoughts: about his father, about the ‘‘individual,’’ about whether Yulia was going to like his Moscow apartment. And, glancing at his wife, who did not love him, he thought dejectedly: ‘‘Why has this happened?’’
V
IN MOSCOW THE Laptevs ran a wholesale trade in haberdashery: fringes, tapes, braid, crocheting cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross receipts reached two million a year; what the net income was no one knew except the old man. The sons and the salesclerks estimated this income at approximately three hundred thousand, and said it would be about a hundred thousand more if the old man did not ‘‘extend himself,’’ that is, sell on credit without discernment; in the last ten years they had accumulated almost a million in hopeless promissory notes alone, and the senior salesclerk, when someone mentioned it, would wink slyly and speak words the meaning of which was not clear to everyone:
‘‘The psychological consequences of the age.’’
The chief trading operations were carried out in the city market, in premises known as the warehouse. The entrance to the warehouse was from the yard, where it was always dark, there was a smell of bast, and the hooves of dray horses clattered on the asphalt. An iron-bound door, very modest to look at, led from the yard into a room gone brown from dampness, the walls written all over with charcoal, and lighted by a narrow window with iron bars; then, on the left, to another room, slightly larger and cleaner, with a cast-iron stove and two tables, but also with a jailhouse window: this was the office, and from here a narrow stone stairway led to the second story, where the main premises were located. This was a rather large room, but owing to the perpetual darkness, the low ceiling, and the crowding of boxes, bundles, and scurrying people, it made as ill-favored an impression on a fresh person as the two below. Upstairs as well as in the office, goods lay on the shelves in heaps, stacks, and cardboard boxes, no order or beauty could be seen in the way it was organized, and if it had not been for a crimson thread, or a tassel, or a tail of fringe peeking through a hole in the paper wrapping here and there, it would have been impossible to guess at once what they traded in. And, from a glance at these crumpled paper packages and boxes, it was hard to believe that millions were made from such trifles, and that here in the warehouse, fifty people were occupied with business every day, not counting the customers.
When, at noon on the day after his arrival in Moscow, Laptev went to the warehouse, the workers, packing goods, were hammering so loudly on the crates that no one in the front room or the office heard him come in; the familiar postman came down the stairs with a packet of letters in his hand, wincing from the noise, and also did not notice him. The first to meet him upstairs was his brother, Fyodor Fyodorych, who looked so much like him that they were considered twins. This resemblance constantly reminded Laptev of his own appearance, and now, seeing before him a man of small stature, with red cheeks, thinning hair, narrow, underbred hips, looking so uninteresting and unintellectual, he asked himself: ‘‘Can I be like that?’’
‘‘I’m so glad to see you!’’ said Fyodor, kissing his brother and firmly shaking his hand. ‘‘I’ve been waiting impatiently for you every day, my dear. As soon as you wrote that you were getting married, I began to be tortured by curiosity, and I missed you as well, brother. Consider for yourself, it’s half a year since we’ve seen each other. Well, so? How are things? Nina’s bad? Very?’’
‘‘Very bad.’’
‘‘It’s God’s will,’’ sighed Fyodor. ‘‘Well, and your wife? A beauty, no doubt? I already love her, she’s my little sister. We’ll pamper her together.’’
Laptev glimpsed the broad, stooping back of his father, Fyodor Stepanych, a sight long familiar to him. The old man was sitting at the counter on a stool, talking to a customer.
‘‘Papa, God has sent us joy!’’ cried Fyodor. ‘‘Brother has come!’’
Fyodor Stepanych was tall and of an extremely sturdy build, so that, despite his eighty years and wrinkles, he still had the look of a hale, strong man. He spoke in a heavy, dense, booming bass, which issued from his broad chest as from a barrel. He shaved his beard, wore a clipped military mustache, and smoked cigars. Since he always felt hot, he wore a roomy canvas jacket at all times of the year, in the warehouse and at home. He had recently had a cataract removed, did not see well, and no longer occupied himself with business but only talked and drank tea with jam.
Laptev bent down and kissed him on the hand, then on the lips.
‘‘We haven’t seen each other for a long time, my dear sir,’’ said the old man. ‘‘A long time. So, then, congratulations on a lawful marriage are in order? Well, so be it, my congratulations.’’
And he offered his lips for a kiss. Laptev bent down and kissed him.
‘‘So, then, you’ve brought your young lady?’’ asked the old man and, without waiting for an answer, said, turning to a customer: ‘‘I hereby inform you, papa, that I am marrying such and such a girl. But as for asking the father’s blessing or advice, that’s no longer the rule. They keep their own counsel now. When I got married, I was over forty, but I lay at my father’s feet and asked for advice. Nowadays it’s no longer done.’’
The old man was glad to see his son but considered it improper to be affectionate with him and in any way show his joy. His voice, his manner of speaking, and the ‘‘young lady’’ cast over Laptev that bad mood he experienced each time in the warehouse. Here every trifle reminded him of the past, when he was whipped and kept on lenten fare; he knew that now, too, boys were whipped and given bloody noses, and that when they grew up, they themselves would do the beating. And it was enough to spend five minutes in the warehouse for him to begin to fancy that he was about to be yelled at or punched in the nose.
Fyodor patted the customer on the shoulder and said to his brother:
‘‘Here, Alyosha, I’d like to introduce you to our Tambov benefactor, Grigory Timofeich. He can serve as an example to contemporary youth: he’s past fifty, yet he has nursing babies.’’
The salesclerks laughed, and the customer, a skinny old man with a pale face, also laughed.
‘‘Nature exceeding its usual activity,’’ observed the senior salesclerk, who was standing behind the counter. ‘‘Where it goes in is where it comes out.’’
The senior salesclerk, a tall man of about fifty, with a dark beard, spectacles, and a pencil behind his ear, usually expressed his thoughts vaguely, in remote hints, and accompanied his words with a sly smile, showing that he had put some especially subtle meaning into them. He liked to obscure his speech with bookish words, which he understood in his own way, and there were many ordinary words that he often employed in a sense other than the one they had. For instance, the word ‘‘except.’’ Whenever he expressed some thought categorically and did not want to be contradicted, he would extend his right arm and pronounce:
‘‘Except!’’
And most surprising of all was that the other salesclerks and the customers understood him perfectly well. His name was Ivan Vassilyich Pochatkin, and he was from Kashira. Now, congratulating Laptev, he expressed himself thus:
‘‘On your side the merit of courage, for a woman’s heart is Shamil.’’ 7
Another important person in the warehouse was the salesclerk Makeichev, a stout, staid blond man with side-whiskers and a completely bald pate. He came up to Laptev and congratulated him respectfully, in a low voice:
‘‘My respects, sir... The Lord has heard the prayers of your parent, sir. Thank God, sir.’’
Then the other salesclerks began to come up to him and congratulate him on his lawful marriage. They were all fashionably dressed and had the
look of quite respectable, well-bred people. They stressed their O’s, pronounced their Gh’s like the hard Latin G, and because their every third word was sir, their congratulations, pronounced in a quick patter— for instance, the phrase: ‘‘I wish you, sir, all the best, sir’’— sounded as if someone was lashing the air with a whip: ‘‘Whis-s-s-s.’’
Laptev soon became bored with it all and wanted to go home, but it was awkward to leave. Out of propriety, he had to spend at least two hours in the warehouse. He stepped away from the counter and began asking Makeichev if the summer had gone well and whether there was any news, and the man answered deferentially without looking him in the eye. A boy, crop-headed, in a gray smock, handed Laptev a glass of tea without a saucer; a little later another boy, passing by, stumbled against a crate and almost fell, and the staid Makeichev suddenly made a terrible, wicked face, a fiendish face, and shouted at him:
‘‘Watch your feet!’’
The salesclerks were glad that the young master had married and finally come back, they looked at him affably and with curiosity, and each of them, in passing, considered it his duty respectfully to say something pleasant to him. But Laptev was convinced that it was all insincere and that they flattered him because they were afraid. He could never forget how, fifteen years ago, one salesclerk, becoming mentally ill, ran outside barefoot in nothing but his underwear and, shaking his fist at the masters’ windows, shouted that they were torturing him; and when the poor man recovered later, they laughed at him for a long time and reminded him of how he had shouted ‘‘Plantators!’’ instead of ‘‘Exploiters.’’ In general, the Laptevs’ employees had a bad life, and the whole market had long been talking about it. Worst of all was that old Fyodor Stepanych held to some sort of Asiatic policy in regard to them. Thus, no one knew what salary his favorites, Pochatkin and Makeichev, received; they received three thousand a year including bonuses, not more, but he pretended that he paid them seven; bonuses were given annually to all the salesclerks, but in secret, so that, out of vanity, someone who received little would have to say he had received a lot; no boy ever knew when he would be promoted to salesclerk; no employee knew whether the master was pleased with him or not. Nothing was directly forbidden, and therefore, the salesclerks did not know what was allowed and what was not. It was not forbidden to marry, but they did not marry, for fear of displeasing the master and losing their jobs. They were allowed to have acquaintances and pay visits, but the gates were locked at nine o’clock in the evening, and every morning the master looked all the employees over suspiciously and tested whether any of them smelled of vodka: ‘‘Go on, breathe!’’
The Complete Short Novels Page 38