She sobbed bitterly, and he realized how painful it was for her, and not knowing what to say, he sank down on the rug before her.
‘‘Enough, enough,’’ he murmured. ‘‘I insulted you because I love you madly,’’ he suddenly kissed her foot and embraced it passionately. ‘‘At least a spark of love!’’ he murmured. ‘‘Well, lie to me! Lie! Don’t tell me it was a mistake!...’
But she went on weeping, and he felt that she tolerated his caresses only 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 lay down and pulled the covers over her head; he undressed and also lay down. In the morning they both felt embarrassed and did not know what to talk about, and it even seemed to him that she stepped gingerly on the foot he had kissed.
Before dinner Panaurov came to say good-bye. Yulia felt an irrepressible desire to go home to her birthplace; it would be good, she thought, to rest from family life, from this embarrassment, and from the constant awareness that she had acted badly. Over dinner it was decided that she would leave with Panaurov and visit her father for two or three weeks, until she got bored.
XI
SHE AND PANAUROV traveled in a separate compartment; on his head was a visored lambskin cap of an odd shape.
‘‘No, Petersburg didn’t satisfy me,’’ he said measuredly, sighing. ‘‘They promise a lot but nothing definite. Yes, my dear. I was a justice of the peace, a permanent member, chairman of the district council, finally an adviser to the provincial board; it would seem I’ve served my fatherland and have a right to some consideration, but there you have it: I can’t get them to transfer me to another town...’
Panaurov closed his eyes and shook his head.
‘‘I’m not recognized,’’ he went on, as if falling asleep. ‘‘Of course, I’m not an administrative genius, but then I’m a decent, honest man, and in our times even that is a rare thing. I confess, I occasionally deceive women slightly, but in relation to the Russian government, I have always been a gentleman. But enough of that,’’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘‘let’s talk about you. Why did you suddenly take it into your head to go to your papa?’’
‘‘Oh, just a little disagreement with my husband,’’ said Yulia, looking at his cap.
‘‘Yes, he’s a bit odd. All the Laptevs are odd. Your husband’s all right, more or less, but his brother Fyodor is a complete fool.’’
Panaurov sighed and asked seriously:
‘‘And do you have a lover yet?’’
Yulia looked at him in astonishment and smiled.
‘‘God knows what you’re saying.’’
At a big station, after ten o’clock, they both got out and had supper. When the train rolled on again, Panaurov took off his coat and cap and sat down beside Yulia.
‘‘You’re very sweet, I must tell you,’’ he began. ‘‘Forgive me the tavern comparison, but you remind me of a freshly pickled cucumber; it still smells of the hotbed, so to speak, but already has a little salt and the scent of dill in it. You’re gradually shaping up into a magnificent woman, a wonderful, graceful woman. If this trip had taken place five years ago,’’ he sighed, ‘‘I would have felt it my pleasant duty to enter the ranks of your admirers, but now, alas, I’m an invalid.’’
He smiled sadly and at the same time graciously, and put his arm around her waist.
‘‘You’re out of your mind!’’ she said, flushing, and so frightened that her hands and feet went cold. ‘‘Stop it, Grigory Nikolaich!’’
‘‘What are you afraid of, my dear?’’ he asked gently. ‘‘What’s so terrible? You’re simply not used to it.’’
If a woman protested, for him it only meant that he had made an impression on her and she liked it. Holding Yulia by the waist, he kissed her firmly on the cheek, then on the lips, fully assured that he was affording her the greatest pleasure. Yulia recovered from her fear and embarrassment and began to laugh. He kissed her once more and said, putting on his funny cap:
‘‘That’s all the invalid can give you. One Turkish pasha, a kind old man, received as a gift, or maybe as an inheritance, an entire harem. When his beautiful young wives lined up before him, he went to them, kissed each one, and said: ‘That’s all I’m able to give you now.’ I say the same thing.’’
She found all this silly, extraordinary, and amusing. She wanted to frolic. Getting up on the seat and humming a tune, she took a box of candies from the shelf and tossed him a piece of chocolate, shouting:
‘‘Catch!’’
He caught it. She then threw him another candy with a loud laugh, then a third, and he kept catching them and putting them in his mouth, looking at her with pleading eyes, and it seemed to her that in his face, in its features and expression, there was much that was feminine and childish. And when she sat down breathless on the seat and went on looking at him laughingly, he touched her cheek with two fingers and said as if in vexation:
‘‘Naughty girl!’’
‘‘Take it,’’ she said, giving him the box. ‘‘I don’t like sweets.’’
He ate the candies to the last one and put the empty box in his suitcase. He liked boxes with pictures on them.
‘‘However, enough frolicking,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s time for the invalid to go bye-bye.’’
He took his Bokhara dressing gown and a pillow from his portmanteau, lay down, and covered himself with the gown.
‘‘Good night, my dove!’’ he said in a soft voice and sighed as if he ached all over.
And soon snoring was heard. Feeling no embarrassment, she also lay down and soon fell asleep.
The next morning, as she drove home from the station in her native town, the streets seemed to her deserted, peopleless, the snow gray, and the houses small, as if someone had flattened them out. She met a procession: a dead man was being carried in an open coffin, with church banners.
‘‘They say it’s lucky to meet a funeral,’’ she thought.
The windows of the house where Nina Fyodorovna used to live were now pasted over with white notices.
With a sinking heart, she drove into her courtyard and rang at the door. It was opened by an unfamiliar maid, fat, sleepy, in a warm quilted jacket. Going up the stairs, Yulia recalled how Laptev had made his declaration of love there, but now the stairway was unwashed, covered with stains. Upstairs, in the cold corridor, patients waited in winter coats. And for some reason, her heart pounded strongly, and she could barely walk from agitation.
The doctor, grown fatter still, red as a brick, and with disheveled hair, was having tea. Seeing his daughter, he was very glad and even became tearful; she thought that she was the only joy in this old man’s life, and, touched, she hugged him tightly and said she would stay with him for a long time, till Easter. After changing in her own room, she came out to the dining room to have tea with him; he was pacing up and down, his hands thrust in his pockets, and singing ‘‘Rooroo-roo-roo’’—meaning that he was displeased with something.
‘‘Your life in Moscow must be very merry,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m very glad for you...Me, I’m an old man, I don’t need anything. I’ll croak soon and deliver you all. And it’s just a wonder that I’ve got such a thick hide, that I’m still alive! Amazing!’’
He said he was a tough old donkey that everybody rode on. Nina Fyodorovna’s treatment had been heaped on him, the care of her children, her funeral; and this coxcomb Panaurov did not want to have anything to do with it and even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and still had not paid it back.
‘‘Take me to Moscow and put me in the madhouse there!’’ said the doctor. ‘‘I’m mad, I’m a naïve child, because I still believe in truth and justice!’’
Then he reproached her husband for lack of foresight: he had not bought a house that was up for sale so profitably. And now it seemed to Yulia that she was not the only joy in this old man’s life. While he received patients and then went to make calls, she walked around all
the rooms, not knowing what to do and what to think about. She was already unaccustomed to her native town and native home; she was now drawn neither outside nor to acquaintances, and she did not feel sad, recalling her former girlfriends and her girl’s life, and did not regret the past.
In the evening she dressed smartly and went to the vigil. But there were only simple people in church, and her magnificent fur coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her as if some change had taken place in the church and in herself. Before, she had liked it when the canon was read during the vigil and the choir sang the verses, for instance, ‘‘I shall open my lips,’’ she had liked moving slowly with the crowd towards the priest standing in the middle of the church, and then feeling the holy oil on her forehead, but now she only waited for the service to be over. And, leaving the church, she was afraid the beggars might ask her for something; it would be boring to stop and search her pockets, and she no longer had copper money but only roubles.
She went to bed early but fell asleep late. Her dreams were all of some sort of portraits and of the funeral procession she had seen in the morning; they carried the open coffin with the dead man into the courtyard, stopped by the door, then for a long time swung the coffin on towels and banged it against the door as hard as they could. Yulia woke up and jumped out of bed in terror. In fact, there was a banging on the door downstairs, and the wire of the bell scraped against the wall, but no ringing was heard.
The doctor coughed. She heard the maid go downstairs, then come back up.
‘‘Madam!’’ she said, knocking on the door. ‘‘Madam!’’
‘‘What is it?’’ asked Yulia.
‘‘A telegram for you!’’
Yulia came out to her with a candle. Behind the maid stood the doctor, his coat thrown over his underwear, and also with a candle.
‘‘Our doorbell’s broken,’’ he said, yawning sleepily. ‘‘It’s long been in need of repair.’’
Yulia unsealed the telegram and read: ‘‘We drink your health. Yartsev, Kochevoy.’’
‘‘Ah, what fools!’’ she said and laughed; her soul felt light and gay.
Going back to her room, she quietly washed, dressed, then packed for a long time, till dawn, and at noon she left for Moscow.
XII
DURING HOLY WEEK the Laptevs were at the Art School for a picture exhibition. They went there as a household, Moscow fashion, taking along the two girls, the governess, and Kostya.
Laptev knew the names of all the well-known artists and never missed a single exhibition. Sometimes at his dacha in the summer, he himself painted landscapes in oils, and it seemed to him that he had considerable taste, and that if he had studied, he would perhaps have made a good artist. When abroad, he would sometimes visit antique shops, look at old things with the air of a connoisseur and utter his opinion, purchase something or other; the antiquarian would charge him whatever he liked, and afterwards the purchased thing would lie in the carriage house, nailed up in a box, until it disappeared no one knew where. Or else, stopping at a print shop, he would spend a long time attentively examining paintings, bronzes, make various observations, and suddenly buy some homemade frame or a box of trashy paper. The paintings he had at home were all of large size, but bad; the good ones were poorly hung. It happened to him more than once to pay a high price for things that later turned out to be crude fakes. And remarkably, though generally timid in life, he was extremely bold and self-assured at picture exhibitions. Why?
Yulia Sergeevna, like her husband, looked at paintings through her fist or with binoculars, and was surprised that the people in the paintings were as if alive, and the trees as if real; but she had no understanding, and it seemed to her that many of the pictures at the exhibition were alike, and that the whole aim of art lay precisely in this, that the people and objects in the pictures, when looked at through the fist, should stand out as if real.
‘‘This forest is by Shishkin,’’19 her husband explained to her. ‘‘He always paints one and the same thing... But pay attention to this: such purple snow has never existed... And this boy’s left arm is shorter than his right.’’
When everyone was tired, and Laptev went looking for Kostya so as to go home, Yulia stopped in front of a small landscape and gazed at it indifferently. In the foreground a rivulet, a wooden bridge across it, a path on the other side disappearing into the dark grass, a field, then to the right a piece of forest, a bonfire nearby: it must have been a night pasture. And in the distance, the last glow of the sunset.
Yulia imagined herelf walking across the little bridge, then down the path further and further, and it is quiet all around, drowsy corncrakes cry, the fire flickers far ahead. And for some reason, it suddenly seemed to her that she had seen those same clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and the forest, and the fields long ago and many times; she felt lonely, and she wanted to walk, walk, walk down the path; and where the sunset’s glow was, there rested the reflection of something unearthly, eternal.
‘‘How well it’s painted!’’ she said, surprised that she had suddenly understood the painting. ‘‘Look, Alyosha! Do you see how quiet it is?’’
She tried to explain why she liked this landscape so much, but neither her husband nor Kostya understood her. She kept looking at the landscape with a sad smile, and the fact that the others found nothing special in it troubled her; then she began walking around the rooms again and looking at the pictures, she wanted to understand them, and it no longer seemed to her that many pictures at the exhibition were alike. When, on returning home, she paid attention for the first time to the big painting that hung over the grand piano in the drawing room, she felt animosity towards it and said:
‘‘Who on earth wants to have such pictures!’’
And after that the gilded cornices, the Venetian mirrors with flowers, and pictures like the one that hung over the grand piano, as well as the discussions of her husband and Kostya about art, aroused in her a feeling of boredom and vexation and sometimes even hatred.
Life flowed on as usual from day to day, promising nothing special. The theater season was over, the warm time was coming. The weather remained excellent all the while. One morning the Laptevs were going to the district court to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the court to defend someone. They were delayed at home and arrived at the court when the examination of the witnesses had already begun. A reserve soldier was accused of burglary. Many of the witnesses were washerwomen; they testified that the accused often visited the woman who ran the laundry; on the eve of the Elevation, 20 he came late at night and began asking for money for the hair of the dog, but no one gave him any; then he left, but came back an hour later and brought some beer and mint gingerbreads for the girls. They drank and sang songs almost till daybreak, and when they looked in the morning, the lock on the attic door was broken and laundry was missing: three men’s shirts, a skirt, and two sheets. Kostya asked each witness mockingly whether she had drunk the beer brought by the accused on the eve of the Elevation. Evidently what he was driving at was that the washerwomen had stolen from themselves. He delivered his speech without the least excitement, looking angrily at the jury.
He explained what was burglary and what was simple theft. He spoke in great detail, persuasively, displaying an extraordinary capacity for talking at length and in a serious tone about something everybody always knew. And it was hard to understand what he was actually after. From his long speech, the foreman of the jury could only come to the following conclusion: ‘‘There was burglary but no theft, because the washerwomen drank up the laundry themselves, or if there was theft, then there was no burglary.’’ But he evidently said precisely what was necessary, because his speech moved the jury and the public, and they liked it very much. When the verdict of acquittal was announced, Yulia nodded to Kostya and later firmly shook his hand.
In May the Laptevs moved to their summer house in Sokolniki. By then Yulia was pregnant.
XIII
MORE THAN A year went by. In Sokolniki, not far from the tracks of the Yaroslavl Railway, Yulia and Yartsev were sitting on the grass; a little to one side, Kochevoy lay with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky. All three had had enough of walking and were waiting for the local six o’clock train to pass before going home to have tea.
‘‘Mothers see something extraordinary in their children— that’s the way nature arranged it,’’ Yulia was saying. ‘‘A mother stands for hours by a little bed, looking at her baby’s little ears, little eyes, little nose, and admiring them. If someone else kisses her child, the poor woman thinks it gives the person great pleasure. And the mother talks about nothing but her child. I know this weakness in mothers and keep an eye on myself, but really, my Olya is extraordinary. How she gazes while she’s nursing! How she laughs! She’s only eight months old, but by God, I haven’t seen such intelligent eyes even in a three-year-old.’’
‘‘Tell us, by the way,’’ asked Yartsev, ‘‘whom do you love more: your husband or your child?’’
Yulia shrugged her shoulders.
‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve never loved my husband very much, and Olya is essentially my first love. You know, I didn’t marry Alexei for love. Before, I used to be stupid, I suffered, I kept thinking I’d ruined his life and mine, but now I see there’s no need for any love, it’s all nonsense.’’
‘‘But if it isn’t love, what feeling binds you to your husband? Why do you live with him?’’
‘‘I don’t know... Just so, out of habit, it must be. I respect him, I miss him when he’s away for long, but that—isn’t love. He’s an intelligent, honest man, and that’s enough for my happiness. He’s very kind, simple...’
‘‘Alyosha’s intelligent, Alyosha’s kind,’’ said Kostya, lazily raising his head, ‘‘but, my dear, to find out that he’s intelligent, kind, and interesting, you have to go through hell and high water with him... And what’s the use of his kindness or his intelligence? He’ll dish you up as much money as you like, that he can do, but if there’s a need for strength of character, to resist some brazenheaded boor, he gets embarrassed and loses heart. People like your gentle Alexis are wonderful people, but they’re not fit for struggle. And generally, they’re not fit for anything.’’
The Complete Short Novels Page 42