“Because you try my patience.”
“Well, so that’s it! And if I’d been rich and had brought you a dowry …”
“Oh, ho, ho! …”
That I couldn’t bear, and, in the words of the late poet Tolstoy,3 “having begun like a god, I ended like a swine.” I assumed an offended look—because I indeed felt myself unjustly offended—and, shaking my head, I turned and went to my study. But as I was closing the door behind me, I felt an invincible thirst for revenge—opened the door again and said:
“That’s swinishness!”
And she replies:
“Merci, husband dear.”
III
Devil knows, what a scene! And don’t forget—that was after four years of the happiest married life, never for a moment troubled by anything! … I was annoyed, offended—it was unbearable! What rubbish! And for what? … It was all my brother’s mischief-making. And what was it to me, that I was so upset and seething? Isn’t he in fact an adult, doesn’t he have the right to decide whom he likes and wishes to marry? … Lord—nowadays you can’t even guide your own son in these matters, so why on earth should a brother listen to his brother? … And by what right, finally? … And can I in fact be such a prophet as to firmly predict how this matchmaking will end? … Mashenka is indeed an excellent girl, and isn’t my wife a lovely woman? … And, thank God, no one has ever called me a scoundrel, and yet here we are, she and I, after four years of happy life, never troubled for a moment by anything, now squabbling like a tailor and his wife … And all over a trifle, over someone else’s clownish whim …
I was terribly ashamed of myself and terribly sorry for her, because I now took no account of her words and blamed myself for everything, and in this sad and displeased mood I fell asleep on the sofa in my study, wrapped in a soft quilted robe, made by my dear wife’s own hands …
It’s a winning thing—a comfortable piece of clothing, made for a husband by his wife’s own hands! It’s so good, so sweet, and such a reminder, timely or untimely, both of our faults and of those precious little hands, which one suddenly wants to kiss and ask forgiveness for something.
“Forgive me, my angel, that you have finally tried my patience. In future it won’t happen.”
And, I’ll confess, I wanted so much to go quickly with that request that I woke up, rose, and left my study.
I look—all through the house it’s dark and quiet.
I ask the maid:
“Where is the lady?”
“She went with your brother to see Marya Nikolaevna’s father,” she replied. “I’ll make your tea at once.”
“What a woman!” I think. “So she won’t give up her stubbornness—she really wants my brother to marry Mashenka … Well, let them do as they like, and let Mashenka’s father dupe them as he did his older sons-in-law. And even more, because they’re shysters themselves, and my brother—the embodiment of honesty and delicacy. So much the better—let him cheat them—both my brother and my wife. Let her get burnt by her first lesson in matchmaking!”
I received a glass of tea from the maid’s hand and sat down to read the case that was to begin the next day in our court and which presented me with no little difficulty.
This work occupied me long past midnight, and at two o’clock my wife and brother returned, both in the merriest spirits.
My wife says to me:
“Would you like some cold roast beef and a glass of water with wine? We had supper at the Vasilievs’.”
“No,” I say, “I humbly thank you.”
“Nikolai Ivanovich waxed generous and gave us an excellent meal.”
“Well now!”
“Yes—we passed the time most merrily and drank champagne.”
“Lucky you!” I say, while thinking to myself: “So that slyboots, Nikolai Ivanovich, saw through my mooncalf of a brother at once, and gave him some swill—not without reason. Now he’ll coddle him till the end of the engagement period, and then—a short tether.”
And my feeling against my wife became embittered again, and, being innocent, I did not ask her forgiveness. And even if I had been free and had had leisure to enter into all the details of the love game they had started, it would have been no surprise if again I had lost patience—had interfered in some way, and we’d have arrived at some sort of psychosis; but, fortunately, I had no time. The case I told you about occupied us so much at court that we had no hope of getting free of it even by the holiday, and therefore I came home only to eat and sleep, and spent all my days and part of my nights before the altar of Themis.4
But at home things did not wait for me, and when I appeared under my own roof on Christmas Eve, pleased to be free of my court duties, I was met by an invitation to examine a magnificent basket of expensive gifts that my brother was offering to Mashenka.
“What might this be?”
“These are the groom’s gifts to the bride,” explained my wife.
“Aha! So it’s come to that now! Congratulations.”
“How else! Your brother didn’t want to make a formal proposal without talking it over with you once more, but he wants to hasten his wedding, and you, as ill luck would have it, went on sitting in your disgusting court. It was impossible to wait, and they’ve become engaged.”
“Well, splendid,” I say. “There was no reason to wait for me.”
“You’re being witty, it seems?”
“Not in the least.”
“Or ironic?”
“Not ironic either.”
“It would all be useless anyway, because, in spite of your croaking, they’ll be very happy.”
“Of course,” I say, “if you guarantee it, they will be … There’s a proverb: ‘Take three days to choose, and you’ll always lose.’ It’s safer not to choose.”
“You know,” replied my wife, closing the basket of gifts, “it’s you who think you choose us, but essentially that’s all nonsense.”
“Why is it nonsense? I hope it’s not the girls who choose their suitors, but the suitors who do the wooing.”
“Yes, they do the wooing, that’s true, but there’s no such thing as a circumspect or reasonable choice.”
I shook my head and said:
“You should think before you say such a thing. I, for instance, chose you—precisely out of respect for you and being conscious of your merits.”
“Rubbish.”
“Why rubbish?!”
“Rubbish—because you didn’t choose me for my merits at all.”
“For what, then?”
“Because you liked me.”
“So you even deny that you have merits?”
“Not in the least—I do have merits, but all the same you wouldn’t have married me if you hadn’t liked me.”
I felt that what she said was true.
“However,” I said, “I waited a whole year and visited your house.
Why did I do that?”
“In order to look at me.”
“Not true—I was studying your character.”
My wife burst out laughing.
“What’s this senseless laughter?!”
“It’s not senseless at all. You, my dear, were not studying anything in me, and you couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?”
“Shall I tell you?”
“Kindly do!”
“Because you were in love with me.”
“Maybe so, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing your inner qualities.”
“Yes, it did.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“It did, and it will always prevent anyone, and therefore this prolonged studying is useless. You think that when you’re in love with a woman you look at her in a reasoning way, but in fact you only gaze in wonder all the day.”
“Well … after all,” I said, “you make it somehow … very real.”
And I thought to myself: “In fact it’s true!”
And my wife said:
“Enough thinking—there’s
no harm done, and now change quickly and we’ll go to Mashenka’s: we’re celebrating Christmas with them tonight, and you should congratulate her and your brother.”
“I’ll be very glad to,” I said. And we went.
IV
Gifts were offered there and congratulations exchanged, and we all drank a fair amount of the merry nectar of Champagne.
There was no more time for thinking and persuading or dissuading. It remained only to uphold in everyone a faith in the happiness that awaited the betrothed couple and to drink champagne. That is how the days and nights were spent, sometimes at our house, sometimes at the house of the bride’s parents.
In such spirits can the time drag out long?
Before we looked twice, New Year’s Eve was upon us. The joyful expectation increased. The whole world wished for joy—and we didn’t lag behind the rest. We ushered in the New Year at Mashenka’s parents’ again, with such “wetting of the whistle,” as our grandfathers used to say, that we also justified the grandfatherly saying: “The joy of Rus’ is to drink.”5 Only one thing was wrong. Mashenka’s father said nothing about a dowry, but instead he gave his daughter a very odd and, as I later understood, a totally inadmissible and ill-omened present. He himself, in front of everyone at supper, put on her a rich pearl necklace … We men, looking at the thing, even gave it some good thought.
“Oh-ho-ho, just how much might that be worth? A little thing like that has probably been stored away here since the good old days, when rich people of the nobility did not yet send things to the pawnbroker, but, in great need of money, preferred to entrust their valuables to secret usurers like Mashenka’s father.”
The pearls were big, well-rounded, and extraordinarily alive. The necklace was made in the old style, what’s known as refid—strung starting at the clasp with small but perfect Black Sea pearls, then larger and larger Persian Gulf pearls, then further down came pearls as big as beans, and in the very center three black pearls of remarkable size and the finest brilliance. The beautiful, valuable gift entirely outshone and put to shame my brother’s gifts. In a word, we crude men all found Mashenka’s father’s gift beautiful, and we also liked the words the old man spoke in presenting the necklace. Mashenka’s father, giving her this treasure, said: “Here, my dear daughter, is a little thing with a spell on it: rot will never rot it, nor a thief steal it, and if he does, he won’t be glad of it. It is eternal.”
But women have their own point of view on everything, and Mashenka, on receiving the necklace, burst into tears, and my wife, unable to help herself, found a convenient moment and even reprimanded Nikolai Ivanovich at the window, and by family right he heard her out. He deserved to be reprimanded for the gift of pearls, because pearls signify and foretell tears. And therefore pearls are never used as New Year’s gifts.
However, Nikolai Ivanovich deftly laughed it off.
“First of all,” he said, “that is an empty superstition, and if anyone can give me the pearl that Princess Yusupov bought from Gorgibus,6 I’ll take it at once. I, madam, also studied these subtleties in my time, and I know what should not be given. Girls should not be given turquoise, because turquoise, in the Persian notion, comes from the bones of people who died of love, and married women should not be given amethysts avec flèches d’Amour,* and yet I have ventured to makes gifts of such amethysts, and ladies have taken them …
My wife smiled. And he said:
“I’ll also venture to give them to you. And with regard to pearls, it should be known that there are pearls and pearls. Not all pearls are obtained with tears. There are Persian pearls, there are pearls from the Red Sea, and there are pearls from fresh water—d’eau douce, which are obtained without tears. The sentimental Mary Stuart wore only these perles d’eau douce from Scotland’s rivers, but they did not bring her happiness. I know what should be given—and that is what I gave my daughter, but you frighten her. For that I will give you nothing avec flèches d’Amour, I will give you a cold-blooded ‘moonstone.’ But you, my child, don’t cry and put it out of your head that my pearls bring tears. These aren’t like that. I’ll reveal the secret of these pearls to you the day after your wedding, and you’ll see that you needn’t fear any superstitions …”
So it quieted down, and my brother and Mashenka were married after Epiphany, and the next day my wife and I went to visit the young couple.
V
We found them already up and in a remarkably cheerful state of mind. My brother himself opened the door to the lodgings he had rented in a hotel for the wedding day, and met us beaming all over and rocking with laughter.
This reminded me of an old novel in which the new husband went out of his mind with happiness, and I mentioned it to my brother, to which he replied:
“And what do you think, such a thing has actually happened to me as could make a man doubt his reason. My family life, having begun today, has brought me not only the expected joys from my dear wife, but quite unexpected prosperity from my father-in-law.”
“What on earth has happened?”
“Come in, I’ll tell you.”
My wife whispers:
“Must be the old scoundrel duped them.”
I reply:
“That’s none of my business.”
We went in and my brother handed us an opened letter, which had come addressed to them early in the morning by the city post, and in the letter we read the following:
“The superstition concerning pearls can in no way threaten you: those pearls are false.”
My wife sank into a chair.
“What a scoundrel!” she said.
But my brother nodded his head in the direction of the bedroom, where Mashenka was finishing her toilette, and said:
“You’re wrong: the old man has acted quite honestly. I received this letter, read it, and burst out laughing … What was sad for me here? I wasn’t looking or asking for a dowry, I was only looking for a wife, and so there was nothing distressing to me in the fact that the pearls of the necklace weren’t real but false. Let the necklace be worth not thirty thousand but a mere three hundred roubles—isn’t it all the same to me, so long as my wife is happy? … Only one thing worried me—how to break it to Masha? I fell to thinking about that and sat down facing the window, and so I didn’t notice that I’d forgotten to bolt the door. A few minutes later I turned and suddenly saw that my father-in-law was standing behind me and holding something wrapped in a handkerchief.
“ ‘Greetings, my dear son-in-law!’ he says.
“I jumped up, embraced him, and said:
“ ‘How nice! We were to go to you in an hour, and here you … It’s against all the customs … How nice and how precious.’
“ ‘Well,’ he replies, ‘who’s counting! We’re family. I went to the liturgy—prayed for you, and here I’ve brought you a prosphora.’7
“Again I embraced him and kissed him.
“ ‘Did you get my letter?’ he asks.
“ ‘I certainly did,’ I say.
“And I burst out laughing.
“He looks at me.
“ ‘Why are you laughing?’ he says.
“ ‘And what should I do? It’s very amusing.’
“ ‘Amusing?’
“ ‘Certainly.’
“ ‘Give me those pearls.’
“The necklace was right there in a case on the table—I gave it to him.
“ ‘Do you have a magnifying glass?’
“I say: ‘No.’
“ ‘In that case, I do. Out of old habit, I always have it with me. Please look at the clasp under the dog.’
“ ‘Why should I look?’
“ ‘No, have a look. Maybe you think I’m deceiving you?’
“ ‘Not at all.’
“ ‘No—look, look!’
“I take the glass and see—on the clasp, in the least conspicuous place, there are microscopic letters in French: ‘Bourguignon.’8
“ ‘Are you convinced,’ he says, ‘that these re
ally are false pearls?’
“ ‘I see it.’
“ ‘And what do you say to me now?’
“ ‘The same thing as before. That is: this does not concern me, and I will only ask you for one thing …’
“ ‘Ask, ask!’
“ ‘Allow me not to speak of it to Masha.’
“ ‘Why is that?’
“ ‘Just so …’
“ ‘No, to precisely what end? You don’t want to upset her?’
“ ‘Yes—that among other things.’
“ ‘And what else?’
“ ‘I also don’t want anything in her heart to be stirred against her father.’
“ ‘Against her father?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Well, for her father she’s now a cut-off slice, which can’t be stuck back on the loaf, and the main thing for her is her husband …’
“ ‘Never,’ I say, ‘is the heart a roadside inn: there’s no lack of space in it. One love goes to the father, and to the husband another, and besides that … a husband who wishes to be happy should see to it that he can respect his wife, and for that he must cherish her love and esteem for her parents.’
“ ‘Aha! What a practical one you are!’
“And he started silently drumming his fingers on the seat, then got up and said:
“ ‘I, my gentle son-in-law, have made my fortune by my own labor, but by various means. From a lofty point of view, it may be that they are not all very laudable, but such was my time, and I didn’t know how to make it any other way. I don’t have much faith in people, and of love I’ve heard only what you read about in novels, but in fact all I saw was that everybody wants money. I gave no money to my two sons-in-law, and right enough: they’re angry with me and won’t let their wives see me. I don’t know who is more noble—they or I? I don’t give them money, and they corrupt living hearts. So I won’t give them money, but you I’ll go and give it to! Yes! And here, I’ll even give it to you right now!’
“And kindly look at this!”
My brother showed us three fifty-thousand-rouble banknotes.
“Can all that be for your wife?” I say.
“No,” he replies, “he gave Masha fifty thousand, and I said to him:
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 55