‘Well, why don’t I marry her then?’ Podgorin thought. But he immediately took fright at this idea and went off towards the house. Tatyana was sitting at the grand piano in the drawing-room and her playing conjured up bright pictures of the past, when people had played, sung and danced in that room until late at night, with the windows open and birds singing too in the garden and beyond the river. Podgorin cheered up, became playful, danced with Nadezhda and Varvara, and then sang. He was hampered by a corn on one foot and asked if he could wear Sergey Sergeich’s slippers. Strangely, he felt at home, like one of the family, and the thought ‘a typical brother-in-law’ flashed through his mind. His spirits rose even higher. Looking at him the others livened up and grew cheerful, as if they had recaptured their youth. Everyone’s face was radiant with hope: Kuzminki was saved! It was all so very simple in fact. They only had to think of a plan, rummage around in law books, or see that Podgorin married Nadezhda. And that little romance was going well, by all appearances. Pink, happy, her eyes brimming with tears in anticipation of something quite out of the ordinary, Nadezhda whirled round in the dance and her white dress billowed, revealing her small pretty legs in flesh-coloured stockings. Absolutely delighted, Varvara took Podgorin’s arm and told him quietly and meaningly, ‘Misha, don’t run away from happiness. Grasp it while you can. If you wait too long you’ll be running when it’s too late to catch it.’
Podgorin wanted to make promises, to reassure her and even he began to believe that Kuzminki was saved – it was really so easy.
‘“And thou shalt be que-een of the world”,’10 he sang, striking a pose. But suddenly he was conscious that there was nothing he could do for these people, absolutely nothing, and he stopped singing and looked guilty.
Then he sat silently in one corner, legs tucked under him, wearing slippers belonging to someone else.
As they watched him the others understood that nothing could be done and they too fell silent. The piano was closed. Everyone noticed that it was late – it was time for bed – and Tatyana put out the large lamp in the drawing-room.
A bed was made up for Podgorin in the same little outhouse where he had stayed in the past. Sergey Sergeich went with him to wish him goodnight, holding a candle high above his head, although the moon had risen and it was bright. They walked down a path with lilac bushes on either side and the gravel crunched underfoot.
Before he had time to groan
A bear came and knocked him prone,
Sergey Sergeich said.
Podgorin felt that he’d heard those lines a thousand times, he was sick and tired of them! When they reached the outhouse, Sergey Sergeich drew a bottle and two glasses from his loose jacket and put them on the table.
‘Brandy,’ he said. ‘It’s a Double-O. It’s impossible to have a drink in the house with Varvara around. She’d be on to me about alcoholism. But we can feel free here. It’s a fine brandy.’
They sat down. The brandy was very good.
‘Let’s have a really good drink tonight,’ Sergey Sergeich continued, nibbling a lemon. ‘I’ve always been a gay dog myself and I like having a fling now and again. That’s a must!’
But the look in his eyes still showed that he needed something from Podgorin and was about to ask for it.
‘Drink up, old man,’ he went on, sighing. ‘Things are really grim at the moment. Old eccentrics like me have had their day, we’re finished. Idealism’s not fashionable these days. It’s money that rules and if you don’t want to get shoved aside you must go down on your knees and worship filthy lucre. But I can’t do that, it’s absolutely sickening!’
‘When’s the auction?’ asked Podgorin, to change the subject.
‘August 7th. But there’s no hope at all, old man, of saving Kuzminki. There’s enormous arrears and the estate doesn’t bring in any income, only losses every year. It’s not worth the battle. Tatyana’s very cut up about it, as it’s her patrimony of course. But I must admit I’m rather glad. I’m no country man. My sphere is the large, noisy city, my element’s the fray!’
He kept on and on, still beating about the bush and he watched Podgorin with an eagle eye, as if waiting for the right moment.
Suddenly Podgorin saw those eyes close to him and felt his breath on his face.
‘My dear fellow, please save me,’ Sergey Sergeich gasped. ‘Please lend me two hundred roubles!’
Podgorin wanted to say that he was hard up too and he felt that he might do better giving two hundred roubles to some poor devil or simply losing them at cards. But he was terribly embarrassed – he felt trapped in that small room with one candle and wanted to escape as soon as possible from that breathing, from those soft arms that grasped him around the waist and which already seemed to have stuck to him like glue. Hurriedly he started feeling in his pockets for his notecase where he kept money.
‘Here you are,’ he muttered, taking out a hundred roubles. ‘I’ll give you the rest later. That’s all I have on me. You see, I can’t refuse.’ Feeling very annoyed and beginning to lose his temper he went on. ‘I’m really far too soft. Only please let me have the money back later. I’m hard up too.’
‘Thank you. I’m so grateful, dear chap.’
‘And please stop imagining that you’re an idealist. You’re as much an idealist as I’m a turkey-cock. You’re simply a frivolous, indolent man, that’s all.’
Sergey Sergeich sighed deeply and sat on the couch.
‘My dear chap, you are angry,’ he said. ‘But if you only knew how hard things are for me! I’m going through a terrible time now. I swear it’s not myself I feel sorry for, oh no! It’s the wife and children. If it wasn’t for my wife and children I’d have done myself in ages ago.’ Suddenly his head and shoulders started shaking and he burst out sobbing.
‘This really is the limit!’ Podgorin said, pacing the room excitedly and feeling really furious. ‘Now, what can I do with someone who has caused a great deal of harm and then starts sobbing? These tears disarm me, I’m speechless. You’re sobbing, so that means you must be right.’
‘Caused a great deal of harm?’ Sergey Sergeich asked, rising to his feet and looking at Podgorin in amazement. ‘My dear chap, what are you saying? Caused a great deal of harm? Oh, how little you know me. How little you understand me!’
‘All right then, so I don’t understand you, but please stop whining. It’s revolting!’
‘Oh, how little you know me!’ Sergey Sergeich repeated, quite sincerely. ‘How little!’
‘Just take a look at yourself in the mirror,’ Podgorin went on. ‘You’re no longer a young man. Soon you’ll be old. It’s time you stopped to think a bit and took stock of who and what you are. Spending your whole life doing nothing at all, forever indulging in empty, childish chatter, this play-acting and affectation. Doesn’t it make your head go round – aren’t you sick and tired of it all? Oh, it’s hard going with you! You’re a stupefying old bore, you are!’
With these words Podgorin left the outhouse and slammed the door. It was about the first time in his life that he had been sincere and really spoken his mind.
Shortly afterwards he was regretting having been so harsh. What was the point of talking seriously or arguing with a man who was perpetually lying, who ate and drank too much, who spent large amounts of other people’s money while being quite convinced that he was an idealist and a martyr? This was a case of stupidity, or of deep-rooted bad habits that had eaten away at his organism like an illness past all cure. In any event, indignation and stern rebukes were useless in this case. Laughing at him would be more effective. One good sneer would have achieved much more than a dozen sermons!
‘It’s best just ignoring him,’ Podgorin thought. ‘Above all, not to lend him money.’
Soon afterwards he wasn’t thinking about Sergey Sergeich, or about his hundred roubles. It was a calm, brooding night, very bright. Whenever Podgorin looked up at the sky on moonlit nights he had the feeling that only he and the moon were awake – everyt
hing else was either sleeping or drowsing. He gave no more thought to people or money and his mood gradually became calm and peaceful. He felt alone in this world and the sound of his own footsteps in the silence of the night seemed so mournful.
The garden was enclosed by a white stone wall. In the right-hand corner, facing the fields, stood a tower that had been built long ago, in the days of serfdom. Its lower section was of stone; the top was wooden, with a platform, a conical roof and a tall spire with a black weathercock. Down below were two gates leading straight from the garden into the fields and a staircase that creaked underfoot led up to the platform. Under the staircase some old broken armchairs had been dumped and they were bathed in the moonlight as it filtered through the gate. With their crooked upturned legs these armchairs seemed to have come to life at night and were lying in wait for someone here in the silence.
Podgorin climbed the stairs to the platform and sat down. Just beyond the fence were a boundary ditch and bank and further off were the broad fields flooded in moonlight. Podgorin knew that there was a wood exactly opposite, about two miles from the estate, and he thought that he could distinguish a dark strip in the distance. Quails and corncrakes were calling. Now and then, from the direction of the wood, came the cry of a cuckoo which couldn’t sleep either.
He heard footsteps. Someone was coming across the garden towards the tower.
A dog barked.
‘Beetle!’ a woman’s voice softly called. ‘Come back, Beetle!’
He could hear someone entering the tower down below and a moment later a black dog – an old friend of Podgorin’s – appeared on the bank. It stopped, looked up towards where Podgorin was sitting and wagged its tail amicably. Soon afterwards a white figure rose from the black ditch like a ghost and stopped on the bank as well. It was Nadezhda.
‘Can you see something there?’ she asked the dog, glancing upwards.
She didn’t see Podgorin but probably sensed that he was near, since she was smiling and her pale, moonlit face was happy. The tower’s black shadow stretching over the earth, far into the fields, that motionless white figure with the blissfully smiling, pale face, the black dog and both their shadows – all this was just like a dream.
‘Someone is there,’ Nadezhda said softly.
She stood waiting for him to come down or to call her up to him, so that he could at last declare his love – then both would be happy on that calm, beautiful night. White, pale, slender, very lovely in the moonlight, she awaited his caresses. She was weary of perpetually dreaming of love and happiness and was unable to conceal her feelings any longer. Her whole figure, her radiant eyes, her fixed happy smile, betrayed her innermost thoughts. But he felt awkward, shrank back and didn’t make a sound, not knowing whether to speak, whether to make the habitual joke out of the situation or whether to remain silent. He felt annoyed and his only thought was that here, in a country garden on a moonlit night, close to a beautiful, loving, thoughtful girl, he felt the same apathy as on Little Bronny Street: evidently this type of romantic situation had lost its fascination, like that prosaic depravity. Of no consequence to him now were those meetings on moonlit nights, those white shapes with slim waists, those mysterious shadows, towers, country estates and characters such as Sergey Sergeich, and people like himself, Podgorin, with his icy indifference, his constant irritability, his inability to adapt to reality and take what it had to offer, his wearisome, obsessive craving for what did not and never could exist on earth. And now, as he sat in that tower, he would have preferred a good fireworks display, or some moonlight procession, or Varvara reciting Nekrasov’s The Railway again. He would rather another woman was standing there on the bank where Nadezhda was: this other woman would have told him something absolutely fascinating and new that had nothing to do with love or happiness. And if she did happen to speak of love, this would have been a summons to those new, lofty, rational aspects of existence on whose threshold we are perhaps already living and of which we sometimes seem to have premonitions.
‘There’s no one there,’ Nadezhda said.
She stood there for another minute or so, then she walked quietly towards the wood, her head bowed. The dog ran on ahead. Podgorin could see her white figure for quite a long time. ‘To think how it’s all turned out, though…’ he repeated to himself as he went back to the outhouse.
He had no idea what he could say to Sergey Sergeich or Tatyana the next day or the day after that, or how he would treat Nadezhda. And he felt embarrassed, frightened and bored in advance. How was he going to fill those three long days which he had promised to spend here? He remembered the conversation about second sight and Sergey Sergeich quoting the lines:
Before he had time to groan
A bear came and knocked him prone.
He remembered that tomorrow, to please Tatyana, he would have to smile at those well-fed, chubby little girls – and he decided to leave.
At half past five in the morning Sergey Sergeich appeared on the terrace of the main house in his Bokhara dressing-gown and tasselled fez. Not losing a moment, Podgorin went over to him to say goodbye.
‘I have to be in Moscow by ten,’ he said, looking away. ‘I’d completely forgotten I’m expected at the Notary Public’s office. Please excuse me. When the others are up please tell them that I apologize. I’m dreadfully sorry.’
In his hurry he didn’t hear Sergey Sergeich’s answer and he kept looking round at the windows of the big house, afraid that the ladies might wake up and stop him going. He was ashamed he felt so nervous. He sensed that this was his last visit to Kuzminki, that he would never come back. As he drove away he glanced back several times at the outhouse where once he had spent so many happy days. But deep down he felt coldly indifferent, not at all sad.
At home the first thing he saw on the table was the note he’d received the day before: ‘Dear Misha,’ he read. ‘You’ve completely forgotten us, please come and visit us soon.’ And for some reason he remembered Nadezhda whirling round in the dance, her dress billowing, revealing her legs in their flesh-coloured stockings…
Ten minutes later he was at his desk working – and he didn’t give Kuzminki another thought.
Ionych
I
When visitors to the county town of S—complained of the monotony and boredom of life there, the local people would reply, as if in self-defence, that the very opposite was the case, that life there was in fact extremely good, that the town had a library, a theatre, a club, that there was the occasional ball and – finally – that there were intelligent, interesting and agreeable families with whom to make friends. And they would single out the Turkins as the most cultivated and gifted family.
This family lived in its own house on the main street, next door to the Governor’s. Ivan Petrovich Turkin, a stout, handsome, dark-haired man with sideburns, would organize amateur theatricals for charity – and he himself played the parts of elderly generals, when he would cough most amusingly. He had a copious stock of funny stories, riddles and proverbs, was a great wag and humorist, and you could never tell from his expression whether he was serious or joking. His wife, Vera Iosifovna, a thin, attractive woman with pince-nez, wrote short stories and novels which she loved reading to her guests. Their young daughter Yekaterina Ivanovna played the piano. In short, each Turkin had some particular talent. The Turkins were convivial hosts and cheerfully displayed their talents to their guests with great warmth and lack of pretension. Their large stone house was spacious, and cool in summer. Half of its windows opened onto a shady old garden where nightingales sang in spring. When they had visitors the clatter of knives came from the kitchen and the yard would smell of fried onion – all of which invariably heralded a lavish and tasty supper.
And no sooner had Dr Dmitry Ionych Startsev been appointed local medical officer and taken up residence at Dyalizh, about six miles away, then he too was told that – as a man of culture – he simply must meet the Turkins. One winter’s day he was introduced to Ivan Petrovich in
the street. They chatted about the weather, the theatre, cholera – and an invitation followed. One holiday in spring (it was Ascension Day), after seeing his patients, Startsev set off for town to relax a little and at the same time to do a spot of shopping. He went there on foot, without hurrying himself (as yet he had no carriage and pair), and all the way he kept humming: ‘’Ere I had drunk from life’s cup of tears.’1
In town he dined, took a stroll in the park, and then he suddenly remembered Ivan Petrovich’s invitation and decided to call on the Turkins and see what kind of people they were.
‘Good day – if you please!’ Ivan Petrovich said, meeting him on the front steps. ‘Absolutely, overwhelmingly delighted to see such a charming visitor! Come in, I’ll introduce you to my good lady wife. Verochka,’ he went on, introducing the doctor to his wife, ‘I’ve been telling him that he has no right at all under Roman law to stay cooped up in that hospital – he should devote his leisure time to socializing. Isn’t that so, my sweet?’
‘Please sit here,’ Vera Iosifovna said, seating the guest beside her. ‘You are permitted to flirt with me. My husband’s as jealous as Othello, but we’ll try and behave so that he doesn’t notice a thing.’
‘Oh, my sweet little chick-chick!’ Ivan Petrovich muttered tenderly, planting a kiss on her forehead. ‘You’ve timed your visit to perfection!’ he added, turning once more to his guest. ‘My good lady wife’s written a real whopper of a novel and she’s going to read it out loud this evening.’
The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904 Page 16
