Tarhov fell to talking of his 'charmer,' and even read me the beginning of a poem entitled: 'My Muse.' His emotional outpourings were not quite to my taste. I felt secretly jealous of him. I soon left him.
* * * * *
A few days after I happened to be passing through one of the arcades of the Gostinny Dvor. It was Saturday; there were crowds of people shopping; on all sides, in the midst of the pushing and crushing, the shopmen kept shouting to people to buy. Having bought what I wanted, I was thinking of nothing but getting away from their teasing importunity as soon as possible—when all at once I halted involuntarily: in a fruit shop I caught sight of my comrade's charmer—Musa, Musa Pavlovna! She was standing, profile to me, and seemed to be waiting for something. After a moment's hesitation I made up my mind to go up to her and speak. But I had hardly passed through the doorway of the shop and taken off my cap, when she tottered back dismayed, turned quickly to an old man in a frieze cloak, for whom the shopman was weighing out a pound of raisins, and clutched at his arm, as though fleeing to put herself under his protection. The latter, in his turn, wheeled round facing her—and, imagine my amazement, I recognised him as Punin!
Yes, it was he; there were his inflamed eyes, his full lips, his soft, overhanging nose. He had, in fact, changed little during the last seven years; his face was a little flabbier, perhaps.
'Nikander Vavilitch!' I cried. 'Don't you know me?' Punin started, opened his mouth, stared at me….
'I haven't the honour,' he was beginning—and all at once he piped out shrilly: 'The little master of Troïtsky (my grandmother's property was called Troïtsky)! Can it be the little master of Troïtsky?'
The pound of raisins tumbled out of his hands.
'It really is,' I answered, and, picking up Punin's purchase from the ground, I kissed him.
He was breathless with delight and excitement; he almost cried, removed his cap—which enabled me to satisfy myself that the last traces of hair had vanished from his 'egg'—took a handkerchief out of it, blew his nose, poked the cap into his bosom with the raisins, put it on again, again dropped the raisins…. I don't know how Musa was behaving all this time, I tried not to look at her. I don't imagine Punin's agitation proceeded from any extreme attachment to my person; it was simply that his nature could not stand the slightest unexpected shock. The nervous excitability of these poor devils!
'Come and see us, my dear boy,' he faltered at last; 'you won't be too proud to visit our humble nest? You're a student, I see …'
'On the contrary, I shall be delighted, really.'
'Are you independent now?'
'Perfectly independent.'
'That's capital! How pleased Paramon Semyonitch will be! To-day he'll be home earlier than usual, and madame lets her, too, off for Saturdays. But, stop, excuse me, I am quite forgetting myself. Of course, you don't know our niece!'
I hastened to slip in that I had not yet had the pleasure.
'Of course, of course! How could you know her! Musotchka … Take note, my dear sir, this girl's name is Musa—and it's not a nickname, but her real name … Isn't that a predestination? Musotchka, I want to introduce you to Mr. … Mr. …'
'B.,' I prompted.
'B.,' he repeated. 'Musotchka, listen! You see before you the most excellent, most delightful of young men. Fate threw us together when he was still in years of boyhood! I beg you to look on him as a friend!'
I swung off a low bow. Musa, red as a poppy, flashed a look on me from under her eyelids, and dropped them immediately.
'Ah!' thought I, 'you 're one of those who in difficult moments don't turn pale, but red; that must be made a note of.'
'You must be indulgent, she's not a fine lady,' observed Punin, and he went out of the shop into the street; Musa and I followed him.
* * * * *
The house in which Punin lodged was a considerable distance from the Gostinny Dvor, being, in fact, in Sadovoy Street. On the way my former preceptor in poetry had time to communicate a good many details of his mode of existence. Since the time of our parting, both he and Baburin had been tossed about holy Russia pretty thoroughly, and had not long—only a year and a half before—found a permanent home in Moscow. Baburin had succeeded in becoming head-clerk in the office of a rich merchant and manufacturer. 'Not a lucrative berth,' Punin observed with a sigh,—'a lot of work, and not much profit … but what's one to do? One must be thankful to get that! I, too, am trying to earn something by copying and lessons; only my efforts have so far not been crowned with success. My writing, you perhaps recollect, is old-fashioned, not in accordance with the tastes of the day; and as regards lessons—what has been a great obstacle is the absence of befitting attire; moreover, I greatly fear that in the matter of instruction—in the subject of Russian literature—I am also not in harmony with the tastes of the day; and so it comes about that I am turned away.' (Punin laughed his sleepy, subdued laugh. He had retained his old, somewhat high-flown manner of speech, and his old weakness for falling into rhyme.) 'All run after novelties, nothing but innovations! I dare say you, too, do not honour the old divinities, and fall down before new idols?'
'And you, Nikander Vavilitch, do you really still esteem Heraskov?'
Punin stood still and waved both hands at once. 'In the highest degree, sir! in the high … est de … gree, I do!'
'And you don't read Pushkin? You don't like Pushkin?'
Punin again flung his hands up higher than his head.
'Pushkin? Pushkin is the snake, lying hid in the grass, who is endowed with the note of the nightingale!'
While Punin and I talked like this, cautiously picking our way over the unevenly laid brick pavement of so-called 'white-stoned' Moscow—in which there is not one stone, and which is not white at all—Musa walked silently beside us on the side further from me. In speaking of her, I called her 'your niece.' Punin was silent for a little, scratched his head, and informed me in an undertone that he had called her so … merely as a manner of speaking; that she was really no relation; that she was an orphan picked up and cared for by Baburin in the town of Voronezh; but that he, Punin, might well call her daughter, as he loved her no less than a real daughter. I had no doubt that, though Punin intentionally dropped his voice, Musa could hear all he said very well; and she was at once angry, and shy, and embarrassed; and the lights and shades chased each other over her face, and everything in it was slightly quivering, the eyelids and brows and lips and narrow nostrils. All this was very charming, and amusing, and queer.
* * * * *
But at last we reached the 'modest nest.' And modest it certainly was, the nest. It consisted of a small, one-storied house, that seemed almost sunk into the ground, with a slanting wooden roof, and four dingy windows in the front. The furniture of the rooms was of the poorest, and not over tidy, indeed. Between the windows and on the walls hung about a dozen tiny wooden cages containing larks, canaries, and siskins. 'My subjects!' Punin pronounced triumphantly, pointing his finger at them. We had hardly time to get in and look about us, Punin had hardly sent Musa for the samovar, when Baburin himself came in. He seemed to me to have aged much more than Punin, though his step was as firm as ever, and the expression of his face altogether was unchanged; but he had grown thin and bent, his cheeks were sunken, and his thick black shock of hair was sprinkled with grey. He did not recognise me, and showed no particular pleasure when Punin mentioned my name; he did not even smile with his eyes, he barely nodded; he asked—very carelessly and drily—whether my granny were living—and that was all. 'I'm not over-delighted at a visit from a nobleman,' he seemed to say; 'I don't feel flattered by it.' The republican was a republican still.
Musa came back; a decrepit little old woman followed her, bringing in a tarnished samovar. Punin began fussing about, and pressing me to take things; Baburin sat down to the table, leaned his head on his hands, and looked with weary eyes about him. At tea, however, he began to talk. He was dissatisfied with his position. 'A screw—not a man,' so he sp
oke of his employer; 'people in a subordinate position are so much dirt to him, of no consequence whatever; and yet it's not so long since he was under the yoke himself. Nothing but cruelty and covetousness. It's a bondage worse than the government's! And all the trade here rests on swindling and flourishes on nothing else!'
Hearing such dispiriting utterances, Punin sighed expressively, assented, shook his head up and down, and from side to side; Musa maintained a stubborn silence…. She was obviously fretted by the doubt, what I was, whether I was a discreet person or a gossip. And if I were discreet, whether it was not with some afterthought in my mind. Her dark, swift, restless eyes fairly flashed to and fro under their half-drooping lids. Only once she glanced at me, but so inquisitively, so searchingly, almost viciously … I positively started. Baburin scarcely talked to her at all; but whenever he did address her, there was a note of austere, hardly fatherly, tenderness in his voice.
Punin, on the contrary, was continually joking with Musa; she responded unwillingly, however. He called her little snow-maiden, little snowflake.
'Why do you give Musa Pavlovna such names?' I asked.
Punin laughed. 'Because she's such a chilly little thing.'
'Sensible,' put in Baburin: 'as befits a young girl.'
'We may call her the mistress of the house,' cried Punin. 'Hey? Paramon Semyonitch?' Baburin frowned; Musa turned away … I did not understand the hint at the time.
So passed two hours … in no very lively fashion, though Punin did his best to 'entertain the honourable company.' For instance, he squatted down in front of the cage of one of the canaries, opened the door, and commanded: 'On the cupola! Begin the concert!' The canary fluttered out at once, perched on the cupola, that is to say, on Punin's bald pate, and turning from side to side, and shaking its little wings, carolled with all its might. During the whole time the concert lasted, Punin kept perfectly still, only conducting with his finger, and half closing his eyes. I could not help roaring with laughter … but neither Baburin nor Musa laughed.
Just as I was leaving, Baburin surprised me by an unexpected question. He wished to ask me, as a man studying at the university, what sort of person Zeno was, and what were my ideas about him.
'What Zeno?' I asked, somewhat puzzled.
'Zeno, the sage of antiquity. Surely he cannot be unknown to you?'
I vaguely recalled the name of Zeno, as the founder of the school of
Stoics; but I knew absolutely nothing more about him.
'Yes, he was a philosopher,' I pronounced, at last.
'Zeno,' Baburin resumed in deliberate tones, 'was that wise man, who declared that suffering was not an evil, since fortitude overcomes all things, and that the good in this world is one: justice; and virtue itself is nothing else than justice.'
Punin turned a reverent ear.
'A man living here who has picked up a lot of old books, told me that saying,' continued Baburin; 'it pleased me much. But I see you are not interested in such subjects.'
Baburin was right. In such subjects I certainly was not interested. Since I had entered the university, I had become as much of a republican as Baburin himself. Of Mirabeau, of Robespierre, I would have talked with zest. Robespierre, indeed … why, I had hanging over my writing-table the lithographed portraits of Fouquier-Tinville and Chalier! But Zeno! Why drag in Zeno?
As he said good-bye to me, Punin insisted very warmly on my visiting them next day, Sunday; Baburin did not invite me at all, and even remarked between his teeth, that talking to plain people of nondescript position could not give me any great pleasure, and would most likely be disagreeable to my granny. At that word I interrupted him, however, and gave him to understand that my grandmother had no longer any authority over me.
'Why, you've not come into possession of the property, have you?' queried Baburin.
'No, I haven't,' I answered.
'Well, then, it follows …' Baburin did not finish his sentence; but I mentally finished it for him: 'it follows that I'm a boy.'
'Good-bye,' I said aloud, and I retired.
I was just going out of the courtyard into the street … Musa suddenly ran out of the house, and slipping a piece of crumpled paper into my hand, disappeared at once. At the first lamp-post I unfolded the paper. It turned out to be a note. With difficulty I deciphered the pale pencil-marks. 'For God's sake,' Musa had written, 'come to-morrow after matins to the Alexandrovsky garden near the Kutafia tower I shall wait for you don't refuse me don't make me miserable I simply must see you.' There were no mistakes in spelling in this note, but neither was there any punctuation. I returned home in perplexity.
* * * * *
When, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time, next day, I began to get near the Kutafia tower (it was early in April, the buds were swelling, the grass was growing greener, and the sparrows were noisily chirrupping and quarrelling in the bare lilac bushes), considerably to my surprise, I caught sight of Musa a little to one side, not far from the fence. She was there before me. I was going towards her; but she herself came to meet me.
'Let's go to the Kreml wall,' she whispered in a hurried voice, running her downcast eyes over the ground; 'there are people here.'
We went along the path up the hill.
'Musa Pavlovna,' I was beginning…. But she cut me short at once.
'Please,' she began, speaking in the same jerky and subdued voice, 'don't criticise me, don't think any harm of me. I wrote a letter to you, I made an appointment to meet you, because … I was afraid…. It seemed to me yesterday,—you seemed to be laughing all the time. Listen,' she added, with sudden energy, and she stopped short and turned towards me: 'listen; if you tell with whom … if you mention at whose room you met me, I'll throw myself in the water, I'll drown myself, I'll make an end of myself!'
At this point, for the first time, she glanced at me with the inquisitive, piercing look I had seen before.
'Why, she, perhaps, really … would do it,' was my thought.
'Really, Musa Pavlovna,' I protested, hurriedly: 'how can you have such a bad opinion of me? Do you suppose I am capable of betraying my friend and injuring you? Besides, come to that, there's nothing in your relations, as far as I'm aware, deserving of censure…. For goodness' sake, be calm.'
Musa heard me out, without stirring from the spot, or looking at me again.
'There's something else I ought to tell you,' she began, moving forward again along the path, 'or else you may think I'm quite mad! I ought to tell you, that old man wants to marry me!'
'What old man? The bald one? Punin?'
'No—not he! The other … Paramon Semyonitch.'
'Baburin?'
'Yes.'
'Is it possible? Has he made you an offer?'
'Yes.'
'But you didn't consent, of course?'
'Yes, I did consent … because I didn't understand what I was about then. Now it's a different matter.'
I flung up my hands. 'Baburin—and you! Why, he must be fifty!'
'He says forty-three. But that makes no difference. If he were five—and—twenty I wouldn't marry him. Much happiness I should find in it! A whole week will go by without his smiling once! Paramon Semyonitch is my benefactor, I am deeply indebted to him; he took care of me, educated me; I should have been utterly lost but for him; I'm bound to look on him as a father…. But be his wife! I'd rather die! I'd rather be in my coffin!'
'Why do you keep talking about death, Musa Pavlovna?'
Musa stopped again.
'Why, is life so sweet, then? Even your friend Vladimir Nikolaitch, I may say, I've come to love from being wretched and dull: and then Paramon Semyonitch with his offers of marriage…. Punin, though he bores me with his verses, he doesn't scare me, anyway; he doesn't make me read Karamzin in the evenings, when my head's ready to drop off my shoulders for weariness! And what are these old men to me? They call me cold, too. With them, is it likely I should be warm? If they try to make me—I shall go. Paramon Semyonitch himself'
s always saying: Freedom! freedom! All right, I want freedom too. Or else it comes to this! Freedom for every one else, and keeping me in a cage! I'll tell him so myself. But if you betray me, or drop a hint—remember; they'll never set eyes on me again!'
Musa stood in the middle of the path.
'They'll never set eyes on me again!' she repeated sharply. This time, too, she did not raise her eyes to me; she seemed to be aware that she would infallibly betray herself, would show what was in her heart, if any one looked her straight in the face…. And that was just why she did not lift her eyes, except when she was angry or annoyed, and then she stared straight at the person she was speaking to…. But her small pretty face was aglow with indomitable resolution.
'Why, Tarhov was right,' flashed through my head; 'this girl is a new type.'
'You've no need to be afraid of me,' I declared, at last.
'Truly? Even, if … You said something about our relations…. But even if there were …' she broke off.
'Even in that case, you would have no need to be afraid, Musa Pavlovna.
I am not your judge. Your secret is buried here.' I pointed to my bosom.
'Believe me, I know how to appreciate …'
'Have you got my letter?' Musa asked suddenly.
'Yes.'
'Where?'
'In my pocket.'
'Give it here … quick, quick!'
I got out the scrap of paper. Musa snatched it in her rough little hand, stood still a moment facing me, as though she were going to thank me; but suddenly started, looked round, and without even a word at parting, ran quickly down the hill.
I looked in the direction she had taken. At no great distance from the tower I discerned, wrapped in an 'Almaviva' ('Almavivas' were then in the height of fashion), a figure which I recognised at once as Tarhov.
'Aha, my boy,' thought I, 'you must have had notice, then, since you're on the look-out.'
A Desperate Character and Other Stories Page 9
