These dreams were, of course, very pleasant, but the unpleasant thing was that amid all these rosy hopes Ivan Ilyich suddenly discovered in himself yet another unexpected ability: namely, spitting. At least the saliva suddenly began leaping from his mouth quite regardless of his will. He noticed it because Akim Petrovich, whose cheek he had sprayed, was sitting there not daring, out of deference, to wipe it off right away. Ivan Ilyich took a napkin and suddenly wiped it off himself. But this at once appeared so preposterous to him, so beyond anything reasonable, that he fell silent and began to be surprised. Akim Petrovich, though he had been drinking, sat all the same as if he were in shock. Ivan Ilyich now realized that, for almost a quarter of an hour already, he had been telling him about some most interesting topic, but that Akim Petrovich, while listening to him, was as if not only embarrassed, but even afraid of something. Pseldonymov, who was sitting two chairs away, also kept stretching his neck toward him, his head inclined to one side, listening with a most disagreeable air. He actually was as if keeping watch on him. Glancing around at the guests, he saw that many were looking straight at him and guffawing. But the strangest thing of all was that this did not embarrass him in the least; on the contrary, he sipped once more from his glass and suddenly started speaking for all to hear.
“I was saying!” he began as loudly as he could, “gentlemen, I was just saying to Akim Petrovich that Russia… yes, precisely Russia… in short, you understand what I mean to sa-sa-say… Russia, in my deepest conviction, experiences hu-humaneness…”
“Hu-humaneness!” came from the other end of the table.
“Hu-hu!”
“Coo-coo!”
Ivan Ilyich paused. Pseldonymov rose from his chair and started peering: who had shouted? Akim Petrovich was covertly shaking his head, as if admonishing the guests. Ivan Ilyich noticed it very well, but painfully held his tongue.
“Humaneness!” he went on stubbornly. “And this evening… and precisely this evening I was saying to Stepan Niki-ki-forovich… yes… that… that the renewal, so to speak, of things…”
“Your Excellency!” came loudly from the other end of the table.
“What can I do for you?” the interrupted Ivan Ilyich replied, trying to make out who had shouted.
“Precisely nothing, Your Excellency, I got carried away, please continue, con-tin-ue!” the voice came again.
Ivan Ilyich winced.
“The renewal, so to speak, of these very things…”
“Your Excellency!” the voice shouted again.
“What is it you want?”
“Hello there!”
This time Ivan Ilyich could not restrain himself. He interrupted his speech and turned to the offender and violator of order. This was a still very young student, totally crocked and arousing enormous suspicion. He had been hollering for a long time and even broke a glass and two plates, insisting that that was what was done at weddings. At the same moment that Ivan Ilyich turned to him, the officer began to reprimand the shouter sternly.
“What’s with you, why are you hollering? You ought to be taken out, that’s what!”
“It’s not about you, Your Excellency, it’s not about you! Do continue!” shouted the merrymaking schoolboy, sprawling on his chair. “Do continue, I’m listening and I’m very, ve-ry, ve-ry pleased with you! Pra-aiseworthy, pra-aiseworthy!”
“A drunken brat!” Pseldonymov prompted in a whisper.
“I can see he’s drunk, but…”
“It’s that I just told an amusing anecdote, Your Excellency!” the officer began. “About a certain lieutenant of our command, who had exactly that way of talking to superiors; so now he’s imitating him. To every word of his superior, he would add: pra-aiseworthy, pra-aiseworthy! He was expelled from the service for it ten years ago.”
“Wha-what lieutenant is that?”
“From our command, Your Excellency, he went mad over this praiseworthy. First they admonished him with milder measures, then they put him under arrest… His superior officer admonished him like a father; and all he said was: pra-aiseworthy, pra-aiseworthy! And it’s strange: he was a courageous officer, six foot six. They wanted to court-martial him, but noticed that he was crazy.”
“Meaning… a prankster. For prankishness they shouldn’t be so severe… I, for my part, am ready to forgive…”
“There was medical evidence, Your Excellency.”
“What! an autopsy?”
“Good heavens, he was perfectly alive, sir.”
A loud and almost general burst of laughter came from the guests, who in the beginning had behaved themselves decorously. Ivan Ilyich became furious.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” he cried, at first almost without stammering, “I am quite well able to distinguish that autopsies are not performed on the living. I thought that in his madness he was no longer living… that is, already dead… that is, already dead… that is, I mean to say… that you don’t love me… And yet I love you all… yes, and I love Por… Porfiry… I humiliate myself by saying so…”
At that moment an enormous spit flew out of Ivan Ilyich’s mouth and spattered on the tablecloth in a most conspicuous place. Pseldonymov rushed to wipe it up with his napkin. This last disaster finally crushed him.
“Gentlemen, this is too much!” he cried out in despair.
“A drunk man, Your Excellency,” Pseldonymov prompted again.
“Porfiry! I see that you… all… yes! I say that I hope… yes, I challenge you all to say: how have I humiliated myself?”
Ivan Ilyich was on the verge of tears.
“Your Excellency, good heavens, sir!”
“Porfiry, I turn to you… Say, if I came… yes… yes, to the wedding, I had a goal. I wanted to morally uplift… I wanted them to feel. I address you all: am I very humiliated in your eyes, or not?”
Deathly silence. That was just the thing, that there was deathly silence, and to such a categorical question. “Why, why don’t they cry out at least at such a moment!” flashed in His Excellency’s head. But the guests only exchanged looks. Akim Petrovich was sitting there more dead than alive, and Pseldonymov, numb with fear, repeated to himself a terrible question, which had already presented itself to him long before:
“What am I going to get for all this tomorrow?”
Suddenly the already very drunk collaborator on The Firebrand, who had been sitting in glum silence, addressed Ivan Ilyich directly and, his eyes flashing, began to reply on behalf of the whole company.
“Yes, sir!” he cried in a thundering voice, “yes, sir, you’ve humiliated yourself, yes, sir, you’re a retrograde… Re-tro-grade!”
“Young man, come to your senses! To whom, as it were, are you speaking!” Ivan Ilyich cried furiously, again jumping up from his seat.
“To you, and, secondly, I’m not a young man… You came to show off and seek popularity.”
“Pseldonymov, what is it!” cried Ivan Ilyich.
But Pseldonymov jumped up in such horror that he stood like a post and absolutely did not know what to start doing. The guests, too, froze in their places. The artist and the student were applauding and shouting, “Bravo, bravo!”
The collaborator went on shouting with irrepressible rage:
“Yes, you came to flaunt your humaneness! You interfered with everybody’s merrymaking. You drank champagne without realizing that it was too expensive for a clerk who makes ten roubles a month, and I suspect that you’re one of those superiors who relish their subordinates’ young wives! Not only that, I’m convinced that you’re in favor of tax-farming… Yes, yes, yes!”
“Pseldonymov, Pseldonymov!” Ivan Ilyich cried, holding his arms out to him. He felt that each of the collaborator’s words was like a new dagger in his heart.
“Wait, Your Excellency, kindly do not worry!” Pseldonymov cried out energetically, jumped over to the collaborator, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and pulled him away from the table. It was even impossible to expect such physical strength from the scr
awny Pseldonymov. But the collaborator was very drunk, and Pseldonymov perfectly sober. Then he gave him several whacks on the back and chucked him out the door.
“You’re all scoundrels!” the collaborator cried. “By tomorrow I’ll make caricatures of you all in The Firebrand!…”
They all jumped up from their seats.
“Your Excellency, Your Excellency!” cried Pseldonymov, his mother, and some of the guests, crowding around the general. “Calm yourself, Your Excellency!”
“No, no!” cried the general, “I’m destroyed… I came… I wanted, so to speak, to baptize. And look here, for all that, for all that!”
He sank onto the chair as if unconscious, put both hands on the table, and lowered his head to them, right into a dish of blancmange. No need to describe the universal horror. A minute later he rose, as if wishing to leave, staggered, tripped against the leg of a chair, fell flat on the floor, and started snoring …
This happens to non-drinkers when they accidentally get drunk. To the last stroke, to the last instant they remain conscious, and then suddenly fall as if cut down. Ivan Ilyich lay on the floor, having lost all consciousness. Pseldonymov seized himself by the hair and froze in that position. The guests hastily began to depart, each discussing in his own way what had happened. It was about three o’clock in the morning.
The main thing was that Pseldonymov’s situation was much worse than could have been imagined, quite apart from the whole attractiveness of the present circumstances. And while Ivan Ilyich is lying on the floor, with Pseldonymov standing over him, desperately tugging himself by the hair, let us interrupt the chosen current of our story and give a few words of explanation about Porfiry Petrovich Pseldonymov himself.
Still as recently as a month before his marriage, he was perishing quite irretrievably. He came from the provinces, where his father had once served as something and where he had died while under prosecution. When, some five months before the wedding, after perishing for a whole year in Petersburg, Pseldonymov got his ten-rouble post, he was resurrected in body and spirit, but circumstances soon laid him low again. In the whole world there remained only two Pseldonymovs, he and his mother, who had left the provinces after her husband’s death. Mother and son were perishing together in the cold and feeding on doubtful substances. There were days when Pseldonymov took a mug and went to the Fontanka himself to fetch water, which he also drank there. Having obtained his post, he and his mother somehow settled themselves in corners somewhere. She began taking in laundry, and he knocked together some savings over four months, so as somehow to provide himself with boots and a bit of an overcoat. And how much grief he endured in his office: his superiors would approach him asking him if it was long since he had taken a bath. There was a rumor that he had nests of bedbugs thriving under the collar of his uniform. But Pseldonymov was a man of firm character. In appearance, he was quiet and placid; he had very little education, and hardly ever was any conversation heard from him. I do not know positively whether he thought, made plans and systems, or dreamed of anything. But instead he was developing some instinctive, deep-seated, unconscious resolve to make his way out of his nasty situation. There was an antlike persistence in him: destroy an anthill and they will immediately start rebuilding it, destroy it again—again they will rebuild it, and so on without tiring. This was a nest-building and domestic being. One could see written on his brow that he would find his way, make his nest, and perhaps even put something aside. His mother alone in the whole world loved him and loved him to distraction. She was a firm, tireless, hardworking woman, and kind besides. They would just have gone on living in their corners for another five or six years, until circumstances changed, had they not run into the retired titular councillor Mlekopitaev, who had been a treasurer serving somewhere in the provinces, but had recently moved to Petersburg and settled there with his family. He knew Pseldonymov and had once owed something to his father. He had a bit of money, not much, of course, but he did have it; how much there was in reality—of this no one knew anything, neither his wife, nor his elder daughter, nor his relations. He had two daughters, and since he was a terrible despot, a drunkard, a domestic tyrant, and ailing besides, he suddenly took a notion to marry one daughter to Pseldonymov: “I know him,” he said, “the father was a good man, and the son will be a good man.” Whatever Mlekopitaev wanted, he did; no sooner said than done. He was a very strange despot. He spent most of his time sitting in his armchair, some illness having deprived him of the use of his legs, though that did not prevent him from drinking vodka. He drank and swore the whole day long. He was a wicked man; he absolutely had to torment someone constantly. For that he kept several distant female relations around him: his own sister, ailing and shrewish; his wife’s two sisters, also wicked and multiloquent; and then his old aunt, who had broken a rib on some occasion. He kept yet another sponger, a Russified German woman, for her talent in telling him tales from The Thousand and One Nights. All his pleasure consisted in picking on these unfortunate hangers-on, cursing them constantly and seven ways to Sunday, though none of them, including his wife, who had been born with a toothache, dared to make a peep before him. He got them to quarrel among themselves, invented and fomented gossip and strife among them, and afterward guffawed and rejoiced seeing how they all nearly came to blows among themselves. He was overjoyed when his elder daughter, who for about ten years had lived in poverty with some officer, her husband, was finally widowed and moved in with him, bringing three small, ailing children. Her children he could not stand, but since their appearance increased the material on which his daily experiments could be conducted, the old man was very pleased. This whole heap of wicked women and ailing children, together with their tormentor, crowded into a wooden house on the Petersburg side, not eating enough, because the old man was miserly and handed out money by kopecks, though he did not stint on his vodka; not sleeping enough, because the old man suffered from insomnia and demanded to be entertained. In short, the whole thing lived in poverty and cursed its fate. It was at this time that Mlekopitaev sought out Pseldonymov. He was struck by his long nose and humble look. His puny and homely younger daughter had then turned seventeen. Though she had once attended some German Schule, she had not learned much more in it than the rudiments. After that, she grew up, scrofulous and sapless, under the crutch of her lame and drunken parent, amid a bedlam of household gossip, spying, and calumny. She never had any girlfriends, or any intelligence. She had long been wishing to get married. With other people she was silent, but at home, by her mummy and the spongers, she was wicked and piercing as a little drill. She particularly liked pinching and dealing out swats to her sister’s children, peaching on them for stolen sugar or bread, which caused an endless and unquenchable quarrel between her and her elder sister. The old man himself offered her to Pseldonymov. But he, wretched though he was, nevertheless asked for some time to reflect. He and his mother pondered long together. But the house was to be registered in the bride’s name, and though it was wooden, though it was one-storied and disgusting, it was still worth something. On top of that came four hundred roubles—when would he ever save up so much! “Why am I taking a man into my house?” the drunken tyrant shouted. “First, since you’re all females, and I’m sick of just females. I want Pseldonymov to dance to my music, too, because I’m his benefactor. Second, I’m taking him, because you all don’t want it and you’re angry. So I’ll do it just to spite you. What I’ve said I’ll do, I’ll do! And you, Porfirka, beat her when she’s your wife; she’s had seven demons sitting in her since the day she was born. Drive them all out, I’ll even get the stick ready…”
Pseldonymov kept silent, but he had already decided. He and his mother were received into the house still prior to the wedding, washed, clothed, shod, given money for the wedding. The old man patronized them, perhaps precisely because the whole family spited them. He even liked the old Pseldonymov woman, so he restrained himself and did not pick on her. However, Pseldonymov himself he made danc
e the Little Cossack28 for him a week before the wedding. “Well, enough, I just wanted to make sure you don’t forget yourself with me,” he said when the dance was finished. He gave just enough money for the wedding and invited all his relations and acquaintances. On Pseldonymov’s side there were only the collaborator on The Firebrand and Akim Petrovich, the guest of honor. Pseldonymov knew very well that the bride loathed him and that she would much rather be marrying an officer and not him. But he endured it all, for such was his arrangement with his mother. The whole day of the wedding and the whole evening the old man spent drinking and cursing in nasty language. The whole family, on account of the wedding, huddled in the back rooms, which were crowded to the point of stinking. The front rooms were reserved for the ball and the supper. Finally, when the old man fell asleep, completely drunk, at around eleven o’clock in the evening, the bride’s mother, who had been especially angry with Pseldonymov’s mother that day, decided to exchange her wrath for mercy and come out for the ball and the supper. Ivan Ilyich’s appearance upset everything. Mrs. Mlekopitaev became embarrassed, offended, and began accusing them of not warning her that a general had been invited. They assured her that he had come on his own, uninvited—she was so stupid that she refused to believe it. Champagne was necessary. Pseldonymov’s mother had only one rouble, Pseldonymov himself—not a kopeck. They had to bow and scrape before the wicked old Mlekopitaev woman, begging money for one bottle, then for another. They pictured future official relations for her, the career, trying to bring her to reason. She finally gave her own money, but she made Pseldonymov drink such a cup of gall and vinegar29 that he ran more than once into the little room where the nuptial bed had been prepared, seized himself silently by the hair, and threw himself headfirst onto the bed destined for paradisal delights, all atremble with impotent rage. No! Ivan Ilyich did not know the cost of the two bottles of Jackson he had drunk that night. What was Pseldonymov’s horror, anguish, and even despair, when the business with Ivan Ilyich ended in so unexpected a way! Again there was going to be a fuss, and maybe a whole night of shrieking and tears from the capricious bride, and reproaches from her muddleheaded relations. He already had a headache without that, already without that the fumes and darkness clouded his eyes. And now Ivan Ilyich needed help, they had to look for a doctor or a carriage at three o’clock in the morning, to take him home, and it must be a carriage, not a hired hack, because it was impossible for such a person, and in such a state, to be sent home in a cab. And where find money at least for the carriage? The Mlekopitaev woman, infuriated that the general had not said even two words to her, nor so much as glanced at her during supper, announced that she did not have a kopeck. And perhaps she really did not have a kopeck. Where to find the money? What to do? Yes, he did have cause for pulling his hair.
The Eternal Husband and Other Stories Page 7
