The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “I don’t see why you’ve told this to me,” Velchaninov frowned severely.

  “But it’s all on account of that, sir that he did stab him with a knife, sir,” Pavel Pavlovich tittered. “You can even see he’s not the type, that he’s a sop of a man, if he forgot decency itself out of fear and threw himself on ladies’ necks in the presence of the governor—and yet he did stab him, sir, he got his own! It’s only for that, sir.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” Velchaninov suddenly screamed in a voice not his own, just as if something had come unhinged in him, “get out of here with your underground trash, you’re underground trash yourself—thinks he can scare me—child-tormentor—mean man—scoundrel, scoundrel, scoundrel!” he shouted, forgetting himself and choking on every word.

  Pavel Pavlovich cringed all over, the drunkenness even fell from him; his lips trembled.

  “Is it me, Alexei Ivanovich, that you’re calling a scoundrel—you calling me, sir?”

  But Velchaninov had already recovered himself.

  “I’m ready to apologize,” he answered, after pausing briefly in gloomy reflection, “but only in the case that you yourself wish to be direct, and that at once.”

  “And in your place I’d apologize anyway, Alexei Ivanovich.”

  “Very well, so be it,” Velchaninov again paused briefly, “I apologize to you; but you must agree, Pavel Pavlovich, that after all this I no longer reckon myself as owing to you, that is, I’m speaking with regard to the whole matter, and not only the present case.”

  “Never mind, sir, what is there to reckon?” Pavel Pavlovich grinned, looking down, however.

  “And if so, all the better, all the better! Finish your wine and lie down, because I’m not letting you go even so…”

  “What of the wine, sir…” Pavel Pavlovich, as if a bit embarrassed, nevertheless went up to the table and began to finish his already long filled last glass. Perhaps he had drunk a lot before then, so that his hand shook now and he splashed some of the wine on the floor, on his shirt, and on his waistcoat, but he drank it to the bottom even so, just as if he were unable to leave it undrunk, and, having respectfully placed the empty glass on the table, obediently went over to his bed to undress.

  “Wouldn’t it be better… not to spend the night?” he said suddenly, for some reason or other, having taken one boot off already and holding it in his hands.

  “No, not better!” Velchaninov replied irately, pacing the room tirelessly, without glancing at him.

  The man undressed and lay down. A quarter of an hour later, Velchaninov also lay down and put out the candle.

  He had trouble falling asleep. Something new, confusing the matter still more, appearing suddenly from somewhere, alarmed him now, and at the same time he felt that, for some reason, he was ashamed of this alarm. He was dozing off, but some sort of rustling suddenly awakened him. He turned at once to look at Pavel Pavlovich’s bed. The room was dark (the curtains were fully drawn), but it seemed to him that Pavel Pavlovich was not lying down but had gotten up and was sitting on the bed.

  “What’s with you?” Velchaninov called.

  “A shade, sir,” Pavel Pavlovich uttered, barely audibly, after waiting a little.

  “What’s that? What kind of shade?”

  “There, in that room, through the doorway, I saw as if a shade, sir.”

  “Whose shade?” Velchaninov asked, after a brief pause.

  “Natalia Vassilievna’s, sir.”

  Velchaninov stood on the rug and himself peeked through the hall into the other room, the door to which was always left open. There were no curtains on the windows there, only blinds, and so it was much brighter.

  “There’s nothing in that room, and you are drunk—lie down!” Velchaninov said, lay down, and wrapped himself in the blanket. Pavel Pavlovich did not say a word and lay down as well.

  “And have you ever seen a shade before?” Velchaninov suddenly asked, some ten minutes later.

  “I think I did once, sir,” Pavel Pavlovich responded weakly and also after a while. Then silence fell again.

  Velchaninov could not have said for certain whether he slept or not, but about an hour went by—and suddenly he turned over again: was it some kind of rustling that awakened him?—he did not know that either, but it seemed to him that amid the perfect darkness something was standing over him, white, not having reached him yet, but already in the middle of the room. He sat up in bed and stared for a whole minute.

  “Is that you, Pavel Pavlovich?” he said in a weakened voice. His own voice, sounding suddenly in the silence and darkness, seemed somehow strange to him.

  There came no reply, but there was no longer any doubt that someone was standing there.

  “Is that you… Pavel Pavlovich?” he repeated more loudly, even so loudly that if Pavel Pavlovich had been peacefully asleep in his bed, he could not have failed to wake up and reply.

  But again there came no reply, and instead it seemed to him that this white and barely distinguishable figure moved still closer to him. Then a strange thing happened: something in him suddenly as if came unhinged, just as earlier, and he shouted with all his might in the most absurd, enraged voice, choking on almost every word:

  “If you, you drunken buffoon—dare merely to think—that you can—frighten me—I’ll turn to the wall, cover my head with the blanket, and not turn around once during the whole night—to prove to you how greatly I value—even if you stand there till morning… buffoonishly… and I spit on you!”

  And, having spat furiously in the direction of the presumed Pavel Pavlovich, he suddenly turned to the wall, wrapped himself, as he had said, in the blanket, and as if froze in that position without moving. A dead silence fell. Whether the shade was moving closer or remained where it was—he could not tell, but his heart was pounding—pounding—pounding… At least five full minutes went by; and suddenly, from two steps away, came the weak, quite plaintive voice of Pavel Pavlovich:

  “Alexei Ivanovich, I got up to look for…” (and he named a most necessary household object). “I didn’t find it there where I was… I wanted to look quietly by your bed, sir.”

  “Then why were you silent… when I shouted!” Velchaninov asked in a faltering voice, after waiting for about half a minute.

  “I was frightened, sir. You shouted so… I got frightened, sir.”

  “It’s in the corner to the left, toward the door, in the cupboard, light a candle…”

  “I’ll do without a candle, sir…” Pavel Pavlovich said humbly, going to the corner. “Do forgive me, Alexei Ivanovich, for troubling you so… I suddenly felt so drunk, sir…”

  But the man made no reply. He went on lying face to the wall and lay like that for the whole night without turning once. Did he really want so much to keep his word and show his scorn?—He himself did not know what was happening to him; his nervous disorder turned, finally, almost into delirium, and for a long time he could not fall asleep. Waking up the next morning past nine o’clock, he suddenly gave a start and sat up in bed as if he had been pushed—Pavel Pavlovich was no longer in the room! All that was left was an empty, unmade bed, but the man himself had slipped away at daybreak.

  “I just knew it!” Velchaninov slapped himself on the forehead.

  X

  AT THE CEMETERY

  The doctor’s apprehensions proved justified, and Liza suddenly grew worse—much worse than Velchaninov and Klavdia Petrovna could have imagined the day before. In the morning Velchaninov found the sick girl still conscious, though all burning with fever; he insisted later that she smiled at him and even gave him her hot little hand. Whether this was true or he unwittingly invented it for himself as a consolation—he had no time to check; by nightfall the sick girl was already unconscious, and so it continued throughout her illness. On the tenth day after her move to the country, she died.

  This was a sorrowful time for Velchaninov; the Pogoreltsevs even feared for him. The greater part of these difficult days he lived w
ith them. In the very last days of Liza’s illness, he spent whole hours sitting alone somewhere in a corner, apparently not thinking of anything; Klavdia Petrovna would come over to distract him, but he responded little, at times clearly finding it burdensome to talk with her. Klavdia Petrovna had not even expected that “all this would produce such an impression” on him. Most of all he was distracted by the children; with them he even laughed at times; but almost every hour he would get up from his chair and go on tiptoe to look at the sick girl. At times it seemed to him that she recognized him. He had no more hope for recovery than anyone else, yet he would not go far from the room in which Liza lay dying, and usually sat in the room next door.

  A couple of times, however, during these days as well, he suddenly displayed an extreme activity: he would suddenly get up, rush to Petersburg to see doctors, invite the most famous ones, gather consultations. The second, and last, of these consultations took place on the eve of the sick girl’s death. Some three days prior to that, Klavdia Petrovna had talked insistently with Velchaninov about the necessity of finally discovering the whereabouts of Mr. Trusotsky: “In case of a calamity, Liza could not even be buried without him.” Velchaninov mumbled that he would write him. Then old Pogoreltsev announced that he himself would find him through the police. Velchaninov finally wrote a two-line note and took it to the Pokrovsky Hotel. Pavel Pavlovich, as usual, was not at home, and he handed the note to Marya Sysoevna to be passed on.

  Finally, Liza died, on a beautiful summer evening, together with the setting sun, and only then did Velchaninov seem to recover himself. When the dead girl was prepared, dressed in a festive white dress from one of Klavdia Petrovna’s daughters, and laid out on the table in the drawing room,9 with flowers in her little folded hands—he went up to Klavdia Petrovna and, flashing his eyes, announced to her that he would at once bring “the murderer” there as well. Ignoring advice that he wait till the next day, he immediately went to town.

  He knew where to find Pavel Pavlovich; he had gone to Petersburg not for doctors only. At times during those days it had seemed to him that if he were to bring her father to the dying Liza, she, on hearing his voice, would recover herself; then, like a desperate man, he would start looking for him. Pavel Pavlovich’s quarters were still in the rooming house, but there was no point even in asking there. “He doesn’t spend the night or even come home for three days in a row,” Marya Sysoevna reported, “and when by chance he comes back drunk, he spends less than an hour and then drags himself off again—quite haywire.” A floorboy from the Pokrovsky Hotel told Velchaninov, among other things, that Pavel Pavlovich once used to visit some girls on Voznesensky Prospect. Velchaninov immediately found the girls. Showered with gifts and treats, these persons at once remembered their visitor, chiefly by the crape on his hat, and straight away denounced him, of course, for not coming to them anymore. One of them, Katya, undertook “to find Pavel Pavlovich whenever you like, because he never leaves Mashka Prostakova, and there’s no bottom to his money, and this Mashka isn’t Prostakova, she’s Shystakova, and she’s been in the hospital, and if she, Katya, wanted to, she could pack her off to Siberia at once, she’d only have to say the word.” Katya, however, did not find him that time, but gave a firm promise for the next time. It was in her assistance that Velchaninov now placed his hopes.

  Having reached town by ten o’clock, he immediately sent for her, paying where he had to for her absence, and set out with her on his search. He did not yet know himself what, in fact, he was going to do now with Pavel Pavlovich: kill him for something, or simply look for him, so as to inform him of his daughter’s death and the need for his assistance in the funeral? First off they had no luck: it turned out that Mashka Shystakova had had a fight with Pavel Pavlovich two days before, and that some cashier had “smashed Pavel Pavlovich’s head in with a bench.” In short, for a long time he refused to be found and, finally, only at two o’clock in the morning, coming out of some establishment he had been directed to, did Velchaninov himself suddenly and unexpectedly run into him.

  Pavel Pavlovich, completely drunk, was being led toward this establishment by two ladies; one of the ladies held him under the arm, and from behind they were accompanied by one stalwart and loose-limbed pretender, who was shouting at the top of his lungs and threatening Pavel Pavlovich terribly with some sort of horrors. He shouted, among other things, that he had “exploited him and poisoned his life.” The matter, it seemed, had to do with some money; the ladies were hurrying and very afraid. Seeing Velchaninov, Pavel Pavlovich rushed to him with outstretched arms, shouting bloody murder:

  “Brother, dear, protect me!”

  At the sight of Velchaninov’s athletic figure, the pretender instantly effaced himself; the triumphant Pavel Pavlovich brandished his fist after him and gave a cry of victory; here Velchaninov seized him furiously by the shoulders and, himself not knowing why, started shaking him with both hands, so that his teeth clacked. Pavel Pavlovich stopped shouting at once and stared at his torturer with dim-witted, drunken fright. Probably not knowing what else to do with him, Velchaninov firmly bent him down and sat him on a hitching post.

  “Liza died!” he said to him.

  Pavel Pavlovich, still not taking his eyes off him, sat on the hitching post, supported by one of the ladies. He understood, finally, and his face suddenly became somehow pinched.

  “Died…” he whispered somehow strangely. Whether he grinned drunkenly with his long, nasty smile, or something went awry in his face, Velchaninov could not tell, but a moment later Pavel Pavlovich made an attempt to lift his trembling right hand so as to cross himself; the cross, however, did not come off, and the trembling hand sank down. A little later he slowly got up from the hitching post, caught hold of his lady, and, supported by her, went on his way, seemingly oblivious, as if Velchaninov were not there. But he seized him again by the shoulder.

  “Do you understand, drunken monster, that without you it won’t even be possible to bury her!” he cried, suffocating.

  The man turned his head toward him.

  “Remember… the artillery… lieutenant?” he mumbled, moving his tongue thickly.

  “Wha-a-at?” Velchaninov screamed, shuddering painfully.

  “There’s the father for you! Go look for him… to bury…”

  “You’re lying!” Velchaninov cried like a lost man. “It’s out of spite… I just knew you’d have it ready for me!”

  Forgetting himself, he raised his terrible fist over Pavel Pavlovich’s head. Another moment—and he would perhaps have killed him with one blow; the ladies shrieked and flew off, but Pavel Pavlovich did not bat an eye. Some sort of frenzy of the most beastly spite distorted his whole face.

  “And do you know,” he spoke much more firmly, almost as if not drunk, “our Russian———?” (And he uttered a swearword most unfit for print.) “Well, take yourself there!” Then he tore violently from Velchaninov’s grip, stumbled, and nearly fell. The ladies picked him up and this time ran, shrieking, and almost dragging Pavel Pavlovich with them. Velchaninov now offered no pursuit.

  The next day, at one o’clock in the afternoon, a quite decent middle-aged official in uniform came to the Pogoreltsevs’ country house and politely handed Klavdia Petrovna a packet addressed to her, on behalf of Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky. The packet contained a letter with an enclosed three hundred roubles and the necessary certificates concerning Liza. Pavel Pavlovich wrote briefly, exceedingly respectfully, and quite decently. He was quite grateful to Her Excellency Klavdia Petrovna for her virtuous concern with the orphan, for which God alone could reward her. He vaguely mentioned that, being extremely unwell, he was prevented from coming in person to bury his tenderly beloved and unfortunate daughter, and for that he placed all his hopes in Her Excellency’s angelic goodness of soul. The three hundred roubles, as he further explained in the letter, were intended for the funeral and generally for the expenses incurred by the illness. If anything should be left of this sum, he most humbly and r
espectfully begged that it be employed for eternal commemoration for the repose of the soul of the departed Liza. The official who delivered the letter was unable to explain more; it even followed from certain of his words that it was only Pavel Pavlovich’s insistent request that had made him take it upon himself personally to deliver the packet to Her Excellency. Pogoreltsev almost took offense at the phrase “expenses incurred by the illness,” and resolved, having set aside fifty roubles for the burial—since it was impossible to forbid a father to bury his own child—to return the remaining two hundred and fifty roubles to Mr. Trusotsky immediately. Klavdia Petrovna decided in the end to return, not the two hundred and fifty roubles, but the receipt from the cemetery church stating that this money had been received for the eternal commemoration of the soul of the departed maiden Elizaveta. The receipt was afterward given to Velchaninov, to be handed on immediately; he sent it by mail to the rooming house.

  After the funeral, he disappeared from the country house. For two whole weeks he hung around the city without any purpose, alone, bumping into people in his pensiveness. At times he spent whole days lying stretched on his sofa, forgetful of the most ordinary things. The Pogoreltsevs sent many times asking him to come; he would promise and at once forget. Klavdia Petrovna even called on him personally, but did not find him at home. The same happened with his lawyer; and yet the lawyer had something to tell him: he had settled the lawsuit quite adroitly, and the adversaries had come to a peaceful agreement, with a very insignificant part of the disputed inheritance as compensation. It remained only to obtain the consent of Velchaninov himself. Finding him home at last, the lawyer was surprised at the extreme listlessness and indifference with which he, still recently so troublesome a client, heard him out.