“Come, go to bed. Go along and sleep it off.”
“Do you mean to say you think I am drunk? . . . if I am so low in the eyes of such a grand lady. . . I can go away altogether.”
“Do. A good thing too.”
“I will, too. I have humbled myself enough. And I will go.”
“Oh, my God! Oh, do go, then! I shall be delighted!”
“Very well, we shall see.”
Nikitin mutters something to himself, and, stumbling over the chairs, goes out of the bedroom. Then sounds reach her from the entry of whispering, the shuffling of goloshes and a door being shut. Mari d’elle has taken offence in earnest and gone out.
“Thank God, he has gone!” thinks the singer. “Now I can sleep.”
And as she falls asleep she thinks of her mari d’elle, what sort of a man he is, and how this affliction has come upon her. At one time he used to live at Tchernigov, and had a situation there as a book-keeper. As an ordinary obscure individual and not the mari d’elle, he had been quite endurable: he used to go to his work and take his salary, and all his whims and projects went no further than a new guitar, fashionable trousers, and an amber cigarette-holder. Since he had become “the husband of a celebrity” he was completely transformed. The singer remembered that when first she told him she was going on the stage he had made a fuss, been indignant, complained to her parents, turned her out of the house. She had been obliged to go on the stage without his permission. Afterwards, when he learned from the papers and from various people that she was earning big sums, he had ‘forgiven her,’ abandoned book-keeping, and become her hanger-on. The singer was overcome with amazement when she looked at her hanger-on: when and where had he managed to pick up new tastes, polish, and airs and graces? Where had he learned the taste of oysters and of different Burgundies? Who had taught him to dress and do his hair in the fashion and call her ‘Nathalie’ instead of Natasha?“
“It’s strange,” thinks the singer. “In old days he used to get his salary and put it away, but now a hundred roubles a day is not enough for him. In old days he was afraid to talk before schoolboys for fear of saying something silly, and now he is overfamiliar even with princes . . . wretched, contemptible little creature!”
But then the singer starts again; again there is the clang of the bell in the entry. The housemaid, scolding and angrily flopping with her slippers, goes to open the door. Again some one comes in and stamps like a horse.
“He has come back!” thinks the singer. “When shall I be left in peace? It’s revolting!” She is overcome by fury.
“Wait a bit. . . . I’ll teach you to get up these farces! You shall go away. I’ll make you go away!”
The singer leaps up and runs barefoot into the little drawing-room where her mari usually sleeps. She comes at the moment when he is undressing, and carefully folding his clothes on a chair.
“You went away!” she says, looking at him with bright eyes full of hatred. “What did you come back for?”
Nikitin remains silent, and merely sniffs.
“You went away! Kindly take yourself off this very minute! This very minute! Do you hear?”
Mari d’elle coughs and, without looking at his wife, takes off his braces.
“If you don’t go away, you insolent creature, I shall go,” the singer goes on, stamping her bare foot, and looking at him with flashing eyes. “I shall go! Do you hear, insolent . . . worthless wretch, flunkey, out you go!”
“You might have some shame before outsiders,” mutters her husband . . . .
The singer looks round and only then sees an unfamiliar countenance that looks like an actor’s. . . . The countenance, seeing the singer’s uncovered shoulders and bare feet, shows signs of embarrassment, and looks ready to sink through the floor.
“Let me introduce . . .” mutters Nikitin, “Bezbozhnikov, a provincial manager.”
The singer utters a shriek, and runs off into her bedroom.
“There, you see . . .” says mari d’elle, as he stretches himself on the sofa, “it was all honey just now . . . my love, my dear, my darling, kisses and embraces . . . but as soon as money is touched upon, then. . . . As you see . . . money is the great thing. . . . Good night!”
A minute later there is a snore.
A Living Chattel
G
roholsky embraced Liza, kept kissing one after another all her little fingers with their bitten pink nails, and laid her on the couch covered with cheap velvet. Liza crossed one foot over the other, clasped her hands behind her head, and lay down.
Groholsky sat down in a chair beside her and bent over. He was entirely absorbed in contemplation of her.
How pretty she seemed to him, lighted up by the rays of the setting sun!
There was a complete view from the window of the setting sun, golden, lightly flecked with purple.
The whole drawing-room, including Liza, was bathed by it with brilliant light that did not hurt the eyes, and for a little while covered with gold.
Groholsky was lost in admiration. Liza was so incredibly beautiful. It is true her little kittenish face with its brown eyes, and turn up nose was fresh, and even piquant, his scanty hair was black as soot and curly, her little figure was graceful, well proportioned and mobile as the body of an electric eel, but on the whole. . . . However my taste has nothing to do with it. Groholsky who was spoilt by women, and who had been in love and out of love hundreds of times in his life, saw her as a beauty. He loved her, and blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere.
“I say,” he said, looking straight into her eyes, “I have come to talk to you, my precious. Love cannot bear anything vague or indefinite. . . . Indefinite relations, you know, I told you yesterday, Liza . . . we will try to-day to settle the question we raised yesterday. Come, let us decide together. . . .”
“What are we to do?”
Liza gave a yawn and scowling, drew her right arm from under her head.
“What are we to do?” she repeated hardly audibly after Groholsky.
“Well, yes, what are we to do? Come, decide, wise little head . . . I love you, and a man in love is not fond of sharing. He is more than an egoist. It is too much for me to go shares with your husband. I mentally tear him to pieces, when I remember that he loves you too. In the second place you love me. . . . Perfect freedom is an essential condition for love. . . . And are you free? Are you not tortured by the thought that that man towers for ever over your soul? A man whom you do not love, whom very likely and quite naturally, you hate. . . . That’s the second thing. . . . And thirdly. . . . What is the third thing? Oh yes. . . . We are deceiving him and that . . . is dishonourable. Truth before everything, Liza. Let us have done with lying!”
“Well, then, what are we to do?”
“You can guess. . . . I think it necessary, obligatory, to inform him of our relations and to leave him, to begin to live in freedom. Both must be done as quickly as possible. . . . This very evening, for instance. . . . It’s time to make an end of it. Surely you must be sick of loving like a thief?”
“Tell! tell Vanya?”
“Why, yes!”
“That’s impossible! I told you yesterday, Michel, that it is impossible.”
“Why?”
“He will be upset. He’ll make a row, do all sorts of unpleasant things. . . . Don’t you know what he is like? God forbid! There’s no need to tell him. What an idea!”
Groholsky passed his hand over his brow, and heaved a sigh.
“Yes,” he said, “he will be more than upset. I am robbing him of his happiness. Does he love you?”
“He does love me. Very much.”
“There’s another complication! One does not know where to begin. To conceal it from him is base, telling him would kill him. . . . Goodness knows what’s one to do. Well, how is it to be?”
Groholsky pondered. His pale face wore a frown.
“Let us go on always as we are now,” said Liza. “Let him find out for himself, if he wants to.”
“But you know that . . . is sinful, and besides the fact is you are mine, and no one has the right to think that you do not belong to me but to someone else! You are mine! I will not give way to anyone! . . . I am sorry for him—God knows how sorry I am for him, Liza! It hurts me to see him! But . . . it can’t be helped after all. You don’t love him, do you? What’s the good of your going on being miserable with him? We must have it out! We will have it out with him, and you will come to me. You are my wife, and not his. Let him do what he likes. He’ll get over his troubles somehow. . . . He is not the first, and he won’t be the last. . . . Will you run away? Eh? Make haste and tell me! Will you run away?”
Liza got up and looked inquiringly at Groholsky.
“Run away?”
“Yes. . . . To my estate. . . . Then to the Crimea. . . . We will tell him by letter. . . . We can go at night. There is a train at half past one. Well? Is that all right?”
Liza scratched the bridge of her nose, and hesitated.
“Very well,” she said, and burst into tears.
Patches of red came out of her cheeks, her eyes swelled, and tears flowed down her kittenish face. . . .
“What is it?” cried Groholsky in a flutter. “Liza! what’s the matter? Come! what are you crying for? What a girl! Come, what is it? Darling! Little woman!”
Liza held out her hands to Groholsky, and hung on his neck. There was a sound of sobbing.
“I am sorry for him . . .” muttered Liza. “Oh, I am so sorry for him!”
“Sorry for whom?”
“Va—Vanya. . . .”
“And do you suppose I’m not? But what’s to be done? We are causing him suffering. . . . He will be unhappy, will curse us . . . but is it our fault that we love one another?”
As he uttered the last word, Groholsky darted away from Liza as though he had been stung and sat down in an easy chair. Liza sprang away from his neck and rapidly—in one instant—dropped on the lounge.
They both turned fearfully red, dropped their eyes, and coughed.
A tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty, in the uniform of a government clerk, had walked into the drawing-room. He had walked in unnoticed. Only the bang of a chair which he knocked in the doorway had warned the lovers of his presence, and made them look round. It was the husband.
They had looked round too late.
He had seen Groholsky’s arm round Liza’s waist, and had seen Liza hanging on Groholsky’s white and aristocratic neck.
“He saw us!” Liza and Groholsky thought at the same moment, while they did not know what to do with their heavy hands and embarrassed eyes. . . .
The petrified husband, rosy-faced, turned white.
An agonising, strange, soul-revolting silence lasted for three minutes. Oh, those three minutes! Groholsky remembers them to this day.
The first to move and break the silence was the husband. He stepped up to Groholsky and, screwing his face into a senseless grimace like a smile, gave him his hand. Groholsky shook the soft perspiring hand and shuddered all over as though he had crushed a cold frog in his fist.
“Good evening,” he muttered.
“How are you?” the husband brought out in a faint husky, almost inaudible voice, and he sat down opposite Groholsky, straightening his collar at the back of his neck.
Again, an agonising silence followed . . . but that silence was no longer so stupid. . . . The first step, most difficult and colourless, was over.
All that was left now was for one of the two to depart in search of matches or on some such trifling errand. Both longed intensely to get away. They sat still, not looking at one another, and pulled at their beards while they ransacked their troubled brains for some means of escape from their horribly awkward position. Both were perspiring. Both were unbearably miserable and both were devoured by hatred. They longed to begin the tussle but how were they to begin and which was to begin first? If only she would have gone out!
“I saw you yesterday at the Assembly Hall,” muttered Bugrov (that was the husband’s name).
“Yes, I was there . . . the ball . . . did you dance?”
“M’m . . . yes . . . with that . . . with the younger Lyukovtsky . . . . She dances heavily. . . . She dances impossibly. She is a great chatterbox.” (Pause.) “She is never tired of talking.”
“Yes. . . . It was slow. I saw you too. . .”
Groholsky accidentally glanced at Bugrov. . . . He caught the shifting eyes of the deceived husband and could not bear it. He got up quickly, quickly seized Bugrov’s hand, shook it, picked up his hat, and walked towards the door, conscious of his own back. He felt as though thousands of eyes were looking at his back. It is a feeling known to the actor who has been hissed and is making his exit from the stage, and to the young dandy who has received a blow on the back of the head and is being led away in charge of a policeman.
As soon as the sound of Groholsky’s steps had died away and the door in the hall creaked, Bugrov leapt up, and after making two or three rounds of the drawing-room, strolled up to his wife. The kittenish face puckered up and began blinking its eyes as though expecting a slap. Her husband went up to her, and with a pale, distorted face, with arms, head, and shoulders shaking, stepped on her dress and knocked her knees with his.
“If, you wretched creature,” he began in a hollow, wailing voice, “you let him come here once again, I’ll. . . . Don’t let him dare to set his foot. . . . I’ll kill you. Do you understand? A-a-ah . . . worthless creature, you shudder! Fil-thy woman!”
Bugrov seized her by the elbow, shook her, and flung her like an indiarubber ball towards the window. . . .
“Wretched, vulgar woman! you have no shame!”
She flew towards the window, hardly touching the floor with her feet, and caught at the curtains with her hands.
“Hold your tongue,” shouted her husband, going up to her with flashing eyes and stamping his foot.
She did hold her tongue, she looked at the ceiling, and whimpered while her face wore the expression of a little girl in disgrace expecting to be punished.
“So that’s what you are like! Eh? Carrying on with a fop! Good! And your promise before the altar? What are you? A nice wife and mother. Hold your tongue!”
And he struck her on her pretty supple shoulder. “Hold your tongue, you wretched creature. I’ll give you worse than that! If that scoundrel dares to show himself here ever again, if I see you— listen!—with that blackguard ever again, don’t ask for mercy! I’ll kill you, if I go to Siberia for it! And him too. I shouldn’t think twice about it! You can go, I don’t want to see you!”
Bugrov wiped his eyes and his brow with his sleeve and strode about the drawing-room, Liza sobbing more and more loudly, twitching her shoulders and her little turned up nose, became absorbed in examining the lace on the curtain.
“You are crazy,” her husband shouted. “Your silly head is full of nonsense! Nothing but whims! I won’t allow it, Elizaveta, my girl! You had better be careful with me! I don’t like it! If you want to behave like a pig, then . . . then out you go, there is no place in my house for you! Out you pack if. . . . You are a wife, so you must forget these dandies, put them out of your silly head! It’s all foolishness! Don’t let it happen again! You try defending yourself! Love your husband! You have been given to your husband, so you must love him. Yes, indeed! Is one not enough? Go away till . . . . Torturers!”
Bugrov paused; then shouted:
“Go away I tell you, go to the nursery! Why are you blubbering, it is your own fault, and you blubber! What a woman! Last year you were after Petka Totchkov, now you are after this devil. Lord forgive us! . . . Tfoo, it’s time you understood what you are! A wife! A mother! Last year there were unpleasantnesses, and now there will be unpleasantnesses. . . . Tfoo!”
Bugrov heaved a loud sigh, and the air was filled with the smell of sherry. He had come back from dining and was slightly drunk . . . .
“Don’t you know your duty? No! . . . you must be
taught, you’ve not been taught so far! Your mamma was a gad-about, and you . . . you can blubber. Yes! blubber away. . . .”
Bugrov went up to his wife and drew the curtain out of her hands.
“Don’t stand by the window, people will see you blubbering. . . . Don’t let it happen again. You’ll go from embracing to worse trouble. You’ll come to grief. Do you suppose I like to be made a fool of? And you will make a fool of me if you carry on with them, the low brutes. . . . Come, that’s enough. . . . Don’t you. . . . Another time. . . . Of course I . . Liza . . . stay. . . .”
Bugrov heaved a sigh and enveloped Liza in the fumes of sherry.
“You are young and silly, you don’t understand anything. . . . I am never at home. . . . And they take advantage of it. You must be sensible, prudent. They will deceive you. And then I won’t endure it. . . . Then I may do anything. . . . Of course! Then you can just lie down, and die. I . . . I am capable of doing anything if you deceive me, my good girl. I might beat you to death. . . . And . . . I shall turn you out of the house, and then you can go to your rascals.”
And Bugrov (horribile dictu) wiped the wet, tearful face of the traitress Liza with his big soft hand. He treated his twenty-year-old wife as though she were a child.
“Come, that’s enough. . . . I forgive you. Only God forbid it should happen again! I forgive you for the fifth time, but I shall not forgive you for the sixth, as God is holy. God does not forgive such as you for such things.”
Bugrov bent down and put out his shining lips towards Liza’s little head. But the kiss did not follow. The doors of the hall, of the dining-room, of the parlour, and of the drawing-room all slammed, and Groholsky flew into the drawing-room like a whirlwind. He was pale and trembling. He was flourishing his arms and crushing his expensive hat in his hands. His coat fluttered upon him as though it were on a peg. He was the incarnation of acute fever. When Bugrov saw him he moved away from his wife and began looking out of the other window. Groholsky flew up to him, and waving his arms and breathing heavily and looking at no one, he began in a shaking voice:
The Tales of Chekhov Page 256
