11.
She traveled with Panaurov in a reserved compartment; he had on his head an astrakhan cap of peculiar shape.
“Yes, Petersburg did not satisfy me,” he said, drawling, with a sigh. “They promise much, but nothing definite. Yes, my dear girl. I have been a justice of the peace, a member of the local Board, chairman of the Board of Magistrates, and finally councillor of the provincial administration. I think I have served my country and have earned the right to receive attention; but—would you believe it?—I can never succeed in wringing from the authorities a post in another town. . . .”
Panaurov closed his eyes and shook his head.
“They don’t recognize me,” he went on, as though dropping asleep. “Of course I’m not an administrator of genius, but, on the other hand, I’m a decent, honest man, and nowadays even that’s something rare. I regret to say I have not been always quite straightforward with women, but in my relations with the Russian government I’ve always been a gentleman. But enough of that,” he said, opening his eyes; “let us talk of you. What put it into your head to visit your papa so suddenly?”
“Well . . . I had a little misunderstanding with my husband,” said Yulia, looking at his cap.
“Yes. What a queer fellow he is! All the Laptevs are queer. Your husband’s all right—he’s nothing out of the way—but his brother Fyodor is a perfect fool.”
Panaurov sighed and asked seriously:
“And have you a lover yet?”
Yulia looked at him in amazement and laughed.
“Goodness knows what you’re talking about.”
It was past ten o’clock when they got out at a big station and had supper. When the train went on again Panaurov took off his greatcoat and his cap and sat down beside Yulia.
“You are very charming, I must tell you,” he began. “Excuse me for the eating-house comparison, but you remind me of fresh salted cucumber; it still smells of the hotbed, so to speak, and yet has a smack of the salt and a scent of fennel about it. As time goes on you will make a magnificent woman, a wonderful, exquisite woman. If this trip of ours had happened five years ago,” he sighed, “I should have felt it my duty to join the ranks of your adorers, but now, alas, I’m a veteran on the retired list.”
He smiled mournfully, but at the same time graciously, and put his arm round her waist.
“You must be mad!” she said; she flushed crimson and was so frightened that her hands and feet turned cold.
“Leave off, Grigory Nikolaevich!”
“What are you afraid of, dear?” he asked softly. “What is there dreadful about it? It’s simply that you’re not used to it.”
If a woman protested he always interpreted it as a sign that he had made an impression on her and attracted her. Holding Yulia round the waist, he kissed her firmly on the cheek, then on the lips, in the full conviction that he was giving her intense gratification. Yulia recovered from her alarm and confusion and began laughing. He kissed her once more and said, as he put on his ridiculous cap:
“That is all that the old veteran can give you. A Turkish Pasha, a kindhearted old fellow, was presented by someone—or inherited, I fancy it was—a whole harem. When his beautiful young wives drew up in a row before him, he walked round them, kissed each one of them, and said: ‘That is all that I am equal to giving you.’ And that’s just what I say, too.”
All this struck her as stupid and extraordinary and amused her. She felt mischievous. Standing up on the seat and humming, she got a box of sweets from the shelf, and, throwing him a piece of chocolate, shouted:
“Catch!”
He caught it. With a loud laugh she threw him another sweet, then a third, and he kept catching them and putting them into his mouth, looking at her with imploring eyes; and it seemed to her that in his face, his features, his expression, there was a great deal that was feminine and childlike. And when, out of breath, she sat down on the seat and looked at him, laughing, he tapped her cheek with two fingers, and said as though he were vexed:
“Naughty girl!”
“Take it,” she said, giving him the box. “I don’t care for sweet things.”
He ate up the sweets—every one of them—and locked the empty box in his trunk; he liked boxes with pictures on them.
“That’s mischief enough, though,” he said. “It’s time for the veteran to go bye-bye.”
He took out of his holdall a Bokhara dressing gown and a pillow, lay down, and covered himself with the dressing gown.
“Good night, darling!” he said softly, and sighed as though his whole body ached.
And soon a snore was heard. Without the slightest feeling of constraint, she, too, lay down and went to sleep.
When next morning she drove through her native town from the station homewards, the streets seemed to her empty and deserted. The snow looked gray, and the houses small, as though someone had squashed them. She was met by a funeral procession: the dead body was carried in an open coffin with banners.
“Meeting a funeral, they say, is lucky,” she thought.
There were white bills pasted in the windows of the house where Nina Fyodorovna used to live.
With a sinking at her heart she drove into her own courtyard and rang at the door. It was opened by a servant she did not know—a plump, sleepy-looking girl wearing a warm wadded jacket. As she went upstairs Yulia remembered how Laptev had declared his love there, but now the staircase was unscrubbed, covered with footmarks. Upstairs in the cold passage patients were waiting in their outdoor coats. And for some reason her heart beat violently, and she was so excited she could scarcely walk.
The doctor, who had grown even stouter, was sitting with a brick-red face and disheveled hair, drinking tea. Seeing his daughter, he was greatly delighted, and even lachrymose. She thought that she was the only joy in this old man’s life, and much moved, she embraced him warmly, and told him she would stay a long time—till Easter. After taking off her things in her own room, she went back to the dining-room to have tea with him. He was pacing up and down with his hands in his pockets, humming, “Ru-ru-ru”; this meant that he was dissatisfied with something.
“You have a gay time of it in Moscow,” he said. “I am very glad for your sake. . . . I’m an old man and I need nothing. I shall soon give up the ghost and set you all free. And the wonder is that my hide is so tough, that I’m alive still! It’s amazing!”
He said that he was a tough old ass that everyone rode on. They had thrust on him the care of Nina Fyodorovna, the worry of her children, and of her burial; and that coxcomb Panaurov would not trouble himself about it and had even borrowed a hundred rubles from him and had never paid it back.
“Take me to Moscow and put me in a madhouse,” said the doctor. “I’m mad; I’m a simple child, as I still put faith in truth and justice.”
Then he found fault with her husband for his shortsightedness in not buying houses that were being sold so cheaply. And now it seemed to Yulia that she was not the one joy in this old man’s life. While he was seeing his patients, and afterwards going his rounds, she walked through all the rooms, not knowing what to do or what to think about. She had already grown strange to her own town and her own home. She felt no inclination to go into the streets or see her friends; and at the thought of her old friends and her life as a girl, she felt no sadness nor regret for the past.
In the evening she dressed a little more smartly and went to the evening service. But there were only poor people in the church, and her splendid fur coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her that there was some change in the church as well as in herself. In old days she had loved it when they read the prayers for the day at evening service, and the choir sang anthems such as “I Will Open My Lips.” She liked moving slowly in the crowd to the priest who stood in the middle of the church, and then to feel the holy oil on her forehead; now she only waited for the service to be over. And now, going out of the church, she was only afraid that beggars would ask for alms; it was such
a bore to have to stop and feel for her pockets; besides, she had no coppers in her pocket now—nothing but rubles.
She went to bed early and was a long time in going to sleep. She kept dreaming of portraits of some sort, and of the funeral procession she had met that morning. The open coffin with the dead body was carried into the yard and brought to a standstill at the door; then the coffin was swung backwards and forwards on a sheet, and dashed violently against the door. Yulia woke and jumped up in alarm. There really was a bang at the door, and the wire of the bell rustled against the wall, though no ring was to be heard.
The doctor coughed. Then she heard the servant go downstairs, and then come back.
“Madam!” she said, and knocked at the door. “Madam!”
“What is it?” said Yulia.
“A telegram for you!”
Yulia went out to her with a candle. Behind the servant stood the doctor, in his night clothes and greatcoat, and he, too, had a candle in his hand.
“Our bell is broken,” he said, yawning sleepily. “It ought to have been mended long ago.”
Yulia broke open the telegram and read:
WE DRINK TO YOUR HEALTH—YARTSEV, KOCHEVOI.
“Ah, what idiots!” she said, and burst out laughing; and her heart felt light and gay.
Going back into her room, she quietly washed and dressed, then she spent a long time in packing her things, until it was daylight, and at midday she set off for Moscow.
12.
In Holy Week the Laptevs went to an exhibition of pictures in the school of painting. The whole family went together in the Moscow fashion, the little girls, the governess, Kostya, and all.
Laptev knew the names of all the well-known painters and never missed an exhibition. He used sometimes to paint little landscape paintings when he was in the country in the summer, and he fancied he had a good deal of taste, and that if he had studied he might have made a good painter. When he was abroad he sometimes used to go to curio shops, examining the antiques with the air of a connoisseur and giving his opinion on them. When he bought any article he gave just what the shopkeeper liked to ask for it and his purchase remained afterwards in a box in the coach house till it disappeared altogether. Or going into a print shop, he would slowly and attentively examine the engravings and the bronzes, making various remarks on them, and would buy a common frame or a box of wretched prints. At home he had pictures always of large dimensions but of inferior quality; the best among them were badly hung. It had happened to him more than once to pay large sums for things which had afterwards turned out to be forgeries of the grossest kind. And it was remarkable that, though as a rule timid in the affairs of life, he was exceedingly bold and self-confident at a picture exhibition. Why?
Yulia Sergeyevna looked at the pictures as her husband did, through her open fist or an opera glass, and was surprised that the people in the pictures were like live people, and the trees like real trees. But she did not understand art, and it seemed to her that many pictures in the exhibition were alike, and she imagined that the whole object in painting was that the figures and objects should stand out as though they were real, when you looked at the picture through your open fist.
“That forest is Shiskin’s,” her husband explained to her. “He always paints the same thing. . . . But notice snow’s never such a lilac color as that. . . . And that boy’s left arm is shorter than his right.”
When they were all tired and Laptev had gone to look for Kostya, that they might go home, Yulia stopped indifferently before a small landscape. In the foreground was a stream, over it a little wooden bridge; on the further side a path that disappeared in the dark grass; a field on the right; a copse; near it a campfire—no doubt of watchers by night; and in the distance there was a glow of the evening sunset.
Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along the little path further and further, while all round was stillness, the drowsy land rails calling and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some reason she suddenly began to feel that she had seen those very clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and that copse, and that field before, many times before. She felt lonely, and longed to walk on and on along the path; and there, in the glow of sunset, was the calm reflection of something unearthly, eternal.
“How finely that’s painted!” she said, surprised that the picture had suddenly become intelligible to her.
“Look, Alyosha! Do you see how peaceful it is?”
She began trying to explain why she liked the landscape so much, but neither Kostya nor her husband understood her. She kept looking at the picture with a mournful smile, and the fact that the others saw nothing special in it troubled her. Then she began walking through the rooms and looking at the pictures again. She tried to understand them and no longer thought that a great many of them were alike. When, on returning home, for the first time she looked attentively at the big picture that hung over the piano in the drawing-room, she felt a dislike for it, and said:
“What an idea to have pictures like that!”
And after that the gilt cornices, the Venetian looking glasses with flowers on them, the pictures of the same sort as the one that hung over the piano, and also her husband’s and Kostya’s reflections upon art, aroused in her a feeling of dreariness and vexation, even of hatred.
Life went on its ordinary course from day to day with no promise of anything special. The theatrical season was over, the warm days had come. There was a long spell of glorious weather. One morning the Laptevs attended the district court to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the court to defend someone. They were late in starting and reached the court after the examination of the witnesses had begun. A soldier in the reserve was accused of theft and housebreaking. There were a great number of witnesses, washerwomen; they all testified that the accused was often in the house of their employer—a woman who kept a laundry. At the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross he came late in the evening and began asking for money; he wanted a pick-me-up, as he had been drinking, but no one gave him anything. Then he went away, but an hour afterwards he came back and brought with him some beer and a soft gingerbread cake for the little girl. They drank and sang songs almost till daybreak, and when in the morning they looked about, the lock of the door leading up into the attic was broken, and of the linen three men’s shirts, a petticoat, and two sheets were missing. Kostya asked each witness sarcastically whether she had not drunk the beer the accused had brought. Evidently he was insinuating that the washerwomen had stolen the linen themselves. He delivered his speech without the slightest nervousness, looking angrily at the jury.
He explained what robbery with housebreaking meant, and the difference between that and simple theft. He spoke very circumstantially and convincingly, displaying an unusual talent for speaking at length and in a serious tone about what had been known to everyone long before. And it was difficult to make out exactly what he was aiming at. From his long speech the foreman of the jury could only have deduced “that it was housebreaking but not robbery, as the washerwomen had sold the linen for drink themselves; or, if there had been robbery, there had not been housebreaking.” But obviously, he said just what was wanted, as his speech moved the jury and the audience and was very much liked. When they gave a verdict of acquittal, Yulia nodded to Kostya, and afterwards pressed his hand warmly.
In May the Laptevs moved to a country villa at Sokolniki. By that time Yulia was expecting a baby.
13.
More than a year had passed. Yulia and Yartsev were lying on the grass at Sokolniki not far from the embankment of the Yaroslav railway; a little distance away Kochevoi was lying with hands under his head, looking at the sky. All three had been for a walk and were waiting for the six o’clock train to pass to go home to tea.
“Mothers see something extraordinary in their children; that is ordained by nature,” said Yulia. “A mother will stand for hours together by the baby’s cot looking at its little ears and eyes and no
se, and fascinated by them. If anyone else kisses her baby the poor thing imagines that it gives him immense pleasure. And a mother talks of nothing but her baby. I know that weakness in mothers, and I keep watch over myself, but my Olga really is exceptional. How she looks at me when I’m nursing her! How she laughs! She’s only eight months old, but, upon my word, I’ve never seen such intelligent eyes in a child of three.”
“Tell me, by the way,” asked Yartsev: “which do you love most—your husband or your baby?”
Yulia shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never was so very fond of my husband, and Olga is in reality my first love. You know that I did not marry Alexei for love. In old days I was foolish and miserable and thought that I had ruined my life and his, and now I see that love is not necessary—that it is all nonsense.”
“But if it is not love, what feeling is it that binds you to your husband? Why do you go on living with him?”
“I don’t know. . . . I suppose it must be habit. I respect him, I miss him when he’s away for long, but that’s—not love. He is a clever, honest man, and that’s enough to make me happy. He is very kind and goodhearted. . . .”
“Alyosha’s intelligent, Alyosha’s good,” said Kostya, raising his head lazily; “but, my dear girl, to find out that he is intelligent, good, and interesting, you have to eat a hundredweight of salt with him. . . . And what’s the use of his goodness and intelligence? He can fork out money as much as you want, but when character is needed to resist insolence or aggressiveness, he is fainthearted and overcome with nervousness. People like your amiable Alyosha are splendid people, but they are no use at all for fighting. In fact, they are no use for anything.”
Peasants and Other Stories Page 13
