"But all the same, if I hadn't forgotten those razors on the table yesterday—maybe nothing would have happened. Is that so? Is it so? After all, he did avoid me earlier, he didn't come for two weeks; he hid from me, pitying me! He did choose Bagautov to begin with, and not me! He did jump out of bed at night to warm the plates, thinking of creating a diversion— from the knife to loving-kindness! . . . He wanted to save himself and me—with warmed-up plates! ..."
And for a long time yet the sick head of this former "man of the world" worked in this way, pouring from empty into void, before he calmed down. He woke up the next day with the same sick head, but with a totally new and totally unexpected horror.
This new horror came from the absolute conviction, which unexpectedly consolidated in him, that he, Velchaninov (and man of the world), today, himself, of his own free will, would end it all by going to Pavel Pavlovich—why? what for?—Of that he knew nothing and in his disgust he wanted to know nothing; he knew only that for some reason he would drag himself.
This madness—he could call it nothing else—developed, all the same, to the point of acquiring a possibly reasonable shape and a quite legitimate pretext: he still kept as if envisioning that Pavel Pavlovich would go back to his room, lock the door tightly, and—hang himself, like that cashier Marya Sysoevna told about. This yesterday's reverie gradually turned into a senseless but irrefutable conviction in him. "Why would the fool hang himself?" he interrupted himself every moment. He remembered Liza's words long ago . . . "And besides, in his place I, too, might hang myself...” it once occurred to him.
The end of it was that, instead of going to dinner, he did after all set out for Pavel Pavlovich's. "I'll just inquire of Marya Sysoevna," he decided. But, before coming out to the street, he stopped suddenly under the gateway.
"Can it be, can it be," he cried, turning crimson with shame. "Can it be that I'm trudging there in order to 'embrace and weep'? Can it be that the whole disgrace lacks only this last senseless abomination!"
But the providence of all respectable and decent people saved him from "senseless abomination." As soon as he reached the street, he suddenly ran into Alexander Lobov. The youth was puffing and excited.
"I was coming to see you! This friend of yours, Pavel Pavlovich, just imagine!"
"Hanged himself?" Velchaninov muttered wildly.
"Who hanged himself? Why?" Lobov goggled his eyes.
"Never mind . . . just so, go on!"
"Pah, the devil, what a funny turn of thought you've got, though! He by no means hanged himself (why hang himself?). On the contrary—he left. I put him on the train just now and sent him off. Pah, how he drinks, let me tell you! We drank three bottles, Predposylov, too—but how he drinks, how he drinks! He sang songs on the train, remembered you, waved his hand, asked to send you his greetings. A scoundrel, don't you think—eh?"
The young man was indeed tipsy; his flushed face, shining eyes, and poorly obedient tongue bore strong witness to that. Velchaninov guffawed at the top of his lungs:
"So they did finally end by pledging brotherhood!—ha, ha! Embraced and wept! Ah, you Schiller-poets!"
"No abuse, please. You know, he gave it up altogether there. He was there yesterday and today as well. He peached on us terribly. Nadya's locked up—sitting in the attic. Shouts, tears, but we won't yield! But how he drinks, let me tell you, how he drinks! And you know, he's such mauvais ton—that is, not mauvais ton, but what's the word? . . . And he kept remembering you, but there's no comparison with you! After all, you are a decent man and in fact once belonged to high society, and only now have been forced to shun—on account of poverty or whatever . . . Devil knows, I didn't quite understand him."
"Ah, so he told you about me in such terms?"
"He . . . he—don't be angry. Being a citizen is better than high society. I mean, in our time in Russia one doesn't know whom to respect. You must agree that it's a bad disease of the time, when one doesn't know whom to respect—isn't it true?"
"True, true, but about him?"
"Him? Whom!—ah, yes! Why did he keep saying: the fifty-year-old but ruined Velchaninov? Why: but ruined and not and ruined! He laughs, he repeated it a thousand times. He got on the train, started a song, and wept—it's simply disgusting; it's even pathetic—the man's drunk. Ah, I don't like fools! He started throwing money to the beggars, for the repose of the soul of Lizaveta—his wife, or what?"
"Daughter." „ "What's with your hand?"
"I cut it."
"Never mind, it'll go away. You know, devil take him, it's good that he left, but I'll bet that there, where he's gone, he'll get married again at once—isn't it true?"
"But don't you want to get married, too?"
"Me? I'm a different matter—what a one you are, really! If you're fifty years old, then he's certainly sixty; we must be logical here, my dear sir! And you know, formerly, long ago now, I was a pure Slavophile in my convictions, but now we're expecting dawn from the West . . . Well, good-bye; it's lucky I ran into you without going in; I won't go in, don't ask, I have no time!...”
And he started to dash off.
"Ah, yes, what's the matter with me," he suddenly came back, "he sent me to you with a letter! Here it is. Why didn't you come to see him off?"
Velchaninov returned home and opened the envelope which was addressed to him.
There was not a single line from Pavel Pavlovich in the envelope, but it contained some other letter. Velchaninov recognized the hand. The letter was an old one, on time-yellowed paper, with faded ink, written to him some ten years earlier in Petersburg, two months after he left T—. But this letter had not gone to him; instead of it, he had received another one then; that was clear from the content of the yellowed letter. In this letter Natalia Vassilievna, bidding him farewell forever—just as in the letter he had received then—and confessing to him her love for another man, did not, however, conceal her pregnancy. On the contrary, to console him she promised to find an occasion for conveying the future child to him, assured him that from then on they would have other responsibilities, that their friendship was now sealed forever— in short, there was not much logic, but the goal was the same: that he should deliver her from his love. She even allowed him to visit T— in a year—to see the baby. God knows why she had changed her mind and sent the other letter instead of this one.
Velchaninov, as he read it, turned pale, but he also imagined Pavel Pavlovich finding this letter and reading it for the first time before the opened heirloom box of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
"He also must have gone pale as death," he thought, chancing to notice his face in the mirror. "He must have been reading it and closing his eyes, and then suddenly opening them again, hoping the letter would turn to simple blank paper ... He probably repeated the experiment three or four times!...”
XVII: The Eternal Husband
Almost exactly two years went by after the adventure we have described. We meet Mr. Velchaninov one beautiful summer day in a car of one of our newly opened railways. He was on his way to Odessa to join a friend, for the pleasure of it, and, along with that, on account of another, also quite agreeable, circumstance; through his friend he hoped to arrange for himself a meeting with one extremely interesting woman, with whom he had long wished to become acquainted. Without going into details, we shall limit ourselves to pointing out that he had regenerated, or, better to say, improved greatly over the last two years. Of the former hypochondria almost no traces remained. All that remained to him of various "memories" and anxieties—the consequences of illness—which had begun to beset him two years ago in Petersburg during the time of his then unsuccessful lawsuit—was some hidden shame from the awareness of his former faintheartedness. He was partially recompensed by the certainty that there would be no more of it and that no one would ever know about it. True, he had abandoned society then, had even begun to dress poorly, had hidden somewhere from everyone—and this, of course, everyone had noticed. But he had so quickly com
e forth to plead guilty, and with such a newly revived and self-confident air, that "everyone" forgave at once his momentary falling away; even those of them whom he had stopped greeting, these were the first to acknowledge him and offer him their hand, and what's more without any importunate questions—as if he had been absent all the while somewhere far away on family business, which was no one's affair, and had only just come back.
The reason for all these beneficial and sensible changes for the better was, naturally, the winning of the lawsuit. Velchaninov got only sixty thousand roubles—no great thing, granted, but a very important one for him: first of all, he felt himself at once on firm ground again—meaning morally appeased; he knew for certain now that he would not squander this last of his money "like a fool," as he had squandered his first two fortunes, and that he would have enough for the rest of his life. "However tottering their social edifice may be, and whatever they may be trumpeting there," he thought occasionally, lending an ear and eye to all the marvelous and incredible that was being accomplished around him and all over Russia, "whatever people and thought may be regenerating into there, still I will always at least have this fine and tasty dinner which I'm now sitting down to, and thus I'm prepared for anything." This thought, tender to the point of voluptuousness, was gradually taking full possession of him and produced in him even a physical turnabout, not to mention a moral one: he now looked like a totally different man compared with that "marmot" we described two years ago, with whom such indecent stories were beginning to happen—he looked cheerful, bright, imposing. Even the malignant wrinkles that had begun to form around his eyes and on his forehead were almost smoothed out; his complexion even changed—it became whiter, rosier. At the present moment he was sitting in a comfortable seat in a first-class car, and a sweet thought was hatching in his mind: at the next station there would be a fork and a new line going to the right. "If I were to leave the direct line for a moment and bear to the right, then in no more than two stops I could visit yet another lady of my acquaintance, who has just returned from abroad and is now living in—agreeable for me, but rather boring for her—provincial seclusion; and thus the possibility arises of spending my time no less interestingly than in Odessa, the more so as Odessa won't slip away either...” But he was still hesitant and had not made a final decision; he was "waiting for a push." Meanwhile the station was approaching; the push was also not long in coming.
At this station the train stopped for forty minutes and the passengers were offered dinner. Just at the entrance to the waiting room for first- and second-class passengers there crowded, as usual, an impatient and hurrying multitude of people, and—perhaps also as usual—a scandal took place. One lady, who got out of a second-class car and was remarkably pretty, but somehow too magnificently dressed for a traveler, almost dragged with her, in both hands, an uhlan, a very young and handsome little officer, who was trying to tear free of her grip. The young officer was very tipsy, and the lady, in all probability an older relative, would not let him go, surely for fear he would rush straight to the buffet for a drink. Meanwhile, the uhlan was jostled in the crush by a little merchant, also on a spree, and even outrageously so. This merchant had been stuck at the station for two days already, drinking and squandering money, surrounded by all sorts of comradery, and kept being late for the train to continue his journey. There was a quarrel, the officer shouted, the merchant cursed, the lady was in despair and, drawing the uhlan away from the quarrel, exclaimed to him in a pleading voice: "Mitenka! Mitenka!" The little merchant found this much too scandalous; true, everyone was laughing, but the merchant was the more upset on account of what seemed to him, for some reason, an offense to morality.
"See that—'Mitenka'!...” he said reproachfully, imitating the lady's piping little voice. "They're no longer ashamed even in public!"
And, staggering over to the lady, who had thrown herself down on the first chair she could find and managed to sit the uhlan down beside her, he looked them both over with contempt and drew out in a singsong voice:
"Slut, slut that you are, your skirt tail's all tattered!"
The lady shrieked and looked around pitifully, waiting for deliverance. She was ashamed, she was afraid, and to crown it all, the officer tore from his chair and, with a yell, rushed for the merchant, but slipped and flopped back into the chair. The guffawing increased around them, while no one even thought of helping; but Velchaninov did help; he suddenly seized the little merchant by the scruff of the neck and, turning him around, shoved him some five steps away from the frightened woman. With that the scandal ended; the little merchant was greatly taken aback both by the shove and by Velchaninov's imposing figure; he was led away at once by his comrades. The dignified physiognomy of the elegantly dressed gentleman produced an imposing impression on the jeerers as well: the laughter ceased. The lady, blushing and almost in tears, began pouring out assurances of her gratitude. The uhlan muttered: "Thanksh, thanksh!"—and made as if to offer Velchaninov his hand, but instead suddenly decided to lie down across the chairs and stretch his legs out on them.
"Mitenka!" the lady moaned reproachfully, clasping her hands.
Velchaninov was pleased both with the adventure and with its setting. The lady interested him; she was, as could be seen, a rich provincial, dressed magnificently but tastelessly, and with somewhat ridiculous manners—she precisely united in herself everything that guaranteed success to a big-city fop with certain goals regarding women. A conversation started; the lady hotly told and complained about her husband, who "suddenly disappeared somewhere from the car, and that was why it all happened, because it was eternally so, when needed, he'd disappear somewhere...”
"For a necessity...” the uhlan muttered.
"Ah, Mitenka!" she again clasped her hands.
"The husband's going to catch it!" thought Velchaninov.
"What's his name? I'll go and find him," he offered.
"Pal Palych," the uhlan responded.
"Your husband's name is Pavel Pavlovich?" Velchaninov asked with curiosity, and suddenly the familiar bald head thrust itself between him and the lady. Instantly he pictured the Zakhlebinins' garden, innocent games, and the importunate bald head constantly thrusting itself between him and Nadezhda Fedoseevna.
"Here you are at last!" the wife cried out hysterically.
It was Pavel Pavlovich himself; in surprise and fear he gazed at Velchaninov, struck dumb before him as before a phantom. His stupefaction was so great that for some time he apparently understood nothing of what his insulted spouse was telling him in an irritable and quick patter. Finally he gave a start and grasped all his horror at once: his own guilt, and about Mitenka, and about this "m'sieur"—for some reason the lady referred this way to Velchaninov—"being our guardian angel and a savior, and you—you are eternally elsewhere when you should be here...”
Velchaninov suddenly burst out laughing.
"But he and I are friends, friends from childhood!" he exclaimed to the astonished lady, familiarly and patronizingly putting his right arm around the shoulders of Pavel Pavlovich, who was smiling a pale smile. "Didn't he ever tell you about Velchaninov?"
"No, never," the wife was slightly dumbstruck.
"But do introduce me to your wife, you perfidious friend!"
"This, Lipochka, is indeed Mr. Velchaninov, this is...” Pavel Pavlovich tried to begin and shamefully broke off. The wife turned red and flashed her eyes at him in spite, obviously for the "Lipochka."
"And imagine not telling me you were getting married, and not inviting me to the wedding, but you, Olympiada...”
"Semyonovna," Pavel Pavlovich prompted.
"Semyonovna," suddenly echoed the falling-asleep uhlan.
"You must forgive him, Olympiada Semyonovna, for me, for the sake of friends meeting . . . He's a good husband!"
And Velchaninov amicably slapped Pavel Pavlovich on the shoulder.
"But, darling, I only stayed behind ... for a moment...” Pavel Pavlovich began to justify
himself.
"And abandoned your wife to disgrace!" Lipochka picked up at once. "You're never where you ought to be, and where you oughn't to be, there you are...”
"Where you oughtn't to be—there where you oughtn't to be . . . where you oughtn't to be...” the uhlan kept agreeing.
Lipochka was nearly breathless with agitation; she knew it was not nice in front of Velchaninov, and she blushed, but she could not help herself.
"Where you oughtn't to be, you're all too cautious, all too cautious!" escaped from her.
"Under the bed . . . looks for lovers . . . under the bed—where he oughtn't to be . . . oughtn't to be...” Mitenka, too, suddenly became terribly agitated.
But there was nothing to be done with Mitenka. Everything ended pleasantly, however; full acquaintance ensued; Pavel Pavlovich was sent for coffee and bouillon. Olympiada Semyonovna explained to Velchaninov that they were now going from O., where her husband worked, to spend two months on their estate, that it was not far away, only twenty-five miles from this station, that they had a wonderful house and garden there, that they would have guests, that they also had neighbors, and that if Alexei Ivanovich was so good as to wish to visit them "in their seclusion," she would receive him as a guardian angel, because she could not recall without horror what would have happened if . . . and so on and so forth—in short, "as a guardian angel...”