Barbara looked at the icons again and crossed herself.
‘No one will have me, Spiridonovna’, Anna Akimovna said, to change the subject. ‘What can I do?’
‘It’s your own fault, dear. The only thing is to wait for a gentleman, someone educated. You should marry your own kind, a businessman.’
‘We don’t want a businessman, God help us’, Auntie said in alarm. ‘A gentleman’ll squander all your money, but he won’t be too hard on you, you silly woman! But a businessman’ll be so strict with you that you’ll never feel at home in your own house. You’ll be wanting to snuggle up close to him, but he’ll be after your money. If you sit down at table with him, the oaf’ll blame you for eating all his food – and in your own house! Go and marry a gentleman!’
Everyone spoke at once, noisily interrupting each other, while Auntie banged the nutcrackers on the table.
‘You don’t need a businessman’, she said, angry and red-faced. ‘If you bring one into this house I’ll go into a workhouse!’
‘Shush! Be quiet!’ Beetle shouted. When everyone was silent she screwed up one eye and said ‘Do you know what, Anna, my precious? There’s no point in your marrying like ordinary folk do. You’re rich, free, your own mistress. But I don’t think it’s right for you to stay an old maid, my child. I’ll go and find you some useless fool whom you’ll marry for show – and then off on the town! Oh, you’ll shove five or ten thousand under your husband’s nose and let him go back where he belongs and then you’ll be mistress in your own house. And then you’ll be able to love who you like and no one can say a word about it. You’ll be able to love your educated gentlemen all right then. Oh, you’ll be living in clover!’ Beetle clicked her fingers and whistled. ‘Go and have a good time, dear!’
‘But that would be sinning!’ Auntie said.
‘So, it’s a sin then’, Beetle said grinning. ‘She’s educated, she understands. Of course it’s a sin cutting someone’s throat or bewitching an old man, but loving your boyfriend is no sin. What is it, after all? No sin in it at all! All that was thought up by pious old women to hoodwink simple folk. I’m always saying that a sin is a sin, but I don’t know why.’
Beetle drank some fruit liqueur and cleared her throat. ‘Go and have a good time’, she said, evidently talking to herself this time. ‘For thirty years I’ve been thinking about sin and was always scared of it, but now I seem to have missed out. I’ve let my chance slip. Oh, what a fool I am!’ she sighed. ‘A woman’s life is short and she should treasure every day. You’re beautiful, Anna, and very rich into the bargain, but when your thirty-fifth or fortieth birthday comes along, that’ll be the end of you. Now don’t listen to what people say, dear, go and enjoy yourself until you’re forty – there’ll be plenty of time for praying, for making amends and sewing shrouds. Let your hair down! Well, what do you say? Do you want to give pleasure to some man?’
‘I do’, Anna Akimovna laughed. ‘But I couldn’t care less now, I’d marry an ordinary working man.’
‘Yes, and that would be a good thing too. Oh, then you could take your pick!’ Beetle frowned and shook her head. ‘By heaven you could!’
‘That’s what I keep telling her’, Auntie said. ‘If you can’t wait for a gentleman, then don’t go and marry a businessman, but someone more ordinary. At least we’d have a man in the house. And there’s no shortage of good men, is there? Just take some of our own factory workers, all sober and respectable.’
‘And how!’ Beetle agreed. ‘All wonderful lads. What if I arranged a match for Anna with Vasily Lebedinsky, Auntie?’
‘Well, Vasily’s got long legs’, Auntie said seriously. ‘He’s very dull, nothing much to look at.’
The crowd at the door laughed.
‘Well, Pimenov then. Would you like to marry Pimenov?’
‘Yes, marry me to Pimenov.’
‘Do you mean it?’
‘Yes, go ahead and arrange it’, Anna Akimovna said determinedly and thumped the table. ‘I’ll marry him, word of honour!’
‘You really will?’
Anna Akimovna suddenly felt ashamed that her cheeks were burning and that everyone was looking at her. She mixed up the cards on the table and tore out of the room. After she had dashed upstairs, reached the upper floor and sat by the grand piano in the drawing-room, she heard a rumbling from down below, like the roar of the sea. They must be talking about her and Pimenov, and perhaps Beetle was taking advantage of her absence to insult Barbara – and of course she wouldn’t be too particular about her language.
Only one lamp was lit on the whole upper floor – in the ballroom – and its dim light found its way through the doorway into the dark drawing-room. It was about ten, no later. Anna Akimovna played a waltz, then a second, then a third, without stopping. She peered into the dark corner behind the piano, smiled, imagined she was calling out to someone, and then she had an idea: why not go at once to town and visit just anyone – Lysevich, for example – and tell him what was going on in her heart? She wanted to talk non-stop, to laugh, play the fool, but that dark corner behind the piano was gloomily silent; and all around her, in every room on that floor, it was quiet and deserted.
She loved sentimental songs, but as her voice was rough and untrained, she could only play accompaniments and she sang barely audibly, in gentle breaths. She sang one song after the other in a whisper, and all of them were mainly about love, parting, lost hope. She imagined herself stretching out her hands: ‘Pimenov, take this burden from me!’ she would tearfully plead. And then, as if her sins had been forgiven, she would feel joyful and relieved. A free and perhaps happy life would follow. In an agony of expectation she bent over the keys and longed for the change in her life to come right away, that very minute. She was terrified to think that her present way of life would continue for some time to come. Then she began to play again and she sang barely audibly, while all around it was quiet. No longer could she hear the roar from downstairs; they must all have gone to bed. It had struck ten ages ago. A long, lonely, tedious night was approaching.
Anna Akimovna paced through all the rooms, lay down on the study sofa and read some letters delivered that evening. There were twelve wishing her happy Christmas and three anonymous ones, unsigned. In one of these an ordinary workman complained, in dreadful, barely decipherable handwriting, that, in the factory shop, workers were sold only rancid vegetable oil that smelt of kerosene. In another, someone politely denounced Nazarych for accepting a thousand-rouble bribe when buying iron at an auction. In another she was abused for her inhumanity.
The mood of festive excitement was fading now and in an attempt to maintain it Anna Akimovna sat at the piano and quietly played a new waltz. Then she remembered how cleverly and frankly she had reasoned and expressed her thoughts over dinner. She looked round at the dark windows, at the paintings on the walls, at the weak light coming from the ballroom and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she burst into tears. She was upset because she was so alone, because she had no one to talk to and to whom she could turn for advice. She tried to cheer herself up by picturing Pimenov in her mind, but she was unsuccessful.
The clock struck twelve. In came Misha, wearing a jacket now and no longer in tailcoat; silently he lit two candles. Then he left and a minute later returned with a cup of tea on a tray.
‘What’s funny?’ she asked, seeing the smile on his face.
‘I was downstairs and heard you joking about Pimenov’, he said, covering his laughing face with one hand. ‘You should have invited him to dinner along with Viktor Nikolayevich and the general, he would have died of fright.’ Misha’s shoulders shook with laughter. ‘He probably doesn’t even know how to hold a fork.’
The servant’s laughter, what he said, his jacket and his little whiskers, all left Anna Akimovna with an impression of dirtiness. She closed her eyes so as not to have to look at him, and she could not help imagining Pimenov dining with Lysevich and Krylin. And then Pimenov’s subservient, stupid appearance struck
her as pathetic, helpless, and filled her with revulsion. Only now did she understand clearly – and for the first time that day – that all she had thought and said about Pimenov, about marrying an ordinary workman, was senseless, absurd and opinionated. In an effort to convince herself that the opposite was the case, and to overcome her disgust, she wanted to remember exactly what she had said during dinner, but was unable to. The feeling of shame at her own thoughts and behaviour, the fear that she might have said something stupid, revulsion at her own lack of nerve – all these things troubled her deeply. She took a candle and dashed downstairs as if someone were chasing her; she woke Spiridonovna and assured her that she had been joking. Then she went to her bedroom. Red-headed Masha, who had been drowsing in an armchair near the bed, jumped up to arrange the pillows. Her face was weary and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had fallen to one side.
‘That clerk Chalikov was here again this evening’, she said, yawning. ‘But I didn’t dare tell you. He was dead drunk. Says he’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘What does he want from me?’ Anna Akimovna said angrily, flinging her comb on the floor. ‘I don’t want to see him, I don’t!’
She concluded that there was nothing in her life besides this Chalikov now. He would never stop hounding her – a daily reminder of how boring and absurd her life was.
Without undressing, she lay down and burst out sobbing from shame and boredom. Most annoying and ridiculous of all, she thought, was the fact that earlier in the day her thoughts about Pimenov had been decent, noble, honourable. But at the same time she felt that Lysevich and even Krylin were closer to her than Pimenov and all the factory workers put together. Now she thought that if it were only possible to reproduce that long day she had just gone through in a painting, then everything that was nasty and cheap – the dinner, for example, what the lawyer had said, the game of Kings – would have been the truth, whereas her dreams and the conversation about Pimenov would have stood out as something false and artificial.
And she thought that now it was too late to dream of happiness, that it was impossible to return to that kind of life where she had slept in her mother’s bed, to devise some new, special lifestyle.
Red-headed Masha was kneeling in front of the bed looking at her sadly and in astonishment. Then she too burst into tears and pressed her face to her hand. There was no need for words to express why she felt so distressed.
‘We’re a pair of fools, you and I’, Anna Akimovna said, both crying and laughing. ‘We’re fools! Oh, what fools!’
The Two Volodyas
‘Let me go, I want to drive. I’m going to sit next to the driver’, Sophia Lvovna shouted. ‘Driver, wait. I’m coming up on to the box to sit next to you.’
She stood on the sledge while her husband Vladimir Nikitych and her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhaylych held her by the arm in case she fell. Away sped the troika.
‘I said you shouldn’t have given her brandy’, Vladimir Nikitych whispered irritably to his companion. ‘You’re a fine one!’
From past experience the Colonel knew that when women like his wife Sophia Lvovna had been in riotous, rather inebriated high spirits he could normally expect fits of hysterical laughter and tears to follow. He was afraid that once they got home he would have to run around with the cold compresses and medicine instead of being able to go to bed.
‘Whoa!’ Sophia Lvovna shouted. ‘I want to drive.’
She was really very gay and in an exultant mood. For two months after her wedding she had been tormented by the thought that she had married Colonel Yagich for his money or, as they say, par dépit. That same evening, in the out-of-town restaurant, she finally became convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years, he was so trim, sprightly and athletic, and he told puns and joined in the gypsy girls’ songs with such charm. It is true that nowadays old men are a thousand times more interesting than young ones, as though age and youth had changed places. The Colonel was two years older than her father, but was that important if, to be quite honest, he was infinitely stronger, more energetic and livelier than she was, even though she was only twenty-three?
‘Oh, my darling!’ she thought. ‘My wonderful man!’
In the restaurant she had come to the conclusion too that not a spark remained of her old feelings. To her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhaylych, whom only yesterday she had loved to distraction, she now felt completely indifferent. The whole evening he had struck her as a lifeless, sleepy, boring nobody and the habitual coolness with which he avoided paying restaurant bills exasperated her so much this time that she very nearly told him, ‘You should have stayed at home if you’re so poor.’ The Colonel footed the bill.
Perhaps it was the trees, telegraph poles and snowdrifts all flashing past that aroused the most varied thoughts. She reflected that the meal had cost one hundred and twenty roubles – with a hundred for the gypsies – and that the next day, if she so wished, she could throw a thousand roubles away, whereas two months ago, before the wedding, she did not have three roubles to call her own and she had to turn to her father for every little thing. How her life had changed!
Her thoughts were in a muddle and she remembered how, when she was about ten, Colonel Yagich, her husband now, had made advances to her aunt and how everyone in the house had said that he had ruined her. In fact, her aunt often came down to dinner with tear-stained eyes and was always going away somewhere; people said the poor woman was suffering terribly. In those days he was very handsome and had extraordinary success with women; the whole town knew him and he was said to visit his admirers every day, like a doctor doing his rounds. Even now, despite his grey hair, wrinkles and spectacles, his thin face looked handsome, especially in profile.
Sophia Lvovna’s father was an army doctor and had once served in Yagich’s regiment. Volodya senior’s father had also been an army doctor and had once served in the same regiment as her own father and Yagich. Despite some highly involved and frantic amorous adventures Volodya junior had been an excellent student. He graduated with honours from university, had decided to specialize in foreign literature and was said to be writing his thesis. He lived in the barracks with his doctor father and he had no money of his own, although he was now thirty. When they were children, Sophia Lvovna and he had lived in different flats, but in the same building, and he often came to play with her; together they had dancing and French lessons. But when he grew up into a well-built, exceedingly good-looking young man, she began to be shy of him. Then she fell madly in love with him and was still in love until shortly before she married Yagich. He too had extraordinary success with women, from the age of fourteen almost, and the ladies who deceived their husbands with him exonerated themselves by saying Volodya was ‘so little’. Not long before, he was said to be living in digs close to the university and every time you knocked, his footsteps could be heard on the other side of the door and then the whispered apology: ‘Pardon, je ne suis pas seul.’ Yagich was delighted with him, gave him his blessing for the future as Derzhavin had blessed Pushkin,1 and was evidently very fond of him. For hours on end they would silently play billiards or piquet, and if Yagich went off somewhere in a troika, he would take Volodya with him; only Yagich shared the secret of his thesis. In earlier days, when the Colonel was younger, they were often rivals, but were never jealous of one another. When they were in company, which they frequented together, Yagich was called ‘Big Volodya’ and his friend ‘Little Volodya’.
Besides Big Volodya and Little Volodya, and Sophia Lvovna, there was someone else in the sledge, Margarita Aleksandrovna – or Rita as everyone called her – Mrs Yagich’s cousin. She was a spinster, in her thirties, very pale, with black eyebrows, pince-nez, who chain-smoked even when it was freezing; there was always ash on her lap and chest. She spoke through her nose and drawled; she was cold and unemotional, could drink any quantity of liqueur or brandy without getting drunk and told stories abounding in doubles entendres in a dull, tasteless way. At home
she read the learned reviews all day long, scattering ash all over them; or she would eat crystallized apples.
‘Sophia, don’t play the fool’, she drawled; ‘it’s really so stupid.’
When the town gates came into view the troika slowed down; they caught glimpses of people and houses, and Sophia quietened down, snuggled against her husband and gave herself up to her thoughts. And now gloomy thoughts began to mingle with her happy, carefree fantasies. The man opposite knew that she had loved him (so she thought), and of course he believed the reports that she had married the Colonel par dépit. Not once had she confessed her love and she did not want him to know. She had concealed her feelings, but his expression clearly showed that he understood her perfectly, and so her pride suffered. But most humiliating of all about her situation was the fact that Little Volodya had suddenly started paying attention to her after her marriage, which had never happened before. He would sit with her for hours on end, in silence, or telling her some nonsense; and now in the sledge he was gently touching her leg or squeezing her hand, without saying a word. Evidently, all he wanted was for her to get married. No less obviously, he did not think much of her and she interested him only in a certain way, as an immoral, disreputable woman. And this mingling of triumphant love for her husband and injured pride was the reason for her behaving so irresponsibly, prompting her to sit on the box and shout and whistle…
Just as they were passing the convent the great twenty-ton bell started clanging away. Rita crossed herself.
‘Our Olga is in that convent’, Sophia Lvovna said, crossing herself and shuddering.
‘Why did she become a nun?’ the Colonel asked.
‘Par dépit’, Rita answered angrily, obviously hinting at Sophia Lvovna’s marriage to Yagich. ‘This par dépit is all the rage now. It’s a challenge to the whole of society. She was a proper good-time girl, a terrible flirt, all she liked was dances and dancing partners. And then suddenly we have all this! She took us all by surprise!’