Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (248 page)

“What?” Zinaida Fyodorovna asked quickly, holding her breath and turning suddenly as white as a sheet of paper.

“To call logic to our aid. . . .”

“Georgy, why are you torturing me?” Zinaida Fyodorovna said suddenly in Russian in a breaking voice. “What is it for? Think of my misery. . . .”

Orlov, afraid of tears, went quickly into his study, and I don’t know why -- whether it was that he wished to cause her extra pain, or whether he remembered it was usually done in such cases -- he locked the door after him. She cried out and ran after him with a rustle of her skirt.

“What does this mean?” she cried, knocking at his door. “What . . . what does this mean?” she repeated in a shrill voice breaking with indignation. “Ah, so this is what you do! Then let me tell you I hate you, I despise you! Everything is over between us now.”

I heard hysterical weeping mingled with laughter. Something small in the drawing-room fell off the table and was broken. Orlov went out into the hall by another door, and, looking round him nervously, he hurriedly put on his great-coat and went out.

Half an hour passed, an hour, and she was still weeping. I remembered that she had no father or mother, no relations, and here she was living between a man who hated her and Polya, who robbed her -- and how desolate her life seemed to me! I do not know why, but I went into the drawing-room to her. Weak and helpless, looking with her lovely hair like an embodiment of tenderness and grace, she was in anguish, as though she were ill; she was lying on a couch, hiding her face, and quivering all over.

“Madam, shouldn’t I fetch a doctor?” I asked gently.

“No, there’s no need . . . it’s nothing,” she said, and she looked at me with her tear-stained eyes. “I have a little headache. . . . Thank you.”

I went out, and in the evening she was writing letter after letter, and sent me out first to Pekarsky, then to Gruzin, then to Kukushkin, and finally anywhere I chose, if only I could find Orlov and give him the letter. Every time I came back with the letter she scolded me, entreated me, thrust money into my hand -- as though she were in a fever. And all the night she did not sleep, but sat in the drawing-room, talking to herself.

Orlov returned to dinner next day, and they were reconciled.

The first Thursday afterwards Orlov complained to his friends of the intolerable life he led; he smoked a great deal, and said with irritation:

“It is no life at all; it’s the rack. Tears, wailing, intellectual conversations, begging for forgiveness, again tears and wailing; and the long and the short of it is that I have no flat of my own now. I am wretched, and I make her wretched. Surely I haven’t to live another month or two like this? How can I? But yet I may have to.”

“Why don’t you speak, then?” said Pekarsky.

“I’ve tried, but I can’t. One can boldly tell the truth, whatever it may be, to an independent, rational man; but in this case one has to do with a creature who has no will, no strength of character, and no logic. I cannot endure tears; they disarm me. When she cries, I am ready to swear eternal love and cry myself.”

Pekarsky did not understand; he scratched his broad forehead in perplexity and said:

“You really had better take another flat for her. It’s so simple!”

“She wants me, not the flat. But what’s the good of talking?” sighed Orlov. “I only hear endless conversations, but no way out of my position. It certainly is a case of ‘being guilty without guilt.’ I don’t claim to be a mushroom, but it seems I’ve got to go into the basket. The last thing I’ve ever set out to be is a hero. I never could endure Turgenev’s novels; and now, all of a sudden, as though to spite me, I’ve heroism forced upon me. I assure her on my honour that I’m not a hero at all, I adduce irrefutable proofs of the same, but she doesn’t believe me. Why doesn’t she believe me? I suppose I really must have something of the appearance of a hero.”

“You go off on a tour of inspection in the provinces,” said Kukushkin, laughing.

“Yes, that’s the only thing left for me.”

A week after this conversation Orlov announced that he was again ordered to attend the senator, and the same evening he went off with his portmanteaus to Pekarsky.

XI

An old man of sixty, in a long fur coat reaching to the ground, and a beaver cap, was standing at the door.

“Is Georgy Ivanitch at home?” he asked.

At first I thought it was one of the moneylenders, Gruzin’s creditors, who sometimes used to come to Orlov for small payments on account; but when he came into the hall and flung open his coat, I saw the thick brows and the characteristically compressed lips which I knew so well from the photographs, and two rows of stars on the uniform. I recognised him: it was Orlov’s father, the distinguished statesman.

I answered that Georgy Ivanitch was not at home. The old man pursed up his lips tightly and looked into space, reflecting, showing me his dried-up, toothless profile.

“I’ll leave a note,” he said; “show me in.”

He left his goloshes in the hall, and, without taking off his long, heavy fur coat, went into the study. There he sat down before the table, and, before taking up the pen, for three minutes he pondered, shading his eyes with his hand as though from the sun -- exactly as his son did when he was out of humour. His face was sad, thoughtful, with that look of resignation which I have only seen on the faces of the old and religious. I stood behind him, gazed at his bald head and at the hollow at the nape of his neck, and it was clear as daylight to me that this weak old man was now in my power. There was not a soul in the flat except my enemy and me. I had only to use a little physical violence, then snatch his watch to disguise the object of the crime, and to get off by the back way, and I should have gained infinitely more than I could have imagined possible when I took up the part of a footman. I thought that I could hardly get a better opportunity. But instead of acting, I looked quite unconcernedly, first at his bald patch and then at his fur, and calmly meditated on this man’s relation to his only son, and on the fact that people spoiled by power and wealth probably don’t want to die. . . .

“Have you been long in my son’s service?” he asked, writing a large hand on the paper.

“Three months, your High Excellency.”

He finished the letter and stood up. I still had time. I urged myself on and clenched my fists, trying to wring out of my soul some trace of my former hatred; I recalled what a passionate, implacable, obstinate hate I had felt for him only a little while before. . . . But it is difficult to strike a match against a crumbling stone. The sad old face and the cold glitter of his stars roused in me nothing but petty, cheap, unnecessary thoughts of the transitoriness of everything earthly, of the nearness of death. . . .

“Good-day, brother,” said the old man. He put on his cap and went out.

There could be no doubt about it: I had undergone a change; I had become different. To convince myself, I began to recall the past, but at once I felt uneasy, as though I had accidentally peeped into a dark, damp corner. I remembered my comrades and friends, and my first thought was how I should blush in confusion if ever I met any of them. What was I now? What had I to think of and to do? Where was I to go? What was I living for?

I could make nothing of it. I only knew one thing -- that I must make haste to pack my things and be off. Before the old man’s visit my position as a flunkey had a meaning; now it was absurd. Tears dropped into my open portmanteau; I felt insufferably sad; but how I longed to live! I was ready to embrace and include in my short life every possibility open to man. I wanted to speak, to read, and to hammer in some big factory, and to stand on watch, and to plough. I yearned for the Nevsky Prospect, for the sea and the fields -- for every place to which my imagination travelled. When Zinaida Fyodorovna came in, I rushed to open the door for her, and with peculiar tenderness took off her fur coat. The last time!

We had two other visitors that day besides the old man. In the evening when it was quite dark, Gruzin came to fetch some papers for Orlov. He opened the table-drawer, took the necessary papers, and, rolling them up, told me to put them in the hall beside his cap while he went in to see Zinaida Fyodorovna. She was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, with her arms behind her head. Five or six days had already passed since Orlov went on his tour of inspection, and no one knew when he would be back, but this time she did not send telegrams and did not expect them. She did not seem to notice the presence of Polya, who was still living with us. “So be it, then,” was what I read on her passionless and very pale face. Like Orlov, she wanted to be unhappy out of obstinacy. To spite herself and everything in the world, she lay for days together on the sofa, desiring and expecting nothing but evil for herself. Probably she was picturing to herself Orlov’s return and the inevitable quarrels with him; then his growing indifference to her, his infidelities; then how they would separate; and perhaps these agonising thoughts gave her satisfaction. But what would she have said if she found out the actual truth?

“I love you, Godmother,” said Gruzin, greeting her and kissing her hand. “You are so kind! And so dear
George
has gone away,” he lied. “He has gone away, the rascal!”

He sat down with a sigh and tenderly stroked her hand.

“Let me spend an hour with you, my dear,” he said. “I don’t want to go home, and it’s too early to go to the Birshovs’. The Birshovs are keeping their Katya’s birthday to-day. She is a nice child!”

I brought him a glass of tea and a decanter of brandy. He slowly and with obvious reluctance drank the tea, and returning the glass to me, asked timidly:

“Can you give me . . . something to eat, my friend? I have had no dinner.”

We had nothing in the flat. I went to the restaurant and brought him the ordinary rouble dinner.

“To your health, my dear,” he said to Zinaida Fyodorovna, and he tossed off a glass of vodka. “My little girl, your godchild, sends you her love. Poor child! she’s rickety. Ah, children, children!” he sighed. “Whatever you may say, Godmother, it is nice to be a father. Dear
George
can’t understand that feeling.”

He drank some more. Pale and lean, with his dinner-napkin over his chest like a little pinafore, he ate greedily, and raising his eyebrows, kept looking guiltily, like a little boy, first at Zinaida Fyodorovna and then at me. It seemed as though he would have begun crying if I had not given him the grouse or the jelly. When he had satisfied his hunger he grew more lively, and began laughingly telling some story about the Birshov household, but perceiving that it was tiresome and that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not laughing, he ceased. And there was a sudden feeling of dreariness. After he had finished his dinner they sat in the drawing-room by the light of a single lamp, and did not speak; it was painful to him to lie to her, and she wanted to ask him something, but could not make up her mind to. So passed half an hour. Gruzin glanced at his watch.

“I suppose it’s time for me to go.”

“No, stay a little. . . . We must have a talk.”

Again they were silent. He sat down to the piano, struck one chord, then began playing, and sang softly, “What does the coming day bring me?” but as usual he got up suddenly and tossed his head.

“Play something,” Zinaida Fyodorovna asked him.

“What shall I play?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “I have forgotten everything. I’ve given it up long ago.”

Looking at the ceiling as though trying to remember, he played two pieces of Tchaikovsky with exquisite expression, with such warmth, such insight! His face was just as usual -- neither stupid nor intelligent -- and it seemed to me a perfect marvel that a man whom I was accustomed to see in the midst of the most degrading, impure surroundings, was capable of such purity, of rising to a feeling so lofty, so far beyond my reach. Zinaida Fyodorovna’s face glowed, and she walked about the drawing-room in emotion.

“Wait a bit, Godmother; if I can remember it, I will play you something,” he said; “I heard it played on the violoncello.”

Beginning timidly and picking out the notes, and then gathering confidence, he played Saint-Saëns’s “Swan Song.” He played it through, and then played it a second time.