Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (471 page)

CHAPTER X

We went to the post office, which looked out gaily with its three little windows on to the market place. Through the grey paling gleamed the many-coloured flower garden of our postmaster, Maxim Fedorovich, who was known in the whole district as a great connoisseur of all that concerned gardening and the art of laying out beds, borders, lawns, etc.

We found Maxim Fedorovich very pleasantly occupied. Smiling, and red with pleasure, he was seated at his green table, turning over hundred-rouble notes as if they were a book. Evidently even the sight of another man’s money had a pleasing effect on his frame of mind.

‘How do you do, Maxim Fedorovich?’ I said to him. ‘Where have you got such a pile of money?’

‘It’s to be sent to St Petersburg,’ the postmaster replied, smiling sweetly, and he pointed his chin at the corner of the room where a dark figure was sitting on the only chair in the post office.

This dark figure rose when he saw me and came towards us. I recognized my new acquaintance, my new enemy, whom I had so grievously insulted when I had got drunk at the Count’s.

‘My best greetings!’ he said.

‘How are you, Kaetan Kazimirovich?’ I answered, pretending not to notice his outstretched hand. ‘How’s the Count?’

‘Thank God, he’s quite well... It’s just that he’s a little bored... He’s expecting you to come at any minute.’

I read on Pshekhotsky’s face the desire to converse with me. How could that desire have arisen after the ‘swine’ to which I had treated him on that evening, and what caused this change of tone?

‘What a lot of money you have!’ I said, gazing at the packet of hundred-rouble notes he was sending away.

It seemed as if somebody had given a fillip to my brain! I noticed that one of the hundred-rouble notes had charred edges, and one corner had been quite burnt off... It was the hundred-rouble note which I had wanted to burn in the flame of a Chandor candle, when the Count refused to accept it from me as my share of the payment for the gipsies, and which Pshekhotsky had picked up when I flung it on the ground.

‘It’s better that I should give it to the poor, than let it be consumed by the flames,’ he had said then.

To what ‘poor’ was he sending it now?

‘Seven thousand five hundred roubles,’ Maxim Fedorovich counted in a drawling voice. ‘Quite right!’

It is ill to pry into the secrets of other people, but I wanted terribly to find out whose this money was and to whom this black-browed Pole was sending it in Petersburg. This money was certainly not his, and the Count had nobody to whom he would send it.

‘He has plundered the drunken Count,’ I thought, if deaf and silly Scops-Owl knows how to plunder the Count, how much trouble will this clever fellow have in thrusting his paw into his pockets?’

‘Oh, by-the-by, I’ll also take this opportunity of sending some money,’ Pavel Ivanovich said hastily. ‘Do you know, gentlemen, it’s quite incredible! For fifteen roubles you can get five things carriage-free! A telescope, a chronometer, a calendar, and something more... Maxim Fedorovich, kindly let me have a sheet of paper and an envelope!’

Screw sent off his fifteen roubles, I received my newspaper and a letter, and we left the post office.

We went towards the church. Screwy paced after me, as pale and dismal as an autumn day. The conversation in which he had tried to show himself to be ‘objective’ had excited him quite beyond all expectation.

All the church bells were being rung. An apparently endless crowd was slowly descending the steps that led from the church porch.

Ancient banners and a dark cross were held high above the crowd, at the head of the procession. The sun played gaily on the vestments of the priests, and the icon of the Holy Virgin emitted blinding rays...

‘Ah, there are our people!’ the doctor said, pointing to the
beau-monde
of our district which had separated itself from the crowd and was standing aside.

‘Your people, but not mine,’ I said.

‘That’s all the same... Let us join them...’

I approached my acquaintances and bowed. The Justice of the Peace, Kalinin, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a grey beard and crawfish-like eyes, was standing in front of all the others, whispering something in his daughter’s ear. Trying to appear as if he had not noticed me, he made not the slightest movement in answer to my general salute that had been made in his direction.

‘Good-bye, my angel,’ he said in a lachrymose voice as he kissed his daughter on the forehead. ‘Take the carriage on ahead. I shall be back by evening. My visits won’t take very long.’

Having kissed his daughter again and smiled sweetly on the
beau-monde,
he frowned fiercely, and turning sharply round on one heel, towards a muzhik wearing the disc of a foreman, he said hoarsely to him:

‘When will they bring up my carriage?’

The muzhik became excited and waved his arms.

‘Look out!’

The crowd that was following the procession made way and the carriage of the Justice of the Peace drove up smartly and with the sound of bells to where Kalinin was standing. He sat down, bowed majestically, and alarming the crowd by his ‘Look out!’ he disappeared from sight without casting a single.glance at me.

‘What a supercilious swine!’ I whispered in the doctor’s ear. ‘Come along!’

‘Don’t you want to say a word to Nadezhda Nikolaevna?’ Pavel Ivanovich asked:

‘It’s time for me to go home. I’m in a hurry.’

The doctor looked at me angrily, sighed, and turned away. I made a general bow and went towards the booths. As I was making my way through the dense crowd, I turned to look back at the Justice’s daughter. She was looking after me and appeared to be seeing whether I could bear her pure, searching gaze, so full of bitter injury and reproach.

Her eyes said: ‘Why?’

Something stirred in my breast, and I felt remorse and shame for my silly conduct. I suddenly felt a wish to return and caress and fondle with all the strength of my soft, and not yet quite corrupt, soul this girl who loved me passionately, and who had been so grievously wronged by me; and tell her that it was not I who was at fault, but my accursed pride that prevented me from living, breathing or advancing a step. Silly, conceited, foppish pride, full of vanity. Could I, a frivolous man, stretch out the hand of reconciliation, when I knew and saw that every one of my movements was watched by the eyes of the district gossips and the ‘ill-omened old women’? Sooner let them laugh her to scorn and cover her with derisive glances and smiles, than undeceive them of the ‘inflexibility’ of my character and the pride, which silly women admired so much in me.

Just before, when I had spoken with Pavel Ivanovich about the reasons that had caused me suddenly to cease my visits to the Kalinins, I had not been candid or accurate... I had held back the real reason; I had concealed it because I was ashamed of its triviality... The cause was as tiny as a grain of dust... It was this. On the occasion of my last visit, after I had given up Zorka to the coachman and was entering the Kalinins’ house, the following phrase reached my ears:

‘Nadenka, where are you?... Your betrothed has come!’

These words were spoken by her father, the Justice of the Peace, who probably did not think that I might hear him. But I heard him, and my self-love was aroused.

I her betrothed?’ I thought. ‘Who allowed you to call me her betrothed? On what basis?’

And something snapped in my breast. Pride rebelled within me, and I forgot all I had remembered when riding to Kalinin’s... I forgot that I had lured the young girl, and was myself attracted by her to such a degree that I was unable to pass a single evening without her company... I forgot her lovely eyes that never left my memory either by night or day, her kind smile, her melodious voice... I forgot the quiet summer evenings that will never return either for her or me... Everything had crumbled away under the pressure of the devilish pride that had been aroused by the silly phrase of her simple-minded father... I left the house in a rage, mounted Zorka, and galloped off, vowing to snub Kalinin, who without my permission had dared to consider me as his daughter’s betrothed.

‘Besides, Voznesensky is in love with her,’ I thought, trying to justify my sudden departure, as I rode home. ‘He began to pay court to her before I did, and they were considered to be engaged when I made her acquaintance. I won’t interfere with him!’

From that day I never put a foot in Kalinin’s house, though there were moments when I suffered from longing to see Nadia, and my soul yearned for the renewal of the past... But the whole district knew of the rupture, knew that I had ‘bolted’ from marriage... How could my pride make concessions?

Who can tell? If Kalinin had not said those words, and if I had not been so stupidly proud and touchy, perhaps I would not have had to look back, nor she to gaze at me with such eyes... But even those eyes were better, even the feeling of being wronged and of reproach was better, than what I saw in those eyes a few months after our meeting in the Tenevo church! The grief that shone in the depths of those black eyes now was only the beginning of the terrible misfortune that, like the sudden onrush of a train, swept that girl from the earth. They were like little flowers compared to those berries that were then already ripening in order to pour terrible poison into her frail body and anguished heart.

CHAPTER XI

When I left Tenevo I took the same road by which I had come.

The sun showed it was already midday. As in the morning, peasants’ carts and landowners’ britzkas beguiled my ears with their squeaking and the metallic rumble of their bells. Again, the gardener, Franz, drove past me with his vodka barrel, but this time it was probably full. Again his eyes gave me a sour look, and he touched his cap. His nasty face jarred on me, but this time again the disagreeable impression that the meeting with him had made on me was entirely wiped away by the forester’s daughter, Olenka, whose heavy wagonette caught me up.

‘Give me a lift!’ I called to her.

She nodded gaily to me and stopped her vehicle. I sat down beside her, and the wagonette rattled on along the road, which cut like a light stripe through the three versts of the Tenevo forest. For about two minutes we looked at each other in silence.

‘What a pretty girl she really is!’ I thought as I looked at her throat and chubby chin. ‘If I were told to choose between Nadenka and her, I would choose her... She’s more natural, fresher, her nature is more generous, bolder... If she fell into good hands, much could be made of her! The other is morose, visionary... clever.’

Lying at Olenka’s feet there were two pieces of linen and several parcels.

‘What a number of purchases you have made!’ I said. ‘What will you do with so much linen?’

‘That’s not all I need!’ Olenka replied. ‘I’ve bought other things too. Today I was a whole hour buying things in the market; tomorrow I must go to make purchases in the town... And then all this has to be made up... I say, don’t you know any woman who would go out to sew?’

‘No, I think not... But why have you to buy so many things? Why have they to be sewn? God knows your family is not large... One, two... there I’ve counted you all...’

‘How queer all you men are! You don’t understand anything! Wait till you get married, you yourself will be angry then if after the wedding your wife comes to you all slovenly. I know Pëtr Egorych is not in want of anything. Still, it seems a bit awkward not to appear as a good housewife from the first...’

‘What has Pëtr Egorych to do with it?’

‘Hm! You are laughing at me, as if you don’t know!’ Olenka said and blushed slightly.

‘Young lady, you are talking in riddles.’

‘Have you really not heard? Why, I am going to marry Pëtr Egorych!’

‘Marry?’ I said in astonishment, my eyes growing large. ‘What Pëtr Egorych?’

‘Oh, good Lord! Urbenin, of course!’

I stared at her blushing and smiling face.

‘You? Going to marry... Urbenin? What a joke!’

‘It’s not a joke at all...I really can’t understand where you see the joke...’

‘You to marry... Urbenin...’ I repeated, turning pale, I really don’t know why. if this is not a joke, what is it?’

‘What joke! I can’t understand what is so extraordinary — what is so strange in it?’ Olenka said, pouting.

A minute passed in silence... I gazed at the pretty girl, at her young, almost childish face, and was astonished that she could make such terrible jokes! I instantly pictured to myself Urbenin, elderly, fat, red-faced with his protruding ears and hard hands, whose very touch could only scratch that young female body which had scarcely begun to live... Surely the thought of such a picture must frighten this pretty wood fay, who could see the poetry in the sky when it is reft by lightning and thunder growls angrily! I, even I, was frightened!

‘It’s true he’s a little old,’ Olenka sighed, ‘but he loves me... His love is trustworthy.’

‘It’s not a matter of trustworthy love, but of happiness...’

‘I shall be happy with him... He has means, thank God, and he’s no pauper, no beggar, but a nobleman. Of course, I’m not in love with him, but are only those who marry for love happy? Oh, I know those marriages for love!’

‘My child, when have you had time to stuff your brain with this terrible worldly wisdom?’ I asked. ‘Admitted that you are joking with me, but where have you learned to joke in such a vulgar, adult way?... Where? When?’

Olenka looked at me with astonishment and shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t understand what you are saying,’ she said. ‘You don’t like to see a young girl marry an old man? Is that so?’

Olenka suddenly blushed all over, her chin moved nervously, and without waiting for my answer she rattled on rapidly.

‘This does not please you? Then perhaps you’d like to try living in the wood — with nothing to amuse you but a few sparrow-hawks and a mad father — and waiting until a young suitor comes along! You liked it the other evening, but if you saw it in winter, when one only wishes... that death might come — ‘

‘Oh, all this is absurd, Olenka, it is childish, silly! If you are not joking... Truly I don’t know what to say! You had better be silent and not offend the air with your tongue. I, in your place, would have hanged myself on the nearest tree, and you buy linen... and smile. Ach!’

‘In any case, with his means he will be able to have father cured,’ she whispered.

‘How much do you need for your father’s cure?’ I cried. ‘Take it from me — a hundred? Two hundred?... A thousand? Olenka, it’s not your father’s cure that you want!’

The news Olenka had communicated to me had excited me so much that I had not even noticed that the wagonette had driven past my village, or how it had turned into the Count’s yard and stopped at the bailiff’s porch. When I saw the children run out, and the smile on Urbenin’s face, who also had rushed out to help Olenka down, I jumped out of the wagonette and ran into the Count’s house without even taking leave. Here further news awaited me.