Part 11

I did not leave her, and she herself was obliged to bring our conversation to an end. Taking the arm of her husband, who was passing us at that moment, she nodded to me with a hypocritical smile, and went away.

The Count's other hare—Nadenka Kalinin—was honoured that evening by the Count's special attention. The whole evening he hovered around her, he told her anecdotes, he was witty, he flirted with her, and she, pale and exhausted, drew her lips to one side in a forced smile. The justice of the peace, Kalinin, watched them all the time, stroking his beard and coughing importantly. That the Count was paying court to his daughter was agreeable to him. “He has a Count as son-in-law!” What thought could be sweeter for a provincial _bon-vivant_? From the moment that the Count began to pay court to his daughter he had grown at least three feet in height in his own estimation. And with what stately glances he measured me, how maliciously he coughed when he talked to me! “So you stood on ceremonies and went away—it was all one to us! Now we have a Count!”

The day after the party I was again at the Count's estate. This time I did not talk with Sasha but with her brother, the schoolboy. The boy led me into the garden and poured out his whole soul to me. These confidences were the result of my questions as to how he got on with his “new mother.”

“She's your good acquaintance,” he began, nervously unbuttoning his uniform. “You will repeat it to her; but I don't care. You may tell her whatever you like! She's spiteful, she's base!”

He told me that Olga had taken his room from him, she had sent away their old nurse who had served at Urbenin's for ten years, she was always screaming about something and always angry.

“Yesterday you admired sister Sasha's hair. . . . Hadn't she pretty hair? Just like flax! This morning she cut it all off!”

“That was jealousy,” I thus explained to myself Olga's invasion into the hairdresser's domain.

“She was evidently envious that you had praised Sasha's hair and not her own,” the boy said in confirmation of my thought. “She worries papasha, too. Papasha is spending a terrible lot of money on her, and is neglecting his work. . . . He has again begun to drink! Again! She's a little fool. . . . She cries all day that she has to live in poverty in such a small house. Is it papasha's fault that he has little money?”

The boy told me many sad things. He saw that which his blinded father did not see or did not want to see. In the poor boy's opinion his father was wronged, his sister was wronged, his old nurse had been wronged. He had been deprived of his little den where he had been used to occupy himself with his books, and feed the goldfinches he had caught. Everybody had been wronged, everybody was laughed at by his stupid and all-powerful stepmother! But the poor boy could not have imagined the terrible wrong that his young stepmother would inflict on his family, and of which I was witness that very evening after my talk with him. Everything else grew dim before that wrong, the cropping of Sasha's hair appeared as a mere trifle in comparison with it.

XVIII

Late at night I was sitting with the Count. As usual, we were drinking. The Count was quite drunk, I only slightly.

“To-day I was allowed accidentally to touch her waist,” he mumbled. “To-morrow, therefore, we can begin to go further.”

“Well, and Nadia? How do things stand with Nadia?”

“We are progressing! I've only begun with her as yet. So far, we are passing through the period of conversations with the eyes. I love to read in her sad black eyes, brother. Something is written there that words are unable to express, that only the soul can understand. Let's have another drink!”

“It seems that you please her since she has the patience to listen to you for hours at a time. You also please her papa!”

“Her papa? Are you talking about that blockhead? Ha, ha! The simpleton suspects me of honourable intentions.”

The Count coughed and drank.

“He thinks I'll marry her! To say nothing of my not being able to marry, when one considers the question honestly it would be more honest in me to seduce a girl than to marry her. . . . An eternal life with a drunken, coughing, semi-old man . . . br‑r‑r! My wife would pine away, or she would run away the next day. . . . What noise is that?”

The Count and I jumped up. . . . Several doors were slammed to, and almost at the same moment Olga rushed into the room. She was as white as snow, and trembled like a chord that had been struck violently. Her hair was falling loose around her. The pupils of her eyes were dilated. She was out of breath and was crumpling in her hand the front pleats of her dressing-gown.

“Olga, what is the matter with you?” I asked, seizing her by the hand and turning pale.

The Count ought to have been surprised at this familiar form of address, but he did not hear it. His whole person was turned into one large note of interrogation, and with open mouth and staring eyes he stood looking at Olga as if she were an apparition.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“He beats me!” Olga said, and fell sobbing on to an armchair. “He beats me!”

“Who is he?”

“My husband! I can't live with him! I have left him!”

“This is revolting!” the Count exclaimed, and he struck the table with his fist. “What right has he? This is tyranny! This . . . the devil only knows what it is! To beat his wife? To beat! What did he do it for?”

“For nothing, for nothing at all,” Olga said, wiping away her tears. “I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket, and the letter you sent me yesterday fell on the floor. . . . He seized it and read it . . . and began to beat me. . . . He clutched my hand and crushed it—look, there are still red spots on it—and demanded an explanation. . . . Instead of explaining, I ran here. . . . Can't you defend me? He has not the right to treat his wife so roughly! I'm no cook! I'm a noblewoman!”

The Count paced about the room and jabbered with his drunken, muddling tongue some sort of nonsense which when rendered into sober language was intended to mean “of the status of women in Russia.”

“This is barbarous! This is New Zealand! Does this muzhik also think that at his funeral his wife will have her throat cut? Savages when they go into the next world take their wives with them!”

I could not recover from my surprise. . . . How was this sudden visit of Olga's in a nightdress to be understood? What was I to think—what to decide? If she had been beaten, if her dignity had been wounded, why had she not run away to her father or to the housekeeper? . . . Lastly why not to me, who was certainly near to her? And had she really been insulted? My heart told me of the innocence of simple-minded Urbenin, and understanding the truth, it sank with the pain that the stupefied husband must have been feeling at that time. Without asking any questions, not knowing where to commence, I began to soothe Olga and offered her wine.

“What a mistake I made! What a mistake!” she sighed between her tears, lifting the wineglass to her lips. “What sanctimoniousness he feigned when he was courting me! I thought he was an angel and not a man!”

“So you wanted him to be pleased with the letter that fell out of your pocket?” I asked. “You wanted him to burst out laughing?”

“Don't let us talk about it!” the Count interrupted. “Whatever might have been, his action was dastardly all the same! Women are not treated in that way. I'll challenge him! I'll teach him! Olga Nikolaevna, believe me he'll have to suffer for this!”

The Count gobbled like a young turkey cock, although he had no authority to come between husband and wife. I kept silent and did not contradict him, because I knew that to take vengeance for another man's wife was limited to drunken ebullitions of words between four walls, and that everything about the duel would be forgotten the next day. But why was Olga silent? . . . I did not wish to think that she was not loth to have the proposed service rendered her by the Count. I did not wish to think that this silly, beautiful cat had so little dignity, that she would willingly consent to the drunken Count being judge between man and wife.

“I'll mix him with the dirt!” piped this newly-fledged knight-errant. “I'll end by boxing his ears! I'll do it to-morrow!”

And she did not stop the mouth of that blackguard, who in his drunken mood was insulting a man whose only blame was that he had made a mistake and was now being duped. Urbenin had seized and pressed her hand very roughly, and this had caused her scandalous flight to the Count's house, and now, when before her eyes this drunken and morally degenerate creature was defaming the honest name and pouring filthy slops on a man, who at that time must have been languishing in melancholy and uncertainty, knowing that he was deceived, she did not even move a hair of her eyebrows!

While the Count was pouring out his wrath and Olga was wiping her eyes, the manservant brought in some roast partridges. The Count put half a partridge on his guest's plate. She shook her head negatively and then mechanically took up her knife and fork and began to eat. The partridge was followed by a large glass of wine, and soon there were no more signs of tears with the exception of red spots near the eyes and occasional deep sighs.

Soon we heard laughter. . . . Olga laughed like a consoled child who had forgotten its injury. And the Count looking at her laughed too.

“Do you know what I have thought of?” he began, sitting down next to her. “I want to arrange private theatricals. We shall act plays in which there are good women's parts. Eh? What do you say to that?”

They began to talk about the private theatricals. How ill this silly chatter accorded with the terror that had but lately been depicted on Olga's face, when only an hour before she had rushed into the room, pale and weeping, with flowing hair! How cheap were those terrors, those tears!

Meanwhile time went on. The clock struck twelve. Respectable women go to bed at that time. Olga ought to have gone away long since. But the clock struck half-past twelve; it struck one, and she was still sitting there chatting with the Count.

“It's time to go to bed,” I said, looking at my watch. “I'm off! . . . Olga Nikolaevna, will you permit me to escort you?”

Olga looked at me and then at the Count.

“Where am I to go?” she murmured. “I can't go to him!”

“Yes, yes; of course, you can't go to him,” the Count said. “Who can answer for his not beating you again? No, no!”

I walked about the room. All was quiet. I paced from corner to corner and my friend and my mistress followed my steps with their eyes. I seemed to understand this quiet and these glances. There was something expectant and impatient in them. I put my hat on the table and sat down on the sofa.

“So, sir,” the Count mumbled and rubbed his hands impatiently. “So, sir. . . . Things are like this. . . .”

The clock struck half-past one. The Count looked quickly at the clock, frowned and began to walk about the room. I could see by the glances he cast on me that he wanted to say something, something important but ticklish and unpleasant.

“I say, Serezha!” he at last picked up courage, sat down next to me, and whispered in my ear. “Golubchek, don't be offended. . . . Of course, you will understand my position, and you won't find my request strange or rude.”

“Tell me quickly. No need to mince matters!”

“You see how things stand . . . how . . . Go away, golubchek! You are interfering with _us_. . . . She will remain with me. . . . Forgive me for sending you away, but . . . you will understand my impatience!”

“All right!”

My friend was loathsome. If I had not been fastidious, perhaps I would have crushed him like a beetle, when he, shivering as if with fever, asked me to leave him alone with Urbenin's wife. He, the debilitated anchorite, steeped through and through with spirits and disease, wanted to take the poetic “girl in red” who dreamed of an effective death and had been nurtured by the forests and the angry lake! No, she must be miles away from him!

I went up to her.

“I am going,” I said.

She nodded her head.

“Am I to go away? Yes?” I asked, trying to read the truth in her lovely, blushing little face. “Yes?”

With the very slightest movement of her long black eyelashes she answered “Yes.”

“You have considered well?”

She turned away from me, as one turns away from an annoying wind. She did not want to speak. Why should she speak? It is impossible to answer a long subject briefly, and there was neither time nor place for long speeches.

I took up my hat and left the room without taking leave. Afterwards, Olga told me that immediately after my departure, as soon as the sound of my steps became mingled with the noise of the wind in the garden, the drunken Count was pressing her in his embrace. And she, closing her eyes and stopping up her mouth and nostrils, was scarcely able to keep her feet from a feeling of disgust. There was even a moment when she had almost torn herself away from his embraces and rushed into the lake. There were moments when she tore her hair and wept. It is not easy to sell oneself.

When I left the house and went towards the stables, I had to pass the bailiff's house. I looked in at the window. Pëtr Egorych was seated at a table by the dim light of a smoking oil lamp that had been turned up too high. I did not see his face. It was covered by his hands. But the whole of his robust, awkward figure displayed so much sorrow, anguish and despair that it was not necessary to see the face to understand the condition of his soul. Two bottles stood before him; one was empty, the other only just begun. They were both vodka bottles. The poor devil was seeking peace not in himself, nor in other people, but in alcohol.

Five minutes later I was riding home. The darkness was terrible. The lake blustered wrathfully and seemed to be angry that I, such a sinner, who had just been the witness of a sinful deed, should dare to infringe its austere peace. I could not see the lake for the darkness. It seemed as if an unseen monster was roaring, that the very darkness which enveloped me was roaring too.

I pulled up Zorka, closed my eyes, and meditated to the roaring of the monster.

“What if I returned at once and destroyed them?”

Terrible wrath raged in my soul. . . . All the little of goodness and honesty that remained in me after long years of a depraved life, all that corruption had left, all that I guarded and cherished, that I was proud of, was insulted, spat upon, splashed with filth!

I had known venal women before, I had bought them, studied them, but they had not had the innocent rosy cheeks and sincere blue eyes that I had seen on the May morning when I walked through the wood to the Tenevo fair. . . . I myself, corrupt to the marrow of my bones, had forgiven, had preached tolerance of everything vicious, and I was indulgent to weakness. . . . I was convinced that it was impossible to demand of dirt that it should not be dirt, and that one cannot blame those ducats which from the force of circumstances have fallen into the mire. But I had not known before that ducats could melt in the mire and be blended with it into a single mass. Consequently gold could also dissolve!

A strong gust of wind blew off my hat and bore it into the surrounding darkness. In its flight my hat touched Zorka's head. She took fright, reared on her hind legs and galloped off along the familiar road.

When I reached home I threw myself on the bed. Polycarp suggested that I should undress, and he got sworn at and called a “devil” for no earthly reason.

“Devil yourself!” Polycarp grumbled as he went away from my bed.

“What did you say? What did you say?” I shouted.

“None so deaf as those who will not hear!”

“Oh, ho! . . . You dare to be impudent!” I thundered and poured out all my bile on my poor lackey. “Get out! That no trace of you be left, scoundrel! Out with you!”

And without waiting for my man to leave the room, I fell on the bed and began to sob like a boy. My overstrained nerves could bear no more. Powerless wrath, wounded feelings, jealousy—all had to have vent in one way or another.

“The husband killed his wife!” squalled my parrot, raising his yellow feathers.

Under the influence of this cry the thought entered my head that Urbenin might really kill his wife.

Falling asleep, I dreamed of murders. My nightmare was suffocating and painful. . . . It appeared to me that my hands were stroking something cold, and I had only to open my eyes to see a corpse. I dreamed that Urbenin was standing at the head of my bed, looking at me with imploring eyes.

XIX

After the night that is described above a calm set in.

I remained at home, only allowing myself to leave the house or ride about on business. Heaps of work had accumulated, therefore it was impossible for me to be dull. From morning till night I sat at my writing-table scribbling, or examining people who had fallen into my magisterial claws. I was no longer drawn to Karnéevka, the Count's estate.

I thought no more of Olga. That which falls from the load is lost; and she was just what had fallen from my load and was, as I thought, irrecoverably lost. I thought no more about her and did not want to think about her.

“Silly, vicious trash!” I said to myself whenever her memory arose in my mind in the midst of my strenuous work.

Occasionally, however, when I lay down to sleep or when I awoke in the morning, I remembered various moments of our acquaintance, and the short connexion I had had with Olga. I remembered the “Stone Grave,” the little house in the wood in which “the girl in red” lived, the road to Tenevo, the meeting in the grotto . . . and my heart began to beat faster. . . . I experienced bitter heartache. . . . But it was not for long. The bright memories were soon obliterated under the weight of the gloomy ones. What poetry of the past could withstand the filth of the present? And now, when I had finished with Olga, I looked upon this “poetry” quite differently to formerly. . . . Now I looked upon it as an optical illusion, a lie, hypocrisy . . . and it lost half its charm in my eyes.

The Count had become quite repugnant to me. I was glad not to see him, and I was always angry when his moustachioed face rose timidly to my mind. Every day he sent me letters in which he implored me not to sulk but to come to see the no longer “solitary hermit.” Had I listened to his letters, I would have been doing a displeasure to myself.

“It's finished!” I thought. “Thank God! . . . It bored me. . . .”

I decided to break off all connexion with the Count, and this decision did not cost me the slightest struggle. Now I was not at all the same man that I had been three weeks before, when after the quarrel about Pshekhotsky I could scarcely bring myself to sit at home. There was no attraction now.

Sitting always at home bored me at last, and I wrote to Doctor Pavil Ivanovich, asking him to come and have a chat. For some reason I received no reply to this letter, so I wrote another. But the second received the same answer as the first. Evidently dear “Screw” pretended to be angry. . . . The poor fellow having received a refusal from Nadenka Kalinin, looked upon me as the cause of his misfortune. He had the right to be angry, and if he had never been angry before it was merely because he did not know how to.

“When had he time to learn?” I thought, being perplexed at not receiving answers to my letters.

In the third week of obstinate seclusion in my own house the Count paid me a visit. Having scolded me for not riding over to see him nor sending him answers to his letters, he stretched himself out on the sofa and before he began to snore he spoke on his favourite theme—on women.

“I understand,” he began languidly, screwing up his eyes and placing his hands under his head, “that you are delicate and susceptible. You don't come to me from fear of breaking into our duet . . . interfering. . . . An unwelcome guest is worse than a Tartar, a guest during the honeymoon is worse than a horned devil. I understand you. But, my dear friend, you forget that you are a friend and not a guest, that you are loved, esteemed. By your presence you would only complete the harmony. . . . And what harmony, my dear brother! A harmony that I am unable to describe to you!”

The Count pulled his hands out from under his head and began to wave them about.

“I myself am unable to understand if I am living happily or not. The devil himself would not be able to understand it. There are certainly moments when one would give half one's life for a ‘bis,’ but on the other hand there are days when one paces the rooms from corner to corner, as if beside oneself and ready to cry. . . .”

“For what reason?”

“Brother, I can't understand that Olga. She's a sort of ague and not a woman. In ague one has either fever or shivering fits. That's how she is; five changes every day. She is either gay or so dull that she swallows her tears and prays. . . . Sometimes she loves me, sometimes she doesn't. There are moments when she caresses me as no woman has ever caressed me in my whole life. But sometimes it is like this: You awake unexpectedly, you open your eyes, and you see a face turned on you . . . such a terrible, such a savage face . . . a face that is all distorted with malignancy and aversion. . . . When one sees such a thing all the enchantment vanishes. . . . And she often looks at me in that way. . . .”

“With aversion?”

“Well, yes! . . . I can't understand it. . . . She swears that she came to me only for love, and still hardly a night passes that I do not see that face. How is it to be explained? I begin to think, though of course I don't want to believe it, that she can't bear me and has given herself to me for those rags which I buy for her now She's terribly fond of rags! She's capable of standing before the mirror from morning to evening in a new frock; she is capable of crying for days and nights about a spoilt flounce. . . . She's terribly vain! What chiefly pleases her in me is that I'm a Count. She would never have loved me had I not been a Count. Never a dinner or supper passes that she does not reproach me with tears in her eyes, for not surrounding myself with aristocratic society. You see, she would like to reign in that society. . . . A strange girl!”

The Count fixed his dim eyes on the ceiling and became pensive. I noticed, to my great astonishment, that this time, as an exception, he was sober. This struck and even touched me.

“You are quite normal to-day,” I said. “You are not drunk, and you don't ask for vodka. What's the meaning of this dream?”

“Yes, so it is! I had no time to drink, I've been thinking. . . . I must tell you, Serezha, I'm seriously in love; it's no joke. I am terribly fond of her. It's quite natural, too. . . . She's a rare woman, not of the ordinary sort, to say nothing of her appearance. Not much intellect, to be sure, but what feeling, elegance, freshness! She can't be compared with my former Amalias, Angelicas, and Grushas, whose love I have enjoyed till now. She's something from another world, a world I do not know.”

“Philosophizing!” I laughed.

“I'm captivated, I've almost fallen in love! But now I see it is useless to try to square a naught. It was only a mask that raised false expectations in me. The pink cheeks of innocence proved to be rouge, the kiss of love—the request to buy a new frock. . . . I took her into my house like a wife, and she behaves like a mistress who is paid with money. But it's enough now. I am restraining my soul's expectations, and am beginning to see in Olga a mistress. . . . Enough!”

“Well, why not? How about the husband?”

“The husband? Hm! . . . What do you think he's about?”

“I think it is impossible to imagine a more unhappy man.”