Love and Other Stories Part 7

"Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?" Va.s.silyev sat up, and tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress came into his pale face. His chin quivered.

"You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,"

he said, "but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate has cheated me! I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped husband has ever been deceived! Only realise what an absurd fool I have been made! Last year before your eyes I did not know what to do with myself for happiness. And now before your eyes. . . ."

Va.s.silyev's head sank on the pillow and he laughed.

"Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly be imagined. Chapter one: spring, love, honeymoon . . . honey, in fact; chapter two: looking for a job, the p.a.w.nshop, pallor, the chemist's shop, and . . . to-morrow's splas.h.i.+ng through the mud to the graveyard."

He laughed again. I felt acutely uncomfortable and made up my mind to go.

"I tell you what," I said, "you lie down, and I will go to the chemist's."

He made no answer. I put on my great-coat and went out of his room.

As I crossed the pa.s.sage I glanced at the coffin and Madame Mimotih reading over it. I strained my eyes in vain, I could not recognise in the swarthy, yellow face Zina, the lively, pretty _ingenue_ of Luhatchev's company.

"_Sic transit_," I thought.

With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made my way to the chemist's. But I ought not to have gone away. When I came back from the chemist's, Va.s.silyev lay on the sofa fainting.

The bandages had been roughly torn off, and blood was flowing from the reopened wound. It was daylight before I succeeded in restoring him to consciousness. He was raving in delirium, s.h.i.+vering, and looking with unseeing eyes about the room till morning had come, and we heard the booming voice of the priest as he read the service over the dead.

When Va.s.silyev's rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when the coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised him to remain at home. But he would not obey me, in spite of the pain and the grey, rainy morning. He walked bareheaded and in silence behind the coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move one leg after the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively at his wounded side. His face expressed complete apathy. Only once when I roused him from his lethargy by some insignificant question he s.h.i.+fted his eyes over the pavement and the grey fence, and for a moment there was a gleam of gloomy anger in them.

"'Weelright,'" he read on a signboard. "Ignorant, illiterate people, devil take them!"

I led him home from the cemetery.

Only one year has pa.s.sed since that night, and Va.s.silyev has hardly had time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud behind his wife's coffin.

At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my drawing-room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how provincial misses sing sentimental songs. The ladies are laughing, and he is laughing too. He is enjoying himself.

I call him into my study. Evidently not pleased at my taking him from agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the att.i.tude of a man who has no time to spare. I give him this story, and ask him to read it. Always condescending about my authors.h.i.+p, he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an armchair and begins upon it.

"Hang it all, what horrors," he mutters with a smile.

But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.

"How does it end?" I ask him.

"How does it end? H'm. . . ."

He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . . He sees his new fas.h.i.+onable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.

"Wasn't I right when I told you it was all absurd? My G.o.d! I have had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant's back; the devil knows what I have suffered--no one could have suffered more, I think, and where are the traces? It's astonis.h.i.+ng. One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a sc.r.a.p. It's as though I hadn't been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!"

"Pyotr Nikolaevitch, are you coming soon?" The impatient ladies call my hero.

"This minute," answers the "vain and fatuous" man, setting his tie straight. "It's absurd and pitiful, my friend, pitiful and absurd, but what's to be done? _h.o.m.o sum_. . . . And I praise Mother Nature all the same for her trans.m.u.tation of substances. If we retained an agonising memory of toothache and of all the terrors which every one of us has had to experience, if all that were everlasting, we poor mortals would have a bad time of it in this life."

I look at his smiling face and I remember the despair and the horror with which his eyes were filled a year ago when he looked at the dark window. I see him, entering into his habitual role of intellectual chatterer, prepare to show off his idle theories, such as the trans.m.u.tation of substances before me, and at the same time I recall him sitting on the floor in a pool of blood with his sick imploring eyes.

"How will it end?" I ask myself aloud.

Va.s.silyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that man's account on that terrible night. It is as though I had lost something. . . .

MARI D'ELLE

IT was a free night. Natalya Andreyevna Bronin (her married name was Nikitin), the opera singer, is lying in her bedroom, her whole being abandoned to repose. She lies, deliciously drowsy, thinking of her little daughter who lives somewhere far away with her grandmother or aunt. . . . The child is more precious to her than the public, bouquets, notices in the papers, adorers . . . and she would be glad to think about her till morning. She is happy, at peace, and all she longs for is not to be prevented from lying undisturbed, dozing and dreaming of her little girl.

All at once the singer starts, and opens her eyes wide: there is a harsh abrupt ring in the entry. Before ten seconds have pa.s.sed the bell tinkles a second time and a third time. The door is opened noisily and some one walks into the entry stamping his feet like a horse, snorting and puffing with the cold.

"d.a.m.n it all, nowhere to hang one's coat!" the singer hears a husky ba.s.s voice. "Celebrated singer, look at that! Makes five thousand a year, and can't get a decent hat-stand!"

"My husband!" thinks the singer, frowning. "And I believe he has brought one of his friends to stay the night too. . . . Hateful!"

No more peace. When the loud noise of some one blowing his nose and putting off his goloshes dies away, the singer hears cautious footsteps in her bedroom. . . . It is her husband, _mari d'elle_, Denis Petrovitch Nikitin. He brings a whiff of cold air and a smell of brandy. For a long while he walks about the bedroom, breathing heavily, and, stumbling against the chairs in the dark, seems to be looking for something. . . .

"What do you want?" his wife moans, when she is sick of his fussing about. "You have woken me."

"I am looking for the matches, my love. You . . . you are not asleep then? I have brought you a message. . . . Greetings from that . . .

what's-his-name? . . . red-headed fellow who is always sending you bouquets. . . . Zagvozdkin. . . . I have just been to see him."

"What did you go to him for?"

"Oh, nothing particular. . . . We sat and talked and had a drink.

Say what you like, Nathalie, I dislike that individual--I dislike him awfully! He is a rare blockhead. He is a wealthy man, a capitalist; he has six hundred thousand, and you would never guess it. Money is no more use to him than a radish to a dog. He does not eat it himself nor give it to others. Money ought to circulate, but he keeps tight hold of it, is afraid to part with it. . . . What's the good of capital lying idle? Capital lying idle is no better than gra.s.s."

_Mari d'elle_ gropes his way to the edge of the bed and, puffing, sits down at his wife's feet.

"Capital lying idle is pernicious," he goes on. "Why has business gone downhill in Russia? Because there is so much capital lying idle among us; they are afraid to invest it. It's very different in England. . . . There are no such queer fish as Zagvozdkin in England, my girl. . . . There every farthing is in circulation . . . . Yes. . . . They don't keep it locked up in chests there . . . ."

"Well, that's all right. I am sleepy."

"Directly. . . . Whatever was it I was talking about? Yes. . . .

In these hard times hanging is too good for Zagvozdkin. . . . He is a fool and a scoundrel. . . . No better than a fool. If I asked him for a loan without security--why, a child could see that he runs no risk whatever. He doesn't understand, the a.s.s! For ten thousand he would have got a hundred. In a year he would have another hundred thousand. I asked, I talked . . . but he wouldn't give it me, the blockhead."

"I hope you did not ask him for a loan in my name."

"H'm. . . . A queer question. . . ." _Mari d'elle_ is offended.

"Anyway he would sooner give me ten thousand than you. You are a woman, and I am a man anyway, a business-like person. And what a scheme I propose to him! Not a bubble, not some chimera, but a sound thing, substantial! If one could hit on a man who would understand, one might get twenty thousand for the idea alone! Even you would understand if I were to tell you about it. Only you . . . don't chatter about it . . . not a word . . . but I fancy I have talked to you about it already. Have I talked to you about sausage-skins?"

"M'm . . . by and by."

"I believe I have. . . . Do you see the point of it? Now the provision shops and the sausage-makers get their sausage-skins locally, and pay a high price for them. Well, but if one were to bring sausage-skins from the Caucasus where they are worth nothing, and where they are thrown away, then . . . where do you suppose the sausage-makers would buy their skins, here in the slaughterhouses or from me? From me, of course! Why, I shall sell them ten times as cheap! Now let us look at it like this: every year in Petersburg and Moscow and in other centres these same skins would be bought to the . . . to the sum of five hundred thousand, let us suppose. That's the minimum.

Well, and if. . . ."

"You can tell me to-morrow . . . later on. . . ."