|
|
|
A.P. Chekhov - Mire
I II
I
GRACEFULLY swaying in the saddle, a young man wearing the
snow-white tunic of an officer rode into the great yard of the
vodka distillery belonging to the heirs of M. E. Rothstein. The
sun smiled carelessly on the lieutenant's little stars, on the
white trunks of the birch-trees, on the heaps of broken glass
scattered here and there in the yard. The radiant, vigorous
beauty of a summer day lay over everything, and nothing hindered
the snappy young green leaves from dancing gaily and winking at
the clear blue sky. Even the dirty and soot-begrimed appearance
of the bricksheds and the stifling fumes of the distillery did
not spoil the general good impression. The lieutenant sprang
gaily out of the saddle, handed over his horse to a man who ran
up, and stroking with his finger his delicate black moustaches,
went in at the front door. On the top step of the old but light
and softly carpeted staircase he was met by a maidservant with a
haughty, not very youthful face. The lieutenant gave her his
card without speaking.
As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see
on it the name "Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky." A minute later
she came back and told the lieutenant that her mistress could
not see him, as she was not feeling quite well. Sokolsky looked
at the ceiling and thrust out his lower lip.
"How vexatious!" he said. "Listen, my dear," he said eagerly.
"Go and tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for
me to speak to her -- very. I will only keep her one minute. Ask
her to excuse me."
The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her
mistress.
"Very well!" she sighed, returning after a brief interval.
"Please walk in!"
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large,
luxuriously furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found
himself in a large and lofty square room, in which from the
first step he was impressed by the abundance of flowers and
plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy fragrance of
jasmine. Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the walls,
screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed
over the corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse
than a place to live in. Tits, canaries, and goldfinches
chirruped among the green leaves and fluttered against the
window-panes.
"Forgive me for receiving you here," the lieutenant heard in a
mellow feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not
without charm. "Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I'm trying
to keep still to prevent its coming on again. What do you want?"
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low
chair, such as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese
dressing-gown, with her head wrapped up, leaning back on a
pillow. Nothing could be seen behind the woollen shawl in which
she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed, somewhat aquiline
nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown concealed
her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her voice,
her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
"Forgive me for being so persistent . . ." began the lieutenant,
clinking his spurs. "Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I
come with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey
Ivanovitch Kryukov, who . . ."
"I know!" interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. "I know Kryukov. Sit
down; I don't like anything big standing before me."
"My cousin charges me to ask you a favour," the lieutenant went
on, clinking his spurs once more and sitting down. "The fact is,
your late father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last
winter, and a small sum was left owing. The payment only becomes
due next week, but my cousin begs you most particularly to pay
him -- if possible, to-day."
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
"Surely I'm not in her bedroom?" he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and
tallest, under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed
not yet made, with the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on
two arm-chairs lay heaps of crumpled feminine garments.
Petticoats and sleeves with rumpled lace and flounces were
trailing on the carpet, on which here and there lay bits of
white tape, cigarette-ends, and the papers of caramels. . . .
Under the bed the toes, pointed and square, of slippers of all
kinds peeped out in a long row. And it seemed to the lieutenant
that the scent of the jasmine came not from the flowers, but
from the bed and the slippers.
"And what is the sum owing?" asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
"Two thousand three hundred."
"Oho!" said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. "And
you call that -- a small sum! However, it's just the same paying
it to-day or paying it in a week, but I've had so many payments
to make in the last two months since my father's death. . . .
Such a lot of stupid business, it makes my head go round! A nice
idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep forcing me to attend to
these silly things. Vodka, oats . . ." she muttered, half
closing her eyes, "oats, bills, percentages, or, as my
head-clerk says, 'percentage.' . . . It's awful. Yesterday I
simply turned the excise officer out. He pesters me with his
Tralles. I said to him: 'Go to the devil with your Tralles! I
can't see any one!' He kissed my hand and went away. I tell you
what: can't your cousin wait two or three months?"
"A cruel question!" laughed the lieutenant. "My cousin can wait
a year, but it's I who cannot wait! You see, it's on my own
account I'm acting, I ought to tell you. At all costs I must
have money, and by ill-luck my cousin hasn't a rouble to spare.
I'm forced to ride about and collect debts. I've just been to
see a peasant, our tenant; here I'm now calling on you; from
here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that
until I get together five thousand roubles. I need money
awfully!"
"Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims,
mischief. Why, have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing
at cards? Or are you getting married?"
"You've guessed!" laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly
from his seat, he clinked his spurs. "I really am going to be
married."
Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry
face, and sighed.
"I can't make out what possesses people to get married!" she
said, looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. "Life is so
short, one has so little freedom, and they must put chains on
themselves!"
"Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . ."
"Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at
things. . . . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one
poor? Are you passionately in love? And why must you have five
thousand? Why won't four do, or three?"
"What a tongue she has!" thought the lieutenant, and answered:
"The difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to
marry till he is twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have
to leave the Service or else pay a deposit of five thousand."
"Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one
has his own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiance
is some one special and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly
unable to understand how any decent man can live with a woman. I
can't for the life of me understand it. I have lived, thank the
Lord, twenty-seven years, and I have never yet seen an endurable
woman. They're all affected minxes, immoral, liars. . . . The
only ones I can put up with are cooks and housemaids, but
so-called ladies I won't let come within shooting distance of
me. But, thank God, they hate me and don't force themselves on
me! If one of them wants money she sends her husband, but
nothing will induce her to come herself, not from pride -- no,
but from cowardice; she's afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I
understand their hatred very well! Rather! I openly display what
they do their very utmost to conceal from God and man. How can
they help hating me? No doubt you've heard bushels of scandal
about me already. . . ."
"I only arrived here so lately . . ."
"Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother's
wife, surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of
letting a young man come to see such an awful woman without
warning him -- how could she? Ha, ha! . . . But tell me, how is
your brother? He's a fine fellow, such a handsome man! . . .
I've seen him several times at mass. Why do you look at me like
that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To an
educated person externals matter less than the idea. . . .
That's so, isn't it?"
"Yes, of course . . ." smiled the lieutenant.
"Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother.
You are handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal
better-looking. There's wonderfully little likeness!"
"That's quite natural; he's not my brother, but my cousin."
"Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?"
"My furlough is over in a few days."
"Well, what's to be done with you!" sighed Susanna Moiseyevna.
"So be it. I'll give you the money, though I know you'll abuse
me for it afterwards. You'll quarrel with your wife after you
are married, and say: 'If that mangy Jewess hadn't given me the
money, I should perhaps have been as free as a bird to-day!" Is
your fiance pretty?"
"Oh yes. . . ."
"H'm! . . . Anyway, better something, if it's only beauty, than
nothing. Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make
up to her husband for her silliness."
"That's original!" laughed the lieutenant. "You are a woman
yourself, and such a woman-hater!"
"A woman . . ." smiled Susanna. "It's not my fault that God has
cast me into this mould, is it? I'm no more to blame for it than
you are for having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for
the choice of its case. I am very fond of myself, but when any
one reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself. Well,
you can go away, and I'll dress. Wait for me in the
drawing-room."
The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw
a deep breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which
had begun to irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.
"What a strange woman!" he thought, looking about him. "She
talks fluently, but . . . far too much, and too freely. She must
be neurotic."
The drawing-room, in which he was standing now, was richly
furnished, and had pretensions to luxury and style. There were
dark bronze dishes with patterns in relief, views of Nice and
the Rhine on the tables, old-fashioned sconces, Japanese
statuettes, but all this striving after luxury and style only
emphasised the lack of taste which was glaringly apparent in the
gilt cornices, the gaudy wall-paper, the bright velvet
table-cloths, the common oleographs in heavy frames. The bad
taste of the general effect was the more complete from the lack
of finish and the overcrowding of the room, which gave one a
feeling that something was lacking, and that a great deal should
have been thrown away. It was evident that the furniture had not
been bought all at once, but had been picked up at auctions and
other favourable opportunities.
Heaven knows what taste the lieutenant could boast of, but even
he noticed one characteristic peculiarity about the whole place,
which no luxury or style could efface -- a complete absence of
all trace of womanly, careful hands, which, as we all know, give
a warmth, poetry, and snugness to the furnishing of a room.
There was a chilliness about it such as one finds in
waiting-rooms at stations, in clubs, and foyers at the theatres.
There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish,
except, perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau.
The lieutenant looked round about him, and, shrugging his
shoulders, thought of his strange, new acquaintance, of her
free-and-easy manners, and her way of talking. But then the door
opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady herself, in a long
black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her figure looked as
though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the lieutenant saw not
only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a head black
and as curly as lamb's-wool. She did not attract him, though she
did not strike him as ugly. He had a prejudice against
un-Russian faces in general, and he considered, too, that the
lady's white face, the whiteness of which for some reason
suggested the cloying scent of jasmine, did not go well with her
little black curls and thick eyebrows; that her nose and ears
were astoundingly white, as though they belonged to a corpse, or
had been moulded out of transparent wax. When she smiled she
showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that
either.
"Anmic debility . . ." he thought; "she's probably as nervous
as a turkey."
"Here I am! Come along!" she said, going on rapidly ahead of him
and pulling off the yellow leaves from the plants as she passed.
"I'll give you the money directly, and if you like I'll give you
some lunch. Two thousand three hundred roubles! After such a
good stroke of business you'll have an appetite for your lunch.
Do you like my rooms? The ladies about here declare that my
rooms always smell of garlic. With that culinary gibe their
stock of wit is exhausted. I hasten to assure you that I've no
garlic even in the cellar. And one day when a doctor came to see
me who smelt of garlic, I asked him to take his hat and go and
spread his fragrance elsewhere. There is no smell of garlic
here, but the place does smell of drugs. My father lay paralyzed
for a year and a half, and the whole house smelt of medicine. A
year and a half! I was sorry to lose him, but I'm glad he's
dead: he suffered so!"
She led the officer through two rooms similar to the
drawing-room, through a large reception hall, and came to a stop
in her study, where there was a lady's writing-table covered
with little knick-knacks. On the carpet near it several books
lay strewn about, opened and folded back. Through a small door
leading from the study he saw a table laid for lunch.
Still chatting, Susanna took out of her pocket a bunch of little
keys and unlocked an ingeniously made cupboard with a curved,
sloping lid. When the lid was raised the cupboard emitted a
plaintive note which made the lieutenant think of an olian
harp. Susanna picked out another key and clicked another lock.
"I have underground passages here and secret doors," she said,
taking out a small morocco portfolio. "It's a funny cupboard,
isn't it? And in this portfolio I have a quarter of my fortune.
Look how podgy it is! You won't strangle me, will you?"
Susanna raised her eyes to the lieutenant and laughed
good-naturedly. The lieutenant laughed too.
"She's rather jolly," he thought, watching the keys flashing
between her fingers.
"Here it is," she said, picking out the key of the portfolio.
"Now, Mr. Creditor, trot out the IOU. What a silly thing money
is really! How paltry it is, and yet how women love it! I am a
Jewess, you know, to the marrow of my bones. I am passionately
fond of Shmuls and Yankels, but how I loathe that passion for
gain in our Semitic blood. They hoard and they don't know what
they are hoarding for. One ought to live and enjoy oneself, but
they're afraid of spending an extra farthing. In that way I am
more like an hussar than a Shmul. I don't like money to be kept
long in one place. And altogether I fancy I'm not much like a
Jewess. Does my accent give me away much, eh?"
"What shall I say?" mumbled the lieutenant. "You speak good
Russian, but you do roll your r's."
Susanna laughed and put the little key in the lock of the
portfolio. The lieutenant took out of his pocket a little roll
of IOUs and laid them with a notebook on the table.
"Nothing betrays a Jew as much as his accent," Susanna went on,
looking gaily at the lieutenant. "However much he twists himself
into a Russian or a Frenchman, ask him to say 'feather' and he
will say 'fedder' . . . but I pronounce it correctly: 'Feather!
feather! feather!' "
Both laughed.
"By Jove, she's very jolly!" thought Sokolsky.
Susanna put the portfolio on a chair, took a step towards the
lieutenant, and bringing her face close to his, went on gaily:
"Next to the Jews I love no people so much as the Russian and
the French. I did not do much at school and I know no history,
but it seems to me that the fate of the world lies in the hands
of those two nations. I lived a long time abroad. . . . I spent
six months in Madrid. . . . I've gazed my fill at the public,
and the conclusion I've come to is that there are no decent
peoples except the Russian and the French. Take the languages,
for instance. . . . The German language is like the neighing of
horses; as for the English . . . you can't imagine anything
stupider. Fight -- feet -- foot! Italian is only pleasant when
they speak it slowly. If you listen to Italians gabbling, you
get the effect of the Jewish jargon. And the Poles? Mercy on us!
There's no language so disgusting! 'Nie pieprz, Pietrze,
pieprzem wieprza bo mozeoz przepieprzy wieprza pieprzem.' That
means: 'Don't pepper a sucking pig with pepper, Pyotr, or
perhaps you'll over-pepper the sucking pig with pepper.' Ha, ha,
ha!"
Susanna Moiseyevna rolled her eyes and broke into such a
pleasant, infectious laugh that the lieutenant, looking at her,
went off into a loud and merry peal of laughter. She took the
visitor by the button, and went on:
"You don't like Jews, of course . . . they've many faults, like
all nations. I don't dispute that. But are the Jews to blame for
it? No, it's not the Jews who are to blame, but the Jewish
women! They are narrow-minded, greedy; there's no sort of poetry
about them, they're dull. . . . You have never lived with a
Jewess, so you don't know how charming it is!" Susanna
Moiseyevna pronounced the last words with deliberate emphasis
and with no eagerness or laughter. She paused as though
frightened at her own openness, and her face was suddenly
distorted in a strange, unaccountable way. Her eyes stared at
the lieutenant without blinking, her lips parted and showed
clenched teeth. Her whole face, her throat, and even her bosom,
seemed quivering with a spiteful, catlike expression. Still
keeping her eyes fixed on her visitor, she rapidly bent to one
side, and swiftly, like a cat, snatched something from the
table. All this was the work of a few seconds. Watching her
movements, the lieutenant saw five fingers crumple up his IOUs
and caught a glimpse of the white rustling paper as it
disappeared in her clenched fist. Such an extraordinary
transition from good-natured laughter to crime so appalled him
that he turned pale and stepped back. . . .
And she, still keeping her frightened, searching eyes upon him,
felt along her hip with her clenched fist for her pocket. Her
fist struggled convulsively for the pocket, like a fish in the
net, and could not find the opening. In another moment the IOUs
would have vanished in the recesses of her feminine garments,
but at that point the lieutenant uttered a faint cry, and, moved
more by instinct than reflection, seized the Jewess by her arm
above the clenched fist. Showing her teeth more than ever, she
struggled with all her might and pulled her hand away. Then
Sokolsky put his right arm firmly round her waist, and the other
round her chest and a struggle followed. Afraid of outraging her
sex or hurting her, he tried only to prevent her moving, and to
get hold of the fist with the IOUs; but she wriggled like an eel
in his arms with her supple, flexible body, struck him in the
chest with her elbows, and scratched him, so that he could not
help touching her all over, and was forced to hurt her and
disregard her modesty.
"How unusual this is! How strange!" he thought, utterly amazed,
hardly able to believe his senses, and feeling rather sick from
the scent of jasmine.
In silence, breathing heavily, stumbling against the furniture,
they moved about the room. Susanna was carried away by the
struggle. She flushed, closed her eyes, and forgetting herself,
once even pressed her face against the face of the lieutenant,
so that there was a sweetish taste left on his lips. At last he
caught hold of her clenched hand. . . . Forcing it open, and not
finding the papers in it, he let go the Jewess. With flushed
faces and dishevelled hair, they looked at one another,
breathing hard. The spiteful, catlike expression on the Jewess's
face was gradually replaced by a good-natured smile. She burst
out laughing, and turning on one foot, went towards the room
where lunch was ready. The lieutenant moved slowly after her.
She sat down to the table, and, still flushed and breathing
hard, tossed off half a glass of port.
"Listen" -- the lieutenant broke the silence -- "I hope you are
joking?"
"Not a bit of it," she answered, thrusting a piece of bread into
her mouth.
"H'm! . . . How do you wish me to take all this?"
"As you choose. Sit down and have lunch!"
"But . . . it's dishonest!"
"Perhaps. But don't trouble to give me a sermon; I have my own
way of looking at things."
"Won't you give them back?"
"Of course not! If you were a poor unfortunate man, with nothing
to eat, then it would be a different matter. But -- he wants to
get married!"
"It's not my money, you know; it's my cousin's!"
"And what does your cousin want with money? To get fashionable
clothes for his wife? But I really don't care whether your
belle-sur has dresses or not."
The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange
house with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with
decorum. He strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously
fingered his waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered
herself in his eyes by her dishonest action, made him feel
bolder and more free-and-easy.
"The devil knows what to make of it!" he muttered. "Listen. I
shan't go away from here until I get the IOUs!"
"Ah, so much the better," laughed Susanna. "If you stay here for
good, it will make it livelier for me."
Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna's
laughing, insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving
bosom, and grew bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking
about the IOU he began for some reason recalling with a sort of
relish his cousin's stories of the Jewess's romantic adventures,
of her free way of life, and these reminiscences only provoked
him to greater audacity. Impulsively he sat down beside the
Jewess and thinking no more of the IOUs began to eat. . . .
"Will you have vodka or wine?" Susanna asked with a laugh. "So
you will stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days
and nights you will have to spend with me, waiting for those
IOUs! Won't your fiance have something to say about it?"
|
|
|
