Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (287 page)

Pyotr came into the study, and announced an unknown lady. On the card he brought in was the name “Josephina Iosefovna Milan.”

Yulia Sergeyevna got up languidly and went out limping slightly, as her foot had gone to sleep. In the doorway appeared a pale, thin lady with dark eyebrows, dressed altogether in black. She clasped her hands on her bosom and said supplicatingly

“M. Laptev, save my children!”

The jingle of her bracelets sounded familiar to him, and he knew the face with patches of powder on it; he recognised her as the lady with whom he had once so inappropriately dined before his marriage. It was Panaurov’s second wife.

“Save my children,” she repeated, and her face suddenly quivered and looked old and pitiful. “You alone can save us, and I have spent my last penny coming to Moscow to see you! My children are starving!”

She made a motion as though she were going to fall on her knees. Laptev was alarmed, and clutched her by the arm.

“Sit down, sit down . . .” he muttered, making her sit down. “I beg you to be seated.”

“We have no money to buy bread,” she said. “Grigory Nikolaevitch is going away to a new post, but he will not take the children and me with him, and the money which you so generously send us he spends only on himself. What are we to do? What? My poor, unhappy children!”

“Calm yourself, I beg. I will give orders that that money shall be made payable to you.”

She began sobbing, and then grew calmer, and he noticed that the tears had made little pathways through the powder on her cheeks, and that she was growing a moustache.

“You are infinitely generous, M. Laptev. But be our guardian angel, our good fairy, persuade Grigory Nikolaevitch not to abandon me, but to take me with him. You know I love him -- I love him insanely; he’s the comfort of my life.”

Laptev gave her a hundred roubles, and promised to talk to Panaurov, and saw her out to the hall in trepidation the whole time, for fear she should break into sobs or fall on her knees.

After her, Kish made his appearance. Then Kostya came in with his photographic apparatus. Of late he had been attracted by photography and took photographs of every one in the house several times a day. This new pursuit caused him many disappointments, and he had actually grown thinner.

Before evening tea Fyodor arrived. Sitting in a corner in the study, he opened a book and stared for a long time at a page, obviously not reading. Then he spent a long time drinking tea; his face turned red. In his presence Laptev felt a load on his heart; even his silence was irksome to him.

“Russia may be congratulated on the appearance of a new author,” said Fyodor. “Joking apart, though, brother, I have turned out a little article -- the firstfruits of my pen, so to say -- and I’ve brought it to show you. Read it, dear boy, and tell me your opinion -- but sincerely.”

He took a manuscript out of his pocket and gave it to his brother. The article was called “The Russian Soul”; it was written tediously, in the colourless style in which people with no talent, but full of secret vanity, usually write. The leading idea of it was that the intellectual man has the right to disbelieve in the supernatural, but it is his duty to conceal his lack of faith, that he may not be a stumbling-block and shake the faith of others. Without faith there is no idealism, and idealism is destined to save Europe and guide humanity into the true path.

“But you don’t say what Europe has to be saved from,” said Laptev.

“That’s intelligible of itself.”

“Nothing is intelligible,” said Laptev, and he walked about the room in agitation. “It’s not intelligible to me why you wrote it. But that’s your business.”

“I want to publish it in pamphlet form.”

“That’s your affair.”

They were silent for a minute. Fyodor sighed and said:

“It’s an immense regret to me, dear brother, that we think differently. Oh, Alyosha, Alyosha, my darling brother! You and I are true Russians, true believers, men of broad nature; all of these German and Jewish crochets are not for us. You and I are not wretched upstarts, you know, but representatives of a distinguished merchant family.”

“What do you mean by a distinguished family?” said Laptev, restraining his irritation. “A distinguished family! The landowners beat our grandfather and every low little government clerk punched him in the face. Our grandfather thrashed our father, and our father thrashed us. What has your distinguished family done for us? What sort of nerves, what sort of blood, have we inherited? For nearly three years you’ve been arguing like an ignorant deacon, and talking all sorts of nonsense, and now you’ve written -- this slavish drivel here! While I, while I! Look at me. . . . No elasticity, no boldness, no strength of will; I tremble over every step I take as though I should be flogged for it. I am timid before nonentities, idiots, brutes, who are immeasurably my inferiors mentally and morally; I am afraid of porters, doorkeepers, policemen, gendarmes. I am afraid of every one, because I was born of a mother who was terrified, and because from a child I was beaten and frightened! . . . You and I will do well to have no children. Oh, God, grant that this distinguished merchant family may die with us!”

Yulia Sergeyevna came into the study and sat down at the table.

“Are you arguing about something here?” she asked. “Am I interrupting?”

“No, little sister,” answered Fyodor. “Our discussion was of principles. Here, you are abusing the family,” he added, turning to his brother. “That family has created a business worth a million, though. That stands for something, anyway!”

“A great distinction -- a business worth a million! A man with no particular brains, without abilities, by chance becomes a trader, and then when he has grown rich he goes on trading from day to day, with no sort of system, with no aim, without having any particular greed for money. He trades mechanically, and money comes to him of itself, without his going to meet it. He sits all his life at his work, likes it only because he can domineer over his clerks and get the better of his customers. He’s a churchwarden because he can domineer over the choristers and keep them under his thumb; he’s the patron of a school because he likes to feel the teacher is his subordinate and enjoys lording it over him. The merchant does not love trading, he loves dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a commercial establishment as a torture chamber! And for a business like yours, you want clerks who have been deprived of individual character and personal life -- and you make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick the dust for a crust of bread, and you’ve trained them from childhood to believe that you are their benefactors. No fear of your taking a university man into your warehouse!”

“University men are not suitable for our business.”

“That’s not true,” cried Laptev. “It’s a lie!”

“Excuse me, it seems to me you spit into the well from which you drink yourself,” said Fyodor, and he got up. “Our business is hateful to you, yet you make use of the income from it.”

“Aha! We’ve spoken our minds,” said Laptev, and he laughed, looking angrily at his brother. “Yes, if I didn’t belong to your distinguished family -- if I had an ounce of will and courage, I should long ago have flung away that income, and have gone to work for my living. But in your warehouse you’ve destroyed all character in me from a child! I’m your product.”

Fyodor looked at the clock and began hurriedly saying good-bye. He kissed Yulia’s hand and went out, but instead of going into the hall, walked into the drawing-room, then into the bedroom.

“I’ve forgotten how the rooms go,” he said in extreme confusion. “It’s a strange house. Isn’t it a strange house!”

He seemed utterly overcome as he put on his coat, and there was a look of pain on his face. Laptev felt no more anger; he was frightened, and at the same time felt sorry for Fyodor, and the warm, true love for his brother, which seemed to have died down in his heart during those three years, awoke, and he felt an intense desire to express that love.

“Come to dinner with us to-morrow, Fyodor,” he said, and stroked him on the shoulder. “Will you come?”

“Yes, yes; but give me some water.”

Laptev ran himself to the dining-room to take the first thing he could get from the sideboard. This was a tall beer-jug. He poured water into it and brought it to his brother. Fyodor began drinking, but bit a piece out of the jug; they heard a crunch, and then sobs. The water ran over his fur coat and his jacket, and Laptev, who had never seen men cry, stood in confusion and dismay, not knowing what to do. He looked on helplessly while Yulia and the servant took off Fyodor’s coat and helped him back again into the room, and went with him, feeling guilty.

Yulia made Fyodor lie down on the sofa and knelt beside him.

“It’s nothing,” she said, trying to comfort him. “It’s your nerves. . . .”

“I’m so miserable, my dear!” he said. “I am so unhappy, unhappy . . . but all the time I’ve been hiding it, I’ve been hiding it!”

He put his arm round her neck and whispered in her ear:

“Every night I see my sister Nina. She comes and sits in the chair near my bed. . . .”

When, an hour later, he put on his fur coat in the hall, he was smiling again and ashamed to face the servant. Laptev went with him to Pyatnitsky Street.

“Come and have dinner with us to-morrow,” he said on the way, holding him by the arm, “and at Easter we’ll go abroad together. You absolutely must have a change, or you’ll be getting quite morbid.”

When he got home Laptev found his wife in a state of great nervous agitation. The scene with Fyodor had upset her, and she could not recover her composure. She wasn’t crying but kept tossing on the bed, clutching with cold fingers at the quilt, at the pillows, at her husband’s hands. Her eyes looked big and frightened.

“Don’t go away from me, don’t go away,” she said to her husband. “Tell me, Alyosha, why have I left off saying my prayers? What has become of my faith? Oh, why did you talk of religion before me? You’ve shaken my faith, you and your friends. I never pray now.”

He put compresses on her forehead, chafed her hands, gave her tea to drink, while she huddled up to him in terror. . . .”

Towards morning she was worn out and fell asleep, while Laptev sat beside her and held her hand. So that he could get no sleep. The whole day afterwards he felt shattered and dull, and wandered listlessly about the rooms without a thought in his head.

XVI

The doctor said that Fyodor’s mind was affected. Laptev did not know what to do in his father’s house, while the dark warehouse in which neither his father nor Fyodor ever appeared now seemed to him like a sepulchre. When his wife told him that he absolutely must go every day to the warehouse and also to his father’s, he either said nothing, or began talking irritably of his childhood, saying that it was beyond his power to forgive his father for his past, that the warehouse and the house in Pyatnitsky Street were hateful to him, and so on.

One Sunday morning Yulia went herself to Pyatnitsky Street. She found old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same big drawing-room in which the service had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and without a cravat, he was sitting motionless in his arm-chair, blinking with his sightless eyes.

“It’s I -- your daughter-in-law,” she said, going up to him. “I’ve come to see how you are.”

He began breathing heavily with excitement.

Touched by his affliction and his loneliness, she kissed his hand; and he passed his hand over her face and head, and having satisfied himself that it was she, made the sign of the cross over her.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “You know I’ve lost my eyes and can see nothing. . . . I can dimly see the window and the fire, but people and things I cannot see at all. Yes, I’m going blind, and Fyodor has fallen ill, and without the master’s eye things are in a bad way now. If there is any irregularity there’s no one to look into it; and folks soon get spoiled. And why is it Fyodor has fallen ill? Did he catch cold? Here I have never ailed in my life and never taken medicine. I never saw anything of doctors.”