The Petty Demon (23 page)

Pylnikov had come, stood in the doorway, beckoned to him and smiled. It was as though someone
were drawing Peredonov on and Pylnikov led him through the dark, filthy streets while the cat ran alongside with shining green
pupils …
¹¹

T
HE ECCENTRICITIES IN
Peredonov’s behavior worried Khripach more and more from day to day. He consulted with the gymnasium doctor to see whether
Peredonov had gone crazy. With a laugh the doctor replied that nothing would make Peredonov crazy but that he was simply acting
foolishly out of stupidity. Complaints came as well. First was Adamenko who sent the director her brother’s workbook in which
he had received a grade of one for work that was well done.

During one of the recesses the director invited Peredonov into his study.

“He really does look like a madman,” Khripach thought when he caught sight of the traces of perturbation and terror in the
dull gloomy face of Peredonov.

“I have a complaint to make against you,” Khripach began in his dry rapid speech. “Every time I have to give a lesson next
to you, my head literally splits—there’s such laughter coming out of your class. Could I ask you not to give lessons that
are so humorous in content? ‘Joking, always joking. When will you ever stop?’”
^*
.

“I’m not to blame,” Peredonov said angrily. “They laugh by themselves. And it’s impossible to go on talking about orthography
and the satires of Kantemir
^{* *}
all the time. Sometimes you say something and they immediately start grinning. They’re badly disciplined. They need to be
reined in.”

“It’s desirable and even essential that classroom work possess a serious character,” Khripach said. “And there’s something
else.”

Khripach showed Peredonov two notebooks and said:

“Here are two notebooks in your subject, both are by students in the same class, Adamenko and my son. I have been obliged
to compare them and I am forced to take the opinion that you do not have a sufficiently attentive attitude towards your work.
The last piece of work by Adamenko,
which was executed with complete satisfaction, was given the grade of one, whereas the work of my son, which was more poorly
written, earned a four. Obviously you made a mistake: you gave the grade of one student to the other and vice versa. Although
a person is bound to make mistakes, nevertheless I request you to forego similar mistakes. They provoke a well-grounded dissatisfaction
in the parents and the students themselves.”

Peredonov muttered something indistinct.

With renewed vigor he spitefully started to tease the young boys who had been recently
punished because of his complaints.

He especially attacked Kramarenko. The latter was silent and grew pale beneath his dark
suntan and his eyes were glittering.

Emerging from the gymnasium, Kramarenko was in no hurry to get home that day. He stood
by the gates, and kept glancing at the entrance. When Peredonov came out, Kramarenko followed him at some distance, waiting
for the rare passers-by to disappear.

Peredonov was walking slowly. The gloomy weather had induced a melancholy feeling in
him. During recent days his face had assumed more and more of a dull expression. Either his gaze would be fixed on something
far off, or it would wander strangely. It seemed as though he were constantly scrutinizing an object. This caused the objects
to double before his eyes, freeze and then pulsate.

Whom was he trying to discover? Denouncers. They were hiding behind all
objects, speaking in hushed whispers and laughing. His enemies were besieging Peredonov with an entire army of denouncers.
Sometimes Peredonov tried to catch them unawares. But they always managed to flee in time, just as though the earth had swallowed
them up …

Peredonov caught the sound of quick, bold steps along the wooden sidewalk behind him and he looked around in fear—Kramarenko
was coming up abreast of him and was staring at him spitefully and resolutely with burning eyes, pale, slender, like a young
savage ready to pounce on his enemy. That look frightened Peredonov.

“What if he suddenly bites me?” he thought.

He walked
faster, but Kramarenko didn’t fall back. Peredonov stopped and said angrily:

“What are you hanging about for, you scruffy
black imp! I’ll take you off to your father right this minute.”

Kramarenko also stopped and still went on staring at Peredonov.
Now they were standing opposite each other on the rickety wooden sidewalk in the deserted street beside a gray fence that
was indifferent to everything living. Trembling all over, Kramarenko said in a hissing voice:

“You scoundrel!”

He grinned and turned around to leave. He took about three steps, stopped, looked back and repeated more loudly:

“What a scoundrel! A foul reptile!”

He spat and set off. Peredonov sullenly watched him go and then headed home as well. Vague, fearful thoughts slowly filed
through his mind.

Vershina hailed him. She was standing behind the fence of her garden by the gate, wrapped up in a large black kerchief and
smoking. Peredonov did not recognize Vershina at once. In her figure he had the illusion of something ominous: a black witch
standing there, emitting a spellbinding smoke and casting spells. He spat and uttered a counter-spell. Vershina laughed and
asked:

“What’s the matter, Ardalyon Borisych?”

Peredonov looked at her dully and finally said:

“Oh, it’s you! I didn’t recognize you.”

“That’s a good sign. It means that I’m going to be rich soon,” Vershina said.

Peredonov didn’t like that. He felt like getting rich himself.

“Sure,” he said angrily. “What do you need to get rich for! You’ve got enough as it is.”

“I’m going to win two hundred thousand,” Vershina said with a crooked smile.

“No, I’m going to win the two hundred thousand,” Peredonov argued.

“I’ll win in one lottery and you’ll win in another one,” Vershina said.

“Well, you’re lying,” Peredonov said rudely. “It never happens that there are two winners in one town. I’m the one who’ll
win.”

Vershina noticed that he was getting angry. She stopped arguing. She opened the gate and lured Peredonov, saying:

“What are we standing here for? Come in, please, Murin is here.”

Murin’s name had a pleasant association for him: food and drink. He went in.

In the sitting room which was somewhat dark because of the trees, sat Marta, with contented eyes and a red kerchief tied around
her neck, Murin, more dishevelled than usual, seemingly pleased about something, and the grown-up gymnasium student, Vitkevich,
who was courting Vershina, thinking that she was in love with him and dreaming of leaving the gymnasium, marrying Vershina
and managing her estate.

Murin stood up to greet Pereddnov, who was entering the room, with exaggeratedly joyful exclamations. His face grew even sweeter,
his little eyes turned oily—and none of it suited his hefty body with his tousled hair wherein pieces of straw were visible
here and there.

“I’m cultivating my business,” he said in a loud and hoarse voice. “I have business everywhere, but my dear hostesses here
decided to treat me to tea as well.”

“Business, sure,” Peredonov answered angrily. “What kind of business do you have! You don’t have official business, you just
make money. I’m the one who has business.”

“Well, business is business—it’s all other people’s money,” Murin protested with a loud burst of laughter.

Vershina smiled crookedly and sat Peredonov down at the table. The round table in front of the divan was covered with glasses
and cups of tea, rum, cloudberry jam, an open-work silver basket covered with a woven
napkin and filled with sweet rolls and homemade almond spice cake.

Murin’s glass smelled strongly of rum, whereas Vitkevich had put a lot of jam on his glass plate which was in the shape of
a crab. Marta was eating a sweet roll in small pieces with obvious pleasure. Vershina wanted to treat Peredonov as well, but
he refused tea.

“They might have poisoned it,” he thought. “It’d be the easiest thing of all to poison it—you’d drink it and
you wouldn’t notice it, there are sweet-tasting poisons, but once you got home you’d kick the bucket.”

He was annoyed over
the thought of why they had put jam out for Murin, but when he had come they hadn’t bothered to bring a fresh jar with better
jam. They had more than cloudberry jam because they made all sorts of jam.

As for Vershina, it was certain that she was chasing
after Murin. Seeing that there wasn’t much hope for Peredonov, she was trying to round up other prospective husbands for Marta.
Now she was luring Murin. This landowner, who had sunk to a semi-civilized state in his pursuit of profits that were not easily
come by, was willingly going for the bait: he liked Marta.

Marta was happy. After all it had been her constant dream that
a prospective husband would be found for her, she would get married and she would have a fine household and live in plenty.
She looked at Murin with eyes of love. This forty-year-old, enormous man with a coarse voice and with an ingenuous expression
seemed to her the very model of male strength, bravado, handsomeness and goodness.

Peredonov noted the loving looks which
Murin and Marta were exchanging. He noted them because he was expecting admiration from Marta for himself. He said angrily
to Murin:

“You’re sitting there just like a prospective husband, your whole phiz is glowing.”

“It’s because of happiness,”
Murin said in a cheerful voice. “I’ve settled my business well here.”

He winked at the hostesses. They both smiled happily.
Peredonov asked in an angry voice, screwing up his eyes scornfully:

“Have you found yourself a bride, or something? Are they
giving much of a dowry?”

Murin spoke as though he hadn’t heard the questions:

“Natalya Afanasyevna, may God grant her everything
nice, has just agreed to give lodgings to my Vanyushka. He’ll be living here as though in the bosom of Christ and my heart
will rest in peace that he won’t be corrupted.”

“He’ll play pranks together with Vladya,” Peredonov said sullenly. “They’ll
burn the house down.”

“He wouldn’t dare!” Murin cried resolutely. “You, my dear old Natalya Afanasyevna, need not worry about
that. He’ll keep to the straight and narrow with you.”

In order to interrupt this conversation Vershina said with a crooked
smile:

“I feel like something tart to eat.”

“Would you like some bilberries and apple? I’ll bring it,” Marta said, quickly getting up.

“Yes, please bring some.”

Marta ran out of the room. Vershina didn’t even watch her go. She had grown so accustomed to calmly accepting Marta’s obliging
ways as something to be expected. She sat calmly and deeply sunk into the divan, exhaled blue puffs of smoke and compared
the men who were talking. Peredonov was angry and dispirited, Murin was cheerful and animated.

She liked Murin much more. He had a good-natured face whereas Peredonov didn’t even know how to smile. She liked everything
about Murin: he was big, fat, attractive, spoke in a pleasant low voice and was very respectful towards her. There were even
times when Vershina thought that maybe she ought to turn things around so that Murin proposed not to Marta but to her. But
she always concluded her musings by magnanimously giving him to Marta.

“Everyone,” she thought to herself, “will be proposing to me once I have money and then I can choose whom I wish. Maybe I’ll
take this youth,” she thought and fixed her gaze with a certain pleasure on the greenish, rude, but nevertheless attractive
face of Vitkevich who was not saying much, eating a great deal and glancing at Vershina with an insolent smile all the while.

Marta brought the bilberries with apple in a clay bowl and started to relate what she had dreamt that night. She had been
with friends at a wedding and was eating pineapple and
bliny
with honey when she found a hundred rouble note in one of the
bliny
. The money had been taken from her and she had wept. She had woken up in tears.

“You should have hid it on the sly so that no one would see,” Peredonov said angrily. “If you couldn’t hang on to the money
in your dream, what kind of lady of the house are you!”

“There’s no point in feeling sorry about that money,” Vershina said. “That’s the least of what people see in their dreams.”

“But I felt so terribly sorry about the money,” Marta said naively. “A whole hundred roubles!”

Tears started to well up in her eyes and she gave a forced laugh so that she wouldn’t start to cry. Murin fussed in his pocket,
exclaiming:

“Dear mother, Marta Stanislavovna, now don’t you go on feeling sorry, we’ll fix that right now!”

He pulled a hundred rouble note out of his wallet, laid it on the table in front of Marta, slapped his palm on it and cried:

“If you please! No one will take that away.”

Marta was on the verge of rejoicing, but then she turned a brilliant crimson and said with embarrassment:

“Ah, really, now, Vladimir Ivanovich, I just couldn’t! I won’t take it, goodness, really I can’t!”

“No, now if you please, don’t be offended,” Murin said, chuckling but not withdrawing the money. “Go ahead, it means that
your dream has come true.”

“No, really, I’m ashamed, I couldn’t take it for anything,” Marta kept making excuses while gazing at the hundred rouble note
with greedy eyes.

“Why kick up such a fuss if someone’s giving it to you,” Vitkevich said. “Here’s good luck falling right into a person’s lap,”
he said with an envious sigh.

Murin stood up in front of Marta and exclaimed in a persuasive voice:

“My dear Marta Stanislavovna,
believe me, I mean it from the bottom of my heart, take it, please! And if you can’t just accept it for nothing, then it’s
for looking after my Vanyushka. What Natalya Afanasyevna and I agreed on, that still stands, but this would be for you, for
supervising him.”

“But really, it’s so much,” Marta said indecisively.

“For the first half year,” Murin said and bowed to
Marta from the waist. “Now, don’t be offended, just take it and you can take the place of an older sister for my Vanyushka.”