The Petty Demon (35 page)

The fire was first seen from the street after the entire room was in flames. The fire spread quickly. The people were saved
but the building burned down.

The following day the only talk in the town was about the scandal over the geisha the evening before and the fire. Bengalsky
kept his word and told no one that it had been a boy dressed up as the geisha.

Changing clothes that same night at the Rutilovs and once more becoming the simple, barefooted boy, Sasha had run off home,
crawled through the window and calmly fallen asleep. Even in a town that was seething with gossip and where everyone knew
everything about everyone else, Sasha’s nocturnal escapade thus remained a secret. For a long while, but of course, not forever.

E
KATERINA
I
VANOVNA
P
YLNIKOVA,
Sasha’s aunt and guardian, received two letters at once concerning Sasha: from the headmaster and from Kokovkina. These letters
alarmed her terribly. In the midst of the wet
autumn season she dropped all her work and hastily set out from the village for our town. Sasha gave his aunt a joyous welcome—he
loved her. She had come bearing ill-will towards Sasha in her heart. But he flung himself so joyously around her neck and
covered her hands with so many kisses that she couldn’t adopt a stern tone right at the beginning.

“Dear Auntie, how kind you are that you’ve come!” Sasha said and gazed joyfully at her full, rosy face with the kindly dimples
on her cheeks and with her sternly businesslike brown eyes.

“You just hang on a moment with your rejoicing, I’m still going to take you in hand,” the aunt said with an uncertain voice.

“That doesn’t matter,” Sasha said carefreely. “Take me in hand for whatever the reason, but still you’ve made me terribly
happy.”

“Terribly!” the aunt repeated in a dissatisfied voice. “Well, the things I’ve found out about have made me terribly unhappy.”

Sasha raised his eyebrows and looked at his aunt with innocent uncomprehending eyes. He protested:

“There’s a teacher here, Peredonov, who’s invented the idea that I’m supposedly a girl, he kept pestering me, and then afterwards
the headmaster bawled me out because I had become acquainted with the young Rutilov ladies. Just as though I were going there
to rob them. What concern is it of other people?”

“Still the utter babe that he was,” the aunt was thinking in perplexity. “Or has he already been corrupted to such a degree
that he can deceive me with his face?”

She locked herself up with Kokovkina and chatted for a long while with her. She was sad when she emerged. Then she went to
the headmaster. She returned utterly upset. His aunt’s weighty reproaches rained down on Sasha. Sasha wept, but he vehemently
tried to assure her that they were all fabrications, that he hadn’t ever indulged in any loose behavior with the young ladies.
His aunt didn’t believe him. She scolded and scolded him,
started to weep, threatened to whip Sasha, to whip him painfully, that very moment, that very day, only first she was going
to see these girls. Sasha sobbed and continued to try and assure her that nothing bad whatsoever had happened, that it was
all terribly exaggerated and invented.

Angry and tear-stained, the aunt set out for the Rutilovs.

Ekaterina Ivanovna was in turmoil as she waited in the Rutilovs’ sitting room. She wanted to descend immediately on the sisters
with the most cruel reproaches, and she already had her words of anger and reproof prepared—but their peaceful, attractive
sitting room intimidated her, despite her wishes, and calm thoughts began to pacify her annoyance. The needlework which someone
had begun and then discarded there, the keepsakes, the etchings on the walls, the carefully tended plants by the windows,
no dust anywhere, and moreover a kind of special atmosphere of domesticity which was something that didn’t exist in disorderly
homes and was always appreciated by housewives—now could this really have been the setting for the seduction of her modest
boy by the thoughtful mistresses of this kind of room? All those assumptions which she had read and heard about Sasha seemed
somehow terribly exaggerated, and, on the other hand, Sasha’s explanations of what he had been doing at the home of the Rutilov
ladies—reading, chatting, joking, laughing, playing cards and trying to organize a house, play, which Olga Vasilyevna wouldn’t
allow,—seemed so like the truth.

But the three sisters were thoroughly frightened. They still didn’t know whether Sasha’s costume was a secret. But after all,
there were three of them, and they all supported one another That made them more courageous. All three of them gathered in
Lyudmila’s room and conferred in a whisper. Valeriya said:

“We have to go out to her, it’s not polite. She’s waiting.”

“It doesn’t matter, let her cool off a little,” Darya said carefreely. “Otherwise she’ll vent her anger on us.”

All the sisters perfumed themselves with the sweetly moist scent of clematis—and they emerged calm, cheerful, attractive,
well dressed, as always, and filled the sitting room with their lovable babble, affability and cheerfulness. Ekaterina Ivanovna
was immediately enchanted with their darling and seemly appearance. “Some libertines they’ve found,” she thought with annoyance
of the pedagogues at the gymnasium. But then she had the thought that perhaps they were only adopting a modest appearance.
She determined not to give in to their charms.

“Excuse me, ladies, I must have a serious discussion with you,” she said, trying to lend a dry business-like tone to her voice.

The sisters sat her down and babbled on cheerfully.

“Which of you?” … Ekaterina Ivanovna began uncertainly.

Lyudmila said cheerfully and with the kind of expression as though she, the polite hostess, were helping a guest out of a
difficulty:

“I was the one who spent most time with your nephew. It turned out that he and I shared many of the same views and tastes.”

“He is a darling boy, your nephew,” Darya said, as though certain that her praise would make their guest feel overjoyed.

“Truly, he is a dear and so amusing,” Lyudmila said.

Ekaterina Ivanovna felt increasingly awkward. She suddenly understood that she had no meaningful reasons for reproach. That
began to make her angry. And Lyudmila’s last words afforded her the opportunity to express her annoyance. She began angrily:

“It might be amusing to you, but for him …”

But Darya interrupted her and said in a sympathetic voice:

“Ah, now we see that these stupid fabrications of Peredonov have reached you. But you know, he’s quite mad. The headmaster
won’t let him into the gymnasium. They’re only waiting for the psychiatrist to make the examination and then he’ll be dismissed
from the gymnasium.”

“But, I dare say,” Ekaterina Ivanovna interrupted in her turn, growing more and more irritated, “I am not interested in that
teacher, but in my nephew. I heard, you will please forgive me, that you are perverting him.”

And having flung this decisive word at the sisters in the heat of the moment, Ekaterina Ivanovna immediately realized that
she had gone too far. Exchanging among themselves a look of perplexity and indignity that was so well performed that not only
Ekaterina Ivanovna would have been deceived, the sisters blushed and exclaimed all at once:

“That’s nice!”

“Terrible!”

“That’s news!”

“Madame,” Darya said coldly, “Your expressions are ill-chosen. Before uttering rude words, you ought to find out how appropriate
they are.”

“Alas, it’s quite understandable!” Lyudmila began animatedly with the look of a darling girl who had been offended but who
forgave the offense. “After all he’s no stranger for you. Of course, all these silly rumors couldn’t help but upset you. Unrelated
as we were, we still felt sorry for him because we had been nice to him. But everyone in our city would make a crime out of
anything. If only you knew what terrible, terrible people there are here!”

“Terrible people!” Valeriya repeated softly in her sonorous, fragile voice and trembled all over, just as though she had touched
something unclean.

“You ought to ask him,” Darya said. “Take a look at him. After all he’s terribly a child. Perhaps you’ve become accustomed
to his naiveté, but for others it’s even more obvious that he’s not a perverted boy, not in the least.”

The sisters lied so confidently and calmly that it was impossible not to believe them. Indeed, a falsehood often seems more
like the truth than the truth itself. Almost always. Whereas the truth, of course, doesn’t seem like the truth.

“Of course it is true that he was here too frequently,” Darya said. “But we won’t let him cross the threshold any more if
you wish it so.”

“And I’ll go this very day to Khripach,” said Lyudmila. “What has he gone and fabricated? Does he really believe in such an
absurdity?”

“No, it seems that he himself doesn’t believe it,” Ekaterina Ivanovna admitted. “Only he says that ugly rumors are circulating.”

“Well, there, you see!” Lyudmila exclaimed joyfully. “Of course he doesn’t believe it himself. What’s all the fuss about?”

Lyudmila’s cheerful voice was seducing Ekaterina Ivanovna. She thought:

“What actually happened? The headmaster did say, after all, that he didn’t believe any of it.”

The sisters went on for a long while vying with one another as they chirped away, trying to convince Ekaterina Ivanovna of
the absolute innocence of their acquaintanceship with Sasha. For greater authenticity they were about to tell in extreme detail
precisely when and what they did with Sasha, but in the midst of this recitation they soon digressed: they were all such innocent
simple things that there was no way of remembering every one of them. And, finally, Ekaterina Ivanovna quite believed that
her Sasha and the dear Rutilov girls were the innocent victims of silly slander.

Taking her leave, Ekaterina Ivanovna exchanged affectionate kisses with the sisters and said to them:

“You are darling, simple girls. At first I thought—forgive me for the rudeness—that you were hussies.”

The sisters laughed cheerfully. Lyudmila said:

“No, we’re only cheerful girls with sharp little tongues and that’s why the other geese around here have no liking for us.”

Returning from the Rutilovs, the aunt said nothing to Sasha. He was frightened and embarrassed as he greeted her and kept
looking at her closely and cautiously. The aunt went to see Kokovkina. They talked for a long while and finally the aunt decided:

“I’ll go and see the headmaster once more.”

On that very day Lyudmila set out to see Khripach. She sat for a while with Varvara Nikolaevna in the sitting room, then she
announced that she had business with Nikolai Vlasyevich.

An animated conversation took place in Khripach’s study—not for the reason that the two actually had a great deal to say to
each other, but rather because both loved to talk. They inundated each other with their rapid talk: Khripach with his dry
crackling quick speech; Lyudmila with her sonorous, tender babbling. Her semi-false story about her relations with Sasha Pylnikov
washed smoothly over Khripach with the irresistible persuasiveness of falsehood. Her main motives had been, of course, sympathy
towards the boy who had been insulted by such vulgar suspicion, and a desire to take the place of Sasha’s absent family. And,
finally, he himself was such a marvellous, cheerful and simple-hearted boy. Lyudmila even began to weep and the quick little
tears ran down her rosy cheeks with such marvellous beauty and then onto her lips that were smiling with embarrassment.

“True, I did love him as a brother. He’s such a marvellous and kind boy, he appreciates affection so much and he used to kiss
my hands.”

“Of course, that is very nice on your part,” Khripach said, somewhat embarrassed. “It does honor to your kind feelings, but
it’s pointless for you to take so much to heart the simple fact that I considered it my duty to inform the boy’s relatives
in regard to the rumors that had reached me.”

Without listening to him, Lyudmila continued to babble, switching now to a tone of mild rebuke:

“Tell me, please, what’s bad about the fact that we took pity on a boy
who was being attacked by that vulgar insane Peredonov of yours, and when will he be removed from our town anyway! You yourself
must see that this Pylnikov of yours is still a complete child, well really—a complete child!”

She clasped her small beautiful hands together, made a tinkling noise with her fine gold bracelets, laughed tenderly as though
she were crying, pulled out a handkerchief to wipe her tears away—and a tender scent wafted over Khripach. Suddenly Khripach
felt like saying that she was “delightful, like a heavenly angel”
^*
and that this entire woeful incident “was not worth a single moment of her dear sorrow.”* But he restrained himself.

And Lyudmila’s tender rapid babbling purled on and on, and the chimerical construct of Peredonov’s falsehood dispersed in
smoke. One only had to compare: the insane, vulgar, filthy Peredonov—and the cheerful, radiant, well-dressed, fragrant Lyudmilochka.
Whether Lyudmila was telling the complete truth or fibbing, it made no difference to Khripach, but he felt that if he were
not to believe Lyudmilochka, if he were to argue with her, allow any after-effects—if nothing more than an exacted promise
from Pylnikov—it would have meant that he was putting his foot right into it and would bring shame on himself throughout the
entire pedagogical district. All the more so because it was tied up with the business of Peredonov whom everyone, of course,
considered to be out of his mind. Khripach, smiling politely, said to Lyudmila:

“I am very sorry that this has upset you so much. Not for a single moment did I allow myself to have any evil thoughts whatsoever
in regard to your acquaintance with Pylnikov. I prize highly those kind and dear motives which inspired your actions, and
not for a single moment did I regard the rumors circulating about the town and reaching me as anything other than stupid and
insane slander which afforded me profound indignation. I was obliged to inform Mrs. Pylnikova, all the more so because even
more distorted reports might have reached her, but I did not intend to upset you in any way and I did not think that Mrs.
Pylnikova would address her reproaches to you.”

“Well, we’ve come to a peaceful arrangement with Mrs. Pylnikova,” Lyudmila said cheerfully. “Only don’t you take it out on
Sasha because of us. If our home is so dangerous for students, then we won’t admit him, if that’s what you wish.”

“You are very kind to him,” Khripach said uncertainly. “We can’t have anything against the fact that in his free time, with
his aunt’s permission, he visits his acquaintances. It is far from our intention to turn student lodgings into places of some
form of incarceration. In any event, until the business with Peredonov is resolved, it would be better if Pylnikov stayed
at home.”