She was not feeling well. After sitting there for a very short time – about ten minutes – she made her farewell. ‘Please take me home, Aleksey Fyodorych’, she said on her way out. They walked in silence down the street, holding on to their hats; he kept behind her, trying to shield her from the wind. It was calmer in a side-street and here they walked side by side.
‘Please forgive me if I was unkind yesterday’, she began and her voice shook, as if she were about to cry. ‘It’s sheer torture! I haven’t slept all night.’
‘I had an excellent night’, Laptev replied without looking at her, ‘but that doesn’t mean I feel all right. My life is in shreds, I’m deeply unhappy after your turning me down yesterday, I feel as if I’ve taken poison. The most painful things were said yesterday, but today I don’t feel at all inhibited and can speak quite frankly. I love you more than my sister, more than my late mother. I could – and I did – live without my sister and mother, but life without you makes no sense. I just can’t…’
As usual, he had guessed her intentions. He saw that she wanted to continue yesterday’s conversation: it was only for this that she had asked him to accompany her and now she was taking him to her house. But what could she add to her refusal? Was there any more to say? Her glance, her smile, even the way she held her head and shoulders as she walked with him – everything indicated that she still did not love him, that he was a stranger to her. So what else was there for her to say?
Dr Sergey Borisych was at home. ‘Welcome! Delighted to see you, Fyodor Alekseich’, he said, getting the name wrong. ‘Delighted, absolutely delighted.’
He had never been so friendly before and Laptev concluded that the doctor already knew about the proposal – and he found this unpleasant to think about. He was sitting in the drawing-room now: it produced a strange impression, with its cheap, vulgar furniture and poor pictures. Although there were armchairs and a huge lamp with a shade, it looked unlived-in, rather like a spacious barn. Obviously, only someone like the doctor could feel at home in such a room. Another room, almost twice as big, was called ‘The Ballroom’ – here there were only chairs, as at a dancing-class. And something suspicious began to worry Laptev as he sat in the drawing-room talking to the doctor about his sister. Had Julia Sergeyevna been to see his sister Nina and then brought him here to announce that she had accepted his proposal? This was bad enough, but even worse was having a nature that was prey to such suspicions. He imagined father and daughter having lengthy deliberations yesterday evening and night, long arguments perhaps, and then agreeing that Julia Sergeyevna had behaved recklessly in refusing a rich man. Even the words spoken by parents on such occasions – ‘It’s true, you don’t love him, but on the other hand think of the good deeds you’ll be able to perform!’ – rang in his ears.
The doctor prepared to leave on his rounds. Laptev wanted to go with him but Julia Sergeyevna said, ‘Please stay, I beg you.’
She had been suffering from dreadful depression and now she was trying to reassure herself that to refuse a respectable, kind man who loved her just because he didn’t attract her, especially when this marriage provided the opportunity of changing her life, so cheerless, monotonous and idle, when her youth was passing and the future held no hope of anything brighter – to refuse him in these circumstances was insane, irresponsible and perverse, and God might even punish her for it.
Her father left the house. When his footsteps had died away she suddenly stopped in front of Laptev.
‘I spent a long time thinking it over yesterday, Aleksey Fyodorych, and I accept your proposal’, she said decisively, turning pale.
He bent down and kissed her hand. Awkwardly, she kissed his head with cold lips. He felt that the essential thing, her love, was absent from this amorous declaration, which none the less stated what was superfluous. He felt like shouting, running away, setting off for Moscow immediately. But she was standing close to him and she seemed so beautiful that he was suddenly gripped with desire. He saw that it was too late now for further discussion, embraced her passionately, pressed her to his chest, muttered something, addressed her intimately, kissed her neck, cheek and head…
She retreated to the window, frightened by these caresses. Now they both regretted their declarations. ‘Why did this happen?’ they asked themselves in their embarrassment.
‘If only you knew how unhappy I feel!’ she said, wringing her hands.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, going up to her and wringing his hands too. ‘My dear, tell me what’s wrong, for God’s sake! But only the truth. I beg you, only the truth!’
‘Don’t take any notice’, she said, forcing a smile. ‘I promise to be a faithful, devoted wife. Come over this evening.’
Later, as he sat reading the historical novel to his sister, he remembered all this and felt insulted that his admirable, pure and generous feelings had elicited such a trivial response. He was not loved, but his proposal had been accepted, probably only because he was rich. In other words, they valued that part of him he valued least. The pure, devout Julia had never given any thought to money – he granted her that – but she didn’t love him, did she? No, she did not, and obviously there had been some sort of calculation here – even though it was somewhat vague and not wholly intentional perhaps, it was calculation none the less. The doctor’s house, with its vulgar décor, repelled him and the doctor himself resembled some fat, pathetic miser, rather like the buffoon Gaspard in The Bells of Corneville.6 The very name Julia sounded common. He imagined Julia and himself during the wedding, essentially complete strangers and without a scrap of feeling on her part, as if it were an arranged marriage. And now his only consolation (as banal as the marriage itself ) was that he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last and that thousands of men had made similar marriages and that, in time, when she knew him better, Julia might perhaps come to love him.
‘Romeo and Julia!’ he said, closing the book and laughing. ‘I’m Romeo, Nina. You may congratulate me. I proposed to Julia Belavin today.’
Nina Fyodorovna first thought that he was joking, then she believed him and burst into tears. The news didn’t please her. ‘All right, congratulations’, she said. ‘But why so sudden?’
‘It’s not, it’s been going on since March, only you never notice a thing. I’ve been in love since March, when I first met her here in your room.’
‘But I thought you’d marry someone we know, from Moscow’, Nina Fyodorovna said after a brief silence. ‘The girls from our little circle are not so complicated. But the main thing, Aleksey, is for you to be happy, that’s what’s important. My Grigory Nikolaich never loved me, and you can see how we live – it’s an open secret. Of course, any woman would love you for your kindness and intellect. But Julia went to a boarding-school, she’s out of the top drawer. Intellect and kindness don’t mean much to her. She’s young. As for you, Aleksey, you’re neither young nor handsome.’
To soften these last words she stroked his cheek and said, ‘You’re not handsome, but you’re a wonderful person.’
She was so excited her cheeks flushed slightly and she talked enthusiastically about whether it would be correct to bless Aleksey with an icon. All said and done, she was his elder sister and was like a mother to him. And she kept trying to convince her despondent brother that the wedding should be celebrated correctly, cheerfully and with great ceremony, so that people didn’t start criticizing.
Then the husband-to-be started calling on the Belavins three or four times a day and he was no longer able to take Sasha’s place reading the historical novel. Julia received him in her own two rooms, away from the drawing-room and her father’s study, and he liked them very much. There were dark walls and a full icon-case in one corner; and there was a smell of fine perfume and lamp oil. She lived in the remotest rooms, her bed and dressing-table were surrounded by screens and her book-case doors were curtained inside with a green material. She had carpets, so that she couldn’t be heard walking about, and all this led
him to believe that hers was a secretive nature, that she loved a quiet, peaceful, enclosed life. Legally, she was only a minor in that house. She had no money of her own: during their walks she was sometimes embarrassed at not having a single copeck on her. Her father gave her a little money for dresses and books, not more than a hundred roubles a year. And the doctor himself had hardly any money, despite his first-class practice: every evening he played cards at the club and always lost. Besides that, he bought houses on mortgage through a mutual credit society and rented them out. His tenants were always behind with their payments, but he was confident that the property deals were highly profitable. He had mortgaged his own house, where he lived with his daughter, and had bought a plot of waste ground with the money. He was already building a large, two-storey house there, with the intention of mortgaging it.
Laptev now seemed to be living in some kind of haze, as if replaced by his double, and he was doing many things he would never have attempted before. Three times he accompanied the doctor to the club, had supper with him and volunteered money for the house-building. He even visited Panaurov in his other flat. One day Panaurov invited him to dinner and, without thinking, Laptev accepted. He was greeted by a lady of about thirty-five, tall and thin, slightly greying and with black eyebrows. She was obviously not Russian. She had white powder blotches on her face and a sickly smile, and she shook his hand brusquely, making the bracelets jingle on her white arm. Laptev thought that she smiled that way to hide the fact she was unhappy from others and from herself. He saw two little girls there too, five and three years old, who looked like Sasha. For dinner they had milk soup, cold veal and carrots, and then chocolate. It was all sickly-sweet and not very tasty, but on the table were gleaming gold forks, bottles of soya sauce and cayenne pepper, an exceptionally ornate sauceboat and a golden pepper pot.
Only after he had finished his soup did Laptev realize the mistake he had made in coming here for dinner. The lady was embarrassed and kept smiling and showing him her teeth the whole time. Panaurov offered a scientific explanation of falling in love and its origins.
‘Here we are dealing with an electrical phenomenon’, he said in French, addressing the lady. ‘Everyone’s skin has microscopic glands with currents running through them. If you meet someone whose currents are parallel to yours – there’s love for you!’
Back home, when his sister asked where he had been, Laptev felt awkward and didn’t answer.
Right up to the wedding he had felt in a false position. With every day his love for Julia grew – she seemed ethereal, sublime. All the same, she didn’t return this love: basically, he was buying her, she was selling herself. Sometimes, after much reflection, he simply grew desperate and wondered whether he should run away from it all. Night after night he didn’t sleep, all he did was think of meeting that lady in Moscow after the wedding – that lady he had called a ‘personage’ in letters to friends. And he wondered how his father and brother, both difficult characters, would react to his marriage and to Julia. He was afraid his father might say something rude to Julia at the first meeting. And his brother Fyodor had been acting very strangely lately. In his lengthy letters he wrote about the importance of health, about the influence of illness on one’s state of mind, about the nature of religion, but not one word about Moscow and business. These letters irritated Laptev and he thought that his brother’s character had taken a turn for the worse.
The wedding was in September. The actual ceremony was held after morning service at the Church of St Peter and St Paul and that same day the couple left for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife (she wore a black dress and train and now resembled a grown woman instead of a girl) were saying goodbye to Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid’s whole face twisted, but not one tear flowed from her dry eyes.
‘If I should die, God forbid’, she said, ‘take care of my little girls.’
‘Oh, I promise!’ Julia Sergeyevna replied, her lips and eyelids twitching nervously too.
‘I’ll come and see you in October’, Laptev said, deeply moved. ‘Get better now, my dearest.’
They had a railway compartment to themselves. Both felt sad and embarrassed. She sat in one corner without taking her hat off, pretending to be dozing, while he lay on the couchette opposite, troubled by various thoughts: about his father, about the ‘personage’, about whether Julia would like his Moscow flat. As he glanced at his wife who didn’t love him he gloomily asked himself ‘How did all this happen?’
V
In Moscow the Laptevs ran a wholesale haberdashery business, selling fringes, ribbons, braid, knitting items, buttons and so on. The gross receipts amounted to two million roubles a year. What the net profit was no one knew except the old man. The sons and assistants put it at about three hundred thousand and said that it could have been a hundred thousand more if the old man hadn’t ‘frittered profits away’ by giving credit indiscriminately. Over the past ten years they had accumulated nearly a million worthless bills of exchange alone, and when the matter was discussed the senior assistant would produce a crafty wink and use language that many couldn’t understand: ‘It’s the psychological aftermath of the age.’
The main business was carried on in the city’s commercial quarter, in a building called the warehouse. This was entered from a perpetually gloomy yard that smelt of matting, where hoofs of drayhorses clattered over asphalt. A very modest looking, iron-bound door led from this yard into a room whose walls, brown from the damp, were covered in charcoal scribbles. This room was lit by a narrow, iron-grilled window. To the left was another room, a little larger and cleaner, with a cast-iron stove and two tables, but with a prison-like window too. This was the office and from it a narrow stone staircase led up to the first floor, where the main business was carried on. This was a fairly large room but, because of the perpetual twilight, low ceiling and lack of space caused by crates, packages and people rushing about, it struck newcomers as just as unprepossessing as the two rooms down below. Up on this floor, and on the office shelves too, goods lay in stacks, bales and cardboard boxes. They were all displayed any old how, with no attempt at order or creating a nice show. If it hadn’t been for the crimson threads, tassels and pieces of fringe sticking out of paper-wrapped parcels here and there, no one could have guessed, at first glance, what kind of business was being carried on here. Looking at those crumpled paper parcels and boxes it was hard to believe that millions of roubles were spent on these trifles and that fifty men – excluding buyers – were busy in that warehouse every day.
When Laptev appeared at the warehouse at noon, the day after arriving in Moscow, men were packing goods and making such a racket with the crates no one in the first room or office heard him come in. A postman he knew was going downstairs with a bundle of letters in his hand – he was frowning at the noise and didn’t notice him either. The first person to welcome him upstairs was his brother Fyodor, who was so like him people thought that they were twins. This similarity kept reminding Laptev of his appearance and now, seeing before him a short man with flushed cheeks, thinning on top, with lean thighs of poor pedigree, so dull and unbusinesslike, he asked himself: ‘Surely I don’t look like that?’
‘I’m so glad to see you!’ Fyodor exclaimed, exchanging kisses with his brother and firmly shaking his hand. ‘I’ve been waiting impatiently every day, my dear brother. When you wrote that you were getting married I was racked with curiosity. I’ve really missed you, old man. Just think, we haven’t seen each other for about six months. Well now, what’s new? How’s Nina? Is she very bad?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s God’s will,’ Fyodor sighed. ‘Well, how’s the wife? I dare say she’s a beauty. I love her already. After all, she’s the same as a little sister to me. We’ll spoil her, the two of us.’
Just then Laptev spotted the long familiar, broad, bent back of his father, Fyodor Stepanych. The old man was sitting on a stool by the counter, talking to a customer.
‘Papa, God has sent us joy today!’
Fyodor cried. ‘My brother’s arrived!’
Fyodor Stepanych senior was tall and so very powerfully built that despite his wrinkles and eighty years he still looked like a strong, healthy man. He spoke in a deep, heavy, booming voice that came thunder ing from his broad chest as if from a barrel. He shaved his beard, sported an army-style trimmed moustache and smoked cigars. Since he was always feeling warm, he wore a loose-fitting canvas jacket in the warehouse and at home, at all seasons. Recently he’d had a cataract removed, his sight was poor and he no longer took an active part in the business, merely chatting to people and drinking tea with jam.
Laptev bent down and kissed his hand, then his lips.
‘It’s been such a long time since we saw each other, my dear sir’, the old man said. ‘Yes, such a long time. Well, I suppose I must congratulate you on your marriage? All right. Congratulations.’
He offered his lips to receive a kiss. Laptev bent down and kissed them.
‘Well now, have you brought the young lady with you?’ the old man asked and without waiting for an answer turned to the customer and said, ‘ “I hereby inform you, dear Papa, that I’m marrying Miss So-and-So.” Yes. But asking for Papa’s blessing and advice isn’t in the rules. They just do what they like now. I was over forty when I married and I fell down at my father’s feet and asked his advice. They don’t do that sort of thing these days.’
The old man was delighted to see his son, but thought it improper to display any affection or show that he was pleased. His voice, his manner of speaking and that ‘young lady’ expression put Laptev in the bad mood which invariably came over him in that warehouse. Every little detail here reminded him of the past, when he had been whipped and given plain, lenten food. He knew that boys were still whipped and punched on the nose until it bled, and that when these boys grew up they would do the punching. Only five minutes in that warehouse, so it seemed, was enough for him to expect abuse or a punch on the nose at any moment.