Fifty-Two Stories

“Now, now, now, please don’t pretend! I don’t like it!” said Volodya, and his face acquired an annoyed expression. “By God, just as if you’re onstage! Let’s behave like human beings.”

So that he would not get angry and leave, she began to apologize and, to please him, even forced herself to smile, and again talked about Olya and about her own wish to resolve the question of her life, to become a human being.

“Tara…ra…boomdeay…,” he sang in a low voice. “Tara…ra…boomdeay!”

And suddenly he took her by the waist. And she, not knowing herself what she was doing, put her hands on his shoulders and for a moment, as if in a daze, stared with admiration at his intelligent, mocking face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard…

“You’ve known for a long time that I love you,” she confessed and blushed painfully, feeling that her lips had even twisted convulsively from shame. “I love you. Why do you torment me?”

She shut her eyes and kissed him firmly on the lips; and for a long time, perhaps a full minute, she could not end the kiss, though she knew it was improper, that he himself might disapprove of her, or a servant might come in…

“Oh, how you torment me!” she repeated.

When, half an hour later, having obtained what he wanted, he was sitting in the dining room and eating, she knelt before him and greedily looked into his face, and he told her she looked like a little dog waiting to be thrown a piece of ham. Then he sat her on his knee and, rocking her like a child, sang:

“Tara…raboomdeay…Tara…raboomdeay!”

When he was preparing to leave, she asked him in a passionate voice:

“When? Today? Where?”

And she reached both hands out to his mouth, as if wishing to seize the answer even with her hands.

“Today is hardly convenient,” he said on reflection. “Maybe tomorrow.”

And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the convent to see Olya, but they told her Olya was somewhere reading the psalter over a dead person. From the convent she went to her father and also did not find him at home. Then she changed cabs and started going aimlessly around the streets and lanes, and went on driving like that until evening. And for some reason she kept remembering that same aunt with the tearful eyes, who didn’t know what to do with herself.

At night they again drove off in the troika and listened to the Gypsies in the suburban restaurant. And when they went past the convent again, Sofya Lvovna remembered about Olya, and she felt eerie at the thought that for the girls and women of her circle there was no solution except to keep driving around in troikas and lying, or to go into a convent to mortify the flesh…The next day there was a rendezvous, and again Sofya Lvovna rode around town alone in a cab and remembered her aunt.

A week later little Volodya abandoned her. And after that, life went on as before, just as uninteresting, dreary, and sometimes even tormenting. The colonel and little Volodya played long rounds of billiards and piquet, Rita told jokes insipidly and flatly, Sofya Lvovna kept riding around in a cab and asked her husband to give her a ride in the troika.

She stopped by the convent almost every day, bothered Olya, complaining about her unbearable sufferings, wept, and felt all the while that something impure, pathetic, and shabby had entered the cell with her, while Olya kept telling her, mechanically, in the tone of a lesson learned by rote, that it was all nothing, it would all pass, and God would forgive.

1893

THE TEACHER OF LITERATURE

I

There was a drumming of horse hooves on the timber floor: first they led the black Count Nulin¹ from the stable, then the white Giant, then his sister Maika. They were all excellent and expensive horses. Old Shelestov saddled Giant and said, turning to his daughter Masha:

“Well, Maria Godefroi,² mount up. Hopla!”

Masha Shelestova was the youngest in the family; she was already eighteen, but the family was still in the habit of considering her little, and therefore they all called her Manya or Manyusya; and after a circus came to town, which she eagerly went to, they all started calling her Maria Godefroi.

“Hopla!” she cried, mounting Giant.

Her sister Varya got on Maika, Nikitin on Count Nulin, the officers on their own horses, and the long, elegant cavalcade, mottled with white officers’ tunics and black riding habits, slowly filed out of the yard.

Nikitin noticed that, as they were mounting their horses and then riding out to the street, Manyusya for some reason paid attention only to him. She anxiously examined him and Count Nulin and said:

“Keep him on the bit all the time, Sergei Vassilyich. Don’t let him shy. He’s pretending.”