Текст книги "The Eternal Husband and Other Stories"

Автор книги: Федор Достоевский

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

He stopped at shops, bought a newspaper, called at his tailor’s and ordered some clothes. The thought of visiting the Pogoreltsevs continued to be disagreeable to him, and he did not think about them; besides, he could not go to the country: it was as if he kept expecting something here in town. He dined with pleasure, talked with the waiter and with a neighboring diner, and drank half a bottle of wine. He did not even think of the possibility of yesterday’s attack coming back; he was convinced that his illness had gone completely the very moment yesterday when, having fallen asleep so strengthless, he had jumped from his bed an hour and a half later and with such strength hurled his murderer to the floor. Toward evening, however, he felt dizzy and it was as if something like last night’s delirium in sleep began to come over him again at moments. He returned home at dusk and was almost scared of his room when he entered it. Dreadful and eerie his apartment seemed to him. He walked around it several times and even went into his kitchen, where he hardly ever went. “They heated the plates here yesterday,” came to his mind. He locked the door well and lit the candles earlier than usual. As he was locking the door, he remembered that half an hour before, passing by the caretaker’s room, he had called Mavra out and asked her: “Hadn’t Pavel Pavlovich come by while he was out?”—as if he might really have come by.

Having locked himself in carefully, he unlocked his bureau, took out the case of razors, and opened “yesterday’s” razor to have a look at it. On the white bone handle slight traces of blood remained. He put the razor back into the case and locked it up in the bureau again. He wanted to sleep; he felt that it was necessary to lie down right away—otherwise “tomorrow he won’t be good for anything.” For some reason he imagined the next day as fatal and “definitive.” But the same thoughts that had never left him for a moment all day, even outside, also crowded and throbbed in his sick head now, tirelessly and irresistibly, and he kept thinking, thinking, thinking, and it would be a long time before he fell asleep…

“If we decide that he got up to kill me inadvertently”he kept thinking and thinking, “then had the thought come to him at least once before, at least as a dream in some wicked moment?”

He decided the question strangely—that “Pavel Pavlovich had wanted to kill him, but the thought of the killing had never once occurred to the future killer.” In short: “Pavel Pavlovich had wanted to kill, but hadn’t known that he wanted to kill. It’s senseless, but it’s so,” thought Velchaninov. “He came here not to solicit a post and not for Bagautov—though he did solicit a post and call on Bagautov, and was furious when the man died; he despised Bagautov like a chip of wood. He came here for me and came with Liza…

“And did I myself expect that he… would put a knife in me?” He decided that, yes, he had expected it precisely from the very moment he had seen him in the coach following Bagautov’s coffin. “I began as if to expect something… but, naturally, not this, naturally, not that he would put a knife in me!…

“And can it be, can it be that it was all true,” he exclaimed again, suddenly raising his head from the pillow and opening his eyes, “all that this… madman told me yesterday about his love for me, when his chin trembled and he beat his breast with his fist?

“Perfectly true!” he decided, tirelessly delving deeper and analyzing. “This Quasimodo ¹⁵from T–is only too sufficiently stupid and noble to fall in love with the lover of his wife, in whom, for twenty years, he noticed nothing!He respected me for nine years, he honored my memory and remembered my ‘utterances’—Lord, and I had no idea of anything! He couldn’t have been lying yesterday! But did he love me yesterday when he talked about his love and said: ‘Let’s square accounts’? Yes, loved me from spite;that’s the strongest love…

“And it could have been, and certainly was so, that I produced a colossal impression on him in T–, precisely a colossal and a ‘delightful’ one, and it’s precisely with such a Schiller in the shape of Quasimodo that that could happen! He exaggerated me a hundredfold, because I struck him too much in his philosophical solitude… It would be curious to know, precisely what about me struck him? Really, it might have been fresh gloves and knowing how to put them on. Quasimodos love aesthetics, oh, how they do! Gloves are all too sufficient for some most noble soul, the more so for one of the ‘eternal husbands.’ The rest they’ll fill out a thousandfold and they’ll even fight for you if you want. And how highly he rates my means of seduction! Maybe it’s precisely the means of seduction that struck him most of all. And that cry of his then: ‘If even this one as well, then who can one believe in after that?’ After such a cry, one could turn into a beast!…

“Hm! He came here so that we could ‘embrace each other and weep,’ as he himself put it in the meanest way—that is, he was coming in order to put a knife in me, but thought he was coming ‘to embrace and weep’… And he brought Liza. What, then: if I had wept with him, maybe he would in fact have forgiven me, because he wanted terribly to forgive!… All this turned, at the first encounter, into drunken clowning and caricature, and into a vile, womanish howling about being offended. (The horns, he made horns over his forehead!) That’s why he came drunk, so as to speak it out, even while clowning; he couldn’t do it not drunk… And he did like clowning, oh, how he did! Oh, how glad he was when he made me kiss him! Only he didn’t know then what he would end with: embracing or killing. It came out, of course, that the best would be both together. The most natural solution!—Yes, sir, nature doesn’t like monsters and finishes them off with ‘natural solutions.’ The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings: I know it from my own experience, Pavel Pavlovich! For a monster, nature is not a tender mother, she’s a stepmother. Nature gives birth to a monster, and, instead of pitying him, executes him—and right she is. Even decent folk in our time don’t get off easily with embraces and tears of all-forgiveness, to say nothing of such as you and I, Pavel Pavlovich!

“Yes, he was stupid enough to take me to his fiancée as well—Lord! His fiancée! Only such a Quasimodo could conceive the thought of ‘resurrection into a new life’—by means of Mademoiselle Zakhlebinin’s innocence! But it’s not your fault, Pavel Pavlovich, it’s not your fault: you’re a monster, and therefore everything in you must be monstrous—both your dreams and your hopes. But, though you’re a monster, you still doubted your dream, and that’s why you required the high sanction of Velchaninov, the reverently respected. He needed Velchaninov’s approval, his confirmation that the dream was not a dream but the real thing. Out of reverent respect for me, he took me there, believing in the nobility of my feelings—believing, perhaps, that there, under a bush, we’d embrace each other and weep, in the proximity of innocence. Yes! and this ‘eternal husband’ was bound, he was obliged, finally, to punish himself definitively for everything sometime or other, and in order to punish himself, he seized the razor—inadvertently, it’s true, but even so he did it! ‘Even so he did stab him with a knife, even so he ended by stabbing him, in the governor’s presence!’ And, by the way, did he have at least some thought of that sort when he was telling me his anecdote about the best man? And was there in fact something that night when he got out of bed and stood in the middle of the room? Hm. No, he stood there as a jokethen. He got up for his own business, and when he saw that I was afraid of him, he refused to answer me for ten minutes, because he found it very pleasant that I was afraid of him… Maybe it was then that he really imagined something for the first time, as he was standing there in the dark …

“But all the same, if I hadn’t forgotten those razors on the table yesterday—maybe nothing would have happened. Is that so? Is it so? After all, he did avoid me earlier, he didn’t come for two weeks; he hid from me, pityingme! He did choose Bagautov to begin with, and not me! He did jump out of bed at night to warm the plates, thinking of creating a diversion—from the knife to loving-kindness!… He wanted to save himself and me—with warmed-up plates!…”

And for a long time yet the sick head of this former “man of the world” worked in this way, pouring from empty into void, before he calmed down. He woke up the next day with the same sick head, but with a totally newand totally unexpected horror.

This new horror came from the absolute conviction, which unexpectedly consolidated in him, that he, Velchaninov (and man of the world), today, himself, of his own free will, would end it all by going to Pavel Pavlovich—why? what for?—Of that he knew nothing and in his disgust he wanted to know nothing; he knew only that for some reason he would drag himself.

This madness—he could call it nothing else—developed, all the same, to the point of acquiring a possibly reasonable shape and a quite legitimate pretext: he still kept as if envisioning that Pavel Pavlovich would go back to his room, lock the door tightly, and—hang himself, like that cashier Marya Sysoevna told about. This yesterday’s reverie gradually turned into a senseless but irrefutable conviction in him. “Why would the fool hang himself?” he interrupted himself every moment. He remembered Liza’s words long ago… “And besides, in his place I, too, might hang myself…” it once occurred to him.

The end of it was that, instead of going to dinner, he did after all set out for Pavel Pavlovich’s. “I’ll just inquire of Marya Sysoevna,” he decided. But, before coming out to the street, he stopped suddenly under the gateway.

“Can it be, can it be,” he cried, turning crimson with shame. “Can it be that I’m trudging there in order to ‘embrace and weep’? Can it be that the whole disgrace lacks only this last senseless abomination!”

But the providence of all respectable and decent people saved him from “senseless abomination.” As soon as he reached the street, he suddenly ran into Alexander Lobov. The youth was puffing and excited.

“I was coming to see you! This friend of yours, Pavel Pavlovich, just imagine!”

“Hanged himself ?” Velchaninov muttered wildly.

“Who hanged himself? Why?” Lobov goggled his eyes.

“Never mind… just so, go on!”

“Pah, the devil, what a funny turn of thought you’ve got, though! He by no means hanged himself (why hang himself?). On the contrary—he left. I put him on the train just now and sent him off. Pah, how he drinks, let me tell you! We drank three bottles, Predposylov, too—but how he drinks, how he drinks! He sang songs on the train, remembered you, waved his hand, asked to send you his greetings. A scoundrel, don’t you think—eh?”

The young man was indeed tipsy; his flushed face, shining eyes, and poorly obedient tongue bore strong witness to that. Velchaninov guffawed at the top of his lungs:

“So they did finally end by pledging brotherhood!—ha, ha! Embraced and wept! Ah, you Schiller-poets!”

“No abuse, please. You know, he gave it up altogether there. He was there yesterday and today as well. He peached on us terribly. Nadya’s locked up—sitting in the attic. Shouts, tears, but we won’t yield! But how he drinks, let me tell you, how he drinks! And you know, he’s such mauvais ton ¹⁶—that is, not mauvais ton, but what’s the word?… And he kept remembering you, but there’s no comparison with you! After all, you are a decent man and in fact once belonged to high society, and only now have been forced to shun—on account of poverty or whatever… Devil knows, I didn’t quite understand him.”

“Ah, so he told you about me in such terms?”

“He… he—don’t be angry. Being a citizen is better than high society. I mean, in our time in Russia one doesn’t know whom to respect. You must agree that it’s a bad disease of the time, when one doesn’t know whom to respect—isn’t it true?”

“True, true, but about him?”

“Him? Whom!—ah, yes! Why did he keep saying: the fifty-year-old butruined Velchaninov? Why: butruined and not andruined! He laughs, he repeated it a thousand times. He got on the train, started a song, and wept—it’s simply disgusting; it’s even pathetic—the man’s drunk. Ah, I don’t like fools! He started throwing money to the beggars, for the repose of the soul of Lizaveta—his wife, or what?”

“Daughter.”

“What’s with your hand?”

“I cut it.”

“Never mind, it’ll go away. You know, devil take him, it’s good that he left, but I’ll bet that there, where he’s gone, he’ll get married again at once—isn’t it true?”

“But don’t you want to get married, too?”

“Me? I’m a different matter—what a one you are, really! If you’re fifty years old, then he’s certainly sixty; we must be logical here, my dear sir! And you know, formerly, long ago now, I was a pure Slavophile in my convictions, but now we’re expecting dawn from the West… Well, good-bye; it’s lucky I ran into you without going in; I won’t go in, don’t ask, I have no time!…”

And he started to dash off.

“Ah, yes, what’s the matter with me,” he suddenly came back, “he sent me to you with a letter! Here it is. Why didn’t you come to see him off?”

Velchaninov returned home and opened the envelope which was addressed to him.

There was not a single line from Pavel Pavlovich in the envelope, but it contained some other letter. Velchaninov recognized the hand. The letter was an old one, on time-yellowed paper, with faded ink, written to him some ten years earlier in Petersburg, two months after he left T–. But this letter had not gone to him; instead of it, he had received another one then; that was clear from the content of the yellowed letter. In this letter Natalia Vassilievna, bidding him farewell forever—just as in the letter he had received then—and confessing to him her love for another man, did not, however, conceal her pregnancy. On the contrary, to console him she promised to find an occasion for conveying the future child to him, assured him that from then on they would have other responsibilities, that their friendship was now sealed forever—in short, there was not much logic, but the goal was the same: that he should deliver her from his love. She even allowed him to visit T–in a year—to see the baby. God knows why she had changed her mind and sent the other letter instead of this one.

Velchaninov, as he read it, turned pale, but he also imagined Pavel Pavlovich finding this letter and reading it for the first time before the opened heirloom box of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

“He also must have gone pale as death,” he thought, chancing to notice his face in the mirror. “He must have been reading it and closing his eyes, and then suddenly opening them again, hoping the letter would turn to simple blank paper… He probably repeated the experiment three or four times!…”

XVII

THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

Almost exactly two years went by after the adventure we have described. We meet Mr. Velchaninov one beautiful summer day in a car of one of our newly opened railways. He was on his way to Odessa to join a friend, for the pleasure of it, and, along with that, on account of another, also quite agreeable, circumstance; through his friend he hoped to arrange for himself a meeting with one extremely interesting woman, with whom he had long wished to become acquainted. Without going into details, we shall limit ourselves to pointing out that he had regenerated, or, better to say, improved greatly over the last two years. Of the former hypochondria almost no traces remained. All that remained to him of various “memories” and anxieties—the consequences of illness—which had begun to beset him two years ago in Petersburg during the time of his then unsuccessful lawsuit—was some hidden shame from the awareness of his former faintheartedness. He was partially recompensed by the certainty that there would be no more of it and that no one would ever know about it. True, he had abandoned society then, had even begun to dress poorly, had hidden somewhere from everyone—and this, of course, everyonehad noticed. But he had so quickly come forth to plead guilty, and with such a newly revived and self-confident air, that “everyone” forgave at once his momentary falling away; even those of them whom he had stopped greeting, these were the first to acknowledge him and offer him their hand, and what’s more without any importunate questions—as if he had been absent all the while somewhere far away on family business, which was no one’s affair, and had only just come back. The reason for all these beneficial and sensible changes for the better was, naturally, the winning of the lawsuit. Velchaninov got only sixty thousand roubles—no great thing, granted, but a very important one for him: first of all, he felt himself at once on firm ground again—meaning morally appeased; he knew for certain now that he would not squander this last of his money “like a fool,” as he had squandered his first two fortunes, and that he would have enough for the rest of his life. “However tottering their social edifice may be, and whatever they may be trumpeting there,” he thought occasionally, lending an ear and eye to all the marvelous and incredible that was being accomplished around him and all over Russia, “whatever people and thought may be regenerating into there, still I will always at least have this fine and tasty dinner which I’m now sitting down to, and thus I’m prepared for anything.” This thought, tender to the point of voluptuousness, was gradually taking full possession of him and produced in him even a physical turnabout, not to mention a moral one: he now looked like a totally different man compared with that “marmot” we described two years ago, with whom such indecent stories were beginning to happen—he looked cheerful, bright, imposing. Even the malignant wrinkles that had begun to form around his eyes and on his forehead were almost smoothed out; his complexion even changed—it became whiter, rosier. At the present moment he was sitting in a comfortable seat in a first-class car, and a sweet thought

was hatching in his mind: at the next station there would be a fork and a new line going to the right. “If I were to leave the direct line for a moment and bear to the right, then in no more than two stops I could visit yet another lady of my acquaintance, who has just returned from abroad and is now living in—agreeable for me, but rather boring for her—provincial seclusion; and thus the possibility arises of spending my time no less interestingly than in Odessa, the more so as Odessa won’t slip away either…” But he was still hesitant and had not made a final decision; he was “waiting for a push.” Meanwhile the station was approaching; the push was also not long in coming.

At this station the train stopped for forty minutes and the passengers were offered dinner. Just at the entrance to the waiting room for first– and second-class passengers there crowded, as usual, an impatient and hurrying multitude of people, and—perhaps also as usual—a scandal took place. One lady, who got out of a second-class car and was remarkably pretty, but somehow too magnificently dressed for a traveler, almost dragged with her, in both hands, an uhlan, a very young and handsome little officer, who was trying to tear free of her grip. The young officer was very tipsy, and the lady, in all probability an older relative, would not let him go, surely for fear he would rush straight to the buffet for a drink. Meanwhile, the uhlan was jostled in the crush by a little merchant, also on a spree, and even outrageously so. This merchant had been stuck at the station for two days already, drinking and squandering money, surrounded by all sorts of comradery, and kept being late for the train to continue his journey. There was a quarrel, the officer shouted, the merchant cursed, the lady was in despair and, drawing the uhlan away from the quarrel, exclaimed to him in a pleading voice: “Mitenka! Mitenka!” The little merchant found this much too scandalous; true, everyone was laughing, but the merchant was the more upset on account of what seemed to him, for some reason, an offense to morality.

“See that—’Mitenka’!…” he said reproachfully, imitating the lady’s piping little voice. “They’re no longer ashamed even in public!”

And, staggering over to the lady, who had thrown herself down on the first chair she could find and managed to sit the uhlan down beside her, he looked them both over with contempt and drew out in a singsong voice:

“Slut, slut that you are, your skirt tail’s all tattered!”

The lady shrieked and looked around pitifully, waiting for deliverance. She was ashamed, she was afraid, and to crown it all, the officer tore from his chair and, with a yell, rushed for the merchant, but slipped and flopped back into the chair. The guffawing increased around them, while no one even thought of helping; but Velchaninov did help; he suddenly seized the little merchant by the scruff of the neck and, turning him around, shoved him some five steps away from the frightened woman. With that the scandal ended; the little merchant was greatly taken aback both by the shove and by Velchaninov’s imposing figure; he was led away at once by his comrades. The dignified physiognomy of the elegantly dressed gentleman produced an imposing impression on the jeerers as well: the laughter ceased. The lady, blushing and almost in tears, began pouring out assurances of her gratitude. The uhlan muttered: “Thanksh, thanksh!”—and made as if to offer Velchaninov his hand, but instead suddenly decided to lie down across the chairs and stretch his legs out on them.

“Mitenka!” the lady moaned reproachfully, clasping her hands.

Velchaninov was pleased both with the adventure and with its setting. The lady interested him; she was, as could be seen, a rich provincial, dressed magnificently but tastelessly, and with somewhat ridiculous manners—she precisely united in herself everything that guaranteed success to a big-city fop with certain goals regarding women. A conversation started; the lady hotly told and complained about her husband, who “suddenly disappeared somewhere from the car, and that was why it all happened, because it was eternally so, when needed, he’d disappear somewhere…”

“For a necessity…” the uhlan muttered.

“Ah, Mitenka!” she again clasped her hands.

“The husband’s going to catch it!” thought Velchaninov.

“What’s his name? I’ll go and find him,” he offered.

“Pal Palych,” the uhlan responded.

“Your husband’s name is Pavel Pavlovich?” Velchaninov asked with curiosity, and suddenly the familiar bald head thrust itself between him and the lady. Instantly he pictured the Zakhlebinins’ garden, innocent games, and the importunate bald head constantly thrusting itself between him and Nadezhda Fedoseevna.

“Here you are at last!” the wife cried out hysterically.

It was Pavel Pavlovich himself; in surprise and fear he gazed at Velchaninov, struck dumb before him as before a phantom. His stupefaction was so great that for some time he apparently understood nothing of what his insulted spouse was telling him in an irritable and quick patter. Finally he gave a start and grasped all his horror at once: his own guilt, and about Mitenka, and about this “m’sieur”—for some reason the lady referred this way to Velchaninov—“being our guardian angel and a savior, and you—you are eternally elsewhere when you should be here…”

Velchaninov suddenly burst out laughing.

“But he and I are friends, friends from childhood!” he exclaimed to the astonished lady, familiarly and patronizingly putting his right arm around the shoulders of Pavel Pavlovich, who was smiling a pale smile. “Didn’t he ever tell you about Velchaninov?”

“No, never,” the wife was slightly dumbstruck.

“But do introduce me to your wife, you perfidious friend!”

“This, Lipochka, is indeed Mr. Velchaninov, this is…” Pavel Pavlovich tried to begin and shamefully broke off. The wife turned red and flashed her eyes at him in spite, obviously for the “Lipochka.”

“And imagine not telling me you were getting married, and not inviting me to the wedding, but you, Olympiada…”

“Semyonovna,” Pavel Pavlovich prompted.

“Semyonovna,” suddenly echoed the falling-asleep uhlan.

“You must forgive him, Olympiada Semyonovna, for me, for the sake of friends meeting… He’s a good husband!”

And Velchaninov amicably slapped Pavel Pavlovich on the shoulder.

“But, darling, I only stayed behind… for a moment…” Pavel Pavlovich began to justify himself.

“And abandoned your wife to disgrace!” Lipochka picked up at once. “You’re never where you ought to be, and where you oughn’t to be, there you are…”

“Where you oughtn’t to be—there where you oughtn’t to be… where you oughtn’t to be…” the uhlan kept agreeing.

Lipochka was nearly breathless with agitation; she knew it was not nice in front of Velchaninov, and she blushed, but she could not help herself.

“Where you oughtn’t to be, you’re all too cautious, all too cautious!” escaped from her.

“Under the bed… looks for lovers… under the bed—where he oughtn’t to be… oughtn’t to be…” Mitenka, too, suddenly became terribly agitated.

But there was nothing to be done with Mitenka. Everything ended pleasantly, however; full acquaintance ensued; Pavel Pavlovich was sent for coffee and bouillon. Olympiada Semyonovna explained to Velchaninov that they were now going from O., where her husband worked, to spend two months on their estate, that it was not far away, only twenty-five miles from this station, that they had a wonderful house and garden there, that they would have guests, that they also had neighbors, and that if Alexei Ivanovich was so good as to wish to visit them “in their seclusion,” she would receive him as a guardian angel, because she could not recall without horror what would have happened if… and so on and so forth—in short, “as a guardian angel…”

“And a savior, and a savior,” the uhlan ardently insisted.

Velchaninov politely thanked her and replied that he was always ready, that he was a perfectly idle and unoccupied man, and that Olympiada Semyonovna’s invitation was only too flattering for him. After which he at once began a merry little conversation, into which he successfully inserted two or three compliments. Lipochka blushed with pleasure and, as soon as Pavel Pavlovich returned, announced to him rapturously that Alexei Ivanovich had been so good as to accept her invitation to be their guest in the country for a whole month and promised to come in a week. Pavel Pavlovich gave a lost smile and said nothing. Olympiada Semyonovna shrugged at him and raised her eyes to heaven. Finally they parted: once more gratitude, again “guardian angel,” again “Mitenka,” and Pavel Pavlovich finally took his spouse and the uhlan to put them on the train. Velchaninov lit a cigar and began to stroll along the gallery in front of the station; he knew that Pavel Pavlovich would presently come running back again to talk with him before the bell rang. And so it happened. Pavel Pavlovich immediately appeared before him with an anxious question in his eyes and on his whole physiognomy. Velchaninov laughed: he took him “amicably” by the elbow and, drawing him to the nearest bench, sat down and sat him down beside him. He kept silent himself; he wanted Pavel Pavlovich to be the first to speak.

“So you’re coming to visit us, sir?” the man babbled, approaching the matter with complete frankness.

“I just knew it! Hasn’t changed a bit!” Velchaninov burst out laughing. “But could you really,” he again slapped him on the shoulder, “could you really think seriously even for a moment that I would in fact come to visit, and for a whole month at that—ha, ha!”

Pavel Pavlovich became all aroused.

“So you—won’t come, sir!” he cried out, not concealing his joy in the least.

“I won’t, I won’t!” Velchaninov laughed smugly. However, he himself did not understand why he found it so especially funny, but the further it went, the funnier it became to him.

“Can it be… can it really be as you say, sir?” And, having said that, Pavel Pavlovich even jumped up from his seat in trembling expectation.

“But I already said I won’t come—what a queer fellow you are!”

“How then… if so, sir, how shall I tell Olympiada Semyonovna, when you don’t come in a week, after she’s been waiting, sir?”

“That’s a hard one! Tell her I broke a leg or something like that.”

“She won’t believe it, sir,” Pavel Pavlovich drew out in a plaintive little voice.

“And you’ll catch hell?” Velchaninov went on laughing. “But I notice, my poor friend, that you do tremble before your beautiful spouse—eh?”

Pavel Pavlovich tried to smile, but it did not come off. That Velchaninov had renounced his visit—that, of course, was good; but that he spoke familiarly about his wife—now, that was bad. Pavel Pavlovich cringed. Velchaninov noticed it. Meanwhile the second bell had already rung; from the faraway car came a piping little voice, anxiously summoning Pavel Pavlovich. He fidgeted on the spot, but did not run at the summons, apparently expecting something more from Velchaninov—of course, a further assurance that he would not visit them.

“What is your wife’s former name?” Velchaninov said, as if not noticing Pavel Pavlovich’s anxiety at all.

“I took her from our local vicar, sir,” the man replied, glancing at the train in bewilderment and cocking an ear.

“Ah, I understand, for her beauty.”

Pavel Pavlovich cringed again.

“And who is this Mitenka to you?”

“He’s just so, sir; our distant relative—that is, mine, sir, my late cousin’s son, Golubchikov, demoted for disorderly conduct, and now restored again; so we’ve equipped him… An unfortunate young man, sir…”

“Well, well,” thought Velchaninov, “everything’s in order—the full setup!”

“Pavel Pavlovich!” again a distant summons was heard from the car, now with quite an irritated note in the voice.