Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

CHAPTER XVIII

Late at night I was sitting with the Count. As usual, we were drinking. The Count was quite drunk, I only slightly.

‘Today I was allowed accidentally to touch her waist,’ he mumbled. ‘Tomorrow, therefore, we can begin to go further.’

‘Well, and Nadia? How do things stand with Nadia?’

‘We are progressing! I’ve only just begun with her as yet. So far, we are passing through the period of conversations with the eyes. I love to gaze into her sad black eyes, brother. Something is written there that words are unable to express, that only the soul can understand. Let’s have another drink!’

‘It seems that you must please her since she has the patience to listen to you for hours at a time. You also please her papa!’

‘Her papa? Are you talking about that blockhead? Ha, ha! The simpleton suspects me of honourable intentions.’

The Count coughed and drank.

‘He thinks I’ll marry her! To say nothing of my not being able to marry, when one considers the question honestly it would be more honest in me to seduce a girl than to marry her... A life spent in perpetuity with a drunken, coughing, semi-old man... br-r-r! My wife would pine away, or else run off the following day... What noise is that?’

The Count and I jumped up... Several doors were slammed to, and almost at the same moment Olga rushed into the room. She was as white as snow, and trembled like a chord that had been struck violently. Her hair was falling loose around her. The pupils of her eyes were dilated. She was out of breath and was crumpling in her hand the front pleats of her dressing-gown.

‘Olga, what is the matter with you?’ I asked, seizing her by the hand and turning pale.

The Count ought to have been surprised at this familiar form of address, but he did not hear it. His whole person was turned into one large note of interrogation, and with open mouth and staring eyes he stood looking at Olga as if she were an apparition.

‘What has happened?’ I asked.

‘He beats me!’ Olga said, and fell sobbing on to an armchair. ‘He beats me!’

‘Who is he?’

‘My husband! I can’t live with him! I have left him!’

‘This is disgraceful!’ the Count exclaimed, and he struck the table with his fist. ‘What right has he? This is tyranny! This... the devil only knows what it is! Beating his wife? Beating her! What did he do it for?’

‘For nothing, for nothing at all,’ Olga said, wiping away her tears. ‘I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket, and the letter you sent me yesterday fell on the floor... He seized it and read it... and began to beat me... He clutched my hand and crushed it - look, there are still red marks on it - and demanded an explanation... Instead of explaining, I ran here... Can’t you defend me? He has no right to treat his wife so roughly! I’m no cook! I’m a noblewoman!’

The Count paced about the room and jabbered with his drunken, muddling tongue some sort of nonsense which when rendered into sober language was intended to mean something about ‘the status of women in Russia’.

‘This is barbarous! This is like New Zealand! Does this muzhik also think that his wife is going to cut her throat at his funeral - like savages going into the next world and taking their wives with them!’

I could not recover from my surprise... How was this sudden visit of Olga’s in a nightdress to be understood? What was I to think - what to decide? If she had been beaten, if her dignity had been wounded, why had she not run away to her father or to the housekeeper?... Lastly why not to me, who was certainly near to her? And had she really been insulted? My heart told me of the innocence of simple-minded Urbenin, and understanding the truth, it sank with the pain that the stupefied husband must have been feeling at that time. Without asking any questions, not knowing where to commence, I began to soothe Olga and offered her wine.

‘What a mistake I made! What a mistake!’ she sighed between her tears, lifting the wineglass to her lips. ‘How sanctimonious he pretended to be when he was courting me! I thought he was an angel and not a man!’

‘So you wanted him to be pleased with the letter that fell out of your pocket?’ I asked. ‘You wanted him to burst out laughing?’

‘Don’t let us talk about it!’ the Count interrupted. ‘Whatever the case, his action was dastardly all the same! That’s no way to treat women. I’ll challenge him! I’ll teach him! Olga Nikolaevna, believe me he’ll have to suffer for this!’

The Count gobbled like a young turkey cock, although he had no authority to come between husband and wife. I kept silent and did not contradict him, because I knew that taking vengeance for another man’s wife was limited to drunken ebullitions of words between four walls, and that everything about the duel would be forgotten the next day. But why was Olga silent?... I did not want to think that she would readily accept the Count’s favours. I did not wish to think that this stupid, beautiful little cat had so little sense of her own worth that she would willingly consent to the drunken Count being judge between man and wife.

‘I’ll drag him through the dirt!’ piped her new knight-errant. ‘And then I’ll box his ears! I’ll do it tomorrow!’

And she did not stop the mouth of that blackguard, who in his drunken mood was insulting a man whose only blame was that he had made a mistake and was now being duped. Urbenin had seized and pressed her hand very roughly, and this had caused her scandalous flight to the Count’s house, and now, when before her eyes this drunken and morally degenerate creature was defaming the honest name and pouring abuse on a man, who at that time must have been languishing in melancholy and uncertainty, knowing that he was deceived, she did not so much as bat an eyelid!

While the Count was venting his wrath and Olga was wiping her eyes, the manservant brought in some roast partridges. The Count put half a partridge on his guest’s plate. She shook her head negatively and then mechanically took up her knife and fork and began to eat. The partridge was followed by a large glass of wine, and soon there were no more signs of tears with the exception of red rims round her eyes and occasional deep sighs.

Soon we heard laughter... Olga laughed like a consoled child who had forgotten its injury. And the Count looking at her laughed too.

‘Do you know what I have thought of?’ he began, sitting down next to her. ‘I want to arrange private theatricals. We shall act plays in which there are good women’s parts. Eh? What do you say to that?’

They began to talk about the private theatricals. How ill this silly chatter accorded with the terror that had but lately been depicted on Olga’s face, when only an hour before she had rushed into the room, pale and weeping, with flowing hair! How cheap were those terrors, those tears!

Meanwhile time went on. The clock struck twelve. Respectable women go to bed at that time. Olga ought to have gone away long since. But the clock struck half-past twelve; it struck one, and she was still sitting there chatting with the Count.

‘It’s time to go to bed,’ I said, looking at my watch. ‘I’m off! Olga Nikolaevna, will you permit me to escort you?’

Olga looked at me and then at the Count.

‘Where am I to go?’ she murmured. ‘I can’t go to him!’

‘Yes, yes; of course, you can’t go to him,’ the Count said. ‘Who can answer for his not beating you again? No, no!’

I walked about the room. All was quiet. I paced from corner to corner and my friend and my mistress followed my steps with their eyes. I seemed to understand this quiet and these glances. There was something expectant and impatient in them. I put my hat on the table and sat down on the sofa.

‘So, sir,’ the Count mumbled and rubbed his hands impatiently. ‘So, sir... Things are like this...’

The clock struck half-past one. The Count looked quickly at the clock, frowned and began to walk about the room. I could see by the glances he cast on me that he wanted to say something, something important but ticklish and unpleasant.

‘I say, Serezha!’ he at last picked up courage, sat down next to me, and whispered in my ear. ‘Golubchek, don’t be offended... Of course, you will understand my position, and you won’t find my request strange or rude.’

‘Tell me quickly. No need to mince matters.’

‘You see how things stand... how... Go away, golubchek!

You are interfering with us..,. She will remain with me... Forgive me for sending you away, but... you will understand my impatience!’

‘All right!’

My friend was loathsome. If I had not been fastidious, perhaps I would have crushed him like a beetle, when he, shivering as if with fever, asked me to leave him alone with Urbenin’s wife. He, the debilitated anchorite, steeped through and through with spirits and disease, wanted to take the poetic ‘girl in red’ who dreamed of a dramatic death and had been nurtured by the forests and the angry lake! Surely not, she must be miles above him!

I went up to her.

‘I am going,’ I said.

She nodded her head.

‘Am I to go away? Yes?’ I asked, trying to read the truth in her lovely, blushing little face. ‘Yes?’

With the very slightest movement of her long black eyelashes she answered ‘Yes.’

‘You have considered well?’

She turned away from me, as one turns away from an annoying wind. She did not want to speak. Why should she speak? It is impossible to answer a difficult question briefly, and there was neither time nor place for long speeches.

I took up my hat and left the room without taking leave. Afterwards, Olga told me that immediately after my departure, as soon as the sound of my steps became mingled with the noise of the wind in the garden, the drunken Count was pressing her in his embrace. And she, closing her eyes and stopping up her mouth and nostrils, was scarcely able to keep her feet from a feeling of disgust. There was even a moment when she had almost torn herself away from his embraces and rushed into the lake. There were moments when she tore her hair and wept. It is not easy to sell oneself.

When I left the house and went towards the stables, I had to pass the bailiff’s house. I looked in at the window. Pëtr Egorych was seated at a table by the dim light of a smoking oil lamp that had been turned up too high. I did not see his face. It was covered by his hands. But the whole of his robust, awkward figure displayed so much sorrow, anguish and despair that it was not necessary to see the face to understand the condition of his soul. Two bottles stood before him; one was empty, the other only just begun. They were both vodka bottles. The poor devil was seeking peace not in himself, nor in other people, but in alcohol.

Five minutes later I was riding home. The darkness was terrible. The lake blustered wrathfully and seemed to be angry that I, such a sinner, who had just been the witness of a sinful deed, should dare to infringe its austere peace. I could not see the lake for the darkness. It seemed as if an unseen monster was roaring, that the very darkness which enveloped me was roaring too.

I pulled up Zorka, closed my eyes, and meditated to the roaring of the monster.

‘What if I returned at once and destroyed them?’

Terrible anger raged in my soul... All the little of goodness and honesty that remained in me after long years of a depraved life, all that corruption had left, all that I guarded and cherished, that I was proud of, was insulted, spat upon, splashed with filth!

I had known venal women before, I had bought them, studied them, but they had not had the innocent rosy cheeks and sincere blue eyes that I had seen on the May morning when I walked through the wood to the Tenevo fair... I myself, corrupt to the marrow of my bones, had forgiven, had preached tolerance of everything vicious, and I was indulgent to weakness... I was convinced that it was impossible to demand of dirt that it should not be dirt, and that one cannot blame those ducats which from the force of circumstances have fallen into the mire. But I had not known before that ducats could melt in the mire and be blended with it into a single mass. So gold too could dissolve!

A strong gust of wind blew off my hat and bore it into the surrounding darkness. In its flight my hat touched Zorka’s head. She took fright, reared on her hind legs and galloped off along the familiar road.

When I reached home I threw myself on the bed. Polycarp suggested that I should undress, and he got sworn at and called a ‘devil’ for no earthly reason.

‘Devil yourself!’ Polycarp grumbled as he went away from my bed.

‘What did you say? What did you say?’ I shouted.

‘None so deaf as those who will not hear!’

‘Oh, ho! You dare to be impudent!’ I thundered and poured out all my bile on my poor lackey. ‘Get out! Let me see no more of you, scoundrel! Out with you!’

And without waiting for my man to leave the room, I fell on the bed and began to sob like a boy. My overstrained nerves could bear no more. Powerless wrath, wounded feelings, jealousy — all found vent in one way or another.

‘The husband killed his wife!’ squalled my parrot, raising his yellow feathers.

Under the influence of this cry the thought entered my head that Urbenin might really kill his wife.

Falling asleep, I dreamed of murders. My nightmare was suffocating and painful... It appeared to me that my hands were stroking something cold, and I had only to open my eyes to see a corpse. I dreamed that Urbenin was standing at the head of my bed, looking at me with imploring eyes.