Fifty-Two Stories

LADIES

FYODOR PETROVICH, DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC EDUCATION of N——sky Province, who considered himself a fair and magnanimous man, was once meeting with the teacher Vremensky in his chancellery.

“No, Mr. Vremensky,” he was saying, “your dismissal is unavoidable. With such a voice you cannot go on working as a teacher. How did you lose it?”

“I was sweaty and drank cold beer…,” the teacher wheezed.

“What a pity! A man works for fourteen years, and suddenly such a calamity! Devil knows, to go and ruin your career for such a trifling thing. What do you intend to do now?”

The teacher did not reply.

“Do you have a family?” asked the director.

“A wife and two children, Your Excellency…,” the teacher wheezed.

Silence ensued. The director got up from the desk and paced from corner to corner in agitation.

“I have no idea what to do with you!” he said. “You cannot be a teacher, you haven’t reached pension age…to abandon you to the mercy of fate, to the four winds, is somehow awkward. You’re one of our people, you’ve worked for fourteen years, which means it’s our duty to help you…But how? What can I do for you? Put yourself in my place: what can I do for you?”

Silence ensued. The director paced and kept thinking, and Vremensky, crushed by his grief, sat on the edge of the chair and also thought. Suddenly the director brightened up and even snapped his fingers.

“I’m surprised I didn’t think of it sooner!” he began speaking quickly. “Listen, here’s what I can offer you…Next week the clerk at our orphanage is going to retire. If you like, you can take his post! There you are!”

Vremensky, who had not expected such a favor, also brightened up.

“Excellent!” said the director. “Write an application today…”

Having dismissed Vremensky, Fyodor Petrovich felt relieved and even pleased: the stooping figure of the wheezing pedagogue was no longer sticking up in front of him, and it was pleasant to realize that in offering Vremensky the vacant post he had acted fairly and conscientiously, as a kind, perfectly decent man. But this good mood did not last long. When he came home and sat down to dinner, his wife, Nastasya Ivanovna, suddenly remembered:

“Ah, yes, I almost forgot! Yesterday Nina Sergeevna came to see me and solicited for a young man. They say there’s a vacancy opening up in the orphanage…”

“Yes, but that post has already been promised to someone else,” the director said and frowned. “And you know my rule: I never make appointments through connections.”

“I know, but for Nina Sergeevna I suppose you could make an exception. She loves us like her own, and we have yet to do anything good for her. So don’t even think of refusing her, Fedya. With your caprices you’ll offend both her and me.”

“Who is she recommending?”

“Polzukhin.”

“What Polzukhin? The one who played Chatsky at the New Year assembly?¹ That fop? Not for anything!”

The director stopped eating.

“Not for anything!” he repeated. “God forbid!”

“Why not?”

“You see, my dear, if a young man doesn’t act directly, but through women, it means he’s trash! Why doesn’t he come to me himself?”

After dinner the director lay down on the sofa in his study and began to read the newspapers and letters he had received.

“Dear Fyodor Petrovich,” wrote the mayor’s wife, “you once said I was a reader of hearts and a knower of human nature. Now you can test that in practice. One of these days a young man will come to you to solicit the post of a clerk in our orphanage, a certain K. N. Polzukhin, whom I know to be an excellent young man. He is very likeable. Once you concern yourself with him, you will discover…,” etc.

“Not for anything!” the director said. “God forbid!”

After that not a day went by without the director receiving letters recommending Polzukhin. One fine morning Polzukhin himself appeared, a young man, portly, with a clean-shaven jockey’s face, in a new two-piece black suit…

“For matters of business I receive in the office, not here,” the director said drily, having heard out his request.

“Forgive me, Your Excellency, but our mutual acquaintances advised me to come precisely here.”

“Hm!…,” the director grunted, staring with hatred at the man’s sharp-toed shoes. “As far as I know,” he said, “your father is wealthy and you are not a pauper: why do you need to ask for this post? The salary is paltry!”

“It’s not for the salary, but just…After all, it’s government service…”

“Well, sir…It seems to me you’ll be bored with this position after a month and will quit, and meanwhile there are candidates for whom the post would be a life’s career…Poor people for whom…”

“I won’t be bored, Your Excellency,” Polzukhin interrupted. “My word of honor, I’ll do my best!”

The director blew up.

“Listen,” he asked, smiling contemptuously, “why is it you didn’t turn directly to me, but found it necessary to trouble the ladies first?”

“I didn’t know you would find that disagreeable,” Polzukhin replied and became embarrassed. “But, Your Excellency, if you attach no importance to letters of recommendation, I can supply you with an attestation…”

He took a paper from his pocket and handed it to the director. Beneath the attestation, written in bureaucratic style and script, was the signature of the governor. Everything suggested that the governor had signed it without reading it, just to get rid of some importunate lady.

“Nothing to be done, I bow down…I obey…,” said the director, having read the attestation, and he sighed. “Submit your application tomorrow…Nothing to be done.”

When Polzukhin left, the director gave himself up entirely to the feeling of loathing.

“Trash!” he hissed, pacing from corner to corner. “So he got what he wanted, worthless lickspittle! Vermin! Women’s pet! Vile creature!”

The director spat loudly at the door through which Polzukhin had left, then suddenly became embarrassed, because a lady was just coming into his study, the wife of the town treasurer…

“Only a moment, a moment…,” the lady began. “Sit yourself down, my friend, and listen to me carefully…They say you have a vacancy…Tomorrow or even today a young man will come to see you, a certain Polzukhin…”

The lady went on chirping, and the director gazed at her with dull, bleary eyes, like a man who is about to fall into a faint, gazed and smiled out of politeness.

The next day, receiving Vremensky in his office, the director took a long time before venturing to tell him the truth. He hemmed and hawed, became confused, could not find where to begin, what to say. He would have liked to apologize to the teacher, to tell him the whole truth, but his tongue, like a drunk man’s, would not obey him, his ears burned, and he suddenly felt hurt and vexed at having to play such an absurd role—in his own office, before his subordinates. He suddenly pounded the table, jumped up, and shouted angrily:

“I have no post for you! None, none! Leave me alone! Don’t torment me! Let me be, finally, do me a favor!”

And he walked out of the office.

1886