Fifty-Two Stories

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.”

And either because her Giant was great friends with Count Nulin, or it came about by chance, she rode next to Nikitin all the time, as she had yesterday and the day before. And he looked at her small, shapely body, seated on the proud white animal, at her fine profile, her top hat, which did not suit her and made her look older than she was, looked with joy, with tenderness, with rapture, listened to her, understood little, and thought:

“On my word of honor, I swear to God, I won’t be timid, I’ll propose to her today…”

It was past six in the evening—that time when the scent of white acacia and lilacs is so intense that it seems the air and the trees themselves swoon from it. Music was already playing in the town garden. The horses drummed resoundingly on the pavement; on all sides there was the sound of laughter, talk, the slamming of gates. Passing soldiers saluted the officers, schoolboys greeted Nikitin; and the promenaders, who were hurrying to the garden to listen to the music, were all obviously very pleased to see the cavalcade. And how warm it was, how soft the clouds looked, scattered in disorder across the sky, how meek and homey the shadows of the poplars and acacias—shadows that stretched all the way across the wide street and covered the houses on the other side up to the balconies and second floors!

They rode out of town and went at a trot down the high road. Here there was no scent of acacias and lilacs, no sound of music; instead there was the smell of the fields, the green growth of young rye and wheat, the squealing of gophers, the cawing of rooks. It was green everywhere you looked, with dark melon patches here and there and far to the left, by the cemetery, the white strip of a fading apple orchard.

They rode past the slaughterhouses, then past the brewery, overtook a crowd of military musicians hurrying to a park outside town.

“Polyansky has a very good horse, I don’t dispute it,” Manyusya said to Nikitin, indicating with her eyes the officer who was riding beside Varya. “But it’s flawed. That white blotch on its left leg is totally out of place, and look how it tosses its head. There’s no way to break it now, it will go on tossing its head till it drops dead.”

Manyusya was as passionate about horses as her father. She suffered when she saw someone with a fine horse, and was glad when she found defects in other people’s horses. Nikitin understood nothing about horses, and for him it was decidedly all the same to hold a horse by the reins or by the bit, to ride at a trot or a gallop; he only felt that his posture was unnatural, strained, and therefore officers who knew how to seat a horse must be more pleasing to Manyusya than he was. And he felt jealous of those officers.

As they rode past the park, someone suggested they stop and drink some seltzer water. So they did. The only trees in the park were oaks; they had begun to leaf out only recently, so that for now, through the young foliage, the whole park could be seen, with its bandstand, tables, swings, and with all its crows’ nests, which looked like big hats. The horsemen and their ladies dismounted by one of the tables and ordered seltzer water. Some acquaintances who were strolling in the park came up to them. Among others there was the army doctor in high boots and the choirmaster, who was waiting for his musicians. The doctor must have taken Nikitin for a student, because he asked:

“Are you here on vacation?”

“No, I live here permanently,” Nikitin replied. “I teach in the high school.”

“Really?” the doctor was surprised. “So young and already a teacher?”

“Why young? I’m twenty-six…Thank God.”

“You have a beard and moustache, but all the same you look no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. So youthful!”

“What swinishness!” thought Nikitin. “This one, too, considers me a milksop!”

He disliked it very much when someone turned the conversation to his youth, especially in the presence of women or schoolboys. Since coming to this town and taking up his post, he had begun to hate his youthfulness. The schoolboys were not afraid of him, the old men called him a youngster, women much preferred dancing with him to listening to his long discourses. And he would have given a lot to age by ten years or so.

From the park they rode further on, to the Shelestovs’ farm. There they stopped at the gate, sent for the steward’s wife Praskovya, and asked for some fresh milk. No one tasted the milk; they all looked at each other, laughed, and rode home. On their way back, music was already playing in the park; the sun had hidden behind the cemetery, and half the sky was crimson with sunset.

Manyusya again rode beside Nikitin. He would have liked to talk about how passionately he loved her, but he was afraid that the officers and Varya would hear him and kept silent. Manyusya was also silent, and he sensed what kept her silent and why she rode beside him, and was so happy that the earth, the sky, the lights of the town, the black silhouette of the brewery—all merged in his eyes into something very good and affectionate, and it seemed to him that his Count Nulin was riding on air and wanted to climb up into the crimson sky.

They came home. On the table in the garden the samovar was already boiling, and old Shelestov was sitting at one end of the table with his friends, the officials of the circuit court, and criticizing something as usual.

“That’s boorishness!” he said. “Boorishness and nothing but! Yes, sirs, boorishness!”

Since Nikitin fell in love with Manyusya, he had liked everything at the Shelestovs’: the house, the garden by the house, the evening tea, the wicker chairs, the old nanny, and even the word “boorishness,” which the old man loved to pronounce all the time. The only things he did not like were the abundance of dogs and cats and the Egyptian doves that moaned mournfully in a big cage on the terrace. There were so many yard dogs and house dogs that in the course of his acquaintance with the Shelestovs he had learned to recognize only two: Mushka and Som. Mushka was a small, mangy dog with a shaggy muzzle, wicked and spoiled. She hated Nikitin. Each time she saw him, she cocked her head to one side, bared her teeth, and went “grrr…nya-nya-nya-nya…grrr…”

Then she would get under his chair. When he tried to chase her out from under his chair, she would dissolve into shrill barking, and the owners would say:

“Don’t be afraid. She doesn’t bite. She’s a good dog.”

Som was a huge black dog with long legs and a tail as stiff as a stick. During dinner and tea, he usually walked silently under the table and beat his tail against the boots and table legs. He was a kindly, stupid dog, but Nikitin could not stand him, because he had the habit of putting his muzzle on the diners’ knees and slobbering on their trousers. More than once Nikitin tried to hit him on his big forehead with a knife handle, gave him flicks on the nose, yelled at him, complained, but nothing saved his trousers from the spots.

After the promenade on horseback, the tea, preserves, rusks and butter seemed very tasty. They all drank the first glass with great appetite and in silence, but before the second they began to argue. The arguments at tea and at dinner were started each time by Varya. She was already twenty-three, good-looking, prettier than Manyusya, was considered the most intelligent and educated one in the house, and behaved importantly, sternly, as befitted an older daughter who had taken the place in the house of the late mother. By right as hostess she came before the guests in a smock, called the officers by their last names, looked at Manyusya as a little girl, and talked to her in the tone of a headmistress. She called herself an old maid—meaning she was sure she would marry.

Every conversation, even about the weather, she unfailingly turned into an argument. It was some sort of passion with her—to catch everyone at their words, to expose their contradictions, to pick on phrases. You would start telling her something, and she would already be peering intently into your face, and would suddenly interrupt: “Excuse me, excuse me, Petrov, but two days ago you said just the opposite!”

Or else she would smile mockingly and say: “However, I notice you’re beginning to preach the principles of the Third Department.³ My congratulations.”

If you said something witty or produced a quip, you would immediately hear her voice: “That’s old hat!” or “That’s banal!” If an officer joked, she would make a contemptuous grimace and say: “An arrrmy joke!”

And she would bring out that “grrr” so impressively that Mushka never failed to respond from under the chair: “Grrr…nya-nya-nya…”

This time the argument over tea began with Nikitin talking about school examinations.

“Excuse me, Sergei Vassilyich,” Varya interrupted him. “Here you’re telling us it’s difficult for the students. But whose fault is that, may I ask? For instance, you assigned your students a composition on the theme ‘Pushkin as Psychologist.’ First of all, you shouldn’t assign such difficult topics, and second, what kind of psychologist is Pushkin? Well, Shchedrin⁴ or, let’s say, Dostoevsky—that’s another matter, but Pushkin is a great poet and nothing more.”

“Shchedrin is one thing, and Pushkin is another,” Nikitin replied sullenly.

“I know, you schoolteachers don’t recognize Shchedrin, but that’s not the point. Tell me, what kind of psychologist is Pushkin?”

“So he’s not a psychologist? If you like, I’ll give you examples.”

And Nikitin recited several passages from Onegin, then from Boris Godunov.⁵

“I see no psychology here,” Varya sighed. “A psychologist is someone who describes the twists of the human soul, but this is just beautiful verse and nothing more.”

“I know what kind of psychology you want!” Nikitin was offended. “You want someone to saw my finger with a dull saw and me to scream at the top of my lungs—that’s what you call psychology.”

“Banal! However, you still haven’t proven it to me: what makes Pushkin a psychologist?”

When Nikitin had to dispute what he found commonplace, narrow-minded, or something of that sort, he usually jumped up, clutched his head with both hands, and started groaning and rushing up and down. And now he did the same: he jumped up, clutched his head, and walked groaning around the table, then sat down further off.

The officers took his side. Staff-Captain Polyansky started assuring Varya that Pushkin really was a psychologist, and to prove it produced two verses from Lermontov;⁶ Lieutenant Gernet said that if Pushkin were not a psychologist, they would not have set up a monument to him in Moscow.

“That’s boorishness!” came from the other end of the table. “As I said to the governor: that, Your Excellency, is boorishness!”

“I won’t argue any more!” cried Nikitin. “Of his kingdom there shall be no end!⁷ Basta! Ah, get away, you vile dog!” he shouted at Som, who put his head and paw on his knees.

“Grrr…nya-nya-nya…” came from under the chair.

“Admit you’re wrong!” shouted Varya. “Admit it!”

But some young ladies came calling, and the argument stopped by itself. They all went to the reception room. Varya sat down at the grand piano and began to play dances. First they danced a waltz, then a polka, then a quadrille with a grand rond through all the rooms led by Staff-Captain Polyansky, then they danced another waltz.

During the dancing, the old men sat in the reception room, smoked, and watched the young people. Among them was Shebaldin, director of the municipal credit society, known for his love of literature and the theater arts. He was the founder of the local “Music and Drama Circle,” and took part in performances himself, for some reason playing only funny lackeys or reciting “The Sinful Woman”⁸ in singsong. In town they called him a mummy, because he was tall, very lean, sinewy, and always had a solemn expression on his face and dull, fixed eyes. He loved the theater arts so sincerely that he shaved his moustache and beard, and that made him look still more like a mummy.

After the grand rond, he came up to Nikitin hesitantly, somehow sideways, coughed, and said:

“I had the pleasure of being present at tea during the argument. I fully share your opinion. You and I are like-minded, and I would be very pleased to talk with you. Have you read Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy?”⁹

“No, I haven’t.”

Shebaldin was horrified and waved his hands as if he had burned his fingers, and, saying nothing, backed away from Nikitin. Shebaldin’s figure, his question, and his astonishment seemed ridiculous to Nikitin, but all the same he thought:

“In fact it’s embarrassing. I’m a teacher of literature, and I still haven’t read Lessing. I must read him.”

Before supper everyone, young and old, sat down to play “fate.” They took two decks of cards: one was dealt out equally among them, the other was placed facedown on the table.

“Whoever holds this card,” old Shelestov solemnly began, lifting the top card from the second deck, “is fated to go right now to the nursery and kiss the nanny.”

The pleasure of kissing the nanny fell to Shebaldin. They all surrounded him, flocked to the nursery, and, laughing and clapping their hands, made him kiss the nanny. There was noise, shouting…

“Not so passionately!” Shelestov shouted, weeping with laughter. “Not so passionately!”

Nikitin’s fate was to confess them all. He sat on a chair in the middle of the reception room. They brought a shawl and covered him head and all. The first to come for confession was Varya.

“I know your sins,” Nikitin began, looking at her stern profile in the darkness. “Tell me, my lady, why on earth do you go strolling with Polyansky every day? Oh, not in vain, ’tis not in vain, that she with a hussar doth remain.”¹⁰

“That’s banal,” said Varya and she left.

Then big, motionless eyes gleamed under the shawl, a dear profile outlined itself in the darkness, and there was the scent of something cherished, long familiar, which reminded Nikitin of Manyusya’s room.

“Maria Godefroi,” he said and did not recognize his own voice, so tender and soft it was, “what are your sins?”

Manyusya narrowed her eyes and showed him the tip of her tongue, then burst out laughing and left. A moment later she was standing in the middle of the reception room, clapping her hands and calling out:

“Supper, supper, supper!”

And they all flocked to the dining room.

At supper Varya argued again, this time with her father. Polyansky ate heartily, drank red wine, and told Nikitin how once in wintertime, during the war, he stood all night up to his knees in a swamp; the enemy was so close that they were not allowed to talk or smoke; it was a cold, dark night, a piercing wind was blowing. Nikitin listened and glanced sidelong at Manyusya. She was gazing fixedly at him, not blinking, as if deep in thought or lost in reverie…For him it was both pleasant and agonizing.

“Why is she looking at me like that?” he agonized. “It’s embarrassing. People may notice. Ah, she’s still so young, so naïve!”

The guests began to disperse at midnight. When Nikitin went out the gate, a window on the first floor banged open and Manyusya appeared.

“Sergei Vassilyich,” she called.

“What are your orders?”

“The thing is…,” Manyusya said, obviously trying to think up what to say. “The thing is…Polyansky has promised to come one of these days with his photography and take a picture of us all. We’ll have to get together.”

“All right.”

Manyusya disappeared, the window banged shut, and at once someone in the house started playing the piano.

“What a house!” Nikitin thought as he crossed the street. “A house where only Egyptian doves moan, and then only because they don’t know how else to express their joy!”

But the Shelestovs were not the only ones who lived merrily. Nikitin had not gone two hundred paces before he heard the sounds of a piano in another house. He went on a little further and saw a peasant in a gateway playing a balalaika. In the garden an orchestra struck up a potpourri of Russian songs…

Nikitin lived half a mile from the Shelestovs, in an eight-room apartment he rented for three hundred roubles a year together with his colleague, the teacher of geography and history, Ippolit Ippolitych. This Ippolit Ippolitych, an older man, with a red beard, pug-nosed, with a coarse and uncultivated face like a workman’s, but good-natured, was sitting at his desk when Nikitin came home, correcting students’ maps. He considered the drawing of maps the most necessary and important thing in geography, and in history the knowledge of chronology. He spent whole nights correcting his students’ maps with a blue pencil, or putting together chronological tables.

“What splendid weather today!” Nikitin said, going into his room. “I’m amazed that you can sit inside like this.”

Ippolit Ippolitych was a taciturn man; he either was silent, or said only what had long been known to everyone. Now he made this reply:

“Yes, fine weather. It’s May now, soon it will be real summer. Summer isn’t the same as winter. In winter we have to light the stoves, but in summer it’s warm without the stoves. In summer you open the windows at night and it’s still warm, but in winter—double-paned windows, and it’s still cold.”

Nikitin sat by the desk for no more than a minute and became bored.

“Good night!” he said, getting up and yawning. “I was about to tell you something romantic concerning myself, but you’re—geography! Someone starts talking to you about love, and you immediately say: ‘What year was the battle of Kalka?’ To hell with you with your battles and your Chukotsky Noses!”¹¹

“Why are you angry?”

“It’s annoying!”

And, annoyed that he still had not proposed to Manyusya and that he now had no one to talk with about his love, he went to his study and lay down on the sofa. The study was dark and quiet. As he lay there and looked into the darkness, Nikitin began for some reason to think about how, in two or three years, he would go to Petersburg for something, how Manyusya would accompany him to the station and weep; in Petersburg he would receive a long letter from her, in which she would beg him to come home quickly. And he would write to her…His letter would begin: “My dearest rat…”

“Precisely, my dearest rat,” he said and laughed.

It was uncomfortable for him lying there. He put his hands behind his head and lifted his left leg onto the back of the sofa. Then it was comfortable. Meanwhile the window became noticeably pale, sleepy roosters started squawking in the yard. Nikitin went on thinking of how he would come back from Petersburg, how Manyusya would meet him at the station, cry out with joy, and throw herself on his neck; or, better still, he would pull a trick: he would come home at night on the quiet, the cook would open the door, he would tiptoe into the bedroom, silently undress, and—plop into bed! She would wake up and—oh, joy!

The air turned completely pale. There was no longer any study or window. On the porch of the brewery, the same one they rode past that day, Manyusya was sitting and saying something. Then she took Nikitin under the arm and went with him to the park. There he saw the oaks and the crows’ nests that looked like hats. One of the nests shook, Shebaldin looked down from it and shouted: “You haven’t read Lessing!”

Nikitin shuddered all over and opened his eyes. In front of the sofa stood Ippolit Ippolitych, his head thrown back, tying his necktie.

“Get up, it’s time for work,” he said. “And you shouldn’t sleep in your clothes. It’s bad for the clothes. You should sleep in your own bed, undressed…”

And, as usual, he began speaking at length and with pauses about something that had long been known to everyone.

Nikitin’s first lesson was in Russian language for the second-year students. When he entered the classroom at exactly nine o’clock, there were two big letters written in chalk on the blackboard: M. S. They probably meant Masha Shelestov.

“They’ve already sniffed it out, the rascals…,” thought Nikitin. “How do they know everything?”

The second lesson in literature was for the fifth-year students. Here, too, M. S. was written on the blackboard, and when he finished the lesson and was leaving the classroom, he was followed by a cry, as if from a theater gallery:

“Hurrah! Shelestova!!”

Sleeping in his clothes had given him a slight headache and left his body feeling weary and lazy. The students, who were waiting every day for the break before examinations, did nothing, languished, became mischievous out of boredom. Nikitin also languished, did not notice the mischief, and kept going to the window. He could see the street, brightly lit by the sun. Above the houses a transparent blue sky, birds, and far away, beyond the green gardens and the houses, a vast, endless distance with bluish groves and the smoke of a racing train…

Now two officers in white tunics came walking down the street in the shade of the acacias, brandishing their whips. Now a group of Jews with gray beards and visored caps drove by in a wagon. A governess strolled with the headmaster’s granddaughter…Som ran somewhere with two yard dogs…Now Varya came along, in a simple gray dress and red stockings, holding The Messenger of Europe in her hand.¹² She must have visited the town library…

And the lessons would not end soon—only at three o’clock! After the lessons he had to go, not home and not to the Shelestovs’, but to Wolf’s for a lesson. This Wolf, a rich Jew who had embraced Lutheranism, did not send his children to school, but invited schoolteachers to them and paid five roubles per lesson…

“Boring, boring, boring!”

At three o’clock he went to Wolf’s and sat it out there through what seemed like a whole eternity. He left them at five o’clock, and after six he already had to go to school for a faculty meeting—to set up oral examinations for the fourth- and sixth-year students!

When, late in the evening, he walked from school to the Shelestovs’, his heart was pounding and his face was burning. A week ago and a month ago, each time he had intended to propose, he had prepared a whole speech with a preface and a conclusion, but this time he had not prepared a single word, everything was confused in his head, and he knew only that today he would certainly propose to her and that to wait any longer was absolutely impossible.

“I’ll invite her to the garden,” he reflected, “stroll a little, and propose…”

There was not a soul in the front hall; he went into the reception room, then the drawing room…There was no one there either. Varya could be heard arguing with someone upstairs, on the first floor, and the hired seamstress clicking her scissors in the children’s room.

There was a little room in the house that bore three epithets: small, pass-through, and dark. In it stood a big old cupboard with medicines, gunpowder, and other hunting accessories. From there a narrow wooden stairway, on which the cats always slept, led to the first floor. Here there were doors: one to the children’s room, the other to the drawing room. When Nikitin came in to go upstairs, the door to the children’s room opened and made such a bang that the stairs and the cupboard shook; Manyusya ran in wearing a dark dress, with a length of blue fabric in her hands, and, not noticing Nikitin, darted for the stairs.

“Wait…” Nikitin stopped her. “Good evening, Godefroi…Allow me…”

He was breathless, he did not know what to say; with one hand he held her by the hand, with the other by the blue fabric. She was either frightened or surprised and looked at him with big eyes.

“Allow me…,” Nikitin went on, afraid she might leave. “I must tell you something…Only…it’s awkward here. I can’t, I’m not able…Understand, Godefroi, I just can’t…that’s all…”

The blue fabric fell to the floor, and Nikitin took Manyusya by the other hand. She turned pale, moved her lips, then backed away from Nikitin and ended up in the corner between the wall and the cupboard.

“My word of honor, I assure you…,” he said softly. “Manyusya, my word of honor…”

She threw her head back, and he kissed her on the lips, and, to make the kiss last longer, he took her by the cheeks with his fingers; and it somehow turned out that he himself ended up in the corner between the cupboard and the wall, and she put her arms around his neck and pressed her head to his chin.

Then they ran out to the garden.

The Shelestovs’ garden was big, a good ten acres. In it grew a couple of dozen old maples and lindens, there was one spruce, the rest were all fruit trees: cherries, apples, pears, horse chestnuts, silvery olives…There were also many flowers.

Nikitin and Manyusya silently ran along the footpaths, laughed, occasionally asked each other disjointed questions, which they did not answer, while a half-moon shone over the garden, and on the ground, from the dark grass, dimly lit by this half-moon, sleepy tulips and irises grew upwards, as if also asking for a declaration of love.

When Nikitin and Manyusya returned to the house, the officers and young ladies were all there, dancing a mazurka. Again Polyansky led the grand rond through all the rooms, again after dancing they played “fate.” Before supper, when the guests went from the reception room to the dining room, Manyusya, remaining alone with Nikitin, pressed herself to him and said:

“You talk with Papa and Varya yourself. I’m embarrassed…”

After supper he talked with the old man. Having heard him out, Shelestov reflected and said:

“I’m very grateful to you for the honor you are showing me and my daughter, but allow me to speak with you as a friend. I’ll speak not as a father, but as a gentleman to a gentleman. Tell me, please, why do you wish to marry so early? Only peasants marry early, but with them, of course, it’s boorishness, but what about you? What is the pleasure of putting yourself in fetters at such a young age?”

“I’m not all that young!” Nikitin was offended. “I’m twenty-six years old.”

“Papa, the farrier’s here!” Varya shouted from the other room.

And the conversation ended. Varya, Manyusya, and Polyansky went to see Nikitin home. When they came to his gate, Varya said:

“Why is it your mysterious Mitropolit Mitropolitych never shows himself anywhere? Let him come to see us.”

The mysterious Ippolit Ippolitych was sitting on his bed and taking off his trousers when Nikitin came to his room.

“Don’t go to bed, my dear friend!” Nikitin said breathlessly. “Wait, don’t go to bed!”

Ippolit Ippolitych quickly put on his trousers and asked worriedly:

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m getting married!”

Nikitin sat down beside his colleague and, looking at him in surprise, as if he were surprised at himself, said:

“Imagine, I’m getting married! To Masha Shelestova! I proposed today!”

“Really? She seems like a nice girl. Only very young.”

“Yes, young!” Nikitin sighed and shrugged worriedly. “Very, very young!”

“She was my student in school. I know her. She wasn’t bad in geography, but in history—very poor. And she was inattentive in class.”

For some reason Nikitin suddenly felt sorry for his colleague and wanted to say something gentle and comforting to him.

“My dear friend, why don’t you get married?” he asked. “Why not marry Varya, for instance—eh, Ippolit Ippolitych? She’s a wonderful, superlative girl! She loves to argue, true, but her heart…such a heart! She just asked about you. Marry her, my dear friend! Eh?”

He knew perfectly well that Varya would never marry this dull, pug-nosed man, but he still went on persuading him to marry her. Why?

“Marriage is a serious step,” Ippolit Ippolitych said on reflection. “One must discuss everything, ponder, it’s not done just like that. Good sense never hurts, especially in marriage, when a man ceases to be a bachelor and starts a new life.”

And he went on talking about things that had long been known to everyone. Nikitin stopped listening to him, said good night, and went to his room. He quickly undressed and quickly went to bed, the sooner to start thinking about his happiness, about Manyusya, about the future, smiled, and suddenly remembered that he had not yet read Lessing.

“I’ll have to read him…,” he thought. “Though why should I read him? To hell with him!”

And, wearied by his happiness, he immediately fell asleep and went on smiling till morning.

He dreamed about the drumming of horse hooves on the timber floor; dreamed of how they had first led the black Count Nulin from the stable, then the white Giant, then his sister Maika…

II

“The church was very crowded and noisy, and someone even cried out once, and the archpriest, who was marrying Manyusya and me, looked at the crowd through his spectacles and said sternly:

“ ‘Do not walk around in the church and do not make noise, but stand quietly and pray. You must have the fear of God.’

“My best men were two of my colleagues, and Manya’s were Staff-Captain Polyansky and Lieutenant Gernet. The bishop’s choir sang magnificently. The sputtering of the candles, the brilliance, the finery, the officers, the multitude of happy, pleased faces, and Manya’s especially ethereal look, and the whole situation in general, and the words of the marriage prayers moved me to tears, filled me with festive feeling. I thought: how my life has blossomed, how poetically beautiful it has come to be recently! Two years ago I was still a student, I lived in cheap furnished rooms on Neglinny Passage, with no money, no family, and, as it seemed then, no future. Yet now I am a high school teacher in one of the best provincial capitals, I am secure, loved, pampered. It is for me, I thought, that this crowd has now gathered, for me that three chandeliers are burning, the protodeacon is bellowing, the singers are outdoing themselves, and for me that she is so young, elegant, and joyful—this young being who will soon be called my wife. I remembered our first meetings, our rides out of town, my declaration of love, and the weather which, as if on purpose, had been wondrously fine all summer; and that happiness which, when I lived on Neglinny Passage, had seemed possible to me only in novels and stories, I now experienced in reality, as if I were taking it in my hands.

“After the wedding everyone crowded in disorder around Manya and me and expressed their sincere pleasure, congratulated us, and wished us happiness. The brigadier general, an old man of about seventy, congratulated only Manyusya and said in an old man’s rasping voice, so loudly that it resounded all through the church:

“ ‘I hope, my dear, that even after the wedding you will remain the same rose you are now.’

“The officers, the headmaster, and all the teachers smiled politely, and I also felt on my face a pleasant, insincere smile. Dearest Ippolit Ippolitych, the teacher of history and geography, who always says what everyone already knows, firmly shook my hand and said with feeling:

“ ‘Up to now you weren’t married and lived alone, but now you’re married and will live as two.’

“From the church we drove to the two-story unstuccoed house I received as a dowry. Besides this house, Manya comes with twenty thousand in cash and also some vacant lot in Melitonovo with a watch house, where they say there are lots of chickens and ducks that are untended and have gone wild. On coming back from church, I stretched out, sprawled on the Turkish divan in my new study, and smoked: it felt soft, comfortable, and cozy, like never before in my life, and just then the guests shouted ‘Hurrah’ and in the front room a bad orchestra played flourishes and all sorts of nonsense. Varya, Manya’s sister, came running into the study with a wineglass in her hand and with some sort of strange, tense expression, as if her mouth was full of water; it looked as if she wanted to run on further, but suddenly she started laughing and sobbing, and the wineglass fell to the floor with a clank. We took her under the arms and led her out.

“ ‘Nobody can understand!’ she muttered afterwards in the farthest room, lying on the wet-nurse’s bed. ‘Nobody, nobody! My God, nobody can understand!’

“But everybody understood perfectly well that she was four years older than her sister Manya and was still unmarried, and that she wept not out of envy, but out of a sad awareness that her time was passing and might already have passed. When they were dancing the quadrille, she was already in the reception room, with a tearful, heavily powdered face, and I saw how Staff-Captain Polyansky held a dish of ice cream out for her, and she ate it with a little spoon…

“It is already past five in the morning. I sat down with my diary in order to describe my full and varied happiness, and I thought I would write some six pages and read them to Manya tomorrow, but, strangely enough, everything got confused in my head, became vague, dreamlike, and the only thing I remember with clarity is that episode with Varya, and I want to write: poor Varya! I could just sit here and write: poor Varya! What’s more, the trees are rustling: it’s going to rain; the crows are cawing, and for some reason my Manya, who just fell asleep, has a sad face.”

Then for a long time Nikitin did not touch his diary. In early August there were repeat examinations and entrance examinations, and after the Dormition classes started.¹³ He usually went to work by eight o’clock, and by nine he had already begun to pine for Manya and his new house and kept glancing at his watch. In the lower grades he would make one of the boys dictate, and while the youngsters were writing, he would sit on the windowsill with his eyes shut, dreaming; whether he dreamed of the future or remembered the past, it all came out equally beautiful, like in a fairy tale. In the higher grades they read Gogol or Pushkin’s prose aloud, and that made him drowsy; people, trees, fields, saddle horses rose up in his imagination, and he said with a sigh, as if admiring the author:

“How good!”

During the noon recess Manya sent him lunch wrapped in a snow-white napkin, and he ate it slowly, with pauses, to prolong the pleasure, and Ippolit Ippolitych, who usually lunched on nothing but a roll, watched him with respect and envy and said something well-known, like:

“Without food people cannot exist.”

From school Nikitin went to give private lessons, and when, after five o’clock, he was finally on his way home, he felt both joy and anxiety, as if he had not been home for a whole year. He ran up the stairs, out of breath, found Manya, embraced her, kissed her, swore that he loved her, could not live without her, assured her that he had missed her terribly, and in fear asked her if she was well and why her face was so cheerless. Then they both had supper. After supper he lay on the divan in his study and smoked, and she sat beside him and talked in a low voice.

The happiest days for him now were Sundays and holidays, when he stayed home from morning till evening. On those days he partook of a naïve but extraordinarily pleasant life, which reminded him of pastoral idylls. He ceaselessly observed how his sensible and positive Manya was making their nest, and, wishing to show that he was not superfluous in the house, he did something useless—for instance, he rolled the charabanc out of the shed and examined it all over. With three cows Manyusya started a veritable dairy farm, and had many jugs of milk and pots of sour cream in the cellar and cold pantry, and all of it she kept for making butter. Occasionally, as a joke, Nikitin would ask for a glass of milk; she would get frightened, because it was against the rules, but, laughing, he would hug her and say:

“Now, now, I was joking, my treasure! Joking!”

Or else he would chuckle at her punctiliousness, when, for instance, she would find a forgotten scrap of sausage or cheese in the cupboard, hard as a rock, and say pompously:

“They will eat it in the kitchen.”

He would point out to her that such a small scrap was good only for a mousetrap, and she would start insisting hotly that men understand nothing about housekeeping, and that servants are surprised at nothing, even if you send a hundred pounds of snacks to them in the kitchen, and he would agree and embrace her rapturously. What was right in her words seemed to him extraordinary, amazing; and what went against his convictions was, in his opinion, naïve and touching.

Occasionally a philosophical mood came over him, and he would start reflecting on an abstract subject, and she would listen and look into his face with curiosity.

“I’m endlessly happy with you, my joy,” he would say, playing with her fingers or undoing her braid and braiding it again. “But I don’t look upon this happiness of mine as something that has fallen upon me accidentally, as if from the sky. This happiness is a wholly natural phenomenon, consistent, logically correct. I believe that man is the creator of his own happiness, and now I am taking precisely what I myself have created. Yes, I say it without affectation, I created this happiness and I own it by right. You know my past. Orphanhood, poverty, unhappy childhood, dreary youth—all that struggle was the path I was laying down to happiness…”

In October the school suffered a heavy loss: Ippolit Ippolitych fell ill with erysipelas of the head and died. For the two last days before his death he was unconscious and delirious, but even in delirium he said only what was known to everyone:

“The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea…Horses eat oats and hay…”

On the day of his burial there were no classes at the school. Colleagues and students carried the lid and the coffin, and the school choir sang “Holy God” all the way to the cemetery.¹⁴ In the procession there were three priests, two deacons, the entire boys’ school, and the archbishop’s choir in festive caftans. And, looking at the solemn funeral, passersby crossed themselves and said:

“God grant everyone such a death.”

On coming home from the cemetery, the deeply moved Nikitin found his diary in his desk and wrote:

“Just lowered Ippolit Ippolitovich Ryzhitsky into his grave.

“Rest in peace, humble laborer! Manya, Varya, and all the women who attended the funeral wept sincerely, maybe because they knew that this uninteresting, downtrodden man had never been loved by a single woman. I wanted to say some warm words at my colleague’s grave, but I had been warned that it might displease the headmaster, because he did not like the deceased. Since my wedding, it seems this is the first day that my soul has not felt light…”

After that there were no special events for the whole school year.

Winter was mild, without frosts, with wet snow; on the eve of Theophany,¹⁵ for instance, the wind howled pitifully all night as in autumn and the roofs were dripping, and in the morning, during the blessing of the water, the police did not allow anyone to go to the river, because, they said, the ice was swollen and dark. But, despite the bad weather, Nikitin’s life was as happy as in summer. One extra diversion was even added: he learned to play whist. Only one thing occasionally upset and angered him, and seemed to keep him from being fully happy: this was the cats and dogs that came with the dowry. The rooms always smelled like a zoo, especially in the morning, and nothing could stifle that smell; the cats often fought with the dogs. Wicked Mushka was fed ten times a day, and she still did not acknowledge Nikitin and growled at him:

“Grrr…nya-nya-nya…”

Once during the Great Lent,¹⁶ at midnight, he was coming home from the club, where he had been playing cards. Rain was falling, it was dark and muddy. Nikitin had an unpleasant aftertaste in his soul and could not understand why: was it because he had lost twelve roubles at the club, or because, as they were settling accounts, one of his partners said that Nikitin was rolling in money, apparently alluding to the dowry? He was not sorry about the twelve roubles, and there was nothing offensive in his partner’s words, but all the same it was unpleasant. He did not even feel like going home.

“Pah, how disagreeble!” he said, stopping by a streetlight.

It occurred to him that he was not sorry about the twelve roubles, because they had come to him gratis. If he were a worker, he would know the value of every kopeck and would not have been indifferent to a gain or a loss. And his whole happiness, he went on reasoning, had come to him gratis, for nothing, and was in fact a luxury for him, like medicine for a healthy man; if he, like the vast majority of people, were weighed down by anxiety over a crust of bread, were struggling for existence, if his back and chest ached from work, then supper, a warm, cozy apartment and family happiness would be a necessity, a reward, and the adornment of his life; while now it all had a strange, indefinite significance.

“Pah, how disagreeable!” he repeated, understanding perfectly well that this reasoning itself was already a bad sign.

When he got home, Manya was in bed. She was breathing evenly, smiling, and apparently sleeping with great pleasure. Beside her lay a white cat curled up and purring. While Nikitin was lighting a candle and smoking, Manya woke up and greedily drank a glass of water.

“I ate a lot of marmalade,” she said and laughed. “Were you with our people?” she asked after a pause.

“No, I wasn’t.”

Nikitin already knew that Staff-Captain Polyansky, whom Varya had recently been counting on very much, was being transferred to one of the western provinces and was paying farewell visits, and therefore it was dreary at his father-in-law’s.

“Varya came by this evening,” Manya said, sitting up. “She didn’t say anything, but you could see by her face how hard it is for her, poor thing. I can’t stand Polyansky. Fat, flabby, when he walks or dances, his cheeks flop…Not my ideal. But still I considered him a decent man.”

“Even now I consider him a decent man.”

“And why did he act so badly with Varya?”

“Why badly?” Nikitin asked, beginning to be annoyed by the white cat, who stretched and arched his back. “As far as I know he made no proposals and gave no promises.”

“Then why did he come to the house so often? If you have no intention to marry, don’t come.”

Nikitin put out the candle and lay down. But he had no wish either to sleep or to lie down. It seemed to him that his head was huge and empty, like a barn, and that new, somehow special thoughts were wandering through it in the form of long shadows. He thought that, apart from the soft light of an icon lamp, smiling upon his quiet family happiness, apart from this little world in which he lived so peacefully and sweetly, along with this cat, there exists another world…And he suddenly wanted passionately, desperately, to be in that other world, so that he himself could work somewhere in a factory or a big workshop, speak from a podium, write, publish, make a noise, wear himself out, suffer…He wanted something that would absorb him to the point of self-forgetfulness, of indifference to his personal happiness, the sensations of which are so monotonous. And suddenly there rose up in his imagination, as if alive, the clean-shaven Shebaldin, who said with horror:

“You haven’t even read Lessing! You’re so far behind! My God, how low you’ve sunk!”

Manya again drank some water. He looked at her neck, her full shoulders and breast, and remembered what the brigadier general once said in church: a rose.

“A rose,” he murmured and laughed.

In reply the sleepy Mushka growled under the bed:

“Grrr…nya-nya-nya…”

Heavy spite, like a cold hammer, stirred in his soul, and he wanted to say something rude to Manya and even to jump up and hit her. His heart began to pound.

“You mean,” he asked, restraining himself, “that if I visited your house, I necessarily had to marry you?”

“Of course. You understand that perfectly well.”

“Nice.”

And a moment later he said again:

“Nice.”

To hold his tongue and quiet his heart, Nikitin went to his study and lay down on the divan without a pillow, then lay on the floor, on the carpet.

“What nonsense!” He tried to calm himself. “You’re a pedagogue, you work at a most noble profession…What need do you have of some other world? That’s all rubbish!”

But at once he told himself confidently that he was not a pedagogue at all, but a functionary, just as giftless and faceless as the Czech who taught Greek; he had never had any calling to be a teacher, was unfamiliar with pedagogy and had no interest in it, and did not know how to deal with children; the significance of what he taught was unknown to him, and he might even be teaching things that were not needed. The late Ippolit Ippolitych was plainly stupid, and all his colleagues and students knew who he was and what to expect of him; while he, Nikitin, like the Czech, was able to conceal his stupidity and cleverly deceive everybody, making it seem that with him, thank God, everything was going well. These new thoughts frightened Nikitin; he rejected them, called them foolish, and believed it was all caused by nerves, that he himself would come to laugh at himself.

And, indeed, by morning he was already laughing at his nervousness, called himself an old woman, but it was already clear to him that peace was lost, probably forever, and that in the two-story unstuccoed house happiness was already impossible for him. He felt that the illusion was exhausted, and that a new, nervous, conscious life was beginning, which was not in tune with peace and personal happiness.

The next day, Sunday, he went to the school church and met there with the headmaster and his colleagues. It seemed to him that they were all busy only with carefully concealing their ignorance and dissatisfaction with life, and he himself, so as not to betray his anxiety to them, smiled pleasantly and talked about trifles. Then he went to the station and saw the mail train come and go, and he was pleased to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone.

At home he found his father-in-law and Varya, who had come for dinner. Varya had tearful eyes and complained of a headache, and Shelestov ate a lot and talked about present-day young men being unreliable and having little of the gentleman about them.

“That’s boorishness!” he said. “I’ll tell him straight out: that’s boorishness, my dear sir!”

Nikitin smiled pleasantly and helped Manya to serve the guests, but after dinner he went to his study and shut the door.

The March sun was shining brightly, and hot rays fell on the desk through the windowpanes. It was still only the twentieth, but wheels were already rolling on the roads and starlings were making noise in the garden. It seemed as if Manyusya would now come in, put her arm around his neck, and say that saddle horses or the charabanc should be brought to the porch, and ask him what she should wear so as not to get chilled. Spring was beginning, as wonderful as the year before, and promising the same joys…But Nikitin was thinking how good it would be to take a vacation and go to Moscow and stay in the familiar furnished rooms on Neglinny Passage. In the next room they were drinking coffee and talking about Staff-Captain Polyansky, but he tried not to listen and wrote in his diary: “My God, where am I? I’m surrounded by banality upon banality. Boring, worthless people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women…There’s nothing more terrible, more insulting, more dreary than banality. I must flee from here, flee today, or I’ll go out of my mind!”

1894