Anastasy propped his head with his fist and fell to thinking.
“It’s bad, Deacon,” he sighed, obviously fighting against the wish to drink. “Bad! In sin did my mother conceive me,11 in sin I’ve lived, and in sin I’ll die…Lord have mercy on me a sinner! I’m confounded, Deacon! There’s no salvation for me! And I got confounded not in life, but in old age, just before death…I…”
The old man waved his hand and had another drink, then got up and sat in a different place. The deacon, not letting go of the letter, paced from corner to corner. He was thinking about his son. Discontent, grief, and fear no longer troubled him: it had all gone into the letter. Now he only imagined Pyotr to himself, pictured his face, recalled the past years, when his son used to visit for the holiday. He thought only of what was good, warm, sad, of what he could even think about all his life without wearying. Longing for his son, he reread the letter one more time and looked questioningly at Anastasy.
“Don’t send it!” the latter said, waving his hand.
“No, anyhow…I must. Anyhow it will sort of…set him to rights. It won’t hurt…”
The deacon took an envelope from his desk, but, before putting the letter into it, sat down at the desk, smiled, and added something of his own at the bottom of the letter: “And they’ve sent us a new full-time caretaker. He’s livelier than the previous one. He’s a dancer, and a babbler, and a jack-of-all-trades, and all the Govorov girls have lost their minds over him. They say the military commander Kostirev will also retire soon. It’s high time!” And very pleased with himself, not realizing that by this postscript he had totally ruined the stern letter, the deacon wrote the address on the envelope and placed it in the most conspicuous place on the table.
1887
VOLODYA
ONE SUMMER SUNDAY, at around five o’clock in the evening, Volodya, a seventeen-year-old boy, unattractive, sickly, and timid, was sitting in the gazebo of the Shumikhins’ dacha, feeling bored. His cheerless thoughts flowed in three directions. First, the next day, Monday, he was to take an examination in mathematics; he knew that if, the next day, he did not succeed in solving a written problem, he would be expelled, because he was already repeating his senior year and had a very low average in algebra. Second, his stay with the Shumikhins, rich people with a claim to aristocracy, constantly hurt his pride. It seemed to him that M-me Shumikhin and her nieces looked upon him and his maman as poor relations and spongers, that they did not respect maman and laughed at her. Once he accidentally overheard M-me Shumikhin on the terrace saying to her cousin Anna Fyodorovna that his maman went on pretending that she was still young and prettified herself, that she never paid her debts at cards and had a predilection for other people’s shoes and cigarettes. Volodya begged her every day not to visit the Shumikhins, described to her how humiliating a role she played with these gentlefolk, persuaded, spoke rudely, but she, flighty, pampered, having run through two fortunes in her time, her own and her husband’s, always drawn to high society, did not understand him, and twice a week Volodya had to accompany her to the hateful dacha.
Third, the boy could not rid himself, even for a moment, of a strange, unpleasant feeling that was totally new to him…It seemed to him that he was in love with M-me Shumikhin’s cousin and guest, Anna Fyodorovna. She was a lively, loud, and laughter-prone little lady of about thirty, healthy, buxom, rosy, with round shoulders, a round, plump chin, and a constant smile on her thin lips. She was not attractive and not young—Volodya knew that perfectly well—but for some reason he was unable not to think about her, not to look at her when, playing croquet, she shrugged her round shoulders and moved her smooth back, or else, after a long time of laughing and running up and down the stairs, she collapsed into an armchair and, closing her eyes, her chest heaving, pretended that she was out of breath and suffocating. She was married. Her husband, a respectable architect, came to the dacha once a week, had a good night’s sleep, and went back to town. Volodya’s strange feeling started with a groundless hatred of this architect and a rejoicing each time the man returned to town.
Now, sitting in the gazebo and thinking about the next day’s examination and about maman, who was laughed at, he felt a strong desire to see Nyuta (as the Shumikhins called Anna Fyodorovna), to hear her laughter, the rustling of her dress…This desire was not like that pure, poetic love, which was familiar to him from novels and which he dreamed about every night going to bed; it was strange, incomprehensible, he was ashamed and afraid of it, as of something very bad and impure, something hard to admit to himself…
“This isn’t love,” he said to himself. “You don’t fall in love with thirty-year-old married women…This is simply a little intrigue…Yes, a little intrigue…”
Thinking of the little intrigue, he remembered about his invincible timidity, his lack of a moustache, his freckles, his narrow eyes, putting himself in imagination beside Nyuta—and the couple seemed impossible to him; then he hastened to imagine himself handsome, brave, witty, dressed in the latest fashion…
At the very peak of his reverie, when he sat in the dark corner of the gazebo, hunched over and looking at the ground, there came the sound of light footsteps. Someone was walking unhurriedly down the path. Soon the footsteps fell silent and something white flashed at the entrance.
“Is anyone here?” a woman’s voice asked.
Volodya recognized the voice and raised his head timorously.
“Who’s here?” Nyuta asked, coming into the gazebo. “Ah, it’s you, Volodya? What are you doing here? Thinking? How can you think, think, think all the time…you could lose your mind that way!”
Volodya got up and looked perplexedly at Nyuta. She was just coming back from bathing. On her shoulder hung a bath-sheet and a Turkish towel, and a strand of wet hair escaped from under her white silk head scarf and clung to her forehead. She smelled of the moist, cool bathhouse and almond soap. She was breathless from walking quickly. The top button of her blouse was undone, so that the young man saw her neck and bosom.
“Why are you silent?” asked Nyuta, looking Volodya up and down. “It’s impolite to be silent when a lady speaks to you. What a lummox you are, Volodya! Always sitting, thinking silently, like some kind of philosopher. There’s no life and fire in you at all! You’re disgusting, really…At your age you should live, jump, chatter, pay court to women, fall in love.”
Volodya was looking at the bath-sheet held up by a plump white hand and thinking…
“Not a word!” Nyuta was surprised. “It’s even strange…Listen, be a man! Well, smile at least! Pfui, disgusting philosopher!” she laughed. “You know why you’re such a lummox, Volodya? Because you don’t pay court to women. Why don’t you? True, there are no young misses here, but nothing keeps you from paying court to the ladies. Why don’t you pay court to me, for instance?”