‘‘Is Zinaida Fyodorovna at home?’’ I asked.
‘‘That’s me,’’ said the lady.
‘‘A letter from Georgiy Ivanych.’’
She impatiently unsealed the letter and, holding it in both hands, displaying her diamond rings for me, began to read. I made out a white face with soft features, a prominent chin, long dark eyelashes. By the looks of her, I would have given this lady no more than twenty-five years.
‘‘Greet him and thank him for me,’’ she said when she finished reading. ‘‘Is there anyone with Georgiy Ivanych?’’ she asked softly, joyfully, and as if ashamed of her mistrust.
‘‘Some two gentlemen,’’ I replied. ‘‘Writing something.’’
‘‘Greet him and thank him for me,’’ she repeated, and inclining her head to one side and reading the letter on the way, she noiselessly went out.
I was meeting few women then, and this lady, whom I had seen fleetingly, made an impression on me. Going back home on foot, I recalled her face and the subtle scent of perfume and dreamed. When I returned, Orlov was no longer at home.
II
AND SO MY master and I lived quietly and peacefully, but all the same, the impure and offensive thing I had been so afraid of when I went to work as a servant was there and made itself felt every day. I did not get along with Polya. She was a well-nourished, pampered creature, who adored Orlov because he was a master, and despised me because I was a servant. Probably, from the point of view of a real servant or a cook, she was seductive: ruddy cheeks, upturned nose, narrow eyes, and a fullness of body that verged on plumpness. She used powder, painted her eyebrows and lips, wore tight corsets and a bustle, and a coin bracelet. She walked with small, bouncy steps; as she went, she twitched or, as they say, wagged her shoulders and behind. In the mornings, when she and I tidied the rooms, the rustling of her skirts, the creaking of her corset, and the jingling of her bracelet, and that boorish smell of lipstick, toilet water, and perfume stolen from her master, aroused a feeling in me as though she and I were doing something loathsome together.
Because I didn’t steal with her, or didn’t show any desire to become her lover, which probably insulted her, or maybe because she sensed a stranger in me, she conceived a hatred for me from the first day on. My ineptitude, my nonservant appearance, and my illness seemed pathetic to her and made her feel squeamish. I coughed badly then and sometimes prevented her from sleeping at night, since her room and mine were separated only by a wooden partition, and every morning she said to me:
‘‘Again you didn’t let me sleep. You should be in the hospital, not in a gentleman’s house.’’
She believed so sincerely that I was not a human being but something placed immeasurably beneath her, that, like Roman matrons, who were not embarrassed to bathe in the presence of their slaves, she sometimes went around in front of me in nothing but her shift.
Once over dinner (we had soup and roast brought from a tavern every day), when I was in a splendid dreamy mood, I asked:
‘‘Polya, do you believe in God?’’
‘‘As if I didn’t!’’
‘‘So then you believe,’’ I went on, ‘‘that there will be a last judgment and we will answer to God for each of our bad acts?’’
She said nothing in reply and only made a scornful grimace, and, looking this time into her cold, sated eyes, I realized that for this wholesome, fully finished nature, there was neither God, nor conscience, nor laws, and that if I had needed to kill, steal, or set a fire, money couldn’t have bought me a better accomplice.
In an inhabitual situation, and unaccustomed as I was to being addressed informally and to constant lying (saying ‘‘The master is not at home’’ when he was), my first week of life at Orlov’s wasn’t easy. In a servant’s tailcoat, I felt as if I was wearing armor. But then I got used to it. I served, tidied the rooms, ran and drove about on all sorts of errands like a real servant. When Orlov didn’t feel like going to a rendezvous with Zinaida Fyodorovna, or when he forgot that he had promised to call on her, I went to Znamenskaya, delivered a letter there into her own hands, and lied. And the result was not at all what I had expected on becoming a servant; each day of this new life of mine turned out to be a waste both for me and for my cause, since Orlov never spoke of his father, nor did his guests, and of the activity of the well-known statesman all I knew was what I managed, as before, to glean from the newspapers and correspondence with friends. The hundreds of notes and documents I found in the study and read, did not have even a remote connection with what I was looking for. Orlov was totally indifferent to his father’s much-touted activity and looked as if he had never heard of it, or as if his father had died long ago.
III
ON THURSDAYS WE received guests.
I would order a roast from a restaurant and telephone Eliseev 2 to have them send us caviar, cheese, oysters, and so forth. I would buy cards. Since morning Polya would be preparing the tea things and laying the supper table. To tell the truth, this slight activity diversified our idle life somewhat, and Thursdays were our most interesting days.
Only three guests used to come. The most solid and perhaps the most interesting was a guest by the name of Pekarsky, a tall lean man of about forty-five, with a long hooked nose, a big black beard, and a bald spot. He had large protruding eyes and a serious, pensive expression on his face, like a Greek philosopher’s. He worked in railway administration and in a bank, was a legal adviser in some important government institution, and maintained business relations with a number of private persons as a trustee, committee chairman, and so on. He was of quite low rank and modestly referred to himself as an attorney-at-law, but his influence was enormous. His calling card or a note was enough for you to be received without waiting by a famous doctor, a railway director, or an important official; it was said that through his patronage you even could obtain a fourth-class post or hush up any unpleasant matter you liked. He was considered a very intelligent man, but his was some sort of special, strange intelligence. In an instant he could multiply 213 by 373 or calculate the exchange of sterling for marks without the aid of a pencil or any tables, had an excellent knowledge of the railway business and finance, and nothing that concerned administration held any secrets for him; in civil cases, he was said to be a most skillful lawyer, and it was not easy to go up against him. But this extraordinary intelligence was totally uncomprehending of much that is known even to some stupid men. Thus he decidedly could not comprehend why people get bored, weep, shoot themselves, and even kill others, why they worry over things and events that do not concern them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Shchedrin3... All that is abstract, vanishing into the realm of thought and feeling, was incomprehensible and boring for him, like music for someone with no ear. He looked at people only from a business point of view, and divided them into the capable and the incapable. No other divisions existed for him. Honesty and decency merely constitute a sign of capability. To carouse, play cards, and indulge in depravity is possible but only so long as it doesn’t interfere with business. To believe in God is not intelligent, but religion should be protected as a necessary restraining principle for the people, otherwise they won’t work. Punishment is needed only to instill fear. There’s no reason for going to country houses, since it’s quite nice in the city. And so on. He was a widower, had no children, but lived in grand family style and paid three thousand a year in rent.
The second guest, Kukushkin, an actual state councillor4 of the younger generation, was not very tall and was distinguished by a highly unpleasant expression, which came from the disproportion between his fat, pudgy body and his small, lean face. His lips were shaped like a little heart, and his trimmed little mustache looked as though it had been stuck on with varnish. He was a man with the manner of a lizard. He did not walk but somehow crept in with tiny mincing steps, swaying and tittering, and he bared his teeth when he laughed. He was an official on special assignment to someone, and did nothing, though he earned a big salary, particularly during the summer, when special business trips were invented for him. He was a careerist, not to the marrow of his bones but much deeper, to the last drop of blood and with that, a petty careerist, unsure of himself, who had built his career on nothing but handouts. For some small foreign cross, or for having it published in the newspapers that he had been present at a memorial or a prayer service together with certain high-ranking individuals, he was ready for any humiliation, ready to beg, flatter, promise. He flattered Orlov and Pekarsky out of cowardice, because he considered them powerful, flattered Polya and me because we served an influential person. Each time I relieved him of his fur coat, he tittered and asked me: ‘‘Are you married, Stepan?’’—and then came scabrous banalities, as a sign of special attention to me. Kukushkin flattered Orlov’s weaknesses, his depravity, his satiety; to please him, he pretended to be a godless and wicked scoffer, criticized with him those before whom, in other places, he was a slavish hypocrite. When there was conversation about love and women over supper, he pretended to be a refined and subtle debauchee. In general, it must be noted, Petersburg philanderers enjoy talking about their extraordinary tastes. Your actual state councillor of the younger generation is excellently well satisfied with the caresses of his scullery maid or some wretched girl strolling on Nevsky Prospect, 5 but to listen to him, he is contaminated by all the vices of Orient and Occident, is an honorary member of a whole dozen secret reprehensible societies, and is under police surveillance. Kukushkin lied shamelessly about himself, and it was not that they didn’t believe him, but all his fabrications somehow went right past their ears.