‘‘That’s all the invalid can give you. One Turkish pasha, a kind old man, received as a gift, or maybe as an inheritance, an entire harem. When his beautiful young wives lined up before him, he went to them, kissed each one, and said: ‘That’s all I’m able to give you now.’ I say the same thing.’’
She found all this silly, extraordinary, and amusing. She wanted to frolic. Getting up on the seat and humming a tune, she took a box of candies from the shelf and tossed him a piece of chocolate, shouting:
‘‘Catch!’’
He caught it. She then threw him another candy with a loud laugh, then a third, and he kept catching them and putting them in his mouth, looking at her with pleading eyes, and it seemed to her that in his face, in its features and expression, there was much that was feminine and childish. And when she sat down breathless on the seat and went on looking at him laughingly, he touched her cheek with two fingers and said as if in vexation:
‘‘Naughty girl!’’
‘‘Take it,’’ she said, giving him the box. ‘‘I don’t like sweets.’’
He ate the candies to the last one and put the empty box in his suitcase. He liked boxes with pictures on them.
‘‘However, enough frolicking,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s time for the invalid to go bye-bye.’’
He took his Bokhara dressing gown and a pillow from his portmanteau, lay down, and covered himself with the gown.
‘‘Good night, my dove!’’ he said in a soft voice and sighed as if he ached all over.
And soon snoring was heard. Feeling no embarrassment, she also lay down and soon fell asleep.
The next morning, as she drove home from the station in her native town, the streets seemed to her deserted, peopleless, the snow gray, and the houses small, as if someone had flattened them out. She met a procession: a dead man was being carried in an open coffin, with church banners.
‘‘They say it’s lucky to meet a funeral,’’ she thought.
The windows of the house where Nina Fyodorovna used to live were now pasted over with white notices.
With a sinking heart, she drove into her courtyard and rang at the door. It was opened by an unfamiliar maid, fat, sleepy, in a warm quilted jacket. Going up the stairs, Yulia recalled how Laptev had made his declaration of love there, but now the stairway was unwashed, covered with stains. Upstairs, in the cold corridor, patients waited in winter coats. And for some reason, her heart pounded strongly, and she could barely walk from agitation.
The doctor, grown fatter still, red as a brick, and with disheveled hair, was having tea. Seeing his daughter, he was very glad and even became tearful; she thought that she was the only joy in this old man’s life, and, touched, she hugged him tightly and said she would stay with him for a long time, till Easter. After changing in her own room, she came out to the dining room to have tea with him; he was pacing up and down, his hands thrust in his pockets, and singing ‘‘Rooroo-roo-roo’’—meaning that he was displeased with something.
‘‘Your life in Moscow must be very merry,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m very glad for you...Me, I’m an old man, I don’t need anything. I’ll croak soon and deliver you all. And it’s just a wonder that I’ve got such a thick hide, that I’m still alive! Amazing!’’
He said he was a tough old donkey that everybody rode on. Nina Fyodorovna’s treatment had been heaped on him, the care of her children, her funeral; and this coxcomb Panaurov did not want to have anything to do with it and even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and still had not paid it back.
‘‘Take me to Moscow and put me in the madhouse there!’’ said the doctor. ‘‘I’m mad, I’m a naïve child, because I still believe in truth and justice!’’
Then he reproached her husband for lack of foresight: he had not bought a house that was up for sale so profitably. And now it seemed to Yulia that she was not the only joy in this old man’s life. While he received patients and then went to make calls, she walked around all the rooms, not knowing what to do and what to think about. She was already unaccustomed to her native town and native home; she was now drawn neither outside nor to acquaintances, and she did not feel sad, recalling her former girlfriends and her girl’s life, and did not regret the past.
In the evening she dressed smartly and went to the vigil. But there were only simple people in church, and her magnificent fur coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her as if some change had taken place in the church and in herself. Before, she had liked it when the canon was read during the vigil and the choir sang the verses, for instance, ‘‘I shall open my lips,’’ she had liked moving slowly with the crowd towards the priest standing in the middle of the church, and then feeling the holy oil on her forehead, but now she only waited for the service to be over. And, leaving the church, she was afraid the beggars might ask her for something; it would be boring to stop and search her pockets, and she no longer had copper money but only roubles.
She went to bed early but fell asleep late. Her dreams were all of some sort of portraits and of the funeral procession she had seen in the morning; they carried the open coffin with the dead man into the courtyard, stopped by the door, then for a long time swung the coffin on towels and banged it against the door as hard as they could. Yulia woke up and jumped out of bed in terror. In fact, there was a banging on the door downstairs, and the wire of the bell scraped against the wall, but no ringing was heard.
The doctor coughed. She heard the maid go downstairs, then come back up.
‘‘Madam!’’ she said, knocking on the door. ‘‘Madam!’’
‘‘What is it?’’ asked Yulia.
‘‘A telegram for you!’’
Yulia came out to her with a candle. Behind the maid stood the doctor, his coat thrown over his underwear, and also with a candle.
‘‘Our doorbell’s broken,’’ he said, yawning sleepily. ‘‘It’s long been in need of repair.’’
Yulia unsealed the telegram and read: ‘‘We drink your health. Yartsev, Kochevoy.’’
‘‘Ah, what fools!’’ she said and laughed; her soul felt light and gay.
Going back to her room, she quietly washed, dressed, then packed for a long time, till dawn, and at noon she left for Moscow.
XII
DURING HOLY WEEK the Laptevs were at the Art School for a picture exhibition. They went there as a household, Moscow fashion, taking along the two girls, the governess, and Kostya.
Laptev knew the names of all the well-known artists and never missed a single exhibition. Sometimes at his dacha in the summer, he himself painted landscapes in oils, and it seemed to him that he had considerable taste, and that if he had studied, he would perhaps have made a good artist. When abroad, he would sometimes visit antique shops, look at old things with the air of a connoisseur and utter his opinion, purchase something or other; the antiquarian would charge him whatever he liked, and afterwards the purchased thing would lie in the carriage house, nailed up in a box, until it disappeared no one knew where. Or else, stopping at a print shop, he would spend a long time attentively examining paintings, bronzes, make various observations, and suddenly buy some homemade frame or a box of trashy paper. The paintings he had at home were all of large size, but bad; the good ones were poorly hung. It happened to him more than once to pay a high price for things that later turned out to be crude fakes. And remarkably, though generally timid in life, he was extremely bold and self-assured at picture exhibitions. Why?
Yulia Sergeevna, like her husband, looked at paintings through her fist or with binoculars, and was surprised that the people in the paintings were as if alive, and the trees as if real; but she had no understanding, and it seemed to her that many of the pictures at the exhibition were alike, and that the whole aim of art lay precisely in this, that the people and objects in the pictures, when looked at through the fist, should stand out as if real.