Tears were still glistening in Anya's eyes, but she was now no longer thinking of her mother or money or her mariage. She was shaking hands with high school boys and officers of her acquaintance, laughing gaily and saying quickly, "How do you do? How are you?"
She went out into the moonlight and stood so that they could aU see her in her new splendid costume and hat.
'Why are we stopping here?" she asked.
"This is a siding. They are waiting for the mail train > »
to pass.
Noticing that Artynov was looking at her, she screwed up her face coquettishly and began talking aloud in French; and because her voice sounded so well and because music was heard and the moon was re- flected in the pond, and because Artynov, the notorious Don Juan and rake, was looking at her greedily and in- quisitively, and because everyone was gay, she suddenly felt happy, and when the train started, and her friends the officers saluted her, she was humming a polka, the strains of which reached her from the military band which was blaring somewhere beyond the trees; and she returned to her compartment feeling as if she had been persuaded at the station that she would certainly be happy in spite of everything.
The couple spent two days at the monastery, then re- turned to town. They lived in an apartment supplied by the government. When Modest Alexeich left for the office, Anya would play the piano or cry out of sheer boredom or lie down on a couch and read novels or look through fashion journals. At dinner Modest Alexeich ate a great deal, talked about politics, new appointments, transfers and bonuses, and declared that one should work hard, that family life was not a pleasure but a duty, that if you took care of the kopecks, the rubles would take care of themselves, and that he put religion and morality above everything else in the world. And holding the knife in his fist like a sword, he would say:
"Everyone must have his duties!"
And Anya listened to him, was frightened, and could not eat, so that she usually rose from the table hungry. After dinner her husband took a nap and snored loudly while she went to see her own people. Her father and the boys looked at her in a peculiar way, as if just before she came they had been blaming her for having married for money a tedious, tiresome man whom she did not love. Her rustling skirts, her bracelets, and her general ladylike air made them uncomfortable, offended them. In her presence they felt a little embarrassed and did not know what to talk to her about; but they still loved her as before and were not used to having dinner with- out her. She sat down with them to cabbage soup, thick porridge, and potatoes fried in mutton fat that smelled of tallow candles. With a trembling hand Pyotr Leon- tyich filled his glass from a decanter and drank it off quickly, greedily, with disgust, then drank a second glass, then a third. Petya and Andrusha, thin, pale boys with big eyes, would take the decanter and say with embarrassment:
"You mustn't, Papa dear . . . Enough, Papa dear."
Anya, too, was troubled and would beg him to drink no more; and he would suddenly fly into a rage and strike the table with his fist. "I will not be dictated to!" he would shout. ''Wretched boys! Wretched girl! I will rum you all out!"
But there was a note of weakness, of kindness in his voice, and no one was afraid of him. Mter dinner he usu- aUy spruced himself up. Pale, with cuts on his chin from shaving, he would stand for half an hour before the mirror, craning his thin neck, preening himself, combing his hair, twisting his black mustache, sprin- kling himself with scent, tying his cravat in a bow; then he would put on his gloves and his top hat and would go off to give private lessons. If there was a holiday, he would stay at home and paint or play the harmonium, which hissed and growled; he would try to wrest me- lodious tones from it and would storm at the boys: "Scamps! Wretches! They have spoiled the instrument!"
Evenings Anya's husband played cards with his col- leagues who lived under the same roof in the govern- ment quarters. During these parties the wives of the functionaries would also assemble—homely, tastelessly dressed women, as coarse as cooks, and gossip, as ugly and insipid as the women themselves, would start in the apartment. Sometimes Modest Alexeich would take Anya to the theater. During the intermissions he would not let her go a step from his side but walked about arm in ann with her through the corridors and the foyer. When he bowed to anyone, he immediately whispered to Anya: "A councilor of state . . . received by His Ex- cellency," or "A man of means . . . has a house of his own." When they passed the buffet Anya had a great longing for sweets; she was fond of chocolate and apple tarts, but she had no money and she did not like to ask her husband. He would take a pear, feel it with his fingers, and ask uncertainly, "How much?"
"Twenty-five kopecks."
"I say!" he would exclaim and put the pear back, but as it was awkward to leave the buffet without buying anything, he would order a bottle of soda water and drink it all himself, and tears would come into his eyes. At such times Anya hated him.
Or suddenly turning quite red, he would say to her hurriedly: "Bow to that old lady!"
"But I am not acquainted with her—"
"No matter. That is the wife of the director of the local treasury office! Bow to her, I mean you," he said grumbling insistently. "Your head won't fall off."
Anya bowed and her head really didn't fall off, but it was very painful. She did everything her husband told her to do, and was very angry with herself that she had let herself be deceived like the silliest little fool. She had married him only for his money, and yet she had less money now than before her marriage. Formerly her father would sometimes give her a twenty-kopeck piece, but now she never had a groat. To take money on the quiet or to ask for it, she couldn't; she was afraid of her husband. She trembled before him. It seemed to her as though she had been afraid of him for a long time. In her childhood the high school principal had always seemed to her the most imposing and terrible power in the world, moving along like a thundercloud or a steam locomotive ready to crush everything in its way. Another such power of which they often talked at home, and which for some reason they feared, was His Excellency. Then, there were a dozen other, less formidable powers, and among them were the high school teachers, strict and impeccable, with shaven upper lip. And now finally, it was Modest Alexeich, a man of principle, who re- sembled the head of the school in every particular, in- cluding his face. And in Anya's imagination, all these powers combined into one, and, in the shape of a terrible, huge white bear, bore down upon the weak and guilty, such as her father. And she was afraid to contradict her husband, and with a forced smile and a show of pleas- ure, submitted to his coarse caresses and defiling em- braces which terrified her.
Only once did Pyotr Leontyich make bold to ask his son-in-law for a loan of fifty rubles in order to pay a very unpleasant debt, but what agony it was!
"Very well, I'll give you the money," said Modest Alexeich after a moment's thought, "but I warn you, I won't help you again until you stop drinking. Such a weakness is disgraceful in a man holding a government postl I cannot refrain from calling your attention to the well-known fact that many able people have been ruined by that passion, though temperance might perhaps have permitted them to attain a very high rank."
Followed long-winded sentences with such phrases as, "in proportion to," "whereas," "in view of the afore- said," while poor Pyotr Leontyich was in an agony of humiliation and felt an intense craving for alcohol.