She went away and Anya took her place beside the silver samovar and the cups. She was soon doing a rush- ing business. Anya charged no less than a ruble for a cup of tea, and foiced the huge officer to empty three cups. Artynov, the rich man with the bulging eyes, who suffered from asthma, came up too; he no longer wore the strange costume in which Anya had seen him in the summer at the station, but was in evening clothes like everyone else. Without taking his eyes off Anya, he drank a glass of champagne and paid one hundred rubles for it, then had a cup of tea and gave another hundred, all this without saying a word and wheezing with asthma. Anya solicited customers and got money out of them, firmly convinced by now that her smiles and glances could afford these people nothing but great pleasure. It had dawned upon her that she was made exclusively for this noisy, brilliant life, with laughter, music, dances, admirers, and her old dread of a power that was bearing down upon her and threatened to crush her now seemed ridiculous to her. She was afraid of no one and only regretted that her mother was not there to rejoice with her at her success. Her father, pale by this time, but still steady on his legs, came up to the booth and asked for a glass of cognac. Anya turned crimson, expecting him to say something inappropriate (she was already ashamed of having such a poor, ordi- nary father), but he emptied his glass, took a ten-ruble note from his roll, threw it do^wn, and walked away with silent dignity. A little later she saw him dancing in the grand rond and by now he was staggering and kept caU- ing out something, to his partner's great embarrassment. And Anya remembered how, at a ball three years be- fore, he had staggered and called out in the same way, and it had ended by a police officer taking him home to bed, and the next day, the principal had threatened to dismiss him from his post. What an inappropriate recol- lection it was!
When the samovars in the booths were no longer alight and the weary charity workers had handed over their takings to the middle-aged lady with the stone in her mouth, Artynov led Anya on his arm to the hall where supper was being served for all who had helped at the bazaar. There were some twenty people at sup- per, not more, but it was very noisy. His Excellency proposed this toast: "This luxurious dining room is the appropriate place in which to drink to the success of the soup kitchens for which the bazaar was held."
The Brigadier General proposed a toast "to the power to which even the artillery must bow," and all the men proceeded to clink glasses with the ladies. It was very, very jolly!
When Anya was escorted home, it was daylight and the cooks were going to market. Elated, intoxicated, full of new sensations, exhausted, she undressed, sank into bed and instantly fell asleep.
It was past one in the afternoon when the maid waked her and announced Mr. Artynov who had come to call on her. She dressed quickly and went into the drawing-room. Soon after Artynov left, His Excellency called to thank her for her part in the bazaar. Eyeing her with a sugary smile and chewing his lips, he kissed her hand, asked her permission to come again and took his leave, while she remained standing in the middle of the drawing room, amazed, entranced, unable to believe that a change in her life, a marvelous change, had oc- curred so quickly. And just then her husband walked in. He stood before her now with that ingratiating, sugary, cringingly respectful expression that she was accustomed to see on his face in the presence of the illustrious and the powerful, and with rapture, with indignation, with contempt, confident now that she could do it with im- punity, she said, articulating each word distinctly:
"Get out, you blockhead!"
Mter that, Anya never had a single free day, as she was constantly taking part in picnics, excursions, private theatricals. Each day she returned home in the early hours of the morning and lay down on the floor in the drawing-room, and afterwards told everyone touchingly that she slept under flowers. She needed a great deal of money, but she was no longer afraid of Modest Alexeich, and spent his money as though it were her and she did not ask or demand it, but simply sent him the bills or brief notes like these: "Give the bearer 200 rubles," or "Pay 100 rubles at once."
At Easter Modest Alexeich received the order of St. Anna of the second class. When he went to ofier his thanks, His Excellency put aside the newspaper he was reading and sank deeper into his armchair: "So now you have three Annas," he said, examining his white hands with their pink nails, "one in your buttonhole and two on your neck."
Modest AleJo.eich put two fingers to his lips as a pre- caution against laughing out loud and said: "Now I have only to look forward to the arrival of a little Vladi- mir. May I make bold to beg Your Excellency to stand godfather?"
He was alluding to the Vladimir of the fourth class and was already imagining how he would repeat every- where this joke of his, so felicitous in its aptness and audacity, and he was making ready to say something equally good, but His Excellency was again absorbed in his newspaper and merely nodded to him.
And Anya went on driving about in troikas, hunting with Artynov, playing in one-acters, going out to supper parties, and she saw less and less of her own people. They dined alone now. Her father was drinking more heavily than ever; there was no money, and the har- monium had long since been sold for debt. The boys did not let him go out alone in the street now, but fol- lowed him for fear he might fall; and whenever they met Anya driving down Old Kiev Street in a smart carriage drawnwn by a team of two horses abreast and an out- runner, with Artynov on the box instead of a coachman, Pyotr Leontyich would take ofl his top hat, and would be about to shout something at her, but Petya and An- drusha would take him by the arms and say imploringly: "Don't, Papa dear . • . enough, Papa dear . . ."
1895
In the Cart
T
HEY drove out of the town at half past eight in the morning.
The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, but there was still snow in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, evil, dark, long, had ended so recently; spring had arrived suddenly; but neither the warmth nor the languid, transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks flying in the fields over huge puddles that were like lakes, nor this marvelous, immeasurably deep sky, into which it seemed that one would plunge with such joy, offered anything new and interesting to Marya Vasilyevna, who was sit- ting in the cart. She had been teaching school for thir- teen years, and in the course of all those years she had gone to the town for her salary countless times; and whether it was spring, as now, or a rainy autumn eve- ning, or winter, it was all the same to her, and what she always, invariably, longed for was to reach her destina- tion as soon as possible.
She felt as though she had been living in these parts for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than
the school, the road to the town and back, and again
the school and again the road.
She had lost the habit of thinking of the time before she became a schoolmistress and had almost forgotten all about it. She had once had a father and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big apartment near the Red Gate, but all that remained in her memory of that part of her life was something vague and formless like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had died soon after. She had a brother, an officer; at first they used to write to each other, then her brother had stopped answering her let- ters, he had lost the habit. Of her former belongings, all that remained was a photograph of her mother, but the dampness in the school had faded it, and now nothing could be seen on it but the hair and the eyebrows.