Short Stories by Chekhov
himself. It was quite possible that Yulia, who was so pure and believed
in God, had not once thought of his money; but she did not love him--did
not love him, and evidently she had interested motives, vague, perhaps,
and not fully thought out--still, it was so. The doctor's house with its
common furniture was repulsive to him, and he looked upon the doctor
himself as a wretched, greasy miser, a sort of operatic Gaspard from
"Les Cloches de Corneville." The very name "Yulia" had a vulgar sound.
He imagined how he and his Yulia would stand at their wedding, in
reality complete strangers to one another, without a trace of feeling on
her side, just as though their marriage had been made by a professional
matchmaker; and the only consolation left him now, as commonplace as the
marriage itself, was the reflection that he was not the first, and would
not be the last; that thousands of people were married like that; and
that with time, when Yulia came to know him better, she would perhaps
grow fond of him.
"Romeo and Juliet!" he said, as he shut the novel, and he laughed. "I am
Romeo, Nina. You may congratulate me. I made an offer to Yulia Byelavin
to-day."
Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but when she believed it, she
began to cry; she was not pleased at the news.
"Well, I congratulate you," she said. "But why is it so sudden?"
"No, it's not sudden. It's been going on since March, only you don't
notice anything. . . . I fell in love with her last March when I made
her acquaintance here, in your rooms."
"I thought you would marry some one in our Moscow set," said Nina
Fyodorovna after a pause. "Girls in our set are simpler. But what
matters, Alyosha, is that you should be happy--that matters most. My
Grigory Nikolaitch did not love me, and there's no concealing it; you
can see what our life is. Of course any woman may love you for your
goodness and your brains, but, you see, Yulitchka is a girl of good
family from a high-class boarding-school; goodness and brains are not
enough for her. She is young, and, you, Alyosha, are not so young, and
are not good-looking."
To soften the last words, she stroked his head and said:
"You're not good-looking, but you're a dear."
She was so agitated that a faint flush came into her cheeks, and she
began discussing eagerly whether it would be the proper thing for her to
bless Alyosha with the ikon at the wedding. She was, she reasoned, his
elder sister, and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to
convince her dejected brother that the wedding must be celebrated in
proper style, with pomp and gaiety, so that no one could find fault with
it.
Then he began going to the Byelavins' as an accepted suitor, three or
four times a day; and now he never had time to take Sasha's place and
read aloud the historical novel. Yulia used to receive him in her two
rooms, which were at a distance from the drawing-room and her father's
study, and he liked them very much. The walls in them were dark; in the
corner stood a case of ikons; and there was a smell of good scent and of
the oil in the holy lamp. Her rooms were at the furthest end of the
house; her bedstead and dressing-table were shut off by a screen. The
doors of the bookcase were covered on the inside with a green curtain,
and there were rugs on the floor, so that her footsteps were noiseless--
and from this he concluded that she was of a reserved character, and
that she liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded life. In her own home she was
treated as though she were not quite grown up. She had no money of her
own, and sometimes when they were out for walks together, she was
overcome with confusion at not having a farthing. Her father allowed her
very little for dress and books, hardly ten pounds a year. And, indeed,
the doctor himself had not much money in spite of his good practice. He
played cards every night at the club, and always lost. Moreover, he
bought mortgaged houses through a building society, and let them. The
tenants were irregular in paying the rent, but he was convinced that
such speculations were profitable. He had mortgaged his own house in
which he and his daughter were living, and with the money so raised had
bought a piece of waste ground, and had already begun to build on it a
large two-storey house, meaning to mortgage it, too, as soon as it was
finished.
Laptev now lived in a sort of cloud, feeling as though he were not
himself, but his double, and did many things which he would never have
brought himself to do before. He went three or four times to the club
with the doctor, had supper with him, and offered him money for house-
building. He even visited Panaurov at his other establishment. It
somehow happened that Panaurov invited him to dinner, and without
thinking, Laptev accepted. He was received by a lady of five-and-thirty.
She was tall and thin, with hair touched with grey, and black eyebrows,
apparently not Russian. There were white patches of powder on her face.
She gave him a honeyed smile and pressed his hand jerkily, so that the
bracelets on her white hands tinkled. It seemed to Laptev that she
smiled like that because she wanted to conceal from herself and from
others that she was unhappy. He also saw two little girls, aged five and
three, who had a marked likeness to Sasha. For dinner they had milk-
soup, cold veal, and chocolate. It was insipid and not good; but the
table was splendid, with gold forks, bottles of Soyer, and cayenne
pepper, an extraordinary bizarre cruet-stand, and a gold pepper-pot.
It was only as he was finishing the milk-soup that Laptev realised how
very inappropriate it was for him to be dining there. The lady was
embarrassed, and kept smiling, showing her teeth. Panaurov expounded
didactically what being in love was, and what it was due to.
"We have in it an example of the action of electricity," he said in
French, addressing the lady. "Every man has in his skin microscopic
glands which contain currents of electricity. If you meet with a person
whose currents are parallel with your own, then you get love."
When Laptev went home and his sister asked him where he had been he felt
awkward, and made no answer.
He felt himself in a false position right up to the time of the wedding.
His love grew more intense every day, and Yulia seemed to him a poetic
and exalted creature; but, all the same, there was no mutual love, and
the truth was that he was buying her and she was selling herself.
Sometimes, thinking things over, he fell into despair and asked himself:
should he run away? He did not sleep for nights together, and kept
thinking how he should meet in Moscow the lady whom he had called in his
letters "a certain person," and what attitude his father and his
brother, difficult people, would take towards his marriage and towards
Yulia. He was afraid that his father would say something rude to Yulia
at their first meeting. And something strange had happened of late to
his brother Fyodor. In his long letters he had taken to writing of the
importance of health, of the effect of illness on the mental condition,
of the meaning of religion, but not a word about Moscow or business.
These letters irritated Laptev, and he thought his brother's character
was changing for the worse.
The wedding was in September. The ceremony took place at the Church of
St. Peter and St. Paul, after mass, and the same day the young couple
set off for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a
long train, already looking not a girl but a married woman, said good-
bye to Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid's face worked, but there was no tear
in her dry eyes. She said:
"If--which God forbid--I should die, take care of my little girls."
"Oh, I promise!" answered Yulia Sergeyevna, and her lips and eyelids
began quivering too.
"I shall come to see you in October," said Laptev, much moved. "You must
get better, my darling."
They travelled in a special compartment. Both felt depressed and
uncomfortable. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat, and
made a show of dozing, and he lay on the seat opposite, and he was
disturbed by various thoughts--of his father, of "a certain person,"
whether Yulia would like her Moscow flat. And looking at his wife, who
did not love him, he wondered dejectedly "why this had happened."
V
The Laptevs had a wholesale business in Moscow, dealing in fancy goods:
fringe, tape, trimmings, crochet cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross
receipts reached two millions a year; what the net profit was, no one
knew but the old father. The sons and the clerks estimated the profits
at approximately three hundred thousand, and said that it would have
been a hundred thousand more if the old man had not "been too free-
handed"--that is, had not allowed credit indiscriminately. In the last
ten years alone the bad debts had mounted up to the sum of a million;
and when the subject was referred to, the senior clerk would wink slyly
and deliver himself of sentences the meaning of which was not clear to
every one:
"The psychological sequences of the age."
Their chief commercial operations were conducted in the town market in a
building which was called the warehouse. The entrance to the warehouse
was in the yard, where it was always dark, and smelt of matting and
where the dray-horses were always stamping their hoofs on the asphalt. A
very humble-looking door, studded with iron, led from the yard into a
room with walls discoloured by damp and scrawled over with charcoal,
lighted up by a narrow window covered by an iron grating. Then on the
left was another room larger and cleaner with an iron stove and a couple
of chairs, though it, too, had a prison window: this was the office, and
from it a narrow stone staircase led up to the second storey, where the
principal room was. This was rather a large room, but owing to the
perpetual darkness, the low-pitched ceiling, the piles of boxes and
bales, and the numbers of men that kept flitting to and fro in it, it
made as unpleasant an impression on a newcomer as the others. In the
offices on the top storey the goods lay in bales, in bundles and in
cardboard boxes on the shelves; there was no order nor neatness in the
arrangement of it, and if crimson threads, tassels, ends of fringe, had
not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper parcels, no one
could have guessed what was being bought and sold here. And looking at
these crumpled paper parcels and boxes, no one would have believed that
a million was being made out of such trash, and that fifty men were
employed every day in this warehouse, not counting the buyers.
When at midday, on the day after his arrival at Moscow, Laptev went into
the warehouse, the workmen packing the goods were hammering so loudly
that in the outer room and the office no one heard him come in. A
postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in
his hand; he was wincing at the noise, and he did not notice Laptev
either. The first person to meet him upstairs was his brother Fyodor
Fyodorovitch, who was so like him that they passed for twins. This
resemblance always reminded Laptev of his own personal appearance, and
now, seeing before him a short, red-faced man with rather thin hair,
with narrow plebeian hips, looking so uninteresting and so
unintellectual, he asked himself: "Can I really look like that?"
"How glad I am to see you!" said Fyodor, kissing his brother and
pressing his hand warmly. "I have been impatiently looking forward to
seeing you every day, my dear fellow. When you wrote that you were
getting married, I was tormented with curiosity, and I've missed you,
too, brother. Only fancy, it's six months since we saw each other. Well?
How goes it? Nina's very bad? Awfully bad?"
"Awfully bad."