Short Stories
completely taken up with them. With shrieks of delight she was continually
turning to me, as though determined not to notice the proprietor, and kept
gushing with laughter at the resemblance she detected between these monkeys
and her intimate friends and acquaintances. I, too, was amused, for the
resemblance was unmistakable. The German did not know whether to laugh or
not, and so at last was reduced to frowning. And it was at that moment
that a terrible, I may say unnatural, scream set the room vibrating. Not
knowing what to think, for the first moment I stood still, numb with
horror, but noticing that Elena Ivanovna was screaming too, I quickly
turned round--and what did I behold! I saw--oh, heavens!--I saw the
luckless Ivan Matveitch in the terrible jaws of the crocodile, held by them
round the waist, lifted horizontally in the air and desperately kicking.
Then--one moment, and no trace remained of him. But I must describe it in
detail, for I stood all the while motionless, and had time to watch the
whole process taking place before me with an attention and interest such as
I never remember to have felt before. "What," I thought at that critical
moment, "what if all that had happened to me instead of to Ivan
Matveitch--how unpleasant it would have been for me!"
But to return to my story. The crocodile began by turning the unhappy Ivan
Matveitch in his terrible jaws so that he could swallow his legs first;
then bringing up Ivan Matveitch, who kept trying to jump out and clutching
at the sides of the tank, sucked him down again as far as his waist. Then
bringing him up again, gulped him down, and so again and again. In this way
Ivan Matveitch was visibly disappearing before our eyes. At last, with a
final gulp, the crocodile swallowed my cultured friend entirely, this time
leaving no trace of him. From the outside of the crocodile we could see the
protuberances of Ivan Matveitch's figure as he passed down the inside of
the monster. I was on the point of screaming again when destiny played
another treacherous trick upon us. The crocodile made a tremendous effort,
probably oppressed by the magnitude of the object he had swallowed, once
more opened his terrible jaws, and with a final hiccup he suddenly let the
head of Ivan Matveitch pop out for a second, with an expression of despair
on his face. In that brief instant the spectacles dropped off his nose to
the bottom of the tank. It seemed as though that despairing countenance
had only popped out to cast one last look on the objects around it, to take
its last farewell of all earthly pleasures. But it had not time to carry
out its intention; the crocodile made another effort, gave a gulp and
instantly it vanished again--this time for ever. This appearance and
disappearance of a still living human head was so horrible, but at the
same--either from its rapidity and unexpectedness or from the dropping of
the spectacles--there was something so comic about it that I suddenly quite
unexpectedly exploded with laughter. But pulling myself together and
realising that to laugh at such a moment was not the thing for an old
family friend, I turned at once to Elena Ivanovna and said with a
sympathetic air:
"Now it's all over with our friend Ivan Matveitch!"
I cannot even attempt to describe how violent was the agitation of Elena
Ivanovna during the whole process. After the first scream she seemed rooted
to the spot, and stared at the catastrophe with apparent indifference,
though her eyes looked as though they were starting out of her head; then
she suddenly went off into a heart-rending wail, but I seized her hands. At
this instant the proprietor, too, who had at first been also petrified by
horror, suddenly clasped his hands and cried, gazing upwards:
"Oh my crocodile! _Oh mein allerliebster Karlchen! Mutter, Mutter,
Mutter!_"
A door at the rear of the room opened at this cry, and the _Mutter_, a
rosy-cheeked, elderly but dishevelled woman in a cap made her appearance,
and rushed with a shriek to her German.
A perfect Bedlam followed. Elena Ivanovna kept shrieking out the same
phrase, as though in a frenzy, "Flay him! flay him!" apparently entreating
them--probably in a moment of oblivion--to flay somebody for something. The
proprietor and _Mutter_ took no notice whatever of either of us; they were
both bellowing like calves over the crocodile.
"He did for himself! He will burst himself at once, for he did swallow a
_ganz_ official!" cried the proprietor.
"_Unser Karlchen, unser allerliebster Karlchen wird sterben_," howled his
wife.
"We are bereaved and without bread!" chimed in the proprietor.
"Flay him! flay him! flay him!" clamoured Elena Ivanovna, clutching at the
German's coat.
"He did tease the crocodile. For what did your man tease the crocodile?"
cried the German, pulling away from her. "You will if _Karlchen wird_
burst, therefore pay, _das war mein Sohn, das war mein einziger Sohn_."
I must own I was intensely indignant at the sight of such egoism in the
German and the cold-heartedness of his dishevelled _Mutter_; at the same
time Elena Ivanovna's reiterated shriek of "Flay him! flay him!" troubled
me even more and absorbed at last my whole attention, positively alarming
me. I may as well say straight off that I entirely misunderstood this
strange exclamation: it seemed to me that Elena Ivanovna had for the moment
taken leave of her senses, but nevertheless wishing to avenge the loss of
her beloved Ivan Matveitch, was demanding by way of compensation that the
crocodile should be severely thrashed, while she was meaning something
quite different. Looking round at the door, not without embarrassment, I
began to entreat Elena Ivanovna to calm herself, and above all not to use
the shocking word "flay." For such a reactionary desire here, in the midst
of the Arcade and of the most cultured society, not two paces from the hall
where at this very minute Mr. Lavrov was perhaps delivering a public
lecture, was not only impossible but unthinkable, and might at any moment
bring upon us the hisses of culture and the caricatures of Mr. Stepanov. To
my horror I was immediately proved to be correct in my alarmed suspicions:
the curtain that divided the crocodile room from the little entry where the
quarter-roubles were taken suddenly parted, and in the opening there
appeared a figure with moustaches and beard, carrying a cap, with the upper
part of its body bent a long way forward, though the feet were scrupulously
held beyond the threshold of the crocodile room in order to avoid the
necessity of paying the entrance money.
"Such a reactionary desire, madam," said the stranger, trying to avoid
falling over in our direction and to remain standing outside the room,
"does no credit to your development, and is conditioned by lack of
phosphorus in your brain. You will be promptly held up to shame in the
_Chronicle of Progress_ and in our satirical prints...."
But he could not complete his remarks; the proprietor coming to himself,
and seeing with horror that a man was talking in the crocodile room without
having paid entrance money, rushed furiously at the progressive stranger
and turned him out with a punch from each fist. For a moment both vanished
from our sight behind a curtain, and only then I grasped that the whole
uproar was about nothing. Elena Ivanovna turned out quite innocent; she
had, as I have mentioned already, no idea whatever of subjecting the
crocodile to a degrading corporal punishment, and had simply expressed the
desire that he should be opened and her husband released from his interior.
"What! You wish that my crocodile be perished!" the proprietor yelled,
running in again. "No! let your husband be perished first, before my
crocodile!... _Mein Vater_ showed crocodile, _mein Grossvater_ showed
crocodile, _mein Sohn_ will show crocodile, and I will show crocodile! All
will show crocodile! I am known to _ganz Europa_, and you are not known to
_ganz Europa_, and you must pay me a _strafe_!"
"_Ja, ja_," put in the vindictive German woman, "we shall not let you go.
_Strafe_, since Karlchen is burst!"
"And, indeed, it's useless to flay the creature," I added calmly, anxious
to get Elena Ivanovna away home as quickly as possible, "as our dear Ivan
Matveitch is by now probably soaring somewhere in the empyrean."
"My dear"--we suddenly heard, to our intense amazement, the voice of Ivan
Matveitch--"my dear, my advice is to apply direct to the superintendent's
office, as without the assistance of the police the German will never be
made to see reason."
These words, uttered with firmness and aplomb, and expressing an
exceptional presence of mind, for the first minute so astounded us that we
could not believe our ears. But, of course, we ran at once to the
crocodile's tank, and with equal reverence and incredulity listened to the
unhappy captive. His voice was muffled, thin and even squeaky, as though it
came from a considerable distance. It reminded one of a jocose person who,
covering his mouth with a pillow, shouts from an adjoining room, trying to
mimic the sound of two peasants calling to one another in a deserted plain
or across a wide ravine--a performance to which I once had the pleasure of
listening in a friend's house at Christmas.
"Ivan Matveitch, my dear, and so you are alive!" faltered Elena Ivanovna.
"Alive and well," answered Ivan Matveitch, "and, thanks to the Almighty,
swallowed without any damage whatever. I am only uneasy as to the view my
superiors may take of the incident; for after getting a permit to go abroad
I've got into a crocodile, which seems anything but clever."
"But, my dear, don't trouble your head about being clever; first of all we
must somehow excavate you from where you are," Elena Ivanovna interrupted.
"Excavate!" cried the proprietor. "I will not let my crocodile be
excavated. Now the _publicum_ will come many more, and I will _fünfzig_
kopecks ask and Karlchen will cease to burst."
"_Gott sei dank!_" put in his wife.
"They are right," Ivan Matveitch observed tranquilly; "the principles of
economics before everything."
"My dear! I will fly at once to the authorities and lodge a complaint, for
I feel that we cannot settle this mess by ourselves."
"I think so too," observed Ivan Matveitch; "but in our age of industrial
crisis it is not easy to rip open the belly of a crocodile without economic
compensation, and meanwhile the inevitable question presents itself: What
will the German take for his crocodile? And with it another: How will it be
paid? For, as you know, I have no means...."
"Perhaps out of your salary...." I observed timidly, but the proprietor
interrupted me at once.
"I will not the crocodile sell; I will for three thousand the crocodile
sell! I will for four thousand the crocodile sell! Now the _publicum_ will
come very many. I will for five thousand the crocodile sell!"
In fact he gave himself insufferable airs. Covetousness and a revolting
greed gleamed joyfully in his eyes.
"I am going!" I cried indignantly.
"And I! I too! I shall go to Andrey Osipitch himself. I will soften him
with my tears," whined Elena Ivanovna.
"Don't do that, my dear," Ivan Matveitch hastened to interpose. He had long
been jealous of Andrey Osipitch on his wife's account, and he knew she
would enjoy going to weep before a gentleman of refinement, for tears
suited her. "And I don't advise you to do so either, my friend," he added,
addressing me. "It's no good plunging headlong in that slap-dash way;
there's no knowing what it may lead to. You had much better go to-day to
Timofey Semyonitch, as though to pay an ordinary visit; he is an
old-fashioned and by no means brilliant man, but he is trustworthy, and