Tales of Chekhov Page 21

  “University men are not suitable for our business.”

  “That’s not true,” cried Laptev. “It’s a lie!”

  “Excuse me, it seems to me you spit into the well from which you drink yourself,” said Fyodor, and he got up. “Our business is hateful to you, yet you make use of the income from it.”

  “Aha! We’ve spoken our minds,” said Laptev, and he laughed, looking angrily at his brother. “Yes, if I didn’t belong to your distinguished family—if I had an ounce of will and courage, I should long ago have flung away that income, and have gone to work for my living. But in your warehouse you’ve destroyed all character in me from a child! I’m your product.”

  Fyodor looked at the clock and began hurriedly saying good-bye. He kissed Yulia’s hand and went out, but instead of going into the hall, walked into the drawing-room, then into the bedroom.

  “I’ve forgotten how the rooms go,” he said in extreme confusion. “It’s a strange house. Isn’t it a strange house!”

  He seemed utterly overcome as he put on his coat, and there was a look of pain on his face. Laptev felt no more anger; he was frightened, and at the same time felt sorry for Fyodor, and the warm, true love for his brother, which seemed to have died down in his heart during those three years, awoke, and he felt an intense desire to express that love.

  “Come to dinner with us to-morrow, Fyodor,” he said, and stroked him on the shoulder. “Will you come?”

  “Yes, yes; but give me some water.”

  Laptev ran himself to the dining-room to take the first thing he could get from the sideboard. This was a tall beer-jug. He poured water into it and brought it to his brother. Fyodor began drinking, but bit a piece out of the jug; they heard a crunch, and then sobs. The water ran over his fur coat and his jacket, and Laptev, who had never seen men cry, stood in confusion and dismay, not knowing what to do. He looked on helplessly while Yulia and the servant took off Fyodor’s coat and helped him back again into the room, and went with him, feeling guilty.

  Yulia made Fyodor lie down on the sofa and knelt beside him.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, trying to comfort him. “It’s your nerves. . . .”

  “I’m so miserable, my dear!” he said. “I am so unhappy, unhappy . . . but all the time I’ve been hiding it, I’ve been hiding it!”

  He put his arm round her neck and whispered in her ear:

  “Every night I see my sister Nina. She comes and sits in the chair near my bed. . . .”

  When, an hour later, he put on his fur coat in the hall, he was smiling again and ashamed to face the servant. Laptev went with him to Pyatnitsky Street.

  “Come and have dinner with us to-morrow,” he said on the way, holding him by the arm, “and at Easter we’ll go abroad together. You absolutely must have a change, or you’ll be getting quite morbid.”

  When he got home Laptev found his wife in a state of great nervous agitation. The scene with Fyodor had upset her, and she could not recover her composure. She wasn’t crying but kept tossing on the bed, clutching with cold fingers at the quilt, at the pillows, at her husband’s hands. Her eyes looked big and frightened.

  “Don’t go away from me, don’t go away,” she said to her husband. “Tell me, Alyosha, why have I left off saying my prayers? What has become of my faith? Oh, why did you talk of religion before me? You’ve shaken my faith, you and your friends. I never pray now.”

  He put compresses on her forehead, chafed her hands, gave her tea to drink, while she huddled up to him in terror. . . .

  Towards morning she was worn out and fell asleep, while Laptev sat beside her and held her hand. So that he could get no sleep. The whole day afterwards he felt shattered and dull, and wandered listlessly about the rooms without a thought in his head.

  XVI

  The doctor said that Fyodor’s mind was affected. Laptev did not know what to do in his father’s house, while the dark warehouse in which neither his father nor Fyodor ever appeared now seemed to him like a sepulchre. When his wife told him that he absolutely must go every day to the warehouse and also to his father’s, he either said nothing, or began talking irritably of his childhood, saying that it was beyond his power to forgive his father for his past, that the warehouse and the house in Pyatnitsky Street were hateful to him, and so on.

  One Sunday morning Yulia went herself to Pyatnitsky Street. She found old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same big drawing-room in which the service had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and without a cravat, he was sitting motionless in his arm-chair, blinking with his sightless eyes.

  “It’s I—your daughter-in-law,” she said, going up to him. “I’ve come to see how you are.”

  He began breathing heavily with excitement.

  Touched by his affliction and his loneliness, she kissed his hand; and he passed his hand over her face and head, and having satisfied himself that it was she, made the sign of the cross over her.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “You know I’ve lost my eyes and can see nothing. . . . I can dimly see the window and the fire, but people and things I cannot see at all. Yes, I’m going blind, and Fyodor has fallen ill, and without the master’s eye things are in a bad way now. If there is any irregularity there’s no one to look into it; and folks soon get spoiled. And why is it Fyodor has fallen ill? Did he catch cold? Here I have never ailed in my life and never taken medicine. I never saw anything of doctors.”

  And, as he always did, the old man began boasting. Meanwhile the servants hurriedly laid the table and brought in lunch and bottles of wine.

  Ten bottles were put on the table; one of them was in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. There was a whole dish of hot pies smelling of jam, rice, and fish.

  “I beg my dear guest to have lunch,” said the old man.

  She took him by the arm, led him to the table, and poured him out a glass of vodka.

  “I will come to you again to-morrow,” she said, “and I’ll bring your grandchildren, Sasha and Lida. They will be sorry for you, and fondle you.”

  “There’s no need. Don’t bring them. They are illegitimate.”

  “Why are they illegitimate? Why, their father and mother were married.”

  “Without my permission. I do not bless them, and I don’t want to know them. Let them be.”

  “You speak strangely, Fyodor Stepanovitch,” said Yulia, with a sigh.

  “It is written in the Gospel: children must fear and honour their parents.”

  “Nothing of the sort. The Gospel tells us that we must forgive even our enemies.”

  “One can’t forgive in our business. If you were to forgive every one, you would come to ruin in three years.”

  “But to forgive, to say a kind, friendly word to any one, even a sinner, is something far above business, far above wealth.”

  Yulia longed to soften the old man, to awaken a feeling of compassion in him, to move him to repentance; but he only listened condescendingly to all she said, as a grown-up person listens to a child.

  “Fyodor Stepanovitch,” said Yulia resolutely, “you are an old man, and God soon will call you to Himself. He won’t ask you how you managed your business, and whether you were successful in it, but whether you were gracious to people; or whether you were harsh to those who were weaker than you, such as your servants, your clerks.”

  “I was always the benefactor of those that served me; they ought to remember me in their prayers forever,” said the old man, with conviction, but touched by Yulia’s tone of sincerity, and anxious to give her pleasure, he said: “Very well; bring my grandchildren to-morrow. I will tell them to buy me some little presents for them.”

  The old man was slovenly in his dress, and there was cigar ash on his breast and on his knees; apparently no one cleaned his boots, or brushed his clothes. The rice in the pies was half cooked, the tablecloth smelt of soap, the servants tramped noisily about the room. And the old man and the whole house had a neglected look, and Yulia, who felt this, was ash
amed of herself and of her husband.

  “I will be sure to come and see you to-morrow,” she said.

  She walked through the rooms, and gave orders for the old man’s bedroom to be set to rights, and the lamp to be lighted under the ikons in it. Fyodor, sitting in his own room, was looking at an open book without reading it. Yulia talked to him and told the servants to tidy his room, too; then she went downstairs to the clerks. In the middle of the room where the clerks used to dine, there was an unpainted wooden post to support the ceiling and to prevent its coming down. The ceilings in the basement were low, the walls covered with cheap paper, and there was a smell of charcoal fumes and cooking. As it was a holiday, all the clerks were at home, sitting on their bedsteads waiting for dinner. When Yulia went in they jumped up, and answered her questions timidly, looking up at her from under their brows like convicts.

  “Good heavens! What a horrid room you have!” she said, throwing up her hands. “Aren’t you crowded here?”

  “Crowded, but not aggrieved,” said Makeitchev. “We are greatly indebted to you, and will offer up our prayers for you to our Heavenly Father.”

  “The congruity of life with the conceit of the personality,” said Potchatkin.

  And noticing that Yulia did not understand Potchatkin, Makeitchev hastened to explain:

  “We are humble people and must live according to our position.”

  She inspected the boys’ quarters, and then the kitchen, made acquaintance with the housekeeper, and was thoroughly dissatisfied.

  When she got home she said to her husband:

  “We ought to move into your father’s house and settle there for good as soon as possible. And you will go every day to the warehouse.”

  Then they both sat side by side in the study without speaking. His heart was heavy, and he did not want to move into Pyatnitsky Street or to go into the warehouse; but he guessed what his wife was thinking, and could not oppose her. He stroked her cheek and said:

  “I feel as though our life is already over, and that a grey half-life is beginning for us. When I knew that my brother Fyodor was hopelessly ill, I shed tears; we spent our childhood and youth together, when I loved him with my whole soul. And now this catastrophe has come, and it seems, too, as though, losing him, I am finally cut away from my past. And when you said just now that we must move into the house in Pyatnitsky Street, to that prison, it began to seem to me that there was no future for me either.”

  He got up and walked to the window.

  “However that may be, one has to give up all thoughts of happiness,” he said, looking out into the street. “There is none. I never have had any, and I suppose it doesn’t exist at all. I was happy once in my life, though, when I sat at night under your parasol. Do you remember how you left your parasol at Nina’s?” he asked, turning to his wife. “I was in love with you then, and I remember I spent all night sitting under your parasol, and was perfectly blissful.”

  Near the book-case in the study stood a mahogany chest with bronze fittings where Laptev kept various useless things, including the parasol. He took it out and handed it to his wife.

  “Here it is.”

  Yulia looked for a minute at the parasol, recognised it, and smiled mournfully.

  “I remember,” she said. “When you proposed to me you held it in your hand.” And seeing that he was preparing to go out, she said: “Please come back early if you can. I am dull without you.”

  And then she went into her own room, and gazed for a long time at the parasol.

  XVII

  In spite of the complexity of the business and the immense turnover, there were no bookkeepers in the warehouse, and it was impossible to make anything out of the books kept by the cashier in the office. Every day the warehouse was visited by agents, German and English, with whom the clerks talked politics and religion. A man of noble birth, ruined by drink, an ailing, pitiable creature, used to come to translate the foreign correspondence in the office; the clerks used to call him a midge, and put salt in his tea. And altogether the whole concern struck Laptev as a very queer business.

  He went to the warehouse every day and tried to establish a new order of things; he forbade them to thrash the boys and to jeer at the buyers, and was violently angry when the clerks gleefully despatched to the provinces worthless shop-soiled goods as though they were new and fashionable. Now he was the chief person in the warehouse, but still, as before, he did not know how large his fortune was, whether his business was doing well, how much the senior clerks were paid, and so on. Potchatkin and Makeitchev looked upon him as young and inexperienced, concealed a great deal from him, and whispered mysteriously every evening with his blind old father.

  It somehow happened at the beginning of June that Laptev went into the Bubnovsky restaurant with Potchatkin to talk business with him over lunch. Potchatkin had been with the Laptevs a long while, and had entered their service at eight years old. He seemed to belong to them—they trusted him fully; and when on leaving the warehouse he gathered up all the takings from the till and thrust them into his pocket, it never aroused the slightest suspicion. He was the head man in the business and in the house, and also in the church, where he performed the duties of churchwarden in place of his old master. He was nicknamed Malyuta Skuratov on account of his cruel treatment of the boys and clerks under him.

  When they went into the restaurant he nodded to a waiter and said:

  “Bring us, my lad, half a bodkin and twenty-four unsavouries.”

  After a brief pause the waiter brought on a tray half a bottle of vodka and some plates of various kinds of savouries.

  “Look here, my good fellow,” said Potchatkin. “Give us a plateful of the source of all slander and evil-speaking, with mashed potatoes.”

  The waiter did not understand; he was puzzled, and would have said something, but Potchatkin looked at him sternly and said:

  “Except.”

  The waiter thought intently, then went to consult with his colleagues, and in the end guessing what was meant, brought a plateful of tongue. When they had drunk a couple of glasses and had had lunch, Laptev asked:

  “Tell me, Ivan Vassilitch, is it true that our business has been dropping off for the last year?”

  “Not a bit of it.”

  “Tell me frankly and honestly what income we have been making and are making, and what our profits are. We can’t go on in the dark. We had a balancing of the accounts at the warehouse lately, but, excuse me, I don’t believe in it; you think fit to conceal something from me and only tell the truth to my father. You have been used to being diplomatic from your childhood, and now you can’t get on without it. And what’s the use of it? So I beg you to be open. What is our position?”

  “It all depends upon the fluctuation of credit,” Potchatkin answered after a moment’s pause.

  “What do you understand by the fluctuation of credit?”

  Potchatkin began explaining, but Laptev could make nothing of it, and sent for Makeitchev. The latter promptly made his appearance, had some lunch after saying grace, and in his sedate, mellow baritone began saying first of all that the clerks were in duty bound to pray night and day for their benefactors.

  “By all means, only allow me not to consider myself your benefactor,” said Laptev.

  “Every man ought to remember what he is, and to be conscious of his station. By the grace of God you are a father and benefactor to us, and we are your slaves.”

  “I am sick of all that!” said Laptev, getting angry. “Please be a benefactor to me now. Please explain the position of our business. Give up looking upon me as a boy, or to-morrow I shall close the business. My father is blind, my brother is in the asylum, my nieces are only children. I hate the business; I should be glad to go away, but there’s no one to take my place, as you know. For goodness’ sake, drop your diplomacy!”

  They went to the warehouse to go into the accounts; then they went on with them at home in the evening, the old father himself assisting
. Initiating his son into his commercial secrets, the old man spoke as though he were engaged, not in trade, but in sorcery. It appeared that the profits of the business were increasing approximately ten per cent. per annum, and that the Laptevs’ fortune, reckoning only money and paper securities, amounted to six million roubles.

  When at one o’clock at night, after balancing the accounts, Laptev went out into the open air, he was still under the spell of those figures. It was a still, sultry, moonlight night. The white walls of the houses beyond the river, the heavy barred gates, the stillness and the black shadows, combined to give the impression of a fortress, and nothing was wanting to complete the picture but a sentinel with a gun. Laptev went into the garden and sat down on a seat near the fence, which divided them from the neighbour’s yard, where there was a garden, too. The bird-cherry was in bloom. Laptev remembered that the tree had been just as gnarled and just as big when he was a child, and had not changed at all since then. Every corner of the garden and of the yard recalled the far-away past. And in his childhood, too, just as now, the whole yard bathed in moonlight could be seen through the sparse trees, the shadows had been mysterious and forbidding, a black dog had lain in the middle of the yard, and the clerks’ windows had stood wide open. And all these were cheerless memories.