The Beauties: Essential Stories Page 9

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Yes, everybody heard you say those very words, right in front of all the common people. ‘This sort of thing is nowt to do with the Justice of the Peace.’ Everybody heard you say those… Your Honour, I fair lost my rag, I couldn’t believe my ears. Just you say that again, you so-and-so, I tells him, just you repeat those words! And he did, he repeated those very same words. So I went for him. How dare you talk that way about his Honour the Justice of the Peace? A police constable, and you’re going against the authorities? Eh? Don’t you realize, I tells him, that if his Honour the Justice of the Peace feels like it, he can send you up to gendarmerie headquarters for insubordination? Do you realize, I say, where his Honour could get you packed off to, for all that political talk? Then the elder says, ‘The Justice of the Peace,’ he says, ‘can’t issue any orders beyond his own competence. He can only rule on minor matters.’ That’s what he said – everybody heard him. ‘How dare you belittle the authorities?’ I tell him. ‘I’ll not have you playing your games with me, or it’ll be the worse for you.’ In the old days, when I was at Warsaw or portering at the boys’ classical primary school, if ever I heard any unsuitable talk, I’d take a look out onto the street, see if I could see a gendarme. ‘Come along this way, soldier,’ I’d say, and I’d report the whole thing. But out here in the sticks, who can you report to?… I saw red. I was that upset over people nowadays, forgetting all their duties and turning wilful and disobedient – I took a swing at him and… didn’t hit him hard, of course, just a tap, as he deserved, teach him not to use words like that about your Honour… The constable took the elder’s side, so I went for him too… That was how it all started… I got worked up, your Honour – well, you’ve got to sort people out. If you don’t beat up a stupid fool, the sin’s on your own conscience. Especially when he’s deserved it… creating a disturbance…”

  “Excuse me! There are people responsible for dealing with disturbances. That’s what the constable is for, and the elder, and the police assistant…”

  “The constable can’t look out for everything. Besides, he don’t understand things the way I do.”

  “But do please realize – this isn’t your business!”

  “What? What do you mean, not my business? That don’t make sense, sir… People behaving disorderly, and it’s none of my business? What am I supposed to do, pat them on the back, then? Here they come complaining to you that I won’t let ’em sing songs… What’s the good of songs, then? Instead of getting on with something sensible, they start singing songs… And then they’ve all gone for this new fashion, sitting around in the evenings with the fire lit. They ought to be lying down to sleep, not talking and laughing. But I’ve got ’em all down!”

  “Got what down?”

  “Them as has their fires lit.”

  Prishibeyev draws a grubby sheet of paper from his pocket, puts on his glasses and reads:

  “Peasants as has fires burning: Ivan Prokhorov, Savva Nikiforov, Piotr Petrov. Soldier’s wife Shustrova, widow, lives in flagrant cohabitation with Semion Kislov. Ignat Sverchok does sorcery, and Mavra his wife is a witch, goes out at night and milks other people’s cows.”

  “That’ll do!” says the magistrate, and begins questioning the witnesses.

  Sergeant Prishibeyev pushes his glasses up on his forehead and stares in amazement at the magistrate, who’s evidently not on his side. His bulging eyes gleam, his nose turns crimson. He looks at the magistrate, then at the witnesses, and can’t make out why this magistrate is getting so indignant, or why angry murmurs and stifled laughter are breaking out all over the courtroom. Nor can he understand the sentence: one month’s detention!

  “Whatever for?!” he demands, throwing out his arms in bewilderment. “Where’s the law as says that?”

  And it’s quite clear to him that the world has changed, life has become impossible. He’s submerged in dark, gloomy thoughts. But as he walks out of the courtroom and sees the peasants crowding round discussing something, his old habit returns. Unable to control himself, he snaps to attention and shouts in a hoarse, angry voice:

  “People – disperse! No crowding! Get along home!”

  THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG

  I

  A NEW FACE had appeared on the seafront, they were saying – a lady with a little dog. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent two weeks at Yalta and knew his way around, had also begun taking an interest in new faces. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret, walking past him with a white Pomeranian trotting behind her.

  After that he started coming across her several times a day, in the public gardens or the square. She would be walking on her own, always in the same beret, with her white Pomeranian. Nobody knew who she was; she was simply known as “the lady with the little dog”.

  “If she’s here without a husband or friends,” thought Gurov, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get to know her.”

  He was not yet forty, but he already had a daughter of twelve and two sons at high school. He had been married off young, when only a second-year student, and now he felt that his wife was half as old again as him. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows who held herself erect and looked stately and dignified; she described herself as a thinking woman. She read a great deal, adopted the modern spelling in her letters, and called her husband not Dmitry but Dimitry, while he secretly regarded her as unintelligent, narrow-minded and dowdy; he was afraid of her, and didn’t like being at home. He had begun cheating on her a long time ago, and did it often; that was probably why he almost always expressed a low opinion of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, he would say:

  “An inferior race!”

  He felt that he had learnt enough, through bitter experience, to be entitled to call them whatever he liked; and yet without that “inferior race” he could not have survived for two days on end. He felt bored and ill at ease in male company, which made him chilly and taciturn; but when he found himself among women, he felt free, he knew what to talk about and how to behave; even saying nothing was easy in their company. His appearance, his character, his whole personality had something intangibly appealing about it that attracted women and made them feel friendly towards him. He knew this, and a force of some kind drew him to them in turn.

  Repeated experience, bitter experience indeed, had taught him long ago that for decent people – especially Muscovites, so slow to move and so indecisive – any relationship, while it may initially feel like an agreeable diversion, a charming and light-hearted adventure, invariably develops into a really complicated headache, and the situation eventually becomes intolerable. But at each new encounter with an interesting woman, all his past experience somehow slipped his mind, and he longed to live, and everything seemed so simple and entertaining.

  And so it came about one evening that he was dining in the gardens when the lady in the beret approached unhurriedly to sit at the next table. Her expression, her walk, her clothing and coiffure, all told him that she belonged to respectable society, that she was married, visiting Yalta for the first time, on her own, and that she was bored here. There was a great deal of untruth in the stories of immorality in this town, and he despised those stories and knew that they were mostly invented by people who would have been very happy to transgress if only they could; but when the lady sat down at the next table, three paces away from him, he remembered those tales of easy victories, and trips to the mountains, and he was suddenly overcome by the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with a strange woman whom he didn’t even know by name.

  He beckoned coaxingly to the Pomeranian, and when the dog approached he wagged his finger threateningly. The dog growled. Gurov wagged his finger again.

  The lady looked at him and at once lowered her eyes.

  “He doesn’t bite,” she said and blushed.

  “Can I give him a bone?” And when she nodded, he asked politely, �
�Have you been in Yalta long?”

  “Five days or so.”

  “I’ve been stuck here almost two weeks.”

  Neither spoke for a while.

  “Time passes quickly here, but how boring it all is!” she said without looking at him.

  “That’s what everybody’s supposed to say, that it’s boring here. Your average man comes from somewhere like Belyov or Zhizdra, and isn’t bored there, but when he gets here he goes ‘Oh, the tedium! Oh, the dust!’ You’d think he came from Granada.”

  She laughed. Then they carried on eating in silence, like strangers; but after their dinner they walked off side by side – and began a jocular, light-hearted conversation, like free spirits who were pleased with themselves and didn’t care where they went or what they talked about. They walked and talked about the strange light on the sea – the water had a soft, warm lilac colour, with a golden streak where the moon was reflected in it. They talked about how sultry it was after the hot day. Gurov said that he came from Moscow, was a philologist by training but worked in a bank; that he had once been trained to sing in a private opera company, but had given it up; that he had two houses in Moscow… And from her he discovered that she had grown up in Petersburg, but had married in S——, where she had now lived for two years; that she was going to spend another month or so in Yalta, and that her husband might come for her then, as he wanted to spend some leave here. She was quite unable to explain where her husband worked – whether it was in the provincial government or the provincial district council – and she herself found that funny. And Gurov also discovered that her name was Anna Sergeyevna.

  Later, back in his room, he thought about her and about the fact that she would probably meet him tomorrow. That was bound to happen. As he went to bed, he remembered that she had only very recently been a schoolgirl, and had been studying just as his daughter was doing now; he remembered how diffident and awkward she had been when she laughed, and in conversation with a stranger – this must be the first time in her life that she had found herself alone, in a situation like this, with people following her, and looking at her, and talking to her, all with a single idea in their minds, which she couldn’t fail to guess. He remembered her slender, delicate neck, and her pretty grey eyes.

  “Still, there’s something pathetic about her,” he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

  II

  A week had passed since they had got to know one another. It was a public holiday. Indoors it was stuffy; outdoors the dust was gusting about in eddies and the wind blew people’s hats off. Gurov felt thirsty all day, and kept going into the pavilion and offering Anna Sergeyevna a glass of syrup and water or an ice cream. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

  That evening, when the wind dropped a little, they went out onto the breakwater to watch a steamer coming in. There were a great many people strolling on the quay, waiting to meet people off the boat, and holding bouquets of flowers. Here, he could not fail to notice two striking features of the elegant Yalta crowd: that the elderly ladies dressed like young girls, and there were a great many generals.

  Because of the rough sea the boat arrived late, after sunset, and then spent a long time turning around before mooring at the quay. Anna Sergeyevna watched the boat and its passengers through her lorgnette, as if looking for someone she knew, and when she turned to Gurov her eyes were shining. She talked a great deal, asking sudden questions and immediately forgetting what she had asked; then she lost her lorgnette in the crush.

  The crowd of well-dressed people was dispersing, it was too dark to see their faces, and the wind had stilled, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna went on standing there as if waiting to see whether anybody else would disembark. Anna Sergeyevna stood silently sniffing at her bouquet of flowers, without looking at Gurov.

  “The weather’s got better this evening,” he said. “Where shall we go now? Shall we drive out somewhere?”

  She did not answer.

  Then he looked hard at her, and suddenly put his arm round her and kissed her on the lips. He was enveloped in the moisture and fragrance of the flowers, and at once looked round anxiously to see if anyone had noticed.

  “Let’s go to your room…” he said quietly.

  And they both walked quickly away.

  Her room was stuffy, and smelt of the scent she had bought at a Japanese shop. Looking at her now, Gurov thought “What strange meetings happen in one’s life!” Thinking of his past, he remembered carefree, friendly women, who loved light-heartedly and were grateful to him for their happiness, however short-lived; and other women – his wife, for instance – who loved without sincere feeling, with too much talk, and affectation, and hysteria, and with an expression on their faces as if all this wasn’t love, or passion, but something more important; and he remembered two or three other women, very beautiful and cold, on whose faces he had suddenly caught a glimpse of a rapacious expression, a determination to seize and take from life more than life could offer – and these were women not in their first youth, who were capricious, unthinking, domineering, unintelligent, and when Gurov cooled towards them, their beauty filled him with hatred, and the lace on their linen reminded him of scales.

  But here there was still that diffidence, that angularity of inexperienced youth, a feeling of awkwardness, a sense of being abashed, as though someone had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, this “lady with the little dog”, was reacting to what had happened in a peculiar way, very gravely, as if this was her fall: that was what it seemed like, and it was strange and inappropriate. Her countenance drooped and seemed faded, and her long hair hung sadly down at the sides of her face; she was sunk in reflection, in a dejected posture, like a sinful woman in an ancient picture.

  “This is bad,” she said. “You’ll be the first to lose your respect for me now.”

  On the table in her room lay a watermelon. Gurov cut himself a slice and began unhurriedly eating it. At least half an hour went by in silence.

  Anna Sergeyevna was a touching figure, redolent of the purity of a respectable, innocent woman who knew little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table barely lit up her face, but it was clear that she was troubled in spirit.

  “Why would I lose my respect for you?” asked Gurov. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “God forgive me!” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “This is dreadful.”

  “You seem to be justifying yourself.”

  “How can I justify myself? I’m a low, wicked woman, I despise myself, I don’t even think of justification. It’s not my husband I’ve deceived, but myself. And not just now – I’ve been deceiving myself for a long time. My husband may be a good, honest man, but he’s a flunkey! I don’t know what he does there, what his work is, all I know is that he’s a flunkey. I was twenty years old when I married him, I was tormented by curiosity, I wanted something better; life must hold something else, I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, and live… I was burnt up with curiosity… you won’t understand this, but I swear to God, I couldn’t control myself, something was happening to me, I couldn’t stop myself, and I told my husband I was ill, and came here… And here I kept walking about like a demented person, like a madwoman… and now I’ve become a vulgar, worthless creature whom everybody has the right to despise.”

  Gurov was already bored with listening to her, and irritated by her naive language, and all that remorse, so unexpected and out of place. But for the tears in her eyes, he might have thought she was joking or acting a part.

  “I don’t understand,” he said quietly. “What is it you want?”

  She buried her head in his chest and pressed herself against him.

  “Please, please believe me, I beg you…” she said. “I care about being upright and pure; I find sin revolting, I myself don’t know what I’m doing. Simple folk say the Evil One ensnared them. And now I can say that about myself – the Evil One has ensnared me.”

  “There, there,” he mutt
ered.

  He looked into her fixed, frightened eyes, and kissed her, and talked gently and quietly to her, and gradually she was comforted, and became cheerful once more, and they both started laughing.

  Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the promenade; the town with its cypresses looked utterly dead, but the sea still murmured as it beat against the shore. A solitary boat was rocking on the waves, with a sleepy light blinking over it.

  They found a cab and drove to Oreanda.

  “I just found out your surname,” said Gurov. “The board down in the hall said Von Diederitz. Is your husband German?”

  “No, I believe his grandfather was German, but he’s Orthodox himself.”

  At Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, and looked down in silence at the sea. Yalta could scarcely be seen through the morning mist. White clouds hung motionless over the mountain tops. The leaves on the trees were still, cicadas were chirruping, and the monotonous dull murmur of the sea reaching them from below spoke of repose, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. That same murmur sounded from the sea below before Yalta or Oreanda ever existed; it sounds there now, and will still sound, just as dull and indifferent, when we are no more. And in this constancy, this complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, there lies hidden, perhaps, a pledge of our everlasting salvation, the ceaseless movement of life on earth, the ceaseless progress towards perfection. As he sat beside this young woman, who looked so beautiful in the dawn light, Gurov felt comforted and enchanted by the sight of his fairy-tale surroundings – the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the expanse of sky – and reflected that in essence, if one really thought about it, everything in this world was beautiful, everything except our own thoughts and actions, when we forget about the higher aims of our existence and our own human dignity.

  Someone – no doubt a watchman – came up to them, looked at them and went away. And this little detail also struck him as very mysterious and beautiful. The steamer from Feodosia could be seen arriving, lit up by the sunrise, its lights no longer burning.