A Woman's Kingdom

I. ON THE EVE

Here is a fat envelope of money. It is from the timber estate, from the bailiff. He writes that he is sending fifteen hundred rubles which he had recovered from someone, having won the case in the court of second instance. Anna Akimovna disliked and feared words like "recovered" and "won the case." She knew that there was no doing without the law, but for some reason, whenever the factory director Nazarych, or the bailiff at the estate, who were forever suing people, won some case on her behalf, she always felt an uneasy chill and something like shame. And now she felt that same chill and awkwardness, and wanted to put these fifteen hundred rubles away somewhere out of sight, so as not to have to look at them.

She thought, with vexation, that other women her age – she was going on twenty-six – were now busy with their households, tired out, and would soon fall soundly asleep, and tomorrow morning would wake in a holiday mood; many of them had long since married and had children. She alone, for some reason, was obliged, like an old woman, to sit over these letters, making notes on them, writing replies, and then to do nothing all evening until midnight and wait for sleep to come, and tomorrow all day people would congratulate her and ask her for things, and the day after that something scandalous would happen at the factory without fail – someone would get beaten, or someone would die of drink, and for some reason her conscience would torment her over it; and after the holidays Nazarych would dismiss some twenty men for absenteeism, and all twenty of them would huddle bareheaded by her porch, and she would be ashamed to go out to them, and they would be driven off like dogs. And all her acquaintances would talk behind her back and write her anonymous letters saying that she was a millionairess, an exploiter, that she battened on other people’s lives and sucked the workers’ blood.

Here, set apart, lies a stack of letters already read and put aside. These are from petitioners. Here are the hungry, the drunk, those burdened with enormous families, the sick, the humiliated, the unrecognized... Anna Akimovna had already marked on each letter who should get three rubles, who five; these letters would go to the office that same day, and tomorrow the handing-out of relief would take place there, or, as the clerks put it, the feeding of the beasts.

They would also hand out, in small sums, 470 rubles – the interest on a capital sum bequeathed by the late Akim Ivanych to the poor and destitute. There would be an unseemly crush. From the gates to the office door a long line of strangers with beastlike faces would stretch out in single file, ragged, frozen, hungry, and already drunk, invoking in hoarse voices their benefactress-mother Anna Akimovna and her parents; those in the back would push against those in front, and those in front would curse at them in ugly words. The clerk, sick of the noise, the swearing, and the wailing, would dash out and box someone’s ears, to everyone’s general satisfaction. And their own people, the workers, who would get nothing for the holiday beyond their ordinary wages, already spent down to the last kopeck, would stand about the yard watching and snickering – some enviously, others ironically.

"Merchants, and merchants’ wives especially, love beggars more than they love their own workers," Anna Akimovna thought. "It’s always so."

Her eyes fell on the packet of money. It would be good to give away tomorrow this unwanted, disagreeable money to the workers, but one cannot simply give a worker something for nothing, or he will come asking again. And besides, what did this fifteen hundred amount to, when the factory had over eighteen hundred workers, not counting their wives and children? Better, perhaps, to choose one of the petitioners who had written these letters, some poor devil who had long since lost hope of a better life, and give him the fifteen hundred outright. The money would strike the poor man like a thunderbolt, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, he would feel himself happy. This thought struck Anna Akimovna as original and amusing, and it diverted her. She drew a letter at random from the stack and read it. Some provincial secretary named Chalikov, long out of a position, ill, living in Gushchin’s building; his wife consumptive, five young daughters. Anna Akimovna knew Gushchin’s four-story building well. Ah, what a foul, rotten, unhealthy building!

"There – I’ll give it to this Chalikov," she decided. "I won’t send it, better to take it myself, so there’s no idle talk. Yes," she reasoned, tucking the fifteen hundred into her pocket, "I’ll have a look, and perhaps find some place for the girls."

She felt cheerful, rang the bell, and ordered the horses brought round.

It was going on seven in the evening when she got into the sleigh. The windows in all the buildings were brightly lit, and because of this the vast yard seemed very dark. By the gates, and far off in the depths of the yard, near the warehouses and the workers’ barracks, electric lamps burned.

These dark, sullen buildings, warehouses, and barracks where the workers lived, Anna Akimovna disliked and feared. She had been inside the main building only once since her father’s death. The high ceilings with their iron girders, the multitude of enormous, swiftly turning wheels, the drive belts and levers, the piercing hiss, the shriek of steel, the rattle of trolley cars, the harsh breath of steam, faces pale or crimson or black with coal dust, shirts soaked with sweat, the gleam of steel, copper, and fire, the smell of oil and coal, and the wind, now scorching hot, now cold, had made on her the impression of hell. It seemed to her that the wheels, the levers, the hot hissing cylinders were trying to tear free of their fastenings in order to destroy the people, and that the people, with their anxious faces, unable to hear one another, ran about fussing near the machines, trying to halt their terrible motion. Things had been pointed out and explained to Anna Akimovna with great deference. She remembers how, in the forging shop, a piece of red-hot iron was dragged from the furnace, and how one old man with a leather band around his head, and another – young, in a blue smock, with a watch chain on his chest and an angry face, evidently one of the foremen – struck the piece of iron with hammers, and how golden sparks flew in every direction, and how, a little later, they clanged before her a huge sheet of rolled iron; the old man stood at attention and smiled, while the young one wiped his wet face with his sleeve and explained something to her. And she remembers, too, how in another shop a one-eyed old man was sawing a piece of iron, and iron filings poured down, and how a red-haired man in dark glasses, with holes in his shirt, worked at a lathe, shaping something out of a piece of steel; the lathe roared and shrieked and whistled, and the noise made Anna Akimovna feel ill, and it seemed to her that someone was boring into her ears. She looked, listened, understood nothing, smiled graciously, and felt ashamed. To be fed and to draw hundreds of thousands from a business one does not understand and cannot love – how strange that was!

And in the workers’ barracks she had never once set foot. There, they say, is damp, bedbugs, depravity, disorder. A strange thing: every year thousands of rubles go toward improving the barracks, yet the workers’ condition, if the anonymous letters are to be believed, grows worse and worse with each passing year...

"There was more order when Father was alive," Anna Akimovna thought, as she drove out of the yard, "because he had been a worker himself and knew what was needed. I know nothing, and only do foolish things."

She grew bored again, and was no longer glad she had come out, and the thought of the lucky man on whom fifteen hundred rubles would fall from the sky no longer seemed to her original or amusing. To go off to see some Chalikov, when at home a million-ruble business was gradually falling to ruin, and the workers in the barracks lived worse than convicts – that was simply foolishness, and a way of deceiving her own conscience. Along the highway, and across the fields beside it, heading toward the city lights, crowds of workers from the neighboring factories – the calico mill and the paper mill – were walking. Laughter and cheerful talk rang out in the frosty air. Anna Akimovna looked at the women and the young ones, and suddenly longed for simplicity, roughness, closeness. She pictured vividly that distant time when she was called Anyutka, and used to lie as a little girl under one blanket with her mother, while next door, in the other room, the lodger, a washerwoman, did the laundry, and from the neighboring flats, through the thin walls, came laughter, cursing, children crying, an accordion, the whirring of lathes and sewing machines, while her father, Akim Ivanych, who knew almost every trade, paying no attention at all to the crowding and the noise, soldered something by the stove, or drew, or planed wood. And she longed to do the washing, the ironing, to run to the shop and the tavern, as she used to do every day when she lived with her mother. She ought to have been a working woman, not a mistress! Her great house with its chandeliers and paintings, the footman Mishenka in his tailcoat with his little velvet mustache, the pious Varvarushka and the fawning Agafyushka, and those young men and women of both sexes who came to her almost every day to ask for money, and before whom she somehow always felt herself guilty, and those officials, doctors, and ladies doing charity at her expense, flattering her and secretly despising her for her lowly origin – how tiresome and alien all of it had become to her!

There was the railway crossing and the toll barrier; houses began, mixed with kitchen gardens; and here at last was the broad street where Gushchin’s famous building stood. On a street ordinarily quiet, there was now a great deal of movement, on account of the eve of the holiday. There was noise in the taverns and the beer-houses. If some outsider, living in the center of town, had driven down this street now, he would have noticed only dirty people, drunks, and foul-mouthed swearing, but Anna Akimovna, who had lived in these parts since childhood, now recognized in the crowd now her late father, now her mother, now her uncle. Her father had been a soft, yielding soul, something of a dreamer, careless and easygoing; he had no attachment either to money, or to honors, or to power; he used to say that a working man had no time to sort out holidays or go to church, and if it hadn’t been for his wife, he would probably never have observed a fast and would have eaten meat during Lent. Her uncle, Ivan Ivanych, on the contrary, had been made of flint; in everything touching religion, politics, and morals he was harsh and unyielding, and kept watch not only over himself but over all the clerks and acquaintances as well. God forbid one should walk into his room without crossing oneself! The splendid rooms in which Anna Akimovna now lived he had kept locked, opening them only on the great feast days for important guests, while he himself lived in the office, in one small room crowded with icons. He inclined toward the Old Belief and was forever receiving Old Believer bishops and priests at his house, though he himself had been baptized and married in the official Church, and had buried his wife according to the rite of the Orthodox Church. His brother Akim, his sole heir, he did not love, on account of his easygoingness, which he called simplemindedness and foolishness, and his indifference to matters of faith. He kept him in straitened circumstances, on the footing of a common workman, paying him sixteen rubles a month. Akim addressed his brother formally, and on Forgiveness Sunday, with his whole family, bowed down at his feet. But some three years before his death, Ivan Ivanych drew him closer, forgave him, and ordered a governess hired for little Anyutka.

The gateway under Gushchin’s building was dark, deep, foul-smelling; one could hear men coughing near the walls. Leaving the sleigh in the street, Anna Akimovna went into the yard and asked there how to find flat No. 46, belonging to the official Chalikov. She was directed to the far door on the right, on the third floor. Both in the yard and near the far door, and even on the stairs, there was the same disagreeable smell as under the gateway. As a child, when Anna Akimovna’s father had been a plain worker, she had lived in buildings like this, and later, when circumstances changed, she had often visited such places as a benefactress; the narrow stone stairway with its high steps, dirty, broken at each floor by a landing; the grimy lantern in the stairwell; the stench, and on the landings by the doors the tubs, pots, and rags – all this had long, long been familiar to her... One door stood open, and through it could be seen Jewish tailors sitting cross-legged on tables in their caps, sewing. On the stairs Anna Akimovna passed people, but it never once occurred to her that she might be molested. She feared workers and peasants, sober or drunk, no more than she feared her own educated acquaintances.

Flat No. 46 had no entryway; it began straight with the kitchen. Usually flats belonging to factory hands and tradesmen smell of varnish, resin, leather, smoke, depending on what the tenant did for a living; but the flats of impoverished gentry and officials are known by a dank smell of some kind of acid. This unpleasant smell now enveloped Anna Akimovna the moment she crossed the threshold. In the corner, at a table, with his back to the door, sat a man in a black frock coat – Chalikov himself, no doubt – with five little girls. The eldest, broad-faced and thin, with a comb in her hair, looked about fifteen; the youngest, chubby, with hair like a hedgehog’s, was no more than three. All six of them were eating. By the stove, holding an oven fork, stood a small, very thin, sallow-faced woman in a skirt and white blouse, pregnant.

"I did not expect this of you, Lizochka, that you’d be so disobedient," the man was saying reproachfully. "For shame, for shame! So you want your papa to give you a whipping, is that it?"

Seeing an unfamiliar lady on the threshold, the gaunt woman started and set down the oven fork.

"Vasily Nikitich!" she called out, not at once, in a hollow voice, as though she could not believe her eyes.

The man turned and jumped up. He was a bony, narrow-shouldered man with sunken temples and a flat chest. His eyes were small, deep-set, ringed with dark circles, his nose long, birdlike, and slightly crooked to the right, his mouth wide. His beard grew in two separate tufts; he shaved his mustache off, which made him look more like a hired footman than an official.

"Is this where Mr. Chalikov lives?" Anna Akimovna asked.

"Just so, madam," Chalikov answered severely, but at once recognized Anna Akimovna and cried out: "Madam Glagoleva! Anna Akimovna!" – and suddenly gasped and threw up his hands, as though in mortal fright. "My benefactress!"

With a groan he ran up to her and, mumbling like a paralytic – there was cabbage in his beard, and he smelled of vodka – pressed his forehead to her muff and seemed to freeze there.

"Your hand! Your sacred hand!" he said, gasping for breath. "A dream! A beautiful dream! Children, wake me up!"

He turned to the table and said, in a sobbing voice, shaking his fists:

"Providence has heard us! Our deliverer has come, our angel! We are saved! Children, on your knees! On your knees!"

Madam Chalikova and the girls, all but the very youngest, began hurriedly clearing the table for some reason.

"You wrote that your wife was very ill," Anna Akimovna said, and felt ashamed and annoyed. "I won’t give him the fifteen hundred," she thought.

"Here she is, my wife!" Chalikov said, in a thin, womanish little voice, as though tears had rushed to his head. "Here she is, poor thing! One foot in the grave! But we, madam, do not complain. Better to die than live so. Die, poor woman!"

"Why is he playacting like this?" Anna Akimovna thought with annoyance. "One can see at once he’s used to dealing with merchants."

"Please, speak to me like a human being," she said. "I do not care for theatrics."

"But, madam, five orphaned children around their mother’s coffin, by the funeral candles – is that theatrics? Ah!" Chalikov said bitterly, and turned away.

"Be quiet!" his wife whispered, tugging at his sleeve. "Forgive us, madam," she said, turning to Anna Akimovna, "we’re not tidied up... you’ll excuse us... It’s a family matter, you understand yourself. Cramped, but no hard feelings."

"I won’t give them the fifteen hundred," Anna Akimovna thought again.

And, in order to get away from these people and the sour smell as quickly as possible, she had already taken out her purse and decided to leave some twenty-five rubles – no more; but she suddenly felt ashamed that she had come all this way and troubled people over trifles.

"If you’ll give me paper and ink, I’ll write at once to a doctor, a good acquaintance of mine, asking him to call on you," she said, flushing. "He is a very good doctor. And I’ll leave you something for medicine."

Madam Chalikova rushed to wipe down the table.

"It’s not clean in here! Where are you going?" Chalikov hissed, glaring at her with spite. "Take her to the lodger’s room! This way, madam, if I may be so bold," he said, turning to Anna Akimovna. "It’s clean in there."

"Osip Ilyich doesn’t allow anyone in his room!" one of the girls said sternly.

But Anna Akimovna was already being led from the kitchen through a narrow passage room, between two beds; one could tell from how the bedding lay that two people slept lengthwise on one, and three crosswise on the other. In the next room, the lodger’s, it was in fact clean. A neat bed with a red woolen blanket, a pillow in a white pillowcase, even a little pocket for a watch, a table covered with a hempen cloth, and on it a milk-white inkstand, pens, paper, photographs in little frames, everything just as it should be, and another table, black, on which watchmaking tools and dismantled watches lay in order. On the walls hung hammers, pincers, gimlets, chisels, pliers, and the like, and three wall clocks hung there, ticking; one enormous clock, with heavy weights, of the kind found in taverns.

Sitting down to write her letter, Anna Akimovna saw before her on the table a portrait of her father, and her own portrait. This surprised her.

"Who lives here?" she asked.

"The lodger, madam, Pimenov. He works at your factory."

"Does he? And I took him for a watchmaker."

"He does the watches privately, as a sideline. An amateur, if you please."

After a silence, in which nothing could be heard but the ticking of the clocks and the scratch of the pen on paper, Chalikov sighed and said mockingly, with indignation:

"It’s true what they say: gentility and rank won’t sew you a fur coat. A cockade on your cap and a noble title, and nothing to eat. To my mind, if a man of low rank helps the poor, he is far nobler than some Chalikov who has sunk into poverty and vice."

To flatter Anna Akimovna, he added a few more phrases insulting to his own gentility, and it was plain that he was debasing himself precisely because he considered himself above her. Meanwhile she finished the letter and sealed it. The letter would be thrown away, and the money would not go toward medicine – this she knew, but she nonetheless left twenty-five rubles on the table, and, after a moment’s thought, added two more red notes. The thin, sallow hand of Madam Chalikova, like a hen’s claw, flashed before her eyes and closed the money into a fist.

"That is what you have kindly given for medicine," Chalikov said in a trembling voice, "but stretch out a helping hand to me as well... and to the children," he added, and gave a sob, "the unfortunate children! It is not for myself I fear, but for my daughters! I fear the hydra of depravity!"

Trying to open her purse, whose little clasp had broken, Anna Akimovna felt flustered and blushed. She was ashamed that people were standing before her, watching her hands, waiting, and probably, deep down, laughing at her. At that moment someone came into the kitchen and stamped his feet, shaking off the snow.

"The lodger’s come," said Madam Chalikova.

Anna Akimovna felt still more flustered. She did not want anyone from the factory to catch her in this ridiculous position. As if on purpose, the lodger came into his room at the very moment when she, having finally broken the little clasp, was handing Chalikov several notes, and Chalikov was mumbling like a paralytic, groping with his lips for somewhere to kiss her. In the lodger she recognized the worker who had once, in the forging shop, clanged a sheet of iron before her and given her explanations. He had evidently come straight from the factory: his face was swarthy with soot, and one cheek near the nose was smudged with grime. His hands were quite black, and his smock, beltless, was greasy with oil. He was a man of about thirty, of middle height, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, and evidently very strong. Anna Akimovna judged at first glance that he was a foreman, earning no less than thirty-five rubles a month, strict, loud-voiced, one who struck workers across the face, and this was plain from the way he stood, from the posture he involuntarily took on seeing a lady in his room, and above all from the fact that he wore trousers worn outside his boots, had pockets on his chest, and a sharp, handsomely trimmed little beard. Her late father, Akim Ivanych, had been the owner’s brother, yet had still gone in fear of foremen like this lodger, and curried favor with them.

"Forgive us, we made ourselves at home here without you," Anna Akimovna said.

The worker looked at her with surprise, smiled awkwardly, and said nothing.

"Speak up a bit louder, madam..." Chalikov said quietly. "Mr. Pimenov, when he comes home in the evenings from the factory, is a bit hard of hearing."

But Anna Akimovna was already glad she had nothing more to do here; she nodded and went out quickly. Pimenov went to see her out.

"Have you been with us long?" she asked loudly, without turning to him.

"Since I was nine years old. I was taken on while your uncle was still alive."

"As long ago as that! My uncle and my father knew all their clerks and workers, and I hardly know anyone. I’ve seen you before, but I didn’t know your name was Pimenov."

Anna Akimovna felt a wish to justify herself before him, to make it seem as though she had not given the money seriously just now, but as a kind of joke.

"Ah, this poverty!" she sighed. "We do good deeds, both on holidays and on ordinary days, and still it’s no use. It seems to me that helping people like this Chalikov does no good at all."

"Of course it does no good," Pimenov agreed. "However much you give, he’ll drink it all away. And now, all night long, husband and wife will be snatching it from each other and fighting over it," he added, and laughed.

"Yes, I have to admit our philanthropy is useless, tedious, and absurd. But all the same, you must agree, one can’t just sit with folded hands — one has to do something. For instance, what is to be done with the Chalikovs?"

She turned to Pimenov and stopped, waiting for his answer; he stopped too and slowly, silently, shrugged his shoulders. Evidently he knew what should be done with the Chalikovs, but it was so harsh and inhuman that he did not even dare say it. And the Chalikovs were so utterly uninteresting and negligible to him that a moment later he had already forgotten about them; looking into Anna Akimovna’s eyes, he smiled with pleasure, and his expression was that of a man dreaming of something very good. Anna Akimovna, standing close to him now, saw for the first time, by his face and especially his eyes, how tired he was and how badly he wanted to sleep.

"Now there’s someone I should give those fifteen hundred to!" she thought, but the idea somehow struck her as absurd and insulting to Pimenov.

"Your whole body must ache from work, and here you are seeing me off," she said, going down the stairs. "Go home."

But he did not hear her. As they came out onto the street, he ran ahead, unfastened the sledge’s lap-robe, and, helping Anna Akimovna in, said:

"A safe and happy holiday to you!"

II. MORNING

"They’ve long since rung the bells! It’s a punishment from God, you’ll miss it altogether! Get up!"

"Two horses running, running..." said Anna Akimovna, and woke up; standing before her with a candle in her hands was her maid, red-haired Masha. "What? What is it?"

"The service is over already!" Masha was saying in despair. "This is the third time I’ve woken you! For all I care you could sleep till evening, but you gave orders yourself to wake you!"

Anna Akimovna raised herself on her elbow and glanced at the window. Outside it was still quite dark, and only the lower edge of the window frame showed white with snow. A deep, low chime could be heard, but it was not ringing from their own parish, it was somewhere farther off. The clock on the little table showed three minutes past six.

"All right, Masha... in three minutes..." said Anna Akimovna in a pleading voice, and pulled the covers over her head.

She pictured to herself the snow by the porch steps, the sledge, the dark sky, the crowd in the church, and the smell of juniper, and she felt a kind of dread, but still she resolved that she would get up at once and go to the early service. And while she lay warming herself in bed and struggling against sleep — which, as if on purpose, is astonishingly sweet just when one is forbidden it — and while first a vast garden on a hillside, then the Gushchin house, drifted before her, the thought kept troubling her the whole time that she must get up this very minute and go to church.

But by the time she got up it was already broad daylight, and the clock showed half past nine. A great deal of new snow had fallen in the night, the trees had dressed themselves in white, and the air was extraordinarily clear, transparent, and soft, so that when Anna Akimovna looked out the window, her first wish was to take a long, deep breath. And as she washed, a remnant of some old childhood feeling — the joy that today was Christmas — suddenly stirred in her breast, and after that her soul felt light, free, and clean, as though it too had been washed, or dipped in the white snow. Masha came in, dressed up and tightly laced into her corset, and wished her a happy holiday; then she spent a long while combing her hair and helping her into her dress. The smell and feel of the new, sumptuous, beautiful dress, its faint rustle and the scent of fresh perfume, put Anna Akimovna in high spirits.

"Well, here’s the holiday season," she said cheerfully to Masha. "Now we’ll tell fortunes."

"Mine came out last year that I’d marry an old man. Three times it came out that way."

"Well, God is merciful."

"But what of it, Anna Akimovna? I think, rather than neither one thing nor the other, neither two nor one and a half, better an old man," said Masha sadly, and sighed. "I’m in my twenty-first year now, it’s no joke."

Everyone in the house knew that red-haired Masha was in love with the footman Mishenka, and that this deep, passionate, but hopeless love had already been going on three years.

"Now, enough of that nonsense," Anna Akimovna comforted her. "I’ll soon be thirty, and I’m still meaning to marry a young man."

While her mistress was dressing, Mishenka, in a new tailcoat and lacquered shoes, walked about the hall and drawing room waiting for her to come out so he could wish her a happy holiday. He always walked in a particular way, treading softly and gently; watching his feet, his hands, and the tilt of his head, one might have thought he was not simply walking but learning the first figure of a quadrille. Despite his thin, velvety little mustache and his handsome, even somewhat card-sharp’s looks, he was sedate, deliberate, and pious as an old man. He always prayed to God with full prostrations and liked to burn incense in his room. The rich and the well-born he respected and revered, but paupers and petitioners of every sort he despised with the whole strength of his fastidious lackey’s soul. Under his starched shirt he wore another one of flannel, which he kept on winter and summer, guarding his health carefully; his ears were plugged with cotton wool.

When Anna Akimovna passed through the hall with Masha, he inclined his head down and slightly to one side and said in his pleasant, honeyed voice:

"I have the honor to congratulate you, Anna Akimovna, on the most solemn feast of the Nativity of Christ."

Anna Akimovna gave him five rubles, and poor Masha nearly fainted. His holiday air, his pose, his voice, and what he had said struck her with their beauty and elegance; as she went on following her mistress she thought of nothing else, saw nothing else, and only smiled, now blissfully, now bitterly.

The upper floor of the house was called the clean, or genteel, half, and the grand apartments; the lower floor, where Aunt Tatyana Ivanovna held sway, had been given the name of the trade, or old-fashioned, or simply the woman’s half. In the former they generally received the well-born and the educated, in the latter, people of plainer sort and Aunt’s own personal acquaintances. Beautiful, full-figured, healthy, still young and fresh, feeling on her the splendor of her dress, from which, it seemed to her, radiance spread on every side, Anna Akimovna went down to the lower floor. There she was met with reproaches — that she, an educated woman, had forgotten God, had slept through the service and not come down to break the fast — and everyone clasped their hands and declared sincerely that she was beautiful, extraordinary, and she believed it, laughed, exchanged kisses, and pressed on this one a ruble, on that one three or five, according to the person. She liked it downstairs. Wherever one looked — icon cases, holy images, little lamps, portraits of clergy, a smell of monks, knives clattering in the kitchen, and already the smell of something rich and delicious drifting through every room. The yellow painted floors shone, and from the doors to the front corners ran narrow carpet runners with bright blue stripes, and the sun cut sharply in through the windows.

In the dining room sat some unfamiliar old women; in Varvarushka’s room there were old women too, and with them a deaf-mute girl who kept being ashamed of something and saying, "bly, bly..." Two skinny little girls, taken in from the orphanage for the holidays, came up to Anna Akimovna to kiss her hand, and stopped before her, struck by the splendor of her dress; she noticed that one of the girls had a slight squint, and amid her light holiday mood her heart suddenly contracted painfully at the thought that suitors would pass this girl by and she would never marry. In the room of the cook Agafyushka, some five enormous peasant men in new shirts sat round the samovar — not factory workers, but the cook’s own kin. On seeing Anna Akimovna the men jumped up from their seats and, out of politeness, stopped chewing, though every one of them had a full mouth; the cook Stepan came in from the kitchen, in his white cap and with a knife in hand, and offered his congratulations; the yard-keepers came in their felt boots and offered theirs too. The water-carrier peeked in, icicles hanging from his beard, but did not dare come inside.

Anna Akimovna went from room to room, and behind her the whole retinue: Aunt, Varvarushka, Nikandrovna, the seamstress Marfa Petrovna, downstairs Masha. Varvarushka — thin, gaunt, tall, taller than anyone in the house, dressed all in black, smelling of cypress and coffee — crossed herself before the icons in every room and bowed from the waist, and looking at her, for some reason, one always remembered that she had already prepared her own shroud for the hour of death, and that in the very same trunk where the shroud lay, her lottery bonds were hidden as well.

"Anyutinka, be merciful for the holiday’s sake," she said, opening the door into the kitchen. "Forgive him, God be with him! Never mind them!"

In the middle of the kitchen, on his knees, stood the coachman Panteley, dismissed for drunkenness back in November. He was a good-natured man, but in his cups he grew unruly and could never get to sleep, and kept wandering about the workshops shouting in a menacing tone: "I know everything!" Now, by his jowly, swollen face and his bloodshot eyes, it was plain that he had been drinking without a break from November right up to the holiday.

"Forgive me, Anna Akimovna!" he said in a hoarse voice, knocking his forehead against the floor and showing the back of his bull-like neck.

"It was Aunt who dismissed you — ask her."

"What do you mean, Aunt?" said Aunt, coming into the kitchen and breathing heavily; she was very stout, and a samovar and a tray of cups could have found room on her bosom. "What’s this about Aunt? You’re the mistress here, you give the orders, and as for me, I wouldn’t care if the scoundrels didn’t exist at all. Well, get up, you old hog!" she shouted at Panteley, unable to bear it any longer. "Out of my sight! I’m forgiving you this last time, but if it happens again, don’t come begging for mercy!"

Then they went to the dining room for coffee. But scarcely had they sat down at the table when downstairs Masha came running in headlong and said, aghast: "The singers!" — and ran back out. There followed the sound of noses being blown, a deep bass cough, and a tramp of feet as though shod horses were being led into the front hall by the drawing room. For half a minute everything went quiet... Then the singers burst out suddenly, so loudly that everyone gave a start. While they sang, priest-na-strastnoy-nedele/">the priest from the almshouse arrived, with a deacon and a sacristan. Putting on his stole, the priest related slowly that in the night, when they had rung for matins, snow had been falling and it was not cold, but toward morning the frost had begun to set in hard, God help us, and now it must be about twenty below.

"Many people maintain, though, that winter is healthier for a person than summer," said the deacon, but at once put a stern expression on his face and struck up after the priest: "Thy Nativity, O Christ our God..."

Soon after, the priest from the laborers’ hospital arrived with his sacristan, then the sisters from the community, the children from the orphanage, and the singing went on almost without a break. They sang, took some refreshment, and left.

The factory staff came with their congratulations, some twenty men. These were only the senior men: the mechanics, their assistants, the pattern-makers, bookkeeper-bezzaschitnoe-suschestvo/">the bookkeeper, and so on — all respectable-looking, in new black frock coats. They were fine fellows, every one, as if handpicked, each of them knowing his own worth, that is, knowing that if he lost his post today, tomorrow he’d be gladly taken on at some other factory. They evidently were fond of Aunt, since they behaved freely in her presence and even smoked, and the bookkeeper, when the crowd came up to the refreshments, took her by her broad waist. They were forward partly, perhaps, because Varvarushka, who under the old masters had held great authority and kept watch over the staff’s morals, now had no standing whatever in the house, and partly, perhaps, because many of them still remembered the time when Aunt Tatyana Ivanovna, whom her brothers had kept in strict order, had dressed like a plain peasant woman, in the manner of Agafyushka, and when Anna Akimovna used to run about the yard by the workshops and everyone called her Anyutka.

The staff ate, talked, and looked at Anna Akimovna in bewilderment: how she had grown, how pretty she had become! But this refined young lady, brought up by governesses and tutors, was already a stranger to them, incomprehensible, and they kept, without meaning to, closer to Aunt, who spoke to them familiarly, plied them continually with food and drink, and, clinking glasses with them, had already downed two glasses of rowan-berry liqueur. Anna Akimovna had always been afraid people would think her proud, an upstart, or a crow in peacock’s feathers; and now, while the staff crowded round the refreshments, she did not leave the dining room and joined in the conversation. She asked Pimenov, her acquaintance from the day before:

"Why do you have so many clocks in your room?"

"I take them in for repair," he answered. "I do it on the side, like, on holidays, or when I can’t sleep."

"So if my watch breaks, I could give it to you to mend?" Anna Akimovna asked, laughing.

"Why not? Gladly," said Pimenov, and his face showed a look of tender feeling when she, not herself knowing quite why, unpinned her splendid little watch from her bodice and handed it to him: he examined it in silence and gave it back. "Why not? Gladly," he repeated. "I don’t mend pocket watches anymore, though. My eyesight is weak, and the doctor’s forbidden me fine work. But for you I could make an exception."

"Doctors lie," said the bookkeeper; everyone laughed. "Don’t you believe them," he went on, flattered by the laughter. "Last year, in Lent, a tooth flew out of the drum and struck old Kalmykov square in the head, so hard you could see the brain, and the doctor said he’d die; and yet he’s alive to this day and still working, only since that business he’s taken to stammering."

"They lie, doctors do, they lie, but not so very much," sighed Aunt. "Pyotr Andreich, God rest him, lost his eyes. Just so, same as you — worked day in, day out at the factory by the hot furnace, and went blind. The eyes don’t take to heat. Well, but what’s the use of talking?" she roused herself. "Let’s have a drink! A happy holiday to you, my dears. I don’t drink with just anyone, but I’ll drink with you, sinner that I am. God grant it!"

It seemed to Anna Akimovna that after yesterday Pimenov despised her as a lady philanthropist, but was charmed by her as a woman. She looked at him and found that he carried himself very pleasantly and was decently dressed. True, the sleeves of his frock coat were a bit short, and it seemed the waist was cut too high and the trousers were not fashionably cut, not wide, but on the other hand his necktie was tied with taste and a certain carelessness, and not so garish as the others’. And he seemed a good-natured man, seeing how meekly he ate everything Aunt piled on his plate. She remembered how black with soot he had looked yesterday, and how badly he had wanted to sleep, and that memory, for some reason, moved her.

When the staff were preparing to leave, Anna Akimovna gave Pimenov her hand; she wanted to tell him that he might come by sometime, quite informally, and sit a while, but she could not manage it — her tongue somehow would not obey her; and so that no one should think Pimenov had pleased her especially, she gave her hand to his companions as well.

Next came the pupils of the school where she was a patroness. They had all had their hair cropped and were dressed in identical gray blouses. The teacher — a tall young man, still without a mustache, with red blotches on his face — visibly agitated, arranged the pupils in rows; the boys struck up a harmonious song, but in harsh, unpleasant voices. The factory director, Nazarych, a bald, sharp-eyed Old Believer, had never gotten along with teachers, but this one, who was now fussily waving his arm, he despised and hated without himself knowing why. He treated him haughtily and rudely, held back his salary, interfered in his teaching, and, to drive him out for good, had a couple of weeks before the holiday installed as watchman at the school a distant relation of his wife’s, a drunken peasant, who paid the teacher no heed and said insolent things to him in front of the pupils.

Anna Akimovna knew all this, but could do nothing to help, since she herself was afraid of Nazarych. Now she wanted, at least, to show the teacher some kindness, to tell him she was very pleased with him, but when, after the singing, he grew terribly embarrassed and began apologizing for something, and when Aunt, addressing him familiarly, hauled him off to the table, she felt bored and awkward, and, having ordered treats given to the children, went upstairs to her own rooms.

"There’s actually a good deal of cruelty in these holiday customs," she said a little later, as if to herself, looking out the window at the boys as they went in a crowd from the house to the gate, putting on their fur coats and overcoats as they walked, shrinking from the cold. "During the holidays one wants to rest, to sit at home with one’s family, and here the poor boys, the teacher, the staff, all have to trudge through the frost for some reason, then offer congratulations, express their respects, be embarrassed..."

Mishenka, who was standing right there in the hall by the doors and had overheard this, said:

"It didn’t start with us, and it won’t end with us either. Of course, I’m an uneducated man, Anna Akimovna, but this is how I see it: the poor must always honor the rich. It is written: God marks the rogue. In the jails, in the flophouses, and in the taverns there are always only the poor, while decent people, mark you, are always rich. Of the rich it is said: deep calls unto deep."

"You, Misha, always express yourself in such a tiresome and incomprehensible way," said Anna Akimovna, and walked off to the other end of the hall.

It was only just past eleven. The silence of the huge rooms, broken only now and then by singing carrying up from the lower floor, brought on a fit of yawning. The bronzes, the albums, and the pictures on the walls — depicting a sea with little ships, a meadow with little cows, and views of the Rhine — were by now so stale that the eye merely slid over them without taking them in. The holiday mood had already begun to wear thin. Anna Akimovna still felt herself beautiful, kind, and extraordinary, but it already seemed to her that none of it was needed by anyone; it seemed to her that she had put on this costly dress not knowing for whom or for what. And, as always happened to her on every holiday, she began to be oppressed by loneliness and by the persistent thought that her beauty, her health, her wealth were nothing but a deception, since she was superfluous in this world, needed by no one, loved by no one. She walked through all the rooms, humming to herself and glancing out the windows. Stopping in the hall, she could not help striking up a conversation with Mishenka.

"I don’t know, Misha, what you think of yourself," she said, and sighed. "Truly, God will punish you for this."

"What do you mean, ma’am?"

"You know quite well what I mean. Forgive me for meddling in your private affairs, but it seems to me you’re spoiling your own life out of sheer stubbornness. Admit it, this is exactly the time for you to marry, and she’s a splendid girl, a worthy one. You’ll never find better. Beautiful, clever, gentle, devoted... And her looks!... Were she of our circle, or higher, people would fall in love with her for those wonderful red curls alone. Just look how her hair suits the color of her face. Ah, my God, you understand nothing, you yourself don’t know what you need," said Anna Akimovna bitterly, and tears came to her eyes. "Poor girl, I feel so sorry for her! I know you want someone with money, but I’ve told you already — I’ll give Masha a dowry."

Mishenka pictured his future wife in his imagination as none other than a tall, full-figured, dignified, and devout woman, walking like a peahen, and for some reason always with a long shawl about her shoulders, whereas Masha was thin and slight, laced tight in her corset, with a mincing little walk, and, worst of all, she was too tempting, and at times pleased Mishenka a great deal — but that, in his view, was fit not for marriage, only for misconduct. When Anna Akimovna promised to give her a dowry, he wavered for a while; but then it happened that a poor student, in a brown overcoat thrown over his uniform, who had come to Anna Akimovna with a letter, could not restrain himself, and, delighted, embraced Masha downstairs by the coat pegs, and she gave a little cry; Mishenka, standing above on the staircase, saw this, and from that time on conceived a feeling of squeamish disgust for Masha. Poor student! Who knows — had it been a rich student, or an officer, who embraced her, the consequences might have been quite different...

"Why is it you don’t want to, then?" Anna Akimovna asked. "What more do you need?"

Mishenka said nothing and gazed fixedly at an armchair, his eyebrows raised.

"Do you love someone else?"

Silence. Red-haired Masha came in with letters and visiting cards on a tray. Guessing that the conversation had been about her, she blushed to the point of tears.

"The postmen came," she mumbled. "And there’s some official, Chalikov, waiting downstairs. He says you told him to come today for some reason."

"What insolence!" Anna Akimovna said angrily. "I told him no such thing. Tell him to clear off — I’m not at home!"

A bell rang. It was the priests from their own parish; they were always received in the genteel half, that is, upstairs. Following the clergy came a visit from the factory director Nazarych and the factory doctor, and then Mishenka announced the inspector of public schools. The reception of visitors had begun.

Whenever a free moment came, Anna Akimovna would sit down in the drawing room in the deep armchair and, closing her eyes, think that her loneliness was entirely natural, since she had not married and never would. But it was not her fault. Fate itself had taken her out of a plain working household, where, if her memories could be trusted, she had felt so at home and so comfortable, and had flung her into these enormous rooms, where she could never think what to do with herself and could not understand why so many people kept flitting past her; everything that was happening now seemed to her petty, needless, since not for one minute did it give her happiness, nor could it.

"If only I could fall in love," she thought, stretching, and at the mere thought a warmth spread near her heart. "And be rid of the factory..." she dreamed on, imagining how all those heavy shops, barracks, the school, would tumble off her conscience. Then she remembered her father and thought that if he had lived longer, he would surely have married her off to some plain man — Pimenov, say. He would have ordered her to marry him — that would have been the whole of it. And it would have been a good thing: the factory would then have fallen into proper hands.

She pictured his curly head, his bold profile, his thin, mocking lips, and the strength, the terrible strength in his shoulders, his arms, his chest — and that tenderness with which he had examined her little watch today.

"Well?" she said aloud. "There would be nothing wrong in it... I would marry him."

"Anna Akimovna!" Mishenka called to her, having come into the drawing room without a sound.

"How you frightened me!" she said, giving a start all over. "What do you want?"

"Anna Akimovna!" he repeated, pressing a hand to his heart and raising his eyebrows. "You are my mistress and benefactress, and you alone can advise me on the matter of marriage, since to me you are the same as a mother... But please give orders that they stop laughing at me downstairs and teasing me. There’s no getting past them!"

"And how do they tease you?"

"They say: Mashenka’s Mishenka."

"Pah, what nonsense!" said Anna Akimovna, indignant. "How silly you all are! What a fool you are, Misha! How you’ve worn me out! I don’t want to see you!"

III. DINNER

As in the previous year, the last to call were the actual state councillor Krylin and the well-known lawyer Lysevich. They arrived when it was already growing dark outside. Krylin, an old man past sixty, with a wide mouth and gray side-whiskers about his ears, with a face like a lynx’s, wore his uniform with the ribbon of St. Anna and white trousers. He held Anna Akimovna’s hand a long while in both of his, gazed fixedly into her face, moved his lips, and at last said, drawing out the words, all on one note:

"I respected your uncle... and your father, and enjoyed their favor. I now consider it a pleasant duty, as you see, to congratulate their respected heiress... despite my illness and the considerable distance... And I am very glad to see you in good health."

The sworn attorney Lysevich, a tall, handsome blond man with a light gray touch at his temples and beard, was distinguished by manners of unusual elegance. He came in with a roll of the shoulders, bowed as though reluctantly, and as he talked he shrugged his shoulders, all with a lazy grace, like a pampered horse that has stood too long in its stall. He was well-fed, extremely healthy, and rich; he had once even won forty thousand, but had concealed it from his acquaintances. He loved to eat well, cheeses especially, truffles, grated radish with hempseed oil, and in Paris, by his own account, he had eaten fried unwashed tripe. He spoke smoothly, fluently, without a stumble, and only out of coquetry would he now and then allow himself to falter and snap his fingers, as though hunting for a word. In everything he was obliged to say in court he had long since ceased to believe, or perhaps he did believe it, but attached no value to it whatever — all of that had long been known, stale, ordinary... He believed only in what was original and out of the common run. Copybook morality in an original form brought tears to his eyes. Both of his notebooks were filled with extraordinary expressions which he culled from various authors, and when he needed to find some expression, he would rummage nervously through both books and usually not find it. The late Akim Ivanych, in a merry moment, had out of vanity engaged him as counsel for the factory’s affairs and had fixed his salary at twelve thousand. All the factory’s legal business amounted to two or three trifling claims, which Lysevich turned over to his assistants.

Anna Akimovna knew that there was nothing for him to do at the factory, but she could not refuse him: she lacked the courage, and besides she had grown used to him. He called himself her legal counsel, and his salary, for which he sent punctually on the first of every month, he called stern prose. Anna Akimovna knew that when, after her father’s death, her forest was sold off for railway ties, Lysevich had made more than fifteen thousand on the sale and had split it with Nazarych. On learning of this deceit Anna Akimovna had wept bitterly, but had since grown used to it.

Having offered his congratulations and kissed both her hands, he looked her over and frowned.

"That won’t do!" he said with genuine distress. "I told you, my dear, that won’t do!"

"What do you mean, Viktor Nikolaich?"

"I told you: you mustn’t put on weight. In your family there’s a wretched tendency to stoutness in the whole line. It won’t do," he repeated in an imploring voice, and kissed her hand. "You’re so good! You’re so lovely! Here, your excellency," he turned to Krylin, "allow me to present: the only woman in the world I have ever seriously loved."

"That’s no surprise. To be acquainted with Anna Akimovna at your age and not love her — that would be impossible."

"I adore her!" the lawyer went on, with perfect sincerity, though still with his customary lazy grace. "I love her, not because I am a man and she a woman; when I am with her it seems to me that she is of some third sex, and I of a fourth, and together we soar away into the realm of the subtlest shades of color and there merge into a single spectrum. No one defines such relations better than Leconte de Lisle. He has one splendid passage, an astonishing passage."

Lysevich rummaged in one notebook, then in the other, and, not finding the saying, calmed down. They began to talk of the weather, of the opera, of how Duse would soon be arriving. Anna Akimovna recalled that Lysevich, and Krylin too, it seemed, had dined with her the previous year, and now, as they made ready to leave, she began sincerely, in a pleading voice, to argue that since they had nowhere else left to call, they ought to stay and dine with her. After some hesitation the guests agreed.

Besides the dinner itself, made up of cabbage soup, sucking pig, goose with apples, and so on, the kitchen also prepared on the great holidays a so-called French, or chef’s, dinner, in case any guest upstairs should wish to partake of it. When the clatter of dishes began in the dining room, Lysevich began to show a marked excitement; he rubbed his hands, shrugged his shoulders, screwed up his eyes, and spoke with feeling of what splendid dinners the old men used to give in their day, and what a wonderful burbot stew the cook here knew how to make — not a stew, a revelation! He savored the dinner in anticipation, already eating it in his mind and taking pleasure in it. And when Anna Akimovna, taking his arm, led him into the dining room, and he at last drank a glass of vodka and put a morsel of salmon into his mouth, he even purred with pleasure. He chewed loudly, unpleasantly, making certain noises through his nose, and his eyes at such moments grew oily and greedy.

The hors d’oeuvres were sumptuous. There were, among other things, fresh porcini in sour cream and a Provençal sauce of fried oysters and crayfish tails, well seasoned with bitter pickles. The dinner itself consisted of holiday delicacies, and the wines were excellent. Mishenka waited at table in a state of rapture. Whenever he set some new dish upon the table or lifted the lid from a gleaming pot, or poured out wine, he did it with the gravity of a professor of black magic, and, watching his face and his walk, which resembled the opening figure of a quadrille, the lawyer more than once thought: "What a fool!"

After the third course Lysevich was saying to Anna Akimovna:

"A woman of the fin de siècle — I mean a young one, and of course a rich one — must be independent, clever, elegant, cultivated, bold, and just a touch dissolute. Dissolute in measure, just a touch, because, you’ll agree, satiety is already a kind of fatigue. You, my dear, must not vegetate, must not merely live as everyone lives, but must savor life, and a light dissoluteness is the sauce of life. Bury yourself in flowers with an intoxicating scent, suffocate in musk, eat hashish, and above all love, love, and love... To start with, in your place I would take on seven men, one for each day of the week, and call one of them Monday, another Tuesday, a third Wednesday, and so on, so that each would know his day."

This talk stirred Anna Akimovna. She ate nothing and only drank a glass of wine.

"Do let me speak, for once!" she said. "For myself, personally, I cannot understand love without a family. I am alone, alone as the moon in the sky, and a waning moon at that, and whatever you may say, I am certain, I feel, that this want can be made up only by love in the ordinary sense. It seems to me that such love would define my duties, my work, would light up my whole outlook on life. From love I want peace for my soul, quiet, I want to be far away from musk and all your spiritism and fin de siècle... in a word," she grew confused, "a husband and children."

"You want to marry? Well, that can be arranged too," Lysevich agreed. "You must try everything: marriage, and jealousy, and the sweetness of a first betrayal, and even children... But make haste to live, make haste, my dear, time is passing, it will not wait."

"There now, I shall go and marry!" she said, looking crossly at his well-fed, contented face. "I shall marry in the most ordinary, the most banal way, and I shall glow with happiness. And, mark my words, I shall marry a plain working man, some mechanic or draughtsman."

"And that would not be bad either. The Duchess Josiana fell in love with Gwynplaine, and that was permitted her, because she was a duchess; to you too everything is permitted, because you are out of the ordinary. If, my dear, you should wish to love a Negro or an Arab, don’t hold back, send for your Negro. Deny yourself nothing. You must be just as bold as your desires. Don’t fall behind them."

"Is it really so hard to understand me?" asked Anna Akimovna in amazement, her eyes shining with tears. "Do understand, I have on my hands an enormous concern, two thousand workers, for whom I must answer before God. The people who work for me go blind and deaf. I am afraid to live, I am afraid! I suffer, and you have the cruelty to talk to me of some Negro and... and you smile!" Anna Akimovna struck the table with her fist. "To go on living the life I now lead, or to marry some man as idle and useless as myself, would be simply a crime. I cannot go on living like this," she said hotly, "I cannot!"

"How lovely she is!" said Lysevich, admiring her. "My God, how lovely she is! But why are you angry, my dear? Suppose I’m wrong — but do you really think that if, for the sake of ideas which I, incidentally, deeply respect, you go about bored and deny yourself the joy of living, the workers will find it any easier? Not in the least! No, dissoluteness, dissoluteness!" he said with decision. "You are bound, you are obliged, to be dissolute! Turn it over in your mind, my dear, turn it over!"

Anna Akimovna was glad she had spoken her mind, and grew more cheerful. She liked that she had spoken so well and thought so honestly and so beautifully, and she was already certain that if, say, Pimenov were to fall in love with her, she would go to him gladly.

Mishenka began pouring the champagne.

"You anger me, Viktor Nikolaich," she said, clinking glasses with the lawyer. "It vexes me that you hand out advice while knowing nothing at all of life. To your mind, if a man is a mechanic or a draughtsman, then he must certainly be a boor and an ignoramus. But these are the cleverest of people! Extraordinary people!"

"Your late father and your uncle... I knew them and respected them," said Krylin, drawing out his words, sitting bolt upright like an idol, and all the while, without pause, eating. "They were men of considerable intellect and... and of high qualities of soul."

"Enough, we know all about those qualities!" muttered the lawyer, and asked leave to smoke.

When dinner was over, Krylin was led off to rest. Lysevich finished his cigar and, swaying with repletion, followed Anna Akimovna into her study. Cozy nooks with photographs, fans on the walls, and the inevitable pink or blue lamp hanging from the ceiling he did not care for, seeing in them the expression of a limp, unoriginal character; besides, memories of certain of his own love affairs, of which he was now ashamed, were bound up for him with just such a lamp. But Anna Akimovna’s study, with its bare walls and tasteless furniture, pleased him exceedingly. It was soft and cozy for him to sit on the Turkish divan and watch Anna Akimovna, who usually sat on the rug before the fireplace and, clasping her knees in her arms, gazed into the fire and thought about something, and at such moments it seemed to him that in her there played some peasant, Old Believer blood.

Every time, after dinner, when coffee and liqueurs were served, he grew livelier and told her all sorts of literary news. He spoke ornately, with inspiration, carried away himself by his own telling, and she listened to him and each time thought that for such a pleasure one might pay not twelve thousand but three times as much, and forgave him everything in him that she disliked. It happened sometimes that he told her the contents of stories and even whole novels, and then two or three hours passed unnoticed, like minutes. Now he began somehow sourly, in a languid voice, with his eyes closed.

"I haven’t read anything in a long while, my dear," he said, when she asked him to tell her something. "Though sometimes I read Jules Verne."

"And I thought you would tell me something new."

"Hm... something new," Lysevich muttered sleepily, sinking still deeper into the corner of the divan. "All the new literature, my dear, is not for the likes of us. Of course it must be as it is, and to refuse to acknowledge it would mean refusing to acknowledge the natural order of things, and I do acknowledge it, but..."

Lysevich seemed to have fallen asleep. But a minute later his voice was heard again:

"All the new literature, like an autumn wind in a chimney, moans and howls: ’Ah, unhappy man! ah, your life may be likened to a prison! ah, how dark and damp it is for you in prison! ah, you will surely perish, and there is no salvation for you!’ That is splendid, but I would prefer a literature that teaches how to escape from prison. Of all living writers I do, however, sometimes read one — Maupassant." Lysevich opened his eyes. "A good writer, an excellent writer! Lysevich stirred on the divan. "An astonishing artist! A terrible, monstrous, supernatural artist!" Lysevich rose from the divan and lifted his right hand aloft. "Maupassant!" he said in ecstasy. "My dear, read Maupassant! A single page of his will give you more than all the riches of the earth! Every line, a new horizon! The softest, tenderest movements of the soul give way to strong, tempestuous sensations, your soul, as though under a pressure of forty thousand atmospheres, is turned into some tiny, most insignificant scrap of matter of an indeterminate, pinkish color, which, it seems to me, if one could lay it on one’s tongue, would give a tart, voluptuous taste. What a frenzy of transitions, of motifs, of melodies! You are resting among lilies of the valley and roses, and suddenly a thought, a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought, bears down on you unexpectedly like a locomotive and douses you in hot steam and deafens you with its whistle. Read, read Maupassant! My dear, I demand it!"

Lysevich waved his arms and, in great agitation, paced from corner to corner.

"No, it’s impossible!" he said, as though in despair. "His last piece has exhausted me, intoxicated me! But I’m afraid you will remain indifferent to it. To be carried away by it, one must savor it, slowly press the juice from every line, drink it... One must drink it!"

After a long preamble, in which there were many such words as demonic voluptuousness, a web of the subtlest nerves, simoom, crystal, and the like, he at last began to tell the contents of the novel. He told it now less floridly but in great detail, reciting whole descriptions and conversations by heart; the characters of the novel delighted him, and, in characterizing them, he struck poses, changed the expression of his face and his voice, like a real actor. In his rapture he laughed now in a bass voice, now in a very thin one, threw up his hands, or clutched at his head with an expression as though it were about to burst. Anna Akimovna listened with delight, though she had already read the novel, and in the lawyer’s retelling it seemed to her many times more beautiful and more intricate than in the book itself. He drew her attention to various subtleties and underscored the happy turns of phrase and the profound thoughts, but she saw only life, life, life, and her very self, as though she were a character in the novel; her spirits rose, and she too, laughing and throwing up her hands, thought that one could not go on living so, that there was no need to live badly if one could live beautifully; she recalled her own words and thoughts at dinner and was proud of them, and when Pimenov suddenly grew up in her imagination, she felt merry and wished that he would fall in love with her.

Having finished his telling, Lysevich, exhausted, sat down on the divan.

"How splendid you are! How good!" he began after a little, in a weak voice, as though he were ill. "I am happy near you, my dear, but why must I be forty-two, and not thirty? Your tastes and mine do not match: you must be dissolute, and I have long outgrown that phase and want a love of the subtlest kind, not material, like a ray of sunlight — that is, from the point of view of a woman of your years, I am already fit for nothing at all."

He was, by his own account, fond of Turgenev, the singer of maiden love, of purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape, but he himself loved maiden love not at close range but by hearsay, as something abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured himself that he loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ideally, though he himself did not know what that meant. But he felt good, cozy, warm, Anna Akimovna seemed to him enchanting, original, and he thought that the pleasant sense of well-being called up in him by this setting was precisely what was called platonic love.

He pressed his cheek to her hand and said in the tone one commonly uses to caress small children:

"My little dove, and why have you fined me?"

"How so? When?"

"I didn’t get my holiday bonus from you this year."

Anna Akimovna had never before heard that the lawyer was sent holiday bonuses, and now she found herself at a loss: how much ought she to give him? But give him something she must, since he was waiting, though he looked at her with eyes full of love.

"Nazarych must have forgotten," she said. "But it’s not too late to put it right."

Suddenly she remembered yesterday’s fifteen hundred, which now lay in her bedroom, in the dressing table. And when she brought this unlovely money and handed it to the lawyer, and he, with his lazy grace, tucked it into his breast pocket, the whole thing happened somehow charmingly and naturally. The unexpected reminder of the bonus, and this fifteen hundred, became the lawyer well.

"Merci," he said, and kissed her finger.

Krylin came in with a sleepy, blissful face, but without his decorations now.

He and Lysevich sat a little longer, drank a glass of tea each, and began to gather themselves to leave. Anna Akimovna was a little embarrassed... She had entirely forgotten where Krylin served and whether or not one ought to give him money, and if so, whether to give it now or send it in an envelope.

"Where does he serve?" she whispered to Lysevich.

"The devil only knows," the lawyer muttered, yawning.

She reasoned that if Krylin had called on her uncle and her father and had respected them, it was not for nothing: evidently he did good deeds at their expense, serving in some charitable institution. As she said goodbye, she pressed three hundred rubles into his hand; he seemed astonished and looked at her in silence for a moment with his leaden eyes, but then seemed to understand, and said:

"But the receipt, my most esteemed Anna Akimovna, you will not be able to get before the New Year."

Lysevich had gone quite limp and heavy and swayed on his feet while Mishenka put his fur coat on him. And going down the stairs he had the look of a man utterly enfeebled, and it was clear that the moment he sat down in the sleigh he would fall asleep at once.

"Your Excellency," he said languidly to Krylin, stopping halfway down the stairs, "have you never happened to feel as though some invisible force were stretching you out lengthwise, and you go on stretching and stretching until at last you turn into the thinnest wire? Subjectively it expresses itself as a peculiar voluptuous sensation that can be compared to nothing else."

Anna Akimovna, standing upstairs, saw them both give Mishenka a banknote each.

"Don’t forget us! Goodbye!" she called down to them, and ran off to her bedroom.

She quickly threw off the dress, which had already grown tiresome to her, put on a dressing gown, and ran downstairs. And as she ran down the staircase she laughed and stamped her feet like a boy. She badly wanted to be naughty.

IV. EVENING

Auntie, in a loose print blouse, Varvarushka, and two more old women were sitting in the dining room having supper. Before them on the table lay a big piece of corned beef, a ham, and various salted savories, and steam rose to the ceiling from the corned beef, which looked very fatty and appetizing. Downstairs they never touched wine, but there was a great deal of vodka and fruit liqueurs of every kind. The cook Agafyushka, plump, pale, and well-fed, stood by the door with her arms folded, talking with the old women, while the lower Masha, a brunette with a crimson ribbon in her hair, served and cleared the dishes. The old women had already eaten their fill that morning and had had tea with a sweet rich cake an hour before supper, and so now ate only by force of duty, as it were.

"Oh, mercy!" Auntie gasped, when Anna Akimovna suddenly ran into the dining room and sat down on a chair beside her. "You frightened me half to death!"

In the household they loved it when Anna Akimovna was in high spirits and played the fool; it was a reminder every time that the old people were dead and gone, that the old women in the house no longer had any power, and that everyone could live as they pleased without fear of being sternly called to account. Only the two unfamiliar old women glanced sidelong at Anna Akimovna in bewilderment: she was humming, and it is a sin to sing at table.

"Our mother, our beauty, a picture painted!" Agafyushka began to intone sweetly. "Our precious diamond! Such crowds, such crowds came today to look at our little queen – Lord, Thy will be done! Generals, and officers, and gentlefolk... I looked and looked out the window, I counted and counted, and then gave it up."

"For all I care they need never have come at all, the scoundrels!" said Auntie; she looked at her niece with sorrow and added: "They only wasted my poor orphan’s time."

Anna Akimovna was hungry, having eaten nothing since morning. They poured her some very bitter cordial; she drank it and had some corned beef with mustard, and found it wonderfully good. Then the lower Masha brought in turkey, soaked apples, and gooseberries. She liked these too. Only one thing was unpleasant: the tiled stove gave off heat, it was stuffy, and everyone’s cheeks had grown flushed. After supper they cleared the tablecloth away and set out plates of peppermint gingerbread, nuts, and raisins.

"Sit down, you too... what of it!" Auntie said to the cook.

Agafyushka sighed and sat down at the table; Masha set a glass for liqueur before her too, and it began to seem to Anna Akimovna that heat came off Agafyushka’s white neck just as it did off the stove. Everyone talked about how hard it had become to get married nowadays, how in former times men were tempted, if not by beauty, then at least by money, but now there was no telling what they wanted, and in the old days only the hunchbacked and the lame were left unmarried, but now they would not even take the pretty and the rich. Auntie began explaining this by the general wickedness of the age and by people’s having stopped fearing God, but then suddenly remembered that her brother Ivan Ivanych and Varvarushka – both of saintly life – had feared God well enough, and yet had quietly borne children on the side and sent them off to the foundling home; she caught herself and turned the conversation to what a fine young suitor she had once had, from among the factory men, and how she had loved him, but her brothers had forced her to marry a widowed icon-painter instead, who, thank God, died two years later. The lower Masha also sat down at the table and, with an air of mystery, told how for a week now, every morning, some unknown man with a black mustache and a coat with a lambskin collar had been seen in the yard: he would come in through the gate, look up at the windows of the big house, and go on toward the workshops; a decent-looking sort of man...

All this talk somehow made Anna Akimovna suddenly want, very badly, achingly, to be married; it seemed she would give half her life and her whole fortune just to know that somewhere upstairs there was a man closer to her than anyone else in the world, that he loved her deeply and missed her; and the thought of this closeness, delightful, beyond expressing in words, stirred her soul. And the instinct of health and youth flattered her and lied to her, saying that the true poetry of life had not yet come but still lay ahead, and she believed it, and, leaning back in her chair (her hair came loose as she did so), she began to laugh, and the others, looking at her, laughed too. And in the dining room the laughter, for no reason at all, would not die down for a long while.

Word came that Zhuzhelitsa had arrived to spend the night. This was the pilgrim woman Pasha, or Spiridonovna, a small, thin woman of about fifty, in a black dress and a white kerchief, sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, with a pointed chin; her eyes were cunning, spiteful, and she looked at people as though she could see straight through them. Her lips were shaped like a little heart. For her spite and her love of ill-will in the merchant households she had been nicknamed Zhuzhelitsa – the Ground Beetle.

Coming into the dining room, she went straight to the icons without looking at anyone, and sang, in a contralto, "Thy Nativity," then "Today the Virgin," then "Christ Is Born," and only then turned and pierced everyone with her gaze.

"A happy feast to you!" she said, and kissed Anna Akimovna on the shoulder. "I could hardly get to you, my benefactors, hardly at all. – She kissed Auntie on the shoulder. – I set out for your house this very morning, but on the way I stopped in at some good people’s to rest. ’Stay a while, stay a while, Spiridonovna,’ they said – and before I knew it, evening had come."

Since she ate no meat, she was served caviar and salmon. She ate, glancing at everyone from under her brows, and drank three glasses of vodka besides. Having had her fill, she said her prayers to God and bowed down at Anna Akimovna’s feet.

As had happened the year before and the year before that, they began to play at kings, and all the servants, as many as there were in the two floors of the house, crowded in the doorway to watch the game. It seemed to Anna Akimovna that once or twice Mishenka’s face flashed in the crowd of women and men with a condescending smile. Zhuzhelitsa was the first to come out as king, and Anna Akimovna, the soldier, paid her tribute; then Auntie became king, and Anna Akimovna fell to the peasants, or "tyutki," which caused general delight, while Agafyushka came out a princess and grew shy with pleasure. At the other end of the table another game had formed: the two Mashas, Varvarushka, and the seamstress Marfa Petrovna, who had been woken up on purpose to play at kings, her face still sleepy and cross.

During the game the talk turned to men, to how hard it was nowadays to marry a good man, and to which lot was better – a maiden’s or a widow’s.

"You’re a fine girl, healthy, sturdy," said Zhuzhelitsa to Anna Akimovna. "Only I can’t make out, dear, who you’re saving yourself for."

"What can I do, if no one will take me?"

"Or maybe you’ve taken a vow to stay a maiden?" Zhuzhelitsa went on, as though she had not heard. "Well, that’s a good thing too, stay one, then... Stay one," she repeated, looking hard and slyly at her cards. "So, then, stay one... yes... Only maidens, these devout ones, come in all kinds," she sighed, and led with a king. "Oh, all kinds, dear! Some really do keep themselves like little nuns, pure as anything, and if one of them should happen to sin, why, she torments herself half to death over it, poor thing. But others go about in black dresses too, and sew themselves shrouds, and all the while, on the quiet, they’re in love with some rich old man. Yes, my little canaries. Some hussy will bewitch an old man and hold sway over him, my doves, hold sway over him, spin him round and round, and once she’s gathered up enough money and lottery tickets, she’ll bewitch him clean into his grave."

In answer to these hints Varvarushka only sighed and looked at the icon. On her face was written Christian meekness.

"I know a girl like that, a bitter enemy of mine," Zhuzhelitsa went on, looking round at everyone in triumph. "She’s always sighing too, always looking at the icons, the she-devil. When she was ruling the roost with one old man, you’d come to her and she’d give you a crust and order you down on your knees to bow to the ground, while she read out, ’In thy nativity thou didst keep thy virginity’... On a feast day she’d give you a crust, and on an ordinary day she’d throw it back in your face. Well, now I’ll have my fun with her! I’ll take my fill of fun, my precious ones!"

Varvarushka glanced again at the icon and crossed herself.

"Yes, no one will take me, Spiridonovna," said Anna Akimovna, to change the subject. "What’s to be done?"

"It’s your own fault, dear. You keep waiting for a gentleman, an educated man, when you ought to marry one of your own kind, a merchant."

"No merchant!" said Auntie, growing alarmed. "Save us, Queen of Heaven! A gentleman will squander your money, true, but he’ll pity you for it, silly girl. A merchant will set up such a strict household that you won’t find a place for yourself in your own home. You’ll want to cuddle up to him, and he’ll be off clipping his coupons, and if you sit down to eat with him he’ll reproach you with your own bread, the boor! Marry a gentleman."

Everyone began talking at once, loudly interrupting one another, while Auntie rapped on the table with the nutcrackers and said, red and angry:

"No merchant, none! If a merchant ever sets foot in this house, I’ll go off to the almshouse!"

"Shh... quiet!" cried Zhuzhelitsa; when everyone had fallen silent, she narrowed one eye and said: "You know what, Annushka, my little swallow? There’s no need for you to marry properly, like everyone else. You’re a rich woman, a free woman, a queen unto yourself; but it doesn’t quite do, child, to stay an old maid either. I’ll find you, you know, some worthless, simple-minded little fellow, you’ll take the vows for appearances’ sake, and then – off you go, Malashka, and have your fun! Well, you’ll press five or ten thousand into the husband’s hand, and let him go back wherever he came from, and you’ll be mistress of your own house – love whoever you like, and no one can judge you for it. And then you can love your gentlemen, your educated men, all you please. Ah, what a life, not a life but a carnival!" Zhuzhelitsa snapped her fingers and gave a whistle: "Off you go, Malashka!"

"But it’s a sin!" said Auntie.

"Well, a sin," Zhuzhelitsa smirked. "She’s an educated woman, she understands. To murder a man, or to bewitch an old man out of his wits – that’s a sin, true enough, but to love a sweetheart, that’s not even the least little bit of a sin. And really, what is there to it! There’s no sin in it at all! The pilgrim women made all that up just to fool plain folk. I go around saying it myself, sin here, sin there, and I don’t even know why it’s supposed to be a sin." Zhuzhelitsa drank off her liqueur and smacked her lips. "Off you go, Malashka!" she said, turning now, evidently, to herself. "Thirty years, my dears, I spent thinking about sins, and being afraid, and now I see: I let it slip by, I missed my chance! Ah, fool that I am, fool!" she sighed. "A woman’s age is a short age, and every last day of it ought to be treasured. You’re very pretty, Annushka, and rich besides, but once you’ve struck thirty-five or forty, that’s the end of your time, you may as well write finis. Don’t listen to anyone, child, live, have your fun till forty, and then you’ll have time enough to repent – plenty of time left for bowing down and sewing shrouds. A candle to God, and a poker to the devil! Pile it all up in one place! Well now, what do you say? Do you want to make a poor fellow happy?"

"I do," laughed Anna Akimovna. "I don’t care about anything now, I’d marry a plain, simple man."

"Well, and a good thing too! Oh, what a fine young fellow you’d pick for yourself then!" Zhuzhelitsa screwed up her eyes and shook her head. "Oh!"

"I tell her the same thing myself: since no gentleman is ever going to come along, better marry someone plain than a merchant," said Auntie. "At least we’d have a master in the house. And there’s no shortage of good men. Take our own factory men, even. All sober, all steady..."

"There, you see!" Zhuzhelitsa agreed. "Fine lads. Want me to go match you up with Vasily Lebedinsky, Auntie?"

"Well, Vasya has such long legs," said Auntie seriously. "Too thin by half. No presence to him."

Laughter broke out in the crowd by the doors.

"Well, then, Pimenov. Will you have Pimenov?" Zhuzhelitsa asked Anna Akimovna.

"Very well. Match me up with Pimenov."

"On your word?"

"Match us up!" said Anna Akimovna firmly, and struck the table. "Word of honor, I’ll marry him!"

"On your word?"

Anna Akimovna suddenly felt ashamed that her cheeks were burning and that everyone was looking at her; she scattered the cards on the table and ran out of the room, and as she ran up the stairs and then came upstairs and sat down in the drawing room by the piano, a murmur came up from the lower floor like the sound of the sea; no doubt they were talking about her and about Pimenov, and, taking advantage of her absence, Zhuzhelitsa was probably needling Varvarushka, and certainly not sparing her words.

In the whole upper floor only a single lamp was burning, in the hall, and its faint light came through the door into the dark drawing room. It was not yet past nine. Anna Akimovna played one waltz, then another, then a third – playing without stopping. She looked into the dark corner behind the piano, smiled, called to someone in her thoughts, and it occurred to her: should she not drive into town right now to see someone – Lysevich, say – and tell him what was happening in her heart at this moment? She wanted to talk without stopping, to laugh, to play the fool, but the dark corner behind the piano kept its sullen silence, and all around, through every room of the upper floor, it was quiet and empty.

She loved sentimental romances, but her voice was rough and untrained, and so she only accompanied herself, singing barely audibly, on breath alone. She sang, in a whisper, one romance after another, all of them about love, parting, hopes lost, and she imagined herself stretching out her hands to him and saying, pleading, in tears: "Pimenov, take this weight off me!" And then, as though her sins would be forgiven her, her soul would grow light and joyful, and a free, and perhaps a happy, life would begin. In an anguish of waiting she bent over the keys, and she wanted passionately for the change in her life to come right now, this instant, and it was frightening to think that the old life would go on a while longer yet. Then she played and sang again, barely audibly, and all around it was quiet. From the lower floor the murmur no longer came: they must have gone to bed down there. It had struck ten long ago. A long, lonely, tedious night was drawing near.

Anna Akimovna walked through all the rooms, lay down for a while on the sofa, read in her study the letters that had come that evening. There were twelve congratulatory letters and three anonymous ones, unsigned. In one, a plain workman, in a dreadful, barely legible hand, complained that in the factory shop they sold the workers rancid cooking oil that smelled of kerosene; in another, someone reported, most respectfully, that Nazarych, at the last purchase of iron, had taken a bribe of a thousand rubles from someone; in the third they abused her for her heartlessness.

The festive excitement was already passing, and to keep it up Anna Akimovna sat down again at the piano and softly played one of the new waltzes, then remembered how cleverly and honestly she had thought and spoken today at dinner. She looked around at the dark windows and the walls with their pictures, at the faint light coming from the hall, and suddenly, without meaning to, burst into tears, and it grieved her that she was so alone, that there was no one for her to talk to, to take counsel with. To cheer herself up she tried to conjure Pimenov in her imagination, but nothing came of it anymore.

It struck twelve. Mishenka came in, no longer in his tailcoat but in a house jacket, and silently lit two candles; then he went out and a minute later came back with a tray bearing a cup of tea.

"What are you laughing at?" she asked, noticing a smile on his face.

"I was downstairs and heard you joking about Pimenov..." he said, covering his laughing mouth with his hand. "If you’d sat him down to dinner just now with Viktor Nikolaich and the general, he’d have died of fright. – Mishenka’s shoulders shook with laughter. – Why, he probably doesn’t even know how to hold a fork."

The footman’s laughter, his words, his house jacket, and his little mustache made on Anna Akimovna the impression of something unclean. She closed her eyes so as not to see him, and, without meaning to, pictured Pimenov dining together with Lysevich and Krylin, and his timid, unrefined figure seemed to her pitiful, helpless, and she felt revulsion. And only now, for the first time all day, did she understand clearly that everything she had thought and said about Pimenov and about marrying a plain workman was nonsense, foolishness, and mere self-indulgent whim. To convince herself of the opposite, to overcome her revulsion, she tried to recall the words she had spoken at dinner, but could no longer piece them together; shame at her own thoughts and actions, and fear that she might have said something too much today, and disgust at her own faintheartedness, threw her into extreme confusion. She took a candle and, as though someone were driving her, went quickly downstairs, woke Spiridonovna, and set about assuring her that she had only been joking. Then she went to her bedroom. The red-haired Masha, who had been dozing in an armchair by the bed, jumped up and began straightening the pillows. Her face was tired, drowsy, and her magnificent hair had slipped over to one side.

"That clerk Chalikov came again this evening," she said, yawning, "but I didn’t dare announce him. He was too drunk. He says he’ll come again tomorrow."

"What does he want from me?" Anna Akimovna said angrily, and struck the floor with her comb. "I don’t want to see him! I don’t want to!"

She decided that she had no one left in her life anymore except this Chalikov, that he would never stop pursuing her, reminding her every single day how uninteresting and absurd her life was. For after all, the only thing she was fit for was helping the poor. Oh, how stupid it all was!

She lay down without undressing and sobbed from shame and boredom. What seemed most vexing and stupid of all to her was that her dreams about Pimenov that day had been honest, lofty, noble, and yet at the same time she felt that Lysevich, and even Krylin, were closer to her than Pimenov and all the workmen put together. She thought now that if the long day she had just lived through could be painted as a picture, then everything base and vulgar in it – the dinner, for instance, the lawyer’s words, the game of kings – would stand as the truth, while the dreams and the talk about Pimenov would stand out from the whole as the false note, the forced touch. And she thought, too, that it was already too late for her to dream of happiness, that everything was already lost for her, and that to return to the life when she slept with her mother under one blanket, or to invent some new, special life of her own, was no longer possible.

The red-haired Masha knelt down by the bed and looked at her sorrowfully, in bewilderment, then she too began to cry and pressed her face to her mistress’s hand; and without a word it was understood why it was so bitter for her.

"We’re fools, the two of us," Anna Akimovna said, crying and laughing at the same time. "Fools! Ah, what fools we are!"