A Woman's Happiness

They were burying Lieutenant-General Zapupyrin. Toward the dead man’s house, where funeral music droned and words of command rang out, crowds came running from every direction, eager to see the coffin brought out. Among the groups hurrying to the procession were the clerks Probkin and Svistkov. Both had their wives with them.

"You can’t, sir!" a police lieutenant’s assistant stopped them, a kindly, sympathetic-looking man, when they came up to the cordon. "You ca-an’t, sir! I be-eg you, fall back a bit! Gentlemen, it doesn’t depend on us, you know! Please, fall back! Although – so be it – the ladies may pass... this way, mesdames, but... you, gentlemen, for God’s sake..."

Probkin’s and Svistkov’s wives flushed at the assistant’s unexpected gallantry and slipped through the cordon, while their husbands remained on this side of the living wall and occupied themselves with contemplating the backs of the guardians of order, mounted and on foot.

"Through they went!" said Probkin, watching the departing ladies with envy and something close to hatred. "Lucky, by God, those chignons are! The male sex will never have such privileges as belong to theirs, the female sex. Now what’s so special about them? Women, one might say, perfectly ordinary, full of prejudices, and yet they’re let through; while you and I, even if we were state councillors, wouldn’t be let through for anything."

"You reason strangely, gentlemen!" said the assistant, looking at Probkin reproachfully. "Let you in, and you’d start shoving and making a scene at once; a lady, by her natural delicacy, would never permit herself anything of the kind!"

"Oh, leave off, please!" Probkin grew angry. "A lady in a crowd is always the first to shove. A man stands and stares at one spot, while a lady spreads her elbows and pushes so her finery won’t get crushed. And that’s not even worth mentioning! Fortune favors the female sex in everything, always. Women aren’t taken into the army, they get into dances for free, and they’re spared corporal punishment... And for what merits, may I ask? A young lady drops her handkerchief – you pick it up; she comes in – you rise and give her your chair; she leaves – you see her out... And take rank! To attain, say, the rank of state councillor, you or I have to trumpet away our whole lives, while some young miss gets herself married to a state councillor in half an hour flat – and there she is, a personage. For me to become a prince or a count, I’d have to conquer the whole world, storm the Shipka Pass, serve as a minister – but some little Varenka or Katenka, Lord forgive me, milk still wet on her lips, gives the count a twirl of her train, blinks her pretty eyes – and there’s your excellency for you... Take yourself now, you’re a provincial secretary. That rank you earned, one might say, with blood and sweat; but your Marya Fomishna? What did she do to become a provincial secretary’s wife? Straight from a priest’s daughter into the official class. Some official she’d make! Give her our work and she’d file the incoming mail under outgoing."

"But she bears children in sickness," Svistkov observed.

"Big deal! Let her stand before the higher-ups when they’re breathing frost down her neck, and she’d count those very children a mercy by comparison. In everything, in everything, they get the privilege! Some young lady or other from our own circle can fling at a general things you wouldn’t dare say even in front of the office executor. Yes indeed... Your Marya Fomishna can walk arm in arm with a state councillor without a second thought, but just you try taking a state councillor’s arm! Just try it! In our building, right below us, brother, there lives some professor with his wife... The general, mind you, holds the Order of St. Anne, First Class, and yet you constantly hear his wife going at him: ’Fool! Fool! Fool!’ And she’s a simple woman too, out of the tradesman class. Well, that one’s lawfully wedded, so let it be – it’s been ordained since time immemorial that lawful wives should scold, but take the unlawful ones! What they allow themselves! Never in all my born days will I forget one incident. I very nearly perished, and survived, it seems, only by my parents’ prayers. Last year, you remember, when our general went off on leave to his estate in the country, he took me along to handle the correspondence... Trifling work, an hour’s labor at most. You do your bit and then you’re off to walk in the woods or sit in the servants’ hall listening to romances. Our general – a bachelor, you know. The house is a full cup, servants thick as dogs, but no wife, no one to run things. The whole crew gone slack, disobedient... and over all of them commands a woman, the housekeeper, Vera Nikitishna. She pours the tea, orders the dinner, and shouts at the footmen... A nasty woman, brother, venomous, looks at you like Satan himself. Fat, red-faced, shrill... Once she starts hollering at somebody, once she raises that shriek of hers, you’d think it was time to carry out the icons. It wasn’t so much the cursing that wore you down as that very shriek. Lord above! No one had any peace from her. Not just the servants – me too, the wretch, she badgered. Well, I thought, just you wait; I’ll catch my moment and tell the general everything about you. He’s buried in his duties, I thought, and doesn’t see how you’re robbing him blind and chewing up the staff – just wait, I’ll open his eyes. And I opened them, brother, opened them so thoroughly that my own eyes very nearly closed for good, so that even now, when I remember it, it turns me cold. I’m walking down the corridor one day, and suddenly I hear shrieking. At first I thought someone was slaughtering a pig, then I listened more closely and made out that it was Vera Nikitishna quarreling with someone: ’You beast! You wretch, you! Devil take you!’ Who’s this about, I wonder. And suddenly, brother, I see the door fly open and out flies our general, all red in the face, eyes bulging, hair as if the devil himself had blown on it. And after him she calls: ’Wretch! Devil!’"

"You’re lying!"

"On my word of honor. It threw me into a sweat, I tell you. Ours ran off to his own rooms, and I stood in the corridor like a fool, understanding nothing. A simple, uneducated woman, a cook, a common serf – and suddenly she allows herself such words and such conduct! This means, I thought, the general wanted to dismiss her, and she took advantage of there being no witnesses to give him a proper dressing-down. She’s leaving anyway, so why not! It set me boiling... I went to her room and said: ’How dare you, you shameless creature, speak such words to a person of high standing? Do you think that because he is a weak old man there’s no one to stand up for him?’ And I took hold of her, you know, and slapped her fat cheeks, twice. The shriek she raised then, brother, the way she howled – may you be thrice cursed, take my grief away with you! I stopped up my ears and went off into the woods. About two hours later a boy comes running to meet me. ’You’re wanted at the master’s.’ I go. I enter. He’s sitting there, scowling like a turkey-cock, and won’t look at me."

"’Now what,’ he says, ’is this you’re setting up in my house?’ ’How do you mean?’ I say. ’If, your excellency, this is about Nikitishna, why, I stood up for you.’ ’It’s none of your business,’ he says, ’to meddle in other people’s family affairs!’ Understand? Family! And then, brother, how he began to lecture me, how he began to roast me – I very nearly died on the spot! He talked and talked, grumbled and grumbled, and then suddenly, brother, out of nowhere he burst out laughing. ’And how,’ he says, ’did you manage it?! However did you find the nerve? Astonishing! But I hope, my friend, that all this stays between us... Your hot-headedness I understand, but you must agree that your remaining further in my house is impossible...’ There you have it, brother! He was actually amazed that I’d managed to give such an important peahen a beating. The woman had bewitched him! A privy councillor, holder of the White Eagle, answerable to no authority above him, and yet he submitted to a woman... Gr-eat privileges, brother, the female sex enjoys! But... hats off! They’re bringing out the general... So many decorations, good heavens! Well, I ask you, they let the ladies go ahead, and do they understand the first thing about decorations?"

The music struck up.

Notes