The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.
“Very well!” she sighed, returning after a brief interval. “Please walk in!”
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large and lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed by the abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy fragrance of jasmine. Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the walls, screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed over the corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse than a place to live in. Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirruped among the green leaves and fluttered against the window-panes.
“Forgive me for receiving you here,” the lieutenant heard in a mellow feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not without charm. “Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I’m trying to keep still to prevent its coming on again. What do you want?”
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair, such as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown, with her head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow. Nothing could be seen behind the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed, somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
“Forgive me for being so persistent …” began the lieutenant, clinking his spurs. “Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I come with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch Kryukov, who …”
“I know!” interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. “I know Kryukov. Sit down; I don’t like anything big standing before me.”
“My cousin charges me to ask you a favour,” the lieutenant went on, clinking his spurs once more and sitting down. “The fact is, your late father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and a small sum was left owing. The payment only becomes due next week, but my cousin begs you most particularly to pay him — if possible, to-day.”
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
“Surely I’m not in her bedroom?” he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and tallest, under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed not yet made, with the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on two armchairs lay heaps of crumpled feminine garments. Petticoats and sleeves with rumpled lace and flounces were trailing on the carpet, on which here and there lay bits of white tape, cigarette-ends, and the papers of caramels… . Under the bed the toes, pointed and square, of slippers of all kinds peeped out in a long row. And it seemed to the lieutenant that the scent of the jasmine came not from the flowers, but from the bed and the slippers.
“And what is the sum owing?” asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
“Two thousand three hundred.”
“Oho!” said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. “And you call that — a small sum! However, it’s just the same paying it to-day or paying it in a week, but I’ve had so many payments to make in the last two months since my father’s death… . Such a lot of stupid business, it makes my head go round! A nice idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep forcing me to attend to these silly things. Vodka, oats …” she muttered, half closing her eyes, “oats, bills, percentages, or, as my head-clerk says, ‘percentage.’ … It’s awful. Yesterday I simply turned the excise officer out. He pesters me with his Tralles. I said to him: ‘Go to the devil with your Tralles! I can’t see any one!’ He kissed my hand and went away. I tell you what: can’t your cousin wait two or three months?”
“A cruel question!” laughed the lieutenant. “My cousin can wait a year, but it’s I who cannot wait! You see, it’s on my own account I’m acting, I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my cousin hasn’t a rouble to spare. I’m forced to ride about and collect debts. I’ve just been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I’m now calling on you; from here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that until I get together five thousand roubles. I need money awfully!”
“Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief. Why, have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards? Or are you getting married?”
“You’ve guessed!” laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from his seat, he clinked his spurs. “I really am going to be married.”
Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face, and sighed.
“I can’t make out what possesses people to get married!” she said, looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. “Life is so short, one has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!”
“Every one has his own way of looking at things… .”
“Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things… . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are you passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why won’t four do, or three?”
“What a tongue she has!” thought the lieutenant, and answered: “The difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till he is twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the Service or else pay a deposit of five thousand.”
“Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has his own way of looking at things… . Perhaps your fiancée is some one special and remarkable, but … but I am utterly unable to understand how any decent man can live with a woman. I can’t for the life of me understand it. I have lived, thank the Lord, twenty-seven years, and I have never yet seen an endurable woman. They’re all affected minxes, immoral, liars… . The only ones I can put up with are cooks and housemaids, but so-called ladies I won’t let come within shooting distance of me. But, thank God, they hate me and don’t force themselves on me! If one of them wants money she sends her husband, but nothing will induce her to come herself, not from pride — no, but from cowardice; she’s afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I understand their hatred very well! Rather! I openly display what they do their very utmost to conceal from God and man. How can they help hating me? No doubt you’ve heard bushels of scandal about me already… .”
“I only arrived here so lately …”
“Tut, tut, tut! … I see from your eyes! But your brother’s wife, surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young man come to see such an awful woman without warning him — how could she? Ha, ha! … But tell me, how is your brother? He’s a fine fellow, such a handsome man! … I’ve seen him several times at mass. Why do you look at me like that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To an educated person externals matter less than the idea… . That’s so, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course …” smiled the lieutenant.
“Yes, the idea… . But you are not a bit like your brother. You are handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking. There’s wonderfully little likeness!”
“That’s quite natural; he’s not my brother, but my cousin.”
“Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?”
“My furlough is over in a few days.”
“Well, what’s to be done with you!” sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. “So be it. I’ll give you the money, though I know you’ll abuse me for it afterwards. You’ll quarrel with your wife after you are married, and say: ‘If that mangy Jewess hadn’t given me the money, I should perhaps have been as free as a bird to-day!” Is your fiancée pretty?”
“Oh yes… .”
“H’m! … Anyway, better something, if it’s only beauty, than nothing. Though however beautiful a woman