with “Ach!” in various voices.
Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the drawing-room listening to the “Ach!” echoing all down the street. There was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay on a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies. On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the glass broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors with lemon-coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a reel of cotton, and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a black blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room two alarmed and fluttered old women were hurriedly picking up similar patterns and pieces of tailor’s chalk from the floor.
“You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy,” said the little lady.
While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too, seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.
“What’s the matter?” said the little lady, addressing the door.
“Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m’avait envoyé de Koursk?” asked a female voice at the door.
“Ah, est-ce que, Marie… que… Really, it’s impossible…. Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous. Ask Lukerya.”
“How well we speak French, though!” I read in the eyes of the little lady, who was flushing with pleasure.
Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson. Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.
“My daughter,” chanted the little lady, “and, Manetchka, this is a young gentleman who has come,” etc.
I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.
“We had a fair here at Ascension,” said the mother; “we always buy materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the next year’s fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made. My husband’s pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves.”
“But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of you?”
“Oh… as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be worn; they are for the trousseau!”
“Ah, mamam, what are you saying?” said the daughter, and she crimsoned again. “Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don’t intend to be married. Never!”
She said this, but at the very word “married” her eyes glowed.
Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries and cream. At seven o’clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses, and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only come from a man.
“That’s my husband’s brother, Yegor Semyonitch,” the little lady explained, noticing my surprise. “He’s been living with us for the last year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the disappointment has preyed on his mind.”
After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the Church. Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the tobacco-pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something in her mother’s ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go with her to the storeroom. There I was shown five large trunks, and a number of smaller trunks and boxes.
“This is her trousseau,” her mother whispered; “we made it all ourselves.”
After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.
It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence in a case that was being tried there.
As I entered the little house I heard the same “Ach!” echo through it. They recognised me at once…. Well they might! My first visit had been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long remembered.
I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.
There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns, the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change. Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and the ladies were in mourning. The Colonel’s death had occurred a week after his promotion to be a general.
Reminiscences began…. The widow shed tears.
“We have had a terrible loss,” she said. “My husband, you know, is dead. We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to. Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They would not have him in the monastery on account of — of intoxicating beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and… taken Manetchka’s trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my Manetchka will be left without a trousseau at all.”
“What are you saying, mamam?” said Manetchka, embarrassed. “Our visitor might suppose… there’s no knowing what he might suppose…. I shall never — never marry.”
Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.
A little baldheaded masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared. “Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose,” I thought.
I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much older and terribly changed. The mother’s hair was silvered, but the daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken for her elder sister, not more than five years her senior.
“I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal,” the mother said to me, forgetting she had told me this already. “I mean to make a complaint. Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up for the sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau.”
Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.
“We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well off. We are all alone in the world now.”
“We are alone in the world,” repeated Manetchka.
A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.
Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black with heavy crape pleureuses, she was sitting on the sofa sewing. Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes instead of boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.
In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:
“Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur.”
“What are you making?” I asked, a little later.
“It’s a blouse.