Читать книгу The Best Works of Anton Chekhov - Anton Chekhov - Страница 17

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We went to the post office, which looked out gaily with its three little windows on to the market place. Through the grey paling gleamed the many-coloured flower garden of our postmaster, Maxim Fedorovich, who was known in the whole district as a great connoisseur of all that concerned gardening and the art of laying out beds, borders, lawns, etc.

We found Maxim Fedorovich very pleasantly occupied. Smiling, and red with pleasure, he was seated at his green table, turning over hundred-rouble notes as if they were a book. Evidently even the sight of another man’s money had a pleasing effect on his frame of mind.

‘How do you do, Maxim Fedorovich?’ I said to him. ‘Where have you got such a pile of money?’

‘It’s to be sent to St Petersburg,’ the postmaster replied, smiling sweetly, and he pointed his chin at the corner of the room where a dark figure was sitting on the only chair in the post office.

This dark figure rose when he saw me and came towards us. I recognized my new acquaintance, my new enemy, whom I had so grievously insulted when I had got drunk at the Count’s.

‘My best greetings!’ he said.

‘How are you, Kaetan Kazimirovich?’ I answered, pretending not to notice his outstretched hand. ‘How’s the Count?’

‘Thank God, he’s quite well… It’s just that he’s a little bored… He’s expecting you to come at any minute.’

I read on Pshekhotsky’s face the desire to converse with me. How could that desire have arisen after the ‘swine’ to which I had treated him on that evening, and what caused this change of tone?

‘What a lot of money you have!’ I said, gazing at the packet of hundred-rouble notes he was sending away.

It seemed as if somebody had given a fillip to my brain! I noticed that one of the hundred-rouble notes had charred edges, and one corner had been quite burnt off… It was the hundred-rouble note which I had wanted to burn in the flame of a Chandor candle, when the Count refused to accept it from me as my share of the payment for the gipsies, and which Pshekhotsky had picked up when I flung it on the ground.

‘It’s better that I should give it to the poor, than let it be consumed by the flames,’ he had said then.

To what ‘poor’ was he sending it now?

‘Seven thousand five hundred roubles,’ Maxim Fedorovich counted in a drawling voice. ‘Quite right!’

It is ill to pry into the secrets of other people, but I wanted terribly to find out whose this money was and to whom this black-browed Pole was sending it in Petersburg. This money was certainly not his, and the Count had nobody to whom he would send it.

‘He has plundered the drunken Count,’ I thought, if deaf and silly Scops-Owl knows how to plunder the Count, how much trouble will this clever fellow have in thrusting his paw into his pockets?’

‘Oh, by-the-by, I’ll also take this opportunity of sending some money,’ Pavel Ivanovich said hastily. ‘Do you know, gentlemen, it’s quite incredible! For fifteen roubles you can get five things carriage-free! A telescope, a chronometer, a calendar, and something more… Maxim Fedorovich, kindly let me have a sheet of paper and an envelope!’

Screw sent off his fifteen roubles, I received my newspaper and a letter, and we left the post office.

We went towards the church. Screwy paced after me, as pale and dismal as an autumn day. The conversation in which he had tried to show himself to be ‘objective’ had excited him quite beyond all expectation.

All the church bells were being rung. An apparently endless crowd was slowly descending the steps that led from the church porch.

Ancient banners and a dark cross were held high above the crowd, at the head of the procession. The sun played gaily on the vestments of the priests, and the icon of the Holy Virgin emitted blinding rays…

‘Ah, there are our people!’ the doctor said, pointing to the beau-monde of our district which had separated itself from the crowd and was standing aside.

‘Your people, but not mine,’ I said.

‘That’s all the same… Let us join them…’

I approached my acquaintances and bowed. The Justice of the Peace, Kalinin, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a grey beard and crawfish-like eyes, was standing in front of all the others, whispering something in his daughter’s ear. Trying to appear as if he had not noticed me, he made not the slightest movement in answer to my general salute that had been made in his direction.

‘Goodbye, my angel,’ he said in a lachrymose voice as he kissed his daughter on the forehead. ‘Take the carriage on ahead. I shall be back by evening. My visits won’t take very long.’

Having kissed his daughter again and smiled sweetly on the beau-monde, he frowned fiercely, and turning sharply round on one heel, towards a muzhik wearing the disc of a foreman, he said hoarsely to him:

‘When will they bring up my carriage?’

The muzhik became excited and waved his arms.

‘Look out!’

The crowd that was following the procession made way and the carriage of the Justice of the Peace drove up smartly and with the sound of bells to where Kalinin was standing. He sat down, bowed majestically, and alarming the crowd by his ‘Look out!’ he disappeared from sight without casting a single.glance at me.

‘What a supercilious swine!’ I whispered in the doctor’s ear. ‘Come along!’

‘Don’t you want to say a word to Nadezhda Nikolaevna?’ Pavel Ivanovich asked:

‘It’s time for me to go home. I’m in a hurry.’

The doctor looked at me angrily, sighed, and turned away. I made a general bow and went towards the booths. As I was making my way through the dense crowd, I turned to look back at the Justice’s daughter. She was looking after me and appeared to be seeing whether I could bear her pure, searching gaze, so full of bitter injury and reproach.

Her eyes said: ‘Why?’

Something stirred in my breast, and I felt remorse and shame for my silly conduct. I suddenly felt a wish to return and caress and fondle with all the strength of my soft, and not yet quite corrupt, soul this girl who loved me passionately, and who had been so grievously wronged by me; and tell her that it was not I who was at fault, but my accursed pride that prevented me from living, breathing or advancing a step. Silly, conceited, foppish pride, full of vanity. Could I, a frivolous man, stretch out the hand of reconciliation, when I knew and saw that every one of my movements was watched by the eyes of the district gossips and the ‘ill-omened old women’? Sooner let them laugh her to scorn and cover her with derisive glances and smiles, than undeceive them of the ‘inflexibility’ of my character and the pride, which silly women admired so much in me.

Just before, when I had spoken with Pavel Ivanovich about the reasons that had caused me suddenly to cease my visits to the Kalinins, I had not been candid or accurate… I had held back the real reason; I had concealed it because I was ashamed of its triviality… The cause was as tiny as a grain of dust… It was this. On the occasion of my last visit, after I had given up Zorka to the coachman and was entering the Kalinins’ house, the following phrase reached my ears:

‘Nadenka, where are you?… Your betrothed has come!’

These words were spoken by her father, the Justice of the Peace, who probably did not think that I might hear him. But I heard him, and my self-love was aroused.

I her betrothed?’ I thought. ‘Who allowed you to call me her betrothed? On what basis?’

And something snapped in my breast. Pride rebelled within me, and I forgot all I had remembered when riding to Kalinin’s… I forgot that I had lured the young girl, and was myself attracted by her to such a degree that I was unable to pass a single evening without her company… I forgot her lovely eyes that never left my memory either by night or day, her kind smile, her melodious voice… I forgot the quiet summer evenings that will never return either for her or me… Everything had crumbled away under the pressure of the devilish pride that had been aroused by the silly phrase of her simple-minded father… I left the house in a rage, mounted Zorka, and galloped off, vowing to snub Kalinin, who without my permission had dared to consider me as his daughter’s betrothed.

‘Besides, Voznesensky is in love with her,’ I thought, trying to justify my sudden departure, as I rode home. ‘He began to pay court to her before I did, and they were considered to be engaged when I made her acquaintance. I won’t interfere with him!’

From that day I never put a foot in Kalinin’s house, though there were moments when I suffered from longing to see Nadia, and my soul yearned for the renewal of the past… But the whole district knew of the rupture, knew that I had ‘bolted’ from marriage… How could my pride make concessions?

Who can tell? If Kalinin had not said those words, and if I had not been so stupidly proud and touchy, perhaps I would not have had to look back, nor she to gaze at me with such eyes… But even those eyes were better, even the feeling of being wronged and of reproach was better, than what I saw in those eyes a few months after our meeting in the Tenevo church! The grief that shone in the depths of those black eyes now was only the beginning of the terrible misfortune that, like the sudden onrush of a train, swept that girl from the earth. They were like little flowers compared to those berries that were then already ripening in order to pour terrible poison into her frail body and anguished heart.