A Desperate Character and Other Stories

living—and that was all. 'I'm not over-delighted at a visit from a nobleman,' he seemed to say; 'I don't feel flattered by it.' The republican was a republican still.

Musa came back; a decrepit little old woman followed her, bringing in a tarnished samovar. Punin began fussing about, and pressing me to take things; Baburin sat down to the table, leaned his head on his hands, and looked with weary eyes about him. At tea, however, he began to talk. He was dissatisfied with his position. 'A screw—not a man,' so he spoke of his employer; 'people in a subordinate position are so much dirt to him, of no consequence whatever; and yet it's not so long since he was under the yoke himself. Nothing but cruelty and covetousness. It's a bondage worse than the government's! And all the trade here rests on swindling and flourishes on nothing else!'

Hearing such dispiriting utterances, Punin sighed expressively, assented, shook his head up and down, and from side to side; Musa maintained a stubborn silence…. She was obviously fretted by the doubt, what I was, whether I was a discreet person or a gossip. And if I were discreet, whether it was not with some afterthought in my mind. Her dark, swift, restless eyes fairly flashed to and fro under their half-drooping lids. Only once she glanced at me, but so inquisitively, so searchingly, almost viciously … I positively started. Baburin scarcely talked to her at all; but whenever he did address her, there was a note of austere, hardly fatherly, tenderness in his voice.

Punin, on the contrary, was continually joking with Musa; she responded unwillingly, however. He called her little snow-maiden, little snowflake.

'Why do you give Musa Pavlovna such names?' I asked.

Punin laughed. 'Because she's such a chilly little thing.'

'Sensible,' put in Baburin: 'as befits a young girl.'

'We may call her the mistress of the house,' cried Punin. 'Hey? Paramon Semyonitch?' Baburin frowned; Musa turned away … I did not understand the hint at the time.

So passed two hours … in no very lively fashion, though Punin did his best to 'entertain the honourable company.' For instance, he squatted down in front of the cage of one of the canaries, opened the door, and commanded: 'On the cupola! Begin the concert!' The canary fluttered out at once, perched on the cupola, that is to say, on Punin's bald pate, and turning from side to side, and shaking its little wings, carolled with all its might. During the whole time the concert lasted, Punin kept perfectly still, only conducting with his finger, and half closing his eyes. I could not help roaring with laughter … but neither Baburin nor Musa laughed.

Just as I was leaving, Baburin surprised me by an unexpected question. He wished to ask me, as a man studying at the university, what sort of person Zeno was, and what were my ideas about him.

'What Zeno?' I asked, somewhat puzzled.

'Zeno, the sage of antiquity. Surely he cannot be unknown to you?'

I vaguely recalled the name of Zeno, as the founder of the school of

Stoics; but I knew absolutely nothing more about him.

'Yes, he was a philosopher,' I pronounced, at last.

'Zeno,' Baburin resumed in deliberate tones, 'was that wise man, who declared that suffering was not an evil, since fortitude overcomes all things, and that the good in this world is one: justice; and virtue itself is nothing else than justice.'

Punin turned a reverent ear.

'A man living here who has picked up a lot of old books, told me that saying,' continued Baburin; 'it pleased me much. But I see you are not interested in such subjects.'

Baburin was right. In such subjects I certainly was not interested. Since I had entered the university, I had become as much of a republican as Baburin himself. Of Mirabeau, of Robespierre, I would have talked with zest. Robespierre, indeed … why, I had hanging over my writing-table the lithographed portraits of Fouquier-Tinville and Chalier! But Zeno! Why drag in Zeno?

As he said good-bye to me, Punin insisted very warmly on my visiting them next day, Sunday; Baburin did not invite me at all, and even remarked between his teeth, that talking to plain people of nondescript position could not give me any great pleasure, and would most likely be disagreeable to my granny. At that word I interrupted him, however, and gave him to understand that my grandmother had no longer any authority over me.

'Why, you've not come into possession of the property, have you?' queried Baburin.

'No, I haven't,' I answered.

'Well, then, it follows …' Baburin did not finish his sentence; but I mentally finished it for him: 'it follows that I'm a boy.'

'Good-bye,' I said aloud, and I retired.

I was just going out of the courtyard into the street … Musa suddenly ran out of the house, and slipping a piece of crumpled paper into my hand, disappeared at once. At the first lamp-post I unfolded the paper. It turned out to be a note. With difficulty I deciphered the pale pencil-marks. 'For God's sake,' Musa had written, 'come to- morrow after matins to the Alexandrovsky garden near the Kutafia tower I shall wait for you don't refuse me don't make me miserable I simply must see you.' There were no mistakes in spelling in this note, but neither was there any punctuation. I returned home in perplexity.

* * * * *

When, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time, next day, I began to get near the Kutafia tower (it was early in April, the buds were swelling, the grass was growing greener, and the sparrows were noisily chirrupping and quarrelling in the bare lilac bushes), considerably to my surprise, I caught sight of Musa a little to one side, not far from the fence. She was there before me. I was going towards her; but she herself came to meet me.

'Let's go to the Kreml wall,' she whispered in a hurried voice, running her downcast eyes over the ground; 'there are people here.'

We went along the path up the hill.

'Musa Pavlovna,' I was beginning…. But she cut me short at once.

'Please,' she began, speaking in the same jerky and subdued voice, 'don't criticise me, don't think any harm of me. I wrote a letter to you, I made an appointment to meet you, because … I was afraid…. It seemed to me yesterday,—you seemed to be laughing all the time. Listen,' she added, with sudden energy, and she stopped short and turned towards me: 'listen; if you tell with whom … if you mention at whose room you met me, I'll throw myself in the water, I'll drown myself, I'll make an end of myself!'

At this point, for the first time, she glanced at me with the inquisitive, piercing look I had seen before.

'Why, she, perhaps, really … would do it,' was my thought.

'Really, Musa Pavlovna,' I protested, hurriedly: 'how can you have such a bad opinion of me? Do you suppose I am capable of betraying my friend and injuring you? Besides, come to that, there's nothing in your relations, as far as I'm aware, deserving of censure…. For goodness' sake, be calm.'

Musa heard me out, without stirring from the spot, or looking at me again.

'There's something else I ought to tell you,' she began, moving forward again along the path, 'or else you may think I'm quite mad! I ought to tell you, that old man wants to marry me!'

'What old man? The bald one? Punin?'

'No—not he! The other … Paramon Semyonitch.'

'Baburin?'

'Yes.'

'Is it possible? Has he made you an offer?'

'Yes.'

'But you didn't consent, of course?'

'Yes, I did consent … because I didn't understand what I was about then. Now it's a different matter.'

I flung up my hands. 'Baburin—and you! Why, he must be fifty!'

'He says forty-three. But that makes no difference. If he were five—and—twenty I wouldn't marry him. Much happiness I should find in it! A whole week will go by without his smiling once! Paramon Semyonitch is my benefactor, I am deeply indebted to him; he took care of me, educated me; I should have been utterly lost but for him; I'm bound to look on him as a father…. But be his wife! I'd rather die! I'd rather be in my coffin!'