used to pass the time walking about with my cap on one side, winking at the German girls. And one little German girl, Luise, took my fancy. They were both laundresses, only doing the finest work, she and her aunt. Her aunt was a stuck-up old thing and they were well off. I used to walk up and down outside their windows at first, and then I got to be real friends with her. Luise spoke Russian well too, she only lisped a little, as it were—she was such a darling, I never met one like her. … I was for being too free at first, but she said to me, ‘No, you mustn’t, Sasha, for I want to keep all my innocence to make you a good wife,’ and she’d only caress me and laugh like a bell … and she was such a clean little thing, I never saw anyone like her. She suggested our getting married herself. Now, could I help marrying her, tell me that? So I made up my mind to go to the lieutenant-colonel for permission. … One day I noticed Luise did not turn up at our meeting-place, and again a second time she didn’t come, and again a third. I sent a letter; no answer. What is it? I wondered. If she had been deceiving me she would have contrived somehow, have answered the letter, and have come to meet me. But she did not know how to tell a lie, so she simply cut it off. It’s her aunt, I thought. I didn’t dare go to the aunt’s; though she knew it, we always met on the quiet. I went about as though I were crazy; I wrote her a last letter and said, ‘If you don’t come I shall come to your aunt’s myself.’ She was frightened and came. She cried; she told me that a German called Schultz, a distant relation, a watchmaker, well-off and elderly, had expressed a desire to marry her—‘to make me happy,’ he says, and not to be left without a wife in his old age; and he loves me, he says, and he’s had the idea in his mind for a long time, but he kept putting it off and saying nothing. ‘You see, Sasha,’ she said, ‘he’s rich and it’s a fortunate thing for me; surely you don’t want to deprive me of my good fortune?’ I looked at her—she was crying and hugging me. … ‘Ech,’ I thought, ‘she is talking sense! What’s the use of marrying a soldier, even though I am a sergeant?’ ‘Well, Luise,’ said I, ‘goodbye, God be with you. I’ve no business to hinder your happiness. Tell me, is he good-looking?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘he is an old man, with a long nose,’ and she laughed herself. I left her. Well,’ I thought, it was not fated to be!’ The next morning I walked by his shop; she had told me the street. I looked in at the window: there was a German sitting there mending a watch, a man of forty-five with a hooked nose and goggle eyes, wearing a tailcoat and a high stand-up collar, such a solemn-looking fellow. I fairly cursed; I should like to have broken his window on the spot … but there, I thought, it’s no good touching him, it’s no good crying over spilt milk! I went home to the barracks at dusk, lay down on my bed and would you believe it, Alexandr Petrovitch, I burst out crying. …
“Well, that day passed, and another and a third. I did not see Luise. And meantime I heard from a friend (she was an old lady, another laundress whom Luise sometimes went to see) that the German knew of our love, and that was why he made up his mind to propose at once, or else he would have waited another two or three years. He had made Luise promise, it seemed, that she would not see me again; and that so far he was, it seems, rather churlish with both of them, Luise and her aunt; as though he might change his mind and had not quite decided even now. She told me, too, that the day after tomorrow, Sunday, he had invited them both to have coffee with him in the morning and that there would be another relation there, an old man who had been a merchant but was very poor now and served as a caretaker in a basement. When I knew that maybe on Sunday everything would be settled, I was seized with such fury that I did not know what I was doing. And all that day and all the next I could do nothing but think of it. I felt I could eat that German.
“On Sunday morning I did not know what I would do, but when the mass was over I jumped up, put on my overcoat and set off to the German’s. I thought I would find them all there. And why I went to the German’s, and what I meant to say, I did not know myself. But I put a pistol in my pocket to be ready for anything. I had a wretched little pistol with an old-fashioned trigger; I used to fire it as a boy. It wasn’t fit to be used. But I put a bullet in it: I thought ‘if they try turning me out and being rude I’ll pull out the pistol and frighten them all.’ I got there, there was no one in the shop, they were all sitting in the backroom. And not a soul but themselves, no servant. He had only one, a German cook. I walked through the shop and saw the door was shut, but it was an old door, fastening with a hook. My heart beat; I stood still and listened they were talking German. I kicked the door with all my might and it opened. I saw the table was laid. On the table there
