‘‘Romeo and Yulia!’’ he said, closing the book and laughing. ‘‘I’m Romeo, Nina. You can congratulate me, I proposed today to Yulia Belavin.’’
Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but then believed him and wept. The news did not please her.
‘‘Well, then I congratulate you,’’ she said. ‘‘But why is it so sudden?’’
‘‘No, it’s not sudden. It’s been going on since March, only you didn’t notice anything... I fell in love back in March, when I made her acquaintance here in your room.’’
‘‘And I thought you’d marry one of our Moscow girls,’’ Nina Fyodorovna said after a pause. ‘‘The girls from our circle would be simpler. But the chief thing, Alyosha, is that you should be happy, that’s the chiefest thing. My Grigory Nikolaich didn’t love me, and there’s no concealing it, you see how we live. Of course, any woman could love you for your kindness and intelligence, but Yulechka is a boarding-school girl and a gentlewoman, for her intelligence and kindness aren’t enough. She’s young, and you, Alyosha, are no longer young, nor are you handsome.’’
To soften these last words, she stroked his cheek and said:
‘‘You’re not handsome, but you’re a sweetheart.’’
She became all excited, so that a slight blush even came to her cheeks, and she spoke with enthusiasm about whether it would be fitting for her to bless Alyosha with an icon; for she was his older sister and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to persuade her mournful brother that the wedding had to be celebrated in the proper way, festively and merrily, so that people would not condemn them.
After that, he began to visit the Belavins as a fiance, three or four times a day, and no longer had time to take turns with Sasha reading historical novels. Yulia received him in her own two rooms, far from the drawing room and her father’s study, and he liked them very much. Here the walls were dark, and in the corner stood a stand with icons; there was a smell of good perfume and icon-lamp oil. She lived in the farthest rooms, her bed and dressing table were partitioned off by a screen, and the doors of the bookcase were covered from inside with green curtains, and she walked about on rugs, so that her footsteps were not heard at all— and from that he concluded that she had a secretive character and liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded life. At home she was still in the position of a minor, she had no money of her own, and it happened during walks that she would be embarrassed not to have a kopeck with her. Her father gave her small amounts for clothing and books, no more than a hundred roubles a year. And the doctor himself had hardly any money, even despite a very good practice. He played cards at the club every evening and always lost. Besides that, he bought houses from the mutual credit society with transfer of mortgage and rented them out; the tenants did not pay regularly, but he insisted that these operations with houses were very profitable. He mortgaged his own house, in which he lived with his daughter, and with the money bought a vacant lot and began to build a large two-story house on it, in order to mortgage it.
Laptev now lived in a sort of fog, as though it was not he but his double, and he did many things he would not have ventured to do before. Three times or so he went with the doctor to the club, had supper with him, and offered him money for building; he even visited Panaurov at his other apartment. It happened once that Panaurov invited him for dinner at his place, and Laptev unthinkingly accepted. He was met by a lady of about thirty-five, tall and lean, with slightly graying hair and black eyebrows, apparently not a Russian. There were white blotches of powder on her face; she smiled mawkishly and shook his hand with such zeal that the bracelets jingled on her white arms. It seemed to Laptev that she smiled like that because she wanted to conceal from herself and others that she was unhappy. He also saw two girls, aged five and three, who resembled Sasha. At dinner they were served milk soup, cold veal with carrots, and chocolate—it was sweetish and untasty, but to make up for it, there were gleaming gilt forks on the table, flacons of soy sauce and cayenne pepper, an extraordinarily fanciful cruet stand, a gilt pepper pot.
Only after he finished the milk soup did Laptev realize how inappropriate it actually was for him to have come there for dinner. The lady was embarrassed, smiled all the time, showing her teeth; Panaurov explained scientifically what falling in love was and why it happened.
‘‘We have to do here with one of the phenomena of electricity,’’ he said in French, addressing the lady. ‘‘In every person’s skin sit microscopic iron strips which contain currents. If you meet an individual whose currents are parallel to your own, there’s love for you.’’
When Laptev returned home and his sister asked where he had been, he felt awkward and did not answer.
All the while before the wedding, he felt himself in a false position. His love grew stronger every day, and Yulia appeared poetic and sublime to him, but all the same there was no mutual love, and the fact of the matter was that he was buying and she was selling herself. Sometimes, as he brooded, he was simply brought to despair and asked himself whether he should not run away. He now spent whole nights without sleeping and kept wondering how, in Moscow after the wedding, he would meet the lady whom he referred to, in his letters to friends, as the ‘‘individual,’’ and how his father and brother, difficult people, would regard his marriage and Yulia. He was afraid his father would say something rude to Yulia at their first meeting. As for his brother Fyodor, something strange had been happening to him lately. In his long letters, he wrote about the importance of health, about the influence of illness on one’s mental state, about what religion is, but not a word about Moscow and business. These letters annoyed Laptev, and it seemed to him that his brother’s character was changing for the worse.
The wedding took place in September. They were married in the Peter-and-Paul church, after the liturgy, and the newlyweds left for Moscow the same day. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a train—no longer a girl, by the look of it, but a real lady—were taking leave of Nina Fyodorovna, the sick woman’s whole face went awry, but not a single tear came from her dry eyes. She said:
‘‘If, God forbid, I should die, take my girls to live with you.’’
‘‘Oh, I promise you!’’ answered Yulia Sergeevna, and her lips and eyelids also began to twitch nervously.
‘‘I’ll come to you in October,’’ said Laptev, deeply moved. ‘‘Get well, my dear.’’
They traveled in a private compartment. Both of them felt sad and awkward. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat and pretended to doze, and he lay on the seat opposite her, troubled by various thoughts: about his father, about the ‘‘individual,’’ about whether Yulia was going to like his Moscow apartment. And, glancing at his wife, who did not love him, he thought dejectedly: ‘‘Why has this happened?’’
V
IN MOSCOW THE Laptevs ran a wholesale trade in haberdashery: fringes, tapes, braid, crocheting cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross receipts reached two million a year; what the net income was no one knew except the old man. The sons and the salesclerks estimated this income at approximately three hundred thousand, and said it would be about a hundred thousand more if the old man did not ‘‘extend himself,’’ that is, sell on credit without discernment; in the last ten years they had accumulated almost a million in hopeless promissory notes alone, and the senior salesclerk, when someone mentioned it, would wink slyly and speak words the meaning of which was not clear to everyone:
