He took her under the arm and led her up the stairs, then down a corridor through a crowd of men and women. The front room was also crowded; there was a smell of incense.
‘‘I’ll introduce you to our father now,’’ Fyodor whispered amidst the solemn, sepulchral silence. ‘‘A venerable old man, a paterfamilias.’’
In a big reception room, near a table prepared for a prayer service, Fyodor Stepanych, a priest in a kamilavka,9 and a deacon stood in obvious expectation. The old man gave Yulia his hand and did not say a word. Everyone was silent. Yulia became embarrassed.
The priest and the deacon began to put on their vestments. A censer was brought, which showered sparks and gave off a smell of incense and charcoal. The candles were lighted. The salesclerks tiptoed into the room and stood near the wall in two rows. It was quiet; no one even coughed.
‘‘Bless, master,’’ the deacon began.
The prayer service proceeded solemnly, without any omissions, and two akathists10 were read: to Sweet Jesus and to the Most Holy Mother of God. The choir sang only by the scores and at great length. Laptev noticed how his wife became embarrassed at the beginning; while the akathists were being read, and the choir chanted the triple ‘‘Lord have mercy’’ in various tunes, he waited with inner tension for the old man to turn and make some observation, such as: ‘‘You don’t know how to cross yourself,’’ and he was vexed: why this crowd, why this whole ceremony with clergy and choir? It was too much in merchant style. But when she, together with the old man, bowed her head to be blessed by the Gospel, and then knelt on several occasions, he realized that she liked it all and calmed down.
At the end of the service, when ‘‘Many Years’’11 was sung, the priest held out the cross for Alexei and the old man to kiss, but when Yulia Sergeevna approached, he covered the cross with his hand and indicated that he wanted to speak. They waved for the choir to stop singing.
‘‘The prophet Samuel,’’ began the priest, ‘‘came to Bethlehem by order of the Lord, and there the town elders asked him in trembling: ‘Comest thou peaceably, O seer?’ And the prophet said: ‘Peaceably: I am come to sacrifice unto the Lord, sanctify yourselves and rejoice with me today.’12 Shall we, too, ask of thee, the servant of God Yulia, whether thou hast come peaceably into this house?...’
Yulia turned all red with agitation. Having finished, the priest gave her the cross to kiss and said in an altogether different tone:
‘‘Now we must get Fyodor Fyodorych married. It’s high time.’’
Again the choir sang, people stirred, it became noisy. The old man, moved, his eyes filled with tears, kissed Yulia three times, made a cross over her face, and said:
‘‘This is your house. I’m an old man, I don’t need anything.’’
The salesclerks congratulated her and said something, but the choir sang so loudly that it was impossible to hear anything. Then they had lunch and drank champagne. She sat next to the old man, and he said to her that it was not good to live separately, that they must live together, in one house, and separations and disagreements lead to ruin.
‘‘I made money, but the children only spend it,’’ he said. ‘‘Now you come and live in the same house with me and make money. I’m an old man, it’s time for me to rest.’’
Fyodor was flitting in front of Yulia’s eyes all the time, looking very much like her husband, but more fidgety and bashful; he fussed about her and often kissed her hand.
‘‘We’re simple people, little sister,’’ he kept saying, and red blotches came to his face. ‘‘We live simply, little sister, like Russians, like Christians.’’
On the way home, Laptev, very pleased that it had all gone well and that, beyond his expectations, nothing particular had happened, said to his wife:
‘‘You’re surprised that a big, broad-shouldered father has such undersized, weak-chested children as me and Fyodor. Yes, but it’s so understandable! Father married my mother when he was forty-five and she was only seventeen. She went pale and trembled in his presence. Nina was born first, born of a comparatively healthy mother, and therefore came out stronger and better than we did. Fyodor and I were conceived and born when mother was already exhausted by perpetual fear. I remember my father began teaching me, or, to put it simply, beating me, when I was not yet five years old. He whipped me with birches, boxed my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up, my first thought was: ‘Will I be whipped today?’ Fyodor and I were forbidden to play and frolic: we had to go to matins and the early liturgy, kiss the hands of priests and monks, read akathists at home. You are religious and like all that, but I’m afraid of religion, and when I pass a church, I recall my childhood and feel eerie. When I was eight years old, I went to work in the warehouse; I worked as a simple boy, and that was unhealthy, because I was beaten almost every day. Later, when I was sent to school, I studied before dinner and had to sit in that same warehouse from dinner till evening, and so it went till I was twenty-two and at the university made the acquaintance of Yartsev, who persuaded me to leave my father’s house. This Yartsev did me a lot of good. You know what,’’ Laptev said and laughed with pleasure, ‘‘let’s go now and visit Yartsev. He’s a most noble man! How touched he’ll be!’’
VII
ONE SATURDAY IN November, Anton Rubinstein13 conducted at the symphony. It was very crowded and hot. Laptev stood behind the columns, while his wife and Kostya Kochevoy sat way up front, in the third or fourth row. At the very beginning of the intermission, the ‘‘individual,’’ Polina Nikolaevna Rassudina, quite unexpectedly walked past him. After the wedding he had often thought anxiously about a possible encounter with her. Now, when she looked at him openly and directly, he remembered that so far he had not even managed to have a talk with her or write her at least two or three friendly lines, as if he was hiding from her; he felt ashamed and blushed. She strongly and impetuously shook his hand and asked:
‘‘Have you seen Yartsev?’’
And without waiting for a reply, she walked on rapidly, in long strides, as if someone was pushing her from behind.
She was very thin and unattractive, with a long nose, and her face was always exhausted, worn out, and it seemed a great effort for her to keep her eyes open and not fall down. She had beautiful dark eyes and an intelligent, kind, sincere expression, but her movements were angular, abrupt. It was not easy to talk with her, because she was not good at listening or talking calmly. To love her was difficult. It happened, when she was alone with Laptev, that she would laugh for a long time, covering her face with her hands and insisting that love was not the main thing in her life, mincing like a seventeen-year-old girl, and before kissing her, he had to put out all the candles. She was thirty years old. Her husband was a teacher, but she had not lived with him for a long time. She provided for herself by giving music lessons and participating in quartets.
