During the Ninth Symphony, she walked past again, as if by chance, but the crowd of men who stood in a thick wall behind the columns blocked her way, and she stopped. Laptev saw on her the same velvet blouse in which she had gone to concerts last year and the year before. Her gloves were new, the fan was also new, but cheap. She loved dressing up but did not know how and was reluctant to spend money on it, and dressed badly and slovenly, so that usually, when she walked down the street in long, hurried strides on her way to a lesson, she could easily be taken for a young novice.
The public applauded and shouted encore.
‘‘You’ll spend this evening with me,’’ said Polina Nikolaevna, going up to Laptev and looking at him sternly. ‘‘We’ll leave here and go to have tea. Do you hear? I demand it. You owe me a lot and have no moral right to deny me this trifle.’’
‘‘All right, let’s go,’’ Laptev agreed.
After the symphony there were endless curtain calls. The public got up from their places and went out extremely slowly, but Laptev could not leave without telling his wife. He had to stand at the door and wait.
‘‘I’m dying for some tea,’’ Rassudina complained. ‘‘My soul is on fire.’’
‘‘We can have it here,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘Let’s go to the buffet.’’
‘‘No, I have no money to throw around at buffets. I’m not some little merchant.’’
He offered her his arm, she refused, uttering a long, tiresome phrase he had heard many times from her, namely that she did not count herself as part of the weak fair sex and had no need of gentlemen’s services.
While talking to him, she looked over the public and often greeted acquaintances; these were her classmates from the Guerrier courses14 and the conservatory, and her pupils, young men and women. She shook their hands strongly and impetuously, almost jerkily. But then she began to hunch her shoulders, as if in a fever, and to tremble, and at last said quietly, looking at Laptev in horror:
‘‘Whom have you married? Where were your eyes, you crazy man? What did you find in that stupid, worthless girl? I loved you for your intelligence, your soul, but this china doll only needs your money!’’
‘‘Let’s drop that, Polina,’’ he said in a pleading voice. ‘‘Everything you can tell me about my marriage, I’ve already told myself many times... Don’t cause me any extra pain.’’
Yulia Sergeevna appeared in a black dress and with a large diamond brooch her father-in-law had sent her after the prayer service; she was followed by her retinue: Kochevoy, two doctors of their acquaintance, an officer, and a stout young man in a student’s uniform whose last name was Kish.
‘‘Go with Kostya,’’ Laptev said to his wife. ‘‘I’ll come later.’’
Yulia nodded and walked on. Polina Nikolaevna followed her with her eyes, trembling all over and hugging herself nervously, and her look was filled with disgust, hatred, and pain.
Laptev was afraid to go with her, anticipating an unpleasant talk, harsh words, and tears, and he suggested they go and have tea in some restaurant. But she said:
‘‘No, no, let’s go to my place. Don’t you dare talk to me about restaurants.’’
She disliked going to restaurants, because restaurant air seemed poisoned to her by tobacco and men’s breath. She regarded all unknown men with a strange prejudice, considering them all debauchees capable of throwing themselves at her any moment. Besides that, tavern music irritated her to the point of giving her a headache.
Coming out of the Assembly of Nobility, they hired a cab for Ostozhenka, to Savelovsky Lane, where Rassudina lived. Laptev thought about her all the way. In fact, he did owe her a lot. He had made her acquaintance at his friend Yartsev’s, to whom she was teaching the theory of music. She loved him deeply, quite disinterestedly, and, after becoming intimate with him, went on giving lessons and working herself to exhaustion as before. Thanks to her, he began to understand and love music, which previously he had been almost indifferent to.
‘‘My kingdom for a cup of tea!’’ she said in a hollow voice, covering her mouth with her muff so as not to catch cold. ‘‘I gave five lessons today, devil take them! The pupils are such dimwits, such dullards, that I nearly died of spite. And I don’t know when this hard labor will end. I’m worn out. As soon as I save three hundred roubles, I’ll drop everything and go to the Crimea. I’ll lie on the beach and gulp down oxygen. How I love the sea, oh, how I love the sea!’’
‘‘You won’t go anywhere,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘First, you won’t save anything, and second, you’re stingy. Forgive me, I’ll repeat again: is saving these three hundred roubles kopeck by kopeck from idle people, who study music with you because they have nothing to do, really less humiliating than borrowing it from your friends?’’
‘‘I have no friends!’’ she said irritably. ‘‘And I beg you not to say foolish things. The working class, to which I belong, has one privilege: the consciousness of its incorruptibility, the right not to owe anything to little merchants and to despise them. No, sir, you won’t buy me! I’m not Yulechka!’’
Laptev did not try to pay the cabby, knowing it would provoke a whole flood of words he had heard many times before. She paid herself.
She rented a small furnished room, with board, in the apartment of a single lady. Her big Becker grand piano15 was meanwhile at Yartsev’s, on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, and she went there every day to play. There were armchairs in slip-covers in her room, a bed with a white summer coverlet, and the landlady’s flowers, some oleographs on the walls, and nothing to remind one that a woman and former student lived there. There was no dressing table, no books, not even a desk. It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she came home and left the house as soon as she got up in the morning.
The cook brought the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea and, still trembling—it was cold in the room—began to denounce the singers who had sung in the Ninth Symphony. Her eyes were closing from fatigue. She drank one glass, then another, then a third.
‘‘And so you got married,’’ she said. ‘‘But don’t worry, I won’t pine away, I’ll be able to tear you out of my heart. It’s only annoying and bitter that you’re the same trash as everybody else, that what you need in a woman is not the mind, the intellect, but the body, beauty, youth...Youth!’ she pronounced through her nose, as if imitating someone, and laughed. ‘‘Youth! You need purity,
When she finished laughing, there were tears in her eyes. ‘‘Are you happy, at least?’’ she asked.
‘‘No.’’
