immeasurably more lofty and noble than pouring tea five times a day and keeping an eye on the cook lest she eat an extra bite. And above all, let father see, finally, that I, too, am capable of protest.’’
After tea she lay down on my bed and went on lying there for some time with her eyes closed, very pale.
‘‘Such weakness!’’ she said, getting up. ‘‘Vladimir said that all town women and girls are anemic from idleness. What an intelligent man Vladimir is! He’s right, infinitely right. One must work!’’
Two days later she came to the rehearsal at the Azhogins’ with a notebook. She was wearing a black dress with a string of corals around her neck, a brooch that, from a distance, looked like a puff pastry, and big earrings in her ears, with a diamond sparkling in each of them. When I looked at her, I felt awkward: the tastelessness struck me. Others, too, noticed that she was wearing earrings and diamonds inappropriately and was strangely dressed; I saw smiling faces and heard someone say laughingly:
‘‘Cleopatra of Egypt.’’
She tried to be worldly, unconstrained, at ease, and that made her look affected and strange. Her simplicity and comeliness abandoned her.
‘‘I just announced to father that I was going to a rehearsal,’’ she began, coming up to me, ‘‘and he shouted that he was depriving me of his blessing and even all but struck me. Imagine, I don’t know my role,’’ she said, looking into her notebook. ‘‘I’m sure to get confused. And so the die is cast,’’ she went on in strong agitation. ‘‘The die is cast...’
It seemed to her that everyone was looking at her and was amazed at the important step she had ventured upon, that everyone expected something special from her, and it was impossible to convince her that nobody paid attention to such small and uninteresting people as she and I.
She had nothing to do till the third act, and her role as a visiting provincial gossip consisted merely in standing by the door as if eavesdropping and then saying a short monologue. Until her appearance, for at least an hour and a half, while there was walking, reading, tea drinking, arguing onstage, she never left my side and kept murmuring her role and clutching her notebook nervously; and, imagining that everyone was looking at her and waiting for her appearance, she kept straightening her hair with a trembling hand and repeating:
‘‘I’m sure to get confused... How heavy my heart is, if you only knew! I’m as frightened as if I was about to be led out to execution.’’
At last her turn came.
‘‘Cleopatra Alexeevna—you’re on!’’ said the director.
She stepped to the middle of the stage with an expression of terror on her face, unattractive, angular, and for half a minute stood there like a post, completely motionless, and only the big earrings swung under her ears.
‘‘You can use the notebook the first time,’’ somebody said.
It was clear to me that she was trembling and, from trembling, could not speak or open her notebook, and that she was past thinking about her role, and I was just about to go to her and say something when she suddenly sank to her knees in the middle of the stage and burst into loud sobs.
There was movement, there was noise all around, I alone stood leaning against the backdrop, struck by what had happened, not understanding, not knowing what I was to do. I saw her being picked up and led away. I saw Anyuta Blagovo come over to me; earlier I hadn’t seen her in the room, and now it was as if she had sprung from the ground. She was wearing a hat with a veil and, as always, had the air of having stopped by only for a minute.
‘‘I told her not to act,’’ she said crossly, pronouncing each word abruptly and blushing. ‘‘This is madness! You should have stopped her!’’
The Azhogin mother, thin and flat, quickly came over to me, in a short jacket with short sleeves, and with cigarette ashes on her chest.
‘‘My friend, it’s terrible,’’ she said, wringing her hands and, as usual, peering intently into my face. ‘‘It’s terrible! Your sister’s condition... she’s pregnant! Take her away, I implore you...’
She was breathing heavily from agitation. And to one side stood her three daughters, as thin and flat as she, and huddled timorously together. They were alarmed, astounded, as if a convict had just been caught in their house. What a disgrace, how frightful! And yet this respectable family spent all their lives fighting prejudice; obviously they assumed that all of mankind’s prejudices and errors consisted only in three candles, the number thirteen, and the black day—Monday!
‘‘I implore you... implore you...’ Mrs. Azhogin repeated, protruding her lips and drawing out the letter O. ‘‘I implo-o-ore you, take her home.’’
XVIII
A LITTLE LATER, my sister and I went down the stairs. I shielded her with the skirt of my coat; we hurried, choosing back lanes where there were no streetlamps, hiding from passersby, and it was like fleeing. She no longer wept but looked at me with dry eyes. To Makarikha, where I was taking her, it was only a twenty-minute walk, and strangely, in so short a time we managed to recall our whole life, we discussed everything, thought over our situation, considered...
We decided it was no longer possible for us to stay in this town, and that when I earned a little money, we would move somewhere else. In some houses people were already asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these houses, feared them, and spoke of the fanaticism, the coarseness of heart, the nonentity of these respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we frightened so much, and I asked how these stupid, cruel, lazy, dishonest people were better than the drunken and superstitious Kurilovka muzhiks, or how they were better than animals, which are also thrown into consternation when some incident disrupts the monotony of their instinct-bound lives. What would become of my sister now, if she went on living at home? What moral suffering would she experience, talking with father, meeting acquaintances every day? I pictured it to myself, and at once people came to my memory, all people of my acquaintance, who were slowly being pushed out of this world by their families and relations, I recalled tortured dogs driven insane, living sparrows plucked bare by little boys and thrown into the water—and the long, long series of obscure, protracted sufferings I had been observing in this town uninterruptedly since childhood; and it was incomprehensible to me what these sixty thousand inhabitants lived by, why they read the Gospel, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What benefit did they derive from all that had been written and said so far, if there was in them the same inner darkness and the same aversion to freedom as a hundred or three hundred years ago? A building contractor builds houses in town all his life, and yet till his dying day he says ‘‘galdary’’ instead of ‘‘gallery,’’ and so, too, these sixty thousand inhabitants for generations have been reading and hearing about truth, mercy, and freedom, and yet till their dying day they lie from morning to evening, torment each other, and as for freedom, they fear it and hate it like an enemy.
