resembled a servant.
‘‘If you’re sick, why do you work?’’ he said.
‘‘So as not to starve,’’ I replied.
‘‘How vile this all really is!’’ he said quietly, going to his desk.
While I, having thrown on my frock coat, set up and lit new candles, he sat by the desk and, with his legs stretched out on the armchair, cut the pages of a book.
I left him immersed in his reading, and the book no longer dropped from his hands, as in the evening.
VII
NOW, AS I WRITE these lines, my hand is restrained by a fear nurtured in me since childhood—of appearing sentimental and ridiculous; when I would like to caress and speak tenderly, I’m unable to be sincere. It is precisely owing to this fear and lack of habit that I am quite unable to express with complete clarity what then happened in my soul.
I was not in love with Zinaida Fyodorovna, but the ordinary human feeling I nursed for her was much younger, fresher, and more joyful than Orlov’s love.
In the mornings, working with the shoe brush or the broom, I waited with bated breath till I would at last hear her voice and footsteps. To stand and watch her as she had her coffee and then her breakfast, to help her into her fur coat in the front hall and put galoshes on her little feet while she leaned on my shoulder, then to wait till the porter rang from downstairs, to meet her at the door, rosy, chilled, powdered with snow, to hear her broken exclamations about the cold or the cabby—if you only knew how important it was for me! I would have liked to fall in love, to have my own family, would have liked my future wife to have exactly such a face, such a voice. I dreamed over dinner, and when I was sent out on some errand, and at night when I didn’t sleep. Orlov squeamishly thrust aside female rags, children, cooking, copper pans, and I picked it all up and carefully cherished it in my reveries, loved it, asked fate for it, and dreamed of a wife, a nursery, a garden path, a little house...
I knew that, if I fell in love with her, I would not dare to count on such a miracle as requital, but this consideration did not trouble me. In my modest, quiet feeling, which resembled ordinary attachment, there was neither jealousy of Orlov nor even envy, since I realized that, for a crippled man like me, personal happiness was possible only in dreams.
When Zinaida Fyodorovna, waiting for her Georges at night, gazed fixedly into a book without turning the pages, or when she gave a start and grew pale because Polya was crossing the room, I suffered with her, and it would occur to me to lance this painful abscess quickly, to make it so that she should quickly learn all that was said here on Thursdays over supper, but—how to do it? More and more often it happened that I saw tears. During the first weeks, she laughed and sang her little song, even when Orlov was not at home, but after another month, there was a dreary silence in our apartment, broken only on Thursdays.
She flattered Orlov, and to obtain an insincere smile or a kiss from him, she went on her knees before him, fawning like a little dog. Going past a mirror, even when her heart was very heavy, she could not help glancing at herself and straightening her hair. It seemed strange to me that she continued to be interested in clothes and went into raptures over her purchases. It somehow didn’t go with her genuine sorrow. She observed fashion and had costly dresses made. For what and for whom? I especially remember one new dress that cost four hundred roubles. To pay four hundred roubles for a superfluous, unnecessary dress, while our working women do hard labor at twenty kopecks a day without board, and Venetian and Brussels lace-makers are paid only half a franc a day with the understanding that they will make up the rest by debauchery! And it was strange to me that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not aware of it, it was vexing to me. But she had only to leave the house and I forgave everything, explained everything, and waited for the porter downstairs to ring for me.
She behaved towards me as towards a servant, a lower being. One can pet a dog and at the same time not notice it. I was given orders, asked questions, but my presence was not noticed. The masters considered it indecent to talk with me more than was proper; if, while serving supper, I had mixed into the conversation or laughed, they would probably have considered me mad and dismissed me. But all the same, Zinaida Fyodorovna was benevolent towards me. When she sent me somewhere, or explained how to handle a new lamp or something of that sort, her face was extraordinarily bright, kind, and affable, and her eyes looked directly into my face. Each time it happened, it seemed to me that she remembered gratefully how I had carried letters for her to Znamenskaya. When she rang, Polya, who considered me her favorite and hated me for it, would say with a caustic smile:
‘‘Go,
Zinaida Fyodorovna behaved towards me as towards a lower being and did not suspect that, if anyone in the house was humiliated, it was she alone. She didn’t know that I, a servant, suffered for her and asked myself twenty times a day what the future held for her and how it would all end. Things were becoming noticeably worse every day. After that evening when they talked about his work, Orlov, who disliked tears, obviously began to fear and avoid conversation; when Zinaida Fyodorovna started arguing or pleading, or was about to weep, he would find some plausible excuse to go to his study or leave the house altogether. He spent the night at home more and more rarely, and dined more rarely still; on Thursdays he himself asked his friends to take him away somewhere. Zinaida Fyodorovna still dreamed of her own kitchen, of a new apartment and a trip abroad, but her dreams remained dreams. Dinner was brought from a restaurant, Orlov asked that the apartment question not be raised till they came back from abroad, and about traveling he said that they could not go before he had grown his hair long, because dragging oneself from hotel to hotel and serving the idea was impossible without long hair.
To crown it all, in Orlov’s absence, Kukushkin began to call on us in the evenings. There was nothing special in his behavior, but I was still quite unable to forget that conversation in which he said he would win Zinaida Fyodorovna away from Orlov. He was offered tea and red wine, and he tittered and, wishing to say something pleasant, maintained that civil marriage was higher than church marriage in all respects, and that indeed all decent people should now come to Zinaida Fyodorovna and bow down at her feet.
VIII
CHRISTMASTIME WENT BY boringly, in vague expectation of something bad. On New Year’s Eve, over morning coffee, Orlov unexpectedly announced that his superiors were sending him with special powers to a senator who was inspecting some province.
‘‘I don’t want to go, but I can’t think up an excuse!’’ he said vexedly. ‘‘I’ll have to go, there’s no help for it.’’
At this news, Zinaida Fyodorovna’s eyes instantly turned red.
‘‘For how long?’’ she asked.
‘‘Five days or so.’’
‘‘I’ll confess I’m glad you’re going,’’ she said after some thought. ‘‘You’ll be diverted. You’ll fall in love with
