The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

“Joking!” exclaimed Pavel Pavlovich in mournful perplexity, “at the very moment when I announce…”

“Ah, keep quiet about that, I beg you!”

Velchaninov got up and again began pacing the room.

And in this way about five minutes went by. The visitor, too, made as if to get up, but Velchaninov cried out: “Sit, sit!”—and the man at once obediently lowered himself into the armchair.

“How changed you are, though!” Velchaninov began talking again, suddenly stopping in front of him—just as if suddenly struck by the thought. “Terribly changed! Extremely! Quite a different man!”

“No wonder, sir: it’s nine years.”

“No, no, no, it’s not a matter of years! You haven’t changed in appearance, God knows: you’ve changed in something else!”

“Also, maybe, these nine years, sir.”

“Or since the month of March!”

“Heh, heh,” Pavel Pavlovich chuckled slyly, “you’ve got some playful thought… But, if I dare ask—what essentially is this change?”

“What indeed! Before there was such a solid and decent Pavel Pavlovich, such a smarty of a Pavel Pavlovich, and now—a perfect vaurien² of a Pavel Pavlovich.”

He was in that degree of vexation in which the most restrained people sometimes start saying unnecessary things.

“Vaurien! You think so? And no longer a ‘smarty’? Not a smarty?” Pavel Pavlovich tittered delightedly.

“The devil you’re a ‘smarty’! Now, maybe, you’re thoroughly smart.

“I’m impudent,” Velchaninov went on thinking, “but this rascal is more impudent still. And… and what’s his purpose?”

“Ah, my dearest, ah, my most priceless Alexei Ivanovich!” The visitor suddenly became extremely agitated and started fidgeting in his armchair. “But what’s that to us? We’re not in society now, not in brilliant, high-society company! We’re—two most sincere and ancient former friends, and, so to speak, have come together in the fullest sincerity to mutually recall that precious connection, in which the deceased woman constituted so precious a link in our friendship!”

And he was as if so carried away by the rapture of his feelings that he again bowed his head, as earlier, but now he covered his face with his hat. Velchaninov studied him with loathing and uneasiness.

“And what if he’s simply a buffoon?” flashed in his head. “But n-no, n-no! it seems he’s not drunk—however, maybe he is; his face is red. Though even if he is drunk—it comes out the same. What has he got up his sleeve? What does the rascal want?”

“Remember, remember,” Pavel Pavlovich cried out, uncovering his face little by little and as if getting more and more carried away by his memories, “remember our excursions outside of town, our evenings and evening parties with dances and innocent games at His Excellency the most hospitable Semyon Semyonovich’s? And our evening readings, just the three of us? And our first acquaintance with you, when you came to me one morning to get information about your lawsuit, and even started shouting, sir, and suddenly Natalia Vassilievna came out and ten minutes later you were already a true friend of our house, for precisely one whole year, sir—just as in The Provincial Lady, Mr. Turgenev’s play…”³

Velchaninov was pacing slowly, looking at the ground, listening with impatience and loathing, but—listening hard.

“The Provincial Lady never entered my head,” he interrupted, somewhat at a loss, “and you never spoke in such a squeaky voice before, or in this… not your own style. Why are you doing it?”

“Indeed, I was mostly silent before, sir—that is, I was more silent,” Pavel Pavlovich picked up hastily. “You know, before I preferred to listen when my late wife spoke. You remember how she spoke, with what wit, sir… And concerning The Provincial Lady and in particular concerning Stupendiev—you’re right there, too, because it was later that we ourselves, I and my priceless late wife, remembering you, sir, in some quiet moments, after you’d already left, compared our first meeting to this theater piece… because there was in fact a resemblance, sir. And particularly concerning Stupendiev…”

“What’s this Stupendiev, devil take it!” Velchaninov shouted and even stamped his foot, being completely put out at the word Stupendiev, owing to a certain uneasy remembrance that flashed in him at this word.

“Stupendiev is a role, sir, a theatrical role, the role of ‘the husband’ in the play The Provincial Lady,” Pavel Pavlovich squeaked in the sweetest little voice, “but that belongs to another category of our dear and beautiful memories, already after your departure, when Stepan Mikhailovich Bagautov graced us with his friendship, just as you did, sir, and for a whole five years.”

“Bagautov? What’s that? Which Bagautov?” Velchaninov suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.

“Bagautov, Stepan Mikhailovich, who graced us with his friendship precisely a year after you and… like you, sir.”

“Ah, my God, but that I know!” Velchaninov cried, finally figuring it out. “Bagautov! but he served with you…”

“He did, he did! at the governor’s! From Petersburg, a most elegant young man of the highest society!” Pavel Pavlovich cried out, decidedly enraptured.

“Yes, yes, yes! How could I! And so he, too…”

“And he, too! And he, too!” Pavel Pavlovich, having picked up his host’s imprudent phrase, echoed with the same rapture. “And he, too! It was then that we produced The Provincial Lady in His Excellency the most hospitable Semyon Semyonovich’s home theater—Stepan Mikhailovich was ‘the count,’ I was ‘the husband,’ and my late wife was ‘the provincial lady’—only the role of ‘the husband,’ was taken from me at the