The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

“Remember… the artillery… lieutenant?” he mumbled, moving his tongue thickly.

“Wha-a-at?” Velchaninov screamed, shuddering painfully.

“There’s the father for you! Go look for him… to bury…”

“You’re lying!” Velchaninov cried like a lost man. “It’s out of spite… I just knew you’d have it ready for me!”

Forgetting himself, he raised his terrible fist over Pavel Pavlovich’s head. Another moment—and he would perhaps have killed him with one blow; the ladies shrieked and flew off, but Pavel Pavlovich did not bat an eye. Some sort of frenzy of the most beastly spite distorted his whole face.

“And do you know,” he spoke much more firmly, almost as if not drunk, “our Russian———?” (And he uttered a swearword most unfit for print.) “Well, take yourself there!” Then he tore violently from Velchaninov’s grip, stumbled, and nearly fell. The ladies picked him up and this time ran, shrieking, and almost dragging Pavel Pavlovich with them. Velchaninov now offered no pursuit.

The next day, at one o’clock in the afternoon, a quite decent middle-aged official in uniform came to the Pogoreltsevs’ country house and politely handed Klavdia Petrovna a packet addressed to her, on behalf of Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky. The packet contained a letter with an enclosed three hundred roubles and the necessary certificates concerning Liza. Pavel Pavlovich wrote briefly, exceedingly respectfully, and quite decently. He was quite grateful to Her Excellency Klavdia Petrovna for her virtuous concern with the orphan, for which God alone could reward her. He vaguely mentioned that, being extremely unwell, he was prevented from coming in person to bury his tenderly beloved and unfortunate daughter, and for that he placed all his hopes in Her Excellency’s angelic goodness of soul. The three hundred roubles, as he further explained in the letter, were intended for the funeral and generally for the expenses incurred by the illness. If anything should be left of this sum, he most humbly and respectfully begged that it be employed for eternal commemoration for the repose of the soul of the departed Liza. The official who delivered the letter was unable to explain more; it even followed from certain of his words that it was only Pavel Pavlovich’s insistent request that had made him take it upon himself personally to deliver the packet to Her Excellency. Pogoreltsev almost took offense at the phrase “expenses incurred by the illness,” and resolved, having set aside fifty roubles for the burial—since it was impossible to forbid a father to bury his own child—to return the remaining two hundred and fifty roubles to Mr. Trusotsky immediately. Klavdia Petrovna decided in the end to return, not the two hundred and fifty roubles, but the receipt from the cemetery church stating that this money had been received for the eternal commemoration of the soul of the departed maiden Elizaveta. The receipt was afterward given to Velchaninov, to be handed on immediately; he sent it by mail to the rooming house.

After the funeral, he disappeared from the country house. For two whole weeks he hung around the city without any purpose, alone, bumping into people in his pensiveness. At times he spent whole days lying stretched on his sofa, forgetful of the most ordinary things. The Pogoreltsevs sent many times asking him to come; he would promise and at once forget. Klavdia Petrovna even called on him personally, but did not find him at home. The same happened with his lawyer; and yet the lawyer had something to tell him: he had settled the lawsuit quite adroitly, and the adversaries had come to a peaceful agreement, with a very insignificant part of the disputed inheritance as compensation. It remained only to obtain the consent of Velchaninov himself. Finding him home at last, the lawyer was surprised at the extreme listlessness and indifference with which he, still recently so troublesome a client, heard him out.

The hottest days of July came, but Velchaninov was forgetful of time itself. The pain of his grief accumulated in his soul like a ripe abscess, and became clearer to him every moment in his tormentingly conscious thought. His chief suffering consisted in Liza’s not having had time to know him and dying without knowing how tormentingly he loved her! The whole purpose of his life, which had flashed before him in such a joyful light, suddenly faded in eternal darkness. This purpose would precisely have consisted—he thought about it all the time now—in Liza’s feeling his love upon her constantly, every day, every hour, and all her life. “No one has had or ever could have a higher purpose!” he pondered at times in gloomy rapture. “If there are other purposes, none can be holier than this one!” “By Liza’s love,” he dreamed, “my whole stinking and useless life would have been purified and redeemed; instead of myself, idle, depraved, and obsolete—I would have cherished for life a pure and beautiful being, and for this being everything would have been forgiven me, and I would have forgiven myself everything.”

All these conscious thoughts came to him always inseparably from the vivid memory of the dead child, always close, and always striking his soul. He re-created for himself her pale little face, recalled its every expression; he remembered her in the coffin amid the flowers, and earlier, unconscious in fever, with open, fixed eyes. He remembered suddenly that, when she was already laid out on the table, he had noticed one of her fingers which, God knows why, had turned black during her illness; he had been so struck by it then, and had felt such pity for this poor little finger, that it had entered his mind right there and then, for the first time, to find Pavel Pavlovich at once and kill him—until that time he “had been as if insensible.” Was it insulted pride that had tormented this child’s little heart, or three months of suffering from a father who had suddenly exchanged love for hatred and insulted her with a shameful word, who had laughed at her fear, and had thrown her away, finally, to strangers? All this he pictured ceaselessly to himself, varying it in a thousand ways. “Do you know what Liza was for me?”—he suddenly recalled the drunken Trusotsky’s exclamation, and he felt that this exclamation had no longer been clowning, but the truth, and there had been love in it. “How, then, could this monster be so cruel to a child he loved so, and is it probable?” But he hastened to drop this question each time, as if waving it away; there was something terrible in this question, something unbearable for him and—unresolved.

One day, and almost not remembering how himself, he wandered into the cemetery where Liza was buried and found her little grave. He had not been to the cemetery once since the funeral; he kept imagining that it would be too painful and had not dared to go. But, strangely, when he bent down to her little grave and kissed it, he suddenly felt better. It was a clear evening, the sun was setting; round about, near the graves, lush green grass was growing; not far away amid the eglantines, a bee buzzed; the flowers and wreaths left on Liza’s little grave by the children and Klavdia Petrovna after the burial still lay there, half their leaves blown off. Even some sort of hope, for the first time in a long while, refreshed his heart. “What lightness!” he thought, feeling the silence of the cemetery and gazing at the clear, serene sky. A flood of some pure, untroubled faith in something filled his soul. “Liza has sent it to me, it’s she talking to me,” came the thought.

It was already getting quite dark as he went back home from the cemetery. Not too far from the cemetery gates, on the road, in a low wooden building, there was something like a chophouse or pub; through the open window clients could be seen sitting at tables. It suddenly seemed to him that one of them, placed just by the window, was—Pavel Pavlovich, and that he had also seen him and was peeking curiously at him through the window. He went on and soon heard someone coming after him; it was in fact Pavel Pavlovich running to catch up with him; it must have been the conciliatory expression on Velchaninov’s face that had attracted and encouraged him as he looked out the window. Having overtaken him, he smiled timorously, but now it was not his former drunken smile; he was even not drunk at all.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” Velchaninov replied.

XI

PAVEL PAVLOVICH GETS MARRIED

Having replied with this “good evening,” he became surprised at himself. It seemed terribly strange to him that