The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

me for the rest of my life. Now, therefore, I had the right to protect myself from you with a wall, to raise these thirty thousand roubles and end my life somewhere in the Crimea, on the southern coast, amid mountains and vineyards, on my own estate, bought with this thirty thousand, and, above all, far away from all of you, but without spite toward you, with an ideal in my soul, with a beloved woman by my heart, with a family, should God send it, and—helping out the neighboring settlers.” Naturally, it’s good that I’m now saying this to myself, but what could have been stupider than if I had then painted it aloud for her? Hence the proud silence, hence the silent sitting. Because what could she have understood? Sixteen years, early youth—what could she understand of my justifications, my sufferings? Here was straightforwardness, ignorance of life, cheap youthful convictions, the chicken’s blindness of “beautiful hearts,” and, above all, here was the pawnshop, and—basta! (But was I a villain in the pawnshop, didn’t she see how I acted and whether I took too much?) Oh, how terrible is the truth on earth! This lovely one, this meek one, this heaven—she was a tyrant, an unbearable tyrant and tormentor of my soul! I’ll slander myself if I don’t say it! You think I didn’t love her? Who can say I didn’t love her? You see: there was irony here, a wicked irony of fate and nature came out here! We’re cursed, the life of men generally is cursed! (Mine in particular!) I understand now that I did make some mistake here! Something here didn’t come out right. Everything was clear, my plan was clear as the sky: “Stern, proud, and needs nobody’s moral consolation, suffers silently.” That’s how it was, I wasn’t lying, I wasn’t lying! “She herself will see afterward that there was magnanimity here, only she failed to notice it—and once she realizes it someday, she’ll appreciate it ten times more, and will fall down in the dust with her hands clasped in entreaty.” That was the plan. But I forgot something here, or lost sight of it. There was something here I failed to do. But enough, enough. And of whom shall I now ask forgiveness? What’s finished is finished. Take heart, man, and be proud! It’s not your fault!…

So, then, I’ll tell the truth, I won’t be afraid to stand face-to-face with the truth: it was her fault, her fault!…

V

THE MEEK ONE REBELS

The quarrels began with her suddenly deciding to lend money in her own way, to appraise things above their value, and she even deigned a couple of times to enter into a dispute with me on the subject. I didn’t agree. But here the captain’s widow turned up.

An old woman, a captain’s widow, came with a locket—a present from her late husband, well, the usual thing, a keepsake. I gave her thirty roubles. She started whining pathetically, begging me not to let the thing go— naturally, I won’t let it go. Well, in short, suddenly, five days later, she comes to exchange it for a bracelet that isn’t worth even eight roubles. Naturally, I rejected it. She must have guessed something right then from my wife’s eyes, but anyway she came when I wasn’t there and my wife exchanged the locket for her.

Finding out that same day, I began speaking meekly, but firmly and reasonably. She was sitting on the bed looking down, tapping the rug with her right toe (her gesture); there was a bad smile on her lips. Then, without raising my voice at all, I declared calmly that the money was mine, that I had the right to look at life with my own eyes, and—that when I invited her into my home, I had not concealed anything from her.

She suddenly jumped up, suddenly trembled all over, and—what do you think?—suddenly stamped her feet at me; this was a beast, this was a fit, this was a beast in a fit. I froze in astonishment; I never expected such an escapade. But I was not put out, I didn’t even stir, and again in the same calm voice declared to her directly that from then on I was depriving her of her participation in my concerns. She burst out laughing in my face and left the apartment.

The thing was that she had no right to leave the apartment. Nowhere without me, that was the agreement while she was still my fiancee. Toward evening she came back. Not a word from me.

The next day she was gone again from morning on, and the day after. I locked my shop and went to the aunts. I had broken with them right after the wedding—they never visited me, nor I them. It now turned out that she hadn’t been there. They listened to me with curiosity and laughed in my face: “Serves you right,” they said. But I had anticipated their laughter. I straightaway bribed the maiden aunt, the younger one, with a hundred roubles, and gave her twenty-five up front. Two days later she comes to me: “An officer,” she says, “Yefimovich, a sub- lieutenant, your former regimental comrade, is mixed up in it.” I was very amazed. This Yefimovich had caused me the most evil in the regiment, and a month ago had come to my shop once and then again, shameless as he was, on the pretext of pawning something, and, I remember, had begun laughing with my wife. I went up to him right then and told him that he dared not come to me, remembering our relations; but no such notion ever entered my head, I simply thought he was a brazen fellow. And now suddenly the aunt informs me that she has already set up a meeting with him and that the whole thing is being handled by a former acquaintance of the aunts, Yulia Samsonovna, a widow, and a colonel’s widow at that—“It’s to her that your spouse now goes,” she says.

I’ll cut this picture short. The business cost me all of three hundred roubles, but in two days it was arranged so that I would be standing in the next room, behind a closed door, listening to the first rendezvous of my wife alone with Yefimovich. In anticipation, on the eve, a brief but, for me, all too portentous scene took place between us.

She came back toward evening, sat on the bed, looking at me mockingly and tapping the rug with her little foot. As I looked at her, the idea flew into my head that for the whole past month, or, better, the past two weeks, she had not been quite in her own character, one might even say it was the opposite character: what showed was a violent, aggressive being, I wouldn’t say shameless, but disorderly and seeking confusion herself. Inviting confusion. Her meekness, however, got in the way. When such a one gets violent, even if she leaps beyond all measure, you can still see that she’s only breaking herself, is egging herself on, and that she herself will be the first to be unable to manage her own sense of integrity and shame. That’s why her sort sometimes leap much too far beyond measure, so that you don’t believe your own observing mind. The soul accustomed to depravity, on the other hand, will always soften things, making them more vile, but in the guise of an order and decency that claim superiority over you.

“And is it true that you were thrown out of your regiment because you were scared to fight a duel?” she asked suddenly, out of the blue, and her eyes flashed.

“It’s true. On the decision of the officers, I was asked to withdraw from the regiment, though, anyhow, I myself had already sent in my resignation before then.”

“Thrown out as a coward?”

“Yes, they judged me a coward. But I refused the duel not because I was a coward, but because I did not wish to submit to their tyrannical decision and challenge a man when I myself did not feel any offense. You know,” I couldn’t help myself here, “that to rise up actively against such tyranny and accept all the consequences was to show much greater courage than in any duel you like.”

I couldn’t help it, with this phrase I began as if justifying myself; that was just what she needed, this new humiliation of me. She laughed maliciously:

“And is it true that after that you wandered the streets of Petersburg for three years, as a vagabond, begging for kopecks and sleeping under billiard tables?”

“I also happened to spend nights in the Haymarket and in Vyazemsky’s house.⁹ Yes, it’s true;