All summer after that she went around the villages and hamlets with him, begging for alms. She wore out her clothes, grew shabby, was baked in the wind and sun, became nothing but skin and bone, but was tireless. She walked bare-footed, with a sackcloth bag over her shoulder, propping herself up with a tall stick, and in the villages and hamlets bowed silently before every hut. The boy walked behind her with a bag over his little shoulder too, wearing her old shoes, battered and hardened like the down-at-heel things that lie about somewhere in a gully.
He was ugly. The crown of his head was large, flat and covered with the red hair of a boar, his little nose was squashed flat and had wide nostrils, his eyes were nut brown and very shiny. But when he smiled he was very sweet.
Antigone[84]
In June, a student set off from his mother’s estate for his uncle and aunt’s – he needed to pay them a visit, find out how they were, about the health of his uncle, a general who had lost the use of his legs. The student performed this service every summer and was travelling now with submissive serenity, unhurriedly reading a new book by Averchenko[85] in a second-class carriage, with a young, rounded thigh set on the edge of the couch, absent-mindedly watching through the window as the telegraph poles dipped and rose with their white porcelain cups in the shape of lilies-of-the-valley. He looked like a young officer – only his white peaked cap with a blue band was a student’s, everything else was to the military modeclass="underline" a white tunic, greenish breeches, boots with patent-leather tops, a cigarette case with an orange lighting wick.
His uncle and aunt were rich. When he came home from Moscow, a heavy tarantass was sent out to the station for him, a pair of draught horses and not a coachman but a workman. But at his uncle’s station he always stepped for a certain time into a completely different life, into the pleasure of great prosperity, he began feeling handsome, jaunty, affected. So it was now too. With involuntary foppishness he got into a light carriage on rubber wheels with three lively dark-bay horses in harness, driven by a young coachman in a blue, sleeveless poddyovka and a yellow silk shirt.
A quarter of an hour later, with a sprinkling of little bells softly playing and its tyres hissing across the sand around the flower bed, the troika flew into the round yard of an extensive country estate towards the perron of a spacious new house of two storeys. Onto the perron to take his things emerged a strapping servant wearing half-whiskers, a red-and-black striped waistcoat and gaiters. The student took an agile and improbably big leap out of the carriage: smiling and rocking as she walked, on the threshold of the vestibule there appeared his aunt – a loose, shapeless, tussore day coat[86] on a big, flaccid body, a large, drooping face, a nose like an anchor and yellow bags beneath brown eyes. She kissed him on the cheeks in a familiar way, with feigned joy he pressed his lips against her soft, dark hand, quickly thinking: lying like this for three whole days, and not knowing what to do with myself in my free time! Feignedly and hurriedly replying to her feignedly solicitous questions about his mother, he followed her into the large vestibule, glanced with cheerful hatred at the somewhat bent, stuffed brown bear with gleaming glass eyes standing clumsily at full height by the entrance to the wide staircase to the upper floor and obligingly holding a bronze dish for calling cards[87] in its sharp-clawed front paws, and suddenly even came to a halt in gratifying surprise: the wheelchair with the plump, pale, blue-eyed General, was being wheeled steadily towards him by a tall, stately beauty with big grey eyes in a grey gingham dress[88], a white pinafore and a white headscarf, all aglow with youth, strength, cleanliness, the lustre of her well-groomed hands and the matt whiteness of her face. Kissing his uncle’s hand, he managed to glance at the extraordinary elegance of her dress and feet. The General joked:
“And this is my Antigone, my good guide, although I’m not even blind, like Oedipus[89] was, and especially not to good-looking women. Make one another’s acquaintance, youngsters.”
She smiled faintly and replied with only a bow to the bow of the student.
The strapping servant with the half-whiskers and the red waistcoat led him past the bear and up the staircase with its gleaming dark-yellow wood and a red runner down the middle and along a similar corridor, took him into a large bedroom with a marble bathroom alongside – on this occasion a different one to before, and with windows looking onto the park, and not into the yard. But he walked without seeing anything. Spinning around in his head there was still the cheerful nonsense with which he had driven onto the estate – “my uncle, the most honest fellow”[90] – but already there was something else too: there’s a woman for you!
Humming, he began to shave, wash and get changed, and he put on trousers with straps under the feet, thinking:
“Such women really do exist! And what would you give for the love of such a woman! And how with such beauty can you possibly be pushing old men and women around in wheelchairs!”
And absurd ideas came into his head: to go on and stay here for a month, for two, to enter in secret from everyone into friendship with her, intimacy, to arouse her love, then say: be my wife, I’m all yours and for ever. Mama, Aunt, Uncle, their amazement when I declare to them our love and our decision to unite our lives, their indignation, then persuasion, cries, tears, curses, disinheritance – it all means nothing to me for your sake…
Running down the stairs to his aunt and uncle – their rooms were downstairs – he thought:
“What rubbish does enter my head, though! It stands to reason[91], you can stay here on some pretext or other… you can start unobtrusively paying court[92], pretend to be madly in love… But will you achieve anything? And even if you do, what next? How do you finish the story off? Really get married, do you?”
For about an hour he sat with his aunt and uncle in the latter’s huge study, with a huge writing desk, with a huge ottoman, covered with fabrics from Turkestan, with a rug on the wall above with crossed oriental weapons hanging all over it, with inlaid tables for smoking, and with a large photographic portrait in a rosewood frame under a little gold crown on the mantelpiece, on which was the free flourish, made with his own hand: Alexander[93].
“How glad I am, Uncle and Aunt, to be with you again,” he said towards the end, thinking of the nurse. “And how wonderful it is here at your place! It’ll be a dreadful shame to leave.”
“And who is it driving you out?” replied his uncle. “Where are you hurrying off to? Stay on till you’re sick of it.”
“It goes without saying[94],” said his aunt absent-mindedly. Sitting and chatting, he was continually expecting her to come in at any moment – a maid would announce that tea was ready in the dining room, and she would come to wheel his uncle through. But tea was served in the study – a table was wheeled in with a silver teapot on a spirit lamp, and his aunt herself poured. Then he kept on hoping she would bring some medicine or other for his uncle… But she simply did not come.
84
Antigone – Антигона, героиня древнегреческой мифологии. Ее образ получил широкое распространение благодаря трагедиям Софокла (496-406 до н.э.). Антигона олицетворяет собой верность родственному долгу, идеал любви к родителям и благородное самоотвержение.
85
a new book by Averchenko: Arkady Timofeyevich Averchenko (1881–1925), a Russian humorist, author of short stories, plays and pamphlets.
86
tussore day coat – чесучовый балахон
88
gingham dress – холстинковое платье
89
my Antigone… like Oedipus: In Greek myth, Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus, King of Thebes, who blinded himself after unwittingly killing his own father; the faithful daughter accompanied him into exile.
90
my uncle, the most honest fellow: The opening line of the novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823–31) by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837), where the eponymous hero is thinking of the dull life awaiting him as he travels to his sick uncle’s rural estate. (
93
Alexander: This could be Alexander II or his son, Alexander III (1845–94), who ruled Russia after his father’s assassination in 1881.