‘Let me have the ticket! I’ll give you a hundred roubles! This is a drama of a broken heart! Five hundred!’
‘Don’t you dare let him have the ticket!’ the lady shouted.
‘I can’t do it,’ the staff captain replied firmly to the artiste. ‘I would gladly, but it’s urgent government business.’
The conductor dragged Astralov, in floods of tears, out into the corridor.
The train set off. There was a despairing shout from the platform:
‘Lycia! I’ll do away with myself! Forgive me!’
‘Never!’ the flushed lady passenger shouted, and flung the magnificent bouquet out of the window, showering the little table with scarlet petals.
She fell back limply on to the seat, covered her face with her fingers and burst into sobs.
‘You are a noble man,’ she said through her sobbing. ‘You refused his money! I’m so grateful to you! I would have jumped out of the window, I swear I would!’
Rybnikov muttered:
‘Five hundred roubles is huge money. I don’t earn a third of that, not even with mess and travelling allowances. But I’ve got my job to do. The top brass won’t excuse lateness…’
‘Five hundred roubles he offered, the buffoon!’ the lady exclaimed, not listening to him. ‘Preening his feathers for his audience! But he’s really so mean, such an economiser!’ She pronounced the final word with boundless contempt and even stopped sobbing, then added: ‘Refuses to live according to his means.’
Intrigued by the logical introduction inherent in this statement, Vasilii Alexandrovich asked:
‘Begging your pardon, but I don’t quite understand. Is he thrifty or does he lives beyond his means?’
‘His means are huge, but he lives too far within them!’ his travelling companion explained, no longer crying, but anxiously examining her slightly reddened nose in a little mirror. She dabbed at it with a powder puff and adjusted a lock of golden hair beside her forehead. ‘Last year he earned almost a hundred thousand, but he barely spent even half of it. He puts it all away “for a rainy day”!’
At this point she finally calmed down completely, turned her gaze on her companion and introduced herself punctiliously.
‘Glyceria Romanovna Lidina.’
The staff captain told her his name too.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the lady told him with a smile. ‘I must explain, since you have witnessed this monstrous spectacle. Georges simply adores histrionic scenes, especially in front of an audience!’
‘Is he really an artiste, then?’
Glyceria Romanovna fluttered her almost inch-long eyelashes incredulously.
‘What? You don’t know Astralov? The tenor Astralov. His name is on all the show bills!’
‘I’m not much for theatres,’ Rybnikov replied with an indifferent shrug. ‘I don’t have any time to go strutting about at operas, you know. And it’s beyond my pocket, anyway. My pay’s miserly, they’re delaying the pension, and life in Petersburg is too pricey by half. The cabbies take seventy kopecks for every piddling little ride…’
Lidina was not listening, she wasn’t even looking at him any more.
‘We’ve been married for two years!’ she said, as if she were not addressing her prosaic companion, but a more worthy audience, which was listening to her with sympathetic attention. ‘Ah, I was so in love! But now I realise it was the voice I loved, not him. What a voice he has! He only has to start singing and I melt, he can wrap me round his little finger. And he knows it, the scoundrel! Did you see the way he started singing just now, the cheap manipulator? Thank goodness the bell interrupted him, my head was already starting to spin!’
‘A handsome gentleman,’ the staff captain acknowledged, trying to suppress a yawn. ‘Probably gets his fair share of crumpet. Is that what the drama’s all about?’
‘They told me about him!’ Glyceria Romanovna exclaimed with her eyes flashing. ‘There are always plenty of “well-wishers” in the world of theatre. But I didn’t believe them. And then I saw it with my own eyes! And where? In my own drawing room! And who with? That old floozy Koturnova! I’ll never set foot in that desecrated apartment again! Or in Petersburg either!’
‘So you’re moving to Moscow, then?’ the staff captain summed up. It was clear from his tone of voice that he was impatient to put an end to this trivial conversation and settle into his newspaper.
‘Yes, we have another apartment in Moscow, on Ostozhenka Street. Georges sometimes takes an engagement for the winter at the Bolshoi.’
At this, Rybnikov finally concealed himself behind Evening Russia and the lady was obliged to fall silent. She nervously picked up the Russian Assembly, ran her eyes over the article on the front page and tossed it aside, muttering:
‘My God, how vulgar! Completely undressed, in the road! Could she really have been stripped totally and completely naked? Who is this Countess N.? Vika Olsufieva? Nelly Vorontsova? Ah, it doesn’t matter anyway.’
Outside the windowpane, dachas, copses of trees and dreary vegetable patches drifted by. The staff captain rustled his newspaper, enthralled.
Lidina sighed, then sighed again. She found the silence oppressive.
‘What’s that you find so fascinating to read?’ she eventually asked, unable to restrain herself.
‘Well, you see, it’s the list of officers who gave their lives for the tsar and the fatherland in the sea battle beside the island of Tsushima. It came through the European telegraph agencies, from Japanese sources. The scrolls of mourning, so to speak. They say they’re going to continue it in forthcoming issues. I’m looking to see if any of my comrades-in-arms are there.’ And Vasilii Alexandrovich started reading out loud, with expression, savouring the words. ‘On the battleship Prince Kutuzov-Smolensky: junior flagman, Rear Admiral Leontiev; commander of the vessel, Commodore Endlung; paymaster of the squadron, State Counsellor Ziukin; chief officer, Captain Second Rank von Schwalbe…’
‘Oh, stop!’ said Glyceria Romanovna, fluttering her little hand. ‘I don’t want to hear it! When is this terrible war ever going to end!’
‘Soon. The insidious enemy will be crushed by the Christian host,’ Rybnikov promised, setting the newspaper aside to take out a little book, in which he immersed himself with even greater concentration.
The lady screwed her eyes up short-sightedly, trying to make out the title, but the book was bound in brown paper.
The train’s brakes screeched and it came to a halt.
‘Kolpino?’ Lidina asked in surprise. ‘Strange, the express never stops here.’
Rybnikov stuck his head out of the window and called to the duty supervisor.
‘Why are we waiting?’
‘We have to let a special get past, Officer, it’s got urgent military freight.’
While her companion was distracted, Glyceria Romanovna seized the chance to satisfy her curiosity. She quickly opened the book’s cover, held her pretty lorgnette on a gold chain up to her eyes and puckered up her face. The book that the staff captain had been reading so intently was called TUNNELS AND BRIDGES: A concise guide for railway employees.
A telegraph clerk clutching a paper ribbon in his hand ran up to the station supervisor, who read the message, shrugged and waved his little flag.
‘What is it?’ asked Rybnikov.
‘Don’t know if they’re coming or going. Orders to dispatch you and not wait for the special.’
The train set off.
‘I suppose you must be a military engineer?’ Glyceria Romanovna enquired.
‘What makes you think that?’
Lidina felt embarrassed to admit that she had peeped at the title of the book, but she found a way out – she pointed to the leather tube.
‘That thing. It’s for drawings, isn’t it?’
‘Ah, yes.’ Vasilii Alexandrovich lowered his voice. ‘Secret documents. I’m delivering them to Moscow.’