The appearance of these two women in one combined party with Sergei and Katerina Lvovna had tragic consequences for the latter.
XIV
From the first days of the combined party’s movement from Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan, Sergei openly began to seek the favors of the soldier’s wife Fiona, and suffered no lack of success. The languid beauty Fiona did not make Sergei languish, as, in her kindness, she did not make anyone languish. At the third or fourth halting place, in the early dusk, Katerina Lvovna set up a meeting with Seryozhechka by means of bribery, and lay there without sleeping: she kept waiting for the guard on duty to come at any moment, nudge her slightly, and whisper “Run quickly.” The door opened once, and a woman darted out to the corridor; the door opened again, and another woman prisoner quickly jumped up from another cot and also disappeared after the guard; finally there came a tug at the coat with which Katerina Lvovna covered herself. The young woman hurriedly got up from the cot, well polished by the sides of convicts, threw the coat over her shoulders, and gave a push to the guard standing before her.
As Katerina Lvovna went down the corridor, in one place faintly lit by a dim lamp, she came across two or three couples who could not be made out from a distance. As Katerina Lvovna passed the male convicts’ room, she seemed to hear restrained laughter through the little window cut out in the door.
“Having fun,” Katerina Lvovna’s guard growled, and, taking her by the shoulders, he pushed her into the corner and withdrew.
Katerina Lvovna felt a coat and a beard with her hand; her other hand touched the hot face of a woman.
“Who’s that?” Sergei asked in a half whisper.
“And what are you doing here? Who is that with you?”
In the darkness, Katerina Lvovna pulled the headcloth from her rival. The woman slipped aside, rushed off, stumbled against someone in the corridor, and fell.
From the men’s quarters came a burst of guffawing.
“Villain!” Katerina Lvovna whispered and hit Sergei across the face with the ends of the kerchief she had torn from the head of his new girlfriend.
Sergei raised his hand; but Katerina Lvovna flitted lightly down the corridor and took hold of her door. The guffawing from the men’s quarters that followed her was repeated so loudly that the guard, who had been standing apathetically next to the lantern and spitting at the toe of his boot, raised his head and barked:
“Quiet!”
Katerina Lvovna lay down silently and went on lying like that until morning. She wanted to say to herself: “I don’t love him,” and felt that her love for him was still greater, still more ardent. And now before her eyes she keeps picturing again and again how his palm trembled under that woman’s head, how his other arm embraced her hot shoulders.
The poor woman wept and unwillingly called upon the same palm to be under her head that minute and his other arm to embrace her hysterically trembling shoulders.
“Well, give me back my kerchief anyhow,” the soldier’s wife Fiona woke her up in the morning.
“Ah, so that was you? …”
“Give it back, please!”
“But why did you come between us?”
“How have I come between you? Is it some sort of love or real interest, that you should be angry?”
Katerina Lvovna thought for a second, then took the kerchief she had torn off at night from under her pillow and, throwing it at Fiona, turned to the wall.
She felt relieved.
“Pah,” she said to herself, “am I going to be jealous of that painted tub? She can drop dead! It’s nasty even comparing myself to her.”
“The thing is this, Katerina Lvovna,” said Sergei, as they walked down the road the next day. “Please understand that, first of all, I’m no Zinovy Borisych to you, and, second, that you’re no great merchant’s wife now: so kindly don’t get so puffed up. There’s no market for butting goats with us.”
Katerina Lvovna said nothing to that, and for a week she walked without exchanging a word or a glance with Sergei. As the offended party, she stood firm and did not want to make the first step towards reconciliation in this first quarrel with him.
In the meantime, while Katerina Lvovna was angry, Sergei began making eyes at and flirting with the blond Sonetka. Now he greets her “with our particular honor,” now he smiles, now, meeting her, he tries to embrace and squeeze her. Katerina Lvovna sees it all and her heart seethes all the more.
“Shouldn’t I maybe make peace with him?” Katerina Lvovna thinks, stumbling and not seeing the ground under her feet.
But her pride now forbids her more than ever to go to him first and make peace. And meanwhile Sergei attaches himself to Sonetka ever more persistently, and it seems to everyone that the inaccessible Sonetka, who slipped away like an eel, is suddenly growing more tame.
“Here you wept over me,” Fiona once said to Katerina Lvovna, “but what did I do to you? With me it came and went, but you’d better watch out for Sonetka.”
“Perish my pride: I absolutely must make peace today,” Katerina Lvovna decided, now only pondering how to set about the reconciliation most adroitly.
Sergei himself helped her out of this difficulty.
“Lvovna!” he called to her as they made a halt. “Come and see me tonight for a moment: it’s business.”
Katerina Lvovna said nothing.
“What, maybe you’re still angry and won’t come?”
Katerina Lvovna again said nothing.
But Sergei and all who observed Katerina Lvovna saw that, as they approached the transit prison, she started moving closer to the chief guard and gave him seventeen kopecks she had saved up from alms.
“I’ll give you another ten once I save more,” Katerina Lvovna begged him.
The soldier put the money behind his cuff and said:
“All right.”
Once these negotiations were concluded, Sergei grunted and winked at Sonetka.
“Ah, Katerina Lvovna!” he said, embracing her as they went up the steps of the transit prison. “Compared to this woman, lads, there’s not another such in the whole world.”
Katerina Lvovna blushed and choked with happiness.
That night, as soon as the door quietly opened a crack, she ran out at once: she was trembling and felt for Sergei with her hands in the dark corridor.
“My Katya!” said Sergei, embracing her.
“Ah, my villain!” Katerina Lvovna answered through her tears and clung to him with her lips.
The guard paced the corridor and, stopping, spat on his boots, and paced again; behind the door the tired inmates snored, a mouse gnawed at a feather, under the stove crickets chirped away one louder than the other, and Katerina Lvovna was still in bliss.
But the raptures wore off, and the inevitable prose began.
“I’m in mortal pain: my bones ache from the ankles right up to the knees,” Sergei complained, sitting with Katerina Lvovna on the floor in a corner of the corridor.
“What can we do, Seryozhechka?” she asked, huddling under the skirt of his coat.
“Maybe I can ask to be put in the infirmary in Kazan?”
“Oh, is it as bad as that, Seryozha?”
“Like I said, it’s the death of me, the way it hurts.”
“So you’ll stay, and I’ll be driven on?”
“What can I do? It chafes, I’m telling you, it chafes, the chain’s cut almost to the bone. If only I had woolen stockings or something to put under,” Sergei said a moment later.
“Stockings? I still have a pair of new stockings, Seryozha.”
“Well, never mind!” Sergei replied.
Without another word, Katerina Lvovna darted to the cell, shook her sack out on the cot, and hastily ran to Sergei again with a pair of thick, dark blue woolen stockings with bright clocks on the sides.