Sometimes Anne's husband took her to the theatre. He kept her by his side in the intervals, holding her arm and strolling in the corri- dors and foyer. He would bow to someone.
'Fairly high up in the service,' he would tell Anne in a rapid whisper. 'Received by His Excellency,' or, 'Rather well off. Has a house of his own.
They were going past the bar once when Anne felt that she would like somethllig sweet. She was fond of chocolate and apple tart, but had no money and did not like to ask her husband. He picked up a pear, squeezed it and asked doubtfully how much it cost.
'Twenty-f1ve copecks.'
'Well, I must say!'
He put the pear back. But it was awkward to leave the bar without buying anything, so he asked for soda water and drank the whole bottle himself, which brought tears to his eyes. Anne hated him at times like these.
Or else, suddenly blushing scarlet, he would hurriedly say, 'Bow to that old lady.'
'But I don't know her.'
'Never ^md. She's the wife of our provincial treasurer. Oh, go on!' he nagged. 'Bow, I tell you. Your head won't faU off.'
So Anne would bow, and in fact her head never did fall off. But it was a painful experience.
She always did what hu husband wanted, furious with herself for letting him make such a complete fool of her. She had only married him for his money, but she had less money now than before. her marriage. In those days her father at least gave her the occasional twenty' copecks, but now she never had any money at all. She could not just take it behind his back or ask for it, being so afraid of her husband, scared stiff in fact.
She felt as ifher fear of the man had long been part of her. As a little girl she had always thought of the high-school headmaster as a terrify- ing, overwhehning force' bearing down on her like a storm cloud or a railway engine that was going to run over her. Another menace of the same kind, continuaUy invoked in the family—feared too for some reason—was His Excellency. And there were a dozen lesser horrors, among whom were clean-shaven schoolmasters, stern and unbending. Now they included this Modeste as well, the man of principle, who even looked like the headmaster. In Anne's imagination aU these menaces seemed to be rolled into one and she saw them as a colossal polar bear, terrifying as it advanced on weak, erring creatures like her father. Afraid to protest, she forced herself to smile and pretend to be pleased when defiled by clumsy caresses and embraces that sickened her.
Only once did Peter Leontyevich pluck up courage to ask his son-in- law for a loan of fifty roubles so that he could meet some particularly irksome debt. And that was quite an ordeal.
'Al right, you can have it,' Anne's husband had said after some thought. 'But I you, you get no more help from me til you stop drinking. Such self-indulgence is disgraceful in a gove^^ent em- ployee. I feel obliged to point out what is generaUy recognized, that this craving has been the ruin of many an able man who, given a little self-control, might in time have become a person of consequence.'.
One rolling period succeeded another—'in so far as', 'basing our- selves on the assumption that', 'in view of what has just been stated'. And Anne's poor father suffered agonies of humiliation. He was dying for a drink.
When the boys visited Anne—usually with holes in their boots and in threadbare trousers—they came in for these lectures too.
'We all have our responsibilities,' Modeste Alekseyevich told them.
But they got no money out of him. He gave Anne presepts instead —rings, bracelets and brooches., 'just the thing to put by for a rainy day' —and often opened her chest of drawers to make sure that none of the stuff was missing.
II
Meanwhile winter had sct in. Long before Christmas the local news- paper announced that the usual winter ball would 'duly take place' in the Assembly Rooms on the twenty-ninth ofDecember. Much excited, Anne's husband held whispered consultations with his colleagues' wives every evening after cards, shooting an anxious glance or two at Anne. Then he would walk up and down the room for a while, thinking. At last, late one evening, he stopped in front of Anne.
'You must get yourself a ball dress,' he said. 'Is that clear? But mind you consult Marya Grigoryevna and Natalya Kuzminishna.'
He gave her a hundred roubles, which she took. But she ordered the dress without consulting anyone, though she did have a word with her father and tried to imagine how her mother would have dressed for the ball. Her mother had alwavs followed the latest fashions and had always taken great pains with Anne, dressing her up like an ex- quisite little doll, teaching her to speak French and dance an excellent mazurka—she had been a governess for five years before her marriage. Like her mother, Anne could make a new dress out of an old one or clean her gloves with benzine and she knew about hiring jewellery. And she could flutter her eyelids like her mother, talk Russian with a Parisian r, adopt elegant poses, go into raptures when necessary or look melancholy and mysterious. She had her dark hair and eyes from her father. Like him she was highly st^mg and was used to making the most of her looks.
Half an hour before they were to leave for the ball Modeste Alek- seyevich came into her room without his coat on to tie his medal ribbon round his neck in front of her wardrobe mirror. Dazzled by her beauty and the glitter of her new dress that seemed light as thistle- down, he combed his whiskers, looking rather smug.
'I must say, Anne .. .' he said, 'you really are, er, quite a girl. My dear,' he went on, suddenly solemn, 'I've made you happy and tonight it's your turn to make me happy. Will you please present yourself to His Excellency's good lady? Do, for heaven's sake. She can get me a more semor post. '
They left for the ball and reached the Assembly Roois. There was a door-keeper at the entrance. The vestibule was full of coat-racks and fur coats, with servants scurrying about and ladies in low-necked dresses trying to keep off the draught with their fans. The place smelt of gas lights and soldiers. Anne went upstairs on her husband's arm. She heard music and saw a full-length reflection of herself in an enormous mirror brightly lit by innumerable lights. Her heartseemed to leap forjoy and she felt that she was going to be happy—the same feeling that had come over her on that moonlit night at the wayside station. She walked proudly, sufe of herself Feeling for the first time that she was no longer a girl, but a grown woman, she unconsciously modelled her walk and manner on her mother. For the first time in her life she felt rich and free. Even her husband's presence did not hamper her because the moment she stepped inside the Assembly Rooms her in- stinct told her that she lost nothing by having an elderly husband at her side—far from it, for it lent her the very air of piquancy and mystery that men so relish.
In the large ballroom the orchestra was blaring away and dancmg had begun. Plunged straight from her very ordinary official flat into this whirl of light, colour, noise and music, Anne surveyed the room and thought how marvellous it all was. She at once picked out every- one she knew in the crowd, everyone she had met at parties or on outings, officers, schoolmasters, lawyers, civil servants, landowners, His Excellency, -Artynov, society ladies in their. finery and low-necked dresses—some beautiful, others ugly as they took their places at the kiosks and stalls of the charity bazaar, ready to open shop in aid of the poor.
An enormous officer with epaulettes—Anne had met him in the Old Kiev Road when she was still at school, but could not remember his name—seemed to pop up from nowhere and asked her to waltz. She bounced away from her husband, feeling as if she was sailing a boat in a raging storm and had left him far behind on the shore. She danced like one possessed—a waltz, a polka and a quadrille—passing from one partner to another, dizzy with music and noise, mixing up French and Russian, pronouncing the Russian r as ifshe came from Paris, laughing, not thinking of her husband or of anything or anyone else. She had made a hit with the men, ihat was obvious. And no wonder. Breathless and excited, she gripped her fan convulsively and felt thirsty. Her father came up, his tail-coat creased and smelling of benzine. He held out a plate of pmk ice-cream.