The Helpmate
Translated by Constance Garnett
“I’VE asked you not to tidy my table,” said Nikolay
Yevgrafitch. “There’s no finding anything when you’ve tidied up. Where’s the
telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It’s from
Kazan, dated yesterday.”
The maid — a pale, very
slim girl with an indifferent expression — found several telegrams in the basket
under the table, and handed them to the doctor without a word; but all these
were telegrams from patients. Then they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga
Dmitrievna’s room.
It was past midnight.
Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five
o’clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not
sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and
her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies
of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which
diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist’s shop all over the house. On such
nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that it was
very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the day before from
his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas greetings.
On the table of his wife’s
room under the box of stationery he found a telegram, and glanced at it
casually. It was addressed to his wife, care of his mother-in-law, from Monte
Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The doctor did not understand one
word of it, as it was in some foreign language, apparently English.
“Who is this Michel? Why
Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother?”
During the seven years of
his married life he had grown used to being suspicious, guessing, catching at
clues, and it had several times occurred to him, that his exercise at home had
qualified him to become an excellent detective. Going into his study and
beginning to reflect, he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in
Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school-fellow, a
civil engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a
young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovitch, with rather a
curious short surname — Riss. Two months later the doctor had seen the young
man’s photograph in his wife’s album, with an inscription in French: “In
remembrance of the present and in hope of the future.” Later on he had met the
young man himself at his mother-in-law’s. And that was at the time when his
wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five
o’clock in the morning, and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for
abroad, which he kept refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house
which made him feel ashamed to face the servants.
Six months before, his
colleagues had decided that he was going into consumption, and advised him to
throw up everything and go to the Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga
Dmitrievna affected to be very much alarmed; she began to be affectionate to
her husband, and kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in the
Crimea, and that he had much better go to Nice, and that she would go with him,
and there would nurse him, look after him, take care of him.
Now, he understood why his
wife was so particularly anxious to go to Nice: her Michel lived at Monte
Carlo.
He took an English
dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees
he put together the following sentence: “I drink to the health of my beloved
darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently
expecting her arrival.” He pictured the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play
if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he
almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat
in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted.
Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a
village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man,
a surgeon by profession — how could he have let himself be enslaved, have sunk
into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature.
“‘Little foot’!” he
muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram; “‘little foot’!”
Of the time when he fell in
love and proposed to her, and the seven years that he had been living with her,
all that remained in his memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft
lace, and her little feet, which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and
even now it seemed as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling
of lace and silk upon his hands and face — and nothing more. Nothing more —
that is, not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies —
brazen, treacherous lies. He remembered how in his father’s house in the
village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the
house and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset things;
so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into his life and
made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had been spent as though
in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and turned into a mockery, his
health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocotte’s, and of the
ten thousand he earned every year he could never save ten roubles to send his
old mother in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand.
It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life
would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of
this woman.
He began coughing and
gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed and got warm, but he could
not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat down to the table, nervously
fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling mechanically on a paper.
“Trying a pen.
. . . A little foot.”
By five o’clock he grew
weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It seemed to him now that if Olga
Dmitrievna had married some one else who might have had a good influence over
her — who knows? — she might after all have become a good, straightforward
woman. He was a poor psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart;
besides, he was churlish, uninteresting . . . .
“I haven’t long to live
now,” he thought. “I am a dead man, and ought not to stand in the way of the
living. It would be strange and stupid to insist upon one’s rights now. I’ll
have it out with her; let her go to the man she loves. . . . I’ll
give her a divorce. I’ll take the blame on myself.”
Olga Dmitrievna came in at
last, and she walked into the study and sank into a chair just as she was in
her white cloak, hat, and overboots.
“The nasty, fat boy,” she
said with a sob, breathing hard. “It’s really dishonest; it’s disgusting.” She
stamped. “I can’t put up with it; I can’t, I can’t!”
“What’s the matter?” asked
Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.
“That student, Azarbekov,
was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and there was fifteen roubles in it. I
borrowed it from mamma.”
She was crying in a most
genuine way, like a little girl, and not only her handkerchief, but even her
gloves, were wet with tears.
“It can’t be helped!” said
the doctor. “If he’s lost it, he’s lost it, and it’s no good worrying over it.
Calm yourself; I want to talk to you.”
“I am not a millionaire to
lose money like that. He says he’ll pay it back, but I don’t believe him; he’s
poor . . .”
Her husband begged her to
calm herself and to listen to him, but she kept on talking of the student and
of the fifteen roubles she had lost.
“Ach! I’ll give you
twenty-five roubles tomorrow if you’ll only hold your tongue!” he said
irritably.
“I must take off my
things!” she said, crying. “I can’t talk seriously in my fur coat! How strange
you are!”
He helped her off with her
coat and overboots, detecting as he did so the smell of the white wine she
liked to drink with oysters (in spite of her etherealness she ate and drank a
great deal). She went into her room and came back soon after, having changed
her things and powdered her face, though her eyes still showed traces of tears.
She sat down, retreating into her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of
billowy pink her husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had let
down, and her little foot wearing a slipper.
“What do you want to talk
about?” she asked, swinging herself in a rocking-chair.
“I happened to see this;”
and he handed her the telegram.
She read it and shrugged
her shoulders.
“Well?” she said, rocking
herself faster. “That’s the usual New Year’s greeting and nothing else. There
are no secrets in it.”
“You are reckoning on my
not knowing English. No, I don’t know it; but I have a dictionary. That
telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health of his beloved and sends you a
thousand kisses. But let us leave that,” the doctor went on hurriedly. “I don’t
in the least want to reproach you or make a scene. We’ve had scenes and
reproaches enough; it’s time to make an end of them. . . . This is
what I want to say to you: you are free, and can live as you like.”
There was a silence. She
began crying quietly.
“I set you free from the
necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,” Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued.
“If you love that young man, love him; if you want to go abroad to him, go. You
are young, healthy, and I am a wreck, and haven’t long to live. In short
. . . you understand me.”
He was agitated and could
not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and speaking in a voice of self-pity,
acknowledged that she loved Riss, and used to drive out of town with him and
see him in his rooms, and now she really did long to go abroad.
“You see, I hide nothing
from you,” she added, with a sigh. “My whole soul lies open before you. And I
beg you again, be generous, get me a passport.”
“I repeat, you are free.”
She moved to another seat
nearer him to look at the expression of his face. She did not believe him and
wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and
however generous were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or
ignoble motive or selfish object in them. And when she looked searchingly into
his face, it seemed to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as
in a cat’s.
“When shall I get the
passport?” she asked softly.
He suddenly had an impulse
to say “Never”; but he restrained himself and said:
“When you like.”
“I shall only go for a
month.”
“You’ll go to Riss for
good. I’ll get you a divorce, take the blame on myself, and Riss can marry
you.”
“But I don’t want a
divorce!” Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly, with an astonished face. “I am not
asking you for a divorce! Get me a passport, that’s all.”
“But why don’t you want the
divorce?” asked the doctor, beginning to feel irritated. “You are a strange
woman. How strange you are! If you are fond of him in earnest and he loves you
too, in your position you can do nothing better than get married. Can you
really hesitate between marriage and adultery?”
“I understand you,” she
said, walking away from him, and a spiteful, vindictive expression came into
her face. “I understand you perfectly. You are sick of me, and you simply want
to get rid of me, to force this divorce on me. Thank you very much; I am not
such a fool as you think. I won’t accept the divorce and I won’t leave you — I
won’t, I won’t! To begin with, I don’t want to lose my position in society,”
she continued quickly, as though afraid of being prevented from speaking.
“Secondly, I am twenty-seven and Riss is only twenty-three; he’ll be tired of
me in a year and throw me over. And what’s more, if you care to know, I’m not
certain that my feeling will last long . . . so there! I’m not going
to leave you.”
“Then I’ll turn you out of
the house!” shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch, stamping. “I shall turn you out, you
vile, loathsome woman!”
“We shall see!” she said,
and went out.
It was broad daylight
outside, but the doctor still sat at the table moving the pencil over the paper
and writing mechanically.
“My dear Sir.
. . . Little foot.”
Or he walked about and
stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph taken seven years ago, soon
after his marriage, and looked at it for a long time. It was a family group:
his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was
twenty, and himself in the rôle of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a
clean-shaven, dropsical privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his
mother-in-law, a stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who
loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything; if her daughter
were strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only
have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small
predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her mother’s;
she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And Nikolay Yevgrafitch
himself in the photograph looked such a guileless soul, such a kindly, good fellow,
so open and simple-hearted; his whole face was relaxed in the naïve,
good-natured smile of a divinity student, and he had had the simplicity to
believe that that company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to
thrust him would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when
as a student he used to sing the song “Youth is wasted, life is nought, when
the heart is cold and loveless.”
And once more he asked
himself in perplexity how he, the son of a village priest, with his democratic
bringing up —a plain, blunt, straightforward man— could have so helplessly
surrendered to the power of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature,
whose nature was so utterly alien to him.
When at eleven o’clock he
put on his coat to go to the hospital the servant came into his study.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The mistress has got up
and asks you for the twenty-five roubles you promised her yesterday.”
1895.
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