When he received a letter from his sister he said restlessly:
“Read it, please. Be quick!”
And he made me read the badly scrawled, insultingly short, and nonsensical letter three times.
He was good and kind, but he behaved toward women like all the others; that is, with the primitive coarseness of an animal.
Willingly and unwillingly, as I observed these affairs, which often went on under my eyes, beginning and ending with striking and impure swiftness, I saw Sidorov arouse in the breast of a woman a kind feeling of pity for him in his soldier’s life, then intoxicate her with tender lies, and then tell Ermokhin of his conquest, frowning and spitting his disgust, just as if he had been taking some bitter medicine.
This made my heart ache, and I angrily asked the soldiers why they all deceived women, lied to them, and then, jeering among themselves at the woman they had treated so, gave her away and often beat her.
One of them laughed softly, and said:
“It is not necessary for you to know anything about such things. It is all very bad; it is sin.
You are young; it is too early for you.”
But one day I obtained a more definite answer, which I have always remembered.
“Do you think that she does not know that I am deceiving her?” he said, blinking and coughing.
“She kno-o-ows.
She wants to be deceived.
Everybody lies in such affairs; they are a disgrace to all concerned. There is no love on either side; it is simply an amusement.
It is a dreadful disgrace. Wait, and you will know for yourself.
It was for that God drove them out of paradise, and from that all unhappiness has come.”
He spoke so well, so sadly, and so penitently that he reconciled me a little to these “romances.” I began to have a more friendly feeling toward him than towards Ermokhin, whom I hated, and seized every oc — casion of mocking and teasing. I succeeded in this, and he often pursued me across the yard with some evil design, which only his clumsiness prevented him from executing.
“It is forbidden,” went on Sidorov, speaking of women.
That it was forbidden I knew, but that it was the cause of human unhappiness I did not believe.
I saw that people were unhappy, but I did not believe what he said, because I sometimes saw an extraordinary expression in the eyes of people in love, and was aware of a peculiar tenderness in those who loved. To witness this festival of the heart was always pleasant to me.
However, I remember that life seemed to me to grow more and more tedious, cruel, fixed for ever in those forms of it which I saw from day to day.
I did not dream of anything better than that which passed interminably before my eyes.
But one day the soldiers told me a story which stirred me deeply.
In one of the flats lived a cutter-out, employed by the best tailor in the town, a quiet, meek foreigner.
He had a little, childless wife who read books all day long.
Over the noisy yard, amid houses full of drunken people, these two lived, invisible and silent. They had no visitors, and never went anywhere themselves except to the theater in holiday-time.
The husband was engaged from early morning until late at night. The wife, who looked like an undersized girl, went to the library twice a week.
I often saw her walking with a limp, as if she were slightly lame, as far as the dike, carrying books in a strap, like a school-girl. She looked unaffected, pleasant, new, clean, with gloves on her small hands.
She had a face like a bird, with little quick eyes, and everything about her was pretty, like a porcelain figure on a mantel-shelf.
The soldiers said that she had some ribs missing in her left side, and that was what made her sway so curiously as she walked; but I thought this very nice, and at once set her above all the other ladies in the yard — the officers’ wives. The latter, despite their loud voices, their variegated attire, and haut tournure had a soiled look about them, as if they had been lying forgotten for a long time, in a dark closet among other unneeded things.
The little wife of the cutter-out was regarded in the yard as half witted. It was said that she had lost her senses over books, and had got into such a condition that she could not manage the housekeeping; that her husband had to go to the market himself in search of provisions, and order the dinner and supper of the cook, a great, huge foreign female. She had only one red eye, which was always moist, and a narrow pink crevice in place of the other.
She was like her mistress, they said of her. She did not know how to cook a dish of fried veal and onions properly, and one day she ignominiously bought radishes, thinking she was buying parsley.
Just think what a dreadful thing that was I
All three were aliens in the building, as if they had fallen by accident into one of the compartments of a large hen-house. They reminded me of a tit-mouse which, taking refuge from the frost, flies through the fortochka into a stifling and dirty habitation of man.
And then the orderlies told me how the officers had played an insulting and wicked trick on the tailor’s little wife. They took turns to write her a letter every day, declaring their love for her, speaking of their sufferings and of her beauty.
She answered them, begging them to leave her in peace, regretting that she had been the cause of unhappiness to any one, and praying God that He would help them to give up loving her.
When any one of them received a letter like that, they used to read it all together, and then make up another letter to her, signed by a different person.
When they told me this story, the orderlies laughed too, and abused the lady.
“She is a wretched fool, the crookback,” said Ermokhin in a bass voice, and Sidorov softly agreed with him.
“Whatever a woman is, she likes being deceived.
She knows all about it.”
I did not believe that the wife of the cutter-out knew that they were laughing at her, and I resolved at once to tell her about it.
I watched for the cook to go down into the cellar, and I ran up the dark staircase to the flat of the little woman, and slipped into the kitchen. It was empty. I went on to the sitting-room. The tailor’s wife was sitting at the table. In one hand she held a heavy gold cup, and in the other an open book. She was startled. Pressing the book to her bosom, she cried in a low voice:
“Who is that?
Angus te!
Who are you?”
I began to speak quickly and confusedly, expecting every minute that she would throw the book at me.
She was sitting in a large, raspberry-colored arm-chair, dressed in a pale-blue wrap with a fringe at the hem and lace on the collar and sleeves over her shoulders was spread her flaxen, wavy hair.
She looked like an angel from the gates of heaven.
Leaning against the back of her chair, she looked at me with round eyes, at first angrily, then in smiling surprise.