From Fair Helen she passed to the Duchess of Herolstein. In this her colorless acting was coupled with a completely preposterous mise en scene, and the outcome was altogether miserable.
At last she undertook to play the role of Clairette in The White Slave. But she overdid her part to such an extent that even the none too refined provincial public was shocked by her behavior on the stage, which she turned into a mire of corruption.
Anninka gained the reputation of being a clever actress with a fairly good voice, and since she was pretty, she could get an audience in the provinces.
But that was all.
Lacking individuality, she could not attain permanent success.
Even among the provincial public she was popular mainly with army officers, whose chief ambition was to obtain access behind the scenes.
She could have got an engagement in the capital only if she had been forced upon some manager by a powerful patron, and even then the public would have given her the unenviable nickname of "a tavern singer."
Thus the two girls had to go back to the provinces.
In Moscow Anninka received a letter from Lubinka, saying that their company had removed from Krechetov to the city of Samovarnov, which made Lubinka quite glad, because there she had become friendly with a certain zemstvo leader, who was so infatuated that he was almost, in his own words, "ready to steal the zemstvo funds, if that were necessary to gratify all her desires."
In fact, on her arrival in Samovarnov, Anninka found her sister quite luxuriously situated and planning to give up the stage.
Lubinka's admirer, the zemstvo official Gavrilo Stepanych Lyulkin, was a retired captain of the Hussars, recently a bel homme, but now somewhat corpulent.
His appearance and manners and views taken separately were conspicuously noble, but taken together they gave one the strong impression that the man was altogether free from scruples.
Lubinka received Anninka with open arms and told her a room had been prepared for her at the lodgings.
Anninka, still under the influence of her trip to Golovliovo, bridled up at the suggestion.
The sisters exchanged tart words, and soon afterwards they separated.
Involuntarily Anninka recalled the words of the Volpino parson, who had told her it was hard to safeguard a maiden's "honor" in the acting profession.
Anninka went to live at a hotel and broke off all relations with her sister.
Easter passed. The next week the theatres opened, and Anninka found out that her sister's place was already filled by Nalimova, a girl from Kazan, a mediocre actress, but utterly unconstrained in the movements of her body.
As usual, Anninka played Pericola and enchanted the Samovarnov theatregoers.
On her return to the hotel, she found an envelope in her room containing a hundred ruble bill and a laconic note which read:
"Should anything happen, you get as much.
Merchant Kukishev, dealer in fancy goods."
Anninka was enraged and went to complain to the hotel-keeper. He told her Kukishev had this peculiar habit of greeting the newly arrived actresses, and otherwise was a harmless man and it did not pay to take offence.
Anninka sealed up the letter and the money in an envelope, sent it back the very next day, and regained her composure.
But Kukishev was more persistent than the hotel-keeper had reported him to be.
He was among Lyulkin's friends and was on good terms with Lubinka.
He was quite well-to-do and, besides, as a member of the city administration was in a most convenient position with regard to the city treasury.
And like Lyulkin, boldness was not his least virtue.
According to the taste of market people he possessed a seductive appearance, reminding one of the beetle, which, as the song has it, Masha found in the fields instead of berries:
"A beetle black, and on his crown Nice curly hair, with whiskers smart, His eyebrows colored a dark-brown, The picture of my own sweetheart."
Being the happy possessor of such looks he thought he had the right to be aggressive, all the more so as Lubinka explicitly promised him her cooperation.
Lubinka, apparently, had burned all her bridges, and her reputation was by no means a pleasant topic in her sister's ears.
Every night, it was said, a merry band caroused in her rooms from midnight till morning, Lubinka presiding and appearing as a "gypsy," half naked (at this, Lyulkin, addressing his intoxicated friends, would cry out, "Look, there's a breast!") and with loosened hair. She would sing to the accompaniment of a guitar:
"How I did love it with my mash, Who had the darlingest mustache!"
Anninka listened to the stories about her sister and became greatly worried.
What surprised her most was that Lubinka sang the ditty about the "mash who had the darlingest mustache" in a gypsy-like manner, just like the celebrated Matryusha of Moscow.
Anninka always gave her sister due credit, and had she been told that Lubinka sang couplets from Old-time Colonels with unsurpassed excellence, she would have considered it quite natural and would have readily believed it.
The theatergoers of Kursk, Tambov and Penza had not yet forgotten with what inimitable naivete Lubinka sang the most atrocious ambiguities in her soft little voice. But that Lubinka could sing like a gypsy—pardon me! A lie!
She, Anninka, could sing like that, no doubt of it.
It was her genre, her business, and everyone in Kursk who had seen her in the play, Russian Romances Personified, would willingly testify to it.
Anninka would take the guitar, sling the striped sash over her shoulder, sit down on a chair, cross her legs and begin: "I-ekh! I-akh!"
It was the very manner of Matryusha the gypsy.
However that may have been, one thing was certain, that Lubinka was extravagant. And Lyulkin, for fear of introducing a discordant note into the drunken bliss, had already resorted to borrowing from the zemstvo treasury.
Not to speak of the tremendous amount of champagne which was both consumed and poured out on the floor in Lubinka's quarters, all sorts of things had to be provided to feed her growing capriciousness and extravagance.
First it was dresses from Mme. Minangois of Moscow, then jewelry from Fuld.
Lubinka was rather thrifty and did not scorn valuables.
Her licentiousness by no means interfered with her love of gold, diamonds and especially lottery bonds.
At any rate, it was a life not of gaiety, but of boisterous debauchery and continuous intoxication.
There was one thorn in the rose-bush. It was necessary for Lubinka to curry favor with the chief of police. Although a friend of Lyulkin's, he sometimes liked to make his power felt, and Lubinka always guessed when he was dissatisfied with her hospitality, for the next day the police warden would come to ask for her passport.
And she yielded. In the morning she would treat the district chief of police to vodka and a light repast, while in the evening she would personally prepare a "Swedish" punch of which he was very fond.