They are waiting for me downstairs.
Kukishev is there, too.
Will you come?"
But Anninka maintained her silence.
"Well, think it over, if there is anything to think about. And when you have done thinking, come to see me.
Good-by."
On the seventeenth of September, Lubinka's birthday, the posters of the Samovarnov theatre announced a gala performance.
Anninka appeared as Fair Helen again, and the same evening the part of Orestes was performed by Pogorelskaya II, Lubinka.
To complete the triumph of the sisters, Nalimova was given the part of Cleon, the blacksmith. She appeared on the stage dressed in tights and a short coat, her face touched with soot, and a sheet of iron in her hands.
The audience was elated.
Hardly did Anninka appear on the stage when the audience raised such a clamor that, already unaccustomed to ovations, she nearly broke into tears.
And when, in the third act, in the scene where she is awakened at night, she stood up on the sofa almost naked, the house was one groaning mass of humanity.
One man in the audience was so thoroughly worked up that he shouted to Menelaus, who was entering the stage,
"Get out, damn you!"
Anninka understood that the public had pardoned her.
As for Kukishev, he was in full dress, white tie and white gloves. In the entr'actes he generously treated friends and strangers alike to champagne and spoke of his triumph with dignity.
At last the manager of the theatre, brimming over with jubilation, appeared in Anninka's room and, kneeling before her, said,
"Now, madam, you are a good girl and you will get your previous salary with the corresponding number of benefits."
Everybody praised her and congratulated her and protested their sympathy, so that she, who at first was timid, restless, and haunted with a feeling of oppressive melancholy, grew suddenly convinced that she had fulfilled her mission.
After the theatre the whole company went to Lubinka's birthday celebration, and there the congratulations were reiterated.
So large a crowd gathered in Lubinka's quarters that the tobacco smoke made it hard to breathe.
They sat down to supper, and champagne began to flow freely.
Kukishev kept close to Anninka. This made her somewhat shy, but she was no longer oppressed by his attentions.
It seemed rather funny, but also flattering, that she had so easily gotten hold of this big, powerful man, who could bend and straighten out a horseshoe without effort, and whom she could order about and do with as she wished.
The supper was crowned by that drunken, disorderly gaiety in which neither the head nor the heart takes a part, and which results only in headaches and nausea.
The tragedian Miloslavsky X was the only one who looked gloomy and declined champagne, preferring plain vodka, which he gulped down glass after glass.
As to Anninka, she abstained from drink for some time, but Kukishev was insistent. He went down on his knees and implored her:
"Anna Semyonovna, it is your turn. I beseech you. For your happiness, for friendship and love.
Do us a favor." She was annoyed by his foolish figure and foolish talk, yet she could not refuse, and before she had time to collect her thoughts, she was already dizzy.
Lubinka, for her part, was so magnanimous that she herself asked her sister to sing,
"How I did love it with my mash." Anninka performed it so well that everybody exclaimed,
"Ah, that was just like Matryusha the gypsy."
Then Lubinka sang an obscene song of a different kind, and at once convinced everybody that that kind of singing was her real genre, in which she had no rivals, just as Anninka had none in the gypsy songs.
In conclusion, Miloslavsky X and Nalimova presented a "masquerade scene" in which the tragedian recited parts from Ugolino (a tragedy in five acts, by Polevoy), and Nalimova followed with a scene from an unpublished tragedy of Barkov.
The result was so unexpected that Nalimova nearly eclipsed the two sisters and almost became the heroine of the evening.
It was already dawn when Kukishev, leaving the charming hostess, helped Anninka into her carriage.
Pious townspeople were coming from matins. At the sight of Anninka, elaborately attired and somewhat unsteady on her feet, they muttered darkly,
"People are coming out of church, and they are gulping wine. A curse on them!"
On leaving her sister's, Anninka went not to the hotel but to her own quarters, small but snug and nicely furnished.
She was followed by Kukishev.
The whole winter passed in an indescribable hurly-burly.
Anninka was completely in the swing, and if she ever reminded herself of her "treasure," it was only in order to laugh it off with
"How foolish I was!"
Kukishev, very proud of the fact that his "idea" of securing a mistress like Lubinka had materialized, made ducks and drakes of his money. Instigated by emulation, he ordered two gowns to Lyulkin's one, and two dozen bottles of champagne to his one dozen.
Lubinka herself began to envy her sister, because she succeeded in laying by forty lottery bonds during the winter in addition to a considerable amount of jewelry.
However, they became friendly again and decided to pool their hoardings.
Anninka always hoped for something, and during an intimate talk with her sister, said:
"When all this will be over, we will go back to Pogorelka.
We will have money and establish a home for ourselves."
"And you think this will ever end? Fool!" Lubinka retorted cynically.