“Isn’t that Belokonskaya the one whose brother is married to Princess Mukhovetskaya?” Zinenko humbly put in the usual comment.
“Yes.” Anna Afanasyevna nodded with condescension. “She’s also a distant relative on her grandmother’s side of the Stremoukhovs, whom you know. Well, she wrote me she had met Vasily Terentyevich at a party and had recommended him to call on us if it ever occurred to him to visit the mill.”
“Shall we be able to receive him properly, Anna?” Zinenko asked anxiously.
“The funny way you talk! We’ll do our best. But of course we can’t expect to impress a man who has a yearly income of three hundred thousand rubles.”
“Dear me! Three hundred thousand!” groaned Zinenko. “It gives you the creeps to think of it.”
“Three hundred thousand!” Nina echoed with a sigh.
“Three hundred thousand!” exclaimed the other young ladies in an ecstatic chorus.
“Yes, and he spends all of it, to the last kopek,” said Anna Afanasyevna. Then, in reply to an unexpressed thought of her daughters, she added: “He’s married. Only they say his marriage is a failure. His wife has no personality and isn’t distinguished at all. And a wife should give tone to her husband’s business activities, whatever you may say.”
“Three hundred thousand!” said Nina once more, as if in delirium. “The things you could do with that money!”
Anna Afanasyevna ran her hand over Nina’s luxuriant hair.
“It wouldn’t be bad to have a husband like him, my child, would it?”
That income of three hundred thousand rubles, which belonged to another man, seemed to have galvanized the whole company. Stories were told, and listened to, with gleaming eyes and flushed faces, about the life of millionaires, their fabulous dinners, their magnificent horses, the dancing-parties they gave, the unheard-of extravagance of their spending.
Bobrov’s heart went cold and shrank painfully. Quietly he took his hat and walked stealthily out on to the porch. However, no one would have noticed his departure anyway.
Riding home at a smart trot and recalling Nina’s languid, dreamy eyes as she whispered, almost distractedly, “Three hundred thousand!” he suddenly thought of the story which Svezhevsky had insisted on telling him that morning.
“This one’s just as capable of selling herself,” he whispered, clenching his teeth and furiously laying his whip on Fairway’s neck.
V
As he rode up to his flat Bobrov saw a light in the windows. “The doctor must have arrived while I was away, and now he’s probably lolling on my sofa, waiting for me,” he thought, pulling up his lathered horse. Just then Dr. Goldberg was the only person whose presence he could bear without painful irritation.
He was sincerely fond of the light-hearted, gentle Jew for his versatile wit, his youthful liveliness, and his good-natured passion for abstract argument. No matter what topic Bobrov brought up, Dr. Goldberg would dispute his point with equal interest and unvarying ardour. And though so far they had done nothing but clash in their interminable arguments, they missed each other, and met almost daily.
The doctor was actually lying on the sofa, his feet on its back, reading a book which he held close to his shortsighted eyes. Bobrov recognized Mevius’ Handbook of Metallurgy at a glance, and smiled. He was familiar with the doctor’s habit of reading with equal absorption whatever he came upon, always starting from the middle.
“You know, I had some tea while you were out,” said the doctor, throwing away the book and looking at Bobrov over his spectacles, “Well, how’s my lord Andrei Ilyich hopping along? My, how angry you look! What is it? A fresh spell of delightful misery?”
“Life is so sickening, doctor,” Bobrov said wearily.
“Why, my friend?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that way. Well, how’s your hospital?”
“The hospital’s all right. I had a most interesting case of surgery today. Really, it was both laughable and touching. A Masalsk stone-mason came to me this morning. Those Masalsk lads are all athletes, without a single exception. ‘What d’you want?’ I asked him. ‘You see, doctor, I was cutting bread for the whole team and scratched my finger a bit, and can’t stop the blood nohow.’ I examined his finger; it was a mere scratch, nothing to worry about, but festering a little. I told my assistant to bandage it. But the lad wouldn’t go. ‘Well, what else do you want? You’ve got your hand bandaged, you can go now.’ ‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘thank you. Only, you see, my head’s kind of splitting, so I thought perhaps you’d give me some medicine for that too.’ ‘What’s the matter with your head? Got a sock on it, I suppose?’ He fairly jumped with delight, and started laughing. ‘Can’t say no,’ he says. ‘We went on a bust the other day, on Saviour’s Day it was’ – that would be about three days ago – ’and drank a good bucketful of vodka. Well, we started fooling among ourselves. Then – you know how it is in a fight, don’t you? – I got a reg’lar crack on my nob with a chisel – had it repaired, sort of. It wasn’t so bad at first – it didn’t hurt, but now my head’s splitting.’ I examined his ‘nob’ and was downright horrified. His skull was smashed right in, there was a hole in it the size of a five-kopek piece, and bone splinters stuck in his brain. Now he’s lying unconscious in hospital. I must say they are marvellous people: babies and heroes all in one. I’m quite certain that only the patient Russian muzhik can stand having his skull ‘repaired’ like that. Anyone else would have given up the ghost on the spot. Besides, what simple good humour! ‘You know how it is in a fight, don’t you?’ he says, God!”
Bobrov was pacing the room, cracking his whip across the tops of his high boots and listening absent-mindedly to the doctor. He still could not shake off the bitterness that had settled on his soul at Zinenko’s.
The doctor paused for a moment, and then said sympathetically, seeing that Bobrov did not feel like talking, “I tell you what, Andrei Ilyich. Try to get some sleep, and take one or two spoonfuls of bromide for the night. It’ll do you good in your present frame of mind – at least it won’t harm you.”
They both lay down in the same room, Bobrov taking the bed and the doctor staying on the sofa. But neither could sleep. For a long time Goldberg listened to Bobrov tossing and sighing in bed, and at last he spoke.
“What is it, friend? What’s worrying you? Hadn’t you better tell me frankly what’s on your mind? After all, I’m not a stranger asking questions out of idle curiosity.”
These simple words moved Bobrov. Although he and the doctor were on friendly terms, neither had ever confirmed it by a single word: both were keenly sensitive and shrank from the embarrassment of mutual confessions. The doctor had opened his heart first, helped by the darkness and his compassion for Bobrov.
“Everything weighs heavily on me and disgusts me so, Osip Osipovich,” Bobrov said softly. “First of all, I’m disgusted because I’m working at the mill and getting a lot of money for it, when I loathe the whole business. I consider myself honest and so I ask myself frankly, ‘What are you doing? Who benefits by your work?’ I’m beginning to see things clearly, and I realize that, thanks to my efforts, a hundred French rentiers and a dozen Russian sharks will eventually pocket millions. And there’s no other aim or sense in the work which I’ve wasted the better half of my life preparing for!”
“But that is simply ridiculous, Andrei Ilyich,” the doctor protested, turning to Bobrov in the darkness. “You want a bunch of money-bags to go soft. My friend, ever since the world came into being things have been governed by the law of the belly. It has never been otherwise, nor ever will be. But the point is that you don’t give a damn for the money-bags, because you’re far above them. Aren’t you satisfied with the proud manly consciousness that you’re pushing forward ‘the chariot of progress,’ as they say in leading articles? Damn it, shipping-company shares