XIII
But the dénouement was near at hand. My fare of black bread and tea was undermining my health. I became irritable, and often, in order to keep myself in hand, I would run away from the rehearsal to some remote corner in the gardens. Besides, I had long ago exhausted my stock of underclothes.
Samoilenko continued to torment me. You know how it is sometimes at a boarding-school, when a master, for no reason at all, suddenly gets his knife into some poor little wretch of a pupil. He will hate him for the pallor of his face, because his ears stick out, because he shrugs his shoulders unpleasantly, and this hate will last for years. This is exactly how Samoilenko behaved towards me. He had already managed to fine me fifteen roubles altogether, and during rehearsals he would speak to me as though he were the head of a prison addressing a convict. Sometimes, as I listened to his insolent remarks, I would lower my eyelids and would then see fiery circles in front of my eyes. As for Valerianov, he had stopped speaking to me at all, and when we met he would bolt like an ostrich. I had been with him a month and a half already and had received exactly one rouble.
One morning I woke up with a headache, with a metallic taste in my mouth, and in my soul a black, heavy, unreasoned anger. In this frame of mind I went to the rehearsal.
I don’t remember what we were acting, but I remember well that there was a thick rolled up copybook in my hand. I knew my part, as usual, perfectly. It contained the words: “I have deserved this.”
And when the play got to this passage I said:
“I have deserved this.”
But Samoilenko ran up to me and bawled out:
“Who speaks Russian like this? Whoever speaks like this? ‘I have deserved this!’ One says: ‘I have deserved for this.’ Mediocrity!”
Growing white I stretched the copybook out to him with these words:
“Kindly look at the text.”
But he shouted out in a guttural voice:
“To hell with your text! I myself am your text. If you don’t want to keep your job here, you may go to the devil.”
I quickly raised my eyes to his. Suddenly he understood everything, became as pale as I was, and moved back quickly two steps. But it was already too late. With the heavy rolled copybook I struck him heavily and loudly on the left cheek and on the right, then again on the left, and then on the right again, and again, and again. He made no resistance, did not even duck, did not even try to run away, but, at each blow, only switched his head to left and right, like a clown who plays at being surprised. Finally I flung the copybook in his face and left the stage for the gardens. Nobody stopped me.
And then the miracle happened. The first person that I saw in the gardens was a little messenger-boy from the local branch of the Volga-Kama bank. He was asking for Leontovitch and handed me a notification of five hundred roubles, that were waiting for me at the bank.
An hour later Nelioubov and I were already in the gardens ordering a gigantic lunch, and two hours later the whole troop was drinking my health in champagne and congratulating me. On my honour, it wasn’t I but Nelioubov who had spread the news that I had come in for sixty thousand roubles. I didn’t contradict it. A little later Valerianov swore to me that business was going to the dogs and I made him a present of a hundred roubles.
At five o’clock that evening I was at the station. In my pocket, apart from my ticket to Moscow, I had only seventy roubles, but I felt like an emperor. When, after the second bell, I was getting into my compartment, Samoilenko, who, up to now, had kept his distance, came up to me.
“Forgive; I was hotheaded,” he said theatrically.
I pressed his outstretched hand and answered amiably: “Forgive, I too was hotheaded.”
They gave me a farewell cheer. I exchanged the last kindly glance with Nelioubov, The train started and everything receded never to return. And when the last of the little blue huts of the outskirts began to disappear and the mournful, yellow, burnt-out steppe stretched itself endlessly—a strange sadness tugged at my heart, as if there, in that scene of my misfortunes, sufferings, hunger, and humiliations, had remained forever a particle of my soul.