XXVI
At the end of two weeks, while Lopukhóf was sitting in the counting-room of his factory, Viéra Pavlovna was spending the whole morning in extraordinary excitement. She threw herself down on her bed, she covered her face with her hands; and at the end of a quarter of an hour she jumped up, walked up and down the room, threw herself into one chair after another, and again walked with quick, unsteady steps, and then again threw herself on her bed, and then walked again; and several times she went to the writing-desk, and stood by it, and turned away, and finally she sat down, wrote a few words, sealed her note. Then, in half an hour, she seized the note, tore it up, burned it, and again she walked about excitedly. She wrote a second letter; this, also, she tore up and burned. Again she walked up and down, and again she wrote, and hastily, scarcely stopping to seal it; not giving herself time to write the address, she ran off with it to her husband’s room, threw it on the table, and hurried back to her own room, fell into a chair, and sat motionless, hiding her face in her hands, half an hour, possibly an hour. There is the sound of the bell; it is he. She ran into the library to seize the letter, to tear it up, to burn it—but where is it? It is not there! where is it? She hastily looked over the papers; where is it? But Masha is already opening the door, and Lopukhóf saw from the threshold how Viéra Pavlovna flashed out from his library into her own room, excited and pale.
He did not follow her, but went straight into his library; coolly, at his leisure, he examined the table and the space behind the table. Yes; he had been expecting for some days some such thing, either in the way of words or note. Nu, here it is, a letter without address, but her seal; nu, she must have been looking for it, so as to destroy it, or she may have just thrown it down. No, she must have been looking for it; the papers are in disorder. But how could she find it, while in throwing it down she had been in such a flurry of excitement that, in being thrown impetuously down, like a coal burning the hand, it slid across the whole width of the table, and fell on the window behind the table? There is hardly need of reading it; the contents are what he expects. However, it is impossible not to read it.
“My dear, never was I so strongly attached to thee as I am now. If I could only die for thy sake! Oh, how happy I would be to die, if it would only make thee happier! but I cannot live without him. I wrong thee, my dear; I am killing thee, my dear. I do not want to do so; I am acting contrary to my will. Forgive me! forgive me!”
For quarter of an hour, maybe more, Lopukhóf stood before the table, looking attentively down at the arm of the chair. Though it was a shock foreseen, still it was painful; though he had thought it all over, and decided what should be done, and how it was necessary to act, in case such a letter or confession came, still he could not at once collect his thoughts. But at last he collected them. He went into the kitchen to give an order to Masha.
“Masha, you will please not set the table until I tell you. I am not quite well, and I must take some medicine before dinner. But don’t you wait; eat your dinner, and don’t hurry: you will have plenty of time before I shall want mine. I will tell when.”
From the kitchen he went to see his wife. She was lying down, hiding her face in the pillows; when he entered, she shuddered:—
“You found it, you read it! bozhe moï! how crazy I am! It is not true—what I wrote! it was fever!”
“Of course, my dear; your words must not be taken seriously, because you were too much excited. These things are not so easily decided. We shall have time to talk this matter over more than once, calmly, rationally, because it is a very important matter for us. And, meanwhile, my dear, I want to tell you something about my affairs. I have succeeded in making a good many changes in them—everything that was needed; and I am very well content. Are you listening?”
Of course she did not herself know whether she was listening or not; she could only have said, however it was, whether she heard or not, that she heard something, but she was very far from understanding what she heard; however, something she did hear, and something could be drawn from what she heard, that something was being done about something, and that it had no connection with her letter; and gradually she began to listen, because her mind was led to it. Her nerves wanted to occupy themselves with something, not with the letter; and though it was long before she could understand what he was driving at, yet she was reassured by the cool and contented tone of her husband’s voice, and gradually she began to understand.
“Do listen! because it is about a very important matter for me.” Her husband kept repeating each question, “Do you hear?”—“Yes, very pleasant changes for me”—and he begins to tell her the whole story in detail. She realizes three-quarters of what he is telling her—no, she knows it all; but it is all the same to her: “Let him speak! How kind he is!” And he keeps on with his story: that he has been tired of giving private lessons this long time, and why, or in what family, and of what special pupils he is tired, and how he is not tired of his occupation in the counting-room of the factory, because it is important, and he has a great influence over all the factory-hands, and how he has succeeded in doing something there; how he has enabled those who desired to learn to read and write; how he has taught them how to learn their letters; how he has succeeded in getting from the firm a salary for the teachers, by proving that the workmen would in this way ruin less machinery and less work, because in this way there would be less idleness and drunken eyes—of course it was a trifling salary; and how he keeps the working people from drinking, and in order to do this he has often been to their saloons—and a great deal of the same sort of talk. But the principal thing was this, that he has made himself solid with the firm as an active, energetic man, and he has been gradually getting the business into his own control, so that the conclusion of his story and the main flavor of it for Lopukhóf consisted in this: he has accepted the place as acting manager of the factory. The nominal manager would be an honorary person from the firm itself, with an honorary salary, but the active manager would be Lopukhóf himself: the member of the firm accepted the position of nominal manager only on this condition: “I,” says he, “cannot do it; how can I?”—“You take the name then, so that an honorable man may have it, and there will be no need for you to trouble yourself, for I will do everything.”—“If that is the case, all right then; I will take the position.” But the importance does not lie in his having the power, but in the fact that he is to have a salary of three thousand five hundred rubles—nearly a thousand rubles more than all taken together that he had received from his occasional hard literary work and from his pupils and from his former place in the factory; consequently he can give up everything now except the factory, and that is splendid. And all this takes more than half an hour to relate; and at the end of the story Viéra Pavlovna is able to say that it is really good, and she is able to arrange her hair and go to dinner.
And after dinner Masha gets eight silver kopeks for an izvoshchik, to take her in four different directions, to carry notes from Lopukhóf, saying, “I am at leisure, gentlemen, and I should be glad to have you come to see me.” And some time later appears the terrible Rakhmétof, and after him, one by one, come a whole tribe of young people, and a formidable scientific conversation begins with immeasurable reproaches heaped up on each individual by all the rest with all possible inconsequentialities; but some traitors to this lofty discussion help Viéra Pavlovna somehow or other to kill the evening, and when half the evening is spent she guesses where Masha has been gone so long. How kind he is! Yes, this time Viéra Pavlovna had been absolutely glad on account of her young friends, though she did not get into a gale with them, but sat quietly, and she was ready to kiss even Rakhmétof himself.
The visitors went away towards three o’clock in the morning, and they did well in being so late. Viéra Pavlovna, weary from the excitement of the day, had only just lain down when her husband came in:—
“While telling you about the factory, my dear Viérotchka, I forgot to tell you one thing about my new place, and by the way, it is not very important, and I don’t know as it is worth while to speak about it, but I will tell you some time; but I have one favor to ask: I want to sleep, so do you; so if I do not tell you the rest of the story now, we will speak about it tomorrow; and now I will tell you in two words. You see when I took the place of acting manager I agreed upon this condition: that I can take the place any time that I want, within a month or two; and now I want to avail myself of this time: I have not seen my old folks in Riazan for five years. I am going to make them a visit. Good night, Viérotchka. Don’t get up. You will have time tomorrow. Go to sleep.”