A Desperate Character and Other Stories

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Yes, it was he; there were his inflamed eyes, his full lips, his soft,
overhanging nose. He had, in fact, changed little during the last seven
years; his face was a little flabbier, perhaps.

'Nikander Vavilitch!' I cried. 'Don't you know me?' Punin started,
opened his mouth, stared at me....

'I haven't the honour,' he was beginning--and all at once he piped out
shrilly: 'The little master of Troitsky (my grandmother's property was
called Troitsky)! Can it be the little master of Troitsky?'

The pound of raisins tumbled out of his hands.

'It really is,' I answered, and, picking up Punin's purchase from the
ground, I kissed him.

He was breathless with delight and excitement; he almost cried, removed
his cap--which enabled me to satisfy myself that the last traces of hair
had vanished from his 'egg'--took a handkerchief out of it, blew his
nose, poked the cap into his bosom with the raisins, put it on again,
again dropped the raisins.... I don't know how Musa was behaving all
this time, I tried not to look at her. I don't imagine Punin's agitation
proceeded from any extreme attachment to my person; it was simply that
his nature could not stand the slightest unexpected shock. The nervous
excitability of these poor devils!

'Come and see us, my dear boy,' he faltered at last; 'you won't be too
proud to visit our humble nest? You're a student, I see ...'

'On the contrary, I shall be delighted, really.'

'Are you independent now?'

'Perfectly independent.'

'That's capital! How pleased Paramon Semyonitch will be! To-day he'll be
home earlier than usual, and madame lets her, too, off for Saturdays.
But, stop, excuse me, I am quite forgetting myself. Of course, you don't
know our niece!'

I hastened to slip in that I had not yet had the pleasure.

'Of course, of course! How could you know her! Musotchka ... Take note,
my dear sir, this girl's name is Musa--and it's not a nickname, but her
real name ... Isn't that a predestination? Musotchka, I want to
introduce you to Mr. ... Mr. ...'

'B.,' I prompted.

'B.,' he repeated. 'Musotchka, listen! You see before you the most
excellent, most delightful of young men. Fate threw us together when he
was still in years of boyhood! I beg you to look on him as a friend!'

I swung off a low bow. Musa, red as a poppy, flashed a look on me from
under her eyelids, and dropped them immediately.

'Ah!' thought I, 'you 're one of those who in difficult moments don't
turn pale, but red; that must be made a note of.'

'You must be indulgent, she's not a fine lady,' observed Punin, and he
went out of the shop into the street; Musa and I followed him.

* * * * *

The house in which Punin lodged was a considerable distance from the
Gostinny Dvor, being, in fact, in Sadovoy Street. On the way my former
preceptor in poetry had time to communicate a good many details of his
mode of existence. Since the time of our parting, both he and Baburin
had been tossed about holy Russia pretty thoroughly, and had not
long--only a year and a half before--found a permanent home in Moscow.
Baburin had succeeded in becoming head-clerk in the office of a rich
merchant and manufacturer. 'Not a lucrative berth,' Punin observed with
a sigh,--'a lot of work, and not much profit ... but what's one to do?
One must be thankful to get that! I, too, am trying to earn something by
copying and lessons; only my efforts have so far not been crowned with
success. My writing, you perhaps recollect, is old-fashioned, not in
accordance with the tastes of the day; and as regards lessons--what has
been a great obstacle is the absence of befitting attire; moreover, I
greatly fear that in the matter of instruction--in the subject of
Russian literature--I am also not in harmony with the tastes of the day;
and so it comes about that I am turned away.' (Punin laughed his sleepy,
subdued laugh. He had retained his old, somewhat high-flown manner of
speech, and his old weakness for falling into rhyme.) 'All run after
novelties, nothing but innovations! I dare say you, too, do not honour
the old divinities, and fall down before new idols?'

'And you, Nikander Vavilitch, do you really still esteem Heraskov?'

Punin stood still and waved both hands at once. 'In the highest degree,
sir! in the high ... est de ... gree, I do!'

'And you don't read Pushkin? You don't like Pushkin?'

Punin again flung his hands up higher than his head.

'Pushkin? Pushkin is the snake, lying hid in the grass, who is endowed
with the note of the nightingale!'

While Punin and I talked like this, cautiously picking our way over the
unevenly laid brick pavement of so-called 'white-stoned' Moscow--in
which there is not one stone, and which is not white at all--Musa walked
silently beside us on the side further from me. In speaking of her, I
called her 'your niece.' Punin was silent for a little, scratched his
head, and informed me in an undertone that he had called her so ...
merely as a manner of speaking; that she was really no relation; that
she was an orphan picked up and cared for by Baburin in the town of
Voronezh; but that he, Punin, might well call her daughter, as he loved
her no less than a real daughter. I had no doubt that, though Punin
intentionally dropped his voice, Musa could hear all he said very well;
and she was at once angry, and shy, and embarrassed; and the lights and
shades chased each other over her face, and everything in it was
slightly quivering, the eyelids and brows and lips and narrow nostrils.
All this was very charming, and amusing, and queer.

* * * * *

But at last we reached the 'modest nest.' And modest it certainly was,
the nest. It consisted of a small, one-storied house, that seemed almost
sunk into the ground, with a slanting wooden roof, and four dingy
windows in the front. The furniture of the rooms was of the poorest, and
not over tidy, indeed. Between the windows and on the walls hung about a
dozen tiny wooden cages containing larks, canaries, and siskins. 'My
subjects!' Punin pronounced triumphantly, pointing his finger at them.
We had hardly time to get in and look about us, Punin had hardly sent
Musa for the samovar, when Baburin himself came in. He seemed to me to
have aged much more than Punin, though his step was as firm as ever, and
the expression of his face altogether was unchanged; but he had grown
thin and bent, his cheeks were sunken, and his thick black shock of hair
was sprinkled with grey. He did not recognise me, and showed no
particular pleasure when Punin mentioned my name; he did not even smile
with his eyes, he barely nodded; he asked--very carelessly and
drily--whether my _granny_ were living--and that was all. 'I'm not
over-delighted at a visit from a nobleman,' he seemed to say; 'I don't
feel flattered by it.' The republican was a republican still.

Musa came back; a decrepit little old woman followed her, bringing in a
tarnished samovar. Punin began fussing about, and pressing me to take
things; Baburin sat down to the table, leaned his head on his hands, and
looked with weary eyes about him. At tea, however, he began to talk. He
was dissatisfied with his position. 'A screw--not a man,' so he spoke of
his employer; 'people in a subordinate position are so much dirt to him,
of no consequence whatever; and yet it's not so long since he was under
the yoke himself. Nothing but cruelty and covetousness. It's a bondage
worse than the government's! And all the trade here rests on swindling
and flourishes on nothing else!'

Hearing such dispiriting utterances, Punin sighed expressively,
assented, shook his head up and down, and from side to side; Musa
maintained a stubborn silence.... She was obviously fretted by the
doubt, what I was, whether I was a discreet person or a gossip. And if I
were discreet, whether it was not with some afterthought in my mind. Her
dark, swift, restless eyes fairly flashed to and fro under their
half-drooping lids. Only once she glanced at me, but so inquisitively,
so searchingly, almost viciously ... I positively started. Baburin
scarcely talked to her at all; but whenever he did address her, there
was a note of austere, hardly fatherly, tenderness in his voice.

Punin, on the contrary, was continually joking with Musa; she responded
unwillingly, however. He called her little snow-maiden, little
snowflake.

'Why do you give Musa Pavlovna such names?' I asked.

Punin laughed. 'Because she's such a chilly little thing.'

'Sensible,' put in Baburin: 'as befits a young girl.'

'We may call her the mistress of the house,' cried Punin. 'Hey? Paramon
Semyonitch?' Baburin frowned; Musa turned away ... I did not understand
the hint at the time.

So passed two hours ... in no very lively fashion, though Punin did his
best to 'entertain the honourable company.' For instance, he squatted
down in front of the cage of one of the canaries, opened the door, and
commanded: 'On the cupola! Begin the concert!' The canary fluttered out
at once, perched on the _cupola_, that is to say, on Punin's bald pate,
and turning from side to side, and shaking its little wings, carolled
with all its might. During the whole time the concert lasted, Punin kept
perfectly still, only conducting with his finger, and half closing his
eyes. I could not help roaring with laughter ... but neither Baburin nor
Musa laughed.

Just as I was leaving, Baburin surprised me by an unexpected question.
He wished to ask me, as a man studying at the university, what sort of
person Zeno was, and what were my ideas about him.

'What Zeno?' I asked, somewhat puzzled.

'Zeno, the sage of antiquity. Surely he cannot be unknown to you?'

I vaguely recalled the name of Zeno, as the founder of the school of
Stoics; but I knew absolutely nothing more about him.

'Yes, he was a philosopher,' I pronounced, at last.

'Zeno,' Baburin resumed in deliberate tones, 'was that wise man, who
declared that suffering was not an evil, since fortitude overcomes all
things, and that the good in this world is one: justice; and virtue
itself is nothing else than justice.'

Punin turned a reverent ear.

'A man living here who has picked up a lot of old books, told me that
saying,' continued Baburin; 'it pleased me much. But I see you are not
interested in such subjects.'

Baburin was right. In such subjects I certainly was not interested.
Since I had entered the university, I had become as much of a republican
as Baburin himself. Of Mirabeau, of Robespierre, I would have talked
with zest. Robespierre, indeed ... why, I had hanging over my
writing-table the lithographed portraits of Fouquier-Tinville and
Chalier! But Zeno! Why drag in Zeno?

As he said good-bye to me, Punin insisted very warmly on my visiting
them next day, Sunday; Baburin did not invite me at all, and even
remarked between his teeth, that talking to plain people of nondescript
position could not give me any great pleasure, and would most likely be
disagreeable to my _granny_. At that word I interrupted him, however,
and gave him to understand that my grandmother had no longer any
authority over me.

'Why, you've not come into possession of the property, have you?'
queried Baburin.

'No, I haven't,' I answered.

'Well, then, it follows ...' Baburin did not finish his sentence; but I
mentally finished it for him: 'it follows that I'm a boy.'

'Good-bye,' I said aloud, and I retired.

I was just going out of the courtyard into the street ... Musa suddenly
ran out of the house, and slipping a piece of crumpled paper into my
hand, disappeared at once. At the first lamp-post I unfolded the paper.
It turned out to be a note. With difficulty I deciphered the pale
pencil-marks. 'For God's sake,' Musa had written, 'come to-morrow after
matins to the Alexandrovsky garden near the Kutafia tower I shall wait
for you don't refuse me don't make me miserable I simply must see you.'
There were no mistakes in spelling in this note, but neither was there
any punctuation. I returned home in perplexity.

* * * * *

When, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time, next day, I began
to get near the Kutafia tower (it was early in April, the buds were
swelling, the grass was growing greener, and the sparrows were noisily
chirrupping and quarrelling in the bare lilac bushes), considerably to
my surprise, I caught sight of Musa a little to one side, not far from
the fence. She was there before me. I was going towards her; but she
herself came to meet me.

'Let's go to the Kreml wall,' she whispered in a hurried voice, running
her downcast eyes over the ground; 'there are people here.'

We went along the path up the hill.

'Musa Pavlovna,' I was beginning.... But she cut me short at once.

'Please,' she began, speaking in the same jerky and subdued voice,
'don't criticise me, don't think any harm of me. I wrote a letter to
you, I made an appointment to meet you, because ... I was afraid.... It
seemed to me yesterday,--you seemed to be laughing all the time.
Listen,' she added, with sudden energy, and she stopped short and turned
towards me: 'listen; if you tell with whom ... if you mention at whose
room you met me, I'll throw myself in the water, I'll drown myself, I'll
make an end of myself!'

At this point, for the first time, she glanced at me with the
inquisitive, piercing look I had seen before.

'Why, she, perhaps, really ... would do it,' was my thought.

'Really, Musa Pavlovna,' I protested, hurriedly: 'how can you have such
a bad opinion of me? Do you suppose I am capable of betraying my friend
and injuring you? Besides, come to that, there's nothing in your
relations, as far as I'm aware, deserving of censure.... For goodness'
sake, be calm.'

Musa heard me out, without stirring from the spot, or looking at me
again.

'There's something else I ought to tell you,' she began, moving forward
again along the path, 'or else you may think I'm quite mad! I ought to
tell you, that old man wants to marry me!'

'What old man? The bald one? Punin?'

'No--not he! The other ... Paramon Semyonitch.'

'Baburin?'

'Yes.'

'Is it possible? Has he made you an offer?'

'Yes.'

'But you didn't consent, of course?'

'Yes, I did consent ... because I didn't understand what I was about
then. Now it's a different matter.'

I flung up my hands. 'Baburin--and you! Why, he must be fifty!'

'He says forty-three. But that makes no difference. If he were
five--and--twenty I wouldn't marry him. Much happiness I should find in
it! A whole week will go by without his smiling once! Paramon Semyonitch
is my benefactor, I am deeply indebted to him; he took care of me,
educated me; I should have been utterly lost but for him; I'm bound to
look on him as a father.... But be his wife! I'd rather die! I'd rather
be in my coffin!'

'Why do you keep talking about death, Musa Pavlovna?'

Musa stopped again.

'Why, is life so sweet, then? Even your friend Vladimir Nikolaitch, I
may say, I've come to love from being wretched and dull: and then
Paramon Semyonitch with his offers of marriage.... Punin, though he
bores me with his verses, he doesn't scare me, anyway; he doesn't make
me read Karamzin in the evenings, when my head's ready to drop off my
shoulders for weariness! And what are these old men to me? They call me
cold, too. With them, is it likely I should be warm? If they try to make
me--I shall go. Paramon Semyonitch himself's always saying: Freedom!
freedom! All right, I want freedom too. Or else it comes to this!
Freedom for every one else, and keeping me in a cage! I'll tell him so
myself. But if you betray me, or drop a hint--remember; they'll never
set eyes on me again!'

Musa stood in the middle of the path.

'They'll never set eyes on me again!' she repeated sharply. This time,
too, she did not raise her eyes to me; she seemed to be aware that she
would infallibly betray herself, would show what was in her heart, if
any one looked her straight in the face.... And that was just why she
did not lift her eyes, except when she was angry or annoyed, and then
she stared straight at the person she was speaking to.... But her small
pretty face was aglow with indomitable resolution.

'Why, Tarhov was right,' flashed through my head; 'this girl is a
new type.'

'You've no need to be afraid of me,' I declared, at last.

'Truly? Even, if ... You said something about our relations.... But even
if there were ...' she broke off.

'Even in that case, you would have no need to be afraid, Musa Pavlovna.
I am not your judge. Your secret is buried here.' I pointed to my bosom.
'Believe me, I know how to appreciate ...'

'Have you got my letter?' Musa asked suddenly.

'Yes.'

'Where?'

'In my pocket.'

'Give it here ... quick, quick!'

I got out the scrap of paper. Musa snatched it in her rough little hand,
stood still a moment facing me, as though she were going to thank me;
but suddenly started, looked round, and without even a word at parting,
ran quickly down the hill.

I looked in the direction she had taken. At no great distance from the
tower I discerned, wrapped in an 'Almaviva' ('Almavivas' were then in
the height of fashion), a figure which I recognised at once as Tarhov.

'Aha, my boy,' thought I, 'you must have had notice, then, since you're
on the look-out.'

And whistling to myself, I started homewards.

* * * * *

Next morning I had only just drunk my morning tea, when Punin made his
appearance. He came into my room with rather an embarrassed face, and
began making bows, looking about him, and apologising for his intrusion,
as he called it. I made haste to reassure him. I, sinful man, imagined
that Punin had come with the intention of borrowing money. But he
confined himself to asking for a glass of tea with rum in it, as,
luckily, the samovar had not been cleared away. 'It's with some
trepidation and sinking of heart that I have come to see you,' he said,
as he nibbled a lump of sugar. 'You I do not fear; but I stand in awe of
your honoured grandmother! I am abashed too by my attire, as I have
already communicated to you.' Punin passed his finger along the frayed
edge of his ancient coat. 'At home it's no matter, and in the street,
too, it's no harm; but when one finds one's self in gilded palaces,
one's poverty stares one in the face, and one feels confused!' I
occupied two small rooms on the ground floor, and certainly it would
never have entered any one's head to call them palaces, still less
gilded; but Punin apparently was referring to the whole of my
grandmother's house, though that too was by no means conspicuously
sumptuous. He reproached me for not having been to see them the previous
day; 'Paramon Semyonitch,' said he, 'expected you, though he did declare
that you would be sure not to come. And Musotchka, too, expected you.'

'What? Musa Pavlovna too?' I queried.

'She too. She's a charming girl we have got with us, isn't she? What
do you say?'

'Very charming,' I assented. Punin rubbed his bare head with
extraordinary rapidity.

'She's a beauty, sir, a pearl or even a diamond--it's the truth I am
telling you.' He bent down quite to my ear. 'Noble blood, too,' he
whispered to me, 'only--you understand--left-handed; the forbidden fruit
was eaten. Well, the parents died, the relations would do nothing for
her, and flung her to the hazards of destiny, that's to say, despair,
dying of hunger! But at that point Paramon Semyonitch steps forward,
known as a deliverer from of old! He took her, clothed her and cared for
her, brought up the poor nestling; and she has blossomed into our
darling! I tell you, a man of the rarest qualities!'

Punin subsided against the back of the armchair, lifted his hands, and
again bending forward, began whispering again, but still more
mysteriously: 'You see Paramon Semyonitch himself too.... Didn't you
know? he too is of exalted extraction--and on the left side, too. They
do say--his father was a powerful Georgian prince, of the line of King
David.... What do you make of that? A few words--but how much is said?
The blood of King David! What do you think of that? And according to
other accounts, the founder of the family of Paramon Semyonitch was an
Indian Shah, Babur. Blue blood! That's fine too, isn't it? Eh?'

'Well?' I queried, 'and was he too, Baburin, flung to the hazards
of destiny?'

Punin rubbed his pate again. 'To be sure he was! And with even greater
cruelty than our little lady! From his earliest childhood nothing but
struggling! And, in fact, I will confess that, inspired by Ruban, I
composed in allusion to this fact a stanza for the portrait of Paramon
Semyonitch. Wait a bit ... how was it? Yes!

'E'en from the cradle fate's remorseless blows
Baburin drove towards the abyss of woes!
But as in darkness gleams the light, so now
The conqueror's laurel wreathes his noble brow!'

Punin delivered these lines in a rhythmic, sing-song voice, with full
rounded vowels, as verses should be read.

'So that's how it is he's a republican!' I exclaimed.

'No, that's not why,' Punin answered simply. 'He forgave his father long
ago; but he cannot endure injustice of any sort; it's the sorrows of
others that trouble him!'

I wanted to turn the conversation on what I had learned from Musa the
day before, that is to say, on Baburin's matrimonial project,--but I did
not know how to proceed. Punin himself got me out of the difficulty.

'Did you notice nothing?' he asked me suddenly, slily screwing up his
eyes, 'while you were with us? nothing special?'

'Why, was there anything to notice?' I asked in my turn.

Punin looked over his shoulder, as though anxious to satisfy himself
that no one was listening. 'Our little beauty, Musotchka, is shortly to
be a married lady!'

'How so?'

'Madame Baburin,' Punin announced with an effort, and slapping his
knees several times with his open hands, he nodded his head, like a
china mandarin.

'Impossible!' I cried, with assumed astonishment. Punin's head
slowly came to rest, and his hands dropped down. 'Why impossible,
allow me to ask?'

'Because Paramon Semyonitch is more fit to be your young lady's father;
because such a difference in age excludes all likelihood of love--on the
girl's side.'

'Excludes?' Punin repeated excitedly. 'But what about gratitude? and
pure affection? and tenderness of feeling? Excludes! You must consider
this: admitting that Musa's a splendid girl; but then to gain Paramon
Semyonitch's affection, to be his comfort, his prop--his spouse, in
short! is that not the loftiest possible happiness even for such a girl?
And she realises it! You should look, turn an attentive eye! In Paramon
Semyonitch's presence Musotchka is all veneration, all tremor and
enthusiasm!'

'That's just what's wrong, Nikander Vavilitch, that she is, as you say,
all tremor. If you love any one you don't feel tremors in their
presence.'

'But with that I can't agree! Here am I, for instance; no one, I
suppose, could love Paramon Semyonitch more than I, but I ... tremble
before him.'

'Oh, you--that's a different matter.'

'How is it a different matter? how? how?' interrupted Punin. I simply
did not know him; he got hot, and serious, almost angry, and quite
dropped his rhythmic sing-song in speaking. 'No,' he declared; 'I notice
that you have not a good eye for character! No; you can't read people's
hearts!' I gave up contradicting him ... and to give another turn to the
conversation, proposed, for the sake of old times, that we should read
something together.

Punin was silent for a while.

'One of the old poets? The real ones?' he asked at last.

'No; a new one.'

'A new one?' Punin repeated mistrustfully.

'Pushkin,' I answered. I suddenly thought of the _Gypsies_ which Tarhov
had mentioned not long before. There, by the way, is the ballad about
the old husband. Punin grumbled a little, but I sat him down on the
sofa, so that he could listen more comfortably, and began to read
Pushkin's poem. The passage came at last, 'old husband, cruel husband';
Punin heard the ballad through to the end, and all at once he got up
impulsively.

'I can't,' he pronounced, with an intense emotion, which impressed even
me;--'excuse me; I cannot hear more of that author. He is an immoral
slanderer; he is a liar ... he upsets me. I cannot! Permit me to cut
short my visit to-day.'

I began trying to persuade Punin to remain; but he insisted on having
his own way with a sort of stupid, scared obstinacy: he repeated several
times that he felt upset, and wished to get a breath of fresh air--and
all the while his lips were faintly quivering and his eyes avoided mine,
as though I had wounded him. So he went away. A little while after, I
too went out of the house and set off to see Tarhov.

* * * * *

Without inquiring of any one, with a student's usual lack of ceremony,
I walked straight into his lodgings. In the first room there was no
one. I called Tarhov by name, and receiving no answer, was just going
to retreat; but the door of the adjoining room opened, and my friend
appeared. He looked at me rather queerly, and shook hands without
speaking. I had come to him to repeat all I had heard from Punin; and
though I felt at once that I had called on Tarhov at the wrong moment,
still, after talking a little about extraneous matters, I ended by
informing him of Baburin's intentions in regard to Musa. This piece of
news did not, apparently, surprise him much; he quietly sat down at the
table, and fixing his eyes intently upon me, and keeping silent as
before, gave to his features an expression ... an expression, as though
he would say: 'Well, what more have you to tell? Come, out with your
ideas!' I looked more attentively into his face.... It struck me as
eager, a little ironical, a little arrogant even. But that did not
hinder me from bringing out my ideas. On the contrary. 'You're showing
off,' was my thought; 'so I am not going to spare you!' And there and
then I proceeded straightway to enlarge upon the mischief of yielding
to impulsive feelings, upon the duty of every man to respect the
freedom and personal life of another man--in short, I proceeded to
enunciate useful and appropriate counsel. Holding forth in this manner,
I walked up and down the room, to be more at ease. Tarhov did not
interrupt me, and did not stir from his seat; he only played with his
fingers on his chin.

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