Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (7 page)

At the beginning of the conversation she liked the St. Petersburg fop even less. His voice proved to be low and lazy, and he drawled his vowels carelessly. A smile of bored politeness wandered listlessly over his face.

Subsequently, when the Zovolzhians had had an opportunity to get to know Vladimir Lvovich better, it became clear that such was his usual manner when he first spoke with people new to him, if he had not set himself the goal of producing a particular impression on the other party. This rendered even more powerful the effect of the sudden metamorphoses, when listlessness and idle talk were replaced by forcefulness and the unexpected
touché
—for Bubentsov was a perfect master of this technique.

With the baron and baroness he began a conversation about all sorts of inconsequentialities having nothing at all to do with the purpose of his visit: about how tiring his journey had been, about the latest fashions, about the advantages that English horses possessed over Arabian ones. Anton Antonovich listened attentively, agreeing with everything and trying to gauge how dangerous this windbag was. At the same time, he himself affected a well-intentioned dullness of wit, in which, let us note, he was remarkably successful. The conclusion reached by the baron was not reassuring: Bubentsov appeared to be dangerous, and even extremely so.

As a matter of principle, Ludmila Platonovna did not take part in the worldly conversation, but sat with a severe expression on her face, examining with distaste the remarkably small, elegant hands of this dangerous official as they toyed with a lace fan (the evening had proved muggy) and thinking that here they had a would-be Count Nulin.

It took the visitor only five minutes to realize which of them was the more important and he almost completely stopped looking at the governor, directing his words exclusively to the governor’s wife. This gave the impression that he was taking pleasure in irritating Ludmila Platonovna with that bored, condescending glance from under his superb lashes. This outrageous inspection made her feel very uncomfortable, as if she had received her visitor in an incomplete state of dress.

Toward the end of the half-hour visit the following incident occurred. The secretary looked into the hall and the baron apologized and walked across to the desk to sign some important document (in fact, we even know which document it was—the removal of excise duty from the book trade). Immediately Bubentsov inquired in the same lazy manner, without changing his tone of voice or expression: “I have heard, my dear Ludmila Platonovna, that you are extremely active in charity work? They say that you are quite indefatigable? Praiseworthy, most praiseworthy…”

Stung by the tone in which these words were spoken, the governor’s wife replied dryly, even acidly: “And what pastime, pray, could possibly be more worthy for a woman in my position?”

An eyebrow so regular that it seemed painted rose in astonishment, and one glinting eye gazed straight into Ludmila Platonovna’s soul, while the other, on the contrary, shrank and became almost invisible.

“Why, what a question. One can see immediately that you have never loved and, I think, do not even have any idea of what love is.”

His hostess blushed, but could not think of anything to say, and in any case she felt doubtful whether she had heard right, because the strange words had been pronounced without the slightest expression. At this point Anton Antonovich returned, so that the moment for a rebuff was in any case lost.

For another five minutes or so after that the visitor chatted about some nonsense or other, but now the governor’s wife watched him differently, with an air of either fright or anticipation.

And as he was already taking his leave and stepping up to her hand (this time for some reason Ludmila Platonovna offered no resistance to the kiss) the inspector whispered: “The whole of life will slip through your fingers like that. It’s a sin.”

He was an adroit man—he took advantage of the fact that just at that moment the governor was engrossed in a yawn that was cracking his jaw, delicately covering his mouth with his skinny hand, and was therefore unable to hear the impertinent words.

That was all that happened. But to the surprise of everyone, and above all of Anton Antonovich himself, from that day Ludmila Platonovna began to favor the visitor from Petersburg—one might even say that she took him under her wing. He took to visiting her apartments frequently, entering unceremoniously, quite unannounced. And then the governor’s house rang with the sounds of the piano, two voices singing duets, and happy laughter. At first Anton Antonovich attempted to join in with the merrymaking but, tormented by his own obvious superfluousness, he would leave, supposedly to deal with some urgent matters, and then suffer even greater agonies in the quiet of his study, wringing his dry white hands. There were also picnic outings with a narrow circle of friends and boating trips and other forms of amusement allowed by the proprieties. Perhaps Vladimir Lvovich was motivated by a genuine liking for the baroness, who, as we have already mentioned, possessed a brilliance both of beauty and of qualities of the heart, but one other thing is certain: A close friendship with the most influential woman in the province was also required by the synodical inspector for other purposes.

THE NEW ARRIVAL set out directly from the von Haggenaus’ to visit the postmaster’s wife, Olympiada Savelievna Shestago, the mistress of a salon run in opposition to that of the governor. At that time Zavolzhsk society was divided into two secret parties that might provisionally be defined as conservative and progressive (out of old habit the latter was also referred to as liberal, although in present-day Russia this word is decidedly going out of fashion). Both camps were headed by women. The conservative party was, as it ought to be, the ruling party, and its true leader was Ludmila Platonovna. This was the banner toward which the majority of state officials and their wives were drawn, by virtue of position, occupation, and natural conviction.

The party of opposition consisted for the most part of young people and the bolder individuals among the teachers, engineers, and telegraph or postal workers; moreover the political orientation of the latter was determined by their being members of a department that was headed by Olympiada Savelievna’s husband, who was totally enslaved by his better half. In the town Madame Shestago was considered a beauty, but in a completely different style from the governor’s wife: She did not captivate with her stateliness and sweetness of character but, on the contrary, with her leanness and sharpness of tongue, or, as Olympiada Savelievna herself defined these qualities, her grace and intellectualism. This lady came from a family of merchant millionaires and she had brought her husband a dowry of three hundred thousand, a fact she never forgot to remind him about at the slightest sign of clouds on the vault of their domestic sky, which for the most part remained quite cloudless. In her rich and hospitable home, customs that were exotic for Zavolzhsk were encouraged, such as atheism, the reading of prohibited newspapers, and free discussion of parliamentarianism. Anybody was free to turn up at Olympiada Savelievna’s Thursdays without ceremony, and very many did come, because, as we have already noted, the fare was notable for its abundance and by provincial standards the conversations were interesting.

Since Bubentsov’s first day of visits happened to fall on a Thursday, he made an appearance in the progressives’ camp without concerning himself about being invited, which testified—as did the very fact that he visited the postmaster’s wife at all—to his thorough knowledge of the customs and balance of forces in the province.

The appearance of the St. Petersburgian provoked a genuine furor among the liberals, since they had already agreed among themselves that this agent of reaction had been sent because of them, in order to eradicate freethinking and sedition in Zavolzhsk society. On one hand, this was alarming, but on the other hand it was really rather agreeable (just imagine the chief procurator himself feeling concerned about the Carbonari of Zavolzhsk), though on the whole it was more alarming.

The “agent of reaction” proved not to be frightening at all, however. In the first place, he demonstrated a total absence of any obscurantism whatever and spoke quite freely about the latest literature—about Count Tolstoy and even about the French naturalist school, which was known in the town mostly from hearsay. The guest also produced quite an impression with his razor-sharp tongue. When the inspector of public schools, Ilya Nikolaevich Fedyakin, reputed among the progressives to be a notably acerbic wit, attempted to put the overconfident speaker in his place, it became clear that Vladimir Lvovich was a mouthful too large for the native-bred carper to chew.

“It is agreeable to hear such bold judgments from the lips of a servant of pious humility,” said Ilya Nikolaevich, squinting ironically and stroking his beard, which signaled his serious irritation. “I suppose you often discuss physiological love in Maupassant with the chief procurator?”

“‘Physiological love’ is a mere tautology,” Bubentsov interrupted his opponent sharply. “Or is the romantic view of relations between the sexes still predominant here in Zavolzhsk?”

Olympiada Savelievna even blushed, she felt so embarrassed that this intelligent man should see Fedyakin sitting at the head of the table, in the place of honor in her home, and she hastily expressed her opposition to all hypocrisy and dissembling in sexual partnership.

With the postmaster’s wife the expeditious Petersburgian acted even more decisively than with the governor’s. As he was leaving—earlier than all the other guests, as if giving them an opportunity to gossip about him—Olympiada Savelievna, by this time absolutely blinded by his metropolitan brilliance, came out to see her dear guest to the hallway. She extended her hand to be shaken (naturally, kissing was not the accepted manner among the progressives), and instead of her hand, Bubentsov took her elbow. With a gentle but astonishingly powerful movement, he pulled his hostess toward him and, without saying a word, kissed her full on the lips with such force that poor Olympiada Savelievna, who in all her twenty-nine years of life had never been kissed like that by anyone, felt her legs turn to cotton wool and began seeing stars. She returned to her guests quite pink and cut off the vengeful Ilya Nikolaevich’s attempts to denigrate the departed visitor in a most energetic fashion.

Thus on his very first day in the province, Konstantin Petrovich’s envoy had established friendly relations with both queens of Zavolzhsk, and his friendship with Olympiada Savelievna was especially agreeable, since this lady’s house directly adjoined the building of the post office, the director of which was her husband, with whom Bubentsov was very soon also on a friendly footing, so that he could enter his office without ceremony and had unlimited access to the only telegraph apparatus for the whole of Zavolzhie. Vladimir Lvovich made assiduous use of this privilege and even managed without the services of a telegrapher, since it turned out that he knew how to use the cunning Baudot apparatus quite splendidly. And so it sometimes happened that the synodical inspector would enter the post office after midnight, despatch something, receive something, and generally behave quite as if he was at home.

BUT WHILE THIS Baltic Varangian’s triumphs among the local ladies were overwhelming and undisputable, with the men things did not go so smoothly.

Bubentsov’s only clear conquest in this field (the postmaster Shestago does not count, because he is not an independent individual) was his alliance with the police chief, Lagrange.

There were specific reasons for this. Felix Stanislavovich Lagrange was a man new to the town, sent to replace the recently deceased Lieutenant-Colonel Gulko, who was for many years a faithful helper of Anton Antonovich and His Grace Mitrofanii in all their undertakings. Everybody here had loved the dead man, they were all used to him, and they greeted the new ministerial appointee with caution. The new police chief was a large, handsome man with hair neatly trimmed at the temples and a picturesquely waxed mustache. He seemed to be obliging, and deferential to his superiors, but the bishop did not like him—he had asked to be allowed to take confession with His Grace, but the words he spoke were insincere and he tried far too hard to make a show of his piety.

Zavolzhsk was not to the police chief’s liking, either, primarily because it was a very quiet and uneventful town. Fortunately, the province was entirely uninfected by the revolutionary plague, because before Mitrofanii and the baron’s time it had not managed to gain a foothold, and after that it had no opportunity. We have no large factories or universities, nor are there any particular social injustices to be observed here, and, it being possible to complain to the authorities about those that do exist, there does not really seem to be any point in rebelling. Contrary to normal state practice, there is not even a department of gendarmes in the province, because when there used to be one, idleness drove the men to drink, or they lapsed into melancholy. In Zavolzhie the police chief is also in charge of all gendarme business, a fact that had initially tempted Felix Stanislavovich into accepting this appointment. It was only afterward that he realized what a cruel joke fate had played on him.