The Man Who Was Afraid

“You are making sport of me,” said Foma, sternly. And she opened her eyes wide and inquired in a tone of great astonishment:

“How do I make sport of you? What does it mean to make sport?”

And her face looked so angelic that he could not help believing her.

“I love you! I love you! It is impossible not to love you!” said he hotly, and immediately added sadly, lowering his voice: “But you don’t need it!”

“There you have it!” sighed Medinskaya, satisfied, drawing back from him. “I am always extremely pleased to hear you say this, with so much youthfulness and originality. Would you like to kiss my hand?”

Without saying a word he seized her thin, white little hand and carefully bending down to it, he passionately kissed it for a long time. Smiling and graceful, not in the least moved by his passion, she freed her hand from his. Pensively, she looked at him with that strange glitter in her eyes, which always confused Foma; she examined him as something rare and extremely curious, and said:

“How much strength and power and freshness of soul you possess! Do you know? You merchants are an altogether new race, an entire race with original traditions, with an enormous energy of body and soul. Take you, for instance – you are a precious stone, and you should be polished. Oh!”

Whenever she told him: “You,” or “according to your merchant fashion,” it seemed to Foma that she was pushing him away from her with these words. This at once saddened and offended him. He was silent, looking at her small maidenly figure, which was always somehow particularly well dressed, always sweet-scented like a flower. Sometimes he was seized with a wild, coarse desire to embrace and kiss her. But her beauty and the fragility of her thin, supple body awakened in him a fear of breaking and disfiguring her, and her calm, caressing voice and the clear, but somewhat cautious look of her eyes chilled his passion; it seemed to him as though she were looking straight into his soul, divining all his thoughts. But these bursts of emotion were rare. Generally the youth regarded Medinskaya with adoration, admiring everything in her – her beauty, her words, her dresses. And beside this adoration there was in him a painfully keen consciousness of his remoteness from her, of her supremacy over him.

These relations were established between them within a short time; after two or three meetings Medinskaya was in full possession of the youth and she slowly began to torture him. Evidently she liked to have a healthy, strong youth at her mercy; she liked to rouse and tame the animal in him merely with her voice and glance, and confident of the power of her superiority, she found pleasure in thus playing with him. On leaving her, he was usually half-sick from excitement, bearing her a grudge, angry with himself, filled with many painful and intoxicating sensations. And about two days later he would come to undergo the same torture again.

One day he asked her timidly:

“Sophya Pavlovna! Have you ever had any children?”

“No.”

“I thought not!” exclaimed Foma with delight.

She cast at him the look of a very naive little girl, and said:

“What made you think so? And why do you want to know whether I had any children or not?”

Foma blushed, and, bending his head, began to speak to her in a heavy voice, as though he was lifting every word from the ground and as though each word weighed a few puds.

“You see – a woman who – has given birth to children – such a woman has altogether different eyes.”

“So? What kind are they then?”

“Shameless!” Foma blurted out.

Medinskaya broke into her silver laughter, and Foma, looking at her, also began to laugh.

“Excuse me!” said he, at length. “Perhaps I’ve said something wrong, improper.”

“Oh, no, no! You cannot say anything improper. You are a pure, amiable boy. And so, my eyes are not shameless?”

“Yours are like an angel’s!” announced Foma with enthusiasm, looking at her with beaming eyes. And she glanced at him, as she had never done before; her look was that of a mother, a sad look of love mingled with fear for the beloved.

“Go, dear one. I am tired; I need a rest,” she said to him, as she rose without looking at him. He went away submissively.

For some time after this incident her attitude toward him was stricter and more sincere, as though she pitied him, but later their relations assumed the old form of the cat-and-mouse play.

Foma’s relation toward Medinskaya could not escape his godfather’s notice, and one day the old man asked him, with a malicious grimace:

“Foma! You had better feel your head more often so that you may not lose it by accident.”

“What do you mean?” asked Foma.

“I speak of Sonka. You are going to see her too often.”

“What has that to do with you?” said Foma, rather rudely. “And why do you call her Sonka?”

“It’s nothing to me. I would lose nothing if you should be fleeced. And as to calling her Sonka – everybody knows that is her name. So does everybody know that she likes to rake up the fire with other people’s hands.”

“She is clever!” announced Foma, firmly, frowning and hiding his hands in his pockets. “She is intelligent.”

“Clever, that’s true! How cleverly she arranged that entertainment; there was an income of two thousand four hundred roubles, the expenses – one thousand nine hundred; the expenses really did not even amount to a thousand roubles, for everybody does everything for her for nothing. Intelligent! She will educate you, and especially will those idlers that run around her.”

“They’re not idlers, they are clever people!” replied Foma, angrily, contradicting himself now. “And I learn from them. What am I? I know nothing. What was I taught? While there they speak of everything – and each one has his word to say. Do not hinder me from being like a man.”

“Pooh! How you’ve learned to speak! With so much anger, like the hail striking against the roof! Very well, be like a man, but in order to be like a man it might be less dangerous for you to go to the tavern; the people there are after all better than Sophya’s people. And you, young man, you should have learned to discriminate one person from another. Take Sophya, for instance: What does she represent? An insect for the adornment of nature and nothing more!”

Intensely agitated, Foma set his teeth together and walked away from Mayakin, thrusting his hands still deeper into his pockets. But the old man soon started again a conversation about Medinskaya.

They were on their way back from the bay after an inspection of the steamers, and seated in a big and commodious sledge, they were enthusiastically discussing business matters in a friendly way. It was in March. The water under the sledge-runners was bubbling, the snow was already covered with a rather dirty fleece, and the sun shone warmly and merrily in the clear sky.

“Will you go to your lady as soon as we arrive?” asked Mayakin, unexpectedly, interrupting their business talk.

“I will,” said Foma, shortly, and with displeasure.

“Mm. Tell me, how often do you give her presents?” asked Mayakin, plainly and somewhat intimately.

“What presents? What for?” Foma wondered.

“You make her no presents? You don’t say. Does she live with you then merely so, for love’s sake?”

Foma boiled up with anger and shame, turned abruptly toward the old man and said reproachfully:

“Eh! You are an old man, and yet you speak so that it is a shame to listen to you! To say such a thing! Do you think she would come down to this?”

Mayakin smacked his lips and sang out in a mournful voice:

“What a blockhead you are! What a fool!” and suddenly grown angry, he spat out: “Shame upon you! All sorts of brutes drank out of the pot, nothing but the dregs remained, and now a fool has made a god unto himself of this dirty pot. Devil! You just go up to her and tell her plainly: ‘I want to be your lover. I am a young man, don’t charge me much for it.’”

“Godfather!” said Foma, sternly, in a threatening voice, “I cannot bear to hear such words. If it were someone else.”

“But who except myself would caution you? Good God!” Mayakin cried out, clasping his hands. “So she has led you by the nose all winter long! What a nose! What a beast she is!”

The old man was agitated; in his voice rang vexation, anger, even tears Foma had never before seen him in such a state, and looking at him, he was involuntarily silent.

“She will ruin you! Oh Lord! The Babylonian prostitute!”