“What a disgrace and scandal this is to me!” he whispered without stirring from the spot. “Things have reached such a pitch that it is as much as the Nikoläievs can do to endure my company.”
The lights in their drawing-room were now extinguished. “They are in their bedroom now,” thought Romashov, and at once he began fancying that Nikoläiev and Shurochka were then talking about him whilst making their toilet for the night with the indifference and absence of bashfulness at each other’s presence that is characteristic of married couples. The wife is sitting in her petticoat in front of the mirror, combing her hair. Vladimir Yefimovitch is sitting in his night-shirt at the edge of the bed, and saying in a sleepy but angry tone, whilst flushed with the exertion of taking off his boots: “Hark you, Shurochka, that infernal bore, your dear Romashov, will be the death of me with his insufferable visits. And I really can’t understand how you can tolerate him.” Then to this frank and candid speech Shurochka replies, without turning round, and with her mouth full of hairpins: “Be good enough to remember, sir, he is not my Romochka, but yours.”
Another five minutes elapsed before Romashov, still tortured by these bitter and painful thoughts, made up his mind to continue his journey. Along the whole extent of the palings belonging to the Nikoläievs’ house he walked with stealthy steps, cautiously and gently dragging his feet from the mire, as if he feared he might be discovered and arrested as a common vagrant. To go straight home was not to his liking at all. Nay, he dared not even think of his gloomy, low-pitched, cramped room with its single window and repulsive furniture. “By Jove! why shouldn’t I look up Nasanski, just to annoy her?” thought he all of a sudden, whereupon he experienced the delightful satisfaction of revenge.
“She reproached me for my friendship with Nasanski. Well, I shall just for that very reason pay him a visit.”
He raised eyes to heaven, and said to himself passionately, as he pressed his hands against his heart—
“I swear—I swear that to-day I have visited them for the last time. I will no longer endure this mortification.”
And immediately afterwards he added mentally, as was his ingrained habit—
“His expressive black eyes glistened with resolution and contempt.”
But Romashov’s eyes, unfortunately, were neither “black” nor “expressive,” but of a very common colour, slightly varying between yellow and green.
Nasanski tenanted a room in a comrade’s—Lieutenant Siégerscht’s—house. This Siégerscht was most certainly the oldest lieutenant in the whole Russian Army. Notwithstanding his unimpeachable conduct as an officer and the fact of his having served in the war with Turkey, through some unaccountable disposition of fate, his military career seemed closed, and every hope of further advancement was apparently lost. He was a widower, with four little children and forty-eight roubles a month, on which sum, strangely enough, he managed to get along. It was his practice to hire large flats which he afterwards, in turn, let out to his brother officers. He took in boarders, fattened and sold fowls and turkeys, and no one understood better than he how to purchase wood and other necessaries cheap and at the right time. He bathed his children himself in a common trough, prescribed for them from his little medicine-chest when they were ill, and, with his sewing-machine, made them tiny shirts, under-vests, and drawers. Like many other officers, Siégerscht had, in his bachelor days, interested himself in woman’s work, and acquired a readiness with his needle that proved very useful in hard times. Malicious tongues went so far as to assert that he secretly and stealthily sold his handiwork.