In fact, on her arrival in Samovarnov, Anninka found her sister quite luxuriously situated and planning to give up the stage. Lubinka's admirer, the zemstvo official Gavrilo Stepanych Lyulkin, was a retired captain of the Hussars, recently a bel homme, but now somewhat corpulent. His appearance and manners and views taken separately were conspicuously noble, but taken together they gave one the strong impression that the man was altogether free from scruples. Lubinka received Anninka with open arms and told her a room had been prepared for her at the lodgings.
Anninka, still under the influence of her trip to Golovliovo, bridled up at the suggestion. The sisters exchanged tart words, and soon afterwards they separated. Involuntarily Anninka recalled the words of the Volpino parson, who had told her it was hard to safeguard a maiden's "honor" in the acting profession.
Anninka went to live at a hotel and broke off all relations with her sister. Easter passed. The next week the theatres opened, and Anninka found out that her sister's place was already filled by Nalimova, a girl from Kazan, a mediocre actress, but utterly unconstrained in the movements of her body. As usual, Anninka played Pericola and enchanted the Samovarnov theatregoers. On her return to the hotel, she found an envelope in her room containing a hundred ruble bill and a laconic note which read: "Should anything happen, you get as much. Merchant Kukishev, dealer in fancy goods." Anninka was enraged and went to complain to the hotel-keeper. He told her Kukishev had this peculiar habit of greeting the newly arrived actresses, and otherwise was a harmless man and it did not pay to take offence. Anninka sealed up the letter and the money in an envelope, sent it back the very next day, and regained her composure.
But Kukishev was more persistent than the hotel-keeper had reported him to be. He was among Lyulkin's friends and was on good terms with Lubinka. He was quite well-to-do and, besides, as a member of the city administration was in a most convenient position with regard to the city treasury. And like Lyulkin, boldness was not his least virtue. According to the taste of market people he possessed a seductive appearance, reminding one of the beetle, which, as the song has it, Masha found in the fields instead of berries:
"A beetle black, and on his crown
Nice curly hair, with whiskers smart,
His eyebrows colored a dark-brown,
The picture of my own sweetheart."
Being the happy possessor of such looks he thought he had the right to be aggressive, all the more so as Lubinka explicitly promised him her cooperation.
Lubinka, apparently, had burned all her bridges, and her reputation was by no means a pleasant topic in her sister's ears. Every night, it was said, a merry band caroused in her rooms from midnight till morning, Lubinka presiding and appearing as a "gypsy," half naked (at this, Lyulkin, addressing his intoxicated friends, would cry out, "Look, there's a breast!") and with loosened hair. She would sing to the accompaniment of a guitar:
"How I did love it with my mash,
Who had the darlingest mustache!"
Anninka listened to the stories about her sister and became greatly worried. What surprised her most was that Lubinka sang the ditty about the "mash who had the darlingest mustache" in a gypsy-like manner, just like the celebrated Matryusha of Moscow. Anninka always gave her sister due credit, and had she been told that Lubinka sang couplets from Old-time Colonels with unsurpassed excellence, she would have considered it quite natural and would have readily believed it. The theatergoers of Kursk, Tambov and Penza had not yet forgotten with what inimitable naïveté Lubinka sang the most atrocious ambiguities in her soft little voice. But that Lubinka could sing like a gypsy—pardon me! A lie! She, Anninka, could sing like that, no doubt of it. It was her genre, her business, and everyone in Kursk who had seen her in the play, Russian Romances Personified, would willingly testify to it.
Anninka would take the guitar, sling the striped sash over her shoulder, sit down on a chair, cross her legs and begin: "I-ekh! I-akh!" It was the very manner of Matryusha the gypsy.