No more did her mother speak of his uncouthness or of his other defects after that day when, remaining in a genuflectory position, she had sobbed out everything to her heart’s content, her cheek pressed against the arm of the chair. “I would have understood everything,” she said later to her husband, “understood and forgiven everything if only she really loved him. But that’s the dreadful part—” “No, I don’t quite agree with you,” interrupted her husband.
“I also thought at first that it was all mental. But her attitude to his illness convinces me to the contrary. Of course such a union is dangerous, and she could also have made a better choice … Although he’s from an old, noble family, his narrow profession has left a certain mark on him. Remember Irina who became an actress? Remember how she had changed when she came to us afterwards? All the same, disregarding all these defects, I consider him a good man. You’ll see, he’ll take up some useful occupation now. I don’t know about you, but I simply can’t bring myself to dissuade her any longer. In my opinion we should brace ourselves and accept the inevitable.”
He spoke briskly and at length, holding himself very straight and playing with the lid of his cigarette case.
“I feel just one thing,” repeated his wife, “She doesn’t love him.”
Chapter 11
In a rudimentary jacket minus one sleeve Luzhin, who was being renovated, stood in profile before a cheval glass, while a bald-headed tailor either chalked his shoulder and back or else jabbed pins into him, which he took with astonishing deftness from his mouth, where they seemed to grow naturally. From all the samples of cloth arranged neatly according to color in an album, Luzhin had chosen a dark gray square, and his fiancée spent a long time feeling the corresponding bolt of cloth, which the tailor threw with a hollow thud onto the counter, unwrapped with lightning speed, and pressed against his protruding stomach, as if covering up his nakedness.
She found that the material tended to crease easily, whereupon an avalanche of tight rolls of cloth began to cover the counter and the tailor, wetting his finger on his lower lip, unrolled and unrolled. Finally a cloth was chosen that was also dark gray, but soft and flexible, and even just a bit shaggy; and now Luzhin, distributed about the cheval glass in pieces, in sections, as if for visual instruction (… here we have a plump, clean-shaven face, here is the same face in profile, and here we have something rarely seen by the subject himself, the back of his head, fairly closely cropped, with folds in the neck and slightly protruding ears, pink where the light shines through …)
looked at himself and at the material, failing to recognize its former smooth, generous, virgin integrity. “I think it needs to be a bit narrower in front,” said his fiancée, and the tailor, taking a step backward, slit his eyes at Luzhin’s figure, purred with the polite trace of a smile that the gentleman was somewhat on the stout side, and then busied himself with some newborn lapels, pulling this and pinning that, while Luzhin in the meantime, with a gesture peculiar to all people in his position, held his arm slightly away from his body or else bent it at the elbow and looked at his wrist, trying to get accustomed to the sleeve. In passing, the tailor slashed him over the heart with chalk to indicate a small pocket, then pitilessly ripped off the sleeve that had seemed finished and began quickly to remove the pins from Luzhin’s stomach.
Besides a good business suit they made Luzhin a dress suit; and the old-fashioned tuxedo found at the bottom of his trunk was altered by the same tailor. His fiancée did not dare to ask why Luzhin had formerly needed a tuxedo and an opera hat, fearing to arouse chess memories, and therefore she never learned about a certain big dinner given in Birmingham, where incidentally Valentinov … Oh well, good luck to him.
The renovation of Luzhin’s envelope did not stop here. Shirts, ties and socks appeared—and Luzhin accepted all this with carefree interest. From the sanatorium he moved into a small, gaily papered room that had been rented on the second floor of his fiancée’s building, and when he moved in he had exactly the same feeling as in childhood when he had moved from country to town.
It was always strange, this settling into town. You went to bed and everything was so new: in the silence of the night the wooden pavement would come to life for several seconds of slow clip-clop, the windows were curtained more heavily and more sumptuously than at the manor; in darkness slightly relieved by the bright line of the incompletely closed door, the objects stopped expectantly, still not fully warmed up, still not having completely renewed their acquaintanceship after the long summer interval.
And when you woke up, there was sober, gray light outside the windows and the sun slipped through a milky haze in the sky, looking like the moon, and suddenly in the distance—a burst of military music: it approached in orange waves, was interrupted by the hurried beat of a drum, and soon everything died down, and in place of the puffed-out sounds of trumpets there came again the imperturbable clopping of hoofs and the subdued rattling of a St. Petersburg morning.
“You forget to put out the light in the corridor,” said, smiling, his landlady, an elderly German woman. “You forget to close your door at night.” And she also complained to his fiancée—saying he was absentminded like an old professor.
“Are you comfortable, Luzhin?” his fiancée kept inquiring. “Are you sleeping well, Luzhin? No, I know it’s not comfortable, but it will all change soon.” “There’s no need to put it off any longer,” muttered Luzhin, putting his arms around her and interlacing his fingers on her hip. “Sit down, sit down, there’s no need to put it off. Let’s do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. Most lawful matrimony.” “Yes, soon, soon,” she replied. “But it can’t be done in a single day. There’s still one more establishment. There you and I will hang on the wall for two weeks, and in the meantime your wife will come from Palermo, take a look at the names and say: Impossible—Luzhin’s mine.”
“It’s mislaid,” replied her mother when she inquired about her birth certificate. “I put it away and mislaid it. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.” The document, however, was found pretty quickly. And in any case it was too late now to warn, to forbid, to think up difficulties. The wedding rolled up with fatal smoothness, and could not be stopped as if one were standing on ice—slippery, nothing to catch hold of.
She was forced to submit and think up ways of embellishing and displaying her daughter’s fiancé so as not to be ashamed before other people, and she had to pluck up the courage to smile at the wedding, to play the role of the satisfied mother and to praise Luzhin’s honesty and goodness of heart. She also thought of how much money had gone on Luzhin and how much more was still to go, and she tried to expel a terrifying picture from her imagination: Luzhin disrobed, aflame with simian passion, and her stubbornly submissive, cold, cold daughter.
Meanwhile the frame for this picture was also ready. A not very expensive but decently furnished apartment was rented in the vicinity—on the fifth floor, it is true, but that did not matter—there was an elevator for Luzhin’s shortness of breath, and in any case the stairs were not steep and there was a chair on every landing beneath a stained-glass window.
From the spacious entrance hall, conventionally enlivened by silhouette drawings in black frames, a door to the left opened into the bedroom and a door to the right into the study. Farther down the right-hand side of the entrance hall was the door to the drawing room; the adjoining dining room had been made a little longer at the expense of the entrance hall, which at this point neatly turned into a corridor—a transformation chastely concealed by a plush portière on rings. To the left of the corridor was the bathroom, then the servant’s room and at the end, the kitchen.
The future mistress of the apartment liked the disposition of the rooms; their furniture was less to her taste. In the study stood some brown velvet armchairs, a bookcase crowned with a broad-shouldered, sharp-faced Dante in a bathing cap, and a large, emptyish desk with an unknown past and an unknown future. A rickety lamp on a black spiraled standard topped with an orange shade rose beside a small couch, on which someone had forgotten a light-haired teddy bear and a fat-faced toy dog with broad pink soles and a black spot over one eye. Above the couch hung an imitation Gobelin tapestry depicting some dancing rustics.
From the study—if the sliding doors were given a slight
