"Shouldn't we end it altogether?" Afanasy Ivanovich asked slyly.

"It's my turn, but I shall exercise my privilege and not tell anything," Ptitsyn said resolutely.

"You don't want to?"

"I can't, Nastasya Filippovna; and generally I consider such a petit jeu impossible."

"General, I believe it's your turn next," Nastasya Filippovna turned to him. "If you decline, too, then everything will go to pieces after you, and I'll be very sorry, because I was counting on telling a deed 'from my own life' at the end, only I wanted to do it after you and Afanasy Ivanovich, because you should encourage me," she ended, laughing.

"Oh, if you promise, too," the general cried warmly, "then I'm ready to tell you my whole life; but, I confess, while waiting for my turn I've already prepared my anecdote . . ."

"And by the mere look of his excellency, one can tell with what special literary pleasure he has polished his little anecdote," Ferdyshchenko, still somewhat abashed, ventured to observe with a venomous smile.

Nastasya Filippovna glanced fleetingly at the general and also smiled to herself. But it was obvious that anguish and irritation were growing stronger and stronger in her. Afanasy Ivanovich became doubly frightened, hearing her promise of a story.

"It has happened to me, ladies and gentlemen, as to everyone,

to do certain not entirely elegant deeds in my life," the general began, "but the strangest thing of all is that I consider the short anecdote I'm about to tell you the nastiest anecdote in my whole life. Meanwhile some thirty-five years have passed; but I have never been able, in recalling it, to break free of a certain, so to speak, gnawing impression in my heart. The affair itself, however, was extremely stupid: at that time I had just been made a lieutenant and was pulling my load in the army. Well, everybody knows what a lieutenant is: blood boiling and just pennies to live on. I had an orderly then, Nikifor, who was terribly solicitous of my livelihood: he saved, mended, cleaned and scrubbed, and even pilfered everywhere, whatever he could to add to the household. He was a most trustworthy and honest man. I, of course, was strict but fair. At some point we were stationed in a little town. I was quartered on the outskirts, with a retired lieutenant's wife, and a widow at that. The old hag was eighty or thereabouts. Her little house was decrepit, wretched, wooden, and she didn't even have a serving woman, so poor she was. But the main thing about her was that she had once had the most numerous family and relations; but some had died in the course of her life, others had gone away, still others had forgotten the old woman, and her husband she had buried forty-five years earlier. A few years before then her niece had lived with her, hunchbacked and wicked as a witch, people said, and once she had even bitten the old woman's finger, but she had died, too, so that for some three years the old woman had been getting along all by herself. My life with her was terribly boring, and she herself was so empty I couldn't get anywhere with her. In the end she stole a rooster from me. The affair has remained cloudy to this day, but no one else could have done it. We quarreled over that rooster, and considerably, but here it so happened that, at my first request, I was transferred to other quarters on the opposite side of town, with the numerous family of a merchant with a great big beard—I remember him as if it were yesterday. Nikifor and I are joyfully moving out, we're indignantly leaving the old woman. About three days go by, I come back from drill, Nikifor tells me, 'You shouldn't have left our bowl with the former landlady, Your Honor, we have nothing to serve soup in.' I, naturally, am amazed: 'How's that? Why would our bowl have stayed with the landlady?' The astonished Nikifor goes on to report that the landlady hadn't given him our bowl when we were moving because, since I had broken a pot of hers, she was keeping our

bowl in exchange for her pot, and I had supposedly suggested doing it that way. Such baseness on her part naturally drove me beyond the final limits; my blood boiled, I jumped up and flew to her. By the time I reach the old woman I'm, so to speak, already beside myself; I see her sitting all alone in the corner of the front hall, as if hiding from the sun, resting her cheek on her hand. I immediately loosed a whole thunderstorm on her: 'You're this,' I said, 'and you're that!'—you know, in the best Russian way. Only I see something strange is happening: she sits, her face is turned to me, her eyes are popping out, and she says not a word in reply, and she looks at me so strangely, strangely, as if she's swaying back and forth. I finally calm down, look closely at her, ask her something—not a word in reply. I stand there irresolutely; flies are buzzing, the sun is setting, silence; completely bewildered, I finally leave. Before I reached home I was summoned to the major's, then I had to pass by my company, so that I got home quite late. Nikifor's first words: 'You know, Your Honor, our landlady died.' 'When?' 'This evening, an hour and a half ago.' Which meant that, just at the time when I was abusing her, she was departing. I was so struck, I must tell you, that I had a hard time recovering. It even made its way into my thoughts, you know, even into my dreams at night. I, of course, have no prejudices, but on the third day I went to church for the funeral. In short, the more time passed, the more I thought about her. Nothing special, only I pictured it occasionally and felt rather bad. The main thing is, how did I reason in the end? First, the woman was, so to speak, a personal being, what's known in our time as a human; she lived, lived a long time, too long finally. She once had children, a husband, a family, relations, everything around her was at the boil, there were all these smiles, so to speak, and suddenly—total zero, everything's gone smash, she's left alone, like . . . some sort of fly bearing a curse from time immemorial. And then, finally, God brings her to an end. At sunset, on a quiet summer evening, my old woman also flies away—of course, this is not without its moralizing idea; and at that very moment, instead of, so to speak, a farewell tear, this desperate young lieutenant, jaunty and arms akimbo, sees her off the face of the earth with the Russian element of riotous abuse over a lost bowl! No doubt I was at fault, and though, owing to the distance in time and to changes in my character, I've long regarded my deed as someone else's, I nevertheless continue to regret it. So that, I repeat, I find it strange, the

more so as, even if I am at fault, it's not so completely: why did she decide to die precisely at that moment? Naturally, there's some excuse here—that the deed was in a certain sense psychological— but all the same I never felt at peace until I began, about fifteen years ago, to keep two permanent sick old women at my expense in the almshouse, with the purpose of easing their last days of earthly life by decent maintenance. I intend to leave capital for it in perpetuity. Well, sirs, that's all. I repeat that I may be to blame for many things in life, but I consider this occasion, in all conscience, the nastiest deed of my whole life."

"And instead of the nastiest, Your Excellency has told us one of the good deeds of your life. You've hoodwinked Ferdyshchenko!" concluded Ferdyshchenko.

"Indeed, General, I never imagined that you had a good heart after all; it's even a pity," Nastasya Filippovna said casually.

"A pity? Why is that?" asked the general, laughing amiably and sipping, not without self-satisfaction, from his champagne.