Emilie went off into a giggle.
“Come, that’s enough,” muttered
Kuzma Vassilyevitch, and he got up from the sofa.
“That’s enough giggling about nothing.
If you can’t think of anything more sensible,
I’ll go home.... I’ll go home,”
he repeated, seeing that she was still laughing.
Emilie subsided.
“Come, stay; I won’t.... Only you
must brush your hair.”
“No, never mind.... Don’t trouble.
I’d better go,” said Kuzma Vassilyevitch,
and he took up his cap.
Emilie pouted.
“Fie, how cross he is! A regular Russian!
All Russians are cross. Now he is going.
Fie! Yesterday he promised me five roubles and
today he gives me nothing and goes away.”
“I haven’t any money on me,” Kuzma
Vassilyevitch muttered grumpily in the doorway.
“Good-bye.”
Emilie looked after him and shook her finger.
“No money! Do you hear, do you hear what
he says? Oh, what deceivers these Russians are!
But wait a bit, you pug.... Auntie, come here,
I have something to tell you.”
That evening as Kuzma Vassilyevitch was undressing
to go to bed, he noticed that the upper edge of his
leather belt had come unsewn for about three inches.
Like a careful man he at once procured a needle and
thread, waxed the thread and stitched up the hole himself.
He paid, however, no attention to this apparently
trivial circumstance.
The whole of the next day Kuzma Vassilyevitch devoted
to his official duties; he did not leave the house
even after dinner and right into the night was scribbling
and copying out his report to his superior officer,
mercilessly disregarding the rules of spelling, always
putting an exclamation mark after the word but
and a semi-colon after however. Next morning
a barefoot Jewish boy in a tattered gown brought him
a letter from Emilie—the first letter that
Kuzma Vassilyevitch had received from her.
“Mein allerliebstep Florestan,” she wrote
to him, “can you really so cross with your Zuckerpuppchen
be that you came not yesterday? Please be not
cross if you wish not your merry Emilie to weep very
bitterly and come, be sure, at 5 o’clock to-day.”
(The figure 5 was surrounded with two wreaths.) “I
will be very, very glad. Your amiable Emilie.”
Kuzma Vassilyevitch was inwardly surprised at the accomplishments
of his charmer, gave the Jew boy a copper coin and
told him to say, “Very well, I will come.”
Kuzma Vassilyevitch kept his word: five o’clock
had not struck when he was standing before Madame
Fritsche’s gate. But to his surprise he
did not find Emilie at home; he was met by the lady
of the house herself who—wonder of wonders!—dropping
a preliminary curtsey, informed him that Emilie had
been obliged by unforeseen circumstances to go out
but she would soon be back and begged him to wait.
Madame Fritsche had on a neat white cap; she smiled,
spoke in an ingratiating voice and evidently tried
to give an affable expression to her morose countenance,
which was, however, none the more prepossessing for
that, but on the contrary acquired a positively sinister
aspect.
