The Jew and Other Stories eBook

I was fatherless and motherless, and my aunt spoiled me.  She placed the whole of the ground floor at my complete disposal.  My rooms were furnished very elegantly, not at all like a student’s rooms in fact:  there were pink curtains in the bedroom, and a muslin canopy, adorned with blue rosettes, towered over my bed.  Those rosettes were, I’ll own, rather an annoyance to me; to my thinking, such ‘effeminacies’ were calculated to lower me in the eyes of my companions.  As it was, they nicknamed me ‘the boarding-school miss.’  I could never succeed in forcing myself to smoke.  I studied—­why conceal my shortcomings?—­very lazily, especially at the beginning of the course.  I went out a great deal.  My aunt had bestowed on me a wide sledge, fit for a general, with a pair of sleek horses.  At the houses of ‘the gentry’ my visits were rare, but at the theatre I was quite at home, and I consumed masses of tarts at the restaurants.  For all that, I permitted myself no breach of decorum, and behaved very discreetly, en jeune homme de bonne maison.  I would not for anything in the world have pained my kind aunt; and besides I was naturally of a rather cool temperament.

II

From my earliest years I had been fond of chess; I had no idea of the science of the game, but I didn’t play badly.  One day in a cafe, I was the spectator of a prolonged contest at chess, between two players, of whom one, a fair-haired young man of about five-and-twenty, struck me as playing well.  The game ended in his favour; I offered to play a match with him.  He agreed,... and in the course of an hour, beat me easily, three times running.

‘You have a natural gift for the game,’ he pronounced in a courteous tone, noticing probably that my vanity was suffering; ’but you don’t know the openings.  You ought to study a chess-book—­Allgacir or Petrov.’

‘Do you think so?  But where can I get such a book?’

‘Come to me; I will give you one.’

He gave me his name, and told me where he was living.  Next day I went to see him, and a week later we were almost inseparable.

III

My new acquaintance was called Alexander Davidovitch Fustov.  He lived with his mother, a rather wealthy woman, the widow of a privy councillor, but he occupied a little lodge apart and lived quite independently, just as I did at my aunt’s.  He had a post in the department of Court affairs.  I became genuinely attached to him.  I had never in my life met a young man more ‘sympathetic.’  Everything about him was charming and attractive:  his graceful figure, his bearing, his voice, and especially his small, delicate face with the golden-blue eyes, the elegant, as it were coquettishly moulded little nose, the unchanging amiable smile on the crimson lips, the light curls of soft hair over the rather narrow, snow-white brow.  Fustov’s character