The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (55 page)

“Could this, too, have been a dream?” His heart pounding to the point of bursting, he felt around him with his hands.
Yes, he was lying on his bed in the same position in which he had fallen asleep.
Before him stood the screen; moonlight filled the room.
Through the chink in the screen he could see the portrait properly covered with a sheet—as he himself had covered it.
And so, this, too, had been a dream!
But his clenched hand felt even now as if something had been in it.
The pounding of his heart was hard, almost terrible; the heaviness on his chest was unbearable.
He looked through the chink and fixed his eyes on the sheet.
And now he saw clearly that the sheet was beginning to come away, as if hands were fumbling under it, trying to throw it off.
“Lord God, what is this!” he cried out, crossing himself desperately, and woke up.

And this had also been a dream!
He jumped from the bed, half demented, frantic, no longer able to explain what was happening to him: the oppression of a nightmare or a household spirit, delirious raving or a living vision.
Trying to calm somewhat his mental agitation and the stormy blood that throbbed in tense pulsations through all his veins, he went to the window and opened the vent pane.
A chill breath of wind revived him.
Moonlight still lay on the roofs and white walls of the houses, though small clouds passed across the sky more often.
Everything was still: occasionally there came the distant rattle of a droshky, whose coachman was sleeping somewhere in an out-of-sight alley, lulled by his lazy nag as he waited for a late passenger.
He gazed for a long time, thrusting his head out the vent.
The sky was already beginning to show signs of approaching dawn; finally he felt the approach of drowsiness, slammed the vent shut, left the window, went to bed, and soon fell sound asleep, like the dead.

He woke up very late and felt himself in the unpleasant condition that conies over a man after fume poisoning; his head ached unpleasantly.
The room was bleak; an unpleasant dampness drizzled through the air, penetrating the cracks in his windows, obstructed by paintings or primed canvases.
Gloomy, disgruntled, he sat down like a wet rooster on his tattered couch, not knowing himself what to undertake, what to do, and finally recalled the whole of his dream.
As he recalled it, the dream presented itself to his imagination so oppressively alive that he even began to wonder whether it had indeed been a dream and a mere delirium, and not something else, not an apparition.
Pulling off the sheet, he studied this terrible portrait in the light of day.
The eyes were indeed striking in their extraordinary aliveness, yet he found nothing especially terrible in them; only, it was as if some inexplicable, unpleasant feeling remained in one’s soul.
For all that, he still could not be completely certain that it had been a dream.
It seemed to him that amidst the dream there had been some terrible fragment of reality.
It seemed that even in the very gaze and expression of the old man something was as if saying that he had visited him that night; his hand felt the heaviness that had only just lain in it, as if someone had snatched it away only a moment before.
It seemed to him that if he had only held on to the packet more tightly, it would surely have stayed in his hand after he woke up.

“My.
God, if I had at least part of that money!” he said, sighing heavily, and in his imagination all the packets he had seen, with the alluring inscription of “1,000 Gold Roubles” began to pour from the sack.
The packets came unwrapped, gold gleamed, was wrapped up again, and he sat staring fixedly and mindlessly into the empty air, unable to tear himself away from such a subject—like a child sitting with dessert in front of him, his mouth watering, watching while others eat.
Finally there came a knock at the door, which roused him unpleasantly.
His landlord entered with the police inspector, whose appearance, as everyone knows, is more unpleasant for little people than the face of a petitioner is for the rich.
The owner of the small house where Chartkov lived was such a creature as owners of houses somewhere on the Fifteenth
Line of Vasilievsky Island or on the Petersburg side or in a remote corner of Kolomna
⁸
usually are—a creature of which there are many in Russia and whose character is as difficult to define as the color of a worn-out frock coat.
In his youth, he had been a captain and a loudmouth, had also been employed in civil affairs, had been an expert at flogging, an efficient man, a fop, and a fool; but in his old age, he had merged all these sharp peculiarities in himself into some indefinite dullness.
He was a widower, he was retired, he no longer played the fop, stopped boasting, stopped bullying, and only liked drinking tea and babbling all sorts of nonsense over it; paced the room, straightened a tallow candle end; visited his tenants punctually at the end of every month for the money; went outside, key in hand, to look at the roof of his house; repeatedly chased the caretaker out of the nook where he hid and slept; in short—a retired man who, after all his rakish life and jolting about in post chaises, is left with nothing but trite habits.

“Kindly look for yourself, Varukh Kuzmich,” the landlord said, addressing the inspector and spreading his arms.
“You see, he doesn’t pay the rent.
He doesn’t pay.”

“And what if I have no money?
Just wait, I’ll pay up.”

“I cannot wait, my dear,” the landlord said angrily, gesturing with the key he was holding.
“I’ve had Potogonkin, a lieutenant colonel, as a tenant for seven years now; Anna Petrovna Bukhmisterova also rents a shed and a stable with two stalls, she has three household serfs with her—that’s the sort of tenants I have.
I am not, to put it to you candidly, in the habit of letting the rent go unpaid.
Kindly pay what you owe and move out.”

“Yes, since that’s the arrangement, kindly pay,” said the police inspector, shaking his head slightly and putting one finger behind a button of his uniform.

“But what to pay with—that’s the question.
Right now I haven’t got a cent.”

“In that case, you’ll have to satisfy Ivan Ivanovich with your professional productions,” said the inspector.
“Perhaps he’ll agree to be paid in pictures.”

“No, my dear fellow, no pictures, thank you.
It would be fine if
they were pictures with some noble content, something that could be hung on the wall, maybe a general with a star, or a portrait of Prince Kutuzov;
⁹
but no, he’s painted a peasant, a peasant in a shirt, the servant who grinds paints for him.
What an idea, to paint a portrait of that swine!
He’ll get it in the neck from me: he pulled all the nails out of the latches on me, the crook!
Look here, what subjects: here he’s painted his room.
It would be fine if he’d taken a neat, tidy room, but no, he’s painted it with all this litter and trash just as it’s lying about.
Look here, how he’s mucked up my room, kindly see for yourself.
I’ve had tenants staying on for seven years now—colonels, Bukhmisterova, Anna Petrovna … No, I tell you, there’s no worse tenant than a painter: they live like real pigs, God spare us.”

And the poor painter had to listen patiently to all that.
The police inspector was busy meanwhile studying the paintings and sketches, and showed straight away that his soul was more alive than the landlord’s and was even no stranger to artistic impressions.

“Heh,” he said, jabbing a finger into one canvas on which a naked woman was portrayed, “the subject’s a bit … playful.
And this one, why is it all black under his nose?
Did he spill snuff there or what?”

“A shadow,” Chartkov answered sternly and without turning his eyes to him.

“Well, it could have been moved somewhere else, under the nose it’s too conspicuous,” said the inspector.
“And whose portrait is that?” he continued, going up to the portrait of the old man.
“Much too terrifying.
Was he really as terrible as that?
Look how he stares!
Eh, what a Gromoboy!
¹⁰
Who was your model?”

“But that’s some …” said Chartkov, and did not finish.
A crack was heard.
The inspector must have squeezed the frame of the portrait too hard, owing to the clumsy way his policeman’s hands were made; the side boards split inward, one fell to the floor, and along with it a packet wrapped in blue paper fell with a heavy clank.
The inscription “1,000 Gold Roubles” struck Chartkov’s eyes.
He rushed like a madman to pick it up, seized the packet, clutched it convulsively in his hand, which sank from the heavy weight.

“Sounds like the clink of money,” said the inspector, hearing something thud on the floor and unable to see it for the quickness of Chartkov’s movement as he rushed to pick it up.

“And what business is it of yours what I have?”

“It’s this: that you have to pay the landlord for the apartment right now; that you’ve got money but don’t want to pay—that’s what.”

“Well, I’ll pay him today.”

“Well, why didn’t you want to pay before?
Why make the landlord worry, and bother the police besides?”

“Because I didn’t want to touch this money.
I’ll pay him everything by this evening and leave the apartment by tomorrow, because I don’t wish to remain with such a landlord.”

“Well, Ivan Ivanovich, he’s going to pay you,” said the inspector, turning to the landlord.
“And in the event of your not being properly satisfied by this evening, then I beg your pardon, mister painter.”

So saying, he put on his three-cornered hat and went out to the front hall, followed by the landlord, his head bowed, it seemed, in some sort of reflection.

“Thank God they got the hell out of here,” said Chartkov when he heard the front door close.

He peeked out to the front hall, sent Nikita for something so as to be left completely alone, locked the door behind him, and, returning to his room, began with wildly fluttering heart to unwrap the packet.
There were gold roubles in it, every one of them new, hot as fire.
Nearly out of his mind, he sat over the heap of gold, still asking himself if he was not dreaming.
There was an even thousand of them in the packet, which looked exactly the same as the ones he had seen in his dream.
For several minutes he ran his fingers through them, looking at them, and still unable to come to his senses.
In his imagination there suddenly arose all the stories about treasures, about boxes with secret compartments, left by forebears to their spendthrift grandchildren in the firm conviction of their future ruined condition.
He reflected thus: “Mightn’t some grandfather have decided even now to leave his grandson a gift, locking it up in the frame of a family portrait?” Full of
romantic nonsense, he even began thinking whether there might not be some secret connection with his destiny here: whether the existence of the portrait might not be connected with his own existence, and whether its very acquisition had not been somehow predestined?
He began studying the frame of the portrait with curiosity.
On one side a groove had been chiseled out, covered so cleverly and inconspicuously with a board that, if the inspector’s weighty hand had not broken through it, the roubles might have lain there till the world’s end.
Studying the portrait, he marveled again at the lofty workmanship, the extraordinary finish of the eyes; they no longer seemed terrible to him, but all the same an unpleasant feeling remained in his soul each time.
“No,” he said to himself, “whoever’s grandfather you were, I’ll put you under glass for this and make you a golden frame.” Here he placed his hand on the heap of gold that lay before him, and his heart began to pound hard at the touch of it.
“What shall I do with it?” he thought, fixing his eyes on it.
“Now I’m set up for at least three years, I can shut myself in and work.
I have enough for paints now, enough for dinners, for tea, for expenses, for rent; no one will hinder and annoy me anymore; I’ll buy myself a good mannequin, order a plaster torso, model some legs, set up a Venus, buy prints of the best pictures.
And if I work some three years for myself, unhurriedly, not to sell, I’ll beat them all, and maybe become a decent artist.”

So he was saying together with the promptings of his reason; but within him another voice sounded more audibly and ringingly.
And as he cast another glance at the gold, his twenty-two years and his ardent youth said something different.
Now everything he had looked at till then with envious eyes, which he had admired from afar with watering mouth, was in his power.
Oh, how his heart leaped in him as soon as he thought of it!
To put on a fashionable tailcoat, to break his long fast, to rent a fine apartment, to go at once to the theater, the pastry shop, the … all the rest—and, having seized the money, he was already in the street.

First of all he stopped at a tailor’s, got outfitted from top to toe, and, like a child, began looking himself over incessantly; bought up lots of scents, pomades; rented, without bargaining, a magnificent
apartment on Nevsky Prospect, the first that came along, with mirrors and plate-glass windows; chanced to buy an expensive lorgnette in a shop; also chanced to buy a quantity of various neckties, more than he needed; had his locks curled at a hairdresser’s; took a couple of carriage rides through the city without any reason; stuffed himself with sweets in a pastry shop; and went to a French restaurant, of which hitherto he had heard only vague rumors, as of the state of China.
There he dined, arms akimbo, casting very proud glances at others, and ceaselessly looking in the mirror and touching his curled locks.
There he drank a bottle of champagne, which till then he had also known more from hearsay.
The wine went to his head a little, and he left feeling lively, pert, devil-may-care, as the saying goes.
He strutted down the sidewalk like a dandy, aiming his lorgnette at everyone.
On the bridge, he noticed his former professor and darted nimbly past him as if without noticing him at all, so that the dumbfounded professor stood motionless on the bridge for a long time, his face the picture of a question mark.

All his things, and whatever else there was—easel, canvases, paintings—were transported to the magnificent apartment that same evening.
The better objects he placed more conspicuously, the worse he stuck into a corner, and he walked through the magnificent rooms, ceaselessly looking in the mirrors.
An irresistible desire was born in him to catch fame by the tail at once and show himself to the world.
He could already imagine the cries: “Chartkov, Chartkov!
Have you seen Chartkov’s picture?
What a nimble brush this Chartkov has!
What a strong talent this Chartkov has!” He walked about his room in a state of rapture, transported who knows where.
The next day, taking a dozen gold roubles, he went to the publisher of a popular newspaper to ask for his magnanimous aid; the journalist received him cordially, called him “most honorable sir” at once, pressed both his hands, questioned him in detail about his name, patronymic, place of residence.
And the very next day there appeared in the newspaper, following an advertisement for newly invented tallow candles, an article entitled “On the Extraordinary Talents of Chartkov”: “We hasten to delight the educated residents of the capital with a wonderful—in
all respects, one may say—acquisition.
Everyone agrees that there are many most beautiful physiognomies and most beautiful faces among us, but so far the means have been lacking for transferring them to miracle-working canvas, to be handed on to posterity; now this lack has been filled: an artist has been discovered who combines in himself all that is necessary.
Now the beautiful woman may be sure that she will be depicted with all the graciousness of her beauty—ethereal, light, charming, wonderful, like butterflies fluttering over spring flowers.
The respectable paterfamilias will see himself with all his family around him.
The merchant, the man of war, the citizen, the statesman—each will continue on his path with renewed zeal.
Hurry, hurry, come from the fete, from strolling to see a friend or
cousine
, from stopping at a splendid shop, hurry from wherever you are.
The artist’s magnificent studio (Nevsky Prospect, number such-and-such) is all filled with portraits from his brush, worthy of Van Dycks and Titians.
One hardly knows which to be surprised at: their faithfulness and likeness to the originals, or the extraordinary brightness and freshness of the brush.
Praised be you, artist!
You drew the lucky ticket in the lottery!
Viva, Andrei Petrovich!” (The journalist evidently enjoyed taking liberties.) “Glorify yourself and us.
We know how to appreciate you.
Universal attraction, and money along with it, though some of our fellow journalists rise up against it, will be your reward.”