Four Plays | Page 5

live.
POTáPYCH. You must enter the service, sir.
LEONíD. What's that you say? Much I must! They'll make me a copying clerk! [_He sits down upon a bench._
POTáPYCH. No, sir, why should you work yourself? That's not the way to do things! They'll find a position for you--of the most gentlemanly, delicate sort; your clerks will work, but you'll be their chief, over all of them. And promotions will come to you of themselves.
LEONíD. Perhaps they will make me vice-governor, or elect me marshal of the nobility.
POTáPYCH. It's not improbable.
LEONíD. Well, and when I'm vice-governor, shall you be afraid of me?
POTáPYCH. Why should I be afraid? Let others cringe, but for us it's all the same. You are our master: that's honor enough for us.
LEONíD. [_Not hearing_] Tell me, Potápych, have we many pretty girls here?
POTáPYCH. Why, really, sir, if you think it over, why shouldn't there be girls? There are some on the estate, and among the house servants; only it must be said that in these matters the household is very strictly run. Our mistress, owing to her strict life and her piety, looks after that very carefully. Now just take this: she herself marries off the protégées and housemaids whom she likes. If a man pleases her, she marries the girl off to him, and even gives her a dowry, not a big one--needless to say. There are always two or three protégées on the place. The mistress takes a little girl from some one or other and brings her up; and when she is seventeen or eighteen years old, then, without any talk, she marries her off to some clerk or townsman, just as she takes a notion, and sometimes even to a nobleman. Ah, yes, sir! Only what an existence for these protégées, sir! Misery!
LEONíD. But why?
POTáPYCH. They have a hard time. The lady says: "I have found you a prospective husband, and now," she says, "the wedding will be on such and such a day, and that's an end to it; and don't one of you dare to argue about it!" It's a case of get along with you to the man you're told to. Because, sir, I reason this way: who wants to see disobedience in a person he's brought up? And sometimes it happens that the bride doesn't like the groom, nor the groom the bride: then the lady falls into a great rage. She even goes out of her head. She took a notion to marry one protégée to a petty shopkeeper in town; but he, an unpolished individual, was going to resist. "The bride doesn't please me," he said, "and, besides, I don't want to get married yet." So the mistress complained at once to the town bailiff and to the priest: well, they brought the blockhead round.
LEONíD. You don't say.
POTáPYCH. Yes, sir. And even if the mistress sees a girl at one of her acquaintances', she immediately looks up a husband for her. Our mistress reasons this way: that they are stupid; that if she doesn't look after them closely now, they'll just waste their life and never amount to anything. That's the way, sir. Some people, because of their stupidity, hide girls from the mistress, so that she may never set eyes on them; because if she does, it's all up with the girls.
LEONíD. And so she treats other people's girls the same way?
POTáPYCH. Other people's, too. She extends her care to everybody. She has such a kind heart that she worries about everybody. She even gets angry if they do anything without her permission. And the way she looks after her protégées is just a wonder. She dresses them as if they were her own daughters. Sometimes she has them eat with her; and she doesn't make them do any work. "Let everybody look," says the mistress, "and see how my protégées live; I want every one to envy them," she says.
LEONíD. Well, now, that's fine, Potápych.
POTáPYCH. And what a touching little sermon she reads them when they're married! "You," she says, "have lived with me in wealth and luxury, and have had nothing to do; now you are marrying a poor man, and will live your life in poverty, and will work, and will do your duty. And now forget," she says, "how you lived here, because not for you I did all this; I was merely diverting myself, but you must never even think of such a life; always remember your insignificance, and of what station you are." And all this so feelingly that there are tears in her own eyes.
LEONíD. Well, now, that's fine.
POTáPYCH. I don't know how to describe it, sir. Somehow they all get tired of married life later; they mostly pine away.
LEONíD. Why do they pine away, Potápych?
POTáPYCH. Must be they don't like