“It’s a very funny story, Alexandr Petrovitch.”
“So much the better. Tell me.”
“Shall I? Well, listen then.”
I heard a strange though not altogether amusing story of a murder.
“This is how it was,” Baklushin began. “When I was sent to R. I saw it was a fine big town, only there were a lot of Germans in it. Well, of course I was a young man then, I stood well with the officers; I used to pass the time walking about with my cap on one side, winking at the German girls. And one little German girl, Luise, took my fancy. They were both laundresses, only doing the finest work, she and her aunt. Her aunt was a stuck-up old thing and they were well off. I used to walk up and down outside their windows at first, and then I got to be real friends with her. Luise spoke Russian well too, she only lisped a little, as it were—she was such a darling, I never met one like her. . . . I was for being too free at first, but she said to me, ‘No, you mustn’t, Sasha, for I want to keep all my innocence to make you a good wife,’ and she’d only caress me and laugh like a bell . . . and she was such a clean little thing, I never saw anyone like her. She suggested our getting married herself. Now, could I help marrying her, tell me that? So I made up my mind to go to the lieutenant-colonel for permission. . . . One day I noticed Luise did not turn up at our meeting-place, and again a second time she didn’t come, and again a third. I sent a letter; no answer. What is it? I wondered. If she had been deceiving me she would have contrived somehow, have answered the letter, and have come to meet me. But she did not know how to tell a lie, so she simply cut it off. It’s her aunt, I thought. I didn’t dare go to the aunt’s; though she knew it, we always met on the quiet. I went about as though I were crazy; I wrote her a last letter and said, ‘If you don’t come I shall come to your aunt’s myself. She was frightened and came. She cried; she told me that a German called Schultz, a distant relation, a watch-maker, well-off and elderly, had expressed a desire to marry her to make me happy,’ he says, and not to be left without a wife in his old age; and he loves me, he says, and he’s had the idea in his mind for a long time, but he kept putting it off and saying nothing. ‘You see, Sasha,’ she said, ‘he’s rich and it’s a fortunate thing for me; surely you don’t want to deprive me of my good fortune?’ I looked at her—she was crying and hugging me. . . . ‘Ech,’ I thought, ‘she is talking
