sense! What’s the use of marrying a soldier, even though I am a sergeant?’ ‘Well, Luise,’ said I, ‘good-bye, God be with you. I’ve no business to hinder your happiness. Tell me, is he good-looking?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘he is an old man, with a long nose,’ and she laughed herself. I left her. Well,’ I thought, it was not fated to be!’ The next morning I walked by his shop; she had told me the street. I looked in at the window: there was a German sitting there mending a watch, a man of forty-five with a hooked nose and goggle eyes, wearing a tail-coat and a high stand-up collar, such a solemn-looking fellow. I fairly cursed; I should like to have broken his window on the spot . . . but there, I thought, it’s no good touching him, it’s no good crying over spilt milk! I went home to the barracks at dusk, lay down on my bed and would you believe it, Alexandr Petrovitch, I burst out crying. . . .
“Well, that day passed, and another and a third. I did not see Luise. And meantime I heard from a friend (she was an old lady, another laundress whom Luise sometimes went to see) that the German knew of our love, and that was why he made up his mind to propose at once, or else he would have waited another two or three years. He had made Luise promise, it seemed, that she would not see me again; and that so far he was, it seems, rather churlish with both of them, Luise and her aunt; as though he might change his mind and had not quite decided even now. She told me, too, that the day after to-morrow, Sunday, he had invited them both to have coffee with him in the morning and that there would be another relation there, an old man who had been a merchant but was very poor now and served as a caretaker in a basement. When I knew that maybe on Sunday everything would be settled, I was seized with such fury that I did not know what I was doing. And all that day and all the next I could do nothing but think of it. I felt I could eat that German.
“On Sunday morning I did not know what I would do, but when the mass was over I jumped up, put on my overcoat and set off to the German’s. I thought I would find them all there. And why I went to the German’s, and what I meant to say, I did not know myself. But I put a pistol in my pocket to be ready for anything. I had a wretched little pistol with an old-fashioned trigger; I used to fire it as a boy. It wasn’t fit to be used. But I put a bullet in it: I thought if they try turning me out and being rude I’ll pull out the pistol and frighten
