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Title: The Darling and Other Stories

Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Translator: Constance Garnett

Release date: September 9, 2004 [eBook #13416]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13416

Credits: Produced by James Rusk. HTML version by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DARLING
AND OTHER STORIES ***

THE TALES OF CHEKHOV

VOLUME 1

THE DARLING AND OTHER
STORIES
BY

ANTON TCHEKHOV

Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT

CONTENTS

THE DARLING
ARIADNE
POLINKA
ANYUTA
THE TWO VOLODYAS
THE TROUSSEAU
THE HELPMATE
TALENT
AN ARTIST'S STORY
THREE YEARS

THE DARLING

OLENKA, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor,
Plemyanniakov, was sitting in her back porch, lost in thought. It was hot,
the flies were persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it
would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering from the east, and
bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air.

Kukin, who was the manager of an open-air theatre called the Tivoli, and
who lived in the lodge, was standing in the middle of the garden looking at
the sky.

"Again!" he observed despairingly. "It's going to rain again! Rain every
day, as though to spite me. I might as well hang myself! It's ruin! Fearful
losses every day."

He flung up his hands, and went on, addressing Olenka:

"There! that's the life we lead, Olga Semyonovna. It's enough to make
one cry. One works and does one's utmost, one wears oneself out, getting no
sleep at night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And then what
happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the
very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you
suppose that's what they want! They don't understand anything of that sort.
They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the
weather! Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and
it's kept it up all May and June. It's simply awful! The public doesn't come,
but I've to pay the rent just the same, and pay the artists."

The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Kukin would say
with an hysterical laugh:

"Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in
this world and the next! Let the artists have me up! Send me to prison!--to
Siberia!--the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!"

And next day the same thing.

Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came
into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him.
He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and curls combed forward on
his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on
one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he
aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She was always fond of some
one, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her
papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had
loved her aunt who used to come every other year from Bryansk; and before
that, when she was at school, she had loved her French master. She was a
gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very
good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a
little dark mole on it, and the kind, naïve smile, which came into her face
when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, "Yes, not half bad,"
and smiled too, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand
in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, "You
darling!"

The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which
was left her in her father's will, was at the extreme end of the town, not far
from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she could head the band
playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her
that it was Kukin struggling with his destiny, storming the entrenchments of
his chief foe, the indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her heart, she
had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at day-break, she tapped
softly at her bedroom window, and showing him only her face and one
shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly smile. . . .

He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer
view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands, and
said:

"You darling!"

He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding, his
face still retained an expression of despair.

They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look after
things in the Tivoli, to put down the accounts and pay the wages. And her
rosy cheeks, her sweet, naïve, radiant smile, were to be seen now at the
office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the
theatre. And already she used to say to her acquaintances that the theatre
was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through
the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and
humane.

"But do you suppose the public understands that?" she used to say.
"What they want is a clown. Yesterday we gave 'Faust Inside Out,' and
almost all the boxes were empty; but if Vanitchka and I had been producing
some vulgar thing, I assure you the theatre would have been packed.
Tomorrow Vanitchka and I are doing 'Orpheus in Hell.' Do come."

And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like
him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art;
she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on
the behaviour of the musicians, and when there was an unfavourable notice
in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor's office to set
things right.

The actors were fond of her and used to call her "Vanitchka and I," and
"the darling"; she was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums of
money, and if they deceived her, she used to shed a few tears in private, but
did not complain to her husband.

They got on well in the winter too. They took the theatre in the town for
the whole winter, and let it for short terms to a Little Russian company, or
to a conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Olenka grew stouter, and was
always beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower,
and continually complained of their terrible losses, although he had not
done badly all the winter. He used to cough at night, and she used to give
him hot raspberry tea or lime-flower water, to rub him with eau-de-Cologne
and to wrap him in her warm shawls.

"You're such a sweet pet!" she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking
his hair. "You're such a pretty dear!"

Towards Lent he went to Moscow to collect a new troupe, and without
him she could not sleep, but sat all night at her window, looking at the stars,
and she compared herself with the hens, who are awake all night and
uneasy when the cock is not in the hen-house. Kukin was detained in
Moscow, and wrote that he would be back at Easter, adding some
instructions about the Tivoli. But on the Sunday before Easter, late in the
evening, came a sudden ominous knock at the gate; some one was
hammering on the gate as though on a barrel-- boom, boom, boom! The
drowsy cook went flopping with her bare feet through the puddles, as she
ran to open the gate.

"Please open," said some one outside in a thick bass. "There is a
telegram for you."

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time
for some reason she felt numb with terror. With shaking hands she opened
the telegram and read as follows:

"IVAN PETROVITCH DIED SUDDENLY TO-DAY. AWAITING
IMMATE INSTRUCTIONS FUFUNERAL TUESDAY."

That was how it was written in the telegram--"fufuneral," and the utterly
incomprehensible word "immate." It was signed by the stage manager of the
operatic company.

"My darling!" sobbed Olenka. "Vanka, my precious, my darling! Why
did I ever meet you! Why did I know you and love you! Your poor heart-
broken Olenka is alone without you!"

Kukin's funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow, Olenka returned
home on Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors, she threw herself on
her bed and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the
street.

"Poor darling!" the neighbours said, as they crossed themselves. "Olga
Semyonovna, poor darling! How she does take on!"

Three months later Olenka was coming home from mass, melancholy
and in deep mourning. It happened that one of her neighbours, Vassily
Andreitch Pustovalov, returning home from church, walked back beside her.
He was the manager at Babakayev's, the timber merchant's. He wore a straw
hat, a white waistcoat, and a gold watch-chain, and looked more a country
gentleman than a man in trade.

"Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Semyonovna," he said
gravely, with a sympathetic note in his voice; "and if any of our dear ones
die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought have fortitude and
bear it submissively."

After seeing Olenka to her gate, he said good-bye and went on. All day
afterwards she heard his sedately dignified voice, and whenever she shut
her eyes she saw his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently
she had made an impression on him too, for not long afterwards an elderly
lady, with whom she was only slightly acquainted, came to drink coffee
with her, and as soon as she was seated at table began to talk about
Pustovalov, saying that he was an excellent man whom one could
thoroughly depend upon, and that any girl would be glad to marry him.
Three days later Pustovalov came himself. He did not stay long, only about
ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Olenka loved him--
loved him so much that she lay awake all night in a perfect fever, and in the
morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was quickly arranged, and
then came the wedding.

Pustovalov and Olenka got on very well together when they were
married.

Usually he sat in the office till dinner-time, then he went out on business,
while Olenka took his place, and sat in the office till evening, making up
accounts and booking orders.

"Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty per cent," she
would say to her customers and friends. "Only fancy we used to sell local
timber, and now Vassitchka always has to go for wood to the Mogilev
district. And the freight!" she would add, covering her cheeks with her
hands in horror. "The freight!"

It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages,
and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber; and
there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of
words such as "baulk," "post," "beam," "pole," "scantling," "batten," "lath,"
"plank," etc.

At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of
planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere
far away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of six-inch beams forty feet
high, standing on end, was marching upon the timber-yard; that logs,
beams, and boards knocked together with the resounding crash of dry wood,
kept falling and getting up again, piling themselves on each other. Olenka
cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her tenderly: "Olenka, what's
the matter, darling? Cross yourself!"

Her husband's ideas were hers. If he thought the room was too hot, or
that business was slack, she thought the same. Her husband did not care for
entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. She did likewise.

"You are always at home or in the office," her friends said to her. "You
should go to the theatre, darling, or to the circus."

"Vassitchka and I have no time to go to theatres," she would answer
sedately. "We have no time for nonsense. What's the use of these theatres?"

On Saturdays Pustovalov and she used to go to the evening service; on
holidays to early mass, and they walked side by side with softened faces as
they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance about them
both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they drank tea, with
fancy bread and jams of various kinds, and afterwards they ate pie. Every
day at twelve o'clock there was a savoury smell of beet-root soup and of
mutton or duck in their yard, and on fast-days of fish, and no one could pass
the gate without feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always
boiling, and customers were regaled with tea and cracknels. Once a week
the couple went to the baths and returned side by side, both red in the face.

"Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God," Olenka used to say to
her acquaintances. "I wish every one were as well off as Vassitchka and I."

When Pustovalov went away to buy wood in the Mogilev district, she
missed him dreadfully, lay awake and cried. A young veterinary surgeon in
the army, called Smirnin, to whom they had let their lodge, used sometimes
to come in in the evening. He used to talk to her and play cards with her,
and this entertained her in her husband's absence. She was particularly
interested in what he told her of his home life. He was married and had a
little boy, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful
to him, and now he hated her and used to send her forty roubles a month for
the maintenance of their son. And hearing of all this, Olenka sighed and
shook her head. She was sorry for him.

"Well, God keep you," she used to say to him at parting, as she lighted
him down the stairs with a candle. "Thank you for coming to cheer me up,
and may the Mother of God give you health."

And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and dignity,
the same reasonableness, in imitation of her husband. As the veterinary
surgeon was disappearing behind the door below, she would say:

"You know, Vladimir Platonitch, you'd better make it up with your wife.
You should forgive her for the sake of your son. You may be sure the little
fellow understands."

And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about the
veterinary surgeon and his unhappy home life, and both sighed and shook
their heads and talked about the boy, who, no doubt, missed his father, and
by some strange connection of ideas, they went up to the holy ikons, bowed
to the ground before them and prayed that God would give them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived for six years quietly and peaceably in love
and complete harmony.

But behold! one winter day after drinking hot tea in the office, Vassily
Andreitch went out into the yard without his cap on to see about sending off
some timber, caught cold and was taken ill. He had the best doctors, but he
grew worse and died after four months' illness. And Olenka was a widow
once more.

"I've nobody, now you've left me, my darling," she sobbed, after her
husband's funeral. "How can I live without you, in wretchedness and
misery! Pity me, good people, all alone in the world!"

She went about dressed in black with long "weepers," and gave up
wearing hat and gloves for good. She hardly ever went out, except to
church, or to her husband's grave, and led the life of a nun. It was not till six
months later that she took off the weepers and opened the shutters of the
windows. She was sometimes seen in the mornings, going with her cook to
market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she lived
now could only be surmised. People guessed, from seeing her drinking tea
in her garden with the veterinary surgeon, who read the newspaper aloud to
her, and from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post-office, she
said to her:

"There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town, and that's the
cause of all sorts of epidemics. One is always hearing of people's getting
infection from the milk supply, or catching diseases from horses and cows.
The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of
human beings."

She repeated the veterinary surgeon's words, and was of the same
opinion as he about everything. It was evident that she could not live a year
without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the lodge. In any
one else this would have been censured, but no one could think ill of
Olenka; everything she did was so natural. Neither she nor the veterinary
surgeon said anything to other people of the change in their relations, and
tried, indeed, to conceal it, but without success, for Olenka could not keep a
secret. When he had visitors, men serving in his regiment, and she poured
out tea or served the supper, she would begin talking of the cattle plague, of
the foot and mouth disease, and of the municipal slaughterhouses. He was
dreadfully embarrassed, and when the guests had gone, he would seize her
by the hand and hiss angrily:

"I've asked you before not to talk about what you don't understand.
When we veterinary surgeons are talking among ourselves, please don't put
your word in. It's really annoying."

And she would look at him with astonishment and dismay, and ask him
in alarm: "But, Voloditchka, what _am_ I to talk about?"

And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, begging him not to
be angry, and they were both happy.

But this happiness did not last long. The veterinary surgeon departed,
departed for ever with his regiment, when it was transferred to a distant
place--to Siberia, it may be. And Olenka was left alone.

Now she was absolutely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his
armchair lay in the attic, covered with dust and lame of one leg. She got
thinner and plainer, and when people met her in the street they did not look
at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her best years
were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had begun for her,
which did not bear thinking about. In the evening Olenka sat in the porch,
and heard the band playing and the fireworks popping in the Tivoli, but now
the sound stirred no response. She looked into her yard without interest,
thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterwards, when night came on
she went to bed and dreamed of her empty yard. She ate and drank as it
were unwillingly.

And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the
objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any
opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it
is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or a
peasant driving in his cart, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the
peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can't say, and could not even for
a thousand roubles. When she had Kukin, or Pustovalov, or the veterinary
surgeon, Olenka could explain everything, and give her opinion about
anything you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her brain and in
her heart as there was in her yard outside. And it was as harsh and as bitter
as wormwood in the mouth.

Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a street,
and where the Tivoli and the timber-yard had been, there were new turnings
and houses. How rapidly time passes! Olenka's house grew dingy, the roof
got rusty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard was overgrown

with docks and stinging-nettles. Olenka herself had grown plain and
elderly; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul, as before, was empty
and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat at her window and looked
at the snow. When she caught the scent of spring, or heard the chime of the
church bells, a sudden rush of memories from the past came over her, there
was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but
this was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of
the futility of life. The black kitten, Briska, rubbed against her and purred
softly, but Olenka was not touched by these feline caresses. That was not
what she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her
whole soul and reason--that would give her ideas and an object in life, and
would warm her old blood. And she would shake the kitten off her skirt and
say with vexation:

"Get along; I don't want you!"

And so it was, day after day and year after year, and no joy, and no
opinions. Whatever Mavra, the cook, said she accepted.

One hot July day, towards evening, just as the cattle were being driven
away, and the whole yard was full of dust, some one suddenly knocked at
the gate. Olenka went to open it herself and was dumbfounded when she
looked out: she saw Smirnin, the veterinary surgeon, grey-headed, and
dressed as a civilian. She suddenly remembered everything. She could not
help crying and letting her head fall on his breast without uttering a word,
and in the violence of her feeling she did not notice how they both walked
into the house and sat down to tea.

"My dear Vladimir Platonitch! What fate has brought you?" she
muttered, trembling with joy.

"I want to settle here for good, Olga Semyonovna," he told her. "I have
resigned my post, and have come to settle down and try my luck on my own
account. Besides, it's time for my boy to go to school. He's a big boy. I am
reconciled with my wife, you know."

"Where is she?' asked Olenka.

"She's at the hotel with the boy, and I'm looking for lodgings."

"Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings? Why not have my house? Why
shouldn't that suit you? Why, my goodness, I wouldn't take any rent!" cried
Olenka in a flutter, beginning to cry again. "You live here, and the lodge
will do nicely for me. Oh dear! how glad I am!"

Next day the roof was painted and the walls were whitewashed, and
Olenka, with her arms akimbo walked about the yard giving directions. Her
face was beaming with her old smile, and she was brisk and alert as though
she had waked from a long sleep. The veterinary's wife arrived--a thin,
plain lady, with short hair and a peevish expression. With her was her little
Sasha, a boy of ten, small for his age, blue-eyed, chubby, with dimples in
his cheeks. And scarcely had the boy walked into the yard when he ran after
the cat, and at once there was the sound of his gay, joyous laugh.

"Is that your puss, auntie?" he asked Olenka. "When she has little ones,
do give us a kitten. Mamma is awfully afraid of mice."

Olenka talked to him, and gave him tea. Her heart warmed and there was
a sweet ache in her bosom, as though the boy had been her own child. And
when he sat at the table in the evening, going over his lessons, she looked at
him with deep tenderness and pity as she murmured to herself:

"You pretty pet! . . . my precious! . . . Such a fair little thing, and so
clever."

"'An island is a piece of land which is entirely surrounded by water,'" he
read aloud.

"An island is a piece of land," she repeated, and this was the first opinion
to which she gave utterance with positive conviction after so many years of
silence and dearth of ideas.

Now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha's
parents, saying how difficult the lessons were at the high schools, but that
yet the high school was better than a commercial one, since with a high-

school education all careers were open to one, such as being a doctor or an
engineer.

Sasha began going to the high school. His mother departed to Harkov to
her sister's and did not return; his father used to go off every day to inspect
cattle, and would often be away from home for three days together, and it
seemed to Olenka as though Sasha was entirely abandoned, that he was not
wanted at home, that he was being starved, and she carried him off to her
lodge and gave him a little room there.

And for six months Sasha had lived in the lodge with her. Every morning
Olenka came into his bedroom and found him fast asleep, sleeping
noiselessly with his hand under his cheek. She was sorry to wake him.

"Sashenka," she would say mournfully, "get up, darling. It's time for
school."

He would get up, dress and say his prayers, and then sit down to
breakfast, drink three glasses of tea, and eat two large cracknels and a half a
buttered roll. All this time he was hardly awake and a little ill-humoured in
consequence.

"You don't quite know your fable, Sashenka," Olenka would say, looking
at him as though he were about to set off on a long journey. "What a lot of
trouble I have with you! You must work and do your best, darling, and obey
your teachers."

"Oh, do leave me alone!" Sasha would say.

Then he would go down the street to school, a little figure, wearing a big
cap and carrying a satchel on his shoulder. Olenka would follow him
noiselessly.

"Sashenka!" she would call after him, and she would pop into his hand a
date or a caramel. When he reached the street where the school was, he
would feel ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman, he would turn
round and say:

"You'd better go home, auntie. I can go the rest of the way alone."

She would stand still and look after him fixedly till he had disappeared at
the school-gate.

Ah, how she loved him! Of her former attachments not one had been so
deep; never had her soul surrendered to any feeling so spontaneously, so
disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were
aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big school
cap, she would have given her whole life, she would have given it with joy
and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why?

When she had seen the last of Sasha, she returned home, contented and
serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger
during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked
at her with pleasure.

"Good-morning, Olga Semyonovna, darling. How are you, darling?"

"The lessons at the high school are very difficult now," she would relate
at the market. "It's too much; in the first class yesterday they gave him a
fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation and a problem. You know it's
too much for a little chap."

And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the
school books, saying just what Sasha said.

At three o'clock they had dinner together: in the evening they learned
their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would stay a
long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer; then she
would go to bed and dream of that far-away misty future when Sasha would
finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big
house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and have
children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears
would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while the black cat lay
purring beside her: "Mrr, mrr, mrr."

Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate.

Olenka would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a
minute later would come another knock.

"It must be a telegram from Harkov," she would think, beginning to
tremble from head to foot. "Sasha's mother is sending for him from Harkov.
. . . Oh, mercy on us!"

She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill,
and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But
another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out to be
the veterinary surgeon coming home from the club.

"Well, thank God!" she would think.

And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel at
ease. She would go back to bed thinking of Sasha, who lay sound asleep in
the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:

"I'll give it you! Get away! Shut up!"

ARIADNE

ON the deck of a steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol, a rather
good-looking gentleman, with a little round beard, came up to me to smoke,
and said:

"Notice those Germans sitting near the shelter? Whenever Germans or
Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool, or
their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get
together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects--but
especially women."

This gentleman's face was familiar to me already. We had returned from
abroad the evening before in the same train, and at Volotchisk when the

luggage was being examined by the Customs, I saw him standing with a
lady, his travelling companion, before a perfect mountain of trunks and
baskets filled with ladies' clothes, and I noticed how embarrassed and
downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery,
and his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint.
Afterwards, on the way to Odessa, I saw him carrying little pies and
oranges to the ladies' compartment.

It was rather damp; the vessel swayed a little, and the ladies had retired
to their cabins.

The gentleman with the little round beard sat down beside me and
continued:

"Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract
subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing
but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The Russian actor
does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce.
We're just the same: when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only
from an exalted point of view. It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity,
and simplicity. We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are
dissatisfied. We take too ideal a view of women, and make demands out of
all proportion with what reality can give us; we get something utterly
different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered
hopes, and inward suffering, and if any one is suffering, he's bound to talk
of it. It does not bore you to go on with this conversation?

"No, not in the least."

"In that case, allow me to introduce myself," said my companion, rising
from his seat a little:

"Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . . You I know
very well."

He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly
expression:

"A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these
incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would
put it down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I take quite a
different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists.
We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and
to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize
those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms.
Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is
ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by
those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted;
and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael's Madonna,
or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is no
affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we have been married or
been intimate with a woman for some two or three years, we begin to feel
deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again--
disappointment, again--repulsion, and in the long run we become convinced
that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel--in fact, far
from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men. And in our
dissatisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to
grumble and talk about what we've been so cruelly deceived in."

While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and our
Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure. This was probably because
he had been very homesick abroad. Though he praised the Russians and
ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and that I
put down to his credit. It could be seen, too, that there was some uneasiness
in his soul, that he wanted to talk more of himself than of women, and that I
was in for a long story in the nature of a confession. And when we had
asked for a bottle of wine and had each of us drunk a glass, this was how he
did in fact begin:

"I remember in a novel of Weltmann's some one says, 'So that's the
story!' and some one else answers, 'No, that's not the story-- that's only the
introduction to the story.' In the same way what I've said so far is only the
introduction; what I really want to tell you is my own love story. Excuse
me, I must ask you again; it won't bore you to listen?"

I told him it would not, and he went on:

The scene of my story is laid in the Moscow province in one of its
northern districts. The scenery there, I must tell you, is exquisite. Our
homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water chatters
noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat flower-beds, beehives,
a kitchen-garden, and below it a river with leafy willows, which, when there
is a heavy dew on them, have a lustreless look as though they had turned
grey; and on the other side a meadow, and beyond the meadow on the
upland a terrible, dark pine forest. In that forest delicious, reddish agarics
grow in endless profusion, and elks still live in its deepest recesses. When I
am nailed up in my coffin I believe I shall still dream of those early
mornings, you know, when the sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring
evenings when the nightingales and the landrails call in the garden and
beyond the garden, and sounds of the harmonica float across from the
village, while they play the piano indoors and the stream babbles . . . when
there is such music, in fact, that one wants at the same time to cry and to
sing aloud.

We have not much arable land, but our pasture makes up for it, and with
the forest yields about two thousand roubles a year. I am the only son of my
father; we are both modest persons, and with my father's pension that sum
was amply sufficient for us.

The first three years after finishing at the university I spent in the
country, looking after the estate and constantly expecting to be elected on
some local assembly; but what was most important, I was violently in love
with an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating girl. She was the sister of
our neighbour, Kotlovitch, a ruined landowner who had on his estate pine-
apples, marvellous peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain in the
courtyard, and at the same time not a farthing in his pocket. He did nothing
and knew how to do nothing. He was as flabby as though he had been made
of boiled turnip; he used to doctor the peasants by homeopathy and was
interested in spiritualism. He was, however, a man of great delicacy and
mildness, and by no means a fool, but I have no fondness for these
gentlemen who converse with spirits and cure peasant women by
magnetism. In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually

free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and,
secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women,
and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I did not
care for his appearance either. He was tall, stout, white-skinned, with a little
head, little shining eyes, and chubby white fingers. He did not shake hands,
but kneaded one's hands in his. And he was always apologising. If he asked
for anything it was "Excuse me"; if he gave you anything it was "Excuse
me" too.

As for his sister, she was a character out of a different opera. I must
explain that I had not been acquainted with the Kotlovitches in my
childhood and early youth, for my father had been a professor at N., and we
had for many years lived away. When I did make their acquaintance the girl
was twenty-two, had left school long before, and had spent two or three
years in Moscow with a wealthy aunt who brought her out into society.
When I was introduced and first had to talk to her, what struck me most of
all was her rare and beautiful name--Ariadne. It suited her so wonderfully!
She was a brunette, very thin, very slender, supple, elegant, and extremely
graceful, with refined and exceedingly noble features. Her eyes were
shining, too, but her brother's shone with a cold sweetness, mawkish as
sugar-candy, while hers had the glow of youth, proud and beautiful. She
conquered me on the first day of our acquaintance, and indeed it was
inevitable. My first impression was so overwhelming that to this day I
cannot get rid of my illusions; I am still tempted to imagine that nature had
some grand, marvellous design when she created that girl.

Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her footprints on the sandy bank
where she used to angle for gudgeon, filled me with delight and a
passionate hunger for life. I judged of her spiritual being from her lovely
face and lovely figure, and every word, every smile of Ariadne's bewitched
me, conquered me and forced me to believe in the loftiness of her soul. She
was friendly, ready to talk, gay and simple in her manners. She had a poetic
belief in God, made poetic reflections about death, and there was such a
wealth of varying shades in her spiritual organisation that even her faults
seemed in her to carry with them peculiar, charming qualities. Suppose she
wanted a new horse and had no money--what did that matter? Something
might be sold or pawned, or if the steward swore that nothing could

possibly be sold or pawned, the iron roofs might be torn off the lodges and
taken to the factory, or at the very busiest time the farm-horses might be
driven to the market and sold there for next to nothing. These unbridled
desires reduced the whole household to despair at times, but she expressed
them with such refinement that everything was forgiven her; all things were
permitted her as to a goddess or to Cæsar's wife. My love was pathetic and
was soon noticed by every one--my father, the neighbours, and the
peasants--and they all sympathised with me. When I stood the workmen
vodka, they would bow and say: "May the Kotlovitch young lady be your
bride, please God!"

And Ariadne herself knew that I loved her. She would often ride over on
horseback or drive in the char-à-banc to see us, and would spend whole
days with me and my father. She made great friends with the old man, and
he even taught her to bicycle, which was his favourite amusement.

I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she
looked so lovely that I felt as though I were burning my hands when I
touched her. I shuddered with rapture, and when the two of them, my old
father and she, both looking so handsome and elegant, bicycled side by side
along the main road, a black horse ridden by the steward dashed aside on
meeting them, and it seemed to me that it dashed aside because it too was
overcome by her beauty. My love, my worship, touched Ariadne and
softened her; she had a passionate longing to be captivated like me and to
respond with the same love. It was so poetical!

But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold and
already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering to her
day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite
idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been
given her, she never pictured herself in the future except as very wealthy
and distinguished, she had visions of balls, races, liveries, of sumptuous
drawing-rooms, of a salon of her own, and of a perfect swarm of counts,
princes, ambassadors, celebrated painters and artists, all of them adoring her
and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .

This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the
mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to me, to

nature, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing, and still there were no
ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on living with her brother, the
spiritualist: things went from bad to worse, so that she had nothing to buy
hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts of tricks and dodges to
conceal her poverty.

As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but an
utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when she was
living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him, point-blank. But now
she was fretted by the worm of repentance that she had refused him; just as
a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of kvass with cockroaches in it but
yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the recollection of the prince,
and yet she would say to me: "Say what you like, there is something
inexplicable, fascinating, in a title. . . ."

She dreamed of a title, of a brilliant position, and at the same time she
did not want to let me go. However one may dream of ambassadors one's
heart is not a stone, and one has wistful feelings for one's youth. Ariadne
tried to fall in love, made a show of being in love, and even swore that she
loved me. But I am a highly strung and sensitive man; when I am loved I
feel it even at a distance, without vows and assurances; at once I felt as it
were a coldness in the air, and when she talked to me of love, it seemed to
me as though I were listening to the singing of a metal nightingale. Ariadne
was herself aware that she was lacking in something. She was vexed and
more than once I saw her cry. Another time--can you imagine it?--all of a
sudden she embraced me and kissed me. It happened in the evening on the
river-bank, and I saw by her eyes that she did not love me, but was
embracing me from curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it. And
I felt dreadful. I took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses
without love cause me suffering!"

"What a queer fellow you are!" she said with annoyance, and walked
away.

Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should
have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased
to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage
appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit from an old

university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom
coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining gentleman." He was a
man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured
bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff, well-kept
moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple. He used to
wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce
either _r_ or _l_. He was always in good spirits, everything amused him.

He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had
acquired two houses in Moscow as part of his wife's dowry. He began doing
them up and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined. Now his
wife and four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he
had to support them--and this amused him. He was thirty-six and his wife
was by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a conceited,
sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and lived
apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to allow her
seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of taste, liked
lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the Hermitage; he needed a
great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed him two thousand roubles a
year, which was not enough, and for days together he would run about
Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying is, looking for some one to
borrow from--and this, too, amused him. He had come to Kotlovitch to find
in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest from family life. At dinner, at supper,
and on our walks, he talked about his wife, about his mother, about his
creditors, about the bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and
assured us that, thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great
number of agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we
laughed too. Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently. I was
more inclined to quiet, so to say idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening
walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks, hunting.
He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with an earnest
and inspired face, used to write a list of oysters, champagne, sweets, and
used to send me into Moscow to get them, without inquiring, of course,
whether I had money. And at the picnics there were toasts and laughter, and
again mirthful descriptions of how old his wife was, what fat lap-dogs his
mother had, and what charming people his creditors were.

Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar
and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created for
his pleasure. He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent
landscape and say: "It would be nice to have tea here."

One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he
nodded towards her and said:

"She's thin, and that's what I like; I don't like fat women."

This made me wince. I asked him not to speak like that about women
before me. He looked at me in surprise and said:

"What is there amiss in my liking thin women and not caring for fat
ones?"

I made no answer. Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle
elevated, he said:

"I've noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you. I can't understand why you
don't go in and win."

His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I
told him how I looked at love and women.

"I don't know," he sighed; "to my thinking, a woman's a woman and a
man's a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as you say,
but it doesn't follow that she must be superior to the laws of nature. You see
for yourself that she has reached the age when she must have a husband or a
lover. I respect women as much as you do, but I don't think certain relations
exclude poetry. Poetry's one thing and love is another. It's just the same as it
is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your
forests or fields is quite another."

When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by
and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.

"I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair," he would
say. "You are young, handsome, interesting--in fact, you're a man not to be
sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och! I can't stand these fellows who are
old at twenty-eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you are, and yet which
of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigoryevna, which?"

"You, of course," Ariadne answered him.

And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which
we stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily:

"You're really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to
be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to
make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence,
but she will never forgive your reasonableness!"

She was angry in earnest, and went on:

"To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold. Lubkov is not so
handsome as you are, but he is more interesting. He will always succeed
with women because he's not like you; he's a man. . . ."

And there was actually a note of exasperation in her voice.

One day at supper she began saying, not addressing me, that if she were
a man she would not stagnate in the country, but would travel, would spend
the winter somewhere aboard--in Italy, for instance. Oh, Italy! At this point
my father unconsciously poured oil on the flames; he began telling us at
length about Italy, how splendid it was there, the exquisite scenery, the
museums. Ariadne suddenly conceived a burning desire to go to Italy. She
positively brought her fist down on the table and her eyes flashed as she
said: "I must go!"

After that came conversations every day about Italy: how splendid it
would be in Italy--ah, Italy!--oh, Italy! And when Ariadne looked at me
over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expression I saw that in her
dreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons, celebrated
foreigners and tourists, and there was no holding her back now. I advised

her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or two, but she frowned
disdainfully and said:

"You're as prudent as an old woman!"

Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply,
and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from family life.

I behaved, I confess, as naïvely as a schoolboy.

Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and
extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone together, and
they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they would pretend they
had just been kissing one another, and so on. But lo and behold, one fine
morning, her plump, white-skinned brother, the spiritualist, made his
appearance and expressed his desire to speak to me alone.

He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy he
could never resist reading another person's letter, if it lay before him on the
table. And now he admitted that he had by chance read a letter of Lubkov's
to Ariadne.

"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My dear
fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness' sake. I can
make nothing of it!"

As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and
smelling of boiled beef.

"Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you are
Ariadne's friend, she respects you. Perhaps you know something of it. She
wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing to go with her.
Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov; he is a married man, he
has children, and yet he is making a declaration of love; he is writing to
Ariadne 'darling.' Excuse me, but it is so strange!"

I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an ache in
my chest, as if a three-cornered stone had been driven into it. Kotlovitch

sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands fell limply at his sides.

"What can I do?" I inquired.

"Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . . Just consider, what is Lubkov
to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, good God! How awful it is, how awful it
is!" he went on, clutching his head. "She has had such splendid offers--
Prince Maktuev and . . . and others. The prince adores her, and only last
Wednesday week his late grandfather, Ilarion, declared positively that
Ariadne would be his wife--positively! His grandfather Ilarion is dead, but
he is a wonderfully intelligent person; we call up his spirit every day."

After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting
myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up. Then I
sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father and set off
for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.

Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as
simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a
cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to
explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that
her bodily formation is different from mine? Oh, how awful that would be!
I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius of man has
struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that, if he has not
conquered it, he has at least succeeded in tangling it in a net-work of
illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no longer a
simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but is real love,
and every embrace is spiritualised by a pure impulse of the heart and
respect for the woman. In reality, a disgust for the animal instinct has been
trained for ages in hundreds of generations; it is inherited by me in my
blood and forms part of my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as
natural and inevitable in our day as my ears' not being able to move and my
not being covered with fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised
people look at it, so that the absence of the moral, poetical element in love
is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of atavism; they say it is
a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. It is true that, in
poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in
them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for

us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than
to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being
man.

In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne
Grigoryevna had on such a day gone abroad, intending to spend the whole
winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now autumn. Every
week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting letters on scented paper,
written in an excellent literary style. It is my opinion that every woman can
be a writer. Ariadne described in great detail how it had not been easy for
her to make it up with her aunt and induce the latter to give her a thousand
roubles for the journey, and what a long time she had spent in Moscow
trying to find an old lady, a distant relation, in order to persuade her to go
with her. Such a profusion of detail suggested fiction, and I realised, of
course, that she had no chaperon with her.

Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and literary.
She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful, intelligent, loving
eyes. She reproached me affectionately for wasting my youth, for stagnating
in the country when I might, like her, be living in paradise under the palms,
breathing the fragrance of the orange-trees. And she signed herself "Your
forsaken Ariadne." Two days later came another letter in the same style,
signed "Your forgotten Ariadne." My mind was confused. I loved her
passionately, I dreamed of her every night, and then this "your forsaken,"
"your forgotten"--what did it mean? What was it for? And then the
dreariness of the country, the long evenings, the disquieting thoughts of
Lubkov. . . . The uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned my days and nights;
it became unendurable. I could not bear it and went abroad.

Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright warm day
after rain; the rain-drops were still hanging on the trees and glistening on
the huge, barrack-like dépendance where Ariadne and Lubkov were living.

They were not at home. I went into the park; wandered about the
avenues, then sat down. An Austrian General, with his hands behind him,
walked past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our generals wear.
A baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the wheels squeaked on the
damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice passed, then a crowd of

Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian General again. A
military band, only just arrived from Fiume, with glittering brass
instruments, sauntered by to the bandstand--they began playing.

Have you ever been at Abbazzia? It's a filthy little Slav town with only
one street, which stinks, and in which one can't walk after rain without
goloshes. I had read so much and always with such intense feeling about
this earthly paradise that when afterwards, holding up my trousers, I
cautiously crossed the narrow street, and in my ennui bought some hard
pears from an old peasant woman who, recognising me as a Russian, said:
"Tcheeteery" for "tchetyry" (four)--"davadtsat" for "dvadtsat" (twenty), and
when I wondered in perplexity where to go and what to do here, and when I
inevitably met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel vexed and
ashamed. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats with coloured
sails. From there I could see Fiume and the distant islands covered with
lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if the view over the bay had
not been hemmed in by the hotels and their dépendances--buildings in an
absurd, trivial style of architecture, with which the whole of that green
shore has been covered by greedy money grubbers, so that for the most part
you see nothing in this little paradise but windows, terraces, and little
squares with tables and waiters' black coats. There is a park such as you
find now in every watering-place abroad. And the dark, motionless, silent
foliage of the palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and the
bright green seats, and the glitter of the braying military horns--all this
sickened me in ten minutes! And yet one is obliged for some reason to
spend ten days, ten weeks, there!

Having been dragged reluctantly from one of these watering-places to
another, I have been more and more struck by the inconvenient and
niggardly life led by the wealthy and well-fed, the dulness and feebleness of
their imagination, the lack of boldness in their tastes and desires. And how
much happier are those tourists, old and young, who, not having the money
to stay in hotels, live where they can, admire the view of the sea from the
tops of the mountains, lying on the green grass, walk instead of riding, see
the forests and villages at close quarters, observe the customs of the
country, listen to its songs, fall in love with its women. . . .

While I was sitting in the park, it began to get dark, and in the twilight
my Ariadne appeared, elegant and dressed like a princess; after her walked
Lubkov, wearing a new loose-fitting suit, bought probably in Vienna.

"Why are you cross with me?" he was saying. "What have I done to
you?"

Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not been in
the park, would have thrown herself on my neck. She pressed my hands
warmly and laughed; and I laughed too and almost cried with emotion.
Questions followed, of the village, of my father, whether I had seen her
brother, and so on. She insisted on my looking her straight in the face, and
asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics. . . .

"How nice it all was really!" she sighed. "But we're not having a slow
time here either. We have a great many acquaintances, my dear, my best of
friends! To-morrow I will introduce you to a Russian family here, but
please buy yourself another hat." She scrutinised me and frowned.
"Abbazzia is not the country," she said; "here one must be _comme il
faut_."

Then we went to the restaurant. Ariadne was laughing and mischievous
all the time; she kept calling me "dear," "good," "clever," and seemed as
though she could not believe her eyes that I was with her. We sat on till
eleven o'clock, and parted very well satisfied both with the supper and with
each other.

Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as: "The son of a
distinguished professor whose estate is next to ours."

She talked to this family about nothing but estates and crops, and kept
appealing to me. She wanted to appear to be a very wealthy landowner, and
did, in fact, succeed in doing so. Her manner was superb like that of a real
aristocrat, which indeed she was by birth.

"But what a person my aunt is!" she said suddenly, looking at me with a
smile. "We had a slight tiff, and she has bolted off to Meran. What do you
say to that?"

Afterwards when we were walking in the park I asked her:

"What aunt were you talking of just now? What aunt is that?"

"That was a saving lie," laughed Ariadne. "They must not know I'm
without a chaperon."

After a moment's silence she came closer to me and said:

"My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov. He is so unhappy! His
wife and mother are simply awful."

She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when
she was going up to bed she said good-night to him exactly as she did to
me, and their rooms were on different floors. All this made me hope that it
was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between them,
and I felt at ease when I met him. And when one day he asked me for the
loan of three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with the greatest pleasure.

Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying
ourselves; we strolled in the park, we ate, we drank. Every day there were
conversations with the Russian family. By degrees I got used to the fact that
if I went into the park I should be sure to meet the old man with jaundice,
the Catholic priest, and the Austrian General, who always carried a pack of
little cards, and wherever it was possible sat down and played patience,
nervously twitching his shoulders. And the band played the same thing over
and over again.

At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when
I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day; here too I was ashamed
at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who met us. It
always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking: "Why are you
doing nothing?" And I was conscious of this feeling of shame every day
from morning to night. It was a strange, unpleasant, monotonous time; it
was only varied by Lubkov's borrowing from me now a hundred, now fifty
guldens, and being suddenly revived by the money as a morphia-maniac is
by morphia, beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at himself, at his
creditors.

At last it began to be rainy and cold. We went to Italy, and I telegraphed
to my father begging him for mercy's sake to send me eight hundred roubles
to Rome. We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence, and in every town
invariably put up at an expensive hotel, where we were charged separately
for lights, and for service, and for heating, and for bread at lunch, and for
the right of having dinner by ourselves. We ate enormously. In the morning
they gave us _café complet_; at one o'clock lunch: meat, fish, some sort of
omelette, cheese, fruits, and wine. At six o'clock dinner of eight courses
with long intervals, during which we drank beer and wine. At nine o'clock
tea. At midnight Ariadne would declare she was hungry, and ask for ham
and boiled eggs. We would eat to keep her company.

In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums and
exhibitions in continual anxiety for fear we should be late for dinner or
lunch. I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed to be at home to rest;
I was exhausted, looked about for a chair and hypocritically repeated after
other people: "How exquisite, what atmosphere!" Like overfed boa
constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects. The shop windows
hypnotised us; we went into ecstasies over imitation brooches and bought a
mass of useless trumpery.

The same thing happened in Rome, where it rained and there was a cold
wind. After a heavy lunch we went to look at St. Peter's, and thanks to our
replete condition and perhaps the bad weather, it made no sort of impression
on us, and detecting in each other an indifference to art, we almost
quarrelled.

The money came from my father. I went to get it, I remember, in the
morning. Lubkov went with me.

"The present cannot be full and happy when one has a past," said he. "I
have heavy burdens left on me by the past. However, if only I get the
money, it's no great matter, but if not, I'm in a fix. Would you believe it, I
have only eight francs left, yet I must send my wife a hundred and my
mother another. And we must live here too. Ariadne's like a child; she won't
enter into the position, and flings away money like a duchess. Why did she
buy a watch yesterday? And, tell me, what object is there in our going on
playing at being good children? Why, our hiding our relations from the

servants and our friends costs us from ten to fifteen francs a day, as I have
to have a separate room. What's the object of it?"

I felt as though a sharp stone had been turned round in my chest. There
was no uncertainty now; it was all clear to me. I turned cold all over, and at
once made a resolution to give up seeing them, to run away from them, to
go home at once. . . .

"To get on terms with a woman is easy enough," Lubkov went on. "You
have only to undress her; but afterwards what a bore it is, what a silly
business!"

When I counted over the money I received he said:

"If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I am faced with complete ruin.
Your money is the only resource left to me."

I gave him the money, and he at once revived and began laughing about
his uncle, a queer fish, who could never keep his address secret from his
wife. When I reached the hotel I packed and paid my bill. I had still to say
good-bye to Ariadne.

I knocked at the door.

"Entrez!"

In her room was the usual morning disorder: tea-things on the table, an
unfinished roll, an eggshell; a strong overpowering reek of scent. The bed
had not been made, and it was evident that two had slept in it.

Ariadne herself had only just got out of bed and was now with her hair
down in a flannel dressing-jacket.

I said good-morning to her, and then sat in silence for a minute while she
tried to put her hair tidy, and then I asked her, trembling all over:

"Why . . . why . . . did you send for me here?"

Evidently she guessed what I was thinking; she took me by the hand and
said:

"I want you to be here, you are so pure."

I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling. And I was afraid I might
begin sobbing, too! I went out without saying another word, and within an
hour I was sitting in the train. All the journey, for some reason, I imagined
Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me, and all the women I
saw in the trains and at the stations looked to me, for some reason, as if they
too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting and pitiable. I was in
the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover
that all his gold coins were false. The pure, gracious images which my
imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my
hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman--all now were jeering
and putting out their tongues at me. "Ariadne," I kept asking with horror,
"that young, intellectual, extraordinarily beautiful girl, the daughter of a
senator, carrying on an intrigue with such an ordinary, uninteresting
vulgarian? But why should she not love Lubkov?" I answered myself. "In
what is he inferior to me? Oh, let her love any one she likes, but why lie to
me? But why is she bound to be open with me?" And so I went on over and
over again till I was stupefied.

It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even so there were
three on a side, there were no double windows, the outer door opened
straight into the compartment, and I felt as though I were in the stocks,
cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my legs were fearfully numb, and at the
same time I kept recalling how fascinating she had been that morning in her
dressing-jacket and with her hair down, and I was suddenly overcome by
such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so that my neighbours stared
at me in wonder and positive alarm.

At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the
winter; I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts, it's
particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket and felt
overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the
yard, or to read in a well warmed room, to sit in my father's study before the
open fire, to wash in my country bath-house. . . . Only if there is no mother

in the house, no sister and no children, it is somehow dreary on winter
evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long and quiet. And the warmer
and snugger it is, the more acutely is this lack felt. In the winter when I
came back from abroad, the evenings were endlessly long, I was intensely
depressed, so depressed that I could not even read; in the daytime I was
coming and going, clearing away the snow in the garden or feeding the
chickens and the calves, but in the evening it was all up with me.

I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them, for I
knew there was sure to be talk of Ariadne. Kotlovitch, the spiritualist, used
often to come to talk about his sister, and sometimes he brought with him
his friend Prince Maktuev, who was as much in love with Ariadne as I was.
To sit in Ariadne's room, to finger the keys of her piano, to look at her
music was a necessity for the prince--he could not live without it; and the
spirit of his grandfather Ilarion was still predicting that sooner or later she
would be his wife. The prince usually stayed a long time with us, from
lunch to midnight, saying nothing all the time; in silence he would drink
two or three bottles of beer, and from time to time, to show that he too was
taking part in the conversation, he would laugh an abrupt, melancholy,
foolish laugh. Before going home he would always take me aside and ask
me in an undertone: "When did you see Ariadne Grigoryevna last? Was she
quite well? I suppose she's not tired of being out there?"

Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do and then the sowing of
spring corn and clover. I was sad, but there was the feeling of spring. One
longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields and listening to the
larks, I asked myself: "Couldn't I have done with this question of personal
happiness once and for all? Couldn't I lay aside my fancy and marry a
simple peasant girl?"

Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the Italian
stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and the peasant girl
all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that she was
profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not holding out a
helping hand to her, for looking down upon her from the heights of my
virtue and deserting her at the moment of danger. All this was written in a
large, nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and it was evident that

she wrote in haste and distress. In conclusion she besought me to come and
save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I was carried away. Ariadne
was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me, she
sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all that
winter, and was just as young and charming. We had supper together and
afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the time she kept telling
me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.

"Don't remind me of that creature!" she cried. "He is loathsome and
disgusting to me!"

"But I thought you loved him," I said.

"Never," she said. "At first he struck me as original and aroused my pity,
that was all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm. And that's
attractive. But we won't talk about him. That is a melancholy page in my
life. He has gone to Russia to get money. Serve him right! I told him not to
dare to come back."

She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two
rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and luxuriously.

After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances
about five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation
for her.

I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed in
that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of the
poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof on her
brother's house, roused a shudder of disgust, and when I suggested going
home to her, she squeezed my hands convulsively and said:

"No, no, I shall die of boredom there!"

Then my love entered upon its final phase.

"Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little," said Ariadne,
bending over to me. "You're sulky and prudent, you're afraid to yield to

impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that's dull. Come, I beg
you, I beseech you, be nice to me! . . . My pure one, my holy one, my dear
one, I love you so!"

I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious
of nothing but rapture. To hold in one's arms a young and lovely body, with
bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to
remember that she was there--she, my Ariadne!-- oh, it was not easy to get
used to that! But yet I did get used to it, and by degrees became capable of
reflecting on my new position. First of all, I realised, as before, that Ariadne
did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of
solitude, and, above all, I was healthy, young, vigorous; she was sensual,
like all cold people, as a rule--and we both made a show of being united by
a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I realised something else, too.

We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but there
we thought it cold and went back to Italy. We introduced ourselves
everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made
our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success everywhere. As she
took lessons in painting, she was called an artist, and only imagine, that
quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent.

She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee
and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat,
asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up
something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy,
careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples
and oranges.

The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an
amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently
apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as
makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antennæ. She was
deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in
the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not one meeting,
took place without affectation and pretence. A man had only to come into
our room--whoever it might be, a waiter, or a baron--for her eyes, her
expression, her voice to change, even the contour of her figure was

transformed. At the very first glance at her then, you would have said there
were no more wealthy and fashionable people in Italy than we. She never
met an artist or a musician without telling him all sorts of lies about his
remarkable talent.

"You have such a talent!" she would say, in honeyed cadences, "I'm
really afraid of you. I think you must see right through people."

And all this simply in order to please, to be successful, to be fascinating!
She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing"! It was the
aim and object of her life. If I had told her that in such a house, in such a
street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused
her real suffering. She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive
men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete
nonentity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that
visitors used to feel in tournaments. My subjection was not enough, and at
nights, stretched out like a tigress, uncovered--she was always too hot--she
would read the letters sent her by Lubkov; he besought her to return to
Russia, vowing if she did not he would rob or murder some one to get the
money to come to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters
excited her. She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she
imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen
how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have
vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin,
offended me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, to vex
me, say all sorts of vulgar things, taunting me. One day when we were at
the summer villa of a lady of our acquaintance, and she lost her temper, she
even went so far as to say: "If you don't leave off boring me with your
sermons, I'll undress this minute and lie naked here on these flowers."

Often looking at her asleep, or eating, or trying to assume a naïve
expression, I wondered why that extraordinary beauty, grace, and
intelligence had been given her by God. Could it simply be for lolling in
bed, eating and lying, lying endlessly? And was she intelligent really? She
was afraid of three candles in a row, of the number thirteen, was terrified of
spells and bad dreams. She argued about free love and freedom in general
like a bigoted old woman, declared that Boleslav Markevitch was a better

writer than Turgenev. But she was diabolically cunning and sharp, and
knew how to seem a highly educated, advanced person in company.

Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or
kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to read about
murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of
money. My poor father sent me his pension, all the little sums he received,
borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he answered me:
"Non habeo," I sent him a desperate telegram in which I besought him to
mortgage the estate. A little later I begged him to get money somehow on a
second mortgage. He did this too without a murmur and sent me every
farthing. Ariadne despised the practical side of life; all this was no concern
of hers, and when flinging away thousands of francs to satisfy her mad
desires I groaned like an old tree, she would be singing "Addio bella
Napoli" with a light heart.

Little by little I grew cold to her and began to be ashamed of our tie. I
am not fond of pregnancy and confinements, but now I sometimes dreamed
of a child who would have been at least a formal justification of our life.
That I might not be completely disgusted with myself, I began reading and
visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking and took to eating very
little. If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to night, one's heart
seems lighter. I began to bore Ariadne too. The people with whom she won
her triumphs were, by the way, all of the middling sort; as before, there
were no ambassadors, there was no salon, the money did not run to it, and
this mortified her and made her sob, and she announced to me at last that
perhaps she would not be against our returning to Russia.

And here we are on our way. For the last few months she has been
zealously corresponding with her brother; she evidently has some secret
projects, but what they are--God knows! I am sick of trying to fathom her
underhand schemes! But we're going, not to the country, but to Yalta and
afterwards to the Caucasus. She can only exist now at watering-places, and
if you knew how I hate all these watering-places, how suffocated and
ashamed I am in them. If I could be in the country now! If I could only be
working now, earning my bread by the sweat of my brow, atoning for my

follies. I am conscious of a superabundance of energy and I believe that if I
were to put that energy to work I could redeem my estate in five years. But
now, as you see, there is a complication. Here we're not abroad, but in
mother Russia; we shall have to think of lawful wedlock. Of course, all
attraction is over; there is no trace left of my old love, but, however that
may be, I am bound in honour to marry her.

----

Shamohin, excited by his story, went below with me and we continued
talking about women. It was late. It appeared that he and I were in the same
cabin.

"So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man,"
said Shamohin. "There she thinks and feels just as man does, and struggles
with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he. In the towns the
woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since fallen behind,
and is returning to her primitive condition. She is half a human beast
already, and, thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human
genius has been lost again; the woman gradually disappears and in her place
is the primitive female. This dropping-back on the part of the educated
woman is a real danger to culture; in her retrogressive movement she tries
to drag man after her and prevents him from moving forward. That is
incontestable."

I asked: "Why generalise? Why judge of all women from Ariadne alone?
The very struggle of women for education and sexual equality, which I look
upon as a struggle for justice, precludes any hypothesis of a retrograde
movement."

But Shamohin scarcely listened to me and he smiled distrustfully. He
was a passionate, convinced misogynist, and it was impossible to alter his
convictions.

"Oh, nonsense!" he interrupted. "When once a woman sees in me, not a
man, not an equal, but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to attract
me--that is, to take possession of me--how can one talk of their rights? Oh,
don't you believe them; they are very, very cunning! We men make a great

stir about their emancipation, but they don't care about their emancipation at
all, they only pretend to care about it; they are horribly cunning things,
horribly cunning!"

I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned over with my
face to the wall.

"Yes," I heard as I fell asleep--"yes, and it's our education that's at fault,
sir. In our towns, the whole education and bringing up of women in its
essence tends to develop her into the human beast --that is, to make her
attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed"--Shamohiri
sighed--"little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that
they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may
be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks
she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first
of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in
everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her
that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be
indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The
apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size
than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the
general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the
physiological aspect, too--to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the
first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women
have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the fields up to
the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be
absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks
up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I
have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or
hands me a glass of water--"

I heard no more, for I fell asleep.

Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp,
unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me,
brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-collars
turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below; a young
and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the Customs

officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the
expression of a naughty, fretful child:

"Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick."

Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing
about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep up with
her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian cap, sketching
on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a little way off. I too was
introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth, and looking at
me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had
given her by my writings.

"Don't you believe her," Shamohin whispered to me, "she has never read
a word of them."

When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin met
me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.

"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He came yesterday with her
brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing to him
about! Oh, Lord!" he went on, gazing up to heaven, and pressing his parcels
to his bosom. "If she hits it off with the prince, it means freedom, then I can
go back to the country with my father!"

And he ran on.

"I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back. "The spirit
of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth! Oh, if only it is
so!"

----

The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story ended I
don't know.

POLINKA

IT is one o'clock in the afternoon. Shopping is at its height at the
"Nouveauté's de Paris," a drapery establishment in one of the Arcades.
There is a monotonous hum of shopmen's voices, the hum one hears at
school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something by heart. This
regular sound is not interrupted by the laughter of lady customers nor the
slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying of the boys.

Polinka, a thin fair little person whose mother is the head of a
dressmaking establishment, is standing in the middle of the shop looking
about for some one. A dark-browed boy runs up to her and asks, looking at
her very gravely:

"What is your pleasure, madam?"

"Nikolay Timofeitch always takes my order," answers Polinka.

Nikolay Timofeitch, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed,
with frizzled hair and a big pin in his cravat, has already cleared a place on
the counter and is craning forward, looking at Polinka with a smile.

"Morning, Pelagea Sergeevna!" he cries in a pleasant, hearty baritone
voice. "What can I do for you?"

"Good-morning!" says Polinka, going up to him. "You see, I'm back
again. . . . Show me some gimp, please."

"Gimp--for what purpose?"

"For a bodice trimming--to trim a whole dress, in fact."

"Certainly."

Nickolay Timofeitch lays several kinds of gimp before Polinka; she
looks at the trimmings languidly and begins bargaining over them.

"Oh, come, a rouble's not dear," says the shopman persuasively, with a
condescending smile. "It's a French trimming, pure silk. . . . We have a
commoner sort, if you like, heavier. That's forty-five kopecks a yard; of
course, it's nothing like the same quality."

"I want a bead corselet, too, with gimp buttons," says Polinka, bending
over the gimp and sighing for some reason. "And have you any bead motifs
to match?"

"Yes."

Polinka bends still lower over the counter and asks softly:

"And why did you leave us so early on Thursday, Nikolay Timofeitch?"

"Hm! It's queer you noticed it," says the shopman, with a smirk. "You
were so taken up with that fine student that . . . it's queer you noticed it!"

Polinka flushes crimson and remains mute. With a nervous quiver in his
fingers the shopman closes the boxes, and for no sort of object piles them
one on the top of another. A moment of silence follows.

"I want some bead lace, too," says Polinka, lifting her eyes guiltily to the
shopman.

"What sort? Black or coloured? Bead lace on tulle is the most
fashionable trimming."

"And how much is it?"

"The black's from eighty kopecks and the coloured from two and a half
roubles. I shall never come and see you again," Nikolay Timofeitch adds in
an undertone.

"Why?"

"Why? It's very simple. You must understand that yourself. Why should I
distress myself? It's a queer business! Do you suppose it's a pleasure to me
to see that student carrying on with you? I see it all and I understand. Ever

since autumn he's been hanging about you and you go for a walk with him
almost every day; and when he is with you, you gaze at him as though he
were an angel. You are in love with him; there's no one to beat him in your
eyes. Well, all right, then, it's no good talking."

Polinka remains dumb and moves her finger on the counter in
embarrassment.

"I see it all," the shopman goes on. "What inducement have I to come
and see you? I've got some pride. It's not every one likes to play gooseberry.
What was it you asked for?"

"Mamma told me to get a lot of things, but I've forgotten. I want some
feather trimming too."

"What kind would you like?"

"The best, something fashionable."

"The most fashionable now are real bird feathers. If you want the most
fashionable colour, it's heliotrope or _kanak_--that is, claret with a yellow
shade in it. We have an immense choice. And what all this affair is going to
lead to, I really don't understand. Here you are in love, and how is it to
end?"

Patches of red come into Nikolay Timofeitch's face round his eyes. He
crushes the soft feather trimming in his hand and goes on muttering:

"Do you imagine he'll marry you--is that it? You'd better drop any such
fancies. Students are forbidden to marry. And do you suppose he comes to
see you with honourable intentions? A likely idea! Why, these fine students
don't look on us as human beings . . . they only go to see shopkeepers and
dressmakers to laugh at their ignorance and to drink. They're ashamed to
drink at home and in good houses, but with simple uneducated people like
us they don't care what any one thinks; they'd be ready to stand on their
heads. Yes! Well, which feather trimming will you take? And if he hangs
about and carries on with you, we know what he is after. . . . When he's a
doctor or a lawyer he'll remember you: 'Ah,' he'll say, 'I used to have a

pretty fair little thing! I wonder where she is now?' Even now I bet you he
boasts among his friends that he's got his eye on a little dressmaker."

Polinka sits down and gazes pensively at the pile of white boxes.

"No, I won't take the feather trimming," she sighs. "Mamma had better
choose it for herself; I may get the wrong one. I want six yards of fringe for
an overcoat, at forty kopecks the yard. For the same coat I want cocoa-nut
buttons, perforated, so they can be sown on firmly. . . ."

Nikolay Timofeitch wraps up the fringe and the buttons. She looks at
him guiltily and evidently expects him to go on talking, but he remains
sullenly silent while he tidies up the feather trimming.

"I mustn't forget some buttons for a dressing-gown . . ." she says after an
interval of silence, wiping her pale lips with a handkerchief.

"What kind?"

"It's for a shopkeeper's wife, so give me something rather striking."

"Yes, if it's for a shopkeeper's wife, you'd better have something bright.
Here are some buttons. A combination of colours--red, blue, and the
fashionable gold shade. Very glaring. The more refined prefer dull black
with a bright border. But I don't understand. Can't you see for yourself?
What can these . . . walks lead to?"

"I don't know," whispers Polinka, and she bends over the buttons; "I
don't know myself what's come to me, Nikolay Timofeitch."

A solid shopman with whiskers forces his way behind Nikolay
Timofeitch's back, squeezing him to the counter, and beaming with the
choicest gallantry, shouts:

"Be so kind, madam, as to step into this department. We have three kinds
of jerseys: plain, braided, and trimmed with beads! Which may I have the
pleasure of showing you?"

At the same time a stout lady passes by Polinka, pronouncing in a rich,
deep voice, almost a bass:

"They must be seamless, with the trade mark stamped in them, please."

"Pretend to be looking at the things," Nikolay Timofeitch whispers,
bending down to Polinka with a forced smile. "Dear me, you do look pale
and ill; you are quite changed. He'll throw you over, Pelagea Sergeevna! Or
if he does marry you, it won't be for love but from hunger; he'll be tempted
by your money. He'll furnish himself a nice home with your dowry, and
then be ashamed of you. He'll keep you out of sight of his friends and
visitors, because you're uneducated. He'll call you 'my dummy of a wife.'
You wouldn't know how to behave in a doctor's or lawyer's circle. To them
you're a dressmaker, an ignorant creature."

"Nikolay Timofeitch!" somebody shouts from the other end of the shop.
"The young lady here wants three yards of ribbon with a metal stripe. Have
we any?"

Nikolay Timofeitch turns in that direction, smirks and shouts:

"Yes, we have! Ribbon with a metal stripe, ottoman with a satin stripe,
and satin with a moiré stripe!"

"Oh, by the way, I mustn't forget, Olga asked me to get her a pair of
stays!" says Polinka.

"There are tears in your eyes," says Nikolay Timofeitch in dismay.
"What's that for? Come to the corset department, I'll screen you --it looks
awkward."

With a forced smile and exaggeratedly free and easy manner, the
shopman rapidly conducts Polinka to the corset department and conceals
her from the public eye behind a high pyramid of boxes.

"What sort of corset may I show you?" he asks aloud, whispering
immediately: "Wipe your eyes!"

"I want . . . I want . . . size forty-eight centimetres. Only she wanted one,
lined . . . with real whalebone . . . I must talk to you, Nikolay Timofeitch.
Come to-day!"

"Talk? What about? There's nothing to talk about."

"You are the only person who . . . cares about me, and I've no one to talk
to but you."

"These are not reed or steel, but real whalebone. . . . What is there for us
to talk about? It's no use talking. . . . You are going for a walk with him to-
day, I suppose?"

"Yes; I . . . I am."

"Then what's the use of talking? Talk won't help. . . . You are in love,
aren't you?"

"Yes . . ." Polinka whispers hesitatingly, and big tears gush from her
eyes.

"What is there to say?" mutters Nikolay Timofeitch, shrugging his
shoulders nervously and turning pale. "There's no need of talk. . . . Wipe
your eyes, that's all. I . . . I ask for nothing."

At that moment a tall, lanky shopman comes up to the pyramid of boxes,
and says to his customer:

"Let me show you some good elastic garters that do not impede the
circulation, certified by medical authority . . ."

Nikolay Timofeitch screens Polinka, and, trying to conceal her emotion
and his own, wrinkles his face into a smile and says aloud:

"There are two kinds of lace, madam: cotton and silk! Oriental, English,
Valenciennes, crochet, torchon, are cotton. And rococo, soutache, Cambray,
are silk. . . . For God's sake, wipe your eyes! They're coming this way!"

And seeing that her tears are still gushing he goes on louder than ever:

"Spanish, Rococo, soutache, Cambray . . . stockings, thread, cotton, silk .
. ."

ANYUTA

IN the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan
Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro,
zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead
perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart.

In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who
shared his room--Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale
with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy embroidering with
red thread the collar of a man's shirt. She was working against time. . . . The
clock in the passage struck two drowsily, yet the little room had not been
put to rights for the morning. Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about,
books, clothes, a big filthy slop-pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette
ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though
purposely jumbled together in one confusion. . . .

"The right lung consists of three parts . . ." Klotchkov repeated.
"Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or
fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib . . . behind to the _spina
scapulæ_. . ."

Klotchkov raised his eyes to the ceiling, striving to visualise what he had
just read. Unable to form a clear picture of it, he began feeling his upper
ribs through his waistcoat.

"These ribs are like the keys of a piano," he said. "One must familiarise
oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over them. One
must study them in the skeleton and the living body . . . . I say, Anyuta, let
me pick them out."

Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened
herself up. Klotchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting her
ribs.

"H'm! . . . One can't feel the first rib; it's behind the shoulder-blade . . . .
This must be the second rib. . . . Yes . . . this is the third . . . this is the
fourth. . . . H'm! . . . yes. . . . Why are you wriggling?"

"Your fingers are cold!"

"Come, come . . . it won't kill you. Don't twist about. That must be the
third rib, then . . . this is the fourth. . . . You look such a skinny thing, and
yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That's the second . . . that's the third. . . .
Oh, this is muddling, and one can't see it clearly. . . . I must draw it. . . .
Where's my crayon?"

Klotchkov took his crayon and drew on Anyuta's chest several parallel
lines corresponding with the ribs.

"First-rate. That's all straightforward. . . . Well, now I can sound you.
Stand up!"

Anyuta stood up and raised her chin. Klotchkov began sounding her, and
was so absorbed in this occupation that he did not notice how Anyuta's lips,
nose, and fingers turned blue with cold. Anyuta shivered, and was afraid the
student, noticing it, would leave off drawing and sounding her, and then,
perhaps, might fail in his exam.

"Now it's all clear," said Klotchkov when he had finished. "You sit like
that and don't rub off the crayon, and meanwhile I'll learn up a little more."

And the student again began walking to and fro, repeating to himself.
Anyuta, with black stripes across her chest, looking as though she had been
tattooed, sat thinking, huddled up and shivering with cold. She said very
little as a rule; she was always silent, thinking and thinking. . . .

In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to
another, she had known five students like Klotchkov. Now they had all

finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course, like
respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was living in
Paris, two were doctors, the fourth was an artist, and the fifth was said to be
already a professor. Klotchkov was the sixth. . . . Soon he, too, would finish
his studies and go out into the world. There was a fine future before him, no
doubt, and Klotchkov probably would become a great man, but the present
was anything but bright; Klotchkov had no tobacco and no tea, and there
were only four lumps of sugar left. She must make haste and finish her
embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered it, and with the quarter
rouble she would get for it, buy tea and tobacco.

"Can I come in?" asked a voice at the door.

Anyuta quickly threw a woollen shawl over her shoulders. Fetisov, the
artist, walked in.

"I have come to ask you a favour," he began, addressing Klotchkov, and
glaring like a wild beast from under the long locks that hung over his brow.
"Do me a favour; lend me your young lady just for a couple of hours! I'm
painting a picture, you see, and I can't get on without a model."

"Oh, with pleasure," Klotchkov agreed. "Go along, Anyuta."

"The things I've had to put up with there," Anyuta murmured softly.

"Rubbish! The man's asking you for the sake of art, and not for any sort
of nonsense. Why not help him if you can?"

Anyuta began dressing.

"And what are you painting?" asked Klotchkov.

"Psyche; it's a fine subject. But it won't go, somehow. I have to keep
painting from different models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue legs.
'Why are your legs blue?' I asked her. 'It's my stockings stain them,' she
said. And you're still grinding! Lucky fellow! You have patience."

"Medicine's a job one can't get on with without grinding."

"H'm! . . . Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It's awful
the way you live!"

"How do you mean? I can't help it. . . . I only get twelve roubles a month
from my father, and it's hard to live decently on that."

"Yes . . . yes . . ." said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust; "but,
still, you might live better. . . . An educated man is in duty bound to have
taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here! The bed not made,
the slops, the dirt . . . yesterday's porridge in the plates. . . Tfoo!"

"That's true," said the student in confusion; "but Anyuta has had no time
to-day to tidy up; she's been busy all the while."

When Anyuta and the artist had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the
sofa and began learning, lying down; then he accidentally dropped asleep,
and waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into
gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man was
in duty bound to have taste, and his surroundings actually struck him now
as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's eye, his own
future, when he would see his patients in his consulting-room, drink tea in a
large dining-room in the company of his wife, a real lady. And now that
slop-pail in which the cigarette ends were swimming looked incredibly
disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his imagination--a plain, slovenly,
pitiful figure . . . and he made up his mind to part with her at once, at all
costs.

When, on coming back from the artist's, she took off her coat, he got up
and said to her seriously:

"Look here, my good girl . . . sit down and listen. We must part! The fact
is, I don't want to live with you any longer."

Anyuta had come back from the artist's worn out and exhausted.
Standing so long as a model had made her face look thin and sunken, and
her chin sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's
words, only her lips began to tremble.

"You know we should have to part sooner or later, anyway," said the
student. "You're a nice, good girl, and not a fool; you'll understand. . . ."

Anyuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in
paper, gathered together her needles and thread: she found the screw of
paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the table by
the books.

"That's . . . your sugar . . ." she said softly, and turned away to conceal
her tears.

"Why are you crying?" asked Klotchkov.

He walked about the room in confusion, and said:

"You are a strange girl, really. . . . Why, you know we shall have to part.
We can't stay together for ever."

She had gathered together all her belongings, and turned to say good-bye
to him, and he felt sorry for her.

"Shall I let her stay on here another week?" he thought. "She really may
as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a week;" and vexed at his own
weakness, he shouted to her roughly:

"Come, why are you standing there? If you are going, go; and if you
don't want to, take off your coat and stay! You can stay!"

Anyuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also
stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable position on her
stool by the window.

The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from
corner to corner. "The right lung consists of three parts," he repeated; "the
upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib . . . ."

In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: "Grigory! The
samovar!"

THE TWO VOLODYAS

"LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!" Sofya Lvovna
said in a loud voice. "Wait a minute, driver; I'll get up on the box beside
you."

She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch, and the
friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, held her arms to prevent her
falling. The three horses were galloping fast.

"I said you ought not to have given her brandy," Vladimir Nikititch
whispered to his companion with vexation. "What a fellow you are, really!"

The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya
Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed by
hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got home,
instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering
compresses and drops.

"Wo!" cried Sofya Lvovna. "I want to drive myself!"

She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months, ever
since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that she had
married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, _par
dépit_; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become
convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years,
he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the gipsies'
tunes so charmingly. Really, the older men were nowadays a thousand times
more interesting than the young. It seemed as though age and youth had
changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her father, but could
there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking, there were infinitely
more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in herself, though she was only
twenty-three?

"Oh, my darling!" she thought. "You are wonderful!"

She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark of her
old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood, Vladimir
Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had
been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete
indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her spiritless, torpid,
uninteresting, and insignificant, and the _sangfroid_ with which he
habitually avoided paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her, and
she had hardly been able to resist saying, "If you are poor, you should stay
at home." The Colonel paid for all.

Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept flitting
past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected ideas came rushing into her mind.
She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been a hundred and twenty
roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies, and to-morrow she could
fling away a thousand roubles if she liked; and only two months ago, before
her wedding, she had not had three roubles of her own, and had to ask her
father for every trifle. What a change in her life!

Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a child
of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her husband, used to make love to her aunt,
and every one in the house said that he had ruined her. And her aunt had, in
fact, often come down to dinner with her eyes red from crying, and was
always going off somewhere; and people used to say of her that the poor
thing could find no peace anywhere. He had been very handsome in those
days, and had an extraordinary reputation as a lady-killer. So much so that
he was known all over the town, and it was said of him that he paid a round
of visits to his adorers every day like a doctor visiting his patients. And
even now, in spite of his grey hair, his wrinkles, and his spectacles, his thin
face looked handsome, especially in profile.

Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served in
the same regiment with Colonel Yagitch. Volodya's father was an army
doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment as her father
and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures, often very
complicated and disturbing, Volodya had done splendidly at the university,
and had taken a very good degree. Now he was specialising in foreign

literature, and was said to be writing a thesis. He lived with his father, the
army doctor, in the barracks, and had no means of his own, though he was
thirty. As children Sofya and he had lived under the same roof, though in
different flats. He often came to play with her, and they had dancing and
French lessons together. But when he grew up into a graceful, remarkably
handsome young man, she began to feel shy of him, and then fell madly in
love with him, and had loved him right up to the time when she was
married to Yagitch. He, too, had been renowned for his success with women
almost from the age of fourteen, and the ladies who deceived their husbands
on his account excused themselves by saying that he was only a boy. Some
one had told a story of him lately that when he was a student living in
lodgings so as to be near the university, it always happened if one knocked
at his door, that one heard his footstep, and then a whispered apology:
"_Pardon, je ne suis pas setul._" Yagitch was delighted with him, and
blessed him as a worthy successor, as Derchavin blessed Pushkin; he
appeared to be fond of him. They would play billiards or picquet by the
hour together without uttering a word, if Yagitch drove out on any
expedition he always took Volodya with him, and Yagitch was the only
person Volodya initiated into the mysteries of his thesis. In earlier days,
when Yagitch was rather younger, they had often been in the position of
rivals, but they had never been jealous of one another. In the circle in which
they moved Yagitch was nicknamed Big Volodya, and his friend Little
Volodya.

Besides Big Volodya, Little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was a
fourth person in the sledge--Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as every one
called her, Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagitch--a very pale girl over thirty,
with black eyebrows and a pince-nez, who was for ever smoking cigarettes,
even in the bitterest frost, and who always had her knees and the front of
her blouse covered with cigarette ash. She spoke through her nose, drawling
every word, was of a cold temperament, could drink any amount of wine
and liquor without being drunk, and used to tell scandalous anecdotes in a
languid and tasteless way. At home she spent her days reading thick
magazines, covering them with cigarette ash, or eating frozen apples.

"Sonia, give over fooling," she said, drawling. "It's really silly."

As they drew near the city gates they went more slowly, and began to
pass people and houses. Sofya Lvovna subsided, nestled up to her husband,
and gave herself up to her thoughts. Little Volodya sat opposite. By now her
light-hearted and cheerful thoughts were mingled with gloomy ones. She
thought that the man sitting opposite knew that she loved him, and no doubt
he believed the gossip that she married the Colonel _par dépit_. She had
never told him of her love; she had not wanted him to know, and had done
her best to hide her feeling, but from her face she knew that he understood
her perfectly --and her pride suffered. But what was most humiliating in her
position was that, since her wedding, Volodya had suddenly begun to pay
her attention, which he had never done before, spending hours with her,
sitting silent or chattering about trifles; and even now in the sledge, though
he did not talk to her, he touched her foot with his and pressed her hand a
little. Evidently that was all he wanted, that she should be married; and it
was evident that he despised her and that she only excited in him an interest
of a special kind as though she were an immoral and disreputable woman.
And when the feeling of triumph and love for her husband were mingled in
her soul with humiliation and wounded pride, she was overcome by a spirit
of defiance, and longed to sit on the box, to shout and whistle to the horses.

Just as they passed the nunnery the huge hundred-ton bell rang out. Rita
crossed herself.

"Our Olga is in that nunnery," said Sofya Lvovna, and she, too, crossed
herself and shuddered.

"Why did she go into the nunnery?" said the Colonel.

"_Par dépit_," Rita answered crossly, with obvious allusion to Sofya's
marrying Yagitch. "_Par dépit_ is all the fashion nowadays. Defiance of all
the world. She was always laughing, a desperate flirt, fond of nothing but
balls and young men, and all of a sudden off she went--to surprise every
one!"

"That's not true," said Volodya, turning down the collar of his fur coat
and showing his handsome face. "It wasn't a case of _par dépit_; it was
simply horrible, if you like. Her brother Dmitri was sent to penal servitude,
and they don't know where he is now. And her mother died of grief."

He turned up his collar again.

"Olga did well," he added in a muffled voice. "Living as an adopted
child, and with such a paragon as Sofya Lvovna,--one must take that into
consideration too!"

Sofya Lvovna heard a tone of contempt in his voice, and longed to say
something rude to him, but she said nothing. The spirit of defiance came
over her again; she stood up again and shouted in a tearful voice:

"I want to go to the early service! Driver, back! I want to see Olga."

They turned back. The nunnery bell had a deep note, and Sofya Lvovna
fancied there was something in it that reminded her of Olga and her life.
The other church bells began ringing too. When the driver stopped the
horses, Sofya Lvovna jumped out of the sledge and, unescorted and alone,
went quickly up to the gate.

"Make haste, please!" her husband called to her. "It's late already."

She went in at the dark gateway, then by the avenue that led from the
gate to the chief church. The snow crunched under her feet, and the ringing
was just above her head, and seemed to vibrate through her whole being.
Here was the church door, then three steps down, and an ante-room with
ikons of the saints on both sides, a fragrance of juniper and incense, another
door, and a dark figure opening it and bowing very low. The service had not
yet begun. One nun was walking by the ikon-screen and lighting the candles
on the tall standard candlesticks, another was lighting the chandelier. Here
and there, by the columns and the side chapels, there stood black,
motionless figures. "I suppose they must remain standing as they are now
till the morning," thought Sofya Lvovna, and it seemed to her dark, cold,
and dreary--drearier than a graveyard. She looked with a feeling of
dreariness at the still, motionless figures and suddenly felt a pang at her
heart. For some reason, in one short nun, with thin shoulders and a black
kerchief on her head, she recognised Olga, though when Olga went into the
nunnery she had been plump and had looked taller. Hesitating and
extremely agitated, Sofya Lvovna went up to the nun, and looking over her
shoulder into her face, recognised her as Olga.

"Olga!" she cried, throwing up her hands, and could not speak from
emotion. "Olga!"

The nun knew her at once; she raised her eyebrows in surprise, and her
pale, freshly washed face, and even, it seemed, the white headcloth that she
wore under her wimple, beamed with pleasure.

"What a miracle from God!" she said, and she, too, threw up her thin,
pale little hands.

Sofya Lvovna hugged her and kissed her warmly, and was afraid as she
did so that she might smell of spirits.

"We were just driving past, and we thought of you," she said, breathing
hard, as though she had been running. "Dear me! How pale you are! I . . .
I'm very glad to see you. Well, tell me how are you? Are you dull?"

Sofya Lvovna looked round at the other nuns, and went on in a subdued
voice:

"There've been so many changes at home . . . you know, I'm married to
Colonel Yagitch. You remember him, no doubt. . . . I am very happy with
him."

"Well, thank God for that. And is your father quite well?"

"Yes, he is quite well. He often speaks of you. You must come and see us
during the holidays, Olga, won't you?"

"I will come," said Olga, and she smiled. "I'll come on the second day."

Sofya Lvovna began crying, she did not know why, and for a minute she
shed tears in silence, then she wiped her eyes and said:

"Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She is with us too. And
Volodya's here. They are close to the gate. How pleased they'd be if you'd
come out and see them. Let's go out to them; the service hasn't begun yet."

"Let us," Olga agreed. She crossed herself three times and went out with
Sofya Lvovna to the entrance.

"So you say you're happy, Sonitchka?" she asked when they came out at
the gate.

"Very."

"Well, thank God for that."

The two Volodyas, seeing the nun, got out of the sledge and greeted her
respectfully. Both were visibly touched by her pale face and her black
monastic dress, and both were pleased that she had remembered them and
come to greet them. That she might not be cold, Sofya Lvovna wrapped her
up in a rug and put one half of her fur coat round her. Her tears had relieved
and purified her heart, and she was glad that this noisy, restless, and, in
reality, impure night should unexpectedly end so purely and serenely. And
to keep Olga by her a little longer she suggested:

"Let us take her for a drive! Get in, Olga; we'll go a little way."

The men expected the nun to refuse--saints don't dash about in three-
horse sledges; but to their surprise, she consented and got into the sledge.
And while the horses were galloping to the city gate all were silent, and
only tried to make her warm and comfortable, and each of them was
thinking of what she had been in the past and what she was now. Her face
was now passionless, inexpressive, cold, pale, and transparent, as though
there were water, not blood, in her veins. And two or three years ago she
had been plump and rosy, talking about her suitors and laughing at every
trifle.

Near the city gate the sledge turned back; when it stopped ten minutes
later near the nunnery, Olga got out of the sledge. The bell had begun to
ring more rapidly.

"The Lord save you," said Olga, and she bowed low as nuns do.

"Mind you come, Olga."

"I will, I will."

She went and quickly disappeared through the gateway. And when after
that they drove on again, Sofya Lvovna felt very sad. Every one was silent.
She felt dispirited and weak all over. That she should have made a nun get
into a sledge and drive in a company hardly sober seemed to her now
stupid, tactless, and almost sacrilegious. As the intoxication passed off, the
desire to deceive herself passed away also. It was clear to her now that she
did not love her husband, and never could love him, and that it all had been
foolishness and nonsense. She had married him from interested motives,
because, in the words of her school friends, he was madly rich, and because
she was afraid of becoming an old maid like Rita, and because she was sick
of her father, the doctor, and wanted to annoy Volodya.

If she could have imagined when she got married, that it would be so
oppressive, so dreadful, and so hideous, she would not have consented to
the marriage for all the wealth in the world. But now there was no setting it
right. She must make up her mind to it.

They reached home. Getting into her warm, soft bed, and pulling the
bed-clothes over her, Sofya Lvovna recalled the dark church, the smell of
incense, and the figures by the columns, and she felt frightened at the
thought that these figures would be standing there all the while she was
asleep. The early service would be very, very long; then there would be "the
hours," then the mass, then the service of the day.

"But of course there is a God--there certainly is a God; and I shall have
to die, so that sooner or later one must think of one's soul, of eternal life,
like Olga. Olga is saved now; she has settled all questions for herself. . . .
But if there is no God? Then her life is wasted. But how is it wasted? Why
is it wasted?"

And a minute later the thought came into her mind again:

"There is a God; death must come; one must think of one's soul. If Olga
were to see death before her this minute she would not be afraid. She is
prepared. And the great thing is that she has already solved the problem of
life for herself. There is a God . . . yes . . . . But is there no other solution

except going into a monastery? To go into the monastery means to renounce
life, to spoil it . . . ."

Sofya Lvovna began to feel rather frightened; she hid her head under her
pillow.

"I mustn't think about it," she whispered. "I mustn't. . . ."

Yagitch was walking about on the carpet in the next room with a soft
jingle of spurs, thinking about something. The thought occurred to Sofya
Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only for one reason--that his
name, too, was Vladimir. She sat up in bed and called tenderly:

"Volodya!"

"What is it?" her husband responded.

"Nothing."

She lay down again. She heard a bell, perhaps the same nunnery bell.
Again she thought of the vestibule and the dark figures, and thoughts of
God and of inevitable death strayed through her mind, and she covered her
ears that she might not hear the bell. She thought that before old age and
death there would be a long, long life before her, and that day by day she
would have to put up with being close to a man she did not love, who had
just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and would have
to stifle in her heart her hopeless love for the other young, fascinating, and,
as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at her husband and tried to say
good-night to him, but suddenly burst out crying instead. She was vexed
with herself.

"Well, now then for the music!" said Yagitch.

She was not pacified till ten o'clock in the morning. She left off crying
and trembling all over, but she began to have a splitting headache. Yagitch
was in haste to go to the late mass, and in the next room was grumbling at
his orderly, who was helping him to dress. He came into the bedroom once
with the soft jingle of his spurs to fetch something, and then a second time

wearing his epaulettes, and his orders on his breast, limping slightly from
rheumatism; and it struck Sofya Lvovna that he looked and walked like a
bird of prey.

She heard Yagitch ring the telephone bell.

"Be so good as to put me on to the Vassilevsky barracks," he said; and a
minute later: "Vassilevsky barracks? Please ask Doctor Salimovitch to come
to the telephone . . ." And a minute later: "With whom am I speaking? Is it
you, Volodya? Delighted. Ask your father to come to us at once, dear boy;
my wife is rather shattered after yesterday. Not at home, you say? H'm! . . .
Thank you. Very good. I shall be much obliged . . . _Merci_."

Yagitch came into the bedroom for the third time, bent down to his wife,
made the sign of the cross over her, gave her his hand to kiss (the women
who had been in love with him used to kiss his hand and he had got into the
habit of it), and saying that he should be back to dinner, went out.

At twelve o'clock the maid came in to announce that Vladimir
Mihalovitch had arrived. Sofya Lvovna, staggering with fatigue and
headache, hurriedly put on her marvellous new lilac dressing-gown
trimmed with fur, and hastily did up her hair after a fashion. She was
conscious of an inexpressible tenderness in her heart, and was trembling
with joy and with fear that he might go away. She wanted nothing but to
look at him.

Volodya came dressed correctly for calling, in a swallow-tail coat and
white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in he kissed her hand and expressed
his genuine regret that she was ill. Then when they had sat down, he
admired her dressing-gown.

"I was upset by seeing Olga yesterday," she said. "At first I felt it
dreadful, but now I envy her. She is like a rock that cannot be shattered;
there is no moving her. But was there no other solution for her, Volodya? Is
burying oneself alive the only solution of the problem of life? Why, it's
death, not life!"

At the thought of Olga, Volodya's face softened.

"Here, you are a clever man, Volodya," said Sofya Lvovna. "Show me
how to do what Olga has done. Of course, I am not a believer and should
not go into a nunnery, but one can do something equivalent. Life isn't easy
for me," she added after a brief pause. "Tell me what to do. . . . Tell me
something I can believe in. Tell me something, if it's only one word."

"One word? By all means: tararaboomdeeay."

"Volodya, why do you despise me?" she asked hotly. "You talk to me in
a special, fatuous way, if you'll excuse me, not as one talks to one's friends
and women one respects. You are so good at your work, you are fond of
science; why do you never talk of it to me? Why is it? Am I not good
enough?"

Volodya frowned with annoyance and said:

"Why do you want science all of a sudden? Don't you perhaps want
constitutional government? Or sturgeon and horse-radish?"

"Very well, I am a worthless, trivial, silly woman with no convictions. I
have a mass, a mass of defects. I am neurotic, corrupt, and I ought to be
despised for it. But you, Volodya, are ten years older than I am, and my
husband is thirty years older. I've grown up before your eyes, and if you
would, you could have made anything you liked of me--an angel. But you"-
-her voice quivered-- "treat me horribly. Yagitch has married me in his old
age, and you . . ."

"Come, come," said Volodya, sitting nearer her and kissing both her
hands. "Let the Schopenhauers philosophise and prove whatever they like,
while we'll kiss these little hands."

"You despise me, and if only you knew how miserable it makes me," she
said uncertainly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. "And if
you only knew how I want to change, to begin another life! I think of it with
enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm actually came into her eyes. "To be
good, honest, pure, not to be lying; to have an object in life."

"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said
Volodya, and an ill-humoured expression came into his face. "Upon my
word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple people."

To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending
herself, and forced herself to smile to please him; and again she began
talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem of her life and
to become something real.

"Ta-ra-ra-boomdee-ay," he hummed. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!"

And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without
knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a
minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical face,
his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.

"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed to him,
and she blushed painfully, and felt that her lips were twitching with shame.
"I love you. Why do you torture me?"

She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for a long
while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though she knew it was
unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a servant might
come in.

"Oh, how you torture me!" she repeated.

When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was sitting at
lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him, gazing greedily into
his face, and he told her that she was like a little dog waiting for a bit of
ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his knee, and dancing her up and
down like a child, hummed:

"Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay." And when he was
getting ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper:

"When? To-day? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as
though she wanted to seize his answer in them.

"To-day it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's thought.
"To-morrow, perhaps."

And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to see
Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter somewhere
over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's and found that he,
too, was out. Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about the
streets till evening. And for some reason she kept thinking of the aunt
whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace anywhere.

And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out of
town and listened to the gipsies. And driving back past the nunnery again,
Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought that for the
girls and women of her class there was no solution but to go on driving
about and telling lies, or going into a nunnery to mortify the flesh. . . . And
next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna drove about the town
alone in a hired sledge thinking about her aunt.

A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on as
before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising. The
Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet, Rita told
anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya Lvovna went about
alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband to take her for a good
drive with three horses.

Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining
of her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that she
brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby. And Olga
repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote, that all this
was of no consequence, that it would all pass and God would forgive her.

THE TROUSSEAU

I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and
old, built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a very vivid
memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house--a tiny
cottage of one story, with three windows, looking extraordinarily like a little
old hunchback woman with a cap on. Its white stucco walls, its tiled roof,
and dilapidated chimney, were all drowned in a perfect sea of green. The
cottage was lost to sight among the mulberry-trees, acacias, and poplars
planted by the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of its present occupants.
And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard stands in a row with other
similar green courtyards, and forms part of a street. Nothing ever drives
down that street, and very few persons are ever seen walking through it.

The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not
care for sunlight--the light is no use to them. The windows are never
opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who spend their lives in
the midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for nature. It is
only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye for the beauties
of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in profound ignorance of the
existence of such beauties. People never prize what they have always had in
abundance. "What we have, we do not treasure," and what's more we do not
even love it.

The little house stands in an earthly paradise of green trees with happy
birds nesting in them. But inside . . . alas . . . ! In summer, it is close and
stifling within; in winter, hot as a Turkish bath, not one breath of air, and the
dreariness! . . .

The first time I visited the little house was many years ago on business. I
brought a message from the Colonel who was the owner of the house to his
wife and daughter. That first visit I remember very distinctly. It would be
impossible, indeed, to forget it.

Imagine a limp little woman of forty, gazing at you with alarm and
astonishment while you walk from the passage into the parlour. You are a
stranger, a visitor, "a young man"; that's enough to reduce her to a state of
terror and bewilderment. Though you have no dagger, axe, or revolver in
your hand, and though you smile affably, you are met with alarm.

"Whom have I the honour and pleasure of addressing?" the little lady
asks in a trembling voice.

I introduced myself and explained why I had come. The alarm and
amazement were at once succeeded by a shrill, joyful "Ach!" and she turned
her eyes upwards to the ceiling. This "Ach!" was caught up like an echo and
repeated from the hall to the parlour, from the parlour to the kitchen, and so
on down to the cellar. Soon the whole house was resounding with "Ach!" in
various voices.

Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the
drawing-room listening to the "Ach!" echoing all down the street. There
was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay on a
chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were
geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies. On
the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the glass
broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors with lemon-
coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a reel of cotton,
and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a black blouse, tacked
together, were lying on the floor. In the next room two alarmed and fluttered
old women were hurriedly picking up similar patterns and pieces of tailor's
chalk from the floor.

"You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy," said the little
lady.

While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other
room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too, seemed
embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.

"What's the matter?" said the little lady, addressing the door.

_"Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m'avait envoyé de Koursk?"_
asked a female voice at the door.

_"Ah, est-ce que, Marie . . . que_. . . Really, it's impossible . . . . _Nous
avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous._ Ask Lukerya."

"How well we speak French, though!" I read in the eyes of the little lady,
who was flushing with pleasure.

Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in
a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a mother-
of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson. Her long
nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the
flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.

"My daughter," chanted the little lady, "and, Manetchka, this is a young
gentleman who has come," etc.

I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper
patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.

"We had a fair here at Ascension," said the mother; "we always buy
materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the next
year's fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made. My
husband's pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit ourselves
luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves."

"But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of
you?"

"Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be
worn; they are for the trousseau!"

"Ah, _mamam_, what are you saying?" said the daughter, and she
crimsoned again. "Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don't intend to be
married. Never!"

She said this, but at the very word "married" her eyes glowed.

Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries
and cream. At seven o'clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses, and
while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I looked
with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only come from a
man.

"That's my husband's brother, Yegor Semyonitch," the little lady
explained, noticing my surprise. "He's been living with us for the last year.
Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an unsociable
person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a monastery. He was
unfairly treated in the service, and the disappointment has preyed on his
mind."

After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor
Semyonitch was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the
Church. Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the
tobacco-pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be
greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something
in her mother's ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go with
her to the store-room. There I was shown five large trunks, and a number of
smaller trunks and boxes.

"This is her trousseau," her mother whispered; "we made it all
ourselves."

After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable
hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.

It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my
first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence in a
case that was being tried there.

As I entered the little house I heard the same "Ach!" echo through it.
They recognised me at once. . . . Well they might! My first visit had been an
event in their lives, and when events are few they are long remembered.

I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and
was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out some
blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.

There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns,
the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change. Beside
the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and the ladies were

in mourning. The Colonel's death had occurred a week after his promotion
to be a general.

Reminiscences began. . . . The widow shed tears.

"We have had a terrible loss," she said. "My husband, you know, is dead.
We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to.
Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They
would not have him in the monastery on account of--of intoxicating
beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am
thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would
you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . . taken
Manetchka's trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken everything out
of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my Manetchka will be left
without a trousseau at all."

"What are you saying, _mamam_?" said Manetchka, embarrassed. "Our
visitor might suppose . . . there's no knowing what he might suppose . . . . I
shall never--never marry."

Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and
aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.

A little bald-headed masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes
instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared.
"Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose," I thought.

I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much
older and terribly changed. The mother's hair was silvered, but the daughter
was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken for her
elder sister, not more than five years her senior.

"I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal," the mother said to me,
forgetting she had told me this already. "I mean to make a complaint. Yegor
Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up for the
sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau."

Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.

"We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so
well off. We are all alone in the world now."

"We are alone in the world," repeated Manetchka.

A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.

Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black
with heavy crape _pleureuses_, she was sitting on the sofa sewing. Beside
her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes instead of
boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.

In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:

_"Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur."_

"What are you making?" I asked, a little later.

"It's a blouse. When it's finished I shall take it to the priest's to be put
away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would carry it off. I store everything at the
priest's now," she added in a whisper.

And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on the
table, she sighed and said:

"We are all alone in the world."

And where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did
not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning. And
while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka came out
to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep. . . .

I understood, and my heart was heavy.

THE HELPMATE

"I'VE asked you not to tidy my table," said Nikolay Yevgrafitch. "There's
no finding anything when you've tidied up. Where's the telegram? Where
have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It's from Kazan, dated
yesterday."

The maid--a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression --found
several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed them to the
doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams from patients. Then
they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga Dmitrievna's room.

It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be
home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her, and when
she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he
despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of
sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her
every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of
a florist's shop all over the house. On such nights he became petty, ill-
humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that it was very necessary for him
to have the telegram he had received the day before from his brother,
though it contained nothing but Christmas greetings.

On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a
telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care of his
mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The doctor did
not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign language,
apparently English.

"Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her
mother?"

During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being
suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times occurred to
him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become an excellent
detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect, he recalled at once
how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had
lunched with an old school-fellow, a civil engineer, and how that engineer

had introduced to him and his wife a young man of two or three and twenty,
called Mihail Ivanovitch, with rather a curious short surname--Riss. Two
months later the doctor had seen the young man's photograph in his wife's
album, with an inscription in French: "In remembrance of the present and in
hope of the future." Later on he had met the young man himself at his
mother-in-law's. And that was at the time when his wife had taken to being
very often absent and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning,
and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he
kept refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made
him feel ashamed to face the servants.

Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into
consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to the Crimea.
When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much alarmed;
she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring him that it
would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and that he had much better go to
Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse him, look after
him, take care of him.

Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to
Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.

He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing
their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I drink
to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times,
and am impatiently expecting her arrival." He pictured the pitiable,
ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife.
He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro
through all the rooms of the flat in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian
fastidiousness, was revolted. Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust,
he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical
school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon by profession--how could he
have let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this
weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature.

"'Little foot'!" he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram; "'little
foot'!"

Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven years
that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory was her
long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet, which certainly
were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed as though he still
had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and
face--and nothing more. Nothing more--that is, not counting hysterics,
shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies--brazen, treacherous lies. He
remembered how in his father's house in the village a bird would sometimes
chance to fly in from the open air into the house and would struggle
desperately against the window-panes and upset things; so this woman from
a class utterly alien to him had flown into his life and made complete havoc
of it. The best years of his life had been spent as though in hell, his hopes
for happiness shattered and turned into a mockery, his health gone, his
rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocotte's, and of the ten thousand
he earned every year he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother
in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It seemed
that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not
have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this
woman.

He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed
and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat
down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling
mechanically on a paper.

"Trying a pen. . . . A little foot."

By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It
seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one else who
might have had a good influence over her--who knows?-- she might after all
have become a good, straightforward woman. He was a poor psychologist,
and knew nothing of the female heart; besides, he was churlish,
uninteresting. . . .

"I haven't long to live now," he thought. "I am a dead man, and ought not
to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange and stupid to insist
upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with her; let her go to the man she
loves. . . . I'll give her a divorce. I'll take the blame on myself."

Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank
into a chair just as she was in her white cloak, hat, and overboots.

"The nasty, fat boy," she said with a sob, breathing hard. "It's really
dishonest; it's disgusting." She stamped. "I can't put up with it; I can't, I
can't!"

"What's the matter?" asked Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.

"That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and
there was fifteen roubles in it. I borrowed it from mamma."

She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only her
handkerchief, but even her gloves, were wet with tears.

"It can't be helped!" said the doctor. "If he's lost it, he's lost it, and it's no
good worrying over it. Calm yourself; I want to talk to you."

"I am not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he'll pay it back,
but I don't believe him; he's poor . . ."

Her husband begged her to calm herself and to listen to him, but she kept
on talking of the student and of the fifteen roubles she had lost.

"Ach! I'll give you twenty-five roubles to-morrow if you'll only hold
your tongue!" he said irritably.

"I must take off my things!" she said, crying. "I can't talk seriously in my
fur coat! How strange you are!"

He helped her off with her coat and overboots, detecting as he did so the
smell of the white wine she liked to drink with oysters (in spite of her
etherealness she ate and drank a great deal). She went into her room and
came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her face,
though her eyes still showed traces of tears. She sat down, retreating into
her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of billowy pink her husband
could see nothing but her hair, which she had let down, and her little foot
wearing a slipper.

"What do you want to talk about?" she asked, swinging herself in a
rocking-chair.

"I happened to see this;" and he handed her the telegram.

She read it and shrugged her shoulders.

"Well?" she said, rocking herself faster. "That's the usual New Year's
greeting and nothing else. There are no secrets in it."

"You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it; but
I have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health of his
beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that," the doctor
went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least want to reproach you or make a
scene. We've had scenes and reproaches enough; it's time to make an end of
them. . . . This is what I want to say to you: you are free, and can live as you
like."

There was a silence. She began crying quietly.

"I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,"
Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you love that young man, love him; if
you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy, and I am a
wreck, and haven't long to live. In short . . . you understand me."

He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and
speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Riss, and used
to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now she really
did long to go abroad.

"You see, I hide nothing from you," she added, with a sigh. "My whole
soul lies open before you. And I beg you again, be generous, get me a
passport."

"I repeat, you are free."

She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression of his
face. She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret

meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their
intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish
object in them. And when she looked searchingly into his face, it seemed to
him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as in a cat's.

"When shall I get the passport?" she asked softly.

He suddenly had an impulse to say "Never"; but he restrained himself
and said:

"When you like."

"I shall only go for a month."

"You'll go to Riss for good. I'll get you a divorce, take the blame on
myself, and Riss can marry you."

"But I don't want a divorce!" Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly, with an
astonished face. "I am not asking you for a divorce! Get me a passport,
that's all."

"But why don't you want the divorce?" asked the doctor, beginning to
feel irritated. "You are a strange woman. How strange you are! If you are
fond of him in earnest and he loves you too, in your position you can do
nothing better than get married. Can you really hesitate between marriage
and adultery?"

"I understand you," she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful,
vindictive expression came into her face. "I understand you perfectly. You
are sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me, to force this divorce
on me. Thank you very much; I am not such a fool as you think. I won't
accept the divorce and I won't leave you--I won't, I won't! To begin with, I
don't want to lose my position in society," she continued quickly, as though
afraid of being prevented from speaking. "Secondly, I am twenty-seven and
Riss is only twenty-three; he'll be tired of me in a year and throw me over.
And what's more, if you care to know, I'm not certain that my feeling will
last long . . . so there! I'm not going to leave you."

"Then I'll turn you out of the house!" shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch,
stamping. "I shall turn you out, you vile, loathsome woman!"

"We shall see!" she said, and went out.

It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table moving
the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically.

"My dear Sir. . . . Little foot."

Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a
photograph taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it
for a long time. It was a family group: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law,
his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the rôle of a
happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, dropsical privy
councillor, crafty and avaricious; his mother-in-law, a stout lady with small
predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and
helped her in everything; if her daughter were strangling some one, the
mother would not have protested, but would only have screened her with
her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small predatory-looking features, but
more expressive and bolder than her mother's; she was not a weasel, but a
beast on a bigger scale! And Nikolay Yevgrafitch himself in the photograph
looked such a guileless soul, such a kindly, good fellow, so open and
simple-hearted; his whole face was relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile
of a divinity student, and he had had the simplicity to believe that that
company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him
would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as
a student he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the
heart is cold and loveless."

And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a
village priest, with his democratic bringing up--a plain, blunt,
straightforward man--could have so helplessly surrendered to the power of
this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature was so utterly
alien to him.

When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the
servant came into his study.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five roubles you
promised her yesterday."

TALENT

AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays
at the house of an officer's widow, was sitting on his bed, given up to the
depression of morning. It was beginning to look like autumn out of doors.
Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick layers; there was a cold,
piercing wind, and with a plaintive wail the trees were all bending on one
side. He could see the yellow leaves whirling round in the air and on the
earth. Farewell, summer! This melancholy of nature is beautiful and
poetical in its own way, when it is looked at with the eyes of an artist, but
Yegor Savvitch was in no humour to see beauty. He was devoured by ennui
and his only consolation was the thought that by to-morrow he would not be
there. The bed, the chairs, the tables, the floor, were all heaped up with
cushions, crumpled bed-clothes, boxes. The floor had not been swept, the
cotton curtains had been taken down from the windows. Next day he was
moving, to town.

His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire
horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of her
severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time been
sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going away, and
she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking, and yet she felt
that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to say. With her eyes full of
tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at it with rapture and sadness.
And Yegor Savvitch was shaggy to a hideous extent, so that he looked like a
wild animal. His hair hung down to his shoulder-blades, his beard grew
from his neck, from his nostrils, from his ears; his eyes were lost under his
thick overhanging brows. It was all so thick, so matted, that if a fly or a

beetle had been caught in his hair, it would never have found its way out of
this enchanted thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He was
tired. When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his
overhanging eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass:

"I cannot marry."

"Why not?" Katya asked softly.

"Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is
out of the question. An artist must be free."

"But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?"

"I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general. . . . Famous
authors and painters have never married."

"And you, too, will be famous--I understand that perfectly. But put
yourself in my place. I am afraid of my mother. She is stern and irritable.
When she knows that you won't marry me, and that it's all nothing . . . she'll
begin to give it to me. Oh, how wretched I am! And you haven't paid for
your rooms, either! . . . ."

"Damn her! I'll pay."

Yegor Savvitch got up and began walking to and fro.

"I ought to be abroad!" he said. And the artist told her that nothing was
easier than to go abroad. One need do nothing but paint a picture and sell it.

"Of course!" Katya assented. "Why haven't you painted one in the
summer?"

"Do you suppose I can work in a barn like this?" the artist said ill-
humouredly. "And where should I get models?"

Some one banged the door viciously in the storey below. Katya, who
was expecting her mother's return from minute to minute, jumped up and
ran away. The artist was left alone. For a long time he walked to and fro,

threading his way between the chairs and the piles of untidy objects of all
sorts. He heard the widow rattling the crockery and loudly abusing the
peasants who had asked her two roubles for each cart. In his disgust Yegor
Savvitch stopped before the cupboard and stared for a long while, frowning
at the decanter of vodka.

"Ah, blast you!" he heard the widow railing at Katya. "Damnation take
you!"

The artist drank a glass of vodka, and the dark cloud in his soul
gradually disappeared, and he felt as though all his inside was smiling
within him. He began dreaming. . . . His fancy pictured how he would
become great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see
distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the shops would sell his
photographs, with what envy his friends would look after him. He tried to
picture himself in a magnificent drawing-room surrounded by pretty and
adoring women; but the picture was misty, vague, as he had never in his life
seen a drawing-room. The pretty and adoring women were not a success
either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one
respectable girl. People who know nothing about life usually picture life
from books, but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either. He had tried to read
Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.

"It won't burn, drat the thing!" the widow bawled down below, as she set
the samovar. "Katya, give me some charcoal!"

The dreamy artist felt a longing to share his hopes and dreams with some
one. He went downstairs into the kitchen, where the stout widow and Katya
were busy about a dirty stove in the midst of charcoal fumes from the
samovar. There he sat down on a bench close to a big pot and began:

"It's a fine thing to be an artist! I can go just where I like, do what I like.
One has not to work in an office or in the fields. I've no superiors or officers
over me. . . . I'm my own superior. And with all that I'm doing good to
humanity!"

And after dinner he composed himself for a "rest." He usually slept till
the twilight of evening. But this time soon after dinner he felt that some one

was pulling at his leg. Some one kept laughing and shouting his name. He
opened his eyes and saw his friend Ukleikin, the landscape painter, who had
been away all the summer in the Kostroma district.

"Bah!" he cried, delighted. "What do I see?"

There followed handshakes, questions.

"Well, have you brought anything? I suppose you've knocked off
hundreds of sketches?" said Yegor Savvitch, watching Ukleikin taking his
belongings out of his trunk.

"H'm! . . . Yes. I have done something. And how are you getting on?
Have you been painting anything?"

Yegor Savvitch dived behind the bed, and crimson in the face, extracted
a canvas in a frame covered with dust and spider webs.

"See here. . . . A girl at the window after parting from her betrothed. In
three sittings. Not nearly finished yet."

The picture represented Katya faintly outlined sitting at an open window,
from which could be seen a garden and lilac distance. Ukleikin did not like
the picture.

"H'm! . . . There is air and . . . and there is expression," he said. "There's
a feeling of distance, but . . . but that bush is screaming . . . screaming
horribly!"

The decanter was brought on to the scene.

Towards evening Kostyliov, also a promising beginner, an historical
painter, came in to see Yegor Savvitch. He was a friend staying at the next
villa, and was a man of five-and-thirty. He had long hair, and wore a blouse
with a Shakespeare collar, and had a dignified manner. Seeing the vodka, he
frowned, complained of his chest, but yielding to his friends' entreaties,
drank a glass.

"I've thought of a subject, my friends," he began, getting drunk. "I want
to paint some new . . . Herod or Clepentian, or some blackguard of that
description, you understand, and to contrast with him the idea of
Christianity. On the one side Rome, you understand, and on the other
Christianity. . . . I want to represent the spirit, you understand? The spirit!"

And the widow downstairs shouted continually:

"Katya, give me the cucumbers! Go to Sidorov's and get some kvass,
you jade!"

Like wolves in a cage, the three friends kept pacing to and fro from one
end of the room to the other. They talked without ceasing, talked, hotly and
genuinely; all three were excited, carried away. To listen to them it would
seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands. And it never
occurred to either of them that time was passing, that every day life was
nearing its close, that they had lived at other people's expense a great deal
and nothing yet was accomplished; that they were all bound by the
inexorable law by which of a hundred promising beginners only two or
three rise to any position and all the others draw blanks in the lottery, perish
playing the part of flesh for the cannon. . . . They were gay and happy, and
looked the future boldly in the face!

At one o'clock in the morning Kostyliov said good-bye, and smoothing
out his Shakespeare collar, went home. The landscape painter remained to
sleep at Yegor Savvitch's. Before going to bed, Yegor Savvitch took a
candle and made his way into the kitchen to get a drink of water. In the
dark, narrow passage Katya was sitting, on a box, and, with her hands
clasped on her knees, was looking upwards. A blissful smile was straying
on her pale, exhausted face, and her eyes were beaming.

"Is that you? What are you thinking about?" Yegor Savvitch asked her.

"I am thinking of how you'll be famous," she said in a half-whisper. "I
keep fancying how you'll become a famous man. . . . I overheard all your
talk. . . . I keep dreaming and dreaming. . . ."

Katya went off into a happy laugh, cried, and laid her hands reverently
on her idol's shoulders.

AN ARTIST'S STORY

I

IT was six or seven years ago when I was living in one of the districts of
the province of T----, on the estate of a young landowner called Byelokurov,
who used to get up very early, wear a peasant tunic, drink beer in the
evenings, and continually complain to me that he never met with sympathy
from any one. He lived in the lodge in the garden, and I in the old
seigniorial house, in a big room with columns, where there was no furniture
except a wide sofa on which I used to sleep, and a table on which I used to
lay out patience. There was always, even in still weather, a droning noise in
the old Amos stoves, and in thunder-storms the whole house shook and
seemed to be cracking into pieces; and it was rather terrifying, especially at
night, when all the ten big windows were suddenly lit up by lightning.

Condemned by destiny to perpetual idleness, I did absolutely nothing.
For hours together I gazed out of window at the sky, at the birds, at the
avenue, read everything that was brought me by post, slept. Sometimes I
went out of the house and wandered about till late in the evening.

One day as I was returning home, I accidentally strayed into a place I did
not know. The sun was already sinking, and the shades of evening lay
across the flowering rye. Two rows of old, closely planted, very tall fir-trees
stood like two dense walls forming a picturesque, gloomy avenue. I easily
climbed over the fence and walked along the avenue, slipping over the fir-
needles which lay two inches deep on the ground. It was still and dark, and
only here and there on the high tree-tops the vivid golden light quivered and
made rainbows in the spiders' webs. There was a strong, almost stifling
smell of resin. Then I turned into a long avenue of limes. Here, too, all was

desolation and age; last year's leaves rusted mournfully under my feet and
in the twilight shadows lurked between the trees. From the old orchard on
the right came the faint, reluctant note of the golden oriole, who must have
been old too. But at last the limes ended. I walked by an old white house of
two storeys with a terrace, and there suddenly opened before me a view of a
courtyard, a large pond with a bathing-house, a group of green willows, and
a village on the further bank, with a high, narrow belfry on which there
glittered a cross reflecting the setting sun.

For a moment it breathed upon me the fascination of something near and
very familiar, as though I had seen that landscape at some time in my
childhood.

At the white stone gates which led from the yard to the fields, old-
fashioned solid gates with lions on them, were standing two girls. One of
them, the elder, a slim, pale, very handsome girl with a perfect haystack of
chestnut hair and a little obstinate mouth, had a severe expression and
scarcely took notice of me, while the other, who was still very young, not
more than seventeen or eighteen, and was also slim and pale, with a large
mouth and large eyes, looked at me with astonishment as I passed by, said
something in English, and was overcome with embarrassment. And it
seemed to me that these two charming faces, too, had long been familiar to
me. And I returned home feeling as though I had had a delightful dream.

One morning soon afterwards, as Byelokurov and I were walking near
the house, a carriage drove unexpectedly into the yard, rustling over the
grass, and in it was sitting one of those girls. It was the elder one. She had
come to ask for subscriptions for some villagers whose cottages had been
burnt down. Speaking with great earnestness and precision, and not looking
at us, she told us how many houses in the village of Siyanovo had been
burnt, how many men, women, and children were left homeless, and what
steps were proposed, to begin with, by the Relief Committee, of which she
was now a member. After handing us the subscription list for our signatures,
she put it away and immediately began to take leave of us.

"You have quite forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said to Byelokurov
as she shook hands with him. "Do come, and if Monsieur N. (she mentioned

my name) cares to make the acquaintance of admirers of his work, and will
come and see us, mother and I will be delighted."

I bowed.

When she had gone Pyotr Petrovitch began to tell me about her. The girl
was, he said, of good family, and her name was Lidia Voltchaninov, and the
estate on which she lived with her mother and sister, like the village on the
other side of the pond, was called Shelkovka. Her father had once held an
important position in Moscow, and had died with the rank of privy
councillor. Although they had ample means, the Voltchaninovs lived on
their estate summer and winter without going away. Lidia was a teacher in
the Zemstvo school in her own village, and received a salary of twenty-five
roubles a month. She spent nothing on herself but her salary, and was proud
of earning her own living.

"An interesting family," said Byelokurov. "Let us go over one day. They
will be delighted to see you."

One afternoon on a holiday we thought of the Voltchaninovs, and went
to Shelkovka to see them. They--the mother and two daughters --were at
home. The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who at one time had been
handsome, but now, asthmatic, depressed, vague, and over-feeble for her
years, tried to entertain me with conversation about painting. Having heard
from her daughter that I might come to Shelkovka, she had hurriedly
recalled two or three of my landscapes which she had seen in exhibitions in
Moscow, and now asked what I meant to express by them. Lidia, or as they
called her Lida, talked more to Byelokurov than to me. Earnest and
unsmiling, she asked him why he was not on the Zemstvo, and why he had
not attended any of its meetings.

"It's not right, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said reproachfully. "It's not right.
It's too bad."

"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented. "It isn't right."

"Our whole district is in the hands of Balagin," Lida went on, addressing
me. "He is the chairman of the Zemstvo Board, and he has distributed all

the posts in the district among his nephews and sons-in-law; and he does as
he likes. He ought to be opposed. The young men ought to make a strong
party, but you see what the young men among us are like. It's a shame,
Pyotr Petrovitch!"

The younger sister, Genya, was silent while they were talking of the
Zemstvo. She took no part in serious conversation. She was not looked
upon as quite grown up by her family, and, like a child, was always called
by the nickname of Misuce, because that was what she had called her
English governess when she was a child. She was all the time looking at me
with curiosity, and when I glanced at the photographs in the album, she
explained to me: "That's uncle . . . that's god-father," moving her finger
across the photograph. As she did so she touched me with her shoulder like
a child, and I had a close view of her delicate, undeveloped chest, her
slender shoulders, her plait, and her thin little body tightly drawn in by her
sash.

We played croquet and lawn tennis, we walked about the garden, drank
tea, and then sat a long time over supper. After the huge empty room with
columns, I felt, as it were, at home in this small snug house where there
were no oleographs on the walls and where the servants were spoken to
with civility. And everything seemed to me young and pure, thanks to the
presence of Lida and Misuce, and there was an atmosphere of refinement
over everything. At supper Lida talked to Byelokurov again of the Zemstvo,
of Balagin, and of school libraries. She was an energetic, genuine girl, with
convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her, though she talked a great
deal and in a loud voice--perhaps because she was accustomed to talking at
school. On the other hand, Pyotr Petrovitch, who had retained from his
student days the habit of turning every conversation into an argument, was
tedious, flat, long-winded, and unmistakably anxious to appear clever and
advanced. Gesticulating, he upset a sauce-boat with his sleeve, making a
huge pool on the tablecloth, but no one except me appeared to notice it.

It was dark and still as we went home.

"Good breeding is shown, not by not upsetting the sauce, but by not
noticing it when somebody else does," said Byelokurov, with a sigh. "Yes, a

splendid, intellectual family! I've dropped out of all decent society; it's
dreadful how I've dropped out of it! It's all through work, work, work!"

He talked of how hard one had to work if one wanted to be a model
farmer. And I thought what a heavy, sluggish fellow he was! Whenever he
talked of anything serious he articulated "Er-er" with intense effort, and
worked just as he talked--slowly, always late and behind-hand. I had little
faith in his business capacity if only from the fact that when I gave him
letters to post he carried them about in his pocket for weeks together.

"The hardest thing of all," he muttered as he walked beside me-- "the
hardest thing of all is that, work as one may, one meets with no sympathy
from any one. No sympathy!"

II

I took to going to see the Voltchaninovs. As a rule I sat on the lower step
of the terrace; I was fretted by dissatisfaction with myself; I was sorry at the
thought of my life passing so rapidly and uninterestingly, and felt as though
I would like to tear out of my breast the heart which had grown so heavy.
And meanwhile I heard talk on the terrace, the rustling of dresses, the pages
of a book being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the idea that during the
day Lida received patients, gave out books, and often went into the village
with a parasol and no hat, and in the evening talked aloud of the Zemstvo
and schools. This slim, handsome, invariably austere girl, with her small
well-cut mouth, always said dryly when the conversation turned on serious
subjects:

"That's of no interest to you."

She did not like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape painter
and did not in my pictures portray the privations of the peasants, and that,
as she fancied, I was indifferent to what she put such faith in. I remember
when I was travelling on the banks of Lake Baikal, I met a Buriat girl on
horseback, wearing a shirt and trousers of blue Chinese canvas; I asked her
if she would sell me her pipe. While we talked she looked contemptuously

at my European face and hat, and in a moment she was bored with talking
to me; she shouted to her horse and galloped on. And in just the same way
Lida despised me as an alien. She never outwardly expressed her dislike for
me, but I felt it, and sitting on the lower step of the terrace, I felt irritated,
and said that doctoring peasants when one was not a doctor was deceiving
them, and that it was easy to be benevolent when one had six thousand
acres.

Meanwhile her sister Misuce had no cares, and spent her life in complete
idleness just as I did. When she got up in the morning she immediately took
up a book and sat down to read on the terrace in a deep arm-chair, with her
feet hardly touching the ground, or hid herself with her book in the lime
avenue, or walked out into the fields. She spent the whole day reading,
poring greedily over her book, and only from the tired, dazed look in her
eyes and the extreme paleness of her face one could divine how this
continual reading exhausted her brain. When I arrived she would flush a
little, leave her book, and looking into my face with her big eyes, would tell
me eagerly of anything that had happened--for instance, that the chimney
had been on fire in the servants' hall, or that one of the men had caught a
huge fish in the pond. On ordinary days she usually went about in a light
blouse and a dark blue skirt. We went for walks together, picked cherries for
making jam, went out in the boat. When she jumped up to reach a cherry or
sculled in the boat, her thin, weak arms showed through her transparent
sleeves. Or I painted a sketch, and she stood beside me watching
rapturously.

One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about nine o
clock in the morning. I walked about the park, keeping a good distance
from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of which there was a great
number that summer, and noting their position so as to come and pick them
afterwards with Genya. There was a warm breeze. I saw Genya and her
mother both in light holiday dresses coming home from church, Genya
holding her hat in the wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the
terrace.

For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for my
perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in our country-houses in the

summer have always had a particular charm. When the green garden, still
wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks radiant with happiness,
when there is a scent of mignonette and oleander near the house, when the
young people have just come back from church and are having breakfast in
the garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and one knows that all these
healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to do nothing the whole long
day, one wishes that all life were like that. Now, too, I had the same
thought, and walked about the garden prepared to walk about like that,
aimless and unoccupied, the whole day, the whole summer.

Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as though she
knew she would find me in the garden, or had a presentiment of it. We
gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked a question she walked
a little ahead so as to see my face.

"A miracle happened in the village yesterday," she said. "The lame
woman Pelagea has been ill the whole year. No doctors or medicines did
her any good; but yesterday an old woman came and whispered something
over her, and her illness passed away."

"That's nothing much," I said. "You mustn't look for miracles only
among sick people and old women. Isn't health a miracle? And life itself?
Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle."

"And aren't you afraid of what is beyond understanding?"

"No. Phenomena I don't understand I face boldly, and am not
overwhelmed by them. I am above them. Man ought to recognise himself as
superior to lions, tigers, stars, superior to everything in nature, even what
seems miraculous and is beyond his understanding, or else he is not a man,
but a mouse afraid of everything."

Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and could guess
correctly what I did not know. She longed for me to initiate her into the
domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful--into that higher world in which, as
she imagined, I was quite at home. And she talked to me of God, of the
eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who could never admit that my self
and my imagination would be lost forever after death, answered: "Yes, men

are immortal"; "Yes, there is eternal life in store for us." And she listened,
believed, and did not ask for proofs.

As we were going home she stopped suddenly and said:

"Our Lida is a remarkable person--isn't she? I love her very dearly, and
would be ready to give my life for her any minute. But tell me"--Genya
touched my sleeve with her finger--"tell me, why do you always argue with
her? Why are you irritated?"

"Because she is wrong."

Genya shook her head and tears came into her eyes.

"How incomprehensible that is!" she said. At that minute Lida had just
returned from somewhere, and standing with a whip in her hand, a slim,
beautiful figure in the sunlight, at the steps, she was giving some orders to
one of the men. Talking loudly, she hurriedly received two or three sick
villagers; then with a busy and anxious face she walked about the rooms,
opening one cupboard after another, and went upstairs. It was a long time
before they could find her and call her to dinner, and she came in when we
had finished our soup. All these tiny details I remember with tenderness,
and that whole day I remember vividly, though nothing special happened.
After dinner Genya lay in a long arm-chair reading, while I sat upon the
bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast with
clouds, and it began to spot with fine rain. It was hot; the wind had dropped,
and it seemed as though the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came
out on the terrace, looking drowsy and carrying a fan.

"Oh, mother," said Genya, kissing her hand, "it's not good for you to
sleep in the day."

They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would
stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call "Aa--oo, Genya!"
or "Mother, where are you?" They always said their prayers together, and
had the same faith; and they understood each other perfectly even when
they did not speak. And their attitude to people was the same. Ekaterina
Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used to me and fond of me, and when I did not

come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were well. She, too, gazed at my
sketches with enthusiasm, and with the same openness and readiness to
chatter as Misuce, she told me what had happened, and confided to me her
domestic secrets.

She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not care for
endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived her life apart, and
to her mother and sister was as sacred and enigmatic a person as the
admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is to the sailors.

"Our Lida is a remarkable person," the mother would often say. "Isn't
she?"

Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.

"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an undertone,
like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: "You wouldn't easily find
another like her; only, do you know, I am beginning to be a little uneasy.
The school, the dispensary, books --all that's very good, but why go to
extremes? She is three-and-twenty, you know; it's time for her to think
seriously of herself. With her books and her dispensary she will find life has
slipped by without having noticed it. . . . She must be married."

Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and
said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:

"Mother, everything is in God's hands."

And again she buried herself in her book.

Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet
and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over supper and talked
again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole district under
his thumb. As I went away from the Voltchaninovs that evening, I carried
away the impression of a long, long idle day, with a melancholy
consciousness that everything ends in this world, however long it may be.

Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with me
all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without her, and that all that
charming family were near and dear to me, and for the first time that
summer I had a yearning to paint.

"Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?" I asked
Byelokurov as I went home. "My life is dreary, difficult, and monotonous
because I am an artist, a strange person. From my earliest days I've been
wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction, distrust in my work. I'm always poor,
I'm a wanderer, but you--you're a healthy, normal man, a landowner, and a
gentleman. Why do you live in such an uninteresting way? Why do you get
so little out of life? Why haven't you, for instance, fallen in love with Lida
or Genya?"

"You forget that I love another woman," answered Byelokurov.

He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge
with him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and dignified, not
unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national dress
and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was continually
calling her in to dinner or to tea. Three years before she had taken one of
the lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down at Byelokurov's
apparently forever. She was ten years older than he was, and kept a sharp
hand over him, so much so that he had to ask her permission when he went
out of the house. She often sobbed in a deep masculine note, and then I used
to send word to her that if she did not leave off, I should give up my rooms
there; and she left off.

When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned
thoughtfully, and I began walking up and down the room, conscious of a
soft emotion as though I were in love. I wanted to talk about the
Voltchaninovs.

"Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as devoted
to schools and hospitals as she is," I said. "Oh, for the sake of a girl like that
one might not only go into the Zemstvo, but even wear out iron shoes, like
the girl in the fairy tale. And Misuce? What a sweet creature she is, that
Misuce!"

Byelokurov, drawling out "Er--er," began a long-winded disquisition on
the malady of the age--pessimism. He talked confidently, in a tone that
suggested that I was opposing him. Hundreds of miles of desolate,
monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one
man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go.

"It's not a question of pessimism or optimism," I said irritably; "its
simply that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no sense."

Byelokurov took this as aimed at himself, was offended, and went away.

III

"The prince is staying at Malozyomovo, and he asks to be remembered
to you," said Lida to her mother. She had just come in, and was taking off
her gloves. "He gave me a great deal of interesting news . . . . He promised
to raise the question of a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo again at the
provincial assembly, but he says there is very little hope of it." And turning
to me, she said: "Excuse me, I always forget that this cannot be interesting
to you."

I felt irritated.

"Why not interesting to me?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "You do
not care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question has great interest
for me."

"Yes?"

"Yes. In my opinion a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo is quite
unnecessary."

My irritation infected her; she looked at me, screwing up her eyes, and
asked:

"What is necessary? Landscapes?"

"Landscapes are not, either. Nothing is."

She finished taking off her gloves, and opened the newspaper, which had
just been brought from the post. A minute later she said quietly, evidently
restraining herself:

"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if there had been a medical
relief centre near, she would have lived. And I think even landscape-
painters ought to have some opinions on the subject."

"I have a very definite opinion on that subject, I assure you," I answered;
and she screened herself with the newspaper, as though unwilling to listen
to me. "To my mind, all these schools, dispensaries, libraries, medical relief
centres, under present conditions, only serve to aggravate the bondage of
the people. The peasants are fettered by a great chain, and you do not break
the chain, but only add fresh links to it--that's my view of it."

She raised her eyes to me and smiled ironically, and I went on trying to
formulate my leading idea.

"What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these
Annas, Mavras, Pelageas, toil from early morning till dark, fall ill from
working beyond their strength, all their lives tremble for their sick and
hungry children, all their lives are being doctored, and in dread of death and
disease, fade and grow old early, and die in filth and stench. Their children
begin the same story over again as soon as they grow up, and so it goes on
for hundreds of years and milliards of men live worse than beasts-- in
continual terror, for a mere crust of bread. The whole horror of their
position lies in their never having time to think of their souls, of their image
and semblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches
of snow, block for them every way to spiritual activity--that is, to what
distinguishes man from the brutes and what is the only thing which makes
life worth living. You go to their help with hospitals and schools, but you
don't free them from their fetters by that; on the contrary, you bind them in
closer bonds, as, by introducing new prejudices, you increase the number of
their wants, to say nothing of the fact that they've got to pay the Zemstvo
for drugs and books, and so toil harder than ever."

"I am not going to argue with you," said Lida, putting down the paper.
"I've heard all that before. I will only say one thing: one cannot sit with
one's hands in one's lap. It's true that we are not saving humanity, and
perhaps we make a great many mistakes; but we do what we can, and we
are right. The highest and holiest task for a civilised being is to serve his
neighbours, and we try to serve them as best we can. You don't like it, but
one can't please every one."

"That's true, Lida," said her mother--"that's true."

In Lida's presence she was always a little timid, and looked at her
nervously as she talked, afraid of saying something superfluous or
inopportune. And she never contradicted her, but always assented: "That's
true, Lida--that's true."

"Teaching the peasants to read and write, books of wretched precepts
and rhymes, and medical relief centres, cannot diminish either ignorance or
the death-rate, just as the light from your windows cannot light up this huge
garden," said I. "You give nothing. By meddling in these people's lives you
only create new wants in them, and new demands on their labour."

"Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!" said Lida with
vexation, and from her tone one could see that she thought my arguments
worthless and despised them.

"The people must be freed from hard physical labour," said I. "We must
lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not spend all
their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and in the fields, but may also have
time to think of their souls, of God--may have time to develop their spiritual
capacities. The highest vocation of man is spiritual activity--the perpetual
search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour
unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see
what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises
his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by religion, science, and art, and
not by these trifles."

"Free them from labour?" laughed Lida. "But is that possible?"

"Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us, townspeople
and country people, all without exception, would agree to divide between us
the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of their physical needs,
each of us would perhaps need to work only for two or three hours a day.
Imagine that we all, rich and poor, work only for three hours a day, and the
rest of our time is free. Imagine further that in order to depend even less
upon our bodies and to labour less, we invent machines to replace our work,
we try to cut down our needs to the minimum. We would harden ourselves
and our children that they should not be afraid of hunger and cold, and that
we shouldn't be continually trembling for their health like Anna, Mavra, and
Pelagea. Imagine that we don't doctor ourselves, don't keep dispensaries,
tobacco factories, distilleries--what a lot of free time would be left us after
all! All of us together would devote our leisure to science and art. Just as
the peasants sometimes work, the whole community together mending the
roads, so all of us, as a community, would search for truth and the meaning
of life, and I am convinced that the truth would be discovered very quickly;
man would escape from this continual, agonising, oppressive dread of
death, and even from death itself."

"You contradict yourself, though," said Lida. "You talk about science,
and are yourself opposed to elementary education."

"Elementary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs on
public houses and sometimes books which he cannot understand-- such
education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol's Petrushka
has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was in the days of Rurik
so it has remained. What is needed is not elementary education, but freedom
for a wide development of spiritual capacities. What are wanted are not
schools, but universities."

"You are opposed to medicine, too."

"Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural
phenomena, and not for the cure of them. If one must cure, it should not be
diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause --physical
labour, and then there will be no disease. I don't believe in a science that
cures disease," I went on excitedly. "When science and art are real, they aim
not at temporary private ends, but at eternal and universal--they seek for

truth and the meaning of life, they seek for God, for the soul, and when they
are tied down to the needs and evils of the day, to dispensaries and libraries,
they only complicate and hamper life. We have plenty of doctors, chemists,
lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are quite without
biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The whole of our
intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying
temporary, passing needs. Scientific men, writers, artists, are hard at work;
thanks to them, the conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our
physical demands increase, yet truth is still a long way off, and man still
remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the
degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness
for life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning, and the more
talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is his position, as
when one looks into it, it is evident that he is working for the amusement of
a rapacious and unclean animal, and is supporting the existing order. And I
don't care to work and I won't work. . . . Nothing is any use; let the earth
sink to perdition!"

"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister, apparently thinking
my words pernicious to the young girl.

Genya looked mournfully at her mother and sister, and went out of the
room.

"These are the charming things people say when they want to justify
their indifference," said Lida. "It is easier to disapprove of schools and
hospitals, than to teach or heal."

"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented.

"You threaten to give up working," said Lida. "You evidently set a high
value on your work. Let us give up arguing; we shall never agree, since I
put the most imperfect dispensary or library of which you have just spoken
so contemptuously on a higher level than any landscape." And turning at
once to her mother, she began speaking in quite a different tone: "The
prince is very much changed, and much thinner than when he was with us
last. He is being sent to Vichy."

She told her mother about the prince in order to avoid talking to me. Her
face glowed, and to hide her feeling she bent low over the table as though
she were short-sighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper. My
presence was disagreeable to her. I said good-bye and went home.

IV

It was quite still out of doors; the village on the further side of the pond
was already asleep; there was not a light to be seen, and only the stars were
faintly reflected in the pond. At the gate with the lions on it Genya was
standing motionless, waiting to escort me.

"Every one is asleep in the village," I said to her, trying to make out her
face in the darkness, and I saw her mournful dark eyes fixed upon me. "The
publican and the horse-stealers are asleep, while we, well-bred people,
argue and irritate each other."

It was a melancholy August night--melancholy because there was
already a feeling of autumn; the moon was rising behind a purple cloud, and
it shed a faint light upon the road and on the dark fields of winter corn by
the sides. From time to time a star fell. Genya walked beside me along the
road, and tried not to look at the sky, that she might not see the falling stars,
which for some reason frightened her.

"I believe you are right," she said, shivering with the damp night air. "If
people, all together, could devote themselves to spiritual ends, they would
soon know everything."

"Of course. We are higher beings, and if we were really to recognise the
whole force of human genius and lived only for higher ends, we should in
the end become like gods. But that will never be--mankind will degenerate
till no traces of genius remain."

When the gates were out of sight, Genya stopped and shook hands with
me.

"Good-night," she said, shivering; she had nothing but her blouse over
her shoulders and was shrinking with cold. "Come to-morrow."

I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone, irritated and dissatisfied
with myself and other people; and I, too, tried not to look at the falling
stars. "Stay another minute," I said to her, "I entreat you."

I loved Genya. I must have loved her because she met me when I came
and saw me off when I went away; because she looked at me tenderly and
enthusiastically. How touchingly beautiful were her pale face, slender neck,
slender arms, her weakness, her idleness, her reading. And intelligence? I
suspected in her intelligence above the average. I was fascinated by the
breadth of her views, perhaps because they were different from those of the
stern, handsome Lida, who disliked me. Genya liked me, because I was an
artist. I had conquered her heart by my talent, and had a passionate desire to
paint for her sake alone; and I dreamed of her as of my little queen who
with me would possess those trees, those fields, the mists, the dawn, the
exquisite and beautiful scenery in the midst of which I had felt myself
hopelessly solitary and useless.

"Stay another minute," I begged her. "I beseech you."

I took off my overcoat and put it over her chilly shoulders; afraid of
looking ugly and absurd in a man's overcoat, she laughed, threw it off, and
at that instant I put my arms round her and covered her face, shoulders, and
hands with kisses.

"Till to-morrow," she whispered, and softly, as though afraid of breaking
upon the silence of the night, she embraced me. "We have no secrets from
one another. I must tell my mother and my sister at once. . . . It's so
dreadful! Mother is all right; mother likes you--but Lida!"

She ran to the gates.

"Good-bye!" she called.

And then for two minutes I heard her running. I did not want to go home,
and I had nothing to go for. I stood still for a little time hesitating, and made

my way slowly back, to look once more at the house in which she lived, the
sweet, simple old house, which seemed to be watching me from the
windows of its upper storey, and understanding all about it. I walked by the
terrace, sat on the seat by the tennis ground, in the dark under the old elm-
tree, and looked from there at the house. In the windows of the top storey
where Misuce slept there appeared a bright light, which changed to a soft
green--they had covered the lamp with the shade. Shadows began to move. .
. . I was full of tenderness, peace, and satisfaction with myself--satisfaction
at having been able to be carried away by my feelings and having fallen in
love, and at the same time I felt uncomfortable at the thought that only a
few steps away from me, in one of the rooms of that house there was Lida,
who disliked and perhaps hated me. I went on sitting there wondering
whether Genya would come out; I listened and fancied I heard voices
talking upstairs.

About an hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were
no longer visible. The moon was standing high above the house, and
lighting up the sleeping garden and the paths; the dahlias and the roses in
front of the house could be seen distinctly, and looked all the same colour. It
began to grow very cold. I went out of the garden, picked up my coat on the
road, and slowly sauntered home.

When next day after dinner I went to the Voltchaninovs, the glass door
into the garden was wide open. I sat down on the terrace, expecting Genya
every minute, to appear from behind the flower-beds on the lawn, or from
one of the avenues, or that I should hear her voice from the house. Then I
walked into the drawing-room, the dining-room. There was not a soul to be
seen. From the dining-room I walked along the long corridor to the hall and
back. In this corridor there were several doors, and through one of them I
heard the voice of Lida:

"'God . . . sent . . . a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably
dictating--"'God sent a crow a piece of cheese . . . . A crow . . . a piece of
cheese.' . . . Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps.

"It's I."

"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to you this minute; I'm giving Dasha
her lesson."

"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"

"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the
province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she
added after a pause. "'God sent . . . the crow . . . a piece . . . of cheese.' . . .
Have you written it?"

I went into the hall, and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and
the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese. . . . God sent the crow a piece
of cheese."

And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time-- first
from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-
trees. . . . At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note:

"I told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you," I
read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness.
Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"

Then there was the dark fir avenue, the broken-down fence. . . . On the
field where then the rye was in flower and the corncrakes were calling, now
there were cows and hobbled horses. On the slope there were bright green
patches of winter corn. A sober workaday feeling came over me and I felt
ashamed of all I had said at the Voltchaninovs', and felt bored with life as I
had been before. When I got home, I packed and set off that evening for
Petersburg.

----

I never saw the Voltchaninovs again. Not long ago, on my way to the
Crimea, I met Byelokurov in the train. As before, he was wearing a jerkin
and an embroidered shirt, and when I asked how he was, he replied that,
God be praised, he was well. We began talking. He had sold his old estate
and bought another smaller one, in the name of Liubov Ivanovna. He could
tell me little about the Voltchaninovs. Lida, he said, was still living in

Shelkovka and teaching in the school; she had by degrees succeeded in
gathering round her a circle of people sympathetic to her who made a strong
party, and at the last election had turned out Balagin, who had till then had
the whole district under his thumb. About Genya he only told me that she
did not live at home, and that he did not know where she was.

I am beginning to forget the old house, and only sometimes when I am
painting or reading I suddenly, apropos of nothing, remember the green
light in the window, the sound of my footsteps as I walked home through
the fields in the night, with my heart full of love, rubbing my hands in the
cold. And still more rarely, at moments when I am sad and depressed by
loneliness, I have dim memories, and little by little I begin to feel that she is
thinking of me, too --that she is waiting for me, and that we shall meet. . . .

Misuce, where are you?

THREE YEARS

I

IT was dark, and already lights had begun to gleam here and there in the
houses, and a pale moon was rising behind the barracks at the end of the
street. Laptev was sitting on a bench by the gate waiting for the end of the
evening service at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. He was reckoning
that Yulia Sergeyevna would pass by on her way from the service, and then
he would speak to her, and perhaps spend the whole evening with her.

He had been sitting there for an hour and a half already, and all that time
his imagination had been busy picturing his Moscow rooms, his Moscow
friends, his man Pyotr, and his writing-table. He gazed half wonderingly at
the dark, motionless trees, and it seemed strange to him that he was living
now, not in his summer villa at Sokolniki, but in a provincial town in a
house by which a great herd of cattle was driven every morning and
evening, accompanied by terrible clouds of dust and the blowing of a horn.
He thought of long conversations in which he had taken part quite lately in
Moscow--conversations in which it had been maintained that one could live
without love, that passionate love was an obsession, that finally there is no
such love, but only a physical attraction between the sexes--and so on, in
the same style; he remembered them and thought mournfully that if he were
asked now what love was, he could not have found an answer.

The service was over, the people began to appear. Laptev strained his
eyes gazing at the dark figures. The bishop had been driven by in his
carriage, the bells had stopped ringing, and the red and green lights in the
belfry were one after another extinguished-- there had been an illumination,
as it was dedication day--but the people were still coming out, lingering,
talking, and standing under the windows. But at last Laptev heard a familiar
voice, his heart began beating violently, and he was overcome with despair
on seeing that Yulia Sergeyevna was not alone, but walking with two ladies.

"It's awful, awful!" he whispered, feeling jealous. "It's awful!"

At the corner of the lane, she stopped to say good-bye to the ladies, and
while doing so glanced at Laptev.

"I was coming to see you," he said. "I'm coming for a chat with your
father. Is he at home?"

"Most likely," she answered. "It's early for him to have gone to the club."

There were gardens all along the lane, and a row of lime-trees growing
by the fence cast a broad patch of shadow in the moonlight, so that the gate
and the fences were completely plunged in darkness on one side, from
which came the sounds of women whispering, smothered laughter, and
someone playing softly on a balalaika. There was a fragrance of lime-
flowers and of hay. This fragrance and the murmur of the unseen whispers
worked upon Laptev. He was all at once overwhelmed with a passionate
longing to throw his arms round his companion, to shower kisses on her
face, her hands, her shoulders, to burst into sobs, to fall at her feet and to
tell her how long he had been waiting for her. A faint scarcely perceptible
scent of incense hung about her; and that scent reminded him of the time
when he, too, believed in God and used to go to evening service, and when
he used to dream so much of pure romantic love. And it seemed to him that,
because this girl did not love him, all possibility of the happiness he had
dreamed of then was lost to him forever.

She began speaking sympathetically of the illness of his sister, Nina
Fyodorovna. Two months before his sister had undergone an operation for
cancer, and now every one was expecting a return of the disease.

"I went to see her this morning," said Yulia Sergeyevna, "and it seemed
to me that during the last week she has, not exactly grown thin, but has, as it
were, faded."

"Yes, yes," Laptev agreed. "There's no return of the symptoms, but every
day I notice she grows weaker and weaker, and is wasting before my eyes. I
don't understand what's the matter with her."

"Oh dear! And how strong she used to be, plump and rosy!" said Yulia
Sergeyevna after a moment's silence. "Every one here used to call her the
Moscow lady. How she used to laugh! On holidays she used to dress up like
a peasant girl, and it suited her so well."

Doctor Sergey Borisovitch was at home; he was a stout, red-faced man,
wearing a long coat that reached below his knees, and looking as though he
had short legs. He was pacing up and down his study, with his hands in his
pockets, and humming to himself in an undertone, "Ru-ru-ru-ru." His grey
whiskers looked unkempt, and his hair was unbrushed, as though he had
just got out of bed. And his study with pillows on the sofa, with stacks of
papers in the corners, and with a dirty invalid poodle lying under the table,
produced the same impression of unkemptness and untidiness as himself.

"M. Laptev wants to see you," his daughter said to him, going into his
study.

"Ru-ru-ru-ru," he hummed louder than ever, and turning into the
drawing-room, gave his hand to Laptev, and asked: "What good news have
you to tell me?"

It was dark in the drawing-room. Laptev, still standing with his hat in his
hand, began apologising for disturbing him; he asked what was to be done
to make his sister sleep at night, and why she was growing so thin; and he
was embarrassed by the thought that he had asked those very questions at
his visit that morning.

"Tell me," he said, "wouldn't it be as well to send for some specialist on
internal diseases from Moscow? What do you think of it?"

The doctor sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and made a vague gesture
with his hands.

It was evident that he was offended. He was a very huffy man, prone to
take offence, and always ready to suspect that people did not believe in him,
that he was not recognised or properly respected, that his patients exploited
him, and that his colleagues showed him ill-will. He was always jeering at

himself, saying that fools like him were only made for the public to ride
rough-shod over them.

Yulia Sergeyevna lighted the lamp. She was tired out with the service,
and that was evident from her pale, exhausted face, and her weary step. She
wanted to rest. She sat down on the sofa, put her hands on her lap, and sank
into thought. Laptev knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he
were conscious of his ugliness all over his body. He was short, thin, with
ruddy cheeks, and his hair had grown so thin that his head felt cold. In his
expression there was none of that refined simplicity which makes even
rough, ugly faces attractive; in the society of women, he was awkward,
over-talkative, affected. And now he almost despised himself for it. He must
talk that Yulia Sergeyevna might not be bored in his company. But what
about? About his sister's illness again?

And he began to talk about medicine, saying what is usually said. He
approved of hygiene, and said that he had long ago wanted to found a night-
refuge in Moscow--in fact, he had already calculated the cost of it.
According to his plan the workmen who came in the evening to the night-
refuge were to receive a supper of hot cabbage soup with bread, a warm,
dry bed with a rug, and a place for drying their clothes and their boots.

Yulia Sergeyevna was usually silent in his presence, and in a strange
way, perhaps by the instinct of a lover, he divined her thoughts and
intentions. And now, from the fact that after the evening service she had not
gone to her room to change her dress and drink tea, he deduced that she was
going to pay some visit elsewhere.

"But I'm in no hurry with the night-refuge," he went on, speaking with
vexation and irritability, and addressing the doctor, who looked at him, as it
were, blankly and in perplexity, evidently unable to understand what
induced him to raise the question of medicine and hygiene. "And most
likely it will be a long time, too, before I make use of our estimate. I fear
our night-shelter will fall into the hands of our pious humbugs and
philanthropic ladies, who always ruin any undertaking."

Yulia Sergeyevna got up and held out her hand to Laptev.

"Excuse me," she said, "it's time for me to go. Please give my love to
your sister."

"Ru-ru-ru-ru," hummed the doctor. "Ru-ru-ru-ru."

Yulia Sergeyevna went out, and after staying a little longer, Laptev said
good-bye to the doctor and went home. When a man is dissatisfied and feels
unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the lime-trees, the shadows,
the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so indifferent! By now
the moon was high up in the sky, and the clouds were scudding quickly
below. "But how naïve and provincial the moon is, how threadbare and
paltry the clouds!" thought Laptev. He felt ashamed of the way he had
talked just now about medicine, and the night-refuge. He felt with horror
that next day he would not have will enough to resist trying to see her and
talk to her again, and would again be convinced that he was nothing to her.
And the day after--it would be the same. With what object? And how and
when would it all end?

At home he went in to see his sister. Nina Fyodorovna still looked strong
and gave the impression of being a well-built, vigorous woman, but her
striking pallor made her look like a corpse, especially when, as now, she
was lying on her back with her eyes closed; her eldest daughter Sasha, a girl
of ten years old, was sitting beside her reading aloud from her reading-
book.

"Alyosha has come," the invalid said softly to herself.

There had long been established between Sasha and her uncle a tacit
compact, to take turns in sitting with the patient. On this occasion Sasha
closed her reading-book, and without uttering a word, went softly out of the
room. Laptev took an historical novel from the chest of drawers, and
looking for the right page, sat down and began reading it aloud.

Nina Fyodorovna was born in Moscow of a merchant family. She and
her two brothers had spent their childhood and early youth, living at home
in Pyatnitsky Street. Their childhood was long and wearisome; her father
treated her sternly, and had even on two or three occasions flogged her, and
her mother had had a long illness and died. The servants were coarse, dirty,

and hypocritical; the house was frequented by priests and monks, also
hypocritical; they ate and drank and coarsely flattered her father, whom
they did not like. The boys had the good-fortune to go to school, while Nina
was left practically uneducated. All her life she wrote an illegible scrawl,
and had read nothing but historical novels. Seventeen years ago, when she
was twenty-two, on a summer holiday at Himki, she made the acquaintance
of her present husband, a landowner called Panaurov, had fallen in love
with him, and married him secretly against her father's will. Panaurov, a
handsome, rather impudent fellow, who whistled and lighted his cigarette
from the holy lamp, struck the father as an absolutely worthless person. And
when the son-in-law began in his letters demanding a dowry, the old man
wrote to his daughter that he would send her furs, silver, and various articles
that had been left at her mother's death, as well as thirty thousand roubles,
but without his paternal blessing. Later he sent another twenty thousand.
This money, as well as the dowry, was spent; the estate had been sold and
Panaurov moved with his family to the town and got a job in a provincial
government office. In the town he formed another tie, and had a second
family, and this was the subject of much talk, as his illicit family was not a
secret.

Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. And now, listening to the
historical novel, she was thinking how much she had gone through in her
life, how much she had suffered, and that if any one were to describe her
life it would make a very pathetic story. As the tumour was in her breast,
she was persuaded that love and her domestic grief were the cause of her
illness, and that jealousy and tears had brought her to her hopeless state.

At last Alexey Fyodorovitch closed the book and said:

"That's the end, and thank God for it. To-morrow we'll begin a new one."

Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always been given to laughter, but of
late Laptev had begun to notice that at moments her mind seemed
weakened by illness, and she would laugh at the smallest trifle, and even
without any cause at all.

"Yulia came before dinner while you were out," she said. "So far as I can
see, she hasn't much faith in her papa. 'Let papa go on treating you,' she

said, 'but write in secret to the holy elder to pray for you, too.' There is a
holy man somewhere here. Yulia forgot her parasol here; you must take it to
her to-morrow," she went on after a brief pause. "No, when the end comes,
neither doctors nor holy men are any help."

"Nina, why can't you sleep at night?" Laptev asked, to change the
subject.

"Oh, well, I don't go to sleep--that's all. I lie and think."

"What do you think about, dear?"

"About the children, about you . . . about my life. I've gone through a
great deal, Alyosha, you know. When one begins to remember and
remember. . . . My God!" She laughed. "It's no joke to have borne five
children as I have, to have buried three. . . Sometimes I was expecting to be
confined while my Grigory Nikolaitch would be sitting at that very time
with another woman. There would be no one to send for the doctor or the
midwife. I would go into the passage or the kitchen for the servant, and
there Jews, tradesmen, moneylenders, would be waiting for him to come
home. My head used to go round . . . . He did not love me, though he never
said so openly. Now I've grown calmer--it doesn't weigh on my heart; but in
old days, when I was younger, it hurt me--ach! how it hurt me, darling!
Once-- while we were still in the country--I found him in the garden with a
lady, and I walked away. . . I walked on aimlessly, and I don't know how,
but I found myself in the church porch. I fell on my knees: 'Queen of
Heaven!' I said. And it was night, the moon was shining. . . ."

She was exhausted, she began gasping for breath. Then, after resting a
little, she took her brother's hand and went on in a weak, toneless voice:

"How kind you are, Alyosha! . . . And how clever! . . . What a good man
you've grown up into!"

At midnight Laptev said good-night to her, and as he went away he took
with him the parasol that Yulia Sergeyevna had forgotten. In spite of the late
hour, the servants, male and female, were drinking tea in the dining-room.
How disorderly! The children were not in bed, but were there in the dining-

room, too. They were all talking softly in undertones, and had not noticed
that the lamp was smoking and would soon go out. All these people, big and
little, were disturbed by a whole succession of bad omens and were in an
oppressed mood. The glass in the hall had been broken, the samovar had
been buzzing every day, and, as though on purpose, was even buzzing now.
They were describing how a mouse had jumped out of Nina Fyodorovna's
boot when she was dressing. And the children were quite aware of the
terrible significance of these omens. The elder girl, Sasha, a thin little
brunette, was sitting motionless at the table, and her face looked scared and
woebegone, while the younger, Lida, a chubby fair child of seven, stood
beside her sister looking from under her brows at the light.

Laptev went downstairs to his own rooms in the lower storey, where
under the low ceilings it was always close and smelt of geraniums. In his
sitting-room, Panaurov, Nina Fyodorovna's husband, was sitting reading the
newspaper. Laptev nodded to him and sat down opposite. Both sat still and
said nothing. They used to spend whole evenings like this without speaking,
and neither of them was in the least put out by this silence.

The little girls came down from upstairs to say good-night. Deliberately
and in silence, Panaurov made the sign of the cross over them several times,
and gave them his hand to kiss. They dropped curtsies, and then went up to
Laptev, who had to make the sign of the cross and give them his hand to
kiss also. This ceremony with the hand-kissing and curtsying was repeated
every evening.

When the children had gone out Panaurov laid aside the newspaper and
said:

"It's not very lively in our God-fearing town! I must confess, my dear
fellow," he added with a sigh, "I'm very glad that at last you've found some
distraction."

"What do you mean?" asked Laptev.

"I saw you coming out of Dr. Byelavin's just now. I expect you don't go
there for the sake of the papa."

"Of course not," said Laptev, and he blushed.

"Well, of course not. And by the way, you wouldn't find such another old
brute as that papa if you hunted by daylight with a candle. You can't
imagine what a foul, stupid, clumsy beast he is! You cultured people in the
capitals are still interested in the provinces only on the lyrical side, only
from the _paysage_ and _Poor Anton_ point of view, but I can assure you,
my boy, there's nothing logical about it; there's nothing but barbarism,
meanness, and nastiness--that's all. Take the local devotees of science--the
local intellectuals, so to speak. Can you imagine there are here in this town
twenty-eight doctors? They've all made their fortunes, and they are living in
houses of their own, and meanwhile the population is in just as helpless a
condition as ever. Here, Nina had to have an operation, quite an ordinary
one really, yet we were obliged to get a surgeon from Moscow; not one
doctor here would undertake it. It's beyond all conception. They know
nothing, they understand nothing. They take no interest in anything. Ask
them, for instance, what cancer is--what it is, what it comes from."

And Panaurov began to explain what cancer was. He was a specialist on
all scientific subjects, and explained from a scientific point of view
everything that was discussed. But he explained it all in his own way. He
had a theory of his own about the circulation of the blood, about chemistry,
about astronomy. He talked slowly, softly, convincingly.

"It's beyond all conception," he pronounced in an imploring voice,
screwing up his eyes, sighing languidly, and smiling as graciously as a king,
and it was evident that he was very well satisfied with himself, and never
gave a thought to the fact that he was fifty.

"I am rather hungry," said Laptev. "I should like something savoury."

"Well, that can easily be managed."

Not long afterwards Laptev and his brother-in-law were sitting upstairs
in the dining-room having supper. Laptev had a glass of vodka, and then
began drinking wine. Panaurov drank nothing. He never drank, and never
gambled, yet in spite of that he had squandered all his own and his wife's
property, and had accumulated debts. To squander so much in such a short

time, one must have, not passions, but a special talent. Panaurov liked
dainty fare, liked a handsome dinner service, liked music after dinner,
speeches, bowing footmen, to whom he would carelessly fling tips of ten,
even twenty-five roubles. He always took part in all lotteries and
subscriptions, sent bouquets to ladies of his acquaintance on their birthdays,
bought cups, stands for glasses, studs, ties, walking-sticks, scents, cigarette-
holders, pipes, lap-dogs, parrots, Japanese bric-à-brac, antiques; he had silk
nightshirts, and a bedstead made of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. His
dressing-gown was a genuine Bokhara, and everything was to correspond;
and on all this there went every day, as he himself expressed, "a deluge" of
money.

At supper he kept sighing and shaking his head.

"Yes, everything on this earth has an end," he said softly, screwing up his
dark eyes. "You will fall in love and suffer. You will fall out of love; you'll
be deceived, for there is no woman who will not deceive; you will suffer,
will be brought to despair, and will be faithless too. But the time will come
when all this will be a memory, and when you will reason about it coldly
and look upon it as utterly trivial. . . ."

Laptev, tired, a little drunk, looked at his handsome head, his clipped
black beard, and seemed to understand why women so loved this pampered,
conceited, and physically handsome creature.

After supper Panaurov did not stay in the house, but went off to his other
lodgings. Laptev went out to see him on his way. Panaurov was the only
man in the town who wore a top-hat, and his elegant, dandified figure, his
top-hat and tan gloves, beside the grey fences, the pitiful little houses, with
their three windows and the thickets of nettles, always made a strange and
mournful impression.

After saying good-bye to him Laptev returned home without hurrying.
The moon was shining brightly; one could distinguish every straw on the
ground, and Laptev felt as though the moonlight were caressing his bare
head, as though some one were passing a feather over his hair.

"I love!" he pronounced aloud, and he had a sudden longing to run to
overtake Panaurov, to embrace him, to forgive him, to make him a present
of a lot of money, and then to run off into the open country, into a wood, to
run on and on without looking back.

At home he saw lying on the chair the parasol Yulia Sergeyevna had
forgotten; he snatched it up and kissed it greedily. The parasol was a silk
one, no longer new, tied round with old elastic. The handle was a cheap one,
of white bone. Laptev opened it over him, and he felt as though there were
the fragrance of happiness about him.

He settled himself more comfortably in his chair, and still keeping hold
of the parasol, began writing to Moscow to one of his friends:

"DEAR PRECIOUS KOSTYA,

"Here is news for you: I'm in love again! I say _again_, because six
years ago I fell in love with a Moscow actress, though I didn't even succeed
in making her acquaintance, and for the last year and a half I have been
living with a certain person you know--a woman neither young nor good-
looking. Ah, my dear boy, how unlucky I am in love. I've never had any
success with women, and if I say _again_ it's simply because it's rather sad
and mortifying to acknowledge even to myself that my youth has passed
entirely without love, and that I'm in love in a real sense now for the first
time in my life, at thirty-four. Let it stand that I love _again_.

"If only you knew what a girl she was! She couldn't be called a beauty--
she has a broad face, she is very thin, but what a wonderful expression of
goodness she has when she smiles! When she speaks, her voice is as clear
as a bell. She never carries on a conversation with me--I don't know her; but
when I'm beside her I feel she's a striking, exceptional creature, full of
intelligence and lofty aspirations. She is religious, and you cannot imagine
how deeply this touches me and exalts her in my eyes. On that point I am
ready to argue with you endlessly. You may be right, to your thinking; but,
still, I love to see her praying in church. She is a provincial, but she was
educated in Moscow. She loves our Moscow; she dresses in the Moscow
style, and I love her for that--love her, love her . . . . I see you frowning and
getting up to read me a long lecture on what love is, and what sort of

woman one can love, and what sort one cannot, and so on, and so on. But,
dear Kostya, before I was in love I, too, knew quite well what love was.

"My sister thanks you for your message. She often recalls how she used
to take Kostya Kotchevoy to the preparatory class, and never speaks of you
except as _poor Kostya_, as she still thinks of you as the little orphan boy
she remembers. And so, poor orphan, I'm in love. While it's a secret, don't
say anything to a 'certain person.' I think it will all come right of itself, or,
as the footman says in Tolstoy, will 'come round.'"

When he had finished his letter Laptev went to bed. He was so tired that
he couldn't keep his eyes open, but for some reason he could not get to
sleep; the noise in the street seemed to prevent him. The cattle were driven
by to the blowing of a horn, and soon afterwards the bells began ringing for
early mass. At one minute a cart drove by creaking; at the next, he heard the
voice of some woman going to market. And the sparrows twittered the
whole time.

II

The next morning was a cheerful one; it was a holiday. At ten o'clock
Nina Fyodorovna, wearing a brown dress and with her hair neatly arranged,
was led into the drawing-room, supported on each side. There she walked
about a little and stood by the open window, and her smile was broad and
naïve, and, looking at her, one recalled a local artist, a great drunkard, who
wanted her to sit to him for a picture of the Russian carnival. And all of
them--the children, the servants, her brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and she
herself-- were suddenly convinced, that she was certainly going to get well.
With shrieks of laughter the children ran after their uncle, chasing him and
catching him, and filling the house with noise.

People called to ask how she was, brought her holy bread, told her that
in almost all the churches they were offering up prayers for her that day.
She had been conspicuous for her benevolence in the town, and was liked.
She was very ready with her charity, like her brother Alexey, who gave
away his money freely, without considering whether it was necessary to

give it or not. Nina Fyodorovna used to pay the school fees for poor
children; used to give away tea, sugar, and jam to old women; used to
provide trousseaux for poor brides; and if she picked up a newspaper, she
always looked first of all to see if there were any appeals for charity or a
paragraph about somebody's being in a destitute condition.

She was holding now in her hand a bundle of notes, by means of which
various poor people, her protégés, had procured goods from a grocer's shop.

They had been sent her the evening before by the shopkeeper with a
request for the payment of the total--eighty-two roubles.

"My goodness, what a lot they've had! They've no conscience!" she said,
deciphering with difficulty her ugly handwriting. "It's no joke! Eighty-two
roubles! I declare I won't pay it."

"I'll pay it to-day," said Laptev.

"Why should you? Why should you?" cried Nina Fyodorovna in
agitation. "It's quite enough for me to take two hundred and fifty every
month from you and our brother. God bless you!" she added, speaking
softly, so as not to be overheard by the servants.

"Well, but I spend two thousand five hundred a month," he said. "I tell
you again, dear: you have just as much right to spend it as I or Fyodor. Do
understand that, once for all. There are three of us, and of every three
kopecks of our father's money, one belongs to you."

But Nina Fyodorovna did not understand, and her expression looked as
though she were mentally solving some very difficult problem. And this
lack of comprehension in pecuniary matters, always made Laptev feel
uneasy and troubled. He suspected that she had private debts in addition
which worried her and of which she scrupled to tell him.

Then came the sound of footsteps and heavy breathing; it was the doctor
coming up the stairs, dishevelled and unkempt as usual.

"Ru-ru-ru," he was humming. "Ru-ru."

To avoid meeting him, Laptev went into the dining-room, and then went
downstairs to his own room. It was clear to him that to get on with the
doctor and to drop in at his house without formalities was impossible; and
to meet the "old brute," as Panaurov called him, was distasteful. That was
why he so rarely saw Yulia. He reflected now that the father was not at
home, that if he were to take Yulia Sergeyevna her parasol, he would be
sure to find her at home alone, and his heart ached with joy. Haste, haste!

He took the parasol and, violently agitated, flew on the wings of love. It
was hot in the street. In the big courtyard of the doctor's house, overgrown
with coarse grass and nettles, some twenty urchins were playing ball. These
were all the children of working-class families who tenanted the three
disreputable-looking lodges, which the doctor was always meaning to have
done up, though he put it off from year to year. The yard resounded with
ringing, healthy voices. At some distance on one side, Yulia Sergeyevna
was standing at her porch, her hands folded, watching the game.

"Good-morning!" Laptev called to her.

She looked round. Usually he saw her indifferent, cold, or tired as she
had been the evening before. Now her face looked full of life and frolic,
like the faces of the boys who were playing ball.

"Look, they never play so merrily in Moscow," she said, going to meet
him. "There are no such big yards there, though; they've no place to run
there. Papa has only just gone to you," she added, looking round at the
children.

"I know; but I've not come to see him, but to see you," said Laptev,
admiring her youthfulness, which he had not noticed till then, and seemed
only that day to have discovered in her; it seemed to him as though he were
seeing her slender white neck with the gold chain for the first time. "I've
come to see you . . ." he repeated. "My sister has sent you your parasol; you
forgot it yesterday."

She put out her hand to take the parasol, but he pressed it to his bosom
and spoke passionately, without restraint, yielding again to the sweet
ecstasy he had felt the night before, sitting under the parasol.

"I entreat you, give it me. I shall keep it in memory of you . . . of our
acquaintance. It's so wonderful!"

"Take it," she said, and blushed; "but there's nothing wonderful about it."

He looked at her in ecstasy, in silence, not knowing what to say.

"Why am I keeping you here in the heat?" she said after a brief pause,
laughing. "Let us go indoors."

"I am not disturbing you?"

They went into the hall. Yulia Sergeyevna ran upstairs, her white dress
with blue flowers on it rustling as she went.

"I can't be disturbed," she answered, stopping on the landing. "I never do
anything. Every day is a holiday for me, from morning till night."

"What you say is inconceivable to me," he said, going up to her. "I grew
up in a world in which every one without exception, men and women alike,
worked hard every day."

"But if one has nothing to do?" she asked.

"One has to arrange one's life under such conditions, that work is
inevitable. There can be no clean and happy life without work."

Again he pressed the parasol to his bosom, and to his own surprise spoke
softly, in a voice unlike his own:

"If you would consent to be my wife I would give everything--I would
give everything. There's no price I would not pay, no sacrifice I would not
make."

She started and looked at him with wonder and alarm.

"What are you saying!" she brought out, turning pale. "It's impossible, I
assure you. Forgive me."

Then with the same rustle of her skirts she went up higher, and vanished
through the doorway.

Laptev grasped what this meant, and his mood was transformed,
completely, abruptly, as though a light in his soul had suddenly been
extinguished. Filled with the shame of a man humiliated, of a man who is
disdained, who is not liked, who is distasteful, perhaps disgusting, who is
shunned, he walked out of the house.

"I would give everything," he thought, mimicking himself as he went
home through the heat and recalled the details of his declaration. "I would
give everything--like a regular tradesman. As though she wanted your
_everything_!"

All he had just said seemed to him repulsively stupid. Why had he lied,
saying that he had grown up in a world where every one worked, without
exception? Why had he talked to her in a lecturing tone about a clean and
happy life? It was not clever, not interesting; it was false--false in the
Moscow style. But by degrees there followed that mood of indifference into
which criminals sink after a severe sentence. He began thinking that, thank
God! everything was at an end and that the terrible uncertainty was over;
that now there was no need to spend whole days in anticipation, in pining,
in thinking always of the same thing. Now everything was clear; he must
give up all hope of personal happiness, live without desires, without hopes,
without dreams, or expectations, and to escape that dreary sadness which he
was so sick of trying to soothe, he could busy himself with other people's
affairs, other people's happiness, and old age would come on imperceptibly,
and life would reach its end--and nothing more was wanted. He did not
care, he wished for nothing, and could reason about it coolly, but there was
a sort of heaviness in his face especially under his eyes, his forehead felt
drawn tight like elastic--and tears were almost starting into his eyes. Feeling
weak all over, he lay down on his bed, and in five minutes was sound
asleep.

III

The proposal Laptev had made so suddenly threw Yulia Sergeyevna into
despair.

She knew Laptev very little, had made his acquaintance by chance; he
was a rich man, a partner in the well-known Moscow firm of "Fyodor
Laptev and Sons"; always serious, apparently clever, and anxious about his
sister's illness. It had seemed to her that he took no notice of her whatever,
and she did not care about him in the least --and then all of a sudden that
declaration on the stairs, that pitiful, ecstatic face. . . .

The offer had overwhelmed her by its suddenness and by the fact that the
word wife had been uttered, and by the necessity of rejecting it. She could
not remember what she had said to Laptev, but she still felt traces of the
sudden, unpleasant feeling with which she had rejected him. He did not
attract her; he looked like a shopman; he was not interesting; she could not
have answered him except with a refusal, and yet she felt uncomfortable, as
though she had done wrong.

"My God! without waiting to get into the room, on the stairs," she said to
herself in despair, addressing the ikon which hung over her pillow; "and no
courting beforehand, but so strangely, so oddly. . . ."

In her solitude her agitation grew more intense every hour, and it was
beyond her strength to master this oppressive feeling alone. She needed
some one to listen to her story and to tell her that she had done right. But
she had no one to talk to. She had lost her mother long before; she thought
her father a queer man, and could not talk to him seriously. He worried her
with his whims, his extreme readiness to take offence, and his meaningless
gestures; and as soon as one began to talk to him, he promptly turned the
conversation on himself. And in her prayer she was not perfectly open,
because she did not know for certain what she ought to pray for.

The samovar was brought in. Yulia Sergeyevna, very pale and tired,
looking dejected, came into the dining-room to make tea--it was one of her
duties--and poured out a glass for her father. Sergey Borisovitch, in his long
coat that reached below his knees, with his red face and unkempt hair,
walked up and down the room with his hands in his pockets, pacing, not
from corner to corner, but backwards and forwards at random, like a wild

beast in its cage. He would stand still by the table, sip his glass of tea with
relish, and pace about again, lost in thought.

"Laptev made me an offer to-day," said Yulia Sergeyevna, and she
flushed crimson.

The doctor looked at her and did not seem to understand.

"Laptev?" he queried. "Panaurov's brother-in-law?"

He was fond of his daughter; it was most likely that she would sooner or
later be married, and leave him, but he tried not to think about that. He was
afraid of being alone, and for some reason fancied, that if he were left alone
in that great house, he would have an apoplectic stroke, but he did not like
to speak of this directly.

"Well, I'm delighted to hear it," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I
congratulate you with all my heart. It offers you a splendid opportunity for
leaving me, to your great satisfaction. And I quite understand your feelings.
To live with an old father, an invalid, half crazy, must be very irksome at
your age. I quite understand you. And the sooner I'm laid out and in the
devil's clutches, the better every one will be pleased. I congratulate you
with all my heart."

"I refused him."

The doctor felt relieved, but he was unable to stop himself and went on:

"I wonder, I've long wondered, why I've not yet been put into a
madhouse--why I'm still wearing this coat instead of a strait-waistcoat? I
still have faith in justice, in goodness. I am a fool, an idealist, and nowadays
that's insanity, isn't it? And how do they repay me for my honesty? They
almost throw stones at me and ride rough-shod over me. And even my
nearest kith and kin do nothing but try to get the better of me. It's high time
the devil fetched an old fool like me. . . ."

"There's no talking to you like a rational being!" said Yulia.

She got up from the table impulsively, and went to her room in great
wrath, remembering how often her father had been unjust to her. But a little
while afterwards she felt sorry for her father, too, and when he was going to
the club she went downstairs with him, and shut the door after him. It was a
rough and stormy night; the door shook with the violence of the wind, and
there were draughts in all directions in the passage, so that the candle was
almost blown out. In her own domain upstairs Yulia Sergeyevna went the
round of all the rooms, making the sign of the cross over every door and
window; the wind howled, and it sounded as though some one were
walking on the roof. Never had it been so dreary, never had she felt so
lonely.

She asked herself whether she had done right in rejecting a man, simply
because his appearance did not attract her. It was true he was a man she did
not love, and to marry him would mean renouncing forever her dreams, her
conceptions of happiness in married life, but would she ever meet the man
of whom she dreamed, and would he love her? She was twenty-one already.
There were no eligible young men in the town. She pictured all the men she
knew--government clerks, schoolmasters, officers, and some of them were
married already, and their domestic life was conspicuous for its dreariness
and triviality; others were uninteresting, colourless, unintelligent, immoral.
Laptev was, anyway, a Moscow man, had taken his degree at the university,
spoke French. He lived in the capital, where there were lots of clever, noble,
remarkable people; where there was noise and bustle, splendid theatres,
musical evenings, first-rate dressmakers, confectioners. . . . In the Bible it
was written that a wife must love her husband, and great importance was
given to love in novels, but wasn't there exaggeration in it? Was it out of the
question to enter upon married life without love? It was said, of course, that
love soon passed away, and that nothing was left but habit, and that the
object of married life was not to be found in love, nor in happiness, but in
duties, such as the bringing up of one's children, the care of one's
household, and so on. And perhaps what was meant in the Bible was love
for one's husband as one's neighbour, respect for him, charity.

At night Yulia Sergeyevna read the evening prayers attentively, then
knelt down, and pressing her hands to her bosom, gazing at the flame of the
lamp before the ikon, said with feeling:

"Give me understanding, Holy Mother, our Defender! Give me
understanding, O Lord!"

She had in the course of her life come across elderly maiden ladies, poor
and of no consequence in the world, who bitterly repented and openly
confessed their regret that they had refused suitors in the past. Would not
the same thing happen to her? Had not she better go into a convent or
become a Sister of Mercy?

She undressed and got into bed, crossing herself and crossing the air
around her. Suddenly the bell rang sharply and plaintively in the corridor.

"Oh, my God!" she said, feeling a nervous irritation all over her at the
sound. She lay still and kept thinking how poor this provincial life was in
events, monotonous and yet not peaceful. One was constantly having to
tremble, to feel apprehensive, angry or guilty, and in the end one's nerves
were so strained, that one was afraid to peep out of the bedclothes.

A little while afterwards the bell rang just as sharply again. The servant
must have been asleep and had not heard. Yulia Sergeyevna lighted a
candle, and feeling vexed with the servant, began with a shiver to dress, and
when she went out into the corridor, the maid was already closing the door
downstairs.

"I thought it was the master, but it's some one from a patient," she said.

Yulia Sergeyevna went back to her room. She took a pack of cards out of
the chest of drawers, and decided that if after shuffling the cards well and
cutting, the bottom card turned out to be a red one, it would mean _yes_--
that is, she would accept Laptev's offer; and that if it was a black, it would
mean _no_. The card turned out to be the ten of spades.

That relieved her mind--she fell asleep; but in the morning, she was
wavering again between _yes_ and _no_, and she was dwelling on the
thought that she could, if she chose, change her life. The thought harassed
her, she felt exhausted and unwell; but yet, soon after eleven, she dressed
and went to see Nina Fyodorovna. She wanted to see Laptev: perhaps now

he would seem more attractive to her; perhaps she had been wrong about
him hitherto. . . .

She found it hard to walk against the wind. She struggled along, holding
her hat on with both hands, and could see nothing for the dust.

IV

Going into his sister's room, and seeing to his surprise Yulia Sergeyevna,
Laptev had again the humiliating sensation of a man who feels himself an
object of repulsion. He concluded that if after what had happened yesterday
she could bring herself so easily to visit his sister and meet him, it must be
because she was not concerned about him, and regarded him as a complete
nonentity. But when he greeted her, and with a pale face and dust under her
eyes she looked at him mournfully and remorsefully, he saw that she, too,
was miserable.

She did not feel well. She only stayed ten minutes, and began saying
good-bye. And as she went out she said to Laptev:

"Will you see me home, Alexey Fyodorovitch?"

They walked along the street in silence, holding their hats, and he,
walking a little behind, tried to screen her from the wind. In the lane it was
more sheltered, and they walked side by side.

"Forgive me if I was not nice yesterday;" and her voice quavered as
though she were going to cry. "I was so wretched! I did not sleep all night."

"I slept well all night," said Laptev, without looking at her; "but that
doesn't mean that I was happy. My life is broken. I'm deeply unhappy, and
after your refusal yesterday I go about like a man poisoned. The most
difficult thing was said yesterday. To-day I feel no embarrassment and can
talk to you frankly. I love you more than my sister, more than my dead
mother. . . . I can live without my sister, and without my mother, and I have

lived without them, but life without you--is meaningless to me; I can't face
it. . . ."

And now too, as usual, he guessed her intention.

He realised that she wanted to go back to what had happened the day
before, and with that object had asked him to accompany her, and now was
taking him home with her. But what could she add to her refusal? What new
idea had she in her head? From everything, from her glances, from her
smile, and even from her tone, from the way she held her head and
shoulders as she walked beside him, he saw that, as before, she did not love
him, that he was a stranger to her. What more did she want to say?

Doctor Sergey Borisovitch was at home.

"You are very welcome. I'm always glad to see you, Fyodor Alexeyitch,"
he said, mixing up his Christian name and his father's. "Delighted,
delighted!"

He had never been so polite before, and Laptev saw that he knew of his
offer; he did not like that either. He was sitting now in the drawing-room,
and the room impressed him strangely, with its poor, common decorations,
its wretched pictures, and though there were arm-chairs in it, and a huge
lamp with a shade over it, it still looked like an uninhabited place, a huge
barn, and it was obvious that no one could feel at home in such a room,
except a man like the doctor. The next room, almost twice as large, was
called the reception-room, and in it there were only rows of chairs, as
though for a dancing class. And while Laptev was sitting in the drawing-
room talking to the doctor about his sister, he began to be tortured by a
suspicion. Had not Yulia Sergeyevna been to his sister Nina's, and then
brought him here to tell him that she would accept him? Oh, how awful it
was! But the most awful thing of all was that his soul was capable of such a
suspicion. And he imagined how the father and the daughter had spent the
evening, and perhaps the night before, in prolonged consultation, perhaps
dispute, and at last had come to the conclusion that Yulia had acted
thoughtlessly in refusing a rich man. The words that parents use in such
cases kept ringing in his ears:

"It is true you don't love him, but think what good you could do!"

The doctor was going out to see patients. Laptev would have gone with
him, but Yulia Sergeyevna said:

"I beg you to stay."

She was distressed and dispirited, and told herself now that to refuse an
honourable, good man who loved her, simply because he was not attractive,
especially when marrying him would make it possible for her to change her
mode of life, her cheerless, monotonous, idle life in which youth was
passing with no prospect of anything better in the future--to refuse him
under such circumstances was madness, caprice and folly, and that God
might even punish her for it.

The father went out. When the sound of his steps had died away, she
suddenly stood up before Laptev and said resolutely, turning horribly white
as she did so:

"I thought for a long time yesterday, Alexey Fyodorovitch. . . . I accept
your offer."

He bent down and kissed her hand. She kissed him awkwardly on the
head with cold lips.

He felt that in this love scene the chief thing--her love--was lacking, and
that there was a great deal that was not wanted; and he longed to cry out, to
run away, to go back to Moscow at once. But she was close to him, and she
seemed to him so lovely, and he was suddenly overcome by passion. He
reflected that it was too late for deliberation now; he embraced her
passionately, and muttered some words, calling her _thou_; he kissed her on
the neck, and then on the cheek, on the head. . . .

She walked away to the window, dismayed by these demonstrations, and
both of them were already regretting what they had said and both were
asking themselves in confusion:

"Why has this happened?"

"If only you knew how miserable I am!" she said, wringing her hands.

"What is it?" he said, going up to her, wringing his hands too. "My dear,
for God's sake, tell me--what is it? Only tell the truth, I entreat you--nothing
but the truth!"

"Don't pay any attention to it," she said, and forced herself to smile. "I
promise you I'll be a faithful, devoted wife. . . . Come this evening."

Sitting afterwards with his sister and reading aloud an historical novel,
he recalled it all and felt wounded that his splendid, pure, rich feeling was
met with such a shallow response. He was not loved, but his offer had been
accepted--in all probability because he was rich: that is, what was thought
most of in him was what he valued least of all in himself. It was quite
possible that Yulia, who was so pure and believed in God, had not once
thought of his money; but she did not love him--did not love him, and
evidently she had interested motives, vague, perhaps, and not fully thought
out--still, it was so. The doctor's house with its common furniture was
repulsive to him, and he looked upon the doctor himself as a wretched,
greasy miser, a sort of operatic Gaspard from "Les Cloches de Corneville."
The very name "Yulia" had a vulgar sound. He imagined how he and his
Yulia would stand at their wedding, in reality complete strangers to one
another, without a trace of feeling on her side, just as though their marriage
had been made by a professional matchmaker; and the only consolation left
him now, as commonplace as the marriage itself, was the reflection that he
was not the first, and would not be the last; that thousands of people were
married like that; and that with time, when Yulia came to know him better,
she would perhaps grow fond of him.

"Romeo and Juliet!" he said, as he shut the novel, and he laughed. "I am
Romeo, Nina. You may congratulate me. I made an offer to Yulia Byelavin
to-day."

Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but when she believed it, she
began to cry; she was not pleased at the news.

"Well, I congratulate you," she said. "But why is it so sudden?"

"No, it's not sudden. It's been going on since March, only you don't
notice anything. . . . I fell in love with her last March when I made her
acquaintance here, in your rooms."

"I thought you would marry some one in our Moscow set," said Nina
Fyodorovna after a pause. "Girls in our set are simpler. But what matters,
Alyosha, is that you should be happy--that matters most. My Grigory
Nikolaitch did not love me, and there's no concealing it; you can see what
our life is. Of course any woman may love you for your goodness and your
brains, but, you see, Yulitchka is a girl of good family from a high-class
boarding-school; goodness and brains are not enough for her. She is young,
and, you, Alyosha, are not so young, and are not good-looking."

To soften the last words, she stroked his head and said:

"You're not good-looking, but you're a dear."

She was so agitated that a faint flush came into her cheeks, and she
began discussing eagerly whether it would be the proper thing for her to
bless Alyosha with the ikon at the wedding. She was, she reasoned, his
elder sister, and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to
convince her dejected brother that the wedding must be celebrated in proper
style, with pomp and gaiety, so that no one could find fault with it.

Then he began going to the Byelavins' as an accepted suitor, three or
four times a day; and now he never had time to take Sasha's place and read
aloud the historical novel. Yulia used to receive him in her two rooms,
which were at a distance from the drawing-room and her father's study, and
he liked them very much. The walls in them were dark; in the corner stood a
case of ikons; and there was a smell of good scent and of the oil in the holy
lamp. Her rooms were at the furthest end of the house; her bedstead and
dressing-table were shut off by a screen. The doors of the bookcase were
covered on the inside with a green curtain, and there were rugs on the floor,
so that her footsteps were noiseless--and from this he concluded that she
was of a reserved character, and that she liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded
life. In her own home she was treated as though she were not quite grown
up. She had no money of her own, and sometimes when they were out for
walks together, she was overcome with confusion at not having a farthing.

Her father allowed her very little for dress and books, hardly ten pounds a
year. And, indeed, the doctor himself had not much money in spite of his
good practice. He played cards every night at the club, and always lost.
Moreover, he bought mortgaged houses through a building society, and let
them. The tenants were irregular in paying the rent, but he was convinced
that such speculations were profitable. He had mortgaged his own house in
which he and his daughter were living, and with the money so raised had
bought a piece of waste ground, and had already begun to build on it a large
two-storey house, meaning to mortgage it, too, as soon as it was finished.

Laptev now lived in a sort of cloud, feeling as though he were not
himself, but his double, and did many things which he would never have
brought himself to do before. He went three or four times to the club with
the doctor, had supper with him, and offered him money for house-building.
He even visited Panaurov at his other establishment. It somehow happened
that Panaurov invited him to dinner, and without thinking, Laptev accepted.
He was received by a lady of five-and-thirty. She was tall and thin, with
hair touched with grey, and black eyebrows, apparently not Russian. There
were white patches of powder on her face. She gave him a honeyed smile
and pressed his hand jerkily, so that the bracelets on her white hands
tinkled. It seemed to Laptev that she smiled like that because she wanted to
conceal from herself and from others that she was unhappy. He also saw
two little girls, aged five and three, who had a marked likeness to Sasha.
For dinner they had milk-soup, cold veal, and chocolate. It was insipid and
not good; but the table was splendid, with gold forks, bottles of Soyer, and
cayenne pepper, an extraordinary bizarre cruet-stand, and a gold pepper-pot.

It was only as he was finishing the milk-soup that Laptev realised how
very inappropriate it was for him to be dining there. The lady was
embarrassed, and kept smiling, showing her teeth. Panaurov expounded
didactically what being in love was, and what it was due to.

"We have in it an example of the action of electricity," he said in French,
addressing the lady. "Every man has in his skin microscopic glands which
contain currents of electricity. If you meet with a person whose currents are
parallel with your own, then you get love."

When Laptev went home and his sister asked him where he had been he
felt awkward, and made no answer.

He felt himself in a false position right up to the time of the wedding.
His love grew more intense every day, and Yulia seemed to him a poetic and
exalted creature; but, all the same, there was no mutual love, and the truth
was that he was buying her and she was selling herself. Sometimes,
thinking things over, he fell into despair and asked himself: should he run
away? He did not sleep for nights together, and kept thinking how he should
meet in Moscow the lady whom he had called in his letters "a certain
person," and what attitude his father and his brother, difficult people, would
take towards his marriage and towards Yulia. He was afraid that his father
would say something rude to Yulia at their first meeting. And something
strange had happened of late to his brother Fyodor. In his long letters he had
taken to writing of the importance of health, of the effect of illness on the
mental condition, of the meaning of religion, but not a word about Moscow
or business. These letters irritated Laptev, and he thought his brother's
character was changing for the worse.

The wedding was in September. The ceremony took place at the Church
of St. Peter and St. Paul, after mass, and the same day the young couple set
off for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a long
train, already looking not a girl but a married woman, said good-bye to
Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid's face worked, but there was no tear in her dry
eyes. She said:

"If--which God forbid--I should die, take care of my little girls."

"Oh, I promise!" answered Yulia Sergeyevna, and her lips and eyelids
began quivering too.

"I shall come to see you in October," said Laptev, much moved. "You
must get better, my darling."

They travelled in a special compartment. Both felt depressed and
uncomfortable. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat, and made a
show of dozing, and he lay on the seat opposite, and he was disturbed by
various thoughts--of his father, of "a certain person," whether Yulia would

like her Moscow flat. And looking at his wife, who did not love him, he
wondered dejectedly "why this had happened."

V

The Laptevs had a wholesale business in Moscow, dealing in fancy
goods: fringe, tape, trimmings, crochet cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross
receipts reached two millions a year; what the net profit was, no one knew
but the old father. The sons and the clerks estimated the profits at
approximately three hundred thousand, and said that it would have been a
hundred thousand more if the old man had not "been too free-handed"--that
is, had not allowed credit indiscriminately. In the last ten years alone the
bad debts had mounted up to the sum of a million; and when the subject
was referred to, the senior clerk would wink slyly and deliver himself of
sentences the meaning of which was not clear to every one:

"The psychological sequences of the age."

Their chief commercial operations were conducted in the town market in
a building which was called the warehouse. The entrance to the warehouse
was in the yard, where it was always dark, and smelt of matting and where
the dray-horses were always stamping their hoofs on the asphalt. A very
humble-looking door, studded with iron, led from the yard into a room with
walls discoloured by damp and scrawled over with charcoal, lighted up by a
narrow window covered by an iron grating. Then on the left was another
room larger and cleaner with an iron stove and a couple of chairs, though it,
too, had a prison window: this was the office, and from it a narrow stone
staircase led up to the second storey, where the principal room was. This
was rather a large room, but owing to the perpetual darkness, the low-
pitched ceiling, the piles of boxes and bales, and the numbers of men that
kept flitting to and fro in it, it made as unpleasant an impression on a
newcomer as the others. In the offices on the top storey the goods lay in
bales, in bundles and in cardboard boxes on the shelves; there was no order
nor neatness in the arrangement of it, and if crimson threads, tassels, ends
of fringe, had not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper parcels,
no one could have guessed what was being bought and sold here. And

looking at these crumpled paper parcels and boxes, no one would have
believed that a million was being made out of such trash, and that fifty men
were employed every day in this warehouse, not counting the buyers.

When at midday, on the day after his arrival at Moscow, Laptev went
into the warehouse, the workmen packing the goods were hammering so
loudly that in the outer room and the office no one heard him come in. A
postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in his
hand; he was wincing at the noise, and he did not notice Laptev either. The
first person to meet him upstairs was his brother Fyodor Fyodorovitch, who
was so like him that they passed for twins. This resemblance always
reminded Laptev of his own personal appearance, and now, seeing before
him a short, red-faced man with rather thin hair, with narrow plebeian hips,
looking so uninteresting and so unintellectual, he asked himself: "Can I
really look like that?"

"How glad I am to see you!" said Fyodor, kissing his brother and
pressing his hand warmly. "I have been impatiently looking forward to
seeing you every day, my dear fellow. When you wrote that you were
getting married, I was tormented with curiosity, and I've missed you, too,
brother. Only fancy, it's six months since we saw each other. Well? How
goes it? Nina's very bad? Awfully bad?"

"Awfully bad."

"It's in God's hands," sighed Fyodor. "Well, what of your wife? She's a
beauty, no doubt? I love her already. Of course, she is my little sister now.
We'll make much of her between us."

Laptev saw the broad, bent back--so familiar to him--of his father,
Fyodor Stepanovitch. The old man was sitting on a stool near the counter,
talking to a customer.

"Father, God has sent us joy!" cried Fyodor. "Brother has come!"

Fyodor Stepanovitch was a tall man of exceptionally powerful build, so
that, in spite of his wrinkles and eighty years, he still looked a hale and
vigorous man. He spoke in a deep, rich, sonorous voice, that resounded

from his broad chest as from a barrel. He wore no beard, but a short-clipped
military moustache, and smoked cigars. As he was always too hot, he used
all the year round to wear a canvas coat at home and at the warehouse. He
had lately had an operation for cataract. His sight was bad, and he did
nothing in the business but talk to the customers and have tea and jam with
them.

Laptev bent down and kissed his head and then his lips.

"It's a good long time since we saw you, honoured sir," said the old man-
-"a good long time. Well, am I to congratulate you on entering the state of
holy matrimony? Very well, then; I congratulate you."

And he put his lips out to be kissed. Laptev bent down and kissed him.

"Well, have you brought your young lady?" the old man asked, and
without waiting for an answer, he said, addressing the customer: "'Herewith
I beg to inform you, father, that I'm going to marry such and such a young
lady.' Yes. But as for asking for his father's counsel or blessing, that's not in
the rules nowadays. Now they go their own way. When I married I was over
forty, but I went on my knees to my father and asked his advice. Nowadays
we've none of that."

The old man was delighted to see his son, but thought it unseemly to
show his affection or make any display of his joy. His voice and his manner
of saying "your young lady" brought back to Laptev the depression he had
always felt in the warehouse. Here every trifling detail reminded him of the
past, when he used to be flogged and put on Lenten fare; he knew that even
now boys were thrashed and punched in the face till their noses bled, and
that when those boys grew up they would beat others. And before he had
been five minutes in the warehouse, he always felt as though he were being
scolded or punched in the face.

Fyodor slapped the customer on the shoulder and said to his brother:

"Here, Alyosha, I must introduce our Tambov benefactor, Grigory
Timofeitch. He might serve as an example for the young men of the day;
he's passed his fiftieth birthday, and he has tiny children."

The clerks laughed, and the customer, a lean old man with a pale face,
laughed too.

"Nature above the normal capacity," observed the head-clerk, who was
standing at the counter close by. "It always comes out when it's there."

The head-clerk--a tall man of fifty, in spectacles, with a dark beard, and a
pencil behind his ear--usually expressed his ideas vaguely in roundabout
hints, while his sly smile betrayed that he attached particular significance to
his words. He liked to obscure his utterances with bookish words, which he
understood in his own way, and many such words he used in a wrong sense.
For instance, the word "except." When he had expressed some opinion
positively and did not want to be contradicted, he would stretch out his
hand and pronounce:

"Except!"

And what was most astonishing, the customers and the other clerks
understood him perfectly. His name was Ivan Vassilitch Potchatkin, and he
came from Kashira. Now, congratulating Laptev, he expressed himself as
follows:

"It's the reward of valour, for the female heart is a strong opponent."

Another important person in the warehouse was a clerk called
Makeitchev--a stout, solid, fair man with whiskers and a perfectly bald
head. He went up to Laptev and congratulated him respectfully in a low
voice:

"I have the honour, sir. . . The Lord has heard your parent's prayer. Thank
God."

Then the other clerks began coming up to congratulate him on his
marriage. They were all fashionably dressed, and looked like perfectly well-
bred, educated men. Since between every two words they put in a "sir,"
their congratulations--something like "Best wishes, sir, for happiness, sir,"
uttered very rapidly in a low voice--sounded rather like the hiss of a whip in
the air--"Shshsh-s s s s s!" Laptev was soon bored and longing to go home,

but it was awkward to go away. He was obliged to stay at least two hours at
the warehouse to keep up appearances. He walked away from the counter
and began asking Makeitchev whether things had gone well while he was
away, and whether anything new had turned up, and the clerk answered him
respectfully, avoiding his eyes. A boy with a cropped head, wearing a grey
blouse, handed Laptev a glass of tea without a saucer; not long afterwards
another boy, passing by, stumbled over a box, and almost fell down, and
Makeitchev's face looked suddenly spiteful and ferocious like a wild
beast's, and he shouted at him:

"Keep on your feet!"

The clerks were pleased that their young master was married and had
come back at last; they looked at him with curiosity and friendly feeling,
and each one thought it his duty to say something agreeable when he passed
him. But Laptev was convinced that it was not genuine, and that they were
only flattering him because they were afraid of him. He never could forget
how fifteen years before, a clerk, who was mentally deranged, had run out
into the street with nothing on but his shirt and shaking his fists at the
windows, shouted that he had been ill-treated; and how, when the poor
fellow had recovered, the clerks had jeered at him for long afterwards,
reminding him how he had called his employers "planters" instead of
"exploiters." Altogether the employees at Laptevs' had a very poor time of
it, and this fact was a subject of conversation for the whole market. The
worst of it was that the old man, Fyodor Stepanovitch, maintained
something of an Asiatic despotism in his attitude to them. Thus, no one
knew what wages were paid to the old man's favourites, Potchatkin and
Makeitchev. They received no more than three thousand a year, together
with bonuses, but he made out that he paid then seven. The bonuses were
given to all the clerks every year, but privately, so that the man who got
little was bound from vanity to say he had got more. Not one boy knew
when he would be promoted to be a clerk; not one of the men knew whether
his employer was satisfied with him or not. Nothing was directly forbidden,
and so the clerks never knew what was allowed, and what was not. They
were not forbidden to marry, but they did not marry for fear of displeasing
their employer and losing their place. They were allowed to have friends
and pay visits, but the gates were shut at nine o'clock, and every morning

the old man scanned them all suspiciously, and tried to detect any smell of
vodka about them:

"Now then, breathe," he would say.

Every clerk was obliged to go to early service, and to stand in church in
such a position that the old man could see them all. The fasts were strictly
observed. On great occasions, such as the birthday of their employer or of
any member of his family, the clerks had to subscribe and present a cake
from Fley's, or an album. The clerks lived three or four in a room in the
lower storey, and in the lodges of the house in Pyatnitsky Street, and at
dinner ate from a common bowl, though there was a plate set before each of
them. If one of the family came into the room while they were at dinner,
they all stood up.

Laptev was conscious that only, perhaps, those among them who had
been corrupted by the old man's training could seriously regard him as their
benefactor; the others must have looked on him as an enemy and a
"planter." Now, after six months' absence, he saw no change for the better;
there was indeed something new which boded nothing good. His brother
Fyodor, who had always been quiet, thoughtful, and extremely refined, was
now running about the warehouse with a pencil behind his ear making a
show of being very busy and businesslike, slapping customers on the
shoulder and shouting "Friends!" to the clerks. Apparently he had taken up
a new role, and Alexey did not recognise him in the part.

The old man's voice boomed unceasingly. Having nothing to do, he was
laying down the law to a customer, telling him how he should order his life
and his business, always holding himself up as an example. That
boastfulness, that aggressive tone of authority, Laptev had heard ten,
fifteen, twenty years ago. The old man adored himself; from what he said it
always appeared that he had made his wife and all her relations happy, that
he had been munificent to his children, and a benefactor to his clerks and
employés, and that every one in the street and all his acquaintances
remembered him in their prayers. Whatever he did was always right, and if
things went wrong with people it was because they did not take his advice;
without his advice nothing could succeed. In church he stood in the
foremost place, and even made observations to the priests, if in his opinion

they were not conducting the service properly, and believed that this was
pleasing God because God loved him.

At two o'clock every one in the warehouse was hard at work, except the
old man, who still went on booming in his deep voice. To avoid standing
idle, Laptev took some trimmings from a workgirl and let her go; then
listened to a customer, a merchant from Vologda, and told a clerk to attend
to him.

"T. V. A.!" resounded on all sides (prices were denoted by letters in the
warehouse and goods by numbers). "R. I. T.!" As he went away, Laptev said
good-bye to no one but Fyodor.

"I shall come to Pyatnitsky Street with my wife to-morrow," he said;
"but I warn you, if father says a single rude thing to her, I shall not stay
there another minute."

"You're the same as ever," sighed Fyodor. "Marriage has not changed
you. You must be patient with the old man. So till eleven o'clock, then. We
shall expect you impatiently. Come directly after mass, then."

"I don't go to mass."

"That does not matter. The great thing is not to be later than eleven, so
you may be in time to pray to God and to lunch with us. Give my greetings
to my little sister and kiss her hand for me. I have a presentiment that I shall
like her," Fyodor added with perfect sincerity. "I envy you, brother!" he
shouted after him as Alexey went downstairs.

"And why does he shrink into himself in that shy way as though he
fancied he was naked?" thought Laptev, as he walked along Nikolsky
Street, trying to understand the change that had come over his brother. "And
his language is new, too: 'Brother, dear brother, God has sent us joy; to pray
to God'--just like Iudushka in Shtchedrin."

VI

At eleven o'clock the next day, which was Sunday, he was driving with
his wife along Pyatnitsky Street in a light, one-horse carriage. He was afraid
of his father's doing something outrageous, and was already ill at ease. After
two nights in her husband's house Yulia Sergeyevna considered her
marriage a mistake and a calamity, and if she had had to live with her
husband in any other town but Moscow, it seemed to her that she could not
have endured the horror of it. Moscow entertained her--she was delighted
with the streets, the churches; and if it had been possible to drive about
Moscow in those splendid sledges with expensive horses, to drive the whole
day from morning till night, and with the swift motion to feel the cold
autumn air blowing upon her, she would perhaps not have felt herself so
unhappy.

Near a white, lately stuccoed two-storey house the coachman pulled up
his horse, and began to turn to the right. They were expected, and near the
gate stood two policemen and the porter in a new full-skirted coat, high
boots, and goloshes. The whole space, from the middle of the street to the
gates and all over the yard from the porch, was strewn with fresh sand. The
porter took off his hat, the policemen saluted. Near the entrance Fyodor met
them with a very serious face.

"Very glad to make your acquaintance, little sister," he said, kissing
Yulia's hand. "You're very welcome."

He led her upstairs on his arm, and then along a corridor through a
crowd of men and women. The anteroom was crowded too, and smelt of
incense.

"I will introduce you to our father directly," whispered Fyodor in the
midst of a solemn, deathly silence. "A venerable old man, _pater-familias_."

In the big drawing-room, by a table prepared for service, Fyodor
Stepanovitch stood, evidently waiting for them, and with him the priest in a
calotte, and a deacon. The old man shook hands with Yulia without saying a
word. Every one was silent. Yulia was overcome with confusion.

The priest and the deacon began putting on their vestments. A censer was
brought in, giving off sparks and fumes of incense and charcoal. The

candles were lighted. The clerks walked into the drawing-room on tiptoe
and stood in two rows along the wall. There was perfect stillness, no one
even coughed.

"The blessing of God," began the deacon. The service was read with
great solemnity; nothing was left out and two canticles were sung --to
sweetest Jesus and the most Holy Mother of God. The singers sang very
slowly, holding up the music before them. Laptev noticed how confused his
wife was. While they were singing the canticles, and the singers in different
keys brought out "Lord have mercy on us," he kept expecting in nervous
suspense that the old man would make some remark such as, "You don't
know how to cross yourself," and he felt vexed. Why this crowd, and why
this ceremony with priests and choristers? It was too bourgeois. But when
she, like the old man, put her head under the gospel and afterwards several
times dropped upon her knees, he realised that she liked it all, and was
reassured.

At the end of the service, during "Many, many years," the priest gave the
old man and Alexey the cross to kiss, but when Yulia went up, he put his
hand over the cross, and showed he wanted to speak. Signs were made to
the singers to stop.

"The prophet Samuel," began the priest, "went to Bethlehem at the
bidding of the Lord, and there the elders of the town with fear and
trembling asked him: 'Comest thou peaceably?' And the prophet answered:
'Peaceably: I am come to sacrifice unto the Lord: sanctify yourselves and
come with me to the sacrifice.' Even so, Yulia, servant of God, shall we ask
of thee, Dost thou come bringing peace into this house?"

Yulia flushed with emotion. As he finished, the priest gave her the cross
to kiss, and said in quite a different tone of voice:

"Now Fyodor Fyodorovitch must be married; it's high time."

The choir began singing once more, people began moving, and the room
was noisy again. The old man, much touched, with his eyes full of tears,
kissed Yulia three times, made the sign of the cross over her face, and said:

"This is your home. I'm an old man and need nothing."

The clerks congratulated her and said something, but the choir was
singing so loud that nothing else could be heard. Then they had lunch and
drank champagne. She sat beside the old father, and he talked to her, saying
that families ought not to be parted but live together in one house; that
separation and disunion led to permanent rupture.

"I've made money and the children only do the spending of it," he said.
"Now, you live with me and save money. It's time for an old man like me to
rest."

Yulia had all the time a vision of Fyodor flitting about so like her
husband, but shyer and more restless; he fussed about her and often kissed
her hand.

"We are plain people, little sister," he said, and patches of red came into
his face as he spoke. "We live simply in Russian style, like Christians, little
sister."

As they went home, Laptev felt greatly relieved that everything had gone
off so well, and that nothing outrageous had happened as he had expected.
He said to his wife:

"You're surprised that such a stalwart, broad-shouldered father should
have such stunted, narrow-chested sons as Fyodor and me. Yes; but it's easy
to explain! My father married my mother when he was forty-five, and she
was only seventeen. She turned pale and trembled in his presence. Nina was
born first--born of a comparatively healthy mother, and so she was finer and
sturdier than we were. Fyodor and I were begotten and born after mother
had been worn out by terror. I can remember my father correcting me--or, to
speak plainly, beating me--before I was five years old. He used to thrash me
with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I
woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me that day. Play and
childish mischief was forbidden us. We had to go to morning service and to
early mass. When we met priests or monks we had to kiss their hands; at
home we had to sing hymns. Here you are religious and love all that, but
I'm afraid of religion, and when I pass a church I remember my childhood,

and am overcome with horror. I was taken to the warehouse as soon as I
was eight years old. I worked like a working boy, and it was bad for my
health, for I used to be beaten there every day. Afterwards when I went to
the high school, I used to go to school till dinner-time, and after dinner I
had to sit in that warehouse till evening; and things went on like that till I
was twenty-two, till I got to know Yartsev, and he persuaded me to leave
my father's house. That Yartsev did a great deal for me. I tell you what,"
said Laptev, and he laughed with pleasure: "let us go and pay Yartsev a visit
at once. He's a very fine fellow! How touched he will be!"

VII

On a Saturday in November Anton Rubinstein was conducting in a
symphony concert. It was very hot and crowded. Laptev stood behind the
columns, while his wife and Kostya Kotchevoy were sitting in the third or
fourth row some distance in front. At the very beginning of an interval a
"certain person," Polina Nikolaevna Razsudin, quite unexpectedly passed
by him. He had often since his marriage thought with trepidation of a
possible meeting with her. When now she looked at him openly and
directly, he realised that he had all this time shirked having things out with
her, or writing her two or three friendly lines, as though he had been hiding
from her; he felt ashamed and flushed crimson. She pressed his hand tightly
and impulsively and asked:

"Have you seen Yartsev?"

And without waiting for an answer she went striding on impetuously as
though some one were pushing her on from behind.

She was very thin and plain, with a long nose; her face always looked
tired, and exhausted, and it seemed as though it were an effort to her to keep
her eyes open, and not to fall down. She had fine, dark eyes, and an
intelligent, kind, sincere expression, but her movements were awkward and
abrupt. It was hard to talk to her, because she could not talk or listen quietly.
Loving her was not easy. Sometimes when she was alone with Laptev she
would go on laughing for a long time, hiding her face in her hands, and

would declare that love was not the chief thing in life for her, and would be
as whimsical as a girl of seventeen; and before kissing her he would have to
put out all the candles. She was thirty. She was married to a schoolmaster,
but had not lived with her husband for years. She earned her living by
giving music lessons and playing in quartettes.

During the ninth symphony she passed again as though by accident, but
the crowd of men standing like a thick wall behind the columns prevented
her going further, and she remained beside him. Laptev saw that she was
wearing the same little velvet blouse she had worn at concerts last year and
the year before. Her gloves were new, and her fan, too, was new, but it was
a common one. She was fond of fine clothes, but she did not know how to
dress, and grudged spending money on it. She dressed so badly and untidily
that when she was going to her lessons striding hurriedly down the street,
she might easily have been taken for a young monk.

The public applauded and shouted encore.

"You'll spend the evening with me," said Polina Nikolaevna, going up to
Laptev and looking at him severely. "When this is over we'll go and have
tea. Do you hear? I insist on it. You owe me a great deal, and haven't the
moral right to refuse me such a trifle."

"Very well; let us go," Laptev assented.

Endless calls followed the conclusion of the concert. The audience got
up from their seats and went out very slowly, and Laptev could not go away
without telling his wife. He had to stand at the door and wait.

"I'm dying for some tea," Polina Nikolaevna said plaintively. "My very
soul is parched."

"You can get something to drink here," said Laptev. "Let's go to the
buffet."

"Oh, I've no money to fling away on waiters. I'm not a shopkeeper."

He offered her his arm; she refused, in a long, wearisome sentence which
he had heard many times, to the effect that she did not class herself with the
feebler fair sex, and did not depend on the services of gentlemen.

As she talked to him she kept looking about at the audience and greeting
acquaintances; they were her fellow-students at the higher courses and at
the conservatorium, and her pupils. She gripped their hands abruptly, as
though she were tugging at them. But then she began twitching her
shoulders, and trembling as though she were in a fever, and at last said
softly, looking at Laptev with horror:

"Who is it you've married? Where were your eyes, you mad fellow?
What did you see in that stupid, insignificant girl? Why, I loved you for
your mind, for your soul, but that china doll wants nothing but your
money!"

"Let us drop that, Polina," he said in a voice of supplication. "All that
you can say to me about my marriage I've said to myself many times
already. Don't cause me unnecessary pain."

Yulia Sergeyevna made her appearance, wearing a black dress with a big
diamond brooch, which her father-in-law had sent her after the service. She
was followed by her suite--Kotchevoy, two doctors of their acquaintance,
an officer, and a stout young man in student's uniform, called Kish.

"You go on with Kostya," Laptev said to his wife. "I'm coming later."

Yulia nodded and went on. Polina Nikolaevna gazed after her, quivering
all over and twitching nervously, and in her eyes there was a look of
repulsion, hatred, and pain.

Laptev was afraid to go home with her, foreseeing an unpleasant
discussion, cutting words, and tears, and he suggested that they should go
and have tea at a restaurant. But she said:

"No, no. I want to go home. Don't dare to talk to me of restaurants."

She did not like being in a restaurant, because the atmosphere of
restaurants seemed to her poisoned by tobacco smoke and the breath of
men. Against all men she did not know she cherished a strange prejudice,
regarding them all as immoral rakes, capable of attacking her at any
moment. Besides, the music played at restaurants jarred on her nerves and
gave her a headache.

Coming out of the Hall of Nobility, they took a sledge in Ostozhenka
and drove to Savelovsky Lane, where she lodged. All the way Laptev
thought about her. It was true that he owed her a great deal. He had made
her acquaintance at the flat of his friend Yartsev, to whom she was giving
lessons in harmony. Her love for him was deep and perfectly disinterested,
and her relations with him did not alter her habits; she went on giving her
lessons and wearing herself out with work as before. Through her he came
to understand and love music, which he had scarcely cared for till then.

"Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!" she pronounced in a hollow voice,
covering her mouth with her muff that she might not catch cold. "I've given
five lessons, confound them! My pupils are as stupid as posts; I nearly died
of exasperation. I don't know how long this slavery can go on. I'm worn out.
As soon as I can scrape together three hundred roubles, I shall throw it all
up and go to the Crimea, to lie on the beach and drink in ozone. How I love
the sea--oh, how I love the sea!"

"You'll never go," said Laptev. "To begin with, you'll never save the
money; and, besides, you'd grudge spending it. Forgive me, I repeat again:
surely it's quite as humiliating to collect the money by farthings from idle
people who have music lessons to while away their time, as to borrow it
from your friends."

"I haven't any friends," she said irritably. "And please don't talk
nonsense. The working class to which I belong has one privilege: the
consciousness of being incorruptible--the right to refuse to be indebted to
wretched little shopkeepers, and to treat them with scorn. No, indeed, you
don't buy me! I'm not a Yulitchka!"

Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would call forth
a perfect torrent of words, such as he had often heard before. She paid

herself.

She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady who provided
her meals. Her big Becker piano was for the time at Yartsev's in Great
Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day to play on it. In her room
there were armchairs in loose covers, a bed with a white summer quilt, and
flowers belonging to the landlady; there were oleographs on the walls, and
there was nothing that would have suggested that there was a woman, and a
woman of university education, living in it. There was no toilet table; there
were no books; there was not even a writing-table. It was evident that she
went to bed as soon as she got home, and went out as soon as she got up in
the morning.

The cook brought in the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea, and, still
shivering--the room was cold--began abusing the singers who had sung in
the ninth symphony. She was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open.
She drank one glass of tea, then a second, and then a third.

"And so you are married," she said. "But don't be uneasy; I'm not going
to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart. Only it's annoying
and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one else; that
what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but simply a body,
good looks, and youth. . . . Youth!" she pronounced through her nose, as
though mimicking some one, and she laughed. "Youth! You must have
purity, _reinheit! reinheit!_" she laughed, throwing herself back in her chair.
"_Reinheit!_"

When she left off laughing her eyes were wet with tears.

"You're happy, at any rate?" she asked.

"No."

"Does she love you?"

Laptev, agitated, and feeling miserable, stood up and began walking
about the room.

"No," he repeated. "If you want to know, Polina, I'm very unhappy.
There's no help for it; I've done the stupid thing, and there's no correcting it
now. I must look at it philosophically. She married me without love,
stupidly, perhaps with mercenary motives, but without understanding, and
now she evidently sees her mistake and is miserable. I see it. At night we
sleep together, but by day she is afraid to be left alone with me for five
minutes, and tries to find distraction, society. With me she feels ashamed
and frightened."

"And yet she takes money from you?"

"That's stupid, Polina!" cried Laptev. "She takes money from me because
it makes absolutely no difference to her whether she has it or not. She is an
honest, pure girl. She married me simply because she wanted to get away
from her father, that's all."

"And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been
rich?" asked Polina.

"I'm not sure of anything," said Laptev dejectedly. "Not of anything. I
don't understand anything. For God's sake, Polina, don't let us talk about it."

"Do you love her?"

"Desperately."

A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up and
down, thinking that by now his wife was probably having supper at the
doctors' club.

"But is it possible to love without knowing why?" asked Polina,
shrugging her shoulders. "No; it's the promptings of animal passion! You
are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body, that _reinheit!_ Go away
from me; you are unclean! Go to her!"

She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled it at
him. He put on his fur coat without speaking and went out, but she ran after

him into the passage, clutched his arm above the elbow, and broke into
sobs.

"Hush, Polina! Don't!" he said, and could not unclasp her fingers. "Calm
yourself, I entreat you."

She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an
unpleasant waxy colour like a corpse's, and Laptev still could not unclasp
her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up carefully, laid her on her bed,
and sat by her for ten minutes till she came to herself. Her hands were cold,
her pulse was weak and uneven.

"Go home," she said, opening her eyes. "Go away, or I shall begin
howling again. I must take myself in hand."

When he came out, instead of going to the doctors' club where his
friends were expecting him, he went home. All the way home he was asking
himself reproachfully why he had not settled down to married life with that
woman who loved him so much, and was in reality his wife and friend. She
was the one human being who was devoted to him; and, besides, would it
not have been a grateful and worthy task to give happiness, peace, and a
home to that proud, clever, overworked creature? Was it for him, he asked
himself, to lay claim to youth and beauty, to that happiness which could not
be, and which, as though in punishment or mockery, had kept him for the
last three months in a state of gloom and oppression. The honeymoon was
long over, and he still, absurd to say, did not know what sort of person his
wife was. To her school friends and her father she wrote long letters of five
sheets, and was never at a loss for something to say to them, but to him she
never spoke except about the weather or to tell him that dinner was ready,
or that it was supper-time. When at night she said her lengthy prayers and
then kissed her crosses and ikons, he thought, watching her with hatred,
"Here she's praying. What's she praying about? What about?" In his
thoughts he showered insults on himself and her, telling himself that when
he got into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking what he had paid
for; but it was horrible. If only it had been a healthy, reckless, sinful
woman; but here he had youth, piety, meekness, the pure eyes of innocence.
. . . While they were engaged her piety had touched him; now the
conventional definiteness of her views and convictions seemed to him a

barrier, behind which the real truth could not be seen. Already everything in
his married life was agonising. When his wife, sitting beside him in the
theatre, sighed or laughed spontaneously, it was bitter to him that she
enjoyed herself alone and would not share her delight with him. And it was
remarkable that she was friendly with all his friends, and they all knew
what she was like already, while he knew nothing about her, and only
moped and was dumbly jealous.

When he got home Laptev put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and sat
down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at home. But within half
an hour there was a ring at the hall door, and he heard the muffled footsteps
of Pyotr running to open it. It was Yulia. She walked into the study in her
fur coat, her cheeks rosy with the frost,

"There's a great fire in Pryesnya," she said breathlessly. "There's a
tremendous glow. I'm going to see it with Konstantin Ivanovitch."

"Well, do, dear!"

The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror in her eyes,
reassured Laptev. He read for another half-hour and went to bed.

Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she had
borrowed from him, all his letters and his photographs; with them was a
note consisting of one word--_"basta."_

VIII

Towards the end of October Nina Fyodorovna had unmistakable
symptoms of a relapse. There was a change in her face, and she grew
rapidly thinner. In spite of acute pain she still imagined that she was getting
better, and got up and dressed every morning as though she were well, and
then lay on her bed, fully dressed, for the rest of the day. And towards the
end she became very talkative. She would lie on her back and talk in a low
voice, speaking with an effort and breathing painfully. She died suddenly
under the following circumstances.

It was a clear moonlight evening. In the street people were tobogganing
in the fresh snow, and their clamour floated in at the window. Nina
Fyodorovna was lying on her back in bed, and Sasha, who had no one to
take turns with her now, was sitting beside her half asleep.

"I don't remember his father's name," Nina Fyodorovna was saying
softly, "but his name was Ivan Kotchevoy--a poor clerk. He was a sad
drunkard, the Kingdom of Heaven be his! He used to come to us, and every
month we used to give him a pound of sugar and two ounces of tea. And
money, too, sometimes, of course. Yes. . . . And then, this is what happened.
Our Kotchevoy began drinking heavily and died, consumed by vodka. He
left a little son, a boy of seven. Poor little orphan! . . . We took him and hid
him in the clerk's quarters, and he lived there for a whole year, without
father's knowing. And when father did see him, he only waved his hand and
said nothing. When Kostya, the little orphan, was nine years old--by that
time I was engaged to be married--I took him round to all the day schools. I
went from one to the other, and no one would take him. And he cried. . . .
'What are you crying for, little silly?' I said. I took him to Razgulyay to the
second school, where--God bless them for it!--they took him, and the boy
began going every day on foot from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyay Street
and back again . . . . Alyosha paid for him. . . . By God's grace the boy got
on, was good at his lessons, and turned out well. . . . He's a lawyer now in
Moscow, a friend of Alyosha's, and so good in science. Yes, we had
compassion on a fellow-creature and took him into our house, and now I
daresay, he remembers us in his prayers. . . Yes. . . ."

Nina Fyodorovna spoke more and more slowly with long pauses, then
after a brief silence she suddenly raised herself and sat up.

"There's something the matter with me . . . something seems wrong," she
said. "Lord have mercy on me! Oh, I can't breathe!"

Sasha knew that her mother would soon die; seeing now how suddenly
her face looked drawn, she guessed that it was the end, and she was
frightened.

"Mother, you mustn't!" she began sobbing. "You mustn't."

"Run to the kitchen; let them go for father. I am very ill indeed."

Sasha ran through all the rooms calling, but there were none of the
servants in the house, and the only person she found was Lida asleep on a
chest in the dining-room with her clothes on and without a pillow. Sasha ran
into the yard just as she was without her goloshes, and then into the street.
On a bench at the gate her nurse was sitting watching the tobogganing.
From beyond the river, where the tobogganing slope was, came the strains
of a military band.

"Nurse, mother's dying!" sobbed Sasha. "You must go for father! . . ."

The nurse went upstairs, and, glancing at the sick woman, thrust a
lighted wax candle into her hand. Sasha rushed about in terror and besought
some one to go for her father, then she put on a coat and a kerchief, and ran
into the street. From the servants she knew already that her father had
another wife and two children with whom he lived in Bazarny Street. She
ran out of the gate and turned to the left, crying, and frightened of unknown
people. She soon began to sink into the snow and grew numb with cold.

She met an empty sledge, but she did not take it: perhaps, she thought,
the man would drive her out of town, rob her, and throw her into the
cemetery (the servants had talked of such a case at tea). She went on and
on, sobbing and panting with exhaustion. When she got into Bazarny Street,
she inquired where M. Panaurov lived. An unknown woman spent a long
time directing her, and seeing that she did not understand, took her by the
hand and led her to a house of one storey that stood back from the street.
The door stood open. Sasha ran through the entry, along the corridor, and
found herself at last in a warm, lighted room where her father was sitting by
the samovar with a lady and two children. But by now she was unable to
utter a word, and could only sob. Panaurov understood.

"Mother's worse?" he asked. "Tell me, child: is mother worse?"

He was alarmed and sent for a sledge.

When they got home, Nina Fyodorovna was sitting propped up with
pillows, with a candle in her hand. Her face looked dark and her eyes were

closed. Crowding in the doorway stood the nurse, the cook, the housemaid,
a peasant called Prokofy and a few persons of the humbler class, who were
complete strangers. The nurse was giving them orders in a whisper, and
they did not understand. Inside the room at the window stood Lida, with a
pale and sleepy face, gazing severely at her mother.

Panaurov took the candle out of Nina Fyodorovna's hand, and, frowning
contemptuously, flung it on the chest of drawers.

"This is awful!" he said, and his shoulders quivered. "Nina, you must lie
down," he said affectionately. "Lie down, dear."

She looked at him, but did not know him. They laid her down on her
back.

When the priest and the doctor, Sergey Borisovitch, arrived, the servants
crossed themselves devoutly and prayed for her.

"What a sad business!" said the doctor thoughtfully, coming out into the
drawing-room. "Why, she was still young--not yet forty."

They heard the loud sobbing of the little girls. Panaurov, with a pale face
and moist eyes, went up to the doctor and said in a faint, weak voice:

"Do me a favour, my dear fellow. Send a telegram to Moscow. I'm not
equal to it."

The doctor fetched the ink and wrote the following telegram to his
daughter:

"Madame Panaurov died at eight o'clock this evening. Tell your husband:
a mortgaged house for sale in Dvoryansky Street, nine thousand cash.
Auction on twelfth. Advise him not miss opportunity."

IX

Laptev lived in one of the turnings out of Little Dmitrovka. Besides the
big house facing the street, he rented also a two-storey lodge in the yard at
the back of his friend Kotchevoy, a lawyer's assistant whom all the Laptevs
called Kostya, because he had grown up under their eyes. Facing this lodge
stood another, also of two storeys, inhabited by a French family consisting
of a husband and wife and five daughters.

There was a frost of twenty degrees. The windows were frozen over.
Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with an anxious face, took twenty drops
of a medicine; then, taking two dumb-bells out of the bookcase, he did
gymnastic exercises. He was tall and thin, with big reddish moustaches; but
what was most noticeable in his appearance was the length of his legs.

Pyotr, a middle-aged peasant in a reefer jacket and cotton breeches
tucked into his high boots, brought in the samovar and made the tea.

"It's very nice weather now, Konstantin Ivanovitch," he said.

"It is, but I tell you what, brother, it's a pity we can't get on, you and I,
without such exclamations."

Pyotr sighed from politeness.

"What are the little girls doing?" asked Kotchevoy.

"The priest has not come. Alexey Fyodorovitch is giving them their
lesson himself."

Kostya found a spot in the window that was not covered with frost, and
began looking through a field-glass at the windows of the house where the
French family lived.

"There's no seeing," he said.

Meanwhile Alexey Fyodorovitch was giving Sasha and Lida a scripture
lesson below. For the last six weeks they had been living in Moscow, and
were installed with their governess in the lower storey of the lodge. And
three times a week a teacher from a school in the town, and a priest, came

to give them lessons. Sasha was going through the New Testament and Lida
was going through the Old. The time before Lida had been set the story up
to Abraham to learn by heart.

"And so Adam and Eve had two sons," said Laptev. "Very good. But
what were they called? Try to remember them!"

Lida, still with the same severe face, gazed dumbly at the table. She
moved her lips, but without speaking; and the elder girl, Sasha, looked into
her face, frowning.

"You know it very well, only you mustn't be nervous," said Laptev.
"Come, what were Adam's sons called?"

"Abel and Canel," Lida whispered.

"Cain and Abel," Laptev corrected her.

A big tear rolled down Lida's cheek and dropped on the book. Sasha
looked down and turned red, and she, too, was on the point of tears. Laptev
felt a lump in his throat, and was so sorry for them he could not speak. He
got up from the table and lighted a cigarette. At that moment Kotchevoy
came down the stairs with a paper in his hand. The little girls stood up, and
without looking at him, made curtsies.

"For God's sake, Kostya, give them their lessons," said Laptev, turning to
him. "I'm afraid I shall cry, too, and I have to go to the warehouse before
dinner."

"All right."

Alexey Fyodorovitch went away. Kostya, with a very serious face, sat
down to the table and drew the Scripture history towards him.

"Well," he said; "where have you got to?"

"She knows about the Flood," said Sasha.

"The Flood? All right. Let's peg in at the Flood. Fire away about the
Flood." Kostya skimmed through a brief description of the Flood in the
book, and said: "I must remark that there really never was a flood such as is
described here. And there was no such person as Noah. Some thousands of
years before the birth of Christ, there was an extraordinary inundation of the
earth, and that's not only mentioned in the Jewish Bible, but in the books of
other ancient peoples: the Greeks, the Chaldeans, the Hindoos. But
whatever the inundation may have been, it couldn't have covered the whole
earth. It may have flooded the plains, but the mountains must have
remained. You can read this book, of course, but don't put too much faith in
it."

Tears trickled down Lida's face again. She turned away and suddenly
burst into such loud sobs, that Kostya started and jumped up from his seat
in great confusion.

"I want to go home," she said, "to papa and to nurse."

Sasha cried too. Kostya went upstairs to his own room, and spoke on the
telephone to Yulia Sergeyevna.

"My dear soul," he said, "the little girls are crying again; there's no doing
anything with them."

Yulia Sergeyevna ran across from the big house in her indoor dress, with
only a knitted shawl over her shoulders, and chilled through by the frost,
began comforting the children.

"Do believe me, do believe me," she said in an imploring voice, hugging
first one and then the other. "Your papa's coming to-day; he has sent a
telegram. You're grieving for mother, and I grieve too. My heart's torn, but
what can we do? We must bow to God's will!"

When they left off crying, she wrapped them up and took them out for a
drive. They stopped near the Iverskoy chapel, put up candles at the shrine,
and, kneeling down, prayed. On the way back they went in Filippov's, and
had cakes sprinkled with poppy-seeds.

The Laptevs had dinner between two and three. Pyotr handed the dishes.
This Pyotr waited on the family, and by day ran to the post, to the
warehouse, to the law courts for Kostya; he spent his evenings making
cigarettes, ran to open the door at night, and before five o'clock in the
morning was up lighting the stoves, and no one knew where he slept. He
was very fond of opening seltzer-water bottles and did it easily, without a
bang and without spilling a drop.

"With God's blessing," said Kostya, drinking off a glass of vodka before
the soup.

At first Yulia Sergeyevna did not like Kostya; his bass voice, his phrases
such as "Landed him one on the beak," "filth," "produce the samovar," etc.,
his habit of clinking glasses and making sentimental speeches, seemed to
her trivial. But as she got to know him better, she began to feel very much
at home with him. He was open with her; he liked talking to her in a low
voice in the evening, and even gave her novels of his own composition to
read, though these had been kept a secret even from such friends as Laptev
and Yartsev. She read these novels and praised them, so that she might not
disappoint him, and he was delighted because he hoped sooner or later to
become a distinguished author.

In his novels he described nothing but country-house life, though he had
only seen the country on rare occasions when visiting friends at a summer
villa, and had only been in a real country-house once in his life, when he
had been to Volokolamsk on law business. He avoided any love interest as
though he were ashamed of it; he put in frequent descriptions of nature, and
in them was fond of using such expressions as, "the capricious lines of the
mountains, the miraculous forms of the clouds, the harmony of mysterious
rhythms . . . ." His novels had never been published, and this he attributed
to the censorship.

He liked the duties of a lawyer, but yet he considered that his most
important pursuit was not the law but these novels. He believed that he had
a subtle, æsthetic temperament, and he always had leanings towards art. He
neither sang nor played on any musical instrument, and was absolutely
without an ear for music, but he attended all the symphony and

philharmonic concerts, got up concerts for charitable objects, and made the
acquaintance of singers. . . .

They used to talk at dinner.

"It's a strange thing," said Laptev, "my Fyodor took my breath away
again! He said we must find out the date of the centenary of our firm, so as
to try and get raised to noble rank; and he said it quite seriously. What can
be the matter with him? I confess I begin to feel worried about him."

They talked of Fyodor, and of its being the fashion nowadays to adopt
some pose or other. Fyodor, for instance, tried to appear like a plain
merchant, though he had ceased to be one; and when the teacher came from
the school, of which old Laptev was the patron, to ask Fyodor for his salary,
the latter changed his voice and deportment, and behaved with the teacher
as though he were some one in authority.

There was nothing to be done; after dinner they went into the study.
They talked about the decadents, about "The Maid of Orleans," and Kostya
delivered a regular monologue; he fancied that he was very successful in
imitating Ermolova. Then they sat down and played whist. The little girls
had not gone back to the lodge but were sitting together in one arm-chair,
with pale and mournful faces, and were listening to every noise in the street,
wondering whether it was their father coming. In the evening when it was
dark and the candles were lighted, they felt deeply dejected. The talk over
the whist, the footsteps of Pyotr, the crackling in the fireplace, jarred on
their nerves, and they did not like to look at the fire. In the evenings they
did not want to cry, but they felt strange, and there was a load on their
hearts. They could not understand how people could talk and laugh when
their mother was dead.

"What did you see through the field-glasses today?" Yulia Sergeyevna
asked Kostya.

"Nothing to-day, but yesterday I saw the old Frenchman having his
bath."

At seven o'clock Yulia and Kostya went to the Little Theatre. Laptev was
left with the little girls.

"It's time your father was here," he said, looking at his watch. "The train
must be late."

The children sat in their arm-chair dumb and huddling together like
animals when they are cold, while he walked about the room looking
impatiently at his watch. It was quiet in the house. But just before nine
o'clock some one rang at the bell. Pyotr went to open the door.

Hearing a familiar voice, the children shrieked, burst into sobs, and ran
into the hall. Panaurov was wearing a sumptuous coat of antelope skin, and
his head and moustaches were white with hoar frost. "In a minute, in a
minute," he muttered, while Sasha and Lida, sobbing and laughing, kissed
his cold hands, his hat, his antelope coat. With the languor of a handsome
man spoilt by too much love, he fondled the children without haste, then
went into the study and said, rubbing his hands:

"I've not come to stay long, my friends. I'm going to Petersburg to-
morrow. They've promised to transfer me to another town."

He was staying at the Dresden Hotel.

X

A friend who was often at the Laptevs' was Ivan Gavrilitch Yartsev. He
was a strong, healthy man with black hair and a clever, pleasant face. He
was considered to be handsome, but of late he had begun to grow stout, and
that rather spoilt his face and figure; another thing that spoilt him was that
he wore his hair cut so close that the skin showed through.

At the University his tall figure and physical strength had won him the
nickname of "the pounder" among the students. He had taken his degree
with the Laptev brothers in the faculty of philology--then he went in for
science and now had the degree of _magister_ in chemistry. But he had

never given a lecture or even been a demonstrator. He taught physics and
natural history in the modern school, and in two girls' high schools. He was
enthusiastic over his pupils, especially the girls, and used to maintain that a
remarkable generation was growing up. At home he spent his time studying
sociology and Russian history, as well as chemistry, and he sometimes
published brief notes in the newspapers and magazines, signing them "Y."
When he talked of some botanical or zoological subject, he spoke like an
historian; when he was discussing some historical question, he approached
it as a man of science.

Kish, nicknamed "the eternal student," was also like one of the family at
the Laptevs'. He had been for three years studying medicine. Then he took
up mathematics, and spent two years over each year's course. His father, a
provincial druggist, used to send him forty roubles a month, to which his
mother, without his father's knowledge, added another ten. And this sum
was not only sufficient for his board and lodging, but even for such luxuries
as an overcoat lined with Polish beaver, gloves, scent, and photographs (he
often had photographs taken of himself and used to distribute them among
his friends). He was neat and demure, slightly bald, with golden side-
whiskers, and he had the air of a man nearly always ready to oblige. He was
always busy looking after other people's affairs. At one time he would be
rushing about with a subscription list; at another time he would be freezing
in the early morning at a ticket office to buy tickets for ladies of his
acquaintance, or at somebody's request would be ordering a wreath or a
bouquet. People simply said of him: "Kish will go, Kish will do it, Kish will
buy it." He was usually unsuccessful in carrying out his commissions.
Reproaches were showered upon him, people frequently forgot to pay him
for the things he bought, but he simply sighed in hard cases and never
protested. He was never particularly delighted nor disappointed; his stories
were always long and boring; and his jokes invariably provoked laughter
just because they were not funny. Thus, one day, for instance, intending to
make a joke, he said to Pyotr: "Pyotr, you're not a sturgeon;" and this
aroused a general laugh, and he, too, laughed for a long time, much pleased
at having made such a successful jest. Whenever one of the professors was
buried, he walked in front with the mutes.

Yartsev and Kish usually came in the evening to tea. If the Laptevs were
not going to the theatre or a concert, the evening tea lingered on till supper.
One evening in February the following conversation took place:

"A work of art is only significant and valuable when there are some
serious social problems contained in its central idea," said Kostya, looking
wrathfully at Yartsev. "If there is in the work a protest against serfdom, or
the author takes up arms against the vulgarity of aristocratic society, the
work is significant and valuable. The novels that are taken up with 'Ach!'
and 'Och!' and 'she loved him, while he ceased to love her,' I tell you, are
worthless, and damn them all, I say!"

"I agree with you, Konstantin Ivanovitch," said Yulia Sergeyevna. "One
describes a love scene; another, a betrayal; and the third, meeting again
after separation. Are there no other subjects? Why, there are many people
sick, unhappy, harassed by poverty, to whom reading all that must be
distasteful."

It was disagreeable to Laptev to hear his wife, not yet twenty-two,
speaking so seriously and coldly about love. He understood why this was
so.

"If poetry does not solve questions that seem so important," said Yartsev,
"you should turn to works on technical subjects, criminal law, or finance,
read scientific pamphlets. What need is there to discuss in 'Romeo and
Juliet,' liberty of speech, or the disinfecting of prisons, instead of love,
when you can find all that in special articles and textbooks?"

"That's pushing it to the extreme," Kostya interrupted. "We are not
talking of giants like Shakespeare or Goethe; we are talking of the hundreds
of talented mediocre writers, who would be infinitely more valuable if they
would let love alone, and would employ themselves in spreading
knowledge and humane ideas among the masses."

Kish, lisping and speaking a little through his nose, began telling the
story of a novel he had lately been reading. He spoke circumstantially and
without haste. Three minutes passed, then five, then ten, and no one could

make out what he was talking about, and his face grew more and more
indifferent, and his eyes more and more blank.

"Kish, do be quick over it," Yulia Sergeyevna could not resist saying;
"it's really agonizing!"

"Shut up, Kish!" Kostya shouted to him.

They all laughed, and Kish with them.

Fyodor came in. Flushing red in patches, he greeted them all in a
nervous flurry, and led his brother away into the study. Of late he had taken
to avoiding the company of more than one person at once.

"Let the young people laugh, while we speak from the heart in here," he
said, settling himself in a deep arm-chair at a distance from the lamp. "It's a
long time, my dear brother, since we've seen each other. How long is it
since you were at the warehouse? I think it must be a week."

"Yes, there's nothing for me to do there. And I must confess that the old
man wearies me."

"Of course, they could get on at the warehouse without you and me, but
one must have some occupation. 'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat
bread,' as it is written. God loves work."

Pyotr brought in a glass of tea on a tray. Fyodor drank it without sugar,
and asked for more. He drank a great deal of tea, and could get through as
many as ten glasses in the evening.

"I tell you what, brother," he said, getting up and going to his brother.
"Laying aside philosophic subtleties, you must get elected on to the town
council, and little by little we will get you on to the local Board, and then to
be an alderman. And as time goes on --you are a clever man and well-
educated--you will be noticed in Petersburg and asked to go there--active
men on the provincial assemblies and town councils are all the fashion there
now--and before you are fifty you'll be a privy councillor, and have a ribbon
across your shoulders."

Laptev made no answer; he knew that all this--being a privy councillor
and having a ribbon over his shoulder--was what Fyodor desired for
himself, and he did not know what to say.

The brothers sat still and said nothing. Fyodor opened his watch and for
a long, long time gazed into it with strained attention, as though he wanted
to detect the motion of the hand, and the expression of his face struck
Laptev as strange.

They were summoned to supper. Laptev went into the dining-room,
while Fyodor remained in the study. The argument was over and Yartsev
was speaking in the tones of a professor giving a lecture:

"Owing to differences of climate, of energy, of tastes, of age, equality
among men is physically impossible. But civilised man can make this
inequality innocuous, as he has already done with bogs and bears. A learned
man succeeded in making a cat, a mouse, a falcon, a sparrow, all eat out of
one plate; and education, one must hope, will do the same thing with men.
Life continually progresses, civilisation makes enormous advances before
our eyes, and obviously a time will come when we shall think, for instance,
the present condition of the factory population as absurd as we now do the
state of serfdom, in which girls were exchanged for dogs."

"That won't be for a long while, a very long while," said Kostya, with a
laugh, "not till Rothschild thinks his cellars full of gold absurd, and till then
the workers may bend their backs and die of hunger. No; that's not it. We
mustn't wait for it; we must struggle for it. Do you suppose because the cat
eats out of the same saucer as the mouse--do you suppose that she is
influenced by a sense of conscious intelligence? Not a bit of it! She's made
to do it by force."

"Fyodor and I are rich; our father's a capitalist, a millionaire. You will
have to struggle with us," said Laptev, rubbing his forehead with his hand.
"Struggle with me is an idea I cannot grasp. I am rich, but what has money
given me so far? What has this power given me? In what way am I happier
than you? My childhood was slavery, and money did not save me from the
birch. When Nina was ill and died, my money did not help her. If people
don't care for me, I can't make them like me if I spend a hundred million."

"But you can do a great deal of good," said Kish.

"Good, indeed! You spoke to me yesterday of a mathematical man who
is looking for a job. Believe me, I can do as little for him as you can. I can
give money, but that's not what he wants--I asked a well-known musician to
help a poor violinist, and this is what he answered: 'You apply to me just
because you are not a musician yourself.' In the same way I say to you that
you apply for help to me so confidently because you've never been in the
position of a rich man."

"Why you bring in the comparison with a well-known musician I don't
understand!" said Yulia Sergeyevna, and she flushed crimson. "What has the
well-known musician to do with it!"

Her face was quivering with hatred, and she dropped her eyes to conceal
the feeling. And not only her husband, but all the men sitting at the table,
knew what the look in her face meant.

"What has the well-known musician got to do with it?" she said slowly.
"Why, nothing's easier than helping some one poor."

Silence followed. Pyotr handed the woodcock, but they all refused it,
and ate nothing but salad. Laptev did not remember what he had said, but it
was clear to him that it was not his words that were hateful, but the fact of
his meddling in the conversation at all.

After supper he went into his study; intently, with a beating heart,
expecting further humiliation, he listened to what was going on in the hall.
An argument had sprung up there again. Then Yartsev sat down to the piano
and played a sentimental song. He was a man of varied accomplishments;
he could play and sing, and even perform conjuring tricks.

"You may please yourselves, my friends, but I'm not going to stay at
home," said Yulia. "We must go somewhere."

They decided to drive out of town, and sent Kish to the merchant's club
to order a three-horse sledge. They did not ask Laptev to go with them
because he did not usually join these expeditions, and because his brother

was sitting with him; but he took it to mean that his society bored them, and
that he was not wanted in their light-hearted youthful company. And his
vexation, his bitter feeling, was so intense that he almost shed tears. He was
positively glad that he was treated so ungraciously, that he was scorned, that
he was a stupid, dull husband, a money-bag; and it seemed to him, that he
would have been even more glad if his wife were to deceive him that night
with his best friend, and were afterwards to acknowledge it, looking at him
with hatred. . . . He was jealous on her account of their student friends, of
actors, of singers, of Yartsev, even of casual acquaintances; and now he had
a passionate longing for her really to be unfaithful to him. He longed to find
her in another man's arms, and to be rid of this nightmare forever. Fyodor
was drinking tea, gulping it noisily. But he, too, got up to go.

"Our old father must have got cataract," he said, as he put on his fur coat.
"His sight has become very poor."

Laptev put on his coat, too, and went out. After seeing his brother part of
the way home, he took a sledge and drove to Yar's.

"And this is family happiness!" he said, jeering at himself. "This is
love!"

His teeth were chattering, and he did not know if it were jealousy or
something else. He walked about near the tables; listened to a comic singer
in the hall. He had not a single phrase ready if he should meet his own
party; and he felt sure beforehand that if he met his wife, he would only
smile pitifully and not cleverly, and that every one would understand what
feeling had induced him to come here. He was bewildered by the electric
light, the loud music, the smell of powder, and the fact that the ladies he
met looked at him. He stood at the doors trying to see and to hear what was
going on in the private rooms, and it seemed to him that he was somehow
playing a mean, contemptible part on a level with the comic singers and
those ladies. Then he went to Strelna, but he found none of his circle there,
either; and only when on the way home he was again driving up to Yar's, a
three-horse sledge noisily overtook him. The driver was drunk and
shouting, and he could hear Yartsev laughing: "Ha, ha, ha!"

Laptev returned home between three and four. Yulia Sergeyevna was in
bed. Noticing that she was not asleep, he went up to her and said sharply:

"I understand your repulsion, your hatred, but you might spare me before
other people; you might conceal your feelings."

She got up and sat on the bed with her legs dangling. Her eyes looked
big and black in the lamplight.

"I beg your pardon," she said.

He could not utter a single word from excitement and the trembling of
his whole body; he stood facing her and was dumb. She trembled, too, and
sat with the air of a criminal waiting for explanations.

"How I suffer!" he said at last, and he clutched his head. "I'm in hell, and
I'm out of my mind."

"And do you suppose it's easy for me?" she asked, with a quiver in her
voice. "God alone knows what I go through."

"You've been my wife for six months, but you haven't a spark of love for
me in your heart. There's no hope, not one ray of light! Why did you marry
me?" Laptev went on with despair. "Why? What demon thrust you into my
arms? What did you hope for? What did you want?"

She looked at him with terror, as though she were afraid he would kill
her.

"Did I attract you? Did you like me?" he went on, gasping for breath.
"No. Then what? What? Tell me what?" he cried. "Oh, the cursed money!
The cursed money!"

"I swear to God, no!" she cried, and she crossed herself. She seemed to
shrink under the insult, and for the first time he heard her crying. "I swear
to God, no!" she repeated. "I didn't think about your money; I didn't want it.
I simply thought I should do wrong if I refused you. I was afraid of spoiling

your life and mine. And now I am suffering for my mistake. I'm suffering
unbearably!"

She sobbed bitterly, and he saw that she was hurt; and not knowing what
to say, dropped down on the carpet before her.

"That's enough; that's enough," he muttered. "I insulted you because I
love you madly." He suddenly kissed her foot and passionately hugged it.
"If only a spark of love," he muttered. "Come, lie to me; tell me a lie! Don't
say it's a mistake! . . ."

But she went on crying, and he felt that she was only enduring his
caresses as an inevitable consequence of her mistake. And the foot he had
kissed she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for her.

She got into bed and covered her head over; he undressed and got into
bed, too. In the morning they both felt confused and did not know what to
talk about, and he even fancied she walked unsteadily on the foot he had
kissed.

Before dinner Panaurov came to say good-bye. Yulia had an irresistible
desire to go to her own home; it would be nice, she thought, to go away and
have a rest from married life, from the embarrassment and the continual
consciousness that she had done wrong. It was decided at dinner that she
should set off with Panaurov, and stay with her father for two or three
weeks until she was tired of it.

XI

She travelled with Panaurov in a reserved compartment; he had on his
head an astrachan cap of peculiar shape.

"Yes, Petersburg did not satisfy me," he said, drawling, with a sigh.
"They promise much, but nothing definite. Yes, my dear girl. I have been a
Justice of the Peace, a member of the local Board, chairman of the Board of
Magistrates, and finally councillor of the provincial administration. I think I

have served my country and have earned the right to receive attention; but--
would you believe it?--I can never succeed in wringing from the authorities
a post in another town. . . ."

Panaurov closed his eyes and shook his head.

"They don't recognise me," he went on, as though dropping asleep. "Of
course I'm not an administrator of genius, but, on the other hand, I'm a
decent, honest man, and nowadays even that's something rare. I regret to
say I have not been always quite straightforward with women, but in my
relations with the Russian government I've always been a gentleman. But
enough of that," he said, opening his eyes; "let us talk of you. What put it
into your head to visit your papa so suddenly?"

"Well. . . . I had a little misunderstanding with my husband," said Yulia,
looking at his cap.

"Yes. What a queer fellow he is! All the Laptevs are queer. Your
husband's all right--he's nothing out of the way, but his brother Fyodor is a
perfect fool."

Panaurov sighed and asked seriously:

"And have you a lover yet?"

Yulia looked at him in amazement and laughed.

"Goodness knows what you're talking about."

It was past ten o'clock when they got out at a big station and had supper.
When the train went on again Panaurov took off his greatcoat and his cap,
and sat down beside Yulia.

"You are very charming, I must tell you," he began. "Excuse me for the
eating-house comparison, but you remind me of fresh salted cucumber; it
still smells of the hotbed, so to speak, and yet has a smack of the salt and a
scent of fennel about it. As time goes on you will make a magnificent
woman, a wonderful, exquisite woman. If this trip of ours had happened

five years ago," he sighed, "I should have felt it my duty to join the ranks of
your adorers, but now, alas, I'm a veteran on the retired list."

He smiled mournfully, but at the same time graciously, and put his arm
round her waist.

"You must be mad!" she said; she flushed crimson and was so frightened
that her hands and feet turned cold.

"Leave off, Grigory Nikolaevitch!"

"What are you afraid of, dear?" he asked softly. "What is there dreadful
about it? It's simply that you're not used to it."

If a woman protested he always interpreted it as a sign that he had made
an impression on her and attracted her. Holding Yulia round the waist, he
kissed her firmly on the cheek, then on the lips, in the full conviction that he
was giving her intense gratification. Yulia recovered from her alarm and
confusion, and began laughing. He kissed her once more and said, as he put
on his ridiculous cap:

"That is all that the old veteran can give you. A Turkish Pasha, a kind-
hearted old fellow, was presented by some one--or inherited, I fancy it was--
a whole harem. When his beautiful young wives drew up in a row before
him, he walked round them, kissed each one of them, and said: 'That is all
that I am equal to giving you.' And that's just what I say, too."

All this struck her as stupid and extraordinary, and amused her. She felt
mischievous. Standing up on the seat and humming, she got a box of sweets
from the shelf, and throwing him a piece of chocolate, shouted:

"Catch!"

He caught it. With a loud laugh she threw him another sweet, then a
third, and he kept catching them and putting them into his mouth, looking at
her with imploring eyes; and it seemed to her that in his face, his features,
his expression, there was a great deal that was feminine and childlike. And

when, out of breath, she sat down on the seat and looked at him, laughing,
he tapped her cheek with two fingers, and said as though he were vexed:

"Naughty girl!"

"Take it," she said, giving him the box. "I don't care for sweet things."

He ate up the sweets--every one of them, and locked the empty box in
his trunk; he liked boxes with pictures on them.

"That's mischief enough, though," he said. "It's time for the veteran to go
bye-bye."

He took out of his hold-all a Bokhara dressing-gown and a pillow, lay
down, and covered himself with the dressing-gown.

"Good-night, darling!" he said softly, and sighed as though his whole
body ached.

And soon a snore was heard. Without the slightest feeling of constraint,
she, too, lay down and went to sleep.

When next morning she drove through her native town from the station
homewards, the streets seemed to her empty and deserted. The snow looked
grey, and the houses small, as though some one had squashed them. She
was met by a funeral procession: the dead body was carried in an open
coffin with banners.

"Meeting a funeral, they say, is lucky," she thought.

There were white bills pasted in the windows of the house where Nina
Fyodorovna used to live.

With a sinking at her heart she drove into her own courtyard and rang at
the door. It was opened by a servant she did not know--a plump, sleepy-
looking girl wearing a warm wadded jacket. As she went upstairs Yulia
remembered how Laptev had declared his love there, but now the staircase
was unscrubbed, covered with foot-marks. Upstairs in the cold passage

patients were waiting in their out-door coats. And for some reason her heart
beat violently, and she was so excited she could scarcely walk.

The doctor, who had grown even stouter, was sitting with a brick-red
face and dishevelled hair, drinking tea. Seeing his daughter, he was greatly
delighted, and even lacrymose. She thought that she was the only joy in this
old man's life, and much moved, she embraced him warmly, and told him
she would stay a long time--till Easter. After taking off her things in her
own room, she went back to the dining-room to have tea with him. He was
pacing up and down with his hands in his pockets, humming, "Ru-ru-ru";
this meant that he was dissatisfied with something.

"You have a gay time of it in Moscow," he said. "I am very glad for your
sake. . . . I'm an old man and I need nothing. I shall soon give up the ghost
and set you all free. And the wonder is that my hide is so tough, that I'm
alive still! It's amazing!"

He said that he was a tough old ass that every one rode on. They had
thrust on him the care of Nina Fyodorovna, the worry of her children, and
of her burial; and that coxcomb Panaurov would not trouble himself about
it, and had even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and had never paid it
back.

"Take me to Moscow and put me in a madhouse," said the doctor. "I'm
mad; I'm a simple child, as I still put faith in truth and justice."

Then he found fault with her husband for his short-sightedness in not
buying houses that were being sold so cheaply. And now it seemed to Yulia
that she was not the one joy in this old man's life. While he was seeing his
patients, and afterwards going his rounds, she walked through all the rooms,
not knowing what to do or what to think about. She had already grown
strange to her own town and her own home. She felt no inclination to go
into the streets or see her friends; and at the thought of her old friends and
her life as a girl, she felt no sadness nor regret for the past.

In the evening she dressed a little more smartly and went to the evening
service. But there were only poor people in the church, and her splendid fur
coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her that there was some

change in the church as well as in herself. In old days she had loved it when
they read the prayers for the day at evening service, and the choir sang
anthems such as "I will open my lips." She liked moving slowly in the
crowd to the priest who stood in the middle of the church, and then to feel
the holy oil on her forehead; now she only waited for the service to be over.
And now, going out of the church, she was only afraid that beggars would
ask for alms; it was such a bore to have to stop and feel for her pockets;
besides, she had no coppers in her pocket now--nothing but roubles.

She went to bed early, and was a long time in going to sleep. She kept
dreaming of portraits of some sort, and of the funeral procession she had
met that morning. The open coffin with the dead body was carried into the
yard, and brought to a standstill at the door; then the coffin was swung
backwards and forwards on a sheet, and dashed violently against the door.
Yulia woke and jumped up in alarm. There really was a bang at the door,
and the wire of the bell rustled against the wall, though no ring was to be
heard.

The doctor coughed. Then she heard the servant go downstairs, and then
come back.

"Madam!" she said, and knocked at the door. "Madam!"

"What is it?" said Yulia.

"A telegram for you!"

Yulia went out to her with a candle. Behind the servant stood the doctor,
in his night-clothes and greatcoat, and he, too, had a candle in his hand.
"Our bell is broken," he said, yawning sleepily. "It ought to have been
mended long ago."

Yulia broke open the telegram and read:

"We drink to your health.--YARTSEV, KOTCHEVOY."

"Ah, what idiots!" she said, and burst out laughing; and her heart felt
light and gay.

Going back into her room, she quietly washed and dressed, then she
spent a long time in packing her things, until it was daylight, and at midday
she set off for Moscow.

XII

In Holy Week the Laptevs went to an exhibition of pictures in the school
of painting. The whole family went together in the Moscow fashion, the
little girls, the governess, Kostya, and all.

Laptev knew the names of all the well-known painters, and never missed
an exhibition. He used sometimes to paint little landscape paintings when
he was in the country in the summer, and he fancied he had a good deal of
taste, and that if he had studied he might have made a good painter. When
he was abroad he sometimes used to go to curio shops, examining the
antiques with the air of a connoisseur and giving his opinion on them. When
he bought any article he gave just what the shopkeeper liked to ask for it
and his purchase remained afterwards in a box in the coach-house till it
disappeared altogether. Or going into a print shop, he would slowly and
attentively examine the engravings and the bronzes, making various
remarks on them, and would buy a common frame or a box of wretched
prints. At home he had pictures always of large dimensions but of inferior
quality; the best among them were badly hung. It had happened to him
more than once to pay large sums for things which had afterwards turned
out to be forgeries of the grossest kind. And it was remarkable that, though
as a rule timid in the affairs of life, he was exceedingly bold and self-
confident at a picture exhibition. Why?

Yulia Sergeyevna looked at the pictures as her husband did, through her
open fist or an opera-glass, and was surprised that the people in the pictures
were like live people, and the trees like real trees. But she did not
understand art, and it seemed to her that many pictures in the exhibition
were alike, and she imagined that the whole object in painting was that the
figures and objects should stand out as though they were real, when you
looked at the picture through your open fist.

"That forest is Shiskin's," her husband explained to her. "He always
paints the same thing. . . . But notice snow's never such a lilac colour as
that. . . . And that boy's left arm is shorter than his right."

When they were all tired and Laptev had gone to look for Kostya, that
they might go home, Yulia stopped indifferently before a small landscape.
In the foreground was a stream, over it a little wooden bridge; on the further
side a path that disappeared in the dark grass; a field on the right; a copse;
near it a camp fire--no doubt of watchers by night; and in the distance there
was a glow of the evening sunset.

Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along the
little path further and further, while all round was stillness, the drowsy
landrails calling and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some reason
she suddenly began to feel that she had seen those very clouds that stretched
across the red part of the sky, and that copse, and that field before, many
times before. She felt lonely, and longed to walk on and on along the path;
and there, in the glow of sunset was the calm reflection of something
unearthly, eternal.

"How finely that's painted!" she said, surprised that the picture had
suddenly become intelligible to her.

"Look, Alyosha! Do you see how peaceful it is?"

She began trying to explain why she liked the landscape so much, but
neither Kostya nor her husband understood her. She kept looking at the
picture with a mournful smile, and the fact that the others saw nothing
special in it troubled her. Then she began walking through the rooms and
looking at the pictures again. She tried to understand them and no longer
thought that a great many of them were alike. When, on returning home, for
the first time she looked attentively at the big picture that hung over the
piano in the drawing-room, she felt a dislike for it, and said:

"What an idea to have pictures like that!"

And after that the gilt cornices, the Venetian looking-glasses with
flowers on them, the pictures of the same sort as the one that hung over the

piano, and also her husband's and Kostya's reflections upon art, aroused in
her a feeling of dreariness and vexation, even of hatred.

Life went on its ordinary course from day to day with no promise of
anything special. The theatrical season was over, the warm days had come.
There was a long spell of glorious weather. One morning the Laptevs
attended the district court to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the
court to defend some one. They were late in starting, and reached the court
after the examination of the witnesses had begun. A soldier in the reserve
was accused of theft and housebreaking. There were a great number of
witnesses, washerwomen; they all testified that the accused was often in the
house of their employer--a woman who kept a laundry. At the Feast of the
Exaltation of the Cross he came late in the evening and began asking for
money; he wanted a pick-me-up, as he had been drinking, but no one gave
him anything. Then he went away, but an hour afterwards he came back,
and brought with him some beer and a soft gingerbread cake for the little
girl. They drank and sang songs almost till daybreak, and when in the
morning they looked about, the lock of the door leading up into the attic
was broken, and of the linen three men's shirts, a petticoat, and two sheets
were missing. Kostya asked each witness sarcastically whether she had not
drunk the beer the accused had brought. Evidently he was insinuating that
the washerwomen had stolen the linen themselves. He delivered his speech
without the slightest nervousness, looking angrily at the jury.

He explained what robbery with housebreaking meant, and the
difference between that and simple theft. He spoke very circumstantially
and convincingly, displaying an unusual talent for speaking at length and in
a serious tone about what had been know to every one long before. And it
was difficult to make out exactly what he was aiming at. From his long
speech the foreman of the jury could only have deduced "that it was
housebreaking but not robbery, as the washerwomen had sold the linen for
drink themselves; or, if there had been robbery, there had not been
housebreaking." But obviously, he said just what was wanted, as his speech
moved the jury and the audience, and was very much liked. When they gave
a verdict of acquittal, Yulia nodded to Kostya, and afterwards pressed his
hand warmly.

In May the Laptevs moved to a country villa at Sokolniki. By that time
Yulia was expecting a baby.

XIII

More than a year had passed. Yulia and Yartsev were lying on the grass
at Sokolniki not far from the embankment of the Yaroslav railway; a little
distance away Kotchevoy was lying with hands under his head, looking at
the sky. All three had been for a walk, and were waiting for the six o'clock
train to pass to go home to tea.

"Mothers see something extraordinary in their children, that is ordained
by nature," said Yulia. "A mother will stand for hours together by the baby's
cot looking at its little ears and eyes and nose, and fascinated by them. If
any one else kisses her baby the poor thing imagines that it gives him
immense pleasure. And a mother talks of nothing but her baby. I know that
weakness in mothers, and I keep watch over myself, but my Olga really is
exceptional. How she looks at me when I'm nursing her! How she laughs!
She's only eight months old, but, upon my word, I've never seen such
intelligent eyes in a child of three."

"Tell me, by the way," asked Yartsev: "which do you love most-- your
husband or your baby?"

Yulia shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know," she said. "I never was so very fond of my husband, and
Olga is in reality my first love. You know that I did not marry Alexey for
love. In old days I was foolish and miserable, and thought that I had ruined
my life and his, and now I see that love is not necessary--that it is all
nonsense."

"But if it is not love, what feeling is it that binds you to your husband?
Why do you go on living with him?"

"I don't know. . . . I suppose it must be habit. I respect him, I miss him
when he's away for long, but that's--not love. He is a clever, honest man,
and that's enough to make me happy. He is very kind and good-hearted. . . ."

"Alyosha's intelligent, Alyosha's good," said Kostya, raising his head
lazily; "but, my dear girl, to find out that he is intelligent, good, and
interesting, you have to eat a hundredweight of salt with him. . . . And
what's the use of his goodness and intelligence? He can fork out money as
much as you want, but when character is needed to resist insolence or
aggressiveness, he is faint-hearted and overcome with nervousness. People
like your amiable Alyosha are splendid people, but they are no use at all for
fighting. In fact, they are no use for anything."

At last the train came in sight. Coils of perfectly pink smoke from the
funnels floated over the copse, and two windows in the last compartment
flashed so brilliantly in the sun, that it hurt their eyes to look at it.

"Tea-time!" said Yulia Sergeyevna, getting up.

She had grown somewhat stouter of late, and her movements were
already a little matronly, a little indolent.

"It's bad to be without love though," said Yartsev, walking behind her.
"We talk and read of nothing else but love, but we do very little loving
ourselves, and that's really bad."

"All that's nonsense, Ivan Gavrilitch," said Yulia. "That's not what gives
happiness."

They had tea in the little garden, where mignonette, stocks, and tobacco
plants were in flower, and spikes of early gladiolus were just opening.
Yartsev and Kotchevoy could see from Yulia's face that she was passing
through a happy period of inward peace and serenity, that she wanted
nothing but what she had, and they, too, had a feeling of peace and comfort
in their hearts. Whatever was said sounded apt and clever; the pines were
lovely--the fragrance of them was exquisite as it had never been before; and
the cream was very nice; and Sasha was a good, intelligent child.

After tea Yartsev sang songs, accompanying himself on the piano, while
Yulia and Kotchevoy sat listening in silence, though Yulia got up from time
to time, and went softly indoors, to take a look at the baby and at Lida, who
had been in bed for the last two days feverish and eating nothing.

"My friend, my tender friend," sang Yartsev. "No, my friends, I'll be
hanged if I understand why you are all so against love!" he said, flinging
back his head. "If I weren't busy for fifteen hours of the twenty-four, I
should certainly fall in love."

Supper was served on the verandah; it was warm and still, but Yulia
wrapped herself in a shawl and complained of the damp. When it got dark,
she seemed not quite herself; she kept shivering and begging her visitors to
stay a little longer. She regaled them with wine, and after supper ordered
brandy to keep them from going. She didn't want to be left alone with the
children and the servants.

"We summer visitors are getting up a performance for the children," she
said. "We have got everything--a stage and actors; we are only at a loss for
a play. Two dozen plays of different sorts have been sent us, but there isn't
one that is suitable. Now, you are fond of the theatre, and are so good at
history," she said, addressing Yartsev. "Write an historical play for us."

"Well, I might."

The men drank up all the brandy, and prepared to go.

It was past ten, and for summer-villa people that was late.

"How dark it is! One can't see a bit," said Yulia, as she went with them to
the gate. "I don't know how you'll find your way. But, isn't it cold?"

She wrapped herself up more closely and walked back to the porch.

"I suppose my Alexey's playing cards somewhere," she called to them.
"Good-night!"

After the lighted rooms nothing could be seen. Yartsev and Kostya
groped their way like blind men to the railway embankment and crossed it.

"One can't see a thing," said Kostya in his bass voice, standing still and
gazing at the sky. "And the stars, the stars, they are like new three-penny-
bits. Gavrilitch!"

"Ah?" Yartsev responded somewhere in the darkness.

"I say, one can't see a thing. Where are you?"

Yartsev went up to him whistling, and took his arm.

"Hi, there, you summer visitors!" Kostya shouted at the top of his voice.
"We've caught a socialist."

When he was exhilarated he was always very rowdy, shouting,
wrangling with policemen and cabdrivers, singing, and laughing violently.

"Nature be damned," he shouted.

"Come, come," said Yartsev, trying to pacify him. "You mustn't. Please
don't."

Soon the friends grew accustomed to the darkness, and were able to
distinguish the outlines of the tall pines and telegraph posts. From time to
time the sound of whistles reached them from the station and the telegraph
wires hummed plaintively. From the copse itself there came no sound, and
there was a feeling of pride, strength, and mystery in its silence, and on the
right it seemed that the tops of the pines were almost touching the sky. The
friends found their path and walked along it. There it was quite dark, and it
was only from the long strip of sky dotted with stars, and from the firmly
trodden earth under their feet, that they could tell they were walking along a
path. They walked along side by side in silence, and it seemed to both of
them that people were coming to meet them. Their tipsy exhilaration passed
off. The fancy came into Yartsev's mind that perhaps that copse was haunted
by the spirits of the Muscovite Tsars, boyars, and patriarchs, and he was on
the point of telling Kostya about it, but he checked himself.

When they reached the town gate there was a faint light of dawn in the
sky. Still in silence, Yartsev and Kotchevoy walked along the wooden
pavement, by the cheap summer cottages, eating-houses, timber-stacks.
Under the arch of interlacing branches, the damp air was fragrant of lime-
trees, and then a broad, long street opened before them, and on it not a soul,
not a light. . . . When they reached the Red Pond, it was daylight.

"Moscow--it's a town that will have to suffer a great deal more," said
Yartsev, looking at the Alexyevsky Monastery.

"What put that into your head?"

"I don't know. I love Moscow."

Both Yartsev and Kostya had been born in Moscow, and adored the
town, and felt for some reason antagonistic to every other town. Both were
convinced that Moscow was a remarkable town, and Russia a remarkable
country. In the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and abroad, they felt dull,
uncomfortable, and ill at ease, and they thought their grey Moscow weather
very pleasant and healthy. And when the rain lashed at the window-panes
and it got dark early, and when the walls of the churches and houses looked
a drab, dismal colour, days when one doesn't know what to put on when one
is going out--such days excited them agreeably.

At last near the station they took a cab.

"It really would be nice to write an historical play," said Yartsev, "but not
about the Lyapunovs or the Godunovs, but of the times of Yaroslav or of
Monomach. . . . I hate all historical plays except the monologue of Pimen.
When you have to do with some historical authority or even read a textbook
of Russian history, you feel that every one in Russia is exceptionally
talented, gifted, and interesting; but when I see an historical play at the
theatre, Russian life begins to seem stupid, morbid, and not original."

Near Dmitrovka the friends separated, and Yartsev went on to his
lodging in Nikitsky Street. He sat half dozing, swaying from side to side,
and pondering on the play. He suddenly imagined a terrible din, a clanging
noise, and shouts in some unknown language, that might have been

Kalmuck, and a village wrapped in flames, and forests near covered with
hoarfrost and soft pink in the glow of the fire, visible for miles around, and
so clearly that every little fir-tree could be distinguished, and savage men
darting about the village on horseback and on foot, and as red as the glow in
the sky.

"The Polovtsy," thought Yartsev.

One of them, a terrible old man with a bloodstained face all scorched
from the fire, binds to his saddle a young girl with a white Russian face, and
the girl looks sorrowful, understanding. Yartsev flung back his head and
woke up.

"My friend, my tender friend . . ." he hummed.

As he paid the cabman and went up his stairs, he could not shake off his
dreaminess; he saw the flames catching the village, and the forest beginning
to crackle and smoke. A huge, wild bear frantic with terror rushed through
the village. . . . And the girl tied to the saddle was still looking.

When at last he went into his room it was broad daylight. Two candles
were burning by some open music on the piano. On the sofa lay Polina
Razsudin wearing a black dress and a sash, with a newspaper in her hand,
fast asleep. She must have been playing late, waiting for Yartsev to come
home, and, tired of waiting, fell asleep.

"Hullo, she's worn out," he thought.

Carefully taking the newspaper out of her hands, he covered her with a
rug. He put out the candles and went into his bedroom. As he got into bed,
he still thought of his historical play, and the tune of "My friend, my tender
friend" was still ringing in his head. . . .

Two days later Laptev looked in upon him for a moment to tell him that
Lida was ill with diphtheria, and that Yulia Sergeyevna and her baby had
caught it from her, and five days later came the news that Lida and Yulia
were recovering, but the baby was dead, and that the Laptevs had left their
villa at Sokolniki and had hastened back to Moscow.

XIV

It had become distasteful to Laptev to be long at home. His wife was
constantly away in the lodge declaring that she had to look after the little
girls, but he knew that she did not go to the lodge to give them lessons but
to cry in Kostya's room. The ninth day came, then the twentieth, and then
the fortieth, and still he had to go to the cemetery to listen to the requiem,
and then to wear himself out for a whole day and night thinking of nothing
but that unhappy baby, and trying to comfort his wife with all sorts of
commonplace expressions. He went rarely to the warehouse now, and spent
most of his time in charitable work, seizing upon every pretext requiring his
attention, and he was glad when he had for some trivial reason to be out for
the whole day. He had been intending of late to go abroad, to study night-
refuges, and that idea attracted him now.

It was an autumn day. Yulia had just gone to the lodge to cry, while
Laptev lay on a sofa in the study thinking where he could go. Just at that
moment Pyotr announced Polina Razsudin. Laptev was delighted; he leapt
up and went to meet the unexpected visitor, who had been his closest friend,
though he had almost begun to forget her. She had not changed in the least
since that evening when he had seen her for the last time, and was just the
same as ever.

"Polina," he said, holding out both hands to her. "What ages! If you only
knew how glad I am to see you! Do come in!"

Polina greeted him, jerked him by the hand, and without taking off her
coat and hat, went into the study and sat down.

"I've come to you for one minute," she said. "I haven't time to talk of any
nonsense. Sit down and listen. Whether you are glad to see me or not is
absolutely nothing to me, for I don't care a straw for the gracious attentions
of you lords of creation. I've only come to you because I've been to five
other places already to-day, and everywhere I was met with a refusal, and
it's a matter that can't be put off. Listen," she went on, looking into his face.
"Five students of my acquaintance, stupid, unintelligent people, but

certainly poor, have neglected to pay their fees, and are being excluded
from the university. Your wealth makes it your duty to go straight to the
university and pay for them."

"With pleasure, Polina."

"Here are their names," she said, giving him a list. "Go this minute;
you'll have plenty of time to enjoy your domestic happiness afterwards."

At that moment a rustle was heard through the door that led into the
drawing-room; probably the dog was scratching itself. Polina turned
crimson and jumped up.

"Your Dulcinea's eavesdropping," she said. "That's horrid!"

Laptev was offended at this insult to Yulia.

"She's not here; she's in the lodge," he said. "And don't speak of her like
that. Our child is dead, and she is in great distress."

"You can console her," Polina scoffed, sitting down again; "she'll have
another dozen. You don't need much sense to bring children into the world."

Laptev remembered that he had heard this, or something very like it,
many times in old days, and it brought back a whiff of the romance of the
past, of solitary freedom, of his bachelor life, when he was young and
thought he could do anything he chose, when he had neither love for his
wife nor memory of his baby.

"Let us go together," he said, stretching.

When they reached the university Polina waited at the gate, while Laptev
went into the office; he came back soon afterwards and handed Polina five
receipts.

"Where are you going now?" he asked.

"To Yartsev's."

"I'll come with you."

"But you'll prevent him from writing."

"No, I assure you I won't," he said, and looked at her imploringly.

She had on a black hat trimmed with crape, as though she were in
mourning, and a short, shabby coat, the pockets of which stuck out. Her
nose looked longer than it used to be, and her face looked bloodless in spite
of the cold. Laptev liked walking with her, doing what she told him, and
listening to her grumbling. He walked along thinking about her, what
inward strength there must be in this woman, since, though she was so ugly,
so angular, so restless, though she did not know how to dress, and always
had untidy hair, and was always somehow out of harmony, she was yet so
fascinating.

They went into Yartsev's flat by the back way through the kitchen, where
they were met by the cook, a clean little old woman with grey curls; she
was overcome with embarrassment, and with a honeyed smile which made
her little face look like a pie, said:

"Please walk in."

Yartsev was not at home. Polina sat down to the piano, and beginning
upon a tedious, difficult exercise, told Laptev not to hinder her. And without
distracting her attention by conversation, he sat on one side and began
turning over the pages of a "The Messenger of Europe." After practising for
two hours--it was the task she set herself every day--she ate something in
the kitchen and went out to her lessons. Laptev read the continuation of a
story, then sat for a long time without reading and without being bored, glad
to think that he was too late for dinner at home.

"Ha, ha, ha!" came Yartsev's laugh, and he walked in with ruddy cheeks,
looking strong and healthy, wearing a new coat with bright buttons. "Ha, ha,
ha!"

The friends dined together. Then Laptev lay on the sofa while Yartsev sat
near and lighted a cigar. It got dark.

"I must be getting old," said Laptev. "Ever since my sister Nina died, I've
taken to constantly thinking of death."

They began talking of death, of the immortality of the soul, of how nice
it would be to rise again and fly off somewhere to Mars, to be always idle
and happy, and, above all, to think in a new special way, not as on earth.

"One doesn't want to die," said Yartsev softly. "No sort of philosophy can
reconcile me to death, and I look on it simply as annihilation. One wants to
live."

"You love life, Gavrilitch?"

"Yes, I love it."

"Do you know, I can never understand myself about that. I'm always in a
gloomy mood or else indifferent. I'm timid, without self-confidence; I have
a cowardly conscience; I never can adapt myself to life, or become its
master. Some people talk nonsense or cheat, and even so enjoy life, while I
consciously do good, and feel nothing but uneasiness or complete
indifference. I explain all that, Gavrilitch, by my being a slave, the grandson
of a serf. Before we plebeians fight our way into the true path, many of our
sort will perish on the way."

"That's all quite right, my dear fellow," said Yartsev, and he sighed.
"That only proves once again how rich and varied Russian life is. Ah, how
rich it is! Do you know, I feel more convinced every day that we are on the
eve of the greatest triumph, and I should like to live to take part in it.
Whether you like to believe it or not, to my thinking a remarkable
generation is growing up. It gives me great enjoyment to teach the children,
especially the girls. They are wonderful children!"

Yartsev went to the piano and struck a chord.

"I'm a chemist, I think in chemical terms, and I shall die a chemist," he
went on. "But I am greedy, and I am afraid of dying unsatisfied; and
chemistry is not enough for me, and I seize upon Russian history, history of
art, the science of teaching music. . . . Your wife asked me in the summer to

write an historical play, and now I'm longing to write and write. I feel as
though I could sit for three days and three nights without moving, writing
all the time. I am worn out with ideas--my brain's crowded with them, and I
feel as though there were a pulse throbbing in my head. I don't in the least
want to become anything special, to create something great. I simply want
to live, to dream, to hope, to be in the midst of everything . . . . Life is short,
my dear fellow, and one must make the most of everything."

After this friendly talk, which was not over till midnight, Laptev took to
coming to see Yartsev almost every day. He felt drawn to him. As a rule he
came towards evening, lay down on the sofa, and waited patiently for
Yartsev to come in, without feeling in the least bored. When Yartsev came
back from his work, he had dinner, and sat down to work; but Laptev would
ask him a question, a conversation would spring up, and there was no more
thought of work and at midnight the friends parted very well pleased with
one another.

But this did not last long. Arriving one day at Yartsev's, Laptev found no
one there but Polina, who was sitting at the piano practising her exercises.
She looked at him with a cold, almost hostile expression, and asked without
shaking hands:

"Tell me, please: how much longer is this going on?"

"This? What?" asked Laptev, not understanding.

"You come here every day and hinder Yartsev from working. Yartsev is
not a tradesman; he is a scientific man, and every moment of his life is
precious. You ought to understand and to have some little delicacy!"

"If you think that I hinder him," said Laptev, mildly, disconcerted, "I will
give up my visits."

"Quite right, too. You had better go, or he may be home in a minute and
find you here."

The tone in which this was said, and the indifference in Polina's eyes,
completely disconcerted him. She had absolutely no sort of feeling for him

now, except the desire that he should go as soon as possible--and what a
contrast it was to her old love for him! He went out without shaking hands
with her, and he fancied she would call out to him, bring him back, but he
heard the scales again, and as he slowly went down the stairs he realised
that he had become a stranger to her now.

Three days later Yartsev came to spend the evening with him.

"I have news," he said, laughing. "Polina Nikolaevna has moved into my
rooms altogether." He was a little confused, and went on in a low voice:
"Well, we are not in love with each other, of course, but I suppose that . . .
that doesn't matter. I am glad I can give her a refuge and peace and quiet,
and make it possible for her not to work if she's ill. She fancies that her
coming to live with me will make things more orderly, and that under her
influence I shall become a great scientist. That's what she fancies. And let
her fancy it. In the South they have a saying: 'Fancy makes the fool a rich
man.' Ha, ha, ha!"

Laptev said nothing. Yartsev walked up and down the study, looking at
the pictures he had seen so many times before, and said with a sigh:

"Yes, my dear fellow, I am three years older than you are, and it's too late
for me to think of real love, and in reality a woman like Polina Nikolaevna
is a godsend to me, and, of course, I shall get on capitally with her till we're
both old people; but, goodness knows why, one still regrets something, one
still longs for something, and I still feel as though I am lying in the Vale of
Daghestan and dreaming of a ball. In short, man's never satisfied with what
he has."

He went into the drawing-room and began singing as though nothing had
happened, and Laptev sat in his study with his eyes shut, and tried to
understand why Polina had gone to live with Yartsev. And then he felt sad
that there were no lasting, permanent attachments. And he felt vexed that
Polina Nikolaevna had gone to live with Yartsev, and vexed with himself
that his feeling for his wife was not what it had been.

XV

Laptev sat reading and swaying to and fro in a rocking-chair; Yulia was
in the study, and she, too, was reading. It seemed there was nothing to talk
about; they had both been silent all day. From time to time he looked at her
from over his book and thought: "Whether one marries from passionate
love, or without love at all, doesn't it come to the same thing?" And the time
when he used to be jealous, troubled, distressed, seemed to him far away.
He had succeeded in going abroad, and now he was resting after the journey
and looking forward to another visit in the spring to England, which he had
very much liked.

And Yulia Sergeyevna had grown used to her sorrow, and had left off
going to the lodge to cry. That winter she had given up driving out
shopping, had given up the theatres and concerts, and had stayed at home.
She never cared for big rooms, and always sat in her husband's study or in
her own room, where she had shrines of ikons that had come to her on her
marriage, and where there hung on the wall the landscape that had pleased
her so much at the exhibition. She spent hardly any money on herself, and
was almost as frugal now as she had been in her father's house.

The winter passed cheerlessly. Card-playing was the rule everywhere in
Moscow, and if any other recreation was attempted, such as singing,
reading, drawing, the result was even more tedious. And since there were
few talented people in Moscow, and the same singers and reciters
performed at every entertainment, even the enjoyment of art gradually
palled and became for many people a tiresome and monotonous social duty.

Moreover, the Laptevs never had a day without something vexatious
happening. Old Laptev's eyesight was failing; he no longer went to the
warehouse, and the oculist told them that he would soon be blind. Fyodor
had for some reason given up going to the warehouse and spent his time
sitting at home writing something. Panaurov had got a post in another town,
and had been promoted an actual civil councillor, and was now staying at
the Dresden. He came to the Laptevs' almost every day to ask for money.
Kish had finished his studies at last, and while waiting for Laptev to find
him a job, used to spend whole days at a time with them, telling them long,

tedious stories. All this was irritating and exhausting, and made daily life
unpleasant.

Pyotr came into the study, and announced an unknown lady. On the card
he brought in was the name "Josephina Iosefovna Milan."

Yulia Sergeyevna got up languidly and went out limping slightly, as her
foot had gone to sleep. In the doorway appeared a pale, thin lady with dark
eyebrows, dressed altogether in black. She clasped her hands on her bosom
and said supplicatingly:

"M. Laptev, save my children!"

The jingle of her bracelets sounded familiar to him, and he knew the face
with patches of powder on it; he recognised her as the lady with whom he
had once so inappropriately dined before his marriage. It was Panaurov's
second wife.

"Save my children," she repeated, and her face suddenly quivered and
looked old and pitiful. "You alone can save us, and I have spent my last
penny coming to Moscow to see you! My children are starving!"

She made a motion as though she were going to fall on her knees. Laptev
was alarmed, and clutched her by the arm.

"Sit down, sit down . . ." he muttered, making her sit down. "I beg you to
be seated."

"We have no money to buy bread," she said. "Grigory Nikolaevitch is
going away to a new post, but he will not take the children and me with
him, and the money which you so generously send us he spends only on
himself. What are we to do? What? My poor, unhappy children!"

"Calm yourself, I beg. I will give orders that that money shall be made
payable to you."

She began sobbing, and then grew calmer, and he noticed that the tears
had made little pathways through the powder on her cheeks, and that she

was growing a moustache.

"You are infinitely generous, M. Laptev. But be our guardian angel, our
good fairy, persuade Grigory Nikolaevitch not to abandon me, but to take
me with him. You know I love him--I love him insanely; he's the comfort of
my life."

Laptev gave her a hundred roubles, and promised to talk to Panaurov,
and saw her out to the hall in trepidation the whole time, for fear she should
break into sobs or fall on her knees.

After her, Kish made his appearance. Then Kostya came in with his
photographic apparatus. Of late he had been attracted by photography and
took photographs of every one in the house several times a day. This new
pursuit caused him many disappointments, and he had actually grown
thinner.

Before evening tea Fyodor arrived. Sitting in a corner in the study, he
opened a book and stared for a long time at a page, obviously not reading.
Then he spent a long time drinking tea; his face turned red. In his presence
Laptev felt a load on his heart; even his silence was irksome to him.

"Russia may be congratulated on the appearance of a new author," said
Fyodor. "Joking apart, though, brother, I have turned out a little article--the
firstfruits of my pen, so to say--and I've brought it to show you. Read it,
dear boy, and tell me your opinion --but sincerely."

He took a manuscript out of his pocket and gave it to his brother. The
article was called "The Russian Soul"; it was written tediously, in the
colourless style in which people with no talent, but full of secret vanity,
usually write. The leading idea of it was that the intellectual man has the
right to disbelieve in the supernatural, but it is his duty to conceal his lack
of faith, that he may not be a stumbling-block and shake the faith of others.
Without faith there is no idealism, and idealism is destined to save Europe
and guide humanity into the true path.

"But you don't say what Europe has to be saved from," said Laptev.

"That's intelligible of itself."

"Nothing is intelligible," said Laptev, and he walked about the room in
agitation. "It's not intelligible to me why you wrote it. But that's your
business."

"I want to publish it in pamphlet form."

"That's your affair."

They were silent for a minute. Fyodor sighed and said:

"It's an immense regret to me, dear brother, that we think differently. Oh,
Alyosha, Alyosha, my darling brother! You and I are true Russians, true
believers, men of broad nature; all of these German and Jewish crochets are
not for us. You and I are not wretched upstarts, you know, but
representatives of a distinguished merchant family."

"What do you mean by a distinguished family?" said Laptev, restraining
his irritation. "A distinguished family! The landowners beat our grandfather
and every low little government clerk punched him in the face. Our
grandfather thrashed our father, and our father thrashed us. What has your
distinguished family done for us? What sort of nerves, what sort of blood,
have we inherited? For nearly three years you've been arguing like an
ignorant deacon, and talking all sorts of nonsense, and now you've written--
this slavish drivel here! While I, while I! Look at me. . . . No elasticity, no
boldness, no strength of will; I tremble over every step I take as though I
should be flogged for it. I am timid before nonentities, idiots, brutes, who
are immeasurably my inferiors mentally and morally; I am afraid of porters,
doorkeepers, policemen, gendarmes. I am afraid of every one, because I
was born of a mother who was terrified, and because from a child I was
beaten and frightened! . . . You and I will do well to have no children. Oh,
God, grant that this distinguished merchant family may die with us!"

Yulia Sergeyevna came into the study and sat down at the table.

"Are you arguing about something here?" she asked. "Am I
interrupting?"

"No, little sister," answered Fyodor. "Our discussion was of principles.
Here, you are abusing the family," he added, turning to his brother. "That
family has created a business worth a million, though. That stands for
something, anyway!"

"A great distinction--a business worth a million! A man with no
particular brains, without abilities, by chance becomes a trader, and then
when he has grown rich he goes on trading from day to day, with no sort of
system, with no aim, without having any particular greed for money. He
trades mechanically, and money comes to him of itself, without his going to
meet it. He sits all his life at his work, likes it only because he can domineer
over his clerks and get the better of his customers. He's a churchwarden
because he can domineer over the choristers and keep them under his
thumb; he's the patron of a school because he likes to feel the teacher is his
subordinate and enjoys lording it over him. The merchant does not love
trading, he loves dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a
commercial establishment as a torture chamber! And for a business like
yours, you want clerks who have been deprived of individual character and
personal life--and you make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick
the dust for a crust of bread, and you've trained them from childhood to
believe that you are their benefactors. No fear of your taking a university
man into your warehouse!"

"University men are not suitable for our business."

"That's not true," cried Laptev. "It's a lie!"

"Excuse me, it seems to me you spit into the well from which you drink
yourself," said Fyodor, and he got up. "Our business is hateful to you, yet
you make use of the income from it."

"Aha! We've spoken our minds," said Laptev, and he laughed, looking
angrily at his brother. "Yes, if I didn't belong to your distinguished family--
if I had an ounce of will and courage, I should long ago have flung away
that income, and have gone to work for my living. But in your warehouse
you've destroyed all character in me from a child! I'm your product."

Fyodor looked at the clock and began hurriedly saying good-bye. He
kissed Yulia's hand and went out, but instead of going into the hall, walked
into the drawing-room, then into the bedroom.

"I've forgotten how the rooms go," he said in extreme confusion. "It's a
strange house. Isn't it a strange house!"

He seemed utterly overcome as he put on his coat, and there was a look
of pain on his face. Laptev felt no more anger; he was frightened, and at the
same time felt sorry for Fyodor, and the warm, true love for his brother,
which seemed to have died down in his heart during those three years,
awoke, and he felt an intense desire to express that love.

"Come to dinner with us to-morrow, Fyodor," he said, and stroked him
on the shoulder. "Will you come?"

"Yes, yes; but give me some water."

Laptev ran himself to the dining-room to take the first thing he could get
from the sideboard. This was a tall beer-jug. He poured water into it and
brought it to his brother. Fyodor began drinking, but bit a piece out of the
jug; they heard a crunch, and then sobs. The water ran over his fur coat and
his jacket, and Laptev, who had never seen men cry, stood in confusion and
dismay, not knowing what to do. He looked on helplessly while Yulia and
the servant took off Fyodor's coat and helped him back again into the room,
and went with him, feeling guilty.

Yulia made Fyodor lie down on the sofa and knelt beside him.

"It's nothing," she said, trying to comfort him. "It's your nerves. . . ."

"I'm so miserable, my dear!" he said. "I am so unhappy, unhappy . . . but
all the time I've been hiding it, I've been hiding it!"

He put his arm round her neck and whispered in her ear:

"Every night I see my sister Nina. She comes and sits in the chair near
my bed. . . ."

When, an hour later, he put on his fur coat in the hall, he was smiling
again and ashamed to face the servant. Laptev went with him to Pyatnitsky
Street.

"Come and have dinner with us to-morrow," he said on the way, holding
him by the arm, "and at Easter we'll go abroad together. You absolutely
must have a change, or you'll be getting quite morbid."

When he got home Laptev found his wife in a state of great nervous
agitation. The scene with Fyodor had upset her, and she could not recover
her composure. She wasn't crying but kept tossing on the bed, clutching
with cold fingers at the quilt, at the pillows, at her husband's hands. Her
eyes looked big and frightened.

"Don't go away from me, don't go away," she said to her husband. "Tell
me, Alyosha, why have I left off saying my prayers? What has become of
my faith? Oh, why did you talk of religion before me? You've shaken my
faith, you and your friends. I never pray now."

He put compresses on her forehead, chafed her hands, gave her tea to
drink, while she huddled up to him in terror. . . .

Towards morning she was worn out and fell asleep, while Laptev sat
beside her and held her hand. So that he could get no sleep. The whole day
afterwards he felt shattered and dull, and wandered listlessly about the
rooms without a thought in his head.

XVI

The doctor said that Fyodor's mind was affected. Laptev did not know
what to do in his father's house, while the dark warehouse in which neither
his father nor Fyodor ever appeared now seemed to him like a sepulchre.
When his wife told him that he absolutely must go every day to the
warehouse and also to his father's, he either said nothing, or began talking
irritably of his childhood, saying that it was beyond his power to forgive his

father for his past, that the warehouse and the house in Pyatnitsky Street
were hateful to him, and so on.

One Sunday morning Yulia went herself to Pyatnitsky Street. She found
old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same big drawing-room in which the service
had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and without a cravat, he
was sitting motionless in his arm-chair, blinking with his sightless eyes.

"It's I--your daughter-in-law," she said, going up to him. "I've come to
see how you are."

He began breathing heavily with excitement.

Touched by his affliction and his loneliness, she kissed his hand; and he
passed his hand over her face and head, and having satisfied himself that it
was she, made the sign of the cross over her.

"Thank you, thank you," he said. "You know I've lost my eyes and can
see nothing. . . . I can dimly see the window and the fire, but people and
things I cannot see at all. Yes, I'm going blind, and Fyodor has fallen ill, and
without the master's eye things are in a bad way now. If there is any
irregularity there's no one to look into it; and folks soon get spoiled. And
why is it Fyodor has fallen ill? Did he catch cold? Here I have never ailed
in my life and never taken medicine. I never saw anything of doctors."

And, as he always did, the old man began boasting. Meanwhile the
servants hurriedly laid the table and brought in lunch and bottles of wine.

Ten bottles were put on the table; one of them was in the shape of the
Eiffel Tower. There was a whole dish of hot pies smelling of jam, rice, and
fish.

"I beg my dear guest to have lunch," said the old man.

She took him by the arm, led him to the table, and poured him out a
glass of vodka.

"I will come to you again to-morrow," she said, "and I'll bring your
grandchildren, Sasha and Lida. They will be sorry for you, and fondle you."

"There's no need. Don't bring them. They are illegitimate."

"Why are they illegitimate? Why, their father and mother were married."

"Without my permission. I do not bless them, and I don't want to know
them. Let them be."

"You speak strangely, Fyodor Stepanovitch," said Yulia, with a sigh.

"It is written in the Gospel: children must fear and honour their parents."

"Nothing of the sort. The Gospel tells us that we must forgive even our
enemies."

"One can't forgive in our business. If you were to forgive every one, you
would come to ruin in three years."

"But to forgive, to say a kind, friendly word to any one, even a sinner, is
something far above business, far above wealth."

Yulia longed to soften the old man, to awaken a feeling of compassion in
him, to move him to repentance; but he only listened condescendingly to all
she said, as a grown-up person listens to a child.

"Fyodor Stepanovitch," said Yulia resolutely, "you are an old man, and
God soon will call you to Himself. He won't ask you how you managed
your business, and whether you were successful in it, but whether you were
gracious to people; or whether you were harsh to those who were weaker
than you, such as your servants, your clerks."

"I was always the benefactor of those that served me; they ought to
remember me in their prayers forever," said the old man, with conviction,
but touched by Yulia's tone of sincerity, and anxious to give her pleasure, he
said: "Very well; bring my grandchildren to-morrow. I will tell them to buy
me some little presents for them."

The old man was slovenly in his dress, and there was cigar ash on his
breast and on his knees; apparently no one cleaned his boots, or brushed his
clothes. The rice in the pies was half cooked, the tablecloth smelt of soap,
the servants tramped noisily about the room. And the old man and the
whole house had a neglected look, and Yulia, who felt this, was ashamed of
herself and of her husband.

"I will be sure to come and see you to-morrow," she said.

She walked through the rooms, and gave orders for the old man's
bedroom to be set to rights, and the lamp to be lighted under the ikons in it.
Fyodor, sitting in his own room, was looking at an open book without
reading it. Yulia talked to him and told the servants to tidy his room, too;
then she went downstairs to the clerks. In the middle of the room where the
clerks used to dine, there was an unpainted wooden post to support the
ceiling and to prevent its coming down. The ceilings in the basement were
low, the walls covered with cheap paper, and there was a smell of charcoal
fumes and cooking. As it was a holiday, all the clerks were at home, sitting
on their bedsteads waiting for dinner. When Yulia went in they jumped up,
and answered her questions timidly, looking up at her from under their
brows like convicts.

"Good heavens! What a horrid room you have!" she said, throwing up
her hands. "Aren't you crowded here?"

"Crowded, but not aggrieved," said Makeitchev. "We are greatly
indebted to you, and will offer up our prayers for you to our Heavenly
Father."

"The congruity of life with the conceit of the personality," said
Potchatkin.

And noticing that Yulia did not understand Potchatkin, Makeitchev
hastened to explain:

"We are humble people and must live according to our position."

She inspected the boys' quarters, and then the kitchen, made
acquaintance with the housekeeper, and was thoroughly dissatisfied.

When she got home she said to her husband:

"We ought to move into your father's house and settle there for good as
soon as possible. And you will go every day to the warehouse."

Then they both sat side by side in the study without speaking. His heart
was heavy, and he did not want to move into Pyatnitsky Street or to go into
the warehouse; but he guessed what his wife was thinking, and could not
oppose her. He stroked her cheek and said:

"I feel as though our life is already over, and that a grey half-life is
beginning for us. When I knew that my brother Fyodor was hopelessly ill, I
shed tears; we spent our childhood and youth together, when I loved him
with my whole soul. And now this catastrophe has come, and it seems, too,
as though, losing him, I am finally cut away from my past. And when you
said just now that we must move into the house in Pyatnitsky Street, to that
prison, it began to seem to me that there was no future for me either."

He got up and walked to the window.

"However that may be, one has to give up all thoughts of happiness," he
said, looking out into the street. "There is none. I never have had any, and I
suppose it doesn't exist at all. I was happy once in my life, though, when I
sat at night under your parasol. Do you remember how you left your parasol
at Nina's?" he asked, turning to his wife. "I was in love with you then, and I
remember I spent all night sitting under your parasol, and was perfectly
blissful."

Near the book-case in the study stood a mahogany chest with bronze
fittings where Laptev kept various useless things, including the parasol. He
took it out and handed it to his wife.

"Here it is."

Yulia looked for a minute at the parasol, recognised it, and smiled
mournfully.

"I remember," she said. "When you proposed to me you held it in your
hand." And seeing that he was preparing to go out, she said: "Please come
back early if you can. I am dull without you."

And then she went into her own room, and gazed for a long time at the
parasol.

XVII

In spite of the complexity of the business and the immense turnover,
there were no bookkeepers in the warehouse, and it was impossible to make
anything out of the books kept by the cashier in the office. Every day the
warehouse was visited by agents, German and English, with whom the
clerks talked politics and religion. A man of noble birth, ruined by drink, an
ailing, pitiable creature, used to come to translate the foreign
correspondence in the office; the clerks used to call him a midge, and put
salt in his tea. And altogether the whole concern struck Laptev as a very
queer business.

He went to the warehouse every day and tried to establish a new order of
things; he forbade them to thrash the boys and to jeer at the buyers, and was
violently angry when the clerks gleefully despatched to the provinces
worthless shop-soiled goods as though they were new and fashionable. Now
he was the chief person in the warehouse, but still, as before, he did not
know how large his fortune was, whether his business was doing well, how
much the senior clerks were paid, and so on. Potchatkin and Makeitchev
looked upon him as young and inexperienced, concealed a great deal from
him, and whispered mysteriously every evening with his blind old father.

It somehow happened at the beginning of June that Laptev went into the
Bubnovsky restaurant with Potchatkin to talk business with him over lunch.
Potchatkin had been with the Laptevs a long while, and had entered their
service at eight years old. He seemed to belong to them--they trusted him

fully; and when on leaving the warehouse he gathered up all the takings
from the till and thrust them into his pocket, it never aroused the slightest
suspicion. He was the head man in the business and in the house, and also
in the church, where he performed the duties of churchwarden in place of
his old master. He was nicknamed Malyuta Skuratov on account of his cruel
treatment of the boys and clerks under him.

When they went into the restaurant he nodded to a waiter and said:

"Bring us, my lad, half a bodkin and twenty-four unsavouries."

After a brief pause the waiter brought on a tray half a bottle of vodka and
some plates of various kinds of savouries.

"Look here, my good fellow," said Potchatkin. "Give us a plateful of the
source of all slander and evil-speaking, with mashed potatoes."

The waiter did not understand; he was puzzled, and would have said
something, but Potchatkin looked at him sternly and said:

"Except."

The waiter thought intently, then went to consult with his colleagues, and
in the end guessing what was meant, brought a plateful of tongue. When
they had drunk a couple of glasses and had had lunch, Laptev asked:

"Tell me, Ivan Vassilitch, is it true that our business has been dropping
off for the last year?"

"Not a bit of it."

"Tell me frankly and honestly what income we have been making and
are making, and what our profits are. We can't go on in the dark. We had a
balancing of the accounts at the warehouse lately, but, excuse me, I don't
believe in it; you think fit to conceal something from me and only tell the
truth to my father. You have been used to being diplomatic from your
childhood, and now you can't get on without it. And what's the use of it? So
I beg you to be open. What is our position?"

"It all depends upon the fluctuation of credit," Potchatkin answered after
a moment's pause.

"What do you understand by the fluctuation of credit?"

Potchatkin began explaining, but Laptev could make nothing of it, and
sent for Makeitchev. The latter promptly made his appearance, had some
lunch after saying grace, and in his sedate, mellow baritone began saying
first of all that the clerks were in duty bound to pray night and day for their
benefactors.

"By all means, only allow me not to consider myself your benefactor,"
said Laptev.

"Every man ought to remember what he is, and to be conscious of his
station. By the grace of God you are a father and benefactor to us, and we
are your slaves."

"I am sick of all that!" said Laptev, getting angry. "Please be a benefactor
to me now. Please explain the position of our business. Give up looking
upon me as a boy, or to-morrow I shall close the business. My father is
blind, my brother is in the asylum, my nieces are only children. I hate the
business; I should be glad to go away, but there's no one to take my place,
as you know. For goodness' sake, drop your diplomacy!"

They went to the warehouse to go into the accounts; then they went on
with them at home in the evening, the old father himself assisting. Initiating
his son into his commercial secrets, the old man spoke as though he were
engaged, not in trade, but in sorcery. It appeared that the profits of the
business were increasing approximately ten per cent. per annum, and that
the Laptevs' fortune, reckoning only money and paper securities, amounted
to six million roubles.

When at one o'clock at night, after balancing the accounts, Laptev went
out into the open air, he was still under the spell of those figures. It was a
still, sultry, moonlight night. The white walls of the houses beyond the
river, the heavy barred gates, the stillness and the black shadows, combined
to give the impression of a fortress, and nothing was wanting to complete

the picture but a sentinel with a gun. Laptev went into the garden and sat
down on a seat near the fence, which divided them from the neighbour's
yard, where there was a garden, too. The bird-cherry was in bloom. Laptev
remembered that the tree had been just as gnarled and just as big when he
was a child, and had not changed at all since then. Every corner of the
garden and of the yard recalled the far-away past. And in his childhood, too,
just as now, the whole yard bathed in moonlight could be seen through the
sparse trees, the shadows had been mysterious and forbidding, a black dog
had lain in the middle of the yard, and the clerks' windows had stood wide
open. And all these were cheerless memories.

The other side of the fence, in the neighbour's yard, there was a sound of
light steps.

"My sweet, my precious . . ." said a man's voice so near the fence that
Laptev could hear the man's breathing.

Now they were kissing. Laptev was convinced that the millions and the
business which was so distasteful to him were ruining his life, and would
make him a complete slave. He imagined how, little by little, he would
grow accustomed to his position; would, little by little, enter into the part of
the head of a great firm; would begin to grow dull and old, die in the end, as
the average man usually does die, in a decrepit, soured old age, making
every one about him miserable and depressed. But what hindered him from
giving up those millions and that business, and leaving that yard and garden
which had been hateful to him from his childhood?

The whispering and kisses the other side of the fence disturbed him. He
moved into the middle of the yard, and, unbuttoning his shirt over his chest,
looked at the moon, and it seemed to him that he would order the gate to be
unlocked, and would go out and never come back again. His heart ached
sweetly with the foretaste of freedom; he laughed joyously, and pictured
how exquisite, poetical, and even holy, life might be. . . .

But he still stood and did not go away, and kept asking himself: "What
keeps me here?" And he felt angry with himself and with the black dog,
which still lay stretched on the stone yard, instead of running off to the open
country, to the woods, where it would have been free and happy. It was

clear that that dog and he were prevented from leaving the yard by the same
thing; the habit of bondage, of servitude. . . .

At midday next morning he went to see his wife, and that he might not
be dull, asked Yartsev to go with him. Yulia Sergeyevna was staying in a
summer villa at Butovo, and he had not been to see her for five days. When
they reached the station the friends got into a carriage, and all the way there
Yartsev was singing and in raptures over the exquisite weather. The villa
was in a great park not far from the station. At the beginning of an avenue,
about twenty paces from the gates, Yulia Sergeyevna was sitting under a
broad, spreading poplar, waiting for her guests. She had on a light, elegant
dress of a pale cream colour trimmed with lace, and in her hand she had the
old familiar parasol. Yartsev greeted her and went on to the villa from
which came the sound of Sasha's and Lida's voices, while Laptev sat down
beside her to talk of business matters.

"Why is it you haven't been for so long?" she said, keeping his hand in
hers. "I have been sitting here for days watching for you to come. I miss
you so when you are away!"

She stood up and passed her hand over his hair, and scanned his face, his
shoulders, his hat, with interest.

"You know I love you," she said, and flushed crimson. "You are precious
to me. Here you've come. I see you, and I'm so happy I can't tell you. Well,
let us talk. Tell me something."

She had told him she loved him, and he could only feel as though he had
been married to her for ten years, and that he was hungry for his lunch. She
had put her arm round his neck, tickling his cheek with the silk of her dress;
he cautiously removed her hand, stood up, and without uttering a single
word, walked to the villa. The little girls ran to meet him.

"How they have grown!" he thought. "And what changes in these three
years. . . . But one may have to live another thirteen years, another thirty
years. . . . What is there in store for us in the future? If we live, we shall
see."

He embraced Sasha and Lida, who hung upon his neck, and said:

"Grandpapa sends his love. . . . Uncle Fyodor is dying. Uncle Kostya has
sent a letter from America and sends you his love in it. He's bored at the
exhibition and will soon be back. And Uncle Alyosha is hungry."

Then he sat on the verandah and saw his wife walking slowly along the
avenue towards the house. She was deep in thought; there was a mournful,
charming expression in her face, and her eyes were bright with tears. She
was not now the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she used to be; she was a
mature, beautiful, vigorous woman. And Laptev saw the enthusiasm with
which Yartsev looked at her when he met her, and the way her new, lovely
expression was reflected in his face, which looked mournful and ecstatic
too. One would have thought that he was seeing her for the first time in his
life. And while they were at lunch on the verandah, Yartsev smiled with a
sort of joyous shyness, and kept gazing at Yulia and at her beautiful neck.
Laptev could not help watching them while he thought that he had perhaps
another thirteen, another thirty years of life before him. . . . And what would
he have to live through in that time? What is in store for us in the future?

And he thought:

"Let us live, and we shall see."

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