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Title: The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Translator: Constance Garnett

Release date: September 9, 2004 [eBook #13415]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13415

Credits: Produced by James Rusk
HTML version by Chuck Greif

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LADY
WITH THE DOG AND OTHER STORIES ***

THE TALES OF CHEKHOV

VOLUME 3

THE LADY WITH THE DOG
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
ANTON TCHEKHOV
Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT

CONTENTS

THE LADY WITH THE DOG
A DOCTOR'S VISIT
AN UPHEAVAL
IONITCH
THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY
THE BLACK MONK
VOLODYA
AN ANONYMOUS STORY
THE HUSBAND

THE LADY WITH THE DOG

I
IT was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a
little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at
Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new
arrivals. Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a
fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white
Pomeranian dog was running behind her.
And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square
several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same béret,
and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every
one called her simply "the lady with the dog."
"If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be amiss to
make her acquaintance," Gurov reflected.
He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and
two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in
his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She
was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she
said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling,
called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her
unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at
home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful
to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of
women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them
"the lower race."
It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that
he might call them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days
together without "the lower race." In the society of men he was bored and
not himself, with them he was cold and uncommunicative; but when he was
in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and
how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent. In
his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature, there was something

attractive and elusive which allured women and disposed them in his
favour; he knew that, and some force seemed to draw him, too, to them.
Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long
ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people—always slow to
move and irresolute—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies
life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a
regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation
becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman
this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life,
and everything seemed simple and amusing.
One evening he was dining in the gardens, and the lady in the béret came
up slowly to take the next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, and the
way she did her hair told him that she was a lady, that she was married, that
she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was dull there....
The stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great
extent untrue; he despised them, and knew that such stories were for the
most part made up by persons who would themselves have been glad to sin
if they had been able; but when the lady sat down at the next table three
paces from him, he remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the
mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a
romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know, suddenly
took possession of him.
He beckoned coaxingly to the Pomeranian, and when the dog came up to
him he shook his finger at it. The Pomeranian growled: Gurov shook his
finger at it again.
The lady looked at him and at once dropped her eyes.
"He doesn't bite," she said, and blushed.
"May I give him a bone?" he asked; and when she nodded he asked
courteously, "Have you been long in Yalta?"
"Five days."
"And I have already dragged out a fortnight here."
There was a brief silence.
"Time goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!" she said, not looking at him.
"That's only the fashion to say it is dull here. A provincial will live in
Belyov or Zhidra and not be dull, and when he comes here it's 'Oh, the

dulness! Oh, the dust!' One would think he came from Grenada."
She laughed. Then both continued eating in silence, like strangers, but
after dinner they walked side by side; and there sprang up between them the
light jesting conversation of people who are free and satisfied, to whom it
does not matter where they go or what they talk about. They walked and
talked of the strange light on the sea: the water was of a soft warm lilac hue,
and there was a golden streak from the moon upon it. They talked of how
sultry it was after a hot day. Gurov told her that he came from Moscow, that
he had taken his degree in Arts, but had a post in a bank; that he had trained
as an opera-singer, but had given it up, that he owned two houses in
Moscow.... And from her he learnt that she had grown up in Petersburg, but
had lived in S—— since her marriage two years before, that she was
staying another month in Yalta, and that her husband, who needed a holiday
too, might perhaps come and fetch her. She was not sure whether her
husband had a post in a Crown Department or under the Provincial Council
—and was amused by her own ignorance. And Gurov learnt, too, that she
was called Anna Sergeyevna.
Afterwards he thought about her in his room at the hotel—thought she
would certainly meet him next day; it would be sure to happen. As he got
into bed he thought how lately she had been a girl at school, doing lessons
like his own daughter; he recalled the diffidence, the angularity, that was
still manifest in her laugh and her manner of talking with a stranger. This
must have been the first time in her life she had been alone in surroundings
in which she was followed, looked at, and spoken to merely from a secret
motive which she could hardly fail to guess. He recalled her slender,
delicate neck, her lovely grey eyes.
"There's something pathetic about her, anyway," he thought, and fell
asleep.

II
A week had passed since they had made acquaintance. It was a holiday.
It was sultry indoors, while in the street the wind whirled the dust round and
round, and blew people's hats off. It was a thirsty day, and Gurov often went
into the pavilion, and pressed Anna Sergeyevna to have syrup and water or
an ice. One did not know what to do with oneself.

In the evening when the wind had dropped a little, they went out on the
groyne to see the steamer come in. There were a great many people walking
about the harbour; they had gathered to welcome some one, bringing
bouquets. And two peculiarities of a well-dressed Yalta crowd were very
conspicuous: the elderly ladies were dressed like young ones, and there
were great numbers of generals.
Owing to the roughness of the sea, the steamer arrived late, after the sun
had set, and it was a long time turning about before it reached the groyne.
Anna Sergeyevna looked through her lorgnette at the steamer and the
passengers as though looking for acquaintances, and when she turned to
Gurov her eyes were shining. She talked a great deal and asked
disconnected questions, forgetting next moment what she had asked; then
she dropped her lorgnette in the crush.
The festive crowd began to disperse; it was too dark to see people's
faces. The wind had completely dropped, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna
still stood as though waiting to see some one else come from the steamer.
Anna Sergeyevna was silent now, and sniffed the flowers without looking at
Gurov.
"The weather is better this evening," he said. "Where shall we go now?
Shall we drive somewhere?"
She made no answer.
Then he looked at her intently, and all at once put his arm round her and
kissed her on the lips, and breathed in the moisture and the fragrance of the
flowers; and he immediately looked round him, anxiously wondering
whether any one had seen them.
"Let us go to your hotel," he said softly. And both walked quickly.
The room was close and smelt of the scent she had bought at the
Japanese shop. Gurov looked at her and thought: "What different people
one meets in the world!" From the past he preserved memories of careless,
good-natured women, who loved cheerfully and were grateful to him for the
happiness he gave them, however brief it might be; and of women like his
wife who loved without any genuine feeling, with superfluous phrases,
affectedly, hysterically, with an expression that suggested that it was not
love nor passion, but something more significant; and of two or three
others, very beautiful, cold women, on whose faces he had caught a glimpse
of a rapacious expression—an obstinate desire to snatch from life more than

it could give, and these were capricious, unreflecting, domineering,
unintelligent women not in their first youth, and when Gurov grew cold to
them their beauty excited his hatred, and the lace on their linen seemed to
him like scales.
But in this case there was still the diffidence, the angularity of
inexperienced youth, an awkward feeling; and there was a sense of
consternation as though some one had suddenly knocked at the door. The
attitude of Anna Sergeyevna—"the lady with the dog"—to what had
happened was somehow peculiar, very grave, as though it were her fall—so
it seemed, and it was strange and inappropriate. Her face dropped and
faded, and on both sides of it her long hair hung down mournfully; she
mused in a dejected attitude like "the woman who was a sinner" in an old-
fashioned picture.
"It's wrong," she said. "You will be the first to despise me now."
There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and
began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of
silence.
Anna Sergeyevna was touching; there was about her the purity of a
good, simple woman who had seen little of life. The solitary candle burning
on the table threw a faint light on her face, yet it was clear that she was very
unhappy.
"How could I despise you?" asked Gurov. "You don't know what you are
saying."
"God forgive me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "It's awful."
"You seem to feel you need to be forgiven."
"Forgiven? No. I am a bad, low woman; I despise myself and don't
attempt to justify myself. It's not my husband but myself I have deceived.
And not only just now; I have been deceiving myself for a long time. My
husband may be a good, honest man, but he is a flunkey! I don't know what
he does there, what his work is, but I know he is a flunkey! I was twenty
when I was married to him. I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted
something better. 'There must be a different sort of life,' I said to myself. I
wanted to live! To live, to live!... I was fired by curiosity ... you don't
understand it, but, I swear to God, I could not control myself; something
happened to me: I could not be restrained. I told my husband I was ill, and
came here.... And here I have been walking about as though I were dazed,

like a mad creature; ... and now I have become a vulgar, contemptible
woman whom any one may despise."
Gurov felt bored already, listening to her. He was irritated by the naïve
tone, by this remorse, so unexpected and inopportune; but for the tears in
her eyes, he might have thought she was jesting or playing a part.
"I don't understand," he said softly. "What is it you want?"
She hid her face on his breast and pressed close to him.
"Believe me, believe me, I beseech you ..." she said. "I love a pure,
honest life, and sin is loathsome to me. I don't know what I am doing.
Simple people say: 'The Evil One has beguiled me.' And I may say of
myself now that the Evil One has beguiled me."
"Hush, hush!..." he muttered.
He looked at her fixed, scared eyes, kissed her, talked softly and
affectionately, and by degrees she was comforted, and her gaiety returned;
they both began laughing.
Afterwards when they went out there was not a soul on the sea-front.
The town with its cypresses had quite a deathlike air, but the sea still broke
noisily on the shore; a single barge was rocking on the waves, and a lantern
was blinking sleepily on it.
They found a cab and drove to Oreanda.
"I found out your surname in the hall just now: it was written on the
board—Von Diderits," said Gurov. "Is your husband a German?"
"No; I believe his grandfather was a German, but he is an Orthodox
Russian himself."
At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at
the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist;
white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir
on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of
the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep
awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda
here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously
when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete
indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a
pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon
earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young

woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these
magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov
thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one
reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget
our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.
A man walked up to them—probably a keeper—looked at them and
walked away. And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. They
saw a steamer come from Theodosia, with its lights out in the glow of
dawn.
"There is dew on the grass," said Anna Sergeyevna, after a silence.
"Yes. It's time to go home."
They went back to the town.
Then they met every day at twelve o'clock on the sea-front, lunched and
dined together, went for walks, admired the sea. She complained that she
slept badly, that her heart throbbed violently; asked the same questions,
troubled now by jealousy and now by the fear that he did not respect her
sufficiently. And often in the square or gardens, when there was no one near
them, he suddenly drew her to him and kissed her passionately. Complete
idleness, these kisses in broad daylight while he looked round in dread of
some one's seeing them, the heat, the smell of the sea, and the continual
passing to and fro before him of idle, well-dressed, well-fed people, made a
new man of him; he told Anna Sergeyevna how beautiful she was, how
fascinating. He was impatiently passionate, he would not move a step away
from her, while she was often pensive and continually urged him to confess
that he did not respect her, did not love her in the least, and thought of her
as nothing but a common woman. Rather late almost every evening they
drove somewhere out of town, to Oreanda or to the waterfall; and the
expedition was always a success, the scenery invariably impressed them as
grand and beautiful.
They were expecting her husband to come, but a letter came from him,
saying that there was something wrong with his eyes, and he entreated his
wife to come home as quickly as possible. Anna Sergeyevna made haste to
go.
"It's a good thing I am going away," she said to Gurov. "It's the finger of
destiny!"

She went by coach and he went with her. They were driving the whole
day. When she had got into a compartment of the express, and when the
second bell had rung, she said:
"Let me look at you once more ... look at you once again. That's right."
She did not shed tears, but was so sad that she seemed ill, and her face
was quivering.
"I shall remember you ... think of you," she said. "God be with you; be
happy. Don't remember evil against me. We are parting forever—it must be
so, for we ought never to have met. Well, God be with you."
The train moved off rapidly, its lights soon vanished from sight, and a
minute later there was no sound of it, as though everything had conspired
together to end as quickly as possible that sweet delirium, that madness.
Left alone on the platform, and gazing into the dark distance, Gurov
listened to the chirrup of the grasshoppers and the hum of the telegraph
wires, feeling as though he had only just waked up. And he thought,
musing, that there had been another episode or adventure in his life, and it,
too, was at an end, and nothing was left of it but a memory.... He was
moved, sad, and conscious of a slight remorse. This young woman whom
he would never meet again had not been happy with him; he was genuinely
warm and affectionate with her, but yet in his manner, his tone, and his
caresses there had been a shade of light irony, the coarse condescension of a
happy man who was, besides, almost twice her age. All the time she had
called him kind, exceptional, lofty; obviously he had seemed to her
different from what he really was, so he had unintentionally deceived her....
Here at the station was already a scent of autumn; it was a cold evening.
"It's time for me to go north," thought Gurov as he left the platform.
"High time!"

III
At home in Moscow everything was in its winter routine; the stoves
were heated, and in the morning it was still dark when the children were
having breakfast and getting ready for school, and the nurse would light the
lamp for a short time. The frosts had begun already. When the first snow
has fallen, on the first day of sledge-driving it is pleasant to see the white
earth, the white roofs, to draw soft, delicious breath, and the season brings

back the days of one's youth. The old limes and birches, white with hoar-
frost, have a good-natured expression; they are nearer to one's heart than
cypresses and palms, and near them one doesn't want to be thinking of the
sea and the mountains.
Gurov was Moscow born; he arrived in Moscow on a fine frosty day,
and when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves, and walked along
Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the ringing of the bells,
his recent trip and the places he had seen lost all charm for him. Little by
little he became absorbed in Moscow life, greedily read three newspapers a
day, and declared he did not read the Moscow papers on principle! He
already felt a longing to go to restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, anniversary
celebrations, and he felt flattered at entertaining distinguished lawyers and
artists, and at playing cards with a professor at the doctors' club. He could
already eat a whole plateful of salt fish and cabbage.
In another month, he fancied, the image of Anna Sergeyevna would be
shrouded in a mist in his memory, and only from time to time would visit
him in his dreams with a touching smile as others did. But more than a
month passed, real winter had come, and everything was still clear in his
memory as though he had parted with Anna Sergeyevna only the day
before. And his memories glowed more and more vividly. When in the
evening stillness he heard from his study the voices of his children,
preparing their lessons, or when he listened to a song or the organ at the
restaurant, or the storm howled in the chimney, suddenly everything would
rise up in his memory: what had happened on the groyne, and the early
morning with the mist on the mountains, and the steamer coming from
Theodosia, and the kisses. He would pace a long time about his room,
remembering it all and smiling; then his memories passed into dreams, and
in his fancy the past was mingled with what was to come. Anna Sergeyevna
did not visit him in dreams, but followed him about everywhere like a
shadow and haunted him. When he shut his eyes he saw her as though she
were living before him, and she seemed to him lovelier, younger, tenderer
than she was; and he imagined himself finer than he had been in Yalta. In
the evenings she peeped out at him from the bookcase, from the fireplace,
from the corner—he heard her breathing, the caressing rustle of her dress.
In the street he watched the women, looking for some one like her.
He was tormented by an intense desire to confide his memories to some
one. But in his home it was impossible to talk of his love, and he had no one

outside; he could not talk to his tenants nor to any one at the bank. And
what had he to talk of? Had he been in love, then? Had there been anything
beautiful, poetical, or edifying or simply interesting in his relations with
Anna Sergeyevna? And there was nothing for him but to talk vaguely of
love, of woman, and no one guessed what it meant; only his wife twitched
her black eyebrows, and said:
"The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri."
One evening, coming out of the doctors' club with an official with whom
he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:
"If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of
in Yalta!"
The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned
suddenly and shouted:
"Dmitri Dmitritch!"
"What?"
"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"
These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation,
and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what
people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The
rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk
always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always
about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of
one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed,
worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just
as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.
Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he
had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat up in
bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his children,
sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.
In the holidays in December he prepared for a journey, and told his wife
he was going to Petersburg to do something in the interests of a young
friend—and he set off for S——. What for? He did not very well know
himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeyevna and to talk with her—to
arrange a meeting, if possible.

He reached S—— in the morning, and took the best room at the hotel, in
which the floor was covered with grey army cloth, and on the table was an
inkstand, grey with dust and adorned with a figure on horseback, with its
hat in its hand and its head broken off. The hotel porter gave him the
necessary information; Von Diderits lived in a house of his own in Old
Gontcharny Street—it was not far from the hotel: he was rich and lived in
good style, and had his own horses; every one in the town knew him. The
porter pronounced the name "Dridirits."
Gurov went without haste to Old Gontcharny Street and found the house.
Just opposite the house stretched a long grey fence adorned with nails.
"One would run away from a fence like that," thought Gurov, looking
from the fence to the windows of the house and back again.
He considered: to-day was a holiday, and the husband would probably be
at home. And in any case it would be tactless to go into the house and upset
her. If he were to send her a note it might fall into her husband's hands, and
then it might ruin everything. The best thing was to trust to chance. And he
kept walking up and down the street by the fence, waiting for the chance.
He saw a beggar go in at the gate and dogs fly at him; then an hour later he
heard a piano, and the sounds were faint and indistinct. Probably it was
Anna Sergeyevna playing. The front door suddenly opened, and an old
woman came out, followed by the familiar white Pomeranian. Gurov was
on the point of calling to the dog, but his heart began beating violently, and
in his excitement he could not remember the dog's name.
He walked up and down, and loathed the grey fence more and more, and
by now he thought irritably that Anna Sergeyevna had forgotten him, and
was perhaps already amusing herself with some one else, and that that was
very natural in a young woman who had nothing to look at from morning
till night but that confounded fence. He went back to his hotel room and sat
for a long while on the sofa, not knowing what to do, then he had dinner
and a long nap.
"How stupid and worrying it is!" he thought when he woke and looked at
the dark windows: it was already evening. "Here I've had a good sleep for
some reason. What shall I do in the night?"
He sat on the bed, which was covered by a cheap grey blanket, such as
one sees in hospitals, and he taunted himself in his vexation:

"So much for the lady with the dog ... so much for the adventure....
You're in a nice fix...."
That morning at the station a poster in large letters had caught his eye.
"The Geisha" was to be performed for the first time. He thought of this and
went to the theatre.
"It's quite possible she may go to the first performance," he thought.
The theatre was full. As in all provincial theatres, there was a fog above
the chandelier, the gallery was noisy and restless; in the front row the local
dandies were standing up before the beginning of the performance, with
their hands behind them; in the Governor's box the Governor's daughter,
wearing a boa, was sitting in the front seat, while the Governor himself
lurked modestly behind the curtain with only his hands visible; the
orchestra was a long time tuning up; the stage curtain swayed. All the time
the audience were coming in and taking their seats Gurov looked at them
eagerly.
Anna Sergeyevna, too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when
Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for
him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so
important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a
provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life
now, was his sorrow and his joy, the one happiness that he now desired for
himself, and to the sounds of the inferior orchestra, of the wretched
provincial violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.
A young man with small side-whiskers, tall and stooping, came in with
Anna Sergeyevna and sat down beside her; he bent his head at every step
and seemed to be continually bowing. Most likely this was the husband
whom at Yalta, in a rush of bitter feeling, she had called a flunkey. And
there really was in his long figure, his side-whiskers, and the small bald
patch on his head, something of the flunkey's obsequiousness; his smile was
sugary, and in his buttonhole there was some badge of distinction like the
number on a waiter.
During the first interval the husband went away to smoke; she remained
alone in her stall. Gurov, who was sitting in the stalls, too, went up to her
and said in a trembling voice, with a forced smile:
"Good-evening."

She glanced at him and turned pale, then glanced again with horror,
unable to believe her eyes, and tightly gripped the fan and the lorgnette in
her hands, evidently struggling with herself not to faint. Both were silent.
She was sitting, he was standing, frightened by her confusion and not
venturing to sit down beside her. The violins and the flute began tuning up.
He felt suddenly frightened; it seemed as though all the people in the boxes
were looking at them. She got up and went quickly to the door; he followed
her, and both walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs,
and figures in legal, scholastic, and civil service uniforms, all wearing
badges, flitted before their eyes. They caught glimpses of ladies, of fur
coats hanging on pegs; the draughts blew on them, bringing a smell of stale
tobacco. And Gurov, whose heart was beating violently, thought:
"Oh, heavens! Why are these people here and this orchestra!..."
And at that instant he recalled how when he had seen Anna Sergeyevna
off at the station he had thought that everything was over and they would
never meet again. But how far they were still from the end!
On the narrow, gloomy staircase over which was written "To the
Amphitheatre," she stopped.
"How you have frightened me!" she said, breathing hard, still pale and
overwhelmed. "Oh, how you have frightened me! I am half dead. Why have
you come? Why?"
"But do understand, Anna, do understand ..." he said hastily in a low
voice. "I entreat you to understand...."
She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love; she looked at him
intently, to keep his features more distinctly in her memory.
"I am so unhappy," she went on, not heeding him. "I have thought of
nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted
to forget, to forget you; but why, oh, why, have you come?"
On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking
down, but that was nothing to Gurov; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to him, and
began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.
"What are you doing, what are you doing!" she cried in horror, pushing
him away. "We are mad. Go away to-day; go away at once.... I beseech you
by all that is sacred, I implore you.... There are people coming this way!"
Some one was coming up the stairs.

"You must go away," Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. "Do you
hear, Dmitri Dmitritch? I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never
been happy; I am miserable now, and I never, never shall be happy, never!
Don't make me suffer still more! I swear I'll come to Moscow. But now let
us part. My precious, good, dear one, we must part!"
She pressed his hand and began rapidly going downstairs, looking round
at him, and from her eyes he could see that she really was unhappy. Gurov
stood for a little while, listened, then, when all sound had died away, he
found his coat and left the theatre.

IV
And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once in two
or three months she left S——, telling her husband that she was going to
consult a doctor about an internal complaint—and her husband believed her,
and did not believe her. In Moscow she stayed at the Slaviansky Bazaar
hotel, and at once sent a man in a red cap to Gurov. Gurov went to see her,
and no one in Moscow knew of it.
Once he was going to see her in this way on a winter morning (the
messenger had come the evening before when he was out). With him
walked his daughter, whom he wanted to take to school: it was on the way.
Snow was falling in big wet flakes.
"It's three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing," said
Gurov to his daughter. "The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is
quite a different temperature at a greater height in the atmosphere."
"And why are there no thunderstorms in the winter, father?"
He explained that, too. He talked, thinking all the while that he was
going to see her, and no living soul knew of it, and probably never would
know. He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to
know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of
his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret.
And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of
circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him,
everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything
that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that
was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—

such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his
"lower race," his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that
was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw,
and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under
the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on
secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so
nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
After leaving his daughter at school, Gurov went on to the Slaviansky
Bazaar. He took off his fur coat below, went upstairs, and softly knocked at
the door. Anna Sergeyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, exhausted by
the journey and the suspense, had been expecting him since the evening
before. She was pale; she looked at him, and did not smile, and he had
hardly come in when she fell on his breast. Their kiss was slow and
prolonged, as though they had not met for two years.
"Well, how are you getting on there?" he asked. "What news?"
"Wait; I'll tell you directly.... I can't talk."
She could not speak; she was crying. She turned away from him, and
pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Let her have her cry out. I'll sit down and wait," he thought, and he sat
down in an arm-chair.
Then he rang and asked for tea to be brought him, and while he drank his
tea she remained standing at the window with her back to him. She was
crying from emotion, from the miserable consciousness that their life was
so hard for them; they could only meet in secret, hiding themselves from
people, like thieves! Was not their life shattered?
"Come, do stop!" he said.
It was evident to him that this love of theirs would not soon be over, that
he could not see the end of it. Anna Sergeyevna grew more and more
attached to him. She adored him, and it was unthinkable to say to her that it
was bound to have an end some day; besides, she would not have believed
it!
He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to say something
affectionate and cheering, and at that moment he saw himself in the
looking-glass.

His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it seemed strange to
him that he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few
years. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering.
He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably
already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own. Why did she
love him so much? He always seemed to women different from what he
was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their
imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and
afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.
And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he had made
their acquaintance, got on with them, parted, but he had never once loved; it
was anything you like, but not love.
And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in
love—for the first time in his life.
Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and
akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate
itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why
he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of
birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave
each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave
everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them
both.
In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with any
arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared for
arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and
tender....
"Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You've had your cry; that's enough....
Let us talk now, let us think of some plan."
Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to
avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns
and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from
this intolerable bondage?
"How? How?" he asked, clutching his head. "How?"
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found,
and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of

them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most
complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

A DOCTOR'S VISIT
THE Professor received a telegram from the Lyalikovs' factory; he was
asked to come as quickly as possible. The daughter of some Madame
Lyalikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was ill, and that was all that
one could make out of the long, incoherent telegram. And the Professor did
not go himself, but sent instead his assistant, Korolyov.
It was two stations from Moscow, and there was a drive of three miles
from the station. A carriage with three horses had been sent to the station to
meet Korolyov; the coachman wore a hat with a peacock's feather on it, and
answered every question in a loud voice like a soldier: "No, sir!" "Certainly,
sir!"
It was Saturday evening; the sun was setting, the workpeople were
coming in crowds from the factory to the station, and they bowed to the
carriage in which Korolyov was driving. And he was charmed with the
evening, the farmhouses and villas on the road, and the birch-trees, and the
quiet atmosphere all around, when the fields and woods and the sun seemed
preparing, like the workpeople now on the eve of the holiday, to rest, and
perhaps to pray....
He was born and had grown up in Moscow; he did not know the country,
and he had never taken any interest in factories, or been inside one, but he
had happened to read about factories, and had been in the houses of
manufacturers and had talked to them; and whenever he saw a factory far or
near, he always thought how quiet and peaceable it was outside, but within
there was always sure to be impenetrable ignorance and dull egoism on the
side of the owners, wearisome, unhealthy toil on the side of the workpeople,
squabbling, vermin, vodka. And now when the workpeople timidly and
respectfully made way for the carriage, in their faces, their caps, their walk,
he read physical impurity, drunkenness, nervous exhaustion, bewilderment.
They drove in at the factory gates. On each side he caught glimpses of
the little houses of workpeople, of the faces of women, of quilts and linen
on the railings. "Look out!" shouted the coachman, not pulling up the
horses. It was a wide courtyard without grass, with five immense blocks of
buildings with tall chimneys a little distance one from another, warehouses

and barracks, and over everything a sort of grey powder as though from
dust. Here and there, like oases in the desert, there were pitiful gardens, and
the green and red roofs of the houses in which the managers and clerks
lived. The coachman suddenly pulled up the horses, and the carriage
stopped at the house, which had been newly painted grey; here was a flower
garden, with a lilac bush covered with dust, and on the yellow steps at the
front door there was a strong smell of paint.
"Please come in, doctor," said women's voices in the passage and the
entry, and at the same time he heard sighs and whisperings. "Pray walk in....
We've been expecting you so long ... we're in real trouble. Here, this way."
Madame Lyalikov—a stout elderly lady wearing a black silk dress with
fashionable sleeves, but, judging from her face, a simple uneducated
woman—looked at the doctor in a flutter, and could not bring herself to
hold out her hand to him; she did not dare. Beside her stood a personage
with short hair and a pince-nez; she was wearing a blouse of many colours,
and was very thin and no longer young. The servants called her Christina
Dmitryevna, and Korolyov guessed that this was the governess. Probably,
as the person of most education in the house, she had been charged to meet
and receive the doctor, for she began immediately, in great haste, stating the
causes of the illness, giving trivial and tiresome details, but without saying
who was ill or what was the matter.
The doctor and the governess were sitting talking while the lady of the
house stood motionless at the door, waiting. From the conversation
Korolyov learned that the patient was Madame Lyalikov's only daughter
and heiress, a girl of twenty, called Liza; she had been ill for a long time,
and had consulted various doctors, and the previous night she had suffered
till morning from such violent palpitations of the heart, that no one in the
house had slept, and they had been afraid she might die.
"She has been, one may say, ailing from a child," said Christina
Dmitryevna in a sing-song voice, continually wiping her lips with her hand.
"The doctors say it is nerves; when she was a little girl she was scrofulous,
and the doctors drove it inwards, so I think it may be due to that."
They went to see the invalid. Fully grown up, big and tall, but ugly like
her mother, with the same little eyes and disproportionate breadth of the
lower part of the face, lying with her hair in disorder, muffled up to the
chin, she made upon Korolyov at the first minute the impression of a poor,

destitute creature, sheltered and cared for here out of charity, and he could
hardly believe that this was the heiress of the five huge buildings.
"I am the doctor come to see you," said Korolyov. "Good evening."
He mentioned his name and pressed her hand, a large, cold, ugly hand;
she sat up, and, evidently accustomed to doctors, let herself be sounded,
without showing the least concern that her shoulders and chest were
uncovered.
"I have palpitations of the heart," she said, "It was so awful all night.... I
almost died of fright! Do give me something."
"I will, I will; don't worry yourself."
Korolyov examined her and shrugged his shoulders.
"The heart is all right," he said; "it's all going on satisfactorily;
everything is in good order. Your nerves must have been playing pranks a
little, but that's so common. The attack is over by now, one must suppose;
lie down and go to sleep."
At that moment a lamp was brought into the bed-room. The patient
screwed up her eyes at the light, then suddenly put her hands to her head
and broke into sobs. And the impression of a destitute, ugly creature
vanished, and Korolyov no longer noticed the little eyes or the heavy
development of the lower part of the face. He saw a soft, suffering
expression which was intelligent and touching: she seemed to him
altogether graceful, feminine, and simple; and he longed to soothe her, not
with drugs, not with advice, but with simple, kindly words. Her mother put
her arms round her head and hugged her. What despair, what grief was in
the old woman's face! She, her mother, had reared her and brought her up,
spared nothing, and devoted her whole life to having her daughter taught
French, dancing, music: had engaged a dozen teachers for her; had
consulted the best doctors, kept a governess. And now she could not make
out the reason of these tears, why there was all this misery, she could not
understand, and was bewildered; and she had a guilty, agitated, despairing
expression, as though she had omitted something very important, had left
something undone, had neglected to call in somebody—and whom, she did
not know.
"Lizanka, you are crying again ... again," she said, hugging her daughter
to her. "My own, my darling, my child, tell me what it is! Have pity on me!
Tell me."

Both wept bitterly. Korolyov sat down on the side of the bed and took
Liza's hand.
"Come, give over; it's no use crying," he said kindly. "Why, there is
nothing in the world that is worth those tears. Come, we won't cry; that's no
good...."
And inwardly he thought:
"It's high time she was married...."
"Our doctor at the factory gave her kalibromati," said the governess, "but
I notice it only makes her worse. I should have thought that if she is given
anything for the heart it ought to be drops.... I forget the name....
Convallaria, isn't it?"
And there followed all sorts of details. She interrupted the doctor,
preventing his speaking, and there was a look of effort on her face, as
though she supposed that, as the woman of most education in the house, she
was duty bound to keep up a conversation with the doctor, and on no other
subject but medicine.
Korolyov felt bored.
"I find nothing special the matter," he said, addressing the mother as he
went out of the bedroom. "If your daughter is being attended by the factory
doctor, let him go on attending her. The treatment so far has been perfectly
correct, and I see no reason for changing your doctor. Why change? It's
such an ordinary trouble; there's nothing seriously wrong."
He spoke deliberately as he put on his gloves, while Madame Lyalikov
stood without moving, and looked at him with her tearful eyes.
"I have half an hour to catch the ten o'clock train," he said. "I hope I am
not too late."
"And can't you stay?" she asked, and tears trickled down her cheeks
again. "I am ashamed to trouble you, but if you would be so good.... For
God's sake," she went on in an undertone, glancing towards the door, "do
stay to-night with us! She is all I have ... my only daughter.... She frightened
me last night; I can't get over it.... Don't go away, for goodness' sake!..."
He wanted to tell her that he had a great deal of work in Moscow, that
his family were expecting him home; it was disagreeable to him to spend
the evening and the whole night in a strange house quite needlessly; but he

looked at her face, heaved a sigh, and began taking off his gloves without a
word.
All the lamps and candles were lighted in his honour in the drawing-
room and the dining-room. He sat down at the piano and began turning over
the music. Then he looked at the pictures on the walls, at the portraits. The
pictures, oil-paintings in gold frames, were views of the Crimea—a stormy
sea with a ship, a Catholic monk with a wineglass; they were all dull,
smooth daubs, with no trace of talent in them. There was not a single good-
looking face among the portraits, nothing but broad cheekbones and
astonished-looking eyes. Lyalikov, Liza's father, had a low forehead and a
self-satisfied expression; his uniform sat like a sack on his bulky plebeian
figure; on his breast was a medal and a Red Cross Badge. There was little
sign of culture, and the luxury was senseless and haphazard, and was as ill
fitting as that uniform. The floors irritated him with their brilliant polish, the
lustres on the chandelier irritated him, and he was reminded for some
reason of the story of the merchant who used to go to the baths with a
medal on his neck....
He heard a whispering in the entry; some one was softly snoring. And
suddenly from outside came harsh, abrupt, metallic sounds, such as
Korolyov had never heard before, and which he did not understand now;
they roused strange, unpleasant echoes in his soul.
"I believe nothing would induce me to remain here to live ..." he thought,
and went back to the music-books again.
"Doctor, please come to supper!" the governess called him in a low
voice.
He went into supper. The table was large and laid with a vast number of
dishes and wines, but there were only two to supper: himself and Christina
Dmitryevna. She drank Madeira, ate rapidly, and talked, looking at him
through her pince-nez:
"Our workpeople are very contented. We have performances at the
factory every winter; the workpeople act themselves. They have lectures
with a magic lantern, a splendid tea-room, and everything they want. They
are very much attached to us, and when they heard that Lizanka was worse
they had a service sung for her. Though they have no education, they have
their feelings, too."
"It looks as though you have no man in the house at all," said Korolyov.

"Not one. Pyotr Nikanoritch died a year and a half ago, and left us alone.
And so there are the three of us. In the summer we live here, and in winter
we live in Moscow, in Polianka. I have been living with them for eleven
years—as one of the family."
At supper they served sterlet, chicken rissoles, and stewed fruit; the
wines were expensive French wines.
"Please don't stand on ceremony, doctor," said Christina Dmitryevna,
eating and wiping her mouth with her fist, and it was evident she found her
life here exceedingly pleasant. "Please have some more."
After supper the doctor was shown to his room, where a bed had been
made up for him, but he did not feel sleepy. The room was stuffy and it
smelt of paint; he put on his coat and went out.
It was cool in the open air; there was already a glimmer of dawn, and all
the five blocks of buildings, with their tall chimneys, barracks, and
warehouses, were distinctly outlined against the damp air. As it was a
holiday, they were not working, and the windows were dark, and in only
one of the buildings was there a furnace burning; two windows were
crimson, and fire mixed with smoke came from time to time from the
chimney. Far away beyond the yard the frogs were croaking and the
nightingales singing.
Looking at the factory buildings and the barracks, where the workpeople
were asleep, he thought again what he always thought when he saw a
factory. They may have performances for the workpeople, magic lanterns,
factory doctors, and improvements of all sorts, but, all the same, the
workpeople he had met that day on his way from the station did not look in
any way different from those he had known long ago in his childhood,
before there were factory performances and improvements. As a doctor
accustomed to judging correctly of chronic complaints, the radical cause of
which was incomprehensible and incurable, he looked upon factories as
something baffling, the cause of which also was obscure and not removable,
and all the improvements in the life of the factory hands he looked upon not
as superfluous, but as comparable with the treatment of incurable illnesses.
"There is something baffling in it, of course ..." he thought, looking at
the crimson windows. "Fifteen hundred or two thousand workpeople are
working without rest in unhealthy surroundings, making bad cotton goods,
living on the verge of starvation, and only waking from this nightmare at

rare intervals in the tavern; a hundred people act as overseers, and the
whole life of that hundred is spent in imposing fines, in abuse, in injustice,
and only two or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don't
work at all, and despise the wretched cotton. But what are the profits, and
how do they enjoy them? Madame Lyalikov and her daughter are unhappy
—it makes one wretched to look at them; the only one who enjoys her life
is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged maiden lady in pince-nez.
And so it appears that all these five blocks of buildings are at work, and
inferior cotton is sold in the Eastern markets, simply that Christina
Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink Madeira."
Suddenly there came a strange noise, the same sound Korolyov had
heard before supper. Some one was striking on a sheet of metal near one of
the buildings; he struck a note, and then at once checked the vibrations, so
that short, abrupt, discordant sounds were produced, rather like "Dair ... dair
... dair...." Then there was half a minute of stillness, and from another
building there came sounds equally abrupt and unpleasant, lower bass
notes: "Drin ... drin ... drin ..." Eleven times. Evidently it was the watchman
striking the hour. Near the third building he heard: "Zhuk ... zhuk ...
zhuk...." And so near all the buildings, and then behind the barracks and
beyond the gates. And in the stillness of the night it seemed as though these
sounds were uttered by a monster with crimson eyes—the devil himself,
who controlled the owners and the work-people alike, and was deceiving
both.
Korolyov went out of the yard into the open country.
"Who goes there?" some one called to him at the gates in an abrupt
voice.
"It's just like being in prison," he thought, and made no answer.
Here the nightingales and the frogs could be heard more distinctly, and
one could feel it was a night in May. From the station came the noise of a
train; somewhere in the distance drowsy cocks were crowing; but, all the
same, the night was still, the world was sleeping tranquilly. In a field not far
from the factory there could be seen the framework of a house and heaps of
building material.
Korolyov sat down on the planks and went on thinking.
"The only person who feels happy here is the governess, and the factory
hands are working for her gratification. But that's only apparent: she is only

the figurehead. The real person, for whom everything is being done, is the
devil."
And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe, and he
looked round at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It seemed
to him that out of those crimson eyes the devil himself was looking at him
—that unknown force that had created the mutual relation of the strong and
the weak, that coarse blunder which one could never correct. The strong
must hinder the weak from living—such was the law of Nature; but only in
a newspaper article or in a school book was that intelligible and easily
accepted. In the hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of
trivialities out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a
law, but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both
equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting to some
directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from man.
So thought Korolyov, sitting on the planks, and little by little he was
possessed by a feeling that this unknown and mysterious force was really
close by and looking at him. Meanwhile the east was growing paler, time
passed rapidly; when there was not a soul anywhere near, as though
everything were dead, the five buildings and their chimneys against the
grey background of the dawn had a peculiar look—not the same as by day;
one forgot altogether that inside there were steam motors, electricity,
telephones, and kept thinking of lake-dwellings, of the Stone Age, feeling
the presence of a crude, unconscious force....
And again there came the sound: "Dair ... dair ... dair ... dair ..." twelve
times. Then there was stillness, stillness for half a minute, and at the other
end of the yard there rang out.
"Drin ... drin ... drin...."
"Horribly disagreeable," thought Korolyov.
"Zhuk ... zhuk ..." there resounded from a third place, abruptly, sharply,
as though with annoyance—"Zhuk ... zhuk...."
And it took four minutes to strike twelve. Then there was a hush; and
again it seemed as though everything were dead.
Korolyov sat a little longer, then went to the house, but sat up for a good
while longer. In the adjoining rooms there was whispering, there was a
sound of shuffling slippers and bare feet.
"Is she having another attack?" thought Korolyov.

He went out to have a look at the patient. By now it was quite light in the
rooms, and a faint glimmer of sunlight, piercing through the morning mist,
quivered on the floor and on the wall of the drawing-room. The door of
Liza's room was open, and she was sitting in a low chair beside her bed,
with her hair down, wearing a dressing-gown and wrapped in a shawl. The
blinds were down on the windows.
"How do you feel?" asked Korolyov.
"Well, thank you."
He touched her pulse, then straightened her hair, that had fallen over her
forehead.
"You are not asleep," he said. "It's beautiful weather outside. It's spring.
The nightingales are singing, and you sit in the dark and think of
something."
She listened and looked into his face; her eyes were sorrowful and
intelligent, and it was evident she wanted to say something to him.
"Does this happen to you often?" he said.
She moved her lips, and answered:
"Often, I feel wretched almost every night."
At that moment the watchman in the yard began striking two o'clock.
They heard: "Dair ... dair ..." and she shuddered.
"Do those knockings worry you?" he asked.
"I don't know. Everything here worries me," she answered, and
pondered. "Everything worries me. I hear sympathy in your voice; it
seemed to me as soon as I saw you that I could tell you all about it."
"Tell me, I beg you."
"I want to tell you of my opinion. It seems to me that I have no illness,
but that I am weary and frightened, because it is bound to be so and cannot
be otherwise. Even the healthiest person can't help being uneasy if, for
instance, a robber is moving about under his window. I am constantly being
doctored," she went on, looking at her knees, and she gave a shy smile. "I
am very grateful, of course, and I do not deny that the treatment is a benefit;
but I should like to talk, not with a doctor, but with some intimate friend
who would understand me and would convince me that I was right or
wrong."
"Have you no friends?" asked Korolyov.

"I am lonely. I have a mother; I love her, but, all the same, I am lonely.
That's how it happens to be.... Lonely people read a great deal, but say little
and hear little. Life for them is mysterious; they are mystics and often see
the devil where he is not. Lermontov's Tamara was lonely and she saw the
devil."
"Do you read a great deal?"
"Yes. You see, my whole time is free from morning till night. I read by
day, and by night my head is empty; instead of thoughts there are shadows
in it."
"Do you see anything at night?" asked Korolyov.
"No, but I feel...."
She smiled again, raised her eyes to the doctor, and looked at him so
sorrowfully, so intelligently; and it seemed to him that she trusted him, and
that she wanted to speak frankly to him, and that she thought the same as he
did. But she was silent, perhaps waiting for him to speak.
And he knew what to say to her. It was clear to him that she needed as
quickly as possible to give up the five buildings and the million if she had it
—to leave that devil that looked out at night; it was clear to him, too, that
she thought so herself, and was only waiting for some one she trusted to
confirm her.
But he did not know how to say it. How? One is shy of asking men
under sentence what they have been sentenced for; and in the same way it is
awkward to ask very rich people what they want so much money for, why
they make such a poor use of their wealth, why they don't give it up, even
when they see in it their unhappiness; and if they begin a conversation
about it themselves, it is usually embarrassing, awkward, and long.
"How is one to say it?" Korolyov wondered. "And is it necessary to
speak?"
And he said what he meant in a roundabout way:
"You in the position of a factory owner and a wealthy heiress are
dissatisfied; you don't believe in your right to it; and here now you can't
sleep. That, of course, is better than if you were satisfied, slept soundly, and
thought everything was satisfactory. Your sleeplessness does you credit; in
any case, it is a good sign. In reality, such a conversation as this between us
now would have been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did not

talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are restless, but talk a
great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we are right or not. For
our children or grandchildren that question—whether they are right or not
—will have been settled. Things will be clearer for them than for us. Life
will be good in fifty years' time; it's only a pity we shall not last out till
then. It would be interesting to have a peep at it."
"What will our children and grandchildren do?" asked Liza.
"I don't know.... I suppose they will throw it all up and go away."
"Go where?"
"Where?... Why, where they like," said Korolyov; and he laughed.
"There are lots of places a good, intelligent person can go to."
He glanced at his watch.
"The sun has risen, though," he said. "It is time you were asleep. Undress
and sleep soundly. Very glad to have made your acquaintance," he went on,
pressing her hand. "You are a good, interesting woman. Good-night!"
He went to his room and went to bed.
In the morning when the carriage was brought round they all came out
on to the steps to see him off. Liza, pale and exhausted, was in a white dress
as though for a holiday, with a flower in her hair; she looked at him, as
yesterday, sorrowfully and intelligently, smiled and talked, and all with an
expression as though she wanted to tell him something special, important—
him alone. They could hear the larks trilling and the church bells pealing.
The windows in the factory buildings were sparkling gaily, and, driving
across the yard and afterwards along the road to the station, Korolyov
thought neither of the workpeople nor of lake dwellings, nor of the devil,
but thought of the time, perhaps close at hand, when life would be as bright
and joyous as that still Sunday morning; and he thought how pleasant it was
on such a morning in the spring to drive with three horses in a good
carriage, and to bask in the sunshine.

AN UPHEAVAL
MASHENKA PAVLETSKY, a young girl who had only just finished her studies
at a boarding school, returning from a walk to the house of the Kushkins,
with whom she was living as a governess, found the household in a terrible
turmoil. Mihailo, the porter who opened the door to her, was excited and
red as a crab.
Loud voices were heard from upstairs.
"Madame Kushkin is in a fit, most likely, or else she has quarrelled with
her husband," thought Mashenka.
In the hall and in the corridor she met maid-servants. One of them was
crying. Then Mashenka saw, running out of her room, the master of the
house himself, Nikolay Sergeitch, a little man with a flabby face and a bald
head, though he was not old. He was red in the face and twitching all over.
He passed the governess without noticing her, and throwing up his arms,
exclaimed:
"Oh, how horrible it is! How tactless! How stupid! How barbarous!
Abominable!"
Mashenka went into her room, and then, for the first time in her life, it
was her lot to experience in all its acuteness the feeling that is so familiar to
persons in dependent positions, who eat the bread of the rich and powerful,
and cannot speak their minds. There was a search going on in her room. The
lady of the house, Fedosya Vassilyevna, a stout, broad-shouldered, uncouth
woman with thick black eyebrows, a faintly perceptible moustache, and red
hands, who was exactly like a plain, illiterate cook in face and manners,
was standing, without her cap on, at the table, putting back into Mashenka's
workbag balls of wool, scraps of materials, and bits of paper.... Evidently
the governess's arrival took her by surprise, since, on looking round and
seeing the girl's pale and astonished face, she was a little taken aback, and
muttered:
"Pardon. I ... I upset it accidentally.... My sleeve caught in it ..."
And saying something more, Madame Kushkin rustled her long skirts
and went out. Mashenka looked round her room with wondering eyes, and,
unable to understand it, not knowing what to think, shrugged her shoulders,

and turned cold with dismay. What had Fedosya Vassilyevna been looking
for in her work-bag? If she really had, as she said, caught her sleeve in it
and upset everything, why had Nikolay Sergeitch dashed out of her room so
excited and red in the face? Why was one drawer of the table pulled out a
little way? The money-box, in which the governess put away ten kopeck
pieces and old stamps, was open. They had opened it, but did not know how
to shut it, though they had scratched the lock all over. The whatnot with her
books on it, the things on the table, the bed—all bore fresh traces of a
search. Her linen-basket, too. The linen had been carefully folded, but it
was not in the same order as Mashenka had left it when she went out. So the
search had been thorough, most thorough. But what was it for? Why? What
had happened? Mashenka remembered the excited porter, the general
turmoil which was still going on, the weeping servant-girl; had it not all
some connection with the search that had just been made in her room? Was
not she mixed up in something dreadful? Mashenka turned pale, and feeling
cold all over, sank on to her linen-basket.
A maid-servant came into the room.
"Liza, you don't know why they have been rummaging in my room?" the
governess asked her.
"Mistress has lost a brooch worth two thousand," said Liza.
"Yes, but why have they been rummaging in my room?"
"They've been searching every one, miss. They've searched all my
things, too. They stripped us all naked and searched us.... God knows, miss,
I never went near her toilet-table, let alone touching the brooch. I shall say
the same at the police-station."
"But ... why have they been rummaging here?" the governess still
wondered.
"A brooch has been stolen, I tell you. The mistress has been rummaging
in everything with her own hands. She even searched Mihailo, the porter,
herself. It's a perfect disgrace! Nikolay Sergeitch simply looks on and
cackles like a hen. But you've no need to tremble like that, miss. They
found nothing here. You've nothing to be afraid of if you didn't take the
brooch."
"But, Liza, it's vile ... it's insulting," said Mashenka, breathless with
indignation. "It's so mean, so low! What right had she to suspect me and to
rummage in my things?"

"You are living with strangers, miss," sighed Liza. "Though you are a
young lady, still you are ... as it were ... a servant.... It's not like living with
your papa and mamma."
Mashenka threw herself on the bed and sobbed bitterly. Never in her life
had she been subjected to such an outrage, never had she been so deeply
insulted.... She, well-educated, refined, the daughter of a teacher, was
suspected of theft; she had been searched like a street-walker! She could not
imagine a greater insult. And to this feeling of resentment was added an
oppressive dread of what would come next. All sorts of absurd ideas came
into her mind. If they could suspect her of theft, then they might arrest her,
strip her naked, and search her, then lead her through the street with an
escort of soldiers, cast her into a cold, dark cell with mice and woodlice,
exactly like the dungeon in which Princess Tarakanov was imprisoned. Who
would stand up for her? Her parents lived far away in the provinces; they
had not the money to come to her. In the capital she was as solitary as in a
desert, without friends or kindred. They could do what they liked with her.
"I will go to all the courts and all the lawyers," Mashenka thought,
trembling. "I will explain to them, I will take an oath.... They will believe
that I could not be a thief!"
Mashenka remembered that under the sheets in her basket she had some
sweetmeats, which, following the habits of her schooldays, she had put in
her pocket at dinner and carried off to her room. She felt hot all over, and
was ashamed at the thought that her little secret was known to the lady of
the house; and all this terror, shame, resentment, brought on an attack of
palpitation of the heart, which set up a throbbing in her temples, in her
heart, and deep down in her stomach.
"Dinner is ready," the servant summoned Mashenka.
"Shall I go, or not?"
Mashenka brushed her hair, wiped her face with a wet towel, and went
into the dining-room. There they had already begun dinner. At one end of
the table sat Fedosya Vassilyevna with a stupid, solemn, serious face; at the
other end Nikolay Sergeitch. At the sides there were the visitors and the
children. The dishes were handed by two footmen in swallowtails and white
gloves. Every one knew that there was an upset in the house, that Madame
Kushkin was in trouble, and every one was silent. Nothing was heard but
the sound of munching and the rattle of spoons on the plates.

The lady of the house, herself, was the first to speak.
"What is the third course?" she asked the footman in a weary, injured
voice.
"Esturgeon à la russe," answered the footman.
"I ordered that, Fenya," Nikolay Sergeitch hastened to observe. "I
wanted some fish. If you don't like it, ma chère, don't let them serve it. I just
ordered it...."
Fedosya Vassilyevna did not like dishes that she had not ordered herself,
and now her eyes filled with tears.
"Come, don't let us agitate ourselves," Mamikov, her household doctor,
observed in a honeyed voice, just touching her arm, with a smile as
honeyed. "We are nervous enough as it is. Let us forget the brooch! Health
is worth more than two thousand roubles!"
"It's not the two thousand I regret," answered the lady, and a big tear
rolled down her cheek. "It's the fact itself that revolts me! I cannot put up
with thieves in my house. I don't regret it—I regret nothing; but to steal
from me is such ingratitude! That's how they repay me for my kindness...."
They all looked into their plates, but Mashenka fancied after the lady's
words that every one was looking at her. A lump rose in her throat; she
began crying and put her handkerchief to her lips.
"Pardon," she muttered. "I can't help it. My head aches. I'll go away."
And she got up from the table, scraping her chair awkwardly, and went
out quickly, still more overcome with confusion.
"It's beyond everything!" said Nikolay Sergeitch, frowning. "What need
was there to search her room? How out of place it was!"
"I don't say she took the brooch," said Fedosya Vassilyevna, "but can
you answer for her? To tell the truth, I haven't much confidence in these
learned paupers."
"It really was unsuitable, Fenya.... Excuse me, Fenya, but you've no kind
of legal right to make a search."
"I know nothing about your laws. All I know is that I've lost my brooch.
And I will find the brooch!" She brought her fork down on the plate with a
clatter, and her eyes flashed angrily. "And you eat your dinner, and don't
interfere in what doesn't concern you!"

Nikolay Sergeitch dropped his eyes mildly and sighed. Meanwhile
Mashenka, reaching her room, flung herself on her bed. She felt now
neither alarm nor shame, but she felt an intense longing to go and slap the
cheeks of this hard, arrogant, dull-witted, prosperous woman.
Lying on her bed she breathed into her pillow and dreamed of how nice
it would be to go and buy the most expensive brooch and fling it into the
face of this bullying woman. If only it were God's will that Fedosya
Vassilyevna should come to ruin and wander about begging, and should
taste all the horrors of poverty and dependence, and that Mashenka, whom
she had insulted, might give her alms! Oh, if only she could come in for a
big fortune, could buy a carriage, and could drive noisily past the windows
so as to be envied by that woman!
But all these were only dreams, in reality there was only one thing left to
do—to get away as quickly as possible, not to stay another hour in this
place. It was true it was terrible to lose her place, to go back to her parents,
who had nothing; but what could she do? Mashenka could not bear the sight
of the lady of the house nor of her little room; she felt stifled and wretched
here. She was so disgusted with Fedosya Vassilyevna, who was so obsessed
by her illnesses and her supposed aristocratic rank, that everything in the
world seemed to have become coarse and unattractive because this woman
was living in it. Mashenka jumped up from the bed and began packing.
"May I come in?" asked Nikolay Sergeitch at the door; he had come up
noiselessly to the door, and spoke in a soft, subdued voice. "May I?"
"Come in."
He came in and stood still near the door. His eyes looked dim and his red
little nose was shiny. After dinner he used to drink beer, and the fact was
perceptible in his walk, in his feeble, flabby hands.
"What's this?" he asked, pointing to the basket.
"I am packing. Forgive me, Nikolay Sergeitch, but I cannot remain in
your house. I feel deeply insulted by this search!"
"I understand.... Only you are wrong to go. Why should you? They've
searched your things, but you ... what does it matter to you? You will be
none the worse for it."
Mashenka was silent and went on packing. Nikolay Sergeitch pinched
his moustache, as though wondering what he should say next, and went on
in an ingratiating voice:

"I understand, of course, but you must make allowances. You know my
wife is nervous, headstrong; you mustn't judge her too harshly."
Mashenka did not speak.
"If you are so offended," Nikolay Sergeitch went on, "well, if you like,
I'm ready to apologise. I ask your pardon."
Mashenka made no answer, but only bent lower over her box. This
exhausted, irresolute man was of absolutely no significance in the
household. He stood in the pitiful position of a dependent and hanger-on,
even with the servants, and his apology meant nothing either.
"H'm!... You say nothing! That's not enough for you. In that case, I will
apologise for my wife. In my wife's name.... She behaved tactlessly, I admit
it as a gentleman...."
Nikolay Sergeitch walked about the room, heaved a sigh, and went on:
"Then you want me to have it rankling here, under my heart.... You want
my conscience to torment me...."
"I know it's not your fault, Nikolay Sergeitch," said Mashenka, looking
him full in the face with her big tear-stained eyes. "Why should you worry
yourself?"
"Of course, no.... But still, don't you ... go away. I entreat you."
Mashenka shook her head. Nikolay Sergeitch stopped at the window and
drummed on the pane with his finger-tips.
"Such misunderstandings are simply torture to me," he said. "Why, do
you want me to go down on my knees to you, or what? Your pride is
wounded, and here you've been crying and packing up to go; but I have
pride, too, and you do not spare it! Or do you want me to tell you what I
would not tell as Confession? Do you? Listen; you want me to tell you what
I won't tell the priest on my deathbed?"
Mashenka made no answer.
"I took my wife's brooch," Nikolay Sergeitch said quickly. "Is that
enough now? Are you satisfied? Yes, I ... took it.... But, of course, I count
on your discretion.... For God's sake, not a word, not half a hint to any one!"
Mashenka, amazed and frightened, went on packing; she snatched her
things, crumpled them up, and thrust them anyhow into the box and the
basket. Now, after this candid avowal on the part of Nikolay Sergeitch, she

could not remain another minute, and could not understand how she could
have gone on living in the house before.
"And it's nothing to wonder at," Nikolay Sergeitch went on after a pause.
"It's an everyday story! I need money, and she ... won't give it to me. It was
my father's money that bought this house and everything, you know! It's all
mine, and the brooch belonged to my mother, and ... it's all mine! And she
took it, took possession of everything.... I can't go to law with her, you'll
admit.... I beg you most earnestly, overlook it ... stay on. Tout comprendre,
tout pardonner. Will you stay?"
"No!" said Mashenka resolutely, beginning to tremble. "Let me alone, I
entreat you!"
"Well, God bless you!" sighed Nikolay Sergeitch, sitting down on the
stool near the box. "I must own I like people who still can feel resentment,
contempt, and so on. I could sit here forever and look at your indignant
face.... So you won't stay, then? I understand.... It's bound to be so ... Yes, of
course.... It's all right for you, but for me—wo-o-o-o!... I can't stir a step out
of this cellar. I'd go off to one of our estates, but in every one of them there
are some of my wife's rascals ... stewards, experts, damn them all! They
mortgage and remortgage.... You mustn't catch fish, must keep off the grass,
mustn't break the trees."
"Nikolay Sergeitch!" his wife's voice called from the drawing-room.
"Agnia, call your master!"
"Then you won't stay?" asked Nikolay Sergeitch, getting up quickly and
going towards the door. "You might as well stay, really. In the evenings I
could come and have a talk with you. Eh? Stay! If you go, there won't be a
human face left in the house. It's awful!"
Nikolay Sergeitch's pale, exhausted face besought her, but Mashenka
shook her head, and with a wave of his hand he went out.
Half an hour later she was on her way.

IONITCH

I
WHEN visitors to the provincial town S—— complained of the dreariness
and monotony of life, the inhabitants of the town, as though defending
themselves, declared that it was very nice in S——, that there was a library,
a theatre, a club; that they had balls; and, finally, that there were clever,
agreeable, and interesting families with whom one could make
acquaintance. And they used to point to the family of the Turkins as the
most highly cultivated and talented.
This family lived in their own house in the principal street, near the
Governor's. Ivan Petrovitch Turkin himself—a stout, handsome, dark man
with whiskers—used to get up amateur performances for benevolent
objects, and used to take the part of an elderly general and cough very
amusingly. He knew a number of anecdotes, charades, proverbs, and was
fond of being humorous and witty, and he always wore an expression from
which it was impossible to tell whether he were joking or in earnest. His
wife, Vera Iosifovna—a thin, nice-looking lady who wore a pince-nez—
used to write novels and stories, and was very fond of reading them aloud to
her visitors. The daughter, Ekaterina Ivanovna, a young girl, used to play on
the piano. In short, every member of the family had a special talent. The
Turkins welcomed visitors, and good-humouredly displayed their talents
with genuine simplicity. Their stone house was roomy and cool in summer;
half of the windows looked into a shady old garden, where nightingales
used to sing in the spring. When there were visitors in the house, there was
a clatter of knives in the kitchen and a smell of fried onions in the yard—
and that was always a sure sign of a plentiful and savoury supper to follow.
And as soon as Dmitri Ionitch Startsev was appointed the district doctor,
and took up his abode at Dyalizh, six miles from S——, he, too, was told
that as a cultivated man it was essential for him to make the acquaintance of
the Turkins. In the winter he was introduced to Ivan Petrovitch in the street;
they talked about the weather, about the theatre, about the cholera; an
invitation followed. On a holiday in the spring—it was Ascension Day—

after seeing his patients, Startsev set off for town in search of a little
recreation and to make some purchases. He walked in a leisurely way (he
had not yet set up his carriage), humming all the time:

"'Before I'd drunk the tears from life's goblet....'"

In town he dined, went for a walk in the gardens, then Ivan Petrovitch's
invitation came into his mind, as it were of itself, and he decided to call on
the Turkins and see what sort of people they were.
"How do you do, if you please?" said Ivan Petrovitch, meeting him on
the steps. "Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor. Come
along; I will introduce you to my better half. I tell him, Verotchka," he went
on, as he presented the doctor to his wife—"I tell him that he has no human
right to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society.
Oughtn't he, darling?"
"Sit here," said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her.
"You can dance attendance on me. My husband is jealous—he is an
Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing."
"Ah, you spoilt chicken!" Ivan Petrovitch muttered tenderly, and he
kissed her on the forehead. "You have come just in the nick of time," he
said, addressing the doctor again. "My better half has written a 'hugeous'
novel, and she is going to read it aloud to-day."
"Petit Jean," said Vera Iosifovna to her husband, "dites que l'on nous
donne du thé."
Startsev was introduced to Ekaterina Ivanovna, a girl of eighteen, very
much like her mother, thin and pretty. Her expression was still childish and
her figure was soft and slim; and her developed girlish bosom, healthy and
beautiful, was suggestive of spring, real spring.
Then they drank tea with jam, honey, and sweetmeats, and with very
nice cakes, which melted in the mouth. As the evening came on, other
visitors gradually arrived, and Ivan Petrovitch fixed his laughing eyes on
each of them and said:
"How do you do, if you please?"
Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces, and
Vera Iosifovna read her novel. It began like this: "The frost was intense...."
The windows were wide open; from the kitchen came the clatter of knives

and the smell of fried onions.... It was comfortable in the soft deep arm-
chair; the lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-
room, and at the moment on a summer evening when sounds of voices and
laughter floated in from the street and whiffs of lilac from the yard, it was
difficult to grasp that the frost was intense, and that the setting sun was
lighting with its chilly rays a solitary wayfarer on the snowy plain. Vera
Iosifovna read how a beautiful young countess founded a school, a hospital,
a library, in her village, and fell in love with a wandering artist; she read of
what never happens in real life, and yet it was pleasant to listen—it was
comfortable, and such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the
mind, one had no desire to get up.
"Not badsome ..." Ivan Petrovitch said softly.
And one of the visitors hearing, with his thoughts far away, said hardly
audibly:
"Yes ... truly...."
One hour passed, another. In the town gardens close by a band was
playing and a chorus was singing. When Vera Iosifovna shut her manuscript
book, the company was silent for five minutes, listening to "Lutchina"
being sung by the chorus, and the song gave what was not in the novel and
is in real life.
"Do you publish your stories in magazines?" Startsev asked Vera
Iosifovna.
"No," she answered. "I never publish. I write it and put it away in my
cupboard. Why publish?" she explained. "We have enough to live on."
And for some reason every one sighed.
"And now, Kitten, you play something," Ivan Petrovitch said to his
daughter.
The lid of the piano was raised and the music lying ready was opened.
Ekaterina Ivanovna sat down and banged on the piano with both hands, and
then banged again with all her might, and then again and again; her
shoulders and bosom shook. She obstinately banged on the same notes, and
it sounded as if she would not leave off until she had hammered the keys
into the piano. The drawing-room was filled with the din; everything was
resounding; the floor, the ceiling, the furniture.... Ekaterina Ivanovna was
playing a difficult passage, interesting simply on account of its difficulty,
long and monotonous, and Startsev, listening, pictured stones dropping

down a steep hill and going on dropping, and he wished they would leave
off dropping; and at the same time Ekaterina Ivanovna, rosy from the
violent exercise, strong and vigorous, with a lock of hair falling over her
forehead, attracted him very much. After the winter spent at Dyalizh among
patients and peasants, to sit in a drawing-room, to watch this young,
elegant, and, in all probability, pure creature, and to listen to these noisy,
tedious but still cultured sounds, was so pleasant, so novel....
"Well, Kitten, you have played as never before," said Ivan Petrovitch,
with tears in his eyes, when his daughter had finished and stood up. "Die,
Denis; you won't write anything better."
All flocked round her, congratulated her, expressed astonishment,
declared that it was long since they had heard such music, and she listened
in silence with a faint smile, and her whole figure was expressive of
triumph.
"Splendid, superb!"
"Splendid," said Startsev, too, carried away by the general enthusiasm.
"Where have you studied?" he asked Ekaterina Ivanovna. "At the
Conservatoire?"
"No, I am only preparing for the Conservatoire, and till now have been
working with Madame Zavlovsky."
"Have you finished at the high school here?"
"Oh, no," Vera Iosifovna answered for her, "We have teachers for her at
home; there might be bad influences at the high school or a boarding
school, you know. While a young girl is growing up, she ought to be under
no influence but her mother's."
"All the same, I'm going to the Conservatoire," said Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"No. Kitten loves her mamma. Kitten won't grieve papa and mamma."
"No, I'm going, I'm going," said Ekaterina Ivanovna, with playful
caprice and stamping her foot.
And at supper it was Ivan Petrovitch who displayed his talents. Laughing
only with his eyes, he told anecdotes, made epigrams, asked ridiculous
riddles and answered them himself, talking the whole time in his
extraordinary language, evolved in the course of prolonged practice in
witticism and evidently now become a habit: "Badsome," "Hugeous,"
"Thank you most dumbly," and so on.

But that was not all. When the guests, replete and satisfied, trooped into
the hall, looking for their coats and sticks, there bustled about them the
footman Pavlusha, or, as he was called in the family, Pava—a lad of
fourteen with shaven head and chubby cheeks.
"Come, Pava, perform!" Ivan Petrovitch said to him.
Pava struck an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic tone:
"Unhappy woman, die!"
And every one roared with laughter.
"It's entertaining," thought Startsev, as he went out into the street.
He went to a restaurant and drank some beer, then set off to walk home
to Dyalizh; he walked all the way singing:

"'Thy voice to me so languid and caressing....'"

On going to bed, he felt not the slightest fatigue after the six miles' walk.
On the contrary, he felt as though he could with pleasure have walked
another twenty.
"Not badsome," he thought, and laughed as he fell asleep.

II
Startsev kept meaning to go to the Turkins' again, but there was a great
deal of work in the hospital, and he was unable to find free time. In this way
more than a year passed in work and solitude. But one day a letter in a light
blue envelope was brought him from the town.
Vera Iosifovna had been suffering for some time from migraine, but now
since Kitten frightened her every day by saying that she was going away to
the Conservatoire, the attacks began to be more frequent. All the doctors of
the town had been at the Turkins'; at last it was the district doctor's turn.
Vera Iosifovna wrote him a touching letter in which she begged him to
come and relieve her sufferings. Startsev went, and after that he began to be
often, very often at the Turkins'.... He really did something for Vera
Iosifovna, and she was already telling all her visitors that he was a
wonderful and exceptional doctor. But it was not for the sake of her
migraine that he visited the Turkins' now....

It was a holiday. Ekaterina Ivanovna finished her long, wearisome
exercises on the piano. Then they sat a long time in the dining-room,
drinking tea, and Ivan Petrovitch told some amusing story. Then there was a
ring and he had to go into the hall to welcome a guest; Startsev took
advantage of the momentary commotion, and whispered to Ekaterina
Ivanovna in great agitation:
"For God's sake, I entreat you, don't torment me; let us go into the
garden!"
She shrugged her shoulders, as though perplexed and not knowing what
he wanted of her, but she got up and went.
"You play the piano for three or four hours," he said, following her;
"then you sit with your mother, and there is no possibility of speaking to
you. Give me a quarter of an hour at least, I beseech you."
Autumn was approaching, and it was quiet and melancholy in the old
garden; the dark leaves lay thick in the walks. It was already beginning to
get dark early.
"I haven't seen you for a whole week," Startsev went on, "and if you
only knew what suffering it is! Let us sit down. Listen to me."
They had a favourite place in the garden; a seat under an old spreading
maple. And now they sat down on this seat.
"What do you want?" said Ekaterina Ivanovna drily, in a matter-of-fact
tone.
"I have not seen you for a whole week; I have not heard you for so long.
I long passionately, I thirst for your voice. Speak."
She fascinated him by her freshness, the naïve expression of her eyes
and cheeks. Even in the way her dress hung on her, he saw something
extraordinarily charming, touching in its simplicity and naïve grace; and at
the same time, in spite of this naïveté, she seemed to him intelligent and
developed beyond her years. He could talk with her about literature, about
art, about anything he liked; could complain to her of life, of people, though
it sometimes happened in the middle of serious conversation she would
laugh inappropriately or run away into the house. Like almost all girls of
her neighbourhood, she had read a great deal (as a rule, people read very
little in S——, and at the lending library they said if it were not for the girls
and the young Jews, they might as well shut up the library). This afforded

Startsev infinite delight; he used to ask her eagerly every time what she had
been reading the last few days, and listened enthralled while she told him.
"What have you been reading this week since I saw you last?" he asked
now. "Do please tell me."
"I have been reading Pisemsky."
"What exactly?"
"'A Thousand Souls,'" answered Kitten. "And what a funny name
Pisemsky had—Alexey Feofilaktitch!"
"Where are you going?" cried Startsev in horror, as she suddenly got up
and walked towards the house. "I must talk to you; I want to explain
myself.... Stay with me just five minutes, I supplicate you!"
She stopped as though she wanted to say something, then awkwardly
thrust a note into his hand, ran home and sat down to the piano again.
"Be in the cemetery," Startsev read, "at eleven o'clock to-night, near the
tomb of Demetti."
"Well, that's not at all clever," he thought, coming to himself. "Why the
cemetery? What for?"
It was clear: Kitten was playing a prank. Who would seriously dream of
making an appointment at night in the cemetery far out of the town, when it
might have been arranged in the street or in the town gardens? And was it in
keeping with him—a district doctor, an intelligent, staid man—to be
sighing, receiving notes, to hang about cemeteries, to do silly things that
even schoolboys think ridiculous nowadays? What would this romance lead
to? What would his colleagues say when they heard of it? Such were
Startsev's reflections as he wandered round the tables at the club, and at
half-past ten he suddenly set off for the cemetery.
By now he had his own pair of horses, and a coachman called
Panteleimon, in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was still
warm, warm as it is in autumn. Dogs were howling in the suburb near the
slaughter-house. Startsev left his horses in one of the side-streets at the end
of the town, and walked on foot to the cemetery.
"We all have our oddities," he thought. "Kitten is odd, too; and—who
knows?—perhaps she is not joking, perhaps she will come"; and he
abandoned himself to this faint, vain hope, and it intoxicated him.

He walked for half a mile through the fields; the cemetery showed as a
dark streak in the distance, like a forest or a big garden. The wall of white
stone came into sight, the gate.... In the moonlight he could read on the
gate: "The hour cometh." Startsev went in at the little gate, and before
anything else he saw the white crosses and monuments on both sides of the
broad avenue, and the black shadows of them and the poplars; and for a
long way round it was all white and black, and the slumbering trees bowed
their branches over the white stones. It seemed as though it were lighter
here than in the fields; the maple-leaves stood out sharply like paws on the
yellow sand of the avenue and on the stones, and the inscriptions on the
tombs could be clearly read. For the first moments Startsev was struck now
by what he saw for the first time in his life, and what he would probably
never see again; a world not like anything else, a world in which the
moonlight was as soft and beautiful, as though slumbering here in its cradle,
where there was no life, none whatever; but in every dark poplar, in every
tomb, there was felt the presence of a mystery that promised a life peaceful,
beautiful, eternal. The stones and faded flowers, together with the autumn
scent of the leaves, all told of forgiveness, melancholy, and peace.
All was silence around; the stars looked down from the sky in the
profound stillness, and Startsev's footsteps sounded loud and out of place,
and only when the church clock began striking and he imagined himself
dead, buried there for ever, he felt as though some one were looking at him,
and for a moment he thought that it was not peace and tranquillity, but
stifled despair, the dumb dreariness of non-existence....
Demetti's tomb was in the form of a shrine with an angel at the top. The
Italian opera had once visited S—— and one of the singers had died; she
had been buried here, and this monument put up to her. No one in the town
remembered her, but the lamp at the entrance reflected the moonlight, and
looked as though it were burning.
There was no one, and, indeed, who would come here at midnight? But
Startsev waited, and as though the moonlight warmed his passion, he waited
passionately, and, in imagination, pictured kisses and embraces. He sat near
the monument for half an hour, then paced up and down the side avenues,
with his hat in his hand, waiting and thinking of the many women and girls
buried in these tombs who had been beautiful and fascinating, who had
loved, at night burned with passion, yielding themselves to caresses. How

wickedly Mother Nature jested at man's expense, after all! How humiliating
it was to recognise it!
Startsev thought this, and at the same time he wanted to cry out that he
wanted love, that he was eager for it at all costs. To his eyes they were not
slabs of marble, but fair white bodies in the moonlight; he saw shapes
hiding bashfully in the shadows of the trees, felt their warmth, and the
languor was oppressive....
And as though a curtain were lowered, the moon went behind a cloud,
and suddenly all was darkness. Startsev could scarcely find the gate—by
now it was as dark as it is on an autumn night. Then he wandered about for
an hour and a half, looking for the side-street in which he had left his
horses.
"I am tired; I can scarcely stand on my legs," he said to Panteleimon.
And settling himself with relief in his carriage, he thought: "Och! I ought
not to get fat!"

III
The following evening he went to the Turkins' to make an offer. But it
turned out to be an inconvenient moment, as Ekaterina Ivanovna was in her
own room having her hair done by a hair-dresser. She was getting ready to
go to a dance at the club.
He had to sit a long time again in the dining-room drinking tea. Ivan
Petrovitch, seeing that his visitor was bored and preoccupied, drew some
notes out of his waistcoat pocket, read a funny letter from a German
steward, saying that all the ironmongery was ruined and the plasticity was
peeling off the walls.
"I expect they will give a decent dowry," thought Startsev, listening
absent-mindedly.
After a sleepless night, he found himself in a state of stupefaction, as
though he had been given something sweet and soporific to drink; there was
fog in his soul, but joy and warmth, and at the same time a sort of cold,
heavy fragment of his brain was reflecting:
"Stop before it is too late! Is she the match for you? She is spoilt,
whimsical, sleeps till two o'clock in the afternoon, while you are a deacon's
son, a district doctor...."

"What of it?" he thought. "I don't care."
"Besides, if you marry her," the fragment went on, "then her relations
will make you give up the district work and live in the town."
"After all," he thought, "if it must be the town, the town it must be. They
will give a dowry; we can establish ourselves suitably."
At last Ekaterina Ivanovna came in, dressed for the ball, with a low
neck, looking fresh and pretty; and Startsev admired her so much, and went
into such ecstasies, that he could say nothing, but simply stared at her and
laughed.
She began saying good-bye, and he—he had no reason for staying now
—got up, saying that it was time for him to go home; his patients were
waiting for him.
"Well, there's no help for that," said Ivan Petrovitch. "Go, and you might
take Kitten to the club on the way."
It was spotting with rain; it was very dark, and they could only tell where
the horses were by Panteleimon's husky cough. The hood of the carriage
was put up.
"I stand upright; you lie down right; he lies all right," said Ivan
Petrovitch as he put his daughter into the carriage.
They drove off.
"I was at the cemetery yesterday," Startsev began. "How ungenerous and
merciless it was on your part!..."
"You went to the cemetery?"
"Yes, I went there and waited almost till two o'clock. I suffered...."
"Well, suffer, if you cannot understand a joke."
Ekaterina Ivanovna, pleased at having so cleverly taken in a man who
was in love with her, and at being the object of such intense love, burst out
laughing and suddenly uttered a shriek of terror, for, at that very minute, the
horses turned sharply in at the gate of the club, and the carriage almost
tilted over. Startsev put his arm round Ekaterina Ivanovna's waist; in her
fright she nestled up to him, and he could not restrain himself, and
passionately kissed her on the lips and on the chin, and hugged her more
tightly.
"That's enough," she said drily.

And a minute later she was not in the carriage, and a policeman near the
lighted entrance of the club shouted in a detestable voice to Panteleimon:
"What are you stopping for, you crow? Drive on."
Startsev drove home, but soon afterwards returned. Attired in another
man's dress suit and a stiff white tie which kept sawing at his neck and
trying to slip away from the collar, he was sitting at midnight in the club
drawing-room, and was saying with enthusiasm to Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"Ah, how little people know who have never loved! It seems to me that
no one has ever yet written of love truly, and I doubt whether this tender,
joyful, agonising feeling can be described, and any one who has once
experienced it would not attempt to put it into words. What is the use of
preliminaries and introductions? What is the use of unnecessary fine words?
My love is immeasurable. I beg, I beseech you," Startsev brought out at
last, "be my wife!"
"Dmitri Ionitch," said Ekaterina Ivanovna, with a very grave face, after a
moment's thought—"Dmitri Ionitch, I am very grateful to you for the
honour. I respect you, but ..." she got up and continued standing, "but,
forgive me, I cannot be your wife. Let us talk seriously. Dmitri Ionitch, you
know I love art beyond everything in life. I adore music; I love it
frantically; I have dedicated my whole life to it. I want to be an artist; I
want fame, success, freedom, and you want me to go on living in this town,
to go on living this empty, useless life, which has become insufferable to
me. To become a wife—oh, no, forgive me! One must strive towards a lofty,
glorious goal, and married life would put me in bondage for ever. Dmitri
Ionitch" (she faintly smiled as she pronounced his name; she thought of
"Alexey Feofilaktitch")—"Dmitri Ionitch, you are a good, clever,
honourable man; you are better than any one...." Tears came into her eyes.
"I feel for you with my whole heart, but ... but you will understand...."
And she turned away and went out of the drawing-room to prevent
herself from crying.
Startsev's heart left off throbbing uneasily. Going out of the club into the
street, he first of all tore off the stiff tie and drew a deep breath. He was a
little ashamed and his vanity was wounded—he had not expected a refusal
—and could not believe that all his dreams, his hopes and yearnings, had
led him up to such a stupid end, just as in some little play at an amateur
performance, and he was sorry for his feeling, for that love of his, so sorry

that he felt as though he could have burst into sobs or have violently
belaboured Panteleimon's broad back with his umbrella.
For three days he could not get on with anything, he could not eat nor
sleep; but when the news reached him that Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone
away to Moscow to enter the Conservatoire, he grew calmer and lived as
before.
Afterwards, remembering sometimes how he had wandered about the
cemetery or how he had driven all over the town to get a dress suit, he
stretched lazily and said:
"What a lot of trouble, though!"

IV
Four years had passed. Startsev already had a large practice in the town.
Every morning he hurriedly saw his patients at Dyalizh, then he drove in to
see his town patients. By now he drove, not with a pair, but with a team of
three with bells on them, and he returned home late at night. He had grown
broader and stouter, and was not very fond of walking, as he was somewhat
asthmatic. And Panteleimon had grown stout, too, and the broader he grew,
the more mournfully he sighed and complained of his hard luck: he was
sick of driving! Startsev used to visit various households and met many
people, but did not become intimate with any one. The inhabitants irritated
him by their conversation, their views of life, and even their appearance.
Experience taught him by degrees that while he played cards or lunched
with one of these people, the man was a peaceable, friendly, and even
intelligent human being; that as soon as one talked of anything not eatable,
for instance, of politics or science, he would be completely at a loss, or
would expound a philosophy so stupid and ill-natured that there was
nothing else to do but wave one's hand in despair and go away. Even when
Startsev tried to talk to liberal citizens, saying, for instance, that humanity,
thank God, was progressing, and that one day it would be possible to
dispense with passports and capital punishment, the liberal citizen would
look at him askance and ask him mistrustfully: "Then any one could murder
any one he chose in the open street?" And when, at tea or supper, Startsev
observed in company that one should work, and that one ought not to live
without working, every one took this as a reproach, and began to get angry
and argue aggressively. With all that, the inhabitants did nothing, absolutely

nothing, and took no interest in anything, and it was quite impossible to
think of anything to say. And Startsev avoided conversation, and confined
himself to eating and playing vint; and when there was a family festivity in
some household and he was invited to a meal, then he sat and ate in silence,
looking at his plate.
And everything that was said at the time was uninteresting, unjust, and
stupid; he felt irritated and disturbed, but held his tongue, and, because he
sat glumly silent and looked at his plate, he was nicknamed in the town "the
haughty Pole," though he never had been a Pole.
All such entertainments as theatres and concerts he declined, but he
played vint every evening for three hours with enjoyment. He had another
diversion to which he took imperceptibly, little by little: in the evening he
would take out of his pockets the notes he had gained by his practice, and
sometimes there were stuffed in his pockets notes—yellow and green, and
smelling of scent and vinegar and incense and fish oil—up to the value of
seventy roubles; and when they amounted to some hundreds he took them
to the Mutual Credit Bank and deposited the money there to his account.
He was only twice at the Turkins' in the course of the four years after
Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone away, on each occasion at the invitation of
Vera Iosifovna, who was still undergoing treatment for migraine. Every
summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to stay with her parents, but he did not
once see her; it somehow never happened.
But now four years had passed. One still, warm morning a letter was
brought to the hospital. Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionitch that she was
missing him very much, and begged him to come and see them, and to
relieve her sufferings; and, by the way, it was her birthday. Below was a
postscript: "I join in mother's request.—K."
Startsev considered, and in the evening he went to the Turkins'.
"How do you do, if you please?" Ivan Petrovitch met him, smiling with
his eyes only. "Bongjour."
Vera Iosifovna, white-haired and looking much older, shook Startsev's
hand, sighed affectedly, and said:
"You don't care to pay attentions to me, doctor. You never come and see
us; I am too old for you. But now some one young has come; perhaps she
will be more fortunate."

And Kitten? She had grown thinner, paler, had grown handsomer and
more graceful; but now she was Ekaterina Ivanovna, not Kitten; she had
lost the freshness and look of childish naïveté. And in her expression and
manners there was something new—guilty and diffident, as though she did
not feel herself at home here in the Turkins' house.
"How many summers, how many winters!" she said, giving Startsev her
hand, and he could see that her heart was beating with excitement; and
looking at him intently and curiously, she went on: "How much stouter you
are! You look sunburnt and more manly, but on the whole you have changed
very little."
Now, too, he thought her attractive, very attractive, but there was
something lacking in her, or else something superfluous—he could not
himself have said exactly what it was, but something prevented him from
feeling as before. He did not like her pallor, her new expression, her faint
smile, her voice, and soon afterwards he disliked her clothes, too, the low
chair in which she was sitting; he disliked something in the past when he
had almost married her. He thought of his love, of the dreams and the hopes
which had troubled him four years before—and he felt awkward.
They had tea with cakes. Then Vera Iosifovna read aloud a novel; she
read of things that never happen in real life, and Startsev listened, looked at
her handsome grey head, and waited for her to finish.
"People are not stupid because they can't write novels, but because they
can't conceal it when they do," he thought.
"Not badsome," said Ivan Petrovitch.
Then Ekaterina Ivanovna played long and noisily on the piano, and when
she finished she was profusely thanked and warmly praised.
"It's a good thing I did not marry her," thought Startsev.
She looked at him, and evidently expected him to ask her to go into the
garden, but he remained silent.
"Let us have a talk," she said, going up to him. "How are you getting on?
What are you doing? How are things? I have been thinking about you all
these days," she went on nervously. "I wanted to write to you, wanted to
come myself to see you at Dyalizh. I quite made up my mind to go, but
afterwards I thought better of it. God knows what your attitude is towards
me now; I have been looking forward to seeing you to-day with such
emotion. For goodness' sake let us go into the garden."

They went into the garden and sat down on the seat under the old maple,
just as they had done four years before. It was dark.
"How are you getting on?" asked Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"Oh, all right; I am jogging along," answered Startsev.
And he could think of nothing more. They were silent.
"I feel so excited!" said Ekaterina Ivanovna, and she hid her face in her
hands. "But don't pay attention to it. I am so happy to be at home; I am so
glad to see every one. I can't get used to it. So many memories! I thought
we should talk without stopping till morning."
Now he saw her face near, her shining eyes, and in the darkness she
looked younger than in the room, and even her old childish expression
seemed to have come back to her. And indeed she was looking at him with
naïve curiosity, as though she wanted to get a closer view and
understanding of the man who had loved her so ardently, with such
tenderness, and so unsuccessfully; her eyes thanked him for that love. And
he remembered all that had been, every minute detail; how he had wandered
about the cemetery, how he had returned home in the morning exhausted,
and he suddenly felt sad and regretted the past. A warmth began glowing in
his heart.
"Do you remember how I took you to the dance at the club?" he asked.
"It was dark and rainy then ..."
The warmth was glowing now in his heart, and he longed to talk, to rail
at life....
"Ech!" he said with a sigh. "You ask how I am living. How do we live
here? Why, not at all. We grow old, we grow stout, we grow slack. Day
after day passes; life slips by without colour, without expressions, without
thoughts.... In the daytime working for gain, and in the evening the club, the
company of card-players, alcoholic, raucous-voiced gentlemen whom I
can't endure. What is there nice in it?"
"Well, you have work—a noble object in life. You used to be so fond of
talking of your hospital. I was such a queer girl then; I imagined myself
such a great pianist. Nowadays all young ladies play the piano, and I
played, too, like everybody else, and there was nothing special about me. I
am just such a pianist as my mother is an authoress. And of course I didn't
understand you then, but afterwards in Moscow I often thought of you. I
thought of no one but you. What happiness to be a district doctor; to help

the suffering; to be serving the people! What happiness!" Ekaterina
Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. "When I thought of you in Moscow,
you seemed to me so ideal, so lofty...."
Startsev thought of the notes he used to take out of his pockets in the
evening with such pleasure, and the glow in his heart was quenched.
He got up to go into the house. She took his arm.
"You are the best man I've known in my life," she went on. "We will see
each other and talk, won't we? Promise me. I am not a pianist; I am not in
error about myself now, and I will not play before you or talk of music."
When they had gone into the house, and when Startsev saw in the
lamplight her face, and her sad, grateful, searching eyes fixed upon him, he
felt uneasy and thought again:
"It's a good thing I did not marry her then."
He began taking leave.
"You have no human right to go before supper," said Ivan Petrovitch as
he saw him off. "It's extremely perpendicular on your part. Well, now,
perform!" he added, addressing Pava in the hall.
Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with moustaches, threw himself
into an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic voice:
"Unhappy woman, die!"
All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage, and looking at the
dark house and garden which had once been so precious and so dear, he
thought of everything at once—Vera Iosifovna's novels and Kitten's noisy
playing, and Ivan Petrovitch's jokes and Pava's tragic posturing, and thought
if the most talented people in the town were so futile, what must the town
be?
Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"You don't come and see us—why?" she wrote to him. "I am afraid that
you have changed towards us. I am afraid, and I am terrified at the very
thought of it. Reassure me; come and tell me that everything is well.

"I must talk to you.—Your E. I."

He read this letter, thought a moment, and said to Pava:

"Tell them, my good fellow, that I can't come to-day; I am very busy. Say
I will come in three days or so."
But three days passed, a week passed; he still did not go. Happening
once to drive past the Turkins' house, he thought he must go in, if only for a
moment, but on second thoughts ... did not go in.
And he never went to the Turkins' again.

V
Several more years have passed. Startsev has grown stouter still, has
grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head thrown
back. When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells and his team
of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the face with his
thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms stiffly out before him as
though they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets: "Keep to the
ri-i-ight!" it is an impressive picture; one might think it was not a mortal,
but some heathen deity in his chariot. He has an immense practice in the
town, no time to breathe, and already has an estate and two houses in the
town, and he is looking out for a third more profitable; and when at the
Mutual Credit Bank he is told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the
house without ceremony, and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of
half-dressed women and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm,
he prods at the doors with his stick, and says:
"Is that the study? Is that a bedroom? And what's here?"
And as he does so he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his
brow.
He has a great deal to do, but still he does not give up his work as district
doctor; he is greedy for gain, and he tries to be in all places at once. At
Dyalizh and in the town he is called simply "Ionitch": "Where is Ionitch off
to?" or "Should not we call in Ionitch to a consultation?"
Probably because his throat is covered with rolls of fat, his voice has
changed; it has become thin and sharp. His temper has changed, too: he has
grown ill-humoured and irritable. When he sees his patients he is usually
out of temper; he impatiently taps the floor with his stick, and shouts in his
disagreeable voice:

"Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions! Don't talk
so much!"
He is solitary. He leads a dreary life; nothing interests him.
During all the years he had lived at Dyalizh his love for Kitten had been
his one joy, and probably his last. In the evenings he plays vint at the club,
and then sits alone at a big table and has supper. Ivan, the oldest and most
respectable of the waiters, serves him, hands him Lafitte No. 17, and every
one at the club—the members of the committee, the cook and waiters—
know what he likes and what he doesn't like and do their very utmost to
satisfy him, or else he is sure to fly into a rage and bang on the floor with
his stick.
As he eats his supper, he turns round from time to time and puts in his
spoke in some conversation:
"What are you talking about? Eh? Whom?"
And when at a neighbouring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks:
"What Turkins are you speaking of? Do you mean the people whose
daughter plays on the piano?"
That is all that can be said about him.
And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovitch has grown no older; he is not changed
in the least, and still makes jokes and tells anecdotes as of old. Vera
Iosifovna still reads her novels aloud to her visitors with eagerness and
touching simplicity. And Kitten plays the piano for four hours every day.
She has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn goes to
the Crimea with her mother. When Ivan Petrovitch sees them off at the
station, he wipes his tears as the train starts, and shouts:
"Good-bye, if you please."
And he waves his handkerchief.

THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY
IT is, as a rule, after losing heavily at cards or after a drinking-bout when an
attack of dyspepsia is setting in that Stepan Stepanitch Zhilin wakes up in
an exceptionally gloomy frame of mind. He looks sour, rumpled, and
dishevelled; there is an expression of displeasure on his grey face, as though
he were offended or disgusted by something. He dresses slowly, sips his
Vichy water deliberately, and begins walking about the rooms.
"I should like to know what b-b-beast comes in here and does not shut
the door!" he grumbles angrily, wrapping his dressing-gown about him and
spitting loudly. "Take away that paper! Why is it lying about here? We keep
twenty servants, and the place is more untidy than a pot-house. Who was
that ringing? Who the devil is that?"
"That's Anfissa, the midwife who brought our Fedya into the world,"
answers his wife.
"Always hanging about ... these cadging toadies!"
"There's no making you out, Stepan Stepanitch. You asked her yourself,
and now you scold."
"I am not scolding; I am speaking. You might find something to do, my
dear, instead of sitting with your hands in your lap trying to pick a quarrel.
Upon my word, women are beyond my comprehension! Beyond my
comprehension! How can they waste whole days doing nothing? A man
works like an ox, like a b-beast, while his wife, the partner of his life, sits
like a pretty doll, sits and does nothing but watch for an opportunity to
quarrel with her husband by way of diversion. It's time to drop these
schoolgirlish ways, my dear. You are not a schoolgirl, not a young lady; you
are a wife and mother! You turn away? Aha! It's not agreeable to listen to
the bitter truth!"
"It's strange that you only speak the bitter truth when your liver is out of
order."
"That's right; get up a scene."
"Have you been out late? Or playing cards?"

"What if I have? Is that anybody's business? Am I obliged to give an
account of my doings to any one? It's my own money I lose, I suppose?
What I spend as well as what is spent in this house belongs to me—me. Do
you hear? To me!"
And so on, all in the same style. But at no other time is Stepan
Stepanitch so reasonable, virtuous, stern or just as at dinner, when all his
household are sitting about him. It usually begins with the soup. After
swallowing the first spoonful Zhilin suddenly frowns and puts down his
spoon.
"Damn it all!" he mutters; "I shall have to dine at a restaurant, I
suppose."
"What's wrong?" asks his wife anxiously. "Isn't the soup good?"
"One must have the taste of a pig to eat hogwash like that! There's too
much salt in it; it smells of dirty rags ... more like bugs than onions.... It's
simply revolting, Anfissa Ivanovna," he says, addressing the midwife.
"Every day I give no end of money for housekeeping.... I deny myself
everything, and this is what they provide for my dinner! I suppose they
want me to give up the office and go into the kitchen to do the cooking
myself."
"The soup is very good to-day," the governess ventures timidly.
"Oh, you think so?" says Zhilin, looking at her angrily from under his
eyelids. "Every one to his taste, of course. It must be confessed our tastes
are very different, Varvara Vassilyevna. You, for instance, are satisfied with
the behaviour of this boy" (Zhilin with a tragic gesture points to his son
Fedya); "you are delighted with him, while I ... I am disgusted. Yes!"
Fedya, a boy of seven with a pale, sickly face, leaves off eating and
drops his eyes. His face grows paler still.
"Yes, you are delighted, and I am disgusted. Which of us is right, I
cannot say, but I venture to think as his father, I know my own son better
than you do. Look how he is sitting! Is that the way decently brought up
children sit? Sit properly."
Fedya tilts his chin up, cranes his neck, and fancies that he is holding
himself better. Tears come into his eyes.
"Eat your dinner! Hold your spoon properly! You wait. I'll show you,
you horrid boy! Don't dare to whimper! Look straight at me!"

Fedya tries to look straight at him, but his face is quivering and his eyes
fill with tears.
"A-ah!... you cry? You are naughty and then you cry? Go and stand in
the corner, you beast!"
"But ... let him have his dinner first," his wife intervenes.
"No dinner for him! Such bla ... such rascals don't deserve dinner!"
Fedya, wincing and quivering all over, creeps down from his chair and
goes into the corner.
"You won't get off with that!" his parent persists. "If nobody else cares to
look after your bringing up, so be it; I must begin.... I won't let you be
naughty and cry at dinner, my lad! Idiot! You must do your duty! Do you
understand? Do your duty! Your father works and you must work, too! No
one must eat the bread of idleness! You must be a man! A m-man!"
"For God's sake, leave off," says his wife in French. "Don't nag at us
before outsiders, at least.... The old woman is all ears; and now, thanks to
her, all the town will hear of it."
"I am not afraid of outsiders," answers Zhilin in Russian. "Anfissa
Ivanovna sees that I am speaking the truth. Why, do you think I ought to be
pleased with the boy? Do you know what he costs me? Do you know, you
nasty boy, what you cost me? Or do you imagine that I coin money, that I
get it for nothing? Don't howl! Hold your tongue! Do you hear what I say?
Do you want me to whip you, you young ruffian?"
Fedya wails aloud and begins to sob.
"This is insufferable," says his mother, getting up from the table and
flinging down her dinner-napkin. "You never let us have dinner in peace!
Your bread sticks in my throat."
And putting her handkerchief to her eyes, she walks out of the dining-
room.
"Now she is offended," grumbles Zhilin, with a forced smile. "She's been
spoilt.... That's how it is, Anfissa Ivanovna; no one likes to hear the truth
nowadays.... It's all my fault, it seems."
Several minutes of silence follow. Zhilin looks round at the plates, and
noticing that no one has yet touched their soup, heaves a deep sigh, and
stares at the flushed and uneasy face of the governess.

"Why don't you eat, Varvara Vassilyevna?" he asks. "Offended, I
suppose? I see.... You don't like to be told the truth. You must forgive me,
it's my nature; I can't be a hypocrite.... I always blurt out the plain truth" (a
sigh). "But I notice that my presence is unwelcome. No one can eat or talk
while I am here.... Well, you should have told me, and I would have gone
away.... I will go."
Zhilin gets up and walks with dignity to the door. As he passes the
weeping Fedya he stops.
"After all that has passed here, you are free," he says to Fedya, throwing
back his head with dignity. "I won't meddle in your bringing up again. I
wash my hands of it! I humbly apologise that as a father, from a sincere
desire for your welfare, I have disturbed you and your mentors. At the same
time, once for all I disclaim all responsibility for your future...."
Fedya wails and sobs more loudly than ever. Zhilin turns with dignity to
the door and departs to his bedroom.
When he wakes from his after-dinner nap he begins to feel the stings of
conscience. He is ashamed to face his wife, his son, Anfissa Ivanovna, and
even feels very wretched when he recalls the scene at dinner, but his amour-
propre is too much for him; he has not the manliness to be frank, and he
goes on sulking and grumbling.
Waking up next morning, he feels in excellent spirits, and whistles gaily
as he washes. Going into the dining-room to breakfast, he finds there Fedya,
who, at the sight of his father, gets up and looks at him helplessly.
"Well, young man?" Zhilin greets him good-humouredly, sitting down to
the table. "What have you got to tell me, young man? Are you all right?
Well, come, chubby; give your father a kiss."
With a pale, grave face Fedya goes up to his father and touches his cheek
with his quivering lips, then walks away and sits down in his place without
a word.

THE BLACK MONK

I
ANDREY VASSILITCH KOVRIN, who held a master's degree at the University,
had exhausted himself, and had upset his nerves. He did not send for a
doctor, but casually, over a bottle of wine, he spoke to a friend who was a
doctor, and the latter advised him to spend the spring and summer in the
country. Very opportunely a long letter came from Tanya Pesotsky, who
asked him to come and stay with them at Borissovka. And he made up his
mind that he really must go.
To begin with—that was in April—he went to his own home, Kovrinka,
and there spent three weeks in solitude; then, as soon as the roads were in
good condition, he set off, driving in a carriage, to visit Pesotsky, his former
guardian, who had brought him up, and was a horticulturist well known all
over Russia. The distance from Kovrinka to Borissovka was reckoned only
a little over fifty miles. To drive along a soft road in May in a comfortable
carriage with springs was a real pleasure.
Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the
stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The
old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for
almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep,
precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like
shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the
peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must
sit down and write a ballad. But near the house itself, in the courtyard and
orchard, which together with the nurseries covered ninety acres, it was all
life and gaiety even in bad weather. Such marvellous roses, lilies, camellias;
such tulips of all possible shades, from glistening white to sooty black—
such a wealth of flowers, in fact, Kovrin had never seen anywhere as at
Pesotsky's. It was only the beginning of spring, and the real glory of the
flower-beds was still hidden away in the hot-houses. But even the flowers
along the avenues, and here and there in the flower-beds, were enough to
make one feel, as one walked about the garden, as though one were in a

realm of tender colours, especially in the early morning when the dew was
glistening on every petal.
What was the decorative part of the garden, and what Pesotsky
contemptuously spoke of as rubbish, had at one time in his childhood given
Kovrin an impression of fairyland.
Every sort of caprice, of elaborate monstrosity and mockery at Nature
was here. There were espaliers of fruit-trees, a pear-tree in the shape of a
pyramidal poplar, spherical oaks and lime-trees, an apple-tree in the shape
of an umbrella, plum-trees trained into arches, crests, candelabra, and even
into the number 1862—the year when Pesotsky first took up horticulture.
One came across, too, lovely, graceful trees with strong, straight stems like
palms, and it was only by looking intently that one could recognise these
trees as gooseberries or currants. But what made the garden most cheerful
and gave it a lively air, was the continual coming and going in it, from early
morning till evening; people with wheelbarrows, shovels, and watering-
cans swarmed round the trees and bushes, in the avenues and the flower-
beds, like ants....
Kovrin arrived at Pesotsky's at ten o'clock in the evening. He found
Tanya and her father, Yegor Semyonitch, in great anxiety. The clear starlight
sky and the thermometer foretold a frost towards morning, and meanwhile
Ivan Karlovitch, the gardener, had gone to the town, and they had no one to
rely upon. At supper they talked of nothing but the morning frost, and it was
settled that Tanya should not go to bed, and between twelve and one should
walk through the garden, and see that everything was done properly, and
Yegor Semyonitch should get up at three o'clock or even earlier.
Kovrin sat with Tanya all the evening, and after midnight went out with
her into the garden. It was cold. There was a strong smell of burning already
in the garden. In the big orchard, which was called the commercial garden,
and which brought Yegor Semyonitch several thousand clear profit, a thick,
black, acrid smoke was creeping over the ground and, curling around the
trees, was saving those thousands from the frost. Here the trees were
arranged as on a chessboard, in straight and regular rows like ranks of
soldiers, and this severe pedantic regularity, and the fact that all the trees
were of the same size, and had tops and trunks all exactly alike, made them
look monotonous and even dreary. Kovrin and Tanya walked along the rows
where fires of dung, straw, and all sorts of refuse were smouldering, and

from time to time they were met by labourers who wandered in the smoke
like shadows. The only trees in flower were the cherries, plums, and certain
sorts of apples, but the whole garden was plunged in smoke, and it was only
near the nurseries that Kovrin could breathe freely.
"Even as a child I used to sneeze from the smoke here," he said,
shrugging his shoulders, "but to this day I don't understand how smoke can
keep off frost."
"Smoke takes the place of clouds when there are none ..." answered
Tanya.
"And what do you want clouds for?"
"In overcast and cloudy weather there is no frost."
"You don't say so."
He laughed and took her arm. Her broad, very earnest face, chilled with
the frost, with her delicate black eyebrows, the turned-up collar of her coat,
which prevented her moving her head freely, and the whole of her thin,
graceful figure, with her skirts tucked up on account of the dew, touched
him.
"Good heavens! she is grown up," he said. "When I went away from here
last, five years ago, you were still a child. You were such a thin, longlegged
creature, with your hair hanging on your shoulders; you used to wear short
frocks, and I used to tease you, calling you a heron.... What time does!"
"Yes, five years!" sighed Tanya. "Much water has flowed since then. Tell
me, Andryusha, honestly," she began eagerly, looking him in the face: "do
you feel strange with us now? But why do I ask you? You are a man, you
live your own interesting life, you are somebody.... To grow apart is so
natural! But however that may be, Andryusha, I want you to think of us as
your people. We have a right to that."
"I do, Tanya."
"On your word of honour?"
"Yes, on my word of honour."
"You were surprised this evening that we have so many of your
photographs. You know my father adores you. Sometimes it seems to me
that he loves you more than he does me. He is proud of you. You are a
clever, extraordinary man, you have made a brilliant career for yourself, and

he is persuaded that you have turned out like this because he brought you
up. I don't try to prevent him from thinking so. Let him."
Dawn was already beginning, and that was especially perceptible from
the distinctness with which the coils of smoke and the tops of the trees
began to stand out in the air.
"It's time we were asleep, though," said Tanya, "and it's cold, too." She
took his arm. "Thank you for coming, Andryusha. We have only
uninteresting acquaintances, and not many of them. We have only the
garden, the garden, the garden, and nothing else. Standards, half-standards,"
she laughed. "Aports, Reinettes, Borovinkas, budded stocks, grafted
stocks.... All, all our life has gone into the garden. I never even dream of
anything but apples and pears. Of course, it is very nice and useful, but
sometimes one longs for something else for variety. I remember that when
you used to come to us for the summer holidays, or simply a visit, it always
seemed to be fresher and brighter in the house, as though the covers had
been taken off the lustres and the furniture. I was only a little girl then, but
yet I understood it."
She talked a long while and with great feeling. For some reason the idea
came into his head that in the course of the summer he might grow fond of
this little, weak, talkative creature, might be carried away and fall in love;
in their position it was so possible and natural! This thought touched and
amused him; he bent down to her sweet, preoccupied face and hummed
softly:

"'Onyegin, I won't conceal it;
I madly love Tatiana....'"

By the time they reached the house, Yegor Semyonitch had got up.
Kovrin did not feel sleepy; he talked to the old man and went to the garden
with him. Yegor Semyonitch was a tall, broad-shouldered, corpulent man,
and he suffered from asthma, yet he walked so fast that it was hard work to
hurry after him. He had an extremely preoccupied air; he was always
hurrying somewhere, with an expression that suggested that if he were one
minute late all would be ruined!
"Here is a business, brother ..." he began, standing still to take breath.
"On the surface of the ground, as you see, is frost; but if you raise the
thermometer on a stick fourteen feet above the ground, there it is warm....
Why is that?"
"I really don't know," said Kovrin, and he laughed.
"H'm!... One can't know everything, of course.... However large the
intellect may be, you can't find room for everything in it. I suppose you still
go in chiefly for philosophy?"
"Yes, I lecture in psychology; I am working at philosophy in general."
"And it does not bore you?"
"On the contrary, it's all I live for."
"Well, God bless you!..." said Yegor Semyonitch, meditatively stroking
his grey whiskers. "God bless you!... I am delighted about you ... delighted,
my boy...."
But suddenly he listened, and, with a terrible face, ran off and quickly
disappeared behind the trees in a cloud of smoke.
"Who tied this horse to an apple-tree?" Kovrin heard his despairing,
heart-rending cry. "Who is the low scoundrel who has dared to tie this horse
to an apple-tree? My God, my God! They have ruined everything; they have
spoilt everything; they have done everything filthy, horrible, and
abominable. The orchard's done for, the orchard's ruined. My God!"
When he came back to Kovrin, his face looked exhausted and mortified.
"What is one to do with these accursed people?" he said in a tearful
voice, flinging up his hands. "Styopka was carting dung at night, and tied

the horse to an apple-tree! He twisted the reins round it, the rascal, as
tightly as he could, so that the bark is rubbed off in three places. What do
you think of that! I spoke to him and he stands like a post and only blinks
his eyes. Hanging is too good for him."
Growing calmer, he embraced Kovrin and kissed him on the cheek.
"Well, God bless you!... God bless you!..." he muttered. "I am very glad
you have come. Unutterably glad.... Thank you."
Then, with the same rapid step and preoccupied face, he made the round
of the whole garden, and showed his former ward all his greenhouses and
hot-houses, his covered-in garden, and two apiaries which he called the
marvel of our century.
While they were walking the sun rose, flooding the garden with brilliant
light. It grew warm. Foreseeing a long, bright, cheerful day, Kovrin
recollected that it was only the beginning of May, and that he had before
him a whole summer as bright, cheerful, and long; and suddenly there
stirred in his bosom a joyous, youthful feeling, such as he used to
experience in his childhood, running about in that garden. And he hugged
the old man and kissed him affectionately. Both of them, feeling touched,
went indoors and drank tea out of old-fashioned china cups, with cream and
satisfying krendels made with milk and eggs; and these trifles reminded
Kovrin again of his childhood and boyhood. The delightful present was
blended with the impressions of the past that stirred within him; there was a
tightness at his heart; yet he was happy.
He waited till Tanya was awake and had coffee with her, went for a
walk, then went to his room and sat down to work. He read attentively,
making notes, and from time to time raised his eyes to look out at the open
windows or at the fresh, still dewy flowers in the vases on the table; and
again he dropped his eyes to his book, and it seemed to him as though every
vein in his body was quivering and fluttering with pleasure.

II
In the country he led just as nervous and restless a life as in town. He
read and wrote a great deal, he studied Italian, and when he was out for a
walk, thought with pleasure that he would soon sit down to work again. He
slept so little that every one wondered at him; if he accidentally dozed for

half an hour in the daytime, he would lie awake all night, and, after a
sleepless night, would feel cheerful and vigorous as though nothing had
happened.
He talked a great deal, drank wine, and smoked expensive cigars. Very
often, almost every day, young ladies of neighbouring families would come
to the Pesotskys', and would sing and play the piano with Tanya; sometimes
a young neighbour who was a good violinist would come, too. Kovrin
listened with eagerness to the music and singing, and was exhausted by it,
and this showed itself by his eyes closing and his head falling to one side.
One day he was sitting on the balcony after evening tea, reading. At the
same time, in the drawing-room, Tanya taking soprano, one of the young
ladies a contralto, and the young man with his violin, were practising a
well-known serenade of Braga's. Kovrin listened to the words—they were
Russian—and could not understand their meaning. At last, leaving his book
and listening attentively, he understood: a maiden, full of sick fancies, heard
one night in her garden mysterious sounds, so strange and lovely that she
was obliged to recognise them as a holy harmony which is unintelligible to
us mortals, and so flies back to heaven. Kovrin's eyes began to close. He got
up, and in exhaustion walked up and down the drawing-room, and then the
dining-room. When the singing was over he took Tanya's arm, and with her
went out on the balcony.
"I have been all day thinking of a legend," he said. "I don't remember
whether I have read it somewhere or heard it, but it is a strange and almost
grotesque legend. To begin with, it is somewhat obscure. A thousand years
ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered about the desert, somewhere in
Syria or Arabia.... Some miles from where he was, some fisherman saw
another black monk, who was moving slowly over the surface of a lake.
This second monk was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which
the legend does not recognise, and listen to the rest. From that mirage there
was cast another mirage, then from that other a third, so that the image of
the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the
atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one time in Africa, at another
in Spain, then in Italy, then in the Far North.... Then he passed out of the
atmosphere of the earth, and now he is wandering all over the universe, still
never coming into conditions in which he might disappear. Possibly he may
be seen now in Mars or in some star of the Southern Cross. But, my dear,
the real point on which the whole legend hangs lies in the fact that, exactly

a thousand years from the day when the monk walked in the desert, the
mirage will return to the atmosphere of the earth again and will appear to
men. And it seems that the thousand years is almost up.... According to the
legend, we may look out for the black monk to-day or to-morrow."
"A queer mirage," said Tanya, who did not like the legend.
"But the most wonderful part of it all," laughed Kovrin, "is that I simply
cannot recall where I got this legend from. Have I read it somewhere? Have
I heard it? Or perhaps I dreamed of the black monk. I swear I don't
remember. But the legend interests me. I have been thinking about it all
day."
Letting Tanya go back to her visitors, he went out of the house, and, lost
in meditation, walked by the flower-beds. The sun was already setting. The
flowers, having just been watered, gave forth a damp, irritating fragrance.
Indoors they began singing again, and in the distance the violin had the
effect of a human voice. Kovrin, racking his brains to remember where he
had read or heard the legend, turned slowly towards the park, and
unconsciously went as far as the river. By a little path that ran along the
steep bank, between the bare roots, he went down to the water, disturbed the
peewits there and frightened two ducks. The last rays of the setting sun still
threw light here and there on the gloomy pines, but it was quite dark on the
surface of the river. Kovrin crossed to the other side by the narrow bridge.
Before him lay a wide field covered with young rye not yet in blossom.
There was no living habitation, no living soul in the distance, and it seemed
as though the little path, if one went along it, would take one to the
unknown, mysterious place where the sun had just gone down, and where
the evening glow was flaming in immensity and splendour.
"How open, how free, how still it is here!" thought Kovrin, walking
along the path. "And it feels as though all the world were watching me,
hiding and waiting for me to understand it...."
But then waves began running across the rye, and a light evening breeze
softly touched his uncovered head. A minute later there was another gust of
wind, but stronger—the rye began rustling, and he heard behind him the
hollow murmur of the pines. Kovrin stood still in amazement. From the
horizon there rose up to the sky, like a whirlwind or a waterspout, a tall
black column. Its outline was indistinct, but from the first instant it could be
seen that it was not standing still, but moving with fearful rapidity, moving

straight towards Kovrin, and the nearer it came the smaller and the more
distinct it was. Kovrin moved aside into the rye to make way for it, and only
just had time to do so.
A monk, dressed in black, with a grey head and black eyebrows, his
arms crossed over his breast, floated by him.... His bare feet did not touch
the earth. After he had floated twenty feet beyond him, he looked round at
Kovrin, and nodded to him with a friendly but sly smile. But what a pale,
fearfully pale, thin face! Beginning to grow larger again, he flew across the
river, collided noiselessly with the clay bank and pines, and passing through
them, vanished like smoke.
"Why, you see," muttered Kovrin, "there must be truth in the legend."
Without trying to explain to himself the strange apparition, glad that he
had succeeded in seeing so near and so distinctly, not only the monk's black
garments, but even his face and eyes, agreeably excited, he went back to the
house.
In the park and in the garden people were moving about quietly, in the
house they were playing—so he alone had seen the monk. He had an
intense desire to tell Tanya and Yegor Semyonitch, but he reflected that they
would certainly think his words the ravings of delirium, and that would
frighten them; he had better say nothing.
He laughed aloud, sang, and danced the mazurka; he was in high spirits,
and all of them, the visitors and Tanya, thought he had a peculiar look,
radiant and inspired, and that he was very interesting.

III
After supper, when the visitors had gone, he went to his room and lay
down on the sofa: he wanted to think about the monk. But a minute later
Tanya came in.
"Here, Andryusha; read father's articles," she said, giving him a bundle
of pamphlets and proofs. "They are splendid articles. He writes capitally."
"Capitally, indeed!" said Yegor Semyonitch, following her and smiling
constrainedly; he was ashamed. "Don't listen to her, please; don't read them!
Though, if you want to go to sleep, read them by all means; they are a fine
soporific."

"I think they are splendid articles," said Tanya, with deep conviction.
"You read them, Andryusha, and persuade father to write oftener. He could
write a complete manual of horticulture."
Yegor Semyonitch gave a forced laugh, blushed, and began uttering the
phrases usually made use of by an embarrassed author. At last he began to
give way.
"In that case, begin with Gaucher's article and these Russian articles," he
muttered, turning over the pamphlets with a trembling hand, "or else you
won't understand. Before you read my objections, you must know what I
am objecting to. But it's all nonsense ... tiresome stuff. Besides, I believe it's
bedtime."
Tanya went away. Yegor Semyonitch sat down on the sofa by Kovrin and
heaved a deep sigh.
"Yes, my boy ..." he began after a pause. "That's how it is, my dear
lecturer. Here I write articles, and take part in exhibitions, and receive
medals.... Pesotsky, they say, has apples the size of a head, and Pesotsky,
they say, has made his fortune with his garden. In short, 'Kotcheby is rich
and glorious.' But one asks oneself: what is it all for? The garden is
certainly fine, a model. It's not really a garden, but a regular institution,
which is of the greatest public importance because it marks, so to say, a new
era in Russian agriculture and Russian industry. But, what's it for? What's
the object of it?"
"The fact speaks for itself."
"I do not mean in that sense. I meant to ask: what will happen to the
garden when I die? In the condition in which you see it now, it would not be
maintained for one month without me. The whole secret of success lies not
in its being a big garden or a great number of labourers being employed in
it, but in the fact that I love the work. Do you understand? I love it perhaps
more than myself. Look at me; I do everything myself. I work from
morning to night: I do all the grafting myself, the pruning myself, the
planting myself. I do it all myself: when any one helps me I am jealous and
irritable till I am rude. The whole secret lies in loving it—that is, in the
sharp eye of the master; yes, and in the master's hands, and in the feeling
that makes one, when one goes anywhere for an hour's visit, sit, ill at ease,
with one's heart far away, afraid that something may have happened in the
garden. But when I die, who will look after it? Who will work? The

gardener? The labourers? Yes? But I will tell you, my dear fellow, the worst
enemy in the garden is not a hare, not a cockchafer, and not the frost, but
any outside person."
"And Tanya?" asked Kovrin, laughing. "She can't be more harmful than
a hare? She loves the work and understands it."
"Yes, she loves it and understands it. If after my death the garden goes to
her and she is the mistress, of course nothing better could be wished. But if,
which God forbid, she should marry," Yegor Semyonitch whispered, and
looked with a frightened look at Kovrin, "that's just it. If she marries and
children come, she will have no time to think about the garden. What I fear
most is: she will marry some fine gentleman, and he will be greedy, and he
will let the garden to people who will run it for profit, and everything will
go to the devil the very first year! In our work females are the scourge of
God!"
Yegor Semyonitch sighed and paused for a while.
"Perhaps it is egoism, but I tell you frankly: I don't want Tanya to get
married. I am afraid of it! There is one young dandy comes to see us,
bringing his violin and scraping on it; I know Tanya will not marry him, I
know it quite well; but I can't bear to see him! Altogether, my boy, I am
very queer. I know that."
Yegor Semyonitch got up and walked about the room in excitement, and
it was evident that he wanted to say something very important, but could
not bring himself to it.
"I am very fond of you, and so I am going to speak to you openly," he
decided at last, thrusting his hands into his pockets. "I deal plainly with
certain delicate questions, and say exactly what I think, and I cannot endure
so-called hidden thoughts. I will speak plainly: you are the only man to
whom I should not be afraid to marry my daughter. You are a clever man
with a good heart, and would not let my beloved work go to ruin; and the
chief reason is that I love you as a son, and I am proud of you. If Tanya and
you could get up a romance somehow, then—well! I should be very glad
and even happy. I tell you this plainly, without mincing matters, like an
honest man."
Kovrin laughed. Yegor Semyonitch opened the door to go out, and stood
in the doorway.

"If Tanya and you had a son, I would make a horticulturist of him," he
said, after a moment's thought. "However, this is idle dreaming.
Goodnight."
Left alone, Kovrin settled himself more comfortably on the sofa and
took up the articles. The title of one was "On Intercropping"; of another, "A
few Words on the Remarks of Monsieur Z. concerning the Trenching of the
Soil for a New Garden"; a third, "Additional Matter concerning Grafting
with a Dormant Bud"; and they were all of the same sort. But what a
restless, jerky tone! What nervous, almost hysterical passion! Here was an
article, one would have thought, with most peaceable and impersonal
contents: the subject of it was the Russian Antonovsky Apple. But Yegor
Semyonitch began it with "Audiatur altera pars," and finished it with
"Sapienti sat"; and between these two quotations a perfect torrent of
venomous phrases directed "at the learned ignorance of our recognised
horticultural authorities, who observe Nature from the height of their
university chairs," or at Monsieur Gaucher, "whose success has been the
work of the vulgar and the dilettanti." And then followed an inappropriate,
affected, and insincere regret that peasants who stole fruit and broke the
branches could not nowadays be flogged.
"It is beautiful, charming, healthy work, but even in this there is strife
and passion," thought Kovrin, "I suppose that everywhere and in all careers
men of ideas are nervous, and marked by exaggerated sensitiveness. Most
likely it must be so."
He thought of Tanya, who was so pleased with Yegor Semyonitch's
articles. Small, pale, and so thin that her shoulder-blades stuck out, her
eyes, wide and open, dark and intelligent, had an intent gaze, as though
looking for something. She walked like her father with a little hurried step.
She talked a great deal and was fond of arguing, accompanying every
phrase, however insignificant, with expressive mimicry and gesticulation.
No doubt she was nervous in the extreme.
Kovrin went on reading the articles, but he understood nothing of them,
and flung them aside. The same pleasant excitement with which he had
earlier in the evening danced the mazurka and listened to the music was
now mastering him again and rousing a multitude of thoughts. He got up
and began walking about the room, thinking about the black monk. It
occurred to him that if this strange, supernatural monk had appeared to him

only, that meant that he was ill and had reached the point of having
hallucinations. This reflection frightened him, but not for long.
"But I am all right, and I am doing no harm to any one; so there is no
harm in my hallucinations," he thought; and he felt happy again.
He sat down on the sofa and clasped his hands round his head.
Restraining the unaccountable joy which filled his whole being, he then
paced up and down again, and sat down to his work. But the thought that he
read in the book did not satisfy him. He wanted something gigantic,
unfathomable, stupendous. Towards morning he undressed and reluctantly
went to bed: he ought to sleep.
When he heard the footsteps of Yegor Semyonitch going out into the
garden, Kovrin rang the bell and asked the footman to bring him some
wine. He drank several glasses of Lafitte, then wrapped himself up, head
and all; his consciousness grew clouded and he fell asleep.

IV
Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya often quarrelled and said nasty things to
each other.
They quarrelled about something that morning. Tanya burst out crying
and went to her room. She would not come down to dinner nor to tea. At
first Yegor Semyonitch went about looking sulky and dignified, as though
to give every one to understand that for him the claims of justice and good
order were more important than anything else in the world; but he could not
keep it up for long, and soon sank into depression. He walked about the
park dejectedly, continually sighing: "Oh, my God! My God!" and at dinner
did not eat a morsel. At last, guilty and conscience-stricken, he knocked at
the locked door and called timidly:
"Tanya! Tanya!"
And from behind the door came a faint voice, weak with crying but still
determined:
"Leave me alone, if you please."
The depression of the master and mistress was reflected in the whole
household, even in the labourers working in the garden. Kovrin was
absorbed in his interesting work, but at last he, too, felt dreary and
uncomfortable. To dissipate the general ill-humour in some way, he made

up his mind to intervene, and towards evening he knocked at Tanya's door.
He was admitted.
"Fie, fie, for shame!" he began playfully, looking with surprise at Tanya's
tear-stained, woebegone face, flushed in patches with crying. "Is it really so
serious? Fie, fie!"
"But if you knew how he tortures me!" she said, and floods of scalding
tears streamed from her big eyes. "He torments me to death," she went on,
wringing her hands. "I said nothing to him ... nothing ... I only said that
there was no need to keep ... too many labourers ... if we could hire them by
the day when we wanted them. You know ... you know the labourers have
been doing nothing for a whole week.... I ... I ... only said that, and he
shouted and ... said ... a lot of horrible insulting things to me. What for?"
"There, there," said Kovrin, smoothing her hair. "You've quarrelled with
each other, you've cried, and that's enough. You must not be angry for long
—that's wrong ... all the more as he loves you beyond everything."
"He has ... has spoiled my whole life," Tanya went on, sobbing. "I hear
nothing but abuse and ... insults. He thinks I am of no use in the house.
Well! He is right. I shall go away to-morrow; I shall become a telegraph
clerk.... I don't care...."
"Come, come, come.... You mustn't cry, Tanya. You mustn't, dear.... You
are both hot-tempered and irritable, and you are both to blame. Come along;
I will reconcile you."
Kovrin talked affectionately and persuasively, while she went on crying,
twitching her shoulders and wringing her hands, as though some terrible
misfortune had really befallen her. He felt all the sorrier for her because her
grief was not a serious one, yet she suffered extremely. What trivialities
were enough to make this little creature miserable for a whole day, perhaps
for her whole life! Comforting Tanya, Kovrin thought that, apart from this
girl and her father, he might hunt the world over and would not find people
who would love him as one of themselves, as one of their kindred. If it had
not been for those two he might very likely, having lost his father and
mother in early childhood, never to the day of his death have known what
was meant by genuine affection and that naïve, uncritical love which is only
lavished on very close blood relations; and he felt that the nerves of this
weeping, shaking girl responded to his half-sick, overstrained nerves like

iron to a magnet. He never could have loved a healthy, strong, rosy-cheeked
woman, but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya attracted him.
And he liked stroking her hair and her shoulders, pressing her hand and
wiping away her tears.... At last she left off crying. She went on for a long
time complaining of her father and her hard, insufferable life in that house,
entreating Kovrin to put himself in her place; then she began, little by little,
smiling, and sighing that God had given her such a bad temper. At last,
laughing aloud, she called herself a fool, and ran out of the room.
When a little later Kovrin went into the garden, Yegor Semyonitch and
Tanya were walking side by side along an avenue as though nothing had
happened, and both were eating rye bread with salt on it, as both were
hungry.

V
Glad that he had been so successful in the part of peacemaker, Kovrin
went into the park. Sitting on a garden seat, thinking, he heard the rattle of a
carriage and a feminine laugh—visitors were arriving. When the shades of
evening began falling on the garden, the sounds of the violin and singing
voices reached him indistinctly, and that reminded him of the black monk.
Where, in what land or in what planet, was that optical absurdity moving
now?
Hardly had he recalled the legend and pictured in his imagination the
dark apparition he had seen in the rye-field, when, from behind a pine-tree
exactly opposite, there came out noiselessly, without the slightest rustle, a
man of medium height with uncovered grey head, all in black, and
barefooted like a beggar, and his black eyebrows stood out conspicuously
on his pale, death-like face. Nodding his head graciously, this beggar or
pilgrim came noiselessly to the seat and sat down, and Kovrin recognised
him as the black monk.
For a minute they looked at one another, Kovrin with amazement, and
the monk with friendliness, and, just as before, a little slyness, as though he
were thinking something to himself.
"But you are a mirage," said Kovrin. "Why are you here and sitting still?
That does not fit in with the legend."

"That does not matter," the monk answered in a low voice, not
immediately turning his face towards him. "The legend, the mirage, and I
are all the products of your excited imagination. I am a phantom."
"Then you don't exist?" said Kovrin.
"You can think as you like," said the monk, with a faint smile. "I exist in
your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in
nature."
"You have a very old, wise, and extremely expressive face, as though
you really had lived more than a thousand years," said Kovrin. "I did not
know that my imagination was capable of creating such phenomena. But
why do you look at me with such enthusiasm? Do you like me?"
"Yes, you are one of those few who are justly called the chosen of God.
You do the service of eternal truth. Your thoughts, your designs, the
marvellous studies you are engaged in, and all your life, bear the Divine,
the heavenly stamp, seeing that they are consecrated to the rational and the
beautiful—that is, to what is eternal."
"You said 'eternal truth.' ... But is eternal truth of use to man and within
his reach, if there is no eternal life?"
"There is eternal life," said the monk.
"Do you believe in the immortality of man?"
"Yes, of course. A grand, brilliant future is in store for you men. And the
more there are like you on earth, the sooner will this future be realised.
Without you who serve the higher principle and live in full understanding
and freedom, mankind would be of little account; developing in a natural
way, it would have to wait a long time for the end of its earthly history. You
will lead it some thousands of years earlier into the kingdom of eternal truth
—and therein lies your supreme service. You are the incarnation of the
blessing of God, which rests upon men."
"And what is the object of eternal life?" asked Kovrin.
"As of all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment lies in knowledge, and
eternal life provides innumerable and inexhaustible sources of knowledge,
and in that sense it has been said: 'In My Father's house there are many
mansions.'"
"If only you knew how pleasant it is to hear you!" said Kovrin, rubbing
his hands with satisfaction.

"I am very glad."
"But I know that when you go away I shall be worried by the question of
your reality. You are a phantom, an hallucination. So I am mentally
deranged, not normal?"
"What if you are? Why trouble yourself? You are ill because you have
overworked and exhausted yourself, and that means that you have sacrificed
your health to the idea, and the time is near at hand when you will give up
life itself to it. What could be better? That is the goal towards which all
divinely endowed, noble natures strive."
"If I know I am mentally affected, can I trust myself?"
"And are you sure that the men of genius, whom all men trust, did not
see phantoms, too? The learned say now that genius is allied to madness.
My friend, healthy and normal people are only the common herd.
Reflections upon the neurasthenia of the age, nervous exhaustion and
degeneracy, et cetera, can only seriously agitate those who place the object
of life in the present—that is, the common herd."
"The Romans used to say: Mens sana in corpore sano."
"Not everything the Greeks and the Romans said is true. Exaltation,
enthusiasm, ecstasy—all that distinguishes prophets, poets, martyrs for the
idea, from the common folk—is repellent to the animal side of man—that
is, his physical health. I repeat, if you want to be healthy and normal, go to
the common herd."
"Strange that you repeat what often comes into my mind," said Kovrin.
"It is as though you had seen and overheard my secret thoughts. But don't
let us talk about me. What do you mean by 'eternal truth'?"
The monk did not answer. Kovrin looked at him and could not
distinguish his face. His features grew blurred and misty. Then the monk's
head and arms disappeared; his body seemed merged into the seat and the
evening twilight, and he vanished altogether.
"The hallucination is over," said Kovrin; and he laughed. "It's a pity."
He went back to the house, light-hearted and happy. The little the monk
had said to him had flattered, not his vanity, but his whole soul, his whole
being. To be one of the chosen, to serve eternal truth, to stand in the ranks
of those who could make mankind worthy of the kingdom of God some
thousands of years sooner—that is, to free men from some thousands of

years of unnecessary struggle, sin, and suffering; to sacrifice to the idea
everything—youth, strength, health; to be ready to die for the common weal
—what an exalted, what a happy lot! He recalled his past—pure, chaste,
laborious; he remembered what he had learned himself and what he had
taught to others, and decided that there was no exaggeration in the monk's
words.
Tanya came to meet him in the park: she was by now wearing a different
dress.
"Are you here?" she said. "And we have been looking and looking for
you.... But what is the matter with you?" she asked in wonder, glancing at
his radiant, ecstatic face and eyes full of tears. "How strange you are,
Andryusha!"
"I am pleased, Tanya," said Kovrin, laying his hand on her shoulders. "I
am more than pleased: I am happy. Tanya, darling Tanya, you are an
extraordinary, nice creature. Dear Tanya, I am so glad, I am so glad!"
He kissed both her hands ardently, and went on:
"I have just passed through an exalted, wonderful, unearthly moment.
But I can't tell you all about it or you would call me mad and not believe
me. Let us talk of you. Dear, delightful Tanya! I love you, and am used to
loving you. To have you near me, to meet you a dozen times a day, has
become a necessity of my existence; I don't know how I shall get on
without you when I go back home."
"Oh," laughed Tanya, "you will forget about us in two days. We are
humble people and you are a great man."
"No; let us talk in earnest!" he said. "I shall take you with me, Tanya.
Yes? Will you come with me? Will you be mine?"
"Come," said Tanya, and tried to laugh again, but the laugh would not
come, and patches of colour came into her face.
She began breathing quickly and walked very quickly, but not to the
house, but further into the park.
"I was not thinking of it ... I was not thinking of it," she said, wringing
her hands in despair.
And Kovrin followed her and went on talking, with the same radiant,
enthusiastic face:

"I want a love that will dominate me altogether; and that love only you,
Tanya, can give me. I am happy! I am happy!"
She was overwhelmed, and huddling and shrinking together, seemed ten
years older all at once, while he thought her beautiful and expressed his
rapture aloud:
"How lovely she is!"

VI
Learning from Kovrin that not only a romance had been got up, but that
there would even be a wedding, Yegor Semyonitch spent a long time in
pacing from one corner of the room to the other, trying to conceal his
agitation. His hands began trembling, his neck swelled and turned purple,
he ordered his racing droshky and drove off somewhere. Tanya, seeing how
he lashed the horse, and seeing how he pulled his cap over his ears,
understood what he was feeling, shut herself up in her room, and cried the
whole day.
In the hot-houses the peaches and plums were already ripe; the packing
and sending off of these tender and fragile goods to Moscow took a great
deal of care, work, and trouble. Owing to the fact that the summer was very
hot and dry, it was necessary to water every tree, and a great deal of time
and labour was spent on doing it. Numbers of caterpillars made their
appearance, which, to Kovrin's disgust, the labourers and even Yegor
Semyonitch and Tanya squashed with their fingers. In spite of all that, they
had already to book autumn orders for fruit and trees, and to carry on a
great deal of correspondence. And at the very busiest time, when no one
seemed to have a free moment, the work of the fields carried off more than
half their labourers from the garden. Yegor Semyonitch, sunburnt,
exhausted, ill-humoured, galloped from the fields to the garden and back
again; cried that he was being torn to pieces, and that he should put a bullet
through his brains.
Then came the fuss and worry of the trousseau, to which the Pesotskys
attached a good deal of importance. Every one's head was in a whirl from
the snipping of the scissors, the rattle of the sewing-machine, the smell of
hot irons, and the caprices of the dressmaker, a huffy and nervous lady.
And, as ill-luck would have it, visitors came every day, who had to be

entertained, fed, and even put up for the night. But all this hard labour
passed unnoticed as though in a fog. Tanya felt that love and happiness had
taken her unawares, though she had, since she was fourteen, for some
reason been convinced that Kovrin would marry her and no one else. She
was bewildered, could not grasp it, could not believe herself.... At one
minute such joy would swoop down upon her that she longed to fly away to
the clouds and there pray to God, at another moment she would remember
that in August she would have to part from her home and leave her father;
or, goodness knows why, the idea would occur to her that she was worthless
—insignificant and unworthy of a great man like Kovrin—and she would
go to her room, lock herself in, and cry bitterly for several hours. When
there were visitors, she would suddenly fancy that Kovrin looked
extraordinarily handsome, and that all the women were in love with him
and envying her, and her soul was filled with pride and rapture, as though
she had vanquished the whole world; but he had only to smile politely at
any young lady for her to be trembling with jealousy, to retreat to her room
—and tears again. These new sensations mastered her completely; she
helped her father mechanically, without noticing peaches, caterpillars or
labourers, or how rapidly the time was passing.
It was almost the same with Yegor Semyonitch. He worked from
morning till night, was always in a hurry, was irritable, and flew into rages,
but all of this was in a sort of spellbound dream. It seemed as though there
were two men in him: one was the real Yegor Semyonitch, who was moved
to indignation, and clutched his head in despair when he heard of some
irregularity from Ivan Karlovitch the gardener; and another—not the real
one—who seemed as though he were half drunk, would interrupt a business
conversation at half a word, touch the gardener on the shoulder, and begin
muttering:
"Say what you like, there is a great deal in blood. His mother was a
wonderful woman, most high-minded and intelligent. It was a pleasure to
look at her good, candid, pure face; it was like the face of an angel. She
drew splendidly, wrote verses, spoke five foreign languages, sang.... Poor
thing! she died of consumption. The Kingdom of Heaven be hers."
The unreal Yegor Semyonitch sighed, and after a pause went on:
"When he was a boy and growing up in my house, he had the same
angelic face, good and candid. The way he looks and talks and moves is as

soft and elegant as his mother's. And his intellect! We were always struck
with his intelligence. To be sure, it's not for nothing he's a Master of Arts!
It's not for nothing! And wait a bit, Ivan Karlovitch, what will he be in ten
years' time? He will be far above us!"
But at this point the real Yegor Semyonitch, suddenly coming to himself,
would make a terrible face, would clutch his head and cry:
"The devils! They have spoilt everything! They have ruined everything!
They have spoilt everything! The garden's done for, the garden's ruined!"
Kovrin, meanwhile, worked with the same ardour as before, and did not
notice the general commotion. Love only added fuel to the flames. After
every talk with Tanya he went to his room, happy and triumphant, took up
his book or his manuscript with the same passion with which he had just
kissed Tanya and told her of his love. What the black monk had told him of
the chosen of God, of eternal truth, of the brilliant future of mankind and so
on, gave peculiar and extraordinary significance to his work, and filled his
soul with pride and the consciousness of his own exalted consequence.
Once or twice a week, in the park or in the house, he met the black monk
and had long conversations with him, but this did not alarm him, but, on the
contrary, delighted him, as he was now firmly persuaded that such
apparitions only visited the elect few who rise up above their fellows and
devote themselves to the service of the idea.
One day the monk appeared at dinner-time and sat in the dining-room
window. Kovrin was delighted, and very adroitly began a conversation with
Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya of what might be of interest to the monk; the
black-robed visitor listened and nodded his head graciously, and Yegor
Semyonitch and Tanya listened, too, and smiled gaily without suspecting
that Kovrin was not talking to them but to his hallucination.
Imperceptibly the fast of the Assumption was approaching, and soon
after came the wedding, which, at Yegor Semyonitch's urgent desire, was
celebrated with "a flourish"—that is, with senseless festivities that lasted for
two whole days and nights. Three thousand roubles' worth of food and drink
was consumed, but the music of the wretched hired band, the noisy toasts,
the scurrying to and fro of the footmen, the uproar and crowding, prevented
them from appreciating the taste of the expensive wines and wonderful
delicacies ordered from Moscow.

VII
One long winter night Kovrin was lying in bed, reading a French novel.
Poor Tanya, who had headaches in the evenings from living in town, to
which she was not accustomed, had been asleep a long while, and, from
time to time, articulated some incoherent phrase in her restless dreams.
It struck three o'clock. Kovrin put out the light and lay down to sleep, lay
for a long time with his eyes closed, but could not get to sleep because, as
he fancied, the room was very hot and Tanya talked in her sleep. At half-
past four he lighted the candle again, and this time he saw the black monk
sitting in an arm-chair near the bed.
"Good-morning," said the monk, and after a brief pause he asked: "What
are you thinking of now?"
"Of fame," answered Kovrin. "In the French novel I have just been
reading, there is a description of a young savant, who does silly things and
pines away through worrying about fame. I can't understand such anxiety."
"Because you are wise. Your attitude towards fame is one of
indifference, as towards a toy which no longer interests you."
"Yes, that is true."
"Renown does not allure you now. What is there flattering, amusing, or
edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off
the inscription together with the gilding? Moreover, happily there are too
many of you for the weak memory of mankind to be able to retain your
names."
"Of course," assented Kovrin. "Besides, why should they be
remembered? But let us talk of something else. Of happiness, for instance.
What is happiness?"
When the clock struck five, he was sitting on the bed, dangling his feet
to the carpet, talking to the monk:
"In ancient times a happy man grew at last frightened of his happiness
—it was so great!—and to propitiate the gods he brought as a sacrifice his
favourite ring. Do you know, I, too, like Polykrates, begin to be uneasy of
my happiness. It seems strange to me that from morning to night I feel
nothing but joy; it fills my whole being and smothers all other feelings. I
don't know what sadness, grief, or boredom is. Here I am not asleep; I

suffer from sleeplessness, but I am not dull. I say it in earnest; I begin to
feel perplexed."
"But why?" the monk asked in wonder. "Is joy a supernatural feeling?
Ought it not to be the normal state of man? The more highly a man is
developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is,
the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius,
were joyful, not sorrowful. And the Apostle tells us: 'Rejoice continually';
'Rejoice and be glad.'"
"But will the gods be suddenly wrathful?" Kovrin jested; and he laughed.
"If they take from me comfort and make me go cold and hungry, it won't be
very much to my taste."
Meanwhile Tanya woke up and looked with amazement and horror at her
husband. He was talking, addressing the arm-chair, laughing and
gesticulating; his eyes were gleaming, and there was something strange in
his laugh.
"Andryusha, whom are you talking to?" she asked, clutching the hand he
stretched out to the monk. "Andryusha! Whom?"
"Oh! Whom?" said Kovrin in confusion. "Why, to him.... He is sitting
here," he said, pointing to the black monk.
"There is no one here ... no one! Andryusha, you are ill!"
Tanya put her arm round her husband and held him tight, as though
protecting him from the apparition, and put her hand over his eyes.
"You are ill!" she sobbed, trembling all over. "Forgive me, my precious,
my dear one, but I have noticed for a long time that your mind is clouded in
some way.... You are mentally ill, Andryusha...."
Her trembling infected him, too. He glanced once more at the arm-chair,
which was now empty, felt a sudden weakness in his arms and legs, was
frightened, and began dressing.
"It's nothing, Tanya; it's nothing," he muttered, shivering. "I really am
not quite well ... it's time to admit that."
"I have noticed it for a long time ... and father has noticed it," she said,
trying to suppress her sobs. "You talk to yourself, smile somehow strangely
... and can't sleep. Oh, my God, my God, save us!" she said in terror. "But
don't be frightened, Andryusha; for God's sake don't be frightened...."

She began dressing, too. Only now, looking at her, Kovrin realised the
danger of his position—realised the meaning of the black monk and his
conversations with him. It was clear to him now that he was mad.
Neither of them knew why they dressed and went into the dining-room:
she in front and he following her. There they found Yegor Semyonitch
standing in his dressing-gown and with a candle in his hand. He was staying
with them, and had been awakened by Tanya's sobs.
"Don't be frightened, Andryusha," Tanya was saying, shivering as though
in a fever; "don't be frightened.... Father, it will all pass over ... it will all
pass over...."
Kovrin was too much agitated to speak. He wanted to say to his father-
in-law in a playful tone: "Congratulate me; it appears I have gone out of my
mind"; but he could only move his lips and smile bitterly.
At nine o'clock in the morning they put on his jacket and fur coat,
wrapped him up in a shawl, and took him in a carriage to a doctor.

VIII
Summer had come again, and the doctor advised their going into the
country. Kovrin had recovered; he had left off seeing the black monk, and
he had only to get up his strength. Staying at his father-in-law's, he drank a
great deal of milk, worked for only two hours out of the twenty-four, and
neither smoked nor drank wine.
On the evening before Elijah's Day they had an evening service in the
house. When the deacon was handing the priest the censer the immense old
room smelt like a graveyard, and Kovrin felt bored. He went out into the
garden. Without noticing the gorgeous flowers, he walked about the garden,
sat down on a seat, then strolled about the park; reaching the river, he went
down and then stood lost in thought, looking at the water. The sullen pines
with their shaggy roots, which had seen him a year before so young, so
joyful and confident, were not whispering now, but standing mute and
motionless, as though they did not recognise him. And, indeed, his head
was closely cropped, his beautiful long hair was gone, his step was lagging,
his face was fuller and paler than last summer.
He crossed by the footbridge to the other side. Where the year before
there had been rye the oats stood, reaped, and lay in rows. The sun had set

and there was a broad stretch of glowing red on the horizon, a sign of windy
weather next day. It was still. Looking in the direction from which the year
before the black monk had first appeared, Kovrin stood for twenty minutes,
till the evening glow had begun to fade....
When, listless and dissatisfied, he returned home the service was over.
Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya were sitting on the steps of the verandah,
drinking tea. They were talking of something, but, seeing Kovrin, ceased at
once, and he concluded from their faces that their talk had been about him.
"I believe it is time for you to have your milk," Tanya said to her
husband.
"No, it is not time yet ..." he said, sitting down on the bottom step.
"Drink it yourself; I don't want it."
Tanya exchanged a troubled glance with her father, and said in a guilty
voice:
"You notice yourself that milk does you good."
"Yes, a great deal of good!" Kovrin laughed. "I congratulate you: I have
gained a pound in weight since Friday." He pressed his head tightly in his
hands and said miserably: "Why, why have you cured me? Preparations of
bromide, idleness, hot baths, supervision, cowardly consternation at every
mouthful, at every step—all this will reduce me at last to idiocy. I went out
of my mind, I had megalomania; but then I was cheerful, confident, and
even happy; I was interesting and original. Now I have become more
sensible and stolid, but I am just like every one else: I am—mediocrity; I
am weary of life.... Oh, how cruelly you have treated me!... I saw
hallucinations, but what harm did that do to any one? I ask, what harm did
that do any one?"
"Goodness knows what you are saying!" sighed Yegor Semyonitch. "It's
positively wearisome to listen to it."
"Then don't listen."
The presence of other people, especially Yegor Semyonitch, irritated
Kovrin now; he answered him drily, coldly, and even rudely, never looked
at him but with irony and hatred, while Yegor Semyonitch was overcome
with confusion and cleared his throat guiltily, though he was not conscious
of any fault in himself. At a loss to understand why their charming and
affectionate relations had changed so abruptly, Tanya huddled up to her
father and looked anxiously in his face; she wanted to understand and could

not understand, and all that was clear to her was that their relations were
growing worse and worse every day, that of late her father had begun to
look much older, and her husband had grown irritable, capricious,
quarrelsome and uninteresting. She could not laugh or sing; at dinner she
ate nothing; did not sleep for nights together, expecting something awful,
and was so worn out that on one occasion she lay in a dead faint from
dinner-time till evening. During the service she thought her father was
crying, and now while the three of them were sitting together on the terrace
she made an effort not to think of it.
"How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their
kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their
inspiration," said Kovrin. "If Mahomed had taken bromide for his nerves,
had worked only two hours out of the twenty-four, and had drunk milk, that
remarkable man would have left no more trace after him than his dog.
Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making
mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin. If only you
knew," Kovrin said with annoyance, "how grateful I am to you."
He felt intense irritation, and to avoid saying too much, he got up
quickly and went into the house. It was still, and the fragrance of the
tobacco plant and the marvel of Peru floated in at the open window. The
moonlight lay in green patches on the floor and on the piano in the big dark
dining-room. Kovrin remembered the raptures of the previous summer
when there had been the same scent of the marvel of Peru and the moon had
shone in at the window. To bring back the mood of last year he went
quickly to his study, lighted a strong cigar, and told the footman to bring
him some wine. But the cigar left a bitter and disgusting taste in his mouth,
and the wine had not the same flavour as it had the year before. And so
great is the effect of giving up a habit, the cigar and the two gulps of wine
made him giddy, and brought on palpitations of the heart, so that he was
obliged to take bromide.
Before going to bed, Tanya said to him:
"Father adores you. You are cross with him about something, and it is
killing him. Look at him; he is ageing, not from day to day, but from hour to
hour. I entreat you, Andryusha, for God's sake, for the sake of your dead
father, for the sake of my peace of mind, be affectionate to him."
"I can't, I don't want to."

"But why?" asked Tanya, beginning to tremble all over. "Explain why."
"Because he is antipathetic to me, that's all," said Kovrin carelessly; and
he shrugged his shoulders. "But we won't talk about him: he is your father."
"I can't understand, I can't," said Tanya, pressing her hands to her
temples and staring at a fixed point. "Something incomprehensible, awful,
is going on in the house. You have changed, grown unlike yourself.... You,
clever, extraordinary man as you are, are irritated over trifles, meddle in
paltry nonsense.... Such trivial things excite you, that sometimes one is
simply amazed and can't believe that it is you. Come, come, don't be angry,
don't be angry," she went on, kissing his hands, frightened of her own
words. "You are clever, kind, noble. You will be just to father. He is so
good."
"He is not good; he is just good-natured. Burlesque old uncles like your
father, with well-fed, good-natured faces, extraordinarily hospitable and
queer, at one time used to touch me and amuse me in novels and in farces
and in life; now I dislike them. They are egoists to the marrow of their
bones. What disgusts me most of all is their being so well-fed, and that
purely bovine, purely hoggish optimism of a full stomach."
Tanya sat down on the bed and laid her head on the pillow.
"This is torture," she said, and from her voice it was evident that she was
utterly exhausted, and that it was hard for her to speak. "Not one moment of
peace since the winter.... Why, it's awful! My God! I am wretched."
"Oh, of course, I am Herod, and you and your father are the innocents.
Of course."
His face seemed to Tanya ugly and unpleasant. Hatred and an ironical
expression did not suit him. And, indeed, she had noticed before that there
was something lacking in his face, as though ever since his hair had been
cut his face had changed, too. She wanted to say something wounding to
him, but immediately she caught herself in this antagonistic feeling, she was
frightened and went out of the bedroom.

IX
Kovrin received a professorship at the University. The inaugural address
was fixed for the second of December, and a notice to that effect was hung
up in the corridor at the University. But on the day appointed he informed

the students' inspector, by telegram, that he was prevented by illness from
giving the lecture.
He had hæmorrhage from the throat. He was often spitting blood, but it
happened two or three times a month that there was a considerable loss of
blood, and then he grew extremely weak and sank into a drowsy condition.
This illness did not particularly frighten him, as he knew that his mother
had lived for ten years or longer suffering from the same disease, and the
doctors assured him that there was no danger, and had only advised him to
avoid excitement, to lead a regular life, and to speak as little as possible.
In January again his lecture did not take place owing to the same reason,
and in February it was too late to begin the course. It had to be postponed to
the following year.
By now he was living not with Tanya, but with another woman, who was
two years older than he was, and who looked after him as though he were a
baby. He was in a calm and tranquil state of mind; he readily gave in to her,
and when Varvara Nikolaevna—that was the name of his friend—decided to
take him to the Crimea, he agreed, though he had a presentiment that no
good would come of the trip.
They reached Sevastopol in the evening and stopped at an hotel to rest
and go on the next day to Yalta. They were both exhausted by the journey.
Varvara Nikolaevna had some tea, went to bed and was soon asleep. But
Kovrin did not go to bed. An hour before starting for the station, he had
received a letter from Tanya, and had not brought himself to open it, and
now it was lying in his coat pocket, and the thought of it excited him
disagreeably. At the bottom of his heart he genuinely considered now that
his marriage to Tanya had been a mistake. He was glad that their separation
was final, and the thought of that woman who in the end had turned into a
living relic, still walking about though everything seemed dead in her
except her big, staring, intelligent eyes—the thought of her roused in him
nothing but pity and disgust with himself. The handwriting on the envelope
reminded him how cruel and unjust he had been two years before, how he
had worked off his anger at his spiritual emptiness, his boredom, his
loneliness, and his dissatisfaction with life by revenging himself on people
in no way to blame. He remembered, also, how he had torn up his
dissertation and all the articles he had written during his illness, and how he
had thrown them out of window, and the bits of paper had fluttered in the

wind and caught on the trees and flowers. In every line of them he saw
strange, utterly groundless pretension, shallow defiance, arrogance,
megalomania; and they made him feel as though he were reading a
description of his vices. But when the last manuscript had been torn up and
sent flying out of window, he felt, for some reason, suddenly bitter and
angry; he went to his wife and said a great many unpleasant things to her.
My God, how he had tormented her! One day, wanting to cause her pain, he
told her that her father had played a very unattractive part in their romance,
that he had asked him to marry her. Yegor Semyonitch accidentally
overheard this, ran into the room, and, in his despair, could not utter a word,
could only stamp and make a strange, bellowing sound as though he had
lost the power of speech, and Tanya, looking at her father, had uttered a
heart-rending shriek and had fallen into a swoon. It was hideous.
All this came back into his memory as he looked at the familiar writing.
Kovrin went out on to the balcony; it was still warm weather and there was
a smell of the sea. The wonderful bay reflected the moonshine and the
lights, and was of a colour for which it was difficult to find a name. It was a
soft and tender blending of dark blue and green; in places the water was like
blue vitriol, and in places it seemed as though the moonlight were liquefied
and filling the bay instead of water. And what harmony of colours, what an
atmosphere of peace, calm, and sublimity!
In the lower storey under the balcony the windows were probably open,
for women's voices and laughter could be heard distinctly. Apparently there
was an evening party.
Kovrin made an effort, tore open the envelope, and, going back into his
room, read:
"My father is just dead. I owe that to you, for you have killed him. Our
garden is being ruined; strangers are managing it already—that is, the very
thing is happening that poor father dreaded. That, too, I owe to you. I hate
you with my whole soul, and I hope you may soon perish. Oh, how
wretched I am! Insufferable anguish is burning my soul.... My curses on
you. I took you for an extraordinary man, a genius; I loved you, and you
have turned out a madman...."
Kovrin could read no more, he tore up the letter and threw it away. He
was overcome by an uneasiness that was akin to terror. Varvara Nikolaevna
was asleep behind the screen, and he could hear her breathing. From the

lower storey came the sounds of laughter and women's voices, but he felt as
though in the whole hotel there were no living soul but him. Because Tanya,
unhappy, broken by sorrow, had cursed him in her letter and hoped for his
perdition, he felt eerie and kept glancing hurriedly at the door, as though he
were afraid that the uncomprehended force which two years before had
wrought such havoc in his life and in the life of those near him might come
into the room and master him once more.
He knew by experience that when his nerves were out of hand the best
thing for him to do was to work. He must sit down to the table and force
himself, at all costs, to concentrate his mind on some one thought. He took
from his red portfolio a manuscript containing a sketch of a small work of
the nature of a compilation, which he had planned in case he should find it
dull in the Crimea without work. He sat down to the table and began
working at this plan, and it seemed to him that his calm, peaceful,
indifferent mood was coming back. The manuscript with the sketch even
led him to meditation on the vanity of the world. He thought how much life
exacts for the worthless or very commonplace blessings it can give a man.
For instance, to gain, before forty, a university chair, to be an ordinary
professor, to expound ordinary and second-hand thoughts in dull, heavy,
insipid language—in fact, to gain the position of a mediocre learned man,
he, Kovrin, had had to study for fifteen years, to work day and night, to
endure a terrible mental illness, to experience an unhappy marriage, and to
do a great number of stupid and unjust things which it would have been
pleasant not to remember. Kovrin recognised clearly, now, that he was a
mediocrity, and readily resigned himself to it, as he considered that every
man ought to be satisfied with what he is.
The plan of the volume would have soothed him completely, but the torn
letter showed white on the floor and prevented him from concentrating his
attention. He got up from the table, picked up the pieces of the letter and
threw them out of window, but there was a light wind blowing from the sea,
and the bits of paper were scattered on the windowsill. Again he was
overcome by uneasiness akin to terror, and he felt as though in the whole
hotel there were no living soul but himself.... He went out on the balcony.
The bay, like a living thing, looked at him with its multitude of light blue,
dark blue, turquoise and fiery eyes, and seemed beckoning to him. And it
really was hot and oppressive, and it would not have been amiss to have a
bathe.

Suddenly in the lower storey under the balcony a violin began playing,
and two soft feminine voices began singing. It was something familiar. The
song was about a maiden, full of sick fancies, who heard one night in her
garden mysterious sounds, so strange and lovely that she was obliged to
recognise them as a holy harmony which is unintelligible to us mortals, and
so flies back to heaven.... Kovrin caught his breath and there was a pang of
sadness at his heart, and a thrill of the sweet, exquisite delight he had so
long forgotten began to stir in his breast.
A tall black column, like a whirlwind or a waterspout, appeared on the
further side of the bay. It moved with fearful rapidity across the bay,
towards the hotel, growing smaller and darker as it came, and Kovrin only
just had time to get out of the way to let it pass.... The monk with bare grey
head, black eyebrows, barefoot, his arms crossed over his breast, floated by
him, and stood still in the middle of the room.
"Why did you not believe me?" he asked reproachfully, looking
affectionately at Kovrin. "If you had believed me then, that you were a
genius, you would not have spent these two years so gloomily and so
wretchedly."
Kovrin already believed that he was one of God's chosen and a genius;
he vividly recalled his conversations with the monk in the past and tried to
speak, but the blood flowed from his throat on to his breast, and not
knowing what he was doing, he passed his hands over his breast, and his
cuffs were soaked with blood. He tried to call Varvara Nikolaevna, who was
asleep behind the screen; he made an effort and said:
"Tanya!"
He fell on the floor, and propping himself on his arms, called again:
"Tanya!"
He called Tanya, called to the great garden with the gorgeous flowers
sprinkled with dew, called to the park, the pines with their shaggy roots, the
rye-field, his marvellous learning, his youth, courage, joy—called to life,
which was so lovely. He saw on the floor near his face a great pool of
blood, and was too weak to utter a word, but an unspeakable, infinite
happiness flooded his whole being. Below, under the balcony, they were
playing the serenade, and the black monk whispered to him that he was a
genius, and that he was dying only because his frail human body had lost its
balance and could no longer serve as the mortal garb of genius.

When Varvara Nikolaevna woke up and came out from behind the
screen, Kovrin was dead, and a blissful smile was set upon his face.

VOLODYA
AT five o'clock one Sunday afternoon in summer, Volodya, a plain, shy,
sickly-looking lad of seventeen, was sitting in the arbour of the Shumihins'
country villa, feeling dreary. His despondent thought flowed in three
directions. In the first place, he had next day, Monday, an examination in
mathematics; he knew that if he did not get through the written examination
on the morrow, he would be expelled, for he had already been two years in
the sixth form and had two and three-quarter marks for algebra in his annual
report. In the second place, his presence at the villa of the Shumihins, a
wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions, was a continual source of
mortification to his amour-propre. It seemed to him that Madame Shumihin
looked upon him and his maman as poor relations and dependents, that they
laughed at his maman and did not respect her. He had on one occasion
accidently overheard Madame Shumihin, in the verandah, telling her cousin
Anna Fyodorovna that his maman still tried to look young and got herself
up, that she never paid her losses at cards, and had a partiality for other
people's shoes and tobacco. Every day Volodya besought his maman not to
go to the Shumihins', and drew a picture of the humiliating part she played
with these gentlefolk. He tried to persuade her, said rude things, but she—a
frivolous, pampered woman, who had run through two fortunes, her own
and her husband's, in her time, and always gravitated towards acquaintances
of high rank—did not understand him, and twice a week Volodya had to
accompany her to the villa he hated.
In the third place, the youth could not for one instant get rid of a strange,
unpleasant feeling which was absolutely new to him.... It seemed to him
that he was in love with Anna Fyodorovna, the Shumihins' cousin, who was
staying with them. She was a vivacious, loud-voiced, laughter-loving,
healthy, and vigorous lady of thirty, with rosy cheeks, plump shoulders, a
plump round chin and a continual smile on her thin lips. She was neither
young nor beautiful—Volodya knew that perfectly well; but for some
reason he could not help thinking of her, looking at her while she shrugged
her plump shoulders and moved her flat back as she played croquet, or after
prolonged laughter and running up and down stairs, sank into a low chair,
and, half closing her eyes and gasping for breath, pretended that she was

stifling and could not breathe. She was married. Her husband, a staid and
dignified architect, came once a week to the villa, slept soundly, and
returned to town. Volodya's strange feeling had begun with his conceiving
an unaccountable hatred for the architect, and feeling relieved every time he
went back to town.
Now, sitting in the arbour, thinking of his examination next day, and of
his maman, at whom they laughed, he felt an intense desire to see Nyuta
(that was what the Shumihins called Anna Fyodorovna), to hear her
laughter and the rustle of her dress.... This desire was not like the pure,
poetic love of which he read in novels and about which he dreamed every
night when he went to bed; it was strange, incomprehensible; he was
ashamed of it, and afraid of it as of something very wrong and impure,
something which it was disagreeable to confess even to himself.
"It's not love," he said to himself. "One can't fall in love with women of
thirty who are married. It is only a little intrigue.... Yes, an intrigue...."
Pondering on the "intrigue," he thought of his uncontrollable shyness, his
lack of moustache, his freckles, his narrow eyes, and put himself in his
imagination side by side with Nyuta, and the juxtaposition seemed to him
impossible; then he made haste to imagine himself bold, handsome, witty,
dressed in the latest fashion.
When his dreams were at their height, as he sat huddled together and
looking at the ground in a dark corner of the arbour, he heard the sound of
light footsteps. Some one was coming slowly along the avenue. Soon the
steps stopped and something white gleamed in the entrance.
"Is there any one here?" asked a woman's voice.
Volodya recognised the voice, and raised his head in a fright.
"Who is here?" asked Nyuta, going into the arbour. "Ah, it is you,
Volodya? What are you doing here? Thinking? And how can you go on
thinking, thinking, thinking?... That's the way to go out of your mind!"
Volodya got up and looked in a dazed way at Nyuta. She had only just
come back from bathing. Over her shoulder there was hanging a sheet and a
rough towel, and from under the white silk kerchief on her head he could
see the wet hair sticking to her forehead. There was the cool damp smell of
the bath-house and of almond soap still hanging about her. She was out of
breath from running quickly. The top button of her blouse was undone, so
that the boy saw her throat and bosom.

"Why don't you say something?" said Nyuta, looking Volodya up and
down. "It's not polite to be silent when a lady talks to you. What a clumsy
seal you are though, Volodya! You always sit, saying nothing, thinking like
some philosopher. There's not a spark of life or fire in you! You are really
horrid!... At your age you ought to be living, skipping, and jumping,
chattering, flirting, falling in love."
Volodya looked at the sheet that was held by a plump white hand, and
thought....
"He's mute," said Nyuta, with wonder; "it is strange, really.... Listen! Be
a man! Come, you might smile at least! Phew, the horrid philosopher!" she
laughed. "But do you know, Volodya, why you are such a clumsy seal?
Because you don't devote yourself to the ladies. Why don't you? It's true
there are no girls here, but there is nothing to prevent your flirting with the
married ladies! Why don't you flirt with me, for instance?"
Volodya listened and scratched his forehead in acute and painful
irresolution.
"It's only very proud people who are silent and love solitude," Nyuta
went on, pulling his hand away from his forehead. "You are proud, Volodya.
Why do you look at me like that from under your brows? Look me straight
in the face, if you please! Yes, now then, clumsy seal!"
Volodya made up his mind to speak. Wanting to smile, he twitched his
lower lip, blinked, and again put his hand to his forehead.
"I ... I love you," he said.
Nyuta raised her eyebrows in surprise, and laughed.
"What do I hear?" she sang, as prima-donnas sing at the opera when they
hear something awful. "What? What did you say? Say it again, say it
again...."
"I ... I love you!" repeated Volodya.
And without his will's having any part in his action, without reflection or
understanding, he took half a step towards Nyuta and clutched her by the
arm. Everything was dark before his eyes, and tears came into them. The
whole world was turned into one big, rough towel which smelt of the
bathhouse.
"Bravo, bravo!" he heard a merry laugh. "Why don't you speak? I want
you to speak! Well?"

Seeing that he was not prevented from holding her arm, Volodya glanced
at Nyuta's laughing face, and clumsily, awkwardly, put both arms round her
waist, his hands meeting behind her back. He held her round the waist with
both arms, while, putting her hands up to her head, showing the dimples in
her elbows, she set her hair straight under the kerchief and said in a calm
voice:
"You must be tactful, polite, charming, and you can only become that
under feminine influence. But what a wicked, angry face you have! You
must talk, laugh.... Yes, Volodya, don't be surly; you are young and will
have plenty of time for philosophising. Come, let go of me; I am going. Let
go."
Without effort she released her waist, and, humming something, walked
out of the arbour. Volodya was left alone. He smoothed his hair, smiled, and
walked three times to and fro across the arbour, then he sat down on the
bench and smiled again. He felt insufferably ashamed, so much so that he
wondered that human shame could reach such a pitch of acuteness and
intensity. Shame made him smile, gesticulate, and whisper some
disconnected words.
He was ashamed that he had been treated like a small boy, ashamed of
his shyness, and, most of all, that he had had the audacity to put his arms
round the waist of a respectable married woman, though, as it seemed to
him, he had neither through age nor by external quality, nor by social
position any right to do so.
He jumped up, went out of the arbour, and, without looking round,
walked into the recesses of the garden furthest from the house.
"Ah! only to get away from here as soon as possible," he thought,
clutching his head. "My God! as soon as possible."
The train by which Volodya was to go back with his maman was at
eight-forty. There were three hours before the train started, but he would
with pleasure have gone to the station at once without waiting for his
maman.
At eight o'clock he went to the house. His whole figure was expressive
of determination: what would be, would be! He made up his mind to go in
boldly, to look them straight in the face, to speak in a loud voice, regardless
of everything.

He crossed the terrace, the big hall and the drawing-room, and there
stopped to take breath. He could hear them in the dining-room, drinking tea.
Madame Shumihin, maman, and Nyuta were talking and laughing about
something.
Volodya listened.
"I assure you!" said Nyuta. "I could not believe my eyes! When he began
declaring his passion and—just imagine!—put his arms round my waist, I
should not have recognised him. And you know he has a way with him!
When he told me he was in love with me, there was something brutal in his
face, like a Circassian."
"Really!" gasped maman, going off into a peal of laughter. "Really! How
he does remind me of his father!"
Volodya ran back and dashed out into the open air.
"How could they talk of it aloud!" he wondered in agony, clasping his
hands and looking up to the sky in horror. "They talk aloud in cold blood ...
and maman laughed!... Maman! My God, why didst Thou give me such a
mother? Why?"
But he had to go to the house, come what might. He walked three times
up and down the avenue, grew a little calmer, and went into the house.
"Why didn't you come in in time for tea?" Madame Shumihin asked
sternly.
"I am sorry, it's ... it's time for me to go," he muttered, not raising his
eyes. "Maman, it's eight o'clock!"
"You go alone, my dear," said his maman languidly. "I am staying the
night with Lili. Goodbye, my dear.... Let me make the sign of the cross over
you."
She made the sign of the cross over her son, and said in French, turning
to Nyuta:
"He's rather like Lermontov ... isn't he?"
Saying good-bye after a fashion, without looking any one in the face,
Volodya went out of the dining-room. Ten minutes later he was walking
along the road to the station, and was glad of it. Now he felt neither
frightened nor ashamed; he breathed freely and easily.
About half a mile from the station, he sat down on a stone by the side of
the road, and gazed at the sun, which was half hidden behind a barrow.

There were lights already here and there at the station, and one green light
glimmered dimly, but the train was not yet in sight. It was pleasant to
Volodya to sit still without moving, and to watch the evening coming little
by little. The darkness of the arbour, the footsteps, the smell of the bath-
house, the laughter, and the waist—all these rose with amazing vividness
before his imagination, and all this was no longer so terrible and important
as before.
"It's of no consequence.... She did not pull her hand away, and laughed
when I held her by the waist," he thought. "So she must have liked it. If she
had disliked it she would have been angry...."
And now Volodya felt sorry that he had not had more boldness there in
the arbour. He felt sorry that he was so stupidly going away, and he was by
now persuaded that if the same thing happened again he would be bolder
and look at it more simply.
And it would not be difficult for the opportunity to occur again. They
used to stroll about for a long time after supper at the Shumihins'. If
Volodya went for a walk with Nyuta in the dark garden, there would be an
opportunity!
"I will go back," he thought, "and will go by the morning train to-
morrow.... I will say I have missed the train."
And he turned back.... Madame Shumihin, Maman, Nyuta, and one of
the nieces were sitting on the verandah, playing vint. When Volodya told
them the lie that he had missed the train, they were uneasy that he might be
late for the examination day, and advised him to get up early. All the while
they were playing he sat on one side, greedily watching Nyuta and
waiting.... He already had a plan prepared in his mind: he would go up to
Nyuta in the dark, would take her by the hand, then would embrace her;
there would be no need to say anything, as both of them would understand
without words.
But after supper the ladies did not go for a walk in the garden, but went
on playing cards. They played till one o'clock at night, and then broke up to
go to bed.
"How stupid it all is!" Volodya thought with vexation as he got into bed.
"But never mind; I'll wait till to-morrow ... to-morrow in the arbour. It
doesn't matter...."

He did not attempt to go to sleep, but sat in bed, hugging his knees and
thinking. All thought of the examination was hateful to him. He had already
made up his mind that they would expel him, and that there was nothing
terrible about his being expelled. On the contrary, it was a good thing—a
very good thing, in fact. Next day he would be as free as a bird; he would
put on ordinary clothes instead of his school uniform, would smoke openly,
come out here, and make love to Nyuta when he liked; and he would not be
a schoolboy but "a young man." And as for the rest of it, what is called a
career, a future, that was clear; Volodya would go into the army or the
telegraph service, or he would go into a chemist's shop and work his way up
till he was a dispenser.... There were lots of callings. An hour or two passed,
and he was still sitting and thinking....
Towards three o'clock, when it was beginning to get light, the door
creaked cautiously and his maman came into the room.
"Aren't you asleep?" she asked, yawning. "Go to sleep; I have only come
in for a minute.... I am only fetching the drops...."
"What for?"
"Poor Lili has got spasms again. Go to sleep, my child, your
examination's to-morrow...."
She took a bottle of something out of the cupboard, went to the window,
read the label, and went away.
"Marya Leontyevna, those are not the drops!" Volodya heard a woman's
voice, a minute later. "That's convallaria, and Lili wants morphine. Is your
son asleep? Ask him to look for it...."
It was Nyuta's voice. Volodya turned cold. He hurriedly put on his
trousers, flung his coat over his shoulders, and went to the door.
"Do you understand? Morphine," Nyuta explained in a whisper. "There
must be a label in Latin. Wake Volodya; he will find it."
Maman opened the door and Volodya caught sight of Nyuta. She was
wearing the same loose wrapper in which she had gone to bathe. Her hair
hung loose and disordered on her shoulders, her face looked sleepy and
dark in the half-light....
"Why, Volodya is not asleep," she said. "Volodya, look in the cupboard
for the morphine, there's a dear! What a nuisance Lili is! She has always
something the matter."

Maman muttered something, yawned, and went away.
"Look for it," said Nyuta. "Why are you standing still?"
Volodya went to the cupboard, knelt down, and began looking through
the bottles and boxes of medicine. His hands were trembling, and he had a
feeling in his chest and stomach as though cold waves were running all over
his inside. He felt suffocated and giddy from the smell of ether, carbolic
acid, and various drugs, which he quite unnecessarily snatched up with his
trembling fingers and spilled in so doing.
"I believe maman has gone," he thought. "That's a good thing ... a good
thing...."
"Will you be quick?" said Nyuta, drawling.
"In a minute.... Here, I believe this is morphine," said Volodya, reading
on one of the labels the word "morph...." "Here it is!"
Nyuta was standing in the doorway in such a way that one foot was in
his room and one was in the passage. She was tidying her hair, which was
difficult to put in order because it was so thick and long, and looked absent-
mindedly at Volodya. In her loose wrap, with her sleepy face and her hair
down, in the dim light that came into the white sky not yet lit by the sun,
she seemed to Volodya captivating, magnificent.... Fascinated, trembling all
over, and remembering with relish how he had held that exquisite body in
his arms in the arbour, he handed her the bottle and said:
"How wonderful you are!"
"What?"
She came into the room.
"What?" she asked, smiling.
He was silent and looked at her, then, just as in the arbour, he took her
hand, and she looked at him with a smile and waited for what would happen
next.
"I love you," he whispered.
She left off smiling, thought a minute, and said:
"Wait a little; I think somebody is coming. Oh, these schoolboys!" she
said in an undertone, going to the door and peeping out into the passage.
"No, there is no one to be seen...."
She came back.

Then it seemed to Volodya that the room, Nyuta, the sunrise and himself
—all melted together in one sensation of acute, extraordinary, incredible
bliss, for which one might give up one's whole life and face eternal
torments.... But half a minute passed and all that vanished. Volodya saw
only a fat, plain face, distorted by an expression of repulsion, and he
himself suddenly felt a loathing for what had happened.
"I must go away, though," said Nyuta, looking at Volodya with disgust.
"What a wretched, ugly ... fie, ugly duckling!"
How unseemly her long hair, her loose wrap, her steps, her voice seemed
to Volodya now!...
"'Ugly duckling' ..." he thought after she had gone away. "I really am
ugly ... everything is ugly."
The sun was rising, the birds were singing loudly; he could hear the
gardener walking in the garden and the creaking of his wheelbarrow ... and
soon afterwards he heard the lowing of the cows and the sounds of the
shepherd's pipe. The sunlight and the sounds told him that somewhere in
this world there is a pure, refined, poetical life. But where was it? Volodya
had never heard a word of it from his maman or any of the people round
about him.
When the footman came to wake him for the morning train, he pretended
to be asleep....
"Bother it! Damn it all!" he thought.
He got up between ten and eleven.
Combing his hair before the looking-glass, and looking at his ugly face,
pale from his sleepless night, he thought:
"It's perfectly true ... an ugly duckling!"
When maman saw him and was horrified that he was not at his
examination, Volodya said:
"I overslept myself, maman.... But don't worry, I will get a medical
certificate."
Madame Shumihin and Nyuta waked up at one o'clock. Volodya heard
Madame Shumihin open her window with a bang, heard Nyuta go off into a
peal of laughter in reply to her coarse voice. He saw the door open and a
string of nieces and other toadies (among the latter was his maman) file into
lunch, caught a glimpse of Nyuta's freshly washed laughing face, and,

beside her, the black brows and beard of her husband the architect, who had
just arrived.
Nyuta was wearing a Little Russian dress which did not suit her at all,
and made her look clumsy; the architect was making dull and vulgar jokes.
The rissoles served at lunch had too much onion in them—so it seemed to
Volodya. It also seemed to him that Nyuta laughed loudly on purpose, and
kept glancing in his direction to give him to understand that the memory of
the night did not trouble her in the least, and that she was not aware of the
presence at table of the "ugly duckling."
At four o'clock Volodya drove to the station with his maman. Foul
memories, the sleepless night, the prospect of expulsion from school, the
stings of conscience—all roused in him now an oppressive, gloomy anger.
He looked at maman's sharp profile, at her little nose, and at the raincoat
which was a present from Nyuta, and muttered:
"Why do you powder? It's not becoming at your age! You make yourself
up, don't pay your debts at cards, smoke other people's tobacco.... It's
hateful! I don't love you ... I don't love you!"
He was insulting her, and she moved her little eyes about in alarm, flung
up her hands, and whispered in horror:
"What are you saying, my dear! Good gracious! the coachman will hear!
Be quiet or the coachman will hear! He can overhear everything."
"I don't love you ... I don't love you!" he went on breathlessly. "You've
no soul and no morals.... Don't dare to wear that raincoat! Do you hear? Or
else I will tear it into rags...."
"Control yourself, my child," maman wept; "the coachman can hear!"
"And where is my father's fortune? Where is your money? You have
wasted it all. I am not ashamed of being poor, but I am ashamed of having
such a mother.... When my schoolfellows ask questions about you, I always
blush."
In the train they had to pass two stations before they reached the town.
Volodya spent all the time on the little platform between two carriages and
shivered all over. He did not want to go into the compartment because there
the mother he hated was sitting. He hated himself, hated the ticket
collectors, the smoke from the engine, the cold to which he attributed his
shivering. And the heavier the weight on his heart, the more strongly he felt
that somewhere in the world, among some people, there was a pure,

honourable, warm, refined life, full of love, affection, gaiety, and serenity....
He felt this and was so intensely miserable that one of the passengers, after
looking in his face attentively, actually asked:
"You have the toothache, I suppose?"
In the town maman and Volodya lived with Marya Petrovna, a lady of
noble rank, who had a large flat and let rooms to boarders. Maman had two
rooms, one with windows and two pictures in gold frames hanging on the
walls, in which her bed stood and in which she lived, and a little dark room
opening out of it in which Volodya lived. Here there was a sofa on which he
slept, and, except that sofa, there was no other furniture; the rest of the
room was entirely filled up with wicker baskets full of clothes, cardboard
hat-boxes, and all sorts of rubbish, which maman preserved for some reason
or other. Volodya prepared his lessons either in his mother's room or in the
"general room," as the large room in which the boarders assembled at
dinner-time and in the evening was called.
On reaching home he lay down on his sofa and put the quilt over him to
stop his shivering. The cardboard hat-boxes, the wicker baskets, and the
other rubbish, reminded him that he had not a room of his own, that he had
no refuge in which he could get away from his mother, from her visitors,
and from the voices that were floating up from the "general room." The
satchel and the books lying about in the corners reminded him of the
examination he had missed.... For some reason there came into his mind,
quite inappropriately, Mentone, where he had lived with his father when he
was seven years old; he thought of Biarritz and two little English girls with
whom he ran about on the sand.... He tried to recall to his memory the
colour of the sky, the sea, the height of the waves, and his mood at the time,
but he could not succeed. The English girls flitted before his imagination as
though they were living; all the rest was a medley of images that floated
away in confusion....
"No; it's cold here," thought Volodya. He got up, put on his overcoat, and
went into the "general room."
There they were drinking tea. There were three people at the samovar:
maman; an old lady with tortoiseshell pince-nez, who gave music lessons;
and Avgustin Mihalitch, an elderly and very stout Frenchman, who was
employed at a perfumery factory.

"I have had no dinner to-day," said maman. "I ought to send the maid to
buy some bread."
"Dunyasha!" shouted the Frenchman.
It appeared that the maid had been sent out somewhere by the lady of the
house.
"Oh, that's of no consequence," said the Frenchman, with a broad smile.
"I will go for some bread myself at once. Oh, it's nothing."
He laid his strong, pungent cigar in a conspicuous place, put on his hat
and went out. After he had gone away maman began telling the music
teacher how she had been staying at the Shumihins', and how warmly they
welcomed her.
"Lili Shumihin is a relation of mine, you know," she said. "Her late
husband, General Shumihin, was a cousin of my husband. And she was a
Baroness Kolb by birth...."
"Maman, that's false!" said Volodya irritably. "Why tell lies?"
He knew perfectly well that what his mother said was true; in what she
was saying about General Shumihin and about Baroness Kolb there was not
a word of lying, but nevertheless he felt that she was lying. There was a
suggestion of falsehood in her manner of speaking, in the expression of her
face, in her eyes, in everything.
"You are lying," repeated Volodya; and he brought his fist down on the
table with such force that all the crockery shook and maman's tea was spilt
over. "Why do you talk about generals and baronesses? It's all lies!"
The music teacher was disconcerted, and coughed into her handkerchief,
affecting to sneeze, and maman began to cry.
"Where can I go?" thought Volodya.
He had been in the street already; he was ashamed to go to his
schoolfellows. Again, quite incongruously, he remembered the two little
English girls.... He paced up and down the "general room," and went into
Avgustin Mihalitch's room. Here there was a strong smell of ethereal oils
and glycerine soap. On the table, in the window, and even on the chairs,
there were a number of bottles, glasses, and wineglasses containing fluids
of various colours. Volodya took up from the table a newspaper, opened it
and read the title Figaro ... There was a strong and pleasant scent about the
paper. Then he took a revolver from the table....

"There, there! Don't take any notice of it." The music teacher was
comforting maman in the next room. "He is young! Young people of his age
never restrain themselves. One must resign oneself to that."
"No, Yevgenya Andreyevna; he's too spoilt," said maman in a singsong
voice. "He has no one in authority over him, and I am weak and can do
nothing. Oh, I am unhappy!"
Volodya put the muzzle of the revolver to his mouth, felt something like
a trigger or spring, and pressed it with his finger.... Then felt something else
projecting, and once more pressed it. Taking the muzzle out of his mouth,
he wiped it with the lapel of his coat, looked at the lock. He had never in his
life taken a weapon in his hand before....
"I believe one ought to raise this ..." he reflected. "Yes, it seems so."
Avgustin Mihalitch went into the "general room," and with a laugh
began telling them about something. Volodya put the muzzle in his mouth
again, pressed it with his teeth, and pressed something with his fingers.
There was a sound of a shot.... Something hit Volodya in the back of his
head with terrible violence, and he fell on the table with his face
downwards among the bottles and glasses. Then he saw his father, as in
Mentone, in a top-hat with a wide black band on it, wearing mourning for
some lady, suddenly seize him by both hands, and they fell headlong into a
very deep, dark pit.
Then everything was blurred and vanished.

AN ANONYMOUS STORY

I
THROUGH causes which it is not the time to go into in detail, I had to enter
the service of a Petersburg official called Orlov, in the capacity of a
footman. He was about five and thirty, and was called Georgy* Ivanitch.
*Both g's hard, as in "Gorgon"; e like ai in rain.
I entered this Orlov's service on account of his father, a prominent
political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I
reckoned that, living with the son, I should—from the conversations I
should hear, and from the letters and papers I should find on the table—
learn every detail of the father's plans and intentions.
As a rule at eleven o'clock in the morning the electric bell rang in my
footman's quarters to let me know that my master was awake. When I went
into the bedroom with his polished shoes and brushed clothes, Georgy
Ivanitch would be sitting in his bed with a face that looked, not drowsy, but
rather exhausted by sleep, and he would gaze off in one direction without
any sign of satisfaction at having waked. I helped him to dress, and he let
me do it with an air of reluctance without speaking or noticing my presence;
then with his head wet with washing, smelling of fresh scent, he used to go
into the dining-room to drink his coffee. He used to sit at the table, sipping
his coffee and glancing through the newspapers, while the maid Polya and I
stood respectfully at the door gazing at him. Two grown-up persons had to
stand watching with the gravest attention a third drinking coffee and
munching rusks. It was probably ludicrous and grotesque, but I saw nothing
humiliating in having to stand near the door, though I was quite as well
born and well educated as Orlov himself.
I was in the first stage of consumption, and was suffering from
something else, possibly even more serious than consumption. I don't know
whether it was the effect of my illness or of an incipient change in my
philosophy of life of which I was not conscious at the time, but I was, day
by day, more possessed by a passionate, irritating longing for ordinary
everyday life. I yearned for mental tranquillity, health, fresh air, good food.

I was becoming a dreamer, and, like a dreamer, I did not know exactly what
I wanted. Sometimes I felt inclined to go into a monastery, to sit there for
days together by the window and gaze at the trees and the fields; sometimes
I fancied I would buy fifteen acres of land and settle down as a country
gentleman; sometimes I inwardly vowed to take up science and become a
professor at some provincial university. I was a retired navy lieutenant; I
dreamed of the sea, of our squadron, and of the corvette in which I had
made the cruise round the world. I longed to experience again the
indescribable feeling when, walking in the tropical forest or looking at the
sunset in the Bay of Bengal, one is thrilled with ecstasy and at the same
time homesick. I dreamed of mountains, women, music, and, with the
curiosity of a child, I looked into people's faces, listened to their voices.
And when I stood at the door and watched Orlov sipping his coffee, I felt
not a footman, but a man interested in everything in the world, even in
Orlov.
In appearance Orlov was a typical Petersburger, with narrow shoulders, a
long waist, sunken temples, eyes of an indefinite colour, and scanty, dingy-
coloured hair, beard and moustaches. His face had a stale, unpleasant look,
though it was studiously cared for. It was particularly unpleasant when he
was asleep or lost in thought. It is not worth while describing a quite
ordinary appearance; besides, Petersburg is not Spain, and a man's
appearance is not of much consequence even in love affairs, and is only of
value to a handsome footman or coachman. I have spoken of Orlov's face
and hair only because there was something in his appearance worth
mentioning. When Orlov took a newspaper or book, whatever it might be,
or met people, whoever they be, an ironical smile began to come into his
eyes, and his whole countenance assumed an expression of light mockery in
which there was no malice. Before reading or hearing anything he always
had his irony in readiness, as a savage has his shield. It was an habitual
irony, like some old liquor brewed years ago, and now it came into his face
probably without any participation of his will, as it were by reflex action.
But of that later.
Soon after midday he took his portfolio, full of papers, and drove to his
office. He dined away from home and returned after eight o'clock. I used to
light the lamp and candles in his study, and he would sit down in a low
chair with his legs stretched out on another chair, and, reclining in that
position, would begin reading. Almost every day he brought in new books

with him or received parcels of them from the shops, and there were heaps
of books in three languages, to say nothing of Russian, which he had read
and thrown away, in the corners of my room and under my bed. He read
with extraordinary rapidity. They say: "Tell me what you read, and I'll tell
you who you are." That may be true, but it was absolutely impossible to
judge of Orlov by what he read. It was a regular hotchpotch. Philosophy,
French novels, political economy, finance, new poets, and publications of
the firm Posrednik*—and he read it all with the same rapidity and with the
same ironical expression in his eyes.
* I.e., Tchertkov and others, publishers of Tolstoy, who issued good
literature for peasants' reading.
After ten o'clock he carefully dressed, often in evening dress, very rarely
in his kammer-junker's uniform, and went out, returning in the morning.
Our relations were quiet and peaceful, and we never had any
misunderstanding. As a rule he did not notice my presence, and when he
talked to me there was no expression of irony on his face—he evidently did
not look upon me as a human being.
I only once saw him angry. One day—it was a week after I had entered
his service—he came back from some dinner at nine o'clock; his face
looked ill-humoured and exhausted. When I followed him into his study to
light the candles, he said to me:
"There's a nasty smell in the flat."
"No, the air is fresh," I answered.
"I tell you, there's a bad smell," he answered irritably.
"I open the movable panes every day."
"Don't argue, blockhead!" he shouted.
I was offended, and was on the point of answering, and goodness knows
how it would have ended if Polya, who knew her master better than I did,
had not intervened.
"There really is a disagreeable smell," she said, raising her eyebrows.
"What can it be from? Stepan, open the pane in the drawing-room, and light
the fire."
With much bustle and many exclamations, she went through all the
rooms, rustling her skirts and squeezing the sprayer with a hissing sound.
And Orlov was still out of humour; he was obviously restraining himself

not to vent his ill-temper aloud. He was sitting at the table and rapidly
writing a letter. After writing a few lines he snorted angrily and tore it up,
then he began writing again.
"Damn them all!" he muttered. "They expect me to have an abnormal
memory!"
At last the letter was written; he got up from the table and said, turning
to me:
"Go to Znamensky Street and deliver this letter to Zinaida Fyodorovna
Krasnovsky in person. But first ask the porter whether her husband —that
is, Mr. Krasnovsky—has returned yet. If he has returned, don't deliver the
letter, but come back. Wait a minute!... If she asks whether I have any one
here, tell her that there have been two gentlemen here since eight o'clock,
writing something."
I drove to Znamensky Street. The porter told me that Mr. Krasnovsky
had not yet come in, and I made my way up to the third storey. The door
was opened by a tall, stout, drab-coloured flunkey with black whiskers, who
in a sleepy, churlish, and apathetic voice, such as only flunkeys use in
addressing other flunkeys, asked me what I wanted. Before I had time to
answer, a lady dressed in black came hurriedly into the hall. She screwed up
her eyes and looked at me.
"Is Zinaida Fyodorovna at home?" I asked.
"That is me," said the lady.
"A letter from Georgy Ivanitch."
She tore the letter open impatiently, and holding it in both hands, so that
I saw her sparkling diamond rings, she began reading. I made out a pale
face with soft lines, a prominent chin, and long dark lashes. From her
appearance I should not have judged the lady to be more than five and
twenty.
"Give him my thanks and my greetings," she said when she had finished
the letter. "Is there any one with Georgy Ivanitch?" she asked softly,
joyfully, and as though ashamed of her mistrust.
"Two gentlemen," I answered. "They're writing something."
"Give him my greetings and thanks," she repeated, bending her head
sideways, and, reading the letter as she walked, she went noiselessly out. I
saw few women at that time, and this lady of whom I had a passing glimpse

made an impression on me. As I walked home I recalled her face and the
delicate fragrance about her, and fell to dreaming. By the time I got home
Orlov had gone out.

II
And so my relations with my employer were quiet and peaceful, but still
the unclean and degrading element which I so dreaded on becoming a
footman was conspicuous and made itself felt every day. I did not get on
with Polya. She was a well-fed and pampered hussy who adored Orlov
because he was a gentleman and despised me because I was a footman.
Probably, from the point of view of a real flunkey or cook, she was
fascinating, with her red cheeks, her turned-up nose, her coquettish glances,
and the plumpness, one might almost say fatness, of her person. She
powdered her face, coloured her lips and eyebrows, laced herself in, and
wore a bustle, and a bangle made of coins. She walked with little ripping
steps; as she walked she swayed, or, as they say, wriggled her shoulders and
back. The rustle of her skirts, the creaking of her stays, the jingle her bangle
and the vulgar smell of lip salve, toilet vinegar, and scent stolen from her
master, aroused in me whilst I was doing the rooms with her in the morning
a sensation as though I were taking part with her in some abomination.
Either because I did not steal as she did, or because I displayed no desire
to become her lover, which she probably looked upon as an insult, or
perhaps because she felt that I was a man of a different order, she hated me
from the first day. My inexperience, my appearance—so unlike a flunkey—
and my illness, seemed to her pitiful and excited her disgust. I had a bad
cough at that time, and sometimes at night I prevented her from sleeping, as
our rooms were only divided by a wooden partition, and every morning she
said to me:
"Again you didn't let me sleep. You ought to be in hospital instead of in
service."
She so genuinely believed that I was hardly a human being, but
something infinitely below her, that, like the Roman matrons who were not
ashamed to bathe before their slaves, she sometimes went about in my
presence in nothing but her chemise.

Once when I was in a happy, dreamy mood, I asked her at dinner (we
had soup and roast meat sent in from a restaurant every day):
"Polya, do you believe in God?"
"Why, of course!"
"Then," I went on, "you believe there will be a day of judgment, and that
we shall have to answer to God for every evil action?"
She gave me no reply, but simply made a contemptuous grimace, and,
looking that time at her cold eyes and over-fed expression, I realised that for
her complete and finished personality no God, no conscience, no laws
existed, and that if I had had to set fire to the house, to murder or to rob, I
could not have hired a better accomplice.
In my novel surroundings I felt very uncomfortable for the first week at
Orlov's before I got used to being addressed as "thou," and being constantly
obliged to tell lies (saying "My master is not at home" when he was). In my
flunkey's swallow-tail I felt as though I were in armour. But I grew
accustomed to it in time. Like a genuine footman, I waited at table, tidied
the rooms, ran and drove about on errands of all sorts. When Orlov did not
want to keep an appointment with Zinaida Fyodorovna, or when he forgot
that he had promised to go and see her, I drove to Znamensky Street, put a
letter into her hands and told a lie. And the result of it all was quite different
from what I had expected when I became a footman. Every day of this new
life of mine was wasted for me and my cause, as Orlov never spoke of his
father, nor did his visitors, and all I could learn of the stateman's doings
was, as before, what I could glean from the newspapers or from
correspondence with my comrades. The hundreds of notes and papers I used
to find in the study and read had not the remotest connection with what I
was looking for. Orlov was absolutely uninterested in his father's political
work, and looked as though he had never heard of it, or as though his father
had long been dead.

III
Every Thursday we had visitors.
I ordered a piece of roast beef from the restaurant and telephoned to
Eliseyev's to send us caviare, cheese, oysters, and so on. I bought playing-
cards. Polya was busy all day getting ready the tea-things and the dinner

service. To tell the truth, this spurt of activity came as a pleasant change in
our idle life, and Thursdays were for us the most interesting days.
Only three visitors used to come. The most important and perhaps the
most interesting was the one called Pekarsky—a tall, lean man of five and
forty, with a long hooked nose, with a big black beard, and a bald patch on
his head. His eyes were large and prominent, and his expression was grave
and thoughtful like that of a Greek philosopher. He was on the board of
management of some railway, and also had some post in a bank; he was a
consulting lawyer in some important Government institution, and had
business relations with a large number of private persons as a trustee,
chairman of committees, and so on. He was of quite a low grade in the
service, and modestly spoke of himself as a lawyer, but he had a vast
influence. A note or card from him was enough to make a celebrated doctor,
a director of a railway, or a great dignitary see any one without waiting; and
it was said that through his protection one might obtain even a post of the
Fourth Class, and get any sort of unpleasant business hushed up. He was
looked upon as a very intelligent man, but his was a strange, peculiar
intelligence. He was able to multiply 213 by 373 in his head
instantaneously, or turn English pounds into German marks without help of
pencil or paper; he understood finance and railway business thoroughly, and
the machinery of Russian administration had no secrets for him; he was a
most skilful pleader in civil suits, and it was not easy to get the better of
him at law. But that exceptional intelligence could not grasp many things
which are understood even by some stupid people. For instance, he was
absolutely unable to understand why people are depressed, why they weep,
shoot themselves, and even kill others; why they fret about things that do
not affect them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or
Shtchedrin.... Everything abstract, everything belonging to the domain of
thought and feeling, was to him boring and incomprehensible, like music to
one who has no ear. He looked at people simply from the business point of
view, and divided them into competent and incompetent. No other
classification existed for him. Honesty and rectitude were only signs of
competence. Drinking, gambling, and debauchery were permissible, but
must not be allowed to interfere with business. Believing in God was rather
stupid, but religion ought be safeguarded, as the common people must have
some principle to restrain them, otherwise they would not work.
Punishment is only necessary as deterrent. There was no need to go away

for holidays, as it was just as nice in town. And so on. He was a widower
and had no children, but lived on a large scale, as though he had a family,
and paid three thousand roubles a year for his flat.
The second visitor, Kukushkin, an actual civil councillor though a young
man, was short, and was conspicuous for his extremely unpleasant
appearance, which was due to the disproportion between his fat, puffy body
and his lean little face. His lips were puckered up suavely, and his little
trimmed moustaches looked as though they had been fixed on with glue. He
was a man with the manners of a lizard. He did not walk, but, as it were,
crept along with tiny steps, squirming and sniggering, and when he laughed
he showed his teeth. He was a clerk on special commissions, and did
nothing, though he received a good salary, especially in the summer, when
special and lucrative jobs were found for him. He was a man of personal
ambition, not only to the marrow of his bones, but more fundamentally—to
the last drop of his blood; but even in his ambitions he was petty and did
not rely on himself, but was building his career on the chance favour flung
him by his superiors. For the sake of obtaining some foreign decoration, or
for the sake of having his name mentioned in the newspapers as having
been present at some special service in the company of other great
personages, he was ready to submit to any kind of humiliation, to beg, to
flatter, to promise. He flattered Orlov and Pekarsky from cowardice,
because he thought they were powerful; he flattered Polya and me because
we were in the service of a powerful man. Whenever I took off his fur coat
he tittered and asked me: "Stepan, are you married?" and then unseemly
vulgarities followed—by way of showing me special attention. Kukushkin
flattered Orlov's weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blasé ways; to
please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company
criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel.
When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle
and perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond
of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is
perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy street-
walker on the Nevsky Prospect, but to listen to him you would think he was
contaminated by all the vices of East and West combined, that he was an
honourary member of a dozen iniquitous secret societies and was already
marked by the police. Kukushkin lied about himself in an unconscionable

way, and they did not exactly disbelieve him, but paid little heed to his
incredible stories.
The third guest was Gruzin, the son of a worthy and learned general; a
man of Orlov's age, with long hair, short-sighted eyes, and gold spectacles. I
remember his long white fingers, that looked like a pianist's; and, indeed,
there was something of a musician, of a virtuoso, about his whole figure.
The first violins in orchestras look just like that. He used to cough, suffered
from migraine, and seemed invalidish and delicate. Probably at home he
was dressed and undressed like a baby. He had finished at the College of
Jurisprudence, and had at first served in the Department of Justice, then he
was transferred to the Senate; he left that, and through patronage had
received a post in the Department of Crown Estates, and had soon
afterwards given that up. In my time he was serving in Orlov's department;
he was his head-clerk, but he said that he should soon exchange into the
Department of Justice again. He took his duties and his shifting about from
one post to another with exceptional levity, and when people talked before
him seriously of grades in the service, decorations, salaries, he smiled good-
naturedly and repeated Prutkov's aphorism: "It's only in the Government
service you learn the truth." He had a little wife with a wrinkled face, who
was very jealous of him, and five weedy-looking children. He was
unfaithful to his wife, he was only fond of his children when he saw them,
and on the whole was rather indifferent to his family, and made fun of them.
He and his family existed on credit, borrowing wherever they could at every
opportunity, even from his superiors in the office and porters in people's
houses. His was a flabby nature; he was so lazy that he did not care what
became of himself, and drifted along heedless where or why he was going.
He went where he was taken. If he was taken to some low haunt, he went; if
wine was set before him, he drank—if it were not put before him, he
abstained; if wives were abused in his presence, he abused his wife,
declaring she had ruined his life—when wives were praised, he praised his
and said quite sincerely: "I am very fond of her, poor thing!" He had no fur
coat and always wore a rug which smelt of the nursery. When at supper he
rolled balls of bread and drank a great deal of red wine, absorbed in
thought, strange to say, I used to feel almost certain that there was
something in him of which perhaps he had a vague sense, though in the
bustle and vulgarity of his daily life he had not time to understand and

appreciate it. He played a little on the piano. Sometimes he would sit down
at the piano, play a chord or two, and begin singing softly:

"What does the coming day bring to me?"

But at once, as though afraid, he would get up and walk from the piano.
The visitors usually arrived about ten o'clock. They played cards in
Orlov's study, and Polya and I handed them tea. It was only on these
occasions that I could gauge the full sweetness of a flunkey's life. Standing
for four or five hours at the door, watching that no one's glass should be
empty, changing the ash-trays, running to the table to pick up the chalk or a
card when it was dropped, and, above all, standing, waiting, being attentive
without venturing to speak, to cough, to smile—is harder, I assure you, is
harder than the hardest of field labour. I have stood on watch at sea for four
hours at a stretch on stormy winter nights, and to my thinking it is an
infinitely easier duty.
They used to play cards till two, sometimes till three o'clock at night, and
then, stretching, they would go into the dining-room to supper, or, as Orlov
said, for a snack of something. At supper there was conversation. It usually
began by Orlov's speaking with laughing eyes of some acquaintance, of
some book he had lately been reading, of a new appointment or
Government scheme. Kukushkin, always ingratiating, would fall into his
tone, and what followed was to me, in my mood at that time, a revolting
exhibition. The irony of Orlov and his friends knew no bounds, and spared
no one and nothing. If they spoke of religion, it was with irony; they spoke
of philosophy, of the significance and object of life—irony again, if any one
began about the peasantry, it was with irony.
There is in Petersburg a species of men whose specialty it is to jeer at
every aspect of life; they cannot even pass by a starving man or a suicide
without saying something vulgar. But Orlov and his friends did not jeer or
make jokes, they talked ironically. They used to say that there was no God,
and personality was completely lost at death; the immortals only existed in
the French Academy. Real good did not and could not possibly exist, as its
existence was conditional upon human perfection, which was a logical
absurdity. Russia was a country as poor and dull as Persia. The intellectual
class was hopeless; in Pekarsky's opinion the overwhelming majority in it
were incompetent persons, good for nothing. The people were drunken,

lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We had no science, our literature was
uncouth, our commerce rested on swindling—"No selling without
cheating." And everything was in that style, and everything was a subject
for laughter.
Towards the end of supper the wine made them more good-humoured,
and they passed to more lively conversation. They laughed over Gruzin's
family life, over Kukushkin's conquests, or at Pekarsky, who had, they said,
in his account book one page headed Charity and another Physiological
Necessities. They said that no wife was faithful; that there was no wife from
whom one could not, with practice, obtain caresses without leaving her
drawing-room while her husband was sitting in his study close by; that girls
in their teens were perverted and knew everything. Orlov had preserved a
letter of a schoolgirl of fourteen: on her way home from school she had
"hooked an officer on the Nevsky," who had, it appears, taken her home
with him, and had only let her go late in the evening; and she hastened to
write about this to her school friend to share her joy with her. They
maintained that there was not and never had been such a thing as moral
purity, and that evidently it was unnecessary; mankind had so far done very
well without it. The harm done by so-called vice was undoubtedly
exaggerated. Vices which are punished by our legal code had not prevented
Diogenes from being a philosopher and a teacher. Cæsar and Cicero were
profligates and at the same time great men. Cato in his old age married a
young girl, and yet he was regarded as a great ascetic and a pillar of
morality.
At three or four o'clock the party broke up or they went off together out
of town, or to Officers' Street, to the house of a certain Varvara Ossipovna,
while I retired to my quarters, and was kept awake a long while by
coughing and headache.

IV
Three weeks after I entered Orlov's service—it was Sunday morning, I
remember—somebody rang the bell. It was not yet eleven, and Orlov was
still asleep. I went to open the door. You can imagine my astonishment
when I found a lady in a veil standing at the door on the landing.
"Is Georgy Ivanitch up?" she asked.

From her voice I recognised Zinaida Fyodorovna, to whom I had taken
letters in Znamensky Street. I don't remember whether I had time or self-
possession to answer her—I was taken aback at seeing her. And, indeed, she
did not need my answer. In a flash she had darted by me, and, filling the
hall with the fragrance of her perfume, which I remember to this day, she
went on, and her footsteps died away. For at least half an hour afterwards I
heard nothing. But again some one rang. This time it was a smartly dressed
girl, who looked like a maid in a wealthy family, accompanied by our house
porter. Both were out of breath, carrying two trunks and a dress-basket.
"These are for Zinaida Fyodorovna," said the girl.
And she went down without saying another word. All this was
mysterious, and made Polya, who had a deep admiration for the pranks of
her betters, smile slyly to herself; she looked as though she would like to
say, "So that's what we're up to," and she walked about the whole time on
tiptoe. At last we heard footsteps; Zinaida Fyodorovna came quickly into
the hall, and seeing me at the door of my room, said:
"Stepan, take Georgy Ivanitch his things."
When I went in to Orlov with his clothes and his boots, he was sitting on
the bed with his feet on the bearskin rug. There was an air of
embarrassment about his whole figure. He did not notice me, and my
menial opinion did not interest him; he was evidently perturbed and
embarrassed before himself, before his inner eye. He dressed, washed, and
used his combs and brushes silently and deliberately, as though allowing
himself time to think over his position and to reflect, and even from his
back one could see he was troubled and dissatisfied with himself.
They drank coffee together. Zinaida Fyodorovna poured out coffee for
herself and for Orlov, then she put her elbows on the table and laughed.
"I still can't believe it," she said. "When one has been a long while on
one's travels and reaches a hotel at last, it's difficult to believe that one
hasn't to go on. It is pleasant to breathe freely."
With the expression of a child who very much wants to be mischievous,
she sighed with relief and laughed again.
"You will excuse me," said Orlov, nodding towards the coffee. "Reading
at breakfast is a habit I can't get over. But I can do two things at once—read
and listen."

"Read away.... You shall keep your habits and your freedom. But why do
you look so solemn? Are you always like that in the morning, or is it only
to-day? Aren't you glad?"
"Yes, I am. But I must own I am a little overwhelmed."
"Why? You had plenty of time to prepare yourself for my descent upon
you. I've been threatening to come every day."
"Yes, but I didn't expect you to carry out your threat to-day."
"I didn't expect it myself, but that's all the better. It's all the better, my
dear. It's best to have an aching tooth out and have done with it."
"Yes, of course."
"Oh, my dear," she said, closing her eyes, "all is well that ends well; but
before this happy ending, what suffering there has been! My laughing
means nothing; I am glad, I am happy, but I feel more like crying than
laughing. Yesterday I had to fight a regular battle," she went on in French.
"God alone knows how wretched I was. But I laugh because I can't believe
in it. I keep fancying that my sitting here drinking coffee with you is not
real, but a dream."
Then, still speaking French, she described how she had broken with her
husband the day before and her eyes were alternately full of tears and of
laughter while she gazed with rapture at Orlov. She told him her husband
had long suspected her, but had avoided explanations; they had frequent
quarrels, and usually at the most heated moment he would suddenly subside
into silence and depart to his study for fear that in his exasperation he might
give utterance to his suspicions or she might herself begin to speak openly.
And she had felt guilty, worthless, incapable of taking a bold and serious
step, and that had made her hate herself and her husband more every day,
and she had suffered the torments of hell. But the day before, when during a
quarrel he had cried out in a tearful voice, "My God, when will it end?" and
had walked off to his study, she had run after him like a cat after a mouse,
and, preventing him from shutting the door, she had cried that she hated
him with her whole soul. Then he let her come into the study and she had
told him everything, had confessed that she loved some one else, that that
some one else was her real, most lawful husband, and that she thought it her
true duty to go away to him that very day, whatever might happen, if she
were to be shot for it.

"There's a very romantic streak in you," Orlov interrupted, keeping his
eyes fixed on the newspaper.
She laughed and went on talking without touching her coffee. Her
cheeks glowed and she was a little embarrassed by it, and she looked in
confusion at Polya and me. From what she went on to say I learnt that her
husband had answered her with threats, reproaches, and finally tears, and
that it would have been more accurate to say that she, and not he, had been
the attacking party.
"Yes, my dear, so long as I was worked up, everything went all right,"
she told Orlov; "but as night came on, my spirits sank. You don't believe in
God, George, but I do believe a little, and I fear retribution. God requires of
us patience, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and here I am refusing to be patient
and want to remodel my life to suit myself. Is that right? What if from the
point of view of God it's wrong? At two o'clock in the night my husband
came to me and said: 'You dare not go away. I'll fetch you back through the
police and make a scandal.' And soon afterwards I saw him like a shadow at
my door. 'Have mercy on me! Your elopement may injure me in the service.'
Those words had a coarse effect upon me and made me feel stiff all over. I
felt as though the retribution were beginning already; I began crying and
trembling with terror. I felt as though the ceiling would fall upon me, that I
should be dragged off to the police-station at once, that you would grow
cold to me—all sorts of things, in fact! I thought I would go into a nunnery
or become a nurse, and give up all thought of happiness, but then I
remembered that you loved me, and that I had no right to dispose of myself
without your knowledge; and everything in my mind was in a tangle—I was
in despair and did not know what to do or think. But the sun rose and I grew
happier. As soon as it was morning I dashed off to you. Ah, what I've been
through, dear one! I haven't slept for two nights!"
She was tired out and excited. She was sleepy, and at the same time she
wanted to talk endlessly, to laugh and to cry, and to go to a restaurant to
lunch that she might feel her freedom.
"You have a cosy flat, but I am afraid it may be small for the two of us,"
she said, walking rapidly through all the rooms when they had finished
breakfast. "What room will you give me? I like this one because it is next to
your study."

At one o'clock she changed her dress in the room next to the study,
which from that time she called hers, and she went off with Orlov to lunch.
They dined, too, at a restaurant, and spent the long interval between lunch
and dinner in shopping. Till late at night I was opening the door to
messengers and errand-boys from the shops. They bought, among other
things, a splendid pier-glass, a dressing-table, a bedstead, and a gorgeous
tea service which we did not need. They bought a regular collection of
copper saucepans, which we set in a row on the shelf in our cold, empty
kitchen. As we were unpacking the tea service Polya's eyes gleamed, and
she looked at me two or three times with hatred and fear that I, not she,
would be the first to steal one of these charming cups. A lady's writing-
table, very expensive and inconvenient, came too. It was evident that
Zinaida Fyodorovna contemplated settling with us for good, and meant to
make the flat her home.
She came back with Orlov between nine and ten. Full of proud
consciousness that she had done something bold and out of the common,
passionately in love, and, as she imagined, passionately loved, exhausted,
looking forward to a sweet sound sleep, Zinaida Fyodorovna was revelling
in her new life. She squeezed her hands together in the excess of her joy,
declared that everything was delightful, and swore that she would love
Orlov for ever; and these vows, and the naïve, almost childish confidence
that she too was deeply loved and would be loved forever, made her at least
five years younger. She talked charming nonsense and laughed at herself.
"There's no other blessing greater than freedom!" she said, forcing
herself to say something serious and edifying. "How absurd it is when you
think of it! We attach no value to our own opinion even when it is wise, but
tremble before the opinion of all sorts of stupid people. Up to the last
minute I was afraid of what other people would say, but as soon as I
followed my own instinct and made up my mind to go my own way, my
eyes were opened, I overcame my silly fears, and now I am happy and wish
every one could be as happy!"
But her thoughts immediately took another turn, and she began talking
of another flat, of wallpapers, horses, a trip to Switzerland and Italy. Orlov
was tired by the restaurants and the shops, and was still suffering from the
same uneasiness that I had noticed in the morning. He smiled, but more
from politeness than pleasure, and when she spoke of anything seriously, he
agreed ironically: "Oh, yes."

"Stepan, make haste and find us a good cook," she said to me.
"There's no need to be in a hurry over the kitchen arrangements," said
Orlov, looking at me coldly. "We must first move into another flat."
We had never had cooking done at home nor kept horses, because, as he
said, "he did not like disorder about him," and only put up with having
Polya and me in his flat from necessity. The so-called domestic hearth with
its everyday joys and its petty cares offended his taste as vulgarity; to be
with child, or to have children and talk about them, was bad form, like a
petty bourgeois. And I began to feel very curious to see how these two
creatures would get on together in one flat—she, domestic and home-loving
with her copper saucepans and her dreams of a good cook and horses; and
he, fond of saying to his friends that a decent and orderly man's flat ought,
like a warship, to have nothing in it superfluous—no women, no children,
no rags, no kitchen utensils.

V
Then I will tell you what happened the following Thursday. That day
Zinaida Fyodorovna dined at Content's or Donon's. Orlov returned home
alone, and Zinaida Fyodorovna, as I learnt afterwards, went to the
Petersburg Side to spend with her old governess the time visitors were with
us. Orlov did not care to show her to his friends. I realised that at breakfast,
when he began assuring her that for the sake of her peace of mind it was
essential to give up his Thursday evenings.
As usual the visitors arrived at almost the same time.
"Is your mistress at home, too?" Kukushkin asked me in a whisper.
"No, sir," I answered.
He went in with a sly, oily look in his eyes, smiling mysteriously,
rubbing his hands, which were cold from the frost.
"I have the honour to congratulate you," he said to Orlov, shaking all
over with ingratiating, obsequious laughter. "May you increase and multiply
like the cedars of Lebanon."
The visitors went into the bedroom, and were extremely jocose on the
subject of a pair of feminine slippers, the rug that had been put down
between the two beds, and a grey dressing-jacket that hung at the foot of the
bedstead. They were amused that the obstinate man who despised all the

common place details of love had been caught in feminine snares in such a
simple and ordinary way.
"He who pointed the finger of scorn is bowing the knee in homage,"
Kukushkin repeated several times. He had, I may say in parenthesis, an
unpleasant habit of adorning his conversation with texts in Church
Slavonic. "Sh-sh!" he said as they went from the bedroom into the room
next to the study. "Sh-sh! Here Gretchen is dreaming of her Faust."
He went off into a peal of laughter as though he had said something very
amusing. I watched Gruzin, expecting that his musical soul would not
endure this laughter, but I was mistaken. His thin, good-natured face
beamed with pleasure. When they sat down to play cards, he, lisping and
choking with laughter, said that all that "dear George" wanted to complete
his domestic felicity was a cherry-wood pipe and a guitar. Pekarsky laughed
sedately, but from his serious expression one could see that Orlov's new
love affair was distasteful to him. He did not understand what had happened
exactly.
"But how about the husband?" he asked in perplexity, after they had
played three rubbers.
"I don't know," answered Orlov.
Pekarsky combed his big beard with his fingers and sank into thought,
and he did not speak again till supper-time. When they were seated at
supper, he began deliberately, drawling every word:
"Altogether, excuse my saying so, I don't understand either of you. You
might love each other and break the seventh commandment to your heart's
content—that I understand. Yes, that's comprehensible. But why make the
husband a party to your secrets? Was there any need for that?"
"But does it make any difference?"
"Hm!...." Pekarsky mused. "Well, then, let me tell you this, my friend,"
he went on, evidently thinking hard: "if I ever marry again and you take it
into your head to seduce my wife, please do it so that I don't notice it. It's
much more honest to deceive a man than to break up his family life and
injure his reputation. I understand. You both imagine that in living together
openly you are doing something exceptionally honourable and advanced,
but I can't agree with that ... what shall I call it?... romantic attitude?"
Orlov made no reply. He was out of humour and disinclined to talk.
Pekarsky, still perplexed, drummed on the table with his fingers, thought a

little, and said:
"I don't understand you, all the same. You are not a student and she is not
a dressmaker. You are both of you people with means. I should have
thought you might have arranged a separate flat for her."
"No, I couldn't. Read Turgenev."
"Why should I read him? I have read him already."
"Turgenev teaches us in his novels that every exalted, noble-minded girl
should follow the man she loves to the ends of the earth, and should serve
his idea," said Orlov, screwing up his eyes ironically. "The ends of the earth
are poetic license; the earth and all its ends can be reduced to the flat of the
man she loves.... And so not to live in the same flat with the woman who
loves you is to deny her her exalted vocation and to refuse to share her
ideals. Yes, my dear fellow, Turgenev wrote, and I have to suffer for it."
"What Turgenev has got to do with it I don't understand," said Gruzin
softly, and he shrugged his shoulders. "Do you remember, George, how in
'Three Meetings' he is walking late in the evening somewhere in Italy, and
suddenly hears, 'Vieni pensando a me segretamente,'" Gruzin hummed. "It's
fine."
"But she hasn't come to settle with you by force," said Pekarsky. "It was
your own wish."
"What next! Far from wishing it, I never imagined that this would ever
happen. When she said she was coming to live with me, I thought it was a
charming joke on her part."
Everybody laughed.
"I couldn't have wished for such a thing," said Orlov in the tone of a man
compelled to justify himself. "I am not a Turgenev hero, and if I ever
wanted to free Bulgaria I shouldn't need a lady's company. I look upon love
primarily as a necessity of my physical nature, degrading and antagonistic
to my spirit; it must either be satisfied with discretion or renounced
altogether, otherwise it will bring into one's life elements as unclean as
itself. For it to be an enjoyment and not a torment, I will try to make it
beautiful and to surround it with a mass of illusions. I should never go and
see a woman unless I were sure beforehand that she would be beautiful and
fascinating; and I should never go unless I were in the mood. And it is only
in that way that we succeed in deceiving one another, and fancying that we
are in love and happy. But can I wish for copper saucepans and untidy hair,

or like to be seen myself when I am unwashed or out of humour? Zinaida
Fyodorovna in the simplicity of her heart wants me to love what I have
been shunning all my life. She wants my flat to smell of cooking and
washing up; she wants all the fuss of moving into another flat, of driving
about with her own horses; she wants to count over my linen and to look
after my health; she wants to meddle in my personal life at every instant,
and to watch over every step; and at the same time she assures me
genuinely that my habits and my freedom will be untouched. She is
persuaded that, like a young couple, we shall very soon go for a honeymoon
—that is, she wants to be with me all the time in trains and hotels, while I
like to read on the journey and cannot endure talking in trains."
"You should give her a talking to," said Pekarsky.
"What! Do you suppose she would understand me? Why, we think so
differently. In her opinion, to leave one's papa and mamma or one's husband
for the sake of the man one loves is the height of civic virtue, while I look
upon it as childish. To fall in love and run away with a man to her means
beginning a new life, while to my mind it means nothing at all. Love and
man constitute the chief interest of her life, and possibly it is the philosophy
of the unconscious at work in her. Try and make her believe that love is
only a simple physical need, like the need of food or clothes; that it doesn't
mean the end of the world if wives and husbands are unsatisfactory; that a
man may be a profligate and a libertine, and yet a man of honour and a
genius; and that, on the other hand, one may abstain from the pleasures of
love and at the same time be a stupid, vicious animal! The civilised man of
to-day, even among the lower classes—for instance, the French workman—
spends ten sous on dinner, five sous on his wine, and five or ten sous on
woman, and devotes his brain and nerves entirely to his work. But Zinaida
Fyodorovna assigns to love not so many sous, but her whole soul. I might
give her a talking to, but she would raise a wail in answer, and declare in all
sincerity that I had ruined her, that she had nothing left to live for."
"Don't say anything to her," said Pekarsky, "but simply take a separate
flat for her, that's all."
"That's easy to say."
There was a brief silence.
"But she is charming," said Kukushkin. "She is exquisite. Such women
imagine that they will be in love for ever, and abandon themselves with

tragic intensity."
"But one must keep a head on one's shoulders," said Orlov; "one must be
reasonable. All experience gained from everyday life and handed down in
innumerable novels and plays, uniformly confirms the fact that adultery and
cohabitation of any sort between decent people never lasts longer than two
or at most three years, however great the love may have been at the
beginning. That she ought to know. And so all this business of moving, of
saucepans, hopes of eternal love and harmony, are nothing but a desire to
delude herself and me. She is charming and exquisite—who denies it? But
she has turned my life upside down; what I have regarded as trivial and
nonsensical till now she has forced me to raise to the level of a serious
problem; I serve an idol whom I have never looked upon as God. She is
charming—exquisite, but for some reason now when I am going home, I
feel uneasy, as though I expected to meet with something inconvenient at
home, such as workmen pulling the stove to pieces and blocking up the
place with heaps of bricks. In fact, I am no longer giving up to love a sous,
but part of my peace of mind and my nerves. And that's bad."
"And she doesn't hear this villain!" sighed Kukushkin. "My dear sir," he
said theatrically, "I will relieve you from the burdensome obligation to love
that adorable creature! I will wrest Zinaida Fyodorovna from you!"
"You may ..." said Orlov carelessly.
For half a minute Kukushkin laughed a shrill little laugh, shaking all
over, then he said:
"Look out; I am in earnest! Don't you play the Othello afterwards!"
They all began talking of Kukushkin's indefatigable energy in love
affairs, how irresistible he was to women, and what a danger he was to
husbands; and how the devil would roast him in the other world for his
immorality in this. He screwed up his eyes and remained silent, and when
the names of ladies of their acquaintance were mentioned, he held up his
little finger—as though to say they mustn't give away other people's secrets.
Orlov suddenly looked at his watch.
His friends understood, and began to take their leave. I remember that
Gruzin, who was a little drunk, was wearisomely long in getting off. He put
on his coat, which was cut like children's coats in poor families, pulled up
the collar, and began telling some long-winded story; then, seeing he was

not listened to, he flung the rug that smelt of the nursery over one shoulder,
and with a guilty and imploring face begged me to find his hat.
"George, my angel," he said tenderly. "Do as I ask you, dear boy; come
out of town with us!"
"You can go, but I can't. I am in the position of a married man now."
"She is a dear, she won't be angry. My dear chief, come along! It's
glorious weather; there's snow and frost.... Upon my word, you want
shaking up a bit; you are out of humour. I don't know what the devil is the
matter with you...."
Orlov stretched, yawned, and looked at Pekarsky.
"Are you going?" he said, hesitating.
"I don't know. Perhaps."
"Shall I get drunk? All right, I'll come," said Orlov after some hesitation.
"Wait a minute; I'll get some money."
He went into the study, and Gruzin slouched in, too, dragging his rug
after him. A minute later both came back into the hall. Gruzin, a little drunk
and very pleased, was crumpling a ten-rouble note in his hands.
"We'll settle up to-morrow," he said. "And she is kind, she won't be
cross.... She is my Lisotchka's godmother; I am fond of her, poor thing! Ah,
my dear fellow!" he laughed joyfully, and pressing his forehead on
Pekarsky's back. "Ah, Pekarsky, my dear soul! Advocatissimus—as dry as a
biscuit, but you bet he is fond of women...."
"Fat ones," said Orlov, putting on his fur coat. "But let us get off, or we
shall be meeting her on the doorstep."
"'Vieni pensando a me segretamente,'" hummed Gruzin.
At last they drove off: Orlov did not sleep at home, and returned next
day at dinner-time.

VI
Zinaida Fyodorovna had lost her gold watch, a present from her father.
This loss surprised and alarmed her. She spent half a day going through the
rooms, looking helplessly on all the tables and on all the windows. But the
watch had disappeared completely.

Only three days afterwards Zinaida Fyodorovna, on coming in, left her
purse in the hall. Luckily for me, on that occasion it was not I but Polya
who helped her off with her coat. When the purse was missed, it could not
be found in the hall.
"Strange," said Zinaida Fyodorovna in bewilderment. "I distinctly
remember taking it out of my pocket to pay the cabman ... and then I put it
here near the looking-glass. It's very odd!"
I had not stolen it, but I felt as though I had stolen it and had been caught
in the theft. Tears actually came into my eyes. When they were seated at
dinner, Zinaida Fyodorovna said to Orlov in French:
"There seem to be spirits in the flat. I lost my purse in the hall to-day,
and now, lo and behold, it is on my table. But it's not quite a disinterested
trick of the spirits. They took out a gold coin and twenty roubles in notes."
"You are always losing something; first it's your watch and then it's your
money ..." said Orlov. "Why is it nothing of the sort ever happens to me?"
A minute later Zinaida Fyodorovna had forgotten the trick played by the
spirits, and was telling with a laugh how the week before she had ordered
some notepaper and had forgotten to give her new address, and the shop had
sent the paper to her old home at her husband's, who had to pay twelve
roubles for it. And suddenly she turned her eyes on Polya and looked at her
intently. She blushed as she did so, and was so confused that she began
talking of something else.
When I took in the coffee to the study, Orlov was standing with his back
to the fire and she was sitting in an arm-chair facing him.
"I am not in a bad temper at all," she was saying in French. "But I have
been putting things together, and now I see it clearly. I can give you the day
and the hour when she stole my watch. And the purse? There can be no
doubt about it. Oh!" she laughed as she took the coffee from me. "Now I
understand why I am always losing my handkerchiefs and gloves. Whatever
you say, I shall dismiss the magpie to-morrow and send Stepan for my
Sofya. She is not a thief and has not got such a repulsive appearance."
"You are out of humour. To-morrow you will feel differently, and will
realise that you can't discharge people simply because you suspect them."
"It's not suspicion; it's certainty," said Zinaida Fyodorovna. "So long as I
suspected that unhappy-faced, poor-looking valet of yours, I said nothing.
It's too bad of you not to believe me, George."

"If we think differently about anything, it doesn't follow that I don't
believe you. You may be right," said Orlov, turning round and flinging his
cigarette-end into the fire, "but there is no need to be excited about it,
anyway. In fact, I must say, I never expected my humble establishment
would cause you so much serious worry and agitation. You've lost a gold
coin: never mind—you may have a hundred of mine; but to change my
habits, to pick up a new housemaid, to wait till she is used to the place—all
that's a tedious, tiring business and does not suit me. Our present maid
certainly is fat, and has, perhaps, a weakness for gloves and handkerchiefs,
but she is perfectly well behaved, well trained, and does not shriek when
Kukushkin pinches her."
"You mean that you can't part with her?... Why don't you say so?"
"Are you jealous?"
"Yes, I am," said Zinaida Fyodorovna, decidedly.
"Thank you."
"Yes, I am jealous," she repeated, and tears glistened in her eyes. "No,
it's something worse ... which I find it difficult to find a name for." She
pressed her hands on her temples, and went on impulsively. "You men are
so disgusting! It's horrible!"
"I see nothing horrible about it."
"I've not seen it; I don't know; but they say that you men begin with
housemaids as boys, and get so used to it that you feel no repugnance. I
don't know, I don't know, but I have actually read.... George, of course you
are right," she said, going up to Orlov and changing to a caressing and
imploring tone. "I really am out of humour to-day. But, you must
understand, I can't help it. She disgusts me and I am afraid of her. It makes
me miserable to see her."
"Surely you can rise above such paltriness?" said Orlov, shrugging his
shoulders in perplexity, and walking away from the fire. "Nothing could be
simpler: take no notice of her, and then she won't disgust you, and you
won't need to make a regular tragedy out of a trifle."
I went out of the study, and I don't know what answer Orlov received.
Whatever it was, Polya remained. After that Zinaida Fyodorovna never
applied to her for anything, and evidently tried to dispense with her
services. When Polya handed her anything or even passed by her, jingling
her bangle and rustling her skirts, she shuddered.

I believe that if Gruzin or Pekarsky had asked Orlov to dismiss Polya he
would have done so without the slightest hesitation, without troubling about
any explanations. He was easily persuaded, like all indifferent people. But
in his relations with Zinaida Fyodorovna he displayed for some reason,
even in trifles, an obstinacy which sometimes was almost irrational. I knew
beforehand that if Zinaida Fyodorovna liked anything, it would be certain
not to please Orlov. When on coming in from shopping she made haste to
show him with pride some new purchase, he would glance at it and say
coldly that the more unnecessary objects they had in the flat, the less airy it
would be. It sometimes happened that after putting on his dress clothes to
go out somewhere, and after saying good-bye to Zinaida Fyodorovna, he
would suddenly change his mind and remain at home from sheer perversity.
I used to think that he remained at home then simply in order to feel
injured.
"Why are you staying?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, with a show of
vexation, though at the same time she was radiant with delight. "Why do
you? You are not accustomed to spending your evenings at home, and I
don't want you to alter your habits on my account. Do go out as usual, if
you don't want me to feel guilty."
"No one is blaming you," said Orlov.
With the air of a victim he stretched himself in his easy-chair in the
study, and shading his eyes with his hand, took up a book. But soon the
book dropped from his hand, he turned heavily in his chair, and again
screened his eyes as though from the sun. Now he felt annoyed that he had
not gone out.
"May I come in?" Zinaida Fyodorovna would say, coming irresolutely
into the study. "Are you reading? I felt dull by myself, and have come just
for a minute ... to have a peep at you."
I remember one evening she went in like that, irresolutely and
inappropriately, and sank on the rug at Orlov's feet, and from her soft, timid
movements one could see that she did not understand his mood and was
afraid.
"You are always reading ..." she said cajolingly, evidently wishing to
flatter him. "Do you know, George, what is one of the secrets of your
success? You are very clever and well-read. What book have you there?"

Orlov answered. A silence followed for some minutes which seemed to
me very long. I was standing in the drawing-room, from which I could
watch them, and was afraid of coughing.
"There is something I wanted to tell you," said Zinaida Fyodorovna, and
she laughed; "shall I? Very likely you'll laugh and say that I flatter myself.
You know I want, I want horribly to believe that you are staying at home to-
night for my sake ... that we might spend the evening together. Yes? May I
think so?"
"Do," he said, screening his eyes. "The really happy man is he who
thinks not only of what is, but of what is not."
"That was a long sentence which I did not quite understand. You mean
happy people live in their imagination. Yes, that's true. I love to sit in your
study in the evening and let my thoughts carry me far, far away.... It's
pleasant sometimes to dream. Let us dream aloud, George."
"I've never been at a girls' boarding-school; I never learnt the art."
"You are out of humour?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, taking Orlov's hand.
"Tell me why. When you are like that, I'm afraid. I don't know whether your
head aches or whether you are angry with me...."
Again there was a silence lasting several long minutes.
"Why have you changed?" she said softly. "Why are you never so tender
or so gay as you used to be at Znamensky Street? I've been with you almost
a month, but it seems to me as though we had not yet begun to live, and
have not yet talked of anything as we ought to. You always answer me with
jokes or else with a long cold lecture like a teacher. And there is something
cold in your jokes.... Why have you given up talking to me seriously?"
"I always talk seriously."
"Well, then, let us talk. For God's sake, George.... Shall we?"
"Certainly, but about what?"
"Let us talk of our life, of our future," said Zinaida Fyodorovna
dreamily. "I keep making plans for our life, plans and plans—and I enjoy
doing it so! George, I'll begin with the question, when are you going to give
up your post?"
"What for?" asked Orlov, taking his hand from his forehead.
"With your views you cannot remain in the service. You are out of place
there."

"My views?" Orlov repeated. "My views? In conviction and
temperament I am an ordinary official, one of Shtchedrin's heroes. You take
me for something different, I venture to assure you."
"Joking again, George!"
"Not in the least. The service does not satisfy me, perhaps; but, anyway,
it is better for me than anything else. I am used to it, and in it I meet men of
my own sort; I am in my place there and find it tolerable."
"You hate the service and it revolts you."
"Indeed? If I resign my post, take to dreaming aloud and letting myself
be carried away into another world, do you suppose that that world would
be less hateful to me than the service?"
"You are ready to libel yourself in order to contradict me." Zinaida
Fyodorovna was offended and got up. "I am sorry I began this talk."
"Why are you angry? I am not angry with you for not being an official.
Every one lives as he likes best."
"Why, do you live as you like best? Are you free? To spend your life
writing documents that are opposed to your own ideas," Zinaida
Fyodorovna went on, clasping her hands in despair: "to submit to authority,
congratulate your superiors at the New Year, and then cards and nothing but
cards: worst of all, to be working for a system which must be distasteful to
you—no, George, no! You should not make such horrid jokes. It's dreadful.
You are a man of ideas, and you ought to be working for your ideas and
nothing else."
"You really take me for quite a different person from what I am," sighed
Orlov.
"Say simply that you don't want to talk to me. You dislike me, that's all,"
said Zinaida Fyodorovna through her tears.
"Look here, my dear," said Orlov admonishingly, sitting up in his chair.
"You were pleased to observe yourself that I am a clever, well-read man,
and to teach one who knows does nothing but harm. I know very well all
the ideas, great and small, which you mean when you call me a man of
ideas. So if I prefer the service and cards to those ideas, you may be sure I
have good grounds for it. That's one thing. Secondly, you have, so far as I
know, never been in the service, and can only have drawn your ideas of
Government service from anecdotes and indifferent novels. So it would not

be amiss for us to make a compact, once for all, not to talk of things we
know already or of things about which we are not competent to speak."
"Why do you speak to me like that?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, stepping
back as though in horror. "What for? George, for God's sake, think what
you are saying!"
Her voice quivered and broke; she was evidently trying to restrain her
tears, but she suddenly broke into sobs.
"George, my darling, I am perishing!" she said in French, dropping
down before Orlov, and laying her head on his knees. "I am miserable, I am
exhausted. I can't bear it, I can't bear it.... In my childhood my hateful,
depraved stepmother, then my husband, now you ... you!... You meet my
mad love with coldness and irony.... And that horrible, insolent servant," she
went on, sobbing. "Yes, yes, I see: I am not your wife nor your friend, but a
woman you don't respect because she has become your mistress.... I shall
kill myself!"
I had not expected that her words and her tears would make such an
impression on Orlov. He flushed, moved uneasily in his chair, and instead
of irony, his face wore a look of stupid, schoolboyish dismay.
"My darling, you misunderstood me," he muttered helplessly, touching
her hair and her shoulders. "Forgive me, I entreat you. I was unjust and I
hate myself."
"I insult you with my whining and complaints. You are a true, generous
... rare man—I am conscious of it every minute; but I've been horribly
depressed for the last few days ..."
Zinaida Fyodorovna impulsively embraced Orlov and kissed him on the
cheek.
"Only please don't cry," he said.
"No, no.... I've had my cry, and now I am better."
"As for the servant, she shall be gone to-morrow," he said, still moving
uneasily in his chair.
"No, she must stay, George! Do you hear? I am not afraid of her now....
One must rise above trifles and not imagine silly things. You are right! You
are a wonderful, rare person!"
She soon left off crying. With tears glistening on her eyelashes, sitting on
Orlov's knee, she told him in a low voice something touching, something

like a reminiscence of childhood and youth. She stroked his face, kissed
him, and carefully examined his hands with the rings on them and the
charms on his watch-chain. She was carried away by what she was saying,
and by being near the man she loved, and probably because her tears had
cleared and refreshed her soul, there was a note of wonderful candour and
sincerity in her voice. And Orlov played with her chestnut hair and kissed
her hands, noiselessly pressing them to his lips.
Then they had tea in the study, and Zinaida Fyodorovna read aloud some
letters. Soon after midnight they went to bed. I had a fearful pain in my side
that night, and I could not get warm or go to sleep till morning. I could hear
Orlov go from the bedroom into his study. After sitting there about an hour,
he rang the bell. In my pain and exhaustion I forgot all the rules and
conventions, and went to his study in my night attire, barefooted. Orlov, in
his dressing-gown and cap, was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.
"When you are sent for you should come dressed," he said sternly.
"Bring some fresh candles."
I was about to apologise, but suddenly broke into a violent cough, and
clutched at the side of the door to save myself from falling.
"Are you ill?" said Orlov.
I believe it was the first time of our acquaintance that he addressed me
not in the singular—goodness knows why. Most likely, in my night clothes
and with my face distorted by coughing, I played my part poorly, and was
very little like a flunkey.
"If you are ill, why do you take a place?" he said.
"That I may not die of starvation," I answered.
"How disgusting it all is, really!" he said softly, going up to his table.
While hurriedly getting into my coat, I put up and lighted fresh candles.
He was sitting at the table, with feet stretched out on a low chair, cutting a
book.
I left him deeply engrossed, and the book did not drop out of his hands
as it had done in the evening.

VII

Now that I am writing these lines I am restrained by that dread of
appearing sentimental and ridiculous, in which I have been trained from
childhood; when I want to be affectionate or to say anything tender, I don't
know how to be natural. And it is that dread, together with lack of practice,
that prevents me from being able to express with perfect clearness what was
passing in my soul at that time.
I was not in love with Zinaida Fyodorovna, but in the ordinary human
feeling I had for her, there was far more youth, freshness, and joyousness
than in Orlov's love.
As I worked in the morning, cleaning boots or sweeping the rooms, I
waited with a thrill at my heart for the moment when I should hear her
voice and her footsteps. To stand watching her as she drank her coffee in the
morning or ate her lunch, to hold her fur coat for her in the hall, and to put
the goloshes on her little feet while she rested her hand on my shoulder;
then to wait till the hall porter rang up for me, to meet her at the door, cold,
and rosy, powdered with the snow, to listen to her brief exclamations about
the frost or the cabman—if only you knew how much all that meant to me!
I longed to be in love, to have a wife and child of my own. I wanted my
future wife to have just such a face, such a voice. I dreamed of it at dinner,
and in the street when I was sent on some errand, and when I lay awake at
night. Orlov rejected with disgust children, cooking, copper saucepans, and
feminine knicknacks and I gathered them all up, tenderly cherished them in
my dreams, loved them, and begged them of destiny. I had visions of a
wife, a nursery, a little house with garden paths....
I knew that if I did love her I could never dare hope for the miracle of
her returning my love, but that reflection did not worry me. In my quiet,
modest feeling akin to ordinary affection, there was no jealousy of Orlov or
even envy of him, since I realised that for a wreck like me happiness was
only to be found in dreams.
When Zinaida Fyodorovna sat up night after night for her George,
looking immovably at a book of which she never turned a page, or when
she shuddered and turned pale at Polya's crossing the room, I suffered with
her, and the idea occurred to me to lance this festering wound as quickly as
possible by letting her know what was said here at supper on Thursdays; but
—how was it to be done? More and more often I saw her tears. For the first
weeks she laughed and sang to herself, even when Orlov was not at home,

but by the second month there was a mournful stillness in our flat broken
only on Thursday evenings.
She flattered Orlov, and to wring from him a counterfeit smile or kiss,
was ready to go on her knees to him, to fawn on him like a dog. Even when
her heart was heaviest, she could not resist glancing into a looking-glass if
she passed one and straightening her hair. It seemed strange to me that she
could still take an interest in clothes and go into ecstasies over her
purchases. It did not seem in keeping with her genuine grief. She paid
attention to the fashions and ordered expensive dresses. What for? On
whose account? I particularly remember one dress which cost four hundred
roubles. To give four hundred roubles for an unnecessary, useless dress
while women for their hard day's work get only twenty kopecks a day
without food, and the makers of Venice and Brussels lace are only paid half
a franc a day on the supposition that they can earn the rest by immorality!
And it seemed strange to me that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not conscious of
it; it vexed me. But she had only to go out of the house for me to find
excuses and explanations for everything, and to be waiting eagerly for the
hall porter to ring for me.
She treated me as a flunkey, a being of a lower order. One may pat a dog,
and yet not notice it; I was given orders and asked questions, but my
presence was not observed. My master and mistress thought it unseemly to
say more to me than is usually said to servants; if when waiting at dinner I
had laughed or put in my word in the conversation, they would certainly
have thought I was mad and have dismissed me. Zinaida Fyodorovna was
favourably disposed to me, all the same. When she was sending me on
some errand or explaining to me the working of a new lamp or anything of
that sort, her face was extraordinarily kind, frank, and cordial, and her eyes
looked me straight in the face. At such moments I always fancied she
remembered with gratitude how I used to bring her letters to Znamensky
Street. When she rang the bell, Polya, who considered me her favourite and
hated me for it, used to say with a jeering smile:
"Go along, your mistress wants you."
Zinaida Fyodorovna considered me as a being of a lower order, and did
not suspect that if any one in the house were in a humiliating position it was
she. She did not know that I, a footman, was unhappy on her account, and
used to ask myself twenty times a day what was in store for her and how it

would all end. Things were growing visibly worse day by day. After the
evening on which they had talked of his official work, Orlov, who could not
endure tears, unmistakably began to avoid conversation with her; whenever
Zinaida Fyodorovna began to argue, or to beseech him, or seemed on the
point of crying, he seized some plausible excuse for retreating to his study
or going out. He more and more rarely slept at home, and still more rarely
dined there: on Thursdays he was the one to suggest some expedition to his
friends. Zinaida Fyodorovna was still dreaming of having the cooking done
at home, of moving to a new flat, of travelling abroad, but her dreams
remained dreams. Dinner was sent in from the restaurant. Orlov asked her
not to broach the question of moving until after they had come back from
abroad, and apropos of their foreign tour, declared that they could not go till
his hair had grown long, as one could not go trailing from hotel to hotel and
serving the idea without long hair.
To crown it all, in Orlov's absence, Kukushkin began calling at the flat in
the evening. There was nothing exceptional in his behaviour, but I could
never forget the conversation in which he had offered to cut Orlov out. He
was regaled with tea and red wine, and he used to titter and, anxious to say
something pleasant, would declare that a free union was superior in every
respect to legal marriage, and that all decent people ought really to come to
Zinaida Fyodorovna and fall at her feet.

VIII
Christmas was spent drearily in vague anticipations of calamity. On New
Year's Eve Orlov unexpectedly announced at breakfast that he was being
sent to assist a senator who was on a revising commission in a certain
province.
"I don't want to go, but I can't find an excuse to get off," he said with
vexation. "I must go; there's nothing for it."
Such news instantly made Zinaida Fyodorovna's eyes look red. "Is it for
long?" she asked.
"Five days or so."
"I am glad, really, you are going," she said after a moment's thought. "It
will be a change for you. You will fall in love with some one on the way,
and tell me about it afterwards."

At every opportunity she tried to make Orlov feel that she did not restrict
his liberty in any way, and that he could do exactly as he liked, and this
artless, transparent strategy deceived no one, and only unnecessarily
reminded Orlov that he was not free.
"I am going this evening," he said, and began reading the paper.
Zinaida Fyodorovna wanted to see him off at the station, but he
dissuaded her, saying that he was not going to America, and not going to be
away five years, but only five days—possibly less.
The parting took place between seven and eight. He put one arm round
her, and kissed her on the lips and on the forehead.
"Be a good girl, and don't be depressed while I am away," he said in a
warm, affectionate tone which touched even me. "God keep you!"
She looked greedily into his face, to stamp his dear features on her
memory, then she put her arms gracefully round his neck and laid her head
on his breast.
"Forgive me our misunderstandings," she said in French. "Husband and
wife cannot help quarrelling if they love each other, and I love you madly.
Don't forget me.... Wire to me often and fully."
Orlov kissed her once more, and, without saying a word, went out in
confusion. When he heard the click of the lock as the door closed, he stood
still in the middle of the staircase in hesitation and glanced upwards. It
seemed to me that if a sound had reached him at that moment from above,
he would have turned back. But all was quiet. He straightened his coat and
went downstairs irresolutely.
The sledges had been waiting a long while at the door. Orlov got into
one, I got into the other with two portmanteaus. It was a hard frost and there
were fires smoking at the cross-roads. The cold wind nipped my face and
hands, and took my breath away as we drove rapidly along; and, closing my
eyes, I thought what a splendid woman she was. How she loved him! Even
useless rubbish is collected in the courtyards nowadays and used for some
purpose, even broken glass is considered a useful commodity, but
something so precious, so rare, as the love of a refined, young, intelligent,
and good woman is utterly thrown away and wasted. One of the early
sociologists regarded every evil passion as a force which might by judicious
management be turned to good, while among us even a fine, noble passion

springs up and dies away in impotence, turned to no account,
misunderstood or vulgarised. Why is it?
The sledges stopped unexpectedly. I opened my eyes and I saw that we
had come to a standstill in Sergievsky Street, near a big house where
Pekarsky lived. Orlov got out of the sledge and vanished into the entry. Five
minutes later Pekarsky's footman came out, bareheaded, and, angry with the
frost, shouted to me:
"Are you deaf? Pay the cabmen and go upstairs. You are wanted!"
At a complete loss, I went to the first storey. I had been to Pekarsky's flat
before—that is, I had stood in the hall and looked into the drawing-room,
and, after the damp, gloomy street, it always struck me by the brilliance of
its picture-frames, its bronzes and expensive furniture. To-day in the midst
of this splendour I saw Gruzin, Kukushkin, and, after a minute, Orlov.
"Look here, Stepan," he said, coming up to me. "I shall be staying here
till Friday or Saturday. If any letters or telegrams come, you must bring
them here every day. At home, of course you will say that I have gone, and
send my greetings. Now you can go."
When I reached home Zinaida Fyodorovna was lying on the sofa in the
drawing-room, eating a pear. There was only one candle burning in the
candelabra.
"Did you catch the train?" asked Zinaida Fyodorovna.
"Yes, madam. His honour sends his greetings."
I went into my room and I, too, lay down. I had nothing to do, and I did
not want to read. I was not surprised and I was not indignant. I only racked
my brains to think why this deception was necessary. It is only boys in their
teens who deceive their mistresses like that. How was it that a man who had
thought and read so much could not imagine anything more sensible? I
must confess I had by no means a poor opinion of his intelligence. I believe
if he had had to deceive his minister or any other influential person he
would have put a great deal of skill and energy into doing so; but to deceive
a woman, the first idea that occurred to him was evidently good enough. If
it succeeded—well and good; if it did not, there would be no harm done—
he could tell some other lie just as quickly and simply, with no mental
effort.
At midnight when the people on the floor overhead were moving their
chairs and shouting hurrah to welcome the New Year, Zinaida Fyodorovna

rang for me from the room next to the study. Languid from lying down so
long, she was sitting at the table, writing something on a scrap of paper.
"I must send a telegram," she said, with a smile. "Go to the station as
quick as you can and ask them to send it after him."
Going out into the street, I read on the scrap of paper:
"May the New Year bring new happiness. Make haste and telegraph; I
miss you dreadfully. It seems an eternity. I am only sorry I can't send a
thousand kisses and my very heart by telegraph. Enjoy yourself, my darling.
—ZINA."
I sent the telegram, and next morning I gave her the receipt.

IX
The worst of it was that Orlov had thoughtlessly let Polya, too, into the
secret of his deception, telling her to bring his shirts to Sergievsky Street.
After that, she looked at Zinaida Fyodorovna with a malignant joy and
hatred I could not understand, and was never tired of snorting with delight
to herself in her own room and in the hall.
"She's outstayed her welcome; it's time she took herself off!" she would
say with zest. "She ought to realise that herself...."
She already divined by instinct that Zinaida Fyodorovna would not be
with us much longer, and, not to let the chance slip, carried off everything
she set her eyes on—smelling-bottles, tortoise-shell hairpins, handkerchiefs,
shoes! On the day after New Year's Day, Zinaida Fyodorovna summoned
me to her room and told me in a low voice that she missed her black dress.
And then she walked through all the rooms, with a pale, frightened, and
indignant face, talking to herself:
"It's too much! It's beyond everything. Why, it's unheard-of insolence!"
At dinner she tried to help herself to soup, but could not—her hands
were trembling. Her lips were trembling, too. She looked helplessly at the
soup and at the little pies, waiting for the trembling to pass off, and
suddenly she could not resist looking at Polya.
"You can go, Polya," she said. "Stepan is enough by himself."
"I'll stay; I don't mind," answered Polya.

"There's no need for you to stay. You go away altogether," Zinaida
Fyodorovna went on, getting up in great agitation. "You may look out for
another place. You can go at once."
"I can't go away without the master's orders. He engaged me. It must be
as he orders."
"You can take orders from me, too! I am mistress here!" said Zinaida
Fyodorovna, and she flushed crimson.
"You may be the mistress, but only the master can dismiss me. It was he
engaged me."
"You dare not stay here another minute!" cried Zinaida Fyodorovna, and
she struck the plate with her knife. "You are a thief! Do you hear?"
Zinaida Fyodorovna flung her dinner-napkin on the table, and with a
pitiful, suffering face, went quickly out of the room. Loudly sobbing and
wailing something indistinct, Polya, too, went away. The soup and the
grouse got cold. And for some reason all the restaurant dainties on the table
struck me as poor, thievish, like Polya. Two pies on a plate had a
particularly miserable and guilty air. "We shall be taken back to the
restaurant to-day," they seemed to be saying, "and to-morrow we shall be
put on the table again for some official or celebrated singer."
"She is a fine lady, indeed," I heard uttered in Polya's room. "I could
have been a lady like that long ago, but I have some self-respect! We'll see
which of us will be the first to go!"
Zinaida Fyodorovna rang the bell. She was sitting in her room, in the
corner, looking as though she had been put in the corner as a punishment.
"No telegram has come?" she asked.
"No, madam."
"Ask the porter; perhaps there is a telegram. And don't leave the house,"
she called after me. "I am afraid to be left alone."
After that I had to run down almost every hour to ask the porter whether
a telegram had come. I must own it was a dreadful time! To avoid seeing
Polya, Zinaida Fyodorovna dined and had tea in her own room; it was here
that she slept, too, on a short sofa like a half-moon, and she made her own
bed. For the first days I took the telegrams; but, getting no answer, she lost
her faith in me and began telegraphing herself. Looking at her, I, too, began
impatiently hoping for a telegram. I hoped he would contrive some

deception, would make arrangements, for instance, that a telegram should
be sent to her from some station. If he were too much engrossed with cards
or had been attracted by some other woman, I thought that both Gruzin and
Kukushkin would remind him of us. But our expectations were vain. Five
times a day I would go in to Zinaida Fyodorovna, intending to tell her the
truth. But her eyes looked piteous as a fawn's, her shoulders seemed to
droop, her lips were moving, and I went away again without saying a word.
Pity and sympathy seemed to rob me of all manliness. Polya, as cheerful
and well satisfied with herself as though nothing had happened, was tidying
the master's study and the bedroom, rummaging in the cupboards, and
making the crockery jingle, and when she passed Zinaida Fyodorovna's
door, she hummed something and coughed. She was pleased that her
mistress was hiding from her. In the evening she would go out somewhere,
and rang at two or three o'clock in the morning, and I had to open the door
to her and listen to remarks about my cough. Immediately afterwards I
would hear another ring; I would run to the room next to the study, and
Zinaida Fyodorovna, putting her head out of the door, would ask, "Who was
it rung?" while she looked at my hands to see whether I had a telegram.
When at last on Saturday the bell rang below and she heard the familiar
voice on the stairs, she was so delighted that she broke into sobs. She
rushed to meet him, embraced him, kissed him on the breast and sleeves,
said something one could not understand. The hall porter brought up the
portmanteaus; Polya's cheerful voice was heard. It was as though some one
had come home for the holidays.
"Why didn't you wire?" asked Zinaida Fyodorovna, breathless with joy.
"Why was it? I have been in misery; I don't know how I've lived through
it.... Oh, my God!"
"It was very simple! I returned with the senator to Moscow the very first
day, and didn't get your telegrams," said Orlov. "After dinner, my love, I'll
give you a full account of my doings, but now I must sleep and sleep.... I
am worn out with the journey."
It was evident that he had not slept all night; he had probably been
playing cards and drinking freely. Zinaida Fyodorovna put him to bed, and
we all walked about on tiptoe all that day. The dinner went off quite
satisfactorily, but when they went into the study and had coffee the
explanation began. Zinaida Fyodorovna began talking of something rapidly

in a low voice; she spoke in French, and her words flowed like a stream.
Then I heard a loud sigh from Orlov, and his voice.
"My God!" he said in French. "Have you really nothing fresher to tell me
than this everlasting tale of your servant's misdeeds?"
"But, my dear, she robbed me and said insulting things to me."
"But why is it she doesn't rob me or say insulting things to me? Why is it
I never notice the maids nor the porters nor the footmen? My dear, you are
simply capricious and refuse to know your own mind.... I really begin to
suspect that you must be in a certain condition. When I offered to let her go,
you insisted on her remaining, and now you want me to turn her away. I can
be obstinate, too, in such cases. You want her to go, but I want her to
remain. That's the only way to cure you of your nerves."
"Oh, very well, very well," said Zinaida Fyodorovna in alarm. "Let us
say no more about that.... Let us put it off till to-morrow.... Now tell me
about Moscow.... What is going on in Moscow?"

X
After lunch next day—it was the seventh of January, St. John the
Baptist's Day—Orlov put on his black dress coat and his decoration to go to
visit his father and congratulate him on his name day. He had to go at two
o'clock, and it was only half-past one when he had finished dressing. What
was he to do for that half-hour? He walked about the drawing-room,
declaiming some congratulatory verses which he had recited as a child to
his father and mother.
Zinaida Fyodorovna, who was just going out to a dressmaker's or to the
shops, was sitting, listening to him with a smile. I don't know how their
conversation began, but when I took Orlov his gloves, he was standing
before her with a capricious, beseeching face, saying:
"For God's sake, in the name of everything that's holy, don't talk of
things that everybody knows! What an unfortunate gift our intellectual
thoughtful ladies have for talking with enthusiasm and an air of profundity
of things that every schoolboy is sick to death of! Ah, if only you would
exclude from our conjugal programme all these serious questions! How
grateful I should be to you!"
"We women may not dare, it seems, to have views of our own."

"I give you full liberty to be as liberal as you like, and quote from any
authors you choose, but make me one concession: don't hold forth in my
presence on either of two subjects: the corruption of the upper classes and
the evils of the marriage system. Do understand me, at last. The upper class
is always abused in contrast with the world of tradesmen, priests, workmen
and peasants, Sidors and Nikitas of all sorts. I detest both classes, but if I
had honestly to choose between the two, I should without hesitation, prefer
the upper class, and there would be no falsity or affectation about it, since
all my tastes are in that direction. Our world is trivial and empty, but at any
rate we speak French decently, read something, and don't punch each other
in the ribs even in our most violent quarrels, while the Sidors and the
Nikitas and their worships in trade talk about 'being quite agreeable,' 'in a
jiffy,' 'blast your eyes,' and display the utmost license of pothouse manners
and the most degrading superstition."
"The peasant and the tradesman feed you."
"Yes, but what of it? That's not only to my discredit, but to theirs too.
They feed me and take off their caps to me, so it seems they have not the
intelligence and honesty to do otherwise. I don't blame or praise any one: I
only mean that the upper class and the lower are as bad as one another. My
feelings and my intelligence are opposed to both, but my tastes lie more in
the direction of the former. Well, now for the evils of marriage," Orlov went
on, glancing at his watch. "It's high time for you to understand that there are
no evils in the system itself; what is the matter is that you don't know
yourselves what you want from marriage. What is it you want? In legal and
illegal cohabitation, in every sort of union and cohabitation, good or bad,
the underlying reality is the same. You ladies live for that underlying reality
alone: for you it's everything; your existence would have no meaning for
you without it. You want nothing but that, and you get it; but since you've
taken to reading novels you are ashamed of it: you rush from pillar to post,
you recklessly change your men, and to justify this turmoil you have begun
talking of the evils of marriage. So long as you can't and won't renounce
what underlies it all, your chief foe, your devil—so long as you serve that
slavishly, what use is there in discussing the matter seriously? Everything
you may say to me will be falsity and affectation. I shall not believe you."
I went to find out from the hall porter whether the sledge was at the door,
and when I came back I found it had become a quarrel. As sailors say, a
squall had blown up.

"I see you want to shock me by your cynicism today," said Zinaida
Fyodorovna, walking about the drawing-room in great emotion. "It revolts
me to listen to you. I am pure before God and man, and have nothing to
repent of. I left my husband and came to you, and am proud of it. I swear,
on my honour, I am proud of it!"
"Well, that's all right, then!"
"If you are a decent, honest man, you, too, ought to be proud of what I
did. It raises you and me above thousands of people who would like to do
as we have done, but do not venture through cowardice or petty prudence.
But you are not a decent man. You are afraid of freedom, and you mock the
promptings of genuine feeling, from fear that some ignoramus may suspect
you of being sincere. You are afraid to show me to your friends; there's no
greater infliction for you than to go about with me in the street.... Isn't that
true? Why haven't you introduced me to your father or your cousin all this
time? Why is it? No, I am sick of it at last," cried Zinaida Fyodorovna,
stamping. "I demand what is mine by right. You must present me to your
father."
"If you want to know him, go and present yourself. He receives visitors
every morning from ten till half-past."
"How base you are!" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, wringing her hands in
despair. "Even if you are not sincere, and are not saying what you think, I
might hate you for your cruelty. Oh, how base you are!"
"We keep going round and round and never reach the real point. The real
point is that you made a mistake, and you won't acknowledge it aloud. You
imagined that I was a hero, and that I had some extraordinary ideas and
ideals, and it has turned out that I am a most ordinary official, a cardplayer,
and have no partiality for ideas of any sort. I am a worthy representative of
the rotten world from which you have run away because you were revolted
with its triviality and emptiness. Recognise it and be just: don't be indignant
with me, but with yourself, as it is your mistake, and not mine."
"Yes, I admit I was mistaken."
"Well, that's all right, then. We've reached that point at last, thank God.
Now hear something more, if you please: I can't rise to your level—I am too
depraved; you can't descend to my level, either, for you are too exalted. So
there is only one thing left to do...."

"What?" Zinaida Fyodorovna asked quickly, holding her breath and
turning suddenly as white as a sheet of paper.
"To call logic to our aid...."
"Georgy, why are you torturing me?" Zinaida Fyodorovna said suddenly
in Russian in a breaking voice. "What is it for? Think of my misery...."
Orlov, afraid of tears, went quickly into his study, and I don't know why
—whether it was that he wished to cause her extra pain, or whether he
remembered it was usually done in such cases—he locked the door after
him. She cried out and ran after him with a rustle of her skirt.
"What does this mean?" she cried, knocking at his door. "What ... what
does this mean?" she repeated in a shrill voice breaking with indignation.
"Ah, so this is what you do! Then let me tell you I hate you, I despise you!
Everything is over between us now."
I heard hysterical weeping mingled with laughter. Something small in
the drawing-room fell off the table and was broken. Orlov went out into the
hall by another door, and, looking round him nervously, he hurriedly put on
his great-coat and went out.
Half an hour passed, an hour, and she was still weeping. I remembered
that she had no father or mother, no relations, and here she was living
between a man who hated her and Polya, who robbed her—and how
desolate her life seemed to me! I do not know why, but I went into the
drawing-room to her. Weak and helpless, looking with her lovely hair like
an embodiment of tenderness and grace, she was in anguish, as though she
were ill; she was lying on a couch, hiding her face, and quivering all over.
"Madam, shouldn't I fetch a doctor?" I asked gently.
"No, there's no need ... it's nothing," she said, and she looked at me with
her tear-stained eyes. "I have a little headache.... Thank you."
I went out, and in the evening she was writing letter after letter, and sent
me out first to Pekarsky, then to Gruzin, then to Kukushkin, and finally
anywhere I chose, if only I could find Orlov and give him the letter. Every
time I came back with the letter she scolded me, entreated me, thrust money
into my hand—as though she were in a fever. And all the night she did not
sleep, but sat in the drawing-room, talking to herself.
Orlov returned to dinner next day, and they were reconciled.

The first Thursday afterwards Orlov complained to his friends of the
intolerable life he led; he smoked a great deal, and said with irritation:
"It is no life at all; it's the rack. Tears, wailing, intellectual conversations,
begging for forgiveness, again tears and wailing; and the long and the short
of it is that I have no flat of my own now. I am wretched, and I make her
wretched. Surely I haven't to live another month or two like this? How can
I? But yet I may have to."
"Why don't you speak, then?" said Pekarsky.
"I've tried, but I can't. One can boldly tell the truth, whatever it may be,
to an independent, rational man; but in this case one has to do with a
creature who has no will, no strength of character, and no logic. I cannot
endure tears; they disarm me. When she cries, I am ready to swear eternal
love and cry myself."
Pekarsky did not understand; he scratched his broad forehead in
perplexity and said:
"You really had better take another flat for her. It's so simple!"
"She wants me, not the flat. But what's the good of talking?" sighed
Orlov. "I only hear endless conversations, but no way out of my position. It
certainly is a case of 'being guilty without guilt.' I don't claim to be a
mushroom, but it seems I've got to go into the basket. The last thing I've
ever set out to be is a hero. I never could endure Turgenev's novels; and
now, all of a sudden, as though to spite me, I've heroism forced upon me. I
assure her on my honour that I'm not a hero at all, I adduce irrefutable
proofs of the same, but she doesn't believe me. Why doesn't she believe me?
I suppose I really must have something of the appearance of a hero."
"You go off on a tour of inspection in the provinces," said Kukushkin,
laughing.
"Yes, that's the only thing left for me."
A week after this conversation Orlov announced that he was again
ordered to attend the senator, and the same evening he went off with his
portmanteaus to Pekarsky.

XI

An old man of sixty, in a long fur coat reaching to the ground, and a
beaver cap, was standing at the door.
"Is Georgy Ivanitch at home?" he asked.
At first I thought it was one of the moneylenders, Gruzin's creditors, who
sometimes used to come to Orlov for small payments on account; but when
he came into the hall and flung open his coat, I saw the thick brows and the
characteristically compressed lips which I knew so well from the
photographs, and two rows of stars on the uniform. I recognised him: it was
Orlov's father, the distinguished statesman.
I answered that Georgy Ivanitch was not at home. The old man pursed
up his lips tightly and looked into space, reflecting, showing me his dried-
up, toothless profile.
"I'll leave a note," he said; "show me in."
He left his goloshes in the hall, and, without taking off his long, heavy
fur coat, went into the study. There he sat down before the table, and, before
taking up the pen, for three minutes he pondered, shading his eyes with his
hand as though from the sun—exactly as his son did when he was out of
humour. His face was sad, thoughtful, with that look of resignation which I
have only seen on the faces of the old and religious. I stood behind him,
gazed at his bald head and at the hollow at the nape of his neck, and it was
clear as daylight to me that this weak old man was now in my power. There
was not a soul in the flat except my enemy and me. I had only to use a little
physical violence, then snatch his watch to disguise the object of the crime,
and to get off by the back way, and I should have gained infinitely more
than I could have imagined possible when I took up the part of a footman. I
thought that I could hardly get a better opportunity. But instead of acting, I
looked quite unconcernedly, first at his bald patch and then at his fur, and
calmly meditated on this man's relation to his only son, and on the fact that
people spoiled by power and wealth probably don't want to die....
"Have you been long in my son's service?" he asked, writing a large
hand on the paper.
"Three months, your High Excellency."
He finished the letter and stood up. I still had time. I urged myself on
and clenched my fists, trying to wring out of my soul some trace of my
former hatred; I recalled what a passionate, implacable, obstinate hate I had
felt for him only a little while before.... But it is difficult to strike a match

against a crumbling stone. The sad old face and the cold glitter of his stars
roused in me nothing but petty, cheap, unnecessary thoughts of the
transitoriness of everything earthly, of the nearness of death....
"Good-day, brother," said the old man. He put on his cap and went out.
There could be no doubt about it: I had undergone a change; I had
become different. To convince myself, I began to recall the past, but at once
I felt uneasy, as though I had accidentally peeped into a dark, damp corner. I
remembered my comrades and friends, and my first thought was how I
should blush in confusion if ever I met any of them. What was I now? What
had I to think of and to do? Where was I to go? What was I living for?
I could make nothing of it. I only knew one thing—that I must make
haste to pack my things and be off. Before the old man's visit my position
as a flunkey had a meaning; now it was absurd. Tears dropped into my open
portmanteau; I felt insufferably sad; but how I longed to live! I was ready to
embrace and include in my short life every possibility open to man. I
wanted to speak, to read, and to hammer in some big factory, and to stand
on watch, and to plough. I yearned for the Nevsky Prospect, for the sea and
the fields—for every place to which my imagination travelled. When
Zinaida Fyodorovna came in, I rushed to open the door for her, and with
peculiar tenderness took off her fur coat. The last time!
We had two other visitors that day besides the old man. In the evening
when it was quite dark, Gruzin came to fetch some papers for Orlov. He
opened the table-drawer, took the necessary papers, and, rolling them up,
told me to put them in the hall beside his cap while he went in to see
Zinaida Fyodorovna. She was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, with
her arms behind her head. Five or six days had already passed since Orlov
went on his tour of inspection, and no one knew when he would be back,
but this time she did not send telegrams and did not expect them. She did
not seem to notice the presence of Polya, who was still living with us. "So
be it, then," was what I read on her passionless and very pale face. Like
Orlov, she wanted to be unhappy out of obstinacy. To spite herself and
everything in the world, she lay for days together on the sofa, desiring and
expecting nothing but evil for herself. Probably she was picturing to herself
Orlov's return and the inevitable quarrels with him; then his growing
indifference to her, his infidelities; then how they would separate; and

perhaps these agonising thoughts gave her satisfaction. But what would she
have said if she found out the actual truth?
"I love you, Godmother," said Gruzin, greeting her and kissing her hand.
"You are so kind! And so dear George has gone away," he lied. "He has
gone away, the rascal!"
He sat down with a sigh and tenderly stroked her hand.
"Let me spend an hour with you, my dear," he said. "I don't want to go
home, and it's too early to go to the Birshovs'. The Birshovs are keeping
their Katya's birthday to-day. She is a nice child!"
I brought him a glass of tea and a decanter of brandy. He slowly and
with obvious reluctance drank the tea, and returning the glass to me, asked
timidly:
"Can you give me ... something to eat, my friend? I have had no dinner."
We had nothing in the flat. I went to the restaurant and brought him the
ordinary rouble dinner.
"To your health, my dear," he said to Zinaida Fyodorovna, and he tossed
off a glass of vodka. "My little girl, your godchild, sends you her love. Poor
child! she's rickety. Ah, children, children!" he sighed. "Whatever you may
say, Godmother, it is nice to be a father. Dear George can't understand that
feeling."
He drank some more. Pale and lean, with his dinner-napkin over his
chest like a little pinafore, he ate greedily, and raising his eyebrows, kept
looking guiltily, like a little boy, first at Zinaida Fyodorovna and then at me.
It seemed as though he would have begun crying if I had not given him the
grouse or the jelly. When he had satisfied his hunger he grew more lively,
and began laughingly telling some story about the Birshov household, but
perceiving that it was tiresome and that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not
laughing, he ceased. And there was a sudden feeling of dreariness. After he
had finished his dinner they sat in the drawing-room by the light of a single
lamp, and did not speak; it was painful to him to lie to her, and she wanted
to ask him something, but could not make up her mind to. So passed half an
hour. Gruzin glanced at his watch.
"I suppose it's time for me to go."
"No, stay a little.... We must have a talk."

Again they were silent. He sat down to the piano, struck one chord, then
began playing, and sang softly, "What does the coming day bring me?" but
as usual he got up suddenly and tossed his head.
"Play something," Zinaida Fyodorovna asked him.
"What shall I play?" he asked, shrugging his shoulders. "I have forgotten
everything. I've given it up long ago."
Looking at the ceiling as though trying to remember, he played two
pieces of Tchaikovsky with exquisite expression, with such warmth, such
insight! His face was just as usual—neither stupid nor intelligent—and it
seemed to me a perfect marvel that a man whom I was accustomed to see in
the midst of the most degrading, impure surroundings, was capable of such
purity, of rising to a feeling so lofty, so far beyond my reach. Zinaida
Fyodorovna's face glowed, and she walked about the drawing-room in
emotion.
"Wait a bit, Godmother; if I can remember it, I will play you something,"
he said; "I heard it played on the violoncello."
Beginning timidly and picking out the notes, and then gathering
confidence, he played Saint-Saëns's "Swan Song." He played it through,
and then played it a second time.
"It's nice, isn't it?" he said.
Moved by the music, Zinaida Fyodorovna stood beside him and asked:
"Tell me honestly, as a friend, what do you think about me?"
"What am I to say?" he said, raising his eyebrows. "I love you and think
nothing but good of you. But if you wish that I should speak generally
about the question that interests you," he went on, rubbing his sleeve near
the elbow and frowning, "then, my dear, you know.... To follow freely the
promptings of the heart does not always give good people happiness. To
feel free and at the same time to be happy, it seems to me, one must not
conceal from oneself that life is coarse, cruel, and merciless in its
conservatism, and one must retaliate with what it deserves—that is, be as
coarse and as merciless in one's striving for freedom. That's what I think."
"That's beyond me," said Zinaida Fyodorovna, with a mournful smile. "I
am exhausted already. I am so exhausted that I wouldn't stir a finger for my
own salvation."
"Go into a nunnery."

He said this in jest, but after he had said it, tears glistened in Zinaida
Fyodorovna's eyes and then in his.
"Well," he said, "we've been sitting and sitting, and now we must go.
Good-bye, dear Godmother. God give you health."
He kissed both her hands, and stroking them tenderly, said that he should
certainly come to see her again in a day or two. In the hall, as he was
putting on his overcoat, that was so like a child's pelisse, he fumbled long in
his pockets to find a tip for me, but found nothing there.
"Good-bye, my dear fellow," he said sadly, and went away.
I shall never forget the feeling that this man left behind him.
Zinaida Fyodorovna still walked about the room in her excitement. That
she was walking about and not still lying down was so much to the good. I
wanted to take advantage of this mood to speak to her openly and then to go
away, but I had hardly seen Gruzin out when I heard a ring. It was
Kukushkin.
"Is Georgy Ivanitch at home?" he said. "Has he come back? You say no?
What a pity! In that case, I'll go in and kiss your mistress's hand, and so
away. Zinaida Fyodorovna, may I come in?" he cried. "I want to kiss your
hand. Excuse my being so late."
He was not long in the drawing-room, not more than ten minutes, but I
felt as though he were staying a long while and would never go away. I bit
my lips from indignation and annoyance, and already hated Zinaida
Fyodorovna. "Why does she not turn him out?" I thought indignantly,
though it was evident that she was bored by his company.
When I held his fur coat for him he asked me, as a mark of special good-
will, how I managed to get on without a wife.
"But I don't suppose you waste your time," he said, laughingly. "I've no
doubt Polya and you are as thick as thieves.... You rascal!"
In spite of my experience of life, I knew very little of mankind at that
time, and it is very likely that I often exaggerated what was of little
consequence and failed to observe what was important. It seemed to me it
was not without motive that Kukushkin tittered and flattered me. Could it
be that he was hoping that I, like a flunkey, would gossip in other kitchens
and servants' quarters of his coming to see us in the evenings when Orlov
was away, and staying with Zinaida Fyodorovna till late at night? And when

my tittle-tattle came to the ears of his acquaintance, he would drop his eyes
in confusion and shake his little finger. And would not he, I thought,
looking at his little honeyed face, this very evening at cards pretend and
perhaps declare that he had already won Zinaida Fyodorovna from Orlov?
That hatred which failed me at midday when the old father had come,
took possession of me now. Kukushkin went away at last, and as I listened
to the shuffle of his leather goloshes, I felt greatly tempted to fling after
him, as a parting shot, some coarse word of abuse, but I restrained myself.
And when the steps had died away on the stairs, I went back to the hall,
and, hardly conscious of what I was doing, took up the roll of papers that
Gruzin had left behind, and ran headlong downstairs. Without cap or
overcoat, I ran down into the street. It was not cold, but big flakes of snow
were falling and it was windy.
"Your Excellency!" I cried, catching up Kukushkin. "Your Excellency!"
He stopped under a lamp-post and looked round with surprise. "Your
Excellency!" I said breathless, "your Excellency!"
And not able to think of anything to say, I hit him two or three times on
the face with the roll of paper. Completely at a loss, and hardly wondering
—I had so completely taken him by surprise—he leaned his back against
the lamp-post and put up his hands to protect his face. At that moment an
army doctor passed, and saw how I was beating the man, but he merely
looked at us in astonishment and went on. I felt ashamed and I ran back to
the house.

XII
With my head wet from the snow, and gasping for breath, I ran to my
room, and immediately flung off my swallow-tails, put on a reefer jacket
and an overcoat, and carried my portmanteau out into the passage; I must
get away! But before going I hurriedly sat down and began writing to
Orlov:
"I leave you my false passport," I began. "I beg you to keep it as a
memento, you false man, you Petersburg official!
"To steal into another man's house under a false name, to watch under
the mask of a flunkey this person's intimate life, to hear everything, to see
everything in order later on, unasked, to accuse a man of lying—all this,

you will say, is on a level with theft. Yes, but I care nothing for fine feelings
now. I have endured dozens of your dinners and suppers when you said and
did what you liked, and I had to hear, to look on, and be silent. I don't want
to make you a present of my silence. Besides, if there is not a living soul at
hand who dares to tell you the truth without flattery, let your flunkey Stepan
wash your magnificent countenance for you."
I did not like this beginning, but I did not care to alter it. Besides, what
did it matter?
The big windows with their dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled dress
coat on the floor, and my wet footprints, looked gloomy and forbidding.
And there was a peculiar stillness.
Possibly because I had run out into the street without my cap and
goloshes I was in a high fever. My face burned, my legs ached.... My heavy
head drooped over the table, and there was that kind of division in my
thought when every idea in the brain seemed dogged by its shadow.
"I am ill, weak, morally cast down," I went on; "I cannot write to you as
I should like to. From the first moment I desired to insult and humiliate you,
but now I do not feel that I have the right to do so. You and I have both
fallen, and neither of us will ever rise up again; and even if my letter were
eloquent, terrible, and passionate, it would still seem like beating on the lid
of a coffin: however one knocks upon it, one will not wake up the dead! No
efforts could warm your accursed cold blood, and you know that better than
I do. Why write? But my mind and heart are burning, and I go on writing;
for some reason I am moved as though this letter still might save you and
me. I am so feverish that my thoughts are disconnected, and my pen
scratches the paper without meaning; but the question I want to put to you
stands before me as clear as though in letters of flame.
"Why I am prematurely weak and fallen is not hard to explain. Like
Samson of old, I have taken the gates of Gaza on my shoulders to carry
them to the top of the mountain, and only when I was exhausted, when
youth and health were quenched in me forever, I noticed that that burden
was not for my shoulders, and that I had deceived myself. I have been,
moreover, in cruel and continual pain. I have endured cold, hunger, illness,
and loss of liberty. Of personal happiness I know and have known nothing. I
have no home; my memories are bitter, and my conscience is often in dread
of them. But why have you fallen—you? What fatal, diabolical causes

hindered your life from blossoming into full flower? Why, almost before
beginning life, were you in such haste to cast off the image and likeness of
God, and to become a cowardly beast who backs and scares others because
he is afraid himself? You are afraid of life—as afraid of it as an Oriental
who sits all day on a cushion smoking his hookah. Yes, you read a great
deal, and a European coat fits you well, but yet with what tender, purely
Oriental, pasha-like care you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical
effort, from pain and uneasiness! How early your soul has taken to its
dressing-gown! What a cowardly part you have played towards real life and
nature, with which every healthy and normal man struggles! How soft, how
snug, how warm, how comfortable—and how bored you are! Yes, it is
deathly boredom, unrelieved by one ray of light, as in solitary confinement;
but you try to hide from that enemy, too, you play cards eight hours out of
twenty-four.
"And your irony? Oh, but how well I understand it! Free, bold, living
thought is searching and dominating; for an indolent, sluggish mind it is
intolerable. That it may not disturb your peace, like thousands of your
contemporaries, you made haste in youth to put it under bar and bolt. Your
ironical attitude to life, or whatever you like to call it, is your armour; and
your thought, fettered and frightened, dare not leap over the fence you have
put round it; and when you jeer at ideas which you pretend to know all
about, you are like the deserter fleeing from the field of battle, and, to stifle
his shame, sneering at war and at valour. Cynicism stifles pain. In some
novel of Dostoevsky's an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his
dearly loved daughter because he had been unjust to her, and you vent your
foul and vulgar jeers upon the ideas of goodness and truth because you have
not the strength to follow them. You are frightened of every honest and
truthful hint at your degradation, and you purposely surround yourself with
people who do nothing but flatter your weaknesses. And you may well, you
may well dread the sight of tears!
"By the way, your attitude to women. Shamelessness has been handed
down to us in our flesh and blood, and we are trained to shamelessness; but
that is what we are men for—to subdue the beast in us. When you reached
manhood and all ideas became known to you, you could not have failed to
see the truth; you knew it, but you did not follow it; you were afraid of it,
and to deceive your conscience you began loudly assuring yourself that it
was not you but woman that was to blame, that she was as degraded as your

attitude to her. Your cold, scabrous anecdotes, your coarse laughter, all your
innumerable theories concerning the underlying reality of marriage and the
definite demands made upon it, concerning the ten sous the French
workman pays his woman; your everlasting attacks on female logic, lying,
weakness and so on—doesn't it all look like a desire at all costs to force
woman down into the mud that she may be on the same level as your
attitude to her? You are a weak, unhappy, unpleasant person!"
Zinaida Fyodorovna began playing the piano in the drawing-room,
trying to recall the song of Saint Saëns that Gruzin had played. I went and
lay on my bed, but remembering that it was time for me to go, I got up with
an effort and with a heavy, burning head went to the table again.
"But this is the question," I went on. "Why are we worn out? Why are
we, at first so passionate, so bold, so noble, and so full of faith, complete
bankrupts at thirty or thirty-five? Why does one waste in consumption,
another put a bullet through his brains, a third seeks forgetfulness in vodka
and cards, while the fourth tries to stifle his fear and misery by cynically
trampling underfoot the pure image of his fair youth? Why is it that, having
once fallen, we do not try to rise up again, and, losing one thing, do not
seek something else? Why is it?
"The thief hanging on the Cross could bring back the joy of life and the
courage of confident hope, though perhaps he had not more than an hour to
live. You have long years before you, and I shall probably not die so soon as
one might suppose. What if by a miracle the present turned out to be a
dream, a horrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed, pure, strong,
proud of our righteousness? Sweet visions fire me, and I am almost
breathless with emotion. I have a terrible longing to live. I long for our life
to be holy, lofty, and majestic as the heavens above. Let us live! The sun
doesn't rise twice a day, and life is not given us again—clutch at what is left
of your life and save it...."
I did not write another word. I had a multitude of thoughts in my mind,
but I could not connect them and get them on to paper. Without finishing
the letter, I signed it with my name and rank, and went into the study. It was
dark. I felt for the table and put the letter on it. I must have stumbled against
the furniture in the dark and made a noise.
"Who is there?" I heard an alarmed voice in the drawing-room.
And the clock on the table softly struck one at the moment.

XIII
For at least half a minute I fumbled at the door in the dark, feeling for
the handle; then I slowly opened it and walked into the drawing-room.
Zinaida Fyodorovna was lying on the couch, and raising herself on her
elbow, she looked towards me. Unable to bring myself to speak, I walked
slowly by, and she followed me with her eyes. I stood for a little time in the
dining-room and then walked by her again, and she looked at me intently
and with perplexity, even with alarm. At last I stood still and said with an
effort:
"He is not coming back."
She quickly got on to her feet, and looked at me without understanding.
"He is not coming back," I repeated, and my heart beat violently. "He
will not come back, for he has not left Petersburg. He is staying at
Pekarsky's."
She understood and believed me—I saw that from her sudden pallor, and
from the way she laid her arms upon her bosom in terror and entreaty. In
one instant all that had happened of late flashed through her mind; she
reflected, and with pitiless clarity she saw the whole truth. But at the same
time she remembered that I was a flunkey, a being of a lower order.... A
casual stranger, with hair ruffled, with face flushed with fever, perhaps
drunk, in a common overcoat, was coarsely intruding into her intimate life,
and that offended her. She said to me sternly:
"It's not your business: go away."
"Oh, believe me!" I cried impetuously, holding out my hands to her. "I
am not a footman; I am as free as you."
I mentioned my name, and, speaking very rapidly that she might not
interrupt me or go away, explained to her who I was and why I was living
there. This new discovery struck her more than the first. Till then she had
hoped that her footman had lied or made a mistake or been silly, but now
after my confession she had no doubts left. From the expression of her
unhappy eyes and face, which suddenly lost its softness and beauty and
looked old, I saw that she was insufferably miserable, and that the
conversation would lead to no good; but I went on impetuously:

"The senator and the tour of inspection were invented to deceive you. In
January, just as now, he did not go away, but stayed at Pekarsky's, and I saw
him every day and took part in the deception. He was weary of you, he
hated your presence here, he mocked at you.... If you could have heard how
he and his friends here jeered at you and your love, you would not have
remained here one minute! Go away from here! Go away."
"Well," she said in a shaking voice, and moved her hand over her hair.
"Well, so be it."
Her eyes were full of tears, her lips were quivering, and her whole face
was strikingly pale and distorted with anger. Orlov's coarse, petty lying
revolted her and seemed to her contemptible, ridiculous: she smiled and I
did not like that smile.
"Well," she repeated, passing her hand over her hair again, "so be it. He
imagines that I shall die of humiliation, and instead of that I am ... amused
by it. There's no need for him to hide." She walked away from the piano and
said, shrugging her shoulders: "There's no need.... It would have been
simpler to have it out with me instead of keeping in hiding in other people's
flats. I have eyes; I saw it myself long ago.... I was only waiting for him to
come back to have things out once for all."
Then she sat down on a low chair by the table, and, leaning her head on
the arm of the sofa, wept bitterly. In the drawing-room there was only one
candle burning in the candelabra, and the chair where she was sitting was in
darkness; but I saw how her head and shoulders were quivering, and how
her hair, escaping from her combs, covered her neck, her face, her arms....
Her quiet, steady weeping, which was not hysterical but a woman's ordinary
weeping, expressed a sense of insult, of wounded pride, of injury, and of
something helpless, hopeless, which one could not set right and to which
one could not get used. Her tears stirred an echo in my troubled and
suffering heart; I forgot my illness and everything else in the world; I
walked about the drawing-room and muttered distractedly:
"Is this life?... Oh, one can't go on living like this, one can't.... Oh, it's
madness, wickedness, not life."
"What humiliation!" she said through her tears. "To live together, to
smile at me at the very time when I was burdensome to him, ridiculous in
his eyes! Oh, how humiliating!"

She lifted up her head, and looking at me with tear-stained eyes through
her hair, wet with her tears, and pushing it back as it prevented her seeing
me, she asked:
"They laughed at me?"
"To these men you were laughable—you and your love and Turgenev;
they said your head was full of him. And if we both die at once in despair,
that will amuse them, too; they will make a funny anecdote of it and tell it
at your requiem service. But why talk of them?" I said impatiently. "We
must get away from here—I cannot stay here one minute longer."
She began crying again, while I walked to the piano and sat down.
"What are we waiting for?" I asked dejectedly. "It's two o'clock."
"I am not waiting for anything," she said. "I am utterly lost."
"Why do you talk like that? We had better consider together what we are
to do. Neither you nor I can stay here. Where do you intend to go?"
Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. My heart stood still. Could it be
Orlov, to whom perhaps Kukushkin had complained of me? How should we
meet? I went to open the door. It was Polya. She came in shaking the snow
off her pelisse, and went into her room without saying a word to me. When
I went back to the drawing-room, Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale as death, was
standing in the middle of the room, looking towards me with big eyes.
"Who was it?" she asked softly.
"Polya," I answered.
She passed her hand over her hair and closed her eyes wearily.
"I will go away at once," she said. "Will you be kind and take me to the
Petersburg Side? What time is it now?"
"A quarter to three."

XIV
When, a little afterwards, we went out of the house, it was dark and
deserted in the street. Wet snow was falling and a damp wind lashed in
one's face. I remember it was the beginning of March; a thaw had set in, and
for some days past the cabmen had been driving on wheels. Under the
impression of the back stairs, of the cold, of the midnight darkness, and the
porter in his sheepskin who had questioned us before letting us out of the

gate, Zinaida Fyodorovna was utterly cast down and dispirited. When we
got into the cab and the hood was put up, trembling all over, she began
hurriedly saying how grateful she was to me.
"I do not doubt your good-will, but I am ashamed that you should be
troubled," she muttered. "Oh, I understand, I understand.... When Gruzin
was here to-day, I felt that he was lying and concealing something. Well, so
be it. But I am ashamed, anyway, that you should be troubled."
She still had her doubts. To dispel them finally, I asked the cabman to
drive through Sergievsky Street; stopping him at Pekarsky's door, I got out
of the cab and rang. When the porter came to the door, I asked aloud, that
Zinaida Fyodorovna might hear, whether Georgy Ivanitch was at home.
"Yes," was the answer, "he came in half an hour ago. He must be in bed
by now. What do you want?"
Zinaida Fyodorovna could not refrain from putting her head out.
"Has Georgy Ivanitch been staying here long?" she asked.
"Going on for three weeks."
"And he's not been away?"
"No," answered the porter, looking at me with surprise.
"Tell him, early to-morrow," I said, "that his sister has arrived from
Warsaw. Good-bye."
Then we drove on. The cab had no apron, the snow fell on us in big
flakes, and the wind, especially on the Neva, pierced us through and
through. I began to feel as though we had been driving for a long time, that
for ages we had been suffering, and that for ages I had been listening to
Zinaida Fyodorovna's shuddering breath. In semi-delirium, as though half
asleep, I looked back upon my strange, incoherent life, and for some reason
recalled a melodrama, "The Parisian Beggars," which I had seen once or
twice in my childhood. And when to shake off that semi-delirium I peeped
out from the hood and saw the dawn, all the images of the past, all my
misty thoughts, for some reason, blended in me into one distinct,
overpowering thought: everything was irrevocably over for Zinaida
Fyodorovna and for me. This was as certain a conviction as though the cold
blue sky contained a prophecy, but a minute later I was already thinking of
something else and believed differently.

"What am I now?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, in a voice husky with the
cold and the damp. "Where am I to go? What am I to do? Gruzin told me to
go into a nunnery. Oh, I would! I would change my dress, my face, my
name, my thoughts ... everything—everything, and would hide myself for
ever. But they will not take me into a nunnery. I am with child."
"We will go abroad together to-morrow," I said.
"That's impossible. My husband won't give me a passport."
"I will take you without a passport."
The cabman stopped at a wooden house of two storeys, painted a dark
colour. I rang. Taking from me her small light basket—the only luggage we
had brought with us—Zinaida Fyodorovna gave a wry smile and said:
"These are my bijoux."
But she was so weak that she could not carry these bijoux.
It was a long while before the door was opened. After the third or fourth
ring a light gleamed in the windows, and there was a sound of steps,
coughing and whispering; at last the key grated in the lock, and a stout
peasant woman with a frightened red face appeared at the door. Some
distance behind her stood a thin little old woman with short grey hair,
carrying a candle in her hand. Zinaida Fyodorovna ran into the passage and
flung her arms round the old woman's neck.
"Nina, I've been deceived," she sobbed loudly. "I've been coarsely, foully
deceived! Nina, Nina!"
I handed the basket to the peasant woman. The door was closed, but still
I heard her sobs and the cry "Nina!"
I got into the cab and told the man to drive slowly to the Nevsky
Prospect. I had to think of a night's lodging for myself.
Next day towards evening I went to see Zinaida Fyodorovna. She was
terribly changed. There were no traces of tears on her pale, terribly sunken
face, and her expression was different. I don't know whether it was that I
saw her now in different surroundings, far from luxurious, and that our
relations were by now different, or perhaps that intense grief had already set
its mark upon her; she did not strike me as so elegant and well dressed as
before. Her figure seemed smaller; there was an abruptness and excessive
nervousness about her as though she were in a hurry, and there was not the
same softness even in her smile. I was dressed in an expensive suit which I

had bought during the day. She looked first of all at that suit and at the hat
in my hand, then turned an impatient, searching glance upon my face as
though studying it.
"Your transformation still seems to me a sort of miracle," she said.
"Forgive me for looking at you with such curiosity. You are an
extraordinary man, you know."
I told her again who I was, and why I was living at Orlov's, and I told her
at greater length and in more detail than the day before. She listened with
great attention, and said without letting me finish:
"Everything there is over for me. You know, I could not refrain from
writing a letter. Here is the answer."
On the sheet which she gave there was written in Orlov's hand:
"I am not going to justify myself. But you must own that it was your
mistake, not mine. I wish you happiness, and beg you to make haste and
forget.
"Yours sincerely,
"G. O.
"P. S.—I am sending on your things."
The trunks and baskets despatched by Orlov were standing in the
passage, and my poor little portmanteau was there beside them.
"So ..." Zinaida Fyodorovna began, but she did not finish.
We were silent. She took the note and held it for a couple of minutes
before her eyes, and during that time her face wore the same haughty,
contemptuous, proud, and harsh expression as the day before at the
beginning of our explanation; tears came into her eyes—not timid, bitter
tears, but proud, angry tears.
"Listen," she said, getting up abruptly and moving away to the window
that I might not see her face. "I have made up my mind to go abroad with
you tomorrow."
"I am very glad. I am ready to go to-day."
"Accept me as a recruit. Have you read Balzac?" she asked suddenly,
turning round. "Have you? At the end of his novel 'Père Goriot' the hero
looks down upon Paris from the top of a hill and threatens the town: 'Now
we shall settle our account,' and after this he begins a new life. So when I

look out of the train window at Petersburg for the last time, I shall say,
'Now we shall settle our account!'"
Saying this, she smiled at her jest, and for some reason shuddered all
over.

XV
At Venice I had an attack of pleurisy. Probably I had caught cold in the
evening when we were rowing from the station to the Hotel Bauer. I had to
take to my bed and stay there for a fortnight. Every morning while I was ill
Zinaida Fyodorovna came from her room to drink coffee with me, and
afterwards read aloud to me French and Russian books, of which we had
bought a number at Vienna. These books were either long, long familiar to
me or else had no interest for me, but I had the sound of a sweet, kind voice
beside me, so that the meaning of all of them was summed up for me in the
one thing—I was not alone. She would go out for a walk, come back in her
light grey dress, her light straw hat, gay, warmed by the spring sun; and
sitting by my bed, bending low down over me, would tell me something
about Venice or read me those books—and I was happy.
At night I was cold, ill, and dreary, but by day I revelled in life—I can
find no better expression for it. The brilliant warm sunshine beating in at the
open windows and at the door upon the balcony, the shouts below, the
splash of oars, the tinkle of bells, the prolonged boom of the cannon at
midday, and the feeling of perfect, perfect freedom, did wonders with me; I
felt as though I were growing strong, broad wings which were bearing me
God knows whither. And what charm, what joy at times at the thought that
another life was so close to mine! that I was the servant, the guardian, the
friend, the indispensable fellow-traveller of a creature, young, beautiful,
wealthy, but weak, lonely, and insulted! It is pleasant even to be ill when
you know that there are people who are looking forward to your
convalescence as to a holiday. One day I heard her whispering behind the
door with my doctor, and then she came in to me with tear-stained eyes. It
was a bad sign, but I was touched, and there was a wonderful lightness in
my heart.
But at last they allowed me to go out on the balcony. The sunshine and
the breeze from the sea caressed and fondled my sick body. I looked down
at the familiar gondolas, which glide with feminine grace smoothly and

majestically as though they were alive, and felt all the luxury of this
original, fascinating civilisation. There was a smell of the sea. Some one
was playing a stringed instrument and two voices were singing. How
delightful it was! How unlike it was to that Petersburg night when the wet
snow was falling and beating so rudely on our faces. If one looks straight
across the canal, one sees the sea, and on the wide expanse towards the
horizon the sun glittered on the water so dazzlingly that it hurt one's eyes to
look at it. My soul yearned towards that lovely sea, which was so akin to
me and to which I had given up my youth. I longed to live—to live—and
nothing more.
A fortnight later I began walking freely. I loved to sit in the sun, and to
listen to the gondoliers without understanding them, and for hours together
to gaze at the little house where, they said, Desdemona lived—a naïve,
mournful little house with a demure expression, as light as lace, so light that
it looked as though one could lift it from its place with one hand. I stood for
a long time by the tomb of Canova, and could not take my eyes off the
melancholy lion. And in the Palace of the Doges I was always drawn to the
corner where the portrait of the unhappy Marino Faliero was painted over
with black. "It is fine to be an artist, a poet, a dramatist," I thought, "but
since that is not vouchsafed to me, if only I could go in for mysticism! If
only I had a grain of some faith to add to the unruffled peace and serenity
that fills the soul!"
In the evening we ate oysters, drank wine, and went out in a gondola. I
remember our black gondola swayed softly in the same place while the
water faintly gurgled under it. Here and there the reflection of the stars and
the lights on the bank quivered and trembled. Not far from us in a gondola,
hung with coloured lanterns which were reflected in the water, there were
people singing. The sounds of guitars, of violins, of mandolins, of men's
and women's voices, were audible in the dark. Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale,
with a grave, almost stern face, was sitting beside me, compressing her lips
and clenching her hands. She was thinking about something; she did not stir
an eyelash, nor hear me. Her face, her attitude, and her fixed, expressionless
gaze, and her incredibly miserable, dreadful, and icy-cold memories, and
around her the gondolas, the lights, the music, the song with its vigorous
passionate cry of "Jam-mo! Jam-mo!"—what contrasts in life! When she sat
like that, with tightly clasped hands, stony, mournful, I used to feel as
though we were both characters in some novel in the old-fashioned style

called "The Ill-fated," "The Abandoned," or something of the sort. Both of
us: she—the ill-fated, the abandoned; and I—the faithful, devoted friend,
the dreamer, and, if you like it, a superfluous man, a failure capable of
nothing but coughing and dreaming, and perhaps sacrificing myself.
But who and what needed my sacrifices now? And what had I to
sacrifice, indeed?
When we came in in the evening we always drank tea in her room and
talked. We did not shrink from touching on old, unhealed wounds—on the
contrary, for some reason I felt a positive pleasure in telling her about my
life at Orlov's, or referring openly to relations which I knew and which
could not have been concealed from me.
"At moments I hated you," I said to her. "When he was capricious,
condescending, told you lies, I marvelled how it was you did not see, did
not understand, when it was all so clear! You kissed his hands, you knelt to
him, you flattered him ..."
"When I ... kissed his hands and knelt to him, I loved him ..." she said,
blushing crimson.
"Can it have been so difficult to see through him? A fine sphinx! A
sphinx indeed—a kammer-junker! I reproach you for nothing, God forbid,"
I went on, feeling I was coarse, that I had not the tact, the delicacy which
are so essential when you have to do with a fellow-creature's soul; in early
days before I knew her I had not noticed this defect in myself. "But how
could you fail to see what he was," I went on, speaking more softly and
more diffidently, however.
"You mean to say you despise my past, and you are right," she said,
deeply stirred. "You belong to a special class of men who cannot be judged
by ordinary standards; your moral requirements are exceptionally rigorous,
and I understand you can't forgive things. I understand you, and if
sometimes I say the opposite, it doesn't mean that I look at things
differently from you; I speak the same old nonsense simply because I
haven't had time yet to wear out my old clothes and prejudices. I, too, hate
and despise my past, and Orlov and my love.... What was that love? It's
positively absurd now," she said, going to the window and looking down at
the canal. "All this love only clouds the conscience and confuses the mind.
The meaning of life is to be found only in one thing—fighting. To get one's

heel on the vile head of the serpent and to crush it! That's the meaning of
life. In that alone or in nothing."
I told her long stories of my past, and described my really astounding
adventures. But of the change that had taken place in me I did not say one
word. She always listened to me with great attention, and at interesting
places she rubbed her hands as though vexed that it had not yet been her lot
to experience such adventures, such joys and terrors. Then she would
suddenly fall to musing and retreat into herself, and I could see from her
face that she was not attending to me.
I closed the windows that looked out on the canal and asked whether we
should not have the fire lighted.
"No, never mind. I am not cold," she said, smiling listlessly. "I only feel
weak. Do you know, I fancy I have grown much wiser lately. I have
extraordinary, original ideas now. When I think of my past, of my life then
... people in general, in fact, it is all summed up for me in the image of my
stepmother. Coarse, insolent, soulless, false, depraved, and a morphia
maniac too. My father, who was feeble and weak-willed, married my
mother for her money and drove her into consumption; but his second wife,
my stepmother, he loved passionately, insanely.... What I had to put up
with! But what is the use of talking! And so, as I say, it is all summed up in
her image.... And it vexes me that my stepmother is dead. I should like to
meet her now!"
"Why?"
"I don't know," she answered with a laugh and a graceful movement of
her head. "Good-night. You must get well. As soon as you are well, we'll
take up our work ... It's time to begin."
After I had said good-night and had my hand on the door-handle, she
said:
"What do you think? Is Polya still living there?"
"Probably."
And I went off to my room. So we spent a whole month. One grey
morning when we both stood at my window, looking at the clouds which
were moving up from the sea, and at the darkening canal, expecting every
minute that it would pour with rain, and when a thick, narrow streak of rain
covered the sea as though with a muslin veil, we both felt suddenly dreary.
The same day we both set off for Florence.

XVI
It was autumn, at Nice. One morning when I went into her room she was
sitting on a low chair, bent together and huddled up, with her legs crossed
and her face hidden in her hands. She was weeping bitterly, with sobs, and
her long, unbrushed hair fell on her knees. The impression of the exquisite
marvellous sea which I had only just seen and of which I wanted to tell her,
left me all at once, and my heart ached.
"What is it?" I asked; she took one hand from her face and motioned me
to go away. "What is it?" I repeated, and for the first time during our
acquaintance I kissed her hand.
"No, it's nothing, nothing," she said quickly. "Oh, it's nothing, nothing....
Go away.... You see, I am not dressed."
I went out overwhelmed. The calm and serene mood in which I had been
for so long was poisoned by compassion. I had a passionate longing to fall
at her feet, to entreat her not to weep in solitude, but to share her grief with
me, and the monotonous murmur of the sea already sounded a gloomy
prophecy in my ears, and I foresaw fresh tears, fresh troubles, and fresh
losses in the future. "What is she crying about? What is it?" I wondered,
recalling her face and her agonised look. I remembered she was with child.
She tried to conceal her condition from other people, and also from herself.
At home she went about in a loose wrapper or in a blouse with extremely
full folds over the bosom, and when she went out anywhere she laced
herself in so tightly that on two occasions she fainted when we were out.
She never spoke to me of her condition, and when I hinted that it might be
as well to see a doctor, she flushed crimson and said not a word.
When I went to see her next time she was already dressed and had her
hair done.
"There, there," I said, seeing that she was ready to cry again. "We had
better go to the sea and have a talk."
"I can't talk. Forgive me, I am in the mood now when one wants to be
alone. And, if you please, Vladimir Ivanitch, another time you want to come
into my room, be so good as to give a knock at the door."
That "be so good" had a peculiar, unfeminine sound. I went away. My
accursed Petersburg mood came back, and all my dreams were crushed and
crumpled up like leaves by the heat. I felt I was alone again and there was

no nearness between us. I was no more to her than that cobweb to that
palm-tree, which hangs on it by chance and which will be torn off and
carried away by the wind. I walked about the square where the band was
playing, went into the Casino; there I looked at overdressed and heavily
perfumed women, and every one of them glanced at me as though she
would say: "You are alone; that's all right." Then I went out on the terrace
and looked for a long time at the sea. There was not one sail on the horizon.
On the left bank, in the lilac-coloured mist, there were mountains, gardens,
towers, and houses, the sun was sparkling over it all, but it was all alien,
indifferent, an incomprehensible tangle.

XVII
She used as before to come into my room in the morning to coffee, but
we no longer dined together, as she said she was not hungry; and she lived
only on coffee, tea, and various trifles such as oranges and caramels.
And we no longer had conversations in the evening. I don't know why it
was like this. Ever since the day when I had found her in tears she had
treated me somehow lightly, at times casually, even ironically, and for some
reason called me "My good sir." What had before seemed to her terrible,
heroic, marvellous, and had stirred her envy and enthusiasm, did not touch
her now at all, and usually after listening to me, she stretched and said:
"Yes, 'great things were done in days of yore,' my good sir."
It sometimes happened even that I did not see her for days together. I
would knock timidly and guiltily at her door and get no answer; I would
knock again—still silence.... I would stand near the door and listen; then the
chambermaid would pass and say coldly, "Madame est partie." Then I
would walk about the passages of the hotel, walk and walk.... English
people, full-bosomed ladies, waiters in swallow-tails.... And as I keep
gazing at the long striped rug that stretches the whole length of the corridor,
the idea occurs to me that I am playing in the life of this woman a strange,
probably false part, and that it is beyond my power to alter that part. I run to
my room and fall on my bed, and think and think, and can come to no
conclusion; and all that is clear to me is that I want to live, and that the
plainer and the colder and the harder her face grows, the nearer she is to me,
and the more intensely and painfully I feel our kinship. Never mind "My

good sir," never mind her light careless tone, never mind anything you like,
only don't leave me, my treasure. I am afraid to be alone.
Then I go out into the corridor again, listen in a tremor.... I have no
dinner; I don't notice the approach of evening. At last about eleven I hear
the familiar footstep, and at the turn near the stairs Zinaida Fyodorovna
comes into sight.
"Are you taking a walk?" she would ask as she passes me. "You had
better go out into the air.... Good-night!"
"But shall we not meet again to-day?"
"I think it's late. But as you like."
"Tell me, where have you been?" I would ask, following her into the
room.
"Where? To Monte Carlo." She took ten gold coins out of her pocket and
said: "Look, my good sir; I have won. That's at roulette."
"Nonsense! As though you would gamble."
"Why not? I am going again to-morrow."
I imagined her with a sick and morbid face, in her condition, tightly
laced, standing near the gaming-table in a crowd of cocottes, of old women
in their dotage who swarm round the gold like flies round the honey. I
remembered she had gone off to Monte Carlo for some reason in secret
from me.
"I don't believe you," I said one day. "You wouldn't go there."
"Don't agitate yourself. I can't lose much."
"It's not the question of what you lose," I said with annoyance. "Has it
never occurred to you while you were playing there that the glitter of gold,
all these women, young and old, the croupiers, all the surroundings—that it
is all a vile, loathsome mockery at the toiler's labour, at his bloody sweat?"
"If one doesn't play, what is one to do here?" she asked. "The toiler's
labour and his bloody sweat—all that eloquence you can put off till another
time; but now, since you have begun, let me go on. Let me ask you bluntly,
what is there for me to do here, and what am I to do?"
"What are you to do?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "That's a question
that can't be answered straight off."

"I beg you to answer me honestly, Vladimir Ivanitch," she said, and her
face looked angry. "Once I have brought myself to ask you this question, I
am not going to listen to stock phrases. I am asking you," she went on,
beating her hand on the table, as though marking time, "what ought I to do
here? And not only here at Nice, but in general?"
I did not speak, but looked out of window to the sea. My heart was
beating terribly.
"Vladimir Ivanitch," she said softly and breathlessly; it was hard for her
to speak—"Vladimir Ivanitch, if you do not believe in the cause yourself, if
you no longer think of going back to it, why ... why did you drag me out of
Petersburg? Why did you make me promises, why did you rouse mad
hopes? Your convictions have changed; you have become a different man,
and nobody blames you for it—our convictions are not always in our power.
But ... but, Vladimir Ivanitch, for God's sake, why are you not sincere?" she
went on softly, coming up to me. "All these months when I have been
dreaming aloud, raving, going into raptures over my plans, remodelling my
life on a new pattern, why didn't you tell me the truth? Why were you silent
or encouraged me by your stories, and behaved as though you were in
complete sympathy with me? Why was it? Why was it necessary?"
"It's difficult to acknowledge one's bankruptcy," I said, turning round,
but not looking at her. "Yes, I have no faith; I am worn out. I have lost
heart.... It is difficult to be truthful—very difficult, and I held my tongue.
God forbid that any one should have to go through what I have been
through."
I felt that I was on the point of tears, and ceased speaking.
"Vladimir Ivanitch," she said, and took me by both hands, "you have
been through so much and seen so much of life, you know more than I do;
think seriously, and tell me, what am I to do? Teach me! If you haven't the
strength to go forward yourself and take others with you, at least show me
where to go. After all, I am a living, feeling, thinking being. To sink into a
false position ... to play an absurd part ... is painful to me. I don't reproach
you, I don't blame you; I only ask you."
Tea was brought in.
"Well?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, giving me a glass. "What do you say
to me?"

"There is more light in the world than you see through your window," I
answered. "And there are other people besides me, Zinaida Fyodorovna."
"Then tell me who they are," she said eagerly. "That's all I ask of you."
"And I want to say, too," I went on, "one can serve an idea in more than
one calling. If one has made a mistake and lost faith in one, one may find
another. The world of ideas is large and cannot be exhausted."
"The world of ideas!" she said, and she looked into my face sarcastically.
"Then we had better leave off talking. What's the use?..."
She flushed.
"The world of ideas!" she repeated. She threw her dinner-napkin aside,
and an expression of indignation and contempt came into her face. "All
your fine ideas, I see, lead up to one inevitable, essential step: I ought to
become your mistress. That's what's wanted. To be taken up with ideas
without being the mistress of an honourable, progressive man, is as good as
not understanding the ideas. One has to begin with that ... that is, with being
your mistress, and the rest will come of itself."
"You are irritated, Zinaida Fyodorovna," I said.
"No, I am sincere!" she cried, breathing hard. "I am sincere!"
"You are sincere, perhaps, but you are in error, and it hurts me to hear
you."
"I am in error?" she laughed. "Any one else might say that, but not you,
my dear sir! I may seem to you indelicate, cruel, but I don't care: you love
me? You love me, don't you?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Yes, shrug your shoulders!" she went on sarcastically. "When you were
ill I heard you in your delirium, and ever since these adoring eyes, these
sighs, and edifying conversations about friendship, about spiritual
kinship.... But the point is, why haven't you been sincere? Why have you
concealed what is and talked about what isn't? Had you said from the
beginning what ideas exactly led you to drag me from Petersburg, I should
have known. I should have poisoned myself then as I meant to, and there
would have been none of this tedious farce.... But what's the use of talking!"
With a wave of the hand she sat down.
"You speak to me as though you suspected me of dishonourable
intentions," I said, offended.

"Oh, very well. What's the use of talking! I don't suspect you of
intentions, but of having no intentions. If you had any, I should have known
them by now. You had nothing but ideas and love. For the present—ideas
and love, and in prospect—me as your mistress. That's in the order of things
both in life and in novels.... Here you abused him," she said, and she
slapped the table with her hand, "but one can't help agreeing with him. He
has good reasons for despising these ideas."
"He does not despise ideas; he is afraid of them," I cried. "He is a
coward and a liar."
"Oh, very well. He is a coward and a liar, and deceived me. And you?
Excuse my frankness; what are you? He deceived me and left me to take
my chance in Petersburg, and you have deceived me and abandoned me
here. But he did not mix up ideas with his deceit, and you ..."
"For goodness' sake, why are you saying this?" I cried in horror,
wringing my hands and going up to her quickly. "No, Zinaida Fyodorovna,
this is cynicism. You must not be so despairing; listen to me," I went on,
catching at a thought which flashed dimly upon me, and which seemed to
me might still save us both. "Listen. I have passed through so many
experiences in my time that my head goes round at the thought of them, and
I have realised with my mind, with my racked soul, that man finds his true
destiny in nothing if not in self-sacrificing love for his neighbour. It is
towards that we must strive, and that is our destination! That is my faith!"
I wanted to go on to speak of mercy, of forgiveness, but there was an
insincere note in my voice, and I was embarrassed.
"I want to live!" I said genuinely. "To live, to live! I want peace,
tranquillity; I want warmth—this sea here—to have you near. Oh, how I
wish I could rouse in you the same thirst for life! You spoke just now of
love, but it would be enough for me to have you near, to hear your voice, to
watch the look in your face ...!"
She flushed crimson, and to hinder my speaking, said quickly:
"You love life, and I hate it. So our ways lie apart."
She poured herself out some tea, but did not touch it, went into the
bedroom, and lay down.
"I imagine it is better to cut short this conversation," she said to me from
within. "Everything is over for me, and I want nothing.... What more is
there to say?"

"No, it's not all over!"
"Oh, very well!... I know! I am sick of it.... That's enough."
I got up, took a turn from one end of the room to the other, and went out
into the corridor. When late at night I went to her door and listened, I
distinctly heard her crying.
Next morning the waiter, handing me my clothes, informed me, with a
smile, that the lady in number thirteen was confined. I dressed somehow,
and almost fainting with terror ran to Zinaida Fyodorovna. In her room I
found a doctor, a midwife, and an elderly Russian lady from Harkov, called
Darya Milhailovna. There was a smell of ether. I had scarcely crossed the
threshold when from the room where she was lying I heard a low, plaintive
moan, and, as though it had been wafted me by the wind from Russia, I
thought of Orlov, his irony, Polya, the Neva, the drifting snow, then the cab
without an apron, the prediction I had read in the cold morning sky, and the
despairing cry "Nina! Nina!"
"Go in to her," said the lady.
I went in to see Zinaida Fyodorovna, feeling as though I were the father
of the child. She was lying with her eyes closed, looking thin and pale,
wearing a white cap edged with lace. I remember there were two
expressions on her face: one—cold, indifferent, apathetic; the other—a look
of childish helplessness given her by the white cap. She did not hear me
come in, or heard, perhaps, but did not pay attention. I stood, looked at her,
and waited.
But her face was contorted with pain; she opened her eyes and gazed at
the ceiling, as though wondering what was happening to her.... There was a
look of loathing on her face.
"It's horrible ..." she whispered.
"Zinaida Fyodorovna." I spoke her name softly. She looked at me
indifferently, listlessly, and closed her eyes. I stood there a little while, then
went away.
At night, Darya Mihailovna informed me that the child, a girl, was born,
but that the mother was in a dangerous condition. Then I heard noise and
bustle in the passage. Darya Mihailovna came to me again and with a face
of despair, wringing her hands, said:

"Oh, this is awful! The doctor suspects that she has taken poison! Oh,
how badly Russians do behave here!"
And at twelve o'clock the next day Zinaida Fyodorovna died.

XVIII
Two years had passed. Circumstances had changed; I had come to
Petersburg again and could live here openly. I was no longer afraid of being
and seeming sentimental, and gave myself up entirely to the fatherly, or
rather idolatrous feeling roused in me by Sonya, Zinaida Fyodorovna's
child. I fed her with my own hands, gave her her bath, put her to bed, never
took my eyes off her for nights together, and screamed when it seemed to
me that the nurse was just going to drop her. My thirst for normal ordinary
life became stronger and more acute as time went on, but wider visions
stopped short at Sonya, as though I had found in her at last just what I
needed. I loved the child madly. In her I saw the continuation of my life,
and it was not exactly that I fancied, but I felt, I almost believed, that when
I had cast off at last my long, bony, bearded frame, I should go on living in
those little blue eyes, that silky flaxen hair, those dimpled pink hands which
stroked my face so lovingly and were clasped round my neck.
Sonya's future made me anxious. Orlov was her father; in her birth
certificate she was called Krasnovsky, and the only person who knew of her
existence, and took interest in her—that is, I—was at death's door. I had to
think about her seriously.
The day after I arrived in Petersburg I went to see Orlov. The door was
opened to me by a stout old fellow with red whiskers and no moustache,
who looked like a German. Polya, who was tidying the drawing-room, did
not recognise me, but Orlov knew me at once.
"Ah, Mr. Revolutionist!" he said, looking at me with curiosity, and
laughing. "What fate has brought you?"
He was not changed in the least: the same well-groomed, unpleasant
face, the same irony. And a new book was lying on the table just as of old,
with an ivory paper-knife thrust in it. He had evidently been reading before
I came in. He made me sit down, offered me a cigar, and with a delicacy
only found in well-bred people, concealing the unpleasant feeling aroused
by my face and my wasted figure, observed casually that I was not in the

least changed, and that he would have known me anywhere in spite of my
having grown a beard. We talked of the weather, of Paris. To dispose as
quickly as possible of the oppressive, inevitable question, which weighed
upon him and me, he asked:
"Zinaida Fyodorovna is dead?"
"Yes," I answered.
"In childbirth?"
"Yes, in childbirth. The doctor suspected another cause of death, but ... it
is more comforting for you and for me to think that she died in childbirth."
He sighed decorously and was silent. The angel of silence passed over
us, as they say.
"Yes. And here everything is as it used to be—no changes," he said
briskly, seeing that I was looking about the room. "My father, as you know,
has left the service and is living in retirement; I am still in the same
department. Do you remember Pekarsky? He is just the same as ever.
Gruzin died of diphtheria a year ago.... Kukushkin is alive, and often speaks
of you. By the way," said Orlov, dropping his eyes with an air of reserve,
"when Kukushkin heard who you were, he began telling every one you had
attacked him and tried to murder him ... and that he only just escaped with
his life."
I did not speak.
"Old servants do not forget their masters.... It's very nice of you," said
Orlov jocosely. "Will you have some wine and some coffee, though? I will
tell them to make some."
"No, thank you. I have come to see you about a very important matter,
Georgy Ivanitch."
"I am not very fond of important matters, but I shall be glad to be of
service to you. What do you want?"
"You see," I began, growing agitated, "I have here with me Zinaida
Fyodorovna's daughter.... Hitherto I have brought her up, but, as you see,
before many days I shall be an empty sound. I should like to die with the
thought that she is provided for."
Orlov coloured a little, frowned a little, and took a cursory and sullen
glance at me. He was unpleasantly affected, not so much by the "important
matter" as by my words about death, about becoming an empty sound.

"Yes, it must be thought about," he said, screening his eyes as though
from the sun. "Thank you. You say it's a girl?"
"Yes, a girl. A wonderful child!"
"Yes. Of course, it's not a lap-dog, but a human being. I understand we
must consider it seriously. I am prepared to do my part, and am very
grateful to you."
He got up, walked about, biting his nails, and stopped before a picture.
"We must think about it," he said in a hollow voice, standing with his
back to me. "I shall go to Pekarsky's to-day and will ask him to go to
Krasnovsky's. I don't think he will make much ado about consenting to take
the child."
"But, excuse me, I don't see what Krasnovsky has got to do with it," I
said, also getting up and walking to a picture at the other end of the room.
"But she bears his name, of course!" said Orlov.
"Yes, he may be legally obliged to accept the child—I don't know; but I
came to you, Georgy Ivanitch, not to discuss the legal aspect."
"Yes, yes, you are right," he agreed briskly. "I believe I am talking
nonsense. But don't excite yourself. We will decide the matter to our mutual
satisfaction. If one thing won't do, we'll try another; and if that won't do,
we'll try a third—one way or another this delicate question shall be settled.
Pekarsky will arrange it all. Be so good as to leave me your address and I
will let you know at once what we decide. Where are you living?"
Orlov wrote down my address, sighed, and said with a smile:
"Oh, Lord, what a job it is to be the father of a little daughter! But
Pekarsky will arrange it all. He is a sensible man. Did you stay long in
Paris?"
"Two months."
We were silent. Orlov was evidently afraid I should begin talking of the
child again, and to turn my attention in another direction, said:
"You have probably forgotten your letter by now. But I have kept it. I
understand your mood at the time, and, I must own, I respect that letter.
'Damnable cold blood,' 'Asiatic,' 'coarse laugh'—that was charming and
characteristic," he went on with an ironical smile. "And the fundamental
thought is perhaps near the truth, though one might dispute the question
endlessly. That is," he hesitated, "not dispute the thought itself, but your

attitude to the question—your temperament, so to say. Yes, my life is
abnormal, corrupted, of no use to any one, and what prevents me from
beginning a new life is cowardice—there you are quite right. But that you
take it so much to heart, are troubled, and reduced to despair by it—that's
irrational; there you are quite wrong."
"A living man cannot help being troubled and reduced to despair when
he sees that he himself is going to ruin and others are going to ruin round
him."
"Who doubts it! I am not advocating indifference; all I ask for is an
objective attitude to life. The more objective, the less danger of falling into
error. One must look into the root of things, and try to see in every
phenomenon a cause of all the other causes. We have grown feeble, slack—
degraded, in fact. Our generation is entirely composed of neurasthenics and
whimperers; we do nothing but talk of fatigue and exhaustion. But the fault
is neither yours nor mine; we are of too little consequence to affect the
destiny of a whole generation. We must suppose for that larger, more
general causes with a solid raison d'être from the biological point of view.
We are neurasthenics, flabby, renegades, but perhaps it's necessary and of
service for generations that will come after us. Not one hair falls from the
head without the will of the Heavenly Father—in other words, nothing
happens by chance in Nature and in human environment. Everything has its
cause and is inevitable. And if so, why should we worry and write
despairing letters?"
"That's all very well," I said, thinking a little. "I believe it will be easier
and clearer for the generations to come; our experience will be at their
service. But one wants to live apart from future generations and not only for
their sake. Life is only given us once, and one wants to live it boldly, with
full consciousness and beauty. One wants to play a striking, independent,
noble part; one wants to make history so that those generations may not
have the right to say of each of us that we were nonentities or worse.... I
believe what is going on about us is inevitable and not without a purpose,
but what have I to do with that inevitability? Why should my ego be lost?"
"Well, there's no help for it," sighed Orlov, getting up and, as it were,
giving me to understand that our conversation was over.
I took my hat.

"We've only been sitting here half an hour, and how many questions we
have settled, when you come to think of it!" said Orlov, seeing me into the
hall. "So I will see to that matter.... I will see Pekarsky to-day.... Don't be
uneasy."
He stood waiting while I put on my coat, and was obviously relieved at
the feeling that I was going away.
"Georgy Ivanitch, give me back my letter," I said.
"Certainly."
He went to his study, and a minute later returned with the letter. I
thanked him and went away.
The next day I got a letter from him. He congratulated me on the
satisfactory settlement of the question. Pekarsky knew a lady, he wrote,
who kept a school, something like a kindergarten, where she took quite little
children. The lady could be entirely depended upon, but before concluding
anything with her it would be as well to discuss the matter with Krasnovsky
—it was a matter of form. He advised me to see Pekarsky at once and to
take the birth certificate with me, if I had it. "Rest assured of the sincere
respect and devotion of your humble servant...."
I read this letter, and Sonya sat on the table and gazed at me attentively
without blinking, as though she knew her fate was being decided.

THE HUSBAND
IN the course of the manoeuvres the N—— cavalry regiment halted for a
night at the district town of K——. Such an event as the visit of officers
always has the most exciting and inspiring effect on the inhabitants of
provincial towns. The shopkeepers dream of getting rid of the rusty
sausages and "best brand" sardines that have been lying for ten years on
their shelves; the inns and restaurants keep open all night; the Military
Commandant, his secretary, and the local garrison put on their best
uniforms; the police flit to and fro like mad, while the effect on the ladies is
beyond all description.
The ladies of K——, hearing the regiment approaching, forsook their
pans of boiling jam and ran into the street. Forgetting their morning
deshabille and general untidiness, they rushed breathless with excitement to
meet the regiment, and listened greedily to the band playing the march.
Looking at their pale, ecstatic faces, one might have thought those strains
came from some heavenly choir rather than from a military brass band.
"The regiment!" they cried joyfully. "The regiment is coming!"
What could this unknown regiment that came by chance to-day and
would depart at dawn to-morrow mean to them?
Afterwards, when the officers were standing in the middle of the square,
and, with their hands behind them, discussing the question of billets, all the
ladies were gathered together at the examining magistrate's and vying with
one another in their criticisms of the regiment. They already knew,
goodness knows how, that the colonel was married, but not living with his
wife; that the senior officer's wife had a baby born dead every year; that the
adjutant was hopelessly in love with some countess, and had even once
attempted suicide. They knew everything. When a pock-marked soldier in a
red shirt darted past the windows, they knew for certain that it was
Lieutenant Rymzov's orderly running about the town, trying to get some
English bitter ale on tick for his master. They had only caught a passing
glimpse of the officers' backs, but had already decided that there was not
one handsome or interesting man among them.... Having talked to their
hearts' content, they sent for the Military Commandant and the committee

of the club, and instructed them at all costs to make arrangements for a
dance.
Their wishes were carried out. At nine o'clock in the evening the military
band was playing in the street before the club, while in the club itself the
officers were dancing with the ladies of K——. The ladies felt as though
they were on wings. Intoxicated by the dancing, the music, and the clank of
spurs, they threw themselves heart and soul into making the acquaintance of
their new partners, and quite forgot their old civilian friends. Their fathers
and husbands, forced temporarily into the background, crowded round the
meagre refreshment table in the entrance hall. All these government
cashiers, secretaries, clerks, and superintendents—stale, sickly-looking,
clumsy figures—were perfectly well aware of their inferiority. They did not
even enter the ball-room, but contented themselves with watching their
wives and daughters in the distance dancing with the accomplished and
graceful officers.
Among the husbands was Shalikov, the tax-collector—a narrow, spiteful
soul, given to drink, with a big, closely cropped head, and thick, protruding
lips. He had had a university education; there had been a time when he used
to read progressive literature and sing students' songs, but now, as he said of
himself, he was a tax-collector and nothing more.
He stood leaning against the doorpost, his eyes fixed on his wife, Anna
Pavlovna, a little brunette of thirty, with a long nose and a pointed chin.
Tightly laced, with her face carefully powdered, she danced without
pausing for breath—danced till she was ready to drop exhausted. But
though she was exhausted in body, her spirit was inexhaustible.... One could
see as she danced that her thoughts were with the past, that faraway past
when she used to dance at the "College for Young Ladies," dreaming of a
life of luxury and gaiety, and never doubting that her husband was to be a
prince or, at the worst, a baron.
The tax-collector watched, scowling with spite....
It was not jealousy he was feeling. He was ill-humoured—first, because
the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a
game of cards; secondly, because he could not endure the sound of wind
instruments; and, thirdly, because he fancied the officers treated the
civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully. But what above

everything revolted him and moved him to indignation was the expression
of happiness on his wife's face.
"It makes me sick to look at her!" he muttered. "Going on for forty, and
nothing to boast of at any time, and she must powder her face and lace
herself up! And frizzing her hair! Flirting and making faces, and fancying
she's doing the thing in style! Ugh! you're a pretty figure, upon my soul!"
Anna Pavlovna was so lost in the dance that she did not once glance at
her husband.
"Of course not! Where do we poor country bumpkins come in!" sneered
the tax-collector.
"We are at a discount now.... We're clumsy seals, unpolished provincial
bears, and she's the queen of the ball! She has kept enough of her looks to
please even officers ... They'd not object to making love to her, I dare say!"
During the mazurka the tax-collector's face twitched with spite. A black-
haired officer with prominent eyes and Tartar cheekbones danced the
mazurka with Anna Pavlovna. Assuming a stern expression, he worked his
legs with gravity and feeling, and so crooked his knees that he looked like a
jack-a-dandy pulled by strings, while Anna Pavlovna, pale and thrilled,
bending her figure languidly and turning her eyes up, tried to look as
though she scarcely touched the floor, and evidently felt herself that she was
not on earth, not at the local club, but somewhere far, far away—in the
clouds. Not only her face but her whole figure was expressive of
beatitude.... The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to
jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten
herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her
excitement....
"You wait; I'll teach you to smile so blissfully," he muttered. "You are
not a boarding-school miss, you are not a girl. An old fright ought to realise
she is a fright!"
Petty feelings of envy, vexation, wounded vanity, of that small,
provincial misanthropy engendered in petty officials by vodka and a
sedentary life, swarmed in his heart like mice. Waiting for the end of the
mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife. Anna Pavlovna
was sitting with her partner, and, flirting her fan and coquettishly dropping
her eyelids, was describing how she used to dance in Petersburg (her lips

were pursed up like a rosebud, and she pronounced "at home in
Pütürsburg").
"Anyuta, let us go home," croaked the tax-collector.
Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as
though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over:
she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly-looking, ill-humoured, ordinary
husband.
"Let us go home," repeated the tax-collector.
"Why? It's quite early!"
"I beg you to come home!" said the tax-collector deliberately, with a
spiteful expression.
"Why? Has anything happened?" Anna Pavlovna asked in a flutter.
"Nothing has happened, but I wish you to go home at once.... I wish it;
that's enough, and without further talk, please."
Anna Pavlovna was not afraid of her husband, but she felt ashamed on
account of her partner, who was looking at her husband with surprise and
amusement. She got up and moved a little apart with her husband.
"What notion is this?" she began. "Why go home? Why, it's not eleven
o'clock."
"I wish it, and that's enough. Come along, and that's all about it."
"Don't be silly! Go home alone if you want to."
"All right; then I shall make a scene."
The tax-collector saw the look of beatitude gradually vanish from his
wife's face, saw how ashamed and miserable she was—and he felt a little
happier.
"Why do you want me at once?" asked his wife.
"I don't want you, but I wish you to be at home. I wish it, that's all."
At first Anna Pavlovna refused to hear of it, then she began entreating
her husband to let her stay just another half-hour; then, without knowing
why, she began to apologise, to protest—and all in a whisper, with a smile,
that the spectators might not suspect that she was having a tiff with her
husband. She began assuring him she would not stay long, only another ten
minutes, only five minutes; but the tax-collector stuck obstinately to his
point.

"Stay if you like," he said, "but I'll make a scene if you do."
And as she talked to her husband Anna Pavlovna looked thinner, older,
plainer. Pale, biting her lips, and almost crying, she went out to the entry
and began putting on her things.
"You are not going?" asked the ladies in surprise. "Anna Pavlovna, you
are not going, dear?"
"Her head aches," said the tax-collector for his wife.
Coming out of the club, the husband and wife walked all the way home
in silence. The tax-collector walked behind his wife, and watching her
downcast, sorrowful, humiliated little figure, he recalled the look of
beatitude which had so irritated him at the club, and the consciousness that
the beatitude was gone filled his soul with triumph. He was pleased and
satisfied, and at the same time he felt the lack of something; he would have
liked to go back to the club and make every one feel dreary and miserable,
so that all might know how stale and worthless life is when you walk along
the streets in the dark and hear the slush of the mud under your feet, and
when you know that you will wake up next morning with nothing to look
forward to but vodka and cards. Oh, how awful it is!
And Anna Pavlovna could scarcely walk.... She was still under the
influence of the dancing, the music, the talk, the lights, and the noise; she
asked herself as she walked along why God had thus afflicted her. She felt
miserable, insulted, and choking with hate as she listened to her husband's
heavy footsteps. She was silent, trying to think of the most offensive, biting,
and venomous word she could hurl at her husband, and at the same time she
was fully aware that no word could penetrate her tax-collector's hide. What
did he care for words? Her bitterest enemy could not have contrived for her
a more helpless position.
And meanwhile the band was playing and the darkness was full of the
most rousing, intoxicating dance-tunes.

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