The Russian Master and Other Stories

'Now, look here—L:lyevsky's ^mds are shaking and al that. He's in no state to pick up his pistol, even. To fight him would be like fighting a drunk or someone with typhus—sheer inhumanity. If they won't be reconciled, gentlemen, we'd better postpone the duel, hadn't we? This is crazy, I feel terrible about it.'

'Then speak to Von Koren.'

'I don't know the rules of duelling, it, and I don't want to

know them. He might think Uyevsky sent me over he has

the wind up. Oh, let him think what he likes, I'll see him anyway.'

Hesitantly and limping slightly as if from leg cramp, Sheshkovsky approached Von Koren, the very picture of indolence as he walked over, clearing his throat.

'A word with you, sir,' he began, studying the flowe.n on the zoolo- gist's shirt. 'This is confidential. I don't know the rules of duelling, blast it, and I don't want to know them. I'm not talking a second and al tlut, but as a ^^ and so on.'

'Yes? Well ?'

'When seconds propose reconciliation, they're not usually listened to because it's thought a formality. Just their conceit and so on. But you look at Ivan Layevsky, I most humbly beg you. He's not normal today, he's not himself, so to speak—he's in a pathetic state. He's had a terrible experience. I can't stand scandal,'—Sheshkovsky blushed and looked round—'but in view of this duel I fmd it necessary to tell you this. Last night he found his lady friend at Myuridov's place with, er, a certam person.'

'Ugh, sickening!' muttered the zoologist. He blenched, fro^ed and spat noisily.

His lower lip quivered. He moved away from Sheshkovsky, not wishing to hear more, and again spat noisily as if he had accidentally tasted something bitter. With loathing he now looked at Layevsky for the first time that morning. His nervousness and awkwardness had passed, and he tossed his head.

'But what arc we waiting for, gentlemen, that's the question?' he said in a loud voice. 'Why don't we get on with it?'

Sheshkovsky exchanged glances with the officers, and shrugged his shoulders.

'Gentlemen,' he shouted, not addressing anyone in particular. 'Gentlemen, we call on you to compose your differences.'

'Let's hurry up and get the formalities over,' said Von Koren. 'Reconciliation has already been discussed. Now, what's the next procedure? Quickly, gentlemen, we've no time to waste.'

'Nevertheless, we still insist you make it up,' said Sheshkovsky in the guilty tone of one obliged to meddle in others' business.

'Gentlemen,' he continued, blushing and putting his hand against his heart, 'we fail to see any causal connection between insult and duel. Affronts, such as we sometimes offer one another through human frailty—they have nothing to do with duelling. You've been to univer- sity, you're educated men, and you yourselves naturally see nothing in a duel but outmoded empty ritual, and all that. Such must be our view, or we shouldn't have come here, for we can't permit people to shoot each other in our presence, and so on.'

Sheshkovsky mopped the swcat off his face. 'So compose your differences, sirs,' he went on. 'Shake hands, and le{s go home for a friendly drink—honestly, gcntlemen.'

Von Koren said nothing. Seeing people looking at him, Layevsky spoke.

'I have nothing against Nicholas Von Koren,' he said. 'If he finds me to blame, I'm ready to apologize.'

Von Koren was offended.

'Obviously, gentlemen,' said he, 'it suits you to have Mr. Layevsky ride home as a paragon ofknightly chivalry, but I can't give you and him that satisfaction. Nor was there any need to get up early and drive six miles out of town just to drink and be friends, have a bite to eat and explain to me about duels being outmoded ritual. Duels are duels. And there's no need to make them more of a silly farce than they already are. I wish to fight.'

Silence followed. Boyko took the two pistols out of the case. One was given to Von Koren and the other to Layevsky, but then a hitch occurred, affording zoologist and seconds some passing amusement. It transpired that none of those present had ever attended a duel in his life, and no one knew exactly how they should stand, or what the seconds should say and do. Then Boyko remembered, and began to explain with a smile.

'Any of you remember Lermontov's description?' Von Koren asked with a laugh. 'Turgenev's Bazarov also exchanged shots with someone or other '

'Why go into all that?' Ustimovich asked impatiently, halting in his tracks. 'Measure off your distance, that's all.'

And he took three steps, as if to show how measuring is done. Boyko counted out the paces, while his comrade unsheathed his sabre and scratched the ground at each end to mark the barrier.

The adversaries took their places amid general silence.

'Those moles!' remembered the deacon where he sat in the bushcs.

Sheshkovsky made some remark, and Boyko gave some further explanation, but Layevsky did not hear. More probably he heard, but did not understand. When the time came, he cocked the cold, heavy pistol and raised it barrel upwards. He had forgotten to unbutton his overcoat, and felt tightly constricted about shoulder and armpit, while he raised his arm as awkwardly as ifhis sleeve was made of metal. He remembered how he had hated that swarthy forehead and curly hair on the previous day, and realized that even then, at the climax of his hatred and rage, he could never have shot a man. Afraid ofhis bullet somehow hitting Von Koren by accident, he kept raising the pistol higher and higher, feeling that this display of exccssive magnanimity was tactless—and anything but magnanimous—yet physically and morally incapable of acting othe^rise. Looking at the pale, sneering,

smiling face of Von Koren—obviousIy certain from the sUrt that his adverary would fire into the air—Layevsky thought tlut it wouId all be over any moment now, thank God, and that he only had to squeeze the trigger hard.

He felt a heavy jolt against his shoulder, the shot rang out, and the echo from the mountaimreplied with a double thud.

Von Koren cocked his pistol and looked towards Ustimovich—still pacing up and do*wn with his hands bchind his back and ignoring the proceedings.

'Doctor,' s;tid the zoologist, 'would you mind not walking up and down like that, you're putting me off.'

The doctor stood still, and Von Koren began to take aim at Layevsky.

'It's all over now,' Uyevsky thought.

The pistol barrel levelled straight at Layevsky's face, Von Koren's posture, his whole figure so expressive of hatred and contempt, this decent man about to commit daylight murder in front of other decent men, the hush, the strange force which made Layevsky hold his ground and stopped him running away—how mysterious, incomprehensible and terrible it all was! Von Koren seemed to take so long aiming— longer than an entire night, Layevsky felt. He glanced imploringly at the seconds. They did not move, and were pale.

'Oh, hurry up :and shoot,' thought Layevsky, sensing that his white, trembling, pathetic face must make Von Koren hate him even more.

Tll kill him now,' thought Von Koren, aiming at the forehead, and already fingering the trigger. 'Yes, of course I will.' 'He'II kill him!'

The despairing cry was suddenly heud somewhere quite near.

And then the shot rang out.

Seeing Uyevsky sund his ground, still upright, everyone looked towards the cry—and uw the deacon. Pale, his wet hair plastered over brow and cheeks, thoroughly soaked and muddy, he stood in the maize on the far bank, smiling strangely and waving his wet hat. Sheshkovsky laughed withjoy, burst into tears and withdrew to one side.

XX

A little later Von Koren and the deacon met near the bridge. The deacon wa.s upset, breathing heavily and avoiding people's eyes. He was ashamed of his panic md his wet, muddy clothes.

'I thought you meant to kill him,' he muttered. 'How contrary to human nature! How very unnatural!'

'But where did you spring from?' the zoologist said.

'Don't ask mc!' The deacon made a gesture of disgust. 'The foul fiend tempted me—lured me on and on. So on and on I went, and nearly died offright in the maizc. But now, thank God, thank God—. I'm very pleased with you,' muttercd the deacon. 'And old Grand- father Tarantula will bc plcascd too. What a lark, I must say! Only don't tell anyone I was hcre, I beg you most urgently, or else I may catch it in thc neck from the authorities. They'll say a deacon acted as second.'

'Gentlemen,' said Von Koren. 'The deacon asks you not to tell anyone you saw him hcre. It could lead to unpleasantness.'

'How contrary to human nature,' sighed the deacon. 'Be generous, forgive mc—but looking at your face I thought you definitely meant to kill him.'

'I did fcel strongly tempted to do thc swine in,' said Von Koren. 'But your shout put me off, and I missed. This whole procedure is rcpulsive if you're not used to it, I must s:^y. It's tired me out, Deacon, I feel terribly exhaustcd. Let's drive home.'

'No, let mc walk. I must dry out. I'm wet through and frozen.'

'All right, do as you like,' said the weary zoologist in a tired voice, climbing into his carriage and closing his cycs. 'Suit yourself.'

While they werc coming and going near the carriages and taking thcir seats, Kcrbalay stood by the road clutching his stomach with both hands, bowing low and showing his tecth. He thought the gentlemen had comc out to enjoy thc vicw and have tea—why they should be getting into their carriagcs, he could not think.

The convoy moved off amid general silcnce, leaving only the dcacon near thc inn.

'Me go inn. Me drink tca,' he told Kcrbalay. 'Me want cat.'

Kerbalay spoke good Russian, but the deacon thought the Tatat would understand him more easily if hc addrcssed him in pidgin.

'You makc omelctte, you bring cheesc.'

'Come, comc, pricst,' said Kcrbalay, bowing. 'I give you cverything. Is checsc, is wine. Eat all you want.'

'What's the Tatar word for God?' asked the dcacon, cntcring thc im.

'Your God and my God arc same,' said Kerbalay, not undcrstanding. 'God is same for all, only peoples is different. Is Russians, is Turks, is English, is many peoples, but God is one.'

'Very well, then—if al people3 worship one God, why do you Moslerru look on Christiaru ^ your ete^l enemies?'

'Why you angry?' uked Kerbahy, seizing his belly in both ^mru. 'You are pricst—1 am Moslem. You you hungry—1 give you Only rich men make diffcrence which God is his and which mine. For ^^r man is no diffcrencc. Comc :md e4t plc4SC.'

Whilc this thcological di^^uon procccdcd in thc inn, Laycvsk.y wa on his way home, rcmcmbering thc ccric serultion of driving Jong at iwn when road, cliflfs and mounuiru wcrc wct and dark., and thc futurc lud loomcd ahcad unknown and tcrrifying as a bottomless pit. But now nindrops hung on gra!S :md stones, glittering diamond- likc in thc sun, naturc smilcd luppily and that tcrrifying future semcd a thing of the p^t. Hc gl:mccd at Sh^^ovsky's grim, tcar-s^rncd face, then looked ahcad at thc two arriages convcying Von Koren, his seconds and thc doctor, and hc fclt as if they wcrc al on thcir way homc from a ccmctcry whcrc thcy lud just buried somc abys^J borc who lud madc everyonc's lifc a misery.

'It's all ovcr,' hc thought, with rcfcrcncc ro his p^t, carcfuly stroking his ncck with his fmgcrs.

A small swelling about as long and as wide ^ his littlc fingcr lud comc up on thc right of his ncck nur thc collar, and it hurt ^ if somc- onc had passed a hot iron ovcr it. It a we-41 madc by thc buLet.

Oncc arrivcd home, hc found thc long, strange, swcct stretching out in front of him, vague as oblivion. As if rele4sed from prison or hospiul, hc g^d at objccts long familiar, amazcd that ubles, win^mdows, chairs, light :md sea should cvokc this vivid, childlikc joy to which he lud all too long becn a strangcr. Palc and wan, N adezh^ did not undcrstand his tcndcr voicc, his strangc walk. She hastcncd to tcll him cverything tlut lud luppencd to her.

Hc must be unablc to hcar hcr properly or makc hcr out, shc fclt— for ifhc knew all about it, hc would curse hcr, kill hcr. But hc listened, Jtrokcd hcr facc and hair, lookcd into her cyes.

'I havc no onc but you,' hc uid.

Thcn they ut for a long timc in the gardcn, clinging to each othcr in alencc. Or they mused aloud about thcir happy futurc, speaking in short, brokcn sentences, and hc fclt as if hc had ncvcr spokcn at such lcngth or so cloqucntly beforc.

XXI

Over three months had passed.

The day ofVon Koren's scheduled departure broke. A cold, drench- ing rain set in at dawn, a north-easterly gale blew up, and the sea roughened. The ste.amer could hardly get into the roadstead in such weather, it was said. It should have arrived before ten in the morning according to the timetable, but going on to the beach at rridday and in the afternoon, Vori Koren saw nothing through his binoculars except grey waves and rain veiling the horizon.

By the end of the day it had stopped raining and the wind had dropped considerably. Now reconciled to the impossibility of leaving that day, Von Koren had settled do^ to a game of chess with Samoy- lenko, but after nightfall the orderly announced that lights had appeared out at sea, and a rocket had been seen.

Von Koren made haste. Throwing a knapsack over one shoulder, he kissed Samoylenko and the deacon, made a quite unnecessary tour of the house, said good-bye to orderly and cook—and went out of doors, feeling as ifhe had left something behind at the doctor's or in his own quarters. He walked down the street beside Samoylenko, with the deacon behind him carrying a chest, and the orderly bringing up the rear with two suitcases. Only Samoylenko and the deacon could discern the dim lights out at sea, the others stared unseeing into black- ness. The steamer had anchored far from shore.

'Hurry up,' Von Koren urged. 'I'm afraid of missing it.'

As he passed the cottage—it had only three windows—into which Layevsky had moved soon after the duel, Von Koren could not resist glancing through the window. Layevsky sat hunched over a table with his back to the window, writing.

'Wonderful how he's pulled himself together,' said the zoologist quietly.

'Well may you wonder,' Samoylenko sighed. 'He stays like that from dawn to dusk, just sits there working. He wants to pay off his debts. And he lives in direst poverty, old boy.'

Half a minute passed in silence. Zoologist, doctor and deacon all stood at the window, watching Layevsky.

'So the poor chap never got away after all,' Samoylenko said. 'Remember the trouble he went to?'

'Yes, he really has pulled himself together,' Von Koren repeated. 'His marriage, this day-long grind to earn his living, that new look on his face, his walk, evcn—it's all so out of the ordinary, I don't know what name to give it.'

The zoologist took Samoylenko by the sleeve and continued in an unsteady voice. 'Do tell him and his wife that I left here admiring him and wishing him all the best—and ask him not to think too badly of me if possible. He knows me. He knows I might have been his best friend could I have foreseen this change.'

'Then go in and say good-bye yourself.'

'No, it would be too awkward.'

'Why? God knows, you'll never see him again, perhaps.'

The zoologist thought for a moment, 'That's true.'

Samoylenko tapped a fmger on the window, and Layevsky looked round with a start.

'Nicholas Von Koren wants to bid you good-bye, Ivan,' said Samoy- lenko. 'He's just leaving.'

Layevsky stood up from the table, and went into the lobby to open the door. Samoylenko, Von Koren and the deacon entered the house.

'I only looked in for a moment,' began the zoologist, taking off his galoshes in the lobby and already regretting his sentimentality in calling here uninvited.

'I feel as ifl'm butting in,' he thought. 'A stupid thing to do.'

'Excuse me disturbing you,' he said, follo^mg Layevsky into his room. 'But I'm just leaving and I felt I had to see you. God knows if we'll ever meet again.'

'Delighted. Do come in,' said Layevsky, placing chaifs for his guests awkwardly as if trying to bar their way. He paused in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.

'I wish I'd left the others in the street,' Von Koren thought.

'Don't think too badly of me, Layevsky,' he said in a steady voice. 'One can't forget the past, of course, for it was too lamentable, and I didn't come in here to apologize or tell you I wasn't to blame. I acted sincerely, nor have I changed my views in the meantime. Admittedly, I was wrong about you, as I'm now only too delighted to see. But even the most sure-footed of us can come an occasional cropper. And ifyou don't err in essentials, then you'll trip up over the details—it's only human nature. None of us knows the real truth.'

'Yes indeed, no one knows the truth,' said Layevsky.

'Well, good-bye. God speed and good luck.'

Von Korcn held out his hand to Layevsky, who pressed it and bowed.

'No hard feelings, then.' said Von Koren. 'My reg.nrds to your wife, and tell her how sorry I was not to be able to say good- bye.'

'But she's at home.'

Layevsky went to the door and spoke into the next room.

'Nadezhda dear, Nicholas Von Koren wants to say good-bye.'

Nadczhda came in and stood by the door, timidly glancing at the guests. Her expression was guilty and fearful, and she held her arms like a schoolgirl under reprimand.

'I'mjust leaving, Mrs. Layevsky,' said Von Koren. 'And I've come to say good-bye.'

She stretched out her hand timidly, and Layevsky bowed.

'How pathetic they both are, though,' Von Koren thought. 'This life is quite a struggle for them.'

'I shall be in Moscow and St. Petersburg,' he said. 'Is there anything I could send you ?'

'Oh/ said Nadezhda, exchanging a worried glance with her husband. 'I don't think so.'

'No, it's all right,' Layevsky said, rubbing his hands. 'Give them our regards.'

Von Koren did not know what else he could or should say, though when entering the house he had supposed himself about to utter a great many edifying, cheering and sigiuficant statements. He shook hands with Layevsky and his wife in silence, and left, feeling do^- cast.

'What wonderful people,' said the deacon in a low voice, following behind. 'Dear God, what people. Verily the Lord's right hand hath planted this vine. Lord, Lord, one hath conquered thousands and another tens of thousands. Von Koren,' he went on solemnly, 'know that you have this day conquered man's greatest enemy—pride.'

'Oh, come offit, Deacon. What sort of conquerors are we, Layevsky and I?.Conquerors look as if they were on top of the world, but he's pathetic, timid, do^-trodden. He bobs up and down like one of those Chinese mandarin-dolls, and I—I feel sad.'

Steps were heard behind them—it was Layevsky running after them to see them off. At the quayside the orderly was standing with the two suitcases, and there were four ferrymen a little way off.

'I say, it isn't half blowing!' said Samoylenko. 'There must be a tidy storm out there at sea. Phew! What a time to leave, Nicholas!'

'Tm not afraid ofbeing sea-sick.' 'That's not what I mean. I only hope these idiots don't capsize you. You should have taken the agent's dinghy. Where's the agent's dinghy?' he shouted to the ferrymen.

'It's already left, General.'

'And the customs boat?'

'She's gone too.'

'Then why didn't you tell me?' Samoylenko asked angrily. 'Imbe- ciles!'

'Don't let it upset you, anyway,' Von Koren said. 'Good-bye then, God preserve you.'

Samoylenko embraced Von Koren and made the sign of the cross over him three times.

'Now don't forget us, Nicholas. Be sure to write. We'll expect you next spring. '

'Good-bye, Deacon,' said Von Koren, shaking hands with the deacon. 'Thanks for your company and all the good talk. Think about the expedition.'

'Oh Lord yes—to the ends of the earth if you like,' laughed the deacon. 'I've nothing against it.'

Recognizing Layevsky in the darkness, Von Koren silently held out his hand. The ferrymen were already standing below, holding the boat as it made to crash into the breakwater, though protected from the real swell by the quay. Von Koren went down the ladder, jumped aboard and took the helm.

'Don't forget to write,' Samoylenko shouted after him. 'And look after yourself.'

'No one knows the real truth,' thought Layevsky, pulling up his overcoat collar and thrusting his hands into his sleeves.

Briskly rounding the quay, the boat emerged in the open sea. It van- ished in the waves and then straightway swooped up from a deep pit to a high crest, so that men, and even oars, could be distinguished. For every six yards which the boat made, she was thrown back about four.

'Mind you write,' shouted Samoylenko. 'But what the hell possessed you to leave in such weather?'

'Yes, no one knows the real truth,' thought Layevsky, looking sadly at the rough, dark sea.

'The boat is thrownwn back,' he thought. 'She makes two paces for- ward and one back. But the rowers a-re persistent, they ply their oars untiringly, they aren't afraid of the high waves. The boat kecps advancing. Now it's out ofsight, but in halfan hour's time the rowers will see the steamer lights cle.arly, and within an hour they'll be along- side her ladder. Such is life.

'When seeking truth, people take two steps forward to one step back. Sufferings, mistakes and world-weariness throw them back, but passion for truth and stubborn will-pO\ver drive them onwards, ever onwards. And—who knows ?—perhaps they will reach real truth in the end.'

'Good-bye,' shouted Samoylenko.

'Out of sight and out of hearing,' said the deacon. 'Happy journey!'

It began to drizzle.

A HARD CASE

At the edge of Mironositskoye village, in Prokofy's—the village elder's—bam, two men were bivouacking after a long day's hunting: Ivan Ivanovich, a veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, a grammar-school teacher.

The vet had a rather odd and quite unsuitable double-barrelled surname (Chimsha-Gimalaysky), but answered to plain Ivan Ivanovich in the neighbourhood. He lived at a suburban stud farm and had made this hunting trip just for the sake of an outing—whereas Burkin, the schoolmaster, was the regular summer guest of a local county family, being very much at home in these parts.

They were still awake. Ivan Ivanovich—a tall, thin old man with a long moustache—sat outside the doorway smoking his pipe in the moonlight, while Burkin lay inside on the hay, invisible in the gloom.

They talked about this and that, incidentally remarking that the elder's wife—a healthy, intelligent woman called Mavra—had never been outside her native village in her life, had never seen a town or railway, had spent the last ten years sitting over her stove, and would venture out of doors only at night.

'What's so odd about that?' asked Burkin.

These solitary types (Burkin continued), these snails, these hermit crabs who seek refuge inside their o^ .shells . .. there are plenty of them about. Perhaps such types represent throw-backs to an epoch when man's ancestors hadn't yet become social animals, but lived alone in their lairs. Or perhaps it's just a quirk ofhuman nature. Who knows? I'm ftot a scientist myself, that sort of thing isn't my line. All I say is, the Mavras aren't all that rare. Well, you take an instance close at hand: someone who died in to^wn a couple of months ago^^ne Belikov, classics master at my o^ school. You've heard of him of course. His great feat was to sport galoshes and an umbrella even on the finest days, and he always wore a warm, padded greatcoat. He kept his umbrella in a holder, his watch in a grey chamois-leather bag. When he took out a penknife to sharpen a pencil, that knife was also in a little holder. His face seemed to be encapsulated, too, because he kept it hidden behind an upturned collar. He wore dark glasses and a pullover, he kept cotton wool in his ears, and when he took a cab he always had the top put up. The man evinced, in short, a persistent obsessive drive to envelop himself in a membrane, creating a sort of carapace to isolate him and protect him from outside influences. The real world irritated him, scared him, kept him permanently on edge. It was to justify this nervousness, perhaps—this abhorrence of the actual—that he always praised things past, things which have never existed. The ancient languages which he taught were, in effect, the same old galoshes and umbrella in another form: his refuge from real life.

'The Greek language . . . oh, how melodious, how beautiful it is!' he would say with a sugary cxpression. And, as if to prove his words, he would screw up his eyes, hold up a finger and pronounce the word anthropos.

His thoughts also Belikov tried to confme within a framework. Nothing made sense to him except official regulations and newspaper articles condenming something or other. A school rule forbidding pupils to appear in the streets after nine in the evening, an article censuring sexual intercourse . . . he foWld clarity and precision in such matters. The thing was banned. That was that. In permissions and concessions, though, he always sensed a lurking sinister quality: some- thing incomplete and vague. When a to^ drama club was licensed— or a reading room, or a tea-shop—he would shake his head.

'That's all very well ofcourse and so on,' he would say. 'But what of the repercussions?'

All offences, all deviations, all infringements of the rules made him despondent^^ne might have wondered, though, what business they were ofhis. Ifa colleague was late for church, ifrumour reached him of some schoolboy prank, if a schoolmistress was seen out late at night with an officer, he would take it very much to heart and keep worrying about those repercusaons. At staff meetings he really depressed us with his misgivings, his pemicketiness, his utterly hideboWld observations on how badly the boys and girls behaved in school, on their rowdiness in class. ('Dear, oh dear, what if the authorities get wind ofit? Oh dear, what of the repercussions? And what a good idea it would be to expel Petrov of the Second Form and Yegorov of the Fourth.')

Well, what with his moa.ning and groaning, what with the dark glasses on his pale and—you know—ferrety little face, he so got us downwn that we yielded, we gave Petrov and Yegorov bad conduct marks, we put them in detention, and in the end we expelled them both.

He had the odd habit ofvisiting our lodgings. He would call on some teacher, sit down, say nothing, and seem to be on the look-out for something. He would sit there for an hour or two without a word, and then he would go. Maintaining good relations with his col- leagues, he called it. This calling and sitting obviously irked him, and he only did it because he felt it his duty to his colleagues. We teachers were afraid of him. So was the headmaster, even. Fantastic, isn't it? Our teachers were all thoroughly decent, right-thinking folk brought up on their Turgenev and their Shchedrin—and yet this little galoshes- and-umbrella man kept the entire school under his thumb for fifteen whole years! And not the school only. The whole town! Our ladies gave up their Saturday amateur theatricals lest he should hear of them. The clergy feared to eat meat and play cards in his presence. Thanks to the Belikovs of this world our townsfolk have begun to fear every- thing during the last ten or fifteen years. They fear to speak aloud, send letters, meet people, read books. They fear to help the poor, they fear to teach anyone to read.

Wishing to say something, Ivan Ivanovich coughed, then lit his pipe and looked at the moon.

'Yes, they're decent, right-thinking folk,' said he, enunciating care- fully. 'They've read their Shchedrin, their Turgenev, their Henry Buckles and all that. But they caved in, you see, they did nothing about it—my point, precisely.'

Belikov and I lived in the same house (Burkin went on). We were on the same floor, his door opposite mine. We often met, and I knew his. domestic circunstances. It was just the same at home. Dressing- gown, nightcap, shutters, bolts, a whole gamut of sundry bans and restrictions, and all this what-about-the-repercussions stuff: To diet was bad for the health—but you couldn't eat what you liked, or people might say that Belikov didn't keep his fasts. So he ate fresh-water fish fried in butter: food which was neither one thing nor the other. He kept no female servants in case people got the wrong ideas, but he had a cook: one Afanasy, a tipsy, half-witted old boy of about sixty, who had been an army batman in his time and could put together a meal of sorts. This Afanasy usually stood by the door with his arms folded.

'There's been a lot of it about lately,' he was for ever muttering with an oracular sigh.

Beli.kov's bedroom was like a little box, and he slept in a four-poster. When he went to bed he would pull a blanket over his head. It was hot and stuffy, the wind rattled the closed door and whined in the chimney. Sighs drifted in from the kitchen, sighs of evil portent.

He was scared, too, under that blanket. He was afraid ofthe repercus- sions, afraid of Afanasy cutting his throat, afraid of burglars. Then he would have nightmares all night, and when we went to school to- gether in the morning he would be dispirited and pale. The crowded school for which he was bound . .. it terrifted him, revolted his whole being, that was obvious. And walking by my side was an ordeal for so solitary a type.

'Our children are too noisy in class,' he would say, as if seeking a reason for his low spirits. 'It's quite disgraceful.'

Yet this teacher of Greek—this hard case—nearly got married, believe it or not.

Ivan Ivanovich glanced into the bam.

'You must be joking,' he said.

Yes, he nearly married, strange as it may seem (continued Burkin). A new history and geography master had been appointed: a Michael Kovalenko, from the Ukraine. He brought his sister Barbara with him. He was a tall, swarthy young man with huge hands. He had the kind of face that goes with a deep bass voice, and that voice really did seem to come boom boom booming at you out of a barrel.

Now, his sister was no longer young—she was about thirty—but she was also tall, well-built, black-browed, rosy-cheeked. She was a real knock-out, in fact: a jolly, hearty girl, for ever singing Ukrainian songs, for ever roaring with laughter. She was alway.s ready to laWlch into a great pea:l of mirth on the slightest pretext. It was on the head- master's name-day, I remember, that we first really met the Kovalenkos. There, amid those austere, overwrought, dim pedagogues, who make even party-going a matter of duty ... behold a new Venus rises from the foam! She walks with arms akimbo, she guffaws, she sings, she dances. She renders a spirited 'Where Southern Breezes Blow', then sings one song after another, and bewitches us al—all, even Belikov.

'The Ukrainian language,' says he with his honeyed smile, utting down by her side, 'resembles the ancient Greek in its tenderness and agrecable melodiousness.'

This flattered her, and she laWlched a harangue about how they had their own farm down Gadyach way and how their old mum lived on that farm. What pears they had, what melons, what pumpkins! Pumpkins, pubs, 'pubkins' . . . they have their own special words for these things down south, and out of their dear little red little tomatoes and their blue little egg-plants they would brew soup: 'frightfully scrumptious, actually!'

We listened and we listened . .. Wltil suddenly the same idea dawned on one! and all.

'They'd make a very good match,' the headmaster's wife told me quietly.

For some reason it now struck us all that friend Belikov wasn't married. We wondered why we had never noticed such a thing before, why we had utterly lost sight of so crucial a factor in his biography. What was his attitude to woman? His solution to this basic problem? So far we had taken no interest in the matter. Perhaps we couldn't even see him as capable oflove—this four-poster-bed man, this galoshes fiend!

'He's well over forty, and she's thirty,' the headmaster's wife elucidated. 'I think she'd have him.'

Boredom in the provinces . .. the things it leads to, the wrong- headedness, the nonsense! And why? Because pcople somehow just can't get anything right. Well, for instance, why tlns sudden urge to marry off friend Belikov, who was hardly anyone's idea of a husband? The headmaster's wife, the second master's wife, all the school ladies perk up, they even look prettier, as if they've suddenly glimpsed the purpose of existence. The head's wife takes a box in the theatre—and behold Barbara sitting in that box with some sort of fan, radiant and happy. By her side is Belikov: small, crumpled, looking as ifhe's been extracted from his house with a pair of pincers. When I give a party the ladies make a point of my inviting both Belikov and Barbara. Things, in short, begin to hum. Barbara, it transpires, doesn't mind getting married. She isn't all that happy living with her brother—they argue and quarrel for days on end by all accounts.

Now, take this for a scene. Kovalenko walks down the street: a tall, lanky brute in his embroidered shirt with a quiff ofhair tumbling from cap on to forehead. He has a clutch of books in one hand and a thick knobbly stick in the other. His sister follows, also carrying books.

'But you haven't read it, Michael!' shc loudly avers. 'I tell you—1 ĵwear—you haven't read a word of it!'

'Well, I say I have,' shouts Kovalenko, thumping his stick on the pavement.

'Goodness me, Michael! Why so angry? This is only a matter of principle, after all.'

'Well, I say I have read it,' Kovalenko shouts in an even louder voicc.

Whenever they had visitors they were at it hammer and tongs. It must have been a bore, that kind of life, and she wanted a place of her own. And then there was her age. You couldn't pick and choose any more, you were ready to iurry anyonc—even a teacher of Greek. And then most of our young ladies don't care who they marry so long as they get thcnselves a husband. Anyway, be that as it may, Barbara began to show Belikov marked partiality.

And Belikov? He used to call on Kovalenko, just as he would call on us. He would arrive, sit down, say nothing. And while he was saying nothing Barbara would be singing him 'Where Southern Breezes Blow', or looking at him pensively with her dark eyes. Or she would suddenly go off in a peal ofnoisy laughter.

In • love affairs, and not least in marriage, suggestion plays a large part. Everyone—his colleagues, their ladies—began assuring Belikov that he must marry, that there was nothing left for him in life except wedlock. We all congratulated him, we made various trite remarks with solemn faces: 'marriage is a serious step,' and the like. What's more, Barbara wasn't bad looking. Besides being attractive she was the daughter of a senior civil servant and owned a farm. Above all, she was the first woman who had ever been kind and affectionate to Belikov. His head was turned, and he decided that he really must marry.

'Now would have been the time to detach him from his galoshes and umbrella,' pronounced Ivan Ivanovich.

That proved impossible, believe it or not (said Burkin). He put Barbara's portrait on his desk, and he kept calling on me and talking: about Barbara, about family life, about ^rriage being a serious step. He often visited the Kovalenkos. But he didn't change his way of life one little bit. Far from it, actually—his resolve to marry had a rather debilitating effect on him. He grew thin and pale, he seemed to retreat further and further into his shell.

'Barbara attracts me,' he tells me with a weak, wry little smile. 'And I know that everyone must get married. But, er, all this has been rather sudden, you know. One must, er. give it some thought.'

'Why?' I ask. 'Just marry, that's all.'

'No. Marriage is a serious step. One must first weigh one's impending responsibilities and duties, just in case ofrepercussions. I'm so worried, I can't sleep a wink. I'm scared, too, frankly. She and her brother have a rather peculiar outlook—they do have an unconventional way of discussing things, you know. And they are a bit on the hearty side. You get married, but before you know where you are you fmd you've become the subject for gossip.'

So he didn't make her an offer, but kept putting it off: to the great grief of the headmaster's wife and all our ladies. He kept weighing his impending responsibilities and duties while walking out with Barbara almost every day—perhaps he thought that necessary for someone in his position—and coming along to talk to me about family life. He would have proposed in the end, very likely. And the result would have been one of those stupid, ^mecessary marriages of which we see thousands: the product of boredom, of having nothing else to do. But then a gigantic scandal suddenly erupted!

The point is, Barbara's brother Kovalenko had taken against Belikov at first sight—simply ĉouldn't stand him.

'It beats me how you put up with the blighter, it really does,' he told us, shrugging his shoulders. 'Horrible little creep! Honestly, gentlemen, how can you live here? Your air stifles a man, damn it. Call yourselves teachers, do you? Educators? You're just a lot oflittle hacks. It's no temple of learning, this isn't—it's more like a suburban police station, and it smells as sour as a sentry-box. Well, that's it, lads. I shall stay here a little longer, and then I'll go to my farm downwn south to catch crayfish and teach the local kids. I shall be off. while you stay on here with this miserable humbug, blast him.'

Or he'd laugh—now in a deep guffaw, now in a thin, piping tone: laugh wuil the tears came.

'Why does he sit around my place?' he would ask with a bewildered gesture. 'What does he want? He just sits and stares.'

He even gave Belikov the nickname 'Master Creepy Crawly'. Well, we naturally didn't tell him that his sister Barbara was ^^^ing of marrying Master Crawly. Once, when the headmaster's wife hinted that it would be worth fixing up his sister with some such generally Tespected worthy as Beli.kov, he frowned.

'Nothing to do with me,' he muttered. 'Let her ^^^ a rattl^^ke if she wants to. I mind my o^ b^rnes.'

Now hear what hap^^ed ne.xt. Some wag drew a cartoon of Belikov walking in his galosha, with the bottorru of h.U trousen rolled up, ^^^mg rut gr^t umbrelk and arm in arm with Barbara. It wa.s captioned THE A^^aoPOs. And it had just aught lil

expresion to ^^ection, se? The art:Ut must tave worked at it night after night the t^chers at the two gra^^r schools, the boys'

and the girls', a11 got their copy. So did the l^^rers at the theological college, so did our l^^ o^^^. Belikov got one too. 'fle c:1ricature had a most depresing efectt on him.

On the first ofMay, a Suntay. we had an outing. All ofus—teachers, pupils—had arranged to meet at school and then go for a walk to the woods. Well, we set off on ^^ trip, and there's Belikov looking quite gr^n and gloomier than a storm-cloud.

'What evil ^ttple there are,' he, his lips quivering.

I a^^lly feel sorry for ^m. T^m, as we're walking along, all of a sudden (believe it or not) Kovalenko sails past on his bicycle fol!owed by Barbara. also on a bicycle: flushed and pufed, but g^^-humoured and tappy.

'I say, we're going on ahead,' she shouts. 'What nurvellous w^ther —frightfully nurvellous, acnally.'

Both vanished from view, while friend Bdikov ^med from green to white and seemed paralysed. He stopped and looked at

'What, pray, is the meaning of this?' he asked. 'Or do my eya deceive me? Is it proper for gra^^^r-school teachen—for wo^m !—to ride bicycles?'

'What's improper about it?' said I. 'Let them cycle away to their h^rt's content.'

'^^at do you mean?' he shouted, amazed at my calmnes. 'You can't know what you're saying.'

But he was so shaken that he decided not to go on and t^rced back.

All next he was nervously rubbing his ^mds and twitching. He wasn't at all well, his face showed that. He abandoned lil cl^^ tro— and that for the fmt time in career. He ^^^d h.U lunch a.s weU . .And then, in the late afternoon, he donned wirm clothing in spite of the fine su^mer w^ther, and off he toddled to the KovaJ^ios'. Barbara was out, only the brother was at home.

'Pray be seated,' pronounced Kovalenko coldly. He frowned, looking sleepy—he'djust been taking anafter-lunch nap, and hewas in a very bad mood indeed.

Belikov sat for ten minutes' without speaking, and then began.

'I have come to you to relieve my mind. I am deeply grieved. Some humorist has drawn a picture ridiculing myself and a certain other individual dear to us both. I am in duty bound to assure you that I am in no way implicated, that I have given no occasion for such witticisms. I have, on the contrary, conducted myself throughout as a person of complete probity.'

Kovalenko sat there fuming and said nothing. Belikov paused.

'I also have something else to tell you,' he went on in a quiet, sad voice. 'I have been in the profession for some time, while you are only a begirmer, and I consider it my duty as your senior colleague to give you a You ride a bicycle: a pastime wholly improper in one

who instructs the young.'

'Why so?' asked Kovalenko in his deep voice.

'Need I say more, Kovalenko? Are my words not intelligible? If a teacher goes bicycling, then what are we to expect ofhis pupils? That they will walk on their heads, I presume! There is nothing in the school rules which says that you can bicycle. Which means you can't. I was appaled yesterday. When I saw your sister my eyes swam. A woman or a girl on a bicycle! An abomination!'

'What, precisely, do you require?'

'I require one thing only: to warn you, Kovalenko. You are young, you have your future before you. You should comport yourself very, very carefuUy indeed, but you don't toe the line at all, oh dear me no. You wear an embroidered shirt. You're always carrying books in the street. And now we have this bicycling! This bicycling, yours and your sister's, will come to the headmaster's ears, and then it will reach the higher authorities. Not very nice, now, is it?'

'Whether my sister and I do or do not ride bicycles is no one else's business,' said Kovalenko, ^^^g crimson. 'And if anyone meddles in my domestic and family affairs I'U bloody well see him in hell!'

Belikov blenched. He stood up.

'If you take this tone with me I ^^ot continue,' he said. 'And I must beg you never to use such expressions abput the authorities in my presence. You must treat authority with respect.'

'Did I say anything against the authorities?' asked Kovalenko, looking at him angrily. 'Kindly leave me in peace. I am an honest man, and I luve no wish to bandy words with an individual of your descrip- tion. I don't like rurb.'

Rdgeting nervously, Belikov quickly put his coat on, horror written on h.U face—no one lud ever been so rude to him in his life.

'You may say what you pl^^,' he remarked as he came out of the lobby on to the lmding. 'But I must warn you of Someone nuy luve overhcard w. Now, in case our conversation might be misin- terpreted, in ^^ of pouible repercus.sioru, I shall be obliged to inform the.headnuster of its substance, er, in general outline. That is my duty.'

'Inform, eh? urry on then, sneak away!'

Seizing him from behind by the collar, Kovalenko gave him a shove —and Belikov flew do^^tain, his galoshes drumming. They were high, steep stairs, but he slid down without mislup, he stood up, and he tou^^d his nose to see if his spectacles were broken. Now, just as he wa.s dithering do^ those stain, in came Barbara with two ladics. They st^^ at the bottom, watching—which, for Belikov, wa'S the last straw. I ^^^ he'd rather luve broken his neck or both legs than become a bughing-stock. Now the whole to^ would know, wouldn't it? The Head would hcar of it, md so would the highcr authorities. There would—alas—be rcpercusions. There would be another cartoon. And he would end up luving to resign.

Barbara recognizcd him when he was on his fect. Secing his ludicrous expreson, his rumpled coat, his galoshes, not understanding what it was about—but supposing him to havc fallen do^ by accidcnt—she couldn't hdp giving a gre2t guffaw.

'Ha, lu, ha !'

It rang through the entire house.

This reverberating peal of laughter was the cnd of everything for Belikov: of his courtship and also of his life on earth. His ears did not hear what Barbara was saying, his eyes saw nothing. On arriving homc he fint removed her portrait from his desk, after which he lay down ... ncvcr to rise again.

Three days later Afanasy came in to ask me if wc should send for a doctor as thcre was 'somcthing wrong' with the ^ster. I wcnt to see Belikov. He lay in his four-poster with a blankct over him, not spcaking. In ^wer to questions he would only"say yes or no, and that was all. While hc lay there Afanasy hovercd ncar by—gloomy, scowling, sighing decply, stinking of vodka.

Belikov died a month latcr. Wc all went to thc funeral: both high schools, that is, and the theological college. Now, as Ke lay in his coffin, his expression was gentle and agreeable—merry, even—as if he was glad to have been placed at last in that ultimate receptacle from which there would be no emerging. Yes, he had attained his ideal. During the funeral the weather was dull and rainy—in his honour, so to speak— and we all sported our galoshes and umbrellas. Barbara was there too, and she sobbed when they lowered the coffm into the grave. Ukrainian girls can only cry or laugh, I've noticed—they have no intermediate mood.

It's a great pleasure, frankly, is burying a Belikov. On our way back from the cemetery we wore modest, sober expressions. No one wanted to show how pleased he felt—it was a pleasure which we had known long, long ago as children when our elders had gone out and we ran about the garden for an hour or two enjoying absolute freedom. Freedom, oh freedom! Even a hint, even the faint hope ofits possibility . .. it makes one's spirits soar, doesn't it?

We came back from the cemetery in a good mood. But within a week life was back in its old rut. It was just as austere, wearisome and pointless as before: a life which was neither forbidden in the school rules, nor yet wholly sanctioned either. There was no improvement. We had buried Belikov, adinittedly. But what a lot of other men in capsules he had left behind him! And we shall see plenty more of them in the future.

'My point exactly,' said Ivan Ivanovich, and lit his pipe.

'We shall see plenty more of them,' repeated Burkin.

The schoolmaster came out of the bam. He was a short, fat, com- pletely bald man with a black beard almost down to his waist. Two dogs came out with him.

'What a moon!' said he, looking up.

It was midnight. On his right could be seen the whole village, and a long road stretching about three miles into the distance. Everything was plunged in deep, peaceful slumber. There was no movement, no sound—it was incredible, indeed, that nature could be so quiet. When you see a broad village street by moonlight—a street with its huts, ricks and sleeping willows—your heart is at peace, and takes refuge in this calm, in the shadows of the night, from its toils, trials and tribula- tions. It is gentle, sad, serene. The stars seem to look down with lo.ving kindness, there seems to be no evil in the world—all seems for the best. On the left, at the edge of the village, open country began. It could be seen stretchuig away as far as the horizon, and in the cntire breadth of these moonlit fields there was neither movement nor sound.

'My point exactly,' repeated Ivan Ivanovich. 'What about us living in a stuffy, crowded to^, writing our futile papers and playing our bridge? Isn't all that a kind ofcapsule? To spend our whole lives among loafers, mischievous litigants and stupid, idle women, talking and hearing various forms of nonsense . .. isn't that a capsule too? Now, if you like I'U tell you an extremely edifying story.'

'No, it's time to sleep,' said Burkin. 'Tell it tomorrow.'

They went into the bam and lay down on the hay. Each had covered himself up and started dozing, when suddenly the padding offootsteps was heard.

Someone was walking near the bam. The steps passed and stopped. Then, a ^mute later, you would hear the same padding sound.

The dogs whimpered.

'That's Mavra,' Burkin said.

The steps died away.

'People are such liars,' said Ivan Ivanovich, turning over. 'To see them, to hear them, to put up with their lies . . and be called a fool for your pains! The insults, the humiliations, that you suffer! Not daring to proclaim aloud that you are on the side of honest, free men! The lies you yourself tell, the smiles you give ! And all this to earn your daily bread and a roof over your head—all for the sake of some miser- able little job not worth a farthing! No—one can't go on living like this!'

'Now, that's another story,' said the teacher. 'Let's go to sleep.'

Ten ^mutes later Burkin was asleep. But Ivan Ivanovich kept tossing from side to side and sighing. Then he got up, went outside again, sat down by the door and lit his pipe.

GOOSEBERRIES

Rain clouds lud fillcd the whole sky since early morning. Itwas quiet weather—not hot and tediow as it is on those dull grey days when clouds hang over the countryside for hours on end while you wait for rain which never comes. Ivan Ivanovich the vet and Burkin the school- ^^ter were tired of walking, and the fields seemed to go on for ever. Far ah«d of them the windmilU of Mironositskoye village could just be ^rn. ^n their right was a chain of hills which vanished far beyond the villige, and which—as they both knew—rrurked a river bank. There were meadows, green willows and homesteads over there. And if you st^^ on one of those hills you could see another eqwlly vast expa^ of fields, a telegraph line and a train crawling caterpillar-like in the distance. In cleu weather you could even see the town. On ^^ calm when all ruture semed gentle and pensive, Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin were filled v.;th love of ^^ open landscape, and both thought how vast, how glorious a bnd it was.

'Tlut time we stayed in Elder Prokofy's barn . . . you were

going to tel me some story,' Burkin said.

'Ya—about my brother.'

Ivan Ivanovi^. gave a long sigh, and lit a pipe as a prelude to h.U rurrative, but just then the rain began. Five minutes later it was a^^ lutely pel^^ do^—looked as if it would never end. Ivan Ivanovich and Burk.in paused, wondering wlut to do. The doS'—wet, tails their legs-s—st^^ and gazed at them devotedly.

'We mwt find shelter,' »id Bur^^ 'Let's go to Alyo^^'s, it's qwte nur. '

'M right.'

They ^^^d off and rrude acros mown fields—now wal.king straight ahead, now ^^rng to the right—until they hit the road. Poplan ^n ap^^ed, an orchard and red-roofed b^ro. There ^^ a gleam of river, and then a view of a wide reach with its ^^ and white bathing-hut. ^^ wa! Soi^mo, Alyokhin's place.

The ^^ was working, and dro^ed the noise of rain. The weir quivered. Wet ho^a st^^ with bowed heads by some and men over their heads moved about. It was tamp, muddy, d^late—and clut reach of river lud a cold, ^Jig^mt look. Ivan

Ivanovich and Burkiu felt wet, unclean and uncoi^ortable all over. Their feet were heavy with mud. When they had passed the weir and climbed up to the manor barns they were not speaking—and so seemed angry with each other.

From one shed came the noise of a winnowing-fan, and there was a surge of dust through the open door. On the threshold stood the boss —Alyokhin, a man of about forty, tall, stout, long-haired, more like a professor or artist than a landowner. He wore a white shirt which needed washing and a rope for a belt. He had underpants on instead of trousers, and he had mud and straw sticking to his high boots. His eyes and nose were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin, and was obviously glad to see them.

'Come in, gentlemen, come inside the house,' he smiled. 'Be with you m a moment.'

It was a large, nvo-storeyed house. Alyokhin lived downstairs in two rooms with vaulted ceilings and small windows—once his bailiffs' quarters. It was all very unpretentious, smelling of rye bread, cheap vodka and harness. His best rooms, upstairs, he used very seldom, only when he had visitors. Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin were received in the house by the maid: a young woman so beautiful that both halted in their tracks and stared at each other.

'You can't imagine how glad I am to see you gentlemen,' said Alyo^m, following them into the hall. 'What a nice surprise!

'Give the guests something to change into, Pelageya,' he told the maid. 'And I'll change too while I'm about it. But I must go and wash first—feel as if I hadn't washed since spring. Would you like to come to the bathing-hut while they get things ready?'

The fair Pelageya—so delicate, so gentle-looking—brought towels and soap, and took his guests to the bathing place.

'Yes, 1 haven't washed for ages,' he said, undressing. 'I have a good bathing-hut, as you see—my father built it—but somehow I never have time for a bathe.'

He sat on the step soaping his long hair and neck, wlile the water round him turned brown.

'Yes, I see what you mean,' said Ivan Ivanovich with a meaning look at his head.

'I haven't washed for ages,' repeated Alyo^m awkwardly. He soaped himself.again and the water round him turned inky.

Ivan Ivanovich came out, plunged in with a loud splash, swam about in the rain with broad sweeps of his arms and sent up waves with white water-lilies to^bg on them. He swam to the middle of the reach and dived. A little later he appeared somewhere ^^ md swam on further. He kept plunging and trying to touch bottom.

'By ^^ is terrific!' he kept repeating. He w:u enjoying

hi^^lf.

He sw.am up to the mill, spoke to the villagers there, then t^rad md floated on his back in the middle of the reach, ex^^ing his face to the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin were dr^^d and ready to leave, but still he swam and dived.

'Ye G^fe!' said he. 'Mercy on us!'

'That's enough,' shouted Burkin.

They went back to the ho^. The lamp was alight in the luge drawing-room upsuin. Burkin and lvan Ivmovich, in silk dr^ing- gowns and warm slippers, sat in easy chain, while Squire Alyo^m —wa.shed, combed, wearing a new frock-coat—paced up md down. obviously revelling in the warmth, cleanliness, dry clothing and light footwear. Soundlesly treading the carpet and softly smi^^, the fair Pelageya served tea and jam on a tray. And only now did Ivan Ivano- vich embark on his story. His audience semed to include not only Burkin and Alyo^^, but also the ladies, young and old, md the officen who looked out calmly md severely from the gilt frames on the walls.

There are two of us brothers (he began): myself, Ivan, md Nicholas —two my junior. I studied to be a vet, while Ni^ol:u had a l^^l gove^rnent job from the age of nineteen. Our father had ^^ a ranker, and after getting his commison he had ^^ueathed us the sutus ofgentleman together with a small estate whi^ was sequestrated after his death to pay his debts. Anyway, we lived a life in the open air as boys. We spent our days md nights in fields and like

ordi:ru.ry village children, minding horses, stripping bark, ^^ng: that kind of thing.

Now, as you know, once you'vĉ ever hooked a ruff^r ^ot migrat- ing thrushes swarm over your village on clear, cold autu^^ days— you'll never ^^e a to^^man after that, you'll yoarn for those wide open spaces till your dying day. My brother was ^^rable at the office. Yean passed, but he suyed put: for ever copying the ume old docu- ments, for ever ob^^d with getting back to the land. Gradually vague longing crysullized into a specific desire: the dream of buying a nice little country estate beside a river or lake.

He was a gentle, kind man. I was fond of him, but never did I sympatluze with his wish to coop limself up for life in a country house. There's a saying that six foot of earth is all a man needs. A man? A corpse, more like! Now, if our professional people want to get back to the land, if they all have their eye on country properties, that's supposed to be a good thing these days. But those little places in the country . . . they're just that same old six foot of earth, really, aren't they? To leave the to^, the tumult and the shouting, to skulk in your little place in the country . . . that's no life, that isn't. It's selfishness, it's idleness, it's the monastic discipline—but without the hope of glory! Man needs no six foot of earth, he needs no little place in thc country. He needs the whole globe—all nature—so that he can develop, untrammelled, all his potentialities, all the attributes of his free spirit.

At the office brother Nicholas dreamed of eating stew made from his o^ cabbages and seemed to sniff their savour wafting through his yard. He dreamed of ta^^g his meals on green grass, of sleeping in the sun, of sitting on a bench outside his gate for hours on end gazing at fields and woods. Booklets on agriculture, calendar mottoes and such ... these were his joy, his favourite spiritual sustenance. He liked newspapers too, but only read advertisements about so many acres of arable land and meadow being up for sale with farmhouse, river, orchard, ^^ and mill-pond. His imagination pictured garden paths, flowers, fruit, nesting boxes for starlings, carp in ponds—you know the sort of stuff. These fancies varied with the advertisements which came his way, but for some reason the staple feature of them all was . .. the gooseberry. No manor house, no idyllic nook could he picture without that gooseberry patch.

'Country life does have its advantages,' he would say. 'You have tea on your balcony while your ducks swim on the pond. There's a wonder- ful smell and, er ... and there are these gooseberries!'

He would sketch a plan of his estate, a plan which always had the same features: (a) ^^or house; (b) servants' quarters; (c) kitchen- garden; (d) gooseberries. He lived miserably. He went short of food and he dressed any old how—like a tramp—and he kept saving money and putting it in the bank. He was a fearful miser. It pained me to see him, and I used to give him one or two things—send them on special occasions. But those things too he used to put away. Once a man's obsessed by an idea there's no^mg you ^^ do about it.

The years paM, he is transferred to a diferent county, he is now in his forties, but he is still reading those newspaper advertisements and saving money. Then I hear he's got married. Still aiming to buy that estate with the gooseberry patch, he has married an ugly old widow for whom he has no feelings-just because she's well-heeled. He leads her a miserable life too, keeping her half starved and putting her money in his own bank account. Before that she has been a post- master's wife, and as such she's been used to cakes and home-made wines, but with her second husband she even goes short ofblack bread. This roitine sends her into a decline, and three years later she duly gives up the ghost! Not, of course, that my brother for one moment fcels responsible for her death. Money's like strong drink, it makes a man act strangely. There was once a merchant of our town, a dying man, who ordered a bowl of honey on his death-bed, mixed in his banknotes and his lottery tickets . .. and swallowed the lot, to stop anyone else getting it. Once, when I was inspecting beasts at a railway station, a catde-dealer was run over by a train. It takes his leg off. We get him to a casualty department, there's blood everywhere: a horrible business! But he keeps begging us to look for that leg—can't stop worrying about the twenty roubles he has in the severed boot, thinks he may lose them.

'That's a bit beside the point,' said Burkin.

After his wife's death (Ivan Ivanovich went on after half a minute's thought) my brother began looking for a country property. Now, of course, you can spend five years hunting and still make the wrong choice, still end up with something quite unlike your dream house. Through an estate agent brother Nicholas bought three hundred acres on a mortgage. There was a manor house, there were servants' quarters, there was a park. But there was no orchard, there were no gooseberries and there were no duck-ponds. He did have a river, but the water was coffee-coloured because of a brickyard on one side of the estate and a bone-ash works on the other. Still, good old Nicholas didn't much care. He ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes, he planted them, and he set up as a squire.

I looked him up last year, thought I'd go and see what he was up to. In his letters my brother called his estate 'Chumbaroklov Patch' or 'Gimalaysky's', and one afternoon I tum up at this 'Gimalaysky's'. It's hot. There are ditches, fences, hedges, rows of little firs aU over the place, and there doesn't seem to be any way into the yard or any place to leave your horse. As I approach the house I am met by a fat, gingcr- coloured dog which resembles a pig and would like to bark but can't be bothered. From the kitchen emerges a cook—barefoot, fat, also resembling a pig—and says that the master is having his after-lunch nap. I entcr my brother's room, and there he is sitting up in bed with a blanket over lus lap. He has aged, he has put on weight, he looks positively frowsty. His nosc, lips and cheeks jut forward. Hc seems all set to grunt into his- blanket.

We embrace, we shed a tear ofjoy—and at the sad thought that we were once young but are both grey-haired now, and that our lives are nearly over. He dresses and begins showing me round his estate.

'Well, how's life?' I ask.

'Oh, pretty good, thank God. Can't complain.'

No longer was he the poor, timid little clerk. He was a rcal squire now, a man of property. He'd scttled here, he'd put down his roots, he was in his element. He was eating a lot, taking steam-baths, putting on weight. He was already suing the parish council and both factories, and he took umbrage when the locals wouldn't call him 'sir'. His spiritual welfare ... that too he cultivated with the dignity bcfitting a proprietor. He couldn't just do good. he had to be so pompous about it! And what did his charity add up to? He dosed all the villagers with bicarbonate of soda and castor oil, no matter what might be wrong with them. On his name-day he would hold a thanksgiving service in the village, then stand the lads vodka all round because he thought it the done tlung. Oh, those awful bumpers of vodka! One day your fat lando^er takes the villagers to court for trespass, and on the next day —some festival—he treats them all to vodka. They drink, they cheer him and they make their drunken salaams.

Improving one's living standards, eating too much, laziness . . . these things develop the most blatant arrogance in us Russians. Back at the office Nicholas had been scared even to hold views ofhis o^, but here he was pronouncing eternal verities in magisterial stylc about education being 'essential, but inopportune for the lower orders', and about corporal punishment being 'detrimental, generally speaking, but in certain cases useful and indispensable'.

'I know the working I can get on with him,' he would say. 'I'm popular with the ordinary common chap. I need only move a finger and the lads will do anything for me.'

And aU this, mark you, with a good-natured, knowing smile. A score of times he'd say 'we landowners' or 'speaking as one of the gentry'. He'd evidently forgotten that our grandfather had been a farm labourer and our father a private in the army. Even our surname Chimsha-Gimalaysky, so essentially absurd, now seemed to him melodious, illustrious and highly agreeable.

It's not Nicholas I'm concerned with, though, it's myself. I want to tell you how I changed during my few hours on his estate. At tea that afternoon the cook served a full bowl of gooseberries. These were no bought gooseberries, they were his own crop: the fmt to be picked since the planting. Nicholas chuckled, contemplated the gooseberries for a minute in silence and tears—his feelings too deep for words. Then, placing a lone berry in his mouth, he surveyed me with the glee of a child who has at last been given a longed-for toy.

'Delicious.'

He ate them greedily.

'Ah, delicious indeed,' he kept saying. 'You try them.'

They were sour and unripe. Still,

To hosts of petty truths man much prefers A single edifying lie,

as Pushkin has put it. Before me was a happy man whose most cherished dream had come true for all to see, who had attained his object in life, who had realized his ambitions, who was content with his fate and with himself. In my reflections on human happiness there had always been an element of sadness, but now the spectacle of a happy man plunged me into a despondency akin to despair. I felt particularly low that night. They had made up a bed for me in the room next to my brother's, and I could hear that he was still awake: he was getting up, going to that bowl and taking out one gooseberry at a time. Really, what a lot of contented, happy people there are, I reflected! What a crushing force they represent! What a life, though! Look at the impudence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, look at the grotesque poverty everywhere, the overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness and hypocrisy, the silly talk.

And yet. . . . In all the houses and streets there is peace and quiet. Out of fifty thousand townsfolk there's not one ready to scream or protest aloud. We see people shopping for food in the market, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their nonsense, marrying their wives, growing old, complacently dragging off their dead to the cemetery. But we have no eyes or ears for those who suffer. Life's real tragedies are enacted off stage. All is peace and quiet, the only protest comes from mute statistics: so many pcoplc drivcn mad, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children starved to death.

Oh yes, the need for such a system is obvious. Quitc obviously, too, the happy man only feels happy because the unhappy man bears his burden in silence. And without that silence happincss would be im- possible. It's collective hypnosis, this is. At the door ofevery contented, happy man there should be someone standing with a little hammer, someone to keep dinning into his head that unhappy pcople do exist —and that, happy though he may be, life will round on him sooner or later. Disaster will strike in the shape of sickness, poverty or bercave- ment. And no one will see him or hear him—-just as he now has neithcr eyes nor ears for others. But there is no ond with a hammer, and so the happy man lives happily away, while life's petty tribulations stir him gently, as the breeze stirs an aspen. And everything in the garden is lovely.

'That night I realized that I too was happy and contented,' Ivan Ivanovich went on, standing up. 'I too had laid down the law—at dinner, out hunting—about how to live, what to believe, how to handle the lower classes. I too had said that learning is a boon, that education is essential—but that plain reading and writing are enough for the common herd to be going on with. Freedom is a blessing, said I, we need it as the air we breathe—but we must wait for it. Yes, such were my words. But now I want to know what on earth we're waiting for?

'What are we waiting for, I ask you?' Ivan Ivanovich demanded, glaring at Burkin. 'What are we trying to prove? We can't have everything at once, I'm told, every idea takes shape gradually, in its o^ good time. But who says so? Where's the evidence that he's right? You refer me to the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect. But is there any law, any order which says that a vigorous, right- thinking man like me should stand by a ditch and wait for it to become overgrown or covered with mud—when all the time I might be able to jump across it or bridge it? Again I ask, what are we waiting for? To wait while we don't have the guts to live, yet need and long so much to be alive!

'I left my brother's early next morning, since when I've found town life unbearable. The peace and quiet . .. they get me down. I fear to look through windows because I know no spectacle more depressing than a happy family having tea round a table. I'm old, I'm past fighting,

I can't even hate any more. I'm just deeply grieved, I'm exasperated, I'm indignant. Thc thoughts which crowd upon me at night ... they make my head burn and I can't sleep. Oh, ifl were only young!'

Ivan Ivanovich paced up and down excitedly, repeating 'if I were only young!'

Suddenly going up to Alyokhin, he took him by one hand, and then by the other.

'Never give up, my dear Alyokhin,' he pleaded. 'Never let them drug you. While you're still young, strong and in good heart, never tire of doing good. There's no such thing—there need be no such thing —as happiness. And iflife has any meaning and purpose, that meaning and purpose certainly aren't in our happiness, but in something higher and more rational. Do good.'

All this Ivan Ivanovich said with a pathetic, pleading smile, as if asking a personal favour.

Then all thret: sat in arm-chairs in different comers of the drawing- room and said nothing. Ivan Ivanovich's story had satisfied neither Burkin nor Alyokhin. To hear about an impoverished clerk eating gooseberries while those generals and ladies looked down from their gilt frames, seeming alive in the twilight . . . it was a bore. Somehow one would rather have talked about women, about persons ofelegance. To be. sitting in this drawing-room, where the covered chandelier, the arm-chairs, the carpets under foot, all proclaimed that the watchers in those frames had once walked, sat and had tea here themselves ... to have the fair Pelageya moving noiselessly about—all that was better any story.

Alyokhin was terribly sleepy. He had been up about the farm before three in the morning, and he could hardly keep his eyes open. But he lin^ered on, fearing to miss any interesting tale which his guests might have to tell. As for what' Ivan Ivanovich had just said, as for whether it was wise or true ... that was beyond him. His guests were not discussing meal, hay or pitch, but something with no direct bearing on his life. He liked that, and he wanted them to go on.

'It's bedtime, though,' said Burkin, getting up. 'May I wish you good night?'

Alyokhin said good night and went down to his own quarters while his guests remained upstairs. They were sharing a large room containing two old carved wooden beds and an ivory crucifix in the comer. Their beds were wide and cool, they had been made by the fair Pelageya, and the linen smelt agreeably fresh.

Ivan Ivanovich undressed in silence and lay down. 'Lord, forgive us sinners,' said he, pulling the blankets over his head. His pipe was on the table, reeking strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin could not sleep for a long time for wondering where the atrocious smell came from. All night long rain drummed on the windows.

CONCERNING LOVE

For lunch next day delicious pasties, crayfish and mutton rissoles were scrved. During the mcal Nikanor the cook came upstairs to .isk what the guests wanted for dinner. He was a man ofaiverage height with a puffy face and small eycs—and so clean-shaven that his whiskers seemed to have been plucked out rather than cut ofЈ

Alyokhin e.xplained that thc fair Pelageya was in lovc with this cook. He was a drunkard .md a bit ofa hooligan, so she didn't want to marry him, but she didn't mind 'just living with him'. He was very pious, though, and his religion forbade his just living with her. He insisted on marriage, didn't want her othcrwise. He swore at hcr in his cups, and even beat her. She would hide upstairs, weeping, when he was drunk, while Alyokhin and his servants stayed at home to protect her if necessary.

The conversation turncd to lovc.

'What makes people fall in love?' asked Alyokhin. 'Why couldn't Pelageya love someonc else more suited to her intellectually and physically? Why must she love this Nikanor—"Fat-face", cveryone calls him round here—seeing that personal happiness is an important factor in love? It's all very mysterious, there are any number ofpossible interpretations. So far we've only heard one incontrovertible truth about love: the biblical "this is a great mystery". Everything else written and spokcn about love has offered no solution, but has just posed questions which have simply remained unanswered. What seems to explain one instance doesn't fit a dozen others. It's best to interpret each instance separately, in my view, without trying to generalize. We must isolate each individual case, as doctors say.'

'Very true,' agreed Burkin.

'Your ordinary decent Russian has a weakness for these unsolved problems. Where other peoples romanticize their love, garnishing it with roses and nightingalcs, we Russians bedizen ours with dubious profundities—and the most tedious available, at that. Back in my student days in Moscow I had a "friend": a lovely lady who, when I held her in my arms, was always wondering what monthly allowancc I would givc her, and what was the price of a pound of beef. We're just the same. When we're in love we're for ever questioning ourselves.

Are we being honourable or dishonourablc? Wise or stupid? How will it end, this love? And so on. Whether this attitude is right or wrong I don't know, but that it is a nuisance, that it is unsatisfactory and frustrating—that I do know.'

He seemed to have some story he wanted to tell. People who live alone always do have things on their minds that they are keen to talk about. Bachelors deliberately go to the public baths, and to restaurants in town, just to talk, and they sometimes tell bath attendants or waiters the most fascinating tales. In the country, though, it is their guests to whom they usually unbosom themselves. Grey sky and rain-soaked trees could be seen through the windows. There was nowhere to go in such weather—and nothing to do except swap yarns.

I've been living and far^mg in Sofyino for some time—since I took my degree (Alyokhin began). By upbringing I'm the arm- chair type, my leanings are academic. But this estate was badly in debt when I came here, and since it was partly through spending so much on my education that Father had run up those debts, I decided to stay on and work until I'd paid them off. I made my decision and started working here: not without a certain repugnance, frankly. The land isn't all that productive hereabouts, and if you don't want to farm at a loss you either have to use hired hands— slave labour, practically—or else you have to run the place peasant- fashion: do your own field work, that is, yourself and your family. There's no other way. But I hadn't gone into these subtleties at the time. Not one single plot of earth did I leave in peace, I corralled all the near-by villagers and their women, and I had us all working away like billy-o. I ploughed myself, I sowed and I reaped myself—bored stiff the while, and frow^^g fastidiously like a village cat eating gherkins in the vegetable patch because it's starving. My body ached, I was nearly dead on my feet. At first I thought I could easily combine this drudgery with the cultured life—all I had to do, thought I, was to observe a certain routine. I moved into the best rooms up here, I arranged for coffee and liqueurs to be served after lunch and dinner, and I read the European Herald in bed at night. But one day our priest, Father Ivan, turned up and scoffed my whole stock of liquor at a sitting. The priest also ran off with my European Heralds, or rather his daughters did, because I never managed to get as far as my bed in su^rner, especially during hayma^^g, but slept in the barn, in a sledge, or in some woodman's hut—hardly conducive to reading, that.

I gradually moved downstairs, I began having my meals with the servantS, and there's nothing left of my former gracious living but these same servants who once worked for my father, and whom I hadn't the hcart to dismiss.

Quite early on I was elected an honorary justice of the peace, and had to go to town now and then to take part in sessions and sit at the assizes, which I found entertaining. When you've been cooped up here for a couple of months, especially in winter, you end up yearning for a black frock-coat. Now, at the assizes you had your frock-coats, your uni- forms, your tail-coats. They were all lawyers there, all educated men. They were the sort of people you could talk to. To sit in an arm-chair wearing clean underwear and light boots with your watch-chain on your chest ... after sleeping in a sledge and eating wi'th servants, that really was the height of luxury.

I was always welcome in townwn, and I liked meeting new people. Now, among these new friendships the most serious—and, quite honestly, the most pleasant—was with Luganovich, the Deputy Chair- man ofAssize. You both know him: a most charming individual. This happened just after the famous arson case. The proceedings had lasted two days, we were worn out, and Luganovich looked in my direction.

'How about dinner at my place?'

I was surprised, barely knowing the man, and then only in an official capacity—I had never visited his home. After calling briefly at my" hotel to change, I set ofЈ This dinner led to my first meeting with Luganovich's wife, ^rne. She was still very young, not more than twenty-two, and her first child had been born six months previously. It all happened so long ago that I'd be hard put to it, now, to deĥne precisely what it was about her that so much attracted me. But at that ^^er it was abundantly clear. I saw a woman—young, handsome, kind, intellectual and captivating—unlike any I had ever met before. I at once sensed that this creature was dear to me, I seemed to know her already—rather as if I'd once seen that face, those eager, intelligent eyes, when I was a little boy looking at the album on my mother's chest-of-drawers.

At the arson trial four Jews had been found gu.ilty and it had been made a conspiracy charge: quite indefensibly in my view. I became rather agitated at ^Mer—most. distressed, in fact—and I've forgotten what I said, now, except that Anne kept s^^mg her head and telling her husband that 'I just can't believe it, Dmitry'.

Luganovich is a good fellow, one of those simple-^mded chaps who have got it into their heads that the man in the dock is .-ilw.-ivs guilty, and that a sentence may be challenged only in writing, through the proper ch^mels—most certainly not at a private dinner-table.

'You and I didn't start that fire,' he said gently. 'Which is why you and I aren't being tried and sent to prison.'

Husband and wife both pressed food and drink on me. From several details—the way they made coffee together, the way they understood each other almost without words—I concluded that they lived in peace and harmony, that they were pleased to be entertaining a guest. We played piano duets after dinner. Then it grew dark and I went to my lodgings.

This happened in early spring, after which I was stuck in Sofyino all summer. I didn't even think of town, I was so busy. But I was haunted all along by the memory of t}lat slender, fair-haired woman. Not directly present in my consciousness, she seemed rather to cast a faint shadow over it.

In late autumn a charity performance was staged in to\wn. I went into the Governor's box (having been invited jn the interval), and there was Anne Luganovich seated by the Governor's wife. Again I was struck by that same irresistible vibrant beauty, by that charming, friendly expression in her eyes. And again I sensed an intimacy shared.

We sat next to each other, we walked in the foyer, and she told me that I had gro\vn thinner. Had I been il?

'Yes. I've had a bad shoulder, and I sleep poorly when it rains.'

'You look worn out. When you came to dinner in the spring you seemed younger, more sure of yourselЈ You were a bit carried away at the time, you talked a lot, you were quite fascinating. I couldn't help being a bit taken with you, actually. I've often thought of you during the summer for some reason, and when I was getting ready for the theatre tonight I felt sure I should see you.'

She laughed. 'But today you look worn out,' she repeated. 'It makes you seem older.'

I lunched at the Luganoviches' next day. Afterwards they drove out to their holiday cottage to put it in shape for the winter. I went with them, I came back to town with them, and at midnight I had tea with them in the peaceful setting of their home: by a blazing fire, with the young mother going out from time to time to see if her little girl was asleep. After that I always made a point of seeing the Luganoviches when I was in We got to know each other, and I used to call un^mounced. I was just like one of the family.

'Who is that?' I would hcar her ask from the back of the house in the slow drawl which I found so attractive.

'It's Mr. Alyokhin,' the maid or nanny would answer, and Anne would appear looking worried. Why hadn't I been to see them sooner? Had anything happened?

Her gaze, the clasp of her fine, delicate hand, thc clothes which she wore about the housc, the way she did her hair, her voice, her steps . . . they always made mc feel as ifsomething new and out of the ordin- ary, something significant, had happened to mc. We enjoyed long conversations—and long silences, each wrapt in his own thoughts. Or she would play the piano for me. When there was no one at home I would wait, I'd talk to nanny, play with baby, or lie on the study ottoman reading the newspaper. When Anne came in I W4)uld meet her in the hall and take her shopping off her. I always carried that shopping so fondly and triumphantly, somehow—-just like a little boy.

It was a bit like the farmer's wife in the story, the one who had no troubles—not, that is, until she went and bought herself a pig ! The Luganoviches had no troubles—so they went and chummed up with me! Ifl hadn't been to townwn recently, then I must be ill or something must have happened to me, and both would be genuinely alarmed. What worried them was that I—an educated man who knew foreign languages—didn't devote myself to learning or letters, but lived in the country, going round and round tle same old treadmill, that I worked so much but was always hard up. I was bound to be unhappy, they felt, and if they saw me talking, laughing or having a meal, I must be doing so merely to conccal my anguish. Even when I was happy and relaxed I could feel them viewing me with concern. They were particularly touching when I really was in a bit of a fix: when some creditor was pressing me, when I couldn't meet some payment on time. Husband and wife would then whisper together by the window, and he would approach me looking very solemn.

'If you're a bit short, Paul, my wife and I would like to lend you something. Please don't hesitate to ask.' His ears would flush with embarrassment.

Or else he would come up with his red ears after one of those whispering sessions by the window, and say that he and his wife 'do most urgently beg you to accept this gift'. He would then present me with some studs, a cigarette-

I was u^Uppy. At home, in my fields and in my b^ my thoughts were of her. I tried to plumb the mystery of a young, handsome, intelligent woman, the ■"Wife of an unattractive, almost elderly husband (the man was over forty) and the mother of his children. I also tried to plumb the myaery of this ame uruttnctive husband, good sort, this easy-going fellow with his boring, co^rnon^^^ol views, who (when attending a pa:uty or dance) always cultivated the fuddy- duddies, this listles misfit with his sub^isive air of being a s^xutor or a bale of g^^ put up for auction . .. of ^^ ^^ who still believed in his right to be happy and to havc children by her. Why ever, I kept wondering, had she met him instead of me? To what so drastic

an error in our lives?

^fc my visits to I could always teU from her eyes that she was expecting me, and she'd admit having had a s^^^ feeling all day— she'd gu^xd I'd be co^^g. We enjoyed our long conv^Mtions and silences, not declaring our love for each other but concealing it fearfully andje:Uously. We feared which might betray our ^CTet to

ourselves. ^^^ and tender though my love was, I tried to be ^raible about it, s^^^^^ what the upshot might be if we should bd the strength to fight our ^^ons. It incredible that a love so quiet,

so ud a.s ^rne could suddenly and crudely disrupt the happy tenor of her husband's and children's lives: disrupt an entire household where I was so loved and ^^ted. Was that the way for a d^^t ^^ to ^tave? She would have gone away with me—but where to? Where could I take her? Things^^^ would have ^ct ^fierent if my life had ^^ ro^^tic and if I'd ^ct fighting for my country's

freedom, for insunce, if I'd ^ct a distinguished ^olar, actor or ^tot. & it was I should be conve^^ her from one humdrum. colourles into another h^ndrum, or even worse. How

long would our happines la.st? ^^t would hap^rn to. her ifl became il or died? What if we just feU out of love?

Her rc:flections were si^^u. She thought about her

husband and children, thought about her mother who loved her hus^rnd like a son. If she yidded to her pasons she would either have to lie or teU the truth, but both co^rc would be alarrming and

difficult to one in her utuation. Would her love ^mg me luppines, she wondered agonizingly. Wouldn't it complicate my life: irksome enough anyway, and bcsct with all sorts of tribulations? She felt she was too old for me, that she lacked the drive and energy to start a new life. Shc often told her husband that I ought tO marry some deccnt, intelligcnt girl who would be a good housewife and helpmeet—but she would add at once that such a paragon was unlikely to be found anywhere in town.

Mcanwhile thc ycars wcre passing. Anne now had two children. Whenever I visitcd the family the scrvams smiled their welcome, the childrcn shouted that Uncle Paul had arrived and clung round my neck, and everyone rcjoiccd. Not understanding my imermost feelings, they thought I was rcjoicing with them. They all saw me as the embodiment of intcgrity. Adults and children alike, they felt that intcgrity incarnate was walking about the room—which imparted a special charm to their relations with me, as if my prcsence made their lives purer and finer. Annc and I used to go to the theatre together, always on foot. We would sit bcsidc each othcr in thc stails, our shoulders touching, and I'd silcntly take the opera glasses from hcr, sensing her nearncss to me, scnsing that she was mine, that we couldn't live without each other. But through somc strangc lack of rapport we always said good-bye when we lcft the theatrc, and wc parted like strangers. People were saying goodness knows what about us in town, but not one word of truth was thcrc in all their gossip.

fume had begun going away to her mother's and sister's more often in reccnt years. Shc had bccome subject to depressions: moods in which shc was conscious that her life was unfulfilled and wasted. She didn't want to sec her husband and children at such times. She was under treatment for a ncrvous condition.

And still we did not speak our minds. In company she would feel curiously exaspcrated with me. She would diagree with cverything I aid, and if I became involved in an argument she would take my opponent's sidc. If I chanced to drop something shc would coldly offer her 'congratulations'. IfI forgot the opera glasscs whcn we went to the theatre, she'd tell' me shc had 'kiown vcry well I'd forget those'.

Luckily or unluckily, thcrc is nothing in our lives which doesn't end sooncr or later. The time had now comc for us to part: Luganovich had bcen appointed to a judgcship in the wcst country. They had to sell their furniturc, horscs and cottaige. Wc drove out to thc cottage, and as we turned back for one last look at the gardcn and green roof cveryonc was sad, and I knew that it was time for mc to take my leave of rather more than a mere cottage. It had been decided that we should se Anne off to the Crimea (where her doctors lud advised her to stay) at the md of Augwt, and that Luganovich would uke the children to the west a little later.

A large crowd of w went to se Anne off. She lud already said g^^- bye to her hwband and children, and the train was due to leave at any moment, when I dashed into her compartment to put a baskct—whir:h she had nearly left behind—on the luggagc rack. It wa$ my tum to say g^^-bye. Our eyes met there in the compartment, and we could hold back no longer. I put my a^ra around her, she pr^^d her face against my breast, and the tears flowed. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her tear-drmched lunds—we were both so unhappy—I declared my love. With a burning pain in my heart, I saw how in^^nrial, how trivial, how iU^ry it was . . . everything which lud frustrated our love. I saw that, if you love, you mwt base your theory of love on something loftier and more significant than happines or unhappines, ^^ sin or vinue as they are commonly undent^^. Better, otherwise, not to theorize at al.

I kissed her for the last rime, I clasped her ^md, and we parted—for ever. The train lud already started. I sat do^wn in the next compart- ment, which was empty . .. sat there, weeping, until the first stop. Then I walked home to Sofyino.

It had stopped r^^g while wa$ telling his story, and the

sun lud ^^ped out. Burlcin and Ivan Ivanovich went on to the balcony, which lud a superb view of the garden, and of the river which now gle2med, miror-like, in the sun. As they admired the view they felt that ^^ the kind, intelligent ey«—who had spokm with such ancere feeling—really was going round and round the same old treadmill, doing neither academic work nor anything else capable ofmaking his life more pleasant. And they imagined how stricken that young woman must luve looked when he had said g^^-bye to her in the train, ki^rng her head and shoulders. Both of them lud met her in Burkin, indeed, had been a friend of hen and had thought

her very

PEASANTS

I

Nicholas Chikildeyev, a waiter at the Slav Fair Hotel in Moscow, fell iU. There was a numbness in his legs and his walk was so much affectcd that going down a corridor one day he tripped and feU with a trayful of ham and peas. That meant thc end of his job. His own and his wife's savings, such as they were, had gone on treatment and they had nothing to live on. Bored with doing nothing, he decided that hc must return to his viUage. Even iUness is not so bad at home and life is cheaper. 'No place like home,' they say, and there is some- thing ui it.

He reached his viUage—Zhukovo—towards evening. Remembering thc old place from boyhood as a bright, comfortable, homely spot, he actuaUy took fright whcn he went inside the hut now and saw how dark, cramped and dirty it was. His wife Olga and daughter Sasha had come with him, and thcy stared aghast at the huge, clumsy stove, black with soot and flies. It took up nearly half the hut. And what a lot of flies! The stove was lop-sidcd, the beans were askew and the hut looked just about ready to faU down. In the corner opposite the stovc, bottle labcls and newspaper cuttings had been stuck near the icons to servc as pictures. This was real poverty and no mistake.

The adults were aU out harvesting. On the stove sat a little girl of about cight, fair-hired, unwashcd, and so bored that she did not even give the ncwcomers a glance. A white cat rubbed itself against the fire-irons on thc floor.

Sasha beckoned to it. 'Puss, puss! Come here, pussy!'

'She can't hear,' said the little girl. 'Deaf.'

'Why?'

'Oh, someone hit her.'

One glance showed Nicholas and Olga how things were, but they said nothing—just threw down their bundles and went out in the street widiout a word.

Their hut was third from the end and seemed the poorest and oldest. The second hut along was no better, but the one at the end did have a liietal roof and window-curtains. This hut, unfenced and st^ding a little to one side, was the uin. The huts formed a single row and the whole villagc, quict and slcepy, with willow, ddcr .md mountain-ash peeping out of the yards, looked plcasant enough.

Behind the villagers' gardens a steep slope, almost a cliff, fell away down to the river, with bare boulders dotted about in the clay. Paths wound down the slope among the boulders and clay-pits dug by potters, and there were great heaps of brown and red broken pottery piled around. Down at the bottom stretched a bright green meadow, broad and level, already piown, where the vilage herd strayed. The river was the best part of a ^Je from the viUage and meandered between splendid leafy banks. Beyond it was another broad meadow, a herd of cattle, long strings of white geese, and then a steep upward rise, as on the near side. At the top of the rise was a large vilage, a church with ftve onion-domes and—a little further off-a manor- house.

'Isn't it lovely here!' said Olga, crossing herselfas she saw the church. 'Lord, what an open view!'

Then the bell rang for evensong—it was Saturday evening. Two little girls, carrying a bucket of water down below, looked back at the church to listen to the bells.

'Dinner time at the Slav Fair,' said Nicholas dreamily.

Nicholas and Olga sat on the edge of the cliff and watched the sun go down. The sky, all gold and crimson, glowed in the river, in the church windows and through the whole air, gentle, quiet, incredibly pure as it never is in Moscow. After sunset cows and sheep moved past, lowing and bleating, geese flew over from across the river, and then all was quiet. The soft light faded in the air and the evening dark- ness swiftly descended.

Meanwhile the old folk—Nicholas's father and mother—had come home. They were gaunt, bent, toothless and both the same height. His brothers' wives came too—Marya and Fyokla, who workcd at the sqnire's place across the river. Marya, his brother Kiryak's wife, had six children, and Fyokla—the wife of his brother Denis, who was away ui tbe army—had two. Nicholas went into the hut and saw the whole family, all these bodies large and small, swarming on the sleeping platform, in cradles and in aU the comers. He saw how ravenously the old man and the women ate their black bread, dipping it in water, and he knew that he had Been wrong to come here—sick, penniless, and with a family too. A great mistake.

'Where's Kiryak ?' he asked, after they had greeted each other.

'Lives in some woods belonging to a merchant. He's the watchman there,' his fathcr answered. 'Not a bad lad, but he can put away the liquor aH right.'

'He's no good to us,' uid the old womin teufully. 'A rotten lot, our men ue—a11 spend and no earn. Kiryak drinks and the old man knows his way to the pub too, no use saying he d^n't. The Blessed Virgin's angry with us.'

They put the samovar on in honour of the visitors. The tea smelt of fish, the sugar was grey and looked nibbled, and cockroaches scurried over the bread and crockery. The tea was disgusting. No les disgusting was their ulk, a11 about being ill and hard up. Before they had got through their first cup a loud, long, drunken shout was heard from outside.

'Ma-arya!'

'Sounds like Kiryak.' said the old min. 'Talk of the devil.'

No one spoke. A little later the same shout was heard again. Hush and prolonged, it seemed to come from underground.

'Ma-arya!'

M^ya. the elder sister-in-law, turned pale and pressed against the stove. It was odd somehow to see this broad-shouldered, strong, ugly woman so scared. Her daughter, the little girl who had been sitting on the stove looking .bored, burst out sobbing.

'What's up with you, you little pest?' shouted Fyokla. a good- looking woman, also strong :md broad-shouldered. 'He won't kill anyone, I reckon.'

The old man told Nicholas that Muya was afraid to live in the woods with Kiryak :md that he always came for her when drunk, making a great row about it and beating her cruelly.

The yell rang out right by the door.

'Ma-arya!'

'For the love of Christ don't let him hurt me, plcasc,' summered Marya, gasping as though plungcd into icy water. 'Don't let him hurt me. Please. . . .'

The children in the hut all burst into tears. and. seeing this sasha surted up as wcll. Thcre was a drunken cough and a tall man camc mto thc hut. Hc had a black beard and worc a fur cap. In the dim light of the lamp his face could not be scen, which made him tcrrifying. This was Ki^pk. He went up to his wife, lashed out and punched her in the face. Stunncd by the blow, she made not a sound, but her feet seemed to give way. Her nose started bleeding at once.

'A disgrace! A downright disgrace!' muttered the old man. climbing onto thc stove. 'In front of visitors too! Proper wickcd, I call it!'

The old woman sat there in silence, hunched up and thoughtful. Fyokla rocked a cradle.

Clearly aware of the fear that he caused and pleased by it, Kiryak seized Marya's arm and dragged her to the door, bcllowing like a wild animal to make himself more frightening still. Then he saw the visitors and stopped.

'Oh, look who's come . . .' he said, letting go of his wife. 'My dear old brother and family. . . .'

He said a prayer before the icon, staggeruig and opening widc his drunken red eyes.

'My dear brother and family come back to the old home . . .' he went on. 'From Moscow, ch? From our great capital city of Moscow, eh? The mother ofcities. . . . So sorry. . . .'

He flopped down on the bench ncar the samovar and began drinking tea, lapping noisily out of the saucer. No one spoke. He drank a dozen cups, then lay on the bench and started snoring.

They went to bed. Nicholas, being ill, was put on the stove with the old man, Sasha lay on the floor and Olga went to the barn with the women. .

'Now then, dearie,' she said, lying on the hay by Marya's side. 'Tears won't do no good. You must just put up with it. The Bible says, "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right check, turn to him the other also. .. ." That's how it is, dearie.'

Then she spoke in a low, sing-song voice about Moscow and her life there as a maid in a lodging-house.

'They have big houses in Moscow, made of brick and stone,' she said. 'There are lots of churches, hundreds and hundreds of them, dearie. And there's gentlefolk living in them houses. All nice and pretty, they are.'

Marya said that she had never been as far as the local town, let alone Moscow. She could not read or write and knew no prayers, not even 'Our Father'. She and Fyokla, the other sister-in-law who sat a little way off listening, were both very backward and imderstood nothing. They both disliked their husbands. Marya was scared of Kiryak. She shook with fear whenever he was with her and felt queer in the head because he smelt so strongly of vodka and tobacco. And when Fyokla was asked ifshe missed her husband, she answered crossly,'What—him!'

They talked a little and then grew quiet. . . .

It was chily and near the bam a cock was crowing at the top of his voice, keeping them awake. When the bluish morning light began to peep through the cracks, Fyokla quietly got up and went out. Her bue feet were heard pounding the ground as she ran off.

II

Olga went to church and took Marya with her. On their way dou^ tlie path to the meadow both felt cheerful. Olga liked the open view and Marya felt that her sister-in-h.w was very near and ^^ to her. The sun was rising. A sleepy hawk skimmed over the meadow, the river looked gloomy and there were patches of drifting ^^t, but a strea of sunlight 'by on the hill across the river, the church shone, and in the manor garden rooks cawed furiously.

'The old man's al right,' Marya was saying. 'But Gran's very strict. A proper terror, she is. Our o^ grain only lasted tiU Shrovetide so we bought some flour at the pub. Real angry, tlut made her. She says we eat too much.'

'Now then, dearie, you must put up with things, tlut's al. As was said, "Come unto me, al ye tlut labour and are heavy 'b^^.'' ' .

Olga spoke in a dignified, sing-song voice and walked li.k.e a pilgrim, with quick, bustling steps. She read the Gospels every day aloud, like someone reading the lesson in church, not understanding much of them. But the holy words moved her to tears and she ^most swooned with delight as she brought out such things as 'who^vcr' or 'until I bring thee word'. She believed in God, the Holy Virgin and the Saints. She believed that no one in the world—whether simple folk, Germans, gipsies or Jcws-s—should be harmed, and woe betide even those who were u^^d to animals. She believed that this was what the ^riptures teU us, so when she said words from the Bible, even without under- sunding them, she looked compassionate, radiant and deeply moved.

'Where are you from?' Marya asked her.

'Vh.dimir. But I was t:Uen to Moscow long ago when I wa.s about eight.'

They reached the river. A woman st^^ undressing by the water's edge on the far side.

Marya saw who it 'Tlut's our Fyolli. She's ^^ acrou the river, playing around with the sbff at the manor. She's a bad girl and she somcthing terrible.'

Black-browed Fyokk with .her hair do^, stil young, and sttong as a girl, struck out from thc bank and t^^hcd thc watcr with hcr lcgs, sending waves in al directioru.

' She's a bad girl,' Marya repeated. ' A real bad lot.'

There was a rickety wooden footbridge across the river and just below it in the clear, limpid water moved shoals of broad-headed chub. Dew sparkled on the green bushes that stared into the water and there was a breath of warmth and cheerfulness in the air. What a lovely morning! And how lovely life on earth might be but for poverty— sheer, grinding poverty that you could not escape from. One glance at the village and yesterday's events came vividly to mind, dispersing in a moment the atmosphere of blissful enchantment.

They reached the church. Marya stopped by the porch and ventured no farther, not even daring to sit down, though the bells were not rung for service till after eight o'clock. She remained standing all the time.

During the reading of the Gospel the congregation suddenly moved to make way for the squire's family. Two girls, wearing white dresses and broad-brimmed hats, came in with a plump, rosy little boy in a sailor suit. Olga was touched by their appearance, and one glance decided her that these were nice, cultivated, fmc-looking people. But Marya gave the new arrivals a sullen, morose, glowering look as if they_ were not human, but monsters that would crush her if she did not get out of their way.

Whenever the priest's deep voice boomed out she fancied she heard the shout of 'Ma-arya!' and shuddered.

III

The village learnt of the visitors' arrival and a crowd gathercd in the hut after service. The Le6nychevs, the Matveichevs and the Ilichovs came for news of relatives working in Moscow. All the lads from Zhukovo who could read and write were packed off" to Moscow to be waiters and hotel servants, just as the boys from the village across the river all went as bakers. This had been going on for some time, since the days of serfdom when a certain Luke—a Zhukovo man, now a legendary figure—had been steward at a Mo5cow club. He would only take on people from his own village to work under him, and as soon as they found their feet they sent for their own relatives and fixed them up in restaurants and taverns. Ever since then Zhukovo village has been called 'Lower Flunkey' or some such name round those parts. Nicholas had been sent to Moscow when he was eleven and was found a j ob by Ivan, a Matveichev, then an usher at the Hermitage

Garden Theatre. Meeting the Matveichcvs now, Nicholas addressed them authoritatively.

'Mr. Ivan did a lot for mc. I miist pray for him day and night. It was him that gave me my start.'

'Yes, my friend,' said a tall old woman, Ivan's sister, tearfully. 'But not a \vord do we hear of the poor dear.'

'Last winter he was working at Aumont's and this season I heard he was out oftown somewhere in a garden rcstaurant. . . . He's looking much older. Time was he brought home his ten roubles a day in the summer season, but things are quieter everywherc now and the old fellow's having a thin time.'

Thc women looked at Nicholas's feet—hc wore felt boots—and his pale face.

'You'll never bring much home, Nicholas, that you won't,' they said sadly. 'No indeed!'

They all made a fuss of Sasha. She was ten, but short for her agc and very thin. She did not look more than seven. Fair-haired Sasha, with her huge, dark eyes and the red ribbon in her hair, seemed a bit funny among the other little girls, sunburnt with their crude hair-cuts and long, faded smocks. She was like a small animal caught in the ficlds and brought into the hut.

'The little pet can even read,' boasted Olga, looking lovingly at her daughter. 'Read something, dear,' she said, fetching the Gospels from the comer. 'You read a bit and these good Christian folk wiU listen.'

It was a heavy old copy ofthe Gospels in a leather binding with dog- cared edges. It smelt as if monks had come into the hut. Sasha raised her eyebrows and began intoning loudly.

'And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord . .. appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother. .. .'

'The young child and his mother,' Olga repeated, glowing with excitement.

'And flee into Egypt . .. and be thou there until I bring thee word. . ..'

At this 'bring thee word' Olga broke down and wept. First Marya and then Ivan Matveichev's sister looked at her and sobbed. The old man had a coughing fit and fidgeted about looking for some little present for his granddaughter, but found nothing and gave up with a wave of his hand. After the reading was over the neighbours went home, much moved and delighted with Olga and Sasha.

It was a holiday, so the family stayed at home all day. The old woman—'Gran' to her husband, daughters-in-law and grandchildren alike—tried to do everything herself. She lit the stove, put on the samovar, even took the others their dinner in the fields, and then complained of being worked to death. She was always worrying— someone might eat too much or the old man and her daughters-in-law might sit around doing nothing. Thinking that she heard the inn- keeper's geese getting at her kitchen-garden round the back, she some- times dashed out of the hut with a long stick and screeched for half an hour among cabbages as scraggy and decrepit as herself. Or she would ^^^ that a crow was after her chicks and rush at it swearing. She stormed and grumbled from morning W night and the row she made often caused people in the street to halt in their tracks.

She was not very kind to the old man—said he was bone idle and a thorough pest. The man was no good. In fact he was hopeless and might just have sat talking on the stove and never done a stroke of work if she had not kept on at him. He held forth to his so'n about certain enemies ofhis and complained of being wronged by the neigh- bours every day. This talk was very tiresome.

'Aye,' he would say, holding his sidcs. 'Aye. . .. Last week in Sep- tember I sold some hay at a rouble the hundredweight. All my own idea. .. . Aye. .. . And very nice too. .. . WeU, I'm carting my hay one morning, pleasing myselfand minding my own business, when the gaffer, Antip Sedelnikov, comes out of the inn—worse luck. "Where d'you think you're taking that lot, you so-and-so?" says he and clouts me on the ear.'

Kiryak had a hangover and a shocking headache and could hardly face his brother.

'Look what the vodka does for you. Oh, my God!' he muttered, shaking his aching head. 'Forgive me, dearest brother and sister, for Christ's sake. It's not much fun for me either.'

As it was a holiday they bought herring at the inn and made hcrruig's head broth. At noon they aU sat down to drink tea and went on and on till the sweat poured off them. Only when they seemed bloated with tea did they start eating the broth, out of a single pot. As for the herring, Gran hid it.

In the evening a potter was firing pots on the slope. Down on the meadow, girls danced country dances and sang. Someone played an accordion. On the far side of the river another kiln was burning and girls were singing. Their songs sounded gentle and melodious at a dis- tance. In and around the inn rowdy pcasants sang in discordant, drunken voiccs and swore so hard that Olga could only shudder. 'Oh, my goodness ...!' she said.

She wondered why they never seemed to stop swearing and why old men with one foot in the grave swore loudest and longest of all. Obviously used to it from the cradle, children and girls heard the bad language without being in the least put out.

Midnight passed and the kilns went out on both sides of the river, but the merrymaking continucd down on the meadow and at the iim Kiryak and the old man, both drunk, linked arms, banging into each other's shoulders, and went up to the barn where Olga and Marya were lying.

'Let her be,' urged the old man. 'Let her be. . .. She never did no harm. . . . It's all wrong. .. .'

'Ma-arya !' Kiryak shouted.

'Let her be. .. . It's downright wicked. . . . The woman's all right.'

They stood near the barn for a minute, then moved off.

'The flowers that bloom in the field tra la,' the old man suddenly sang in a high, shrill tenor. 'I lo-ove to pi-ick them flowers!'

He spat and went into the hut with a foul oath.

IV

Gran stationed Sasha near her kitchen garden and told her to see that the geese didn't get in. It was a hot August day. The inn-keeper's geese could get at the plot round the back, but just now they were busy pecking oats near the inn and quietly chatting. Only the gander craned his neck as if to see whether the old woman was coming with her stick. Other geese might come up from below, but they were feeding far away on the other side of the river, strung out over the meadow like a long daisy-chain.

Sasha stood about for a while, then grew bored and, seeing that no geese were coming, went off to the cliff.

There she saw Marya's eldest daughter Motka standing quite still on a boulder and looking at the church. Marya had had thirteen children, but only six had lived. They were aU girls—not a boy among them—and the eldest was eight. Barefoot, in a long smock, Motka stood with the ful glare of the sun beating on her head, but was unaware of that and seemed rooted to the spot. Sasha stood by her looking at the church.

'God lives in church,' she said. 'People have lamps and candles, but God has red, green and blue lamps like little eyes. At night God walks round the church with the Holy Mother of God and St. Nicholas —clump, clump, clump . . . ! And the caretaker gets terribly scared. Now then, dearie,' she added, mimicking her mother. 'At the Day of Judgment " the churches will all fly off to heaven.'

'Wha-at, be-ells and a-all?' asked Motka in a deep voice, dragging out each syllable.

'Yes, bells and all. On the Day ofJudgment all good people will go to heaven, and angry ones will burn forever in everlasting flames, dearie. "You never harmed anyone so you can go to the right—to heaven," God will tell Mother and Marya. But He'll send Kiryak and Gran to the left—into the fire. And anyone who eats meat or drinks milk in Lent will be burnt too.'

She looked up at the sky with wide open eyes.

'If you look at the sky without blinking you'll sce angels,' she said.

Motka looked at the sky too and a minute passed in silence.

'See anything?' asked Sasha.

'I can't see nothing,' said Motka in a deep voice.

'Well, I can. There are tiny angels flying round the sky, flapping their little wings—buzz, buzz, like mosquitoes.'

Motka thought a little, looking at the ground. 'Will Gran burn?' she asked.

'Yes, dearie.'

From the boulder a smooth slope led down to the bottom. It was covered with soft green grass that made you want to touch it or lie on it. Sasha lay down and rolled to the bottom. Motka, looking grave and stern, lay down as well and rolled, puffmg and panting, to the bottom and her smock got pulled up to her shoulders.

'That was fun,' said Sasha gleefully.

They went up to the top to roll down again, but then a familiar screeching sound was heard. How horrible! Toothless, bony, doubled up, her short grey hair streaming in the wmd, Gran was driving gecse out of the vegetables with a long stick.

'Trample me cabbages, would 'ce !' she shouted. 'Drat 'ce, curse 'ce and plague be on 'ee! Want yer necks wrung, do 'cc ?'

She saw the little girls, threw down her stick and picked up a switch, then seized Sasha's neck with fingers as hard and dry as a pair of tongs and started whipping her. Sasha cried. out with pain and fear, whereupon the gander went up to the old woman, waddling and stick- ing his neck oiit, and hisscd at hcr. Whcn hc wcnt back co thc flock, the gccsc all grcctcd him with a cackle ofapproval. Then Gran pitched into Motka, whosc smock rode up again. Frantic, sobbing loudly, Sasha went to thc hut to complain, followed by Motka who was crying too, but in a deep roar and not wiping her cycs—hcr face was wet as if shc had plunged it in water.

'Goodness gracious mc!' cricd Olga, aghast, when the two girls camc into the hut. 'Holy Mother of God!'

Sasha had just started to tell the tale when Gran came in with a piercing yell, swearing, Fyokla lost her temper, and all hcll was let loose in the hut.

Pale and distraught, Olga tried to comfort them. 'There there. Never mind,' she said, stroking Sasha's head. 'She's your granny. You mustn't bc cross with her. Never nind, child.'

Worn out by the incessant din, hunger, fumcs and stink, hating and despising thcir poverty, Nicholas ,was ashamed of the impression that his parents made on his wife and daughter. He dangled his feet from the stove.

'You can't beat her,' he told his mother in an exasperated, tearful voice. 'You've no right.'

'You weakling, rotting up there on the stove!' shouted Fyokla viciously. 'What the heU brought you lot here, eating us out of house and home!'

Sasha and Motka and all the other small girls huddled on the stove in the comcr behind Nicholas's back and listened, silent and terrified, their little hcarts beating wildly. If someone in a family has been desperately ill for a long while, thcre are painful moments when, in their heart of hearts, his nearest and dearest quietly and timidly wish for his death. Only children fear the death of a loved one—the idea always horrifies them. So now the little girls held their breath, looking at Nicholas with woebegone expressions, expecting him to die soon. They wanted to cry and say something kind and loving to him.

Hc clung to Olga as if for protection.

'I can't stick this any more, Olga dear,' he said in a low, quavering voice. 'I can't abide it. For God's sake write to your sister Claudia and teU her for the love of Christ to seU or pawn everything she has and send us money so we can get away.

'Oh God, for one g^npse of Moscow!' he went on in anguish. 'If only I could dream of dear old Moscow wwn!'

When night feU and the hut grew dark, they could hardly utter a word for shcer miscrv. Angry Gran dipped ryc nusts in .1 cup and spent a whole hour sucking thcm. Marya milked thc cow, brought in a pail of milk and stood it on a bench. Then Gran poured the milk into jugs, taking her time about it, clearly glad that it was the Fast of the Assumption, so that no one would have any and it could all be kept. She just poured a tiny drop into a saucer for Fyokla's baby.

When she and Marya started taking the jugs to the cellar, Motka suddenly stirred, climbed down from the stove, went to the bench with the wooden cup of crusts on it and splashed some milk from the saucer into the cup.

Gran came back into the hut and settled down to her crusts again while Sasha and Motka sat watching on the stove, glad that she had broken her fast and would now go to hell. They cheered up and lay down to sleep. As she dozed off, Sasha imagined the Day ofjudgment. There was a blazing furnace like the potter's and an evil spirit, with horns like a cow and black all over, was driving Gran into the flames with a long stick just as she had driven those geese.

v

At about half past ten on the evening of the Feast of the Assumption the young men and girls making merry down in the meadow suddenly started yelling and screaiing and began running towards the village. At first people sitting up on the cliff edge could not see what was the matter.

'Fire! Fire!' came the desperate yell from below. 'The village is on fire.'

Those on top looked round, and a fantastic, grisly spectacle met their eyes. On the thatched roof of a hut at the end of the village stood a colu^^ of fire six feet high, writhing and shooting sparksall over the place like a splashing fountain. Then the whole roofwent up in a bright flash of flame and there was a loud crackling.

With the whole village caught in the flickering red glare, the moonlight vanished, black shadows moved over the ground and there was a smell of burning. Out of breath, shaken, speechless, those who had run up from below jostled and fell. They could not see properly or recognize each other, being unaccustomed to the glare. It was terrifying, especially the pigeons flying about in the smoke above the fire and the singing and accordion playing that went on quite regardless in the in, where they did not yet know about the fire.

'Old Simon's hut's on fire !' yelled someone in a rough voice.

Marya was dashing about near her hut, crying and wringing her hands, her teeth chattering, though the fire was right away at the far end of the vilage. Out went Nicholas in his felt boots and out rushed the children in their little smocks. Near the police constable's hut someone started banging the alarm on an iron sheet. The clang, clang, clang was borne through the air and the incessant, clamorous din caught at thc heart and chilled the blood. Old women stood about holding icons. Sheep, calves and cows were driven out of the yards iruo the street. Trunks, sheepskins and tubs were carried out. A black stallion, usually kept apart from the other horses because he kicked and maimed them, was set free and galoped through the vilage and back, stamping and whinnying, then suddenly halted by a cart and lashed into it with his hind legs.

Church bells rang on the other side of the river.

Near the burning hut it was hot and so light that every blade of grass on the ground stood out clearly. Simon, a red-haired peasant with a big nose and a peaked cap pulled down to his ears, sat on one of the trunks that they had managed to drag out. He wore a jacket. His wife lay face down, swoonuig and groaning. An old fellow of about eighty walked about near by, hatless, carrying a white bundle. He was short, with a huge beard and looked like a gnome, and though not a local man, obviously had something to do with the ĥre. The flames glinted on his bald head. The village elder Antip Sedelnikov, swarthy and black-haired as a gipsy, went up to the hut with an axe and smashed the windows one after the other for no clear reason and then started chopping down the porch.

'Come on, you women! Fetch water!' he shouted. 'And let's have that fire-engine! Get a move on!'

The fire-enguie was hauled along by peasants who had just been drinking in the in. They stumbled and fell, all drunk, all looking helpless with tears in their eyes.

'Come on, you girls! Water!' yelled thc elder, also drunk. 'Gct a move on, girls!'

Women and girls ran down to the spring, lugged up buckets and tubs filled with water, emptied them in the engine, and ran down again. Olga, Marya, Sasha and Motka all fetched water. The women and boys worked the pump, the hose hissed and the elder directed it at the door or windows, holding back the jet with a finger, which made it hiss even more sharply.

Voices were raised in approval. 'Wcll done, Antip! Keep it up!'

Antip made his way into the blazing entrance-lobby. 'Pump away!' he shouted from inside. 'Do your best, mates, on this here inauspicious occasion.'

The men stood by in a huddle, idly watching the fire. No one knew what to tackle first—it was quite beyond them—and al around were stacks of wheat and hay, barns and piles of dry brushwood. K.iryak and old Osip, his father, were there as well, both the worse for drink. As ifto excuse himself for doing nothing, the old man t^^ed to the woman lying on the ground.

'Don't take on so, old girl,' he said. 'The hut's insured, so why worry ?'

Simon t^rced to one person after another and told them how the fire started.

'It was that old feUow with the bundle—him as used to work for General Zhukov... . Used to be a cook at our old general's, God rest his soul. He comes along this evening and asks us to put him up for the night. ... Well, we had a drink or two, see . . . ? The old woman fiddles round with the samovar, getting the old feUow his tea. She puts it in the lobby, worse luck, and the flame goes straight up out of that samovar chimney and catches' the thatch. That's what did it. We nearly went up too. The old man's cap was burnt—what a shame.'

They went on and on beating the iron sheet and the church beUs across the river kept ringing. Lit up by the glare and out of breath, Olga kept dashing up and down the slope, staring horror-struck at red sheep and pink pigeons flying in the smoke. The ringing seemed to go right into her like a needle. It seemed that the fire would last for ever and that Sasha was lost.

When the roof of the hut crashed in, she thought the whole village was bound to burn down. Too weak to carry any more water, she sat on the cliff, putting her pails near her, while beside and below her women sat wailing as ' if someone had died.

Then some labourers and staff from the manor farm across the river arrived with two carts and their own fire-engine. A student rode up, a lad in a white military tunic open on the chest. Axes crashed. A ladder was placed against the blazing hulk and five men ran straight up it, the student leading the way. He was red in the face and shouted in a hoarse, biting voice and sounded as if putting out fires was all part of the day's work. They dismantled the hut beam by beam and pulled down the cow-shed, a fence and the nearest rick.

Stern voices were heard in the crowd. 'Stop them biisting the placc up! Stop them!'

Kiryak made for the hut looking resolute, as if he wanted to stop the newcomers breaking things up, but a labourer turned him back and hit him in the neck. That was good for a laugh and thc labourer hit him again. Kiryak fell over and crawled back into the crowd on all fours.

Two pretty girls wearing hats—the student's sisters, no doubt—had also arrived from across the river. They stood watching the fire from some way off. The dismantled beams had stopped blazing, but were smoking furiously. The student worked the hose, pointing the jet at the beams, the peasants and the women bringing water.

'Georgie!' thc girls shouted, reproachful and anxious. 'Georgie dear!'

The fire went out, and only when they were moving off did peoplc notice that day was breaking and everyone was pale and rather dark- faced, as always when the last stars vanish from the sky at dawn. Going their several ways, the villagers laughed and made fun of General Zhukov's cook and his burnt cap. By now they wantcd to make a joke of the fire and even seemed sorry that it had gone out so quickly.

'You managed the fire ve_ry well, sir,' Olga told the student. 'They should send you to Moscow—we have fircs there most days.'

'Why, arc you from Moscow?' one of the young ladies asked.

'Yes miss. My husband worked at the Slav Fair. And this is my daughter.' She pointed to Sasha who was cold and clung to her. 'She comes from Moscow too, miss.'

The t\vo girls spoke to the student in French and he gave Sasha twenty copecks. Old Osip saw it and his face lit up.

'Thank God there was no wind, sir,' he said to the student. 'Or elsc the whole place would have gone up in no rime. And now, Guv, and you, kind ladies,' he added sheepishly in a lower voice, 'it's a cold dawn and a man needs a bit of warmth . . . so give us the price of a noggin, Guv.'

Hc got nothing, cleared his throat and sloiiched off home. Then Olga stood on the edge of the slope and watched the two waggons fording the river and the ladies and gentleman walking across the meadow—a carriage awaited them on the other side. When she had come back to the hut she spoke to her husband.

'Aren't they nice!' she said admiringly. 'And so good-looking too! J ust like little cheribs, those yoing ladies arc.'

'Damn and blast 'em!' said sleepy Fyokla vicioisly.

VI

Marya thought herself unhappy and said that she longed to be dead. But Fyokla found that the life suited her—thc poverty, the filth, the frantic cursing. She ate what she was given without fuss and did not care where she slept or what she slept on. She emptied slops outside the front door, splashing them out from the step, and cven walked barefoot in the puddles. She took against Olga and Nicholas from the start just because they disliked the life.

'We'U see what you get to eat round here, you and your fme Moscow ways!' she said with malicious glee. 'We'll see about that.'

One morning early in September, Fyokla, pink with cold, healthy and handsome, brought up two pails of water. Marya and Olga were sitting at table drinking tea.

'Tea and sugar!' sneered Fyokla.

'Quite the ladies, aren't wc?' she added, putting down the pails. 'Quite the latest fashion, I suppose, this drinking tea cvery day. Mind you don't burst, you and your tca!' she went on, giving Olga a look of hate. 'Fed your face aU right in Moscow, didn't you, you fat bitch!'

She swung the yoke and hit Olga on the shoulder, making both her sisters-in-law throw up their hands.

'Oh, good heavens!' they said.

Then Fyokla went to the river to wash clothes, swearing so loudly all thc way down that they heard her in the hut.

The day passed and the long autumn evcning set in. They wcre winding silk in the hut—everyone except Fyokla who had gonc across the river. The silk came from a near-by factory and the whole family earned a little from it, about twenty copecks a week.