The Russian Master and Other Stories

'We were bettcr off"as serfs,' said the old man, winding his silk. 'You worked, you ate, you slept—evcrything in its propcr turn. There was cabbage soup and gruel for dinner and the same again for supper. There was cucumbers and cabbage aplenty, you could eat away to your heart's content. Things wcre strictcr too—we all knew our place.'

The only light camc from a single lamp that gave a dim glow and smoked. When anyone stood in the way of it, a large shadow fell on the window and you could see bright moonlight. Old Osip told a leisurely tale about life before the serfs were freed. In these very parts where things wcre so drab and miserable now, there had been hunting with hounds, borzois and teams ofhuntsmen skiUcd in driving wolves towards the guns. There was vodka for the bcatcrs, and whole waggon-trains took the game to Moscow for thc young mastcrs. Bad peasants were flogged or sent to the family cstate in Tver and good ones were rewarded.

Gran also told a tale or two. She remembered every single thing. She talked about her mistress, a kind, God-fearing woman whose husband was a drunken rake. Her daughters aU made unsuitable marriages—one to a drunkard and another to a tradesman, whilc the third eloped, helped by Gran herself, who was just a girl at the time. Like thcir mother they aU died of broken hearts. Remembering all this, Gran even shed a tear.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door that made them aU start.

'Put us up for the night, Osip old friend.'

In came a little bald old man, General Zhukov's cook, the one whose cap was burnt. He sat down and listencd and then he too started re- calling old times and teUing stories. Nicholas sat listening on the stove with his legs dangling down and kept asking what food they cooked in the days of serfdom. They talked about rissoles, soups and sauces of various kinds. And the cook, who also had a good memory, named dishes that no longer existed. For instance there was something made from bulls' eyes and called, 'Wake me early in the morning.'

'Did you ever make cutlets a la marechal?' asked Nicholas.

'No.'

Nicholas shook his head reproachfully. 'Call yourselves cooks!' he said.

The little girls sat or lay on the stove, looking down without blink- ing. There seemed to be a great many of them, like cherubs in the clouds. They liked the stories. They sighed, shuddered and grew pale with ecstasy or fear. Gran's stories were the most interesting of aU and they listened breathlessly, afraid to move.

They lay down to sleep in silence. Agitated and excited by the storics, the old people thought how precious youth was, because no matter what it had been like at the time, it left only joyful, lively, stirring memories behind. And they thought of the fearful chill of death. That was not so far off—best not to think about it. The lamp wcnt out. The darkness, the two windows sharply defmed by the moonlight, the stillness and the creaking cradle somehow served only to remind them that their life was over and that there was no bringing it back.

You doze off and forget everything. But then someone suddenly touches your shoulder or breathes on your cheek and sleep is gone, your body feels numb and thoughts ofdeath will come into your mind. You turn over and forget death, but the same old miserable, dreary thoughts go round and round inside your head—about poverty, cattle feed and the rising price offlour. Then a little later you remember once again that life has passed you by and you can't put back the clock. . . .

'Oh Lord!' sighed the cook.

Someone tapped faintly on the window—Fyokla must be back. Olga stood up, yawning and whispering a prayer, opened the door and drew the bolt in the lobby. But no one came in. There was just a breath of cold from the street and the sudden brightness of the moon- light. Through the open door Olga could see the street, quiet and empty, and the moon riding in the sky.

'Who's there?' she called.

'It's me,' came the answer. 'Me.'

Near the door, clinging to the wall, stood Fyokla, completely naked, shivering with cold, her teeth chattering. She looked very pale, beautiful and strange in the bright moonlight. The shadows and glint of moonlight on her skin stood out vividly, and her dark brows and firm young breasts were especially sharply outlined.

'Them swine across the river stripped me and turned me loose like this .. .' she said. 'I've come all the way home with nothing on ... mother naked. Bring me someching to put on.'

'Well, come inside,' said Olga quietly, starting to shiver as well.

'I don't want the old folk to see me.'

Sure enough, Gran had started muttering restlessly and the old man was asking, 'Who's there?' Olga brought her own smock and skirt and put them on Fyokla and then both crept into the hut, trying not to bang the doors.

'That you, my beauty?' Gran grumbled crossly, guessing who it was. 'Gadding about in the middle of the night, are you . . . ? Need your neck wrung, you do!'

'Never mind, it's all right,' whispered Olga, wrapping Fyokla up. 'Never mind, dearie.'

It grew quiet again. They always slept badly in the hut, each with something everlastingly nagging at him and keeping him awake. With the old ma.n it was backache, with Gran it was her worries and bad temper, with Marya it was fear and with the children it was itching and being hungry. And tonight their sleep was as troubled as ever. They kept turning over, talking in their sleep or getting up for a drink.

Fyokla suddenly yelled out in her loud, harsh voice, but took a grip on herself at once and went on with occasional sobs that grew quieter and more muffled till she stopped entirely. From time to time a clock was heard striking across the river, but there was something odd about it, for it struck fim five and then three.

'Oh Lord!' sighed the cook.

It was hard to tell by looking at the windows whether it was stiU mooniight or already daybreak. Marya got up and went out and could be heard milking the cow outside and saying, 'Stea-dy there!' Gran went out too. It was stiU dark in the hut, but you could already make things out.

Nicholas, who had not slept all night, got down from. the stove. He took his tail-coat from a small green chest, put it on and, going to the window, smoothed the sleeves, held it by the tails and smiled. Then he carefully took the coat off, put it back in the chest, and lay down again.

Marya came back and started lighting the stove. She was obviously not fully awake and was still waking up as she moved about. She had probably had a dream or remembered last night's stories because she said, stretching luxuriously in front of the stove, 'No, better be free than a serf.'

VII

The 'Governor' turned up—this was what they called the local police inspector in the village. They had known for a week when he was coming and why. There were only forty households in Zhukovo, but their arrears oftaxes and rates had passed the two thousand rouble mark.

The inspector put up at the inn. He 'partook of' two glasses of tea, then walked off to the village elder's hut near which a group of de- faulters awaited him.

Despite his youth—he was not much over thirty—the 'elder', Antip Sedelnikov, was strict and always backed up the c.uthorities, though poor and irreguiar with his own tax payments. He obviously enjoyed being elder and liked the sense of power, which he could only display by severity. He was feared and heeded at village meetings. He was known to pounce on a drunk in the street or near the inn, tie his arms behind him and shove him in the lock-up. He had once even put Gran inside for twenty-four hours for swearing when attending a meeting in place of Osip. Never having lived in a town or read a book, he had somehow picked up a stock of long words and liked to usc them in conversation, for which he was respected, if not always understood.

When Osip went into the elder's hut with his tax-book, the in- spector, a lean old man with long grey whiskers, wearing a grey tunic, was sitting at a table in the comer opposite the stove making notes. The hut was clean and pictures cut out of magazines lent variety to the walls. In the most prominent place near the icons hung a portrait of Alexander ofBattenberg, one-time Prince of Bulgaria. Antip Sedcl- nikov stood by the table with folded arms.

'This one owes a hundred and nineteen roubles, sir,' he said when Osip's turn came. 'He paid a rouble before Easter, but not a copeck smce/

The inspector looked up at Osip. 'Why is that, my man?'

'Don't be too hard on us, si'r, for God's sake,' began Osip in a great pother. 'Let me speak, sir. Last year the squire from Lyutoretsk says, "0sip," he says, "seU me your hay . . . " says he. "Y ou sell it. " We11, why not? I had a couple of tons to seU that the women had mown down on the meadow. .. . Well, we agreed on the price. . .. AU nice and above board. . ..'

He complained of the elder and kept turning to the other peasants as if calling them to wimess. His face was red and sweaty and his eyes were sharp and vicious.

'I don't know why you tell me al this,' said the inspector. 'I'm asking you. .. . I'm asking you why you don't pay your arrears, man. None of you pay up. Think I'm going to take the blame?'

'I can't help it.'

'These remarks haven't got no consequence, sir,' said the elder. 'ActuaUy them Chikildeyevs are a bit impecunious like, but if you care to ask the others, you'll find it's all due to vodka and gcneral mis- behaviour. They're just ignorant.'

The inspector made a note. Quietly and evenly, as if asking for a drink of water, he told Osip to clear out.

He left soon after, coughing as he got into his cheap carriage. Even the set of his long, thin back showed that he had forgotten Osip, the elder and the Zhukovo arrears, and was thinking of his own affairs.

Before he had gone a mile Antip Sedelnikov was taking the samovar from the Chikildeyevs' hut, followed by Gran, shrieking at thc top of her voice, 'You shan't have it! You shan't have it, dami you.'

He walked swiftly with long strides while she panted after him, stumbling, bcnt double, fiirious. Her kerchief had slipped onto her shoulders and her grey hair with its greenish tinge streamed in the brecze. All at once she paused.

'Christian, God-fearing people! Friends, we've been wronged,' she shouted louder than ever in a sort of sobbing chant and started beating her breast, as if taking part in a real peasants' revolt. 'They done iis wrong, mates! Stick up for us, dear friends!'

'Look here, Gran,' said the elder sternly. 'Do show some sense.'

Life was very dull in the Chikildeyevs' hut without a samovar. There was something degrading and insulting about this deprivation, as if the hut had been dishonoured. Better if the elder had gone off with the table or all the benches and pots—the place would have seemed less empty. Gran shrieked, Marya wept and the little girls took their cue from her and wept too. The old man felt guilty and sat silent in the corner with a hang-dog look.

Nicholas did not say anything either. Gran was fond of him and pitied him, but now she forgot her pity and suddenly stormed at him with reproaches and abuse, thrusting her fists right under his nose. It was all his fault, she shouted. And reaUy, why had he sent them so little money after boasting in his letters ofgetting fifty roubles a month at the Slav Fair? Why had he come here—with his family and all? And if he died how would they pay for his funeral?

Nicholas, Olga and Sasha looked utterly ^^erable.

The old man cleared his throat, took his cap and went to see the elder. It was already growing dark. Antip Sedelnikov was soldering near his stove, pufng out his cheeks. The place was ful of fumes. His scraggy, unwashed children, no better than the Chikildeyevs', were messing about on the floor, and his wife—ugly, freckled, wid:t a bulging stomach—was winding silk. It was a wretched and ^^erable family except for jaunty, handsome Antip. Five samovars stood in a row on a bench.

The old man said a prayer to the portrait of Prince Battenberg.

'Antip,' said he, 'don't be too hard on us, for God's sake, and give us back our samovar. Have a heart!'

'Bring three roubles and you can have it.'

'What a hope!'

Antip puffed out his cheeks and the flame droned and hissed, glinting on the samovars. The old man twisted his cap and thought for a moment.

'You give it back,' he said.

The swarthy elder looked qiiitc black, like a sore of sorcerer. He turned to Osip.

'It all dcpends on the magistrate,' he said rapidly and severely. 'You can state your grounds for dissatisfaction verbally or in writing at the administrative session on the twenty-sixth of the month.'

It meant nothing to Osip, but hc left it at that and went home.

About ten days later the inspector came again, stayed about an hour and left. The weather was cold and windy at the time. The river had frozen long ago, but there was still no snow and everyone was fed up because the roads were impassable.

Late one Sunday afternoon Osip's neighbours called for a chat. They sat in the dark, as it would have been sinful to work and the lamp was not lit. Therc were a few rather unpleasant bits of news. Two or three households had had hens seized for tax arrcars. They had been taken to the local offices where they had died because no one fed them. Sheep had also been seized, carted oflf with their legs tied together and shifted from one cart to another at every village. One of them had died. Now they were arguing about whose fault it was.

'The council's,' said Osip. 'Who else?'

'It's the council. Stands to reason.'

The council got the blame for everything-;-for tax arrears, abuses generally and crop failures, though none of them knew what a council was. This went back to the time when some rich peasants, with workshops, stores and inns of their own, had done a spell on the council, which had left them with a grudge against it and a habit of cursing it in their workshops and inns.

They talked of the snow that God had not sent them. There was firewood to cart, but you could not drive or walk for the bumps in the road. Fifteen or twenty years ago and earlier the local small talk had been much more amusing. In those days every old man had looked as though he had some secret, something that he knew about and was expecting. They talked of a charter with a gold seal, land partition, new territories, buried treasure. And they were always hinting at something. But now the villagers had no secrets, their whole life was an open book for anyone to read, and all they could talk about was poverty, catde feed and the fact that there had been no snow.

They said nothing for a while. Then they remembered about the hens and sheep, and went on arguing about whose fault it was.

'The coimcil's,' said Osip lugubriously. 'Who else?'

VIII

The parish church was about four miles away in Kosogorovo and the peasants only went there when they had to, for christenings, weddings or funerals. For ordinary worship they just crossed the river. On fine Sundays and saints' days the girls dressed up and went to service in a body, and it was a cheering sight to see them cross the meadow in their red, yellow and green dresses. In bad weather they all stayed at home. They went to pre-communion services in the parish church. Those who had not prepared themselves for communion in Lent were charged fifteen copecks each by the parish priest when he went round the huts with the cross at Easter.

The old man did not believe in God because he hardly ever gave Him a thought. He recognized the supernatural, but thought it was women's business. When the subject of religion or miracles came up and he was asked what he thought, he would scratch himself. 'How should I know?' he would say reluctantly.

Gran believed, but somewhat vaguely. It was all jumbled up in her mind. No sool}er had she started thinking about sin, death and salva- tion, than hardship and worries took over, whereupon she forgot what she had been thinking about. She had forgotten her prayers and usually stood in front of the icons at bedtime, whispering, 'To the Virgin of Kazan, to the Virgin ofSmolensk, to the Virgin ofthe Three Arms....'

Marya and Fyokla crossed themselves and took co^munion once a year, but it meant nothing to them. They did not teach their children to pray, never spoke to them of God and taught them no principles. They only told them not to eat the wrong things during fasts. It was much the same with other families—few believed, few understood. Yet they all loved the Scriptures, loved them dearly and revered them, but they had neither books nor anyone to read and explain things. They respected Olga for reading the Gospels to them sometimes and always treated her and Sasha with deference.

Olga often went to church festivals and special services in near-by villages and the local county town, which had two monasteries and twenty-seven churches. She was rather vague and forgot al about her family on these pilgrimages. Only when she came home did she suddenly discover to her great delight that she had a husband and daughter. 'God has been good to me,' she would say, smiling and radiant.

The viUage goings-on pained and sickened her. On Elijah's Day they drank. On the Feast of the Assumption they drank. On Holy

Cross Day they drank. The Feast of the Intercession was the parish holiday for Zhnkovo and the villagers seized the chance to druik for three days. They drank thcir way through ftfty roubles of communal funds and then the vilage had a whip-round for more vodka. Thc Chikildeyevs kiUed a sheep on the first day and ate vast helpings of it morning, noon and night, aid even then the children got up at night for a bite. Kiryak was terribly drunk on all three days. He drank the cap off his head and the boots oft" his feet, and beat Marya so hard that she had to be doused with water. Later on everyone fclt ashamed and sick.

But even Zhukovo or 'Lower Flunkey' had one true religious ceremony—in August when the Icon ofthe Blessed Life-giving Virgin was carried roiUld the whole district from vilage to village. It was on a quiet, overcast day that it was expected in Zhukovo. The girls in their bright Sunday dresses had gone to meet the icon in the morning and it had been brought in with singing and a procession in the late afternoon while bells pealed across the river. A great crowd of people from the vilage and elsewhete blocked the street. There was noise, dust and a great crush of people.

The old man, Gran and Kiryak—all stretched out their hands to the icon, feasting their eyes on it. 'Intercessor, Holy Mother! Pray for us!' they said tearfuly.

Everyone ^emed to Wlderstand at once that there was no yoid be- tween heaven and earth, that the lich and strong had not yet grabbed everything, that there was still someone to protect them against iU- treatment, slavery and bondage, against intolerable, grinding poverty and the demon vodka.

'Intercessor, Holy Mother!' sobbed Marya. 'Holy Mother!'

But the service ended, the icon was taken off, and everything was as before. Harsh, drunken voices once more came from the inn.

Only the rich peasants feared death. The richer they grew, the less they believed in God and salvation, and if they gave candles and had special masses said, it was only for fear of their earthly end and to be on the safe side. Poorer peasants were not afraid to die. People told Gran and the old man to their faces that their day was done and it was time they were dead. They didn't care. And people thought nothing of telling Fyokla in Nicholas's presence that when he died her husband Denis would get his discharge and be sent home from the army. Far from fearing death, Marya wished that it would come quicker and was glad when her children died.

Though not afraid of death they did have an exaggerated horror of all illnesses. The slightest thing—an upset stomach, a mild chill— was enough to make Gran lie on the stove, wrap herself up and embark on a series of heartv groans. 'I'm dy-ing!' The old man would rush off for the priest and Gran would be given the sacrament and extreme uncnon.

They were always talking about colds, tape-worms and tmnours going round the stomach and moving up to the heart. They were more frightened of catchiiig cold than of anything, so wrapped up well and warmed themselves on the stove even in summer. Gran liked seeing the doctor and often went to hospital, giving her age as fifty- eight instead of seventy. She thought that if the doctor knew her real age he would refuse to treat her, and say she ought to be dead—not consulting him. She usually left for hospital in the early morning, taking two or three of the little girls, and came back in the evening, hungry and cross, with drops for herself and ointment for the children. She once took Nicholas as well and for a fortnight afterwards he was taking drops and said they did him good.

Gran knew all the doctors, medical assistants and quacks for twenty niles around and disliked the lot. At the Feast of the Intercession, when the priest went round the huts with his cross, the parish clerk told her of an old fellow living near the prison in town, a former army medical orderly \vho was good at cures. He advised her to consult him. Gran did. She drove off to town at first snowfall and brought back a little bearded old man in a long coat, a converted Jew whose whole face was covered with blue veins. There happened to be some jobbing craftsmen working in the hut at the time. An old tailor, wearing awe- inspiring spectacles, was cutting a waistcoat out of odd bits and pieces and two young fellows were making felt boots out of wool. Having been sacked for dr^&ng, Kiryak lived at home these days and was sit- ting beside the tailor mending a horse-collar. It was crowded, stuffy and smelly in the hut. The Jew examined Nicholas and said that he must be bled.

He put on the cups. The old tailor, Kiryak and the little girls stood watching and thought that they could see the iless coming out of Nicholas. Nicholas also \vatched the cups stuck to his chest graduaUy filling witl dark blood. He felt that something really was leaving him and smilci with pleasure.

'Good thing, this,' said the tailor. 'Let's hope it's some use.'

The Jew put on twelve cups and then twelve more, had some tea and Ieft. Nicholas started to shiver. His face looked peaked and seemed 'clenched like a fist', the women said. His fingers turned blue. He wrapped himself in a blanket and shcepskin, but grew coldcr and colder. By evening he felt very low. He wanted to be put on the floor and asked the tailor not to smoke. Then he went quiet inside his sheepskin and by morning he was dead.

IX

What a hard winter it was and what a long one!

Their own grain ran out by Christmas and they had to buy flour. Now that Kiryak lived at home he made such a din in the evenings that everyone was scared. He had such frightful headaches and felt so ashamed of himself in the mornings that it was painful to look at him. The starving cow could be heard Iowing in the shed day and night, a heart-breaking sound to Gran and Marya. Needless to say, there were hard frosts all the time and deep snowdrifts. Winter dragged on. On Lady Day a real blizzard blew up and it snowed at Easter.

Anyway, winter did end. In early April the days were warm, with night frosts. Winter still held out, but one day the warmth won through at last. Streams flowed and birds sang. The whoIe meadow and the bushes near the river were submerged in spring floods and between Zhukovo and the far bank there was one vast sheet of water with flocks of wild duck taking wing here and there. Every evening the blazing spring sunset and gorgeous clouds presented a new, un- believable, extraordinary sight—the sort of colours and clouds that you just cannot believe if you see them in a picture.

Cranes sped past overhead, calling plaintively as if asking someone to join them. Standing on the edge of the cliff, Olga gazed for some time at the floods, the sun and the bright church which Iooked like new. Her tears flowed and she caught her breath, feeling a wild urge to go away somewhere into the blue, even to the ends of the earth. It had been settled that she was to go back to Moscow as a house-maid, and Kiryak was to go with her to take a hall-porter's job or some- thing. If they could only go soon!

When it was dry and warm they prepared to leave. With packs on their backs, both wearing bark shoes, Olga and Sasha left the hut at daybreak. Marya came out to see them off-—Kiryak was ill and was staying at home for another week.

Olga looked at the church for the last time and said a prayer, thinking of her husband. She did not cry, but her face puckered up and looked as ugly as an old womai's. She had grown thin and plain and a little grey that winter and her bcrcavcmem had given hcr face a resigned, sad expression in place of her former attractive looks and pleasant smile. There was something blank and torpid about hcr glance, as if she was deaf. She was sorry to leave the village and the villagers. She remembered them carrying Nicholas's body and asking for a prayer to be said fof him at each hut, everyone wecping in sympathy with her grief.

During the sununer and winter there had been hours and days when these people seemed to live worse than beasts. They were frightful people to live with—rough, dishonest, filthy, drunken. Holding each other in mutual disrespect, fear and suspicion, they were always at loggerheads, always squabbling.

Who keeps the pot-house and makes the peasant drwtic ? The peasant. Who squanders his vilage, school and church funds on drink? The peasant. Who steals from his neighbours, sets fire to their property and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to run down the peasant at council and other meetings? The peasant.

Yes, they were frighrful people to live with. Still, they were men and women, they suffered and wept like men and women, and there was nothing in their lives for which an excuse could not be found— back-breaking work that makes you ache al over at night, cruel winters, poor harvests and overcrowding, with no help and nowhere to turn for it. The richer and stronger ones are no help, for they are rough, dishonest and drunken themselves and use the same filthy language. The pettiest official or clerk treats the peasants like tramps, even talking downwn to elders and churchwardens as if by right. Anyway, what help or good example can you expect from grasping, greedy, depraved, lazy persons who come to the vilage only to insult, rob and intimidate? Olga remembered how pitiful and crushed the old people had looked at the time when Kiryak had ben taken off to be flogged that winter.

She now felt sick with pity for all these people and kept turning back to look at the huts.

Marya went with her for about two miles, then said goodbye, knelt down and began wailing, pressing her face to the ground.

'I'm on my again. Poor me, poor lonely, unhappy me ... !'

For a long time she moaned like this. And for a long ^rne Olga and Sasha saw her kneeling and bowing as ifto someone at her side, clutch- ing her head while rooks flew above.

The sun rose high and it grew hot. Zhukovo was far behind. It was a nice day for walking and Olga and Sasha soon forgot both village and Marya. They felt cheerful and found everything entcrta^mg. It might be an old burial mound or a row of telegraph poles marching who knows where over the horizon, their wires whining mysteriously. Or they would see a far-away farm-house sunk in foliage, smeUing of dampness and hemp, and somehow felt that it was a happy home. Or they would see a horse's skeleton, bleached and lonely in the open country. Larks triUed furiously, quails caUed to each othcr and the corncrake's cry sounded as if someone was jerking an old iron latch.

At midday Olga and Sasha reached a large viUage. In the broad vilage street thcy ran across the little old man, Gencral Zhukov's cook, all hot, with his red, sweaty bald pate sh^^g in the sun. Olga and he did not recognize each other, but then both looked round to- gether and saw who it was and went their ways without a word. Stopping by a hut that looked newer and more prosperous than the others, Olga bowed in front of the open windows.

'Good Christian folk/ she chanted in a loud, shriU voice, 'alms for the love of Christ, of your charity, God rest the souls of your parents, may the Kingdom of Heaven be theirs.'

'Good Christian folk,' intoned Sasha, 'alms for the love of Christ, of your charity, the Kingdom of Heaven... .'

ANGEL

Miss Olga Plemyannikov, daughter. of a retired minor civil servant, sat brooding on the porch in her yard. She was hot, she was plagued by flies, she was glad it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were moving in from the east, and there were a few puffs of damp wind from the same quarter.

In the middle ofher yard stood Vanya Kukin. He waS in the enter- tainments business—he ran the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens—and he lived in a detached cottage in the grounds of Olga's house. He gazed up at the sky.

'Oh no, not again!' he said desperatelv. 'Not more rain! Why does it have to rain every single blessed day? This is the absolute limit! It'll be the ruin of me—such terrible losses every day!'

He threw up his arms.

'Such is our life, Miss,' he went on, addressing Olga. 'It's pathetic! You work, you do your best, you worry, you lie awake at night, you keep thinking how to improve things. But what happens? Take the audiences, to start with—ignorant savages! I give them the best operetta and pantomime, give them first-rate burlesque. But do they want it? Do they understand any of it? They want vulgar slapstick, that's what they want. And then, just look at this weather: rain nearly every evening. It started on May the tenth, and it's been at it the whole of May and June. It's an abomination! There are no audiences, but who has to pay the rent? Who pays the performers? Not me, I suppose, oh dear me no!'

Clouds gathered again late next afternoon.

'Oh, never mind, let it rain,' Kukin laughed hysterically. 'Let it swamp the whole Gardens, me included. May I enjoy no happiness in this world or the next! May the performers sue me! Better still, let them send me to Siberia: to hard labour! Even better, send me to the gallows, ha, ha, ha.'

It was just the same on the third day.

Olga listened to Kukin silently and seriously, occasional tears in her eyes, until his troubles moved her in the end, and she fell in love. He was a short, skinny, yellow-faced fellow with his hair combed back over his temples. He had a reedy, high-pitched voice, he twisted his mouth when he spoke, he always had a look of desperation. Yet he aroused deep and true emotion in her. She was always in love with someone—couldn't help it. Before this she had loved her father: an invalid, now, wheezing in his arm^hair in a darkened room. She had loved her aunt who came over from Bryansk to see her about once every two years. Earlier still, at j unior school, she had loved the French master. She was a quiet, good-hearted, sentimental, very healthy young lady with a tender, melting expression. Looking at her full, rosy cheeks, at her soft white neck with its dark birth-mark, at her kind, innocent smile whenever she heard good tidings—men thought she was 'a bit of all right'. They would smile too, while her lady guests couldn't resist suddenly clasping her hand when talking to her.

'You really are an angell' they would gush.

The house-where she had lived since birth, and which she was due to inherit, stood on the outskirts of to^: in Gipsy Lane, near Tivoli Gardens. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band in the Gardens and the crash of bursting rockcts, and it all sounded to her like Kukin battling with his doom and taking his main enemy—the indifferent public—by storm. She would feel deliciously faint—not at all sleepy—and when Kukin came back in the small hours she would tap her bedroom window, showing him only her face and onc shoulder through the curtains . .. and smile tenderly.

He proposed, they were married, and when he had feasted his eyes on that neck and those plump, healthy shoulders, he clapped his hands.

'You angel! he said.

He was happy, but it rained on his wedding day—fl«d his wedding night—so that look of desperation remained.

They lived happily after the marriage. She would sit in the box- office, look after the Gardens, record expenses, hand out wages. Her rosy cheeks, her charming, innocent, radiant smile could be glimpsed, now through the box-office window, now in the wings, now in the bar. Already she was telling all her friends that there was nothing in this world so remarkable, so important, so vital as the stage. True pleasure, culture, civilization . .. only in the theatre were these things to be had.

'But does the public understand?' she would ask. 'They want slap- stick. We put on Faust Inside Out yesterday, and almost all the boxes were empty. But if we'd staged some vulgar rubbish, me and Vanya, we'd have had a full house, you take my word. We're presenting Orpheus in the Underworld tomorrow, me and Vanya. You must come.'

Whatever Kukin said about the theatre and actors, she echoed. Like him she scorned the public for its ignorance and indifference to art. She interfered in rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the bandsmen. Whenever there was an unfavourable theatrical notice in the local newspaper she would weep—and then go and demand an explanation from the editor's office.

The actors liked her, they called her 'Me and Vanya' and 'Angel'. She was kind to them, she lent them small sums, and ifany of them let her down she would go and cry secretly without complaining to her husband.

They did quite well in winter too. They had taken the townwn theatre for the whole season, and rented it out for short engagements to a Ukrainian troupe, a conjurer, some local amateurs. Olga grew buxom and radiated happiness, while Kukin became thinner and yellower, and complained of his appalling losses though business was pretty good all winter. He coughed at night, and she would give him raspberry or lime-flower tisane, rub him with eau-de-Cologne and wrap him up in her soft shawls.

'Oh, you are such a splendid little chap,' she would say, stroking his hair and meaning every word. 'You're such a handsome little fellow.'

When he was a\vay in Moscow in Lent recruiting a new company she couldn't sleep, but just sat by the window looking at the stars. She compared herself to a hen—they too are restless and sleepless at night without a cock in the fowl-house. Kukin was held up in Moscow. But he'd be back by Easter, he wrote, and he was already making certain plans for the Tivoli in his letters. Then, late on Palm Sunday evening, there was a sudden ominous knocking at the gate as someone pum- melled it till it boomed like a barrel. Shuffling barefoot through the puddles, the sleepy cook ran to answer.

'Open up, please,' said a deep, hollow voice outside. 'A telegram for you.'

Olga had had telegrams from her husband before, but this time she nearly fainted for some reason. She opened it with trembling fingers, and read as follows:

MR KUKIN PASSED AWAY SUDDENLY TODAY NUBSCUTCH AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS FUFERAL TnJE.SDAY

That's what was printed in the telegram: fuferal. And there was this mcaningless nubscutch too. It was^ signcd by the operetta producer.

'My darling!' Olga sobbed. 'My lovely, darling Iittle Vanya, oh why did I ever meet you? Why did I have to know you, love you? For whom have you forsaken your poor, miserable little Olga?'

Kukin was buried in the Vagankov Cemetery in Moscow on the Tuesday. Olga returned home on Wednesday, flopped down on her bed as soon as she reached her room, and sobbed so Ioudly that she could be heard out in the street and in the next-door yards.

'Poor angel!' said the ladies of the neighbourhood, crossing them- selves. 'Darling Olga—she is taking it hard, poor dear.'

One day three months later Olga was coming dolefully back from church, in full mourning. A neighbour, Vasya Pustovalov, manager of the Babakayev timber-yard—also on his way back from church— chanced to be walking by her side. He wore a boater and a white waist- coat with a gold chain across it. He looked more like a country squire than a tradesman.

'There's always a pattern in things, Mrs. Kukin,' said he in a grave, sympathetic voice. 'The death of a dear one must be God's will, in which case we must be sensible and endure it patiently.'

He saw Olga to her gate, he said good-bye, he went his way. After- wards she seemed to hear that grave voice all day, and she need onIy close her eyes to see his dark beard in her imagination. She thought him very attractive. And she must havĉ made an impression on him, too, because not long afterwards a certain elderly Iady, whom she barely knew, came to take coffee with her . . . and had hardly sat down at table before she was on about Pustovalov. What a good steady man he was, said she—any young Iady would be glad to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov called in person. He onIy stayed about ten minutes, he hadn't much to say for himself, but Olga feII so much in Iove with him that she lay awake alI night in a hot, feverish state. In the morning she sent for the elderly Iady, the match was soon made, a wedding foIIowed.

After their marriage the Pustovalovs Iived happiIy. He was usuaIIy at the timber-yard tiII Iunch. Then he wouId do his business errands whiIe OIga took his pIace—sitting in the office tilI evening, keeping accounts, dispatching orders.

'Timber prices rise twenty per cent a year these days,' she wouId teII customers and friends. 'We used to deal in Iocal stuff, but now—just fancy !—Vasya has to go and fetch it from out Mogilyov way every year. And what a price!' she would say, putting both hands over her chceks in horror. 'What a pricc!'

She felt as if she had been a timber dealer from time immemorial. The most vital and essential thing in lifc was wood, she fclt: And she found something deeply moving in thc words joist, logging, laths, slats, scantlings, purlins, frames, slabs. When she was aslecp at nights, she would dream of mountains of boards and laths, and oflong, never- ending wagon trains taking timber somewhere far out of town. She dreamt of a whole battalion of posts, thirty foot by one foot, marching upright as they moved to take thc timber-yard by storm. Beams, baulks, slabs clashed with the resounding thud of seasoned wood, falling do\\Ti and getting up again, jamming against each other, and Olga would cry out in her sleep.

'What's the matter, Olga dcar?' Pustovalov would ask tenderly, and tell her to cross herself.

Shc shared all her husband's thoughts. If he thought the room too hot, if hc thought business slack—then she thought so as well. Her husband disliked all forms of entertainment, and stayed at home on his days off. So she did too.

'You spend all your time at home or in the officc,' her friends would say. 'You should go to the theatre or the circus, angeL'

'We haven't time for theatre-going, me and Vasya,' she would answer gravely. 'We're working people, we can't be bothered with trifles. What's so wonderful about your theatres, anyway?'

The Pustovalovs attended vcspers on Saturday nights. On Sundays and saints'-days they went to early service, and walked back from church side by side—with rapt expressions, both smelling sweet, her silk dress rustling agreeably. At homc they drank tea with fine white bread and various jams, and then ate pasties. At noon each day their yard, and the street outside their gate, were deliciously redolent of beetroot soup, roast lamb and duck—and of fish in Lent.You couldn't pass their gate without feeling hungry. They always kept the samovar boiling in the office, and they treated their customers to tea and buns. Once a week they both went to the public baths, and they would walk back side by side, red-faced.

'We're doing all right,' Olga told her friends. 'It's a good life, praise be. God grant everyone to live like me and Vasya.'

When Pustovalov went to fetch timber from the Mogilyov district she missed him terribly, she couldn't sleep at night, and she cried. She had an occasional evening visitor in young Srnirnin, an army vet who was renting her cottage. He would tell her stories or play cards with hcr, and this cheered her up. She was fascinated by his accounts of his own family life—he was married and had a son, but he and his wife had separated because she had been unfaithful. Now he hated her and sent her forty roublcs a month for the son's keep—hearing which, Olga would sigh, shake her head and pity Smirnin.

'God bless you,' she would say as she bade him good night and lighted his way to the stairs with a candlc. 'Thank you for sharing your sorrows with me. May God and the Holy Mother keep you.' She always spoke in this grave, deliberate way, imitating her husband.

Just as the vet was vanishing through the door downstairs she would call him back. 'Mr. Smirnin, you should make it up with your wife, you know. Do forgive her, if only for your son's sake—that little lad understands everything, I'II be bound.'

On PustovaIov's retum she wouId taIk in Iow tones about the vet and his unhappy famiIy history. Both wouId sigh, shake thcir heads— and discuss the Iittle boy, who probably missed lis fathcr. Then, strange as it might seem, by association of ideas both would kneeI before the icons, bow to the ground and pray to God to give thcm chiIdren.

Thus quietIy and peacefuIIy, in love and utter harmony, the Pustovalovs spent six years. But then, one winter's day, Vasya drank some hot tea in the office, wcnt out to dispatch some timber without his cap on, caught coId and feII iII. He was attended by aII thc best doctors, but the ilIncss took its course and he dicd after four months' suffering. OIga had bcen widowed again.

'Why did you forsake mc, dearest?' she sobbed after burying her husband. 'How ever can I Iivc without you? Oh, I'm so wrctched and unhappy! Pity me, good people, I'm all aIone now '

She worc a bIack dress with weepcrs, she had renounced her hat and gloves for alI timc, she seIdom went out of the house—and then onIy to church or her husband's grave—she lived at home Iike a nun. Not untiI six months had passed did she rcmovc those wecpers and open the shutters. She couId sometimes be scen of a morning shopping for food in the market with her cook, but how did she Iive now, what went on in her housc? It was a matter of guesswork . .. of guesswork based— shaII we say?—on her being seen having tca in her garden with the vet whiIe he read the newspaper to her, and also on what she said when she mct a Iady of hcr acquaintance at the post-office.

'Therc are no proper veterinary inspections in town, which is why we have so many diseases. You keep hearing ofpeople infected by milk and catching things from horses and cows. We should really take as much care of domestic animals' health as of people's.'

She echoed the vet's thoughts, f1ow holding the same views on all subjects as he. That she could not live a single year without an attach- ment, that she had found a new happiness in her o^ cottage . .. so much was clear. Any other woman would have incurred censure, but no one could think ill of Olga—everything about her was so above- board. She and the vet told no one of the change. in their relations. They tried to hide it, but failed because Olga couldn't keep a secret. When his service colleagues came to visit she would pour their tea or give them their supper, while talking about cattle plague, pearl disease and municipal slaughter-houses . .. which embarrassed him terribly. He would seize her arm as the guests left.

'Haven't I asked you not to talk about things you don't understand?' he would hiss angrily. 'Kindly don't interfere when us vets are talking shop, it really is most tiresome.'

She looked at him in consternation and alarm. 'What can I talk about then, Volodya ?'

She would embrace him with tears in her eyes, she would beg him not to be angry—and they would both be happy.

Their happiness proved short-lived, though. The vet left with his regiment. And since that regiment had been posted to far-away parts —Siberia practically—he left for good. Olga was alone.

She really was alone this time. Her father had died long ago, and his old arm-chair was lying around the attic minus one leg and covered with dust. She became thin, she lost her looks. People no longer noticed her, no longer smiled at her in the street. Her best years were over and done with, obviously. A new life was beginning, an unknown life—better not think about it. Sitting on the porch ofan evening, Olga could hear the band playing and the rockets bursting in the Tivoli, but that did not stimulate her thoughts. She gazed blankly at her empty yard, she thought of nothing, she wanted nothing. When night came she went to bed and dreamt about that empty yard. She did not seem to want food and drink.

The main trouble was, though, that she no longer had views on anything. She saw objects around her, yes, she did grasp what was going o_n. But she could not form opinions. What was she to talk about? She did not know. It's a terrible thing, that, not having opinions. You see an upright bottle, say—or rain, or a peasant in a cart. But what are they for: that bottIe, that rain, that peasant? What sense do they make? That you couldn't say . . . not even if someone gave you a thousand roubles, you couldn't. In the Kukin and Pustovalov eras—and then in the vet's day—Olga could give reasons for everything, she would have offered a view on any subject you Iiked. But. now her mind and heart were as empty as her empty yard. It was an unnerving, bitter sensation: like eating a lot of wormwood.

The town has been gradually expanding on all sides. Gipsy Lane is a 'road' now. Houses have mushroomed and a set of side-streets has sprung up where once Tivoli and timber-yard stood. How time does fly! Olga's house looks dingy, her roofhas rusted, her shed is lop-sided, her entire premises are deep in weeds and stinging nettles. OIga herself looks older, uglier. In summer she sits on her porch with the same old heartache and emptiness, there is the same old taste of wormwood. In winter she sits by her window looking at the snow. If she scents the spring air, or hears the peal of cathedral bells borne on the breeze, memories suddenly overwhelm her, she feels a delicious swooning sensation, tears well from her eyes. It lasts only a minute, though. Then the old emptiness returns, and life loses all meaning. Her black cat Bryska rubs up against his mistress, purring gently, but these feline caresses leave Olga cold. She needs a bit more than that! She needs a love to possess her whole being, all her mind and soul: a Iove to equip her with ideas, with a sense of purpose, a love to warm her ageing blood. She irritably shakes black Bryska off her lap. 'Away with you, you're not wanted here.'

So day follows day, year follows year: a life without joy, without opinions. Whatever her cook Mavra says goes.

Late one warm July afternoon, as the town cows are being driven do^ the street, filling the whole yard with dust clouds, there is a sudden knock at the gate. Olga opens it herself, Iooks out—and is dumbfounded. At the gate stands veterinary surgeon Smirnin—now grey-haired and wearing civilian clothes. It all comes back to her at once and she breaks down and cries, laying her head on his chest without a word. She is so shaken that they have both gone into the house and sat do^ to tea before she has realized what is happening.

'Dearest Volodya,' she mutters, trembling with joy. 'What brings you here?'

'I want to settle down here for good,' he tells her. 'I've resigned and I want to try my luck as a civilian—want to put down some roots.

Bcsides, it's time my son wcnt to school, he's a big boy now. I've made it up with my wife, you know.'

Olga asked where she was.

'She's at a hotel with thc boy while I look for somewhere to live.'

'Goodness me, then why not take my house, dear? It would be ideal for you! Oh, for heaven's sake, I wouldn't charge you anything.'

Overcome by emotion, Olga burst out crying again. 'You can live here and I'll manage in the cottage. Goodness, how marvellous!'

Next day they were already painting the roof and wrutew:ishing the walls, while Olga strode up and down the yard, arms akimbo, seeing to everything. Hcr old smile shone on her face, but she was like a new woman—she seemed as fresh as if she had woken up after a long sleep. The vct's wife arrived—a thin, plain woman with short hair and a petulant expression—bringing little Sasha. He was small for his age (nine), he was chubby, he had bright blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. And no sooner had that boy sct foot in the yard than he was off chasing the cat. His cheerful, merry laughter rang out.

'Is that your cat, Aunty ?' he asked Olga. 'When it has babies, may we have one, please? Mummy's so scared of mice.'

Olga talked to him and gave him tea. She suddenly fclt warm inside, and a delicious faintncss came over her, just as if he was her own son. When he sat in the dining-room of an evening doing his homework she would gaze at him with loving pity.

'My darling, my little beauty, my child,' she would whisper. 'What a clever little, pale little fcllow you are.'

'An island,' he read out, 'is a piecc of land entirely surrounded by water.'

'An island is a piece of land—' she repeated. This, after so many years' silence and empty-headedness, was her first confidently expressed opmion.

Yes, she now had opinions of her own. At supper she would tell Sasha's parents how hard schoolchildren had to work these days. Better, even so, to have a classical than a modern education because the classical curriculum opens all doors. Doctor, engineer . .. you can take your pick.

After Sasha had started going to school his mother went to her sister's in Kharkov and did not return. His father was off every day inspecting cattle, and there wcre times when he was away from home for three days on cnd. They werc completely neglccting Sasha, Olga felt—he wasn't wantcd in the house, he was dying of starvation. So

she moved him to her cottage and fixed him up with his little room.

Now Sasha has been living in the cottage for six months. Every mo^^g Olga goes to his room and finds him sound asleep with his hand beneath his cheek—not breathing, apparently. It seems a pity to wake him up.

'Get up, Sasha darling,' she says sadly. 'Time for school.'

He gets up, dresses,'says his prayers, sits down to breakfast. He drinks three glasses of tea, he eats two large rolls, half a French loafand butter. He is still not quite awake, and so is in rather a bad mood.

'That fable, Sasha—' says Olga. 'You didn't learn it properly.' She looks at him as though she is seeing him off on a long jo^ney. 'Oh, you are such a handful! You m«ĵf try and learn, dear, you must do what teacher says.'

'Oh, don't bother me, please!' replies Sasha.

Then he starts off down the street to school: a small boy in a large cap, satchel on back.. Olga follows him silently.

'Sasha, dear,' she calls.

He looks round and she puts a date or caramel in his hand. When they turn off into the school road he feels ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman. He looks rotmd.

'Go home, AWlty,' says he. 'I'll make my o"wn way now.'

She stands and watches without taking her eyes off him Witil he disappears up the school drive. How she loves him! None ofher earlier attac^nents has been so profound, never before has her innermost being surrendered as wholeheartedly, as ^welfishly, as joyfully as it does now that her maternal feelings are increasingly welling up inside her. For this boy—no relative at all—for his dimpled cheeks, for his cap she would give her whole life, give it gladly, with tears ofecstasy. Why? Who knows?

After taking Sasha to school she goes home quietly—contented, at peace, overflowing with love. Her face glows—she has been looking yotmger these last six months—and she smiles. It is a pleasure to see her.

'Hallo, Olga, angel,' people say when they meet her. 'How are you. angel?'

'They do work schoolchildren so hard these days,' she says in the market. 'No, seriously—the First Form had to learn a whole fable by heart yesterday. And do a Latin translation. S^ra too. It's too much for a little lad.'

What she says about teachers, lessons and textbooks ... it's all pure Sasha!

At about half past two they lunch together, and in the evening they do Sasha's homework together, weeping. Putting him to bed, she makes the sign of the cross over him at great length, whispering a prayer. Then she goes to bed herself, and she dreams of that future— vague, far distant—when Sasha will take his degree and become a doctor or engineer . .. when he will own his own big house, his horses and carriage, when he will marry and have children.

Still thinking these same thoughts, she falls asleep. From her closed eyes tears course down her cheeks, and the black cat lies purring by her side.

Then, suddenly, there is a loud knock on the garden gate and Olga wakes up, too scared to breathe, her heart pounding. Half a minute passes, there is a second knock.

'A telegram from Kharkov,' thinks she, trembling all over. 'Sasha's mother wants him in Kharkov. Oh, goodness me!'

She is in despair. Her head, hands and feet are cold, and she feels as if shc's the most ^^appy person in the world. But another minute passes, voices are heard. It's the vet coming back from his club.

'Oh, thank God,' she thinks.

Her anxiety gradually subsides and she can relax again. She lies down and thinks ofSasha: deep in slumber in the next room, and occasionally talking in his sleep.

'You watch out!' he says. 'You go away! Don't you pick quarrels with me!'

THE RUSSIAN MASTER

I

With a cIatter of hooves on the woodcn floor three fine, expensive horses werc brought out of the stable: Count Nulin, the black, and then the grey, Giant, with his sister Mayka. WhiIe saddling Giant oId Shelestov spoke to his daughter Masha.

'Come on, Marie Godefroi, up you get and off with you!'

Masha SheIestov was the youngest in the famiIy. She was eightecn, but they stiIl thought of her as a chiId, calling her by the pet names Manya and Manyusya. And when the circus had come to town she had enjoyed it so mdch that they had nicknamed her Maric Godefroi .ifter the famous equestrienne.

'Off we go !' she shouted, mounting Giant.

Her sister Varya got on Mayka, Nikitin on Count Nulin, the officers mounted their own horses, and the long, picturesque cavalcade amblcd out of the yard in singIe file with a gIeam of officers' white tunics and ladies' black riding habits.

As they mounted and rode into the strcet Nikitin noticed that Masha had eyes for him aIone, looking anxiousIy at him and Count Nulin.

'HoId him tight, Mr. Nikitin. Don't let him shy, he's onIy playing

Whether by accident or because her Giant was a great friend of his Count Nulin, she rode beside Nikitin all the time, as she had the day before and the day before that, while he looked at her smalI, graceful form as she sat the proud grey, at her fine profile and the wholIy unbecoming chimney-pot hat which seemed to age her. Enchanted, enthralled, enraptured, he looked and Iistened without taking much in.

'I swear I'Il pIuck up my courage,' he toId himself. 'I'II speak to her this very day, by God I wiII.'

It was after six in the evening, the hour when white acacias and IiIacs smeIl so strongly that the air and the very trees seem to congeal in their perfume. The band pIayed in the town park. Horses' hooves rang on the road. Laughter, voices, banging gates were heard on aII sides. SoIdiers they met saluted the officers, schooIboys bowed to Nikitin. StroIIers, and those hurrying to the park for the music, alI obviousIy enjoyed Iooking at the riders. How warm it was and how 184 the russian master

soft the clouds looked, scattered at random about the sky, how gently soothing were the shadows of the poplars and acacias—shadows reaching right across the wide street to grasp the houses on the othcr side as high as their first floors and balconies.

They rode on out of town, trotting down the highway. Here was no more sccnt of acacia and lilac, nor band music—-just thc smell of fields and the bright green of young rye and wheat. Gophers whistled, rooks cawed. Wherever one looked all was green apart from a few black melon-plots here and there, and a white streak of late apple- blossom in the graveyard far to their left.

They passed the slaughterhouses and brewery, they overtook a military band hurrying to the country park.

'Polyansky has a fine horse, I admit,' Masha told Nikitin with a glancc at the officer riding beside Varya. 'But it does have its blemishes. The white patch on its left leg is wrong, and you'll notice it jibs. Thcre's no way of training it now, so it'll go on jibbing till its dying day.'

Like her father, Masha was keen on horses. To sec anyone else with a fine horse agony to hcr, and she liked faulting other people's mounts. Nikitin knew nothing about horses, though. Reining or curbing, trotting or galloping—it was all one to him. He just felt he looked out of place, which \vas why he thought the officers must attract Masha more than he, being so much at home in the saddle. And so he was jealous of them.

As they rode past the country p.irk someone suggested calling in for a glass of soda water. They did. The only trees in this park were oaks just coming into leaf, and through the young foliage the whole park could be seen—bandstand, tables, swings and crows' nests like huge fur caps. Dismounting ncar a table, the ridcrs and their ladies ordered soda water. Friends strolling in the park came up, including an army medical ofiicer in riding boots and the bandmaster awaiting his bands- mcn. The doctor must have taken Nikitin for a student because he asked whcthcr he had come ovcr for the summer holidays.

'No, I live hcrc,' Nikitin answered. 'I teach at the high school.'

'Rcally?' The doctor was surprised. 'So young and tcaching already?'

'Young indeed ! Good grief, I'm twenty-six!'

'You do have a beard and moustache, yet you don't seem more than twcnty-two or thrce. You certainly do look young.'

'Oh, not again—what bloody chcck!' thought Nikitin. 'The fellow takes me for a whipper-snapper.'

It riled him when people said how young he looked, especially in women's or schoolboys' company. Ever since coming to town and taking this job he had fonnd himself disliking his own youthful appearance. The boys were not afraid of him, old men called him 'young chap', and women would rather dance with him than listen to his long speeches. He would have given a lot to be ten years older.

From the park they rode on to the Shelestovs' farm, stopped at the gate and called for the bailiff's wife Praskovya to bring them fresh milk. But no one drank it—they just looked at each other, laughed and started cantering back. As they rode back the band was playing in the country park, the sun had sunk behind the graveyard, and half thc sky was sunset-crimson.

Again Masha rode with Nikitin. He wanted to tell her he was madly in love with her—but said nothing, afraid of the officers and Varya hearing. Masha was silent too. Sensing why this was and why she rode beside him, he felt so happy that everything—earth, sky, town lights, thc brewery's black silhouette—blended before his eyes into something delightfully soothing while Count Nulin seemed to float on air, wanting to climb the crimson sky.

They arrived home. A samovar hissed on the gardcn table at one edgc of which old Shelestov sat with some friends, officers of the local assizes. As usual hc was criticizing someonc.

'It's the act of a bounder, an utter bounder—yes, of a bounder, si r.'

Since falling in lovc with Masha, Nikitin had found everything about the Shelestovs to his liking—their house, its garden, afternoon tea, wicker chairs, their old nanny and even the old man's favouritc word, 'bounder'. Hc only disliked the horde of cats and dogs and the Egyptian pigeons moaning lugubriously in their big cagc on the terrace. There were so many dogs about house and yard that he had learnt to distinguish only two since meeting thc family—Bluebottlc and Fishfacc.

Bluebottle was a small, mangy, shaggy-muzzled, spiteful, spoilt little tyke. She hated Nikitin, and at sight ofhim would put her head on one side, barc her tceth and cmbark on a long, liquid, nasal-guttural snarl. Then she would sit undcr his chair, and givc a grcat piercing pcal of yelps when he tricd to chase her away. 'Don't be afraid,' his hosts would say. 'She's a good little dog.'

Fishface was a huge, black, long-legged hound with a tail like a ramrod. During tca and dinncr it usually stalked silcntly bencath the table, banging that tail on boots and table-legs. This was a good- natured, stupid hound, but Nikitin couldn't stand it because it would put its muzzle on your lap at mealtimes and slobber on your trousers. He had often tried hitting its large head with his knife handle, had flicked its nose, cursed it, complained. But nothing saved his trousers from spots.

Tea, jam, rusks and butter tasted good after the ride. Everyone drank his first glass with silent relish, but by the second they were already arguing. It was always Varya who began these mealtime disputes. She was twenty-three. A good-looking girl, prettier than Masha, she was considered the cleverest and most cultured person in the household and she wore the responsible, severe air befitting an older daughter who has taken the plact: ofher dead mother. As mistress of the house she felt entitled to wear a smock when she had guests, she called the officers by their surnames, and she treated Masha as a child, addressing her in schoolmistressy style. She called herself an old maid— she was quite sure she was going to get married, in other words.

Every conversation, even on the weather, she needs must convert into an argument. She was a great one for quibbling, detecting inconsistencies, splitting hairs. Start talking to her and she would be glaring into your face, suddenly interrupting with a 'now,just you look here, Petrov, you were saying the exact opposite only the day before yesterday'. Or she would smile sardonically with an 'ah,so now we're advocating the principles of the secret police, are we? Hearty congratu- lations!' If you made a joke or pun she'd pitch in at once with her 'feeble' or 'dead as a door nail'. Or, should an officer jest, she would give a scornful gumace and call it 'barrack-room wit', rolling her Rs so impressively that Bluebottle would growl back from under a chair.

Today's teatime quarrel began with Nikitin talking about school examinations and Varya interrupting.

'Now, you look here, Nikitin. You say the boys have a hard time. And whose fault is that, pray? For instance you set the eighth form an essay on Pushkin as a psychologist. Now, in the fmst place you shouldn't set such difficuJt subjects. And secondly how can you call Pushkin a psychologist? Shchcdrin, now, or Dostoyevsky, say—that's a different story. But Pushkin is a great poet and nothing more.'

'Shchedrin is one thing, Pushkin is something else,' Nikitin sulkily rejoined.

'I know Shchedrin isn't on your syllabus, but that's beside the point. Just you explain what makes Pushkin a psychologist.'

'Biit it's plain as a pikcstaff Very well, then, I'll give exmnples.'

He recited some passages of Eugene Oncgi« and then of Boris Goduuot>.

'I see no psychology thcre,' sighed Vary;i. 'A psychologist ddvcs into the crannies of the human soul. Those arc fine vcrses, nothing more.'

Nikitin was offended. 'I know your sort of psychology. You want somebody to saw my finger with a blunt saw while I yell my head ofi", that's your idea of psychology.'

'Fceble! And you still haven't proved that Piishkin's a psychologist.'

When Nikitin found himself arguing against views which he thought hackneyed, conventional and the like, he usually jumpcd out of his seat, clutched his head in both hands and ran up and down thc room groaning—which is what he did now. He jumped up, he clutched his head, he walked round the table groaning, and then sat away from it.

The officers took his part. Captain Polyansky .assured V;irya that Pushkin really was a psychologist, citing two lines of Lermontov to prove it, and Lieutenant Gernct said that Pushkin wouldn't have had a statue erected to him in Moscow had he not been a psychologist.

'It's the act of a bounder,' was heard from.thc other end of the table. 'I said as much to the Governor. "It's the act of a bounder, sir", I told him.'

'I shan't argue any more!' shouted Nikitin. 'This could go on till doomsday, I've had enough. Oh, clear off, you bloody dog!' he shouted at Fishface who had put his head and paw on his lap.

A guttural snarl came from under his chair.

'Admit you're in the wrong!' Varya shouted. 'Own up!'

But some young ladies came in, and the dispute died a natural death. They all went into the drawing-room, where Varya sat at the grand piano and played dances. They danced a waltz, a polka and a quadrille with a grand chain led through the whole house by Captain Polyansky, after which they waltzed again.

Watching the yoWigsters in the drawing-room, the older folk sat out the dances and smoked, among them the municipal bank manager Shebaldin, reno-wned for his love oflitcrature and dramatic art. He had founded the local music and drama group, taking part in performances himself, but for some reason only playing comic footmen or intoning Alexis Tolstoy's poem 'The Sinful Woman'. He had been nicknamed 'the Mummy' in to^n because he was tall, emaciated and sinewy with a fixed, solemn expression and dull, glazed eyes. So sincere was his love of the theatre that he cven shaved his moustache and beard, which made him look still more like a mummy.

After the grand chain he shuffled up sideways to Nikitin.

'I had the pleasure of being present at the argument during tca,' he remarked, coughing. 'And I fully share your opinion. We're fellow- spirits, you and I, and I'd much welcome a chat. Now, have you read Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgie ?'

'No.'

Shebaldin lookcd horrified, waved his hands as if he had b^nt his fi.ngers, and backed away from Nikitin without a word. The man's ftgure, his question, his surprise—all seemed absurd to Nikitin, who yet wondered whether it wasn't 'really rather embarrassing. Here I am teaching literature, and I still haven't read Lessing. I shall have to.'

Before supper everyone, young and old, sat do^ to play forfeits. They took two packs of cards. One was dealt round, the other laid on the table face downwards.

'Whoever holds this card,' said old Shelestov solemnly, lifting the top card of the second pack, 'his forfeit is to go straight to the nursery and kiss Nanny.'

The good fortune ofkissing Nanny devolved upon Shebaldin. They all flocked rotmd him, they took him to the nursery and they made him kiss the nanny in an uproar of laughing, clapping and shouting.

'Less passion, I insist!' shouted Shclestov, tears rolling down his cheeks.

Nikitin's forfeit was to take confession. He sat on a chair in the middle of the drawing-room, a shawl was brought and put over his head. Varya came to confess first.

'I know your sins, madam.' Nikitin gazed at her stcm profile in thc gloom. 'How, pray, do you account for going out with Polyansky every day? Oho, there's more to this than meets the eye!'

'Feeblc,' said Varya. And went.

Then Nikitin saw big, lustrous, unwavering eyes tmder his shawl, a lovely profile emerged from the gloom, and he caught a familiar, precious fragrance redolent of.Masha's room.

'Marie Godefroi, what are your sins?' he said, and did not know his own voice—so tender, so soft was it.

Masha screwed up her eyes, put out the tip of her tongue, laughed and went away. A minute later she was standing in the middle of the room clapping her hands.

'Supper, supper, supper,' she shouted, and all trooped into the dining-room.

At supper Varya had another argument, with her father this time. Polyansky stolidly ate his food, drank his claret, and told Nikitin about a winter's night which he had once spent knee-deep in a bog when on active service. The enemy had been so near that they were forbidden to speak or smoke, it had been cold and dark, there had been a piercing wind. Nikitin listened, watching Masha out of the corner of his eye while she gazed at him without wavering or blinking, as if deep in thought and oblivious ofher surroundings. This pleased and tormented him.

'Why docs shc look at me like that?' he agonizingly wondercd. 'It's embarrassing, someone may notice. Oh, how young, how innoccnt she is.'

The party broke up at midnight. When Nikitin had gone through the gate a first-floor window banged open, Masha showed herself, and called his name.

'What is it?'

'It's just that—.' Masha was obviously wondering what to say. 'Er, Polyansky's promised to bring his camera in a day or two and photo- graph us all. We must have a get-together.'

'Fine.'

Masha disappearcd, the window slammed, and someone in the house at once started playing the piano.

'Oh, what a house,' thought Nikitin, crossing the street. 'A house where the only moaning comes from the Egyptian pigeons, and that simply because they have no other way to express their joy.'

Fun was not confined to the Shelestovs', though, for Nikitin had not taken two hundrcd steps before piano music was heard from another house. He w.alked on a bit and saw a peasant playing a balalaika near a gate. The band in the park struck up a pot-pourri of Russian folk- songs.

Nikitin lived a quarter of a mile from the Shclcstovs in an eight- roomed flat, rented at three hundred roubles a year, which he shared with his colleague Hippolytus, the geography and history master. This Hippolytus—a snub-nosed, reddish-bearded, middlc-aged man with a rather coarse but good-natured cxpression more like a workman's than an intcllectual's—was sitting at his desk correcting pupils' maps when Nikitin returncd. According to Hippolytus, drawing your maps was the most crucial and essential aspect of geography, while with history it was knowing your dates—he would sit up night after night with his blue pencil correcting the maps of boys and girls he taught, or compiling lists of dates.

'Wonderful weather today,' said Nikitin, going into Hippolytus's room. 'I don't know how you can stay indoors.'

No great talker, Hippolytus would either say nothing at all or utter the merest platitudes. He now vouchsafed the following reply.

'It is indeed excellent weather. It is May now, and it will soon be full su^mer. Summer differs from winter. Stoves must be lit in winter, whercas in summer you can keep warm without them. Open your windows on a summer night and you'll still be warm, whereas in winter you are cold even with the double frames.'

After sitting near the desk for less than a minute, Nikitin felt bored and stood up, yawning.

'Good night,' he said. 'I wanted to tell you something romantic affecting myself, but you have geography on the brain. One talks to you of love, and you ask for the date of the Battle of Kalka. To hell with your battles and your Siberian capes.'

'But why are you so cross?'

'I'm just fed up.'

Annoyed at not having proposed to Masha and having no one to tell about his love, he went and lay on his study sofa. The room was dark and quiet. Lying and gazing into the darkness, Nikitin imagined that somc errand would take him to St. Petersburg in a couple ofyears, and that the weeping Masha would see him off at the station. In St. Petersburg he would receive a long letter from her in which she would cntreat him to hurry back home. He would write her a reply beginning 'Darling little rat '

'Just so, "darling little rat",' he laughed.

He was lying uncomfortably, so he put his hands behind his head and canted his left leg on to the sofa back. That was better. Meanwhile dawn was breaking beyond the window, sleepy cocks crowed outside. Nikitin went on thinking—how he would come back from St. Petersburg, how Masha would meet him at the station and throw her arms round his neck shrieking with joy. Better still, he would play a trick. He would come back secretly late at night, the cook would let him in, and he would tip-toe to the bedroom, undress noiselessly and dive into bed. She would wake up—ah, bliss!

It was quite light now, but instead of his study and its window he saw Masha, who sat talking on the steps of the brewery they had ridden past that afternoon. She took Nikitin's arm and they went to the country park where he saw those oaks and crows' nests like fur caps. One nest swayed and out peeped Shebaldin with a vociferous 'Who hasn't read his Lessing?'

Shuddering all over, Nikitin opened his eyes. There by the sofa stood Hippolytus, head thrown back as he tied his cravat.

'Get up, it's time for school,' he said. 'Now, you shouldn't sleep in your clothes, it spoils them. One sleeps in one's bed after first removing one 's atti re.'

And he embarked on his usual long, emphatic string of platitudes.

Nikitin's first period was Russian grammar with the second form. Going into the classroom at nine o'clock precisely, he saw two capital letters chalked on the blackboard: M. S. They stood for Masha Shclestov no doubt.

'So the' little devils have found out,' thought Nikitin. 'How do they always know everything?'

His second period was Russian literature with the fifth form. Here too he saw an M. S. on the board, and as he left the classroom at the end of the lesson a cry rang out behind him like a catcall from a theatre gallery. 'Good old Masha !'

He felt muzzy after sleeping in his clothes, his body drooped from fatigue. His pupils, daily tooking forward to the break before their examinations, were idle and depressed, and they misbehaved out of boredom. Also depressed, Nikitin ignored their little tricks and kept going to the window. He saw the street bathed in sunJight, the limpid blue sky above the houses, the birds—while far, far away beyond green gardens and houses stretched an infinitely remote expanse with dark blue coppices and a puff of steam from a moving train.

Two white-tunicked officers flicked their whips as they walked down the street in the shade of the acacias. A party of grey-bearded Jews in peaked caps drove past in a brake, the governess was taking the headmistress's grand-daughter for a walk, Fishface dashed past with two mongrels. And there went Varya in her plain grey dress and red stockings, carrying a European Hera/d—she must have been to the municipal library.

It was a long time before school would end at three o'clock. Nor could Nikitin go home or visit the Shelestovs after school, for he had to give a lesson at Wolf's. This Wolf was a rich Jewish protestant convert who did not send his children to school, but got schoolmasters to coach them privately at five roubles a lesson.

Nikitin was bored, bored, bored)

At thrce o'clock he wcnt to Wolf's and spcnt what scemed like all cternity there. He left at five o'clock, and was due back at school by seven for a teachers' mceting to fix the oral examination timetable for the fourth and sixth forms.

That night, on his way from school to the Shelestovs', he felt his heart pounding and his face burning. A weck ago, a month ago— every time he had been about to propose he had had an entire harangue ready complete with introduction and peroration, but now he didn't have one word preparcd, his head was awhirl. All he knew was that he was going to declare himself this evening for sure and that there was no more putting it off.

He would ask her into the garden, he reflected. Tll stroll about a bit and I'll propose.'

There was no one in the hall. He went into the drawing-room and parlour, but there was no one there either. He heard Varya arguing with someone upstairs and the dressmaker clicking her scissors in the nursery.

There was a lobby with three names: the 'small', the 'corridor', the 'dark' room. It contained a big old cupboard full of medicines, gun- powder and hunting gear, and a narrow wooden staircase, with cats always asleep on it, leading to the first floor. The lobby had two doors—one to the nursery, one to the drawing-room. When Nikitin went in on his way upstairs the nursery door suddenly opened and slammed so hard that staircase and cupboard rattled. Out rushed Masha in a dark dress, carrying a piece of blue material, and darted to the stairs without seeing him.

'Hey', Nikitin said to stop her. 'Hallo, Godefroi. May I, er '

He gasped, he didn't know what to say, clutching her hand with one hand and the blue material with the other. Half frightened, half surprised, she gazed at him wide-eyed.

'Look here—,' Nikitin went on, afraid she would go away. 'I have something to say, only it's, er, awkward here. I can't do it, it's beyond me, Godefroi, it's more than I can manage and that's all there, er, is to it. '

The blue material slipped to the floor and Nikitin took Masha's other hand. She turned pale, moved her lips and backed away from him, ending up in the corner between wall and cupboard.

'I swear, I assure you,' he said softly. 'I take my oath, Masha, er '

She threw her head back and he kissed her lips, holding her check with his fingers to make the kiss last longer. Then he somehow found himself in the corner between cupboard and wall, whilc she had twined her arms round his neck and was pressing her head ag;iinst his chin.

Then they both ran into the garden.

Thc Shelestovs had a large, ten-acre garden with a score ot old maplcs and limes. There was a fir, a sweet chestnut, a silvery olive, and all the rest were fruit-trees—cherries, apples, pears. There were masscs of flowers too.

Nikitin and Masha ran down the paths, now silent, now laugrung, now asking disconnected questions which went unanswered, while a half moon shone over the garden. On the ground—dark grass, dimly lit by the moon's crcscent—drowsy tulips and irises stretched up as if they too longed to hear words of love.

When Nikitin and Masha came back to the house the officers and young ladies were already assembled, dancing a mazurka. Again Polyansky led a grand chain through the house, again they played forfeits after dancing. But when the guests went into the dining-room before supper, Masha was left alone with Nikitin.

She pressed close to him. 'You must talk to papa and Varya, I'm too embarrassed.'

After supper he spoke to the old man, who heard him out. 'I'm most grateful,' said he, after some thought, 'for the honour which you are conferring on myself and my daughter, but permit me to spcak as a friend—not as a father, but as between gentlemen. Now, why oh why the great rush to marry so early? Only farm labourers marry so young, but then we all know they're a lot of bounders, sir. But you—what's got into you? A ball and chain at your tender age—where's the fun in that?'

Nikitin took umbrage. 'I'm nof young, I'm nearly twenty-seven.'

'Father, the farrier's here,' shouted Varya from another room. And that cnded the conversation.

Varya, Masha and Polyansky saw Nikitin home.

'Why does your mysterious Mr. Hippolytus never emerge?' Varya asked when they rcached his gate. 'He might come and see us.'

The mysterious Mr. Hippolytus was sitting on his bed taking off 1 iis trousers when Nikitin went into his room.

'Don't go to bed yet, old man,' Nikitin gasped. 'Just give me a moment, please.'

Hippolytus quickly put his trousers on again and asked anxiously what the mattcr was.

'I'm gctting married.'

Nikitin sat do^vm beside his colleague with the amazed look of one who has succceded in surprising himself. 'Just fancy, I'm getting married. To Masha Shelestov, I proposed this cvening.'

'Well, she seems a nice girl. She is very young, though,'

'Yes, young she is,' sighed Nikitin with a worried shrug. 'Very young indeed.'

'She was a pupil of mine once. I remember her, she wam't bad at geography but she was no good at history. And she was inattentive in class.'

Nikitin suddenly felt rather sorry for his colleague and wanted to say something kind and consoling. 'Why don't get married, old man?' he asked. 'My dear Hippolytus, why don't you marry Varya, say? She's a splendid girl, quite first-rate. Oh, she is very argumentative, I know, but she's so very, very good-hearted. She was asking about you just now. So you marry her, old chap, how about it?'

That Varya wouldn't have this boring, snub-nosed character Nikitin knew perfectly well, yet he still tried to persuade him to marry her. Why?

Hippolytus pondered. 'Marriage is a serious step,' he said. 'One must look at all the angles, weigh every issue, one mustn't be too casual. Caution never comes amiss—cspecially in wedlock when a man, ceasing to be a bachelor, begins a new life.'

He began uttering his pIatitudes, but Nikitin stopped listening to him, said goodnight and went to his room. Hastily undressing, he quickly Iay down in a great hurry to brood on his happiness, his Masha, his future. Then he smiled, suddenly remembering that he still hadn't read Lessing.

'I must read him,' he thought. 'But then again, why should I? To hell with him.'

Exhausted by bliss, he fell asleep at once and smiled through till morning. Hc dreamt of the clatter of horses' hooves on the wooden floor. He dreamt of black Count Nulin and the grey, Giant, with his sister Mayka, being brought out of the stable.

II

It was very crowded and noisy in church. At onc point somconc in the congregation actually shouted aloud, and the priest who was marrying me and Masha pcered over his spectacles.

'Don't wander about the church,' he said sternly. 'Just keep still and worship. This is God's house, remember.'

I had two of my colleagues in attendance, while Masha was attended by Captain Polyansky and Lieutenant Gernet. The bishop's choir sang superbly. The sputtering candles, the glitter, the fine clothes, the officers, the mass of joyful, contented faces, Masha's special ethereal look, the entire ambience, the words of the nuptial prayers—they moved me to tears, they filled me with exultation. How my life has blossomed out, I thought. How romantically, how poetically it has been shaping oflate. Two years ago I wasjust a student living in cheap lodgings in Moscow's Neglinny Drive, with no money, no relatives and—1 then fancied—no future. But now I teach at the high school in one of the best county towns, I'm secure, I'm loved, I'm spoilt. For me this congregation is assembled, thought I. For me three chandeliers burn, for me the archdeacon booms, for me the choir puts forth its efforts. For me too this young creature, soon to be called my wife, is so youthful, so elegant, so happy. I remembered our first meetings, our country rides, my proposal and the weather which seemed to have gone out of its way to be wonderfully fine all summer. That happiness which, in my old Neglinny Drive days, only seemed possible in novels and stories—I was actually experiencing it now, apparently, I was taking it in my hands.

After the ceremony everyone crowded round Masha and me, they expressed their sincere pleasure, they congratulated us, they wished us happiness. A retired major-general in his late sixties congratulated Masha alone.

'I trust, my dear, that now you're married you'll still be the same dear little rosebud,' he told her in a squeaky, senile voice audible throughout the church.

The officers, the headmaster, the teachers—all gave the socially incumbent grin, and I could feel that ingratiating, artificial smile on my face too. Dear old Mr. Hippolytus—history master, geography master, mouther of platitudes—shook my hand firmly and spoke with feeling. 'Hitherto you've been a bachelor and have lived on your own. But now you're married and single no longer.'

From church we went to the two-storeyed house with unrendered walls which comes to me with the dowry. Besides the house Masha is bringing about twenty thousand roubles in cash and a place called Meliton's Heath complete with a shack where I'm told there are lots of hens and ducks running wild because no one looks after them.

When I got home from church I strctchcd and loungcd on thc otto- man in my new study, smoking. I felt more snug, morc comfortable, more cosy than evcr in my life. Meanwhile wedding gucsts chccred, a wretched band played flourishes and sundry trash in the hall. Masha's sister Varya ran into the study carrying a wineglass, her face oddly strained as if her mouth was full of water. Apparently she had meant to run on, but she suddenly burst out laughing and sobbing, whilc the glass rolled, ringing, across the floor. We took her by the arms and led her off.

'No one understands,' shc muttered later as shc lay on thc old nursc's bed at the back of the house. 'No one, no one—God, no one undcr- stands.'

Everyone understood perfectly well, though, that she was four ycars older than her sister Masha, that she still wasn't married, and that she wasn't crying through envy but because she was sadly aware that her time was passing—or had perhaps already passed. By the timc the quadrille began she was back in the drawing-room with a tearful, heavily powdered face, and I saw her spooning up a dish of ice-crcam held for her by Captain Polyansky.

It is now past five in the morning. I have taken up my diary to describe my complete, my manifold happiness, intending to write half a dozen pages and read them to Masha later in thc day, but oddly enough my mind is just a vague, dreamy jumble, and all I remember distinctly is this business of Varya. 'Poor Varya', I want to write. Yes, I could go on sitting here and writing 'poor Varya'. And now the trees have started rustling, which means rain. Crows are cawing and my dear Masha, who has just fallen asleep, has a rather sad expression.

Nikitin did not touch his diary for a long time aftenvards. He had various entrance and other school examinations at the beginning of August, and after the fifteenth of the month term started again. He usually left for school before nine, and an hour later was already missing Masha and his new home, and kept looking at his watch. In the lower forms he would get one of the boys to dictate and would sit in the window day-dreaming, eyes shut, while his pupils wrote. Picturing the future, recalling the past—he found everything equally splendid, Jike a fairy-tale. In the senior forms they read Gogol or Pushkin's prose aloud, which made hini drowsy, conjuring up in his imagination people, trees, fields, horses.

'Superb,' he would sigh, as if bewitched by the author.

At the lunch break Masha would send him his meal in a snow-white napkin, and he would cat it slowly, with pauscs to prolong his enjoy- ment, while Hippolytus—who usually lunched on .1 single roll—looked at him with respectful envy, uttering some such platitude as that 'man cannot live without food'.

From school Nikitin would go to his coaching, and when he at last reached home about half past ftve he would feel as happy and excited as if he had been away a whole year. He would run panting upstairs, fmd Masha, take her in his arms, kiss her, swear he loved her and couldn't live without her, claiming to have missed her tcrribly, asking in panic whether she was well and why she looked so solemn. Then they would dine together. After dinner he would lie smoking on his study ottoman while she sat beside him, talking in a low voice.

His happiest days were Sundays and holidays, when he stayed at home from morning till evening. On these days he shared an unsophisticated but most agreeable life reminiscent of pastoral idylls. Constantly watching the sensible, practical Masha as she wove her nest, he too wanted to show that he was some use about the house, and would do something pointless like pushing the chaise out of the shed and inspecting it from all sides. Masha had set up a regular dairy and kept three cows. Her cellar and. larder contained many jugs of milk and pots of sour cream, all of which she kept for butter. Nikitin woul.d sometimes ask her for a glass of milk as a joke, and she would take fright at this breach of discipline, while he laughed and put his arms round her.

'There, there, it was only a joke, my treasure—just a little joke.'

Or he would laugh at how strict she was when she found an old stone-hard piece of salami, say, or cheese in the cupboard and solenmly said that 'they can eat that out in the kitchen'.

He would tell her that such a scrap was fit only for a mousetrap, while she hotly contended that men know nothing of housekeeping, and that you could send food out to those servants by the hundred- weight and you still wouldn't get any reaction from them. He would agree and embrace her ecstatically. When she said something sensible he found it unique and astounding, and whatever contradicted his own sentiments was deliciously unsophisticated.

Sometimes, in philosophical vein, he would discourse on an abstract theme, while she listened and looked inquiringly into his face. 'I'm infinitely happy with you, darling,' he would say, playing with her fingers, or plaiting and unplaiting her hair. 'But I don't regard my happiness as a windfall or manna from heaven. My felicity is a wholly natural, consistent and impeccably logical phenomenon. I believe that man makes his o\wn happiness, so I'm now enjoying something I myself created. Yes, I can say so without false modesty: I created this bliss, and I have every right to it. You know my past.. Having no mother and father, being poor, an unhappy childhood, a miserable adolescence— all that was a struggle, a road to happiness built by myself.'

In October the school suffered a grievous loa when Hi ppolytus succumbed to erysipelas of the head and died. He was unconscious and delirious for nvo days before dying, but even when rambling he rambled only platitudes.

'The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, horses eat oats and hay '

There was no school on the day of his funeral. Colleagues and pupils carried coffm-lid and coffm, and the school choir sang the anthem 'Holy, holy, holy' all the way to the cemetery. The procession included three priests, nvo deacons, all the boys' high school and the bishop's choir in their beM cassocks. Seeing so sole^ a cortege, pawers-by crossed themselves and prayed to God to 'grant us all such a death'.

Nikitin went home from the cemetery very moved, and took his diary from the desk.

Today Mr. Hippolytus Ryzhitsky was consigned to his grave (he wrote). Rest in peace, thou humble toiler. Masha, Varya and the other ladies at the funeral all wept sincerely, perhaps because they knew that no woman ever loved So unattractive, so do^trodden a man. I wan:ted to say a word of appreciation at my colleague's grave, but was warned that the Head might take exception since he disliked the deceased. I think this has been the first day since the wedding that I've felt de- pressed.

There was no other event of note during the school year.

\Vinter was a half-hearted affair—sleety, without hard frosts. All Twelfth Night, for instance, the wind howled piteously as in autu^, the roofs dripped, and during the Consecration of the Waters in the morning the police stopped people walking on the frozen river because they said the ice had swollen up and looked dark. Despite the dismal weather Nikitin was just as happy as in summer, though, and had even acquired a new hobby—he had le^t to play bridge. There' only seemed to be one fly in the ointment, only one thing that got on his nerves and riled him—the cats and dogs which he had acquired as part of the dowry. The house smelt like a zoo, especially in the mornings, and there was no getting rid of the stench. The cats often fought the dogs. That spiteful Bluebottle was fed a dozen timcs a day, but still wouldn't accept Nikitin, still treated him to her liquid, nasal-guttur.il growls.

One midnight in Lent Nikitin was on his way home from the club after cards. It was raining, dark and muddy. Things felt unsavoury, somehow. Was it the twelve roubles he had lost at the club? Or was it that when they were settling up one of the players had remarked that Nikitin had pots of money—a clear hint at that dowry? The twelve roubles didn't matter to him, and there had been nothing offensive in the man's words. Still, it was distasteful, and he didn't even feel like going home.

'Oh, how awful,' he said, halting by a street lamp.

The reason he didn't care about the twelve roubles was that he had got them for nothing, it struck him. Now, ifhe had been a labourer he would have valued every copeck, he would not have been so casual about winning or losing. But then, all his good fortune had come to him free and gratis, he reasoned—it was a luxury, really, like medicine to a healthy man. Had he been harassed like the great majority by worrying about his livelihood, had he been struggling for existence, had his back and chest ached from hard work, then his supper, his warm, snug quarters and his domestic bliss would be a necessity, a reward, an adomnent of his life. As it was the significance of all that was oddly blurred, somehow.

'Oh, how awful,' he repeated, knowing full well that these very broodings were a bad sign.

Masha was in bed when he arrived home. Her breathing was even, and she smiled, obviously relishing her sleep. Next to her curled the white cat, purring. While Nikitin was lighting his candle and cigarette Masha woke up and thirstily drank a glass of water.

'I ate too muchjam,' she laughed, and asked after a pause whether he had been visiting her family. 'No.'

Nikitin knew that Captain Polyansky, on whom Varya had been counting heavily of late, was being posted to the west country, and was now making his farewell visits in to^wn for which reason there was an air of gloom at his father-in-law's.

Masha sat up. 'Varya called this evening. She didn't say anything, but you can see from her face how depressed she is, poor thing. I can't stand Polyansky. He's so fat, so (rowsty, and his cheeks wobble when he walks or dances. He's not my type. Still, I did think he was a decent person.¹

'Well, I still do think he is a decent person.'

'What, after he's treated Varya so badly?'

'Badly in what sense?' Nikitin was irked by the white cat stretching and arching its back. 'To the best of my kiowledge he never proposed or made any promises.'

'Then why did he visit our house so often? He shouldn't have come if he didn't mean business.'

Nikitin put out the candle and lay down. But he did not feel like sleeping or lying there. His head seemed like some vast, empty bam with new, rather weird thoughts drifting about it like tall shadows. Away from the soft icon-lamp beaming on their quiet family happiness, away from this cosy little world in which he and that cat both lived in such delectable serenity, there was a very different world, he reflected. And for that other world he felt a sudden pang of anguished longing. He wanted to toil in some factory or big workshop, to lecture to audiences, to write, to publish, to make a splash, to exhaust himself, to suffer. He craved some obsession to make him oblivious of self and indifferent to personal happiness with its monotonous sensa.tions. And then suddenly, in his mind's eye, the living image of dean-shaven Shebaldin arose and spoke in horror.

'Who hasn't even read Lessing? How backward you are—God, how you have gone to seed.'

Masha drank more water. He looked at her neck, plump shoulders and breasts, remembering what the retired major-general had called her in church that day—'a dear little rosebud'.

'Dear little rosebud,' he muttered. And laughed. Under the bed sleepy Bluebottle growled her guttural response.

Inside Nikitin a cold, heavy, spiteful urge seemed to hammer and twist. He wanted to be rude to Masha, or even jump up and hit her. His heart throbbed.

'So that's the way of it,' he stated, trying to restrain himself. 'By visiting your house I thereby undertook to marry you, I suppose?'

'Of course you did, you know that as well as I do.'

'Charming, I must say.'

A minute later he said it again. 'Charming.'

To stop himself adding something which he would regret, and to calm his emotions, Nikitin went to his study and lay on the ottoman without a pillow. Then he lay on the carpet on thc floor.

He tried to reassure himself. 'This is all nonsense. You, a teacher, have a most admirable calling. What other world can you need? What utter rubbish!'

But then he at once answered himself with certainty that, far from being a teacher, he was a mediocre, featureless hack like the Greek master, a Czech. He had never had a vocation for teaching, he knew nothing of pedagogic theory, he had never been interested in it, he had no idea how to treat children. The significance ofhis teaching was lost on him, perhaps he was even teaching all the wrong things. The late Hippolytus had been frankly stupid, but all his colleagues and pupils had known who he was .and what to expect of him—whereas he, Nikitin, was like the Czech who could conceal his dullness and adroitly deceive people by pretending that everything was, thank God, just as it should be. These new ideas alarmed Nikitin, he spurned them, he called them stupid, he put them down to nerves, he thought he would soon be laughing at himself.

Towards morning, indeed, he already was laughing at his nerves and calling himself an old woman. And yet he also realized that his pcace of mind was lost, probably for ever, and that there was no happiness for him in this two-storeyed house with its unrendered walls. The illusion was gone, he sensed, and a new, uneasy, conscious life had begun—a life incompatible with peace of mind and personal happiness.

On the next day, a SWlday, he went to the school chapel where he met the headmaster and his colleagues. Their sole business in life seemed to consist of sedulously concealing their ignorance and dissatis- faction, and he too smiled affably and indulged in small talk to avoid betraying his unease. Then he walked to the station. He watched the mail train come and go, pleased to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone.

At home he foWld his father-in-law and Varya who had come over for dinner. Varya's eyes were red from crying, and she complained of a headache, while Shelestov ate a lot and went on about young people being so wueliable and ungentlemanly nowadays.

'It's the act of a boWlder,' he said. 'And so I shall tell him to his face— the act of a boWlder, sir.'

Nikitin smiled amiably and helped Masha entertain their guests, but after dinner he went and locked himself in his study.

The March sun shone brightly, and warm rays fell on the desk through the doublc frames. It was only the twentieth of the month, but sledges had now given way to whceled traffic and starlings wcrc singing in the garden. He had the feeling that Masha was about to come in, put one arm around his neck, say that the horses or chaise had been brought round to the porch, and ask what die was to wear to keep warm. Spring had begun—a spring just as exquisite as the previous yi!ar's, promisingjust the same joys. But Nikitin thought he would like to take a holiday, go to Moscow and stay in his old lodgings in Neglimiy Drive. In the next room they were drinking coffee and talking about Captain Polyansky while he tried not to listen.

Ye gods, where am I (he wrote in his diary)? I'm surrounded by smug, complaccnt mediocrities, dreary nonentities, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women.

There is nothing more tcrrible, insulting and mortifying than the smug complacency of the second-rate. I musr run away, I must escape this very day or I shall go out of my mind.

TERROR

MY FRIEND ' S STORY

Having t aken a university degree and been a civil servant in St. Pcters- burg, Dmitry Silin had given up his job at thc age of thirty to take up farming. Though he had made a fair success ofit I felt hewas out ofhis element and would have done better to return to St. Petersburg. Sun- burnt, grey with dust and toil-worn, he would meet me ncar his gate or entrance, then battle with drowsiness over supper until his wife took him off to bed like a baby. Or else he would conquer his fatigue and begin expounding edifying sentiments in his gentle, sincere and ap- parently pleading voice—at which times I never saw him as a farmer or agriculturalist) but only as a' tormented human being. He needed no fann, I realized, he just wanted some way of getting through the day without mishap.

I liked going over there and sometimes stayed at his farm for two or three days at a stretch. I liked his house, his park, his big orchard, his little river, and I liked his general outlook: rather passive and over- elaborate, yet lucid. I must have liked him perso!lally too, though I cannot say for certain as I am still unable to analyse my feelings of the time. He was an intelligent, good-natured, genuine, quite interest- ing person, but I well remember how upset and embarrassed I was when he told me his most intimate secrets and said what great friends the two of us were. There was something uncomfortable and tiresome about this great affection for me, and I would far rather have had us just ordinary friendly acquaintances.

The fact is, I was greatly attracted by his wife Mary. Not that I was in love with her, but I liked her face, her eyes, her voice, her walk. I used to miss this good-looking, elegant young woman when I hadn't seen her for some time and I liked to dwell OJ1. her image in fancy: more so than on anyone else's. I had no specific designs on her, no romantic aspirations, but whenever we were alone together I somehow re- membered that her husband took me for his great friend, which was so embarrassing. I enjoyed listening when she played my favourite piano pieces or told me anything of interest, yet I was aIso rather irked by the thought of her loving her husband, of him being my great friend, ofher thinking me his great friend, and all this spoilt my mood, making me listless, uncomfortable and bored. She would notice these changes in me.

'You're bored without your friend,' she usually said. 'I must get him back from the fields.'

'See, your friend's here,' she would say when Silin arrived. 'You can cheer up now.'

This situation continued for about eighteen months.

One Sunday in July Silin and I happened to have nothing to do, so we drove over to the large village of Klushino to buy some food for supper. The sun set while we were shopping and evening came on: an evening which I shall probably never forget as long as I live. After buying soap-like cheese and petrified salaii smelling of tar, we went to the inn in quest of beer. Our coachman drove off to the smithy to have our horses shod and we told him we would wait for him by the church. While we walked, spoke and laughed at our purchases, our steps were dogged, with an air of silent mystery befitting a detective, by one known in the county under the rather odd nic^ume of Forty Martyrs. This Forty Martyrs was none other than a Gabriel ('Gavry- ushka') Severov whom I had once briefly employed as footman before dismisang him for drunkenness. He had worked for Dmitry Silin too and had also been dismissed by him: again for the same shortcoming. He was a raging drunkard—his whole way of life, indeed, was as tipsy and debauched as the man himself. His father had been a priest and his mother a gentlewoman, so he had been born into the privileged classes. But carefully though I might scrutinize his haggard, respectful, always s\veaty face, his ginger beard now turning grey, his wretched, tattered little jacket and his red shirt worn outside his trousers—of what are commonly called privileges I found not the faintest trace. He called himself educated—said he had studied at a church school, but hadn't stayed the course since he was expelled for smoking. Then he had sung in the bishop's choir and spent a couple ofyears in a monastery from which he was also dismissed: not for smoking this time, but for 'my weaknes'. He had tramped all over two provinces, had put in certain applications to the provincial church authorities and various govern- ment offices, and had been had up in court four times. In the end he had become stranded in our county, working as footman, forester, kennel- man and church caretaker. He had married a widowed cook of loose character and had eventually been swallowed up in this menial swamp, growing so inured to its dirt and brawls that even he now referred to his genteel origin somewhat sceptically, as to a myth. At the time of which I write he was running around jobless, pretending to be a farrier and huntsman. His wife had vanished without trace.

From the inn we went to the church and sat in the porch waiting for our coachman. Forty Martyrs stood a little way off, holding his hand to his mouth so that he could cough respectfully into it should need arise. It was dark. There was a strong smell of evening dampness and the moon was about to come up. There were only two clouds in the clear, starry sky: e.xactly overhead, one big, the other smaller, like mother and child. Alone up there, they were chasing each other towards the dying sunset's embers.

'What a marvellous evening,' said Silin.

• 'Exceptionally so,' Forty Martyrs agreed with a respectful cough into his hand.

'Whatever possessed you to come here, Mr. Silin ?' he asked in an ingratiating voice, evidently wanting to chat.

Silin made no answer and Forty Martyrs heaved a deep sigh.

'My sufferings are all on account of a cause for which I must answer to Almighty God,' he said quietly, not looking at us. 'Now, I'm a lost man, no doubt about it, and I ain't no good at anything, and I ain't got nothing to eat, honest, I'm worse off than a dog, I'm sorry to

I

say.

. Silin propped his head on his fists, unheeding, and meditated. The church stood on a high bank at the end of the street and through the churchyard railing could be seen a river, water-meadows on the far side and the crimson glare of a camp fire round which black figures were moving: men and horses. Beyond the fire, further away, were more lights: those of a hamlet whence came the sound ofsinging.

Mist rose above the river and there were patches of it above the meadow. High, narrow coils of thick, milky haze drifted over the river, masking the stars' refl.ections and clinging to the willows. They were constantly changing shape, some seemingly locked in embrace, others bowing low, while yet others lifted broad-sleeved arms aloft like priests at prayer. They probably suggested ghosts and departed spirits to Silin, for he turned his face to me with a sad smile and asked me why it was, 'that when we want to tell some frightening, mysterious, grotesque tale, we nevercull our material from life, my dear chap, but always from the world of phantoms and shades of the hereafter?'

'We fear what we don't understand.'

'But we don't understand life, do we? Do we understand life any better than the world hereafter, you tell me that?'

Silin sat down so close to me that I could feel his breath onmy cheek. His pale, lean face seemed yet paler in the gloaming and his dark beard was black as soot. His eyes were sad, earnest and rather frightened, as if he was about to tell me something terriffying.

'Our life and the world hereafter . .. they're both equally mysterious and terrifying,' he went on in his habitual pleading voice, gazing into my eyes. 'Anyone who's scared of ghosts should also be afraid of me, those lights and of the sky—for when you really come to think of it these things are alljust as mysterious and grotesque as any manifestations from another world. The reason why Hamlet didn't kill himself was dread of "in that sleep of death what dreams may come". I like that famous soliloquy, but it never really got home to me, quite frankly. I tell you, my friend, there have been anguished moments when I have pictured my last hour in my mind's eye, when my fancy has conjured up thousands of utterly lugubrious vistas, when I have managed to work myself up into a lather of agonized, nightmarish exaltation. Yet none of that has ever scared me anything like as much as everyday life, you take my word for it. Ghosts are frightening, it goes without saying, but so is life too. I can't make any sense of life, old boy, and I fear it. I don't know—perhaps I'm being morbid, perhaps I've gone off the rails. A sane, healthy man believes he understands everything he sees and hears, but I have lost any such impression and I'm poisoning my- self with terror day in day out. There is a complaint called fear of open spaces, but it's fear oflife that ails me. When I lie on the grass \vatching a little beetle—born only yesterday, understanding nothing—its life seems one long chain of horror. And that is just how I see mysel('

'But what exactly are you scared of?' I asked.

'Everything. I am not naturally profound, I'm not much interested in such questions as the hereafter or the fate of humanity and I'm not much of a one for flightsinto the sublime either. What terrifies me most s just ordinary everyday routine, the thing none of us can escape. The hings I do ... I can't tell the true from the false, and they trouble me. My living conditions and upbringing have imprisoned me in a closed circle of lies, I know. Worrying how to deceive myself and others every day without noticing that I'm doing so ... that's rriy entire existence, I know that too, and I dread not being rid of this fraud until I'm in my grave. I do something one day and next day I have no idea why I did it. I entered government service in St. Petersburg and took fright. Then I came here to farm and took fright again. We know so little, which is why we make mistakes every day, I see that—we're unfair, we slander people or pester the life out of them, we lavish all our efforts on futilities which oniy make things more difficult, and that scares me because I can't see what use it is to anyone. I don't understand people, old man, I'm so scared of them. The peasants are a terrifying spectacle—what lofty purposes their sufferings serve, what they live for, I have no idea. If life exists for pleasure they are superfluous and redundant. But if life's purpose and meaning is hardship and crass, hopeless barbarism, then what use is this ordeal to anyone? That's what I. don't see. I don't understand anyone or anything.

'Just you try and make sense of this specimen,' said Silin, pointing to Forty Martyrs. 'You just puzzle him out!'

Seeing us both looking at him, Forty Martyrs coughed deferentially into his fist.

'I have always been a faithful servant when I've had good masters, but' it was drinking spirits, mainly, what done for me. Now, if you was to take pity on a poor man and give me a job I'd take the pledge, like. My word is my bond.'

The verger walked by, gave us a baffled look and began tugging his rope. Slowly, lengthily, rudely shattering the calm of evening, the bell tolled ten.

'What—ten o'clock already!' said Silin. 'It's time we were going.

'Yes, old man,' he sighed, 'if you did but know how I dread my ordinary, everyday thoughts which one wouldn't expect to contain anything terrible. To stop myselfth^ing I seek distraction in my work and I try to tire myself out so that I may sleep soundly at night. Children, a wife . . . to other men these are perfectly normal things, but they're such a burden to me, old man.'

He rubbed his face with his hands, cleared his throat and gave a laugh.

'If only I could tell you what an idiotic role I've played,' he said. 'I have a lovely wife, I have delightful children, everyone tells me, and I'm a good husband and father. They think I'm so happy, they envy me. Well, since we've gone so far I'll let you into a secret: my happy family life's just a deplorable blunder, and I fear that too.'

A wry smile disfigured his pale face and he put an arm around my waist.

'You're a true friend,' he continued in hushed tones. 'I trust you, I profoundly respect you. Heaven sends us friendship so that we can open our hearts and find relief from the mysteries which oppress us. Let me exploit your afection, then, and tell you the full truth. My fanily life, which you think so enchanting ... it's my chief nisfortune, it's what scares me most. I made a strange and foolish marriage. I was madly in love with Mary before we married, I may say, and I courted her for nvo years. Five times I proposed, but she refused me because she didn't care for me at all. On the sixth occasion I went down on my knees, aflame with passion, and besought her hand like one begging for mercy. She said yes.

' "I don't love you," she told me, "but I will be faithful to you."

'I \vas delighted to accept this condition. It made sense to me at the time, but now, by God, it makes sense no more. "I don't love you, but I'll be faithful to you" . . . what does it mean? It's all so muzzy and obscure. I love her every bit as much now as I did on our wedding day, while she seems to care as little for me as ever and she must be glad when I'm away from home. \Vhether she likes me or not I don't know for sure, I just don't know, but we live under the same roof, don't we? We speak intimately to each other, we sleep together, we have children, we hold our property in common. But what on earth does it signify? What's it all in aid of? Do you understand anything, old man? Oh, it's sheer torture, this! Understanding nothing about our relationship, I hate her or myself by turns, or the two of us together, and my head's in, a complete whirl. I torment myself, I grow duller and duller, while she . . . she looks prettier every day, as if to spite me, quite fantastic she's becoming. She has such marvellous hair, I think, and her smile's unlike any other woman's. I love her, yet I know my love is hopeless. A hopeless love for a woman who has already borhe you two children . . . not easy to make sense of, that, is it? Pretty frightening, eh? More frightening than your ghosts, wouldn't you say?'

He was in a mood to go on ta^mg for some time, but luckily the coachman's voice rang out: our carriage had arrived. As we got in Forty Martyrs doffed his hat and helped us both into our seats, his expression suggesting that he had long been awaiting the opportunity to touch our precious bodies.

'May I come and see you, Mr. Silin?' he asked, blinking furiously, his head cocked to one side. 'Have pity on me, for God's sake, seeing as how I'm dying of hunger.'

'Oh, all right then/ said Silin. 'Come along for three days and we'll see how it goes.'

Forty Martyrs was delighted. 'Very good, sir, I'll be along tonight, sir.'

We were about four miles from the house. Content to have un- burdened himself to his great friend at last, Silin kept his arm round my waist all the way. He had put his griefs and fears behind him, and cheerfully explained that he would have gone back to St. Petersburg and taken up academic work had his family situation been favourable. The mood which had banished so many gifted yoWlg people to the countryside . . . it was a deplorable trend, said he. Russia had rye and wheat in plenty, but no civilized people whatever. Talented and healthy young folk should take up science, the arts, politics. Any other course was irrational. He enjoyed such theorizing and said how sorry he was that we must part early next morning as he had to go to a timber sale.

Now, I felt Wlcomfortable and depressed. I had the impression of deceiving the man, yet that feeling was also agreeable. Looking at the huge, crimson moon, I pictured that tall, shapely blonde with her pale face, always so well-dressed and smelling of some special musky scent, and I was somehow happy to think that she didn't love her husband.

We reached home and sat do^ to supper. Mary laughingly regaled us with our purchases. She really did have marvellous hair, I found, and a smile unlike any other woman's. Watching her, I sought signs in her every movemcnt and glance of her not loving her husband, and seemed to find them.

Silin was soon struggling with sleep.

'You two can do what you like,' he said, having sat with us for ten minutes after supper. 'But I have to be up at three o'clock in the morrung, you must excuse me.'

He kissed his wife tenderly, and he pressed my hand firmly and grate- fully, making me promise to come next week without fail. To a void oversleeping on the morrow he went to spend the night in a hut in the groWlds.

Mary always sat up late, in St. Petersburg style, and now I was rather glad of this.

'Well, now,' I began, when we were alone together. 'Well now, do please play me something.'

I didn't want music, but I didn't know what to start talking about. She sat down at the piano and played—what, I don't remember— while I sat near by, looking at her plump white arms and trying to read her cold, impassive expression. Then she smiled at some thought and looked at me.

'You miss your friend,' she said.

I laughed.

'For purposes offriendship one visit a month would be adequate, but I come here more than once a week.'

This said, I stood up and paced the room excitedly. She stood up too and moved away to the fireplace.

'What do you mean by that?' she asked, raising her large, clear eyes to me.

I made no answer.

'What you say is untrue,' she went on, after some thought. 'You only come hcre for Dmitry's sake. All right, I'm very glad you do, one doesn't often see such friendship these days.'

'Well, well,' thought I, and not knowing what to say I asked whether she would like a stroll in the garden. 'No.'

I went out on to the terrace. My scalp was tingling and I felt a chill of excitement. I was certain now that our conversation would be utterly trivial and that we shouldn't manage to say anything special to each other. And yet the thing I did not even dare to dream of. .. it was defmitely bound to come about this night: this night, most definitely, or never.

'What marvellous weather,' I said in a loud voice.

'I just don't care about it either way,' I heard in answer.

I went into the drawing-room. Mary was still standing by the fireplace with her hands behind her back, thinking and looking away.

'And why don't you care about it either way?' I asked.

'Because I'm so bored. You are only bored when your friend isn't here, but I'm bored all the time. Anyway, that's ofno interest to you.'

I sat down at the piano and struck a few chords, waiting to hear what she would say next.

'Pray don't stand on ceremony,' she said, looking at me angrily, as if ready to weep with vexation. 'If you're tired go to bed. Don't think that being Dmitry's friend means having to be bored by his wife. I don't require any sacrifices, so please go.'

I didn't go of course. She went out on to the terrace while I stayed in the drawing-room and spent five minutes leafmg through the music. Then I went out too. We stood side by side in the curtains' shadow above steps fiooded with moonlight. Black tree shadows lay across flower-beds and on the paths' yellow sand.

'I shall have to go away tomorrow too,' I said.

'But of course, you can't stay here if my husband's away,' she said mockingly. 'I can just think how miserable you would be if you fell in love with me. Just wait, one day I'll suddenly throw myself at you just

to see your look of outrage as you run away from me. It should be an interesting sight.'

Her words and her pale face were angry, but her eyes were full of the tenderest, the most passionate love. I was now looking at chis lovely creature as my own property and I noticed for the first time that she had golden eyebrows: exquisite eyebrows the like of which I had never seen before. The thought that I might take her in my arms, fondle her, touch that wonderful hair . . . it suddenly seemed so fantastic that I laughed and shut my eyes.

'It's bed-time, though,' she said. 'I wish you a restful night.'

'I don't want a restful night,' I said, laughing and following her into the drawing-room. 'I'll see this night in hell if it proves restful!'

Pressing her arm, escorting her to the door, I saw from her face that she understood me and was pleased that I had understood her.

I went to my room. Ncar the books on the table lay Dmitry's cap, reminding me of our great friendship. I took my stick and went into the garden. Mist was rising and tall, narrow phantoms were trailing near trees and bushes, embracing them: the- same phantoms seen not long ago on the river. What a pity I couldn't talk to them.

In air unusually clear each leaf, each dew-drop, was sharply outlined and all these things seemed to smile at me in the drowsy silence. As I passed the green benches I recalled words from some pla y of Shake- speare's: 'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!'

There was a little hillock in the garden. I climbed it, I sat down and a swoon of enchantment came over me. I knew for certain that I was soon going to hold her in my arms, that I would press against that voluptuous body, kiss those golden eyebrows. Yet I wanted not to believe that this was so, I wanted to tantalize myself and I was sorry that s^he had tormented me so little by yielding so quickly.

Then, suddenly, heavy footsteps were heard. A man of medium height appeared on the path and I at once recognized Forty Martyrs. He sat on the bench, heaved a deep sigh, crossed himself three times and lay down. A minute later he stood up and lay on his other side. The gnats and the dampness of the night prevented him from sleeping.

'What a life!' he said. 'What a wretched, miserable existence.'

Looking at his gaunt, stooped body and hearing his heavy, hoarse sighs, I remembered another wretched, miserable existence as confessed to me that day and I felt aghast—terrified of my own ecstatic mood. I climbed do^wn the knoll and went to the house.

'Silin finds life terrifying,' I thought. 'So don't stand on ceremony with it, break it, snatch everything you can from it before it crushes you.'

Mary was standing on the terrace. I put my arms round her without a word and began greedily kissing her eyebrows, her temples, her ncck. . . .

In my room she told me that she had loved me for a long time, for more than a year. She swore she loved me, she wept, she begged me to take her away. I kept leading her over to the window to see her face in the moonlight. She seemed like a lovely dream and I quickly gripped her tight in my arms to convince myself that she was really there. Not for a long time had I known such raptures. And yet I felt a certain dis- quiet. In some remote cranny of my heart I was ill at ease. There was something as incongruous and oppressive about her love for me as in Dmitry's friendship. It was a grand passion, this, all very serious with tears and vows thrown in, whereas I didn't want it to be serious, I wanted no tears, no vows, no talk about the future—this moonlit night should just flash through our lives like a bright meteor and let that be the end of it.

She left me at exactly three o'clock and I was standing in the door- way watching her go when Dmitry Silin suddenly appeared at the end of the corridor. Seeing him, she shuddered and made way for him to pass, her whole figure expressing revulsion. He gave a rather strange smile, coughed and came into my room.

'I left my cap here last night,^he said, not looking at me.

He found the cap, put it on his head with both hands, and then looked at my embarrassed face and slippers.

'I must be doomed never to understand anything,' he said in a rather strange, husky voice quite unlike his own. 'If you can make sense of anything I can only congratulate you. I see nothing.'

He went out, coughing. Then I saw him through the window harnessing his horses near the stable. His hands trembled, he was hurry- ing and he kept looking back at the house. He probably felt scared. Then he climbed into his carriage and struck the horses. There was a strange, hunted expression on his face.

A little later I set off too. The sun was already rising, and yesterday's mist clung timidly to bushes and hillocks. Forty Martyrs sat on my carriage box. He' had already got himself a drink somewhere and was talking drunken gibberish.

'I'm a free man,' he shouted to the horses. 'Hey there, my darlings! I was born a gentleman, just in case you're interested.'

Dmitry Silin's tcrror . . .I had been unable to get it out of my mind and it infected me too. Thinking of what had happened, I CouJd make nothing ofit. I looked at the rooks and their flight puzzled me, terrified me.

'Why did I do it?' I wondered, baffled and frantic. 'Why did it have to happen just like that? Why not in some differcnt way? Why did she havc to fall in love with me so seriously? Why must he come into the room to fetch his cap? What use was it all? And to whom? And why should his cap be involved ?'

I lcft for St. Petersburg that day and I have never set eyes on Dmitry Silin or his wife again. Thcy arc said to bc still living together.

THE ORDER OF ST. ANNE

I

No food was served after the wedding, not even light refreshments. Bridc and groom just drank their glass of champagne, changed and drove to the station. There was no gay wedding breakfast, no party, no band and no dancing—they were going to stay at a monastery instead, a hundred and fifty miles away.

A good idea too, many people thought. Modeste Alekseyevich was pretty high up in the service now and not so young as all that either, so a hearty wedding reception might wcU have seemed not quite the thing—or so people said. Who feels like music, anyway, when a civil servant of fifty-two marries a girl barely turned eighteen? Besides, being a man of principle, Modeste Alekseyevich was said to have arranged this monastery trip on purpose, to let his bride know that even as a married man he still put religion and morality first.

A crowd went to see them off at the station, colleagues and relatives who stood glass in hand waiting to cheer when the train pulled out. Peter Leontyevich, thc bride's father, wore a top hat and the tail-coat bclonging to his schoolmaster's regulation dress. Alreadv drunk and white as a sheet, he kept reaching up to the train wmdow, holding his glass and pleading with his daughter.

'Anne, dear. A word in your ear, Anne.'

Anne leant out ofthe window towards him and he whispered to her, breathing alcohol aU over her, blowing in her ear—not one word could she miderstand—and making the sign of the cross over her face, breast and hands. His breathing was unsteady and tears shone in his eyes. Anne's schoolboy brothers Peter and Andrew were tugging at his coat.

'Oh reaUy, Father,' thcy whispered, somewhat put out. 'Do stop it.'

When the train startcd, Anne saw her father run a few steps after the coach, staggering aid spilling his win^ He had such a pathetic, good-natured, hang-dog air.

He gave a long cheer.

Now bride and bridegroom were alone. Modeste looked round the compartment, put their things on thc racks and sat down, beaming, oppositc his young wife. He was a civil scrvant of average height, rather round and plump and extremely sleek. He had long whiskers, but no moustache, and his round, clean-shaven, sharply defined chin looked like the heel of a foot. That missing moustache—the freshly shaved bare patch that graduaUy merged into fat cheeks quivering like jellies—was the most t)rpical thing about his face. He bore himself with dignity, his movements slow and his manner mild.

'At this juncture I cannot but recall a certain incident,' he said with a smile. 'Five years ago Kosorotov received the Order of St. Anne, second class, and caUed on the Governor ofthe Provir.:.:e to thank him. "So you have three Annes now," declared His Excellency. "One in your buttonhole and two round your neck." I must explain that Kosorotov's wife had just come back, a bad-tempered, giddy creature called Anne. When I receive the Order of St. Anne, second class, His Excellency I trust, have no cause to pass the same remark.'

A smile lit up his small eyes and Anne smiled back. Any moment the man might kiss her with his ful, wet lips and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it—a disturbing thought. The sleek motions of his plump body scared her. She felt frightened and disgusted.

He stood up, slowly took the medal from his neck, removed his coat and waistcoat, and put on his dressing-go^.

'That's better,' he said, sitting downwn beside her.

She remembered the ordeal of the marriage service, with the priest, the guests and everyone else in church looking at hsr sadly as if wondering why on earth such a lovely girl should be marrying this unattractive elderly gentleman. Only that mo^rng she had been terribly pleased that everything had worked out so well, but during the ceremony and here in the train she had a guilty feeling—felt she had been let downwn and made to look silly. Yes, she had her rich husband. But she stil had no money. Her wedding dress had still not been paid for, and her father and brothers had not had a copeck between them when they had seen her off that mo^rng—she could tell by the look on their faces. Would they have any supper tonight? Or tomorrow night ? Somehow she thought that Father and the boys must be starving now that she had left home, and would be sitting there in the depths of despair as on the night after Mother's funeral.

'Oh, I'm so unhappy,' she thought. 'Why am I so unhappy?'

As clumsy as any other pilar ofsociety unused to women's company, Modeste kept touching her waist and patting her shoulder, while she thought about money, about her mother, and her mother's death.

After Mother's death, her father—art master at the local high school —had takcn to drink and then they really had been in a bad way, what with the boys havmg no boots or galoshes, Father being continually had up m court, and bailiffs coming and making an inventory of the furniture.

What a shameful business! Anne had had to look after her druiken father, darn her brothers' socks and do the shopping. And any com- pliment to her beauty, youth and elegant manners made her feeI as if the whoIe worId couId see her cheap hat and the worn patches on her shoes that she had smeared with ink. At nights she cried and could not shake off the nagging worry that Father might Iose his job any day because he drank. That might welI be the last straw, and then he wouId follow Mother to the grave.

But then some ladies who knew the famiIy bestirred themselves and started looking out a husband for her. And before Iong this Modeste Alekseyevich had emerged. He was not young or handsome, but he did have money. He had something like a hundred thousand in the bank and a family estate which he let to a tenant. He was a man of principle, in His ExcelJency's good books, and couId easily^^r so Anne \vas told^^btain a note from His ExceIlency to the headmaster or even to the local education officer, and then Father would not lose his job . .. .

She was musing on these points when a snatch of music and a buzz of voices suddenly burst through the window. The train had stopped at a \vayside halt. Someone in the crowd on the other side of the platform had struck up a rousing tunc on an accordion accompanied by a cheap, squeaky fiddle. There were taIl birches, poplars, moonlit cottages, and beyond them a miJitary band was playing. The summer visitors must be holding a dance. People were strolling along the plat- form—holidav-makers and visitors from town who had made the trip for a breath of fresh air on a fine day. And Artynov was there. He owned the whole holiday area. A rich man, tall and stout with dark hair, a face like an Armenian's and bulging eyes, he wore peculiar clothes —an open-necked shirt, riding boots and spurs, and a black cloak hanging from his shoulders and traiJing on the ground like the train of a dress. At his heels, their pointed muzzles lowered, were two borzoi hounds.

Anne's eyes were still bright with tears, but now Mother, money problems, wedding—all were forgotten. She shook hands with schooI- boys and oflicers that she knew, Iaughed merrily and showered greet- ings on them.

She went out onto the small platform at the end ofher carriage and stood there in the moonlight to show off her marvellous new dress and hat. She asked why the train had stopped.

'This is a loop-line,' she was told. 'They're waiting for the mail train.'

Seeing that Artynov was watching her, she coyly fluttered her eye- lids and began to speak loudly in French. The splendid ring of her own voice, the strains of the band and a glimpse of the moon reflected in the pond, together with the general high spirits and the fact that Arty- nov, notorious gay spark and ladies' man, had his eye on her—all these things suddenly combined to make her happy. When the train started off again and her officer friends gave her a goodbye salute, she was already humming a polka—the tune blown after her by the brass band blaring away somewhere be^^d the trees. Back in her compartment, she felt that the halt at that country station had proved that she. was bound to be happy in spite of everything..

Bride and groom stayed two days at the monastery, then retumed to town and lived in the flat which went with Modeste's job. Anne used to play the piano when he was at the office, or felt bored to tears, or lay on the sofa reading novels and looking at fashion magazines. At diner her husband ate a lot and talked about politics, appointments. staff transfers and honours lists.

'Hard work never harmed anyone,' he would say, or, 'Family life is not pleasure, but duty,' or, 'Take care of the copecks and the roubles wil take care of themselves.' He thought religion and morality the most important things in life. 'We all have^ our responsibilities, ' he would say, holding a knife in his fist like a sword.

Listening to him scared Anne so much that she could not eat and usually left the table hungry.

After dinner her husband would take a nap, snoring noisily, while she went off to see the family. Father and the boys always gave her a special look as if they had.just been saying as she came in how wrong she was to have married an abysmal bore for his money when she didn't even like the man. The rustle of her dress, her bracelets, her ladylike air—they found it vaguely inhibiting and offensive. It was.a little em- barrassing having her there and they did not know what to say to her, though they were as fond of her as ever and stil could not get used to her not being around at supper time. She would sit down with them and eat cabbage soup, porridge or potatoes fried in mutton dripping that smelt of tallow. Her father's hand would shake as he poured out a glass of vodka from the decanter and drank it down rapidly and greedily, with disgust, followed by a second glass and a third.

Peter and Andrew, thin, pale boys with large eyes, would take the decanter from him, quite at their wits' end.

'Oh really, Father . . .' they would say. 'Do stop it. . . .'

When Anne grew worried as well and begged him to stop drinking, he would suddenly flare up, thumping his fist on the table. 'No one orders me about,' he would shout. 'Young puppies! Wretched girl! I've a good ^rnd to chuck you out!'

But his voice sounded so feeble and good-natured that no one was afraid. After dinner he usually dressed up. Pale, with his chin cut from shaving, he would spend half an hour craning his thin neck in front of the mirror and trying to make himself look smart, brushing his hair or twirling his black moustache. He would sprinkle himself with scent, put on a bow tie, gloves and top hat and go out to give private lessons. On holidays he stayed at home, painting or playing the wheezy, groaning harmonium. He tried to squeeze out delicious harmonies, humming an accompaniment, or else lost his temper with the boys.

'Monsters! Scoundrels! They've ruined the instrument.'

In the evening Anne's husband played cards with colleagues from the office who lived in the same block of government flats. During these sessions the wives forgathered as well. Hideous women, dressed in appallingly bad taste and as vulgar as could be, they would start gossiping and telling tales as ugly and tasteless as they were themselves.

Sometimes Anne's husband took her to the theatre. He kept her by his side in the intervals, holding her arm and strolling in the corri- dors and foyer. He would bow to someone.

'Fairly high up in the service,' he would tell Anne in a rapid whisper. 'Received by His Excellency,' or, 'Rather well off. Has a house of his own.

They were going past the bar once when Anne felt that she would like somethllig sweet. She was fond of chocolate and apple tart, but had no money and did not like to ask her husband. He picked up a pear, squeezed it and asked doubtfully how much it cost.

'Twenty-f1ve copecks.'

'Well, I must say!'

He put the pear back. But it was awkward to leave the bar without buying anything, so he asked for soda water and drank the whole bottle himself, which brought tears to his eyes. Anne hated him at times like these.

Or else, suddenly blushing scarlet, he would hurriedly say, 'Bow to that old lady.'

'But I don't know her.'

'Never ^md. She's the wife of our provincial treasurer. Oh, go on!' he nagged. 'Bow, I tell you. Your head won't faU off.'

So Anne would bow, and in fact her head never did fall off. But it was a painful experience.

She always did what hu husband wanted, furious with herself for letting him make such a complete fool of her. She had only married him for his money, but she had less money now than before. her marriage. In those days her father at least gave her the occasional twenty' copecks, but now she never had any money at all. She could not just take it behind his back or ask for it, being so afraid of her husband, scared stiff in fact.

She felt as ifher fear of the man had long been part of her. As a little girl she had always thought of the high-school headmaster as a terrify- ing, overwhehning force' bearing down on her like a storm cloud or a railway engine that was going to run over her. Another menace of the same kind, continuaUy invoked in the family—feared too for some reason—was His Excellency. And there were a dozen lesser horrors, among whom were clean-shaven schoolmasters, stern and unbending. Now they included this Modeste as well, the man of principle, who even looked like the headmaster. In Anne's imagination aU these menaces seemed to be rolled into one and she saw them as a colossal polar bear, terrifying as it advanced on weak, erring creatures like her father. Afraid to protest, she forced herself to smile and pretend to be pleased when defiled by clumsy caresses and embraces that sickened her.

Only once did Peter Leontyevich pluck up courage to ask his son-in- law for a loan of fifty roubles so that he could meet some particularly irksome debt. And that was quite an ordeal.

'Al right, you can have it,' Anne's husband had said after some thought. 'But I you, you get no more help from me til you stop drinking. Such self-indulgence is disgraceful in a gove^^ent em- ployee. I feel obliged to point out what is generaUy recognized, that this craving has been the ruin of many an able man who, given a little self-control, might in time have become a person of consequence.'.

One rolling period succeeded another—'in so far as', 'basing our- selves on the assumption that', 'in view of what has just been stated'. And Anne's poor father suffered agonies of humiliation. He was dying for a drink.

When the boys visited Anne—usually with holes in their boots and in threadbare trousers—they came in for these lectures too.

'We all have our responsibilities,' Modeste Alekseyevich told them.

But they got no money out of him. He gave Anne presepts instead —rings, bracelets and brooches., 'just the thing to put by for a rainy day' —and often opened her chest of drawers to make sure that none of the stuff was missing.

II

Meanwhile winter had sct in. Long before Christmas the local news- paper announced that the usual winter ball would 'duly take place' in the Assembly Rooms on the twenty-ninth ofDecember. Much excited, Anne's husband held whispered consultations with his colleagues' wives every evening after cards, shooting an anxious glance or two at Anne. Then he would walk up and down the room for a while, thinking. At last, late one evening, he stopped in front of Anne.

'You must get yourself a ball dress,' he said. 'Is that clear? But mind you consult Marya Grigoryevna and Natalya Kuzminishna.'

He gave her a hundred roubles, which she took. But she ordered the dress without consulting anyone, though she did have a word with her father and tried to imagine how her mother would have dressed for the ball. Her mother had alwavs followed the latest fashions and had always taken great pains with Anne, dressing her up like an ex- quisite little doll, teaching her to speak French and dance an excellent mazurka—she had been a governess for five years before her marriage. Like her mother, Anne could make a new dress out of an old one or clean her gloves with benzine and she knew about hiring jewellery. And she could flutter her eyelids like her mother, talk Russian with a Parisian r, adopt elegant poses, go into raptures when necessary or look melancholy and mysterious. She had her dark hair and eyes from her father. Like him she was highly st^mg and was used to making the most of her looks.

Half an hour before they were to leave for the ball Modeste Alek- seyevich came into her room without his coat on to tie his medal ribbon round his neck in front of her wardrobe mirror. Dazzled by her beauty and the glitter of her new dress that seemed light as thistle- down, he combed his whiskers, looking rather smug.

'I must say, Anne .. .' he said, 'you really are, er, quite a girl. My dear,' he went on, suddenly solemn, 'I've made you happy and tonight it's your turn to make me happy. Will you please present yourself to His Excellency's good lady? Do, for heaven's sake. She can get me a more semor post. '

They left for the ball and reached the Assembly Roois. There was a door-keeper at the entrance. The vestibule was full of coat-racks and fur coats, with servants scurrying about and ladies in low-necked dresses trying to keep off the draught with their fans. The place smelt of gas lights and soldiers. Anne went upstairs on her husband's arm. She heard music and saw a full-length reflection of herself in an enormous mirror brightly lit by innumerable lights. Her heartseemed to leap forjoy and she felt that she was going to be happy—the same feeling that had come over her on that moonlit night at the wayside station. She walked proudly, sufe of herself Feeling for the first time that she was no longer a girl, but a grown woman, she unconsciously modelled her walk and manner on her mother. For the first time in her life she felt rich and free. Even her husband's presence did not hamper her because the moment she stepped inside the Assembly Rooms her in- stinct told her that she lost nothing by having an elderly husband at her side—far from it, for it lent her the very air of piquancy and mystery that men so relish.

In the large ballroom the orchestra was blaring away and dancmg had begun. Plunged straight from her very ordinary official flat into this whirl of light, colour, noise and music, Anne surveyed the room and thought how marvellous it all was. She at once picked out every- one she knew in the crowd, everyone she had met at parties or on outings, officers, schoolmasters, lawyers, civil servants, landowners, His Excellency, -Artynov, society ladies in their. finery and low-necked dresses—some beautiful, others ugly as they took their places at the kiosks and stalls of the charity bazaar, ready to open shop in aid of the poor.

An enormous officer with epaulettes—Anne had met him in the Old Kiev Road when she was still at school, but could not remember his name—seemed to pop up from nowhere and asked her to waltz. She bounced away from her husband, feeling as if she was sailing a boat in a raging storm and had left him far behind on the shore. She danced like one possessed—a waltz, a polka and a quadrille—passing from one partner to another, dizzy with music and noise, mixing up French and Russian, pronouncing the Russian r as ifshe came from Paris, laughing, not thinking of her husband or of anything or anyone else. She had made a hit with the men, ihat was obvious. And no wonder. Breathless and excited, she gripped her fan convulsively and felt thirsty. Her father came up, his tail-coat creased and smelling of benzine. He held out a plate of pmk ice-cream.

'You're enchanting this evening,' he said, looking at her with great enthusiasm. 'Oh, why did you have to rush into that marriage? I've never regretted it ntore. I know you did it for us, but. .. .' His hands shook as he pulled out a bundle of notes.

'I was paid for some coaching today,' he said. 'So I can pay your husband back.'

She thrust the plate into his hands and someone pounced on her and whisked her off. Over her partner's shoulder she caught a glimpse ofher father gliding over the parquet floor, his arms round a lady as he whirled her through the ballroom.

'Isn't he nice when he's sober!' she thought.

The big officer partnered her again in the mazurka. He moved along, solemn, ponderous, like a uniformed dummy, twitching his chest and shoulders and just faintly tapping his feet. It seemed as if he did not want to dance at all, but she fluttered round him and provoked him with her beauty and bare neck, her movements impetuous and her blazing eyes a challenge. He looked more and more bored and stretched his arms towards her like royalty conferring a favour.

Everyone cheered.

GraduaUy the big officer caught on too. He seemed to wake up and come to life. He yielded to the spell and reaUy let himself go, his movements lithe and youthful, while she just twitched her shoulders with a sly look as if to say that she was queen now and he the slave. She felt everyone's eyes on them and everybody in the ballroom seemed to be swooning with envy. The big officer had hardly had time to thank her when everyone suddenly formed a gangway and the men drew themselves up in a curiously stiff way with their arms at their sides.

The reason was—His ExceUency. He was advancing towards her and he wore a tail-coat with two stars on the chest. She was his target sure enough, for he was staring straight at her with a sickly smile, his lips working as always happened when he saw a pretty woman.

'Delighted, delighted .. .' he began. TU have to put your husband under arrest for sitting tight on such a treasure aU this time. I've a message from my wife,' he went on, holding out his hand. 'You must help us. ... M'm, yes. .. . We ought to give you a prize for beauty ... as they do in America.... M'm, yes.... Those Americans—er, my wife is longing to meet you.'

He took her to a stall, to an eIderIy woman with a vast chin so out of proportion to the rest of her face that she might have had a big stone in her mouth.

'Do come and help,' she said in a nasal drawl. 'AII the pretty women are heIping with the charity bazaar and for some reason you're the only one idle. Why don't you join us?'

She Ieft. Anne took her place by a siIver samovar and tea cups and did a roaring trade from the start. She charged at Ieast a rouble for a cup of tea and made the big officer drink three cups. Artynov, the rich man with the protruding eyes and the wheeze, came up. Tonight he was not wearing the strange cIothes that Anne had seen him in that summer, but sported a taiI-coat Iike everyone eIse. Without taking his eyes off Anne, he drank a glass of champagne and paid a hundred roubles. Then he drank some tea and put down another hundred. He was suffering from asthma and said not a word.

Anne cried hcr wares and took the customers' money, quite sure by this time that these people found nothing but sheer delight in her smiles and gIances. She knew now that this was what she was born for, this hectic, brilIiant life ofIaughter, music, dancing and admirers. Now she couId laugh at her old fear of t he force that bore down and threatened to crush her. She was afraid of no one now and was only sad that her mother was not there so that they couId both enjoy her success.

PaIe, but stiII steady on his feet, her father came up to her stall and asked for a gIass of brandy. Anne thought that he was going to say something out of turn and blushed—she aIready felt ashamed of such a poor, such a very ordinary father. But he just drank his brandy, tossed her ten roubIes from his bundIe of notes and moved away with dignity. Not a word had he said. A IittIe later she saw him dancing the grand rond, staggering now and shouting, at which his partner seemed greatIy put out. He had staggered and shouted just like this at a balI about three years ago, Anne remembered. That had ended with a poIice inspector taking him home to bed, and next day the headmaster had threatened to dismiss him. Not quite the sort of thing Anne wanted to remember just now!

When the samovars had gone cold in the booths and the exhaustcd heIpers had handed their takings to the elderIy woman with thc stone in her mouth, Artynov took Anne's arm and they went into the halI where supper was served for the charity workers. Thcre were not more than a score of peopIe at t.ible, but things were pretty lively. His ExceIlency gave a toast. 'In this magnificent dining-room it is fittŭig that we should drink to the cheap canteens which arc the occasion of tonight's bazaar.' An artillery brigadier proposed 'the power that can bring even a gunner to his knees', and the men all clinked glasses with the ladies.

It was all great fun.

Day was breaking when Anne was taken home, and cooks were on their way to market. Happy, drunk and absolutely dead beat, her head awhirl with new impressions, she undressed, flopped on the bed and fell straight asleep. . . .

At about half past one in the afternoon her maid woke her to say that Mr. Artynov had called. She dressed quickly and went into the draw- mg-room.

Not long after Artynov, His Excellency came to thank her for help- ing with the bazaar. Giving her his sickly look, his lips working, he kissed her hand, asked permission to call again, and left. She stood in the middle of the drawing-room, absolutely dumbfounded, almost in a trance, unable to believe that a change, and such a staggering change, had taken place in her life so quickly.

Then her husband came in.

He stood before her with the look that she knew so well. It was the crawling, sugary, slavish, deferential look that he kept for powerful and distuiguished people. Triumphant, indignant, scornful—quite cer- tain that she could get away with anything and articulating each word clearly—she spoke.

'Get out! Idiot!'

After that Anne never had a day to herself as she was always off on some picnic or outing or taking part in theatricals. She always came home in the small hours and would lie down on the drawing-room floor, after which she would tell everyone the pathetic story of how she had slept beneath the flowers. She needed a lot of money, but she no longer feared Modeste Alekseyevich and spent his money as if it was her ovwn. She made no requests or demands—just sent him bills or notes saying, 'Give bearer 200 roubles', '100 roubles—pay at once.'

At Easter her husban.d received the Order of St. Anne, second class, and called to thank His Excellency. His Excellency laid aside his news- paper and settled back in his arm-chair.

'So you now have three Annes,' he said, studying his white hands and pink finger-nails. 'One in your button-hole and two round your neck.'

Modeste laid two fingers to his lips for fear oflaughing out loud.

'Now we must await the appearance of a tiny Vladimir,' he said. 'Dare I ask your Excellency to be godfather?'

He was hinting at the Order of St. Vladimir, fourth class, and could already see himselfdining out on a quip so brilliantly apt and audacious. He was about to make some other equally happy remark when His Excellency plWlged back into his newspaper and nodded. ...

As for Anne, she took troika rides, went hunting with Artynov, acted in one-act plays, went out to supper, and saw less and less of her family. They always had supper on their own these days. Her father was drinking more than ever, his money had run out, and the har- monium had been sold to pay his debts.

Nowadays the boys never let him out in the street on his own and were always watching in case he fell down. When he met Anne driving along the Old Kiev Road in her coach with a pair ofhorses and a side- horse while Artynov sat on the box and acted as coachman, her father would take off his top hat and start to shout something. Then Peter and Andrew would hold his arms and plead with him.

'Oh really, Father. Please don't.'

NOTES

HIS WIFE

I 'Kazan.' Town on the Volga, about 500 milcs east ofMoscow.

'at Cubat's Restaurant.' Probably the Bellevue Restaurant (pro- prietor Cubat), on one of the islands (Kamenny ostrov) in the north ofSt. Petersburg. Most large restaurants in St. Petersburg were run by Frenchmen or Germans.

'a passport.' A Russian citizen was required to possess a passport for purposes of internal as well as e.xternal travel. Wives, who were legally obliged to reside with their husbands, had to have the husband's permission in order to apply for a passport.

A LADY WITH A DOG

'Yalta.' Town and seaside resort on the Crimean coast, where Chekhov built a villa in 1899, and which was his main residence from then until his death in l904;Vemet's cafe is mentioned in Baedeker's Russia (1914). p. 417.

'Belyov.' Small town about 150 miles south of Moscow.

8 'Zhizdra.' Small town about 200 miles south-west of Moscow.

8 'sunny Spain.' The text has 'Grenada' (an island in the West Indies), but it seems more likely that Chekhov had the Spanish 'Granada' in mind.

'Oreanda.' On the coast about five miles south-west of Yalta, Oreanda contained a park which extended down to the sea.

I 2 'Feodosiya.' Resort on the Crimean coast, about 70 miles north- east of Yalta.

'the waterfall.' The waterfall of Uchan-Su, about six miles from Yalta, was a favourite target for e.xcursions.

I 6 'The Geisha.' The operetta by Sidney Jones, first produced in London (1896).

18 'The Slav Fair.' A large hotel in central Moscow, at which Chekhov himself sometimes stayed.

TllE DUEL

'Superfluous Men.' Reference is to a well-known Russian literarv type—the man at odds with societv, as found particu- larlv in certain works by Griboyedov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and Goncharov. See The O.vford Chcklwi', ii. 5-6.

'Tolstoy.' The novdist and thinker L. N. Tolstoy (1828-1910).

24 'Herbert Spencer.' The English philosophn (182^1903).

26 'Tula.' Provincial capital. about 120 miles south of Moscow.

26 'Vereshchagin.' The Russian painter V. V. Vercshchagin (1824-1904).

28 'Order of St. Vladimir.' The imperial Russian 'orders', or decorations for distinction in peace or war, were instituted by Peter the Great and added to as the years went by.

'Circassians.' Inhabitants of an area in the northern Caucasus.

'Anna Karenin.' The reference is to Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenin

(1875-7).

'Abkhazians.' Inhabitants of Abkhazia, an area north-west of Georgia.

'Sevastopol.' The Crimean port.

30 'Kursk.' City in central Russia, about 300 miles south of Moscow.

33 'Prince Vorontsov.' Field Marshal M. S. Vorontsov (1782-1856), Viceroy of the Caucasus (1844-53).

36 'Onegin.' Reference is to Yevgeny Onegin, a Superfluous Man and hero of the verse novel Yei>geny Onegin (1823-31) by A. S. Pushkin (179^1837).

36 'Pechorin.' Reference is to Pechorin. a Superfluous Man and hero of the novel A Hero o/Our Time (1840) by the poet M. Yu. Lermontov (1814-41).

36 'Byron's Cain.' Reference is to Cain (1821) by the English poet Byron (1788-1824).

36 'Bazarov.' Reference is to Yevgeny Bazarov, hero of the novel Fathers and Children (1862) by 1. S. Turgenev (1818-83).

36 'serf system.' That is, they are descended from owners of the serfs, who were emancipated in 1861.

41 'Dorpat.' Reference is to the Estonian town ofTartu, which lay within the Russian Empire, seat of a university reopened in 1802, at which the language of instruction was German until

48 'Vladivostok.' Russian port in the far east ofSiberia on the Sea ofJapan.

48 'Bering Straits.' Between far north-eastern Siberia and Alaska.

48 'Yenisey.' Large river in central Siberia.

50 'Pushkin's "Ukrainian Night".' Reference is to a celebrated descriptive passage beginning 'Quiet is the Ukrainian night' from the Second Canto of Pushkin's narrative poem Poitava (1829).

55 'His beaver collar . . . ' The lines are from Verse xvi of Chapter One ofPushkin's Yevgeny Onegin, being part of a description of a winter scene in St. Petersburg.

6o 'Stanley.' Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the explorer.

64 'Whosoever shall offend .. . '. Mark 9:42.

71 'Turgenev's Rudin.' Reference is to the hero of Turgenev's novel Rudin (1856), a Superfluous Man.

74 'Anna Karenin.' Reference is to the tragic climax of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenin, where the heroine commits suicide by throwing herself under a train as the result of an unhappy adulterous love affair.

83 'New Athos.' New Athos (or Akhali Afoni), a settlement on the Abkhazian shore of the Black Sea, now a spa in the Gudauta District of the Abkhazian A.S.S.R.

83 'Novorossisk.' Black Sea port in the Krasnodar (formerly Yekaterinodar) Region of the northern Caucasus.

92 'Leskov.' N. S. Leskov (1831-95), the Russian novelist and short-story writer.

94 'Peter and Paul dungeons.' The Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. founded in 1703, where manv political prisoners were held.

94 'In my oppressed and anguished mind ...' The last lines of Pushkin's famous lyric Memory (1828).

99 'Chechen.' A people of the northern Caucasus still not entirelv subjected to Russian rule at the end of the nineteenth century.

105 'Lermontov.' Reference is to the duel between Pechorin and Grushnitsky in A Hero of Our Time (see note to p. 36 above).

105 'Turgenev's Bazarov.' Reference is to Bazarov's duel with Paul Kirsanov in Fathers and Childreti (see note to p. 36 above).

A HAUDCASE

i 14 'the: villagc elder's barn.' It was the practice for thc heads of houscholds in a village to elect an elder who became the head of the mir or village commune. He presided over and summoned its meetings, and was in charge of village administration.

i 16 'their Turgenev and their Shchedrin.' The novelist Turgenev (see note to p. 36) was a well-known liberal; M. Ye. Saltykov (1826-89) was a satirist and a well-known radical (who wrote under the pseudonym 'Shchcdrin ', and is often known as Saltykov-Shched rin).

i 16 'Henry Buckles.' Reference is to Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62), the English social historian and author of History of Civilization (1857—61), which enjoved a great vogue in Russia.

i 17 '"Where Southern Breezes Blow".' A popular Ukrainian folk- song.

i i8 'Gadyach.' A small town in the Ukraine about i50 miles east of Kiev.

GOOSEliERRIES

i29 'si.x foot of earth.' Reference is to Tolstoy's short story Does a Mmi Need /nitch Јm-rh? (i886).

i32 'To hosts of petty truths .. . .' From the poem A Hero (1830) by Pushkin.

CONCEIINING LOVE

'"this is a great mystery".' Ephesians 5:32.

'European Herald.' Vestnik Yevropy—a historico-political and literary monthly of liberal complexion published in St. Petersburg/Pctrograd, i 866-1918.

PEASANTS

'Whosoever shall smite thee .. . .' Matthew 5:39.

'Come unto me all ye that labour... .' Matthew i 1:28.

'Vladimir.' Provincial capital about i20 miks cast of Moscow.

'since the days of serfdom.' Since i86i, the year of emanci- pation.

14^50 'at the Hermitage Garden Theatre.' The Hermitage Variety Theatre in Karetny ryad in Moscow (not to be confused with the Hermkage Restaurant in Trubny Place in Moscow or t'he Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg).

150 'And when they were departed... . ' Matthew 2:13.

155 'the Assumption.' 15 August, the end of the harvest.

'huntsmen skilled in driving wolves towards the guns.' Transla- tion of Russian pskovichi. These are not 'retrievers', as in some earlier translations, but specialists in wo!f- or fox-hunting— their function being to drive the beasts from cover while the guns wait at a pre-arranged spot. The pskovichi originally came from Pskov Province, whence their name, and usually worked in teams of three.

'Tver.' Town about 140 miles north-west of Moscow, named Kalinin in 1931.

163 'Alexander of Battenberg' (1857-93). Prince of Bulgaria 187^86. He was forced to abdicate by Alexander lll of Russia. 'This detail . . . indicates perhaps the elder's ignorance, for one so loyal would not otherwise have given the place ofhonour to an enemy of his Tsar.' (W. H. Bruford, Chek/zov a»d his Russia, p. 55-)

'Elijah's Day.' 20 July, the beginning of the harvest.

16(r.7 'Holy Cross Day.' 14 September.

'The Feast ofthe Intercession' [of the VirginJ. i October.

ANGEL

173 'Bryansk.' Town about 250 miles south-west of Moscow.

173 'Faust /wside Om.' Perhaps a burlesque of the opera Fa/zst (1859) by Charles Gounod (1818-93).

173 'Orpheus i» the Underwor/d.' The operetta Orfee aux en/ers (1858, revised 1874) by Jacques Offenbach (181^80).

175 'Mogilyov.' Town about 350 miles west-south-west of Moscow.

180 'Kharkov.' Large city in the Ukraine.

THE RUSSIAN MASTER

183 'Count Nulin.' The horse is named after the hero of Pushkin's comic poem Count Nu/itr (1825).

183 'Marie Godefroi.' A well-known equestrienne of the period, of whom A. A. Suvorin had written to Chekhov from Feodosiya in the Crimea, on 6 September 1888, as 'that prima domw of the ring, a rather handsome, well-built brunette—a truly fabulous horsewoman and a devastating trick rider' (Works, 1944-51, xiv, 512).

186 'Shchedrin.' See note to p. 116 above.

'Dostoyevsky.' F. M. Dostoyevsky (1821-81), the novelist.

'Eugene Onegin.' See note to p. 36 above.

187 'Boris Codunov.' Pushkin's historical play (1824-5).

187 'Lermontov.' See note- to p. 36 above.

'Alt:xis Tolstoy's poem "The Sitifnl Woman".' This work by A. K. Tolstoy (1817-75) also figures in Act Three of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard—see The Oxford Chekhoi', iii, 181.

'Lessing's Hambnrgische DramaturS!ie.' The treatise on drama ( 1769) by the German critic and dramatist G. E. Lessing (1729-81).

190 'Battle of Kalka.' At the battle by the River Kalka in south Russia, on 3 I May 1223, the Russians were routed by a Mongol-Tatar army.

'Siberian capes.' Literally, 'Cape Chukotskys'—rcference being to the Chukotsky Peninsula in the far north-cast of Siberia, opposite the Bering Straits.

'European Herald.' See note to p. 137 above.

'Neglinny Drive.' Street leading north from the Maly Theatre in central Moscow.

'Gogol.' N. V. Gogol (1809-52), the novelist and short-story wnter.

198 'the Consecration of the Waters.' Annual ceremony of the Orthodox Church held on 5 January, the Eve of Epiphany.

204 'Klushino.' Name of a locality about a hundred miles west of Moscow.

206 'in that sleep of death . .. ' From the soliloquy 'To be, or not to be' in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III, Scene i.

209 'The mood which h«id banished so many gifted young people to the countryside.' The reference is to a recurrent tendency for young Russian intellectuals to attempt to help (or 'repay their debt to') the peasantry by working as village teachers, doctors, political agitators, etc.

'How sweet the moonlight . ..' Shakespeare, Merchant of Venicc, Act V, Scenc i.

'1 was born a gentleman.' A deliberately loose translation for literal '1 am a hereditary honorary citizen' (pofomsn't'»//)' pochotuy r:razhdaiiin). This was one of the many categories to which Imperial Russian citizens were assigned. In the present instance 'Forty Martyrs' was neither a gentleman (since his father had been a priest) nor a cleric (since he himself had not entered the church). As an 'honorary citizen' he retained certain privileges denied to peasants and other members of the lower classcs.

214 'The Order of St. Anne' and 'the Order of St. Anne, second class.' Sec note to p. 28. The Order of St. Annt', third class, was worn in the button-hole, while the Order of St. Anne, second class, was worn on a ribbon round the neck.

225 'the Order of St. Vladimir, fourth class.' This rated just above the Order of St. Anne, second class.