Fifty-Two Stories

ON THE ROAD

A golden cloudlet spent the night

Upon the breast of a giant cliff…

L

ERMONTOV

¹

IN THE ROOM which the innkeeper himself, the Cossack Semyon Spitcleanov, calls “the traveling room,” that is, set aside exclusively for travelers, at a big unpainted table, sat a tall, broad-shouldered man of about forty. He was asleep, his elbow on the table, his head propped on his fist. The stub of a tallow candle, stuck into a jar of pomade, lit up his brown beard, his broad, fat nose, his tanned cheeks, and the thick, black eyebrows hanging over his closed eyes. His nose, his cheeks, his brows, all of his features, taken separately, were crude and heavy, like the furniture and the stove in the “traveling room,” but together they resulted in something harmonious and even handsome. Such is the fortuity, as they say, of the Russian face: the larger and sharper its features, the gentler and kindlier it seems. The man was dressed in a gentleman’s suit jacket, much-worn but trimmed with a wide new band, a velvet waistcoat, and wide black trousers tucked into big boots.

On one of the benches that stood in an unbroken line along the wall, on a fox-fur coat, slept a girl of about eight, in a brown dress and long black stockings. Her face was pale, her hair blond, her shoulders narrow, her whole body thin and frail, but her nose protruded in the same fat and unattractive lump as the man’s. She was fast asleep and did not feel how the curved comb, fallen from her head, was cutting her cheek.

The “traveling room” had a festive look. The air smelled of freshly washed floors, the line that stretched diagonally across the entire room did not have the usual rags hanging on it, and in the corner, over the table, an icon lamp flickered, casting a patch of red light on the icon of St. George. Observing the most strict and careful gradation in the transition from the divine to the secular, from the icon, on both sides of the corner, stretched two rows of popular prints. In the dim light of the candle stub and the red light of the icon lamp, the pictures appeared as continuous strips covered with black blotches. But when the tile stove, wishing to sing in unison with the weather, breathed air into itself with a howl, and the logs, as if awakened, burst brightly into flame and growled angrily, then ruddy patches began to leap on the timber walls, and above the head of the sleeping man one could see now St. Seraphim, now Shah Nasr-Eddin, now a fat brown baby, goggling his eyes and whispering something into the ear of a girl with an extraordinarily dull and indifferent face…²

Outside a storm was raging. Something fierce, malicious, but deeply unhappy was rushing around the inn with savage ferocity, trying to burst inside. Banging on the doors, knocking on the windows and the roof, clawing at the walls, it threatened and then pleaded, then calmed down for a while, then plunged with a gleeful, treacherous howling down the chimney, but here the logs flared up and the fire, like a guard dog, rushed fiercely to meet the enemy; a fight started, followed by sobbing, shrieking, angry roaring. In all of it there was the sound of malicious anguish, and unquenched hatred, and the offended impotence of someone who had been accustomed to winning…

Enchanted by this wild, inhuman music, the “traveling room” seemed to be transfixed forever. But then the door creaked and a servant boy in a new calico shirt came into the room. Limping on one leg and blinking his sleepy eyes, he snuffed the candle with his fingers, added logs to the stove, and left. Just then the bell of the church in Rogachi, which is three hundred paces from the inn, began to strike midnight. The wind played with the ringing as it did with the flakes of snow; chasing after the bell’s sounds, it whirled them around the huge space, so that some strokes broke off or were drawn into a long, wavy sound, while others vanished completely in the general din. One stroke sounded as clearly in the room as if the bells were ringing just outside the window. The girl who was sleeping on the fox fur gave a start and raised her head. For a moment she gazed senselessly at the dark window, at Nasr-Eddin, over whom the crimson light from the stove danced at that moment, then she shifted her gaze to the sleeping man.

“Papa!” she said.

But the man did not move. The girl knitted her brow crossly, lay down, and tucked her legs under. Behind the door in the inn someone yawned loud and long. Soon after that the door-pulley screeched and indistinct voices were heard. Someone came in and softly stamped his felt boots, shaking off the snow.

“What is it?” a woman’s voice asked lazily.

“Miss Ilovaiskaya has arrived,” a bass replied.

Again the door-pulley screeched. The noise of the wind bursting in was heard. Someone, probably the lame boy, ran to the door that led to the “traveling room,” coughed deferentially, and touched the latch.

“This way, dear miss, if you please,” said the woman’s singsong voice. “It’s clean here, pretty lady…”

The door flew open, and a bearded peasant, all plastered with snow from head to foot, appeared on the threshold, in a coachman’s kaftan and with a big suitcase on his shoulder. After him came a woman’s figure, short, almost half the size of the coachman, with no face or hands, all wrapped up, muffled, looking like a bundle, and also covered with snow. Dampness wafted over the girl from the coachman and the bundle, as if from a cellar, and the candle’s flame wavered.

“What stupidity!” the bundle said angrily. “We could have driven perfectly well! There are only eight miles left to go, all through forest, and we wouldn’t get lost…”

“Lost, no, not lost, but the horses refused to go, miss,” the coachman replied. “And it’s Thy will, Lord—as if I’d have done it on purpose!”

“God knows where you’ve brought us…But be quiet…People seem to be sleeping here. Go now…”

The coachman set down the suitcase, which caused whole layers of snow to fall from his shoulders, produced a sobbing sound with his nose, and left. Then the girl saw two small hands come out from inside the bundle, reach upwards, and angrily begin to untangle the tangle of shawls, kerchiefs, and scarves. First a big shawl fell on the floor, then a bashlyk, followed by a white knitted kerchief. Having freed her head, the visitor took off her overcoat and at once became twice narrower. She was now wearing a long gray coat with big buttons and bulging pockets. From one pocket she took something wrapped in paper, from the other a bunch of big, heavy keys, which she set down so carelessly that the sleeping man gave a start and opened his eyes. For some time he looked around dully, as if not understanding where he was, then shook his head, went to the corner, and sat down…The traveler took off her coat, which again made her twice narrower, pulled off her velvet boots, and also sat down.

Now she no longer looked like a bundle. She was a small, thin brunette of about twenty, slender as a little snake, with an elongated white face and wavy hair. Her nose was long, sharp, her chin also long and sharp, her eyelashes long, the corners of her mouth sharp, and, thanks to this overall sharpness, the expression of her face seemed prickly. Drawn tightly into a black dress, with masses of lace at the neck and sleeves, with sharp elbows and long pink fingers, she resembled the portraits of medieval English ladies. The serious, concentrated expression of her face increased this resemblance still more…

The brunette looked around the room, glanced sidelong at the man and the girl, and, shrugging her shoulders, went to sit by the window. The dark windows were trembling from the damp west wind. Big flakes of snow, sparkling white, settled on the window glass, but disappeared at once, carried off by the wind. The wild music was becoming ever louder…

After a long silence, the little girl suddenly stirred and said, angrily rapping out each word:

“Lord! Lord! I’m so unhappy! Unhappier than anybody!”

The man got up and, with a guilty step not at all suited to his enormous height and big beard, went mincing over to the girl.

“You’re not asleep, sweetie?” he said in an apologetic voice. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything! My shoulder hurts! You’re a bad man, Papa, and God will punish you! You’ll see, he’ll punish you!”

“My darling, I know your shoulder hurts, but what can I do, sweetie?” the man said, in the tone in which drunken men apologize to their stern spouses. “Your shoulder hurts from traveling, Sasha. Tomorrow we’ll arrive, get some rest, and it will go away…”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow…You say ‘tomorrow’ every day. We’ll be traveling for another twenty days!”

“But, sweetie, a father’s word of honor, we’ll arrive tomorrow. I never lie, and it’s not my fault if we’ve been held up by a blizzard!”

“I can’t take any more! I can’t, I can’t!”

Sasha sharply kicked her foot and filled the room with unpleasant, high-pitched crying. Her father waved his hand and gave the brunette a lost look. She shrugged her shoulders and hesitantly went over to Sasha.

“Listen, my dear,” she said, “why cry? True, it’s not nice that your shoulder hurts, but what can be done?”

“You see, madam,” the man began quickly, as if apologizing, “we haven’t slept for two nights, and we’ve been traveling in disgusting conditions. So, of course, she’s sick and languishing…And then, too, you know, we happened to have a drunken coachman, and our suitcase was stolen…a blizzard all the time, but why cry, madam? Then again, this sleeping sitting up has tired me, and it’s as if I’m drunk. By God, Sasha, it’s sickening even without you, and then you go crying!”

The man shook his head, waved his hand, and sat down.

“Of course, you shouldn’t cry,” said the brunette. “Only nursing babies cry. If you’re sick, my dear, you should get undressed and go to sleep…Let’s get undressed!”

Once the girl was undressed and calmed down, there was silence again. The brunette sat by the window and looked around perplexedly at the room, the icon, the stove…Apparently, it all seemed strange to her—the room, the girl with her fat nose, in her short boy’s undershirt, and the girl’s father. This strange man was sitting in the corner, bewildered, like a drunk man, glancing around and rubbing his face with his palm. He said nothing, blinked his eyes, and, looking at his guilty figure, it was hard to suppose that he would soon start talking. But he was the first to start talking. He stroked his knees, coughed, then chuckled and said:

“A comedy, by God…I look and don’t believe my eyes: why the devil has fate driven us to this vile inn? What did it mean to show by it? Life sometimes performs such a salto mortale that you’re left staring and blinking in perplexity. Are you going far, madam?”

“No, not far,” replied the brunette. “I’m going from our estate, some fifteen miles from here, to our farmstead, to my father and brother. I’m Ilovaiskaya myself, and the farmstead is called Ilovaiskoe, it’s eight miles on from here. Such unpleasant weather!”

“Couldn’t be worse!”

The lame boy came in and stuck a new candle stub in the pomade jar.

“Serve up the samovar for us, laddie,” the man turned to him.

“Who drinks tea now?” the lame boy smirked. “It’s a sin to drink before the liturgy.”³

“Never mind, laddie, it’s not you who’ll burn in hell, it’s us…”

Over tea the new acquaintances got to talking. Miss Ilovaiskaya learned that her interlocutor’s name was Grigory Petrovich Likharev, that he was the brother of the Likharev who was marshal of the nobility in one of the neighboring districts,⁴ and that he himself had been a landowner, but had been “ruined in good time.” Likharev learned that Miss Ilovaiskaya was named Marya Mikhailovna, that her father’s estate was enormous, but that the management fell to her alone, because her father and brother looked at life through their fingers, were carefree and overly fond of borzois.

“At the farmstead my father and brother are all by themselves,” said Miss Ilovaiskaya, waving her fingers (she had the habit of waving her fingers in front of her prickly face during a conversation and of licking her lips with her sharp tongue after each phrase). “They’re men, carefree folk, and won’t move a finger for themselves! I suppose no one will give them Christmas dinner. We have no mother, and our servants are such that they won’t even spread a tablecloth properly without me. Just imagine their situation now! They’ll go without Christmas dinner, and I have to sit here all night. How strange it all is!”

Miss Ilovaiskaya shrugged her shoulders, took a sip from the cup, and said:

“There are feasts that have their own smell. At Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas there’s a particular smell in the air. Even unbelievers love these feasts. My brother, for instance, says there is no God, but at Easter he’s the first to run to church.”

Likharev raised his eyes to Miss Ilovaiskaya and laughed.

“They say there is no God,” Miss Ilovaiskaya went on, also laughing, “but why then, tell me, do all the famous writers, scholars, and intelligent people in general, become believers toward the end of their lives?”

“Anyone who was unable to believe at a young age, madam, will not believe when he’s old, even if he’s a writer ten times over.”

Judging by his cough, Likharev had a bass voice, but, probably from fear of talking loudly or from excessive shyness, he spoke in a tenor. After a brief silence, he sighed and said:

“As I understand it, faith is a spiritual capacity. It’s like a talent: you have to be born with it. Insofar as I can judge by myself, by the people I’ve met in my time, by all that goes on around me, Russian people possess this capacity in the highest degree. Russian life is an uninterrupted series of beliefs and infatuations, and as for unbelief or denial, Russia, if you wish to know, hasn’t caught a whiff of it. If a Russian man doesn’t believe in God, it means he believes in something else.”

Likharev accepted a cup of tea from Miss Ilovaiskaya, swigged half of it at once, and went on:

“I’ll tell you about myself. Nature put into my soul an extraordinary ability to believe. For half my life (don’t let me spook you!) I’ve belonged to the ranks of the atheists and nihilists, but there hasn’t been a single hour of my life when I haven’t believed. Usually all talents reveal themselves in early childhood, and so my ability already made itself known when I was still knee-high. My mother liked her children to eat a lot, and when she fed me, she used to say: ‘Eat! The main thing in life is soup!’ I believed, I ate that soup, ate it ten times a day, ate like a shark, to the point of loathing and passing out. My nanny told fairy tales, and I believed in house goblins, in wood demons, in all sorts of devilry. I used to steal rat poison from my father, pour it on gingerbread, and carry it up to the attic, so that the house goblins would eat it and drop dead. And when I learned to read and understand what I read, then things really took off! I fled to America, I became a highway robber, I asked to be taken to a monastery, I hired other boys to torture me for the sake of Christ. And notice, my belief was always active, not dead. If I ran away to America, I didn’t go alone, I seduced another fool like myself to go with me, and I was glad when I was freezing outside the city gate and when they flogged me; and when I became a highway robber, I never failed to come back with a bloodied mug. A most troubled childhood, I assure you! And when I was sent to school and showered there with all sorts of truths, like that the earth moves around the sun, and that the color white is not white, but consists of seven colors, my poor little head was in a whirl! Everything went topsy-turvy in me: Joshua, who stopped the sun, and my mother, who rejected lightning rods on behalf of the prophet Elijah,⁵ and my father, who was indifferent to the truths I learned. My enlightenment inspired me. I went around the house and stables like a lunatic, preaching my truths, horrified by ignorance, burning with hatred for anyone who saw white as merely white…However, this is all nonsense and childishness. My serious, so to speak, masculine passions began at the university. Did you study anywhere, madam?”

“In Novocherkassk, at the Donskoy boarding school.”

“So you have no higher education? That means you don’t know what science is. All the sciences, however many there are in the world, have one and the same passport, without which they consider themselves unthinkable: striving for the truth! Each of them, even some sort of pharmacognosis, has as its aim not usefulness, not the comforts of life, but truth. Remarkable! When you set about the study of some science, you’re struck first of all by its beginnings. I’ll tell you, there is nothing more fascinating and grandiose, nothing that so astonishes and captivates the human spirit, as the beginnings of some science. After the first five or six lectures, you’re already inspired by the brightest hopes, you already fancy yourself the master of truth. And I gave myself to science selflessly, passionately, as to a beloved woman. I was its slave and didn’t want to know any other sun. Day and night I studied, never straightening my back, I went broke on books, I wept when before my eyes people exploited science for their personal ends. But I was not passionate for long. The thing is that each science has a beginning, but no end, like a recurrent decimal. Zoology has discovered thirty-five thousand kinds of insects, chemistry numbers sixty elements. If in time ten zeroes are added to the right of these numbers, zoology and chemistry will be as far from their ends as they are now, and all contemporary scientific work consists precisely in increasing the numbers. I caught on to this trick when I discovered the thirty-five-thousand-and-first species and did not feel any satisfaction. Well, ma’am, I had no time to be disappointed, because soon a new faith took hold of me. I threw myself into nihilism with its leaflets, black repartitions, and the like.⁶ I went to the people, worked in factories, was an oiler, a hauler. Later, wandering around Russia, I got a taste of Russian life, and turned into an ardent admirer of that life. I loved the Russian people to the point of suffering, loved and believed in their God, their language, their creativity…And so on, and so forth…For some time I was a Slavophile, pestered Aksakov with letters,⁷ was a Ukrainophile, an archaeologist, collected specimens of folk art…I was fascinated by ideas, people, events, places…endlessly fascinated! Five years ago I served the repudiation of private property; my last belief was in non-resistance to evil.”⁸

Sasha sighed fitfully and stirred. Likharev got up and went over to her.

“Would you like some tea, sweetie?” he asked tenderly.

“Drink it yourself!” the girl replied rudely.

Likharev became embarrassed and with a guilty step went back to the table.

“So you’ve had fun in your life,” said Miss Ilovaiskaya. “There’s a lot to remember.”

“Well, yes, it’s all fun, when you sit chattering over tea with a nice fellow talker, but if you ask what this fun cost me? What was the price of this diversity in my life? You see, madam, I did not believe like a German doctor of philosophy, zierlichmännerlich,⁹ I didn’t live in the desert, no, each of my beliefs bowed me down, tore my life to pieces. Judge for yourself. I was as rich as my brothers, but now I’m a beggar. In the whirl of my passions, I ran through my own fortune and my wife’s as well—a huge amount of other people’s money. I’m now forty-two, old age is at the door, and I’m as homeless as a dog left behind by the baggage train at night. All my life I’ve known no peace. My soul was constantly pining, suffering even in its hopes…I wore myself out with hard, random tasks, I suffered privation, was in prison maybe five times, dragged myself around the provinces of Archangelsk and Tobolsk¹⁰…It’s painful to remember! I’ve lived, but in the whirl I’ve never felt the process of life itself. Would you believe it, I don’t remember a single spring, I never noticed my wife’s love, my children’s births. What else shall I tell you? I was a misfortune for all those who loved me…My mother has been in mourning for me for fifteen years now, and my proud brothers, who, on account of me, had to feel sick at heart, to blush, to bend their backs, to waste their money, in the end came to hate me like poison.”

Likharev stood up and sat down again.

“If I were merely unhappy, I’d give thanks to God,” he went on, not looking at Miss Ilovaiskaya. “My personal unhappiness falls into the background when I remember how often in my passions I was absurd, far from the truth, unfair, cruel, dangerous! How often I hated and despised with all my soul those I should have loved, and—vice versa. I’ve been unfaithful a thousand times. Today I believe, I fall on my knees, but tomorrow I already flee in cowardice from my gods and friends of today and silently swallow the ‘scoundrel’ they send after me. God alone saw how often I wept and chewed the pillow from shame at my passions. Never once in my life have I deliberately lied or done evil, but my conscience isn’t clean! I can’t even boast of having no one’s life on my conscience, madam, because my wife died before my eyes, worn out by my recklessness. Yes, my wife! Listen, in our everyday life there are now two prevailing attitudes towards women. Some measure women’s skulls so as to prove that women are inferior to men, seek out their shortcomings so as to deride them, play the original in their eyes and justify their own animality. Others try with all their might to raise women up to them, that is, to make them learn thirty-five thousand species, and speak and write the same stupidities that they themselves speak and write…”

Likharev’s face darkened.

“But I tell you that woman has always been and will always be man’s slave,” he began in a bass voice, pounding his fist on the table. “She is tender, soft wax from which man has always molded whatever he liked. Lord God, for two cents’ worth of masculine passion, she’ll cut her hair, abandon her family, die in a foreign land…Among the ideas for which she has sacrificed herself, not one is feminine…A selfless, devoted slave! I haven’t measured skulls, I’m speaking from hard, bitter experience. The most proud and independent women, once I managed to convey my inspiration to them, followed me without reasoning, without questioning, and did everything I wanted; I turned a nun into a nihilist, who, as I later learned, shot a policeman; my wife never left me for a moment in my wanderings and, like a weathercock, changed her beliefs parallel to how I changed my passions.”

Likharev jumped up and began to pace the room.

“Noble, sublime slavery!” he said, clasping his hands. “The lofty meaning of a woman’s life consists precisely in that! Of the terrible muddle that has accumulated in my head during all the time of my dealings with women, my memory, like a filter, has retained not the ideas, not the big words, not the philosophy, but this extraordinary obedience to fate, this extraordinary, all-forgiving mercy…”

Likharev clenched his fists, fixed his gaze on one point, and with a sort of passionate tension, as if sucking on each word, said through clenched teeth:

“This…this magnanimous endurance, faithfulness to the grave, poetry of the heart…The meaning of life is precisely in this uncomplaining martyrdom, in tears that can soften stone, in boundless, all-forgiving love, which brings light and warmth into the chaos of life…”

Miss Ilovaiskaya slowly got up, took a step towards Likharev, and fixed her eyes on his face. From the tears that glistened on his eyelashes, from his trembling, passionate voice, from his flushed cheeks, it was clear to her that women were not a chance or simple topic of conversation. They were the subject of his new passion or, as he said himself, his new belief! For the first time in her life, Ilovaiskaya saw before her a passionately, ardently believing man. Gesticulating, flashing his eyes, he seemed insane, frenzied to her, but in the fire of his eyes, in his talk, in the movements of his whole big body there was so much beauty, that she, not noticing it herself, stood before him as if rooted to the spot, and looked him rapturously in the face.

“Take my mother!” he said, stretching his arms towards her and making a pleading face. “I poisoned her existence, to her mind I disgraced the Likharev family, I caused her as much harm as only the worst enemy can cause, and—what then? My brothers give her small change for holy bread and prayer services, and she, violating her religious feelings, saves this money and secretly sends it to her wayward Grigory! This one little thing educates and ennobles the soul far more than any theories, big words, or thirty-five thousand species! I can give you a thousand examples. Take you, for instance! Outside a blizzard, night, and you’re going to your brother and father to give them tender warmth on the holiday, though maybe they don’t think of you, have even forgotten about you. But just wait, you’ll fall in love with a man, and then you’ll go to the North Pole with him. You will, won’t you?”

“Yes, if…I fall in love.”

“There, you see!” Likharev rejoiced and even stamped his foot. “Oh, God, I’m so glad we’ve become acquainted! My fate is so good to me, I keep meeting such splendid people. Every day brings such an acquaintance as a man would simply give his soul for. In this world there are many more good people than evil. Just imagine, you and I have talked as candidly and openheartedly as if we’ve known each other for a hundred years. Sometimes, I must tell you, for ten years you restrain yourself, say nothing, conceal things from your friends and wife, but you meet a cadet on the train and pour your whole life out to him. I’ve had the honor of seeing you for the first time, and I’ve confessed to you as I’ve never confessed before. Why is that?”

Rubbing his hands and smiling cheerfully, Likharev took a turn around the room and again began talking about women. Meanwhile the bell rang for matins.

“Lord!” Sasha wept. “He won’t let me sleep with all his talk!”

“Ah, yes!” Likharev caught himself. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Sleep, sleep…Besides her, I also have two boys,” he whispered. “They live with their uncle, madam, but this one can’t survive a day without her father. She suffers, complains, yet she clings to me like a fly to honey. I’m talking away, madam, but it wouldn’t hurt if you got some rest. Wouldn’t you like me to make a bed for you?”

Without waiting for permission, he shook the wet overcoat and spread it on the bench fur-side up, gathered the scattered kerchiefs and shawls, put the rolled-up coat at the head, and all that silently, with an expression of obsequious reverence on his face, as if he were fussing not with a woman’s rags, but with the broken pieces of sacred vessels. In his whole figure there was something guilty, embarrassed, as if he were ashamed of his height and strength in the presence of a weak being…

When Miss Ilovaiskaya lay down, he put out the candle and sat on a stool by the stove.

“So it is, madam,” he whispered, lighting a fat cigarette and blowing the smoke into the stove. “Nature has endowed the Russian man with an extraordinary capacity for belief, an inquisitive mind, and a gift for thinking, but it is all reduced to dust by carelessness, laziness, and dreamy light-mindedness…Yes, ma’am…”

Miss Ilovaiskaya peered into the darkness in astonishment and could see only the red patch on the icon and the flickering of light from the stove on Likharev’s face. The darkness, the bell-ringing, the howl of the blizzard, the lame boy, the complaining Sasha, the unhappy Likharev and his talk—all of it was mingling, growing into one enormous impression, and God’s world seemed to her fantastic, filled with wonders and enchanting powers. Everything she had just heard resounded in her ears, and human life appeared to her as a beautiful, poetic fairy tale, which had no end.

The enormous impression grew and grew, it clouded her consciousness and turned into a sweet sleep. Miss Ilovaiskaya slept, but she saw the icon lamp and the fat nose with the red light playing on it. She heard crying.

“Dear Papa,” a child’s voice pleaded tenderly, “let’s go back to Uncle! There’s a Christmas tree! There’s Styopa and Kolya!”

“What can I do, sweetie?” a man’s soft bass persuaded. “Understand me! Do understand!”

And the child’s crying was joined by a man’s.

This voice of human grief amid the howling of the storm touched the girl’s hearing with such sweet, human music that she could not bear the sweetness and also started crying. She heard later how the big, dark shadow quietly came over to her, picked up a fallen shawl from the floor, and wrapped it around her feet.

Miss Ilovaiskaya was awakened by a strange roar. She jumped up and looked around in surprise. A bluish dawn was looking through the windows half covered with snow. There was a gray twilight in the room, through which the stove, the sleeping girl, and Nasr-Eddin were clearly outlined. The stove and the lamp had already gone out. Through the wide-open door, the main room of the inn could be seen, with its counter and tables. Some man with a dull, Gypsy face and astonished eyes stood in the middle of the room, in a puddle of melted snow, holding a big red star on a stick. He was surrounded by a group of boys immobile as statues and all plastered with snow. The light of the star, passing through the red paper, reddened their wet faces. The crowd roared confusedly, and in their roar Miss Ilovaiskaya made out one quatrain:

Hey, you, ragged little kid,

Take your knife and go,

We’ll kill, we’ll kill ourselves a Yid,

He is the son of woe…

Likharev was standing by the counter, gazing tenderly at the singers and beating time with his foot. Seeing Miss Ilovaiskaya, he smiled broadly and went up to her. She also smiled.

“Merry Christmas!” he said. “I noticed you slept well.”

Miss Ilovaiskaya looked at him, said nothing, and went on smiling. After the night’s conversation, he now seemed to her not tall, not broad-shouldered, but small, just as the biggest steamship seems small to us once we are told that it has crossed the ocean.

“Well, it’s time for me to go,” she said. “I must get dressed. Tell me, where are you headed for now?”

“Me? To the Klipushki station, from there to Sergievo, and from Sergievo thirty miles by horse to the coal mines of one jackass, a certain General Shashkovsky. My brothers found me the post of superintendent there…I’ll be digging coal.”

“Wait, I know those mines. Shashkovsky is my uncle. But…why are you going there?” Miss Ilovaiskaya asked, looking at Likharev with surprise.

“To be superintendent. To superintend the mines.”

“I don’t understand!” Miss Ilovaiskaya shrugged her shoulders. “You’re going to the mines. But it’s bare steppe, deserted, so boring you won’t last a day there! The coal is wretched, nobody buys it, and my uncle’s a maniac, a despot, a bankrupt…You won’t even get any salary!”

“It’s all the same,” Likharev said indifferently. “I’m thankful for the mines at least.”

Miss Ilovaiskaya shrugged her shoulders and paced the room in agitation.

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand!” she kept saying, waving her fingers in front of her face. “It’s impossible and…and unreasonable! You understand, it’s…it’s worse than exile, it’s a grave for a living man! Oh, Lord,” she said ardently, going up to Likharev and waving her fingers in front of his smiling face; her upper lip trembled and her prickly face grew pale. “Well, imagine the bare steppe, the solitude. There’s no one to talk to, and you…are passionate about women! Coal mines and women!”

Miss Ilovaiskaya suddenly became embarrassed at her ardor and, turning away from Likharev, went over to the window.

“No, no, you mustn’t go there!” she said, quickly moving her fingers over the glass. Not only with her soul, but even with her back she sensed that behind her stood an infinitely unhappy, lost, neglected man, while he, as if unaware of his unhappiness, as if he had not cried at night, looked at her and smiled good-naturedly. It would have been better if he had gone on crying! She paced the room several times in agitation, then stopped in the corner, pondering. Likharev was saying something, but she did not hear him. Her back turned to him, she took a twenty-five-rouble note from her wallet, crumpled it in her hands for a while, then, turning to Likharev, blushed and slipped the note into her pocket.

The coachman’s voice was heard through the door. Silently, with a stern, concentrated face, Miss Ilovaiskaya began to dress. Likharev wrapped her up and chattered cheerfully, but his every word weighed heavily on her soul. It is not cheerful to listen to the banter of an unhappy or a dying man.

When the transformation of the living person into a shapeless bundle was completed, Ilovaiskaya took a last look around the “traveling room,” stood silently, and slowly left. Likharev went to see her off…

Outside, God knows why, winter was still raging. Whole clouds of big, soft snowflakes circled restlessly over the earth and found no place for themselves. Horses, sledges, trees, an ox tied to a post—everything was white and looked soft, fluffy.

“Well, God be with you,” Likharev murmured, helping Miss Ilovaiskaya into the sledge. “Don’t remember evil…”¹¹Miss Ilovaiskaya was silent. When the sledge set off and began to skirt a big snowdrift, she turned and looked at Likharev as if she wanted to say something to him. He ran up to her, but she did not say a word to him, but only looked at him through her long eyelashes, on which snowflakes were hanging…

Either his sensitive soul had indeed been able to read that gaze, or maybe his imagination deceived him, but it suddenly began to seem to him that, another two or three good, firm strokes, and this girl would forgive him his failures, his age, his misery, and follow him, without asking questions, without reasoning. For a long time he stood as if rooted to the spot and looked at the tracks left by the runners. Snowflakes avidly settled on his hair, his beard, his shoulders…Soon the tracks of the runners disappeared, and he himself, covered with snow, began to look like a white cliff, but his eyes still went on searching for something in the clouds of snow.

1886