The Best Stories of Anton Chekhov

On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had taken place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he was studying at the university he had fancied that medicine would soon be overtaken by the fate of alchemy and meta- physics; but now when he was reading at night the science of medicine touched him and excited his won- der, and even enthusiasm. What unexpected bril- liance, what a revolution I Thanks to the antiseptic system operations were performed such as the great Pirogov had considered impossible even in spe. Ordinary Zemstvo doctors were venturing to per- form the resection of the kneecap; of abdominal operations only one per cent. was fatal; while stone was considered such a trifle that they did not even write about it. A radical cure for syphilis had been discovered. And the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and of Koch, hygiene based on statistics, and the work of our Zemstvo doctors !

Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods of diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison with what had been in the past. They no longer poured cold water on the heads of lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats upon them; they treated them with humanity, and even, so it was stated in the papers, got up balls and enter- tainments for them. Andrey Yefimitch knew that with modern tastes and views such an abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred and fifty miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon the doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any criticism even if he had poured molten lead into their mouths; in any other place the public and the newspapers would long ago have torn this little Bastille to pieces,

" But, after all, what of it?" Andrey Yefimitch would ask himself, opening his eyes. " There is the antiseptic system, there is Koch, there is Pasteur, but the essential reality is not altered a bit; ill-health and mortality are still the same. They get up balls and entertainments for the mad, but still they don't let them go free; so it's all nonsense and vanity, and there is no difference in reality between the best

Vienna clinic and my hospital." But depression and a feeling akin to envy prevented him from feeling indifferent; it must have been owing to exhaustion. His heav⁷ head sank on to the book, he put his hands under his face to make it softer, and thought: " I serve in a pernicious institution and receive a salary from people whom I am deceiving. I am not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an inevitable social evil: all local officials are perni- cious and receive their salary for doing nothing. . . . And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am to blame, but the times. ... If I had been born two hundred years later I should have been different. . . . "

When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his bedroom; he was not sleepy.

VIII

Two years before, the Zemstvo in a liberal mood had decided to allow three hundred roubles a year to pay for additional medical service in the town till the Zemstvo hospital should be opened, and the dis- trict doctor, Yevgeny Fyodoritch Hobotov, was in- vited to the town to assist Andrey Yefimitch. He was a very young man—not yet thirty—tall and dark, with broad cheek-bones and little eyes; his forefathers had probably come from one of the many alien races of Russia. He arrived in the town with- out a farthing, with a small portmanteau, and a plain young woman whom he called his cook. This woman had a baby at the breast. Yevgeny Fyodoritch used to go about in a cap with a peak, and in high boots, and in the winter wore a sheepskin. He made great friends with Sergey Sergeyitch, the medical assistant, and with the treasurer, but held aloof from the other officials, and for some reason called them aristocrats. He had only one book in his lodgings, " The Latest Prescriptions of the Vienna Clinic for 188 1." When he went to a patient he always took this book with him. He played billiards in the evening at the club: he did not like cards. He was very fond of using in conversa- tion such expressions as " endless bobbery," " cant- ing soft soap," " shut up with your finicking. . . ."

He visited the hospital twice a week, made the round of the wards, and saw out-patients. The complete absence of antiseptic treatment and the cupping roused his indignation, but he did not intro- duce any new system, being afraid of offending An- drey Yefimitch. He regarded his colleague as a sly old rascal, suspected him of being a man of large means, and secretly envied him. He would have been very glad to have his post.

IX

On a spring evening towards the end of March, when there was no snow left on the ground and the starlings were singing in the hospital garden, the doctor went out to see his friend the postmaster as far as the gate. At that very moment the Jew Moiseika, returning with his booty, came into the yard. He had no cap on, and his bare feet were thrust into goloshes; in his hand he had a little bag of coppers.

" Give me a kopeck I " he said to the doctor, smil- ing, and shivering with cold. Andrey Yefi.mitch, who could never refuse anyone anything, gave him a ten-kopeck piece.

" How bad that is I " he thought, looking at the Jew's bare feet with their thin red ankles. " Why, it's wet."

And stirred by a feeling akin both to pity and disgust, he went into the lodge behind the Jew, looking now at his bald head, now at his ankles. As the doctor went in, Nikita jumped up from his heap of litter and stood at attention.

" Good-day, Nikita," Andrey Yefi.mitch said mildly. " That Jew should be provided with boots or something, he will catch cold."

" Certainly, your honour. I'll inform the super- intendent.''

" Please do; ask him in my name. Tell him that I asked."

The door into the ward was open. Ivan Dmit- ritch, lying propped on his elbow on the bed, listened in alarm to the unfamiliar voice, and suddenly recog- nized the doctor. He trembled all over with anger, jumped up, and with a red and wrathful face, with his eyes starting out of his head, ran out into the middle of the road.

" The doctor has come I " he shouted, and broke into a laugh. " At last I Gentlemen, I congratu- late you. The doctor is honouring us with a visit I Cursed reptile I " he shrieked, and stamped in a frenzy such as had never been seen in the ward before. " Kill the reptile I No, killing's too good. Drown him in the midden-pit I "

Andrey Yefimitch, hearing this, looked into the ward from the entry and asked gently: " What for ? "

" What for? ¹¹ shouted Ivan Dmitritch, going up to him with a menacing air and convulsively wrap- ping himself in his dressing-gown. ¹¹ What for? Thief I " he said with a look of repulsion, moving his lips as though he would spit at him. " Quack I hangman ¹ "

" Calm yourself," said Andrey Yefimitch, smiling guiltily. " I assure you I have never stolen any- thing; and as to the rest, most likely you greatly exaggerate. I see you are angry with me. Calm yourself, I beg, if you can, and tell me coolly what are you angry for? "

" What are you keeping me here for? "

" Because you are ill."

" Yes, I am ill. But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from the sane. Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up here like scapegoats for all the rest? You, your assistant, the superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably inferior to every one of us morally; why then are we shut up and you not? Where's the logic of it? "

" Morality and logic don't come in, it all depends on chance. If anyone is shut up he has to stay, and if anyone is not shut up he can walk about, that's all. There is neither morality nor logic in my being a doctor and your being a mental patient, there is nothing but idle chance."

" That twaddle I don't understand . . ." Ivan

Dmitritch brought out in a hollow voice, and he sat down on his bed.

Moiseika, whom Nikita did not venture to search in the presence of the doctor, laid out on his bed pieces of bread, bits of paper, and little bones, and, still shivering with cold, began rapidly in a singsong voice saying something in Yiddish. He most likely imagined that he had opened a shop.

" Let me out,'' said Ivan Dmitritch, and his voice quivered.

" I cannot."

" But why, why ? "

" Because it is not in my power. Think, what use will it be to you if I do let you out? Go. The towns- people or the police will detain you or bring you back."

" Yes, yes, that's true," said Ivan Dmitritch, and he rubbed his forehead. " It's awful! But what am I to do, what? "

Andrey Yefimitch liked Ivan Dmitritch's voice and his intelligent young face with its grimaces. He longed to be kind to the young man and soothe him; he sat down on the bed beside him, thought, and said:

" You ask me what to do. The very best thing in your position would be to run away. But, un- happily, that is useless. You would be taken up. When society protects itself from the criminal, mentally deranged, or otherwise inconvenient people, it is invincible. There is only one thing left for you : to resign yourself to the thought that your presence here is inevitable."

" It is no use to anyone."

" So long as prisons and madhouses exist someone must be shut up in them. If not you, I. If not I, some third person. Wait till in the distant future prisons and madhouses no longer exist, and there will be neither bars on the windows nor hospital gowns. Of course, that time will come sooner or later."

Ivan Dmitritch smiled ironically. " You are jesting," he said, screwing up his eyes. " Such gentlemen as you and your assistant Nikita have nothing to do with the future, but you may be sure, sir, better days will come I I may express myself cheaply, you may laugh, but the dawn of a new life is at hand; truth and justice will triumph, and—our turn will come I I shall not live to see it, I shall perish, but some people's great-grandsons will see it. I greet them with all my heart and rejoice, rejoice with them I Onward I God be your help, friends I "

With shining eyes Ivan Dmitritch got up, and stretching his hands towards the window, went on with emotion in his voice :

" From behind these bars I bless you I Hurrah for truth and justice I I rejoice I "

" I see no particular reason to rejoice," said Andrey Yefimitch, who thought Ivan Dmitritch's movement theatrical, though he was delighted by it. " Prisons and madhouses there will not be, and truth, as you have just expressed it, will triumph; but the reality of things, you know, will not change, the laws of nature will still remain the same. People will suffer pain, grow old, and die just as they do now. However magnificent a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet in the end be nailed up m a coffin and thrown into a hole."

" And immortality ? "

" Oh, come, now! "

" You don't believe in it, but I do. Somebody in Dostoevsky or Voltaire said that if there had not been a God men would have invented him. And I firmly believe that if there is no immortality the great intellect of man will sooner or later invent it."

" Well said," observed Andrey Yefimitch, smil- ing with pleasure; " it's a good thing you have faith. With such a belief one may live happily even shut up within walls. You have studied somewhere, I presume? "

" Yes, I have been at the university, but did not complete my studies."

¹¹ You are a reflecting and a thoughtful man. In any surroundings you can find tranquillity in your- self. Free and deep thinking which strives for the comprehension of life, and complete contempt for the foolish bustle of the world—those are two bless- ings beyond any that man has ever known. And you can possess them even though you lived behind threefold bars. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth."

¹¹ Your Diogenes was a blockhead," said Ivan Dmitritch morosely. " Why do you talk to me about Diogenes and some foolish comprehension of life? " he cried, growing suddenly angry and leaping up. " I love life; I love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a continual agonizing terror ; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed by the thirst for life, and then I am afraid of going mad. I want dreadfully to live, dreadfully! "

He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and said, dropping his voice:

" When I dream I am haunted by phantoms. Peo- ple come to me, I hear voices and music, and I fancy I am walking through woods or by the seashore, and I long so passionately for movement, for inter- ests. . . . Come, tell me, what news is there? " asked Ivan Dmitritch; " what's happening? "

" Do you wish to know about the town or in general? "

" Well, tell me first about the town, and then in general."

" Well, in the town it is appallingly dull. . . . There's no one to say a word to, no one to listen to. There are no new people. A young doctor called Hobotov has come here recently."

" He had come in my time. Well, he is a low cad, isn't he ? "

" Yes, he is a man of no culture. It's strange, you know. . . . Judging by every sign, there is no intellectual stagnation in our capital cities; there is a movement—so there must be real people there too; but for some reason they always send us such men as I would rather not see. It's an unlucky town! ''

" Yes, it is an unlucky town," sighed Ivan Dmit- ritch, and he laughed. " And how are things in general? What are they writing in the papers and reviews? "

It was by now dark in the ward. The doctor got up, and, standing, began to describe what was being written abroad and in Russia, and the tendency of thought that could be noticed now. Ivan Dmitritch listened attentively and put questions, but suddenly, as though recalling something terrible, clutched at his head and lay down on the bed with his back to the doctor.

" What's the matter? " asked Andrey Yefimitch.

" You will not hear another word from me," said Ivan Dmitritch rudely. "Leave me alone."

" Why so? "

" I tell you, leave me alone. Why the devil do you persist? "

Andrey Yefimitch shrugged his shoulders, heaved a sigh, and went out. As he crossed the entry he said: ¹¹ You might clear up here, Nikita . . . there's an awfully stuffy smell."

" Certainly, your honour."

" What an agreeable young man I " thought Andrey Yefimitch, going back to his flat. " In all the years I have been living here I do believe he is the first I have met with whom one can talk. He is capable of reasoning and is interested in just the right things."

While he was reading, and afterwards, while he was going to bed, he kept thinking about Ivan Dmit- ritch, and when he woke next morning he remem- bered that he had the day before made the acquaintance of an intelligent and interesting man, and determined to visit him again as soon as possible.

X

Ivan Dmitritch was lying in the same position as on the previous day, with his head clutched in both hands and his legs drawn up. His face was not visible.

" Good-day, my friend," said Andrey Yefimitch. " You are not asleep, are you? "

" In the first place, I am not your friend," Ivan Dmitritch articulated into the pillow; " and in the second, your efforts are useless; you will not get one word out of me."

" Strange, " muttered Andrey Yefimitch in con- fusion. " Yesterday we talked peacefully, but sud- denly for some reason you took offence and broke off all at once. . . . Probably I expressed myself awkwardly, or perhaps gave utterance to some idea which did not fit in with your convictions. . . ."

" Yes, a likely idea! " said Ivan Dmitritch, sitting up and looking at the doctor with irony and uneasi- ness. His eyes were red. " You can go and spy and probe somewhere else, it's no use your doing it here. I knew yesterday what you had come for."

'' A strange fancy," laughed the doctor. " So you suppose me to be a spy? "

" Yes, I do. . . . A spy or a doctor who has been charged to test me—it's all the same "

" Oh, excuse me, what a queer fellow you are really! "

The doctor sat down on the stool near the bed and shook his head reproachfully.

'' But let us suppose you are right," he said, " let us suppose that I am treacherously trying to trap you into saying something so as to betray you to the police. You would be arrested and then tried. But would you be any worse off being tried and in prison than you are here? If you are banished to a settlement, or even sent to penal servitude, would it be worse than being shut up in this ward? I imagine it would be no worse . . . . \Vhat, then, are you afraid of? "

These words evidently had an effect on Ivan Dmitritch. He sat down quietly.

It was between four and five in the afternoon— the time when Andrey Yefimitch usually walked up and down his rooms, and Daryushka asked whether it was not time for his beer. It was a still, bright d?.y.

" I came out for a walk after dinner, and here I have come, as you see," said the doctor. " It is quitc spring."

"What month is it? March?" asked Ivan Dmitritch.

" Yes, the end of March."

" Is it very muddy ? "

" No, not very. There are already paths in the garden."

" It would be nice now to drive in an open carriage somewhere into the country," said Ivan Dmitritch, rubbing his red eyes as though he were just awake, " then to come home to a warm, snug study, and . . . and to have a decent doctor to cure one's headache. . . . It's so long since I have lived like a human being. It's disgusting here I Insufferably disgusting I "

After his excitement of the previous day he was exhausted and listless, and spoke unwillingly. His fingers twitched, and from his face it could be seen tliat he had a splitting headache.

" There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward," said Andrey Yefimitch. " A man's peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself."

" What do you mean? "

" The ordinary man looks for good and evil in cxternal things—that is, in carriages, in studies— but a thinking man looks for it in himself."

" You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate. \Vith whom was it I was talking of Diogenes? \Vas it with you? "

" Yes, with me yesterday."

" Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habita- tion; it's hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Rus- sia to live: he'd be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with the cold."

" No. One can be insensible to cold as to every other pain. Marcus Aurelius says: ' A pain is a vivid idea of pain; make an effort of will to change that idea, dismiss it, cease to complain, and the pain will disappear.' That is true. The wise man, or simply the reflecting, thoughtful man, is distinguished precisely by his contempt for suffering; he is always contented and surprised at nothing."

'' Then I am an idiot, since I suffer and am dis- contented and surprised at the baseness of man- kind."

" You are wrong in that; if you will reflect more on the subject you will understand how insignificant is all that external world that agitates us. One must strive for the comprehension of life, and m that is true happiness."

" Comprehension . . ." repeated Ivan Dmitritch frowning. " External, internal. . . . Excuse me, but I don't understand it. I only know," he said, getting up and looking angrily at the doctor—" I only know chat God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed I If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do I To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is just what is called life. The lower the organ- ism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feebly it reacts to stimulus; and the higher it is, the more responsively and vigorously it reacts to reality. How is it you don't know that? A doctor, and not know such trifles I To despise suffering, to be always contented, and to be surprised at nothing, one must reach this condition "—and Ivan Dmitritch pointed to the peasant who was a mass of fat—" or to harden oneself by suffering to such a point that one loses all sensibility to it—that is, in other words, to cease to live. You must excuse me, I am not a sage or a philosopher," Ivan Dmitritch continued with irrita- tion, " and I don't understand anything about it. I am not capable of reasoning."

" On the contrary, your reasoning is excellent."

" The Stoics, whom you are parodying, were re- markable people, but their doctrine crystallized two thousand years ago and has not advanced, and will not advance, an inch forward, since it is not practical or living. It had a success only with the minority which spends its life in savouring all sorts of theories and ruminating over them; the majority did not understand it. A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death, is quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to it despising life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, loss, and a Hamlet-like dread of death. The whole of life lies in these sensations; one may be oppressed by it, one may hate it, but one cannot despise it. Yes, so, I repeat, the doctrine of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time up to to-day you see continually increasing the struggle, the sensibility to pain, the capacity of responding to stimulus."

Ivan Dmitritch suddenly lost the thread of his thoughts, stopped, and rubbed his forehead with vexation.

" I meant to say something important, but I have lost it," he said. " What was I saying? Oh, yes I This is what I mean: one of the Stoics sold himself into slavery to redeem his neighbour, so, you see, even a Stoic did react to stimulus, since, for such a generous act as the destruction of oneself for the sake of one's neighbour, he must have had a soul capable of pity and indignation. Here in prison I have forgotten everything I have learned, or else I could have recalled something else. Take Christ, for instance: Christ responded to reality by weep- ing, smiling, being sorrowful and moved to wrath, even overcome by misery. He did not go to meet

His sufferings with a smile, He did not despise death, but prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that this cup might pass Him by."

Ivan Dmitritch laughed and sat down.

" Granted that a man's peace and contentment lie not outside but in himself," he said, " granted that one must despise suffering and not be surprised at anything, yet on what ground do you preach the theory? Are you a sage? A philosopher? "

" No, I am not a philosopher, but everyone ought to preach it because it is reasonable."

" No, I want to know how it is that you consider yourself competent to judge of ' comprehension,' contempt for suffering, and so on. Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of suffering? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed in your child- hood? "

" No, my parents had an aversion for corporal punishment."

" My father used to flog me cruelly; my father was a harsh, sickly Government clerk with a long nose and a yellow neck. But let us talk of you. No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has scared you nor beaten you; you are as strong as a bull. You grew up under your father's wing and studied at his expense, and then you dropped at once into a sinecure. For more than twenty years you have lived rent free with heating, light- ing, and service all provided, and had the right to work how you pleased and as much as you pleased, even to do nothing. You were naturally a flabby, lazy man, and so you have tried to arrange your life so that nothing should disturb you or make you move. You have handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse your- self with reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense, and " (Ivan Dmitritch looked at the doctor's red nose) " with boozing; in fact, you have seen nothing of life, you know absolutely nothing of it, and are only theoretically acquainted with reality; you despise suffering and are surprised at nothing for a very simple reason: vanity of vanities, the external and the internal, contempt for life, for suffering and for death, comprehension, true happiness— that's the philosophy that suits the Russian sluggard best. You see a peasant beating his wife, for in- stance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they will both die sooner or later, anyway; and, besides, he who beats injures by his blows, not the person he is beating, but himself. To get drunk is stupid and unseemly, but if you drink you die, and if you don't drink you die. A peasant woman comes with tooth- ache . . . well, what of it? Pain is the idea of pain, and besides ' there is no living in this world without illness; we shall all die, and so, go away, woman, don't hinder me from thinking and drinking vodka.' A young man asks advice, what he is to do, how he is to live; anyone else would think before answering, but you have got the answer ready: strive for ' comprehension ' or for true happiness. And what is that fantastic ' true happiness '? There's no answer, of course. We are kept here behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but that is very good and reasonable, because there is no differ- ence at all between this ward and a warm, snug study.

A convenient philosophy. You can do nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise. . . . No, sir, it is not philosophy, it's not thinking, it's not breadth of vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction. Yes," cried Ivan Dmitritch, getting angry again, " you despise suffering, but I'll be bound if you pinch your finger in the door you will howl at the top of your voice."

" And perhaps I shouldn't howl," said Andrey Yefimitch, with a gentle smile.

" Oh, I dare say I Well, if you had a stroke of paralysis, or supposing some fool or bully took ad- vantage of his position and rank to insult you in public, and if you knew he could do it with im- punity, then you would understand what it means to put people off with comprehension and true happi- ness."

" That's original," said Andrey Yefimitch, laugh- ing with pleasure and rubbing his hands. "I am agreebly struck by your inclination for drawing generalizations, and the sketch of my character you have just drawn is simply brilliant. I must confess that talking to you gives me great pleasure. Well, I've listened to you, and now you must graciously listen to me."

XI

The conversation went on for about an hour longer, and apparently made a deep impression an Andrey Yefimitch. He began going to the ward every day. He went there in the mornings and after dinner, and often the dusk of evening found him in conversation with Ivan Dmitritch. At first Ivan Dmitritch held aloof from him, suspected him of evil designs, and openly expressed his hostility. But afterwards he got used to him, and his abrupt manner changed to one of condescending irony.

Soon it was all over the hospital that the doctor, Andrey Yefimitch, had taken to visiting Ward No. 6. No one—neither Sergey Sergeyitch, nor Nikita, nor the nurses—could conceive why he went there, why he stayed there for hours together, what he was talking about, and why he did not write prescrip- tions. His actions seemed strange. Often Mihail Averyanitch did not find him at home, which had never happened in the past, and Daryushka was greatly perturbed, for the doctor drank his beer now at no definite time, and sometimes was even late for dinner.

One day—it was at the end of June—Dr. Hobotov went to see Andrey Yefimitch about some- thing. Not finding him at home, he proceeded to look for him in the yard; there he was told that the old doctor had gone to see the mental patients. Going into the lodge and stopping in the entry, Hobotov heard the following conversation:

" We shall never agree, and you will not succeed in converting me to your faith," Ivan Dmitritch was saying irritably; " you are utterly ignorant of reality, and you have never known suffering, but have only like a leech fed beside the sufferings of others, while I have been in continual suffering from the day of my birth till to-day. For that reason, I tell you frankly, I consider myself superior to you and more com- petent in every respect. It's not for you to teach me.

¹¹ I have absolutely no ambition to convert you to my faith," said Andrey Yefimitch gently, and with regret that the other refused to understand him. ¹¹ And that is not what matters, my friend; what matters is not that you have suffered and I have not. Joy and suffering are passing; let us leave them, never mind them. What matters is that you and I think; we see in each other people who are capable of thinking and reasoning, and that is a common bond between us however different our views. If you knew, my friend, how sick I am of the universal senselessness, ineptitude, stupidity, and with what delight I always talk with you I You are an intelligent man, and I enjoy your company."

Hobotov opened the door an inch and glanced into the ward; Ivan Dmitritch in his night-cap and the doctor Andrey Yefimitch were sitting side by side on the bed. The madman was grimacing, twitching, and convulsively wrapping himself in his gown, while the doctor sat motionless with bowed l.ead, and his face was red and look helpless and sorrowful. Hobotov shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and glanced at Nikita. Nikita shrugged his shoulders too.

Next day Hobotov went to the lodge, accompanied by the assistant. Both stood in the entry and listened.

" I fancy our old man has gone clean off his chump I " said Hobotov as he came out of the lodge.

" Lord have mercy upon us sinners I" sighed the decorous Sergey Sergeyitch, scrupulously avoiding the puddles that he might not muddy his polished boots. " I must own, honoured Yevgeny Fyodo- ritch, I have been expecting it for a long time."

XII

After this Andrey Yefimitch began to notice a mysterious air in all around him. The attendants, the nurses, and the patients looked at him inquisi- tively when they met him, and then whispered together. The superintendent's little daughter Masha, whom he liked to meet in the hospital gar- den, for some reason ran away from him now when he went up with a smile to stroke her on the head. The postmaster no longer said, " Perfectly true," as he listened to him, but in unaccountable confusion muttered, " Yes, yes, yes . . ." and looked at him with a grieved and thoughtful expression ; for some reason he took to advising his friend to give up vodka and beer, but as a man of delicate feeling he did not say this directly, but hinted it, telling him first about the commanding officer of his battalion, an excellent man, and then about the priest of the regiment, a capital fellow, both of whom drank and fell ill, but on giving up drinking completely re- gained their health. On two or three occasions Andrey Yefimitch was visited by his colleague Hobotov, who also advised him to give up spirituous liquors, and for no apparent reason recommended him to take bromide.

In August Andrey Yefimitch got a letter from the mayor of the town asking him to come on very important business. On arriving at the town hall at the time fixed, Andrey Yefimitch found there the military commander, the superintendent of the district school, a member of the town council, Hobotov, and a plump, fair gentleman who was introduced to him as a doctor. This doctor, with a Polish surname difficult to pronounce, lived at a pedigree stud-farm twenty miles away, and was now on a visit to the town.

" There's something that concerns you," said the member of the town council, addressing Andrey Yefimitch after they had all greeted one another and sat down to the table. " Here Yevgeny Fyodoritch says that there is not room for the dispensary in the main building, and that it ought to be transferred to one of the lodges. That's of no consequence—of course it can be transferred, but the point is that the lodge wants doing up."

" Yes, it would have to be done up," said Andrey Yefimitch after a moment's thought. " If the cor- ner lodge, for instance, were fitted up as a dispen- sary, I imagine it would cost at least five hundred roubles. An unproductive expenditure I "

Everyone was silent for a space.

" I had the honour of submitting to you ten years ago," Andrey Yefimitch went on in a low voice, " that the hospital in its present form is a luxury for the town beyond its means. It was built in the forties, but things were different then. The town spends too much on unnecessary buildings and super- fluous staff. I believe with a different system two model hospitals might be maintained for the same money."

" Well, let us have a different system, then I" the member of the town council said briskly.

" I have already had the honour of submitting to you that the medical department should be trans- ferred to the supervision of the Zemstvo."

" Yes, transfer the money to the Zemstvo and they will steal it," laughed the fair-haired doctor.

" That's what it always comes to," the member of the council assented, and he also laughed.

Andrey Yefimitch looked with apathetic, lustreless eyes at the fair-haired doctor and said: " One should be just."

Again there was silence. Tea was brought in. The military commander, for some reason much embarrassed, touched Andrey Yefimitch's hand across the table and said: "You have quite for- gotten us, doctor. But of course you are a hermit: you don't play cards and don't like women. You would be dull with fellows like us."

They all began saying how boring it was for a decent person to live in such a town. No theatre, no music, and at the last dance at the club there had been about twenty ladies and only two gentle- men. The young men did not dance, but spent all the time crowding round the refreshment bar or playing cards.

Not looking at anyone and speaking slowly in a low voice, Andrey Yefimitch began saying what a pity, what a terrible pity it was that the towns- people should waste their vital energy, their hearts, and their minds on cards and gossip, and should have neither the power nor the inclination to spend their time in interesting conversation and reading, and should refuse to take advantage of the enjoy- ments of the mind. The mind alone was interest- ing and worthy of attention, all the rest was low and petty. Hobotov listened to his colleague at- tentively and suddenly asked:

" Andrey Yefimitch, what day of the month is it ? "

Having received an answer, the fair-haired doctor and he, in the tone of examiners conscious of their lack of skill, began asking Andrey Yefimitch what was the day of the week, how many days there were in the year, and whether it was true that there was a remarkable prophet living in Ward No. 6.

In response to the last question Andrey Yefi.mitch turned rather red and said: " Yes, he is mentally deranged, but he is an interesting young man." They asked him no other questions. When he was putting on his overcoat in the entry, the military commander laid a hand on his shoulder and said with a sigh:

" It's time for us old fellows to rest! " As he came out of the hall, Andrey Yefi.mitch understood that it had been a committee appointed to enquire into his mental condition. He recalled the questions that had been asked him, flushed crim- son, and for some reason, for the first time in his life, felt bitterly grieved for medical science.

" My God . . ." he thought, remembering how these doctors had just examined him; " why, they have only lately been hearing lectures on mental pathology; they had passed an examination—what's the explanation of this crass ignorance? They have not a conception of mental pathology I "

And for the first time in his life he felt insulted and moved to anger.

In the evening of the same day Mihail Averya- nitch came to see him. The postmaster went up to him without waiting to greet him, took him by both hands, and said in an agitated voice:

" My dear fellow, my dear friend, show me that you believe in my genuine affection and look on me as your friend I " And preventing Andrey Yefimitch from speaking, he went on, growing excited: " I love you for your culture and nobility of soul. Listen to me, my dear fellow. The rules of their profession compel the doctors to conceal the truth from you, but I blurt out the plain truth like a soldier. You are not well! Excuse me, my dear fellow, but it is the truth; everyone about you has been noticing it for a long time. Dr. Yevgeny Fyodoritch has just told me that it is essential for you to rest and distract your mind for the sake of your health. Per- fectly true I Excellent! In a day or two I am taking a holiday and am going away for a sniff of a different atmosphere. Show that you are a friend to me, let us go together! Let us go for a jaunt as in the good old days."

" I feel perfectly well," said Andrey Yefimitch after a moment's thought. " I can't go away. Allow me to show you my friendship in some other way."

To go off with no object, without his books, with- out his Daryushka, without his beer, to break abruptly through the routine of life, established for twenty years—the idea for the first minute struck him as wild and fantastic, but he remembered the conversation at the Zemstvo committee and the de- pressing feelings with which he had returned home, and the thought of a brief absence from the town in which stupid people looked on him as a madman was pleasant to him.

" And where precisely do you intend to go? " he asked.

" To Moscow, to Petersburg, to Warsaw. . . . I spent the five happiest years of my life in Warsaw. What a marvellous town I Let us go, my dear fellow I "

XIII

A week later it was suggested to Andrey Yefimitch that he should have a rest—that is, send in his resignation—a suggestion he received with indiffer- ence, and a week later still, Mihail Averyanitch and he were sitting in a posting carriage driving to the nearest railway station. The days were cool and bright, with a blue sky and a transparent distance. They were two days driving the hundred and fifty miles to the railway station, and stayed two nights on the way. When at the posting station the glasses given them for their tea had not been properly washed, or the drivers were slow in harnessing the horses, Mihail Averyanitch would turn crimson, and quivering all over would shout:

" Hold your tongue I Don't argue I "

And in the carriage he talked without ceasing for a moment, describing his campaigns in the Caucasus and in Poland. What adventures he had had, what meetings I He talked loudly and opened his eyes so wide with wonder that he might well be thought to be lying. Moreover, as he talked he breathed in Andrey Yefimitch's face and laughed into his ear. This bothered the doctor and pre- vented him from thinking or concentrating his mind.

In the train they travelled, from motives of economy, third-class in a non-smoking compartment. Half the passengers were decent people. Mihail Averyanitch soon made friends with everyone, and moving from one seat to another, kept saying loudly that they ought not to travel by these appalling lines. It was a regular swindle! A very different thing riding on a good horse: one could do over seventy miles a day and feel fresh and well after it. And our bad harvests were due to the draining of the Pinsk marshes; altogether, the way things were done was dreadful. He got excited, talked loudly, and would not let others speak. This endless chatter to the accompaniment of loud laughter and expres- sive gestures wearied Andrey Yefimitch.

" Which of us is the madman? " he thought with vexation. " I, who try not to disturb my fellow- passengers in any way, or this egoist who thinks that he is cleverer and more interesting than anyone here, and so will leave no one in peace? "

In Moscow Mihail Averyanitch put on a military coat without epaulettes and trousers with red braid on them. He wore a military cap and overcoat in the street, and soldiers saluted him. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch, now, that his companion was a man who had flung away all that was good and kept only what was bad of all the characteristics of a country gentleman that he had once possessed. He liked to be waited on even when it was quite unnecessary. The matches would be lying before him on the table, and he would see them and shout to the waiter to give him the matches; he did not hesitate to appear before a maidservant in nothing but his underclothes; he used the familiar mode of address to all footmen indiscriminately, even old men, and when he was angry called them fools and blockheads. This, Andrey Yefimitch thought, was like a gentleman, but disgusting.

First of all Mihail Averyanitch led his friend to the Iversky Madonna. He prayed fervently, shed- ding tears and bowing down to the earth, and when he had finished, heaved a deep sigh and said:

" Even though one does not believe it makes one somehow easier when one prays a little. Kiss the ikon, my dear fellow."

Andrey Yefimitch was embarrassed and he kissed the image, while Mihail Averyanitch pursed up his lips and prayed in a whisper, and again tears came into his eyes. Then they went to the Kremlin and looked there at the Tsar-cannon and the Tsar-bell, and even touched them with their fingers, admired the view over the river, visited St. Saviour's and the Rumyantsev museum.

They dined at Tyestov's. Mihail Averyanitch looked a long time at the menu, stroking his whiskers, and said in the tone of a gourmand accustomed to dine in restaurants:

" We shall see what you give us to eat to-day, angel! "

XIV

The doctor wa!ked about, looked at things, ate and drank, but he had all the while one feeling: an- noyance with Mihail Averyanitch. He longed to have a rest from his friend, to get away from him, to hide himself, while the friend thought it his duty not to let the doctor move a step away from him, and to provide him with as many distractions as possible. When there was nothing to look at he entertained him with conversation. For two days Andrey Y efimitch endured it, but on the third he announced to his friend that he was ill and wanted to stay at home for the whole day ; his friend replied that in that case he would stay too—that really he needed rest, for he was run off his legs already. Andrey Yefimitch lay on the sofa, with his face to the back, and clenching his teeth, listened to his friend, who assured him with heat that sooner or later France would certainly thrash Germany, that there were a great many scoundrels in Moscow, and that it was impossible to judge of a horse's quality by its outward appearance. The doctor began to have a buzzing in his ears and palpitations of the heart, but out of delicacy could not bring himself to beg his friend to go away or hold his tongue. Fortunately Mihail Averyanitch grew weary of sitting in the hotel room, and after dinner he went out for a walk.

As soon as he was alone Andrey Yefimitch aban- doned himself to a feeling of relief. How pleasant to lie motionless on the sofa and to know that one is alone in the room! Real happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel betrayed God probably because he longed for solitude, of which the angels know nothing. Andrey Yefimitch wanted to think about what he had seen and heard during the last few days, but he could not get Mihail Averyanitch out of his head.

" Why, he has taken a holiday and come with me out of friendship, out of generosity," thought the doctor with vexation; " nothing could be worse than this friendly supervision. I suppose he is good- natured and generous and a lively fellow, but he is a bore. An insufferable bore. In the same way there are people who never say anything but what is clever and good, yet one feels that they are dull- witted people."

For the following days Andrey Yefimitch de- clared himself ill and would not leave the hotel room; he lay with his face to the back of the sofa, and suffered agonies of weariness when his friend entertained him with conversation, or rested when his friend was absent. He was vexed with himself for having come, and with his friend, who grew every day more talkative and more free-and-easy; he could not succeed in attuning his thoughts to a serious and lofty level.

" This is what I get from the real life Ivan Dmit- ritch talked about," he thought, angry at his own pettiness. " It's of no consequence, though. . . . I shall go home, and everything will go on as before. . . ."

It was the same thing in Petersburg too; for whole days together he did not leave the hotel room, but lay on the sofa and only got up to drink beer.

Mihail Averyanitch was all haste to get to Warsaw.

" My dear man, what should I go there for?" said Andrey Yefimitch in an imploring voice. " You go alone and let me get home I I entreat you I "

" On no account," protested Mihail Averyanitch. " It's a marvellous town."

Andrey Yefimitch had not the strength of will to insist on his own way, and much against his in- clination went to Warsaw. There he did not leave the hotel room, but lay on the sofa, furious with himself, with his friend, and with the waiters, who obstinately refused to understand Russian; while Mihail Averyanitch, healthy, hearty, and full of spirits as usual, went about the town from morning to night, looking for his old acquaintances. Several times he did not return home at night. After one night spent in some unknown haunt he returned home early in the morning, in a violently excited condition, with a red face and tousled hair. For a long time he walked up and down the rooms muttering some- thing to himself, then stopped and said:

" Honour before everything."

After walking up and down a little longer he clutched his head in both hands and pronounced in a tragic voice: " Yes, honour before everything I Accursed be the moment when the idea first entered my head to visit this Babylon I My dear friend," he added, addressing the doctor, " you may despise me, I have played and lost; lend me five hundred roubles I "

Andrey Yefi.mitch counted out five hundred roubles and gave them to his friend without a word. The latter, still crimson with shame and anger, inco- herently articulated some useless vow, put on his cap, and went out. Returning two hours later he flopped into an easy-chair, heaved a loud sigh, and said:

" My honour is saved. Let us go, my friend; I do not care to remain another hour in this accursed town. Scoundrels I Austrian spies I "

By the time the friends were back in their own town it was November, and deep snow was lying in the streets. Dr. Hobotov had Andrey Yefimitch's post; he was still living in his old lodgings, waiting for Andrey Yefimitch to arrive and clear out of the hospital apartments. The plain woman whom he called his cook was already established in one of the lodges.

Fresh scandals about the hospital were going the round of the town. It was said that the plain woman had quarrelled with the superintendent, and that the latter had crawled on his knees before her beg- ging forgiveness. On the very first day he arrived Andrey Yefimitch had to look out for lodgings.

" My friend," the postmaster said to him timidly, " excuse an indiscreet question: what means have you at your disposal?"

Andrey Yefimitch, without a word, counted out his money and said : " Eighty-six roubles."

" I don't mean that," Mihail Averyanitch brought out in confusion, misunderstanding him; " I mean, what have you to live on? "

" I tell you, eighty-six roubles ... I have noth- in g el se."

Mihail Averyanitch looked upon the doctor as an honourable man, yet he suspected that he had accumulated a fortune of at least twenty thousand. Now learning that Andrey Yefimitch was a beggar, that he had nothing to live on he was for some reason suddenly moved to tears and embraced his friend.

XV

Andrey Yefimitch now lodged in a little house with three windows. There were only three rooms besides the kitchen in the little house. The doctor lived in two of them which looked into the street, while Daryushka and the landlady with her three children lived in the third room and the kitchen. Sometimes the landlady's lover, a drunken peasant who was rowdy and reduced the children and Daryushka to terror, would come for the night. When he arrived and established himself in the kitchen and demanded vodka, they all felt very uncomfortable, and the doctor would be moved by pity to take the crying children into his room and let them lie on his floor, and this gave him great satisfaction.

He got up as before at eight o'clock, and after his morning tea sat down to read his old books and magazines: he had no money for new ones. Either because the books were old, or. perhaps because of the change in his surroundings, reading exhausted him, and did not grip his attention as before. That he might not spend his time in idleness he made a detailed catalogue of his books and gummed little labels on their backs, and this mechanical, tedious work seemed to him more interesting than reading. The monotonous, tedious work lulled his thoughts to sleep in some unaccountable way, and the time passed quickly while he thought of nothing. Even sitting in the kitchen, peeling potatoes with Daryushka or picking over the buckwheat grain, seemed to him interesting. On Saturdays and Sun- days he went to church. Standing near the wall and half closing his eyes, he listened to the singing and thought of his father, of his mother, of the uni- versity, of the religions of the world; he felt calm and melancholy, and as he went out of the church afterwards he regretted that the service was so soon over. He went twice to the hospital to talk to Ivan Dmitritch. But on both occasions Ivan Dmitritch was unusually excited and ill-humoured; he bade the doctor leave him in peace, as he had long been sick of empty chatter, and declared, to make up for all his sufferings, he asked from the damned scoundrels only one favour—solitary confinement. Surely they would not refuse him even that? On both occasions when Andrey Yefimitch was taking leave of him and wishing him good-night, he answered rudely and said:

" Go to hell! "

And Andrey Yefimitch did not know now whether to go to him for the third time or not. He longed to go.

In old days Andrey Yefimitch used to walk about his rooms and think in the interval after dinner, but now from dinner-time till evening tea he lay on the sofa with his face to the back and gave himself up to trivial thoughts which he could not struggle against. He was mortified that after more than twenty years of service he had been given neither a pension nor any assistance. It is true that he had not done his work honestly, but, then, all who are in the Service get a pension without distinction whether they are honest or not. Contemporary justice lies precisely in the bestowal of grades, or- ders, and pensions, not for moral qualities or capaci- ties, but for service whatever it may have been like. Why was he alone to be an exception? He had no money at alL He was ashamed to pass by the shop and look at the woman who owned it. He owed thirty-two roubles for beer already. There was money owing to the landlady also. Daryushka sold old clothes and books on the sly, and told lies to the landlady, saying that the doctor was just going to receive a large sum of money.

He was angry with himself for having wasted on travelling the thousand roubles he had saved up. How useful that thousand roubles would have been now I He was vexed that people would not leave him in peace. Hobotov thought it his duty to look in on his sick colleague from time to time. Every- thing about him was revolting to Andrey Yefimitch —his well-fed face and vulgar, condescending tone, and his use of the word " colleague," and his high top-boots ; the most revolting thing was that he thought it was his duty to treat Andrey Yefimitch, and thought that he really was treating him. On every visit he brought a bottle of bromide and rhubarb pills.

Mihail Averyanitch, too, thought it his duty to visit his friend and entertain him. Every time he went in to Andrey Yefimitch with an affectation of ease, laughed constrainedly, and began assuring him that he was looking very well to-day, and that, thank

God, he was on the highroad to recovery, and from this it might be concluded that he looked on his friend's condition as hopeless. He had not yet repaid his Warsaw debt, and was overwhelmed by shame; he was constrained, and so tried to laugh louder and talk more amusingly. His anecdotes and descriptions seemed endless now, and were an agony both to Andrey Yefimitch and himself.

In his presence Andrey Yefimitch usually lay on the sofa with his face to the wall, and listened with his teeth clenched; his soul was oppressed with rankling disgust, and after every visit from his friend he felt as though this disgust had risen higher, and was mounting into his throat.

To stifle petty thoughts he made haste to reflect that he himself, and Hobotov, and Mihail Averya- nitch, would all sooner or later perish without leav- ing any trace on the world. If one imagined some spirit flying by the earthly globe in space in a million years he would see nothing but clay and bare rocks. Everything—culture and the moral law—would pass away and not even a burdock would grow out of them. Of what consequence was shame in the presence of a shopkeeper, of what consequence was the insignificant Hobotov or the wearisome friend- ship of Mihail Averyanitch? It was all trivial and nonsensical.

But such reflections did not help him now. Scarcely had he imagined the earthly globe in a million years, when Hobotov in his high top-boots or Mihail Averyanitch with his forced laugh would appear from behind a bare rock, and he even heard the shamefaced whisper: " The Warsaw debt. . . .

I will repay it in a day or two, my dear fellow, with- out fail. . . ."

XVI

One day Mihail Averyanitch came after dinner when Andrey Yefimitch was lying on the sofa. It so happened that Hobotov arrived at the same time with his bromide. Andrey Yefimitch got up heavily and sat down, leaning both arms on the sofa.

" You have a much better colour to-day than you had yesterday, my dear man," began Mihail Averya- nitch. " Yes, you look jolly. Upon my soul, you dol "

" It's high time you were well, colleague," said Hobotov, yawning. " I'll be bound, you are sick of this bobbery."

" And we shall recover," said Mihail Averya- nitch cheerfully. " We shall live another hundred years I To be sure I "

" Not a hundred years, but another twenty," Hobotov s::1.id reassuringly. " It's all right, all right, colleague; don't lose heart. . . . Don't go piling it on! "

" We'll show what we can do," laughed Mihail Averyanitch, and he slapped his friend on the knee. " We'll show them yet i Next summer, please God, we shall be off to the Caucasus, and we will ride all over it on horseback—trot, trot, trot I And when we are back from the Caucasus I shouldn't wonder if we will all dance at the wedding." Mihail Averya- nitch gave a sly wink. " We'll marry you, my dear boy, we'll marry you. . . ."

Andrey Yefimitch felt suddenly that the rising disgust had mounted to his throat, his heart began beating violently.

" That's vulgar," he said, getting up quickly and walking away to the window. " Don't you under- stand that you are talking vulgar nonsense? "

He meant to go on softly and politely, but against his will he suddenly clenched his fists and raised them above his head.

" Leave me alone," he shouted in a voice unlike his own, flushing crimson and shaking all over. " Go away, both of you I"

Mihail Averyanitch and Hobotov got up and stared at him first with amazement and then with alarm.

" Go away, both I" Andrey Yefimitch went on shouting. " Stupid people I Foolish people! I don't want either your friendship or your medicines, stupid man I Vulgar I Nasty I ''

Hobotov and Mihail Averyanitch, looking at each other in bewilderment, staggered to the door and went out. Andrey Yefi.mitch snatched up the bottle of bromide and flung it after them; the bottle broke with a crash on the door-frame.

" Go to the devil! " he shouted in a tearful voice, running out into the passage. " To the devil! "

When his guests were gone Andrey Yefimitch lay down on the sofa, trembling as though in a fever, and went on for a long while repeating: " Stupid people I Foolish people I "

When he was calmer, what occurred to him first of all was the thought that poor Mihail Averyanitch must be feeling fearfully ashamed and depressed now, and that it was all dreadful. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Where was his intelligence and his tact? Where was his comprehension of things and his philosophical indifference?

The doctor could not sleep all night for shame and vexation with himself, and at ten o'clock next morning he went to the post office and apologized to the postmaster.

" We won't think again of what has happened," Mihail Averyanitch, greatly touched, said with a sigh, warmly pressing his hand. " Let bygones be bygones. Lyubavkin," he suddenly shouted so loud that all the postmen and other persons present started, " hand a chair; and you wait," he shouted to a peasant woman who was stretching out a regis- tered letter to him through the grating. " Don't you see that I am busy? We will not remember the past," he went on, affectionately addressing Andrey Yefimitch; " sit down, I beg you, my dear fellow."

For a minute he stroked his knees in silence, and then said:

" I have never had a thought of taking offence. Illness is no joke, I understand. Your attack fright- ened the doctor and me yesterday, and we had a long talk about you afterwards. My dear friend, why won't you treat your illness seriously? You can't go on like this. . . . Excuse me speaking openly as a friend," whispered Mihail Averyanitch. "You live in the most unfavourable surroundings, in a crowd, in uncleanliness, no one to look after you, no money for proper treatment. . . . My dear friend, the doctor and I implore you with all our hearts, listen to our advice: go into the hospital! There you will have wholesome food and attend- ance and treatment. Though, between ourselves, Yevgeny Fyodoritch is mauvais ton, yet he does understand his work, you can fully rely upon him. He has promised me he will look after you."

Andrey Yefimitch was touched by the postmaster's genuine sympathy and the tears which suddenly glit- tered on his cheeks.

'' My honoured friend, don't believe it! " he whispered, laying his hand on his heart; " don't believe them. It's all a sham. My illness is only that in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town, and he is mad. I am not ill at all, it's simply that I have got into an enchanted circle which there is no getting out of. I don't care; I am ready for anything."

" Go into the hospital, my dear fellow."

" I don't care if it were into the pit."

"Give me your word, my dear man, that you will obey Yevgeny Fyodoritch in everything."

" Certainly I will give you my word. But I re- peat, my honoured friend, I have got into an en- chanted circle. Now everything, even the genuine sympathy of my friends, leads to the same thing— to my ruin. I am going to my ruin, and I have the manliness to recognize it."

" My dear fellow, you will recover."

" What's the use of saying that? " said Andrey Yefimitch, with irritation. " There are few men who at the end of their lives do not experience what I am experiencing now. When you are told that you have something such as diseased kidneys or enlarged heart, and you begin being treated for it, or are told you are mad or a criminal—that is, in fact, when people suddenly turn their attention to you— you may be sure you have got into an enchanted circle from which you will not escape. You will try to escape and make things worse. You had better give in, for no human efforts can save you. So it seems to me."

Meanwhile the public was crowding at the grat- ing. That he might not be in their way, Andrey Yefimitch got up and began to take leave. Mihail Averyanitch made him promise on his honour once more, and escorted him to the outer door.

Towards evening on the same day Hobotov, in his sheepskin and his high top-boots, suddenly made his appearance, and said to Andrey Yefimitch in a tone as though nothing had happened the day before:

" I have come on business, colleague. I have come to ask you whether you would not join me in a consultation. Eh? "

Thinking that Hobotov wanted to distract his mind with an outing, or perhaps really to enable him to earn something, Andrey Yefimitch put on his coat and hat, and went out with him into the street. He was glad of the opportunity to smooth over his fault of the previous day and to be reconciled, and in his heart thanked Hobotov, who did not even allude to yesterday's scene and was evidently sparing him. One would never have expected such delicacy from this uncultured man.

" Where is your invalid? " asked Andrey Yefimitch.

" In the hospital. ... I have long wanted to show him to you. A very interesting case."

They went into the hospital yard, and going round the main building, turned towards the lodge where the mental cases were kept, and all this, for some reason, in silence. When they went into the lodge Nikita as usual jumped up and stood at attention.

" One of the patients here has a lung complica- tion," Hobotov said in an undertone, going into the ward with Andrey Yefimitch. " You wait here, I'll be back directly. I am going for a stethoscope."

And he went away.

XVII

It was getting dusk. Ivan Dmitritch was lying on his bed with his face thrust into his pillow; the paralytic was sitting motionless, crying quietly and moving his lips. The fat peasant and the former sorter were asleep. It was quiet.

Andrey Yefimitch sat down on Ivan Dmitritch's bed and waited. But half an hour passed, and in- stead of Hobotov, Nikita came into the ward with a dressing-gown, some underlinen, and a pair of slippers in a heap on his arm.

" Please change your things, your honour," he said softly. " Here is your bed; come this way," he added, pointing to an empty bedstead which had obviously been recently brought into the ward. " It's all right; please God, you will recover."

Andrey Yefimitch understood it all. Without saying a word he crossed to the bed to which Nikita pointed and sat down; seeing that Nikita was stand- ing waiting, he undressed entirely and he felt ashamed. Then he put on the hospital clothes; the drawers were very short, the shirt was long, and the dressing-gown smelt of smoked fish.

" Please God, you will recover," repeated Nikita, and he gathered up Andrey Yefimitch's clothes into his arms, went out, and shut the door after him.

" No matter . . ." thought Andrey Yefimitch, wrapping himself in his dressing-gown in a shame- faced way and feeling that he looked like a convict in his new costume. " It's no matter. . . . It does not matter whether it's a dress-coat or a uniform or this dressing-gown. . . ."

But how about his watch? And the notebook that was in the side-pocket? And his cigarettes? Where had Nikita taken his clothes? Now perhaps to the day of his death he would not put on trousers, a waistcoat, and high boots. It was all somehow strange and even incomprehensible at first. Andrey Yefimitch was even now convinced that there was no difference between his landlady's house and \Vard No. 6, that everything in this world was nonsensl! and vanity of vanities. And yet his hands were trembling, his feet were cold, and he was filled with dread at the thought that soon Ivan Dmitritch would get up and see that he was in a dressing-gown. He got up and walked across the room and sat down again.

Here he had been sitting already half an hour, an hour, and he was miserably sick of it: was it really possible to live here a day, a week, and even years like these people? Why, he had been sitting here, had walked about and sat down again; he could get up and look out of window and walk from corner to corner again, and then what ? Sit so all the time, like a post, and think? No, that was scarcely possible.

Andrey Yefimitch lay down, but at once got up, wiped the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve, and felt that his whole face smelt of smoked fish. He walked about again.

" It's some misunderstanding . . ." he said, turn- ing out the palms of his hands in perplexity. " It must be cleared up. There is a misunderstand- ing. ..."

Meanwhile Ivan Dmitritch woke up; he sat up and propped his cheeks on his fists. He spat. Then he glanced lazily at the doctor, and apparently for the first minute did not understand; but soon his sleepy face grew malicious and mocking.

" Aha I so they have put you in here, too, old fellow? " he said in a voice husky from sleepiness, screwing up one eye. " Very glad to see you. You sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours. Excellent I "

" It's a misunderstanding . . ." Andrey Yefi- mitch brought out, frightened by Ivan Dmitritch's words; he shrugged his shoulders and repeated: " It's some misunderstanding. . . ."

Ivan Dmitritch spat again and lay down.

" Cursed life," he grumbled, " and what's bitter and insulting, this life will not end in compensation for our sufferings, it will not end with apotheosis as it would in an opera, but with death; peasants will come and drag one's dead body by the arms and the legs to the cellar. Ugh I Well, it does not matter. . . . We shall have our good time in the other world. ... I shall come here as a ghost from the other world and frighten these reptiles. I'll turn their hair grey."

Moiseika returned, and, seeing the doctor, held out his hand.

" Give me one little kopeck," he said.

XVIII

Andrey Yefimitch walked away to the window and looked out into the open country. It was getting dark, and on the horizon to the right a cold crimson moon was mounting upwards. Not far from the hospital fence, not much more than two hundred yards away, stood a tall white house shut in by a stone wall. This was the prison.

" So this is real life," thought Andrey Yefimitch, and he felt frightened.

The moon and the prison, and the nails on the fence, and the far-away flames at the bone-charring factory were all terrible. Behind him there was the sound of a sigh. Andrey Yefimitch looked round and saw a man with glittering stars and orders on his breast, who was smiling and slily wink- ing. And this, too, seemed terrible.

Andrey Yefimitch assured himself that there was nothing special about the moon or the prison, that even sane persons wear orders, and that everything in time will decay and turn to earth, but he was suddenly overcome with despair; he clutched at the grating with both hands and shook it with all his might. The strong grating did not yield.

Then that it might not be so dreadful he went to Ivan Dmitritch's bed and sat down.

" I have lost heart, my dear fellow," he muttered, trembling and wiping away the cold sweat, " I have lost heart."

" You should be philosophical," said Ivan Dmitritch ironically.

" My God, my God. . . . Yes, yes. . . . You were pleased to say once that there was no philos- ophy in Russia, but that all people, even the paltriest, talk philosophy. But you know the philosophizing of the paltriest does not harm any- one," said Andrey Yefimitch in a tone as if he wanted to cry and complain. " Why, then, that malignant laugh, my friend, and how can these paltry creatures help philosophizing if they are not satis- fied? For an intelligent, educated man, made in God's image, proud and loving freedom, to have no alternative but to be a doctor in a filthy, stupid, wretched little town, and to spend his whole life among bottles, leeches, mustard plasters! Quackery, narrowness, vulgarity! Oh, my God I "

" You are talking nonsense. If you don't like being a doctor you should have gone in for being a statesman."

" I could not, I could not do anything. We are weak, my dear friend . ... I used to be indifferent. I reasoned boldly and soundly, but at the first coarse touch of life upon me I have lost heart. . . . Pros- tration . . . . We are weak, we are poor creatures . . . and you, too, my dear friend, you are intelli- gent, generous, you drew in good impulses with your mother's milk, but you had hardly entered upon life when you were exhausted and fell ill. . . . Weak, weak!"

Andrey Yefimitch was all the while at the ap- proach of evening tormented by another persistent sensation besides terror and the feeling of resent- ment. At last he realized that he was longing for a smoke and for beer.

" I am going out, my friend," he said. " I will tell them to bring a light; I can't put up with this. . . . I am not equal to it . . . ."

Andrey Yefimitch went to the door and opened it, but at once Nikita jumped up and barred his way.

" Where are you going? You can't, you can't I " he said. " It's bedtime."

" But I'm only going out for a minute to walk about the yard," said Andrey Yefimitch.

" You can't, you can't; it's forbidden. You know that yourself."

" But what difference will it make to anyone if I do go out? " asked Andrey Yefimitch, shrugging his shoulders. " I don't understand. Nikita, I must go out I " he said in a trembling voice. " I must."

" Don't be disorderly, it's not right," Nikita said peremptorily.

" This is beyond everything," Ivan Dmitritch cried suddenly, and he jumped up. " What right has he not to let you out? How dare they keep us here ? I believe it is clearly laid down in the law that no one can be deprived of freedom without trial! It's an outrage! It's tyranny I "

" Of course it's tyranny," said Andrey Yefimitch, encouraged by Ivan Dmitritch's outburst. " I must go out, I want to. He has no right I Open, I tell you."

" Do you hear, you dull-witted brute?" cried Ivan Dmitritch, and he banged on the door with his fist. " Open the door, or I will break it open I Torturer I "

" Open the door," cried Andrey Yefimitch, trem- bling all over; " I insist! "

" Talk away! " Nikita answered through the door, " talk away . . . ."

" Anyhow, go and call Yevgeny Fyodoritch! Say that I beg him to come for a minute! "

" His honour will come of himself to-morrow." " They will never let us out," Ivan Dmitritch was going on meanwhile. " They will leave us to rot here! Oh, Lord, can there really be no hell in the next world, and will these wretches be forgiven? Where is justice? Open the door, you wretch I I am choking! " he cried in a hoarse voice, and flung himself upon the door. " I'll dash out my brains, murderers I "

Nikita opened the door quickly, and roughly with both his hands and his knee shoved Andrey Yefi- mitch back, then swung his arm and punched him in the face with his fist. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch as though a huge salt wave enveloped him from his head downwards and dragged him to the bed; there really was a salt taste in his mouth: most likely the blood was running from his teeth. He waved his arms as though he were trying to swim out and clutched at a bedstead, and at the same moment felt Nikita hit him twice on the back.

Ivan Drnitritch gave a loud scream. He must have been beaten too.

Then all was still, the faint moonlight carne through the grating, and a shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Andrey Yefimitch lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck again. He felt as though some- one had taken a sickle, thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day by day for years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he had not known it and had re- fused to know it? He knew nothing of pain, had no conception of it, so he was not to blame, but his conscience, as inexorable and as rough as Nikita, made him turn cold from the crown of his head to his heels. He leaped up, tried to cry out with all his might, and to run in haste to kill Nikita, and then Hobotov, the superintendent and the assistant, and then himself; but no sound carne from his chest, and his legs would not obey him. Gasping for breath, he tore at the dressing-gown and the shirt on his breast, rent them, and fell senseless on the bed.

XIX

Next morning his head ached, there was a droning in his ears and a feeling of utter weakness all over.

He was not ashamed at recalling his weakness the day before. He had been cowardly, had even been afraid of the moon, had openly expressed thoughts and feelings such as he had not expected in himself before; for instance, the thought that the paltry people who philosophized were really dissatisfied. But now nothing mattered to him.

He ate nothing, he drank nothing. He lay mo- tionless and silent.

"It is all the same to me," he thought when they asked him questions. "I am not going to answer. . . . It's all the same to me."

After dinner Mihail Averyanitch brought him a quarter of a pound of tea and a pound of fruit pastilles. Daryushka came too and stood for a whole hour by the bed with an expression of dull grief on her face. Dr. Hobotov visited him. He brought a bottle of bromide and told Nikita to fumigate the ward with something.

Towards evening Andrey Yefimitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shiver- ing fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his finger-tips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefimitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitritch, Mihail Averyanitch, and mil- lions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortal- ity, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter. . . . Mihail Averya- nitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion for ever.

The hospital porters came, took him by his arms and his legs, and carried him away to the chapel.

There he lay on the table, with open eyes, and the moon shed its light upon him at night. In the morning Sergey Sergeyitch came, prayed piously before the crucifix, and closed his former chief's eyes.

Next day Andrey Yefimitch was buried. Mihail Averyanitch and Daryushka were the only people at the funeral.

1892

THE DARLING

0LENKA1 the daughter of the retired collegiate asses- sor, Plemyanniakov, was sitting in her back porch, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gath- ering from the east, and bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And next day the same thing.

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

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

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

" You darling I "

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

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

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

And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behaviour of the musicians, and when there was an unfavourable no- tice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor's office to set things right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

" Ivan Petrovitch died suddenly to-day. Await- ing immate instructions fufuneral Tuesday."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages, and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of words such as ¹¹ baulk," " post," " beam," " pole," " scantling," " batten," ''lath," " plank," etc.

At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere far away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of six- inch beams forty feet high, standing on end, was marching upon the timber-yard; that logs, beams, and boards knocked together with the resounding crash of dry wood, kept falling and getting up again, pil- ing themselves on each other. Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her tenderly: ¹¹ Olenka, what's the matter, darling? Cross your- self I "

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

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

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

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

" Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God," Olenka used to say to her acquaintances. " I wish every one were as well off as Vassitchka and 1."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went about dressed in black with long " weep- ers," and gave up wearing hat and gloves for good. She hardly ever went out, except to church, or to her husband's grave, and led the life of a nun. It was not till six months later that she took off the weepers and opened the shutters of the windows.

She was sometimes seen in the mornings, going with her cook to market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she lived now could only be sur- mised. People guessed, from seeing her drinking tea in her garden with the veterinary surgeon, who read the newspaper aloud to her, and from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post-office, she said to her:

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

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

¹¹ I've asked you before not to talk about what you don't understand. When we veterinary sur- geons are talking among ourselves, please don't put your word in. It's really annoying."

And she would look at him with astonishment and dismay, and ask him in alarm: " But, Volo- ditchka, what am I to talk about? "

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

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

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

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

Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a street, and where the Tivoli and the timber-yard had been, there were new turnings and houses. How rapidly time passes! Olenka's house grew dingy, the roof got rusty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard was overgrown with docks and stinging-nettles. Olenka herself had grown plain and elderly; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul, as before, was empty and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat at her win- dow and looked at the snow. When she caught the scent of spring, or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of memories from the past came over her, there was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but this was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of the futility of life. The black kitten, Briska, rubbed against her and purred softly, but Olenka was not touched by these feline caresses. That was not what she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason — that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood. And she would shake the kitten off her skirt and say with vexation:

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

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

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

" My dear Vladimir Platonitch I What fate has

brought you? " she muttered, trembling with joy.

" I want to settle here for good, Olga Semyon- ovna," he told her. " I have resigned my post, and have come to settle down and try my luck on my own account. Besides, it's time for my boy to go to school. He's a big boy. I am reconciled with my wife, vou know.¹¹

" Where is she? " asked Olenka. " She's at the hotel with the boy, and I'm looking for lodgings."

" Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings? Why not have my house? Why shouldn't that suit you ? Why, my goodness, I wouldn't take any rent! ¹¹ cried Olenka in a flutter, beginning to cry agam. " You live here, and the lodge will do nicely for me. Oh dear I how glad I am I "

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

" Is that your puss, auntie? " he asked Olenka.

" When she has little ones, do give us a kitten. Mamma is awfully afraid of mice."

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

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

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

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

Now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha's parents, saying how difficult the lessons were at the high schools, but that yet the high-school was better than a commercial one, since with a high-school education all careers were open to one, such as being a doctor or an engineer.

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

him off to her lodge and gave him a little room there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¹¹ The lessons at the high school are very diffi- cult now," she would relate at the market. ¹¹ It's too much; in the first class yesterday they gave him a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation and a problem. You know it's too much for a little chap."

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

At three o'clock they had dinner together: in the evening they learned their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would stay a long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer;

then she would go to bed and dream of that far-away misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and have children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while the black cat lay purring beside her: " Mrr, mrr, mrr."

Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate.

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

¹¹ It must be a telegram from Harkov," she would think, beginning to tremble from head to foot. " Sasha's mother is sending for him from Harkov. . . . Oh, mercy on us I "

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

" Well, thank God I " she would think.

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

¹¹ I'll give it you I Get away I Shut up I "

THE HUSBAND

In the course of the manreuvres the N cavalry

regiment halted for a night at the district town of

K . Such an event as the visit of officers always

has the most exciting and inspiring effect on the in- habitants of provinicial towns. The shopkeepers dream of getting rid of the rusty sausages and " best brand " sardines that have been lying for ten years on their shelves; the inns and restaurants keep open all night; the Military Commandant, his secretary, and the local garrison put on their best uniforms; the police flit to and fro like mad, while the effect on the ladies is beyond all description.

The ladies of K , hearing the regiment ap-

proaching, forsook their pans of boiling jam and ran into the street. Forgetting their morning deshabille and general untidiness, they rushed breathless with excitement to meet the regiment, and listened greedily to the band playing the march. Looking at their pale, ecstatic faces, one might have thought those strains came from some heavenly choir rather than from a military brass band.

" The regiment I " they cried joyfully. " The regiment is coming I "

What could this unknown regiment that came by chance to-day and would depart at dawn to-morrow mean to them ?

Afterwards, when the officers were standing in the middle of the square, and, with their hands behind them, discussing the question of billets, all the ladies were gathered together at the examining magistrate's and vying with one another in their criticisms of the regiment. They already knew, goodness knows how, that the colonel was married, but not living with his wife; that the senior officer's wife had a baby born dead every year ; that the adjutant was hope- lessly in love with some countess, and had even once attempted suicide. They knew everything. When a pock-marked soldier in a red shirt darted past the windows, they knew for certain that it was Lieu- tenant Rymzov's orderly running about the town, try- ing to get some English bitter ale on tick for his master. They had only caught a passing glimpse of the officers' backs, but had already decided that there was not one handsome or interesting man among them. • . . Having talked to their hearts' content, they sent for the Military Commandant and the com- mittee of the club, and instructed them at all costs to make arrangements for a dance.

Their wishes were carried out. At nine o'clock in the evening the military band was playing in the street before the club, while in the club itself the

officers were dancing with the ladies of K . The

ladies felt as though they were on wings. Intoxi- cated by the dancing, the music, and the clank of spurs, they threw themselves heart and soul into mak- ing the acquaintance of their new partners, and quite forgot their old civilian friends. Their fathers and husbands, forced temporarily into the background, crowded round the meagre refreshment table in the entrance hall. All these government cashiers, secre- taries, clerks, and superintendents — stale, sickly- looking, clumsy figures — were perfectly well aware of their inferiority. They did not even enter the ball-room, but contented themselves with watching their wives and daughters in the distance dancing with the accomplished and graceful officers.

Among the husbands was Shalikov, the tax-collec- tor — a narrow, spiteful soul, given to drink, with a big, closely cropped head, and thick, protruding lips. He had had a university education; there had been a time when he used to read progressive literature and sing students' songs, but now, as he said of himself, he was a tax-collector and nothing more.

He stood leaning against the doorpost, his eyes fi.xed on his wife, Anna Pavlovna, a little brunette of thirty, with a long nose and a pointed chin. Tightly laced, with her face carefully powdered, she danced without pausing for breath — danced till she wa,s ready to drop exhausted. But though she was ex- hausted in body, her spirit was inexhaustible. . . . One could see as she danced that her thoughts were with the past, that faraway past when she used to dance at the " College for Young Ladies," dreaming of a life of luxury and gaiety, and never doubting that her husband was to be a prince or, at the worst, a baron.

The tax-collector watched, scowling with spite. . . .

It was not jealousy he was feeling. He was ill- humoured — first, because the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a game of cards; secondly, because he could not en- dure the sound of wind instruments; and, thirdly, be- cause he fancied the officers treated the civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully. But what above everything revolted him and moved him to in- dignation was the expression of happiness on his wife's face.

" It makes me sick to look at her I " he muttered. " Going on for forty, and nothing to boast of at any time, and she must powder her face and lace herself up I And frizzing her hair! Flirting and making faces, and fancying she's doing the thing in style I Ugh I you're a pretty figure, upon my soul! "

Anna Pavlovna was so lost in the dance that she did not once glance at her husband.

" Of course not I Where do we poor country bumpkins come in I " sneered the tax-collector.

" We are at a discount now. . . . We're clumsy seals, unpolished provincial bears, and she's the queen of the ball! She has kept enough of her looks to please even officers. . . . They'd not object to making love to her, I dare say I "

During the mazurka the tax-collector's face twitched with spite. A black-haired officer with prominent eyes and Tartar cheekbones danced the mazurka with Anna Pavlovna. Assuming a stern expression, he worked his legs with gravity and feel- ing, and so crooked his knees that he looked like a jack-a-dandy pulled by strings, while Anna Pavlovna, pale and thrilled, bending her figure languidly and turning her eyes up, tried to look as though she scarcely touched the floor, and evidently felt herself that she was not on earth, not at the local club, but somewhere far, far away — in the clouds. Not only her face but her whole figure was expressive of beatitude . . . . The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten her- self, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her excitement. . . .

" You wait; I'll teach you to smile so blissfully," he muttered. " You are not a boarding-school miss, you are not a girl. An old fright ought to realise she is a fright I "

Petty feelings of envy, vexation, wounded vanity, of that small, provincial misanthropy engendered in petty officials by vodka and a sedentary life, swarmed in his heart like mice. Waiting for the end of the mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife. Anna Pavlovna was sitting with her partner, and, flirting her fan and coquettishly dropping her eyelids, was describing how she used to dance in Petersburg (her lips were pursed up like a rosebud, and she pronounced " at home in Putursburg ").

" Anyuta, let us go home," croaked the tax-col- lector.

Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly-looking, ill- humoured, ordinary husband.

" Let us go home," repeated the tax-collector.

" Why? It's quite early I "

" I beg you to come home I " said the tax-collector deliberately, with a spiteful expression.

"Why? Has anything happened?" Anna Pav- lovna asked in a flutter.

" Nothing has happened, but I wish you to go home at once. . . .I wish it; that's enough, and without further talk, please."

Anna Pavlovna was not afraid of her husband, but she felt ashamed on account of her partner, who was looking at her husband with surprise and amuse- ment. She got up and moved a little apart with her husband.

" What notion is this? " she began. " Why go home? Why, it's not eleven o'clock."

" I wish it, and that's enough. Come along, and that's all about it."

" Don't be silly I Go home alone if you want to."

¹¹ All right; then I shall make a scene."

The tax-collector saw the look of beatitude gradu- ally vanish from his wife's face, saw how ashamed and miserable she was — and he felt a little happier.

" Why do you want me at once? " asked his wife.

" I don't want you, but I wish you to be at home. I wish it, that's all."

At first Anna Pavlovna refused to hear of it, then she began entreating her husband to let her stay just another half-hour; then, without knowing why, she began to apologise, to protest — and all in a whisper, with a smile, that the spectators might not suspect that she was having a tiff with her husband. She began assuring him she would not stay long, only an- other ten minutes, only five minutes; but the tax-col- lector stuck obstinately to his point.

" Stay if you like," he said, " but I'll make a scene if you do."

And as she talked to her husband Anna Pavlovna looked thinner, older, plainer. Pale, biting her lips, and almost crying, she went out to the entry and be- gan putting on her things.

" You are not going? " asked the ladies in sur- prise. " Anna Pavlovna, you are not going, dear? "

" Her head aches," said the tax-collector for his wife.

Coming out of the club, the husband and wife walked all the way home in silence. The tax-col- lector walked behind his wife, and watching her downcast, sorrowful, humiliated little figure, he re- called the look of beatitude which had so irritated him at the club, and the consciousness that the beati- tude was gone filled his soul with triumph. He was pleased and satisfied, and at the same time he felt the lack of something; he would have liked to go back to the club and make every one feel dreary and miser- able, so that all might know how stale and worthless life is when you walk along the streets in the dark and hear the slush of the mud under your feet, and when you know that you will wake up next morning with nothing to look forward to but vodka and cards. Oh, how awful it is I

And Anna Pavlovna could scarcely walk. . . . She was still under the influence of the dancing, the music, the talk, the lights, and the noise; she asked herself as she walked along why God had thus afRicted her. She felt miserable, insulted, and choking with hate as she listened to her husband's heavy footsteps. She was silent, trying to think of the most offensive, biting, and venomous word she could hurl at her husband, and at the same time she was fully aware that no word could penetrate her tax- collector's hide. What did he care for words? Her bitterest enemy could not have contrived for her a more helpless position.

And meanwhile the band was playing and the darkness was full of the most rousing, intoxicating dance-tunes.

1886

ARIADNE

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

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

This gentleman's face was familiar to me already. We had returned from abroad the evening before in the same train, and at Volotchisk when the lug- gage was being examined by the Customs, I saw him standing with a lady, his travelling companion, be- fore a perfect mountain of trunks and baskets filled with ladies' clothes, and I noticed how embarrassed and downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery, and his companion pro- tested and threatened to make a complaint. After- wards, on the way to Odessa, I saw him carrying lit- tle pies and oranges to the ladies' compartment.

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

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

" Yes, when Russians come together they dis- cuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter noth- ing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce. We're just the same: when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied. We take too ideal a view of women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give us; we get something utterly different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if any one is suffering, he's bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go on with this conversation? " " No, not in the least."

" In that case, allow me to introduce myself," said my companion, rising from his seat a little: " Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . . You I know very well."

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

" A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I take quite a different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia marriage with- out love it despised, sensuality is ridiculed and in- spires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beauti- ful, poetical, and exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael's Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is no affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we have been married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three years, we be- gin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again — disappointment, again — repulsion, and in the long run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undevel- oped, cruel — in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men. And in our dis- satisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about what we've been so cruelly deceived in."

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

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

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

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

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

The first three years after finishing at the univer- sity I spent in the country, looking after the estate and constantly expecting to be elected on some local assembly; but what was most important, I was vio- lently in love with an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating girl. She was the sister of our neigh- bour, Kotlovitch, a ruined landowner who had on his estate pine-apples, marvellous peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain in the courtyard, and at the same time not a farthing in his po&et. He did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He was as flabby as though he had been made of boiled turnip; he used to doctor the peasants by homa!opathy and was interested in spiritualism. He was, however, a man of great delicacy and mildness, and by no means a fool, but I have no fondness for these gen- tlemen who converse with spirits and cure peasant women by magnetism. In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I did not care for his appearance either. He was tall, stout, white-skinned, with a little head, little shining eyes, and chubby white fingers. He did not shake hands, but kneaded one's hands in his. And he was always apologising. If he asked for anything it was " Excuse me "; if he gave you anything it was " Excuse me " too.

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

Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her foot- prints on the sandy bank where she used to angle for gudgeon, filled me with delight and a passionate hunger for life. I judged of her spiritual being from her lovely face and lovely figure, and every word, every smile of Ariadne's bewitched me, con- quered me and forced me to believe in the loftiness of her soul. She was friendly, ready to talk, gay and simple in her manners. She had a poetic be- lief in God, made poetic reflections about death, and there was such a wealth of varying shades in her spiritual organisation that even her faults seemed in her to carry with them peculiar, charming qual- ities. Suppose she wanted a new horse and had no money — what did that matter? Something might be sold or pawned, or if the steward swore that noth- ing could possibly be sold or pawned, the iron roofs might be torn off the lodges and taken to the fac- tory, or at the very busiest time the farm-horses might be driven to the market and sold there for next to nothing. These unbridled desires reduced the whole household to despair at times, but she ex- pressed them with such refinement that everything was forgiven her; all things were permitted her as to a goddess or to Cc:esar's wife. My love was pa- thetic and was soon noticed by every one — my fa- ther, the neighbours, and the peasants — and they all sympathised with me. When I stood the workmen vodka, they would bow and say: " May the Kotlo- vitch young lady be your bride, please God I "

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

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

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

This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold — to me, to na- ture, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing, and still there were no ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on living with her brother, the spirit- ualist: things went from bad to worse, so that she had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts of tricks and dodges to conceal her poverty.

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

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

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

Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit from an old university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom coachmen and footmen used to say: " An entertaining gentleman." He was a man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff, well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple. He used to wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce either r or l. He was always in good spirits, everything amused him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live with- out a love affair," he would say. " You are young, handsome, interesting — in fact, you're a man not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och I I can't stand these fellows who are old at twenty- eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you are, and yet which of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigory- evna, which? "

" You, of course," Ariadne answered him. And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily : " You're really not a man, but a mush, God for- give me l A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer ! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never for- give your reasonableness! "

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

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

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

After that came conversations every day about Italy: how splendid it would be in Italy— ah, Italy I — oh, Italy I And when Ariadne looked at me over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expres- sion I saw that in her dreams she had already con- quered Italy with all its salons, celebrated foreigners and tourists, and there was no holding her back now. I advised her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or two, but she frowned disdainfully and said: " You're as prudent as an old woman I " Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply, and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from family life.

I behaved, I confess, as naively as a schoolboy. Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of some- thing terrible and extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they would pretend they had just been kissing one an- other, and so on.

But lo and behold, one fine morning, her plump, white-skinned brother, the spiritualist, made his ap- pearance and expressed his desire to speak to me alone.

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

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

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

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

I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an ache in my chest, as if a three- cornered stone had been driven into it. Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands fell limply at his sides.

" What can I do? "I inquired.

" Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were not at home. I went into the park;

wandered about the avenues, then sat down. An Austrian General, with his hands behind him, walked past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our generals wear. A baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the wheels squeaked on the damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice passed, then a crowd of Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian General again. A military band, only just arrived from Fiume, with glittering brass instruments, sauntered by to the bandstand — they began playing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as: ¹¹ The son of a distinguished professor whose estate is next to ours."

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

¹¹ But what a person my aunt is I " she said sud- denly, looking at me with a smile. " We had a slight tiff, and she has bolted off to Meran. What do you say to that? "

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

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

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

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

¹¹ My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov. He is so unhappy I His wife and mother are simply awful."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to run away from them, to go home at once

" To get on terms with a woman is easy enough," Lubkov went on. " You have only to undress her; but aftrrwards what a bore it is, what a silly busi- ness I "

When I counted over the money I received he said:

¹¹ If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I am faced with complete ruin. Your money is the only resource left to me."

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

I knocked at the door.

" Entrez I "

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

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

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

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

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

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

I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling.

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

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

At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the winter; I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts, it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed room, to sit in my fa- ther's study before the open fire, to wash in my coun- try bath-house. . • . Only if there is no mother in the house, no sister and no children, it is somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem extraor- dinarily long and quiet. And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this lack felt. In the winter when I came back from abroad, the eve- nings were endlessly long, I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not even read; in the day- time I was coming and going, clearing away the snow in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening it was all up with me.

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

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

Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the Italian stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and the peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that she was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not holding out a helping hand to her, for looking down upon her from the heights of my virtue and deserting her at the mo- ment of danger. All this was written in a large, nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and it was evident that she wrote in haste and distress. In conclusion she besought me to come and save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I was carried away. Ariadne was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me, she sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all that winter, and was just as young and charming. We had supper together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the time she kept telling me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.

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

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

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

She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two rooms which she had deco- rated in her own taste, frigidly and luxuriously. After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation for her. I had reckoned on taking her back to the country,

but I did not succeed in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of the pov- erty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof on her brother's house, roused a shud- der of disgust, and when I suggested going home to her, she squeezed my hands convulsively and said: " No, no, I shall die of boredom there I " Then my love entered upon its final phase. " Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little," said Ariadne, bending over to me. " You're sulky and prudent, you're afraid to yield to im- pulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that's dull. Come, I beg you, I beseech you, be nice to me I . . . My pure one, my holy one, my dear one, I love you so I "

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

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

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

The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an im- pulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antennz. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and pretence. A man had only to come into our room — whoever it might be, a waiter, or a baron — for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change, even the contour of her figure was transformed. At the very first glance at her then, you would have said there were no more wealthy and fashionable people in Italy than we. She never met an artist or a musician without telling him all sorts of lies about his remarkable talent.

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

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

Often looking at her asleep, or eating, or trying to assume a naive expression, I wondered why that extraordinary beauty, grace, and intelligence had been given her by God. Could it simply be for lolling in bed, eating and lying, lying endlessly? And was she intelligent really? She was afraid of three candles in a row, of the number thirteen, was terrified of spells and bad dreams. She argued about free love and freedom in general like a big- oted old woman, declared that Boleslav Markevitch was a better writer than Turgenev. But she was diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how to seem a highly educated, advanced person in com- pany.

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

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

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

And here we are on our way. For the last few months she has been zealously corresponding with her brother; she evidently has some secret projects, but what they are — God knows! I am sick of try- ing to fathom her underhand schemes I But we're going, not to the country, but to Yalta and after- wards to the Caucasus. She can only exist now at watering-places, and if you knew how I hate all these watering-places, how suffocated and ashamed I am in them. If I could be in the country now I If I could only be working now, earning my bread by the sweat of my brow, atoning for my follies. I am conscious of a superabundance of energy and I believe that if I were to put that energy to work I could redeem my estate in five years. But now, as you see, there is a complication. Here we're not abroad, but in mother Russia; we shall have to think of lawful wed- lock. Of course, all attraction is over; there is no trace left of my old love, but, however that may be, I am bound in honour to marry her.

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

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

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

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

" Oh, nonsense I " he interrupted. " When on:e a woman sees in me, not a man, not an equal, but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to attract me — that is, to take possession of me — how can one talk of their rights? Oh, don't you believe them ; they are very, very cunning ! We men make a great stir about their emancipation, but they don't care about their emancipation at all, they only pre- tend to care about it; they are horribly cunning things, horribly cunning ! "

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

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

put on my coat or hands me a glass of water "

I heard no more, for I fell asleep. Next morning when we were approaching Se- vastopol, it was damp, unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me, brooding and silent. ^^en the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child:

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

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

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

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

And he ran on.

" I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back. ¹¹ The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth I Oh, if only it is so I "

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

1895

PEASANTS

I

Nikolay Tchikildyeev, a waiter in the Moscow hotel, Slavyansky Bazaar, was taken ill. His legs went numb and his gait was affected, so that on one occasion, as he was going along the corridor, he tum- bled and fell down with a tray full of ham and peas. He had to leave his job. All his own savings and his wife's were spent on doctors and medicines; they had nothing left to live upon. He felt dull with no work to do, and he made up his mind he must go home to the village. It is better to be ill at home, and living there is cheaper; and it is a true saying that the walls of home are a help.

He reached Zhukovo towards evening. In his memories of childhood he had pictured his home as bright, snug, comfortable. Now, going into the hut, he was positively frightened ; it was so dark, so crowded, so unclean. His wife Olga and his daugh- ter Sasha, who had come with him, kept looking in bewilderment at the big untidy stove, which filled up almost half the hut and was black with soot and flies. What lots of flies! The stove was on one side, the beams lay slanting on the walls, and it looked as though the hut were just going to fall to pieces. In the corner, facing the door, under the holy images, bottle labels and newspaper cuttings were stuck on the walls instead of pictures. The poverty, the poverty I Of the grown-up people there were none at home; all were at work at the harvest. On the stove was sitting a white-headed girl of eight, unwashed and apathetic; she did not even glance at them as they came in. On the floor a white cat was rubbing itself against the oven fork.

" Puss, puss I " Sasha called to her. " Puss I "

" She can't hear," said the little girl; " she has gone deaf."

" How is that? "

" Oh, she was beaten."

Nikolay and Olga realized from the first glance what life was like here, but said nothing to one another; in silence they put down their bundles, and went out into the village street. Their hut was the third from the end, and seemed the very poorest and oldest-looking; the second wa6 not much better; but the last one had an iron roof, and cur- tains in the windows. That hut stood apart, not enclosed ; it was a tavern. The huts were in a sin- gle row, and the whole of the little village — quiet and dreamy, with willows, elders, and mountain-ash trees peeping out from the yards — had an attrac- tive look.

Beyond the peasants' homesteads there was a slope down to the river, so steep and precipitous that huge stones jutted out bare here and there through the clay. Down the slope, among the stones and holes dug by the potters, ran winding paths ; bits of broken pottery, some brown, some red, lay piled up in heaps, and below there stretched a broad, level, bright green meadow, from which the hay had been already carried, and in which the peasants' cattle were wandering. The river, three-quarters of a mile from the village, ran twist- ing and turning, with beautiful leafy banks; beyond it was again a broad meadow, a herd of cattle, long strings of white geese; then, just as on the near side, a steep ascent uphill, and on the top of the hill a hamlet, and a church with five domes, and at a lit- tle distance the manor-house.

" It's lovely here in your parts 1 " said Olga, crossing herself at the sight of the church. " What space, oh Lord I "

Just at that moment the bell began ringing for service (it was Saturday evening). Two little girls, down below, who were dragging up a pail of wa- ter, looked round at the church to listen to the bell.

" At this time they are serving the dinners at the Slavyansky Bazaar," said Nikolay dreamily.

Sitting on the edge of the slope, Nikolay and Olga watched the sun setting, watched the gold and crimson sky reflected in the river, in the church win- dows, and in the whole air — which was soft and still and unutterably pure as it never was in Moscow. And when the sun had set the flocks and herds passed, bleating and lowing; geese flew across from the fur- ther side of the river, and all sank into silence ; the soft light died away in the air, and the dusk of eve- ning began quickly moving down upon them.

Meanwhile Nikolay's father and mother, two gaunt, bent, toothless old people, just of the same height, came back. The women — the sisters-in- law Marya and Fyokla — who had been working on the landowner's estate beyond the river, arrived home, too. Marya, the wife of Nikolay's brother Kiryak, had six children, and Fyokla, the wife of Nikolay's brother Denis — who had gone for a sol- dier — had two; and when Nikolay, going into the hut, saw all the family, all those bodies big and little moving about on the lockers, in the hanging cradles and in all the corners, and when he saw the greed with which the old father and the women ate the black bread, dipping it in water, he realized he had made a mistake in coming here, sick, penniless, and with a family, too — a great mistake!

" And where is Kiryak? " he asked after they had exchanged greetings.

" He is in service at the merchant's," answered his father; " a keeper in the woods. He is not a bad peasant, but too fond of his glass."

" He is no great help ! " said the old woman tearfully. " Our men are a grievous lot; they bring nothing into the house, but take plenty out. Kiryak drinks, and so does the old man; it is no use hiding a sin; he knows his way to the tavern. The Heav- enly Mother is wroth."

In honour of the visitors they brought out the samovar. The tea smelt of fish: the sugar was grey and looked as though it had been nibbled; cock- roaches ran to and fro over the bread and among the crockery. It was disgusting to drink, and the conversation was disgusting, too — about nothing but poverty and illnesses. But before they had time

to empty their first cups there came a loud, pro- longed, drunken shout from the yard: " Ma-arya I "

" It looks as though Kiryak were coming," said the old man. " Speak of the devil.' '

All were hushed. And again, soon afterwards, the same shout, coarse and drawn-out as though it came out of the earth: " Ma-arya I "

Marya, the elder sister-in-law, turned pale and huddled against the stove, and it was strange to see the look of terror on the face of the strong, broad-shouldered, ugly woman. Her daughter, the child who had been sitting on the stove and looked so apathetic, suddenly broke into loud weeping.

" What are you howling for, you plague?" Fyokla, a handsome woman, also strong and broad- shouldered, shouted to her. " He won't kill you, no fearI "

From his old father Nikolay learned that Marya was afraid to live in the forest with Kiryak, and that when he was drunk he always came for her, made a row, and beat her mercilessly.

" Ma-arya I ¹¹ the shout sounded close to the door. " Protect me, for Christ's sake, good people I ¹¹ faltered Marya, breathing as though she had been plunged into very cold water. " Protect me, kind people. . . .¹¹

All the children in the hut began crying, and looking at them, Sasha, too, began to cry. They heard a drunken cough, and a tall, black-bearded peasant wearing a winter cap came into the hut, and was the more terrible because his face could not be seen in the dim light of the little lamp. It was Kiryak. Going up to his wife, he swung his arm and punched her in the face with his fist. Stunned by the blow, she did not utter a sound, but sat down, and her nose instantly began bleeding.

" What a disgrace! What a disgrace I " mut- tered the old man, clambering up on to the stove. " Before visitors, too! It's a sin I "

The old mother sat silent, bowed, lost in thought; Fyokla rocked the cradle.

Evidently conscious of inspiring fear, and pleased at doing so, Kiryak seized Marya by the arm, dragged her towards the door, and bellowed like an animal in order to seem still more terrible ; but at that moment he suddenly caught sight of the visi- tors and stopped.

" Oh, they have come, . . ." he said, letting his wife go; " my own brother and his family. . . . "

Staggering and opening wide his red, drunken eyes, he said his prayer before the image and went on:

" My brother and his family have come to the parental home . . . from Moscow, I suppose. The great capital Moscow, to be sure, the mother of cities. . . . Excuse me."

He sank down on the bench near the samovar and began drinking tea, sipping it loudly from the saucer in the midst of general silence. . . . He drank off a dozen cups, then reclined on the bench and began snoring.

They began going to bed. Nikolay, as an in- valid, was put on the stove with his old father;

Sasha lay down on the floor, while Olga went with the other women into the barn.

" Aye, aye, dearie," she said, lying down on the hay beside Marya; " you won't mend your trouble with tears. Bear it in patience, that is all. It is written in "the Scriptures: ' If anyone smite thee on the right cheek, offer him the left one also.' . . . Aye, aye, dearie."

Then in a low singsong murmur she told them about Moscow, about her own life, how she had been a servant in furnished lodgings.

" And in Moscow the houses are big, built of brick," she said; " and there are ever so many churches, forty times forty, dearie; and they are all gentry in the houses, so handsome and so pro- per! "

Marya told her that she had not only never been in Moscow, but had not even been in their own district town; she could not read or write, and knew no prayers, not even " Our Father." Both she and Fyokla, the other sister-in-law, who was sitting a little way off listening, were extremely ignorant and could understand nothing. They both disliked their husbands; Marya was afraid of Kiryak, and when- ever he stayed with her she was shaking with fear, and always got a.headache from the fumes of vodka and tobacco with which he reeked. And in answer to the question whether she did not miss her hus- band, Fyokla answered with vexation:

" Miss him I "

They talked a little and sank into silence.