The Complete Short Novels

‘‘Really, you should rent her a separate apartment. It’s so simple!’’

‘‘She needs me, not an apartment. What’s there to talk about?’’ sighed Orlov. ‘‘All I hear is endless talk, but I don’t see any way out of my situation. Truly, I’m blamelessly to blame! I didn’t sow, but I have to reap. All my life I’ve shunned the role of hero, I never could stand Turgenev’s novels, and suddenly, as if in mockery, I’ve wound up a veritable hero. I assure her on my word of honor that I’m not a hero at all, I supply irrefutable proofs, but she doesn’t believe me. Why doesn’t she believe me? There must indeed be something heroic in my physiognomy.’’

‘‘Why don’t you go and inspect the provinces?’’ Kukushkin said with a laugh.

‘‘That’s the only thing left.’’

A week after this conversation, Orlov announced that he was being sent on business to the senator again, and in the evening of that same day he drove to Pekarsky’s with his suitcases.

XI

ON THE THRESHOLD stood an old man of about sixty, in a floor-length fur coat and a beaver hat.

‘‘Is Georgiy Ivanych at home?’’ he asked.

At first I thought he was a moneylender, one of Gruzin’s creditors, who occasionally came to Orlov for small handouts, but when he came into the front hall and opened his coat, I saw the thick eyebrows and characteristically compressed lips I had come to know so well from photographs, and two rows of stars on his uniform tailcoat. I recognized him: it was Orlov’s father, the well-known statesman.

I replied that Georgiy Ivanych was not at home. The old man pressed his lips tightly together and looked away, pondering, showing me his dry, toothless profile.

‘‘I’ll leave a note,’’ he said. ‘‘Show me in.’’

He left his galoshes in the front hall and, without taking off his long, heavy fur coat, went to the study. There he sat down in the armchair at the desk and, before taking up the pen, thought about something for three minutes or so, shielding his eyes as if from the sun—exactly as his son did when he was out of sorts. His face was sad, pensive, with an expression of that submissiveness which I had seen only in the faces of old and religious people. I stood behind him, looking at his bald spot and the depression on his nape, and it was clear as day to me that this weak, ailing old man was now in my hands. For there was not a soul in the whole apartment except me and my enemy. I had only to use a little physical force, then tear off his watch so as to camouflage my purpose, and leave by the back stairs, and I would have gotten immeasurably more than I had counted on when I became a servant. I thought: I’ll hardly ever have a luckier chance. But instead of acting, I went on looking with complete indifference now at the bald spot, now at the fur, and calmly reflected on the relations between this man and his only son, and that people spoiled by wealth and power probably don’t want to die . . .

‘‘Have you worked for my son long?’’ he asked, tracing large letters on the paper.

‘‘This is the third month, Your Excellency.’’

He finished writing and stood up. I still had time. I prodded myself and clenched my teeth, trying to squeeze from my soul at least a drop of my former hatred; I remembered what a passionate, stubborn, and indefatigable enemy I had been still recently . . . But it’s hard to strike a match on a crumbling wall. The sad old face and the cold gleam of the stars called up only petty, cheap, and useless thoughts about the frailty of all earthly things, about the proximity of death...

‘‘Good-bye, brother!’’ the old man said, put his hat on, and left.

It was no longer possible to doubt it: a change had taken place in me, I had become different. To test myself, I started to remember, but at once felt eerie, as if I had accidentally glanced into a dark, damp corner. I remembered my friends and acquaintances, and my first thought was of how I would now blush and be at a loss when I met one of them. Who am I now? What am I to think about, and what am I to do? Where am I to go? What am I living for?

I understood nothing and was clearly aware of only one thing: that I must quickly pack my bags and leave. Before the old man’s visit, my lackeydom still had meaning, but now it was ridiculous. Teardrops fell into my open suitcase, I was unbearably sad, but how I wanted to live! I was ready to embrace and pack into my short life all that was accessible to man. I wanted to talk, and read, and pound with a hammer somewhere in a big factory, and stand watch, and till the soil. I was drawn to Nevsky Prospect, and to the fields, and to the sea—wherever my imagination could reach. When Zinaida Fyodorovna came back, I rushed to open the door for her, and with special tenderness helped her out of her fur coat. For the last time!

Besides the old man, two others came to us that day. In the evening, when it was already quite dark, Gruzin came unexpectedly to pick up some papers for Orlov. He opened the desk, took out the necessary papers, and, rolling them into a tube, told me to put them in the front hall by his hat while he himself went to Zinaida Fyodorovna. She was lying on the sofa in the drawing room with her hands behind her head. Five or six days had gone by since Orlov left on inspection, and no one knew when he would be back, but she no longer sent telegrams or expected any. Polya still lived with us, but she didn’t seem to notice her. ‘‘Let it be!’’—I read on her dispassionate, very pale face. Like Orlov, she now wanted to be unhappy out of stubbornness; to spite herself and the whole world, she spent whole days lying motionless on the sofa, wishing only the bad for herself and expecting only the bad. She was probably imagining Orlov’s return and the inevitable quarrels between them, then his cooling off, his infidelities, then how they would break up, and these tormenting thoughts may have afforded her pleasure. But what would she have said if she had suddenly learned the real truth?

‘‘I love you, my friend,’’ said Gruzin, greeting her and kissing her hand. ‘‘You’re so kind! And Georginka’s gone away,’’ he lied. ‘‘Gone away, the villain!’’

He sat down with a sigh and tenderly stroked her hand.

‘‘Allow me, my dove, to sit with you for a little hour,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t really want to go home, and it’s too early to go to the Birshovs’. Today is their Katya’s birthday. A nice girl!’’

I served him a glass of tea and a decanter of cognac. He drank the tea slowly, with obvious reluctance, and, as he returned the glass to me, asked timidly:

‘‘My lad, mightn’t you have a little something... to eat? I haven’t had dinner yet.’’

We had nothing. I went to the restaurant and brought him an ordinary one-rouble dinner.

‘‘To your health, my dove!’’ he said to Zinaida Fyodorovna and drank a glass of vodka. ‘‘My little one, your goddaughter sends you her greetings. The poor thing has scrofula! Ah, children, children!’’ he sighed. ‘‘Say what you like, my dear, but it’s nice to be a father. Georginka doesn’t understand that feeling.’’

He drank again. Skinny, pale, with the napkin on his chest like a bib, he ate greedily and, raising his eyebrows, glanced guiltily now at Zinaida Fyodorovna, now at me, like a little boy. It seemed if I hadn’t given him grouse or jelly, he would have wept. Having satisfied his hunger, he cheered up and laughingly began telling something about the Birshovs’ family, but, noticing that it was boring and that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not laughing, he fell silent. And somehow it suddenly became boring. After dinner the two of them sat in the drawing room with only one lamp lit and were silent: it was painful for him to lie, and she wanted to ask him about something but could not make up her mind to do it. Half an hour went by that way. Gruzin looked at his watch.

‘‘But perhaps it’s time I left.’’

‘‘No, stay a little . . . We must talk.’’

Again they were silent. He sat down at the piano, touched one key, then began to play and sing softly: ‘‘ ‘What does the morrow hold for me?’ ’’—but as usual got up at once and shook his head.

‘‘Play something, my friend,’’ Zinaida Fyodorovna requested.

‘‘But what?’’ he asked, shrugging his shoulders. ‘‘I’ve forgotten everything. I stopped playing long ago.’’

Looking at the ceiling as if in recollection, he played two pieces by Tchaikovsky with wonderful expression, so warmly, so intelligently! His face was the same as ever— neither intelligent nor stupid—and to me it seemed simply a wonder that a man whom I was used to seeing in the most mean, impure surroundings was capable of such a high and, for me, inaccessible upsurge of feeling, of such purity. Zinaida Fyodorovna became flushed and began pacing the drawing room in agitation.

‘‘But wait now, my friend, if I can remember it, I’ll play a little piece for you,’’ he said. ‘‘I heard it played on the cello.’’

Timidly and tentatively at first, then with assurance, he began playing the ‘‘Swan Song’’ by Saint-Saëns.¹⁹ He played it and repeated it.

‘‘Nice, isn’t it?’’ he said.

Agitated, Zinaida Fyodorovna stopped by him and asked:

‘‘Tell me sincerely, as a friend: what do you think of me?’’

‘‘What can I say?’’ he said, raising his eyebrows. ‘‘I love you and think only good things of you. If you want me to speak generally on the question that interests you,’’ he went on, brushing his sleeve at the elbow and frowning, ‘‘then, my dear, you know . . . To freely follow the yearnings of one’s heart does not always bring good people happiness. To feel yourself free and at the same time happy, it seems to me, you mustn’t conceal from yourself the fact that life is cruel, crude, and merciless in its conservatism, and you must respond to it according to its worth; that is, be just as crude and merciless in your yearning for freedom. That’s what I think.’’

‘‘It’s beyond me!’’ Zinaida Fyodorovna smiled sadly. ‘‘I’m already weary, my friend. I’m so weary that I won’t lift a finger to save myself.’’

‘‘Go to a convent, my friend.’’

He said it jokingly, but after his words, Zinaida Fyodorovna and then he himself had tears glistening in their eyes.

‘‘Well, ma’am,’’ he said, ‘‘we’ve sat and sat, now off we go. Good-bye, my dear friend. May God keep you well.’’

He kissed both her hands and, stroking them tenderly, said he would be sure to visit her one of those days. In the front hall, putting on his coat that resembled a child’s capote, he searched in his pockets for a long time, so as to give me a tip, but found nothing.

‘‘Good-bye, my dove!’’ he said sadly and left.

Never will I forget the mood this man left behind him. Zinaida Fyodorovna still went on pacing the drawing room in agitation. She did not lie down but paced—that was one good thing. I wanted to take advantage of this mood to have a candid talk with her and leave at once, but no sooner had I seen Gruzin off than the bell rang. It was Kukushkin.

‘‘Is Georgiy Ivanych at home?’’ he asked. ‘‘Has he returned? No, you say? What a pity! In that case, I’ll go and kiss the mistress’s hand and—be off! Zinaida Fyodorovna, may I?’’ he cried. ‘‘I want to kiss your hand. Excuse the late hour.’’

He did not sit long in the drawing room, no more than ten minutes, but to me, it seemed he had been sitting for a long time and would never go away. I bit my lip with indignation and vexation, and now hated Zinaida Fyodorovna. ‘‘Why doesn’t she chase him away?’’ I fulminated, though it was obvious that she was bored with him.

While I held his coat for him, he asked, as a special favor to me, how it was that I could do without a wife.

‘‘But I suppose you’re not missing out,’’ he said with a laugh. ‘‘You must have all sorts of hanky-panky going on with Polya . . . You rogue!’’

Despite my life’s experience, I knew very little about people then, and it’s very possible that I often exaggerated insignificant things and didn’t notice the important at all. I imagined that Kukushkin was tittering and flattering me for a reason: wasn’t he hoping that, being a servant, I would blab in servants’ quarters and kitchens everywhere about him visiting us in the evenings when Orlov was away and staying with Zinaida Fyodorovna till late at night? And when my gossip reached the ears of his acquaintances, he would drop his eyes abashedly and shake his little finger. And mightn’t he—I thought, looking at his honeyed little face—pretend tonight over cards and perhaps let slip that he had already won Zinaida Fyodorovna away from Orlov?

The hatred I had so lacked at noontime, when the old man came, now took possession of me. Kukushkin finally left, and, listening to the shuffling of his leather galoshes, I felt a strong desire to send some rude oath after him in farewell, but I restrained myself. But when the footsteps died away on the stairs, I went back to the front hall and, not knowing what I was doing, seized the bundle of papers Gruzin had forgotten and rushed downstairs. I ran outside without coat or hat. It wasn’t cold, but snow was falling in big flakes, and the wind was blowing.

‘‘Your Excellency!’’ I cried, running after Kukushkin. ‘‘Your Excellency!’’

He stopped by a streetlamp and looked back in perplexity.

‘‘Your Excellency!’’ I said breathlessly. ‘‘Your Excellency!’’

And, unable to think up anything to say, I struck him on the face twice with the bundle of papers. Understanding nothing and not even astonished—so stunned he was—he leaned his back against the streetlamp and covered his face with his hands. At that moment some military doctor walked by and saw me beating a man, but he only looked at us in perplexity and went on.

I felt ashamed and ran back into the house.

XII

BREATHLESS, MY HEAD wet with snow, I ran to the servants’ quarters, threw off the tailcoat at once, put on a suit jacket and overcoat, and brought my suitcase out to the front hall. To flee! But before leaving, I quickly sat down and began writing to Orlov:

‘‘I am leaving you my false passport,’’ I began, ‘‘asking you to keep it as a souvenir, you false man, Mr. Petersburg Official!

‘‘To sneak into a house under another man’s name, to observe your intimate life from behind a servant’s mask, to see and hear everything, and then, unbidden, to expose the lie—all that, you will say, resembles theft. Yes, but I cannot worry about nobility now. I lived through dozens of your suppers and dinners, when you said and did whatever you liked, and I had to listen, see, and be silent—I do not want to make you a gift of that. Besides, if there is no living soul around you who would dare to tell you the truth and not flatter, then at least let the servant Stepan wash your splendid physiognomy for you.’’

I didn’t like this beginning, but I had no wish to correct it. And what difference did it make?

The big windows with dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled tailcoat on the floor, and the wet tracks of my feet looked stern and sorrowful. And the silence was somehow peculiar.

Probably because I had run outside without a hat and galoshes, my temperature went up. My face was burning, my legs ached . . . My heavy head bent to the table, and there was a sort of doubling in my thoughts, when it seems that each thought in your brain is followed by its shadow.

‘‘I am ill, weak, morally depressed,’’ I went on, ‘‘I cannot write to you as I would like. In the first moment, I had the wish to insult and humiliate you, but now I do not think I have the right to do so. You and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever get up, and my letter, even if it were eloquent, strong, and fearsome, would still be like knocking on a coffin lid: knock as you will, there’s no waking up! No efforts can warm your cursed cold blood, and you know it better than I do. Why write, then? But my head and heart are on fire, I go on writing, agitated for some reason, as if this letter might still save you and me. Fever keeps the thoughts in my head from cohering, and my pen scratches somehow senselessly on the paper, but the question I want to ask you stands before me as clear as a flame.

‘‘Why I grew weak and fell before my time is not hard to explain. Like the biblical strongman,²⁰ I lifted the gates of Gaza on my back, so as to carry them to the top of the mountain, but only when I was exhausted, when youth and health were extinguished in me forever, did I notice that those gates were too heavy for me, that I had deceived myself. Besides, I was in constant, cruel pain. I have experienced hunger, cold, illness, the loss of freedom; personal happiness I have not known and do not know, I have no refuge, my memories are a burden, and my conscience is often afraid of them. But you, why have you fallen? What fatal, diabolical reasons kept your life from unfolding into full spring flower? Why, before you had begun to live, did you hasten to shake from yourself the image and likeness of God ²¹ and turn into a cowardly animal that barks, and frightens others with its barking, because it is afraid? You are afraid of life, afraid, like that Asiatic, the one who sits on a featherbed all day and smokes a hookah. Yes, you read a lot, and wear your European tailcoat dashingly, but still, with what tender, purely Asiatic, khanlike solicitude you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical strain—from pain and anxiety! How early your soul hid itself in a dressing gown, how you played the coward before real life and nature, with which every healthy and normal person struggles! How soft, cozy, warm, and comfortable it is for you—and how boring! Yes, it is sometimes killingly, irredeemably boring for you, as in solitary confinement, but you try to hide from that enemy as well: you spend eight hours a day playing cards.

‘‘And your irony? Oh, how well I understand it! Living, free, spirited thought is inquisitive and imperious; for a lazy, idle mind, it is unbearable. To keep it from disturbing your peace, you, like thousands of your peers, hastened while still young to set limits to it; you armed yourself with an ironic attitude toward life, or whatever you want to call it, and your restricted, intimidated thought does not dare jump over the little palisade you have set around it, and when you jeer at the ideas that are supposedly all known to you, you are like a deserter who shamefully runs away from the field of battle but, to stifle his shame, mocks at war and courage. Cynicism stifles pain. In one of Dostoevsky’s stories,²² an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his beloved daughter because he is in the wrong before her, and you vilely and tritely make fun of the ideas of good and truth because you are no longer able to go back to them. Any sincere and truthful hint at your fall is frightening to you, and you have deliberately surrounded yourself with people who know only how to flatter your weaknesses. And not for nothing, not for nothing, are you so afraid of tears!

‘‘Incidentally, about your relations with women. We have inherited shamelessness with our flesh and blood, and we are brought up in shamelessness, but it is also for this that we are human beings, so as to overcome the beast in us. With maturity, when all ideas became known to you, you could not help seeing the truth; you knew it, but you did not follow it, you were frightened of it, and in order to deceive your conscience, you began loudly assuring yourself that the one to blame was not you but women themselves, that they were as mean as your relations with them. Your cold, scabrous jokes, your horse laugh, all your numberless theories about the essential, the indefinite demands of marriage, the ten sous that a French worker pays a woman, your eternal allusions to women’s logic, falsity, weakness, and the rest—does it not all look like a desire to force women down into the mud at all costs, so that they and your relations with them stand on the same level? You are a weak, unhappy, unsympathetic man.’’

In the drawing room, Zinaida Fyodorovna started playing the piano, trying to remember the piece by Saint-Saëns that Gruzin had played. I went and lay on my bed, but, remembering that it was time for me to leave, I forced myself to get up and, with a heavy, hot head, went back to the table.

‘‘But here is the question,’’ I went on. ‘‘Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

‘‘The thief who hung on the cross²³ managed to recover the joy of life and a bold, realizable hope, though he probably had no more than an hour left to live. You still have long years ahead of you, and most likely I will not die as soon as it seems. What if, by a miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a terrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed, pure, strong, proud of our truth? . . . Sweet dreams burn me, and I can hardly breathe from excitement. I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault. Let us live! The sun does not rise twice a day, and life is not given us twice—hold fast to the remains of your life and save them . . .’’

I did not write a word more. I had many thoughts in my head, but they were all scattered and wouldn’t fit into the lines. Without finishing the letter, I signed it with my rank, name, and family name, and went into the study. It was dark. I felt for the desk and put the letter on it. I must have bumped into the furniture in the darkness and made a noise.

‘‘Who’s there?’’ an alarmed voice came from the drawing room.

And just then the clock on the desk delicately struck one.

XIII

IN THE DARKNESS I spent at least half a minute scratching the door, feeling it over, then slowly opened it and went into the drawing room. Zinaida Fyodorovna was lying on a couch and, propped on her elbow, met me with her eyes. Not daring to start talking, I slowly walked past her, and she followed me with her gaze. I stood in the reception room for a while and again walked past, and she looked at me attentively and with perplexity, even with fear. Finally I stopped and forced myself to speak:

‘‘He won’t come back!’’

She quickly stood up and looked at me, not understanding.

‘‘He won’t come back!’’ I repeated, and my heart began pounding terribly. ‘‘He won’t come back, because he never left Petersburg. He’s living at Pekarsky’s.’’

She understood and believed me—that I could see from her sudden pallor and the way she abruptly crossed her hands on her breast with fear and entreaty. In a moment, her recent past flashed through her memory, she put things together and saw the whole truth with implacable clarity. But at the same time, she remembered that I was a servant, an inferior being... A rascal with tousled hair, with a face red from fever, maybe drunk, in some sort of banal coat, had rudely interfered in her private life, and that offended her. She said to me sternly:

‘‘Nobody’s asking you. Get out of here.’’

‘‘Oh, believe me!’’ I said impulsively, holding my arms out to her. ‘‘I’m not a servant, I’m as much a free person as you are!’’

I gave my name and quickly, quickly, so that she wouldn’t interrupt me or go to her room, explained who I was and why I was living there. This new discovery struck her more strongly than the first one. Earlier, she still had a hope that the servant was lying or mistaken, or had said something stupid, while now, after my confession, she had no doubts left. By the expression of her unhappy eyes and face, which suddenly became unattractive, because it turned old and lost its softness, I saw that it was unbearably painful for her and that nothing good could come of this conversation. Yet I went on impulsively:

‘‘The senator and the inspection were invented to deceive you. In January, just as now, he didn’t go anywhere, but lived at Pekarsky’s, and I saw him every day and participated in the deception. You were a burden, your presence here was hateful, you were laughed at... If you could have heard how he and his friends here scoffed at you and your love, you wouldn’t have stayed here even one minute! Flee this place! Flee!’’

‘‘Well, so what?’’ she said in a trembling voice and passed her hand over her hair. ‘‘Well, so what? Let it be.’’

Her eyes were filled with tears, her lips trembled, and her whole face was strikingly pale and breathed wrath. Orlov’s crude, petty lie made her indignant and seemed despicable and ridiculous to her; she was smiling, and I didn’t like this smile of hers.

‘‘Well, so what?’’ she repeated and again passed her hand over her hair. ‘‘Let it be. He imagines I’d die of humiliation, but I find it . . . funny. He needn’t be hiding.’’ She stepped away from the piano and said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘‘He needn’t . . . It would be simpler to have a talk than to hide and knock about in other people’s apartments. I have eyes, I saw it long ago...and was only waiting for him to come back to have a final talk.’’

Then she sat in the armchair by the table and, lowering her head onto the armrest of the sofa, wept bitterly. Only one candle was burning in a candelabra in the drawing room, and it was dark around the armchair where she sat, but I saw how her head and shoulders shook and her hair, coming undone, covered her neck, face, hands... In her quiet, regular weeping, not hysterical, but ordinary woman’s weeping, one could hear insult, humiliated pride, offense, and something irreparable, hopeless, which it was impossible to set right and to which it was impossible to become accustomed. In my agitated, suffering soul, her weeping found an echo; I forgot about my illness and about everything in the world, paced about the drawing room, and muttered perplexedly:

‘‘What sort of life is this? . . . Oh, it’s impossible to live this way! Impossible! It’s madness, crime, not life!’’

‘‘What humiliation!’’ she said through her tears. ‘‘To live together... to smile at me, and all the while I’m a burden to him, laughable . . . Oh, what humiliation!’’

She raised her head and, looking at me with tearful eyes through her hair, wet with tears, and straightening a strand of hair that kept her from seeing me, asked:

‘‘Did they laugh?’’

‘‘These people made fun of you, and of your love, and of Turgenev, whom you have supposedly read too much of. And if we both die of despair right now, they’ll also make fun of that. They’ll make a funny story out of it and tell it at your panikhida. Why talk about them?’’ I said with impatience. ‘‘We must flee this place. I can’t stay here a minute longer.’’

She started weeping again, and I stepped towards the piano and sat down.

‘‘What are we waiting for?’’ I asked dejectedly. ‘‘It’s past two o’clock.’’

‘‘I’m not waiting for anything,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m lost.’’

‘‘Why say that? Better let’s think over together what we’re going to do. Neither you nor I can stay here now . . . Where do you intend to go from here?’’

Suddenly the bell rang in the front hall. My heart skipped a beat. Might it not be Orlov, to whom Kukushkin had complained about me? How would we meet? I went to open the door. It was Polya. She came in, shook the snow off her cape in the front hall, and, without saying a word to me, went to her room. When I returned to the drawing room, Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale as a corpse, was standing in the middle of the room and looked at me with big eyes as I came in.

‘‘Who came?’’ she asked softly.

‘‘Polya,’’ I replied.

She ran her hand over her hair and closed her eyes in exhaustion.

‘‘I’ll leave here at once,’’ she said. ‘‘Be so kind as to take me to the Petersburg side. What time is it now?’’

‘‘A quarter to three.’’

XIV

WHEN WE LEFT the house a little later, the street was dark and deserted. Wet snow was falling, and a damp wind lashed at our faces. I remember it was then the beginning of March, there was a thaw, and for several days the cabs had been driving on wheels. Under the impression of the back stairway, the cold, the darkness of night, and the caretaker in a sheepskin coat, who questioned us before letting us out the gate, Zinaida Fyodorovna became quite faint and dispirited. When we got into the cab and put the top up, she was shivering all over and hastily began telling me how grateful she was to me.

‘‘I don’t doubt your good will, but I’m ashamed that you’re troubling yourself . . .’’ she murmured. ‘‘Oh, I understand, I understand... When Gruzin visited today, I felt he was lying and concealing something. Well, so what? Let it be. But even so, I’m ashamed that you’re going to such trouble.’’

She still had some lingering doubts. To disperse them definitively, I told the cabby to drive down Sergievskaya. Stopping by Pekarsky’s porch, I got out of the cab and rang the bell. When the porter came out, I asked loudly, so that Zinaida Fyodorovna could hear, whether Georgiy Ivanych was at home.

‘‘He’s at home,’’ the porter replied. ‘‘He came about half an hour ago. He must be asleep now. What do you want?’’

Zinaida Fyodorovna couldn’t help herself and stuck her head out of the cab.

‘‘Has Georgiy Ivanovich been living here long?’’ she asked.

‘‘It’s the third week now.’’

‘‘And he never went away anywhere?’’

‘‘No,’’ the porter replied and looked at me in surprise.

‘‘Tell him tomorrow early,’’ I said, ‘‘that his sister from Warsaw has come to see him. Good-bye.’’

Then we drove on. The cab had no front flap, the snow poured on us in big flakes, and the wind, especially on the Neva, pierced us to the bone. It began to seem to me that we had been driving for a long time, suffering for a long time, that I had been listening to Zinaida Fyodorovna’s quavering breath for a long time. Fleetingly, in some sort of half-delirium, as if falling asleep, I looked back over my strange, senseless life, and for some reason I remembered the melodrama The Beggars of Paris, which I had seen twice in my childhood. And for some reason, when, in order to shake off this half-delirium, I peeked from under the top and saw the dawn, all the images of the past, all the dim thoughts, suddenly merged in me into one clear, strong thought: Zinaida Fyodorovna and I were now lost irretrievably. This was a certainty, as if the cold blue sky contained a prophecy, but a moment later I was already thinking something else and believing something else.

‘‘What am I now?’’ Zinaida Fyodorovna was saying in a voice husky from the cold and damp. ‘‘Where am I to go? What am I to do? Gruzin said: go to a convent. Oh, I would go! I’d change my clothes, my face, name, thoughts... everything, everything, and hide myself forever. But they won’t let me into a convent. I’m pregnant.’’

‘‘Tomorrow you and I will go abroad,’’ I said.

‘‘That’s impossible. My husband won’t give me a passport.’’

‘‘I’ll get you there without a passport.’’

The cab stopped by a two-story wooden house painted a dark color. I rang. Taking from me a light little basket—the only baggage we had brought with us—Zinaida Fyodorovna smiled somehow sourly and said:

‘‘These are my bijoux . . .’’

But she was so weak that she was unable to hold these bijoux. They didn’t open the door for a long time. After the third or fourth ring, light flashed in the windows, and footsteps, coughing, and whispering were heard; at last the lock clicked and a fat woman with a red, frightened face appeared in the doorway. Behind her, at some distance, stood a small, thin old lady with short gray hair, in a white chemise, and with a candle in her hand. Zinaida Fyodorovna rushed into the front hall and threw herself on this old lady’s neck.

‘‘Nina, I’ve been deceived!’’ she sobbed loudly. ‘‘I’ve been crudely, vilely deceived! Nina! Nina!’’

I handed the basket to the woman. The door was locked again, but I could still hear sobbing and the cry: ‘‘Nina!’’ I got into the cab and told the cabby to drive unhurriedly to Nevsky Prospect. I had to think about where to spend the night.

The next day, before evening, I was at Zinaida Fyodorovna’s. She was much changed. Her pale face, now grown very thin, showed no trace of tears, and its expression was different. I don’t know whether it was because I now saw her in different, far from luxurious surroundings, or because our relations were altered, or maybe strong grief had already left its mark on her, but now she did not appear so graceful and well dressed as always; her figure seemed to have become smaller; in her movements, in her gait, in her face, I noticed an unnecessary nervousness, an impulsiveness, as if she was in a hurry, and there was not even the former softness in her smile. I was now dressed in an expensive two-piece suit, which I had bought in the afternoon. Her eyes first took in this two-piece suit and the hat in my hand, then she rested her impatient, searching gaze on my face, as if studying it.

‘‘Your transformation still seems some sort of miracle to me,’’ she said. ‘‘Excuse me for studying you with such curiosity. You really are an extraordinary man.’’

I told her once again who I was and why I had been living at Orlov’s, and I spoke longer and in more detail than the evening before. She listened with great attention and, without letting me finish, said:

‘‘It’s all over for me there. You know, I couldn’t restrain myself and wrote a letter. Here’s the reply.’’

On the sheet of paper she handed me, there was written in Orlov’s hand: ‘‘I will not justify myself. But you must agree: it was you who were mistaken, not I. I wish you happiness and ask you to quickly forget your respectful G.O. —P.S. I am sending your belongings.’’

The trunks and baskets, sent by Orlov, were standing there in the living room, and among them was my pitiful little suitcase as well.

‘‘Which means . . .’’ said Zinaida Fyodorovna and did not finish.

We were silent for a while. She took the note and for a minute or two held it before her eyes, and at that moment her face took on the same haughty, scornful, and proud, hard expression it had had the day before at the beginning of our talk; tears welled up in her eyes, not timid, not bitter, but proud, angry tears.

‘‘Listen,’’ she said, getting up impulsively and going to the window, so that I couldn’t see her face. ‘‘I’ve decided like this: tomorrow I’ll go abroad with you.’’

‘‘That’s splendid. I’m even ready to go today.’’

‘‘Recruit me. Have you read Balzac?’’ she asked suddenly, turning around. ‘‘Have you? His novel Père Goriot²⁴ ends with the hero looking at Paris from the top of a hill and threatening the city: ‘Now we’ll have it out!’ And after that a new life begins. So, too, when I look at Petersburg for the last time from the train, I’ll say to it: ‘Now we’ll have it out!’ ’’

And having said that, she smiled at her joke and, for some reason, shuddered all over.

XV

IN VENICE I began to have pleuritic pains. I had probably caught a cold the evening we went by boat from the train station to the Hotel Bauer. From the first day, I had to take to my bed and stayed in it for about two weeks. Every morning while I was ill, Zinaida Fyodorovna came to me from her room so that we could have coffee together, and then she read aloud to me from French and Russian books, of which we had bought many in Vienna. I had been long familiar with those books or was not interested in them, but beside me was the sound of a dear, kind voice, so that the contents of them all came down to one thing for me: I was not lonely. She would go for a walk, come back in her pale gray dress, in her light straw hat, cheerful, warmed by the spring sun, and, sitting at my bedside, bending low towards my face, would tell me something about Venice or read those books—and I felt good.

At night I was cold, bored, and in pain, but by day I reveled in life—I can’t think of a better expression. The bright, hot sun beating in through the open windows and the balcony door, the shouts below, the splashing of oars, the ringing of bells, the rolling thunder of the cannon at noon, and the feeling of total, total freedom worked miracles with me; I felt strong wide wings at my sides, which carried me God knows where. And what enchantment, how much joy sometimes at the thought that next to my life now went another life, that I was the servant, the guardian, the friend, the needed companion of a beautiful and rich but weak, insulted, lonely young being! It is even pleasant to be ill when you know there are people who wait for your recovery as for a feast. Once I heard her and my doctor whispering outside the door, and then she came into my room with tearful eyes—a bad sign—but I was moved and felt extraordinarily light in my soul.

But now I was allowed to go out on the balcony. The sun and the light breeze from the sea pamper and caress my ailing body. I look down on the long-familiar gondolas, which float with feminine grace, smoothly and majestically, as if they are alive and feel all the luxury of this original, charming culture. There is a smell of the sea. Somewhere a stringed instrument is being played and two voices are singing. How good! How unlike that Petersburg night when wet snow was falling and lashing my face so rudely! Now, if you look directly across the channel, you can see the seashore, and over the vastness of the horizon, the sun ripples so brightly on the water that it hurts to look. My soul is drawn there, to the dear, good sea to which I gave my youth. I want to live! To live—and nothing more!

In two weeks I began going wherever I wanted. I liked to sit in the sun, to listen to a gondolier without understanding, and to spend whole hours looking at the little house where they say Desdemona lived—a naïve, sad little house with a virginal expression, light as lace, so light that it seems you could move it from its spot with one hand. I would stand for a long time by the tomb of Canova,²⁵ not tearing my eyes from the mournful lion. And in the Doges’ Palace, I was always drawn to the corner where the unfortunate Marino Faliero²⁶ was daubed over with black paint. It’s good to be an artist, a poet, a playwright, I thought, but if that’s inaccessible to me, I could at least throw myself into mysticism! Ah, if only there was a bit of some sort of faith to add to this untroubled peace and satisfaction that fills my soul.

In the evenings we ate oysters, drank wine, went for boat rides. I remember our black gondola quietly rocking in one spot, the water splashing barely audibly under it. Here and there, reflections of the stars and coastal lights tremble and sway. Not far from us, in a gondola hung with colorful lanterns, which are reflected in the water, some people are sitting and singing. The sounds of guitars, violins, mandolins, male and female voices ring out in the darkness, and Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale, with a serious, almost stern face, sits beside me, tightly clenching her lips and hands. She’s thinking about something, and won’t even stir an eyebrow, and doesn’t hear me. Her face, her posture, her immobile gaze, expressive of nothing, and her memories—unbelievably dismal, eerie, cold as snow—and around us gondolas, lights, music, the song with its energetic, passionate cry: ‘‘Jam-mo!... Jam-mo! . . .’’ What contrasts of life! When she sat that way, with her hands clenched, stony, grief-stricken, I imagined both of us participating in some novel in the old-fashioned taste, entitled An Ill-fated Woman, An Abandoned Woman, or something of the sort. Both of us: she ill-fated, abandoned, and I a true, faithful friend, a dreamer, and, if you like, a superfluous man,²⁷ a luckless fellow, incapable of anything but coughing and dreaming, and maybe also of sacrificing himself... but to whom and for what are my sacrifices needed now? And what am I to sacrifice, may I ask?

Each time, after the evening promenade, we drank tea in her room and talked. We weren’t afraid of touching old, stillunhealed wounds—on the contrary, for some reason, I even felt pleasure when I told her about my life at Orlov’s or openly referred to relations that were known to me and could not have been concealed from me.

‘‘There were moments when I hated you,’’ I said. ‘‘When he fussed, condescended, and lied, it struck me how it could be that you didn’t see anything, didn’t understand, when everything was so clear. You kiss his hands, go on your knees, flatter...’’

‘‘When I ... kissed his hands and went on my knees, I loved him . . .’’ she said, blushing.

‘‘Could it have been so hard to see through him? A fine sphinx he is! A kammerjunker sphinx! I’m not reproaching you for anything, God forbid!’’ I went on, feeling that I had been a bit crude, that I lacked worldliness and that delicacy which was so necessary when dealing with another person’s soul; before I met her, I had never noticed this shortcoming in myself. ‘‘But how could you not have guessed?’’ I repeated, more softly now and with less assurance.

‘‘You mean to say that you despise my past, and you’re right,’’ she said in great agitation. ‘‘You belong to a special category of people who can’t be measured by the usual yardstick; your moral demands are distinguished by an exceptional strictness, and, as I understand, you cannot forgive; I understand you, and if I sometimes contradict you, it doesn’t mean that I look at things differently than you; I say old rubbish simply because I haven’t had time yet to wear out my old dresses and prejudices. I myself hate and despise my past, and Orlov, and my love . . . What kind of love is that? Now it’s all even ridiculous,’’ she said, going over to the window and looking down on the canal. ‘‘All these loves only darken one’s conscience and throw one off. The meaning of life is only in one thing—in struggle. To plant your heel on the vile serpent’s head so that it goes ‘crack!’ The meaning is in that. In that alone, or else there’s no meaning at all.’’

I told her long stories from my past and described for her my indeed amazing adventures. But I never let out a word about the change that had taken place in me. She listened to me with great attention each time and rubbed her hands at the interesting places, as if vexed that she had not yet managed to live through such adventures, fears, and joys, but suddenly she would turn pensive, withdraw into herself, and I could see from her face that she wasn’t listening to me.

I’d close the windows looking out on the canal and ask if I shouldn’t light the fire.

‘‘No, God help it. I’m not cold,’’ she would say, smiling listlessly, ‘‘it’s just that I’m all faint. You know, it seems to me that I’ve become terribly intelligent recently. I have such extraordinary, original thoughts now. When I think about the past, for instance, about my life then . . . well, about people in general, it all merges into one thing in me—the image of my stepmother. Crude, impudent, heartless, false, depraved, and a morphine addict besides. My father, a weak, spineless man, married my mother for money and drove her to consumption, but this second wife, my stepmother, he loved passionately, to distraction . . . The things I suffered! Well, what’s there to talk about! So, as I was saying, it all merges into one image... And that vexes me: why did my stepmother die? I’d like to meet her now! . . .’’

‘‘Why?’’

‘‘Just so, I don’t know . . .’’ she answered with a laugh, shaking her head prettily. ‘‘Good night. Get well. As soon as you recover, we’ll take care of our affairs... It’s time.’’

When I had already taken leave and stood holding the door handle, she would say:

‘‘What do you think? Does Polya still live there?’’

‘‘Probably.’’

And I would go to my room. We lived like that for a whole month. One overcast noontime, when we were both standing by the window in my room and silently looking at the clouds coming in from the sea, and at the canal, which had turned dark blue, and expecting the rain to pour down any minute, and when a narrow, dense strip of rain had already covered the coastline like gauze, we both suddenly felt bored. That same day we left for Florence.

XVI

THIS HAPPENED THAT autumn in Nice. One morning when I came to her room, she was sitting in an armchair, her legs crossed, hunched up, shrunken, her face buried in her hands, and weeping bitterly, sobbing, and her long, undone hair fell over her knees. The impression of the marvelous, astonishing sea, which I had only just seen, which I wanted to tell her about, suddenly left me, and my heart was wrung with pain.

‘‘What is it?’’ I asked. She took one hand away from her face and waved for me to leave. ‘‘Well, what is it?’’ I repeated, and for the first time in our acquaintance, I kissed her hand.

‘‘No, no, it’s nothing!’’ she said quickly. ‘‘Oh, nothing, nothing . . . Go away . . . You can see I’m not dressed.’’

I left in terrible confusion. My peace and the untroubled mood I had been in for so long were poisoned by compassion. I passionately wanted to fall at her feet, to implore her not to weep alone but to share her sorrow with me, and the even sound of the sea now growled in my ears like a dark prophecy, and I saw new tears ahead, new griefs and losses. What, what was she crying about?—I asked, remembering her face and her suffering eyes. I remembered that she was pregnant. She tried to hide her condition both from people and from her own self. At home she went about in a loose blouse or a chemise with exaggeratedly sumptuous pleats in front, and when she went somewhere, she laced her corset so tightly that she fell into a swoon twice during her walks. She never talked with me about her pregnancy, and once, when I tried to mention that it would do no harm to get a doctor’s advice, she turned all red and didn’t say a word.

When I came to her room later, she was already dressed, and her hair was done.

‘‘Come, come!’’ I said, seeing that she was again about to cry. ‘‘Better let’s go to the sea and have a talk.’’

‘‘I can’t speak. Forgive me, I’m in such a mood now that I’d rather be alone. And please, Vladimir Ivanovich, the next time you want to come into my room, give a preliminary knock on the door.’’

That ‘‘preliminary’’ had some special, unfeminine ring to it. I left. The cursed Petersburg mood was coming back, and all my dreams curled up and shriveled like leaves in the heat. I felt that I was alone again, that there was no closeness between us. I was the same for her as the spiderweb for this palm tree, which hung on it accidentally and would be torn off and blown away by the wind. I strolled through the square, where music was playing, and went into a casino; there I looked at the dressed-up, much-perfumed women, and each of them looked at me as if she wanted to say: ‘‘You’re lonely, that’s splendid . . .’’ Then I went out to the terrace and looked at the sea for a long time. Not a single sail on the far horizon; on the shore to the left, hills, gardens, towers, houses in a purple mist; the sun plays on it all, but it’s all alien, indifferent, some sort of tangle...

XVII

SHE CAME TO me as before to have coffee in the mornings, but we no longer dined together; she, so she said, did not feel like eating, and subsisted on nothing but coffee, tea, and various trifles such as oranges and caramels.

Nor did we have conversations in the evenings. I don’t know why that was. After the time I found her in tears, she began to treat me somehow lightly, sometimes carelessly, even with irony, and for some reason called me ‘‘my sir.’’ That which earlier had seemed frightening, astonishing, heroic to her, and which had aroused envy and rapture in her, now didn’t touch her at all, and usually, having heard me out, she would stretch a little and say:

‘‘Yes, there were big doings at Poltava,²⁸ my sir, there were indeed.’’

It even happened that I wouldn’t meet her for whole days. I’d knock timidly and guiltily at her door—no answer; I’d knock again—silence . . . I’d stand by the door and listen; but then a maid goes by and announces coldly: ‘‘Madame est partie.’’⁶ Then I’d pace the hotel corridor, pace, pace . . . Englishmen of some sort, full-breasted ladies, garçons in tailcoats . . . And when I’ve looked for a long time at the long striped carpet that stretches all down the corridor, it occurs to me that I’m playing a strange, probably false role in this woman’s life, and that I’m no longer able to change this role; I run to my room, fall on my bed, think and think, and can’t think anything up, and it’s only clear to me that I want to live, and that the more unattractive, dry, and tough her face becomes, the closer she is to me, and the more strongly and painfully I feel our affinity. Let me be ‘‘my sir,’’ let there be this light, disdainful tone, let there be anything, only don’t abandon me, my treasure. I’m afraid to be alone now.

Then I go out to the corridor again, listen with anxiety . . . I don’t have dinner, don’t notice how evening comes. Finally, past ten o’clock, I hear familiar footsteps, and Zinaida Fyodorovna appears at the turning by the stairs.

‘‘Taking a stroll?’’ she asks, passing by. ‘‘You’d do better to go out . . . Good night!’’

‘‘But won’t we see each other today?’’

‘‘It’s already late, it seems. However, as you wish.’’

‘‘Tell me, where have you been?’’ I ask, following her into her room.

‘‘Where? To Monte Carlo.’’ She takes some ten gold pieces from her pocket and says, ‘‘Here, my sir. I won. At roulette.’’

‘‘Well, you’re not going to start gambling.’’

‘‘Why not? And I’ll go again tomorrow.’’

I imagined her with an unpleasant, sickly face, pregnant, tightly laced, standing at the gaming table in a crowd of cocottes, of doddering old women who swarm around gold like flies around honey, remembered that she had left for Monte Carlo in secret from me for some reason...

‘‘I don’t believe you,’’ I said once. ‘‘You won’t go there.’’

‘‘Don’t worry. I can’t lose much.’’

‘‘It’s not a matter of losing,’’ I said with vexation. ‘‘Didn’t it occur to you, as you were gambling there, that the gleam of gold, all those women, old and young, the croupier, the whole setting, that it’s all a low, vile mockery of a worker’s labor, of his sweat and blood?’’

‘‘If you don’t gamble, what is there to do here?’’ she asked. ‘‘The worker’s labor, sweat and blood—set aside that eloquence for another time. But now, since you’ve started, allow me to continue; allow me to put the question point-blank: what am I to do here, and what will I do?’’

‘‘What to do?’’ I said, shrugging. ‘‘It’s impossible to answer that question all at once.’’

‘‘I ask you to answer me in all conscience, Vladimir Ivanych,’’ she said, and her face became angry. ‘‘If I’ve ventured to ask you this question, it is not in order to hear commonplaces. I’m asking you,’’ she went on, rapping the table with her palm as if beating time, ‘‘what should I do here? And not only here in Nice, but generally?’’

I said nothing and looked out the window at the sea. My heart began to pound terribly.

‘‘Vladimir Ivanych,’’ she said softly, gasping for breath; it was hard for her to speak. ‘‘Vladimir Ivanych, if you don’t believe in the cause yourself, if you don’t intend to return to it, then why...why did you drag me away from Petersburg? Why did you promise me, and why did you arouse mad hopes in me? Your convictions have changed, you’ve become a different person, and no one blames you for that—convictions aren’t always in our power, but...but Vladimir Ivanych, for God’s sake, why are you insincere?’’ she went on softly, coming up to me. ‘‘When I dreamed aloud all these months, raved, admired my plans, reconstructed my life in a new way, why, instead of telling me the truth, did you keep silent or encourage me with stories and behave as if you fully sympathized with me? Why? What did you need that for?’’

‘‘It’s difficult to confess your bankruptcy,’’ I said, turning around but not looking at her. ‘‘No, I don’t believe, I’m weary, disheartened . . . It’s hard to be sincere, terribly hard, and so I kept silent. God forbid that anyone should go through what I’ve gone through.’’

It seemed to me that I was about to burst into tears, and I fell silent.

‘‘Vladimir Ivanych,’’ she said and took me by both hands. ‘‘You’ve experienced and gone through a great deal, you know more than I do; think seriously and tell me: what am I to do? Teach me. If you’re no longer able to go yourself and lead others behind you, at least show me where to go. You must agree, I’m a living, feeling, and reasoning person. To get into a false position . . . to play some absurd role...is hard for me. I’m not reproaching, I’m not accusing you, I’m only asking.’’

Tea was served.

‘‘Well, so?’’ asked Zinaida Fyodorovna, handing me a glass. ‘‘What have you to tell me?’’

‘‘There’s more than one light in the window,’’ I replied. ‘‘There are other people besides me, Zinaida Fyodorovna.’’

‘‘Point them out for me, then,’’ she said briskly. ‘‘That’s the only thing I ask of you.’’

‘‘And I want to say more,’’ I went on. ‘‘You can serve the idea in more than just some one field. If you make a mistake and lose faith in one thing, you can find another. The world of ideas is wide and inexhaustible.’’

‘‘The world of ideas!’’ she said and looked me mockingly in the face. ‘‘Then we’d better stop . . . What’s the point . . .’’

She blushed.

‘‘The world of ideas!’’ she repeated and flung the napkin aside, and her face acquired an indignant, squeamish expression. ‘‘I see that all your beautiful ideas come down to one inevitable, indispensable step: I must become your mistress. That’s what’s needed. To fuss with ideas and not be the mistress of the most honest, most idea-conscious man— means not to understand ideas. One must begin with this...that is, with the mistress, and the rest will go by itself.’’

‘‘You’re irritated, Zinaida Fyodorovna,’’ I said.

‘‘No, I’m sincere!’’ she cried, breathing heavily. ‘‘I’m sincere.’’

‘‘Maybe you’re sincere, but you’re deluded, and it’s painful for me to listen to you.’’

‘‘I’m deluded!’’ she laughed. ‘‘Anyone can say that, but not you, my sir. Let me seem indelicate to you, cruel, but so it goes: you’re in love with me, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?’’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘‘Yes, shrug your shoulders!’’ she went on mockingly. ‘‘When you were ill, I heard you raving, then there were those constantly adoring eyes, the sighs, the well-intentioned conversations about closeness, spiritual affinity . . . But above all, why have you been insincere up to now? Why did you hide what was there, and talk about what wasn’t? You should have told me from the very beginning what, in fact, the ideas were that forced you to drag me away from Petersburg. Then I would have known. I would have poisoned myself, as I wanted to, and there would not have been this tedious comedy now... Eh, what’s there to talk about!’’ She waved her hand at me and sat down.

‘‘You speak in such a tone as if you suspect me of dishonorable intentions.’’ I was offended.

‘‘Well, all right now. What’s the point. It’s not that I suspect your intentions, but that you never had any intentions. If you’d had any, I’d know them. Besides ideas and love, you had nothing. Ideas and love now, and down the road—me as your mistress. Such is the order of things both in life and in novels . . . You denounced him,’’ she said and slapped the table with her palm, ‘‘but, willy-nilly, one must agree with him. It’s not for nothing he despises all these ideas.’’

‘‘He doesn’t despise ideas, he’s afraid of them,’’ I cried. ‘‘He’s a coward and a liar.’’

‘‘Well, all right now! He’s a coward, a liar, and he deceived me—and you? Forgive my frankness, but who are you? He deceived me and abandoned me to my fate in Petersburg, and you deceived me and abandoned me here. But he at least didn’t drag ideas into his deceit, while you . . .’’

‘‘For God’s sake, why do you say that?’’ I was horrified and, wringing my hands, quickly went over to her. ‘‘No, Zinaida Fyodorovna, no, that’s cynicism, you shouldn’t be in such despair, hear me out,’’ I went on, seizing upon a thought that had suddenly glimmered vaguely in my head and, it seemed, might still save us both. ‘‘Listen to me. I’ve experienced much in my time, so much that my head is spinning with memories now, and I have now firmly understood with my brain, with my pain-weary soul, that man’s purpose is either in nothing or in only one thing—the selfless love of one’s neighbor. That’s where we should go and what our purpose is! That is my faith!’’

I meant to speak further about mercy, about all-forgiveness, but my voice suddenly rang false, and I got embarrassed.

‘‘I want to live!’’ I said sincerely. ‘‘To live, to live! I want peace, quiet, I want warmth, this sea here, your closeness. Oh, how I’d like to inspire this passionate love of life in you as well! You were just talking about love, but for me your closeness alone, your voice, the expression of your face would be enough . . .’’

She blushed and said quickly, so as to keep me from talking:

‘‘You love life, but I hate it. Therefore our paths are different.’’

She poured herself tea but didn’t touch it, went to the bedroom, and lay down.

‘‘I suppose it will be better if we stop this conversation,’’ she said to me from there. ‘‘For me everything’s already over, and I don’t need anything . . . Why go on talking about it!’’

‘‘No, everything’s not over!’’

‘‘Well, all right! . . . I know! I’m sick of it . . . Enough.’’

I stood there for a while, paced from corner to corner, and went out to the corridor. Afterwards, late at night, when I came to her door and listened, I clearly heard weeping.

The next morning the servant, giving me my clothes, told me with a smile that the lady in number thirteen was giving birth. I dressed haphazardly and, sinking with terror, hurried to Zinaida Fyodorovna. In her room were a doctor, a midwife, and an elderly Russian lady from Kharkov by the name of Darya Mikhailovna. There was a smell of ether drops. I had barely stepped over the threshold when a soft, plaintive moan came from the room where she lay, and it was as if the wind had brought it to me from Russia, I remembered Orlov, his irony, Polya, the Neva, big snowflakes, then the cab with no flap, the prophecy I had read in the cold morning sky, and the desperate cry: ‘‘Nina! Nina!’’

‘‘Go to her,’’ said the lady.

I went into Zinaida Fyodorovna’s room feeling as if I was the father of the child. She lay with her eyes closed, thin, pale, in a white cap trimmed with lace. I remember there were two expressions on her face: one indifferent, cold, listless; the other childlike and helpless, given her by the white cap. She didn’t hear me come in, or maybe she did, but paid no attention to me. I stood, looked at her, and waited.

But then her face twisted with pain, she opened her eyes and started looking at the ceiling, as if trying to figure out what was the matter with her... On her face there was a look of disgust.

‘‘Vile,’’ she whispered.

‘‘Zinaida Fyodorovna,’’ I called weakly.

She gave me an indifferent, listless look and closed her eyes. I stood there for a while and then left.

During the night, Darya Mikhailovna told me that the baby was a girl, but the mother was in a dangerous state; then there was running in the corridor, a commotion. Darya Mikhailovna came to me again and, with a desperate look, wringing her hands, said:

‘‘Oh, it’s terrible! The doctor suspects she’s taken poison! Oh, how badly the Russians behave themselves here!’’

And the next day at noon, Zinaida Fyodorovna passed away.

XVIII

TWO YEARS WENT by. My circumstances changed, I went back to Petersburg and could live there without hiding. I was no longer afraid to be and to seem sentimental, and gave myself entirely to the fatherly or, more precisely, the idolatrous feeling aroused in me by Sonya, Zinaida Fyodorovna’s daughter. I fed her with my own hands, bathed her, put her to bed, spent whole nights looking at her, and cried out when I thought the nurse was going to drop her. My thirst for ordinary, humdrum life grew stronger and more exasperating as time went on, but my vast dreams settled around Sonya, as if they had finally found in her precisely what I needed. I loved that little girl madly. I saw in her the continuation of my life, and it was not that it seemed so to me, but I felt, and almost believed, that when I had finally cast off this long, bony, bearded body, I would live in those light blue eyes, in that blond silky hair and those plump pink arms that so lovingly stroked my face and embraced my neck.

Sonya’s destiny frightened me. Her father was Orlov, on her birth certificate her name was Krasnovsky, and the only person who knew of her existence and found it interesting— that is, I—was already drawing out his last song. I had to think about her seriously.

The day after my arrival in Petersburg, I went to see Orlov. A fat old man with red side-whiskers and no mustache, apparently a German, opened the door. Polya, who was tidying up in the drawing room, didn’t recognize me, but Orlov did at once.

‘‘Ah, Mr. Seditionist!’’ he said, looking me over with curiosity and laughing. ‘‘What brings you here?’’

He hadn’t changed at all: the same sleek, unpleasant face, the same irony. And on the table, as in former times, lay some new book with an ivory paper knife in place of a bookmark. He had evidently been reading before I came. He sat me down, offered me a cigar, and, with a delicacy proper only to very well-bred people, hiding the unpleasant feeling provoked in him by my face and my gaunt figure, observed in passing that I hadn’t changed at all and was easily recognizable, even though I had grown a beard. We talked of the weather, of Paris. To have done the sooner with the unavoidable painful question that was oppressing both him and me, he asked:

‘‘Did Zinaida Fyodorovna die?’’

‘‘Yes, she did,’’ I replied.

‘‘In childbed?’’

‘‘Yes, in childbed. The doctor suspected there was some other cause of death, but . . . for you and for me, it’s easier to think she died in childbed.’’

He sighed out of politeness and was silent. An angel passed.

‘‘So, sir. And with me, everything’s as before, no particular changes,’’ he said briskly, noticing that I was looking around his study. ‘‘Father, as you know, resigned and is now retired, I’m still where I was. Remember Pekarsky? He’s the same as ever. Gruzin died last year of diphtheria... Well, sir, Kukushkin’s alive and often remembers you. Incidentally,’’ Orlov went on, lowering his eyes bashfully, ‘‘when Kukushkin learned who you were, he began telling everywhere that you had supposedly made an assault on him, had wanted to kill him...and he had barely escaped with his life.’’

I said nothing.

‘‘Old servants don’t forget their masters . . . It’s very nice on your part,’’ Orlov joked. ‘‘However, would you like some wine or coffee? I’ll order it made.’’

‘‘No, thank you. I’ve come to you on very important business, Georgiy Ivanych.’’

‘‘I’m not a lover of important business, but I’m glad to be of service to you. What is it you want?’’

‘‘You see,’’ I began agitatedly, ‘‘the daughter of the late Zinaida Fyodorovna is at present here with me... Till now I have occupied myself with her upbringing, but as you see, one of these days I shall turn into an empty sound. I’d like to die with the thought that she has been settled.’’

Orlov turned slightly red, frowned, and glanced at me sternly, fleetingly. He was unpleasantly affected not so much by the ‘‘important business’’ as by my words about turning into an empty sound, about death.

‘‘Yes, that must be given thought,’’ he said, shielding his eyes as from the sun. ‘‘Thank you. You say it’s a girl?’’

‘‘Yes, a girl. A wonderful girl!’’

‘‘So. It’s not a pug dog, of course, but a human being... I see it must be given serious thought. I’m ready to take a hand and . . . and I’m much obliged to you.’’

He got up, paced about, biting his nails, and stopped before a painting.

‘‘It must be given thought,’’ he said tonelessly, standing with his back to me. ‘‘I’ll go to Pekarsky today and ask him to call on Krasnovsky. I think Krasnovsky won’t make too many difficulties and will agree to take the girl.’’

‘‘Excuse me, but I don’t see what Krasnovsky has to do with it,’’ I said, also getting up and going over to the painting at the other end of the study.

‘‘But she bears his name, I hope!’’ said Orlov.

‘‘Yes, maybe he’s obliged by law to take this girl in, I don’t know, but I haven’t come to you to talk about laws, Georgiy Ivanych.’’

‘‘Yes, yes, you’re right,’’ he promptly agreed. ‘‘It seems I’m talking nonsense. But don’t worry. We’ll discuss it all to our mutual satisfaction. If not one thing, then another, if not another, then a third, but one way or another, this ticklish question will be resolved. Pekarsky will arrange it all. Kindly leave me your address, and I’ll inform you immediately of what decision we come to. Where do you live?’’

Orlov wrote down my address, sighed, and said with a smile:

‘‘What a chore, O Creator, to be the father of a little daughter! ²⁹ But Pekarsky will arrange it all. He’s a ‘nintelligent’ man. How long did you live in Paris?’’

‘‘About two months.’’

We fell silent. Orlov was obviously afraid I’d bring up the girl again, and to divert my attention in a different direction, he said:

‘‘You’ve probably forgotten about your letter. But I keep it. I understand your mood at the time, and I confess, I respect that letter. The cursed cold blood, the Asiatic, the horse laugh—it’s nice and characteristic,’’ he went on, smiling ironically. ‘‘And the main thought is perhaps close to the truth, though one could argue no end. That is,’’ he faltered, ‘‘argue not with the thought but with your attitude to the question, with your temperament, so to speak. Yes, my life is abnormal, corrupt, good for nothing, and cowardice keeps me from starting a new life—there you’re perfectly right. But that you take it so close to heart, that you worry and despair, is not reasonable—there you’re quite wrong.’’

‘‘A living man can’t help worrying and despairing when he sees himself and others around him perishing.’’

‘‘Who’s talking! I’m by no means preaching indifference, I merely want an objective attitude towards life. The more objective, the less risk of falling into error. One must look at the root and seek the cause of all causes in each phenomenon. We’ve become weak, gone to seed, fallen finally, our generation consists entirely of neurasthenics and whiners, the only thing we know how to do is talk about being tired and overexhausted, but neither you nor I is to blame for it: we’re too small for the fate of a whole generation to hang upon our will. Here, one must think, there are large, general causes, which, from a biological point of view, have a sound raison d’être. We are neurasthenics, soured spirits, back-sliders, but maybe that’s needful and useful for the generations that will live after us. Not a single hair falls from our heads without the will of the Heavenly Father—in other words, nothing in nature and the human environment happens just like that. Everything is well grounded and necessary. But if so, why should we be so especially worried and write desperate letters?’’

‘‘That may be so,’’ I said after some reflection. ‘‘I believe that for the coming generations, it will be easier and clearer; they will have our experience at their service. But one wants to live independently of the future generations and not merely for them. Life is given only once, and one would like to live it cheerfully, meaningfully, beautifully. One would like to play a prominent, independent, noble role; one would like to make history, so that those same generations would have no right to say of each of us: ‘He was a nonentity,’ or even worse than that . . . I do believe in the purposefulness and necessity of what happens around us, but what does that necessity have to do with me? Why should my ‘I’ perish?’’

‘‘Well, what to do!’’ sighed Orlov, getting up and as if giving me to understand that our conversation was over.

I took my hat.

‘‘We’ve sat for only half an hour and resolved so many questions, just think!’’ Orlov said, seeing me off to the front hall. ‘‘So I’ll take care of that . . . Today I’ll be seeing Pekarsky. Have no doubts.’’

He stopped to wait while I put on my coat, and obviously felt pleasure at the fact that I would soon be gone.

‘‘Georgiy Ivanych, give me back my letter,’’ I said.

‘‘Yes, sir.’’

He went to the study and came back a moment later with the letter. I thanked him and left.

The next day I received a note from him. He congratulated me upon the fortunate solution of the problem. A lady of Pekarsky’s acquaintance, he wrote, kept a boarding school, something like a kindergarten, where even very small children were accepted. The lady was totally reliable, but, before entering into any agreements with her, it would do no harm to discuss things with Krasnovsky—formality required it. He advised me to go immediately to Pekarsky and, incidentally, to bring the birth certificate with me, if there was such a thing. ‘‘Accept the assurance of your humble servant’s sincere respect and devotion . . .’’

I was reading this letter, and Sonya was sitting on the table and looking at me attentively, without blinking, as if she knew her fate was being decided.

1892

THREE YEARS

I

IT WAS NOT dark yet, but here and there lights had been lit in the houses, and beyond the barracks at the end of the street a pale moon was rising. Laptev sat on a bench by the gate and waited for the end of vespers in the Peter-and-Paul church. He reckoned that Yulia Sergeevna, on her way home from vespers, would pass by, and then he would start talking with her and perhaps spend the whole evening with her.

He had been sitting there for about an hour and a half, and his imagination all the while had been picturing his Moscow apartment, his Moscow friends, his footman Pyotr, his desk; he kept glancing in perplexity at the dark, motionless trees, and it seemed strange to him that he was not now living in his dacha¹ in Sokolniki, but in a provincial town, in a house past which a large herd was driven every morning and evening, accompanied by a frightful cloud of dust and the blowing of a horn. He remembered long Moscow conversations in which he himself had taken part still so recently—conversations about how it was possible to live without love, how passionate love was a psychosis, how there was finally no such thing as love, but only physical attraction between the sexes—all in the same vein; he remembered and thought sadly that if he were now asked what love was, he would be at a loss to answer.

Vespers were over, people appeared. Laptev peered at the dark figures intently. The bishop had driven past in his carriage, the bell ringing had stopped, and the red and green lights on the bell tower—this was an illumination on the occasion of the church’s feast day ²—had gone out one by one, yet people still walked unhurriedly, talking, stopping under windows. But then, finally, Laptev heard the familiar voice, his heart began to pound, and because Yulia Sergeevna was not alone but with some two ladies, he was overcome with despair.

‘‘This is terrible, terrible!’’ he whispered, jealous over her. ‘‘This is terrible!’’

At the corner, before turning into the lane, she stopped to say good-bye to the ladies and at that moment glanced at Laptev.

‘‘And I’m on my way to your house,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve come to have a talk with your father. Is he at home?’’

‘‘Probably,’’ she replied. ‘‘It’s too early for him to go to the club.’’

The lane was all gardens, and lindens grew by the fences, now casting a broad shadow in the moonlight, so that on one side, the fences and gates were completely drowned in darkness; from there came the whisper of women’s voices, restrained laughter, and someone very softly played a balalaika. It smelled of lindens and hay. This smell and the whispering of the invisible ones stirred Laptev. He suddenly wanted passionately to embrace his companion, to cover her face, hands, shoulders with kisses, to burst into sobs, to fall at her feet, to tell her how long he had been waiting for her. She gave off a slight, barely perceptible smell of incense, and it reminded him of the time when he also believed in God and went to vespers and dreamed much of a pure, poetic love. And because this girl did not love him, it seemed to him now that the possibility of the happiness he had dreamed of then was lost to him forever.

She began speaking with concern about the health of his sister, Nina Fyodorovna. Some two months ago, his sister had had a cancer removed, and now everyone expected the illness to return.

‘‘I went to see her this morning,’’ said Yulia Sergeevna, ‘‘and it seemed to me that in this last week she has not so much grown thin as faded away.’’

‘‘Yes, yes,’’ Laptev agreed. ‘‘There’s no relapse, but with each day, I’ve noticed, she grows weaker and weaker and wastes away before my eyes. I don’t understand what’s wrong with her.’’

‘‘Lord, and how healthy, plump, and red-cheeked she used to be!’’ said Yulia Sergeevna after a moment’s silence. ‘‘Here they all used to call her a robin. How she laughed! On feast days she’d dress up like a simple peasant, and it became her very well.’’

Dr. Sergei Borisych was at home; stout, red-faced, in a long frock coat below his knees, which made him seem short-legged, he paced up and down his study, his hands in his pockets, and hummed in a low voice: ‘‘Roo-roo-rooroo.’’ His gray side-whiskers were disheveled, his hair uncombed, as if he had just gotten out of bed. And his study, with pillows on the sofas, heaps of old papers in the corners, and a sick, dirty poodle under the desk, made the same disheveled and rough impression as the man himself.

‘‘M’sieur Laptev wishes to see you,’’ said the daughter, going into the study.

‘‘Roo-roo-roo-roo,’’ he sang louder and, veering into the drawing room, gave his hand to Laptev and said: ‘‘What’s the good news?’’

It was dark in the drawing room. Laptev, not sitting down, and holding his hat in his hand, began to apologize for the disturbance; he asked what to do so that his sister could sleep at night, and why she was becoming so terribly thin, and he was embarrassed by the thought that he seemed to have asked the doctor these same questions that day during his morning visit.

‘‘Tell me,’’ he asked, ‘‘shouldn’t we invite some specialist in internal diseases from Moscow? What do you think?’’

The doctor sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and made an indefinite gesture with both hands.

It was obvious that he was offended. He was an extremely touchy doctor, very quick to take offense, and always imagined that he was not believed, that he was not recognized and not sufficiently respected, that the public exploited him and his colleagues treated him with ill will. He always laughed at himself, saying such fools as he were created only so that the public could ride on them.

Yulia Sergeevna lighted the lamp. She had gotten tired in church, and that could be noticed by her pale, weary face, by her sluggish gait. She wanted to rest. She sat on the sofa, leaned her arms on her knees, and lapsed into thought. Laptev knew that he was unattractive, and now it seemed to him that he even felt this unattractiveness on his body. He was of small stature, thin, with ruddy cheeks, and his hair was already quite sparse, so that his head got chilled. His expression was totally deprived of that graceful simplicity which makes even coarse, unattractive faces sympathetic; in the company of women, he was awkward, excessively garrulous, affected. And now he almost despised himself for that. To keep Yulia Sergeevna from getting bored in his company, it was necessary to talk. But what about? Again about his sister’s illness?

And he began saying what is usually said about medicine, praised hygiene, and mentioned that he had long wished to set up a night shelter in Moscow and that he even had an estimate. According to his plan, a worker coming to the night shelter in the evening would, for five or six kopecks, get a portion of hot cabbage soup with bread, a warm, dry bed with a blanket, and a place to dry his clothes and shoes.

Yulia Sergeevna was usually silent in his presence, and in a strange way, perhaps with the intuition of a man in love, he could guess her thoughts and intentions. And now he realized that if she did not go to her room to change her clothes and have tea after vespers, it meant she was invited somewhere else that evening.

‘‘But I’m in no rush with this night shelter,’’ he went on, now with annoyance and vexation, addressing the doctor, who gazed at him somehow dully and with perplexity, evidently not understanding why on earth he had turned the conversation to medicine and hygiene. ‘‘And most likely I won’t soon make use of our estimate. I’m afraid our night shelter will fall into the hands of our Moscow hypocrites and philanthropic ladies, who ruin every undertaking.’’

Yulia Sergeevna got up and gave Laptev her hand.

‘‘Sorry,’’ she said, ‘‘it’s time for me to go. Please give my greetings to your sister.’’

‘‘Roo-roo-roo-roo,’’ sang the doctor. ‘‘Roo-roo-rooroo.’’

Yulia Sergeevna left, and a little later, Laptev took his leave of the doctor and went home. When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how banal seem to him all these lindens, shadows, clouds, all these self-satisfied and indifferent beauties of nature! The moon was already high, and clouds raced swiftly under it. ‘‘But what a naïve, provincial moon, what skimpy, pathetic clouds!’’ thought Laptev. He was ashamed that he had just spoken of medicine and the night shelter, and he was terrified that tomorrow, too, he would not have character enough, and he would again try to see her and speak with her, and once more be convinced that he was a stranger to her. The day after tomorrow—again the same thing. What for? And when and how would all this end?

At home he went to his sister’s room. Nina Fyodorovna still looked sturdy and gave the impression of a well-built, strong woman, but a marked pallor made her look like a dead person, especially when, as now, she lay on her back with her eyes closed. Near her sat her elder daughter, Sasha, ten years old, reading something to her from her school reader.

‘‘Alyosha’s come,’’ the sick woman said softly to herself. Between Sasha and her uncle a silent agreement had long been established: they took turns. Now Sasha closed her reader and, without saying a word, quietly left the room; Laptev took a historical novel from the chest of drawers and, finding the page he needed, sat down and started reading aloud.

Nina Fyodorovna was a native Muscovite. She and her two brothers had spent their childhood and youth on Pyatnitskaya Street, in a family of merchants. It was a long, boring childhood; her father treated her severely and even punished her with a birching three times or so, and her mother was sick with something for a long time and died; the servants were dirty, coarse, hypocritical; priests and monks often came to the house, also coarse and hypocritical; they drank and ate and crudely flattered her father, whom they did not like. The boys had the luck to be sent to school, but Nina remained uneducated, wrote in a scrawl all her life, and read only historical novels. Seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-two, at their dacha in Khimki, she made the acquaintance of her present husband, Panaurov, a landowner, fell in love with him, and married him secretly, against her father’s will. Panaurov, handsome, slightly insolent, given to lighting cigarettes from the icon lamp and whistling, seemed utterly worthless to her father, and when, in letters afterward, the son-in-law started demanding a dowry, the old man wrote to his daughter that he would send to her on the estate fur coats, silverware, and various objects left by her mother, and thirty thousand in cash, but without his parental blessing; then he sent another twenty thousand. This money and the dowry were run through, the estate was sold, and Panaurov moved to town with his family and took a job with the provincial government. In town he acquired another family for himself, and that caused much talk every day, since his illegitimate family lived quite openly.

Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. And now, listening to the historical novel, she was thinking about how she had lived through so much, had suffered so greatly in all that time, and that if someone were to describe her life, it would come out as very pitiful. Since the tumor was in her breast, she was certain that she had fallen ill from love, from her family life, and that it was jealousy and tears that had brought her to bed.

But here Alexei Fyodorovich closed his book and said:

‘‘The end, and God be praised. Tomorrow we’ll start another.’’

Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always laughed readily, but now Laptev had begun to notice that she had moments, on account of illness, when her mind seemed to weaken, and she laughed at the least trifle and even for no reason.

‘‘Yulia came here before dinner, while you were away,’’ she said. ‘‘From what I can see, she doesn’t have much faith in her father. ‘Let my papa treat you,’ she says, ‘but all the same, write to the holy elder on the quiet and ask him to pray for you.’ They’ve acquired some elder here. Yulechka forgot her parasol here, send it to her tomorrow,’’ she went on after a pause. ‘‘No, when it’s the end, no doctors or elders will help.’’

‘‘Nina, why don’t you sleep at night?’’ Laptev asked, to change the subject.

‘‘Just because. I don’t sleep, that’s all. I lie here and think.’’

‘‘What do you think about, dear?’’

‘‘About the children, about you . . . about my life. I’ve lived through so much, Alyosha. Once I start remembering, once I start... Lord God!’’ She laughed. ‘‘No joke, I’ve given birth five times, I’ve buried three children . . . Once I was about to give birth, and my Grigory Nikolaich was with some other woman just then, there was nobody to send for the midwife or a wise woman; I went to the front hall to call for the maid, and there were Jews, shopkeepers, moneylenders—waiting for him to come back. It made my head spin... He didn’t love me, though he never said so. By now I’ve calmed down, my heart is more at peace, but before, when I was younger, it hurt me—hurt me, oh, how it hurt me, dear heart! Once—this was still on the estate—I found him in the garden with a lady, and I went away... I went wherever my legs would carry me and, I don’t know how, I found myself on the church porch, I fell on my knees: ‘Queen of Heaven!’ I said. And it was night out, a crescent moon was shining...’

She was exhausted and began to gasp; then, after resting a little, she took her brother’s hand and went on in a weak, soundless voice:

‘‘How kind you are, Alyosha... How intelligent you are... What a good man you’ve turned out to be!’’

At midnight Laptev said good night to her and, on his way out, took along the parasol forgotten by Yulia Sergeevna. Despite the late hour, the servants, men and women, were having tea in the dining room. What disorder! The children were not asleep and were sitting right there in the dining room. They were talking softly, in low voices, and did not notice that the lamp was growing dim and was about to go out. All these big and small people were upset by a whole series of inauspicious omens, and the mood was oppressive: the mirror in the front hall had broken, the samovar had hummed every day and, as if on purpose, was humming even now; someone said that as Nina Fyodorovna was getting dressed, a mouse had leaped out of her shoe. And the children already knew the awful meaning of these omens; the older girl, Sasha, a thin brunette, sat motionless at the table, and her face was frightened, sorrowful, and the younger, Lida, seven years old, a plump blonde, stood beside her sister and looked at the fire from under her eyebrows.

Laptev went to his rooms on the lower floor, lowceilinged rooms, where it was stuffy and always smelled of geraniums. In his drawing room sat Panaurov, Nina Fyodorovna’s husband, reading a newspaper. Laptev nodded to him and sat down opposite. They both sat and were silent. It sometimes happened that they would spend the whole evening thus silently, and this silence did not embarrass them.

The girls came from upstairs to say good night. Panaurov silently, unhurriedly crossed them both several times and gave them his hand to kiss; they curtseyed, then went over to Laptev, who also had to cross them and give them his hand to kiss. This ceremony with kissing and curtseying was repeated every evening.

When the girls left, Panaurov laid the paper aside and said:

‘‘It’s boring in our God-protected town! I confess, my dear,’’ he added with a sigh, ‘‘I’m very glad you’ve finally found yourself some distraction.’’

‘‘What do you mean?’’ asked Laptev.

‘‘I saw you earlier coming out of Dr. Belavin’s house. I hope you didn’t go there for the papa’s sake.’’

‘‘Of course not,’’ said Laptev, reddening.

‘‘Well, of course not. And, incidentally speaking, you won’t find another such plug horse as this papa if you search with a lamp in broad daylight. You can’t imagine what a slovenly, giftless, and clumsy brute he is! You people there in your capital are still interested in the provinces only from the lyrical side, so to speak, from the paysage and Anton the Wretch ³ side, but I swear to you, my friend, there are no lyrics, there’s only wildness, meanness, vileness—and nothing more. Take the local high priests of science, the local intelligentsia, so to speak. Can you imagine, there are twenty-eight doctors here in town, they’ve all made fortunes and live in their own houses, and the populace meanwhile is in the same helpless situation as before. Here Nina had to have an operation, essentially a trifling one, and for that we had to invite a surgeon from Moscow—not a single one here would undertake it. You can’t imagine. They know nothing, understand nothing, are interested in nothing. Ask them, for instance, what is cancer? What is it? Where does it come from?’’

And Panaurov began to explain what cancer was. He was a specialist in all the sciences and explained scientifically everything that happened to come up in conversation. But he explained it all somehow in his own way. He had his own theory of the circulation of the blood, his own chemistry, his own astronomy. He spoke slowly, quietly, persuasively, and uttered the words ‘‘you can’t imagine’’ in a pleading voice, narrowing his eyes, sighing languidly, and smiling benevolently, like a king, and it was obvious that he was very pleased with himself and never thought at all of the fact that he was already fifty years old.

‘‘I’d really like to have something to eat,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘It would be pleasant to eat something salty.’’

‘‘Well, why not? That can be arranged at once.’’

A little later, Laptev and his brother-in-law were sitting upstairs in the dining room, having supper. Laptev drank a glass of vodka and then began drinking wine, but Panaurov drank nothing. He never drank or played cards and, in spite of that, had all the same run through his own and his wife’s fortunes and acquired many debts. To run through so much in such a short time, one had to have not passion but something else, some special talent. Panaurov liked good food, fine place settings, music at the table, speeches, bowing foot-men, to whom he casually tossed tips of ten and even twentyfive roubles; he always took part in all the subscriptions and lotteries, sent birthday bouquets to ladies of his acquaintance, bought cups, tea-glass holders, shirt studs, neckties, canes, scent, cigarette holders, pipes, lapdogs, parrots, Japanese objects, antiques; his nightshirts were made of silk, his bed of ebony with mother-of-pearl, his dressing gown was genuine Bokhara, and so on, and all that required a daily outlay of, as he himself said, ‘‘no end of money.’’

Over supper he kept sighing and shaking his head.

‘‘Yes, everything in this world has an end,’’ he said quietly, narrowing his dark eyes. ‘‘You’ll fall in love, and you’ll suffer, fall out of love, be betrayed, because there’s no woman who doesn’t betray; you’ll suffer, become desperate, betray her yourself. But the time will come when it will all turn into a memory, and you’ll reason coldly and regard it as completely trifling...’

And Laptev, tired, slightly drunk, looked at his handsome head, his black, clipped beard, and it seemed he understood why women so loved this spoiled, self-confident, and physically charming man.

After supper Panaurov did not stay at home but went to his other apartment. Laptev went out to see him off. In the whole town, Panaurov was the only one who wore a top hat, and next to the gray fences, the pitiful three-windowed houses, and the clumps of nettles, his elegant, foppish figure, his top hat and orange gloves, produced each time a strange and sad impression.

After taking leave of him, Laptev returned home unhurriedly. The moon shone brightly, one could see every straw on the ground, and it seemed to Laptev as though the moonlight was caressing his uncovered head, as though someone was stroking his hair with down.

‘‘I’m in love!’’ he said aloud, and he suddenly wanted to run, overtake Panaurov, embrace him, forgive him, give him a lot of money, and then run off somewhere to the fields, the groves, and keep running without looking back.

At home he saw Yulia Sergeevna’s forgotten parasol on a chair, seized it, and greedily kissed it. The parasol was of silk, no longer new, held by an elastic band; the handle was of simple, cheap white bone. Laptev opened it and held it over him, and it seemed to him that there was even a smell of happiness around him.

He settled more comfortably and, without letting go of the parasol, began writing to one of his friends in Moscow:

‘‘My dear Kostya, here is news for you: I am in love again! I say again, because some six years ago I was in love with a Moscow actress with whom I never even managed to get acquainted, and for the last year and a half I have been living with the ‘individual’ known to you—a woman neither young nor beautiful. Ah, dear heart, how generally unlucky I have been in love! I have never had success with women, and if I say again, it is only because it is somehow sad and disappointing to confess to my own self that my youth has passed entirely without love, and that in a real way I am in love for the first time only now, when I am thirty-four. So let it be in love again.

‘‘If you only knew what a girl she is! She cannot be called a beauty—her face is broad, and she is very thin—but what a wonderful expression of kindness, what a smile! Her voice, when she speaks, sings and rings. She never gets into conversation with me, I do not know her, but when I am near her, I sense in her a rare, extraordinary being pervaded with intelligence and lofty aspirations. She is religious, and you cannot imagine how that touches me and elevates her in my eyes. On this point I am ready to argue endlessly with you. You are right, let it be your way, but even so, I like it when she prays in church. She is a provincial, but she studied in Moscow, loves our Moscow, dresses in Moscow fashion, and for that I love her, love her, love her... I can see you frowning and getting up to give me a long lecture on what love is, and who can and cannot be loved, and so on and so forth. But, dear Kostya, before I fell in love, I myself also knew perfectly well what love was.

‘‘My sister thanks you for your greetings. She often remembers how she once took Kostya Kochevoy to place him in the preparatory class, and to this day she calls you poor, because she’s kept a memory of you as an orphan boy. And so, poor orphan, I am in love. So far it is a secret, do not say anything there to the ‘individual’ known to you. That, I think, will get settled by itself, or ‘shape up,’ as the footman says in Tolstoy...’⁴

Having finished the letter, Laptev went to bed. His eyes closed of themselves from fatigue, but for some reason, he could not sleep; it seemed that the street noises interfered. The herd was driven past, and the horn was blown, then the bells soon rang for the early liturgy. Now a cart went creaking by, then came the voice of some peasant woman going to market. And the sparrows were chirping all the while.

II

IT WAS A gay, festive morning. At around ten o’clock, Nina Fyodorovna, wearing a brown dress, neatly combed, was brought out to the drawing room, supported under both arms, and there she promenaded a little and stood for a while at the open window, and her smile was broad, naïve, and looking at her reminded one of the local artist, a drunken fellow, who said hers was a face on an icon and wanted to paint her in a Russian Shrovetide scene. And to everybody— the children, the servants, even her brother Alexei Fyodorych and herself—it suddenly appeared a certainty that she would unfailingly recover. The girls chased their uncle with shrill laughter, trying to catch him, and the house became noisy.

Strangers came to ask after her health, bringing prosphoras, ⁵ saying that prayer services had been held for her that day in almost all the churches. She did charitable work in her town and was loved. She gave charity with extraordinary ease, just like her brother Alexei, who gave money very easily, without considering whether he should give or not. Nina Fyodorovna paid for poor pupils, gave money to old women for tea, sugar, preserves, fitted out needy brides, and if a newspaper happened into her hands, she first looked whether there was any appeal for help or notice of someone in distress.

In her hands now was a bundle of notes by means of which various poor people, her protégés, took goods from the grocery store, and which the merchant had sent her the day before with a request for the payment of eighty-two roubles.

‘‘Just look how much they’ve taken, shameless folk!’’ she said, barely making out her bad handwriting on the notes. ‘‘No joke! Eighty-two! I’m just not going to pay it!’’

‘‘I’ll pay it today,’’ said Laptev.

‘‘Why should you? Why?’’ Nina Fyodorovna became alarmed. ‘‘It’s enough that I get two hundred and fifty a month from you and our brother. Lord save you,’’ she added quietly, so that the servants would not hear.

‘‘Well, and I run through twenty-five hundred a month,’’ he said. ‘‘I repeat to you once more, my dear: you have as much right to spend money as Fyodor and I. Understand that once and for all. Father had the three of us, and of every three kopecks, one is yours.’’

But Nina Fyodorovna did not understand and had an expression as if she was mentally resolving some very difficult problem. And this obtuseness in money matters always disturbed and confused Laptev. Besides, he suspected that she had personal debts of which she was embarrassed to tell him, and which made her suffer.

Footsteps were heard, and heavy breathing: this was the doctor coming up the stairs, disheveled and uncombed, as usual.

‘‘Roo-roo-roo,’’ he hummed. ‘‘Roo-roo.’’

To avoid meeting him, Laptev went out to the dining room, then downstairs to his own rooms. It was clear to him that to become more intimate with the doctor and visit his house informally was an impossible thing; even to meet this ‘‘plug horse,’’ as Panaurov called him, was unpleasant. And that was why he so rarely saw Yulia Sergeevna. He now realized that her father was not at home, that if he brought Yulia Sergeevna her parasol now, then most likely he would find her at home alone, and his heart was wrung with joy. Quickly, quickly!

He took the parasol and, in great excitement, flew off on the wings of love. It was hot outside. In the doctor’s enormous courtyard, overgrown with weeds and nettles, some two dozen boys were playing with a ball. These were all children of the tenants, workers who lived in three old, unsightly wings that the doctor intended to renovate every year and kept putting it off. Healthy, ringing voices resounded. Far to one side, near her porch, stood Yulia Sergeevna, her hands behind her back, watching the game.

‘‘Hello!’’ called Laptev.

She turned to look. Usually he saw her indifferent, cold, or, as yesterday, tired, but now her expression was lively and frisky, like the boys playing with the ball.

‘‘Look, in Moscow they never play so merrily,’’ she said, coming towards him. ‘‘Anyhow, they don’t have such big courtyards there, there’s no room to run around. And papa has just gone to your house,’’ she added, glancing back at the children.

‘‘I know, but I’ve come to see you, not him,’’ said Laptev, admiring her youth, which he had not noticed before, and which he seemed to have discovered in her only today; it was as if he was seeing her slender white neck with its golden chain for the first time today. ‘I’ve come to see you...’ he repeated. ‘‘My sister sends you your parasol, you forgot it yesterday.’’

She reached out to take the parasol, but he clutched it to his breast and said passionately, irrepressibly, yielding again to the sweet ecstasy he had experienced the previous night, sitting under the parasol:

‘‘I beg you, give it to me. I’ll keep it as a souvenir of you... of our acquaintance. It’s so wonderful!’’

‘‘Take it,’’ she said and blushed. ‘‘But there’s nothing wonderful about it.’’

He looked at her in rapture, silently, and not knowing what to say.

‘‘Ah, what am I doing keeping you out in this heat?’’ she said after some silence and laughed. ‘‘Let’s go inside.’’

‘‘But won’t I be disturbing you?’’

They went into the front hall. Yulia Sergeevna ran up the stairs, her dress rustling, white with little blue flowers.

‘‘It’s impossible to disturb me,’’ she said, stopping on the stairs, ‘‘I never do anything. Every day is a holiday for me, from morning till evening.’’

‘‘For me, what you’re saying is incomprehensible,’’ he said, going up to her. ‘‘I grew up in a milieu where people worked every day, all of them without exception, both the men and the women.’’

‘‘But if there’s nothing to do?’’ she asked.

‘‘You must set up your life on such conditions that labor will be necessary. Without labor, there can be no pure and joyful life.’’

He again clutched the parasol to his breast and said softly, unexpectedly for himself, not recognizing his own voice:

‘‘If you would consent to be my wife, I’d give anything. I’d give anything... There’s no price, no sacrifice I wouldn’t go to.’’

She gave a start and looked at him in surprise and fear.

‘‘What, what are you saying!’’ she said, turning pale. ‘‘It’s impossible, I assure you. Forgive me.’’

Then quickly, with the same rustling of her dress, she went further up and disappeared through the door.

Laptev understood what this meant, and his mood changed at once, abruptly, as if the light had suddenly gone out in his soul. Feeling the shame, the humiliation, of a man who has been scorned, who is disliked, repulsive, maybe vile, whom people flee from, he left the house.

‘‘ ‘I’d give anything,’ ’’ he mocked himself, going home in the heat and remembering the details of his proposal. ‘‘ ‘I’d give anything’—utterly merchantlike. Much need there is for your anything!’’

Everything he had just said seemed to him stupid to the point of revulsion. Why had he lied about growing up in a milieu where everybody worked without exception? Why had he spoken in an admonitory tone about a pure and joyful life? That was not intelligent, not interesting, false—false Moscow-style. But now a mood of indifference gradually set in, such as criminals lapse into after a harsh sentence, and he thought that, thank God, everything was now past, and there was not that terrible unknowing, there was no need to spend whole days waiting, languishing, thinking about one and the same thing; now everything was clear; he had to abandon any hope of personal happiness, to live without desires, without hopes, not to dream, not to wait, but so that there would not be this boredom he was so sick of nursing, he could be occupied with other people’s affairs, other people’s happiness, and then old age would set in imperceptibly, life would come to an end—and nothing would be needed anymore. It already made no difference to him, he did not want anything and could reason coldly, but there was some heaviness in his face, especially under his eyes, his forehead was taut as rubber—tears were ready to burst out. Feeling weak all over, he went to bed and in five minutes was fast asleep.

III

THE PROPOSAL LAPTEV had made so unexpectedly brought Yulia Sergeevna to despair.

She knew Laptev only slightly and had become acquainted with him by chance; he was a rich man, a representative of the well-known Moscow firm of Fyodor Laptev and Sons, always very serious, apparently intelligent, preoccupied with his sister’s illness; it had seemed to her that he never paid any attention to her, and she herself was totally indifferent to him—and suddenly this declaration on the stairs, this pitiful, admiring face...

The proposal had confused her by its suddenness, and by the fact that the word ‘‘wife’’ had been uttered, and by the fact that she had had to answer with a refusal. She no longer remembered what she had said to Laptev, but she went on smarting from the traces of that impulsive, unpleasant feeling with which she had refused him. She did not like him; he had the look of a shopkeeper, was personally uninteresting, she could not have responded otherwise than by refusal, but all the same, she felt awkward, as if she had acted badly.

‘‘My God, without even going in, right on the stairs,’’ she said in despair, addressing the little icon that hung at the head of her bed, ‘‘and without courting me beforehand, but somehow strangely, peculiarly...’

In solitude, her anxiety grew stronger with every hour, and it was beyond her strength to deal with this painful feeling alone. She needed someone to hear her out and tell her she had done the right thing. But she had no one to talk to. She had lost her mother long ago, and she considered her father a strange person and could not talk with him seriously. He inhibited her with his caprices, his excessive touchiness and indefinite gestures; and as soon as one got into conversation with him, he would at once begin talking about himself. And during her prayers she was not fully candid, because she did not know for certain what essentially she must ask from God.

The samovar was served. Yulia Sergeevna, very pale, tired, with a helpless look, came out to the dining room, made tea—this was her duty—and poured a glass for her father. Sergei Borisych, in his long frock coat below the knees, red-faced, uncombed, his hands in his pockets, paced the dining room, not up and down, but anyhow, like a caged animal. He would stop by the table, sip some tea with appetite, and again pace and go on thinking about something.

‘‘Laptev proposed to me today,’’ said Yulia Sergeevna, and she blushed.

The doctor looked at her and seemed not to understand.

‘‘Laptev?’’ he asked. ‘‘Mrs. Panaurov’s brother?’’

He loved his daughter; it was probable that she would marry sooner or later and leave him, but he tried not to think about it. He was frightened of solitude, and for some reason, it seemed to him that if he was left alone in this big house, he would have an apoplectic stroke, but he did not like to talk about it directly.

‘‘Well, then, I’m very glad,’’ he said and shrugged. ‘‘I heartily congratulate you. Now you’re presented with a beautiful opportunity for parting with me, to your great satisfaction. I understand you very well. To live with an old father, an ailing half-wit, must be very hard at your age. I understand you perfectly. And if I dropped dead the sooner and got snatched up by devils, everyone would be glad. I heartily congratulate you.’’

‘‘I refused him.’’

The doctor felt easier at heart but was no longer able to stop, and went on:

‘‘I’m amazed, I’ve long been amazed, why they haven’t put me in a madhouse yet. Why am I wearing this frock coat and not a straitjacket? I still believe in truth, in the good, I’m a fool of an idealist, and in our time, isn’t that madness? And how do they respond to my truth, to my honest attitude? They all but throw stones at me and ride on me. And even my close relations only try to ride on my neck, devil take me, old blockhead that I am...’

‘‘It’s impossible to have a human conversation with you!’’ said Yulia.

She got up from the table impulsively and went to her room in great wrath, remembering how often her father had been unfair to her. But a little later, she felt sorry for her father, and when he left for the club, she went downstairs to see him off and locked the door behind him herself. The weather outside was foul, restless; the door trembled from the gusts of wind, and in the front hall, there were drafts from all sides, so that the candle was nearly blown out. Upstairs Yulia went around all the rooms and made crosses at all the windows and doors; the wind howled, and it seemed as though someone was walking on the roof. It had never been so dismal, and she had never felt so alone.

She asked herself: had she acted well in refusing a man only because she did not like his looks? True, this was a man she did not love, and to marry him would mean saying good-bye forever to her dreams, her notions of happiness and married life, but would she ever meet the man she was dreaming of and fall in love with him? She was already twenty-one years old. There were no suitors in town. She pictured to herself all the men she knew—officials, teachers, officers—and some were already married, and their family life struck her as empty and boring, and the others were uninteresting, colorless, unintelligent, immoral. Laptev, whatever else he was, was a Muscovite, he had finished the university, he spoke French; he lived in the capital, where there were many intelligent, noble, remarkable people, where there was noise, splendid theaters, musical evenings, excellent dressmakers, confectioners... It was said in the Holy Scriptures that a wife should love her husband, and in novels love was given enormous significance, but was there not some exaggeration in that? Was family life really impossible without love? Yet they say love soon passes and only habit remains, and that the very goal of family life lies not in love, not in happiness, but in responsibilities, for instance, in bringing up children, taking care of the household, and so on. And the Holy Scriptures may have in mind love for one’s husband as for a neighbor, respect for him, tolerance.

That night Yulia Sergeevna attentively read the evening prayers, then knelt and, pressing her hands to her breast, looking at the light of the icon lamp, said with feeling:

‘‘Grant me wisdom, Mother of God! Grant me wisdom, Lord!’’

During her life she had happened to meet old maids, poor and insignificant, who bitterly repented and expressed regret that they had once rejected their suitors. Might not the same thing happen to her? Should she not go to a convent or become a sister of mercy?

She undressed and went to bed, crossing herself and crossing the air around her. Suddenly the bell in the corridor rang sharply and plaintively.

‘‘Ah, my God!’’ she said, feeling a painful irritation all over her body from the ringing. She lay and went on thinking how poor in events this provincial life was, how monotonous and at the same time restless. One kept shuddering, being apprehensive of something, feeling angry or guilty, and in the end one’s nerves became upset to such a degree that it was frightening to peek out from under the blanket.

Half an hour later, the bell rang again, as sharply as the first time. It must be that the maid was asleep and did not hear it. Yulia Sergeevna lighted a candle and, trembling, vexed with the maid, began to dress, and when, having dressed, she went out to the corridor, the maid was already locking the door downstairs.

‘‘I thought it was the master, but it was someone sent from a patient,’’ she said.

Yulia Sergeevna went back to her room. She took a pack of cards from the chest of drawers and decided that if she shuffled the cards well and then cut them, and if the card on the bottom was red, it would mean yes, that is, she ought to accept Laptev’s proposal, but if it was black, it meant no. The card was the ten of spades.

That set her at ease, she fell asleep, but in the morning it was again neither yes nor no, and she thought that if she wished, she could now change her life. The thinking wearied her, she languished and felt ill, but all the same, shortly after eleven o’clock, she got dressed and went to visit Nina Fyodorovna. She wanted to see Laptev: maybe now he would seem better to her; maybe she had been mistaken all the while...

It was hard for her to walk against the wind; she inched along, holding her hat with both hands, and could see nothing because of the dust.

IV

GOING INTO HIS sister’s room and unexpectedly seeing Yulia Sergeevna, Laptev again experienced the humiliating condition of a man who inspires revulsion. He concluded that if, after what had happened yesterday, she could so easily visit his sister and meet him, it meant she did not notice him, or considered him a total nonentity. But when he greeted her, she, pale, with dust under her eyes, looked at him sadly and guiltily; he realized that she, too, was suffering.

She was unwell. She stayed a very short time, about ten minutes, and began saying good-bye. And, going out, she said to Laptev:

‘‘See me home, Alexei Fyodorych.’’

They walked down the street in silence, holding their hats, and he, walking behind, tried to shield her from the wind. In the lane, it was quieter, and here they walked side by side.

‘‘If I was unfeeling yesterday, forgive me,’’ she began, and her voice trembled as if she was about to cry. ‘‘This is so tormenting! I didn’t sleep all night.’’

‘‘And I slept splendidly all night,’’ Laptev said without looking at her, ‘‘but that doesn’t mean I’m well. My life is broken, I’m deeply unhappy, and after your refusal yesterday, I walk around as if I’ve been poisoned. The hardest part was said yesterday, today I feel no constraint with you and can speak directly. I love you more than my sister, more than my late mother... I can and have lived without my sister and my mother, but to live without you—it’s senseless for me, I can’t...’

And now, as usual, he guessed her intention. It was clear to him that she wanted to continue yesterday’s talk and had asked him to accompany her only for that, and now she was leading him to her home. But what more could she add to her refusal? What new thing had she thought up? By everything, by her glances, by her smile, and even by the way she held her head and shoulders as she walked beside him, he could see that she still did not love him, that he was a stranger to her. What more did she want to say?

Dr. Sergei Borisych was at home.

‘‘Welcome, Fyodor Alexeich, very glad to see you,’’ he said, confusing his name and patronymic. ‘‘Very, very glad.’’

Before, he had not been so cordial, and Laptev concluded that the doctor already knew about his proposal; and he did not like that. He was now sitting in the drawing room, and this room made a strange impression, with its poor bourgeois furnishings, its bad paintings, and though there were armchairs in it and an enormous lamp with a lamp shade, it still resembled an uninhabited space, a roomy barn, and it was obvious that only such a man as the doctor could feel at home there; the other room, nearly twice bigger, was called the reception hall, and here there were only straight chairs, as in a dancing school. And Laptev, as he sat in the drawing room and talked with the doctor about his sister, began to be tormented by a certain suspicion. What if Yulia Sergeevna had visited his sister, Nina, and then brought him here in order to announce to him that she accepted his proposal? Oh, how terrible that would be, but most terrible of all was that his soul was accessible to such suspicions. He pictured to himself how yesterday evening and night the father and daughter had discussed it for a long time, maybe argued for a long time, and then come to an agreement that Yulia had acted light-mindedly in refusing a rich man. Even the words parents speak on such occasions rang in his ears:

‘‘True, you don’t love him, but then think how much good you can do!’’

The doctor was about to go on his sick rounds. Laptev wanted to leave with him, but Yulia Sergeevna said:

‘‘No, please stay.’’

She was tormented, dispirited, and was now persuading herself that to refuse a decent, kind, loving man only because she did not like him, especially when this marriage would present an opportunity to change her life, her cheerless, monotonous, idle life, when youth was passing by, and there was nothing bright to look forward to in the future—to refuse under such circumstances was madness, it was a caprice and a whim, and God might even punish her for it.

Her father left. When the sound of his footsteps died away, she suddenly stopped in front of Laptev and said resolutely, turning terribly pale:

‘‘I thought for a long time yesterday, Alexei Fyodorych ... I accept your proposal.’’

He bent down and kissed her hand, she awkwardly kissed him on the head with cold lips. He felt that in this declaration of love, the main thing—her love—was missing, and there was much that was superfluous, and he wanted to shout, to run away, to leave at once for Moscow, but she was standing close by, she seemed so beautiful to him, and passion suddenly overcame him, he realized that it was now too late to reason, he embraced her passionately, pressed her to his breast, and, murmuring something, calling her dear , kissed her on the neck, then on the cheek, on the head...

She stepped away to the window, fearing these caresses, and both of them already regretted this declaration and were asking themselves in embarrassment:

‘‘Why has this happened?’’

‘‘If you only knew how unhappy I am!’’ she said, pressing her hands together.

‘‘What’s wrong?’’ he asked, going up to her and also pressing his hands together. ‘‘My dear, for God’s sake, tell me, what is it? But only the truth, I beg you, only the truth!’’

‘‘Don’t pay any attention,’’ she said and smiled forcedly. ‘‘I promise you, I will be a faithful, devoted wife... Come tonight.’’

Sitting with his sister later and reading a historical novel, he remembered all that, and felt bad that his magnificent, pure, broad feeling had met such a puny response; he was not loved, but his proposal had been accepted, probably only because he was rich; that is, the preference was given to that which he valued least in himself. It might be allowed that Yulia, pure and believing in God, had not thought once about money, but she did not love him, did not love him, and obviously had some calculation, though maybe not fully conscious, vague, but a calculation all the same. The doctor’s house was repulsive to him with its bourgeois furnishings, the doctor himself seemed to him like a fat, pathetic niggard, some sort of operetta Gaspard from The Bells of Corneville,⁶ the very name of Yulia now sounded vulgar. He imagined how he and his Yulia would go to the altar together, essentially complete strangers to each other, without a drop of feeling on her part, as if they had been betrothed by a matchmaker, and there was now only one consolation left him, as banal as this marriage itself, the consolation that he was not the first nor the last, that thousands of people marry that way, and that with time Yulia would get to know him better and might come to love him.

‘‘Romeo and Yulia!’’ he said, closing the book and laughing. ‘‘I’m Romeo, Nina. You can congratulate me, I proposed today to Yulia Belavin.’’

Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but then believed him and wept. The news did not please her.

‘‘Well, then I congratulate you,’’ she said. ‘‘But why is it so sudden?’’

‘‘No, it’s not sudden. It’s been going on since March, only you didn’t notice anything... I fell in love back in March, when I made her acquaintance here in your room.’’

‘‘And I thought you’d marry one of our Moscow girls,’’ Nina Fyodorovna said after a pause. ‘‘The girls from our circle would be simpler. But the chief thing, Alyosha, is that you should be happy, that’s the chiefest thing. My Grigory Nikolaich didn’t love me, and there’s no concealing it, you see how we live. Of course, any woman could love you for your kindness and intelligence, but Yulechka is a boarding-school girl and a gentlewoman, for her intelligence and kindness aren’t enough. She’s young, and you, Alyosha, are no longer young, nor are you handsome.’’

To soften these last words, she stroked his cheek and said:

‘‘You’re not handsome, but you’re a sweetheart.’’

She became all excited, so that a slight blush even came to her cheeks, and she spoke with enthusiasm about whether it would be fitting for her to bless Alyosha with an icon; for she was his older sister and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to persuade her mournful brother that the wedding had to be celebrated in the proper way, festively and merrily, so that people would not condemn them.

After that, he began to visit the Belavins as a fiancé, three or four times a day, and no longer had time to take turns with Sasha reading historical novels. Yulia received him in her own two rooms, far from the drawing room and her father’s study, and he liked them very much. Here the walls were dark, and in the corner stood a stand with icons; there was a smell of good perfume and icon-lamp oil. She lived in the farthest rooms, her bed and dressing table were partitioned off by a screen, and the doors of the bookcase were covered from inside with green curtains, and she walked about on rugs, so that her footsteps were not heard at all— and from that he concluded that she had a secretive character and liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded life. At home she was still in the position of a minor, she had no money of her own, and it happened during walks that she would be embarrassed not to have a kopeck with her. Her father gave her small amounts for clothing and books, no more than a hundred roubles a year. And the doctor himself had hardly any money, even despite a very good practice. He played cards at the club every evening and always lost. Besides that, he bought houses from the mutual credit society with transfer of mortgage and rented them out; the tenants did not pay regularly, but he insisted that these operations with houses were very profitable. He mortgaged his own house, in which he lived with his daughter, and with the money bought a vacant lot and began to build a large two-story house on it, in order to mortgage it.

Laptev now lived in a sort of fog, as though it was not he but his double, and he did many things he would not have ventured to do before. Three times or so he went with the doctor to the club, had supper with him, and offered him money for building; he even visited Panaurov at his other apartment. It happened once that Panaurov invited him for dinner at his place, and Laptev unthinkingly accepted. He was met by a lady of about thirty-five, tall and lean, with slightly graying hair and black eyebrows, apparently not a Russian. There were white blotches of powder on her face; she smiled mawkishly and shook his hand with such zeal that the bracelets jingled on her white arms. It seemed to Laptev that she smiled like that because she wanted to conceal from herself and others that she was unhappy. He also saw two girls, aged five and three, who resembled Sasha. At dinner they were served milk soup, cold veal with carrots, and chocolate—it was sweetish and untasty, but to make up for it, there were gleaming gilt forks on the table, flacons of soy sauce and cayenne pepper, an extraordinarily fanciful cruet stand, a gilt pepper pot.

Only after he finished the milk soup did Laptev realize how inappropriate it actually was for him to have come there for dinner. The lady was embarrassed, smiled all the time, showing her teeth; Panaurov explained scientifically what falling in love was and why it happened.

‘‘We have to do here with one of the phenomena of electricity,’’ he said in French, addressing the lady. ‘‘In every person’s skin sit microscopic iron strips which contain currents. If you meet an individual whose currents are parallel to your own, there’s love for you.’’

When Laptev returned home and his sister asked where he had been, he felt awkward and did not answer.

All the while before the wedding, he felt himself in a false position. His love grew stronger every day, and Yulia appeared poetic and sublime to him, but all the same there was no mutual love, and the fact of the matter was that he was buying and she was selling herself. Sometimes, as he brooded, he was simply brought to despair and asked himself whether he should not run away. He now spent whole nights without sleeping and kept wondering how, in Moscow after the wedding, he would meet the lady whom he referred to, in his letters to friends, as the ‘‘individual,’’ and how his father and brother, difficult people, would regard his marriage and Yulia. He was afraid his father would say something rude to Yulia at their first meeting. As for his brother Fyodor, something strange had been happening to him lately. In his long letters, he wrote about the importance of health, about the influence of illness on one’s mental state, about what religion is, but not a word about Moscow and business. These letters annoyed Laptev, and it seemed to him that his brother’s character was changing for the worse.

The wedding took place in September. They were married in the Peter-and-Paul church, after the liturgy, and the newlyweds left for Moscow the same day. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a train—no longer a girl, by the look of it, but a real lady—were taking leave of Nina Fyodorovna, the sick woman’s whole face went awry, but not a single tear came from her dry eyes. She said:

‘‘If, God forbid, I should die, take my girls to live with you.’’

‘‘Oh, I promise you!’’ answered Yulia Sergeevna, and her lips and eyelids also began to twitch nervously.

‘‘I’ll come to you in October,’’ said Laptev, deeply moved. ‘‘Get well, my dear.’’

They traveled in a private compartment. Both of them felt sad and awkward. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat and pretended to doze, and he lay on the seat opposite her, troubled by various thoughts: about his father, about the ‘‘individual,’’ about whether Yulia was going to like his Moscow apartment. And, glancing at his wife, who did not love him, he thought dejectedly: ‘‘Why has this happened?’’

V

IN MOSCOW THE Laptevs ran a wholesale trade in haberdashery: fringes, tapes, braid, crocheting cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross receipts reached two million a year; what the net income was no one knew except the old man. The sons and the salesclerks estimated this income at approximately three hundred thousand, and said it would be about a hundred thousand more if the old man did not ‘‘extend himself,’’ that is, sell on credit without discernment; in the last ten years they had accumulated almost a million in hopeless promissory notes alone, and the senior salesclerk, when someone mentioned it, would wink slyly and speak words the meaning of which was not clear to everyone:

‘‘The psychological consequences of the age.’’

The chief trading operations were carried out in the city market, in premises known as the warehouse. The entrance to the warehouse was from the yard, where it was always dark, there was a smell of bast, and the hooves of dray horses clattered on the asphalt. An iron-bound door, very modest to look at, led from the yard into a room gone brown from dampness, the walls written all over with charcoal, and lighted by a narrow window with iron bars; then, on the left, to another room, slightly larger and cleaner, with a cast-iron stove and two tables, but also with a jailhouse window: this was the office, and from here a narrow stone stairway led to the second story, where the main premises were located. This was a rather large room, but owing to the perpetual darkness, the low ceiling, and the crowding of boxes, bundles, and scurrying people, it made as ill-favored an impression on a fresh person as the two below. Upstairs as well as in the office, goods lay on the shelves in heaps, stacks, and cardboard boxes, no order or beauty could be seen in the way it was organized, and if it had not been for a crimson thread, or a tassel, or a tail of fringe peeking through a hole in the paper wrapping here and there, it would have been impossible to guess at once what they traded in. And, from a glance at these crumpled paper packages and boxes, it was hard to believe that millions were made from such trifles, and that here in the warehouse, fifty people were occupied with business every day, not counting the customers.

When, at noon on the day after his arrival in Moscow, Laptev went to the warehouse, the workers, packing goods, were hammering so loudly on the crates that no one in the front room or the office heard him come in; the familiar postman came down the stairs with a packet of letters in his hand, wincing from the noise, and also did not notice him. The first to meet him upstairs was his brother, Fyodor Fyodorych, who looked so much like him that they were considered twins. This resemblance constantly reminded Laptev of his own appearance, and now, seeing before him a man of small stature, with red cheeks, thinning hair, narrow, underbred hips, looking so uninteresting and unintellectual, he asked himself: ‘‘Can I be like that?’’

‘‘I’m so glad to see you!’’ said Fyodor, kissing his brother and firmly shaking his hand. ‘‘I’ve been waiting impatiently for you every day, my dear. As soon as you wrote that you were getting married, I began to be tortured by curiosity, and I missed you as well, brother. Consider for yourself, it’s half a year since we’ve seen each other. Well, so? How are things? Nina’s bad? Very?’’

‘‘Very bad.’’

‘‘It’s God’s will,’’ sighed Fyodor. ‘‘Well, and your wife? A beauty, no doubt? I already love her, she’s my little sister. We’ll pamper her together.’’

Laptev glimpsed the broad, stooping back of his father, Fyodor Stepanych, a sight long familiar to him. The old man was sitting at the counter on a stool, talking to a customer.

‘‘Papa, God has sent us joy!’’ cried Fyodor. ‘‘Brother has come!’’

Fyodor Stepanych was tall and of an extremely sturdy build, so that, despite his eighty years and wrinkles, he still had the look of a hale, strong man. He spoke in a heavy, dense, booming bass, which issued from his broad chest as from a barrel. He shaved his beard, wore a clipped military mustache, and smoked cigars. Since he always felt hot, he wore a roomy canvas jacket at all times of the year, in the warehouse and at home. He had recently had a cataract removed, did not see well, and no longer occupied himself with business but only talked and drank tea with jam.

Laptev bent down and kissed him on the hand, then on the lips.

‘‘We haven’t seen each other for a long time, my dear sir,’’ said the old man. ‘‘A long time. So, then, congratulations on a lawful marriage are in order? Well, so be it, my congratulations.’’

And he offered his lips for a kiss. Laptev bent down and kissed him.

‘‘So, then, you’ve brought your young lady?’’ asked the old man and, without waiting for an answer, said, turning to a customer: ‘‘I hereby inform you, papa, that I am marrying such and such a girl. But as for asking the father’s blessing or advice, that’s no longer the rule. They keep their own counsel now. When I got married, I was over forty, but I lay at my father’s feet and asked for advice. Nowadays it’s no longer done.’’

The old man was glad to see his son but considered it improper to be affectionate with him and in any way show his joy. His voice, his manner of speaking, and the ‘‘young lady’’ cast over Laptev that bad mood he experienced each time in the warehouse. Here every trifle reminded him of the past, when he was whipped and kept on lenten fare; he knew that now, too, boys were whipped and given bloody noses, and that when they grew up, they themselves would do the beating. And it was enough to spend five minutes in the warehouse for him to begin to fancy that he was about to be yelled at or punched in the nose.

Fyodor patted the customer on the shoulder and said to his brother:

‘‘Here, Alyosha, I’d like to introduce you to our Tambov benefactor, Grigory Timofeich. He can serve as an example to contemporary youth: he’s past fifty, yet he has nursing babies.’’

The salesclerks laughed, and the customer, a skinny old man with a pale face, also laughed.

‘‘Nature exceeding its usual activity,’’ observed the senior salesclerk, who was standing behind the counter. ‘‘Where it goes in is where it comes out.’’

The senior salesclerk, a tall man of about fifty, with a dark beard, spectacles, and a pencil behind his ear, usually expressed his thoughts vaguely, in remote hints, and accompanied his words with a sly smile, showing that he had put some especially subtle meaning into them. He liked to obscure his speech with bookish words, which he understood in his own way, and there were many ordinary words that he often employed in a sense other than the one they had. For instance, the word ‘‘except.’’ Whenever he expressed some thought categorically and did not want to be contradicted, he would extend his right arm and pronounce:

‘‘Except!’’

And most surprising of all was that the other salesclerks and the customers understood him perfectly well. His name was Ivan Vassilyich Pochatkin, and he was from Kashira. Now, congratulating Laptev, he expressed himself thus:

‘‘On your side the merit of courage, for a woman’s heart is Shamil.’’ ⁷

Another important person in the warehouse was the salesclerk Makeichev, a stout, staid blond man with side-whiskers and a completely bald pate. He came up to Laptev and congratulated him respectfully, in a low voice:

‘‘My respects, sir... The Lord has heard the prayers of your parent, sir. Thank God, sir.’’

Then the other salesclerks began to come up to him and congratulate him on his lawful marriage. They were all fashionably dressed and had the look of quite respectable, well-bred people. They stressed their O’s, pronounced their Gh’s like the hard Latin G, and because their every third word was sir, their congratulations, pronounced in a quick patter— for instance, the phrase: ‘‘I wish you, sir, all the best, sir’’— sounded as if someone was lashing the air with a whip: ‘‘Whis-s-s-s.’’

Laptev soon became bored with it all and wanted to go home, but it was awkward to leave. Out of propriety, he had to spend at least two hours in the warehouse. He stepped away from the counter and began asking Makeichev if the summer had gone well and whether there was any news, and the man answered deferentially without looking him in the eye. A boy, crop-headed, in a gray smock, handed Laptev a glass of tea without a saucer; a little later another boy, passing by, stumbled against a crate and almost fell, and the staid Makeichev suddenly made a terrible, wicked face, a fiendish face, and shouted at him:

‘‘Watch your feet!’’

The salesclerks were glad that the young master had married and finally come back, they looked at him affably and with curiosity, and each of them, in passing, considered it his duty respectfully to say something pleasant to him. But Laptev was convinced that it was all insincere and that they flattered him because they were afraid. He could never forget how, fifteen years ago, one salesclerk, becoming mentally ill, ran outside barefoot in nothing but his underwear and, shaking his fist at the masters’ windows, shouted that they were torturing him; and when the poor man recovered later, they laughed at him for a long time and reminded him of how he had shouted ‘‘Plantators!’’ instead of ‘‘Exploiters.’’ In general, the Laptevs’ employees had a bad life, and the whole market had long been talking about it. Worst of all was that old Fyodor Stepanych held to some sort of Asiatic policy in regard to them. Thus, no one knew what salary his favorites, Pochatkin and Makeichev, received; they received three thousand a year including bonuses, not more, but he pretended that he paid them seven; bonuses were given annually to all the salesclerks, but in secret, so that, out of vanity, someone who received little would have to say he had received a lot; no boy ever knew when he would be promoted to salesclerk; no employee knew whether the master was pleased with him or not. Nothing was directly forbidden, and therefore, the salesclerks did not know what was allowed and what was not. It was not forbidden to marry, but they did not marry, for fear of displeasing the master and losing their jobs. They were allowed to have acquaintances and pay visits, but the gates were locked at nine o’clock in the evening, and every morning the master looked all the employees over suspiciously and tested whether any of them smelled of vodka: ‘‘Go on, breathe!’’

On every feast day, the employees were obliged to attend the early liturgy and stand in church so that the master could see them all. Fasts were strictly observed. On festive days, for instance, the name day of the master or one of his family members, the salesclerks had to take up a collection and offer him a cake from Fley’s or an album. They lived on the ground floor of the house on Pyatnitskaya or in the wing, three to four men to a room, and at dinner they all ate from the same bowl, though each of them had a plate in front of him. If one of the masters came in during dinner, they all stood up.

Laptev was aware that only those among them who had been corrupted by the old man’s tutelage could seriously consider him a benefactor; the rest saw in him an enemy and a ‘‘plantator.’’ Now, after six months’ absence, he did not see any changes for the better; there was even something new that boded no good. His brother Fyodor, who used to be quiet, pensive, and extremely tactful, now ran about the warehouse with the look of a very occupied and businesslike man, with a pencil behind his ear, patting customers on the shoulder, and shouting ‘‘Friends!’’ to the salesclerks. Apparently he was playing some sort of role, and Alexei did not recognize him in this new role.

The old man’s voice boomed incessantly. Being unoccupied, the old man was instructing the customer on how he ought to live and conduct his affairs, and kept setting himself up as an example. This boasting, this authoritative, overbearing tone, Laptev had heard ten and fifteen and twenty years ago. The old man adored himself; to listen to him, he had made the happiness of his late wife and her family, provided for his children, showered his salesclerks and employees with benefactions, and had the whole street and all his acquaintances eternally praying to God for him; whatever he did was all very good, and if things were not going well for people, it was only because they did not want to take his advice; without his advice, nothing could succeed. In church he always stood in front of everyone and even made observations to the priests when, in his opinion, they were not serving correctly, and thought it was pleasing to God, because God loved him.

By two o’clock everybody in the warehouse had gotten down to business, except the old man, who went on booming. Laptev, so as not to stand there doing nothing, took some braid from a maker and dismissed her, then heard out a customer, a merchant from Vologda, and told a salesclerk to take care of him.

‘‘T, V, A!’’ came from all sides (letters stood for prices and numbers for goods). ‘‘R, I, T!’’

Going out, Laptev said good-bye only to Fyodor.

‘‘Tomorrow I’ll come to Pyatnitskaya with my wife,’’ he said, ‘‘but I warn you that if father says just one rude word to her, I won’t stay there for a minute.’’

‘‘And you’re still the same,’’ sighed Fyodor. ‘‘Married, but unchanged. You must be indulgent to the old man, brother. So, then, tomorrow at around eleven. We’ll be waiting impatiently. Come straight from the liturgy.’’

‘‘I don’t go to the liturgy.’’

‘‘Well, it makes no difference. Above all, no later than eleven, so that we’ll have time to pray to God and have lunch together. I send greetings to my little sister and kiss her hand. I have a presentiment that I’ll come to love her,’’ Fyodor added quite sincerely. ‘‘I’m envious, brother!’’ he cried when Alexei was already going downstairs.

‘‘And why is it that he keeps cringing somehow bashfully, as if he feels naked?’’ thought Laptev, walking down Nikolskaya Street and trying to understand the change that had taken place in Fyodor. ‘‘And he’s got some kind of new language: brother, dear brother, God has sent us mercy, we’ll pray to God—just like Shchedrin’s Iudushka.’’ ⁸

VI

THE NEXT DAY, Sunday, at eleven o’clock, he was driving down Pyatnitskaya in a light one-horse carriage. He feared some sort of escapade on Fyodor Stepanych’s part and had an unpleasant feeling beforehand. Yulia Sergeevna, after spending two nights in her husband’s home, already considered her marriage a mistake, a misfortune, and if she had had to live with her husband not in Moscow but somewhere in another town, it seemed to her she could not have endured this horror. But Moscow diverted her; she liked the streets, the houses, and the churches very much, and if it had been possible to ride around Moscow in these excellent carriages, with expensive horses, to ride all day long, from morning to evening, and, while going very fast, to breathe the cool autumnal air, perhaps she would not have felt so miserable.

The driver reined in the horse near a white, recently stuccoed two-story house and began turning to the right. Here they were expected. By the gate stood a porter in a new caftan, high boots, and galoshes, and two policemen; the whole space from the middle of the street to the gate, and then through the yard to the porch, had been sprinkled with fresh sand. The porter took off his hat, the policemen saluted. Fyodor met them by the porch with a very serious face.

‘‘I am very glad to make your acquaintance, little sister,’’ he said, kissing Yulia’s hand. ‘‘You are welcome.’’

He took her under the arm and led her up the stairs, then down a corridor through a crowd of men and women. The front room was also crowded; there was a smell of incense.

‘‘I’ll introduce you to our father now,’’ Fyodor whispered amidst the solemn, sepulchral silence. ‘‘A venerable old man, a paterfamilias.’’

In a big reception room, near a table prepared for a prayer service, Fyodor Stepanych, a priest in a kamilavka,⁹ and a deacon stood in obvious expectation. The old man gave Yulia his hand and did not say a word. Everyone was silent. Yulia became embarrassed.

The priest and the deacon began to put on their vestments. A censer was brought, which showered sparks and gave off a smell of incense and charcoal. The candles were lighted. The salesclerks tiptoed into the room and stood near the wall in two rows. It was quiet; no one even coughed.

‘‘Bless, master,’’ the deacon began.

The prayer service proceeded solemnly, without any omissions, and two akathists¹⁰ were read: to Sweet Jesus and to the Most Holy Mother of God. The choir sang only by the scores and at great length. Laptev noticed how his wife became embarrassed at the beginning; while the akathists were being read, and the choir chanted the triple ‘‘Lord have mercy’’ in various tunes, he waited with inner tension for the old man to turn and make some observation, such as: ‘‘You don’t know how to cross yourself,’’ and he was vexed: why this crowd, why this whole ceremony with clergy and choir? It was too much in merchant style. But when she, together with the old man, bowed her head to be blessed by the Gospel, and then knelt on several occasions, he realized that she liked it all and calmed down.

At the end of the service, when ‘‘Many Years’’¹¹ was sung, the priest held out the cross for Alexei and the old man to kiss, but when Yulia Sergeevna approached, he covered the cross with his hand and indicated that he wanted to speak. They waved for the choir to stop singing.

‘‘The prophet Samuel,’’ began the priest, ‘‘came to Bethlehem by order of the Lord, and there the town elders asked him in trembling: ‘Comest thou peaceably, O seer?’ And the prophet said: ‘Peaceably: I am come to sacrifice unto the Lord, sanctify yourselves and rejoice with me today.’¹² Shall we, too, ask of thee, the servant of God Yulia, whether thou hast come peaceably into this house?...’

Yulia turned all red with agitation. Having finished, the priest gave her the cross to kiss and said in an altogether different tone:

‘‘Now we must get Fyodor Fyodorych married. It’s high time.’’

Again the choir sang, people stirred, it became noisy. The old man, moved, his eyes filled with tears, kissed Yulia three times, made a cross over her face, and said:

‘‘This is your house. I’m an old man, I don’t need anything.’’

The salesclerks congratulated her and said something, but the choir sang so loudly that it was impossible to hear anything. Then they had lunch and drank champagne. She sat next to the old man, and he said to her that it was not good to live separately, that they must live together, in one house, and separations and disagreements lead to ruin.

‘‘I made money, but the children only spend it,’’ he said. ‘‘Now you come and live in the same house with me and make money. I’m an old man, it’s time for me to rest.’’

Fyodor was flitting in front of Yulia’s eyes all the time, looking very much like her husband, but more fidgety and bashful; he fussed about her and often kissed her hand.

‘‘We’re simple people, little sister,’’ he kept saying, and red blotches came to his face. ‘‘We live simply, little sister, like Russians, like Christians.’’

On the way home, Laptev, very pleased that it had all gone well and that, beyond his expectations, nothing particular had happened, said to his wife:

‘‘You’re surprised that a big, broad-shouldered father has such undersized, weak-chested children as me and Fyodor. Yes, but it’s so understandable! Father married my mother when he was forty-five and she was only seventeen. She went pale and trembled in his presence. Nina was born first, born of a comparatively healthy mother, and therefore came out stronger and better than we did. Fyodor and I were conceived and born when mother was already exhausted by perpetual fear. I remember my father began teaching me, or, to put it simply, beating me, when I was not yet five years old. He whipped me with birches, boxed my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up, my first thought was: ‘Will I be whipped today?’ Fyodor and I were forbidden to play and frolic: we had to go to matins and the early liturgy, kiss the hands of priests and monks, read akathists at home. You are religious and like all that, but I’m afraid of religion, and when I pass a church, I recall my childhood and feel eerie. When I was eight years old, I went to work in the warehouse; I worked as a simple boy, and that was unhealthy, because I was beaten almost every day. Later, when I was sent to school, I studied before dinner and had to sit in that same warehouse from dinner till evening, and so it went till I was twenty-two and at the university made the acquaintance of Yartsev, who persuaded me to leave my father’s house. This Yartsev did me a lot of good. You know what,’’ Laptev said and laughed with pleasure, ‘‘let’s go now and visit Yartsev. He’s a most noble man! How touched he’ll be!’’

VII

ONE SATURDAY IN November, Anton Rubinstein¹³ conducted at the symphony. It was very crowded and hot. Laptev stood behind the columns, while his wife and Kostya Kochevoy sat way up front, in the third or fourth row. At the very beginning of the intermission, the ‘‘individual,’’ Polina Nikolaevna Rassudina, quite unexpectedly walked past him. After the wedding he had often thought anxiously about a possible encounter with her. Now, when she looked at him openly and directly, he remembered that so far he had not even managed to have a talk with her or write her at least two or three friendly lines, as if he was hiding from her; he felt ashamed and blushed. She strongly and impetuously shook his hand and asked:

‘‘Have you seen Yartsev?’’

And without waiting for a reply, she walked on rapidly, in long strides, as if someone was pushing her from behind.

She was very thin and unattractive, with a long nose, and her face was always exhausted, worn out, and it seemed a great effort for her to keep her eyes open and not fall down. She had beautiful dark eyes and an intelligent, kind, sincere expression, but her movements were angular, abrupt. It was not easy to talk with her, because she was not good at listening or talking calmly. To love her was difficult. It happened, when she was alone with Laptev, that she would laugh for a long time, covering her face with her hands and insisting that love was not the main thing in her life, mincing like a seventeen-year-old girl, and before kissing her, he had to put out all the candles. She was thirty years old. Her husband was a teacher, but she had not lived with him for a long time. She provided for herself by giving music lessons and participating in quartets.

During the Ninth Symphony, she walked past again, as if by chance, but the crowd of men who stood in a thick wall behind the columns blocked her way, and she stopped. Laptev saw on her the same velvet blouse in which she had gone to concerts last year and the year before. Her gloves were new, the fan was also new, but cheap. She loved dressing up but did not know how and was reluctant to spend money on it, and dressed badly and slovenly, so that usually, when she walked down the street in long, hurried strides on her way to a lesson, she could easily be taken for a young novice.

The public applauded and shouted encore.

‘‘You’ll spend this evening with me,’’ said Polina Nikolaevna, going up to Laptev and looking at him sternly. ‘‘We’ll leave here and go to have tea. Do you hear? I demand it. You owe me a lot and have no moral right to deny me this trifle.’’

‘‘All right, let’s go,’’ Laptev agreed.

After the symphony there were endless curtain calls. The public got up from their places and went out extremely slowly, but Laptev could not leave without telling his wife. He had to stand at the door and wait.

‘‘I’m dying for some tea,’’ Rassudina complained. ‘‘My soul is on fire.’’

‘‘We can have it here,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘Let’s go to the buffet.’’

‘‘No, I have no money to throw around at buffets. I’m not some little merchant.’’

He offered her his arm, she refused, uttering a long, tiresome phrase he had heard many times from her, namely that she did not count herself as part of the weak fair sex and had no need of gentlemen’s services.

While talking to him, she looked over the public and often greeted acquaintances; these were her classmates from the Guerrier courses¹⁴ and the conservatory, and her pupils, young men and women. She shook their hands strongly and impetuously, almost jerkily. But then she began to hunch her shoulders, as if in a fever, and to tremble, and at last said quietly, looking at Laptev in horror:

‘‘Whom have you married? Where were your eyes, you crazy man? What did you find in that stupid, worthless girl? I loved you for your intelligence, your soul, but this china doll only needs your money!’’

‘‘Let’s drop that, Polina,’’ he said in a pleading voice. ‘‘Everything you can tell me about my marriage, I’ve already told myself many times... Don’t cause me any extra pain.’’

Yulia Sergeevna appeared in a black dress and with a large diamond brooch her father-in-law had sent her after the prayer service; she was followed by her retinue: Kochevoy, two doctors of their acquaintance, an officer, and a stout young man in a student’s uniform whose last name was Kish.

‘‘Go with Kostya,’’ Laptev said to his wife. ‘‘I’ll come later.’’

Yulia nodded and walked on. Polina Nikolaevna followed her with her eyes, trembling all over and hugging herself nervously, and her look was filled with disgust, hatred, and pain.

Laptev was afraid to go with her, anticipating an unpleasant talk, harsh words, and tears, and he suggested they go and have tea in some restaurant. But she said:

‘‘No, no, let’s go to my place. Don’t you dare talk to me about restaurants.’’

She disliked going to restaurants, because restaurant air seemed poisoned to her by tobacco and men’s breath. She regarded all unknown men with a strange prejudice, considering them all debauchees capable of throwing themselves at her any moment. Besides that, tavern music irritated her to the point of giving her a headache.

Coming out of the Assembly of Nobility, they hired a cab for Ostozhenka, to Savelovsky Lane, where Rassudina lived. Laptev thought about her all the way. In fact, he did owe her a lot. He had made her acquaintance at his friend Yartsev’s, to whom she was teaching the theory of music. She loved him deeply, quite disinterestedly, and, after becoming intimate with him, went on giving lessons and working herself to exhaustion as before. Thanks to her, he began to understand and love music, which previously he had been almost indifferent to.

‘‘My kingdom for a cup of tea!’’ she said in a hollow voice, covering her mouth with her muff so as not to catch cold. ‘‘I gave five lessons today, devil take them! The pupils are such dimwits, such dullards, that I nearly died of spite. And I don’t know when this hard labor will end. I’m worn out. As soon as I save three hundred roubles, I’ll drop everything and go to the Crimea. I’ll lie on the beach and gulp down oxygen. How I love the sea, oh, how I love the sea!’’

‘‘You won’t go anywhere,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘First, you won’t save anything, and second, you’re stingy. Forgive me, I’ll repeat again: is saving these three hundred roubles kopeck by kopeck from idle people, who study music with you because they have nothing to do, really less humiliating than borrowing it from your friends?’’

‘‘I have no friends!’’ she said irritably. ‘‘And I beg you not to say foolish things. The working class, to which I belong, has one privilege: the consciousness of its incorruptibility, the right not to owe anything to little merchants and to despise them. No, sir, you won’t buy me! I’m not Yulechka!’’

Laptev did not try to pay the cabby, knowing it would provoke a whole flood of words he had heard many times before. She paid herself.

She rented a small furnished room, with board, in the apartment of a single lady. Her big Becker grand piano¹⁵ was meanwhile at Yartsev’s, on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, and she went there every day to play. There were armchairs in slip-covers in her room, a bed with a white summer coverlet, and the landlady’s flowers, some oleographs on the walls, and nothing to remind one that a woman and former student lived there. There was no dressing table, no books, not even a desk. It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she came home and left the house as soon as she got up in the morning.

The cook brought the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea and, still trembling—it was cold in the room—began to denounce the singers who had sung in the Ninth Symphony. Her eyes were closing from fatigue. She drank one glass, then another, then a third.

‘‘And so you got married,’’ she said. ‘‘But don’t worry, I won’t pine away, I’ll be able to tear you out of my heart. It’s only annoying and bitter that you’re the same trash as everybody else, that what you need in a woman is not the mind, the intellect, but the body, beauty, youth...Youth!’ she pronounced through her nose, as if imitating someone, and laughed. ‘‘Youth! You need purity, Reinheit! Reinheit!’’ she laughed loudly, throwing herself back in the armchair. ‘‘Reinheit!’’

When she finished laughing, there were tears in her eyes. ‘‘Are you happy, at least?’’ she asked.

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Does she love you?’’

‘‘No.’’

Laptev, agitated, feeling unhappy, got up and began pacing the room.

‘‘No,’’ he repeated. ‘‘If you want to know, Polina, I’m very unhappy. What to do? I did a stupid thing, there’s no putting it right now. I have to deal with it philosophically. She married without love, stupidly, maybe out of calculation, but without reasoning, and now, obviously, is aware of her mistake and suffers. I can see it. At night we sleep, but in the daytime she’s afraid to stay alone with me even for five minutes and seeks diversion, company. She’s ashamed and afraid with me.’’

‘‘And yet she takes money from you?’’

‘‘That’s stupid, Polina!’’ cried Laptev. ‘‘She takes money from me because it makes decidedly no difference to her whether she has it or not. She’s an honest, pure person. She married me simply because she wanted to get away from her father, that’s all.’’

‘‘And you’re sure she would have married you if you weren’t rich?’’ asked Rassudina.

‘‘I’m not sure of anything,’’ Laptev said in anguish. ‘‘Not of anything. For God’s sake, Polina, let’s not talk about it.’’

‘‘You love her?’’

‘‘Madly.’’

Then silence ensued. She was drinking her fourth glass of tea, and he was pacing and thinking that his wife was now most likely having dinner at the Doctors’ Club.

‘‘But can one possibly love without knowing why?’’ Rassudina asked and shrugged her shoulders. ‘‘No, it’s animal passion speaking in you! You’re intoxicated! You’re poisoned by that beautiful body, that Reinheit! Get away from me, you’re dirty! Go to her!’’

She waved her hand at him, then took his hat and flung it at him. He silently put on his fur coat and went out, but she ran to the front hall, clutched his arm convulsively near the shoulder, and burst into sobs.

‘‘Stop it, Polina! Enough!’’ he said, and could not unclench her fingers. ‘‘Calm yourself, I beg you!’’

She closed her eyes and went pale, and her long nose turned an unpleasant waxen color, like a dead person’s, and Laptev still could not unclench her fingers. She was in a swoon. He carefully lifted her up and put her on the bed, and sat beside her for about ten minutes, until she came to. Her hands were cold, her pulse weak and unsteady.

‘‘Go home,’’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘‘Go, otherwise I’ll howl again. I must get control of myself.’’

Having left her, he went not to the Doctors’ Club, where the company was expecting him, but home. All the way there, he asked himself with reproach: why had he not set up a family for himself with this woman who loved him so much and was already in fact his wife and friend? She was the only human being who was attached to him, and besides, would it not have been a gratifying, worthy task to give happiness, shelter, and peace to this intelligent, proud being who was worn out with work? Did they suit him, he kept asking himself, these pretensions to beauty, youth, to that very happiness which could not be and which, as if in punishment or mockery, had kept him for three months now in a gloomy, depressed state? The honeymoon was long over, and he, funny to say, still did not know what sort of person his wife was. She wrote long five-page letters to her boarding-school friends and her father, and she found what to write about, but with him she talked only about the weather or about it being time for dinner or supper. When she said long prayers to God before sleeping and then kissed her little crosses and icons, he looked at her and thought with hatred: ‘‘Here she is praying, but what is she praying for? What?’’ In his thoughts, he insulted her and himself, saying that when he went to bed with her and took her in his arms, he was taking what he had paid for, but it was terrible to think that; if she had been a robust, bold, sinful woman, but here she was all youth, religiosity, meekness, innocent, pure eyes... When she was his fiancée, her religiosity had touched him, but now this conventional definitiveness of views and convictions seemed to him like a screen behind which the real truth could not be seen. Everything had become tormenting in his family life. When his wife, sitting beside him in the theater, sighed or laughed sincerely, he felt bitter that she was enjoying herself alone and did not want to share her delight with him. And remarkably, she made friends with all his friends, and they all knew what kind of person she was, while he knew nothing, and only sulked and was silently jealous.

On coming home, Laptev put on his dressing gown and slippers and sat down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at home. But before half an hour went by, the bell rang in the front hall, and the muffled steps of Pyotr were heard, running to open the door. It was Yulia. She came into his study in her fur coat, her cheeks red from frost.

‘‘There’s a big fire on Presnya,’’ she said breathlessly. ‘‘The glow is enormous. I’m going there with Konstantin Ivanych.’’

‘‘Go with God!’’

The look of health, freshness, and childish fear in her eyes set Laptev at ease. He read for another half hour and went to bed.

The next day Polina Nikolaevna sent him at the warehouse two books she had once borrowed from him, all his letters, and his photographs; with it was a note consisting of only one word: ‘Basta!’

VIII

BY THE END of October, Nina Fyodorovna’s relapse was clearly marked. She quickly lost weight and changed countenance. Despite severe pains, she imagined she was getting better, and dressed each morning as if she was healthy, and then lay in bed all day dressed. And towards the end she became very talkative. She would lie on her back telling something quietly, with effort, breathing heavily. She died suddenly in the following circumstances.

It was a bright moonlit evening, outside people went sleigh-riding over the fresh snow, and the noise from outside came into the room. Nina Fyodorovna lay on her back in bed, and Sasha, who no longer had anyone to replace her, sat dozing near her bed.

‘‘I don’t remember his patronymic,’’ Nina Fyodorovna was saying softly, ‘‘but he was called Ivan, last name Kochevoy, a poor clerk. He was an awful drunkard, God rest his soul. He used to come to us, and we gave him a pound of sugar and a packet of tea every month. Well, and occasionally money, of course. Yes... Then this is what happened: our Kochevoy went on a bad binge and died, burnt up on vodka. He left a little son, a dear little boy of about seven. An orphan... We took him and hid him with the salesclerks, and he lived a whole year like that, and papa didn’t know. But when papa saw it, he only waved his hand and said nothing. When Kostya, our orphan, that is, was going on nine—and I was about to get married then—I took him to all the schools. We went here and there, and they wouldn’t accept him. He was weeping... ‘Why are you weeping, little fool?’ So I took him to Razgulai, to the Second School, and there, God grant them health, they took him... And the little boy went on foot every day from Pyatnitskaya to Razgulai, and from Razgulai to Pyatnitskaya... Alyosha paid for him... Merciful Lord, the boy began to study, grasped things well, and with good results... Now he’s a lawyer in Moscow, Alyosha’s friend, of the same high learning. We didn’t neglect our fellow man, we took him into our house, and no doubt he prays to God for us now...Yes...’

Nina Fyodorovna began speaking more and more softly, with long pauses, then, after some silence, suddenly raised herself and sat up.

‘‘But I’m not so... as if I’m unwell,’’ she said. ‘‘Lord have mercy. Ah, I can’t breathe!’’

Sasha knew her mother was soon to die; now, seeing how her face suddenly became pinched, she guessed that this was the end and was frightened.

‘‘Mama, you mustn’t!’’ she wept. ‘‘You mustn’t!’’

‘‘Run to the kitchen, have them fetch your father. I’m very unwell.’’

Sasha ran through all the rooms and called, but none of the servants was at home, only Lida was sleeping on a trunk in the dining room, dressed and without a pillow. Just as she was, without galoshes, Sasha ran out to the yard, then to the street. On a bench outside the gate, her nanny sat watching people sleigh-riding. From the river, where the skating rink was, came the sounds of military music.

‘‘Nanny, mama’s dying!’’ Sasha said, weeping. ‘‘We must fetch papa!...’

The nanny went upstairs to the bedroom and, after glancing at the sick woman, gave her a lighted wax candle to hold. Terrified, Sasha fussed and begged, herself not knowing whom, to fetch her papa, then she put on her coat and kerchief and ran outside. She knew from the servants that her father had another wife and two daughters with whom he lived on Bazarnaya Square. She ran left from the gate, crying and afraid of strangers, and soon began to sink into the snow and feel cold.

She met an empty cab but did not take it: he might drive her out of town, rob her, and abandon her by the cemetery (the maid had told her over tea that there had been such a case). She walked and walked, breathless from fatigue and sobbing. Coming to Bazarnaya, she asked where Mr. Panaurov lived. Some unknown woman explained it to her at length and, seeing that she understood nothing, took her by the hand to a one-story house with a porch. The door was not locked. Sasha ran through the front hall, then a corridor, and finally found herself in a bright, warm room where her father was sitting by the samovar, and with him a lady and two little girls. But she could no longer utter a word and only sobbed. Panaurov understood.

‘‘Mama’s probably not well?’’ he asked. ‘‘Tell me, girl: is mama unwell?’’

He became worried and sent for a cab.

When they reached home, Nina Fyodorovna was sitting, propped on pillows, with a candle in her hand. Her face had darkened, and her eyes were closed. In the bedroom, crowded by the doorway, stood the nanny, the cook, the maid, the muzhik Prokofy, and some other unknown simple people. The nanny was ordering something in a whisper, and they did not understand her. At the far end of the room, by the window, stood Lida, pale, sleepy, sternly gazing at her mother from there.

Panaurov took the candle from Nina Fyodorovna’s hands and, wincing squeamishly, flung it onto the chest of drawers.

‘‘This is terrible!’’ he said, and his shoulders twitched. ‘‘Nina, you must lie down,’’ he said tenderly. ‘‘Lie down, dear.’’

She looked and did not recognize him... They lay her on her back.

When the priest and Dr. Sergei Borisych came, the servants were already crossing themselves piously and commemorating her.

‘‘There’s a story for you!’’ the doctor said pensively, coming out to the drawing room. ‘‘And she was still young, not even forty yet.’’

The loud sobbing of the girls was heard. Panaurov, pale, with moist eyes, went over to the doctor and said in a weak, languid voice:

‘‘My dear, do me a favor, send a telegram to Moscow. It’s decidedly beyond me.’’

The doctor found the ink and wrote the following telegram to his daughter: ‘‘Mrs. Panaurov passed away eight this evening. Tell husband: house on Dvoryanskaya for sale, transfer of mortgage plus nine. Auction twelfth. Advise not let slip.’’

IX

LAPTEV LIVED IN one of the lanes off Malaya Dmitrovka, not far from Stary Pimen. Besides the big house on the street, he also rented the two-story wing in the yard for his friend Kochevoy, an assistant attorney whom all the Laptevs simply called Kostya, because he had grown up before their eyes. Facing his wing was another, also two-story, in which there lived a French family, consisting of a husband, a wife, and five daughters.

It was ten below zero. The windows were covered with frost. Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with a preoccupied look, took fifteen drops of some medicine, then got two dumbbells from the bookcase and began doing exercises. He was tall, very thin, with a big, reddish mustache; but most conspicuous in his appearance were his remarkably long legs. Pyotr, a middle-aged muzhik in a jacket and cotton trousers tucked into high boots, brought the samovar and made tea.

‘‘Very nice weather today, Konstantin Ivanych,’’ he said.

‘‘Yes, nice, only the pity is, brother, our life here is nothing to shout about.’’

Pyotr sighed out of politeness.

‘‘How are the girls?’’ asked Kochevoy.

‘‘The priest hasn’t come, Alexei Fyodorych himself is giving them their lesson.’’

Kostya found an unfrosted spot on the window and began looking through binoculars at the windows of the French family’s house.

‘‘Can’t see,’’ he said.

Meanwhile, downstairs Alexei Fyodorych was teaching Sasha and Lida their catechism. They had been living in Moscow for a month and a half, on the ground floor of the wing, with their governess. Three times a week, a teacher from the city school and a priest came. Sasha was studying the New Testament, and Lida had recently started the Old. Lida’s homework from the last time was to repeat everything before Abraham.

‘‘And so, Adam and Eve had two sons,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘Splendid. But what were their names? Try to remember!’’

Lida, stern as ever, said nothing, stared at the table, and only moved her lips; and the older Sasha looked into her face and suffered.

‘‘You know perfectly well, only don’t be nervous,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘Well, what were the names of Adam’s sons?’’

‘‘Abel and Cabel,’’ Lida whispered.

‘‘Cain and Abel,’’ Laptev corrected.

A big tear crept down Lida’s cheek and fell onto the book. Sasha also lowered her eyes and blushed, ready to weep. Laptev could not speak from pity, a lump rose in his throat; he got up from the table and lit a cigarette. Just then Kochevoy came downstairs with a newspaper in his hand. The girls stood up and curtseyed without looking at him.

‘‘For God’s sake, Kostya, work with them a little,’’ Laptev turned to him. ‘‘I’m afraid I’ll start crying myself, and I have to get to the warehouse before dinner.’’

‘‘All right.’’

Alexei Fyodorych left. Kostya, with a very serious face, frowning, sat down at the table and drew the Catechism towards him.

‘‘Well, missies?’’ he asked. ‘‘How far did you get?’’

‘‘She knows about the flood,’’ said Sasha.

‘‘About the flood? All right, let’s whiz through the flood. Go ahead.’’ Kostya skimmed through the brief description of the flood in the book and said: ‘‘I must point out to you that such a flood as they describe here never actually happened. And there wasn’t any Noah. Several thousand years before the birth of Christ, there was an unusual flood on earth, and it’s mentioned not only in the Jewish Bible but in the books of other ancient people as well, such as the Greeks, the Chaldeans, the Hindus. But whatever this flood was, it couldn’t have covered the whole earth. Well, the plains were flooded, but not the mountains. You can go ahead and read this book, but don’t believe it especially.’’

Lida’s tears flowed again; she turned away and suddenly sobbed so loudly that Kostya gave a start and got up from his place in great confusion.

‘‘I want to go home,’’ she said. ‘‘To papa and nanny.’’

Sasha also began to cry. Kostya went upstairs to his rooms and said to Yulia Sergeevna on the telephone:

‘‘Dearest, the girls are crying again. It’s simply impossible.’’

Yulia Sergeevna came running from the big house in nothing but a dress and a knitted shawl, chilled through, and began comforting the girls.

‘‘Believe me, believe me,’’ she said in a pleading voice, pressing one of the girls to her, then the other, ‘‘your papa will come today, he sent a telegram. You’re sorry for your mama, and I’m sorry for her, too, it breaks my heart, but what’s to be done? We can’t go against God!’’

When they stopped crying, she wrapped them up and took them for a drive. First they went down Malaya Dmitrovka, then past Strastnoy Boulevard to Tverskaya; they stopped at the Iverskaya Chapel,¹⁶ lit candles, knelt down, and prayed. On the way back, they stopped at Filippov’s and bought some lenten rolls with poppyseed.

The Laptevs dined between two and three. Pyotr served the courses. During the day this Pyotr ran to the post office, to the warehouse, to the district court for Kostya, served; in the evenings he rolled cigarettes, during the night he ran to open the door, and by five o’clock in the morning was already stoking the stoves, and nobody knew when he slept. He very much enjoyed uncorking seltzer water, and did it easily, noiselessly, without spilling a drop.

‘‘God bless!’’ said Kostya, drinking a glass of vodka before dinner.

At first Yulia Sergeevna did not like Kostya; his bass voice, his little phrases like ‘‘stood me a bottle,’’ ‘‘socked him in the mug,’’ ‘‘scum,’’ ‘‘portray us the samovar,’’ his habit of clinking and mumbling over the glass seemed trivial to her. But when she got to know him better, she began to feel very easy in his presence. He was frank with her, in the evenings he liked to discuss things with her in a low voice, and he even let her read the novels he wrote, something that so far was a secret even from such friends as Laptev and Yartsev. She read these novels and praised them, so as not to upset him, and he was glad, because he hoped to become a famous writer sooner or later. In his novels he described only the country and landowners’ estates, though he had seen the country very rarely, only when visiting his acquaintances in their dachas, and had been on a landowner’s estate once in his life, when he went to Volokolamsk on a lawsuit. He avoided the amorous element, as if he was ashamed of it, he frequently described nature, and in his descriptions liked to use such expressions as ‘‘the whimsical contours of the mountains,’’ ‘‘the fantastic shapes of the clouds,’’ or ‘‘the accord of mysterious harmonies’...His novels were never published, and he explained that by the conditions of censorship.

He liked his activity as a lawyer, but even so, he considered these novels and not the legal profession his chief occupation. It seemed to him that he had a subtle, artistic constitution, and he had always been drawn to the arts. He did not sing or play any instrument himself, and was totally without a musical ear, but he attended all the symphonic and philharmonic gatherings, organized concerts for charitable purposes, met with singers...

During dinner they talked.

‘‘An amazing thing,’’ said Laptev, ‘‘again my Fyodor has nonplussed me! He says we must find out when is the hundredth anniversary of our firm, so as to petition for nobility, and he says it in the most serious way. What’s happened to him? Frankly speaking, I’m beginning to worry.’’

They talked about Fyodor, about the fact that it was now the fashion to affect something or other. Fyodor, for instance, tried to look like a simple merchant, though he was no longer a merchant, and when a teacher from the school where old Laptev was a trustee came to him for his salary, he even changed his voice and gait and behaved like the teacher’s superior.

After dinner there was nothing to do, so they went to the study. They talked about the decadents, about The Maid of Orleans, and Kostya recited a whole monologue; it seemed to him that he had done a very successful imitation of Ermolova.¹⁷ Then they sat down to play vint. The girls did not go to their wing but, pale and sad, sat both in one armchair, listening to the noise in the street: was it their father coming? In the evening, in the dark and with candles, they felt anguish. The conversation over cards, Pyotr’s footsteps, the crackling in the fireplace irritated them, and they did not want to look at the fire; in the evening they no longer even wanted to cry but felt eerie and heavyhearted. And they could not understand how it was possible to talk about something and laugh, when their mama was dead.

‘‘What did you see today through the binoculars?’’ Yulia Sergeevna asked Kostya.

‘‘Nothing today, but yesterday the old Frenchman himself took a bath.’’

At seven o’clock Yulia Sergeevna and Kostya went to the Maly Theater. Laptev stayed with the girls.

‘‘It’s time your papa came,’’ he kept saying, glancing at the clock. ‘‘The train must be late.’’

The girls sat silently in the armchair, huddled together like little animals in the cold, and he kept pacing the rooms, looking with impatience at his watch. The house was quiet. Then, towards nine o’clock, someone rang the bell. Pyotr went to open the door.

Hearing the familiar voice, the girls cried out, sobbed, and rushed to the front hall. Panaurov was wearing a luxurious fur coat, and his beard and mustache were white with hoarfrost.

‘‘One moment, one moment,’’ he muttered, but Sasha and Lida, sobbing and laughing, kissed his cold hands, his hat, his coat. Handsome, languid, pampered by love, he unhurriedly caressed the girls, then went into the study and said, rubbing his hands:

‘‘But I won’t stay with you long, my friends. Tomorrow I’m off to Petersburg. I’ve been promised a transfer to another town.’’

He stayed at the Dresden.

X

YARTSEV, IVAN GAVRILYCH, frequently visited the Laptevs. He was a healthy, robust man, black-haired, with an intelligent, pleasant face; he was considered handsome, but lately he had begun to put on weight, and that spoiled his face and figure; another thing that spoiled his looks was his close-cropped, almost shaven head. At the university, owing to his good height and strength, the students used to call him the ‘‘bouncer.’’

He took a degree in philology, along with the Laptev brothers, then studied natural science and now had a master’s degree in chemistry. He never counted on having a chair, and did not even work in any laboratory, but taught physics and natural history in a technical high school and in two girls’ schools. He was delighted with his students, especially the girls, and said that a wonderful generation was growing up. Besides chemistry, he was also occupied at home with sociology and Russian history, and his brief articles occasionally appeared in newspapers and magazines over the initial Y. When he talked about something from botany or zoology, he resembled a historian; when he discussed some historical question, he resembled a natural scientist.

Another familiar man at the Laptevs’ was Kish, nicknamed the eternal student. He had spent three years studying medicine, then had switched to mathematics and had sat through each course there twice. His father, a provincial pharmacist, sent him forty roubles a month, and his mother, in secret from his father, sent another ten, and this money was enough for his expenses and even such luxuries as an overcoat with Polish beaver, gloves, scent, and photography (he often had himself photographed and gave his portraits to acquaintances). Clean, slightly bald on top, with golden side-whiskers at his ears, modest, he had the look of a man ever ready to be of service. He always bustled about on other people’s business: ran around with a subscription list, froze by the theater box office from early in the morning to buy a ticket for a lady of his acquaintance, or went at someone’s request to order a wreath or a bouquet. All they said of him was: ‘‘Kish will go, Kish will do it, Kish will buy it.’’ For the most part, he performed his errands badly. Reproaches were showered on him, people often forgot to repay him for their purchases, but he never said anything and on embarrassing occasions only sighed. He was never especially glad or sorry, always told long and boring stories, and his witticisms provoked laughter each time only because they were not funny. Thus, one day, intending to make a joke, he said to Pyotr: ‘‘Pyotter, you’re not an otter,’’ and this provoked general laughter, and he himself laughed a long time, pleased to have made such a successful joke. Whenever some professor was buried, he walked in front with the torchbearers.

Yartsev and Kish usually came in the evening for tea. If the hosts were not going to the theater or a concert, the evening tea stretched till suppertime. On one February evening, the following conversation took place in the dining room:

‘‘A work of art is significant and useful only when its idea includes some serious social problem,’’ Kostya said, looking angrily at Yartsev. ‘‘If there is a protest against serfdom in the work, or the author takes up arms against high society with all its banality, such a work is significant and useful. While novels and stories where it’s ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah,’ and she falls in love with him but he falls out of love with her—these works, I say, are worthless, and to the devil with them.’’

‘‘I agree with you, Konstantin Ivanych,’’ said Yulia Sergeevna. ‘‘One describes a lovers’ tryst, another a betrayal, the third a meeting after the separation. Are there really no other subjects? A great many people who are sick, unhappy, worn out by poverty must find it disgusting to read all that.’’

Laptev was displeased that his wife, a young woman who was not yet twenty-two years old, should reason about love so seriously and coldly. He could guess why it was so.

‘‘If poetry doesn’t resolve the questions that seem important to you,’’ said Yartsev, ‘‘turn to works on technology, criminal and financial law, read scholarly articles. Who wants to have Romeo and Juliet talk not about love but, let’s say, about freedom of instruction or prison sanitation, if you can go to special articles and handbooks for that?’’

‘‘That’s going to extremes, uncle!’’ Kostya interrupted. ‘‘We’re not talking about giants like Shakespeare and Goethe, we’re talking about a hundred talented and mediocre writers who would be much more useful if they abandoned love and occupied themselves with bringing knowledge and humane ideas to the masses.’’

Kish, slightly nasally and rolling his R’s, began to recount the content of a short novel he had read recently. He recounted it thoroughly, unhurriedly; three minutes went by, then five, ten, and he still went on, and nobody could understand what it was all about, and his face grew more and more indifferent, and his eyes went dim.

‘‘Tell it more quickly, Kish,’’ Yulia Sergeevna could not stand it, ‘‘this is really torture!’’

‘‘Stop, Kish!’’ Kostya yelled at him.

Everybody laughed, including Kish.

Fyodor arrived. Red spots on his face, hurrying, he gave his greetings and led his brother to the study. Lately he had avoided gatherings of many people and preferred the company of a single person.

‘‘Let the young people laugh in there, but here you and I can have a heart-to-heart talk,’’ he said, sitting down in a deep chair away from the lamp. ‘‘We haven’t seen each other for a long time, brother. When was the last time you came to the warehouse? Must be a week ago.’’

‘‘Yes. I have nothing to do there. And, I confess, I’m sick of the old man.’’

‘‘Of course, they can do without us at the warehouse, but one must have some sort of occupation. In the sweat of your brow you shall eat your bread, as they say.¹⁸ God loves labor.’’

Pyotr brought a glass of tea on a tray. Fyodor drank it without sugar and asked for more. He was a great tea drinker and could drink ten glasses in an evening.

‘‘You know what, brother?’’ he said, getting up and going over to his brother. ‘‘Clever sophistries aside, why don’t you get yourself elected representative, and by easy stages we’ll make you a member of the board, and then associate head. The further the better; you’re an intelligent, educated man, you’ll be noticed and invited to Petersburg—zemstvo and city council activists are in fashion there, brother, and lo and behold, you won’t be fifty yet, and you’ll already be a privy councillor with a ribbon over your shoulder.’’

Laptev did not reply. He realized that all this—the privy councillor and the ribbon—was what Fyodor himself wanted, and he did not know how to reply.

The brothers sat and said nothing. Fyodor opened his watch and looked into it for a long, long time with strained attention, as if he wanted to observe the movement of the hands, and Laptev found the expression on his face strange.

Supper was served. Laptev went to the dining room, but Fyodor remained in the study. The argument was over, and Yartsev was saying in the tone of a professor reading a lecture:

‘‘Owing to differences of climate, energy, taste, and age, equality among people is physically impossible. But a cultured man can make this inequality harmless, as has already been done with swamps and bears. One scientist did succeed in having a cat, a mouse, a buzzard, and a sparrow eat from the same plate, and education, it must be hoped, will do the same with people. Life keeps going forward, forward, culture makes enormous progress before our eyes, and obviously the time will come when, for instance, the present-day situation of factory workers will seem as absurd as serfdom seems to us, when girls were traded for dogs.’’

‘‘That won’t be soon, it won’t be very soon,’’ Kostya said and grinned, ‘‘it won’t be very soon that Rothschild thinks his cellars of gold are absurd, and until then, the worker can slave away and be swollen with hunger. No, uncle. We mustn’t wait, we must fight. If a cat eats from the same plate as a mouse, do you think it’s conscious of it? Not at all. It was forced.’’

‘‘Fyodor and I are rich, our father is a capitalist, a millionaire, it’s with us you must fight!’’ Laptev said and rubbed his forehead with his palm. ‘‘Fighting with me—that doesn’t fit in with my thinking! I’m rich, but what has money given me so far, what has this power given me? How am I happier than you? My childhood was like hard labor, and money didn’t save me from birching. When Nina was sick and dying, my money didn’t help her. If someone doesn’t love me, I can’t force him to love me, though I spend a hundred million.’’

‘‘But you can do a lot of good,’’ said Kish.

‘‘What sort of good! Yesterday you solicited me for some mathematician who is looking for a post. Believe me, I can do as little for him as you can. I can give him money, but that’s not what he wants. Once I solicited a post for a poor violinist from a famous musician, and his answer was: ‘You have turned to me precisely because you are not a musician.’ And so I will answer you: you’ve turned to me for help with such assurance, because you’ve never once been in the position of a rich man.’’

‘‘Why this comparison with the famous musician, I don’t understand!’’ said Yulia Sergeevna, and she turned red. ‘‘What does the famous musician have to do with it!’’

Her face trembled with hatred, and she lowered her eyes to conceal this feeling. And not only her husband but everyone sitting at the table understood the expression of her face.

‘‘What does the famous musician have to do with it!’’ she repeated quietly. ‘‘Nothing is easier than helping a poor man.’’

Silence ensued. Pyotr served grouse, but no one ate it, everyone ate only salad. Laptev no longer remembered what he had said, but it was clear to him that it was not his words that were hateful but merely the fact that he had interfered in the conversation.

After supper he went to his study; tensely, with pounding heart, expecting new humiliations, he listened to what was going on in the drawing room. There again an argument started; then Yartsev sat at the piano and sang a sentimental romance. He was a jack-of-all-trades: he could sing, play, and even do magic tricks.

‘‘As you like, gentlemen, but I don’t wish to sit at home,’’ said Yulia. ‘‘We must go somewhere.’’

They decided to drive out of town and sent Kish to the Merchants’ Club for a troika. Laptev was not invited, because he usually did not go out of town, and because his brother was now with him, but the way he understood it was that his society bored them, and that in this gay young company, he was quite superfluous. And his vexation, his bitter feeling were so strong that he all but wept; he was even glad that they treated him so unkindly, that they disdained him, that he was a stupid, boring husband, a moneybags, and it seemed to him that he would be even more glad if his wife was unfaithful to him that night with his best friend and then confessed it, looking at him with hatred... He was jealous of the students they knew, the actors, the singers, Yartsev, even passersby, and he now passionately wished that she would indeed be unfaithful to him, wanted to find her with someone, then poison himself, to get rid of this nightmare once and for all. Fyodor was drinking tea and swallowing loudly. But then he, too, got ready to go.

‘‘Our old man must be losing his sight,’’ he said, putting on his coat. ‘‘He sees quite poorly.’’

Laptev also put on his coat and left. He saw his brother off to Strastnoy, took a cab, and went to the Yar.

‘‘And this is called family happiness!’’ he laughed at himself. ‘‘This is love!’’

His teeth were chattering, and he did not know whether it was jealousy or something else. At the Yar he walked among the tables, listened to a coupleteer in the big hall; he did not have a single phrase prepared in case he met his people, and was certain beforehand that if he met his wife, he would only smile pitifully and stupidly, and everyone would understand what feeling had made him come there. The electric lights, the loud music, the smell of powder, and the fact that the ladies he met stared at him, made him feel sick. He stopped by doorways, trying to see and hear what was going on in the private rooms, and it seemed to him that, along with the coupleteer and those ladies, he was playing some low, contemptible role. Then he went to the Strelna, but did not meet any of his people there, either, and it was only when he drove up to the Yar again on his way back that a troika noisily overtook him; the drunken driver was shouting, and he could hear Yartsev’s guffaw: ‘‘Ha, ha, ha!’’

Laptev came home after three. Yulia Sergeevna was already in bed. Noticing that she was not asleep, he went up to her and said sharply:

‘‘I understand your loathing, your hatred, but you might spare me in front of others, you might conceal your feelings.’’

She sat up in bed and hung her legs over the side. In the light of the icon lamp, her eyes looked big and dark.

‘‘I ask your forgiveness,’’ she said.

From agitation and the trembling of his whole body, he could no longer utter a single word but stood before her in silence. She was also trembling and sat looking like a criminal, waiting for a talking to.

‘‘How I suffer!’’ he said at last and clutched his head. ‘‘It’s like I’m in hell, I’ve lost my mind!’’

‘‘And is it easy for me?’’ she asked in a quavering voice. ‘‘God alone knows what it’s like for me.’’

‘‘You’ve been my wife for half a year now, but there’s not even a spark of love in your soul, no hope, no bright spot! Why did you marry me?’’ Laptev went on in despair. ‘‘Why? What demon pushed you into my arms? What did you hope for? What did you want?’’

She looked at him in terror, as if she was afraid he would kill her.

‘‘Was I pleasing to you? Did you love me?’’ he went on breathlessly. ‘‘No! What was it, then? What? Tell me— what?’’ he shouted. ‘‘Oh, cursed money! Cursed money!’’

‘‘No, I swear to God!’’ she cried and crossed herself; she shrank under the insult, and for the first time he heard her weep. ‘‘No, I swear to God!’’ she repeated. ‘‘I didn’t think of money, I don’t need it, I simply thought that if I refused you, it would be a bad thing to do. I was afraid to ruin your life and mine. And now I’m suffering for my mistake, suffering unbearably!’’