The Complete Short Novels

She sobbed bitterly, and he realized how painful it was for her, and not knowing what to say, he sank down on the rug before her.

‘‘Enough, enough,’’ he murmured. ‘‘I insulted you because I love you madly,’’ he suddenly kissed her foot and embraced it passionately. ‘‘At least a spark of love!’’ he murmured. ‘‘Well, lie to me! Lie! Don’t tell me it was a mistake!...’

But she went on weeping, and he felt that she tolerated his caresses only as an inevitable consequence of her mistake. And the foot he had kissed, she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for her.

She lay down and pulled the covers over her head; he undressed and also lay down. In the morning they both felt embarrassed and did not know what to talk about, and it even seemed to him that she stepped gingerly on the foot he had kissed.

Before dinner Panaurov came to say good-bye. Yulia felt an irrepressible desire to go home to her birthplace; it would be good, she thought, to rest from family life, from this embarrassment, and from the constant awareness that she had acted badly. Over dinner it was decided that she would leave with Panaurov and visit her father for two or three weeks, until she got bored.

XI

SHE AND PANAUROV traveled in a separate compartment; on his head was a visored lambskin cap of an odd shape.

‘‘No, Petersburg didn’t satisfy me,’’ he said measuredly, sighing. ‘‘They promise a lot but nothing definite. Yes, my dear. I was a justice of the peace, a permanent member, chairman of the district council, finally an adviser to the provincial board; it would seem I’ve served my fatherland and have a right to some consideration, but there you have it: I can’t get them to transfer me to another town...’

Panaurov closed his eyes and shook his head.

‘‘I’m not recognized,’’ he went on, as if falling asleep. ‘‘Of course, I’m not an administrative genius, but then I’m a decent, honest man, and in our times even that is a rare thing. I confess, I occasionally deceive women slightly, but in relation to the Russian government, I have always been a gentleman. But enough of that,’’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘‘let’s talk about you. Why did you suddenly take it into your head to go to your papa?’’

‘‘Oh, just a little disagreement with my husband,’’ said Yulia, looking at his cap.

‘‘Yes, he’s a bit odd. All the Laptevs are odd. Your husband’s all right, more or less, but his brother Fyodor is a complete fool.’’

Panaurov sighed and asked seriously:

‘‘And do you have a lover yet?’’

Yulia looked at him in astonishment and smiled.

‘‘God knows what you’re saying.’’

At a big station, after ten o’clock, they both got out and had supper. When the train rolled on again, Panaurov took off his coat and cap and sat down beside Yulia.

‘‘You’re very sweet, I must tell you,’’ he began. ‘‘Forgive me the tavern comparison, but you remind me of a freshly pickled cucumber; it still smells of the hotbed, so to speak, but already has a little salt and the scent of dill in it. You’re gradually shaping up into a magnificent woman, a wonderful, graceful woman. If this trip had taken place five years ago,’’ he sighed, ‘‘I would have felt it my pleasant duty to enter the ranks of your admirers, but now, alas, I’m an invalid.’’

He smiled sadly and at the same time graciously, and put his arm around her waist.

‘‘You’re out of your mind!’’ she said, flushing, and so frightened that her hands and feet went cold. ‘‘Stop it, Grigory Nikolaich!’’

‘‘What are you afraid of, my dear?’’ he asked gently. ‘‘What’s so terrible? You’re simply not used to it.’’

If a woman protested, for him it only meant that he had made an impression on her and she liked it. Holding Yulia by the waist, he kissed her firmly on the cheek, then on the lips, fully assured that he was affording her the greatest pleasure. Yulia recovered from her fear and embarrassment and began to laugh. He kissed her once more and said, putting on his funny cap:

‘‘That’s all the invalid can give you. One Turkish pasha, a kind old man, received as a gift, or maybe as an inheritance, an entire harem. When his beautiful young wives lined up before him, he went to them, kissed each one, and said: ‘That’s all I’m able to give you now.’ I say the same thing.’’

She found all this silly, extraordinary, and amusing. She wanted to frolic. Getting up on the seat and humming a tune, she took a box of candies from the shelf and tossed him a piece of chocolate, shouting:

‘‘Catch!’’

He caught it. She then threw him another candy with a loud laugh, then a third, and he kept catching them and putting them in his mouth, looking at her with pleading eyes, and it seemed to her that in his face, in its features and expression, there was much that was feminine and childish. And when she sat down breathless on the seat and went on looking at him laughingly, he touched her cheek with two fingers and said as if in vexation:

‘‘Naughty girl!’’

‘‘Take it,’’ she said, giving him the box. ‘‘I don’t like sweets.’’

He ate the candies to the last one and put the empty box in his suitcase. He liked boxes with pictures on them.

‘‘However, enough frolicking,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s time for the invalid to go bye-bye.’’

He took his Bokhara dressing gown and a pillow from his portmanteau, lay down, and covered himself with the gown.

‘‘Good night, my dove!’’ he said in a soft voice and sighed as if he ached all over.

And soon snoring was heard. Feeling no embarrassment, she also lay down and soon fell asleep.

The next morning, as she drove home from the station in her native town, the streets seemed to her deserted, peopleless, the snow gray, and the houses small, as if someone had flattened them out. She met a procession: a dead man was being carried in an open coffin, with church banners.

‘‘They say it’s lucky to meet a funeral,’’ she thought.

The windows of the house where Nina Fyodorovna used to live were now pasted over with white notices.

With a sinking heart, she drove into her courtyard and rang at the door. It was opened by an unfamiliar maid, fat, sleepy, in a warm quilted jacket. Going up the stairs, Yulia recalled how Laptev had made his declaration of love there, but now the stairway was unwashed, covered with stains. Upstairs, in the cold corridor, patients waited in winter coats. And for some reason, her heart pounded strongly, and she could barely walk from agitation.

The doctor, grown fatter still, red as a brick, and with disheveled hair, was having tea. Seeing his daughter, he was very glad and even became tearful; she thought that she was the only joy in this old man’s life, and, touched, she hugged him tightly and said she would stay with him for a long time, till Easter. After changing in her own room, she came out to the dining room to have tea with him; he was pacing up and down, his hands thrust in his pockets, and singing ‘‘Rooroo-roo-roo’’—meaning that he was displeased with something.

‘‘Your life in Moscow must be very merry,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m very glad for you...Me, I’m an old man, I don’t need anything. I’ll croak soon and deliver you all. And it’s just a wonder that I’ve got such a thick hide, that I’m still alive! Amazing!’’

He said he was a tough old donkey that everybody rode on. Nina Fyodorovna’s treatment had been heaped on him, the care of her children, her funeral; and this coxcomb Panaurov did not want to have anything to do with it and even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and still had not paid it back.

‘‘Take me to Moscow and put me in the madhouse there!’’ said the doctor. ‘‘I’m mad, I’m a naïve child, because I still believe in truth and justice!’’

Then he reproached her husband for lack of foresight: he had not bought a house that was up for sale so profitably. And now it seemed to Yulia that she was not the only joy in this old man’s life. While he received patients and then went to make calls, she walked around all the rooms, not knowing what to do and what to think about. She was already unaccustomed to her native town and native home; she was now drawn neither outside nor to acquaintances, and she did not feel sad, recalling her former girlfriends and her girl’s life, and did not regret the past.

In the evening she dressed smartly and went to the vigil. But there were only simple people in church, and her magnificent fur coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her as if some change had taken place in the church and in herself. Before, she had liked it when the canon was read during the vigil and the choir sang the verses, for instance, ‘‘I shall open my lips,’’ she had liked moving slowly with the crowd towards the priest standing in the middle of the church, and then feeling the holy oil on her forehead, but now she only waited for the service to be over. And, leaving the church, she was afraid the beggars might ask her for something; it would be boring to stop and search her pockets, and she no longer had copper money but only roubles.

She went to bed early but fell asleep late. Her dreams were all of some sort of portraits and of the funeral procession she had seen in the morning; they carried the open coffin with the dead man into the courtyard, stopped by the door, then for a long time swung the coffin on towels and banged it against the door as hard as they could. Yulia woke up and jumped out of bed in terror. In fact, there was a banging on the door downstairs, and the wire of the bell scraped against the wall, but no ringing was heard.

The doctor coughed. She heard the maid go downstairs, then come back up.

‘‘Madam!’’ she said, knocking on the door. ‘‘Madam!’’

‘‘What is it?’’ asked Yulia.

‘‘A telegram for you!’’

Yulia came out to her with a candle. Behind the maid stood the doctor, his coat thrown over his underwear, and also with a candle.

‘‘Our doorbell’s broken,’’ he said, yawning sleepily. ‘‘It’s long been in need of repair.’’

Yulia unsealed the telegram and read: ‘‘We drink your health. Yartsev, Kochevoy.’’

‘‘Ah, what fools!’’ she said and laughed; her soul felt light and gay.

Going back to her room, she quietly washed, dressed, then packed for a long time, till dawn, and at noon she left for Moscow.

XII

DURING HOLY WEEK the Laptevs were at the Art School for a picture exhibition. They went there as a household, Moscow fashion, taking along the two girls, the governess, and Kostya.

Laptev knew the names of all the well-known artists and never missed a single exhibition. Sometimes at his dacha in the summer, he himself painted landscapes in oils, and it seemed to him that he had considerable taste, and that if he had studied, he would perhaps have made a good artist. When abroad, he would sometimes visit antique shops, look at old things with the air of a connoisseur and utter his opinion, purchase something or other; the antiquarian would charge him whatever he liked, and afterwards the purchased thing would lie in the carriage house, nailed up in a box, until it disappeared no one knew where. Or else, stopping at a print shop, he would spend a long time attentively examining paintings, bronzes, make various observations, and suddenly buy some homemade frame or a box of trashy paper. The paintings he had at home were all of large size, but bad; the good ones were poorly hung. It happened to him more than once to pay a high price for things that later turned out to be crude fakes. And remarkably, though generally timid in life, he was extremely bold and self-assured at picture exhibitions. Why?

Yulia Sergeevna, like her husband, looked at paintings through her fist or with binoculars, and was surprised that the people in the paintings were as if alive, and the trees as if real; but she had no understanding, and it seemed to her that many of the pictures at the exhibition were alike, and that the whole aim of art lay precisely in this, that the people and objects in the pictures, when looked at through the fist, should stand out as if real.

‘‘This forest is by Shishkin,’’¹⁹ her husband explained to her. ‘‘He always paints one and the same thing... But pay attention to this: such purple snow has never existed... And this boy’s left arm is shorter than his right.’’

When everyone was tired, and Laptev went looking for Kostya so as to go home, Yulia stopped in front of a small landscape and gazed at it indifferently. In the foreground a rivulet, a wooden bridge across it, a path on the other side disappearing into the dark grass, a field, then to the right a piece of forest, a bonfire nearby: it must have been a night pasture. And in the distance, the last glow of the sunset.

Yulia imagined herelf walking across the little bridge, then down the path further and further, and it is quiet all around, drowsy corncrakes cry, the fire flickers far ahead. And for some reason, it suddenly seemed to her that she had seen those same clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and the forest, and the fields long ago and many times; she felt lonely, and she wanted to walk, walk, walk down the path; and where the sunset’s glow was, there rested the reflection of something unearthly, eternal.

‘‘How well it’s painted!’’ she said, surprised that she had suddenly understood the painting. ‘‘Look, Alyosha! Do you see how quiet it is?’’

She tried to explain why she liked this landscape so much, but neither her husband nor Kostya understood her. She kept looking at the landscape with a sad smile, and the fact that the others found nothing special in it troubled her; then she began walking around the rooms again and looking at the pictures, she wanted to understand them, and it no longer seemed to her that many pictures at the exhibition were alike. When, on returning home, she paid attention for the first time to the big painting that hung over the grand piano in the drawing room, she felt animosity towards it and said:

‘‘Who on earth wants to have such pictures!’’

And after that the gilded cornices, the Venetian mirrors with flowers, and pictures like the one that hung over the grand piano, as well as the discussions of her husband and Kostya about art, aroused in her a feeling of boredom and vexation and sometimes even hatred.

Life flowed on as usual from day to day, promising nothing special. The theater season was over, the warm time was coming. The weather remained excellent all the while. One morning the Laptevs were going to the district court to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the court to defend someone. They were delayed at home and arrived at the court when the examination of the witnesses had already begun. A reserve soldier was accused of burglary. Many of the witnesses were washerwomen; they testified that the accused often visited the woman who ran the laundry; on the eve of the Elevation, ²⁰ he came late at night and began asking for money for the hair of the dog, but no one gave him any; then he left, but came back an hour later and brought some beer and mint gingerbreads for the girls. They drank and sang songs almost till daybreak, and when they looked in the morning, the lock on the attic door was broken and laundry was missing: three men’s shirts, a skirt, and two sheets. Kostya asked each witness mockingly whether she had drunk the beer brought by the accused on the eve of the Elevation. Evidently what he was driving at was that the washerwomen had stolen from themselves. He delivered his speech without the least excitement, looking angrily at the jury.

He explained what was burglary and what was simple theft. He spoke in great detail, persuasively, displaying an extraordinary capacity for talking at length and in a serious tone about something everybody always knew. And it was hard to understand what he was actually after. From his long speech, the foreman of the jury could only come to the following conclusion: ‘‘There was burglary but no theft, because the washerwomen drank up the laundry themselves, or if there was theft, then there was no burglary.’’ But he evidently said precisely what was necessary, because his speech moved the jury and the public, and they liked it very much. When the verdict of acquittal was announced, Yulia nodded to Kostya and later firmly shook his hand.

In May the Laptevs moved to their summer house in Sokolniki. By then Yulia was pregnant.

XIII

MORE THAN A year went by. In Sokolniki, not far from the tracks of the Yaroslavl Railway, Yulia and Yartsev were sitting on the grass; a little to one side, Kochevoy lay with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky. All three had had enough of walking and were waiting for the local six o’clock train to pass before going home to have tea.

‘‘Mothers see something extraordinary in their children— that’s the way nature arranged it,’’ Yulia was saying. ‘‘A mother stands for hours by a little bed, looking at her baby’s little ears, little eyes, little nose, and admiring them. If someone else kisses her child, the poor woman thinks it gives the person great pleasure. And the mother talks about nothing but her child. I know this weakness in mothers and keep an eye on myself, but really, my Olya is extraordinary. How she gazes while she’s nursing! How she laughs! She’s only eight months old, but by God, I haven’t seen such intelligent eyes even in a three-year-old.’’

‘‘Tell us, by the way,’’ asked Yartsev, ‘‘whom do you love more: your husband or your child?’’

Yulia shrugged her shoulders.

‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve never loved my husband very much, and Olya is essentially my first love. You know, I didn’t marry Alexei for love. Before, I used to be stupid, I suffered, I kept thinking I’d ruined his life and mine, but now I see there’s no need for any love, it’s all nonsense.’’

‘‘But if it isn’t love, what feeling binds you to your husband? Why do you live with him?’’

‘‘I don’t know... Just so, out of habit, it must be. I respect him, I miss him when he’s away for long, but that—isn’t love. He’s an intelligent, honest man, and that’s enough for my happiness. He’s very kind, simple...’

‘‘Alyosha’s intelligent, Alyosha’s kind,’’ said Kostya, lazily raising his head, ‘‘but, my dear, to find out that he’s intelligent, kind, and interesting, you have to go through hell and high water with him... And what’s the use of his kindness or his intelligence? He’ll dish you up as much money as you like, that he can do, but if there’s a need for strength of character, to resist some brazenheaded boor, he gets embarrassed and loses heart. People like your gentle Alexis are wonderful people, but they’re not fit for struggle. And generally, they’re not fit for anything.’’

At last the train appeared. Perfectly pink steam poured from the smokestack and rose above the grove, and two windows in the last car suddenly flashed so brightly in the sun that it was painful to look.

‘‘Teatime!’’ said Yulia Sergeevna, getting up.

She had gained weight recently, and her gait was now ladylike, slightly lazy.

‘‘But all the same, it’s not good without love,’’ said Yartsev, walking after her. ‘‘We just keep talking and reading about love, but we love little ourselves, and that really isn’t good.’’

‘‘It’s all trifles, Ivan Gavrilych,’’ said Yulia. ‘‘That’s not where happiness lies.’’

They had tea in a little garden where mignonette, stock, and nicotiana were blooming and the early gladioli were already opening. By Yulia Sergeevna’s face, Yartsev and Kochevoy could see that she was living through a happy time of inner peace and balance, and that she needed nothing besides what was already there, and they themselves felt inwardly peaceful and well. Whatever any of them said, it all came out intelligent and to the point. The pines were beautiful, the resin smelled more wonderful than ever, and the cream was very tasty, and Sasha was a nice, intelligent girl...

After tea, Yartsev sang romances, accompanying himself on the piano, while Yulia and Kochevoy sat silently and listened, only Yulia got up from time to time and quietly went to look at the baby and at Lida, who for two days now had lain in a fever and eaten nothing.

‘‘ ‘My friend, my tender friend...’ ’ sang Yartsev. ‘‘No, ladies and gentlemen, you can put a knife in me,’’ he said and shook his head, ‘‘but I don’t understand why you’re against love! If I weren’t busy fifteen hours a day, I’d certainly fall in love.’’

Supper was served on the terrace; it was warm and still, but Yulia wrapped herself in a shawl and complained of the dampness. When it got dark, she felt out of sorts for some reason, kept shuddering, and asked her guests to stay longer; she offered them wine and had cognac served after supper to keep them from leaving. She did not want to be left alone with the children and the servants.

‘‘We dacha women are organizing a show for the children,’’ she said. ‘‘We already have everything—the space and the actors—all we need is a play. About two dozen plays have been sent to us, but not a single one of them will do. Now, you love theater and you know history well,’’ she turned to Yartsev, ‘‘so write us a history play.’’

‘‘Well, that’s possible.’’

The guests drank all the cognac and got ready to leave. It was past ten o’clock, late by dacha standards.

‘‘How dark, dark as pitch!’’ Yulia said, seeing them off to the gate. ‘‘I don’t know how you’ll make it, gentlemen. Anyhow, it’s cold!’’

She wrapped herself more tightly and went back to the porch.

‘‘And my Alexei must be playing cards somewhere!’’ she called. ‘‘Good night!’’

After the bright rooms, nothing could be seen. Yartsev and Kostya felt their way like blind men, reached the railroad tracks, and crossed them.

‘‘Can’t see a damned thing!’’ Kostya suddenly said in a bass voice, stopping and looking at the sky. ‘‘But the stars, the stars, like new coins! Gavrilych!’’

‘‘Eh?’’ Yartsev responded somewhere.

‘‘I say: can’t see a thing. Where are you!’’

Yartsev, whistling, came up to him and took his arm.

‘‘Hey, dacha people!’’ Kostya suddenly shouted at the top of his voice. ‘‘We’ve caught a socialist!’’

When tipsy, he was always very restless, shouted, picked on policemen and cabbies, sang, guffawed furiously.

‘‘Nature, devil take it!’’ he shouted.

‘‘Now, now,’’ Yartsev tried to calm him down. ‘‘Mustn’t do that. I beg you.’’

Soon the friends became accustomed to the darkness and began to make out the silhouettes of the tall pines and telephone poles. Rare whistles reached them from the Moscow stations, and the wires hummed plaintively. The grove itself made no sound, and in this silence, something proud, strong, mysterious could be felt, and now, at night, it seemed that the tops of the pines almost touched the sky. The friends found their cutting and went along it. It was quite dark here, and only by the long strip of sky spangled with stars, and the trampled ground under their feet, did they know they were going along a path. They walked side by side in silence, and both fancied there were people coming in the opposite direction. The drunken mood left them. It occurred to Yartsev that the souls of Moscow tsars, boyars, and patriarchs might be flitting about in this grove now, and he was going to say so to Kostya but restrained himself.

When they came to the city gate, there was a slight glimmer in the sky. Still silent, Yartsev and Kochevoy walked along the pavement past cheap dachas, taverns, lumber yards; under the railway arch, the dampness, pleasant, scented with lindens, chilled them, and then a long, wide street opened out, with not a soul on it, not a light... When they reached Krasny Pond, day was already breaking.

‘‘Moscow is a city that still has much suffering ahead of her,’’ Yartsev said, looking at the Alexeevsky Monastery.

‘‘How did that enter your head?’’

‘‘It just did. I love Moscow.’’

Yartsev and Kostya had both been born in Moscow and adored her, and for some reason regarded other cities with hostility; they were convinced that Moscow was a remarkable city and Russia a remarkable country. In the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and abroad, they felt bored, uncomfortable, ill at ease, and they found the gray Moscow weather most pleasant and healthy. Days when cold rain raps at the windows, and dusk falls early, and the walls of houses and churches take on a brown, mournful color, and you do not know what to put on when you go outside—such days pleasantly excited them.

Finally, near a train station, they took a cab.

‘‘In fact, it would be nice to write a history play,’’ said Yartsev, ‘‘but you know, without the Liapunovs and the Godunovs, from the times of Yaroslav or Monomakh²¹... I hate all Russian history plays, except for Pimen’s monologue.²² When you deal with some historical source, or even when you read a textbook of Russian history, it seems that everything in Russia is remarkably talented, gifted, and interesting, but when I watch a history play in the theater, Russian life begins to seem giftless, unhealthy, and unoriginal to me.’’

Near Dmitrovka, the friends parted, and Yartsev went further on to his place on Nikitskaya. He dozed, rocking in the cab, and kept thinking about the play. Suddenly he imagined an awful noise, clanging, shouts in some unknown language like Kalmyk; and some village, all caught in flames, and the neighboring forest, covered with hoarfrost and a tender pink from the fire, can be seen far around, and so clearly that each little fir tree is distinct; some wild people, on horseback and on foot, rush about the village, their horses and themselves as crimson as the glow in the sky.

‘‘It’s the Polovtsi,’’²³ thinks Yartsev.

One of them—old, frightening, with a bloody face, all scorched—is tying a young girl with a white Russian face to his saddle. The old man shouts something furiously, but the girl watches sorrowfully, intelligently... Yartsev shook his head and woke up.

‘‘ ‘My friend, my tender friend...’ ’he sang.

Paying the cabby and then going up the stairs to his place, he still could not quite recover, and saw the flames sweep on to the trees, the forest crackle and smoke; an enormous wild boar, mad with terror, rushes through the village... But the girl tied to the saddle keeps watching.

When he entered his apartment, it was already light. On the grand piano, near an open score, two candles were burning down. On the couch lay Rassudina, in a black dress with a sash, a newspaper in her hand, fast asleep. She must have played for a long time, waiting for Yartsev to come back, and fallen asleep before he came.

‘‘Eh, quite worn out!’’ he thought.

He carefully took the newspaper from her hand, covered her with a plaid, put out the candles, and went to his bedroom. Lying down, he thought about the history play, and the refrain ‘‘My friend, my tender friend...’ would not leave his head.

Two days later, Laptev stopped by for a moment to tell him that Lida had come down with diphtheria, and that Yulia Sergeevna and the baby had caught it from her, and in another five days came the news that Lida and Yulia were recovering, but the baby had died, and the Laptevs had fled from their Sokolniki dacha to the city.

XIV

IT BECAME UNPLEASANT for Laptev to stay long at home. His wife often went to the wing, telling him she had to do lessons with the girls, but he knew she went there not to give lessons but to weep at Kostya’s. The ninth day came, then the twentieth, then the fortieth,²⁴ and he had to go each time to the Alexeevskoe cemetery and listen to the memorial service, and then torment himself all day thinking only about the unfortunate baby and saying all sorts of banalities to his wife in consolation. He rarely went to the warehouse now and was occupied only with charity, thinking up various cares and chores, and he was glad when he chanced to drive around for a whole day on account of some trifle. Recently he had been preparing to go abroad, in order to acquaint himself there with the setting up of night shelters, and this thought now diverted him.

It was an autumn day. Yulia had just gone to the wing to weep, and Laptev was lying on the couch in his study, trying to think where he would go. Just then Pyotr announced that Rassudina had come. Laptev was very glad, jumped up, and went to meet the unexpected guest, his former friend, whom he had almost begun to forget. Since that evening when he had seen her for the last time, she had not changed in the least and was exactly the same.

‘‘Polina!’’ he said, reaching both hands out to her. ‘‘It’s been ages! If you knew how glad I am to see you! Come in!’’

Rassudina jerked his hand as she shook it and, without taking off her coat and hat, went into the study and sat down.

‘‘I’ve come for a minute,’’ she said. ‘‘I have no time to talk of trifles. Kindly sit down and listen. Whether you’re glad to see me or not is decidedly all one to me, since I don’t care a whit about any gracious attention to me from fine gentlemen. If I’ve come to you, it’s because I’ve already been to five places today and was refused everywhere, and yet it’s an urgent matter. Listen,’’ she went on, looking him in the eye, ‘‘five students I know, limited and muddleheaded people but unquestionably poor, haven’t made their payments and are now being expelled. Your wealth imposes on you the duty of going to the university at once and paying for them.’’

‘‘With pleasure, Polina.’’

‘‘Here are their last names,’’ said Rassudina, handing Laptev a little note. ‘‘Go this very minute, you’ll have time to enjoy family happiness afterwards.’’

Just then a rustling was heard behind the door to the drawing room: it must have been the dog scratching himself. Rassudina blushed and jumped up.

‘‘Your Dulcinea’s²⁵ eavesdropping on us!’’ she said. ‘‘That is vile!’’

Laptev felt offended for Yulia.

‘‘She’s not here, she’s in the wing,’’ he said. ‘‘And do not speak of her like that. Our baby has died, and she is in terrible grief.’’

‘‘You can reassure her,’’ Rassudina grinned, sitting down again, ‘‘there’ll be a dozen more. Who hasn’t got wits enough to make babies?’’ ²⁶

Laptev remembered hearing the same thing or something like it many times long ago, and the poetry of the past wafted over him, the freedom of solitary, unmarried life, when it seemed to him that he was young and could do whatever he liked, and when there was no love for his wife or memory of their baby.

‘‘Let’s go together,’’ he said, stretching.

When they came to the university, Rassudina stopped to wait by the gate, and Laptev went to the office; a little later, he returned and handed Rassudina five receipts.

‘‘Where to now?’’ he asked.

‘‘Yartsev’s.’’

‘‘I’ll come with you.’’

‘‘But you’ll keep him from working.’’

‘‘No, I assure you!’’ he said and looked at her imploringly.

She was wearing a black hat trimmed with crape, as if she was in mourning, and a very short, shabby coat with the pockets sticking out. Her nose seemed longer than it used to be, and her face was deathly pale, despite the cold. Laptev found it pleasing to follow her, obey her, and listen to her grumbling. He walked along and thought about her: what inner strength this woman must have if, being so unattractive, angular, restless, unable to dress properly, aways untidily combed, and always somehow ungainly, she still could charm.

They entered Yartsev’s apartment by the back door, through the kitchen, where they were met by the cook, a neat little old woman with gray curls; she got very embarrassed, smiled sweetly, which made her face resemble a piece of pastry, and said:

‘‘Please come in.’’

Yartsev was not at home. Rassudina sat at the piano and took up some dull, difficult exercises, ordering Laptev not to bother her. And he did not distract her with talk but sat to one side and leafed through The Messenger of Europe. After playing for two hours—this was her daily helping—she ate something in the kitchen and went to her lessons. Laptev read the sequel to some novel, then sat for a long time, not reading and not feeling bored, and pleased that he was late for dinner at home.

‘‘Ha, ha, ha!’’ Yartsev’s laughter rang out, and he himself came in, hale, cheerful, red-cheeked, in a new tailcoat with bright buttons. ‘‘Ha, ha, ha!’’

The friends had dinner together. Then Laptev lay down on the sofa, and Yartsev sat by him and lit a cigar. Dusk fell.

‘‘I must be getting old,’’ said Laptev. ‘‘Since my sister Nina died, for some reason I’ve begun thinking frequently of death.’’

They talked about death, about the immortality of the soul, how it would indeed be nice to resurrect and then fly off somewhere to Mars, to be eternally idle and happy, and above all, to think in some special unearthly way.

‘‘I have no wish to die,’’ Yartsev said softly. ‘‘No philosophy can reconcile me with death, and I look upon it simply as a disaster. I want to live.’’

‘‘You love life, Gavrilych?’’

‘‘Yes, I do.’’

‘‘And I can’t understand myself at all in this connection. First I’m in a gloomy mood, then I’m indifferent. I’m timid, unsure of myself, I have a cowardly conscience, I’m quite unable to adjust to life, to master it. Another man talks stupidly, or cheats, and does it so cheerfully, while it happens that I do good consciously and feel nothing but anxiety or total indifference. All this, Gavrilych, I explain by the fact that I’m a slave, the grandson of a bonded serf. Before we smutty-faced ones make it onto the real path, a lot of our kind will have to lay down their bones!’’

‘‘That’s all to the good, dear heart,’’ Yartsev said and sighed. ‘‘It only shows once again how rich and diverse Russian life is. Ah, how rich! You know, I’m more convinced every day that we’re living on the eve of the greatest triumph, and I’d like to live long enough to take part in it myself. Believe it or not, but I think a remarkable generation is now growing up. When I teach children, especially girls, it delights me. Wonderful children!’’

Yartsev went to the piano and played a chord.

‘‘I’m a chemist, I think chemically, and I’ll die a chemist,’’ he went on. ‘‘But I’m greedy, I’m afraid I’ll die unsated; chemistry alone isn’t enough for me, I snatch at Russian history, art history, pedagogy, music... Your wife told me once in the summer that I should write a history play, and now I want to write and write; it seems I could just sit for three days and nights, without getting up, and keep writing. Images wear me out, they crowd in my head, and I feel as if my brain is pulsing. I have no wish at all that something special should come from me, that I should create some great thing, I simply want to live, to dream, to hope, to keep up everywhere . . . Life, dear heart, is short, and we must live it the best we can.’’

After this friendly conversation, which ended only at midnight, Laptev began to visit Yartsev almost every day. He was drawn to him. Usually he came before evening, lay down, and waited patiently for him to come, without feeling the least boredom. Yartsev, having come home from school and eaten, would sit down to work, but Laptev would ask some question, a conversation would begin, work was set aside, and at midnight the friends would part, very pleased with each other.

But this did not last long. Once, coming to Yartsev’s, Laptev found Rassudina alone, sitting at the piano and playing her exercises. She looked him over coldly, almost hostilely, and asked, without offering him her hand:

‘‘Tell me, please, when will there be an end to this?’’

‘‘To what?’’ Laptev asked, not understanding.

‘‘You come here every day and hinder Yartsev in his work. Yartsev is not a little merchant, he’s a scholar, and every minute of his life is precious. You must understand that and have at least a little delicacy!’’

‘‘If you find that I’m hindering him,’’ Laptev said meekly, feeling confused, ‘‘I’ll discontinue my visits.’’

‘‘Splendid. Go now, or he may come and find you here.’’

The tone in which this was said, and Rassudina’s indifferent eyes, utterly confused him. She no longer had any feelings for him, except the wish that he leave quickly—and how unlike her former love that was! He left without shaking her hand, and thought she would call after him and tell him to come back, but the sounds of the exercises were heard again, and he understood, as he slowly went down the stairs, that he was now a stranger to her.

After three days or so, Yartsev came to see him and spend the evening together.

‘‘And I’ve got news,’’ he said and laughed. ‘‘Polina Nikolaevna has moved in with me for good.’’ He was slightly embarrassed and went on in a low voice: ‘‘What, then? Of course, we’re not in love with each other, but I think that . . . that makes no difference. I’m glad I can give her shelter and peace and the possibility of not working, in case she gets sick, and it seems to her that if she lives with me, there will be more order in my life, and that under her influence, I’ll become a great scholar. So she thinks. And let her think it. They have a saying in the south: ‘A fool gets rich on fancies.’ Ha, ha, ha!’’

Laptev was silent. Yartsev strolled about the study, looked at the pictures he had seen many times before, and said with a sigh:

‘‘Yes, my friend, I’m three years older than you, and it’s late for me to think about true love, and essentially a woman like Polina Nikolaevna is a find for me, and I could certainly live my life very well with her into old age, but, devil take it, I keep regretting something, keep wanting something, and imagining that I’m lying in the Vale of Dagestan and dreaming of a ball.²⁷ In short, a man is never content with what he’s got.’’

He went to the drawing room and sang romances as if nothing had happened, but Laptev sat in his study, his eyes closed, trying to understand why Rassudina had gone with Yartsev. And then he became sad that there were no firm, lasting attachments, and felt vexed that Polina Nikolaevna had gone with Yartsev, and vexed with himself that his feeling for his wife was not at all what it had been before.

XV

LAPTEV WAS SITTING in an armchair, reading and rocking; Yulia was there in the study and also reading. There seemed to be nothing to talk about, and both had been silent since morning. Now and then he glanced at her over his book and thought: whether you marry from passionate love or without any love—isn’t it all the same? And the time when he was jealous, worried, tormented now seemed far away. He had managed to travel abroad and was now resting from the trip and counting, with the coming of spring, on going to England, which he had liked very much.

And Yulia Sergeevna had grown accustomed to her grief and no longer went to the wing to weep. That winter she did not drive around shopping, did not go to theaters and concerts, but stayed at home. She did not like big rooms and was always either in her husband’s study or in her own room, where she kept the encased icons she had received as a dowry, and that landscape she had liked so much at the exhibition hung on the wall. She spent almost no money on herself and lived on as little as she had once lived on in her father’s house.

The winter passed cheerlessly. Everywhere in Moscow, they were playing cards, but if instead of that they invented some other diversion, for instance singing, reading, drawing, it came out still more boring. And because there were few talented people in Moscow, and the same singers and readers participated in all the evenings, the enjoyment of art itself gradually became habitual and, for many, turned into a boring, monotonous duty.

Besides, not a single day passed for the Laptevs without some distress. Old Fyodor Stepanych’s eyesight was now very poor, he did not go to the warehouse, and the eye doctors said he would soon be blind; Fyodor also stopped going to the warehouse for some reason and stayed at home all the time writing something. Panaurov obtained a transfer to another town, with a promotion to the rank of actual state councillor,²⁸ and now lived at the Dresden and came to Laptev almost every day to ask for money. Kish finally left the university and, while waiting for the Laptevs to find some job for him, spent whole days sitting with them, telling long, boring stories. All this was annoying and wearisome and made daily life unpleasant.

Pyotr came into the study and announced that some unknown lady had come. Written on the card he brought was: ‘‘Josephina Iosifovna Milan.’’

Yulia Sergeevna got up lazily and went out, limping slightly because her foot was asleep. A lady appeared in the doorway, thin, very pale, with dark eyebrows, dressed all in black. She clasped her hands to her breast and said pleadingly:

‘‘Monsieur Laptev, save my children!’’

The jingling of bracelets and the face with blotches of powder were familiar to Laptev: he recognized her as the same lady in whose house he had happened to dine so inappropriately sometime before his wedding. It was Panaurov’s second wife.

‘‘Save my children!’’ she repeated, and her face quivered and suddenly became old and pathetic, and her eyes reddened. ‘‘You alone can save us, and I’ve come to you in Moscow on my last money! My children will starve!’’

She made a movement as if to go on her knees. Laptev became alarmed and grasped her arms above the elbows.

‘Sit down, sit down...’ he murmured, seating her. ‘I beg you, sit down.’’

‘‘We have no money now to buy bread,’’ she said. ‘‘Grigory Nikolaich is leaving for his new post, but he does not want to take me and the children with him, and the money that you have been sending us so magnanimously, he spends only on himself. What are we to do? What? Poor, unfortunate children!’’

‘‘Calm yourself, I beg you. I’ll tell them in the office to send the money in your name.’’

She burst into sobs, then calmed down, and he noticed that the tears had made tracks on her powdered cheeks, and that she had a mustache sprouting.

‘‘You are endlessly magnanimous, Monsieur Laptev. But be our angel, our good fairy, persuade Grigory Nikolaich not to abandon me but to take me with him. I love him, love him madly, he is my joy.’’

Laptev gave her a hundred roubles and promised to talk with Panaurov and, seeing her off to the front hall, kept fearing she might burst into sobs or go down on her knees.

After her came Kish. Then came Kostya with his camera. Lately he had become interested in photography, and each day he photographed everyone in the house several times, and this new occupation caused him much distress, and he even lost weight.

Before evening tea, Fyodor came. He sat down in a corner of the study, opened a book, and stared at one page for a long time, apparently without reading it. Then for a long time he drank tea; his face was red. In his presence, Laptev felt inwardly oppressed; he even found his silence disagreeable.

‘‘You may congratulate Russia on the appearance of a new publicist,’’ said Fyodor. ‘‘However, joking aside, I’ve been delivered of a little article, brother, a trial of the pen, so to speak, and I’ve brought it to show you. Read it, dear heart, and tell me your opinion. Only frankly.’’

He took a notebook out of his pocket and handed it to his brother. The article was entitled ‘‘The Russian Soul.’’ It was written dully, in the colorless style usually employed by untalented, secretly vain people, and its main thought was this: an intelligent man has the right not to believe in the supernatural, but it is his duty to conceal this disbelief, so as not to cause temptation and shake people’s faith; without faith, there is no idealism, and idealism is predestined to save Europe and show mankind to the true path.

‘‘But you don’t write what Europe must be saved from,’’ said Laptev.

‘‘That’s self-evident.’’

‘‘Nothing is evident,’’ said Laptev, and he paced about in agitation. ‘‘It’s not evident what you wrote it for. However, that’s your affair.’’

‘‘I want to publish it as a separate brochure.’’

‘‘That’s your affair.’’

There was a moment’s silence. Fyodor sighed and said:

‘‘I’m deeply, infinitely sorry that you and I think differently. Ah, Alyosha, Alyosha, my dear brother! You and I are Russian people, broad Orthodox people; do all these little German and Jewish ideas suit us? We’re not some sort of scalawags, we represent a distinguished merchant family.’’

‘‘What sort of distinguished family?’’ Laptev said, restraining his irritation. ‘‘Distinguished family! Landowners thrashed our grandfather, and every last little official hit him in the mug. Grandfather thrashed our father, father thrashed you and me. What has this distinguished family given us? What nerves and blood have we inherited? For almost three years now you’ve been reasoning like a beadle, saying all sorts of nonsense, and here you’ve written it down—it’s boorish raving. And me? And me? Look at me... No resilience, no courage, no strength of will; I’m afraid at every step, as if I’m going to be whipped, I’m timid before nonentities, idiots, brutes who are incomparably beneath me mentally and morally; I’m afraid of caretakers, porters, policemen, gendarmes, I’m afraid of everybody, because I was born of a cowed mother, I’ve been beaten down and frightened since childhood!... You and I would do well not to have children. Oh, God grant that this distinguished merchant family ends with us!’’

Yulia Sergeevna came into the study and sat down by the desk.

‘‘You’ve been arguing about something?’’ she said. ‘‘Am I interfering?’’

‘‘No, little sister,’’ answered Fyodor, ‘‘our conversation is on principle. So you say our family is this and that,’’ he turned to his brother, ‘‘however, this family has created a million-rouble business. That’s something!’’

‘‘Big deal—a million-rouble business! A man of no special intelligence or ability happens to become a trader, then a rich man, he trades day in and day out with no system or goal, not even a lust for money, he trades mechanically, and money comes to him, not he to it. All his life he sits in his shop and loves it only because he can dominate his salesclerks and scoff at his customers. He’s a church warden because there he can dominate the choir and bend them to his will; he’s a school trustee because he likes to think the teacher is his subordinate and he can play the superior before him. The merchant doesn’t like to trade, he likes to dominate, and your warehouse is not a trading establishment but a torture chamber! Yes, for such trading as yours, you need depersonalized, deprived salesclerks, and you prepare them that way yourselves, making them bow at your feet from childhood on for a crust of bread, and from childhood on you accustom them to thinking that you’re their benefactors. No fear you’d take a university man into your warehouse!’’

‘‘University people are no use in our business.’’

‘‘Not true!’’ cried Laptev. ‘‘That’s a lie!’’

‘‘Excuse me, but it seems to me you’re fouling the well you drink from,’’ Fyodor said and got up. ‘‘Our business is hateful to you, and yet you make use of its income.’’

‘‘Aha, you’ve finally come out with it!’’ Laptev said and laughed, looking angrily at his brother. ‘‘If I didn’t belong to your distinguished family, if I had at least a pennyworth of will and courage, I’d have flung away that income long ago and gone to earn my bread. But you in your warehouse depersonalized me from childhood on! I’m yours!’’

Fyodor glanced at his watch and hastily began taking his leave. He kissed Yulia’s hand and went out, but instead of going to the front hall, he went to the drawing room, then to the bedroom.

‘‘I’ve forgotten the layout of the rooms,’’ he said in great perplexity. ‘‘A strange house, isn’t it? A strange house.’’

As he was putting on his coat, he looked as if stunned, and his face expressed pain. Laptev no longer felt angry; he was alarmed and, at the same time, sorry for Fyodor, and that warm, good love for his brother, which seemed to have been extinguished in those three years, now awakened in his breast, and he felt a strong desire to express that love.

‘‘Come for dinner tomorrow, Fedya,’’ he said and stroked his shoulder. ‘‘Will you?’’

‘‘Yes, yes. But give me some water.’’

Laptev himself ran to the dining room, took the first thing he happened upon in the sideboard—it was a tall beer mug— poured water into it, and brought it to his brother. Fyodor began drinking greedily, then suddenly bit the mug, there was a gnashing sound, then sobbing. Water poured onto his coat and frock coat. And Laptev, who had never seen a man cry before, stood confused and frightened and did not know what to do. He watched like a lost man as Yulia and the maid took Fyodor’s coat off and brought him back inside, and he walked after them, feeling himself to blame.

Yulia helped Fyodor to lie down and lowered herself onto her knees before him.

‘‘Never mind,’’ she comforted him. ‘‘It’s your nerves...’

‘‘Dear heart, it’s so hard for me!’’ he said. ‘‘I’m unhappy, unhappy...but I’ve been concealing it, concealing it all the while!’’

He put his arms around her neck and whispered in her ear:

‘‘I see my sister Nina every night. She comes and sits in the armchair by my bed...’

An hour later, as he was again putting his coat on in the front hall, he smiled and felt abashed in front of the maid. Laptev drove with him to Pyatnitskaya.

‘‘Come for dinner with us tomorrow,’’ he said on the way, holding him under the arm, ‘‘and for Easter we’ll go abroad together. You need airing out, you’ve grown quite stale as it is.’’

‘‘Yes, yes. I’ll go, I’ll go...And we’ll take little sister along.’’

When he returned home, Laptev found his wife in great nervous agitation. The incident with Fyodor had shocked her, and she was unable to calm down. She did not cry, but she was very pale, and thrashed about on her bed, and with her cold fingers tenaciously clutched hold of the blanket, the pillow, her husband’s hands. Her eyes were large, frightened.

‘‘Don’t go, don’t go,’’ she kept saying to her husband. ‘‘Tell me, Alyosha, why have I stopped praying to God? Where is my faith? Ah, why did you talk about religion in front of me? You’ve confused me, you and your friends. I don’t pray anymore.’’

He put compresses on her forehead, warmed her hands, gave her tea, and she clung to him in fear...

Towards morning she grew weary and fell asleep, with Laptev sitting beside her and holding her hand. He did not have a chance to sleep. The whole next day he felt broken, dull, thought about nothing, and wandered sluggishly through the rooms.

XVI

THE DOCTORS SAID that Fyodor had a mental illness. Laptev did not know what was going on at Pyatnitskaya, and the dark warehouse, in which neither the old man nor Fyodor appeared anymore, gave him the impression of a tomb. When his wife told him that it was necessary for him to go every day both to the warehouse and to Pyatnitskaya, he either said nothing or began talking irritably about his childhood, about his inability to forgive his father for his past, about Pyatnitskaya and the warehouse being hateful to him, and so on.

One Sunday morning Yulia herself drove to Pyatnitskaya. She found old Fyodor Stepanych in the same big room where the prayer service had been held on the occasion of her arrival. In his canvas jacket, without a tie, in slippers, he was sitting motionless in an armchair, blinking his blind eyes.

‘‘It’s me, your daughter-in-law,’’ she said, going up to him. ‘‘I’ve come to see how you are.’’

He started breathing heavily from excitement. Moved by his misfortune, by his solitude, she kissed his hand, and he felt her face and head and, as if he had assured himself that it was her, made the sign of the cross over her.

‘‘Thank you, thank you,’’ he said. ‘‘And I’ve lost my eyes and don’t see anything... I can just barely see the window, and also the fire, but not people or objects. Yes, I’m going blind, Fyodor’s fallen ill, and it’s bad now without a master’s supervision. If there’s some disorder, nobody’s answerable; people will get spoiled. And why is it Fyodor’s fallen ill? Was it a cold? I’ve never taken sick and never been treated. Never known any doctors.’’

And the old man started boasting as usual. Meanwhile, the servants were hurriedly setting the table in the big room and putting hors d’oeuvres and bottles of wine on it. They put out some ten bottles, and one of them looked like the Eiffel Tower. A dish of hot little pirozhki was served, smelling of boiled rice and fish.

‘‘My dear guest, please have a bite to eat,’’ said the old man.

She took him under the arm, led him to the table, and poured him some vodka.

‘‘I’ll come to see you tomorrow, too,’’ she said, ‘‘and bring along your two granddaughters, Sasha and Lida. They’ll feel sorry and be nice to you.’’

‘‘No need, don’t bring them. They’re illegitimate.’’

‘‘Why illegitimate? Their father and mother were married in church.’’

‘‘Without my permission. I didn’t bless them and don’t want to know them. God be with them.’’

‘‘That’s a strange thing for you to say, Fyodor Stepanych,’’ Yulia said with a sigh.

‘‘In the Gospel it says children should respect and fear their parents.’’

‘‘Nothing of the sort. In the Gospel it says we should even forgive our enemies.’’

‘‘In our business you can’t forgive. If you start forgiving everybody, in three years it’ll all fly up the chimney.’’

‘‘But to forgive, to say an affectionate, friendly word to a man, even if he’s to blame—is higher than business, higher than riches!’’

Yulia wanted to soften the old man, to fill him with a sense of pity, to awaken repentance in him, but everything she said he listened to only with condescension, as adults listen to children.

‘‘Fyodor Stepanych,’’ Yulia said resolutely, ‘‘you’re old, and God will soon call you to Him; He will ask you not about your trade, and whether your business went well, but whether you were merciful to people; weren’t you severe to those weaker than you, for instance, to servants, to salesclerks?’’

‘‘I’ve always been a benefactor to those who worked for me, and they should eternally pray to God for me,’’ the old man said with conviction; but, touched by Yulia’s sincere tone and wishing to give her pleasure, he said: ‘‘Very well, bring the granddaughters tomorrow. I’ll have presents bought for them.’’

The old man was untidily dressed and had cigar ashes on his chest and knees; apparently no one cleaned his boots or clothes. The rice in the pirozhki was undercooked, the tablecloth smelled of soap, the servants stamped their feet loudly. Both the old man and this whole house on Pyatnitskaya had an abandoned air, and Yulia, who felt it, was ashamed of herself and of her husband.

‘‘I’ll be sure to come and see you tomorrow,’’ she said.

She walked through the rooms and ordered the old man’s bedroom tidied up and the icon lamp lighted. Fyodor was sitting in his room and looking into an open book without reading it; Yulia talked to him and ordered his room tidied up as well, then went downstairs to the salesclerks. In the middle of the room where the salesclerks dined stood an unpainted wooden column that propped up the ceiling, keeping it from collapsing; the ceilings here were low, the walls covered with cheap wallpaper; it smelled of fumes and the kitchen. All the salesclerks were at home for Sunday and sat on their beds waiting for dinner. When Yulia came in, they jumped up from their places and answered her questions timidly, looking at her from under their brows like prisoners.

‘‘Lord, what bad living quarters you have!’’ she said, clasping her hands. ‘‘Aren’t you crowded here?’’

‘‘Crowded but content,’’ said Makeichev. ‘‘We’re much pleased with you and offer up our prayers to merciful God.’’

‘‘The correspondence of life to personal ambition,’’ said Pochatkin.

And, noticing that Yulia had not understood Pochatkin, Makeichev hastened to clarify:

‘‘We’re small people and should live according to our rank.’’

She looked at the boys’ living quarters and the kitchen, made the acquaintance of the housekeeper, and remained very displeased.

On returning home, she said to her husband:

‘‘We should move to Pyatnitskaya as soon as possible and live there. And you’ll go to the warehouse every day.’’

Then they both sat side by side in the study and were silent. His heart was heavy, he did not want to go to Pyanitskaya or to the warehouse, but he guessed what his wife was thinking and was unable to contradict her. He stroked her cheek and said:

‘‘I feel as if our life is already over, and what’s beginning is some sort of gray half-life. When I learned that my brother Fyodor was hopelessly ill, I wept; we spent our childhood and youth together, I once loved him with all my heart—and here comes catastrophe, and I think that in losing him, I’ve finally broken with my past. But now, when you said it’s necessary for us to move to Pyatnitskaya, into that prison, I began to think that I no longer have any future.’’

He got up and went to the window.

‘‘Be that as it may, we must bid farewell to thoughts of happiness,’’ he said, looking outside. ‘‘There isn’t any. I’ve never known it, and it must be that it simply doesn’t exist. However, once in my life I was happy, when I sat all night under your parasol. Remember when you forgot your parasol at my sister Nina’s?’’ he asked, turning to his wife. ‘‘I was in love with you then, and I remember sitting all night under that parasol in a state of bliss.’’

In the study next to the bookcase stood a mahogany chest of drawers trimmed with bronze, in which Laptev kept various useless objects, among them the parasol. He took it out and handed it to his wife.

‘‘Here it is.’’

Yulia looked at the parasol for a minute, recognized it, and smiled sadly.

‘‘I remember,’’ she said. ‘‘When you declared your love to me, you were holding it in your hands,’’ and, noticing that he was about to leave, she said: ‘‘If you can, please try to come back early. I’m bored without you.’’

And then she went to her room and looked for a long time at the parasol.

XVII

THERE WAS NO accountant at the warehouse, despite the complexity of the business and the enormous turnover, and it was impossible to understand anything from the books kept by the clerk at the counter. Every day, customers, Germans and Englishmen, came to the warehouse, and the salesclerks talked politics and religion with them; a nobleman came, a sick, pathetic drunkard who translated foreign correspondence for the office; the salesclerks called him a piddler and put salt in his tea. And in general, the whole trade appeared to Laptev as some great bizarrerie.

He came to the warehouse every day and tried to introduce a new order; he forbade whipping the boys and scoffing at customers; he was beside himself when salesclerks with a merry laugh disposed of musty, worthless wares somewhere in the provinces in the guise of the freshest and most fashionable. He was now the chief person in the warehouse, yet he still did not know how great his fortune was, whether the business was going well, how much salary the senior salesclerks got, and so on. Pochatkin and Makeichev considered him young and inexperienced, concealed a lot from him, and each evening exchanged mysterious whispers about something with the blind old man.

Once, at the beginning of June, Laptev and Pochatkin went to Bubnov’s tavern to have lunch and, incidentally, to discuss business. Pochatkin had worked for the Laptevs a long time, and had entered the firm when he was only eight years old. He was their own man, was trusted completely, and when, on leaving the warehouse, he took all the day’s earnings from the cash box and stuffed them in his pockets, it did not arouse any suspicion. He was the chief in the warehouse and at home, and also in church, where he fulfilled the duties of the warden in place of the old man. For his cruel treatment of his subordinates, the salesclerks and boys had nicknamed him Malyuta Skuratov.²⁹

When they came to the tavern, he nodded to the waiter and said:

‘‘Well, brother, bring us a half-wonder and twenty-four objectionables.’’

A little later, the waiter brought a tray with a half-bottle of vodka and several plates of various snacks.

‘‘See here, my man,’’ Pochatkin said to him, ‘‘give us a helping of the past master of slander and malignity, with mashed potatoes.’’

The waiter did not understand and became confused and wanted to say something, but Pochatkin looked at him sternly and said:

‘‘Except!’’

The waiter thought with great effort, then went to consult his colleagues, and in the end figured it out and brought a helping of tongue. When they had drunk two glasses each and had some snacks, Laptev said:

‘‘Tell me, Ivan Vassilyich, is it true that our business has begun to fall off in the last few years?’’

‘‘By no means.’’

‘‘Tell me frankly, candidly, how much we’ve been earning, how much we’re earning now, and how great our fortune is. It’s simply impossible to walk in the dark. We recently had an accounting done at the warehouse, but, forgive me, I don’t believe this accounting; you find it necessary to conceal something from me and tell the truth only to my father. From early on, you’ve been accustomed to playing politics, and you can no longer do without it. But what use is it? Well, then, I beg you, be frank. What is the state of our business?’’

‘‘It all depends on the undulations of credit,’’ Pochatkin said after some reflection.

‘‘What do you mean by the undulations of credit?’’

Pochatkin started to explain, but Laptev did not understand anything and sent for Makeichev. The man came at once, said a prayer, had a bite to eat, and, in his sedate, dense baritone, began by saying that salesclerks were obliged to pray to God day and night for their benefactors.

‘‘Splendid, only allow me not to consider myself your benefactor,’’ said Laptev.

‘‘Every man should remember what he is and sense his rank. You, by God’s mercy, are our father and benefactor, and we are your slaves.’’

‘‘I’m sick of all this, finally!’’ Laptev became angry. ‘‘Please be my benefactor now, explain to me the state of our business. Kindly do not consider me a boy, otherwise I’ll close the warehouse tomorrow. Father has gone blind, my brother’s in the madhouse, my nieces are still young; I hate this business and would gladly walk out, but there’s nobody to replace me, you know that yourselves. For God’s sake, then, drop the politics!’’

They went to the warehouse to do the accounts. Then they did accounts at home in the evening, and the old man himself helped; initiating his son into his commercial secrets, he spoke in such a tone as if he was occupied not with trade but with sorcery. It turned out that the income increased by approximately a tenth yearly, and that the Laptevs’ fortune, counting only money and securities, equaled six million roubles.

When, past midnight, after the accounting, Laptev went out into the fresh air, he felt himself under the charm of those numbers. The night was still, moonlit, stifling; the white walls of the houses across the river, the sight of the heavy, locked gates, the silence, and the black shadows produced the general impression of some sort of fortress, and the only thing lacking was a sentry with a gun. Laptev went to the little garden and sat on a bench by the fence that separated it from the next yard, where there was also a little garden. The bird cherry was in bloom. Laptev remembered that in the time of his childhood, this bird cherry was just as gnarled and just as tall, and had not changed in the least since then. Every little corner of the garden and yard reminded him of the distant past. And in his childhood, just as now, one could see, through the sparse trees, the whole yard flooded with moonlight, the shadows were just as mysterious and severe, the black dog lay in just the same way in the middle of the yard, and the windows of the salesclerks’ lodgings were open wide. And these were all cheerless memories.

Light footsteps were heard behind the fence in the neighboring yard.

‘‘My dearest, my darling...’ a man’s voice whispered just by the fence, so that Laptev could even hear breathing.

Now they kissed... Laptev was sure that the millions and the business, which he had no heart for, would ruin his life and turn him finally into a slave; he imagined how he would gradually become accustomed to his position, would gradually enter into the role of head of a trading firm, would grow dull, old, and finally die, as average people generally die, squalidly, sourly, boring everyone around him. But what prevented him from abandoning both the millions and the business, and leaving this little garden and yard that had been hateful to him ever since childhood?

The whispering and kisses on the other side of the fence stirred him. He went out to the middle of the yard and, unbuttoning his shirt on his chest, looked at the moon, and he fancied that he would now order the gate to be opened, go out and never come back there again; his heart was sweetly wrung by the foretaste of freedom, he laughed joyfully and imagined what a wonderful, poetic, and maybe even holy life it could be...

But he went on standing there and asking himself: ‘‘What holds me here?’’ And he was vexed both with himself and with this black dog, which lay on the stones instead of going off to the fields, to the forest, where it would be independent, joyful. Obviously the same thing prevented both him and this dog from leaving the yard: the habit of captivity, of the slavish condition...

The next day, at noon, he went to see his wife, and so as not to be bored, he invited Yartsev to come with him. Yulia Sergeevna was living in a dacha in Butovo, and he had not seen her for five days now. Arriving at the station, the friends got into a carriage, and Yartsev kept singing all the way and admiring the splendid weather. The dacha was in a big park not far from the station. About twenty paces from the gate, at the beginning of the main alley, under an old, spreading poplar, sat Yulia Sergeevna, waiting for her guests. She was wearing a light, elegant, lace-trimmed dress of a pale cream color, and in her hands was the same old, familiar parasol. Yartsev greeted her and went to the dacha, from which came the voices of Sasha and Lida, but Laptev sat down beside her to talk about their affairs.

‘‘Why haven’t you come for so long?’’ she asked without letting go of his hand. ‘‘I sit here for whole days and watch to see if you’re coming. I’m bored without you!’’

She got up and passed her hand over his hair, looking curiously at his face, his shoulders, his hat.

‘‘You know, I love you,’’ she said and blushed. ‘‘You’re dear to me. Here you’ve come, I see you, and I’m so happy I can’t say. Well, let’s talk. Tell me something.’’

She was declaring her love for him, but he felt as if he had been married to her for ten years already, and he wanted to have lunch. She hugged him around the neck, tickling his cheek with the silk of her dress; he carefully removed her arm, got up, and, without saying a word, went to the dacha. The girls came running to meet him.

‘‘How they’ve grown!’’ he thought. ‘‘And so many changes in these three years... But maybe I’m to live another thirteen or thirty years... The future still holds something for us! Time will tell.’’

He embraced Sasha and Lida, who hung on his neck, and said:

‘‘Grandpa sends his greetings... Uncle Fedya will die soon, Uncle Kostya has sent a letter from America and says hello to you. He’s bored with the exposition³⁰ and will come back soon. And Uncle Alyosha’s hungry.’’

Then he sat on the terrace and watched his wife slowly walking down the alley towards the dacha. She was thinking about something, and on her face there was a sad, charming expression, and tears glistened in her eyes. She was no longer the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she once had been, but a mature, beautiful, strong woman. And Laptev noticed the rapturous look with which Yartsev met her, how her new, beautiful expression was reflected in his face, also sad and admiring. It seemed as if he was seeing her for the first time in his life. And while they were having lunch on the terrace, Yartsev smiled somehow joyfully and bashfully, and kept looking at Yulia, at her beautiful neck. Laptev watched him involuntarily and thought that maybe he was to live another thirteen or thirty years...And what were they to live through in that time? What does the future hold for us?

And he thought:

‘‘Time will tell.’’

1895

MY LIFE

A Provincial’s Story

I

THE MANAGER SAID to me: ‘‘I keep you only out of respect for your esteemed father, otherwise I’d have sent you flying long ago.’’ I answered him: ‘‘You flatter me too much, Your Excellency, in supposing I can fly.’’ And then I heard him say: ‘‘Take the gentleman away, he’s bad for my nerves.’’

Two days later I was dismissed. And so, in all the time I’ve been considered an adult, to the great chagrin of my father, the town architect, I have changed jobs nine times. I worked in various departments, but all these nine jobs were as alike as drops of water; I had to sit, write, listen to stupid or rude remarks, and wait until they dismissed me.

My father, when I came to him, was sitting in a deep armchair with his eyes closed. His face, lean, dry, with a bluish tinge on the shaved areas (in looks he resembled an old Catholic organist), expressed humility and submissiveness. Without answering my greeting or opening his eyes, he said:

‘‘If my dear wife, your mother, were alive, your life would be a source of constant grief for her. I see divine providence in her premature death. I beg you, unfortunate boy,’’ he went on, opening his eyes, ‘‘instruct me: what am I to do with you?’’

Formerly, when I was younger, my relations and friends knew what to do with me: some advised me to become a volunteer soldier, others to work in a pharmacy, still others in a telegraph office; but now that I’ve turned twenty-five, and gray has even appeared at my temples, and I’ve already been a volunteer soldier and a pharmacist and a telegrapher, everything earthly seems exhausted for me, and people no longer advise me but only sigh or shake their heads.

‘‘What do you think of yourself ?’ my father went on. ‘‘At your age, young people already have a firm social position, but look at you: a proletarian, destitute, living on your father’s neck!’’

And, as usual, he began his talk about young men nowadays being lost, lost through unbelief, materialism, and superfluous self-confidence, and about how amateur performances ought to be forbidden because they distract young people from religion and their duties.

‘‘Tomorrow we’ll go together, and you’ll apologize to the manager and promise him to work conscientiously,’’ he concluded. ‘‘You shouldn’t remain without a social position even for a single day.’’

‘‘I beg you to hear me out,’’ I said sullenly, expecting nothing good from this conversation. ‘‘What you call a social position consists in the privilege of capital and education. Unwealthy and uneducated people earn their crust of bread by physical labor, and I see no reason why I should be an exception.’’

‘‘When you start talking about physical labor, it comes out stupid and banal,’’ my father said with irritation. ‘‘Understand, you dullard, understand, you brainless head, that besides crude physical strength, you also have the spirit of God, the holy fire, which distinguishes you in the highest degree from an ass or a reptile and brings you close to divinity! This fire has been obtained over thousands of years by the best people. Your great-grandfather Poloznev, a general, fought at Borodino,¹ your grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a marshal of the nobility,² your uncle is a pedagogue, and lastly, I, your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs kept the sacred fire just so that you could put it out!’’

‘‘One must be fair,’’ I said. ‘‘Millions of people bear physical labor.’’

‘‘And let them bear it! They can’t do anything else! Anybody can take up physical labor, even an utter fool or a criminal, such labor is the distinctive quality of the slave and the barbarian, while fire falls to the lot of only a few!’’

To prolong this conversation was useless. My father adored himself, and for him, only what he said himself was convincing. Besides, I knew very well that the arrogance with which he referred to common labor had its basis not so much in considerations regarding the sacred fire as in the secret fear that I would become a worker and set the whole town talking about me; and the main thing was that all my peers had long since finished university and were on good paths, and the son of the manager of the State Bank office was already a collegiate assessor,³ while I, an only son, was nothing! To prolong the conversation was useless and unpleasant, but I went on sitting there and objecting weakly, hoping to be understood at last. For the whole question was simple and clear and only had to do with my means of obtaining a crust of bread, but he didn’t see the simplicity and talked to me in sweetly rounded phrases about Borodino, about the sacred fire, about my uncle, a forgotten poet who once wrote bad and false verses, and called me a brainless head and a dullard. And I wanted so much to be understood! Despite all, I love my father and sister, and since childhood the habit has been lodged in me of asking their opinion, lodged so firmly that it’s unlikely I’ll ever get rid of it; whether I’m right or wrong, I’m constantly afraid of upsetting them, afraid that my father’s skinny neck is turning red now with agitation and he may have a stroke.

‘‘To sit in a stuffy room,’’ I said, ‘‘to copy papers, to compete with a typewriter, for a man of my age is shameful and insulting. How can there be any talk about sacred fire here!’’

‘‘Still, it’s intellectual work,’’ said my father. ‘‘But enough, let’s break off this conversation, and in any case, I’m warning you: if you follow your despicable inclinations and don’t go back to work, then I and my daughter will deprive you of our love. I’ll deprive you of your inheritance—I swear by the true God!’’

With perfect sincerity, to show all the purity of the motives by which I wanted to be guided in my life, I said:

‘‘The question of inheritance seems unimportant to me. I renounce it all beforehand.’’

For some reason, quite unexpectedly for me, these words greatly offended my father. He turned all purple.

‘‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that, stupid boy!’’ he cried in a high, shrill voice. ‘‘Scoundrel!’’ And quickly and deftly, with an accustomed movement, he struck me on the cheek once and then again. ‘‘You begin to forget yourself!’

In childhood, when my father beat me, I had to stand up straight at attention and look him in the face. And now, when he beat me, I was completely at a loss and, as if my childhood was still going on, stood at attention and tried to look him right in the eye. My father was old and very skinny, but his thin muscles must have been strong as straps, because he struck me very painfully.

I backed away into the front hall, and here he seized his umbrella and struck me several times on the head and shoulders; just then my sister opened the door from the drawing room to find out what the noise was, but at once turned away with an expression of horror and pity, not saying a single word in my defense.

The intention not to go back to the office but to start a new working life was unshakable in me. It remained only to choose the kind of trade—and that did not appear especially difficult, because it seemed to me that I was very strong, enduring, capable of the most heavy labor. I had a monotonous working life ahead of me, with hunger, stench, and coarse surroundings, with the constant thought of wages and a crust of bread. And—who knows?—returning from work down Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street, maybe more than once I’d envy the engineer Dolzhikov, who lived by intellectual work, but now I enjoyed the thought of all these future adversities of mine. Once I used to dream of mental activity, imagining myself now a teacher, now a doctor, now a writer, but my dreams remained dreams. The inclination to intellectual pleasures, for instance, the theater and reading, was developed in me to the point of passion, but whether I had the capacity for intellectual work, I don’t know. In high school I had an invincible aversion to Greek, so that I had to be taken out of the fourth class.⁴ For a long time, tutors came and prepared me for the fifth class, then I served in various departments, spending the greater part of the day in total idleness, and was told that it was intellectual work; my activity in the spheres of learning and service called neither for mental effort, nor for talent, nor for personal ability, nor for a creative uplifting of spirit: it was mechanical; and such intellectual work I place lower than physical, and I don’t think it can serve even for a moment as justification for an idle, carefree life, since it is nothing but a deception itself, one of the forms of that same idleness. In all likelihood, I have never known real intellectual work.

Evening came. We lived on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya—it was the main street of the town, and in the evenings our beau monde, for lack of a decent public garden, promenaded on it. This lovely street could partly replace a garden, because on both sides of it grew poplars, which were fragrant, especially after rain, and from behind fences and palisades hung acacias, tall lilac bushes, bird cherries, apple trees. The May twilight, the tender young greenery with its shadows, the smell of the lilacs, the hum of beetles, the silence, the warmth—how new it all is, and how extraordinary, though spring is repeated every year! I stood by the gate and looked at the promenaders. I had grown up and used to play pranks with most of them, but now my proximity might embarrass them, because I was dressed poorly, not fashionably, and on account of my very tight trousers and big, clumsy boots, people called me macaroni on ships. What’s more, I had a bad reputation in town because I had no social position and often played billiards in cheap taverns, and maybe also because, without any cause on my part, I was twice taken to the police.

In the big house opposite, at the engineer Dolzhikov’s, somebody was playing the piano. It was growing dark, and stars twinkled in the sky. Now my father, in an old top hat with a wide, turned-up brim, arm in arm with my sister, walked by slowly, responding to bows.

‘‘Look!’’ he was saying to my sister, pointing at the sky with the very umbrella he had struck me with earlier that day. ‘‘Look at the sky! The stars, even the smallest of them, are all worlds! How insignificant man is compared to the universe!’’

And he said it in such a tone as if he found it extremely flattering and agreeable to be so insignificant. What a giftless man! Unfortunately, he was our only architect, and in the last fifteen or twenty years, as I recall, not a single decent house was built in town. When he was asked for a plan, he usually drew the reception room and drawing room first; as boarding-school girls in the old days could only start dancing on the same foot, so his artistic idea could proceed and develop only from the reception room and drawing room. To them he added a dining room, a nursery, a study, connecting the rooms with doors, so that you inevitably had to pass through one to get to the next, and each had two or even three superfluous doors. His idea must have been unclear, extremely confused, curtailed; each time, as if sensing that something was lacking, he resorted to various sorts of annexes, attaching them one to the other, and I can see even now the narrow little entries, the narrow little corridors, the crooked stairways leading to entresols where you could only stand bent over and where, instead of a floor, there were three huge steps, like shelves in a bathhouse; and the kitchen was unfailingly under the house, with vaulting and a brick floor. The façade had a stubborn, hard expression; the lines were dry, timid, the roof low, flattened; and the fat, muffinlike chimneys unfailingly had wire covers with black, squeaking weathervanes. And for some reason, all these houses my father built, which were so like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top hat, the dry and stubborn nape of his neck. In the course of time, my father’s giftless-ness became a familiar sight in town, it struck root and became our style.

Father introduced this style into my sister’s life as well. Beginning with the fact that he called her Cleopatra (and me Misail).⁵ When she was still a little girl, he used to frighten her by telling her about the stars, about the ancient sages, about our ancestors, explaining to her at length what life was, what duty was; and now, when she was twenty-six, he went on the same way, allowing her to walk arm in arm only with him, and imagining for some reason that sooner or later a decent young man must appear who would wish to contract a marriage with her out of respect for his personal qualities. And she adored my father, feared him, and believed in his extraordinary intelligence.

It grew quite dark, and the street gradually became deserted. In the house opposite, the music ceased; the gates were thrust open, and a troika of prancing horses drove down our street with a soft ringing of little bells. It was the engineer and his daughter going for a ride. Time for bed!

I had my own room in the house, but I lived in the yard, in a little shack under the same roof as the brick shed, probably built once for storing harness—there were big spikes driven into the walls—but now no longer needed, and for thirty years my father had been storing his newspapers in it, which for some reason he had bound every six months and allowed no one to touch. Living there, I ran across my father and his visitors less often, and it seemed to me that if I didn’t live in my real room and didn’t go to the house every day for dinner, my father’s words about my living on his neck wouldn’t sound so offensive.

My sister was waiting for me. She had brought me supper in secret from my father: a small piece of cold veal and a slice of bread. ‘‘Money loves counting,’’ ‘‘A kopeck saves a rouble,’’ and the like, were often repeated in our house, and my sister, oppressed by these banalities, did her utmost to reduce expenses, and therefore we ate badly. She set the plate on the table, sat down on my bed, and began to cry.

‘‘Misail,’’ she said, ‘‘what are you doing to us?’’

She didn’t cover her face, the tears dropped on her breast and hands, and her expression was grief-stricken. She fell on the pillow and let her tears flow freely, shaking all over and sobbing.

‘‘Again you’ve left your job...’ she said. ‘‘Oh, it’s so terrible!’’

‘‘But understand, sister, understand...’ I said, and despair came over me because she was crying.

As if on purpose, all the kerosene had burnt up in my lamp, it smoked and was about to go out, and the old spikes in the walls looked stern, and their shadows wavered.

‘‘Spare us!’’ my sister said, getting up. ‘‘Father is awfully grieved, and I’m sick, I’m losing my mind. What will become of you?’’ she asked, sobbing and reaching her arms out to me. ‘‘I beg you, I implore you, in the name of our late mama, I beg you: go back to your job!’’

‘‘I can’t, Cleopatra!’’ I said, feeling that a little more and I’d give in. ‘‘I can’t!’’

‘‘Why?’’ my sister went on. ‘‘Why? Well, if you didn’t get along with your superior, look for another position. For instance, why don’t you go and work for the railway? I was just talking with Anyuta Blagovo, and she assures me you’d be accepted at the railway, and even promised to put in a word for you. For God’s sake, Misail, think! Think, I implore you!’’

We talked a little more and I gave in. I said the thought of working for the railway that was under construction had never once entered my head, and that maybe I was ready to try.

She smiled joyfully through her tears and pressed my hand, and after that still went on crying because she couldn’t stop, and I went to the kitchen to get some kerosene.

II

AMONG THE LOVERS of amateur theater, concerts, and tableaux vivants for charitable purposes, the first place in town went to the Azhogins, who lived in their own house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya; they provided the space each time and also took upon themselves all the cares and expenses. This rich landowning family had about ten thousand acres and a magnificent estate in the district, but they didn’t like the country and lived in town year-round. It consisted of the mother, a tall, lean, delicate woman who cut her hair short and wore a short jacket and a straight skirt after the English fashion, and three daughters who, when spoken of, were called not by their names but simply the eldest, the middle, and the youngest. They all had unattractively sharp chins, were nearsighted, stoop-shouldered, and dressed the same as their mother, lisped unpleasantly, and despite all that were sure to take part in every performance and were constantly doing something for philanthropic purposes—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in vaudevilles with songs, acted without the slightest merriment, with a businesslike air, as if they were doing bookkeeping.

I loved our theatricals and especially the rehearsals, frequent, noisy and often slightly witless, after which we were always given supper. I took no part in choosing the plays and distributing the roles. My part lay backstage. I painted the sets, copied the parts, prompted, did makeup, and was also in charge of arranging various effects such as thunder, nightingales’ singing, and so on. Since I had no social position or decent clothes, I kept myself apart at rehearsals, in the shadow of the wings, and was timidly silent.

I painted the sets either in the Azhogins’ shed or in the yard. I was helped by a housepainter—or, as he called himself, a housepainting contractor—Andrei Ivanov, a man of about fifty, tall, very thin and pale, with a sunken chest, sunken temples, and blue rings under his eyes, whose appearance was even a little frightening. He was sick with some wasting disease, and every fall and spring they said he was on the way out, but he’d lie down for a while, get up, and then say with surprise: ‘‘Again I didn’t die!’’

In town he was known as Radish, and they said it was his real family name. He loved the theater as much as I did, and as soon as the rumor reached him that a production was being prepared, he’d drop all his work and go to the Azhogins’ to paint sets.

The day after my talk with my sister, I worked from morning till night at the Azhogins’. The rehearsal was set for seven o’clock in the evening, and an hour before the start, all the amateurs had gathered in the reception room, and the eldest, the middle, and the youngest walked about the stage reading from their notebooks. Radish, in a long, rusty coat and with a scarf wrapped around his neck, stood leaning his temple against the wall and looking at the stage with a pious expression. The Azhogin mother went up to one guest, then another, and said something pleasant to each of them. She had a manner of looking intently into your face and speaking quietly, as if in secret.

‘‘It must be difficult to paint sets,’’ she said quietly, coming up to me. ‘‘And Madame Mufke and I were just talking about prejudice, and I saw you come in. My God, all my life, all my life I’ve fought against prejudice! To convince the servants of what nonsense all these fears are, I always light three candles in my house and begin all my important business on the thirteenth.’’

The daughter of the engineer Dolzhikov came in, a beautiful, plump blonde, dressed, as they said here, in everything Parisian. She didn’t act, but a chair was placed onstage for her at rehearsals, and the performances would not begin until she appeared in the front row, radiant and amazing everyone with her finery. As a young thing from the capital, she was allowed to make observations during the rehearsals, and she made them with a sweet, condescending smile, and one could see that she looked upon our performances as a childish amusement. It was said of her that she had studied singing at the Petersburg Conservatory and had even sung one whole winter in a private opera. I liked her very much, and usually, at rehearsals and during performances, I never took my eyes off her.

I had already picked up the notebook to start prompting when my sister unexpectedly appeared. Without taking off her coat and hat, she came over to me and said:

‘‘Please come with me.’’

I went. Backstage, in the doorway, stood Anyuta Blagovo, also wearing a hat with a dark little veil. She was the daughter of the associate court magistrate, who had long served in our town, almost from the very founding of the district court. As she was tall and well built, her participation in tableaux vivants was considered obligatory, and when she represented some sort of fairy or Glory, her face burned with shame; but she didn’t take part in the plays and would come to the rehearsals only for a moment, on some errand, and would not go to the reception room. Now, too, it was evident that she had come only for a moment.

‘‘My father has spoken for you,’’ she said drily, not looking at me and blushing. ‘‘Dolzhikov has promised you a position on the railway. Go to see him tomorrow, he will be at home.’’

I bowed and thanked her for taking the trouble.

‘‘And you can drop this,’’ she said, pointing to the notebook.

She and my sister went over to Mrs. Azhogin and exchanged whispers with her for a couple of moments, glancing at me. They were discussing something.

‘‘Indeed,’’ Mrs. Azhogin said quietly, coming up to me and looking intently into my face, ‘‘indeed, if this distracts you from serious occupations,’’ she pulled the notebook from my hands, ‘‘you may pass it on to someone else. Don’t worry, my friend, God be with you.’’

I took leave of her and went out in embarrassment. As I was going down the stairs, I saw my sister and Anyuta Blagovo leave; they were talking animatedly about something, most likely my starting work at the railway, and were hurrying. My sister had never before come to rehearsals, and now probably had pangs of conscience and was afraid father would find out that she had gone to the Azhogins’ without his permission.

I went to see Dolzhikov the next day between twelve and one. The footman took me to a very beautiful room that served the engineer simultaneously as a drawing room and a study. Here everything was soft, elegant, and, for an unaccustomed person like me, even strange. Costly rugs, enormous armchairs, bronze, paintings, gilt and plush frames; in the photographs scattered over the walls, very beautiful women, intelligent, wonderful faces, free poses; the door from the drawing room leads straight to the garden, to the balcony, and one can see lilacs, one can see a table set for lunch, many bottles, a bouquet of roses, it smells of spring and expensive cigars, it smells of happiness—and everything seems to want to say that this is a man who has lived, worked, and achieved that happiness which is possible on earth. The engineer’s daughter was sitting at the desk and reading a newspaper.

‘‘You’ve come to see my father?’’ she asked. ‘‘He’s taking a shower, he’ll be here presently. Meanwhile, please be seated.’’

I sat down.

‘‘You live opposite us, I believe?’’ she said after some silence.

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘I watch out the window every day, from boredom, and, you must forgive me,’’ she went on, looking into the newspaper, ‘‘I often see you and your sister. She always has such a kind, concentrated expression.’’

Dolzhikov came in. He was wiping his neck with a towel.

‘‘Papa, Monsieur Poloznev,’’ said his daughter.

‘‘Yes, yes, Blagovo spoke to me,’’ he briskly turned to me without offering me his hand. ‘‘But listen, what can I give you? What sort of positions do I have? You’re strange people, gentlemen!’’ he went on loudly, and in such a tone as if he was reprimanding me. ‘‘Twenty men come to me every day, they imagine I’m running a department! I’m running a railway, gentlemen, it’s hard labor, I need mechanics, metal workers, excavators, carpenters, well diggers, and you all can only sit and write, nothing more! You’re all writers!’’

And the same happiness breathed on me from him as from his rugs and armchairs. Full-bodied, healthy, with red cheeks, a broad chest, well scrubbed, in a calico shirt and balloon trousers, like a toy china coachman. He had a rounded, curly little beard—and not a single gray hair—a slightly hooked nose, and dark, clear, innocent eyes.

‘‘What are you able to do?’’ he went on. ‘‘You’re not able to do anything! I’m an engineer, sir, I’m a well-to-do man, but before I got ahead, I worked hard for a long time, I was an engine driver, I worked for two years in Belgium as a simple oiler. Consider for yourself, my gentle one, what kind of work can I offer you?’’

‘‘Of course, that’s so...’ I murmured in great embarrassment, unable to bear his clear, innocent gaze.

‘‘Can you at least manage a telegraph machine?’’ he asked after a little thought.

‘‘Yes, I worked in a telegraph office.’’

‘Hm...Well, we’ll see. Go to Dubechnya, meanwhile. I’ve got a man sitting there already, but he’s terrible trash.’’

‘‘And what will my duties consist of?’ I asked.

‘‘We’ll see about that. Go, meanwhile, I’ll make the arrangements. Only please don’t start drinking, and don’t bother me with any requests. I’ll throw you out.’’

He walked away from me and didn’t even nod his head. I bowed to him and his daughter, who was reading the newspaper, and left. My heart was heavy, so much so that when my sister began asking how the engineer had received me, I couldn’t utter a single word.

In order to go to Dubechnya, I got up early in the morning, with the sunrise. There wasn’t a soul on our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, everybody was still asleep, and my footsteps sounded solitary and muffled. The poplars, covered with dew, filled the air with a delicate fragrance. I felt sad and did not want to leave town. I loved my native town. It seemed to me so beautiful and warm! I loved this greenery, the quiet, sunny mornings, the ringing of our bells; but the people I lived with in this town bored me, were alien and sometimes even repulsive to me. I didn’t love them and didn’t understand them.

I didn’t understand why and from what all these sixty-five thousand people lived. I knew that Kimry subsisted on boots, that Tula made samovars and guns, that Odessa was a seaport, but what our town was and what it did, I didn’t know. Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya and the two other proper streets lived on ready capital and on the salaries the officials received from the treasury; but how the remaining eight streets lived, which stretched parallel to each other for some two miles and disappeared beyond the horizon—that for me had always been an unfathomable enigma. And the way those people lived was shameful to tell about! No park, no theater, no decent orchestra; the town and club libraries were visited only by Jewish adolescents, so that magazines and new books lay uncut for months; rich and educated people slept in stuffy little bedrooms, on wooden beds with bedbugs, the children were kept in disgustingly dirty rooms known as nurseries, and the servants, even old and respected ones, slept on the kitchen floor and covered themselves with rags. On ordinary days, the houses smelled of borscht, and on fast days, of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. The food was not tasty, the water was not good to drink. In the duma,⁶ at the governor’s, at the bishop’s, in houses everywhere, there had been talk for many years about the fact that our town had no good and cheap water, and that it was necessary to borrow two hundred thousand from the treasury for a water system; very rich people, who numbered up to three dozen in our town, and who chanced to lose entire estates at cards, also drank the bad water and all their lives talked passionately about the loan—and I didn’t understand that; it seemed simpler to me to take the two hundred thousand from their own pockets.

I didn’t know a single honest man in the whole town. My father took bribes and imagined they were given him out of respect for his inner qualities; high school students, in order to pass from grade to grade, boarded with their teachers and paid them big money for it; the wife of the army administrator took bribes from the recruits at call-up time and even let them offer her treats, and once in church was unable to get up from her knees because she was so drunk; the doctors also took bribes during recruitment, and the town physician and the veterinarian levied a tax on the butcher shops and taverns; the district school traded in certificates that provided the benefits of the third category; the dean of the cathedral took bribes from the clergy and church wardens; on the municipal, the tradesmen’s, the medical, and all other boards, they shouted at each petitioner’s back: ‘‘You should say thank you!’’ and the petitioner would come back and give thirty or forty kopecks. And those who didn’t take bribes—for instance, the court administration—were haughty, offered you two fingers to shake, were distinguished by the coldness and narrowness of their judgments, played cards a lot, drank a lot, married rich women, and undoubtedly had a harmful, corrupting influence on their milieu. Only from the young girls came a whiff of moral purity; most of them had lofty yearnings, honest and pure souls; but they didn’t understand life and believed that bribes were given out of respect for inner qualities, and, after marrying, aged quickly, went to seed, and drowned hopelessly in the mire of banal, philistine existence.

III

A RAILWAY WAS being constructed in our parts. On the eves of feast days, the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins who were known as ‘‘railboys’’ and were feared. Not seldom did I happen to see a ragamuffin, hatless, with a bloodied physiognomy, being taken to the police station; and carried behind him, as material evidence, a samovar or some recently washed, still-wet laundry. The ‘‘railboys’’ usually crowded around the pot-houses and markets; they drank, ate, used bad language, and sent a shrill whistle after every woman of light behavior who passed by. Our shopkeepers, to amuse this hungry riffraff, got dogs and cats to drink vodka, or would tie an empty kerosene can to a dog’s tail, give a whistle, and the dog would race down the street squealing with terror, the tin can clanking behind it; believing some monster was chasing at its heels, it would run far out of town, into the fields, till it was exhausted; and we had several dogs in town who trembled constantly, tails between their legs, of whom it was said that they were unable to endure such amusements and lost their minds.

The station was being built three miles from town. It was said that the engineers had asked for a bribe of fifty thousand to have the railway come right to town, but the town administration had agreed to give only forty, a difference of ten thousand, and now the townspeople regretted it, because they had to build a road to the station, for which the estimate was higher. The ties and rails were already laid the whole length of the line, and service trains were running, bringing building materials and workers, and the only holdup was the bridges, which Dolzhikov was building, and here and there a station wasn’t ready yet.

Dubechnya—so our first station was called—was some ten miles from town. I went on foot. The winter and spring crops were bright green, caught by the morning sunlight. The area was level, cheerful, and the station, the barrows, and some remote estates were clearly outlined in the distance... How good it was here at liberty! And how I wanted to be filled with the awareness of freedom, at least for this one morning, and not think of what was going on in town, not think of my needs, not want to eat! Nothing so prevented me from living as the acute sense of hunger, when my best thoughts were strangely mingled with thoughts of buckwheat kasha, meat cakes, fried fish. Here I am standing alone in the field and looking up at a lark, which is hanging in one place in the air and pouring itself out as if in hysterics, and I’m thinking: ‘‘It would be good now to have some bread and butter!’’ Or here I am sitting down by the roadside and closing my eyes to rest, to listen to this wonderful Maytime clamor, and I recall the smell of hot potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I generally had little to eat, and therefore my main feeling in the course of a day was hunger, and that may have been why I understood perfectly well why so many people worked only for a crust of bread and could talk only about grub.

In Dubechnya they were plastering the inside of the station and building a wooden upper story to the pump house. It was hot, there was a smell of lime, and workers wandered sluggishly over heaps of shavings and rubbish; the switchman was asleep by his booth, and the sun burned down directly on his face. Not a single tree. The telegraph wires hummed faintly, and hawks rested on them here and there. Wandering over the same heaps, not knowing what to do, I remembered how the engineer, to my question of what my duties would be, had answered: ‘‘We’ll see.’’ But what could one see in this desert? The plasterers were talking about the foreman and about some Fedot Vassiliev, I didn’t understand, and anguish gradually came over me—physical anguish, when you feel your arms and legs and your whole big body and don’t know what to do with them or where to take yourself.

After wandering around for at least two hours, I noticed that there were telegraph poles going from the station somewhere to the right of the line, which ended after a mile or a mile and a half at a white stone wall; the workers said the office was there, and I finally realized that that was precisely where I had to go.

It was an old, long-neglected estate. The wall of porous white stone was weathered and had fallen down in places, and the roof on the wing, whose blank wall looked into the fields, was rusty, and tin patches shone on it here and there. Through the gate, you could see a spacious yard overgrown with tall weeds, and an old master’s house with jalousies on the windows and a high roof red-brown with rust. At the sides of the house, to right and left, stood two identical wings; one had its windows boarded up; near the other, whose windows were open, laundry hung on a line, and calves were walking around. The last telegraph pole stood in the yard, and its wire went to the window of the wing whose blank wall looked onto the fields. The door was open, and I went in. At a table by a telegraph machine sat some gentleman with dark curly hair, in a canvas jacket; he looked at me sternly from under his brows but smiled at once and said:

‘‘Greetings, Small Profit!’’

This was Ivan Cheprakov, my schoolmate, who had been expelled from the second class for smoking tobacco. In the autumn he and I used to catch siskins, finches, and grosbeaks and sell them at the market early in the morning, while our parents were still asleep. We lay in wait for flocks of migratory starlings and shot them with birdshot, then gathered up the wounded, and some of them died on us in awful torment (I still remember them moaning at night in the cage I had), but others recovered and we sold them, brazenly swearing to God that they were all males. Once, at the market, I had only one starling left, which I kept offering to buyers and finally let go for a kopeck. ‘‘Still, it’s a small profit!’’ I said to console myself, pocketing the kopeck, and after that the street urchins and schoolboys nicknamed me ‘‘Small Profit’’; and even now the street urchins and shopkeepers tease me with it, though no one but me remembers any longer where the nickname came from.

Cheprakov was not strongly built: narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, long-legged. A string tie, no waistcoat at all, and boots worse than mine—with crooked heels. He rarely blinked and had a look of urgency, as if he was about to grab something, and was always in a flurry.

‘‘But wait,’’ he said in a flurry. ‘‘No, listen here!... What was it I was just saying?’’

We got to talking. I found out that the estate we were then on had belonged still recently to the Cheprakovs and had passed only last autumn to the engineer Dolzhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than in securities, and had already bought three considerable estates in our region, with a transfer of mortgages; at the time of the sale, Cheprakov’s mother had negotiated for herself the right to live in one of the wings for another two years and had managed to obtain for her son a position in the office.

‘‘How can he not go buying up?’’ Cheprakov said of the engineer. ‘‘He fleeces the contractors alone for that much! He fleeces everybody!’’

Then he took me to dinner, having decided in a flurry that I would live in the wing with him and board with his mother.

‘‘She’s a niggard,’’ he said, ‘‘but she won’t take much from you.’’

In the small rooms where his mother lived, it was very crowded; all of them, even the entry and the front room, were cluttered with furniture, which, after the sale of the estate, had been brought there from the big house; and it was all old mahogany furniture. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout, elderly lady with slanted Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big armchair by the window and knitting a stocking. She received me ceremoniously.

‘‘This is Poloznev, mama,’’ Cheprakov introduced me. ‘‘He’ll be working here.’’

‘‘Are you a nobleman?’’ she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice; it seemed to me as if fat was gurgling in her throat.

‘‘Yes,’’ I said.

‘‘Be seated.’’

The dinner was bad. All that was served was a pie with rancid cottage cheese and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, the hostess, blinked somehow strangely, now with one eye, now with the other. She talked, ate, but there was something already dead in her whole figure, and it was as if you could even sense the smell of a corpse. There was barely a glimmer of life in her, along with a glimmer of awareness that she was a landowner who had once had her own serfs, that she was a general’s widow whom the servants were obliged to call ‘‘Your Excellency’’; and when these pathetic remnants of life lit up in her for a moment, she would say to her son:

‘‘Jean, you’re holding your knife the wrong way!’’

Or else she would tell me, breathing heavily, with the mincing manner of a hostess wishing to entertain a guest:

‘‘And we, you know, have sold our estate. Of course, it’s a pity, we’re used to it here, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean the stationmaster of Dubechnya, so we won’t be leaving the place, we’ll live here at the station, and it’s the same as on the estate. The engineer is so kind! Don’t you find him very handsome?’’

Still recently the Cherpakovs lived a wealthy life, but after the general’s death, everything changed. Elena Nikiforovna started quarreling with the neighbors, went to court, paid less than she owed to her stewards and hired hands, kept fearing she would be robbed—and in some ten years, Dubechnya became unrecognizable.

Behind the big house was an old garden, grown wild, stifled with tall weeds and bushes. I strolled about the terrace, still strong and beautiful; through the glass door, a room with a parquet floor could be seen, probably the drawing room; an old piano, and on the walls, etchings in wide mahogany frames—and nothing more. All that was left of the former flowerbeds were peonies and poppies that lifted their white and scarlet heads from the grass; on the pathways, stretching themselves out, hindering each other, grew young maples and elms, already plucked by the cows. The growth was thick, and the garden looked impenetrable, but that was only near the house, where poplars, pines, and old lindens, all of an age, survivors from the former alleys, still stood, but further behind them the garden had been cleared for hayfields, and here it was no longer so close, the cobwebs did not get into your eyes and mouth, a breeze blew; the further on, the more spacious it became, and here cherries, plums, and spreading apple trees grew in abandon, disfigured by props and canker, and pear trees so tall it was even hard to believe they were pear trees. This part of the garden was rented by our town marketwomen and was guarded from thieves and starlings by a peasant simpleton who lived in a brush hut.

The garden, growing ever sparser, turned into a real meadow, descending to the river, where green bulrushes and willows grew; by the dam there was a pool, deep and full of fish, a small mill with a thatched roof made an angry clamor, frogs croaked furiously. From time to time, the water, smooth as a mirror, would be covered with rings, and the water lilies would shake, disturbed by playful fish. On the other side of the river was the small village of Dubechnya. The quiet blue pool enticed you, promising coolness and peace. And now all of it—the pool, and the mill, and the cozy-looking banks—belonged to the engineer!

And so my new work began. I received telegrams and sent them further on, kept various records, and made clean copies of the requests, claims, and reports sent to our office by illiterate foremen and workmen. But the greater part of the day I did nothing but walk around the room waiting for telegrams, or I’d get a boy to sit there and go to the garden myself, and stroll until the boy came running to tell me the telegraph was tapping. I ate dinners with Mrs. Cheprakov. Meat was served very rarely, the dishes were all from dairy products, but on Wednesdays and Fridays they were lenten, and on those days pink plates, which were known as lenten plates, were set out on the table. Mrs. Cheprakov blinked constantly—such was her habit—and I felt ill at ease each time I was in her presence.

Since there was not enough work in the wing even for one person, Cheprakov did nothing but sleep or go to the pool with a gun to shoot ducks. In the evenings he would get drunk in the village or at the station and, before going to bed, would look in the mirror and shout:

‘‘Greetings, Ivan Cheprakov!’’

When drunk, he was very pale and kept rubbing his hands and laughing with a sort of whinny: ‘‘Hee, hee, hee!’’ Out of mischief, he would strip and run naked through the fields. He ate flies and said they tasted sour.

IV

ONCE AFTER DINNER he came running to the wing, out of breath, and said:

‘‘Go, your sister’s here.’’

I went out. Indeed, a hired town droshky was standing by the porch of the big house. My sister had come, and Anyuta Blagovo with her, and some gentleman in a military tunic. Going closer, I recognized the military man: it was Anyuta’s brother, a doctor.

‘‘We’ve come for a picnic,’’ he said. ‘‘It that all right?’’

My sister and Anyuta would have liked to ask how my life was there, but they both said nothing and only looked at me. I also said nothing. They understood that I didn’t like it there, and tears welled up in my sister’s eyes, and Anyuta Blagovo turned red. We went to the garden. The doctor went ahead of us, saying rapturously:

‘‘What air! Holy Mother, what air!’’

In appearance, he was still quite the student. He spoke and walked like a student, and the gaze of his gray eyes was as lively, simple, and open as in a good student. Next to his tall and beautiful sister, he seemed weak and thin; and his little beard was thin, and his voice also—a thin little tenor, though pleasant enough. He served in a regiment somewhere, and had now come home on leave, and said that in the fall he would go to Petersburg to pass the examination for doctor of medicine. He already had a family of his own— a wife and three children; he had married early, while still in the second year of his studies, and now they said of him in town that he was unhappy in his family life and no longer lived with his wife.

‘‘What time is it now?’’ My sister was worried. ‘‘We should get back early, papa allowed me to visit my brother only till six o’clock.’’

‘‘Ah, your papa again!’’ sighed the doctor.

I prepared a samovar. We had tea on a rug in front of the terrace of the big house, and the doctor, on his knees, drank from the saucer and said that he was experiencing bliss. Then Cheprakov fetched the key and opened the glass door, and we all went into the house. Here it was dim, mysterious, it smelled of mushrooms, and our footsteps made a hollow sound, as if there was a basement under the floor. The doctor, standing, touched the keys of the piano, and it responded to him weakly, in quavering, husky, but still harmonious chords; he tested his voice and began to sing some love song, wincing and tapping his foot impatiently when one of the keys turned out to be mute. My sister no longer wanted to go home but went about the room excitedly, saying:

‘‘I feel merry! I feel very, very merry!’’

There was surprise in her voice, as if it seemed incredible to her that she also could be in good spirits. It was the first time in her life I had seen her so merry. She even became prettier. In profile she was unattractive, her nose and mouth were somehow thrust forward and made it look as if she was blowing, but she had beautiful dark eyes, a pale, very delicate complexion, and a touching expression of kindness and sorrow, and when she spoke, she looked comely and even beautiful. Both she and I took after our mother—broad-shouldered, strong, enduring—but her paleness was sickly, she coughed frequently, and in her eyes I sometimes caught the expression people have who are seriously ill but for some reason conceal it. In her present merriment, there was something childlike, naïve, as if the joy which, during our childhood, had been suppressed and stifled by a stern upbringing, had now suddenly awakened in her soul and burst out into freedom.

But when evening came and the horses were brought, my sister became quiet, shrank, and got into the droshky looking as if it was the prisoner’s bench.

Then they were all gone, the noise died away... I remembered that in all that time, Anyuta Blagovo had not said a single word to me.

‘‘An astonishing girl!’’ I thought. ‘‘An astonishing girl!’’

Saint Peter’s fast⁷ came, and we were now given lenten food every day. In my idleness and the uncertainty of my position, I was oppressed by physical anguish, and, displeased with myself, sluggish, hungry, I loitered about the estate and only waited for the appropriate mood in order to leave.

Before evening once, when Radish was sitting in our wing, Dolzhikov came in unexpectedly, very sunburnt and gray with dust. He had spent three days at his work site and had now arrived in Dubechnya by locomotive and come from the station on foot. While waiting for the carriage that was to come from town, he went around the estate with his steward giving orders in a loud voice, then sat for a whole hour in our wing writing some letters; telegrams addressed to him came in his presence, and he tapped out the replies himself. The three of us stood silently at attention.

‘‘Such disorder!’’ he said, looking scornfully into a report. ‘‘In two weeks I’ll transfer the office to the station, and I don’t know what I’ll do with you, gentlemen.’’

‘‘I try hard, Your Honor,’’ said Cheprakov.

‘‘I see how hard you try. All you know how to do is collect your salary,’’ the engineer went on, looking at me. ‘‘You rely on connections, so as to faire la carrière⁷ quickly and easily. Well, I don’t look at connections. Nobody put in a word for me, sir. Before I got ahead, I was an engine driver, I worked in Belgium as a simple oiler, sir. And you, Pantelei, what are you doing here?’’ he asked, turning to Radish. ‘‘Drinking with them?’’

For some reason, he called all simple people Pantelei, but those like me and Cheprakov he despised and called drunkards, brutes, and scum behind their backs. In general, he was cruel to underlings, fined them, and threw them out of their jobs coldly, without explanations.

At last the horses came for him. As a farewell he promised to dismiss us all in two weeks, called his steward a blockhead, and then, sprawling in the carriage, drove off to town.

‘‘Andrei Ivanych,’’ I said to Radish, ‘‘take me on as a hired hand.’’

‘‘Well, why not!’’

And we set off for town together. When the estate and the station were left far behind us, I asked:

‘‘Andrei Ivanych, why did you come to Dubechnya today?’’

‘‘First, my boys are working on the line, and second— I came to pay interest to the general’s widow. Last summer I borrowed fifty roubles from her, and now I pay her a rouble a month.’’

The painter stopped and took hold of my button.

‘‘Misail Alexeich, angel mine,’’ he went on, ‘‘it’s my understanding that if a simple man or a gentleman takes even the smallest interest, he’s already a villain. Truth cannot exist in such a man.’’

Skinny, pale, frightening Radish closed his eyes, shook his head, and pronounced in the tones of a philosopher:

‘‘Worm eats grass, rust eats iron, and lying eats the soul. Lord, save us sinners!’’

V

RADISH WAS IMPRACTICAL and a poor planner; he took more work than he could do, became worried and confused when calculating, and therefore almost always wound up in the red. He was a painter, a glazier, a paperhanger, and even did roofing, and I remember him running around for three days looking for roofers for the sake of a worthless job. He was an excellent craftsman, and it happened that he sometimes earned up to ten roubles a day, and if it hadn’t been for this wish to be the head at all costs and be called a contractor, he probably would have made good money.

He himself was paid by the job, but me and the other boys he paid by the day, from seventy kopecks to a rouble a day. While the weather stayed hot and dry, we did various outdoor jobs, mainly roof painting. My feet weren’t used to it and got as hot as if I was walking on a burning stove, but when I put on felt boots, they sweltered. But that was only at first; later I got used to it, and everything went swimmingly. I now lived among people for whom work was obligatory and inevitable, and who worked like dray horses, often unaware of the moral significance of labor and never even using the word ‘‘labor’’ in conversation; alongside them, I, too, felt like a dray horse, ever more pervaded by the obligatoriness and inevitability of all I did, and that made my life easier, delivering me from all doubts.

At first everything interested me, everything was new, as if I had been newly born. I could sleep on the ground, I could go barefoot—and that was a great pleasure; I could stand in a crowd of simple people without embarrassing anyone, and when a cab horse fell in the street, I ran and helped to lift it up with no fear of dirtying my clothes. And above all, I lived at my own expense and was not a burden to anyone!

Painting roofs, especially with our own oil and paint, was considered very profitable, and therefore even such good craftsmen as Radish did not scorn this crude, boring work. In his short trousers, with his skinny, purple legs, he walked over a roof looking like a stork, and as he worked with his brush, I heard him sigh heavily and say:

‘‘Woe, woe to us sinners!’’

He walked on a roof as freely as on the floor. Though ill and pale as a corpse, he was remarkably nimble; just like the young men, he painted the cupolas and domes of churches without scaffolding, only with the aid of ladders and ropes, and it was a bit scary when, standing up there, far from the ground, he would straighten up to his full height and pronounce for who knows whom:

‘‘Worm eats grass, rust eats iron, and lying eats the soul!’’ Or else, thinking about something, he would answer his own thoughts aloud:

‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s possible!’’

When I came home from work, all those who were sitting on benches by the gateways, all the shop clerks, errand boys, and their masters, sent various mocking and spiteful observations after me, and at first that upset me and seemed simply monstrous.

‘‘Small Profit!’’ came from all sides. ‘‘Housepainter! Ocher!’’

And nobody treated me as mercilessly as precisely those who still recently had been simple people themselves and had earned their crust of bread by common labor. In the market, when I passed a hardware store, they poured water on me as if accidentally and once even threw a stick at me. And one fishmonger, a gray-haired old man, stood in my way and said, looking at me with spite:

‘‘It’s not you who’s to be pitied, you fool! It’s your father!’’

And my acquaintances, on meeting me, were for some reason embarrassed. Some looked upon me as an eccentric and buffoon, others felt sorry for me, still others did not know how to treat me, and it was hard to understand them. One afternoon, in one of the lanes near our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, I met Anyuta Blagovo. I was on my way to work and was carrying two long brushes and a bucket of paint. Recognizing me, Anyuta blushed.

‘‘I beg you not to greet me in the street,’’ she said nervously, sternly, in a trembling voice, without offering me her hand, and tears suddenly glistened in her eyes. ‘‘If, in your opinion, all this is necessary, then so be it... so be it, but I beg you not to approach me!’’

I now lived not on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya but in the suburb of Makarikha, with my nanny Karpovna, a kind but gloomy old woman who always anticipated something bad, was afraid of all dreams in general, and saw bad omens even in the bees and wasps that flew into her room. And the fact that I had become a worker, in her opinion, did not presage anything good.

‘‘It’ll be your head!’’ she repeated mournfully, shaking her head. ‘‘So it will!’’

With her in her little house lived her adopted son Prokofy, a butcher, a huge, clumsy fellow of about thirty, red-haired, with a stiff mustache. Meeting me in the front hall, he would silently and deferentially make way for me, and if he was drunk, he would give me a five-finger salute. He took his dinner in the evenings, and I could hear him through the wooden partition grunting and sighing as he drank glass after glass.

‘‘Mama!’’ he would call in a low voice.

‘‘Well?’’ Karpovna would answer (she loved her adopted son to distraction). ‘‘What is it, sonny?’’

‘‘I can do you this indulgence, mama. For all my earthly life, I’ll feed you in your old age in this vale, and when you die, I’ll bury you at my own expense. I’ve said it, and it’s so.’’

I got up every day before sunrise and went to bed early. We housepainters ate a lot and slept soundly, only for some reason my heart beat hard during the night. I never quarreled with my comrades. Abuse, desperate curses, and such wishes as that your eyes should burst, or you should drop dead from cholera, never ceased all day, but nonetheless we still lived together amicably. The boys suspected I was a religious sectarian and made fun of me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father had renounced me, telling me straight off that they seldom saw the inside of God’s church themselves, and that many of them hadn’t gone to confession for ten years, and justifying such dissipation by saying that a housepainter is among people what a jackdaw is among birds.

The boys respected me and treated me with deference; they apparently liked it that I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and led a quiet, sedate life. They were only unpleasantly shocked that I didn’t take part in stealing drying oil and didn’t go to the clients with them to ask for a tip. Stealing the owner’s oil and paint was habitual among housepainters and was not considered theft, and remarkably, even such an upright man as Radish, each time he left a job, took along a little whiting and oil. And even venerable old men, who owned their own houses in Makarikha, weren’t ashamed to ask for a tip, and I found it vexing and shameful when the boys would go in a bunch to congratulate some nonentity for the start or the finish and, getting ten kopecks from him, thank him humbly.

With clients, they behaved like wily courtiers, and I recalled Shakespeare’s Polonius almost every day.

‘‘But surely it’s going to rain,’’ the client would say, looking at the sky.

‘‘It is, it certainly is!’’ the painters would agree.

‘‘Though the clouds aren’t the rainy sort. Perhaps it won’t rain.’’

‘‘It won’t, Your Honor! It sure won’t.’’

Behind their backs, their attitude to the clients was generally ironic, and when, for instance, they saw a gentleman sitting on a balcony with a newspaper, they would observe:

‘‘Reads the newspaper, but I bet he’s got nothing to eat.’’

I never went home to my family. On returning from work, I often found notes, short and anxious, in which my sister wrote to me about father: now he was somehow especially preoccupied and ate nothing at dinner, now he lost his balance, now he locked himself in his study and didn’t come out for a long time. Such news disturbed me, I couldn’t sleep, and sometimes even went past our house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya at night, looking into the dark windows and trying to make out whether everything was all right at home. On Sundays my sister came to see me, but on the sly, as if not to me but to our nanny. And if she came into my room, she would be very pale, with tearful eyes, and would begin to cry at once.

‘‘Our father won’t survive it!’’ she would say. ‘‘If, God forbid, something should happen to him, your conscience will torment you all your life. It’s terrible, Misail! I implore you in our mother’s name: mend your ways!’’

‘‘Sister, dear,’’ I would say, ‘‘how can I mend my ways if I’m convinced that I’m acting according to conscience? Try to understand!’’

‘‘I know it’s according to conscience, but maybe it could be done somehow differently, so as not to upset anyone.’’

‘‘Oh, dear me!’’ the old woman would sigh behind the door. ‘‘It’ll be your head! There’ll be trouble, my dearies, there’ll be trouble!’’

VI

ONE SUNDAY, DR. BLAGOVO unexpectedly appeared at my place. He was wearing a tunic over a silk shirt, and high patent-leather boots.

‘‘I’ve come to see you!’’ he began, shaking my hand firmly, student-fashion. ‘‘I hear about you every day and keep intending to come and have, as they say, a heart-to-heart talk. It’s terribly boring in town, not a single live soul, nobody to talk to. Heavenly Mother, it’s hot!’’ he went on, taking off his tunic and remaining in nothing but the silk shirt. ‘‘Dear heart, allow me to talk with you!’’

I was bored myself and had long wanted to be in the society of other than housepainters. I was sincerely glad to see him.

‘‘I’ll begin by saying,’’ he said, sitting down on my bed, ‘‘that I sympathize with you wholeheartedly and deeply respect this life of yours. Here in town you’re not understood, and there’s nobody to understand you, because, you know yourself, here, with very few exceptions, it’s all Gogol’s pig snouts.⁸ But I figured you out at once, that time at the picnic. You’re a noble soul, an honest, lofty man! I respect you and regard it as a great honor to shake your hand!’’ he went on rapturously. ‘‘To change your life as sharply and summarily as you did, one must have lived through a complex inner process, and to continue that life now and be constantly at the height of your convictions, you must work intensely in your mind and heart day after day. Now, to begin our conversation, tell me, don’t you find that if you expended this willpower, this intensity, this whole potential on something else, for instance, so as to become in time a great scholar or artist, your life would then expand more widely and deeply, and would be more productive in all respects?’’

We fell to talking, and when we began to discuss physical labor, I expressed the following thought: it is necessary that the strong not enslave the weak, that the minority not be parasites on the majority or a pump constantly pumping its best juices out of it; that is, it is necessary that everyone without exception—the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor—participate equally in the struggle for existence, each for himself, and there is no better means of leveling in this respect than physical labor in the quality of a common service obligatory for everyone.

‘‘So, in your opinion, everyone without exception should be occupied with physical labor?’’ asked the doctor.

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘But don’t you find that if everyone, including the best people, the thinkers and great scholars, as they participate in the struggle for existence, each for himself, begins to spend time crushing stone and painting roofs, it may pose a serious threat to progress?’’

‘‘What’s the danger?’’ I asked. ‘‘Progress lies in works of love, in the fulfillment of the moral law. If you don’t enslave anyone, are not a burden to anyone, what more progress do you want?’’

‘‘But excuse me!’’ Blagovo suddenly flared up, getting to his feet. ‘‘But excuse me! If the snail in its shell is occupied with personal self-perfection and dabbles in the moral law, do you call that progress?’’

‘‘Why dabbles?’’ I was offended. ‘‘If you don’t make your neighbors feed you, clothe you, drive you around, protect you from enemies, then isn’t that progress in a life that’s all built on slavery? In my opinion, that is the most genuine progress, and perhaps the only kind possible and necessary for man.’’

‘‘The limits of universally human world progress lie in infinity, and to speak of some ‘possible’ progress, limited by our needs or temporary views—that, forgive me, is even strange.’’

‘‘If the limits of progress lie in infinity, as you say, that means its goals are undefined,’’ I said. ‘‘To live and not know definitely what you’re living for!’’

‘‘So be it! But this ‘not knowing’ is not as boring as your ‘knowing.’ I’m climbing the ladder known as progress, civilization, culture, I go on and on without knowing definitely where I’m going, but really, for the sake of this wonderful ladder alone, life is worth living; while you know what you’re living for—so that some people will not enslave others, so that an artist and the man who grinds pigments for him will have the same dinner. But that is the gray, philistine, kitchen side of life, and to live for that alone—isn’t that disgusting? If some insects enslave others, devil take them, let them eat each other! We shouldn’t think about them—they’ll die and rot anyway, no matter how you save them from slavery—we must think about that great X that awaits all mankind in the distant future.’’

Blagovo argued hotly with me, but at the same time, he was noticeably troubled by some extraneous thought.

‘‘Your sister probably won’t come,’’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘‘Yesterday she visited my family and said she’d be here. You keep saying slavery, slavery...’ he went on. ‘‘But that is a specific problem, and all such problems get solved by mankind gradually, of themselves.’’

We began to talk about gradualness. I said that each of us resolves the question of whether to do good or evil for himself, without waiting until mankind approaches the resolution of the question by way of gradual development. Besides, gradualness was a stick with two ends. Alongside the process of the gradual development of humane ideas, there could be observed the gradual growth of ideas of a different sort. There is no serfdom, but capitalism is growing instead. And at the very height of liberating ideas, the majority, just as in the times of Batu Khan,⁹ feeds, clothes, and protects the minority while going hungry, naked, and unprotected itself. This order gets along splendidly with all trends and currents, because the art of enslavement is also gradually cultivated. We no longer thrash our lackeys in the stable, but we endow slavery with refined forms, or at least we know how to find a justification for it in each particular case. With us, ideas are ideas, but if now, at the end of the nineteenth century, it were possible to heap our most unpleasant physiological functions on workers, we would do it and then, of course, say in order to justify ourselves that if the best people, the thinkers and great scholars, started wasting their precious time on these functions, it might seriously threaten progress.

But then my sister came. Seeing the doctor, she began bustling, worrying, and right away began saying it was time for her to go home to father.

‘‘Cleopatra Alexeevna,’’ Blagovo said persuasively, pressing both hands to his heart, ‘‘what will happen to your dear papa if you spend a mere half hour with me and your brother?’’

He was simple-hearted and knew how to communicate his animation to others. My sister, having thought for a moment, laughed and became all merry suddenly, unexpectedly, like the other time at the picnic. We went into the fields and, settling in the grass, continued our conversation and looked at the town, where all the windows to the west seemed bright gold because of the setting sun.

After that, each time my sister came to see me, Blagovo appeared as well, and the two greeted each other as if their meeting at my place was accidental. My sister listened to me and the doctor arguing, and her expression then was joyfully rapturous, tender, and curious, and it seemed to me that a different world was gradually opening before her eyes, which she had never seen before even in dreams, and which she now tried to puzzle out. Without the doctor, she was quiet and sad, and if she wept occasionally, sitting on my bed, it was now for reasons she did not speak about.

In August, Radish told us to get ready to go to the railway line. A couple of days before we were ‘‘herded’’ out of town, my father came to see me. He sat down and wiped his red face unhurriedly, without looking at me, then took our town Messenger from his pocket and slowly, emphasizing each word, read that my peer, the son of the office manager of the State Bank, had been appointed head of a section in the treasury department.

‘‘And now look at yourself,’’ he said, folding the newspaper, ‘‘a beggar, a ragamuffin, a scoundrel! Even tradesmen and peasants get educated in order to become human beings, while you, a Poloznev, with noble, wellborn forebears, are striving towards the mud! But I haven’t come here to talk to you; I’ve already waved you aside,’’ he went on in a stifled voice, getting up. ‘‘I’ve come to find out where your sister is, you scoundrel! She left home after dinner, and it’s now past seven o’clock, and she’s not back. She’s started going out frequently without telling me, she’s less respectful—and I see in it your wicked, mean influence. Where is she?’’

In his hands was the umbrella I knew so well, and I already felt at a loss and stood at attention like a schoolboy, expecting my father to start beating me, but he noticed the glance I cast at the umbrella, and that probably held him back.

‘‘Live as you like!’’ he said. ‘‘I deprive you of my blessing!’’

‘‘Saints alive!’’ my nanny muttered behind the door. ‘‘Your poor, miserable head! Oh, there’s a foreboding in my heart, a foreboding!’’

I worked on the line. It rained ceaselessly all August, it was damp and cold; the grain wasn’t taken in from the fields, and on large estates, where they harvested with machines, the wheat lay not in sheaves but in heaps, and I remember how those sad heaps grew darker every day, and the grain sprouted in them. It was hard to work; the downpour ruined everything we managed to get done. We weren’t allowed to live and sleep in the station buildings, and took shelter in dirty, damp dugouts where the ‘‘railboys’’ lived in summer, and I couldn’t sleep at night from the cold and from the woodlice that crawled over my face and hands. And when we worked near the bridges, bands of ‘‘railboys’’ came in the evenings just to beat us painters—for them it was a kind of sport. They beat us, stole our brushes, and to taunt us and provoke us to fight, they ruined our work, for instance, by smearing green paint all over the booths. To crown all our troubles, Radish began to pay very irregularly. All the painting work at the site had been given to a contractor, who had subcontracted it to someone else, who in turn had subcontracted it to Radish, having negotiated twenty percent for himself. The work itself was unprofitable, and there was rain besides; time was lost for nothing, we didn’t work, but Radish was obliged to pay the boys by the day. The hungry painters almost beat him up, called him a crook, a blood-sucker, a Christ-selling Judas, and he, poor man, sighed, raised his hands to heaven in despair, and kept going to Mrs. Cheprakov for money.

VII

A RAINY, DIRTY, dark autumn came. Joblessness came, and I would sit at home for three days in a row with nothing to do, or perform various nonpainting jobs, for instance, carting earth for subflooring, getting twenty kopecks a day for it. Dr. Blagovo left for Petersburg. My sister stopped coming to see me. Radish lay at home sick, expecting to die any day.

My mood, too, was autumnal. Maybe because, having become a worker, I now saw our town life only from its underside, making discoveries almost every day that simply drove me to despair. Those of my fellow townsmen of whom I had previously had no opinion, or who from the outside had seemed quite decent, now turned out to be low people, cruel, capable of every nastiness. We simple people were deceived, cheated, made to wait whole hours in cold entries or kitchens; we were insulted and treated extremely rudely. In the autumn I hung wallpaper in the reading room and two other rooms of our club; I was paid seven kopecks a roll but was told to sign for twelve, and when I refused to do so, a decent-looking gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one of the club elders, said to me:

‘‘If you say any more about it, you blackguard, I’ll push your face in.’’

And when the footman whispered to him that I was the son of the architect Poloznev, he became embarrassed, turned red, but recovered at once and said:

‘‘Ah, devil take him!’’

In the shops, we workers were fobbed off with rotten meat, lumpy flour, and once-brewed tea; the police shoved us in church, the orderlies and nurses robbed us in hospitals, and if we, poor as we were, did not give them bribes, they fed us from dirty dishes in revenge; at the post office, the least clerk considered it his right to treat us like animals and shout rudely and insolently: ‘‘Wait! No shoving ahead!’’ The yard dogs—even they were unfriendly to us and attacked us with some special viciousness. But the main thing that struck me in my new condition was the total lack of fairness, precisely what is defined among the people by the words: ‘‘They have forgotten God.’’ Rarely did a day pass without cheating. The shopkeepers who sold us oil cheated; so did the contractors, and the workmen, and the clients themselves. It goes without saying that there could be no talk of any rights for us, and each time, we had to beg for the money we had earned as if it was alms, standing at the back door with our hats off.

I was hanging wallpaper in the club, in one of the rooms adjacent to the reading room; in the evening, as I was about to leave, the daughter of the engineer Dolzhikov came into the room with a stack of books in her hands.

I bowed to her.

‘‘Ah, hello!’’ she said, recognizing me at once and offering her hand. ‘‘I’m very glad to see you.’’

She was smiling and, with curiosity and perplexity, examined my smock, the bucket of paste, the wallpaper spread out on the floor. I was embarrassed, and she also felt awkward.

‘‘Excuse me for looking at you like this,’’ she said. ‘‘They’ve told me a lot about you. Especially Dr. Blagovo— he’s simply in love with you. And I’ve become acquainted with your sister; a dear, sympathetic girl, but I haven’t been able to convince her that there’s nothing terrible in your simplification. On the contrary, you’re now the most interesting person in town.’’

She glanced again at the bucket of paste, at the wallpaper, and went on:

‘‘I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but he obviously forgot or had no time. Be that as it may, we’re acquainted anyway, and if you were so good as simply to call on me one day, I’d be very much obliged to you. I do so want to talk! I’m a simple person,’’ she said, giving me her hand, ‘‘and I hope you won’t feel any constraint with me. Father’s not there, he’s in Petersburg.’’

She went to the reading room, rustling her skirts, and I, when I got home, was unable to fall asleep for a long time.

During this cheerless autumn, some kindly soul, evidently wishing to alleviate my existence a little, occasionally sent me now some tea and lemons, now some pastry, now a roast hazel grouse. Karpovna said it was brought each time by a soldier, but from whom she didn’t know; and the soldier asked whether I was in good health, whether I had dinner every day, and whether I had warm clothes. When the frosts struck, I received in the same way—in my absence, through a soldier—a soft knitted scarf that gave off a delicate, barely perceptible odor of perfume, and I guessed who my good fairy was. The scarf smelled of lily of the valley, Anyuta Blagovo’s favorite scent.

Towards winter we got more work, and things became more cheerful. Radish revived again, and we worked together in the cemetery church, where we primed the iconostasis¹⁰ for gilding. This was clean, peaceful work and, as our boys used to say, gainful. We could do a lot in one day, and the time passed quickly, imperceptibly. There was no cursing, or laughter, or loud talk. The place itself imposed silence and good order and was conducive to quiet, serious thoughts. Immersed in our work, we stood or sat motionless, like statues; there was a dead silence, as befitted a cemetery, so that if a tool was dropped or the flame sizzled in an icon lamp, these noises resounded sharply and hollowly—and we turned to look. After long silence, a humming would be heard, like the buzz of bees: this was a funeral service for an infant, being sung unhurriedly, softly, in a side chapel; or the artist painting a dove on the cupola with stars around it would start whistling quietly, then catch himself and fall silent at once; or Radish, answering his own thoughts, would say with a sigh: ‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s possible!’’; or a slow, mournful ringing would resound over our heads, and the painters would remark that it must be some rich man’s burial...

I spent my days in this silence, in this churchly dimness, and during the long evenings played billiards or went to the gallery of the theater in my new tricot suit, which I had bought with the money I earned. At the Azhogins’, theatricals and concerts had already begun; the sets were now painted by Radish alone. He told me the contents of the plays and tableaux vivants he saw at the Azhogins’, and I listened to him with envy. I had a strong yearning to attend the rehearsals, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to the Azhogins’.

A week before Christmas, Dr. Blagovo arrived. Again we argued and in the evenings played billiards. When he played, he took off his frock coat and unbuttoned his shirt on his chest, and generally tried to make himself look like a desperate carouser. He drank little but noisily and, in such a poor, cheap tavern as the Volga, managed to leave twenty roubles an evening.

Again my sister began to frequent me; the two of them, seeing each other, were surprised each time, but from her joyful, guilty face it was evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening while we were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:

‘‘Listen, why don’t you ever call on Miss Dolzhikov? You don’t know Marya Viktorovna, she’s intelligent, lovely, a simple, kind soul.’’

I told him how the engineer had received me in the spring.

‘‘Trifles!’’ the doctor laughed. ‘‘The engineer’s one thing, and she’s another. Really, dear heart, don’t offend her, go and see her one day. For instance, we could go and see her tomorrow evening. Do you want to?’’

He persuaded me. The next evening, donning my new tricot suit and feeling worried, I went to see Miss Dolzhikov. The footman no longer seemed so arrogant and fearsome, nor the furniture so luxurious, as on that morning when I went there as a petitioner. Marya Viktorovna was expecting me and greeted me like an old acquaintance, and gave my hand a firm, friendly shake. She was wearing a gray flannel dress with full sleeves, and a hairstyle which, when it became fashionable in our town a year later, was known as ‘‘dog’s ears.’’ The hair was combed down from the temples and over the ears, and it made Marya Viktorovna’s face seem broader, and this time she looked to me very much like her father, whose face was broad, ruddy, and had something of the coachman in its expression. She was beautiful and graceful but not young, around thirty by the look of it, though in reality she was no more than twenty-five.

‘‘The dear doctor, how grateful I am to him!’’ she said as she was seating me. ‘‘If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t have come to see me. I’m bored to death! Father went away and left me alone, and I don’t know what to do in this town.’’

Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned, where I lived.

‘‘You spend on yourself only what you earn?’’ she asked.

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Lucky man!’’ she sighed. ‘‘All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes from idleness, from boredom, from inner emptiness, and that is all inevitable when one is used to living at the expense of others. Don’t think I’m showing off, I tell you sincerely: it’s uninteresting and unpleasant to be rich. Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness ¹¹—so it says, because generally there is not and cannot be a mammon of righteousness.’’

She looked the furniture over with a serious, cold expression, as if she was taking an inventory, and went on:

‘‘Comfort and conveniences possess a magic power; they gradually suck in even strong-willed people. My father and I once lived moderately and simply, but now you see how. Who ever heard of it,’’ she said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘‘we go through twenty thousand a year! In the provinces!’’

‘‘Comfort and conveniences are to be regarded as the inevitable privilege of capital and education,’’ I said, ‘‘and it seems to me that life’s conveniences can be combined with any sort of labor, even the heaviest and dirtiest. Your father is rich, yet, as he says, he had to work as an engine driver and a simple oiler.’’

She smiled and shook her head doubtfully.

‘‘Papa sometimes eats bread soaked in kvass,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a whim, for fun!’’

Just then the bell rang, and she got up.

‘‘The educated and the rich should work like everyone else,’’ she went on, ‘‘and if there’s comfort, it should be the same for everyone. There should be no privileges. Well, God help philosophy! Tell me something merry. Tell me about housepainters. What are they like? Funny?’’

The doctor came in. I began telling about housepainters but was abashed, being unaccustomed, and spoke like an ethnographer, gravely and ploddingly. The doctor also told a few anecdotes from the workmanly life. He staggered, wept, fell on his knees, and, in portraying a drunkard, even lay on the floor. It was a real actor’s performance, and Marya Viktorovna, as she watched him, laughed to the point of tears. Then he played the piano and sang in his pleasant, thin tenor, and Marya Viktorovna stood beside him, choosing what he should sing and correcting him when he made mistakes.

‘‘I hear that you also sing?’’ I asked.

‘‘Also!’’ The doctor was horrified. ‘‘She’s a wonderful singer, an artist, and you say ‘also’! That’s a bit much!’’

‘‘I once studied seriously,’’ she said in answer to my question, ‘‘but now I’ve dropped it.’’

Sitting on a low stool, she told us about her life in Petersburg and impersonated well-known singers, mimicking their voices and manners of singing; she drew the doctor in her album, then me; she drew badly, but we both came out looking like ourselves. She laughed, was mischievous, grimaced sweetly, and this suited her more than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness, and it seemed to me that what she had said to me earlier about riches and comfort wasn’t serious but was an imitation of someone. She was a superb comic actress. I mentally placed her beside our young ladies, and even the beautiful, grave Anyuta Blagovo could not bear comparison with her; the difference was enormous, as between a fine cultivated rose and a wild brier.

The three of us had dinner. The doctor and Marya Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with cognac; they clinked glasses and toasted friendship, reason, progress, freedom, and they didn’t get drunk, but only turned red and often laughed loudly for no reason, to the point of tears. So as not to seem dull, I also drank red wine.

‘‘Talented, richly endowed natures,’’ said Miss Dolzhikov, ‘‘know how to live and follow their own path; but average people, like me, for instance, don’t know anything and can’t do anything themselves; nothing remains for them but to pick out some deep social current and float off where it takes them.’’

‘‘Is it possible to pick out what’s not there?’’ asked the doctor.

‘‘Not there, because we don’t see it.’’

‘‘Is that so? Social currents are an invention of the new literature. We don’t have any.’’

An argument began.

‘‘We don’t have and never have had any deep social currents,’’ the doctor said loudly. ‘‘What has the new literature not invented! It has also invented some sort of intellectual laborers in the villages, but go around all our villages and you’ll find only some Disrespect-Trough¹² in a jacket or a black frock coat who makes four spelling errors in the word ‘although.’ Our cultural life hasn’t begun yet. The same savagery, the same overall boorishness, the same worthlessness as five hundred years ago. Currents, trends, but all this is petty, miserable, hitched to a banal groatsworth of little interests—how can we see anything serious in it? If you imagine you’ve picked out some deep social current and, following it, devote your life to such tasks in the contemporary taste as liberating insects from slavery or abstaining from beef cutlets, then—I congratulate you, madam. Study is what we must do, study and study, and let’s wait a little with social currents: we haven’t grown up to them yet and, in all conscience, understand nothing about them.’’

‘‘You don’t understand, but I do,’’ said Marya Viktorovna. ‘‘You’re God knows how boring today!’’

‘‘Our business is to study and study, to try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, because serious social currents are there where knowledge is, and the happiness of future mankind lies only in knowledge. I drink to learning!’’

‘‘One thing is unquestionable: one should set up one’s life somehow differently,’’ said Marya Viktorovna, after some silence and reflection, ‘‘and life as it has been so far is worth nothing. We won’t talk about it.’’

As we left her house, it was already striking two at the cathedral.

‘‘Did you like her?’’ asked the doctor. ‘‘Nice, isn’t she?’’

On Christmas day we dined with Marya Viktorovna and then, in the course of all the holidays, went to see her almost every day. No one visited her except us, and she was right when she said that, except for me and the doctor, she had no acquaintances in town. We spent most of the time talking: occasionally the doctor brought along some book or magazine and read aloud to us. Essentially, he was the first educated man I had met in my life. I can’t judge how much he knew, but he constantly showed his knowledge, because he wanted others to know as well. When he talked about something related to medicine, he bore no resemblance to any of our town doctors but produced a new, special impression, and it seemed to me that if he had wanted to, he could have become a real scientist. And this was perhaps the only man who had a serious influence on me at that time. Seeing him and reading the books he gave me, I gradually began to feel a need for knowledge that would inspire my cheerless labor. It now seemed strange to me that I hadn’t known before, for example, that the entire world consists of sixty elements, hadn’t known what linseed oil was, what paints were, and somehow could have done without this knowledge. Acquaintance with the doctor raised me morally as well. I often argued with him, and though I usually stuck to my own opinion, still, owing to him, I gradually began to notice that not everything was clear to me, and I then tried to work out for myself some possibly definite convictions, so that the dictates of my conscience would be definite and have nothing vague about them. Nevertheless, this best and most educated man in town was still far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of reducing every conversation to an argument, in his pleasant tenor voice, and even in his gentleness, there was something slightly coarse, something of the seminarian,¹³ and when he took off his frock coat and remained in nothing but his silk shirt, or when he tossed a tip to a waiter in a tavern, it seemed to me each time that culture is culture, but there was still a Tartar fermenting in him.

At the Baptism,¹⁴ he left for Petersburg again. He left in the morning, and after dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off her coat and hat, she sat silently, very pale, and stared at one spot. She was shivering but clearly trying to carry on.

‘‘You must have caught a cold,’’ I said.

Her eyes filled with tears, she got up and went to Karpovna without saying a word to me, as if I had offended her. A little later, I heard her speaking in a tone of bitter reproach:

‘‘Nanny, what have I been living for till now? Why? Tell me: haven’t I ruined my youth? To spend the best years of your life doing nothing but writing down expenses, pouring tea, counting kopecks, entertaining guests, and thinking that there was nothing higher than that in the world! Nanny, understand, I, too, have human needs, and I want to live, but I’ve been made into some sort of housekeeper. It’s terrible, terrible!’’

She flung the keys through the doorway, and they landed in my room with a jingle. These were the keys to the sideboard, the pantry, the cellar, and the tea chest—the same keys my mother once carried.

‘‘Ah, oh, dear hearts!’’ the old woman was horrified. ‘‘Saints in heaven!’’

Before going home, my sister came to my room to pick up the keys and said:

‘‘Excuse me. Something strange has been happening to me lately.’’

VIII

ONCE, COMING HOME from Marya Viktorovna’s late in the evening, I found in my room a young police officer in a new uniform; he was sitting at my table and leafing through a book.

‘‘At last!’’ he said, getting up and stretching. ‘‘This is the third time I’ve come to you. The governor orders you to come to him tomorrow at exactly nine o’clock in the morning. Without fail.’’

He had me sign a statement that I would carry out His Excellency’s order punctually, and left. This late visit from a police officer and the unexpected invitation to the governor’s affected me in a most oppressive manner. From early childhood, a fear of gendarmes, policemen, magistrates had remained in me, and I was now tormented by anguish, as if I was indeed guilty of something. And I was quite unable to fall asleep. Nanny and Prokofy were also agitated and couldn’t sleep. Besides that, nanny had an earache; she moaned and began to cry several times from the pain. Hearing that I was not asleep, Prokofy cautiously came into my room with a lamp and sat at the table.

‘‘You ought to drink some pepper vodka...’ he said, pondering. ‘‘In this vale, once you’ve had a drink, it feels all right. And if mama took a drop of pepper vodka in her ear, it would be a great benefit.’’

Between two and three o’clock, he got ready to go to the slaughterhouse for meat. I knew I wouldn’t sleep before morning, and to while away the time till nine o’clock, I went with him. We walked with a lantern, and his boy, Nikolka, about thirteen years old, with blue spots on his face from the cold and the look of a perfect robber, drove after us with the sledge, urging the horse on in a husky voice.

‘‘Must be they’re going to punish you at the governor’s,’’ Prokofy said to me on the way. ‘‘There’s governor’s learning, there’s archimandrite’s learning, there’s officer’s learning, there’s doctor’s learning, for every title there’s its learning. But you don’t keep to your learning, and you shouldn’t be allowed.’’

The slaughterhouse was beyond the cemetery, and I had previously seen it only from a distance. It was three dismal sheds surrounded by a gray fence, and on hot summer days, when the wind blew from that direction, it gave off a choking stench. Now, going into the yard, I couldn’t see the sheds in the darkness, I kept running into horses and sledges, empty or already loaded with meat; people with lanterns walked about cursing repulsively. Prokofy and Nikolka cursed as vilely, and a constant noise of cursing, coughing, and the whinnying of horses hung in the air.

It smelled of corpses and dung. The melting snow was mixed with mud, and it seemed to me in the darkness that I was walking on pools of blood.

Having filled the sledges with meat, we went to the butcher shop at the market. Dawn was breaking. Cooks with baskets and elderly ladies in overcoats walked by one after the other. Prokofy, with a meat axe in his hand, in a blood-spattered white apron, swore terribly, crossed himself towards the church, shouted loudly enough for the whole marketplace to hear, claiming that he was giving the meat away at cost and was even losing on it. He short-weighed, short-changed, the cooks saw it, but, deafened by his shouting, did not protest but only called him a hangman. As he raised and lowered his terrible meat axe, he assumed picturesque poses and, with a ferocious look, emitted a loud ‘‘Hack!’’ each time, and I was afraid he would indeed cut off somebody’s head or arm.

I stayed in the butcher shop all morning, and when I finally went to the governor’s, my coat smelled of meat and blood. I was in such a mental state as if, on somebody’s orders, I was going for bear with a spear. I remember a high stairway with a striped runner, and a young official in a tailcoat with bright buttons, who silently pointed me to the door with both hands and ran to announce me. I entered a reception hall in which the furnishings were luxurious but cold and tasteless, and the tall, narrow mirrors between the windows and the bright yellow curtains struck the eye especially unpleasantly; one could see that the governors changed but the furnishings remained the same. The young official again pointed me to the door with both hands, and I went to a big green desk behind which stood an army general with a Vladimir on his neck.¹⁵

‘‘Mr. Poloznev, I have asked you to appear,’’ he began, holding some letter in his hand and opening his mouth round and wide like an O, ‘‘I have asked you to appear in order to announce to you the following. Your esteemed father has addressed the provincial marshal of the nobility in writing and verbally, asking him to summon you and bring to your attention all the incompatibility of your behavior with the rank of a nobleman, which you have the honor of bearing. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, correctly supposing that your behavior may be a temptation, and finding that on his part, persuasion alone would be insufficient here, and that serious administrative intervention was necessary, has presented me in this letter with his considerations concerning you, which I share.’’

He said this quietly, respectfully, standing at attention as if I was his superior, and looking at me without any severity. His face was flabby, worn, all wrinkled, there were bags hanging under his eyes, his hair was dyed, and generally it was impossible to tell by his appearance how old he was— forty or sixty.

‘‘I hope,’’ he went on, ‘‘that you will appreciate the delicacy of the esteemed Alexander Pavlovich, who has addressed me not officially but in a private manner. I have also summoned you unofficially, and I am speaking to you not as a governor but as a sincere admirer of your parent. And so I ask you either to change your behavior and return to the duties proper to your rank, or, to avoid temptation, to relocate in another place, where people do not know you and where you can occupy yourself with whatever you like. Otherwise I shall have to take extreme measures.’’

He stood silently for about half a minute, with his mouth open, looking at me.

‘‘Are you a vegetarian?’’ he asked.

‘‘No, Your Excellency, I eat meat.’’

He sat down and drew some paper towards him; I bowed and left.

It wasn’t worth going to work before dinner. I went home to sleep, but could not fall asleep because of the unpleasant, morbid feeling brought upon me by the slaughterhouse and the talk with the governor, and, waiting till evening, upset, gloomy, I went to see Marya Viktorovna. I told her about my visit to the governor, and she looked at me in perplexity, as if she didn’t believe me, and suddenly laughed merrily, loudly, impetuously, as only good-natured, easily amused people know how to laugh.

‘‘If I were to tell that in Petersburg!’’ she said, nearly dropping with laughter and leaning on her desk. ‘‘If I were to tell that in Petersburg!’’

IX

WE NOW SAW each other often, about twice a day. Almost every day after dinner she came to the cemetery and, while waiting for me, read the inscriptions on the crosses and tombstones; sometimes she went into the church and, standing beside me, watched me work. The silence, the naïve work of the artists and gilders, Radish’s reasonings, and the fact that externally I was no different from the other craftsmen and worked, like them, only in a vest and old shoes, and that they addressed me familiarly—all this was new to her and moved her. Once, in her presence, the artist who was painting the dove up top shouted to me:

‘‘Misail, bring me some whiting!’’

I fetched him some whiting, and as I came down the flimsy scaffolding afterwards, she watched me, moved to tears and smiling.

‘‘How nice you are!’’ she said.

The memory had stayed with me since childhood of how a green parrot belonging to one of our wealthy people escaped its cage, and how after that the beautiful bird wandered about town for a whole month, lazily flying from one garden to another, lonely, shelterless. And Marya Viktorovna reminded me of that bird.

‘‘I now have positively nowhere to go except the cemetery,’’ she said to me, laughing. ‘‘This town bores me to the point of loathing. At the Azhogins’ they read, sing, lisp, I can’t bear them lately; your sister is unsociable, Mlle. Blagovo hates me for some reason, I don’t like the theater. What do you suggest I do?’’

When I called on her, I smelled of paint and turpentine, my hands were dark—and she liked that; she also wanted me to come to her not otherwise than in my ordinary working clothes; but those clothes hampered me in the drawing room, I was embarrassed, as if I was wearing a uniform, and therefore, when I went to her, I always put on my new tricot suit. And she didn’t like it.

‘‘But confess, you don’t quite feel comfortable in your new role,’’ she said to me once. ‘‘Your working costume hampers you, you feel awkward in it. Tell me, isn’t that because you have no assurance and are not satisfied? The very kind of work you’ve chosen, this painting spell of yours, can it be that it satisfies you?’’ she asked, laughing. ‘‘I know painting makes things prettier and more durable, but these things belong to the townspeople, the rich, and in the end constitute a luxury. Besides, you yourself have said more than once that each man should procure his bread with his own hands, while you procure money, not bread. Why don’t you stick to the literal meaning of your words? You should procure precisely bread, that is, you should plow, sow, mow, thresh, or do something that has a direct relation to farming, for instance, tend cattle, till the earth, build cottages...’

She opened a pretty bookcase that stood by her desk and said:

‘‘I’m saying all this because I want to initiate you into my secret. Voilà! This is my farming library. Here are fields, and kitchen garden, and orchard, and cattle yard, and apiary. I read them avidly and in terms of theory have already studied everything to the last jot. My dream, my sweet dream, is to go to our Dubechnya as soon as March comes. It’s wonderful there, marvelous! Isn’t that so? For the first year I’ll observe things and get accustomed to them, and the next year I’ll work myself in a real way, give it my all, as they say. Father has promised me Dubechnya, and I can do whatever I like with it.’’

All flushed, excited to the point of tears, and laughing, she dreamed aloud of how she would live in Dubechnya and what an interesting life it would be. And I envied her. March was already near, the days were getting longer and longer, and on bright sunny afternoons the roofs dripped and it smelled of spring. I would have liked to go to the country myself.

And when she said she would move to live in Dubechnya, I vividly pictured how I would remain alone in town, and I felt jealous of her bookcase and of farming. I didn’t know and didn’t like farming, and was about to tell her that farming was a slavish occupation, but remembered that my father had said something like that more than once, and kept silent.

Lent came. The engineer Viktor Ivanych, whose existence I was beginning to forget, arrived from Petersburg. He arrived unexpectedly, without even a warning telegram. When I came in the evening as usual, he, scrubbed, hair trimmed, looking ten years younger, was pacing the drawing room and telling about something; his daughter was on her knees, taking boxes, flacons, and books from the suitcases and handing it all to the footman Pavel. Seeing the engineer, I involuntarily stepped back, but he held out both arms to me and said, smiling, showing his white, strong coachman’s teeth:

‘‘Here he is, here he is! Very glad to see you, Mr. Housepainter! Masha has told me everything, she’s sung a whole panegyric to you here. I fully understand and approve of you!’’ he went on, taking me under the arm. ‘‘To be a decent worker is much more intelligent and honest than to waste official stationery and wear a cockade on your forehead. I myself worked in Belgium, with these hands, then spent two years as an engine driver...’

He was wearing a short jacket and slippers for around the house, and walked like a man with gout, waddling slightly and rubbing his hands. Humming something, he murmured softly and kept hugging himself with satisfaction that he had finally come back home and taken his beloved shower.

‘‘Indisputably,’’ he said to me over supper, ‘‘indisputably, you’re all nice, sympathetic people, but for some reason, gentlemen, as soon as you undertake some physical labor or start saving muzhiks, it all comes down in the end to sectarianism. Aren’t you a sectarian? Look, you don’t drink vodka. What’s that if not sectarianism?’’

To give him pleasure, I drank some vodka. I also drank some wine. We sampled cheeses, sausages, pâtés, pickles, and various delicacies the engineer had brought along, and the wines received from abroad during his absence. The wines were excellent. For some reason, the engineer received wines and cigars from abroad tax-free; someone sent him caviar and smoked fish gratis, he paid no rent for his apartment because the owner of the house supplied the railway line with kerosene; and in general, he and his daughter gave me the impression that everything best in the world was at their disposal, and they received it completely gratis.

I continued to frequent them, but no longer as willingly. The engineer hampered me, and I felt constrained in his presence. I couldn’t stand his clear, innocent eyes, his reasonings oppressed me, disgusted me; oppressive, too, was the memory of my being so recently a subordinate of this well-nourished, ruddy man, and of his being mercilessly rude to me. True, he put his arm around my waist, patted me benignly on the shoulder, approved of my life, but I felt that he scorned my nonentity as much as before and put up with me only to please his daughter; I could no longer laugh and say what I liked, I behaved unsociably and kept waiting every moment for him to call me Pantelei, as he did his footman Pavel. How exasperated my provincial, philistine pride was! I, a proletarian, a housepainter, go every day to see rich people, strangers to me, whom the whole town looks upon as foreigners, and every day drink expensive wines with them and eat exotic things—my conscience refused to be reconciled with it! On the way to them, I sullenly avoided passersby and looked from under my brows, as if I was indeed a sectarian, and when I went home from the engineer’s, I was ashamed of my satiety.

And above all, I was afraid of becoming infatuated. Whether I was walking down the street, or working, or talking with the boys, all I thought about the whole time was how in the evening I would go to Marya Viktorovna’s, and I imagined her voice, her laughter, her gait. Before going to her each time, I stood for a long while in front of my nanny’s crooked mirror, tying my necktie; I found my tricot suit repulsive, and I suffered and at the same time despised myself for being so petty. When she called to me from the other room to say she was undressed and asked me to wait, I listened to her getting dressed; this excited me, I felt as if the floor was giving way under me. And when I saw a female figure in the street, even from afar, I invariably made the comparison; it seemed to me then that all our women and girls were vulgarly, absurdly dressed and did not know how to behave; and these comparisons aroused a feeling of pride in me: Marya Viktorovna was the best of all! And at night I saw the two of us in my dreams.

Once, at supper, the engineer and I ate a whole lobster together. Going home then, I remembered that at supper the engineer had twice addressed me as ‘‘my most gentle,’’ and I reasoned that I was being petted in this house like a big, unhappy dog that has lost its master, that I was an amusement, and when they tired of me, they would chase me away like a dog. I felt ashamed and pained, pained to the point of tears, as if I had been insulted, and, looking at the heavens, I vowed to put an end to all this.

The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikovs’. Late in the evening, when it was quite dark and pouring rain, I walked down Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, looking at the windows. The Azhogins were already asleep, and only in one of the end windows was there a light; it was the old Azhogin woman in her bedroom, doing embroidery to the light of three candles, imagining she was fighting prejudice. Our house was dark, and in the house across the street, at the Dolzhikovs’, there was light in the windows, but nothing could be seen through the flowers and curtains. I kept walking up and down the street; the cold March rain poured down on me. I heard my father come back from the club; he knocked at the gate, a minute later there was light in the window, and I saw my sister walking hurriedly with a lamp, straightening her thick hair with one hand as she went. Then father paced up and down the drawing room and talked about something, rubbing his hands, and my sister sat motionless in an armchair, thinking about something, not listening to him.

But then they left, the light went out... I turned to look at the engineer’s house—there, too, it was dark now. In the darkness, under the rain, I felt myself hopelessly lonely, abandoned to my fate, felt that, compared with this solitude of mine, compared with my suffering, the present and that which still lay ahead of me in life, all my deeds, desires, and all that I had thought and said till now, were terribly petty. Alas, the deeds and thoughts of living beings are far less significant than their sorrows! And without giving myself a clear account of what I was doing, I pulled with all my might on the doorbell at the Dolzhikovs’ gate, tore it off, and ran down the street like a little boy, feeling afraid and thinking that now they were sure to come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to catch my breath, the only thing to be heard was the sound of the rain and a night watchman rapping on an iron bar somewhere far away.

For a whole week, I didn’t go to the Dolzhikovs’. The tricot suit got sold. There was no painting work, and again I starved, earning ten or twenty kopecks a day, wherever I could, by heavy, unpleasant work. Floundering knee-deep in cold mud, straining my chest, I wanted to stifle my memories, as if taking revenge on myself for all those cheeses and potted meats I had been treated to at the engineer’s; but all the same, as soon as I went to bed, hungry and wet, my sinful imagination began at once to paint wonderful, seductive pictures, and I confessed to myself in amazement that I was in love, passionately in love, and I would fall asleep soundly and healthily, feeling that this life of hard labor only made my body stronger and younger.

On one of those evenings, it snowed unseasonably, and the wind blew from the north as if winter was coming again. On returning from work that evening, I found Marya Viktorovna in my room. She was sitting in her fur coat, holding both hands in her muff.

‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she asked, raising her intelligent, clear eyes, while I was greatly embarrassed from joy and stood at attention before her, as before my father when he was about to beat me; she looked into my face, and I could see from her eyes that she understood why I was embarrassed.

‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she repeated. ‘‘If you don’t want to come, here, I’ve come myself.’’

She stood up and came close to me.

‘‘Don’t abandon me,’’ she said, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘‘I’m alone, completely alone!’’

She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:

‘‘Alone! It’s hard for me to live, very hard, and I have no one in the whole world except you. Don’t abandon me!’’

Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears, she smiled; we were silent for a while, then I embraced and kissed her, getting a bloody scratch on my cheek as I did so from the pin that held her hat.

And we began talking as if we had been close to each other for a long, long time...

X

SOME TWO DAYS later, she sent me to Dubechnya, and I was unspeakably glad of it. On my way to the station, and then sitting on the train, I laughed for no reason, and people looked at me as if I was drunk. It was snowing, and there were morning frosts, but the roads had already darkened, and rooks, crowing, flitted over them.

At first I planned to set up quarters for the two of us, Masha and me, in the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov’s wing, but it turned out that it had long been inhabited by pigeons and ducks, and it would be impossible to clean it out without destroying a multitude of nests. I had, willy-nilly, to go to the inhospitable rooms of the big house with jalousies. The muzhiks called this house a mansion; it had more than twenty rooms and no furniture except the piano and a child’s chair that lay in the attic, and if Masha had brought all her furniture from town, even then we would not have managed to get rid of this impression of gloomy emptiness and coldness. I chose three smaller rooms with windows on the garden, and cleaned them from early morning till night, putting in new window glass, hanging wallpaper, filling the cracks and holes in the floor. It was easy, pleasant work. Time and again I ran to the river to see if the ice was breaking up; I kept imagining that the starlings had flown back. And at night, thinking about Masha, I listened, with an inexpressibly sweet feeling, with a thrilling joy, to the sound of the rats and the wind howling and knocking above the ceiling; it seemed as though some old household spirit was coughing in the attic.

The snow was deep; at the end of March, a lot more poured down, but it melted quickly, as if by magic, the spring waters flowed stormily, and by the beginning of April the starlings were already making their racket, and yellow butterflies flew about the garden. The weather was wonderful. Every day towards evening, I headed for town to meet Masha, and what a pleasure it was to go barefoot on the drying, still-soft road! Halfway there, I would sit down and look at the town, not venturing to go nearer. The sight of it perplexed me. I kept thinking: how would my acquaintances treat me when they learned of my love? What would my father say? Especially perplexing was the thought that my life had become more complicated, and I had totally lost the ability to control it, and, like a big balloon, it was carrying me God knows where. I no longer thought of how to provide nourishment for myself, how to live, but thought—I truly can’t remember of what.

Masha would come in a carriage; I would get in with her, and we would go to Dubechnya together, merry, free. Or, after waiting till sunset, I would return home displeased, downcast, puzzling over why Masha hadn’t come, and by the gates of the estate or in the garden, a sweet phantom— she!—would meet me unexpectedly! It turned out that she had come by train and walked from the station. How festive it was! In a simple woolen dress, in a kerchief, with a modest parasol, but tightly laced, trim, in expensive imported shoes—this was a talented actress playing the little tradeswoman. We looked over our domain, deciding which room was whose, where we would have alleys, the kitchen garden, the apiary. We already had chickens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were ours. We already had oats, clover, timothy, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds ready for sowing, and we examined it all each time and had long discussions of what the harvest might be, and everything Masha said seemed to me remarkably intelligent and beautiful. This was the happiest time of my life.

Soon after Saint Thomas’s Sunday,¹⁶ we were married in our parish church, in the village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubechnya. Masha wanted everything to be done modestly; at her wish, we had peasant lads as best men, the beadle did all the singing, and we came home from church in a small, jolty tarantass, and she herself did the driving. Our only guest from town was my sister Cleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the wedding. My sister wore a white dress and gloves. During the ceremony, she cried quietly from tenderness and joy, the expression of her face was motherly, infinitely kind. She was drunk with our happiness and smiled as though she was inhaling sweet fumes, and, looking at her during our wedding, I understood that for her there was nothing higher in the world than love, earthly love, and that she dreamed of it secretly, timorously, but constantly and passionately. She embraced and kissed Masha and, not knowing how to express her rapture, kept saying to her about me: ‘‘He’s kind! He’s very kind!’’

Before leaving us, she changed into her ordinary dress and led me to the garden to talk with me one to one.

‘‘Father is very upset that you didn’t write anything to him,’’ she said. ‘‘You should have asked his blessing. But essentially he’s very pleased. He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of all society, and that under the influence of Marya Viktorovna, you’ll take a more serious attitude towards life. In the evenings we talk only about you, and yesterday he even used the phrase ‘our Misail.’ That made me glad. Evidently he has something in mind, and it seems he wants to show you an example of magnanimity and be the first to start talking about a reconciliation. It’s very possible that he’ll come to see you one of these days.’’

She hastily crossed me several times and said:

‘‘Well, God be with you, I wish you happiness. Anyuta Blagovo is a very intelligent girl, she says of your marriage that God is sending you a new test. What, then? In family life there are not only joys but also sufferings. It’s impossible without that.’’

Seeing her off, Masha and I went on foot about two miles; then, on the way back, we walked slowly and silently, as if resting. Masha held my hand, our hearts were light, and we no longer wanted to speak of love; after our marriage, we became still closer and dearer to each other, and it seemed to us that nothing could separate us now.

‘‘Your sister is a sympathetic being,’’ said Masha, ‘‘but it looks as though she’s been tormented for a long time. Your father must be a terrible man.’’

I began to tell her how my sister and I had been brought up and indeed how tormenting and senseless our childhood had been. Learning that my father had beaten me still so recently, she shuddered and pressed herself to me.

‘‘Don’t tell me any more,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s frightening.’’

Now she never parted from me. We lived in the big house, in three rooms, and in the evening tightly bolted the door leading to the empty part of the house, as if someone lived there whom we did not know and were afraid of. I got up early, at dawn, and straightaway started some work. I repaired the carts, laid out the paths in the garden, dug the flower beds, painted the roof of the house. When the time came for sowing oats, I tried my hand at cross-plowing, harrowing, sowing, and I did it all conscientiously, without lagging behind the hired man; I’d get tired from the rain, and the sharp, cold wind made my face and legs burn for a long time, and at night I dreamed of plowed earth. But working in the fields did not attract me. I didn’t know farming and didn’t like it; the reason for that might have been that my ancestors were not tillers of the soil, and pure city blood flowed in my veins. Nature I loved tenderly, I loved the fields and meadows, and the kitchen garden, but the muzhik turning over the soil with a wooden plow, bedraggled, wet, his neck stretched out, urging on his pitiful horse, was for me the expression of a crude, wild, ugly force, and each time I looked at his clumsy movements, I involuntarily began to think of that long-gone, legendary life before people knew the use of fire. The stern bull going about with the peasant’s herd, and the horses, when they raced through the village, their hooves pounding, inspired fear in me, and everything at all big, strong, and angry, whether it was a ram with horns, a gander, or a watchdog, was to me an expression of the same crude, wild force. This prejudice spoke in me especially strongly during bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plowed fields. But above all, when I plowed or sowed, and two or three people stood and watched me do it, I had no consciousness that this labor was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing myself. And I preferred to do something in the yard and liked nothing so much as painting the roof.

I used to go through the garden and through the meadow to our mill. It was leased to Stepan, a muzhik from Kurilovka, handsome, swarthy, with a thick black beard, a very strong man by the look of him. He didn’t like the work at the mill, and considered it boring and unprofitable, and he lived at the mill only so as not to live at home. He was a harness-maker, and there was always a pleasant smell of tar and leather about him. He didn’t like talking, was sluggish, inert, and kept crooning ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo’’ to himself as he sat on the riverbank or in the doorway. Occasionally his wife and mother-in-law would come to him from Kurilovka, both of them fair-skinned, languid, meek; they bowed low to him and addressed him formally as ‘‘Stepan Petrovich.’’ But he, not responding to their bows either by a gesture or by a word, sat apart on the riverbank and crooned softly ‘‘Ooloo-loo-loo.’’ An hour or two would pass in silence. Mother-in-law and wife would exchange whispers, get up, look at him for some time, waiting for him to turn and look at them, then bow low and say in sweet, singsong voices:

‘‘Good-bye, Stepan Petrovich!’’

And go away. After that, picking up a bundle of bread rolls or a shirt, Stepan would sigh and say, winking in their direction:

‘‘The female sex!’’

The mill, with its two sets of millstones, worked day and night. I helped Stepan, it was to my liking, and when he went off somewhere, I willingly stayed in his place.

XI

AFTER THE WARM, clear weather came mud time; it rained all through May, and it was cold. The noise of the mill wheels and the rain disposed one to laziness and sleepiness. The floor trembled, there was a smell of flour, and that also made one drowsy. My wife, in a short fur coat and high, man’s rubber boots, put in an appearance twice a day and always said one and the same thing:

‘‘And they call this summer! It’s worse than October!’’

Together we drank tea, cooked kasha, or sat silently for long hours waiting for the rain to stop. Once, when Stepan went off to a country fair somewhere, Masha spent the whole night at the mill. When we got up, it was impossible to tell what time it was, because the rain clouds covered the sky; only sleepy roosters crowed in Dubechnya, and corncrakes called in the meadow; it was still very, very early... My wife and I went down to the pool and pulled out the creel Stepan had set in our presence the day before. One big perch was struggling in it, and a bristling crayfish, his claw thrust up.

‘‘Let them out,’’ said Masha. ‘‘Let them be happy, too.’’

Because we got up very early and then did nothing, this day seemed very long, the longest in my life. Before evening Stepan came back, and I went home to the farmhouse.

‘‘Your father came today,’’ Masha told me.

‘‘Where is he?’’ I asked.

‘‘He left. I didn’t receive him.’’

Seeing that I stood there and said nothing, that I felt sorry for my father, she said:

‘‘One must be consistent. I didn’t receive him and sent word to him that he needn’t trouble himself anymore by coming to see us.’’

A minute later, I was out the gate and on my way to town to talk things over with my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time since the wedding, I felt sad, and in my brain, weary from this long, gray day, the thought flashed that maybe I wasn’t living as I should. I was worn out, I gradually succumbed to faintheartedness, laziness, I didn’t want to move, to think, and, having gone a little way, I waved my hand and turned back.

In the middle of the yard stood the engineer in a leather coat with a hood, speaking loudly:

‘‘Where’s the furniture? There was fine furniture in the Empire style, there were paintings, there were vases, and now you could play skittles in it! I bought the estate with the furniture, devil take it!’’

Beside him, crumpling his hat in his hands, stood the widow Cheprakov’s hired man Moisei, a fellow of about twenty-five, skinny, slightly pockmarked, with insolent little eyes; one of his cheeks was slightly bigger than the other, as if he had slept on it.

‘‘You bought it without the furniture, if you please, Your Honor,’’ he said hesitantly. ‘‘I remember it, sir.’’

‘‘Silence!’’ the engineer shouted, turned purple, shook, and the echo in the garden loudly repeated his shout.

XII

WHENEVER I WAS doing something in the garden or the yard, Moisei stood nearby and, with his hands behind his back, watched me lazily and insolently with his little eyes. And this annoyed me so much that I would abandon my work and leave.

We learned from Stepan that this Moisei was the widow’s lover. I noticed that when people came to her for money, they first addressed themselves to Moisei, and once I saw a muzhik, all black, probably a coal shoveler, bow down at his feet; sometimes, after some whispering, he handed the money over himself, without telling the lady, from which I concluded that on occasion he operated independently, on his own account.

He went shooting in the garden under our windows, pilfered food from our cellar, took the horses without asking, and we became indignant, ceasing to believe that Dubechnya was ours, and Masha would say, turning pale:

‘‘Do we really have to live with these vermin for another year and a half?’

The widow’s son, Ivan Cheprakov, served as a conductor on our railway. Over the winter he had grown very thin and weak, so that one glass made him drunk, and he felt cold in the shade. He wore conductor’s dress with disgust and was ashamed of it, but he considered his post profitable because he could steal candles and sell them. My new position aroused in him mixed feelings of astonishment, envy, and the vague hope that something similar might happen to him. He followed Masha with admiring eyes, asked what I now ate for dinner, and a sad and sweet expression appeared on his emaciated, homely face, and he moved his fingers as if touching my happiness.