The Portable Chekhov

The tramp bares his head with its scanty bristles, turns his eyes upward, and crosses himself twice.

"Grant her, O Lord, a green and peaceful resting- place," he says in a drawling voice, rather like an old woman's than a man's. "Instruct Thy servant, Xenia, in Thy ways, O Lordl If it had not been for my dear, dar- ling mother I should have been a plain peasant with no understanding of anything! Now, mate, ask me what you like and I understand it all: the Holy Scriptures and profane writings, and every prayer and catechism. And I live according to the Scriptures, too. I don't harm any- body, I keep my body pure and chaste, I observe the fasts, I cat when it is proper. Another man takes no pleasure in anything but vodka and beastliness, but I, when I have time, I sit in a corner and read a book. I read and I cry and cry—"

"What do you cry about?"

"They write so pitifully! For some little book you pay no more than a five-kopeck piece, but how you weep and groan over itl"

"Is your father dead?" asks Ptaha.

"I don't know, mate. I don't know my father; it's no use hiding the sin. I judge that I was my dear mother's illegitimate child. My dear mother lived with the gentry all her life and she didn't want to marry a plain peas- ant—"

"And so she lit upon a master," Ptaha grins.

"She did not preserve her honor, that's true. She was pious and God-fearing, but she did not keep her maiden purity. Of course, it is a sin, a great sin, there's no doubt about it, but then, maybe there is noble blood in my veins. Maybe I am only a peasant by rank, but by nature I am a noble gentleman."

The "noble gentleman" says all this in a low, mawk- ish tenor voice, wrinkling up his narrow forehead and making creaking sounds with his red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listens and looks askance at him in wonder, and does not stop shrugging his shoulders.

After walking nearly four miles the constables and the tramp sit down on a hillock to rest.

"Even a dog knows his own name," mutters Ptaha.

"My name is Andryushka, his is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it can't be forgotten. Nohow!"

'Who has any need to know my name?" sighs the tramp, resting his cheek on his fist. "And what good would it do me if they did know it? If they let me go where I liked—but this way, it would be worse for me than it is now. I know the law, friends. Now I am one of those tramps who don't tell who they are, and the most they can do is exile me to Eastern Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if I told them my real name and rank they would send me back to hard labor, I know!"

'Why, were you a convict?"

"I was, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head shaved and irons on my legs."

"What for?"

"For murder, my good friend! When I was still a lad of about eighteen, my dear mother accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into the master's glass. There were powders of all sorts in the storeroom; it was easy to make a mistake."

The tramp sighs, shakes his head, and says:

"My mother was a pious woman, but who knows? The soul of another is a dark forest! Maybe it was an accident, and maybe she couldn't bear the humiliation of seeing the master make a favorite of another servant. Maybe she put it in on purpose, God alone knows! I was young then, and didn't understand everything. Now I remember that as a matter of fact our master did take another paramour and my dear mother was greatly dis- tressed. Our trial lasted nearly two years. My dear mother was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor, and I, because of my youth, only to seven."

"And where did you come in?"

"As an accomplice. It was me handed the glass to the master. That was how it always was. My dear mother prepared the soda and I handed it to him. Only I'm tell- ing you this, brothers, as Christian to Christian, as I would say it before God. And don't you go telling any- body—"

"Oh, nobody's going to ask us," says Ptaha. "So you've run away from hard labor, have you?"

"Yes, dear friend. Some fourteen of us ran away. They ran away, God bless them, and took me with them. Now answer me, on your conscience, mate, what reason have I to tell who I am? They'll send me back to hard labor, you know! And what sort of a convict am I! I'm a refined man, and not in the best of health. I like it clean where I sleep and eat. When I pray to God I like to light a little lamp or a candle, and not have a racket around me. When I bow down and touch the ground with my forehead, I don't like the floor to be dirty or covered with spittle. And for my dear mother's sake I bow down forty times morning and evening."

The tramp takes off his cap and crosses himself.

"Let them exile me to Eastern Siberia," he says. Tm not afraid of that."

"Is that any better?"

"It's a different thing altogether. Doing hard labor you're like a lobster in a basket: there's crowding, crush- ing, jostling, no room to breathe; it's plain hell—may the Queen of Heaven deliver us from such hell! You're a criminal and treated like a criminal—worse than any dog. You can't eat, you can't sleep, or even say your prayers. But it's not like that in a colony of exiles. In such a settlement, first thing I do is join the community like the others. The authorities are bound by law to give me my allotment. Ye-es! They say the land is free there, like snow; take as much as you please! They'll give me plow land, and land for a kitchen garden, and a build- ing lot. . . . I'll plow my fields like other people, I'H sow. I'll have cattle and all sorts of things, bees, sheep, dogs—a Siberian cat, so that rats and mice don't eat up my stores. I'll build a house, brothers, I'll buy icons— Please God, I'll get married, and have children. . . ."

The tramp mumbles and looks away from his listeners. Naive as his daydreams are, they are uttered in such a sincere, heartfelt manner that it is hard not to credit them. The tramp's little mouth is distorted by a smile. His eyes, his little nose, his whole face, are set and dazed with blissful anticipation of distant happiness. The constables listen and look at him gravely, not with- out sympathy. They share his faith.

"I am not afraid of Siberia," the tramp goes on mum- bling. "Siberia is Russia too, and has the same God and Czar as here. They talk the language of Orthodox Chris- tians, just like you and me. Only there's more free space there and people are better off. Everything's better there. The rivers there, for instance, are way better than those we have here. And there's fish, and game, no end of it all. And there's nothing in the world, brothers, that I'd rather do than fish. Don't give me bread, just let me sit with a hook and line, by God! I use a line and I set creels and when the ice breaks then I take a casting-net. If I'm not strong enough to handle the net, I hire a man for five kopecks. And, Lord, what a pleasure it is! You catch an eel-pout or a chub of some sort and are as pleased' as if you'd found your own brother. And let me tell you, there's a special trick with every fish: you catch one with a minnow, you catch another with a worm, the third with a frog or a grasshopper. You have to un- derstand all that, of course! Take the eel-pout, for in- stance. An eel-pout is a coarse fish—it will grab even a perch; a pike loves a gudgeon, the bullhead likes a butterfly. There's no greater pleasure than to fish for chub where the current is strong. You cast a seventy- foot line without a sinker, using a butterfly or a beetle, so that the bait floats on the surface; you stand in the water with your pants off and let it go with the current, and smack! the chub jerks it! Only you've got to be on the lookout that it doesn't snatch your bait away, the damned creature. As soon as it tugs at your line, you must give it a pull: don't wait. What a lot of fish I've caught in my time! When we ran away, the other con- victs used to sleep in the forest; but I couldn't sleep, I made for the river. The rivers there are wide and rapid, the banks are steep—fearfully! And all along the banks there are dense forests. The trees are so tall that you get dizzy looking up to the top of them. At the prices timber brings here, every pine would fetch ten rubles."

Overwhelmed by the disorderly onrush of reveries, idealized images of the past, and sweet anticipations of happiness, the wretched fellow sinks into silence, merely moving his lips as though whispering to himself. A dazed, blissful smile never leaves his face. The con- stables are silent. They are sunk in thought, their heads bowed. In the autumn stillness, when the chill, sullen mist that hangs over the earth weighs upon the heart, when it looms like a prison wall before the eyes, and bears witness to the limited scope of man's will, it is sweet to think of broad, swift rivers, with steep banks open to the sky, of impenetrable forests, of boundless plains. Slowly and tranquilly imagination conjures up the picture of a man, early in the morning, before the flush of dawn has left the sky, making his way along the steep, lonely bank, looking like a tiny speck: age-old pines, fit for ships' masts, rise up in terraces on both sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur menacingly; roots, huge boulders, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is strong in body and bold in spirit, and fears neither the pine trees nor the boul- ders, nor his solitude, nor the reverberant echo that re- peats the sound of his every footstep.

The constables picture to themselves a free life such as they have never lived; whether they vaguely remem- ber scenes from stories heard long ago or whether they have inherited notions of a free life from remote free ancestors with their flesh and blood, God alone knows!

The first to break the silence is Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who until now has not uttered a single word. Whether he envies the tramp's illusory happiness, or whether he feels in his heart that dreams of happiness are out of keeping with the gray fog and the dirty brown mud—at all events, he looks grimly at the tramp and says:

"That's all right, to be sure, but you won't never get to them free lands, brother. How can you? You'd walk two hundred miles and you'd give up the ghost. Look, you're half dead already! You've hardly gone five miles and you can't get your breath."

The tramp turns slowly toward Nikandr, and his bliss- ful smile vanishes. He looks with a scared and guilty air at the constable's sedate face, apparently remembers something, and lets his head drop. Silence falls again. All three are pensive. The constables are struggling to grasp with their imagination what can perhaps be grasped by none but God—that is, the vast expanse which separates them from the land of freedom. But the tramp's mind is filled with clear, distinct images more terrible than that expanse. He envisages vividly legal red tape and procrastinations, jails used as distributing centers and regular penal institutions, prison barracks, exhausting delays en route, cold winters, illnesses, deaths of comrades. . . .

The tramp blinks guiltily, passes his sleeve across his forehead that is beaded with tiny drops of sweat, and puffs hard as though he had just emerged from a steam- ing bathhouse, then wipes his forehead with his other sleeve and looks round timorously.

"That's a fact; you won't get there!" Ptaha agrees. "What kind of a walker are you, anyway? Look at you —nothing but skin and bone! You'll die, brother!"

"Sure he'll die. How can he help it?" says Nikandr. "They'll put him in the hospital straight off. Surel"

The man who will not reveal his identity looks with horror at the stern, dispassionate faces of his sinister companions, and without removing his cap, hurriedly crosses himself, his eyes bulging. He trembles all over, shakes his head, and begins writhing, like a caterpillar that, has been stepped on.

"Well, it's time to go," says Nikandr, getting to his feet; "we've had a rest."

A minute later the wayfarers are stepping along the muddy road. The tramp is more hunched than before, and his hands are thrust deeper into his sleeves. Ptaha is silent.

1886

Heartache

"To whom shall I tell my sorrow?" [4]

_E

VENING twilight. Large flakes of wet snow are circling lazily about the street lamps which have just been lighted, settling in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses' backs, peoples' shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the cabby, is all white like a ghost. As hunched as a liv- ing body can be, he sits on the box without stirring. If a whole snowdrift were to fall on him, even then, per- haps, he would not find it necessary to shake it off. His nag, too, is white and motionless. Her immobility, the angularity of her shape, and the sticklike straightness of her legs make her look like a penny gingerbread horse. She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away from the plow, from the familiar gray scenes, and cast into this whirlpool full of monstrous lights, of ceaseless uproar and hurrying people, cannot help think- ing.

Iona and his nag have not budged for a long time. They had driven out of the yard before dinnertime and haven't had a single fare yet. But now evening dusk is descending upon the city. The pale light of the street lamps changes to a vivid color and the bustle of the street grows louder.

"Sleigh to the Vyborg District!" Iona hears. "Sleigh!"

Iona starts, and through his snow-plastered eyelashes sees an officer in a military overcoat with a hood.

"To the Vyborg District!" repeats the officer. "Are you asleep, eh? To the Vyborg District!"

As a sign of assent Iona gives a tug at the reins, which sends layers of snow flying from the horse's back and from his own shoulders. The officer gets into the sleigh. The driver clucks to the horse, cranes his neck like a swan, rises in his seat and, more from habit than neces- sity, flourishes his whip. The nag, too, stretches her neck, crooks her sticklike legs and irresolutely sets off.

"Where are you barging in, damn you?" Iona is promptly assailed by shouts from the massive dark wav- ering to and fro before him. "Where the devil are you going? Keep to the right!"

"Don't you know how to drive? Keep to the right," says the officer with vexation.

A coachman driving a private carriage swears at him; a pedestrian who was crossing the street and brushed against the nag's nose with his shoulder, looks at him an- grily and shakes the snow off his sleeve. Iona fidgets on the box as if sitting on needles and pins, thrusts out his elbows and rolls his eyes like a madman, as though he did not know where he was or why he was there.

"What rascals they all are," the officer jokes. "They are doing their best to knock into you or be trampled by the horse. It's a conspiracy."

Iona looks at his fare and moves his lips. He wants to say something, but the only sound that comes out is a wheeze.

"What is it?" asks the officer.

Iona twists his mouth into a smile, strains his throat and croaks hoarsely: "My son, sir • . . er, my son died this week."

"H'm, what did he die of?"

Iona turns his whole body around to his fare and says, 'Who can tell? It must have been a fever. He lay in the hospital only three days and then he died. . . . It is God's will."

"Get over, you devil!" comes out of the dark. "Have you gone blind, you old dog? Keep your eyes peeled!"

"Go on, go on," says the officer. "We shan't get there until tomorrow at this rate. Give her the whip!"

The driver cranes his neck again, rises in his seat, and with heavy grace swings his whip. Then he looks around at the officer several times, but the latter keeps his eyes closed and is apparently indisposed to listen. Letting his fare off in the Vyborg District, Iona stops by a teahouse and again sits motionless and hunched on the box. Again the wet snow paints him and his nag white. One hour passes, another . . .

Three young men, two tall and lanky, one short and hunchbacked, come along swearing at each other and loudly pound the pavement with their galoshes.

"Cabby, to the Police Bridge!" the hunchback shouts in a cracked voice. "The three of us • . . twenty ko- pecks!"

Iona tugs at the reins and clucks to his horse. Twenty kopecks is not fair, but his mind is not on that. Whether it is a ruble or five kopecks, it is all one to him now, so long as he has a fare. . . . The three young men, jos- tling each other and using foul language, $0 up to the sleigh and aU three try to sit do^ at once. They start arguing about which two are to sit and who shall be the one to stand. After a long ill-tempered and abusive alter- cation, they decide that the hunchback must stand up because he is the shortest.

"Well, get going," says the hunchback in his cracked voice, taking up his station and breathing down Iona's neck. "On your way! What a cap you've got, brother! You won't find a worse one in all Petersburg—"

"Hee, hee • . . hee, hee . . ." Iona giggles, "as you »

say—

"Well, then, 'as you say,' drive on. Are you going to crawl like this all the way, eh? D'you want to get it in the neck?"

"My head is splitting," says one of the tall ones. "At the Dukmasovs' yesterday, Vaska and I killed four bot- tles of cognac between us."

"I don't get it, why lie?" says the other tall one an- grily. "He is lying like a trouper."

"Strike me dead, it's the truth!"

"It is about as true as that a louse sneezes."

"Hee, hee," giggles Iona. "The gentlemen are feeling good!"

"Faugh, the devil take you!" cries the hunchback in- dignantly. "Will you get a move on, you old pest, or won't you? Is that the way to drive? Give her a crack of the whip! Giddap, devil! Giddap! Let her feel it!"

Iona feels the hunchback's wriggling body and quiv- ering voice behind his back. He hears abuse addressed to him, sees people, and the feeling of loneliness begins little by little to lift from his heart. The hunchback swears till he chokes on an elaborate three-decker oath and is overcome by cough. The tall youths begin discuss- ing a certain Nadezhda Petrovna. Iona looks round at them. When at last there is a lull in the conversation for which he has been waiting, he turns around and says: "This week . . . er . . . my son died."

"We shall all die," says the hunchback, with a sigh wiping his lips after his coughing fit. "Come, drive on, drive on. Gentlemen, I simply cannot stand this pace! When will he get us there?"

"Well, you give him a little encouragement. Biff him in the neck!"

"Do you hear, you old pest? I'll give it to you in the neck. If one stands on ceremony with fellows like you, one may as well walk. Do you hear, you old serpent? Or don't you give a damn what we say?"

And Iona hears rather than feels the thud of a blow on his neck.

"Hee, hee," he laughs. "The gentlemen are feeling good. God give you health!"

"Cabby, are you married?" asks one of the taU ones.

"Me? Hee, heel The gentlemen are feeling good. The only wife for me now is the damp earth . . . Hee, haw, haw! The grave, that is! . . . Here my son is dead and me alive . . . It is a queer thing, death comes in at the wrong door . . . It don't come for me, it comes for my son. . . ."

And Iona turns round to tell them how his son died, but at that point the hunchback gives a sigh of relief and announces that, thank God, they have arrived at last. Having received his twenty kopecks, for a long while Iona stares after the revelers, who disappear into a dark entrance. Again he is alone and once more silence envelops him. The grief which has been allayed for a brief space comes back again and wrenches his heart more cruelly than ever. There is a look of anxiety and torment in Iona's eyes as they wander restlessly over the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the street. Isn't there someone among those thousands who will lis- ten to him? But the crowds hurry past, heedless of him and his grief. His grief is immense, boundless. If his heart were to burst and his grief to pour out, it seems that it would flood the whole world, and yet no one sees it. It has found a place for itself in such an insignificant shell that no one can see it in broad daylight.

Iona notices a doorkeeper with a bag and makes up his mind to speak to him.

"What time will it be, friend?" he asks.

"Past nine. What have you stopped here for? On your way!"

Iona drives a few steps away, hunches up and sur» renders himself to his grief. He feels it is useless to turn to people. But before five minutes are over, he draws himself up, shakes his head as though stabbed by a sharp pain and tugs at the reins . . . He can bear it no longer.

"Back to the yard!" he thinks. "To the yard!"

And his nag, as though she knew his thoughts, starts out at a trot. An hour and a half later, Iona is sitting be- side a large dirty stove. On the stove, on the floor, on benches are men snoring. The air is stuffy and foul. Iona looks at the sleeping figures, scratches himself and re- grets that he has come home so early.

"I haven't earned enough to pay for the oats," he reflects. "That's what's wrong with me. A man that knows his job . . . who has enough to eat and has enough for his horse don't need to fret."

In one of the comers a young driver gets up, hawks sleepily and reaches for the water bucket.

"Thirsty?" Iona asks him.

"Guess so."

"H'm, may it do you good, but my son is dead, brother • • . did you hear? This week in the hospital. • • . What a business!"

Iona looks to see the effect ofhis words, but he notices none. The young man has drawn his cover over his head and is already asleep. The old man sighs and scratches himself. Just as the young man was thirsty for water so he thirsts for talk. It will soon be a week since his son died and he hasn't talked to anybody about him prop- erly. He ought to be able to talk about it, taking his time, sensibly. He ought to teU how his son was taken ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died. . . . He ought to describe the funeral, and how he went to the hospital to fetch his son's clothes. His daughter Anisya is still in the country. . . . And he would like to talk about her, too. Yes, he has plenty to talk about now. And his listener should gasp and moan and keen. . • . It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are foolish, two words wiU make them blubber.

"I must go out and have a look at the horse," Iona thinks. 'There will be time enough for sleep. You will have enough sleep, no fear. . • ,"

He gets dressed and goes into the stable where his horse is standing. He thinks about oats, hay, the weather. When he is alone, he dares not think of his son. It is pos- sible to talk about him with someone, but to think of him when one is alone, to evoke his image is unbearably painful.

"You chewing?" Iona asks his mare seeing her shin- ing eyes. "There, chew away, chew away. . . . If we haven't earned enough for oats, we'll eat hay. . . . Yes. . . . I've grown too old to drive. My son had ought to be driving, not me. . . . He was a real cabby. . . . He had ought to have lived. . . ."

Iona is silent for a space and then goes on: "That's how it is, old girl. . . . Kuzma Ionych is gone. . . . Departed this life. . . . He went and died to no pur- pose. . . . Now let's say you had a little colt, and you were that little colt's own mother. And suddenly, let's say, that same little colt departed this life. . . . You'd be sorry, wouldn't you?"

The nag chews, listens and breathes on her master's hands. Iona is carried away and tells her everything.

1886

An Encounter

_Y

E F REM DENISO V anxiously looked round.

He was tormented by thirst and he ached all over. His horse, who had not eaten for a long time and was miserable with the heat, drooped his head sadly. The road went downhill and disappeared in a vast forest of evergreens. The treetops in the distance merged with the blue of the sky, and above the deserted fields one could see nothing but birds lazily winging their way and a shimmering haze in the air. The forest, a green mon- ster, climbed up a terraced hill, and seemed endless.

Yefrem was traveling about to collect money for the building of a church to replace the one that had burned do^ in his native village in the province of Kursk. In his cart was set up an icon of the Virgin of Kazan, its paint faded and peeling; before the image stood a capacious tin box with bent sides and a slit in the top large enough to admit a good-sized rye cake. A board nailed to the back of the cart bore an inscription stating that on such and such a date "by an act of God the flames of a conflagration had destroyed a church" in the village of Malinovtzy, and that the village meeting, with the sanction and blessing of the proper authorities, had resolved to dispatch volunteers to collect contributions for the building of a new church. At one side of the cart hung a twenty-pound bell.

Yefrem did not know where he was, and the forest, which swallowed the road, held out no promise of a settlement near by. He stood still for a while, adjusted the breeching, and then began to lead the horse cau- tiously downhill. The cart creaked and the bell rang out, breaking the silence of the sultry day.

In the woods the air was close and thick with the smell of resin, moss, and rotting needles. Nothing was to be heard except the twanging of gnats and Yefrem's muffled footsteps. The sunlight lay in patches on the tree trunks, the lower branches, and the dark earth strewn with needles. The ground was bare, except for the ferns and stone brambles showing here and there at the base of the trees.

"Hello, Daddy!" Yefrem suddenly heard a sharp, rasp- ing voice. "Good luck to the traveler!"

Close to the road, his head propped on an ant-hill, lay a lanky peasant of about thirty wearing a cotton shirt and tight citified trousers tucked into reddish boots. Near his head was a cap that went with some uniform, now so faded that its original color could only be guessed from the spot that had once flaunted a cockade. The man did not lie still: all the while that Yefrem was looking at him, he kept jerking his arms and legs, as if attacked by gnats or suffering from the itch. But neither his garb nor his movements were as odd as his face. Yefrem had never seen such a face be- fore. Pale, with a scanty beard, a jutting chin and a forelock, in profile it looked like the new moon; the nose and ears were strikingly small, the eyes had a fixed look that might have been one of imbecility or aston- ishment, and, to add to its oddity, the skull was flat- tened on the sides, so that the back of the head pro- jected in a regular semicircle.

"Fellow Christian," Yefrem addressed him, "how far is it to the next village?"

"Not so far. Maloye ain't no more'n three or four miles from here."

"Am I dry!"

"Sure!" said the queer peasant, grinning. "It's a scorcher! Must be a hundred and twenty degrees or more. What's your name?"

"Yefrem, brother."

"Mine's Kuzma. As they say: Kuzma's my name, and great's my fame!"

Kuzma stepped on a wheel, thrust out his lips, and kissed the icon.

"Have you far to go?" he asked.

"Yes, fellow Christian. I was to Kursk and even to Moscow, and now I'm on my way to the fair at Nizhny."

"You're collecting for a church?"

"Just so, brother . . . for the Virgin of Kazan . . . Our church burned down!"

"How did that happen?"

Yefrem, articulating lazily, started telling how light- ning struck the church at Malinovtzy on St. Elijah's day, while both the priest and the sexton and the peasants were in the fields.

"The boys who stayed in the village saw the smoke and wanted to ring the church bells, but Elijah the Prophet must have been wroth, the church was locked, and the whole belfry was in flames, so there was no getting at the bells. We came from the fields and, good Lord, the church was ablaze—it was terrible to go near it."

Kuzma strode alongside and listened. He was sober, but he walked as though he were drunk, waving his arms and tramping now beside the cart, now in front of it ...

"And what do you get out of it? They pay you wages?" he asked.

"What wages? I am traveling for the salvation of my soul, the community sent me . . ."

"So you're traveling for nothing?"

''Who's to pay me wages? The community sent me, you know—they'll harvest my crops, sow the rye, pay the taxes for me . . . So it's not for nothing!"

"And how do you eat?"

"I beg my bread."

"And your gelding, does it belong to the community?"

''Why, yes."

"So, brother . . . You don't happen to have some tobacco on you?"

"I don't smoke, brother."

"And if your horse croaks, what will you do then? How will you travel?" "Why should he croak? He don't need to do that."

"And if robbers go for you?"

And Kuzma inquired further, what would happen to the horse and the money if Yefrem himself died, where would people put their contributions if the box were suddenly filled, and what if the bottom of the box fell out, and so on. Yefrem, getting no chance to answer all these queries, merely panted and stared at his fellow traveler in wonder.

"What a pot-bellied box," Kuzma chattered on, prod- ding it with his fist. "Oho, it's heavy! Must be a mint of silver in it! Maybe there's nothing but silver in it. Listen, did you collect a lot?"

"I didn't count, I don't know. People put in coppers and silver, but how much—I don't look."

"And do they put in paper money too?"

"The better people, gentlefolk or merchants, they put in paper money."

''Well, do you keep that in the box too?"

"No, what for? Paper's soft, it may tear ... I keep it in my bosom."

"And did you collect much paper?"

"About twenty-six rubles."

"Twenty-six rubles!" exclaimed Kuzma with a shrug of his shoulders. "At Kachabrov, ask anyone, they were building a church, and for the plans alone they paid three thousand rubles! Your money won't pay for the nails. Twenty-six rubles nowadays—why, that's chicken- feed! Nowadays you pay a ruble and a half for a pound of tea, and you can't even drink it ... And look at the tobacco I smoke. It's all right for me, because I'm a peasant, a plain fellow, but an officer or a student . •

Kuzma suddenly struck his hands together and con- tinued, smiling:

"A German from the railway was with us in the lockup, and, would you believe it? he smoked cigars ten kopecks apiece! Ah-h! Ten kopecks apiece! Why, that way, grandfather, you can burn up a hundred ru- bles a month!"

Kuzma fairly choked at this agreeable recollection, and started blinking.

"They kept you in the lockup?" asked Yefrem.

"Sure enough," Kuzma answered and glanced at the sky. "They let me out two days ago. I was there a whole month."

Evening was coming on, the sun was setting, but it was still sultry. Yefrem was dead tired and scarcely listened to Kuzma. Finally they came upon a peasant who told them that they were within less than a mile of Maloye. And now the travelers were out of the woods and had emerged into an open meadow, where an ani- mated scene opened up before them. The cart drove straight into a herd of cows, sheep, and tethered horses. Back of the pasture stretched green fields of rye and barley and a white patch of blossoming buckwheat, and farther on lay Maloye with a dark church that appeared flattened against the ground. Beyond the village loomed the forest, which now looked black.

"Here is Maloye!" said Kuzma. "The peasants are well-to-do, but they're robbers."

Yefrem took off his cap and rang the bell. Immedi- ately two peasants came walking towards him from the well which was at the entrance to the village. Then be- gan the usual queries: Where do you come from? Where are you bound for?

'Well, cousins, give the man of God a drink of wa- ter!" Kuzma started chattering, slapping now one, now the other on the shoulder. "Look lively!"

"How do we get to be cousins? How d'you make that out?"

"Haw-haw-haw! Your granny pulled my granddad by the hair, or so I'm told, because I wasn't there. That's how!"

While the cart was rolling through the village, Kuzma kept up his ceaseless chatter and rough-housed with everyone they met. He snatched one man's cap, rammed his fist into another's stomach, pulled a third by the beard. He called the women darling, dearie, mamasha, and addressed the men, according to their peculiarities, as Carrots, Tawny, Nosey, One-Eye, and the like. All this aroused lively, hearty laughter. Soon Kuzma found acquaintances. Greetings were heard: "Ah, Kuzma Rivet," "Hello, gallows bird!" "How long since you've been out of jail?"

"Hey, folks, give something to the man of God!" Kuzma cried, waving his arms. "Shake a leg! Look lively!"

He held himself with dignity and shouted as if he had taken the man of God under his wing or was his guide and mentor.

It was decided that Yefrem would spend the night at Grandmother Avdotya's, where those passing through the village usually stopped. Unhurriedly Yefrem took the horse out of the shafts and watered him at the well, where he spent half an hour talking to the peasants, then went indoors. Kuzma was waiting for him.

"Here you are!" the queer peasant rejoiced. "You're coming to the teahouse?"

"Tea would be fine," said Yefrem scratching himself, "fine, but I haven't any money, brother. Will you stand treat?"

"Me—treat? What with?"

Kuzma stood there a moment, disappointed, then sat down. Moving clumsily, sighing, and scratching himself, Yefrem placed the icon and the collection box under the holy images, undressed, took off his boots, sat about awhile, then got up and removed the box to a bench, sat down again and started eating. He chewed slowly, as a cow chews her cud, and sipped water noisily.

"The poverty!" Kuzma sighed. "Some vodka would be fine now, and tea . . ."

The evening light came feebly through the two win- dows. The village was already in deep shade, the cot- tages were somber; the church, merging into the dark- ness, seemed to grow wider and flatten itself more against the ground. A faint red gleam, apparently the reflection of the sunset, twinkled gently on the church cross. Having eaten, Yefrem sat motionless for a long time, his hands clenched on his knees, and stared at the windows. What was he thinking of? In the evening hush, when you see before you one dull window behind which the natural scene softly fades away, when the hoarse barking of strange dogs and the muffied squeak- ing of a strange accordion reaches your ear, it is diffi- cult not to think of home. He who has been a wanderer, whom necessity or Fate or whim has separated from his kin, knows how long and wearisome an evening in the country among strangers can be.

Then Yefrem stood for a long time before his icon, praying. As he finally settled himself down on the bench to sleep, he sighed deeply and observed, as though re- luctantly:

"You're a queer one • • . The Lord knows what sort you are . . ."

"What d'you mean?"

"Why, you don't look like a regular peasant • • . you clown, you wisecrack, and you've just come from the lockup."

"That don't matter! You'll even find fine gentlemen in the lockup sometimes . . . The lockup, brother, that's nothing, it don't matter, I can put in a whole year there, but if it's prison, that's bad! Tell you the truth, I've been in prison three times, and there ain't a week that I don't get a flogging at village headquarters . . . They're sore at me, damn 'em. The community's ready to deport me to Siberia. They've already passed a reso- lution."

"You're a fine one!"

"What do I care? In Siberia people live too."

"Your mother and father living?"

"Yes, they're living, they haven't croaked yet . .

"And what about honoring your father and moth- er? "

"Don't matter • . • If you ask me, they're my worst enemies. Who egged the community on against me? It's them and Uncle Stepan. Nobody else."

"Much you understand, you fool . . . The commu- nity don't need your uncle to see what sort you are. And why do the folks here call you gallows bird?"

"When I was little, our peasants nearly killed me. They hanged me by the neck on a tree, the damned brutes, but men from the next village were passing by and they saved me . . ."

"A dangerous member of society!" observed Yefrem and sighed.

Then he turned to the wall and was soon snoring.

When he woke up in the middle of the night to have a look at his horse, Kuzma was not in the house. A white cow stood at the wide-open door looking into the entry and knocking her horn against the jamb. The dogs were asleep. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the shadows a corn crake was calling in the stillness of the night, and the long-dra^-out sobbing hoot of an owl broke upon the quiet air.

And when he woke up for the second time at dawn,

Kuzma was sitting on a bench at the table, looking thoughtful. A drunken, blissful smile was frozen on his pale face. Rosy thoughts were roaming through his flattened skull and agitating him; he breathed fast, as though panting from a walk uphill.

"Ah, man of God!" he exclaimed, seeing that Yefrem was awake, and he grinned. "How would you like a white roll?"

"Where were you?" asked Yefrem.

"Hee, hee, hee!" Kuzma laughed foolishly. A dozen times he uttered this silly sound with his queer fixed grin, and then shook with convulsive laughter.

"I was drinking tea . . . tea," he brought out, stiU laughing, "I drank vo . . . vodka!"

And he started telling a long story about how he had been drinking tea and vodka with passing carters at the tavern, and as he talked, he kept pulling matches, to- bacco, pretzels out of his pocket.

"Shwedish matches—no less! Psh!" he was saying, striking matches one after another and lighting a ciga- rette. "Shwedish matches, real ones! Look!"

Yefrem was yawning and scratching himself, but sud- denly he jumped to his feet as though something bit him, lifted up his shirt and began feeling his bare chest, then, stomping about the bench like a bear, he went through his rags, looked under the platform, felt his chest again.

"The money is gone!" he exclaimed.

Yefrem stood awhile motionless and stared at the platform, then began searching again.

"Heavenly Mother, the money is gone! D'you hear?" he turned to Kuzma. "The money is gone!"

Kuzma was carefully examining the picture on the box of matches and held his peace.

"Where's the money?" asked Yefrem, taking a step toward him.

"What money?" drawled Kuzma in an offhand man- ner, scarcely opening his mouth and not taking his eyes off the box.

"The money . . . the money I kept in my bosom! . . ."

'Why pester me? If you've lost it, look for it!"

"Where can I look? Where is it?"

Kuzma glanced at Yefrem's purple face and grew purple himself.

"What money?" he shouted, jumping up.

"The money! The twenty-six rubles!"

"Have I taken it? He plagues me, the dirty dog!"

"Don't call me dirty dog! You tell me where the money is!"

"Did I take your money? Did I take it? You tell me: did I? When I get through with you, damn you and your money, you won't know your own father and mother!"

"If you didn't take it, why do you turn away your mug? It was you took it! Besides, where did you get the money to buy tobacco, and booze all night at the tav- ern? You're a foolish fellow, you're cracked. Is it me you done wrong? You done God wrong!"

"Did I . . . take it? When did I take it?" Kuzma shouted in a high squeaky voice, then he swung his arm and hit Yefrem on the face. "There you are! You want some more? I don't give a damn that you're a man of God!"

Yefrem merely shook his head and, without saying a word, began to pull on his boots.

"What a crook!" Kuzma went on shouting, getting more and more excited. "You drank up the money, and now you're blaming it on others, you dirty dog! I'll have

the law on you! I'll see that you cool your heels in the

lockup for trying to frame me!"

"You didn't take it, so keep quiet," Yefrem said mildly.

"Here, search mel"

"If you didn't take it ... why should I search ^oui' You didn't take it, well and good . , . No use shouting, you cannot shout down God . . ."

Yefrem put on his boots and went outdoors. When he returned, Kuzma, still flushed, was sitting at the win- dow, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.

"The old devil," he grumbled. "There's plenty of your sort riding about, plaguing people. You've come to the wrong man, brother! You won't pull the wool over my eyes! I know all these tricks myself. Send for the Elder!"

"What for?"

"To draw up charges! We'll go to the courthouse. Let them judge between us!"

"Why should they judge between us! It's not my money, it's God's . . . God will do the judging."

Yefrem said his prayers and, taking the box and the icon, left the cottage.

An hour later the cart was entering the forest. The village with its flattened church, the meadow, and patches of rye were already left behind, wrapped in light morning mist. The sun had risen, but it was still hidden by the forest and only gilded the edges of the clouds facing eastward. Kuzma followed the cart at some distance, He looked like an innocent man who had been terribly wronged. He wanted very much to talk, but kept quiet, waiting for Yefrem to begin.

"I don't want to have a row with you, or you'd get it from me," he dropped, as though talking to himself. 'Td show you what comes of trying to frame people, you bald devil . ,

Another half-hour passed in silence. The man of God, who was saying his prayers as he walked, started cross- ing himself rapidly, drew a deep sigh and climbed into the cart to fetch some bread.

"When we get to Telibeyevo," began Kuzma, "our justice of the peace lives there. Hand your complaint to him!"

"You're talking rot. What's the justice of the peace to do with it? Is it his money? It's God's money. You're answerable to God."

"You keep on saying God's! God's! Like a crow. If I stole it, let them me; if I didn't steal it, you should get it in the neck for false charges."

"I got no time to hang around courts!"

"So you don't care about the money?"

"Why should I care? It ain't my money, it's God's."

Yefrem spoke reluctantly, calmly, and his face wore a dispassionate, unconcerned expression, as if he really did not care about this money or had forgotten the theft. Such indifference toward the loss and the crime seemed to nonplus and irritate Kuzma. It was incom- prehensible to him. It is natural when an offense is countered by cunning or force, when it leads to a struggle which turns the offender into one offended. If Yefrem had acted like an ordinary human being, that is, if he had taken umbrage, started a fight, lodged a complaint, if the justice of the peace had sentenced the accused to prison or dismissed the charge against him for lack of evidence, Kuzma would have quieted down. But now, as he walked behind the cart, he had the look of a man who missed something.

"I didn't take your money!" he said.

"You didn't take it, so well and good."

"When we get to Telibeyevo, I'll call the Elder. Let him . • . look into the matter . . ."

"There's nothing to look into. It ain't his money. And you'd better take yourself off, brother. Go your ways! I've had enough of you!"

For a long time Kuzma kept casting sidelong glances at Yefrem, trying to guess what he was thinking about, what terrible plot he was hatching, and finally he de- cided to tack about.

"Hey, you peacock, there's no having any fun with you, you get sore so easy. Here, here, take your money! It was a joke."

Kuzma drew several ruble bills from his pocket and handed them to Yefrem. The latter was neither sur- prised nor gladdened. It was as though he expected it. He took the money and, without a word, stuck it in his pocket.

"I just wanted to have some fun with you," Kuzma continued, looking searchingly into Yefrem's dispassion- ate face. "I reckoned it would scare you. I thought I'd give you a scare and return the money in the morning . . . Altogether there was twenty-six rubles, and I just gave you ten, or nine. The carters took the rest • . • Don't be sore, grandfather . . . It wasn't me drank it up, but them . • • I swear to God!"

"Why should I be sore? It's God's money . • . It wasn't me you wronged, but the Queen of Heaven."

"Maybe I drunk up a ruble, no more."

"What's that to me? Take it and drink it all up . • . A ruble, a kopeck—it's all the same to God. You'll have to answer for it just the same."

"But don't get sore, grandfather. Please don't get sore! Don't!"

Yefrem said nothing. Kuzma began blinking and his face assumed a childishly tearful expression.

"Forgive me, for Christ's sake!" he said, looking im- ploringly at the back of Yefrem's neck. "Don't take of- fense, uncle. I was joking."

"Oh, you're plaguing me!" said Yefrem with irrita- tion. 'Tm telling you: it's not my money! Pray to God he should forgive you, it's none of my business!"

Kuzma gazed at the icon, at the sky, at the trees, looking for God, as it were, and an expression of terror distorted his face. Under the influence of the forest si- lence, the icon with its austere colors, and Yefrem's dis- passionate attitude, which was so unusual and inhuman, he felt alone, helpless, abandoned to the mercies of a terrible, wrathful Deity. He ran in front of Yefrem and looked into his eyes, as though to assure himself that he was not alone.

"Forgive me, for Christ's sake!" he said, beginning to tremble all over. "Forgive me, grandfather!"

"Go away!"

Once more Kuzma cast a rapid glance at the sky, the trees, the cart with the icon, and then sank at Yefrem's feet. In his terror he mumbled incoherently, struck the ground with his forehead, clasped the old man's feet, and wept aloud like a child.

"Granddaddy! Kinsman! Uncle! Man of God!"

At first Yefrem recoiled from him perplexed, and pushed him away, but then he himself started glancing fearfully at the sky. He was frightened, and he felt pity for the thief.

"Stop, brother, listen!" he said persuasively to Kuzma. "Listen to what I tell you, you fool! Eh, he blubbers like a woman! Listen, if you want God to forgive you: as soon as you get home, go to the priest right away • . . D'you hear me?"

Yefrem began to explain to Kuzma what to do to atone for his sin: he must confess to the priest, lay a penance on his soul, then get together the money he had stolen and drunk up and send it to Malinovtzy, and in future he must lead a quiet, honest, sober, Christian life. Kuzma heard him out, calmed down little by little, and appeared to have forgotten his trouble completely. He teased Yefrem, and began chattering again. Without stopping for a moment, he went on talking about peo- ple who lived at ease, about the lockup and the German there, about prison, in a word, about all the things of which he had talked the previous day. He guffawed, struck his hands together, recoiled reverently, and alto- gether behaved as though he were recounting some- thing new. He spoke smoothly, like a man who had been around, peppering his talk with saws and sayings, but it was painful to listen to him, because he repeated himself and often stopped to recall a suddenly forgotten thought, and then he would knit his brow, spin about like a top and wave his arms. And how he bragged, how he lied!

At noon, when the cart stopped at Telibeyevo, Kuzma disappeared in the pot-house. Yefrem rested for about two hours and all that time Kuzma stayed in the pot-house. One could hear him swearing in there and bragging, pounding the bar with his fist, and the drunken peasants jeering at him. And when Yefrem was leaving Telibeyevo, a brawl had started in the pot-house, and Kuzma was shrilly threatening someone and shouting that he would send for the police.

1887

The Letter

_A

RCHDEACON Fyodor Orlov, a presentable, _L well-nourished man of fifty, with an expression of self-importance, severity, and dignity that never left his face, but now looking exceedingly weary, was pacing his small living room from one end to the other and thinking hard about the same thing: "When would his visitor finally leave?" This thought fretted him and stayed with him all the time. The visitor, Father Anas- tasy, whose parish was a village not far from the city, had come to call on him some three hours before on a very unpleasant and tedious business of his own, had stayed on and was now seated at a small round table in the comer with his elbow on a thick account book, ap- parently with no thought of leaving, although it was al- ready past eight in the evening.

Not everyone knows how to stop talking in good time and how to leave in good time. Not seldom it happens that even tactful, well-bred people who have had a secular education fail to notice that their presence is arousing a feeling resembling hatred in a tired or busy host and that this feeling is being laboriously concealed and covered up with a lie. Yet Father Anastasy per- ceived plainly that his presence was burdensome and out of place, that the archdeacon, who had officiated at a night service and at a long noonday Mass, was now tired and longing for rest; every moment he meant to get up and go, but he didn't get up, he sat on, as though waiting for something. He was an old man of sixty-five, prematurely decrepit, stooped and bony, with a senile, dark-skinned, emaciated face, red eyelids, and a long, narrow back like that of a fish. He wore a fashionable cassock, pale lilac in color, but too large for him (it had been presented to him by the widow of a recently de- ceased young priest), a cloth jacket with a broad leather belt, and clumsy boots the size and color of which showed plainly that Father Anastasy got along without galoshes. In spite of his rank and advanced years, there was a suggestion of something pitiful, humbled, and crushed about his red, clouded eyes, the thin greenish- gray plaits of hair on his nape, the prominent shoulder blades of his lean back . . . He held his peace, did not move, and coughed with caution, as if afraid that the noise of his coughing would render his presence more noticeable.

The old man had come to the archdeacon several times on business. Some two months previously he had been forbidden to officiate till further notice and been subjected to judicial investigation. His transgressions were numerous. He was addicted to drink, was on bad terms with the clergy and the laity, was negligent in re- cording vital statistics and keeping the church accounts —these were the formal charges against him. In ad- dition, it had long been rumored that he performed jllegal marriages for a consideration and sold certificates of the performance of religious duties to officials and army officers who came to him from the city. These ^mors persisted all the more stubbornly since he was poor and had nine children who depended on him and were failures like himself. His sons were spoiled, unedu- cated, and without occupation, and his homely daugh- ters could find no husbands.

Lacking the force to be frank, the archdeacon paced the room from one end to the other, was silent, or else threw out hints:

"So you are not driving home tonight?" he asked, stopping at the dark window and poking his little finger into the cage where a canary was asleep with its feathers fluffed up.

Father Anastasy gave a start, coughed cautiously and spoke hurriedly:

"Home? No, I'm not going there, Fyodor Ilyich. You know yourself, I cannot officiate, so what am I to do there? I went away on purpose, so as not to have to look people in the face. You know yourself, it is a disgrace not to be allowed to officiate. Besides, I have business here, Fyodor Ilyich. Tomorrow after breaking fast I want to have a long talk with the Father who is investi- gating my case."

"So . . ," the archdeacon yawned. "And where are you stopping?" "At Zyavkin's."

Father Anastasy suddenly recalled that in about two hours the archdeacon was to officiate at the Easter mid- night service and he felt so keenly ashamed of his dis- agreeable, embarrassing presence that he decided to leave at once and give the tired man a rest. And the old man got up to leave, but before starting to say his fare- wells, he stood a while clearing his throat and looking inquiringly at the archdeacon's back with the same air of indefinite expectation in his entire frame; his face was contorted with shame, timidity, and the pathetic forced smile of people who do not respect themselves. With a resolute wave of his hand and a husky, jarring laugh he brought out:

"Father Fyodor, let your graciousness go a little further: have them give me at parting . . . just a little wee gla& of vodka!"

"This isn't the time to drink vodka," said the arch- deacon sternly. "One must have a sense of propriety."

Father Anastasy was greatly embarrassed. He gave a laugh and, forgetting his decision to leave, sat do-wn again. The archdeacon glanced at his abashed, embar- rassed face and his stooped body and felt sorry for the old man.

"Please God, we will drink tomorrow," he said, wish- ing to soften his harsh refusal. "Everything in good time."

The archdeacon believed that people could reform, but now, as a feeling of pity rose within him, it seemed to him that this disreputable, hollow-cheeked old man, caught in a network of sins and infirmities, was lost be- yond all hope, that there was no power on earth that could straighten his back, give serenity to his look, check the disagreeable timid laugh that he laughed on pur- pose, in order to counteract at least a little the repulsive impression he made on people. Already the old man seemed to Father Fyodor not guilty and vicious, but humiliated, insulted, unfortunate; he recalled the man's wife, his nine children, the dirty beggarly bed at Zyav- kin's; for some reason he also recalled the people who take pleasure in seeing priests drunk and officials con- victed of crimes, and it occurred to him that the best thing Father Anastasy could do now was to die as soon as possible and to depart this life forever.

Steps were heard.

"Father Fyodor, you are not resting?" a bass voice came from the anteroom.

"No, deacon, come in."

Into the room walked Father Orlov's colleague, dea- con Lubimov, an old man with a bald patch extending over the entire top of his head, but still vigorous, with a fringe of black hair and with bushy black eyebrows like a Georgian's. He bowed to Father Anastasy and sat down.

"What good news have you brought us?"

"What good news?" replied the deaacon, and after a pause continued with a smile: "Smaall children—small troubles; big children—big troubles. Here's such a kettle of fish, Father Fyodor, that I don't know where I'm at. A regular farce, that's what it is."

He paused again, smiled even more broadly and said:

"Nikolay Matveich has just come back from Kharkov. He was telling me about my Pyotr. He went to see him once or twice, he said."

"What has he been telling you, then?"

"He has upset me, God forgive him. He meant to give me joy, but when I thought it over, I found there wasn't much to rejoice over. There is more cause for grief than for joy. 'Your Petrushka,' says he, 1ives in style, he's way beyond our reach,' says he. 'WeU, thank God for that,' says I. 'I had dinner with him,' says he, 'and saw the way he lives. He lives like the gentry. You couldn't want any- thing better.' Of course, I'm curious and I ask him: 'And what did they serve for dinner?' 'First of all, there was a fish course, something like a chowder, then tongue with peas, and then,' says he, 'roast turkey.' 'Roast turkey in Lent? That's something to rejoice mel' says I. Turkey in Lent, eh?"

"There's little surprising about that," said the arch- deacon, narrowing his eyes sarcastically.

And inserting both thumbs in his belt, he drew him- self up and declaimed in the tone in which he preached sermons or gave lessons in religion at the high school:

"People who do not keep the fasts fall into two dif- ferent categories: some fail to keep them out of laxity, others through unbelief. Your Pyotr fails to keep them through unbelief. Yes."

The deacon looked timidly at Father Fyodor's stem face and said:

"That isn't the worst of it ... We talked about this and that and it turned out that my infidel of a son is liv- ing with some sort of a lady, another man's wife. There she is in his lodgings, taking the place of a wife and a hostess, she pours out the tea, receives guests and aU that sort of thing, like a wedded wife. It is the third year now that he has been making merry with this viper. A regular farce, that's what it is. Three years together and no children."

"So they must be living in chastity!" giggled Father Anastasy, coughing hoarsely. "There are children, Father Deacon, there are, but they are not kept at home! They're packed off to the Foundling Hospital! Hee-hee- hee . . ." (Here Father Anastasy had a coughing fit.)

"Don't meddle, Father Anastasy," the archdeacon said sternly.

"Nikolay Matveich asks him: 'Who's this lady who dishes out the soup at your table?' " the deacon con- tinued, gloomily examining Father Anastasy's stooped body. " 'She is my wife,' says he. 'And how long ago were you married?' Nikolay Matveich inquires. 'We were married in Kulikov's pastry shop,' Pyotr answers."

The archdeacon's eyes flashed angrily and there were red spots on his temples. He disliked Pyotr not only be- cause of his sins but because he found him personally repellent. In fact, Father Fyodor had a grudge against him. He remembered him as a schoolboy, remembered him distinctly, because even then the boy had seemed to him abnormal. He had been ashamed to help at the altar, had taken offense at being addressed familiarly, had not crossed himself on entering the house, and what was most memorable, had liked to talk a great deal and heatedly, and in Father Fyodor's ODinion loquacity was unseemly in and harmful to children. Furthermore, Petrushka had assumed a critical and contemptuous at- titude toward fishing, to which both the archdeacon and the deacon were much addicted. As a student Pyotr had not gone to church at all, had slept until noon, had looked down on people, and had taken pleasure in rais- ing ticklish and insoluble questions with an air of bra- vado.

"What do you want?" the archdeacon said, going up to the deacon and looking at him angrily. "What do you want? This was to be expected! I always knew that noth- ing good would come of your Pyotr, was certain of it! I told you so and I am telling you so again. What you sowed, now you must reap! Reap!"

"But what have I sown, Father Fyodor?" the deacon asked quietly, looking up at the archdeacon.

'Who but you is to blame? You are the parent, he is your offspring! You should have instructed him, instilled the fear of God in him. You must teach them! You bring them into the world, but you don't instruct them. It's a sin! It is wrong! It's a disgrace!"

The archdeacon forgot his fatigue, paced the room and continued to talk. Fine drops of sweat came out on the deacon's forehead and bare pate. He looked guiltily at the archdeacon and said:

"But didn't I instruct him, Father Fyodor? Lord have mercy, haven't I been a father to my child? You know yourself I refused him nothing, and all my life I prayed to God and I did my best to give him a good education. He went to high school and had tutors and graduated from the university. As for my failing to direct his mind the right way, Father Fyodor, why, that is because I haven't the ability, as you well know! When he used to come home as a student, I would begin to instruct him in my own way, but he wouldn't listen. I would say to him: 'Go to church,' and he would snap back: 'Why?' I would start explaining, and he'd say: 'Why? What for?' Or he would clap me on the shoulder and say: 'Everything in this world is relative, approximate, and conditional. Neither I nor you know anything, papasha.'" Father Anastasy laughed huskily, had another cough- ing spell and wagged his fingers in the air as though getting ready to say something. The archdeacon glanced at him and said severely:

"Don't meddle, Father Anastasy." The old man laughed, beamed, and listeneC: to the deacon with apparent pleasure, as though glad that there were other sinners in this world besides himself. The deacon spoke sincerely, out of a contrite heart, and tears even came into his eyes. Father Fyodor felt sorry for him.

"You're to blame, deacon, you're to blame," he said, but not so sternly and vehemently. "You knew how to bring him into the world, you should know how to in- struct him. You should have taught him in his child- hood; who's to reform a student?"

Silence fell. The deacon struck his hands together and said with a sigh:

"But I shall have to answer for him, you know." "True enough."

After a short pause the archdeacon gave a ya^wn that turned into a sigh and asked: "Who reads The Acts?" "Yevstrat. Yevstrat always reads that." The deacon got up and, looking imploringly at the archdeacon, asked:

"So, Father Fyodor, what am I to do now?" "Do as you please. You are the father, not I. You ought to know best."

"I don't know anything, Father Fyodorl Tell me what

I am to do, for pity's sake! Would you believe me, I am heartsick! I am in a state now where I can neither sleep nor sit quietly, and the holiday is no holiday for me. Tell me what to do, Father Fyodor!"

"Write him a letter."

"What shall I write to him?"

'Write him that this must come to an end. Write briefly, but severely, and take due note of everything, without minimizing or extenuating his guilt. It is your parental duty. Once you've written, you will have done your duty and you will be at peace."

"That's true, but what shall I write to him? In what terms? I will write to him, and he will come back at me: 'Why? What for? Why is it a sin?'"

Father Anastasy again laughed huskily and wagged his fingers.

'Why? What for? Why is it a sin?" he wheezed. "I was once confessing a gentleman and I told him that excessive reliance on Divine mercy is a sin, and he asked: 'Why?' I wanted to answer him, but—" Father Anastasy slapped himself on the forehead, "there wan nothing here! Hee-hee-hee—"

Father Anastasy's words, his husky, quivering laugh- ter at something that was not laughable, made a dis- agreeable impression on the archdeacon and the deacon. The archdeacon was on the point of cutting the old man short with a "don't meddle," but did not do so, and merely frowned.

"I cannot write to him!" sighed the deacon.

"If you can't, who can?"

"Father Fyodorl" said the deacon, putting his head to one side and pressing his hand to his heart. "I am an uneducated man, with a poor mind, but you the Lord has endowed with intelligence and wisdom. You know and understand everything, you have a mind that can

fathom anything, while I'm not able to put two words

together. Be charitable, instruct me as to how I am to go

about ^riting. Tell me how to phrase it and just what to

, »

Say . . •

'What is there to instruct you in? There is no ques- tion of instruction. You simply sit down and write."

"No, do me the favor, Father! I implore you. I know, your letter will put the fear of God in him and com- mand his obedience, because you, too, are an educated man. Be so kind! I'll sit down and you dictate to me. To- morrow it will be a sin to write, but now is just the time, and then my mind would be at peace?"

The archdeacon looked at the deacon's beseeching face, recalled the refractory Pyotr and agreed to dictate. He seated the deacon at his desk and began:

"Well, write . . . 'Christ is risen, my dear son . . .' exclamation mark. 'Rumors have reached your father's ear . . .' then in parentheses: 'from what source they came to me does not concern you . . .' close paren- theses . . . Have you written? '. . . that you are lead- ing a life incompatible with the laws of both God and man. Neither the creature comforts, nor the worldly magnificence, nor again the show of culture with which you cover yourself outwardly can conceal your heathen- ishness. You call yourself a Christian, but in essence you are a heathen, as wretched and miserable as all other heathens, nay, more wretched, for those other heathens, not knowing Christ, go to perdition out of ignorance. whereas you go to perdition because, possessing a treas- ure, you neglect it. I shall not enumerate your vices here, these being well known to you; I shall only say that I see the cause of your perdition in your unbelief. You consider yourself to be wise, you boast of your knowledge of the sciences, but you do not wish to un- derstand that science without faith not only fails to ele- vate man, but in fact degrades him to the level of a low animal, forasmuch • . .'"

The whole letter was couched in these terms. Having finished writing, the deacon read it aloud, beamed, and jumped to his feet.

"A gift, verily a gift!" he exclaimed, looking raptur- ously at the archdeacon and striking his hands together. "To think that the Lord bestows such a talent on man! Eh? Holy Mother and Queen of Heavenl I believe that I could not have written a letter like that in a hundred years! May the Lord preserve you!"

Father Anastasy, too, was enraptured.

"It's a gift to be able to write like that!" he said, getting up and wagging his fingers.

"To write like that! There is such rhetoric here as would stump any philosopher, and would make him see stars! A mind! A brilliant mind! If you hadn't married, Father Fyodor, you would have been a bishop long ago, verily you would!"

Having poured out his wrath in the letter, the arch- deacon felt relieved. Fatigue, the feeling of being fagged out came back. The deacon was an intimate and so Father Fyodor did not scruple to say to him:

"Well, deacon, go now, and God be with you. I'll nap for half an hour, I must have a rest."

The deacon went away and took Anastasy with him. As always happens on Easter eve, the street was dark, but the entire sky was sparkling with bright, shining stars. The soundless, motionless air was redolent of spring and holiday.

"How long did he dictate?" the deacon continued to voice his admiration. "Some ten minutes, no more! An- other person wouldn't have composed a letter like that in a month. Eh? What an intellectl I have no words for such an intellect! A marvell Verily, a marvel!"

"Education!" sighed Anastasy as he crossed the muddy street, lifting his cassock up to his belt. "We are not to be compared with him. We come of the lowest order of the clergy, while he is a man of learning. Yes. He's a real man, there's no gainsaying it."

"And you ought to hear how he reads the Gospel in Latin at Mass! He knows Latin and he knows Greek. . • . Ah, Petruha, Petruha!" the deacon exclaimed, sud- denly brought back to his problem. "Well, now he'll scratch his head! He'll shut his mouth! He'll find out what's what! Now he won't ask: 'Why?' He has met his match, he has indeed! Ha-ha-hal"

The deacon burst out into gay, loud laughter. As soon as the letter was written his spirits had risen and he had grown serene. The consciousness of having done his parental duty and his faith in the efficacy of the letter had restored his gaiety and good-nature.

"Pyotr in translation means 'a stone,' " he said, as they were approaching his house. "But my Pyotr is not a stone, he is a rag. The viper has laid hold of him, and he pets her and hasn't the strength to cast her off. Fie! To think that there should be such women, God forgive me for mentioning them! Eh? Has she no shame? She has got hold of the boy, she won't let go of him and keeps him trailing after her. . . . To the dickens with her!"

"Maybe, though, it isn't she who holds on to him, but he to her?"

"Still, it means she's a Jezebel! I am not defending Pyotr. He'll get what's coming to him. He'll read the letter, and he'll scratch the back of his neck! He'll bum up with shame!"

"It's a fine letter, only . • • maybe you shouldn't send it off, Father Deacon. Let Pyotr be!" '^^at's that?" asked the deacon, scared.

"Just sol Don't send it, deacon! What's the good of it? You'll send it, he'll read it, and then what? You'll only upset him. Forgive him, let him be!"

The deacon looked in surprise at Anastasy's dark face, at his open cassock which looked like wings in the night, and shrugged his shoulders.

"How can I forgive him just like that?" he asked. "I shall have to answer for him to God, you know."

"Even so, you forgive him, all the same. Really! And because of your loving kindness God will forgive you, too."

"But isn't he my son? Is it my duty to teach him, or not?"

"Teach him? Why not? You may teach him; but why call him a heathen? That will hurt his feelings, deacon, you know—"

The deacon was a widower and lived in a small house with three windows. His housekeeping was done by his sister, a spinster who had lost the use of her legs three years previously and was bedridden. He was afraid of her, complied wholly with her wishes, and did nothing without her advice. Father Anastasy went into the house with the deacon. Seeing the table already set with the tall Easter cakes and Easter eggs, and perhaps remem- bering his own home, he began to weep and, to cover his tears, at once started laughing huskily.

"Yes, it will soon be time to break fast," he said. "Yes . . . It would not come amiss . . . to take a wee glass even now. May I? I'll down it," he whispered, stealing a glance at the door, "so that the old one in there . . • won't hear a thing . . . no, no . . ."

The deacon silently shoved the decanter and the glass toward Father Anastasy, unfolded the letter, and began to read it aloud. The letter pleased him just as much as it had when the archdeacon was dictating it. He beamed

with satisfaction and wagged his head as though he had

just savored something very sweet.

"Well, what a letter!" he said. "Petruha never can have dreamt of such a letter. Just what he needs, some- thing to throw him into a fever . . . the very thing!"

"You know what, deacon? Don't send it!" said Anas- tasy, pouring out another glass with seeming absent- mindedness. "Forgive him, let him be! I am speaking to you . . . from the heart. If his own father will not for- give him, who will? And is he to live so, unforgiven? Figure it out for yourself, deacon: there will be enough to mete out punishment without you, but you'd better seek out those who will show mercy to your own son! I'll . . . I'll . . . just have another little one, brother . . . the last . . . Now you just sit down and write to him: 'I forgive you, Pyotrl' He'll understa-and! He'll fee-eel it! I know it from my own experience, brother . . . deacon, I mean. When I lived like other people there was little to fret me, but now that I have betrayed the image and likeness of God, all I crave is that good people should forgive me. Judge for yourself, it isn't the righteous that should be forgiven, but the sinners. Why should you forgive the old one in there, if she is no sin- ner? No, you should forgive a man who is a pitiful sight . . . that's it."

Anastasy propped his head on his fist and grew thoughtful.

"It is dreadful, deacon," he sighed, obviously strug- gling with the desire to have another drink. "Dreadful! In sin my mother brought me into the world, in sin I lived, in sin I shall die . . . Lord forgive me, sinner that I am. I have strayed from the path, deacon! I am beyond salvation! And it isn't as though I had strayed from the path in the prime of life, but in my old age, on the brink of the grave . . . I . . ."

With a hopeless wave of the hand the old man drank one more glass, then went and sat down in another chair. The deacon, still clutching the letter, started pac- ing the room. He was thinking of his son. Dissatisfac- tion, sorrow, and anxiety no longer fretted him: all that had vented itself in the letter. Now he was simply call- ing up the image of Pyotr, picturing his face, remember- ing the years when his son would come home for the holidays. His mind dwelt only on what was good, heart- warming, touched with melancholy, on what one could contemplate for a lifetime without getting tired. Missing his son, he read the letter through once more and looked questioningly at Anastasy.

"Don't send it!" said the latter, with a wave of the hand.

"No, all the same . . • I must. All the same, it will • . . I mean . . . have a good effect on him . . . It can't hurt . . ."

The deacon got an envelope from a drawer, but be- fore placing the letter in it, he sat down at the table, smiled, and added these words of his o^ at the bottom of the letter: "They have sent us a new school super- visor. He is spryer than the old one. He is a dancer, a talker, and a jack-of-all-trades, so that the Govorov girls are wild about him. The army chief Kostyrev, too, will soon be sent packing, they say. High time!" Well pleased with himself, and not realizing that his postscript had completely spoiled the stern missive, he addressed the envelope and laid the letter in the most conspicuous place on the table.

Tke Kiss

AT EIGHT o'clock on the evening of the twentieth

/V of May all the six batteries of the N Reserve

Artillery Brigade halted for the night in the village of Mestechki on their way to camp. At the height of the general commotion, while some officers were busily oc- cupied around the guns, and others, gathered together in the square near the church enclosure, were receiving the reports of the quartermasters, a man in civilian dress, riding a queer horse, came into sight round the church. The little dun-colored horse with a fine neck and a short tail came, moving not straight forward, but as it were sideways, with a sort of dance step, as though it were being lashed about the legs. When he reached the officers the man on the horse took off his hat and said:

"His Excellency Lieutenant-General von Rabbeck, a local landowner, invites the officers to have tea with him this minute. , , ,"

The horse bowed, danced, and retired sideways; the rider raised his hat once more and in an instant disap- peared with his strange horse behind the church.

"What the devil does it mean?" grumbled some of the officers, dispersing to their quarters. "One is sleepy, and here this von Rabbeck with his tea! We know what tea means."

The officers of all the six batteries remembered vividly an incident of the previous year, when during maneu- vers they, together with the officers of a Cossack regi- ment, were in the same way invited to tea by a count who had an estate in the neighborhood and was a re- tired army officer; the hospitable and genial count made much of them, dined and wined them, refused to let them go to their quarters in the village, and made them stay the night. All that, of course, was very nice—noth- ing better could be desired, but the worst of it was, the old army officer was so carried away by the pleasure of the young men's company that till sunrise he was telling the officers anecdotes of his glorious past, taking them over the house, showing them expensive pictures, old engravings, rare guns, reading them autograph letters from great people, while the weary and exhausted of- ficers looked and listened, longing for their beds and yawning in their sleeves; when at last their host let them go, it was too late for sleep.

Might not this von Rabbeck be just such another? Whether he were or not, there was no help for it. The officers changed their uniforms, brushed themselves, and went all together in search of the gentleman's house. In the square by the church they were told they could get to his Excellency's by the lower road—going downwn behind the church to the river, walking along the bank to the garden, and there the alleys would take them to the house; or by the upper way—straight from the church by the road which, half a mile from the vil- lage, led right up to his Excellency's barns. The officers decided to go by the upper road.

"Which von Rabbeck is it?" they wondered on the way. "Surely not the one who was in command of the N cavalry division at Plevna?"

"No, that was not von Rabbeck, but simply Rabbe and no 'von.' "

'What lovely weather!"

At the first of the barns the road divided in two: one branch went straight on and vanished in the evening darkness, the other led to the owner's house on the right. The officers turned to the right and began to speak more softly. . . . On both sides of the road stretched stone barns with red roofs, heavy and sullen-looking, very much like barracks in a district town. Ahead of them gleamed the windows of the manor house.

"A good omen, gentlemen," said one of the officers. "Our setter leads the way; no doubt he scents game ahead of us! . . ."

Lieutenant Lobytko, who was walking in front, a tall and stalwart fellow, though entirely without mustache (he was over twenty-five, yet for some reason there was no sign of hair on his round, well-fed face), renowned in the brigade for his peculiar ability to divine the pres- ence of women at a distance, turned round and said:

"Yes, there must be women here; I feel that by in- stinct."

On the threshold the officers were met by von Rab- beck himself, a comely looking man of sixty in civilian dress. Shaking hands with his guests, he said that he was very glad and happy to see them, but begged them earnestly for God's sake to excuse him for not asking them to stay the night; two sisters with their children, his brothers, and some neighbors, had come on a visit to him, so that he had not one spare room left.

The General shook hands with everyone, made his apologies, and smiled, but it was evident by his face that he was by no means so delighted as last year's count, and that he had invited the officers simply be- cause, in his opinion, it was a social obligation. And the officers themselves, as they walked up the softly car- peted stairs, as they listened to him, felt that they had been invited to this house simply because it would have been awkward not to invite them; and at the sight of the footmen, who hastened to light the lamps at the en- trance below and in the anteroom above, they began to feel as though they had brought uneasiness and discom- fort into the house with them. In a house in which two sisters and their children, brothers, and neighbors were gathered together, probably on account of some family festivity or event, how could the presence of nineteen unknown officers possibly be welcome?

Upstairs at the entrance to the drawing room the offi- cers were met by a tall, graceful old lady with black eyebrows and a long face, very much like the Empress Eugenie. Smiling graciously and majestically, she said she was glad and happy to see her guests, and apolo- gized that her husband and she were on this occasion unable to invite messieurs les officiers to stay the night. From her beautiful majestic smile, which instantly van- ished from her face every time she turned away from her guests, it was evident that she had seen numbers of officers in her day, that she was in no humor for them now, and if she invited them to her house and apolo- gized for not doing more, it was only because her breed- ing and position in society required it of her.

When the officers went into the big dining-room, there were about a dozen people, men and ladies, young and old, sitting at tea at the end of a long table. A group of men wrapped in a haze of cigar smoke was dimly visible behind their chairs; in the midst of them stood a lanky young man with red whiskers, talking loudly in English, with a burr. Through a door beyond the group could be seen a light room with pale blue furniture.

"Gentlemen, there are so many of you that it is im- possible to introduce you all!" said the General in a loud voice, trying to sound very gay. "Make each other's ac- quaintance, gentlemen, without any ceremony!"

The officers—some with very serious and even stem faces, others with forced smiles, and all feeling ex- tremely awkward—somehow made their bows and sat down to tea. _v .

The most ill at ease of them all was Ryabovich—a short, somewhat stooped officer in spectacles, with whisk- ers like a lynx's. While some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed to say, "I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistin- guished officer in the whole brigade!" At first, on going into the room and later, sitting down at table, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the molded cornices—all blended in one general impression that inspired in Ryabovich alarm and a desire to hide his head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim understanding of it (among physiologists this condition, when the subject sees but does not understand, is called "mental blindness"). After a little while, growing accus- tomed to his surroundings, Ryabovich regained his sight and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient—namely, the extraordinary boldness of his new acquaintances. Von Rabbeck, his wife, two elderly ladies, a young lady in a lilac dress, and the young man with the red whiskers, who was, it appeared, a younger son of von Rabbeck, very cleverly, as though they had rehearsed it beforehand, took seats among the officers, and at once got up a heated discussion in which the visi- tors could not help taking part. The lilac young lady hotly asserted that the artillery had a much better time than the cavalry and the infantry, while von Rabbeck and the elderly ladies maintained the opposite. A brisk inter- change followed. Ryabovich looked at the lilac young lady who argued so hotly about what was unfamiliar and utterly uninteresting to her, and watched artificial smiles come and go on her face.

Von Rabbeck and his family skillfully drew the offi- cers into the discussion, and meanwhile kept a sharp eye on their glasses and mouths, to see whether all of them were drinking, whether all had enough sugar, why some- one was not eating cakes or not drinking brandy. And the longer Ryabovich watched and listened, the more he was attracted by this insincere but splendidly dis- ciplined family.

After tea the officers went into the drawing-room. Lieutenant Lobytko's instinct had not deceived him. There were a great many girls and young married ladies. The "setter" lieutenant was soon standing by a very young blonde in a black dress, and, bending over her jauntily, as though leaning on an unseen sword, smiled and twitched his shoulders coquettishly. He probably talked very interesting nonsense, for the blonde looked at his well-fed face condescendingly and asked indiffer- ently, "Really?" And from that indifferent "Really?" the "setter," had he been intelligent, might have concluded that she would never call him to heel.

The piano struck up; the melancholy strains of a waltz floated out of the wide open windows, and every- one, for some reason, remembered that it was spring, a May evening. Everyone was conscious of the fragrance of roses, of lilac, and of the young leaves of the poplar. Ryabovich, who felt the brandy he had drunk, under the influence of the music stole a glance towards the window, smiled, and began watching the movements of the women, and it seemed to him that the smell of roses, of poplars, and lilac came not from the garden, but from the ladies' faces and dresses.

Von Rabbeck's son invited a scraggy-looking young lady to dance and waltzed round the room twice with her. Lobytko, gliding over the parquet floor, flew up to the lilac young lady and whirled her away. Dancing be- gan. . . . Ryabovich stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the knowledge that he was timid, round- shouldered, and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, look- ing at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful.

When the quadrille began, young von Rabbeck came up to those who were not dancing and invited two offi- cers to have a game at billiards. The officers accepted and went with him out of the drawing room. Ryabovich, having nothing to do and wishing to take at least some part in the general movement, slouched after them. From the big drawing room they went into the little drawing room, then into a narrow corridor with a glass roof, and thence into a room in which on their entrance three sleepy-looking footmen jumped up quickly from couches. At last, after passing through a long succession of rooms, young von Rabbeck and the officers came into a small roon^ where there was a billiard table. They be- gan to play.

Ryabovich, who haad never played any game but cards, stood neaar the billiard table and looked indiffer- ently at the players, while they in unbuttoned coats, with cues in their hands, stepped about, made puns, and kept shouting out unintelligible words.

The players took no notice of him, and only now and then one of them, shoving him with his elbow or acci- dentally touching him with his cue, would tum round and say "Pardon!" Before the first game was over he was weary of it, and began to feel that he was not wanted and in the way. . . • He felt disposed to return to the drawing-room and he went out.

On his way back he met with a little adventure. When he had gone half-way he noticed that he had taken a wrong turning. He distinctly remembered that he ought to meet three sleepy footmen on his way, but he had passed five or six rooms, and those sleepy figures seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. No- ticing his mistake, he walked back a little way and turned to the right; he found himself in a little room which was in semidarkness and which he had not seen on his way to the billiard room. After standing there a little while, he resolutely opened the first door that met his eyes and walked into an absolutely dark room. Straight ahead could be seen the crack in the doorway through which came a gleam of vivid light; from the other side of the door came the muffied sound of a melancholy mazurka. Here, too, as in the drawing-room, the windows were wide open and there was a smell of poplars, lilac, and roses. . . .

Ryabovich stood still in hesitation. . . . At that mo- ment, to his surprise, he heard hurried footsteps and the rustling of a dress, a breathless feminine voice whispered "At last!" and two soft, fragrant, unmistak- ably feminine arms were clasped about his neck; a wann cheek was pressed against his; and simultaneously there was the sound of a kiss. But at once the bestower of the kiss uttered a faint shriek and sprang away from him, as it seemed to Ryabovich, with disgust. He, too, almost shrieked and rushed towards the gleam of light at the door. . . .

When he returned to the drawing-room his heart was palpitating and his hands were tremBling so noticeably that he made haste to hide them behind his back. At first he was tormented by shame and dread that the whole drawing-room knew that he had just been kissed and embraced by a woman. He shrank into himself and looked uneasily about him, but as he became convinced that people were dancing and talking as calmly as ever, he gave himself up entirely to the new sensation which he had never experienced before in his life. Something strange was happening to him. . . . His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his mustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from pep- permint drops, and the more he rubbed the place the more distinct was the chilly sensation; all of him, from head to foot, was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger. . . . He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud. . . . He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninter- esting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an "undistin- guished appearance" (that was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard). When von Rabbeck's wife happened to pass by him, he gave her such a broad and friendly smile that she stood still and looked at him in- quiringly.

"I like your house immensely!" he said, setting his spectacles straight.

The General's wife smiled and said that the house had belonged to her father; then she asked whether his parents were living, whether he had long been in the army, why he' was so thin, and so on. . . . After receiv- ing answers to her questions, she went on, and after his conversation with her his smiles were more friendly than ever, and he thought he was surrounded by splendid people. . . .

At supper Ryabovich ate mechanically everything of- fered him, drank, and without listening to anything, tried to understand what had just happened to him. . • • The adventure was of a mysterious and romantic char- acter, but it was not difficult to explain it. No doubt some girl or young married lady had arranged a tryst with some man in the dark room; had waited a long time, and being nervous and excited had taken Ryabo- vich for her hero; this was the more probable as Ryabo- vich had stood still hesitating in the dark room, so that he, too, had looked like a person waiting for something. • . . This was how Ryabovich explained to himself the kiss he had received.

"And who is she?" he wondered, looking round at the women's faces. "She must be young, for elderly ladies don't arrange rendezvous. That she was a lady, one could tell by the rustle of her dress, her perfume, her voice. . . ,"

His eyes rested on the lilac young lady, and he thought her very attractive; she had beautiful shoulders and arms, a clever face, and a delightful voice. Ryabo- vich, looking at her, hoped that she and no one else was his unknown. . . . But she laughed somehow artificially and wrinkled up her long nose, which seemed to him to make her look old. Then he turned his eyes upon the blonde in a black dress. She was younger, simpler, and more genuine, had a charming brow, and drank very daintily out of her wineglass. Ryabovich now hoped that it was she. But soon he began to think her face flat, and fixed his eyes upon the one next her.

"It's difficult to guess," he thought, musing. "If one were to take only the shoulders and arms of the lilac girl, add the brow of the blonde and the eyes of the one on the left of Lobytko, then . . ."

He made a combination of these things in his mind and so formed the image of the girl who had kissed him, the image that he desired but could not find at the table. . . .

After supper, replete and exhilarated, the officers be- gan to take leave and say thank you. Von Rabbeck and his wife began again apologizing that they could not ask them to stay the night.

"Very, very glad to have met you, gentlemen," said von Rabbeck, and this time sincerely (probably because people are far more sincere and good-humored at speed- ing their parting guests than on meeting them). "De- lighted. Come again on your way back! Don't stand on ceremony! Where are you going? Do you want to go by the upper way? No, go across the garden; it's nearer by the lower road."

The officers went out into the garden. After the bright light and the noise the garden seemed very dark and quiet. They walked in silence all the way to the gate. They were a little drunk, in good spirits, and con- tented, but the darkness and silence made them thought- ful for a minute. Probably the same idea occurred to each one of them as to Ryabovich: would there ever come a time for them when, like von Rabbeck, they would have a large house, a family, a garden—when they, too, would be able to welcome people, even though insincerely, feed them, make them drunk and contented?

Going out of the garden gate, they all began talking at once and laughing loudly about nothing. They were walking now along the little path that led down to the river and then ran along the water's edge, winding round the bushes on the bank, the gulleys, and the wil- lows that overhung the water. The bank and the path were scarcely visible, and the other bank was entirely plunged in darkness. Stars were reflected here and there in the dark water; they quivered and were broken up —and from that alone it could be seen that the river was flowing rapidly. It was still. Drowsy sandpipers cried plaintively on the farther bank, and in one of the bushes on the hither side a nightingale was trilling loudly, taking no notice of the crowd of officers. The officers stood round the bush, touched it, but the nightingale went on singing.

"What a fellow!" they exclaimed approvingly. "We stand beside him and he takes not a bit of notice! What a rascal!"

At the end of the way the path went uphill, and, skirting the church enclosure, led into the road. Here the officers, tired with walking uphill, sat down and lighted their cigarettes. On the farther bank of the river a murky red fire came into sight, and having nothing better to do, they spent a long time in discussing whether it was a camp fire or a light in a window, or something else. . . . Ryabovich, too, looked at the light, and he fancied that the light looked and winked at him, as though it knew about the kiss.

On reaching his quarters, Ryabovich undressed as quickly as possible and got into bed. Lobytko and Lieu- tenant Merzlyakov—a peaceable, silent fellow, who was considered in his own circle a highly educated officer, and was always, whenever it was possible, reading The Messenger of Europe, which he carried about with him everywhere—were quartered in the same cottage with Ryabovich. Lobytko undressed, walked up and down the room for a long while with the air of a man who has not been satisfied, and sent his orderly for beer. Merz- lyakov got into bed, put a candle by his pillow and plunged into The Messenger of Europe.

"Who was she?" Ryabovich wondered, looking at the sooty ceiling.

His neck still felt as though he had been anointed with oil, and there was still the chilly sensation near his mouth as though from peppermint drops. The shoul- ders and arms of the young lady in lilac, the brow and the candid eyes of the blonde in black, waists, dresses, and brooches, floated through his imagination. He tried to fix his attention on these images, but they danced about, broke up and flickered. When these images van- ished altogether from the broad dark background which everyone sees when he closes his eyes, he began to hear hurried footsteps, the rustle of skirts, the sound of a kiss—and an intense baseless joy took possession of him. . . . Abandoning himself to this joy, he heard the orderly return and announce that there was no beer. Lobytko was terribly indignant, and began pacing up and down the room again.

"Well, isn't he an idiot?" he kept saying, stopping first before Ryabovich and then before Merzlyakov. "Wha^ a fool and a blockhead a man must be not to get hold of any beer! Eh? Isn't he a blackguard?"

"Of course you can't get beer here," said Merzlyakov, not removing his eyes from The Messenger of Europe.

"Oh! Is that your opinion?" Lobytko persisted. "Lord have mercy upon us, if you dropped me on the moon I'd find you beer and women directly! I'll go and find some at once. . . . You may call me a rascal if I don't!"

He spent a long time in dressing and pulling on his high boots, then finished smoking his cigarette in silence and went out.

"Rabbeck, Grabbeck, Labbeck," he muttered, stop- ping in the outer room. "I don't care to go alone, damn it all! Ryabovich, wouldn't you like to go for a walk? Eh?"

Receiving no answer, he returned, slowly undressed, and got into bed. Merzlyakov sighed, put The Messen- ger of Europe away, and extinguished the light.

"H'm! . . ." muttered Lobytko, lighting a cigarette in the dark.

Ryabovich pulled the bedclothes over his head, curled himself up in bed, and tried to gather together the flashing images in his mind and to combine them into a whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him and made him happy—that something extraordi- nary, foolish, but joyful and delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even in his sleep.

When he woke up the sensations of oil on his neck and the chill of peppermint about his lips had gone, but joy flooded his heart just as the day before. He looked enthusiastically at the window-frames, gilded by the light of the rising sun, and listened to the movement of the passers-by in the street. People were talking loudly close to the window. Lebedetzky, the commander of Ryabovich's battery, who had only just overtaken the brigade, was talking to his sergeant at the top of his voice, having lost the habit of speaking in ordinary tones.

"What else?" shouted the commander.

"When they were shoeing the horses yesterday, your Honor, they injured Pigeon's hoof with a nail. The vet put on clay and vinegar; they are leading him apart now. Also, your Honor, Artemyev got drunk yesterday, and the lieutenant ordered him to be put in the limber of a spare gun-carriage."

The sergeant reported that Karpov had forgotten the new cords for the trumpets and the pegs for the tents, and that their Honors the officers had spent the previ- ous evening visiting General von Rabbeck. In the mid- dle of this conversation the red-bearded face of Leb- edetzky appeared in the window. He screwed up his short-sighted eyes, looking at the sleepy faces of the officers, and greeted them.

"Is everything all right?" he asked. "One of the horses has a sore neck from the new collar," answered Lobytko, yawning.

The commander sighed, thought a moment, and sai^' 1n a loud voice:

"I am thinking of going to see Alexandra Yevgrafovna. I must call on her. Well, good-by. I shall catch up with you in the evening."

A quarter of an hour later the brigade set off on its way. When it was moving along the road past the barns, Ryabovich looked at the house on the right. The blinds were down in all the windows. Evidently the house- hold was still asleep. The one who had kissed Ryabo- vich the day before was asleep too. He tried to imagine her asleep. The wide-open window of the bedroom, the green branches peeping in, the morning freshness, the scent of the poplars, lilac, and roses, the bed, a chair, and on it the skirts that had rustled the day before, the little slippers, the little watch on the table—all this he pictured to himself clearly and distinctly, but the features of the face, the sweet sleepy smile, just what was characteristic and important, slipped through his imagination like quicksilver through the fingers. When he had ridden a third of a mile, he looked back: the yellow church, the house, and the river, were all bathed in light; the river with its bright green banks, with the blue sky reflected in it and glints of silver in the sun- shine here and there, was very beautiful. Ryabovich gazed for the last time at Mestechki, and he felt as sad as though he were parting with something very near and dear to him.

And before him on the road were none but long fa- miliar, uninteresting scenes. . . . To right and to left, fields of young rye and buckwheat with rooks hopping about in them; if one looked ahead, one saw dust and the backs of men's heads; if one looked back, one saw the same dust and faces. . . . Foremost of all marched four men with sabers—this was the vanguard. Next came the singers, and behind them the trumpeters on horseback. The vanguard and the singers, like torch- bearers in a funeral procession, often forgot to keep the regulation distance and pushed a long way ahead. . . . Ryabovich was with the first cannon of the fifth battery. He could see all the four batteries moving in front of him. To a civilian the long tedious procession which is a brigade on the move seems an intricate and unintel- ligible muddle; one cannot understand why there are so many people round one cannon, and why it is drawn by so many horses in such a strange network of har- ness, as though it really were so terrible and heavy. To Ryabovich it was all perfectly comprehensible and there- fore uninteresting. He had known for ever so long why at the head of each battery beside the officer there rode a stalwart noncom, called bombardier; immediately be- hind him could be seen the horsemen of the first and then of the middle units. Ryabovich knew that of the horses on which they rode, those on the left were called one name, while those on the right were called another —it was all extremely uninteresting. Behind the horse- men came two shaft-horses. On one of them sat a rider still covered with the dust of yesterday and with a clumsy and funny-looking wooden guard on his right leg. Ryabovich knew the object of this guard, and did not think it funny. All the riders waved their whips mechanically and shouted from time to time. The can- non itself was not presentable. On the limber lay sacks of oats covered with a tarpaulin, and the cannon itself was hung all over with kettles, soldiers' knapsacks, bags, and looked like some small harmless animal surrounded for some unknown reason by men and horses. To the leeward of it marched six men, the gunners, swinging their arms. After the cannon there came again more bombardiers, riders, shaft-horses, and behind them an- other cannon, as unpresentable and unimpressive as the first. After the second came a third, a fourth; near the fourth there was an officer, and so on. There were six batteries in all in the brigade, and four cannon in each battery. The procession covered a third of a mile; it ended in a string of wagons near which an extremely appealing creature—the ass, Magar, brought by a bat- tery commander from Turkey—paced pensively, his long-eared head -drooping.

Ryabovich looked indifferently ahead and behind him, at the backs of heads and at faces; at any other time he would have been half asleep, but now he was entirely absorbed in his new agreeable thoughts. At first when the brigade was setting off on the march he tried to persuade himself that the incident of the kiss could only be interesting as a mysterious little adven- ture, that it was in reality trivial, and to think of it seriously, to say the least, was stupid; but now he bade farewell to logic and gave himself up to dreams. . . . At one moment he imagined himself in von Rabbeck's drawing-room beside a girl who was like the young lady in lilac and the blonde in black; then he would close his eyes and see himself with another, entirely un- known girl, whose features were very vague. In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned over her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife, children. . . .

"Brakes on!" The word of command rang out every time they went downhill.

He, too, shouted "Brakes on!" and was afraid this shout would disturb his reverie and bring him back to reality. . . .

As they passed by some landowner's estate Ryabo- vich looked over the fence into the garden. A long avenue, straight as a ruler, strewn with yellow sand and bordered with young birch-trees, met his eyes. . . . With the eagerness of a man who indulges in daydream- ing, he pictured to himself little feminine feet tripping along yellow sand, and quite unexpectedly had a clear vision in his imagination of her who had kissed him and whom he had succeeded in picturing to himself the evening before at supper. This image remained in his brain and did not desert him again.

At midday there was a shout in the rear near the string of wagons:

"Attention! Eyes to the left! Officers!"

The general of the brigade drove by in a carriage drawn by a pair of white horses. He stopped near the second battery, and shouted something which no one understood. Several officers, among them Ryabovich, galloped up to him.

"Well? How goes it?" asked the general, blinking his red eyes. "Are there any sick?"

Receiving an answer, the general, a little skinny man, chewed, thought for a moment and said, addressing one of the officers:

"One of your drivers of the third cannon has taken off his leg-guard and hung it on the fore part of the cannon, the rascal. Reprimand him."

He raised his eyes to Ryabovich and went on: "It seems to me your breeching is too long." Making a few other tedious remarks, the general looked at Lobytko and grinned.

"You look very melancholy today, Lieutenant Lo- bytko," he said. "Are you pining for Madame Lopuhova? Eh? Gentlemen, he is pining for Madame Lopuhova."

Madame Lopuhova was a very stout and very tall lady long past forty. The general, who had a predilec- tion for large women, whatever their ages, suspected a similar taste in his officers. The officers smiled respect- fully. The general, delighted at having said something very amusing and biting, laughed loudly, touched his coachman's back, and saluted. The carriage rolled on. . . .

"All I am dreaming about now which seems to me so impossible and unearthly is really quite an ordinary thing," thought Ryabovich, looking at the clouds of dust racing after the general's carriage. "It's all very ordinary, and everyone goes through it. . . . That gen- eral, for instance, was in love at one time; now he is married and has children. Captain Wachter, too, is married and loved, though the nape of his neck is very red and ugly and he has no waist. . . . Salmanov is coarse and too much of a Tartar, but he had a love afair that has ended in marriage. . . . I am the same as every- one else, and I, too, shall have the same experience as everyone else, sooner or later. . . ."

And the thought that he was an ordinary person and that his life was ordinary delighted him and gave him courage. He pictured her and his happiness boldly, just as he liked. . . .

When the brigade reached their halting-place in the evening, and the officers were resting in their tents, Ryabovich, Merzlyakov, and Lobytko were sitting round a chest having supper. Merzlyakov ate without haste and, as he munched deliberately, read The Messenger of Europe, which he held on his knees. Lobytko talked incessantly and kept filling up his glass with beer, and Ryabovich, whose head was confused from dreaming all day long, drank and said nothing. After three glasses lie got a little drunk, felt weak, and had an iresistible desire to relate his new sensations to his comrades.

"A strange thing happened to me at those von Rab- becks'," he began, trying to impart an indifferent and ironical tone to his voice. "You know I went into the billiard-room. . .

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence. . . . In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning. Listening to him, Lobytko, who was a great liar and consequently believed no one, looked at him skeptically and laughed. Merzlyakov twitched his eyebrows and, without removing his eyes from The Messenger of Europe, said:

"That's an odd thing! How strange! . . . throws her- self on a man's neck, without addressing him by name. . . . She must have been some sort of lunatic."

"Yes, she must," Ryabovich agreed.

"A similar thing once happened to me," said Lobytko, assuming a scared expression. "I was going last year to

Kovno. ... I took a second-class ticket. The train was crammed, and it was impossible to sleep. I gave the guard half a ruble; he took my luggage and led me to another compartment. . . . I lay down and covered myself with a blanket. . . . It was dark, you understand. Suddenly I felt someone touch me on the shoulder and breathe in my face. I made a movement with my hand and felt somebody's elbow. ... I opened my eyes and only imagine—a woman. Black eyes, lips red as a prime salmon, nostrils breathing passionately—a bosom like a buffer. . . ."

"Excuse me," Merzlyakov interrupted calmly, "I un- derstand about the bosom, but how could you see th-e lips if it was dark?"

Lobytko began trying to put himself right and laugh- ing at Merzlyakov's being so dull-witted. It made Ryabo- vich wince. He walked away from the chest, got into bed, and vowed never to confi.de again.

Camp life began. . . . The days flowed by, one very much like another. All those days Ryabovich felt, thought, and behaved as though he were in love. Every morning when his orderly handed him what he needed for washing, and he sluiced his head with cold water, he recalled that there was something warm and delight- ful in his life.

In the evenings when his comrades began talking of love and women, he would listen, and draw up closer; and he wore the expression of a soldier listening to the description of a battle in which he has taken part. And on the evenings when the officers, out on a spree with the setter Lobytko at their head, made Don-Juanesque raids on the neighboring "suburb," and Ryabovich took part in such excursions, he always was sad, felt profoundly guilty, and inwardly begged her forgiveness. . . . In hours of leisure or on sleepless nights when he felt moved to recall his childhood, his father and mother—every- thing near and dear, in fact, he invariably thought of Mes- techki, the queer horse, von Rabbeck, his wife who re- sembled Empress Eugcnie, the dark room, the light in the crack of the door. . . .

On the thirty-first of August he was returning from the camp, not with the whole brigade, but with only two batteries. He was dreamy and excited all the way, as though he were going home. He had an intense long- ing to see again the queer horse, the church, the in- sincere family of the von Rabbecks, the dark room. The "inner voice," which so often deceives lovers, whispered to him for some reason that he would surely see her . . . And he was tortured by the questions: How would he meet her? What would he talk to her about? Had she forgotten the kiss? If the worst came to the worst, he thought, even if he did not meet her, it would be a pleasure to him merely to go through the dark room and recall the past. . . .

Towards evening there appeared on the horizon the familiar church and white barns. Ryabovich's heart raced. . . • He did not hear the officer who was riding beside him and saying something to him, he forgot everything, and looked eagerly at the river shining in the distance, at the roof of the house, at the dovecote round which the pigeons were circling in the light of the setting sun.

When they reached the church and were listening to the quartermaster, he expected every second that a man on horseback would come round the church en- closure and invite the officers to tea, but . . . the quartermaster ended his report, the officers dismounted and strolled off to the village, and the man on horse- back did not appear.

"Von Rabbeck wiU hear at once from the peasants

that we have come and wiU send for us," thought

Ryabovich, as he went into the peasant cottage, unable

to understand why a comrade was lighting a candle and

why the orderlies were hastening to get the samovars

going.

A crushing uneasiness took possession of him. He lay down, then got up and looked out of the window to see whether the messenger were coming. But there was no sign of him.

He lay do^ again, but half an hour later he got up and, unable to restrain his uneasiness, went into the street and strode towards the church. It was dark and deserted in the square near the church enclosure. Three soldiers were standing silent in a row where the road began to go down-hill. Seeing Ryabovich, they roused themselves and saluted. He returned the salute and be- gan to go do^ the familiar path.

On the farther bank of the river the whole sky was flooded with crimson: the moon was rising; two peasant women, talking loudly, were pulling cabbage leaves in the kitchen garden; beyond the kitchen garden there were some cottages that formed a dark mass. . . • Everything on the near side of the river was just as it had been in May: the path, the bushes, the willows over- hanging the water . . . but there was no sound of the brave nightingale and no scent of poplar and young grass.

Reaching the garden, Ryabovich looked in at the gate. The garden was dark and still. . • . He could see nothing but the white stems of the nearest birch-trees and a little bit of the avenue; all the rest melted to- gether into a dark mass. Ryabovich looked and listened eagerly, but after waiting for a quarter of an hour out hearing a sound or catching a glimpse of a light, he trudged back. . • .

He went do^ to the river. The General's bathing cabin and the bath-sheets on the rail of the little bridge showed white before him. . . . He walked up on the bridge, stood a little, and quite unnecessarily touched a sheet. It felt rough and cold. He looked do^ at the water. . . . The river ran rapidly and with a faintly audible gurgle round the piles of the bathing cabin. The red moon was reflected near the left bank; little ripples ran over the reflection, stretching it out, breaking it into bits, and seemed trying to carry it away. . . .

"How stupid, how stupid!" thought Ryabovich, look- ing at the running water. "How unintelligent it all is!"

Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and disappoint- ment, presented themselves to him in a clear light. It no longer seemed to him strange that the General's mes- senger never came and that he would never see the girl who had accidentally kissed him instead of someone else; on the contrary, it would have been strange if he had seen her. . . .

The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May. At that time it had flowed into a great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapor, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before Ryabovich's eyes again. . . . What for? Why?

And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovich an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how Fate in the person of an un- known woman had by chance caressed him, he recalled his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meager, poverty-stricken, and drab. . . .

When he had returned to the cottage he did not find a single comrade. The orderly informed him that they had all gone to "General Fontryabkin, who had sent a messenger on horseback to invite them. . . ."

For an instant there was a flash of joy in Ryabovich's heart, but he quenched it at once, got into bed, and in his wrath with his fate, as though to spite it, did not go to the General's.

1887

The Name-Day Party

the festive dinner with its eight courses Ј\. and its endless conversation, Olga Mihailovna, whose husband's name-day was being celebrated, went out into the garden. The duty of smiling and talking in- cessantly, the clatter of the crockery, the stupidity of the servants, the long intervals between the courses, and the stays she had put on to conceal her pregnancy from the visitors, wearied her to exhaustion. She longed to get away from the house, to sit in the shade and rest her mind with thoughts of the baby which was to be born to her in another two months. She was used to these thoughts coming to her as she turned to the left out of the big avenue into the narrow path. Here in the thick shade of the plums and cherry-trees the dry branches would scratch her neck and shoulders; a spi- der's web would settle on her face, and there would rise up in her mind the image of a little creature of undetermined sex and undefined features, and it began to seem as though it were not the spider's web that tickled her face and neck caressingly, but that little creature. When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker fence came into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs; when into the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and honey, and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature would take complete possession of Olga Mihailovna. She used to sit down on a bench near the shanty of woven branches, and fall to thinking.

This time, too, she went on as far as the seat, sat down, and began thinking; but instead of the little creature there rose up in her imagination the figures of the grown-up people whom she had just left. She felt dreadfully uneasy that she, the hostess, had deserted her guests, and she remembered how her husband, Pyotr Dmitrich, and her uncle, Nikolay Nikolaich, had argued at dinner about trial by jury, about the press, and about the higher education of women. Her husband, as usual, argued in order to show off his Conservative ideas be- fore his visitors—but chiefly in order to disagree with her uncle, whom he disliked. Her uncle contradicted him and wrangled over every word he uttered, so as to show the company that he, Uncle Nikolay Nikolaich, still retained his youthful freshness of spirit and free- thinking in spite of his fifty-nine years. And towards the end of dinner even Olga Mihailovna herself could not resist taking part and unskillfully attempting to defend university education for women—not that it stood in need of her defense, but simply because she wanted to annoy her husband, who to her mind was unfair. The guests were wearied by this discussion, but they all thought it necessary to take part in it, and talked a great deal, although none of them took any interest in trial by jury or the higher education of women. . . .

Olga Mihailovna was sitting on the hither side of the fence near the shanty. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The trees and the air were frowning as before rain, but in spite of that it was hot and stifling. The hay cut under the trees on the previous day was lying un- gathered, looking melancholy, with here and there a patch of color from the faded flowers, and from it came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. On the other side of the fence there was a monotonous hum of bees. . . .

Suddenly she heard footsteps and voices; someone was coming along the path towards the apiary.

"How stifling it is!" said a feminine voice. "What do you think—is it going to rain, or not?"

"It is going to rain, my charmer, but not before night,'' a very familiar male voice answered languidly. "There will be a good rain."

Olga Mihailovna figured that if she made haste to hide in the shanty they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not have to talk and to force heiself to smile. She picked up her skirts, bent down, and crept into the shanty. At once she felt upon her face, her neck, her arms, the hot air as heavy as steam. If it had not been for the stuffiness and the close smell of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood, which prevented her from breathing freely, it would have been delightful to hide from her visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and to think about the little creature. It was cozy and quiet.

"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here, Pyotr Dmitrich."

Olga Mihailovna began peeping through a crack be- tween two branches. She saw her husband, Pyotr Dmi- trich, and Lubochka Scheller, a girl of seventeen who had recently left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitrich, with his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk so much at dinner, slouched past the fence and raked the hay into a heap with his foot;

Lubochka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood with her hands behind her, watching the lazy move- ments of his big handsome body.

Olga Mihailovna knew that her husband was attrac- tive to women, and did not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way in Pyotr Dmitrich's lazily raking together the hay in order to sit down on it with Lubochka and chatter to her of trivialities; there was nothing out of the way, either, in pretty Lubochka's looking at him meekly; but yet Olga Mihailovna felt vexed with her husband and frightened and pleased that she could eavesdrop.

"Sit do^, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitrich, sinking down on the hay and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."

"What next! If I begin telling you anything you wiU go to sleep."

"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like yours are watching me?"

In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat on the back of his head in the pres- ence of a lady, there was nothing out of the way either. He was spoiled by women, knew that they found him attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which everyone said suited him. With Lubochka he be- haved as with all women. But, all the same, Olga Mi- hailovna was jealous.

"Tell me, please," said Lubochka, after a brief si- lence, "is it true that you are to be tried for something?"

"I? Yes, I am numbered among the transgressors, my charmer.

"But what for?"

"For nothing, just so . . . it's chiefly a question of politics," ya^ed Pyotr Dmitrich, "the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an obscurantist and reactionary, ven- tured in an official paper to make use of an expression offensive to such immaculate Gladstones as Vladimir Pavlovich Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace, Kuzma Grigorich Vostryakov."

Pyotr Dmitrich yawned again and went on:

"And it is the way with us that you may express dis- approval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the horrid dry fungus which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with your finger."

'What happened to you?"

"Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle. A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with insulting language and behavior in a public place. Everything suggests that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers and that they behaved equally badly. If there had been insulting behavior, the insult had anyway been mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined them both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the court—that is all. But that's not uur way of doing things. With us what stands first is not the person—not the fact itself, but the trademark and label. However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the right because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong because he is a tavern-keeper and a moneygrubber. Vostryakov placed the tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the Circuit Court triumphantly up- held Vostryakov's decision. Well, I stuck to my own opinion. , . . Got a little hot. . . . That was all."

Pyotr Dmitrich spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the trial that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihailovna remembered how on his re- turn from the unfortunate session he had tried to con. ceal from his household how troubled he was and how dissatisfied with himself. As an intelligent man he could not help feeling that he had gone too far in expressing his disagreement; and how much lying had been need- ful to conceal that feeling from himself and from others! How many unnecessary conversations there had been! How much grumbling and insincere laughter at what was not laughable! When he learned that he was to be brought up before the Court, he suddenly felt very tired and depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood oftener than ever at the windows, drumming on the panes with his fingers. And he was ashamed to let his wife see that he was worried, and it vexed her.

"Is it true, as they say, that you've been to the prov- ince of Poltava?" Lubochka asked him.

"Yes," answered Pyotr Dmitrich. "I came back the day before yesterday."

"I expect it is very nice there."

"Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I ar- rived just in time for the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine the haymaking is the most poetical moment of the year. Here we have a big house, a big garden, a lot of servants, and a lot going on, so that you don't see the haymaking; here it all passes unnoticed. There, at the farm, I have a meadow of forty acres as flat as my hand. You can see the men mowing from any window you stand at. They are mowing in the meadow, they are mowing in the garden. There are no visitors, no fuss nor hurry either, so that you can't help seeing, feeling, hearing nothing but the haymaking. There is a smell of hay indoors and outdoors. There's the sound of the scythes from sunrise to sunset. Altogether Little Russia is a charming country. Would you believe it, when I was drinking water from the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew's tavern, when on quiet eve- nings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle and the tambourines reached me, I was tempted by a fasci- nating idea—to settle down on my place and live there as long as I chose, far away from Circuit Courts, intel- lectual conversations, philosophizing women, long din- ners. . . ."

Pyotr Dmitrich was not lying. He was unhappy and ieaHy longed for a rest. And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid seeing his study, his servants, his acquaintances, and everything that could remind him of his wounded vanity and his mistakes.

Lubochka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in horror. "Oh! A bee, a bee!" she shrieked. "It will sting!"

"Nonsense; it won't sting," said Pyotr Dmitrich. "What a coward you are!"

"No, no, no," cried Lubochka; and looking round at the bees, she walked rapidly back.

Pyotr Dmitrich walked away after her, looking at her with a softened and melancholy face. He was probably thinking, as he looked at her, of his farm, of solitude, and—who knows?—perhaps he was even thinking how snug and cozy life would be at the farm if his wife had been this girl—young, pure, fresh, not corrupted by higher education, not with child. . • •

When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihailovna came out of the shanty and turned towards the house. She wanted to cry. She was by now acutely jealous. She could understand that her husband was worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had noth- ing to fear from Lubochka or from those women who were now drinking coffee indoors. But everything in general was terrible, incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihailovna that Pyotr Dmitrich only half belonged to her. . . .

"He has no right!" she muttered, trying to find rea- sons for her jealousy and her vexation with her hus- band. "He has no right at all. I will tell him so plainly!"

She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all about it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive to other women and sought their admiration as though it were heavenly manna; it was unjust and dishonorable that he should give to others what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face he came across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to blame? She had grown sick of his lying long ago; he was forever posing, flirting, saying what he did not think, and trying to seem different from what he was and what he ought to be. Why this falsity? Was it seemly in a decent man? If he lied he was demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and slighting what he lied about. Could he not understand that if he swaggered and posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on the prerogatives of Government, simply to provoke her uncle, he was showing thereby that he had not a groat's worth of respect for the Court, or himself, or any of the people who were listening and looking at him?

Coming out into the big avenue, Olga Mihailovna as- sumed an expression of face as though she had just gone away to look after some domestic matter. On the veranda the gentlemen were drinking liqueur and eating straw- berries: one of them, the Examining Magistrate—a stout elderly man, a chatter-box and wit—must have been telling some rather broad anecdote, for, seeing their hostess, he suddenly clapped his hands over his fat lips, rolled his eyes, and sat down. Olga Mihailovna did not like the local officials. She did not care for their clumsy, ceremonious wives, their scandalmongering, their frequent visits, their flattery of her husband, whom they all hated. Now, when they were drinking, were replete with food and showed no signs of going away, she felt their presence an agonizing weariness; but not to appear impolite, she smiled cordially to the magis- trate and shook her finger at him. She walked across the dining-room and drawing-room smiling and looking as though she had gone to give some order and make some arrangement. "God grant no one stops me," she thought, but she forced herself to stop in the drawing- room to listen from politeness to a young man who was sitting at the piano playing; after standing for a minute, she cried, "Bravo, bravo, M. Georges!" and clapping her hands twice, went on.

She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at the table, thinking of something. His face looked stern, thoughtful, and guilty. This was not the same Pyotr Dmitrich who had been arguing at dinner and whom his guests knew, but a different man—tired, feeling guilty and dissatisfied with himself, whom no- body knew but his wife. He must have come to the study to get cigarettes. Before him lay an open ciga- rette-case full of cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer; he had paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.

Olga Mihailovna felt sorry for him. It was as clear as day that this man was harassed, could find no rest, and was perhaps struggling with himself. Olga Mihail- ovna went up to the table in silence: wanting to show that she had forgotten the argument at dinner and was not cross, she shut the cigarette-case and put it in her husband's coat pocket.

"What should I say to him?" she wondered. "I shall say that lying is like a forest—the further one goes into it the more difficult it is to get out of it. I shall tell him, 'You have been carried away by the false part you are playing; you have insulted people who were attached to you and have done you no harm. Go and apologize to them, laugh at yourself, and you will feel better. And if you want peace and solitude, let us go away to- gether.'"

Meeting his wife's gaze, Pyotr Dmitrich's face im- mediately assumed the expression it had worn at dinner and in the garden—indifferent and slightly ironical. He ya^ed and got up.

"It's past five," he said, looking at his watch. "If our guests are merciful and leave us at eleven, even then we have another six hours of it. It's a cheerful prospect, there's no denying!"

And whistling something, he walked slowly out of the study with his usual dignified gait. She could hear his dignified tread as he crossed the ballroom and the drawing-room, and hear him laugh with pompous as- surance, as he said to the young man who was playing, "Bravo! bravo!" Soon his footsteps died away:he must have gone out into the garden. And now not jealousy, not vexation, but real hatred of his footsteps, his in- sincere laugh and voice, took possession of Olga Mihail- ovna. She went to the window and looked out into the garden. Pyotr Dmitrich was already walking along the avenue. Putting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the other, he walked with confident swiging steps, throwing his head back a little and looking as though he were very well satisfied with him- self, with his dinner, with his digestion, and with Na- ture. . . .

Two little schoolboys, the children of Madame Chiz- hevskaya, who had only just arrived, made their appear- ance in the avenue, accompanied by their tutor, a stu- dent wearing a white tunic and very tight trousers. When they reached Pyotr Dmitrich, the boys and the student stopped, and probably congratulated him on his name-day. With a graceful swing of his shoulders, he patted the children on their cheeks and carelessly of- fered the student his hand without looking at him. The student must have praised the weather and compared it with the climate of Petersburg, for Pyotr Dmitrich said in a loud voice, in a tone as though he were speaking not to a guest, but to a sergeant-at-arms or a witness at court:

"What? It's cold in Petersburg? And here, my good sir, we have the finest weather and the fruits of the earth in abundance. Eh? What?"

And thrusting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the other, he walked on. Till he had dis- appeared behind the hazel bushes, Olga Mihailovna watched the back of his head in perplexity. How had this man of thirty-four come by this staid gait of a general? How had he come by that impressive, elegant manner? Where had he got that vibration of authority in his voice? Where had he got these "what's," "to be sure's," and "my good sir's"?

Olga Mihailovna remembered how in the first months of her marriage she had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into to^ to the Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitrich had sometimes presided in lieu of her godfather, Count Alexey Petrovich. In the presidential chair, wearing his uniform and the chain of office on his breast, he was completely transformed. Stately gestures, a voice of thunder, "what?'' "to be sure," a careless tone. • • . Everything, all that was ordinary and human, all that was individual and personal to himself that Olga Mihailovna was accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished in grandeur, and in the presidential chair there sat not Pyotr Dmitrich but another man whom everyone called Mr. President. This consciousness of power prevented him from sitting still in his place, and he seized every opportunity to ring his bell, to glance sternly at the public, to shout. . . . Where had he got his short-sight and his deafness when he suddenly be- gan to see and hear with difficulty, and, frowning ma- jestically, insisted on people speaking louder and com- ing closer to the table? From the height of his grandeur he could hardly distinguish faces or sounds, so that it seemed that if Olga Mihailovna herself had gone up to him he would have shouted even to her, "Your name?" Peasant witnesses he addressed familiarly, he shouted at the public so that his voice could be heard even in the street, and behaved incredibly with the lawyers. If an attorney had to speak to him, Pyotr Dmitrich, turning a little away from him, looked with half-closed eyes at the ceiling, meaning to signify thereby that the lawyer was utterly superfluous and that he was neither recog- nizing him nor listening to him; if a badly dressed private solicitor spoke, Pyotr Dmitrich pricked up his ears and looked the man up and down with a sarcastic, annihilating stare as though to say: "Queer sort of lawyers nowadays!" "What do you mean by that?" he would interrupt the man. If a lawyer with pretensions to eloquence mispronounced a foreign word, saying, for instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious," Pyotr Dmi- trich brightened up at once and asked, "What? How? Factitious? What does that mean?" and then observed impressively: "Don't make use of words you do not un- derstand." And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would walk away from the table, red and perspiring, while Pyotr Dmitrich, with a self-satisfied smile, would lean back in his chair triumphant. In his manner with the lawyers he imitated Count Alexey Petrovich a little, but when the latter said, for instance, "Counsel for the de- fense, you keep quiet for a little!" it sounded paternally good-natured and natural, while the same words in Pyotr Dmitrich's mouth were rude and strained.

II

There were sounds of applause. The young man had finished playing. Olga Mihailovna remembered her guests and hurried into the drawing-room.

"I have so enjoyed your playing," she said, going up to the piano. "I have so enjoyed it. You have a wonder- ful talent! But don't you think our piano's out of tune?"

At that moment the two schoolboys walked into the room, accompanied by the student.

"My goodness! Mitya and Kolya," Olga Mihailovna drawled joyfully, going to meet them: "How big you have grown! One would not know you! But where is your mamma?"

"I congratulate you on the name-day," the student began in a free-and-easy tone, "and I wish you all hap- piness. Yekaterina Andreyevna sends her congratula- tions and begs you to excuse her. She is not very well."

"How unkind of her! I have been expecting her all day. Is it long since you left Petersburg?" Olga Mihail- ovna asked the student. 'What kind of weather have you there now?" And without waiting for an answer, she looked cordially at the schoolboys and repeated:

"How tall they have grown! It is not long since they used to come with their nurse, and they are at school already! The old grow older while the young grow up- . . . Have you had dinner?"

"Oh, please don't trouble!" said the student.

"Why, you have not had dinner?"

"For goodness' sake, don't trouble!"

"But I suppose you are hungry?" Olga Mihailovna said it in a harsh, rude voice, with impatience and vexation—it escaped her unawares, but at once she coughed, smiled, and flushed crimson. "How tall they have grown!" she said softly.

"Please don't trouble!" the student said once more.

The student begged her not to trouble; the boys said nothing; obviously all three of them were hungry. Olga Mihailovna took them into the dining-room and told Vasily to lay the table.

"How unkind of your mamma!" she said as she made them sit down. "She has quite forgotten me. Unkind, unkind, unkind . • , you must tell her so. What are you studying?" she asked the student.

"Medicine."

'Well, I have a weakness for doctors, only fancy. I am very sorry my husband is not a doctor. What courage anyone must have to perform an operation or dissect a corpse, for instance! Horrible! Aren't you frightened? I believe I should die of terror! Of course, you will have sorrie vodka?"

"Please don't trouble."

"After your journey you must, you must have a drink. Though I am a woman, even I drink sometimes. And Mitya and Kolya will have some Malaga. It's not a strong wine; you needn't be afraid of it. What fine fel- lows they are, really! They'll be thinking of getting mar- ried next."

Olga Mihailovna talked without ceasing; she knew by experience that when she had guests to entertain it was far easier and more comfortable to talk than to listen. When you talk there is no need to strain your attention, to think of answers to questions, and to change your expression of face. But unawares she asked the student a serious question; the student began a lengthy speech and she was forced to listen. The student knew that she had once been at the university, and so tried to seem a serious person as he talked to her.

'What subject are you studying?" she asked, for- getting that she had already put that question to him.

"Medicine."

Olga Mihailovna now remembered that she had been away from the ladies for a long while.

"Yes? Then I suppose you are going to be a doctor?" she said, getting up. "That's splendid. I am sorry I did not go in for medicine myself. So you will finish your dinner here, gentlemen, and then come into the garden. I will introduce you to the young ladies."

She went out and glanced at her watch: it was five minutes to six. And she wondered that the time had gone so slowly, and thought with horror that there were six more hours before midnight, when the party would break up. How could she get through those six hours? What phrases could she find? How should she behave to ner husband?

There was not a soul in the drawing-room or on the veranda. All the guests were scattered about the garden.

"I shall have to suggest a walk in the birchwood be- fore tea, or that we take out the rowboats," thought Olga Mihailovna, hurrying to the croquet la^, from which came the sounds of voices and laughter. "And sit the old people down to vint. • . ." She met Grigory the footman coming from the croquet lawn with empty bottles.

'Where are the ladies?" she asked.

"In the raspberry patch. The master's there, too."

"Oh, good heavens!" someone on the croquet la^ shouted with exasperation. "I have told you a thousand times over! To know the Bulgarians you must see them! You can't judge from the papers!"

Either because of this outburst or for some other rea- son, Olga Mihailovna was suddenly aware of a terrible weakness all over, especially in her legs and in her shoulders. She felt she could not bear to speak, to listen, or to move.

"Grigory," she said languidly and with an effort, "when you have to serve tea or anything, please don't appeal to me, don't ask me anything, don't speak of any- thing. . . . Do it all yourself, and . . . and don't make a noise with your feet, I entreat you. . • • I can't, be- cause . . ."

Without finishing, she walked on towards the croquet lawn, but on the way she thought of the ladies and turned towards the raspberry-bushes. The sky, the air, and the trees looked gloomy again and tlueatened rain; it was hot and stifling. An immense flock of crows, fore- seeing a storm, flew cawing over the garden. The paths were more overgrown, darker, and narrower as they got nearer the kitchen garden. On one of them, buried in a thick tangle of wild pear, crabapple, sorrel, young oaks, and hop-bine, clouds of tiny black flies swarmed round Olga Mihailovna. She covered her face with her hands and began forcing herself to think of the little creature. . • . There floated through her imagination the figures of Grigory, Mitya, Kolya, the faces of the peasants who had come in the morning to present their congratula- tions. . . .

She heard footsteps, and opened her eyes. Uncle Nik- olay Nikolaich was coming rapidly towards her.

"It's you, dear? I am very glad—" he began, breath- less. "Just a word—" He mopped with his handkerchief his red shaven chin, then suddenly stepped back a pace, clapped his hands together, and opened his eyes wide. "My dear girl, how long will this go on?" he said rapidly, spluttering. "I ask you: is there no limit to it? I say noth- ing of the demoralizing effect of his martinet views on all around him, of the way he insults all that is sacred and best in me and in every honest thinking man—I will say nothing about that, but he might at least behave de- cently! Why, he shouts, he bellows, gives himself airs, poses as a sort of Bonaparte, does not let one say a word. ... I don't know what the devil's the matter with him! These lordly gestures, this condescending tone; and laughing like a general! Who is he, allow me to ask you? I ask you, who is he? The husband of his wife, with a few paltry acres and the rank of a titular councilor who has had the luck to marry an heiress! An upstart and a Junker, of whom there are many! A type out of Shche- drin! Upon my word, it's either that he's suffering from megalomania, or that old rat in his dotage, Count Alexey Petrovich, is right when he says that children and young people are a long time growing up nowadays, and go on playing they are cabmen and generals tiU they are forty!"

"That's true, that's true," Olga Mihailovna assented. "Let me pass."

"Now just consider: what is it leading to?" her uncle went on, barring her way. "How will this playing at being a general and a Conservative end? Already he has got himself into trouble! Yes, he'll have to stand trial! I am very glad of itl That's what his noise and shouting has brought him to—the prisoner's dock. And it's not as though it were the Circuit Court or something: it's the

Central Court! Nothing worse could be imagined, I think! And then he has quarreled with everyone! He is celebrating his name-day, and look, Vostryakov's not here, nor Yahontov, nor Vladimirov, nor Shevud, nor the Count. . . . There is no one, I imagine, more conserv- ative than Count Alexey Petrovich, yet even he has not come. And he never will come again. He won't come, you will see!"

"My God! but what has it to do with me?" asked Olga Mihailovna.

"What has it to do with you? Why, you are his wife! You are clever, you have had a university education, and it was in your power to make him an honest worker!"

"At the lectures I went to they did not teach us how to influence difficult people. It seems as though I should have to apologize to all of you for having been at the university," said Olga Mihailovna sharply. ''Listen, uncle. If people played the same scales over and over again all day long in your hearing, you wouldn't be able to sit still and listen, but would run away. I hear the same thing over again for days together all the year round. You must have pity on me at last."

Her uncle pulled a very long face, then looked at her searchingly and twisted his lips into a mocking smile.

"So that's how it is," he piped in a voice like an old woman's, "I beg your pardon, ma'am!" he said, and made a ceremonious bow. "If you have fallen under his influence yourself, and have abandoned your convic- tions, you should have said so before. I beg your par- don!"

"Yes, I have abandoned my convictions," she cried. ^frere; make the most of it!"

"I beg your pardon, ma'am!"

Her uncle for the last time made her a ceremonious bow, a little on one side, and, shrinking into himself, made a scrape with his foot and walked back.

"Idiot!" thought Olga Mihailovna. "I hope he will go home."

She found the ladies and the young people near the raspberry patch in the kitchen garden. Some were eat- ing raspberries; others, tired of eating raspberries, were strolling about the strawberry beds or foraging among the sugar-peas. A little to one side of the raspberry patch, near a branching apple-tree propped up by posts which had been pulled out of an old fence, Pyotr Dmi- trich was mowing the grass. His hair was falling over his forehead, his cravat was untied. His watch-chain was hanging loose. Every step and every swing of the scythe showed skill and the possession of immense physical strength. Near him were standing Lubochka and the daughters of a neighbor, Colonel Bukreyev—two anemic and unhealthily stout blondes, Natalya and Valentina, or, as they were always called, Nata and Vata, both wearing white frocks and strikingly like each other. Pyotr Dmitrich was teaching them how to mow.

"It's very simple," he said. "You have only to know how to hold the scythe and not to get too hot over it— that is, not to use more force than is necessary! Like this. . . . Wouldn't you like to try?" he said, offering the scythe to Lubochka. "Cornel"

Lubochka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.

"Don't be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovnal" cried Olga Mihailovna, loud enough for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. "Don't be afraid! You must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you mow."

Lubochka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless with laughter, let go of it at once.

She was ashamed and pleased at being talked to as though she were a grown-up. Nata, with a cold, serious face, with no trace of smiling or shyness, took the scythe, swung it and caught it in the grass; Vata, also without a smile, as cold and serious as her sister, took the scythe, and silently thrust it into the earth. Having done this, the two sisters linked arms and walked in silence to the raspberry patch.

Pyotr Dmitrich laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish, frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited him far better than any other. Olga Mihailovna loved him when he was like that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It didn't this time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it necessary to take a serious tone about it.

'When I ^ mowing, I feel, do you lmow, healthier and more normal," he said. "If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I believe I should go out of my mind. I feel that I was not born to be a man of culture! I ought to mow, plow, sow, break in horses."

And Pyotr Dmitrich began a conversation with the ladies about the advantages of physical labor, about cul- ture, and then about the pernicious effects of money, of property. Listening to her husband Olga Mihailovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.

"And the time will come, I suppose," she thought, "when he will not forgive me for being richer than he. He is proud and vain. Maybe he will hate me because he owes so much to me."

She stopped near Colonel Bukreyev, who was eating raspberries and also taking part in the conversation.

"Come," he said, making room for Olga Mihailovna and Pyotr Dmitrich. "The ripest are here. • . . And so, according to Proudhon," he went on, raising his voice, "property is theft. But I must confess I don't believe in Proudhon, and don't consider him a philosopher. To my ^^^ng the French are no authorities—God bless them!"

'"\Vell, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in that department," said Pyotr Dmi- trich. "For philosophy you must apply to my wife. She has been to the university, and knows all your Schopen- hauers and Proudhons by heart. . . ."

Olga Mihailovna felt bored again. She walked again along a little path, past apple-and pear-trees, and again looked as though she was on some very important er- rand. She reached the gardener's cottage. In the door- way the gardener's wife, Varvara, was sitting with her four little children who had big close-cropped heads. Varvara, too, was with child and expecting to be con- fined by Elijah's Day. After greeting her, Olga Mi- hailovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked:

"Well, how do you feel?"

"Oh, all right. . . ."

A silence followed. The two women seemed to under- stand each other without words.

"It's dreadful having one's first baby," said Olga Mi- hailovna after a moment's thought. "I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it, as though I shall die."

"I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. . . • One has all sorts of fancies."

Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked do^ a little on her mistress from the height of her ex- perience and spoke in a rather didactic tone, and Olga Mihailovna could not help feeling her authority; she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naive and trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.

"Olga, we are going indoors," Pyotr Drnitrich called from the raspberries.

Olga Mihailovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She would have been ready to stay like ihat till night without speaking or having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the cottage when Lubochka, Nata, and Vata carne running to meet her. The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubochka ran right up to her and flung herself on her neck.

"You dear, darling, precious," she said, kissing her face and her neck. "Let us go and have tea on the island!"

"On the island, on the island!" said the precisely similar Nata and Vata, both at once, without a smile.

"But it's going to rain, my dears."

"It's not, it's not," cried Lubochka with a woebegone face. "They've all agreed to go. Dear! darling!"

"They are all getting ready to have tea on the island," said Pyotr Drnitrich, corning up. "See to the arrange- ments . . . We wiU all go in the boats, and the samo- vars and all the rest of it must be sent in the carriage with the servants."

He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihailovna had a desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting, even about her do^^ perhaps—the crueler the better, she felt. She thought a little, and said:

"Why is it Count Alexey Petrovich hasn't come? What a pity!"

"I am very glad he hasn't come," said Pyotr Drnitrich, lying. Tm sick to death of that old lunatic."

"But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!"

DI

Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the piles to which the boats were fastened. They were all talking and laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could hardly get into the boats. Three boats were crammed with pas- sengers, while two stood empty. The keys to the pad- locks on these two boats had been somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from the river to the house to look for them. Some said Grigory had the keys, others that the steward had them, while others again suggested sending for a blacksmith and breaking the padlocks. And all talked at once, interrupting and shouting one another down. Pyotr Dmitrich paced im- patiently to and fro on the bank, saying:

'What the devil's the meaning of it! The keys ought always to be lying on the hall window sill! Who has dared to take them away? The steward can get a boat of his own if he wants one!"

At last the keys were found. Then it appeared that two oars were missing. Again there was a great hulla- baloo. Pyotr Dmitrich, who was weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow skiff hollowed out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side and almost falling into the water, pushed off from the bank. The other boats followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the shrieks of the young ladies.

The white cloudy sky, the trees on the banks, the boats with the people in them, and the oars, were re- flected in the water as in a mirror; under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a second sky with birds flying across it. The bank on which the house stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other, which was sloping, stretched broad green water- meadows with sheets of water glistening in them. The boats had floated a hundred yards when, behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks, huts and a herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs, drunken shouts, and the strains of an accordion.

Here and there on the river darted the boats of fisher- men who were going out to set their nets for the night. In one of these boats was a festive party, playing on homemade violins and a cello.

Olga Mihailovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while stealing a glance at her husband from time to time. He was ahead of them aU, standing up and punting with one oar. The light sharp-nosed canoe, which all the guests called the "deathtrap"—while Pyotr Dmitrich, for some reason, called it Penderaklia—moved along quickly; it had a brisk, crafty expression, as though it hated its heavy occupant and was waiting for a favor- able moment to glide away from under his feet. Olga Mihailovna kept glancing at her husband, and she loathed his good looks which attracted everyone, the back of his head, his attitude, his familiar manner with women; she hated all the women sitting in the boat with her, was jealous, and at the same time was trembling every minute in terror that her husband's frail craft would upset and cause an accident.

"Take care, Pyotr!" she cried, while her heart fluttered with terror. "Sit down! We believe in your courage with- out aU that!"

She was worried, too, by the people who were in the boat with her. They were aU ordinary, good people like thousands of others, but now each one of them struck her as exceptional and evil. In each one of them she saw nothing but falsity. "That young man," she thought, "rowing, in gold-rimmed spectacles, with chestnut hair and a nice-looking beard; he is a mamma's darling, rich, and well-fed, and always fortunate, and everyone con- siders him an honorable, free-thinking, progressive per- son. It's not a year since he left the university and c^e to live in the district, but he already talks of himself as 'we active members of the Zemstvo.' But in another year he will be bored like so many others and go off to Peters- burg, and to justify his running away, will tell everyone that the Zemstvo is good for nothing, and that it has dis- appointed him. And from the other boat his young wife keeps her eyes fixed on him, and believes that he is 'an active member of the Zemstvo,' just as in a year she will believe that the Zemstvo is good for nothing. And that stout, carefully shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad ribbon, an expensive cigar in his mouth: he is fond of saying, 'It is time to put away dreams and set to work!' He has Yorkshire pigs, Butler's hives, rape, pineapples, a dairy, a cheese factory, Italian bookkeep- ing by double entry; but every summer he sells his tim- ber and mortgages part of his land to spend the autumn with his mistress in the Crimea. And there's Uncle Nik- olay Nikolaich, who has quarreled with Pyotr Dmitrich, and yet for some reason does not go home.''

Olga Mihailovna looked at the other boats, and there, too, she saw only uninteresting, queer creatures, affected or stupid people. She thought of all the people she knew in the district, and could not remember one person of whom one could say or think anything good. They all seemed to her mediocre, insipid, unintelligent, narrow, false, heartless; they all said what they did not think, and did what they did not want to. Dreariness and despair were stifling her; she longed to stop smiling, to leap up and cry out, "I am sick of you," and then jump out and swim to the bank.

"I say, let's take Pyotr Dmitrich in tow!" someone shouted.

"In tow, in tow!" the others chimed in. "Olga Mi- hailovna, take your husband in tow."

To take him in tow, Olga Mihailovna, who was steer- ing, had to seize the right moment and to catch hold of his boat by the chain at the prow. When she bent over to grasp the chain Pyotr Dmitrich frowned and looked at her in alarm.

"I hope you won't catch cold," he said.

"If you are uneasy about me and the child, why do you torment me?" thought Olga Mihailovna.

Pyotr Dmitrich acknowledged himself vanquished, and, not caring to be towed, jumped from the Pender- aklia into the boat which was overfull already, and jumped so carelessly that the boat lurched violently, and everyone cried out in terror.

"He did that to please the ladies," thought Olga Mi- hailovna; ''he knows it's charming." Her hands and feet began trembling, as she supposed, from boredom, vex- ation, the strain of smiling, and the discomfort she felt all over her body. And to conceal this trembling from her guests, she tried to talk more loudly, to laugh, to move.

"If I suddenly begin to cry," she thought, "I shall say I have toothache. . . ."

But at last the boats reached the "Island of Good Hope," as they called the peninsula formed by a bend in the river at an acute angle and covered with a copse of birch-trees, oaks, willows, and poplars. The tables were already laid under the trees; the samovars were smoking, and Vasily and Grigory, in their swallowtails and white knitted gloves, were already busy with the tea-things. On the other bank, opposite the Island of Good Hope, there stood the carriages which had come with the provisions. The baskets and parcels of pro- visions were carried across to the island in a canoe like the Penderaklia. The footmen, the coachmen, and even the peasant who rowed the skiff, had the solemn expres- sion befitting a name-day such as one only sees in chil- dren and servants.

While Olga Mihailovna was making the tea and pour- ing out the first glasses, the visitors were busy with the liqueurs and sweets. Then there was the general com- motion usual at picnics over drinking tea, very weari- some and exhausting for the hostess. Grigory and Vasily had hardly had time to take the glasses round before hands were being stretched out to Olga Mihailovna with empty glasses. One wanted tea with no sugar, another wanted it stronger, another weak, a fourth declined an- other glass. And all this Olga Mihailovna had to remem- ber, and then to call, "Ivan Petrovich, is it without sugar for you?" or, "Gentlemen, which of you wanted it weak?" But the guest who had asked for weak tea, or no sugar, had by now forgotten it, and, absorbed in agree- able conversation, took the first glass that came. De- pressed-looking figures wandered like shadows at a little distance from the table, pretending to look for mush- rooms in the grass, or reading the labels on the boxes— these were those for whom there were no glasses. "Have you had tea?'' Olga Mihailovna kept asking, and the guest so addressed begged her not to trouble and said, "I will wait," though it would have suited the hostess better if the visitors did not wait but made haste.

Some, absorbed in conversation, drank their tea slowly, keeping their glasses for half an hour; others, especially some who had drunk a good deal at dinner, would not leave the table and kept on drinking glass after glass, so that Olga Mihailovna scarcely had time to fill them. One young wag sipped his tea through a lump of sugar and kept saying, "Sinful man that I am, I love to indulge myself with the Chinese herb." He kept asking with a heavy sigh: "Another rotsherd of tea more, if you please." He drank a great deal, nibbled at his sugar, and thought it all very amusing and original, and imagined that he was doing a clever imitation of a Russian merchant. None of them understood that these trifles were agonizing to their hostess, and, indeed, it was hard to understand it, as Olga Mihailovna went on all the time smiling affably and talking nonsense.

But she felt ill. . . . She was irritated by the crowd of people, the laughter, the questions, the young wag, the footmen harassed and run off their legs, the children who hung round the table; she was irritated at Vata's being like Nata, at Kolya's being like Mitya, so that one could not tell which of them had had tea and which of them had not. She felt that her smile of forced affability was passing into an expression of anger, and she felt every minute as though she would burst into tears.

"Rain, gentlemen," cried someone.

Everyone looked at the sky.

"Yes, it really is rain . . ." Pyotr Dmitrich assented, and wiped his cheek.

Only a few drops were falling from the sky—the real rain had not begun yet; but the company abandoned their tea and made haste to leave. At first they all wanted to drive home in the carriages, but changed their minds and made for the boats. On the pretext that she had to hasten home to give directions about the sup- per, Olga Mihailovna asked to be excused for leaving the others, and went home in a carriage.

When she got into the carriage, she first of all gave her face a rest from smiling. With an angry face she drove through the village and with an angry face ac- knowledged the bows of the peasants she met. When she got horne, she went to the bedroom by the back way and lay down on her husband's bed.

"Merciful God!" she whispered. "What is all this hard labor for? Why do all these people jostle each other here and pretend that they are enjoying themselves? Why do I smile and lie? I don't understand it."

She heard steps and voices. The visitors had come back.

"Let them come," thought Olga Mihailovna; "I shall lie a little longer."

But a maidservant carne and said:

"Marya Grigoryevna is going, Madam."

Olga Mihailovna jumped up, tidied her hair and hur- ried out of the room.

"Marya Grigoryevna, what is the meaning of this?" she Degan in an injured voice, going to meet Marya Grigoryevna. ''Why are you in such a hurry?"

"I can't help it, darlingl I've stayed too long as it is; my children are expecting me horne."

"It's too bad of you! Why didn't you bring your chil- dren with you?"

"If you will let me, dear, I will bring them on some ordinary day, but today—"

"Oh, please do," Olga Mihailovna interrupted. "I shall be delighted! Your children are so sweet! Kiss them all for me. . . . But, really, you've hurt my feelings! I don't understand why you are in such a hurry!"

"I reaUy must, I really must. . . . Good-by, dear. Take care of yourself. In your condition, you know . . ."

And the ladies kissed each other. After seeing the de- parting guest to her carriage, Olga Mihailovna went in to the ladies in the drawing-room. There the l^ps were already lighted and the gentlemen were sitting down to cards.

IV

The party broke up after supper about a quarter past twelve. Seeing her visitors off, Olga Mihailovna stood at the door and said:

"You really ought to take a shawl! It's turning a little chilly. You may catch cold, God forbid!"

"Don't trouble, Olga Mihailovna," the ladies an- swered as they got into the carriage. "Well, good-by. Mind now, we are expecting you; don't disappoint us!''

"Whoa!" the coachman checked the horses.

"Let's go, Denis! Good-by, Olga Mihailovna!"

"Kiss the children for me!"

The carriage started and immediately disappeared into the darkness. In the red circle of light cast by the lamp on the road a fresh pair or a team of three im- patient horses and the silhouette of a coachman with his arms held out stiffiy before him would come into view. Again there began kisses, reproaches, and en- treaties to come again or to take a shawl. Pyotr Dmitrich kept running out and helping the ladies into their car- riages.

"You go now by Yefremovshchina," he directed the coachman. "It's nearer through Mankino, but the road is worse that way. You might take a tumble. . . . Good-by, my charmer. Mille compliments to your art- ist!"

"Good-by, Olga Mihailovna, darling! Go indoors, or you will catch cold! It's damp!"

"Whoa! you rascal!"

"What horses have you got here?" Pyotr Dmitrich asked.

210 the portable chekhov

"Tiey were bought from Haydarov, in Lent," an- swered the coachman.

"Capital horses. . . ."

And Pyotr Dmitrich patted the trace horse on the haunch.

"Well, you can start! God give you good luck!"

The last visitor was gone at last; the red circle on the road quivered, moved aside, contracted and went out, as Vasily carried away the lamp from the porch. On previous occasions when they had seen off their visitors, Pyotr Dmitrich and Olga Mihailovna had begun danc- ing about the drawing-room, facing each other, clapping their hands and singing: "They're gone! They're gone!" But now Olga Mihailovna was not equal to that. She went to her bedroom, undressed, and got into bed.

She fancied she would faU asleep at once and sleep soundly. Her legs and her shoulders ached painfully, her head was heavy from the strain of talking, and she was conscious, as before, of discomfort all over her body. Having drawn the cover over her head, she lay still for three or four minutes, then peeped out from under the bedclothes at the icon lamp, listened to the silence, and smiled.

"It's nice, it's nice," she whispered, curling up her legs, which felt as if they had grown longer from so much walking. "Sleep, sleep. . . ."

Her legs would not get into a comfortable position; she felt uneasy all over, and she turned on the other side. A big fly was buzzing about the bedroom and thumped against the ceiling in distress. She could hear, too, Grigory and Vasily stepping cautiously about the drawing-room, putting the chairs back in their places; it seemed to Olga Mihailovna that she could not go to sleep, nor be comfortable till those sounds were hushed.

And again she turned over on the other side impatiently.

She heard her husband's voice in the drawing-room. Someone must be staying the night, as Pyotr Dmitrich was addressing someone and speaking loudly:

"I don't say that Count Alexey Petrovich is a fraud. But he can't help seeming to be one, because all of you gentlemen attempt to see in him something different from what he really is. His craziness is looked upon as originality, his familiar manners as good-nature, and his complete absence of opinions as conservatism. Even granted that he is a Conservative 84 proof, what after all is conservatism?"

Pyotr Dmitrich, angry with Count Alexey Petrovich, his visitors, and himself, was relieving his heart. He abused both the Count and his visitors, and in his vex- ation with himself was ready to say and champion any- thing. After seeing his guest to his quarters, he paced up and down the drawing-room, walked through the din- ing-room, down the corridor, then into his study, then again went into the drawing-room, and came into the bedroom. Olga Mihailovna was lying on her back, with the bedclothes only to her waist (by now she felt hot), and with an angry face watched the fly that was thump- ing against the ceiling.

"Is someone staying the night?" she asked.

"Yegorov."

Pyotr Dmitrich undressed and got into his bed. With- out speaking, he lighted a cigarette, and he, too, fell to watching the fly. There was an uneasy and forbidding look in his eyes. Olga Mihailovna looked at his hand- some profile for five minutes in silence. It seemed to her for some reason that if her husband were suddenly to turn facing her and to say, "Olga, I am unhappy," she would cry or laugh, and she would be at ease. She

fancied that her legs were aching and her body was

uncomfortable all over because of her mental strain.

"Pyotr, what are you thinking of?" she said.

"Oh, nothing . . ." her husband answered.

"You have taken to having secrets from me of late: that's not right."

"Why is it not right?" answered Pyotr Dmitrich dryly and not at once. "We all have our personal life, every one of us, and we are bound to have our secrets."

"Personal life, our secrets . . . that's all words! Just realize that you are insulting me!" said Olga Mihailovna, sitting up in bed. "If you have a load on your heart, why do you hide it from me? And why do you find it more suitable to open your heart to women who are nothing to you, instead of to your wife? I overheard your out- pourings to Lubochka by the hives today."

"Well, I congratulate you. I am glad you did overhear it."

This meant "Leave me alone and let me think." Olga Mihailovna was indignant. Vexation, hatred, and wrath, which had been accumulating within her during the whole day, suddenly boiled over; she wanted at once to speak out, to hurt her husband without putting it off till tomorrow, to wound him, to punish him. . . . Making an effort to control herself and not to scream, she said:

"Let me tell you, then, that it's all vile, vile, vile! I've been hating you all day; you see what you've done."

Pyotr Dmitrich, too, sat up in bed.

"It's vile, vile, vile," Olga Mihailovna went on, be- ginning to tremble all over. "There's no need to con- gratulate me; you had better congratulate yourself! It's a shame, a disgrace. You're so full of lies that you are ashamed to be alone in the room with your wife! You are a deceitful man! I see through you and understand every step you take!"

"Olya, I wish you would please warn me when you are out of humor. Then I will sleep in the study."

Saying this, Pyotr Dmitrich picked up his pillow and walked out of the bedroom. Olga Mihailovna had not foreseen this. For some minutes she remained silent, her mouth open, trembling all over and looking at the door by which her husband had gone out, and trying to un- derstand what it meant. Was this one of the devices to which deceitful people have recourse when they are in the wrong, or was it a deliberate insult aimed at her pride? How was she to take it? Olga Mihailovna remem- bered her cousin, a lively young officer, who often used to tell her, laughing, that when "his spouse started nagging at him" at night, he usually picked up his pil- low and went whistling to spend the night in his study, leaving his wife in a foolish and ridiculous position. This officer was married to a rich, capricious, and foolish woman whom he did not respect but simply put up with.

Olga Mihailovna jumped out of bed. To her mind there was only one thing left for her to do now; to dress with all possible haste and to leave the house forever. The house was her own, but so much the worse for Pyotr Dmitrich. Without pausing to consider whether this was necessary or not, she went quickly to the study to inform her husband of her intention ("Feminine logic!" flashed through her mind), and to say something wounding and sarcastic at parting. • • .

Pyotr Dmitrich was lying on the sofa and pretending to read a newspaper. There was a candle burning on a chair near him. His face could not be seen behind the newspaper.

"Be so kind as to tell me what this means? I am ask- ing you."

"Be so kind • • Pyotr Dmitrich mimicked her, not showing his face. "It's sickening, Olga! Upon my honor, I am exhausted and not up to it. . . . Let us do our quarreling tomorrow."

"No, I understand you perfectly!" Olga Mihailovna went on. "You hate mel Yes, yes! You hate me because I am richer than you! You will never forgive me that, and will always be lying to mel" ("Feminine logic!'' flashed through her mind again.) "You are laughing at me now. ... I am convinced, in fact, that you only married me in order to have property qualifications and those vile horses. . . . Oh, I am miserable!"

Pyotr Dmitrich dropped the newspaper and got up. The unexpected insult overwhelmed him. With a child- ishly helpless smile he looked desperately at his wife, and holding out his hands to her as though to ward off blows, he said imploringly:

"Olya!"

And expecting her to say something else that was aw- ful, he thrust his shoulders against the back of the sofa, and his huge figure seemed as helplessly childish as his smile.

"Olya, how could you say it?" he whispered.

Olga Mihailovna came to herself. She was suddenly aware of her passionate love for this man, remembered that he was her husband, Pyotr Dmitrich, without whom she could not live for a day, and who loved her passionately, too. She burst into loud sobs that sounded strange and unlike her, and ran back to her bedroom.

She fell on the bed, and short hysterical sobs, choking her and making her arms and legs twitch, resounded in the bedroom. Remembering that there was a visitor sleeping three or four rooms away, she buried her head under her pillow to stifle her sobs, but the pillow dropped to the floor, and she almost fell on the floor her- self when she stooped to pick it up. She pulled the quilt up to her face, but her hands would not obey her and tore convulsively at everything she clutched.

She thought that everything was lost, that the lie she had told to wound her husband had shattered her life into fragments. Her husband would not forgive her. The insult she had hurled at him was not one that could be effaced by any caresses, by any vows. . . . How could she convince her husband that she did not believe what she had said?

"It's finished, it's finished!" she cried, not noticing that the pillow had slipped onto the floor again. "For God's sake, for God's sake!"

Probably roused by her cries, the guest and the serv- ants were now awake; next day all the neighborhood would know that she had been in hysterics and would blame Pyotr Dmitrich. She made an effort to restrain herself, but her sobs grew louder and louder every minute.

"For God's sake," she cried in a voice not like her o^, and not knowing why she cried it. "For God's sake!"

She felt as though the bed were heaving under her and her feet were entangled in the bedclothes. Pyotr Dmitrich, in his dressing-go^, with a candle in his hand, came into the bedroom.

"Olya, hush!" he said.

She raised herself, and kneeling in bed, screwing up her eyes at the light, articulated through her sobs:

"Understand . . . understand! . . ."

She wanted to tell him that she was worn out by the guests, by his lying, by her own lying, and that it had aU come to a head, but she could only articulate:

"Understand . . . understand!"

"Come, drink!" he said, handing her some water.

She took the glass obediently and began drinking, but

the water splashed over and was spilt on her arms, her

throat and knees.

"I must look a sight," she thought.

Pyotr Dmitrich put her back into bed without a word, and covered her with the quilt, then he took the can- dle and went out.

"For God's sake!" Olga Mihailovna cried again. "Pyotr, understand, understand!"

Suddenly something gripped her in the lower part of her abdomen and her back with such violence that her wailing was cut short, and she bit the pillow from the pain. But the pain let her go at once, and she began sobbing again.

The maid came in, and arranging the quilt over her, asked in alarm:

"Mistress, darling, what is the matter?"

"Get out of here," said Pyotr Dmitrich sternly, going up to the bed.

"Understand . • • understand! . . ." Olga Mihailovna began.

"Olya, I entreat you, calm yourself," he said. "I did not mean to hurt you. I would not have gone out of the room if I had kno^ it would have hurt you so much; I simply felt depressed. I tell you, on my honor—"

"Understand! . . . You were lying, I was lying. . . ."

"I understand. . . . Come, come, that's enough! I understand," said Pyotr Dmitri^ tenderly, sitting do^ on her bed. "You said that in anger; I quite understand. I swear to God I love you beyond anything on earth, and when I married you I never once thought of your being rich. I loved you immensely, and that's all . . . I assure you. I have never been in want of money or felt the value of it, and so I cannot feel the difference be- tween your fortune and mine. It always seemed to me we were equally well off. And that I have been deceitful in little things, that . . . of course, is true. My life has hitherto been arranged so frivolously that it has some- how been impossible to get on without paltry lying. It weighs on me, too, now. . . . Let us leave off talking about it, for goodness' sake!"

Olga Mihailovna again felt an acute pain, and clutched her husband by the sleeve.

"I am in _ pain, in pain, in pain . . ," she said rapidly. "Oh, what pain!"

"Damnation take those visitors!" muttered Pyotr Dmi- trich, getting up. "You ought not to have gone to the island today!" he cried. "What an idiot I was not to prevent you! Oh, my God!"

He scratched his head in vexation, and, with a wave of his hand, walked out of the room.

Then he came into the room several times, sat down on the bed beside her, and talked a great deal, some- times tenderly, sometimes angrily, but she hardly heard him. Her sobs were continually interrupted by fearful attacks of pain, and each time the pain was more acute and prolonged. At first she held her breath and bit the pillow during the pain, but then she began screaming in an unseemly piercing voice. Once, seeing her husband near her, she remembered that she had insulted him, and without pausing to think whether it were really Pyotr Dmitrich or whether she were in delirium, clutched his hand in both of hers and began kissing it.

"You were lying, I was lying . . ." she began justify- ing herself. "Understand, understand. . . . They have exhausted me, driven me out of all patience."

"Olya, we are not alone," said Pyotr Dmitrich.

Olga Mihailovna raised her head and saw Varvara, who was kneeling by the chest of drawers and pulling out the bottom drawer. The top drawers were already open. Then Varvara got up, red from the strain, and

with a cold, solemn face began trying to unlock a box.

"Marya, I can't unlock it!" she said in a whisper. "You unlock it, won't you?"

Marya, the maid, was digging a candle end out of the candlestick with a pair of scissors, so as to put in a new candle; she went up to Varvara and helped her to unlock the box.

"There should be nothing locked . . ." whispered Varvara. "Unlock this casket, too, my good girl. Mas- ter," she said, "you should send word to Father Mihail to unlock the holy gates! You mustl"

"Do what you like," said Pyotr Dmitrich, breathing hard, "only, for God's sake, make haste and fetch the doctor or the midwife! Has Vasily gone? Send someone else. Send your husband!"

'Tm in labor," Olga Mihailovna thought. "Varvara," she moaned, "but he won't be born alivel"

"It's all right, it's all right, mistress," whispered Var- vara. "Please God, he will be alive! He will be alive!"

When Olga Mihailovna came to herself again after a pain she was no longer sobbing nor tossing from side to side, but moaning. She could not refrain from moan- ing even in the intervals between the pains. The can- dles were still burning, but the morning light was com- ing through the blinds. It was probably about five o'clock in the morning. At the round table there was sitting some unknown woman with a very discreet air, wearing a white apron. From her whole appearance it was evident she had been sitting there a long time. Olga Mihailovna guessed that she was the midwife.

"Will it soon be over?" she asked, and in her voice she heard a peculiar and unfamiliar note which had never been there before. "I must be dying in childbirth," she thought.

Pyotr Dmitrich came cautiously into the bedroom, dressed for the day, and stood at the window with his back to his wife. He lifted the blind and looked out the window.

"What rain!" he said.

"What time is it?" asked Olga Mihailovna, in order to hear the unfamiliar note in her voice again.

"A quarter to six," answered the midwife.

"And what if I really am dying?" thought Olga Mi- hailovna, looking at her husband's head and the win- dowpanes on which the rain was beating. "How will he live without me? With whom will he have tea and din- ner, talk in the evening, sleep?"

He looked little to her and orphaned; she felt sorry for him and wanted to say something nice, caressing and consolatory. She remembered how in the spring he had meant to buy himself some hounds, and she, think- ing it a cruel and dangerous sport, had prevented him from doing it.

"Pyotr, buy yourself hounds," she moaned.

He lowered the blind and went up to the bed, and would have said something; but at that moment the pain came back, and Olga Mihailovna uttered an un- seemly, piercing scream.

The pain and the constant screaming and moaning stupefied her. She heard, saw, and sometimes spoke, but hardly understood anything, and was only conscious that she was in pain or was just going to be in pain. It seemed to her that the name-day party had been long, long ago—not yesterday, but a year ago perhaps; and that her new life of agony had lasted longer than her childhood, her schooldays, her time at the university, and her marriage, and would go on for a long, long time, endlessly. She saw them bring tea to the midwife and summon her at midday to lnnch and afterwards to dinner; she saw Pyotr Dmitrich grow used to coming in, standing for long intervals by the window, and going out again; saw strange men, the maid, Varvara, come in as though they were at home. . . . Varvara said nothing but, "He will, he will," and was angry when anyone closed the drawers of the bureau. Olga Mihail- ovna saw the light change in the room and in the win- dows: at one time it was pale as at dusk, then thick like fog, then bright as it had been at dinnertime the day before, then pale again . . . and each of these changes lasted as long as her childhood, her schooldays, her years at the university. . . .

In the evening two doctors—one bony, bald, with a big red beard, the other swarthy with a Jewish face and cheap spectacles—performed some sort of operation on Olga Mihailovna. To these unknown men touching her body she felt utterly indifferent. By now she had no feeling of shame, no will, and anyone might do what he would with her. If anyone had rushed at her with a knife, or had insulted Pyotr Dmitrich, or had robbed her of her right to the little creature, she would not have said a word.

They gave her chloroform during the operation. When she came to again, the pain was still there and in- sufferable. It was night. And Olga Mihailovna remem- bered that there had been just such a night with the stillness, the lamp, with the midwife sitting motionless by the bed, with the drawers of the chest pulled out, with Pyotr Dmitrich standing by the window, but some time very, very long ago. . . .

v

"I am not dead . . ." thought Olga Mihailovna when she began to understand her surroundings again, and when the pain was over.

A bright summer day looked in at the widely open windows; in the garden below the windows, sparrows and magpies never ceased chattering for one instant.

The drawers were shut now, her husband's bed had been made. There was no sign of the midwife or of the maid or of Varvara in the room, only Pyotr Dmitrich was standing, as before, motionless by the window look- ing into the garden. There was no sound of a child's crying, no one was congratulating her or rejoicing, it was evident that the little creature had not been born alive.

"Pyotr!" Olga Mihailovna called to her husband.

Pyotr Dmitrich looked round. It seemed as though a long time must have passed since the last guest had departed and Olga Mihailovna had insulted her hus- band, for Pyotr Dmitrich was perceptibly thinner and hollow-eyed.

'What is it?" he asked, coming up to the bed.

He looked away, moved his lips and smiled childlike helplessness.

"Is it all over?" asked Olga Mihailovna.

Pyotr Dmitrich tried to make some answer,. but his lips quivered and his mouth worked like a toothless old man's, like Uncle Nikolay Nikolaich's.

"Olya," he said, wringing his hands; big tears sud- denly dropping from his eyes. "Olya, I don't care about your property qualification, nor the Circuit Courts" (he gave a sob) "nor dissenting opinions, nor those visitors, nor your dowry. ... I don't care about anythingl Why didn't we take thought for our child? Oh, it's no good talking!"

With a despairing wave of the hand he went out oЈ the bedroom.

But nothing mattered to Olga Mihailovna now. There was a mistiness in her brain from the chloroform, an emptiness in her soul. . . • The dull indifference to life which possessed her when the two doctors were performing the operation was still with her.

1888

An Attack of Nerves

_A

MEDICAL student called Meier, and a pupil of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture called Rybnikov, went one evening to see their friend Vasilyev, a law student, and suggested that

he should go with them to S Street. For a long

time Vasilyev would not consent to go, but in the end he put on his overcoat and went with them.

He knew nothing of fallen women except by hearsay and from books, and he had never in his life been to the houses in which they live. He knew that there are im- moral women who, under the pressure of fatal circum- stances—environment, bad education, poverty, and so on—are forced to sell their honor for money. They know nothing of pure love, have no children, have no civil rights; their mothers and sisters wee_p over them as though they were dead, science treats of them as an evil, men address them with contemptuous familiarity. But in spite of all that, they do not lose the image and likeness of God. They all acknowledge their sin and hope for salvation. Of the means that lead to salvation they can avail themselves to the fullest extent. Society, it is true, will not forgive people their past, but in the sight of God St. Mary of Egypt is no lower than the other saints, When it had happened to Vasilyev in the street to recognize a fallen woman by her dress or her manners, or to see a picture of one in a comic paper, he always remembered a story he had once read: a young man, pure and self-sacrificing, loves a fallen woman and asks her to become his wife; she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, takes poison.

Vasilyev lived in one of the side streets leading into Tverskoy Boulevard. When he came out of the house with his two friends it was about eleven o'clock. The first snow had recently fallen, and all nature was un- der its spell. There was the smell of snow in the air, the snow crunched softly under the feet; the earth, the roofs, the trees, the seats in the boulevards, everything was soft, white, young, and this made the houses look quite different from the way they did the day before; the street lamps burned more brightly, the air was more transparent, the carriages rumbled with a deeper note, and with the fresh, light, frosty air a feeling stirred in the soul akin to the white, youthful, fluffy snow.

"Against my will an unkno^ force," hummed the medical student in his agreeable tenor, "has led me to these mournful shores."

"Behold the mill . . ." the artist seconded him, "in ruins now. . . ."

"Behold the mill . . . in ruins now," the medical student repeated, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head mournfully.

He paused, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, and then sang aloud, so well that passers-by looked round:

Here in old days when I was free, Love, free, unfettered, greeted me.

The three of them went into a restaurant and, with- out taking off their overcoats, drank a couple of glasses of vodka each. Before drinking the second glass, Vasilyev noticed a bit of cork in his vodka, raised the glass to his eyes, and gazed into it for a long time, frowning, screw- ing up his shortsighted eyes. The medical student mis- understood his expression, and said:

"Come, why look at it? No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked upon. For one evening anyway live like a human being!"

"But I haven't said anything . . ." Vasilyev protested, laughing. "Am I refusing to?"

There was a warmth inside him from the vodka. He looked with emotion at his friends, admired and envied them. In these strong, healthy, cheerful people how wonderfully balanced everything is, how finished and smooth is everything in their minds and souls! They sing, and have a passion for the theater, and draw, and talk a great deal, and drink, and they don't have head- aches the day after; they are both poetical and de- bauched, both soft and hard; they can work, too, and be indignant, and laugh without reason, and talk nonsense; they are warm, honest, self-sacrificing, and as human beings are in no way inferior to himself, who watches over every step. he takes and every word he utters, who is fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every trifle to the level of a problem. And he longed for one eve- ning to live as his friends did, to open out, to free him- self from his own control. If vodka had to be drunk, he would drink it, though his head would be splitting next morning. If he were taken to the women he would go. He would laugh, play the fool, gaily respond to the passing advances of strangers in the street. . . .

He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends—one in a crushed broad-brimmed hat, with an afiectation of artistic disorder; the other in a sealskin

an attack of nerves 225

cap, a man not poor, though he affected to belong to the Bohemia of learning. He liked the snow, the pale street lamps, the sharp black tracks left in the first snow by the feet of the passers-by. He liked the air, and especially that limpid, tender, naive, as it were virginal tone, which can be observed in nature only twice in the year—when everything is covered with snow, and in spring on bright days and moonlight evenings when the ice breaks on the river.

Against my will an unkno^ force, Has led me to these mournful shores,

he hummed in an undertone.

And the lines for some reason haunted him and his friends aU the way, and all three of them hummed it mechanically, not in time with one another.

Vasilyev's imagination was picturing how, in another ten minutes, he and his friends would knock at a door; how by little dark passages and dark rooms they would steal in to the women; how, taking advantage of the darkness, he would strike a match, would light up and see a martyred face and a guilty smile. The unknown, fair or dark, would certainly have her hair down and be wearing a white bed-jacket; she would be frightened by the light, would be fearfuUy confused, and would say: "For God's sake, what are you doing? Put it out!" It would aU be dreadful, but interesting and novel.

n

The friends proceeded from Trubnoy Square to Gra- chevka, and soon reached the side street which Vasilyev only knew by reputation. Seeing two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors, and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated out from every door and formed a strange medley, as though an unseen orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vasilyev was surprised and said: