The Portable Chekhov

When Osip came into the headman's cabin with his tax book, the inspector, a lean old man with long gray side-whiskers, who wore a gray tunic, was sitting at a table in a corner writing something do^wn. The cabin was clean; all the walls were bright with pictures clipped from magazines, and in the most conspicuous place near the icons there was a portrait of Prince Battenberg of Bulgaria. Beside the table stood Antip Sedelnikov with his arms folded.

"He owes one hundred and nineteen rubles, Your Honor," he said, when Osip's turn came. "Before Easter he paid a ruble, and he's not paid a kopeck since."

The inspector looked up at Osip and asked:

"Why is this, brother?"

"Show heavenly mercy, Your Honor," began Osip, growing agitated. "Allow me to say, last year the master from Lutoretzk said to me, 'Osip,' says he, 'sell me your hay . . . you sell it,' says he. Well, why not? I had a hundred poods[5] for sale; the women mowed it on the water-meadow. Well, we struck a bargain. It was all right and proper."

He complained of the headman, and kept turning round to the peasants as though inviting them to bear witness; his face got red and sweaty and his eyes grew sharp and angry.

"I don't know why you're saying all this,'' said the inspector. "I am asking you—I am asking you why you don't pay your arrears. You don't pay, any of you, and am I to answer for you?"

"I just can't."

''These words are of no consequence, Your Honor," said the headman. "The Chikildeyevs certainly are of the needy class, but please just inquire of the others, the root of it all is vodka, and they are a disorderly lot. With no understanding at all."

The inspector wrote something downwn, and then said to Osip quietly, in an even tone, as though he were ask- ing him for a drink of water: "Get out."

Soon he drove off; and as he was climbing into his cheap buggy, coughing as he did so, it could be seen from the very look of his long lean back that he no longer remembered Osip or the village headman or the Zhukovo arrears, but was thinking of his affairs. Be- fore he had gone two thirds of a mile Antip was already carrying off the samovar from the Chikildeyevs' cabin, while Granny followed him, screaming shrilly, straining her Iungs:

"I won't let you have itl I won't let you have it, god- damn you!"

He walked rapidly with long strides, and she ran after ^m, panting, almost falling down, a hunched infuriated creature; her kerchief slipped onto her shoulders, her gray hair with a greenish tint to it blew in the wind. She suddenly stood still, and like a real insurgent, fell to thumping her breast with her fists and shouting louder than ever in a singsong voice, seeming to sob:

"Christians, all you who believe in God! Dear friends, they have wronged mel Darlings, they're trampling on me! Oh, oh, darlings, come and help mel"

"Granny, Granny!" said the village headman sternly, "get some sense into your head!"

With no samovar it was hopelessly dismal in the Chikildeyevs' cabin. There was something humiliating in this deprivation, something insulting, as though the honor of the house were lost. It would have been better, had the headman carried off the tabIe, alI the benches, all the pots—the place would not have seemed so bare. Granny screamed, Marya cried, and the little girls, see- ing her tears, cried too. The old man, feeling guilty, sal in the corner, silent, with hanging head. Nikolay too was silent. Granny loved him and was sorry for him, but now, forgetting her pity, she fell upon him with abuse, with reproaches, shaking her fist right in his face. She screamed that it was all his fault; indeed, why had he sent them so little when he bragged in his letters that he was earning fifty rubles a month at the Slavyansky Bazar? Why had he come, and with his family, too? If he died, where would the money come from for his funeral? And it was pitiful to look at Nikolay, Olga, and Sasha.

The old man sighed hoarsely, took his cap, and went off to the headman. It was getting dark. Antip was sol- dering something by the stove, puffing out his cheeks; the air was full of fumes. His children, thin and un- washed, no better than the Chikildeyev brood, were scrambling about on the floor; his wife, an ugly, freckled, big-bellied woman, was winding silk. They were a wretched, unlucky family, and Antip was the only one who looked sturdy and handsome. On a bench stood five samovars in a row. The old man muttered a prayer to Battenberg and then said:

"Antip, show heavenly mercy, give me back the sam- ovar! For Christ's sake!"

"Bring three rubles, then you can have it."

"I just can't."

Antip puffed out his cheeks, the fire hummed and hissed, and was reflected in the s^ovars. The old man lmeaded his cap and said after a moment's thought:

"You give it back to me."

The dark-skinned headman looked quite black and resembled a magician; he turned round to Osip and said sternly, speaking rapidly:

"It all depends on the district magistrate. On the twenty-sixth instant you can state the grounds of your dissatisfaction before the administrative session, verbally or in writing."

Osip did not understand a word, but he was satisfed with that and went home.

Some ten days later the police inspector came again, stayed for an hour and drove away. During those days it had been cold and windy; the river had been frozen for a long time, but still there was no snow, and people were worn to a frazzle because the roads were impass- able. On the eve of a holiday some of the neighbors came in to Osip's to sit and have a chat. They talked in the dark, because it was a sin to work and so they did not light the lamp. There were some scraps of news, all rather unpleasant. In two or three households hens had been taken for the arrears and had been sent to the dis- trict office, and there they had died because no one had fed them; sheep had been taken, and while they were being carted away tied to one another, and shifted into another cart at each village, one of them had died. And now the question was being discussed: who was to blame?

"The Zemstvo," said Osip. 'Who else?"

"Of course, the Zemstvo."

The Zemstvo was blamed for everything—for the ar- rears, the unjust exactions, the failure of the crops, though no one of them knew what was meant by the Zemstvo. And this dated from the time when well-to-do peasants who had factories, shops, and inns of their own served as members of the Zemstvo boards, were dissatisf ed with them, and took to berating the Zem- stvos in their factories and taverns.

They talked about how God was not sending the snow; wood had to be hauled for fuel, yet there was no driving or walking over the frozen ruts. In former days, fifteen to twenty years ago, talk had been much more interesting in Zhukovo. In those days every old man looked as though he were guarding some secret; as though he knew something and were waiting for some- thing. They used to talk about a charter with a golden seal, about the division of acreage, about new lands, about treasure troves; they hinted at something. Now the folk of Zhukovo had no secrets at all; their whole life lay bare and clear to all, as though on the palm of your hand, and they could talk of nothing but want, food and fodder, the absence of snow.

There was a lull. Then they recalled the hens again, and the sheep, and began arguing once more as to who was at fault.

"The Zemstvo," said Osip dejectedly. "Who else?"

VIII

The parish church was nearly four miles away at Kosogorovo, and the peasants only attended it when they had to do so, for christenings, weddings, or funer- als; for regular services they went to the church across the river. On holidays in fine weather the girls dressed up in their best and went to Mass in a crowd, and it was a cheering sight to see them walk across the meadow in their red, yellow, and green frocks; when the weather was bad they all stayed home. To confess and to take the communion, they went to the parish church. The priest, making the round of the cabins with the cross at Easter, took fifteen kopecks from each of those who had not managed to take the sacrament during Lent.

The old man did not believe in God, for he had hardly ever given Him a thought; he acknowledged the supernatural, but felt that it could be of concern to women only, and when religion or miracles were dis- cussed in his presence, and a question about these matters was put to him, he would say reluctantly, scratching himself:

"Who can tell!"

Granny did believe, but somehow her faith was hazy; everything was mixed up in her memory, and no sooner did she begin to think of sins, of death, of the salvation of the soul, than want and cares took possession of her mind, and she instantly forgot what she had started to think about. She remembeied no prayers at all, and usually in the evenings, before lying down to sleep, she would stand before the icons and whisper:

"Virgin Mother of Kazan, Virgin Mother of Smolensk, Virgin Mother of the Three Arms. . . ."

Marya and Fyokla crossed themselves regularly, fasted, and took communion every year, but quite igno- rantly. The children were not taught any prayers, noth- ing was told them about God, and no moral precepts were given them; they were merely forbidden to take certain foods on fast days. In other families it was much the same: there were few who believed, few who had any understanding. At the same time all loved the Holy Scripture, loved it tenderly, reverently; but they had no books, there was no one to read the Bible and explain it, and because Olga sometimes read them the Gospels, they respected her, and they all addressed her and Sasha in the deferential second-person plural.

For local holidays and special services Olga often went to neighboring villages and to the county seat, in which there were two monasteries and twenty-seven churches. She was abstracted, and when she went on these pilgrimages she quite forgot her family, and only when she was on her way home would suddenly make the joyful discovery that she had a husband and

daughter, and then she would say, smiling and radiant: "God has blessed me!"

What went on in the village seemed to her revolting and was a source of torment to her. On St. Elijah's Day they drank, at the Assumption they drank, at the Exal- tation of the Cross they drank. The Feast of the Inter- cession was the parish holiday for Zhukovo, and on that occasion the peasants drank for three days on end; they drank up fifty rubles belonging to the communal fund, and on top of that collected money for vodka from each household. On the first day the Chikildeyevs slaughtered a sheep and ate mutton in the morning, at noon, and in the evening; they ate large amounts of it, and the chil- dren got up at night to eat some more. Those three days Kiryak was fearfully drunk; he drank up all his belong- ings, even his cap and boots, and beat Marya so terribly that they had to pour water over her to revive her. Af- terwards they were all ashamed and felt sick.

However, even in Zhukovo, in this "Flunkeyville," once a year there was a genuine religious event. It was in August, when they carried the icon of the Life-Bear- ing Mother of God from village to village throughout the district. The day on which it was expected at Zhu- kovo was windless and the sky was overcast. The girls, in their bright holiday frocks, set off in the morning to meet the icon, and they brought it to the village towards evening, in solemn procession, singing, while the bells pealed in the church across the river. A huge crowd of villagers and strangers blocked the street; there was noise, dust, a crush of people. . . . The old man and Granny and Kiryak all stretched out their hands to the icon, gazed at it greedily and cried, weeping: "Intercede for us! Mother! Intercede!" All seemed suddenly to grasp that there was no void between earth and heaven, that the rich and powerful had not seized everything, that there was still protec- tion from abuse, from bondage, from crushing, unbear- able want, from the terrible vodka.

"Intercede for us! Mother!" sobbed Marya. "Motherl"

But the service ended, the icon was carried away, and everything went on as before; and again the sound of coarse, drunken voices came from the tavern.

Only the well-to-do peasants were afraid of death; the richer they grew the less they believed in God and in the salvation of the soul, and only through fear of their earthly end did they light candles and have Masses said, in order to be on the safe side. The poorer peasants did not fear death. The old man and Granny were told to their faces that they had lived too long, that it was time they were dead, and they did not mind. They did not scruple to tell Fyokla in Nikolay's presence that when Nikolay died her husband Denis would be dis- charged from the army and return home. And Marya, far from dreading death, regretted that it was so long in coming, and was glad when her children died.

Death they did not fear, but they had an exaggerated terror of every disease. The merest trifle—an upset stomach, a slight chill, and Granny would lie down on the stove, wrap herself up, and start moaning loudly and incessantly: "I am dy-ing!" The old man would hurry off for the priest, and Granny would receive the sacrament and extreme unction. They often talked of colds, of worms, of tumors that shifted about in the stomach and moved up close to the heart. Most of all they feared catching cold, and so dressed in heavy clothes even in summer and warmed themselves on the stove. Granny was fond of doctoring herself and often drove to the dispensary, where she always said she was fifty-eight instead of seventy; she supposed that if the doctor knew her real age he would not treat her, but would say it was time she died instead of doctoring herself. She usually went to the dispensary early in the morning, taking with her two or three of the little girls, and came back in the evening, hungry and cross, with drops for herself and salves for the little girls. Once she had Nikolay go along with her, too, and for a fortnight afterwards he took drops, and said he felt better.

Granny knew all the doctors, medical assistants, and quacks for twenty miles round, and not one of them she liked. At the Feast of the Intercession, when the priest made the round of the cabins with the cross, the deacon told her that in the town near the prison lived an old man who had been an army surgeon's assistant and who worked many cures, and advised her to turn to him. Granny took his advice. After the first snowfall she drove to the town and fetched a little bearded old man, in a long coat, a converted Jew, whose face was covered with a network of tiny blue veins. Just then there were people working in the house: an old tailor, in terrifying spectacles, was cutting a waistcoat out of some rags, and two young men were making felt boots out of wool; Kir- yak, who had been sacked for drunkenness and now lived at home, was sitting beside the tailor mending a horse-collar. And the place was crowded, stuffy, and evil- smelling. The converted Jew examined Nikolay and said that it was necessary to cup the patient.

He put on the cups, and the old tailor, Kiryak, and the little girls stood round and looked on, and it seemed to them that they saw the disease coming out of Nikolay; and Nikolay, too, watched how the cups sucking at his breast gradually filled with dark blood, and felt as though there really were something coming out of him, and smiled with pleasure.

"That's fine," said the tailor. "Please God, it will do you good."

The convert put on twelve cups and then another twelve, had tea, and drove away. Nikolay began shiver- ing; his face took on a drawn look, and, as the women put it, shrank up into a little fist; his fingers turned blue. He wrapped himself up in a quilt and a sheepskin coat, but felt colder and colder. Towards evening he began to feel very ill, asked to be laid on the floor, begged the tailor not to smoke; then he grew quiet under the coat,

and towards morning he died.

IX

Oh, what a hard, what a long, winter it was!

Already by Christm;is their own flour had given out and they started buying flour. Kiryak, who lived at home now, was disorderly in the evenings, terrifying everyone, and in the mornings he was tormented by headache and shame, and it was pitiful to look at him. Day and night the bellowing of the starved cow came from the barn—breaking the hearts of Granny and Marya. And as though out of spite, the frosts were bitter the whole time and the snowdrifts high; and the winter dragged on. At Annunciation there was a regular bliz- zard, and snow fell at Easter.

But after all, the winter did end. At the beginning of April there were warm days and frosty nights; winter would not yield, but one warm day overpowered it at last, and the streams began to flow and the birds to sing. The whole meadow and the shrubs that fringed the river were submerged by the spring floods, and the area between Zhukovo and the farther bank was one vast sheet of water, from which wild ducks rose up in flocks here and there. Every evening a fiery spring sunset, with superb clouds, offered new, extraordinary, incredible sights, just the sort of thing that one does not credit af- terwards, when one sees those very colors and those very clouds in a painting.

The cranes flew swiftly, swiftly, uttering mournful sounds, and there seemed to be a s^moning note in their cries. Standing on the edge of the slope, Olga stared for a long time at the flooded meadow, at the sun- shine, at the church, which looked bright and rejuve- nated, as it were; and her tears flowed and she gasped for breath: so passionate was her longing to go away, anywhere, to the end of the world. It was already de- cided that she should return to Moscow to go into serv- ice as a chambermaid, and that Kiryak should set off with her to get a job as a gatekeeper or something of the sort. Oh, to get away quickly!

As soon as the ground was dry and it was wann, they made ready to leave. Olga and Sasha, with bundles on their backs and sandals of plaited bast on their feet, left at daybreak: Marya came out, too, to see them off. Kiryak was not well and remained at home for another week. For the last time Olga, looking at the church, crossed herself and murmured a prayer; thought of her husband, and though she did not cry, her face puckered up and turned ugly, like an old woman's. During the winter she had grown thinner and plainer, her hair had gone a little gray, and instead of her former attractive appearance and pleasant smile, her face now had the sad, resigned expression left by the sorrows she had ex- perienced, and there was something obtuse and wooden about her gaze, as though she were deaf.

She was sorry to leave the village and the peasants. She kept remembering how they had carried Nikolay down the street, and how a Mass for the repose of his: soul had been said at every cabin, and how aU had wept in sympathy with her grief. During the summer and the winter there had been hours and days when it seemed as though these people lived worse than cattle, and it was terrible to be with them; they were coarse, dishonest, dirty, and drunken; they did not live at peace with one another but quarreled continually, because they feared, suspected, and despised each other. Who keeps the tavern and encourages drunkenness? The peasant. Who embezzles and drinks up the funds that belong to the community, the schools, the church? The peasant. Who steals from his neighbors, sets fire to their property, bears false witness at court for a bottle of vodka? At meetings of the Zemstvo and other local bodies, who is the first to raise his voice against the peasants? The peasant. Yes, to live with them was ter- rible; but yet, they were human beings, they suffered and wept like human beings, and there was nothing in their lives for which one could not find justification. Crushing labor that made the whole body ache at night, cruel winters, scanty crops, overcrowding; and no help, and nowhere to look for help. Those who were stronger and better-off could give no assistance, as they were themselves coarse, dishonest, drunken, and swore just as foully. The most insignificant little clerk or official treated the peasants as though they were tramps, and addressed even the village elders and church wardens as inferiors, and as though they had a right to do so. And indeed, can any sort of help or good example be given by lazy, grasping, greedy, dissolute men who only visit the village in order to outrage, to despoil, to terror- ize? Olga recalled the wretched, humiliated look of the old folks when in the winter Kiryak had been led off to be flogged. . . . And now she felt sorry for all these people, it hurt her, and as she walked on she kept look- ing back at the cabins.

After walking two miles with them Marya said

good-by, then she knelt, and pressing her face against the earth, began wailing:

"Again I am left alone. Poor me! poor unhappy soul that I am!"

And for a long time she went on wailing like this, and for a long time Olga and Sasha could see her still on her knees, as she kept bowing sideways, clutching her head in her hands, while the rooks flew over her.

The sun rose high; it turned hot. Zhukovo was left far behind. Walking was pleasant; Olga and Sasha soon for- got both the village and Marya; they were cheerful and everything entertained them: an ancient burial-mound; a row of telegraph posts marching one after another into the distance and disappearing on the horizon, the wires humming mysteriously; a farmhouse, half hidden by green foliage, and with a scent of dampness and hemp coming from it, a place that for some reason seemed in- habited by happy people; a horse's skeleton making a lonely white spot in the open fields. And the larks trilled tirelessly, quails called to one another, and the corn- crake cawed as though someone were jerking an old cramp-iron.

At noon Olga and Sasha came to a large village. There on the broad street they encountered the little old man who had been General Zhukov's cook. He was hot, and his red, perspiring bald spot shone in the sun. At first he and Olga failed to recognize each other, then they looked round at the same moment, did recognize each other, and went their separate ways without say- ing a word. Stopping before the open windows of a cottage w'nich looked newer and more prosperous than the rest, Olga bowed do^ and said in a loud, thin, singsong voice :

"Orthodox Christians, give ahns, for Christ's sake, as much as you can, and in the Kingdom of Heaven may

your parents know peace eternal."

"Orthodox Christians," Sasha echoed her chant, "give ahns, for Christ's sake, as much as you can, and in the Kingdom of Heaven. . . ."

1897

^fo Man Zn a Shell

_O

N THE outskirts of the village of Mironositzkoe two belated huntsmen had settled for the night in the barn belonging to the Elder, Prokofy. They were the veterinary, Ivan Ivanych, and the high school teacher, Burkin. Ivan Ivanych had a rather queer dou- ble surname—Chimsha-Himalaisky—which did not suit him at all, and he was known as Ivan Ivanych all over the province. He lived on a stud-farm near the townwn, and had gone out shooting to breathe some fresh air. As for Burkin, the high school teacher, he spent every sum-

mer at Count P 's, and had long been thoroughly at

home in the district.

They did not sleep. Ivan lvanych, a tall, spare old man with long mustaches, was sitting outside the door, smoking a pipe in the moonlight. Burkin was lying in- side on the hay, and could not be seen for the darkness.

They were telling each other stories. Among other things, they spoke of the Elder's wife, Mavra, a healthy and by no means stupid woman, observing that she had never been beyond her native village, had never seen a city or a railway in her life, and had spent the last ten years hugging the stove and only going out into the street at night.

"There's nothing remarkable about that!" said Burkin. "There are not a few people in the world, temperamen- tally unsociable, who try to withdraw into a shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is a manifestation of atavism, a return to the time when man's ancestor was not yet a gregarious animal and lived alone in his lair, or perhaps it is only one of the varieties of human char- acter—who knows? I am no naturalist, and it is not my business to settle such questions; I only mean to say that people like Mavra are by no means rare. Why, not to go far afield, there was Belikov, a colleague of mine, a teacher of Greek, who died in our town two months ago. You have heard of him, no doubt. The curious thing about him was that he wore mbbers, and a warm coat with an interlining, and carried an umbrella even in the finest weather. And he kept his umbrella in its cover and his watch in a gray chamois case, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his pen- knife, too, was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too, because it was always hidden in his turned-up collar. He wore dark spectacles and a sweater, s^fied his ears with cotton-wool, and when he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In short, the man showed a constant and irrepressible in- clination to keep a covering about himself, to create for himself a membrane, as it were, which would isolate him and protect him from outside influences. Actuality irtated him, frightened him, kept him in a state of continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the present, he would always laud the past and things that had never existed, and the dead languages that he taught were in effect for him the

same rubbers and umbrella in which he sought conceal-

ment from real life.

" 'Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful the Greek lan- guage is!' he would say, with a saccharine expression; and as though to prove his point, he would screw up his eyes and, raising one finger, utter: 'Anthropos!'

"His thoughts, too, Belikov tried to tuck away in a sheath. The only things that were clear to him were Government regulations and newspaper notices in which something was forbidden. When some ruling prohibited high school students from appearing on the streets after nine o'clock at night, or some article censured carnal love, this he found clear and definite: it was forbidden, and that was that. But there was always a doubtful element for him, something vague and not fully ex- pressed in any sanction or permission. When a dramatic club or a reading-room or a teahouse was licensed in the town, he would shake his head and say in a low voice:

" 'Of course, it's all very well, but you can't tell what may come of it.'

"Any infringement of the rules, any deviation or de- parture from them, plunged him into gloom, though one would have thought it was no concern of his. If one of his colleagues was late for the thanksgiving serv- ice, or if rumors reached him of some prank of the high school boys, or if one of the female members of the staff had been seen late in the evening in the company of an officer, he would become very much agitated and keep saying that one couldn't tell what might come of it. At faculty meetings he simply crushed us with his cautiousness, his suspiciousness, and his typical remarks to the effect that the young people in the girls' as weU as in the boys' high school were unruly, that there was much noise in the classrooms, that it might reach the ears of the authorities, that one couldn't tell what might come of it, and that it would be a good thing if Petrov were expelled from the second form and Yegorov from the fourth. And what do you think, with his sighs, his moping, the dark spectacles on his pale little face, a little face like a polecat's, you know, he weighed us all down, and we submitted, reduced Petrov's and Yego- rov's marks for conduct, detained them, and in the end expelled them both.

"He had a peculiar habit of visiting our lodgings. He would call on some teacher, would sit do^wn, and re- main silently staring, as though he were trying to de- tect something. He would sit like this in silence for an hour or two and then leave. "This he called 'maintaining good relations with his colleagues'; and it was obvious that making these calls and sitting there like that was painful to him, and that he went to see us simply be- cause he considered it his duty to his colleagues. We teachers were afraid of him. And even the principal was afraid of him. Would you believe it, our teachers were all thoughtful, decent people, brought up on Turgenev and Shchedrin, yet this little man, who always wore rubbers and carried an umbrella, had the whole high school under his th^nb for fully fifteen years! The high school? The whole townwn! Our ladies did not get up private theatricals on Saturdays for fear he should find it out, and the clergy dared not eat meat in Lent or play cards in his presence. Under the influence of people like Belikov the whole town spent ten to fifteen frightened years. We were afraid to speak out loud, to write letters, to make acquaintances, to read books, to help the poor, to teach people how to read and write. . . "

Ivan lvanych coughed, as a preliminary to making some remark, but first lighted his pipe, gazed at the moon, and then said, between pauses:

"Yes, thoughtful, decent people, readers of Shchedrin and Turgenev, of Buckle and all the rest of them, yet they knuckled under and put up with it—that's just how it is."

"Bclikov and I lived in the same house," Burkin went on, "on the same floor, his door facing mine; we often saw each other, and I was acquainted with his domestic arrangements. It was the same story: dressing-go^, nightcap, blinds, bolts, prohibitions and restrictions of all sorts, and, 'Oh, you can't tell what may come of it!' Lenten fare didn't agree with him, yet he could not eat meat, as people might say that Belikov did not keep the fasts, and he ate perch fried in butter—not a Lenten dish, yet one could not call it meat. He did not keep a fe- male servant for fear people might think evil of him, but instead employed an old man of sixty, called Afa- nasy, half-witted and given to drinking, who had once been an orderly and could cook after a fashion. This Afanasy was usually standing at the door with folded arms; he would sigh deeply and always mutter the same thing:

" 'The likes of them is thick as hops hereabouts!'

"Belikov's bedroom was tiny and boxlike; his bed was curtained. When he went to bed he drew the bed- clothes over his head; it was hot and stuffy; the wind rattled the closed doors; a humming noise came from the stove and the sound of sighs from the kitchen, omi- nous sighs— And he lay under the quilt, terrified. He was afraid that something might happen, that Afanasy would murder ^m, that thieves would break in, and he had bad dreams all night long, and in the morning when we went to school together, he was downcast and pale, and it was plain that the place, swarming with people, towards which he was going, filled his whole being with dread and aversion, and tiiat walking beside me was disagreeable to a man of his unsociable tempera- ment.

" 'How noisy the classrooms are,' he used to say, as though trying to find an explanation for his distress. 'It's an outrage.'

"And imagine, this teacher of Greek—this man in a shell—came near to getting married."

Ivan Ivanych glanced rapidly into the barn, and said, "You are joking!"

"Yes, strange as it seems, he nearly got married. A new teacher of geography and history, a certain Mihail Savvich Kovalenko, a Ukrainian, was assigned to our school. He did not come alone, but with his sister, Varenka. He was a tall, dark young man with huge hands, and one could see from his face that he spoke in a deep voice, and, in fact, his voice seemed to come out of a barrel: 'Boom, boom, boom!' She was not so young, about thirty, but she too was tall, well built, with black eyebrows and red cheeks—in a word, she was not a girl but a peach, and so lively, so noisy; she was always singing Little Russian songs and laughing. At the least provocation, she would go off into ringing laughter: 'Ha-ha-hal' We first got well acquainted with the Kovalenkos, I remember, at the principal's name- day party. Among the morose, emphatically dull peda- gogues who attend even a name-day party as a duty, we suddenly saw a new Aphrodite risen from the foam; she walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang, danced. She sang with feeling 'The Winds Are Blow- ing' and then another Ukrainian song and another, and she fascinated us all, all, even Belikov. He sat down beside her and said with a saccharine smile:

" 'The Little Russian tongue reminds one of ancient Greek in its softness and agreeable sonority.'

"That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling and persuasiveness that they had a farm in the Gadyach district, and that her Mummy lived there, and that they had such pears, such melons, such kabaki! The Little Russians call a pumpkin kabak [Russian for tavern], while their taverns they call shinki, and they make a borshch with tomatoes and eggplant in it, 'which is so delicious—ever so delicious!'

"We listened, and listened, and suddenly the same idea occurred to all of us:

" 'It would be a good thing to marry them off,' the principal's wife whispered to me.

"For some reason we all recalled that our friend Be- likov was unmarried, and it seemed strange to us now that we had failed to notice it before, and in fact had completely lost sight of so important a detail in his life. What was his attitude towards women? How had he settled for himself this vital problem? Until then we had had no interest in the matter; perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a man who wore rubbers in all weathers and slept behind curtains was capable of love.

" 'He is way past forty and she is thirty,' the prin- cipal's wife clarified her idea. 'I believe she would marry him.'

'What isn't done in the provinces out of boredom, how many useless and foolish things! And that is be- cause what is necessary isn't done at all. What need was there, for instance, for us to make a match for diis Belikov, whom one could not even imagine as a mariied man? The principal's wife, the inspector's wife, and all our high school ladies, grew livelier and even bettei looking, as though they had suddenly found an object in life. The principal's wife would take a box at the theater, and lo and behold! Varenka would be sitting in it, fanning herself, beaming and happy, and beside her would be Belikov, a twisted little man, looking as though he had been pulled out of his lodging by pin- cers. I would give an evening party and the ladies would insist on my inviting Bclikov and Varenk;i. In short, the machine was set in motion. It turned out th.it Varenka was not averse to matrimony. Her life with her brother was not very cheerful: they did nothing but argue and quarrel with one another for days on end. Here is a typical scene: Kovalenko strides down the street, a tall, husky fellow, in an embroidered shirt, a lock of hair falling over his forehead from under his cap, in one hand a bundle of books, in the other a thick, knotted stick; he is followed by his sister, also carrying books.

" 'But you haven't read it, Mihailik!' she is arguing loudly. 'I tell you, I swear you haven't read it at all!'

" 'And I tell you I have read it,' bellows Kovalenko, banging his stick on the sidewalk.

" 'Oh, my goodness, Mihailik, why are you so cross? We are only discussing principles.'

" 'I tell you that I have read it!' Kovalenko shouts, more loudly than ever.

"And at home, if there an outsider present, there was sure to be a fusillade. She must have been fed up with such a life and longed for a home of her own. Be- sides, there was her age; there was no time left to pick and choose; she was apt to marry anybody, even a teacher of Creek. Come to think of it, most of our young ladies don't care whom they marry so long as they do marry. Be that as it may, Varenka began to show an unmistakable inclination for Belikov.

"And Belikov? He used to call on Kovalenko just as he did on the rest of us. He would arrive, sit down, and go on sitting there in silence. He would sit quietly, and Varenka would sing to him 'The Winds Are Blowing' or would stare at him pensively with her dark eyes, or would suddenly go off into a peal of laughter—'Ha- ha-ha!'

"In amorous affairs and in marrying, suggestion plays a great part. Everybody—both his colleagues and the ladies—began assuring Belikov that he ought to get married, that there was nothing left for him in life but to get married; we all felicitated him, and with solemn faces delivered ourselves of various platitudes, such as 'Marriage is a serious step.' Besides, Varenka was good- looking and attractive; she was the daughter of a civil councilor, and she owned a farm; above all, she was the first woman who had treated him cordially and affec- tionately. His head was turned, and he decided that he really ought to get married.''

''Well, at that point," said Ivan Ivanych, "you should have taken away his rubbers and umbrella."

"Just fancy, that proved to be impossible. He put Varenka's portrait on his table, kept calling on me and talking about Varenka, and about family life, saying that marriage was a serious step. He went frequently to the Kovalenkos, but he did not alter his habits in the least. On the contrary, his decision to get married seemed to have a deleterious effect on him. He grew thinner and paler and seemed to retreat further into his shell.

" 'I like Varvara Savvishna,' he would say to me, with a faint and crooked smile, 'and I know that everyone ought to get married, but—you know, all this has hap- pened so suddenly— One must think it over a little.'

" 'What is there to think over?' I would say to him. 'Get married—that's all.'

" 'No; marriage is a serious step; one must first weigh the impending duties and responsibilities—so that noth- ing untoward may come of it. It worries me so much that I don't sleep nights. And I must confess I am afraid: she and her brother have such a peculiar way of thinking; they reason so strangely, you know, and she has a very impetuous disposition. You get married, and then, there is no telling, you may get into trouble.'

"And he did not propose; he kept putting it off, to the great vexation of the principal's wife and all our ladies; he kept weighing his future duties and responsi- bilities, and meanwhile he went for a walk with Varenka almost every day—possibly he thought that this was the proper thing under the circumstances—and came to see me to talk about family life. And in all probability he would have ended by proposing to her, and would have made one of those needless, stupid marriages thou- sands of which are made among us out of sheer bore- dom and idleness, if it had not been for a kolossalischer Skandal.

"I must tell you that Varenka's brother conceived a hatred of Belikov from the first day of their acquaint- ance and couldn't endure him.

" 'I don't understand,' he used to say to us, shrugging his shoulders, 'I don't understand how you can put up with that informer, that nasty mug. Ughl how can you live here? The atmosphere you breathe is vile, stifling! Are you pedagogues, teachers? No, you are piddling functionaries; yours is not a temple of learning but a police station, and it has the same sour smell. No, brothers, I will stay with you for a while, and then I will go to my farm and catch crayfish there and teach Ukrainian brats. I will go, and you can stay here with your Judas—blast himl'

"Or he would laugh till tears came to his eyes, his laughter now deep, now shrill, and ask me, throwing up his hands, 'What does he come here for? What does he want? He sits and stares.'

"He even gave Belikov a nickname, 'The Spider.' Of course, we avoided talking to him about his sister's planning to marry 'The Spider.' And when, on one oc- casion, the principal's wife hinted to him what a good thing it would be if his sister settled down with such a substantial, universally respected man as Belikov, he frowned and grumbled:

" 'It's none of my business; let her marry a viper if she likes. I don't care to meddle in other people's af- fairs.'

"Now listen to what happened next. Some wag drew a caricature of Belikov walking along under his um- brella, wearing his rubbers, his trousers tucked up, with Varenka on his arm; below there was the legend 'An- thropos in love.' The artist got the expression admirably, you know. He must have worked more than one night, for the teachers of both the boys' and the girls' high schools, the teachers of the theological seminary, and the government officials all received copies. Belikov re- ceived one, too. The caricature made a very painful impression on him.

"We left the house together; it was the first of May, a Sunday, and all of us, the boys and the teachers, had agreed to meet at the high school and then to walk to a grove on the outskirts of the town. We set off, and he was green in the face and gloomier than a thunder- cloud.

" 'What wicked, malicious people there arel' he said, and his lips quivered.

"I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. We were walk- ing along, and all of a sudden—imaginel—Kovalenko came rolling along on a bicycle, and after him, also on a bicycle, Varenka, flushed and exhausted, but gay and high-spirited.

" 'We are going on ahead,' she shouted. 'What lovely weather! Just too lovely!'

"And they both vanished. Belikov turned from green to white, and seemed petiified. He stopped short and stared at me.

" 'Good heavens, what is this?' he asked. 'Can my eyes be deceiving me? Is it proper for high school teach- ers and ladies to ride bicycles?'

" 'What's improper about it?' I asked. 'Let them ride and may it do them good.'

" 'But you can't mean it,' he cried, amazed at my calm. 'What are you saying?'

"And he was so shocked that he refused to go farther, and returned home.

"Next day he was continually twitching and rubbing his hands nervously, and it was obvious from the ex- pression of his face that he was far from well. And he left before the school day was over, for the first time in his life. And he ate no dinner. Towards evening he wrapped himself up warmly, though it was practically summer weather, and made his way to the Kovalenkos'. Varenka was out; he found only her brother at home.

" 'Please sit down,' Kovalenko said coldly, frownwning. He had a sleepy look; he had just taken an after-dinner nap and was in a very bad humor.

"Belikov sat in silence for about ten minutes, and then began, 'I have come to you to relieve my mind. I am very, very much troubled. Some malicious fellow has drawn a caricature of me and of another person who is close to both of us. I regard it as my duty to assure you that I had nothing to do with it. I have given no grounds for such an attack—on the contrary, I have always behaved as a respectable person would.'

"Kovalenko sat there sulking without a word. Belikov waited a while, and then went on in a low, mournful voice; 'And I have something else to say to you. I have been in the service for years, while you have entered it only lately, and I consider it my duty as an older colleague to give you a warning. You ride a bi- cycle, and that pastime is utterly improper for an edu- cator of youth.'

" *Why so?' asked Kovalenko in his deep voice.

" 'Surely that needs no explanation, Mihail Savvich— surely it is self-evident! If the teacher rides a bicycle, what can one expect of the pupils? The only thing left them is to walk on their heads! And so long as it is not explicitly permitted, it should not be done. I was hor- rified yesterday! When I saw your sister, everything went black before my eyes. A lady or a young girl on a bicycle—it's terrible!'

" 'What is it you wish exactly?'

" 'All I wish to do is to warn you, Mihail Savvich. You are a young man, you have a future before you, you must be very, very careful of your behavior, and you are so neglectful, oh, so neglectful! You go about in an embroidered shirt, are constantly seen in the street carrying books, and now the bicycle, too. The principal will learn that you and your sister ride bicycles, and then it will reach the Trustee's ears. No good can come of that.'

" 'It's nobody's business if my sister and I do bicycle,' said Kovalenko, and he turned crimson. 'And whoever meddles in my private affairs can go to the devill'

"Belikov turned pale and got up.

" 'If you speak to me in that tone, I cannot continue/ he said. 'And I beg you never to express yourself in that manner about our superiors in my presence; you should be respectful to the authorities.'

" 'Have I said anything offensive about the authori- ties?' asked Kovalenko, looking at him angrily. 'Please leave me in peace. I am an honorable man, and do not care to talk to gentlemen of your stripe. I hate in- formers!'

"Belikov fidgeted nervously and hurriedly began put- ting on his coat, with an expression of horror on his face. It was the first time in his life he had been spoken to so rudely.

"'You can say what you please,' he declared, as he stepped out of the entry onto the staircase landing. 'Only I must warn you: someone may have overheard us, and lest our conversation be misinterpreted and harm come of it, I shall have to inform the principal of the contents of our conversation—in a general way. I am obliged to do so.'

" 'Inform him? Go, make your report and be damned to you!'

"Kovalenko seized him from behind by the collar and gave him a shove, and Belikov rolled noisily do^stairs, rubbers and all. The staircase was high and steep, but he arrived at the bottom safely, got up, and felt his nose to see whether his spectacles were intact. But just as he was rolling do^ the stairs, Varenka came in, ac- companied by two ladies; they stood below, staring, and this was more dreadful to Belikov than anything else. I believe he would rather have broken his neck or both legs than have been an object of ridicule. Why, now the whole town would hear of it; it would come to the principal's ears, it would reach the Trustee. Oh, there was no telling what might come of it! There would be another caricature, and it would all end in his being ordered to retire from his post.

"When he got up, Varenka recognized him and, look- ing at his ludicrous face, his crumpled overcoat, and his rubbers, not grasping the situation and supposing

that he had fallen by accident, could not restrain herself

and burst into laughter that resounded throughout the

house:

" 'Ha-ha-ha!'

"And this reverberant, ringing 'Ha-ha-hal' put an end to everything: to the expected match and to Belikov's earthly existence. He did not hear what Varenka was saying; he saw nothing. On reaching home, the first thing he did was to remove Varenka's portrait from the table; then he went to bed, and he never got up again.

"Two or three days later Afanasy came to me and asked whether the doctor should not be sent for, as there was something wrong with his master. I went in to see Belikov. He lay silent behind the curtains, cov- ered with a quilt; when you questioned him, he an- swered 'yes' and 'no' and nothing more. He lay there while Afanasy, gloomy and scowling, hovered about him, sighing heavily and reeking of vodka like a tavern.

"A month later Belikov died. We all went to his funeral—that is, all connected with both high schools and with the theological seminary. Now when he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, pleasant, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case that he would never leave again. Yes, he had attained his ideal! And as though in his honor, it was cloudy, rainy weather on the day of his funeral, and we all wore rubbers and carried umbrellas. Varenka, too, was at the funeral, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave, she dropped a tear. I have noticed that Ukrainian women always laugh or cry— there is no intermediate state for them.

"I confess, it is a great pleasure to bury people like Belikov. As we were returning from the cemetery we wore discreet Lenten faces; no one wanted to display this feeling of pleasure—a feeling like that we had ex- perienced long, long ago as children when the grown- ups had gone out and we ran about the garden for an hour or two, enjoying complete freedom. Ah, freedom, freedom! A mere hint, the faintest hope of its possibility, gives wings to the soul, isn't that true?

"We returned from the cemetery in good humor. But not more than a week had passed before life dropped into its old rut, and was as gloomy, tiresome, and stupid as before, the sort of life that is not explicitly forbidden, but on the other hand is not fully permitted; things were no better. And, indeed, though we had buried Belikov, how many such men in shells were left, how many more of them there will be!"

"That's the way it is," said Ivan Ivanych, and lit his

P^ipe'

"How many more of them there will bel" repeated Burkin.

The high school teacher came out of the barn. He was a short, stout man, completely bald, with a black beard that nearly reached his waist; two dogs came out with him.

"What a moon!" he said, looking up.

It was already midnight. On the right could be seen the whole village, a long street stretching far away for some three miles. Everything was sunk in deep, silent slumber; not a movement, not a sound; one could hardly believe that nature could be so still. When on a moon- light night you see a wide village street, with its cot- tages, its haystacks, and its willows that have dropped off to sleep, a feeling of serenity comes over the soul; as it rests thus, hidden fiom toil, care, and sorrow by the nocturnal shadows, the street is gentle, sad, beauti- ful, and it seems as though the stars look down upon it kindly and tenderly, and as if there were no more evil on earth, and all were well. On the left, where the vil- lage ended, the open country began; the fields could be seen stretching far away to the horizon, and there was no movement, no sound in that whole expanse drenched with moonlight.

"Yes, that's the way it is," repeated Ivan lvanych; "and isn't our living in the airless, crowded town, our writing useless papers, our playing vint—isn't all that a sort of shell for us? And this spending our lives among pettifogging, idle men and silly, unoccupied women, our talking and our listening to all sorts of poppycock— isn't that a shell, too? If you like, I wiU tell you a very instructive story."

"No; it's time to turn in," said Burkin. "Tomorrow's another day."

They went into the barn and lay do^ on the hay. And they were both covered up and had dozed off when suddenly there was the sound of light footsteps— tap, tap. Someone was walking near the barn, walking a little and stopping, and a minute later, tap, tap again. The dogs began to growl.

"That's Mavra," said Burkin.

The footsteps died away.

"To see and hear them lie," said Ivan lvanych, turn- ing over on the other side, "and to be called a fool for putting up with their lies; to endure insult and humili- ation, and not dare say openly that you are on the side of the honest and the free, and to lie and smile yourself, and all for the sake of a crust of bread, for the sake of a warm nook, for the sake of a mean, worthless rank in the service—no, one cannot go on living like that!"

"Come, now, that's a horse of another color, Ivan lvanych," said the teacher. "Let's go to sleep."

And ten minutes later Burkin was asleep. But Ivan

Ivanych kept sighing and turning from one side to the other; then he got up, went outside again, and seating himself near the door, lighted his pipe.

1898

Gooseberries

was a still day, not hot, but tedious, as it usually is when the weather is gray and dull, when clouds have been hanging over the fields for a long time, and you wait for the rain that does not come. Ivan Ivanych, a veterinary, and Burkin, a high school teacher, were al- ready tired with walking, and the plain seemed endless to them. Far ahead were the scarcely visible windmills of the village of Mironositzkoe; to the right lay a range of hills that disappeared in the distance beyond the vil- lage, and both of them knew that over there were the river, and fields, green willows, homesteads, and if you stood on one of the hills, you could see from there an- other vast plain, telegraph poles, and a train that from afar looked like a caterpillar crawling, and in clear weather you could even see the town. Now, when it was still and when nature seemed mild and pensive, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were filled with love for this plain, and both of them thought what a beautiful land it was.

"Last time when we were in Elder Prokofy's barn," said Burkin, "you were going to tell me a story."

"Yes; I wanted to tell you about my brother."

HE sky had been overcast since early morning; it

Ivan Ivanych heaved a slow sigh and lit his pipe be- fore beginning his story, but just then it began to rain.

And five minutes later there was a downpour, and it was hard to tell when it would be over. The two men halted, at a loss; the dogs, already wet, stood with their tails between their legs and looked at them feelingly.

"We must find shelter somewhere," said Burkin. "Let's go to Alyohin's; it's quite near."

KT ,> M

Let s.

They turned aside and walked across a mown meadow, now going straight ahead, now bearing to the right, until they reached the road. Soon poplars came into view, a garden, then the red roofs of barns; the river gleamed, and the view opened on a broad expanse of water with a mill and a white bathing-cabin. That was Sofyino, Alyohin's place.

The mill was going, drowning out the sound of the rain; the dam was shaking. Wet horses stood near the carts, their heads drooping, and men were walking about, their heads covered with sacks. It was damp, muddy, dreary; and the water looked cold and unkind. Ivan lvanych and Burkin felt cold and messy and un- comfortable through and through; their feet were heary with mud and when, having crossed the dam, they climbed up to the barns, they were silent as though they were cross with each other.

The noise of a winnowing-machine came from one of the barns, the door was open, and clouds of dust were pouring from within. On the threshold stood Alyohin himself, a man of forty, tall and rotund, with long hair, looking more like a professor or an artist than a gentle- man farmer. He was wearing a white blouse, badly in need of washing, that was belted with a rope, and drawers, and his high boots were plastered with mud and straw. His eyes and nose were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanych and Burkin and was appar- ently very glad to see them.

"Please go up to the house, gentlemen," he said, smil- ing; 'Tll be there directly, in a moment."

It was a large structure of two stories. Alyohin lived downstairs in what was formerly the stewards' quarters: two rooms that had arched ceilings and small windows; the furniture was plain, and the place smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He went into the showy rooms upstairs only rarely, when he had guests. Once in the house, the two visitors were met by a chambermaid, a young woman so beautiful that both of them stood still at the same moment and glanced at each other.

"You can't imagine how glad I am to see you, gentle- men," said Alyohin, joining them in the hall. "What a surprise! Pelageya," he said, turning to the chamber- maid, "give the guests a change of clothes. And, come to think of it, I will change, too. But I must go and bathe first, I don't think I've had a wash since spring. Don't you want to go into the bathing-cabin? In the meanwhile things will be got ready here."

The beautiful Pelageya, with her soft, delicate air, brought them bath towels and soap, and Alyohin went to the bathing-cabin with his guests.

"Yes, it's a long time since I've bathed," he said, as he undressed. ''I've an excellent bathing-cabin, as you see—it was put up by my father—but somehow I never find time to use it." He sat down on the steps and lathered his long hair and neck, and the water around him turned brown.

"I say—" observed Ivan lvanych significantly, look- ing at his head.

"I haven't had a good wash for a long time," repeated Alyohin, embarrassed, and soaped himself once more; the water about him turned dark-blue, the color of ink.

Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, plunged into the water with a splash and swam in the rain, thrusting his anns out wide; he raised waves on which white lilies swayed. He swam out to the middle of the river and dived and a minute later came up in another spot and swam on and kept diving, trying to touch bottom. "By God!" he kept repeating delightedly, "by God!" He swam to the mill, spoke to the peasants there, and turned back and in the middle of the river lay floating, exposing his face to the rain. Burkin and Alyohin were already dressed and ready to leave, but he kept on swimming and diving. "By Godl" he kept exclaiming. "Lord, have mercy on me."

"You've had enough!" Burkin shouted to him.

They returned to the house. And only when the lamp was lit in the big drawing room upstairs, and the two guests, in silk dressing-go^s and warm slippers, were lounging in armchairs, and Alyohin himself, washed and combed, wearing a new jacket, was walking about the room, evidently savoring the warmth, the cleanliness, the dry clothes and light footwear, and when pretty Pelageya, stepping noiselessly across the carpet and smiling softly, brought in a tray with tea and jam, only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story, and it was as though not only Burkin and Alyohin were listening, but also the ladies, old and young, and the military men who looked down upon them, calmly and severely, from their gold frames.

"We are two brothers," he began, "I, Ivan Ivanych, and my brother, Nikolay Ivanych, who is two years my junior. I went in for a learned profession and became a veterinary; Nikolay at nineteen began to clerk in a pro- vincial branch of the Treasury. Our father was a kan- tonist,[6] but he rose to be an officer and so a nobleman, a rank that he bequeathed to us together with a small estate. After his death theie was a lawsuit and we lost the estate to creditors, but be that as it may, we spent our childhood in the country. Just like peasant children we passed days and nights in the fields and the woods, herded hoises, stripped bast from the trees, fished, and so on. And, you know, whoever even once in his life has caught a perch or seen thrushes migrate in the autumn, when on clear, cool days they sweep in flocks over the village, will never really be a townsman and to the day of his death will have a longing for the open. My brother was unhappy in the government office. Years passed, but he went on warming the same seat, scratch- ing away at the same papers, and thinking of one and the same thing: how to get away to the country. And little by little this vague longing turned into a definite desire, into a dream of buying a little property some- where on the banks of a river or a lake.

"He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm— that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his office, dreamed of eating his own shchi, which would fill the whole farm- yard with a delicious aroma, of picnicking on the green grass, of sleeping in the sun, of sitting for hours on the seat by the gate gazing at field and forest. Books on agriculture and the farming items in almanacs were his joy, the delight of his soul. He liked newspapers too, but the only things he read in them were advertisements of land for sale, so many acres of tillable land and pasture, with house, garden, river, mill, and millpond. And he pictured to himself garden paths, flowers, fruit, bird- houses with starlings in them, crucians in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you know. These imaginary pic- tures varied with the advertisements he came upon, but somehow gooseberry bushes figured in every one of them. He could not picture to himself a single country- house, a single rustic nook, without gooseberries.

" 'Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda having tea, and your ducks swim in the pond, and everything smells delicious and—the gooseberries are ripening.'

"He would draw a plan of his estate and invariably it would contain the following features: a) the master's house; b) servants' quarters; c) kitchen-garden; d) a gooseberry patch. He lived meagerly: he deprived him- self of food and drink; he dressed God knows how, like a beggar, but he kept on saving and salting money away in the bank. He was terribly stingy. It was painful for me to see it, and I used to give him small sums and send him something on holidays, but he would put that away too. Once a man is possessed by an idea, there is no doing anything with him.

"Years passed. He was transferred to another prov- ince, he was already past forty, yet he was still reading newspaper advertisements and saving up money. Then I heard that he was married. Still for the sake of buying a property with a gooseberry patch he married an eld- erly, homely widow, without a trace of affection for her, but simply because she had money. Mter marrying her, he went on living parsimoniously, keeping her half- starved, and he put her money in the bank in his own name. She had previously been the wife of a postmaster, who had got her used to pies and cordials. This second husband did not even give her enough black bread. She began to sicken, and some three years later gave up the ghost. And, of course, it never for a moment occurred to my brother that he was to blame for her death. Money, like vodka, can do queer things to a man. Once in our town a merchant lay on his deathbed; before he died, he ordered a plateful of honey and he ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so that no one should get it. One day when I was inspecting a drove of cattle at a railway station, a cattle dealer fell under a locomotive and it sliced off his leg. We carried him in to the infirmary, the blood was gushing from the wound —a terrible business, but he kept begging us to find his leg and was very anxious about it: he had twenty rubles in the boot that was on that leg, and he was afraid they would be lost."

"That's a tune from another opera," said Burkin.

Ivan Ivanych paused a moment and then continued:

"After his wife's death, my brother began to look around for a property. Of course, you may scout about for five years and in the end make a mistake, and buy something quite different from what you have been dreaming of. Through an agent my brother bought a mortgaged estate of three hundred acres with a house, servants' quarters, a park, but with no orchard, no goose- berry patch, no duck-pond. There was a stream, but the water in it was the color of coffee, for on one of its banks there was a brickyard and on the other a glue factory. But my brother was not at all disconcerted: he ordered a score of gooseberry bushes, planted them, and settled down to the life of a country gentleman.

"Last year I paid him a visit. I thought I would go and see how things were with him. In his letter to me my brother called his estate 'Chumbaroklov Waste, or Himalaiskoe' (our surname was Chimsha-Himalaisky). I reached the place in the afternoon. It was hot. Every- where there were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of fir trees, and I was at a loss as to how to get to the yard and where to leave my horse. I made my way to the house and was met by a fat dog with reddish hair that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barelegged woman, who also looked like a pig, came out of the kitchen and said that the master was resting after dinner. I went in to see my brother, and found him sitting up in bed, with a quilt over his knees. He had grown older, stouter, flabby; his cheeks, his nose, his lips jutted out: it looked as though he might grunt into the quilt at any moment.

"We embraced and dropped tears of joy and also of sadness at the thought that the two of us had once been young, but were now gray and nearing death. He got dressed and took me out to show me his estate.

" Well, how are you getting on here?' I asked.

" 'Oh, aU right, thank God. I am doing very well.'

"He was no longer the poor, timid clerk he used to be but a real landowner, a gentleman. He had already grown used to his new manner of living and developed a taste for it. He ate a great deal, steamed himself in the bathhouse, was growing stout, was already having a lawsuit with the village commune and the two factories and was very much offended when the peasants failed to address him as 'Your Honor.' And he concerned him- self with his soul's welfare too in a substantial, upper- class manner, and performed good deeds not simply, but pompously. And what good works! He dosed the peas- ants with bicarbonate and castor oil for all their ail- ments and on his name day he had a thanksgiving serv- ice celebrated in the center of the village, and then treated the villagers to a gallon of vodka, which he thought was the thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka! One day a fat landowner hauls the peasants up before the rural police officer for trespassing, and the next, to mark a feast day, treats them to a gallon of vodka, and they drink and shout 'Hurrah' and when they are drunk bow down at his feet. A higher standard of living, overeating and idleness develop the most in- solent self-conceit in a Russian. Nikolay Ivanych, who when he was a petty official was afraid to have opinions of his own even if he kept them to himself, now uttered nothing but incontrovertible truths and did so in the tone of a minister of state: 'Education is necessary, but the masses are not ready for it; corporal punishment is generally harmful, but in some cases it is useful and nothing else will serve.'

" 'I know the common people, and I know how to deal with them,' he would say. 'They love me. I only have to raise my little finger, and they will do anything I want.'

"And all this, mark you, would be said with a smile that bespoke kindness and intelligence. Twenty times over he repeated: 'We, of the gentry,' 'I, as a member of the gentry.' Apparently he no longer remembered that our grandfather had been a peasant and our father just a private. Even our surname, 'Chimsha-Himalaisky,' which in reality is grotesque, seemed to him sonorous, distinguished, and delightful.

"But I am concerned now not with him, but with me. I want to tell you about the change that took place in me during the few hours that I spent on his estate. In the evening when we were having tea, the cook served a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, they were his own gooseberries, the first ones picked since the bushes were planted. My brother gave a laugh and for a minute looked at the gooseberries in silence, with tears in his eyes—he could not speak for excitement. Then he put one berry in his mouth, glanced at me with the triumph of a child who has at last been given a toy he was longing for and said: 'How tasty!' And he ate the gooseberries greedily, and kept repeating: 'Ah, how delicious! Do taste them!'

"They were hard and sour, but as Pushkin has it,

The falsehood that exalts we cherish more

Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

I saw a happy man, one whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, who was satisfied with his lot and with himself. For some reason an element of sadness had always mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and now at the sight of a happy man l was assailed by an oppressive feeling bordering on despair. It weighed on me particularly at night. A bed was made up for me in a room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was wakeful, and that he would get up again and again, go to the plate of gooseberries and eat one after another. I said to myself: how many con- tented, happy people there really are! What an over- whelming force they are! Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying— Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our to^ there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their dead to the ceme- tery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many chil- dren dead from malnutrition— And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little ha^mer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and trouble wiU come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a ha^mer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well."

"That night I came to understand that I too had been contented and happy," Ivan Ivanych continued, getting up. "I too over the dinner table or out hunting would hold forth on how to live, what to believe, the right way to govern the people. I too would say that learning was the enemy of darkness, that education was necessary but that for the common people the three R's were suffi- cient for the time being. Freedom is a boon, I used to say, it is as essential as air, but we must wait awhile. Yes, that's what I used to say, and now I ask: Why must we wait?" said Ivan Ivanych, looking wrathfully at Bur- kin. "Why must we wait, I ask you? For what reason?

I am told that nothing can be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in its own time. But who is it that says so? Where is the proof that it is just? You cite the natural order of things, the law governing all phenomena, but is there law, is there order in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand beside a ditch and wait for it to close up of itself or fill up with silt, when I could jump over it or throw a bridge across it? And again, why must we wait? Wait, until we have no strength to live, and yet we have to live and are eager to live!

"I left my brother's place early in the morning, and ever since then it has become intolerable for me to stay in town. I am oppressed by the peace and the quiet, I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is nothing that pains me more than the spectacle of a happy family sitting at table having tea. I am an old man now and un- fit for combat, I am not even capable of hating. I can only grieve inwardly, get irritated, worked up, and at night my head is ablaze with the rush of ideas and I cannot sleep. Oh, if I were young!"

Ivan Ivanych paced up and down the room excitedly and repeated, "If I were young!"

He suddenly walked up to Alyohin and began to press now one of his hands, now the other.

"Pavel Konstantinych," he said imploringly, "don't quiet down, don't let yourself be lulled to sleep! As long as you are young, strong, alert, do not cease to do good! There is no happiness and there should be none, and if life has a meaning and a purpose, that meaning and purpose is not our happiness but something greater and more rational. Do good!"

All this Ivan Ivanych said with a pitiful, imploring smile, as though he were asking a personal favor.

Afterwards all three of them sat in armchairs in dif- ferent corners of the drawing room and were silent. Ivan Ivanych's story satisfied neither Burkin nor Alyohin. With the ladies and generals looking down from the golden frames, seeming alive in the dim light, it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women. And the fact that they were sitting in a drawing room where everything—the chan- delier under its cover, the armchairs, the carpets under- foot—testified that the very people who were now look- ing down from the frames had once moved about here, sat and had tea, and the fact that lovely Pelageya was noiselessly moving about—that was better than any story.

Alyohin was very sleepy; he had gotten up early, be- fore three o'clock in the morning, to get some work done, and now he could hardly keep his eyes open, but he was afraid his visitors might tell an interesting story in his absence, and he would not leave. He did not trouble to ask himself if what Ivan Ivanych had just said was in- telligent or right. The guests were not talking about groats, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad of it and wanted them to go on.

"However, it's bedtime," said Burkin, rising. "Allow me to wish you good night."

Alyohin took leave of his guests and went downstairs to his own quarters, while they remained upstairs. They were installed for the night in a big room in which stood two old wooden beds decorated with carvings and in the corner was an ivory crucifix. The wide cool beds which had been made by the lovely Pelageya gave off a pleasant smell of clean linen.

Ivan Ivanych undressed silently and got into bed.

"Lord forgive us sinnersl" he murmured, and drew the bedclothes over his head.

His pipe, which lay on the table, smelled strongly of burnt tobacco, and Burkin, who could not sleep for a long time, kept wondering where the unpleasant odor came from.

The rain beat against the window panes all night.

1898

About Love

_F

O R breakfast next day delicious little patties, cray- fish and mutton croquettes were served, and while we were eating Nikanor the cook came up to ask what the guests would like for dinner. He was a man of me- dium height, with a puffy face and small eyes; he was clean-shaven, and it looked as though his mustache had not been shaven off but plucked out.

According to Alyohin, the beautiful Pelageya was in love with this cook. As he drank and had a violent tem- per, she did not want to marry him, but was willing to live with him just so. But he was very devout, and his religious convictions did not allow him to live "just so"; he insisted that she marry him, and didn't want it other- wise, and when he was drunk he used to swear at her and even beat her. Whenever he was drunk she would hide upstairs and sob, and on such occasions Alyohin and the servants stayed in the house to defend her if necessary.

The conversation turned to love.

"How love is born," said Alyohin, "why Pelageya hasn't fallen in love with somebody more like herself both inwardly and outwardly, and why she fell in love with Nikanor, that mug—we all call him the Mug—to what extent personal happiness counts in love—all that is uncertain; and one can argue about it as one pleases. So far only one incontestable truth has been stated about love: 'This is a great mystery'; everything else that has been written or said about love is not a solu- tion, but only a statement of questions that have re- mained unanswered. The explanation that would fit one case does not apply to a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind, would be to explain every case separately without attempting to generalize. Each case should be individualized, as the doctors say."

"Perfectly true," Burkin assented.

"We Russians who are cultivated have a weakness for these questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized, embellished with roses, nightingales; but we Russians embellish our loves with these fatal questions, and choose the least interesting of them, at that. In Moscow, when I was a student, there was a girl with whom I lived, a channing creature, and every time I held her in my arms she was thinking about what I would allow her a month for housekeeping and about the price of beef. Similarly, when we are in love, we never stop asking ourselves whether it is honorable or dishonorable, sensible or stupid, what this love will lead to, and so on. If that is a good thing or not I don't know, but that it is a hindrance and a source of dissatisfaction and irritation, of that I am certain."

It looked as though he wanted to tell a story. People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about. In to^ bachelors visit baths and restaurants in order to have a chance to talk, and sometimes tell very interesting stories to bath attendants and waiters; in the country they usually unbosom themselves to their guests. At the moment we could see a gray sky from the windows and trees drenched with rain; in such weather we could go nowhere and there was nothing for us to do but to tell and listen to stories.

"I have been living at Sofyino and been farming for a long time," Alyohin began, "ever since I graduated from the University. My education did not fit me for rough work and temperamentally I am a bookish fellow, but when I came here the estate was heavily mortgaged, and as my father had gone into debt partly because he had spent a great deal on my education, I decided not to leave the place but to work till I had paid off the debt. I made up my mind to this and set to work, not, I must confess, without some repugnance. The land here does not yield much, and if you are not to farm at a loss you must employ serf labor or hired help, which comes to almost the same thing, or work it like a peas- ant—that is, you must work in the fields yourself with your family. There is no middle way. But in those days I did not go into such niceties. I did not leave an inch of earth unturned; I got together all the peasants, men and women, from the neighboring villages; the work hummed. I myself plowed and sowed and reaped, and found it awfully tedious, and frowned with disgust, like a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen garden. My body ached, and I slept on my feet.

"At first it seemed to me that I could easily reconcile this life of toil with civilized living; to achieve that, I thought, all that was necessary was to secure a certain external order. I established myself upstairs here in the best rooms, and had them serve me coffee and liqueurs after lunch and dinner, and every night I read The Mes- senger of Europe in bed. But one day our priest, Father Ivan, came and drank up all my liqueurs at one sitting, and the The Messenger of Europe went to the priest's daughters, because in summer, especially at haymaking time, I couldn't drag myself to bed at all, but fell asleep on a sledge in the shed or somewhere in a shack in the woods, and how could I think of reading? Little by little I moved do^stairs, began to eat in the servants' kitchen, and nothing is left of my former luxury but the people who were in father's service and whom it would be pain- ful to discharge.

"Before I had been here many years I was elected honorary justice of the peace. Now and then I had to go to to^ and take part in the assizes of the peace and the sessions of the circuit court, and this diverted me. When you live here for two or three months without seeing a soul, especially in winter, you begin at last to pine for a black coat. And at the circuit court there were black coats and uniforms and frock coats, too, all worn by lawyers, educated men; there were always people to talk to. After sleeping on the sledge and dining in the kitchen, to sit in an armchair wearing clean linen, in light boots, with the chain of office around one's neck—that was such luxury!

"I would be warmly received in the town. I made friends readily. And of all my friendships the most in- timate and, to tell the truth, the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with Luganovich, the assistant president of the circuit court. You both know him: an extremely charming man. This was just after the cele- brated arson case; the preliminary investigation had lasted two days and we were worn out. Luganovich looked at me and said:

" 'You know what? Come and dine with me.'

"This was unexpected, as I knew Luganovich very slightly, only officially, and I had never been to his house. I went to my hotel room for a minute to change and then went off to dinner. And here came my oppor- tunity to meet Anna Alexeyevna, Luganovich's wife. She was then still a very young woman, not more than twenty-two, and her first baby had been born just six months before. It is all a thing of the past; and now I should find it hard to determine what was so exceptional about her, what it was about her that I liked so much; but at the time, at dinner, it was all perfectly clear to me. I saw a young woman, beautiful, kind, intelligent, fascinating, such a woman as I had never met before; and at once I sensed in her a being near to me and al- ready familiar, as though I had seen that face, those friendly, intelligent eyes long ago, in my childhood, in the album which lay on my mother's chest of drawers.

"In the arson case the defendants were four Jews who were charged with collusion, and in my opinion they were quite innocent. At dinner I was very much agitated and out of sorts, and I don't recall what I said, but Anna Alexeyevna kept shaking her head, and saying to her husband,

" 'Dmitry, how can this be?'

"Luganovich is one of those good-natured, simple- minded people who firmly adhere to the belief that once a man is indicted in court he is guilty, and that one should not express doubt as to the correctness of a ver- dict except with all legal formalities on paper, but never at dinner and in private conversation.

" 'You and I didn't commit arson,' he said gently, 'and you see we are not on trial and not in prison.'

"Both husband and wife tried to make me eat and drink as much as possible. From some details, from the way they made the coffee together, for instance, and the way they understood each other without completing their phrases, I gathered that they lived in peace and harmony, and that they were glad of a guest. After din- ner they played a duet on the piano; then it got dark, and I drove home.

"That was at the beginning of spring. I spent the whole summer at Sofyino without a break, and I had no time even to think of the town, but the memory of the willowy, fair-haired woman remained in my mind all those months; I did not think of her, but it was as though her shadow were lying lightly on my soul.

"In the late autumn a benefit performance was given in the town. I entered the governor's box (I had been invited there in the intermission); and there I saw Anna Alexeyevna sitting beside the governor's wife; and again there was the same irresistible, striking impression of beauty and lovely, caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat side by side, then went out into the foyer.

" 'You've grown thinner,' she said; 'have you been ill?'

" 'Yes, I had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather I sleep badly.'

" 'You look listless. In spring, when you came to din- ner, you seemed younger, livelier. You were animated, and talked a great deal then; you were very interesting, and I must confess I was a little carried away. For some reason I often thought of you during the summer, and this evening when I was getting ready to go to the theater it occurred to me that I might see you.'

"And she laughed.

" 'But you look listless tonight,' she repeated; 'it makes you seem older.'

"The next day I lunched at the Luganoviches'. After lunch they drove out to their summer villa, to make ar- rangements to close it up for the winter, and I went along. I went back to the town with them, and at mid- night we had tea together in quiet domesticity, while the fire glowed, and the young mother kept going to see if her little girl were asleep. And after that, every time I went to the town I never failed to visit the Lu- ganoviches. They grew used to me and I grew used to them. As a rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the family.

" 'Who is there?' would be heard from a faraway room, in the drawling voice that seemed to me so lovely.

" 'It is Pavel Konstantinovich,' the maid or the nurse would answer.

"Anna Alexeyevna would come out to me with an anxious air and would invariably ask, 'Why haven't we seen you for so long? Is anything wrong?'

"Her gaze, the elegant, exquisite hand she gave me, her simple dress, the way she did her hair, her voice, her gait, always produced the same impression on me of something new and extraordinary, and very significant. We would talk together for hours, there would be long silences, while we were each thinking our own thoughts, or she would play to me for hours on the piano. If I found no one in, I stayed and waited, chatted with the nurse, played with the child, or lay on the couch in the study and read a newspaper; and when Anna Alexeye- vna came back I met her in the hall, took all her parcels from her, and for some reason I carried those parcels every time with as much love, as much solemnity, as if I were a boy.

" 'The old woman had it easy,' the proverb runs, 'so she bought a pig.' The Luganoviches had it easy, so they made friends with me. If I was long in coming to the town, I must be ill, or something must have hap- pened to me, and both of them would be very anxious. They were distressed that I, an educated man with a knowledge of languages, instead of devoting myself to scholarship or literary work, should live in the country, rush around like a squirrel in a cage, work hard and yet always be penniless. They imagined that I was un- happy, and that I only talked, laughed, and ate to con- ceal my sufferings, and even at cheerful moments when I was quite at ease I was aware of their searching eyes fixed upon me. They were particularly touching when I was really in trouble, when I was being hard pressed by some creditor and was unable to meet a payment on time. The two of them, husband and wife, would whis- per together at the window; then he would come over to me and say with a grave face:

" 'If you are in need of money at the moment, Pavel Konstantinovich, my wife and I beg you not to stand on ceremony, but borrow from us.'

"And in his agitation his ears would turn red. Or again, after whispering in the same way at the window, he would come up to me, his ears red, and say, 'My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present from us.'

"And he would hand me studs, a cigarette case, or a lamp, and I would send them fowls, butter, and flowers from the farm. Both of them, by the way, were very well off. In the early days I often borrowed money, and was not very choosy about it—borrowed wherever I could—but nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from the Luganoviches. But why mention the matter?

'1 was unhappy. At home, in the fields, in the shed, I kept thinking of her. I tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful, intelligent young woman marrying some- one so uninteresting, almost an old man (her husband was over forty), and having children by him; I tried to fathom the mystery of this dull, kindly, simple-hearted man, who reasoned with such tiresome good sense, who at evening parties and balls kept near the more sub- stantial people, looking listless and superfluous, with a submissive, apathetic expression, as though he had been brought there for sale, who yet believed in his right to be happy, to have children by her; and I kept trying to understand why she had met just him first and not me, and why such a terrible mistake need have happened in our lives.

"And every time I came to the town I saw from her eyes that she had been expecting me, and she would teU me herself that she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that I would come. We would talk a long time, and then we would be silent, yet we did not confess our love to each other, but timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that would reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if we did not have the strength to fight against it. It seemed incredible to me that my gentle, sad love could all at once rudely break up the even course of the life of her husband, her children, and the whole household in which I was so loved and trusted. Would it be honorable? She would follow me, but where? Where could I take her? It would have been different if I had led a beautiful, interesting life—if I had been fighting for the liberation of my country, for instance, or had been a celebrated scholar, an actor, or a painter; but as things were it would mean taking her from one humdrum life to another as humdrum or per- haps more so. And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her if I fell ill, if I died, or if we simply stopped loving each other?

"And she apparently reasoned the same way. She thought of her husband, her children, and of her mother, who loved her son-in-law like a son. If she yielded to her feeling she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been equally in- convenient and terrible. And she was tormented by the question whether her love would bring me happiness— whether she would not complicate my life, which as it was she believed to be hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble. It seemed to her that she was not young enough for me, that she was not industrious or energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often said to her husband that I ought to marry a girl of intelligence and worth who would be a good housewife and a helpmate —and she would add at once that such a girl was not likely to be found in the whole town.

"Meanwhile the years were passing. Anna Alexeyevna already had two children. Whenever I arrived at the Luganoviches' the servants smiled cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinovich had come, and hung on my neck; everyone was happy. They did not understand what was going on within me, and thought that I too was happy. Everyone regarded me as a noble fellow. Both grown-ups and children felt that a noble fellow was walking about the room, and that gave a peculiar charm to their relations with me, as though in my presence their life, too, was purer and more beau» tiful. Anna Alexeyevna and I used to go to the t'ieater together, always on foot. We used to sit side bj side, our shoulders touching; I would take the opera glass from her hands without a word, and feel at that mo- ment that she was close to me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other. But by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theater we always said good-by and parted like stran- gers. Goodness knows what people were saying about

us in the town already, but there was not a word of truth

in it all.

"Latterly Anna Alexeyevna took to going away fre- quently to stay with her mother or her sister; she began to be moody, she was coming to recognize that her life was without satisfaction, was ruined, and at such times she did not care to see her husband or her children. She was already being treated for nervous prostration.

"We continued to say nothing, and in the presence of strangers she displayed an odd irritation with me; no matter what I said she disagreed with me, and if I had an argument she sided with my opponent. If I dropped something, she would say coldly:

" 'I congratulate you.'

"If I forgot to take the opera glass when we were go- ing to the theater she would say afterwards:

" 'I knew you would forget.'

"Luckily or not, there is nothing in our lives that does not come to an end sooner or later. The time came when we had to part, as Luganovich received an appointment in one of the western provinces. They had to sell their furniture, their horses, their summer villa. When we drove out to the villa and afterwards, as we were going away, looked back to see the garden and the green roof for the last time, everyone was sad, and I realized that the time had come to say good-by not only to the villa. It was arranged that at the end of August we should see Anna Alexeyevna off to the Crimea, where the doctors were sending her, and that a little later Luganovich and the children would set off for the western province.

"A great crowd had collected to see Anna Alexeyevna off. When she had said good-by to her husband and children and there was only a minute left before the third bell, I ran into her compartment to place on the rack a basket that she had almost forgotten, and then I had to say good-by. When our eyes met right there in the compartment our spiritual strength deserted us both, I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears—oh, how miserable we were!—I confessed my love to her, and with a burn- ing pain in my heart I realized how needless and petty and deceptive was all that had hindered us from loving each other. I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappi- ness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all.

"I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and we parted forever. The train was already moving. I walked into the next compartment—it was empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Then I walked home to Sofyino. . . ."

While Alyohin was telling his story, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanych went out on the balcony, from which there was a fine view of the garden and the river, which was shining now in the sunshine like a mirror. They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry that this man with the kind, intelligent eyes who had told them his story with such candor should be rushing round and round on this huge estate like a squirrel in a cage instead of devoting him- self to some scholarly pursuit or something else which would have made his life pleasanter; and they thought what a sorrowful face Anna Alexeyevna must have had when he said good-by to her in the compartment and kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them had come across her in the town, and Burkin was acquainted with her and thought she was beautiful.

The Darling

_O

LENKA PLEMYANNIKOVA, the daughter of a retired collegiate assessor, was sitting on her porch, which gave on the courtyard; deep in thought. It was hot, the flies were persistent and annoying, and it was pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering in the east and there was a breath of moisture in the wind that occasionally blew from that direction.

Kukin, a theater manager who ran a summer garden kno^ as The Tivoli and lodged in the wing of the house, was standing in the middle of the courtyard, star- ing at the sky.

"Again!" he was saying in despair. "It's going to rain again! Rain every day, every day, as if to spite mel It will be the death of me! It's ruin! Such a frightful loss every dayl"

He struck his hands together and continued, turning to Olenka:

"There, Olga Semyonovna, that's our life. It's enough to make you weep! You work, you try your utmost, you wear yourself out, you lie awake nights, you rack your brains trying to make a better thing of it, and what's the upshot? In the first place, the public is ignorant, bar- barous. I give them the very best operetta, an elaborate spectacle, first-rate vaudeville artists. But do you think they want that? It's all above their heads. All they want is slapstick! Give them trash! And then look at the weather! Rain almost every evening. It started raining on the tenth of May, and it has kept it up all May and June. It's simply terrible! The public doesn't come, but don't I have to pay the rent? Don't I have to pay the artists?"

The next day toward evening the sky would again be overcast and Kukin would say, laughing hysterically:

"Well, go on, rain! Flood the garden, drown me! Bad luck to me in this world and the next! Let the artists sue me! Let them send me to prison—to Siberia—to the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!"

The next day it was the same thing all over again.

Olenka listened to Kukin silently, gravely, and some- times tears would come to her eyes. In the end his mis- fortunes moved her and she fell in love with him. He was a short, thin man with a sallow face, and wore his hair combed down over his temples. He had a thin tenor voice and when he spoke, his mouth twisted, and his face perpetually wore an expression of despair. Never- theless he aroused a genuine, deep feeling in her. She was always enamored of someone and could not live otherwise. At first it had been her papa, who was now ill and sat in an armchair in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty. Then she had devoted her affections to her aunt, who used to come from Bryansk every other year. Still earlier, when she went to school, she had been in love with her French teacher. She was a quiet, kind, soft-hearted girl, with meek, gentle eyes, and she en- joyed very good health. At the sight of her full pink cheeks, her soft white neck with a dark birthmark on it, and the kind artless smile that came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men said to themselves, "Yes, not half bad," and smiled too, while the ladies present could not refrain from suddenly seiz- ing her hand in the middle of the conversation and ex- claiming delightedly, "You darling!"

The house in which she lived all her life and which was to be hers by her father's will, was situated on the outskirts of the city on what was known as Gypsy Road, not far from The Tivoli. In the evening and at night she could hear the band play and the skyrockets go off, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin fighting his fate and assaulting his chief enemy, the apathetic public. Her heart contracted sweetly, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at dawn, she would tap softly at her bedroom window and, showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, give him a friendly smile.

He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a good look at her neck and her plump firm shoulders, he struck his hands together, and ex- claimed, "Darling!"

He was happy, but as it rained on their wedding day and the night that followed, the expression of despair did not leave his face.

As a married couple, they got on well together. She presided over the box office, looked after things in the summer garden, kept accounts and paid salaries; and her rosy cheeks, the radiance of her sweet artless smile showed now in the box office window, now in the wings of the theater, now at the buffet. And she was already telling her friends that the theater was the most remark- able, the most important, and the most essential thing in the world, and that it was only the theater that could give true pleasure and make you a cultivated and hu- mane person.

"But do you suppose the public understands that?" she would ask. "What it wants is slapstick! Yesterday we gave 'Faust Inside Out,' and almost all the boxes were empty, and if Vanichka and I had put on some- thing vulgar, I assure you the theater would have been packed. Tomorrow Vanichka and I are giving 'Orpheus in Hell.' Do come."

And what Kukin said about artists and the theater she would repeat. Like him she despised the public for its ignorance and indifference to art; she took a hand in the rehearsals, correcting the actors, kept an eye on the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she wept and went to see the editor about it.

The actors were fond of her and called her "the dar- ling," and "Vanichka-and-1." She was sorry for them and would lend them small sums, and if they cheated her, she cried in private but did not complain to her husband.

The pair got on just as well together when winter came. They leased the municipal theater for the season and sublet it for short periods to a Ukrainian troupe, a magician, or a local dramatic club. Olenka was gaining weight and beamed with happiness, but Kukin was getting thinner and more sallow and complained of ter- rible losses, although business was fairly good during the winter. He coughed at night, and she would make him drink an infusion of raspberries and linden blos- soms, rub him with eau de Cologne and wrap him in her soft shawls.

'What a sweet thing you are!" she would say quite sincerely, smoothing his hair. "My handsome sweet!"

At Lent he left for Moscow to engage a company of actors for the summer season, and she could not sleep with him away. She sat at the window and watched the stars. It occurred to her that she had something in com- mon with the hens: they too stayed awake all night and were disturbed when the cock was absent from the hen- house. Kukin was detained in Moscow, and wrote that he would return by Easter, and in his letters he sent in- structions about The Tivoli. But on the Monday of Pas- sion Week, late in the evening, there was a sudden ominous knock at the gate; someone was banging at the wicket as though it were a barrel—boom, boom, boom! The sleepy cook, her bare feet splashing through the puddles, ran to open the gate.

"Open, please!" someone on the other side of the gate was saying in a deep voice. "There's a telegram for you.

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband be- fore, but this time for some reason she was numb with fright. With trembling hands she opened the telegram and read the following:

"Ivan Petrovich died suddenly today awaiting prot instructions tuneral Tuesday."

That is exactly how the telegram had it: "tuneral," and there was also the incomprehensible word "prot"; the signature was that of the director of the comic opera company.

"My precious!" Olenka sobbed. "Vanichka, my pre- cious, my sweet! Why did we ever meet! Why did I get to know you and to love you! To whom can your poor unhappy Olenka turn?"

Kukin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. Olenka returned home on Wed- nesday, and no sooner did she enter her room than she sank onto the bed and sobbed so loudly that she could be heard. in the street and in the neighboring courtyards.

"The darling!" said the neighbors, crossing them- selves. "Darling Olga Semyonovna! How the poor soul takes on!"

Three months later Olenka was returning from Mass one day in deep mourning and very sad. It happened that one of her neighbors, Vasily Andreich Pustovalov, the manager of Babakayev's lumberyard, who was also returning from church, was walking beside her. He was wearing a straw hat and a white waistcoat, with a gold watch-chain, and he looked more like a landowner than a businessman.

"There is order in all things, Olga Semyonovna," he was saying sedately, with a note of sympathy in his voice; "and if one of our dear ones passes on, then it means that this was the will of God, and in that case we must keep ourselves in hand and bear it submissively."

Having seen Olenka to her gate, he took leave of her and went further. All the rest of the day she heard his sedate voice, and as soon as she closed her eyes she had a vision of his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently she too had made an impression on him, because a little later a certain elderly lady, whom she scarcely knew, called to have coffee with her, and no sooner was she seated at table than the visitor began to talk about Pustovalov, saying that he was a fine, sub- stantial man, and that any marriageable woman would be glad to go to the altar with him. Three days later Pustovalov himself paid her a visit. He did not stay more than ten minutes and he said little, but Olenka fell in love with him, so deeply that she stayed awake all night burning as with fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was soon arranged and then came the wedding.

As a married couple Pustovalov and Olenka got on very well together. As a rule he was in the lumberyard till dinnertime, then he went out on business and was replaced by Olenka, who stayed in the office till evening, making out bills and seeing that orders were shipped.

"We pay twenty per cent more for l^rnber every year," she would say to customers and acquaintances. "Why, we used to deal in local timber, and now Vasi- chka has to travel to the province of Mogilev for timber regularly. And the freight rates!" she would exclaim, putting her hands to her cheeks in horror. "The freight rates! "

It seemed to her that she had been in the lumber business for ages, that lumber was the most important, the most essential thing in the world, and she found something intimate and touching in the very sound of such words as beam, log, batten, plank, box board, lath, scantling, slab . . .

At night she would dream of whole mountains of boards and planks, of endless caravans of carts hauling lumber out of town to distant points. She would dream that a regiment of beams, 28 feet by 8 inches, standing on end, was marching in the lumberyard, that beams, logs, and slabs were crashing against each other with the hollow sound of dry wood, that they kept tumbling down and rising again, piling themselves on each other. Olenka would scream in her sleep and Pustovalov would say to her tenderly: "Olenka, what's the matter, darling? Cross yourself!"

Whatever ideas her husband had, she adopted as her own. If he thought that the room was hot or that busi- ness was slow, she thought so too. Her husband did not care for entertainments and on holidays stayed home— so did she.

"You are always at home or in the office," her friends would say. "You ought to go to the theater, darling, or to the circus."

"Vasichka and I have no time for the theater," she would answer sedately. "We are working people, we're not interested in such foolishness. What good are these theaters?"

On Saturdays the two of them would go to evening service, on holidays they attended early Mass, and re- turning from the church they walked side by side, their faces wearing a softened expression. There was an agree- able aroma about them, and her silk dress rustled pleas- antly. At home they had tea with shortbread, and vari- ous kinds of jam, and afterwards they ate pie. Every day at noon, in the yard and on the street just outside the gate, there was a delicious smell of borshch and roast lamb or duck, and on fast days there was the odor of fish, and one could not pass the Pustovalov gate with- out one's mouth watering.

In the office the samovar was always boiling and the customers were treated to tea with doughnuts. Once a week the pair went to the baths and returned side by side, both with red faces.

"Yes, everything goes well with us, thank God," Olenka would say to her friends. "I wish everyone were as happy as Vasichka and I."

When Pustovalov went off to the provinces of Mogilev for timber, she missed him badly and lay awake nights, crying. Sometimes, in the evening, a young army vet- erinary, by the name of Smirnin, who rented the wing of their house, would call on her. He chatted or played cards with her and that diverted her. What interested her most was what he told her about his domestic life. He had been married and had a son, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her; he sent her forty rubles a month for the maintenance of the child. And listening to him, Olenka would sigh and shake her head: she was sorry for him.

"Well, God keep you," she would say to him as she took leave of him, going to the stairs with him, candle in hand. "Thank you for relieving my boredom, and may the Queen of Heaven give you healthl"

She always expressed herself in this sedate and rea- sonable manner, in imitation of her husband. Just as the veterinary would be closing the door behind ^m, she would recall him and say:

"You know, Vladimir Platonych, you had better make up with your wife. You ought to forgive her, at least for your son's sake! I am sure the little boy understands everything."

And when Pustovalov came back, she would tell him in low tones about the veterinary and his unhappy do- mestic life, and both of them would sigh and shake their heads and speak of the boy, who was probably missing his father. Then by a strange association of ideas they would both turn to the icons, bow down to the ground before them and pray that the Lord would grant them children.

Thus the Pustovalovs lived in peace and quiet, in love and harmony for six years. But one winter day, right after having hot tea at the office, Vasily Andreich went out without his cap to see about shipping some lumber, caught a chill and was taken sick. He was treated by the best doctors, but the illness had its o^ way with ^m, and he died after four months. Olenka was a widow again.

"To whom can I turn now, my darling?" she sobbed when she had buried her husband. "How can I live without you, wretched and unhappy as I a!li? Pity me, good people, left all alone in the world—"

She wore a black dress with white cuffs and gave up wearing hat and gloves for good. She hardly ever left the house except to go to church or to visit her hus- band's grave, and at home she lived like a nun. Only at the end of six months did she take off her widow's weeds and open the shutters. Sometimes in the morn- ing she was seen with her cook going to market for pro- visions, but how she lived now and what went on in her house could only be guessed. People based their guesses on such facts as that they saw her having tea with the veterinary in her little garden, he reading the newspaper aloud to her, and that, meeting an acquaint- ance at the post office, she would say:

''There is no proper veterinary inspection in our to^, and that's why there is so much illness around. So often you hear of people getting ill from the milk or catching infections from horses and cows. When you come down to it, the health of domestic animals must be as well cared for as the health of human beings."

She now repeated the veterinary's words and held the same opinions about everything that he did. It was plain that she could not live even for one year without an attachment and that she had found new happiness in the wing of her house. Another woman would have been condemned for this, but of Olenka no one could think ill: everything about her was so unequivocal. Nei- ther she nor the veterinary mentioned to anyone the change that had occurred in their relations; indeed, they tried to conceal it, but they didn't succeed, be- cause Olenka could not keep a secret. When he had visitors, his regimental colleagues, she, pouring the tea or serving the supper, would begin to talk of the cattle plague, of the pearl disease, of the municipal slaughter- houses. He would be terribly embarrassed and when the guests had gone, he would grasp her by the arms and hiss angrily:

''I've asked you before not to talk about things that you don't understand! When veterinaries speak among themselves, please don't butt in! It's really annoying!"

She would look at him amazed and alarmed and ask, "But Volodichka, what shall I talk about?"

And with tears in :her eyes she would hug him and beg him not to be angry, and both of them were happy. Yet this happiness did not last long. The veterinary

left, left forever, with his regiment, which was moved to some remote place, it may have been Siberia. And Olenka remained alone.

Now she was quite alone. Her father had died long ago, and his armchair stood in the attic, covered with dust and minus one leg. She got thinner and lost her looks, and passers-by in the street did not glance at her and smile as they used to. Obviously, her best years were over, were behind her, and now a new kind of life was beginning for her, an unfamiliar kind that did not bear thinking of. In the evening Olenka sat on her porch, and heard the band play at The Tivoli and the rockets go off, but this no longer suggested anything to her mind. She looked apathetically at the empty court- yard, thought of nothing, and later, when night came, she would go to bed and dream of the empty court- yard. She ate and drank as though involuntarily.

Above all, and worst of all, she no longer had any opinions whatever. She saw objects about her and un- derstood what was going on, but she could not form an opinion about anything and did not know what to talk about. And how terrible it is not to have any opinions! You see, for instance, a bottle, or the rain, or a peasant driving in a cart, but what is the bottle for, or the rain, or the peasant, what is the meaning of them, you can't tell, and you couldn't, even if they paid you a thousand rubles. When Kukin was about, or Pustovalov or, later, the veterinary, Olenka could explain it all and give her opinions about anything you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her head and in her heart as in her courtyard. It was weird, and she felt as bitter as if she had been eating wormwood.

Little by little the town was extending in all direc- tions. Gypsy Road was now a regular street, and where

The Tivoli had been and the lumberyards, houses had sprung up and lanes had multiplied. How swiftly time passes! Olcnka's house had taken on a shabby look, the roof was rusty, the shed sloped, and the whole yard was invaded by burdock and stinging nettles. Olenka herself had aged and grown homely. In the summer she sat on the porch, feeling empty and dreary and bitter, as before; in the winter she sat by the window and stared at the snow. Sometimes at the first breath of spring or when the wind brought her the chime of church bells, memories of the past would overwhelm her, her heart would contract sweetly and her eyes would brim over with tears. But this only lasted a mo- ment, and then there was again emptiness and once more she was possessed by a sense of the futility of life; Trot, the black kitten, rubbed against her and purred softly, but Olenka was not affected by these feline ca- resses. Is that what she needed? She needed an affection that would take possession of her whole being, her soul, her mind, that would give her ideas, a purpose in life, that would warm her aging blood. And she would shake the kitten off her lap, and say irritably: "Scat! Scat! Don't stick to me!"

And so it went, day after day, year after year, and no joy, no opinion! Whatever Mavra the cook would say, was well enough.

One hot July day, toward evening, when the cattle were being driven home and the yard was filled with clouds of dust, suddenly someone knocked at the gate. Olenka herself went to open it and was dumfounded at what she saw: at the gate stood Smirnin, the veteri- nary, already gray, and wearing civilian clothes. She suddenly recalled everything and, unable to control her- self, burst into tears, silently letting her head drop on his breast. She was so agitated that she scarcely noticed how the two of them entered the house and sat do^ to tea.

"My dear," she m^mured, trembling with joy, "Vla- dimir Platonych, however did you get here?"

"I have come here for good," he explained. "I have retired from the army and want to see what it's like to be on my own and live a settled life. And besides, my son is ready for high school. I have made up with my wife, you know."

"Where is she?..

"She's at the hotel with the boy, and I'm out looking for lodgings."

"Goodness, Vladimir Platonych, take my house! You don't need to look further! Good Lord, and you can have it free," exclaimed Olenka, all in a flutter and be- ginning to cry again. "You live here in the house, and the wing will do for me. Heavens, I'm so glad!"

The next day they began painting the roof and white- washing the walls, and Olenka, her arms akimbo, walked about the yard, giving orders. The old smile had come back to her face, and she was lively and spry, as though she had waked from a long sleep. Presently the veteri- nary's wife arrived, a thin, homely lady with bobbed hair who looked as if she were given to caprices. With her was the little boy, Sasha, small for his age (he was going on ten), chubby, with clear blue eyes and dim- ples in his cheeks.

No sooner did he walk into the yard than he began chasing the cat, and immediately his eager, joyous laughter rang out.

"Auntie, is that your cat?" he asked Olenka. 'When she has little ones, please give us a kitten. Mama is terribly afraid of mice."

Olenka chatted with him, then gave him tea, and her heart suddenly grew warm and contracted sweetly, as if this little boy were her own son. And in the evening, as he sat in the dining-room doing his homework, she looked at him with pity and tenderness and whispered:

"My darling, my pretty one, my little one! How blond you are, and so clever!"

"An island," he was reciting from the book, "is a body of land entirely surrounded by water."

"An island is a body of land . • ." she repeated and this was the first opinion she expressed with conviction after so many years of silence and mental vacuity.

She now had opinions of her own, and at supper she had a conversation with Sasha's parents, saying that studying in high school was hard on the children, but that nevertheless the classical course was better than the scientific one because a classical education opened all careers to you: you could be either a doctor or an engineer.

Sasha started going to high school. His mother went off to Kharkov to visit her sister and did not come back; every day his father left town to inspect herds and sometimes he stayed away for three days together, and it seemed to Olenka that Sasha was wholly abandoned, that he was unwanted, that he was being starved, and she moved him into the wing with her and settled him in a little room there.

For six months now Sasha has been living in her wing. Every morning Olenka comes into his room; he is fast asleep, his hand under his cheek, breathing quietly. She is sorry to wake him.

"Sashenka," she says sadly, "get up, my sweet! It's time to go to school."

He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, and sits down to his breakfast: he drinks three glasses of tea and eats two large doughnuts, and half a buttered French roll. He is hardly awake and consequently cross.

"You haven't learned the fable, Sashenka," says Olenka, looking at him as though she were seeing him off on a long journey. "You worry me. You must do your best, darling, study. And pay attention to your teachers."

"Please leave me alone!" says Sasha.

Then he walks do^ the street to school, a small boy in a big cap, with his books in a rucksack. Olenka fol- lows him noiselessly.

"Sashenka!" she calls after him. He turns around and she thrusts a date or a caramel into his hand. When they turn into the school lane, he feels ashamed at being fol- lowed by a tall stout woman; he looks round and says: "You'd better go home, auntie; I can go alone now."

She stands still and stares after him until he dis- appears at the school entrance. How she loves him! Not one of her former attachments was so deep; never had her soul surrendered itself so unreservedly, so disin- terestedly and with such joy as now when her maternal instinct was increasingly asserting itself. For this little boy who was not her own, for the dimples in his cheeks, for his very cap, she would have laid down her life, would have laid it down with joy, with tears of tender- ness. Why? But who knows why?

Having seen Sasha off to school, she goes quietly home, contented, tranquil, brimming over with love; her face, gro^ younger in the last six months, beams with happiness; people meeting her look at her with pleasure and say:

"Good morning, Olga Semyonovna, darling! How are you, darling?"

"They make the children work so hard at high school nowadays," she says, as she does her marketing. "Think of it: yesterday in the first form they had a fable to learn by heart, a Latin translation and a problem for homework. That's entirely too much for a little fellow."

And she talks about the teachers, the lessons, the textbooks—saying just what Sasha says about them.

At three o'clock they have dinner together, in the evening they do the homework together, and cry. When she puts him to bed, she takes a long time making the sign of the cross over him and whispering prayers. Then she goes to bed and thinks of the future, distant and misty, when Sasha, having finished his studies, will become a doctor or an engineer, will have a large house of his own, horses, a carriage, will marry and become a father. She falls asleep and her dreams are of the same thing, and tears flow do^ her cheeks from her closed eyes. The black kitten lies beside her purring: Purr- purrr-purrr.

Suddenly there is a loud knock at the gate. Olenka wakes up, breathless with fear, her heart palpitating. Half a minute passes, and there is another knock.

"That's a telegram from Kharkov," she thinks, begin- ning to tremble from head to foot. "Sasha's mother is sending for him from Kharkov— O Lordl"

She is in despair. Her head, her hands, her feet grow chill and it seems to her that she is the most unhappy woman in the whole world. But another minute passes, voices are heard: it's the veterinary returning from the club.

"Well, thank God!" she thinks.

Little by little the load rolls off her heart and she is again at ease; she goes back to bed and thinks of Sasha who is fast asleep in the next room and sometimes shouts in his sleep:

'Tll give it to youl Scram! No fighting!"

The Lady With the Pet Dog

NEW person, it was said, had appeared on the

esplanade: a lady with a pet dog. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, who had spent a fortnight at Yalta and had got used to the place, had also begun to take an interest in new arrivals. As he sat in Vernet's confectionery shop, he saw, walking on the esplanade, a fair-haired young woman of medium height, wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian was trotting behind her.

And afterwards he met her in the public garden and in the square several times a day. She walked alone, always wearing the same beret and always with the white dog; no one knew who she was and everyone called her simply "the lady with the pet dog."

"If she is here alone without husband or friends," Gurov reflected, "it wouldn't be a bad thing to make her acquaintance."

He was under forty, but he already had a daughter twelve years old, and two sons at school. They had found a wife for him when he was very young, a stu- dent in his second year, and by now she seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, stately and dignified and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used sim- plified spelling in her letters, called her husband, not Dmitry, but Dimitry, while he privately considered her of limited intelligence, narrow-minded, dowdy, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been un- faithful to her often and, probably for that reason, ahnost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked of in his presence used to call them "the inferior race."

It seemed to him that he had been sufficiently tutored by bitter experience to call them what he pleased, and yet he could not have lived without "the inferior race" for two days together. In the company of men he was bored and ill at ease, he was chilly and uncommunica- tive with them; but when he was among women he felt free, and knew what to speak to them about and how to comport himself; and even to be silent with them was no strain on him. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole make-up there was something attractive and elusive that disposed women in his favor and allured them. He knew that, and some force seemed to draw him to them, too.

Oft-repeated and really bitter experience had taught him long ago that with decent people—particularly Moscow people—who are irresolute and slow to move, every affair which at first seems a light and charming adventure inevitably grows into a whole problem of extreme complexity, and in the end a painful situation is created. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman this lesson of experience seemed to slip from his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed so simple and diverting.

One evening while he was dining in the public gar- den the lady in the beret walked up without haste to take the next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, and the way she did her hair told him that she belonged to the upper class, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was bored there. The stories told of the immorality in Yalta are to a great extent untrue; he despised them, and knew that such stories were made up for the most part by persons who would have been glad to sin themselves if they had had the chance; but when the lady sat downwn at the next table three paces from him, he recalled these stories of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting liaison, a ro- mance with an unknown woman of whose very name he was ignorant suddenly took hold of him.

He beckoned invitingly to the Pomeranian, and when the dog approached him, shook his finger at it. The Pomeranian growled; Gurov threatened it again.

The lady glanced at him and at once dropped her eyes.

"He doesn't bite," she said and blushed.

"May I give him a bone?" he asked; and when she nodded he inquired affably, "Have you been in Yalta long?"

"About five days."

"And I am dragging out the second week here."

There was a short silence.

"Time passes quickly, and yet it is so dull herel" she said, not looking at him.

"It's only the fashion to say it's dull here. A pro- ^ticial wiU live in Belyov or Zhizdra and not be bored, but when he comes here it's 'Oh, the dullness! Oh, the dust!' One would think he came from Granada."

She laughed. Then both continued eating in silence, like strangers, but after dinner they walked together and there sprang up between them the light banter of people who are free and contented, to whom it does not matter where they go or what they talk about. They walked and talked of the strange light on the sea: the water was a soft, warm, lilac color, and there was a golden band of moonlight upon it. They talked of how sultry it was after a hot day. Gurov told her that he was a native of Moscow, that he had studied languages and literature at the university, but had a post in a bank; that at one time he had trained to become an opera singer but had given it up, that he owned two houses in Moscow. And he learned from her that she had

gro^ up in Petersburg, but had lived in S since

her marriage two years previously, that she was going to stay in Yalta for about another month, and that her husband, who needed a rest, too, might perhaps come to fetch her. She was not certain whether her husband was a member of a Government Board or served on a Zemstvo Council, and this amused her. And Gurov learned too that her name was Anna Sergeyevna.

Afterwards in his room at the hotel he thought about her—and was certain that he would meet her the next day. It was bound to happen. Getting into bed he re- called that she had been a schoolgirl only recently, do- ing lessons like his o^ daughter; he thought how much timidity and angularity there was still in her laugh and her manner of talking with a stranger. It must have been the first time in her life that she was alone in a setting in which she was followed, looked at, and spoken to for one secret purpose alone, which she could hardly fail to guess. He thought of her slim, delicate throat, her lovely gray eyes.

"There's something pathetic about her, though," he thought, and dropped off.

II

A week had passed since they had struck up an ac- quaintance. It was a holiday. It was close indoors, while in the street the wind whirled the dust about and blew people's hats off. One was thirsty aU day, and Gurov often went into the restaurant and offered Anna Serge- yevna a soft drink or ice cream. One did not know what to do with oneself.

In the evening when the wind had abated they went out on the pier to watch the steamer come in. There were a great many people walking about the dock; they had come to welcome someone and they were carrying bunches of flowers. And two peculiarities of a festive Yalta crowd stood out: the elderly ladies were dressed like young ones and there were many generals.

Owing to the choppy sea, the steamer arrived late, after sunset, and it was a long time tacking about be- fore it put in at the pier. Anna Sergeyevna peered at the steamer and the passengers through her lorgnette as though looking for acquaintances, and whenever she turned to Gurov her eyes were shining. She talked a great deal and asked questions jerkily, forgetting the next moment what she had asked; then she lost her lorgnette in the crush.

The festive crowd began to disperse; it was now too dark to see people's faces; there was no wind any more, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna still stood as though waiting to see someone else come off the steamer. Anna Sergeyevna was silent now, and sniffed her flowers with- out looking at Gurov.

"The weather has improved this evening," he said. 'Where shall we go now? Shall we drive somewhere?"

She did not reply.

Then he looked at her intently, and suddenly em- braced her and kissed her on the lips, and the moist fragrance of her flowers enveloped him; and at once he looked round him anxiously, wondering if anyone had seen them.

"Let us go to your place," he said softly. And they walked off together rapidly.

The air in her room was close and there was the smell of the perfume she had bought at the Japanese shop. Looking at her, Gurov thought: "What encounters life offers!" From the past he preserved the memory of carefree, good-natured women whom love made gay and who were grateful to him for the happiness he gave them, however brief it might be; and of women like his wife who loved without sincerity, with too many words, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression that it was not love or passion that engaged them but something more significant; and of two or three others, very beau- tiful, frigid women, across whose faces would suddenly flit a rapacious expression—an obstinate desire to take from life more than it could give, and these were women no longer young, capricious, unreflecting, domineering, unintelligent, and when Gurov grew cold to them their beauty aroused his hatred, and the lace on their linge\-ie seemed to him to resemble scales.

But here there was the timidity, the angularity of inexperienced youth, a feeling of awkwardness; and there was a sense of embarrassment, as though some- one had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Serge- yevna, "the lady with the pet dog," treated what had happened in a peculiar way, very seriously, as though it were her fall—so it seemed, and this was odd and inappropriate. Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly on either side of her face; she grew pensive and her dejected pose was that of a Magdalene in a picture by an old master.

"It's not right," she said. "You don't respect me now, you first of all."

There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut him- seU a slice and began eating it without haste. They were silent for at least haU an hour.

There was something touching about Anna Serge- yevna; she had the purity of a well-bred, naive woman who has seen little of life. The single candle burning on the table barely illumined her face, yet it was clear that she was unhappy.

"Why should I stop respecting you, darling?" asked Gurov. 'You don't know what you're saying."

"God forgive me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "It's terrible."

"It's as though you were trying to exonerate your- self."

"How can I exonerate myself? No. I am a bad, low woman; I despise myself and I have no thought of ex- onerating myself. It's not my husband but myself I have deceived. And not only just now; I have been de- ceiving myself for a long time. My husband may be a good, honest man, but he is a flunkey! I don't know what he does, what his work is, but I know he is a flunkey! I was twenty when I married him. I was tor- mented by curiosity; I wanted something better. 'There must be a different sort of life,' I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live! Curiosity kept eating at me—you don't understand it, but I swear to God I could no longer control myself; something was going on in me: I could not be held back. I told my husband I was ill, and came here. And here I have been walking about as though in a daze, as though I were mad; and now I have become a vulgar, vile woman whom anyone may despise."

Gurov was already bored with her; he was irritated by her naive tone, by her repentance, so unexpected and so out of place; but for the tears in her eyes he might have thought she was joking or play-acting.

"'I don't understand, my dear," he said softly. "What do you want?"

the lady with the pet dog 419

She hid her face on his breast and pressed close to

"Believe me. believe me, I beg you," she said, "I love honesty and purity, and sin is loathsome to me; I don't know what I'm doing. Simple people say, 'The Evil One has led me astray.' And I may say of myself now that the Evil One has led me astray."

"Quiet, quiet," he murmured.

He looked into her fixed, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke to her softly and affectionately, and by degrees she calmed down, and her gaiety returned; both began laughing.

Afterwards when they went out there was not a soul on the esplanade. The town with its cypresses looked quite dead, but the sea was still sounding as it broke upon the beach; a single launch was rocking on the waves and on it a lantern was blinking sleepily.

They found a cab and drove to Oreanda.

"I found out your surname in the hall just now: it was written on the board—von Dideritz," said Gurov. "Is your husband German?"

"No; I believe his grandfather waS German, but he is Greek Orthodox himself."

At Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked do^ at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds rested motionlessly on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Ore- anda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing ad- vance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement to- wards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spell- bound by these magical surroundings—the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky—thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do our- selves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.

A man strolled up to them—probably a guard— looked at them and walked away. And this detail, too, seemed so mysterious and beautiful. They saw a steamer arrive from Feodosia, its lights extinguished in the glow of da^.

"There is dew on the grass," said Anna Sergeyevna, after a silence.

"Yes, it's time to go home."

They returned to the city.

Then they met every day at twelve o'clock on the esplanade, lunched and dined together, took walks, ad- mired the sea. She complained that she slept badly, that she had palpitations, asked the same questions, troubled now by jealousy and now by the fear that he did not respect her sufficiently. And often in the square or the public garden, when there was no one near them, he suddenly drew her to him and kissed her passion- ately. Complete idleness, these kisses in broad daylight exchanged furtively in dread of someone's seeing them, the heat, the smell of the sea, and the continual flitting before his eyes of idle, well-dressed, well-fed people, worked a complete change in him; he kept telling Anna Sergeyevna how beautiful she was, how seductive, was urgently passionate; he would not move a step away from her, while she was often pensive and continually pressed him to confess that he did not respect her, did not love her in the least, and saw in her nothing but a common woman. Almost every evening rather late they drove somewhere out of town, to Oreanda or to the waterfall; and the excursion was always a success, the scenery invariably impressed them as beautiful and magnificent.

They were expecting her husband, but a letter came from him saying that he had eye-trouble, and begging his wife to return home as soon as possible. Anna Ser- geyevna made haste to go.

"It's a good thing I am leaving," she said to Gurov. "It's the hand of Fate!"

She took a carriage to the railway station, and he went with her. They were driving the whole day. When she had taken her place in the express, and when the second bell had rung, she said, "Let me look at you once more—let me look at you again. Like this."

She was not crying but was so sad that she seemed ill, and her face was quivering.

"I shall be thinking of you—remembering you," she said. "God bless you; be happy. Don't remember evil against me. We are parting forever—it has to be, for we ought never to have met. Well, God bless you."

The train moved off rapidly, its lights soon vanished, and a minute later there was no sound of it, as though everything had conspired to end as quickly as possible that sweet trance, that madness. Left alone on the plat- form, and gazing into the dark distance, Gurov listened to the twang of the grasshoppers and the hum of the telegraph wires, feeling as though he had just waked up. And he reflected, musing, that there had now been another episode or adventure in his life, and it, too, was at an end, and nothing was left of it but a memory. He was moved, sad, and slightly remorseful: this young woman whom he would never meet again had not been happy with him; he had been warm and affectionate with her, but yet in his manner, his tone, and his ca- resses there had been a shade of light irony, the slightly coarse arrogance of a happy male who was, besides, ahnost twice her age. She had constantly called him kind, exceptional, high-minded; obviously he had seemed to her different from what he really was, so he had involuntarily deceived her.

Here at the station there was already a scent of au- tumn in the air; it was a chilly evening.

"It is time for me to go north, too," thought Gurov as he left the platform. "High time!"

III

At home in Moscow the winter routine was already established: the stoves were heated, and in the morning it was still dark when the children were having break- fast and getting ready for school, and the nurse would light the lamp for a short time. There were frosts al- ready. When the first snow falls, on the first day the sleighs are out, it is pleasant to see the white earth, the white roofs; one draws easy, delicious breaths, and the season brings back the days of one's youth. The old limes and birches, white with hoar-frost, have a good- natured look; they are closer to one's heart than cy- presses and palms, and near them one no longer wants to think of mountains and the sea.

Gurov, a native of Moscow, arrived there on a fine frosty day, and when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves and took a walk along Petrovka, and when on Saturday night he heard the bells ringing, his recent trip and the places he had visited lost all charm for him. Little by little he became immersed in Moscow life, greedily read three newspapers a day, and de- clared that he did not read the Moscow papers on principle. He already felt a longing for restaurants, clubs, formal dinners, anniversary celebrations, and it flattered him to entertain distinguished lawyers and ac- tors, and to play cards with a professor at the physicians' club. He could eat a whole portion of meat stewed with pickled cabbage and served in a pan, Moscow style.

A month or so would pass and the image of Anna Sergeyevna, it seemed to him, would become misty in his memory, and only from time to time he would dream of her with her touching smile as he dreamed of others. But more than a month went by, winter came into its own, and everything was still clear in his mem- ory as though he had parted from Anna Sergeyevna only yesterday. And his memories glowed more and more vividly. When in the evening stillness the voices of his children preparing their lessons reached his study, or when he listened to a song or to an organ playing in a restaurant, or when the storm howled in the chimney, suddenly everything would rise up in his memory: what had happened on the pier and the early morning with the mist on the mountains, and the steamer coming from Feodosia, and the kisses. He would pace about his room a long time, remembering and smiling; then his memories passed into reveries, and in his imagina- tion the past would mingle with what was to come. He did not dream of Anna Sergeyevna, but she followed him about everywhere and watched him. When he shut his eyes he saw her before him as though she were there in the flesh, and she seemed to him lovelier, younger, tenderer than she had been, and he imagined himself a finer man than he had been in Yalta. Of evenings she peered out at him from the bookcase, from the fireplace, from the corner—he heard her breathing, the caressing rustle of her clothes. In the street he followed the women with his eyes, looking for someone who re- sembled her.

Already he was tormented by a strong desire to share his memories with someone. But in his home it was im- possible to talk of his love, and he had no one to talk to outside; certainly he could not confide in his tenants or in anyone at the bank. And what was there to talk about? He hadn't loved her then, had he? Had there been anything beautiful, poetical, edifying, or simply in- teresting in his relations with Anna Sergeyevna? And he was forced to talk vaguely of love, of women, and no one guessed what he meant; only his wife would twitch her black eyebrows and say, "The part of a philanderer does not suit you at all, Dimitry."

One evening, coming out of the physicians' club with an official with whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:

"If you only knew what a fascinating woman I be- came acquainted with at Yalta!"

The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:

"Dmitry Dmitrich!"

"What is it?"

"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit high."

These words, so commonplace, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what mugs! What stu- pid nights, what dull, humdrum days! Frenzied gam- bling, gluttony, drunkenness, continual talk always about the same things! Futile pursuits and conversations al- ways about the same topics take up the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life clipped and wingless, an absurd mess, and there is no escaping or getting away from it— just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

Gurov, boiling with indignation, did not sleep aU night. And he had a headache all the next day. And the following nights too he slept badly; he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was fed up with his children, fed up with the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.

In December during the holidays he prepared to take a trip and told his wife he was going to Petersburg to do what he could for a young friend—and he set off for

S What for? He did not know, himself. He wanted

to see Anna Sergeyevna and talk with her, to arrange a rendezvous if possible.

He arrived at S in the morning, and at the hotel

took the best room, in which the floor was covered with gray army cloth, and on the table there was an inkstand, gray with dust and topped by a figure on horseback, its hat in its raised hand and its head broken off. The porter gave him the necessary information: von Dideritz lived in a house of his own on Staro-Goncharnaya Street, not far from the hotel: he was rich and lived well and kept his o^ horses; everyone in the town knew him. The porter pronounced the name: "Dridiritz."

Without haste Gurov made his way to Staro-Gon- charnaya Street and found the house. Directly opposite the house stretched a long gray fence studded with nalls.

"A fence like that would make one run away," thought Gurov, looking now at the fence, now at the windows of the house.

He reflected: this was a holiday, and the husband was apt to be at home. And in any case, it would be tactless to go into the house and disturb her. If he were to send her a note, it might fall into her husband's hc.nds, and that might spoil everything. The best thing was to rely on chance. And he kept walking up and down the street and along the fence, waiting for the chance. He saw a beggar go in at the gate and heard the dogs attack him; then an hour later he heard a piano, and the sound came to him faintly and indistinctly. Probably it was Anna Sergeyevna playing. The front door opened suddenly, and an old woman came out, followed by the familiar white Pomeranian. Gurov was on the point of calling to the dog, but his heart began beating violently, and in his excitement he could not remember the Pom- eranian's name.

He kept walking up and down, and hated the gray fence more and more, and by now he thought irritably that Anna Sergeyevna had forgotten him, and was per- haps already diverting herself with another man, and that that was very natural in a young woman who from morning till night had to look at that damn fence. He went back to his hotel room and sat on the couch for a long while, not knowing what to do, then he had dinner and a long nap.

"How stupid and annoying all this is!" he thought when he woke and looked at the dark windows: it was already evening. "Here I've had a good sleep for some reason. What am I going to do at night?"

He sat on the bed, which was covered with a cheap gray blanket of the kind seen in hospitals, and he twitted himself in his vexation:

"So there's your lady with the pet dog. There's your adventure. A nice place to cool your heels in."

That morning at the station a playbill in large letters had caught his eye. The Geisha was to be given for the first time. He thought of this and drove to the theater.

"It's quite possible that she goes to first nights," he thought.

The theater was full. As in all provincial theaters, there was a haze above the chandelier, the gallery was noisy and restless; in the front row, before the begin- ning of the performance the local dandies were standing with their hands clasped behind their backs; in the Governor's box the Governor's daughter, wearing a boa, occupied the front seat, while the Governor himself hid modestly behind the portiere and only his hands were visible; the curtain swayed; the orchestra was a long time tuning up. While the audience were corr.ing in and taking their seats, Gurov scanned the faces eagerly.

Anna Sergeyevna, too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart con- tracted, and he understood clearly that in the whole world there was no human being so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little, undistinguished woman, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lor- gnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the only happiness that he now de- sired for himself, and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, of the miserable local violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.

A young man with small side-whiskers, very tall and stooped, came in with Anna Sergeyevna and sat do^ beside her; he nodded his head at every step and seemed to be bowing continually. Probably this was the husband whom at Yalta, in an access of bitter feeling, she had called a flunkey. And there really was in his lanky figure, his side-whiskers, his small bald patch, something of a flunkey's retiring manner; his smile was mawkish, and in his buttonhole there was an academic badge like a waiter's number.

During the first inte^rission the husband went out to have a smoke; she remained in her seat. Gurov, who was also sitting in the orchestra, went up to her and said in a shaky voice, with a forced smile:

"Good evening!"

She glanced at him and turned pale, then looked at him again in horror, unable to believe her eyes, and gripped the fan and the lorgnette tightly together in her hands, evidently trying to keep herself from faint- ing. Both were silent. She was sitting, he was standing, frightened by her distress and not daring to take a seat beside her. The violins and the flute that were being tuned up sang out. He suddenly felt frightened: it seemed as if all the people in the boxes were looking at them. She got up and went hurriedly to the exit; he followed her, and both of them walked blindly along the corridors and up and down stairs, and figures in the uniforms prescribed for magistrates, teachers, and officials of the Department of Crown Lands, all wear- ing badges, flitted before their eyes, as did also ladies, and fur coats on hangers; they were conscious of drafts and the smell of stale tobacco. And Gurov, whose heart was beating violently, thought:

"Oh, Lord! Why are these people here and this or- chestra!"

And at that instant he suddenly recalled how when he had seen Anna Sergeyevna off at the station he had said to himself that all was over between them and that they would never meet again. But how distant the end still was!

On the narrow, gloomy staircase over which it said "To the Amphitheatre," she stopped.

"How you frightened me!" she said, breathing hard, still pale and stunned. "Oh, how you frightened mel I am barely alive. Why did you come? Why?"

"But do understand, Anna, do understand—" he said hurriedly, under his breath. "I implore you, do under- stand—"

She looked at him with fear, with entreaty, with love; she looked at him intently, to keep his features more distinctly in her memory.

"I suffer so," she went on, not listening to him. "All this time I have been thinking of nothing but you; I live only by the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget; but why, oh, why have you come?"

On the landing above them two high school boys were looking down and smoking, but it was all the same to Gurov; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to him and began kissing her face and her hands.

''What are you doing, what are you doing!" she was saying in horror, pushing him away. "We have lost our senses. Go away today; go away at once— I conjure you by all that is sacred, I implore you— People are coming this way!"

Someone was walking up the stairs.

"You must leave," Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. "Do you hear, Dmitry Dmitrich? I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am unhappy now, and I never, never shall be happy, neverl So don't make me suffer still more! I swear I'll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My dear, good, precious one, let us partl"

She pressed his hand and walked rapidly downstairs, turning to look round at him, and from her eyes he could see that she really was unhappy. Gurov stood for a while, listening, then when all grew quiet, he found his coat and left the theater.

IV

And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once every two or three months she left

S , telling her husband that she was going to con-

sult a doctor about a woman's ailment from which she was suffering—and her husband did and did not be- lieve her. When she arrived in Moscow she would stop at the Slavyansky Bazar Hotel, and at once send a man in a red cap to Gurov. Gurov came to see her, and no one in Moscow knew of it.

Once he was going to see her in this way on a winter morning (the messenger had come the evening before and not found him in). With him walked his daughter, whom he wanted to take to school: it was on the way. Snow was coming down in big wet flakes.

"It's three degrees above zero, and yet it's snowing," Gurov was saying to his daughter. "But this temperature prevails only on the surface of the earth; in the upper layers of the atmosphere there is quite a different tem- perature."

"And why doesn't it thunder in winter, papa?"

He explained that, too. He talked, thinking all the while that he was on his way to a rendezvous, and no living soul knew of it, and probably no one would ever know. He had two lives: an open one, seen and known by all who needed to know it, full of conventional truth and conventional falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life that went on in secret. And through some strange, perhaps acci- dental, combination of circumstances, everything that was of interest and importance to him, everything that was essential to him, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself, everything that constituted the core of his life, was going on concealed from others; while all that was false, the shell in which he hid to cover the truth—his work at the bank, for instance, his discussions at the club, his references to the "inferior race," his appearances at anniversary cele- brations with his wife—all that went on in the open. Judging others by himself, he did not believe what he saw, and always fancied that every man led his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy as under cover of night. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Having taken his daughter to school, Gurov went on to the Slavyansky Bazar Hotel. He took off his fur coat in the lobby, went upstairs, and knocked gently at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, wearing his favorite gray dress, exhausted by the journey and by waiting, had been ex- pecting him since the previous evening. She was pale, and looked at him without a smile, and he had hardly entered when she flung herself on his breast. Their kiss was a long, lingering one, as though they had not seen one another for two years.

"Well, darling, how are you getting on there?" he. asked. "What news?"

"Wait; I'll tell you in a moment— I can't speak."

She could not speak; she was crying. She turned away from him, and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

"Let her have her cry; meanwhile I'll sit do^," he thought, and he seated himself in an armchair.

Then he rang and ordered tea, and while he was having his tea she remained standing at the window with her back to him. She was crying out of sheer agita- tion, in the sorrowful consciousness that their life was so sad; that they could only see each other in secret and had to hide from people like thieves! Was it not a broken life?

"Come, stop now, dear!" he said.

It was plain to him that this love of theirs would not be over soon, that the end of it was not in sight. Anna Sergeyevna was growing more and more attached to him. She adored him, and it was unthinkable to tell her that their love was bound to come to an end some day; besides, she would not have believed itl

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders, to fondle her and say something diverting, and at that moment he caught sight of himself in the mirror.

His hair was already beginning to turn gray. And it seemed odd to him that he had grown so much older in the last few years, and lost his looks. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and heaving. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already about to begin to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so much? He al- ways seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man whom their imagination created and whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they saw their mistake, they loved him nevertheless. And not one of them had been happy with him. In the past he had met women, come together with them, parted from them, but he had never once loved; it was anything you please, but not love. And only now when his head was gray he had fallen in love, really, truly— for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other as people do who are very close and intimate, like man and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that Fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not under- stand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of migratory birds, male and female, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had altered them both.

Formerly in moments of sadness he had soothed him- self with whatever logical arguments came into his head, but now he no longer cared for logic; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender.

"Give it up now, my darling," he said. "You've had your cry; that's enough. Let us have a talk now, we'll think up something."

Then they spent a long time taking counsel together, they talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different cities, and not seeing one another for long stretches of time. How could they free themselves from these intolerable fetters?

"How? How?" he asked, clutching his head. "How?"

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.

1899

At Christmas Time

7 HAT'LL I write?" asked Yegor, and dipped his pen in the ink.

Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years. After the wedding her daughter Yefimya had gone to Petersburg with her husband, sent two letters home, and then disappeared without leaving a trace. She was neither seen nor heard from. And whether the old woman was milking the cow at dawn, or lighting the stove, or dozing at night, she was always thinking of one thing: how was Yefimya getting on out there, was she alive at all? A letter should have gone off, but the old man did not know how to write, and there was no one to turn to.

But now it was Christmas time, and Vasilisa could bear it no longer, and went to the teahouse to see Yegor, the proprietor's brother-in-law, who had been staying there, doing nothing, ever since he came back from the army; it was said that he could write a fine letter if he were properly paid. At the teahouse Vasilisa had a talk with the cook, then with the proprietress, and then with Yegor himself. Fifteen kopecks was the price agreed on.

And now—this took place in the teahouse kitchen on the second day of the holidays—Yegor was sitting at the table, pen in hand. Vasilisa was standing before him, thoughtful, an expression of care and grief on her face. Pyotr, her husband, a tall, gaunt old man with a brown bald spot, had come with her; he stood staring fixedly ahead of him like a blind man. On the range a piece of pork was being fried in a saucepan; it sizzled and hissed, and seemed actually to be saying: "Flu-flu- flu." It was stifling.

"What'll I write?" Yegor asked again.

"What?" asked Vasilisa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously. "Don't rush me! You're not writing for nothing; you'll get money for it. Well, write: 'To our dear son-in-law, Andrey Hrisanfych, and to our only beloved daughter, Yefimya Petrovna, our love, a low bow, and our parental blessing enduring forever and ever.'"

"Done; keep going."

" 'And we also send wishes for a merry Christmas, we are alive and well, hoping you are the s^e, please God, the Heavenly King.' "

Vasilisa thought for a moment and exchanged glances with the old man.

" 'Hoping you are the same, please God, the Heav- enly King,' " she repeated, and burst into tears.

She could say nothing further. And yet before, when she had lain awake at night thinking of it, it had seemed to her that she could not get all she had to say into ten letters. Since the time when her daughter had gone away with her husband much water had flowed under the bridges, the old people had lived like orphans, and sighed heavily at night as though they had buried their daughter. And during all that time how many events had occurred in the village, how many wed^ngs and funerals! What long winters! What long nights!

"It's hot," said Yegor, unbuttoning his vest. "Must be a hundred and fifty degrees. What else?" he asked.

The old couple were silent.

"What does your son-in-law do there?" asked Yegor.

"He used to be a soldier, son, you know," the old man answered in a weak voice. "He came back from the service the same time you did. He used to be a soldier, and now, to be sure, he is in Petersburg at a hyderpathic establishment. The doctor treats sick people with water. So, he works as a doorman, to be sure, at the doctor's."

"It's written down here," said the old woman, taking a letter out of a kerchief. "We got it from Yefimya, goodness knows when. Maybe they're no longer in this world."

Yegor thought a little and then began writing rap- idly:

"At the present time," he wrote, "as your fate has of itself assined you to a Militery Carere, we advise you to look into the Statutes on Disiplinery Fines and Crimi- nal Laws of the War Department and you will discover in that Law the Sivelisation of the Officials of the War Department."

He was writing and reading aloud what he had writ- ten, while Vasilisa kept thinking that the letter should tell about how needy they had been the previous year, how the flour had not lasted even till Christmas, and they had had to sell the cow. She ought to ask for money, ought to say that the old man was often ailing and would soon no doubt give up his soul to God . . . but how to put it in words? What should be said first and what next?

"Observe," Yegor went on writing, "in volume five of Militery Regulashuns. Soldier is a common name and an honorable one. The Topmost General and the lowest Private is both called soldier . . ."

The old man moved his lips and said quietly:

"To have a look at the grandchildren, that wouldn't be bad."

'What grandchildren?" asked the old woman, and she gave him a cross look; "maybe there ain't any."

"Grandchildren? Maybe there are some. Who knows?"

"And thereby you can judge," Yegor hurried on, "what a Foreign enemy is and what an Internal enemy. Our foremost Internal Enemy is Bacchus."

The pen creaked, forming flourishes on the paper that looked like fish-hooks. Yegor wrote hurriedly, read- ing every line over several times. He sat on a stool, his feet spread wide apart under the table, a well-fed, lusty fellow, with a coarse snout and a red nape. He was vulgarity itself: coarse, arrogant, invincible, proud of having been born and bred in a teahouse; and Vasilisa knew perfectly well that here was vulgarity but she could not put it into words, and only looked at Yegor angrily and suspiciously. The sound of his voice and the incomprehensible words, the heat and the stuffiness, made her head ache and threw her thoughts into con- fusion, and she said nothing further, stopped thinking, and simply waited for him to cease scratching away. But the old man looked on with full confi.dence. He had faith in his old woman, who had brought him there, and in Yegor; and when he had mentioned the hydropathic establishment earlier it was clear from his expression that he had faith in the establishment and in the heal- ing virtues of water.

Having finished writing, Yegor got up, and read the entire letter from the beginning. The old man did not understand it, but he nodded his head trustfully.

"That's all right; it's smooth . . ." he said. "God give you health. That's all right . . ."

They laid three five-kopeck pieces on the table and went out of the teahouse; the old man stared fixedly before him as though he were blind, and his counte- nance showed perfect trustfulness; but as Vasilisa went out of the teahouse she made an angry pass at the dog, and said crossly:

438 the portable chekhov

"Ugh, the pest!"

The old woman, disturbed by her thoughts, did not sleep all night, and at daybreak she got up, said her prayers, and went to the station to send off the letter.

It was some seven miles to the station.

Dr. B. O. Moselweiser's hydropathic establishment was open on New Year's Day just as on ordinary days; but the doorman, Andrey Hrisanfych, wore a uniform with new braid, his boots had an extra polish, and he greeted every visitor with a "Happy New Year!"

Andrey Hrisanfych was standing at the door in the morning, reading the newspaper. Precisely at ten o'clock a general arrived, one of the regular patients, and di- rectly after him came the postman; Andrey Hrisanfych helped the general off with his overcoat and said:

"Happy New Year, Your Excellency!"

''Thank you, my good man; the same to you."

And as he walked upstairs the general asked, nodding towards a door (he asked the same question every day and always forgot the answer) :

"And what's in that room?"

"That's the massage room, Your Excellency."

When the general's steps had died away, Andrey Hrisanfych looked over the mail and found one letter addressed to himself. He opened it, read several lines, then, glancing at the newspaper, walked unhurriedly to his own quarters, which were on the same floor, at the end of the corridor. His wife Yefimya was sitting on the bed, nursing her baby; another child, the eldest, was standing close by, his curly head resting on her knee; a third was asleep on the bed.

Entering the room, Andrey handed his wife the let- ter, and said:

"Must be from the village."

Then he walked out again without removing his eyes from the paper, and stopped in the corridor, not far from his door. He could hear Yefimya reading the first lines in a trembling voice. She read them and could read no more; these lines were enough for her. She burst into tears, and hugging and kissing her eldest child, she began to speak—and it was impossible to teU whether she were laughing or crying.

"It's from granny, from grandpa," she said. "From the country. Queen of Heaven, saints and martyrs! The snow is piled up to the roofs there now—the trees are white as white can be. Children are out on tiny little sleds—and darling bald old grandpa is up on the stove —and there is a little yellow puppy— My precious darlings!"

Hearing this, Andrey Hrisanfych recalled that three or four times his wife had given him letters and asked him to send them to the village, but some important business had always intervened; he had not sent the let- ters and somehow they were mislaid.

"And little hares hop about in the fields," Yefimya continued mournfully, bathed in tears, and kissing her boy. "Grandpa is gentle and good; granny is good, too, and kindhearted. In the village folks are friendly, they fear God—and there is a little church in the village; the peasants sing in the choir. If only the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God would take us away from here!"

Andrey Hrisanfych returned to his room to have a smoke before another patient arrived, and Yeflmya sud- denly stopped speaking, grew quiet, and wiped her eyes, and only her lips quivered. She was very much afraid of him—oh, how afraid of him she was! She trembled and was terrorized at the sound of his steps, his look, she dared not say a word in his presence.

Andrey Hrisanfych lit a cigarette, but at that very moment there was a ring from upstairs. He put out his cigarette and, assuming a very grave face, hastened to the front door.

The general was coming downstairs, fresh and rosy from his bath.

"And what's in that room?" he asked, pointing to a door.

Andrey Hrisanfych came to attention, and announced loudly:

"Charcot douche, Your Excellency!"

1900

On Offuial Business

_T

HE deputy examining magistrate and the county physician were on their way to an autopsy in the vil- lage of Syrnya. En route they were caught in a blizzard; they wasted a great deal of time traveling in circles and arrived at their destination not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was already dark. They put up for the night at the village headquarters.^ It was here that the dead body happened to be lying, the corpse of the Zemstvo insurance agent Lesnitzky, who had come to Syrnya three days previously and, af-

¹ a cottage in which community meetings and sessions of the vil- lage elders were held and which was sometimes used as a hostelry.

ter settling in the village headquarters and ordering the samovar, had shot himself, to the complete surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life under such strange circumstances, with the samovar before him and the food he had brought along laid out on the table, led many to suspect murder; an inquest was in order.

In the entry the doctor and the examining magistrate stamped their feet to shake off the snow, and near by stood an old man who belonged to the lowest order of rural police: Ilya Loshadin; he was holding a little tin lamp in his hands to give them light. There was a strong smell of kerosene.

"Who are you?" asked the doctor.

"The p'liceman," answered Loshadin.

He used to spell it "pleaceman" when he signed the receipts at the post office.

"And where are the inquest witnesses?"

"They must have gone to have tea, your honor."

To the right was the best room, the travelers' or gentry's room; to the left a room for the lower orders with a big stove and a sleeping platform. The doctor and the examining magistrate, followed by the police- man, holding the lamp high above his head, went into the best room. Here, motionless on the floor, close to the table legs, lay a long body, covered with a white sheet. In the dim light of the lamp, in addition to the white cover, a pair of new rubbers could be clearly seen, and everything about the place was weird and sinister: the dark walls, and the silence, and the mbbers, and the immobility of the dead body. On the table stood a samovar, long since cold; and round it packages, prob- ably containing food.

"To shoot oneself in the village headquarters, how tactless!" said the doctor. "If you do want to put a buUet

through your brain, you ought to do it at home, in some

shed."

He sank onto a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his felt boots; his companion, the magis- trate, sat down opposite him.

"These hysterical and neurasthenic people are great egoists," the doctor went on bitterly. "If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his news- paper; when he dines with you, he has a row with his wife unrestrained by your presence; and when he feels like shooting himself, he shoots himself in village head- quarters, so as to give everybody the greatest amount of trouble. Under all circumstances these gentlemen think only of themselves! That's why elderly people so dislike our 'nervous age.' "

"Elderly people dislike so many things," said the mag- istrate, yawning. "You ought to point out to the old fel- lows the difference between the suicides of the past and the suicides of the present. Formerly the so-called gentleman shot himself because he had embezzled Gov- ernment funds, but nowadays it's because he's fed up with life, depressed. Which is better?"

"Fed up with life, depressed; but you must admit that he might have shot himself somewhere else than at the village headquarters."

"Such aggravation!" said the policeman, "such ag- gravation! It's a regular punishment. Folks are all upset, your honor; they've not slept these three nights. The children are crying. The cows ought to be milked but the women won't go to the barn—they're scared—that they may see the dead gentleman in the dark. Sure they're foolish women, but some of the men is scared, too. As soon as it's dark they won't pass the place alone, but only in a drove. And the witnesses too—"

Dr. Starchenko, a middle-aged, dark-bearded man in spectacles, and the magistrate Lyzhin, a fair-haired man, still young, who had taken his degree only two years before and looked more like a student than an official, sat in silence, musing. They were annoyed at having been delayed. Now, although it was not yet six o'clock, they had to wait till morning, spending the night here; and they pictured a long evening, a long, dark night, boredom, wretched beds, cockroaches, morning chill; and listening to the storm that howled in the chimney and in the garret, they both thought how unlike all this was the life they would have wished for themselves and of which they had once dreamed, and how far away they both were from their contemporaries, who at that moment were walking about the lighted streets in town without noticing the weather, or getting ready for the theater, or sitting in their studies over a book. Oh, how much they would have given now only to stroll along the Nevsky or along Petrovka in Moscow, to listen to decent singing, to spend an hour or so in a restaurant!

Hoo-oo-oo! sang the storm in the garret, and some- thing outside banged viciously, probably the signboard on the cottage. Hoo-oo-ool

"You can do as you like, but I don't want to stay here," said Starchenko, getting up. "It's not six yet; it's too early to go to bed; I'll drive somewhere. Von Tau- nitz lives not far from here, only a couple of miles from Syrnya. I'll drive there and spend the evening with him. Officer, go and tell my coachman not to take the horses out. And what will you do?" he asked Lyzhin.

"I don't know; I'll probably go to sleep."

The doctor wrapped his fur coat round him and went out. He could be heard talking to the coachman and there was the sound of bells shaking on the frozen horses. He drove off.

"It's not right for you, sir, to spend the night in here," said the policeman. "Go into the other room. It's not clean there, but for one night it don't matter. I'll get a samovar from a peasant and heat it directly. I'll pile up some hay for you and then you can go to sleep, and God be with you, your honor."

A little later the magistrate was sitting at a table in the other room, drinking tea, while Loshadin the police- man stood at the door, talking. He was an old man of about sixty, short and very lean, hunched and white- haired, with a naive smile on his face and watery eyes; and he kept smacking his lips as though he were suck- ing a candy. He was wearing a short sheepskin coat and felt boots, and did not let his stick out of his hands. The magistrate's youth aroused his compassion and that was probably why he addressed him familiarly.

"Fyodor Makarych, the Elder, gave orders that he was to be informed when the police inspector or the examining magistrate came," he said, "so I reckon I must go now. It's nearly three miles to the district office, and the storm's bad, the snowdrifts are a caution— blamed if I'll get there before midnight. Listen to it howl!"

"I don't need the elder," said Lyzhin. "There's noth- ing for him to do here."

He looked at the old man with curiosity and asked:

"Tell me, grandfather, how many years is it you've been a policeman?"

"Why, about thirty. Five years after the Freedom[7] I got to be policeman, you can figure out for yourself. And I've been on the go every day since. People have holidays, but me, I'm always on the go. When it's Easter and the church bells are ringing and Christ has risen,

I keep on trotting, with my bag. To the treasury, to the post office, to the police inspector's lodgings, to the dis- trict magistrate, to the tax collector, to the municipal office, to the gentry, to the peasants, to all Orthodox folk. I carry packages, notices, tax blanks, letters, all kinds of forms, reports, and you know, kind sir, your honor, they've got such forms nowadays to write numbers on —yellow, white, red—and every gentleman or priest or well-to-do peasant must write down a dozen times a year how much he has sown or harvested, how many bushels or poods he has of rye, how many of oats, and of hay, and all about the weather, you know, and in- sects, too, of all kinds. Of course you can write what you like, it's only a rule, but you must go and hand out the papers and then go and collect 'ern again. Here, for in- stance, there's no call to cut open the gentleman; you know yourself it's all foolishness, you only dirty your hands, but here you've gone to the trouble, your honor, you've come because it's the rule, there's no getting round it. For thirty years I've been walking my legs off according to rule. In summer it's all right, it is warm and dry; but in winter and fall it puts you out. There were times I was dro^ing and times I was near froze to death; all kinds of things happened to me—wicked peo- ple in the woods took my bag away; I've got it in the neck and I've been brought to law."

"What for?"

"Fraud."

"What do you mean, fraud?"

"Why, you see, Khrisanf Grigoryev, the clerk, sold the contractor some boards as didn't belong to him— cheated him, that is. I was mixed up in it. They sent me to the tavern for vodka; well, the clerk didn't go shares with me—didn't even stand me a drink; but seeing as I'm a poor man, and so a no-account person, not to be relied on—to look at, that is—we were both brought to trial; he was sent to prison, but, praise God! I was acquitted on all counts. They read a paper, you know, in the court, about it. And they were all in uniform—in the court, I mean. I can tell you, your honor, for anyone not used to 'em, my duties are a caution, Lord keep you from them; but me, I don't mind it. Matter of fact, when I'm not on the go, my feet hurt. And at home it's worse for me. At home you have to light the stove for the clerk in the district office, to fetch water for him, to clean his boots."

"And what's your salary?" Lyzhin asked.

"Eighty-four rubles a year."

'Tll bet there are other little sums coming in. There are, aren't there?"

"Other little sums? No, indeed! Gentlemen nowadays don't often give tips.Gentlemen is strict nowadays, they take offense easy. If you bring him a paper, he's of- fended, if you take off your cap to him, he's offended. 'You used the wrong entrance,' he says. 'You're a drunk- ard,' he says. 'You smell of onion; you're a blockhead,' he says; 'you're the son of a bitch.' There are some as is decent, of course; but what does it get you? They only laugh at you and call you names. Take Squire Altuhin, for instance, he's good-natured; and to look at him, he's sober and in his right mind, but as soon as he lays eyes on me he shouts God knows what. The name he calls me! 'You—' says he.''

The policeman pronounced some word but in such a low voice that it was impossible to make out what he said.

"What?" asked Lyzhin. "Say it again.''

" 'Administration,' " the policeman repeated aloud. "He's been calling me that for a long time, for maybe six years. 'Hello, Administration!' But I don't mind; let him, God bless him! A lady will send you a glass of vodka and a piece of pie sometimes, and you drink her health. But it's mostly the peasants that give me some- thing; peasants are more warm-hearted, they fear God: one will give you a piece of bread, another some rab- bage soup, and there's some as stand you a glass. The village Elders treat you to tea in the tavern. Here the inquest witnesses have gone to drink tea. 'Loshadin,' they says, 'you stay here and keep watch for us,' and each of 'em gives me a kopeck. They're scared, not be- ing used to it, and yesterday they gave me fifteen ko- pecks and stood me a glass."

"And you, aren't you scared?"

"I am, sir; but of course it's all in the line of duty, there's no getting round it. Last year I was taking an arrested man into town and he laced into me and took it out of my hide! And all around us—fields, woods— how could I get away from him? And that's how it is here. I remember the gentleman, this Lesnitzky, when he was that high, and I knew his father and his mama. I am from the village of Nedoshchotova, and the Les- nitzkys, they weren't more than two thirds of a mile from us and even less, their land bordered on ours, and the old master, Lesnitzky, he had a sister, a God-fearing, charitable maiden lady. God rest the soul of Thy servant, Yulia, of sainted memory! She never married, and when she was dying she divided up all her property; she left two hundred and fifty acres to the monastery, and five hundred to our village commune for her soul's sake; but her brother, I moan the master, he hid the paper, they say he burnt it in the stove, and took all this land for himself. To be sure, he thought it would be to his bene- fit; but no, wait, you can't get on in the world by wrongdoing, brother. For twenty years the master didn't go to confession. There was something as kept him from church, you see, and he died without the sacrament. He busted. He was as fat as they come. He busted length- wise. Then everything was taken away from Seryozha, the young master, I mean, to pay the debts—every last thing. Well, he hadn't got very far with his book learn- ing, he couldn't do anything, and the president of the Zemstvo Board, his uncle, he says to himself: 'I'll take him'—Seryozha, I mean—'to be our agent; let him in- sure people, that's easy work.' And the gentleman was young and proud, he wanted to live in better style, on a grander scale, and have things his way; to be sure, it hurt his feelings to be jolting about the county in a trashy cart and talking to the peasants; he would walk and keep looking on the ground, looking on the ground and saying nothing; if you called him right in his ear, 'Sergey Sergeyich!' he would look round like this, 'Eh?' and stare at the ground again; and now you see he's laid hands on himself. It don't fit, your honor, it's wrong, this thing, and there's no understanding what goes on in the world, merciful Lord! Say your father was rich and you're poor; it's eating humble pie, no denying it, but there, you've got to put up with it. I used to live well, too, your honor; I had two horses, three cows, I used to keep twenty head of sheep; but that time's past, and here I am with nothing but a bag, and even that's not mine, it's the Government's. And now in our village, if the truth be told, my house is the worst of the lot. Mokey had four footmen to scrape and bow, Mokey is a footman himself now; Petrak had four workmen to dig and delve, and now Petrak is a workman himself."

"And how was it you came down in the world?" asked the magistrate.

"My sons are terrible boozers. They get so soused, so soused there's no saying what it's like, you wouldn't believe me."

Lyzhin listened and thought how he, Lyzhin, would go back to Moscow sooner or later, while this old man would stay here forever and would always be on the go. And how many times in his life he would come across such battered, unkempt, "no-account" old men, whose souls cherished equally the fifteen kopeck piece, the glass of vodka, and the profound belief that you can't get along in this world by wrongdoing.

Then he grew tired of listening, and told the old man to bring him some hay for his bed. In the traveler's room there was an iron bedstead with a pillow and a quilt, and it could have been brought in; but the deceased had been lying beside it for nearly three days (and he may have been sitting on it just before his death), and now it would be disagreeable to sleep on it.

"It's only half past seven," thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch. "How awful!"

He was not sleepy, but having no means of passing the time, he lay down and covered himself with a plaid. Loshadin went in and out several times, clearing away the dishes; smacking his lips and sighing, he kept stomp- ing about the table; at last he took his little lamp and went out, and looking at his long gray hair and bent body from behind, Lyzhin reflected: "Just like a magi- cian in an opera."

It grew dark. The moon must have been behind the clouds, as the windows and the snow on the window- frames could be seen distinctly.

"Hoo-oo-oo!" sang the storm. "Hoo-oo-oo!"

"He-e-e-lp!" shrieked a woman in the garret, or so it sounded. "He-e-e-lp!"

Thump! something outside banged against the wall. Bang!

The magistrate listened; there was no woman up there, it was the wind wailing. It was chilly, and he put his fur coat over his plaid. As he got warm, he thought how all this—the blizzard, and the cottage, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room—how all this was remote from the life he desired for himself, and how alien it all was to him, how petty, uninterest- ing. If this man had killed himself in Moscow or some- where near the city, and he had had to hold an inquest on him there, it would have been interesting, important, and perhaps it would have seemed terrible to sleep in the room next to that in which the corpse lay. Here, hundreds of miles from Moscow, all this appeared some- how in a different light; it was not life, not human be- ings, but something that existed "according to rule," as Loshadin said; it would not leave the faintest trace in the memory and would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, drove away from Syrnya. The fatherland, the ieal Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming kno^, of being, for instance, ex- amining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get recon- ciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life—to get away, to get away as quickly as possible. And in his mind Lyzhin hurried through the Moscow streets, called on acquaintances, met relatives, colleagues, and his heart contracted sweetly at the thought that he was only twenty-six, and that if in five or ten years he could break away from here and get to Moscow, even then it would not be too late and he would still have a whole life ahead of him. And as he began to doze off, and as his thoughts became confused, he imagined the long corridors of the Moscow court, himself delivering a speech, his sisters, the orchestra which for some reason kept droning: Hoo-oo-ool Hoo- oo-oo!

Thump! Bang! sounded again. Thump!

And he suddenly recalled how one day, when he was talking to the bookkeeper at the Zemstvo office, a thin pale gentleman with dark eyes and black hair came up to the counter; he had a disagreeable look in his eyes such as one sees in people who have slept too long after dinner, and it marred his delicate, intelligent profile; and the high boots that he was wearing did not suit him, they looked clumsy. The bookkeeper had intro- duced him: "This is our Zemstvo agent."

"So that was Lesnitzky—this very man," it now oc- curred to Lyzhin.

He recalled Lesnitzky's low voice, called to mind his gait, and it seemed to him that someone was walking beside him now with a step like Lesnitzky's.

All at once he was terrified, his head felt cold.

"Who's there?" he asked fearfully.

"The p'liceman!"

"What do you want here?"

"I've come to ask, your honor— You said this evening as the elder wasn't needed, but I'm afraid he'll be an- gry. He told me to let him know. Shouldn't I go?"

"The deuce, I'm fed up with you," said Lyzhin with vexation, and covered himself up again.

"Maybe he'll be angry. I'll go, your honor. I hope you'U be all right here."

And Loshadin went out. There was coughing and whispering in the entry. The inquest witnesses must have returned.

"We'll let these poor devils get off as early as possible tomorrow—" thought the examining magistrate; "we'll do the autopsy as soon as it's light."

He began to doze off when suddenly he again be- came conscious of steps, not timid this time, but quick and noisy. A door slammed, voices were heard, the scratching of a match. . . .

"Are you asleep? Are you asleep?" Dr. Starchenko asked hurriedly and crossly as he lit one match after another. He was covered with snow from head to foot and he had brought cold air in with him. "Are you asleep? Get up! Let's go to von Taunitz's. He's sent his horses to fetch you. Let's go. There you will have sup- per, at least, and sleep decently. You see I've come for you myself. The horses are excellent, we'll get there in twenty minutes."

"What time is it now?"

"Quarter past ten."

Lyzhin, sleepy and out of sorts, put on his felt boots, his fur coat, cap and hood, and went out with the doc- tor. The frost had abated, but a strong, piercing wind was blowing and chasing down the street clouds of snow that seemed to flee in terror; high drifts had al- ready piled up against fences and on door-steps. The doctor and the magistrate got into the sleigh, and the white coachman bent over them to button up the apron. They were both hot.

"Go ahead!"

They drove through the village. "Cutting a fluffy fur- row there," the magistrate quoted the poet to himself, as he listlessly watched the working of the outrunner's legs. There were lights in all the cabins, as though it were the eve of a high holiday: the peasants had stayed up because they were afraid of the dead man. The coach- man sullenly held his peace, he must have turned glum while he was waiting at ths village headquarters, and now he too was thinking of the deceased.

"When they found out at von Taunitz's," said Star- chenko, "that you were spending the night in the village, they all attacked me for not having brought you along with me."

At the turning, as they left the village behind them, the coachman suddenly shouted at the top of his voice: "Get off the road!"

A man flashed by: he was standing in the snow up to his knees, having moved off the road, and was staring at the troika. The magistrate caught sight of a hooked staff, a beard, and a bag slung sideways, and it seemed to him that it was Loshadin, and he even fancied that the man was smiling. He flashed by and vanishP-d.

The road at first skirted the forest, then, broadening, cut through it; old pines and a young birch grove shot past, as well as tall, gnarled young oaks standing singly in the clearings where the wood had recently been cut; but soon everything was lost in clouds of snow; the coachman said that he could see the forest, but the mag- istrate could see nothing but the outrunner. The wind blew at their backs.

Suddenly the horses stopped.

"Well, what now?" asked Starchenko crossly.

Without a word the coachman climbed down from the box and began to run around the sleigh on his heels; he made larger and larger circles, getting further and further away from the sleigh, and it looked as though he were dancing; finally he returned and began turning off to the right.

"You've lost your way, eh?" asked Starchenko.

"No ma-a-atter—"

They came to a hamlet with not a light in it. Then again, forest and fields. And again they lost their way, and the coachman climbed down from the box and per- formed his dance. The troika flew along a dark road un- der overarching trees, flew swiftly, and the hooves of the fiery outrunner knocked against the dashboard.

Here the trees roared fearfully and resonantly, and it was pitch dark, so that those in the sleigh felt as though they were rushing into an abyss. Suddenly bright light from an entrance and windows flashed upon their eyes, and they heard the friendly, steady barking of dogs and the sound of voices. They had arrived.

While they were taking off their fur coats and felt boots downstairs in the entry, "Un petit verre de Citc- quot" was being played on the piano upstairs, and the stamping of children's feet was heard. Immediately they were enveloped in the genial warmth and the smell peculiar to an old mansion where, whatever the weather, it is warm and clean and comfortable.