Ward Number Six and Other Stories

XIX

On the next morning he had a headache, his ears buzzed, his whole body felt exhausted. He was not ashamed to recall his feebleness ofthe previous day. He had been cowardly yesterday, he had even been scared of the moon, he had frankly expressed feelings and thoughts which he had never suspected himself ofharbouring: those ideas on the discontents of theorizing nonentities, for instance. But now he cared nothing for all that. '

He neither ate nor drank, but lay still and silent.

'I don't care,' he thought as they asked him their questions. 'I'm not answering, I just don't care.'

Michael Averyanovich arrived that afternoon with a quarter of a pound of tea and a pound ofjam. Daryushka came too and stood near the bed for a whole hour, her face expressing dazed grief Dr. Khobotov also visited. He brought a bottle of potassium bromide and told Nikita to fumigate the ward.

Late that afternoon Ragin died of a stroke. His first sensation was of a devastating feverish chill and nausea. Something quite sickening seemed to permeate his whole body, even his fingers, sweeping from his stomach to his head, swamping his eyes and ears. A green light flashed in his eyes. Knowing that his end was near, Ragin remembered that Gromov, Michael Averyanovich and millions of others believed in immortality. Now, what if there really were such a thing? But he didn't want any immortality, he only thought about it for a moment. A herd of deer, extraordinarily handsome and graceful, of which he had been reading on the previous day, darted past him. A peasant woman held out a registered letter, Michael Averyanovich said something.

Then it all vanished. Dr. Andrew Yefimovich Ragin plunged into eternal oblivion.

The peasant orderlies came, seized his hands and feet, and hauled him off to the chapel. There he lay on the table, open-eyed and bathed in moonlight at night. On the next morning Sergey Sergeyevich came, prayed devoutly before the crucifix and closed his ex-boss's eyes.

A day later Ragin was buried. Only Michael Averyanovich and Daryushka went to the funeral.

ARIADNE

о n the deck of the Odessa-Sevastopol steamer a rather good-looking man with a full beard carne up and asked me for a light.

'Notice those Germans sitting by the deck-house?' he asked. 'When Germans or Englishmen meet, they talk about crops, the price ofwool or personal affairs, yet somehow when we Russians meet, we always talk about women and abstract ideas. Mainly women, though.'

I knew him by sight because we had both come in on the train from abroad the day before and I had seen him at the customs at Volochisk, standing with his lady companion before a mountain of suitcases and hampers full offeminine attire. He was annoyed and much disheartened at having to pay duty on some odd bit of silk, and his companion pro­tested and threatened to complain. Then on the way to Odessa I saw him taking cakes and oranges along to the ladies' compartment.

It was rather damp and the sea was a little rough, so the women had gone to their cabins. The bearded man sat do^n beside me.

'Yes,' he went on. 'When Russians meet they only discuss abstract subjects and women. We're pompous intellectuals forever laying down the law and we can't tackle a problem at all unless it's on a very lofty plane. A Russian actor can't act the fool—even in a farce he feels he has to be profound—and the rest of us arejust the same. Even our small talk must be on the most exalted level. We're not bold, sincere or natural enough, that 's why. And why do we keep on about women so ? Because we aren't satisfied, I think. We idealize women too much and make demands out of all proportion to what we're actually likely to get. We don't get what we want or anything like it. Hence our dissatisfaction, shattered hopes and wounded spirits, and you can't have a sore point without wanting to talk about it. Would it bore you if I went on?'

'Not at all.'

'Then may I introduce myself?' he asked, rising slightly from his seat. 'I'm Ivan Sharnokhin, a landowner from the Moscow district, you might say. As for you—1 know you well.

He sat do^n again and went on, loo^ng into my eyes in a frank, friendly sort of way.

'This endless talk about women—a second-rate philosopher like Max Nordau would put it do^n to sex mania, the serf-owning mentality or somet^ng, but that's not my view. We're dissatisfied because we're idealists, I tell you. We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and everything else on God's earth. As young men we feel romantic adoration for our beloved. To us love and happiness are one and the same. We Russians look do^n on anyone who doesn't marry for love, we find lust ridiculous and disgusting, and our most successful novels and stories are those in which the women are beautiful, romantic and exalted. Russians have raved over Raphael's Madonna and worried about w^nen's rights for years, but that isn't a pose, believe me. The trouble is this, though. No sooner do we marry or have a love affair than in a couple of years we feel disappointed and let do^n. Then we have more affairs and more dreadful disappointments. In the end we decide that women are mean, restless, lying, unfair, primitive, cruel creatures. Indeed, far from thi^^mg them man's superiors, we completely look do^n on them. Dissatisfied and deceived as we are, we can only grouse and talk in and out of season about being let down so badly.'

Whilз Shamokhin spoke I noticed how much he relished his native language and environment. He must have been terribly homesick abroad. He praised Russians and called them great idealists, but without disparaging foreigners, and that was rather in his favour. Clearly, too, he was feeling a little upset and it was himself rather than women that he wanted to talk about. I was in for a long story, a confession of some kind.

Sure enough, after we had ordered a bottle of wine and drunk a glass each, he began.

'I remember someone in a tale of Weltmann's remarking, "I say, what a story!" But someone else answers, "That's no story, it's only the beginning of one." Well, what I've told you so far is only the be^^ning. What I'd really like is to tell you my latest romantic adventure. Excuse my asking again, but would it bore you to hear it?'

I said no and he went on as follows.

The action takes place in the north of Moscow Province. The country round there is just wonderful, indeed it is. Our estate is on the high bank of a swift-flowing stream by some rapids, with water thundering past day and night. Picture a large, old garden, pleasant flower-beds, beehives, a vegetable-plot and the river downwn below with feathery willows that seem to lose their gloss and tum grey in heavy dew. Across the river there is a meadow and beyond it on a hill is a grim, dark pinewood with masses and masses oforange mushroonu. Elks live in the heart of it.

Those early mo^tings, you know, with the sun actually hurting your eyes—when I am dead and in my grave I think I shall stiU dream of them. Then there are the wonderful spring evenings with nightin­gales and corncrakcs calling in the garden and beyond, the strains of an accordion floating over from the village, someone playing the piano in the house and the river roaring past—such music, indeed, that you want to cry and sing out loud. We haven't much ploughland, but the pasture helps us out, bringing in about two thousand a year with what we get from the woods. I'm the only son. My father and I live modestly and with Father's pension this was quite enough for us to live on.

For three years after taking my degree I stayed in the country, running the farm and expecting all the time that some job would turn up. But the point is, I was very much in love with an extremely beauti­ful and charming girl. She was the sister of our neighbour Kotlovich, a bankrupt squire whose estate sported pineapples, superb peaches, lightning-conductors and a fountain in the courtyard, though he had not a copeck to his name. He was idle, incompetent and somehow mushy like a boiled turnip. He treated the peasants by homreopathy and went in for spiritualism. He was a mild, tactful sort of person, actually, and no fool, but I have no use for anyone who talks to spirits and treats village women by magnetism. To start with, this kind of limited outlook always goes with muddled thinking, and such people are very hard to talk to. And then they aren't fond of anyone usually and they don't live with women, which gives them an air of mystery that puts sensitive people off I didn't like his looks either. He was tall, fat and white, and had -a tiny head, tiny glittering eyes and plump white fingers. He didn't shake your hand, he massaged it. He was always saying how sorry he was—if he asked for something it was 'so sorry', and if he gave you something, it was 'so sorry' again.

But his sister was quite a different story. By the way, I hadn't known the Kotloviches when I was younger, for my father was a professor at N. and we lived in the provinces for years. The girl was twenty-two by the time I met them, had left school long ago, and had lived in Moscow for a year or two with a rich aunt who brought her oUt. The first time I met her I was greatly struck by her unusual and beautiful christian name—Ariadne. It suited her so well. She was a brunette, very slim, very dainty, svelte, elegant and amazingly graceful, with exquisite and reaUy handsome features. Her eyes were bright, like her brother's, but whereas his had a cold, sickly glint like boiled sweets, it was youthful beauty and self-confidence that shone in hers. I fell in love with her at first sight, and no wonder. First impressions were so strong that I have still nфt lost my illusions and would like to that nature created this girl as part of some splendid grand

design.

Ariadne's voice, her footsteps, her hat—even her footprints on the sandy bank where she fished for gudgeon—thrilled me, delighted me and put new life into me. To me her lovely face and figure were pledges of her inner self. Ariadne's every word and smile bewitched me, charmedme, made me feel that hers was indeed a noble nature. She was affectionate, talkative, gay and natural. Her belief in God seemed infused with poetry, as did her reflections on death. So rich and subtle was her inner nature that it lent even her faults delightful qualities all her o^.

Perhaps she wanted a new horse, but couldn't afford one. Well, why worry ? There was always something to sell or pa^. And ifthe estate- manager swore that there was not, then why not strip the metal roofs off the lodges and dispose of them to the local factory? Or take the cart-horses to market and let them go dirt cheap just when the farm work was at its height? These wild urges sometimes drove everyone on the estate quite frantic, but she expressed them with such style that she was always forgiven in the end and allowed to do as she pleased, ^tу a goddess or Caesar's wife.

There was something rather moving about my love andsoon every­one—Father, neighbours, village people—noticed it. They were all on my side and if I happened to stand the men a round of vodka, they would bow and say, 'Here's hoping you may wed Miss Kotlovich, sir.'

Ariadne herselfknew that I loved her. She often rode over to see us, or drove over by cabriolet, and sometimes spent whole days with me and Father. She made friends with the old man and he even taught her to ride a bicycle—his great hobby. I remember helping her onto her bicycle one evening when they were just going for a ride. She was so beautiful. I felt that touching her was like scorching my hands. I was trembling, I was in ecstasy. And when she and the old man, both so handsome and graceful, bowled off down the road together, a black horse—coming the other way and ridden by our manager— lurched to one side because it too was dazzled by her beauty, or so I thought. My love and adoration greatly moved Ariadne and she longed to feel the same magic and love me in return. That would be so romantic, you sec.

But unlike me she couldn't love truly, for she was cold and already rather corrupted. Day and night a devil inside her whispered that she was so charming, so divine. What was she doing in this world ? What had she been born for? She had no clear idea and saw her own future purely in terms of fame and fortune. She dreamt of dances, race- meetings, liveries, a sumptuous drawing-room, her o^n salon with a swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, famous painters and enter­tainers—the whole lot at her feet, raving about her beauty and fine clothes.

This lust for power, this ambition and unswerving concentration on a single goal—it makes people insensitive. And insensitive Ariadne was, about me, about nature and about music.

Meanwhile time was passing and so far there were no ambassadors in evidence. Ariadne continued to live with her spiritualist brother and things went from bad to worse until she could not afford to buy dresses and hats and was put to all sorts of shifts and dodges to hide how badly off she was.

Typically enough, a Prince Maktuyev—rich, but an utter worm— had paid his addresses to her when she was living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him out of hand, but now there was some­times that little nagging doubt. Had she been right to turn him do^n ? Just as your peasant blows disgustedly on a glass of kvass with beetles in it, but stil drinks it, so she frowned and turned up her nose when she remembered the prince—yet remarked to me, 'Say what you like, but there's something mysterious and delightful about a title.'

She dreamt of titles and gracious living, yet she did not want to let me go either. Dream of ambassadors as you wil, you are not made of stone after all, and it's hard to forget that you are only yowig once. Ariadne tried to fall in love, pretended to be in love, and even swore that she loved me.

Now I am a highly strung, sensitive person. I can tell when someone loves me, even at a distance, and I need no assurances or vows. But this was like a breath of cold air. When she spoke of love I seemed to hear the singing of a mechanical nightingale. Ariadne herself felt that there was something missing. That distressed her and I often saw her in tears. Then once, believe it or not, she suddenly fl.Wlg her arms round me impetuously and kissed me—it happened on the river bank one evening. I could tell by her eyes that she did not love me, but had embraced me purely out of curiosity, as a sort of exercise. She wanted to sec what would happen. Uut it horrified me. I took her hands.

'It makes me so unhappy when you kiss me without loving me,' I brought out in desperation.

'Oh, you are a—funny boy!' she said irritably and went away.

I should probably have married her after a year or two, which would have been the end of my story, but fate decided to give our romance a different twist. A new personality happened to swim into our ken when Michael Lubkov, a university friend of Ariadne's brother, came to stay with him. He was a charming fellow and even the coachmen and servants called him 'the amusing gentleman'. He was of medium height, a bit scraggy and bald. His face was that of a good bourgeois—unattractive, but presentable, pale, with a bristly, carefully tended moustache. He had goose-flesh and pimples on his neck and a large Adam's apple. He wore pince-nez on a broad black ribbon and couldn't pronounce r or I properly. He was always in high spirits and found everything great fun. He had made a peculiarly stupid marriage at the age of twenty, and receiving two houses in Moscow near Devichy as part of his wife's dowry, had had them re­paired, built a bath-house and then lost every penny. Now his wife and four children were living in terrible poverty at the Oriental Apartments and he had to support them. All this was great fun. He was thirty-six and his wife was forty-two and that was fun too. His mother, a stuck-up, pompous person—a frightful snob—looked down on his wife and lived alone with a horde of dogs and cats and he had to pay her seventy-five roubles a month, quite apart from what his wife got.

Lubkov himself was a man of taste and liked lwiching at the Slav Fair Hotel or dining at the Hermitage Restaurant. He needed a lot of money, but his uncle only let him have two thousand a year, which was not enough, and for days on end he ran round Moscow with his tongue practically hanging out, trying to cadge a loan. That was funny too. He said that he had come to stay with Kotlovich to recover from family life in the heart of the country. At lunch, at supper and on walks he talked about his wife and mother, about creditors and bailiffs, and laughed at them. He laughed at himself too and claimed to have met a lot of very nice people through his knack of borrowing.

He laughed all the time and we joined in. And during his stay we passed the time differently. I was given to quiet and 'idyllic' pleasures, being fond of fishing, evening walks and mushroom-picking. But

Liibkov preferred picnics, fireworks and hunting. Two or three times a week he arranged a picnic and Ariadne, looking solemn and dedicated, would list oysters, ch^pagne and chocolates, and dispatch me to Moscow—not asking, naturally, if I had any money. Toasts were drunk at the picnics, there were lots oflaughs, and more gleeful stories about how old his wife was, how fat his mother's dogs were, and what nice people creditors were.

Lubkov was fond of nature, but took it very much for granted, thinking it thoroughly beneath his notice and created only for his amusement.

'Not a bad place to have tea,' he would say, pausing in front ofsome magnificent view.

Once, seeing Ariadne walking some way off widi a parasol, he nodded towards her.

'What I like about her is, she's thin,' he said. 'I don't like fat women.'

I was shocked and asked him not to speak of women like that in my presence. He looked surprised.

'What's wrong about me liking thin ones and not fat ones ?' he asked.

I made no answer. Then there was another occasion, when he was in a good mood and had had a drop to dr^k.

'I've noticed that Ariadne likes you,' he said. 'But I can't make out why you're so slow off the mark.'

This embarrassed me and I rather shyly gave him my views on love and women.

'I don't know,' he sighed. 'Women are women, the way I see it, and men are men. Ariadne may be the poetical, exalted creature you make her out, but that doesn't put her outside the laws of nature. She's at an age when she needs a husband or lover, you can see that for yourself. I respect women every bit as much as you do, but I don't think certain relationships are incompatible with poetry. Poetry is one thing. A lover's another. It'sjust like agriculture—natural beauty's onething and the income from forests and fields is something else again.'

When Ariadne and I fished for gudgeon, Lubkov lay near us on the sand and poked fun at me or instructed me in the art of living.

'How do you manage without a mistress?' he asked. 'It baffles me, man. You're young, handsome, attractive—in fact, you're one hell of a fellow. But you live like a monk. I've no use for these old men of twenty-eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you, but which of us is the younger? You tell us, Ariadne.'

'You of course,' Ariadne answered.

When he tired of us saying nothing and keeping our eyes on tie floats, he would go indoors.

'It's a fact,' she would say, looking furiously at me. 'You're not a man. You're such a ninny, God forgive us! A man should be swept off his feet, do crazy things, make mistakes and suffer! A woman will forgive you if you're rude and impudent, but she'll never forgive you for being so stuffy.'

She was genuinely angry.

'You must be bold and dashing if you want to get anywhere,' she went on. 'Lubkov isn't as good-looking as you, but he's more attrac­tive and he'll always be a success with women because he's not like you, he's a real man.'

She sounded really vexed. One evening at supper she started off without looking at me about how she wouldn't vegetate in the country if she was a man. She would travel and spend the winter abroad somewhere—in Italy, say. Oh, Italy! Now my father inadvertently added fuel to the flames by making a long speech about Italy—how splendid it was with its wonderful weather and museums. Ariadne suddenly yearned to go there. She actually banged the table with her fist and her eyes flashed as if to say, 'Let's be off!'

This started a lot of talk about how nice it would be in Italy. 'Oh, Italy, lovely Italy!' We had this every day. When Ariadne looked at me over her shoulder, her cold, stubborn look told me that in her day-dreams she already had Italy at her feet—salons, famous foreigners, tourists and all. There was no holding her back now. I advised her to wait—put the trip off for a year or two—but she frowned disdainfully.

'You're so stuffy!' she said. 'You're like an old woman.'

But Lubkov was in favour of the trip. He said that it would be very cheap and he would be glad to go along himself and recover from family life in Italy. I'm afraid I behaved as innocently as a schoolboy. I tried to leave them alone together as little as possible, not from jealousy, but because I thought that something outrageous might happen. They pulled my leg—pretended to have been kissing, say, when I came in the room and that kind of thing.

Then one fine morning her plump, white, spiritualist brother arrived and evinced a desire to speak to me in private.

He was a man with no will-power. If he saw other people's letters on a table, he simply couldn't stop himself reading them, for all his education and tact. Now, as we spoke, he admitted that he had happened to read a letter from Lubkov to Ariadne.

'This letter shows she's going abroad soon. I'm terribly upset, old boy. For goodness' sake tell me what it's all about. It makes no sense to me.'

He panted straight into my face as he spoke and his breath smelt of boiled beef.

'Excuse my revealing the secrets of this letter,' he went on. 'But you're a friend of Ariadne's and she thinks highly of you. You might know something. She wants to go away, but do you know who with ? Mr. Lubkov proposes to go with her. I must say, Lubkov's behaviour is decidedly odd. He's a married man with children, but he tells Ariadne he loves her and calls her "darling". All most peculiar, I must say!'

A chiH came over me. My arms and legs grew numb and I felt a sharp pain in my chest. Kotlovich flopped helplessly in an easy chair with his arms hanging limply downwn.

'But what can I do?' I asked.

'Influence her. Make her see sense. She and Lubkov—well, judge for yourself. They're not in the same street. Oh God, it's so awful!' he went on, clutching his head. 'Awful! She has such wonderful pros­pects—Prince Maktuyev and ... and the rest of them. The prince adores her and only last Wednesday his deceased grandfather Ilarion definitely confirmed in so many words that Ariadne would be his wife—no doubt about it! Grandfather Ьarion may be dead, but he's amazingly clever. We call up his spirit every day.'

I lay awake all night after this conversation and felt like shooting myself Next morning I wrote five letters and tore them all in little pieces. Then I wept in the bam. Then I borrowed money from Father and left for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.

Women are women, of course, and men are men, but is all that really as straightforward these days as it was before the flood? Must I, an educated man with a complex spiritual nature, really put downwn my yea^ung for a woman to the fact that her body is a different shape from my ownwn? What a ghastly thought! I should like to think that man's genius has taken up the cudgels against carnal love as part of his battle with nature, and that if he hasn't beaten it, he has at least managed to enmesh it in iHusions of comradeship and affection. For me at any rate these things were not just a function of my biological organism as if I were a dog or frog, but true love—every em­brace inspired by a pure impulse of the heart, by respect for woman­kind.

Actually a revulsion against animal instincts has been built up over the centuries in hundreds of generations. I've inherited it—it is pan of my blood, part ofthe very fibre ofmy being. And ifl now romanticize love, isn't that just as natural and inevitable these days as the fact that I can't waggle my ears and am not covered with fur? I think this is what most educated people feel, since love without anything m(iol"al and poetical about it is treated as an atavistic phenomenon these days, and is said to be a symptom of degeneracy and many forms of de­rangement. Granted, when we romanticize love we do endow the loved one with virtues that are often just non-existent, and that's why we're always doing the wrong thing and suffering for it. But it's better that way in my opinion. I mean it's better to suffer than to console oneself with women being women and men men.

In Tiflis I had a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne had gone abroad on such-and-such a date and intended to be away all winter.

A month later I went home. It was autu^. Every week Ariadne sent my father letters on scented paper, most interesting letters too, written in an excellent literary style—1 think any woman could be an author. Ariadne described in great detail how hard she had found it to placate her aunt and obtain a thousand roubles from her for the trip, and how long she had spent in Moscow hunting up an old lady, a distant relative, to persuade her to go with them. There was a highly contrived air about this excess of detail and I realized of course that she was travelling without a chaperon.

Soon afterwards I too had a letter from her—also scented and well- written. She wrote how much she missed me and my beautiful, clever, love-lorn eyes, reproached me in a friendly way for wasting my youth and stagnating in the country when, like her, I might live in paradise under palm-trees and breathe the fragrance of orange groves. She signed herself, 'Ariadne, whom you have deserted'. A day or two later there was a second letter in the same style signed 'whom you have forgotten'. I was in a complete daze. I loved her passionately and dreamt of her every night, and here was all this 'deserted' and 'for­gotten' stuff. Why ? What was I to make of it ? Besides, there was the tedium of country life to put up with, and the long evenings and nagging thoughts about Lubkov.

I was tortured by uncertainty that poisoned my days and nights until I could stand it no more. I gave in and left.

Ariadne wanted me to go to Abbazia. I arrived on a fine, warm day after a shower had left drops hanging on the trees, and took a room in the huge, barrack-like hotel annexe where Ariadne and Lubkov were staying. They were out. I went into the local park, strolled along the paths for a while and then sat down. An Austrian general passed by with his hands behind his back. He had red stripes down his trousers just like one of our own generals. A baby was pushed past in a pram, with a squeaking of wheels on the wet sand. A doddery old man with jaundice passed by, followed by a group of Englishwomen and a Polish priest, then the Austrian general came round again. Military bandsmen, just in from Fiume, plodded off to the bandstand, carrying their glittering trumpets, and struck up a tune.

Were you ever in Abbazia? It is a filthy little Slav townwn. Its only street stinks, and when it has been raining you can't get along it without galoshes. I had been so carried away by all the things I had read about this earthly paradise that I was annoyed and embarrassed to fmd myself hitching up my trousers as I gingerly crossed the narrow street and bought some hard pears from an old countrywoman out of sheer boredom. Seeing that I was a Russian, she made a pathetic attempt to talk our language. I was puzzled where on earth to go and what to do in the place, and was forever running across other Russians who felt as cheated as I did.

There is a quiet bay crossed by steamers and boats with coloured sails. You can see Fiume and distant islands shrouded in mauvish mist. It would be all very picturesque if the view of the bay wasn't blocked by hotels and their annexes in the inane suburban architectural style favoured by greedy speculators who have built up the whole of that green coast, so that you hardly see anything ofparadise butwindows, terraces and odd spaces with little white tables and waiters' black tail-coats. There is the sort of park that you find in any foreign resort nowadays. The dark, still, silent foliage of palms, the bright yellow sand on the paths, the bright green benches, the flash of soldiers' blaring trumpets and the red stripes on generals' trousers—it takes just ten minutes for al that stuff to bore you stiff Meanwhile you are somehow forced to spend ten days or ten weeks in the place!

Drifting from one resort to another, I have noticed more and more what mean, uncomfortable lives the rich and overfed lead. Their imaginations are so feeble and stunted, their tastes and desires so unadventurous. How much happier are travellers, young or old, who cannot afford hotels, but live where they can, admire the sea while lying on green grass high in the ^Ш, go about on foot, see forests and villages at close quarters, study a country's customs, listen to its songs and love its women.

It was growing dark as I sat in the park. Spruce aid elegant as any princess, Ariadne appeared in the twilight, followed by Lubkov in a new, loosely fitting suit that he must have bought in Vienna.

'Why do you look so cross?' he asked. 'What have I done wrong?'

She saw me and gave a joyful shout, and would certainly have thrown her arms round my neck if we had not been in a park. She squeezed my hands, laughing, and I joined in, moved almost to tears. Then the questions began. How were things in the village ? How was Father? Had I seen her brother? And so on. She insisted on me looking her in the eyes and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels and the picnics.

'It was so marvellous, wasn't it ?' she sighed. 'Not that it's dull here either. Darling, we've lots of friends! Tomorrow I'll introduce you to a Russian family here. Only for goodness' sake buy another hat.' She looked me up and down and frowned. 'Abbazia isn't a village,' she said. 'It's the thing here to be comme ilJaut.'

We went to a restaurant. Ariadne kept laughing, behaving skittishly and ca^^g me a 'dear', a 'darling' and 'such a clever boy', as if she could scarcely believe I was with her. We sat around till about eleven and departed very_pleased with our supper and each other. Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as 'the son of a distin­guished professor whose estate is next to ours'. She talked of nothing but estates and harvests to these people, continually referring to me. She wanted to pass as a member of a rich 'county' family, and I must say she succeeded, having the superb manner of a true aristocrat— which indeed she was.

'Isn't Aunt funny!' she suddenly said, smiling at me. 'We had a bit of a tiff" and she's gone off to Merano. What do you think of that?'

'Who's this aunt you were talking about?'. I asked her later when we were walking in the park. 'What's all this about an aunt?'

'Oh, just a little white lie,' laughed Ariadne. 'They mustn't know I'm unchaperoned.' After a moment's silence she snuggled up to me. 'Please, darling, do be nice to Lubkov,' she said. 'He's so miserable. His mother and wife are simply dreadful.'

With Lubkov she seemed to keep her distance, and when she went to bed she wished him good night with a 'till tomorrow', just as she did me. And they lived on different floors, which made me hope there was nothing in the idea that they were lovers. So I felt at ease with him and when he asked for a loan of three hundred roubles, I was glad to let him have it.

We spent the whole of each day amusing ourselves, stroUing about the park, eating and drinking. And every day we had these conversa­tions with the Russian family. One thing I gradually got used to was that if I went in the park I was sure to meet the old man with jaundice, the Polish priest and the Austrian general, who always had a small pack ofcards with him and whenever possible sat do^n and played patience, nervously twitching his shoulders. And the band kept playing the same tune.

At home in the country I was always ashamed to face our peasants when I went fishing on a working day or drove out for a picnic. And I had the same feeling of shame with the servants, coachmen and workers that I met here. I felt they were looking at me and wondering why I never did anything. I felt this sense of shame every day from morning to night.

It was a strange, unpleasant, monotonous time, varied only by Lubkov borrowing money from me—now a hundred florins, now fifty. Money was to him what morphine is to an addict. It soon cheered him up and he would roar with laughter at his wife, at himself or at his creditors.

Then the rains and cold weather set in. We left for Italy and I telegraphed Father, asking him for God's sake to send me an eight hundred rouble money-order in Rome. We stopped in Venice, Bologna and Florence, and in each city invariably found ourselves at expensive hotels where we were charged extra for lighting, service, heating, bread with our lunch, and the right to dine in a private room. We ate an enormous amount. We had a large breakfast and lunched at one o'clock on meat, fish, some kind of omelette, cheese, fruit and wine. At six o'clock we had an eight-course dinner with long intervals when we drank beer and wine. About half-past eight tea was served. Towards midnight Ariadne would declare herselfhungry and demand ham and boiled eggs and we would have some too to keep her com­pany.

Between meals we dashed round museums and exhibitions, haunted by the fear ofbeing late for lunch or dinner. I was bored with pictures and longed to go home and lie do^n.

'Marvellous! What a feeling ofspace,' I would repeat hypocritically after the others, looking exhausted.ly for a chair.

Like gorged boa-constrictors, we only noticed things that glittered. Shop windows mesmerized us, we were fascinated by cheap brooches and bought a lot of useless junk.

It was the same story in Rome where there was rain and a cold wind and we went to inspect St. Peter's after a greasy lunch. Because we had been stuffing ourselves, or perhaps because the weather was so bad, it did not impress us, and having caught each other outnot caring about art we almost quarrelled.

The money arrived from Father. It was morning, I remember, when I went to fetch it and Lubkov went with me.

'So long as one has a past,' he said, 'one can't lead a full, happy life here and now. My past is a great handicap to me. True, ifl had money it wouldn't be too bad, but I'm broke. Do you know I've only eight francs left ?' he went on, lowering his voice. 'Yet I must send my wife a hundred and my mother another hundred. Then there's living here. Ariadne's such a child, She just won't understand, and she squanders money like a duchess. Why did she have to buy that watch yesterday? And why should we still pretend to be as innocent as new-born babes ? You tell me that! Why, it costs us an extra ten to fifteen francs a day to conceal our relationship from servants and friends by taking a separate room for me. What's the point ?'

I felt a sharp stab ofpain in my chest. Now I knew what was going on—no more uncertainty. I felt cold all over and at once found myself deciding to sec no more of these two, but to escape and go home at once.

'Starting an affair with a woman's easy enough,' Lubkov went on. 'It's just a matter of undressing her. It's what comes later that's such a bore—oh, what a lot of nonsense!'

I counted my remittance.

'Lend me a thousand francs or I'm done for,' he said. 'Your money's my last hope.'

I gave him it and he cheered up at once and started laughing at his uncle—the silly fool hadn't managed to keep Lubkov's address from his wife. I went back to the hotel, packed and paid the bill. It remained to say good-bye to Ariadne.

I knocked on her door.

'Entrez!'

Her room was in a typical morning mess—tea things on the table, a half-eaten roll and eggshells. There was a strong, stifling reck of scent. The bed had not been made and it was obvious that two people had slept in it. Ariadne herself had only just got up and was wearing a flannel bed-jacket. She had not done her hair.

I said good morning and sat for a moment in silence while she tried to tidy her hair.

'Why, oh why did you send for me?' I asked her, trembling in every limb. 'Why drag me abroad?

She evidently guessed what was in my mind and took me by the hand.

'I want you here,' she said. 'You're such a decent person.'

I was ashamed ofbeing so shaken and distressed—I should be bursting into tears next thing! I went out without another word, and an hour later I was in the train. All the way home I somehow pictured Ariadne as pregnant and she seemed repulsive. And somehow all the women I saw in trains and stations appeared pregnant and, like her, repulsive and pathetic. I felt like a fanatical miser who suddenly finds that his gold coins are all counterfeit. Those pure, graceful visions which my imagination, inspired by love, had so long cherished, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my views oflove and woman—all that seemed to be mocking me and jeering at me.

'Could this be Ariadne,' I asked in horror, '—this young, stri^rngly beautiful, educated girl, the daughter of a senator—conducting an intrigue with that vulgar, humdrum mediocrity?'

'But why shouldn't she love Lubkov?' I answered. 'Is he any worse than me? Oh, let her love who she likes. But why lie? And then again, why on earth should she be honest with me?' And so on and so forth until I felt I was going out of my mind.

The train was cold. I was traveUing first class, but there were three people to a side and no double windows. There was no corridor either and I felt like a man in the stocks—cramped, abandoned, pitiable. My feet were dreadfully cold. Meanwhile I kept thinking how seduc­tive she had looked that morning in her jacket with her hair down. I felt such pangs ofjealousy and I jumped to my feet in such agony of mind that my neighbours looked surprised and even scared.

At home I found snow-drifts and nearly forty degrees of frost. I like winter because my home has always been so warm and snug even in the hardest frosts. I like putting on my furjacket and felt boots on a fine, frosty day and doing a job in the garden or yard, reading in my well-heated room, sitting in Father's study by the fire, or taking a country-style steam-bath. But when one has no mother, sister or children about the place, winter evenings are somehow eerie and fearfully long and silent. 'nte warmer and cosier the home, the more you feel that something is missing. After my return from abroad that winter the evenings seemed interminable. I was so dreadfully depressed that I could not even read. It wasn't so bad in the daytime when you could clear snow in the garden or feed the hens and calves, but the evenings were more than flesh and blood could stand.

I used to hate visitors, but I was glad to see them now, knowing that they were bound to talk about Ariadne. Kotlovich, our spiritualist, often drove over for a chat about his sister, and sometimes brought along his friend Prince Maktuyev who loved her as much as I did. To sit in Ariadne's room, strumming on her piano and looking at her music—this was a necessity for the prince. He could not live without it. And the spirit of Grandpa Ilarion was still predicting that she would be his wife one day. The prince usually stayed for a long time, from lunch to midnight perhaps, and hardly spoke. He would drink two or three bottles of beer without a word and now and then he would give a staccato, sad, silly laugh just to show that he was still with us. Before going home he always took me on one side.

'When did you last see Miss Kotlovich ?' he would ask in a low voice. 'Is she well? She's not bored there, is she?'

Spring came round with the woodcock-shooting and the com and clover to be so^n. There was a sad feeling, but this was springtime melancholy and one felt like making the best of things. Listening to the larks as I worked in the fields, I wondered if I should not settle this business of personal happiness once and for all by simply marrying an ordinary village girl. Then suddenly, when the work was in full swing, I had a letter with an Italian stamp.

Clover, beehives, calves and village girls ... all that vanished in a flash. Ariadne now wrote that she was profoundly, unutterably miser­able. She blamed me for not corning to her rescue, for looking down on her from the pedestal of my o^n virtue, and deserting her in her hour of danger—all this in large, shaky writing with smears and blots, evidently dashed off in great distress. At the end she begged me to come and save her.

Once more I slipped my moorings and was swept away. Ariadne was living in Rome. I reached her late one evening and she burst into tears when she saw me and flung her arms round my neck. She had not changed at all during the winter and looked as young and lovely as ever. We had supper and drove round Rome till dawn while she told me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.

'Don't mention that man to me!' she shouted. 'Disgusting, loath­some creature!'

'But you did love him, I think.'

'Never! He seemed a bit unusual to start with and made me feel sorry for him, but nothing more. He's shameless and takes a woman by storm, which is attractive. But don't let's talk about him—that's a dreary chapter of my life. He's gone to Russia to fetch some money and jolly good riddance to him! I told him not to dare come back.'

She was not staying in a hotel now, but in a two-room private apartment which she had decorated to her o^n taste, with chilly luxury. She had borrowed about five thousand francs from friends since Lubkov's departure, and my arrival really was her last hope. I was counting on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed— though she was homesick for Russia, memories of past hardships and shortcomings, and of the rusty roof on her brother's house, made her shudder with disgust. When I suggested going home she clutched my hands convulsively.

'No, no!' she said. 'I'd be bored to death.'

It was now that my love entered its last, waning phase.

'Be a darling again and love me a little,' said Ariadne, leaning to­wards me. 'You're so solemn and stuffy. You're afraid to let yourself go and you keep worrying about what might happen, which is a bore. Please, please be nice, I beg you! My good, kind, precious darling, I love you so:

I became her lover. For at least a month I was crazy with sheer undiluted happiness. To hold her beautiful young body in my arms, to enjoy it, and feel her warmth every time one woke up and remember that she, she, my Ariadne, was here—well, it took a bit of getting used to! Still, I did get used to it and gradually found my bearings in my new position. The main thing was, I could see that Ariadne loved me no more now than she had before. Yet she longed for true love, fearing loneliness. And the point is, I was young, healthy and strong, while she, like all unemotional people, was sensual, so we both acted as if our affair was a grand passion. That, and a few other things, became clearer as time went on.

We stayed in Rome, Naples and Florence. We went to Paris for a while, but found it cold there and returned to Italy. We passed every­where as man and wife, rich landowners. People were glad to meet us and Ariadne was a great success. She took painting lessons, so they called her an artist, and do you know, that really suited her, though she had not a scrap oftalent. She always slept til two or three in the afternoon and had coffee and lunch in bed. For dinner she took soup, scampi, fi.sh, meat, asparagus and game, and then when she went to bed I used to bring her something else—roast beef, say—which she ate with a sad, preoccupied look. And if she woke up in the night she ate apples and oranges.

The woman's main and more or less basic characteristic was her fabulous cunning. She was up to some trick every minute of the day. There was no obvious motive for it, it was just instinctive—the sort of urge that makes a sparrow chirp or a beetle waggle its antennae. She played these tricks on me, on servants, porters, shop-assistants and friends. She could not talk to anyone or meet anyone without all sorts of posturing and antics. Just let a man come into our room—waiter or baron, it made no difference—and the look in her eyes, her expression, her voice changed. Even the contours of her figure altered. If you had seen her then, you would have called us the smartest and richest people in all Italy. Not one artist or musician did she meet without telling him a string of fatuous lies about his remarkable genius.

'You're so brilliant!' she would say in a sickly drawl. 'You frighten me, really. I'm sure you see right through people.'

The point of al this was to be attractive, successful and charming. Every mo^rng she woke with but a single thought—to attract! That was the aim and object ofher life. Ifl h:id told her that in such-and-such a house in such-and-such a street there lived someone who did not find her attractive, it would really have spoilt her day. Every day she must bewitch, captivate, drive people out of their minds. To have me in her power, converted into an utter worm by her charms, gave her the pleasure that victors once felt at tournaments.

My humiliation was not enough, though, and at nights she lounged about like a tigress—with no clothes on, for she always felt too hot— reading letters from Lubkov. He begged her to come back to Russia, or else he swore he would rob or murder somebody to get money and come and see her. She hated him, but his ardent, abject letters excited her.

Having an extremely high opinion of her charms, she thought that if a great assembly ofpeople could see what her figure and complexion were like, she would vanquish all Italy and indeed the entire globe. This talk about her 'figure' and 'complexion' shocked me. She noticed this, and when angry she tried to annoy me with all sorts of vulgar taunts. It reached the point where, losing her temper once at some woman's villa, she told me, 'If you don't stop boring me with your sermons, I'll take off all my clothes this instant and lie do^n naked on those flowers!'

When I watched her sleeping, eating or trying to look innocent, I often wondered why God had given her such outstanding beauty, grace and intelligence. Could it really be just for lolling in bed, eating and telling lies, lies, lies? Indeed, was she really intelligent ? She thought the number thirteen unlucky—three candles too. She was terrified of the evil eye and nightmares. She spoke of free love—and freedom in general—like some pions old granny, and maintained that Boleslav Markevich was a better writer than Turgenev! But she was diabolically sharp and cunning, and in company she had the knack of passing as educated and progressive.

Even when she was in a good mood she thought nothing of insulting a servant or killing an insect. She liked bullfights and reading about murders, and was angry when accused people were acquitted in court.

For the kind of life that we were leading, Ariadne and I needed plenty of money. Poor Father sent me his pension and all his odds and ends of income, and borrowed for me where he could. Once when he answered that he had no money left, I sent a frantic telegram begging him to mortgage the estate. A little later I asked him to raise funds on a second mortgage. He did both without a murmur and sent me the money down to the last copeck. Ariadne despised the practical side of life and took no interest in any of this. While I squandered thousands of francs to gratify her mad whims and groaned like an old tree in the wind, she just gaily hummed, 'Addio, bella NapoW.

I gradually cooled towards her and grew ashamed of our liaison. I dislike pregnancy and childbirth, but now I sometimes longed for a child, if only as some formal justification of our way of life. To retain some shreds of self-respect, I began visiting museums and galleries and reading books, ate little, and gave up drinking. If you keep yourself on the go like that from mor^ng to night it does seem to help a little.

Ariadne tired of me too. It was only mediocrities, by the way, who were so taken with her, and her ambassadors and salon were still as far away as ever. Money was short and that upset her and made her cry. In the end she announced that perhaps after all she wouldn't mind going back to Russia. So here we arc on our way back. In the last few months before our departure she has been very busy corresponding with her brodier. She is obviously up to something, but what, God only knows. I'm tired ofpuzzling over her tricks. But we aren't going to the country—it's to be Yalta and then the Caucasus.

She can only live in holiday resorts these days. If you did but know how I loathe al such places—they make me feel I'm choking, they embarrass me so. I want to go to the country! I want to work and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow and make good my mistakes. I'm so ful of energy just now. And I feel that if I really put my back into it I could clear the estate of debt in five years. But there's a snag, you see. We're not abroad now, this is dear old mother Russia and there's the question of holy wedlock. Of course my infatuation's over, my love has gone beyond recall, but be that as it may, I'm in honour bound to marry her.

Shamokhin was excited by telling his story and we went below, still tal^^g about women. It was late. We were sharing a cabin as it turned out.

'Nowadays it's only in the viilages that women keep up with men,' said Shamokhin. 'There women think and feel like men. They grapple with nature, they fight for civilization just as hard as men. But the urban, bourgeois, educated woman long ago dropped out. She's reverting to her primeval condition, she's already half animal and, thanks to her, many triumphs ofthe human spirit have just been thrown away. Woman is gradually disappearing and her place is being taken by an archetypal female. This backwardness of the educated woman is a real menace to civilization. Retreating, she tries to drag man back with her and arrest his progress, no doubt about it.'

'Why generalize ?' I asked. 'Why judge all women by Ariadne ? Women's urge towards education and the equality ofthe sexes, which I take to be an urge forjustice, simply can't be reconciled with any idea of retreat.'

But Shamokhin was hardly listening. He smiled suspiciously. By now he was a fanatical misogynist and was not going to change.

'Oh, get away with you!' he interrupted. 'Once a woman sees me, not as a man and her equal, but as a male animal, and is bent solely on attracting me—possessing me, that is—her whole life through, the question of equal rights doesn't arise. Don't you believe them, they're very, very cu^kg! We men make a great fuss about their freedom, but they don't want to be free at all, they're only pretending. They're up to al sorts of dirty tricks.'

Tired of arguing and wanting to sleep, I turned my face to the wall.

'Yes indeed,' I heard as sleep came over me. 'Indeed yes. It's all the fault of our upbringing, man. What does the upbringing and training of an urban woman boil down to? To turning her into a human animal so she can attract a male and conquer him. Yes indeed.'

Shamokhin sighed. 'Our girls and boys should be brought up to­gether and never be separated. A woman should be trained to know when she's wrong, like a man. As it is she always thinks she knows best. Impress on a little girl from the cradle that a man is not first and foremost her escort and suitor, but her comrade and equal. Teach her to think logically and to generalize, and don't keep telling her that her brain weighs less than a man's and so she needn't bother with learning, the arts or cultural matters. A boy—a cobbler's or house- painter's apprentice—also has a smaller brain than a grown man's, but he takes part in the general struggle for existence, he works and suffers. We must also give up this trick of putting it all down to physiology, pregnancy and childbirth. And why? Firstly, a woman doesn't give birth every month. Secondly, not all women have children anyway. And thirdly, a normal village woman works in the fields the day before she has her baby and is none the worse for that. Then there should be complete equality in everyday life. If a man gives up his seat to a lady or picks up her handkerchief, let her do as much for him. I don't mind a girl of good family helping me on with my coat or giving me a glass of water '

I fell asleep, so that was the last I heard.

As we approached Sevastopol next morning the weather was wet and unpleasant and the sea was a little rough. Shamokhin sat with me in the deck-house. thoughtful and silent. When the beU rang for tea, men with turned-up coat collars and pale, sleepy-looking ladies began going below. A young, very pretty woman—the one who had been angry with the customs officers at Volochisk—stopped in front of Shamokhin and spoke to him, looking like a naughty, spoilt child.

'Ivan dear, poor little Ariadne's been sick!'

Later on, while staying in Yalta, I saw this lovely creature dashing about on horseback followed by two officers who could hardly keep up with her. Then I saw her one morning wearing a Phrygian cap and a small apron, sitting on the sea-front and sketching while a large crowd stood a little way off admiring her. I was introduced to her. She shook me heartily by the hand, gave me an enraptured look and thanked me in a sickly drawl for the enjoyment that my writings gave her.

'Don't you believe it,' Shaiiinkhin whispered. 'SIk hasn't read a word of yours.'

Strolling on the front late one afternoon, l met Shamokhin who was carrying some large parcels of delicatessen and fruit.

'Prince Maktuyev's here!' he said delightedly. 'He arrived yesterday with her spiritualist brother. Now I see what she was writing to him about. My God!' he went on, looking at the sky and pressing the parcels to his chest. 'If she and the prince hit it off, I'm free, don't you see! I can go back to the country, to Father.'

He ran off".

'I'm beginning to believe in spirits,' he shouted, looking back. 'Grandfather Ilarion's prophecy seems to have come true. God, I hope so !'

The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamokhin's story ended I do not know.

A DREARY STORY

from an old man's memoirs

I

There is in Russia an eminent professor, a Nicholas Stepanovich Such-and-such—a man of great seniority and distinction. So many medals, Russian and foreign, does he possess that when he wears them his students refer to him as an icon-stand. He knows all the best people, having been on terms of intimacy with every celebrated Russian scholar of the last twenty-five or thirty years at least. His present life offers no scope for friendship. But if we speak ofthe past the long list of his famous friends ends with names like Pirogov, Kavelin and the poet Nekrasov, who all bestowed on him an affection sincere and warm in the extreme. He is a member of all Russian and three foreign universi­ties, and so on and so forth. All this, and a lot more that might be said, makes up my so-called name.

It is a popular name. It is kno^n to every Russian who can read and write, and is invoked in foreign lecture-rooms with 'famous and dis­tinguished' appended. It's one of those few lucky names—to abuse it, to take it in vain in public or in print, would be a sign of bad taste. And this is as it should be. My name is, after all, closely linked to the image of an illustrious, brilliant and unquestionably useful man. I work hard. I have the stamina ofan ox, which is important, and I have flair, which is a great deal more important. I'm also a well-behaved, modest, decent sort of chap, incidentally. Never have I poked my nose into literature and politics, or curried favour by bandying words with nitwits—nor have I ever made after-dinner speeches or orated at my colleagues' funerals.

My name as a scholar is free from blemish, by and large. It has nothing to grumble about. It is a fortunate name.

What ofthe bearer ofthis name—ofmyself, in other words ? I present the spectacle of a sixty-two-year-old man with bald head, false teeth and an incurable nervous tic. I'm every bit as dim and ugly as my name is brilliant and imposing. My head and hands tremble with weakness. Like one of Turgenev's heroines, I have a throat resembling the stringy neck of a double bass, my chest is hollow, my shoulders are narrow. When I speak or lecture, my mouth twists to one side. When

I smile, senile wrinkles cover my whole face, and I look like death. There is nothing impressive about my wretched figure, except perhaps that, when I suffer from my nervous tic, a special look comes over me— one bound to provoke in those who observe me the grim, arresting thought that 'the man will soon be dead, obviously'.

I still lecture quite well, I can still hold my audience for two hours. My enthusiasm, the skill with which I deploy my theme, and my humour almost hide the defects of my voice, which is dry, harsh and sing-song, like that of some snivelling preacher. But I write badly. The bit of my brain which controls the writing faculty has ceased to function. My memory is going, my ideas lack consistency, and when I put them down on paper I always feel I've lost all feel for their organic links. My construction is monotonous, my language is poverty- stricken and feeble. I often write things I don't mean, and by the time I reach the end of what I'm writing, I've forgotten the beginning. I often forget ordinary words, and I always have to waste a lot ofenergy avoiding unnecessary sentences and superfluous parentheses in my writing. These things are clear evidence ofdeclining intellectual activity. The simpler the subject the more agonizing the effort, oddly enough. I feel more at ease and more intelligent writing a learned article than when composing a congratulatory letter or memorandum. Another thing—I find it easier to write German or English than Russian.

As to my present mode of life, I must first mention the sleeplessness from which I've been suffering lately. If anyone should ask me what constitutes the essential core ofmy life at the moment, I should answer inso^mia. From force of habit I still undress and go to bed at midnight exactly. I fall asleep quickly, but I wake up between one and two o'clock feeling as if I hadn't slept at all. I have to get up and light the lamp. I walk up and down the room for an hour or two, and look at long-familiar pictures and photographs. When I tire of walking I sit at my table—sit motionless, thinking no thoughts, experiencing no desires. If there's a book in front of me I pull it towards me mechanic­ally and read listlessly. Not long ago I read an entire novel in one night in this mechanical way—it had an odd title: The Song the Swallow Sang. Or I make myself count a thousand to occupy my mind. Or else I imagine a colleague's face and start recalling when and how he took up academic work. I like to listen for sounds. My daughter Liza sometimes mutters rapidly in her sleep two rooms away. Or my wife walks through the drawing-room with a candle—and never fails to drop the match-box. A warping cupboard squeaks, or the lamp burner gives a sudden buzz. All these sounds excite me, somehow.

To miss one's sleep of a night is to feel abnormal every minute, which is why I yearn for dawn and the daytime when I have the right not to sleep. Much exhausting time passes before the cock crows outside—my first herald of good news. At cock-crow I know that the house-porter downstairs will awake within an hour and come up on some errand, angrily coughing. Then the air beyond the windows will gradually grow pale and voices will be borne in from the street.

The day begins for me when my wife comes in. She arrives in her petticoat with her hair in disarray—but washed, smelling of flower- scented eau-de-Cologne, and looking as if she has dropped in by accident. She always says the same thing.

'Sorry, I'll only be a minute. Had another bad night?'

Then she turns out the lamp, sits by the table and starts talking. I'm no prophet, but I can predict her theme, which is the same every morn­ing. After anxious inquiries about my health, she'll suddenly mention our son—an officer stationed in Warsaw. We always send him fifty roubles after the twentieth of the month, and this is our chief topic of conversation.

'We can't afford it, of course,' my wife sighs. 'But we're bound to help the boy till he finds his feet. He's abroad, and his pay's not much. Anyway, we'll send him forty roubles next month instead of fifty if you like. How about that?'

Daily experience might have taught my wife that constant talk about our expenses does nothing to reduce them, but having no faith in experience, she regularly discusses our officer son every morning, and tells me that the price of bread is down, thank God, but sugar has gone up two copecks—all this with the air ofone communicating matters of moment.

I listen and grunt encouragement mechanically, while strange, unsuitable thoughts obsess me, probably because I had such a bad night. I look at my wife and feel a childlike wonder. This elderly woman, very stout and clumsy, with her stupid look of petty anxiety, her fear of falling on evil days, her eyes clouded by brooding on debts and poverty, her capacity for harping on the price of things, and for smiling only when it comes do^n^

Desdemona felt for Othello's? Can this really be my wife Varya who once bore me a son?

I stare intensely at this fat, clumsy old woman's face, seeking my Varya, but of her old self nothing remains except her anxiety over my health, together with her habit of calling my salary 'our salary', and my cap 'our cap'. She's a painful sight to me, . so I let her say what she likes to give her what comfort I can, and I don't even answer when she criticizes others unfairly, or nags me for not taking up pri^- ..te practice and publishing textbooks.

Our conversation always ends in -the same way—my wife suddenly remembers that I haven't had my tea, and panics.

'But what am I doing here?' she asks, standing up. 'The samovar's been on the table ever so long, and here I am chattering. Dear me, how forgetful I'm becoming.'

She moves off quickly, but stops by the door.

'You know we owe Yegor five months' wages?' she asks. 'We shouldn't let the servants' wages run up, I've told you that again and again. It's far easier to pay them ten roubles a month than fifty every five months.'

She goes through the doorway and stops again.

'Poor Liza's the one I'm sorry for,' she says. 'The child studies at the Conservatory and moves in good society, but her clothes aren't fit to be seen. Her fur coat is—well, she's ashamed to go out in it. If she was just anyone's daughter it wouldn't matter, but of course everyone knows her father's a distinguished professor, one of the heads of his profession.'

Having reproached me with my rank and reputation, she goes out at last. This is the start of my day. Nor does it improve as it proceeds.

While I'm drinking tea, my daughter Liza enters in her fur coat and little cap—carrying some music, and all ready to go off to the Conserva­tory. She's twenty-two years old, but seems younger. She's pretty, and looks a bit like my wife when young. She kisses me affectionately on temple and hand.

'Good morning, Father,' she says. 'Are you well?'

She was very fond of ice-cream as a child, and I often used to take her to a cafй. Ice-cream was her yard-stick of excellence. 'You're ice- creamy, Daddy,' she would say ifshe wanted to praise me. We used to call one ofher fingers 'pistachio', another 'cream', a third 'raspberry', and so on. When she came in to say good morning I would usually put her on my knee and kiss her fingers.

'Cream, pistachio, lemon,' I would say.

I still kiss Liza's fingers for old time's sake. 'Pistachio, cream, lemon,' I mutter—but it doesn't come off at all, somehow. I feel as cold as ice myself, I'm embarrassed. When my daughter comes in and touches my temple with her lips, I start as ifstung by a bee, givea forced smile and tum my face away. Ever since I first contracted insomnia, a single question has been nagging at me. My daughter often sees me, a dis­tinguished elderly man, blushing painfully because I owe my servant money, she sees how often worry over petty debts stops me working and has me \if.llking up and down the room for hours on end brooding. Then why has she never come to me without telling her mother and whispered: 'Here are my watch, bracelet, car-rings and dresses, Father. Pawn them all, you need the money' ? When she sees her mother and me trying to keep up appearances by concealing our poverty—why doesn't she give up the expensive pleasure of music study? I wouldn't accept her watch, her bracelet or any other sacrifices. God forbid, that's not what I need.

I also happen to remember my son, the officer stationed in Warsaw. He's an intelligent, honest, sober fellow, but that's not good enough for me. Ifl had an old father, and ifl knew that he had moments when he felt ashamed of his poverty, I think I'd give someone else my officer's commission, and take a job as an ordinary labourer. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What good are they? To har­bour ill-will against ordinary mortals for not being heroes—only a narrow-minded or embittered man can do that. But enough!

At a quarter to ten I have to go aaH lecture to my dear boys. I dress and walk along the road which I've known for thirty years, and which has a history of its own for me. There is the large grey house containing the chemist's shop. Here was once a small house with an ale bar where I thought out my thesis and wrote Varya my first loVe letter—in pencil, on a page headed Historia Morbi. Next comes the grocery once kept by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, and then by a fat countrywoman who loved students because 'each ofthem has a mother'. Its present occupant is a red-headed shopkeeper, a very stolid man who drinks his tea out of a copper teapot. Now come the gloomy university gates so long in need of repair, the bored janitor in his sheepskin coat, the broom, the piles of snow.

On a bright boy fresh from the provinces with the idea that a temple oflearning really is a temple, such gates cannot produce a salutary im­pression. By and large the university's dilapidated buildings, its gloomy corridors and grimy walls, the dearth of light, the melancholy vista of steps, coathooks and benches, have played an outstanding part as a conditioning factor in the history of Russian pessimism.

Here is our garden—it seems neither better nor worse than it was in my student days. I don't like it. Instead of these wizened limes, that yellow acacia and the skimpy pollarded lilac, it would be far more sensible to have some tall pines and fine oaks growing here. Most students' moods depend on their environment, and their place oflearn- ing should confront them exclusively with loftiness, strength and elegance at every hand.

God preserve them from scraggy trees, broken windows, grey walls and doors upholstered in tattered oilcloth.

When I reach my ownwn entrance, the door is flung open and I'm greeted by my old colleague, contemporary and namesake—the porter Nicholas. He lets me in and clears his throat.

'Freezing weather, Professor,' says he.

Or, if my fur coat is wet he says: 'A bit on the rainy side, Professor.'

Then he runs ahead, opening all the doors on my way. In my study he solicitously removes my fur coat whilst contriving to purvey some item of university news. Such is the close fellowship between all university porters and caretakers that he knows all about what goes on in the four faculties, the registry, the vice-chancellor's study and the library. He knows pretty well everything. For instance, when the vice- chancellor's retirement is in the air, or a dean's, I hear him talking to the young door-keepers—listing the candidates for the vacancy, and immediately explaining that So-and-so won't be accepted by the Minister, and Such-and-such will turn it downwn. Then he goes into fantastic details about certain mysterious papers which have turned up in the registry and concern an alleged secret dilcussion of the Minister's with the County Education Officer, and so forth. These details apart, he's practically always right. His sketches of each candidate's character have their peculiarities, but they're dependable too. Should you need to know the year when So-and-so was vivaed for his thesis, took up academic work, retired or died—then enlist this old soldier's portentous memory, and he'll not only tell you year, month and date, he'll also furnish the details attending this or that circumstance. No one can have a memory like this unless he loves his subject.

He's a custodian of academic tradition. From his predecessors as porter he has inherited many university legends, to which treasures he has added stocks of his o^n amassed in the course of his career. Many are the tales, long and short, which he'll tell you should you wish. He can speak of fantastic pundits who knew everything, about tremen­dous workers who went without sleep for weeks on end, about scholar­ship's many victims and martyrs. In his stories good triumphs over evil, while the weak, the wise, the modest and the young always vanquish the strong, the stupid, the proud and the old.

There's no need to take all these legends and fantasies at face value, but sift them carefully and you'll be left with something vital—our fine traditions and the names of real paragons who are generally recognized.

Society at large knows nothing of the academic world beyond anec­dotes about the grotesque absentmindedness of elderly professors, and two or three witticisms variously ascribed to Gruber, me or Babukhin. For an educated community this is rather poor. If society loved learning, scholars and students as Nicholas loves them, its literature would long ago have included whole epics, legends and chronicles such as it now unhappily lacks.

After telling me the news, Nicholas adopts a stem expression, and we proceed to discuss practical matters. If an outsider could observe the freedom with which Nicholas handles technical terminology at such times, he might take him for a scholar masquerading as an old soldier. Those stories of college porters' erudition are grossly exaggerated, by the way. True, Nicholas knows over a hundred Latin terms. True, he can put a skeleton together, he can prepare the occasional specimen, and he can amuse the students with some long, learned quotation. But a theory as straightforward as that of the circulation of the blood, say—it's as deep a mystery to him today as it was twenty years ago.

Hunched over a book or preparation, my demonstrator Peter Igna- tyevich sits at a desk in my study. This industrious, modest, not very bright person is about thirty-five years ofage, but already bald and pot­bellied. He slogs away morning noon and night, reads a great deal, and has a good memory for what he has read, in which respect he's a real treasure. But in all other respects he's an old hack—a dull pedant, in other words. The old hack's characteristic features—those which dis­tinguish him from a reaUy able man—are as follows. His horizon's restricted and narrowly confmed to his subject—outside his o^ special field he's like a baby, he's so naive. I remember going into the study one morning.

'What terrible news!' say I. 'I'm told Skobelev's died!'

Nicholas crosses himself, but Peter Ignatyevich turns to me and asks who this Skobelev is!

Another time—this was somewhat earlier—I announce that Professor Perov has died, and dear old Peter Ignatyevich asks what he used to lecture on!

IfPatti sang in his very ear, if Chinese hordes invaded Russia, or if an earthquake struck, I don't think he'd move a muscle—he'd just go on squinting do^n his microscope, imperturbable as ever. 'What was Hecuba to him?' in other words. I'd have given a lot to see this fossilized specimen in bed with his wife.

Another feature is his fanatical faith in the infallibility of science, and above all in anything written by a German. He has confidence in himself and his preparations, he knows the purpose oflife, and is a total stranger to the doubts and disillusionments which tum more able heads grey. Then there's his grovelling deference to authority, his lack of any urge to original thought. It's hard to change his views on any subject, and there's no arguing with him. How can you argue with a man so deeply convinced that medicine is the queen of the sciences, that doctors are an йlite, that medical traditions are the finest of all? Only one tradition has survived from medicine's bad old days—the white tie still worn by doctors. For a scholar—for any educated man, indeed—the only possible traditions are those of the academic world as a whole, without any distinction between medicine, law and so on. But it's hard for Peter Ignatyevich to accept this, and he's prepared to argue about it till doomsday.

I can picture his future clearly. In the course ofhis life he'll have made several hundred preparations of exceptional purity, he'll write a number of dull but highly respectable articles, and he'll do a dozen conscientious translations. But he'll never make a real splash. For that you need imagination, inventiveness, flair—and Peter Ignatyevich has nothing of the kind. He's no master of science, in brief, he's its lackey.

Peter Ignatyevich, Nicholas and I speak in low voices. We feel a certain unease. It's a peculiar sensation, this, to hear your audience booming away like the sea on the other side of a door. Thirty years haven't hardened me to this sensation, I still feel it each morning. I nervously button up my frock-coat, ask Nicholas unnecessary ques­tions, betray irritation.

Panic-stricken though I may look, this is no panic, but something else that I can neither name nor describe.

I look at my watch quite unnecessarily.

'How about it?' I say. 'Time to go.'

We parade in sequence. Nicholas walks in front with the preparations or charts, and I follow—while after me, his head modestly lowered, trudges the old hack. Or, if necessary, a corpse is carried in first on a stretcher, followed by Nicholas, and so on. At my appearance the students stand up, then they sit do^n and the sea's boom is suddenly hushed. We are becalmed.

I know what I shall lecture about, but just how I shall lecture, what I shall start with, where I shall end—that I don't know. I haven't a single sentence on the tip ofmy tongue. But I only have to glance round my lccture hall, built in the form of an amphitheatre, and utter the timeworn phrase 'last week we were discussing—', for sentences to surge out of my inner self in a long parade—and the fat is in the fire! I speak with overwhelming speed and enthusiasm, feeling as ifno power on earth could check the flow of words. To lecture well—interestingly, that is, and with some profit to the audience—you need other qualities besides ability of a high order: experience, a special knack, and the clearest possible conception ofyour o^n powers, ofyour audience, and ofthe subject ofyour lecture. Furthermore, you need to have your head screwed on, keep your wits about you, and never for one moment lose sight of your object.

When a good conductor interprets his composer, he does twenty things at once—reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, motions sideways towards drum or French horn, and so on. My lecturing is the same. I have before mc a hundred and fifty faces, all different from each other, and three hundred eyes boring into my o^n. My aim is to vanquish this many-headed hydra. If I can keep its level of attention and comprehcnsion clearly in view throughout every minute ofmy lecture, then I have it in my power. My other adversary is within myself. This is an infinite variety offorms, phenomena and laws, and the welter of ideas—my own and other people's—thereby con­ditioned. I must maintain a constant facility for seizing out of this vast material the most significant and vital element, keeping time with the general flow of my lecture as I clothe my idea in a form suited to the hydra's understanding and calculated to stimulate its attention, re­maining on the alert to convey my thoughts—not as they accumulate, but in a certain order essential to the proper grouping of the picture which I wish to paint. Furthermore, I try to make my language as elegant, my definitions as brief and precise, and my wording as simple and graceful as I can. Every moment I must check myselfand remember that I have a mere hour and forty minutes at my disposal. I have my work cut out, in other words. I have to play the scholar, the pedagogue and the orator at one and the same time, and it's a poor lookout if the orator in one preponderates over the pedagogue and scholar, or vice versa.

After a quarter or half an hour of lecturing, you notice the students looking up at the ceiling or at Peter Ignatyevich. One feels for his handkerchief, another shifts in his scat, a third smiles at his thoughts.

Their attention is flagging, in other words, and something must be done about it—so I seize the first chance to make some joke. The one hundred and fifty faces grin broadly, the eyes glitter merrily and the sea briefly booms.

I laugh too. Their attention has been revived, and I can go on.

No argument, no entertainment, no sport has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only when lecturing have I really been able to let myself go, appreciating that inspiration isn't an invention of the poets, but really docs exist. And I don't think that even the most exotic of Hercules' labours ever left him so voluptuously exhausted as I've always felt after lecturing.

So it was once, but now lecturing is sheer agony. Not half an hour has passed before I feel intolerable weakness in legs and shoulders. I sit in an arm-chair—but I'm not accustomed to lecture sitting do^n. I stand up a minute later, and carry on standing—but then sit down again. My mouth feels dry, my voice grows husky, my head reels.

To conceal my condition from the audience, I keep drinking water, I cough, I frequently blow my nose as ifl had a cold, I make random jokes, and I end up announcing the break before time. But my main feeling is one of shame.

Conscience and reason tell me that my best course would now be to deliver the boys a farewell lecture, say my last words to them, give them my blessing, and yield my post to a younger and stronger man. But, as God is my judge, I lack the courage to obey my conscience.

Unluckily I'm neither philosopher nor theologian. I'm perfectly well aware that I have less than six months to live. My main concern should now be with the shades beyond the grave, one might suppose—with the ghosts which will haunt my entombed slumbers. Dut somehow my heart rejects these issues, though my mind recognizes their full import. On the brink of death my interests arc just the same now as they were twenty or thirty years ago—purely scientific and scholarly.

Even at my last gasp I shall still believe that learning is the most important, splendid and vital thing in man's life, that it always has been and always will be the highest manifestation of love, and that it alone can enable man to conquer nature and himself. Though the belief may be naive and based on incorrect premisses, it's not my fault if I hold this faith and no other. Nor can I shake this conviction within me.

But this is beside the point. I only want people to indulge my weak­ness, and realize that if a man's more interested in the fate of the bone medulla than in the ultimate goal of creation, then to deprive him of his professorial chair and pupils would be like taking him and nailing him in his coffin without waiting for his death.

My insomnia, and the strain of fighting my increasing weakness, have caused a strange thing to happen to me. In the middle of a lecture tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin smarting, and I feel a furious, hysterical urge to stretch forth my arms and complain aloud. I want to cry aloud that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, that within six months someone else will be officiating in this lecture theatre. I want to shout that I've been poisoned. New thoughts, hitherto unfamiliar, have been blighting the last days of my life, and they continue to^ sting my brain like mosquitoes. Meanwhile my situation seems so appalling that I want all members ofmy audience to leap from their seats in terror and rush panic-stricken to the exit with screams of despair.

Such moments are not easily endured.

II

After the lecture I stay at home working. I readjournals and academic theses, or prepare my next lecture. Sometimes I write. I work in fits and starts because I have to receive visitors.

My bell rings. A colleague has come to discuss some professional matter. Entering my room with his hat and stick, he thrusts both at me.

'I'll only be a minute, only a minute,' says he. 'Don't get up, dear colleague, I only want a couple ofwords.'

Our first concern is to demonstrate how extremely courteous we both are, and how delighted to see each other. I sit him in an arm-chair, he asks me to sit too. Meanwhile we're cautiously stroking each others' waists, touching each others' buttons, and seem to be feeling each other over as if afraid of burning our fingers. We both laugh, though our remarks are devoid of humour. Once seated, we incline our heads towards each other, and speak in subdued tones. However affectionately disposed we may be towards each other, we can't help embellishing our speech with all manner of mumbo-jumbo like 'as you so justly deigned to observe', or 'I have already had the honour to inform you'. And we can't help laughing aloud if one of us makes a joke, how­ever poor. His business completed, my colleague stands up jerkily, and begins saying good-bye with a wave of his hat in the direction of my work. Again we finger each other, again we laugh. I see him out into the hall. Here I help him on with his coat, while he makes every effort to evade so high an honour. Then, when Yegor opens the door, my colleague assures me that I shall catch cold, while I pretend that I'm ready to escort him into the street, even. And when I get back to my study at last, my face still smiles—through inertia, no doubt.

A little later the bell rings again. Someone comes into the hall and spends some time removing his coat and coughing. Yegor announces a student.

'Ask him in,' say I.

A little later a well-favoured young man comes in. Our relations have been strained for the last twelve months. He makes a frightful hash of his examinations, so I give him the lowest mark. Each year I always have half a dozen of these young hopefuls whom I fail—or 'plough', in student parlance. Most of those who fail an examination through incompetence or illness bear their cross patiently, they don't bargain with me. The only ones to bargain and visit my home are gay, ^^^bited spirits who find that the examination grind spoils their appetite and prevents them visiting the opera regularly. The first sort I spare, the second I go on 'ploughing' throughout the year.

'Sit downwn,' I tell my visitor. 'Now, what can I do for you?'

'Sorry to disturb you, Professor,' he begins haltingly, not looking

me in the eye. 'I wouldn't venture to bother you ifl, er . I've taken

your examination five times now and, er, have ploughed. I beg you, please pass me because, er '

All idlers defend themselves with the same argument. They have passed with distinction in all other subjects, they have only failed mine —which is all the more amazing because they've always studied my subject so industriously, and know it inside out. Their failure is due to some mysterious misunderstanding.

'I'm sorry, friend,' I tell my visitor, 'but I can't pass you. Go and read your lecture notes again, then come back—and we'll see about it.'

There is a pause. I feel the urge to torment the student a little for lo^Bg beer and opera more than learning.

'Your best course,' I sigh, 'is to give up medicine altogether, I thinkhink If you, with your ability, can't get through your examination, you obviously don't want to be a doctor, and you've no vocation for it either.'

The young hopeful's face lengthens.

'I'm sorry, Professor,' he smiles. 'But that would be a bit odd, to put it mildly—study five years, and then suddenly throw it all up!'

'Oh, I don't know—better lose five years than spend the rest ofyour life doing a job you dislike.'

But then I immediately feel sorry for him.

'All right, suit yourself,' I hasten to add. 'Do a bit more reading, then, and come along again.'

'When?' asks the idler in a hollow voice.

'When you like—tomorrow would do.'

'Corne I may,' his good-natured eyes seem to tell me, 'but you'U only plough me again, you swine!'

'Ifl examine you fifteen times over,' I tell him, 'it still won't make you any more learned, that's obvious. But it will train your character, and that's at least something.'

Silence ensues while I get up and wait for my visitor to leave, but he stands looking at the window, plucking at his beard and t^^^g. This grows tedious.

Our young hopeful's voice is pleasantly fruity, his eyes are alert and sardonic, his face is complacent and somewhat the worse for wear from too much beer-drinking and lolling on his sofa. He would obviously have a lot to say about the opera, his love affairs and his student friends. But it's not done to discuss such things, unfortunately, much as I'd like to hear about them.

'On my word of honour, Professor, if you pass me I'll, er '

When we arrive at that 'word ofhonour', I make gestures of despair and sit downwn at my desk, while the student spends another minute in thought.

'In that case good-bye,' he says despondently. 'I'm sorry.'

'Good-bye, dear boy. Look after yourself.'

He walks hesitantly into the hall, slowly dons his coat and goes into the street, where he probably ponders the matter further, but without hitting on anything new beyond the term 'old devil' with reference to myself. He goes into a cheap restaurant for some beer and a meal, then returns home to bed. May your bones rest in peace, honest toiler!

The bell rings for the third time, and a young doctor comes in— wearing a new black suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, the inevitable white tie. He introduces himself, I sit him downwn and ask what I can do for him. Somewhat nervous, this youthful devotee of scholarship tells me that he has this year passed the examination qualifying him to go on to a doctorate, and all he has to do now is to write his thesis. He would like me to be his supervisor, and I should oblige him greatly by giving him a research subject.

'Delighted to be ofassistance, dear colleague,' say I. 'But can we first agree about what a research thesis is? The term normally implies a dissertation based on original work—or am I wrong ?—while a com­position written on someone else's subject, under someone else's supervision, is given a rather different name '

The doctorate-seeker remains silent.

'Why do you all come to me? That's what I don't see!' I blaze out angrily, leaping from my chair. 'Think I'm running a shop? I'm not hawking research theses! Why won't you all leave me in peace, for the umpteenth time! I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I'm absolutely sick and tired of it!'

The doctorate-seeker makes no reply beyond a slight flush in the region of the cheek-bones. Though his face expresses deep respect for my distinguished reputation and erudition, I can read in his eyes how he despises my voice, miserable figure and nervous gestures. Angry, I seem a kind of freak to him.

'I'm not keeping a shop!' I say wrathfully. 'But why won't any of you be original, that's what baffles me? Why do you hate freedom so?'

I talk a great deal, he says nothing. In the end I gradually calm do^n —and give in, of course. He'll receive a subject from me not worth a brass farthing, write an utterly pointless thesis under my supervision, hold his ownwn in a tedious disputation, and obtain an academic degree of no possible use to him.

Sometimes the bell never seems to stop ringing, but I shall confine myself here to four visits only. With the fourth ring I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress and a well-loved voice.

Eighteen years ago an oculist colleague of mine died, leaving his seven-year-old daughter Katya and about sixty thousand roubles. He appointed me guardian in his will, and Katya lived with us as one ofthe family till she was ten, after which she went to boarding-school and spent only the summer holidays in my home. Having no time to attend to her upbringing, I only observed her sporadically, which is why 1 can't say much about her childhood.

My first memory of her—and one that I'm very fond of—is the amazing trustfulness with which she entered my house, which showed in her manner towards the doctors who treated her, and which always glowed in her little face. She would sit somewhere out ofthe way with cheek bandaged, and she was always examining something attentively. I might be writing or leafing through some books while my wife busied herself about the house, the cook peeled potatoes in the kitchen, or the dog played—seeing which things, her eyes always retained the same unchanging expression.

'All things in this world are beautiful and rational,' they seemed to say.

She was inquisitive and much enjoyed talking to me, sitting on the other side of my desk, watching my movements and asking questions— curious to know what I was reading, what my job was at the university, whether I was afraid of corpses, and what I did with my salary.

'Do the students have fights at the university?' she asks.

'Yes, dear.'

'And do you make them go do^ on their knees?'

'I do.'

She was tickled by theidea ofstudent fights—and ofme making them kneel—and she laughed. She was an affectionate, patient, good child. I often chanced to see something taken off her—or saw her punished for something that she hadn't done, or with her curiosity left unsatis­fied. Her unfailing expression of trustfulness took on a tinge of sadness at such times, but that was all.

I was incapable of standing up for her and only when I saw her sadness did I long to draw her to myselfand console her in the voice of an old nanny, calling her my 'poor darling orphan'.

I remember too how fond she was of dressing up and using scent, in which she resembled me, for I too like fine clothes and good scent.

I regret that I lacked the time and inclination to observe the origin and development of the great passion which engulfed Katya when she was fourteen or fifteen. I mean her passion for the stage. When she came home from school for the summer holidays, she spoke ofnot^ng with such delight and eagerness as plays and actors, wea^nng us with her incessant talk of the theatre. My wife and children wouldn't listen, and only I was too cowardly to deny her an audience. When she felt an urge to share her enthusiasm, she would come into my study.

'Nicholas Stepanovich, let me talk to you about the theatre,' she would plead.

I would point to the clock.

'You can have half an hour,' I'd say. 'Commence.'

Later she began bringing home dozens of portraits of actors and actresses whom she adored. Then she tried to take part in amateur theatricals several times, until finally, when her schooldays were over, she informed me that she was born to become an actress.

I never shared Katya's enthusiasm for the theatre. Ifa play's any good, one can gain a true impression without troubling actors, I think— one only needs to read it. And if the play's bad, no acting will make it good.

As a young man I often went to the theatre, and now my family takes a box twice a year and 'gives me an airing'. That's not enough to entitle me to judge the theatre, of course, but I shan't say much about it. I don't think the theatre's any better now than it was thirty or forty years ago. I still can't find a glass of clean water in corridors or foyer. Attendants still fine me twenty copecks for my coat, though there's nothing discreditable about wearing warm clothes in winter. The orchestra still plays in the intervals without the slightest need, adding to the impression already conveyed by the play a furttar new and quite uncalled for impression. The men still go to the bar in the intervals and drink spirits. Where there's no progress in small things it would be idle to seek it in matters of substance. When an actor, swathed from head to foot in theatrical traditions and preconceptions, tries to declaim a simple, straightforward soliloquy like 'To be or not to be' in a manner anything but simple, and somehow inevitably attended with hissings and convulsions ofhis entire frame, when he tries to convince me at all costs that Chatsky—who spends so much time talking to fools and falls in love with a foolish girl—is a highly intelligent man, and that Woe from Wit isn't a boring play, then the stage seems to exhale that same ritual tedium which used to bore me forty years ago when they regaled me with bellowings and breast-beatings in the classical manner. And I always come out ofthe theatre more conservative than I went in.

You may convince the sentimental, gullible rabble that the theatre as at present constituted is a school, but that lure won't work on anyone who knows what a school really is. What may happen in fifty or a hundred years, I can't say, but the theatre can only be a form of enter­tainment under present conditions. Yet this entertainment costs too much for us to continue enjoying it. It deprives the country of thou­sands ofhealthy, able young men and women who light have become good doctors, husbandmen, schoolmistresses and officers, had they not devoted themselves to the stage. It deprives the public ofthe evening hours, which are best for intellectual work and friendly converse— not to mention the waste of money, and the moral damage to the theatre-goer who sees murder, adultery or slander improperly handled on the stage.

Katya held quite different views, however, assuring me that the theatre—even in its present form—was superior to lecture-rooms, books, and anything else on earth. The stage was a power uniting all the arts,-the actors were missionaries. No art, no science on its o^ could make an impact on the human psyche as powerful and sincere as the stage—no wonder, then, if a second-rate actor enjoyed- more popularity in the state than the greatest scholar or artist. Nor could any form of public service give such enjoyment and satisfaction as the stage.

So one fine day Katya joined a theatrical troupe and went away— to Ufa, I think—taking with her a lot ,of cash, a host of rainbow- coloured hopes and the most lotdly views of the matter.

Her first letters written on the road were wonderful. I read them, simply astounded that these small sheets of paper could contain so much youth, spiritual integrity and heavenly innocence—yet also subtle, practical judgements such as would have done credit to a good male ^rnd. The Volga, the scenery, the townwns which she visited, her colleagues, hersuccesses and failures—she did not describe them so much as rhapsodize them. Every line breathed that trusting quality which I was used to seeing in her face—and with all this went masses of grammatical mistakes and an almost total lack of punctuation marks.

Within six months I received an extremely romantic, ecstatic letter. 'I'm in love,' it began, and with it was enclosed the photograph of a clean-shaven young man in a broad-brimmed hat with a rug thrownwn over his shoulder. The ensuing letters were still as magnificent as ever, but punctuation marks had now appeared, grammatical mistakes had vanished, and there was a strong masculine flavour about them. It would be a good idea to build a large theatre somewhere on the Volga, Katya wrote. It must be a joint-stock company, and rich businessmen and steamship ownwners must be brought into the project. There would be lots of money in it, terrific takings, and the actors would play on a partnership basis.

Perhaps it really was a good idea, but such schemes can originate only in a man's brain, I feel.

Be this as it may, all seemed to go well for eighteen months or two years. Katya was in love, she had faith in her work, she was happy. But later I began to notice in her letters the obVious signs of a decline. It started with complaints about her associates—the first symptom, and a most sinister one. If a young scholar or literary man begins his career by complaining bitterly about other scholars and literary men, it's a sure sign of premature fatigue and unfimess for his work. Katya wrote that her colleagues missed rehearsals, and never knew their lines. By the fatuous plays which they put Ollf by their bearing on stage, they each revealed utter disrespect for the public. For the sake of box-office receipts, their sole topic of conversation, serious actresses sank to singing popular songs, while tragic actors performed musical skits on deceived husbands, the pregnancy of unfaithful wives and so forth. The wonder was, what with one thing and another, that the provincial stage hadn't yet collapsed entirely— that it could still hang on by a thread so flimsy and rotten.

I wrote Katya a long answer—a very boring one, admittedly.

'I've had many occasions,' I wrote, amongst other things, 'to talk to elderly actbrs, extremely decent folk sympathetically disposed towards myself. From our conversations I could see that their activities were governed less by their ownwn intelligence and free choice than by fashion and society's moods. The best of them had had to play tragedy, operetta, Parisian farce and pantomime in their time, and whichever it was, they always felt they were on the right lines, and were doing good. So, you see, one musm't seek the root of this evil in actors, but more deeply—in the art itself, in society's attitude to it as a whole.'

This letter only irritated Katya.

'We're completely at cross purposes,' she replied. 'I was not referring to these extremely decent folk sympathetically disposed towards your­self, but to a gang of crooks without the faintest shred of decency—a pack of yahoos who only went on the stage because no one would take them anywhere else, and who only call themselves artists out of sheer impudence. There's not one talent among them, but there are plenty of mediocrities, drunkards, schemers and scandal-mongers. My adored art has falen into the clutches of people odious to me, and I can't tell you how bitterly I feel about it. And I'm bitter because even the best of men will only look on evil from a distance, won't go any nearer, and won't stick up for me—but only write me pompous, platitudinous, futile sermons instead.'

And so on. It was all in that vein.

A little later I received the following letter.

'I've been cruelly deceived, I can't go on living. Do what you think fit with my money. I've loved you as my father, my only friend. Farewell.'

Her young man, it turned out, also belonged to that pack of yahoos. I later gathered from certain hints that there had been an attempt at suicide. I think she tried to poison herself. That she fell seriously ill afterwards seems likely because her next letter reached me from Yalta, where her doctors had presumably sent her. Her last letter contained a request to send her a thousand roubles in Yalta quickly.

'I'm sorry my letter's so gloomy,' she ended. 'Yesterday I buried my baby.'

She spent about a year in the Crimea, and then came home.

She had been on the road about four years, during the whole ofwhich time I had played a pretty invidious and curious role in our relations, I can't deny it. When she originally told me that she was going on the stage, and then wrote about her love, when she was periodically seized by fits ofextravagance and I had to keep sending her a thousand or two roubles at her demand, when she wrote ofher intention to die and then of her baby's death—I always felt disconcerted, and could express my sympathy for her lot only by much meditation, and by composing long, boring letters which might just as well never have been written. And all this rime I was supposed to be a father to her, don't you see? I loved her as a daughter!

Katya lives a few hundred yards from me now, having taken a five- room flat and fixed herself up rather comfortably, and in her own peculiar taste. Were one to portray her surroundings, the picture's dominant mood would be laziness—with soft couches and soft stools for lazy bodies, rugs for lazy feet and faded, dim or pastel colours for lazy eyes. A profusion of cheap fans on the walls caters for the lazy psyche, as also do the wretched little pictures wherein eccentricity of technique predominates over content, the welter of little tables and shelves stocked with utterly superfluous and worthless objects, and the shapeless rags in place of curtains.

Add to all this a dread of bright colours, symmetry and space, and you have evidence of perverted natural taste in addition to tempera­mental indolence. Katya lies on the couch reading books day in day out^

While I work, Katya sits near me on the sofa in silence, wrapped in a shawl as if she felt cold. Either because she's so congenial, or because

I was so used to her visits as a little girl, her presence doesn't affect my concentration. I automatically ask her a question from time to time, and she replies very briefly. Or, for the sake of a minute's relaxation, I turn towards her and watch as she pensively scans some medical journal or newspaper. At such times her face no longer carries its former trustful look, I observe, her present expression being cold, listless and abstracted—as with passengers who have a long wait for a train. She still dresses beautifully and simply, but carelessly. Her dress and coiffure have clearly taken no little punishment from the sofas and rocking-chairs on which she sprawls for days on end. Nor is she inquisitive as of old, having given up asking me questions, as if she'd already seen what there is to see in life and didn't expect to learn any­thing new.

Towards four o'clock movement begins in hall and drawing-room— Liza is back from the Conservatory, and has brought some girl friends with her. They are heard playing the piano, exercising their voices and laughing. In the dining-room Yegor lays the table with a clatter of crockery.

'Good-bye,' Katya says. 'I shan't call on your family today. I hope they'll excuse me, I haven't time. Do come and see me again.'

As I escort her to the hall she looks me up and down severely.

'You keep getting thinner,' she says regretfully. 'Why don't you see a doctor? I'll call on Sergey Fyodorovich and ask him to look you over.'

'Don't do that, Katya.'

'What's your family playing at? That's what I don't see! A fine lot they are, I must say.'

She puts her coat on abruptly, and inevitably a couple of pins fall from her carelessly dressed hair to the floor. She's too lazy to do her hair, hasn't the time. She awkwardly hides the straying locks under her hat and leaves.

I enter the dining-room.

'Wasn't that Katya with you just now ?' my wife asks. 'Why didn't she come and see us? It's rather peculiar '

'Mother,' says Liza reproachfully, 'ifshe doesn't want to, never mind. We can't very well go down on bended knee.'

'Say what you like, but it is rather off-hand. To spend three hours in the study without one thought for us. Oh, anyway, let her suit herself.'

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is quite beyond me, one must probably be a woman to appreciate it. Among the hundred and fifty young men whom I see almost daily in my lecture-theatre, and among the hundred or so older men whom I run across every week, there's barely one, I'd stake my life, capable of understanding this hatred and disgust for Katya's past—her pregnancy and the illegitimate child, in other words. And yet I can't recall one woman or girl of my acquaintance who wouldn't harbour such sentiments, consciously or unconsciously. Nor is this because woman is purer and more virtuous than man, for virtue and purity differ precious little from vice unless they're free from malice. I attribute it simply to women's backwardness. The despondency, the sympathy, the conscience-pangs which the spectacle of misery evokes in your modern male—they say a lot more for his cultural and moral level than would hatred and disgust. Now, your female is as tearful and insensitive today as she was in the Middle Ages, and those who advocate educating her like a man are being perfectly sensible, or so I believe.

My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for being un­grateful, proud and eccentric, and for all those many other vices which one woman can always find in another.

Besides myself and my family, two or three of my daughter's girl friends lunch with us, as also does Alexander Adolfovich Gnekker— Liza's admirer and a suitor for her hand. He is a fair-haired young man under thirty, of medium height, very stout and broad-shouldered, with ginger dundreary whiskers near his ears and a tinted little moustache which makes his plump, smooth face look like a toy. He wears a very short jacket, a gaudy waistcoat, trousers very broad on top, very narrow do^n below and patterned in large checks, and yellow heelless boots. He has bulging eyes like a crayfish, his tie resembles a cray­fish's neck. The young man's whole person gives off a smell of cray­fish soup, or so it seems to me. He visits us daily, but no one in the family knows where he comes from, where he went to school, or what his means are. He doesn't play or sing, but he's somehow im­plicated in singing and music as a salesman for someone or other's pianos who's always in and out of the Conservatory, knowing all the celebrities and officiating at concerts. He criticizes music with a great air of authority, and I've noticed that people are quick to agree with him.

As rich men are always surrounded by toadies, so are science and the arts. There seems to be no art, no branch ofleaming free from 'foreign bodies' offriend Gnekker's ilk. Not being a musician, I may be wrong about Gnekker—not that I know him very well, anyway. But his authority seems to me rather suspect, as does his air of profundity when he stands by a piano listening to someone sing or play.

You may be a gentleman and a leading member of your profession a hundred times over, but once you have a daughter there's nothing to protect you from the lower-class vulgarity so frequently obtruded upon your home and mood by courtship, marriage negotiations and wedding. For instance, I simply can't abide the triumphant look on my wife's face when Gnekker's in the house, and I can't put up with bottles of Chateau Lafite, port and sherry served solely to provide him with ocular evidence of our generous and lavish way of life. Neither can I stomach Liza's laugh which she has picked up at the Conserva­tory, or her trick of screwing up her eyes when we have men in the house. Least of all can I comprehend why I should be visited daily by —and lunch daily with—a creature so totally alien to my habits, my studies and the whole tenor of my life, who is also so utterly different from anyone dear to me. My wife and the servants mysteriously whisper about him being 'Liza's young man', but I still can't see what he's doing here, and I feel as nonplussed as if they'd sat a Zulu down beside me at table. What also seems odd is that my daughter, whom I'm used to regarding as a child, should love this tie, these eyes, these soft cheeks.

In the old days I used to enjoy my lunch, or was indifferent to it. But now it only bores and irritates me. Since I became a professor, since I've been a Dean of Faculty, my family has found it necessary to make a complete change in our menu and lunching procedures for some reason.

Instead of the simple dishes familiar to me as student and ordinary doctor, I'm now given 'puree'—or soup with things like white icicles floating in it—and kidneys in Madeira. Professorial rank and fame have for ever cut me off from cabbage stew, tasty pies, goose and apple, bream and kasha. They have also robbed me of our maid Agasha, a chatty old woman who liked a bit of a laugh, and in whose stead a dim, haughty creature called Yegor, with a white glove on his right hand, now serves meals. The intervals between courses arc short, but seem excessively long because there's nothing to occupy them. Our former gaiety, the carefree talk, the jokes, the laughs, the expressions of fond­ness for each other, the delight which used to stir the children, my wife and myself whenever we met in our dining-room—these arc all things of the past. To a busy nun like mysclflunch was a time for relaxation and sociability, while for my wife and children it was a holiday—brief indeed, but bright and gay—when, for one half hour, they knew that I belonged not to science, not to my students ... but to them, and them alone. Now I've lost the knack of growing merry on one glass of wine, and there's no more Agasha, no more bream and kasha, no more uproar such as once greeted minor meal-time scandals like the cat and dog fi ghting under the table, or Katya's bandage falling off her cheek into a bowl of soup.

To describe my present style oflunch is as unappetizing as the eating of it. Solemn in its pompous affectation, my wife's face wears its usual careworn expression.

'I see you don't like the joint,' says she with an a^rious glance at our plates. 'Now, you don't like it, do you? Tell me.'

'Don't worry, dear,' I have to answer, 'the joint's very nice.'

'You always agree with me, Nicholas,' says she. 'You never tell the truth. Dut why is Mr. Gnekker eating so little?'

So it goes on right through the meal, with Liza laughing her staccato laugh and screwing up her eyes. I watch them both, and only now at lunch does it da^n on me that their inner life has long since vanished from my field of vision. Once I lived at home with a real family, I feel, but now I'm just the lunch-guest of a spurious wife, looking at a spurious Liza. A great change has taken place in them both, but I have missed the long process by which it occurred, so no wonder I can't make sense of anything. What caused that change I don't know. The trouble is, perhaps, that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than he granted me. I've been used to holding out against external pressures since boyhood, I've steeled myself pretty well. Such disasters in life as fame, reaching the top of one's profession, abandoning modest com­fort for living above one's means, acquaintance with celebrities and all that—these things have barely touched me, I've kept a whole skin. Dut on my weak, unternpered wife and Liza the whole business has collapsed like an avalanche of snow, crushing them.

Gnekker and the young ladies talk fugues, counterpoint, singers, pianists, Bach and Brahms, while my wife smiles sympathetically, fearing to be suspected of musical ignorance.

'How splendid,' she mutters. 'Really? You don't say!'

Gnekker eats solidly away, making his solid jokes and lending a patronizing ear to the young ladies' observations. Evincing an occa­sional desire to speak bad French, he finds it necessary for some reason to dub me Votre Excellence at such times.

Dut I'm morose. They're as uneasy with me, obviously, as I am with them. I had never come up against class hatred before, but that's what plagues me now, or something like it. I seek only the bad in Gnekker, I find it soon enough, and suffer agonies at the thought of someone outside my o^n circle as suitor for my daughter's hand. His presence affects me badly in another way too. When I'm on my o^n or with people I like, I don't brood on my o^n virtues as a rule— or, ifl do, I find them as trifling as ifI'd only spent one day in academic life. But when I'm with someone like Gnekker, my merits loom before me like some great mountain with its summit lost in cloud, while do^n on the foothills squirm Gnekkers scarce visible to the naked eye.

After lunch I go into my study and light my only pipe of the day, a relic of my bad old habit of puffing away morning noon and night. While I smoke my wife comes in and sits do^n for a talk. As in the mornings, I know what we're going to talk about in advance.

'You and I must have a serious talk, Nicholas,' she begins. 'About Liza, I mean—. Why won't you put your mind to it?'

'To what?'

'You pretend you don't see anything, but that's wrong, one mustn't be so off-hand. Gnekker has intentions towards Liza—what do you say about it?'

'That he's a bad man I can't say because I don't know him. That I don't like him I've told you a thousand times already.'

'Oh, this is impossible, really '

She stands up and walks about in agitation.

'You can't adopt that attitude to a serious step,' says she. 'With a daughter's happiness at stake, one must put all personal considerations aside. All right, I know you don't like him—but if we tum him down now and break it off, what guarantee have you that Liza won't hold it against us for the rest of her life? There aren't too many young men about these days, heaven knows, and another one may not come along. He's very much in love with Liza, and she obviously likes him. He hasn't got a proper job, of course, but that can't be helped. He'll get fixed up somewhere in time, God willing. He's of good family and he's well off.'

'How do you know?'

'He said so himself. His father has a large house in Kharkov and an estate near by. What it comes to, Nicholas, is that you must definitely visit Kharkov.'

'What for?' 'You can go into things there—you know some of the local pro­fessors, and they'll help you. I'd go myself, but I'm a woman and I can't '

'I shan't go to Kharkov,' I say gloomily.

My wife takes fright, and an anguished expression appears on her face.

'For God's sake, Nicholas,' she begs between sobs. 'For God's sake, take this burden from me—I'm in agony.'

The sight of her causes me suffering.

'All right then, Varya,' I say tenderly. 'All right, I'll run downwn to Kharkov if you like and do what you want.'

She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes off to cry in her room while I'm left on my o^n.

Somewhat later a lamp is brought in. Arm-chairs and lampshade throw on walls and floor the familiar shadows of which I have long since tired. Watching them, I feel as if night had fallen and my da^fted insomnia had started already. I lie on the bed, I get up and pace the room, then lie do^n again.

As a rule my nervous excitement reaches its highest pitch in the late afternoon. I begin crying for no good reason, and bury my head in the pillow—afraid of someone coming in, afraid of dying suddenly, ashamed of my tears, and altogether in the most unbearable state of mind. No longer, I feel, can I bear the sight of my lamp, of my books, of the shadows on the floor, nor can I endure the voices ringing in the drawing-room. Some force, unseen and inscrutable, is thrusting me roughly out of my home, and I leap up, quickly dress and slip into the street, heedful to elude the attention of my family. Where shall I go?

The answer to that question has been in my mind for some time—to Katya's.

III

As a rule she's lying on a Turkish divan or sofa, reading. Seeing me, she idly lifts her head, sits up and stretches out her hand.

'You're always lying do^n,' I say after pausing for breath. 'That's bad for you, you should be doing something.'

'Eh?'

'You should be doing something, I say.'

'Doing what ? A woman can only do menial work or go on the stage.' 'Well then, go on the stage if you can't do the other kind of work.'

She says nothing.

'You ought to get married,' I say, halfjoking.

'There's no one to marry—no point in it either.'

'You can't go on like this.'

'Without a husband? A lot that matters—I could have as many men as I liked if I wanted.'

'That's not very nice, Katya.'

'What isn't?'

'What you just said.'

'Come on,' says Katya, noting my distress and wishing to remove the bad impression. 'Now, come with me—there you are.'

She takes me into a small, extremely comfortable room.

'There you are,' she says, pointing to the desk. 'I arranged this for you, you can work here. Come here every day and bring your work— they only interrupt you at home. You will work here, won't you?'

To avoid the offence of a refusal, I reply that I will indeed, and that I like the room very much. Then we both sit downwn in that comfortable room and start talking.

Warmth, comfort, a congenial presence—instead of pleasure, as of old, these things now evoke in me only a strong urge to complain and grouse. I'll somehow feel better, it seems, if I fuss and grumble.

'Things are in a bad way, my dear,' I begin with a sigh. 'Very bad '

'What is?'

'Well, it's like this, my dear. The greatest, the most sacred right of kings is the right of pardon, and I've always felt like a king because I've availed myself of this right up to the limit. I've neverjudged, I've been indulgent, I've gladly forgiven all and sundry. Where others protested or waxed indignant, I merely advised or persuaded. Throughout my life my sole concern has been to make my company tolerable to my family, students, colleagues and servants. This attitude to others has had a fo^ative influence on those around me, I know. But now I'm a king no longer. Something is going on inside me—some process fit only for slaves. Day and night evil thoughts haunt me, feelings hitherto unfamiliar have settled in my heart—hatred, scorn, indignation, out­rage, fear. I've grown excessively severe, exacting, irritable, disagree­able, suspicious. What once provoked me to an extra joke and a jolly laugh, no more—even those things depress my spirits now. And my sense of logic has changed too. Where once I despised only money,

I now harbour malice against rich people, asif they were at fault—not against their money. Where once I hated violence and tyranny, I now hate those who employ violence, as if they alone were to blame—and not the rest of us for our inability to educate each other. What's the meaning of this? If these new thoughts and new feelings proceed from changed convictions, then where did this change come from? Has the world gro^n worse? And I better? Or was I blind before, and apathetic? Now, if the change derives from a general decline in my physical and intellectual powers—and I am ill, after all, I do lose weight every day— then my situation's pathetic, for my new thoughts must be abno^al and morbid. I should be ashamed of them, make little of them '

'Illness is neither here nor there,' Katya breaks in. 'Your eyes have been opened, that's all, and you've seen what, for some reason, you once preferred to ignore. The main thing is, you must make a clean break with your family and get away—that's what I think.'

'Nonsense.'

'You don't love them, so why pretend? Call that a family! Non­entities! If they dropped dead today, not a soul would miss them tomorrow. '

Katya despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. Nowadays one can hardly talk about the right to despise other people. But put yourself in Katya's place, and admit such a right—then she's clearly as entitled to scorn my wife and Liza as they are to hate her.

'Nonentities!' she repeats. 'Did you get any lunch today? Don't tell me they remembered to tell you it was ready! Or that they haven't forgotten your existence!'

'Please be quiet, Katya,' I say sternly.

'Think I enjoy talking about them? I wish I'd never set eyes on them! Now, listen, my dear. Throw everything up and leave—go abroad, and the sooner the better.'

'Oh, rubbish! What about the university?'

'Leave the university as well—what do you want with it? It makes no sense, anyway. You've been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your pupils? Are there many distinguished scholars among them? Just try counting them! As for breeding the sort of doctor who ex­ploits ignorance and earns his hundred thousand roubles—it doesn't need a good man or a brilliant intellect for that! You're not needed.'

I am aghast. 'My God, you're so harsh, so very harsh! Now, be quiet, or I'll leave—1 don't know how to answer such rudeness.'

The maid comes in to announce tea, and over the samovar we change the subject, thank God. Having had my grouse, I now wish to indulge another senile weakness—reminiscences. I tell Katya about my past—informing her, to my o^n amazement, of details that have survived all unsuspected in my memory, while she listens with bated breath, delighted and proud. I particularly like telling her how I was once at a school for clergy's sons, and dreamt of going on to the university.

'I used to walk in our school garden,' I tell her. 'A song or an accordion's grinding floats on the breeze from some faraway tavern, or a troika with bells careers past the school fence—and that's quite enough to fill my heart, and even my stomach, legs and arms, with a sudden happy glow.

'Listening to an accordion, or a dying peal of bells, I'd imagine myself a doctor, and paint pictures of the scene—each better than the last. Now my dreams have come true, as you see. I've received more than I dared to hope. For thirty years I've been a well-loved professor, I've had excellent colleagues, I've enjoyed honours and distinction. I've loved, I've married for love, I've had children. When I look back, in fact, my whole life seems a beautiful and accomplished composition. Now it only remains not to spoil the finale, for which purpose I have to die like a man. If death really is a menace, I have to meet it as befits a teacher, a scholar and the citizen of a Christian country—confidently and with equanimity. But I'm spoiling the finale. I feel I'm drowning, I run off to you, I ask for help, and—"Drown away,'' say you, "that's just what you should be doing".'

Then a bell sounds in the hall. Katya and I recognize the ring.

'It must be Michael Fyodorovich,' we say.

A minute later my colleague, the literary specialist Michael Fyodoro­vich, comes in—a tall, well-built, clean-shaven man of fifty with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He's a good-natured man, an excellent colleague, and comes of an old, rather successful and accomplished family of gentry which has played a prominent part in our literary and educational history. He himself is intelligent, accomplished, highly educated—but he has his foibles. We're all peculiar, we're all freaks in some degree, but his quirks are somewhat extreme, and they're rather a menace to his friends. I know quite a few of them whom his eccen­tricities have blinded to his many virtues.

He enters and slowly peels off" his gloves.

'Hallo,' says he in a deep, velvety voice. 'Having tea? How con­venient. It's hellishly cold.'

Then he sits down at table, takes a glass and starts speaking im­mediately. Nothing is more typical of his delivery than his unfailing jocularity—a sort of cross between philosophy and buffoonery re­miniscent of Shakespeare's grave-diggers. He always treats of serious topics—but never treats them seriously. Though his judgements are always harsh and acrimonious, the soft, level, jocular tone somehow prevents the harshness and acrimony fromjarring, and one soon grows used to them. Each evening he brings along five or six items of univer­sity gossip With which he leads off when he sits down at table.

'Oh Lord,' he sighs with a sardonic twitch of his black eyebrows. 'There are some clowns in this world, I must say!'

'Meaning what?' asks Katya.

'I'm leaving a lecture this morning when I meet friend So-and-so on the stairs, the old fool. He walks along with that horsy chin jutting out as usual, looking for someone to hear him moan about his migraine, his wife and the students who won't go to his lectures. Well, think I, he's spotted me, and I'm lost, the game's up '

And so it goes on, all in that style. Or else he leads off like this.

'I went to dear old Such-and-such's public lecture yesterday. The less said about this, the better—but I'm astonished that the dear old alma mater dares put such numskulls as this creature, such certified boobies, on public display. Why, the man's an imbecile in the international class—oh yes he is, European champion! He lectures, believe it or not, as ifhe was sucking a boiled sweet—champ, champ, champ! He panics, he can't keep track of his notes, while his wretched thoughts crawl along about as fast as an abbot on a bicycle, and above all you can't make head or tail of what he's driving at. It's so fiendishly dull, the very flies drop dead. The only comparable bore is the annpal ceremony in the university hall, the day of our traditional oration, da^ftation take it!'

Then he makes an abrupt transition.

'About three years ago, as Nicholas here will remember, I had to give that oration. It was hot and stuffy, my uniform was too tight under the arms—sheer hell it was! I lecture for half an hour, one hour, an hour and a half, two hours. "Well," think I, "I've only ten pages left, praise the Lord!" And there are four pages at the end that I needn't bring in at all—I'd reckoned on leaving them out. So I reckon I've only six pages left. But then I glance in front of me, see? And I notice some general with a medal ribbon, and a bishop—sitting together in the front row. The poor creatures are bored rigid, their eyes are popping out of their heads in their efforts to stay awake, yet they try to look as if they're attending, they make out that they understand and appre­ciate my lecture. "Very well," think I, "if you like it so much you can da^A well have it, and serve you right!" So I go ahead and give them the last four pages too.'

As is the way of these sardonic people, only his eyes and eyebrows smile when he speaks. His eyes then express neither hatred nor malice, but a great deal of wit, and the peculiar foxy cunning only seen in very observant people. And talking of eyes, I've spotted another peculiarity in his. When he takes a glass from Katya, listens to her speak or glances after her as she leaves the room on some brief errand, I notice something tender, supplicatory and innocent in his look.

The maid takes the samovar away, and serves a large piece of cheese, some fruit and a bottle of Crimean champagne—a poorish vintage of which Katya had been fond in the Crimea. Picking up two packs of cards from the shelves, Michael Fyodorovich plays patience. But though he claims that certain forms of patience require much imagina­tion and attention, he doesn't pause from his conversational diversions as he plays. Katya follows his cards keenly, helping him more by mime than words. She drinks no more than two glasses of wine in an evening, and I drink a quarter of a glass.

The rest of the bottle devolves upon Michael Fyodorovich, who can put away a great deal without ever getting drunk.

We discuss various problems, mainly on the loftiest level, during the game of patience, and our great love—science—comes in for rougher treatment than anything else.

'Science has had its day, thank God,' enunciates Michael Fyodoro­vich. 'It's day is done, indeed it is, and mankind already feels the need for some substitute. Science grew out of superstition, it was fed on superstition, and it now represents superstition s quintessence, like its outmoded granddams—alchemy, metaphysics and philosophy. And what have people got out of it, anyway ? Between learned Europeans and the entirely unscientific Chinese, there's precious little difference, isn't there—and that purely external ? The Chinese have done without science, and what have they missed?'

'Flies don't have science either,' I say. 'What of it?'

'Don't be angry, Nicholas, I only say this here, you know, it's between us three. I'm more discreet than you think, I wouldn't talk this way in public—God forbid! The masses hold the superstitious view that science and the arts are a cut above agriculture, trade and handicraft. Our section of society lives on this superstition, and God forbid that you and I should destroy it.'

As the game of patience proceeds, the younger generation also finds itself in hot water.

'Our people have gone to seed,' sighs Michael Fyodorovich. 'I say nothing of ideals and all that, but if they could only work and think sensibly! It's Lermontov's "How sadly I regard the present generation" all over again.'

'Yes, they've degenerated terribly,' Katya agrees. 'Tell me, have you had one outstanding student in the last five or six years ?'

'I can't speak for other professors, but I don't remember any, some­how.'

'I've seen many students in my day, many of your young scholars, many actors. And what do you think ? Not once have I been privileged to meet an ordinary interesting person among them, let alone any star performers or high flyers. They're all so dim, so mediocre, so puffed up with pretensions '

All this talk about things going to the bad—it always affects me as if I'd accidentally overheard unpleasant gossip about my daughter. I'm insulted by the sweeping nature of indictments built on such hackneyed truisms and bugbears as degeneracy, lack of idealism and harking back to the good old days. Every criticism—even one expressed in ladies' company—should be formulated with maximum precision, or else it isn't criticism, it's just baseless calumny unworthy of a decent man.

I'm an old man, I've been in university work for thirty years, but I see no degeneration or lack of idealism, I don't think things are worse now than they used to be. My porter Nicholas, whose experience has some bearing on the matter, calls today's students no better and no worse than those who went before.

If asked what I dislike about my present students, I shouldn't answer at once or say much, but I should be adequately specific. Knowing their defects, I don't need to resort to a fog of platitude. I dislike their smoking, spirit-drinking, marrying late in life, and being so happy-go- lucky—and often so callous—that they condone starvation among their fellows by not paying their dues to the students' aid society. They don't know modern languages, nor do they express themselves in correct Russian. Only yesterday a colleague—a specialist in hygiene—was com­plaining to me that he has to give twice as many lectures because their physics is weak and they're wholly ignorant of meteorology.

They gladly fall under the influence of the latest writers, and not the best ones at that, but they're quite indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus or Pascal, say, and this inability to distinguish great from small reveals their lack of practical experience more than anything else. All difficult problems of a more or less social nature—for instance, that of colonizing unpopulated areas of the country—they decide by getting up a public subscription, not by scientific investigation and experiment, though this last procedure is well within their grasp and has a close bearing on their mission in life. They gladly become assistant surgeons, registrars, demonstrators and housemen, and they're ready to do these jobs up to the age of forty, though independence, a feeling of freedom and personal initia­tive are just as much needed in science as in art or commerce. I have pupils and audiences, but no helpers and successors. So I like them, I'm enthusiastic about them—but without being proud ofthem. And so on and so forth.

However numerous such defects may be, they can breed a pessimistic or abusive mood only in a poor-spirited, feeble individual. They're all adventitious and temporary, they derive exclusively from living conditions. A few decades will see them vanish or yield to other, new defects such as cannot be avoided, and will also alarm the craven- hearted in their tum. Students' misdemeanours often annoy me, but such vexation is nothing to the thirty years of enjoyment which I've had through talking and lecturing to my pupils, keeping an eye on their attitudes and comparing them with people in different walks of life.

Michael Fyodorovich casts his aspersions, and Katya listens, neither noticing the bottomless pit into which they are gradually sucked by the patently innocent diversion of condemning their neighbour. They don't sense how ordinary talk gradually turns into sneering and scoffing, or how they both start employing the techniques ofdownright muck-raking.

'You meet some really killing characters!' says Michael Fyodoro­vich. 'I dropped in on friend Yegor Petrovich yesterday, where I run across a student type, one of your medicals—in his third year, I think. He has a face in—well, in the Dobrolyubov style, with that stamp of profundity on his brow. We get talking.

'"Oh yes, young man," say I, "I was reading that some German, whose name I forget, has extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain—idiotin." 'Know what ? He falls for it! And even adopts a respectful expression, as if to say "Good for us!" Then I went to the theatre the other day. I take my seat. Just in front, in the next row, sit a couple of them—one a member of the Chosen Race and evidently a law student, and the other shaggy creature a medico. The medical boy's as tight as a coot, pays no attention to the stage at all, andjust snoozes away, nodding his head. But as soon as some actor launches into a noisy soliloquy, or simply raises his voice, my medico starts and pokes his neighbour in the ribs.

"'What's that?" he asks. "Noble sentiments, eh?"

' "Yes indeed," answers the Chosen One.

'"Hurray!" bellows our medico. "Elevating stuff, this! Bravo!"

'This drunken clot hasn't come to the theatre for ar t, you see, but for noble sentiments. He wants to be edified!'

Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange kind of guffaw, breathing in and out in rapid, even rhythm, as if playing a concertina, while her nostrils are the only part of her face to express amusement. But I feel do^n«st, and don't know what to say. I lose my temper, I flare up, I leap from my seat.

'Why don't you just shut up?' I shout. 'Why sit here poisoning the air with your breath like a couple of toads? Stop it!'

Without waiting for an end to their calumnies, I prepare to go home. It's high time anyway, gone ten o'clock.

'Well, I'll stay a bit longer,' says Michael Fyodorovich. 'Have I your permission, Miss Katya ?'

'You have,' Katya answers.

'Bene. Then have them bring on another little bottle.'

They both see me into the hall with candles.

'You've gro^n very thin of late, and you've aged,' says Michael Fyodorovich as I put on my fur coat. 'What's up ? Ill, arc you?'

'Yes, a bit.'

'And he won't see a doctor,' Katya puts in gloomily.

'But why ever not? This won't do! God helps those who help themselves, dear man. My regards to your family, and my excuses for not calling on them. I'll come round and say good-bye in a day or two before I go abroad—I'll make a point of it. I leave next week.'

As I come away from Katya's I'm irritable, alarmed by the talk about my illness and annoyed with myself. I wonder whether I really should consult a colleague about my health. Then I immediately picture him sounding my chest, after which he goes towards the window without speaking, thinks a little, and then turns to me, trying to prevent me from reading the truth in his face.

'I see nothing to worry about at the moment,' says he in a neutral voice. 'Still, I'd advise you to give up work, dear colleague.'

And that would rob me of my last hope.

What man lives without hope ? Now that I am diagnosing my own condition and treating myself, I have times when I hope that I'm deceived by my o^n ignorance, that I'm wrong about the albumen and sugar that I find—wrong about my heart, too, and about the oedemas which I've twice noticed in the mornings. Perusing textbooks of therapy with true hypochondriac fervour, and changing my nostrums every day, I still fancy I may stumble on some consolation. But this is all so trivial.

Whether the sky's cloudy or aglow with moon and stars, I always gaze at it on my way back, thinking how death will shortly overtake me. One might suppose that my thoughts must be as profound as that sky on these occasions, and as bright and vivid.

Far from it! I think about myself, my wife, Liza, Gnekker, students, people in general. My thoughts are wretched and trivial, I'm not honest with myself, and all the time my outlook is that expressed by the famous Arakcheyev in a private letter: 'Nothing good can exist without evil in this world, and there's always more evil than good.' All is vile, in other words, there's nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years of my life must be written off. Catching myself tanking like this, I cultivate the conviction that such ideas are accidental, temporary, superficial.

'But if that's so,' I immediately think, 'why am I drawnwn to see those two toads every evening ?'

I swear I'll never go to Katya's any more—yet I shall visit her again the very next evening, I know.

Tugging my door-bell and walking upstairs, I feel I've lost my family and don't want it back. These new, Arakcheyev-like ideas of mine obviously aren't accidental or temporary at all, they dominate my entire being. Sick in conscience, despondent, indolent, scarce moving my limbs, and feeling about fifty tons heavier, I go to bed and soon fall asleep.

Follows another sleepless night.

IV

Summer comes, life changes.

One fme morning Liza enters my room.

'Come, sir,' says she in jocular tone. 'All is ready.'

Sir is taken into the street, put in a cab and driven off. For want of anything better to do, I read the shop signs backwards as I pass. Traktir, thr: word for 'tavern', comes out as Ritkart, which would do as a baronial surname—the Baroness Ritkart. Then I drive through fields past a graveyard, which makes no impression on me at all, though I'll soon be lying there. Then I go through a wood, then through fields again. This is boring. After travelling for two hours, Sir is taken into the growid floor of a summer cottage and placed in a small, very jolly room with light blue wall-paper.

At night I sleep as little as before, but instead ofwaking and listening to my wife in the morning, I lie in bed—not asleep, but a prey to drowsiness, that semi-conscious state when you know you're not asleep, yet dream. I rise at noon and sit at my desk through force of habit, but instead of working I amuse myself with French books in yellow wrappers, which Katya sends me. To read Russian authors would be more patriotic, of course, but I'm not particularly disposed in their favour, I must confess. Two or three veterans apart, all modem literature seems to me less literature than a variety of cottage industry which exists solely to enjoy the patronage of persons reluctant to avail themselves ofits products. Even the best ofthese homely artefacts can't be called noteworthy, nor can one praise them sincerely without qualification. The same applies to all those literary novelties that I've read during the last ten or fifteen years and which include nothing noteworthy, nothing which can be praised without a 'but'. Such a product may be witty and uplifting—but lacks talent. Or else it's talented and uplifting, but lacks wit. Or, finally, it may be talented and witty, but lacks uplift.

I wouldn't call these French books talented, witty or uplifting. They don't satisfy me either. But they're less boring than the Russian, and it's not unusual to find in them that element vital to originality—a feeling of personal freedom such as Russian authors lack. I can't remember one new work where the author wasn't at pains to hobble himself with all sorts of conditions and contracts with his conscience from the first page onwards. One fears to speak of the naked body, another has tied himself hand and foot with psychological ^^ysis, a third requires a 'warm attitude to man', while a fourth deliberately pads the thing out with whole pages of nature description so as not to be suspected of tendentiousness.

One insists on his work showing him as a townsman of the lower orders, another must be a gentleman and so on. They have premedita­tion, caution, an eye to the main chance, but they lack the freedom and courage to write what they like, and hence they lack the creative.spirit.

All this relates to so-called belles-lettres.

As for learned Russian articles—on sociology, say, on art and all that —the reason I don't read them is sheer nervousness. As a boy and youth I was terrified of hall-porters and theatre ushers for some reason, and that terror is with me to this day. I still fear them. One fears only what one doesn't understand, it's said. And hard indeed it is to see quite why hall-porters and ushers should be so pompous, overweening and sub­limely unmannerly. Reading learned articles fills me withjust the same vague dread. That fantastic pomposity, this air of magisterial banter, those familiar allusions to foreign authors, the ability to preserve one's dignity while on a wild-goose chase—it's all rather beyond me, it terrifies me, and it's most unlike the modesty, the calm, gentlemanly tone to which I've gro^n accustomed when reading our natural scientists and medical authors. Articles apart, I find it hard to read even translations made or edited by your serious Russian. The presumptuous­ly condescending tone ofthe introductions, the profusion oftranslator's notes which stop me concentrating, the question marks and the word sic in brackets with which the liberal translator has bespattered the whole article—these things encroach on the author's personality and on my independence as a reader, or so I feel. I was once called in to give expert evidence in a county court. During the adjournment a fellow- expert pointed out how rude the prosecutor had been to the accused, who included two ladies of good social standing. I don't think I was exaggerating in the least when I told my colleague that the prosecutor's manner was no ruder than that obtaining between the authors of learned articles. So offensive is this manner, in fact, that one can't speak of it without distaste. They either handle each other, or the writers whom they criticize, with such egregious obsequiousness that it lowers their o^n dignity—or, conversely, treat them with far scanter cere­mony than I have my future son-in-law Gnckker in these jottings and musings. Allegations of irresponsibility, of impure motives—of all kinds of criminal activity, even—arc the staple embellishment of learned articles. And that is, as young doctors like to say in their papers, the ultima ratio! Such attitudes are inevitably reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, which is why I'm not one bit surprised that the new items accruing to our literature in the last ten or fifteen years contain heroes who drink too much vodka and heroines whose chastity leaves something to be desired.

I read French books and look out of the open window. I see the sharp points of my garden fence, two or three wizened little trees, and then—beyond the fence—a road, the fields, a broad belt of pine-wood. I often enjoy watching a little boy and girl, both with fair hair and torn clothes, as they climb the fence and laugh at my hairless pate. In their gleaming little eyes I read the words: 'Go up, thou bald head.' They must be pretty well the only people who care nothing for my fame and rank.

Out here I don't have callers every day, and I'll mention only the visits of Nicholas and Peter Ignatyevich. Nicholas usually comes on a Sunday or saint's day—supposedly on business, but really to see me. He arrives quite tipsy—which he never is in winter.

'What news?' I ask, going to meet him in the hall.

'Sir!' says he, pressing a hand to his heart and looking at me with the fervour of a lover. 'Sir! May God punish me, may lightning strike me where I stand! Gaudeamus igitur juvenes tra-la-la!'

He kisses me eagerly on shoulders, sleeves and buttons.

'Is all well ?' I ask.

'Sir, I swear by Almighty '

He keeps on swearing to no purpose and soon grows tedious, so I send him to the kitchen where they give him a meal.

Peter Ignatyevich also comes out on holidays, especially to look me up and share his thoughts. He usually sits at my table. Modest, dapper, judicious, not venturing to cross his legs or lean his elbows on the table, he recounts in a soft, level, smooth, pedantic little voice sundry supposedly fascinating and spicy novelties culled from journals and pamphlets. All these items are alike, all add up to something like this. A Frenchman has made a discovery. Someone else, a German, has caught him out by proving that this discovery was made back in 1870 by some American. Now someone else again, another German, has out^na:uvred both—proving that they slipped up by taking air bubbles for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when trying to amuse me, Peter Ignatyevich discourses in long-winded, circumstantial fashion like one defending his dissertation—giving a detailed catalogue ofhis bibliographical sources, endeavo^ъg not to misquote his names or the dates and issues of his jou^^s, and never calling someone plain 'Petit', but always 'Jean-Jacques Petit'. Sometimes he stays for a meal, and spends the whole time telling these same pithy anecdotes which depress the whole table. Should Gnekker and Liza mention fugue and counterpoint, or Brahms and Bach, in his presence, he modestly drops his eyes and betrays embarrassment, ashamed for such trivialities to be invoked before two serious people like him and me.

In my present mood five minutes of him is enough to bore me as if I'd been seeing and hearing him from time immemorial. I loathe the poor fellow. His quiet, level voice and pedantic speech shrivel me up, his stories numb my brain.

He has the greatest good will for me, he only talks to me to give me pleasure, and I repay him by goggling back as if trying to hypno­tize him.

'Go!' I think. 'Go, go, go!'

But not being susceptible to telepathy hejust stays on and on and on.

When he's with me, I'm obsessed by the thought that he'll very likely be appointed to succeed me when I die, and my poor lecture- room seems to me like an oasis with a dried-up spring. I'm surly with Peter Ignatyevich—tacitum and gloomy, as if these thoughts were his fault, not mine. When he praises German scholars in his usual fashion, I no longer make fun of him good-humouredly, as once I did.

'Your Germans are asses,' I mutter gloomily.

It reminds me of when Professor Nikita Krylov was alive. He was once bathing with Pirogov in Revel, and lost his temper because the water was so cold. 'These Germans are scoundrels!' he cursed. I treat Peter Ignatyevich badly. Only when he's leaving—when I look through the window and glimpse his grey hat flickering behind the garden fence—do I want to call him back and say: 'Forgive me, dear fellow!'

Lunch is more boring than in winter. That same Gnekker, whom I now loathe and despise, eats with me almost daily. Where once I endured his presence in silence, I now make cutting remarks at his expense, causing my wife and Liza to blush. Yielding to malice, I often utter complete imbecilities without knowing why. For instance, I once gave Gnekker a long, contemptuous stare. Then I suddenly barked out, apropos of nothing:

'An eagle on occasion may swoop lower than a hen,

But the clouds the eagle soars through are beyond that chicken's ken.'

Most aggravating of all, Hen Gnekker turns out far cleverer than the professorial eagle. Knowing that he has my wife and daughter on his side, he pursues the tactic of answering my cutting remarks with condescending silence.

'The old boy has a screw loose,' he implies. 'So why talk to him?'

Or else he teases me good-humouredly. It's astonishing how petty one can be—I can spend the whole meal brooding on the day when Gnekker will turn out an impostor, Liza and my wife will realize their mistake, and I shall make fun of them. But fancy conceiving such inane ideas with one foot in the grave!

Nowadays we also have disagreements such as I could once conceive only through hearsay. Shameful as it is, I'll describe one which occurred the other afternoon.

I'm sitting in my room smoking a pipe. In comes my wife as usual, sits downwn and says what a good idea it would be to pop over to Kharkov now that the weather's warm and we're free, and find out what sort of man this Gnekker really is.

'All right, I'll go,' I agree.

Pleased with me, my wife gets up and goes to the door, but comes back at once.

'By the way, I've another request,' says she. 'I know you'll be angry, but it's my duty to warn you—. I'm sorry, Nicholas, but there's talk among our friends and neighbours about your visiting Katya so much. She's a clever, educated girl, I'm not denying that, and she's good company. But for someone at your time of life, and in your social position, to enjoy her society—well, it is rather odd, you know—. What's more, her reputation is hardly '

I have a rush of blood to the head. My eyes flash, I jump up, I clutch my head, I stamp my feet.

'Leave me alone!' I shout ina voice unlike my o^n. 'Leave me alone! Leave me!'

My face must look terrible, and my voice must be strange indeed, for my wife suddenly blenches and shrieks, also in a desperate voice unlike her ownwn. At our shouts Liza and Gnekker run in, followed by Yegor.

'Leave me alone!' I shout. 'Get out! Leave me!'

My legs are numb and bereft of sensation, I feel myself fall into someone's arms. Then I briefly hear the sound of weeping, and plunge into a swoon which lasts for two or three hours.

As for Katya, she visits me daily in the late afternoon, and neither our neighbours nor our friends can fail to notice that, of course. She comes in for a minute, then takes me out for a drive. She keeps her own horse, and a new chaise bought this summer. By and large she lives pretty lavishly—having taken an expensive detached villa with a big garden, she has moved all her belongings there from town, and keeps two maids and a coachman.

'Katya,' I often ask her, 'what will you live on when you've spent all your father's money?'

'We'll see about that,' answers she.

'That money deserves to be taken more seriously, my dear. It was earned by a good man's honest labour.'

'So I'm aware, you've told me that before.'

First we drive through open country, then through the pine-wood which can be seen from my window. Nature seems as lovely as ever, though the devil whispers that when I'm dead in three or four months' time, none of these pines and firs, these birds and white clouds in the sky, will miss me. Katya likes driving, and is pleased that the day is fine, and I'm sitting beside her. She's in a good mood, and doesn't speak harshly.

'You're a very fine man, Nicholas Stepanovich,' she says. 'You're a rare specimen—no actor could play you. Now, take me, say, or Michael Fyodorovich—even a poor actor could play us. But no one could act you. I envy you too, I envy you terribly. What do I add up to, after all? What indeed?'

She thinks for a minute.

'I'm a negative phenomenon, aren't I?' she asks. 'Well, Nicholas Stepanovich ?'

'Yes,' I reply.

'H'm. Then what am I to do?'

What can I tell her? 'Work', 'Give all you have to the poor', 'Know yourself—these things are easily said, so easily that I don't know how to answer.

When teaching the art of healing, my colleagues on the therapy side advise one to 'individualize each separate case'. Following this advice, one comes to see that the techniques recommended in the manuals as best—and as fully applicable to a textbook case—turn out quite un­suitable in specific instances. Moral ailments arc the same.

But I have to give some answer.

'You have too much spare time, my dear,' I say. 'You should find an occupation. Now, why shouldn't you go on the stage again if that's your real line?'

IT V »

I can t.

'Your tone and manner are those of a victim. I don't like that, my dear. It's your o^n fault. Remember, you began by getting angry with people and the way things were done ? But you did nothing to improve the things or the people. You didn't resist evil, you just caved in—so you're a victim of your o^n weakness, not a battle casualty. Well, you were young and inexperienced then, of course, but now everything may be different. So go ahead, honestly! You'll be working, serving the sacred cause of art '

'Don't be so devious, Nicholas Stepanovich,' Katya breaks in. 'Let's agree once and for all that we can talk about actors, actresses and writers—but we'll leave art out ofit. You're a marvellous, rare person, but you don't know enough about art to be sincere in calling it sacred. You have no feel for art, no ear. You've been so busy all your life, you've had no time to cultivate this feel. And anyway—I don't like this talk about art!' she goes on nervously. 'I dislike it! The thing's been vulgarized enough already, thank you very much!'

'Who vulgarized it?'

'Some by drunkenness, the newspapers by their patronizing attitude, and clever men by their theories.'

'Theories are neither here nor there.'

'Oh yes they are. When someone theorizes, it shows he doesn't understand.'

To prevent unpleasantness, I hurriedly change the subject, and then remain silent for a while. Only when we emerge from the wood and make for Katya's villa do I take up the topic again.

'You still haven't answered me,' I say. 'Why don't you want to go back to the stage?'

'Nicholas Stepanovich, this is really cruel!' she shrieks, suddenly flushing crimson. 'Do you want it spelt out for you? All right then, if that's what you want. I'm no good at it. I have no talent, and—and I have a lot of vanity. So there !'

After making this confession, she turns her face away and gives a powerful tug at the reins to hide the trembling of her hands.

Driving up to her villa, we see Michael Fyodorovich from afar strolling near the gate and impatiently awaiting us.

'There's that Michael Fyodorovich again,' says Katya, annoyed. 'Can't you get rid of him—please! I'm sick of him—he's half dead, confound him !'

Michael Fyodorovich should have gone abroad long ago, but puts off his departure every week. One or two changes have occurred in him of late. He looks pinched, somehow. Wine makes him tipsy, which it never used to, and his black eyebrows are going grey. When our chaise pulls up by the gate, he can't hide his delight and im­patience. He fussily helps the two of us do^n, firing rapid quettions, laughing, rubbing his hands. That tender, supplicatory, innocent look which I'd previously noticed only in his eyes—his whole face is now suffused with it. He rejoices—yet feels ashamed of his joy, ashamed of this habit of calling on Katya every evening, and he finds it necessary to motivate his appearance with some obvious absurdity such as: 'I was just passing on an errand and thought I'd look in for a minute.'

We all three go indoors. First we drink tea, after which objects long familiar appear on the table—the two packs of cards, the large piece of cheese, the fruit, the bottle of Crimean champagne. Our topics of conversation are not new, they haven't changed since winter. The university comes in for abuse, as do students, literature and the theatre. Calumny clogs the stifling air, and it is no longer two toads, as in winter, which exhale their poisonous breath, but a whole trio of them. Besides the velvet baritone laugh and the loud guffaw like the sound of a concertina, the serving maid can also hear an unpleasant rattling snigger resembling the chuckle of a stage general in a farce.

v

There arc terrible nights with thunder, lightning, rain and wind— 'sparrow nights', country people call them. There was once such a sparrow night in my personal life.

I wake up after midnight, and suddenly jump out of bed. I'm on the point of dying quite suddenly, I somehow feel. Why this feeling? There's no physical sensation pointing to a sudden end, yet terror clutches at my heart, as if I'd just seen the huge glow of some siiister conflagration.

I quickly strike a light, drink water straight from the carafe, rush to the open window. The night is superb, with a smell of hay and some other very sweet scent. I sec the sharp points of my garden fence, the sleepy, wizened little trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of wood. There's a very bright, peaceful moon in the sky, and not a single cloud. It's quiet, not a leaf moves. I feel as if all these things were looking at me, and listening for me to start dying.

It's an eerie feeling. I close the window and run to my bed. I feel for my pulse. Not finding it in my wrist, I feel for it in my temple, then in my chin, then again in my wrist—and all these places are cold, clammy with sweat. I breathe faster and faster, my body trembles, all my inside is moving, my face and bald pate feel covered with a spiders' web.

What shall I do? Call my family? No, there's no point—I've no idea what my wife and Liza could do if they came in.

I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes and wait—just wait.

My back's cold, and feels as if it was being sucked inside me, and I sense that death is sure to sneak up quietly from behind.

'Kee-vee, kee-vee!' something suddenly shrieks in the night's still­ness, and I don't know where it comes from—my chest or the street.

'Kee-vee, kee-vee!'

God, how appalling! I'd have another drink of water, butI'm scared to open my eyes, afraid to lift my head. This is an unreasoning, animal fear. Why I'm so scared, I haven't the faintest idea—whether because of an urge to live, or because new, as yet unknown, pain is in store for me.

In the room above me someone is groaning or laughing. I listen. Soon afterwards footsteps are heard on the stairs. Someone goes quickly do^n, then back up again. A minute later steps are again heard downstairs. Someone stops near my door and listens.

'Who's there?' I shout.

The door opens, I boldly open my eyes and see my wife—her face pale, her eyes tear-stained.

'Can't you sleep, Nicholas?' she asks.

'What is it?'

'Come and have a look at Liza, for God's sake. There's something wrong with her.'

'All right—I'll be glad to,' I mutter, delighted not to be alone. 'Very well—straight away.'

I follow my wife and hear her speaking, but am too upset to take in any of it. Her candle throwsjumping patches oflight on the steps, our long shadows quiver, my legs trip in the skirts of my dressing-gown, I gasp for breath, I feel as if someone's chasing me and trying to seize my back.

'I shall die here and now on these stairs,' I think. 'Now '

But then we pass up the staircase and along the dark corridor with the Italian window, and enter Liza's room. She sits on the bed in her night-go^n with her bare feet dangling. She is groaning.

'God, God!' she mutters, frowning in the light of our candle. 'I can't stand it, I can't '

'Liza, my child,' I say. 'What's the matter?'

Seeing me, she shrieks and throws herself on my neck.

'My kind father,' she sobs. 'My good, kind father, my darling, my dearest! I don't know what's the matter, I feel so awful.'

She puts her arms round me, kisses me and babbles endearments such as I used to hear from her when she was a little girl.

'Be calm, child—really!' I say. 'You mustn't cry. I feel awful my­self.'

I try to tuck her in, my wife gives her some water, and we both potter about haphazardly at her bedside. I jog my wife's shoulder with my o^n, reminded of the days when we used to bath our children together.

'Help her, can't you?' begs my wife. 'Do something!'

But what can I do?. Nothing. Something's depressing the child, but I understand nothing, know nothing.

'Never mind,' is all I can mutter. 'It'll pass—. Sleep, sleep '

To make thi,jigs worse, dogs suddenly howl in our yard—quietly and hesitantly at first, but then in a rowdy duet. I never used to bother about omens like dogs howling or owls hooting, but now my heart sinks in anguish, and I hasten to find an explanation for the howling.

'It means nothing,' I think. 'It's just the way one organism affects another. My extreme nervous tension infected my wife, then Liza and the dog, and that's all. Such infection is behind all forebodings and premonitions.'

Returning to my room soon afterwards to write Liza a prescription, I no longer brood on my impending death, but just feel so downcast and forlorn that I actually regret not having died suddenly. I stand motionless in the centre of the room for a while, wondering what to prescribe for Liza, but the groans above my ceiling fade away, and I decide not to prescribe anything. But I still stand there .

There's a deathly hush, a quiet so intense that it makes your ears tingle, as some writer once put it. Time passes slowly, and the strips of moonlight look as if they had congealed on the window-sill, for they don't budge.

Da^n is still a long way off.

But then the garden gate squeaks. Someone creeps in, breaks a twig off one of the scraggy saplings, and cautiously taps the window.

'Nicholas,' I hear a whisper. 'Nicholas Stepanovich!'

I open the window and feel asifl'm dreaming. Beneath the window, huddled against the wall and bathed in moonlight stands a black- garbed woman whose huge eyes stare at me. Her face is pale and stern —and weird, like marble, in the moonlight. Her chin quivers.

'It's me,' she says. 'Me—Katya.'

By moonlight all women's eyes look large and black, and people seem taller and paler, which is probably why I had failed to recognize her at first.

'What do you want?'

'I'm sorry,' she says, 'but I suddenly felt unutterably depressed, some­how. I couldn't bear it, so I came here, there was a light in your window and—and I decided to knock. I'm sorry—. Oh, I was so depressed, did you but know. What are you doing now?'

'Nothing—I can't sleep.'

'I had some premonition—it doesn't matter, anyway.'

She raises her eyebrows, tears shine in her eyes, and her whole face glows with that familiar, trustful look which I have not seen for so long.

'Nicholas Stepanovich,' she beseeches, stretching out both arms to me. 'My dear friend, I beg you—1 implore you—. If you don't despise my affection and respect, do grant me this request.'

'What request?'

'Take my money.'

'Oh, really, don't be silly! What do I want with your money ?'

'You can go somewhere for your health—you need treatment. You will take it, won't you, my dear?'

She stares avidly into my face.

'You will,' she repeats, 'won't you?'

'No, my dear, I won't,' I say. 'No thank you.'

She turns her back on me and bows herhead. I must have refused her in a tone which brooked no discussion of money.

'Go home and sleep,' say I. 'We'll meet tomorrow.'

'So you don't consider me your friend?' she asks dejectedly.

'That's not what I'm saying, but your money's no good to me now.'

'I'm sorry,' she says, dropping her voice an octave. 'I see what you mean. To borrow money from someone like me—a retired actress—. Good-bye, anyway.'

And she leaves in such haste that I don't even have time to say good­bye.

VI

I'm in Kharkov.

It would be pointless, and beyond my powers, to fight against my present mood. So I've decided that the last days of my life shall at least be above reproach in the formal sense. If I'm in the wrong where my family's concerned—as I fully realize I am—I'll try to do what they want. If I'm to go to Kharkov, then to Kharkov I will go. Besides, I've grownwn so indifferent to everything lately that I really don't in the least care where I go—Kharkov, Paris or Berdichev.

I arrived at noon, and took a room in a hotel near the cathedral. The train's jolting upset me, I had draughts blowing right through me, and now I'm sitting on my bed, clutching my head and waiting for my nervous tic to start. I ought to visit some professors of my acquaintance today, but I have neither strength nor inclination.

The old corridor servant comes in and asks ifl have bed linen. I keep him for five minutes, putting several questions about Gnekker, the object of my errand. The servant turns out to be a Kharkov man who knows the city inside out, but he doesn't remember any house belonging to a Gnekker. I ask about the country estates and the answer is the same.

The corridor clock strikes one, then two, then three.

These last months of my life, this waiting for death, seem to last far longer than the rest of my life put together. Never before could I resign myself to the slow passage of time as I can now. Waiting for a train at the station, or sitting through an examination once used to make a quarter of an hour seem an eternity, but now I can sit motionless all night on my bed, reflecting with total unconcern that tomorrow night will be just as long and colourless, and so will the night after.

Five o'clock strikes in the corridor, then six, then seven.

It grows dark.

There is a dull ache in my check—the onset of the tic. To occupy my mind, I revert to a point of view which I held before I became so apathetic.

'Why', I ask, 'should a distinguished man like myself, one of the heads of his profession, sit in this small hotel room, on this bed with the unfamiliar grey blanket. Why do I look at this cheap tin wash- stand? Why listen to that wretched clock rattling in the corridor? Is this in keeping with my fame and high social position?' I answer these questions with an ironical smile, tickled by my own youthful credulity in once' exaggerating the importance of fame and of the exclusive position supposedly enjoyed by notabilities. I'm well kno^n, my name is invoked with awe, I've had my picture in The Meadmv and World Illustrated—I've even read my biography in a German magazine. And the upshot? I sit all on my own in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching check with my hand.

Family squabbles, hard-hearted creditors, rude railway officials, the nuisance of the internal passport system, expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, general loutishness and rough manners—all these, and many other things too time-consuming to mention, affect me no less than any humble citizen unknown outside his own back alley. So what is there so special about my situation? Granted, I'm a celebrity a thousand times over, a great man, the pride of Russia. Granted, bulletins about my illness appear in all the papers, and my mail in­cludes addresses of sympathy from colleagues, pupils and the general public. Yet these things won't save me from dying a miserable death on a strange bed in utter loneliness.

No one's to blame, of course, but I dislike being a celebrity, I'm sorry—I feel cheated, somehow.

At about ten o'clock I fall asleep, despite my tic. I sleep soundly, and would have gone on sleeping for a long time, had not someone woken me—soon after one o'clock comes a sudden knock on the door.

'Who's there?'

'A telegram.'

'You might have left it till the morning,' I say angrily, taking the telegram from the servant. 'Now I shan't get to sleep again.'

'Sorry, sir, but your light was on, so I thought you were awake.'

Tearing open the telegram, I first glance at the signature—my wife's. What can she want ?

yesterday gnekker secretly married liza come home

Reading the telegram, I feel momentary panic—not at what Liza and Gnekkcr have done, but at my own indifference to the news of their marriage. Philosophers and true sages are said to be aloof, but that's false, for such dispassionateness is spiritual atrophy and prema­ture death.

I go to bed again, wondering how to occupy my mind. What shall I think about? I seem to have thought everything over already, and have nothing left capable of stimulating my ideas.

When da-- breaks, I sit up in bed, arms round my knees—and for want of anything better to do I try to know myself. 'Know thyself— excellent practical advice, that, and the only pity is, it didn't occur to the ancients to tell us the technique of following it.

When I wished to understand some other person or myself, it was not their actions—so dependent on other factors, all of them—that I used to consider, but their desires. Tell me what you want, and I'll tell you who you are.

Now I scrutinize myself. What do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends and pupils to love us as ordinary people—not for our reputation, not forhow we're branded and labelled. What then? I'd like to have had helpers and successors. And then? I'd like to wake up a hundred years from now and cast at least a cursory glance at what's happening in science. I'd like to have lived another ten years or so.

And then ?

The rest is nothing. I go on thinking—for a long time—but can't hit on anything. And rack my brains as I will, broadcast my thoughts where I may, I clearly see that there's-something missing in my wishes —something vital, something really basic. My passion for science, my urge to live, my sitting on this strange bed, my urge to know myself, together with all my thoughts and feelings, and the conceptions which I form about everything—these things lack any common link capable of bonding them into a single entity. Each sensation, each idea of mine has its o^n separate being. Neither in my judgements about science, the stage, literature and my pupils, nor in the pictures painted by my imagination could even the most skilful analyst detect any 'general conception', or the God of a live human being.

And if one lacks that, one has nothing.

So wretched is my plight that serious illness, fear of death, the im­pact of circumstance and people, have sufficed to capsize and shatter my entire outlook as I formerly conceived it—everything which once gave my life its joy and significance. No wonder, then, if I have blackened my last months with thoughts and feelings worthy of a slave and savage, no wonder I'm so listless and don't notice the break of day. Unless a man has something stronger, something superior to all outside influences, he only needs to catch a bad cold to lose his balance entirely, to take every bird for a fowl ofill omen, and to hear the baying of hounds in every noise, while his pessimism or his optimism, to­gether with all his thoughts, great and small, arc significant solely as symptoms and in no other way.

I am beaten. And if so, there's no point in going on thinking and talking. I shall sit and await the future in silence.

In the morning the corridor waiter brings tea and the local paper. I mechanically read the announcements on the front page, the leading article, extracts from newspapers and magazines, and the Diary of the Day.

Amongst other things I find the following item in the Diary:

'Yesterday that well-kno^ scholar and distinguished Professor, Nicholas Stepanovich So-and-so, arrived in Kharkov by express train, and is staying at the Such-and-such Hotel.'

Famous names are obviously created to live their o^ lives inde­pendently of those who bear them. My name is now quietly drifting round Kharkov. In another three months it be painted on my tombstone in gold letters brilliant as the very sun, by which time I myself shaH already be under the sod.

A light tap on the door. Someone wants me.

'Who's there? Come in.'

The door opens and I step back in surprise, hurriedly wrapping the folds of my dressing-go^ about me. Before me stands Katya.

'Good morning,' she says, panting after her walk upstairs. 'Didn't expect me, did you ? I, er, I've arrived too.'

She sits do^.

'But why don't you say hallo ?' she goes on in a halting voice, avoiding my eyes. 'I'm here too—came today. I heard you were at this hotel, and I called round.'

'Delighted to see you,' I say, shrugging my shoulders. 'But I'm amazed—dropping in out of the blue like this. What have you come for?'

'Me? Oh, nothing—I just came.'

Silence. Suddenly she gets up impulsively and comes to me.

'Nicholas Stepanovich,' she says, blenching and clasping her hands on her bosom. 'I can't go on living like this, really, Nicholas Stepano­vich ! Tell me quickly, for God's sake, this very instant—what am I to do? Tell me what to do?'

'But what can I say?' I ask in bewilderment. 'There's nothing I can say.'

'Tell me, I beg you,' she goes on, gasping, and shaking in every limb. 'I swear I can't live like this any longer, I can't stand it!'

She collapses on a chair and starts sobbing. Her head thro^ back, she 'wrings her hands and stamps her feet. Her hat has fallen off her head and dangles by a piece of elastic, her hair is ^ffled.

'Help me, help me!' she begs. 'I can't stand any more.'

She takes a handkerchieffrom her travelling bag, pulling out with it several letters which fall from her lap. I pick them off the floor, and on one I notice Michael Fyodorovich's handwriting and happen to read part of a word: 'passionat—'.

'There's nothing I can say, Katya,' I tell her.

'Help me!' she sobs, clutching my hand and kissing it. 'You're my father, aren't you? My only friend? You're clever, well educated, you've had a long life. You've been a teacher. Tell me what to do.'

'Honestly, Katya, I don't know '

I am at a loss, embarrassed, moved by her sobbing, and I can hardly stand.

'Let's have lunch, Katya,' I say with a forced smile. 'And stop that crying.'

'I shall soon be dead, Katya,' I at once add in a low voice.

'Just say one word, just one word!' she cries, holding out her hands. 'What can I do?'

'Now, don't be so silly, really,' I mutter. 'I can't make you out. Such a sensible little girl, and suddenly all these tears—whatever next!'

Silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, dons her hat, bundles up her letters and thrusts them in her bag—all without speaking or hurry­ing. Her face, bosom and gloves are wet with tears, but her expression is now cold and forbidding.

I look at her, ashamed to be happier than she. Only on the brink of death, in the sunset of my life, have I noticed that I lack what my philosopher colleagues call a general idea. But this poor girl has never kno^n—and never will know—any refuge in all her days on earth.

'Let's have lunch, Katya,' I say.

'No thanks,' she answers coldly.

Another minute passes in silence.

'I don't like Kharkov,' I say. 'It's so grey—a grey sort of townwn.'

'Yes, I suppose so. It's ugly. I shan't stay long—I'm just passing through. I'll leave today.'

'Where are you going?'

'To the Crimea—the Caucasus, I mean.'

'Oh. Will you be away long?'

'I don't know.'

Katya stands up and holds out her hand—smiling coldly, not meeting my eyes.

'So you won't be at my funeral?' I want to ask.

But she doesn't look at me. Her hand is cold and seems alien. I accompany her to the door in silence.

Now she has left me and is walking do^n the long corridor without looking back. She knows I'm watching her, and will probably tum round when she reaches the comer.

No, she hasn't turned. Her black dress has flashed before my eyes for the last time, her steps have died away.

Farewell, my treasure!

NEIGHBOURS

Peter Ivashin was invery bad humour. His unmarried sister had gone to live with Vlasich, a married man. Somehow hoping to shake off the irksome, depressed mood which obsessed him indoors and out of doors, he would summon up his sense of fair play and all his high-minded, worthy principles. (Hadn't he always stood out for free love ?) But it was no use and he could never help reaching the same conclusion as stupid N^my: his sister had behaved badly, Vlasich had stolen his sister. It was all most distressing.

His mother stayed closeted in her room all day, Nanny spoke in whispers and kept sighing, his aunt was on the point of leaving every day, so they kept bringing her suitcases into the hall and then taking them back to her room. In house, courtyard and garden it was as quiet as if they had a corpse laid out. Aunt, servants, even the peasants ... all seemed to give Ivashin enigmatic, baffled looks as if to say that his sister had been seduced and what was he going to do about it? And he blamed himself for doing nothing, though what he should actually be doing he had no idea.

Thus six days passed. On the afternoon of the seventh, a Sunday, a messenger rode over with a letter. The address was in a familiar feminine hand: 'Her Excell. Mrs. Anna Ivashin.' Ivashin rather felt that there was something provocative, defiant and liberal about the envelope, the handwriting and that unfinished word 'Excell.'. And female liberalism is intolerant, pitiless and harsh.

'She'd rather die than give in to her unhappy mother and ask forgiveness,' thought Ivashin, taking the letter to his mother.

Mother was lying on her bed fullyclothed. Seeingherson, she abruptly sat up and patted the greyhairs which had strayed from under her cap.

'What is it, what is it?' she asked impatiently.

'This came,' said her son, handing over the letter.

The name Zina, even the word 'she', were not spoken in that house. They talked of Zina impersonally: 'this was sent,' 'a departure took place.' The mother recognized her daughter's writing, her face grew ugly and disagreeable, and the grey hairs once more escaped from her cap.

'Never!' she said, gesticulating as if the letter had scorched her fmgers. 'No, no, never! Nothing would induce me.'

The mother sobbed hysterically in her grief and shame. She obviously wanted to read the letter, but pride would not permit her. Ivashin realized that he ought to open it himself and read it out, but he suddenly felt angrier than he had ever felt in his life and he rushed out into the yard.

'Say there will be no answer!' he shouted to the messenger. 'No answer, I say! Tell her that, you swine!'

He tore up the letter. Then tears came into his eyes and he went out into the fields, feeling cruel, guilty and wretched.

He was only twenty-seven years old, but he was already fat, he dressed like an old man in loose, roomy clothes and was short of breath. He had all the qualities of an old bachelor lando^er. He never fell in love, never thought of marriage, and the only people he was fond of were his mother, his sister, Nanny and Vasilyich the gardener. He liked a good meal, his afternoon nap and conversation about politics or lofty abstractions. He had taken a university degree in his time, but had come to think of that as a sort of conscription incumbent on young men between eighteen and twenty-five years of age. Anyway, the thoughts which now daily haunted his mind . . . they had nothing to do with the university and his course of studies.

In the fields it was hot and still, as if rain was in the offing. The wood was steaming, and there was an oppressive, fragrant smell of pines and rotting leaves. Ivashin kept stopping to wipe his wet brow. He inspected his winter com and his spring com, went round his clover field, and twice chased off a partridge and her chicks at the edge of the wood. And all the time he was conscious that this insufferable situation could not go on for ever, that he must end it one way or the other. He might end it stupidly and brutally somehow, but end it he must.

How, though? What could he do, he wondered, casting supplicatory glances at sky and trees as if begging their help.

But sky and trees were mute, nor were high-minded principles of any avail. Common sense suggested that the agonizing problem admit­ted only a stupid solution and that today's scene with the messenger was not the last of its kind. He was afraid to think what might happen next.

The sun was setting as he made his way home, now feeling the problem to be utterly insoluble. To accept what had happened was impossible, \>ut it was equally impossible not to accept it and there was no middle way. Removing his hat, he fanned himself with his handker­chief and was walking do^ the road with over a mile to go when he heard a ringing behind him. It was an ingenious, highly successful combination of bells and chimes which sounded like tinkling glass. Only one person went abroad with this tintinnabulation: Inspector Medovsky of the police, a former hussar officer who had wasted his substance and had a pretty rough time, an invalid and a distant relative of Ivashin's. He was an old friend of the family and had a fatherly affection for Zina, whom he much admired.

'I was just corning to see you,' he said as he caught Ivashin up. 'Get in and I'll give you a lift.'

He was smiling and looked cheerful, clearly not yet aware that Zina had gone to live with Vlasich. He might have been informed, but if so he hadn't believed it. Ivashin found himself in an awkward situation.

'You're most welcome,' he muttered, blushing until tears carne into his eyes and uncertain what lie to tell or how to tell it.

'Delighted,' he went on, trying to smile, 'but, er, Zina's away and Mother's ill.'

'What a pity,' said the Inspector, looking at Ivashin thoughtfully. 'And I was hoping to spend an evening with you. Where has Zina gone?'

'To the Sinitskys', and then she wanted to go on to a convent, I think. I don't know definitely.'

The Inspector talked a little longer, then turned back, and Ivashin walked home, horrified to think what the other would feel when he learnt the truth. Ivashin imagined his feelings and savoured them as he entered the house.

'Lord help us,' he thought.

Only his aunt was taking afternoon tea in the dining-room. Her face held its usual expression suggestive of a weak, defenceless woman, but one who would not permit herself to be insulted. Ivashin sat at the far end of the table (he disliked his aunt) and began drinking his tea in silence.

'Your mother missed lunch again today,' said his aunt. 'You light bear it in mind, Peter. Starving herself to death won't cure her troubles.'

Ivashin found it absurd for his aunt to meddle in other people's business and make her o^n departure depend on Zina's having left home. He felt like saying something rude, but restrained himself— realizing even as he did so that the time had come for action and that he could let things slide no longer. It was a matter of either doing some­thing straight away or of falling down, screaming and banging his head on the floor. He pictured Vlasich and Zina, both free-thinking, both well pleased with themselves, kissing under some maple-tree, and then his seven days' accumulated depression and anger all seemed to topple over on Vlasich.

'One man seduces and abducts my sister,' he thought. 'A second will come and cut my mother's throat, a third will set fire to the house or burgle us: and all this under the mask of friendship, lofty principles and sufferings.'

'I won't have it!' Ivashin suddenly shouted, thumping the table.

He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room. His estate-manager's horse was saddled up in the stables, so he mounted it and galloped off to see Vlasich.

Stormy emotions raged within him. He felt the urge to do something striking and impetuous even if it meant regretting it for the rest of his life. Should he call Vlasich a blackguard, slap his face, challenge him to a duel ? But Vlasich wasn't the sort who fights duels. As for calling him a blackguard and slapping his face, that would only increase his wretchedness and make him retreat further inside himself. These miserable, meek specimens are the limit, they are more trouble than anyone. They get away with murder. When a miserable man counters a well-deserved reproach with his look of profound guilt and sickly smile, when he submissively bows his head before you . . . then, it seems, Justice herself has not the heart to strike.

'Never mind,' decided Ivashin. 'I'll horsewhip him in Zina's presence and I'll give him a piece of my mind.'

He rode through his woodland and scrub, and imagined Zina trying to justify what she had done by talking of women's rights, of the freedom of the individual, and by saying that there is no difference between being married in church and being a common-law wife. Just like a woman, she would argue about things she didn't understand, and she would probably end up by asking what this had to do with him and what right he had to interfere.

'True, I haven't any right,' muttered Ivashin. 'But so much the better. The ruder, the more in the wrong I am the better.'

The air was sultry, clouds of gnats hung low above the ground and peewits wept piteously in the scrub. There was every sign of rain, yet not a cloud in the sky. Crossing the boundary of his estate, Ivashin galloped over a level, smooth field—he often took this way, and he knew every bush and hollow. That object looming far ahead of him in the twilight like a dark cliff... it was a red church. He could picture it all in the smallest detail, even the plaster on the gate and the calves which were always browsing on the hedge. Nearly a mile from the church, on the right, was the dark copse belonging to Count Koltovich and beyond that copse Vlasich's land began.

From behind church and Count's copse a huge black cloud advanced with white lightnings flashing on it.

'Well, here we arc, Lord help us,' thought Ivashin.

The horse soon tired of the pace and Ivashin tired too. The thunder- head glared at him, apparently advising him to turn back, and he felt a little scared.

'I'll prove they're in the wrong,' he tried to reassure himself. 'They'll talk of .free love and freedom of the individual, yet freedom means self-control, surely, not giving way to passions. It's sheer licentiousness, their freedom is.'

Here was the Count's large pond, dark blue and glowering under the cloud, breathing damp and slime. Near the log-path two willows— one old, one young—were leaning tenderly into each other. Ivashin and Vlasich had walked past this very spot a fortnight ago, softly singing the students' song about it being love that makes the world go round.

Wretched song!

Thunder rumbled as Ivashin rode through the wood, and the trees roared and bent in the wind. He must hurry. From the copse to Vlasich's estate he had less than a mile ofmeadow to cover along a path flanked on both sides by old birch-trees. Like Vlasich they were a wretched, dismal sight, being every bit as spindly and lanky as their o^ner. Heavy rain rustled in birches and grass. The wind suddenly dropped, there was a whiff of wet earth and poplars. Then Vlasich's yellow acacia hedge, also lanky and spindly, came into view. At the point where some lattice-work had collapsed his neglected orchard appeared.

No longer thinking about slapping Vlasich's face or horsewhipping him, Ivashin did not know what he was going to do p.t the man's house. He felt nervous. He was afraid on his o^n behalf and on his sister's— scarcd at the thought of seeing her any moment. How would she behave towards her brother? What would the two of them talk about? And should he not turn back while there was yet time ? Thus brooding, he galloped down the avenue of lime-trees to the house, rounded the broad lilac bushes—and suddenly saw Vlasich.

Bare-headed, in cotton shirt and top-boots, stooping under the rain, Vlasich was going from a corner of the house towards the front door followed by a workman with a hammer and a box ofnails. They must have been mending a shutter which had been banging in the wind. Vlasich saw Ivashin and stopped.

'Is it you Peter?' he smiled. 'What a very nice surprise.'

'Yes, it's me, as you see,' said Ivashin quietly, brushing off rain-drops with both hands.

'Well, what a good idea. Delighted,' said Vlasich, but did not hold out his hand, obviously hesitating and waiting for the other to make the first move.

'Good for the oats, this,' he said with a glance at the sky.

'Quite so.'

They went silently into the house. A door on the right led from the hall into another hall and then into a reception room, and there was a door on the left into the small room occupied by Vlasich's manager in winter. Ivashin and Vlasich went into that room.

'Where did the rain catch you?' Vlasich asked.

'Not far from here, quite close to the house.'

Ivashin sat on the bed, glad of the rain's noise, glad that the room was dark. It was better that way—not so unnerving, and he need not look his companion in the eye. His rage had passed, but he felt afraid and vexed with himself. He had got off to a bad start, he felt, and his trip boded ill.

For some time neither man spoke and they pretended to be listening to the rain.

'Thanks, Peter,' began Vlasich, clearing his throat. 'Most obliged to you for corning. It's generous of you, very decent. I appreciate it, I value it greatly, believe you me.'

He looked out of the window and continued, standing in the middle of the room.

'Somehow everything happened secretly as if we were keeping you in the dark. Knowing that we might have hurt you, made you angry ... it has cast a cloud over our happiness all this time. But let mo: defend myself. It was not that we didn't trust you, that wasn't why we were so secretive. In the first place, it all happened, on the spur of the moment and there was no time to discuss things. Secondly, this is such an intimate, sensitive business and it was awkward to bring in a third party, even one as close to us as you. But the real point is, we were banking heavily on your generosity all along. You're the most generous of men, you're such a frightfully decent chap. I'm infinitely obliged to you. If you should ever need my life, then come and take it.'

Vlasich spoke in a low, hollow, deep voice, all on one note like a fog-hom. He was obviously upset. Ivashin felt that it was his tum to speak now, and that for him to listen in silence really would be to pose as the most generous and frightfully decent of nit-wits—which was not what he had come for.

He got quickly to his feet.

'Look here, Gregory,' he panted in a low voice, 'you know I liked you—couldn't want a better husband for my sister. But what's happened is frightful, it doesn't bear thinking of."

'What's so horrible, though?' asked Vlasich in quaking tones. 'It would be horrible if we had done wrong, but we haven't, have we?'

'Look here, Gregory, you know I'm not the least bit stuffy, but— well, I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you have both been very selfish, to my way of thinking. I shan't say anything to Zina about this, of course, it would only upset her, but you ought to know that Mother's sufferings are practically indescribable.'

'Yes, very lamentable,' sighed Vlasich. 'We foresaw that, Peter, but what on earth could we do about it? Just because your actions upset someone it doesn't mean they're wrong. It can't be helped. Any serious step you take . . . it's bound to upset somebody. If you went to fight for freedom that would hurt your mother too, it can't be helped. If you make your family's peace of mind your main priority it means good-bye to any idealism in life.'

Lightning flared beyond the window and the flash seemed to switch Vlasich's thoughts into a different channel. He sat do^n by Ivashin's side and started saying things which would have been far better left unsaid.

'I worship your sister, Peter,' he said. 'Visiting your place, I always felt I was on pilgrimage. I absolutely idolized Zina and now I worship her more each day. She is more than a wife to me! More sacred, I tell you!'

Vlasich waved his arms.

'I adore her. Since she has been living here I have entered my house as if it were a shrine. She is a rare, an outstanding, a most frightfully decent woman.'

What a ghastly rigmarole, thought Ivashin, irked by the word 'woman'.

'Why don't you get married properly?' he asked. 'How much does your wife want for a divorce?'

'Seventy-five thousand.'

'That's a bit much, but why not beat her down?'

'She won't give an inch. She's an awful woman, old man.'

Vlasich sighed. 'I never told you about her before, it has been such a hideous memory, but as the subject has come up I'll go on. I married her on a decent, chivalrous impulse. In our regiment, if you want the details, a certain battalion commander took up with her as a girl of eighteen— simply seduced her, in other words, lived with her a couple of months and then dropped her.

'She was in a most ghastly plight, old man. She was ashamed to go home to her parents, who wouldn't have her anyway, and her lover had deserted her. What could she do—set up as barrack-room whore ? My fellow-officers were horrified. Not that they were little plaster saints themselves, but this was such a rotten show, even they found it a bit thick! Besides, no one in the regiment could stand that colonel. All the second lieutenants and ensigns were furious and they decided to do him in the eye by getting up a subscription for the wretched girl, see ? So we junior officers met in conclave and each started putting downwn his five or ten roubles, when I had a rush of blood to the head. The situation seemed to cry out for some heroic gesture, so I dashed off to the girl and said how sorry I was—I spoke with tremendous feeling. On my way to see her, and then as I was speaking, I loved her passion­ately as a woman insulted and injured. Yes, quite so.