Ward Number Six and Other Stories

'Well—the upshot was, I proposed a week later. My superiors and comrades found my marriage unbecoming to an officer's dignity. That only added fuel to the flames, though. So I wrote a great epistle, see? I argued that what I had done should be inscribed in regimental history in letters of gold, and all that. I _sent the letter to my colonel with copies to my brother-officers. Now, I was a bit upset, of course, and I did rather overstep the mark. I was asked to leave the regiment. I have a rough copy hidden somewhere, I'll let you read it some time. It's written with real feeling—I enjoyed some sublime moments of sheer decency, as you'll see. I resigned my commission and came here with my wife. My father had left a. debt or two and I had no money, but my wife embarked on a social whirl from the start, dressing up and playing cards, so I had to mortgage my estate. She was no better than she should be if you see what I mean, and you are the only one of my neighbours who hasn't been her lover. About two years later I gave her some money—all I had at the time—to go away, and away she went to townwn. Yes, quite so.

'Now I'm paying the ghastly creature twelve hundred a year. There is a certain fly, old man, that puts its larva on a spider's back and the spider can't get rid of it. The grub attaches itselfand drinks the spider's heart's blood. That's just how this woman fixed on me. She's a regular vampire. She loaths and scorns me for my folly: for marrying someone like her, that is. She despises my chivalry. A wise man dropped her, says she, and a fool picked her up. Only a wretched half­wit could do what I did, she reckons. It really is a bit hard to take, old man. And by the way, old man, I've had a pretty raw deal, one way and another, it really has got me down.'

Ivashin became quite mystified as he listened to Vlasich. What ever could Zina see in the man? He was not young (he was forty-one), he was lean, lanky, narrow-chested, long-nosed and his beard was turning grey. He spoke like a fog-hom, he had a sickly smile and an ungainly trick of flapping his arms about when he was talking. Instead of being healthy, handsome, manly, urbane and good-humoured, he was just vaguely dim so far as looks went. He dressed so badly, everything about him was so dismal, he rejected poetry and painting as 'irrelevant to modem needs'—didn't appreciate them, in other words. Music left him cold. He was a poor farmer. His estate was in utter chaos, and was mortgaged too. He was paying twelve per cent on a second mortgage and on top of that he owed another ten thousand in personal loans. When his interest or alimony fell due he went round cadging money with the air of a man whose house is on fire. At these times he'd say oh, to hell with it, and he would sell up his whole winter store offirewood for five roubles or a straw rick for three, and then have his garden fence or some old seed-bed frames used to heat his stores. Pigs had ruined his pastures, the villagers' cattle trampled his saplings, and each winter there were fewer and fewer of his old trees left. Beehives and rusty pails bestrewed his vegetable plot and garden. He lacked all talents and gifts, even the humble knack ofleading an average life. In practical matters he was an innocent, a weakling easily cheated and done do^n. No wonder the peasants said he was 'a bit touched'.

He was a liberal and was thought quite a firebrand in the county, but in this too he wore a humdrum air. There was no panache or verve about his free-thinking. Whether indignant, irate or enthusiastic, he was all on one note, so to speak—it all lacked flair, it fell so very flat. Even at times of extreme agitation he never raised lis head or stood up straight. But the main snag was his trick of trotting out even lis fmest and loftiest ideas in a way that made them seem hackneycd and dated. Whenever he embarked on a sluggish, portentous-sounding exegesis, all about impulses of sublime integrity and the best years of his life, whenever he raved about young folk always being, and always having been, in the van ofsocial progress, whenever he condemned Russians for donning their dressing-gowns at thirty and forgetting their alma mater's traditions, it all sounded like something you had read in a book long, long ago. When you stayed in his house he would put a Pisarev or Darwin on your bedside table, and ifyou said you had already read them he'd go and fetch a Dobrolyubov!

In the county this rated as free-thinking and many thought it an innocent, harmless quirk. Yet it made him profoundly unhappy. For him it was that maggot to which he had just alluded and which had fastened on him to batten on his life's blood. There was his past with that weird marriage a la Dostoyevsky, those long letters and the copies written in a poor, illegible hand but with great emotion, there were the interminable misunderstandings, explanations, disillusionments. Then there were his debts, his second mortgage, his wife's alimony and his monthly loans, none ofwhich was any good to anybody, either him or anyone else. Now, in the present, he was still as restless as he always had been, he still sought some great mission in life and he still couldn't mind his o^ business. There were still these long letters and copies of them in season and out of season, there were still those exhausting, hack­neyed tirades about the village community, reviving local handicrafts, starting up cheese-dairies—each speech exactly like the one before as if they were machine-made rather than hatched by a live brain. Finally, there was this scandal over Zina which might end heaven knew how.

And the thing was, Zina was so young, she was only twenty-two. She was pretty, elegant, high-spirited, she liked laughing, chattering, arguing, she was crazy about music. She was good with clothes and books, she knew how to create a civilized environment: at home she would never have put up with a room like this with its smell of boots and cheap vodka. She was a liberal too, but her free-thinking seemed to brim over with energy, with the pride of a young girl, vigorous, bold, eagerly yearning to excel and show more originality than others.

How could she love a Vlasich?

'The man's so quixotic, so pig-headed, so fanatical, so lunatic,' thought Ivashin. 'But she's as wishy-washy, characterless and pliable as me. She and I both give in quickly, we don't stand up for ourselves. She fell in love with him—bu', then I like him too, don't I, in spite of everything ?'

Ivashin thought Vlasich a good, decent man, but narrow and one­sided. In Vlasich's emotions and sufferings, in his whole life, Ivashin saw no lofty aims, either near or distant, he saw only boredom and lack of savoir-vivre. Vlasich's self-martyrdom, what he called his achieve­ments and decent impulses . . . they struck Ivashin as so much wasted effort like firing off purposeless blank shots and using up a lot of powder. As for Vlasich's obsession with the outstanding integrity and rectitude of his o^n mental processes, that struck Ivashin as naive— morbid, even. Then there was the man's lifelong knack of confusing the trivial and the sublime, his making a stupid marriage and regarding that as a stupendous feat—and then having affairs with women and calling them the triumph of ideals or something. None of it made any kind of sense.

Still, Ivashin did like him and felt that there was a certain power about him. He somehow never had the heart to contradict the man.

Vlasich sat do^ very near Ivashin in the dark, wanting to talk to the sound of the rain. He had already cleared his throat to tell some other long story like the history of his marriage, but Ivashin couldn't bear to hear it, tormented as he was by the thought of seeing his sister any moment.

'Y«, you have had a raw deal,' he said gently. 'But I'm sorry, we're digressing, you and I. This is beside the point.'

'Yes, yes, quite,' said Vlasich, rising to his feet. 'So let's get back to the subject. Our conscience is clear, Peter, I can tell you. We aren't married, but that we're man and wife in every real sense is neither for me to argue nor for you to hear. You're as free from prejudice as I am, so there can be no disagreement between us on that score, thank God. As for our future, yon have no cause for apprehension. I shall work my fingers to the bone, I'll work day and night—I'll do all in my power to make Zina happy, in other words. Her life will be a beautiful thing. Shall I pull it off, you ask? I shall, old boy. When a man's obsessed with one idea every minute of the day it isn't hard for him to get his way. But let's go and see Zina, we must give her a nice surprise.'

Ivashin's heart pounded. He stood up and followed Vlasich into the hall, and then into the drawing-room. The huge, grim room contained only an upright piano and a long row of antique bronzed chairs on which no one ever sat. A single candle burnt on the piano. From the drawing-room they went silently into the dining-room. This too was spacious and uncomfortable. In the centre of the room was a round, two-leaved table with six legs. There was only one candle. A clock in a large red case like an icon-holder showed half past two.

Vlasich opened the door into the next room.

'Peter's here, Zina,' he said.

At once rapid footsteps were heard and Zina carne into the dining- room—a tall, buxom, very pale girl, looking exactly as Ivashin had last seen her at horne in her black skirt and red blouse with a large buckle on the belt. She put one arm round her brother and kissed him on the temple.

'What a storm!' she said. 'Gregory went off somewhere and I was left alone in the house.'

She betrayed no embarrassment, and she looked at her brother as frankly and openly as at home. Looking at her, lvashin too ceased to feel embarrassed.

'But you aren't afraid of thunder, are you?' he said, sitting down at the table.

'No, but the rooms are so vast here. It's an old house, and the thunder makes it all rattle like a cupboardful of crockery.

'Altogether it's a nice little house,' she went on, sitting opposite her brother. 'Every room has some delightful association—Gregory's grandfather shot himself in my room, believe it or not.'

'We'll have some money in August and I'll do up the cottage in the garden,' said Vlasich.

'Somehow one always thinks of that grandfather when it thunders,' Zina went on. 'And in this dining-room a man was fogged to death.'

'It's a fact,' Vlasich confirmed, gazing wide-eyed at lvashin. 'Some time in the Forties- this place was leased to a certain Olivier, a French­man. His daughter's portrait is lying about in our attic now: a very pretty girl. This Olivier, my father told me, despised Russians as dunces and mocked them cruelly. For instance, he insisted that when the priest walked past the manor he should remove his cap a quarter of a mile away, and whenever the Olivier family drove through the village the church bells had to be rung. Serfs and small fry got even shorter shrift, of course. Now, one day one of the cheeriest members of the Russian tramping fraternity chanced to roll along—the lad had a bit of Gogol's theological student Khorna Brut about him. He asked for a night's lodging, the managers liked him and they let him stay in the office.

'There are a lot ofversions ofthe story. Some say the boy incited the peasants, while others have it that Olivier's daughter fell in love with the boy. What really happened I don't know, except that Olivier called him in here one fme evening, cross-examined him and then gave orders to flog him. The master sits at this table drinking claret, see, while the grooms are beating the student. Olivier must have been trying to wring something out of him. Dy morning the lad was dead of torture and they hid the body somewhere. They are said to have thrown it in Koltovich's pond. An official inquiry was started, but the Frenchman paid several thousand in the right quarter and went off to Alsace. His lease ran out just then and that was the end of the matter.'

'What scoundrels,' shuddered Zina.

'My father remembered Olivier and his daughter well. He said she was a remarkably beautiful girl, and eccentric to boot. Myself, I think the young fellow did both: incited the peasants and took the daughter's fancy. Perhaps, even, he wasn't a theological student at all, but some­one travelling incognito.'

Zina grew pensive. The story of the student and the beautiful French girl had obviously run away with her imagination. Her appearance hadn't changed at all in the last week, Ivashin thought, she had only grown a little paler. She looked calm and normal as if she and her brother were now visiting Vlasich together. But some change had taken place in himself, Ivashin felt. The fact was that he had been able to discuss absolutely anything with her when she was still living at home, but now he couldn't even bring himself to ask her quite simply how she was getting on. The question seemed clumsy, superfluous. And a similar change must have affected her, for she was in no hurry to mention their mother, their home, her affair with Vlasich. She didn't try to justify herself, nor did she say that free unions are better than being married in church, but she remained calm, quietly pondering the story of Olivier.

Why, though, had they suddenly spoken about Olivier?

'You both got your shoulders wet in the rain,' Zina said with a happy smile, touched by this small resemblance between her brother and Vlasich.

Ivashin felt the full bitterness and horror ofhis situation. He remem­bered his deserted home, the closed piano and Zina's bright little room where no one went any more. He remembered that her small foot­prints had vanished from their garden paths and that now no one went bathing with a noisy laugh before afternoon tea. The things that had increasingly claimed his affections since earliest childhood, that he used to like contemplating sometimes when sitting in a stuffy classroom or lecture-hall—serenity, integrity,joy, everything that filled a home with life and light ... those things had gone without trace, they had vanished and merged with the crude, clumsy story of some battalion commander, chivalrous subaltern, loose woman and grandfather who had shot himself

To start talking about his mother, to think that there could be any return to the past . . . that would mean misunderstanding what was perfectly clear.

Ivashin's eyes brimmed with tears and his hand trembled where it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her eyes also reddened and glistened.

'Corne here, Gregory,' she said to Vlasich.

Doth went over to the window and started whispering. From Vlasich's way of bending do^n towards her and from her way of looking at him Ivashin again realized that the matter was settled, that it couldn't be mended and that there was nothing more to be said. Zina went out.

'Well, old boy,' said Vlasich, after a short pause, rubbing his hands and smiling. 'Just now I said we were happy, but that was a bit of poetic licence, so to speak. We haven't yet experienced happiness, in fact. Zina has been thinking of you and her mother all the time and she has been suffering, while I've suffered too, watching her. Hers is a free, undaunted nature, but it's hard to go against the grain, you know— besides which she's young. The servants call her Miss. It seems a trifle, but it upsets her. That's the way of it, old man.'

Zina brought in a dish of strawberries. She was followed by a little maidservant, seemingly meek and downtrodden, who put a jug of milk on the table and gave a very low bow. She had something in common with the antique furniture which was comparably torpid and dreary.

The sound of rain had ceased. Ivashin ate strawberries while Vlasich and Zina looked at him in silence. The time had come for a conversa­tion pointless but unavoidable, and all three were depressed by the prospect. Ivashin's eyes again brimmed with tears. He pushed the bowl away, saying that it was time to go home, or else he would be late and it might rain again. The moment had arrived when it behoved Zina to speak of her family and her new life.

'How are things at home ?' she asked rapidly, her pale face trembling. 'How's Mother?'

'Well, you know Mother—' answered Ivashin, not looking at her.

'You have thought a lot about what's happened, Peter,' she said, taking her brother by the sleeve, and he realized how hard it was for her to speak. 'You have given it a lot of thought, so tell me: is there any chance Mother will ever accept Gregory . . . and the situation in general?'

She stood close to her brother, facing him, and he marvelled at her beauty, and at his o^n apparent failure to notice it before. His sister, this sensitive, elegant girl who looked so much like their mother, now lived with Vlasich and shared Vlasich's home with a torpid maid and six-legged table in a house where a man had been flogged to death. And now she wouldn't be going home with her brother, but would stay the night here. All of this struck Ivashin as incredibly absurd.

'You know Mother,' he said, not answering her question. 'In my view you should conform with . . . you should, cr, do something, sort of ask her forgiveness or '

'But asking forgiveness would mean pretending we had done wrong. I don't mind telling lies to comfort Mother, but it won't work, will it? I know Mother.

'Well, we shall just have to see,' said Zina, cheering up now that the most unpleasant bit was over. 'We shall just have to put up with it for five or ten years and sec what happens then.'

She took her brother's arm and pressed against his shoulder as they went through the dark hall.

They went on to the steps. Ivaslin said good-bye, mounted his horse and started off at a walk. Zina and Vlasich walked a little way with him. It was quiet and warm, there was a delicious smell of hay. Between the clouds stars blazed vividly in the sky. Vlasich's old garden, witness of so many distressing episodes in its time, slumbered in the enveloping darkness and riding through it was saddening, somehow.

'This afternoon Zina and I experienced a number of truly sublime moments,' said Vlasich. 'I read her a first-rate article on the agricultural resettlement problem. You really must read it, old man, it has out­standing integrity. I couldn't resist writing to the author, care of the editor. I wrote only a single line: "I thank you and firmly shake your honest hand."'

Ivashin wanted to tell him not to meddle in other people's business for heaven's sake, but remained silent.

Vlasich walked by his right stirrup, Zina by the left. Both seemed to have forgotten that they had to go back home, that it was damp, that they had nearly reached Koltovich's copse. They were expecting something from him, Ivashin felt, but what it was they expected they didn't know themselves and he felt desperately sorry for them. Now, as they walked by his horse so meekly and pensively, he felt absolutely convinced that they were unhappy—that they never could be happy— and their love seemed a deplorable and irrevocable mistake. Pitying them and aware that he could do nothing to help them, he fell prey to weakmindedness which made him ready for any sacrifi.ce, could he but rid himself of this onerous feeling of compassion.

'I'll come and stay the night with you sometimes,' he said.

But that looked like giving in to them and didn't satisfy him. When they stopped to say good-bye near Koltovich's copse he leant towards Zina and touched her shoulder.

'You're quite right, Zina,' he said. 'You have done the right thing.'

To stop himself saying more and bursting into tears, he lashed his horse and galloped into the wood. Riding into darkness, he looked back, and saw Vlasich and Zina walking home along the path—he with long strides, she at his side with quick, jerky steps. They were conducting an animated conversation.

'I'm like a silly old woman,' thought Ivashin. 'I went there to solve a problem, but only complicated it. Ah well, never mind.'

He felt depressed. When the wood ended he rode at a walk, then stopped his horse near the pond. He wanted to sit and t^nki On the far side of the pond the rising moon was reflected as a red streak and there were hollow rumbles of thunder somewhere. Ivashin gazed steadily at the water, picturing his sister's despair, her anguished pallor and the dry eyes with which she would hide her degradation from the world. He imagined her pregnancy, their mother's death and funeral, Zina's horror. Nothing but death could break that proud, superstitious old woman. Appalling visions of the future appeared before him on the dark, smooth water, and amid pale feminine figures he saw himself— cowardly, weak, hunted-looking.

On the pond's right bank about a hundred yards aw:^.y stood some dark, unmoving object—was it a man or a tall tree-stump? Ivashin remembered the murdered student who had been thrownwn into this pond.

'Olivier behaved cruelly,' he thought, gazing at the dark, ghostly f.gure. 'But at least he did solve his problem one way or the other, while I have s^ved nothing, I've only made a worse mess. He did and said what he thought, whereas I do and say what I don't think. Besides, I don't really know what I do think '

He rode up to the dark figure. It was an old, rotting post, the relic of some building.

From Koltovich's copse and garden came a strong whiff of lily-of- the-valley and honey-laden herbs. Ivashin rode along the edge of the pond, gazed mournfully at the water and remembered his past life.

So far he had not done or said what he thought, he concluded, and others had repaid him in like coin, which was why all life now seemed as dark as this pond with its reflections of the night sky and its tangled water-weed. There was no mending matters either, he thought.

AN ANONYMOUS STORY

I

For reasons which I cannot at present specify I was compelled to take a job as footman to a St. Petersburg civil servant called George Orlov, a man of about thirty-five.

I entered Orlov's service because of his father, the well-kno^n politician, whom I considered a serious enemy to my cause. I reckoned to study the father's plans and intentions in detail while living with the son: by overhearing conversations, and by finding papers and jottings on his desk.

The electric bell usually trilled in my footman's quarters at about eleven o'clock in the morning to inform me that my master was awake. When I went into his bedroom with his clean clothes and boots, Orlov would be sitting immobile in his bed, looking not so much sleepy as exhausted by sleeping, and staring fixedly without any sign of pleasure at his awakening. I would help him to dress while he submitted to me reluctantly and silently, ignoring my existence. Then, his head wet after washing, smelling of fresh scent, he would go into the dining- room for coffee. He sat at table, drank his coffee and leafed through newspapers, while Polya the maid and I stood by the door, respectfully watching him. Two adults were compelled to pay the gravest attention to a third drinking his coffee and munching his rusks: all very absurd and barbarous, no doubt, but I found nothing degrading in having to stand by that door though I was Orlov's equal in social standing and education.

I had incipient tuberculosis and there were a few other things wrong with me: a sight wdrse, perhaps, than tuberculosis. Whether it was the effect of illness, or of some new change of outlook which eluded my notice at the time, I was obsessed day in day out by a passionate, hyper­sensitive craving for ordinary everyday life. I yearned for peace of mind, health, fresh air, plenty to eat. I was becoming a day-dreamer, and as such I did not know exactly what I wanted. I might feel an urge to go to a monastery and to sit day after day by the window, gazing at trees and fields. Or I would imagine myself buying a dozen acres and settling do^n as a country squire. Or else I would swear to take up academic work and make a point of becoming a professor at a provincial university. Asa retired naval lieutenant I had visions of the sea, of our squadron, of the corvette on which I had sailed round the world. I wanted to experience once again the indescribable sensation of walk­ing in a tropical forest, or of gazing at the sunset in the Bay ofBengal, when you swoon with ecstasy and feel homesick: both at the same time. I dreamt of mountains, women, music. With childlike curiosity I scrutinized people's faces and hung on their voices. As I stood by the door watching Orlov drink his coffee, I felt less like a servant than a man for whom everything on earth, even an Orlov, held some interest.

Orlov was a typical St. Petersburger in appearance, with narrow shoulders, elongated waist, sunken temples, eyes of indeterminate hue and sparse, faintly tinted vegetation on head, chin and upper lip. His face was well-groomed, worn, disagreeable: particularly disagreeable when he was thinking or sleeping. It is hardly necessary to describe a commonplace appearance, though. Besides, St. Petersburg is not Spain, a man's looks don't mean anything there even in affairs of the heart, being of value only to imposing servants and coachmen. Ifl have mentioned Orlov's face and hair, it is only because there was one notable feature about his looks, to wit: when he picked up a newspaper or book, whatever it might be, or when he met people, whoever they might be, his eyes began to smile ironically and his whole face took on an air of gentle mockery free from malice. Before reading or hearing anything he always held this irony at the ready, as a savage holds his shield. It was an irony of habit, an irony of the old school, and it had recently been corning into his face without any effort of will, probably, but as if by reflex. More of that later, though.

At about half past twelve he would take up a brief-case stuffed with papers and drive off, with an ironical air, to work. He would have his meal out and ret^^ after eight. I would light the lamp and candles in his study, and he would sit in a low chair, stretching his legs out on to another chair, and start reading in this sprawling position. He brought new books almost every day, or had them sent from the shops, and a mass of books in three languages (not counting Russian), already read and abandoned, lay in the corners and under the bed in my quarters. He read unusually fast. 'Tell me what you read,' it is said, 'and I shall tell you who you are.' That may be true, but it is absolutely impossible to judge an Orlov by the books which he reads. It was all such a hotch­potch, what with philosophy, French novels, political economy, finance, new poets and Intermediary editions. He read it all with equal speed, and always with that same ironical look in his eyes.

After ten o'clock he would dress carefully—often in evening clothes, very rarely in his official uniform—and leave the house. He would return towards morning.

I lived there peaceably and quietly, and there were no clashes between us. As a rule he ignored my existence, and he spoke to me without that ironical look on his face—not considering me human, obviously.

Only once did I see him angry. One evening, a week after I .had entered his service, he came back from some dinner at about nine o'clock. His expression was bad-tempered and tired.

'There's a nasty smell in the flat,' he said as I followed him into the study to light the candles.

'But it's quite fresh in here, sir.'

'It stinks, I tell you,' he repeated irritably.

'I open the casement windows every day.'

'Don't you answer me back, you oaf!' he shouted.

I took umbrage, and was about to object. God knows how it would have ende(l but for the intervention of Polya, who knew her master better than I did.

'Yes, really, what a nasty smell,' she said, raising her eyebrows. 'Where can it come from? Stephen, open the casements in the drawing- room and light the fire.'

She clucked and fussed, and went through all the rooms, rustling her skirts and swishing her sprayer. But Orlov's bad mood remained. Keeping his temper with obvious effort, he sat at his desk and quickly wrote a letter. He wrote several lines, then gave an angry snort, tore up the letter and began writing again.

'To hell with them!' he muttered. 'Do they credit me with a super­human memory?'

The letter was written at last. He got up from the desk and addressed me.

'You are to go to Znamensky Square and deliver this letter to Mrs. Zinaida Krasnovsky in person. But first ask the porter whether her husband—Mr. Krasnovsky, that is—has returned. If he has, keep the letter and come back. Hey, wait a moment! If she should ask whether I have anyone with me, tell her two gentlemen have been here since eight o'clock -writing something.'

I went to Znamensky Square. The porter told me that Mr. Krasnovsky was not yet back, and I went up to the second floor. The door was opened by a tall, fat, dark-complexioned servant with black side- whiskers. Sleepily, apathetically, churlishly, as flunkey to flunkey, he asked what I wanted. Before I had time to answer a woman in a black dress carne quickly into the hall from the drawing-room. She screwed up her eyes at me.

'Is Mrs. Krasnovsky in?' I asked.

'I am she.'

'A letter from Mr. Orlov.'

She unsealed the letter impatiently, held it in both hands, displaying her diamond rings, and began reading. I saw a white face with soft lines, a jutting chin, and long, dark lashes. She looked no more than twenty-five years old.

'Give him my regards and thank him,' she said when she had finished reading.

'Is anyone with Mr. Orlov?' she asked gently, happily, and as if ashamed to be mistrustful.

'Two gentlemen,' I answered. 'They are writing something.'

'Give him my regards and thank him,' she repeated, and went back silently, leaning her head on one side and reading the letter as she went.

I was meeting few women at the time, and this one, of whom I had only had a passing glimpse, made an impression on me. Walking home, remembering her face and delicate fragrance, I fell into a reverie. When I returned Orlov had left the house.

II

Well, I lived quietly and peaceably enough with my employer, and yet the pollution, the degrading element which I had so dreaded on becoming a footman ... it was present and made itself felt every day. I was on bad terms with Polya. She was a sleek, spoilt little trollop who adored Orlov because he was the master and scorned me because I was the footman. To a real servant or a cook she was probably quite devastating, with her red cheeks, retrousse nose, screwed-up eyes and buxom build already verging on the plump. She powdered her face, she tinted her eyebrows and lips, she wore a corset, a bustle and a bangle made of coins. She walked with little tripping steps. When she walked she twisted or 'waggled' her shoulders and behind. Her rustling skirts, her creaking stays, her jingling bangle, this plebeian smell of lipstick, toilet-vinegar and scent stolen from the master . . . when I tidied the rooms with her of a morning, these things made me feel like her accomplice in some foul crime.

Whether because I did not help her to steal, or because I evinced no desire whatever to become her lover—which she probably took as an insult—or else, perhaps, because she sensed in me an alien being, she loathed me from the first day. My clumsiness, my unflunkeylike ex­terior, my illness ... she found these things pitiful, and they disgusted her. I was coughing very badly at the time, and I occasionally kept her awake at night because her room was separated from mine by only a wooden screen.

'You kept me awake again,' she told me every morning. 'You ought to be in hospital, not in a gentleman's service.'

So sincerely did she think me not human, but a thing immeasurably beneath her, that she sometimes appeared before me wearing only her chemise like those Roman matrons who had no scruples about bathing in the presence of their slaves.

One lunch-time (we ordered soup and a roast from the restaurant every day) I was in a marvellous contemplative mood.

'Polya,' I asked her, 'do you believe in God?'

'Yes, of course I do.'

'Then you believe there will be a Day of Judgement?' I went on. 'And that we shall answer to God for all our misdeeds?'

She made no reply, only giving a scornful grimace. Now, as I looked at her smug, cold eyes, I saw that this well-integrated, perfectly rounded being was godless, conscienceless and lawless, and that I could never fmd a better paid accomplice should I ever require to commit murder, arson or burglary. .

In this novel setting, unaccustomed as I was to being addressed curtly, and to the constant lying (saying 'the master's out' when he was in), I found my first week at Orlov's rather an ordeal. My valet's tail­coat made me feel as ifl had donned a suit ofarmour. Later on I settled do^. I performed my little services like any regular footman, I cleaned the rooms, I ran or drove around on errands. When Orlov did not wish to keep a rendezvous with Zinaida Krasnovsky, or when he forgot that he had promised to visit her, I would drive to Znamensky Square, deliver a note to her personaUy and tell lies. It all added up to something quite different from what I had envisaged on becoming a servant. Every day of my new life turned out a waste of time both for me and my cause, since Orlov never spoke of his father, nor did his guests either, and all I could learn about that )VeU-kno^ politician's activities was what I contrived, as I had previously contrived, to glean from newspapers and correspondence with my associates. The hundreds of notes and papers which I found in the study and read . . . they lacked even the remotest connection with what I was seeking. Orlov was absolutely indifferent to his father's much-bruited activity, and looked as if he had never even heard of it, or as if his father had died long ago.

Ill

We had guests every Thursday.

I would order a joint of beef from the restaurant and telephone Yeliseyev's for caviare, cheese, oysters and the like. I bought playing cards. Polya was busy all day preparing the tea things and the supper service. This little bout of activity did rather vary our idle lives, to be honest, and Thursdays were our most interesting days.

There would be three guests only. The most substantial of them— and the most interesting, perhaps—was called Pekarsky: a tall, gaunt person of about forty-five, with a long, hooked nose, a large, black beard and a bald pate. His eyes were big and bulging, and his facial expression was as grave and pensive as a Greek philosopher's. He worked on a railway board and at a bank, he was legal consultant to an important government institution, he was on business terms with a mass of private persons as trustee, chairman of official receivers and so on. His civil service rank was quite low, and he modestly termed him­self a 'barrister', but his influence was enormous. A note or card from him was enough to have you received out of turn by a celebrated doctor, a railway director or an important official. One could obtain a pretty senior post through his patronage, it was said, or hush up any un­pleasantness whatever. He rated as highly intelligent, but his was a most peculiar and odd sort of brain. He could multiply 213 by 373 in his head in a flash, or convert pounds sterling to German marks without a pencil and tables. He was well up in railway matters and finance, and the entire world of administration was an open book to him. In civil cases he was reckoned a pretty artful advocate, and he was an awkward customer to tangle with at law. Yet this rare intellect was utterly baffied by many things known even to the most limited intelligence. Why do people feel bored ? Why do they weep, shoot themselves— and murder others, even? Why do they fret about things and events which don't concern them personally, and why do they laugh when they read Gogol or Shchedrin? All that was utterly beyond his ken. Everything abstract, everything evanescent in the sphere of thought and feeling ... it was as mysterious and boring to him as music to one who has no ear. He took only the business view of people, dividing them into competent and incompetent. He had no other criterion. Honesty and integrity were merely signs of competence. Drinking, gambling and whoring were all right so long as they didn't interfere with business. Believing in God was rather stupid, but religion must be preserved, since the common people needed some restraining principle or else they wouldn't work. Punishments were only needed as a deter­rent. There was no point in going away for one's holidays because life was quite all right in to^n. And so on. He was a widower without children, but he lived on as ample a scale as a family man, paying three thousand a year for his flat.

The second guest, Kukushkin, was young for the fairly senior rank which he held. He was a short man distinguished by the lack of pro­portion between his stout, podgy trunk and small, thin face: a highly disagreeable combination. His lips were puckered up, his little trimmed moustache looked as if it had been glued on with varnish. The creature had the manners of a lizard. He didn't enter a room, but rather slithered into it with mincing little steps, squirming and tittering, and he bared his teeth when he laughed. He was a clerk of special commissions to someone or other, and did nothing at all though he was paid a large salary: especially in summer when various assignments were invented for him. He was not so much a careerist to the marrow of his bones as, deeper still, to his last drop of blood, and a petty careerist to boot: one lacking in confidence, who had built his whole career on favours received. For the sake of some wretched foreign decoration, or of being mentioned in the newspapers as present with other august personages at some funeral or other service, he would stoop to any conceivable humiliation, beg, fawn and promise. He flattered Orlov and Pekarsky out of cowardice, considering them powerful, while he flattered Polya and me because we were in the service of an influential man. Whenever I helped him off with his coat he would titter and ask: 'Are you married, Stephen?' This was followed by scurrilous vulgarities by way of showing me special attention. Kukushkin flattered Orlov's weak­nesses, his perversity and his complacency. To please Orlov he posed as an arrant cynic and atheist, and joined him in criticizing those to whom he elsewhere grovelled slavishly. When, at supper, the talk turned to women and love, he posed as a refined and sophisticated libertine. It is remarkable, by and large, how the gay dogs of St. Peters­burg like talking about their unusual tastes. Some youthful officials of high rank make do very well with the embraces of their cook or a wretched street-walker onthe Ncvsky Prospekt, but from the way they speak they are contaminated with all the vices of east and west, being honorary members of a round dozen iniquitous secret societies and already having a police record. Kukushkin told the most barefaced lies about himself, and people didn't so much disbelieve him as let his fantasies go in one ear and out of the other.

The third guest, Gruzin, was the son of a worthy and erudite senior official. He was the same age as Orlov, his colouring was fair, he had long hair, he was short-sighted and he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. I remember his long, pale fingers like a pianist's, and there was some­thing of the musician and virtuoso about his whole f.gure, actually. Orchestral first violins have that same look. He coughed, he was subject to migraine, he seemed generally sickly and frail. At home they prob­ably dressed and undressed him like a baby. He had been to law school, and had first worked in the legal department, had then been transferred to the Senate, and had left that, after which he had received a post in the Ministry of Works through his connections, but had soon left that too. In my time he had a job as section head in Orlov's division, but he used to say that he would soon be back in the legal department. His attitude to his work, and to this skipping from job to job, was extra­ordinarily flippant, and when people started talking seriously about ranks, decorations and salaries in his presence he would smile com­placently and repeat Prutkov's aphorism about government service being 'the only place where you can learn the truth'. He had a little wife with a lined face who was very jealous, and five weedy little children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he loved his children only when he could see them. His general attitude to his family was one of in­difference, rather, and he would make fun of it. He and his family lived on credit, and he borrowed here there and everywhere on every possible occasion, not exempting even office superiors and house- porters. His was a flabbynature so lazy that he didn't care what happened to him, but floated with the tide he knew not where and why. He- went wherever he was taken. If he was taken to some low dive, he went. If wine was set before him he drank it, and if it wasn't he didn't. If people abused their wives in his presence he abused his, asserting that she had wrecked his life, and when wives were praised he would praise his too.

'I'm very fond of the poor thing,' he would say quite sincerely.

He had no fur coat, and always went round wrapped in a rug smelling of the nursery. When he became absorbed in thought at supper, rolling bread balls and drinking a lot of red wine, I was practically certain, oddly enough, that there was something to him: something which he himself dimly sensed, very likely, but could not really fathom and appreciate, what with having so much fuss and vulgarity around him. He played the piano a little. He would sit down at the instrument, strike a couple of chords and quietly sing:

'What does the morrow hold for me?'

But then he would jump up at once as if scared, and retreat some dis­tance from the piano.

The guests had usually forgathered by ten o'clock. They played cards in Orlov's study, while Polya and I served tea. Only now did I relish the full savour ofa flunkey's life. To stand by that door, four or five hours on end, to keep the glasses filled, to change the ash-trays, to dash to the table and pick up a dropped piece ofchalk or card—above all to stand, wait, be attentive without venturing to speak, cough or smile ... all that is harder than the hardest physical labour, I can tell you. I once used to take four-hour watch at sea on stormy winter nights, and watch-keeping is incomparably easier, I fmd.

They would play cards until two or sometimes three o'clock, then stretch themselves and go into the dining-room for supper: 'a bit of a bite', as Orlov called it. At supper there was conversation. It usually began when Orlov, smiling with his eyes, mentioned a common acquaintance, or a book which he had just read, or some new appoint­ment or project. The fawning Kukushkin chimed in, and there began what to me, in my mood of the time, was a most hideous exhibition. Orlov's and his friends' irony knew no bounds, it spared no one and nothing. They spoke ofreligion: with irony. They spoke ofphilosophy, of the meaning and purpose oflife: with irony. If the peasant question cropped up there was still more irony. St. Petersburg has a peculiar breed of specialists in deriding every manifestation of life. They can't even pass a starving man or a suicide without some banal remark. But Orlov and his friends did notjoke orjeer, they just ironized. They said there was no God, that individuality disappeared completely at death . . . and that there were no immortals outside the French Academy. There was no such thing as true goodness, and never could be since its existence presupposed human perfectibility: a contradiction in terms, that. Russia was just as tedious and poverty^tricken as Persia. Our intellectuals were hopeless, on Pekarsky's reckoning, consisting very largely of futile incompetents. As for our peasants, they were s^ak in drink, sloth, thieving and degeneracy. We had no science, our literature was primitive, our commerce was based on fraud and on the idea that 'you can't sell without cheating'. Everything else' was the same, it was all absurd.

The wine would cheer them up by the end of supper, and the con­versation became brighter. They made fun of Gruzin's family life, of Kukushkin's conquests, and of Pekarsky, who reputedly headed one page in his cash book To Charity and another To Demands of Nature. There were no faithful wives, they said, there was no wife with whom, given the knack, one couldn't have one's bit of fun without leaving her drawing-room at the very time when her husband was in his study next door. Adolescent girls were corrupt and no better than they should be. Orlov kept a letter written by some fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. On her way home from school she had 'picked up such a nice officer' on the Nevsky, said she, and he had taken her home and kept her there till late at night, and then she had rushed off to write to her girl-friend and share her ecstasies. Chastity had never existed, according to them, there was no such thing, nor was there any need for it, obviously: humanity had managed pretty well without it so far. And the harm done by 'loose living' was much exaggerated. A certain perversion specified in our penal code ... it hadn't stopped Diogenes being a philosopher and teacher. Caesar and Cicero were lechers, but also great men. Cato married a young girl in his old age, yet continued to rank as an austere, ascetic custodian of morals.

At three or four in the morning the party would break up, or they would drive out of town together—or else to one Barbara Osipovna's on Officer Street—while I would retire to my room where my head­ache and coughing kept me awake for some time.

IV

I remember a ring on the door-bell one Sunday morning about three weeks after I had entered Orlov's service. It was about half past ten and he was still asleep. I opened the door, and you can picture my astonish­ment when I saw a veiled lady on the landing.

'Has Mr. Orlov got up yet?' she asked. I recognized the voice of the Zinaida Krasnovsky to whom I had taken letters in Znamensky Square. Whether I had time or wit to answer her, I do not recollect, for I was so taken aback by her arrival. Not that she needed an answer, anyway. She had darted past me in a flash, filling the hall with the fragrance of her scent, which I still remember vividly. Then she disappeared into the flat and her footsteps died away. Not a sound was heard for at least half an hour. Then there was another ring at the door-bell. This time some dolled-up girl (evidently a maid from a wealthy household) and our porter, both puffing, brought in two suitcases and a dress- basket.

'These arc for Mrs. Krasnovsky,' said the girl.

She went down without another word. All this was most mysterious and provoked a sly grin from Polya, who doted on her master's capers. 'He isn't half a one,' she seemed to say, and she walked round on tiptoe the whole time. Then, at last, steps were heard, and Zinaida came quickly into the hall.

'Stephen,' she said, seeing me at the door of my room, 'help Mr. Orlov to get dressed.'

When I went into Orlov's room with his clothes and boots he was sitting on his bed with his feet dangling on the bearskin rug, his whole being expressive of discomfiture. He ignored me, having no interest in my menial opinion. It was in his own eyes, in the eyes of his inner self, that he felt disconcerted and embarrassed, that was obvious. He dressed, washed and spent some time fussing with his brushes and combs: silently, unhurriedly, as if taking time to ponder and work out where he stood, and his very back betrayed his dismay and annoyance with himself.

They had coffee together. Zinaida poured out for both of them, then put her elbows on the table and laughed.

'I still can't believe it,' she said. 'When you've been travelling for ages, and at last reach your hotel, you still can't believe you are at journey's end. It's so nice to breathe freely.'

Looking like a mischievous little girl, she sighed with relief and laughed again.

'You will excuse me,' said Orlov with a nod at the newspapers. 'Reading at breakfast is an addiction of mine. But I can do two things at once, I can both read and listen.'

'No, read away, do. You shall keep all your old habits and your freedom. Why are you so glum, though? Are you always like this in the mornings, or is it only today? Aren't you pleased?'

'Oh, very much so. But I must confess to being somewhat non­plussed.'

'Now, why? You've had plenty of time to prepare for my invasion, I've been threatening you with it every day.'

'True, but I had not cxpected you to execute that threat on this particular morning.'

'Well, I hadn't expected to either, but it's better this way—far better, darling. It's best to take the plunge and get it over with.'

'Yes, of course.'

'Darling!' she said, screwing up her eyes. 'All's well that ends well, but how much trouble there was before we reached this happy ending! Don't mind my laughing. I'm so glad and happy, but I feel more like crying than laughing.

'Yesterday I won a pitched battle,' she went on in French, 'God alone knows how I suffered. But I'm laughing because I just can't believe it. Sitting drinking coffee with you ... I feel I must be dreaming it, it can't be real.'

Continuing in French, she told how she had broken with her husband on the previous day, her eyes brimming with tears and laughing by turns as she gazed at Orlov enraptured. Her husband had long suspected her, she said, but had avoided the subject. They had quarrelled very frequently, but he had a way of retreating into silence when things reached boiling point—he would retire to his study to avoid blurting out his suspicions in the heat of the moment, and also to cut short any admissions on her part. Now, Zinaida had felt guilty, despicable and incapable oftaking any bold, serious step, for which reason she had hated herself and her husband more and more every day, and had suffered the torments ofthe damned. But when, during their quarrel ofthe previous day, he had shouted tearfully 'My God, when will all this end ?' and had retired to his study, she had pounced after him like a cat after a mouse, she had stopped himclosingthe door behindhim, andshehadshoutedthatshe hated him from the bottom ofher heart. Then he had admitted her to the study and she had told him everything, confessing that she loved another man, that this other man was her true and most lawful husband, and that she considered ither moral duty to go away andjoin him that very day, come what might, and even under artillery bombardment if necessary.

'You have a marked romantic streak,' Orlov put in, his eyes glued to his newspaper.

She laughed and went on talking, leaving her coffce untouched, Her cheeks were burning, which rather disconcerted her, and she looked at me and Polya in embarrassment. From the rest of her tale I learnt that her husband had replied with reproaches and threats, and fmall y with tears—it would have been truer to say that it was he, not she, who had won their pitched battle.

'Yes, darling, aslong asI was worked upitall went off marvellously,' she said. 'But with nightfall I lost heart. You don't believe in God, George, but I do believe a little and I'm afraid of retribution. God requires us to be patient, generous and unselfish, but here am I refusing to be patient and wanting to build my life my o^ way. But is that right? What if it's wrong in God's eyes? My husband came in at two o'clock in the morning.

"'You'll never dare leave me," he said. "I'll have you brought back by the police and make a scene."

'Then; a little later, I saw him in the doorway again, looking like a ghost. "Have pity on me, you might damage my career by riming away."

'These words shocked me, they made me feel rotten. The retribution's started, thought I, and I began trembling with fear and crying. I felt as though the ceiling would fall in on me, as ifl should be dragged off to the police station then and there, as if you'd get tired of me. God knows what I didn't feel, in other words! I shall enter a convent, thought I, I'll become a nurse, I'll renounce happiness, but then I remembered that you loved me, that I had no right to dispose of myselfwithout your knowledge—oh, my head was in such a whirl and I didn't know what to do or think, I was so frantic. Then the sun rose and I cheered up again. As soon as morning came I dashed off here. Oh, what I've been through, darling! I haven't slept the last two nights.'

She was tired and excited. She wanted to sleep, to go on talking for ever, to laugh, cry, and drive off for lunch in a restaurant and savour her new freedom: all these things at one and the same time.

'Your flat is comfortable, but it's a bit small for two, I'm afraid,' she said, quickly touring all the rooms after breakfast. 'Which is my room? I like this one because it's next to your study.'

At about half past one she changed her dress in the; room next to the study, which she thereafter termed hers, and went out to lunch with Orlov. They also dined in a restaurant, and they spent the long gap between lunch and dinner shopping. I was opening the door and accepting sundry purchases from shop-assistants and errand-boys till late that night. Amongst other things they brought a magnificent pier- glass, a dressing-table, a bedstead and a sumptuous tea service which we didn't need. They brought a whole tribe of copper saucepans which we arranged in a row on the shelf in our cold, empty kitchen. When we unpacked the tea service Polya's eyes gleamed and she looked at me two or three times with hatred, and with fear that I, not she, might he first to steal one of those elegant cups. They brought a very expensive but inconvenient lady's writing desk. Zinaida obviously intended to settle in permanently and set up house with us.

At about half past nine she and Orlov returned. Proudly conscious of having achieved something bold and original, passionately in love, and (as she supposed) passionately loved, deliciously tired and anticipa­ting deep, sweet sleep, Zinaida was revelling in her new life. She kept clasping her hands tightly together from sheer high spirits, she declared that everything was marvellous, she swore to love for ever. These vows and the innocent, almost infantile, conviction that she was deeply loved in return and would be loved for ever ... it all made her look five years younger. She talked charming nonsense, laughing at herself.

'There is no greater blessing than freedom,' she announced, forcing herself to say something earnest and significant. 'Why, it's all so silly, isn't it? We attach no value to our o^n views, however wise, and yet we are terrified of what various half-wits think. Up to the last minute I was afraid ofwhat people might say, but as soon as I followed my own inclinations and decided to live my own way, my eyes were opened, I got over my stupid fears, and now I'm happy, and I wish everyone else could be as happy.'

But then her chain of thought broke and she spoke of taking a new flat, of wallpaper, of horses, of a trip to Switzerland and Italy. But Orlov was tired by his voyage round restaurants and shops, and still felt the self-conscious discornfiture which I had noticed in him that morning. He smiled, but more from politeness than pleasure, and when she said anything serious he agreed ironically.

'Yes, yes, of course.'

'You must hurry up and find us a good cook, Stephen,' she told me.

'There's no need for any hurry on the kitchen front,' said Orlov with a cold look at me. 'We must move into our new flat first.'

He had never had his cooking done at home or kept horses, 'not liking dirty ^fhings about the place', as he said, and he only put up with me and Polya in his flat from sheer necessity. So-called domesticity with its mundanejoys and squabbles . . . it jarred on him as .1 form of vulgarity. To be pregnant, or have children and speak of them, that was bad form and suburban. I was now extremely curious to sec how these two creatures would manage together in the same dwelling: she- domesticated, very much the housewife with her copper saucepans and her dreams of a good cook and horses, and he who so often told his friends that a decent, clean-living man's apartment should be like a warship. There should be nothing superfluous in it: no women, no children, no bits and pieces, no kitchen utensils.

v

Now I shall tell you what happened on the following Thursday. Orlov and Zinaida ate at Contant's or Donon's that day. Orlov came home alone and Zinaida drove off-—as I later learnt, to the Old Town to see her former governess and wait till our guests had gone. Orlov was not keen on showing her to his friends: I realized that at breakfast when he began assuring her that he must cancel his Thursdays for the sake of her peace of mind.

As usual the guests arrived almost simultaneously.

'Is the mistress at home?' Kukushkin asked me in a whisper.

'No, sir,' I answered.

He came in with sly, glinting eyes, smiling enigmatically, rubbing his cold hands.

'Congratulations, my good sir,' he told Orlov, vibrating all over with an obsequious, ingratiating laugh. 'Be ye fruitful, and multiply ye, like unto the cedars of Lebanon.'

Making for the bedroom, the guests uttered some witticisms about a pair of lady's slippers, a rug which had been placed between the two beds and a grey blouse hanging on the back of a bed. They were amused by the idea of one so obstinate, one who despised all the mundane details of love, suddenly being caught in female toils in so simple and commonplace a manner.

'That which we mocked, to that have we bowed the knee,' Kukush­kin repeated several times. He had, I may say, the disagreeable affecta­tion of parading what sounded like biblical texts.

'Hush!' he whispered, raising a finger to his lips when they came out ofthe bedroom into the room next to the study. 'Quiet! Here it is that Gretchen dreams of her Faust!'

He roared with laughter as ifhe had said something terribly funny. I observed Gruzin, expecting this laugh to jar on his musical ear, but I was wrong. His lean, good-natured face beamed with pleasure. When they sat do^n to cards he said—pronouncing the letter г in his throat, and choking with laughter—that dear Georgie only needed a cherry- wood pipe and guitar for his cup of domestic felicity to run over. Pekarsky laughed sedately, but his tense expression showed that he found Orlov's new love affair distasteful. He could not understand exactly what had happened.

'But what about the husband?' he asked in perplexity after they had played three rubbers.

'I don't know,' answered Orlov.

Pekarsky combed his great beard with his fingers, pltmged deep in thought, and did not speak again until supper-time.

'I'm sorry, but I don't understand you two, I must say,' said he, slowly drawling out each word, when they had sat down to supper. 'You could love each other and break the seventh commandment to your hearts' content—that I could understand, I could see the point of that. But why make the husband a party to your secrets? Was there really any need ?'

'Oh, does it really matter?'

'H'm,' Pekarsky brooded.

'Well, I'll tell you one thing, old chap,' he went on, obviously racking his brains. 'Should I ever marry again, and should you conceive the notion ofpresenting me with a pair of horns, please do it so that I don't notice. It is far more honest to deceive a man than to wreck his daily routine and reputation. Oh, I can see what you're after. You both think that by living together openly you are behaving in an exceptionally decent and liberal manner, but I don't hold with this, er—what's it called ?—this romanticism.'

Orlov did not answer. He was in a bad mood and disinclined to speak. Still baffled, Pekarsky drummed his fingers on the table and thought for a moment.

'I still don't understand you two,' he said. 'You're not a student, she's not a little seamstress. You both have means. You could set her up in a separate establishment, I take it.'

'No, I couldn't. Read your Turgenev.'

'Oh? Why? I already have read him.'

'In his works Turgenev preaches that every superior, right-minded young woman should follow her beloved to the ends of the earth and serve his ideals,' said Orlov, screwing up his eyes ironically. 'Theends of the earth . . . that's poetic licence, since the whole globe with all its regions is subsumed in the dwelling of the man she loves. Not sharing your dwelling with the woman who loves you, that means denying her high destiny and failing to share her ideals. Yes, old boy, the pre­scription is Turgenev's, but it's me who has to take the laming medicine!'

'I can't see where Turgenev comes in,' said Gruzinn softly, s^^gging his shoulders. 'Do you remember Three Meetings, George, and how he's walking somewhere in Italy late one evening, and suddenly hears "Vieni, pensando a me segretamente" ?'

G^in started humming it. 'Good stuff, that.'

'But she didn't force herself on you, did she?' Pekarsky asked. 'It's what you yourself wanted.'

'Oh, do have a heart! Far from wanting it, I couldn't even conceive of such a possibility. When she mentioned corning to live with me I thought she was just having her little joke.'

Everyone laughed.

'How could I want such a thing ?' continued Orlov in the tone ofone put on the defensive. 'I am not a Turgenev hero, and should I ever require to liberate Bulgaria I could dispense with any female escort. I regard love principally as an element essential to my physical nature: one primitive and inimical to my whole ethos. I must satisfy it with discretion or give it up altogether, otherwise it will introduce elements as impure as itself into my life. To make it a pleasure instead of a torment I try to beautify it and surround it with a multitude ofillusions. I won't go to a woman unless I am assured beforehand that she will be beautiful and attractive. Nor will I visit her unless I'm on the top ofmy form. Only under such conditions do we manage to deceive each other, and feel that we love and are happy. But what do I want with copper saucepans and untidy hair ? Or with being seen when I haven't washed ? And am in a bad mood ? In her naive way Zinaida wants to make me like something I've been dodging all my life. She wants my flat to smell of cooking and washing up. She wants to move into a new establishment with tremendous йclat and drive about with her own horses, she needs must count my underwear, she must worry about my health, she must be constantly meddling in my private life, and she must dog my every step, while all the time sincerely assuring me that I can retain my old habits and my freedom. She is convinced that we're soon going off on our honeymoon, as if we had just got married —she wishes to be constantly at my side in trains and hotels, in other words, whereas I like reading when I travel and can't stand conversa­tion.'

'Then try and talk some sense into her,' said Pekarsky.

'Eh? Do you think she would understand me? Why, we think so differently! Leaving Daddy and Mummy, or one's husband, going off with the man one loves . . . that's civic courage at its highest in her view, whereas to me it's sheer childishness. To fall in love and have an affair ... to her it means beginning a new life, while to me it means nothing. Love, man . . . they're her be-all and end-all, and perhaps the theory of the subconscious is affecting her here. You just try persuading her that love is only a simple need like food and clothing, that it really isn't the end of the world if husbands and wives misbehave, that one may be a lecher and seducer yet also a man of genius and integrity— and that, conversely, someone who renounces the pleasures oflove may be a stupid, nasty animal all the same. Modern civilized man, even on a low level—your French worker, say—spends ten sous a day on his dinner, five sous on the wine with his dinner, and five to ten sous on his woman, and he gives all his mind and nerves to his work. Now, Zinaida doesn't pay for love in sous, she gives her whole soul. I might well try to talk some sense into her, but she would answer by crying out in all sincerity that I've r^ned her and that she has nothing left to live for.'

'Then don't talk to her,' said Pekarsky. 'Just take a separate flat for her, and that will be that.'

'It's easy enough to say '

There was a short pause.

'But she is so charming,' said Kukus^rin. 'She's delightful. Such women think they'll love for ever, they surrender themselves with such feeling.'

'One must keep one's wits about one,' said Orlov. 'One must use one's brain. Experiences culled from everyday life, and enshrined in countless novels and plays . . . they all confirm that the adulteries and cohabitations ofdecent people never last more than two or three years at the outside, however much they may have loved each other at the start. That she must know. So all these changes of residence, these saucepans, these hopes for eternal love and harmony simply add up to a wish to bamboozle herself and me. She is charming and delightful, no doubt about it. But she has turned my life upside do^. All that I have hitherto considered trivial nonsense . .. she makes me elevate it to the status of a serious problem, so I'm serving an idol which I have never worshipped. She is charming, she is delightful, but when I drive home from work nowadays I'm somehow in a bad mood, as if I expect to find some inconvenience at home like workmen having dismantled all our stoves and left great piles of bricks everywhere. I'm not paying for my love in sous now, in other words, but with part of my peace of mind and my nerves. And that's pretty bad.' 'Oh, if only she could hear this wicked man!' sighed Kukushkin.

'My dear sir,' he added theatrically, 'I will liberate you from the onerous obligation of loving this charming creature: I'll cut you out with Zinaida.'

'Go ahead,' said Orlov nonchalantly.

Kukushkin laughed a shrill little laugh for half a minute, shaking all over, and then spoke. 'Now sec here, I'm not joking. And don't let's have any of the Othello business afterwards!'

Everyone started talking about Kukushkin's unflagging love life, about how irresistible he was to women, how dangerous to husbands, and how devils would barbecue him in the next world because he was so dissolute. He said nothing, he just screwed up his eyes, and when people named ladies of his acquaintance he would wag his little finger as if warning that other people's secrets must not be divulged.

Orlov suddenly looked at his watch.

The guests understood and prepared to leave. On this occasion I remember Gruzin, who had drunk too much wine, taking an uncon­scionable time getting ready. He donned an overcoat resembling the coats made for children in poor families, put his collar up and began telling some long-winded story. Then, noticing that no one was listening to him, he shouldered that rug smelling of the nursery, assumed a hunted, wheedling air and begged me to find his cap.

'My dear old George,' he said tenderly. 'Now, listen: how about a trip out of town, old boy?'

'You go, I can't. I now have married status.'

'She's a marvellous woman, she won't be angry. Come on, my good lord and master. It's wonderful weather, there's a bit of a snow-storm and a spot of frost. You need a thorough shake-up, believe me. You're out of sorts, da^^ it '

Orlov stretched, yawned and looked at Pckarsky.

'You going?' he asked hesitantly.

'I don't know, I might.'

'A drinking expedition, eh? Oh, all right, I'll come,' Orlov decided after some hesitation. 'Wait a moment, I'll get some money.'

He went into the study and Gruzin waddled after him, trailing his rug. A minute later both returned to the hall. Tipsy and very pleased with himself, Gruzin was crumpling a ten-rouble note in his hand.

'We'll settle up tomorrow,' he said. 'And she's so good-natured, she won't be angry. She's godmother to my little Liza, I'm fond ofthe poor girl. Oh, my dear chap!'—he gave a sudden happy laugh and pressed his forehead on Pekarsky's back—'Oh, my dear old Pekarsky! You legal eagle, you crusty old fogy, you. . . . But you're fond of women, that I'll wager.'

'Fat ones, incidentally,' said Orlov, putting his coat on. 'But let's be off, or we shall meet her on the way out.'

'Vieni, pensando a me segretamente,' hummed Gruzin.

They left at last. Orlov was away all night, and returned for lunch next day.

VI

Zinaida had lost a little gold watch, a present from her father. Its disappearance surprised and alarmed her. She spent half the day going round the flat, looking frantically at tables and window-sills, but that watch seemed to have vanished into thin air.

A day or two later she left her purse in the hall on returning from some expedition. Luckily for me it was Polya, not I, who had helped her off with her coat on that occasion. When the purse was missed it was no longer in the hall.

Zinaida was puzzled. 'This is most odd. I distinctly remember taking it out of my pocket to pay the cabman, and then I put it do^ here near the looking-glass. Highly peculiar!'

I had not stolen it, yet I felt as ifl had and had been caught in the act. Tears even came to my eyes.

'We must be haunted,' Zinaida told Orlov in French as they sat do^ to their meal. 'I lost my purse in the hall today—and now, lo and behold, it has turned up on my table! But it was in no disinterested spirit that our ghost performed this trick. He took a gold coin and twenty roubles in notes for his pains.'

'First your watch is missing, then it's money,' said Orlov. 'Why docs that sort of thing never happen to me?'

A minute later Zinaida had forgotten the ghost's trick, and was laughing as she told how she had ordered some writing-paper last week, but had forgotten to give her new address, so the shop had sent the paper to her husband at her old home and he had had to pay a bill of twelve roubles. Then she suddenly fixed her eyes on Polya and stared at her, while blushing and feeling such embarrassment that she changed the subject.

When I took their coffee into the study Orlov was standing with his back to the fire, and she was sitting in an arm-chair facing him.

'No, I am not in a bad mood,' she was saying in French. 'But I've started putting two and two together now, and I understand the whole thing. I can name the day, and even the hour, when she stole my watch. And what about that purse? There's no room for doubt.'

She laughed and accepted some coffee from me. 'Oh, now I under­stand why I'm always loang my handkerchiefs and gloves. Say what you like, I'm going to dismiss that thieving magpie tomorrow and send Stephen for my Sophia. Sophia doesn't steal and she hasn't such an, er, repulsive appearance.'

'You're in a bad mood. Tomorrow you'll feel differently, and you'll realize that one can't just dismiss a person simply on suspicion.'

'It's not suspicion, I'm absolutely certain,' said Zinaida. 'While I suspected this plebeian with the sorrowful countenance, this valet of yours, I said not a word. I am hurt that you don't trust me, George.'

'If we disagree about something it doesn't follow that I mistrust you.

'Let us suppose you're right,' said Orlov, tu^rng to the fire and throwing his cigarette-end in it. 'Even so, there is still no need to get excited. Actually, to be perfectly fr^ik, I had never expected my humble establishment to cause you so much serious worry and upset. If you have lost a gold coin, never mind, I'll give you a hundred gold coins. But to alter my routine, to pick a new maid off the streets and wait for her to learn the ropes ... it all takes time, it's boring, and it's not my line. Our present maid is fat, admittedly, and she may have a weakness for gloves and handkerchiefs, but she is also well-behaved and well-trained, and she doesn't squeak when Kukushkin pinches her.'

'In other words you can't bear to part with her. Then why not say so ?'

'Are you jealous?'

'Yes, I am,' Zinaida said decisively.

'Most grateful, I'm sure.'

'Yes, I amjealous,' she repeated, and tears gleamed in her eyes. 'No, this isn't jealousy, it's something worse. I don't know what to call it.'

She clutched her temples. 'Men are so foul,' she continued impetu­ously. 'It's awful.'

'I don't know what you find so awful.'

'I've never seen it and1 know nothing about it, but you men are said to start off with housemaids when you are quite small, after which you get used to it and no longer feel any repugnance. I know nothing whatever about it, but I've even read that '

Then she adopted a fondly wheedling tone and went up to Orlov. 'You're so right, of course, George, I really am in a bad mood today. I can't help it, though, you must see that. She disgusts me, and I'm afraid of her. I can't bear the sight of her.'

'Surely you can rise above such trivialities,' said Orlov, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity and moving away from the fire. 'It's simple enough, isn't it?Just take no notice ofher, then she won't disgust you— and you won't need to dramatize these pin-pricks either.'

I left the study, and what answer Orlov received I do not know. Whatever it was, Polya stayed on. After this Zinaida never asked her to do anything, obviously trying to dispense with her services. When Polya handed her anything—or merely • passed by, even, her bangle jingling, her skirts crackling—Zinaida shuddered.

Had Gruzin or Pekarsky asked Orlov to discharge Polya he would have done so without turning a hair, I think, nor would he have troubled to give any explanation whatever, being complaisant, like all apathetic people. But with Zinaida he was stubborn even over trifles for some reason: to the point of sheer pig-headedness on occasion. So ifZinaida took a liking to anything he was sure to dislike it, I knew that by now. When she came back from shopping eager to show off her new purchases he would give them a passing glance, remarking icily that the more the flat was cluttered up with rubbish the less air there was to breathe. Sometimes he would put on evening dress to go out and would say good-bye to Zinaida, but would then suddenly decide to stay at home out of sheer perversity. At such times he only stayed in so that he could be miserable, I felt.

'But why stay in ?' Zinaida would ask with pretended annoyance, yet radiant with pleasure. 'Now, why? You arc not used to staying in of an evening, and I don't want you to change your habits on my account. So do go out, please, or else I shall feel guilty.'

'No one's blaming you for anything, are they?' Orlov would ask.

He would sprawl in his study arm-chair with a martyred look and take up a book, shielding his eyes with his hand. But soon the book would fall from his grasp, he would turn heavily in his chair and put his hand up again as if to keep the sun out of his eyes. Now he was annoyed with himself for not having gone out.

'May I come in?' Zinaida would ask, hesitantly entering the study. 'Are you reading ? I was a bit bored, so I've looked in for a moment just for a peep.'

I remember her coming in one evening in this same hesitant fashion and at some ill-chosen moment. She sank on the rug at Orlov's feet, and her gentle, timorous movements showed that his mood puzzled and scared her.

'You are always reading,' she began artfully, with an obvious wish to flatter. 'Do you know the secret of your success, George ? You're an intelligent, educated man. What book have you there?'

Orlov answered. Some minutes passed in silence: minutes which seemed hours to me. I was standing in the drawing-room where I could watch them both, and I was afraid of coughing.

'There is something I wanted to tell you,' Zinaida softly announced, and laughed. 'Shall I? You may laugh at me, you may say I'm flattering myself, but you know, I do so terribly much want to think you stayed in tonight on my be!Ialf, so that we could spend the evening together. Did you? May I think that?'

'Pray do,' said Orlov, screening his eyes. 'True happiness lies in the capacity to conceive things not only as they are, but also as they are not.'

'That was a very long sentence, I didn't quite understand it. Do you mean that happy people live in their imaginations? That is certainly true. I like sitting in your study in the evenings and letting my thoughts carry me far, far away. It's nice to day-dream a little. Shall we dream aloud together, George?'

'Never having attended a girls' boarding school, I am unacquainted with the technique.'

'You're in a bad mood, are you?' Zinaida asked, taking Orlov's hand. 'Tell me, why? I am afraid of you when you're like this. I don't know whether you have a headache or are angry with me '

More long minutes passed in silence.

'Why have you changed?' she asked softly. 'Why aren't you so tender and cheerful any more, as you were in Znamensky Square? I havelived with you foramonth, nearly, but I feel wehaven't begun living yet, we haven't had a proper talk. You always fob me offwithjokes or with long, bleak answers like a teacher's. There's something bleak about your jokes too. Why have you stopped speaking to me seriously?'

'I always speak seriously.'

'Well, let's have a talk. For God's sake, George.'

'Carry on then. What shall we talk about.'

'About our life, our future,' said Zinaida dreamily. 'I keep making plans for the future, I always enjoy that. I'll start by asking when you mean to give up your job, George.'

'But why ever should I?' Orlov asked, removing his hand from his forehead.

'No one with your views can work for the government, you're out of place there.'

'My views?' Orlov asked. 'What views ? By conviction and tempera­ment I am an ordinary civil servant: a typical red-tape merchant. You are mistaking me for someone else, I venture to assure you.'

'You're joking again, George.'

'Not a bit of it. The Civil Service may not satisfy me, but still it does suit me better than anything else. I am used to it, and I'm with people of my o^n sort there. There at least I'm not an odd-man-out, and I feel reasonably all right.'

'You hate the Civil Service, it sickens you.'

'Oh, it does, does it? If I resign, if I start dreaming aloud and letting myself fl oat off into some other world, you don't suppose I'll find that world any less hateful than my job, do you?'

'You're so keen on contradicting me you even disparage yourself.' Zinaida was hurt and stood up. 'I'm sorry I ever started this conversa­tion.'

'But why so angry? I'm not angry because you're not in the Civil Service, am I? Everyone lives his own life.'

'But do you live your own life? Are you free?' Zinaida went on, throwing up her arms in despair. 'Spending all your time writing papers repugnant to your convictions, doing what you arc told, visiting your superiors to wish them a Happy New Year, all that incessant card-playing—and then, to cap it all, serving a system which you must find uncongenial ... no, George, no! Don't make such clumsy jokes. Oh, you are awful. As a man ofhigh ideals you should serve only )'OUr ideals.'

'You really are mistaking me for someone else,' sighed Orlov.

'Why don't you just tell me you don't want to talk to me?' Zinaida brought out through tears. 'You're fed up with me, that's all.'

'Now, look here, my dear,' Orlov admonished her, sitting up in his arm-chair. 'As you yourself so kindly remarked, I am an intelligent, educated man. Now, one can't teach an old dog new tricks. Those ideas, small and great, which you have in mind when calling me an idealist ... I know all about all of them. So if I prefer myjob and my cards to those ideals I presumably have grounds for doing so. That is the first point. And, secondly, you have never been a civil servant so far as I am aware, and you can only cull your views on government work from anecdotes and trashy novels. It might therefore be a good idea if we agreed once and for all to talk neither about things which we have knownwn all about all along nor about things outside our sphere of competence.'

'Why, why speak to me like that?' Zinaida asked, stepping back in horror. 'Think what you are saying, George, for God's sake.'

Her voice quivered and broke. Though obviously trying to hold back her tears, she suddenly burst out sobbing.

'George, darling, this is killing me,' she said in French, quickly falling to her knees before Orlov and laying her head on his lap. 'I'm so worn out and exhausted Ijust can't cope any more, I really can't. As a little girl I had that horrible depraved stepmother, then there was my husband, and now there's you . . . you. . . . I'm absolutely crazy about you, and you give me this callous irony in return!

'And then there's that awful, impudent maid,' she went on, sobbing. 'Yes, yes, I see. I'm not your wife or helpmate, I'm just a woman you don't respect.because she is your mistress. I shall commit suicide.'

I had not expected these words and tears to produce so strong an impression on Orlov. He flushed, stirring uneasily in his chair, and the irony on his face gave way to a sort of mindless dread. He looked exactly like a schoolboy.

'Darling, I swear you've misunderstood me,' he muttered frantically, touching her hair and shoulders. 'Do forgive me, I implore you. I was in the wrong and I, er, hate myself.'

'I offend you by my complaints and whining. You have such integrity, you're so generous. You are an exceptional man, I'm conscious of that every minute of the day, but I've been so utterly depressed all this time '

Zinaida embraced Orlov impulsively and kissed his cheek.

'Just stop crying, please,' he said.

'Yes, yes. I have already cried my eyes out, and I feel better.'

'As for the maid, she'll be gone tomorrow,' he said, still squirming in his chair.

'No, let her stay, George, do you hear? I'm not afraid of her any more. One must rise above such trivialities and not imagine silly things. You're so right. You're a rare, exceptional person.'

She soon stopped crying. With the tear-drops still wet on her lashes, she sat on Orlov's lap and recounted in hushed tones some pathetic tale: a reminiscence of her childhood and youth, or something like that. She stroked his face and kissed him, scrutinizing his beringed hands and the seals on his watch-chain. She was carried away by what she was saying, by having her lover near her, and her voice sounded unusually pure and candid: because her recent tears had cleansed and freshened her spirits, very likely. Orlov played with her auburn hair and kissed her hands, touching them soundlessly with his lips.

Then they had tea in the study and Zinaida read some letters aloud. They went to bed at about half past twelve.

That night my side ached mightily, and da^ broke before I was able to get warm or doze off. I heard Orlov go out of the bedroom into his study. After sitting there for about an hour he rang. My pain and fatigue made me forget all etiquette and conventions on this earth, and I went into the study barefoot, wearing only my underclothes. Orlov stood awaiting me in the doorway in dressing-go^ and cap.

'Report properly dressed when you're called,' he said sternly. 'Fetch fresh candles, will you?'

I tried to apologize, but suddenly had a terrible coughing fit and clutched the door-post with one hand to stop myself falling.

'Are you ill?' Orlov asked.

I think this was the first occasion on which he had addressed me politely during the whole time we had known each other. Why he did it God alone knows. Wearing underclothes, my face distorted by coughing, I was probably playing my part very badly and little resembled a servant.

'Why do you work then if you're so ill?' he asked.

'Because I don't want to die of starvation.'

'Oh, what a filthy business it all is, really!' he said quietly, going to his desk.

Throwing on a frock-coat, I fitted and lit fresh candles, while he sat near the desk with his legs on the arm-chair and cut the pages ofa book.

I left him engrossed in his reading, and his book no longer tended to fall from his grasp as it had in the evening.

VII

As I now write these lines my hand is restrained by a fear drilled in­to me since childhood, of seeming sentimental and ridiculous. I am incapable of being natural when I want to show affection and speak tenderly. And it is this very fear, combined with lack of experience, which now makes it quite impossible for me to convey with full precision my emotions of the time.

I was not in love with Zinaida, but my ordinary human liking for her contained far more youth, spontaneity and joy than was to be found in Orlov's love.

Plying my boot-brush or broom of a morning, I would wait with bated breath to hear her voice and steps. To stand and watch her drinking coffee and eating breakfast, to hold her fur coat for her in the hall, to put galoshes on her little feet while she placed a hand on my shoulders, and later to wait for the hall-porter's ring from downstairs and meet her at the door—rosy-checked, cold, powdered with snow— hearing her impulsive exclamations about the cold or the sledge- driver . . . ah, if you did but know how much it all meant to me! I wanted to fall in love and have a family, and I wanted my future wife to have a face and voice just like hers. I dreamt of it at mealtimes, on errands in the street and when I lay awake at night. The finicky Orlov spurned women's frippery, clildren, cooking and copper saucepans, but I garnered all these things together and watchfully cherished them in my dreams. I doted on them, I begged fate to grant me them, and I had visions of a wife, a nursery, garden paths and a little cottage.

Had I fallen in love with Zinaida I should never have dared to hope for the miracle of being loved in return, I knew, but that consideration did not trouble me. In my discreet, gentle feeling, akin to ordinary affection, there was neither jealousy nor even envy of Orlov, since .I realized that, for someone as incapacitated as I was, personal happiness was possible only in dreams.

When Zinaida waited up night after night for her George, look­ing at her book without moving or turning the pages, or when she shuddered and blenched because Polya was crossing the room, I suffered with her and I was tempted to lance this painful abscess at once by letting her know what was said in the place at supper-time on Thursdays. But how was I to do it? More and more often I saw her in tears. During the first weeks she had laughed and sung to herself even when Orlov was out, but by the second month our flat was plunged in dismal silence broken only on Thursdays.

She flattered Orlov. Just to win a spurious smile or kiss from him she would go do^n on her knees and cuddle up like a little dog. Even when she was most depressed she could not pass a looking-glass without glancing at herself and straightening her hair. I was puzzled by her continued interest in clothes and delight in making purchases—some­how it didn't quite square with her deep-felt grief. She followed fashion and ordered expensive dresses. But what use was that to anyone ?

I particularly remember one new dress costing four hundred roubles. Fancy paying that much money for one more useless frock when char­women slave away for only twenty copecks a day and provide their own food, besides which the girls who make Venice and Brussels lace receive only half a franc a day, being expected to earn the balance by immorality! Why couldn't Zinaida see the point? It puzzled me, grieved me. But she only had to leave the house and I was fmding excuscs and explanations for all that, and looking forward to the hall- porter's ring from downstairs.

She treated me like a servant, a lower form of life, as one may pat a dog while ignoring its existence. I received order:;, I was asked ques­tions, but my presence passed unremarked. The master and mistress thought it unseemly to talk to me more than was accepted. Had I interrupted their conversation or burst out laughing while serving their meals, they would surely have deemed me insane and given me my notice. And fet Zinaida did wish me well. When she sent me on errands—when she explained the workings of a new lamp or anything like that—her expression was unusually serene, kindly and cordial, and she looked me straight in the eye. At such times I always felt that she gratefully remembered my bringing her letters to Znamensky Square. Polya thought me her favourite and hated me for that.

'Go on then, that mistress of yours wants you,' she would say with a sarcastic grin when Zinaida rang.

Zinaida treated me as a lower form of life, not suspecting that if anyone was humiliated in that house it was she herself! She failed to realize that I, a servant, suffered on her behalf, wondering twenty times a day what the future held for her and how it would all end. Matters deteriorated noticeably each day. Disliking tears as he did, Orlov began to show obvious fear of conversations and to shy off them after that evening's discussion about his job. When Zinaida began arguing or appealing, when she seemed on the verge oftears, he would make some plausible excuse and go to his study, or else leave the house altogether. He took to spending more and more lights away from home, and he ate out more frequently stiil. It was now he who asked his friends to take him off somewhere on Thursdays. Zinaida still longed to have the cooking done at home, to move into a new flat, to travel abroad—but day-dreams these day-dreams remained. Meals were brought in from the restaurant, and Orlov asked her not to broach the question of moving house until they had returned from abroad, observing with regard to the said expedition that they could not set off until he had gro^n his hair long since trailing from hotel to hotel in pursuit of ideals was impermissible without flowing locks.

It was the last strawwhenKukushkinbeganshowing up ofan evening during Orlov's absence. There was nothing exceptionable about his behaviour, but I just could not forget his once mentioning his intention of cutting Orlov out with Zinaida. Regaled on tea and claret, he sniggered and tried to curry favour by assuring Zinaida that a free union was superior to holy wedlock in every way, and that every respectable person should really come and do her homage now.

VIII

Christmas passed tediously in vague anticipation of some mishap. At breakfast on New Year's Eve Orlov suddenly announced that his office was sending him on some special mission to a Senator who was conducting a certain inspection in the provinces.

'One doesn't feel like going, but one can't think of any excuse,' he said with a vexed air. 'One must go, there's nothing for it.'

At this news Zinaida's eyes reddened instantly.

'Is.it for long?' she asked.

'About five days.'

'I'm glad you are going, quite honestly,' she said after a little thought. 'It will make a change. You will fall in love on the way and tell me all about it later.'

Whenever possible she tried to let Orlov see that she was no burden to him, and that he could do as he pleased, but this flaive, blatantly transparent stratagem deceived no one, only reminding him once again that he was not free.

'I am leaving this evening,' he said, and started reading the newspapers.

Zinaida was all for seeing him offat the station, but he dissuaded her, saying that he was not going to America and wouldn't be away five years, but only five days at the most.

They said good-bye at about half past seven. He put one arm round her, kissing her on forehead and lips.

'Now, you be a good little girl and don't fret while I'maway,' he said with a warmthand sincerity which touched even me. 'God preserve you.'

She gazed avidly into his face to imprint those precious features on her memory the more firmly, then twined her arms gracefully round his neck and laid her head on his chest.

'Forgive our misunderstandings,' she said in French. 'Husband and wife can't help quarrelling if they love one another, and I'm absolutely crazy about you. Don't forget me. Send lots of telegrams giving me all the details.'

Orlov kissed her again and left, looking awkward, not uttering a word. When he heard the door-lock click behind him he paused half way downstairs, deep in thought, and glanced upwards. Had but a sound reached him from above just then he would have turned back, I felt. But all was quiet. He adjusted his cloak and began walking down­stairs hesitantly.

Hired sledges had long been awaiting him at the door. Orlov climbcd into one and I took his two suitcases into the other. There was a hard frost and fires smoked at the crossroads. As we hurtled .along, the cold wind nipped my face and hands, taking my breath away. I shut my eyes and thought what a marvellous woman she was, and how much she loved him. People actually collect rubbish in back yards nowadays, and sell it to obtain money for charity, while even broken glass is thought a useful commodity. And yet so rare a treasure as the love of an elegant, intelligent, decent young woman was going completely begging. One of the early sociologists regarded every evil passion as a potential force for good, given the skill to apply it, yet with us a fine, noble passion is born only to fade away: paralysed, aimless, uncom- prehended or vulgarized. Why?

The sledges suddenly halted. I opened my eyes and saw that we had stopped in Sergiyevsky Street near the large apartment house where Pekarsky lived. Orlov got out of his sledge and vanished into the entry. Five minutes later Pekarsky's man appeared in the doorway bare­headed.

'You deaf or something ?' he shouted at me, furious with the piercing cold. 'Send those drivers off and come upstairs, you're wanted.'

Mystified, I made my way to the first floor. I had been in Pekarsky's flat before—had stood in the hall and looked into the drawing-room, that is—and after the damp, gloomy street it had impressed me each time with the glitter of its picture-frames, bronzes and expensive furniture. Now, amid all this glory, I saw Gruzin, Kukushkin and, a little later, Orlov.

'Look here, Stephen,' said he, coming up to me. 'I shall be staying here till Friday or Saturday. If any letters or telegrams come, bring them here every day. At home, of course, you will say I've left town and sent my regards. You may go.'

When I returned Zinaida was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room eating a pear. Only one candle was burning in the holder.

'You caught the train all right then?' Zinaida asked.

'Yes, ma'am. The master sends his regards.'

I went to my room and lay down too. There was nothing to do, and I did not feel like reading. I was neither surprised nor indignant, I was merely racking my brains to understand the need for such deception. Why, only a boy in his teens would trick his mistress like that! And he, so well-read, so very rational a being ... surely he could have concocted something a little cleverer! I rated his intelligence pretty high, quite frankly. Had he needed to deceive his Minister or some other powerful man, he would have applied plenty of energy and skill to that, I thought, but now that deceiving a woman was involved any old idea would do—obviously. If the trick came off, so much the better, and if it didn't come off,, no matter, for one could tell another lie equally glib and equally hasty without any mental effort whatever.

At midnight there was a shifting of chairs and a cheering on the floor above ours as people greeted the New Year. Zinaida rang for me from the room next to the study. Her energy sapped from lying downwn so long, she was sitting at her table writing on a piece of paper.

'I must send a telegram,' she said with a smile. 'Drive to the station as quick as you can and ask them to send this after him.'

Coming out into the street, I read her jotting.

'Best New Year wishes. Telegraph quickly. Miss you terribly. Seems like eternity. Sorry I cannot wire a thousand kisses and my very heart. Enjoy yourself, darling,

'zinaida'

I sent the telegram and gave her the receipt next morning.

IX

The worst thing was that Orlov had thoughtlessly let Polya into the secret of his deception by asking her to bring his shirts to Sergiyevsky Street. After that she looked at Zinaida with a gloating hatred beyond my comprehension. She kept snorting with pleasure in her room and in the hall.

'She has outstayed her welcome and it's time she took herself off,' she said triumphantly. 'You would think she could see that for herself '

She already sensed that Zinaida would not be with us much longer, so she pilfered everything she could lay her hands on while the going was good: scent bottles, tortoiseshell hairpins, handkerchiefs and shoes. On the second ofJanuary, Zinaida called me to her room and informed me in hushed tones that her black dress was missing. Then she went round the whole flat, pale-faced, looking frightened and indignant, talking to herself.

'Really! No, I must say! Did you ever hear of such impudence?'

At lunch she tried to help herself to soup, but could not do so because her hands were shaking. So were her lips. She kept glancing helplessly at the soup and pies, waiting for the trembling to pass off. Then she suddenly lost her self-control and looked at Polya.

'You may leave today, Polya,' she said. 'Stephen can manage on his own.'

'No, madam,' said Polya, 'I shall be staying, madam.'

'There is no need for that, you can clear out once and for all!' Zinaida went on, standing up in a great pother. 'You can look for another job. You leave here this instant!'

'I can't go without the master's orders. It was him took me on and what he says goes.'

'I can give you orders too!' said Zinaida, flushing crimson. 'I'm the mistress in this house.'

'Mistress you may be, madam, but only the master can dismiss me. It was him took me on.'

'How dare you stay here one minute longer!' shouted Zinaida and hit her plate with her knife. 'You are a thief, do you hear me ?'

Zinaida threw her napkin on the table and rushed out ofthe dining- room with a pathetic, martyred look. Polya went out too, sobbing aloud and reciting some incantation. The soup and grouse grew cold, and all these restaurant delicacies on the table now wore a meagre, felonious, Polya-like air. Two pies on a little plate had a most pathetic, criminal look.

'We shall be taken back to our restaurant this afternoon,' they seemed to say. 'And tomorrow we shall be served up for lunch again to some civil servant or well-known singer.'

Polya's voice carried from her room. 'Some mistress, I must say! I could have been that kind of a mistress long ago, but I wouldn't demean meself. We shall see who'll leave here first, that we shall!'

Zinaida rang. She was sitting in a corner of her room with the air of having been put there as a punishment.

'There isn't a telegram, is there?' she asked.

'No, ma'am.'

'Ask the porter, there might be one.

'And don't go out of the house,' she called after me. 'I'm afraid to be here on my o^n.'

I had to run do^n to the porter every hour after that and ask if there was a telegram. What an unnerving time, though, honestly! Zinaida ate and had tea in her room to avoid seeing Polya, she slept there on a short crescent-shaped divan and she made her owri bed. For the first few days it was I who took the telegrams, but when no answer came she ceased to trust me and went to the post office herself. Looking at her, I too anxiously awaited a wire. I hoped he might have contrived some deception: arranging for her to receive a telegram from some railway station, for instance. If he was too engrossed with his cards, or had taken up with another woman, Gruzin and Kukushkin would surely remind him of us, I thought. But we waited in vain. I went into Zinaida's room half a dozen times a day to tell her the truth, but there she would be with shoulders drooping and lips moving, looking rather like a goat. I went away again without a word. Pity and compassion had quite unmanned me. Apparently unaffected by all this, Polya was cheerful and jolly, tidying the master's study and bedroom, ferreting in cupboards, clattering dishes. When she passed Zinaida's door she would hum something and cough. She was glad that Zinaida was hiding from her. In the evening she would go off somewhere and ring the doorbell at about two or three in the morning, when I had to open up to her and listen to her remarks about my cough. At once another ring would be heard and I would run to the room next to the study. Zinaida would stick her head through the doorway.

'Who was that ringing ?' she would ask, looking at my hands to see if I was holding a telegram.

When, on Saturday, there was a ring downstairs at last, and a well- known voice was heard on the staircase, she was so happy that she burst into tears. She rushed to greet him, embraced him, kissed his chest and sleeves, and said something unintelligible. The porter carried the suit­cases up, and Polya's jolly voice was heard. It was as if he was just starting his holidays.

'Why didn't you telegraph?' asked Zinaida, panting withjoy. 'Why? I've suffered such torments, I've hardly survived. Oh, my God!'

'It's all perfectly simple,' Orlov said. 'The Senator and I left for Moscow on the very first day, so I didn't get your wires. I'll give you a detailed account this afternoon, dearest, but now I must sleep, sleep, sleep. The train was so tiring.'

He had obviously been up all night: playing cards, probably, and drinking a lot. Zinaida tucked him up in bed, and after that we all went round on tiptoe until evening. Lunch passed off quite successfully, but when they went to have coffee in the study the argument began. Zinaida said something rapidly in a low voice. She was speaking French, her words gurgling like a stream, after which a loud sigh camc from Orlov, followed by his voice.

'My God!' he said in French. 'Have you really no more interesting news than this eternal lament about the wicked maidservant?'

'But, darling, she did rob me, and she was most impudent.'

'Then why doesn't she rob me? Why isn't she impudent to me? Why do I never notice maids or porters or footmen ? You are behaving like a spoilt child, my dear, you don't know your o^n mind. I suspect you may be pregnant, actually. When I offered to dismiss her it was you who insisted on her staying. And now you want me to get rid of her. Well, in a case like this I can be stubborn too, I answer fad with fad. You want her to go away. Very well then, I want her to stay. It's the only way to cure you of your nerves.'

'Oh, all right, all right,' said Zinaida in panic. 'Let us change the subject. Let's leave it till tomorrow. Now tell me about Moscow. How was Moscow?'

X

The following day was the seventh ofJanuary (St. John the Baptist's Day) and after lunch Orlov put on his black dress-coat and decoration to go and wish his father many happy returns ofhis name-day. He had to leave at two o'clock, and it was only half past one when he had finished dressing. How should he spend the thirty minutes? He paced the drawing-room declaiming congratulatory verses which he had once recited to his father and mother as a child. Zinaida was sitting there too, being about to visit her dressmaker or go shopping, and she listened with a smile. How their conversation began I do not know, but when I took Orlov his gloves he was standing in front of Zinaida and peevishly pleading with her.

'In the name of God, in the name of all that is sacred, don't keep churning out the same old truisms. What an unfortunate faculty some clever, intellectually active ladies have for talking with an air of profundity and enthusiasm about things that have been boring even schoolboys to distraction for years! Oh, if you would but eliminate all these serious problems from our connubial programme, how grateful I should be !'

'Women may not dare hold views of their own, it seems.'

'I concede you total freedom. Be as liberal as you like, quote what authors you will, but do grant me a concession. Just don't discuss either oftwo subjects in my presence: the evils ofupper-class society and the defects ofmarriage as an institution. Now, get this into your head once and for all. The upper class is always abused in contrast with the world oftradesfolk, priests, workmen, peasants and every other sort of vulgar lout. Both classes are repugnant to me, but were I asked to make an honest choice between the two I should opt for the upper class without hesitation, and there would be nothing spurious or affected about it because my tastes are all on that side. Our world may be trivial, it may be empty, but you and I do at any rate speak decent French, we do read the occasional book, and we don't go around bashing each other in the ribs even when we are having a serious quarrel. Now, as for the hoi polloi, the riff-raff, the beard-and-caftan brigade, with them it's all "we aims to give satisfaction, 'alf a mo', gorblimey," not to mention their unbridled licentiousness, their pot-house manners and their idolatrous superstitions.'

'The peasant and tradesman do feed us.'

'So what? That reflects as much discredit on them as it docs on me. If they feed me, if they doff their caps to me, it only means they lack the wit and honesty to do otherwise. I am not blaming anyone, I am not praising anyone, all I'm saying is that where upper and lower class are concerned it's six ofone to halfa dozen ofthe other. My heart and mind are against both, but my tastes are with the former.

'Now then, with regard to marriage being an unnatural institution,' Orlov went on with a glance at his watch. 'It is high time you realized that it's not a matter ofnatural or unnatural, but ofpeople not knowing what they want out ofmarriage. What do you expect from it? Cohabi­tation, licit or illicit, and all manner of unions and liaisons, good and bad . . . they all boil do^ to the same basic element. You ladies live exclusively for that element, it's the very stuff oflife to you, and without it you'd find existence meaningless. Outside it you have no other needs and so you grab hold of it. But ever since you started reading serious fiction you have been ashamed of grabbing hold ofit—you dash from pillar to post, you rush headlong from man to man, and then try to justify the whole imbroglio by saying how unnatural a thing is marriage. But if you can't or won't renounce that essence, your greatest enemy and bugbear, if you mean to go on truckling to it so obsequiously, dien what serious discussion can there be? Whatever you say will only be pretentious nonsense and I shan't believe it.'

I went to ask the hall-porter whether the hired sledge had come, and on my return I found them quarrelling. There was a squall in the offing, as sailors say.

'Today you wish to shock me with your cynicism, I see,' said Zinaida, pacing the drawing-room in great agitation. 'I find your words quite disgusting. I am innocent in the eyes ofGod and man, and I have nothing to rcproach myselfwith, either. I left my husband for you, and I am proud of it. Yes, I swear: proud, on my word of honour.'

'Well, that's all right then.'

'If you have a shred of decency and honesty in you, then you too must be proud of what I have done. It lifts us both above thousands of people who would like to do the same as I, but don't dare through cowardice or meanness. But you aren't a decent person. You fear freedom, you deride an honest impulse because you arc afraid ofsome ignoramus suspecting you ofbeing honest. You're afraid to show me to your friends, and there's nothing you hate more than driving do^ the street with me—that's true, isn't it? Why have you never introduced me to your father and cousin, that's what I want to know?

'Oh, I am sick of this, I must say,' shouted Zinaida, stamping. 'I insist on having my rights, so kindly introduce me to your father.'

'Go and introduce yourself if you want, he interviews petitioners each morning from ten to ten thirty.'

'Oh, you really are foul,' said Zinaida, frantically wringing her hands. 'Even if you don't mean it, even ifyou're not saying what you think, that crueljoke alone makes you detestable. Oh, you are/ŭu/, I must say.'

'We're barking up the wrong tree, yon and I, this way we'll never get anywhere. What it comes to is this: you made a mistake and you won't admit it. You took me for a hero, you credited me with certain unusual notions and ideals, but then I turned out to be just a common- or-garden bureaucrat who plays cards and isn't the least bit keen on ideals. I am a worthy representative of that same tainted society which you have fled, outraged by its emptiness and vulgarity. Well, why not be fair and admit as much? Lavish your indignation on yourself, not me, for the mistake's yours, not mine.'

'All right, I admit it: I made a mistake.'

'Well, that's all right then. We have reached the point at last, thank God. Now, bear with me a little longer if you will be so kind. I cannot rise to your heights, being too depraved, nor can you demean yourself to my level, since you are too superior. So there's only one way out '

'What's that?' asked Zinaida quickly, holding her breath and suddenly turning white as a sheet.

'We must have recourse to logic, and '

'Why, oh why, do you torture me like this, George?' Zinaida suddenly asked in Russian, her voice breaking. 'Try to understand how much I suffer '

Dreading her tears, Orlov darted into his study and then for some reason—whether to hurt her more, or remembering that it was usual practice in such cases—locked the door behind him. She screamed and rushed after him, her dress swishing.

'What is the meaning of this?' she asked, banging the door.

'What, what does it mean?' she repeated in a shrill voice breaking with indignation. 'So that's the kind of man you are, is it ? I hate and despise you, so there! It's all over between us: all over, I tell you!'

Hysterical tears followed, mingled with laughter. Some small object fell off the drawing-room table and broke. Orlov made his way from study to hall through the other door, looked aronnd him in panic, swiftly donned his cloak and top hat, and fled.

Half an hour passed, then an hour, and she was still crying. She had no father, no mother, no relatives, I remembered, and she was living here between a man who hated her and Polya who robbed her. How wretched her life indeed was, thought I. Not knowing why I did so, I went into the drawing-room to see her. Weak, helpless, with her lovely hair—a very paragon of tenderness and elegance in my eyes— she was suffering as if she was ill. She lay on the sofa hiding her face and shuddering all over.

'Would you like me to fetch the doctor, ma'am?' I asked softly.

'No, there's no need, it's nothing,' she said, looking at me with tearful eyes. 'It's only a bit of a headache, thank you very much.'

I went out. In the evening she wrote one letter after another. She sent me to Pekarsky, Kukushkin and Gruzin by t^^s, and finally anywhere I liked ifl would but fmd Orlov quickly and give him her letter. Every time I returned with that letter she feverishly scolded me, pleaded with me, thrust money into my hand. She did not sleep that night, but sat in the drawing-room talking to herself

Orlov came back to lnnch next day and they were reconciled.

On the following Thursday Orlov complained to his friends that he had reached the end of his tether and that life was not worth living. He smoked a lot.

'It's no life, this isn't, it's sheer torture,' he said irritably. 'Tears, shrieks, intellectual conversation and pleas for forgiveness followed by more tears and shrieks, and the result is I can't call the place my o^n. I suffer agoiies and I make her suffer too. Must I really put up with another couple of months of this? Surely not? But I may have to.'

'Then why not speak to her?' Pekarsky asked.

' 'I have tried, but I can't. With a rational, self-sufficient person you can say anything you like with complete confidence, but here you arc dealing with a creature devoid of will-power, character and reason, aren't you? I can't stand tears, they unnerve me. Whenever she cries I'm ready to swear eternal love, and I want to cry as well.'

Not understanding, Pekarsky scratched his broad forehead thought­fully.

'You really should take a separate flat for her,' he said. 'It's easy enough, surely.'

'It's me she needs, not a flat,' Orlov sighed. 'But what's the use of talking ? All I hear is chatter, chatter, chatter, I sec no way out. Talk about innocent victims! I didn't make this bed, yet it's me who's got to lie on it! A hero's the last thing I ever wanted to be! I could never stand Turgenev's novels, but now (and this is sheer farce) I suddenly find myselfa sort of quintessential Turgenev hero. I swear blindI'm no such thing, I adduce the most irrefutable proofs to that effect, but she won't believe me. Now, why not ? There must be something heroic about my countenance.'

'Then you had better go and inspect the provinces,' laughed Kukushkin.

'Yes, that's all I can do.'

A week after this conversation Orlov declared that he was being assigned to the Senator again, and he took his suitcases to Pekarsky's that same evening.

XI

On the threshold stood a man ofabout sixty in a beaver cap. His long fur coat reached the ground.

'Is Mr. Orlov in?' he asked.

I thought it was a money-lender at first, one of Gruzin's creditors who occasionally called on Orlov to collect small sums on account. But when the visitor came into the hall and flung open his coat, I saw the thick eyebrows and characteristic pursing of the lips which I had so thoroughly studied on photographs, and two rows of stars on the coat of a dress uniform. I recognized Orlov's father, the well-known statesman.

Mr. Orlov was out, I told him. The old man pursed his lips firmly and looked thoughtfully to one side, showing me a wasted, toothless profile.

'I'll leave a note,' he said. 'Will you show me in?'

Leaving his galoshes in the hall, he went into the study without taking off his long, heavy fur coat. He sat down in a low chair in front of the desk and pondered for several minutes before picking up a pen, shielding his eyes with his hand as ifto keep the sun off: just like his son in a bad mood. He had a sad, thoughtful look, with an air ofresignation such as I have only seen on the faces of elderly religious people. I stood behind him, contemplating the bald pate and the hollow at the back of his neck, and it was crystal clear to me that this weak, ailing, elderly man was now at my mercy. Why, there was no one in the flat apart from myselfand my enemy. I only needed to employ a little force, then snatch his watch to disguise my motive and leave by the tradesmen's exit—and I should have gained incomparably more than I could ever have banked on when I became a servant. I was never likely to get a better chance than this, I thought. But instead of doing anything about it I looked with complete detachment from his bald pate to his furs and back, quietly brooding on the relations between this man and his only son, and on the probability that persons spoilt byriches and power don't want to die.

'You there—how long have you been working for my son?' he asked, forming large letters on the paper.

'Between two and three months, sir.'

He finished writing and stood up. There was still time. I spurred myself on, clenching my fists, searching my heart for some particle at least of my former loathing. How impassioned, how stubborn, how assiduous an enemy I had so recently been, I remembered. But it is hard to strike a match on crumbling stone. The sad old face, the cold glitter of his medal stars . . . they evoked in me only trivial, cheap, futile thoughts about the transiency ofall things terrestrial and the proximity of death.

'Good-bye, my good fellow,' said the old man.

He put on his cap and left.

I had changed, I had become a new man: there could be no more doubt on that score. To test myself I began thinking of the past, but at once felt aghast as ifl had chanced to peep into some dark, dank corner. Recalling my comrades and friends, I first thought how I should blush, how put out I should be, when I met any of them. But what kind of man was I now? What should I think about? What should I do? What was my goal in life?

None of it made sense to me, and I realized only one thing clearly: I must pack my things and leave with all speed. Before the old man's visit there had still been some point in my job, but now it was just ludicrous. My tears dropped into my open suitcase. I felt unbearably sad, and yet so tremendously vital. I was ready to span all human potentialities within the compass of my brief existence. I wanted to speak, to read, to wield a mallet in some big factory, to keep watch at sea, to plough the fields. I wanted to go to the Nevsky Prospekt, to the country, out to sea: wherever my imagination reached. When Zinaida returned I rushed to open the door and took off her coat with especial tenderness, for this was the last time.

We had two other visitors that day besides the old man. In the evening, when it was quite dark, Gruzin unexpectedly arrived to fetch some papers for Orlov. He opened the desk, took the papers he wanted, rolled them up and told me to put them by his cap in the hall while he went to see Zinaida. She lay on the drawing-room sofa, hands behind her head. Five or six days had passed since Orlov had left on his 'tour of inspection', and no one knew when he would be back, but she no longer sent telegrams or expected them. She ignored Polya, who was still living with us. She just didn't care ... that was written all over her impassive, dead pale face. Now it was she who wanted to be miserable out of obstinacy, like Orlov. To spite herself and everything else on earth she lay quite still on the sofa for days on end, wishing herselfonly harm, expecting only the worst. She was probably picturing how Orlov would return, how they were bound to quarrel, how he would cool towards her and be unfaithful to her, after which they would separate, and these agonizing thoughts may have given her satisfaction. But what would she say if she suddenly discovered the real truth?

'I'm fond of you, my dear,' said Gruzin, greeting her and kissing her hand. 'You're so kind.

'Good old George has gone away,' he lied. 'He's gone away, the wicked man.'

He sat do^ with a sigh and fondly stroked her hand.

'Let me spend an hour with you, my dear,' he said. 'I don't like going home, and it's too early to go to the Birshovs'. Today's Katya Birshov's binhday. She's a very nice little girl.'

I brought him a glass of tea and a carafe ofvodka. He drank the tea slowly, with evident reluctance.

'Have you a bite to, er, eat, my friend?' he asked timidly as he gave me back the glass. 'I haven't had a meal.'

There was nothing in the flat, so I fetched him the ordinary one- rouble dinner from the restaurant.

'Your health, dear!' he said to Zinaida and tossed do^ a glass of vodka. 'My little girl, your god-daughter, sends her love. She has a touch of scrofula, poor child.

'Ah, children, children!' he sighed. 'But you can say what you like, my dear, it's nice being a father. Good old George can't understand that feeling.'

He do^ed another glass. Gaunt, pale, wearing a napkin on his chest like an apron, he ate greedily, raising his eyebrows and looking from Zinaida to me like a small boy in disgrace. He looked ready to have burst into tears if l had not given him his grouse or jelly. Having satisfied his hunger, he cheered up and laughed as he started telling a story about the Birshov family, but then grew silent, when he noticed that this was uninteresting, and that Zinaida was not laug^ng. Then a sort of boredom suddenly descended. After the meal they both sat in the dining-room by the light of a single lamp and said nothing. He was tired oflying, while she wanted to ask him something, but didn't dare. Half an hour passed in this way. Then G^in looked at his watch.

'Well, perhaps it's time I went.'

'No, please stay. We must Ык.'

There was a further silence. He sat at the piano, touched a key, then played and quietly sang: 'What does the morrow hold in store?' Then, as usual, he suddenly rose to his feet and shook his head.

'Play something, my dear,' Zinaida said.

'But what?' he asked with a s^^g. 'I've forgotten it all, I gave it up ages ago.'

Looking at the ceiling as if ^^g to remember, he played two of Tchaikovsky's pieces with wonderful expression, warmly and intelli­gently. He looked just as he always did—neither intelligentnor stupid— and I found it utterly miraculous that a ^до whom I was used to seeing in this mean and squalid environment should be capable of flights of emotion so pure, so far beyond my ken. Zinaida flushed and paced the drawing-room excitedly.

'Just a moment, my dear, I'll play you something else if I can remember it,' he said. 'It's something I heard on the 'cello.'

Starting timidly, then picking up, and finally with complete confidence, he played Saint-Saens's The Swan. Then he played it again.

'Not bad, eh ?' he said.

Greatly moved, Zinaida went and stood beside him.

'My friend,' she said, 'tell me truly as a friend: what do you think of me?'

'What can I say?' he answered, raising his eyebrows. 'I like you, and I think only good of you.

'But if you want my general views on the problem which concerns you,' he went on, rubbing his sleeve near the elbow and frowning, 'then, my dear, you know. . . . Following one's heart's impulses freely ... it doesn't always bring nappiness to decent people. If one wants to be free and happy at the same time, I think one must face the fact that life is cruel, harsh and pitiless in its conservatism, and that one must pay it back in its o^ currency: be equally harsh, equally pitiless in one's o^ drive for freedom, in other words. That's my view.'

'But how can I ?' Zinaida smiled sadly. 'I'm so tired, my friend. I can't lift a finger to save myself, I'm so tired.'

'Go into a convent, my dear.'

He said it injest, but after he had spoken tears glistened in Zinaida's eyes, and then in his.

'Ah well,' he said, 'I have sat here long enough, it's time I was olf. Good-bye, dear friend. God give you health.'

He kissed both her hands and stroked them affectionately, saying that he would certainly come to see her again in a day or rwo. As he put on his overcoat—the one that was so like a child's—in the hall, he spent a long time fumbling in his pockets for a tip for me, but found nothing.

'Good-bye, old chap,' he said sadly, and went out.

I shall never forget the atmosphere which the man left behind him. Zinaida continued pacing the drawing-room excitedly. She was walking about instead of lying do^, and that in itself was a good sign. I wanted to take advantage of this mood to speak to her frankly and then leave at once, but hardly had I seen Gruzin out when the door-bell rang. It was Kukushkin.

'Is Mr. Orlov in?' he asked. 'Is he back? No, you say? What a pity. In that case I'll go and kiss your mistress's hand and then run along.

'May I come in, Zinaida?' he shouted. 'I want to kiss your hand. I'm sorry I'm so late.'

He was not long in the drawing-room—ten minutes, no more—but I felt as ifhe had been there for some time and would never leave. I bit my lips in indignation and annoyance, and I already hated Zinaida. I wondered why she didn't throw him out and I felt outraged, though it was obvious that he bored her.

When I held his coat for him he bestowed a special sign offavour by asking how I managed without a wife.

'But you don't let the grass grow under your feet, I'm sure,' he laughed. 'No doubt you have your bit of slap and tickle with Polya, you rascal.'

Despite my experience oflife I had little knowledge of people at that time, and I frequently exaggerated trifles, very possibly, and entirely missed things of importance. Kukuslkin's sniggers and flattery had a certain point, it struck me. Perhaps he hoped that, being a servant, I should gossip in kitchens and servants' halls all over the place about his visiting us in the evenings when Orlov was out, and sitting with Zin­aida until late at night? Then, when my gossip reached his friends' ears he would drop his eyes in confusion, and wag his'little finger. At cards that very evening he would pretend, or perhaps accidentally blurt out, that he had won Zinaida away from Orlov—or so I thought, looking at that unctuous little face.

I was now gripped by the very hatred which had failed me during the old man's visit at midday. Kukushkin left at last. Listening to the shuffle of his leather galoshes, I felt a strong urge to pursue him with some coarse parting oath, but restrained myself. Then, when his steps had died away on the stairs, I went back into the hall and, not knowing what I was doing, seized the roll ofpapers which he had left behind and rushed headlong downstairs. I ran into the street without my coat or cap. It was not cold, but big snow flakes were falling, and there was a wind.

'Sir!' I shouted, catching up Kukushkin. 'I say, sir!'

He stopped by a lamp-post and looked round in bewilderment.

'I say, sir,' I panted. 'Sir!'

Having no idea what to say, I hit him twice on the face with the roll of paper. Quite at a loss, not even surprised—so unawares had I taken him—he leant back against the lamp-post and shielded his face with his hands. At that moment some army medical officer passed by and saw me hitting the man, but only looked at us in a^zement and walked on.

I felt ashamed and rushed back to the house.

XII

My head wet with snow, out of breath, I ran to my room, imme­diately threw off my tail-coat, put on my jacket and top-coat, and brought my suitcase into the hall. Oh, to escape! But before leaving I quickly sat do^ and began writing to Orlov.

'I leave you my false passport,' I began. 'Please keep it in memory of me, you humbug, you metropolitan stuffed shirt.

'To insinuate oneself into a household under an alias, to observe domestic intimacies behind a servant's mask, to see all, hear all, and then volunteer denunciations ofyour mendacity ... it's all rather underhand, you will say. Very well, but I am not concerned with cultivating integrity at the moment. I have suffered dozens of your suppers and lunches, when you spoke and did as you pleased while I had to listen, watch and hold my peace, and I don't see why you should get away with it. Besides, if there's no one else near you who dares tell you the truth without flattery, let Stephen the footman be the one to knock you offyour elevated perch.'

I disliked this beginning, but I was not inclined to change it. What did it matter, anyway?

The large windows with their dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled dress-coat on the floor, my wet footprints ... they all looked forbidding and gloomy. There was something peculiar about the silence too.

Perhaps because I had dashed into the street without my cap or galoshes, I was running a high fever. My face burnt, my legs ached, my heavy head sagged over the table, and I appeared to be suffering from split personality, each thought in my brain being seemingly haunted by its own shadow.

'Ill, weak and demoralized as I am, I cannot write to you as I should like,' I continued. 'My first wish was to insult and humiliate you, but I no longer feel I have any right to do that. We arc both failures, you and I, and neither ofus is going to rise again, so however eloquent, forceful and awesome my letter might be, it would still be like beating on a coffin lid: I could bang away for all I was worth without waking anyone up. No exertions can ever warm that damnable cold blood of yours, as you know better than I do. Is there any point in writing to you, then ? But my head and heart are burning and I continue writing, somehow excited, as if this letter could still rescue the two of us. My thoughts are incoherent because I am ^^ing a temperature, and my pen somehow scratches meaninglessly on the paper, but the question I want to ask you is plain before my eyes as though written in letters offire.

'It is not hard to explain why I have flagged and fallen prematurely. Like Samson in the Bible, I hoisted the gates of Gaza on my back to carry them to the top of the mountain, but only when I was already exhausted, when my youth and health had faded once and for all, did I realize that those gates were too heavy for me and that I had deceived myself. Moreover, I was in constant, agonizing pain. I have suffered hunger, cold, sickness and loss of liberty. I never knew personal happiness, and I still don't. I have no refuge, my memories weigh me down, and my conscience is often afraid ofthem. But you, now, you ... why have you fallen? What fatal, hellish causes prevented your life from blossoming forth in full vernal splendour? Before you had even begun to live you hastened to renounce the image and likeness ofGod, you turned into a cowardly animal which barks to scare others because it is scared itself. Why, though? You fear life, you fear it like the Oriental who sits on a cushion all day smoking his hookah. Oh yes, you read a lot, and your European coat fits you well. Yet with what fond, purely Oriental solicitude, worthy of some eastern potentate, do you shield yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, pain and worry! How early you began to rest on your oars! What a cowardly attitude you have shown to real life and the natural forces with which every normal, healthy man has to contend! How soft, snug, warm, comfort­able you are ... and oh, how bored! Yes, you experience the shattering, abysmal boredom ofa man in solitary confinement, but you try to hide even from that enemy by playing cards for eight hours out of the twenty-four.

'And your irony? Oh, how well I understand it! Vital, free-ranging, confident speculation ... it's a pretty keen and potent process, that, hut not one that a sluggish, idle brain can cope with. So, to stop it encroach­ing on your peace of mind, you hastened while yet young to confine it within bounds, as did thousands of your contemporaries, by arming yourself with an ironical approach to life or whatever you want to call it. Your inhibited, cowed thoughts do not dare to leap the fence which you have set round them, and when you mock ideals which you claim to know "all about", you'rejust like the deserter fleeing disgracefully from the battlefield, and stifling his own shame by deriding war and valour. Cynicism dulls the pain. In some novel of Dostoyevsky's an old man tramples his favourite daughter's portrait underfoot because he has treated her unfairly, just as you mock the ideals of goodness and justice in your nasty, cheap way because you can't live up to them any longer. You dread every honest, direct reference to your own decline, and you deliberately surround yourself with people capable only of flattering your weaknesses. So no wonder you're so scared of tears, no wonder at all.

'And incidentally, there's your attitude to women. We are all shameless—that's something we inherited with our flesh and blood, it's part of our upbringing. But what is one a man for, ifnot to subdue the beast within one? When you grew up, when you got to know "all about" ideas, the truth was staring you in the face. You knew it, but you didn't pursue it, you took fright at it, and you tried to deceive your conscience by loudly assuring yourself that the fault was not yours, it was women's, and that women were as debased as your relations with them. Those bleak dirty stories, that neighing snigger, all your innumer­able theories about the so-called "basic clement", .about the vagueness of the demands made on marriage, about the ten sous which the French labourer pays his woman, your never-ending references to female illogicality, mendaciousness, feebleness and the like . . . doesn't it all rather look as ifyou want to push woman down in the mud at all costs so as to put her on the same level as your own relations with her? You're a wretched, weak, disagreeable person.'

Zinaida started playing the piano in the drawing-room, trying to remember the Saint-Sacns piece which Gruzin had played. I went and lay on my bed, but then remembered that it was time to go. Forcing myself to stand up, I went back to the desk with a heavy, hot head.

'But why are we so tired? That's the question,' I went on. 'We who start out so passionate, bold, high-minded and confident . . . why arc we so totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirtv-five? Why is it that one person pines away with consumption, another puts a bullet in his brains, and a third seeks oblivion in vodka or cards, while a fourth tries to stifle his anguished terrors by cynically trampling on the image of his fine, unsullied youth? Why do we never try to stand up once we have fallen down ? Ifwe lose one thing why don't we look for another ? Well may one ask.

'The thief on the Cross managed to recover his zest for living and a bold, realistic hope for his future, though he may have had less than an hour to live. You have long years ahead of you, and I'm not going to die as soon as you think, probably. What if, by some miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a hideous nightmare, what if we awoke renewed, cleansed, strong, proud in our sense of rectitude? Joyous visions fire me, I am breathless with excitement. I have a terrific appetite for life, I want our lives to be sacred, sublime and sole^^ as the vault of the heavens. And live we shall! The sun rises only once a day, and life isn't given twice, so hold tight to what is left of it and preserve that.'

I wrote not a word more. My head was seething with ideas, but they were all so blurred that I could not get them down on paper. Leaving the letter unfinished, I signed my rank, Christian name and surname, and went into the study. It was dark there. I groped for the desk and put the letter on it. I must have stumbled into the furniture in the dark and made a noise.

'Who's there ?' asked a worried voice in the drawing-room.

At that moment the clock on the desk gently struck one o'clock.

XIII

I spent at least half a minute scratching at the door and fumbling with it in the darkness, then jlowly opened it and went into the drawing- room. Zinaida was lying on a sofa and raised herself on an elbow to watch me come in. Not daring to speak, I walked slowly past her while sl e followed me with her eyes. I stood in the hall for a moment, then v. ent past again while she watched me carefully and with amazement— with fear, even. At last I halted.

'He won't be corning back,' I brought out with an effort.

She quickly rose to her feet and looked at me uncomprehendingly.

'He won't be corning back,' I repeated, my heart pounding violently. 'He can't come back because he hasn't left St. Petersburg. He is staying at Pekarsky's.'

She understood and believed me, as I could tell from her sudden pallor, and from the way in which she suddenly crossed her hands over her breast in fear and entreaty. Her recent history flashed through her mind, she put two and two together, she saw the whole truth with pitiless clarity. But she also remembered that I was a servant, a lower form oflife. Some bounder, his hair awry and face flushed with fever, very possibly drunk, wearing a vulgar overcoat, had crudely barged in on her private life, and that offended her.

'Nobody asked your opinion,' she told me sternly. 'You may leave the room.'

'But you must believe me,' I said impetuously, stretching out my arms to her. 'I am not a servant, I'm an independent person just as you are.'

I mentioned my name and quickly—very quickly indeed, to stop her interrupting me or going to her room—explained who I was and why I was living there. This new revelation shocked her more than the first. Hitherto she had still hoped that her servant was lying, or was mistaken and had spoken foolishly, but now after my confession there was no longer room for doubt. The expression in her unhappy eyes and face, which suddenly seemed ugly because it looked older and lost its gentleness ... it told me that she had reached the limit ofher endurance, and how ill it boded, this conversation which I had started. But I continued, quite carried away.

'The Senator and his inspection were invented to deceive you. He did the same inJanuary: he didn't go away, hejust stayed at Pckarsky's. I saw him every day and helped to deceive you. They were fed up with you, they hated having you around, they mocked you. If you could have heard how he and his friends jeered at you and your love you wouldn't have stayed here a minute longer. So run away, escape!'

'Oh, all right;' she said in quavering tones, passing her hand over her hair. 'All right then. Who cares ?'

Her eyes were full of tears, her lips trembled, her whole face was strikingly pale and breathed anger. Orlov's crude, petty lies outraged her, she found them contemptible and ridiculous. She smiled, but I dis­liked the look of that smile.

'All right then,' she repeated, passing her hand over her hair again. 'Who cares? He thinks I shall die ofhumiliation, but I just ... think it's fununy.

'There's no point in him hiding, no point at all,' she said, moving away from the piano and shrugging her shoulders. 'It would have been simpler to discuss things openly than to go into hiding and skulk about in other people's flats. I do have eyes in my head, I'd noticed all this myselfages ago, and I was only waiting for him to come back to have things out once and for all.'

Then she sat in the arm-chair near the table, leant her head on the sofa arm and wept bitterly. There was only one candle burning in the drawing-room candle-holder and the chair she sat in was in darkness, but I could see her head and shoulders quivering, while her hair fell loose and covered her neck, face and hands. In her quiet, even, un- hysterical, normal, womanly weeping could be heard wounded pride, humiliation, resentment and the absolute hopelessness of a situation utterly irreparable and unacceptable. Her weeping found its echo in my agitated, suffering heart. I had forgotten my illness and everything else on earth as I paced the drawing-room, muttering distractedly.

'Oh, what a life! One really can't go on like this, indeed one can't. It's sheer criminal lunacy, this life is.'

'How humiliating!' she said through her tears. 'To live with me and smile at me when he found me such a drag, so ridiculous. What terrible humiliation!'

Raising her head, she gazed at me with tearful eyes through hair wet with tears as she tidied this hair which blocked her view of me.

'Did they laugh at me?' she asked.

'You, your love, Turgenev in whom you were allegedly too well versed . . . these men found it all ft^y. And should we both die of despair this instant they would find that funny too. They would make up a comic story and tell it at your funeral service.

'But why talk about them?' I asked impatiently. 'We must escape. I can't stay here a minute longer.'

She began crying again, and I went over to the piano and sat do^.

'Well, what are we waiting for?' I asked despondently. 'It's past two o'clock already.'

'I'm not waiting for anything,' she said. 'My life is ruined.'

'Don't say such things. Come on, let us pool forces and decide what to do. Neither of us can stay here. Where do you intend going?'

Suddenly the bell rang in the hall and my heart missed a beat. Could Orlov have come back after receiving a complaint about me from Kukushkin? How should we greet him? I went to open the door, and there was Polya. She came in, shook the snow from her cloak in the hall and went to her room without a word to me. When I returned to the drawing-room Zinaida was pale as death and stood in the middle of the room, fixing huge eyes on me.

'Who was that?' she asked softly.

'Polya,' I told her.

She ran her hand over her hair and closed her eyes wearily.

'I'll leave this instant,' she' said. 'Would you be very kind and take me to the Old To^? What time is it!'

'A quarter to three.'

XIV

The street was dark and deserted when we left the house a little later. Sleet was falling and a damp wind lashed us in the face. It was the beginning of March, I remember, there was a thaw, and it was some days since the cabmen had started driving on wheels in place ofsl^ges. The back stairs, the cold, the darkness of night, the porter in his sheep­skin questioning us before he let us out ofthc gate . . . these things utterly fatigued and depressed Zinaida. When we had got into a fly and put the hood up, she shook all over and quickly said how grateful she was.

'I don't doubt your good will,' she muttered, 'but I am ashamed to put you to this trouble. Oh, I understand, I understand. When Gruzin was here this evening I could tell he was lying and hiding something. Very well then, I don't care. Still, I'm ashamed to have you go to so much trouble.'

She still had some doubts. To dispel them once and for all I told our cabman to drive do^ Sergiyevsky Street. Halting him at Pekarsky's door, I got out of the cab and rang. When the porter came I asked if Mr. Orlov was at home, speaking in a loud voice so that Zinaida could hear.

'Yes, he came back about half an hour ago,' was the answer. 'He must be in bed now. What do you want?'

Zinaida could not resist leaning out of the carriage.

'Has Mr. Orlov been staying here long?' she asked.

'Going on three weeks.'

'And he hasn't been away?'

'No,' answered the porter, looking at me with surprise.

'Tell him tomorrow morning that his sister is here from Warsaw,' I said. 'Good night.'

Then we drove on. The cab had no apron, and snowflakes fell on us, while the wind pierced us to the bone, especially when we were crossing the Neva. I began to feel as if we had been travelling like this for some time, as if we had long been suffering, and as if I had been listening to Zinaida's shuddering breath for ages. In a state bordering on hallucination, as if I was dozing off", I cast a casual backward glance at my strange, feckless life. Somehow a melodrama, Parisian Bc_l?ars, which I had seen once or twice as a child, came to mind. The'n I tried to shake off this semi-trance¹ by looking out from the hood of my cab to sec the da^, and somehow all the images ofthe past, all my blurred thoughts, suddenly fused into a single clear and cogent idea: both Zinaida and I were now utterly lost. The idea carried conviction, deriving apparently from an air of impending doom in the cold, blue sky, but a second later my thoughts and beliefs were elsewhere engaged.

'Oh, what can I do now?' Zinaida asked, her voice rough in the cold, damp air. 'Where am I to go, what can I do ? Gruzin said I should enter a convent, and I would, oh, I would! I would change my dress, my face, my name; my thoughts, everything about me, and I'd hide away for ever. But they won't have me as a nun, I'm pregnant.'

'We'll go abroad together tomorrow,' I told her.

'We can't, my husband won't give me a passport.'

'Then I'll take you without one.'

The cab stopped near a two-storey wooden house painted a dark colour. I rang. Taking from me her light little basket—the only luggage we had brought—Zinaida smiled a wry smile.

'My jewels,' she said.

But so weak was she that she could not hold those jewels.

It was a long time before the door opened. After the third or fourth ring a light glinted in the windows. Footsteps, coughing and whispering were heard. Then the key turned in the lock at last and a stout peasant woman with a scared red face appeared at the door. Some way behind her stood a thin little old woman with bobbed grey hair, in a white blouse, carrying a candle. Zinaida ran into the lobby and flung herself on the old woman's neck.

'I've been so badly let do^n, Nina,' she sobbed loudly. 'Oh, Nina, it's such a dirty, rotten business.'

I gave the peasant woman the basket. They locked the door, but sobs and shouts of'Nina' were still audible. I got in the fly and told the man to drive slowly towards the Nevsky Prospekt. I had to think where I could find my night's lodging.

I called on Zinaida late in the following afternoon. She was greatly changed. There were no traces of tears on her pale, very thin face, and her expression was altered. Whether it was because I now saw her in different and far from luxurious surroundings, or because our relations had changed, or perhaps because great sorrow had left its mark on her, she no longer seemed as elegant and well-dressed as formerly. Her figure had shrunk, rather. In her movements, her walk and her expression I noticed a jerkiness, an excess of nervousness and a quality of urgency, while even her smile lacked its former sweetness. I was now wearing an expensive suit which I had bought during the day. She first cast an eye over this suit and the hat in my hand, then fixed an impatient, quizzical glance on my face as if studying it.

'Your transformation still seems pretty miraculous to me,' she said. 'Forgive me looking at you so inquisitively. You're a most unusual man, aren t you?

I told her again who I was and why I had lived at Orlov's, speaking at greater length and in more detail than on the previous day. She listened with great attention.

'I am finished with all that,' she interrupted me. 'Do you know, I couldn't resist writing him a note? Here is the answer.'

On the sheet which she gave me I saw Orlov's handwriting.

'I'm not looking for excuses, but you must admit it was your mistake, not mine.

'Wishing you happiness and begging you to forget with all speed 'Your faithful servant

'G. O.

'PS. Am sending on your things.'

There in the drawing-room stood the trunks and baskets sent on by Orlov, among them being my o^ pathetic suitcase.

'So he must . . .' said Zinaida, but did not finish her sentence.

We were silent for a time. She took the note and held it before her eyes for a couple of minutes while her face assumed the haughty, con­temptuous, proud, harsh expression which she had worn at the begin­ning ofour discussion on the previous evening. Tears came to her eyes: proud, angry tears, with nothing timid or bitter about them.

'Listen,' she said, standing up abruptly and going over to the window to prevent my seeing her face. 'I have decided to go abroad with you tomorrow.'

'Very well. We can start today so far as I'm concerned.'

'Recruit me into your organization,' she said, then suddenly turned round and asked if I had read Balzac. 'Have you read him? Pire Goriot ends with the hero looking do^ at Paris from a hill-top and threaten­ing the city. "I shall be even with you yet," says he, after which he begins a new life. And when I look at St. Petersburg from the train window for the last time, I'll say the same: "I shall be even with you

I

yet.

Having spoken, she smiled at her own joke and for some reason shuddered all over.

XV

In Venice I began to suffer attacks of pleurisy, having probably caught cold on the evening when we took the boat from the station to the Hotel Bauer. I had to go to bed on the first day and stay there for a formight. During my illness Zinaida came from her room to drink coffee with me every morning, and then read me aloud the French and Russian books of which we had bought a great ^^y in Vienna. These were books which I had known for years, or which did not interest me, but with her delightful, amiable voice sounding so near to me the contents of the whole lot of them boiled do^, so far as I was con­cerned, to the single fact that I was not alone. She would go out for a stroll and come back in her light grey dress and dainty straw hat, cheerful and warmed by the spring sunshine. Sitting by my bed, stoop­ing over my face, she would tell me something about Venice or read these books, and I felt splendid.

At night I was cold, I had pains, I was bored, but during the day I exulted in life: there is no better way of putting it. The hot, brilliant sunshine beating through open windows and balcony door, the shouts below, the plash of oars, the tolling of bells, the thunder-peals of the noon-tide cannon, the sensation of complete and utter freedom . . . these things did wonders for me. I felt as if I were growing mighty, broad wings to bear me off God knows where. And how enchanting it was, what pleasure there was sometimes in the thought that another life was now marching step by step with mine, that I was the servant, protector, friend and indispensable travelling companion of a young woman who besides being beautiful and rich was also weak, insulted and lonely. Even illness

Then I was allowed out on the balcony. The sunshine and sea breeze lulled and caressed my sick body. I looked do^ at the fa^^ar gon­dolas gliding along with feminine grace, smoothly and majestically, like living creatures attuned to the voluptuousness of a civilization so exotic and bewitching. There was a smell of the sea. Somewhere people were playing stringed instruments and singing a two-part song. It was so marvellous, so ^^ke that night in St. Petersburg with sleet falling and lashing me roughly in the face. Looking straight across the canal now, I could see the open sea, while the sunlight on the far skyline's expanse dazzled till it hurt your eyes. It made me long to go down to the dear old sea to which I had given my youth. I wanted a bit of excite­ment: a bit of life, that was all.

A fortnight later I was up and about, and could go where I pleased. I liked sitting in the sun, listening to a gondolier whom I could not understand and spending hours on end gazing at the villa where Desdemona was said to have lived: an unsophisticated, sad, demure little place as light as lace, it looked as if you could pick it up in one hand. I stood for some time by the Canova monument, my eyes fixed on the sad lion. In the Palace of the Doges I was attracted by the comer where the wretched Marino Faliero had been daubed with black paint. I should like to be an artist, poet or playwright, I thought, but if that is beyond me a dose of mysticism might not come amiss. Oh, if only I had some scrap of faith to add to the unruffled calm and serenity which filled my heart!

In the evenings we ate oysters, drank wine and went boating. I re­member our black gondola quietly bobbing about in one place while the water gurgled beneath it, scarcely audible. The reflections of stars and shore lights quivered and trembled in places. Not far away people were singing in a gondola festooned with coloured lamps which were reflected in the water. Guitars, violins, mandolins, men's and women's voices rang out in the darkness, while Zinaida, looking pale and serious— stem, almost—sat by my side, pursing her lips and clasping her hands. Musing on something, she did not so much as move an eyebrow, and did not hear me. Her face, her pose, her fixed, expressionless glance, those incredibly bleak, unnerving ice-cold memories . .. and around us the gondolas, the lights, the music, the song with its dynamic, ardent cry of "Jam-mol Jam-mol" . . . what a fantastic contrast! When she sat like this, her hands tightly clasped, petrified, disconsolate, I felt as if we were both characters in an old-fashioned novel with some title like A Maid Forlorn or The Forsaken Damozel. Yes, both of us fitted: she forlorn and forsaken, and I, the loyal, faithful friend, the introvert, the odd-man-out if you like, the failure no longer capable of anything but coughing and brooding, and perhaps also of sacrificing himself. But what usc were my sacrifices to anyone? And what had I to sacrificc, one might ask ?

After our evening's outing we always had tea in her room and talked. We were not afraid of touching old wounds which were still unhealed: far from it, for it actually gave me pleasure, somehow, to tell her ofmy life with Orlov, or make frank allusions to those relations of which I was aware and which could not have been hidden from me.

'There were times when I hated you,' I said. 'When Orlov was behaving like a spoilt child, when he was condescending or lying to you, I was struck by your failure to see and grasp what was going on under your nose. You kissed his hands, you went down on your knees, you flattered him '

She blushed. 'When I kissed his hands and knelt do^ I loved him.'

'Was he so very hard to see through? Was he really such a sphinx? A sphinx-cum-bureaucrat—oh really!

'God forbid that I should reproach you with anything,' I went on, feeling a little clumsy and lacking in the urbanity and finesse so essential when dealing with another's inner life, though I had never been aware of suffering from that defect before meeting her.

'But why couldn't you see through him?' I repeated, now more quietly and diffidently.

'You despise my past, you mean, and you are quite right,' she said, greatly upset. 'You are one of those special people who can't bejudged conventionally, your moral imperatives are extremely stringent and you are incapable of forgiveness, I can see that. I understand you, and ifl sometimes contradict you it doesn't mean I don't see eye to eye with you. I am only talking this antiquated rubbish because I haven't yet had time to wear out my old dresses and prejudices. Myself, I hate and despise my past, I despise Orlov and my love. A fine sort of love that was !

'It all seems so comic now, actually,' she said, going to the window and looking do^ at the canal. 'These love affairs only dull one's conscience and confuse one. Our struggle is the only thing with any meaning in life. Bring do^ your heel 'On the vile serpent's head and crush it. That is where you'll find your purpose, it's either there or there isn't any such thing.'

I told her long stories from my past, describing my exploits—and astounding they had indeed been. But not one syllable did I breathe about the change which had occurred inside me. She always listened with close attention, rubbing her hands at the interesting parts as if irked that such adventures, fears and delights hadnot yet come her way, but then she would suddenly grow pensive, retreating into herself, and I could tell from her expression that she was heeding me no longer.

I would close the windows on to the canal and ask whether we should have the fire lit.

'Oh, never mind that, I'm not cold,' she would say with a wan smile. 'I just feel weak aU over. I think my wits have gro^ sharper of late, you know. I now have most unusual and original ideas. When I think about my past, say, about my old life—yes, and about people in general —the whole thing merges into a single picture and I see my stepmother. That rude, impudent, heartless, false slut of a woman! And she was a drug addict too! My father was a weak, spineless character who married my mother for her money and drove her into a decline, but his sccond wife, my stepmother ... he loved her passionately, he was crazy about her. I had a lot to put up with, I can tell you. Anyway, why go on about it? So, as I say, eve^^ng somehow merges into this one image. And I feel annoyed that my stepmother's dead, I would dearly love to meet her now!'

'Why?'

'Oh, I don't know,' she answered with a laugh and a pretty toss of her head. 'Good night. Hurry up and get better. As soon as you do we shall start working for the cause, it's high time we did.'

I had said good night and had my hand on the door handle when she asked: 'What do you think? Does Polya still live there?'

'Probably.'

I went to my room. We lived like this for a whole month. Then, one dull day we were both standing by my window at noon, silently watching the storm—louds rolling in from the sea and the canal which had turned dark blue. We were expecting a downpour at any moment, and when a narrow, dense belt of rain shrouded the open sea like a muslin veil we both suddenly felt bored. We left for Florence the same day.

XVI

It was auturhn, we were in Nice. One morning when I went into her room she was. sitting in an a^-chair: legs crossed, hunchcd, gaunt, face in hands, weeping torrents of bitter tears, with her long, unkempt hair trailing over her knees. The impression ofthe superb, magnificent sea which I had just been looking at and wanted to tell her about ... it suddenly vanished and my heart ached.

'What's the matter?' I asked.

She took one hand from hcr face and motioned for me to go out.

'Now, what is the matter?' I repeated, and for the first time since we had first met I kissed her hand.

'It's nothing really,' she said quickly. 'Oh, it's nothing, nothing. Go away. Can't you see I'm not dressed ?'

I went out in appalling distress. The serenity and peace of mind which I had so long enjoyed . . . now they were poisoned by com­passion. I desperately longed to fall at her feet, to beg her not to bottle up her tears, but to share her grief with me, while the sea's steady rumble growled in my ears like the voice of doom and I foresaw new tears, new griefs, new losses. What, oh what was she crying about, I wondered, remembering her face and martyred look. She was pregnant, I remembered. She tried to hide her condition both from others and from herself. At home she wore a loose blouse or a bodice with voluminous folds in front, and when she went out she laced her­self in so tightly that she twice fainted during our outings. She never mentioned her pregnancy to me, and when I once intimated that she might see a doctor she blushed deeply and said not a word.

When I went to her room later she was already dressed and had done her hair.

'Now, that's enough of that,' I said, seeing her once more on the brink of tears. 'Let's go downwn on the beach and have a talk.'

'I can't talk. I'm sorry, but I'm in the mood to be alone. And when you want to come into my room again, Vladimir, you might be good enough to knock first.'

That 'be good enough' sounded rather peculiar and unfeminine. I went out. My da^ed St. Petersburg mood came back, and my dreams all curled up and shrivelled like leaves in a heatwave. I felt that I was alone again, that there was no intimacy between us. I meant no more to her than yonder cobweb meant to the palm-tree on which it had chanced to cling until the wind should whip it olf and whisk it away. I strolled about the sq^e where the band was playing and went into the Casino. Here I looked at the overdressed, heavily perfumed women, and each of them glanced at me.

'You're an unattached male,' they seemed to say. 'Good!'

Then I went on the terrace and spent a long time looking at the sea. There was not one sail on the horizon. On the coast to my left were hills, gardens, towers and houses with sunlight playing on them in the mauve haze, but it was all so alien, so impassive—it was all such a clutter, somehow.

XVII

She still came and drank her coffee with me in the mornings, but we no longer had our meals together. She didn't feel hungry, she said, and she lived entirely on coffee, tea and oddments like oranges and caramels.

We no longer had our evening chats either, I don't know why. Ever since the day when I had found her in tears she had adopted a rather casual manner towards me, sometimes off-hand—or ironical, even. For some reason she was calling me 'my dear sir'. Whatever had once impressed her as awesome, admirable and heroic, arousing her envy and enthusiasm ... it left her quite cold now. After hearing me out she would usually stretch herself slightly.

'Yes, yes, yes, but I seem to have heard all that before, my dear sir.'

There were even times when I did not see her for days on end. Sometimes I would knock timidly and quietly on her door, and there would be no answer. Then I would knock again: still silence. I would stand by the door listening, but then the chambermaid would walk past and bleakly declare that 'Madame est partie' Then I would pace up and do^ the hotel corridor. I would see English people, full-bosomed ladies, waiters in evening dress. Then, after I have been gazing for some time at the long, striped carpet which runs do^ the whole corridor, it occurs to me that I am playing a strange and probably false part in this woman's life, and that I am no longer able to change that role. I run to my room, I fall on the bed, I rack my brains, but no ideas come to me. All I can see is that I have a great zest for life, and that the uglier, the more wasted, the rougher her face looks, the closer does she seem to me, and the more intensely and painfully do I sense our kinship. Call me 'my dear sir', adopt that casual, contemptuous tone, do what you like, my darling, only don't leave me. I am afraid of being alone.

Then I go into the corridor again and listen anxiously. I miss my dinner, I don't notice evening coming on. At last, at about half past ten, familiar footsteps are heard and Zinaida appears at the bend near the staircase.

'Are you taking a stroll?' she asks as she passes by. 'Then you'd better go outside. Good night.'

'Shan't we meet today then?'

'I think it's too late. Oh, all right, have it your own way.'

'Tell me where you've been?' I say, following her into her room.

'Oh, to Monte Carlo.' She takes a dozen gold coins from her pocket.

'There, my dear sir,' says she. 'My roulette winnings.'

'Oh, I can't see you gambling.'

'Why ever not? I'm going back tomorrow.'

I could picture her with that ugly, ill expression on her face, preg­nant, tightly laced, as she stood near the gaming table in a crowd of demimondaines and old women in their dotage swarming round the gold like flies round honey, and I remembered that for some reason she had gone to Monte Carlo without telling me.

'I don't believe you,' I said once. 'You wouldn't go there.'

'Don't worry, I can't lose much.'

'It's not a question ofwhat you lose,' I said irritably. 'When you were gambling there, did it never occur to you that the glint of gold, all these women, old and young, the croupiers, the whole complex . . . it's all a filthy rotten mockery of the worker's toil, blood and sweat?'

'But what else is there to do here except gamble?' she asked. 'The worker's toil, blood and sweat ... you keep those fine phrases till some other time. But now, since you started it, permit me to go on. Let me ask you outright: what is there for me to do here? What am I to do?'

'What indeed?' I shrugged. 'One can't answer that question straight out.'

'I want an honest answer, Vladimir,' she said, her expression growing angry. 'I didn't venture to pose the question in order to be fobbed off with commonplaces.

'I repeat,' she went on, banging her palm on the table as if marking time. 'What am I supposed to do here ? And not only here in Nice, but anywhere else.'

I said nothing and looked through the window at the sea. My heart was pounding fearfully.

'Vladimir,' she said, breathing quietly and unevenly, and finding it hard to speak. 'If you don't believe in the cause yourself, Vladimir, if you no longer mean to go back to it, then why, oh why, did you drag me out of St. Petersburg ? Why make promises, why raise mad hopes ? Your convictions have altered, you have changed, and no blame attaches to you because we can't always control what we believe, but

' Vladimir, why are you so insincere, in heaven's name?' she con­tinued quietly, corning close to me. 'While I was dreaming aloud all these months—raving, exulting in my plans, remodelling my life— why didn't you tell me the truth? Why did you say nothing? Or why did you encourage me with your stories and behave as though you were in complete sympathy with me? Why? What was the point of it?' 'It is hard to confess one's o^ bankruptcy,' I brought out, turning round but not looking at her. 'All right, I have lost my faith, I'm worn out, I'm feeling pretty low. It is hard to be truthful, terribly hard, so I said nothing. God forbid that anyone else should suffer as I have.'

I felt like bursting into tears and said no more.

'Vladimir,' she said, taking me by both hands. 'You have suffered and experienced so much, you know more than I do. Think seriously and tell me what I am to do. Teach me. If you yourself are unable to take the lead any longer, then at least show me the way. Look here, I am a living, feeling, reasoning creature, aren't I ? To get into a false position, play some fatuous role . . . that I can't stand. I am not reproaching you, I am not blaming you, I'm only asking you.'

Tea was served.

'Well?' asked Zinaida, handing me a glass. 'What's your answer?'

'There is more light in the world than shines through yonder window,' I replied. 'And there are other people about besides me, Zinaida.'

'Then show me where they are,' she said briskly. 'That is all I ask of you.'

'And another thing,' I went on. 'One can serve an idea in more than one field. If you have gone wrong and lost your faith in one cause, then find yourself another. The world of ideas is broad and inexhaustible.'

'The world of ideas!' she said, looking me in the face sardonically. 'Oh, we had really better stop. Why go on?'

She blushed.

'The world of ideas!' she repeated, hurling her napkin to one side, and her face took on an indignant, contemptuous expression. 'All your fine ideas, I note, boil down to one single essential, vital step: I am to become your mistress. That is what you're after. To run round with a load of ideals while not being the mistress of the most upright and idealistic of men . . . that means failing to comprehend ideas. The mis­tress business is the starting point, the rest follows automatically!'

'You're in an irritable mood,' I told her.

'No, I mean it!' she shouted, breathing hard. 'I'm perfectly sincere.'

'Sincere you may be, but you're mistaken and I'm wounded by what you say.'

'Mistaken, am I?' she laughed. 'You are the last person in the world to say that, my dear sir. Now, I shall sound tactless and cruel, perhaps, but never mind. Do you love me? You do love me, don't you?'

I shrugged my shoulders.

'Oh yes, you can shrug your shoulders,' she continued sarcastically. 'When you were ill I heard your delirious ravings, and then we had all these adoring eyes and sighs, these well-meant discussions on inti­macy and spiritual kinship. But the main thing is, why have you never been sincere with me? Why have you hidden the truth and told lies? Had you told me at the start just what ideas obliged you to drag me away from St. Petersburg I should have kno^ where I stood. I should have poisoned myself then, as I meant to, and we should have been spared this dismal farce. Oh, what's the point of going on ?'

She waved a hand and sat do^.

'You speak as if you suspected me of dishonourable intentions,' I said, hurt.

'All right, have it your own way. Why go on ? It isn't your intentions I suspect, it's your lack of intentions. Ifyou had had any I should know wh^t they were. All you had was your ideas and your love. And now it's ideas and love with me as your prospective mistress. Such is the way of life and novels.

'You used to blame Orlov,' she said, and struck her palm on the table. 'But you can't help agreeing with him. No wonder he despises all those ideas.'

'He doesn't despise ideas, he fears them,' I shouted. 'He's a coward and a liar.'

'All right, have it your o^ way. He's a coward, he's a liar, he betrayed me. But what about you? Excuse me being so frank, but what about you? He betrayed me and abandoned me to my fate in St. Peters­burg, while you have betrayed and abandoned me here. But he at least didn't tag any ideas to his betrayal, while you '

'Why say all this, for heaven's sake ?' I asked in horror, wringing my hands and going quickly up to her. 'Look here, Zinaida, this is sheer cynicism, it's not right to give way to despair like this.

'Now, you listen to me,' I went on, clutching at a vague thought which had suddenly flashed through my ^and and which, it seemed, might still save both of us. 'Listen to me. I have been through a lot in my time—so much that my head spins at the thought of it all—and I have now really grasped, both with my mind and in my tortured heart, that man either hasn't got a destiny, or else it lies exclusively in self-sacrificing love for his neighbour. That's the way we should be going, that's our purpose in life. And that is my faith.'

I wanted to go on talking about mercy and forgiveness, but my voice suddenly rang false and I felt confused.

'I feel such zest for life!' I said sincerely. 'Oh, to live, to live! I want peace and quiet, I want warmth, I want this sea, I want you near me. Oh, if only I could instil this passionate craving for life in you l You spoke of love just now, but I would be content just to have you near me, to hear your voice and see the look on your fac с '

She blushed.

'You love life and I hate it,' she said quickly, to stop me going on. 'So our ways lie apart.'

She poured herself some tea, but left it untouched, went into her bedroom and lay down.

'I think we had better end this conversation,' she told me from there. 'Everything is finished so far as I'm concerned, and I don't need any­thing. So why go on talking?'

'No, everything is not finished.'

'Oh, have it your own way. I know all about that and I'm bored, so give over.'

I stood for a moment, walked up and down the room, and then went into the corridor. Approaching her door late that night and listening, I distinctly heard her crying.

When the servant brought me my clothes next morning he informed me with a smile that the lady in Number Thirteen was in labour. I pulled my clothes on somehow and rushed to Zinaida, terrified out of my wits. In her suite were the doctor, a midwife and an elderly Russian lady from Kharkov called Darya Mikhaylovna. There was a smell of ether drops. Barely had I crossed the threshold when a quiet, piteous groan came from the room where she lay, as ifborne on the winds from Russia. I remembered Orlov and his irony, Polya, the Neva, the snow- flakes, then the cab without an apron, the portents which I had read in the bleak morning sky and the desperate shout of 'Nina, Nina!'

'Go into her room,' the lady said.

I went into Zinaida's room feeling as if I was the child's father. She was lying with her eyes closed: thin, pale, in a white lace nightcap. There were two expressions on her face, I remember. One was impas­sive, cold and listless, while the other, childlike and helpless, was im­parted by the white cap. She did not hear me come in, or perhaps she did hear, but paid me no attention. I stood, looked at her, waited.

Then her face twisted with pain. She opened her eyes and gazed at the ceiling as though puzzling out what was happening to her. Revulsion was written on her face.

'How sickening,' she whispered.

'Zinaida,' I called weakly.

She looked at me impassively and wanly, and closed her eyes. I stood there for a while, then went out.

That night Darya Mikhaylovna told me that the baby was a little girl, but that the mother's condition was serious. Then there was noise and bustle in the corridor. Darya Mikhaylovna came to see me again.

'This is absolutely awful,' she said, looking frantic and wringing her hands. 'The doctor suspects her of taking poison. Russians do behave so badly here, I must say!'

Zinaida died at noon next day.

XVIII

Two years passed. Conditions changed, I returned to St. Petersburg and could now live there openly. I no longer feared being or seeming senti­mental, and I surrendered entirely to the fatherly—or rather idolatrous —feelings aroused in me by Zinaida's daughter Sonya. I fed her myself, I bathed her, I put her to bed, I did not take my eyes olfher for nights on end, I shrieked when I thought the nanny was about to drop her. My craving for ordinary commonplace life became more and more powerful and insistent in course of time, but my sweeping fantasies stopped short at Sonya as if in her they had at last found just what I needed. I loved this little girl insanely. In her I saw the continuation of my o^ life. This was more than just an impression, it was something I felt, something I had faith in, almost: that when I should at last cast olf this long, bony, bearded body, I should live on in those little light blue eyes, those fair, silky little hairs, those chubby little pink hands which so lovingly stroked my face and clasped my neck.

I feared for Sonya's future. Orlov was her father, she was a Kras- novsky on her birth certificate and the only person who knew of her existence or took any interest in it—myself, that is—was now at death's door. I must think about her seriously.

On the day after my arrival in St. Petersburg I went to see Orlov A fat old man with ginger side-whiskers and no moustache—a German, obviously—opened the door. Polya was tidying the drawing-room and failed to recognize me, but Orlov knew me at once.

'Aha, our seditious friend,' he sa!d, looking me over with curiosity and laughing. 'And how are you faring?'

He had not changed at all. There was still that same well-groomed, disagreeable face, that same irony. On the table, as of old, lay a new book with an ivory paper-knife stuck in it. He had obviously been reading before I arrived. He sat me do^n, offered me a cigar. With the tact peculiar to the well-bred he concealed the distaste which my face and wasted figure aroused in him, and remarked in passing that I hadn't changed a bit—that he would have kno^n me anywhere in spite of my having gro^n a beard. We spoke of the weather and Paris.

'Zinaida Krasnovsky died, didn't she?' he asked, hastening to dispose of the tiresome and unavoidable problem which weighed on both of us.

'Yes, she did,' I answered.

'In childbirth?'

'That is so. The doctor suspected another cause of death, but it's more comforting for both of us to take it that she died in childbirth.'

He sighed for reasons of propriety and said nothing. There was a short silence.

'Quite so. Well, things are just the same as ever here, there haven't been any real changes,' he said briskly, noticing me looking round the study. 'My father has retired, as you know, he's taking it easy now, and I'm still where I was. Remember Pekarsky? He hasn't changed either. Gruzin died of diphtheria last year. Well now, Kukushkin's alive, and he mentions you quite often.

'By the way,' Orlov went on, lowering his eyes diffidently, 'when Kukushkin learnt who you were, he told everyone you had attacked him and tried to assassinate him, and that he had barely escaped with his life.'

I said nothing.

'Old servants don't forget their masters. This is very decent of you,' Orlov joked. 'Now, would you care for wine—or coffee? I'll have some made.'

'No, thank you. I came to see you on a most important matter, Orlov.'

'I'm not all that keen on important matters, but I am happy to be of service. What can I do for you?'

'Well, you see,' I began excitedly, \ have poor Zinaida's daughter with me at the moment. I have been looking after her so far, but I'm not long for this world, as you see. I should like to die knowing that she was provided for.'

Orlov coloured slightly, frowned and flashed a stem glance at me. It wasn't so much the 'important matter' which had riled him as what I had said about my not being long for this world—my reference to death.

'Yes, I must think about that,' he said, shielding his eyes as if from the sun. 'Most grateful to you. A little girl, you say?'

'Yes, a girl. A splendid child.'

'Quite so. Not a pet dog, of course, a human being—I must give it serious thought, I can see that. I ar;n prepared to do my bit and, er, I'm most grateful to you.'

He stood up, paced about biting his nails, and stopped before a picture.

'This requires some thought,' he said in a hollow voice, standing with his back to me. 'I shall be at Pekarsky's today and I'll ask him to call on Krasnovsky. I doubt if Krasnovsky will make any great diffi­culties, he'll consent to take the girl.'

'I'm sorry, but I can't see what this has to do with Krasnovsky,' I said, also standing up and going over to a picture at the other end of the study.

'Well, she does bear his name I should hope.'

'Yes, he may be legally obliged to take the child, I don't know, but I didn't come here for a legal consultation, Orlov.'

'Yes, yes, you're right,' he agreed briskly. 'I seem to be talking non­sense. But don't excite yourself. We shall settle all this to our mutual satisfaction. If one solution doesn't fit we'll try a second. If that won't do then something else will, and this ticklish problem will be solved one way or another. Pekarsky will fix it all up. Now, will you be good enough to leave me your address, and I shall let you know at once what we decide. Where are you staying?'

Orlov noted my address and sighed.

' "My fate, ye gods, is just too bad: To be a tiny daughter's dad!" '

he said with a smile. 'But Pekarsky will fix everything, he has his head screwed on. Did you stay long in Paris?'

'Two months.'

We were silent. Orlov was obviously afraid of my mentioning the little girl again.

'You have probably forgotten your letter,' he said, trying to divert my attention elsewhere. 'But I have kept it. I understand your mood of the time and, frankly, I respect that letter.

'The damnable cold blood, the Oriental, the neighing snigger . . . that is charming and much to the point,' he went on with an ironical smile. 'And the basic idea may be close to the truth, though one might go on disputing for ever. That is,'—he fumbled for words—'not dispute the idea itself, but your attitude to the question: your temperament, so to speak. Yes, my life is abnormal, corrupt and useless, and what pre­vents me from starting a new one is cowardice, there you are quite right. But your taking it so much to heart, and getting so excited and frantic about it ... now, that isn't rational, there you are quite wrong.'

'A live man can't help being excited and frantic when he sees him­self and other people near him heading for disaster.'

'No one disputes that. I am not in the least preaching callousness, all I'm asking for is an objective attitude. The more objective one is the less the risk of error. One must look at the roots, one must seek the ultimate cause of every phenomenon. We have weakened, we've let ourselves go, we've fallen by the wayside in fact, and our generation consists entirely of whimpering neurotics. All we do is talk about fatigue and exhaustion, but that's not our fault, yours and mine. We arc too insignificant for a whole generation's fate to hang on our idio­syncrasies. There must be substantial general causes behind all this, causes with a solid biological basis. Snivelling neurotics and backsliders we are, but perhaps that's necessaryand useful for future generations. Not one hair falls from a man's head without the will of the Heavenly Father. Nothing in nature or human society happens in isolation, in other words. Everything is based on something, it's all determined. Now, if so, why should we worry so particularly? Why write frantic letters?'

'Yes, yes, all right,' I said after a little thought. 'I believe that future generations will find things easier and see their way more clearly. They will have our experience to help them. But we do want to be indepen­dent of future generations, don't we, we don't want to live just for them? We only have one life, and we should like to live it confidently, rationally and elegantly. We should like to play a prominent, inde­pendent, honourable role, we should like to make history so that these same future generations won't have the right to call each one of us a nonentity or worse. I believe that what is going on around us is functional and inevitable. But whyshould that inevitability involve me? Why should my ego come to grief?'

'Well, it can't be helped,' sighed Orlov, standing up as if to let me see that our conversation was over.

I picked up my hat.

'We have only sat here half an hour, and just think how many problems we'vesolved,' said Orlov, seeing me into the hall. 'All right, I shall think about that matter. I'll see Pekarsky today, my word upon it.'

He stood waiting for me to put my coat on, obviously glad that I was leaving. I asked whether he would mind giving me back my letter.

'Very well.'

He went into his study and came back with the letter a minute later. I thanked him and left.

On the following day I received a note from him congratulating me on a satisfactory solution to the problem. He wrote that Pekarsky knew a lady who kept a boarding home: a kind of kindergarten where she took quite small children. The woman was completely reliable, but before settling things with her it might be as well to talk to Krasnovsky, as the formalities required. He advised me to see Pekarsky at once, taking the birth certificate if there was such a thing,

'With assurances of my sincere respect and devotion,

'Your humble servant '

Wllile I read the letter Sonya sat on the table looking at me most attentively, without blinking, as if she knew that her fate was being decided.

DOCTOR STARTSEV

I

To visitors' complaints that the county town of S was boring

and humdrum local people would answer defensively that life there was, on the contrary, very good indeed. The town had its library, its theatre, its club. There was the occasional ball. And, in conclusion, it contained intelligent, interesting and charming families with whom one might make friends. Among these families the Turkins were pointed out as the most cultivated and accomplished.

These Turkins lived in their own house on the main street near the Governor's. Mr. Turkin—a stout, handsome, dark man with dundreary whiskers—used to stage amateur dramatic performances for charity, himself playing elderly generals and coughing most amusingly 'while doing so. He knew endless funny stories, riddles, proverbs. He rather liked his fun—he was a bit of a wag—and you could never tell from his face whether he was joking or not. His wife Vera—a slim, pretty woman in a pince-иег—wrote short stories and novels which she liked reading to her guests. Their young daughter Catherine played the piano. Each Turkin had, in short, some accomplishment. They liked entertaining, and gladly displayed their talents to their guests in a jolly, hearty sort of a way. Their large, stone-built house was roomy and cool in hot weather, with half its windows opening on to a shady old garden where nightingales sang in springtime. When they were entertaining there would be a clatter of knives in the kitchen and a smell of fried onions in the yard—the sign that an ample, appetizing supper was on the way.

No sooner had Dr. Dmitry Startsev been appointed to a local medical post and moved in at Dyalizh, six miles away, than he too was told that he simply must meet the Turkins, seeing that he was an intellectual. One winter's day, then, he was introduced to Mr. Turkin in the street. They chatted about the weather, the theatre, the cholera. He was invited to call. On a public holiday in spring—Ascension Day. to be precise—Startsev set out for town after surgery in se.arch of recreation, meaning to do some shopping while he was about it. He made the journey unhurriedly on foot—he had not yet set up his carriage—humming 'Ere from the Cup of Life I yet had Drunk the Tears'.

He had dinner in to^, he strolled in the park. Then Mr. Turkin's invitation suddenly crossed his mind, and he decided to call and see what the family was like.

Mr. Turkin welcomed him in the porch. 'Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. Delighted indeed to see so charming a guest. Come along, I'll introduce you to the wife.

'I was telling him, Vera dear—' he went on, presenting the doctor to his wife. 'He ain't got no statutory right, I was telling him, to coop himself up in that hospital. He should devote his leisure to society, shouldn't he, love?'

'Do sit here,' said Mrs. Turkin, placing the guest next to her. 'You can be my new boy-friend. My husband is jealous—oh, he's quite the Othello !—but we'll try to behave so he won't notice anything.'

'Now, now, ducky!' Mr. Turkin muttered tenderly, kissing her forehead. 'Oh, you are naughty!'

'You're in luck,' he added, turning to the doctor again. 'Mrs. T. has written a whacking great Novel, and today she's going to read it to us.'

Mrs. Turkin turned to her husband. 'Dites que I'on nous donne du the, dear.'

Startsev was introduced to Catherine: a girl of eighteen, very much like her mother. Also slim and pretty, she still had a rather childlike expression. Her waist was soft and slender. So beautiful, healthy and well-developed were her youthful breasts that she seemed like the very breath of springtime.

They had tea with jam and honey, sweets and delicious cakes which melted in the mouth. As evening drew on other guests gradually arrived. Mr. Turkin fixed each of them with his grin.

'Pleased to meet you, I'm sure.'

Then they all sat in the drawing-room, looking very earnest, while Mrs. Turkin read her Novel, which began: 'The frost had set in.' The windows were wide open, a clatter of knives was heard from the kitchen, there was a smell of fried onions. It was relaxing to sit in the deep, soft arm-chairs. The lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room that, on this late spring evening— with voices and laughter borne from the street, with the scent of lilac wafting from outside—it was hard to grasp this stuff about the frost setting in and the dying sun illuminating with its chill rays a traveller on his lonely journey over some snow-covered plain. Mrs. Turkin was reading about a beautiful young countess who ran schools, hospi­tals and libraries in her village, and who fell in love with a wandering artist. These were not things which happen in real life, but they made you feel nice and cosy, they evoked peaceful, serene thoughts—and so no one wanted to get up.

'Not so dusty,' said Mr. Turkin softly.

One of the audience had been carried away by a long, long train of thought.

'No indeed,' he said in a voice barely audible.

An hour passed, then another. In the municipal park near by a band was playing, a choir sang. No one spoke for five minutes or so after Mrs. Turkin had closed her manuscript. They were listening to the choir singing 'Rushlight': a song which conveyed the real-life atmos­phere which the Novel lacked.

'Do you publish your stories in the magazines?' Startsev asked Mrs. Turkin.

'No, never,' she answered. 'I keep my writings in a cupboard. Why publish!' she explained. 'It's not as though we were badly off'

For some reason everyone sighed.

'Now, Pussy, you play us something,' Mr. Turkin told his daughter.

They put the lid of the grand piano up, they opened some music which was lying ready. Catherine sat down. She struck the keys with both hands. Then she immediately struck them again as hard as she could, and then again and again. Her shoulders and bosom quivered, and she kept hitting the same place as if she did not mean to stop until she had driven those keys right inside the instrument. The drawing- room resounded with the din as everything—floor, ceiling, furniture— reverberated.

Catherine was playing a difficult passage—its interest lay in its very difficulty. It was long and tedious. Startsev, as he listened, pictured a fall of rocks down a high mountain: on, on they tumbled while he very much wished they wouldn't. Yet Catherine—pink from her exertions, strong and vigorous, with a lock of hair falling over her forehead—greatly attracted him.

What a pleasant new sensation it was, after a winter in Dyalizh among patients and peasants: to sit in a drawing-room watching this young, exquisite and probably innocent creature, and hearing this noisy, tiresome—yet cultured—racket.

'Well, Pussy, you played better than ever today,' said Mr. Turkin

with tears in his eyes after his daughter had finished and stood up. 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.'

They all crowded round with their congratulations and admiration, declaring that they hadn't heard such a performance for ages. She listened in silence with a faint smile, her whole figure radiating triumph.

'Marvellous! Splendid!'

Infected by the general enthusiasm, Startsev too said how marvellous it had been. 'Where did you study?' he asked Catherine. 'At the Conservatory?'

'No, I'm still at the pre-Conservatory stage. Meanwhile I've been taking lessons here, with Madame Zavlovsky.'

'Did you go to the local high school?'

'No indeed, we engaged private tutors,' Mrs. Turkin answered for her. 'There might be bad influences in a high school or a boarding school, you know. A growing girl should be under no influence but that of her mother.'

'All the same, I am going to the Conservatory,' Catherine said.

'No. Pussy loves Mummy, Pussy won't upset Mummy and Daddy.'

'I will go there, I will,' joked Catherine, playing up like a naughty child and stamping her foot.

At supper it was Mr. Turkin's turn to display his talents. Laughing with his eyes alone, he told funny stories, he joked, he propounded absurd riddles, he answered them himself—talking all the time in an extraordinary lingo evolved by long practice in the exercise of wit . . . by now it was obviously second nature to him.

'Whacking great,' 'Not so dusty,' 'Thanking you most unkindly '

Nor was this all. When the guests; contented and replete, were jammed in the hall looking for coats and sticks, the footman Paul— nicknamed Peacock, a boy of about fourteen with cropped hair and full cheeks—bustled around them.

'Come on then, Peacock, perform!' Mr. Turkin said.

Peacock struck an attitude, threw up an arm.

'Unhappy woman, die!' he uttered in a tragic voice. And everyone roared with laughter.

'Great fun,' thought Startsev, going out in the street.

He called at a restaurant and had a beer before setting off home for Dyalizh. During the walk he hummed 'Your Voice to me both Languorous and Tender.'

Going to bed, he did not feel at all tired after his six-mile walk— fir from it, he felt he could have walked another fifteen with pleasure.

'Not so dusty,' he remembered as he was falling asleep. And laughed.

II

Startsev kept meaning to visit the Turkins again, but just couldn't find a free hour, being so very busy at his hospital. Then, after more than a year of such solitary toil, a letter in a light blue envelope arrived from town.

Mrs. Turkin had had migraine for years, but recently—what with Pussy now scaring her daily with talk of going to the Conservatory— these attacks had increased. The town doctors had all attended the Turkins, now it was the country doctor's turn. Mrs. Turkin wrote him a touching letter, asking him to come and relieve her sufferings. Startsev went, and then became a frequent—a very frequent—visitor at the Turkins'.

He really did help Mrs. Turkin a bit, and she was now telling all her guests what an extraordinary, what an admirable doctor he was. But it was no migraine that brought him to the Turkins' now!

On one of his free days, after Catherine had completed her lengthy, exhausting piano exercises, they had sat for a long time over tea in the dining-room while Mr. Turkin told a funny story. Suddenly the door­bell rang. He had to go into the hall to greet a visitor, and Startsev took advantage of the brief confusion.

'For God's sake, I beg you, don't torment me,' he whispered; much agitated, to Catherine. 'Let's go in the garden.'

She shrugged her shoulders as if puzzled to know what he wanted of her, but she did get up and go.

'You play the piano for three or four hours on end,' he said .as he followed her. 'Then you sit with your mother, and one can never have a word with you. Give me a quarter ofan hour, I beg you.'

Autumn was approaching. The old garden was quiet and sad, dark leaves lay on the paths and the evenings were drawing in.

'I haven't seen you for a week,' Startsev went on. 'If only you knew how I suffer. Come and sit down, and hear what I have to say.'

They had their favourite place in the garden: a bench under a broad old maple, which was where they now sat.

'What do you require?' asked Catherine in a dry, matter-of-fact voice.

'I haven't seen you for a week, or heard your voice all that time. I long, I yearn to hear you speak. Say something.'

He was fascinated by her freshness, by the innocent expression ofher eyes and cheeks. Even in the cut of her dress he saw something un­usually lovely, touching in its simplicity and naive gracefulness. And yet, despite this innocence, he found her very intelligent, very mature for her age. He could talk to her about literature, art or anything else. He could complain about life or people to her, though she was liable to laugh suddenly in the wrong place during a serious conversation. Qr she would run off into the house. Like almost all the local girls, she was a great reader. (Few people in the town read much. 'If it wasn't for the girls and the young Jews we might just as well shut up shop,' they used to say in the town library.) Her reading pleased Startsev no end. He always made a great fuss of asking what she had read in the last few days, and he would listen, fascinated, as she told him.