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THE TALES OF CHEKHOV

VOLUME 5

THE WIFE AND OTHER STORIES

BY

ANTON TCHEKHOV

Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT




CONTENTS


The Wife
Difficult People
The Grasshopper
A Dreary Story
The Privy Councillor
The Man in Case
Gooseberries
About Love
The Lottery Ticket



THE WIFE

I

I RECEIVED the following letter:

"DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH!

"Not far from you -- that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo
-- very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which
I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that
village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set off
for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there,
and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing now;
everything belongs to other people. They have settled three or
four families in a hut, so that there are no less than fifteen
persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the young
children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing
to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of
hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The
doctor's assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one
see? Every one is sick, every one delirious, some laughing,
others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch
them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but
frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor) and his lady
assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need bread
which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them,
on the ground that their names have been taken off the register
of this district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants
of Tomsk; and, besides, the Zemstvo has no money.

"Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg
you not to refuse immediate help.

"Your well-wisher."

Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal
name* or his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants
go on for years growing more and more convinced every day that
they can do _nothing_, and yet continue to receive their salaries
from people who are living upon frozen potatoes, and consider
they have a right to judge whether I am humane or not.

*Sobol in Russian means "sable-marten."- TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants
came every morning to the servants' kitchen and went down on
their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen
at night out of the barn, the wall having first been broken in,
and by the general depression which was fostered by
conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather -- worried by all
this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing "A
History of Railways"; I had to read a great number of Russian and
foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make
calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then
again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a
book or began to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes
began blinking, I would get up from the table with a sigh and
begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted country-house.
When I was tired of walking about I would stand still at my study
window, and, looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and
the bare young birch-trees and the great fields covered with
recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the horizon
a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran
down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was
Pestrovo, concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written
to me. If it had not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or
snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond and the fields, and
the tapping in the carpenter's shed, this bit of the world about
which such a fuss was being made would have seemed like the Dead
Sea; it was all so still, motionless, lifeless, and dreary!

My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating myself;
I did not know what it was, and chose to believe it was
disappointment. I had actually given up my post in the Department
of Ways and Communications, and had come here into the country
expressly to live in peace and to devote myself to writing on
social questions. It had long been my cherished dream. And now I
had to say good-bye both to peace and to literature, to give up
everything and think only of the peasants. And that was
inevitable, because I was convinced that there was absolutely
nobody in the district except me to help the starving. The people
surrounding me were uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the
most part dishonest, or if they were honest, they were
unreasonable and unpractical like my wife, for instance. It was
impossible to rely on such people, it was impossible to leave the
peasants to their fate, so that the only thing left to do was to
submit to necessity and see to setting the peasants to rights
myself.

I began by making up my mind to give five thousand roubles to the
assistance of the starving peasants. And that did not decrease,
but only aggravated my uneasiness. As I stood by the window or
walked about the rooms I was tormented by the question which had
not occurred to me before: how this money was to be spent. To
have bread bought and to go from hut to hut distributing it was
more than one man could do, to say nothing of the risk that in
your haste you might give twice as much to one who was well-fed
or to one who was making. money out of his fellows as to the
hungry. I had no faith in the local officials. All these district
captains and tax inspectors were young men, and I distrusted them
as I do all young people of today, who are materialistic and
without ideals. The District Zemstvo, the Peasant Courts, and all
the local institutions, inspired in me not the slightest desire
to appeal to them for assistance. I knew that all these
institutions who were busily engaged in picking out plums from
the Zemstvo and the Government pie had their mouths always wide
open for a bite at any other pie that might turn up.

The idea occurred to me to invite the neighbouring landowners and
suggest to them to organize in my house something like a
committee or a centre to which all subscriptions could be
forwarded, and from which assistance and instructions could be
distributed throughout the district; such an organization, which
would render possible frequent consultations and free control on
a big scale, would completely meet my views. But I imagined the
lunches, the dinners, the suppers and the noise, the waste of
time, the verbosity and the bad taste which that mixed provincial
company would inevitably bring into my house, and I made haste to
reject my idea.

As for the members of my own household, the last thing I could
look for was help or support from them. Of my father's household,
of the household of my childhood, once a big and noisy family, no
one remained but the governess Mademoiselle Marie, or, as she was
now called, Marya Gerasimovna, an absolutely insignificant
person. She was a precise little old lady of seventy, who wore a
light grey dress and a cap with white ribbons, and looked like a
china doll. She always sat in the drawing-room reading.

Whenever I passed by her, she would say, knowing the reason for
my brooding:

"What can you expect, Pasha? I told you how it would be before.
You can judge from our servants."

My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower storey, all the
rooms of which she occupied. She slept, had her meals, and
received her visitors downstairs in her own rooms, and took not
the slightest interest in how I dined, or slept, or whom I saw.
Our relations with one another were simple and not strained, but
cold, empty, and dreary as relations are between people who have
been so long estranged, that even living under the same roof
gives no semblance of nearness. There was no trace now of the
passionate and tormenting love -- at one time sweet, at another
bitter as wormwood -- which I had once felt for Natalya
Gavrilovna. There was nothing left, either, of the outbursts of
the past -- the
 loud altercations, upbraidings, complaints, and gusts of hatred
which had usually ended in my wife's going abroad or to her own
people, and in my sending money in small but frequent instalments
that I might sting her pride oftener. (My proud and sensitive
wife and her family live at my expense, and much as she would
have liked to do so, my wife could not refuse my money: that
afforded me satisfaction and was one comfort in my sorrow.) Now
when we chanced to meet in the corridor downstairs or in the
yard, I bowed, she smiled graciously. We spoke of the weather,
said that it seemed time to put in the double windows, and that
some one with bells on their harness had driven over the dam. And
at such times I read in her face: "I am faithful to you and am
not disgracing your good name which you think so much about; you
are sensible and do not worry me; we are quits."

I assured myself that my love had died long ago, that I was too
much absorbed in my work to think seriously of my relations with
my wife. But, alas! that was only what I imagined. When my wife
talked aloud downstairs I listened intently to her voice, though
I could not distinguish one word. When she played the piano
downstairs I stood up and listened. When her carriage or her
saddlehorse was brought to the door, I went to the window and
waited to see her out of the house; then I watched her get into
her carriage or mount her horse and ride out of the yard. I felt
that there was something wrong with me, and was afraid the
expression of my eyes or my face might betray me. I looked after
my wife and then watched for her to come back that I might see
again from the window her face, her shoulders, her fur coat, her
hat. I felt dreary, sad, infinitely regretful, and felt inclined
in her absence to walk through her rooms, and longed that the
problem that my wife and I had not been able to solve because our
characters were incompatible, should solve itself in the natural
way as soon as possible -- that is, that this beautiful woman of
twenty-seven might make haste and grow old, and that my head
might be grey and bald.

One day at lunch my bailiff informed me that the Pestrovo
peasants had begun to pull the thatch off the roofs to feed their
cattle. Marya Gerasimovna looked at me in alarm and perplexity.

"What can I do?" I said to her. "One cannot fight single-handed,
and I have never experienced such loneliness as I do now. I would
give a great deal to find one man in the whole province on whom I
could rely."

"Invite Ivan Ivanitch," said Marya Gerasimovna.

"To be sure!" I thought, delighted. "That is an idea! _C'est
raison_," I hummed, going to my study to write to Ivan Ivanitch.
"_C'est raison, c'est raison_."

II

Of all the mass of acquaintances who, in this house twenty-five
to thirty-five years ago, had eaten, drunk, masqueraded, fallen
in love, married bored us with accounts of their splendid packs
of hounds and horses, the only one still living was Ivan Ivanitch
Bragin. At one time he had been very active, talkative, noisy,
and given to falling in love, and had been famous for his extreme
views and for the peculiar charm of his face, which fascinated
men as well as women; now he was an old man, had grown corpulent,
and was living out his days with neither views nor charm. He came
the day after getting my letter, in the evening just as the
samovar was brought into the dining-room and little Marya
Gerasimovna had begun slicing the lemon.

"I am very glad to see you, my dear fellow," I said gaily,
meeting him. "Why, you are stouter than ever. . . ."

"It isn't getting stout; it's swelling," he answered. "The bees
must have stung me."

With the familiarity of a man laughing at his own fatness, he put
his arms round my waist and laid on my breast his big soft head,
with the hair combed down on the forehead like a Little
Russian's, and went off into a thin, aged laugh.

"And you go on getting younger," he said through his laugh. "I
wonder what dye you use for your hair and beard; you might let me
have some of it." Sniffing and gasping, he embraced me and kissed
me on the cheek. "You might give me some of it," he repeated.
"Why, you are not forty, are you?"

"Alas, I am forty-six!" I said, laughing.

Ivan Ivanitch smelt of tallow candles and cooking, and that
suited him. His big, puffy, slow-moving body was swathed in a
long frock-coat like a coachman's full coat, with a high waist,
and with hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and it would have
been strange if he had smelt of eau-de-Cologne, for instance. In
his long, unshaven, bluish double chin, which looked like a
thistle, his goggle eyes, his shortness of breath, and in the
whole of his clumsy, slovenly figure, in his voice, his laugh,
and his words, it was difficult to recognize the graceful,
interesting talker who used in old days to make the husbands of
the district jealous on account of their wives.

"I am in great need of your assistance, my friend," I said, when
we were sitting in the dining-room, drinking tea. "I want to
organize relief for the starving peasants, and I don't know how
to set about it. So perhaps you will be so kind as to advise me."

"Yes, yes, yes," said Ivan Ivanitch, sighing. "To be sure, to be
sure, to be sure. . . ."

"I would not have worried you, my dear fellow, but really there
is no one here but you I can appeal to. You know what people are
like about here."

"To be sure, to be sure, to be sure. . . . Yes."

I thought that as we were going to have a serious, business
consultation in which any one might take part, regardless of
their position or personal relations, why should I not invite
Natalya Gavrilovna.

"_Tres faciunt collegium_," I said gaily. "What if we were to ask
Natalya Gavrilovna? What do you think? Fenya," I said, turning to
the maid, "ask Natalya Gavrilovna to come upstairs to us, if
possible at once. Tell her it's a very important matter."

A little later Natalya Gavrilovna came in. I got up to meet her
and said:

"Excuse us for troubling you, Natalie. We are discussing a very
important matter, and we had the happy thought that we might take
advantage of your good advice, which you will not refuse to give
us. Please sit down."

Ivan Ivanitch kissed her hand while she kissed his forehead;
then, when we all sat down to the table, he, looking at her
tearfully and blissfully, craned forward to her and kissed her
hand again. She was dressed in black, her hair was carefully
arranged, and she smelt of fresh scent. She had evidently dressed
to go out or was expecting somebody. Coming into the dining-room,
she held out her hand to me with simple friendliness, and smiled
to me as graciously as she did to Ivan Ivanitch -- that pleased
me; but as she talked she moved her fingers, often and abruptly
leaned back in her chair and talked rapidly, and this jerkiness
in her words and movements irritated me and reminded me of her
native town -- Odessa, where the society, men and women alike,
had wearied me by its bad taste.

"I want to do something for the famine-stricken peasants," I
began, and after a brief pause I went on: " Money, of course, is
a great thing, but to confine oneself to subscribing money, and
with that to be satisfied, would be evading the worst of the
trouble. Help must take the form of money, but the most important
thing is a proper and sound organization. Let us think it over,
my friends, and do something."

Natalya Gavrilovna looked at me inquiringly and shrugged her
shoulders as though to say, "What do I know about it?"

"Yes, yes, famine . . ." muttered Ivan Ivanitch. "Certainly . . .
yes."

"It's a serious position," I said, "and assistance is needed as
soon as possible. I imagine the first point among the principles
which we must work out ought to be promptitude. We must act on
the military principles of judgment, promptitude, and energy."

"Yes, promptitude . . ." repeated Ivan Ivanitch in a drowsy and
listless voice, as though he were dropping asleep. "Only one
can't do anything. The crops have failed, and so what's the use
of all your judgment and energy? . . . It's the elements. . . .
You can't go against God and fate."

"Yes, but that's what man has a head for, to conten d against the
elements."

"Eh? Yes . . . that's so, to be sure. . . . Yes."

Ivan Ivanitch sneezed into his handkerchief, brightened up, and
as though he had just woken up, looked round at my wife and me.

"My crops have failed, too." He laughed a thin little laugh and
gave a sly wink as though this were really funny. "No money, no
corn, and a yard full of labourers like Count Sheremetyev's. I
want to kick them out, but I haven't the heart to."

Natalya Gavrilovna laughed, and began questioning him about his
private affairs. Her presence gave me a pleasure such as I had
not felt for a long time, and I was afraid to look at her for
fear my eyes would betray my secret feeling. Our relations were
such that that feeling might seem surprising and ridiculous.

She laughed and talked with Ivan Ivanitch without being in the
least disturbed that she was in my room and that I was not
laughing.

"And so, my friends, what are we to do?" I asked after waiting
for a pause. "I suppose before we do anything else we had better
immediately open a subscription-list. We will write to our
friends in the capitals and in Odessa, Natalie, and ask them to
subscribe. When we have got together a little sum we will begin
buying corn and fodder for the cattle; and you, Ivan Ivanitch,
will you be so kind as to undertake distributing the relief?
Entirely relying on your characteristic tact and efficiency, we
will only venture to express a desire that before you give any
relief you make acquaintance with the details of the case on the
spot, and also, which is very important, you should be careful
that corn should be distributed only to those who are in genuine
need, and not to the drunken, the idle, or the dishonest."

"Yes, yes, yes . . ." muttered Ivan Ivanitch. "To be sure, to be
sure."

"Well, one won't get much done with that slobbering wreck," I
thought, and I felt irritated.

"I am sick of these famine-stricken peasants, bother them! It's
nothing but grievances with them!" Ivan Ivanitch went on, sucking
the rind of the lemon. "The hungry have a grievance against those
who have enough, and those who have enough have a grievance
against the hungry. Yes . . . hunger stupefies and maddens a man
and makes him savage; hunger is not a potato. When a man is
starving he uses bad language, and steals, and may do worse. . .
. One must realize that."

Ivan Ivanitch choked over his tea, coughed, and shook all over
with a squeaky, smothered laughter.

" 'There was a battle at Pol . . . Poltava,' " he brought out,
gesticulating with both hands in protest against the laughter and
coughing which prevented him from speaking. " 'There was a battle
at Poltava!' When three years after the Emancipation we had
famine in two districts here, Fyodor Fyodoritch came and invited
me to go to him. 'Come along, come along,' he persisted, and
nothing else would satisfy him. 'Very well, let us go,' I said.
And, so we set off. It was in the evening; there was snow
falling. Towards night we were getting near his place, and
suddenly from the wood came 'bang!' and another time 'bang!' 'Oh,
damn it all!' . . . I jumped out of the sledge, and I saw in the
darkness a man running up to me, knee-deep in the snow. I put my
arm round his shoulder, like this, and knocked the gun out of his
hand. Then another one turned up; I fetched him a knock on the
back of his head so that he grunted and flopped with his nose in
the snow. I was a sturdy chap then, my fist was heavy; I disposed
of two of them, and when I turned round Fyodor was sitting
astride of a third. We did not let our three fine fellows go; we
tied their hands behind their backs so that they might not do us
or themselves any harm, and took the fools into the kitchen. We
were angry with them and at the same time ashamed to look at
them; they were peasants we knew, and were good fellows; we were
sorry for them. They were quite stupid with terror. One was
crying and begging our pardon, the second looked like a wild
beast and kept swearing, the third knelt down and began to pray.
I said to Fedya: 'Don't bear them a grudge; let them go, the
rascals!' He fed them, gave them a bushel of flour each, and let
them go: 'Get along with you,' he said. So that's what he did.. .
. The Kingdom of Heaven be his and everlasting peace! He
understood and did not bear them a grudge; but there were some
who did, and how many people they ruined! Yes. . . Why, over the
affair at the Klotchkovs' tavern eleven men were sent to the
disciplinary battalion. Yes. . . . And now, look, it's the same
thing. Anisyin, the investigating magistrate, stayed the night
with me last Thursday, and he told me about some landowner. . . .
Yes. . . . They took the wall of his barn to pieces at night and
carried off twenty sacks of rye. When the gentleman heard that
such a crime had been committed, he sent a telegram to the
Governor and another to the police captain, another to the
investigating magistrate! . . . Of course, every one is afraid of
a man who is fond of litigation. The authorities were in a
flutter and there was a general hubbub. Two villages were
searched."

"Excuse me, Ivan Ivanitch," I said. "Twenty sacks of rye were
stolen from me, and it was I who telegraphed to the Governor. I
telegraphed to Petersburg, too. But it was by no means out of
love for litigation, as you are pleased to express it, and not
because I bore them a grudge. I look at every subject from the
point of view of principle. From the point of view of the law,
theft is the same whether a man is hungry or not."

"Yes, yes. . ." muttered Ivan Ivanitch in confusion. "Of course.
. . To be sure, yes."

Natalya Gavrilovna blushed.

"There are people. . ." she said and stopped; she made an effort
to seem indifferent, but she could not keep it up, and looked
into my eyes with the hatred that I know so well. "There are
people," she said, "for whom famine and human suffering exist
simply that they may vent their hateful and despicable
temperaments upon them."

I was confused and shrugged my shoulders.

"I meant to say generally," she went on, "that there are people
who are quite indifferent and completely devoid of all feeling of
sympathy, yet who do not pass human suffering by, but insist on
meddling for fear people should be able to do without them.
Nothing is sacred for their vanity."

"There are people," I said softly, "who have an angelic
character, but who express their glorious ideas in such a form
that it is difficult to distinguish the angel from an Odessa
market-woman."

I must confess it was not happily expressed.

My wife looked at me as though it cost her a great effort to hold
her tongue. Her sudden outburst, and then her inappropriate
eloquence on the subject of my desire to help the famine-stricken
peasants, were, to say the least, out of place; when I had
invited her to come upstairs I had expected quite a different
attitude to me and my intentions. I cannot say definitely what I
had expected, but I had been agreeably agitated by the
expectation. Now I saw that to go on speaking about the famine
would be difficult and perhaps stupid.

"Yes . . ." Ivan Ivanitch muttered inappropriately. "Burov, the
merchant, must have four hundred thousand at least. I said to
him: 'Hand over one or two thousand to the famine. You can't take
it with you when you die, anyway.' He was offended. But we all
have to die, you know. Death is not a potato."

A silence followed again.

"So there's nothing left for me but to reconcile myself to
loneliness," I sighed. "One cannot fight single-handed. Well, I
will try single-handed. Let us hope that my campaign against the
famine will be more successful than my campaign against
indifference."

"I am expected downstairs," said Natalya Gavrilovna.

She got up from the table and turned to Ivan Ivanitch.

"So you will look in upon me downstairs for a minute? I won't say
good-bye to you."

And she went away.

Ivan Ivanitch was now drinking his seventh glass of tea, choking,
smacking his lips, and sucking sometimes his moustache, sometimes
the lemon. He was muttering something drowsily and listlessly,
and I did not listen but waited for him to go. At last, with an
expression that suggested that he had only come to me to take a
cup of tea, he got up and began to take leave. As I saw him out I
said:

"And so you have given me no advice."

"Eh? I am a feeble, stupid old man," he answered. "What use would
my advice be? You shouldn't worry yourself. . . . I really don't
know why you worry yourself. Don't disturb yourself, my dear
fellow! Upon my word, there's no need," he whispered genuinely
and affectionately, soothing me as though I were a child. "Upon
my word, there's no need."

"No need? Why, the peasants are pulling the thatch off their
huts, and they say there is typhus somewhere already."

"Well, what of it? If there are good crops next year, they'll
thatch them again, and if we die of typhus others will live after
us. Anyway, we have to die -- if not now, later. Don't worry
yourself, my dear."

"I can't help worrying myself," I said irritably.

We were standing in the dimly lighted vestibule. Ivan Ivanitch
suddenly took me by the elbow, and, preparing to say something
evidently very important, looked at me in silence for a couple of
minutes.

"Pavel Andreitch!" he said softly, and suddenly in his puffy, set
face and dark eyes there was a gleam of the expression for which
he had once been famous and which was truly charming. "Pavel
Andreitch, I speak to you as a friend: try to be different! One
is ill at ease with you, my dear fellow, one really is!"

He looked intently into my face; the charming expression faded
away, his eyes grew dim again, and he sniffed and muttered
feebly:

"Yes, yes. . . . Excuse an old man. . . . It's all nonsense . . .
yes."

As he slowly descended the staircase, spreading out his hands to
balance himself and showing me his huge, bulky back and red neck,
he gave me the unpleasant impression of a sort of crab.

"You ought to go away, your Excellency," he muttered. "To
Petersburg or abroad. . . . Why should you live here and waste
your golden days? You are young, wealthy, and healthy. . . . Yes.
. . . Ah, if I were younger I would whisk away like a hare, and
snap my fingers at everything."

III

My wife's outburst reminded me of our married life together. In
old days after every such outburst we felt irresistibly drawn to
each other; we would meet and let off all the dynamite that had
accumulated in our souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch had gone
away I had a strong impulse to go to my wife. I wanted to go
downstairs and tell her that her behaviour at tea had been an
insult to me, that she was cruel, petty, and that her plebeian
mind had never risen to a comprehension of what _I_ was saying
and of what _I_ was doing. I walked about the rooms a long time
thinking of what I would say to her and trying to guess what she
would say to me.

That evening, after Ivan Ivanitch went away, I felt in a
peculiarly irritating form the uneasiness which had worried me of
late. I could not sit down or sit still, but kept walking about
in the rooms that were lighted up and keeping near to the one in
which Marya Gerasimovna was sitting. I had a feeling very much
like that which I had on the North Sea during a storm when every
one thought that our ship, which had no freight nor ballast,
would overturn. And that evening I understood that my uneasiness
was not disappointment, as I had supposed, but a different
feeling, though what exactly I could not say, and that irritated
me more than ever.

"I will go to her," I decided. "I can think of a pretext. I shall
say that I want to see Ivan Ivanitch; that will be all."

I went downstairs and walked without haste over the carpeted
floor through the vestibule and the hall. Ivan Ivanitch was
sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room; he was drinking tea
again and muttering something. My wife was standing opposite to
him and holding on to the back of a chair. There was a gentle,
sweet, and docile expression on her face, such as one sees on the
faces of people listening to crazy saints or holy men when a
peculiar hidden significance is imagined in their vague words and
mutterings. There was something morbid, something of a nun's
exaltation, in my wife's expression and attitude; and her
low-pitched, half-dark rooms with their old-fashioned furniture,
with her birds asleep in their cages, and with a smell of
geranium, reminded me of the rooms of some abbess or pious old
lady.

I went into the drawing-room. My wife showed neither surprise nor
confusion, and looked at me calmly and serenely, as though she
had known I should come.

"I beg your pardon," I said softly. "I am so glad you have not
gone yet, Ivan Ivanitch. I forgot to ask you, do you know the
Christian name of the president of our Zemstvo?"

"Andrey Stanislavovitch. Yes. . . ."

"_Merci_," I said, took out my notebook, and wrote it down.

There followed a silence during which my wife and Ivan Ivanitch
were probably waiting for me to go; my wife did not believe that
I wanted to know the president's name -- I saw that from her
eyes.

"Well, I must be going, my beauty," muttered Ivan Ivanitch, after
I had walked once or twice across the drawing-room and sat down
by the fireplace.

"No," said Natalya Gavrilovna quickly, touching his hand. "Stay
another quarter of an hour. . . . Please do!"

Evidently she did not wish to be left alone with me without a
witness.

"Oh, well, I'll wait a quarter of an hour, too," I thought.

"Why, it's snowing!" I said, getting up and looking out of
window. "A good fall of snow! Ivan Ivanitch"-- I went on walking
about the room -- "I do regret not being a sportsman. I can
imagine what a pleasure it must be coursing hares or hunting
wolves in snow like this!"

My wife, standing still, watched my movements, looking out of the
corner of her eyes without turning her head. She looked as though
she thought I had a sharp knife or a revolver in my pocket.

"Ivan Ivanitch, do take me out hunting some day," I went on
softly. "I shall be very, very grateful to you."

At that moment a visitor came into the room. He was a tall,
thick-set gentleman whom I did not know, with a bald head, a big
fair beard, and little eyes. From his baggy, crumpled clothes and
his manners I took him to be a parish clerk or a teacher, but my
wife introduced him to me as Dr. Sobol.

"Very, very glad to make your acquaintance," said the doctor in a
loud tenor voice, shaking hands with me warmly, with a naive
smile. "Very glad!"

He sat down at the table, took a glass of tea, and said in a loud
voice:

"Do you happen to have a drop of rum or brandy? Have pity on me,
Olya, and look in the cupboard; I am frozen," he said, addressing
the maid.

I sat down by the fire again, looked on, listened, and from time
to time put in a word in the general conversation. My wife smiled
graciously to the visitors and kept a sharp lookout on me, as
though I were a wild beast. She was oppressed by my presence, and
this aroused in me jealousy, annoyance, and an obstinate desire
to wound her. "Wife, these snug rooms, the place by the fire," I
thought, "are mine, have been mine for years, but some crazy Ivan
Ivanitch or Sobol has for some reason more right to them than I.
Now I see my wife, not out of window, but close at hand, in
ordinary home surroundings that I feel the want of now I am
growing older, and, in spite of her hatred for me, I miss her as
years ago in my childhood I used to miss my mother and my nurse.
And I feel that now, on the verge of old age, my love for her is
purer and loftier than it was in the past; and that is why I want
to go up to her, to stamp hard on her toe with my heel, to hurt
her and smile as I do it."

"Monsieur Marten," I said, addressing the doctor, "how many
hospitals have we in the district?"

"Sobol," my wife corrected.

"Two," answered Sobol.

"And how many deaths are there every year in each hospital?"

"Pavel Andreitch, I want to speak to you," said my wife.

She apologized to the visitors and went to the next room. I got
up and followed her.

"You will go upstairs to your own rooms this minute," she said.

"You are ill-bred," I said to her.

"You will go upstairs to your own rooms this very minute," she
repeated sharply, and she looked into my face with hatred.

She was standing so near that if I had stooped a lit tle my beard
would have touched her face.

"What is the matter?" I asked. "What harm have I done all at
once?"

Her chin quivered, she hastily wiped her eyes, and, with a
cursory glance at the looking-glass, whispered:

"The old story is beginning all over again. Of course you won't
go away. Well, do as you like. I'll go away myself, and you
stay."

We returned to the drawing-room, she with a resolute face, while
I shrugged my shoulders and tried to smile. There were some more
visitors -- an elderly lady and a young man in spectacles.
Without greeting the new arrivals or taking leave of the others,
I went off to my own rooms.

After what had happened at tea and then again downstairs, it
became clear to me that our "family happiness," which we had
begun to forget about in the course of the last two years, was
through some absurd and trivial reason beginning all over again,
and that neither I nor my wife could now stop ourselves; and that
next day or the day after, the outburst of hatred would, as I
knew by experience of past years, be followed by something
revolting which would upset the whole order of our lives. "So it
seems that during these two years we have grown no wiser, colder,
or calmer," I thought as I began walking about the rooms. "So
there will again be tears, outcries, curses, packing up, going
abroad, then the continual sickly fear that she will disgrace me
with some coxcomb out there, Italian or Russian, refusing a
passport, letters, utter loneliness, missing her, and in five
years old age, grey hairs." I walked about, imagining what was
really impossible -- her, grown handsomer, stouter, embracing a
man I did not know. By now convinced that that would certainly
happen, "'Why," I asked myself, "Why, in one of our long past
quarrels, had not I given her a divorce, or why had she not at
that time left me altogether? I should not have had this yearning
for her now, this hatred, this anxiety; and I should have lived
out my life quietly, working and not worrying about anything."

A carriage with two lamps drove into the yard, then a big sledge
with three horses. My wife was evidently having a party.

Till midnight everything was quiet downstairs and I heard
nothing, but at midnight there was a sound of moving chairs and a
clatter of crockery. So there was supper. Then the chairs moved
again, and through the floor I heard a noise; they seemed to be
shouting hurrah. Marya Gerasimovna was already asleep and I was
quite alone in the whole upper storey; the portraits of my
forefathers, cruel, insignificant people, looked at me from the
walls of the drawing-room, and the reflection of my lamp in the
window winked unpleasantly. And with a feeling of jealousy and
envy for what was going on downstairs, I listened and thought: "I
am master here; if I like, I can in a moment turn out all that
fine crew." But I knew that all that was nonsense, that I could
not turn out any one, and the word "master" had no meaning. One
may think oneself master, married, rich, a kammer-junker, as much
as one likes, and at the same time not know what it means.

After supper some one downstairs began singing in a tenor voice.

"Why, nothing special has happened," I tried to persuade myself.
"Why am I so upset? I won't go downstairs tomorrow, that's all;
and that will be the end of our quarrel."

At a quarter past one I went to bed.

"Have the visitors downstairs gone?" I asked Alexey as he was
undressing me.

"Yes, sir, they've gone."

"And why were they shouting hurrah?"

"Alexey Dmitritch Mahonov subscribed for the famine fund a
thousand bushels of flour and a thousand roubles. And the old
lady -- I don't know her name -- promised to set up a soup
kitchen on her estate to feed a hundred and fifty people. Thank
God . . . Natalya Gavrilovna has been pleased to arrange that all
the gentry should assemble every Friday."

"To assemble here, downstairs?"

"Yes, sir. Before supper they read a list: since August up to
today Natalya Gavrilovna has collected eight thousand roubles,
besides corn. Thank God. . . . What I think is that if our
mistress does take trouble for the salvation of her soul, she
will soon collect a lot. There are plenty of rich people here."

Dismissing Alexey, I put out the light and drew the bedclothes
over my head.

"After all, why am I so troubled?" I thought. "What force draws
me to the starving peasants like a butterfly to a flame? I don't
know them, I don't understand them; I have never seen them and I
don't like them. Why this uneasiness?"

I suddenly crossed myself under the quilt.

"But what a woman she is!" I said to myself, thinking of my wife.
"There's a regular committee held in the house without my
knowing. Why this secrecy? Why this conspiracy? What have I done
to them? Ivan Ivanitch is right -- I must go away."

Next morning I woke up firmly resolved to go away. The events of
the previous day -- the conversation at tea, my wife, Sobol, the
supper, my apprehensions -- worried me, and I felt glad to think
of getting away from the surroundings which reminded me of all
that. While I was drinking my coffee the bailiff gave me a long
report on various matters. The most agreeable item he saved for
the last.

"The thieves who stole our rye have been found," he announced
with a smile. "The magistrate arrested three peasants at Pestrovo
yesterday."

"Go away!" I shouted at him; and a propos of nothing, I picked up
the cake-basket and flung it on the floor.

IV

After lunch I rubbed my hands, and thought I must go to my wife
and tell her that I was going away. Why? Who cared? Nobody cares,
I answered, but why shouldn't I tell her, especially as it would
give her nothing but pleasure? Besides, to go away after our
yesterday's quarrel without saying a word would not be quite
tactful: she might think that I was frightened of her, and
perhaps the thought that she has driven me out of my house may
weigh upon her. It would be just as well, too, to tell her that I
subscribe five thousand, and to give her some advice about the
organization, and to warn her that her inexperience in such a
complicated and responsible matter might lead to most lamentable
results. In short, I wanted to see my wife, and while I thought
of various pretexts for going to her, I had a firm conviction in
my heart that I should do so.

It was still light when I went in to her, and the lamps had not
yet been lighted. She was sitting in her study, which led from
the drawing-room to her bedroom, and, bending low over the table,
was writing something quickly. Seeing me, she started, got up
from the table, and remained standing in an attitude such as to
screen her papers from me.

"I beg your pardon, I have only come for a minute," I said, and,
I don't know why, I was overcome with embarrassment. "I have
learnt by chance that you are organizing relief for the famine,
Natalie."

"Yes, I am. But that's my business," she answered.

"Yes, it is your business," I said softly. "I am glad of it, for
it just fits in with my intentions. I beg your permission to take
part in it."

"Forgive me, I cannot let you do it," she said in response, and
looked away.

"Why not, Natalie?" I said quietly. "Why not? I, too, am well fed
and I, too, want to help the hungry."

"I don't know what it has to do with you," she said with a
contemptuous smile, shrugging her shoulders. "Nobody asks you."

"Nobody asks you, either, and yet you have got up a regular
committee in _my_ house," I said.

"I am asked, but you can have my word for it no one will ever ask
you. Go and help where you are not known."

"For God's sake, don't talk to me in that tone." I tried to be
mild, and besought myself most earnestly not to lose my temper.
For the first few minutes I felt glad to be with my wife. I felt
an atmosphere of youth, of home, of feminine softness, of the
most refined elegance -- exactly what was lacking on my floor and
in my life altogether. My wife was wearing a pink flannel
dressing-gown; it made her look much younger, and gave a softness
to her rapid and sometimes abrupt movements. Her beautiful dark
hair, the mere sight of which at one time stirred me to passion,
had from sitting so long with her head bent c ome loose from the
comb and was untidy, but, to my eyes, that only made it look more
rich and luxuriant. All this, though is banal to the point of
vulgarity. Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps neither
beautiful nor elegant, but this was my wife with whom I had once
lived, and with whom I should have been living to this day if it
had not been for her unfortunate character; she was the one human
being on the terrestrial globe whom I loved. At this moment, just
before going away, when I knew that I should no longer see her
even through the window, she seemed to me fascinating even as she
was, cold and forbidding, answering me with a proud and
contemptuous mockery. I was proud of her, and confessed to myself
that to go away from her was terrible and impossible.

"Pavel Andreitch," she said after a brief silence, "for two years
we have not interfered with each other but have lived quietly.
Why do you suddenly feel it necessary to go back to the past?
Yesterday you came to insult and humiliate me," she went on,
raising her voice, and her face flushed and her eyes flamed with
hatred; "but restrain yourself; do not do it, Pavel Andreitch!
Tomorrow I will send in a petition and they will give me a
passport, and I will go away; I will go! I will go! I'll go into
a convent, into a widows' home, into an almshouse. . . ."

"Into a lunatic asylum!" I cried, not able to restrain myself.

"Well, even into a lunatic asylum! That would be better, that
would be better," she cried, with flashing eyes. "When I was in
Pestrovo today I envied the sick and starving peasant women
because they are not living with a man like you. They are free
and honest, while, thanks to you, I am a parasite, I am perishing
in idleness, I eat your bread, I spend your money, and I repay
you with my liberty and a fidelity which is of no use to any one.
Because you won't give me a passport, I must respect your good
name, though it doesn't exist."

I had to keep silent. Clenching my teeth, I walked quickly into
the drawing-room, but turned back at once and said:

"I beg you earnestly that there should be no more assemblies,
plots, and meetings of conspirators in my house! I only admit to
my house those with whom I am acquainted, and let all your crew
find another place to do it if they want to take up philanthropy.
I can't allow people at midnight in my house to be shouting
hurrah at successfully exploiting an hysterical woman like you!"

My wife, pale and wringing her hands, took a rapid stride across
the room, uttering a prolonged moan as though she had toothache.
With a wave of my hand, I went into the drawing-room. I was
choking with rage, and at the same time I was trembling with
terror that I might not restrain myself, and that I might say or
do something which I might regret all my life. And I clenched my
hands tight, hoping to hold myself in.

After drinking some water and recovering my calm a little, I went
back to my wife. She was standing in the same attitude as before,
as though barring my approach to the table with the papers. Tears
were slowly trickling down her pale, cold face. I paused then and
said to her bitterly but without anger:

"How you misunderstand me! How unjust you are to me! I swear upon
my honour I came to you with the best of motives, with nothing
but the desire to do good!"

"Pavel Andreitch!" she said, clasping her hands on her bosom, and
her face took on the agonized, imploring expression with which
frightened, weeping children beg not to be punished, "I know
perfectly well that you will refuse me, but still I beg you.
Force yourself to do one kind action in your life. I entreat you,
go away from here! That's the only thing you can do for the
starving peasants. Go away, and I will forgive you everything,
everything!"

"There is no need for you to insult me, Natalie," I sighed,
feeling a sudden rush of humility. "I had already made up my mind
to go away, but I won't go until I have done something for the
peasants. It's my duty!"

"Ach!" she said softly with an impatient frown. "You can make an
excellent bridge or railway, but you can do nothing for the
starving peasants. Do understand!"

"Indeed? Yesterday you reproached me with indifference and with
being devoid of the feeling of compassion. How well you know me!"
I laughed. "You believe in God -- well, God is my witness that I
am worried day and night. . . ."

"I see that you are worried, but the famine and compassion have
nothing to do with it. You are worried because the starving
peasants can get on without you, and because the Zemstvo, and in
fact every one who is helping them, does not need your guidance."

I was silent, trying to suppress my irritation. Then I said:

"I came to speak to you on business. Sit down. Please sit down."

She did not sit down.

"I beg you to sit down," I repeated, and I motioned her to a
chair.

She sat down. I sat down, too, thought a little, and said:

"I beg you to consider earnestly what I am saying. Listen. . . .
Moved by love for your fellow-creatures, you have undertaken the
organization of famine relief. I have nothing against that, of
course; I am completely in sympathy with you, and am prepared to
co-operate with you in every way, whatever our relations may be.
But, with all my respect for your mind and your heart . . . and
your heart," I repeated, "I cannot allow such a difficult,
complex, and responsible matter as the organization of relief to
be left in your hands entirely. You are a woman, you are
inexperienced, you know nothing of life, you are too confiding
and expansive. You have surrounded yourself with assistants whom
you know nothing about. I am not exaggerating if I say that under
these conditions your work will inevitably lead to two deplorable
consequences. To begin with, our district will be left
unrelieved; and, secondly, you will have to pay for your mistakes
and those of your assistants, not only with your purse, but with
your reputation. The money deficit and other losses I could, no
doubt, make good, but who could restore you your good name? When
through lack of proper supervision and oversight there is a
rumour that you, and consequently I, have made two hundred
thousand over the famine fund, will your assistants come to your
aid?"

She said nothing.

"Not from vanity, as you say," I went on, "but simply that the
starving peasants may not be left unrelieved and your reputation
may not be injured, I feel it my moral duty to take part in your
work."

"Speak more briefly," said my wife.

"You will be so kind," I went on, "as to show me what has been
subscribed so far and what you have spent. Then inform me daily
of every fresh subscription in money or kind, and of every fresh
outlay. You will also give me, Natalie, the list of your helpers.
Perhaps they are quite decent people; I don't doubt it; but,
still, it is absolutely necessary to make inquiries."

She was silent. I got up, and walked up and down the room.

"Let us set to work, then," I said, and I sat down to her table.

"Are you in earnest?" she asked, looking at me in alarm and
bewilderment.

"Natalie, do be reasonable!" I said appealingly, seeing from her
face that she meant to protest. "I beg you, trust my experience
and my sense of honour."

"I don't understand what you want."

"Show me how much you have collected and how much you have
spent."

"I have no secrets. Any one may see. Look."

On the table lay five or six school exercise books, several
sheets of notepaper covered with writing, a map of the district,
and a number of pieces of paper of different sizes. It was
getting dusk. I lighted a candle.

"Excuse me, I don't see anything yet," I said, turning over the
leaves of the exercise books. "Where is the account of the
receipt of money subscriptions?"

"That can be seen from the subscription lists."

"Yes, but you must have an account," I said, smiling at her
naivete. "Where are the letters accompanying the subscriptions in
money or in kind? _Pardon_, a little practical advice, Natalie:
it's absolutely necessary to keep those letters. You ought to
number each letter and make a special note of it in a special
record. You ought to do the same with your own letters. But
 I will do all that myself."

"Do so, do so . . ." she said.

I was very much pleased with myself. Attracted by this living
interesting work, by the little table, the naive exercise books
and the charm of doing this work in my wife's society, I was
afraid that my wife would suddenly hinder me and upset everything
by some sudden whim, and so I was in haste and made an effort to
attach no consequence to the fact that her lips were quivering,
and that she was looking about her with a helpless and frightened
air like a wild creature in a trap.

"I tell you what, Natalie," I said without looking at her; "let
me take all these papers and exercise books upstairs to my study.
There I will look through them and tell you what I think about it
tomorrow. Have you any more papers?" I asked, arranging the
exercise books and sheets of papers in piles.

"Take them, take them all!" said my wife, helping me to arrange
them, and big tears ran down her cheeks. "Take it all! That's all
that was left me in life. . . . Take the last."

"Ach! Natalie, Natalie!" I sighed reproachfully.

She opened the drawer in the table and began flinging the papers
out of it on the table at random, poking me in the chest with her
elbow and brushing my face with her hair; as she did so, copper
coins kept dropping upon my knees and on the floor.

"Take everything!" she said in a husky voice.

When she had thrown out the papers she walked away from me, and
putting both hands to her head, she flung herself on the couch. I
picked up the money, put it back in the drawer, and locked it up
that the servants might not be led into dishonesty; then I
gathered up all the papers and went off with them. As I passed my
wife I stopped. and, looking at her back and shaking shoulders, I
said:

"What a baby you are, Natalie! Fie, fie! Listen, Natalie: when
you realize how serious and responsible a business it is you will
be the first to thank me. I assure you you will."

In my own room I set to work without haste. The exercise books
were not bound, the pages were not numbered. The entries were put
in all sorts of handwritings; evidently any one who liked had a
hand in managing the books. In the record of the subscriptions in
kind there was no note of their money value. But, excuse me, I
thought, the rye which is now worth one rouble fifteen kopecks
may be worth two roubles fifteen kopecks in two months' time! Was
that the way to do things? Then, "Given to A. M. Sobol 32
roubles." When was it given? For what purpose was it given? Where
was the receipt? There was nothing to show, and no making
anything of it. In case of legal proceedings, these papers would
only obscure the case.

"How naive she is!" I thought with surprise. "What a child!"

I felt both vexed and amused.

V

My wife had already collected eight thousand; with my five it
would be thirteen thousand. For a start that was very good. The
business which had so worried and interested me was at last in my
hands; I was doing what the others would not and could not do; I
was doing my duty, organizing the relief fund in a practical and
businesslike way

Everything seemed to be going in accordance with my desires and
intentions; but why did my feeling of uneasiness persist? I spent
four hours over my wife's papers, making out their meaning and
correcting her mistakes, but instead of feeling soothed, I felt
as though some one were standing behind me and rubbing my back
with a rough hand. What was it I wanted? The organization of the
relief fund had come into trustworthy hands, the hungry would be
fed -- what more was wanted?

The four hours of this light work for some reason exhausted me,
so that I could not sit bending over the table nor write. From
below I heard from time to time a smothered moan; it was my wife
sobbing. Alexey, invariably meek, sleepy, and sanctimonious, kept
coming up to the table to see to the candles, and looked at me
somewhat strangely.

"Yes, I must go away," I decided at last, feeling utterly
exhausted. "As far as possible from these agreeable impressions!
I will set off tomorrow."

I gathered together the papers and exercise books, and went down
to my wife. As, feeling quite worn out and shattered, I held the
papers and the exercise books to my breast with both hands, and
passing through my bedroom saw my trunks, the sound of weeping
reached me through the floor.

"Are you a kammer-junker?" a voice whispered in my ear. "That's a
very pleasant thing. But yet you are a reptile."

"It's all nonsense, nonsense, nonsense," I muttered as I went
downstairs. "Nonsense . . . and it's nonsense, too, that I am
actuated by vanity or a love of display. . . . What rubbish! Am I
going to get a decoration for working for the peasants or be made
the director of a department? Nonsense, nonsense! And who is
there to show off to here in the country?"

I was tired, frightfully tired, and something kept whispering in
my ear: "Very pleasant. But, still, you are a reptile." For some
reason I remembered a line out of an old poem I knew as a child:
"How pleasant it is to be good!"

My wife was lying on the couch in the same attitude, on her face
and with her hands clutching her head. She was crying. A maid was
standing beside her with a perplexed and frightened face. I sent
the maid away, laid the papers on the table, thought a moment and
said:

"Here are all your papers, Natalie. It's all in order, it's all
capital, and I am very much pleased. I am going away tomorrow."

She went on crying. I went into the drawing-room and sat there in
the dark. My wife's sobs, her sighs, accused me of something, and
to justify myself I remembered the whole of our quarrel, starting
from my unhappy idea of inviting my wife to our consultation and
ending with the exercise books and these tears. It was an
ordinary attack of our conjugal hatred, senseless and unseemly,
such as had been frequent during our married life, but what had
the starving peasants to do with it? How could it have happened
that they had become a bone of contention between us? It was just
as though pursuing one another we had accidentally run up to the
altar and had carried on a quarrel there.

"Natalie," I said softly from the drawing-room, "hush, hush!"

To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state
of affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her,
caressed her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she
would believe me? How could I persuade the wild duck, living in
captivity and hating me, that it was dear to me, and that I felt
for its sufferings? I had never known my wife, so I had never
known how to talk to her or what to talk about. Her appearance I
knew very well and appreciated it as it deserved, but her
spiritual, moral world, her mind, her outlook on life, her
frequent changes of mood, her eyes full of hatred, her disdain,
the scope and variety of her reading which sometimes struck me,
or, for instance, the nun-like expression I had seen on her face
the day before -- all that was unknown and incomprehensible to
me. When in my collisions with her I tried to define what sort of
a person she was, my psychology went no farther than deciding
that she was giddy, impractical, ill-tempered, guided by feminine
logic; and it seemed to me that that was quite sufficient. But
now that she was crying I had a passionate desire to know more.

The weeping ceased. I went up to my wife. She sat up on the
couch, and, with her head propped in both hands, looked fixedly
and dreamily at the fire.

"I am going away tomorrow morning," I said.

She said nothing. I walked across the room, sighed, and said:

"Natalie, when you begged me to go away, you said: 'I will
forgive you everything, everything' . . . . So you think I have
wronged you. I beg you calmly and in brief terms to formulate the
wrong I've done you."

"I am worn out. Afterwards, some time. . ." said my wife.

"How am I to blame?" I went on. "What have I done? Tell me: you
are young and beautiful, you want to live, and I am nearly twice
your age and hated by you, but is that my fault? I didn't marry
you by force. But if you want to live in freedom, go; I'll give
you your liberty. You can go and love who m you please. . . . I
will give you a divorce."

"That's not what I want," she said. "You know I used to love you
and always thought of myself as older than you. That's all
nonsense. . . . You are not to blame for being older or for my
being younger, or that I might be able to love some one else if I
were free; but because you are a difficult person, an egoist, and
hate every one."

"Perhaps so. I don't know," I said.

"Please go away. You want to go on at me till the morning, but I
warn you I am quite worn out and cannot answer you. You promised
me to go to town. I am very grateful; I ask nothing more."

My wife wanted me to go away, but it was not easy for me to do
that. I was dispirited and I dreaded the big, cheerless, chill
rooms that I was so weary of. Sometimes when I had an ache or a
pain as a child, I used to huddle up to my mother or my nurse,
and when I hid my face in the warm folds of their dress, it
seemed to me as though I were hiding from the pain. And in the
same way it seemed to me now that I could only hide from my
uneasiness in this little room beside my wife. I sat down and
screened away the light from my eyes with my hand. . . . There
was a stillness.

"How are you to blame?" my wife said after a long silence,
looking at me with red eyes that gleamed with tears. "You are
very well educated and very well bred, very honest, just, and
high-principled, but in you the effect of all that is that
wherever you go you bring suffocation, oppression, something
insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree. You have a
straightforward way of looking at things, and so you hate the
whole world. You hate those who have faith, because faith is an
expression of ignorance and lack of culture, and at the same time
you hate those who have no faith for having no faith and no
ideals; you hate old people for being conservative and behind the
times, and young people for free-thinking. The interests of the
peasantry and of Russia are dear to you, and so you hate the
peasants because you suspect every one of them of being a thief
and a robber. You hate every one. You are just, and always take
your stand on your legal rights, and so you are always at law
with the peasants and your neighbours. You have had twenty
bushels of rye stolen, and your love of order has made you
complain of the peasants to the Governor and all the local
authorities, and to send a complaint of the local authorities to
Petersburg. Legal justice!" said my wife, and she laughed. "On
the ground of your legal rights and in the interests of morality,
you refuse to give me a passport. Law and morality is such that a
self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend her life in
idleness, in depression, and in continual apprehension, and to
receive in return board and lodging from a man she does not love.
You have a thorough knowledge of the law, you are very honest and
just, you respect marriage and family life, and the effect of all
that is that all your life you have not done one kind action,
that every one hates you, that you are on bad terms with every
one, and the seven years that you have been married you've only
lived seven months with your wife. You've had no wife and I've
had no husband. To live with a man like you is impossible; there
is no way of doing it. In the early years I was frightened with
you, and now I am ashamed. . . . That's how my best years have
been wasted. When I fought with you I ruined my temper, grew
shrewish, coarse, timid, mistrustful. . . . Oh, but what's the
use of talking! As though you wanted to understand! Go upstairs,
and God be with you!"

My wife lay down on the couch and sank into thought.

"And how splendid, how enviable life might have been!" she said
softly, looking reflectively into the fire. "What a life it might
have been! There's no bringing it back now."

Any one who has lived in the country in winter and knows those
long dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too bored to
bark and even the clocks seem weary of ticking, and any one who
on such evenings has been troubled by awakening conscience and
has moved restlessly about, trying now to smother his conscience,
now to interpret it, will understand the distraction and the
pleasure my wife's voice gave me as it sounded in the snug little
room, telling me I was a bad man. I did not understand what was
wanted of me by my conscience, and my wife, translating it in her
feminine way, made clear to me in the meaning of my agitation. As
often before in the moments of intense uneasiness, I guessed that
the whole secret lay, not in the starving peasants, but in my not
being the sort of a man I ought to be.

My wife got up with an effort and came up to me.

"Pavel Andreitch," she said, smiling mournfully, "forgive me, I
don't believe you: you are not going away, but I will ask you one
more favour. Call this" -- she pointed to her papers --
"self-deception, feminine logic, a mistake, as you like; but do
not hinder me. It's all that is left me in life." She turned away
and paused. "Before this I had nothing. I have wasted my youth in
fighting with you. Now I have caught at this and am living; I am
happy. . . . It seems to me that I have found in this a means of
justifying my existence."

"Natalie, you are a good woman, a woman of ideas," I said,
looking at my wife enthusiastically, and everything you say and
do is intelligent and fine."

I walked about the room to conceal my emotion.

"Natalie," I went on a minute later, "before I go away, I beg of
you as a special favour, help me to do something for the starving
peasants!"

"What can I do?" said my wife, shrugging her shoulders. "Here's
the subscription list."

She rummaged among the papers and found the subscription list.

"Subscribe some money," she said, and from her tone I could see
that she did not attach great importance to her subscription
list; "that is the only way in which you can take part in the
work."

I took the list and wrote: "Anonymous, 5,000."

In this "anonymous" there was something wrong, false, conceited,
but I only realized that when I noticed that my wife flushed very
red and hurriedly thrust the list into the heap of papers. We
both felt ashamed; I felt that I must at all costs efface this
clumsiness at once, or else I should feel ashamed afterwards, in
the train and at Petersburg. But how efface it? What was I to
say?

"I fully approve of what you are doing, Natalie," I said
genuinely, "and I wish you every success. But allow me at parting
to give you one piece of advice, Natalie; be on your guard with
Sobol, and with your assistants generally, and don't trust them
blindly. I don't say they are not honest, but they are not
gentlefolks; they are people with no ideas, no ideals, no faith,
with no aim in life, no definite principles, and the whole object
of their life is comprised in the rouble. Rouble, rouble,
rouble!" I sighed. "They are fond of getting money easily, for
nothing, and in that respect the better educated they are the
more they are to be dreaded."

My wife went to the couch and lay down.

"Ideas," she brought out, listlessly and reluctantly, "ideas,
ideals, objects of life, principles . . . .you always used to use
those words when you wanted to insult or humiliate some one, or
say something unpleasant. Yes, that's your way: if with your
views and such an attitude to people you are allowed to take part
in anything, you would destroy it from the first day. It's time
you understand that."

She sighed and paused.

"It's coarseness of character, Pavel Andreitch," she said. "You
are well-bred and educated, but what a . . . Scythian you are in
reality! That's because you lead a cramped life full of hatred,
see no one, and read nothing but your engineering books. And, you
know, there are good people, good books! Yes . . . but I am
exhausted and it wearies me to talk. I ought to be in bed."

"So I am going away, Natalie," I said.

"Yes . . . yes. . . . _Merci_. . . ."

I stood still for a little while, then went upstairs. An hour
later -- it was half-past one -- I went downstairs again with a
candle in my hand to speak to my wife. I didn't know what I was
going to say to her, but I felt that I must say some thing very
important and necessary. She was not in her study, the door
leading to her bedroom was closed.

"Natalie, are you asleep?" I asked softly.

There was no answer.

I stood near the door, sighed, and went into the drawing-room.
There I sat down on the sofa, put out the candle, and remained
sitting in the dark till the dawn.

VI

I went to the station at ten o'clock in the morning. There was no
frost, but snow was falling in big wet flakes and an unpleasant
damp wind was blowing.

We passed a pond and then a birch copse, and then began going
uphill along the road which I could see from my window. I turned
round to take a last look at my house, but I could see nothing
for the snow. Soon afterwards dark huts came into sight ahead of
us as in a fog. It was Pestrovo.

"If I ever go out of my mind, Pestrovo will be the cause of it,"
I thought. "It persecutes me."

We came out into the village street. All the roofs were intact,
not one of them had been pulled to pieces; so my bailiff had told
a lie. A boy was pulling along a little girl and a baby in a
sledge. Another boy of three, with his head wrapped up like a
peasant woman's and with huge mufflers on his hands, was trying
to catch the flying snowflakes on his tongue, and laughing. Then
a wagon loaded with fagots came toward us and a peasant walking
beside it, and there was no telling whether his beard was white
or whether it was covered with snow. He recognized my coachman,
smiled at him and said something, and mechanically took off his
hat to me. The dogs ran out of the yards and looked inquisitively
at my horses. Everything was quiet, ordinary, as usual. The
emigrants had returned, there was no bread; in the huts "some
were laughing, some were delirious"; but it all looked so
ordinary that one could not believe it really was so. There were
no distracted faces, no voices whining for help, no weeping, nor
abuse, but all around was stillness, order, life, children,
sledges, dogs with dishevelled tails. Neither the children nor
the peasant we met were troubled; why was I so troubled?

Looking at the smiling peasant, at the boy with the huge
mufflers, at the huts, remembering my wife, I realized there was
no calamity that could daunt this people; I felt as though there
were already a breath of victory in the air. I felt proud and
felt ready to cry out that I was with them too; but the horses
were carrying us away from the village into the open country, the
snow was whirling, the wind was howling, and I was left alone
with my thoughts. Of the million people working for the
peasantry, life itself had cast me out as a useless, incompetent,
bad man. I was a hindrance, a part of the people's calamity; I
was vanquished, cast out, and I was hurrying to the station to go
away and hide myself in Petersburg in a hotel in Bolshaya
Morskaya.

An hour later we reached the station. The coachman and a porter
with a disc on his breast carried my trunks into the ladies'
room. My coachman Nikanor, wearing high felt boots and the skirt
of his coat tucked up through his belt, all wet with the snow and
glad I was going away, gave me a friendly smile and said:

"A fortunate journey, your Excellency. God give you luck."

Every one, by the way, calls me "your Excellency," though I am
only a collegiate councillor and a kammer-junker. The porter told
me the train had not yet left the next station; I had to wait. I
went outside, and with my head heavy from my sleepless night, and
so exhausted I could hardly move my legs, I walked aimlessly
towards the pump. There was not a soul anywhere near.

"Why am I going?" I kept asking myself. "What is there awaiting
me there? The acquaintances from whom I have come away,
loneliness, restaurant dinners, noise, the electric light, which
makes my eyes ache. Where am I going, and what am I going for?
What am I going for?"

And it seemed somehow strange to go away without speaking to my
wife. I felt that I was leaving her in uncertainty. Going away, I
ought to have told that she was right, that I really was a bad
man.

When I turned away from the pump, I saw in the doorway the
station-master, of whom I had twice made complaints to his
superiors, turning up the collar of his coat, shrinking from the
wind and the snow. He came up to me, and putting two fingers to
the peak of his cap, told me with an expression of helpless
confusion, strained respectfulness, and hatred on his face, that
the train was twenty minutes late, and asked me would I not like
to wait in the warm?

"Thank you," I answered, "but I am probably not going. Send word
to my coachman to wait; I have not made up my mind."

I walked to and fro on the platform and thought, should I go away
or not? When the train came in I decided not to go. At home I had
to expect my wife's amazement and perhaps her mockery, the dismal
upper storey and my uneasiness; but, still, at my age that was
easier and as it were more homelike than travelling for two days
and nights with strangers to Petersburg, where I should be
conscious every minute that my life was of no use to any one or
to anything, and that it was approaching its end. No, better at
home whatever awaited me there. . . . I went out of the station.
It was awkward by daylight to return home, where every one was so
glad at my going. I might spend the rest of the day till evening
at some neighbour's, but with whom? With some of them I was on
strained relations, others I did not know at all. I considered
and thought of Ivan Ivanitch.

"We are going to Bragino!" I said to the coachman, getting into
the sledge.

"It's a long way," sighed Nikanor; "it will be twenty miles, or
maybe twenty-five."

"Oh, please, my dear fellow," I said in a tone as though Nikanor
had the right to refuse. "Please let us go!"

Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that we really
ought to have put in the shafts, not Circassian, but Peasant or
Siskin; and uncertainly, as though expecting I should change my
mind, took the reins in his gloves, stood up, thought a moment,
and then raised his whip.

"A whole series of inconsistent actions . . ." I thought,
screening my face from the snow. "I must have gone out of my
mind. Well, I don't care. . . ."

In one place, on a very high and steep slope, Nikanor carefully
held the horses in to the middle of the descent, but in the
middle the horses suddenly bolted and dashed downhill at a
fearful rate; he raised his elbows and shouted in a wild, frantic
voice such as I had never heard from him before:

"Hey! Let's give the general a drive! If you come to grief he'll
buy new ones, my darlings! Hey! look out! We'll run you down!"

Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at took my
breath away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He must have been
drinking at the station. At the bottom of the descent there was
the crash of ice; a piece of dirty frozen snow thrown up from the
road hit me a painful blow in the face.

The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had
downhill, and before I had time to shout to Nikanor my sledge was
flying along on the level in an old pine forest, and the tall
pines were stretching out their shaggy white paws to me from all
directions.

"I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman's drunk," I
thought. "Good!"

I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He laughed till he coughed, laid
his head on my breast, and said what he always did say on meeting
me:

"You grow younger and younger. I don't know what dye you use for
your hair and your beard; you might give me some of it."

"I've come to return your call, Ivan Ivanitch," I said
untruthfully. "Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional;
I do keep count of calls."

"I am delighted, my dear fellow. I am an old man; I like respect.
. . . Yes."

From his voice and his blissfully smiling face, I could see that
he was greatly flattered by my visit. Two peasant women helped me
off with my coat in the entry, and a peasant in a red shirt hung
it on a hook, and when Ivan Ivanitch and I went into his little
study, two barefooted little girls were sitting on the floor
looking at a picture-book; when they saw us they jumped up and
ran away, and a tall, thin old woman in specta cles came in at
once, bowed gravely to me, and picking up a pillow from the sofa
and a picture-book from the floor, went away. From the adjoining
rooms we heard incessant whispering and the patter of bare feet.

"I am expecting the doctor to dinner," said Ivan Ivanitch. "He
promised to come from the relief centre. Yes. He dines with me
every Wednesday, God bless him." He craned towards me and kissed
me on the neck. "You have come, my dear fellow, so you are not
vexed," he whispered, sniffing. "Don't be vexed, my dear
creature. Yes. Perhaps it is annoying, but don't be cross. My
only prayer to God before I die is to live in peace and harmony
with all in the true way. Yes."

"Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I will put my feet on a chair," I
said, feeling that I was so exhausted I could not be myself; I
sat further back on the sofa and put up my feet on an arm-chair.
My face was burning from the snow and the wind, and I felt as
though my whole body were basking in the warmth and growing
weaker from it.

"It's very nice here," I went on -- "warm, soft, snug . . . and
goose-feather pens," I laughed, looking at the writing-table;
"sand instead of blotting-paper."

"Eh? Yes . . . yes. . . . The writing-table and the mahogany
cupboard here were made for my father by a self-taught
cabinet-maker -- Glyeb Butyga, a serf of General Zhukov's. Yes .
. . a great artist in his own way."

Listlessly and in the tone of a man dropping asleep, he began
telling me about cabinet-maker Butyga. I listened. Then Ivan
Ivanitch went into the next room to show me a polisander wood
chest of drawers remarkable for its beauty and cheapness. He
tapped the chest with his fingers, then called my attention to a
stove of patterned tiles, such as one never sees now. He tapped
the stove, too, with his fingers. There was an atmosphere of
good-natured simplicity and well-fed abundance about the chest of
drawers, the tiled stove, the low chairs, the pictures
embroidered in wool and silk on canvas in solid, ugly frames.
When one remembers that all those objects were standing in the
same places and precisely in the same order when I was a little
child, and used to come here to name-day parties with my mother,
it is simply unbelievable that they could ever cease to exist.

I thought what a fearful difference between Butyga and me! Butyga
who made things, above all, solidly and substantially, and seeing
in that his chief object, gave to length of life peculiar
significance, had no thought of death, and probably hardly
believed in its possibility; I, when I built my bridges of iron
and stone which would last a thousand years, could not keep from
me the thought, "It's not for long . . . .it's no use." If in
time Butyga's cupboard and my bridge should come under the notice
of some sensible historian of art, he would say: "These were two
men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his
fellow-creatures and would not admit the thought that they might
die and be annihilated, and so when he made his furniture he had
the immortal man in his mind. The engineer Asorin did not love
life or his fellow-creatures; even in the happy moments of
creation, thoughts of death, of finiteness and dissolution, were
not alien to him, and we see how insignificant and finite, how
timid and poor, are these lines of his. . . ."

"I only heat these rooms," muttered Ivan Ivanitch, showing me his
rooms. "Ever since my wife died and my son was killed in the war,
I have kept the best rooms shut up. Yes . . . see. . ."

He opened a door, and I saw a big room with four columns, an old
piano, and a heap of peas on the floor; it smelt cold and damp.

"The garden seats are in the next room . . ." muttered Ivan
Ivanitch. "There's no one to dance the mazurka now. . . . I've
shut them up."

We heard a noise. It was Dr. Sobol arriving. While he was rubbing
his cold hands and stroking his wet beard, I had time to notice
in the first place that he had a very dull life, and so was
pleased to see Ivan Ivanitch and me; and, secondly, that he was a
naive and simple-hearted man. He looked at me as though I were
very glad to see him and very much interested in him.

"I have not slept for two nights," he said, looking at me naively
and stroking his beard. "One night with a confinement, and the
next I stayed at a peasant's with the bugs biting me all night. I
am as sleepy as Satan, do you know."

With an expression on his face as though it could not afford me
anything but pleasure, he took me by the arm and led me to the
dining-room. His naive eyes, his crumpled coat, his cheap tie and
the smell of iodoform made an unpleasant impression upon me; I
felt as though I were in vulgar company. When we sat down to
table he filled my glass with vodka, and, smiling helplessly, I
drank it; he put a piece of ham on my plate and I ate it
submissively.

"_Repetitia est mater studiorum_," said Sobol, hastening to drink
off another wineglassful. "Would you believe it, the joy of
seeing good people has driven away my sleepiness? I have turned
into a peasant, a savage in the wilds; I've grown coarse, but I
am still an educated man, and I tell you in good earnest, it's
tedious without company."

They served first for a cold course white sucking-pig with
horse-radish cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with
pork on it, with boiled buckwheat, from which rose a column of
steam. The doctor went on talking, and I was soon convinced that
he was a weak, unfortunate man, disorderly in external life.
Three glasses of vodka made him drunk; he grew unnaturally
lively, ate a great deal, kept clearing his throat and smacking
his lips, and already addressed me in Italian, "Eccellenza."
Looking naively at me as though he were convinced that I was very
glad to see and hear him, he informed me that he had long been
separated from his wife and gave her three-quarters of his
salary; that she lived in the town with his children, a boy and a
girl, whom he adored; that he loved another woman, a widow, well
educated, with an estate in the country, but was rarely able to
see her, as he was busy with his work from morning till night and
had not a free moment.

"The whole day long, first at the hospital, then on my rounds,"
he told us; "and I assure you, Eccellenza, I have not time to
read a book, let alone going to see the woman I love. I've read
nothing for ten years! For ten years, Eccellenza. As for the
financial side of the question, ask Ivan Ivanitch: I have often
no money to buy tobacco."

"On the other hand, you have the moral satisfaction of your
work," I said.

"What?" he asked, and he winked. "No," he said, "better let us
drink."

I listened to the doctor, and, after my invariable habit, tried
to take his measure by my usual classification -- materialist,
idealist, filthy lucre, gregarious instincts, and so on; but no
classification fitted him even approximately; and strange to say,
while I simply listened and looked at him, he seemed perfectly
clear to me as a person, but as soon as I began trying to
classify him he became an exceptionally complex, intricate, and
incomprehensible character in spite of all his candour and
simplicity. "Is that man," I asked myself, "capable of wasting
other people's money, abusing their confidence, being disposed to
sponge on them?" And now this question, which had once seemed to
me grave and important, struck me as crude, petty, and coarse.

Pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between,
during which we drank home-made liquors, they gave us a stew of
pigeons, some dish of giblets, roast sucking-pig, partridges,
cauliflower, curd dumplings, curd cheese and milk, jelly, and
finally pancakes and jam. At first I ate with great relish,
especially the cabbage soup and the buckwheat, but afterwards I
munched and swallowed mechanically, smiling helplessly and
unconscious of the taste of anything. My face was burning from
the hot cabbage soup and the heat of the room. Ivan Ivanitch and
Sobol, too, were crimson.

"To the health of your wife," said Sobol. "She likes me. Tell her
her doctor sends her his respects."

"She's fortunate, upon my word," sighed Ivan Ivanitch. "Though
she takes no trouble, does not fuss  or worry
 herself, she has become the most important person in the whole
district. Almost the whole business is in her hands, and they all
gather round her, the doctor, the District Captains, and the
ladies. With people of the right sort that happens of itself.
Yes. . . . The apple-tree need take no thought for the apple to
grow on it; it will grow of itself."

"It's only people who don't care who take no thought," said I.

"Eh? Yes . . . " muttered Ivan Ivanitch, not catching what I
said, "that's true. . . . One must not worry oneself. Just so,
just so. . . . Only do your duty towards God and your neighbour,
and then never mind what happens."

"Eccellenza," said Sobol solemnly, "just look at nature about us:
if you poke your nose or your ear out of your fur collar it will
be frost-bitten; stay in the fields for one hour, you'll be
buried in the snow; while the village is just the same as in the
days of Rurik, the same Petchenyegs and Polovtsi. It's nothing
but being burnt down, starving, and struggling against nature in
every way. What was I saying? Yes! If one thinks about it, you
know, looks into it and analyses all this hotchpotch, if you will
allow me to call it so, it's not life but more like a fire in a
theatre! Any one who falls down or screams with terror, or rushes
about, is the worst enemy of good order; one must stand up and
look sharp, and not stir a hair! There's no time for whimpering
and busying oneself with trifles. When you have to deal with
elemental forces you must put out force against them, be firm and
as unyielding as a stone. Isn't that right, grandfather?" He
turned to Ivan Ivanitch and laughed. "I am no better than a woman
myself; I am a limp rag, a flabby creature, so I hate flabbiness.
I can't endure petty feelings! One mopes, another is frightened,
a third will come straight in here and say: 'Fie on you! Here
you've guzzled a dozen courses and you talk about the starving!'
That's petty and stupid! A fourth will reproach you, Eccellenza,
for being rich. Excuse me, Eccellenza," he went on in a loud
voice, laying his hand on his heart, "but your having set our
magistrate the task of hunting day and night for your thieves --
excuse me, that's also petty on your part. I am a little drunk,
so that's why I say this now, but you know, it is petty!"

"Who's asking him to worry himself? I don't understand!" I said,
getting up.

I suddenly felt unbearably ashamed and mortified, and I walked
round the table.

"Who asks him to worry himself? I didn't ask him to. . . . Damn
him!"

"They have arrested three men and let them go again. They turned
out not to be the right ones, and now they are looking for a
fresh lot," said Sobol, laughing. "It's too bad!"

"I did not ask him to worry himself," said I, almost crying with
excitement. "What's it all for? What's it all for? Well,
supposing I was wrong, supposing I have done wrong, why do they
try to put me more in the wrong?"

"Come, come, come, come!" said Sobol, trying to soothe me. "Come!
I have had a drop, that is why I said it. My tongue is my enemy.
Come," he sighed, "we have eaten and drunk wine, and now for a
nap."

He got up from the table, kissed Ivan Ivanitch on the head, and
staggering from repletion, went out of the dining-room. Ivan
Ivanitch and I smoked in silence.

I don't sleep after dinner, my dear," said Ivan Ivanitch, "but
you have a rest in the lounge-room."

I agreed. In the half-dark and warmly heated room they called the
lounge-room, there stood against the walls long, wide sofas,
solid and heavy, the work of Butyga the cabinet maker; on them
lay high, soft, white beds, probably made by the old woman in
spectacles. On one of them Sobol, without his coat and boots,
already lay asleep with his face to the back of the sofa; another
bed was awaiting me. I took off my coat and boots, and, overcome
by fatigue, by the spirit of Butyga which hovered over the quiet
lounge-room, and by the light, caressing snore of Sobol, I lay
down submissively.

And at once I began dreaming of my wife, of her room, of the
station-master with his face full of hatred, the heaps of snow, a
fire in the theatre. I dreamed of the peasants who had stolen
twenty sacks of rye out of my barn.

"Anyway, it's a good thing the magistrate let them go," I said.

I woke up at the sound of my own voice, looked for a moment in
perplexity at Sobol's broad back, at the buckles of his
waistcoat, at his thick heels, then lay down again and fell
asleep.

When I woke up the second time it was quite dark. Sobol was
asleep. There was peace in my heart, and I longed to make haste
home. I dressed and went out of the lounge-room. Ivan Ivanitch
was sitting in a big arm-chair in his study, absolutely
motionless, staring at a fixed point, and it was evident that he
had been in the same state of petrifaction all the while I had
been asleep.

"Good!" I said, yawning. "I feel as though I had woken up after
breaking the fast at Easter. I shall often come and see you now.
Tell me, did my wife ever dine here?"

"So-ome-ti-mes . . . sometimes,"' muttered Ivan Ivanitch, making
an effort to stir. "She dined here last Saturday. Yes. . . . She
likes me."

After a silence I said:

"Do you remember, Ivan Ivanitch, you told me I had a disagreeable
character and that it was difficult to get on with me? But what
am I to do to make my character different?"

"I don't know, my dear boy. . . . I'm a feeble old man, I can't
advise you. . . . Yes. . . . But I said that to you at the time
because I am fond of you and fond of your wife, and I was fond of
your father. . . . Yes. I shall soon die, and what need have I to
conceal things from you or to tell you lies? So I tell you: I am
very fond of you, but I don't respect you. No, I don't respect
you."

He turned towards me and said in a breathless whisper:

"It's impossible to respect you, my dear fellow. You look like a
real man. You have the figure and deportment of the French
President Carnot -- I saw a portrait of him the other day in an
illustrated paper . . . yes. . . . You use lofty language, and
you are clever, and you are high up in the service beyond all
reach, but haven't real soul, my dear boy . . . there's no
strength in it."

"A Scythian, in fact," I laughed. "But what about my wife? Tell
me something about my wife; you know her better."

I wanted to talk about my wife, but Sobol came in and prevented
me.

"I've had a sleep and a wash," he said, looking at me naively.
"I'll have a cup of tea with some rum in it and go home."

VII

It was by now past seven. Besides Ivan Ivanitch, women servants,
the old dame in spectacles, the little girls and the peasant, all
accompanied us from the hall out on to the steps, wishing us
good-bye and all sorts of blessings, while near the horses in the
darkness there were standing and moving about men with lanterns,
telling our coachmen how and which way to drive, and wishing us a
lucky journey. The horses, the men, and the sledges were white.

"Where do all these people come from?" I asked as my three horses
and the doctor's two moved at a walking pace out of the yard.

"They are all his serfs," said Sobol. "The new order has not
reached him yet. Some of the old servants are living out their
lives with him, and then there are orphans of all sorts who have
nowhere to go; there are some, too, who insist on living there,
there's no turning them out. A queer old man!"

Again the flying horses, the strange voice of drunken Nikanor,
the wind and the persistent snow, which got into one's eyes,
one's mouth, and every fold of one's fur coat. . . .

"Well, I am running a rig," I thought, while my bells chimed in
with the doctor's, the wind whistled, the coachmen shouted; and
while this frantic uproar was going on, I recalled all the
details of that strange wild day, unique in my life, and it
seemed to me that I really had gone out of my mind or become a
different man. It was as though the man I had been till that day
were already a stranger to me.

The doctor drove behind and kept talking loudly with his
coachman. From time to time he overtook me, drove side by side,
and always, with the same naive confidence that it was very
pleasant to me, offered me a ci garette or asked for the matches.
Or, overtaking me, he would lean right out of his sledge, and
waving about the sleeves of his fur coat, which were at least
twice as long as his arms, shout:

"Go it, Vaska! Beat the thousand roublers! Hey, my kittens!"

And to the accompaniment of loud, malicious laughter from Sobol
and his Vaska the doctor's kittens raced ahead. My Nikanor took
it as an affront, and held in his three horses, but when the
doctor's bells had passed out of hearing, he raised his elbows,
shouted, and our horses flew like mad in pursuit. We drove into a
village, there were glimpses of lights, the silhouettes of huts.
Some one shouted:

"Ah, the devils!" We seemed to have galloped a mile and a half,
and still it was the village street and there seemed no end to
it. When we caught up the doctor and drove more quietly, he asked
for matches and said:

"Now try and feed that street! And, you know, there are five
streets like that, sir. Stay, stay," he shouted. "Turn in at the
tavern! We must get warm and let the horses rest."

They stopped at the tavern.

"I have more than one village like that in my district," said the
doctor, opening a heavy door with a squeaky block, and ushering
me in front of him. "If you look in broad daylight you can't see
to the end of the street, and there are side-streets, too, and
one can do nothing but scratch one's head. It's hard to do
anything."

We went into the best room where there was a strong smell of
table-cloths, and at our entrance a sleepy peasant in a waistcoat
and a shirt worn outside his trousers jumped up from a bench.
Sobol asked for some beer and I asked for tea.

"It's hard to do anything," said Sobol. "Your wife has faith; I
respect her and have the greatest reverence for her, but I have
no great faith myself. As long as our relations to the people
continue to have the character of ordinary philanthropy, as shown
in orphan asylums and almshouses, so long we shall only be
shuffling, shamming, and deceiving ourselves, and nothing more.
Our relations ought to be businesslike, founded on calculation,
knowledge, and justice. My Vaska has been working for me all his
life; his crops have failed, he is sick and starving. If I give
him fifteen kopecks a day, by so doing I try to restore him to
his former condition as a workman; that is, I am first and
foremost looking after my own interests, and yet for some reason
I call that fifteen kopecks relief, charity, good works. Now let
us put it like this. On the most modest computation, reckoning
seven kopecks a soul and five souls a family, one needs three
hundred and fifty roubles a day to feed a thousand families. That
sum is fixed by our practical duty to a thousand families.
Meanwhile we give not three hundred and fifty a day, but only
ten, and say that that is relief, charity, that that makes your
wife and all of us exceptionally good people and hurrah for our
humaneness. That is it, my dear soul! Ah! if we would talk less
of being humane and calculated more, reasoned, and took a
conscientious attitude to our duties! How many such humane,
sensitive people there are among us who tear about in all good
faith with subscription lists, but don't pay their tailors or
their cooks. There is no logic in our life; that's what it is! No
logic!"

We were silent for a while. I was making a mental calculation and
said:

"I will feed a thousand families for two hundred days. Come and
see me tomorrow to talk it over."

I was pleased that this was said quite simply, and was glad that
Sobol answered me still more simply:

"Right."

We paid for what we had and went out of the tavern.

"I like going on like this," said Sobol, getting into the sledge.
"Eccellenza, oblige me with a match. I've forgotten mine in the
tavern."

A quarter of an hour later his horses fell behind, and the sound
of his bells was lost in the roar of the snow-storm. Reaching
home, I walked about my rooms, trying to think things over and to
define my position clearly to myself; I had not one word, one
phrase, ready for my wife. My brain was not working.

But without thinking of anything, I went downstairs to my wife.
She was in her room, in the same pink dressing-gown, and standing
in the same attitude as though screening her papers from me. On
her face was an expression of perplexity and irony, and it was
evident that having heard of my arrival, she had prepared herself
not to cry, not to entreat me, not to defend herself, as she had
done the day before, but to laugh at me, to answer me
contemptuously, and to act with decision. Her face was saying:
"If that's how it is, good-bye."

"Natalie, I've not gone away," I said, "but it's not deception. I
have gone out of my mind; I've grown old, I'm ill, I've become a
different man -- think as you like. . . . I've shaken off my old
self with horror, with horror; I despise him and am ashamed of
him, and the new man who has been in me since yesterday will not
let me go away. Do not drive me away, Natalie!"

She looked intently into my face and believed me, and there was a
gleam of uneasiness in her eyes. Enchanted by her presence,
warmed by the warmth of her room, I muttered as in delirium,
holding out my hands to her:

"I tell you, I have no one near to me but you. I have never for
one minute ceased to miss you, and only obstinate vanity
prevented me from owning it. The past, when we lived as husband
and wife, cannot be brought back, and there's no need; but make
me your servant, take all my property, and give it away to any
one you like. I am at peace, Natalie, I am content. . . . I am at
peace."

My wife, looking intently and with curiosity into my face,
suddenly uttered a faint cry, burst into tears, and ran into the
next room. I went upstairs to my own storey.

An hour later I was sitting at my table, writing my "History of
Railways," and the starving peasants did not now hinder me from
doing so. Now I feel no uneasiness. Neither the scenes of
disorder which I saw when I went the round of the huts at
Pestrovo with my wife and Sobol the other day, nor malignant
rumours, nor the mistakes of the people around me, nor old age
close upon me -- nothing disturbs me. Just as the flying bullets
do not hinder soldiers from talking of their own affairs, eating
and cleaning their boots, so the starving peasants do not hinder
me from sleeping quietly and looking after my personal affairs.
In my house and far around it there is in full swing the work
which Dr. Sobol calls "an orgy of philanthropy." My wife often
comes up to me and looks about my rooms uneasily, as though
looking for what more she can give to the starving peasants "to
justify her existence," and I see that, thanks to her, there will
soon be nothing of our property left and we shall be poor; but
that does not trouble me, and I smile at her gaily. What will
happen in the future I don't know.


DIFFICULT PEOPLE

YEVGRAF IVANOVITCH SHIRYAEV, a small farmer, whose father, a
parish priest, now deceased, had received a gift of three hundred
acres of land from Madame Kuvshinnikov, a general's widow, was
standing in a corner before a copper washing-stand, washing his
hands. As usual, his face looked anxious and ill-humoured, and
his beard was uncombed.

"What weather!" he said. "It's not weather, but a curse laid upon
us. It's raining again!"

He grumbled on, while his family sat waiting at table for him to
have finished washing his hands before beginning dinner. Fedosya
Semyonovna, his wife, his son Pyotr, a student, his eldest
daughter Varvara, and three small boys, had been sitting waiting
a long time. The boys -- Kolka, Vanka, and Arhipka -- grubby,
snub-nosed little fellows with chubby faces and tousled hair that
wanted cutting, moved their chairs impatiently, while their
elders sat without stirring, and apparently did not care whether
they ate their dinner or waited. . . .

As though trying their patience, Shiryaev deliberately dried his
hands, deliberately said his prayer, and sat down to the table
without hurrying himself. Cabbage-soup was served immediately.
The sound of carpenters' axes (Shiryaev was having a new barn
built) and the laughter of Fomka, their labourer, teasing the
turkey, floated in from the courtyard.

Big, sparse drops of rain pattered on the window.

Pyotr, a round-shouldered student in spectacles, kept exchanging
glances with his mother as he ate his dinner. Several times he
laid down his spoon and cleared his throat, meaning to begin to
speak, but after an intent look at his father he fell to eating
again. At last, when the porridge had been served, he cleared his
throat resolutely and said:

"I ought to go tonight by the evening train. I out to have gone
before; I have missed a fortnight as it is. The lectures begin on
the first of September."

"Well, go," Shiryaev assented; "why are you lingering on here?
Pack up and go, and good luck to you."

A minute passed in silence.

"He must have money for the journey, Yevgraf Ivanovitch," the
mother observed in a low voice.

"Money? To be sure, you can't go without money. Take it at once,
since you need it. You could have had it long ago!"

The student heaved a faint sigh and looked with relief at his
mother. Deliberately Shiryaev took a pocket-book out of his
coat-pocket and put on his spectacles.

"How much do you want?" he asked.

"The fare to Moscow is eleven roubles forty-two kopecks. . . ."

"Ah, money, money!" sighed the father. (He always sighed when he
saw money, even when he was receiving it.) "Here are twelve
roubles for you. You will have change out of that which will be
of use to you on the journey."

"Thank you."

After waiting a little, the student said:

"I did not get lessons quite at first last year. I don't know how
it will be this year; most likely it will take me a little time
to find work. I ought to ask you for fifteen roubles for my
lodging and dinner."

Shiryaev thought a little and heaved a sigh.

"You will have to make ten do," he said. "Here, take it."

The student thanked him. He ought to have asked him for something
more, for clothes, for lecture fees, for books, but after an
intent look at his father he decided not to pester him further.

The mother, lacking in diplomacy and prudence, like all mothers,
could not restrain herself, and said:

"You ought to give him another six roubles, Yevgraf Ivanovitch,
for a pair of boots. Why, just see, how can he go to Moscow in
such wrecks?"

"Let him take my old ones; they are still quite good."

"He must have trousers, anyway; he is a disgrace to look at."

And immediately after that a storm-signal showed itself, at the
sight of which all the family trembled.

Shiryaev's short, fat neck turned suddenly red as a beetroot. The
colour mounted slowly to his ears, from his ears to his temples,
and by degrees suffused his whole face. Yevgraf Ivanovitch
shifted in his chair and unbuttoned his shirt-collar to save
himself from choking. He was evidently struggling with the
feeling that was mastering him. A deathlike silence followed. The
children held their breath. Fedosya Semyonovna, as though she did
not grasp what was happening to her husband, went on:

"He is not a little boy now, you know; he is ashamed to go about
without clothes."

Shiryaev suddenly jumped up, and with all his might flung down
his fat pocket-book in the middle of the table, so that a hunk of
bread flew off a plate. A revolting expression of anger,
resentment, avarice -- all mixed together -- flamed on his face.

"Take everything!" he shouted in an unnatural voice; "plunder me!
Take it all! Strangle me!"

He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head, and ran
staggering about the room.

"Strip me to the last thread!" he shouted in a shrill voice.
"Squeeze out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!"

The student flushed and dropped his eyes. He could not go on
eating. Fedosya Semyonovna, who had not after twenty-five years
grown used to her husband's difficult character, shrank into
herself and muttered something in self-defence. An expression of
amazement and dull terror came into her wasted and birdlike face,
which at all times looked dull and scared. The little boys and
the elder daughter Varvara, a girl in her teens, with a pale ugly
face, laid down their spoons and sat mute.

Shiryaev, growing more and more ferocious, uttering words each
more terrible than the one before, dashed up to the table and
began shaking the notes out of his pocket-book.

"Take them!" he muttered, shaking all over. "You've eaten and
drunk your fill, so here's money for you too! I need nothing!
Order yourself new boots and uniforms!"

The student turned pale and got up.

"Listen, papa," he began, gasping for breath. "I . . . I beg you
to end this, for . . ."

"Hold your tongue!" the father shouted at him, and so loudly that
the spectacles fell off his nose; "hold your tongue!"

"I used . . . I used to be able to put up with such scenes, but .
. . but now I have got out of the way of it. Do you understand? I
have got out of the way of it!"

"Hold your tongue!" cried the father, and he stamped with his
feet. "You must listen to what I say! I shall say what I like,
and you hold your tongue. At your age I was earning my living,
while you . . . Do you know what you cost me, you scoundrel? I'll
turn you out! Wastrel!"

"Yevgraf Ivanovitch," muttered Fedosya Semyonovna, moving her
fingers nervously; "you know he. . . you know Petya . . . !"

"Hold your tongue!" Shiryaev shouted out to her, and tears
actually came into his eyes from anger. "It is you who have
spoilt them -- you! It's all your fault! He has no respect for
us, does not say his prayers, and earns nothing! I am only one
against the ten of you! I'll turn you out of the house!"

The daughter Varvara gazed fixedly at her mother with her mouth
open, moved her vacant-looking eyes to the window, turned pale,
and, uttering a loud shriek, fell back in her chair. The father,
with a curse and a wave of the hand, ran out into the yard.

This was how domestic scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs'. But
on this occasion, unfortunately, Pyotr the student was carried
away by overmastering anger. He was just as hasty and
ill-tempered as his father and his grandfather the priest, who
used to beat his parishioners about the head with a stick. Pale
and clenching his fists, he went up to his mother and shouted in
the very highest tenor note his voice could reach:

"These reproaches are loathsome! sickening to me! I want nothing
from you! Nothing! I would rather die of hunger than eat another
mouthful at your expense! Take your nasty money back! take it!"

The mother huddled against the wall and waved her hands, as
though it were not her son, but some phantom before her. "What
have I done?" she wailed. "What?"

Like his father, the boy waved his hands and ran into the yard.
Shiryaev's house stood alone on a ravine which ran like a furrow
for four miles along the steppe. Its sides were overgrown with
oak saplings and alders, and a stream ran at the bottom. On one
side the house looked towards the ravine, on the other towards
the open country, there were no fences nor hurdles. Instead there
were farm-buildings of all sorts close to one another, shutting
in a small space in front of the house which was regarded as the
yard, and in which hens, ducks, and pigs ran about.

Going out of the house, the student walked along the muddy road
towards the open country. The air was full of a penetrating
autumn dampness. The road was muddy, puddles gleamed here and
there, and in the yellow fields autumn itself seemed looking out
from the grass, dismal, decaying, dark. On the right-hand side of
the road was a vegetable-garden cleared of its crops and
gloomy-looking, with here and there sunflowers standing up in it
with hanging heads already black.

Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to walk to Moscow on
foot; to walk just as he was, with holes in his boots, without a
cap, and without a farthing of money. When he had gone eighty
miles his father, frightened and aghast, would overtake him,
would begin begging him to turn back or take the money, but he
would not even look at him, but would go on and on. . . . Bare
forests would be followed by desolate fields, fields by forests
again; soon the earth would be white with the first snow, and the
streams would be coated with ice. . . . Somewhere near Kursk or
near Serpuhovo, exhausted and dying of hunger, he would sink down
and die. His corpse would be found, and there would be a
paragraph in all the papers saying that a student called Shiryaev
had died of hunger. . . .

A white dog with a muddy tail who was wandering about the
vegetable-garden looking for something gazed at him and sauntered
after him.

He walked along the road and thought of death, of the grief of
his family, of the moral sufferings of his father, and then
pictured all sorts of adventures on the road, each more
marvellous than the one before -- picturesque places, terrible
nights, chance encounters. He imagined a string of pilgrims, a
hut in the forest with one little window shining in the darkness;
he stands before the window, begs for a night's lodging. . . .
They let him in, and suddenly he sees that they are robbers. Or,
better still, he is taken into a big manor-house, where, learning
who he is, they give him food and drink, play to him on the
piano, listen to his complaints, and the daughter of the house, a
beauty, falls in love with him.

Absorbed in his bitterness and such thoughts, young Shiryaev
walked on and on. Far, far ahead he saw the inn, a dark patch
against the grey background of cloud. Beyond the inn, on the very
horizon, he could see a little hillock; this was the
railway-station. That hillock reminded him of the connection
existing between the place where he was now standing and Moscow,
where street-lamps were burning and carriages were rattling in
the streets, where lectures were being given. And he almost wept
with depression and impatience. The solemn landscape, with its
order and beauty, the deathlike stillness all around, revolted
him and moved him to despair and hatred!

"Look out!" He heard behind him a loud voice.

An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the
neighbourhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He
bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he caught
himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his
gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full
of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given
man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of
spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest
as the fox and the wild duck do. Every family has its joys and
its horrors, but however great they may be, it's hard for an
outsider's eye to see them; they are a secret. The father of the
old lady who had just driven by, for instance, had for some
offence lain for half his lifetime under the ban of the wrath of
Tsar Nicolas I.; her husband had been a gambler; of her four
sons, not one had turned out well. One could imagine how many
terrible scenes there must have been in her life, how many tears
must have been shed. And yet the old lady seemed happy and
satisfied, and she had answered his smile by smiling too. The
student thought of his comrades, who did not like talking about
their families; he thought of his mother, who almost always lied
when she had to speak of her husband and children. . . .

Pyotr walked about the roads far from home till dusk, abandoning
himself to dreary thoughts. When it began to drizzle with rain he
turned homewards. As he walked back he made up his mind at all
costs to talk to his father, to explain to him, once and for all,
that it was dreadful and oppressive to live with him.

He found perfect stillness in the house. His sister Varvara was
lying behind a screen with a headache, moaning faintly. His
mother, with a look of amazement and guilt upon her face, was
sitting beside her on a box, mending Arhipka's trousers. Yevgraf
Ivanovitch was pacing from one window to another, scowling at the
weather. From his walk, from the way he cleared his throat, and
even from the back of his head, it was evident he felt himself to
blame.

"I suppose you have changed your mind about going today?" he
asked.

The student felt sorry for him, but immediately suppressing that
feeling, he said:

"Listen . . . I must speak to you seriously. . . yes, seriously.
I have always respected you, and . . . and have never brought
myself to speak to you in such a tone, but your behaviour . . .
your last action . . ."

The father looked out of the window and did not speak. The
student, as though considering his words, rubbed his forehead and
went on in great excitement:

"Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar. Your
bread sticks in our throat. . . nothing is more bitter, more
humiliating, than bread that sticks in one's throat. . . . Though
you are my father, no one, neither God nor nature, has given you
the right to insult and humiliate us so horribly, to vent your
ill-humour on the weak. You have worn my mother out and made a
slave of her, my sister is hopelessly crushed, while I . . ."

"It's not your business to teach me," said his father.

"Yes, it is my business! You can quarrel with me as much as you
like, but leave my mother in peace! I will not allow you to
torment my mother!" the student went on, with flashing eyes. "You
are spoilt because no one has yet dared to oppose you. They
tremble and are mute towards you, but now that is over! Coarse,
ill-bred man! You are coarse . . . do you understand? You are
coarse, ill-humoured, unfeeling. And the peasants can't endure
you!"

The student had by now lost his thread, and was not so much
speaking as firing off detached words. Yevgraf Ivanovitch
listened in silence, as though stunned; but suddenly his neck
turned crimson, the colour crept up his face, and he made a
movement.

"Hold your tongue!" he shouted.

"That's right!" the son persisted; "you don't like to hear the
truth! Excellent! Very good! begin shouting! Excellent!"

"Hold your tongue, I tell you!" roared Yevgraf Ivanovitch.

Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway, very pale, with an
astonished face; she tried to say something, but she could not,
and could only move her fingers.

"It's all your fault!" Shiryaev shouted at her. "You have brought
him up like this!"

"I don't want to go on living in this house!" shouted the
student, crying, and looking angrily at his mother. "I don't want
to live with you!"

Varvara uttered a shriek behind the screen and broke into loud
sobs. With a wave of his hand, Shiryaev ran out of the house.

The student went to his own room and quietly lay down. He lay
till midnight without moving or opening his eyes. He felt neither
anger nor shame, but a vague ache in his soul. He neither blamed
his father nor pitied his mother, nor was he tormented by stings
of conscience; he realized that every one in the house was
feeling the same ache, and God only knew which was most to blame,
which was suffering most. . . .

At midnight he woke the labourer, and told him to have the horse
ready at five o'clock in the morning for him to drive to the
station; he undressed and got into bed, but could not get to
sleep. He heard how his father, still awake, paced slowly from
window to window, sighing, till early morning. No one was asleep;
they spoke rarely, and only in whispers. Twice his mother came to
him behind the screen. Always with the same look of vacant
wonder, she slowly made the cross over him, shaking nervously.

At five o'clock in the morning he said good-bye to them all
affectionately, and even shed tears. As he passed his father's
room, he glanced in at the door. Yevgraf Ivanovitch, who had not
taken off his clothes or gone to bed, was standing by the window,
drumming on the panes.

"Good-bye; I am going," said his son.

"Good-bye . . . the money is on the round table . . ." his father
answered, without turning round.

A cold, hateful rain was falling as the labourer drove him to the
station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still lower,
and the grass seemed darker than ever.


THE GRASSHOPPER

I

ALL Olga Ivanovna's friends and acquaintances were at her
wedding.

"Look at him; isn't it true that there is something in him?" she
said to her friends, with a nod towards her husband, as though
she wanted to explain why she was marrying a simple, very
ordinary, and in no way remarkable man.

Her husband, Osip Stepanitch Dymov, was a doctor, and only of the
rank
 of a titular councillor. He was on the staff of two hospitals:
in one a ward-surgeon and in the other a dissecting demonstrator.
Every day from nine to twelve he saw patients and was busy in his
ward, and after twelve o'clock he went by tram to the other
hospital, where he dissected. His private practice was a small
one, not worth more than five hundred roubles a year. That was
all. What more could one say about him? Meanwhile, Olga Ivanovna
and her friends and acquaintances were not quite ordinary people.
Every one of them was remarkable in some way, and more or less
famous; already had made a reputation and was looked upon as a
celebrity; or if not yet a celebrity, gave brilliant promise of
becoming one. There was an actor from the Dramatic Theatre, who
was a great talent of established reputation, as well as an
elegant, intelligent, and modest man, and a capital elocutionist,
and who taught Olga Ivanovna to recite; there was a singer from
the opera, a good-natured, fat man who assured Olga Ivanovna,
with a sigh, that she was ruining herself, that if she would take
herself in hand and not be lazy she might make a remarkable
singer; then there were several artists, and chief among them
Ryabovsky, a very handsome, fair young man of five-and-twenty who
painted genre pieces, animal studies, and landscapes, was
successful at exhibitions, and had sold his last picture for five
hundred roubles. He touched up Olga Ivanovna's sketches, and used
to say she might do something. Then a violoncellist, whose
instrument used to sob, and who openly declared that of all the
ladies of his acquaintance the only one who could accompany him
was Olga Ivanovna; then there was a literary man, young but
already well known, who had written stories, novels, and plays.
Who else? Why, Vassily Vassilyitch, a landowner and amateur
illustrator and vignettist, with a great feeling for the old
Russian style, the old ballad and epic. On paper, on china, and
on smoked plates, he produced literally marvels. In the midst of
this free artistic company, spoiled by fortune, though refined
and modest, who recalled the existence of doctors only in times
of illness, and to whom the name of Dymov sounded in no way
different from Sidorov or Tarasov -- in the midst of this company
Dymov seemed strange, not wanted, and small, though he was tall
and broad-shouldered. He looked as though he had on somebody
else's coat, and his beard was like a shopman's. Though if he had
been a writer or an artist, they would have said that his beard
reminded them of Zola.

An artist said to Olga Ivanovna that with her flaxen hair and in
her wedding-dress she was very much like a graceful cherry-tree
when it is covered all over with delicate white blossoms in
spring.

"Oh, let me tell you," said Olga Ivanovna, taking his arm, "how
it was it all came to pass so suddenly. Listen, listen! . . . I
must tell you that my father was on the same staff at the
hospital as Dymov. When my poor father was taken ill, Dymov
watched for days and nights together at his bedside. Such
self-sacrifice! Listen, Ryabovsky! You, my writer, listen; it is
very interesting! Come nearer. Such self-sacrifice, such genuine
sympathy! I sat up with my father, and did not sleep for nights,
either. And all at once -- the princess had won the hero's heart
-- my Dymov fell head over ears in love. Really, fate is so
strange at times! Well, after my father's death he came to see me
sometimes, met me in the street, and one fine evening, all at
once he made me an offer . . . like snow upon my head. . . . I
lay awake all night, crying, and fell hellishly in love myself.
And here, as you see, I am his wife. There really is something
strong, powerful, bearlike about him, isn't there? Now his face
is turned three-quarters towards us in a bad light, but when he
turns round look at his forehead. Ryabovsky, what do you say to
that forehead? Dymov, we are talking about you!" she called to
her husband. "Come here; hold out your honest hand to Ryabovsky.
. . . That's right, be friends."

Dymov, with a naive and good-natured smile, held out his hand to
Ryabovsky, and said:

"Very glad to meet you. There was a Ryabovsky in my year at the
medical school. Was he a relation of yours?"


II


Olga Ivanovna was twenty-two, Dymov was thirty-one. They got on
splendidly together when they were married. Olga Ivanovna hung
all her drawing-room walls with her own and other people's
sketches, in frames and without frames, and near the piano and
furniture arranged picturesque corners with Japanese parasols,
easels, daggers, busts, photographs, and rags of many colours. .
. . In the dining-room she papered the walls with peasant
woodcuts, hung up bark shoes and sickles, stood in a corner a
scythe and a rake, and so achieved a dining-room in the Russian
style. In her bedroom she draped the ceiling and the walls with
dark cloths to make it like a cavern, hung a Venetian lantern
over the beds, and at the door set a figure with a halberd. And
every one thought that the young people had a very charming
little home.

When she got up at eleven o'clock every morning, Olga Ivanovna
played the piano or, if it were sunny, painted something in oils.
Then between twelve and one she drove to her dressmaker's. As
Dymov and she had very little money, only just enough, she and
her dressmaker were often put to clever shifts to enable her to
appear constantly in new dresses and make a sensation with them.
Very often out of an old dyed dress, out of bits of tulle, lace,
plush, and silk, costing nothing, perfect marvels were created,
something bewitching -- not a dress, but a dream. From the
dressmaker's Olga Ivanovna usually drove to some actress of her
acquaintance to hear the latest theatrical gossip, and
incidentally to try and get hold of tickets for the first night
of some new play or for a benefit performance. From the actress's
she had to go to some artist's studio or to some exhibition or to
see some celebrity -- either to pay a visit or to give an
invitation or simply to have a chat. And everywhere she met with
a gay and friendly welcome, and was assured that she was good,
that she was sweet, that she was rare. . . . Those whom she
called great and famous received her as one of themselves, as an
equal, and predicted with one voice that, with her talents, her
taste, and her intelligence, she would do great things if she
concentrated herself. She sang, she played the piano, she painted
in oils, she carved, she took part in amateur performances; and
all this not just anyhow, but all with talent, whether she made
lanterns for an illumination or dressed up or tied somebody's
cravat -- everything she did was exceptionally graceful,
artistic, and charming. But her talents showed themselves in
nothing so clearly as in her faculty for quickly becoming
acquainted and on intimate terms with celebrated people. No
sooner did any one become ever so little celebrated, and set
people talking about him, than she made his acquaintance, got on
friendly terms the same day, and invited him to her house. Every
new acquaintance she made was a veritable fete for her. She
adored celebrated people, was proud of them, dreamed of them
every night. She craved for them, and never could satisfy her
craving. The old ones departed and were forgotten, new ones came
to replace them, but to these, too, she soon grew accustomed or
was disappointed in them, and began eagerly seeking for fresh
great men, finding them and seeking for them again. What for?

Between four and five she dined at home with her husband. His
simplicity, good sense, and kind-heartedness touched her and
moved her up to enthusiasm. She was constantly jumping up,
impulsively hugging his head and showering kisses on it.

"You are a clever, generous man, Dymov," she used to say, "but
you have one very serious defect. You take absolutely no interest
in art. You don't believe in music or painting."

"I don't understand them," he would say mildly. "I have spent all
my life in working at natural science and medicine, and I have
never had time to take an interest in the arts."

"But, you know, that's awful, Dymov!"

"Why so? Your friends don't know a nything of science or
medicine, but you don't reproach them with it. Every one has his
own line. I don't understand landscapes and operas, but the way I
look at it is that if one set of sensible people devote their
whole lives to them, and other sensible people pay immense sums
for them, they must be of use. I don't understand them, but not
understanding does not imply disbelieving in them."

"Let me shake your honest hand!"

After dinner Olga Ivanovna would drive off to see her friends,
then to a theatre or to a concert, and she returned home after
midnight. So it was every day.

On Wednesdays she had "At Homes." At these "At Homes" the hostess
and her guests did not play cards and did not dance, but
entertained themselves with various arts. An actor from the
Dramatic Theatre recited, a singer sang, artists sketched in the
albums of which Olga Ivanovna had a great number, the
violoncellist played, and the hostess herself sketched, carved,
sang, and played accompaniments. In the intervals between the
recitations, music, and singing, they talked and argued about
literature, the theatre, and painting. There were no ladies, for
Olga Ivanovna considered all ladies wearisome and vulgar except
actresses and her dressmaker. Not one of these entertainments
passed without the hostess starting at every ring at the bell,
and saying, with a triumphant expression, "It is he," meaning by
"he," of course, some new celebrity. Dymov was not in the
drawing-room, and no one remembered his existence. But exactly at
half-past eleven the door leading into the dining-room opened,
and Dymov would appear with his good-natured, gentle smile and
say, rubbing his hands:

"Come to supper, gentlemen."

They all went into the dining-room, and every time found on the
table exactly the same things: a dish of oysters, a piece of ham
or veal, sardines, cheese, caviare, mushrooms, vodka, and two
decanters of wine.

My dear _maitre d' hotel!_" Olga Ivanovna would say, clasping her
hands with enthusiasm, "you are simply fascinating! My friends,
look at his forehead! Dymov, turn your profile. Look! he has the
face of a Bengal tiger and an expression as kind and sweet as a
gazelle. Ah, the darling!"

The visitors ate, and, looking at Dymov, thought, "He really is a
nice fellow"; but they soon forgot about him, and went on talking
about the theatre, music, and painting.

The young people were happy, and their life flowed on without a
hitch.

The third week of their honeymoon was spent, however, not quite
happily -- sadly, indeed. Dymov caught erysipelas in the
hospital, was in bed for six days, and had to have his beautiful
black hair cropped. Olga Ivanovna sat beside him and wept
bitterly, but when he was better she put a white handkerchief on
his shaven head and began to paint him as a Bedouin. And they
were both in good spirits. Three days after he had begun to go
back to the hospital he had another mischance.

"I have no luck, little mother," he said one day at dinner. "I
had four dissections to do today, and I cut two of my fingers at
one. And I did not notice it till I got home."

Olga Ivanovna was alarmed. He smiled, and told her that it did
not matter, and that he often cut his hands when he was
dissecting.

"I get absorbed, little mother, and grow careless."

Olga Ivanovna dreaded symptoms of blood-poisoning, and prayed
about it every night, but all went well. And again life flowed on
peaceful and happy, free from grief and anxiety. The present was
happy, and to follow it spring was at hand, already smiling in
the distance, and promising a thousand delights. There would be
no end to their happiness. In April, May and June a summer villa
a good distance out of town; walks, sketching, fishing,
nightingales; and then from July right on to autumn an artist's
tour on the Volga, and in this tour Olga Ivanovna would take part
as an indispensable member of the society. She had already had
made for her two travelling dresses of linen, had bought paints,
brushes, canvases, and a new palette for the journey. Almost
every day Ryabovsky visited her to see what progress she was
making in her painting; when she showed him her painting, he used
to thrust his hands deep into his pockets, compress his lips,
sniff, and say:

"Ye--es . . . ! That cloud of yours is screaming: it's not in the
evening light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and there is
something, you know, not the thing. . . . And your cottage is
weighed down and whines pitifully. That corner ought to have been
taken more in shadow, but on the whole it is not bad; I like it."

And the more incomprehensible he talked, the more readily Olga
Ivanovna understood him.

III

After dinner on the second day of Trinity week, Dymov bought some
sweets and some savouries and went down to the villa to see his
wife. He had not seen her for a fortnight, and missed her
terribly. As he sat in the train and afterwards as he looked for
his villa in a big wood, he felt all the while hungry and weary,
and dreamed of how he would have supper in freedom with his wife,
then tumble into bed and to sleep. And he was delighted as he
looked at his parcel, in which there was caviare, cheese, and
white salmon.

The sun was setting by the time he found his villa and recognized
it. The old servant told him that her mistress was not at home,
but that most likely she would soon be in. The villa, very
uninviting in appearance, with low ceilings papered with
writing-paper and with uneven floors full of crevices, consisted
only of three rooms. In one there was a bed, in the second there
were canvases, brushes, greasy papers, and men's overcoats and
hats lying about on the chairs and in the windows, while in the
third Dymov found three unknown men; two were dark-haired and had
beards, the other was clean-shaven and fat, apparently an actor.
There was a samovar boiling on the table.

"What do you want?" asked the actor in a bass voice, looking at
Dymov ungraciously. "Do you want Olga Ivanovna? Wait a minute;
she will be here directly."

Dymov sat down and waited. One of the dark-haired men, looking
sleepily and listlessly at him, poured himself out a glass of
tea, and asked:

"Perhaps you would like some tea?"

Dymov was both hungry and thirsty, but he refused tea for fear of
spoiling his supper. Soon he heard footsteps and a familiar
laugh; a door slammed, and Olga Ivanovna ran into the room,
wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a box in her hand; she
was followed by Ryabovsky, rosy and good-humoured, carrying a big
umbrella and a camp-stool.

"Dymov!" cried Olga Ivanovna, and she flushed crimson with
pleasure. "Dymov!" she repeated, laying her head and both arms on
his bosom. "Is that you? Why haven't you come for so long? Why?
Why?"

"When could I, little mother? I am always busy, and whenever I am
free it always happens somehow that the train does not fit."

"But how glad I am to see you! I have been dreaming about you the
whole night, the whole night, and I was afraid you must be ill.
Ah! if you only knew how sweet you are! You have come in the nick
of time! You will be my salvation! You are the only person who
can save me! There is to be a most original wedding here
tomorrow," she went on, laughing, and tying her husband's cravat.
"A young telegraph clerk at the station, called Tchikeldyeev, is
going to be married. He is a handsome young man and -- well, not
stupid, and you know there is something strong, bearlike in his
face . . . you might paint him as a young Norman. We summer
visitors take a great interest in him, and have promised to be at
his wedding. . . . He is a lonely, timid man, not well off, and
of course it would be a shame not to be sympathetic to him.
Fancy! the wedding will be after the service; then we shall all
walk from the church to the bride's lodgings. . . you see the
wood, the birds singing, patches of sunlight on the grass, and
all of us spots of different colours against the bright green
background -- very original, in the style of the French
impressionists. But, Dymov, what am I to go to the church in?"
said Olga Ivanovna, and she looked as though she were going to
cry. "I have nothing here, literally nothing!  no dress, no
 flowers, no gloves . . . you must save me. Since you have come,
fate itself bids you save me. Take the keys, my precious, go home
and get my pink dress from the wardrobe. You remember it; it
hangs in front. . . . Then, in the storeroom, on the floor, on
the right side, you will see two cardboard boxes. When you open
the top one you will see tulle, heaps of tulle and rags of all
sorts, and under them flowers. Take out all the flowers
carefully, try not to crush them, darling; I will choose among
them later. . . . And buy me some gloves."

"Very well," said Dymov; "I will go tomorrow and send them to
you."

"Tomorrow?" asked Olga Ivanovna, and she looked at him surprised.
"You won't have time tomorrow. The first train goes tomorrow at
nine, and the wedding's at eleven. No, darling, it must be today;
it absolutely must be today. If you won't be able to come
tomorrow, send them by a messenger. Come, you must run along. . .
. The passenger train will be in directly; don't miss it,
darling."

"Very well."

"Oh, how sorry I am to let you go!" said Olga Ivanovna, and tears
came into her eyes. "And why did I promise that telegraph clerk,
like a silly?"

Dymov hurriedly drank a glass of tea, took a cracknel, and,
smiling gently, went to the station. And the caviare, the cheese,
and the white salmon were eaten by the two dark gentlemen and the
fat actor.

IV

On a still moonlight night in July Olga Ivanovna was standing on
the deck of a Volga steamer and looking alternately at the water
and at the picturesque banks. Beside her was standing Ryabovsky,
telling her the black shadows on the water were not shadows, but
a dream, that it would be sweet to sink into forgetfulness, to
die, to become a memory in the sight of that enchanted water with
the fantastic glimmer, in sight of the fathomless sky and the
mournful, dreamy shores that told of the vanity of our life and
of the existence of something higher, blessed, and eternal. The
past was vulgar and uninteresting, the future was trivial, and
that marvellous night, unique in a lifetime, would soon be over,
would blend with eternity; then, why live?

And Olga Ivanovna listened alternately to Ryabovsky's voice and
the silence of the night, and thought of her being immortal and
never dying. The turquoise colour of the water, such as she had
never seen before, the sky, the river-banks, the black shadows,
and the unaccountable joy that flooded her soul, all told her
that she would make a great artist, and that somewhere in the
distance, in the infinite space beyond the moonlight, success,
glory, the love of the people, lay awaiting her. . . . When she
gazed steadily without blinking into the distance, she seemed to
see crowds of people, lights, triumphant strains of music, cries
of enthusiasm, she herself in a white dress, and flowers showered
upon her from all sides. She thought, too, that beside her,
leaning with his elbows on the rail of the steamer, there was
standing a real great man, a genius, one of God's elect. . . .
All that he had created up to the present was fine, new, and
extraordinary, but what he would create in time, when with
maturity his rare talent reached its full development, would be
astounding, immeasurably sublime; and that could be seen by his
face, by his manner of expressing himself and his attitude to
nature. He talked of shadows, of the tones of evening, of the
moonlight, in a special way, in a language of his own, so that
one could not help feeling the fascination of his power over
nature. He was very handsome, original, and his life, free,
independent, aloof from all common cares, was like the life of a
bird.

"It's growing cooler," said Olga Ivanovna, and she gave a
shudder.

Ryabovsky wrapped her in his cloak, and said mournfully:

"I feel that I am in your power; I am a slave. Why are you so
enchanting today?"

He kept staring intently at her, and his eyes were terrible. And
she was afraid to look at him.

"I love you madly," he whispered, breathing on her cheek. "Say
one word to me and I will not go on living; I will give up art .
. ." he muttered in violent emotion. "Love me, love . . . ."

"Don't talk like that," said Olga Ivanovna, covering her eyes.
"It's dreadful! How about Dymov?"

"What of Dymov? Why Dymov? What have I to do with Dymov? The
Volga, the moon, beauty, my love, ecstasy, and there is no such
thing as Dymov. . . . Ah! I don't know . . . I don't care about
the past; give me one moment, one instant!"

Olga Ivanovna's heart began to throb. She tried to think about
her husband, but all her past, with her wedding, with Dymov, and
with her "At Homes," seemed to her petty, trivial, dingy,
unnecessary, and far, far away. . . . Yes, really, what of Dymov?
Why Dymov? What had she to do with Dymov? Had he any existence in
nature, or was he only a dream?

"For him, a simple and ordinary man the happiness he has had
already is enough," she thought, covering her face with her
hands. "Let them condemn me, let them curse me, but in spite of
them all I will go to my ruin; I will go to my ruin! . . . One
must experience everything in life. My God! how terrible and how
glorious!"

"Well? Well?" muttered the artist, embracing her, and greedily
kissing the hands with which she feebly tried to thrust him from
her. "You love me? Yes? Yes? Oh, what a night! marvellous night!"

"Yes, what a night!" she whispered, looking into his eyes, which
were bright with tears.

Then she looked round quickly, put her arms round him, and kissed
him on the lips.

"We are nearing Kineshmo!" said some one on the other side of the
deck.

They heard heavy footsteps; it was a waiter from the
refreshment-bar.

"Waiter," said Olga Ivanovna, laughing and crying with happiness,
"bring us some wine."

The artist, pale with emotion, sat on the seat, looking at Olga
Ivanovna with adoring, grateful eyes; then he closed his eyes,
and said, smiling languidly:

"I am tired."

And he leaned his head against the rail.


V


On the second of September the day was warm and still, but
overcast. In the early morning a light mist had hung over the
Volga, and after nine o'clock it had begun to spout with rain.
And there seemed no hope of the sky clearing. Over their morning
tea Ryabovsky told Olga Ivanovna that painting was the most
ungrateful and boring art, that he was not an artist, that none
but fools thought that he had any talent, and all at once, for no
rhyme or reason, he snatched up a knife and with it scraped over
his very best sketch. After his tea he sat plunged in gloom at
the window and gazed at the Volga. And now the Volga was dingy,
all of one even colour without a gleam of light, cold-looking.
Everything, everything recalled the approach of dreary, gloomy
autumn. And it seemed as though nature had removed now from the
Volga the sumptuous green covers from the banks, the brilliant
reflections of the sunbeams, the transparent blue distance, and
all its smart gala array, and had packed it away in boxes till
the coming spring, and the crows were flying above the Volga and
crying tauntingly, "Bare, bare!"

Ryabovsky heard their cawing, and thought he had already gone off
and lost his talent, that everything in this world was relative,
conditional, and stupid, and that he ought not to have taken up
with this woman. . . . In short, he was out of humour and
depressed.

Olga Ivanovna sat behind the screen on the bed, and, passing her
fingers through her lovely flaxen hair, pictured herself first in
the drawing-room, then in the bedroom, then in her husband's
study; her imagination carried her to the theatre, to the
dress-maker, to her distinguished friends. Were they getting
something up now? Did they think of her? The season had begun by
now, and it would be time to think about her "At Homes." And
Dymov? Dear Dymov! with what gentleness and childlike pathos he
kept begging her in his letters to make haste and come home!
Every month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she wrote
him that she had lent the artists a hundred roubles, he sent that
hundred too. What a kind, generous-hearted man! The travelling
wearied Olga Ivanovna; she was bored; and she longed to get away
from the peasants, from the damp smell of the river, and to cast
off the feeling of physical uncleanliness of which she was
conscious all the time, living in the peasants' huts and
wandering from village to village. If Ryabovsky had not given his
word to the artists that he would stay with them till the
twentieth of September, they might have gone away that very day.
And how nice that would have been!

"My God!" moaned Ryabovsky. "Will the sun ever come out? I can't
go on with a sunny landscape without the sun. . . ."

"But you have a sketch with a cloudy sky," said Olga Ivanovna,
coming from behind the screen. "Do you remember, in the right
foreground forest trees, on the left a herd of cows and geese?
You might finish it now."

"Aie!" the artist scowled. "Finish it! Can you imagine I am such
a fool that I don't know what I want to do?"

"How you have changed to me!" sighed Olga Ivanovna.

"Well, a good thing too!"

Olga Ivanovna's face quivered; she moved away to the stove and
began to cry.

"Well, that's the last straw -- crying! Give over! I have a
thousand reasons for tears, but I am not crying."

"A thousand reasons!" cried Olga Ivanovna. "The chief one is that
you are weary of me. Yes!" she said, and broke into sobs. "If one
is to tell the truth, you are ashamed of our love. You keep
trying to prevent the artists from noticing it, though it is
impossible to conceal it, and they have known all about it for
ever so long."

"Olga, one thing I beg you," said the artist in an imploring
voice, laying his hand on his heart -- "one thing; don't worry
me! I want nothing else from you!"

"But swear that you love me still!"

"This is agony!" the artist hissed through his teeth, and he
jumped up. "It will end by my throwing myself in the Volga or
going out of my mind! Let me alone!"

"Come, kill me, kill me!" cried Olga Ivanovna. "Kill me!"

She sobbed again, and went behind the screen. There was a swish
of rain on the straw thatch of the hut. Ryabovsky clutched his
head and strode up and down the hut; then with a resolute face,
as though bent on proving something to somebody, put on his cap,
slung his gun over his shoulder, and went out of the hut.

After he had gone, Olga Ivanovna lay a long time on the bed,
crying. At first she thought it would be a good thing to poison
herself, so that when Ryabovsky came back he would find her dead;
then her imagination carried her to her drawing-room, to her
husband's study, and she imagined herself sitting motionless
beside Dymov and enjoying the physical peace and cleanliness, and
in the evening sitting in the theatre, listening to Mazini. And a
yearning for civilization, for the noise and bustle of the town,
for celebrated people sent a pang to her heart. A peasant woman
came into the hut and began in a leisurely way lighting the stove
to get the dinner. There was a smell of charcoal fumes, and the
air was filled with bluish smoke. The artists came in, in muddy
high boots and with faces wet with rain, examined their sketches,
and comforted themselves by saying that the Volga had its charms
even in bad weather. On the wall the cheap clock went
"tic-tic-tic." . . . The flies, feeling chilled, crowded round
the ikon in the corner, buzzing, and one could hear the
cockroaches scurrying about among the thick portfolios under the
seats. . . .

Ryabovsky came home as the sun was setting. He flung his cap on
the table, and, without removing his muddy boots, sank pale and
exhausted on the bench and closed his eyes.

"I am tired . . ." he said, and twitched his eyebrows, trying to
raise his eyelids.

To be nice to him and to show she was not cross, Olga Ivanovna
went up to him, gave him a silent kiss, and passed the comb
through his fair hair. She meant to comb it for him.

"What's that?" he said, starting as though something cold had
touched him, and he opened his eyes. "What is it? Please let me
alone."

He thrust her off, and moved away. And it seemed to her that
there was a look of aversion and annoyance on his face.

At that time the peasant woman cautiously carried him, in both
hands, a plate of cabbage-soup. And Olga Ivanovna saw how she
wetted her fat fingers in it. And the dirty peasant woman,
standing with her body thrust forward, and the cabbage-soup which
Ryabovsky began eating greedily, and the hut, and their whole way
of life, which she at first had so loved for its simplicity and
artistic disorder, seemed horrible to her now. She suddenly felt
insulted, and said coldly:

"We must part for a time, or else from boredom we shall quarrel
in earnest. I am sick of this; I am going today."

"Going how? Astride on a broomstick?"

"Today is Thursday, so the steamer will be here at half-past
nine."

"Eh? Yes, yes. . . . Well, go, then . . ." Ryabovsky said softly,
wiping his mouth with a towel instead of a dinner napkin. "You
are dull and have nothing to do here, and one would have to be a
great egoist to try and keep you. Go home, and we shall meet
again after the twentieth."

Olga Ivanovna packed in good spirits. Her cheeks positively
glowed with pleasure. Could it really be true, she asked herself,
that she would soon be writing in her drawing-room and sleeping
in her bedroom, and dining with a cloth on the table? A weight
was lifted from her heart, and she no longer felt angry with the
artist.

"My paints and brushes I will leave with you, Ryabovsky," she
said. "You can bring what's left. . . . Mind, now, don't be lazy
here when I am gone; don't mope, but work. You are such a
splendid fellow, Ryabovsky!"

At ten o'clock Ryabovsky gave her a farewell kiss, in order, as
she thought, to avoid kissing her on the steamer before the
artists, and went with her to the landing-stage. The steamer soon
came up and carried her away.

She arrived home two and a half days later. Breathless with
excitement, she went, without taking off her hat or waterproof,
into the drawing-room and thence into the dining-room. Dymov,
with his waistcoat unbuttoned and no coat, was sitting at the
table sharpening a knife on a fork; before him lay a grouse on a
plate. As Olga Ivanovna went into the flat she was convinced that
it was essential to hide everything from her husband, and that
she would have the strength and skill to do so; but now, when she
saw his broad, mild, happy smile, and shining, joyful eyes, she
felt that to deceive this man was as vile, as revolting, and as
impossible and out of her power as to bear false witness, to
steal, or to kill, and in a flash she resolved to tell him all
that had happened. Letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank
down on her knees before him and hid her face.

"What is it, what is it, little mother?" he asked tenderly. "Were
you homesick?"

She raised her face, red with shame, and gazed at him with a
guilty and imploring look, but fear and shame prevented her from
telling him the truth.

"Nothing," she said; "it's just nothing. . . ."

"Let us sit down," he said, raising her and seating her at the
table. "That's right, eat the grouse. You are starving, poor
darling."

She eagerly breathed in the atmosphere of home and ate the
grouse, while he watched her with tenderness and laughed with
delight.


VI


Apparently, by the middle of the winter Dymov began to suspect
that he was being deceived. As though his conscience was not
clear, he could not look his wife straight in the face, did not
smile with delight when he met her, and to avoid being left alone
with her, he often brought in to dinner his colleague,
Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a wrinkled face, who
kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with
embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with
his right hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two
doctors talked about the fact that a displacement of the
diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by irregularities of the
heart, or that a great number of neurotic complaints were met
with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found a cancer of
the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with the diagnosis of
pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were talking of
medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being silent -- that
is, of not lying. After dinner Korostelev sat
 down to the piano, while Dymov sighed and said to him:

"Ech, brother -- well, well! Play something melancholy."

Hunching up his shoulders and stretching his fingers wide apart,
Korostelev played some chords and began singing in a tenor voice,
"Show me the abode where the Russian peasant would not groan,"
while Dymov sighed once more, propped his head on his fist, and
sank into thought.

Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct of
late. Every morning she woke up in a very bad humour and with the
thought that she no longer cared for Ryabovsky, and that, thank
God, it was all over now. But as she drank her coffee she
reflected that Ryabovsky had robbed her of her husband, and that
now she was left with neither her husband nor Ryabovsky; then she
remembered talks she had heard among her acquaintances of a
picture Ryabovsky was preparing for the exhibition, something
striking, a mixture of genre and landscape, in the style of
Polyenov, about which every one who had been into his studio went
into raptures; and this, of course, she mused, he had created
under her influence, and altogether, thanks to her influence, he
had greatly changed for the better. Her influence was so
beneficent and essential that if she were to leave him he might
perhaps go to ruin. And she remembered, too, that the last time
he had come to see her in a great-coat with flecks on it and a
new tie, he had asked her languidly:

"Am I beautiful?"

And with his elegance, his long curls, and his blue eyes, he
really was very beautiful (or perhaps it only seemed so), and he
had been affectionate to her.

Considering and remembering many things Olga Ivanovna dressed and
in great agitation drove to Ryabovsky's studio. She found him in
high spirits, and enchanted with his really magnificent picture.
He was dancing about and playing the fool and answering serious
questions with jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the picture
and hated it, but from politeness she stood before the picture
for five minutes in silence, and, heaving a sigh, as though
before a holy shrine, said softly:

"Yes, you have never painted anything like it before. Do you
know, it is positively awe-inspiring?"

And then she began beseeching him to love her and not to cast her
off, to have pity on her in her misery and her wretchedness. She
shed tears, kissed his hands, insisted on his swearing that he
loved her, told him that without her good influence he would go
astray and be ruined. And, when she had spoilt his good-humour,
feeling herself humiliated, she would drive off to her dressmaker
or to an actress of her acquaintance to try and get theatre
tickets.

If she did not find him at his studio she left a letter in which
she swore that if he did not come to see her that day she would
poison herself. He was scared, came to see her, and stayed to
dinner. Regardless of her husband's presence, he would say rude
things to her, and she would answer him in the same way. Both
felt they were a burden to each other, that they were tyrants and
enemies, and were wrathful, and in their wrath did not notice
that their behaviour was unseemly, and that even Korostelev, with
his close-cropped head, saw it all. After dinner Ryabovsky made
haste to say good-bye and get away.

"Where are you off to?" Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the hall,
looking at him with hatred.

Scowling and screwing up his eyes, he mentioned some lady of
their acquaintance, and it was evident that he was laughing at
her jealousy and wanted to annoy her. She went to her bedroom and
lay down on her bed; from jealousy, anger, a sense of humiliation
and shame, she bit the pillow and began sobbing aloud. Dymov left
Korostelev in the drawing-room, went into the bedroom, and with a
desperate and embarrassed face said softly:

"Don't cry so loud, little mother; there's no need. You must be
quiet about it. You must not let people see. . . . You know what
is done is done, and can't be mended."

Not knowing how to ease the burden of her jealousy, which
actually set her temples throbbing with pain, and thinking still
that things might be set right, she would wash, powder her
tear-stained face, and fly off to the lady mentioned.

Not finding Ryabovsky with her, she would drive off to a second,
then to a third. At first she was ashamed to go about like this,
but afterwards she got used to it, and it would happen that in
one evening she would make the round of all her female
acquaintances in search of Ryabovsky, and they all understood it.

One day she said to Ryabovsky of her husband:

"That man crushes me with his magnanimity."

This phrase pleased her so much that when she met the artists who
knew of her affair with Ryabovsky she said every time of her
husband, with a vigorous movement of her arm:

"That man crushes me with his magnanimity."

Their manner of life was the same as it had been the year before.
On Wednesdays they were "At Home"; an actor recited, the artists
sketched. The violoncellist played, a singer sang, and invariably
at half-past eleven the door leading to the dining-room opened
and Dymov, smiling, said:

"Come to supper, gentlemen."

As before, Olga Ivanovna hunted celebrities, found them, was not
satisfied, and went in pursuit of fresh ones. As before, she came
back late every night; but now Dymov was not, as last year,
asleep, but sitting in his study at work of some sort. He went to
bed at three o'clock and got up at eight.

One evening when she was getting ready to go to the theatre and
standing before the pier glass, Dymov came into her bedroom,
wearing his dress-coat and a white tie. He was smiling gently and
looked into his wife's face joyfully, as in old days; his face
was radiant.

"I have just been defending my thesis," he said, sitting down and
smoothing his knees.

"Defending?" asked Olga Ivanovna.

"Oh, oh!" he laughed, and he craned his neck to see his wife's
face in the mirror, for she was still standing with her back to
him, doing up her hair. "Oh, oh," he repeated, "do you know it's
very possible they may offer me the Readership in General
Pathology? It seems like it."

It was evident from his beaming, blissful face that if Olga
Ivanovna had shared with him his joy and triumph he would have
forgiven her everything, both the present and the future, and
would have forgotten everything, but she did not understand what
was meant by a "readership" or by "general pathology"; besides,
she was afraid of being late for the theatre, and she said
nothing.

He sat there another two minutes, and with a guilty smile went
away.

VII

It had been a very troubled day.

Dymov had a very bad headache; he had no breakfast, and did not
go to the hospital, but spent the whole time lying on his sofa in
the study. Olga Ivanovna went as usual at midday to see
Ryabovsky, to show him her still-life sketch, and to ask him why
he had not been to see her the evening before. The sketch seemed
to her worthless, and she had painted it only in order to have an
additional reason for going to the artist.

She went in to him without ringing, and as she was taking off her
goloshes in the entry she heard a sound as of something running
softly in the studio, with a feminine rustle of skirts; and as
she hastened to peep in she caught a momentary glimpse of a bit
of brown petticoat, which vanished behind a big picture draped,
together with the easel, with black calico, to the floor. There
could be no doubt that a woman was hiding there. How often Olga
Ivanovna herself had taken refuge behind that picture!

Ryabovsky, evidently much embarrassed, held out both hands to
her, as though surprised at her arrival, and said with a forced
smile:

"Aha! Very glad to see you! Anything nice to tell me?"

Olga Ivanovna's eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed and
bitter, and would not for a million roubles have consented to
speak in the presence of the outsider, the rival, the deceitful
woman who was standing now behind the picture, and probably
giggling malignantly.

"I have brought you a sketch," she said timidly in a thin voice,
and her lips quivered. "_Nature morte._"

"Ah--ah! . . . A sketch?"

The artist took the sketch in his hands, and as he examined it w
alked, as it were mechanically, into the other room.

Olga Ivanovna followed him humbly.

"_Nature morte_ . . . first-rate sort," he muttered, falling into
rhyme. "Kurort . . . sport . . . port . . ."

From the studio came the sound of hurried footsteps and the
rustle of a skirt.

So she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to scream aloud, to hit the
artist on the head with something heavy, but she could see
nothing through her tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt
herself, not Olga Ivanovna, not an artist, but a little insect.

"I am tired . . ." said the artist languidly, looking at the
sketch and tossing his head as though struggling with drowsiness.
"It's very nice, of course, but here a sketch today, a sketch
last year, another sketch in a month . . . I wonder you are not
bored with them. If I were you I should give up painting and work
seriously at music or something. You're not an artist, you know,
but a musician. But you can't think how tired I am! I'll tell
them to bring us some tea, shall I?"

He went out of the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some
order to his footman. To avoid farewells and explanations, and
above all to avoid bursting into sobs, she ran as fast as she
could, before Ryabovsky came back, to the entry, put on her
goloshes, and went out into the street; then she breathed easily,
and felt she was free for ever from Ryabovsky and from painting
and from the burden of shame which had so crushed her in the
studio. It was all over!

She drove to her dressmaker's; then to see Barnay, who had only
arrived the day before; from Barnay to a music-shop, and all the
time she was thinking how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, cruel
letter full of personal dignity, and how in the spring or the
summer she would go with Dymov to the Crimea, free herself
finally from the past there, and begin a new life.

On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the
drawing-room, without taking off her things, to begin the letter.
Ryabovsky had told her she was not an artist, and to pay him out
she wrote to him now that he painted the same thing every year,
and said exactly the same thing every day; that he was at a
standstill, and that nothing more would come of him than had come
already. She wanted to write, too, that he owed a great deal to
her good influence, and that if he was going wrong it was only
because her influence was paralysed by various dubious persons
like the one who had been hiding behind the picture that day.

"Little mother!" Dymov called from the study, without opening the
door.

"What is it?"

"Don't come in to me, but only come to the door -- that's right.
. . . The day before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at
the hospital, and now . . . I am ill. Make haste and send for
Korostelev."

Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as she
did all the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian
name, Osip, because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol and the
silly pun on his name. But now she cried:

"Osip, it cannot be!"

"Send for him; I feel ill," Dymov said behind the door, and she
could hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. "Send!" she
heard his voice faintly.

"Good Heavens!" thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with horror.
"Why, it's dangerous!"

For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom, and
there, reflecting what she must do, glanced casually at herself
in the pier glass. With her pale, frightened face, in a jacket
with sleeves high on the shoulders, with yellow ruches on her
bosom, and with stripes running in unusual directions on her
skirt, she seemed to herself horrible and disgusting. She
suddenly felt poignantly sorry for Dymov, for his boundless love
for her, for his young life, and even for the desolate little bed
in which he had not slept for so long; and she remembered his
habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept bitterly, and wrote
an imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o'clock in the
night.


VIII

When towards eight o'clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her head
heavy from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of her
bedroom, looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on her
face, a gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor,
passed by her into the entry. There was a smell of drugs.
Korostelev was standing near the study door, twisting his left
moustache with his right hand.

"Excuse me, I can't let you go in," he said surlily to Olga
Ivanovna; "it's catching. Besides, it's no use, really; he is
delirious, anyway."

"Has he really got diphtheria?" Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.

"People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled up and
punished for it," muttered Korostelev, not answering Olga
Ivanovna's question. "Do you know why he caught it? On Tuesday he
was sucking up the mucus through a pipette from a boy with
diphtheria. And what for? It was stupid. . . . Just from folly. .
. ."

"Is it dangerous, very?" asked Olga Ivanovna.

"Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send for
Shrek really."

A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent
arrived; then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked
like a head deacon; then a stout young man with a red face and
spectacles. These were doctors who came to watch by turns beside
their colleague. Korostelev did not go home when his turn was
over, but remained and wandered about the rooms like an uneasy
spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the various doctors, and
was constantly running to the chemist, and there was no one to do
the rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat.

Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was
punishing her for having deceived her husband. That silent,
unrepining, uncomprehended creature, robbed by his mildness of
all personality and will, weak from excessive kindness, had been
suffering in obscurity somewhere on his sofa, and had not
complained. And if he were to complain even in delirium, the
doctors watching by his bedside would learn that diphtheria was
not the only cause of his sufferings. They would ask Korostelev.
He knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he looked
at his friend's wife with eyes that seemed to say that she was
the real chief criminal and diphtheria was only her accomplice.
She did not think now of the moonlight evening on the Volga, nor
the words of love, nor their poetical life in the peasant's hut.
She thought only that from an idle whim, from self-indulgence,
she had sullied herself all over from head to foot in something
filthy, sticky, which one could never wash off. . . .

"Oh, how fearfully false I've been!" she thought, recalling the
troubled passion she had known with Ryabovsky. "Curse it all! . .
."

At four o'clock she dined with Korostelev. He did nothing but
scowl and drink red wine, and did not eat a morsel. She ate
nothing, either. At one minute she was praying inwardly and
vowing to God that if Dymov recovered she would love him again
and be a faithful wife to him. Then, forgetting herself for a
minute, she would look at Korostelev, and think: "Surely it must
be dull to be a humble, obscure person, not remarkable in any
way, especially with such a wrinkled face and bad manners!"

Then it seemed to her that God would strike her dead that minute
for not having once been in her husband's study, for fear of
infection. And altogether she had a dull, despondent feeling and
a conviction that her life was spoilt, and that there was no
setting it right anyhow. . . .

After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went into the
drawing-room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa, with a
gold-embroidered silk cushion under his head.

"Khee-poo-ah," he snored -- "khee-poo-ah."

And the doctors as they came to sit up and went away again did
not notice this disorder. The fact that a strange man was asleep
and snoring in the drawing-room, and the sketches on the walls
and the exquisite decoration of the room, and the fact that the
lady of the house was dishevelled and untidy -- all that aroused
not the slightest interest now. One of the doctors chanced to
laugh at something, and the laugh had a strange and timid sound
that made one's heart ac he.

When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next time,
Korostelev was not asleep, but sitting up and smoking.

"He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity," he said in a low voice,
"and the heart is not working properly now. Things are in a bad
way, really."

"But you will send for Shrek?" said Olga Ivanovna.

"He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had
passed into the nose. What's the use of Shrek! Shrek's no use at
all, really. He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more."

The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay down in
her clothes on her bed, that had not been made all day, and sank
into a doze. She dreamed that the whole flat was filled up from
floor to ceiling with a huge piece of iron, and that if they
could only get the iron out they would all be light-hearted and
happy. Waking, she realized that it was not the iron but Dymov's
illness that was weighing on her.

"Nature morte, port . . ." she thought, sinking into
forgetfulness again. "Sport . . . Kurort . . . and what of Shrek?
Shrek. . . trek . . . wreck. . . . And where are my friends now?
Do they know that we are in trouble? Lord, save . . . spare!
Shrek. . . trek . . ."

And again the iron was there. . . . The time dragged on slowly,
though the clock on the lower storey struck frequently. And bells
were continually ringing as the doctors arrived. . . . The
house-maid came in with an empty glass on a tray, and asked,
"Shall I make the bed, madam?" and getting no answer, went away.

The clock below struck the hour. She dreamed of the rain on the
Volga; and again some one came into her bedroom, she thought a
stranger. Olga Ivanovna jumped up, and recognized Korostelev.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"About three."

"Well, what is it?"

"What, indeed! . . . I've come to tell you he is passing. . . ."

He gave a sob, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped away the
tears with his sleeve. She could not grasp it at once, but turned
cold all over and began slowly crossing herself.

"He is passing," he repeated in a shrill voice, and again he gave
a sob. "He is dying because he sacrificed himself. What a loss
for science!" he said bitterly. "Compare him with all of us. He
was a great man, an extraordinary man! What gifts! What hopes we
all had of him!" Korostelev went on, wringing his hands:
"Merciful God, he was a man of science; we shall never look on
his like again. Osip Dymov, what have you done -- aie, aie, my
God!"

Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair, and shook
his head.

"And his moral force," he went on, seeming to grow more and more
exasperated against some one. "Not a man, but a pure, good,
loving soul, and clean as crystal. He served science and died for
science. And he worked like an ox night and day -- no one spared
him -- and with his youth and his learning he had to take a
private practice and work at translations at night to pay for
these . . . vile rags!"

Korostelev looked with hatred at Olga Ivanovna, snatched at the
sheet with both hands and angrily tore it, as though it were to
blame.

"He did not spare himself, and others did not spare him. Oh,
what's the use of talking!"

"Yes, he was a rare man," said a bass voice in the drawing-room.

Olga Ivanovna remembered her whole life with him from the
beginning to the end, with all its details, and suddenly she
understood that he really was an extraordinary, rare, and,
compared with every one else she knew, a great man. And
remembering how her father, now dead, and all the other doctors
had behaved to him, she realized that they really had seen in him
a future celebrity. The walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and the
carpet on the floor, seemed to be winking at her sarcastically,
as though they would say, "You were blind! you were blind!" With
a wail she flung herself out of the bedroom, dashed by some
unknown man in the drawing-room, and ran into her husband's
study. He was lying motionless on the sofa, covered to the waist
with a quilt. His face was fearfully thin and sunken, and was of
a greyish-yellow colour such as is never seen in the living; only
from the forehead, from the black eyebrows and from the familiar
smile, could he be recognized as Dymov. Olga Ivanovna hurriedly
felt his chest, his forehead, and his hands. The chest was still
warm, but the forehead and hands were unpleasantly cold, and the
half-open eyes looked, not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the quilt.

"Dymov!" she called aloud, "Dymov!" She wanted to explain to him
that it had been a mistake, that all was not lost, that life
might still be beautiful and happy, that he was an extraordinary,
rare, great man, and that she would all her life worship him and
bow down in homage and holy awe before him. . . .

"Dymov!" she called him, patting him on the shoulder, unable to
believe that he would never wake again. "Dymov! Dymov!"

In the drawing-room Korostelev was saying to the housemaid:

"Why keep asking? Go to the church beadle and enquire where they
live. They'll wash the body and lay it out, and do everything
that is necessary."


A DREARY STORY

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN OLD MAN

I

THERE is in Russia an emeritus Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch, a
chevalier and privy councillor; he has so many Russian and
foreign decorations that when he has occasion to put them on the
students nickname him "The Ikonstand." His acquaintances are of
the most aristocratic; for the last twenty-five or thirty years,
at any rate, there has not been one single distinguished man of
learning in Russia with whom he has not been intimately
acquainted. There is no one for him to make friends with
nowadays; but if we turn to the past, the long list of his famous
friends winds up with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the
poet Nekrasov, all of whom bestowed upon him a warm and sincere
affection. He is a member of all the Russian and of three foreign
universities. And so on, and so on. All that and a great deal
more that might be said makes up what is called my "name."

That is my name as known to the public. In Russia it is known to
every educated man, and abroad it is mentioned in the
lecture-room with the addition "honoured and distinguished." It
is one of those fortunate names to abuse which or to take which
in vain, in public or in print, is considered a sign of bad
taste. And that is as it should be. You see, my name is closely
associated with the conception of a highly distinguished man of
great gifts and unquestionable usefulness. I have the industry
and power of endurance of a camel, and that is important, and I
have talent, which is even more important. Moreover, while I am
on this subject, I am a well-educated, modest, and honest fellow.
I have never poked my nose into literature or politics; I have
never sought popularity in polemics with the ignorant; I have
never made speeches either at public dinners or at the funerals
of my friends. . . . In fact, there is no slur on my learned
name, and there is no complaint one can make against it. It is
fortunate.

The bearer of that name, that is I, see myself as a man of
sixty-two, with a bald head, with false teeth, and with an
incurable tic douloureux. I am myself as dingy and unsightly as
my name is brilliant and splendid. My head and my hands tremble
with weakness; my neck, as Turgenev says of one of his heroines,
is like the handle of a double bass; my chest is hollow; my
shoulders narrow; when I talk or lecture, my mouth turns down at
one corner; when I smile, my whole face is covered with
aged-looking, deathly wrinkles. There is nothing impressive about
my pitiful figure; only, perhaps, when I have an attack of tic
douloureux my face wears a peculiar expression, the sight of
which must have roused in every one the grim and impressive
thought, "Evidently that man will soon die."

I still, as in the past, lecture fairly well; I can still, as in
the past, hold the attention of my listeners for a couple of
hours. My fervour, the literary skill of my exposition, and my
humour, almost efface the defects of my voice, though it is
harsh, dry, and monotonous as a praying beggar's. I write poorly.
That bit of my brain which presides over the faculty of
authorship refuses to
 work. My memory has grown weak; there is a lack of sequence in
my ideas, and when I put them on paper it always seems to me that
I have lost the instinct for their organic connection; my
construction is monotonous; my language is poor and timid. Often
I write what I do not mean; I have forgotten the beginning when I
am writing the end. Often I forget ordinary words, and I always
have to waste a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous
phrases and unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both
unmistakable proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is
noteworthy that the simpler the letter the more painful the
effort to write it. At a scientific article I feel far more
intelligent and at ease than at a letter of congratulation or a
minute of proceedings. Another point: I find it easier to write
German or English than to write Russian.

As regards my present manner of life, I must give a foremost
place to the insomnia from which I have suffered of late. If I
were asked what constituted the chief and fundamental feature of
my existence now, I should answer, Insomnia. As in the past, from
habit I undress and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep
quickly, but before two o'clock I wake up and feel as though I
had not slept at all. Sometimes I get out of bed and light a
lamp. For an hour or two I walk up and down the room looking at
the familiar photographs and pictures. When I am weary of walking
about, I sit down to my table. I sit motionless, thinking of
nothing, conscious of no inclination; if a book is lying before
me, I mechanically move it closer and read it without any
interest -- in that way not long ago I mechanically read through
in one night a whole novel, with the strange title "The Song the
Lark was Singing"; or to occupy my attention I force myself to
count to a thousand; or I imagine the face of one of my
colleagues and begin trying to remember in what year and under
what circumstances he entered the service. I like listening to
sounds. Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something
rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room with a
candle and invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped cupboard
creaks; or the burner of the lamp suddenly begins to hum -- and
all these sounds, for some reason, excite me.

To lie awake at night means to be at every moment conscious of
being abnormal, and so I look forward with impatience to the
morning and the day when I have a right to be awake. Many
wearisome hours pass before the cock crows in the yard. He is my
first bringer of good tidings. As soon as he crows I know that
within an hour the porter will wake up below, and, coughing
angrily, will go upstairs to fetch something. And then a pale
light will begin gradually glimmering at the windows, voices will
sound in the street. . . .

The day begins for me with the entrance of my wife. She comes in
to me in her petticoat, before she has done her hair, but after
she has washed, smelling of flower-scented eau-de-Cologne,
looking as though she had come in by chance. Every time she says
exactly the same thing: "Excuse me, I have just come in for a
minute. . . . Have you had a bad night again?"

Then she puts out the lamp, sits down near the table, and begins
talking. I am no prophet, but I know what she will talk about.
Every morning it is exactly the same thing. Usually, after
anxious inquiries concerning my health, she suddenly mentions our
son who is an officer serving at Warsaw. After the twentieth of
each month we send him fifty roubles, and that serves as the
chief topic of our conversation.

"Of course it is difficult for us," my wife would sigh, "but
until he is completely on his own feet it is our duty to help
him. The boy is among strangers, his pay is small. . . . However,
if you like, next month we won't send him fifty, but forty. What
do you think?"

Daily experience might have taught my wife that constantly
talking of our expenses does not reduce them, but my wife refuses
to learn by experience, and regularly every morning discusses our
officer son, and tells me that bread, thank God, is cheaper,
while sugar is a halfpenny dearer -- with a tone and an air as
though she were communicating interesting news.

I listen, mechanically assent, and probably because I have had a
bad night, strange and inappropriate thoughts intrude themselves
upon me. I gaze at my wife and wonder like a child. I ask myself
in perplexity, is it possible that this old, very stout, ungainly
woman, with her dull expression of petty anxiety and alarm about
daily bread, with eyes dimmed by continual brooding over debts
and money difficulties, who can talk of nothing but expenses and
who smiles at nothing but things getting cheaper -- is it
possible that this woman is no other than the slender Varya whom
I fell in love with so passionately for her fine, clear
intelligence, for her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello his
Desdemona, for her "sympathy" for my studies? Could that woman be
no other than the Varya who had once borne me a son?

I look with strained attention into the face of this flabby,
spiritless, clumsy old woman, seeking in her my Varya, but of her
past self nothing is left but her anxiety over my health and her
manner of calling my salary "our salary," and my cap "our cap."
It is painful for me to look at her, and, to give her what little
comfort I can, I let her say what she likes, and say nothing even
when she passes unjust criticisms on other people or pitches into
me for not having a private practice or not publishing
text-books.

Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly
remembers with dismay that I have not had my tea.

"What am I thinking about, sitting here?" she says, getting up.
"The samovar has been on the table ever so long, and here I stay
gossiping. My goodness! how forgetful I am growing!"

She goes out quickly, and stops in the doorway to say:

"We owe Yegor five months' wages. Did you know it? You mustn't
let the servants' wages run on; how many times I have said it!
It's much easier to pay ten roubles a month than fifty roubles
every five months!"

As she goes out, she stops to say:

"The person I am sorriest for is our Liza. The girl studies at
the Conservatoire, always mixes with people of good position, and
goodness knows how she is dressed. Her fur coat is in such a
state she is ashamed to show herself in the street. If she were
somebody else's daughter it wouldn't matter, but of course every
one knows that her father is a distinguished professor, a privy
councillor."

And having reproached me with my rank and reputation, she goes
away at last. That is how my day begins. It does not improve as
it goes on.

As I am drinking my tea, my Liza comes in wearing her fur coat
and her cap, with her music in her hand, already quite ready to
go to the Conservatoire. She is two-and-twenty. She looks
younger, is pretty, and rather like my wife in her young days.
She kisses me tenderly on my forehead and on my hand, and says:

"Good-morning, papa; are you quite well?"

As a child she was very fond of ice-cream, and I used often to
take her to a confectioner's. Ice-cream was for her the type of
everything delightful. If she wanted to praise me she would say:
"You are as nice as cream, papa." We used to call one of her
little fingers "pistachio ice," the next, "cream ice," the third
"raspberry," and so on. Usually when she came in to say
good-morning to me I used to sit her on my knee, kiss her little
fingers, and say:

"Creamy ice . . . pistachio . . . lemon. . . ."

And now, from old habit, I kiss Liza's fingers and mutter:
"Pistachio . . . cream . . . lemon. . ." but the effect is
utterly different. I am cold as ice and I am ashamed. When my
daughter comes in to me and touches my forehead with her lips I
start as though a bee had stung me on the head, give a forced
smile, and turn my face away. Ever since I have been suffering
from sleeplessness, a question sticks in my brain like a nail. My
daughter often sees me, an old man and a distinguished man, blush
painfully at being in debt to my footman; she sees how often
anxiety over petty debts forces me to lay aside my work and to
walk u p and down the room for hours together, thinking; but why
is it she never comes to me in secret to whisper in my ear:
"Father, here is my watch, here are my bracelets, my earrings, my
dresses. . . . Pawn them all; you want money . . ."? How is it
that, seeing how her mother and I are placed in a false position
and do our utmost to hide our poverty from people, she does not
give up her expensive pleasure of music lessons? I would not
accept her watch nor her bracelets, nor the sacrifice of her
lessons -- God forbid! That isn't what I want.

I think at the same time of my son, the officer at Warsaw. He is
a clever, honest, and sober fellow. But that is not enough for
me. I think if I had an old father, and if I knew there were
moments when he was put to shame by his poverty, I should give up
my officer's commission to somebody else, and should go out to
earn my living as a workman. Such thoughts about my children
poison me. What is the use of them? It is only a narrow-minded or
embittered man who can harbour evil thoughts about ordinary
people because they are not heroes. But enough of that!

At a quarter to ten I have to go and give a lecture to my dear
boys. I dress and walk along the road which I have known for
thirty years, and which has its history for me. Here is the big
grey house with the chemist's shop; at this point there used to
stand a little house, and in it was a beershop; in that beershop
I thought out my thesis and wrote my first love-letter to Varya.
I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed "Historia morbi." Here
there is a grocer's shop; at one time it was kept by a little
Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant
woman, who liked the students because "every one of them has a
mother"; now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a
very stolid man who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are
the gloomy gates of the University, which have long needed doing
up; I see the bored porter in his sheep-skin, the broom, the
drifts of snow. . . . On a boy coming fresh from the provinces
and imagining that the temple of science must really be a temple,
such gates cannot make a healthy impression. Altogether the
dilapidated condition of the University buildings, the gloominess
of the corridors, the griminess of the walls, the lack of light,
the dejected aspect of the steps, the hat-stands and the benches,
take a prominent position among predisposing causes in the
history of Russian pessimism. . . . Here is our garden . . . I
fancy it has grown neither better nor worse since I was a
student. I don't like it. It would be far more sensible if there
were tall pines and fine oaks growing here instead of
sickly-looking lime-trees, yellow acacias, and skimpy pollard
lilacs. The student whose state of mind is in the majority of
cases created by his surroundings, ought in the place where he is
studying to see facing him at every turn nothing but what is
lofty, strong and elegant. . . . God preserve him from gaunt
trees, broken windows, grey walls, and doors covered with torn
American leather!

When I go to my own entrance the door is flung wide open, and I
am met by my colleague, contemporary, and namesake, the porter
Nikolay. As he lets me in he clears his throat and says:

"A frost, your Excellency!"

Or, if my great-coat is wet:

"Rain, your Excellency!"

Then he runs on ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In
my study he carefully takes off my fur coat, and while doing so
manages to tell me some bit of University news. Thanks to the
close intimacy existing between all the University porters and
beadles, he knows everything that goes on in the four faculties,
in the office, in the rector's private room, in the library. What
does he not know? When in an evil day a rector or dean, for
instance, retires, I hear him in conversation with the young
porters mention the candidates for the post, explain that such a
one would not be confirmed by the minister, that another would
himself refuse to accept it, then drop into fantastic details
concerning mysterious papers received in the office, secret
conversations alleged to have taken place between the minister
and the trustee, and so on. With the exception of these details,
he almost always turns out to be right. His estimates of the
candidates, though original, are very correct, too. If one wants
to know in what year some one read his thesis, entered the
service, retired, or died, then summon to your assistance the
vast memory of that soldier, and he will not only tell you the
year, the month and the day, but will furnish you also with the
details that accompanied this or that event. Only one who loves
can remember like that.

He is the guardian of the University traditions. From the porters
who were his predecessors he has inherited many legends of
University life, has added to that wealth much of his own gained
during his time of service, and if you care to hear he will tell
you many long and intimate stories. He can tell one about
extraordinary sages who knew _everything_, about remarkable
students who did not sleep for weeks, about numerous martyrs and
victims of science; with him good triumphs over evil, the weak
always vanquishes the strong, the wise man the fool, the humble
the proud, the young the old. There is no need to take all these
fables and legends for sterling coin; but filter them, and you
will have left what is wanted: our fine traditions and the names
of real heroes, recognized as such by all.

In our society the knowledge of the learned world consists of
anecdotes of the extraordinary absentmindedness of certain old
professors, and two or three witticisms variously ascribed to
Gruber, to me, and to Babukin. For the educated public that is
not much. If it loved science, learned men, and students, as
Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have contained whole
epics, records of sayings and doings such as, unfortunately, it
cannot boast of now.

After telling me a piece of news, Nikolay assumes a severe
expression, and conversation about business begins. If any
outsider could at such times overhear Nikolay's free use of our
terminology, he might perhaps imagine that he was a learned man
disguised as a soldier. And, by the way, the rumours of the
erudition of the University porters are greatly exaggerated. It
is true that Nikolay knows more than a hundred Latin words, knows
how to put the skeleton together, sometimes prepares the
apparatus and amuses the students by some long, learned
quotation, but the by no means complicated theory of the
circulation of the blood, for instance, is as much a mystery to
him now as it was twenty years ago.

At the table in my study, bending low over some book or
preparation, sits Pyotr Ignatyevitch, my demonstrator, a modest
and industrious but by no means clever man of five-and-thirty,
already bald and corpulent; he works from morning to night, reads
a lot, remembers well everything he has read -- and in that way
he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else he is a carthorse or,
in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse characteristics
that show his lack of talent are these: his outlook is narrow and
sharply limited by his specialty; outside his special branch he
is simple as a child.

"Fancy! what a misfortune! They say Skobelev is dead."

Nikolay crosses himself, but Pyotr Ignatyevitch turns to me and
asks:

"What Skobelev is that?"

Another time -- somewhat earlier -- I told him that Professor
Perov was dead. Good Pyotr Ignatyevitch asked:

"What did he lecture on?"

I believe if Patti had sung in his very ear, if a horde of
Chinese had invaded Russia, if there had been an earthquake, he
would not have stirred a limb, but screwing up his eye, would
have gone on calmly looking through his microscope. What is he to
Hecuba or Hecuba to him, in fact? I would give a good deal to see
how this dry stick sleeps with his wife at night.

Another characteristic is his fanatical faith in the
infallibility of science, and, above all, of everything written
by the Germans. He believes in himself, in his preparations;
knows the object of life, and knows nothing of the doubts and
disappointments that turn the hair o f talent grey. He has a
slavish reverence for authorities and a complete lack of any
desire for independent thought. To change his convictions is
difficult, to argue with him impossible. How is one to argue with
a man who is firmly persuaded that medicine is the finest of
sciences, that doctors are the best of men, and that the
traditions of the medical profession are superior to those of any
other? Of the evil past of medicine only one tradition has been
preserved -- the white tie still worn by doctors; for a learned
-- in fact, for any educated man the only traditions that can
exist are those of the University as a whole, with no distinction
between medicine, law, etc. But it would be hard for Pyotr
Ignatyevitch to accept these facts, and he is ready to argue with
you till the day of judgment.

I have a clear picture in my mind of his future. In the course of
his life he will prepare many hundreds of chemicals of
exceptional purity; he will write a number of dry and very
accurate memoranda, will make some dozen conscientious
translations, but he won't do anything striking. To do that one
must have imagination, inventiveness, the gift of insight, and
Pyotr Ignatyevitch has nothing of the kind. In short, he is not a
master in science, but a journeyman.

Pyotr Ignatyevitch, Nikolay, and I, talk in subdued tones. We are
not quite ourselves. There is always a peculiar feeling when one
hears through the doors a murmur as of the sea from the
lecture-theatre. In the course of thirty years I have not grown
accustomed to this feeling, and I experience it every morning. I
nervously button up my coat, ask Nikolay unnecessary questions,
lose my temper. . . . It is just as though I were frightened; it
is not timidity, though, but something different which I can
neither describe nor find a name for.

Quite unnecessarily, I look at my watch and say: "Well, it's time
to go in."

And we march into the room in the following order: foremost goes
Nikolay, with the chemicals and apparatus or with a chart; after
him I come; and then the carthorse follows humbly, with hanging
head; or, when necessary, a dead body is carried in first on a
stretcher, followed by Nikolay, and so on. On my entrance the
students all stand up, then they sit down, and the sound as of
the sea is suddenly hushed. Stillness reigns.

I know what I am going to lecture about, but I don't know how I
am going to lecture, where I am going to begin or with what I am
going to end. I haven't a single sentence ready in my head. But I
have only to look round the lecture-hall (it is built in the form
of an amphitheatre) and utter the stereotyped phrase, "Last
lecture we stopped at . . ." when sentences spring up from my
soul in a long string, and I am carried away by my own eloquence.
I speak with irresistible rapidity and passion, and it seems as
though there were no force which could check the flow of my
words. To lecture well -- that is, with profit to the listeners
and without boring them -- one must have, besides talent,
experience and a special knack; one must possess a clear
conception of one's own powers, of the audience to which one is
lecturing, and of the subject of one's lecture. Moreover, one
must be a man who knows what he is doing; one must keep a sharp
lookout, and not for one second lose sight of what lies before
one.

A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer, does
twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches
the singer, makes a motion sideways, first to the drum then to
the wind-instruments, and so on. I do just the same when I
lecture. Before me a hundred and fifty faces, all unlike one
another; three hundred eyes all looking straight into my face. My
object is to dominate this many-headed monster. If every moment
as I lecture I have a clear vision of the degree of its attention
and its power of comprehension, it is in my power. The other foe
I have to overcome is in myself. It is the infinite variety of
forms, phenomena, laws, and the multitude of ideas of my own and
other people's conditioned by them. Every moment I must have the
skill to snatch out of that vast mass of material what is most
important and necessary, and, as rapidly as my words flow, clothe
my thought in a form in which it can be grasped by the monster's
intelligence, and may arouse its attention, and at the same time
one must keep a sharp lookout that one's thoughts are conveyed,
not just as they come, but in a certain order, essential for the
correct composition of the picture I wish to sketch. Further, I
endeavour to make my diction literary, my definitions brief and
precise, my wording, as far as possible, simple and eloquent.
Every minute I have to pull myself up and remember that I have
only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, one has
one's work cut out. At one and the same minute one has to play
the part of savant and teacher and orator, and it's a bad thing
if the orator gets the upper hand of the savant or of the teacher
in one, or _vice versa_.

You lecture for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour, when you
notice that the students are beginning to look at the ceiling, at
Pyotr Ignatyevitch; one is feeling for his handkerchief, another
shifts in his seat, another smiles at his thoughts. . . . That
means that their attention is flagging. Something must be done.
Taking advantage of the first opportunity, I make some pun. A
broad grin comes on to a hundred and fifty faces, the eyes shine
brightly, the sound of the sea is audible for a brief moment. . .
. I laugh too. Their attention is refreshed, and I can go on.

No kind of sport, no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me
such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to
abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that
inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real
life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his
exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience
after every lecture.

That was in old times. Now at lectures I feel nothing but
torture. Before half an hour is over I am conscious of an
overwhelming weakness in my legs and my shoulders. I sit down in
my chair, but I am not accustomed to lecture sitting down; a
minute later I get up and go on standing, then sit down again.
There is a dryness in my mouth, my voice grows husky, my head
begins to go round. . . . To conceal my condition from my
audience I continually drink water, cough, often blow my nose as
though I were hindered by a cold, make puns inappropriately, and
in the end break off earlier than I ought to. But above all I am
ashamed.

My conscience and my intelligence tell me that the very best
thing I could do now would be to deliver a farewell lecture to
the boys, to say my last word to them, to bless them, and give up
my post to a man younger and stronger than me. But, God, be my
judge, I have not manly courage enough to act according to my
conscience.

Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher and not a theologian. I
know perfectly well that I cannot live more than another six
months; it might be supposed that I ought now to be chiefly
concerned with the question of the shadowy life beyond the grave,
and the visions that will visit my slumbers in the tomb. But for
some reason my soul refuses to recognize these questions, though
my mind is fully alive to their importance. Just as twenty,
thirty years ago, so now, on the threshold of death, I am
interested in nothing but science. As I yield up my last breath I
shall still believe that science is the most important, the most
splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man; that it
always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love,
and that only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature.
This faith is perhaps naive and may rest on false assumptions,
but it is not my fault that I believe that and nothing else; I
cannot overcome in myself this belief.

But that is not the point. I only ask people to be indulgent to
my weakness, and to realize that to tear from the lecture-theatre
and his pupils a man who is more interested in the history of the
development of the bone  medulla than in the
 final object of creation would be equivalent to taking him and
nailing him up in his coffin without waiting for him to be dead.

Sleeplessness and the consequent strain of combating increasing
weakness leads to something strange in me. In the middle of my
lecture tears suddenly rise in my throat, my eyes begin to smart,
and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch out my
hands before me and break into loud lamentation. I want to cry
out in a loud voice that I, a famous man, have been sentenced by
fate to the death penalty, that within some six months another
man will be in control here in the lecture-theatre. I want to
shriek that I am poisoned; new ideas such as I have not known
before have poisoned the last days of my life, and are still
stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at that moment my position
seems to me so awful that I want all my listeners to be
horrified, to leap up from their seats and to rush in panic
terror, with desperate screams, to the exit.

It is not easy to get through such moments.

II

After my lecture I sit at home and work. I read journals and
monographs, or prepare my next lecture; sometimes I write
something. I work with interruptions, as I have from time to time
to see visitors.

There is a ring at the bell. It is a colleague come to discuss
some business matter with me. He comes in to me with his hat and
his stick, and, holding out both these objects to me, says:

"Only for a minute! Only for a minute! Sit down, _collega_! Only
a couple of words."

To begin with, we both try to show each other that we are
extraordinarily polite and highly delighted to see each other. I
make him sit down in an easy-chair, and he makes me sit down; as
we do so, we cautiously pat each other on the back, touch each
other's buttons, and it looks as though we were feeling each
other and afraid of scorching our fingers. Both of us laugh,
though we say nothing amusing. When we are seated we bow our
heads towards each other and begin talking in subdued voices.
However affectionately disposed we may be to one another, we
cannot help adorning our conversation with all sorts of Chinese
mannerisms, such as "As you so justly observed," or "I have
already had the honour to inform you"; we cannot help laughing if
one of us makes a joke, however unsuccessfully. When we have
finished with business my colleague gets up impulsively and,
waving his hat in the direction of my work, begins to say
good-bye. Again we paw one another and laugh. I see him into the
hall; when I assist my colleague to put on his coat, while he
does all he can to decline this high honour. Then when Yegor
opens the door my colleague declares that I shall catch cold,
while I make a show of being ready to go even into the street
with him. And when at last I go back into my study my face still
goes on smiling, I suppose from inertia.

A little later another ring at the bell. Somebody comes into the
hall, and is a long time coughing and taking off his things.
Yegor announces a student. I tell him to ask him in. A minute
later a young man of agreeable appearance comes in. For the last
year he and I have been on strained relations; he answers me
disgracefully at the examinations, and I mark him one. Every year
I have some seven such hopefuls whom, to express it in the
students' slang, I "chivy" or "floor." Those of them who fail in
their examination through incapacity or illness usually bear
their cross patiently and do not haggle with me; those who come
to the house and haggle with me are always youths of sanguine
temperament, broad natures, whose failure at examinations spoils
their appetites and hinders them from visiting the opera with
their usual regularity. I let the first class off easily, but the
second I chivy through a whole year.

"Sit down," I say to my visitor; "what have you to tell me?"

"Excuse me, professor, for troubling you," he begins, hesitating,
and not looking me in the face. "I would not have ventured to
trouble you if it had not been . . . I have been up for your
examination five times, and have been ploughed. . . . I beg you,
be so good as to mark me for a pass, because . . ."

The argument which all the sluggards bring forward on their own
behalf is always the same; they have passed well in all their
subjects and have only come to grief in mine, and that is the
more surprising because they have always been particularly
interested in my subject and knew it so well; their failure has
always been entirely owing to some incomprehensible
misunderstanding.

"Excuse me, my friend," I say to the visitor; "I cannot mark you
for a pass. Go and read up the lectures and come to me again.
Then we shall see."

A pause. I feel an impulse to torment the student a little for
liking beer and the opera better than science, and I say, with a
sigh:

"To my mind, the best thing you can do now is to give up medicine
altogether. If, with your abilities, you cannot succeed in
passing the examination, it's evident that you have neither the
desire nor the vocation for a doctor's calling."

The sanguine youth's face lengthens.

"Excuse me, professor," he laughs, "but that would be odd of me,
to say the least of it. After studying for five years, all at
once to give it up."

"Oh, well! Better to have lost your five years than have to spend
the rest of your life in doing work you do not care for."

But at once I feel sorry for him, and I hasten to add:

"However, as you think best. And so read a little more and come
again."

"When?" the idle youth asks in a hollow voice.

"When you like. Tomorrow if you like."

And in his good-natured eyes I read:

"I can come all right, but of course you will plough me again,
you beast!"

"Of course," I say, "you won't know more science for going in for
my examination another fifteen times, but it is training your
character, and you must be thankful for that."

Silence follows. I get up and wait for my visitor to go, but he
stands and looks towards the window, fingers his beard, and
thinks. It grows boring.

The sanguine youth's voice is pleasant and mellow, his eyes are
clever and ironical, his face is genial, though a little bloated
from frequent indulgence in beer and overlong lying on the sofa;
he looks as though he could tell me a lot of interesting things
about the opera, about his affairs of the heart, and about
comrades whom he likes. Unluckily, it is not the thing to discuss
these subjects, or else I should have been glad to listen to him.

"Professor, I give you my word of honour that if you mark me for
a pass I . . . I'll . . ."

As soon as we reach the "word of honour" I wave my hands and sit
down to the table. The student ponders a minute longer, and says
dejectedly:

"In that case, good-bye. . . I beg your pardon."

"Good-bye, my friend. Good luck to you."

He goes irresolutely into the hall, slowly puts on his outdoor
things, and, going out into the street, probably ponders for some
time longer; unable to think of anything, except "old devil,"
inwardly addressed to me, he goes into a wretched restaurant to
dine and drink beer, and then home to bed. "Peace be to thy
ashes, honest toiler."

A third ring at the bell. A young doctor, in a pair of new black
trousers, gold spectacles, and of course a white tie, walks in.
He introduces himself. I beg him to be seated, and ask what I can
do for him. Not without emotion, the young devotee of science
begins telling me that he has passed his examination as a doctor
of medicine, and that he has now only to write his dissertation.
He would like to work with me under my guidance, and he would be
greatly obliged to me if I would give him a subject for his
dissertation.

"Very glad to be of use to you, colleague," I say, "but just let
us come to an understanding as to the meaning of a dissertation.
That word is taken to mean a composition which is a product of
independent creative effort. Is that not so? A work written on
another man's subject and under another man's guidance is called
something different. . . ."

The doctor says nothing. I fly into a rage and jump up from my
seat.

"Why is it you all come to me?" I cry angrily. "Do I keep a shop?
I don't deal in subjects. For the tho usand and oneth time I ask
you all to leave me in peace! Excuse my brutality, but I am quite
sick of it!"

The doctor remains silent, but a faint flush is apparent on his
cheek-bones. His face expresses a profound reverence for my fame
and my learning, but from his eyes I can see he feels a contempt
for my voice, my pitiful figure, and my nervous gesticulation. I
impress him in my anger as a queer fish.

"I don't keep a shop," I go on angrily. "And it is a strange
thing! Why don't you want to be independent? Why have you such a
distaste for independence?"

I say a great deal, but he still remains silent. By degrees I
calm down, and of course give in. The doctor gets a subject from
me for his theme not worth a halfpenny, writes under my
supervision a dissertation of no use to any one, with dignity
defends it in a dreary discussion, and receives a degree of no
use to him.

The rings at the bell may follow one another endlessly, but I
will confine my description here to four of them. The bell rings
for the fourth time, and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of
a dress, a dear voice. . . .

Eighteen years ago a colleague of mine, an oculist, died leaving
a little daughter Katya, a child of seven, and sixty thousand
roubles. In his will he made me the child's guardian. Till she
was ten years old Katya lived with us as one of the family, then
she was sent to a boarding-school, and only spent the summer
holidays with us. I never had time to look after her education. I
only superintended it at leisure moments, and so I can say very
little about her childhood.

The first thing I remember, and like so much in remembrance, is
the extraordinary trustfulness with which she came into our house
and let herself be treated by the doctors, a trustfulness which
was always shining in her little face. She would sit somewhere
out of the way, with her face tied up, invariably watching
something with attention; whether she watched me writing or
turning over the pages of a book, or watched my wife bustling
about, or the cook scrubbing a potato in the kitchen, or the dog
playing, her eyes invariably expressed the same thought -- that
is, "Everything that is done in this world is nice and sensible."
She was curious, and very fond of talking to me. Sometimes she
would sit at the table opposite me, watching my movements and
asking questions. It interested her to know what I was reading,
what I did at the University, whether I was not afraid of the
dead bodies, what I did with my salary.

"Do the students fight at the University?" she would ask.

"They do, dear."

"And do you make them go down on their knees?"

"Yes, I do."

And she thought it funny that the students fought and I made them
go down on their knees, and she laughed. She was a gentle,
patient, good child. It happened not infrequently that I saw
something taken away from her, saw her punished without reason,
or her curiosity repressed; at such times a look of sadness was
mixed with the invariable expression of trustfulness on her face
-- that was all. I did not know how to take her part; only when I
saw her sad I had an inclination to draw her to me and to
commiserate her like some old nurse: "My poor little orphan one!"

I remember, too, that she was fond of fine clothes and of
sprinkling herself with scent. In that respect she was like me.
I, too, am fond of pretty clothes and nice scent.

I regret that I had not time nor inclination to watch over the
rise and development of the passion which took complete
possession of Katya when she was fourteen or fifteen. I mean her
passionate love for the theatre. When she used to come from
boarding-school and stay with us for the summer holidays, she
talked of nothing with such pleasure and such warmth as of plays
and actors. She bored us with her continual talk of the theatre.
My wife and children would not listen to her. I was the only one
who had not the courage to refuse to attend to her. When she had
a longing to share her transports, she used to come into my study
and say in an imploring tone:

"Nikolay Stepanovitch, do let me talk to you about the theatre!"

I pointed to the clock, and said:

"I'll give you half an hour -- begin."

Later on she used to bring with her dozens of portraits of actors
and actresses which she worshipped; then she attempted several
times to take part in private theatricals, and the upshot of it
all was that when she left school she came to me and announced
that she was born to be an actress.

I had never shared Katya's inclinations for the theatre. To my
mind, if a play is good there is no need to trouble the actors in
order that it may make the right impression; it is enough to read
it. If the play is poor, no acting will make it good.

In my youth I often visited the theatre, and now my family takes
a box twice a year and carries me off for a little distraction.
Of course, that is not enough to give me the right to judge of
the theatre. In my opinion the theatre has become no better than
it was thirty or forty years ago. Just as in the past, I can
never find a glass of clean water in the corridors or foyers of
the theatre. Just as in the past, the attendants fine me twenty
kopecks for my fur coat, though there is nothing reprehensible in
wearing a warm coat in winter. As in the past, for no sort of
reason, music is played in the intervals, which adds something
new and uncalled-for to the impression made by the play. As in
the past, men go in the intervals and drink spirits in the
buffet. If no progress can be seen in trifles, I should look for
it in vain in what is more important. When an actor wrapped from
head to foot in stage traditions and conventions tries to recite
a simple ordinary speech, "To be or not to be," not simply, but
invariably with the accompaniment of hissing and convulsive
movements all over his body, or when he tries to convince me at
all costs that Tchatsky, who talks so much with fools and is so
fond of folly, is a very clever man, and that "Woe from Wit" is
not a dull play, the stage gives me the same feeling of
conventionality which bored me so much forty years ago when I was
regaled with the classical howling and beating on the breast. And
every time I come out of the theatre more conservative than I go
in.

The sentimental and confiding public may be persuaded that the
stage, even in its present form, is a school; but any one who is
familiar with a school in its true sense will not be caught with
that bait. I cannot say what will happen in fifty or a hundred
years, but in its actual condition the theatre can serve only as
an entertainment. But this entertainment is too costly to be
frequently enjoyed. It robs the state of thousands of healthy and
talented young men and women, who, if they had not devoted
themselves to the theatre, might have been good doctors, farmers,
schoolmistresses, officers; it robs the public of the evening
hours -- the best time for intellectual work and social
intercourse. I say nothing of the waste of money and the moral
damage to the spectator when he sees murder, fornication, or
false witness unsuitably treated on the stage.

Katya was of an entirely different opinion. She assured me that
the theatre, even in its present condition, was superior to the
lecture-hall, to books, or to anything in the world. The stage
was a power that united in itself all the arts, and actors were
missionaries. No art nor science was capable of producing so
strong and so certain an effect on the soul of man as the stage,
and it was with good reason that an actor of medium quality
enjoys greater popularity than the greatest savant or artist. And
no sort of public service could provide such enjoyment and
gratification as the theatre.

And one fine day Katya joined a troupe of actors, and went off, I
believe to Ufa, taking away with her a good supply of money, a
store of rainbow hopes, and the most aristocratic views of her
work.

Her first letters on the journey were marvellous. I read them,
and was simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could
contain so much youth, purity of spirit, holy innocence, and at
the same time subtle and apt judgments which would have done
credit to a fine mas culine intellect. It was more like a
rapturous paean of praise she sent me than a mere description of
the Volga, the country, the towns she visited, her companions,
her failures and successes; every sentence was fragrant with that
confiding trustfulness I was accustomed to read in her face --
and at the same time there were a great many grammatical
mistakes, and there was scarcely any punctuation at all.

Before six months had passed I received a highly poetical and
enthusiastic letter beginning with the words, "I have come to
love . . ." This letter was accompanied by a photograph
representing a young man with a shaven face, a wide-brimmed hat,
and a plaid flung over his shoulder. The letters that followed
were as splendid as before, but now commas and stops made their
appearance in them, the grammatical mistakes disappeared, and
there was a distinctly masculine flavour about them. Katya began
writing to me how splendid it would be to build a great theatre
somewhere on the Volga, on a cooperative system, and to attract
to the enterprise the rich merchants and the steamer owners;
there would be a great deal of money in it; there would be vast
audiences; the actors would play on co-operative terms. . . .
Possibly all this was really excellent, but it seemed to me that
such schemes could only originate from a man's mind.

However that may have been, for a year and a half everything
seemed to go well: Katya was in love, believed in her work, and
was happy; but then I began to notice in her letters unmistakable
signs of falling off. It began with Katya's complaining of her
companions -- this was the first and most ominous symptom; if a
young scientific or literary man begins his career with bitter
complaints of scientific and literary men, it is a sure sign that
he is worn out and not fit for his work. Katya wrote to me that
her companions did not attend the rehearsals and never knew their
parts; that one could see in every one of them an utter
disrespect for the public in the production of absurd plays, and
in their behaviour on the stage; that for the benefit of the
Actors' Fund, which they only talked about, actresses of the
serious drama demeaned themselves by singing chansonettes, while
tragic actors sang comic songs making fun of deceived husbands
and the pregnant condition of unfaithful wives, and so on. In
fact, it was amazing that all this had not yet ruined the
provincial stage, and that it could still maintain itself on such
a rotten and unsubstantial footing.

In answer I wrote Katya a long and, I must confess, a very boring
letter. Among other things, I wrote to her:

"I have more than once happened to converse with old actors, very
worthy men, who showed a friendly disposition towards me; from my
conversations with them I could understand that their work was
controlled not so much by their own intelligence and free choice
as by fashion and the mood of the public. The best of them had
had to play in their day in tragedy, in operetta, in Parisian
farces, and in extravaganzas, and they always seemed equally sure
that they were on the right path and that they were of use. So,
as you see, the cause of the evil must be sought, not in the
actors, but, more deeply, in the art itself and in the attitude
of the whole of society to it."

This letter of mine only irritated Katya. She answered me:

"You and I are singing parts out of different operas. I wrote to
you, not of the worthy men who showed a friendly disposition to
you, but of a band of knaves who have nothing worthy about them.
They are a horde of savages who have got on the stage simply
because no one would have taken them elsewhere, and who call
themselves artists simply because they are impudent. There are
numbers of dull-witted creatures, drunkards, intriguing schemers
and slanderers, but there is not one person of talent among them.
I cannot tell you how bitter it is to me that the art I love has
fallen into the hands of people I detest; how bitter it is that
the best men look on at evil from afar, not caring to come
closer, and, instead of intervening, write ponderous commonplaces
and utterly useless sermons. . . ." And so on, all in the same
style.

A little time passed, and I got this letter: "I have been
brutally deceived. I cannot go on living. Dispose of my money as
you think best. I loved you as my father and my only friend.
Good-bye."

It turned out that _he_, too, belonged to the "horde of savages."
Later on, from certain hints, I gathered that there had been an
attempt at suicide. I believe Katya tried to poison herself. I
imagine that she must have been seriously ill afterwards, as the
next letter I got was from Yalta, where she had most probably
been sent by the doctors. Her last letter contained a request to
send her a thousand roubles to Yalta as quickly as possible, and
ended with these words:

"Excuse the gloominess of this letter; yesterday I buried my
child." After spending about a year in the Crimea, she returned
home.

She had been about four years on her travels, and during those
four years, I must confess, I had played a rather strange and
unenviable part in regard to her. When in earlier days she had
told me she was going on the stage, and then wrote to me of her
love; when she was periodically overcome by extravagance, and I
continually had to send her first one and then two thousand
roubles; when she wrote to me of her intention of suicide, and
then of the death of her baby, every time I lost my head, and all
my sympathy for her sufferings found no expression except that,
after prolonged reflection, I wrote long, boring letters which I
might just as well not have written. And yet I took a father's
place with her and loved her like a daughter!

Now Katya is living less than half a mile off. She has taken a
flat of five rooms, and has installed herself fairly comfortably
and in the taste of the day. If any one were to undertake to
describe her surroundings, the most characteristic note in the
picture would be indolence. For the indolent body there are soft
lounges, soft stools; for indolent feet soft rugs; for indolent
eyes faded, dingy, or flat colours; for the indolent soul the
walls are hung with a number of cheap fans and trivial pictures,
in which the originality of the execution is more conspicuous
than the subject; and the room contains a multitude of little
tables and shelves filled with utterly useless articles of no
value, and shapeless rags in place of curtains. . . . All this,
together with the dread of bright colours, of symmetry, and of
empty space, bears witness not only to spiritual indolence, but
also to a corruption of natural taste. For days together Katya
lies on the lounge reading, principally novels and stories. She
only goes out of the house once a day, in the afternoon, to see
me.

I go on working while Katya sits silent not far from me on the
sofa, wrapping herself in her shawl, as though she were cold.
Either because I find her sympathetic or because I was used to
her frequent visits when she was a little girl, her presence does
not prevent me from concentrating my attention. From time to time
I mechanically ask her some question; she gives very brief
replies; or, to rest for a minute, I turn round and watch her as
she looks dreamily at some medical journal or review. And at such
moments I notice that her face has lost the old look of confiding
trustfulness. Her expression now is cold, apathetic, and
absent-minded, like that of passengers who had to wait too long
for a train. She is dressed, as in old days, simply and
beautifully, but carelessly; her dress and her hair show visible
traces of the sofas and rocking-chairs in which she spends whole
days at a stretch. And she has lost the curiosity she had in old
days. She has ceased to ask me questions now, as though she had
experienced everything in life and looked for nothing new from
it.

Towards four o'clock there begins to be sounds of movement in the
hall and in the drawing-room. Liza has come back from the
Conservatoire, and has brought some girl-friends in with her. We
hear them playing on the piano, trying their voices and laughing;
in the dining-room Yegor is laying th e table, with the clatter
of crockery.

"Good-bye," said Katya. "I won't go in and see your people today.
They must excuse me. I haven't time. Come and see me."

While I am seeing her to the door, she looks me up and down
grimly, and says with vexation:

"You are getting thinner and thinner! Why don't you consult a
doctor? I'll call at Sergey Fyodorovitch's and ask him to have a
look at you."

"There's no need, Katya."

"I can't think where your people's eyes are! They are a nice lot,
I must say!"

She puts on her fur coat abruptly, and as she does so two or
three hairpins drop unnoticed on the floor from her carelessly
arranged hair. She is too lazy and in too great a hurry to do her
hair up; she carelessly stuffs the falling curls under her hat,
and goes away.

When I go into the dining-room my wife asks me:

"Was Katya with you just now? Why didn't she come in to see us?
It's really strange . . . ."

"Mamma," Liza says to her reproachfully, "let her alone, if she
doesn't want to. We are not going down on our knees to her."

"It's very neglectful, anyway. To sit for three hours in the
study without remembering our existence! But of course she must
do as she likes."

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is beyond my
comprehension, and probably one would have to be a woman in order
to understand it. I am ready to stake my life that of the hundred
and fifty young men I see every day in the lecture-theatre, and
of the hundred elderly ones I meet every week, hardly one could
be found capable of understanding their hatred and aversion for
Katya's past -- that is, for her having been a mother without
being a wife, and for her having had an illegitimate child; and
at the same time I cannot recall one woman or girl of my
acquaintance who would not consciously or unconsciously harbour
such feelings. And this is not because woman is purer or more
virtuous than man: why, virtue and purity are not very different
from vice if they are not free from evil feeling. I attribute
this simply to the backwardness of woman. The mournful feeling of
compassion and the pang of conscience experienced by a modern man
at the sight of suffering is, to my mind, far greater proof of
culture and moral elevation than hatred and aversion. Woman is as
tearful and as coarse in her feelings now as she was in the
Middle Ages, and to my thinking those who advise that she should
be educated like a man are quite right.

My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for
ingratitude, for pride, for eccentricity, and for the numerous
vices which one woman can always find in another.

Besides my wife and daughter and me, there are dining with us two
or three of my daughter's friends and Alexandr Adolfovitch
Gnekker, her admirer and suitor. He is a fair-haired young man
under thirty, of medium height, very stout and broad-shouldered,
with red whiskers near his ears, and little waxed moustaches
which make his plump smooth face look like a toy. He is dressed
in a very short reefer jacket, a flowered waistcoat, breeches
very full at the top and very narrow at the ankle, with a large
check pattern on them, and yellow boots without heels. He has
prominent eyes like a crab's, his cravat is like a crab's neck,
and I even fancy there is a smell of crab-soup about the young
man's whole person. He visits us every day, but no one in my
family knows anything of his origin nor of the place of his
education, nor of his means of livelihood. He neither plays nor
sings, but has some connection with music and singing, sells
somebody's pianos somewhere, is frequently at the Conservatoire,
is acquainted with all the celebrities, and is a steward at the
concerts; he criticizes music with great authority, and I have
noticed that people are eager to agree with him.

Rich people always have dependents hanging about them; the arts
and sciences have the same. I believe there is not an art nor a
science in the world free from "foreign bodies" after the style
of this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a musician, and possibly I am
mistaken in regard to Mr. Gnekker, of whom, indeed, I know very
little. But his air of authority and the dignity with which he
takes his stand beside the piano when any one is playing or
singing strike me as very suspicious.

You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor,
but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity from
that petty bourgeois atmosphere which is so often brought into
your house and into your mood by the attentions of suitors, by
matchmaking and marriage. I can never reconcile myself, for
instance, to the expression of triumph on my wife's face every
time Gnekker is in our company, nor can I reconcile myself to the
bottles of Lafitte, port and sherry which are only brought out on
his account, that he may see with his own eyes the liberal and
luxurious way in which we live. I cannot tolerate the habit of
spasmodic laughter Liza has picked up at the Conservatoire, and
her way of screwing up her eyes whenever there are men in the
room. Above all, I cannot understand why a creature utterly alien
to my habits, my studies, my whole manner of life, completely
different from the people I like, should come and see me every
day, and every day should dine with me. My wife and my servants
mysteriously whisper that he is a suitor, but still I don't
understand his presence; it rouses in me the same wonder and
perplexity as if they were to set a Zulu beside me at the table.
And it seems strange to me, too, that my daughter, whom I am used
to thinking of as a child, should love that cravat, those eyes,
those soft cheeks. . . .

In the old days I used to like my dinner, or at least was
indifferent about it; now it excites in me no feeling but
weariness and irritation. Ever since I became an "Excellency" and
one of the Deans of the Faculty my family has for some reason
found it necessary to make a complete change in our menu and
dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes to which I was
accustomed when I was a student and when I was in practice, now
they feed me with a puree with little white things like circles
floating about in it, and kidneys stewed in madeira. My rank as a
general and my fame have robbed me for ever of cabbage-soup and
savoury pies, and goose with apple-sauce, and bream with boiled
grain. They have robbed me of our maid-servant Agasha, a chatty
and laughter-loving old woman, instead of whom Yegor, a
dull-witted and conceited fellow with a white glove on his right
hand, waits at dinner. The intervals between the courses are
short, but they seem immensely long because there is nothing to
occupy them. There is none of the gaiety of the old days, the
spontaneous talk, the jokes, the laughter; there is nothing of
mutual affection and the joy which used to animate the children,
my wife, and me when in old days we met together at meals. For
me, the celebrated man of science, dinner was a time of rest and
reunion, and for my wife and children a fete -- brief indeed, but
bright and joyous -- in which they knew that for half an hour I
belonged, not to science, not to students, but to them alone. Our
real exhilaration from one glass of wine is gone for ever, gone
is Agasha, gone the bream with boiled grain, gone the uproar that
greeted every little startling incident at dinner, such as the
cat and dog fighting under the table, or Katya's bandage falling
off her face into her soup-plate.

To describe our dinner nowadays is as uninteresting as to eat it.
My wife's face wears a look of triumph and affected dignity, and
her habitual expression of anxiety. She looks at our plates and
says, "I see you don't care for the joint. Tell me; you don't
like it, do you?" and I am obliged to answer: "There is no need
for you to trouble, my dear; the meat is very nice." And she will
say: "You always stand up for me, Nikolay Stepanovitch, and you
never tell the truth. Why is Alexandr Adolfovitch eating so
little?" And so on in the same style all through dinner. Liza
laughs spasmodically and screws up her eyes. I watch them both,
and it is only now at dinner that it becomes absolutely evident
to me that the inner life of these two has  slipped away out of my
ken. I have a feeling as though I had once lived at home with a
real wife and children and that now I am dining with visitors, in
the house of a sham wife who is not the real one, and am looking
at a Liza who is not the real Liza. A startling change has taken
place in both of them; I have missed the long process by which
that change was effected, and it is no wonder that I can make
nothing of it. Why did that change take place? I don't know.
Perhaps the whole trouble is that God has not given my wife and
daughter the same strength of character as me. From childhood I
have been accustomed to resisting external influences, and have
steeled myself pretty thoroughly. Such catastrophes in life as
fame, the rank of a general, the transition from comfort to
living beyond our means, acquaintance with celebrities, etc.,
have scarcely affected me, and I have remained intact and
unashamed; but on my wife and Liza, who have not been through the
same hardening process and are weak, all this has fallen like an
avalanche of snow, overwhelming them. Gnekker and the young
ladies talk of fugues, of counterpoint, of singers and pianists,
of Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of their suspecting her
of ignorance of music, smiles to them sympathetically and
mutters: "That's exquisite . . . really! You don't say so! . . .
Gnekker eats with solid dignity, jests with solid dignity, and
condescendingly listens to the remarks of the young ladies. From
time to time he is moved to speak in bad French, and then, for
some reason or other, he thinks it necessary to address me as
_"Votre Excellence."_

And I am glum. Evidently I am a constraint to them and they are a
constraint to me. I have never in my earlier days had a close
knowledge of class antagonism, but now I am tormented by
something of that sort. I am on the lookout for nothing but bad
qualities in Gnekker; I quickly find them, and am fretted at the
thought that a man not of my circle is sitting here as my
daughter's suitor. His presence has a bad influence on me in
other ways, too. As a rule, when I am alone or in the society of
people I like, never think of my own achievements, or, if I do
recall them, they seem to me as trivial as though I had only
completed my studies yesterday; but in the presence of people
like Gnekker my achievements in science seem to be a lofty
mountain the top of which vanishes into the clouds, while at its
foot Gnekkers are running about scarcely visible to the naked
eye.

After dinner I go into my study and there smoke my pipe, the only
one in the whole day, the sole relic of my old bad habit of
smoking from morning till night. While I am smoking my wife comes
in and sits down to talk to me. Just as in the morning, I know
beforehand what our conversation is going to be about.

"I must talk to you seriously, Nikolay Stepanovitch," she begins.
"I mean about Liza. . . . Why don't you pay attention to it?"

"To what?"

"You pretend to notice nothing. But that is not right. We can't
shirk responsibility. . . . Gnekker has intentions in regard to
Liza. . . . What do you say?"

"That he is a bad man I can't say, because I don't know him, but
that I don't like him I have told you a thousand times already."

"But you can't . . . you can't!"

She gets up and walks about in excitement.

"You can't take up that attitude to a serious step," she says.
"When it is a question of our daughter's happiness we must lay
aside all personal feeling. I know you do not like him. . . .
Very good . . . if we refuse him now, if we break it all off, how
can you be sure that Liza will not have a grievance against us
all her life? Suitors are not plentiful nowadays, goodness knows,
and it may happen that no other match will turn up. . . . He is
very much in love with Liza, and she seems to like him. . . . Of
course, he has no settled position, but that can't be helped.
Please God, in time he will get one. He is of good family and
well off."

"Where did you learn that?"

"He told us so. His father has a large house in Harkov and an
estate in the neighbourhood. In short, Nikolay Stepanovitch, you
absolutely must go to Harkov."

"What for?"

"You will find out all about him there. . . . You know the
professors there; they will help you. I would go myself, but I am
a woman. I cannot. . . ."

"I am not going to Harkov," I say morosely.

My wife is frightened, and a look of intense suffering comes into
her face.

"For God's sake, Nikolay Stepanovitch," she implores me, with
tears in her voice --"for God's sake, take this burden off me! I
am so worried!"

It is painful for me to look at her.

"Very well, Varya," I say affectionately, "if you wish it, then
certainly I will go to Harkov and do all you want."

She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes off to her room
to cry, and I am left alone.

A little later lights are brought in. The armchair and the
lamp-shade cast familiar shadows that have long grown wearisome
on the walls and on the floor, and when I look at them I feel as
though the night had come and with it my accursed sleeplessness.
I lie on my bed, then get up and walk about the room, then lie
down again. As a rule it is after dinner, at the approach of
evening, that my nervous excitement reaches its highest pitch.
For no reason I begin crying and burying my head in the pillow.
At such times I am afraid that some one may come in; I am afraid
of suddenly dying; I am ashamed of my tears, and altogether there
is something insufferable in my soul. I feel that I can no longer
bear the sight of my lamp, of my books, of the shadows on the
floor. I cannot bear the sound of the voices coming from the
drawing-room. Some force unseen, uncomprehended, is roughly
thrusting me out of my flat. I leap up hurriedly, dress, and
cautiously, that my family may not notice, slip out into the
street. Where am I to go?

The answer to that question has long been ready in my brain. To
Katya.

III

As a rule she is lying on the sofa or in a lounge-chair reading.
Seeing me, she raises her head languidly, sits up, and shakes
hands.

"You are always lying down," I say, after pausing and taking
breath. "That's not good for you. You ought to occupy yourself
with something."

"What?"

"I say you ought to occupy yourself in some way."

"With what? A woman can be nothing but a simple workwoman or an
actress."

"Well, if you can't be a workwoman, be an actress."

She says nothing.

"You ought to get married," I say, half in jest.

"There is no one to marry. There's no reason to, either."

"You can't live like this."

"Without a husband? Much that matters; I could have as many men
as I like if I wanted to."

"That's ugly, Katya."

"What is ugly?"

"Why, what you have just said."

Noticing that I am hurt and wishing to efface the disagreeable
impression, Katya says:

"Let us go; come this way."

She takes me into a very snug little room, and says, pointing to
the writing-table:

"Look . . . I have got that ready for you. You shall work here.
Come here every day and bring your work with you. They only
hinder you there at home. Will you work here? Will you like to?"

Not to wound her by refusing, I answer that I will work here, and
that I like the room very much. Then we both sit down in the snug
little room and begin talking.

The warm, snug surroundings and the presence of a sympathetic
person does not, as in old days, arouse in me a feeling of
pleasure, but an intense impulse to complain and grumble. I feel
for some reason that if I lament and complain I shall feel
better.

"Things are in a bad way with me, my dear -- very bad. . . ."

"What is it?"

"You see how it is, my dear; the best and holiest right of kings
is the right of mercy. And I have always felt myself a king,
since I have made unlimited use of that right. I have never
judged, I have been indulgent, I have readily forgiven every one,
right and left. Where others have protested and expressed
indignation, I have only advised and persuaded. All my life it
has been my endeavour that my society should not be a burden to
my family, to my students, to my colleagues, to my servants. And
I know that this attitude to people has had a good influence on
all who have chanced to c ome into contact with me. But now I am
not a king. Something is happening to me that is only excusable
in a slave; day and night my brain is haunted by evil thoughts,
and feelings such as I never knew before are brooding in my soul.
I am full of hatred, and contempt, and indignation, and loathing,
and dread. I have become excessively severe, exacting, irritable,
ungracious, suspicious. Even things that in old days would have
provoked me only to an unnecessary jest and a good-natured laugh
now arouse an oppressive feeling in me. My reasoning, too, has
undergone a change: in old days I despised money; now I harbour
an evil feeling, not towards money, but towards the rich as
though they were to blame: in old days I hated violence and
tyranny, but now I hate the men who make use of violence, as
though they were alone to blame, and not all of us who do not
know how to educate each other. What is the meaning of it? If
these new ideas and new feelings have come from a change of
convictions, what is that change due to? Can the world have grown
worse and I better, or was I blind before and indifferent? If
this change is the result of a general decline of physical and
intellectual powers -- I am ill, you know, and every day I am
losing weight -- my position is pitiable; it means that my new
ideas are morbid and abnormal; I ought to be ashamed of them and
think them of no consequence. . . ."

"Illness has nothing to do with it," Katya interrupts me; "it's
simply that your eyes are opened, that's all. You have seen what
in old days, for some reason, you refused to see. To my thinking,
what you ought to do first of all, is to break with your family
for good, and go away."

"You are talking nonsense."

"You don't love them; why should you force your feelings? Can you
call them a family? Nonentities! If they died today, no one would
notice their absence tomorrow."

Katya despises my wife and Liza as much as they hate her. One can
hardly talk at this date of people's having a right to despise
one another. But if one looks at it from Katya's standpoint and
recognizes such a right, one can see she has as much right to
despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.

"Nonentities," she goes on. "Have you had dinner today? How was
it they did not forget to tell you it was ready? How is it they
still remember your existence?"

"Katya," I say sternly, "I beg you to be silent."

"You think I enjoy talking about them? I should be glad not to
know them at all. Listen, my dear: give it all up and go away. Go
abroad. The sooner the better."

"What nonsense! What about the University?"

"The University, too. What is it to you? There's no sense in it,
anyway. You have been lecturing for thirty years, and where are
your pupils? Are many of them celebrated scientific men? Count
them up! And to multiply the doctors who exploit ignorance and
pile up hundreds of thousands for themselves, there is no need to
be a good and talented man. You are not wanted."

"Good heavens! how harsh you are!" I cry in horror. "How harsh
you are! Be quiet or I will go away! I don't know how to answer
the harsh things you say!"

The maid comes in and summons us to tea. At the samovar our
conversation, thank God, changes. After having had my grumble
out, I have a longing to give way to another weakness of old age,
reminiscences. I tell Katya about my past, and to my great
astonishment tell her incidents which, till then, I did not
suspect of being still preserved in my memory, and she listens to
me with tenderness, with pride, holding her breath. I am
particularly fond of telling her how I was educated in a seminary
and dreamed of going to the University.

"At times I used to walk about our seminary garden . . ." I would
tell her. "If from some faraway tavern the wind floated sounds of
a song and the squeaking of an accordion, or a sledge with bells
dashed by the garden-fence, it was quite enough to send a rush of
happiness, filling not only my heart, but even my stomach, my
legs, my arms. . . . I would listen to the accordion or the bells
dying away in the distance and imagine myself a doctor, and paint
pictures, one better than another. And here, as you see, my
dreams have come true. I have had more than I dared to dream of.
For thirty years I have been the favourite professor, I have had
splendid comrades, I have enjoyed fame and honour. I have loved,
married from passionate love, have had children. In fact, looking
back upon it, I see my whole life as a fine composition arranged
with talent. Now all that is left to me is not to spoil the end.
For that I must die like a man. If death is really a thing to
dread, I must meet it as a teacher, a man of science, and a
citizen of a Christian country ought to meet it, with courage and
untroubled soul. But I am spoiling the end; I am sinking, I fly
to you, I beg for help, and you tell me 'Sink; that is what you
ought to do.' "

But here there comes a ring at the front-door. Katya and I
recognize it, and say:

"It must be Mihail Fyodorovitch."

And a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mihail
Fyodorovitch, a tall, well-built man of fifty, clean-shaven, with
thick grey hair and black eyebrows, walks in. He is a
good-natured man and an excellent comrade. He comes of a
fortunate and talented old noble family which has played a
prominent part in the history of literature and enlightenment. He
is himself intelligent, talented, and very highly educated, but
has his oddities. To a certain extent we are all odd and all
queer fish, but in his oddities there is something exceptional,
apt to cause anxiety among his acquaintances. I know a good many
people for whom his oddities completely obscure his good
qualities.

Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says in his
velvety bass:

"Good-evening. Are you having tea? That's just right. It's
diabolically cold."

Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once begins
talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is
the continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and
drollery as in Shakespeare's gravediggers. He is always talking
about serious things, but he never speaks seriously. His
judgments are always harsh and railing, but, thanks to his soft,
even, jesting tone, the harshness and abuse do not jar upon the
ear, and one soon grows used to them. Every evening he brings
with him five or six anecdotes from the University, and he
usually begins with them when he sits down to table.

"Oh, Lord!" he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows ironically.
"What comic people there are in the world!"

"Well?" asks Katya.

"As I was coming from my lecture this morning I met that old
idiot N. N---- on the stairs. . . . He was going along as usual,
sticking out his chin like a horse, looking for some one to
listen to his grumblings at his migraine, at his wife, and his
students who won't attend his lectures. 'Oh,' I thought, 'he has
seen me -- I am done for now; it is all up. . . .' "

And so on in the same style. Or he will begin like this:

"I was yesterday at our friend Z. Z----'s public lecture. I
wonder how it is our alma mater -- don't speak of it after dark
-- dare display in public such noodles and patent dullards as
that Z. Z---- Why, he is a European fool! Upon my word, you could
not find another like him all over Europe! He lectures -- can you
imagine? -- as though he were sucking a sugar-stick -- sue, sue,
sue; . . . he is in a nervous funk; he can hardly decipher his
own manuscript; his poor little thoughts crawl along like a
bishop on a bicycle, and, what's worse, you can never make out
what he is trying to say. The deadly dulness is awful, the very
flies expire. It can only be compared with the boredom in the
assembly-hall at the yearly meeting when the traditional address
is read -- damn it!"

And at once an abrupt transition:

"Three years ago -- Nikolay Stepanovitch here will remember it --
I had to deliver that address. It was hot, stifling, my uniform
cut me under the arms -- it was deadly! I read for half an hour,
for an hour, for an hour and a half, for two hours. . . . 'Come,'
I thought; 'thank God, there are only ten  pages left!' And at the
end there were four pages that there was no need to read, and I
reckoned to leave them out. 'So there are only six really,' I
thought; 'that is, only six pages left to read.' But, only fancy,
I chanced to glance before me, and, sitting in the front row,
side by side, were a general with a ribbon on his breast and a
bishop. The poor beggars were numb with boredom; they were
staring with their eyes wide open to keep awake, and yet they
were trying to put on an expression of attention and to pretend
that they understood what I was saying and liked it. 'Well,' I
thought, 'since you like it you shall have it! I'll pay you out;'
so I just gave them those four pages too."

As is usual with ironical people, when he talks nothing in his
face smiles but his eyes and eyebrows. At such times there is no
trace of hatred or spite in his eyes, but a great deal of humour,
and that peculiar fox-like slyness which is only to be noticed in
very observant people. Since I am speaking about his eyes, I
notice another peculiarity in them. When he takes a glass from
Katya, or listens to her speaking, or looks after her as she goes
out of the room for a moment, I notice in his eyes something
gentle, beseeching, pure. . . .

The maid-servant takes away the samovar and puts on the table a
large piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean
champagne -- a rather poor wine of which Katya had grown fond in
the Crimea. Mihail Fyodorovitch takes two packs of cards off the
whatnot and begins to play patience. According to him, some
varieties of patience require great concentration and attention,
yet while he lays out the cards he does not leave off distracting
his attention with talk. Katya watches his cards attentively, and
more by gesture than by words helps him in his play. She drinks
no more than a couple of wine-glasses of wine the whole evening;
I drink four glasses, and the rest of the bottle falls to the
share of Mihail Fyodorovitch, who can drink a great deal and
never get drunk.

Over our patience we settle various questions, principally of the
higher order, and what we care for most of all -- that is,
science and learning -- is more roughly handled than anything.

"Science, thank God, has outlived its day," says Mihail
Fyodorovitch emphatically. "Its song is sung. Yes, indeed.
Mankind begins to feel impelled to replace it by something
different. It has grown on the soil of superstition, been
nourished by superstition, and is now just as much the
quintessence of superstition as its defunct granddames, alchemy,
metaphysics, and philosophy. And, after all, what has it given to
mankind? Why, the difference between the learned Europeans and
the Chinese who have no science is trifling, purely external. The
Chinese know nothing of science, but what have they lost
thereby?"

"Flies know nothing of science, either," I observe, "but what of
that?"

"There is no need to be angry, Nikolay Stepanovitch. I only say
this here between ourselves. . . I am more careful than you
think, and I am not going to say this in public -- God forbid!
The superstition exists in the multitude that the arts and
sciences are superior to agriculture, commerce, superior to
handicrafts. Our sect is maintained by that superstition, and it
is not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!"

After patience the younger generation comes in for a dressing
too.

"Our audiences have degenerated," sighs Mihail Fyodorovitch. "Not
to speak of ideals and all the rest of it, if only they were
capable of work and rational thought! In fact, it's a case of 'I
look with mournful eyes on the young men of today.' "

"Yes; they have degenerated horribly," Katya agrees. "Tell me,
have you had one man of distinction among them for the last five
or ten years?"

"I don't know how it is with the other professors, but I can't
remember any among mine."

"I have seen in my day many of your students and young scientific
men and many actors -- well, I have never once been so fortunate
as to meet -- I won't say a hero or a man of talent, but even an
interesting man. It's all the same grey mediocrity, puffed up
with self-conceit."

All this talk of degeneration always affects me as though I had
accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter. It
offends me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on such
worn-out commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as degeneration
and absence of ideals, or on references to the splendours of the
past. Every accusation, even if it is uttered in ladies' society,
ought to be formulated with all possible definiteness, or it is
not an accusation, but idle disparagement, unworthy of decent
people.

I am an old man, I have been lecturing for thirty years, but I
notice neither degeneration nor lack of ideals, and I don't find
that the present is worse than the past. My porter Nikolay, whose
experience of this subject has its value, says that the students
of today are neither better nor worse than those of the past.

If I were asked what I don't like in my pupils of today, I should
answer the question, not straight off and not at length, but with
sufficient definiteness. I know their failings, and so have no
need to resort to vague generalities. I don't like their smoking,
using spirituous beverages, marrying late, and often being so
irresponsible and careless that they will let one of their number
be starving in their midst while they neglect to pay their
subscriptions to the Students' Aid Society. They don't know
modern languages, and they don't express themselves correctly in
Russian; no longer ago than yesterday my colleague, the professor
of hygiene, complained to me that he had to give twice as many
lectures, because the students had a very poor knowledge of
physics and were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are
readily carried away by the influence of the last new writers,
even when they are not first-rate, but they take absolutely no
interest in classics such as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius,
Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish the great
from the small betrays their ignorance of practical life more
than anything. All difficult questions that have more or less a
social character (for instance the migration question) they
settle by studying monographs on the subject, but not by way of
scientific investigation or experiment, though that method is at
their disposal and is more in keeping with their calling. They
gladly become ward-surgeons, assistants, demonstrators, external
teachers, and are ready to fill such posts until they are forty,
though independence, a sense of freedom and personal initiative,
are no less necessary in science than, for instance, in art or
commerce. I have pupils and listeners, but no successors and
helpers, and so I love them and am touched by them, but am not
proud of them. And so on, and so on. . . .

Such shortcomings, however numerous they may be, can only give
rise to a pessimistic or fault-finding temper in a faint-hearted
and timid man. All these failings have a casual, transitory
character, and are completely dependent on conditions of life; in
some ten years they will have disappeared or given place to other
fresh defects, which are all inevitable and will in their turn
alarm the faint-hearted. The students' sins often vex me, but
that vexation is nothing in comparison with the joy I have been
experiencing now for the last thirty years when I talk to my
pupils, lecture to them, watch their relations, and compare them
with people not of their circle.

Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and
neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent
diversion of finding fault with their neighbours is gradually
drawing them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk
passes into malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both
beginning to drop into the habits and methods of slander.

"Killing types one meets with," says Mihail Fyodorovitch. "I went
yesterday to our friend Yegor Petrovitch's, and there I found a
studious gentleman, one of your medicals in his third year, I
believe. Such a face! . . . in the Dobrolubov style, the imprint
of profound thought on his brow; we got i nto talk. 'Such doings,
young man,' said I. 'I've read,' said I, 'that some German --
I've forgotten his name -- has created from the human brain a new
kind of alkaloid, idiotine.' What do you think? He believed it,
and there was positively an expression of respect on his face, as
though to say, 'See what we fellows can do!' And the other day I
went to the theatre. I took my seat. In the next row directly in
front of me were sitting two men: one of 'us fellows' and
apparently a law student, the other a shaggy-looking figure, a
medical student. The latter was as drunk as a cobbler. He did not
look at the stage at all. He was dozing with his nose on his
shirt-front. But as soon as an actor begins loudly reciting a
monologue, or simply raises his voice, our friend starts, pokes
his neighbour in the ribs, and asks, 'What is he saying? Is it
elevating?' 'Yes,' answers one of our fellows. 'B-r-r-ravo!'
roars the medical student. 'Elevating! Bravo!' He had gone to the
theatre, you see, the drunken blockhead, not for the sake of art,
the play, but for elevation! He wanted noble sentiments."

Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange laugh; she catches
her breath in rhythmically regular gasps, very much as though she
were playing the accordion, and nothing in her face is laughing
but her nostrils. I grow depressed and don't know what to say.
Beside myself, I fire up, leap up from my seat, and cry:

"Do leave off! Why are you sitting here like two toads, poisoning
the air with your breath? Give over!"

And without waiting for them to finish their gossip I prepare to
go home. And, indeed, it is high time: it is past ten.

"I will stay a little longer," says Mihail Fyodorovitch. "Will
you allow me, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?"

"I will," answers Katya.

"_Bene!_ In that case have up another little bottle."

They both accompany me with candles to the hall, and while I put
on my fur coat, Mihail Fyodorovitch says:

"You have grown dreadfully thin and older looking, Nikolay
Stepanovitch. What's the matter with you? Are you ill?"

"Yes; I am not very well."

"And you are not doing anything for it. . ." Katya puts in
grimly.

"Why don't you? You can't go on like that! God helps those who
help themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your wife and
daughter, and make my apologies for not having been to see them.
In a day or two, before I go abroad, I shall come to say
good-bye. I shall be sure to. I am going away next week."

I come away from Katya, irritated and alarmed by what has been
said about my being ill, and dissatisfied with myself. I ask
myself whether I really ought not to consult one of my
colleagues. And at once I imagine how my colleague, after
listening to me, would walk away to the window without speaking,
would think a moment, then would turn round to me and, trying to
prevent my reading the truth in his face, would say in a careless
tone: "So far I see nothing serious, but at the same time,
_collega_, I advise you to lay aside your work. . . ." And that
would deprive me of my last hope.

Who is without hope? Now that I am diagnosing my illness and
prescribing for myself, from time to time I hope that I am
deceived by my own illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the
albumen and the sugar I find, and in regard to my heart, and in
regard to the swellings I have twice noticed in the mornings;
when with the fervour of the hypochondriac I look through the
textbooks of therapeutics and take a different medicine every
day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon something comforting.
All that is petty.

Whether the sky is covered with clouds or the moon and the stars
are shining, I turn my eyes towards it every evening and think
that death is taking me soon. One would think that my thoughts at
such times ought to be deep as the sky, brilliant, striking. . .
. But no! I think about myself, about my wife, about Liza,
Gnekker, the students, people in general; my thoughts are evil,
petty, I am insincere with myself, and at such times my theory of
life may be expressed in the words the celebrated Araktcheev said
in one of his intimate letters: "Nothing good can exist in the
world without evil, and there is more evil than good." That is,
everything is disgusting; there is nothing to live for, and the
sixty-two years I have already lived must be reckoned as wasted.
I catch myself in these thoughts, and try to persuade myself that
they are accidental, temporary, and not deeply rooted in me, but
at once I think:

"If so, what drives me every evening to those two toads?"

And I vow to myself that I will never go to Katya's again, though
I know I shall go next evening.

Ringing the bell at the door and going upstairs, I feel that I
have no family now and no desire to bring it back again. It is
clear that the new Araktcheev thoughts are not casual, temporary
visitors, but have possession of my whole being. With my
conscience ill at ease, dejected, languid, hardly able to move my
limbs, feeling as though tons were added to my weight, I get into
bed and quickly drop asleep.

And then -- insomnia!

IV

Summer comes on and life is changed.

One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a jesting tone:

"Come, your Excellency! We are ready."

My Excellency is conducted into the street, and seated in a cab.
As I go along, having nothing to do, I read the signboards from
right to left. The word "Traktir" reads " Ritkart"; that would
just suit some baron's family: Baroness Ritkart. Farther on I
drive through fields, by the graveyard, which makes absolutely no
impression on me, though I shall soon lie in it; then I drive by
forests and again by fields. There is nothing of interest. After
two hours of driving, my Excellency is conducted into the lower
storey of a summer villa and installed in a small, very cheerful
little room with light blue hangings.

At night there is sleeplessness as before, but in the morning I
do not put a good face upon it and listen to my wife, but lie in
bed. I do not sleep, but lie in the drowsy, half-conscious
condition in which you know you are not asleep, but dreaming. At
midday I get up and from habit sit down at my table, but I do not
work now; I amuse myself with French books in yellow covers, sent
me by Katya. Of course, it would be more patriotic to read
Russian authors, but I must confess I cherish no particular
liking for them. With the exception of two or three of the older
writers, all our literature of today strikes me as not being
literature, but a special sort of home industry, which exists
simply in order to be encouraged, though people do not readily
make use of its products. The very best of these home products
cannot be called remarkable and cannot be sincerely praised
without qualification. I must say the same of all the literary
novelties I have read during the last ten or fifteen years; not
one of them is remarkable, and not one of them can be praised
without a "but." Cleverness, a good tone, but no talent; talent,
a good tone, but no cleverness; or talent, cleverness, but not a
good tone.

I don't say the French books have talent, cleverness, and a good
tone. They don't satisfy me, either. But they are not so tedious
as the Russian, and it is not unusual to find in them the chief
element of artistic creation -- the feeling of personal freedom
which is lacking in the Russian authors. I don't remember one new
book in which the author does not try from the first page to
entangle himself in all sorts of conditions and contracts with
his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body; another
ties himself up hand and foot in psychological analysis; a third
must have a "warm attitude to man"; a fourth purposely scrawls
whole descriptions of nature that he may not be suspected of
writing with a purpose. . . . One is bent upon being middle-class
in his work, another must be a nobleman, and so on. There is
intentionalness, circumspection, and self-will, but they have
neither the independence nor the manliness to write as they like,
and therefore there is no creativeness.

All this applies to what is called belles-lettres.

As for serious treatises in Russian on sociology, for instance,
on art, and so on, I do not rea d them simply from timidity. In
my childhood and early youth I had for some reason a terror of
doorkeepers and attendants at the theatre, and that terror has
remained with me to this day. I am afraid of them even now. It is
said that we are only afraid of what we do not understand. And,
indeed, it is very difficult to understand why doorkeepers and
theatre attendants are so dignified, haughty, and majestically
rude. I feel exactly the same terror when I read serious
articles. Their extraordinary dignity, their bantering lordly
tone, their familiar manner to foreign authors, their ability to
split straws with dignity -- all that is beyond my understanding;
it is intimidating and utterly unlike the quiet, gentlemanly tone
to which I am accustomed when I read the works of our medical and
scientific writers. It oppresses me to read not only the articles
written by serious Russians, but even works translated or edited
by them. The pretentious, edifying tone of the preface; the
redundancy of remarks made by the translator, which prevent me
from concentrating my attention; the question marks and "sic" in
parenthesis scattered all over the book or article by the liberal
translator, are to my mind an outrage on the author and on my
independence as a reader.

Once I was summoned as an expert to a circuit court; in an
interval one of my fellow-experts drew my attention to the
rudeness of the public prosecutor to the defendants, among whom
there were two ladies of good education. I believe I did not
exaggerate at all when I told him that the prosecutor s manner
was no ruder than that of the authors of serious articles to one
another. Their manners are, indeed, so rude that I cannot speak
of them without distaste. They treat one another and the writers
they criticize either with superfluous respect, at the sacrifice
of their own dignity, or, on the contrary, with far more
ruthlessness than I have shown in my notes and my thoughts in
regard to my future son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of
irrationality, of evil intentions, and, indeed, of every sort of
crime, form an habitual ornament of serious articles. And that,
as young medical men are fond of saying in their monographs, is
the _ultima ratio!_ Such ways must infallibly have an effect on
the morals of the younger generation of writers, and so I am not
at all surprised that in the new works with which our literature
has been enriched during the last ten or fifteen years the heroes
drink too much vodka and the heroines are not over-chaste.

I read French books, and I look out of the window which is open;
I can see the spikes of my garden-fence, two or three scraggy
trees, and beyond the fence the road, the fields, and beyond them
a broad stretch of pine-wood. Often I admire a boy and girl, both
flaxen-headed and ragged, who clamber on the fence and laugh at
my baldness. In their shining little eyes I read, "Go up, go up,
thou baldhead!" They are almost the only people who care nothing
for my celebrity or my rank.

Visitors do not come to me every day now. I will only mention the
visits of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevitch. Nikolay usually comes
to me on holidays, with some pretext of business, though really
to see me. He arrives very much exhilarated, a thing which never
occurs to him in the winter.

"What have you to tell me?" I ask, going out to him in the hall.

"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and
looking at me with the ecstasy of a lover -- "your Excellency!
God be my witness! Strike me dead on the spot! _Gaudeamus egitur
juventus!_"

And he greedily kisses me on the shoulder, on the sleeve, and on
the buttons.

"Is everything going well?" I ask him.

"Your Excellency! So help me God! . . ."

He persists in grovelling before me for no sort of reason, and
soon bores me, so I send him away to the kitchen, where they give
him dinner.

Pyotr Ignatyevitch comes to see me on holidays, too, with the
special object of seeing me and sharing his thoughts with me. He
usually sits down near my table, modest, neat, and reasonable,
and does not venture to cross his legs or put his elbows on the
table. All the time, in a soft, even, little voice, in rounded
bookish phrases, he tells me various, to his mind, very
interesting and piquant items of news which he has read in the
magazines and journals. They are all alike and may be reduced to
this type: "A Frenchman has made a discovery; some one else, a
German, has denounced him, proving that the discovery was made in
1870 by some American; while a third person, also a German,
trumps them both by proving they both had made fools of
themselves, mistaking bubbles of air for dark pigment under the
microscope. Even when he wants to amuse me, Pyotr Ignatyevitch
tells me things in the same lengthy, circumstantial manner as
though he were defending a thesis, enumerating in detail the
literary sources from which he is deriving his narrative, doing
his utmost to be accurate as to the date and number of the
journals and the name of every one concerned, invariably
mentioning it in full -- Jean Jacques Petit, never simply Petit.
Sometimes he stays to dinner with us, and then during the whole
of dinner-time he goes on telling me the same sort of piquant
anecdotes, reducing every one at table to a state of dejected
boredom. If Gnekker and Liza begin talking before him of fugues
and counterpoint, Brahms and Bach, he drops his eyes modestly,
and is overcome with embarrassment; he is ashamed that such
trivial subjects should be discussed before such serious people
as him and me.

In my present state of mind five minutes of him is enough to
sicken me as though I had been seeing and hearing him for an
eternity. I hate the poor fellow. His soft, smooth voice and
bookish language exhaust me, and his stories stupefy me. . . . He
cherishes the best of feelings for me, and talks to me simply in
order to give me pleasure, and I repay him by looking at him as
though I wanted to hypnotize him, and think, "Go, go, go! . . ."
But he is not amenable to thought-suggestion, and sits on and on
and on. . . .

While he is with me I can never shake off the thought, "It's
possible when I die he will be appointed to succeed me," and my
poor lecture-hall presents itself to me as an oasis in which the
spring is died up; and I am ungracious, silent, and surly with
Pyotr Ignatyevitch, as though he were to blame for such thoughts,
and not I myself. When he begins, as usual, praising up the
German savants, instead of making fun of him good-humouredly, as
I used to do, I mutter sullenly:

"Asses, your Germans! . . ."

That is like the late Professor Nikita Krylov, who once, when he
was bathing with Pirogov at Revel and vexed at the water's being
very cold, burst out with, "Scoundrels, these Germans!" I behave
badly with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, and only when he is going away,
and from the window I catch a glimpse of his grey hat behind the
garden-fence, I want to call out and say, "Forgive me, my dear
fellow!"

Dinner is even drearier than in the winter. Gnekker, whom now I
hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. I used to
endure his presence in silence, now I aim biting remarks at him
which make my wife and daughter blush. Carried away by evil
feeling, I often say things that are simply stupid, and I don't
know why I say them. So on one occasion it happened that I stared
a long time at Gnekker, and, _a propos_ of nothing, I fired off:

    "An eagle may perchance swoop down below a cock,
     But never will the fowl soar upwards to the clouds. .

And the most vexatious thing is that the fowl Gnekker shows
himself much cleverer than the eagle professor. Knowing that my
wife and daughter are on his side, he takes up the line of
meeting my gibes with condescending silence, as though to say:

"The old chap is in his dotage; what's the use of talking to
him?"

Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly. It is wonderful how petty a
man may become! I am capable of dreaming all dinner-time of how
Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, how my wife and Liza
will come to see their mistake, and how I will taunt them -- and
such absurd thoughts at the time when I am standing with one foot
in th e grave!

There are now, too, misunderstandings of which in the old days I
had no idea except from hearsay. Though I am ashamed of it, I
will describe one that occurred the other day after dinner.

I was sitting in my room smoking a pipe; my wife came in as
usual, sat down, and began saying what a good thing it would be
for me to go to Harkov now while it is warm and I have free time,
and there find out what sort of person our Gnekker is.

"Very good; I will go," I assented.

My wife, pleased with me, got up and was going to the door, but
turned back and said:

"By the way, I have another favour to ask of you. I know you will
be angry, but it is my duty to warn you. . . . Forgive my saying
it, Nikolay Stepanovitch, but all our neighbours and
acquaintances have begun talking about your being so often at
Katya's. She is clever and well-educated; I don't deny that her
company may be agreeable; but at your age and with your social
position it seems strange that you should find pleasure in her
society. . . . Besides, she has such a reputation that . . ."

All the blood suddenly rushed to my brain, my eyes flashed fire,
I leaped up and, clutching at my head and stamping my feet,
shouted in a voice unlike my own:

"Let me alone! let me alone! let me alone!"

Probably my face was terrible, my voice was strange, for my wife
suddenly turned pale and began shrieking aloud in a despairing
voice that was utterly unlike her own. Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor,
came running in at our shouts. . . .

"Let me alone!" I cried; "let me alone! Go away!"

My legs turned numb as though they had ceased to exist; I felt
myself falling into someone's arms; for a little while I still
heard weeping, then sank into a swoon which lasted two or three
hours.

Now about Katya; she comes to see me every day towards evening,
and of course neither the neighbours nor our acquaintances can
avoid noticing it. She comes in for a minute and carries me off
for a drive with her. She has her own horse and a new chaise
bought this summer. Altogether she lives in an expensive style;
she has taken a big detached villa with a large garden, and has
taken all her town retinue with her -- two maids, a coachman . .
. I often ask her:

"Katya, what will you live on when you have spent your father's
money?"

"Then we shall see," she answers.

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

"You have told me that already. I know it."

At first we drive through the open country, then through the
pine-wood which is visible from my window. Nature seems to me as
beautiful as it always has been, though some evil spirit whispers
to me that these pines and fir trees, birds, and white clouds on
the sky, will not notice my absence when in three or four months
I am dead. Katya loves driving, and she is pleased that it is
fine weather and that I am sitting beside her. She is in good
spirits and does not say harsh things.

"You are a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovitch," she says. "You
are a rare specimen, and there isn't an actor who would
understand how to play you. Me or Mihail Fyodorovitch, for
instance, any poor actor could do, but not you. And I envy you, I
envy you horribly! Do you know what I stand for? What?"

She ponders for a minute, and then asks me:

"Nikolay Stepanovitch, I am a negative phenomenon! Yes?"

"Yes," I answer.

"H'm! what am I to do?"

What answer was I to make her? It is easy to say "work," or "give
your possessions to the poor," or "know yourself," and because it
is so easy to say that, I don't know what to answer.

My colleagues when they teach therapeutics advise "the individual
study of each separate case." One has but to obey this advice to
gain the conviction that the methods recommended in the textbooks
as the best and as providing a safe basis for treatment turn out
to be quite unsuitable in individual cases. It is just the same
in moral ailments.

But I must make some answer, and I say:

"You have too much free time, my dear; you absolutely must take
up some occupation. After all, why shouldn't you be an actress
again if it is your vocation?"

"I cannot!"

"Your tone and manner suggest that you are a victim. I don't like
that, my dear; it is your own fault. Remember, you began with
falling out with people and methods, but you have done nothing to
make either better. You did not struggle with evil, but were cast
down by it, and you are not the victim of the struggle, but of
your own impotence. Well, of course you were young and
inexperienced then; now it may all be different. Yes, really, go
on the stage. You will work, you will serve a sacred art."

"Don't pretend, Nikolay Stepanovitch," Katya interrupts me. "Let
us make a compact once for all; we will talk about actors,
actresses, and authors, but we will let art alone. You are a
splendid and rare person, but you don't know enough about art
sincerely to think it sacred. You have no instinct or feeling for
art. You have been hard at work all your life, and have not had
time to acquire that feeling. Altogether . . . I don't like talk
about art," she goes on nervously. "I don't like it! And, my
goodness, how they have vulgarized it!"

"Who has vulgarized it?"

"They have vulgarized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by their
familiar attitude, clever people by philosophy."

"Philosophy has nothing to do with it."

"Yes, it has. If any one philosophizes about it, it shows he does
not understand it."

To avoid bitterness I hasten to change the subject, and then sit
a long time silent. Only when we are driving out of the wood and
turning towards Katya's villa I go back to my former question,
and say:

"You have still not answered me, why you don't want to go on the
stage."

"Nikolay Stepanovitch, this is cruel!" she cries, and suddenly
flushes all over. "You want me to tell you the truth aloud? Very
well, if . . . if you like it! I have no talent! No talent and .
. . and a great deal of vanity! So there!"

After making this confession she turns her face away from me, and
to hide the trembling of her hands tugs violently at the reins.

As we are driving towards her villa we see Mihail Fyodorovitch
walking near the gate, impatiently awaiting us.

"That Mihail Fyodorovitch again!" says Katya with vexation. "Do
rid me of him, please! I am sick and tired of him . . . bother
him!"

Mihail Fyodorovitch ought to have gone abroad long ago, but he
puts off going from week to. week. Of late there have been
certain changes in him. He looks, as it were, sunken, has taken
to drinking until he is tipsy, a thing which never used to happen
to him, and his black eyebrows are beginning to turn grey. When
our chaise stops at the gate he does not conceal his joy and his
impatience. He fussily helps me and Katya out, hurriedly asks
questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that gentle, imploring,
pure expression, which I used to notice only in his eyes, is now
suffused all over his face. He is glad and at the same time he is
ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of his habit of spending every
evening with Katya. And he thinks it necessary to explain his
visit by some obvious absurdity such as: "I was driving by, and I
thought I would just look in for a minute."

We all three go indoors; first we drink tea, then the familiar
packs of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the
bottle of Crimean champagne are put upon the table. The subjects
of our conversation are not new; they are just the same as in the
winter. We fall foul of the University, the students, and
literature and the theatre; the air grows thick and stifling with
evil speaking, and poisoned by the breath, not of two toads as in
the winter, but of three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and
the giggle like the gasp of a concertina, the maid who waits upon
us hears an unpleasant cracked "He, he!" like the chuckle of a
general in a vaudeville.

V

There are terrible nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and
wind, such as are called among the people "sparrow nights." There
has been one such night in my personal life.

I woke up after midnight and leaped suddenly out of bed. It
seemed to me for some reason that I was just immedi ately going
to die. Why did it seem so? I had no sensation in my body that
suggested my immediate death, but my soul was oppressed with
terror, as though I had suddenly seen a vast menacing glow of
fire.

I rapidly struck a light, drank some water straight out of the
decanter, then hurried to the open window. The weather outside
was magnificent. There was a smell of hay and some other very
sweet scent. I could see the spikes of the fence, the gaunt,
drowsy trees by the window, the road, the dark streak of
woodland, there was a serene, very bright moon in the sky and not
a single cloud, perfect stillness, not one leaf stirring. I felt
that everything was looking at me and waiting for me to die. . .
.

It was uncanny. I closed the window and ran to my bed. I felt for
my pulse, and not finding it in my wrist, tried to find it in my
temple, then in my chin, and again in my wrist, and everything I
touched was cold and clammy with sweat. My breathing came more
and more rapidly, my body was shivering, all my inside was in
commotion; I had a sensation on my face and on my bald head as
though they were covered with spiders' webs.

What should I do? Call my family? No; it would be no use. I could
not imagine what my wife and Liza would do when they came in to
me.

I hid my head under the pillow, closed my eyes, and waited and
waited. . . . My spine was cold; it seemed to be drawn inwards,
and I felt as though death were coming upon me stealthily from
behind

"Kee-vee! kee-vee!" I heard a sudden shriek in the night's
stillness, and did not know where it was -- in my breast or in
the street -- "Kee-vee! kee-vee!"

"My God, how terrible!" I would have drunk some more water, but
by then it was fearful to open my eyes and I was afraid to raise
my head. I was possessed by unaccountable animal terror, and I
cannot understand why I was so frightened: was it that I wanted
to live, or that some new unknown pain was in store for me?

Upstairs, overhead, some one moaned or laughed. I listened. Soon
afterwards there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. Some one
came hurriedly down, then went up again. A minute later there was
a sound of steps downstairs again; some one stopped near my door
and listened.

"Who is there?" I cried.

The door opened. I boldly opened my eyes, and saw my wife. Her
face was pale and her eyes were tear-stained.

"You are not asleep, Nikolay Stepanovitch?" she asked.

"What is it? "

"For God's sake, go up and have a look at Liza; there is
something the matter with her. . . ."

"Very good, with pleasure," I muttered, greatly relieved at not
being alone. "Very good, this minute. . . ."

I followed my wife, heard what she said to me, and was too
agitated to understand a word. Patches of light from her candle
danced about the stairs, our long shadows trembled. My feet
caught in the skirts of my dressing-gown; I gasped for breath,
and felt as though something were pursuing me and trying to catch
me from behind.

"I shall die on the spot, here on the staircase," I thought. "On
the spot. . . ." But we passed the staircase, the dark corridor
with the Italian windows, and went into Liza's room. She was
sitting on the bed in her nightdress, with her bare feet hanging
down, and she was moaning.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" she was muttering, screwing up her eyes
at our candle. "I can't bear it."

"Liza, my child," I said, "what is it?"

Seeing me, she began crying out, and flung herself on my neck.

"My kind papa! . . ." she sobbed -- "my dear, good papa . . . my
darling, my pet, I don't know what is the matter with me. . . . I
am miserable!"

She hugged me, kissed me, and babbled fond words I used to hear
from her when she was a child.

"Calm yourself, my child. God be with you," I said. "There is no
need to cry. I am miserable, too."

I tried to tuck her in; my wife gave her water, and we awkwardly
stumbled by her bedside; my shoulder jostled against her
shoulder, and meanwhile I was thinking how we used to give our
children their bath together.

"Help her! help her!" my wife implored me. "Do something!"

What could I do? I could do nothing. There was some load on the
girl's heart; but I did not understand, I knew nothing about it,
and could only mutter:

"It's nothing, it's nothing; it will pass. Sleep, sleep!"

To make things worse, there was a sudden sound of dogs howling,
at first subdued and uncertain, then loud, two dogs howling
together. I had never attached significance to such omens as the
howling of dogs or the shrieking of owls, but on that occasion it
sent a pang to my heart, and I hastened to explain the howl to
myself.

"It's nonsense," I thought, "the influence of one organism on
another. The intensely strained condition of my nerves has
infected my wife, Liza, the dog -- that is all. . . . Such
infection explains presentiments, forebodings. . . ."

When a little later I went back to my room to write a
prescription for Liza, I no longer thought I should die at once,
but only had such a weight, such a feeling of oppression in my
soul that I felt actually sorry that I had not died on the spot.
For a long time I stood motionless in the middle of the room,
pondering what to prescribe for Liza. But the moans overhead
ceased, and I decided to prescribe nothing, and yet I went on
standing there. . . .

There was a deathlike stillness, such a stillness, as some author
has expressed it, "it rang in one's ears." Time passed slowly;
the streaks of moonlight on the window-sill did not shift their
position, but seemed as though frozen. . . . It was still some
time before dawn.

But the gate in the fence creaked, some one stole in and,
breaking a twig from one of those scraggy trees, cautiously
tapped on the window with it.

"Nikolay Stepanovitch," I heard a whisper. "Nikolay
Stepanovitch."

I opened the window, and fancied I was dreaming: under the
window, huddled against the wall, stood a woman in a black dress,
with the moonlight bright upon her, looking at me with great
eyes. Her face was pale, stern, and weird-looking in the
moonlight, like marble, her chin was quivering.

"It is I," she said -- " I . . . Katya."

In the moonlight all women's eyes look big and black, all people
look taller and paler, and that was probably why I had not
recognized her for the first minute.

"What is it?"

"Forgive me! " she said. "I suddenly felt unbearably miserable .
. . I couldn't stand it, so came here. There was a light in your
window and . . . and I ventured to knock. . . . I beg your
pardon. Ah! if you knew how miserable I am! What are you doing
just now?"

"Nothing. . . . I can't sleep."

"I had a feeling that there was something wrong, but that is
nonsense."

Her brows were lifted, her eyes shone with tears, and her whole
face was lighted up with the familiar look of trustfulness which
I had not seen for so long.

"Nikolay Stepanovitch," she said imploringly, stretching out both
hands to me, "my precious friend, I beg you, I implore you. . . .
If you don't despise my affection and respect for you, consent to
what I ask of you."

"What is it?"

"Take my money from me!"

"Come! what an idea! What do I want with your money?"

"You'll go away somewhere for your health. . . . You ought to go
for your health. Will you take it? Yes? Nikolay Stepanovitch
darling, yes?"

She looked greedily into my face and repeated: "Yes, you will
take it?"

"No, my dear, I won't take it . . " I said. "Thank you."

She turned her back upon me and bowed her head. Probably I
refused her in a tone which made further conversation about money
impossible.

"Go home to bed," I said. "We will see each other tomorrow."

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

"I don't say that. But your money would be no use to me now."

"I beg your pardon . . ." she said, dropping her voice a whole
octave. "I understand you . . . to be indebted to a person like
me . . . a retired actress. . . . But, good-bye. . . ."

And she went away so quickly that I had not time even to say
good-bye.

VI

I am in Harkov.

As it would be useless to contend against my present mood and,
indeed, beyond my power, I have made up my mind that the last
days of my life shall at least be irreproachable externally. If I
am unjust in regard to my wife and daughter, which I fully
recognize, I will try and do as she wishes; since she wants me to
go to Harkov, I go to Harkov. Besides, I have become of late so
indifferent to everything that it is really all the same to me
where I go, to Harkov, or to Paris, or to Berditchev.

I arrived here at midday, and have put up at the hotel not far
from the cathedral. The train was jolting, there were draughts,
and now I am sitting on my bed, holding my head and expecting tic
douloureux. I ought to have gone today to see some professors of
my acquaintance, but I have neither strength nor inclination.

The old corridor attendant comes in and asks whether I have
brought my bed-linen. I detain him for five minutes, and put
several questions to him about Gnekker, on whose account I have
come here. The attendant turns out to be a native of Harkov; he
knows the town like the fingers of his hand, but does not
remember any household of the surname of Gnekker. I question him
about the estate -- the same answer.

The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three. . .
. These last months in which I am waiting for death seem much
longer than the whole of my life. And I have never before been so
ready to resign myself to the slowness of time as now. In the old
days, when one sat in the station and waited for a train, or
presided in an examination-room, a quarter of an hour would seem
an eternity. Now I can sit all night on my bed without moving,
and quite unconcernedly reflect that tomorrow will be followed by
another night as long and colourless, and the day after tomorrow.

In the corridor it strikes five, six, seven. . . . It grows dark.

There is a dull pain in my cheek, the tic beginning. To occupy
myself with thoughts, I go back to my old point of view, when I
was not so indifferent, and ask myself why I, a distinguished
man, a privy councillor, am sitting in this little hotel room, on
this bed with the unfamiliar grey quilt. Why am I looking at that
cheap tin washing-stand and listening to the whirr of the
wretched clock in the corridor? Is all this in keeping with my
fame and my lofty position? And I answer these questions with a
jeer. I am amused by the naivete with which I used in my youth to
exaggerate the value of renown and of the exceptional position
which celebrities are supposed to enjoy. I am famous, my name is
pronounced with reverence, my portrait has been both in the
_Niva_ and in the _Illustrated News of the World_; I have read my
biography even in a German magazine. And what of all that? Here I
am sitting utterly alone in a strange town, on a strange bed,
rubbing my aching cheek with my hand. . . . Domestic worries, the
hard-heartedness of creditors, the rudeness of the railway
servants, the inconveniences of the passport system, the
expensive and unwholesome food in the refreshment-rooms, the
general rudeness and coarseness in social intercourse -- all
this, and a great deal more which would take too long to reckon
up, affects me as much as any working man who is famous only in
his alley. In what way, does my exceptional position find
expression? Admitting that I am celebrated a thousand times over,
that I am a hero of whom my country is proud. They publish
bulletins of my illness in every paper, letters of sympathy come
to me by post from my colleagues, my pupils, the general public;
but all that does not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in
misery, in utter loneliness. Of course, no one is to blame for
that; but I in my foolishness dislike my popularity. I feel as
though it had cheated me.

At ten o'clock I fall asleep, and in spite of the tic I sleep
soundly, and should have gone on sleeping if I had not been
awakened. Soon after one came a sudden knock at the door.

"Who is there?"

"A telegram."

"You might have waited till tomorrow," I say angrily, taking the
telegram from the attendant. "Now I shall not get to sleep
again."

"I am sorry. Your light was burning, so I thought you were not
asleep."

I tear open the telegram and look first at the signature. From my
wife.

"What does she want?"

"Gnekker was secretly married to Liza yesterday. Return."


I read the telegram, and my dismay does not last long. I am
dismayed, not by what Liza and Gnekker have done, but by the
indifference with which I hear of their marriage. They say
philosophers and the truly wise are indifferent. It is false:
indifference is the paralysis of the soul; it is premature death.

I go to bed again, and begin trying to think of something to
occupy my mind. What am I to think about? I feel as though
everything had been thought over already and there is nothing
which could hold my attention now.

When daylight comes I sit up in bed with my arms round my knees,
and to pass the time I try to know myself. "Know thyself" is
excellent and useful advice; it is only a pity that the ancients
never thought to indicate the means of following this precept.

When I have wanted to understand somebody or myself I have
considered, not the actions, in which everything is relative, but
the desires.

"Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what manner of man
you are."

And now I examine myself: what do I want?

I want our wives, our children, our friends, our pupils, to love
in us, not our fame, not the brand and not the label, but to love
us as ordinary men. Anything else? I should like to have had
helpers and successors. Anything else? I should like to wake up
in a hundred years' time and to have just a peep out of one eye
at what is happening in science. I should have liked to have
lived another ten years. . . What further? Why, nothing further.
I think and think, and can think of nothing more. And however
much I might think, and however far my thoughts might travel, it
is clear to me that there is nothing vital, nothing of great
importance in my desires. In my passion for science, in my desire
to live, in this sitting on a strange bed, and in this striving
to know myself -- in all the thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form
about everything, there is no common bond to connect it all into
one whole. Every feeling and every thought exists apart in me;
and in all my criticisms of science, the theatre, literature, my
pupils, and in all the pictures my imagination draws, even the
most skilful analyst could not find what is called a general
idea, or the god of a living man.

And if there is not that, then there is nothing.

In a state so poverty-stricken, a serious ailment, the fear of
death, the influences of circumstance and men were enough to turn
upside down and scatter in fragments all which I had once looked
upon as my theory of life, and in which I had seen the meaning
and joy of my existence. So there is nothing surprising in the
fact that I have over-shadowed the last months of my life with
thoughts and feelings only worthy of a slave and barbarian, and
that now I am indifferent and take no heed of the dawn. When a
man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all external
impressions a bad cold is really enough to upset his equilibrium
and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog
howling in every sound. And all his pessimism or optimism with
his thoughts great and small have at such times significance as
symptoms and nothing more.

I am vanquished. If it is so, it is useless to think, it is
useless to talk. I will sit and wait in silence for what is to
come.

In the morning the corridor attendant brings me tea and a copy of
the local newspaper. Mechanically I read the advertisements on
the first page, the leading article, the extracts from the
newspapers and journals, the chronicle of events. . . . In the
latter I find, among other things, the following paragraph: "Our
distinguished savant, Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch So-and-so,
arrived yesterday in Harkov, and is staying in the So-and-so
Hotel."

Apparently, illustrious names are created to live on their own
account, apart from those that bear them. Now my name is
promenading tranquilly about Harkov; in another three months,
printed in gold letters on my monument, it will shine bright as
the sun itself, while I s hall be already under the moss.

A light tap at the door. Somebody wants me.

"Who is there? Come in."

The door opens, and I step back surprised and hurriedly wrap my
dressing-gown round me. Before me stands Katya.

"How do you do?" she says, breathless with running upstairs. "You
didn't expect me? I have come here, too. . . . I have come, too!"

She sits down and goes on, hesitating and not looking at me.

"Why don't you speak to me? I have come, too . . . today. . . . I
found out that you were in this hotel, and have come to you."

"Very glad to see you," I say, shrugging my shoulders, "but I am
surprised. You seem to have dropped from the skies. What have you
come for?"

"Oh . . . I've simply come."

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

"Nikolay Stepanovitch," she says, turning pale and pressing her
hands on her bosom -- "Nikolay Stepanovitch, I cannot go on
living like this! I cannot! For God's sake tell me quickly, this
minute, what I am to do! Tell me, what am I to do?"

"What can I tell you?" I ask in perplexity. "I can do nothing."

"Tell me, I beseech you," she goes on, breathing hard and
trembling all over. "I swear that I cannot go on living like
this. It's too much for me!"

She sinks on a chair and begins sobbing. She flings her head
back, wrings her hands, taps with her feet; her hat falls off and
hangs bobbing on its elastic; her hair is ruffled.

"Help me! help me! "she implores me. "I cannot go on!"

She takes her handkerchief out of her travelling-bag, and with it
pulls out several letters, which fall from her lap to the floor.
I pick them up, and on one of them I recognize the handwriting of
Mihail Fyodorovitch and accidentally read a bit of a word
"passionat. . ."

"There is nothing I can tell you, Katya," I say.

"Help me!" she sobs, clutching at my hand and kissing it. "You
are my father, you know, my only friend! You are clever,
educated; you have lived so long; you have been a teacher! Tell
me, what am I to do?"

"Upon my word, Katya, I don't know. . . ."

I am utterly at a loss and confused, touched by her sobs, and
hardly able to stand.

"Let us have lunch, Katya," I say, with a forced smile. "Give
over crying."

And at once I add in a sinking voice:

"I shall soon be gone, Katya. . . ."

"Only one word, only one word!" she weeps, stretching out her
hands to me.

"What am I to do?"

"You are a queer girl, really . . ." I mutter. "I don't
understand it! So sensible, and all at once crying your eyes out.
. . ."

A silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, puts on her hat,
then crumples up the letters and stuffs them in her bag -- and
all this deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom, and her
gloves are wet with tears, but her expression now is cold and
forbidding. . . . I look at her, and feel ashamed that I am
happier than she. The absence of what my philosophic colleagues
call a general idea I have detected in myself only just before
death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of this poor
girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her
life!

"Let us have lunch, Katya," I say.

"No, thank you," she answers coldly. Another minute passes in
silence. "I don't like Harkov," I say; "it's so grey here -- such
a grey town."

"Yes, perhaps. . . . It's ugly. I am here not for long, passing
through. I am going on today."

"Where?"

"To the Crimea . . . that is, to the Caucasus."

"Oh! For long?"

"I don't know."

Katya gets up, and, with a cold smile, holds out her hand without
looking at me.

I want to ask her, "Then, you won't be at my funeral?" but she
does not look at me; her hand is cold and, as it were, strange. I
escort her to the door in silence. She goes out, walks down the
long corridor without looking back; she knows that I am looking
after her, and most likely she will look back at the turn.

No, she did not look back. I've seen her black dress for the last
time: her steps have died away. Farewell, my treasure!


THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR

AT the beginning of April in 1870 my mother, Klavdia Arhipovna,
the widow of a lieutenant, received from her brother Ivan, a
privy councillor in Petersburg, a letter in which, among other
things, this passage occurred: "My liver trouble forces me to
spend every summer abroad, and as I have not at the moment the
money in hand for a trip to Marienbad, it is very possible, dear
sister, that I may spend this summer with you at Kotchuevko. . .
."

On reading the letter my mother turned pale and began trembling
all over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came
into her face. She began crying and laughing. This conflict of
tears and laughter always reminds me of the flickering and
spluttering of a brightly burning candle when one sprinkles it
with water. Reading the letter once more, mother called together
all the household, and in a voice broken with emotion began
explaining to us that there had been four Gundasov brothers: one
Gundasov had died as a baby; another had gone to the war, and he,
too, was dead; the third, without offence to him be it said, was
an actor; the fourth . . .

"The fourth has risen far above us," my mother brought out
tearfully. "My own brother, we grew up together; and I am all of
a tremble, all of a tremble! . . . A privy councillor with the
rank of a general! How shall I meet him, my angel brother? What
can I, a foolish, uneducated woman, talk to him about? It's
fifteen years since I've seen him! Andryushenka," my mother
turned to me, "you must rejoice, little stupid! It's a piece of
luck for you that God is sending him to us!"

After we had heard a detailed history of the Gundasovs, there
followed a fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been
accustomed to see only before Christmas and Easter. The sky above
and the water in the river were all that escaped; everything else
was subjected to a merciless cleansing, scrubbing, painting. If
the sky had been lower and smaller and the river had not flowed
so swiftly, they would have scoured them, too, with bath-brick
and rubbed them, too, with tow. Our walls were as white as snow,
but they were whitewashed; the floors were bright and shining,
but they were washed every day. The cat Bobtail (as a small child
I had cut off a good quarter of his tail with the knife used for
chopping the sugar, and that was why he was called Bobtail) was
carried off to the kitchen and put in charge of Anisya; Fedka was
told that if any of the dogs came near the front-door "God would
punish him." But no one was so badly treated as the poor sofas,
easy-chairs, and rugs! They had never, before been so violently
beaten as on this occasion in preparation for our visitor. My
pigeons took fright at the loud thud of the sticks, and were
continually flying up into the sky.

The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole district who
ventured to make for the gentry, came over from Novostroevka. He
was a hard-working capable man who did not drink and was not
without a certain fancy and feeling for form, but yet he was an
atrocious tailor. His work was ruined by hesitation. . . . The
idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter
everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town
simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits
that even a caricaturist would have called _outre_ and grotesque.
We cut a dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short
jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the presence of
young ladies.

This Spiridon spent a long time taking my measure. He measured me
all over lengthways and crossways, as though he meant to put
hoops round me like a barrel; then he spent a long time noting
down my measurements with a thick pencil on a bit of paper, and
ticked off all the measurements with triangular signs. When he
had finished with me he set to work on my tutor, Yegor
Alexyevitch Pobyedimsky. My beloved tutor was then at the stage
when young men watch the growth of their moustache and are
critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the devout awe
with which Spiridon approached him. Yegor Alexyevitch had to
throw back his head, to straddle his legs like an inverted V,
first lift up his arms,  then let them fall. Spiridon measured him
several times, walking round him during the process like a
love-sick pigeon round its mate, going down on one knee, bending
double. . . . My mother, weary, exhausted by her exertions and
heated by ironing, watched these lengthy proceedings, and said:

"Mind now, Spiridon, you will have to answer for it to God if you
spoil the cloth! And it will be the worse for you if you don't
make them fit!"

Mother's words threw Spiridon first into a fever, then into a
perspiration, for he was convinced that he would not make them
fit. He received one rouble twenty kopecks for making my suit,
and for Pobyedimsky's two roubles, but we provided the cloth, the
lining, and the buttons. The price cannot be considered
excessive, as Novostroevka was about seven miles from us, and the
tailor came to fit us four times. When he came to try the things
on and we squeezed ourselves into the tight trousers and jackets
adorned with basting threads, mother always frowned
contemptuously and expressed her surprise:

"Goodness knows what the fashions are coming to nowadays! I am
positively ashamed to look at them. If brother were not used to
Petersburg I would not get you fashionable clothes!"

Spiridon, relieved that the blame was thrown on the fashion and
not on him, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, as though to say:

"There's no help for it; it's the spirit of the age!"

The excitement with which we awaited the arrival of our guest can
only be compared with the strained suspense with which
spiritualists wait from minute to minute the appearance of a
ghost. Mother went about with a sick headache, and was
continually melting into tears. I lost my appetite, slept badly,
and did not learn my lessons. Even in my dreams I was haunted by
an impatient longing to see a general -- that is, a man with
epaulettes and an embroidered collar sticking up to his ears, and
with a naked sword in his hands, exactly like the one who hung
over the sofa in the drawing-room and glared with terrible black
eyes at everybody who dared to look at him. Pobyedimsky was the
only one who felt himself in his element. He was neither
terrified nor delighted, and merely from time to time, when he
heard the history of the Gundasov family, said:

"Yes, it will be pleasant to have some one fresh to talk to."

My tutor was looked upon among us as an exceptional nature. He
was a young man of twenty, with a pimply face, shaggy locks, a
low forehead, and an unusually long nose. His nose was so big
that when he wanted to look close at anything he had to put his
head on one side like a bird. To our thinking, there was not a
man in the province cleverer, more cultivated, or more stylish.
He had left the high-school in the class next to the top, and had
then entered a veterinary college, from which he was expelled
before the end of the first half-year. The reason of his
expulsion he carefully concealed, which enabled any one who
wished to do so to look upon my instructor as an injured and to
some extent a mysterious person. He spoke little, and only of
intellectual subjects; he ate meat during the fasts, and looked
with contempt and condescension on the life going on around him,
which did not prevent him, however, from taking presents, such as
suits of clothes, from my mother, and drawing funny faces with
red teeth on my kites. Mother disliked him for his "pride," but
stood in awe of his cleverness.

Our visitor did not keep us long waiting. At the beginning of May
two wagon-loads of big boxes arrived from the station. These
boxes looked so majestic that the drivers instinctively took off
their hats as they lifted them down.

"There must be uniforms and gunpowder in those boxes," I thought.

Why "gunpowder"? Probably the conception of a general was closely
connected in my mind with cannons and gunpowder.

When I woke up on the morning of the tenth of May, nurse told me
in a whisper that "my uncle had come." I dressed rapidly, and,
washing after a fashion, flew out of my bedroom without saying my
prayers. In the vestibule I came upon a tall, solid gentleman
with fashionable whiskers and a foppish-looking overcoat. Half
dead with devout awe, I went up to him and, remembering the
ceremonial mother had impressed upon me, I scraped my foot before
him, made a very low bow, and craned forward to kiss his hand;
but the gentleman did not allow me to kiss his hand: he informed
me that he was not my uncle, but my uncle's footman, Pyotr. The
appearance of this Pyotr, far better dressed than Pobyedimsky or
me, excited in me the utmost astonishment, which, to tell the
truth, has lasted to this day. Can such dignified, respectable
people with stern and intellectual faces really be footmen? And
what for?

Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden with my mother. I
rushed into the garden.

Nature, knowing nothing of the history of the Gundasov family and
the rank of my uncle, felt far more at ease and unconstrained
than I. There was a clamour going on in the garden such as one
only bears at fairs. Masses of starlings flitting through the air
and hopping about the walks were noisily chattering as they
hunted for cockchafers. There were swarms of sparrows in the
lilac-bushes, which threw their tender, fragrant blossoms
straight in one's face. Wherever one turned, from every direction
came the note of the golden oriole and the shrill cry of the
hoopoe and the red-legged falcon. At any other time I should have
begun chasing dragon-flies or throwing stones at a crow which was
sitting on a low mound under an aspen-tree, with his blunt beak
turned away; but at that moment I was in no mood for mischief. My
heart was throbbing, and I felt a cold sinking at my stomach; I
was preparing myself to confront a gentleman with epaulettes,
with a naked sword, and with terrible eyes!

But imagine my disappointment! A dapper little foppish gentleman
in white silk trousers, with a white cap on his head, was walking
beside my mother in the garden. With his hands behind him and his
head thrown back, every now and then running on ahead of mother,
he looked quite young. There was so much life and movement in his
whole figure that I could only detect the treachery of age when I
came close up behind and saw beneath his cap a fringe of
close-cropped silver hair. Instead of the staid dignity and
stolidity of a general, I saw an almost schoolboyish nimbleness;
instead of a collar sticking up to his ears, an ordinary light
blue necktie. Mother and my uncle were walking in the avenue
talking together. I went softly up to them from behind, and
waited for one of them to look round.

"What a delightful place you have here, Klavdia!" said my uncle.
"How charming and lovely it is! Had I known before that you had
such a charming place, nothing would have induced me to go abroad
all these years."

My uncle stooped down rapidly and sniffed at a tulip. Everything
he saw moved him to rapture and excitement, as though he had
never been in a garden on a sunny day before. The queer man moved
about as though he were on springs, and chattered incessantly,
without allowing mother to utter a single word. All of a sudden
Pobyedimsky came into sight from behind an elder-tree at the turn
of the avenue. His appearance was so unexpected that my uncle
positively started and stepped back a pace. On this occasion my
tutor was attired in his best Inverness cape with sleeves, in
which, especially back-view, he looked remarkably like a
windmill. He had a solemn and majestic air. Pressing his hat to
his bosom in Spanish style, he took a step towards my uncle and
made a bow such as a marquis makes in a melodrama, bending
forward, a little to one side.

"I have the honour to present myself to your high excellency," he
said aloud: "the teacher and instructor of your nephew, formerly
a pupil of the veterinary institute, and a nobleman by birth,
Pobyedimsky!"

This politeness on the part of my tutor pleased my mother very
much. She gave a smile, and waited in thrilled suspense to hear
what clever thing he would say next; but my tutor, expecting his
dignified address to be answered with equal dignity -- that is,
that my uncle would say "H'm!" like a general and hold out two
fingers -- was greatly confused and abashed when the latter
laughed genially and shook hands with him. He muttered something
incoherent, cleared his throat, and walked away.

"Come! isn't that charming?" laughed my uncle. "Just look! he has
made his little flourish and thinks he's a very clever fellow! I
do like that -- upon my soul I do! What youthful aplomb, what
life in that foolish flourish! And what boy is this?" he asked,
suddenly turning and looking at me.

"That is my Andryushenka," my mother introduced me, flushing
crimson. "My consolation. . ."

I made a scrape with my foot on the sand and dropped a low bow.

"A fine fellow . . . a fine fellow . . ." muttered my uncle,
taking his hand from my lips and stroking me on the head. "So
your name is Andrusha? Yes, yes. . . . H'm! . . . upon my soul! .
. . Do you learn lessons?"

My mother, exaggerating and embellishing as all mothers do, began
to describe my achievements in the sciences and the excellence of
my behaviour, and I walked round my uncle and, following the
ceremonial laid down for me, I continued making low bows. Then my
mother began throwing out hints that with my remarkable abilities
it would not be amiss for me to get a government nomination to
the cadet school; but at the point when I was to have burst into
tears and begged for my uncle's protection, my uncle suddenly
stopped and flung up his hands in amazement.

"My goo-oodness! What's that?" he asked.

Tatyana Ivanovna, the wife of our bailiff, Fyodor Petrovna, was
coming towards us. She was carrying a starched white petticoat
and a long ironing-board. As she passed us she looked shyly at
the visitor through her eyelashes and flushed crimson.

"Wonders will never cease . . ." my uncle filtered through his
teeth, looking after her with friendly interest. "You have a
fresh surprise at every step, sister . . . upon my soul!"

"She's a beauty . . ." said mother. "They chose her as a bride
for Fyodor, though she lived over seventy miles from here. . . ."

Not every one would have called Tatyana a beauty. She was a plump
little woman of twenty, with black eyebrows and a graceful
figure, always rosy and attractive-looking, but in her face and
in her whole person there was not one striking feature, not one
bold line to catch the eye, as though nature had lacked
inspiration and confidence when creating her. Tatyana Ivanovna
was shy, bashful, and modest in her behaviour; she moved softly
and smoothly, said little, seldom laughed, and her whole life was
as regular as her face and as flat as her smooth, tidy hair. My
uncle screwed up his eyes looking after her, and smiled. Mother
looked intently at his smiling face and grew serious.

"And so, brother, you've never married!" she sighed.

"No; I've not married."

"Why not?" asked mother softly.

"How can I tell you? It has happened so. In my youth I was too
hard at work, I had no time to live, and when I longed to live --
I looked round -- and there I had fifty years on my back already.
I was too late! However, talking about it . . . is depressing."

My mother and my uncle both sighed at once and walked on, and I
left them and flew off to find my tutor, that I might share my
impressions with him. Pobyedimsky was standing in the middle of
the yard, looking majestically at the heavens.

"One can see he is a man of culture!" he said, twisting his head
round. "I hope we shall get on together."

An hour later mother came to us.

"I am in trouble, my dears!" she began, sighing. "You see brother
has brought a valet with him, and the valet, God bless him, is
not one you can put in the kitchen or in the hall; we must give
him a room apart. I can't think what I am to do! I tell you what,
children, couldn't you move out somewhere -- to Fyodor's lodge,
for instance -- and give your room to the valet? What do you
say?"

We gave our ready consent, for living in the lodge was a great
deal more free than in the house, under mother's eye.

"It's a nuisance, and that's a fact!" said mother. "Brother says
he won't have dinner in the middle of the day, but between six
and seven, as they do in Petersburg. I am simply distracted with
worry! By seven o'clock the dinner will be done to rags in the
oven. Really, men don't understand anything about housekeeping,
though they have so much intellect. Oh, dear! we shall have to
cook two dinners every day! You will have dinner at midday as
before, children, while your poor old mother has to wait till
seven, for the sake of her brother."

Then my mother heaved a deep sigh, bade me try and please my
uncle, whose coming was a piece of luck for me for which we must
thank God, and hurried off to the kitchen. Pobyedimsky and I
moved into the lodge the same day. We were installed in a room
which formed the passage from the entry to the bailiff's bedroom.

Contrary to my expectations, life went on just as before,
drearily and monotonously, in spite of my uncle's arrival and our
move into new quarters. We were excused lessons "on account of
the visitor. "Pobyedimsky, who never read anything or occupied
himself in any way, spent most of his time sitting on his bed,
with his long nose thrust into the air, thinking. Sometimes he
would get up, try on his new suit, and sit down again to relapse
into contemplation and silence. Only one thing worried him, the
flies, which he used mercilessly to squash between his hands.
After dinner he usually "rested," and his snores were a cause of
annoyance to the whole household. I ran about the garden from
morning to night, or sat in the lodge sticking my kites together.
For the first two or three weeks we did not see my uncle often.
For days together he sat in his own room working, in spite of the
flies and the heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as
though glued to his table produced upon us the effect of an
inexplicable conjuring trick. To us idlers, knowing nothing of
systematic work, his industry seemed simply miraculous. Getting
up at nine, he sat down to his table, and did not leave it till
dinner-time; after dinner he set to work again, and went on till
late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I invariably
saw the same thing: my uncle sitting at the table working. The
work consisted in his writing with one hand while he turned over
the leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, he kept
moving all over -- swinging his leg as though it were a pendulum,
whistling, and nodding his head in time. He had an extremely
careless and frivolous expression all the while, as though he
were not working, but playing at noughts and crosses. I always
saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a jauntily tied cravat,
and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of delicate
feminine perfumery. He only left his room for dinner, but he ate
little.

"I can't make brother out!" mother complained of him. "Every day
we kill a turkey and pigeons on purpose for him, I make a
_compote_ with my own hands, and he eats a plateful of broth and
a bit of meat the size of a finger and gets up from the table. I
begin begging him to eat; he comes back and drinks a glass of
milk. And what is there in that, in a glass of milk? It's no
better than washing up water! You may die of a diet like that. .
. . If I try to persuade him, he laughs and makes a joke of it. .
. . No; he does not care for our fare, poor dear!"

We spent the evenings far more gaily than the days. As a rule, by
the time the sun was setting and long shadows were lying across
the yard, we -- that is, Tatyana Ivanovna, Pobyedimsky, and I --
were sitting on the steps of the lodge. We did not talk till it
grew quite dusk. And, indeed, what is one to talk of when every
subject has been talked over already? There was only one thing
new, my uncle's arrival, and even that subject was soon
exhausted. My tutor never took his eyes off Tatyana Ivanovna 's
face, and frequently heaved deep sighs. . . . At the time I did
not understand those sighs, and did not try to fathom their
significance; now they explain a great deal to me.

When the shadows merged into one thick mass of shade, the bailiff
Fyodor would come in from shooting or from the field. This Fyodor
gave me the impres sion of being a fierce and even a terrible
man. The son of a Russianized gipsy from Izyumskoe, swarthy-faced
and curly-headed, with big black eyes and a matted beard, he was
never called among our Kotchuevko peasants by any name but "The
Devil." And, indeed, there was a great deal of the gipsy about
him apart from his appearance. He could not, for instance, stay
at home, and went off for days together into the country or into
the woods to shoot. He was gloomy, ill-humoured, taciturn, was
afraid of nobody, and refused to recognize any authority. He was
rude to mother, addressed me familiarly, and was contemptuous of
Pobyedimsky's learning. All this we forgave him, looking upon him
as a hot-tempered and nervous man; mother liked him because, in
spite of his gipsy nature, he was ideally honest and industrious.
He loved his Tatyana Ivanovna passionately, like a gipsy, but
this love took in him a gloomy form, as though it cost him
suffering. He was never affectionate to his wife in our presence,
but simply rolled his eyes angrily at her and twisted his mouth.

When he came in from the fields he would noisily and angrily put
down his gun, would come out to us on the steps, and sit down
beside his wife. After resting a little, he would ask his wife a
few questions about household matters, and then sink into
silence.

"Let us sing," I would suggest.

My tutor would tune his guitar, and in a deep deacon's bass
strike up "In the midst of the valley." We would begin singing.
My tutor took the bass, Fyodor sang in a hardly audible tenor,
while I sang soprano in unison with Tatyana Ivanovna.

When the whole sky was covered with stars and the frogs had left
off croaking, they would bring in our supper from the kitchen. We
went into the lodge and sat down to the meal. My tutor and the
gipsy ate greedily, with such a sound that it was hard to tell
whether it was the bones crunching or their jaws, and Tatyana
Ivanovna and I scarcely succeeded in getting our share. After
supper the lodge was plunged in deep sleep.

One evening, it was at the end of May, we were sitting on the
steps, waiting for supper. A shadow suddenly fell across us, and
Gundasov stood before us as though he had sprung out of the
earth. He looked at us for a long time, then clasped his hands
and laughed gaily.

"An idyll!" he said. "They sing and dream in the moonlight! It's
charming, upon my soul! May I sit down and dream with you?"

We looked at one another and said nothing. My uncle sat down on
the bottom step, yawned, and looked at the sky. A silence
followed. Pobyedimsky, who had for a long time been wanting to
talk to somebody fresh, was delighted at the opportunity, and was
the first to break the silence. He had only one subject for
intellectual conversation, the epizootic diseases. It sometimes
happens that after one has been in an immense crowd, only some
one countenance of the thousands remains long imprinted on the
memory; in the same way, of all that Pobyedimsky had heard,
during his six months at the veterinary institute, he remembered
only one passage:

"The epizootics do immense damage to the stock of the country. It
is the duty of society to work hand in hand with the government
in waging war upon them."

Before saying this to Gundasov, my tutor cleared his throat three
times, and several times, in his excitement, wrapped himself up
in his Inverness. On hearing about the epizootics, my uncle
looked intently at my tutor and made a sound between a snort and
a laugh.

"Upon my soul, that's charming!" he said, scrutinizing us as
though we were mannequins. "This is actually life. . . . This is
really what reality is bound to be. Why are you silent, Pelagea
Ivanovna?" he said, addressing Tatyana Ivanovna.

She coughed, overcome with confusion.

"Talk, my friends, sing . . . play! . . . Don't lose time. You
know, time, the rascal, runs away and waits for no man! Upon my
soul, before you have time to look round, old age is upon you. .
. . Then it is too late to live! That's how it is, Pelagea
Ivanovna. . . . We mustn't sit still and be silent. . . ."

At that point supper was brought out from the kitchen. Uncle went
into the lodge with us, and to keep us company ate five curd
fritters and the wing of a duck. He ate and looked at us. He was
touched and delighted by us all. Whatever silly nonsense my
precious tutor talked, and whatever Tatyana Ivanovna did, he
thought charming and delightful. When after supper Tatyana
Ivanovna sat quietly down and took up her knitting, he kept his
eyes fixed on her fingers and chatted away without ceasing.

"Make all the haste you can to live, my friends. . ." he said.
"God forbid you should sacrifice the present for the future!
There is youth, health, fire in the present; the future is smoke
and deception! As soon as you are twenty begin to live."

Tatyana Ivanovna dropped a knitting-needle. My uncle jumped up,
picked up the needle, and handed it to Tatyana Ivanovna with a
bow, and for the first time in my life I learnt that there were
people in the world more refined than Pobyedimsky.

"Yes . . ." my uncle went on, "love, marry, do silly things.
Foolishness is a great deal more living and healthy than our
straining and striving after rational life."

My uncle talked a great deal, so much that he bored us; I sat on
a box listening to him and dropping to sleep. It distressed me
that he did not once all the evening pay attention to me. He left
the lodge at two o'clock, when, overcome with drowsiness, I was
sound asleep.

From that time forth my uncle took to coming to the lodge every
evening. He sang with us, had supper with us, and always stayed
on till two o'clock in the morning, chatting incessantly, always
about the same subject. His evening and night work was given up,
and by the end of June, when the privy councillor had learned to
eat mother's turkey and _compote_, his work by day was abandoned
too. My uncle tore himself away from his table and plunged into
"life." In the daytime he walked up and down the garden, he
whistled to the workmen and hindered them from working, making
them tell him their various histories. When his eye fell on
Tatyana Ivanovna he ran up to her, and, if she were carrying
anything, offered his assistance, which embarrassed her
dreadfully.

As the summer advanced my uncle grew more and more frivolous,
volatile, and careless. Pobyedimsky was completely disillusioned
in regard to him.

"He is too one-sided," he said. "There is nothing to show that he
is in the very foremost ranks of the service. And he doesn't even
know how to talk. At every word it's 'upon my soul.' No, I don't
like him!"

From the time that my uncle began visiting the lodge there was a
noticeable change both in Fyodor and my tutor. Fyodor gave up
going out shooting, came home early, sat more taciturn than ever,
and stared with particular ill-humour at his wife. In my uncle's
presence my tutor gave up talking about epizootics, frowned, and
even laughed sarcastically.

"Here comes our little bantam cock!" he growled on one occasion
when my uncle was coming into the lodge.

I put down this change in them both to their being offended with
my uncle. My absent-minded uncle mixed up their names, and to the
very day of his departure failed to distinguish which was my
tutor and which was Tatyana Ivanovna's husband. Tatyana Ivanovna
herself he sometimes called Nastasya, sometimes Pelagea, and
sometimes Yevdokia. Touched and delighted by us, he laughed and
behaved exactly as though in the company of small children. . . .
All this, of course, might well offend young men. It was not a
case of offended pride, however, but, as I realize now, subtler
feelings.

I remember one evening I was sitting on the box struggling with
sleep. My eyelids felt glued together and my body, tired out by
running about all day, drooped sideways. But I struggled against
sleep and tried to look on. It was about midnight. Tatyana
Ivanovna, rosy and unassuming as always, was sitting at a little
table sewing at her husband's shirt. Fyodor, sullen and gloomy,
was staring at her from one corner, and in the other sat
Pobyedimsky, snorting angrily and retreating into the high collar
of his shi rt. My uncle was walking up and down the room
thinking. Silence reigned; nothing was to be heard but the
rustling of the linen in Tatyana Ivanovna's hands. Suddenly my
uncle stood still before Tatyana Ivanovna, and said:

"You are all so young, so fresh, so nice, you live so peacefully
in this quiet place, that I envy you. I have become attached to
your way of life here; my heart aches when I remember I have to
go away. . . . You may believe in my sincerity!"

Sleep closed my eyes and I lost myself. When some sound waked me,
my uncle was standing before Tatyana Ivanovna, looking at her
with a softened expression. His cheeks were flushed.

"My life has been wasted," he said. "I have not lived! Your young
face makes me think of my own lost youth, and I should be ready
to sit here watching you to the day of my death. It would be a
pleasure to me to take you with me to Petersburg."

"What for?" Fyodor asked in a husky voice.

"I should put her under a glass case on my work-table. I should
admire her and show her to other people. You know, Pelagea
Ivanovna, we have no women like you there. Among us there is
wealth, distinction, sometimes beauty, but we have not this true
sort of life, this healthy serenity. . . ."

My uncle sat down facing Tatyana Ivanovna and took her by the
hand.

"So you won't come with me to Petersburg?" he laughed. "In that
case give me your little hand. . . . A charming little hand! . .
. You won't give it? Come, you miser! let me kiss it, anyway. . .
."

At that moment there was the scrape of a chair. Fyodor jumped up,
and with heavy, measured steps went up to his wife. His face was
pale, grey, and quivering. He brought his fist down on the table
with a bang, and said in a hollow voice:

"I won't allow it!

At the same moment Pobyedimsky jumped up from his chair. He, too,
pale and angry, went up to Tatyana Ivanovna, and he, too, struck
the table with his fist.

"I . . . I won't allow it!" he said.

"What, what's the matter?" asked my uncle in surprise.

"I won't allow it!" repeated Fyodor, banging on the table.

My uncle jumped up and blinked nervously. He tried to speak, but
in his amazement and alarm could not utter a word; with an
embarrassed smile, he shuffled out of the lodge with the hurried
step of an old man, leaving his hat behind. When, a little later,
my mother ran into the lodge, Fyodor and Pobyedimsky were still
hammering on the table like blacksmiths and repeating, "I won't
allow it!"

"What has happened here?" asked mother. "Why has my brother been
taken ill? What's the matter?"

Looking at Tatyana's pale, frightened face and at her infuriated
husband, mother probably guessed what was the matter. She sighed
and shook her head.

"Come! give over banging on the table!" she said. "Leave off,
Fyodor! And why are you thumping, Yegor Alexyevitch? What have
you got to do with it?"

Pobyedimsky was startled and confused. Fyodor looked intently at
him, then at his wife, and began walking about the room. When
mother had gone out of the lodge, I saw what for long afterwards
I looked upon as a dream. I saw Fyodor seize my tutor, lift him
up in the air, and thrust him out of the door.

When I woke up in the morning my tutor's bed was empty. To my
question where he was nurse told me in a whisper that he had been
taken off early in the morning to the hospital, as his arm was
broken. Distressed at this intelligence and remembering the scene
of the previous evening, I went out of doors. It was a grey day.
The sky was covered with storm-clouds and there was a wind
blowing dust, bits of paper, and feathers along the ground. . . .
It felt as though rain were coming. There was a look of boredom
in the servants and in the animals. When I went into the house I
was told not to make such a noise with my feet, as mother was ill
and in bed with a migraine. What was I to do? I went outside the
gate, sat down on the little bench there, and fell to trying to
discover the meaning of what I had seen and heard the day before.
From our gate there was a road which, passing the forge and the
pool which never dried up, ran into the main road. I looked at
the telegraph-posts, about which clouds of dust were whirling,
and at the sleepy birds sitting on the wires, and I suddenly felt
so dreary that I began to cry.

A dusty wagonette crammed full of townspeople, probably going to
visit the shrine, drove by along the main road. The wagonette was
hardly out of sight when a light chaise with a pair of horses
came into view. In it was Akim Nikititch, the police inspector,
standing up and holding on to the coachman's belt. To my great
surprise, the chaise turned into our road and flew by me in at
the gate. While I was puzzling why the police inspector had come
to see us, I heard a noise, and a carriage with three horses came
into sight on the road. In the carriage stood the police captain,
directing his coachman towards our gate.

"And why is he coming?" I thought, looking at the dusty police
captain. "Most probably Pobyedimsky has complained of Fyodor to
him, and they have come to take him to prison."

But the mystery was not so easily solved. The police inspector
and the police captain were only the first instalment, for five
minutes had scarcely passed when a coach drove in at our gate. It
dashed by me so swiftly that I could only get a glimpse of a red
beard.

Lost in conjecture and full of misgivings, I ran to the house. In
the passage first of all I saw mother; she was pale and looking
with horror towards the door, from which came the sounds of men's
voices. The visitors had taken her by surprise in the very throes
of migraine.

"Who has come, mother?" I asked.

"Sister," I heard my uncle's voice, "will you send in something
to eat for the governor and me?"

"It is easy to say 'something to eat,' " whispered my mother,
numb with horror. "What have I time to get ready now? I am put to
shame in my old age!"

Mother clutched at her head and ran into the kitchen. The
governor's sudden visit stirred and overwhelmed the whole
household. A ferocious slaughter followed. A dozen fowls, five
turkeys, eight ducks, were killed, and in the fluster the old
gander, the progenitor of our whole flock of geese and a great
favourite of mother's, was beheaded. The coachmen and the cook
seemed frenzied, and slaughtered birds at random, without
distinction of age or breed. For the sake of some wretched sauce
a pair of valuable pigeons, as dear to me as the gander was to
mother, were sacrificed. It was a long while before I could
forgive the governor their death.

In the evening, when the governor and his suite, after a
sumptuous dinner, had got into their carriages and driven away, I
went into the house to look at the remains of the feast. Glancing
into the drawing-room from the passage, I saw my uncle and my
mother. My uncle, with his hands behind his back, was walking
nervously up and down close to the wall, shrugging his shoulders.
Mother, exhausted and looking much thinner, was sitting on the
sofa and watching his movements with heavy eyes.

"Excuse me, sister, but this won't do at all," my uncle grumbled,
wrinkling up his face. "I introduced the governor to you, and you
didn't offer to shake hands. You covered him with confusion, poor
fellow! No, that won't do. . . . Simplicity is a very good thing,
but there must be limits to it. . . . Upon my soul! And then that
dinner! How can one give people such things? What was that mess,
for instance, that they served for the fourth course?"

"That was duck with sweet sauce . . ." mother answered softly.

"Duck! Forgive me, sister, but . . . but here I've got heartburn!
I am ill!"

My uncle made a sour, tearful face, and went on:

"It was the devil sent that governor! As though I wanted his
visit! Pff! . . . heartburn! I can't work or sleep . . . I am
completely out of sorts. . . . And I can't understand how you can
live here without anything to do . . . in this boredom! Here I've
got a pain coming under my shoulder-blade! . . ."

My uncle frowned, and walked about more rapidly than ever.

"Brother," my mother inquired softly, "what would it cost to go
abroad?"

"At least three thousand . . ." my  uncle answered in a te arful
voice. "I would go, but where am I to get it? I haven't a
farthing. Pff! . . . heartburn!"

My uncle stopped to look dejectedly at the grey, overcast
prospect from the window, and began pacing to and fro again.

A silence followed. . . . Mother looked a long while at the ikon,
pondering something, then she began crying, and said:

"I'll give you the three thousand, brother. . . ."


Three days later the majestic boxes went off to the station, and
the privy councillor drove off after them. As he said good-bye to
mother he shed tears, and it was a long time before he took his
lips from her hands, but when he got into his carriage his face
beamed with childlike pleasure. . . . Radiant and happy, he
settled himself comfortably, kissed his hand to my mother, who
was crying, and all at once his eye was caught by me. A look of
the utmost astonishment came into his face.

"What boy is this?" he asked.

My mother, who had declared my uncle's coming was a piece of luck
for which I must thank God, was bitterly mortified at this
question. I was in no mood for questions. I looked at my uncle's
happy face, and for some reason I felt fearfully sorry for him. I
could not resist jumping up to the carriage and hugging that
frivolous man, weak as all men are. Looking into his face and
wanting to say something pleasant, I asked:

"Uncle, have you ever been in a battle?"

"Ah, the dear boy . . ." laughed my uncle, kissing me. "A
charming boy, upon my soul! How natural, how living it all is,
upon my soul! . . ."

The carriage set off. . . . I looked after him, and long
afterwards that farewell "upon my soul" was ringing in my ears.


THE MAN IN A CASE

AT the furthest end of the village of Mironositskoe some belated
sportsmen lodged for the night in the elder Prokofy's barn. There
were two of them, the veterinary surgeon Ivan Ivanovitch and the
schoolmaster Burkin. Ivan Ivanovitch had a rather strange
double-barrelled surname -- Tchimsha-Himalaisky -- which did not
suit him at all, and he was called simply Ivan Ivanovitch all
over the province. He lived at a stud-farm near the town, and had
come out shooting now to get a breath of fresh air. Burkin, the
high-school teacher, stayed every summer at Count P-----'s, and
had been thoroughly at home in this district for years.

They did not sleep. Ivan Ivanovitch, a tall, lean old fellow with
long moustaches, was sitting outside the door, smoking a pipe in
the moonlight. Burkin was lying within on the hay, and could not
be seen in the darkness.

They were telling each other all sorts of stories. Among other
things, they spoke of the fact that the elder's wife, Mavra, a
healthy and by no means stupid woman, had never been beyond her
native village, had never seen a town nor a railway in her life,
and had spent the last ten years sitting behind the stove, and
only at night going out into the street.

"What is there wonderful in that!" said Burkin. "There are plenty
of people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to
retreat into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps
it is an instance of atavism, a return to the period when the
ancestor of man was not yet a social animal and lived alone in
his den, or perhaps it is only one of the diversities of human
character -- who knows? I am not a natural science man, and it is
not my business to settle such questions; I only mean to say that
people like Mavra are not uncommon. There is no need to look far;
two months ago a man called Byelikov, a colleague of mine, the
Greek master, died in our town. You have heard of him, no doubt.
He was remarkable for always wearing goloshes and a warm wadded
coat, and carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather.
And his umbrella was in a case, and his watch was in a case made
of grey chamois leather, and when he took out his penknife to
sharpen his pencil, his penknife, too, was in a little case; and
his face seemed to be in a case too, because he always hid it in
his turned-up collar. He wore dark spectacles and flannel vests,
stuffed up his ears with cotton-wool, and when he got into a cab
always told the driver to put up the hood. In short, the man
displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself
in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would
isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality
irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation,
and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the
actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed;
and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality
for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from
real life.

" 'Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful is the Greek language!' he
would say, with a sugary expression; and as though to prove his
words he would screw up his eyes and, raising his finger, would
pronounce 'Anthropos!'

"And Byelikov tried to hide his thoughts also in a case. The only
things that were clear to his mind were government circulars and
newspaper articles in which something was forbidden. When some
proclamation prohibited the boys from going out in the streets
after nine o'clock in the evening, or some article declared
carnal love unlawful, it was to his mind clear and definite; it
was forbidden, and that was enough. For him there was always a
doubtful element, something vague and not fully expressed, in any
sanction or permission. When a dramatic club or a reading-room or
a tea-shop was licensed in the town, he would shake his head and
say softly:

"It is all right, of course; it is all very nice, but I hope it
won't lead to anything!"

"Every sort of breach of order, deviation or departure from rule,
depressed him, though one would have thought it was no business
of his. If one of his colleagues was late for church or if
rumours reached him of some prank of the high-school boys, or one
of the mistresses was seen late in the evening in the company of
an officer, he was much disturbed, and said he hoped that nothing
would come of it. At the teachers' meetings he simply oppressed
us with his caution, his circumspection, and his characteristic
reflection on the ill-behaviour of the young people in both male
and female high-schools, the uproar in the classes.

"Oh, he hoped it would not reach the ears of the authorities; oh,
he hoped nothing would come of it; and he thought it would be a
very good thing if Petrov were expelled from the second class and
Yegorov from the fourth. And, do you know, by his sighs, his
despondency, his black spectacles on his pale little face, a
little face like a pole-cat's, you know, he crushed us all, and
we gave way, reduced Petrov's and Yegorov's marks for conduct,
kept them in, and in the end expelled them both. He had a strange
habit of visiting our lodgings. He would come to a teacher's,
would sit down, and remain silent, as though he were carefully
inspecting something. He would sit like this in silence for an
hour or two and then go away. This he called 'maintaining good
relations with his colleagues'; and it was obvious that coming to
see us and sitting there was tiresome to him, and that he came to
see us simply because he considered it his duty as our colleague.
We teachers were afraid of him. And even the headmaster was
afraid of him. Would you believe it, our teachers were all
intellectual, right-minded people, brought up on Turgenev and
Shtchedrin, yet this little chap, who always went about with
goloshes and an umbrella, had the whole high-school under his
thumb for fifteen long years! High-school, indeed -- he had the
whole town under his thumb! Our ladies did not get up private
theatricals on Saturdays for fear he should hear of it, and the
clergy dared not eat meat or play cards in his presence. Under
the influence of people like Byelikov we have got into the way of
being afraid of everything in our town for the last ten or
fifteen years. They are afraid to speak aloud, afraid to send
letters, afraid to make acquaintances, afraid to read books,
afraid to help the poor, to teach people to read and write. . .
."

Ivan Ivanovitch cleared his throat, meaning to say something, but
first lighted his pipe, g azed at the moon, and then said, with
pauses:

"Yes, intellectual, right minded people read Shtchedrin and
Turgenev, Buckle, and all the rest of them, yet they knocked
under and put up with it. . . that's just how it is."

"Byelikov lived in the same house as I did," Burkin went on, "on
the same storey, his door facing mine; we often saw each other,
and I knew how he lived when he was at home. And at home it was
the same story: dressing-gown, nightcap, blinds, bolts, a perfect
succession of prohibitions and restrictions of all sorts, and
--'Oh, I hope nothing will come of it!' Lenten fare was bad for
him, yet he could not eat meat, as people might perhaps say
Byelikov did not keep the fasts, and he ate freshwater fish with
butter -- not a Lenten dish, yet one could not say that it was
meat. He did not keep a female servant for fear people might
think evil of him, but had as cook an old man of sixty, called
Afanasy, half-witted and given to tippling, who had once been an
officer's servant and could cook after a fashion. This Afanasy
was usually standing at the door with his arms folded; with a
deep sigh, he would mutter always the same thing:

" 'There are plenty of _them_ about nowadays!'

"Byelikov had a little bedroom like a box; his bed had curtains.
When he went to bed he covered his head over; it was hot and
stuffy; the wind battered on the closed doors; there was a
droning noise in the stove and a sound of sighs from the kitchen
-- ominous sighs. . . . And he felt frightened under the
bed-clothes. He was afraid that something might happen, that
Afanasy might murder him, that thieves might break in, and so he
had troubled dreams all night, and in the morning, when we went
together to the high-school, he was depressed and pale, and it
was evident that the high-school full of people excited dread and
aversion in his whole being, and that to walk beside me was
irksome to a man of his solitary temperament.

" 'They make a great noise in our classes,' he used to say, as
though trying to find an explanation for his depression. 'It's
beyond anything.'

"And the Greek master, this man in a case -- would you believe
it? -- almost got married."

Ivan Ivanovitch glanced quickly into the barn, and said:

"You are joking!"

"Yes, strange as it seems, he almost got married. A new teacher
of history and geography, Milhail Savvitch Kovalenko, a Little
Russian, was appointed. He came, not alone, but with his sister
Varinka. He was a tall, dark young man with huge hands, and one
could see from his face that he had a bass voice, and, in fact,
he had a voice that seemed to come out of a barrel -- 'boom,
boom, boom!' And she was not so young, about thirty, but she,
too, was tall, well-made, with black eyebrows and red cheeks --
in fact, she was a regular sugar-plum, and so sprightly, so
noisy; she was always singing Little Russian songs and laughing.
For the least thing she would go off into a ringing laugh --
'Ha-ha-ha!' We made our first thorough acquaintance with the
Kovalenkos at the headmaster's name-day party. Among the glum and
intensely bored teachers who came even to the name-day party as a
duty we suddenly saw a new Aphrodite risen from the waves; she
walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang, danced. . . . She
sang with feeling 'The Winds do Blow,' then another song, and
another, and she fascinated us all -- all, even Byelikov. He sat
down by her and said with a honeyed smile:

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

"That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling and
earnestness that they had a farm in the Gadyatchsky district, and
that her mamma lived at the farm, and that they had such pears,
such melons, such _kabaks_! The Little Russians call pumpkins
_kabaks_ (i.e., pothouses), while their pothouses they call
_shinki_, and they make a beetroot soup with tomatoes and
aubergines in it, 'which was so nice -- awfully nice!'

"We listened and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon
us all:

" 'It would be a good thing to make a match of it,' the
headmaster's wife said to me softly.

"We all for some reason recalled the fact that our friend
Byelikov was not married, and it now seemed to us strange that we
had hitherto failed to observe, and had in fact completely lost
sight of, a detail so important in his life. What was his
attitude to woman? How had he settled this vital question for
himself? This had not interested us in the least till then;
perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a man who went out
in all weathers in goloshes and slept under curtains could be in
love.

" 'He is a good deal over forty and she is thirty,' the
headmaster's wife went on, developing her idea. 'I believe she
would marry him.'

"All sorts of things are done in the provinces through boredom,
all sorts of unnecessary and nonsensical things! And that is
because what is necessary is not done at all. What need was there
for instance, for us to make a match for this Byelikov, whom one
could not even imagine married? The headmaster's wife, the
inspector's wife, and all our high-school ladies, grew livelier
and even better-looking, as though they had suddenly found a new
object in life. The headmaster's wife would take a box at the
theatre, and we beheld sitting in her box Varinka, with such a
fan, beaming and happy, and beside her Byelikov, a little bent
figure, looking as though he had been extracted from his house by
pincers. I would give an evening party, and the ladies would
insist on my inviting Byelikov and Varinka. In short, the machine
was set in motion. It appeared that Varinka was not averse to
matrimony. She had not a very cheerful life with her brother;
they could do nothing but quarrel and scold one another from
morning till night. Here is a scene, for instance. Kovalenko
would be coming along the street, a tall, sturdy young ruffian,
in an embroidered shirt, his love-locks falling on his forehead
under his cap, in one hand a bundle of books, in the other a
thick knotted stick, followed by his sister, also with books in
her hand.

" 'But you haven't read it, Mihalik!' she would be arguing
loudly. 'I tell you, I swear you have not read it at all!'

" 'And I tell you I have read it,' cries Kovalenko, thumping his
stick on the pavement.

" 'Oh, my goodness, Mihalik! why are you so cross? We are arguing
about principles.'

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

"And at home, if there was an outsider present, there was sure to
be a skirmish. Such a life must have been wearisome, and of
course she must have longed for a home of her own. Besides, there
was her age to be considered; there was no time left to pick and
choose; it was a case of marrying anybody, even a Greek master.
And, indeed, most of our young ladies don't mind whom they marry
so long as they do get married. However that may be, Varinka
began to show an unmistakable partiality for Byelikov.

"And Byelikov? He used to visit Kovalenko just as he did us. He
would arrive, sit down, and remain silent. He would sit quiet,
and Varinka would sing to him 'The Winds do Blow,' or would look
pensively at him with her dark eyes, or would suddenly go off
into a peal -- 'Ha-ha-ha!'

"Suggestion plays a great part in love affairs, and still more in
getting married. Everybody -- both his colleagues and the ladies
-- began assuring Byelikov that he ought to get married, that
there was nothing left for him in life but to get married; we all
congratulated him, with solemn countenances delivered ourselves
of various platitudes, such as 'Marriage is a serious step.'
Besides, Varinka was good-looking and interesting; she was the
daughter of a civil councillor, and had a farm; and what was
more, she was the first woman who had been warm and friendly in
her manner to him. His head was turned, and he decided that he
really ought to get married."

"Well, at that point you ought to have taken away his goloshes
and umbrella," said Ivan Ivanovitch.

"Only fancy! that turned out to be impossible. He put Varinka's
portrait on his table, kept coming to see me and talking about
Varinka, and home life,
 saying marriage was a serious step. He was frequently at
Kovalenko's, but he did not alter his manner of life in the
least; on the contrary, indeed, his determination to get married
seemed to have a depressing effect on him. He grew thinner and
paler, and seemed to retreat further and further into his case.

" 'I like Varvara Savvishna,' he used to say to me, with a faint
and wry smile, 'and I know that every one ought to get married,
but . . . you know all this has happened so suddenly. . . . One
must think a little.'

" 'What is there to think over?' I used to say to him. 'Get
married -- that is all.'

" 'No; marriage is a serious step. One must first weigh the
duties before one, the responsibilities . . . that nothing may go
wrong afterwards. It worries me so much that I don't sleep at
night. And I must confess I am afraid: her brother and she have a
strange way of thinking; they look at things strangely, you know,
and her disposition is very impetuous. One may get married, and
then, there is no knowing, one may find oneself in an unpleasant
position.'

"And he did not make an offer; he kept putting it off, to the
great vexation of the headmaster's wife and all our ladies; he
went on weighing his future duties and responsibilities, and
meanwhile he went for a walk with Varinka almost every day --
possibly he thought that this was necessary in his position --
and came to see me to talk about family life. And in all
probability in the end he would have proposed to her, and would
have made one of those unnecessary, stupid marriages such as are
made by thousands among us from being bored and having nothing to
do, if it had not been for a _kolossalische scandal_. I must
mention that Varinka's brother, Kovalenko, detested Byelikov from
the first day of their acquaintance, and could not endure him.

" 'I don't understand,' he used to say to us, shrugging his
shoulders --'I don't understand how you can put up with that
sneak, that nasty phiz. Ugh! how can you live here! The
atmosphere is stifling and unclean! Do you call yourselves
schoolmasters, teachers? You are paltry government clerks. You
keep, not a temple of science, but a department for red tape and
loyal behaviour, and it smells as sour as a police-station. No,
my friends; I will stay with you for a while, and then I will go
to my farm and there catch crabs and teach the Little Russians. I
shall go, and you can stay here with your Judas -- damn his
soul!'

"Or he would laugh till he cried, first in a loud bass, then in a
shrill, thin laugh, and ask me, waving his hands:

" 'What does he sit here for? What does he want? He sits and
stares.'

"He even gave Byelikov a nickname, 'The Spider.' And it will
readily be understood that we avoided talking to him of his
sister's being about to marry 'The Spider.'

"And on one occasion, when the headmaster's wife hinted to him
what a good thing it would be to secure his sister's future with
such a reliable, universally respected man as Byelikov, he
frowned and muttered:

" 'It's not my business; let her marry a reptile if she likes. I
don't like meddling in other people's affairs.'

"Now hear what happened next. Some mischievous person drew a
caricature of Byelikov walking along in his goloshes with his
trousers tucked up, under his umbrella, with Varinka on his arm;
below, the inscription 'Anthropos in love.' The expression was
caught to a marvel, you know. The artist must have worked for
more than one night, for the teachers of both the boys' and
girls' high-schools, the teachers of the seminary, the government
officials, all received a copy. Byelikov received one, too. The
caricature made a very painful impression on him.

"We went out together; it was the first of May, a Sunday, and all
of us, the boys and the teachers, had agreed to meet at the
high-school and then to go for a walk together to a wood beyond
the town. We set off, and he was green in the face and gloomier
than a storm-cloud.

'What wicked, ill-natured people there are!' he said, and his
lips quivered.

"I felt really sorry for him. We were walking along, and all of a
sudden -- would you believe it? -- Kovalenko came bowling along
on a bicycle, and after him, also on a bicycle, Varinka, flushed
and exhausted, but good-humoured and gay.

" 'We are going on ahead,' she called. 'What lovely weather!
Awfully lovely!'

"And they both disappeared from our sight. Byelikov turned white
instead of green, and seemed petrified. He stopped short and
stared at me. . . .

" 'What is the meaning of it? Tell me, please!' he asked. 'Can my
eyes have deceived me? Is it the proper thing for high-school
masters and ladies to ride bicycles?'

" 'What is there improper about it?' I said. 'Let them ride and
enjoy themselves.'

" 'But how can that be?' he cried, amazed at my calm. 'What are
you saying?'

"And he was so shocked that he was unwilling to go on, and
returned home.

"Next day he was continually twitching and nervously rubbing his
hands, and it was evident from his face that he was unwell. And
he left before his work was over, for the first time in his life.
And he ate no dinner. Towards evening he wrapped himself up
warmly, though it was quite warm weather, and sallied out to the
Kovalenkos'. Varinka was out; he found her brother, however.

" 'Pray sit down,' Kovalenko said coldly, with a frown. His face
looked sleepy; he had just had a nap after dinner, and was in a
very bad humour.

"Byelikov sat in silence for ten minutes, and then began:

" 'I have come to see you to relieve my mind. I am very, very
much troubled. Some scurrilous fellow has drawn an absurd
caricature of me and another person, in whom we are both deeply
interested. I regard it as a duty to assure you that I have had
no hand in it. . . . I have given no sort of ground for such
ridicule -- on the contrary, I have always behaved in every way
like a gentleman.'

"Kovalenko sat sulky and silent. Byelikov waited a little, and
went on slowly in a mournful voice:

" 'And I have something else to say to you. I have been in the
service for years, while you have only lately entered it, and I
consider it my duty as an older colleague to give you a warning.
You ride on a bicycle, and that pastime is utterly unsuitable for
an educator of youth.'

" 'Why so?' asked Kovalenko in his bass.

" 'Surely that needs no explanation, Mihail Savvitch -- surely
you can understand that? If the teacher rides a bicycle, what can
you expect the pupils to do? You will have them walking on their
heads next! And so long as there is no formal permission to do
so, it is out of the question. I was horrified yesterday! When I
saw your sister everything seemed dancing before my eyes. A lady
or a young girl on a bicycle -- it's awful!'

" 'What is it you want exactly?'

" 'All I want is to warn you, Mihail Savvitch. You are a young
man, you have a future before you, you must be very, very careful
in your behaviour, and you are so careless -- oh, so careless!
You go about in an embroidered shirt, are constantly seen in the
street carrying books, and now the bicycle, too. The headmaster
will learn that you and your sister ride the bicycle, and then it
will reach the higher authorities. . . . Will that be a good
thing?'

" 'It's no business of anybody else if my sister and I do
bicycle!' said Kovalenko, and he turned crimson. 'And damnation
take any one who meddles in my private affairs!'

"Byelikov turned pale and got up.

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

" 'Why, have I said any harm of the authorities?' asked
Kovalenko, looking at him wrathfully. 'Please leave me alone. I
am an honest man, and do not care to talk to a gentleman like
you. I don't like sneaks!'

"Byelikov flew into a nervous flutter, and began hurriedly
putting on his coat, with an expression of horror on his face. It
was the first time in his life he had been spoken to so rudely.

" 'You can say what you please,' he said, as he went out from the
entry to the landing on the staircase. 'I ought only to warn you:
possibly some on e may have overheard us, and that our
conversation may not be misunderstood and harm come of it, I
shall be compelled to inform our headmaster of our conversation .
. . in its main features. I am bound to do so.'

" 'Inform him? You can go and make your report!'

"Kovalenko seized him from behind by the collar and gave him a
push, and Byelikov rolled downstairs, thudding with his goloshes.
The staircase was high and steep, but he rolled to the bottom
unhurt, got up, and touched his nose to see whether his
spectacles were all right. But just as he was falling down the
stairs Varinka came in, and with her two ladies; they stood below
staring, and to Byelikov this was more terrible than anything. I
believe he would rather have broken his neck or both legs than
have been an object of ridicule. 'Why, now the whole town would
hear of it; it would come to the headmaster's ears, would reach
the higher authorities -- oh, it might lead to something! There
would be another caricature, and it would all end in his being
asked to resign his post. . . .

"When he got up, Varinka recognized him, and, looking at his
ridiculous face, his crumpled overcoat, and his goloshes, not
understanding what had happened and supposing that he had slipped
down by accident, could not restrain herself, and laughed loud
enough to be heard by all the flats:

" 'Ha-ha-ha!'

"And this pealing, ringing 'Ha-ha-ha!' was the last straw that
put an end to everything: to the proposed match and to Byelikov's
earthly existence. He did not hear what Varinka said to him; he
saw nothing. On reaching home, the first thing he did was to
remove her portrait from the table; then he went to bed, and he
never got up again.

"Three days later Afanasy came to me and asked whether we should
not send for the doctor, as there was something wrong with his
master. I went in to Byelikov. He lay silent behind the curtain,
covered with a quilt; if one asked him a question, he said 'Yes'
or 'No' and not another sound. He lay there while Afanasy, gloomy
and scowling, hovered about him, sighing heavily, and smelling
like a pothouse.

"A month later Byelikov died. We all went to his funeral -- that
is, both the high-schools and the seminary. Now when he was lying
in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful,
as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case
which he would never leave again. Yes, he had attained his ideal!
And, as though in his honour, it was dull, rainy weather on the
day of his funeral, and we all wore goloshes and took our
umbrellas. Varinka, too, was at the funeral, and when the coffin
was lowered into the grave she burst into tears. I have noticed
that Little Russian women are always laughing or crying -- no
intermediate mood.

"One must confess that to bury people like Byelikov is a great
pleasure. As we were returning from the cemetery we wore discreet
Lenten faces; no one wanted to display this feeling of pleasure
-- a feeling like that we had experienced long, long ago as
children when our elders had gone out and we ran about the garden
for an hour or two, enjoying complete freedom. Ah, freedom,
freedom! The merest hint, the faintest hope of its possibility
gives wings to the soul, does it not?

"We returned from the cemetery in a good humour. But not more
than a week had passed before life went on as in the past, as
gloomy, oppressive, and senseless -- a life not forbidden by
government prohibition, but not fully permitted, either: it was
no better. And, indeed, though we had buried Byelikov, how many
such men in cases were left, how many more of them there will
be!"

"That's just how it is," said Ivan Ivanovitch and he lighted his
pipe.

"How many more of them there will be!" repeated Burkin.

The schoolmaster came out of the barn. He was a short, stout man,
completely bald, with a black beard down to his waist. The two
dogs came out with him.

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

It was midnight. On the right could be seen the whole village, a
long street stretching far away for four miles. All was buried in
deep silent slumber; not a movement, not a sound; one could
hardly believe that nature could be so still. When on a moonlight
night you see a broad village street, with its cottages,
haystacks, and slumbering willows, a feeling of calm comes over
the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from care, toil, and sorrow
in the darkness of night, it is mild, melancholy, beautiful, and
it seems as though the stars look down upon it kindly and with
tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth and all
were well. On the left the open country began from the end of the
village; it could be seen stretching far away to the horizon, and
there was no movement, no sound in that whole expanse bathed in
moonlight.

"Yes, that is just how it is," repeated Ivan Ivanovitch; "and
isn't our living in town, airless and crowded, our writing
useless papers, our playing _vint_ -- isn't that all a sort of
case for us? And our spending our whole lives among trivial,
fussy men and silly, idle women, our talking and our listening to
all sorts of nonsense -- isn't that a case for us, too? If you
like, I will tell you a very edifying story."

"No; it's time we were asleep," said Burkin. "Tell it tomorrow."

They went into the barn and lay down on the hay. And they were
both covered up and beginning to doze when they suddenly heard
light footsteps -- patter, patter. . . . Some one was walking not
far from the barn, walking a little and stopping, and a minute
later, patter, patter again. . . . The dogs began growling.

"That's Mavra," said Burkin.

The footsteps died away.

"You see and hear that they lie," said Ivan Ivanovitch, turning
over on the other side, "and they call you a fool for putting up
with their lying. You endure insult and humiliation, and dare not
openly say that you are on the side of the honest and the free,
and you lie and smile yourself; and all that for the sake of a
crust of bread, for the sake of a warm corner, for the sake of a
wretched little worthless rank in the service. No, one can't go
on living like this."

"Well, you are off on another tack now, Ivan Ivanovitch," said
the schoolmaster. "Let us go to sleep!

And ten minutes later Burkin was asleep. But Ivan Ivanovitch kept
sighing and turning over from side to side; then he got up, went
outside again, and, sitting in the doorway, lighted his pipe.


GOOSEBERRIES

THE whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early
morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey
dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country
for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come.
Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, the
high-school teacher, were already tired from walking, and the
fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they could just
see the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe; on the right
stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared in the distance
behind the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of
the river, that there were meadows, green willows, homesteads
there, and that if one stood on one of the hillocks one could see
from it the same vast plain, telegraph-wires, and a train which
in the distance looked like a crawling caterpillar, and that in
clear weather one could even see the town. Now, in still weather,
when all nature seemed mild and dreamy, Ivan Ivanovitch and
Burkin were filled with love of that countryside, and both
thought how great, how beautiful a land it was.

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

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

Ivan Ivanovitch heaved a deep sigh and lighted a pipe to begin to
tell his story, but just at that moment the rain began. And five
minutes later heavy rain came down, covering the sky, and it was
hard to tell when it would be over. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin
stopped in hesitation; the dogs, already drenched, stood with
their tails between their legs gazing at them feelingly.

"We must take shelter somewhere," said Burkin. "Let us go to
Alehin's; it's close by."

"Come along."

They turned aside a nd walked through mown fields, sometimes
going straight forward, sometimes turning to the right, till they
came out on the road. Soon they saw poplars, a garden, then the
red roofs of barns; there was a gleam of the river, and the view
opened on to a broad expanse of water with a windmill and a white
bath-house: this was Sofino, where Alehin lived.

The watermill was at work, drowning the sound of the rain; the
dam was shaking. Here wet horses with drooping heads were
standing near their carts, and men were walking about covered
with sacks. It was damp, muddy, and desolate; the water looked
cold and malignant. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were already
conscious of a feeling of wetness, messiness, and discomfort all
over; their feet were heavy with mud, and when, crossing the dam,
they went up to the barns, they were silent, as though they were
angry with one another.

In one of the barns there was the sound of a winnowing machine,
the door was open, and clouds of dust were coming from it. In the
doorway was standing Alehin himself, a man of forty, tall and
stout, with long hair, more like a professor or an artist than a
landowner. He had on a white shirt that badly needed washing, a
rope for a belt, drawers instead of trousers, and his boots, too,
were plastered up with mud and straw. His eyes and nose were
black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin, and
was apparently much delighted to see them.

"Go into the house, gentlemen," he said, smiling; "I'll come
directly, this minute."

It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower
storey, with arched ceilings and little windows, where the
bailiffs had once lived; here everything was plain, and there was
a smell of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He went upstairs
into the best rooms only on rare occasions, when visitors came.
Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were met in the house by a
maid-servant, a young woman so beautiful that they both stood
still and looked at one another.

"You can't imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,"
said Alehin, going into the hall with them. "It is a surprise!
Pelagea," he said, addressing the girl, "give our visitors
something to change into. And, by the way, I will change too.
Only I must first go and wash, for I almost think I have not
washed since spring. Wouldn't you like to come into the
bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here."

Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them
towels and soap, and Alehin went to the bath-house with his
guests.

"It's a long time since I had a wash," he said, undressing. "I
have got a nice bath-house, as you see -- my father built it --
but I somehow never have time to wash."

He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his neck,
and the water round him turned brown.

"Yes, I must say," said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking at his
head.

"It's a long time since I washed . . ." said Alehin with
embarrassment, giving himself a second soaping, and the water
near him turned dark blue, like ink.

Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with a loud
splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He
stirred the water into waves which set the white lilies bobbing
up and down; he swam to the very middle of the millpond and
dived, and came up a minute later in another place, and swam on,
and kept on diving, trying to touch the bottom.

"Oh, my goodness!" he repeated continually, enjoying himself
thoroughly. "Oh, my goodness!" He swam to the mill, talked to the
peasants there, then returned and lay on his back in the middle
of the pond, turning his face to the rain. Burkin and Alehin were
dressed and ready to go, but he still went on swimming and
diving. "Oh, my goodness! . . ." he said. "Oh, Lord, have mercy
on me! . . ."

"That's enough!" Burkin shouted to him.

They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lighted
in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch,
attired in silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in
arm-chairs; and Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was
walking about the drawing-room, evidently enjoying the feeling of
warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes, and light shoes; and when
lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling
softly, handed tea and jam on a tray -- only then Ivan Ivanovitch
began on his story, and it seemed as though not only Burkin and
Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and old, and
the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from
their gold frames.

"There are two of us brothers," he began --"I, Ivan Ivanovitch,
and my brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in
for a learned profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while
Nikolay sat in a government office from the time he was nineteen.
Our father, Tchimsha-Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but he rose to
be an officer and left us a little estate and the rank of
nobility. After his death the little estate went in debts and
legal expenses; but, anyway, we had spent our childhood running
wild in the country. Like peasant children, we passed our days
and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after horses,
stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on. . . . And,
you know, whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen
the migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float
in flocks over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be
a real townsman, and will have a yearning for freedom to the day
of his death. My brother was miserable in the government office.
Years passed by, and he went on sitting in the same place, went
on writing the same papers and thinking of one and the same thing
-- how to get into the country. And this yearning by degrees
passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself a
little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.

"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but
I never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the
rest of his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct
thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But
six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too,
now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land
and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just
the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the
struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in
one's farm -- it's not life, it's egoism, laziness, it's
monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man
does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe,
all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of
how he would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole
yard with such a savoury smell, take his meals on the green
grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the seat by the
gate gazing at the fields and the forest. Gardening books and the
agricultural hints in calendars were his delight, his favourite
spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading newspapers, too, but the
only things he read in them were the advertisements of so many
acres of arable land and a grass meadow with farm-houses and
buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for sale. And
his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing,
you know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds
according to the advertisements which he came across, but for
some reason in every one of them he had always to have
gooseberries. He could not imagine a homestead, he could not
picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.

" 'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say.
'You sit on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim
on the pond, there is a delicious smell everywhere, and . . . and
the gooseberries are growing.'

"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there
were the same things -- (a) house for the family, (b) servants'
quarters, (c) kitchen-ga rden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived
parsimoniously, was frugal in food and drink, his clothes were
beyond description; he looked like a beggar, but kept on saving
and putting money in the bank. He grew fearfully avaricious. I
did not like to look at him, and I used to give him something and
send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he used to save
that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no doing
anything with him.

"Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was
over forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the
papers and saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the
same object of buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married
an elderly and ugly widow without a trace of feeling for her,
simply because she had filthy lucre. He went on living frugally
after marrying her, and kept her short of food, while he put her
money in the bank in his name.

"Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second
husband she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine
away with this sort of life, and three years later she gave up
her soul to God. And I need hardly say that my brother never for
one moment imagined that he was responsible for her death. Money,
like vodka, makes a man queer. In our town there was a merchant
who, before he died, ordered a plateful of honey and ate up all
his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so that no one
might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting cattle at a
railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his
leg cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was
flowing -- it was a horrible thing -- and he kept asking them to
look for his leg and was very much worried about it; there were
twenty roubles in the boot on the leg that had been cut off, and
he was afraid they would be lost."

"That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.

"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking
for half a minute, "my brother began looking out for an estate
for himself. Of course, you may look about for five years and yet
end by making a mistake, and buying something quite different
from what you have dreamed of. My brother Nikolay bought through
an agent a mortgaged estate of three hundred and thirty acres,
with a house for the family, with servants' quarters, with a
park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-bushes, and no
duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour
of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a
brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But
Nikolay Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty
gooseberry-bushes, planted them, and began living as a country
gentleman.

"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and
see what it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate
'Tchumbaroklov Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached 'alias
Himalaiskoe' in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were
ditches, fences, hedges, fir-trees planted in rows, and there was
no knowing how to get to the yard, where to put one's horse. I
went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked
like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too lazy. The cook, a
fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and she, too,
looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed
with a quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled;
his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck out -- he looked as
though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.

"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at
the thought that we had once been young and now were both
grey-headed and near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to
show me the estate.

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

" 'Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'

"He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a
gentleman. He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it,
and liked it. He ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was
growing stout, was already at law with the village commune and
both factories, and was very much offended when the peasants did
not call him 'Your Honour.' And he concerned himself with the
salvation of his soul in a substantial, gentlemanly manner, and
performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with an air of
consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the peasants
for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his
name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village,
and then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka -- he thought
that was the thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka!
One day the fat landowner hauls the peasants up before the
district captain for trespass, and next day, in honour of a
holiday, treats them to a gallon of vodka, and they drink and
shout 'Hurrah!' and when they are drunk bow down to his feet. A
change of life for the better, and being well-fed and idle
develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay
Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid
to have any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not
gospel truth, and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime
minister. 'Education is essential, but for the peasants it is
premature.' 'Corporal punishment is harmful as a rule, but in
some cases it is necessary and there is nothing to take its
place.'

" 'I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,' he
would say. 'The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my
little finger and the peasants will do anything I like.'

"And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent
smile. He repeated twenty times over 'We noblemen,' 'I as a
noble'; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather was a
peasant, and our father a soldier. Even our surname
Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so incongruous, seemed to him now
melodious, distinguished, and very agreeable.

"But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you
about the change that took place in me during the brief hours I
spent at his country place. In the evening, when we were drinking
tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They
were not bought, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first
time since the bushes were planted. Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed
and looked for a minute in silence at the gooseberries, with
tears in his eyes; he could not speak for excitement. Then he put
one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a
child who has at last received his favourite toy, and said:

" 'How delicious!'

"And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, 'Ah, how
delicious! Do taste them!'

"They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:

    " 'Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts
       Than hosts of baser truths.'

"I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously
fulfilled, who had attained his object in life, who had gained
what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and himself.
There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled
with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at
the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling
that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at
night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's
bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept
getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one.
I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are!
'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence
and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the
weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding,
degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying. . . . Yet all is
calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty
thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out,
who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people
going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night,
talking their silly nonse nse, getting married, growing old,
serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see
and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life
goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Everything is quiet
and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many
people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk,
so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of
things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels
at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and
without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case
of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every
happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually
reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that
however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or
later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and
no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears
others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at
his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the
wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.

"That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented,"
Ivan Ivanovitch went on, getting up. "I, too, at dinner and at
the hunt liked to lay down the law on life and religion, and the
way to manage the peasantry. I, too, used to say that science was
light, that culture was essential, but for the simple people
reading and writing was enough for the time. Freedom is a
blessing, I used to say; we can no more do without it than
without air, but we must wait a little. Yes, I used to talk like
that, and now I ask, 'For what reason are we to wait?' " asked
Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. "Why wait, I ask you?
What grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told, it can't be
done all at once; every idea takes shape in life gradually, in
its due time. But who is it says that? Where is the proof that
it's right? You will fall back upon the natural order of things,
the uniformity of phenomena; but is there order and uniformity in
the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand over a chasm and
wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up with mud at the
very time when perhaps I might leap over it or build a bridge
across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till
there's no strength to live? And meanwhile one must live, and one
wants to live!

"I went away from my brother's early in the morning, and ever
since then it has been unbearable for me to be in town. I am
oppressed by its peace and quiet; I am afraid to look at the
windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now than
the sight of a happy family sitting round the table drinking tea.
I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not even capable
of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated and vexed;
but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I cannot
sleep. . . . Ah, if I were young!"

Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement, and
repeated: "If I were young!"

He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first one of his
hands and then the other.

"Pavel Konstantinovitch," he said in an imploring voice, "don't
be calm and contented, don't let yourself be put to sleep! While
you are young, strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing!
There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is
a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not
our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do good!"

And all this Ivan Ivanovitch said with a pitiful, imploring
smile, as though he were asking him a personal favour.

Then all three sat in arm-chairs at different ends of the
drawing-room and were silent. Ivan Ivanovitch's story had not
satisfied either Burkin or Alehin. When the generals and ladies
gazed down from their gilt frames, looking in the dusk as though
they were alive, it was dreary to listen to the story of the poor
clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt inclined, for some reason,
to talk about elegant people, about women. And their sitting in
the drawing-room where everything -- the chandeliers in their
covers, the arm-chairs, and the carpet under their feet --
reminded them that those very people who were now looking down
from their frames had once moved about, sat, drunk tea in this
room, and the fact that lovely Pelagea was moving noiselessly
about was better than any story.

Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three
o'clock in the morning, to look after his work, and now his eyes
were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell some
interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on. He did
not go into the question whether what Ivan Ivanovitch had just
said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of groats, nor
of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no direct bearing
on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.

"It's bed-time, though," said Burkin, getting up. "Allow me to
wish you good-night."

Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own domain,
while the visitors remained upstairs. They were both taken for
the night to a big room where there stood two old wooden beds
decorated with carvings, and in the corner was an ivory crucifix.
The big cool beds, which had been made by the lovely Pelagea,
smelt agreeably of clean linen.

Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.

"Lord forgive us sinners!" he said, and put his head under the
quilt.

His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco, and
Burkin could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering where
the oppressive smell came from.

The rain was pattering on the window-panes all night.


ABOUT LOVE

AT lunch next day there were very nice pies, crayfish, and mutton
cutlets; and while we were eating, Nikanor, the cook, came up to
ask what the visitors would like for dinner. He was a man of
medium height, with a puffy face and little eyes; he was
close-shaven, and it looked as though his moustaches had not been
shaved, but had been pulled out by the roots. Alehin told us that
the beautiful Pelagea was in love with this cook. As he drank and
was of a violent character, she did not want to marry him, but
was willing to live with him without. He was very devout, and his
religious convictions would not allow him to "live in sin"; he
insisted on her marrying him, and would consent to nothing else,
and when he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her.
Whenever he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on
such occasions Alehin and the servants stayed in the house to be
ready to defend her in case of necessity.

We began talking about love.

"How love is born," said Alehin, "why Pelagea does not love
somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external
qualities, and why she fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly snout
-- we all call him 'The Snout' -- how far questions of personal
happiness are of consequence in love -- all that is known; one
can take what view one likes of it. So far only one incontestable
truth has been uttered about love: 'This is a great mystery.'
Everything else that has been written or said about love is not a
conclusion, but only a statement of questions which have remained
unanswered. The explanation which would seem to fit one case does
not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind,
would be to explain every case individually without attempting to
generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each
case."

"Perfectly true," Burkin assented.

"We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these
questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized,
decorated with roses, nightingales; we Russians decorate our
loves with these momentous questions, and select the most
uninteresting of them, too. In Moscow, when I was a student, I
had a friend who shared my life, a charming lady, and every time
I took her in my arms she was thinking what I would allow her a
month for housekeeping and what was the price of beef a pound. In
the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of asking
ourselves questi ons: whether it is honourable or dishonourable,
sensible or stupid, what this love is leading up to, and so on.
Whether it is a good thing or not I don't know, but that it is in
the way, unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do know."

It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who lead
a solitary existence always have something in their hearts which
they are eager to talk about. In town bachelors visit the baths
and the restaurants on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell the
most interesting things to bath attendants and waiters; in the
country, as a rule, they unbosom themselves to their guests. Now
from the window we could see a grey sky, trees drenched in the
rain; in such weather we could go nowhere, and there was nothing
for us to do but to tell stories and to listen.

"I have lived at Sofino and been farming for a long time," Alehin
began, "ever since I left the University. I am an idle gentleman
by education, a studious person by disposition; but there was a
big debt owing on the estate when I came here, and as my father
was in debt partly because he had spent so much on my education,
I resolved not to go away, but to work till I paid off the debt.
I made up my mind to this and set to work, not, I must confess,
without some repugnance. The land here does not yield much, and
if one is not to farm at a loss one must employ serf labour or
hired labourers, which is almost the same thing, or put it on a
peasant footing -- that is, work the fields oneself and with
one's family. There is no middle path. But in those days I did
not go into such subtleties. I did not leave a clod of earth
unturned; I gathered together all the peasants, men and women,
from the neighbouring villages; the work went on at a tremendous
pace. I myself ploughed and sowed and reaped, and was bored doing
it, and frowned with disgust, like a village cat driven by hunger
to eat cucumbers in the kitchen-garden. My body ached, and I
slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I could easily
reconcile this life of toil with my cultured habits; to do so, I
thought, all that is necessary is to maintain a certain external
order in life. I established myself upstairs here in the best
rooms, and ordered them to bring me there coffee and liquor after
lunch and dinner, and when I went to bed I read every night the
_Yyesnik Evropi_. But one day our priest, Father Ivan, came and
drank up all my liquor at one sitting; and the _Yyesnik Evropi_
went to the priest's daughters; as in the summer, especially at
the haymaking, I did not succeed in getting to my bed at all, and
slept in the sledge in the barn, or somewhere in the forester's
lodge, what chance was there of reading? Little by little I moved
downstairs, began dining in the servants' kitchen, and of my
former luxury nothing is left but the servants who were in my
father's service, and whom it would be painful to turn away.

"In the first years I was elected here an honourary justice of
the peace. I used to have to go to the town and take part in the
sessions of the congress and of the circuit court, and this was a
pleasant change for me. When you live here for two or three
months without a break, especially in the winter, you begin at
last to pine for a black coat. And in the circuit court there
were frock-coats, and uniforms, and dress-coats, too, all
lawyers, men who have received a general education; I had some
one to talk to. After sleeping in the sledge and dining in the
kitchen, to sit in an arm-chair in clean linen, in thin boots,
with a chain on one's waistcoat, is such luxury!

"I received a warm welcome in the town. I made friends eagerly.
And of all my acquaintanceships the most intimate and, to tell
the truth, the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with
Luganovitch, the vice-president of the circuit court. You both
know him: a most charming personality. It all happened just after
a celebrated case of incendiarism; the preliminary investigation
lasted two days; we were exhausted. Luganovitch looked at me and
said:

" 'Look here, come round to dinner with me.'

"This was unexpected, as I knew Luganovitch very little, only
officially, and I had never been to his house. I only just went
to my hotel room to change and went off to dinner. And here it
was my lot to meet Anna Alexyevna, Luganovitch's wife. At that
time she was still very young, not more than twenty-two, and her
first baby had been born just six months before. It is all a
thing of the past; and now I should find it difficult to define
what there was so exceptional in her, what it was in her
attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it was all
perfectly clear to me. I saw a lovely young, good, intelligent,
fascinating woman, such as I had never met before; and I felt her
at once some one close and already familiar, as though that face,
those cordial, intelligent eyes, I had seen somewhere in my
childhood, in the album which lay on my mother's chest of
drawers.

"Four Jews were charged with being incendiaries, were regarded as
a gang of robbers, and, to my mind, quite groundlessly. At dinner
I was very much excited, I was uncomfortable, and I don't know
what I said, but Anna Alexyevna kept shaking her head and saying
to her husband:

" 'Dmitry, how is this?'

"Luganovitch is a good-natured man, one of those simple-hearted
people who firmly maintain the opinion that once a man is charged
before a court he is guilty, and to express doubt of the
correctness of a sentence cannot be done except in legal form on
paper, and not at dinner and in private conversation.

" 'You and I did not set fire to the place,' he said softly, 'and
you see we are not condemned, and not in prison.'

"And both husband and wife tried to make me eat and drink as much
as possible. From some trifling details, from the way they made
the coffee together, for instance, and from the way they
understood each other at half a word, I could gather that they
lived in harmony and comfort, and that they were glad of a
visitor. After dinner they played a duet on the piano; then it
got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of spring.

"After that I spent the whole summer at Sofino without a break,
and I had no time to think of the town, either, but the memory of
the graceful fair-haired woman remained in my mind all those
days; I did not think of her, but it was as though her light
shadow were lying on my heart.

"In the late autumn there was a theatrical performance for some
charitable object in the town. I went into the governor's box (I
was invited to go there in the interval); I looked, and there was
Anna Alexyevna sitting beside the governor's wife; and again the
same irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty and sweet,
caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat
side by side, then went to the foyer.

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

" 'Yes, I've had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather
I can't sleep.'

" 'You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner,
you were younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness, and
talked a great deal then; you were very interesting, and I really
must confess I was a little carried away by you. For some reason
you often came back to my memory during the summer, and when I
was getting ready for the theatre today I thought I should see
you.'

"And she laughed.

" 'But you look dispirited today,' she repeated; 'it makes you
seem older.'

"The next day I lunched at the Luganovitchs'. After lunch they
drove out to their summer villa, in order to make arrangements
there for the winter, and I went with them. I returned with them
to the town, and at midnight drank tea with them in quiet
domestic surroundings, while the fire glowed, and the young
mother kept going to see if her baby girl was asleep. And after
that, every time I went to town I never failed to visit the
Luganovitchs. They grew used to me, and I grew used to them. As a
rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the family.

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

" 'It is Pavel Konstantinovitch,' answered the maid or the nurs
e.

"Anna Alexyevna would come out to me with an anxious face, and
would ask every time:

" 'Why is it so long since you have been? Has anything happened?'

"Her eyes, the elegant refined hand she gave me, her indoor
dress, the way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always
produced the same impression on me of something new and
extraordinary in my life, and very important. We talked together
for hours, were silent, thinking each our own thoughts, or she
played for hours to me on the piano. If there were no one at home
I stayed and waited, talked to the nurse, played with the child,
or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and when Anna Alexyevna
came back I met her in the hall, took all her parcels from her,
and for some reason I carried those parcels every time with as
much love, with as much solemnity, as a boy.

"There is a proverb that if a peasant woman has no troubles she
will buy a pig. The Luganovitchs had no troubles, so they made
friends with me. If I did not come to the town I must be ill or
something must have happened to me, and both of them were
extremely anxious. They were worried that I, an educated man with
a knowledge of languages, should, instead of devoting myself to
science or literary work, live in the country, rush round like a
squirrel in a rage, work hard with never a penny to show for it.
They fancied that I was unhappy, and that I only talked, laughed,
and ate to conceal my sufferings, and even at cheerful moments
when I felt happy I was aware of their searching eyes fixed upon
me. They were particularly touching when I really was depressed,
when I was being worried by some creditor or had not money enough
to pay interest on the proper day. The two of them, husband and
wife, would whisper together at the window; then he would come to
me and say with a grave face:

" 'If you really are in need of money at the moment, Pavel
Konstantinovitch, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to borrow
from us.'

"And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would happen
that, after whispering in the same way at the window, he would
come up to me, with red ears, and say:

" 'My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.'

"And he would give me studs, a cigar-case, or a lamp, and I would
send them game, butter, and flowers from the country. They both,
by the way, had considerable means of their own. In early days I
often borrowed money, and was not very particular about it --
borrowed wherever I could -- but nothing in the world would have
induced me to borrow from the Luganovitchs. But why talk of it?

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

"And when I went to the town I saw every time from her eyes that
she was expecting me, and she would confess to me herself that
she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that
I should come. We talked a long time, and were silent, yet we did
not confess our love to each other, but timidly and jealously
concealed it. We were afraid of everything that might reveal our
secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I
reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if
we had not the strength to fight against it. It seemed to be
incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at once coarsely
break up the even tenor of the life of her husband, her children,
and all the household in which I was so loved and trusted. Would
it be honourable? She would go away with me, but where? Where
could I take her? It would have been a different matter if I had
had a beautiful, interesting life -- if, for instance, I had been
struggling for the emancipation of my country, or had been a
celebrated man of science, an artist or a painter; but as it was
it would mean taking her from one everyday humdrum life to
another as humdrum or perhaps more so. And how long would our
happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was ill, in
case I died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?

"And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her
husband, her children, and of her mother, who loved the husband
like a son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings she would
have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position
either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient. And she
was tormented by the question whether her love would bring me
happiness -- would she not complicate my life, which, as it was,
was hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble? She fancied she
was not young enough for me, that she was not industrious nor
energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often talked to her
husband of the importance of my marrying a girl of intelligence
and merit who would be a capable housewife and a help to me --
and she would immediately add that it would be difficult to find
such a girl in the whole town.


"Meanwhile the years were passing. Anna Alexyevna already had two
children. When I arrived at the Luganovitchs' the servants smiled
cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinovitch
had come, and hung on my neck; every one was overjoyed. They did
not understand what was passing in my soul, and thought that I,
too, was happy. Every one looked on me as a noble being. And
grown-ups and children alike felt that a noble being was walking
about their rooms, and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner
towards me, as though in my presence their life, too, was purer
and more beautiful. Anna Alexyevna and I used to go to the
theatre together, always walking there; we used to sit side by
side in the stalls, our shoulders touching. I would take the
opera-glass from her hands without a word, and feel at that
minute that she was near me, that she was mine, that we could not
live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding,
when we came out of the theatre we always said good-bye and
parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people
were saying about us in the town already, but there was not a
word of truth in it all!

"In the latter years Anna Alexyevna took to going away for
frequent visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to
suffer from low spirits, she began to recognize that her life was
spoilt and unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see her
husband nor her children. She was already being treated for
neurasthenia.

"We were silent and still silent, and in the presence of
outsiders she displayed a strange irritation in regard to me;
whatever I talked about, she disagreed with me, and if I had an
argument she sided with my opponent. If I dropped anything, she
would say coldly:

" 'I congratulate you.'

"If I forgot to take the opera-glass when we were going to the
theatre, she would say afterwards:

" 'I knew you would forget it.'

"Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does
not end sooner or later. The time of parting came, as Luganovitch
was appointed president in one of the western provinces. They had
to sell their furniture, their horses, their summer villa. When
they drove out to the villa, and afterwards looked back as they
were going away, to look for the last time at the garden, at the
green roof, every one was sad, and I realized that I had to say
goodbye not only to the villa. It was arranged that at the end of
August we should see Anna Alexyevna off to the Crimea, where the
doctors were sending her, and that a little later Luganovitch and
the children would set off for the western province.

"We were a great crowd to see Anna Alexye vna off. When she had
said good-bye to her husband and her children and there was only
a minute left before the third bell, I ran into her compartment
to put a basket, which she had almost forgotten, on the rack, and
I had to say good-bye. When our eyes met in the compartment our
spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she
pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes.
Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears -- oh,
how unhappy we were! -- I confessed my love for her, and with a
burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty,
and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I
understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings
about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more
important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their
accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

"I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted for
ever. The train had already started. I went into the next
compartment -- it was empty -- and until I reached the next
station I sat there crying. Then I walked home to Sofino. . . ."

While Alehin was telling his story, the rain left off and the sun
came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch went out on the balcony,
from which there was a beautiful view over the garden and the
mill-pond, which was shining now in the sunshine like a mirror.
They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry that this
man with the kind, clever eyes, who had told them this story with
such genuine feeling, should be rushing round and round this huge
estate like a squirrel on a wheel instead of devoting himself to
science or something else which would have made his life more
pleasant; and they thought what a sorrowful face Anna Alexyevna
must have had when he said good-bye to her in the
railway-carriage and kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them
had met her in the town, and Burkin knew her and thought her
beautiful.


THE LOTTERY TICKET

IVAN DMITRITCH, a middle-class man who lived with his family on
an income of twelve hundred a year and was very well satisfied
with his lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and began reading
the newspaper.

"I forgot to look at the newspaper today," his wife said to him
as she cleared the table. "Look and see whether the list of
drawings is there."

"Yes, it is," said Ivan Dmitritch; "but hasn't your ticket
lapsed?"

"No; I took the interest on Tuesday."

"What is the number?"

"Series 9,499, number 26."

"All right . . . we will look . . . 9,499 and 26."

Ivan Dmitritch had no faith in lottery luck, and would not, as a
rule, have consented to look at the lists of winning numbers, but
now, as he had nothing else to do and as the newspaper was before
his eyes, he passed his finger downwards along the column of
numbers. And immediately, as though in mockery of his scepticism,
no further than the second line from the top, his eye was caught
by the figure 9,499! Unable to believe his eyes, he hurriedly
dropped the paper on his knees without looking to see the number
of the ticket, and, just as though some one had given him a
douche of cold water, he felt an agreeable chill in the pit of
the stomach; tingling and terrible and sweet!

"Masha, 9,499 is there!" he said in a hollow voice.

His wife looked at his astonished and panic-stricken face, and
realized that he was not joking.

"9,499?" she asked, turning pale and dropping the folded
tablecloth on the table.

"Yes, yes . . . it really is there!"

"And the number of the ticket?"

"Oh, yes! There's the number of the ticket too. But stay . . .
wait! No, I say! Anyway, the number of our series is there!
Anyway, you understand. . . ."

Looking at his wife, Ivan Dmitritch gave a broad, senseless
smile, like a baby when a bright object is shown it. His wife
smiled too; it was as pleasant to her as to him that he only
mentioned the series, and did not try to find out the number of
the winning ticket. To torment and tantalize oneself with hopes
of possible fortune is so sweet, so thrilling!

"It is our series," said Ivan Dmitritch, after a long silence.
"So there is a probability that we have won. It's only a
probability, but there it is!"

"Well, now look!"

"Wait a little. We have plenty of time to be disappointed. It's
on the second line from the top, so the prize is seventy-five
thousand. That's not money, but power, capital! And in a minute I
shall look at the list, and there -- 26! Eh? I say, what if we
really have won?"

The husband and wife began laughing and staring at one another in
silence. The possibility of winning bewildered them; they could
not have said, could not have dreamed, what they both needed that
seventy-five thousand for, what they would buy, where they would
go. They thought only of the figures 9,499 and 75,000 and
pictured them in their imagination, while somehow they could not
think of the happiness itself which was so possible.

Ivan Dmitritch, holding the paper in his hand, walked several
times from corner to corner, and only when he had recovered from
the first impression began dreaming a little.

"And if we have won," he said -- "why, it will be a new life, it
will be a transformation! The ticket is yours, but if it were
mine I should, first of all, of course, spend twenty-five
thousand on real property in the shape of an estate; ten thousand
on immediate expenses, new furnishing . . . travelling . . .
paying debts, and so on. . . . The other forty thousand I would
put in the bank and get interest on it."

"Yes, an estate, that would be nice," said his wife, sitting down
and dropping her hands in her lap.

"Somewhere in the Tula or Oryol provinces. . . . In the first
place we shouldn't need a summer villa, and besides, it would
always bring in an income."

And pictures came crowding on his imagination, each more gracious
and poetical than the last. And in all these pictures he saw
himself well-fed, serene, healthy, felt warm, even hot! Here,
after eating a summer soup, cold as ice, he lay on his back on
the burning sand close to a stream or in the garden under a
lime-tree. . . . It is hot. . . . His little boy and girl are
crawling about near him, digging in the sand or catching
ladybirds in the grass. He dozes sweetly, thinking of nothing,
and feeling all over that he need not go to the office today,
tomorrow, or the day after. Or, tired of lying still, he goes to
the hayfield, or to the forest for mushrooms, or watches the
peasants catching fish with a net. When the sun sets he takes a
towel and soap and saunters to the bathing-shed, where he
undresses at his leisure, slowly rubs his bare chest with his
hands, and goes into the water. And in the water, near the opaque
soapy circles, little fish flit to and fro and green water-weeds
nod their heads. After bathing there is tea with cream and milk
rolls. . . . In the evening a walk or _vint_ with the neighbours.

"Yes, it would be nice to buy an estate," said his wife, also
dreaming, and from her face it was evident that she was enchanted
by her thoughts.

Ivan Dmitritch pictured to himself autumn with its rains, its
cold evenings, and its St. Martin's summer. At that season he
would have to take longer walks about the garden and beside the
river, so as to get thoroughly chilled, and then drink a big
glass of vodka and eat a salted mushroom or a soused cucumber,
and then -- drink another. . . . The children would come running
from the kitchen-garden, bringing a carrot and a radish smelling
of fresh earth. . . . And then, he would lie stretched full
length on the sofa, and in leisurely fashion turn over the pages
of some illustrated magazine, or, covering his face with it and
unbuttoning his waistcoat, give himself up to slumber.

The St. Martin's summer is followed by cloudy, gloomy weather. It
rains day and night, the bare trees weep, the wind is damp and
cold. The dogs, the horses, the fowls -- all are wet, depressed,
downcast. There is nowhere to walk; one can't go out for days
together; one has to pace up and down the room, looking
despondently at the grey window. It is dreary!

Ivan Dmitritch stopped and looked at his wife.

"I should go abro ad, you know, Masha," he said.

And he began thinking how nice it would be in late autumn to go
abroad somewhere to the South of France . . . to Italy . . . . to
India!

"I should certainly go abroad too," his wife said. "But look at
the number of the ticket!"

"Wait, wait! . . ."

He walked about the room and went on thinking. It occurred to
him: what if his wife really did go abroad? It is pleasant to
travel alone, or in the society of light, careless women who live
in the present, and not such as think and talk all the journey
about nothing but their children, sigh, and tremble with dismay
over every farthing. Ivan Dmitritch imagined his wife in the
train with a multitude of parcels, baskets, and bags; she would
be sighing over something, complaining that the train made her
head ache, that she had spent so much money. . . . At the
stations he would continually be having to run for boiling water,
bread and butter. . . . She wouldn't have dinner because of its
being too dear. . . .

"She would begrudge me every farthing," he thought, with a glance
at his wife. "The lottery ticket is hers, not mine! Besides, what
is the use of her going abroad? What does she want there? She
would shut herself up in the hotel, and not let me out of her
sight. . . . I know!"

And for the first time in his life his mind dwelt on the fact
that his wife had grown elderly and plain, and that she was
saturated through and through with the smell of cooking, while he
was still young, fresh, and healthy, and might well have got
married again.

"Of course, all that is silly nonsense," he thought; "but . . .
why should she go abroad? What would she make of it? And yet she
would go, of course. . . . I can fancy . . . In reality it is all
one to her, whether it is Naples or Klin. She would only be in my
way. I should be dependent upon her. I can fancy how, like a
regular woman, she will lock the money up as soon as she gets it.
. . . She will hide it from me. . . . She will look after her
relations and grudge me every farthing."

Ivan Dmitritch thought of her relations. All those wretched
brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles would come crawling
about as soon as they heard of the winning ticket, would begin
whining like beggars, and fawning upon them with oily,
hypocritical smiles. Wretched, detestable people! If they were
given anything, they would ask for more; while if they were
refused, they would swear at them, slander them, and wish them
every kind of misfortune.

Ivan Dmitritch remembered his own relations, and their faces, at
which he had looked impartially in the past, struck him now as
repulsive and hateful.

"They are such reptiles!" he thought.

And his wife's face, too, struck him as repulsive and hateful.
Anger surged up in his heart against her, and he thought
malignantly:

"She knows nothing about money, and so she is stingy. If she won
it she would give me a hundred roubles, and put the rest away
under lock and key."

And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with hatred.
She glanced at him too, and also with hatred and anger. She had
her own daydreams, her own plans, her own reflections; she
understood perfectly well what her husband's dreams were. She
knew who would be the first to try and grab her winnings.

"It's very nice making daydreams at other people's expense!" is
what her eyes expressed. "No, don't you dare!"

Her husband understood her look; hatred began stirring again in
his breast, and in order to annoy his wife he glanced quickly, to
spite her at the fourth page on the newspaper and read out
triumphantly:

"Series 9,499, number 46! Not 26!"

Hatred and hope both disappeared at once, and it began
immediately to seem to Ivan Dmitritch and his wife that their
rooms were dark and small and low-pitched, that the supper they
had been eating was not doing them good, but lying heavy on their
stomachs, that the evenings were long and wearisome. . . .

"What the devil's the meaning of it?" said Ivan Dmitritch,
beginning to be ill-humoured. "Wherever one steps there are bits
of paper under one's feet, crumbs, husks. The rooms are never
swept! One is simply forced to go out. Damnation take my soul
entirely! I shall go and hang myself on the first aspen-tree!"