The Darling and Other Stories..........................................................................................................................1

Anton Chekhov........................................................................................................................................1

OLENKA, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor, Plemyanniakov, was sitting in her back porch, lost

in thought. It was hot, the flies were persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be

evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering from the east, and bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in

Kukin, who was the manager of an openair theatre called the Tivoli, and who lived in the lodge, was

"Again!" he observed despairingly. "It's going to rain again! Rain every day, as though to spite me. I might as

"There! that's the life we lead, Olga Semyonovna. It's enough to make one cry. One works and does one's

utmost, one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And

then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a

dainty masque, first rate musichall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't understand

anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather!

Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it's kept it up all May and June. It's simply

awful! The public doesn't come, but I've to pay the rent just the same, and pay the artists."

The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Kukin would say with an hysterical laugh:

"Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in this world and the next! Let the artists

Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his

misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and curls

combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and

there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She

was always fond of some one, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who

now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved her aunt who used to come every other

year from Bryansk; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her French master. She was a

gentle, softhearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full

rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, na�ve smile, which came into her

face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, "Yes, not half bad," and smiled too, while lady

visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of

The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which was left her in her father's will, was at

the extreme end of the town, not far from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she could head the band

playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin struggling with

his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her

heart, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak, she tapped softly at her bedroom

window, and showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly smile.

He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine

He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding, his face still retained an expression of

They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look after things in the Tivoli, to put down the

accounts and pay the wages. And her rosy cheeks, her sweet, na�ve, radiant smile, were to be seen now at the

office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the theatre. And already she used to say to

her acquaintances that the theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through

the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.

"But do you suppose the public understands that?" she used to say. "What they want is a clown. Yesterday we

gave 'Faust Inside Out,' and almost all the boxes were empty; but if Vanitchka and I had been producing some

vulgar thing, I assure you the theatre would have been packed. Tomorrow Vanitchka and I are doing 'Orpheus

And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their

ignorance and their indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an

eye on the behaviour of the musicians, and when there was an unfavourable notice in the local paper, she

The actors were fond of her and used to call her "Vanitchka and I," and "the darling"; she was sorry for them

and used to lend them small sums of money, and if they deceived her, she used to shed a few tears in private,

They got on well in the winter too. They took the theatre in the town for the whole winter, and let it for short

terms to a Little Russian company, or to a conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Olenka grew stouter, and

was always beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower, and continually complained

of their terrible losses, although he had not done badly all the winter. He used to cough at night, and she used

to give him hot raspberry tea or limeflower water, to rub him with eaudeCologne and to wrap him in her

"You're such a sweet pet!" she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his hair. "You're such a pretty

Towards Lent he went to Moscow to collect a new troupe, and without him she could not sleep, but sat all

night at her window, looking at the stars, and she compared herself with the hens, who are awake all night

and uneasy when the cock is not in the henhouse. Kukin was detained in Moscow, and wrote that he would

be back at Easter, adding some instructions about the Tivoli. But on the Sunday before Easter, late in the

evening, came a sudden ominous knock at the gate; some one was hammering on the gate as though on a

barrel boom, boom, boom! The drowsy cook went flopping with her bare feet through the puddles, as she

"Please open," said some one outside in a thick bass. "There is a telegram for you."

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for some reason she felt numb with

That was how it was written in the telegram "fufuneral," and the utterly incomprehensible word "immate."

"My darling!" sobbed Olenka. "Vanka, my precious, my darling! Why did I ever meet you! Why did I know

Kukin's funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow, Olenka returned home on Wednesday, and as soon as she

got indoors, she threw herself on her bed and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the

"Poor darling!" the neighbours said, as they crossed themselves. "Olga Semyonovna, poor darling! How she

Three months later Olenka was coming home from mass, melancholy and in deep mourning. It happened that

one of her neighbours, Vassily Andreitch Pustovalov, returning home from church, walked back beside her.

He was the manager at Babakayev's, the timber merchant's. He wore a straw hat, a white waistcoat, and a

"Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Semyonovna," he said gravely, with a sympathetic note in his

voice; "and if any of our dear ones die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought have fortitude

After seeing Olenka to her gate, he said goodbye and went on. All day afterwards she heard his sedately

dignified voice, and whenever she shut her eyes she saw his dark beard. She liked him very much. And

apparently she had made an impression on him too, for not long afterwards an elderly lady, with whom she

was only slightly acquainted, came to drink coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at table began to

talk about Pustovalov, saying that he was an excellent man whom one could thoroughly depend upon, and

that any girl would be glad to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov came himself. He did not stay long,

only about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Olenka loved him loved him so much

that she lay awake all night in a perfect fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was

Usually he sat in the office till dinnertime, then he went out on business, while Olenka took his place, and

"Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty per cent," she would say to her customers and friends.

"Only fancy we used to sell local timber, and now Vassitchka always has to go for wood to the Mogilev

district. And the freight!" she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror. "The freight!"

It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages, and that the most important and

necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of

words such as "baulk," "post," "beam," "pole," "scantling," "batten," "lath," "plank," etc.

At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of

wagons, carting timber somewhere far away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of sixinch beams forty feet

high, standing on end, was marching upon the timberyard; that logs, beams, and boards knocked together

with the resounding crash of dry wood, kept falling and getting up again, piling themselves on each other.

Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her tenderly: "Olenka, what's the matter, darling? Cross

Her husband's ideas were hers. If he thought the room was too hot, or that business was slack, she thought the

same. Her husband did not care for entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. She did likewise.

"You are always at home or in the office," her friends said to her. "You should go to the theatre, darling, or to

"Vassitchka and I have no time to go to theatres," she would answer sedately. "We have no time for

On Saturdays Pustovalov and she used to go to the evening service; on holidays to early mass, and they

walked side by side with softened faces as they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance

about them both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they drank tea, with fancy bread and jams of

various kinds, and afterwards they ate pie. Every day at twelve o'clock there was a savoury smell of beetroot

soup and of mutton or duck in their yard, and on fastdays of fish, and no one could pass the gate without

feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling, and customers were regaled with tea and

cracknels. Once a week the couple went to the baths and returned side by side, both red in the face.

"Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God," Olenka used to say to her acquaintances. "I wish every

When Pustovalov went away to buy wood in the Mogilev district, she missed him dreadfully, lay awake and

cried. A young veterinary surgeon in the army, called Smirnin, to whom they had let their lodge, used

sometimes to come in in the evening. He used to talk to her and play cards with her, and this entertained her

in her husband's absence. She was particularly interested in what he told her of his home life. He was married

and had a little boy, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he

hated her and used to send her forty roubles a month for the maintenance of their son. And hearing of all this,

"Well, God keep you," she used to say to him at parting, as she lighted him down the stairs with a candle.

"Thank you for coming to cheer me up, and may the Mother of God give you health."

And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and dignity, the same reasonableness, in imitation

of her husband. As the veterinary surgeon was disappearing behind the door below, she would say:

"You know, Vladimir Platonitch, you'd better make it up with your wife. You should forgive her for the sake

And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about the veterinary surgeon and his unhappy

home life, and both sighed and shook their heads and talked about the boy, who, no doubt, missed his father,

and by some strange connection of ideas, they went up to the holy ikons, bowed to the ground before them

And so the Pustovalovs lived for six years quietly and peaceably in love and complete harmony.

But behold! one winter day after drinking hot tea in the office, Vassily Andreitch went out into the yard

without his cap on to see about sending off some timber, caught cold and was taken ill. He had the best

doctors, but he grew worse and died after four months' illness. And Olenka was a widow once more.

"I've nobody, now you've left me, my darling," she sobbed, after her husband's funeral. "How can I live

without you, in wretchedness and misery! Pity me, good people, all alone in the world!"

She went about dressed in black with long "weepers," and gave up wearing hat and gloves for good. She

hardly ever went out, except to church, or to her husband's grave, and led the life of a nun. It was not till six

months later that she took off the weepers and opened the shutters of the windows. She was sometimes seen

in the mornings, going with her cook to market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she

lived now could only be surmised. People guessed, from seeing her drinking tea in her garden with the

veterinary surgeon, who read the newspaper aloud to her, and from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at

"There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town, and that's the cause of all sorts of epidemics. One is

always hearing of people's getting infection from the milk supply, or catching diseases from horses and cows.

The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings."

She repeated the veterinary surgeon's words, and was of the same opinion as he about everything. It was

evident that she could not live a year without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the lodge. In

any one else this would have been censured, but no one could think ill of Olenka; everything she did was so

natural. Neither she nor the veterinary surgeon said anything to other people of the change in their relations,

and tried, indeed, to conceal it, but without success, for Olenka could not keep a secret. When he had visitors,

men serving in his regiment, and she poured out tea or served the supper, she would begin talking of the

cattle plague, of the foot and mouth disease, and of the municipal slaughterhouses. He was dreadfully

embarrassed, and when the guests had gone, he would seize her by the hand and hiss angrily:

"I've asked you before not to talk about what you don't understand. When we veterinary surgeons are talking

And she would look at him with astonishment and dismay, and ask him in alarm: "But, Voloditchka, what am

And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, begging him not to be angry, and they were both happy.

But this happiness did not last long. The veterinary surgeon departed, departed for ever with his regiment,

when it was transferred to a distant place to Siberia, it may be. And Olenka was left alone.

Now she was absolutely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic, covered with

dust and lame of one leg. She got thinner and plainer, and when people met her in the street they did not look

at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her best years were over and left behind, and now a

new sort of life had begun for her, which did not bear thinking about. In the evening Olenka sat in the porch,

and heard the band playing and the fireworks popping in the Tivoli, but now the sound stirred no response.

She looked into her yard without interest, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterwards, when night

came on she went to bed and dreamed of her empty yard. She ate and drank as it were unwillingly.

And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood

what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how

awful it is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or a peasant driving in his

cart, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can't say, and

could not even for a thousand roubles. When she had Kukin, or Pustovalov, or the veterinary surgeon, Olenka

could explain everything, and give her opinion about anything you like, but now there was the same

emptiness in her brain and in her heart as there was in her yard outside. And it was as harsh and as bitter as

Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a street, and where the Tivoli and the

timberyard had been, there were new turnings and houses. How rapidly time passes! Olenka's house grew

dingy, the roof got rusty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard was overgrown with docks and

stingingnettles. Olenka herself had grown plain and elderly; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul, as

before, was empty and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat at her window and looked at the snow.

When she caught the scent of spring, or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of memories from

the past came over her, there was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but this

was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of the futility of life. The black kitten,

Briska, rubbed against her and purred softly, but Olenka was not touched by these feline caresses. That was

not what she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason

that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood. And she would shake the

And so it was, day after day and year after year, and no joy, and no opinions. Whatever Mavra, the cook, said

One hot July day, towards evening, just as the cattle were being driven away, and the whole yard was full of

dust, some one suddenly knocked at the gate. Olenka went to open it herself and was dumbfounded when she

looked out: she saw Smirnin, the veterinary surgeon, greyheaded, and dressed as a civilian. She suddenly

remembered everything. She could not help crying and letting her head fall on his breast without uttering a

word, and in the violence of her feeling she did not notice how they both walked into the house and sat down

"My dear Vladimir Platonitch! What fate has brought you?" she muttered, trembling with joy.

"I want to settle here for good, Olga Semyonovna," he told her. "I have resigned my post, and have come to

settle down and try my luck on my own account. Besides, it's time for my boy to go to school. He's a big boy.

"Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings? Why not have my house? Why shouldn't that suit you? Why, my

goodness, I wouldn't take any rent!" cried Olenka in a flutter, beginning to cry again. "You live here, and the

Next day the roof was painted and the walls were whitewashed, and Olenka, with her arms akimbo walked

about the yard giving directions. Her face was beaming with her old smile, and she was brisk and alert as

though she had waked from a long sleep. The veterinary's wife arrived a thin, plain lady, with short hair

and a peevish expression. With her was her little Sasha, a boy of ten, small for his age, blueeyed, chubby,

with dimples in his cheeks. And scarcely had the boy walked into the yard when he ran after the cat, and at

"Is that your puss, auntie?" he asked Olenka. "When she has little ones, do give us a kitten. Mamma is

Olenka talked to him, and gave him tea. Her heart warmed and there was a sweet ache in her bosom, as

though the boy had been her own child. And when he sat at the table in the evening, going over his lessons,

"You pretty pet! . . . my precious! . . . Such a fair little thing, and so clever."

" 'An island is a piece of land which is entirely surrounded by water,' " he read aloud.

"An island is a piece of land," she repeated, and this was the first opinion to which she gave utterance with

Now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha's parents, saying how difficult the

lessons were at the high schools, but that yet the high school was better than a commercial one, since with a

highschool education all careers were open to one, such as being a doctor or an engineer.

Sasha began going to the high school. His mother departed to Harkov to her sister's and did not return; his

father used to go off every day to inspect cattle, and would often be away from home for three days together,

and it seemed to Olenka as though Sasha was entirely abandoned, that he was not wanted at home, that he

was being starved, and she carried him off to her lodge and gave him a little room there.

And for six months Sasha had lived in the lodge with her. Every morning Olenka came into his bedroom and

found him fast asleep, sleeping noiselessly with his hand under his cheek. She was sorry to wake him.

He would get up, dress and say his prayers, and then sit down to breakfast, drink three glasses of tea, and eat

two large cracknels and a half a buttered roll. All this time he was hardly awake and a little illhumoured in

"You don't quite know your fable, Sashenka," Olenka would say, looking at him as though he were about to

set off on a long journey. "What a lot of trouble I have with you! You must work and do your best, darling,

Then he would go down the street to school, a little figure, wearing a big cap and carrying a satchel on his

"Sashenka!" she would call after him, and she would pop into his hand a date or a caramel. When he reached

the street where the school was, he would feel ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman, he would

She would stand still and look after him fixedly till he had disappeared at the schoolgate.

Ah, how she loved him! Of her former attachments not one had been so deep; never had her soul surrendered

to any feeling so spontaneously, so disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were

aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big school cap, she would have given her

whole life, she would have given it with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why?

When she had seen the last of Sasha, she returned home, contented and serene, brimming over with love; her

face, which had grown younger during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked at

"The lessons at the high school are very difficult now," she would relate at the market. "It's too much; in the

first class yesterday they gave him a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation and a problem. You know

And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the school books, saying just what Sasha

At three o'clock they had dinner together: in the evening they learned their lessons together and cried. When

she put him to bed, she would stay a long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer; then she

would go to bed and dream of that faraway misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and become a

doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and

have children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears would run down her cheeks

from her closed eyes, while the black cat lay purring beside her: "Mrr, mrr, mrr."

Olenka would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a minute later would come another

"It must be a telegram from Harkov," she would think, beginning to tremble from head to foot. "Sasha's

She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill, and she would feel that she was the

most unhappy woman in the world. But another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out

And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel at ease. She would go back to bed

thinking of Sasha, who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:

ON the deck of a steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol, a rather goodlooking gentleman, with a little

"Notice those Germans sitting near the shelter? Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk

about the crops, the price of wool, or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians

get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects but especially women."

This gentleman's face was familiar to me already. We had returned from abroad the evening before in the

same train, and at Volotchisk when the luggage was being examined by the Customs, I saw him standing with

a lady, his travelling companion, before a perfect mountain of trunks and baskets filled with ladies' clothes,

and I noticed how embarrassed and downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery,

and his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint. Afterwards, on the way to Odessa, I saw

It was rather damp; the vessel swayed a little, and the ladies had retired to their cabins.

"Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. We are so

intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The

Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce. We're just the same:

when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from a lack of

boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied. We

take too ideal a view of women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give us; we get

something utterly different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward

suffering, and if any one is suffering, he's bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go on with this

"In that case, allow me to introduce myself," said my companion, rising from his seat a little:

"Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . . You I know very well."

"A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant conversations about women as a

form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slaveowners and so on; I take quite a

different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We want the creatures who bear us

and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and

poeticize those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia

marriage without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is

enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted; and if the Russian has

been for years in ecstasies over Raphael's Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you

there is no affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we have been married or been intimate with a

woman for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and

again disappointment, again repulsion, and in the long run we become convinced that women are

lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior

to us men. And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk

While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and our Russian surroundings gave him

great pleasure. This was probably because he had been very homesick abroad. Though he praised the

Russians and ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and that I put down to his

credit. It could be seen, too, that there was some uneasiness in his soul, that he wanted to talk more of himself

than of women, and that I was in for a long story in the nature of a confession. And when we had asked for a

bottle of wine and had each of us drunk a glass, this was how he did in fact begin:

"I remember in a novel of Weltmann's some one says, 'So that's the story!' and some one else answers, 'No,

that's not the story that's only the introduction to the story.' In the same way what I've said so far is only

the introduction; what I really want to tell you is my own love story. Excuse me, I must ask you again; it

The scene of my story is laid in the Moscow province in one of its northern districts. The scenery there, I

must tell you, is exquisite. Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water chatters

noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat flowerbeds, beehives, a kitchengarden, and below it a

river with leafy willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a lustreless look as though they had

turned grey; and on the other side a meadow, and beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible, dark pine

forest. In that forest delicious, reddish agarics grow in endless profusion, and elks still live in its deepest

recesses. When I am nailed up in my coffin I believe I shall still dream of those early mornings, you know,

when the sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring evenings when the nightingales and the landrails call in

the garden and beyond the garden, and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village, while they play

the piano indoors and the stream babbles . . . when there is such music, in fact, that one wants at the same

We have not much arable land, but our pasture makes up for it, and with the forest yields about two thousand

roubles a year. I am the only son of my father; we are both modest persons, and with my father's pension that

The first three years after finishing at the university I spent in the country, looking after the estate and

constantly expecting to be elected on some local assembly; but what was most important, I was violently in

love with an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating girl. She was the sister of our neighbour, Kotlovitch, a

ruined landowner who had on his estate pineapples, marvellous peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain in

the courtyard, and at the same time not a farthing in his pocket. He did nothing and knew how to do nothing.

He was as flabby as though he had been made of boiled turnip; he used to doctor the peasants by homeopathy

and was interested in spiritualism. He was, however, a man of great delicacy and mildness, and by no means

a fool, but I have no fondness for these gentlemen who converse with spirits and cure peasant women by

magnetism. In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and

it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with

women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I did not care for his appearance

either. He was tall, stout, whiteskinned, with a little head, little shining eyes, and chubby white fingers. He

did not shake hands, but kneaded one's hands in his. And he was always apologising. If he asked for anything

As for his sister, she was a character out of a different opera. I must explain that I had not been acquainted

with the Kotlovitches in my childhood and early youth, for my father had been a professor at N., and we had

for many years lived away. When I did make their acquaintance the girl was twentytwo, had left school long

before, and had spent two or three years in Moscow with a wealthy aunt who brought her out into society.

When I was introduced and first had to talk to her, what struck me most of all was her rare and beautiful

name Ariadne. It suited her so wonderfully! She was a brunette, very thin, very slender, supple, elegant,

and extremely graceful, with refined and exceedingly noble features. Her eyes were shining, too, but her

brother's shone with a cold sweetness, mawkish as sugarcandy, while hers had the glow of youth, proud and

beautiful. She conquered me on the first day of our acquaintance, and indeed it was inevitable. My first

impression was so overwhelming that to this day I cannot get rid of my illusions; I am still tempted to

imagine that nature had some grand, marvellous design when she created that girl.

Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her footprints on the sandy bank where she used to angle for

gudgeon, filled me with delight and a passionate hunger for life. I judged of her spiritual being from her

lovely face and lovely figure, and every word, every smile of Ariadne's bewitched me, conquered me and

forced me to believe in the loftiness of her soul. She was friendly, ready to talk, gay and simple in her

manners. She had a poetic belief in God, made poetic reflections about death, and there was such a wealth of

varying shades in her spiritual organisation that even her faults seemed in her to carry with them peculiar,

charming qualities. Suppose she wanted a new horse and had no money what did that matter? Something

might be sold or pawned, or if the steward swore that nothing could possibly be sold or pawned, the iron

roofs might be torn off the lodges and taken to the factory, or at the very busiest time the farmhorses might

be driven to the market and sold there for next to nothing. These unbridled desires reduced the whole

household to despair at times, but she expressed them with such refinement that everything was forgiven her;

all things were permitted her as to a goddess or to C�sar's wife. My love was pathetic and was soon noticed

by every one my father, the neighbours, and the peasants and they all sympathised with me. When I

stood the workmen vodka, they would bow and say: "May the Kotlovitch young lady be your bride, please

And Ariadne herself knew that I loved her. She would often ride over on horseback or drive in the

char�banc to see us, and would spend whole days with me and my father. She made great friends with the

I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she looked so lovely that I felt as though I

were burning my hands when I touched her. I shuddered with rapture, and when the two of them, my old

father and she, both looking so handsome and elegant, bicycled side by side along the main road, a black

horse ridden by the steward dashed aside on meeting them, and it seemed to me that it dashed aside because it

too was overcome by her beauty. My love, my worship, touched Ariadne and softened her; she had a

passionate longing to be captivated like me and to respond with the same love. It was so poetical!

But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold and already somewhat corrupted. There was

a demon in her, whispering to her day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite

idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been given her, she never pictured herself

in the future except as very wealthy and distinguished, she had visions of balls, races, liveries, of sumptuous

drawingrooms, of a salon of her own, and of a perfect swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated

painters and artists, all of them adoring her and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .

This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people

cold, and Ariadne was cold to me, to nature, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing, and still there

were no ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on living with her brother, the spiritualist: things went from

bad to worse, so that she had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts of tricks and

As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but an utterly insignificant person, had paid

his addresses to her when she was living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him, pointblank. But now

she was fretted by the worm of repentance that she had refused him; just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at

a mug of kvass with cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the recollection of the

prince, and yet she would say to me: "Say what you like, there is something inexplicable, fascinating, in a

She dreamed of a title, of a brilliant position, and at the same time she did not want to let me go. However

one may dream of ambassadors one's heart is not a stone, and one has wistful feelings for one's youth.

Ariadne tried to fall in love, made a show of being in love, and even swore that she loved me. But I am a

highly strung and sensitive man; when I am loved I feel it even at a distance, without vows and assurances; at

once I felt as it were a coldness in the air, and when she talked to me of love, it seemed to me as though I

were listening to the singing of a metal nightingale. Ariadne was herself aware that she was lacking in

something. She was vexed and more than once I saw her cry. Another time can you imagine it? all of a

sudden she embraced me and kissed me. It happened in the evening on the riverbank, and I saw by her eyes

that she did not love me, but was embracing me from curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it. And

I felt dreadful. I took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses without love cause me suffering!"

Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should have married her, and so my story

would have ended, but fate was pleased to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage

appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit from an old university friend called Mihail Ivanitch

Lubkov, a charming man of whom coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining gentleman." He was

a man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a goodnatured bourgeois, not interesting, but pale

and presentable, with a stiff, wellkept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple. He

used to wear pincenez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce either r or l. He was always

He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired two houses in Moscow as part of

his wife's dowry. He began doing them up and building a bathhouse, and was completely ruined. Now his

wife and four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had to support them and this

amused him. He was thirtysix and his wife was by now fortytwo, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a

conceited, sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and lived apart with a perfect

menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to allow her seventyfive roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of

taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money,

but his uncle only allowed him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days together he

would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying is, looking for some one to borrow from and

this, too, amused him. He had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest from family

life. At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked about his wife, about his mother, about his creditors,

about the bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us that, thanks to his talent for

borrowing, he had made a great number of agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we

laughed too. Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently. I was more inclined to quiet, so to say

idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks,

hunting. He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with an earnest and inspired face, used to

write a list of oysters, champagne, sweets, and used to send me into Moscow to get them, without inquiring,

of course, whether I had money. And at the picnics there were toasts and laughter, and again mirthful

descriptions of how old his wife was, what fat lapdogs his mother had, and what charming people his

Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar and at the same time, in reality,

infinitely beneath himself and created for his pleasure. He would sometimes stand still before some

One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he nodded towards her and said:

This made me wince. I asked him not to speak like that about women before me. He looked at me in surprise

I made no answer. Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle elevated, he said:

"I've noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you. I can't understand why you don't go in and win."

His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I told him how I looked at love and

"I don't know," he sighed; "to my thinking, a woman's a woman and a man's a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna

may be poetical and exalted, as you say, but it doesn't follow that she must be superior to the laws of nature.

You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must have a husband or a lover. I respect women

as much as you do, but I don't think certain relations exclude poetry. Poetry's one thing and love is another.

It's just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or

When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by and make fun of me, or lecture me

"I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair," he would say. "You are young, handsome,

interesting in fact, you're a man not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och! I can't stand these

fellows who are old at twentyeight! I'm nearly ten years older than you are, and yet which of us is the

And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we stared at our floats he went home,

"You're really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to be able to be carried away by his

feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and

"To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold. Lubkov is not so handsome as you are, but he is more

interesting. He will always succeed with women because he's not like you; he's a man. . . ."

One day at supper she began saying, not addressing me, that if she were a man she would not stagnate in the

country, but would travel, would spend the winter somewhere aboard in Italy, for instance. Oh, Italy! At

this point my father unconsciously poured oil on the flames; he began telling us at length about Italy, how

splendid it was there, the exquisite scenery, the museums. Ariadne suddenly conceived a burning desire to go

to Italy. She positively brought her fist down on the table and her eyes flashed as she said: "I must go!"

After that came conversations every day about Italy: how splendid it would be in Italy ah, Italy! oh,

Italy! And when Ariadne looked at me over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expression I saw that in

her dreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons, celebrated foreigners and tourists, and there

was no holding her back now. I advised her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or two, but she

Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply, and he, too, would go to Italy and

Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and extraordinary, I tried as far as possible

not to leave them alone together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they would pretend

they had just been kissing one another, and so on. But lo and behold, one fine morning, her plump,

whiteskinned brother, the spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his desire to speak to me alone.

He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy he could never resist reading another

person's letter, if it lay before him on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance read a letter of

"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My dear fellow, I am very much upset!

As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled beef.

"Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you are Ariadne's friend, she respects you.

Perhaps you know something of it. She wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing to go

with her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov; he is a married man, he has children, and yet he

is making a declaration of love; he is writing to Ariadne 'darling.' Excuse me, but it is so strange!"

I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an ache in my chest, as if a threecornered

stone had been driven into it. Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easychair, and his hands fell limply at his

"Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . . Just consider, what is Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh,

good God! How awful it is, how awful it is!" he went on, clutching his head. "She has had such splendid

offers Prince Maktuev and . . . and others. The prince adores her, and only last Wednesday week his late

grandfather, Ilarion, declared positively that Ariadne would be his wife positively! His grandfather Ilarion

is dead, but he is a wonderfully intelligent person; we call up his spirit every day."

After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting myself. In the morning I wrote five

letters and tore them all up. Then I sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father and set

Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before the

Flood, and can it be that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to explain

the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from

mine? Oh, how awful that would be! I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius of man has

struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that, if he has not conquered it, he has at least

succeeded in tangling it in a network of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no

longer a simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but is real love, and every embrace is

spiritualised by a pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a disgust for the animal

instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part

of my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and inevitable in our day as my ears' not being able to

move and my not being covered with fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised people look at it, so that

the absence of the moral, poetical element in love is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of

atavism; they say it is a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. It is true that, in poetizing love,

we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and

continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find

In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne Grigoryevna had on such a day gone

abroad, intending to spend the whole winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now autumn.

Every week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting letters on scented paper, written in an excellent

literary style. It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer. Ariadne described in great detail how it had

not been easy for her to make it up with her aunt and induce the latter to give her a thousand roubles for the

journey, and what a long time she had spent in Moscow trying to find an old lady, a distant relation, in order

to persuade her to go with her. Such a profusion of detail suggested fiction, and I realised, of course, that she

Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and literary. She wrote that she had missed me,

missed my beautiful, intelligent, loving eyes. She reproached me affectionately for wasting my youth, for

stagnating in the country when I might, like her, be living in paradise under the palms, breathing the

fragrance of the orangetrees. And she signed herself "Your forsaken Ariadne." Two days later came another

letter in the same style, signed "Your forgotten Ariadne." My mind was confused. I loved her passionately, I

dreamed of her every night, and then this "your forsaken," "your forgotten" what did it mean? What was it

for? And then the dreariness of the country, the long evenings, the disquieting thoughts of Lubkov. . . . The

uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned my days and nights; it became unendurable. I could not bear it and

Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright warm day after rain; the raindrops were still

hanging on the trees and glistening on the huge, barracklike d�pendance where Ariadne and Lubkov were

They were not at home. I went into the park; wandered about the avenues, then sat down. An Austrian

General, with his hands behind him, walked past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our generals

wear. A baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the wheels squeaked on the damp sand. A decrepit old

man with jaundice passed, then a crowd of Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian General again.

A military band, only just arrived from Fiume, with glittering brass instruments, sauntered by to the

Have you ever been at Abbazzia? It's a filthy little Slav town with only one street, which stinks, and in which

one can't walk after rain without goloshes. I had read so much and always with such intense feeling about this

earthly paradise that when afterwards, holding up my trousers, I cautiously crossed the narrow street, and in

my ennui bought some hard pears from an old peasant woman who, recognising me as a Russian, said:

"Tcheeteery" for "tchetyry" (four) "davadtsat" for "dvadtsat" (twenty), and when I wondered in perplexity

where to go and what to do here, and when I inevitably met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel

vexed and ashamed. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats with coloured sails. From there I

could see Fiume and the distant islands covered with lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if the

view over the bay had not been hemmed in by the hotels and their d�pendances buildings in an absurd,

trivial style of architecture, with which the whole of that green shore has been covered by greedy money

grubbers, so that for the most part you see nothing in this little paradise but windows, terraces, and little

squares with tables and waiters black coats. There is a park such as you find now in every wateringplace

abroad. And the dark, motionless, silent foliage of the palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and

the bright green seats, and the glitter of the braying military horns all this sickened me in ten minutes!

Having been dragged reluctantly from one of these wateringplaces to another, I have been more and more

struck by the inconvenient and niggardly life led by the wealthy and wellfed, the dulness and feebleness of

their imagination, the lack of boldness in their tastes and desires. And how much happier are those tourists,

old and young, who, not having the money to stay in hotels, live where they can, admire the view of the sea

from the tops of the mountains, lying on the green grass, walk instead of riding, see the forests and villages at

close quarters, observe the customs of the country, listen to its songs, fall in love with its women. . . .

While I was sitting in the park, it began to get dark, and in the twilight my Ariadne appeared, elegant and

dressed like a princess; after her walked Lubkov, wearing a new loosefitting suit, bought probably in

Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not been in the park, would have thrown herself

on my neck. She pressed my hands warmly and laughed; and I laughed too and almost cried with emotion.

Questions followed, of the village, of my father, whether I had seen her brother, and so on. She insisted on

my looking her straight in the face, and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics. . .

"How nice it all was really!" she sighed. "But we're not having a slow time here either. We have a great many

acquaintances, my dear, my best of friends! Tomorrow I will introduce you to a Russian family here, but

please buy yourself another hat." She scrutinised me and frowned. "Abbazzia is not the country," she said;

Then we went to the restaurant. Ariadne was laughing and mischievous all the time; she kept calling me

"dear," "good," "clever," and seemed as though she could not believe her eyes that I was with her. We sat on

till eleven o'clock, and parted very well satisfied both with the supper and with each other.

Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as: "The son of a distinguished professor whose estate

She talked to this family about nothing but estates and crops, and kept appealing to me. She wanted to appear

to be a very wealthy landowner, and did, in fact, succeed in doing so. Her manner was superb like that of a

"But what a person my aunt is!" she said suddenly, looking at me with a smile. "We had a slight tiff, and she

"That was a saving lie," laughed Ariadne. "They must not know I'm without a chaperon."

"My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov. He is so unhappy! His wife and mother are simply awful."

She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when she was going up to bed she said

goodnight to him exactly as she did to me, and their rooms were on different floors. All this made me hope

that it was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between them, and I felt at ease when I met

him. And when one day he asked me for the loan of three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with the greatest

Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying ourselves; we strolled in the park, we

ate, we drank. Every day there were conversations with the Russian family. By degrees I got used to the fact

that if I went into the park I should be sure to meet the old man with jaundice, the Catholic priest, and the

Austrian General, who always carried a pack of little cards, and wherever it was possible sat down and played

patience, nervously twitching his shoulders. And the band played the same thing over and over again.

At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when I was fishing or on a picnic party on

a working day; here too I was ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who met

us. It always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking: "Why are you doing nothing?" And I was

conscious of this feeling of shame every day from morning to night. It was a strange, unpleasant, monotonous

time; it was only varied by Lubkov's borrowing from me now a hundred, now fifty guldens, and being

suddenly revived by the money as a morphiamaniac is by morphia, beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at

At last it began to be rainy and cold. We went to Italy, and I telegraphed to my father begging him for

mercy's sake to send me eight hundred roubles to Rome. We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence, and

in every town invariably put up at an expensive hotel, where we were charged separately for lights, and for

service, and for heating, and for bread at lunch, and for the right of having dinner by ourselves. We ate

enormously. In the morning they gave us caf� complet; at one o'clock lunch: meat, fish, some sort of

omelette, cheese, fruits, and wine. At six o'clock dinner of eight courses with long intervals, during which we

drank beer and wine. At nine o'clock tea. At midnight Ariadne would declare she was hungry, and ask for

In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums and exhibitions in continual anxiety for

fear we should be late for dinner or lunch. I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed to be at home to

rest; I was exhausted, looked about for a chair and hypocritically repeated after other people: "How exquisite,

what atmosphere!" Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects. The shop

windows hypnotised us; we went into ecstasies over imitation brooches and bought a mass of useless

The same thing happened in Rome, where it rained and there was a cold wind. After a heavy lunch we went

to look at St. Peter's, and thanks to our replete condition and perhaps the bad weather, it made no sort of

impression on us, and detecting in each other an indifference to art, we almost quarrelled.

The money came from my father. I went to get it, I remember, in the morning. Lubkov went with me.

"The present cannot be full and happy when one has a past," said he. "I have heavy burdens left on me by the

past. However, if only I get the money, it's no great matter, but if not, I'm in a fix. Would you believe it, I

have only eight francs left, yet I must send my wife a hundred and my mother another. And we must live here

too. Ariadne's like a child; she won't enter into the position, and flings away money like a duchess. Why did

she buy a watch yesterday? And, tell me, what object is there in our going on playing at being good children?

Why, our hiding our relations from the servants and our friends costs us from ten to fifteen francs a day, as I

I felt as though a sharp stone had been turned round in my chest. There was no uncertainty now; it was all

clear to me. I turned cold all over, and at once made a resolution to give up seeing them, to run away from

"To get on terms with a woman is easy enough," Lubkov went on. "You have only to undress her; but

"If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I am faced with complete ruin. Your money is the only resource left

I gave him the money, and he at once revived and began laughing about his uncle, a queer fish, who could

never keep his address secret from his wife. When I reached the hotel I packed and paid my bill. I had still to

In her room was the usual morning disorder: teathings on the table, an unfinished roll, an eggshell; a strong

overpowering reek of scent. The bed had not been made, and it was evident that two had slept in it.

Ariadne herself had only just got out of bed and was now with her hair down in a flannel dressingjacket.

I said goodmorning to her, and then sat in silence for a minute while she tried to put her hair tidy, and then I

I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling. And I was afraid I might begin sobbing, too! I went out

without saying another word, and within an hour I was sitting in the train. All the journey, for some reason, I

imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me, and all the women I saw in the trains and at

the stations looked to me, for some reason, as if they too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting and

pitiable. I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all his gold

coins were false. The pure, gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so

long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman all now were jeering and putting

out their tongues at me. "Ariadne," I kept asking with horror, "that young, intellectual, extraordinarily

beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator, carrying on an intrigue with such an ordinary, uninteresting

vulgarian? But why should she not love Lubkov?" I answered myself. "In what is he inferior to me? Oh, let

her love any one she likes, but why lie to me? But why is she bound to be open with me?" And so I went on

It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even so there were three on a side, there were no

double windows, the outer door opened straight into the compartment, and I felt as though I were in the

stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my legs were fearfully numb, and at the same time I kept recalling

how fascinating she had been that morning in her dressingjacket and with her hair down, and I was suddenly

overcome by such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so that my neighbours stared at me in wonder and

At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the winter; I'm fond of it because at that

time, even in the hardest frosts, it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket and felt

overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed

room, to sit in my father's study before the open fire, to wash in my country bathhouse. . . . Only if there is

no mother in the house, no sister and no children, it is somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem

extraordinarily long and quiet. And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this lack felt. In the

winter when I came back from abroad, the evenings were endlessly long, I was intensely depressed, so

depressed that I could not even read; in the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow in the

garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening it was all up with me.

I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them, for I knew there was sure to be talk of

Ariadne. Kotlovitch, the spiritualist, used often to come to talk about his sister, and sometimes he brought

with him his friend Prince Maktuev, who was as much in love with Ariadne as I was. To sit in Ariadne's

room, to finger the keys of her piano, to look at her music was a necessity for the prince he could not live

without it; and the spirit of his grandfather Ilarion was still predicting that sooner or later she would be his

wife. The prince usually stayed a long time with us, from lunch to midnight, saying nothing all the time; in

silence he would drink two or three bottles of beer, and from time to time, to show that he too was taking part

in the conversation, he would laugh an abrupt, melancholy, foolish laugh. Before going home he would

always take me aside and ask me in an undertone: "When did you see Ariadne Grigoryevna last? Was she

Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do and then the sowing of spring corn and clover. I was sad, but

there was the feeling of spring. One longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields and listening to the

larks, I asked myself: "Couldn't I have done with this question of personal happiness once and for all?

Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the Italian stamp, and the clover and the

beehives and the calves and the peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that she

was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not holding out a helping hand to her, for looking

down upon her from the heights of my virtue and deserting her at the moment of danger. All this was written

in a large, nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and it was evident that she wrote in haste and

distress. In conclusion she besought me to come and save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I was

carried away. Ariadne was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me, she sobbed and

threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all that winter, and was just as young and charming. We

had supper together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the time she kept telling me about

"Don't remind me of that creature!" she cried. "He is loathsome and disgusting to me!"

"Never," she said. "At first he struck me as original and aroused my pity, that was all. He is insolent and takes

a woman by storm. And that's attractive. But we won't talk about him. That is a melancholy page in my life.

He has gone to Russia to get money. Serve him right! I told him not to dare to come back."

She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two rooms which she had decorated in her

After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about five thousand francs, and my

I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed in that. She was homesick for her

native place, but her recollections of the poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof

on her brother's house, roused a shudder of disgust, and when I suggested going home to her, she squeezed

"Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little," said Ariadne, bending over to me. "You're sulky and

prudent, you're afraid to yield to impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that's dull. Come, I beg

you, I beseech you, be nice to me! . . . My pure one, my holy one, my dear one, I love you so!"

I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of nothing but rapture. To hold in

one's arms a young and lovely body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and

to remember that she was there she, my Ariadne! oh, it was not easy to get used to that! But yet I did

get used to it, and by degrees became capable of reflecting on my new position. First of all, I realised, as

before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of solitude, and,

above all, I was healthy, young, vigorous; she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule and we both

made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I realised something else, too.

We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but there we thought it cold and went back to

Italy. We introduced ourselves everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made

our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success everywhere. As she took lessons in painting, she was

called an artist, and only imagine, that quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent.

She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would

eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for

instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the

The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity. She was continually

deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as

makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antenn�. She was deceitful with me, with the

footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not

one meeting, took place without affectation and pretence. A man had only to come into our room whoever

it might be, a waiter, or a baron for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change, even the contour of her

figure was transformed. At the very first glance at her then, you would have said there were no more wealthy

and fashionable people in Italy than we. She never met an artist or a musician without telling him all sorts of

"You have such a talent!" she would say, in honeyed cadences, "I'm really afraid of you. I think you must see

And all this simply in order to please, to be successful, to be fascinating! She waked up every morning with

the one thought of "pleasing"! It was the aim and object of her life. If I had told her that in such a house, in

such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She

wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to

a complete nonentity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that visitors used to feel in

tournaments. My subjection was not enough, and at nights, stretched out like a tigress, uncovered she was

always too hot she would read the letters sent her by Lubkov; he besought her to return to Russia, vowing

if she did not he would rob or murder some one to get the money to come to her. She hated him, but his

passionate, slavish letters excited her. She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that

if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of

her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended

me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, to vex me, say all sorts of vulgar things, taunting me.

One day when we were at the summer villa of a lady of our acquaintance, and she lost her temper, she even

went so far as to say: "If you don't leave off boring me with your sermons, I'll undress this minute and lie

Often looking at her asleep, or eating, or trying to assume a na�ve expression, I wondered why that

extraordinary beauty, grace, and intelligence had been given her by God. Could it simply be for lolling in

bed, eating and lying, lying endlessly? And was she intelligent really? She was afraid of three candles in a

row, of the number thirteen, was terrified of spells and bad dreams. She argued about free love and freedom

in general like a bigoted old woman, declared that Boleslav Markevitch was a better writer than Turgenev.

But she was diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how to seem a highly educated, advanced person in

Even at a goodhumoured moment, she could always insult a servant or kill an insect without a pang; she

liked bullfights, liked to read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of money. My poor father sent me his

pension, all the little sums he received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he answered

me: "Non habeo," I sent him a desperate telegram in which I besought him to mortgage the estate. A little

later I begged him to get money somehow on a second mortgage. He did this too without a murmur and sent

me every farthing. Ariadne despised the practical side of life; all this was no concern of hers, and when

flinging away thousands of francs to satisfy her mad desires I groaned like an old tree, she would be singing

Little by little I grew cold to her and began to be ashamed of our tie. I am not fond of pregnancy and

confinements, but now I sometimes dreamed of a child who would have been at least a formal justification of

our life. That I might not be completely disgusted with myself, I began reading and visiting museums and

galleries, gave up drinking and took to eating very little. If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to

night, one's heart seems lighter. I began to bore Ariadne too. The people with whom she won her triumphs

were, by the way, all of the middling sort; as before, there were no ambassadors, there was no salon, the

money did not run to it, and this mortified her and made her sob, and she announced to me at last that perhaps

And here we are on our way. For the last few months she has been zealously corresponding with her brother;

she evidently has some secret projects, but what they are God knows! I am sick of trying to fathom her

underhand schemes! But we're going, not to the country, but to Yalta and afterwards to the Caucasus. She can

only exist now at wateringplaces, and if you knew how I hate all these wateringplaces, how suffocated and

ashamed I am in them. If I could be in the country now! If I could only be working now, earning my bread by

the sweat of my brow, atoning for my follies. I am conscious of a superabundance of energy and I believe

that if I were to put that energy to work I could redeem my estate in five years. But now, as you see, there is a

complication. Here we're not abroad, but in mother Russia; we shall have to think of lawful wedlock. Of

course, all attraction is over; there is no trace left of my old love, but, however that may be, I am bound in

Shamohin, excited by his story, went below with me and we continued talking about women. It was

"So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man," said Shamohin. "There she thinks and

feels just as man does, and struggles with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he. In the towns the

woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since fallen behind, and is returning to her primitive

condition. She is half a human beast already, and, thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human

genius has been lost again; the woman gradually disappears and in her place is the primitive female. This

droppingback on the part of the educated woman is a real danger to culture; in her retrogressive movement

she tries to drag man after her and prevents him from moving forward. That is incontestable."

I asked: "Why generalise? Why judge of all women from Ariadne alone? The very struggle of women for

education and sexual equality, which I look upon as a struggle for justice, precludes any hypothesis of a

But Shamohin scarcely listened to me and he smiled distrustfully. He was a passionate, convinced

"Oh, nonsense!" he interrupted. "When once a woman sees in me, not a man, not an equal, but a male, and

her one anxiety all her life is to attract me that is, to take possession of me how can one talk of their

rights? Oh, don't you believe them; they are very, very cunning! We men make a great stir about their

emancipation, but they don't care about their emancipation at all, they only pretend to care about it; they are

I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned over with my face to the wall.

"Yes," I heard as I fell asleep "yes, and it's our education that's at fault, sir. In our towns, the whole

education and bringing up of women in its essence tends to develop her into the human beast that is, to

make her attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed" Shamohiri sighed "little girls

ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be

trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the

right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her

neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her

brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks

of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the

grownup man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give

up our attitude to the physiological aspect, too to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place

women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal

countrywoman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought

to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has

dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on

Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp, unpleasant weather; the ship rocked.

Shamohin sat on deck with me, brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coatcollars

turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who

had been so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the

Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing about on horseback with a couple of

officers hardly able to keep up with her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian cap,

sketching on the seafront with a great crowd admiring her a little way off. I too was introduced to her. She

pressed my hand with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the

"Don't you believe her," Shamohin whispered to me, "she has never read a word of them."

When I was walking on the seafront in the early evening Shamohin met me with his arms full of big parcels

"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He came yesterday with her brother, the spiritualist! Now I

understand what she was writing to him about! Oh, Lord!" he went on, gazing up to heaven, and pressing his

parcels to his bosom. "If she hits it off with the prince, it means freedom, then I can go back to the country

"I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back. "The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have

The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story ended I don't know.

IT is one o'clock in the afternoon. Shopping is at its height at the "Nouveaut�'s de Paris," a drapery

establishment in one of the Arcades. There is a monotonous hum of shopmen's voices, the hum one hears at

school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something by heart. This regular sound is not interrupted by the

laughter of lady customers nor the slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying of the boys.

Polinka, a thin fair little person whose mother is the head of a dressmaking establishment, is standing in the

middle of the shop looking about for some one. A darkbrowed boy runs up to her and asks, looking at her

Nikolay Timofeitch, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed, with frizzled hair and a big pin in his

cravat, has already cleared a place on the counter and is craning forward, looking at Polinka with a smile.

"Morning, Pelagea Sergeevna!" he cries in a pleasant, hearty baritone voice. "What can I do for you?"

"Goodmorning!" says Polinka, going up to him. "You see, I'm back again. . . . Show me some gimp,

Nickolay Timofeitch lays several kinds of gimp before Polinka; she looks at the trimmings languidly and

"Oh, come, a rouble's not dear," says the shopman persuasively, with a condescending smile. "It's a French

trimming, pure silk. . . . We have a commoner sort, if you like, heavier. That's fortyfive kopecks a yard; of

"I want a bead corselet, too, with gimp buttons," says Polinka, bending over the gimp and sighing for some

"Hm! It's queer you noticed it," says the shopman, with a smirk. "You were so taken up with that fine student

Polinka flushes crimson and remains mute. With a nervous quiver in his fingers the shopman closes the

boxes, and for no sort of object piles them one on the top of another. A moment of silence follows.

"I want some bead lace, too," says Polinka, lifting her eyes guiltily to the shopman.

"What sort? Black or coloured? Bead lace on tulle is the most fashionable trimming."

"The black's from eighty kopecks and the coloured from two and a half roubles. I shall never come and see

"Why? It's very simple. You must understand that yourself. Why should I distress myself? It's a queer

business! Do you suppose it's a pleasure to me to see that student carrying on with you? I see it all and I

understand. Ever since autumn he's been hanging about you and you go for a walk with him almost every

day; and when he is with you, you gaze at him as though he were an angel. You are in love with him; there's

"I see it all," the shopman goes on. "What inducement have I to come and see you? I've got some pride. It's

"Mamma told me to get a lot of things, but I've forgotten. I want some feather trimming too."

"The most fashionable now are real bird feathers. If you want the most fashionable colour, it's heliotrope or

kanak that is, claret with a yellow shade in it. We have an immense choice. And what all this affair is

going to lead to, I really don't understand. Here you are in love, and how is it to end?"

Patches of red come into Nikolay Timofeitch's face round his eyes. He crushes the soft feather trimming in

"Do you imagine he'll marry you is that it? You'd better drop any such fancies. Students are forbidden to

marry. And do you suppose he comes to see you with honourable intentions? A likely idea! Why, these fine

students don't look on us as human beings . . . they only go to see shopkeepers and dressmakers to laugh at

their ignorance and to drink. They're ashamed to drink at home and in good houses, but with simple

uneducated people like us they don't care what any one thinks; they'd be ready to stand on their heads. Yes!

Well, which feather trimming will you take? And if he hangs about and carries on with you, we know what

he is after. . . . When he's a doctor or a lawyer he'll remember you: 'Ah,' he'll say, 'I used to have a pretty fair

little thing! I wonder where she is now?' Even now I bet you he boasts among his friends that he's got his eye

"No, I won't take the feather trimming," she sighs. "Mamma had better choose it for herself; I may get the

wrong one. I want six yards of fringe for an overcoat, at forty kopecks the yard. For the same coat I want

Nikolay Timofeitch wraps up the fringe and the buttons. She looks at him guiltily and evidently expects him

to go on talking, but he remains sullenly silent while he tidies up the feather trimming.

"I mustn't forget some buttons for a dressinggown . . ." she says after an interval of silence, wiping her pale

"Yes, if it's for a shopkeeper's wife, you'd better have something bright. Here are some buttons. A

combination of colours red, blue, and the fashionable gold shade. Very glaring. The more refined prefer

dull black with a bright border. But I don't understand. Can't you see for yourself? What can these . . . walks

"I don't know," whispers Polinka, and she bends over the buttons; "I don't know myself what's come to me,

A solid shopman with whiskers forces his way behind Nikolay Timofeitch's back, squeezing him to the

"Be so kind, madam, as to step into this department. We have three kinds of jerseys: plain, braided, and

At the same time a stout lady passes by Polinka, pronouncing in a rich, deep voice, almost a bass:

"Pretend to be looking at the things," Nikolay Timofeitch whispers, bending down to Polinka with a forced

smile. "Dear me, you do look pale and ill; you are quite changed. He'll throw you over, Pelagea Sergeevna!

Or if he does marry you, it won't be for love but from hunger; he'll be tempted by your money. He'll furnish

himself a nice home with your dowry, and then be ashamed of you. He'll keep you out of sight of his friends

and visitors, because you're uneducated. He'll call you 'my dummy of a wife.' You wouldn't know how to

behave in a doctor's or lawyer's circle. To them you're a dressmaker, an ignorant creature."

"Nikolay Timofeitch!" somebody shouts from the other end of the shop. "The young lady here wants three

"Yes, we have! Ribbon with a metal stripe, ottoman with a satin stripe, and satin with a moir� stripe!"

"Oh, by the way, I mustn't forget, Olga asked me to get her a pair of stays!" says Polinka.

"There are tears in your eyes," says Nikolay Timofeitch in dismay. "What's that for? Come to the corset

With a forced smile and exaggeratedly free and easy manner, the shopman rapidly conducts Polinka to the

corset department and conceals her from the public eye behind a high pyramid of boxes.

"What sort of corset may I show you?" he asks aloud, whispering immediately: "Wipe your eyes!"

"I want . . . I want . . . size fortyeight centimetres. Only she wanted one, lined . . . with real whalebone . . . I

"You are the only person who . . . cares about me, and I've no one to talk to but you."

"These are not reed or steel, but real whalebone. . . . What is there for us to talk about? It's no use talking. . . .

"Then what's the use of talking? Talk won't help. . . . You are in love, aren't you?"

"What is there to say?" mutters Nikolay Timofeitch, shrugging his shoulders nervously and turning pale.

"There's no need of talk. . . . Wipe your eyes, that's all. I . . . I ask for nothing."

At that moment a tall, lanky shopman comes up to the pyramid of boxes, and says to his customer:

"Let me show you some good elastic garters that do not impede the circulation, certified by medical authority

Nikolay Timofeitch screens Polinka, and, trying to conceal her emotion and his own, wrinkles his face into a

"There are two kinds of lace, madam: cotton and silk! Oriental, English, Valenciennes, crochet, torchon, are

cotton. And rococo, soutache, Cambray, are silk. . . . For God's sake, wipe your eyes! They're coming this

"Spanish, Rococo, soutache, Cambray . . . stockings, thread, cotton, silk . . ."

IN the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third

year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead perspiring

In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who shared his room Anyuta, a thin

little brunette of fiveandtwenty, very pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy

embroidering with red thread the collar of a man's shirt. She was working against time. . . . The clock in the

passage struck two drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the morning. Crumpled

bedclothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a big filthy sloppail filled with soapsuds in which

cigarette ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor all seemed as though purposely jumbled together

"The right lung consists of three parts . . ." Klotchkov repeated. "Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall of

thorax reaches the fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib . . . behind to the spina scapul�. . ."

Klotchkov raised his eyes to the ceiling, striving to visualise what he had just read. Unable to form a clear

"These ribs are like the keys of a piano," he said. "One must familiarise oneself with them somehow, if one is

not to get muddled over them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body. . . . I say, Anyuta, let

Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened herself up. Klotchkov sat down facing her,

"H'm! . . . One can't feel the first rib; it's behind the shoulderblade. . . . This must be the second rib. . . . Yes .

. . this is the third . . . this is the fourth. . . . H'm! . . . yes. . . . Why are you wriggling?"

"Come, come . . . it won't kill you. Don't twist about. That must be the third rib, then . . . this is the fourth. . . .

You look such a skinny thing, and yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That's the second . . . that's the third. . . .

Oh, this is muddling, and one can't see it clearly. . . . I must draw it. . . . Where's my crayon?"

Klotchkov took his crayon and drew on Anyuta's chest several parallel lines corresponding with the ribs.

"Firstrate. That's all straightforward. . . . Well, now I can sound you. Stand up!"

Anyuta stood up and raised her chin. Klotchkov began sounding her, and was so absorbed in this occupation

that he did not notice how Anyuta's lips, nose, and fingers turned blue with cold. Anyuta shivered, and was

afraid the student, noticing it, would leave off drawing and sounding her, and then, perhaps, might fail in his

"Now it's all clear," said Klotchkov when he had finished. "You sit like that and don't rub off the crayon, and

And the student again began walking to and fro, repeating to himself. Anyuta, with black stripes across her

chest, looking as though she had been tattooed, sat thinking, huddled up and shivering with cold. She said

In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to another, she had known five students

like Klotchkov. Now they had all finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course, like

respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was living in Paris, two were doctors, the fourth

was an artist, and the fifth was said to be already a professor. Klotchkov was the sixth. . . . Soon he, too,

would finish his studies and go out into the world. There was a fine future before him, no doubt, and

Klotchkov probably would become a great man, but the present was anything but bright; Klotchkov had no

tobacco and no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left. She must make haste and finish her

embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered it, and with the quarter rouble she would get for it, buy tea

Anyuta quickly threw a woollen shawl over her shoulders. Fetisov, the artist, walked in.

"I have come to ask you a favour," he began, addressing Klotchkov, and glaring like a wild beast from under

the long locks that hung over his brow. "Do me a favour; lend me your young lady just for a couple of hours!

"Rubbish! The man's asking you for the sake of art, and not for any sort of nonsense. Why not help him if

"Psyche; it's a fine subject. But it won't go, somehow. I have to keep painting from different models.

Yesterday I was painting one with blue legs. 'Why are your legs blue?' I asked her. 'It's my stockings stain

"H'm! . . . Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It's awful the way you live!"

"How do you mean? I can't help it. . . . I only get twelve roubles a month from my father, and it's hard to live

"Yes . . . yes . . ." said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust; "but, still, you might live better. . . . An

educated man is in duty bound to have taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here! The bed not

"That's true," said the student in confusion; "but Anyuta has had no time today to tidy up; she's been busy all

When Anyuta and the artist had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the sofa and began learning, lying down;

then he accidentally dropped asleep, and waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into

gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man was in duty bound to have taste, and

his surroundings actually struck him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's eye, his

own future, when he would see his patients in his consultingroom, drink tea in a large diningroom in the

company of his wife, a real lady. And now that sloppail in which the cigarette ends were swimming looked

incredibly disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his imagination a plain, slovenly, pitiful figure . . . and he

When, on coming back from the artist's, she took off her coat, he got up and said to her seriously:

"Look here, my good girl . . . sit down and listen. We must part! The fact is, I don't want to live with you any

Anyuta had come back from the artist's worn out and exhausted. Standing so long as a model had made her

face look thin and sunken, and her chin sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's words,

"You know we should have to part sooner or later, anyway," said the student. "You're a nice, good girl, and

Anyuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in paper, gathered together her needles

and thread: she found the screw of paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the table

"That's . . . your sugar . . . " she said softly, and turned away to conceal her tears.

"You are a strange girl, really. . . . Why, you know we shall have to part. We can't stay together for ever."

She had gathered together all her belongings, and turned to say goodbye to him, and he felt sorry for her.

"Shall I let her stay on here another week?" he thought. "She really may as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a

"Come, why are you standing there? If you are going, go; and if you don't want to, take off your coat and

Anyuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly

The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from corner to corner. "The right lung consists

of three parts," he repeated; "the upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib . . . ."

In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: "Grigory! The samovar!"

"LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!" Sofya Lvovna said in a loud voice. "Wait a minute,

She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch, and the friend of her childhood, Vladimir

Mihalovitch, held her arms to prevent her falling. The three horses were galloping fast.

"I said you ought not to have given her brandy," Vladimir Nikititch whispered to his companion with

The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya Lvovna, after a little too much wine,

turbulent gaiety was followed by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got home,

instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering compresses and drops.

She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months, ever since her wedding, she had been

tortured by the thought that she had married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, par

d�pit; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become convinced that she loved him passionately.

In spite of his fiftyfour years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the gipsies' tunes

so charmingly. Really, the older men were nowadays a thousand times more interesting than the young. It

seemed as though age and youth had changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her father, but

could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking, there were infinitely more vitality, go, and

She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark of her old feeling remained. For the friend

of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had been

madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete indifference. All that evening he had seemed to

her spiritless, torpid, uninteresting, and insignificant, and the sangfroid with which he habitually avoided

paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her, and she had hardly been able to resist saying, "If you are

Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept flitting past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected

ideas came rushing into her mind. She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been a hundred and twenty

roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies, and tomorrow she could fling away a thousand roubles if she

liked; and only two months ago, before her wedding, she had not had three roubles of her own, and had to ask

Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a child of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her

husband, used to make love to her aunt, and every one in the house said that he had ruined her. And her aunt

had, in fact, often come down to dinner with her eyes red from crying, and was always going off somewhere;

and people used to say of her that the poor thing could find no peace anywhere. He had been very handsome

in those days, and had an extraordinary reputation as a ladykiller. So much so that he was known all over

the town, and it was said of him that he paid a round of visits to his adorers every day like a doctor visiting

his patients. And even now, in spite of his grey hair, his wrinkles, and his spectacles, his thin face looked

Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served in the same regiment with Colonel

Yagitch. Volodya's father was an army doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment as her

father and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures, often very complicated and disturbing,

Volodya had done splendidly at the university, and had taken a very good degree. Now he was specialising in

foreign literature, and was said to be writing a thesis. He lived with his father, the army doctor, in the

barracks, and had no means of his own, though he was thirty. As children Sofya and he had lived under the

same roof, though in different flats. He often came to play with her, and they had dancing and French lessons

together. But when he grew up into a graceful, remarkably handsome young man, she began to feel shy of

him, and then fell madly in love with him, and had loved him right up to the time when she was married to

Yagitch. He, too, had been renowned for his success with women almost from the age of fourteen, and the

ladies who deceived their husbands on his account excused themselves by saying that he was only a boy.

Some one had told a story of him lately that when he was a student living in lodgings so as to be near the

university, it always happened if one knocked at his door, that one heard his footstep, and then a whispered

apology: "Pardon, je ne suis pas setul." Yagitch was delighted with him, and blessed him as a worthy

successor, as Derchavin blessed Pushkin; he appeared to be fond of him. They would play billiards or picquet

by the hour together without uttering a word, if Yagitch drove out on any expedition he always took Volodya

with him, and Yagitch was the only person Volodya initiated into the mysteries of his thesis. In earlier days,

when Yagitch was rather younger, they had often been in the position of rivals, but they had never been

jealous of one another. In the circle in which they moved Yagitch was nicknamed Big Volodya, and his

Besides Big Volodya, Little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was a fourth person in the sledge

Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as every one called her, Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagitch a very pale girl

over thirty, with black eyebrows and a pincenez, who was for ever smoking cigarettes, even in the bitterest

frost, and who always had her knees and the front of her blouse covered with cigarette ash. She spoke through

her nose, drawling every word, was of a cold temperament, could drink any amount of wine and liquor

without being drunk, and used to tell scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way. At home she spent

her days reading thick magazines, covering them with cigarette ash, or eating frozen apples.

As they drew near the city gates they went more slowly, and began to pass people and houses. Sofya Lvovna

subsided, nestled up to her husband, and gave herself up to her thoughts. Little Volodya sat opposite. By now

her lighthearted and cheerful thoughts were mingled with gloomy ones. She thought that the man sitting

opposite knew that she loved him, and no doubt he believed the gossip that she married the Colonel par d�pit.

She had never told him of her love; she had not wanted him to know, and had done her best to hide her

feeling, but from her face she knew that he understood her perfectly and her pride suffered. But what was

most humiliating in her position was that, since her wedding, Volodya had suddenly begun to pay her

attention, which he had never done before, spending hours with her, sitting silent or chattering about trifles;

and even now in the sledge, though he did not talk to her, he touched her foot with his and pressed her hand a

little. Evidently that was all he wanted, that she should be married; and it was evident that he despised her

and that she only excited in him an interest of a special kind as though she were an immoral and disreputable

woman. And when the feeling of triumph and love for her husband were mingled in her soul with humiliation

and wounded pride, she was overcome by a spirit of defiance, and longed to sit on the box, to shout and

Just as they passed the nunnery the huge hundredton bell rang out. Rita crossed herself.

"Our Olga is in that nunnery," said Sofya Lvovna, and she, too, crossed herself and shuddered.

"Par d�pit," Rita answered crossly, with obvious allusion to Sofya's marrying Yagitch. "Par d�pit is all the

fashion nowadays. Defiance of all the world. She was always laughing, a desperate flirt, fond of nothing but

"That's not true," said Volodya, turning down the collar of his fur coat and showing his handsome face. "It

wasn't a case of par d�pit; it was simply horrible, if you like. Her brother Dmitri was sent to penal servitude,

"Olga did well," he added in a muffled voice. "Living as an adopted child, and with such a paragon as Sofya

Sofya Lvovna heard a tone of contempt in his voice, and longed to say something rude to him, but she said

nothing. The spirit of defiance came over her again; she stood up again and shouted in a tearful voice:

They turned back. The nunnery bell had a deep note, and Sofya Lvovna fancied there was something in it that

reminded her of Olga and her life. The other church bells began ringing too. When the driver stopped the

horses, Sofya Lvovna jumped out of the sledge and, unescorted and alone, went quickly up to the gate.

She went in at the dark gateway, then by the avenue that led from the gate to the chief church. The snow

crunched under her feet, and the ringing was just above her head, and seemed to vibrate through her whole

being. Here was the church door, then three steps down, and an anteroom with ikons of the saints on both

sides, a fragrance of juniper and incense, another door, and a dark figure opening it and bowing very low. The

service had not yet begun. One nun was walking by the ikonscreen and lighting the candles on the tall

standard candlesticks, another was lighting the chandelier. Here and there, by the columns and the side

chapels, there stood black, motionless figures. "I suppose they must remain standing as they are now till the

morning," thought Sofya Lvovna, and it seemed to her dark, cold, and dreary drearier than a graveyard.

She looked with a feeling of dreariness at the still, motionless figures and suddenly felt a pang at her heart.

For some reason, in one short nun, with thin shoulders and a black kerchief on her head, she recognised Olga,

though when Olga went into the nunnery she had been plump and had looked taller. Hesitating and extremely

agitated, Sofya Lvovna went up to the nun, and looking over her shoulder into her face, recognised her as

"Olga!" she cried, throwing up her hands, and could not speak from emotion. "Olga!"

The nun knew her at once; she raised her eyebrows in surprise, and her pale, freshly washed face, and even, it

seemed, the white headcloth that she wore under her wimple, beamed with pleasure.

"What a miracle from God!" she said, and she, too, threw up her thin, pale little hands.

Sofya Lvovna hugged her and kissed her warmly, and was afraid as she did so that she might smell of spirits.

"We were just driving past, and we thought of you," she said, breathing hard, as though she had been running.

"Dear me! How pale you are! I . . . I'm very glad to see you. Well, tell me how are you? Are you dull?"

"There've been so many changes at home . . . you know, I'm married to Colonel Yagitch. You remember him,

"Yes, he is quite well. He often speaks of you. You must come and see us during the holidays, Olga, won't

Sofya Lvovna began crying, she did not know why, and for a minute she shed tears in silence, then she wiped

"Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She is with us too. And Volodya's here. They are close to the

gate. How pleased they'd be if you'd come out and see them. Let's go out to them; the service hasn't begun

"Let us," Olga agreed. She crossed herself three times and went out with Sofya Lvovna to the entrance.

The two Volodyas, seeing the nun, got out of the sledge and greeted her respectfully. Both were visibly

touched by her pale face and her black monastic dress, and both were pleased that she had remembered them

and come to greet them. That she might not be cold, Sofya Lvovna wrapped her up in a rug and put one half

of her fur coat round her. Her tears had relieved and purified her heart, and she was glad that this noisy,

restless, and, in reality, impure night should unexpectedly end so purely and serenely. And to keep Olga by

The men expected the nun to refuse saints don't dash about in threehorse sledges; but to their surprise,

she consented and got into the sledge. And while the horses were galloping to the city gate all were silent,

and only tried to make her warm and comfortable, and each of them was thinking of what she had been in the

past and what she was now. Her face was now passionless, inexpressive, cold, pale, and transparent, as

though there were water, not blood, in her veins. And two or three years ago she had been plump and rosy,

Near the city gate the sledge turned back; when it stopped ten minutes later near the nunnery, Olga got out of

She went and quickly disappeared through the gateway. And when after that they drove on again, Sofya

Lvovna felt very sad. Every one was silent. She felt dispirited and weak all over. That she should have made

a nun get into a sledge and drive in a company hardly sober seemed to her now stupid, tactless, and almost

sacrilegious. As the intoxication passed off, the desire to deceive herself passed away also. It was clear to her

now that she did not love her husband, and never could love him, and that it all had been foolishness and

nonsense. She had married him from interested motives, because, in the words of her school friends, he was

madly rich, and because she was afraid of becoming an old maid like Rita, and because she was sick of her

If she could have imagined when she got married, that it would be so oppressive, so dreadful, and so hideous,

she would not have consented to the marriage for all the wealth in the world. But now there was no setting it

They reached home. Getting into her warm, soft bed, and pulling the bedclothes over her, Sofya Lvovna

recalled the dark church, the smell of incense, and the figures by the columns, and she felt frightened at the

thought that these figures would be standing there all the while she was asleep. The early service would be

very, very long; then there would be "the hours," then the mass, then the service of the day.

"But of course there is a God there certainly is a God; and I shall have to die, so that sooner or later one

must think of one's soul, of eternal life, like Olga. Olga is saved now; she has settled all questions for herself.

. . . But if there is no God? Then her life is wasted. But how is it wasted? Why is it wasted?"

"There is a God; death must come; one must think of one's soul. If Olga were to see death before her this

minute she would not be afraid. She is prepared. And the great thing is that she has already solved the

problem of life for herself. There is a God . . . yes. . . . But is there no other solution except going into a

monastery? To go into the monastery means to renounce life, to spoil it . . . ."

Sofya Lvovna began to feel rather frightened; she hid her head under her pillow.

Yagitch was walking about on the carpet in the next room with a soft jingle of spurs, thinking about

something. The thought occurred to Sofya Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only for one reason

She lay down again. She heard a bell, perhaps the same nunnery bell. Again she thought of the vestibule and

the dark figures, and thoughts of God and of inevitable death strayed through her mind, and she covered her

ears that she might not hear the bell. She thought that before old age and death there would be a long, long

life before her, and that day by day she would have to put up with being close to a man she did not love, who

had just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and would have to stifle in her heart her

hopeless love for the other young, fascinating, and, as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at her

husband and tried to say goodnight to him, but suddenly burst out crying instead. She was vexed with

She was not pacified till ten o'clock in the morning. She left off crying and trembling all over, but she began

to have a splitting headache. Yagitch was in haste to go to the late mass, and in the next room was grumbling

at his orderly, who was helping him to dress. He came into the bedroom once with the soft jingle of his spurs

to fetch something, and then a second time wearing his epaulettes, and his orders on his breast, limping

slightly from rheumatism; and it struck Sofya Lvovna that he looked and walked like a bird of prey.

"Be so good as to put me on to the Vassilevsky barracks," he said; and a minute later: "Vassilevsky barracks?

Please ask Doctor Salimovitch to come to the telephone . . ." And a minute later: "With whom am I speaking?

Is it you, Volodya? Delighted. Ask your father to come to us at once, dear boy; my wife is rather shattered

after yesterday. Not at home, you say? H'm! . . . Thank you. Very good. I shall be much obliged . . . Merci."

Yagitch came into the bedroom for the third time, bent down to his wife, made the sign of the cross over her,

gave her his hand to kiss (the women who had been in love with him used to kiss his hand and he had got into

At twelve o'clock the maid came in to announce that Vladimir Mihalovitch had arrived. Sofya Lvovna,

staggering with fatigue and headache, hurriedly put on her marvellous new lilac dressinggown trimmed with

fur, and hastily did up her hair after a fashion. She was conscious of an inexpressible tenderness in her heart,

and was trembling with joy and with fear that he might go away. She wanted nothing but to look at him.

Volodya came dressed correctly for calling, in a swallowtail coat and white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came

in he kissed her hand and expressed his genuine regret that she was ill. Then when they had sat down, he

"I was upset by seeing Olga yesterday," she said. "At first I felt it dreadful, but now I envy her. She is like a

rock that cannot be shattered; there is no moving her. But was there no other solution for her, Volodya? Is

burying oneself alive the only solution of the problem of life? Why, it's death, not life!"

"Here, you are a clever man, Volodya," said Sofya Lvovna. "Show me how to do what Olga has done. Of

course, I am not a believer and should not go into a nunnery, but one can do something equivalent. Life isn't

easy for me," she added after a brief pause. "Tell me what to do. . . . Tell me something I can believe in. Tell

"Volodya, why do you despise me?" she asked hotly. "You talk to me in a special, fatuous way, if you'll

excuse me, not as one talks to one's friends and women one respects. You are so good at your work, you are

fond of science; why do you never talk of it to me? Why is it? Am I not good enough?"

"Why do you want science all of a sudden? Don't you perhaps want constitutional government? Or sturgeon

"Very well, I am a worthless, trivial, silly woman with no convictions. I have a mass, a mass of defects. I am

neurotic, corrupt, and I ought to be despised for it. But you, Volodya, are ten years older than I am, and my

husband is thirty years older. I've grown up before your eyes, and if you would, you could have made

anything you liked of me an angel. But you" her voice quivered "treat me horribly. Yagitch has

"Come, come," said Volodya, sitting nearer her and kissing both her hands. "Let the Schopenhauers

philosophise and prove whatever they like, while we'll kiss these little hands."

"You despise me, and if only you knew how miserable it makes me," she said uncertainly, knowing

beforehand that he would not believe her. "And if you only knew how I want to change, to begin another life!

I think of it with enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm actually came into her eyes. "To be good, honest, pure,

"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said Volodya, and an illhumoured expression

came into his face. "Upon my word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple people."

To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending herself, and forced herself to smile

to please him; and again she began talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem of her life

And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without knowing what she was doing, laid her

hands on his shoulders and for a minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical face,

"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed to him, and she blushed painfully, and felt

She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for a long while, a full minute, could not take

her lips away, though she knew it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a servant

When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was sitting at lunch in the diningroom, she was

kneeling before him, gazing greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a little dog waiting for a

bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:

"Tararaboomdeeay. . . . Tararaboomdeeay." And when he was getting ready to go she asked him in a

"When? Today? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as though she wanted to seize his answer in

"Today it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's thought. "Tomorrow, perhaps."

And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to see Olga, but there she was told that

Olga was reading the psalter somewhere over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's and found

that he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about the streets till evening. And for

some reason she kept thinking of the aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace

And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out of town and listened to the gipsies.

And driving back past the nunnery again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought

that for the girls and women of her class there was no solution but to go on driving about and telling lies, or

going into a nunnery to mortify the flesh. . . . And next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna drove

A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on as before, uninteresting, miserable, and

sometimes even agonising. The Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet, Rita told

anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya Lvovna went about alone in hired sledges and kept

Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining of her unbearable misery, weeping,

and feeling as she did so that she brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby. And Olga

repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote, that all this was of no consequence, that it

I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and old, built of stone and of wood, but of

one house I have kept a very vivid memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house a tiny

cottage of one story, with three windows, looking extraordinarily like a little old hunchback woman with a

cap on. Its white stucco walls, its tiled roof, and dilapidated chimney, were all drowned in a perfect sea of

green. The cottage was lost to sight among the mulberrytrees, acacias, and poplars planted by the

grandfathers and greatgrandfathers of its present occupants. And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard

stands in a row with other similar green courtyards, and forms part of a street. Nothing ever drives down that

The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not care for sunlight the light is no use

to them. The windows are never opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who spend their lives in the

midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for nature. It is only to the summer visitor that God

has vouchsafed an eye for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in profound ignorance

of the existence of such beauties. People never prize what they have always had in abundance. "What we

The little house stands in an earthly paradise of green trees with happy birds nesting in them. But inside . . .

alas . . . ! In summer, it is close and stifling within; in winter, hot as a Turkish bath, not one breath of air, and

The first time I visited the little house was many years ago on business. I brought a message from the Colonel

who was the owner of the house to his wife and daughter. That first visit I remember very distinctly. It would

Imagine a limp little woman of forty, gazing at you with alarm and astonishment while you walk from the

passage into the parlour. You are a stranger, a visitor, "a young man"; that's enough to reduce her to a state of

terror and bewilderment. Though you have no dagger, axe, or revolver in your hand, and though you smile

"Whom have I the honour and pleasure of addressing?" the little lady asks in a trembling voice.

I introduced myself and explained why I had come. The alarm and amazement were at once succeeded by a

shrill, joyful "Ach!" and she turned her eyes upwards to the ceiling. This "Ach!" was caught up like an echo

and repeated from the hall to the parlour, from the parlour to the kitchen, and so on down to the cellar. Soon

Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the drawingroom listening to the "Ach!"

echoing all down the street. There was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay on

a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on

the curtains were torpid flies. On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the glass

broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors with lemoncoloured faces of a gipsy type.

On the table lay a thimble, a reel of cotton, and a halfknitted stocking, and paper patterns and a black

blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room two alarmed and fluttered old women were

hurriedly picking up similar patterns and pieces of tailor's chalk from the floor.

While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other room where the patterns were still

being picked up. The door, too, seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.

"O� est mon cravatte lequel mon p�re m'avait envoy� de Koursk?" asked a female voice at the door.

"Ah, estce que, Marie . . . que. . . Really, it's impossible. . . . Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu

"How well we speak French, though!" I read in the eyes of the little lady, who was flushing with pleasure.

Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt

from which, I remember, hung a motherofpearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson.

Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her

"My daughter," chanted the little lady, "and, Manetchka, this is a young gentleman who has come," etc.

I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper patterns. Mother and daughter dropped

"We had a fair here at Ascension," said the mother; "we always buy materials at the fair, and then it keeps us

busy with sewing till the next year's fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made. My

husband's pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up

"Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be worn; they are for the trousseau!"

"Ah, mamam, what are you saying?" said the daughter, and she crimsoned again. "Our visitor might suppose

Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries and cream. At seven o'clock, we had

supper, consisting of six courses, and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I

looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only come from a man.

"That's my husband's brother, Yegor Semyonitch," the little lady explained, noticing my surprise. "He's been

living with us for the last year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an unsociable

person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the

After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch was embroidering with his own

hands as an offering for the Church. Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the

tobaccopouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be greatly struck by her work, she

flushed crimson and whispered something in her mother's ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to

go with her to the storeroom. There I was shown five large trunks, and a number of smaller trunks and

After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable hostesses. They made me promise to

It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my first visit, I was sent down to the little

As I entered the little house I heard the same "Ach!" echo through it. They recognised me at once. . . . Well

they might! My first visit had been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long

I walked into the drawingroom: the mother, who had grown stouter and was already getting grey, was

creeping about on the floor, cutting out some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa,

There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns, the same portrait with the broken

glass. But yet there was a change. Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and the

ladies were in mourning. The Colonel's death had occurred a week after his promotion to be a general.

"We have had a terrible loss," she said. "My husband, you know, is dead. We are alone in the world now, and

have no one but ourselves to look to. Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They

would not have him in the monastery on account of of intoxicating beverages. And now in his

disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a

complaint. Would you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . . taken Manetchka's

trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my

"What are you saying, mamam?" said Manetchka, embarrassed. "Our visitor might suppose . . . there's no

Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and aspiration, evidently not for a moment

A little baldheaded masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes instead of boots darted like a mouse

I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much older and terribly changed. The

mother's hair was silvered, but the daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken

"I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal," the mother said to me, forgetting she had told me this

already. "I mean to make a complaint. Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it

"We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well off. We are all alone in the world

Walking into the drawingroom, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black with heavy crape pleureuses, she

was sitting on the sofa sewing. Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes instead of

"It's a blouse. When it's finished I shall take it to the priest's to be put away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would

And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on the table, she sighed and said:

And where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did not dare to ask the old mother

dressed in her new deep mourning. And while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka

came out to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep. . . .

"I'VE asked you not to tidy my table," said Nikolay Yevgrafitch. "There's no finding anything when you've

tidied up. Where's the telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It's from Kazan,

The maid a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression found several telegrams in the basket

under the table, and handed them to the doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams from patients.

It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o'clock at

least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time

he despised his wife, and her bed, and her lookingglass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the

lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly

fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house. On such nights he became petty, illhumoured, irritable, and

he fancied now that it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the day before from

On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a telegram, and glanced at it casually. It

was addressed to his wife, care of his motherinlaw, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel. . . . The doctor

did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign language, apparently English.

During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being suspicious, guessing, catching at clues,

and it had several times occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become an excellent

detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect, he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in

Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had lunched with an old schoolfellow, a civil engineer, and how that

engineer had introduced to him and his wife a young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail

Ivanovitch, with rather a curious short surname Riss. Two months later the doctor had seen the young

man's photograph in his wife's album, with an inscription in French: "In remembrance of the present and in

hope of the future." Later on he had met the young man himself at his motherinlaw's. And that was at the

time when his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five o'clock in the

morning, and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept refusing to do; and a

continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed to face the servants.

Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into consumption, and advised him to throw

up everything and go to the Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much

alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in

the Crimea, and that he had much better go to Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse

Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.

He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees he put

together the following sentence: "I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a

thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." He pictured the pitiable, ludicrous part he would

play if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and began

pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness,

was revolted. Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a village priest,

brought up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon by profession how could he have

let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low

" 'Little foot'!" he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram; " 'little foot'!"

Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven years that he had been living with her, all

that remained in his memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet, which

certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed as though he still had from those old

embraces the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and face and nothing more. Nothing more that is,

not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies brazen, treacherous lies. He remembered how

in his father's house in the village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house

and would struggle desperately against the windowpanes and upset things; so this woman from a class

utterly alien to him had flown into his life and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had been

spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and turned into a mockery, his health gone, his

rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocotte's, and of the ten thousand he earned every year he could

never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen

thousand. It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have been so

He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed and got warm, but he could not. He

kept walking about the rooms, or sat down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling

By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It seemed to him now that if Olga

Dmitrievna had married some one else who might have had a good influence over her who knows? she

might after all have become a good, straightforward woman. He was a poor psychologist, and knew nothing

"I haven't long to live now," he thought. "I am a dead man, and ought not to stand in the way of the living. It

would be strange and stupid to insist upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with her; let her go to the man she

Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank into a chair just as she was in her

"The nasty, fat boy," she said with a sob, breathing hard. "It's really dishonest; it's disgusting." She stamped.

"That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and there was fifteen roubles in it. I

She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only her handkerchief, but even her gloves,

"It can't be helped!" said the doctor. "If he's lost it, he's lost it, and it's no good worrying over it. Calm

"I am not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he'll pay it back, but I don't believe him; he's poor . .

Her husband begged her to calm herself and to listen to him, but she kept on talking of the student and of the

"Ach! I'll give you twentyfive roubles tomorrow if you'll only hold your tongue!" he said irritably.

"I must take off my things!" she said, crying. "I can't talk seriously in my fur coat! How strange you are!"

He helped her off with her coat and overboots, detecting as he did so the smell of the white wine she liked to

drink with oysters (in spite of her etherealness she ate and drank a great deal). She went into her room and

came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her face, though her eyes still showed traces

of tears. She sat down, retreating into her light, lacy dressinggown, and in the mass of billowy pink her

husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had let down, and her little foot wearing a slipper.

"What do you want to talk about?" she asked, swinging herself in a rockingchair.

"Well?" she said, rocking herself faster. "That's the usual New Year's greeting and nothing else. There are no

"You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it; but I have a dictionary. That telegram is

from Riss; he drinks to the health of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that," the

doctor went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least want to reproach you or make a scene. We've had scenes and

reproaches enough; it's time to make an end of them. . . . This is what I want to say to you: you are free, and

"I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences," Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you

love that young man, love him; if you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy, and I am a

He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and speaking in a voice of selfpity,

acknowledged that she loved Riss, and used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now

"You see, I hide nothing from you," she added, with a sigh. "My whole soul lies open before you. And I beg

She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression of his face. She did not believe him and

wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were

their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish object in them. And when she

looked searchingly into his face, it seemed to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as in a

"You'll go to Riss for good. I'll get you a divorce, take the blame on myself, and Riss can marry you."

"But I don't want a divorce!" Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly, with an astonished face. "I am not asking you

"But why don't you want the divorce?" asked the doctor, beginning to feel irritated. "You are a strange

woman. How strange you are! If you are fond of him in earnest and he loves you too, in your position you

can do nothing better than get married. Can you really hesitate between marriage and adultery?"

"I understand you," she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful, vindictive expression came into her

face. "I understand you perfectly. You are sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me, to force this

divorce on me. Thank you very much; I am not such a fool as you think. I won't accept the divorce and I

won't leave you I won't, I won't! To begin with, I don't want to lose my position in society," she continued

quickly, as though afraid of being prevented from speaking. "Secondly, I am twentyseven and Riss is only

twentythree; he'll be tired of me in a year and throw me over. And what's more, if you care to know, I'm not

certain that my feeling will last long . . . so there! I'm not going to leave you."

"Then I'll turn you out of the house!" shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch, stamping. "I shall turn you out, you vile,

It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table moving the pencil over the paper and writing

Or he walked about and stopped in the drawingroom before a photograph taken seven years ago, soon after

his marriage, and looked at it for a long time. It was a family group: his fatherinlaw, his motherinlaw,

his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the r�le of a happy young husband. His

fatherinlaw, a cleanshaven, dropsical privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his motherinlaw, a stout

lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in

everything; if her daughter were strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only

have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small predatorylooking features, but more

expressive and bolder than her mother's; she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And Nikolay

Yevgrafitch himself in the photograph looked such a guileless soul, such a kindly, good fellow, so open and

simplehearted; his whole face was relaxed in the na�ve, goodnatured smile of a divinity student, and he had

had the simplicity to believe that that company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him

would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he used to sing the song

And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a village priest, with his democratic

bringing up a plain, blunt, straightforward man could have so helplessly surrendered to the power of

this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature was so utterly alien to him.

When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the servant came into his study.

"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twentyfive roubles you promised her yesterday."

AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays at the house of an officer's widow,

was sitting on his bed, given up to the depression of morning. It was beginning to look like autumn out of

doors. Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick layers; there was a cold, piercing wind, and with a

plaintive wail the trees were all bending on one side. He could see the yellow leaves whirling round in the air

and on the earth. Farewell, summer! This melancholy of nature is beautiful and poetical in its own way, when

it is looked at with the eyes of an artist, but Yegor Savvitch was in no humour to see beauty. He was

devoured by ennui and his only consolation was the thought that by tomorrow he would not be there. The

bed, the chairs, the tables, the floor, were all heaped up with cushions, crumpled bedclothes, boxes. The

floor had not been swept, the cotton curtains had been taken down from the windows. Next day he was

His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire horses and carts to move next day to

town. Profiting by the absence of her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time

been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going away, and she had a great deal to say to

him. She kept talking, talking, and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to say. With

her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at it with rapture and sadness. And Yegor Savvitch

was shaggy to a hideous extent, so that he looked like a wild animal. His hair hung down to his

shoulderblades, his beard grew from his neck, from his nostrils, from his ears; his eyes were lost under his

thick overhanging brows. It was all so thick, so matted, that if a fly or a beetle had been caught in his hair, it

would never have found its way out of this enchanted thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He

was tired. When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging eyebrows,

"Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must

"I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general. . . . Famous authors and painters have never

"And you, too, will be famous I understand that perfectly. But put yourself in my place. I am afraid of my

mother. She is stern and irritable. When she knows that you won't marry me, and that it's all nothing . . . she'll

begin to give it to me. Oh, how wretched I am! And you haven't paid for your rooms, either! . . . ."

"I ought to be abroad!" he said. And the artist told her that nothing was easier than to go abroad. One need do

"Do you suppose I can work in a barn like this?" the artist said illhumouredly. "And where should I get

Some one banged the door viciously in the storey below. Katya, who was expecting her mother's return from

minute to minute, jumped up and ran away. The artist was left alone. For a long time he walked to and fro,

threading his way between the chairs and the piles of untidy objects of all sorts. He heard the widow rattling

the crockery and loudly abusing the peasants who had asked her two roubles for each cart. In his disgust

Yegor Savvitch stopped before the cupboard and stared for a long while, frowning at the decanter of vodka.

The artist drank a glass of vodka, and the dark cloud in his soul gradually disappeared, and he felt as though

all his inside was smiling within him. He began dreaming. . . . His fancy pictured how he would become

great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see distinctly how the papers would talk of him,

how the shops would sell his photographs, with what envy his friends would look after him. He tried to

picture himself in a magnificent drawingroom surrounded by pretty and adoring women; but the picture was

misty, vague, as he had never in his life seen a drawingroom. The pretty and adoring women were not a

success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one respectable girl. People who

know nothing about life usually picture life from books, but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either. He had

"It won't burn, drat the thing!" the widow bawled down below, as she set the samovar. "Katya, give me some

The dreamy artist felt a longing to share his hopes and dreams with some one. He went downstairs into the

kitchen, where the stout widow and Katya were busy about a dirty stove in the midst of charcoal fumes from

"It's a fine thing to be an artist! I can go just where I like, do what I like. One has not to work in an office or

in the fields. I've no superiors or officers over me. . . . I'm my own superior. And with all that I'm doing good

And after dinner he composed himself for a " rest." He usually slept till the twilight of evening. But this time

soon after dinner he felt that some one was pulling at his leg. Some one kept laughing and shouting his name.

He opened his eyes and saw his friend Ukleikin, the landscape painter, who had been away all the summer in

"Well, have you brought anything? I suppose you've knocked off hundreds of sketches?" said Yegor

"H'm! . . . Yes. I have done something. And how are you getting on? Have you been painting anything?"

Yegor Savvitch dived behind the bed, and crimson in the face, extracted a canvas in a frame covered with

"See here. . . . A girl at the window after parting from her betrothed. In three sittings. Not nearly finished

The picture represented Katya faintly outlined sitting at an open window, from which could be seen a garden

"H'm! . . . There is air and . . . and there is expression," he said. "There's a feeling of distance, but . . . but that

Towards evening Kostyliov, also a promising beginner, an historical painter, came in to see Yegor Savvitch.

He was a friend staying at the next villa, and was a man of fiveandthirty. He had long hair, and wore a

blouse with a Shakespeare collar, and had a dignified manner. Seeing the vodka, he frowned, complained of

"I've thought of a subject, my friends," he began, getting drunk. "I want to paint some new . . . Herod or

Clepentian, or some blackguard of that description, you understand, and to contrast with him the idea of

Christianity. On the one side Rome, you understand, and on the other Christianity. . . . I want to represent the

Like wolves in a cage, the three friends kept pacing to and fro from one end of the room to the other. They

talked without ceasing, talked, hotly and genuinely; all three were excited, carried away. To listen to them it

would seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands. And it never occurred to either of them that

time was passing, that every day life was nearing its close, that they had lived at other people's expense a

great deal and nothing yet was accomplished; that they were all bound by the inexorable law by which of a

hundred promising beginners only two or three rise to any position and all the others draw blanks in the

lottery, perish playing the part of flesh for the cannon. . . . They were gay and happy, and looked the future

At one o'clock in the morning Kostyliov said goodbye, and smoothing out his Shakespeare collar, went

home. The landscape painter remained to sleep at Yegor Savvitch's. Before going to bed, Yegor Savvitch

took a candle and made his way into the kitchen to get a drink of water. In the dark, narrow passage Katya

was sitting, on a box, and, with her hands clasped on her knees, was looking upwards. A blissful smile was

"I am thinking of how you'll be famous," she said in a halfwhisper. "I keep fancying how you'll become a

famous man. . . . I overheard all your talk. . . . I keep dreaming and dreaming. . . ."

Katya went off into a happy laugh, cried, and laid her hands reverently on her idol's shoulders.

IT was six or seven years ago when I was living in one of the districts of the province of T, on the estate

of a young landowner called Byelokurov, who used to get up very early, wear a peasant tunic, drink beer in

the evenings, and continually complain to me that he never met with sympathy from any one. He lived in the

lodge in the garden, and I in the old seigniorial house, in a big room with columns, where there was no

furniture except a wide sofa on which I used to sleep, and a table on which I used to lay out patience. There

was always, even in still weather, a droning noise in the old Amos stoves, and in thunderstorms the whole

house shook and seemed to be cracking into pieces; and it was rather terrifying, especially at night, when all

Condemned by destiny to perpetual idleness, I did absolutely nothing. For hours together I gazed out of

window at the sky, at the birds, at the avenue, read everything that was brought me by post, slept. Sometimes

One day as I was returning home, I accidentally strayed into a place I did not know. The sun was already

sinking, and the shades of evening lay across the flowering rye. Two rows of old, closely planted, very tall

firtrees stood like two dense walls forming a picturesque, gloomy avenue. I easily climbed over the fence

and walked along the avenue, slipping over the firneedles which lay two inches deep on the ground. It was

still and dark, and only here and there on the high treetops the vivid golden light quivered and made

rainbows in the spiders' webs. There was a strong, almost stifling smell of resin. Then I turned into a long

avenue of limes. Here, too, all was desolation and age; last year's leaves rusted mournfully under my feet and

in the twilight shadows lurked between the trees. From the old orchard on the right came the faint, reluctant

note of the golden oriole, who must have been old too. But at last the limes ended. I walked by an old white

house of two storeys with a terrace, and there suddenly opened before me a view of a courtyard, a large pond

with a bathinghouse, a group of green willows, and a village on the further bank, with a high, narrow belfry

For a moment it breathed upon me the fascination of something near and very familiar, as though I had seen

At the white stone gates which led from the yard to the fields, oldfashioned solid gates with lions on them,

were standing two girls. One of them, the elder, a slim, pale, very handsome girl with a perfect haystack of

chestnut hair and a little obstinate mouth, had a severe expression and scarcely took notice of me, while the

other, who was still very young, not more than seventeen or eighteen, and was also slim and pale, with a large

mouth and large eyes, looked at me with astonishment as I passed by, said something in English, and was

overcome with embarrassment. And it seemed to me that these two charming faces, too, had long been

familiar to me. And I returned home feeling as though I had had a delightful dream.

One morning soon afterwards, as Byelokurov and I were walking near the house, a carriage drove

unexpectedly into the yard, rustling over the grass, and in it was sitting one of those girls. It was the elder

one. She had come to ask for subscriptions for some villagers whose cottages had been burnt down. Speaking

with great earnestness and precision, and not looking at us, she told us how many houses in the village of

Siyanovo had been burnt, how many men, women, and children were left homeless, and what steps were

proposed, to begin with, by the Relief Committee, of which she was now a member. After handing us the

subscription list for our signatures, she put it away and immediately began to take leave of us.

"You have quite forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said to Byelokurov as she shook hands with him. "Do

come, and if Monsieur N. (she mentioned my name) cares to make the acquaintance of admirers of his work,

When she had gone Pyotr Petrovitch began to tell me about her. The girl was, he said, of good family, and her

name was Lidia Voltchaninov, and the estate on which she lived with her mother and sister, like the village

on the other side of the pond, was called Shelkovka. Her father had once held an important position in

Moscow, and had died with the rank of privy councillor. Although they had ample means, the Voltchaninovs

lived on their estate summer and winter without going away. Lidia was a teacher in the Zemstvo school in her

own village, and received a salary of twentyfive roubles a month. She spent nothing on herself but her

"An interesting family," said Byelokurov. "Let us go over one day. They will be delighted to see you."

One afternoon on a holiday we thought of the Voltchaninovs, and went to Shelkovka to see them. They

the mother and two daughters were at home. The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who at one time had been

handsome, but now, asthmatic, depressed, vague, and overfeeble for her years, tried to entertain me with

conversation about painting. Having heard from her daughter that I might come to Shelkovka, she had

hurriedly recalled two or three of my landscapes which she had seen in exhibitions in Moscow, and now

asked what I meant to express by them. Lidia, or as they called her Lida, talked more to Byelokurov than to

me. Earnest and unsmiling, she asked him why he was not on the Zemstvo, and why he had not attended any

"It's not right, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said reproachfully. "It's not right. It's too bad."

"Our whole district is in the hands of Balagin," Lida went on, addressing me. "He is the chairman of the

Zemstvo Board, and he has distributed all the posts in the district among his nephews and sonsinlaw; and

he does as he likes. He ought to be opposed. The young men ought to make a strong party, but you see what

The younger sister, Genya, was silent while they were talking of the Zemstvo. She took no part in serious

conversation. She was not looked upon as quite grown up by her family, and, like a child, was always called

by the nickname of Misuce, because that was what she had called her English governess when she was a

child. She was all the time looking at me with curiosity, and when I glanced at the photographs in the album,

she explained to me: "That's uncle . . . that's godfather," moving her finger across the photograph. As she

did so she touched me with her shoulder like a child, and I had a close view of her delicate, undeveloped

chest, her slender shoulders, her plait, and her thin little body tightly drawn in by her sash.

We played croquet and lawn tennis, we walked about the garden, drank tea, and then sat a long time over

supper. After the huge empty room with columns, I felt, as it were, at home in this small snug house where

there were no oleographs on the walls and where the servants were spoken to with civility. And everything

seemed to me young and pure, thanks to the presence of Lida and Misuce, and there was an atmosphere of

refinement over everything. At supper Lida talked to Byelokurov again of the Zemstvo, of Balagin, and of

school libraries. She was an energetic, genuine girl, with convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her,

though she talked a great deal and in a loud voice perhaps because she was accustomed to talking at

school. On the other hand, Pyotr Petrovitch, who had retained from his student days the habit of turning every

conversation into an argument, was tedious, flat, longwinded, and unmistakably anxious to appear clever

and advanced. Gesticulating, he upset a sauceboat with his sleeve, making a huge pool on the tablecloth, but

"Good breeding is shown, not by not upsetting the sauce, but by not noticing it when somebody else does,"

said Byelokurov, with a sigh. "Yes, a splendid, intellectual family! I've dropped out of all decent society; it's

He talked of how hard one had to work if one wanted to be a model farmer. And I thought what a heavy,

sluggish fellow he was! Whenever he talked of anything serious he articulated "Erer with intense effort, and

worked just as he talked slowly, always late and behindhand. I had little faith in his business capacity if

only from the fact that when I gave him letters to post he carried them about in his pocket for weeks together.

"The hardest thing of all," he muttered as he walked beside me "the hardest thing of all is that, work as

I took to going to see the Voltchaninovs. As a rule I sat on the lower step of the terrace; I was fretted by

dissatisfaction with myself; I was sorry at the thought of my life passing so rapidly and uninterestingly, and

felt as though I would like to tear out of my breast the heart which had grown so heavy. And meanwhile I

heard talk on the terrace, the rustling of dresses, the pages of a book being turned. I soon grew accustomed to

the idea that during the day Lida received patients, gave out books, and often went into the village with a

parasol and no hat, and in the evening talked aloud of the Zemstvo and schools. This slim, handsome,

invariably austere girl, with her small wellcut mouth, always said dryly when the conversation turned on

She did not like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape painter and did not in my pictures portray the

privations of the peasants, and that, as she fancied, I was indifferent to what she put such faith in. I remember

when I was travelling on the banks of Lake Baikal, I met a Buriat girl on horseback, wearing a shirt and

trousers of blue Chinese canvas; I asked her if she would sell me her pipe. While we talked she looked

contemptuously at my European face and hat, and in a moment she was bored with talking to me; she shouted

to her horse and galloped on. And in just the same way Lida despised me as an alien. She never outwardly

expressed her dislike for me, but I felt it, and sitting on the lower step of the terrace, I felt irritated, and said

that doctoring peasants when one was not a doctor was deceiving them, and that it was easy to be benevolent

Meanwhile her sister Misuce had no cares, and spent her life in complete idleness just as I did. When she got

up in the morning she immediately took up a book and sat down to read on the terrace in a deep armchair,

with her feet hardly touching the ground, or hid herself with her book in the lime avenue, or walked out into

the fields. She spent the whole day reading, poring greedily over her book, and only from the tired, dazed

look in her eyes and the extreme paleness of her face one could divine how this continual reading exhausted

her brain. When I arrived she would flush a little, leave her book, and looking into my face with her big eyes,

would tell me eagerly of anything that had happened for instance, that the chimney had been on fire in the

servants' hall, or that one of the men had caught a huge fish in the pond. On ordinary days she usually went

about in a light blouse and a dark blue skirt. We went for walks together, picked cherries for making jam,

went out in the boat. When she jumped up to reach a cherry or sculled in the boat, her thin, weak arms

showed through her transparent sleeves. Or I painted a sketch, and she stood beside me watching rapturously.

One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about nine o clock in the morning. I walked about

the park, keeping a good distance from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of which there was a great

number that summer, and noting their position so as to come and pick them afterwards with Genya. There

was a warm breeze. I saw Genya and her mother both in light holiday dresses coming home from church,

Genya holding her hat in the wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the terrace.

For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for my perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in

our countryhouses in the summer have always had a particular charm. When the green garden, still wet with

dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks radiant with happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and

oleander near the house, when the young people have just come back from church and are having breakfast in

the garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and one knows that all these healthy, wellfed, handsome

people are going to do nothing the whole long day, one wishes that all life were like that. Now, too, I had the

same thought, and walked about the garden prepared to walk about like that, aimless and unoccupied, the

Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as though she knew she would find me in the

garden, or had a presentiment of it. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked a question she

"A miracle happened in the village yesterday," she said. "The lame woman Pelagea has been ill the whole

year. No doctors or medicines did her any good; but yesterday an old woman came and whispered something

"That's nothing much," I said. "You mustn't look for miracles only among sick people and old women. Isn't

health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle."

"No. Phenomena I don't understand I face boldly, and am not overwhelmed by them. I am above them. Man

ought to recognise himself as superior to lions, tigers, stars, superior to everything in nature, even what seems

miraculous and is beyond his understanding, or else he is not a man, but a mouse afraid of everything."

Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and could guess correctly what I did not know. She

longed for me to initiate her into the domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful into that higher world in

which, as she imagined, I was quite at home. And she talked to me of God, of the eternal life, of the

miraculous. And I, who could never admit that my self and my imagination would be lost forever after death,

answered: "Yes, men are immortal"; "Yes, there is eternal life in store for us." And she listened, believed, and

"Our Lida is a remarkable person isn't she? I love her very dearly, and would be ready to give my life for

her any minute. But tell me" Genya touched my sleeve with her finger "tell me, why do you always

"How incomprehensible that is!" she said. At that minute Lida had just returned from somewhere, and

standing with a whip in her hand, a slim, beautiful figure in the sunlight, at the steps, she was giving some

orders to one of the men. Talking loudly, she hurriedly received two or three sick villagers; then with a busy

and anxious face she walked about the rooms, opening one cupboard after another, and went upstairs. It was a

long time before they could find her and call her to dinner, and she came in when we had finished our soup.

All these tiny details I remember with tenderness, and that whole day I remember vividly, though nothing

special happened. After dinner Genya lay in a long armchair reading, while I sat upon the bottom step of the

terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast with clouds, and it began to spot with fine rain. It was

hot; the wind had dropped, and it seemed as though the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out

"Oh, mother," said Genya, kissing her hand, "it's not good for you to sleep in the day."

They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would stand on the terrace, and, looking

towards the trees, call "Aaoo, Genya!" or "Mother, where are you?" They always said their prayers

together, and had the same faith; and they understood each other perfectly even when they did not speak. And

their attitude to people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used to me and fond of me, and

when I did not come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with

enthusiasm, and with the same openness and readiness to chatter as Misuce, she told me what had happened,

She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not care for endearments, she talked only of

serious matters; she lived her life apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and enigmatic a person as

"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an undertone, like a conspirator, looking about her

timidly: "You wouldn't easily find another like her; only, do you know, I am beginning to be a little uneasy.

The school, the dispensary, books all that's very good, but why go to extremes? She is threeandtwenty,

you know; it's time for her to think seriously of herself. With her books and her dispensary she will find life

Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and said as it were to herself, looking at

Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet and tennis, then when it got dark, sat

a long time over supper and talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole district under

his thumb. As I went away from the Voltchaninovs that evening, I carried away the impression of a long,

long idle day, with a melancholy consciousness that everything ends in this world, however long it may be.

Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with me all day, from morning till night, I

felt dull without her, and that all that charming family were near and dear to me, and for the first time that

"Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?" I asked Byelokurov as I went home. "My life is

dreary, difficult, and monotonous because I am an artist, a strange person. From my earliest days I've been

wrung by envy, selfdissatisfaction, distrust in my work. I'm always poor, I'm a wanderer, but you you're

a healthy, normal man, a landowner, and a gentleman. Why do you live in such an uninteresting way? Why

do you get so little out of life? Why haven't you, for instance, fallen in love with Lida or Genya?"

He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge with him. Every day I saw this lady,

very plump, rotund, and dignified, not unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national

dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was continually calling her in to dinner or to tea.

Three years before she had taken one of the lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down at

Byelokurov's apparently forever. She was ten years older than he was, and kept a sharp hand over him, so

much so that he had to ask her permission when he went out of the house. She often sobbed in a deep

masculine note, and then I used to send word to her that if she did not leave off, I should give up my rooms

When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned thoughtfully, and I began walking up and

down the room, conscious of a soft emotion as though I were in love. I wanted to talk about the

"Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as devoted to schools and hospitals as she is," I

said. "Oh, for the sake of a girl like that one might not only go into the Zemstvo, but even wear out iron

shoes, like the girl in the fairy tale. And Misuce? What a sweet creature she is, that Misuce!"

Byelokurov, drawling out "Erer," began a longwinded disquisition on the malady of the age

pessimism. He talked confidently, in a tone that suggested that I was opposing him. Hundreds of miles of

desolate, monotonous, burntup steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and

"It's not a question of pessimism or optimism," I said irritably; "its simply that ninetynine people out of a

"The prince is staying at Malozyomovo, and he asks to be remembered to you," said Lida to her mother. She

had just come in, and was taking off her gloves. "He gave me a great deal of interesting news. . . . He

promised to raise the question of a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo again at the provincial assembly,

but he says there is very little hope of it." And turning to me, she said: "Excuse me, I always forget that this

"Why not interesting to me?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "You do not care to know my opinion, but I

"Yes. In my opinion a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo is quite unnecessary."

She finished taking off her gloves, and opened the newspaper, which had just been brought from the post. A

"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if there had been a medical relief centre near, she would have lived.

"I have a very definite opinion on that subject, I assure you," I answered; and she screened herself with the

newspaper, as though unwilling to listen to me. "To my mind, all these schools, dispensaries, libraries,

medical relief centres, under present conditions, only serve to aggravate the bondage of the people. The

peasants are fettered by a great chain, and you do not break the chain, but only add fresh links to it that's

She raised her eyes to me and smiled ironically, and I went on trying to formulate my leading idea.

"What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelageas, toil from early

morning till dark, fall ill from working beyond their strength, all their lives tremble for their sick and hungry

children, all their lives are being doctored, and in dread of death and disease, fade and grow old early, and die

in filth and stench. Their children begin the same story over again as soon as they grow up, and so it goes on

for hundreds of years and milliards of men live worse than beasts in continual terror, for a mere crust of

bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having time to think of their souls, of their image

and semblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block for them every

way to spiritual activity that is, to what distinguishes man from the brutes and what is the only thing

which makes life worth living. You go to their help with hospitals and schools, but you don't free them from

their fetters by that; on the contrary, you bind them in closer bonds, as, by introducing new prejudices, you

increase the number of their wants, to say nothing of the fact that they've got to pay the Zemstvo for drugs

"I am not going to argue with you," said Lida, putting down the paper. "I've heard all that before. I will only

say one thing: one cannot sit with one's hands in one's lap. It's true that we are not saving humanity, and

perhaps we make a great many mistakes; but we do what we can, and we are right. The highest and holiest

task for a civilised being is to serve his neighbours, and we try to serve them as best we can. You don't like it,

In Lida's presence she was always a little timid, and looked at her nervously as she talked, afraid of saying

something superfluous or inopportune. And she never contradicted her, but always assented: "That's true,

"Teaching the peasants to read and write, books of wretched precepts and rhymes, and medical relief centres,

cannot diminish either ignorance or the deathrate, just as the light from your windows cannot light up this

huge garden," said I. "You give nothing. By meddling in these people's lives you only create new wants in

"Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!" said Lida with vexation, and from her tone one could see

"The people must be freed from hard physical labour," said I. "We must lighten their yoke, let them have time

to breathe, that they may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the washtub, and in the fields, but may also

have time to think of their souls, of God may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The highest

vocation of man is spiritual activity the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse

animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery

these dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by

"Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us, townspeople and country people, all without

exception, would agree to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of their

physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two or three hours a day. Imagine that we all,

rich and poor, work only for three hours a day, and the rest of our time is free. Imagine further that in order to

depend even less upon our bodies and to labour less, we invent machines to replace our work, we try to cut

down our needs to the minimum. We would harden ourselves and our children that they should not be afraid

of hunger and cold, and that we shouldn't be continually trembling for their health like Anna, Mavra, and

Pelagea. Imagine that we don't doctor ourselves, don't keep dispensaries, tobacco factories, distilleries

what a lot of free time would be left us after all! All of us together would devote our leisure to science and

art. Just as the peasants sometimes work, the whole community together mending the roads, so all of us, as a

community, would search for truth and the meaning of life, and I am convinced that the truth would be

discovered very quickly; man would escape from this continual, agonising, oppressive dread of death, and

"You contradict yourself, though," said Lida. "You talk about science, and are yourself opposed to

"Elementary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs on public houses and sometimes books

which he cannot understand such education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol's

Petrushka has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was in the days of Rurik so it has remained.

What is needed is not elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities. What

"Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural phenomena, and not for the cure of them.

If one must cure, it should not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause physical

labour, and then there will be no disease. I don't believe in a science that cures disease," I went on excitedly.

"When science and art are real, they aim not at temporary private ends, but at eternal and universal they

seek for truth and the meaning of life, they seek for God, for the soul, and when they are tied down to the

needs and evils of the day, to dispensaries and libraries, they only complicate and hamper life. We have

plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are quite without biologists,

mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is spent

on satisfying temporary, passing needs. Scientific men, writers, artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the

conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical demands increase, yet truth is still a long

way off, and man still remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration

of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for life. In such conditions an artist's work has

no meaning, and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is his position, as when one

looks into it, it is evident that he is working for the amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and is

supporting the existing order. And I don't care to work and I won't work. . . . Nothing is any use; let the earth

"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister, apparently thinking my words pernicious to the young

"These are the charming things people say when they want to justify their indifference," said Lida. "It is

"You threaten to give up working," said Lida. "You evidently set a high value on your work. Let us give up

arguing; we shall never agree, since I put the most imperfect dispensary or library of which you have just

spoken so contemptuously on a higher level than any landscape." And turning at once to her mother, she

began speaking in quite a different tone: "The prince is very much changed, and much thinner than when he

She told her mother about the prince in order to avoid talking to me. Her face glowed, and to hide her feeling

she bent low over the table as though she were shortsighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper. My

It was quite still out of doors; the village on the further side of the pond was already asleep; there was not a

light to be seen, and only the stars were faintly reflected in the pond. At the gate with the lions on it Genya

"Every one is asleep in the village," I said to her, trying to make out her face in the darkness, and I saw her

mournful dark eyes fixed upon me. "The publican and the horsestealers are asleep, while we, wellbred

It was a melancholy August night melancholy because there was already a feeling of autumn; the moon

was rising behind a purple cloud, and it shed a faint light upon the road and on the dark fields of winter corn

by the sides. From time to time a star fell. Genya walked beside me along the road, and tried not to look at the

sky, that she might not see the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.

"I believe you are right," she said, shivering with the damp night air. "If people, all together, could devote

"Of course. We are higher beings, and if we were really to recognise the whole force of human genius and

lived only for higher ends, we should in the end become like gods. But that will never be mankind will

"Goodnight," she said, shivering; she had nothing but her blouse over her shoulders and was shrinking with

I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone, irritated and dissatisfied with myself and other people; and I,

too, tried not to look at the falling stars. "Stay another minute," I said to her, "I entreat you."

I loved Genya. I must have loved her because she met me when I came and saw me off when I went away;

because she looked at me tenderly and enthusiastically. How touchingly beautiful were her pale face, slender

neck, slender arms, her weakness, her idleness, her reading. And intelligence? I suspected in her intelligence

above the average. I was fascinated by the breadth of her views, perhaps because they were different from

those of the stern, handsome Lida, who disliked me. Genya liked me, because I was an artist. I had conquered

her heart by my talent, and had a passionate desire to paint for her sake alone; and I dreamed of her as of my

little queen who with me would possess those trees, those fields, the mists, the dawn, the exquisite and

beautiful scenery in the midst of which I had felt myself hopelessly solitary and useless.

I took off my overcoat and put it over her chilly shoulders; afraid of looking ugly and absurd in a man's

overcoat, she laughed, threw it off, and at that instant I put my arms round her and covered her face,

"Till tomorrow," she whispered, and softly, as though afraid of breaking upon the silence of the night, she

embraced me. "We have no secrets from one another. I must tell my mother and my sister at once. . . . It's so

And then for two minutes I heard her running. I did not want to go home, and I had nothing to go for. I stood

still for a little time hesitating, and made my way slowly back, to look once more at the house in which she

lived, the sweet, simple old house, which seemed to be watching me from the windows of its upper storey,

and understanding all about it. I walked by the terrace, sat on the seat by the tennis ground, in the dark under

the old elmtree, and looked from there at the house. In the windows of the top storey where Misuce slept

there appeared a bright light, which changed to a soft green they had covered the lamp with the shade.

Shadows began to move. . . . I was full of tenderness, peace, and satisfaction with myself satisfaction at

having been able to be carried away by my feelings and having fallen in love, and at the same time I felt

uncomfortable at the thought that only a few steps away from me, in one of the rooms of that house there was

Lida, who disliked and perhaps hated me. I went on sitting there wondering whether Genya would come out;

About an hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer visible. The moon was

standing high above the house, and lighting up the sleeping garden and the paths; the dahlias and the roses in

front of the house could be seen distinctly, and looked all the same colour. It began to grow very cold. I went

When next day after dinner I went to the Voltchaninovs, the glass door into the garden was wide open. I sat

down on the terrace, expecting Genya every minute, to appear from behind the flowerbeds on the lawn, or

from one of the avenues, or that I should hear her voice from the house. Then I walked into the

drawingroom, the diningroom. There was not a soul to be seen. From the diningroom I walked along the

long corridor to the hall and back. In this corridor there were several doors, and through one of them I heard

" 'God . . . sent . . . a crow,' " she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating " 'God sent a crow a

piece of cheese. . . . A crow . . . a piece of cheese.' . . . Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps.

"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to you this minute; I'm giving Dasha her lesson."

"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they

will probably go abroad," she added after a pause. " 'God sent . . . the crow . . . a piece . . . of cheese.' . . .

I went into the hall, and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of

And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time first from the yard into the garden past the

house, then into the avenue of limetrees. . . . At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a

"I told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you," I read. "I could not wound her by

disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are

Then there was the dark fir avenue, the brokendown fence. . . . On the field where then the rye was in flower

and the corncrakes were calling, now there were cows and hobbled horses. On the slope there were bright

green patches of winter corn. A sober workaday feeling came over me and I felt ashamed of all I had said at

the Voltchaninovs', and felt bored with life as I had been before. When I got home, I packed and set off that

I never saw the Voltchaninovs again. Not long ago, on my way to the Crimea, I met Byelokurov in the

train. As before, he was wearing a jerkin and an embroidered shirt, and when I asked how he was, he replied

that, God be praised, he was well. We began talking. He had sold his old estate and bought another smaller

one, in the name of Liubov Ivanovna. He could tell me little about the Voltchaninovs. Lida, he said, was still

living in Shelkovka and teaching in the school; she had by degrees succeeded in gathering round her a circle

of people sympathetic to her who made a strong party, and at the last election had turned out Balagin, who

had till then had the whole district under his thumb. About Genya he only told me that she did not live at

I am beginning to forget the old house, and only sometimes when I am painting or reading I suddenly,

apropos of nothing, remember the green light in the window, the sound of my footsteps as I walked home

through the fields in the night, with my heart full of love, rubbing my hands in the cold. And still more rarely,

at moments when I am sad and depressed by loneliness, I have dim memories, and little by little I begin to

feel that she is thinking of me, too that she is waiting for me, and that we shall meet. . . .

IT was dark, and already lights had begun to gleam here and there in the houses, and a pale moon was rising

behind the barracks at the end of the street. Laptev was sitting on a bench by the gate waiting for the end of

the evening service at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. He was reckoning that Yulia Sergeyevna would

pass by on her way from the service, and then he would speak to her, and perhaps spend the whole evening

He had been sitting there for an hour and a half already, and all that time his imagination had been busy

picturing his Moscow rooms, his Moscow friends, his man Pyotr, and his writingtable. He gazed half

wonderingly at the dark, motionless trees, and it seemed strange to him that he was living now, not in his

summer villa at Sokolniki, but in a provincial town in a house by which a great herd of cattle was driven

every morning and evening, accompanied by terrible clouds of dust and the blowing of a horn. He thought of

long conversations in which he had taken part quite lately in Moscow conversations in which it had been

maintained that one could live without love, that passionate love was an obsession, that finally there is no

such love, but only a physical attraction between the sexes and so on, in the same style; he remembered

them and thought mournfully that if he were asked now what love was, he could not have found an answer.

The service was over, the people began to appear. Laptev strained his eyes gazing at the dark figures. The

bishop had been driven by in his carriage, the bells had stopped ringing, and the red and green lights in the

belfry were one after another extinguished there had been an illumination, as it was dedication day but

the people were still coming out, lingering, talking, and standing under the windows. But at last Laptev heard

a familiar voice, his heart began beating violently, and he was overcome with despair on seeing that Yulia

At the corner of the lane, she stopped to say goodbye to the ladies, and while doing so glanced at Laptev.

"I was coming to see you," he said. "I'm coming for a chat with your father. Is he at home?"

There were gardens all along the lane, and a row of limetrees growing by the fence cast a broad patch of

shadow in the moonlight, so that the gate and the fences were completely plunged in darkness on one side,

from which came the sounds of women whispering, smothered laughter, and someone playing softly on a

balalaika. There was a fragrance of limeflowers and of hay. This fragrance and the murmur of the unseen

whispers worked upon Laptev. He was all at once overwhelmed with a passionate longing to throw his arms

round his companion, to shower kisses on her face, her hands, her shoulders, to burst into sobs, to fall at her

feet and to tell her how long he had been waiting for her. A faint scarcely perceptible scent of incense hung

about her; and that scent reminded him of the time when he, too, believed in God and used to go to evening

service, and when he used to dream so much of pure romantic love. And it seemed to him that, because this

girl did not love him, all possibility of the happiness he had dreamed of then was lost to him forever.

She began speaking sympathetically of the illness of his sister, Nina Fyodorovna. Two months before his

sister had undergone an operation for cancer, and now every one was expecting a return of the disease.

"I went to see her this morning," said Yulia Sergeyevna, "and it seemed to me that during the last week she

"Yes, yes," Laptev agreed. "There's no return of the symptoms, but every day I notice she grows weaker and

weaker, and is wasting before my eyes. I don't understand what's the matter with her."

"Oh dear! And how strong she used to be, plump and rosy!" said Yulia Sergeyevna after a moment's silence.

"Every one here used to call her the Moscow lady. How she used to laugh! On holidays she used to dress up

Doctor Sergey Borisovitch was at home; he was a stout, redfaced man, wearing a long coat that reached

below his knees, and looking as though he had short legs. He was pacing up and down his study, with his

hands in his pockets, and humming to himself in an undertone, "Rurururu." His grey whiskers looked

unkempt, and his hair was unbrushed, as though he had just got out of bed. And his study with pillows on the

sofa, with stacks of papers in the corners, and with a dirty invalid poodle lying under the table, produced the

"Rurururu," he hummed louder than ever, and turning into the drawingroom, gave his hand to Laptev,

It was dark in the drawingroom. Laptev, still standing with his hat in his hand, began apologising for

disturbing him; he asked what was to be done to make his sister sleep at night, and why she was growing so

thin; and he was embarrassed by the thought that he had asked those very questions at his visit that morning.

"Tell me," he said, "wouldn't it be as well to send for some specialist on internal diseases from Moscow?

The doctor sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and made a vague gesture with his hands.

It was evident that he was offended. He was a very huffy man, prone to take offence, and always ready to

suspect that people did not believe in him, that he was not recognised or properly respected, that his patients

exploited him, and that his colleagues showed him illwill. He was always jeering at himself, saying that

Yulia Sergeyevna lighted the lamp. She was tired out with the service, and that was evident from her pale,

exhausted face, and her weary step. She wanted to rest. She sat down on the sofa, put her hands on her lap,

and sank into thought. Laptev knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he were conscious of his

ugliness all over his body. He was short, thin, with ruddy cheeks, and his hair had grown so thin that his head

felt cold. In his expression there was none of that refined simplicity which makes even rough, ugly faces

attractive; in the society of women, he was awkward, overtalkative, affected. And now he almost despised

himself for it. He must talk that Yulia Sergeyevna might not be bored in his company. But what about? About

And he began to talk about medicine, saying what is usually said. He approved of hygiene, and said that he

had long ago wanted to found a nightrefuge in Moscow in fact, he had already calculated the cost of it.

According to his plan the workmen who came in the evening to the nightrefuge were to receive a supper of

hot cabbage soup with bread, a warm, dry bed with a rug, and a place for drying their clothes and their boots.

Yulia Sergeyevna was usually silent in his presence, and in a strange way, perhaps by the instinct of a lover,

he divined her thoughts and intentions. And now, from the fact that after the evening service she had not gone

to her room to change her dress and drink tea, he deduced that she was going to pay some visit elsewhere.

"But I'm in no hurry with the nightrefuge," he went on, speaking with vexation and irritability, and

addressing the doctor, who looked at him, as it were, blankly and in perplexity, evidently unable to

understand what induced him to raise the question of medicine and hygiene. "And most likely it will be a

long time, too, before I make use of our estimate. I fear our nightshelter will fall into the hands of our pious

"Excuse me," she said, "it's time for me to go. Please give my love to your sister."

Yulia Sergeyevna went out, and after staying a little longer, Laptev said goodbye to the doctor and went

home. When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the limetrees,

the shadows, the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so indifferent! By now the moon was high

up in the sky, and the clouds were scudding quickly below. "But how na�ve and provincial the moon is, how

threadbare and paltry the clouds!" thought Laptev. He felt ashamed of the way he had talked just now about

medicine, and the nightrefuge. He felt with horror that next day he would not have will enough to resist

trying to see her and talk to her again, and would again be convinced that he was nothing to her. And the day

after it would be the same. With what object? And how and when would it all end?

At home he went in to see his sister. Nina Fyodorovna still looked strong and gave the impression of being a

wellbuilt, vigorous woman, but her striking pallor made her look like a corpse, especially when, as now, she

was lying on her back with her eyes closed; her eldest daughter Sasha, a girl of ten years old, was sitting

There had long been established between Sasha and her uncle a tacit compact, to take turns in sitting with the

patient. On this occasion Sasha closed her readingbook, and without uttering a word, went softly out of the

room. Laptev took an historical novel from the chest of drawers, and looking for the right page, sat down and

Nina Fyodorovna was born in Moscow of a merchant family. She and her two brothers had spent their

childhood and early youth, living at home in Pyatnitsky Street. Their childhood was long and wearisome; her

father treated her sternly, and had even on two or three occasions flogged her, and her mother had had a long

illness and died. The servants were coarse, dirty, and hypocritical; the house was frequented by priests and

monks, also hypocritical; they ate and drank and coarsely flattered her father, whom they did not like. The

boys had the goodfortune to go to school, while Nina was left practically uneducated. All her life she wrote

an illegible scrawl, and had read nothing but historical novels. Seventeen years ago, when she was

twentytwo, on a summer holiday at Himki, she made the acquaintance of her present husband, a landowner

called Panaurov, had fallen in love with him, and married him secretly against her father's will. Panaurov, a

handsome, rather impudent fellow, who whistled and lighted his cigarette from the holy lamp, struck the

father as an absolutely worthless person. And when the soninlaw began in his letters demanding a dowry,

the old man wrote to his daughter that he would send her furs, silver, and various articles that had been left at

her mother's death, as well as thirty thousand roubles, but without his paternal blessing. Later he sent another

twenty thousand. This money, as well as the dowry, was spent; the estate had been sold and Panaurov moved

with his family to the town and got a job in a provincial government office. In the town he formed another tie,

and had a second family, and this was the subject of much talk, as his illicit family was not a secret.

Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. And now, listening to the historical novel, she was thinking how much

she had gone through in her life, how much she had suffered, and that if any one were to describe her life it

would make a very pathetic story. As the tumour was in her breast, she was persuaded that love and her

domestic grief were the cause of her illness, and that jealousy and tears had brought her to her hopeless state.

Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always been given to laughter, but of late Laptev had begun to notice that

at moments her mind seemed weakened by illness, and she would laugh at the smallest trifle, and even

"Yulia came before dinner while you were out," she said. "So far as I can see, she hasn't much faith in her

papa. 'Let papa go on treating you,' she said, 'but write in secret to the holy elder to pray for you, too.' There

is a holy man somewhere here. Yulia forgot her parasol here; you must take it to her tomorrow," she went

on after a brief pause. "No, when the end comes, neither doctors nor holy men are any help."

"About the children, about you . . . about my life. I've gone through a great deal, Alyosha, you know. When

one begins to remember and remember. . . . My God!" She laughed. "It's no joke to have borne five children

as I have, to have buried three. . . Sometimes I was expecting to be confined while my Grigory Nikolaitch

would be sitting at that very time with another woman. There would be no one to send for the doctor or the

midwife. I would go into the passage or the kitchen for the servant, and there Jews, tradesmen, moneylenders,

would be waiting for him to come home. My head used to go round. . . . He did not love me, though he never

said so openly. Now I've grown calmer it doesn't weigh on my heart; but in old days, when I was younger,

it hurt me ach! how it hurt me, darling! Once while we were still in the country I found him in the

garden with a lady, and I walked away. . . I walked on aimlessly, and I don't know how, but I found myself in

the church porch. I fell on my knees: 'Queen of Heaven!' I said. And it was night, the moon was shining. . . ."

She was exhausted, she began gasping for breath. Then, after resting a little, she took her brother's hand and

"How kind you are, Alyosha! . . . And how clever! . . . What a good man you've grown up into!"

At midnight Laptev said goodnight to her, and as he went away he took with him the parasol that Yulia

Sergeyevna had forgotten. In spite of the late hour, the servants, male and female, were drinking tea in the

diningroom. How disorderly! The children were not in bed, but were there in the diningroom, too. They

were all talking softly in undertones, and had not noticed that the lamp was smoking and would soon go out.

All these people, big and little, were disturbed by a whole succession of bad omens and were in an oppressed

mood. The glass in the hall had been broken, the samovar had been buzzing every day, and, as though on

purpose, was even buzzing now. They were describing how a mouse had jumped out of Nina Fyodorovna's

boot when she was dressing. And the children were quite aware of the terrible significance of these omens.

The elder girl, Sasha, a thin little brunette, was sitting motionless at the table, and her face looked scared and

woebegone, while the younger, Lida, a chubby fair child of seven, stood beside her sister looking from under

Laptev went downstairs to his own rooms in the lower storey, where under the low ceilings it was always

close and smelt of geraniums. In his sittingroom, Panaurov, Nina Fyodorovna's husband, was sitting reading

the newspaper. Laptev nodded to him and sat down opposite. Both sat still and said nothing. They used to

spend whole evenings like this without speaking, and neither of them was in the least put out by this silence.

The little girls came down from upstairs to say goodnight. Deliberately and in silence, Panaurov made the

sign of the cross over them several times, and gave them his hand to kiss. They dropped curtsies, and then

went up to Laptev, who had to make the sign of the cross and give them his hand to kiss also. This ceremony

"It's not very lively in our Godfearing town! I must confess, my dear fellow," he added with a sigh, "I'm

"I saw you coming out of Dr. Byelavin's Just now. I expect you don't go there for the sake of the papa."

"Well, of course not. And by the way, you wouldn't find such another old brute as that papa if you hunted by

daylight with a candle. You can't imagine what a foul, stupid, clumsy beast he is! You cultured people in the

capitals are still interested in the provinces only on the lyrical side, only from the paysage and Poor Anton

point of view, but I can assure you, my boy, there's nothing logical about it; there's nothing but barbarism,

meanness, and nastiness that's all. Take the local devotees of science the local intellectuals, so to

speak. Can you imagine there are here in this town twentyeight doctors? They've all made their fortunes,

and they are living in houses of their own, and meanwhile the population is in just as helpless a condition as

ever. Here, Nina had to have an operation, quite an ordinary one really, yet we were obliged to get a surgeon

from Moscow; not one doctor here would undertake it. It's beyond all conception. They know nothing, they

understand nothing. They take no interest in anything. Ask them, for instance, what cancer is what it is,

And Panaurov began to explain what cancer was. He was a specialist on all scientific subjects, and explained

from a scientific point of view everything that was discussed. But he explained it all in his own way. He had a

theory of his own about the circulation of the blood, about chemistry, about astronomy. He talked slowly,

"It's beyond all conception," he pronounced in an imploring voice, screwing up his eyes, sighing languidly,

and smiling as graciously as a king, and it was evident that he was very well satisfied with himself, and never

Not long afterwards Laptev and his brotherinlaw were sitting upstairs in the diningroom having supper.

Laptev had a glass of vodka, and then began drinking wine. Panaurov drank nothing. He never drank, and

never gambled, yet in spite of that he had squandered all his own and his wife's property, and had

accumulated debts. To squander so much in such a short time, one must have, not passions, but a special

talent. Panaurov liked dainty fare, liked a handsome dinner service, liked music after dinner, speeches,

bowing footmen, to whom he would carelessly fling tips of ten, even twentyfive roubles. He always took

part in all lotteries and subscriptions, sent bouquets to ladies of his acquaintance on their birthdays, bought

cups, stands for glasses, studs, ties, walkingsticks, scents, cigaretteholders, pipes, lapdogs, parrots,

Japanese bric�brac, antiques; he had silk nightshirts, and a bedstead made of ebony inlaid with

motherofpearl. His dressinggown was a genuine Bokhara, and everything was to correspond; and on all

"Yes, everything on this earth has an end," he said softly, screwing up his dark eyes. "You will fall in love

and suffer. You will fall out of love; you'll be deceived, for there is no woman who will not deceive; you will

suffer, will be brought to despair, and will be faithless too. But the time will come when all this will be a

memory, and when you will reason about it coldly and look upon it as utterly trivial. . . ."

Laptev, tired, a little drunk, looked at his handsome head, his clipped black beard, and seemed to understand

After supper Panaurov did not stay in the house, but went off to his other lodgings. Laptev went out to see

him on his way. Panaurov was the only man in the town who wore a tophat, and his elegant, dandified

figure, his tophat and tan gloves, beside the grey fences, the pitiful little houses, with their three windows

After saying goodbye to him Laptev returned home without hurrying. The moon was shining brightly; one

could distinguish every straw on the ground, and Laptev felt as though the moonlight were caressing his bare

"I love!" he pronounced aloud, and he had a sudden longing to run to overtake Panaurov, to embrace him, to

forgive him, to make him a present of a lot of money, and then to run off into the open country, into a wood,

At home he saw lying on the chair the parasol Yulia Sergeyevna had forgotten; he snatched it up and kissed it

greedily. The parasol was a silk one, no longer new, tied round with old elastic. The handle was a cheap one,

of white bone. Laptev opened it over him, and he felt as though there were the fragrance of happiness about

He settled himself more comfortably in his chair, and still keeping hold of the parasol, began writing to

"Here is news for you: I'm in love again! I say again, because six years ago I fell in love with a Moscow

actress, though I didn't even succeed in making her acquaintance, and for the last year and a half I have been

living with a certain person you know a woman neither young nor goodlooking. Ah, my dear boy, how

unlucky I am in love. I've never had any success with women, and if I say again it's simply because it's rather

sad and mortifying to acknowledge even to myself that my youth has passed entirely without love, and that

I'm in love in a real sense now for the first time in my life, at thirtyfour. Let it stand that I love again.

"If only you knew what a girl she was! She couldn't be called a beauty she has a broad face, she is very

thin, but what a wonderful expression of goodness she has when she smiles! When she speaks, her voice is as

clear as a bell. She never carries on a conversation with me I don't know her; but when I'm beside her I

feel she's a striking, exceptional creature, full of intelligence and lofty aspirations. She is religious, and you

cannot imagine how deeply this touches me and exalts her in my eyes. On that point I am ready to argue with

you endlessly. You may be right, to your thinking; but, still, I love to see her praying in church. She is a

provincial, but she was educated in Moscow. She loves our Moscow; she dresses in the Moscow style, and I

love her for that love her, love her. . . . I see you frowning and getting up to read me a long lecture on

what love is, and what sort of woman one can love, and what sort one cannot, and so on, and so on. But, dear

"My sister thanks you for your message. She often recalls how she used to take Kostya Kotchevoy to the

preparatory class, and never speaks of you except as poor Kostya, as she still thinks of you as the little orphan

boy she remembers. And so, poor orphan, I'm in love. While it's a secret, don't say anything to a 'certain

person.' I think it will all come right of itself, or, as the footman says in Tolstoy, will 'come round.' "

When he had finished his letter Laptev went to bed. He was so tired that he couldn't keep his eyes open, but

for some reason he could not get to sleep; the noise in the street seemed to prevent him. The cattle were

driven by to the blowing of a horn, and soon afterwards the bells began ringing for early mass. At one minute

a cart drove by creaking; at the next, he heard the voice of some woman going to market. And the sparrows

The next morning was a cheerful one; it was a holiday. At ten o'clock Nina Fyodorovna, wearing a brown

dress and with her hair neatly arranged, was led into the drawingroom, supported on each side. There she

walked about a little and stood by the open window, and her smile was broad and na�ve, and, looking at her,

one recalled a local artist, a great drunkard, who wanted her to sit to him for a picture of the Russian carnival.

And all of them the children, the servants, her brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and she herself were

suddenly convinced, that she was certainly going to get well. With shrieks of laughter the children ran after

People called to ask how she was, brought her holy bread, told her that in almost all the churches they were

offering up prayers for her that day. She had been conspicuous for her benevolence in the town, and was

liked. She was very ready with her charity, like her brother Alexey, who gave away his money freely, without

considering whether it was necessary to give it or not. Nina Fyodorovna used to pay the school fees for poor

children; used to give away tea, sugar, and jam to old women; used to provide trousseaux for poor brides; and

if she picked up a newspaper, she always looked first of all to see if there were any appeals for charity or a

She was holding now in her hand a bundle of notes, by means of which various poor people, her prot�g�s,

They had been sent her the evening before by the shopkeeper with a request for the payment of the total

"My goodness, what a lot they've had! They've no conscience!" she said, deciphering with difficulty her ugly

"Why should you? Why should you?" cried Nina Fyodorovna in agitation. "It's quite enough for me to take

two hundred and fifty every month from you and our brother. God bless you!" she added, speaking softly, so

"Well, but I spend two thousand five hundred a month," he said. "I tell you again, dear: you have just as

much right to spend it as I or Fyodor. Do understand that, once for all. There are three of us, and of every

But Nina Fyodorovna did not understand, and her expression looked as though she were mentally solving

some very difficult problem. And this lack of comprehension in pecuniary matters, always made Laptev feel

uneasy and troubled. He suspected that she had private debts in addition which worried her and of which she

Then came the sound of footsteps and heavy breathing; it was the doctor coming up the stairs, dishevelled

To avoid meeting him, Laptev went into the diningroom, and then went downstairs to his own room. It was

clear to him that to get on with the doctor and to drop in at his house without formalities was impossible; and

to meet the "old brute," as Panaurov called him, was distasteful. That was why he so rarely saw Yulia. He

reflected now that the father was not at home, that if he were to take Yulia Sergeyevna her parasol, he would

He took the parasol and, violently agitated, flew on the wings of love. It was hot in the street. In the big

courtyard of the doctor's house, overgrown with coarse grass and nettles, some twenty urchins were playing

ball. These were all the children of workingclass families who tenanted the three disreputablelooking

lodges, which the doctor was always meaning to have done up, though he put it off from year to year. The

yard resounded with ringing, healthy voices. At some distance on one side, Yulia Sergeyevna was standing at

She looked round. Usually he saw her indifferent, cold, or tired as she had been the evening before. Now her

face looked full of life and frolic, like the faces of the boys who were playing ball.

"Look, they never play so merrily in Moscow," she said, going to meet him. "There are no such big yards

there, though; they've no place to run there. Papa has only just gone to you," she added, looking round at the

"I know; but I've not come to see him, but to see you," said Laptev, admiring her youthfulness, which he had

not noticed till then, and seemed only that day to have discovered in her; it seemed to him as though he were

seeing her slender white neck with the gold chain for the first time. "I've come to see you . . ." he repeated.

She put out her hand to take the parasol, but he pressed it to his bosom and spoke passionately, without

restraint, yielding again to the sweet ecstasy he had felt the night before, sitting under the parasol.

"I entreat you, give it me. I shall keep it in memory of you . . . of our acquaintance. It's so wonderful!"

"Why am I keeping you here in the heat?" she said after a brief pause, laughing. "Let us go indoors."

They went into the hall. Yulia Sergeyevna ran upstairs, her white dress with blue flowers on it rustling as she

"I can't be disturbed," she answered, stopping on the landing. "I never do anything. Every day is a holiday for

"What you say is inconceivable to me," he said, going up to her. "I grew up in a world in which every one

"But if one has nothing to do?" she asked. "One has to arrange one's life under such conditions, that work is

Again he pressed the parasol to his bosom, and to his own surprise spoke softly, in a voice unlike his own:

"If you would consent to be my wife I would give everything I would give everything. There's no price I

"What are you saying!" she brought out, turning pale. "It's impossible, I assure you. Forgive me."

Then with the same rustle of her skirts she went up higher, and vanished through the doorway.

Laptev grasped what this meant, and his mood was transformed, completely, abruptly, as though a light in his

soul had suddenly been extinguished. Filled with the shame of a man humiliated, of a man who is disdained,

who is not liked, who is distasteful, perhaps disgusting, who is shunned, he walked out of the house.

"I would give everything," he thought, mimicking himself as he went home through the heat and recalled the

details of his declaration. "I would give everything like a regular tradesman. As though she wanted your

All he had just said seemed to him repulsively stupid. Why had he lied, saying that he had grown up in a

world where every one worked, without exception? Why had he talked to her in a lecturing tone about a clean

and happy life? It was not clever, not interesting; it was false false in the Moscow style. But by degrees

there followed that mood of indifference into which criminals sink after a severe sentence. He began thinking

that, thank God! everything was at an end and that the terrible uncertainty was over; that now there was no

need to spend whole days in anticipation, in pining, in thinking always of the same thing. Now everything

was clear; he must give up all hope of personal happiness, live without desires, without hopes, without

dreams, or expectations, and to escape that dreary sadness which he was so sick of trying to soothe, he could

busy himself with other people's affairs, other people's happiness, and old age would come on imperceptibly,

and life would reach its end and nothing more was wanted. He did not care, he wished for nothing, and

could reason about it coolly, but there was a sort of heaviness in his face especially under his eyes, his

forehead felt drawn tight like elastic and tears were almost starting into his eyes. Feeling weak all over, he

She knew Laptev very little, had made his acquaintance by chance; he was a rich man, a partner in the

wellknown Moscow firm of "Fyodor Laptev and Sons"; always serious, apparently clever, and anxious

about his sister s illness. It had seemed to her that he took no notice of her whatever, and she did not care

about him in the least and then all of a sudden that declaration on the stairs, that pitiful, ecstatic face. . . .

The offer had overwhelmed her by its suddenness and by the fact that the word wife had been uttered, and by

the necessity of rejecting it. She could not remember what she had said to Laptev, but she still felt traces of

the sudden, unpleasant feeling with which she had rejected him. He did not attract her; he looked like a

shopman; he was not interesting; she could not have answered him except with a refusal, and yet she felt

"My God! without waiting to get into the room, on the stairs," she said to herself in despair, addressing the

ikon which hung over her pillow; "and no courting beforehand, but so strangely, so oddly. . . ."

In her solitude her agitation grew more intense every hour, and it was beyond her strength to master this

oppressive feeling alone. She needed some one to listen to her story and to tell her that she had done right.

But she had no one to talk to. She had lost her mother long before; she thought her father a queer man, and

could not talk to him seriously. He worried her with his whims, his extreme readiness to take offence, and his

meaningless gestures; and as soon as one began to talk to him, he promptly turned the conversation on

himself. And in her prayer she was not perfectly open, because she did not know for certain what she ought to

The samovar was brought in. Yulia Sergeyevna, very pale and tired, looking dejected, came into the

diningroom to make tea it was one of her duties and poured out a glass for her father. Sergey

Borisovitch, in his long coat that reached below his knees, with his red face and unkempt hair, walked up and

down the room with his hands in his pockets, pacing, not from corner to corner, but backwards and forwards

at random, like a wild beast in its cage. He would stand still by the table, sip his glass of tea with relish, and

"Laptev made me an offer today," said Yulia Sergeyevna, and she flushed crimson.

He was fond of his daughter; it was most likely that she would sooner or later be married, and leave him, but

he tried not to think about that. He was afraid of being alone, and for some reason fancied, that if he were left

alone in that great house, he would have an apoplectic stroke, but he did not like to speak of this directly.

"Well, I'm delighted to hear it," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I congratulate you with all my heart. It

offers you a splendid opportunity for leaving me, to your great satisfaction. And I quite understand your

feelings. To live with an old father, an invalid, half crazy, must be very irksome at your age. I quite

understand you. And the sooner I'm laid out and in the devil's clutches, the better every one will be pleased. I

"I wonder, I've long wondered, why I've not yet been put into a madhouse why I'm still wearing this coat

instead of a straitwaistcoat? I still have faith in justice, in goodness. I am a fool, an idealist, and nowadays

that's insanity, isn't it? And how do they repay me for my honesty? They almost throw stones at me and ride

roughshod over me. And even my nearest kith and kin do nothing but try to get the better of me. It's high

She got up from the table impulsively, and went to her room in great wrath, remembering how often her

father had been unjust to her. But a little while afterwards she felt sorry for her father, too, and when he was

going to the club she went downstairs with him, and shut the door after him. It was a rough and stormy night;

the door shook with the violence of the wind, and there were draughts in all directions in the passage, so that

the candle was almost blown out. In her own domain upstairs Yulia Sergeyevna went the round of all the

rooms, making the sign of the cross over every door and window; the wind howled, and it sounded as though

some one were walking on the roof. Never had it been so dreary, never had she felt so lonely.

She asked herself whether she had done right in rejecting a man, simply because his appearance did not

attract her. It was true he was a man she did not love, and to marry him would mean renouncing forever her

dreams, her conceptions of happiness in married life, but would she ever meet the man of whom she dreamed,

and would he love her? She was twentyone already. There were no eligible young men in the town. She

pictured all the men she knew government clerks, schoolmasters, officers, and some of them were married

already, and their domestic life was conspicuous for its dreariness and triviality; others were uninteresting,

colourless, unintelligent, immoral. Laptev was, anyway, a Moscow man, had taken his degree at the

university, spoke French. He lived in the capital, where there were lots of clever, noble, remarkable people;

where there was noise and bustle, splendid theatres, musical evenings, firstrate dressmakers, confectioners. .

. . In the Bible it was written that a wife must love her husband, and great importance was given to love in

novels, but wasn't there exaggeration in it? Was it out of the question to enter upon married life without love?

It was said, of course, that love soon passed away, and that nothing was left but habit, and that the object of

married life was not to be found in love, nor in happiness, but in duties, such as the bringing up of one's

children, the care of one's household, and so on. And perhaps what was meant in the Bible was love for one's

At night Yulia Sergeyevna read the evening prayers attentively, then knelt down, and pressing her hands to

"Give me understanding, Holy Mother, our Defender! Give me understanding, O Lord!"

She had in the course of her life come across elderly maiden ladies, poor and of no consequence in the world,

who bitterly repented and openly confessed their regret that they had refused suitors in the past. Would not

the same thing happen to her? Had not she better go into a convent or become a Sister of Mercy?

She undressed and got into bed, crossing herself and crossing the air around her. Suddenly the bell rang

"Oh, my God!" she said, feeling a nervous irritation all over her at the sound. She lay still and kept thinking

how poor this provincial life was in events, monotonous and yet not peaceful. One was constantly having to

tremble, to feel apprehensive, angry or guilty, and in the end one's nerves were so strained, that one was

A little while afterwards the bell rang just as sharply again. The servant must have been asleep and had not

heard. Yulia Sergeyevna lighted a candle, and feeling vexed with the servant, began with a shiver to dress,

and when she went out into the corridor, the maid was already closing the door downstairs.

Yulia Sergeyevna went back to her room. She took a pack of cards out of the chest of drawers, and decided

that if after shuffling the cards well and cutting, the bottom card turned out to be a red one, it would mean yes

that is, she would accept Laptev's offer; and that if it was a black, it would mean no. The card turned out

That relieved her mind she fell asleep; but in the morning, she was wavering again between yes and no,

and she was dwelling on the thought that she could, if she chose, change her life. The thought harassed her,

she felt exhausted and unwell; but yet, soon after eleven, she dressed and went to see Nina Fyodorovna. She

wanted to see Laptev: perhaps now he would seem more attractive to her; perhaps she had been wrong about

She found it hard to walk against the wind. She struggled along, holding her hat on with both hands, and

Going into his sister's room, and seeing to his surprise Yulia Sergeyevna, Laptev had again the humiliating

sensation of a man who feels himself an object of repulsion. He concluded that if after what had happened

yesterday she could bring herself so easily to visit his sister and meet him, it must be because she was not

concerned about him, and regarded him as a complete nonentity. But when he greeted her, and with a pale

face and dust under her eyes she looked at him mournfully and remorsefully, he saw that she, too, was

She did not feel well. She only stayed ten minutes, and began saying goodbye. And as she went out she said

They walked along the street in silence, holding their hats, and he, walking a little behind, tried to screen her

"Forgive me if I was not nice yesterday;" and her voice quavered as though she were going to cry. "I was so

"I slept well all night," said Laptev, without looking at her; "but that doesn't mean that I was happy. My life is

broken. I'm deeply unhappy, and after your refusal yesterday I go about like a man poisoned. The most

difficult thing was said yesterday. Today I feel no embarrassment and can talk to you frankly. I love you

more than my sister, more than my dead mother. . . . I can live without my sister, and without my mother, and

I have lived without them, but life without you is meaningless to me; I can't face it. . . ."

He realised that she wanted to go back to what had happened the day before, and with that object had asked

him to accompany her, and now was taking him home with her. But what could she add to her refusal? What

new idea had she in her head? From everything, from her glances, from her smile, and even from her tone,

from the way she held her head and shoulders as she walked beside him, he saw that, as before, she did not

"You are very welcome. I'm always glad to see you, Fyodor Alexeyitch," he said, mixing up his Christian

He had never been so polite before, and Laptev saw that he knew of his offer; he did not like that either. He

was sitting now in the drawingroom, and the room impressed him strangely, with its poor, common

decorations, its wretched pictures, and though there were armchairs in it, and a huge lamp with a shade over

it, it still looked like an uninhabited place, a huge barn, and it was obvious that no one could feel at home in

such a room, except a man like the doctor. The next room, almost twice as large, was called the

receptionroom, and in it there were only rows of chairs, as though for a dancing class. And while Laptev

was sitting in the drawingroom talking to the doctor about his sister, he began to be tortured by a suspicion.

Had not Yulia Sergeyevna been to his sister Nina's, and then brought him here to tell him that she would

accept him? Oh, how awful it was! But the most awful thing of all was that his soul was capable of such a

suspicion. And he imagined how the father and the daughter had spent the evening, and perhaps the night

before, in prolonged consultation, perhaps dispute, and at last had come to the conclusion that Yulia had

acted thoughtlessly in refusing a rich man. The words that parents use in such cases kept ringing in his ears:

The doctor was going out to see patients. Laptev would have gone with him, but Yulia Sergeyevna said:

She was distressed and dispirited, and told herself now that to refuse an honourable, good man who loved her,

simply because he was not attractive, especially when marrying him would make it possible for her to change

her mode of life, her cheerless, monotonous, idle life in which youth was passing with no prospect of

anything better in the future to refuse him under such circumstances was madness, caprice and folly, and

The father went out. When the sound of his steps had died away, she suddenly stood up before Laptev and

"I thought for a long time yesterday, Alexey Fyodorovitch. . . . I accept your offer."

He bent down and kissed her hand. She kissed him awkwardly on the head with cold lips.

He felt that in this love scene the chief thing her love was lacking, and that there was a great deal that

was not wanted; and he longed to cry out, to run away, to go back to Moscow at once. But she was close to

him, and she seemed to him so lovely, and he was suddenly overcome by passion. He reflected that it was too

late for deliberation now; he embraced her passionately, and muttered some words, calling her thou; he kissed

She walked away to the window, dismayed by these demonstrations, and both of them were already

"What is it?" he said, going up to her, wringing his hands too. "My dear, for God's sake, tell me what is it?

"Don't pay any attention to it," she said, and forced herself to smile. "I promise you I'll be a faithful, devoted

Sitting afterwards with his sister and reading aloud an historical novel, he recalled it all and felt wounded that

his splendid, pure, rich feeling was met with such a shallow response. He was not loved, but his offer had

been accepted in all probability because he was rich: that is, what was thought most of in him was what he

valued least of all in himself. It was quite possible that Yulia, who was so pure and believed in God, had not

once thought of his money; but she did not love him did not love him, and evidently she had interested

motives, vague, perhaps, and not fully thought out still, it was so. The doctor's house with its common

furniture was repulsive to him, and he looked upon the doctor himself as a wretched, greasy miser, a sort of

operatic Gaspard from "Les Cloches de Corneville." The very name "Yulia" had a vulgar sound. He imagined

how he and his Yulia would stand at their wedding, in reality complete strangers to one another, without a

trace of feeling on her side, just as though their marriage had been made by a professional matchmaker; and

the only consolation left him now, as commonplace as the marriage itself, was the reflection that he was not

the first, and would not be the last; that thousands of people were married like that; and that with time, when

"Romeo and Juliet!" he said, as he shut the novel, and he laughed. "I am Romeo, Nina. You may congratulate

Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but when she believed it, she began to cry; she was not pleased at

"No, it's not sudden. It's been going on since March, only you don't notice anything. . . . I fell in love with her

"I thought you would marry some one in our Moscow set," said Nina Fyodorovna after a pause. "Girls in our

set are simpler. But what matters, Alyosha, is that you should be happy that matters most. My Grigory

Nikolaitch did not love me, and there's no concealing it; you can see what our life is. Of course any woman

may love you for your goodness and your brains, but, you see, Yulitchka is a girl of good family from a

highclass boardingschool; goodness and brains are not enough for her. She is young, and, you, Alyosha,

She was so agitated that a faint flush came into her cheeks, and she began discussing eagerly whether it

would be the proper thing for her to bless Alyosha with the ikon at the wedding. She was, she reasoned, his

elder sister, and took the place of his mother; and she kept trying to convince her dejected brother that the

wedding must be celebrated in proper style, with pomp and gaiety, so that no one could find fault with it.

Then he began going to the Byelavins' as an accepted suitor, three or four times a day; and now he never had

time to take Sasha's place and read aloud the historical novel. Yulia used to receive him in her two rooms,

which were at a distance from the drawingroom and her father's study, and he liked them very much. The

walls in them were dark; in the corner stood a case of ikons; and there was a smell of good scent and of the

oil in the holy lamp. Her rooms were at the furthest end of the house; her bedstead and dressingtable were

shut off by a screen. The doors of the bookcase were covered on the inside with a green curtain, and there

were rugs on the floor, so that her footsteps were noiseless and from this he concluded that she was of a

reserved character, and that she liked a quiet, peaceful, secluded life. In her own home she was treated as

though she were not quite grown up. She had no money of her own, and sometimes when they were out for

walks together, she was overcome with confusion at not having a farthing. Her father allowed her very little

for dress and books, hardly ten pounds a year. And, indeed, the doctor himself had not much money in spite

of his good practice. He played cards every night at the club, and always lost. Moreover, he bought

mortgaged houses through a building society, and let them. The tenants were irregular in paying the rent, but

he was convinced that such speculations were profitable. He had mortgaged his own house in which he and

his daughter were living, and with the money so raised had bought a piece of waste ground, and had already

begun to build on it a large twostorey house, meaning to mortgage it, too, as soon as it was finished.

Laptev now lived in a sort of cloud, feeling as though he were not himself, but his double, and did many

things which he would never have brought himself to do before. He went three or four times to the club with

the doctor, had supper with him, and offered him money for housebuilding. He even visited Panaurov at his

other establishment. It somehow happened that Panaurov invited him to dinner, and without thinking, Laptev

accepted. He was received by a lady of fiveandthirty. She was tall and thin, with hair touched with grey,

and black eyebrows, apparently not Russian. There were white patches of powder on her face. She gave him a

honeyed smile and pressed his hand jerkily, so that the bracelets on her white hands tinkled. It seemed to

Laptev that she smiled like that because she wanted to conceal from herself and from others that she was

unhappy. He also saw two little girls, aged five and three, who had a marked likeness to Sasha. For dinner

they had milksoup, cold veal, and chocolate. It was insipid and not good; but the table was splendid, with

gold forks, bottles of Soyer, and cayenne pepper, an extraordinary bizarre cruetstand, and a gold

It was only as he was finishing the milksoup that Laptev realised how very inappropriate it was for him to

be dining there. The lady was embarrassed, and kept smiling, showing her teeth. Panaurov expounded

"We have in it an example of the action of electricity," he said in French, addressing the lady. "Every man has

in his skin microscopic glands which contain currents of electricity. If you meet with a person whose currents

When Laptev went home and his sister asked him where he had been he felt awkward, and made no answer.

He felt himself in a false position right up to the time of the wedding. His love grew more intense every day,

and Yulia seemed to him a poetic and exalted creature; but, all the same, there was no mutual love, and the

truth was that he was buying her and she was selling herself. Sometimes, thinking things over, he fell into

despair and asked himself: should he run away? He did not sleep for nights together, and kept thinking how

he should meet in Moscow the lady whom he had called in his letters "a certain person," and what attitude his

father and his brother, difficult people, would take towards his marriage and towards Yulia. He was afraid

that his father would say something rude to Yulia at their first meeting. And something strange had happened

of late to his brother Fyodor. In his long letters he had taken to writing of the importance of health, of the

effect of illness on the mental condition, of the meaning of religion, but not a word about Moscow or

business. These letters irritated Laptev, and he thought his brother's character was changing for the worse.

The wedding was in September. The ceremony took place at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, after mass,

and the same day the young couple set off for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife, in a black dress with a

long train, already looking not a girl but a married woman, said goodbye to Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid's

"Oh, I promise!" answered Yulia Sergeyevna, and her lips and eyelids began quivering too.

"I shall come to see you in October," said Laptev, much moved. "You must get better, my darling."

They travelled in a special compartment. Both felt depressed and uncomfortable. She sat in the corner

without taking off her hat, and made a show of dozing, and he lay on the seat opposite, and he was disturbed

by various thoughts of his father, of " a certain person," whether Yulia would like her Moscow flat. And

looking at his wife, who did not love him, he wondered dejectedly "why this had happened."

The Laptevs had a wholesale business in Moscow, dealing in fancy goods: fringe, tape, trimmings, crochet

cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross receipts reached two millions a year; what the net profit was, no one

knew but the old father. The sons and the clerks estimated the profits at approximately three hundred

thousand, and said that it would have been a hundred thousand more if the old man had not "been too

freehanded" that is, had not allowed credit indiscriminately. In the last ten years alone the bad debts had

mounted up to the sum of a million; and when the subject was referred to, the senior clerk would wink slyly

and deliver himself of sentences the meaning of which was not clear to every one:

Their chief commercial operations were conducted in the town market in a building which was called the

warehouse. The entrance to the warehouse was in the yard, where it was always dark, and smelt of matting

and where the drayhorses were always stamping their hoofs on the asphalt. A very humblelooking door,

studded with iron, led from the yard into a room with walls discoloured by damp and scrawled over with

charcoal, lighted up by a narrow window covered by an iron grating. Then on the left was another room

larger and cleaner with an iron stove and a couple of chairs, though it, too, had a prison window: this was the

office, and from it a narrow stone staircase led up to the second storey, where the principal room was. This

was rather a large room, but owing to the perpetual darkness, the lowpitched ceiling, the piles of boxes and

bales, and the numbers of men that kept flitting to and fro in it, it made as unpleasant an impression on a

newcomer as the others. In the offices on the top storey the goods lay in bales, in bundles and in cardboard

boxes on the shelves; there was no order nor neatness in the arrangement of it, and if crimson threads, tassels,

ends of fringe, had not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper parcels, no one could have guessed

what was being bought and sold here. And looking at these crumpled paper parcels and boxes, no one would

have believed that a million was being made out of such trash, and that fifty men were employed every day in

When at midday, on the day after his arrival at Moscow, Laptev went into the warehouse, the workmen

packing the goods were hammering so loudly that in the outer room and the office no one heard him come in.

A postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in his hand; he was wincing at the

noise, and he did not notice Laptev either. The first person to meet him upstairs was his brother Fyodor

Fyodorovitch, who was so like him that they passed for twins. This resemblance always reminded Laptev of

his own personal appearance, and now, seeing before him a short, redfaced man with rather thin hair, with

narrow plebeian hips, looking so uninteresting and so unintellectual, he asked himself: "Can I really look like

"How glad I am to see you!" said Fyodor, kissing his brother and pressing his hand warmly. "I have been

impatiently looking forward to seeing you every day, my dear fellow. When you wrote that you were getting

married, I was tormented with curiosity, and I've missed you, too, brother. Only fancy, it's six months since

"It's in God's hands," sighed Fyodor. "Well, what of your wife? She's a beauty, no doubt? I love her already.

Laptev saw the broad, bent back so familiar to him of his father, Fyodor Stepanovitch. The old man

Fyodor Stepanovitch was a tall man of exceptionally powerful build, so that, in spite of his wrinkles and

eighty years, he still looked a hale and vigorous man. He spoke in a deep, rich, sonorous voice, that

resounded from his broad chest as from a barrel. He wore no beard, but a shortclipped military moustache,

and smoked cigars. As he was always too hot, he used all the year round to wear a canvas coat at home and at

the warehouse. He had lately had an operation for cataract. His sight was bad, and he did nothing in the

"It's a good long time since we saw you, honoured sir," said the old man "a good long time. Well, am I to

congratulate you on entering the state of holy matrimony? Very well, then; I congratulate you."

"Well, have you brought your young lady?" the old man asked, and without waiting for an answer, he said,

addressing the customer: " 'Herewith I beg to inform you, father, that I'm going to marry such and such a

young lady.' Yes. But as for asking for his father's counsel or blessing, that's not in the rules nowadays. Now

they go their own way. When I married I was over forty, but I went on my knees to my father and asked his

The old man was delighted to see his son, but thought it unseemly to show his affection or make any display

of his joy. His voice and his manner of saying "your young lady" brought back to Laptev the depression he

had always felt in the warehouse. Here every trifling detail reminded him of the past, when he used to be

flogged and put on Lenten fare; he knew that even now boys were thrashed and punched in the face till their

noses bled, and that when those boys grew up they would beat others. And before he had been five minutes in

the warehouse, he always felt as though he were being scolded or punched in the face.

"Here, Alyosha, I must introduce our Tambov benefactor, Grigory Timofeitch. He might serve as an example

for the young men of the day; he's passed his fiftieth birthday, and he has tiny children."

The clerks laughed, and the customer, a lean old man with a pale face, laughed too.

"Nature above the normal capacity," observed the headclerk, who was standing at the counter close by. "It

The headclerk a tall man of fifty, in spectacles, with a dark beard, and a pencil behind his ear usually

expressed his ideas vaguely in roundabout hints, while his sly smile betrayed that he attached particular

significance to his words. He liked to obscure his utterances with bookish words, which he understood in his

own way, and many such words he used in a wrong sense. For instance, the word "except." When he had

expressed some opinion positively and did not want to be contradicted, he would stretch out his hand and

And what was most astonishing, the customers and the other clerks understood him perfectly. His name was

Ivan Vassilitch Potchatkin, and he came from Kashira. Now, congratulating Laptev, he expressed himself as

Another important person in the warehouse was a clerk called Makeitchev a stout, solid, fair man with

whiskers and a perfectly bald head. He went up to Laptev and congratulated him respectfully in a low voice:

"I have the honour, sir. . . The Lord has heard your parent's prayer. Thank God."

Then the other clerks began coming up to congratulate him on his marriage. They were all fashionably

dressed, and looked like perfectly wellbred, educated men. Since between every two words they put in a

"sir," their congratulations something like "Best wishes, sir, for happiness, sir," uttered very rapidly in a

low voice sounded rather like the hiss of a whip in the air "Shshshs s s s s!" Laptev was soon bored

and longing to go home, but it was awkward to go away. He was obliged to stay at least two hours at the

warehouse to keep up appearances. He walked away from the counter and began asking Makeitchev whether

things had gone well while he was away, and whether anything new had turned up, and the clerk answered

him respectfully, avoiding his eyes. A boy with a cropped head, wearing a grey blouse, handed Laptev a glass

of tea without a saucer; not long afterwards another boy, passing by, stumbled over a box, and almost fell

down, and Makeitchev's face looked suddenly spiteful and ferocious like a wild beast's, and he shouted at

The clerks were pleased that their young master was married and had come back at last; they looked at him

with curiosity and friendly feeling, and each one thought it his duty to say something agreeable when he

passed him. But Laptev was convinced that it was not genuine, and that they were only flattering him because

they were afraid of him. He never could forget how fifteen years before, a clerk, who was mentally deranged,

had run out into the street with nothing on but his shirt and shaking his fists at the windows, shouted that he

had been illtreated; and how, when the poor fellow had recovered, the clerks had jeered at him for long

afterwards, reminding him how he had called his employers "planters" instead of "exploiters." Altogether the

employees at Laptevs' had a very poor time of it, and this fact was a subject of conversation for the whole

market. The worst of it was that the old man, Fyodor Stepanovitch, maintained something of an Asiatic

despotism in his attitude to them. Thus, no one knew what wages were paid to the old man's favourites,

Potchatkin and Makeitchev. They received no more than three thousand a year, together with bonuses, but he

made out that he paid then seven. The bonuses were given to all the clerks every year, but privately, so that

the man who got little was bound from vanity to say he had got more. Not one boy knew when he would be

promoted to be a clerk; not one of the men knew whether his employer was satisfied with him or not. Nothing

was directly forbidden, and so the clerks never knew what was allowed, and what was not. They were not

forbidden to marry, but they did not marry for fear of displeasing their employer and losing their place. They

were allowed to have friends and pay visits, but the gates were shut at nine o'clock, and every morning the

old man scanned them all suspiciously, and tried to detect any smell of vodka about them:

Every clerk was obliged to go to early service, and to stand in church in such a position that the old man

could see them all. The fasts were strictly observed. On great occasions, such as the birthday of their

employer or of any member of his family, the clerks had to subscribe and present a cake from Fley's, or an

album. The clerks lived three or four in a room in the lower storey, and in the lodges of the house in

Pyatnitsky Street, and at dinner ate from a common bowl, though there was a plate set before each of them. If

one of the family came into the room while they were at dinner, they all stood up.

Laptev was conscious that only, perhaps, those among them who had been corrupted by the old man's

training could seriously regard him as their benefactor; the others must have looked on him as an enemy and

a "planter." Now, after six months' absence, he saw no change for the better; there was indeed something new

which boded nothing good. His brother Fyodor, who had always been quiet, thoughtful, and extremely

refined, was now running about the warehouse with a pencil behind his ear making a show of being very busy

and businesslike, slapping customers on the shoulder and shouting "Friends!" to the clerks. Apparently he had

The old man's voice boomed unceasingly. Having nothing to do, he was laying down the law to a customer,

telling him how he should order his life and his business, always holding himself up as an example. That

boastfulness, that aggressive tone of authority, Laptev had heard ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. The old man

adored himself; from what he said it always appeared that he had made his wife and all her relations happy,

that he had been munificent to his children, and a benefactor to his clerks and employ�s, and that every one in

the street and all his acquaintances remembered him in their prayers. Whatever he did was always right, and

if things went wrong with people it was because they did not take his advice; without his advice nothing

could succeed. In church he stood in the foremost place, and even made observations to the priests, if in his

opinion they were not conducting the service properly, and believed that this was pleasing God because God

At two o'clock every one in the warehouse was hard at work, except the old man, who still went on booming

in his deep voice. To avoid standing idle, Laptev took some trimmings from a workgirl and let her go; then

listened to a customer, a merchant from Vologda, and told a clerk to attend to him.

"T. V. A.!" resounded on all sides (prices were denoted by letters in the warehouse and goods by numbers).

"I shall come to Pyatnitsky Street with my wife tomorrow," he said; "but I warn you, if father says a single

"You're the same as ever," sighed Fyodor. "Marriage has not changed you. You must be patient with the old

man. So till eleven o'clock, then. We shall expect you impatiently. Come directly after mass, then."

"That does not matter. The great thing is not to be later than eleven, so you may be in time to pray to God and

to lunch with us. Give my greetings to my little sister and kiss her hand for me. I have a presentiment that I

shall like her," Fyodor added with perfect sincerity. "I envy you, brother!" he shouted after him as Alexey

"And why does he shrink into himself in that shy way as though he fancied he was naked?" thought Laptev,

as he walked along Nikolsky Street, trying to understand the change that had come over his brother. "And his

language is new, too: 'Brother, dear brother, God has sent us joy; to pray to God' just like Iudushka in

At eleven o'clock the next day, which was Sunday, he was driving with his wife along Pyatnitsky Street in a

light, onehorse carriage. He was afraid of his father's doing something outrageous, and was already ill at

ease. After two nights in her husband's house Yulia Sergeyevna considered her marriage a mistake and a

calamity, and if she had had to live with her husband in any other town but Moscow, it seemed to her that she

could not have endured the horror of it. Moscow entertained her she was delighted with the streets, the

churches; and if it had been possible to drive about Moscow in those splendid sledges with expensive horses,

to drive the whole day from morning till night, and with the swift motion to feel the cold autumn air blowing

Near a white, lately stuccoed twostorey house the coachman pulled up his horse, and began to turn to the

right. They were expected, and near the gate stood two policemen and the porter in a new fullskirted coat,

high boots, and goloshes. The whole space, from the middle of the street to the gates and all over the yard

from the porch, was strewn with fresh sand. The porter took off his hat, the policemen saluted. Near the

"Very glad to make your acquaintance, little sister," he said, kissing Yulia's hand. "You're very welcome."

He led her upstairs on his arm, and then along a corridor through a crowd of men and women. The anteroom

"I will introduce you to our father directly," whispered Fyodor in the midst of a solemn, deathly silence. "A

In the big drawingroom, by a table prepared for service, Fyodor Stepanovitch stood, evidently waiting for

them, and with him the priest in a calotte, and a deacon. The old man shook hands with Yulia without saying

The priest and the deacon began putting on their vestments. A censer was brought in, giving off sparks and

fumes of incense and charcoal. The candles were lighted. The clerks walked into the drawingroom on tiptoe

and stood in two rows along the wall. There was perfect stillness, no one even coughed.

"The blessing of God," began the deacon. The service was read with great solemnity; nothing was left out and

two canticles were sung to sweetest Jesus and the most Holy Mother of God. The singers sang very

slowly, holding up the music before them. Laptev noticed how confused his wife was. While they were

singing the canticles, and the singers in different keys brought out "Lord have mercy on us," he kept

expecting in nervous suspense that the old man would make some remark such as, "You don't know how to

cross yourself," and he felt vexed. Why this crowd, and why this ceremony with priests and choristers? It was

too bourgeois. But when she, like the old man, put her head under the gospel and afterwards several times

At the end of the service, during "Many, many years," the priest gave the old man and Alexey the cross to

kiss, but when Yulia went up, he put his hand over the cross, and showed he wanted to speak. Signs were

"The prophet Samuel," began the priest, "went to Bethlehem at the bidding of the Lord, and there the elders

of the town with fear and trembling asked him: 'Comest thou peaceably?' And the prophet answered:

'Peaceably: I am come to sacrifice unto the Lord: sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.'

Even so, Yulia, servant of God, shall we ask of thee, Dost thou come bringing peace into this house?"

Yulia flushed with emotion. As he finished, the priest gave her the cross to kiss, and said in quite a different

The choir began singing once more, people began moving, and the room was noisy again. The old man, much

touched, with his eyes full of tears, kissed Yulia three times, made the sign of the cross over her face, and

The clerks congratulated her and said something, but the choir was singing so loud that nothing else could be

heard. Then they had lunch and drank champagne. She sat beside the old father, and he talked to her, saying

that families ought not to be parted but live together in one house; that separation and disunion led to

"I've made money and the children only do the spending of it," he said. "Now, you live with me and save

Yulia had all the time a vision of Fyodor flitting about so like her husband, but shyer and more restless; he

"We are plain people, little sister," he said, and patches of red came into his face as he spoke. "We live simply

As they went home, Laptev felt greatly relieved that everything had gone off so well, and that nothing

"You're surprised that such a stalwart, broadshouldered father should have such stunted, narrowchested

sons as Fyodor and me. Yes; but it's easy to explain! My father married my mother when he was fortyfive,

and she was only seventeen. She turned pale and trembled in his presence. Nina was born first born of a

comparatively healthy mother, and so she was finer and sturdier than we were. Fyodor and I were begotten

and born after mother had been worn out by terror. I can remember my father correcting me or, to speak

plainly, beating me before I was five years old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on

the head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me that day. Play

and childish mischief was forbidden us. We had to go to morning service and to early mass. When we met

priests or monks we had to kiss their hands; at home we had to sing hymns. Here you are religious and love

all that, but I'm afraid of religion, and when I pass a church I remember my childhood, and am overcome with

horror. I was taken to the warehouse as soon as I was eight years old. I worked like a working boy, and it was

bad for my health, for I used to be beaten there every day. Afterwards when I went to the high school, I used

to go to school till dinnertime, and after dinner I had to sit in that warehouse till evening; and things went on

like that till I was twentytwo, till I got to know Yartsev, and he persuaded me to leave my father's house.

That Yartsev did a great deal for me. I tell you what," said Laptev, and he laughed with pleasure: "let us go

and pay Yartsev a visit at once. He's a very fine fellow! How touched he will be!"

On a Saturday in November Anton Rubinstein was conducting in a symphony concert. It was very hot and

crowded. Laptev stood behind the columns, while his wife and Kostya Kotchevoy were sitting in the third or

fourth row some distance in front. At the very beginning of an interval a "certain person," Polina Nikolaevna

Razsudin, quite unexpectedly passed by him. He had often since his marriage thought with trepidation of a

possible meeting with her. When now she looked at him openly and directly, he realised that he had all this

time shirked having things out with her, or writing her two or three friendly lines, as though he had been

hiding from her; he felt ashamed and flushed crimson. She pressed his hand tightly and impulsively and

And without waiting for an answer she went striding on impetuously as though some one were pushing her

She was very thin and plain, with a long nose; her face always looked tired, and exhausted, and it seemed as

though it were an effort to her to keep her eyes open, and not to fall down. She had fine, dark eyes, and an

intelligent, kind, sincere expression, but her movements were awkward and abrupt. It was hard to talk to her,

because she could not talk or listen quietly. Loving her was not easy. Sometimes when she was alone with

Laptev she would go on laughing for a long time, hiding her face in her hands, and would declare that love

was not the chief thing in life for her, and would be as whimsical as a girl of seventeen; and before kissing

her he would have to put out all the candles. She was thirty. She was married to a schoolmaster, but had not

lived with her husband for years. She earned her living by giving music lessons and playing in quartettes.

During the ninth symphony she passed again as though by accident, but the crowd of men standing like a

thick wall behind the columns prevented her going further, and she remained beside him. Laptev saw that she

was wearing the same little velvet blouse she had worn at concerts last year and the year before. Her gloves

were new, and her fan, too, was new, but it was a common one. She was fond of fine clothes, but she did not

know how to dress, and grudged spending money on it. She dressed so badly and untidily that when she was

going to her lessons striding hurriedly down the street, she might easily have been taken for a young monk.

"You'll spend the evening with me," said Polina Nikolaevna, going up to Laptev and looking at him severely.

"When this is over we'll go and have tea. Do you hear? I insist on it. You owe me a great deal, and haven't the

Endless calls followed the conclusion of the concert. The audience got up from their seats and went out very

slowly, and Laptev could not go away without telling his wife. He had to stand at the door and wait.

"I'm dying for some tea," Polina Nikolaevna said plaintively. "My very soul is parched."

He offered her his arm; she refused, in a long, wearisome sentence which he had heard many times, to the

effect that she did not class herself with the feebler fair sex, and did not depend on the services of gentlemen.

As she talked to him she kept looking about at the audience and greeting acquaintances; they were her

fellowstudents at the higher courses and at the conservatorium, and her pupils. She gripped their hands

abruptly, as though she were tugging at them. But then she began twitching her shoulders, and trembling as

though she were in a fever, and at last said softly, looking at Laptev with horror:

"Who is it you've married? Where were your eyes, you mad fellow? What did you see in that stupid,

insignificant girl? Why, I loved you for your mind, for your soul, but that china doll wants nothing but your

"Let us drop that, Polina," he said in a voice of supplication. "All that you can say to me about my marriage

Yulia Sergeyevna made her appearance, wearing a black dress with a big diamond brooch, which her

fatherinlaw had sent her after the service. She was followed by her suite Kotchevoy, two doctors of

their acquaintance, an officer, and a stout young man in student's uniform, called Kish.

Yulia nodded and went on. Polina Nikolaevna gazed after her, quivering all over and twitching nervously,

Laptev was afraid to go home with her, foreseeing an unpleasant discussion, cutting words, and tears, and he

She did not like being in a restaurant, because the atmosphere of restaurants seemed to her poisoned by

tobacco smoke and the breath of men. Against all men she did not know she cherished a strange prejudice,

regarding them all as immoral rakes, capable of attacking her at any moment. Besides, the music played at

Coming out of the Hall of Nobility, they took a sledge in Ostozhenka and drove to Savelovsky Lane, where

she lodged. All the way Laptev thought about her. It was true that he owed her a great deal. He had made her

acquaintance at the flat of his friend Yartsev, to whom she was giving lessons in harmony. Her love for him

was deep and perfectly disinterested, and her relations with him did not alter her habits; she went on giving

her lessons and wearing herself out with work as before. Through her he came to understand and love music,

"Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!" she pronounced in a hollow voice, covering her mouth with her muff

that she might not catch cold. "I've given five lessons, confound them! My pupils are as stupid as posts; I

nearly died of exasperation. I don't know how long this slavery can go on. I'm worn out. As soon as I can

scrape together three hundred roubles, I shall throw it all up and go to the Crimea, to lie on the beach and

"You'll never go," said Laptev. "To begin with, you'll never save the money; and, besides, you'd grudge

spending it. Forgive me, I repeat again: surely it's quite as humiliating to collect the money by farthings from

idle people who have music lessons to while away their time, as to borrow it from your friends."

"I haven't any friends," she said irritably. "And please don't talk nonsense. The working class to which I

belong has one privilege: the consciousness of being incorruptible the right to refuse to be indebted to

wretched little shopkeepers, and to treat them with scorn. No, indeed, you don't buy me! I'm not a Yulitchka!

Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would call forth a perfect torrent of words, such as

She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady who provided her meals. Her big Becker piano

was for the time at Yartsev's in Great Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day to play on it. In her room

there were armchairs in loose covers, a bed with a white summer quilt, and flowers belonging to the landlady;

there were oleographs on the walls, and there was nothing that would have suggested that there was a woman,

and a woman of university education, living in it. There was no toilet table; there were no books; there was

not even a writingtable. It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she got home, and went out as soon as

The cook brought in the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea, and, still shivering the room was cold

began abusing the singers who had sung in the ninth symphony. She was so tired she could hardly keep her

"And so you are married," she said. "But don't be uneasy; I'm not going to pine away. I shall be able to tear

you out of my heart. Only it's annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one else;

that what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but simply a body, good looks, and youth. . . .

Youth!" she pronounced through her nose, as though mimicking some one, and she laughed. "Youth! You

must have purity, reinheit! reinheit!" she laughed, throwing herself back in her chair. "Reinheit!"

Laptev, agitated, and feeling miserable, stood up and began walking about the room.

"No," he repeated. "If you want to know, Polina, I'm very unhappy. There's no help for it; I've done the stupid

thing, and there's no correcting it now. I must look at it philosophically. She married me without love,

stupidly, perhaps with mercenary motives, but without understanding, and now she evidently sees her

mistake and is miserable. I see it. At night we sleep together, but by day she is afraid to be left alone with me

for five minutes, and tries to find distraction, society. With me she feels ashamed and frightened."

"That's stupid, Polina!" cried Laptev. "She takes money from me because it makes absolutely no difference to

her whether she has it or not. She is an honest, pure girl. She married me simply because she wanted to get

"And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been rich?" asked Polina.

"I'm not sure of anything," said Laptev dejectedly. "Not of anything. I don't understand anything. For God's

A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up and down, thinking that by now his wife was

"But is it possible to love without knowing why?" asked Polina, shrugging her shoulders. "No; it's the

promptings of animal passion! You are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body, that reinheit! Go away

She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled it at him. He put on his fur coat without

speaking and went out, but she ran after him into the passage, clutched his arm above the elbow, and broke

"Hush, Polina! Don't!" he said, and could not unclasp her fingers. "Calm yourself, I entreat you."

She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an unpleasant waxy colour like a corpse's, and

Laptev still could not unclasp her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up carefully, laid her on her bed, and

sat by her for ten minutes till she came to herself. Her hands were cold, her pulse was weak and uneven.

"Go home," she said, opening her eyes. "Go away, or I shall begin howling again. I must take myself in

When he came out, instead of going to the doctors' club where his friends were expecting him, he went home.

All the way home he was asking himself reproachfully why he had not settled down to married life with that

woman who loved him so much, and was in reality his wife and friend. She was the one human being who

was devoted to him; and, besides, would it not have been a grateful and worthy task to give happiness, peace,

and a home to that proud, clever, overworked creature? Was it for him, he asked himself, to lay claim to

youth and beauty, to that happiness which could not be, and which, as though in punishment or mockery, had

kept him for the last three months in a state of gloom and oppression. The honeymoon was long over, and he

still, absurd to say, did not know what sort of person his wife was. To her school friends and her father she

wrote long letters of five sheets, and was never at a loss for something to say to them, but to him she never

spoke except about the weather or to tell him that dinner was ready, or that it was suppertime. When at night

she said her lengthy prayers and then kissed her crosses and ikons, he thought, watching her with hatred,

"Here she's praying. What's she praying about? What about?" In his thoughts he showered insults on himself

and her, telling himself that when he got into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking what he had paid

for; but it was horrible. If only it had been a healthy, reckless, sinful woman; but here he had youth, piety,

meekness, the pure eyes of innocence. . . . While they were engaged her piety had touched him; now the

conventional definiteness of her views and convictions seemed to him a barrier, behind which the real truth

could not be seen. Already everything in his married life was agonising. When his wife, sitting beside him in

the theatre, sighed or laughed spontaneously, it was bitter to him that she enjoyed herself alone and would not

share her delight with him. And it was remarkable that she was friendly with all his friends, and they all knew

what she was like already, while he knew nothing about her, and only moped and was dumbly jealous.

When he got home Laptev put on his dressinggown and slippers, and sat down in his study to read a novel.

His wife was not at home. But within half an hour there was a ring at the hall door, and he heard the muffled

footsteps of Pyotr running to open it. It was Yulia. She walked into the study in her fur coat, her cheeks rosy

"There's a great fire in Pryesnya," she said breathlessly. "There's a tremendous glow. I'm going to see it with

The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror in her eyes, reassured Laptev. He read for

Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she had borrowed from him, all his letters and

Towards the end of October Nina Fyodorovna had unmistakable symptoms of a relapse. There was a change

in her face, and she grew rapidly thinner. In spite of acute pain she still imagined that she was getting better,

and got up and dressed every morning as though she were well, and then lay on her bed, fully dressed, for the

rest of the day. And towards the end she became very talkative. She would lie on her back and talk in a low

voice, speaking with an effort and breathing painfully. She died suddenly under the following circumstances.

It was a clear moonlight evening. In the street people were tobogganing in the fresh snow, and their clamour

floated in at the window. Nina Fyodorovna was lying on her back in bed, and Sasha, who had no one to take

"I don't remember his father's name," Nina Fyodorovna was saying softly, "but his name was Ivan Kotchevoy

a poor clerk. He was a sad drunkard, the Kingdom of Heaven be his! He used to come to us, and every

month we used to give him a pound of sugar and two ounces of tea. And money, too, sometimes, of course.

Yes. . . . And then, this is what happened. Our Kotchevoy began drinking heavily and died, consumed by

vodka. He left a little son, a boy of seven. Poor little orphan! . . . We took him and hid him in the clerk's

quarters, and he lived there for a whole year, without father's knowing. And when father did see him, he only

waved his hand and said nothing. When Kostya, the little orphan, was nine years old by that time I was

engaged to be married I took him round to all the day schools. I went from one to the other, and no one

would take him. And he cried. . . . 'What are you crying for, little silly?' I said. I took him to Razgulyay to the

second school, where God bless them for it! they took him, and the boy began going every day on foot

from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyay Street and back again. . . . Alyosha paid for him. . . . By God's grace the

boy got on, was good at his lessons, and turned out well. . . . He's a lawyer now in Moscow, a friend of

Alyosha's, and so good in science. Yes, we had compassion on a fellowcreature and took him into our

Nina Fyodorovna spoke more and more slowly with long pauses, then after a brief silence she suddenly

"There's something the matter with me . . . something seems wrong," she said. "Lord have mercy on me! Oh,

Sasha knew that her mother would soon die; seeing now how suddenly her face looked drawn, she guessed

Sasha ran through all the rooms calling, but there were none of the servants in the house, and the only person

she found was Lida asleep on a chest in the diningroom with her clothes on and without a pillow. Sasha ran

into the yard just as she was without her goloshes, and then into the street. On a bench at the gate her nurse

was sitting watching the tobogganing. From beyond the river, where the tobogganing slope was, came the

The nurse went upstairs, and, glancing at the sick woman, thrust a lighted wax candle into her hand. Sasha

rushed about in terror and besought some one to go for her father, then she put on a coat and a kerchief, and

ran into the street. From the servants she knew already that her father had another wife and two children with

whom he lived in Bazarny Street. She ran out of the gate and turned to the left, crying, and frightened of

She met an empty sledge, but she did not take it: perhaps, she thought, the man would drive her out of town,

rob her, and throw her into the cemetery (the servants had talked of such a case at tea). She went on and on,

sobbing and panting with exhaustion. When she got into Bazarny Street, she inquired where M. Panaurov

lived. An unknown woman spent a long time directing her, and seeing that she did not understand, took her

by the hand and led her to a house of one storey that stood back from the street. The door stood open. Sasha

ran through the entry, along the corridor, and found herself at last in a warm, lighted room where her father

was sitting by the samovar with a lady and two children. But by now she was unable to utter a word, and

When they got home, Nina Fyodorovna was sitting propped up with pillows, with a candle in her hand. Her

face looked dark and her eyes were closed. Crowding in the doorway stood the nurse, the cook, the

housemaid, a peasant called Prokofy and a few persons of the humbler class, who were complete strangers.

The nurse was giving them orders in a whisper, and they did not understand. Inside the room at the window

Panaurov took the candle out of Nina Fyodorovna's hand, and, frowning contemptuously, flung it on the chest

"This is awful!" he said, and his shoulders quivered. "Nina, you must lie down," he said affectionately. "Lie

When the priest and the doctor, Sergey Borisovitch, arrived, the servants crossed themselves devoutly and

"What a sad business!" said the doctor thoughtfully, coming out into the drawingroom. "Why, she was still

They heard the loud sobbing of the little girls. Panaurov, with a pale face and moist eyes, went up to the

"Do me a favour, my dear fellow. Send a telegram to Moscow. I'm not equal to it."

"Madame Panaurov died at eight o'clock this evening. Tell your husband: a mortgaged house for sale in

Dvoryansky Street, nine thousand cash. Auction on twelfth. Advise him not miss opportunity."

Laptev lived in one of the turnings out of Little Dmitrovka. Besides the big house facing the street, he rented

also a twostorey lodge in the yard at the back of his friend Kotchevoy, a lawyer's assistant whom all the

Laptevs called Kostya, because he had grown up under their eyes. Facing this lodge stood another, also of

two storeys, inhabited by a French family consisting of a husband and wife and five daughters.

There was a frost of twenty degrees. The windows were frozen over. Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with

an anxious face, took twenty drops of a medicine; then, taking two dumbbells out of the bookcase, he did

gymnastic exercises. He was tall and thin, with big reddish moustaches; but what was most noticeable in his

Pyotr, a middleaged peasant in a reefer jacket and cotton breeches tucked into his high boots, brought in the

"It is, but I tell you what, brother, it's a pity we can't get on, you and I, without such exclamations."

"The priest has not come. Alexey Fyodorovitch is giving them their lesson himself."

Kostya found a spot in the window that was not covered with frost, and began looking through a fieldglass

Meanwhile Alexey Fyodorovitch was giving Sasha and Lida a scripture lesson below. For the last six weeks

they had been living in Moscow, and were installed with their governess in the lower storey of the lodge. And

three times a week a teacher from a school in the town, and a priest, came to give them lessons. Sasha was

going through the New Testament and Lida was going through the Old. The time before Lida had been set the

"And so Adam and Eve had two sons," said Laptev. "Very good. But what were they called? Try to

Lida, still with the same severe face, gazed dumbly at the table. She moved her lips, but without speaking;

"You know it very well, only you mustn't be nervous," said Laptev. "Come, what were Adam's sons called?"

A big tear rolled down Lida's cheek and dropped on the book. Sasha looked down and turned red, and she,

too, was on the point of tears. Laptev felt a lump in his throat, and was so sorry for them he could not speak.

He got up from the table and lighted a cigarette. At that moment Kotchevoy came down the stairs with a

paper in his hand. The little girls stood up, and without looking at him, made curtsies.

"For God's sake, Kostya, give them their lessons," said Laptev, turning to him. "I'm afraid I shall cry, too, and

Alexey Fyodorovitch went away. Kostya, with a very serious face, sat down to the table and drew the

"The Flood? All right. Let's peg in at the Flood. Fire away about the Flood." Kostya skimmed through a brief

description of the Flood in the book, and said: "I must remark that there really never was a flood such as is

described here. And there was no such person as Noah. Some thousands of years before the birth of Christ,

there was an extraordinary inundation of the earth, and that's not only mentioned in the Jewish Bible, but in

the books of other ancient peoples: the Greeks, the Chaldeans, the Hindoos. But whatever the inundation may

have been, it couldn't have covered the whole earth. It may have flooded the plains, but the mountains must

have remained. You can read this book, of course, but don't put too much faith in it."

Tears trickled down Lida's face again. She turned away and suddenly burst into such loud sobs, that Kostya

Sasha cried too. Kostya went upstairs to his own room, and spoke on the telephone to Yulia Sergeyevna.

"My dear soul," he said, "the little girls are crying again; there's no doing anything with them."

Yulia Sergeyevna ran across from the big house in her indoor dress, with only a knitted shawl over her

"Do believe me, do believe me," she said in an imploring voice, hugging first one and then the other. "Your

papa's coming today; he has sent a telegram. You're grieving for mother, and I grieve too. My heart's torn,

When they left off crying, she wrapped them up and took them out for a drive. They stopped near the

Iverskoy chapel, put up candles at the shrine, and, kneeling down, prayed. On the way back they went in

The Laptevs had dinner between two and three. Pyotr handed the dishes. This Pyotr waited on the family, and

by day ran to the post, to the warehouse, to the law courts for Kostya; he spent his evenings making

cigarettes, ran to open the door at night, and before five o'clock in the morning was up lighting the stoves,

and no one knew where he slept. He was very fond of opening seltzerwater bottles and did it easily, without

"With God's blessing," said Kostya, drinking off a glass of vodka before the soup.

At first Yulia Sergeyevna did not like Kostya; his bass voice, his phrases such as "Landed him one on the

beak," "filth," "produce the samovar," etc., his habit of clinking glasses and making sentimental speeches,

seemed to her trivial. But as she got to know him better, she began to feel very much at home with him. He

was open with her; he liked talking to her in a low voice in the evening, and even gave her novels of his own

composition to read, though these had been kept a secret even from such friends as Laptev and Yartsev. She

read these novels and praised them, so that she might not disappoint him, and he was delighted because he

In his novels he described nothing but countryhouse life, though he had only seen the country on rare

occasions when visiting friends at a summer villa, and had only been in a real countryhouse once in his life,

when he had been to Volokolamsk on law business. He avoided any love interest as though he were ashamed

of it; he put in frequent descriptions of nature, and in them was fond of using such expressions as, "the

capricious lines of the mountains, the miraculous forms of the clouds, the harmony of mysterious rhythms. . .

." His novels had never been published, and this he attributed to the censorship.

He liked the duties of a lawyer, but yet he considered that his most important pursuit was not the law but

these novels. He believed that he had a subtle, �sthetic temperament, and he always had leanings towards art.

He neither sang nor played on any musical instrument, and was absolutely without an ear for music, but he

attended all the symphony and philharmonic concerts, got up concerts for charitable objects, and made the

"It's a strange thing," said Laptev, "my Fyodor took my breath away again! He said we must find out the date

of the centenary of our firm, so as to try and get raised to noble rank; and he said it quite seriously. What can

They talked of Fyodor, and of its being the fashion nowadays to adopt some pose or other. Fyodor, for

instance, tried to appear like a plain merchant, though he had ceased to be one; and when the teacher came

from the school, of which old Laptev was the patron, to ask Fyodor for his salary, the latter changed his voice

and deportment, and behaved with the teacher as though he were some one in authority.

There was nothing to be done; after dinner they went into the study. They talked about the decadents, about

"The Maid of Orleans," and Kostya delivered a regular monologue; he fancied that he was very successful in

imitating Ermolova. Then they sat down and played whist. The little girls had not gone back to the lodge but

were sitting together in one armchair, with pale and mournful faces, and were listening to every noise in the

street, wondering whether it was their father coming. In the evening when it was dark and the candles were

lighted, they felt deeply dejected. The talk over the whist, the footsteps of Pyotr, the crackling in the

fireplace, jarred on their nerves, and they did not like to look at the fire. In the evenings they did not want to

cry, but they felt strange, and there was a load on their hearts. They could not understand how people could

"What did you see through the fieldglasses today?" Yulia Sergeyevna asked Kostya.

At seven o'clock Yulia and Kostya went to the Little Theatre. Laptev was left with the little girls.

"It's time your father was here," he said, looking at his watch. "The train must be late."

The children sat in their armchair dumb and huddling together like animals when they are cold, while he

walked about the room looking impatiently at his watch. It was quiet in the house. But just before nine

Hearing a familiar voice, the children shrieked, burst into sobs, and ran into the hall. Panaurov was wearing a

sumptuous coat of antelope skin, and his head and moustaches were white with hoar frost. "In a minute, in a

minute," he muttered, while Sasha and Lida, sobbing and laughing, kissed his cold hands, his hat, his

antelope coat. With the languor of a handsome man spoilt by too much love, he fondled the children without

"I've not come to stay long, my friends. I'm going to Petersburg tomorrow. They've promised to transfer me

A friend who was often at the Laptevs' was Ivan Gavrilitch Yartsev. He was a strong, healthy man with black

hair and a clever, pleasant face. He was considered to be handsome, but of late he had begun to grow stout,

and that rather spoilt his face and figure; another thing that spoilt him was that he wore his hair cut so close

At the University his tall figure and physical strength had won him the nickname of "the pounder" among the

students. He had taken his degree with the Laptev brothers in the faculty of philology then he went in for

science and now had the degree of magister in chemistry. But he had never given a lecture or even been a

demonstrator. He taught physics and natural history in the modern school, and in two girls' high schools. He

was enthusiastic over his pupils, especially the girls, and used to maintain that a remarkable generation was

growing up. At home he spent his time studying sociology and Russian history, as well as chemistry, and he

sometimes published brief notes in the newspapers and magazines, signing them "Y." When he talked of

some botanical or zoological subject, he spoke like an historian; when he was discussing some historical

Kish, nicknamed "the eternal student," was also like one of the family at the Laptevs'. He had been for three

years studying medicine. Then he took up mathematics, and spent two years over each year's course. His

father, a provincial druggist, used to send him forty roubles a month, to which his mother, without his father's

knowledge, added another ten. And this sum was not only sufficient for his board and lodging, but even for

such luxuries as an overcoat lined with Polish beaver, gloves, scent, and photographs (he often had

photographs taken of himself and used to distribute them among his friends). He was neat and demure,

slightly bald, with golden sidewhiskers, and he had the air of a man nearly always ready to oblige. He was

always busy looking after other people's affairs. At one time he would be rushing about with a subscription

list; at another time he would be freezing in the early morning at a ticket office to buy tickets for ladies of his

acquaintance, or at somebody's request would be ordering a wreath or a bouquet. People simply said of him:

"Kish will go, Kish will do it, Kish will buy it." He was usually unsuccessful in carrying out his commissions.

Reproaches were showered upon him, people frequently forgot to pay him for the things he bought, but he

simply sighed in hard cases and never protested. He was never particularly delighted nor disappointed; his

stories were always long and boring; and his jokes invariably provoked laughter just because they were not

funny. Thus, one day, for instance, intending to make a joke, he said to Pyotr: "Pyotr, you're not a sturgeon;"

and this aroused a general laugh, and he, too, laughed for a long time, much pleased at having made such a

successful jest. Whenever one of the professors was buried, he walked in front with the mutes.

Yartsev and Kish usually came in the evening to tea. If the Laptevs were not going to the theatre or a concert,

the evening tea lingered on till supper. One evening in February the following conversation took place:

"A work of art is only significant and valuable when there are some serious social problems contained in its

central idea," said Kostya, looking wrathfully at Yartsev. "If there is in the work a protest against serfdom, or

the author takes up arms against the vulgarity of aristocratic society, the work is significant and valuable. The

novels that are taken up with 'Ach!' and 'Och!' and 'she loved him, while he ceased to love her,' I tell you, are

"I agree with you, Konstantin Ivanovitch," said Yulia Sergeyevna. "One describes a love scene; another, a

betrayal; and the third, meeting again after separation. Are there no other subjects? Why, there are many

people sick, unhappy, harassed by poverty, to whom reading all that must be distasteful."

It was disagreeable to Laptev to hear his wife, not yet twentytwo, speaking so seriously and coldly about

"If poetry does not solve questions that seem so important," said Yartsev, "you should turn to works on

technical subjects, criminal law, or finance, read scientific pamphlets. What need is there to discuss in

'Romeo and Juliet,' liberty of speech, or the disinfecting of prisons, instead of love, when you can find all that

"That's pushing it to the extreme," Kostya interrupted. "We are not talking of giants like Shakespeare or

Goethe; we are talking of the hundreds of talented mediocre writers, who would be infinitely more valuable if

they would let love alone, and would employ themselves in spreading knowledge and humane ideas among

Kish, lisping and speaking a little through his nose, began telling the story of a novel he had lately been

reading. He spoke circumstantially and without haste. Three minutes passed, then five, then ten, and no one

could make out what he was talking about, and his face grew more and more indifferent, and his eyes more

"Kish, do be quick over it," Yulia Sergeyevna could not resist saying; "it's really agonizing!"

Fyodor came in. Flushing red in patches, he greeted them all in a nervous flurry, and led his brother away into

the study. Of late he had taken to avoiding the company of more than one person at once.

"Let the young people laugh, while we speak from the heart in here," he said, settling himself in a deep

armchair at a distance from the lamp. "It's a long time, my dear brother, since we've seen each other. How

"Yes, there's nothing for me to do there. And I must confess that the old man wearies me."

"Of course, they could get on at the warehouse without you and me, but one must have some occupation. 'In

Pyotr brought in a glass of tea on a tray. Fyodor drank it without sugar, and asked for more. He drank a great

"I tell you what, brother," he said, getting up and going to his brother. "Laying aside philosophic subtleties,

you must get elected on to the town council, and little by little we will get you on to the local Board, and then

to be an alderman. And as time goes on you are a clever man and welleducated you will be noticed in

Petersburg and asked to go there active men on the provincial assemblies and town councils are all the

fashion there now and before you are fifty you'll be a privy councillor, and have a ribbon across your

Laptev made no answer; he knew that all this being a privy councillor and having a ribbon over his

The brothers sat still and said nothing. Fyodor opened his watch and for a long, long time gazed into it with

strained attention, as though he wanted to detect the motion of the hand, and the expression of his face struck

They were summoned to supper. Laptev went into the diningroom, while Fyodor remained in the study. The

argument was over and Yartsev was speaking in the tones of a professor giving a lecture:

"Owing to differences of climate, of energy, of tastes, of age, equality among men is physically impossible.

But civilised man can make this inequality innocuous, as he has already done with bogs and bears. A learned

man succeeded in making a cat, a mouse, a falcon, a sparrow, all eat out of one plate; and education, one

must hope, will do the same thing with men. Life continually progresses, civilisation makes enormous

advances before our eyes, and obviously a time will come when we shall think, for instance, the present

condition of the factory population as absurd as we now do the state of serfdom, in which girls were

"That won't be for a long while, a very long while," said Kostya, with a laugh, "not till Rothschild thinks his

cellars full of gold absurd, and till then the workers may bend their backs and die of hunger. No; that's not it.

We mustn't wait for it; we must struggle for it. Do you suppose because the cat eats out of the same saucer as

the mouse do you suppose that she is influenced by a sense of conscious intelligence? Not a bit of it! She's

"Fyodor and I are rich; our father's a capitalist, a millionaire. You will have to struggle with us," said Laptev,

rubbing his forehead with his hand. "Struggle with me is an idea I cannot grasp. I am rich, but what has

money given me so far? What has this power given me? In what way am I happier than you? My childhood

was slavery, and money did not save me from the birch. When Nina was ill and died, my money did not help

her. If people don't care for me, I can't make them like me if I spend a hundred million."

"Good, indeed! You spoke to me yesterday of a mathematical man who is looking for a job. Believe me, I can

do as little for him as you can. I can give money, but that's not what he wants I asked a wellknown

musician to help a poor violinist, and this is what he answered: 'You apply to me just because you are not a

musician yourself.' In the same way I say to you that you apply for help to me so confidently because you've

"Why you bring in the comparison with a wellknown musician I don't understand!" said Yulia Sergeyevna,

Her face was quivering with hatred, and she dropped her eyes to conceal the feeling. And not only her

husband, but all the men sitting at the table, knew what the look in her face meant.

"What has the wellknown musician got to do with it?" she said slowly. "Why, nothing's easier than helping

Silence followed. Pyotr handed the W., but they all refused it, and ate nothing but salad. Laptev did

not remember what he had said, but it was clear to him that it was not his words that were hateful, but the fact

After supper he went into his study; intently, with a beating heart, expecting further humiliation, he listened

to what was going on in the hall. An argument had sprung up there again. Then Yartsev sat down to the piano

and played a sentimental song. He was a man of varied accomplishments; he could play and sing, and even

"You may please yourselves, my friends, but I'm not going to stay at home," said Yulia. "We must go

They decided to drive out of town, and sent Kish to the merchant's club to order a threehorse sledge. They

did not ask Laptev to go with them because he did not usually join these expeditions, and because his brother

was sitting with him; but he took it to mean that his society bored them, and that he was not wanted in their

lighthearted youthful company. And his vexation, his bitter feeling, was so intense that he almost shed tears.

He was positively glad that he was treated so ungraciously, that he was scorned, that he was a stupid, dull

husband, a moneybag; and it seemed to him, that he would have been even more glad if his wife were to

deceive him that night with his best friend, and were afterwards to acknowledge it, looking at him with

hatred. . . . He was jealous on her account of their student friends, of actors, of singers, of Yartsev, even of

casual acquaintances; and now he had a passionate longing for her really to be unfaithful to him. He longed to

find her in another man's arms, and to be rid of this nightmare forever. Fyodor was drinking tea, gulping it

"Our old father must have got cataract," he said, as he put on his fur coat. "His sight has become very poor."

Laptev put on his coat, too, and went out. After seeing his brother part of the way home, he took a sledge and

His teeth were chattering, and he did not know if it were jealousy or something else. He walked about near

the tables; listened to a comic singer in the hall. He had not a single phrase ready if he should meet his own

party; and he felt sure beforehand that if he met his wife, he would only smile pitifully and not cleverly, and

that every one would understand what feeling had induced him to come here. He was bewildered by the

electric light, the loud music, the smell of powder, and the fact that the ladies he met looked at him. He stood

at the doors trying to see and to hear what was going on in the private rooms, and it seemed to him that he

was somehow playing a mean, contemptible part on a level with the comic singers and those ladies. Then he

went to Strelna, but he found none of his circle there, either; and only when on the way home he was again

driving up to Yar's, a threehorse sledge noisily overtook him. The driver was drunk and shouting, and he

Laptev returned home between three and four. Yulia Sergeyevna was in bed. Noticing that she was not

"I understand your repulsion, your hatred, but you might spare me before other people; you might conceal

She got up and sat on the bed with her legs dangling. Her eyes looked big and black in the lamplight.

He could not utter a single word from excitement and the trembling of his whole body; he stood facing her

and was dumb. She trembled, too, and sat with the air of a criminal waiting for explanations.

"How I suffer!" he said at last, and he clutched his head. "I'm in hell, and I'm out of my mind."

"And do you suppose it's easy for me?" she asked, with a quiver in her voice. "God alone knows what I go

"You've been my wife for six months, but you haven't a spark of love for me in your heart. There's no hope,

not one ray of light! Why did you marry me?" Laptev went on with despair. "Why? What demon thrust you

"Did I attract you? Did you like me?" he went on, gasping for breath. "No. Then what? What? Tell me what?"

"I swear to God, no!" she cried, and she crossed herself. She seemed to shrink under the insult, and for the

first time he heard her crying. "I swear to God, no!" she repeated. "I didn't think about your money; I didn't

want it. I simply thought I should do wrong if I refused you. I was afraid of spoiling your life and mine. And

She sobbed bitterly, and he saw that she was hurt; and not knowing what to say, dropped down on the carpet

"That's enough; that's enough," he muttered. "I insulted you because I love you madly." He suddenly kissed

her foot and passionately hugged it. "If only a spark of love," he muttered. "Come, lie to me; tell me a lie!

But she went on crying, and he felt that she was only enduring his caresses as an inevitable consequence of

her mistake. And the foot he had kissed she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for her.

She got into bed and covered her head over; he undressed and got into bed, too. In the morning they both felt

confused and did not know what to talk about, and he even fancied she walked unsteadily on the foot he had

Before dinner Panaurov came to say goodbye. Yulia had an irresistible desire to go to her own home; it

would be nice, she thought, to go away and have a rest from married life, from the embarrassment and the

continual consciousness that she had done wrong. It was decided at dinner that she should set off with

Panaurov, and stay with her father for two or three weeks until she was tired of it.

She travelled with Panaurov in a reserved compartment; he had on his head an astrachan cap of peculiar

"Yes, Petersburg did not satisfy me," he said, drawling, with a sigh. "They promise much, but nothing

definite. Yes, my dear girl. I have been a Justice of the Peace, a member of the local Board, chairman of the

Board of Magistrates, and finally councillor of the provincial administration. I think I have served my country

and have earned the right to receive attention; but would you believe it? I can never succeed in

"They don't recognise me," he went on, as though dropping asleep. "Of course I'm not an administrator of

genius, but, on the other hand, I'm a decent, honest man, and nowadays even that's something rare. I regret to

say I have not been always quite straightforward with women, but in my relations with the Russian

government I've always been a gentleman. But enough of that," he said, opening his eyes; "let us talk of you.

"Well. . . . I had a little misunderstanding with my husband," said Yulia, looking at his cap.

"Yes. What a queer fellow he is! All the Laptevs are queer. Your husband's all right he's nothing out of

It was past ten o'clock when they got out at a big station and had supper. When the train went on again

"You are very charming, I must tell you," he began. "Excuse me for the eatinghouse comparison, but you

remind me of fresh salted cucumber; it still smells of the hotbed, so to speak, and yet has a smack of the salt

and a scent of fennel about it. As time goes on you will make a magnificent woman, a wonderful, exquisite

woman. If this trip of ours had happened five years ago," he sighed, "I should have felt it my duty to join the

He smiled mournfully, but at the same time graciously, and put his arm round her waist.

"You must be mad!" she said; she flushed crimson and was so frightened that her hands and feet turned cold.

"What are you afraid of, dear?" he asked softly. "What is there dreadful about it? It's simply that you're not

If a woman protested he always interpreted it as a sign that he had made an impression on her and attracted

her. Holding Yulia round the waist, he kissed her firmly on the cheek, then on the lips, in the full conviction

that he was giving her intense gratification. Yulia recovered from her alarm and confusion, and began

"That is all that the old veteran can give you. A Turkish Pasha, a kindhearted old fellow, was presented by

some one or inherited, I fancy it was a whole harem. When his beautiful young wives drew up in a row

before him, he walked round them, kissed each one of them, and said: 'That is all that I am equal to giving

All this struck her as stupid and extraordinary, and amused her. She felt mischievous. Standing up on the seat

and humming, she got a box of sweets from the shelf, and throwing him a piece of chocolate, shouted:

He caught it. With a loud laugh she threw him another sweet, then a third, and he kept catching them and

putting them into his mouth, looking at her with imploring eyes; and it seemed to her that in his face, his

features, his expression, there was a great deal that was feminine and childlike. And when, out of breath, she

sat down on the seat and looked at him, laughing, he tapped her cheek with two fingers, and said as though he

He ate up the sweets every one of them, and locked the empty box in his trunk; he liked boxes with

"That's mischief enough, though," he said. "It's time for the veteran to go byebye."

He took out of his holdall a Bokhara dressinggown and a pillow, lay down, and covered himself with the

"Goodnight, darling!" he said softly, and sighed as though his whole body ached.

And soon a snore was heard. Without the slightest feeling of constraint, she, too, lay down and went to sleep.

When next morning she drove through her native town from the station homewards, the streets seemed to her

empty and deserted. The snow looked grey, and the houses small, as though some one had squashed them.

She was met by a funeral procession: the dead body was carried in an open coffin with banners.

There were white bills pasted in the windows of the house where Nina Fyodorovna used to live.

With a sinking at her heart she drove into her own courtyard and rang at the door. It was opened by a servant

she did not know a plump, sleepylooking girl wearing a warm wadded jacket. As she went upstairs Yulia

remembered how Laptev had declared his love there, but now the staircase was unscrubbed, covered with

footmarks. Upstairs in the cold passage patients were waiting in their outdoor coats. And for some reason

The doctor, who had grown even stouter, was sitting with a brickred face and dishevelled hair, drinking tea.

Seeing his daughter, he was greatly delighted, and even lacrymose. She thought that she was the only joy in

this old man's life, and much moved, she embraced him warmly, and told him she would stay a long time

till Easter. After taking off her things in her own room, she went back to the diningroom to have tea with

him. He was pacing up and down with his hands in his pockets, humming, "Rururu"; this meant that he

"You have a gay time of it in Moscow," he said. "I am very glad for your sake. . . . I'm an old man and I need

nothing. I shall soon give up the ghost and set you all free. And the wonder is that my hide is so tough, that

He said that he was a tough old ass that every one rode on. They had thrust on him the care of Nina

Fyodorovna, the worry of her children, and of her burial; and that coxcomb Panaurov would not trouble

himself about it, and had even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and had never paid it back.

"Take me to Moscow and put me in a madhouse," said the doctor. "I'm mad; I'm a simple child, as I still put

Then he found fault with her husband for his shortsightedness in not buying houses that were being sold so

cheaply. And now it seemed to Yulia that she was not the one joy in this old man's life. While he was seeing

his patients, and afterwards going his rounds, she walked through all the rooms, not knowing what to do or

what to think about. She had already grown strange to her own town and her own home. She felt no

inclination to go into the streets or see her friends; and at the thought of her old friends and her life as a girl,

In the evening she dressed a little more smartly and went to the evening service. But there were only poor

people in the church, and her splendid fur coat and hat made no impression. And it seemed to her that there

was some change in the church as well as in herself. In old days she had loved it when they read the prayers

for the day at evening service, and the choir sang anthems such as "I will open my lips." She liked moving

slowly in the crowd to the priest who stood in the middle of the church, and then to feel the holy oil on her

forehead; now she only waited for the service to be over. And now, going out of the church, she was only

afraid that beggars would ask for alms; it was such a bore to have to stop and feel for her pockets; besides,

She went to bed early, and was a long time in going to sleep. She kept dreaming of portraits of some sort, and

of the funeral procession she had met that morning. The open coffin with the dead body was carried into the

yard, and brought to a standstill at the door; then the coffin was swung backwards and forwards on a sheet,

and dashed violently against the door. Yulia woke and jumped up in alarm. There really was a bang at the

door, and the wire of the bell rustled against the wall, though no ring was to be heard.

The doctor coughed. Then she heard the servant go downstairs, and then come back.

Yulia went out to her with a candle. Behind the servant stood the doctor, in his nightclothes and greatcoat,

and he, too, had a candle in his hand. "Our bell is broken," he said, yawning sleepily. "It ought to have been

"Ah, what idiots!" she said, and burst out laughing; and her heart felt light and gay.

Going back into her room, she quietly washed and dressed, then she spent a long time in packing her things,

In Holy Week the Laptevs went to an exhibition of pictures in the school of painting. The whole family went

together in the Moscow fashion, the little girls, the governess, Kostya, and all.

Laptev knew the names of all the wellknown painters, and never missed an exhibition. He used sometimes

to paint little landscape paintings when he was in the country in the summer, and he fancied he had a good

deal of taste, and that if he had studied he might have made a good painter. When he was abroad he

sometimes used to go to curio shops, examining the antiques with the air of a connoisseur and giving his

opinion on them. When he bought any article he gave just what the shopkeeper liked to ask for it and his

purchase remained afterwards in a box in the coachhouse till it disappeared altogether. Or going into a print

shop, he would slowly and attentively examine the engravings and the bronzes, making various remarks on

them, and would buy a common frame or a box of wretched prints. At home he had pictures always of large

dimensions but of inferior quality; the best among them were badly hung. It had happened to him more than

once to pay large sums for things which had afterwards turned out to be forgeries of the grossest kind. And it

was remarkable that, though as a rule timid in the affairs of life, he was exceedingly bold and selfconfident

Yulia Sergeyevna looked at the pictures as her husband did, through her open fist or an operaglass, and was

surprised that the people in the pictures were like live people, and the trees like real trees. But she did not

understand art, and it seemed to her that many pictures in the exhibition were alike, and she imagined that the

whole object in painting was that the figures and objects should stand out as though they were real, when you

"That forest is Shiskin's," her husband explained to her. "He always paints the same thing. . . . But notice

snow's never such a lilac colour as that. . . . And that boy's left arm is shorter than his right."

When they were all tired and Laptev had gone to look for Kostya, that they might go home, Yulia stopped

indifferently before a small landscape. In the foreground was a stream, over it a little wooden bridge; on the

further side a path that disappeared in the dark grass; a field on the right; a copse; near it a camp fire no

doubt of watchers by night; and in the distance there was a glow of the evening sunset.

Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along the little path further and further, while

all round was stillness, the drowsy landrails calling and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some

reason she suddenly began to feel that she had seen those very clouds that stretched across the red part of the

sky, and that copse, and that field before, many times before. She felt lonely, and longed to walk on and on

along the path; and there, in the glow of sunset was the calm reflection of something unearthly, eternal.

"How finely that's painted!" she said, surprised that the picture had suddenly become intelligible to her.

She began trying to explain why she liked the landscape so much, but neither Kostya nor her husband

understood her. She kept looking at the picture with a mournful smile, and the fact that the others saw

nothing special in it troubled her. Then she began walking through the rooms and looking at the pictures

again. She tried to understand them and no longer thought that a great many of them were alike. When, on

returning home, for the first time she looked attentively at the big picture that hung over the piano in the

And after that the gilt cornices, the Venetian lookingglasses with flowers on them, the pictures of the same

sort as the one that hung over the piano, and also her husband's and Kostya's reflections upon art, aroused in

Life went on its ordinary course from day to day with no promise of anything special. The theatrical season

was over, the warm days had come. There was a long spell of glorious weather. One morning the Laptevs

attended the district court to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the court to defend some one. They

were late in starting, and reached the court after the examination of the witnesses had begun. A soldier in the

reserve was accused of theft and housebreaking. There were a great number of witnesses, washerwomen; they

all testified that the accused was often in the house of their employer a woman who kept a laundry. At the

Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross he came late in the evening and began asking for money; he wanted a

pickmeup, as he had been drinking, but no one gave him anything. Then he went away, but an hour

afterwards he came back, and brought with him some beer and a soft gingerbread cake for the little girl. They

drank and sang songs almost till daybreak, and when in the morning they looked about, the lock of the door

leading up into the attic was broken, and of the linen three men's shirts, a petticoat, and two sheets were

missing. Kostya asked each witness sarcastically whether she had not drunk the beer the accused had brought.

Evidently he was insinuating that the washerwomen had stolen the linen themselves. He delivered his speech

He explained what robbery with housebreaking meant, and the difference between that and simple theft. He

spoke very circumstantially and convincingly, displaying an unusual talent for speaking at length and in a

serious tone about what had been know to every one long before. And it was difficult to make out exactly

what he was aiming at. From his long speech the foreman of the jury could only have deduced "that it was

housebreaking but not robbery, as the washerwomen had sold the linen for drink themselves; or, if there had

been robbery, there had not been housebreaking." But obviously, he said just what was wanted, as his speech

moved the jury and the audience, and was very much liked. When they gave a verdict of acquittal, Yulia

In May the Laptevs moved to a country villa at Sokolniki. By that time Yulia was expecting a baby.

More than a year had passed. Yulia and Yartsev were lying on the grass at Sokolniki not far from the

embankment of the Yaroslav railway; a little distance away Kotchevoy was lying with hands under his head,

looking at the sky. All three had been for a walk, and were waiting for the six o'clock train to pass to go home

"Mothers see something extraordinary in their children, that is ordained by nature," said Yulia. "A mother

will stand for hours together by the baby's cot looking at its little ears and eyes and nose, and fascinated by

them. If any one else kisses her baby the poor thing imagines that it gives him immense pleasure. And a

mother talks of nothing but her baby. I know that weakness in mothers, and I keep watch over myself, but my

Olga really is exceptional. How she looks at me when I'm nursing her! How she laughs! She's only eight

months old, but, upon my word, I've never seen such intelligent eyes in a child of three."

"Tell me, by the way," asked Yartsev: "which do you love most your husband or your baby?"

"I don't know," she said. "I never was so very fond of my husband, and Olga is in reality my first love. You

know that I did not marry Alexey for love. In old days I was foolish and miserable, and thought that I had

ruined my life and his, and now I see that love is not necessary that it is all nonsense."

"But if it is not love, what feeling is it that binds you to your husband? Why do you go on living with him?"

"I don't know. . . . I suppose it must be habit. I respect him, I miss him when he's away for long, but that's

not love. He is a clever, honest man, and that's enough to make me happy. He is very kind and goodhearted.

"Alyosha's intelligent, Alyosha's good," said Kostya, raising his head lazily; "but, my dear girl, to find out

that he is intelligent, good, and interesting, you have to eat a hundredweight of salt with him. . . . And what's

the use of his goodness and intelligence? He can fork out money as much as you want, but when character is

needed to resist insolence or aggressiveness, he is fainthearted and overcome with nervousness. People like

your amiable Alyosha are splendid people, but they are no use at all for fighting. In fact, they are no use for

At last the train came in sight. Coils of perfectly pink smoke from the funnels floated over the copse, and two

windows in the last compartment flashed so brilliantly in the sun, that it hurt their eyes to look at it.

She had grown somewhat stouter of late, and her movements were already a little matronly, a little indolent.

"It's bad to be without love though," said Yartsev, walking behind her. "We talk and read of nothing else but

"All that's nonsense, Ivan Gavrilitch," said Yulia. "That's not what gives happiness."

They had tea in the little garden, where mignonette, stocks, and tobacco plants were in flower, and spikes of

early gladiolus were just opening. Yartsev and Kotchevoy could see from Yulia's face that she was passing

through a happy period of inward peace and serenity, that she wanted nothing but what she had, and they, too,

had a feeling of peace and comfort in their hearts. Whatever was said sounded apt and clever; the pines were

lovely the fragrance of them was exquisite as it had never been before; and the cream was very nice; and

After tea Yartsev sang songs, accompanying himself on the piano, while Yulia and Kotchevoy sat listening in

silence, though Yulia got up from time to time, and went softly indoors, to take a look at the baby and at

"My friend, my tender friend," sang Yartsev. "No, my friends, I'll be hanged if I understand why you are all

so against love!" he said, flinging back his head. "If I weren't busy for fifteen hours of the twentyfour, I

Supper was served on the verandah; it was warm and still, but Yulia wrapped herself in a shawl and

complained of the damp. When it got dark, she seemed not quite herself; she kept shivering and begging her

visitors to stay a little longer. She regaled them with wine, and after supper ordered brandy to keep them from

"We summer visitors are getting up a performance for the children," she said. "We have got everything a

stage and actors; we are only at a loss for a play. Two dozen plays of different sorts have been sent us, but

there isn't one that is suitable. Now, you are fond of the theatre, and are so good at history," she said,

"How dark it is! One can't see a bit," said Yulia, as she went with them to the gate. "I don't know how you'll

"I suppose my Alexey's playing cards somewhere," she called to them. "Goodnight!"

After the lighted rooms nothing could be seen. Yartsev and Kostya groped their way like blind men to the

"One can't see a thing," said Kostya in his bass voice, standing still and gazing at the sky. "And the stars, the

"Hi, there, you summer visitors!" Kostya shouted at the top of his voice. "We've caught a socialist."

When he was exhilarated he was always very rowdy, shouting, wrangling with policemen and cabdrivers,

Soon the friends grew accustomed to the darkness, and were able to distinguish the outlines of the tall pines

and telegraph posts. From time to time the sound of whistles reached them from the station and the telegraph

wires hummed plaintively. From the copse itself there came no sound, and there was a feeling of pride,

strength, and mystery in its silence, and on the right it seemed that the tops of the pines were almost touching

the sky. The friends found their path and walked along it. There it was quite dark, and it was only from the

long strip of sky dotted with stars, and from the firmly trodden earth under their feet, that they could tell they

were walking along a path. They walked along side by side in silence, and it seemed to both of them that

people were coming to meet them. Their tipsy exhilaration passed off. The fancy came into Yartsev's mind

that perhaps that copse was haunted by the spirits of the Muscovite Tsars, boyars, and patriarchs, and he was

When they reached the town gate there was a faint light of dawn in the sky. Still in silence, Yartsev and

Kotchevoy walked along the wooden pavement, by the cheap summer cottages, eatinghouses,

timberstacks. Under the arch of interlacing branches, the damp air was fragrant of limetrees, and then a

broad, long street opened before them, and on it not a soul, not a light. . . . When they reached the Red Pond,

"Moscow it's a town that will have to suffer a great deal more," said Yartsev, looking at the Alexyevsky

Both Yartsev and Kostya had been born in Moscow, and adored the town, and felt for some reason

antagonistic to every other town. Both were convinced that Moscow was a remarkable town, and Russia a

remarkable country. In the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and abroad, they felt dull, uncomfortable, and ill at ease,

and they thought their grey Moscow weather very pleasant and healthy. And when the rain lashed at the

windowpanes and it got dark early, and when the walls of the churches and houses looked a drab, dismal

colour, days when one doesn't know what to put on when one is going out such days excited them

"It really would be nice to write an historical play," said Yartsev, "but not about the Lyapunovs or the

Godunovs, but of the times of Yaroslav or of Monomach. . . . I hate all historical plays except the monologue

of Pimen. When you have to do with some historical authority or even read a textbook of Russian history,

you feel that every one in Russia is exceptionally talented, gifted, and interesting; but when I see an historical

play at the theatre, Russian life begins to seem stupid, morbid, and not original."

Near Dmitrovka the friends separated, and Yartsev went on to his lodging in Nikitsky Street. He sat half

dozing, swaying from side to side, and pondering on the play. He suddenly imagined a terrible din, a clanging

noise, and shouts in some unknown language, that might have been Kalmuck, and a village wrapped in

flames, and forests near covered with hoarfrost and soft pink in the glow of the fire, visible for miles around,

and so clearly that every little firtree could be distinguished, and savage men darting about the village on

One of them, a terrible old man with a bloodstained face all scorched from the fire, binds to his saddle a

young girl with a white Russian face, and the girl looks sorrowful, understanding. Yartsev flung back his

As he paid the cabman and went up his stairs, he could not shake off his dreaminess; he saw the flames

catching the village, and the forest beginning to crackle and smoke. A huge, wild bear frantic with terror

rushed through the village. . . . And the girl tied to the saddle was still looking.

When at last he went into his room it was broad daylight. Two candles were burning by some open music on

the piano. On the sofa lay Polina Razsudin wearing a black dress and a sash, with a newspaper in her hand,

fast asleep. She must have been playing late, waiting for Yartsev to come home, and, tired of waiting, fell

Carefully taking the newspaper out of her hands, he covered her with a rug. He put out the candles and went

into his bedroom. As he got into bed, he still thought of his historical play, and the tune of "My friend, my

Two days later Laptev looked in upon him for a moment to tell him that Lida was ill with diphtheria, and that

Yulia Sergeyevna and her baby had caught it from her, and five days later came the news that Lida and Yulia

were recovering, but the baby was dead, and that the Laptevs had left their villa at Sokolniki and had

It had become distasteful to Laptev to be long at home. His wife was constantly away in the lodge declaring

that she had to look after the little girls, but he knew that she did not go to the lodge to give them lessons but

to cry in Kostya's room. The ninth day came, then the twentieth, and then the fortieth, and still he had to go to

the cemetery to listen to the requiem, and then to wear himself out for a whole day and night thinking of

nothing but that unhappy baby, and trying to comfort his wife with all sorts of commonplace expressions. He

went rarely to the warehouse now, and spent most of his time in charitable work, seizing upon every pretext

requiring his attention, and he was glad when he had for some trivial reason to be out for the whole day. He

had been intending of late to go abroad, to study nightrefuges, and that idea attracted him now.

It was an autumn day. Yulia had just gone to the lodge to cry, while Laptev lay on a sofa in the study thinking

where he could go. Just at that moment Pyotr announced Polina Razsudin. Laptev was delighted; he leapt up

and went to meet the unexpected visitor, who had been his closest friend, though he had almost begun to

forget her. She had not changed in the least since that evening when he had seen her for the last time, and was

"Polina," he said, holding out both hands to her. "What ages! If you only knew how glad I am to see you! Do

Polina greeted him, jerked him by the hand, and without taking off her coat and hat, went into the study and

"I've come to you for one minute," she said. "I haven't time to talk of any nonsense. Sit down and listen.

Whether you are glad to see me or not is absolutely nothing to me, for I don't care a straw for the gracious

attentions of you lords of creation. I've only come to you because I've been to five other places already

today, and everywhere I was met with a refusal, and it's a matter that can't be put off. Listen," she went on,

looking into his face. "Five students of my acquaintance, stupid, unintelligent people, but certainly poor, have

neglected to pay their fees, and are being excluded from the university. Your wealth makes it your duty to go

"Here are their names," she said, giving him a list. "Go this minute; you'll have plenty of time to enjoy your

At that moment a rustle was heard through the door that led into the drawingroom; probably the dog was

"She's not here; she's in the lodge," he said. "And don't speak of her like that. Our child is dead, and she is in

"You can console her," Polina scoffed, sitting down again; "she'll have another dozen. You don't need much

Laptev remembered that he had heard this, or something very like it, many times in old days, and it brought

back a whiff of the romance of the past, of solitary freedom, of his bachelor life, when he was young and

thought he could do anything he chose, when he had neither love for his wife nor memory of his baby.

When they reached the university Polina waited at the gate, while Laptev went into the office; he came back

She had on a black hat trimmed with crape, as though she were in mourning, and a short, shabby coat, the

pockets of which stuck out. Her nose looked longer than it used to be, and her face looked bloodless in spite

of the cold. Laptev liked walking with her, doing what she told him, and listening to her grumbling. He

walked along thinking about her, what inward strength there must be in this woman, since, though she was so

ugly, so angular, so restless, though she did not know how to dress, and always had untidy hair, and was

They went into Yartsev's flat by the back way through the kitchen, where they were met by the cook, a clean

little old woman with grey curls; she was overcome with embarrassment, and with a honeyed smile which

Yartsev was not at home. Polina sat down to the piano, and beginning upon a tedious, difficult exercise, told

Laptev not to hinder her. And without distracting her attention by conversation, he sat on one side and began

turning over the pages of a "The Messenger of Europe." After practising for two hours it was the task she

set herself every day she ate something in the kitchen and went out to her lessons. Laptev read the

continuation of a story, then sat for a long time without reading and without being bored, glad to think that he

"Ha, ha, ha!" came Yartsev's laugh, and he walked in with ruddy cheeks, looking strong and healthy, wearing

The friends dined together. Then Laptev lay on the sofa while Yartsev sat near and lighted a cigar. It got dark.

"I must be getting old," said Laptev. "Ever since my sister Nina died, I've taken to constantly thinking of

They began talking of death, of the immortality of the soul, of how nice it would be to rise again and fly off

somewhere to Mars, to be always idle and happy, and, above all, to think in a new special way, not as on

"One doesn't want to die," said Yartsev softly. "No sort of philosophy can reconcile me to death, and I look

"Do you know, I can never understand myself about that. I'm always in a gloomy mood or else indifferent.

I'm timid, without selfconfidence; I have a cowardly conscience; I never can adapt myself to life, or become

its master. Some people talk nonsense or cheat, and even so enjoy life, while I consciously do good, and feel

nothing but uneasiness or complete indifference. I explain all that, Gavrilitch, by my being a slave, the

grandson of a serf. Before we plebeians fight our way into the true path, many of our sort will perish on the

"That's all quite right, my dear fellow," said Yartsev, and he sighed. "That only proves once again how rich

and varied Russian life is. Ah, how rich it is! Do you know, I feel more convinced every day that we are on

the eve of the greatest triumph, and I should like to live to take part in it. Whether you like to believe it or

not, to my thinking a remarkable generation is growing up. It gives me great enjoyment to teach the children,

"I'm a chemist, I think in chemical terms, and I shall die a chemist," he went on. "But I am greedy, and I am

afraid of dying unsatisfied; and chemistry is not enough for me, and I seize upon Russian history, history of

art, the science of teaching music. . . . Your wife asked me in the summer to write an historical play, and now

I'm longing to write and write. I feel as though I could sit for three days and three nights without moving,

writing all the time. I am worn out with ideas my brain's crowded with them, and I feel as though there

were a pulse throbbing in my head. I don't in the least want to become anything special, to create something

great. I simply want to live, to dream, to hope, to be in the midst of everything. . . . Life is short, my dear

After this friendly talk, which was not over till midnight, Laptev took to coming to see Yartsev almost every

day. He felt drawn to him. As a rule he came towards evening, lay down on the sofa, and waited patiently for

Yartsev to come in, without feeling in the least bored. When Yartsev came back from his work, he had

dinner, and sat down to work; but Laptev would ask him a questions a conversation would spring up, and

there was no more thought of work and at midnight the friends parted very well pleased with one another.

But this did not last long. Arriving one day at Yartsev's, Laptev found no one there but Polina, who was

sitting at the piano practising her exercises. She looked at him with a cold, almost hostile expression, and

"You come here every day and hinder Yartsev from working. Yartsev is not a tradesman; he is a scientific

man, and every moment of his life is precious. You ought to understand and to have some little delicacy! "

"If you think that I hinder him," said Laptev, mildly, disconcerted, "I will give up my visits."

"Quite right, too. You had better go, or he may be home in a minute and find you here."

The tone in which this was said, and the indifference in Polina's eyes, completely disconcerted him. She had

absolutely no sort of feeling for him now, except the desire that he should go as soon as possible and what

a contrast it was to her old love for him! He went out without shaking hands with her, and he fancied she

would call out to him, bring him back, but he heard the scales again, and as he slowly went down the stairs he

"I have news," he said, laughing. "Polina Nikolaevna has moved into my rooms altogether." He was a little

confused, and went on in a low voice: "Well, we are not in love with each other, of course, but I suppose that

. . . that doesn't matter. I am glad I can give her a refuge and peace and quiet, and make it possible for her not

to work if she's ill. She fancies that her coming to live with me will make things more orderly, and that under

her influence I shall become a great scientist. That's what she fancies. And let her fancy it. In the South they

Laptev said nothing. Yartsev walked up and down the study, looking at the pictures he had seen so many

"Yes, my dear fellow, I am three years older than you are, and it's too late for me to think of real love, and in

reality a woman like Polina Nikolaevna is a godsend to me, and, of course, I shall get on capitally with her till

we're both old people; but, goodness knows why, one still regrets something, one still longs for something,

and I still feel as though I am lying in the Vale of Daghestan and dreaming of a ball. In short, man's never

He went into the drawingroom and began singing as though nothing had happened, and Laptev sat in his

study with his eyes shut, and tried to understand why Polina had gone to live with Yartsev. And then he felt

sad that there were no lasting, permanent attachments. And he felt vexed that Polina Nikolaevna had gone to

live with Yartsev, and vexed with himself that his feeling for his wife was not what it had been.

Laptev sat reading and swaying to and fro in a rockingchair; Yulia was in the study, and she, too, was

reading. It seemed there was nothing to talk about; they had both been silent all day. From time to time he

looked at her from over his book and thought: "Whether one marries from passionate love, or without love at

all, doesn't it come to the same thing?" And the time when he used to be jealous, troubled, distressed, seemed

to him far away. He had succeeded in going abroad, and now he was resting after the journey and looking

forward to another visit in the spring to England, which he had very much liked.

And Yulia Sergeyevna had grown used to her sorrow, and had left off going to the lodge to cry. That winter

she had given up driving out shopping, had given up the theatres and concerts, and had stayed at home. She

never cared for big rooms, and always sat in her husband's study or in her own room, where she had shrines

of ikons that had come to her on her marriage, and where there hung on the wall the landscape that had

pleased her so much at the exhibition. She spent hardly any money on herself, and was almost as frugal now

The winter passed cheerlessly. Cardplaying was the rule everywhere in Moscow, and if any other recreation

was attempted, such as singing, reading, drawing, the result was even more tedious. And since there were few

talented people in Moscow, and the same singers and reciters performed at every entertainment, even the

enjoyment of art gradually palled and became for many people a tiresome and monotonous social duty.

Moreover, the Laptevs never had a day without something vexatious happening. Old Laptev's eyesight was

failing; he no longer went to the warehouse, and the oculist told them that he would soon be blind. Fyodor

had for some reason given up going to the warehouse and spent his time sitting at home writing something.

Panaurov had got a post in another town, and had been promoted an actual civil councillor, and was now

staying at the Dresden. He came to the Laptevs' almost every day to ask for money. Kish had finished his

studies at last, and while waiting for Laptev to find him a job, used to spend whole days at a time with them,

telling them long, tedious stories. All this was irritating and exhausting, and made daily life unpleasant.

Pyotr came into the study, and announced an unknown lady. On the card he brought in was the name

Yulia Sergeyevna got up languidly and went out limping slightly, as her foot had gone to sleep. In the

doorway appeared a pale, thin lady with dark eyebrows, dressed altogether in black. She clasped her hands on

The jingle of her bracelets sounded familiar to him, and he knew the face with patches of powder on it; he

recognised her as the lady with whom he had once so inappropriately dined before his marriage. It was

"Save my children," she repeated, and her face suddenly quivered and looked old and pitiful. "You alone can

save us, and I have spent my last penny coming to Moscow to see you! My children are starving!"

She made a motion as though she were going to fall on her knees. Laptev was alarmed, and clutched her by

"Sit down, sit down . . ." he muttered, making her sit down. "I beg you to be seated."

"We have no money to buy bread," she said. "Grigory Nikolaevitch is going away to a new post, but he will

not take the children and me with him, and the money which you so generously send us he spends only on

"Calm yourself, I beg. I will give orders that that money shall be made payable to you."

She began sobbing, and then grew calmer, and he noticed that the tears had made little pathways through the

"You are infinitely generous, M. Laptev. But be our guardian angel, our good fairy, persuade Grigory

Nikolaevitch not to abandon me, but to take me with him. You know I love him I love him insanely; he's

Laptev gave her a hundred roubles, and promised to talk to Panaurov, and saw her out to the hall in

trepidation the whole time, for fear she should break into sobs or fall on her knees.

After her, Kish made his appearance. Then Kostya came in with his photographic apparatus. Of late he had

been attracted by photography and took photographs of every one in the house several times a day. This new

Before evening tea Fyodor arrived. Sitting in a corner in the study, he opened a book and stared for a long

time at a page, obviously not reading. Then he spent a long time drinking tea; his face turned red. In his

"Russia may be congratulated on the appearance of a new author," said Fyodor. "Joking apart, though,

brother, I have turned out a little article the firstfruits of my pen, so to say and I've brought it to show

He took a manuscript out of his pocket and gave it to his brother. The article was called "The Russian Soul";

it was written tediously, in the colourless style in which people with no talent, but full of secret vanity,

usually write. The leading idea of it was that the intellectual man has the right to disbelieve in the

supernatural, but it is his duty to conceal his lack of faith, that he may not be a stumblingblock and shake

the faith of others. Without faith there is no idealism, and idealism is destined to save Europe and guide

"Nothing is intelligible," said Laptev, and he walked about the room in agitation. "It's not intelligible to me

"It's an immense regret to me, dear brother, that we think differently. Oh, Alyosha, Alyosha, my darling

brother! You and I are true Russians, true believers, men of broad nature; all of these German and Jewish

crochets are not for us. You and I are not wretched upstarts, you know, but representatives of a distinguished

"What do you mean by a distinguished family?" said Laptev, restraining his irritation. "A distinguished

family! The landowners beat our grandfather and every low little government clerk punched him in the face.

Our grandfather thrashed our father, and our father thrashed us. What has your distinguished family done for

us? What sort of nerves, what sort of blood, have we inherited? For nearly three years you've been arguing

like an ignorant deacon, and talking all sorts of nonsense, and now you've written this slavish drivel here!

While I, while I! Look at me. . . . No elasticity, no boldness, no strength of will; I tremble over every step I

take as though I should be flogged for it. I am timid before nonentities, idiots, brutes, who are immeasurably

my inferiors mentally and morally; I am afraid of porters, doorkeepers, policemen, gendarmes. I am afraid of

every one, because I was born of a mother who was terrified, and because from a child I was beaten and

frightened! . . . You and I will do well to have no children. Oh, God, grant that this distinguished merchant

"No, little sister," answered Fyodor. "Our discussion was of principles. Here, you are abusing the family," he

added, turning to his brother. "That family has created a business worth a million, though. That stands for

"A great distinction a business worth a million! A man with no particular brains, without abilities, by

chance becomes a trader, and then when he has grown rich he goes on trading from day to day, with no sort

of system, with no aim, without having any particular greed for money. He trades mechanically, and money

comes to him of itself, without his going to meet it. He sits all his life at his work, likes it only because he can

domineer over his clerks and get the better of his customers. He's a churchwarden because he can domineer

over the choristers and keep them under his thumb; he's the patron of a school because he likes to feel the

teacher is his subordinate and enjoys lording it over him. The merchant does not love trading, he loves

dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a commercial establishment as a torture chamber! And for a

business like yours, you want clerks who have been deprived of individual character and personal life and

you make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick the dust for a crust of bread, and you've trained

them from childhood to believe that you are their benefactors. No fear of your taking a university man into

"Excuse me, it seems to me you spit into the well from which you drink yourself," said Fyodor, and he got

"Aha! We've spoken our minds," said Laptev, and he laughed, looking angrily at his brother. "Yes, if I didn't

belong to your distinguished family if I had an ounce of will and courage, I should long ago have flung

away that income, and have gone to work for my living. But in your warehouse you've destroyed all character

Fyodor looked at the clock and began hurriedly saying goodbye. He kissed Yulia's hand and went out, but

instead of going into the hall, walked into the drawingroom, then into the bedroom.

"I've forgotten how the rooms go," he said in extreme confusion. "It's a strange house. Isn't it a strange

He seemed utterly overcome as he put on his coat, and there was a look of pain on his face. Laptev felt no

more anger; he was frightened, and at the same time felt sorry for Fyodor, and the warm, true love for his

brother, which seemed to have died down in his heart during those three years, awoke, and he felt an intense

"Come to dinner with us tomorrow, Fyodor," he said, and stroked him on the shoulder. "Will you come?"

Laptev ran himself to the diningroom to take the first thing he could get from the sideboard. This was a tall

beerjug. He poured water into it and brought it to his brother. Fyodor began drinking, but bit a piece out of

the jug; they heard a crunch, and then sobs. The water ran over his fur coat and his jacket, and Laptev, who

had never seen men cry, stood in confusion and dismay, not knowing what to do. He looked on helplessly

while Yulia and the servant took off Fyodor's coat and helped him back again into the room, and went with

"I'm so miserable, my dear!" he said. "I am so unhappy, unhappy . . . but all the time I've been hiding it, I've

"Every night I see my sister Nina. She comes and sits in the chair near my bed. . . ."

When, an hour later, he put on his fur coat in the hall, he was smiling again and ashamed to face the servant.

"Come and have dinner with us tomorrow," he said on the way, holding him by the arm, "and at Easter we'll

go abroad together. You absolutely must have a change, or you'll be getting quite morbid."

When he got home Laptev found his wife in a state of great nervous agitation. The scene with Fyodor had

upset her, and she could not recover her composure. She wasn't crying but kept tossing on the bed, clutching

with cold fingers at the quilt, at the pillows, at her husband's hands. Her eyes looked big and frightened.

"Don't go away from me, don't go away," she said to her husband. "Tell me, Alyosha, why have I left off

saying my prayers? What has become of my faith? Oh, why did you talk of religion before me? You've

He put compresses on her forehead, chafed her hands, gave her tea to drink, while she huddled up to him in

Towards morning she was worn out and fell asleep, while Laptev sat beside her and held her hand. So that he

could get no sleep. The whole day afterwards he felt shattered and dull, and wandered listlessly about the

The doctor said that Fyodor's mind was affected. Laptev did not know what to do in his father's house, while

the dark warehouse in which neither his father nor Fyodor ever appeared now seemed to him like a sepulchre.

When his wife told him that he absolutely must go every day to the warehouse and also to his father's, he

either said nothing, or began talking irritably of his childhood, saying that it was beyond his power to forgive

his father for his past, that the warehouse and the house in Pyatnitsky Street were hateful to him, and so on.

One Sunday morning Yulia went herself to Pyatnitsky Street. She found old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same

big drawingroom in which the service had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and without a

cravat, he was sitting motionless in his armchair, blinking with his sightless eyes.

"It's I your daughterinlaw," she said, going up to him. "I've come to see how you are."

Touched by his affliction and his loneliness, she kissed his hand; and he passed his hand over her face and

head, and having satisfied himself that it was she, made the sign of the cross over her.

"Thank you, thank you," he said. "You know I've lost my eyes and can see nothing. . . . I can dimly see the

window and the fire, but people and things I cannot see at all. Yes, I'm going blind, and Fyodor has fallen ill,

and without the master's eye things are in a bad way now. If there is any irregularity there's no one to look

into it; and folks soon get spoiled. And why is it Fyodor has fallen ill? Did he catch cold? Here I have never

And, as he always did, the old man began boasting. Meanwhile the servants hurriedly laid the table and

Ten bottles were put on the table; one of them was in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. There was a whole dish

She took him by the arm, led him to the table, and poured him out a glass of vodka.

"I will come to you again tomorrow," she said, "and I'll bring your grandchildren, Sasha and Lida. They will

"Without my permission. I do not bless them, and I don't want to know them. Let them be."

"Nothing of the sort. The Gospel tells us that we must forgive even our enemies."

"One can't forgive in our business. If you were to forgive every one, you would come to ruin in three years."

"But to forgive, to say a kind, friendly word to any one, even a sinner, is something far above business, far

Yulia longed to soften the old man, to awaken a feeling of compassion in him, to move him to repentance;

but he only listened condescendingly to all she said, as a grownup person listens to a child.

"Fyodor Stepanovitch," said Yulia resolutely, "you are an old man, and God soon will call you to Himself. He

won't ask you how you managed your business, and whether you were successful in it, but whether you were

gracious to people; or whether you were harsh to those who were weaker than you, such as your servants,

"I was always the benefactor of those that served me; they ought to remember me in their prayers forever,"

said the old man, with conviction, but touched by Yulia's tone of sincerity, and anxious to give her pleasure,

he said: "Very well; bring my grandchildren tomorrow. I will tell them to buy me some little presents for

The old man was slovenly in his dress, and there was cigar ash on his breast and on his knees; apparently no

one cleaned his boots, or brushed his clothes. The rice in the pies was half cooked, the tablecloth smelt of

soap, the servants tramped noisily about the room. And the old man and the whole house had a neglected

She walked through the rooms, and gave orders for the old man's bedroom to be set to rights, and the lamp to

be lighted under the ikons in it. Fyodor, sitting in his own room, was looking at an open book without reading

it. Yulia talked to him and told the servants to tidy his room, too; then she went downstairs to the clerks. In

the middle of the room where the clerks used to dine, there was an unpainted wooden post to support the

ceiling and to prevent its coming down. The ceilings in the basement were low, the walls covered with cheap

paper, and there was a smell of charcoal fumes and cooking. As it was a holiday, all the clerks were at home,

sitting on their bedsteads waiting for dinner. When Yulia went in they jumped up, and answered her questions

"Good heavens! What a horrid room you have!" she said, throwing up her hands. "Aren't you crowded here?"

"Crowded, but not aggrieved," said Makeitchev. "We are greatly indebted to you, and will offer up our

And noticing that Yulia did not understand Potchatkin, Makeitchev hastened to explain:

She inspected the boys' quarters, and then the kitchen, made acquaintance with the housekeeper, and was

"We ought to move into your father's house and settle there for good as soon as possible. And you will go

Then they both sat side by side in the study without speaking. His heart was heavy, and he did not want to

move into Pyatnitsky Street or to go into the warehouse; but he guessed what his wife was thinking, and

"I feel as though our life is already over, and that a grey halflife is beginning for us. When I knew that my

brother Fyodor was hopelessly ill, I shed tears; we spent our childhood and youth together, when I loved him

with my whole soul. And now this catastrophe has come, and it seems, too, as though, losing him, I am

finally cut away from my past. And when you said just now that we must move into the house in Pyatnitsky

Street, to that prison, it began to seem to me that there was no future for me either."

"However that may be, one has to give up all thoughts of happiness," he said, looking out into the street.

"There is none. I never have had any, and I suppose it doesn't exist at all. I was happy once in my life,

though, when I sat at night under your parasol. Do you remember how you left your parasol at Nina's?" he

asked, turning to his wife. "I was in love with you then, and I remember I spent all night sitting under your

Near the bookcase in the study stood a mahogany chest with bronze fittings where Laptev kept various

useless things, including the parasol. He took it out and handed it to his wife.

"I remember," she said. "When you proposed to me you held it in your hand." And seeing that he was

preparing to go out, she said: "Please come back early if you can. I am dull without you.

In spite of the complexity of the business and the immense turnover, there were no bookkeepers in the

warehouse, and it was impossible to make anything out of the books kept by the cashier in the office. Every

day the warehouse was visited by agents, German and English, with whom the clerks talked politics and

religion. A man of noble birth, ruined by drink, an ailing, pitiable creature, used to come to translate the

foreign correspondence in the office; the clerks used to call him a midge, and put salt in his tea. And

He went to the warehouse every day and tried to establish a new order of things; he forbade them to thrash

the boys and to jeer at the buyers, and was violently angry when the clerks gleefully despatched to the

provinces worthless shopsoiled goods as though they were new and fashionable. Now he was the chief

person in the warehouse, but still, as before, he did not know how large his fortune was, whether his business

was doing well, how much the senior clerks were paid, and so on. Potchatkin and Makeitchev looked upon

him as young and inexperienced, concealed a great deal from him, and whispered mysteriously every evening

It somehow happened at the beginning of June that Laptev went into the Bubnovsky restaurant with

Potchatkin to talk business with him over lunch. Potchatkin had been with the Laptevs a long while, and had

entered their service at eight years old. He seemed to belong to them they trusted him fully; and when on

leaving the warehouse he gathered up all the takings from the till and thrust them into his pocket, it never

aroused the slightest suspicion. He was the head man in the business and in the house, and also in the church,

where he performed the duties of churchwarden in place of his old master. He was nicknamed Malyuta

After a brief pause the waiter brought on a tray half a bottle of vodka and some plates of various kinds of

"Look here, my good fellow," said Potchatkin. "Give us a plateful of the source of all slander and

The waiter did not understand; he was puzzled, and would have said something, but Potchatkin looked at him

The waiter thought intently, then went to consult with his colleagues, and in the end guessing what was

meant, brought a plateful of tongue. When they had drunk a couple of glasses and had had lunch, Laptev

"Tell me, Ivan Vassilitch, is it true that our business has been dropping off for the last year?"

"Tell me frankly and honestly what income we have been making and are making, and what our profits are.

We can't go on in the dark. We had a balancing of the accounts at the warehouse lately, but, excuse me, I

don't believe in it; you think fit to conceal something from me and only tell the truth to my father. You have

been used to being diplomatic from your childhood, and now you can't get on without it. And what's the use

"It all depends upon the fluctuation of credit," Potchatkin answered after a moment's pause.

Potchatkin began explaining, but Laptev could make nothing of it, and sent for Makeitchev. The latter

promptly made his appearance, had some lunch after saying grace, and in his sedate, mellow baritone began

saying first of all that the clerks were in duty bound to pray night and day for their benefactors.

"By all means, only allow me not to consider myself your benefactor," said Laptev.

"Every man ought to remember what he is, and to be conscious of his station. By the grace of God you are a

"I am sick of all that!" said Laptev, getting angry. "Please be a benefactor to me now. Please explain the

position of our business. Give up looking upon me as a boy, or tomorrow I shall close the business. My

father is blind, my brother is in the asylum, my nieces are only children. I hate the business; I should be glad

to go away, but there's no one to take my place, as you know. For goodness' sake, drop your diplomacy!"

They went to the warehouse to go into the accounts; then they went on with them at home in the evening, the

old father himself assisting. Initiating his son into his commercial secrets, the old man spoke as though he

were engaged, not in trade, but in sorcery. It appeared that the profits of the business were increasing

approximately ten per cent. per annum, and that the Laptevs' fortune, reckoning only money and paper

When at one o'clock at night, after balancing the accounts, Laptev went out into the open air, he was still

under the spell of those figures. It was a still, sultry, moonlight night. The white walls of the houses beyond

the river, the heavy barred gates, the stillness and the black shadows, combined to give the impression of a

fortress, and nothing was wanting to complete the picture but a sentinel with a gun. Laptev went into the

garden and sat down on a seat near the fence, which divided them from the neighbour's yard, where there was

a garden, too. The birdcherry was in bloom. Laptev remembered that the tree had been just as gnarled and

just as big when he was a child, and had not changed at all since then. Every corner of the garden and of the

yard recalled the faraway past. And in his childhood, too, just as now, the whole yard bathed in moonlight

could be seen through the sparse trees, the shadows had been mysterious and forbidding, a black dog had lain

in the middle of the yard, and the clerks' windows had stood wide open. And all these were cheerless

The other side of the fence, in the neighbour's yard, there was a sound of light steps.

"My sweet, my precious . . ." said a man's voice so near the fence that Laptev could hear the man's breathing.

Now they were kissing. Laptev was convinced that the millions and the business which was so distasteful to

him were ruining his life, and would make him a complete slave. He imagined how, little by little, he would

grow accustomed to his position; would, little by little, enter into the part of the head of a great firm; would

begin to grow dull and old, die in the end, as the average man usually does die, in a decrepit, soured old age,

making every one about him miserable and depressed. But what hindered him from giving up those millions

and that business, and leaving that yard and garden which had been hateful to him from his childhood?

The whispering and kisses the other side of the fence disturbed him. He moved into the middle of the yard,

and, unbuttoning his shirt over his chest, looked at the moon, and it seemed to him that he would order the

gate to be unlocked, and would go out and never come back again. His heart ached sweetly with the foretaste

of freedom; he laughed joyously, and pictured how exquisite, poetical, and even holy, life might be. . . .

But he still stood and did not go away, and kept asking himself: "What keeps me here?" And he felt angry

with himself and with the black dog, which still lay stretched on the stone yard, instead of running off to the

open country, to the woods, where it would have been free and happy. It was clear that that dog and he were

prevented from leaving the yard by the same thing; the habit of bondage, of servitude. . . .

At midday next morning he went to see his wife, and that he might not be dull, asked Yartsev to go with him.

Yulia Sergeyevna was staying in a summer villa at Butovo, and he had not been to see her for five days.

When they reached the station the friends got into a carriage, and all the way there Yartsev was singing and in

raptures over the exquisite weather. The villa was in a great park not far from the station. At the beginning of

an avenue, about twenty paces from the gates, Yulia Sergeyevna was sitting under a broad, spreading poplar,

waiting for her guests. She had on a light, elegant dress of a pale cream colour trimmed with lace, and in her

hand she had the old familiar parasol. Yartsev greeted her and went on to the villa from which came the

sound of Sasha's and Lida's voices, while Laptev sat down beside her to talk of business matters.

"Why is it you haven't been for so long?" she said, keeping his hand in hers. "I have been sitting here for days

She stood up and passed her hand over his hair, and scanned his face, his shoulders, his hat, with interest.

"You know I love you," she said, and flushed crimson. "You are precious to me. Here you've come. I see you,

She had told him she loved him, and he could only feel as though he had been married to her for ten years,

and that he was hungry for his lunch. She had put her arm round his neck, tickling his cheek with the silk of

her dress; he cautiously removed her hand, stood up, and without uttering a single word, walked to the villa.

"How they have grown!" he thought. "And what changes in these three years. . . . But one may have to live

another thirteen years, another thirty years. . . . What is there in store for us in the future? If we live, we shall

"Grandpapa sends his love. . . . Uncle Fyodor is dying. Uncle Kostya has sent a letter from America and

sends you his love in it. He's bored at the exhibition and will soon be back. And Uncle Alyosha is hungry."

Then he sat on the verandah and saw his wife walking slowly along the avenue towards the house. She was

deep in thought; there was a mournful, charming expression in her face, and her eyes were bright with tears.

She was not now the slender, fragile, palefaced girl she used to be; she was a mature, beautiful, vigorous

woman. And Laptev saw the enthusiasm with which Yartsev looked at her when he met her, and the way her

new, lovely expression was reflected in his face, which looked mournful and ecstatic too. One would have

thought that he was seeing her for the first time in his life. And while they were at lunch on the verandah,

Yartsev smiled with a sort of joyous shyness, and kept gazing at Yulia and at her beautiful neck. Laptev could

not help watching them while he thought that he had perhaps another thirteen, another thirty years of life

before him. . . . And what would he have to live through in that time? What is in store for us in the future?