IVAN ALEXEYITCH OGNEV remembers how on that August evening he opened
the glass door with a rattle and went out on to the verandah. He
was wearing a light Inverness cape and a wide-brimmed straw hat,
the very one that was lying with his top-boots in the dust under
his bed. In one hand he had a big bundle of books and notebooks,
in the other a thick knotted stick.
Behind the door, holding the lamp to show the way, stood the master
of the house, Kuznetsov, a bald old man with a long grey beard, in
a snow-white piqué jacket. The old man was smiling cordially and
nodding his head.
"Good-bye, old fellow!" said Ognev.
Kuznetsov put the lamp on a little table and went out to the verandah.
Two long narrow shadows moved down the steps towards the flower-beds,
swayed to and fro, and leaned their heads on the trunks of the
lime-trees.
"Good-bye and once more thank you, my dear fellow!" said Ivan
Alexeyitch. "Thank you for your welcome, for your kindness, for
your affection. . . . I shall never forget your hospitality as long
as I live. You are so good, and your daughter is so good, and
everyone here is so kind, so good-humoured and friendly . . . Such
a splendid set of people that I don't know how to say what I feel!"
From excess of feeling and under the influence of the home-made
wine he had just drunk, Ognev talked in a singing voice like a
divinity student, and was so touched that he expressed his feelings
not so much by words as by the blinking of his eyes and the twitching
of his shoulders. Kuznetsov, who had also drunk a good deal and was
touched, craned forward to the young man and kissed him.
"I've grown as fond of you as if I were your dog," Ognev went on.
"I've been turning up here almost every day; I've stayed the night
a dozen times. It's dreadful to think of all the home-made wine
I've drunk. And thank you most of all for your co-operation and
help. Without you I should have been busy here over my statistics
till October. I shall put in my preface: 'I think it my duty to
express my gratitude to the President of the District Zemstvo of
N----, Kuznetsov, for his kind co-operation.' There is a brilliant
future before statistics! My humble respects to Vera Gavrilovna,
and tell the doctors, both the lawyers and your secretary, that I
shall never forget their help! And now, old fellow, let us embrace
one another and kiss for the last time!"
Ognev, limp with emotion, kissed the old man once more and began
going down the steps. On the last step he looked round and asked:
"Shall we meet again some day?"
"God knows!" said the old man. "Most likely not!"
"Yes, that's true! Nothing will tempt you to Petersburg and I am
never likely to turn up in this district again. Well, good-bye!"
"You had better leave the books behind!" Kuznetsov called after
him. "You don't want to drag such a weight with you. I would send
them by a servant to-morrow!"
But Ognev was rapidly walking away from the house and was not
listening. His heart, warmed by the wine, was brimming over with
good-humour, friendliness, and sadness. He walked along thinking
how frequently one met with good people, and what a pity it was
that nothing was left of those meetings but memories. At times one
catches a glimpse of cranes on the horizon, and a faint gust of
wind brings their plaintive, ecstatic cry, and a minute later,
however greedily one scans the blue distance, one cannot see a speck
nor catch a sound; and like that, people with their faces and their
words flit through our lives and are drowned in the past, leaving
nothing except faint traces in the memory. Having been in the N----
District from the early spring, and having been almost every day
at the friendly Kuznetsovs', Ivan Alexeyitch had become as much at
home with the old man, his daughter, and the servants as though
they were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house
to the smallest detail, with the cosy verandah, the windings of the
avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the
bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the gate all this would
be changed to memory and would lose its meaning as reality for ever,
and in a year or two all these dear images would grow as dim in his
consciousness as stories he had read or things he had imagined.
"Nothing in life is so precious as people!" Ognev thought in his
emotion, as he strode along the avenue to the gate. "Nothing!"
It was warm and still in the garden. There was a scent of the
mignonette, of the tobacco-plants, and of the heliotrope, which
were not yet over in the flower-beds. The spaces between the bushes
and the tree-trunks were filled with a fine soft mist soaked through
and through with moonlight, and, as Ognev long remembered, coils
of mist that looked like phantoms slowly but perceptibly followed
one another across the avenue. The moon stood high above the garden,
and below it transparent patches of mist were floating eastward.
The whole world seemed to consist of nothing but black silhouettes
and wandering white shadows. Ognev, seeing the mist on a moonlight
August evening almost for the first time in his life, imagined he
was seeing, not nature, but a stage effect in which unskilful
workmen, trying to light up the garden with white Bengal fire, hid
behind the bushes and let off clouds of white smoke together with
the light.
When Ognev reached the garden gate a dark shadow moved away from
the low fence and came towards him.
"Vera Gavrilovna!" he said, delighted. "You here? And I have been
looking everywhere for you; wanted to say good-bye. . . . Good-bye;
I am going away!"
"So early? Why, it's only eleven o'clock."
"Yes, it's time I was off. I have a four-mile walk and then my
packing. I must be up early to-morrow."
Before Ognev stood Kuznetsov's daughter Vera, a girl of one-and-twenty,
as usual melancholy, carelessly dressed, and attractive. Girls who
are dreamy and spend whole days lying down, lazily reading whatever
they come across, who are bored and melancholy, are usually careless
in their dress. To those of them who have been endowed by nature
with taste and an instinct of beauty, the slight carelessness adds
a special charm. When Ognev later on remembered her, he could not
picture pretty Verotchka except in a full blouse which was crumpled
in deep folds at the belt and yet did not touch her waist; without
her hair done up high and a curl that had come loose from it on her
forehead; without the knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the
edge which hung disconsolately on Vera's shoulders in the evenings,
like a flag on a windless day, and in the daytime lay about, crushed
up, in the hall near the men's hats or on a box in the dining-room,
where the old cat did not hesitate to sleep on it. This shawl and
the folds of her blouse suggested a feeling of freedom and laziness,
of good-nature and sitting at home. Perhaps because Vera attracted
Ognev he saw in every frill and button something warm, naïve, cosy,
something nice and poetical, just what is lacking in cold, insincere
women that have no instinct for beauty.
Verotchka had a good figure, a regular profile, and beautiful curly
hair. Ognev, who had seen few women in his life, thought her a
beauty.
"I am going away," he said as he took leave of her at the gate.
"Don't remember evil against me! Thank you for everything!"
In the same singing divinity student's voice in which he had talked
to her father, with the same blinking and twitching of his shoulders,
he began thanking Vera for her hospitality, kindness, and friendliness.
"I've written about you in every letter to my mother," he said. "If
everyone were like you and your dad, what a jolly place the world
would be! You are such a splendid set of people! All such genuine,
friendly people with no nonsense about you."
"Where are you going to now?" asked Vera.
"I am going now to my mother's at Oryol; I shall be a fortnight
with her, and then back to Petersburg and work."
"And then?"
"And then? I shall work all the winter and in the spring go somewhere
into the provinces again to collect material. Well, be happy, live
a hundred years . . . don't remember evil against me. We shall not
see each other again."
Ognev stooped down and kissed Vera's hand. Then, in silent emotion,
he straightened his cape, shifted his bundle of books to a more
comfortable position, paused, and said:
"What a lot of mist!"
"Yes. Have you left anything behind?"
"No, I don't think so. . . ."
For some seconds Ognev stood in silence, then he moved clumsily
towards the gate and went out of the garden.
"Stay; I'll see you as far as our wood," said Vera, following him
out.
They walked along the road. Now the trees did not obscure the view,
and one could see the sky and the distance. As though covered with
a veil all nature was hidden in a transparent, colourless haze
through which her beauty peeped gaily; where the mist was thicker
and whiter it lay heaped unevenly about the stones, stalks, and
bushes or drifted in coils over the road, clung close to the earth
and seemed trying not to conceal the view. Through the haze they
could see all the road as far as the wood, with dark ditches at the
sides and tiny bushes which grew in the ditches and caught the
straying wisps of mist. Half a mile from the gate they saw the dark
patch of Kuznetsov's wood.
"Why has she come with me? I shall have to see her back," thought
Ognev, but looking at her profile he gave a friendly smile and said:
"One doesn't want to go away in such lovely weather. It's quite a
romantic evening, with the moon, the stillness, and all the etceteras.
Do you know, Vera Gavrilovna, here I have lived twenty-nine years
in the world and never had a romance. No romantic episode in my
whole life, so that I only know by hearsay of rendezvous, 'avenues
of sighs,' and kisses. It's not normal! In town, when one sits in
one's lodgings, one does not notice the blank, but here in the fresh
air one feels it. . . . One resents it!"
"Why is it?"
"I don't know. I suppose I've never had time, or perhaps it was I
have never met women who. . . . In fact, I have very few acquaintances
and never go anywhere."
For some three hundred paces the young people walked on in silence.
Ognev kept glancing at Verotchka's bare head and shawl, and days
of spring and summer rose to his mind one after another. It had
been a period when far from his grey Petersburg lodgings, enjoying
the friendly warmth of kind people, nature, and the work he loved,
he had not had time to notice how the sunsets followed the glow of
dawn, and how, one after another foretelling the end of summer,
first the nightingale ceased singing, then the quail, then a little
later the landrail. The days slipped by unnoticed, so that life
must have been happy and easy. He began calling aloud how reluctantly
he, poor and unaccustomed to change of scene and society, had come
at the end of April to the N---- District, where he had expected
dreariness, loneliness, and indifference to statistics, which he
considered was now the foremost among the sciences. When he arrived
on an April morning at the little town of N---- he had put up at
the inn kept by Ryabuhin, the Old Believer, where for twenty kopecks
a day they had given him a light, clean room on condition that he
should not smoke indoors. After resting and finding who was the
president of the District Zemstvo, he had set off at once on foot
to Kuznetsov. He had to walk three miles through lush meadows and
young copses. Larks were hovering in the clouds, filling the air
with silvery notes, and rooks flapping their wings with sedate
dignity floated over the green cornland.
"Good heavens!" Ognev had thought in wonder; "can it be that there's
always air like this to breathe here, or is this scent only to-day,
in honour of my coming?"
Expecting a cold business-like reception, he went in to Kuznetsov's
diffidently, looking up from under his eyebrows and shyly pulling
his beard. At first Kuznetsov wrinkled up his brows and could not
understand what use the Zemstvo could be to the young man and his
statistics; but when the latter explained at length what was material
for statistics and how such material was collected, Kuznetsov
brightened, smiled, and with childish curiosity began looking at
his notebooks. On the evening of the same day Ivan Alexeyitch was
already sitting at supper with the Kuznetsovs, was rapidly becoming
exhilarated by their strong home-made wine, and looking at the calm
faces and lazy movements of his new acquaintances, felt all over
that sweet, drowsy indolence which makes one want to sleep and
stretch and smile; while his new acquaintances looked at him
good-naturedly and asked him whether his father and mother were
living, how much he earned a month, how often he went to the
theatre. . . .
Ognev recalled his expeditions about the neighbourhood, the picnics,
the fishing parties, the visit of the whole party to the convent
to see the Mother Superior Marfa, who had given each of the visitors
a bead purse; he recalled the hot, endless typically Russian arguments
in which the opponents, spluttering and banging the table with their
fists, misunderstand and interrupt one another, unconsciously
contradict themselves at every phrase, continually change the
subject, and after arguing for two or three hours, laugh and say:
"Goodness knows what we have been arguing about! Beginning with one
thing and going on to another!"
"And do you remember how the doctor and you and I rode to Shestovo?"
said Ivan Alexeyitch to Vera as they reached the copse. "It was
there that the crazy saint met us: I gave him a five-kopeck piece,
and he crossed himself three times and flung it into the rye. Good
heavens! I am carrying away such a mass of memories that if I could
gather them together into a whole it would make a good nugget of
gold! I don't understand why clever, perceptive people crowd into
Petersburg and Moscow and don't come here. Is there more truth and
freedom in the Nevsky and in the big damp houses than here? Really,
the idea of artists, scientific men, and journalists all living
crowded together in furnished rooms has always seemed to me a
mistake."
Twenty paces from the copse the road was crossed by a small narrow
bridge with posts at the corners, which had always served as a
resting-place for the Kuznetsovs and their guests on their evening
walks. From there those who liked could mimic the forest echo, and
one could see the road vanish in the dark woodland track.
"Well, here is the bridge!" said Ognev. "Here you must turn back."
Vera stopped and drew a breath.
"Let us sit down," she said, sitting down on one of the posts.
"People generally sit down when they say good-bye before starting
on a journey."
Ognev settled himself beside her on his bundle of books and went
on talking. She was breathless from the walk, and was looking, not
at Ivan Alexeyitch, but away into the distance so that he could not
see her face.
"And what if we meet in ten years' time?" he said. "What shall we
be like then? You will be by then the respectable mother of a family,
and I shall be the author of some weighty statistical work of no
use to anyone, as thick as forty thousand such works. We shall meet
and think of old days. . . . Now we are conscious of the present;
it absorbs and excites us, but when we meet we shall not remember
the day, nor the month, nor even the year in which we saw each other
for the last time on this bridge. You will be changed, perhaps
. . . . Tell me, will you be different?"
Vera started and turned her face towards him.
"What?" she asked.
"I asked you just now. . . ."
"Excuse me, I did not hear what you were saying."
Only then Ognev noticed a change in Vera. She was pale, breathing
fast, and the tremor in her breathing affected her hands and lips
and head, and not one curl as usual, but two, came loose and fell
on her forehead. . . . Evidently she avoided looking him in the
face, and, trying to mask her emotion, at one moment fingered her
collar, which seemed to be rasping her neck, at another pulled her
red shawl from one shoulder to the other.
"I am afraid you are cold," said Ognev. "It's not at all wise to
sit in the mist. Let me see you back _nach-haus_."
Vera sat mute.
"What is the matter?" asked Ognev, with a smile. "You sit silent
and don't answer my questions. Are you cross, or don't you feel
well?"
Vera pressed the palm of her hand to the cheek nearest to Ognev,
and then abruptly jerked it away.
"An awful position!" she murmured, with a look of pain on her face.
"Awful!"
"How is it awful?" asked Ognev, shrugging his shoulders and not
concealing his surprise. "What's the matter?"
Still breathing hard and twitching her shoulders, Vera turned her
back to him, looked at the sky for half a minute, and said:
"There is something I must say to you, Ivan Alexeyitch. . . ."
"I am listening."
"It may seem strange to you. . . . You will be surprised, but I
don't care. . . ."
Ognev shrugged his shoulders once more and prepared himself to
listen.
"You see . . ." Verotchka began, bowing her head and fingering a
ball on the fringe of her shawl. "You see . . . this is what I
wanted to tell you. . . . You'll think it strange . . . and silly,
but I . . . can't bear it any longer."
Vera's words died away in an indistinct mutter and were suddenly
cut short by tears. The girl hid her face in her handkerchief, bent
lower than ever, and wept bitterly. Ivan Alexeyitch cleared his
throat in confusion and looked about him hopelessly, at his wits'
end, not knowing what to say or do. Being unused to the sight of
tears, he felt his own eyes, too, beginning to smart.
"Well, what next!" he muttered helplessly. "Vera Gavrilovna, what's
this for, I should like to know? My dear girl, are you . . . are
you ill? Or has someone been nasty to you? Tell me, perhaps I could,
so to say . . . help you. . . ."
When, trying to console her, he ventured cautiously to remove her
hands from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:
"I . . . love you!"
These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human
language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera,
and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.
The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the
home-made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and
unpleasant feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he
looked askance at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him
she had cast off the aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm,
she seemed to him, as it were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.
"What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I . . .
do I love her or not? That's the question!"
And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most
difficult thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan
Alexeyitch straight in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly,
irrepressibly.
As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the
succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed
him, so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can only
recall the meaning of what she said, and the sensation her words
evoked in him. He remembers her voice, which seemed stifled and
husky with emotion, and the extraordinary music and passion of her
intonation. Laughing, crying with tears glistening on her eyelashes,
she told him that from the first day of their acquaintance he had
struck her by his originality, his intelligence, his kind intelligent
eyes, by his work and objects in life; that she loved him passionately,
deeply, madly; that when coming into the house from the garden in
the summer she saw his cape in the hall or heard his voice in the
distance, she felt a cold shudder at her heart, a foreboding of
happiness; even his slightest jokes had made her laugh; in every
figure in his note-books she saw something extraordinarily wise and
grand; his knotted stick seemed to her more beautiful than the
trees.
The copse and the wisps of mist and the black ditches at the side
of the road seemed hushed listening to her, whilst something strange
and unpleasant was passing in Ognev's heart. . . . Telling him of
her love, Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and
passionately, but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would
have liked to; he felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and
regret that a good girl should be distressed on his account. Whether
he was affected by generalizations from reading or by the insuperable
habit of looking at things objectively, which so often hinders
people from living, but Vera's ecstasies and suffering struck him
as affected, not to be taken seriously, and at the same time
rebellious feeling whispered to him that all he was hearing and
seeing now, from the point of view of nature and personal happiness,
was more important than any statistics and books and truths. . . .
And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not understand exactly
where he was in fault.
To complete his embarrassment, he was absolutely at a loss what to
say, and yet something he must say. To say bluntly, "I don't love
you," was beyond him, and he could not bring himself to say "Yes,"
because however much he rummaged in his heart he could not find one
spark of feeling in it. . . .
He was silent, and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was
no greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he
liked this very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he
went away from her she would die of misery.
"I cannot stay here!" she said, wringing her hands. "I am sick of
the house and this wood and the air. I cannot bear the everlasting
peace and aimless life, I can't endure our colourless, pale people,
who are all as like one another as two drops of water! They are all
good-natured and warm-hearted because they are all well-fed and
know nothing of struggle or suffering, . . . I want to be in those
big damp houses where people suffer, embittered by work and
need. . ."
And this, too, seemed to Ognev affected and not to be taken seriously.
When Vera had finished he still did not know what to say, but it
was impossible to be silent, and he muttered:
"Vera Gavrilovna, I am very grateful to you, though I feel I've
done nothing to deserve such . . . feeling . . . on your part.
Besides, as an honest man I ought to tell you that . . . happiness
depends on equality--that is, when both parties are . . . equally
in love. . . ."
But he was immediately ashamed of his mutterings and ceased. He
felt that his face at that moment looked stupid, guilty, blank,
that it was strained and affected. . . . Vera must have been able
to read the truth on his countenance, for she suddenly became grave,
turned pale, and bent her head.
"You must forgive me," Ognev muttered, not able to endure the
silence. "I respect you so much that . . . it pains me. . . ."
Vera turned sharply and walked rapidly homewards. Ognev followed
her.
"No, don't!" said Vera, with a wave of her hand. "Don't come; I can
go alone."
"Oh, yes . . . I must see you home anyway."
Whatever Ognev said, it all to the last word struck him as loathsome
and flat. The feeling of guilt grew greater at every step. He raged
inwardly, clenched his fists, and cursed his coldness and his
stupidity with women. Trying to stir his feelings, he looked at
Verotchka's beautiful figure, at her hair and the traces of her
little feet on the dusty road; he remembered her words and her
tears, but all that only touched his heart and did not quicken his
pulse.
"Ach! one can't force oneself to love," he assured himself, and at
the same time he thought, "But shall I ever fall in love without?
I am nearly thirty! I have never met anyone better than Vera and I
never shall. . . . Oh, this premature old age! Old age at thirty!"
Vera walked on in front more and more rapidly, without looking back
at him or raising her head. It seemed to him that sorrow had made
her thinner and narrower in the shoulders.
"I can imagine what's going on in her heart now!" he thought, looking
at her back. "She must be ready to die with shame and mortification!
My God, there's so much life, poetry, and meaning in it that it
would move a stone, and I . . . I am stupid and absurd!"
At the gate Vera stole a glance at him, and, shrugging and wrapping
her shawl round her walked rapidly away down the avenue.
Ivan Alexeyitch was left alone. Going back to the copse, he walked
slowly, continually standing still and looking round at the gate
with an expression in his whole figure that suggested that he could
not believe his own memory. He looked for Vera's footprints on the
road, and could not believe that the girl who had so attracted him
had just declared her love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly
"refused" her. For the first time in his life it was his lot to
learn by experience how little that a man does depends on his own
will, and to suffer in his own person the feelings of a decent
kindly man who has against his will caused his neighbour cruel,
undeserved anguish.
His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as
though he had lost something very precious, something very near and
dear which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part
of his youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which
he had passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.
When he reached the bridge he stopped and sank into thought. He
wanted to discover the reason of his strange coldness. That it was
due to something within him and not outside himself was clear to
him. He frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the
intellectual coldness of which clever people so often boast, not
the coldness of a conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul,
incapacity for being moved by beauty, premature old age brought on
by education, his casual existence, struggling for a livelihood,
his homeless life in lodgings. From the bridge he walked slowly,
as it were reluctantly, into the wood. Here, where in the dense
black darkness glaring patches of moonlight gleamed here and there,
where he felt nothing except his thoughts, he longed passionately
to regain what he had lost.
And Ivan Alexeyitch remembers that he went back again. Urging himself
on with his memories, forcing himself to picture Vera, he strode
rapidly towards the garden. There was no mist by then along the
road or in the garden, and the bright moon looked down from the sky
as though it had just been washed; only the eastern sky was dark
and misty. . . . Ognev remembers his cautious steps, the dark
windows, the heavy scent of heliotrope and mignonette. His old
friend Karo, wagging his tail amicably, came up to him and sniffed
his hand. This was the one living creature who saw him walk two or
three times round the house, stand near Vera's dark window, and
with a deep sigh and a wave of his hand walk out of the garden.
An hour later he was in the town, and, worn out and exhausted,
leaned his body and hot face against the gatepost of the inn as he
knocked at the gate. Somewhere in the town a dog barked sleepily,
and as though in response to his knock, someone clanged the hour
on an iron plate near the church.
"You prowl about at night," grumbled his host, the Old Believer,
opening the door to him, in a long nightgown like a woman's. "You
had better be saying your prayers instead of prowling about."
When Ivan Alexeyitch reached his room he sank on the bed and gazed
a long, long time at the light. Then he tossed his head and began
packing.