Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to
the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between
Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform.
The shades of evening were already lying on the station garden, on the
platform, and on the fields; the station screened off the sunset, but on
the topmost clouds of smoke from the engine, which were tinged with rosy
light, one could see the sun had not yet quite vanished.
As I walked up and down the platform I noticed that the greater
number of the passengers were standing or walking near a second-class
compartment, and that they looked as though some celebrated person were
in that compartment. Among the curious whom I met near this compartment
I saw, however, an artillery officer who had been my fellow-traveler, an
intelligent, cordial, and sympathetic fellow--as people mostly are
whom we meet on our travels by chance and with whom we are not long
acquainted.
“What are you looking at there?” I asked.
He made no answer, but only indicated with his eyes a feminine figure.
It was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Russian dress,
with her head bare and a little shawl flung carelessly on one
shoulder; not a passenger, but I suppose a sister or daughter of the
station-master. She was standing near the carriage window, talking to an
elderly woman who was in the train. Before I had time to realize what
I was seeing, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had once
experienced in the Armenian village.
The girl was remarkably beautiful, and that was unmistakable to me and
to those who were looking at her as I was.
If one is to describe her appearance feature by feature, as the practice
is, the only really lovely thing was her thick wavy fair hair, which
hung loose with a black ribbon tied round her head; all the other
features were either irregular or very ordinary. Either from a peculiar
form of coquettishness, or from short-sightedness, her eyes were screwed
up, her nose had an undecided tilt, her mouth was small, her profile was
feebly and insipidly drawn, her shoulders were narrow and undeveloped
for her age--and yet the girl made the impression of being really
beautiful, and looking at her, I was able to feel convinced that the
Russian face does not need strict regularity in order to be lovely; what
is more, that if instead of her turn-up nose the girl had been given a
different one, correct and plastically irreproachable like the Armenian
girl’s, I fancy her face would have lost all its charm from the change.
Standing at the window talking, the girl, shrugging at the evening damp,
continually looking round at us, at one moment put her arms akimbo, at
the next raised her hands to her head to straighten her hair, talked,
laughed, while her face at one moment wore an expression of wonder, the
next of horror, and I don’t remember a moment when her face and body
were at rest. The whole secret and magic of her beauty lay just in these
tiny, infinitely elegant movements, in her smile, in the play of her
face, in her rapid glances at us, in the combination of the subtle grace
of her movements with her youth, her freshness, the purity of her soul
that sounded in her laugh and voice, and with the weakness we love so
much in children, in birds, in fawns, and in young trees.
It was that butterfly’s beauty so in keeping with waltzing, darting
about the garden, laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious
thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind
blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither
the fragile body and scatter the capricious beauty like the pollen of a
flower.
“So--o!...” the officer muttered with a sigh when, after the second
bell, we went back to our compartment.
And what that “So--o” meant I will not undertake to decide.
Perhaps he was sad, and did not want to go away from the beauty and
the spring evening into the stuffy train; or perhaps he, like me, was
unaccountably sorry for the beauty, for himself, and for me, and for all
the passengers, who were listlessly and reluctantly sauntering back to
their compartments. As we passed the station window, at which a pale,
red-haired telegraphist with upstanding curls and a faded, broad-cheeked
face was sitting beside his apparatus, the officer heaved a sigh and
said:
“I bet that telegraphist is in love with that pretty girl. To live out
in the wilds under one roof with that ethereal creature and not fall in
love is beyond the power of man. And what a calamity, my friend! what an
ironical fate, to be stooping, unkempt, gray, a decent fellow and not a
fool, and to be in love with that pretty, stupid little girl who would
never take a scrap of notice of you! Or worse still: imagine that
telegraphist is in love, and at the same time married, and that his wife
is as stooping, as unkempt, and as decent a person as himself.”
On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was
standing with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of
the beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face,
exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look
of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw
happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though
he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not
his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and
his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as
far away as heaven....
The third bell rang, the whistles sounded, and the train slowly moved
off. First the guard, the station-master, then the garden, the beautiful
girl with her exquisitely sly smile, passed before our windows....
Putting my head out and looking back, I saw how, looking after the
train, she walked along the platform by the window where the telegraph
clerk was sitting, smoothed her hair, and ran into the garden. The
station no longer screened off the sunset, the plain lay open before us,
but the sun had already set and the smoke lay in black clouds over the
green, velvety young corn. It was melancholy in the spring air, and in
the darkening sky, and in the railway carriage.
The familiar figure of the guard came into the carriage, and he began
lighting the candles.