In the evening she got ready to go to town.
She had often been to town lately to stay the night. In her absence I
could not work, and felt listless and disheartened; our big yard seemed
dreary, disgusting, and deserted; there were ominous noises in the
garden, and without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer
"ours."
I never went out but sat all the time at her writing-table among her
books on farming and agriculture, those deposed favourites, wanted no
more, which looked out at me so shamefacedly from the bookcase. For
hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, and the autumn night
crept up as black as soot to the windows, I sat brooding over an old
glove of hers, or the pen she always used, and her little scissors. I
did nothing and saw clearly that everything I had done before,
ploughing, sowing, and felling trees, had only been because she wanted
it. And if she told me to clean out a well, when I had to stand
waist-deep in water, I would go and do it, without trying to find out
whether the well wanted cleaning or not. And now, when she was away,
Dubechnia with its squalor, its litter, its slamming shutters, with
thieves prowling about it day and night, seemed to me like a chaos in
which work was entirely useless. And why should I work, then? Why
trouble and worry about the future, when I felt that the ground was
slipping away from under me, that my position at Dubechnia was hollow,
that, in a word, the same fate awaited me as had befallen the books on
agriculture? Oh! what anguish it was at night, in the lonely hours, when
I lay listening uneasily, as though I expected some one any minute to
call out that it was time for me to go away. I was not sorry to leave
Dubechnia, my sorrow was for my love, for which it seemed that autumn
had already begun. What a tremendous happiness it is to love and to be
loved, and what a horror it is to feel that you are beginning to topple
down from that lofty tower!
Masha returned from town toward evening on the following day. She was
dissatisfied with something, but concealed it and said only: "Why have
the winter windows been put in? It will be stifling." I opened two of
the windows. We did not feel like eating, but we sat down and had
supper.
"Go and wash your hands," she said. "You smell of putty."
She had brought some new illustrated magazines from town and we both
read them after supper. They had supplements with fashion-plates and
patterns. Masha just glanced at them and put them aside to look at them
carefully later on; but one dress, with a wide, bell-shaped skirt and
big sleeves interested her, and for a moment she looked at it seriously
and attentively.
"That's not bad," she said.
"Yes, it would suit you very well," said I. "Very well."
And I admired the dress, only because she liked it, and went on
tenderly:
"A wonderful, lovely dress! Lovely, wonderful, Masha. My dear Masha!"
And tears began to drop on the fashion-plate.
"Wonderful Masha...." I murmured. "Dear, darling Masha...."
She went and lay down and I sat still for an hour and looked at the
illustrations.
"You should not have opened the windows," she called from the bedroom.
"I'm afraid it will be cold. Look how the wind is blowing in!"
I read the miscellany, about the preparation of cheap fish, and the size
of the largest diamond in the world. Then I chanced on the picture of
the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, and
bare shoulders, a brilliant, dazzling figure, well up in music and
painting and literature, and how insignificant and brief my share in her
life seemed to be!
Our coming together, our marriage, was only an episode, one of many in
the life of this lively, highly gifted creature. All the best things in
the world, as I have said, were at her service, and she had them for
nothing; even ideas and fashionable intellectual movements served her
pleasure, a diversion in her existence, and I was only the coachman who
drove her from one infatuation to another. Now I was no longer necessary
to her; she would fly away and I should be left alone.
As if in answer to my thoughts a desperate scream suddenly came from the
yard:
"Mur-der!"
It was a shrill female voice, and exactly as though it were trying to
imitate it, the wind also howled dismally in the chimney. Half a minute
passed and again it came through the sound of the wind, but as though
from the other end of the yard:
"Mur-der!"
"Misail, did you hear that?" said my wife in a hushed voice. "Did you
hear?"
She came out of the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and
stood listening and staring out of the dark window.
"Somebody is being murdered!" she muttered. "It only wanted that!"
I took my gun and went out; it was very dark outside; a violent wind was
blowing so that it was hard to stand up. I walked to the gate and
listened; the trees were moaning; the wind went whistling through them,
and in the garden the idiot's dog was howling. Beyond the gate it was
pitch dark; there was not a light on the railway. And just by the wing,
where the offices used to be, I suddenly heard a choking cry:
"Mur-der!"
"Who is there?" I called.
Two men were locked in a struggle. One had nearly thrown the other, who
was resisting with all his might. And both were breathing heavily.
"Let go!" said one of them and I recognised Ivan Cheprakov. It was he
who had cried out in a thin, falsetto voice. "Let go, damn you, or I'll
bite your hands!"
The other man I recognised as Moissey. I parted them and could not
resist hitting Moissey in the face twice. He fell down, then got up, and
I struck him again.
"He tried to kill me," he muttered. "I caught him creeping to his
mother's drawer.... I tried to shut him up in the wing for safety."
Cheprakov was drunk and did not recognise me. He stood gasping for
breath as though trying to get enough wind to shriek again.
I left them and went back to the house. My wife was lying on the bed,
fully dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not keep
back the fact that I had struck Moissey.
"Living in the country is horrible," she said. "And what a long night it
is!"
"Mur-der!" we heard again, a little later.
"I'll go and part them," I said.
"No. Let them kill each other," she said with an expression of disgust.
She lay staring at the ceiling, listening, and I sat near her, not
daring to speak and feeling that it was my fault that screams of
"murder" came from the yard and the night was so long.
We were silent and I waited impatiently for the light to peep in at the
window. And Masha looked as though she had wakened from a long sleep and
was astonished to find herself, so clever, so educated, so refined, cast
away in this miserable provincial hole, among a lot of petty, shallow
people, and to think that she could have so far forgotten herself as to
have been carried away by one of them and to have been his wife for more
than half a year. It seemed to me that we were all the same to
her--myself, Moissey, Cheprakov; all swept together into the drunken,
wild scream of "murder"--myself, our marriage, our work, and the muddy
roads of autumn; and when she breathed or stirred to make herself more
comfortable I could read in her eyes: "Oh, if the morning would come
quicker!"
In the morning she went away.
I stayed at Dubechnia for another three days, waiting for her; then I
moved all our things into one room, locked it, and went to town. When I
rang the bell at the engineer's, it was evening, and the lamps were
alight in Great Gentry Street. Pavel told me that nobody was at home;
Victor Ivanich had gone to Petersburg and Maria Victorovna must be at a
rehearsal at the Azhoguins'. I remember the excitement with which I went
to the Azhoguins', and how my heart thumped and sank within me, as I
went up-stairs and stood for a long while on the landing, not daring to
enter that temple of the Muses! In the hall, on the table, on the piano,
on the stage, there were candles burning; all in threes, for the first
performance was fixed for the thirteenth, and the dress rehearsal was on
Monday--the unlucky day. A fight against prejudice! All the lovers of
dramatic art were assembled; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest
Miss Azhoguin were walking about the stage, reading their parts. Radish
was standing still in a corner all by himself, with his head against the
wall, looking at the stage with adoring eyes, waiting for the beginning
of the rehearsal. Everything was just the same!
I went toward my hostess to greet her, when suddenly everybody began to
say "Ssh" and to wave their hands to tell me not to make such a noise.
There was a silence. The top of the piano was raised, a lady sat down,
screwing up her short-sighted eyes at the music, and Masha stood by the
piano, dressed up, beautiful, but beautiful in an odd new way, not at
all like the Masha who used to come to see me at the mill in the spring.
She began to sing:
"Why do I love thee, straight night?"
It was the first time since I had known her that I had heard her sing.
She had a fine, rich, powerful voice, and to hear her sing was like
eating a ripe, sweet-scented melon. She finished the song and was
applauded. She smiled and looked pleased, made play with her eyes,
stared at the music, plucked at her dress exactly like a bird which has
broken out of its cage and preens its wings at liberty. Her hair was
combed back over her ears, and she had a sly defiant expression on her
face, as though she wished to challenge us all, or to shout at us, as
though we were horses: "Gee up, old things!"
And at that moment she must have looked very like her grandfather, the
coachman.
"You here, too?" she asked, giving me her hand. "Did you hear me sing?
How did you like it?" And, without waiting for me to answer she went on:
"You arrived very opportunely. I'm going to Petersburg for a short time
to-night. May I?"
At midnight I took her to the station. She embraced me tenderly,
probably out of gratitude, because I did not pester her with useless
questions, and she promised to write to me, and I held her hands for a
long time and kissed them, finding it hard to keep back my tears, and
not saying a word.
And when the train moved, I stood looking at the receding lights, kissed
her in my imagination and whispered:
"Masha dear, wonderful Masha!..."
I spent the night at Mikhokhov, at Karpovna's, and in the morning I
worked with Radish, upholstering the furniture at a rich merchant's, who
had married his daughter to a doctor.