steaming in the wood, and there was a heavy fragrant scent from the
pines and rotting leaves. Pyotr Mihalitch stopped several times and
wiped his wet brow. He looked at his winter corn and his spring oats,
walked round the clover-field, and twice drove away a partridge with its
chicks which had strayed in from the wood. And all the while he was
thinking that this insufferable state of things could not go on for
ever, and that he must end it one way or another. End it stupidly,
madly, but he must end it.
"But how? What can I do?" he asked himself, and looked imploringly at
the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.
But the sky and the trees were mute. His noble ideas were no help, and
his common sense whispered that the agonising question could have no
solution but a stupid one, and that to-day's scene with the messenger
was not the last one of its kind. It was terrible to think what was in
store for him!
As he returned home the sun was setting. By now it seemed to him that
the problem was incapable of solution. He could not accept the
accomplished fact, and he could not refuse to accept it, and there was
no intermediate course. When, taking off his hat and fanning himself
with his handkerchief, he was walking along the road, and had only
another mile and a half to go before he would reach home, he heard bells
behind him. It was a very choice and successful combination of bells,
which gave a clear crystal note. No one had such bells on his horses but
the police captain, Medovsky, formerly an officer in the hussars, a man
in broken-down health, who had been a great rake and spendthrift, and
was a distant relation of Pyotr Mihalitch. He was like one of the family
at the Ivashins' and had a tender, fatherly affection for Zina, as well
as a great admiration for her.
"I was coming to see you," he said, overtaking Pyotr Mihalitch. "Get in;
I'll give you a lift."
He was smiling and looked cheerful. Evidently he did not yet know that
Zina had gone to live with Vlassitch; perhaps he had been told of it
already, but did not believe it. Pyotr Mihalitch felt in a difficult
position.
"You are very welcome," he muttered, blushing till the tears came into
his eyes, and not knowing how to lie or what to say. "I am delighted,"
he went on, trying to smile, "but . . . Zina is away and mother is ill."
"How annoying!" said the police captain, looking pensively at Pyotr
Mihalitch. "And I was meaning to spend the evening with you. Where has
Zinaida Mihalovna gone?"
"To the Sinitskys', and I believe she meant to go from there to the
monastery. I don't quite know."
The police captain talked a little longer and then turned back. Pyotr
Mihalitch walked home, and thought with horror what the police captain's
feelings would be when he learned the truth. And Pyotr Mihalitch
imagined his feelings, and actually experiencing them himself, went into
the house.
"Lord help us," he thought, "Lord help us!"
At evening tea the only one at the table was his aunt. As usual, her
face wore the expression that seemed to say that though she was a weak,
defenceless woman, she would allow no one to insult her. Pyotr Mihalitch
sat down at the other end of the table (he did not like his aunt) and
began drinking tea in silence.
"Your mother has had no dinner again to-day," said his aunt. "You ought
to do something about it, Petrusha. Starving oneself is no help in
sorrow."
It struck Pyotr Mihalitch as absurd that his aunt should meddle in other
people's business and should make her departure depend on Zina's having
gone away. He was tempted to say something rude to her, but restrained
himself. And as he restrained himself he felt the time had come for
action, and that he could not bear it any longer. Either he must act at
once or fall on the ground, and scream and bang his head upon the floor.
He pictured Vlassitch and Zina, both of them progressive and self-
satisfied, kissing each other somewhere under a maple tree, and all the
anger and bitterness that had been accumulating in him for the last
seven days fastened upon Vlassitch.
"One has seduced and abducted my sister," he thought, "another will come
and murder my mother, a third will set fire to the house and sack the
place. . . . And all this under the mask of friendship, lofty ideas,
unhappiness!"
"No, it shall not be!" Pyotr Mihalitch cried suddenly, and he brought
his fist down on the table.
He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room. In the stable the steward's
horse was standing ready saddled. He got on it and galloped off to
Vlassitch.
There was a perfect tempest within him. He felt a longing to do
something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it all
his life afterwards. Should he call Vlassitch a blackguard, slap him in
the face, and then challenge him to a duel? But Vlassitch was not one of
those men who do fight duels; being called a blackguard and slapped in
the face would only make him more unhappy, and would make him shrink
into himself more than ever. These unhappy, defenceless people are the
most insufferable, the most tiresome creatures in the world. They can do
anything with impunity. When the luckless man responds to well-deserved
reproach by looking at you with eyes full of deep and guilty feeling,
and with a sickly smile bends his head submissively, even justice itself
could not lift its hand against him.
"No matter. I'll horsewhip him before her eyes and tell him what I think
of him," Pyotr Mihalitch decided.
He was riding through his wood and waste land, and he imagined Zina
would try to justify her conduct by talking about the rights of women
and individual freedom, and about there being no difference between
legal marriage and free union. Like a woman, she would argue about what
she did not understand. And very likely at the end she would ask, "How
do you come in? What right have you to interfere?"
"No, I have no right," muttered Pyotr Mihalitch. "But so much the
better. . . . The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, the
better."
It was sultry. Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste
places the peewits called plaintively. Everything betokened rain, but he
could not see a cloud in the sky. Pyotr Mihalitch crossed the boundary
of his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often went
along this road and knew every bush, every hollow in it. What now in the
far distance looked in the dusk like a dark cliff was a red church; he
could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on
the gate and the calves that were always grazing in the church
enclosure. Three-quarters of a mile to the right of the church there was
a copse like a dark blur--it was Count Koltonovitch's. And beyond the
church Vlassitch's estate began.
From behind the church and the count's copse a huge black storm-cloud
was rising, and there were ashes of white lightning.
"Here it is!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch. "Lord help us, Lord help us!"
The horse was soon tired after its quick gallop, and Pyotr Mihalitch was
tired too. The storm-cloud looked at him angrily and seemed to advise
him to go home. He felt a little scared.
"I will prove to them they are wrong," he tried to reassure himself.
"They will say that it is free-love, individual freedom; but freedom
means self-control and not subjection to passion. It's not liberty but
license!"
He reached the count's big pond; it looked dark blue and frowning under
the cloud, and a smell of damp and slime rose from it. Near the dam, two
willows, one old and one young, drooped tenderly towards one another.
Pyotr Mihalitch and Vlassitch had been walking near this very spot only
a fortnight before, humming a students' song:
"'Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and
loveless.'"
A wretched song!
It was thundering as Pyotr Mihalitch rode through the copse, and the
trees were bending and rustling in the wind. He had to make haste. It
was only three-quarters of a mile through a meadow from the copse to
Vlassitch's house. Here there were old birch-trees on each side of the
road. They had the same melancholy and unhappy air as their owner
Vlassitch, and looked as tall and lanky as he. Big drops of rain
pattered on the birches and on the grass; the wind had suddenly dropped,
and there was a smell of wet earth and poplars. Before him he saw
Vlassitch's fence with a row of yellow acacias, which were tall and
lanky too; where the fence was broken he could see the neglected
orchard.
Pyotr Mihalitch was not thinking now of the horsewhip or of a slap in
the face, and did not know what he would do at Vlassitch's. He felt
nervous. He felt frightened on his own account and on his sister's, and
was terrified at the thought of seeing her. How would she behave with
her brother? What would they both talk about? And had he not better go
back before it was too late? As he made these reflections, he galloped
up the avenue of lime-trees to the house, rode round the big clumps of
lilacs, and suddenly saw Vlassitch.
Vlassitch, wearing a cotton shirt, and top-boots, bending forward, with
no hat on in the rain, was coming from the corner of the house to the
front door. He was followed by a workman with a hammer and a box of
nails. They must have been mending a shutter which had been banging in
the wind. Seeing Pyotr Mihalitch, Vlassitch stopped.
"It's you!" he said, smiling. "That's nice."
"Yes, I've come, as you see," said Pyotr Mihalitch, brushing the rain
off himself with both hands.
"Well, that's capital! I'm very glad," said Vlassitch, but he did not
hold out his hand: evidently he did not venture, but waited for Pyotr
Mihalitch to hold out his. "It will do the oats good," he said, looking
at the sky.
"Yes."
They went into the house in silence. To the right of the hall was a door
leading to another hall and then to the drawing-room, and on the left
was a little room which in winter was used by the steward. Pyotr
Mihalitch and Vlassitch went into this little room.
"Where were you caught in the rain?"
"Not far off, quite close to the house."
Pyotr Mihalitch sat down on the bed. He was glad of the noise of the
rain and the darkness of the room. It was better: it made it less
dreadful, and there was no need to see his companion's face. There was
no anger in his heart now, nothing but fear and vexation with himself.
He felt he had made a bad beginning, and that nothing would come of this
visit.
Both were silent for some time and affected to be listening to the rain.
"Thank you, Petrusha," Vlassitch began, clearing his throat. "I am very
grateful to you for coming. It's generous and noble of you. I understand
it, and, believe me, I appreciate it. Believe me."
He looked out of the window and went on, standing in the middle of the
room:
"Everything happened so secretly, as though we were concealing it all
from you. The feeling that you might be wounded and angry has been a
blot on our happiness all these days. But let me justify myself. We kept
it secret not because we did not trust you. To begin with, it all
happened suddenly, by a kind of inspiration; there was no time to
discuss it. Besides, it's such a private, delicate matter, and it was
awkward to bring a third person in, even some one as intimate as you.
Above all, in all this we reckoned on your generosity. You are a very
noble and generous person. I am infinitely grateful to you. If you ever
need my life, come and take it."
Vlassitch talked in a quiet, hollow bass, always on the same droning
note; he was evidently agitated. Pyotr Mihalitch felt it was his turn to
speak, and that to listen and keep silent would really mean playing the
part of a generous and noble simpleton, and that had not been his idea
in coming. He got up quickly and said, breathlessly in an undertone:
"Listen, Grigory. You know I liked you and could have desired no better
husband for my sister; but what has happened is awful! It's terrible to
think of it!"
"Why is it terrible?" asked Vlassitch, with a quiver in his voice. "It
would be terrible if we had done wrong, but that isn't so."
"Listen, Grigory. You know I have no prejudices; but, excuse my
frankness, to my mind you have both acted selfishly. Of course, I shan't
say so to my sister--it will distress her; but you ought to know: mother
is miserable beyond all description."
"Yes, that's sad," sighed Vlassitch. "We foresaw that, Petrusha, but
what could we have done? Because one's actions hurt other people, it
doesn't prove that they are wrong. What's to be done! Every important
step one takes is bound to distress somebody. If you went to fight for
freedom, that would distress your mother, too. What's to be done! Any
one who puts the peace of his family before everything has to renounce
the life of ideas completely."
There was a vivid flash of lightning at the window, and the lightning
seemed to change the course of Vlassitch's thoughts. He sat down beside
Pyotr Mihalitch and began saying what was utterly beside the point.
"I have such a reverence for your sister, Petrusha," he said. "When I
used to come and see you, I felt as though I were going to a holy
shrine, and I really did worship Zina. Now my reverence for her grows
every day. For me she is something higher than a wife--yes, higher!"
Vlassitch waved his hands. "She is my holy of holies. Since she is
living with me, I enter my house as though it were a temple. She is an
extraordinary, rare, most noble woman!"
"Well, he's off now!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch; he disliked the word
"woman."
"Why shouldn't you be married properly?" he asked. "How much does your
wife want for a divorce?"
"Seventy-five thousand."
"It's rather a lot. But if we were to negotiate with her?"
"She won't take a farthing less. She is an awful woman, brother," sighed
Vlassitch. "I've never talked to you about her before--it was unpleasant
to think of her; but now that the subject has come up, I'll tell you
about her. I married her on the impulse of the moment--a fine, honourable
impulse. An officer in command of a battalion of our regiment--if you
care to hear the details--had an affair with a girl of eighteen; that is,
to put it plainly, he seduced her, lived with her for two months, and
abandoned her. She was in an awful position, brother. She was ashamed to
go home to her parents; besides, they wouldn't have received her. Her
lover had abandoned her; there was nothing left for her but to go to the
barracks and sell herself. The other officers in the regiment were
indignant. They were by no means saints themselves, but the baseness of
it was so striking. Besides, no one in the regiment could endure the
man. And to spite him, you understand, the indignant lieutenants and
ensigns began getting up a subscription for the unfortunate girl. And
when we subalterns met together and began to subscribe five or ten
roubles each, I had a sudden inspiration. I felt it was an opportunity
to do something fine. I hastened to the girl and warmly expressed my
sympathy. And while I was on my way to her, and while I was talking to
her, I loved her fervently as a woman insulted and injured. Yes. . . .
Well, a week later I made her an offer. The colonel and my comrades
thought my marriage out of keeping with the dignity of an officer. That
roused me more than ever. I wrote a long letter, do you know, in which I
proved that my action ought to be inscribed in the annals of the
regiment in letters of gold, and so on. I sent the letter to my colonel
and copies to my comrades. Well, I was excited, and, of course, I could
not avoid being rude. I was asked to leave the regiment. I have a rough
copy of it put away somewhere; I'll give it to you to read sometime. It
was written with great feeling. You will see what lofty and noble
sentiments I was experiencing. I resigned my commission and came here
with my wife. My father had left a few debts, I had no money, and from
the first day my wife began making acquaintances, dressing herself
smartly, and playing cards, and I was obliged to mortgage the estate.
She led a bad life, you understand, and you are the only one of the
neighbours who hasn't been her lover. After two years I gave her all I
had to set me free and she went off to town. Yes. . . . And now I pay
her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman! There is a
fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider so that the
spider can't shake it off: the grub fastens upon the spider and drinks
its heart's blood. That was how this woman fastened upon me and sucks
the blood of my heart. She hates and despises me for being so stupid;
that is, for marrying a woman like her. My chivalry seems to her
despicable. 'A wise man cast me off,' she says, 'and a fool picked me
up.' To her thinking no one but a pitiful idiot could have behaved as I
did. And that is insufferably bitter to me, brother. Altogether, I may
say in parenthesis, fate has been hard upon me, very hard."
Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity what it
was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not young--he was
forty-one--lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with a long nose, and grey
hairs in his beard. He talked in a droning voice, had a sickly smile,
and waved his hands awkwardly as he talked. He had neither health, nor
pleasant, manly manners, nor savoir-faire, nor gaiety, and in all his
exterior there was something colourless and indefinite. He dressed
without taste, his surroundings were depressing, he did not care for
poetry or painting because "they have no answer to give to the questions
of the day" --that is, he did not understand them; music did not touch
him. He was a poor farmer.
His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was paying
twelve percent on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand on personal
securities as well. When the time came to pay the interest on the
mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked every one to lend him
money with as much agitation as though his house were on fire, and, at
the same time losing his head, he would sell the whole of his winter
store of fuel for five roubles and a stack of straw for three roubles,
and then have his garden fence or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat
his stoves. His meadows were ruined by pigs, the peasants' cattle
strayed in the undergrowth in his woods, and every year the old trees
were fewer and fewer: beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden
and kitchen-garden. He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even
ordinary capacity for living like other people. In practical life he was
a weak, naïve man, easy to deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with
good reason called him "simple."
He was a Liberal, and in the district was regarded as a "Red," but even
his progressiveness was a bore. There was no originality nor moving
power about his independent views: he was revolted, indignant, and
delighted always on the same note; it was always spiritless and
ineffective. Even in moments of strong enthusiasm he never raised his
head or stood upright. But the most tiresome thing of all was that he
managed to express even his best and finest ideas so that they seemed in
him commonplace and out of date. It reminded one of something old one
had read long ago, when slowly and with an air of profundity he would
begin discoursing of his noble, lofty moments, of his best years; or
when he went into raptures over the younger generation, which has always
been, and still is, in advance of society; or abused Russians for
donning their dressing-gowns at thirty and forgetting the principles of
their alma mater. If you stayed the night with him, he would put
Pissarev or Darwin on your bedroom table; if you said you had read it,
he would go and bring Dobrolubov.
In the district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked
upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it
made him profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which
he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his
life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style
of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible
hand-writing, but with great feeling, endless misunderstandings,
explanations, disappointments, then debts, a second mortgage, the
allowance to his wife, the monthly borrowing of money--and all this for
no benefit to any one, either himself or others. And in the present, as
in the past, he was still in a nervous flurry, on the lookout for heroic
actions, and poking his nose into other people's affairs; as before, at
every favourable opportunity there were long letters and copies,
wearisome, stereotyped conversations about the village community, or the
revival of handicrafts or the establishment of cheese
factories--conversations as like one another as though he had prepared
them, not in his living brain, but by some mechanical process. And
finally this scandal with Zina of which one could not see the end!
And meanwhile Zina was young--she was only twenty-two--good-looking,
elegant, gay; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a passionate
musician; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in books, and in
her own home she would not have put up with a room like this, smelling
of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced ideas, but in her free-
thinking one felt the overflow of energy, the vanity of a young, strong,
spirited girl, passionately eager to be better and more original than
others. . . . How had it happened that she had fallen in love with
Vlassitch?
"He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr
Mihalitch, "and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as I am.
. . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but,
then, I, too, love him in spite of everything."
Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man, but
narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings, and in
fact in his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or immediate; he
saw nothing but boredom and incapacity for life. His self-sacrifice and
all that Vlassitch himself called heroic actions or noble impulses
seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary blank shots which
consumed a great deal of powder. And Vlassitch's fanatical belief in the
extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness of his own way of thinking
struck him as naïve and even morbid; and the fact that Vlassitch all
his life had contrived to mix the trivial with the exalted, that he had
made a stupid marriage and looked upon it as an act of heroism, and then
had affairs with other women and regarded that as a triumph of some idea
or other was simply incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, Pyotr Mihalitch was fond of Vlassitch; he was conscious of
a sort of power in him, and for some reason he had never had the heart
to contradict him.
Vlassitch sat down quite close to him for a talk in the dark, to the
accompaniment of the rain, and he had cleared his throat as a prelude to
beginning on something lengthy, such as the history of his marriage. But
it was intolerable for Pyotr Mihalitch to listen to him; he was
tormented by the thought that he would see his sister directly.
"Yes, you've had bad luck," he said gently; "but, excuse me, we've been
wandering from the point. That's not what we are talking about."
"Yes, yes, quite so. Well, let us come back to the point," said
Vlassitch, and he stood up. "I tell you, Petrusha, our conscience is
clear. We are not married, but there is no need for me to prove to you
that our marriage is perfectly legitimate. You are as free in your ideas
as I am, and, happily, there can be no disagreement between us on that
point. As for our future, that ought not to alarm you. I'll work in the
sweat of my brow, I'll work day and night-- in fact, I will strain every
nerve to make Zina happy. Her life will be a splendid one! You may ask,
am I able to do it. I am, brother! When a man devotes every minute to
one thought, it's not difficult for him to attain his object. But let us
go to Zina; it will be a joy to her to see you."