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.
MY LIFE THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL I
THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep you out of regard for your
worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago." I
replied to him: "You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming
that I am capable of flying." And then I heard him say: "Take that
gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during the years
I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the great
mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have served in
various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as alike as one
drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or
stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.
When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low arm-chair
with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a shade of dark blue
where it was shaved (he looked like an old Catholic organist), expressed
meekness and resignation. Without responding to my greeting or opening
his eyes, he said:
"If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would have been
a source of continual distress to her. I see the Divine Providence in
her premature death. I beg you, unhappy boy," he continued, opening his
eyes, "tell me: what am I to do with you?"