Autumn began to glow with yellow fires, and the sky to weep with heavy
rain, and the bungalows became quickly empty, and silent, as though the
incessant rain and wind had extinguished them one by one, like candles.
“What are we to do with Snapper?” asked Lelya, with hesitation. She was
sitting embracing her knees and looking sorrowfully out of the window,
down which were rolling glistening drops of rain.
“What a position you’re in, Lelya; that’s not the way to sit!” said her
mother, and added: “Snapper must be left behind, poor fellow.”
“That’s—a—pity,” said Lelya lingeringly.
“But what can one do? We have no courtyard at home, and we can’t keep
him in the house, that you must very well understand.”
“It’s—a—pity,” repeated Lelya, ready to cry. Her dark brows were
raised, like a swallow’s wings, and her pretty little nose puckered
piteously, when her mother said:
“The Dogayevs offered me a puppy some time ago. They say that it is
very well bred, and ready trained. Do you see? But this is only a
yard-dog.”
“A—pity,” repeated Lelya, but she did not cry.
Once, more strangers arrived, and wagons creaked, and the floors
groaned beneath heavy footsteps, but there was less talk, and no
laughter was heard at all. Terrified by the strange people, and dimly
prescient of calamity, Snapper fled to the extreme end of the garden,
and thence through the thinning bushes gazed unceasingly at that corner
of the verandah which was open to his view, and at the figures in red
shirts which were moving about on it.
“You there! my poor Snapper,” said Lelya as she came out. She was
already dressed for the journey in the same cinnamon skirt, out of
which Snapper had torn a piece, and a black jacket. “Come along!”
And they went out into the road. The rain kept coming and going, and
the whole expanse between the blackened earth and the sky was full of
clubbed, swiftly-moving clouds. From below it could be seen how heavy
they were, impenetrable to the light on account of the water which
saturated them, and how weary the sun must be behind that solid wall.
To the left of the road stretched the darkened stubble field, and only
on the near hummocky horizon short uneven trees and shrubs appeared in
lonesome patches. In front, not far off, was the barrier, and near it a
wine-shop with red iron roof, and by it was a group of people teasing
the village idiot Ilyusha.
“Give us a ha’penny,” snuffled the idiot in a drawling voice, and evil,
jeering voices replied all together:
“Will you chop up some wood?”
Ilyusha reviled foully and cynically, and the others laughed without
mirth. A sunray broke through, yellow and anaemic, as though the sun
were hopelessly sick; and the foggy Autumn distance became wider, and
more melancholy.
“I’m sorry, Snapper!” Lelya gently let fall the words, and went back
without looking round. It was not till she reached the station that she
remembered that she had not said good-bye to Snapper.
Snapper long followed the track of the people as they went away, he ran
as far as the station, and wet through and muddy, returned to the
bungalow. There he performed one more new trick, which no one, however,
was there to see. For the first time he went on to the verandah, stood
on his hind legs, looked in at the glass door, and even scratched at
it. But the rooms were all empty, and no one answered him.
A violent rain poured down, and on all sides the darkness of the long
Autumn night began to close in. Quickly and dully it filled the empty
bungalow: noiselessly it crept out from the shrubs and in company with
the rain, poured down from the uninviting sky. On the verandah, from
which the awning had been taken away, and which for that reason looked
like a broad and unknown waste, the light had long been in conflict
with the darkness, and mournfully illumined the marks of dirty feet;
but soon it gave in.
Night had come on.
When there was no longer any doubt that the night was upon him, the dog
began to howl in loud complaint. With a note resonant, and sharp as
despair, that howl broke into the monotonous, sullenly persistent sound
of the rain, rending the darkness, and then dying down was carried over
the dark naked fields.
The dog howled—regularly, persistently, desperately, soberly—and to any
one who heard that howling it seemed as though the impenetrable dark
night itself were groaning and longing for the light, and he would wish
himself with his wife by his warm fireside.
The dog howled.