“My Dear Lecoq,—If you are still alive, well, and have not forgotten
your ever-drunken friend, do not delay a moment. Array yourself in
your clothing and fly to me. I only arrived last night and am already
dying from ennui. The impatience I feel to see you knows no bounds. I
myself wanted to drive over to see you and carry you off to my den,
but the heat has fettered all my limbs. I am sitting on one spot
fanning myself. Well, how are you? How is your clever Ivan Dem'yanych?
Are you still at war with your pedant, Polycarp? Come quickly and tell
me everything.—Your A. K.”
It was not necessary to look at the signature to recognize the
drunken, sprawling, ugly handwriting of my friend, Count Alexey
Karnéev. The shortness of the letter, its pretension to a certain
playfulness and vivacity proved that my friend, with his limited
capacities, must have torn up much notepaper before he was able to
compose this epistle.
The pronoun “which” was absent from this letter, and adverbs were
carefully avoided—both being grammatical forms that were seldom
achieved by the Count at a single sitting.
“What answer is there, sir?” the muzhik repeated.
At first I did not reply to this question, and every clean-minded man
in my place would have hesitated too. The Count was fond of me, and
quite sincerely obtruded his friendship on me. I, on my part, felt
nothing like friendship for the Count; I even disliked him. It would
therefore have been more honest to reject his friendship once for all
than to go to him and dissimulate. Besides, to go to the Count's meant
to plunge once more into the life my Polycarp had characterized as a
“pigsty,” which two years before during the Count's residence on his
estate and until he left for Petersburg had injured my good health and
had dried up my brain. That loose, unaccustomed life so full of show
and drunken madness, had not had time to shatter my constitution, but
it had made me notorious in the whole Government . . . I was
popular. . . .
My reason told me the whole truth, a blush of shame for the not
distant past suffused my face, my heart sank with fear that I would
not possess sufficient manliness to refuse to go to the Count's, but I
did not hesitate long. The struggle lasted not more than a minute.
“Give my compliments to the Count,” I said to his messenger, “and
thank him for thinking of me. . . . Tell him I am busy, and
that. . . . Tell him that I . . .”
And at the very moment my tongue was about to pronounce a decisive
“No,” I was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of dullness. . . . The
young man, full of life, strength and desires, who by the decrees of
fate had been cast into this forest village, was seized by a sensation
of ennui, of loneliness. . . .
I remembered the Count's gardens with the exuberant vegetation of
their cool conservatories, and the semi-darkness of the narrow,
neglected avenues. . . . Those avenues protected from the sun by
arches of the entwined branches of old limes know me well; they also
know the women who sought my love and semi-darkness. . . . I
remembered the luxurious drawing-room with the sweet indolence of its
velvet sofas, heavy curtains and thick carpets, soft as down, with the
laziness so loved by young healthy animals. . . . There recurred to my
mind my drunken audacity that knew no limits to its boundless satanic
pride, and contempt of life. My large body wearied by sleep again
longed for movement. . . .
“Tell him I'll come!”
The muzhik bowed and retired.
“If I'd known, I wouldn't have let that devil in!” Polycarp grumbled,
quickly turning over the pages of his book in an objectless manner.
“Put that book away and go and saddle Zorka,” I said. “Look sharp!”
“Look sharp! Oh, of course, certainly. . . . I'm just going to rush
off. . . . It would be all right to go on business, but he'll go to
break the devil's horns!”
This was said in an undertone, but loud enough for me to hear it.
Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before
me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have
heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest arms I could use
in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous manner of allowing his
venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away
from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the
ear or a flood of vituperation. . . . When Polycarp had gone into the
yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been
prevented from reading. It was _The Count of Monte Cristo_, Dumas'
terrible romance. . . . My civilized fool read everything, beginning
with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste
Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books
that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed
matter he only approved of terrible, strongly exciting novels with
“celebrated personages,” poison and subterranean passages; all the
rest he dubbed “nonsense.” I shall have again to recur to his reading,
now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my
Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the
Count's estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the
sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless,
although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake. . . . On my
right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was
caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless,
my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara. “If there could only be a
storm!” I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.
The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the
flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that
broke the grave-like silence of the motionless giant. The sun looked
at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the
whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the opposite
distant banks. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received
light from the lake and not from the sun.
The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the
lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden
themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets
and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All
around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick
cloud of littoral mosquitoes, and far away on the lake, scarcely
moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our
fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.