'It's people who are most precious in life!' thoughtOgnyov, feeling very moved, as he strode along the path towards the gate. 'People!'
In the garden it was warm and quiet. The smell of still-flowering tobacco-plants, heliotrope and mignonette wafted to him from the beds. The spaces between the shrubs and tree-trunks were filled with a soft, airy mist suffused with moonlight, and Ognyov would long remember how wraith-like wisps stole one by one, slowly but per- ceptibly, across the pathways. The moon stood high above the garden, while below it translucent patchesof mist raced towards the cast. The whole world seemed to be made up of nothing but black silhouettes and floating white shapes, and Ognyov, who was seeinga misty moonlit August night for practically the first time in his life, felt that he was looking not at nature but at some stage set on which incompetent pyrotechnists, attcmpung to illuminate the garden with white Bengal lights, had stationed themselves behind the shrubs and succeeded in filling the air not only with light but with white smoke as well.
As Ognyov was approaching the garden gate, a dark shadow detached itself from the low paling fence and came towards him.
'Vera Gavrilovna !' he exclaimed joyfully. 'Sothat'swhere you are! I've been looking for you everywhere, I wanted to say farewell ... I'm just off!'
'So soon? But it's only eleven o'clock.'
'No, I must be going. It's five vems there and I still have to pack. Got to be up early tomorrow . . .'
Standing in front of Ognyov was Kuznetsov's daughter Vera, a girl of rwenry-one, as usual sad-looking, casually dressed and appealing. Girls who dream to themselves a lot and spend days on end lying around lazily reading everything that comes their way, who are bored and feel sad, generally do dress casually. This touch of infor- mality lends an especial charm to those of them who are endowed with good taste and an instinct for beauty. Ognyov, at any rate, when he came to recall later how pretty Verochka was, could not picture her without the loose-fitting blouse, creased into deep folds at the waist but still not touching her figure, or the curl that had worked itself loose from her piled-up hair and was hanging over her brow, or the red knitted shawl with the shaggy bobbles round the edges, which in the evenings hung dejectedly on Verochka's shoulder like a flag in calm weather, and during the day lay crumpled up in the hall next to the men's caps or on a chest in the dining-room, where it was uncere^niously slept on by the old cat. The shawl and the creases in the blouse conveyed an air of relaxation and placid domesticity. Perhaps because Ognyov liked Vera, for him every button and frill that she wore held something warm, cosy and good, a naivery and poetry that are so conspicuously absent in women who are artificial, devoid of a feeling for beauty, and essentially cold.
Verochka had a good figure, a straight profile and attractive curly hair. Ognyov, who had not seen many women in his lifetime, thought her beautiful.
'So I'm leaving!' he said, bidding her farewell by the gate. 'Think kindly of me, won't you; and thank you for everything!'
In the same chanting voice in which he had talked to the old man, blinking and twitching his shoulders as before, he began to thank Vera for being so kind, hospitable and welcoming.
'I mentioned you every time I wrote home to my mother,' he said. 'If everyone in the world was like you and your papa, we'd be living in a seventh heaven! You're such a marvellous crowd here! So simple, warm-hearted and sincere.'
'Where are you off to now?' asked Vera.
'First to see my mother in Oryol and spend a couple ofweeks with her, then back to work in Petersburg.'
'And after that?'
'After that? I'llbe working right through the winter, then off again in the spring to the provinces somewhere to collect material. Well then, all the best, long life to you ... think kindly of me. We shan't meet again.'
Ognyov bent over and kissed Verochka's hand. Then, at a loss for words, he straightened his cape, took a better grip on his bundle of books, and after a further pause said:
'What a lot of mist's collected!'
'Yes. Are you sure you haven't left anything?'
'Left anything? I don't think so . . .'
Ognyov stood there in silence for several seconds, then turned awkwardly towards the garden gate and went out.
'Just a moment,' said Vera, running after him, Tll come with you as far as our wood.'
They set off along the track. There were no trees to shut out the view now, so one could see the sky and the fardistance.The whole of nature was veiled in a gauzy, transparent haze, which made its beauty all the more appealing. The thicker, whiter mist, lying unevenly round the ricks and bushes or floating in wisps across the track, hugged the ground, as if trying not to obscure the view. Through the haze the whole of the track could be seen as far as the wood, with dark ditches on either side in which grew small bushes that hindered the passage of the floating wisps. The dark strip of the
Kuznetsovs' wood began half a verst from the gate.
'Why's she come with me? I'll have to see her back,' thought Ognyov, but glancing at Vera's profile, he smiled affectionately and said:
'One doesn't feel like leavmg on a night like this! It's a real romantic night, what with the moon, the siltnce and all the trim- mings. Shall I tell you something, Vera Gavrilovna? I'm twenty-nine and I've never had a single romance. Not a single romantic episode in my whole hfe - so I only know about such things as garden trysts, avenues of sighs, and kisses at second-hand. It's not normal! When you're sitting in a room in town, you're not aware you've missed out on something, but here in the countryside you become very con- scious of it ... and it's rather hurtful!'
'And why are you like this?'
'I don't know. Probably because I've never had the time, but maybe because I've simply not come across the kind of women who . . . The fact is, I don't have many friends and I never go out.'
For about three hundred paces the young people walked along in silence. Ognyov kept glancing at Verochka's bare head and shawl, and one after another the memories of days in spring and summer came flooding back to him. Far from his dismal Petersburg room, revelling in nature, the kind attentions of good people and his favourite work, he had not been aware ofone day following the next, how first the nightingale, then the quail, and a little later the corn- crake, fell silent, presaging the end of summer . . . Time had sped by unnoticed, so life must have been easy and good ... He began recallingaloud how unwillingly he had come here to N. district at the end of April, a young man of modest means unused to travel and to people, and how he was expecting to find boredom, loneliness and an indifference to statistics, which in his opinion now occupied the foremost position among the sciences. Arriving one April morning at the little district town of N., he had put up at the inn run by the Old Believer Ryabukhin, where for twenty kopecks a day he was given a clean, bright room with the condition that he smoke out of doors. After resting and finding out who was the Chairman of the Rural Council, he had immediately set offon foot to see Gavriil Petrovich. The route had taken him through four versts of luxuriant meadows and young woodland. Skylarks hovered beneath the very clouds, filling the air with silvery notes, while rooks sailed across the green- sprouting fields, flapping their wings solemnly and sedately.