“I’ll come to stay the night with you,” he said.
But that sounded as if he was making a concession, and it did not satisfy him. When they stopped at Koltovich’s grove to say goodbye, he bent down to Zina, touched her shoulder, and said:
“You’re right, Zina! You did well!”
And, so as not to say more and not to burst into tears, he whipped up his horse and galloped into the grove. Going into the darkness, he turned and saw Vlasich and Zina walking home down the road—he with big strides, and she beside him with a hurrying, skipping gait—and talking animatedly about something.
“I’m just an old woman,” Pyotr Mikhailych thought. “I went to resolve the question, but I’ve confused it even more. Well, God be with it all!”
His heart was heavy. When the grove ended, he rode on at a walk and then stopped the horse by the pond. He wanted to sit motionless and think. The moon was rising, and was reflected in a red column on the other side of the pond. There was a muted rumbling of thunder somewhere. Pyotr Mikhailych looked at the water without blinking and imagined his sister’s despair, the suffering paleness and dry eyes with which she would hide her humiliation from people. He imagined her pregnancy, their mother’s death, her funeral, Zina’s horror…The proud, superstitious old woman could not end otherwise than in death. Terrible pictures of the future loomed before him on the dark, smooth water, and among pale women’s figures he saw himself, fainthearted, weak, with a guilty face…
A hundred paces away, on the right bank of the pond, something dark stood motionless: was it a man or a tall stump? Pyotr Mikhailych remembered about the seminarian who had been killed and thrown into this pond.
“Olivier behaved inhumanly, but in any case he resolved the question, and I haven’t resolved anything, but only confused it,” he thought, peering at the dark figure, which looked like a phantom. “He said and did what he thought, while I say and do what I do not think; and I don’t even know for certain what I actually think…”
He rode up to the dark figure: it was a rotten old post left from some construction.
A strong scent of lily-of-the-valley and honeyed herbs came from the grove and Koltovich’s estate. Pyotr Mikhailych rode along the bank of the pond and gazed sorrowfully at the water, and, looking back on his life, was becoming convinced that up to then he had always said and done what he did not think, and people had repaid him in kind, and therefore the whole of life now looked to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and waterweeds were entangled. And it seemed to him that it could not be set right.
1892
FEAR
My Friend’s Story
DMITRI PETROVICH SILIN finished his studies at the university and entered government service in Petersburg, but at the age of thirty he abandoned the service and took up farming. His farming went rather well, but it still seemed to me that this was not the right place for him and that he would do well to go back to Petersburg. When, sunburnt, gray with dust, worn out from work, he met me at the gate or by the porch, and then at supper struggled with drowsiness, and his wife led him off to bed like a child, or when, overcoming his drowsiness, he began in his soft, soulful, as if pleading voice to explain his good thoughts, I saw in him not a farmer and not an agronomist, but only a weary man, and it was clear to me that he did not need any farming, but needed only for the day to be over—and thanks be to God.
I liked to visit him and, occasionally, to spend two or three days on his estate. I liked his house, and the park, and the big orchard, and the river, and his philosophizing, a bit languid and flowery, but clear. It must be that I also liked the man himself, though I cannot say so for certain, since to this day I’m unable to sort out my feelings of that time. He was an intelligent, kind, sincere man, and not boring, but I remember very well that when he confided his innermost secrets to me and called our relations friendship, it disturbed me unpleasantly, and I felt awkward. In his friendship towards me there was something troubling, burdensome, and I would sooner have preferred ordinary comradely relations with him.
The thing was that I had a great liking for his wife, Maria Sergeevna. I was not in love with her, but I liked her face, her eyes, her voice, her gait, I missed her when I had not seen her for a long time, and then my imagination pictured no one more eagerly than that beautiful and refined young woman. I had no definite intentions regarding her, nor did I dream of any, but for some reason each time she and I were left alone together, I remembered that her husband considered me his friend, and I felt awkward. When she played my favorite pieces on the piano or told me something interesting, I listened with pleasure, and at the same time for some reason thoughts crept into my head that she loved her husband, that he was my friend, and that she herself considered me his friend, and my mood would be spoiled, and I would become listless, awkward, and bored. She would notice this change and usually say:
“You’re bored without your friend. We must send to the fields for him.”
And when Dmitri Petrovich came, she would say:
“Well, your friend has come now. Be glad.”
So it went for a year and a half.
Once on a Sunday in July, Dmitri Petrovich and I, having nothing to do, went to the big village of Klushino to buy some things for supper. While we made the round of the shops, the sun went down and evening came on, an evening I will probably never forget all my life. We bought cheese that resembled soap and petrified sausage that smelled of tar, then went to the inn to ask if they had beer. Our coachman drove to the smithy to have the horses shod, and we told him we would wait for him by the church. We walked, talked, laughed at our purchases, and behind us, silently and with a mysterious look, like a sleuth, followed a man known to us in the district by the rather strange nickname of Forty Martyrs. This Forty Martyrs was none other than Gavrila Severov, or simply Gavryushka, who had worked for a short time as my valet and had been fired for drunkenness. He had also worked for Dmitri Petrovich and had been fired by him for exactly the same sin. He was a hardened drunkard, and in general his whole life was as drunken and wayward as himself. His father had been a priest and his mother a noblewoman, meaning that by birth he had belonged to the privileged class, but however much I studied his wasted, deferential, eternally sweaty face, his red, already graying beard, his pathetic, ragged suit jacket and loose red shirt, I simply could not find even a trace of what is known in our society as privilege. He called himself educated and told of how he had studied at a seminary, where he did not finish his courses because he was expelled for smoking, then sang in a bishop’s choir and lived for two years in a monastery, from which he had also been expelled, not for smoking this time, but for “the weakness.” He had gone on foot all over two provinces, had made some sort of petitions to the consistory and various offices, had been tried four times. Finally, having landed in our district, he had worked as a servant, a forester, a huntsman, a beadle, had married a wanton widow—a scullery maid—and had sunk definitively into a subservient life. He became so accustomed to its squalor and squabbles that he himself spoke of his privileged origins with a certain mistrust, as of some sort of myth. At the time I am describing, he hung around without work, passing himself off as a farrier and a huntsman, and his wife vanished somewhere without a trace.
From the inn we went to the church and sat down on the porch to wait for the coachman. Forty Martyrs stood at a distance and put his hand to his mouth, so that he could cough into it respectfully when necessary. It was already dark; there was a strong smell of evening dampness and the moon was preparing to rise. In the clear, starry sky there were only two clouds just over our heads: one big, the other smaller; solitary, like a mother and child, they ran one after the other in the direction where the evening glow was fading.