She ordered books and magazines and used to read them in her room. She also read at night in bed. When the clock in the hall struck two or three and her temples were beginning to ache from reading, she sat up in bed and thought: "What shall I do? Where shall I go?" Accursed, galling questions to which there were a num- ber of ready-made answers and in reality none at all.
Oh, how noble, how blessed, how beautiful it must be to serve the people to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them! But she, Vera, did not know the people. And how could she approach them? They were alien and uninteresting to her; she could not endure the bad smell of the peasant cabins, the tavern oaths, the un- washed children, the women's talk of illness. To walk over snowdrifts, to freeze, then to sit in the st:i.lng air of the cabin to teach children she did not love, no, she would rather die! And to teach the peasants' children while Aunt Dasha took in rent for the taverns and fined the peasants—what a farce it would have been! What a lot of talk there was of schools, of village libraries, of uni- versal education; but if all these engineers, industrialists, and ladies of her acquaintance had not been hypocrites and had really believed that schooling was necessary, they would not have paid the teachers fifteen rubles a month as they did now and would not have starved them. And all the talk about schools and ignorance— that was only to stifle the voice of conscience, since people were ashamed to fifteen or thirty thousand acres and to be indifferent to the lot of the people. Here the ladies were saying about Dr. Neshchapov that he was a kind man and that he had built a school at the iron works. Yes, he had built a school out of used bricks at a cost of some eight hundred rubles, and they chanted "Long life," to him when the building was consecrated, but there was no chance of his giving up his shares and it certainly never entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself, and that they too should be taught in universities, not in these wretched factory schools.
And Vera was angry at herself and at everyone else. She took up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down, plunged into thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that you must pass an ex- amination in Latin, besides she had an invincible aver- sion to corpses and illnesses. It would be fine to become a mechanic, a judge, a captain of a ship, a savant, to do something into which she could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; it would be fine to devote her life to something that would make her an interesting person, able to attract interesting people, to love, to have a real family of her own. But what was she to do? How was she to begin?
One Sunday in Lent her aunt came into her room early in the morning to get her umbrella. Vera was sit- ting up in bed clasping her head in her hands, thinking.
"You ought to drive to church, darling," said her aunt, "or people will think you are an unbeliever."
Vera made no answer.
"I see you are bored, child," said Aunt Dasha, sinking on her knees by the bedside; she adored Vera. "Tell me the truth, are you bored?"
"DreadfuUy."
"My beauty, my queen, I am your obedient slave, I wish you nothing but good and all happiness. Tell me, why don't you want to marry Neshchapov? Whom else do you want, my child? Forgive me, darling, but you can't be so finicky, we are not princes. . . . Time is passing, you are not seventeen. . • . And I don't un- derstand it! He loves you, idolizes you!"
"Oh, heavens," said Vera with vexation, 'how can I tell? He sits there and never opens his mouth."
"He is shy, darling. • • . He is afraid you wiU refuse him."
And when afterwards her aunt had left, Vera stood still in the middle of her room uncertain whether to dress or to go back to bed. The bed was hateful and if one looked out of the window, one saw bare trees, gray snow, hateful jackdaws, pigs that her grandfather would eat . . .
"Yes, really," she thought, "perhaps, I'd better get married!"
m
For two days Aunt Dasha went about with a tear- stained and heavily powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking at the icon. And it was im- possible to discover what was the trouble. At last she made up her mind, went in to Vera and said in an offhand way, "The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the tenant has defaulted on his rent. Allow me to pay it out of the fifteen thousand your papa left you."
Afterwards Aunt Dasha did nothing all day but make cherry jam in the garden. Alyona, her cheeks flushed with the heat, kept running to the garden, to the house, to the cellar. When Aunt Dasha was making jam, her face very serious as though she were performing a re- ligious rite, her sleeves displaying her small, strong, des- potic arms, and the servants running about incessantly, bustling about the jam which others would eat, there was always a feeling of torment in the air.
The garden smelled of hot cherries. The sun had set. The brazier had been carried away, but the pleasant sweetish smell still lingered in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new hired man, a young soldier on leave who had been passing through the neighborhood and who was, by her orders, making paths. He was cutting the sod with a spade and throw- ing it onto a wheelbarrow.
''Where were you stationed when you were in serv- ice?" Vera asked him.
"At Berdyansk."
"And where are you going now, home?"
"No, ma'am," answered the man, "I have no home."
"But where were you born and raised?"
"In the Province of Orel. Till I went into the army I lived with my mother and stepfather. My mother was a good housewife, and people looked up to her, and I was well-off. But while I was in the army I got a letter saying my mother died . . . and now I don't seem to care to go home. It's not my own father, so it's not my home."
"Is your father dead?"
"I don't know, ma'am. I was born out of wedlock."
At that moment Aunt Dasha appeared at the window and said: "Il ne faut pas parler aux gens. . • . Go into the kitchen, my good man," she said to the soldier; "you can tell your story there."
And then came supper, as it had the previous day and did every day, reading, a sleepless night and end- less thoughts about the same thing. At three o'clock it began to grow light; Alyona was already busy in the- corridor, and Vera was not asleep yet and was trying to read. She heard the creaking of the wheelbarrow: it was the new hired man at work in the garden. She seated herself at the open window with a book and, half-dozing, watched the soldier make paths for her, and that entertained her. The paths were even as a leather strap and level, and it was pleasant to imagine what they would be like when they were strewn with yellow sand.
Soon after five o'clock she saw her aunt come out of the house in a pink dressing-gown and curl-papers. She stood silently on the steps for about three minutes and then said to the soldier:
"Take your passport and go in peace. I can't have anyone in my house who is illegitimate."
Pain and anger wrenched Vera's heart. She was in- dignant with her aunt, she hated her; she was sick of her, she loathed her. But what was she to do? Cut her short? Be rude to her? But what would be the use? Suppose she were to stand up to her, get her out of the way, mado her harmless; suppose she were to prevent her grandfather from raising his stick to strik^—what would be the use? would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe. The vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony and dreariness of life generated a sense of helplessness; the situation seems hopeless, and one wants to do nothing—all is useless.