A Drama on the Hunt (The Shooting Party), Anton Chekhov: Read FREE Full Text Online (English Translation)

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You can now read the full text for free of one of the most intriguing early works by the iconic author Anton Chekhov — A Drama on the Hunt (also known as The Shooting Party). This essential piece of reflective fiction Russian literature is available for online reading here in a high-quality English translation.

Dive into this captivating masterpiece and experience Chekhov’s rare foray into the sensational murder mystery genre, woven with his signature psychological depth and observation of provincial Russian society. Start reading instantly without any download required. This exclusive free access is your gateway to the world of great Russian authors and their works.

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First published in 1884 – 1885

by newspaper “Novosti Dnya”

This book is in the public domain

Reprint by Publishing House №10

Publication date July 12, 2025

Translation from Russian

216 Pages, Font 12 pt, Bookman Old Style

Electronic edition, File size 1.9 MB

Cover design, Translate by Yulia Basharova

Copyright© Yulia Basharova 2025. All rights reserved

 

Table of Contents

A True Incident 8

Chapter I 18

Chapter II 33

Chapter III 70

Chapter IV. 91

Chapter V. 124

Chapter VI 147

Chapter VII 181

Chapter VIII 206

Chapter IX. 248

Chapter X. 274

 

A True Incident

 

One April afternoon in 1880, Andrei, the doorman, entered my study and mysteriously informed me that some gentleman had appeared at the editorial office and was urgently requesting an audience with the editor.

“He must be a civil servant, sir,” Andrei added, “with a cockade…”

“Ask him to come another time,” I said. “I’m busy today. Tell him the editor only sees visitors on Saturdays.”

“He came the day before yesterday too, asking for you. Says it’s an important matter. He’s pleading, almost crying. Says he’s not free on Saturday… Shall I let him in?”

I sighed, put down my pen, and began to wait for the gentleman with the cockade. Aspiring writers, and indeed all people uninitiated into editorial secrets, who feel a sacred tremor at the word “editorial office,” tend to make you wait for quite some time. After the editor’s “show him in,” they cough for a long time, blow their noses for a long time, slowly open the door, enter even more slowly, and thus consume a good deal of time. The gentleman with the cockade, however, didn’t keep me waiting. No sooner had Andrei closed the door than I saw in my study a tall, broad-shouldered man, holding a paper parcel in one hand and a cap with a cockade in the other.

The man who had so persistently sought an audience with me plays a very prominent role in my story. It is necessary to describe his appearance.

As I’ve already said, he is tall, broad-shouldered, and stout, like a good working horse. His entire body exudes health and strength. His face is rosy, his hands large, his chest broad and muscular, his hair thick, like a healthy boy’s. He’s approaching forty. He’s dressed tastefully and in the latest fashion, in a brand-new, recently tailored tweed suit. On his chest is a large gold chain with charms, and on his little finger, a diamond ring glitters with tiny, bright stars. But most importantly, and what is so vital for any hero of a novel or story, however insignificant, he is extraordinarily handsome. I am neither a woman nor an artist. I understand little of male beauty, but the gentleman with the cockade made an impression on me with his appearance. His large, muscular face has remained forever in my memory. On this face, you will see a truly Grecian nose with a slight hump, thin lips, and fine blue eyes, in which kindness shines, and something else that is difficult to find a suitable name for. This “something” can be noticed in the eyes of small animals when they are longing or when they are in pain. Something pleading, childlike, enduring meekly… Cunning and very intelligent people do not have such eyes.

His whole face radiates simplicity, a broad, simple nature, truth… If it’s not a lie that the face is the mirror of the soul, then on the first day of my meeting with the gentleman with the cockade, I could have given my word of honor that he was incapable of lying. I could even have wagered on it.

Whether I would have lost the wager or not, the reader will see later.

His chestnut hair and beard are thick and soft as silk. They say that soft hair is a sign of a soft, gentle, “silken” soul… Criminals and evil, stubborn characters mostly have coarse hair. Whether this is true or not, the reader will again see later… Neither his facial expression nor his beard—nothing in the gentleman with the cockade is as soft and gentle as the movements of his large, heavy body. In these movements, breeding, lightness, grace, and even—forgive the expression—a certain femininity are evident. My hero would not need much effort to bend a horseshoe or flatten a sardine tin in his fist, yet none of his movements betray his physical strength. He takes hold of a doorknob or a hat as if it were a butterfly: gently, carefully, lightly touching with his fingers. His steps are silent, his handshakes weak. Looking at him, you forget that he is mighty as Goliath, that with one hand he can lift what five editorial Andreis could not. Looking at his light movements, it’s hard to believe that he is strong and heavy. Spencer might have called him a model of grace.

Entering my study, he became flustered. His delicate, sensitive nature was probably shocked by my frowning, displeased look.

“Forgive me, for God’s sake!” he began in a soft, rich baritone. “I’m bursting in on you at an inconvenient time and making you make an exception for me. You are so busy! But you see, Mr. Editor, the thing is: I’m leaving for Odessa tomorrow on a very important matter… If I had the opportunity to postpone this trip until Saturday, believe me, I wouldn’t have asked you to make an exception for me. I bow to rules, because I love order…”

“How much he talks, though!” I thought, reaching for my pen and thereby indicating that I had no time. (Visitors had become terribly tiresome to me then!)

“I’ll only take one minute of your time!” my hero continued in an apologetic voice. “But first of all, allow me to introduce myself… Bachelor of Laws Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev, former investigative magistrate… I do not have the honor of belonging to the writing fraternity, but, nevertheless, I have come to you with purely literary aims. Before you stands one who wishes to join the ranks of beginners, despite being almost forty. But better late than never.”

“Very glad… How can I be of service?”

The aspiring writer sat down and continued, looking at the floor with his pleading eyes:

“I’ve brought you a small story that I’d like to publish in your newspaper. I’ll tell you frankly, Mr. Editor: I wrote my story not for authorial fame or for sweet sounds… I’m too old for those good things. I’m embarking on the path of authorship simply for mercenary motives… I want to earn something… I currently have absolutely no occupation. I was, you see, an investigative magistrate in S— district, served for over five years, but gained neither capital nor preserved my innocence…”

Kamyshev looked up at me with his kind eyes and chuckled softly.

“A tiresome service… I served and served, then threw up my hands and quit. I have no occupation now, almost nothing to eat… And if you, overlooking its merits, publish my story, you will do me more than a favor… You will help me… A newspaper is not a charity, not a hospice… I know that, but… please, be so kind…”

“You’re lying!” I thought.

The charms and the ring on his little finger didn’t quite fit with writing for a crust of bread, and a barely noticeable cloud, perceptible only to an experienced eye, passed over Kamyshev’s face—the kind of cloud seen only on the faces of people who rarely lie.

“What’s the plot of your story?” I asked.

“The plot… How can I tell you? The plot isn’t new… Love, murder… Well, you’ll read it, you’ll see… ‘From the Notes of an Investigative Magistrate’…”

I probably winced, because Kamyshev blinked in embarrassment, fidgeted, and said quickly:

“My story is written in the style of former investigative magistrates, but… in it you will find truth, reality… Everything depicted in it, everything from cover to cover, happened before my very eyes… I was both an eyewitness and even a participant.”

“It’s not about truth… You don’t necessarily need to see something to describe it… That’s not important. The point is, our poor public has long since grown weary of Gaboriau and Shklyarevsky. They’re tired of all these mysterious murders, the cunning machinations of detectives, and the extraordinary resourcefulness of interrogating magistrates. The public, of course, varies, but I’m talking about the public that reads my newspaper. What’s your story called?”

“Drama on the Hunt.”

“Hmm… Not serious, you know… And, frankly speaking, I’ve accumulated such a mass of material that it’s absolutely impossible to accept new works, even if they have undeniable merits…”

“But please, do accept my work… You say it’s not serious, but… it’s difficult to judge a work without seeing it… And can you really not allow that investigative magistrates can also write seriously?”

Kamyshev stammered all this, twirling a pencil between his fingers and looking at his feet. He finished by becoming greatly embarrassed and blinking. I felt sorry for him.

“Alright, leave it,” I said. “Only I can’t promise you that your story will be read anytime soon. You’ll have to wait…”

“Long?”

“I don’t know… Come back in, say, two or three months…”

“Quite long… But I dare not insist… Let it be as you wish…”

Kamyshev stood up and picked up his cap.

“Thank you for the audience,” he said. “I’ll go home now and feed myself on hopes. Three months of hopes! But, I’ve probably tired you out. I have the honor to bow!”

“Just one moment,” I said, flipping through his thick notebook, filled with small handwriting. “You’re writing here in the first person… So, by ‘investigative magistrate’ here, you mean yourself?”

“Yes, but under a different surname. My role in this story is somewhat scandalous… It’s awkward to use my own name… So, in three months?”

“Yes, probably not sooner…”

“Be well!”

The former investigative magistrate bowed gallantly, carefully took hold of the doorknob, and disappeared, leaving his work on my table. I took the notebook and put it in my desk.

The handsome Kamyshev’s story rested in my desk for two months. One day, leaving the editorial office for my dacha, I remembered it and took it with me.

Sitting in the train car, I opened the notebook and began to read from the middle. The middle interested me. That same evening, despite my lack of leisure, I read the entire story from beginning to the word “The End,” written in a sprawling hand. That night, I read the story once more, and at dawn, I walked back and forth on the terrace, rubbing my temples as if I wanted to wipe away a new, suddenly appearing, tormenting thought… And the thought was indeed tormenting, unbearably sharp… It seemed to me that I, neither an investigative magistrate nor, even less so, a professional psychologist, had discovered a terrible secret about a person, a secret that was none of my business… I walked the terrace, trying to convince myself not to believe my discovery…

Kamyshev’s story did not make it into my newspaper for the reasons stated at the end of my conversation with the reader. I will meet the reader once more. For now, as I take my leave, I offer Kamyshev’s story for their reading.

This story is nothing out of the ordinary. It has many lengthy passages, quite a few rough edges… The author has a weakness for effects and strong phrases… It’s clear that he’s writing for the first time in his life, with an unaccustomed, untrained hand… But still, his story reads easily. There is a plot, and a meaning too, and, most importantly, it is original, very characteristic, and what is called sui generis (of its own kind, Latin). It also has some literary merits. It’s worth reading… Here it is.

 

 

 

 

 

From the Notes of an

Investigative Magistrate

Chapter I

 

“The husband killed his wife! Oh, how foolish you are! Give me some sugar at last!”

This shout woke me up. I stretched and felt a heaviness, a malaise, in all my limbs… One can get a limb numb, but this time it felt as if my entire body, from head to toe, was numb. An afternoon nap in a stuffy, parching atmosphere, amidst the buzzing of flies and mosquitoes, has a debilitating, not invigorating, effect. Broken and drenched in sweat, I got up and went to the window. It was six o’clock in the evening. The sun was still high and burned with the same intensity as three hours earlier. There was still a long time until sunset and coolness.

“The husband killed his wife!”

“Stop lying, Ivan Demianych!” I said, flicking Ivan Demianych’s nose lightly. “Husbands kill wives only in novels and in the tropics, where African passions boil, my dear. For us, horrors like burglaries or living under false pretenses are quite enough.”

“Burglaries…” Ivan Demianych drawled through his hooked nose. “Oh, how foolish you are!”

“But what can one do, my dear? How are we, humans, to blame that our brains have limits? However, Ivan Demianych, it’s not a sin to be a fool in such a temperature. You are clever, but I bet even your brains have turned soggy and stupid from this heat.”

My parrot is not called “Polly” or any other bird name, but Ivan Demianych. He got this name entirely by chance. One day, my servant Polikarp, while cleaning his cage, suddenly made a discovery without which my noble bird would still be called “Polly”… The lazy fellow was suddenly struck by the thought that my parrot’s nose was very similar to the nose of our village shopkeeper, Ivan Demianych, and from that moment on, the parrot was forever stuck with the name and patronymic of the long-nosed shopkeeper. With Polikarp’s light hand, the entire village christened my strange bird Ivan Demianych. By Polikarp’s will, the bird became a “person,” and the shopkeeper lost his real nickname: he would, until the end of his days, be referred to by the villagers as “the investigator’s parrot.”

I bought Ivan Demianych from the mother of my predecessor, the judicial investigator Pospelov, who had died shortly before my appointment. I bought him along with antique oak furniture, kitchen clutter, and all the household effects left by the deceased. My walls are still adorned with photographs of his relatives, and above my bed still hangs a portrait of the owner himself. The deceased, a thin, sinewy man with a reddish mustache and a large lower lip, sits, eyes bulging, in a faded walnut frame and never takes his eyes off me the entire time I lie on his bed… I haven’t removed a single photograph from the walls; in short—I left the apartment exactly as I found it. I am too lazy to bother with my own comfort, and I don’t mind not only the dead hanging on my walls, but even the living, if the latter so desire. (I beg the reader’s pardon for such expressions. Kamyshev’s unfortunate novella is rich with them, and if I did not cross them out, it was only because I deemed it necessary, in the interest of characterizing the author, to print his novella in toto (without omissions, Latin). — A. Ch.)

Ivan Demianych was as stuffy as I was. He ruffled his feathers, spread his wings, and loudly shouted phrases he had learned from my predecessor Pospelov and Polikarp. To occupy my afternoon leisure, I sat in front of the cage and observed the parrot’s movements, diligently searching for and not finding a way out of the torment caused by the stuffiness and the insects inhabiting his feathers… The poor creature seemed very unhappy…

“And at what time do they wake up?” I heard a bass voice from the anteroom…

“It varies!” Polikarp’s voice replied. “Sometimes he wakes at five, and sometimes he sleeps until morning… You know, there’s nothing to do…”

“Are you their valet?”

“A servant. Now, don’t bother me, be quiet… Can’t you see I’m reading?”

I peered into the anteroom. There, on a large red chest, lay my Polikarp, as usual, reading some book. His sleepy, never-blinking eyes fixed on the book, he moved his lips and frowned. Apparently, the presence of a stranger, a tall, bearded peasant, standing in front of the chest and vainly trying to strike up a conversation, irritated him. At my appearance, the peasant took a step back from the chest and stood at attention like a soldier. Polikarp made a displeased face and, without taking his eyes off the book, slightly raised himself.

“What do you want?” I asked the peasant.

“I’m from the Count, Your Honor. The Count sends his regards and asked you to come to him at once, sir…”

“Has the Count arrived?” I was surprised.

“Precisely so, Your Honor… Arrived last night… Here’s the letter, please…”

“The devils brought him again!” my Polikarp grumbled. “Two summers we lived peacefully without him, and now he’ll start a pigsty in the district again. There’ll be no end to the shame.”

“Be quiet, no one asked you!”

“No need to ask me… I’ll tell you myself. You’ll be coming back from him drunk and in a mess again, swimming in the lake, just as you are, in full costume… Then clean it! You won’t clean it in three days!”

“What is the Count doing now?” I asked the peasant…

“He was just sitting down to dinner when they sent me to you… Before dinner, they were fishing in the bathhouse, sir… How shall I answer?”

I opened the letter and read the following:

“My dear Lecoq! If you are still alive, well, and haven’t forgotten your most drunken friend, then, without a moment’s delay, put on your clothes and rush to me. I only arrived last night, but I am already dying of boredom. The impatience with which I await you knows no bounds. I wanted to come for you myself and take you to my den, but the heat has bound all my limbs. I sit in one place and fan myself. Well, how are you living? How is your cleverest Ivan Demianych? Still warring with your pedant Polikarp? Come quickly and tell me.

Your A. K.”

 

One didn’t need to look at the signature to recognize the large, ugly handwriting of my friend, Count Aleksey Korneev, rarely writing when drunk. The brevity of the letter, its attempt at playfulness and vivacity, indicated that my simple-minded friend had torn up a lot of stationery before he managed to compose this letter.

The letter lacked the pronoun “which” and carefully avoided participles — both of which the Count rarely managed in one sitting.

“How shall I answer?” the peasant repeated.

I didn’t answer that question immediately, and any fastidious person would have hesitated in my place. The Count loved me and sincerely pushed himself upon me as a friend, but I felt nothing akin to friendship for him and didn’t even like him; it would therefore have been more honest to simply refuse his friendship once and for all, rather than go to him and be hypocritical. Besides, going to the Count meant immersing myself once again in a life that my Polikarp called a “pigsty” and which, two years ago, throughout the Count’s stay before his departure for St. Petersburg, undermined my robust health and dried up my brain. This dissolute, unusual life, full of effects and drunken frenzy, did not manage to undermine my body, but it did make me known throughout the entire province… I was popular…

Reason told me the absolute truth, the blush of shame for the recent past spread across my face, my heart contracted with fear at the mere thought that I wouldn’t have the courage to refuse the trip to the Count, but I didn’t hesitate for long. The struggle lasted no more than a minute.

“Bow to the Count,” I told the messenger, “and thank him for remembering me… Tell him I’m busy and that… Tell him that I…”

And at the very moment when a decisive “no” was about to escape my tongue, a heavy feeling suddenly overwhelmed me… A young man, full of life, strength, and desires, cast by fate into a rural wilderness, was seized by a feeling of longing, of loneliness…

I remembered the Count’s garden with the luxury of its cool conservatories and the twilight of its narrow, abandoned alleys… These alleys, protected from the sun by a canopy of green, intertwining branches of old lime trees, know me… They also know the women who sought my love and the twilight… I remembered the luxurious living room, with the sweet languor of its velvet sofas, heavy curtains and carpets, soft as down, with the languor that young, healthy animals so love… My drunken daring came to mind, knowing no bounds in its breadth, satanic pride, and contempt for life. And my large body, tired from sleep, again craved movement…

“Tell him I’ll come!”

The peasant bowed and left.

“If I had known, I wouldn’t have let him in, the devil!” Polikarp grumbled, quickly and aimlessly flipping through the book.

“Leave the book and go saddle Zorka!” I said sternly. “Quickly!”

“Quickly… Indeed, without fail… So I’ll just go and run… If only it were for a real purpose, but no, he’s going to break the devil’s horns!”

This was said in a half-whisper, but loud enough for me to hear. The lackey, having whispered his impudence, stood at attention before me and, with a contemptuous smirk, awaited my angry outburst, but I pretended not to hear his words. My silence is the best and sharpest weapon in battles with Polikarp. This contemptuous disregard of his poisonous words disarms him and deprives him of ground. It acts as a punishment more effectively than a slap on the back of the head or a stream of curses… When Polikarp went out to the yard to saddle Zorka, I looked into the book I had interrupted him from reading… It was “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a terrifying novel by Dumas… My civilized fool reads everything, from pub signs to Auguste Comte, who lies in my chest with other unread, abandoned books of mine; but out of the entire mass of printed and written material, he recognizes only terrible, powerfully affecting novels with noble “gentlemen,” poisons, and underground passages; everything else he has christened “nonsense.” I will have to speak of his reading in the future, but now — to ride! A quarter of an hour later, the hooves of my Zorka were already raising dust on the road from the village to the Count’s estate. The sun was close to its rest, but the heat and stuffiness were still palpable… The heated air was motionless and dry, despite the fact that my road lay along the bank of a huge lake… To my right, I saw the mass of water, to my left, the young, spring foliage of the oak forest caressed my gaze, and meanwhile, my cheeks experienced the Sahara.

“There’s going to be a storm!” I thought, dreaming of a good, cold downpour…

The lake slept quietly. It did not greet the flight of my Zorka with a single sound, and only the squeak of a young sandpiper disturbed the deathly silence of the motionless giant. The sun looked into it as into a large mirror, and flooded its entire expanse, from my road to the distant shore, with blinding light. To my blinded eyes, it seemed that nature took its light not from the sun, but from the lake.

The heat had lulled to sleep the life with which the lake and its green banks were so rich… Birds hid, fish did not splash, field crickets and grasshoppers quietly waited for the coolness. All around was a desert. Only occasionally did my Zorka carry me into a thick cloud of coastal mosquitoes, and in the distance on the lake, three black boats of old Mikhey, our fisherman who had leased the entire lake, barely stirred.

I was riding not in a straight line, but along the circumference of the round lake. One could only travel in a straight line by boat; those traveling by land made a large circle and lost about eight versts. Throughout the journey, looking at the lake, I saw the opposite clay bank, above which a strip of flowering cherry orchard gleamed white, and from behind the cherries rose the Count’s threshing floor, dotted with multi-colored pigeons, and the small white bell tower of the Count’s church. At the clay bank stood a bathhouse, covered with sailcloth; sheets were drying on the railings. I saw all this, and it seemed to my eyes that I was separated from my friend the Count by some verst, and yet, to reach the Count’s estate, I had to gallop sixteen versts.

On the way, I thought about my strange relationship with the Count. It was interesting for me to account for them, to regulate them, but — alas! — this accounting proved to be an impossible task. No matter how much I thought and decided, in the end, I had to conclude that I was a poor connoisseur of myself and of human nature in general. People who knew me and the Count interpreted our mutual relations differently. Narrow-minded individuals, seeing nothing beyond their own noses, loved to assert that the noble Count saw in the “poor and undistinguished” judicial investigator a good hanger-on and drinking companion. I, who am writing these lines, in their understanding, crawled and groveled at the Count’s table for crumbs and scraps! In their opinion, the noble rich man, the scarecrow and envy of the entire S — district, was very intelligent and liberal; otherwise, his merciful condescension to friendship with an impoverished investigator and the genuine liberalism that made the Count insensitive to my informal “you” would be incomprehensible. Smarter people, however, explained our close relations by the commonality of “spiritual interests.” The Count and I are peers. We both graduated from the same university, we are both lawyers, and we both know very little: I know some things, while the Count has forgotten and drowned in alcohol everything he ever knew. We are both proud and, for reasons known only to us, like savages, shun society. We both disregard public opinion (i.e., of the S — district), we are both immoral, and we will both come to a bad end. Such are the “spiritual interests” that bind us. Beyond this, people who knew us could say nothing more about our relations.

They, of course, would have said more if they had known how weak, soft, and pliable was the nature of my friend the Count and how strong and firm I was. They would have said much if they had known how much this frail man loved me and how I did not love him! He was the first to offer me his friendship, and I was the first to address him informally, but with what a difference in tone! He, in a fit of good feelings, embraced me and timidly asked for my friendship — while I, once seized by a feeling of contempt, of fastidiousness, said to him:

“Stop talking nonsense!”

And he accepted this informal address as an expression of friendship and began to use it, repaying me with an honest, brotherly informal address…

Yes, I would have done better and more honestly if I had turned my Zorka around and ridden back to Polikarp and Ivan Demianych.

Later, I often thought: how many misfortunes I would not have had to bear on my shoulders, and how much good I would have brought to my neighbors, if that evening I had had the determination to turn back, if my Zorka had gone mad and carried me far away from that terrible large lake! How many tormenting memories would not now weigh on my brain and would not force my hand to constantly put down the pen and clutch my head! But I will not run ahead, especially since I will have to dwell on bitterness many more times in the future. Now, about something cheerful…

My Zorka carried me through the gates of the Count’s estate. At the very gates, she stumbled, and I, losing my stirrup, almost fell to the ground.

“A bad sign, master!” a peasant standing at one of the doors of the long Count’s stables called out to me.

I believe that a person who falls from a horse can break their neck, but I don’t believe in omens. Handing the reins to the peasant and dusting off my riding boots with my whip, I ran into the house. No one met me. The windows and doors in the rooms were wide open, but despite this, a heavy, strange smell hung in the air. It was a mixture of the smell of old, abandoned rooms with the pleasant but pungent, narcotic smell of hothouse plants recently brought from the conservatory into the rooms… In the hall, on one of the sofas upholstered in light blue silk, lay two crumpled pillows, and on a round table in front of the sofa, I saw a glass with a few drops of liquid, emitting the smell of strong Riga balm. All this indicated that the house was inhabited, but I, having walked through all eleven rooms, did not meet a single living soul. The house was as deserted as the area around the lake…

From the so-called “mosaic” living room, a large glass door led into the garden. I opened it with a noise and descended to the garden by the marble terrace. Here, after a few steps along the alley, I met the ninety-year-old old woman Nastasya, who had once been the Count’s nanny. She is a small, wrinkled creature, forgotten by death, with a bald head and prickly eyes. When you look at her face, you involuntarily recall the nickname given to her by the servants: “Sychikha”… Seeing me, she started and almost dropped a glass of cream, which she was carrying with both hands.

“Hello, Sychikha!” I said to her.

She looked at me askance and silently passed by… I took her by the shoulder…

“Don’t be afraid, you fool… Where’s the Count?”

The old woman pointed to her ears.

“Are you deaf? And how long have you been deaf?”

The old woman, despite her advanced age, hears and sees perfectly well, but finds it not superfluous to slander her senses… I threatened her with my finger and let her go.

After a few more steps, I heard voices, and a little later I saw people. In the place where the alley widened into a clearing surrounded by cast-iron benches, under the shade of tall white acacias, stood a table on which a samovar gleamed. People were talking near the table. I quietly approached the clearing across the grass and, hidden behind a lilac bush, began to search for the Count with my eyes.

 

Chapter II

 

My friend, Count Karneev, sat at the table on a folding lattice chair, drinking tea. He wore a colorful dressing gown I had seen him in two years ago, and a straw hat. His face was preoccupied, concentrated, creased, so that someone unfamiliar with him might think he was tormented by a profound thought or worry at that moment. Outwardly, the Count had not changed at all during our two-year separation. The same small, thin body, fluid and flabby, like a corncrake’s. The same narrow, consumptive shoulders with a small, reddish head. His nose was still pink, his cheeks, as two years ago, hung like rags. Nothing bold, strong, or courageous in his face… Everything was weak, apathetic, and sluggish. Only his large, drooping mustache was impressive. Someone had told my friend that long mustaches suited him. He believed it and now, every morning, measures how much longer the growth above his pale lips has become. With these mustaches, he resembled a mustachioed, but very young and frail kitten.

Next to the Count, at the same table, sat some stout man unknown to me, with a large, cropped head and very black eyebrows. His face was greasy and shiny, like a ripe melon. His mustache was longer than the Count’s, his forehead small, his lips compressed, and his eyes lazily looked at the sky… His features were blurred, yet they were hard, like dried skin. Not a Russian type… The stout man was without a frock coat or waistcoat, in just a shirt, where damp sweat stains darkened. He was drinking not tea, but seltzer water.

At a respectful distance from the table stood a plump, squat little man with a red, greasy nape and protruding ears. This was the Count’s manager, Urbénin. For His Excellency’s arrival, he had put on a new black suit and was now suffering. Sweat streamed down his red, tanned face. Next to the manager stood the peasant who had come to me with the letter. Only then did I notice that this peasant had one eye missing. Standing at attention, not allowing himself the slightest movement, he stood like a statue and awaited questions.

“I ought to take your whip, Kuzma, and give you a good thrashing,” the manager said to him slowly in his impressive, soft bass voice. “How can you execute the master’s orders so sloppily? You should have asked them to come here immediately and found out exactly when they could be here?”

“Yes, yes, yes…” the Count nervously chimed in. “You should have found out everything! He said: ‘I’ll come!’ But that’s not enough! I need him now! Absolutely now! You asked him, but he didn’t understand you!”

“What do you need him so badly for?” the stout man asked the Count.

“I need to see him!”

“Only that? Well, Aleksey, in my opinion, your investigator would do better to stay at home today. I’m not in the mood for guests right now.”

My eyes widened. What did this possessive, imperative “I” mean?

“But he’s not a guest!” my friend said in a pleading voice. “He won’t disturb your rest after the journey. Please, don’t stand on ceremony with him!… You’ll see what kind of person he is! You’ll immediately like him and become friends with him, my dear!”

I emerged from behind the lilac bushes and headed towards the table. The Count saw me, recognized me, and a smile lit up his beaming face.

“Here he is! Here he is!” he exclaimed, blushing with pleasure and springing from the table. “How kind of you!”

And running up to me, he jumped, embraced me, and with his rough mustache scratched my cheek several times. Kisses were followed by a prolonged handshake and intense looking into my eyes…

“And you, Sergei, haven’t changed a bit! Still the same! Still as handsome and strong! Thank you for honoring me and coming!”

Freeing myself from the Count’s embrace, I greeted the manager, my good acquaintance, and sat down at the table.

“Oh, my dear!” the agitated and joyful Count continued. “If only you knew how pleased I am to see your serious face! You are unfamiliar? Allow me to introduce you: my good friend Kaetan Kazimirovich Pshekhotsky. And this,” he continued, pointing me out to the stout man, “is my good, old friend Sergei Petrovich Zinoviev! The local investigator…”

The dark-browed stout man slightly rose and offered me his fat, terribly sweaty hand.

“Very pleasant,” he mumbled, examining me. “Very glad.”

Having poured out his feelings and calmed down, the Count poured me a glass of cold reddish-brown tea and pushed a box of biscuits towards me.

“Eat… I bought them at Einem’s while passing through Moscow. And I’m angry with you, Seryozha, so angry that I even wanted to quarrel with you!… Not only have you not written me a single line in these two years, but you haven’t even deigned to answer any of my letters! That’s not friendly!”

“I don’t know how to write letters,” I said, “and besides, I don’t have time for correspondence. And what, pray tell, could I have written to you about?”

“What isn’t there to write about?”

“Truly, nothing. I only recognize three types of letters: love letters, congratulatory letters, and business letters. I didn’t write the first because you are not a woman and I am not in love with you; you don’t need the second; and we are spared the third, as we have never had any common business together.”

“That, presumably, is so,” the Count agreed, quickly and readily agreeing to everything, “but still, you could have at least a line… And then, as Pyotr Egorych here says, in two years you haven’t once visited here, as if you live a thousand versts away or… despise my hospitality. You could have lived here, hunted. And who knows what might have happened here without me!”

The Count spoke at length and often. Once he started talking about something, he would rattle on incessantly and endlessly, no matter how trivial and pathetic the subject.

In uttering sounds, he was as indefatigable as my Ivan Demianych. I could barely tolerate him for this ability. This time, he was stopped by the lackey Ilya, a tall, thin man in a worn, stained livery, who presented the Count with a glass of vodka and half a glass of water on a silver tray. The Count drank the vodka, chased it with water, and, wincing, shook his head.

“So you haven’t stopped downing vodka on the go!” I said.

“Haven’t stopped, Seryozha!”

“Well, at least stop the drunken habit of wincing and shaking your head! It’s repulsive.”

“My dear, I’m giving up everything… The doctors have forbidden me to drink. I only drink now because it’s unhealthy to stop immediately… One needs to do it gradually…”

I looked at the Count’s sick, worn face, at the glass, at the lackey in yellow shoes, I looked at the dark-browed Pole, who for some reason seemed to me a scoundrel and a swindler from the very first moment, at the one-eyed peasant standing at attention —  and I felt eerie, suffocated… I suddenly wanted to leave this dirty atmosphere, after first opening the Count’s eyes to my boundless antipathy towards him… There was a moment when I was ready to get up and leave… But I didn’t leave… I was prevented (I’m ashamed to admit it!) by simple physical laziness…

“Give me vodka too!” I said to Ilya.

Elongated shadows began to fall on the alley and our clearing…

The distant croaking of frogs, the cawing of crows, and the singing of an oriole already greeted the setting sun. A spring evening was descending…

“Tell Urbénin to sit down,” I whispered to the Count. “He’s standing before you like a boy.”

“Ah, I didn’t even think of it myself! Pyotr Egorych,” the Count addressed the manager, “please sit down! You needn’t stand!”

Urbénin sat down and looked at me with grateful eyes. Always healthy and cheerful, he seemed to me this time sick, bored. His face looked as if it had been crumpled, sleepy, and his eyes gazed at us lazily, reluctantly…

“What’s new, Pyotr Egorych? Anything good?” Karneev asked him. “Anything… out of the ordinary?”

“Everything’s as before, Your Excellency…”

“Anything… new girls, Pyotr Egorych?”

The moral Pyotr Egorych blushed.

“I don’t know, Your Excellency… I don’t get involved in that.”

“There are, Your Excellency,” boomed the one-eyed Kuzma, who had been silent until now. “And very worthwhile ones at that.”

“Good ones?”

“There are all kinds, Your Excellency, to suit every taste… Brunettes, blondes, all sorts…”

“Oh, really!… Wait, wait… I remember you now… My former Leporello, a secretary for… Your name is Kuzma, I believe?”

“Precisely so…”

“I remember, I remember… What ones do you have in mind now? Mostly peasant girls, I suppose?”

“Mostly peasant girls, of course, but there are some finer ones too…”

“Where did you find finer ones?” Ilya asked, squinting at Kuzma.

“The postman’s sister-in-law arrived for Holy Week… Nastas Ivanna… A girl all wound up — I’d eat her myself, but money is needed… Blood in her cheeks and all that… There’s even a finer one. She was only waiting for you, Your Excellency. Young, plump, lively… a beauty! Such beauty, Your Excellency, you haven’t even seen in Petersburg…”

“Who is that?”

“Olenka, the forester Skvortsov’s daughter.”

The chair under Urbénin creaked. Leaning his hands on the table and turning crimson, the manager slowly rose and turned his face to the one-eyed peasant. The expression of weariness and boredom gave way to strong anger…

“Shut up, boor!” he grumbled. “One-eyed snake!… Say what you want, but don’t you dare touch respectable people!”

“I’m not touching you, Pyotr Egorych,” Kuzma said impassively.

“I’m not talking about myself, idiot! However… forgive me, Your Excellency,” the manager turned to the Count. “Forgive me for making a scene, but I would ask Your Excellency to forbid your Leporello, as you were pleased to call him, from extending his zeal to persons worthy of all respect!”

“I didn’t mean anything…” the naive Count stammered. “He didn’t say anything special.”

Offended and extremely agitated, Urbénin moved away from the table and stood sideways to us. Crossing his arms over his chest and blinking, he hid his crimson face from us behind a twig and fell into thought.

Did this man not forebode that in the near future his moral sense would have to endure insults a thousand times worse?

“I don’t understand why he’s offended!” the Count whispered to me. “What an oddball! Nothing offensive was said, after all.”

After two years of sober living, the glass of vodka had a slightly intoxicating effect on me. A feeling of lightness and pleasure spread through my brain and entire body. Moreover, I began to feel the evening coolness, which gradually displaced the daytime stuffiness… I suggested a walk. The Count and his new Polish friend had their frock coats brought from the house, and we set off. Urbénin followed us.

The Count’s garden, through which we strolled, due to its striking luxury, deserves a special description. In botanical, economic, and many other respects, it is richer and grander than all the gardens I have ever seen. Besides the aforementioned poetic alleys with green arches, you will find in it everything that the eye of a capricious pampered one could demand from a garden. Here are all kinds of native and foreign fruit trees, from cherries and plums to large, goose-egg-sized apricots. Mulberries, barberries, French bergamot trees, and even olive trees are found at every step… Here are also semi-ruined, moss-grown grottoes, fountains, ponds intended for goldfish and tame carp, mountains, arbors, expensive conservatories… And this rare luxury, collected by the hands of grandfathers and fathers, this wealth of large, full roses, poetic grottoes, and endless alleys, was barbarously abandoned and surrendered to the power of weeds, the thieving axe, and jackdaws, unceremoniously building their ugly nests in rare trees! The rightful owner of this property walked beside me, and not a single muscle of his wasted and well-fed face twitched at the sight of the neglect and glaring human sloppiness, as if he were not the owner of the garden. Only once, idly, he remarked to the manager that it would not be bad if the paths were sprinkled with sand. He noted the absence of useless sand, but did not notice the bare trees that had died during the cold winter and the cows grazing in the garden. To his remark, Urbénin replied that supervising the garden would require about ten workers, and since His Excellency did not deign to live on his estate, the expenses for the garden were an unnecessary and unproductive luxury. The Count, of course, agreed with this argument.

“And I don’t have the time, I confess!” Urbénin waved his hand. “In summer, in the field, in winter, selling grain in town… No time for the garden here!”

The main, so-called “general” alley, whose entire charm lay in its old, wide lime trees and the mass of tulips stretching in two colorful strips along its entire length, ended in the distance in a yellow spot. That was a yellow stone arbor, which once housed a buffet with billiards, skittles, and a Chinese game. We aimlessly headed towards this arbor… At its entrance, we were met by a living creature that somewhat unsettled the nerves of my not-so-brave companions.

“A snake!” the Count suddenly shrieked, grabbing my arm and turning pale. “Look!”

The Pole stepped back, stood rooted to the spot, and spread his arms, as if blocking the path of a phantom… On the top step of the half-ruined stone staircase lay a young snake of the kind of our common Russian vipers. Seeing us, it raised its head and stirred… The Count shrieked again and hid behind my back.

“Don’t be afraid, Your Excellency!…” Urbénin said lazily, stepping onto the first step…

“What if it bites?”

“It won’t bite. And generally, by the way, the harm from the bite of these snakes is exaggerated. I was once bitten by an old snake — and I didn’t die, as you see.”

“A human sting is more dangerous than a snake’s!” Urbénin did not fail to moralize with a sigh.

And indeed. No sooner had the manager taken two or three steps than the snake stretched out to its full length and, with the speed of lightning, darted into a crack between two slabs. Entering the arbor, we saw another living creature. On an old, faded billiard table with torn cloth lay a short old man in a blue jacket, striped trousers, and a jockey’s cap. He was sleeping sweetly and serenely. Flies buzzed around his toothless, hollow-like mouth and on his sharp nose. Thin as a skeleton, with an open mouth and motionless, he resembled a corpse just brought from the morgue for autopsy.

“Franz!” Urbénin nudged him. “Franz!”

After five or six nudges, Franz closed his mouth, rose slightly, looked around at all of us, and lay down again. A minute later, his mouth was open again, and the flies circling his nose were again disturbed by the slight tremor of his snoring.

“Sleeping, the dissolute pig!” Urbénin sighed.

“This is our gardener Trier, I believe?” the Count asked.

“The very one… This is how it is every day… He sleeps like a log during the day, and plays cards at night. Today, they say, he played until six in the morning…”

“What does he play?”

“Gambling games… Mostly stoukolka.”

“Well, such gentlemen don’t do good work… They just take their salary for nothing.”

“I didn’t tell you that, Your Excellency,” Urbénin quickly corrected himself, “to complain or express displeasure, but simply… I just wanted to pity that such a capable man is prone to passions. And he is a hardworking man, not bad… he doesn’t take his salary for nothing.”

We glanced once more at the card player Franz and exited the arbor. From there, we headed towards the garden gate that led into the field.

In rare novels does a garden gate not play a significant role. If you haven’t noticed this yourself, then ask my Polikarp, who has devoured many terrible and not-so-terrible novels in his lifetime, and he will surely confirm this insignificant, yet characteristic fact.

My novel is also not devoid of a gate. But my gate differs from others in that my pen will have to lead many unhappy people through it and almost no happy ones, which in other novels is only the reverse. And, worst of all, I have already had to describe this gate once, but not as a novelist, but as a judicial investigator… Through it, I will see more criminals than lovers.

A quarter of an hour later, leaning on our canes, we trudged up the hill, which we call Stone Grave.

Among the villages, there is a legend that the body of some Tatar Khan rests beneath this stone pile, a Khan who feared that his enemies would desecrate his ashes after his death, and therefore bequeathed that a mountain of stone be piled upon him. But this legend is hardly true… The rock layers, their mutual superposition, and their size exclude human intervention in the origin of this mountain. It stands alone in the field and resembles an overturned cap.

Having climbed it, we saw the entire lake in all its captivating breadth and indescribable beauty. The sun was no longer reflected in it; it had set and left behind a wide crimson strip, coloring the surroundings in a pleasant, reddish-yellow hue. At our feet lay the Count’s estate with its house, church, and garden, and in the distance, on the other side of the lake, lay the grey village where, by the will of fate, I had my residence. The surface of the lake was still motionless. The old Mikhey’s boats, separated from each other, hastened towards the shore.

To the side of my village, the railway station darkened with smoke from a locomotive, and behind us, on the other side of the Stone Grave, a new scene unfolded. At the foot of the Grave ran a road, flanked by old poplars. This road led to the Count’s forest, stretching to the horizon.

The Count and I stood on the mountain. Urbénin and the Pole, being heavy men, preferred to wait for us below, on the road.

“Who’s that big shot?” I asked the Count, nodding at the Pole. “Where did you pick him up?”

“He’s a very kind gentleman, Seryozha, very kind!” the Count said worriedly. “You’ll soon become friends with him!”

“Well, that’s unlikely. Why is he always silent?”

“He’s silent by nature! But how clever he is!”

“What kind of person is he?”

“I met him in Moscow. He’s very kind. You’ll find out everything later, Seryozha, but don’t ask now. Shall we go down?”

We descended from the Grave and walked along the road towards the forest. It was noticeably getting darker. From the forest came the cuckoo’s call and the vocal tremors of a tired, probably young, nightingale.

“Hello! Hello!” we heard a clear child’s voice as we approached the forest. “Catch me!”

And out of the forest ran a little girl, about five years old, with hair as white as flax and in a blue dress. Seeing us, she burst into clear laughter and, skipping, ran up to Urbénin and hugged his knee. Urbénin picked her up and kissed her cheek.

“My daughter Sasha!” he said. “I recommend.”

Following Sasha from the forest was a fifteen-year-old gymnasium student, Urbénin’s son. Seeing us, he indecisively took off his cap, put it on, and took it off again. Behind him, a red spot moved quietly. This spot immediately drew our attention.

“What a wondrous vision!” exclaimed the Count, grabbing my arm. “Look! What a delight! Who is that girl? I didn’t know such naiads inhabited my forests!”

I looked at Urbénin to ask who this girl was, and, strangely, only at that moment did I notice that the manager was terribly drunk. Red as a lobster, he swayed and grabbed my elbow.

“Sergei Petrovich!” he whispered in my ear, breathing alcoholic fumes on me, “I implore you — restrain the Count from further remarks about this girl. He might say something unnecessary out of habit, and she is an extremely respectable person!”

The “extremely respectable person” was a nineteen-year-old girl with a beautiful blonde head, kind blue eyes, and long curls. She was in a bright red, half-childish, half-maidenly dress. Her slender, needle-like legs in red stockings were encased in tiny, almost childish shoes. Her rounded shoulders constantly shrugged coquettishly while I admired her, as if they were cold and as if my gaze was biting them.

“Such a young face and such developed forms!” the Count whispered to me, who had lost the ability to respect women and not look at them from the perspective of a debauched animal in his early youth.

As for me, I remember a good feeling igniting in my chest. I was still a poet, and in the company of forests, a May evening, and the beginning of a twinkling evening star, I could only look at a woman as a poet… I looked at the girl in red with the same reverence with which I was accustomed to looking at forests, mountains, and the azure sky. I still had some sentimentality then, inherited from my German mother.

“Who is this?” the Count asked.

“This is the forester Skvortsov’s daughter, Your Excellency!” Urbénin said.

“Is this the Olenka the one-eyed peasant was talking about?”

“Yes, he mentioned her name,” the manager replied, looking at me with pleading, wide eyes.

The girl in red walked past us, seemingly paying us no attention. Her eyes looked somewhere to the side, but I, a man who knows women, felt her pupils on my face.

“Which of them is the Count?” I heard her whisper behind us.

“This one, with the long mustache,” the gymnasium student replied.

And we heard silvery laughter behind us… It was the laughter of someone disappointed… She thought that the Count, the owner of these huge forests and the wide lake — was me, not this pygmy with a wasted face and long mustache…

I heard a deep sigh escaping Urbénin’s sturdy chest. The iron man barely moved.

“Let the manager go,” I whispered to the Count. “He’s sick or… drunk.”

“You seem to be unwell, Pyotr Egorych!” the Count addressed Urbénin. “I don’t need you, so I won’t detain you.”

“Don’t worry, Your Excellency. Thank you for your attention, but I am not ill.”

I looked back… The red spot didn’t move and watched us go…

Poor blonde head! Did I, on this quiet, peaceful May evening, ever imagine that she would later become the heroine of my restless novel?

Now, as I write these lines, the autumn rain angrily taps on my warm windows, and somewhere above me the wind howls. I look at the dark window and, against the backdrop of the night’s gloom, I try to create my dear heroine by force of imagination…

And I see her with her innocently childlike, naive, kind face and loving eyes. I want to throw down my pen and tear up, burn what has already been written. Why touch the memory of this young, innocent creature?

But right here, next to my inkwell, stands her photographic portrait. Here, the blonde head is presented in all the vain grandeur of a deeply fallen beautiful woman. Her eyes, tired but proud of their depravity, are motionless. Here she is precisely the snake whose bite Urbénin would not have called exaggerated.

She gave the storm a kiss, and the storm broke the flower at its very root. Much was taken, but too dearly paid for. The reader will forgive her sins…

We walked through the forest.

Pine trees are boring in their silent monotony. All are of the same height, resemble one another, and retain their appearance in all seasons, knowing neither death nor spring renewal. But they are attractive in their gloominess: motionless, silent, as if lost in mournful thought.

“Shall we go back?” the Count suggested.

This question went unanswered. The Pole was utterly indifferent as to where he was, Urbénin did not consider his voice decisive, and I was too delighted by the forest’s coolness and resinous air to turn back. Besides, we needed to kill time until nightfall, even if it was just with a simple walk. The thought of the approaching wild night was accompanied by a sweet fluttering in my heart. I, ashamed to admit it, dreamed of it and mentally already savored its pleasure. And from the impatience with which the Count kept glancing at his watch, it was clear that he, too, was tormented by anticipation. We felt that we understood each other.

Near the forester’s house, nestled among the pines in a small square clearing, two small yellow-fire-colored dogs of an unknown breed, flexible as eels and sleek, met us with a loud, melodious bark. Recognizing Urbénin, they wagged their tails cheerfully and ran to him, from which one could conclude that the manager often visited the forester’s house. Right there, near the house, we were met by a young fellow without boots or a cap, with large freckles on his surprised face. For a moment, he looked at us silently, wide-eyed, then, probably recognizing the Count, gasped and ran headlong into the house.

“I know why he ran,” the Count laughed. “I remember him… That’s Mitka.”

The Count was not mistaken. In less than a minute, Mitka emerged from the house, carrying a glass of vodka and half a glass of water on a tray.

“To your good health, Your Excellency!” he said, offering it and smiling with his entire foolish, surprised face.

The Count drank the vodka, “chased” it with water, but this time did not wince. A hundred steps from the house stood a cast-iron bench, as old as the pines. We sat on it and began to contemplate the May evening in all its quiet beauty… Above our heads, startled crows flew, cawing, and nightingale songs came from various directions; this alone disturbed the general silence.

The Count cannot keep silent even on a quiet spring evening, when the human voice is least pleasant.

“I don’t know if you’ll be satisfied?” he turned to me. “I ordered perch soup and game for dinner. For vodka, there will be cold sturgeon and suckling pig with horseradish.”

As if angered by this prose, the poetic pines suddenly stirred their tops, and a quiet murmur passed through the forest. A fresh breeze ran through the clearing and played with the grass.

“That’s enough!” Urbénin shouted at the fiery-colored little dogs, who were hindering him with their affection as he tried to light a cigarette. “And it seems to me that it will rain today. I feel it in the air. Today was such terrible heat that you don’t need to be a learned professor to predict rain. It will be good for the grain.”

“And what good is grain to you,” I thought, “if the Count drinks it all away? No need for the rain to even bother.”

The breeze rustled through the forest once more, but this time it was sharper. The pines and grass murmured louder.

“Let’s go home.”

We stood up and lazily shuffled back towards the house.

“It’s better to be this blonde Olenka,” I said to Urbénin, “and live here with the beasts, than to be a judicial investigator and live with people… It’s more peaceful. Isn’t that right, Pyotr Egorych?”

“Whatever you are, as long as your soul is at peace, Sergei Petrovich.”

“And is this pretty Olenka’s soul at peace?”

“Only God knows another’s soul, but it seems to me she has nothing to worry about. Not much grief, as few sins as a child… She is a very good girl! But now, at last, the sky has spoken of rain…”

A rumble was heard, whether of a distant carriage or a game of skittles… Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance beyond the forest… Mitka, who had been watching us all along, flinched and quickly crossed himself…

“A thunderstorm!” the Count started. “What a surprise! It’ll catch us on the road… And it’s gotten so dark! I said: ‘Let’s go back!’ But no, you kept going…”

“We’ll wait out the storm in the house,” I suggested.

“Why in the house?” Urbénin said, blinking strangely. “The rain will fall all night, so will you sit in the house all night? And don’t you bother yourself… Go on, and Mitka will run ahead, he’ll send a carriage to meet you.”

“It’s nothing, maybe the rain won’t lash all night… Thunderstorm clouds usually pass quickly… Besides, I’m not yet acquainted with the new forester, and I’d like to chat with this Olenka… to find out what kind of bird she is…”

“I’m not against it!” the Count agreed.

“But how will you go there, if… if it’s… not tidy?” Urbénin stammered anxiously. “To sit there in the stuffiness, Your Excellency, when you could be at home… I don’t understand what pleasure!… And to get acquainted with the forester, if he’s ill…”

It was clear that the manager strongly disliked the idea of us entering the forester’s house. He even spread his arms, as if to block our way… I understood from his face that he had reasons not to let us in. I respect other people’s reasons and secrets, but this time, curiosity strongly spurred me on. I insisted, and we entered the house.

“Come into the hall!” the barefoot Mitka said, or rather, somehow particularly hiccupped, choking with joy…

Imagine the smallest hall in the world, with unpainted wooden walls. The walls were hung with oleographs from “Niva,” photographs in shell-decorated, or as we call them, “seashell” frames, and certificates… One certificate was a thank-you from some baron for long service, the rest were horse-related… Ivy climbed here and there along the walls… In the corner, before a small icon, a blue flame quietly flickered and faintly reflected in a silver setting. Chairs huddled against the walls, apparently recently purchased… Many extra ones were bought, but they were all put out: there was nowhere else to put them… Here, too, crowded armchairs with a sofa in snow-white covers with ruffles and lace, and a round lacquered table. On the sofa, a tame rabbit dozed… Cozy, clean, and warm… The presence of a woman was noticeable everywhere. Even the small bookcase with books looked somehow innocent, feminine, as if it wanted to say that it contained nothing but weak novels and meek poems… The charm of such cozy, warm rooms is felt less in spring than in autumn, when one seeks shelter from the cold and dampness…

Mitka, with a loud huff and puff, fiercely striking matches, lit two candles and carefully, like milk, placed them on the table. We sat in the armchairs, exchanged glances, and laughed…

“Nikolai Efimych is sick in bed,” Urbénin explained the absence of the hosts, “and Olga Nikolaevna must have gone to see my children off…”

“Mitka, are the doors locked?” we heard a faint tenor voice from the next room.

“Locked, sir, Nikolai Efimych!” Mitka croaked and flew headlong into the next room.

“Good… Make sure they’re all locked… tightly…” said the same weak voice. “With the key, very tightly… If thieves try to get in, you’ll tell me… I’ll shoot them, those villains… those scoundrels…”

“Certainly, sir, Nikolai Efimych!”

We laughed and looked inquiringly at Urbénin. He blushed and, to hide his embarrassment, began to adjust the curtain on the window… What did this dream mean? We exchanged glances again.

But there was no time to ponder. Hurried footsteps were heard in the yard, then a noise on the porch and a door slamming. The girl in red flew into the “hall.”

“I love a thunderstorm in early May!” she sang in a high, squealing soprano, interrupting her squeals with laughter, but seeing us, she suddenly stopped and fell silent.

She was embarrassed and quietly, like a lamb, went into the room from which her father’s voice, Nikolai Efimych, had just been heard.

“Didn’t expect that!” Urbénin chuckled.

After a while, she quietly re-entered, sat on the chair nearest the door, and began to observe us. She looked at us boldly, directly, as if we were not new people to her, but animals in a zoological garden. For a minute, we also looked at her silently, without moving… I would have agreed to sit motionless for a year and look at her — that’s how beautiful she was that evening. Fresh as air blush, frequently breathing, rising chest, curls scattered over her forehead, shoulders, and right hand adjusting her collar, large shining eyes… all this on one small body, absorbed in one glance… You look at this small space once and see more than if you had looked for entire centuries at the endless horizon… She looked at me seriously, from below upwards, inquiringly; but when her eyes moved from me to the Count or the Pole, I began to read the opposite in them: a glance from above downwards and laughter…

I was the first to speak.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” I said, standing up and approaching her, “Zinoviev… And this, I recommend, is my friend, Count Karneev… We apologize for breaking into your pretty little house without an invitation… We, of course, would not have done this if the thunderstorm hadn’t driven us in…”

“But our little house won’t fall apart because of that!” she said, laughing and offering me her hand.

She showed me lovely teeth. I sat next to her on a chair and told her how unexpectedly the thunderstorm had met us on our path. A conversation about the weather began — the beginning of all beginnings. While we talked, Mitka had already managed to bring the Count vodka twice, and the inseparable water… Taking advantage of my not looking at him, the Count, after both glasses, winced sweetly and shook his head.

“Perhaps you’d like something to eat?” Olenka asked me and, without waiting for an answer, left the room…

The first drops tapped on the windowpanes… I went to the window… It was already completely dark, and through the glass, I saw nothing but raindrops crawling down and the reflection of my own nose. A flash of lightning gleamed and illuminated several nearby pines…

“Are the doors locked?” I heard the weak tenor voice again. “Mitka, go, you vile soul, lock the doors! My torment, Lord!”

A woman with a double, cinched stomach and a foolish, preoccupied face entered the hall, bowed low to the Count, and covered the table with a white tablecloth. Behind her, Mitka moved cautiously, carrying snacks. A minute later, vodka, rum, cheese, and a plate with some fried bird stood on the table. The Count drank a glass of vodka but did not eat. The Pole sniffed the bird distrustfully and began to cut it.

“The rain has already started! Look!” I said to Olenka as she entered.

The girl in red approached my window, and at that very moment, we were illuminated for an instant by a white glow… A crackling sound echoed above, and it seemed to me that something large and heavy had torn loose from its place in the sky and was rolling down to earth with a thunderous roar… The windowpanes and the glasses before the Count shuddered and emitted their glassy sound… The impact was strong…

“Are you afraid of thunderstorms?” I asked Olenka.

She pressed her cheek to her rounded shoulder and looked at me with childlike trust.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered, after a moment’s thought. “A thunderstorm killed my mother… They even wrote about it in the newspapers… My mother was walking across a field and crying… She had a very bitter life in this world… God took pity on her and killed her with His heavenly electricity.”

“How do you know it was electricity?”

“I studied… Do you know? Those killed by lightning, and in war, and those who die in difficult childbirth go to heaven… It’s not written anywhere in books, but it’s true. My mother is in heaven now. I think a thunderstorm will kill me someday too, and I will also be in heaven… Are you an educated person?”

“Yes…”

“Then you won’t laugh… This is how I would like to die. To put on the most expensive, fashionable dress, like the one I saw the other day on the rich lady here, the landowner Sheffer, to wear bracelets on my arms… Then to stand on the very top of Stone Grave and let lightning kill me so that all people would see… A terrible thunder, you know, and the end…”

“What a wild fantasy!” I chuckled, looking into her eyes, full of sacred terror before a terrible, but spectacular death. “And in an ordinary dress, you don’t want to die?”

“No…” Olenka shook her head. “And so that all people would see.”

“Your current dress is better than any fashionable and expensive dresses… It suits you. In it, you look like a red flower of the green forest.”

“No, that’s not true!” Olenka sighed naively. “This dress is cheap, it can’t be good.”

The Count approached our window with the clear intention of speaking with the pretty Olenka. My friend speaks three European languages, but does not know how to speak to women. He stood awkwardly near us, smiled foolishly, grunted “hmm,” and retreated to the decanter of vodka.

“When you came into this room,” I said to Olenka, “you sang ‘I love a thunderstorm in early May.’ Are those verses set to music?”

“No, I sing all the poems I know in my own way.”

I happened to glance back. Urbénin was looking at us. In his eyes, I read hatred and malice, which did not at all suit his kind, soft face.

“Is he jealous, or something?” I thought.

The poor fellow, catching my questioning glance, rose from his chair and went into the anteroom for some reason… Even by his gait, it was noticeable that he was agitated. The claps of thunder, each stronger and more rolling than the last, began to repeat more and more frequently… Lightning continuously painted the sky, the pines, and the wet ground in its pleasant, dazzling light… The rain was still far from over. I moved from the window to the bookcase and began to examine Olenka’s library. “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you who you are,” but from the goods symmetrically resting on the bookcase, it was difficult to draw any conclusion about Olenka’s intellectual level or “educational qualification.” There was a strange mixture here. Three anthologies, one book by Born, Evtushevsky’s problem book, the second volume of Lermontov, Shklyarevsky, the journal “Delo,” a cookbook, “Skladchina”… I could have listed even more books for you, but at the moment when I took “Skladchina” from the bookcase and began to leaf through it, the door from another room opened, and a subject entered the hall who immediately diverted my attention from Olenka’s educational qualification. This was a tall, sinewy man in a calico dressing gown and torn slippers, with a rather original face. His face, etched with blue veins, was adorned with sergeant-major’s mustaches and sideburns, and in general resembled a bird’s physiognomy. His entire face was stretched forward, as if striving towards the tip of his nose… Such faces are called, I believe, “jug-snouts.” This subject’s small head sat on a long, thin neck with a large Adam’s apple and swayed like a starling’s nest in the wind… The strange man surveyed us with murky, green eyes and stared at the Count…

“Are the doors locked?” he asked in a pleading voice.

The Count looked at me and shrugged…

“Don’t worry, Papa!” Olenka said. “Everything’s locked… Go to your room!”

“And is the shed locked?”

“He’s a little… touched sometimes,” Urbénin whispered, appearing from the anteroom. “He’s afraid of thieves and, as you can see, he’s always fussing about the doors… Nikolai Efimych,” he addressed the strange subject, “go to your room and go to sleep! Don’t worry, everything is locked!”

“And are the windows locked?”

Nikolai Efimych quickly ran around all the windows, tried their latches, and without looking at us, shuffled in his slippers to his room.

“It comes over him sometimes, the poor fellow,” Urbénin began to explain after his departure. “A good, glorious man, you know, a family man — and such an affliction! He gets confused almost every summer…”

I looked at Olenka. She blushingly, hiding her face from us, straightened her disturbed books. She seemed ashamed of her mad father.

“And the carriage has arrived, Your Excellency!” Urbénin said. “You can leave if you wish!”

“Where did this carriage come from?” I asked.

“I sent for it…”

A minute later, the Count and I were sitting in the carriage, listening to the rumbling of thunder, and I was angry…

“That Pyotr Egorych, damn him, really drove us out of the house!” I grumbled, genuinely annoyed. “He didn’t even let me get a good look at that Olenka! I wouldn’t have eaten her, for heaven’s sake… The old fool! He was bursting with jealousy the whole time… He’s in love with that girl…”

“Yes, yes, yes… Imagine, I noticed that too! And he didn’t let us into the house only out of jealousy, and he sent for the carriage out of jealousy… Haha!”

“Old age in the beard, and the devil in the ribs… However, brother, it’s hard not to fall in love with that girl in red, seeing her every day as we saw her today! Devilishly pretty! Only she’s not for his snout… He should understand that and not be so selfishly jealous… Love, but don’t hinder others, especially when you know she’s not meant for you… What an old blockhead!”

“Remember how he flared up when Kuzma mentioned her name at tea?” the Count giggled. “I thought he’d beat us all then… People don’t defend the honor of a woman they’re indifferent to so passionately…”

“They do, brother… But that’s not the point… The important thing is this… If he commanded us so much today, then what does he do to the small people, those who are under his command! I bet he doesn’t let the keymasters, stewards, hunters, and other lowly folk even approach her! Love and jealousy make a person unfair, heartless, a misanthrope… I bet he’s already eaten up more than one employee under his command because of this Olenka. So you’ll do wisely if you trust his complaints about employees and reports about the necessity of expelling one or another less. In general, limit his power for a while… Love will pass — well, then there will be nothing to fear. He is a kind and honest fellow…”

“And how do you like her father?” the Count laughed.

“Mad… He should be in a lunatic asylum, not managing forests… In general, you wouldn’t be lying if you hung a sign on your estate gates: ‘Lunatic Asylum’… You have a real Bedlam here! This forester, Sychikha, Franz, obsessed with cards, the old man in love, the exalted girl, the drunken Count… what could be better?”

“But this forester gets a salary! How does he serve if he’s mad?”

“Obviously, Urbénin keeps him only because of his daughter… Urbénin says that Nikolai Efimych gets this way almost every summer… But that’s hardly true… This forester is not just ill every summer, he’s constantly ill… Fortunately, your Pyotr Egorych rarely lies and gives himself away if he does tell a fib…”

“Last year Urbénin notified me that the old forester Akhmetiev was going to become a monk on Mount Athos, and recommended the ‘experienced, honest, and deserving’ Skvortsov… I, of course, consented, as I always do. Letters are not people: they don’t give themselves away if they lie.”

The carriage entered the courtyard and stopped at the entrance. We got out. The rain had already passed. The thundercloud, flashing lightning and emitting an angry rumble, hastened northeast, revealing more and more of the blue, starry sky. It seemed a heavily armed force, having wrought devastation and taken a terrible toll, rushed to new victories… The lagging clouds chased after it and hurried, as if afraid of not catching up… Nature regained its peace…

And this peace was felt in the quiet, fragrant air, full of languor and nightingale melodies, in the silence of the sleeping garden, in the caressing light of the rising moon… The lake awoke from its daytime slumber and with a gentle grumble made its presence known to human ears…

At such a time, it is good to ride through the field in a comfortable carriage or work the oars on the lake… But we went into the house… There, another kind of “poetry” awaited us.

Chapter III

 

A suicide is one who, under the influence of mental pain or oppressed by unbearable suffering, puts a bullet through their head; but for those who give rein to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the sacred days of spring and youth, there is no name in human language. After the bullet comes the peace of the grave; after ruined youth come years of sorrow and tormenting memories. He who has profaned his spring understands the current state of my soul. I am not yet old, not gray, but I am no longer living. Psychiatrists say that a soldier, wounded at Waterloo, went mad and afterwards assured everyone, and believed it himself, that he was killed at Waterloo, and that what they now consider him to be is only his shadow, a reflection of the past. Something similar to this half-death I am now experiencing…

“I am very glad you didn’t eat anything at the forester’s and didn’t spoil your appetite,” the Count told me as we entered the house. “We’ll have an excellent dinner… just like old times… Serve!” he commanded Ilya, who was pulling off his frock coat and putting on his dressing gown.

We went to the dining room. Here, on the set table, “life was already boiling.” Bottles of all colors and sizes stood in rows, like on shelves in theater buffets, and, reflecting the lamp light, awaited our attention. Salted, pickled, and all other appetizers stood on another table with a decanter of vodka and English bitters. Next to the wine bottles stood two dishes: one with a suckling pig, the other with cold sturgeon…

“Well then…” the Count began, pouring three glasses and shivering as if from the cold. “To our health! Take your glass, Kaetan Kazimirovich!”

I drank; the Pole, however, shook his head negatively. He pulled the sturgeon towards him, sniffed it, and began to eat.

I ask the reader’s forgiveness. Now I will have to describe something entirely un-“romantic.”

“Well then… they had another,” the Count said, pouring second glasses. “Go for it, Lecocq!”

I took my glass, looked at it, and put it down…

“Damn it, I haven’t had a drink in ages,” I said. “Shall we recall old times?” And without a second thought, I poured five glasses and downed them one after another. I didn’t know how to drink otherwise. Small schoolchildren learn to smoke cigarettes from older ones: the Count, watching me, poured himself five glasses and, bending into an arch, wincing and shaking his head, drank them. My five glasses seemed like bravado to him, but I was not drinking to boast of my drinking talent… I wanted intoxication, a good, strong intoxication, one I hadn’t felt in a long time, living in my village. Having drunk, I sat down at the table and began on the suckling pig…

Intoxication didn’t keep me waiting long. Soon I felt a slight dizziness. A pleasant chill played in my chest — the beginning of a happy, expansive state. Suddenly, without any noticeable transition, I became terribly cheerful. The feeling of emptiness and boredom gave way to a sensation of complete mirth and joy. I began to smile. I suddenly craved chatter, laughter, people. Chewing the suckling pig, I began to feel the fullness of life, almost the very contentment with life, almost happiness.

“Why aren’t you drinking anything?” I asked the Pole.

“He doesn’t drink anything,” the Count said. “Don’t force him.”

“But still, you must drink something!”

The Pole put a large piece of sturgeon in his mouth and shook his head negatively. His silence egged me on.

“Listen, Kaetan… what’s your patronymic… why are you always silent?” I asked him. “I haven’t yet had the pleasure of hearing your voice.”

His two eyebrows, like a flying swallow, rose, and he looked at me.

“Do you wish me to speak?” he asked with a strong Polish accent.

“Very much so.”

“And why?”

“Pardon me! On steamboats at dinner, strangers and unfamiliar people strike up conversation, and we’ve known each other for several hours, looking at each other, and haven’t exchanged a single word! What kind of behavior is that?”

The Pole remained silent.

“Why are you silent?” I asked, after waiting a little. “Answer something!”

“I do not wish to answer you. I hear laughter in your voice, and I do not like mockery.”

“He’s not laughing at all!” the Count exclaimed, agitated. “Where did you get that from, Kaetan? He’s friendly…”

“Counts and princes haven’t spoken to me in such a tone!” Kaetan said, frowning. “I don’t like that tone.”

“So, you won’t honor me with conversation?” I continued to pester, drinking another glass and laughing.

“Do you know why I actually came here?” the Count interrupted, wanting to change the subject. “Haven’t I told you about it yet? I go to a familiar doctor in Petersburg, whom I constantly see, and complain about my illness. He listened, tapped, felt me all over, you know, and says: ‘Are you not a coward?’ Although I’m not a coward, you know, I paled: ‘Not a coward,’ I say.”

“In short, brother… I’m tired.”

“He predicted an early death if I didn’t leave Petersburg and move away! My entire liver is ruined from prolonged drinking… So I decided to come here. And it’s silly to sit there… This estate here is so luxurious, rich… The climate alone is worth something!… At least one can do some work! Labor is the best, the most radical medicine. Isn’t that right, Kaetan? I’ll take up farming and stop drinking… The doctor forbade me a single glass… not one!”

“Well, then don’t drink.”

“I’m not drinking… Today is the last time, for the sake of seeing you (the Count reached out and smacked me on the cheek)… my dear, good friend, tomorrow — not a drop! Bacchus bids me farewell forever today… For a farewell, Seryozha, some cognac… shall we drink?”

We drank cognac.

“I’ll get well, Seryozha, my dear, and I’ll take up farming… Rational farming! Urbénin is kind, sweet… understands everything, but is he a master? He’s a stickler for routine! One needs to subscribe to journals, read, keep track of everything, participate in agricultural exhibitions, but he’s uneducated for that! Olenka… is he really in love? Haha! I’ll take charge myself, and make him my assistant… I’ll participate in elections, entertain society… eh? After all, one can live happily even here! What do you think? Well, you’re already laughing! You’re already laughing! Truly, one can’t talk to you about anything!”

I was cheerful, amused. The Count amused me, the candles, the bottles, the stucco rabbits and ducks adorning the dining room walls amused me… Only Kaetan Kazimirovich’s sober face did not amuse me. This man’s presence irritated me.

“Can’t we get rid of this noble Pole?” I whispered to the Count.

“What are you saying! For God’s sake…” the Count stammered, grabbing both my hands as if I intended to beat his Pole. “Let him sit there!”

“But I can’t stand the sight of him! Listen!” I addressed Pshekhotsky. “You refused to speak with me, but, forgive me, I haven’t lost hope of getting better acquainted with your conversational ability…”

“Stop it!” the Count tugged at my sleeve. “I beg you!”

“I will pester you until you start answering me,” I continued. “Why are you frowning? Do you still hear laughter in my voice even now?”

“If I had drunk as much as you, I would talk to you, but we are not a match…” the Pole grumbled.

“We are not a match, and that’s what needed to be proven… I wanted to say exactly the same thing… A goose is no companion for a pig, a drunkard is no relative to a sober man… The drunkard bothers the sober, the sober the drunkard. In the neighboring living room, there are excellent soft sofas! They are good for lying on after sturgeon with horseradish. My voice can’t be heard there. Don’t you want to go there?”

The Count threw up his hands and, blinking, paced the dining room.

He is a coward and fears “big” conversations… As for me, when I was drunk, misunderstandings and displeasure amused me…

“I don’t understand! I don’t understand!” the Count moaned, not knowing what to say or do…

He knew I was hard to stop.

“I am still little acquainted with you,” I continued, “perhaps you are a most excellent man, and therefore I would not want to quarrel with you so early… I am not quarreling with you… I only invite you to understand that sober people have no place among the drunk… The presence of a sober person has an irritating effect on a drunken organism!… Understand this!”

“Say what you please!” Pshekhotsky sighed. “Nothing will get to me, young man…”

“Nothing at all, really? What if I call you a stubborn pig, will you not be offended then either?”

The Pole blushed — and nothing more. The Count, pale, approached me, made a pleading face, and threw up his hands.

“Please! Control your tongue!”

I had already entered my drunken role and wanted to continue, but fortunately for the Count and the Pole, footsteps were heard and Urbénin entered the dining room.

“Enjoy your meal!” he began. “I came to inquire, Your Excellency, if there are any orders?”

“There are no orders yet, but there is a request…” the Count replied. “I’m very glad you came, Pyotr Egorych… Sit down with us for dinner and let’s discuss the estate…”

Urbénin sat down. The Count drank some cognac and began to lay out his plan for his future actions in the realm of rational farming. He spoke at length, tiresomely, constantly repeating himself and changing the subject. Urbénin listened to him as serious people listen to the chatter of children and women, lazily and attentively… He ate the perch soup and looked sadly into his plate.

“I brought some excellent drawings with me!” the Count said, among other things. “Remarkable drawings! Would you like me to show you?”

Karneev jumped up and ran to his study for the drawings. Urbénin, taking advantage of his absence, quickly poured himself half a teacup of vodka, drank it, and did not have a chaser.

“This vodka is disgusting!” he said, looking at the decanter with hatred.

“Why don’t you drink when the Count is around, Pyotr Egorych?” I asked him. “Are you really afraid?”

“It’s better, Sergei Petrovich, to be a hypocrite and drink in secret than to drink in front of the Count. You know, the Count has a strange character… If I knowingly stole twenty thousand from him, he, in his carelessness, wouldn’t say anything, but if I forgot to give him an account for a spent dime or drank vodka in front of him, he would start complaining that he has a brigand of a manager. You know him well.”

Urbénin poured himself another half-glass and drank.

“You seemed not to drink before, Pyotr Egorych,” I said.

“Yes, but now I drink… Terribly I drink!” he whispered. “Terribly, day and night, not giving myself a minute’s rest! And the Count never drank to the extent that I drink now… It’s terribly hard, Sergei Petrovich! Only God knows how heavy my heart is! Indeed, I drink from grief… I have always loved and respected you, Sergei Petrovich, and I will tell you frankly… I’d gladly hang myself!”

“Why is that?”

“My foolishness… Not only children are foolish… There are fools even at fifty. Don’t ask for reasons.”

The Count entered and stopped his outpouring.

“Excellent liqueur!” he said, placing on the table, instead of the “remarkable” drawings, a pot-bellied bottle with a Benedictine wax seal. “I got it from Depré while passing through Moscow. Would you like some, Seryozha?”

“You were going for the drawings, weren’t you?” I said.

“Me? What drawings? Oh, right! But, brother, the devil himself couldn’t make sense of my suitcases… I rummaged and rummaged and gave up… The liqueur is very nice. Don’t you want some?”

Urbénin sat for a little longer, said goodbye, and left. After his departure, we turned to the red wine. This wine completely loosened me up. I achieved the exact intoxication I had wanted when I came to the Count. I became overly vivacious, agile, and unusually cheerful. I felt like performing an unnatural, ridiculous feat, something to impress… In these moments, it seemed to me, I could swim across the entire lake, solve the most tangled case, conquer any woman… The world with its lives filled me with delight; I loved it, but at the same time, I wanted to find fault, burn with venomous wit, mock… The ridiculous dark-browed Pole and the Count had to be ridiculed, broken with caustic wit, reduced to dust.

“Why are you silent?” I began. “Speak, I’m listening to you! Haha! I absolutely love it when people with serious, respectable faces speak childish nonsense!… It’s such a mockery, such a mockery of human brains!… Faces don’t match brains! To not lie, one must have an idiotic face, but your faces are those of Greek sages!”

I didn’t finish… My tongue got tangled with the thought that I was speaking with insignificant people, not worth even half a word! I needed a hall full of people, brilliant women, thousands of lights… I stood up, took my glass, and began to walk around the rooms. When we revel, we do not restrict ourselves to space, we do not limit ourselves to just the dining room, but we take over the entire house and often even the entire estate…

In the “mosaic” living room, I chose a Turkish sofa, lay down on it, and gave myself over to fantasies and castles in the air. Drunken dreams, each more grandiose and boundless than the last, enveloped my young mind… A new world emerged, full of intoxicating charm and indescribable beauties.

All that was missing was for me to speak in rhymes and begin to hallucinate.

The Count approached me and sat on the edge of the sofa… He wanted to tell me something. This desire to impart something special to me began to read in his eyes soon after the aforementioned five glasses. I knew what he wanted to talk about…

“How much I’ve drunk today!” he said to me. “This is worse for me than any poison… But today is the last time… Honestly, the last time… I have willpower…”

“Alright, alright…”

“The last… Seryozha, my friend, for the last time, shouldn’t we send a telegram to the city?”

“Perhaps, send it…”

“Let’s splurge one last time properly… Well, get up, write it…” The Count himself can’t write telegrams. His come out too long and incomplete. I got up and wrote:

“To… ‘London’ Restaurant. To choir director Karpov. Leave everything and come immediately by the two o’clock train. Count.”

“It’s quarter to eleven now,” the Count said. “The man will ride to the station for three-quarters of an hour, an hour maximum… Karpov will receive the telegram by one o’clock… So he’ll make the train… If he doesn’t make this one, he’ll come on the freight train… Yes?”

The telegram was sent with one-eyed Kuzma… Ilya was ordered to send carriages to the station in an hour… To kill time, I slowly began to light lamps and candles in all the rooms, then unlocked the piano and tried the keys…

Then, I remember, I lay on the same sofa, thinking of nothing, and silently pushed away the Count who was bothering me with conversation… I was in a sort of oblivion, a half-sleep, feeling only the bright light of the lamps and a cheerful, peaceful mood… The image of the girl in red, with her head inclined on her shoulder, with eyes full of horror at a spectacular death, stood before me and quietly wagged a small finger at me… The image of another girl, in a black dress and with a pale, proud face, passed by and looked at me with either supplication or reproach.

Then I heard noise, laughter, running… Black, deep eyes obscured the light from me. I saw their sparkle, their laughter… A joyful smile played on full lips… It was my gypsy Tina smiling…

“Is that you?” her voice asked. “Are you asleep? Get up, dear… I haven’t seen you in a long time…”

I silently squeezed her hand and pulled her to me…

“Let’s go there… All ours have arrived…”

“Stay… I’m good here, Tina…”

“But… it’s too bright here… You’re crazy… People might come in…”

“Whoever comes in, I’ll wring their neck… I’m good, Tina… Two years have passed since I saw you…”

In the hall, the piano began to play.

“Oh, Moscow, Moscow,

Moscow… white-stoned…”

—  several voices shouted…

“See, they’re all singing there… No one will come in…”

“Yes, yes…”

The meeting with Tina brought me out of my oblivion… Ten minutes later, she led me into the hall, where the choir stood in a semicircle… The Count sat astride a chair, beating time with his hands… Pshekhotsky stood behind his chair and looked at the singing birds with astonished eyes… I snatched the balalaika from Karpov’s hands, waved my hand, and began…

Down the mother… along the Vo-olga…

—  the choir picked up…

Ay, burn, speak… speak…

I waved my hand, and instantly, with lightning speed, a new transition occurred…

Nights of madness, nights of joy…

Nothing irritates and tickles my nerves so much as such sharp transitions. I trembled with delight and, embracing Tina with one hand, and waving the balalaika in the air with the other, I sang “Nights of Madness” to the end… The balalaika crashed to the floor with a crack and shattered into tiny splinters…

“Wine!”

Further on, my memories approach chaos… Everything mixed, tangled, everything murky, unclear… I remember the gray sky of early morning… We are riding in boats… The lake is slightly agitated and seems to grumble, looking at our debaucheries… I stand in the middle of the boat and sway… Tina assures me that I might fall into the water and asks me to sit down… I, however, loudly express regret that there are no waves as high as Stone Grave on the lake, and frighten the gulls, flickering like white spots on the blue surface of the lake, with my shouting. Then follows a long hot day with its endless breakfasts, ten-year-old liqueurs, punches, debauchery… From that day, I remember only a few moments… I remember myself swaying with Tina on a swing in the garden. I stand on one end of the board, she on the other. I work with my whole torso with ferocity, as hard as I can, and I don’t even know what I really want: for Tina to fall off the swing and kill herself, or for her to fly up to the clouds? Tina stands pale as death, but proud and self-respecting, she clenches her teeth so as not to betray her fear with a single sound. We fly higher and higher and… I don’t remember how it ended. Then follows a walk with Tina to a distant alley with a green arch, hiding from the sun. Poetic twilight, black braids, full lips, whispers… Then a small contralto walks beside me, a blonde with a sharp nose, childlike eyes, and a very thin waist. I walk with her until Tina, having tracked us, makes a scene… The gypsy is pale, enraged… She calls me “cursed” and, offended, intends to leave for the city. The Count, pale, with trembling hands, runs around us and, as usual, cannot find words to persuade Tina to stay… She eventually slaps me… Strange: I fly into a rage at the slightest, barely offensive word spoken by a man, and am completely indifferent to slaps given to me by women… Again a long “after dinner,” again the snake on the stairs, again the sleeping Franz with flies around his mouth, again the wicket gate… The girl in red stands on Stone Grave, but, seeing us, disappears like a lizard.

By evening, Tina and I are friends again. The evening is followed by the same wild night, with music, daring singing, with nerve-tickling transitions… and not a single minute of sleep!

“This is self-destruction!” Urbénin whispered to me, having come for a moment to listen to our singing…

He is, of course, right. Then, I remember, the Count and I are standing in the garden facing each other and arguing. The dark-browed Kaetan walks around us, having taken no part in our merriment the whole time, but nevertheless, not sleeping and following us like a shadow… The sky is already white, and on the top of the highest tree, the rays of the rising sun are already beginning to glow golden. All around, sparrows squabble, starlings sing, rustling, the flapping of wings heavy from the night… The lowing of cattle and the shouts of shepherds are heard. Near us is a small table with a marble top. On the table is a Shandor candle with a pale flame. Cigarette butts, candy wrappers, broken glasses, orange peels…

“You must take this!” I say, handing the Count a wad of banknotes. “I’ll make you take it!”

“But I invited them, not you!” the Count argues, trying to catch my button. “I’m the host here… I treated you — why should you pay? Understand that you’re even insulting me with this!”

“I also hired them, so I’m paying half. You won’t take it? I don’t understand this favor! Do you really think that if you’re as rich as the devil, you have the right to do me such favors? Damn it, I hired Karpov, and I’ll pay him! I don’t need your half! I wrote the telegram!”

“In a restaurant, Seryozha, you can pay as much as you like, but my house is not a restaurant… And besides, I absolutely don’t understand what you’re fussing about, I don’t understand your eagerness. You have little money, but I have more than enough chickens won’t peck at… Justice itself is on my side!”

“So you won’t take it? No? No need…”

I bring the banknotes to the pale flame of the Shandor candle, light them, and throw them to the ground. A groan suddenly escapes Kaetan’s chest. He widens his eyes, pales, and falls his heavy body to the ground, trying to extinguish the fire on the money with his palms… He succeeds.

“I don’t understand!” he says, putting the burned banknotes into his pocket. “Burning money?! As if it’s last year’s chaff or love letters… I’d rather give it to some poor person than give it to fire.”

I go into the house… There, in all the rooms, on sofas and carpets, exhausted, worn-out singers sleep sprawled out… My Tina sleeps on the sofa in the “mosaic living room”…

She is sprawled out and breathing heavily… Her teeth are clenched, her face pale… She is probably dreaming of the swing… Sychikha walks through all the rooms, casting malicious glances with her sharp eyes at the people who so suddenly disturbed the dead silence of the forgotten estate… She is not walking for nothing and tiring her old bones…

This is all that remained in my memory after two wild nights; the rest did not stick in my drunken brain or is unsuitable for description… But this is enough!…

Never at any other time did Zorka carry me with such zeal as on the morning after the burning of the banknotes… She also wanted to go home… The lake gently rolled its foaming waves and, reflecting the rising sun, prepared for its daytime slumber… The forests and coastal willows stood motionless, as if in morning prayer… It is difficult to describe the state of my soul then… Without going into too much detail, I will only say that I was unspeakably joyful and at the same time almost burned with shame when, upon turning from the Count’s estate, I saw on the shore the old, emaciated by honest labor and diseases, holy face of old Mikhei… Mikhei’s appearance reminds one of biblical fishermen… He is as gray as a loon, bearded, and contemplatively looks at the sky… When he stands motionless on the shore and watches the fleeting clouds, one might think that he sees angels in the sky… I love such faces…

Seeing him, I reined in my Zorka and offered him my hand, as if wishing to cleanse myself by touching his honest, calloused hand… He raised his small, discerning eyes to me and smiled.

“Greetings, good sir!” he said, awkwardly shaking my hand. “What, are you galloping again? Has that idler arrived?”

“He has arrived.”

“Just so… I see it in your face… And I stand here and look… The world is the world. Vanity of vanities… Look! The German needs to die, but he worries about vanity… See?”

The old man pointed his stick at the Count’s bathhouse. A boat was quickly sailing away from the bathhouse. A man in a jockey cap and a blue jacket sat in it. It was Franz the gardener.

“Every morning he carries money to the island and hides it… The fool has no concept in his head that for him sand and money are one and the same value… When he dies, he won’t take it with him. Give me a cigarette, sir!”

I offered him my cigarette case. He took three cigarettes and tucked them into his bosom.

“These are for my nephew… Let him smoke.”

Impatient Zorka stirred and flew. I bowed to the old man, grateful that he had given my eyes a rest on his face. He watched me for a long time.

At home, Polikarp met me… With a contemptuous, crushing gaze, he measured my master’s body, as if wanting to know if I had bathed in my full suit this time or not?

“Congratulations!” he grumbled. “Had a good time!”

“Shut up, fool!” I said.

His stupid face angered me. Quickly undressing, I covered myself with a blanket and closed my eyes.

My head spun, and the world was enveloped in fog. Familiar images flashed in the fog… The Count, the snake, Franz, fire-colored dogs, the girl in red, the mad Nikolai Efimych.

“The husband killed his wife! Oh, how foolish you are!”

The girl in red wagged her finger at me, Tina obscured the light with her black eyes, and… I fell asleep…

Chapter IV

 

“How sweetly and peacefully he sleeps! Looking at this pale, weary face, at this innocently childlike smile, and listening to this even breathing, one might think that not a judicial investigator lies here on the bed, but conscience itself, serene and tranquil! One might think that Count Karneev hasn’t arrived yet, that there’s been no drunkenness, no gypsies, no scandals on the lake… Get up, you most devious of men! You are unworthy of such a blessing as peaceful sleep! Get up!”

I opened my eyes and stretched sweetly… From the window to my bed, a wide sunbeam streamed, in which white dust motes chased each other, agitated, making the beam itself seem veiled in a milky white haze… The beam would disappear from my sight, then reappear, depending on whether our dearest district doctor, Pavel Ivanovich Voznesensky, was walking into or out of its path in my bedroom. In a long, unbuttoned frock coat that hung on him like on a hanger, with his hands in the pockets of his unusually long trousers, the doctor walked from corner to corner, from chair to chair, from portrait to portrait, squinting his nearsighted eyes at everything that caught his gaze. True to his habit of poking his nose and peering (“glazenap”) wherever possible – he would bend down or stretch out, looking into the washbasin, into the folds of the lowered blind, into door cracks, into the lamp… as if searching for something or wanting to ascertain if everything was intact… Staring intently through his glasses at some crack or spot on the wallpaper, he would frown, assume a concerned expression, sniff with his long nose, meticulously scrape with his fingernail… All this he did mechanically, unconsciously, and by habit, but nevertheless, quickly darting his eyes from one object to another, he had the air of an expert conducting an examination.

“Get up, I’m telling you!” he woke me with his melodious tenor, peering into the soap dish and picking a hair off the soap with his fingernail.

“Ah… ah… ah… good day, Mr. Shchur!” I yawned, seeing him bent over the washbasin. “Long time no see!”

The entire district teased the doctor as “shchur” (pike, implying squint-eyed) because of his perpetually squinting eyes; I teased him too. Seeing that I had woken up, Voznesensky came over to me, sat on the edge of the bed, and immediately pulled a box of matches towards his squinting eyes…

“Only idlers and people with a clear conscience sleep like that,” he said, “and since you are neither, my friend, you ought to get up a little earlier…”

“What time is it now?”

“Past eleven.”

“Damn you, my dear Shchur! No one asked you to wake me so early! You know, I only fell asleep today at six o’clock, and if it weren’t for you, I would have slept until evening.”

“Indeed!” I heard Polikarp’s bass from the next room. “He hasn’t slept enough! He’s been sleeping for two days, and it’s still not enough for him! Do you even know what day it is today?” Polikarp asked, entering the bedroom and looking at me as clever people look at fools.

“Wednesday,” I said.

“Of course, absolutely. We arranged it specially for you, so there would be two Wednesdays in a week…”

“Today is Thursday!” the doctor said. “So, my dear fellow, you managed to sleep through all of Wednesday? Charming! Very charming! How much did you drink, if I may ask?”

“I hadn’t slept for two days, and I drank… I don’t remember how much I drank.”

After sending Polikarp away, I began to get dressed and describe to the doctor the “mad nights, incoherent speeches” that I had recently experienced, which are so beautiful and poignant in romances but so unsightly in reality. In my descriptions, I tried not to stray beyond the bounds of the “light genre,” to stick to facts and not delve into morals, although all this is contrary to the nature of a person who has a passion for conclusions and inferences… I spoke and pretended to speak of trifles that did not trouble me in the least. Sparing Pavel Ivanovich’s modesty and knowing his aversion to the Count, I concealed much, only lightly touched upon many things, but nevertheless, despite even the playfulness of my tone, the caricatured manner of my speech, the doctor looked at my face seriously throughout my story, constantly shaking his head and impatiently shrugging his shoulders. He never smiled once… Evidently, my “light genre” made a far from light impression on him.

“Why aren’t you laughing, my dear Shchur?” I asked, finishing my descriptions…

“If all this hadn’t been told to me by you, and if it weren’t for one incident, I wouldn’t believe any of it. It’s just too ugly, my friend!”

“What incident are you talking about?”

“Yesterday evening, I had a peasant who you so indelicately treated with an oar… Ivan Osipov…”

“Ivan Osipov…” I shrugged. “First time I’ve heard of him!”

“A tall fellow, red-haired… with freckles on his face… Try to recall! You hit him on the head with an oar.”

“I don’t understand anything! I don’t know any Osipov, I didn’t treat anyone with an oar… You dreamed all this, uncle!”

“God grant it was a dream… He came to me with a report from the Karneev district administration and asked for a medical certificate… The report states, and he himself isn’t lying, that the wound was inflicted by you… You still don’t remember? The wound is a contusion, above the forehead, at the hairline… You struck him down to the bone, my dear fellow!”

“I don’t remember!” I whispered. “Who is he? What does he do?”

“An ordinary Karneev peasant, he was a rower for you there on the lake when you were carousing…”

“Hmm… maybe! I don’t remember… Probably I was drunk and somehow accidentally…”

“No, sir, not accidentally… He says you got angry with him for something, cursed him for a long time, and then, enraged, jumped at him and struck him in front of witnesses… Not only that, you shouted: ‘I’ll kill you, you scoundrel!'”

I blushed and walked from corner to corner.

“Kill me, I don’t remember!” I muttered, straining my memory with all my might. “I don’t remember! You say ‘enraged’… When I’m drunk, I can be unforgivably vile!”

“What could be better!”

“The peasant, obviously, wants to start a scandal, but that’s not what’s important… The fact itself is important, the beating… Am I really capable of fighting? And why did I hit the poor peasant?”

“Yes, sir… Of course, I couldn’t refuse him a certificate, but I didn’t fail to advise him to approach you… You should meet with him somehow… The injuries are minor, but, speaking unofficially, a head wound that penetrates to the skull is a serious matter… It’s not uncommon for what seems to be the most trivial head wound, categorized as minor assault, to end in necrosis of the skull bones and, consequently, a journey ad patres (to the fathers, Latin.)

And “Shchur,” carried away, got up, paced around the walls, and, gesticulating with his hands, began to lay out his knowledge of surgical pathology before me… Necrosis of the skull bones, brain inflammation, death, and other horrors poured from his mouth with endless explanations of macroscopic and microscopic processes accompanying this vague and uninteresting terra incognita (unknown land, Latin) for me.

“That’s enough, you chatterbox!” I stopped his medical babble. “Don’t you know how boring all this is?”

“It’s nothing that it’s boring… You listen and repent… Perhaps next time you’ll be more careful and won’t do unnecessary foolishness… Because of that scoundrel Osipov, if you meet with him, you could lose your position! A priest of Themis to be sued for assault… that’s a scandal!”

Pavel Ivanovich is the only person whose pronouncements I listen to with a light heart, without grimacing, who is allowed to look questioningly into my eyes and delve with an inquiring hand into the depths of my soul… We are friends in the best sense of the word and respect each other, although we do have unpleasant, delicate matters between us… A woman, like a black cat, has passed between us. This eternal casus belli (war accident, Latin) created issues between us, but did not quarrel us, and we continue to be at peace. “Shchur” is a very good fellow… I love his simple, far from plastic face with a large nose, squinting eyes, and a sparse red beard. I love his tall, thin, narrow-shouldered figure, on which frock coats and overcoats hang like on a hanger.

His awkwardly tailored trousers gather in unsightly folds at his knees and are mercilessly trampled by his boots; his white tie is always out of place… But don’t think he’s a slob… Looking once at his kind, focused face, you’ll understand that he has no time to fuss about his appearance, nor does he know how… He is young, honest, not vain, loves his medicine, always on the road —  this is enough to explain in his favor all the shortcomings of his unassuming attire. He, like an artist, doesn’t know the value of money and unperturbedly sacrifices his comfort and life’s blessings for some of his little passions, and that’s why he gives the impression of a poor man, barely making ends meet… He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t pay women, but nevertheless, the two thousand he earns from his service and practice disappear from him as quickly as my money disappears from me when I’m in a period of carousing. Two passions strip him bare: the passion for lending and the passion for ordering from newspaper advertisements… He lends to everyone who asks, without saying a word or stuttering about repayment… No nail could pry from him his reckless faith in human conscientiousness, and this faith is even more clearly manifested in his constant ordering of items extolled in newspaper advertisements… He orders everything, necessary and unnecessary. He orders books, telescopes, humorous magazines, cutlery “consisting of 100 items,” chronometers… And it’s no wonder if patients coming to Pavel Ivanovich mistake his room for an arsenal or a museum… He has been and is being swindled, but his faith remains strong and reckless… He’s a splendid fellow, and we will meet him again more than once on the pages of this novel…

“How long I’ve stayed with you, though,” he remembered, glancing at his cheap, single-cased watch, which he had ordered from Moscow “with a 5-year guarantee,” but which had nevertheless been repaired twice. “It’s time for me to go, friend! Farewell, and mind my words! These Count’s revelries will not end well! Not to mention your health… Oh, yes! Will you be in Tenevo tomorrow?”

“What’s there tomorrow?”

“The patron saint’s day! Everyone will be there, and you come too! You absolutely must come! I gave my word that you would definitely come. Don’t make me a liar…”

To whom he had given his word — there was no need to ask. We understood each other. Having said goodbye to me, the doctor put on his worn coat and left…

I was left alone… To drown out the unpleasant thoughts that were beginning to stir in my head, I went to my desk and, trying not to think, not to account for myself, occupied myself with the papers I had received… The first envelope that caught my eye contained the following letter:

“My dear Seryozha! Forgive me for bothering you, but I am so surprised that I don’t know who to turn to… This is utterly unacceptable. Of course, it can’t be helped now, and I don’t regret it, but judge for yourself, if thieves are indulged, then an honest woman can’t be at peace anywhere. After you left, I woke up on the sofa and didn’t find many of my things on me. My bracelet, gold cufflink, ten pearls from my necklace were stolen, and about a hundred rubles were taken from my purse. I wanted to complain to the Count, but he was asleep, so I left. This is bad. The Count’s house, and they steal like in a tavern. You tell the Count. I kiss you and bow. Your loving Tina.”

That His Excellency’s house abounded in thieves was no news to me, and I added Tina’s letter to the information I already had on this matter in my memory. Sooner or later — I had to put this information to use… I knew the thieves.

The black-eyed Tina’s letter, her bold, rich handwriting reminded me of the mosaic living room and aroused in me a desire akin to a hangover craving, but I overcame myself and by force of will compelled myself to work. At first, it was unspeakably boring to decipher the sprawling handwriting of the bailiffs, but then my attention gradually became fixed on a burglary case, and I began to work with pleasure. I sat at my desk all day, and Polikarp kept passing by me and looking at my work with distrust. He could not believe in my gravity, and every minute he expected me to get up from the table and order Zorka to be saddled; but by evening, seeing my persistence, he believed, and the expression of sullenness on his face changed to an expression of pleasure… He began to walk on tiptoe, spoke in a whisper…

When the lads with the accordion passed by my windows, he went outside and shouted:

“What are you devils doing stomping around here? Walk on another street! Don’t you know, you heathens, that the master is working!”

In the evening, after serving the samovar in the dining room, he quietly opened my door and gently invited me to drink tea.

“Please, come and have tea!” he said, sighing tenderly and smiling respectfully.

And as I drank tea, he quietly came up behind me and kissed my shoulder…

“This is better, Sergei Petrovich,” he mumbled. “Spit on that blond devil, may he… Is it proper for a man of your high understanding and education to engage in cowardice? Your business is noble… Everyone should flatter you, fear you, but if you go around breaking people’s heads with that devil and swimming in the lake in your clothes, everyone will say: ‘No sense at all! A trivial man!’ And then your reputation will spread throughout the world! Daring suits a merchant, but not a nobleman… A nobleman needs learning, service…”

“Well, that’s enough, that’s enough…”

“Don’t get mixed up with the Count, Sergei Petrovich! And if you want to be friends, why isn’t Doctor Pavel Ivanych a man? He walks around in rags, but he has a lot of intelligence!”

Polikarp’s sincerity warmed me… I wanted to say a kind word to him…

“What novel are you reading now?” I asked him.

“The Count of Monte Cristo. Now that’s a count! He’s a real count! Not like your messy one!”

After tea, I again sat down to work and worked until my eyelids began to droop and close my weary eyes… Going to bed, I ordered Polikarp to wake me at five o’clock.

The next day, at six in the morning, I, gaily whistling and knocking off flower heads with my cane, walked to Tenevo, where it was the patron saint’s day and where my friend “Shchur,” Pavel Ivanovich, had invited me. The morning was delightful. Happiness itself, it seemed, hung over the earth and, reflected in diamond dewdrops, beckoned to the soul of the passerby… The forest, enveloped in the morning light, was quiet and still, as if listening to my footsteps and the chirping of the bird brethren, who greeted me with expressions of distrust and fright… The air was permeated with the exhalations of spring greenery and its tenderness caressed my healthy lungs. I breathed it in and, casting enthusiastic glances at the expanse, felt spring, youth, and it seemed to me that the young birches, the roadside grass, and the constantly buzzing May beetles shared this feeling of mine.

“And what is the point, there, in the world,” I thought, “of man huddling in his cramped hovels, in his narrow and constricted ideas, if there is such expanse here for life and thought? Why doesn’t he come here?”

And my poeticized imagination did not want to trouble itself with thoughts of winter and bread, those two sorrows that drive poets into cold, prosaic Petersburg and into untidy Moscow, where they pay fees for verses but do not give inspiration.

Peasant carts and landowners’ phaetons, hurrying to mass and to the fair, passed by me. Every now and then, I had to take off my hat and respond to the friendly bows of peasants and familiar landowners. Everyone offered a “ride,” but walking was better than riding, and I refused each time. Among others, the Count’s gardener, Franz, in a blue jacket and jockey cap, rode past me on a light racing droshky… He lazily looked at me with sleepy, sour eyes and even more lazily touched his visor. Behind him was tied a five-bucket barrel with iron hoops, evidently a vodka barrel… Franz’s repulsive face and his barrel somewhat spoiled my poetic mood, but soon poetry triumphed again when I heard the sound of a carriage behind me and, looking back, saw a heavy charabanc, harnessed to a pair of bay horses, and in the heavy charabanc on a leather box-shaped seat – my new acquaintance, the “girl in red,” who two days before had spoken to me about the “electricity” that had killed her mother… Olenka’s pretty, freshly washed, and somewhat sleepy little face brightened and flushed slightly when she saw me, walking along the edge of the boundary separating the forest from the road. She nodded gaily to me and smiled as warmly as only old acquaintances do.

“Good morning!” I shouted to her.

She waved to me, and together with her heavy charabanc, disappeared from my sight, not allowing me to gaze enough at her pretty, fresh face. This time she was not dressed in red. She wore some dark green bustle with large buttons and a wide-brimmed straw hat, but nevertheless, I liked her no less than before. I would have gladly talked to her and listened to her voice. I would have liked to look into her deep eyes in the brilliance of the sun, as I had looked into them that evening, when lightning flashed. I wanted to make her get out of the ugly charabanc and offer her to walk the rest of the way beside me, which I would have done, were it not for the “conditions” of society. For some reason, it seemed to me that she would have gladly agreed to this proposal… It was no wonder that she looked back at me twice when the charabanc turned behind the tall alders!…

From my residence to Tenevo was six versts – a distance almost imperceptible for a young man on a fine morning. By the beginning of the seventh hour, I was already making my way between carts and fair booths to the Tenevo church. The mercantile noise, despite the early morning and the fact that mass had not yet ended, already filled the air. The creaking of carts, the neighing of horses, the lowing of cows, the playing of toy trumpets – all this mixed with the shouts of gypsy horse dealers and the singing of peasants who had already managed to get “lemoned” (drunk). How many cheerful, festive faces, how many types! How much charm and movement in this mass, motley with bright colors of dresses, bathed in the light of the morning sun! All this, thousands strong, was bustling, moving, making noise, to do its business in a few hours and disperse by evening, leaving behind in the square, as if in memory, hay refuse, scattered oats here and there, and nut shells… People in thick crowds streamed to and from the church.

The church cross emitted golden rays, as bright as the sun itself. It sparkled and seemed to burn with golden fire. Below it, the church dome burned with the same fire, and the freshly painted green dome glistened in the sun, and beyond the sparkling cross, a transparent, distant blue stretched wide. I, passing through the fence filled with people, made my way into the church. Mass had only recently begun, and when I entered, they were still reading only the Apostle. There was silence in the church, broken by the reading and the footsteps of the censing deacon. The people stood quietly, motionless, reverently gazing at the open royal doors and listening to the drawn-out reading. Village decorum, or rather, village propriety, strictly prosecutes any attempt to disturb the reverent silence in church. I always felt ashamed when something forced me to smile or talk in church. Unfortunately, only in rare cases did I not meet acquaintances in church, of whom, alas, I had very many; usually, as soon as I entered the church, some “intellectual” would immediately approach me and, after long prefaces about the weather, begin a conversation about his trivial affairs. I would answer “yes” and “no,” but was so scrupulous that I was unable to completely deny my interlocutor attention. And my scrupulousness cost me dearly: I conversed and glanced furtively at my praying neighbors, fearing that I was offending them with my idle chatter.

And this time it was not without acquaintances. Entering the church, right at the entrance, I saw my heroine, the very “girl in red” whom I had met while making my way to Tenevo.

The poor girl, red as a crab and sweating, stood in the crowd and surveyed all faces with pleading eyes, seeking a deliverer. She was stuck in the tight crowd and, unable to move back or forth, resembled a bird tightly squeezed in a fist. Seeing me, she smiled bitterly and nodded to me with her pretty chin.

“For heaven’s sake, lead me forward!” she began, grabbing my sleeve. “It’s terribly stuffy here and… crowded… Please!”

“But it’s crowded up front too!” I said.

“But there, everyone is neatly dressed, decent… Here are just common people, and a place is reserved for us up front… And you should be there too…”

So, she was red not because the church was stuffy and crowded. The question of precedence troubled her small head! I heeded the vain girl’s pleas and, carefully pushing through the crowd, led her to the very ambo, where the entire flower of our district’s high society was already gathered. Having placed Olenka in the spot befitting her aristocratic pretensions, I stood behind the high society and began to observe.

Men and ladies, as usual, whispered and giggled. The justice of the peace, Kalinin, gesturing with his fingers and shaking his head, quietly told the landowner Deryaev about his illnesses. Deryaev almost audibly cursed doctors and advised the justice to seek treatment from some Evstrat Ivanych. The ladies, seeing Olenka, seized upon her as a good topic and began to whisper. Only one girl, apparently, was praying… She knelt and, fixing her black eyes forward, moved her lips. She did not notice how a curl escaped from under her hat and hung disheveled on her pale temple… She did not notice how I stopped next to her with Olenka.

This was Nadezhda Nikolaevna, the daughter of Justice Kalinin. When I spoke earlier of the woman who ran like a black cat between me and the doctor, I was speaking of her… The doctor loved her in a way only good natures like my dear “Shchur” Pavel Ivanovich were capable of loving… Now, he stood beside her like a pole, hands at his sides and neck outstretched… Occasionally, he would cast his loving, questioning eyes upon her focused face… He seemed to be guarding her prayer, and in his eyes glowed an ardent, longing desire to be the subject of her prayer. But, to his misfortune, he knew for whom she prayed… Not for him…

I nodded to Pavel Ivanovich when he glanced at me, and we both exited the church.

“Let’s wander around the fair,” I suggested.

We lit cigarettes and walked among the stalls.

“How is Nadezhda Nikolaevna doing?” I asked the doctor, entering a tent with him where toys were sold…

“Alright… Seems healthy…” the doctor replied, squinting at a little soldier with a purple face and a crimson uniform. “She asked about you…”

“What did she ask about me?”

“Just generally… She’s annoyed that you haven’t visited them in a long time… She wants to see you and ask you the reasons for such a sudden cooling towards their house… You used to visit almost every day and then — boom! As if you cut them off… And don’t even bow.”

“You’re lying, Shchur… Indeed, due to lack of leisure, I stopped visiting the Kalinins… That’s true. My relations with that family are still excellent… I always bow if I meet any of them.”

“However, when you met her father last Thursday, for some reason you didn’t find it necessary to return his bow.”

“I don’t like that fool of a justice,” I said, “and I can’t look at his mug indifferently, but I still have enough strength to bow to him and shake his extended hand. Probably, I didn’t notice him on Thursday or didn’t recognize him. You’re out of sorts today, Shchur, and you’re nitpicking…”

“I love you, my dear fellow,” Pavel Ivanovich sighed, “but I don’t believe you… ‘Didn’t notice, didn’t recognize…’ I don’t need your justifications or excuses… What’s the point if there’s so little truth in them? You’re a splendid, good person, but in your sick brain there’s a tiny piece, sticking out like a nail, which, forgive me, is capable of any nastiness…”

“Our most humble thanks.”

“Don’t be angry, my dear fellow… God grant that I am mistaken, but it seems to me that you are a bit of a psychopath. Sometimes, against your will and the direction of your good nature, such desires and actions break out that everyone who knows you as a decent person is at a loss… You wonder how your highly moral principles, which I have the honor to know, can coexist with those sudden impulses of yours, which in the end result in crying abomination! What kind of animal is this?” Pavel Ivanovich suddenly asked the vendor, changing his tone and bringing a wooden animal with a human nose, a mane, and gray stripes on its back closer to his eyes.

“A lion,” the seller yawned. “Or maybe some other creature. The devil knows!”

From the toy stalls, we headed to the “red” shops, where trade was already bustling.

“These toys only deceive children,” the doctor said. “They give the most distorted notions of flora and fauna. This lion, for example… Striped, crimson, and squeaking… Do lions squeak?”

“Listen, Shchur,” I said. “Apparently, you want to tell me something, and you seem hesitant… Speak… I enjoy listening to you even when you say unpleasant things…”

“Pleasant, my friend, or unpleasant, but do listen… There’s much I’d like to talk to you about…”

“Begin… I am all ears.”

“I have already expressed my assumption that you are a psychopath. Now, would you care to hear the proof?… I will speak frankly, perhaps sometimes a little harshly… you may be offended by my words, but don’t be angry, my friend… You know my feelings for you: I love and respect you more than anyone else in the district… I tell you this not for reproach or condemnation, not to prick you. Let us both be objective, my friend… Let us examine your psyche with an impartial eye, like a liver or a stomach…”

“Alright, let’s be objective,” I agreed.

“Excellent… Let’s start with your relations with Kalinin, for example… If you consult your memory, it will tell you that you began visiting the Kalinins immediately upon your arrival in our God-saved district. Your acquaintance was not sought… From the very first time, you displeased the justice with your arrogant demeanor, mocking tone, and friendship with the dissolute Count, and you would not have visited the justice’s home if you had not paid him a visit yourself. Do you remember? You became acquainted with Nadezhda Nikolaevna and began to visit the justice almost every day… It used to be, whenever you came, you were always there… You were given the most cordial reception. People caressed you as only they knew how… Both father, and mother, and the little sisters… They became attached to you as if you were family… They admired you, carried you on their hands, laughed at your slightest witticism… You were for them a model of intelligence, nobility, gentlemanship. You seemed to understand all this and reciprocated their attachment with attachment — you visited every day, even on days of pre-holiday preparations and commotion. Finally, that unfortunate love you aroused in Nadenka is no secret to you… It’s no secret, is it? You, knowing she was head over heels in love with you, kept visiting and visiting… And what happened, my friend? A year ago, suddenly, out of the blue, you abruptly ceased your visits. They waited for you for a week… a month… waited until today, and you still haven’t shown up… They write to you, you don’t reply… Finally, you don’t even bow… For you, who attaches great importance to propriety, these actions of yours must seem the height of impoliteness! Why did you so sharply and abruptly abandon the Kalinins? Were you offended? No… Did you get tired of them? In that case, you could have left gradually, without this offensive, unmotivated abruptness…”

“I stopped visiting,” I smiled, “and became a psychopath. How naive you are, Shchur! Does it matter whether you break off an acquaintance immediately or gradually? Immediately is even more honest — less hypocrisy. What trifles all this is, though!”

“Let’s assume that all this is trifles or that you were forced to make such a sharp turn by hidden reasons that are none of an outsider’s business. But how do you explain your subsequent actions?”

“For example?”

“For example, you once appeared in our zemstvo administration,” – I don’t know what business you had there – “and when the chairman asked why you hadn’t been seen at the Kalinins’, you said… Recall what you said! ‘I’m afraid I’ll be married off!’ That’s what slipped from your tongue! And you said this during the meeting, loudly, clearly – so that all hundred people in the meeting room could hear you! Was that beautiful? In response to your words, there was laughter and vulgar jokes about bachelor hunting. Your phrase was picked up by some scoundrel, who went to the Kalinins and delivered it to Nadenka during dinner… Why such an insult, Sergei Petrovich?”

Pavel Ivanovich blocked my path, stood before me, and continued, looking at my face with pleading, almost weeping eyes:

“Why such an insult? Why? Because this good girl loves you? Let’s assume that the father, like any father, had designs on your person… He, paternally, considers everyone: you, and me, and Markuzin… All parents are the same… There’s no doubt that she, head over heels in love, perhaps hoped to become your wife… So, is that a reason to deliver such a resounding slap in the face? Uncle, uncle! Weren’t you yourself seeking these designs on your person? You visited every day; ordinary guests don’t visit so often. During the day, you fished with her, in the evenings you walked in the garden, jealously guarding your tête-à-tête… You learned that she loved you, and you didn’t change your behavior by an iota… Could one after this not suspect good intentions in you? I was sure you would marry her! And you… you complained, you laughed! Why? What did she do to you?”

“Don’t shout, Shchur, people are watching,” I said, bypassing Pavel Ivanovich. “Let’s stop this conversation. This is women’s talk… I’ll just tell you three lines, and that will be enough for you. I visited the Kalinins because I was bored and interested in Nadenka… She’s a very interesting young lady… Perhaps I would have married her, but, having learned that you had become a suitor for her heart before me, having learned that you were not indifferent to her, I decided to withdraw… It would have been cruel of me to interfere with such a good fellow as you…”

“Merci for the favor! I did not ask you for this gracious handout, and, as far as I can judge now from the expression on your face, you are now speaking untruth, speaking idly, without thinking about your words… And then the fact that I am a splendid fellow did not prevent you, however, during one of your last visits, from proposing to Nadenka in the gazebo, a proposal that would not have boded well for a splendid fellow if he had married her!”

“Aha! Where did you learn about this proposal, Shchur? So, your affairs are going well if such secrets are now being entrusted to you!… But, however, you have turned pale with anger and are almost about to hit me… And yet you also agreed to be objective! How funny you are, Shchur! Well, let’s drop this nonsense… Let’s go to the post office…”

We headed towards the post office, which cheerfully looked out with its three small windows onto the market square. Through the gray picket fence, the flowerbed of our receptionist Maxim Fedorovich, a well-known expert in our district on arranging flowerbeds, vegetable gardens, lawns, and so on, stood out brightly.

We found Maxim Fedorovich engaged in a very pleasant activity… Red with pleasure and smiling, he sat at his green table and, like a book, flipped through a thick wad of hundred-ruble notes. Apparently, even the sight of other people’s money could affect his mood.

“Hello, Maxim Fedorych!” I greeted him. “Where did you get such a pile of money?”

“Oh, they’re sending it to St. Petersburg!” the receptionist smiled sweetly and pointed his chin to the corner, where a dark human figure sat on the only chair in the post office…

Seeing me, this figure rose and approached me. In him, I recognized my new acquaintance, my freshly made enemy, whom I had so offended when I got drunk at the Count’s…

“My respects,” he said.

“Hello, Kaetan Kazimirovich,” I replied, pretending not to see his outstretched hand. “Is the Count well?”

“Thank God… Just a little bored… He expects you any minute…”

On Pshekhotsky’s face, I read a desire to converse with me. Where could such a desire come from after the “pig” I had treated him to that evening, and whence such a change in his demeanor?

“How much money you have!” I said, looking at the wads of hundred-ruble notes he was sending.

And it was as if someone had struck me on the brain! On one of the hundred-ruble notes, I saw burned edges and a completely charred corner… This was the very hundred-ruble note that I had wanted to burn in Shandor’s fire when the Count refused to take it from me to pay the gypsies, and which Pshekhotsky had picked up when I threw it to the ground.

“I’d rather give it to some poor person,” he had said then, “than give them to fire.”

To which “poor person” was he sending it now?

“Seven thousand five hundred rubles,” Maxim Fedorych counted slowly. “Perfectly correct!”

It’s awkward to intrude on other people’s secrets, but I desperately wanted to know to whom and whose money this dark-browed Pole was sending to Petersburg? In any case, the money was not his, and the Count had no one to send it to.

“He robbed the drunken Count,” I thought. “If the deaf and stupid Sychikha can rob the Count, then what’s to stop this goose from putting his paw in his pocket?”

“Ah… by the way, I’ll send money too,” Pavel Ivanovich remembered. “You know, gentlemen? It’s even incredible! For fifteen rubles, five items with shipping! A telescope, a chronometer, a calendar, and something else… Maxim Fedorych, lend me a sheet of paper and an envelope!”

Shchur sent his fifteen rubles, I received newspapers and letters, and we left the post office…

We headed towards the church. Shchur walked behind me, pale and dejected, like an autumn day. Beyond expectation, the conversation in which he had tried to appear “objective” had greatly disturbed him.

In the church, bells were ringing. A thick crowd, seemingly endless, slowly descended from the porch. From the crowd rose ancient banners and a dark cross, preceding the procession. The sun playfully glinted on the vestments of the clergy, and the icon of the Mother of God radiated dazzling rays…

“And there are ours!” the doctor said, pointing to our district’s high society, which had separated from the crowd and stood to the side.

“Yours, not ours,” I said.

“It’s all the same… Let’s go to them…”

I approached my acquaintances and bowed. Justice of the Peace Kalinin, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a grey beard and bulging, crab-like eyes, stood in front of everyone, whispering something into his daughter’s ear. Pretending not to notice me, he did not respond with a single movement to my “general” bow directed his way.

“Farewell, little angel,” he murmured in a weeping voice, kissing his daughter on her pale forehead. “Go home alone, and I will return by evening… My visits will not last long.”

Kissing his daughter once more and smiling sweetly at the high society, he sternly knitted his brows and sharply turned on one heel towards a peasant with a hundred-man’s badge standing behind him.

“When, finally, will they bring me the horses?” he croaked.

The hundred-man flinched and waved his hands.

“Look out!”

The crowd, following the procession, parted, and the justice’s horses, with a flourish and jingling bells, rolled up to Kalinin. He sat down, bowed majestically, and, disturbing the crowd with his “Look out!”, disappeared from sight, not gracing me with a single glance.

“Such a majestic pig,” I whispered into the doctor’s ear. “Let’s get out of here!”

“But don’t you want to talk to Nadezhda Nikolaevna?” Pavel Ivanych asked.

“It’s time for me to go home. No time.”

The doctor looked at me angrily, sighed, and walked away. I gave a general bow and headed for the stalls. As I made my way through the thick crowd, I looked back and saw the justice’s daughter. She was looking after me, as if testing whether I could endure her pure, piercing gaze, full of bitter offense and reproach.

“Why?!” her eyes seemed to say.

Something stirred in my chest, and I felt pain and shame for my foolish behavior. I suddenly wanted to turn back and, with all the strength of my gentle, not yet completely corrupted soul, caress and comfort this girl who loved me so passionately, whom I had offended, and tell her that it was not my fault, but my cursed pride, which prevented me from living, breathing, taking a step. Pride, stupid, foppish, full of vanity. Could I, an empty man, extend a hand of reconciliation if I knew and saw that the eyes of the district gossips and “ominous old women” followed my every move? Let them rather shower her with mocking glances and smiles than lose faith in the “inflexibility” of my character and pride, which foolish women find so appealing in me.

When I had previously spoken with Pavel Ivanych about the reasons that made me suddenly stop my visits to the Kalinins, I had been insincere and quite inaccurate… I concealed the real reason, I concealed it because I was ashamed of its insignificance… The reason was as trivial as gunpowder… It was as follows: when on my last visit, after handing Zorka to the coachman, I entered the Kalinin house, a phrase reached my ears:

“Nadenka, where are you? Your fiancé has arrived!”

Her father, the justice, said this, probably not expecting me to hear him. But I heard, and my self-esteem spoke out.

“I’m the fiancé?” I thought. “Who allowed you to call me a fiancé? On what grounds?”

And it was as if something tore in my chest… Pride raged within me, and I forgot everything I had remembered while driving to the Kalinins… I forgot that I had captivated the girl and had begun to be captivated by her myself to the point that I could not spend a single evening without her company… I forgot her kind eyes, which never left my mind day or night, her gentle smile, her melodic voice… I forgot the quiet, summer evenings that would never be repeated for either me or her… Everything collapsed under the pressure of devilish pride, agitated by the stupid phrase of her simpleton father… Enraged, I turned back from the house, got on Zorka, and galloped away, swearing to “put Kalinin in his place” for daring to enlist me as his daughter’s fiancé without my permission…

“Besides, Voznesensky loves her…” I justified my sudden departure, riding home. “He started circling around her before me and was already considered a suitor when I met her. I won’t stand in his way!”

And since then, I had not once been to the Kalinins, although there were moments when I suffered from longing for Nadia and my soul yearned, yearned for a renewal of the past… But the entire district knew about the break, knew that I had “run away from marriage…” My pride simply could not make concessions!

Who knows? Had Kalinin not uttered that phrase, and had I not been so foolishly proud and scrupulous, perhaps I would not have needed to look back, and she — to look at me with such eyes… But let such eyes be, let this feeling of offense and reproach be better than what I saw in those eyes several months after our meeting at the Tenevo church! The sorrow that now shone in the depths of those black eyes was only the beginning of that terrible misfortune which, like a suddenly arriving train, wiped this girl from the face of the earth… What were mere blossoms compared to the berries that were already ripening to pour terrible poison into her fragile body and aching soul!

Chapter V

 

Leaving Tenevo, I took the same road I had walked that morning. The sun already indicated midday… Peasant carts and landowners’ phaetons, as in the morning, delighted my ears with their creaking and the metallic grumbling of bells. Gardener Franz passed by again with his vodka barrel, this time, probably full… Again, he looked at me with his sour eyes and touched his cap. His repulsive face put me off, but this time, too, the heavy impression made by meeting him was instantly dispelled by the forester’s daughter, Olenka, who caught up with me in her heavy charabanc…

“Give me a ride!” I called out to her.

She nodded gaily and stopped the driver. I sat down next to her, and the charabanc rattled along the road, a bright strip stretching through the three-verst clearing of the Tenevo forest. For a minute or two, we silently looked at each other.

“How truly pretty she is!” I thought, looking at her neck and plump chin. “If I were offered a choice between Nadenka and her, I would choose this one… She is more natural, fresher, her nature is broader and more expansive… If she fell into good hands, much could be made of her! The other one is gloomy, dreamy… intelligent.”

At Olenka’s feet lay two pieces of linen and several bundles.

“You have so many purchases!” I said. “Why do you need so much linen?”

“I still need even more!..” Olenka replied. “I just bought this, by the way… You can’t imagine how much trouble! Today I walked around the fair for a whole hour, and tomorrow I’ll have to go to town for purchases… And then, please, sew… Listen, do you know any women who could be hired to sew?”

“I don’t think so… But why do you need so many purchases? Why sew? Your family isn’t that large, for goodness sake… One, two… and that’s it…”

“How strange you men all are! And you understand nothing! Just wait until you get married, then you yourselves will be angry if your wife comes to you looking disheveled after the wedding. I know Pyotr Egorych isn’t in need, but still, it’s awkward not to show yourself as a good housewife from the very beginning…”

“What does Pyotr Egorych have to do with it?”

“Hmm… He’s laughing as if he doesn’t know!” Olenka said, blushing slightly.

“You, young lady, speak in riddles…”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m marrying Pyotr Egorych!”

“Marrying?” I exclaimed, widening my eyes. “Which Pyotr Egorych?”

“Oh, my God! Urbénin, of course!”

I looked at her blushing and smiling face…

“You… marrying? Urbénin? What a joker you are!”

“There are no jokes here… I don’t even understand what’s so funny about it…”

“You marrying… Urbénin…” I muttered, turning pale, I didn’t know why. “If this isn’t a joke, then what is it?”

“What jokes! I don’t even know what’s so surprising, so strange about it…” Olenka said, pouting her lips.

A moment passed in silence… I looked at the beautiful girl, at her young, almost childlike face, and wondered how she could joke so terribly? I immediately imagined the elderly, stout, red-faced Urbénin next to her, with his protruding ears and rough hands, whose touch could only scratch a young, just beginning to live female body… Couldn’t the thought of such a picture frighten a pretty forest fairy who knew how to gaze poetically at the sky when lightning flashed and thunder grumbled angrily? Even I was frightened!

“It’s true, he’s a bit old,” Olenka sighed, “but then he loves me… His love is reliable.”

“It’s not about reliable love, but about happiness…”

“I will be happy with him… His fortune, thank God, is not negligible, and he’s not some pauper, but a nobleman. I’m not in love with him, of course, but are only those who marry for love truly happy? I know about those love marriages!”

“My child,” I asked, looking with horror into her bright eyes, “when did you manage to stuff your poor little head with this dreadful worldly wisdom? Let’s assume you’re joking with me, but where did you learn to joke so brutally, like an old woman?… Where? When?”

Olenka looked at me with surprise and shrugged…

“I don’t understand what you’re saying…” she said. “Does it bother you that a young girl is marrying an old man? Yes?”

Olenka suddenly flushed, her chin trembled nervously, and without waiting for my answer, she spoke quickly:

“You don’t like it? Then please go into the forest yourself… into this boredom, where there’s no one but kestrels and a mad father… and wait there for a young groom to come! You liked it that evening, but you should see it in winter, when you’d be glad… for death to come soon…”

“Ah, this is all ridiculous, Olenka, all of it is immature, stupid! If you’re not joking, then… I don’t even know what to say! Better be quiet and don’t insult the air with your tongue! If I were in your place, I’d hang myself on seven aspens, and you’re buying linen… smiling! Aa-ah!”

“At least he’ll pay for my father’s treatment with his own money…” she whispered…

“How much do you need for your father’s treatment?” I shouted. “Take it from me! A hundred?… Two hundred?… A thousand? You’re lying, Olenka! You don’t need money for your father’s treatment!”

The news Olenka gave me agitated me so much that I didn’t even notice our charabanc driving past my village, or how it entered the Count’s estate and stopped at the manager’s porch… Seeing the children running out and Urbénin’s smiling face as he rushed to help Olenka alight, I jumped out of the charabanc and, without saying goodbye, ran to the Count’s house. A new piece of news awaited me there.

“How timely! How timely!” the Count greeted me, scratching my cheek with his long, prickly mustache. “You couldn’t have chosen a better time! We just sat down to breakfast this minute… You, of course, know… You’ve probably had several encounters with him in your judicial capacity… Ha-ha!”

The Count gestured with both hands towards two men sitting in soft armchairs and eating cold tongue. In one, I had the displeasure of recognizing Justice Kalinin; the other, a small, gray-haired old man with a large, moon-shaped bald spot, was a good acquaintance of mine, Babaev, a wealthy landowner who held the position of permanent member in our district. Bowing, I looked at Kalinin with surprise… I knew how he hated the Count and what rumors he spread throughout the district about the man with whom he was now so eagerly eating tongue with peas and drinking ten-year-old cordial. How could a decent man explain this visit? The justice caught my gaze and probably understood it.

“I dedicated today to visits,” he told me. “I’m driving all over the district… And I dropped in on His Excellency, as you see…”

Ilya brought the fourth place setting. I sat down, drank a glass of vodka, and began to breakfast…

“Not good, Your Excellency… Not good!” Kalinin continued the conversation interrupted by my arrival. “For us, little people, it’s no sin, but you are a distinguished, wealthy, brilliant man… It is a sin for you to neglect your duties.”

“That’s true, it is a sin…” Babaev agreed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nikolai Ignatyich gave me a good idea!” the Count nodded to the justice. “He comes to me… sits down for breakfast, and I complain to him about boredom…”

“And they complain to me about boredom…” Kalinin interrupted the Count. “Boring, sad… this and that… In short, disillusioned… Onegin, in a way… You are to blame, I say, Your Excellency… How so? Very simple… You, I say, so as not to be bored, serve… manage your estate… The estate is excellent, wonderful… They say they intend to engage in farming, but it’s still boring… They lack, so to speak, an entertaining, stimulating element. They lack that… how shall I put it… er… that… strong sensations…”

“Well, what idea did you propose?”

“Strictly speaking, I did not propose any idea, but merely ventured to reproach His Excellency. How is it, I say, Your Excellency, such a young… educated, brilliant man, can live in such seclusion? Is it not a sin, I say? You go nowhere, you receive no one, you are seen nowhere… like some old man or hermit… What would it cost you, I say, to arrange gatherings at your place… jours fixes, so to speak?”

“Why would he need these jours fixes?” I asked.

“Why, indeed? Firstly, then His Excellency, if he has evenings, will become acquainted with society… he will study, so to speak… Secondly, society will also have the honor of becoming more closely acquainted with one of our wealthiest landowners… A mutual exchange of ideas, conversations, merriment, so to speak… And how many educated young ladies and gentlemen we have, if one considers it!… What musical evenings, dances, picnics one could arrange — just think! The halls are enormous, in the garden there are gazebos and… so on… Such amateur performances and concerts could be put on as no one in the province has ever dreamed of… By God! Just think for yourself!… Now all this is almost going to waste, buried in the ground, but then… one only needs to understand! If I had such means as His Excellency, I would show how one should live! And they say: ‘boring!’ Truly, by God… it’s even funny to listen to… even shameful…”

And Kalinin blinked his eyes, wanting to appear genuinely ashamed…

“That’s perfectly fair,” the Count said, standing up and putting his hands in his pockets. “I can have excellent evenings… Concerts, amateur performances… all of that can indeed be charmingly arranged. And besides, these evenings will not only entertain society but will also have an educational influence!… Isn’t that right?”

“Well, yes,” I agreed. “As soon as our young ladies look at your mustachioed face, they’ll immediately be imbued with the spirit of civilization…”

“You’re always joking, Seryozha,” the Count said, offended, “and you never give me friendly advice! Everything is funny to you! It’s time, my friend, to drop these student habits!”

The Count began to pace back and forth, and in long, tedious conjectures, he began to describe to me the benefits his evenings could bring to humanity. Music, literature, theater, horseback riding, hunting. One hunt alone could unite all the best forces of the district!…

“We’ll talk about this again!” the Count said to Kalinin, as he bid him farewell after breakfast.

“So, you will allow the district to hope, Your Excellency?” the justice asked.

“Of course, of course… I will develop this idea, I will try… I am glad… very much so… So tell everyone…”

One had to see the bliss written on the justice’s face as he got into his carriage and said, “Go!” He was so overjoyed that he even forgot our disagreements and, as a farewell, called me “my dear fellow” and shook my hand firmly.

After the visitors departed, the Count and I sat at the table and continued breakfast. We breakfasted until seven in the evening, when the dishes were cleared from our table and dinner was served. Young drunkards know how to pass long intermissions. We drank and ate small bites the whole time, which maintained our appetite, which would have vanished if we had completely stopped eating.

“Did you send money to anyone today?” I asked the Count, remembering the wads of hundred-ruble notes I had seen that morning at the Tenevo post office.

“To no one.”

“Tell me, please, is your… what’s his name?… new friend, Kazimir Kaetanovich or Kaetan Kazimirovich, a wealthy man?”

“No, Seryozha. He’s a poor man!… But what a soul, what a heart! You are wrongly speaking so contemptuously of him and… attacking him… One must, my brother, learn to distinguish people. Shall we have another drink?”

Pshekhotsky returned for dinner. Seeing me sitting at the table and drinking, he winced and, after circling our table, found it best to withdraw to his room. He declined dinner, citing a headache, but expressed no objection when the Count advised him to dine in his room, in bed.

During the second course, Urbénin entered. I didn’t recognize him. His wide, red face glowed with pleasure. A satisfied smile seemed to play even on his protruding ears and thick fingers, with which he constantly adjusted his new, dapper tie.

“The cow is sick, Your Excellency,” he reported. “I sent for our veterinarian, but it turns out he’s left. Should I send for the town veterinarian, Your Excellency? If I send, he won’t listen, he won’t go, but if you write to him, that’s another matter. Maybe it’s nothing serious with the cow, or maybe something else.”

“Alright, I’ll write…” the Count mumbled.

“Congratulations, Pyotr Egorych,” I said, standing up and extending my hand to the manager.

“On what, sir?” he whispered.

“You’re getting married!”

“Yes, yes, imagine, he’s getting married!” the Count spoke up, winking at the blushing Urbénin. “Isn’t he something? Ha-ha-ha! He kept silent, kept silent, and then — bam! And do you know who he’s marrying? We guessed it that evening, you and I! We, Pyotr Egorych, decided then and there that something was amiss in your mischievous heart. As he looked at you and Olenka, he said, ‘Well, the fellow’s smitten!’ Ha-ha! Sit down and have dinner with us, Pyotr Egorych!”

Urbénin carefully and respectfully sat down, called Ilya with his eyes, and ordered him to bring him soup. I poured him a glass of vodka.

“I don’t drink, sir,” he said.

“Come now, you drink even more than we do.”

“I used to, sir, but I don’t anymore,” the manager smiled. “Now I can’t drink… No need… Everything, thank God, went smoothly, everything settled, and exactly as my heart desired, even more than I could have expected.”

“Well, then at least drink this one for joy,” I said, pouring him some sherry.

“This one, perhaps. And I really did drink a lot. Now I can confess to His Excellency. From morning till night, it used to be. As soon as you get up in the morning, you remember that very thing… well, and naturally, straight to the cabinet. Now, thank God, there’s no need to drown anything with vodka.”

Urbénin drank a glass of sherry. I poured him another. He drank that one too and imperceptibly became intoxicated…

“I can hardly believe it…” he said, suddenly laughing with a happy, childlike laugh. “I look at this ring, I recall her words in which she expressed her consent, and I can’t believe it… It’s even funny… Well, at my age, with my appearance, could I have hoped that this worthy girl wouldn’t disdain to become my… the mother of my orphans? She’s a beauty, as you’ve seen, an angel in the flesh! Miracles, nothing less! You poured me another?… Perhaps for the last time… I drank from sorrow, I’ll drink from joy. And how I suffered, gentlemen, how much grief I endured! I saw her a year ago and – do you believe it? – from that moment on, there wasn’t a single night I slept soundly, not a day I didn’t drown this… foolish weakness in vodka, didn’t scold myself for my foolishness… Sometimes, I’d look at her through the window, admire her and… tear my hair out… It was time to hang myself… But, thank God… I risked it, made the proposal, and it was exactly, you know, like a blow with a club! Ha-ha! I hear it and can’t believe my ears… She says: ‘I agree,’ and I think: ‘Get lost, you old fart, to hell’… Afterward, when she kissed me, I was convinced…”

Fifty-year-old Urbénin, at the memory of his first kiss with the poetic Olenka, closed his eyes and blushed like a boy… I found it repulsive…

“Gentlemen,” he said, looking at us with happy, affectionate eyes. “Why don’t you marry? Why do you waste, throw away your lives? Why do you shun that which constitutes the greatest good for all living things on earth? For the pleasures that depravity gives do not give even a hundredth of what a quiet, family life would give you! Young men… Your Excellency and you, Sergei Petrovich… I am happy now and… God knows how much I love you both! Forgive me my foolish advice, but… I want happiness for you! Why don’t you marry? Family life is a blessing… It is everyone’s duty!..”

The happy and tender appearance of the old man, marrying a young woman and advising us to exchange our dissolute lives for a quiet, family one, became unbearable to me.

“Yes,” I said, “family life is a duty. I agree with you. So, you are fulfilling this duty for the second time?”

“Yes, for the second time. I generally love family life. Being single or widowed for me is living half a life. Say what you will, gentlemen, but matrimony is a great thing!”

“Of course… Even then, if the husband is almost three times older than his spouse?”

Urbénin blushed. The hand carrying a spoonful of soup to his mouth trembled, and the soup spilled back into the plate.

“I understand what you mean, Sergei Petrovich,” he murmured. “Thank you for your frankness. I ask myself: isn’t it despicable? I torment myself! But how can one question oneself, resolve various issues, when every moment you feel that you are happy, when you forget your old age, your ugliness… everything! Homo sum (I am a man, Latin), Sergei Petrovich! And when for a second the question of age inequality creeps into my head, I don’t reach into my pocket for an answer and calm myself as best I can. It seems to me that I have given Olga happiness. I have given her a father, and my children a mother. However, all this sounds like a novel, and… I’m dizzy. You shouldn’t have given me sherry.”

Urbénin stood up, wiped his face with a napkin, and sat down again. A minute later, he drained a glass, looked at me with a prolonged, pleading gaze, as if begging for mercy, then suddenly his shoulders trembled, and he unexpectedly sobbed like a boy.

“It’s nothing, sir… Nothing, sir,” he mumbled, overcoming his sobs. “Don’t worry. My heart, after your words, was seized by some premonition. But it’s nothing, sir.”

Urbénin’s premonition came true, it came true so quickly that I don’t have time to change my pen and start a new page. From the next chapter, my late muse’s expression of peace on her face will be replaced by an expression of anger and sorrow. The preface is over, and the drama begins.

Man’s criminal will takes its rightful place.

 

I remember a beautiful Sunday morning. Through the windows of the Count’s church, a transparent, blue sky was visible, and the entire church, from the painted dome to the floor, was permeated by a soft ray of light, in which playful clouds of incense smoke joyfully danced… The singing of swallows and starlings drifted through the open windows and doors… One sparrow, apparently a daring fellow, flew through the door and, after circling with chirps above our heads, diving several times into the soft light, flew out the window… Inside the church, there was also singing… They sang harmoniously, with feeling and with the enthusiasm of which our Little Russian singers are capable, when they feel like the heroes of the moment and when they see that people are constantly looking at them… The melodies were mostly cheerful, playful, like bright, sunny “sunbeams” dancing on the walls and clothes of the listeners… In the untrained, but soft and fresh tenor, my ear, despite the cheerful wedding tune, caught a difficult, mournful note, as if this tenor felt sorry that next to the pretty, poetic Olenka stood the heavy, bear-like, and aging Urbénin… And not only the tenor felt sorry looking at this unequal couple… On the numerous faces that dotted my field of vision, however hard they tried to appear cheerful and carefree, even an idiot could have read regret.

I, dressed in a new tailcoat, stood behind Olenka and held the wedding crown over her. I was pale and not entirely well… My head was throbbing from yesterday’s drinking and walking by the lake, and I constantly checked if my hand, holding the crown, was trembling… My soul felt awful and eerie, like in a forest on a rainy autumn night. I was annoyed, disgusted, sorry… Cats were scratching at my heart, somewhat resembling pangs of conscience… There, deep down, at the very bottom of my soul, sat a little devil, stubbornly, persistently whispering to me that if Olenka’s marriage to the clumsy Urbénin was a sin, then I too was guilty of this sin… Where could such thoughts come from? Could I have saved this young foolish girl from her incomprehensible risk and undeniable mistake?..

“And who knows!” whispered the little devil. “You know best! I have seen many unequal marriages in my lifetime, I have stood before Pukirev’s painting more than once, I have read many novels based on the disparity between husband and wife, I knew, finally, physiology, which unequivocally condemns unequal marriages, but never once in my life have I experienced the disgusting mental state that I cannot get rid of now, standing behind Olenka and performing the duties of best man… If only regret stirs my soul, then why did I not know this regret earlier, when present at other weddings?..”

“It’s not regret,” whispered the little devil. “Jealousy…”

But one can only be jealous of those one loves, and do I love the girl in red? If I were to love all the girls I meet while living under the moon, my heart wouldn’t be big enough, and it would be too much…

My friend, Count Karneev, stood behind me, right by the church door, behind the churchwarden’s cabinet, selling candles. He was slicked back, primped, and emitted a narcotic, suffocating scent of perfume. Today he looked so charming that, greeting him that morning, I couldn’t resist saying:

“Today, Alexei, you look like an ideal quadrille dancer!”

He accompanied every incoming and outgoing person with a saccharine smile, and I heard what ponderous compliments he bestowed upon every lady who bought a candle from him. He, a spoiled child of fortune, who had never had copper coins and didn’t know how to handle them, constantly dropped five-kopeck and three-kopeck pieces on the floor. Near him, leaning against the cabinet, stood the majestic Kalinin with the Order of Saint Stanislaus around his neck. His face shone and glistened. He was glad that his idea of jours fixes had fallen on fertile ground and was already beginning to bear fruit. In his heart, he showered Urbénin with a thousand thanks: his wedding was absurd, but, nevertheless, it was easy to pick on it to arrange the first jour fixe.

Vain Olenka should have been rejoicing… From the wedding lectern to the royal gates, two rows of representatives of our district’s elite stretched… The guests were dressed as they would have been if the Count himself were getting married: one could not wish for better outfits… These were mostly aristocrats… Not a single priest’s wife, not a single merchant’s wife… There were even some whom Olenka had previously not felt entitled to even bow to… Olenka’s groom was a manager, a privileged servant, but her vanity could not suffer from this… He was a nobleman and owned a mortgaged estate in the neighboring district. His father had been the district marshal, and he himself had been a justice of the peace in his native district for nine years… What more could the ambition of a personal nobleman’s daughter desire? Even her best man, a bon vivant and Don Juan known throughout the province, could tickle her pride… All the guests gazed at him… He was as effective as forty thousand best men combined, and, most importantly, he did not refuse to be her best man, a simple girl, when it was known that he even refused aristocrats when they invited him to be their best man…

But vain Olenka was not rejoicing… She was pale as the linen she had recently brought from the Tenevo fair. Her hand, holding the candle, trembled slightly, her chin occasionally quivered. In her eyes was a kind of stupor, as if she had suddenly been amazed, frightened by something… There was no trace of the cheerfulness that had shone in her eyes when, no further than yesterday, she had run through the garden and excitedly described what wallpaper would be in her living room, on what days she would invite guests, and so on. Her face was now too serious, more than the solemnity of the occasion demanded…

Urbénin was in a new tailcoat. He was dressed decently, but his hair was styled as Orthodox men styled theirs in 1812. He was, as usual, red and serious. His eyes were praying, and the signs of the cross he made after each “Lord, have mercy” were not mechanical.

Behind me stood Urbénin’s children from his first marriage — Grisha, a high school student, and Sasha, a fair-haired girl. They looked at their father’s red nape and protruding ears, and their faces showed question marks. They did not understand why their father needed Aunt Olya and why he was taking her into his house. Sasha was merely surprised, but fourteen-year-old Grisha frowned and looked sullenly. He would probably have refused if his father had asked for his permission to marry…

The wedding ceremony was performed with special solemnity. Three priests and two deacons officiated. The service was long, so long that my arm grew tired of holding the crown, and the ladies, who generally enjoyed watching weddings, stopped looking at the newlyweds. The dean read the prayers deliberately, without skipping a single one; the choir sang something long and melodic; the deacon, taking the opportunity to boast about his octave, read the Apostle with “singular prolongation”… But then, finally, the dean took the crown from my hands… the young couple kissed… The guests stirred, the neat rows broke, congratulations, kisses, and exclamations were heard. Urbénin, radiant and smiling, took his young bride’s arm, and we went outside…

If anyone who was with me in the church finds this description incomplete and not entirely accurate, let them attribute these oversights to a headache and the aforementioned mental state, which prevented me from observing and noticing… Of course, if I had known then that I would have to write a novel, I would not have looked at the ground, as on the morning described, and would not have paid attention to the headache!

Fate sometimes allows itself sharp, poisonous jokes! No sooner had the newlyweds left the church than an unwanted and unexpected surprise rushed to meet them… As the wedding procession, resplendent in the sun with hundreds of colors and shades, moved from the church to the Count’s house, Olenka suddenly took a step back, stopped, and tugged her husband’s elbow so hard that he staggered…

“He’s been let out!” she said aloud, looking at me with horror.

Poor girl! Rushing towards the procession, down the alley, was her mad father, the forester Skvortsov. Waving his arms, stumbling, and rolling his eyes wildly, he presented a rather unattractive sight. All of this might still have been decent, perhaps, if he hadn’t been in his calico robe and slipper-like shoes, whose dilapidation ill-matched the luxury of his daughter’s wedding attire. His face was sleep-worn, his hair ruffled by the wind, his nightshirt unbuttoned.

“Olenka!” he stammered, catching up with them. “Why did you leave?”

Olenka blushed and looked askance at the smiling ladies. The poor girl burned with shame…

“Mitka didn’t lock the doors,” the forester continued, addressing us. “How easy is it for thieves to break in?… They took the samovar from the kitchen last year, and now she wants us to be robbed again!”

“I don’t know who let him out!” Urbénin whispered to me. “I told them to lock him up… My dear Sergei Petrovich, please be merciful, help us out of this awkward situation somehow! Somehow!”

“I know who stole your samovar,” I said to the forester. “Come, I’ll show you.”

And, putting my arm around Skvortsov’s waist, I led him towards the church… After taking him into the enclosure, I spoke with him, and when, by my calculation, the wedding procession was already in the house, I left him, without showing him the place where his stolen samovar was located.

However unexpected and extraordinary the encounter with the madman was, it was nevertheless soon forgotten… The new surprise that fate presented to the newlyweds was even more bizarre…

Chapter VI

 

An hour later, we were all sitting at long tables, having dinner.

For one accustomed to the cobwebs, mold, and gypsy whooping of the Count’s apartments, it was strange to gaze at this mundane, prosaic crowd, disturbing the silence of the dilapidated, abandoned rooms with their ordinary chatter. This motley, noisy crowd resembled a flock of starlings momentarily alighting to rest in an abandoned cemetery, or — may the noble bird forgive me this comparison! — a flock of storks alighting in one of the twilight migratory days on the ruins of a deserted castle.

I sat and hated this crowd, which with vain curiosity examined the decaying wealth of the Karneev Counts. The mosaic walls, sculpted ceilings, luxurious Persian carpets, and Rococo furniture evoked delight and astonishment. The Count’s mustachioed face incessantly contorted into a self-satisfied smile… He accepted the enthusiastic flattery of his guests as something deserved, though in essence he was not at all to blame for the wealth and luxury of his abandoned nest; on the contrary, he deserved the bitterest reproaches and even contempt for his barbarically dull indifference to the good accumulated by his father and grandfathers, accumulated not over days, but over decades! Only one who was spiritually blind and poor in spirit could fail to see the sweat, tears, and calluses of people, whose children now huddled in the huts of the Count’s village, on every grayed marble slab, in every painting, in every dark corner of the Count’s garden… And among the large number of people sitting at the wedding table, wealthy, independent people, who were hindered by nothing from speaking even the harshest truth, there was not a single person who would tell the Count that his self-satisfied smile was foolish and inappropriate…

Everyone found it necessary to smile flatteringly and burn cheap incense! If this was “simple” politeness (we like to blame a lot on politeness and decorum), then I would prefer to these fops the boors who eat with their hands, take bread from someone else’s place setting, and blow their noses with two fingers…

Urbénin smiled, but he had his reasons for it. He smiled flatteringly, respectfully, and with childlike happiness. His broad smile was a surrogate for a dog’s happiness. A devoted and loving dog had been caressed, made happy, and now, in gratitude, it wagged its tail cheerfully and sincerely…

He, like Risler senior in Alphonse Daudet’s novel, beaming and rubbing his hands with pleasure, looked at his young wife and, from an excess of feeling, could not help but ask question after question:

“Who would have thought that this young beauty would love an old man like me? And couldn’t she have found someone younger and more elegant? These women’s hearts are incomprehensible!”

And he even had the courage to turn to me and blurt out:

“What an age we live in, when you look at it! Heh-heh! An old man snatches such a fairy from under the noses of the young! What were you looking at? Heh-heh… No, today’s youth are not what they used to be!”

Not knowing what to do with the overflowing gratitude that swelled his broad chest, he repeatedly stood up, extended his glass towards the Count’s, and said in a voice trembling with emotion:

“My feelings for you are well known, Your Excellency… On this very day, you have done so much for me that my love for you is simply dust… How did I deserve such attention from Your Excellency, that you took such a part in my joy? Only counts and bankers celebrate their weddings like this! This luxury, this gathering of eminent guests… Ah, what can I say!… Believe me, Your Excellency, my memory will not forget you, just as it will not forget this best and happiest day of my life…”

And so on… Olenka, apparently, did not like her husband’s ornate deference… She was noticeably burdened by his speeches, which caused smiles on the faces of the diners, and even, it seemed, was ashamed of them… Despite the glass of champagne she had drunk, she was still cheerless and gloomy… The same pallor as in the church, the same fright in her eyes… She was silent, answered all questions lazily, forced a smile at the Count’s jokes, and barely touched the expensive dishes… As much as the intoxicating Urbénin considered himself the happiest of mortals, so unhappy was her pretty face. I simply felt sorry looking at it, and to avoid seeing that face, I tried to look at my plate.

How was her sadness to be explained? Was remorse beginning to gnaw at the poor girl? Or perhaps her vanity expected even greater pomp?

Raising my eyes to her during the second course, I was struck with a pang in my heart. The poor girl, answering some trivial question from the Count, made strained swallowing movements: sobs were welling up in her throat. She kept her handkerchief pressed to her mouth and timidly, like a frightened animal, glanced at us: were we noticing that she wanted to cry?

“Why are you so sour today?” asked the Count. “Aha! Pyotr Egorych, this is your fault! Please cheer up your wife! Gentlemen, I demand a kiss. Ha-ha!… Not a kiss for myself, of course, but that… they should kiss each other! Bitter!”

“Bitter!” Kalinin echoed.

Urbénin, smiling with his whole red face, stood up and blinked. Olenka, compelled by the shouts and whooping of the guests, slightly rose and offered Urbénin her motionless, lifeless lips… He kissed them… Olenka pressed her lips together, as if afraid of being kissed again, and looked at me… Probably my gaze was not good. Catching it, she suddenly blushed, reached for her handkerchief, and began to blow her nose, wanting to hide her terrible embarrassment with anything… It occurred to me that she was ashamed before me, ashamed of this kiss, of the marriage…

“What do I care about you?” I thought, but at the same time, I did not take my eyes off her, trying to grasp the reason for her embarrassment…

The poor girl could not bear my gaze. True, the blush of shame soon left her face, but tears, real tears, such as I had never seen on her face before, welled up in her eyes… Pressing the handkerchief to her face, she stood up and ran out of the dining room…

“Olga Nikolaevna has a headache,” I hastened to explain her departure. “She complained to me this morning…”

“Forget it, brother!” the Count quipped. “A headache has nothing to do with it… The kiss did it all, she was embarrassed. I declare, gentlemen, a severe reprimand to the groom! He hasn’t accustomed his bride to kisses! Ha-ha!”

The guests, delighted by the Count’s wit, burst into laughter… But they should not have laughed…

Five, ten minutes passed, and the young woman did not return… Silence fell… Even the Count stopped joking… Olenka’s absence was all the more noticeable because she had left suddenly, without a word… Not to mention the etiquette, which was offended first and foremost, Olenka left the table immediately after the kiss, as if she was angry at being forced to kiss her husband… It was impossible to assume that she had left because she was embarrassed… One can be embarrassed for a minute, for two, but not for an eternity, which the first ten minutes of her absence seemed to us… How many bad thoughts flashed through the drunken heads of the men and how many rumors were already ready among the dear ladies! The bride got up from the table and left — what a striking and dramatic moment for a “high society” district novel!

Urbénin began to look around uneasily.

“Nerves…” he muttered. “Or maybe something in her dress came undone… Who knows these women! She’ll be back in a moment… Any minute now.”

But when another ten minutes passed and she did not appear, he looked at me with such miserable, pleading eyes that I felt sorry for him…

“Is it alright if I go and look for her?” his eyes seemed to say. “Won’t you help me, my dear fellow, get out of this terrible situation? You are the smartest, bravest, and most resourceful person here, please help me!”

I heeded the plea in his unhappy eyes and decided to help him. How I helped him, the reader will see later… I will only say that Krylov’s bear, who rendered a service to the hermit, loses all its animal majesty in my eyes, pales, and turns into an innocent infusorian when I recall myself in the role of a “helpful fool”… The similarity between me and the bear lies only in the fact that we both went to help sincerely, not foreseeing the bad consequences of our service, but the difference between us is enormous… My stone, with which I hit Urbénin on the forehead, was many times heavier…

“Where is Olga Nikolaevna?” I asked the footman who was serving me salad.

“She went out into the garden,” he replied.

“This is unacceptable, mesdames!” I said in a playful tone, addressing the ladies. “The bride has left, and my wine has turned sour!… I must go find her and bring her back here, even if all her teeth hurt! The best man is an official, and he goes to show his authority!”

I stood up and, to the loud applause of my friend the Count, left the dining room for the garden. The direct, burning rays of the midday sun struck my wine-heated head. The air was hot and stuffy. I randomly walked down one of the side alleys and, whistling a tune, gave “full steam” to my investigative abilities in the role of a simple bloodhound. I inspected all the bushes, gazebos, caves, and when remorse began to torment me for having gone right instead of left, I suddenly heard strange sounds. Someone was laughing or crying. The sounds came from a cave that I had intended to inspect last. Quickly entering it, enveloped by dampness, the smell of mold, mushrooms, and lime, I saw the one I was looking for.

She stood, leaning against a wooden column covered with black moss, and, raising her eyes full of horror and despair to me, tore at her hair. Tears flowed from her eyes like from a squeezed sponge.

“What have I done? What have I done!” she muttered.

“Yes, Olya, what have you done!” I said, standing before her and crossing my arms.

“Why did I marry him? Where were my eyes? Where was my mind?”

“Yes, Olya… It’s difficult to explain this step of yours… To explain it by inexperience is too lenient, to explain it by depravity — I don’t want to…”

“I only understood today… today! Why didn’t I understand this yesterday? Now everything is irretrievable, everything is lost! Everything, everything! I could have married a man I love, who loves me!”

“Who is that, Olya?” I asked.

“You!” she said, looking at me directly, openly… “But I rushed! I was foolish! You are intelligent, noble, young… You are rich… You seemed inaccessible to me!”

“Well, enough, Olya,” I said, taking her hand. “Let’s wipe our eyes and go… They’re waiting there… Well, stop crying, stop…” I kissed her hand. “Stop, girl! You’ve made a foolish mistake and now pay for it… You are to blame… Well, enough, calm down…”

“You love me, don’t you? You’re so big, so handsome! You love me, don’t you?”

“It’s time to go, my dear…” I said, noticing, to my great horror, that I was kissing her on the forehead, taking her by the waist, that she was burning me with her hot breath and clinging to my neck…

“That’s enough!” I muttered. “Enough!..”

When, about five minutes later, I carried her out of the cave in my arms and, exhausted by new impressions, set her down almost at the very threshold, I saw Pshekhotsky… He stood there, looking at me maliciously and quietly applauding… I measured him with a glance and, taking Olga by the arm, headed towards the house.

“You won’t be here today!” I said, looking back at Pshekhotsky. “Your spying will not go unpunished!”

My kisses were probably hot, because Olga’s face was burning as if on fire. There was no trace of the tears she had just shed…

“Now, as they say, the sea is knee-deep for me!” she muttered, walking with me to the house and convulsively squeezing my elbow. “This morning I didn’t know what to do with horror, and now… now, my good giant, I don’t know what to do with happiness! My husband is sitting there waiting for me… Ha-ha! What do I care? Even if he were a crocodile, a terrible snake… I’m not afraid of anything! I love you and want to know nothing else.”

I looked at her face, blazing with happiness, at her eyes, full of happy, satisfied love, and my heart contracted with fear for the future of this pretty, happy creature: her love for me was just another push into the abyss… How would this laughing woman, who thought nothing of the future, end up?… My heart contracted and turned over with a feeling that could be called neither pity nor compassion, because it was stronger than these feelings. I stopped and took Olga by the shoulder… Never at any other time had I seen anything more beautiful, more graceful, and at the same time more pathetic… There was no time to reason, calculate, think, and I, overwhelmed by emotion, said:

“We are going to my place this instant, Olga! Right now!”

“What? What did you say?” she asked, not understanding my somewhat solemn tone…

“We are going to my place immediately!”

Olga smiled and pointed to the house…

“Well, what then?” I said. “Whether I take you today or tomorrow — does it matter? But the sooner, the better… Let’s go!”

“But… it’s somehow strange…”

“You, girl, are afraid of a scandal?… Yes, the scandal will be extraordinary, grandiose, but a thousand scandals are better than you remaining here! I will not leave you here! I cannot leave you here! Do you understand, Olga? Leave your faintheartedness, your feminine logic, and obey! Obey, if you do not wish for your ruin!”

Olga’s eyes said that she did not understand me… And time, meanwhile, did not wait, it went on its course, and we had no time to stand in the alley when we were expected there. A decision had to be made… I pressed the “girl in red” to me, who was now practically my wife, and in those moments it seemed to me that I truly loved her, loved her with the love of a husband, that she was mine and her fate lay on my conscience… I saw that I was bound to this creature forever, irrevocably.

“Listen, my dear, my treasure!” I said. “This step is bold… It will quarrel us with close people, bring thousands of reproaches, tearful complaints upon our heads. It may even ruin my career, cause me thousands of insurmountable inconveniences, but, my dear, it is decided! You will be my wife… I do not need a better wife, and damn those other women! I will make you happy, I will cherish you as the apple of my eye, as long as I live, I will educate you, I will make a woman out of you! I promise you this, and here is my honest hand!”

I spoke with sincere enthusiasm, with feeling, like a jeune premier (first lover, French) performing the most pathetic part of his role… I spoke beautifully, and it was not in vain that an eagle flying over our heads flapped its wings at me. And my Olya took my outstretched hand, held it in her small hands, and kissed it tenderly. But this was not a sign of consent… On the foolish face of the inexperienced woman, who had never before heard such speeches, bewilderment was expressed… She still continued not to understand me.

“You say, go to your place…” she murmured, thinking… “I don’t quite understand you… Don’t you know what he will say?”

“What do you care what he says?”

“What do you mean, what? No, Seryozha, don’t even say it… Please leave it… You love me, and I need nothing more. With your love, I could live even in hell…”

“But how will you be, foolish girl?”

“I will live here, and you… will come every day… I will come out to meet you.”

“But I cannot imagine this life of yours without shuddering!… At night — he, during the day — I… No, it’s impossible! Olya, I love you so much at this moment that… I am even insanely jealous… I never even suspected myself capable of such feelings…”

But what carelessness! I was holding her by the waist, and she was gently stroking my hand at a time when at any moment one could expect someone to pass by in the alley and see us.

“Let’s go,” I said, pulling my hands away. “Get dressed and let’s go!”

“But how quickly you’re doing all this…” she mumbled in a tearful voice. “You’re rushing as if to a fire… And God knows what you’ve invented! To run away immediately after the wedding! What will people say!”

And Olenka shrugged. There was so much bewilderment, surprise, and misunderstanding on her face that I waved my hand and postponed the solution to her “life’s question” until next time. And there was no time to continue our conversation: we were ascending the stone steps of the terrace and heard people talking. Before the dining room door, Olya adjusted her hairstyle, looked at her dress, and entered. There was no sign of embarrassment on her face. She entered, beyond my expectation, very bravely.

“Gentlemen, I return to you the runaway,” I said, entering and sitting down in my place. “I barely found her… Even got tired… I go out into the garden, I look, and she is pleased to stroll along the alley… ‘Why are you here?’ I ask… ‘Oh, she says, it’s stuffy!'”

Olya looked at me, at the guests, at her husband… and burst out laughing. She suddenly found it funny, cheerful. On her face, I read the desire to share her suddenly overwhelming happiness with all this dining crowd, and, unable to convey it in words, she poured it out in her laughter.

“How funny I am!” she said. “I’m laughing and I don’t even know why I’m laughing… Count, laugh!”

“Bitter!” Kalinin shouted.

Urbénin coughed and looked at Olya questioningly.

“Well?” she asked, frowning for a second.

“They’re shouting ‘bitter’,” Urbénin grinned, standing up and wiping his lips with a napkin.

Olga stood up and let him kiss her motionless lips… This kiss was cold, but it ignited even more the fire that smoldered in my chest and was ready to burst into flame at any moment… I turned away and, clenching my lips, began to wait for the end of dinner… This end, fortunately, came quickly, otherwise I would not have endured…

“Come here!” I said rudely, approaching the Count after dinner.

The Count looked at me in surprise and followed me into the empty room where I led him…

“What do you want, my dear friend?” he asked, unbuttoning his waistcoat and belching…

“Choose one of two…” I said, barely standing from the anger that seized me. “Either me, or Pshekhotsky! If you don’t promise me that this scoundrel will leave your village in an hour, I will never set foot here again!… I give you half a minute to answer!”

The Count dropped his cigar from his mouth and spread his arms…

“What’s wrong with you, Seryozha?” he asked, widening his eyes. “You’re pale as a ghost!”

“No unnecessary words, please! I cannot stand a spy, a scoundrel, a villain, and your friend Pshekhotsky, and in the name of our good relations, I demand that he be gone from here immediately!”

“But what has he done to you?” the Count asked, alarmed. “Why are you attacking him like this?”

“I ask you: me or him?”

“But, my dear fellow, you are putting me in a terribly delicate position… Wait, you have a feather on your tailcoat… You are demanding the impossible from me!”

“Goodbye!” I said. “I no longer know you.”

And, turning sharply, I went to the anteroom, got dressed, and quickly left. Passing through the garden to the servants’ kitchen, where I intended to order my horse to be harnessed, I was stopped by an encounter… Nadia Kalinina was coming towards me with a small cup of coffee. She was also at Urbénin’s wedding, but some vague fear made me avoid talking to her, and all day I had not once approached her or said a single word to her…

“Sergei Petrovich!” she said in an unnaturally low voice, as I passed her and slightly raised my hat. “Wait!”

“What do you wish?” I asked, approaching her.

“I have nothing to wish… and you are not a footman,” she said, looking me straight in the face and turning terribly pale. “You are in a hurry somewhere, but if you are not pressed for time, may I detain you for a minute?”

“Of course… I don’t even know why you ask…”

“In that case, let’s sit down… You, Sergei Petrovich,” she continued, when we had sat down, “today you kept trying not to notice me, you avoided me, as if afraid to meet, and as if on purpose, today I decided to talk to you… I am proud and self-loving… I don’t know how to impose a meeting… but once in a lifetime one can sacrifice pride.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I decided today to ask you… A humiliating question, difficult for me… I don’t know how I’ll bear it… Please answer without looking at me… Don’t you feel sorry for me, Sergei Petrovich?”

Nadia looked at me and weakly shook her head. Her face grew even paler, her upper lip trembled and twisted…

“Sergei Petrovich! It always seems to me that some misunderstanding, some caprice… has separated you from me… It seems to me that if we spoke out — everything would go back to the way it was… If it didn’t seem so to me, I wouldn’t have had the courage to ask you the question you are about to hear… I, Sergei Petrovich, am unhappy… You must see that… My life is not a life… It has all dried up… And most importantly — some kind of uncertainty: you don’t know whether to hope or not… Your behavior towards me is so incomprehensible that it’s impossible to draw any definite conclusion… Tell me, and I will know what to do… Then my life will get at least some direction… I will then decide on something…”

“You want, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, to ask me something,” I said, mentally preparing an answer to the question I foresaw.

“Yes, I want to ask… A humiliating question… If someone overhears, they will think I am imposing, like… Pushkin’s Tatyana… But this is a forced question…”

Indeed, the question was forced. When Nadia turned her face to me to ask this question, I was frightened: Nadia trembled, convulsively squeezed her fingers, and with a mournful slowness squeezed out the fateful word. Her pallor was terrible.

“Can I hope?” she finally whispered. “Don’t be afraid to speak directly… Whatever the answer, it’s better than uncertainty. So, what then? Can I hope?”

She waited for an answer, and meanwhile, my state of mind was such that I was incapable of a sensible answer. Drunk, agitated by the incident in the cave, enraged by Pshekhotsky’s spying and Olga’s indecisiveness, having endured a foolish conversation with the Count, I barely listened to Nadia.

“Can I hope?” she repeated. “Answer me!”

“Oh, I’m not in the mood for answers, Nadezhda Nikolaevna!” I waved my hand, standing up. “I’m incapable of giving any answers now. Forgive me, but I didn’t hear you and didn’t understand. I’m foolish and enraged… You only troubled yourself in vain, truly.”

I waved my hand once more and left Nadia. Only later, when I came to my senses, did I understand how foolish and cruel I had been, not giving the girl an answer to her simple, uncomplicated question… Why didn’t I answer?

Now, when I can look dispassionately at the past, I do not explain my cruelty by my state of mind… It seems to me that by not giving her an answer, I was being coquettish, putting on an act. It is difficult to understand the human soul, but it is even harder to understand one’s own soul. If I truly was putting on an act, then may God forgive me! Although, in truth, mockery of another’s suffering should not be forgiven.

For three days I paced back and forth like a wolf in a cage, and with all the strength of my extraordinary will, I tried not to let myself leave the house. I did not touch the pile of papers lying on the table patiently awaiting my attention, I received no one, quarreled with Polikarp, became irritated… I did not allow myself to go to the Count’s estate, and this stubbornness cost me considerable nervous effort. A thousand times I reached for my hat and just as many times I threw it down… One moment I decided to disregard everything in the world and go to Olga at all costs, the next I doused myself with the cold resolve to stay home…

My reason was against going to the Count’s estate. Once I had sworn to the Count not to visit him, could I sacrifice my self-esteem, my pride? What would that mustachioed fop think if, after our foolish conversation, I went to him as if nothing had happened? Wouldn’t that be admitting my own wrong?…

Furthermore, as an honest man, I should have broken off all relations with Olga. Our continued connection could only lead to her ruin. By marrying Urbénin, she made a mistake; by associating with me, she made another. Living with an old husband and at the same time secretly having a lover, wouldn’t she resemble a depraved doll? Not to mention how disgusting such a life is in principle, one also had to consider the consequences.

What a coward I am! I was afraid of the consequences, and the present, and the past… An ordinary person would laugh at my reasoning. He would not pace back and forth, would not grab his head, and would not make all sorts of plans, but would leave everything to life, which grinds even millstones into flour. Life would digest everything, without asking for his help or permission… But I am timid to the point of cowardice… I paced back and forth, suffered from compassion for Olga, and at the same time shuddered at the thought that she would understand my proposal, which I made to her in a moment of passion, and would come to my house, as I promised her, forever! What would have happened if she had listened to me and followed me? How long would this “forever” have lasted, and what would life with me have given poor Olga? I would not have given her a family, and therefore, would not have given her happiness. No, I should not have gone to Olga!

And meanwhile, my soul was fiercely drawn to her… I yearned, like a boy in love for the first time, who is not allowed to go to a rendez-vous (date, French). Tempted by the incident in the cave, I craved a new meeting, and the provocative image of Olga, who, as I knew, was also waiting for me and languishing with longing, never left my mind for a moment…

The Count sent letter after letter, each more pathetic and humiliating than the last… He begged me to “forget everything” and come, apologized for Pshekhotsky, asked me to forgive this “good, simple, but somewhat limited man,” and wondered why I would break off old friendly relations over trifles. In one of his last letters, he promised to come himself and, if I wished, bring Pshekhotsky with him, who would apologize to me, “although he feels no guilt.” I read the letters and in response to them asked each messenger to leave me in peace. I knew how to put on an act!

And in the midst of my nervous turmoil, when I, standing at the window, had already decided to go somewhere other than the Count’s estate, tormenting myself with reasoning, self-reproaches, and visions of love that awaited me with Olga, my door quietly opened, light footsteps sounded behind me, and soon two small, pretty hands embraced my neck…

“Is that you, Olga?” I asked, turning around.

I recognized her by her hot breath, by the way she clung to my neck, and even by her scent. Pressing her head against my cheek, she seemed extraordinarily happy to me… From happiness, she could not utter a single word… I pressed her to my chest, and — where had the longing and questions that had tormented me for three whole days gone! I laughed with pleasure and jumped like a schoolboy.

Olga was in a blue silk dress, which suited her pale complexion and luxurious flaxen hair very well. This dress was fashionable and terribly expensive. It probably cost Urbénin a quarter of his annual salary…

“How pretty you are today!..” I said, lifting Olga into my arms and kissing her neck. “Well, what? How are you? Are you well?”

“How unpleasant it is here, though!” she said, glancing around my study. “A rich man, you receive a large salary, and yet… you live so simply!”

“Not everyone, my dear, lives as luxuriously as the Count,” I said. “But let’s leave my wealth alone. What good genius brought you to my den?”

“Wait, Seryozha, you’ll wrinkle my dress… Put me down… I’m only here for a minute, my dear! I told everyone at home that I was going to Akatyikha, the Count’s laundress, who lives nearby, three houses away from you… Let me go, my dear, otherwise it’s awkward… Why didn’t you come for so long?”

I answered something, sat her opposite me, and began to contemplate her beauty… For a minute we looked at each other and were silent…

“You are very pretty, Olya!” I sighed. “It’s even a pity and an insult that you’re so pretty!”

“Why a pity?”

“You fell to God knows who.”

“But what more do you want! I’m yours! I’ve come here… Listen, Seryozha… Will you tell me the truth if I ask you?”

“Of course, the truth.”

“Would you have married me if I hadn’t married Pyotr Egorych?”

“Probably not,” I wanted to say, but why poke at an already sore wound that tormented poor Olya’s heart?

“Of course,” I said in the tone of a person speaking the truth.

Olya sighed and looked down…

“How wrong I was, how wrong! And worst of all, it can’t be fixed! I can’t divorce him, can I?”

“No…”

“And why did I rush, I don’t understand! We, girls, are so foolish and flighty… There’s no one to beat us! However, you can’t turn back, and there’s nothing to discuss here… Neither reasoning nor tears will help. I, Seryozha, cried all night today! He’s here… lying nearby, and I’m thinking of you… I can’t sleep… I even wanted to run away at night, even to my father in the forest… Better to live with a mad father than with this… what’s his name…”

“Reasoning, Olya, won’t help…” I said. “You should have reasoned then, when you were riding with me from Tyenevo and rejoiced that you were marrying a rich man… Now it’s too late to practice eloquence…”

“Too late… but so be it!” Olya said, waving her hand decisively. “As long as it doesn’t get worse, one can still live… Goodbye! It’s time to go…”

“No, not goodbye…”

I pulled Olya to me and began to shower her face with kisses, as if trying to compensate myself for the lost three days. She clung to me like a chilled lamb, warming my face with her hot breath… Silence fell…

“The husband killed his wife!” my parrot squawked… Olya flinched, freed herself from my embrace, and looked at me questioningly…

“It’s the parrot, my dear…” I said. “Calm down…”

“The husband killed his wife!” Ivan Demyanych repeated.

Olya stood up, silently put on her hat, and offered me her hand… Fear was written on her face…

“What if Urbénin finds out?” she asked, looking at me with wide eyes. “He’ll kill me!”

“Oh, come on…” I laughed. “I’d be a fine one if I let him kill you! And he’s hardly capable of such an extraordinary deed as murder… Are you leaving? Well, goodbye then, my child… I’ll wait… Tomorrow I’ll be in the forest near the little house where you lived… We’ll meet…”

After seeing Olga off and returning to my study, I found Polikarp there. He stood in the middle of the room, looking at me sternly and shaking his head contemptuously…

“Don’t let this happen again, Sergei Petrovich!” he said in the tone of a strict parent. “I don’t want it…”

“What is it?”

“That very thing… You think I didn’t see? I saw everything… She shouldn’t dare to come here! No need to start anything clandestine here! There are other places for that…”

I was in the most excellent mood, and so Polikarp’s spying and mentoring tone did not anger me. I laughed and sent him to the kitchen.

No sooner had I recovered from Olga’s visit than a new guest arrived. A carriage pulled up to my apartment with a clatter, and Polikarp, spitting to the sides and muttering curses, announced the arrival of “that… that one, damn him…”, i.e., the Count, whom he hated with all the strength of his soul. The Count entered, looked at me tearfully, and shook his head…

“You’re turning away… You don’t want to talk…”

“I’m not turning away,” I said.

“I loved you so much, Seryozha, and you… over a trifle! Why do you insult me? Why?”

The Count sat down, sighed, and shook his head…

“Well, stop playing the fool!” I said. “Alright!”

My influence over this weak, frail little man was strong, just as strong as my contempt for him… My contemptuous tone did not offend him; on the contrary… Hearing my “alright,” he jumped up and began to hug me…

“I brought him with me… He’s in the carriage… Do you want him to apologize to you?”

“And do you know his guilt?”

“No…”

“Excellent. Let him not apologize, but just warn him that if anything similar happens again in the future, I will not lose my temper, but will take measures.”

“So, peace, Seryozha? Excellent! It should have been like this long ago, instead of quarreling over God knows what! Like schoolgirls! Ah, yes, my dear fellow! Do you have… half a shot of vodka? My throat is terribly dry!”

I ordered vodka to be brought. The Count drank two shots, stretched out on the sofa, and began to chatter.

“Just now, brother, I met Olya… What a wonderful woman! I must tell you that I’m starting to hate Urbénin… That means Olenka is starting to please me… Terribly pretty! I think I’ll flirt with her.”

“One should not meddle with married women!” I sighed.

“Well, with an old man… With Pyotr Egorych, it’s no sin to snatch his wife… She’s not his match… He’s like a dog: neither eats himself nor lets others… I’ll start my advances today and begin systematically… Such a sweet soul… hmm… simply chic, brother! Mouth-watering!”

The Count drank a third shot and continued:

“Do you know who else I like around here?… Nadezhka, the daughter of that fool Kalinin… A fiery brunette, pale, you know, with such eyes… I’ll have to cast my line there too… I’m having an evening for Trinity Sunday… musical-vocal-literary… specifically to invite her… And here, brother, as it turns out, it’s not bad at all, cheerful! Both society and women… and… Can I fall asleep here at your place… for a minute?..”

“You can… But what about Pshekhotsky and the carriage?”

“Let him wait, damn him!… I don’t like him myself, brother.”

The Count propped himself up on his elbow and said mysteriously:

“I only keep him out of necessity… out of need… Well, damn him!”

The Count’s elbow slipped, and his head fell onto the pillow. A minute later, snoring was heard.

In the evening, after the Count had left, I had a third guest: Doctor Pavel Ivanovich. He came to inform me of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s illness and that she had… finally refused his hand. The poor fellow was sad and looked like a drowned rat.

The End of May and New Troubles

Poetic May passed…

Lilacs and tulips bloomed and faded, and with them, the raptures of love were destined to fade too — love which, despite its criminality and torment, still occasionally brought us sweet, unforgettable moments. And there are moments for which one could give months and years!

On one June evening, when the sun had already set, but its wide trail — a crimson-golden strip — still painted the distant west, promising a quiet and clear day tomorrow, I rode up on Zorka to the annex where Urbénin lived. That evening, the Count was planning a “musical” evening. Guests had already begun to arrive, but the Count was not home: he had gone for a ride and promised to return soon.

A little later, holding my horse by the reins, I stood by the porch and talked with Urbénin’s daughter, Sasha. Urbénin himself sat on a step, propping his head with his fists, gazing into the distance visible through the gate. He was sullen, reluctantly answering my questions. I left him in peace and turned my attention to Sasha.

“Where is your new mama?” I asked her.

“She went riding with the Count. She rides with him every day.”

“Every day,” Urbénin mumbled, sighing.

Much could be heard in that sigh. It spoke of the same thing that agitated my soul, that I tried to explain to myself but could not, and was lost in conjectures.

Every day Olga rode horseback with the Count. But this was trifles. Olga could not have fallen in love with the Count, and Urbénin’s jealousy was unfounded. We should have been jealous not of the Count, but of something else that I could not understand for so long. This “something else” became a whole wall between me and Olga. She continued to love me, but after that visit, which was described in the previous chapter, she had only been to my place no more than twice, and when meeting me outside my apartment, she would strangely blush and persistently evade answers to my questions. She responded to my caresses ardently, but her answers were so impulsive and timid that only agonizing bewilderment remained in my memory from our short rendezvous. Her conscience was not clear — that was obvious, but what exactly it was, could not be read on Olga’s guilty face.

“I hope your new mama is well?” I asked Sasha.

“She’s well. But her teeth hurt at night. She cried.”

“Cried?” Urbénin turned his face to Sasha. “Did you see? You dreamed it, my dear.”

Olga’s teeth did not hurt. If she cried, it was not from pain, but from something else… I still wanted to talk to Sasha, but I couldn’t, because I heard the sound of hooves, and soon we saw a horseman, clumsily bouncing in the saddle, and a graceful amazon. To hide my joy from Olga, I picked up Sasha and, running my fingers through her fair hair, kissed her head.

“How pretty you are, Sasha!” I said. “What lovely curls you have!”

Olga glanced at me, silently returned my bow, and, leaning on the Count’s arm, entered the annex. Urbénin stood up and followed her.

About five minutes later, the Count emerged from the annex. He was cheerful as never before. Even his face seemed refreshed.

“Congratulate me!” he said, taking my arm and giggling.

“On what?”

“On victory… One more such ride, and, I swear by the dust of my noble ancestors, I will pluck the petals from this flower.”

“But you haven’t plucked them yet?”

“Yet?… Almost! For ten minutes ‘your hand in mine’,” the Count sang, “and… she never withdrew her hand… I kissed her endlessly! But let’s wait until tomorrow, and now let’s go. They are waiting for me. Oh, yes! I need to talk to you, my dear fellow, about one thing. Tell me, my dear, is it true that you are… harboring malicious intentions regarding Nadezhka Kalinina?”

“And what then?”

“If it’s true, I won’t interfere. It’s not in my nature to trip someone up. If you have no intentions, then, of course…”

“I have none.”

“Merci, my soul!”

The Count dreamed of killing two birds with one stone, quite confident that he would succeed. And on the evening described, I observed the chase for these birds. The chase was foolish and ridiculous, like a good caricature. Looking at it, one could only laugh or be outraged by the Count’s vulgarity; but no one would have thought that this boyish chase would end in the moral fall of some, the ruin of others, and the crime of a third!

The Count killed not two birds, but more! He killed them, but the skin and meat did not go to him.

I saw him secretly shaking Olga’s hand, who always met him with a friendly smile, but saw him off with a contemptuous grimace. Once, even wishing to show that there were no secrets between him and me, he kissed her hand in front of me.

“What an idiot!” she whispered in my ear, wiping her hand.

“Listen, Olga!” I said after the Count left. “It seems to me that you want to tell me something. Do you?”

I looked at her face intently. She flushed and blinked nervously, like a cat caught stealing.

“Olga,” I said strictly, “you must tell me! I demand it!”

“Yes, I want to tell you something,” she whispered, squeezing my hand. “I love you, I can’t live without you, but… don’t come to me, my dear! Don’t love me anymore and address me as ‘you’ (formal). I can’t continue… It’s impossible… And don’t even show that you love me.”

“But why?”

“I want it that way. You don’t need to know the reasons, and I won’t tell you. They’re coming… Step away from me.”

I did not step away from her, and she herself had to end our conversation. Taking her husband’s arm as he passed by, she nodded to me with a hypocritical smile and left.

The Count’s other “bird” — Nadezhka Kalinina — received special attention from the Count that evening. He hovered around her all evening, telling her anecdotes, making jokes, flirting… and she, pale, tormented, twisted her mouth into a forced smile. Kalinin, the justice of the peace, observed them all the time, stroked his beard, and coughed significantly. The Count’s courtship pleased him. The Count as his son-in-law! What could be sweeter than this dream for a provincial bon vivant? After the Count’s courtship of his daughter began, he grew an entire arshin in his own eyes. And with what majestic glances he measured me, how maliciously he coughed when he conversed with me! “You, you see, were too ceremonious, you left, but we — don’t care! — Now we have the Count!”

Chapter VII

 

The next evening, I was again at the Count’s estate. This time I was not talking to Sasha, but to her brother, a high school student. The boy led me into the garden and poured out his heart to me. These outpourings were prompted by my question about his life with his “new mama.”

“She’s a good acquaintance of yours,” he began, nervously unbuttoning his uniform jacket, “you’ll tell her, but I’m not afraid… Tell her as much as you like! She’s evil, base!”

And he told me that Olga had taken away his room, chased away the old nanny who had served Urbénin for ten years, and was constantly yelling and angry.

“Yesterday you praised my sister Sasha’s hair… It’s good hair, isn’t it? Real flax! But this morning she cut it off!”

“That’s jealousy!” I explained to myself this intrusion of Olga into the unfamiliar hairdressing realm…

“It was as if she became envious that you praised Sasha’s hair, not hers!” the boy confirmed my thought. “She’s also tormented Papa. Papa spends terribly on her, neglects his work… and has started drinking again! Again! She’s a fool… She cries all day about having to live in poverty, in such a small annex. And is Papa to blame for not having much money?” The boy told me many sad things. He saw what his blinded father did not see or did not want to see. The poor boy’s father had been offended, his sister and the old nanny had been offended. His small hearth, where he used to tinker with arranging his books and feeding the goldfinches he caught, had been taken from him. Everything was offended, everything was mocked by the foolish and all-powerful stepmother! But the poor boy could not even dream of the terrible insult that the young stepmother had inflicted on his family, and of which I was a witness that very evening, after talking to him. Everything paled before this insult, and Sasha’s cut hair was a trifle in comparison.

Late that evening, I was sitting with the Count. We were drinking, as usual. The Count was completely drunk, but I was only slightly tipsy.

“Today I was even allowed to accidentally touch her waist,” he mumbled. “Tomorrow, then, we’ll go even further.”

“Well, what about Nadia? How is it with Nadia?”

“We’re progressing! With her, it’s only the beginning. We’re still in the period of talking with our eyes. I, brother, love to read in her dark, sad eyes. There’s something written in them that cannot be conveyed in words, but can only be understood with the soul. Shall we drink?”

“So, she likes you if she has the patience to talk with you for hours on end. And her father likes you.”

“Her father? Are you talking about that blockhead? Ha-ha! The fool suspects me of honest intentions!”

The Count coughed and drank.

“He thinks I’ll marry her! Not to mention that I can’t get married, but honestly, for me personally, it’s more honest to seduce a girl than to marry her… An eternal life with a drunken, coughing semi-old man — brrr! My wife would wither away or run away the next day… But what’s that noise?”

The Count and I jumped up… Several doors slammed almost simultaneously, and Olga burst into our room. She was as pale as snow, and trembled like a tightly struck string. Her hair was disheveled, her pupils dilated. She was gasping for breath and twisting the gathers of her night peignoir between her fingers…

“Olga, what’s wrong with you?” I asked, grabbing her hand and turning pale.

The Count should have been surprised by my accidentally uttered “you” (familiar), but he didn’t hear it. Having turned entirely into a large question mark, with his mouth agape and eyes bulging, he stared at Olga as if she were a ghost.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He’s hitting me!” Olga stammered and, bursting into sobs, fell into an armchair. “He’s hitting me!”

“Who is he?”

“My husband! I can’t live with him! I left!”

“This is outrageous!” the Count slammed his fist on the table. “What right does he have! This is tyranny… this is… this is God knows what! To hit his wife?! To hit! What did he hit you for?”

“For nothing at all,” Olya said, wiping away tears. “I was taking a handkerchief out of my pocket, and the letter you sent me yesterday fell out… He jumped up, read it, and… started hitting me… He grabbed my hand, squeezed it — look, there are still red marks on my hand — and demanded explanations… Instead of explaining, I ran here… At least you stand up for me! He has no right to treat his wife so roughly! I’m not a cook! I’m a noblewoman!”

The Count began pacing back and forth, spouting some drunken, confused nonsense that, translated into sober language, should have meant: “On the situation of women in Russia.”

“This is barbarism! This is New Zealand! Does this peasant also think that his wife will be slaughtered at his funeral? Savages, you know, take their wives with them to the next world!..”

I, however, could not collect myself… How was I to understand Olga’s sudden visit in a night peignoir, what should I think, what should I decide? If she was beaten, if her dignity was insulted, why did she not run to her father, or to the housekeeper… finally, not to me, who was still close to her? And was she truly insulted? My heart spoke of the innocence of the simpleton Urbénin; it, sensing the truth, constricted with the pain that the stunned husband must have been feeling at that moment. Without asking questions and not knowing where to begin, I started to comfort Olga and offered her wine.

“How wrong I was! How wrong!” she sighed through tears, raising the glass to her lips. “And yet, what a quiet man he pretended to be when he was courting me! I thought he was an angel, not a man!”

“And you wanted him to like the letter that fell out of your pocket?” I asked. “Did you want him to burst out laughing?”

“Let’s not talk about it!” the Count interrupted me. “Whatever happened, his action is vile! You don’t treat women like that! I’ll challenge him to a duel! I’ll show him! Believe me, Olga Nikolaevna, he won’t get away with this!”

The Count strutted like a young turkey, though no one had authorized him to step between husband and wife. I was silent and did not contradict him, because I knew that revenge for another man’s wife would be limited to drunken ranting within four walls, and that the duel would be forgotten by tomorrow. But why was Olga silent?… I didn’t want to think that she was not averse to the services the Count was offering her. I didn’t want to believe that this foolishly beautiful cat had so little dignity that she would willingly agree for a drunken Count to become the judge between husband and wife…

“I’ll drag his name through the mud!” shrieked the newly minted knight. “Finally, I’ll slap him! Tomorrow!”

And she did not shut the mouth of this scoundrel, who was drunkenly insulting a man who was only guilty of being deceived and deceiving himself! Urbénin had squeezed her hand hard, and that led to a scandalous escape to the Count’s house; now, before her very eyes, a drunken moral underdeveloped person was trampling a good name and pouring dirty slop on a man who at that moment must have been languishing in anguish and uncertainty, realizing he had been deceived, and she didn’t even bat an eyelid!

While the Count vented his anger, and Olga wiped her tears, a servant brought roasted partridges. The Count put half a partridge on the guest’s plate… She shook her head negatively, then as if mechanically took a fork and knife and began to eat. The partridge was followed by a large glass of wine, and soon no trace of tears remained, except for pink spots around her eyes and rare deep sighs.

Soon we heard laughter… Olga laughed, like a comforted child who had forgotten the offense. The Count, looking at her, also laughed.

“Do you know what I’ve decided?” he began, moving closer to her. “I want to arrange an amateur play at my place. We’ll put on a play with good female roles. Eh? What do you think?”

They started talking about an amateur play. How this foolish conversation did not fit with the recent horror that had been written on Olga’s face when she burst in an hour ago, pale, crying, with disheveled hair! How cheap were this horror, these tears!

And time, meanwhile, passed. It struck twelve. Respectable women go to bed at this hour. It was already time for Olga to leave. But it struck half past twelve, it struck one, and she still sat and talked with the Count.

“It’s time to go to bed,” I said, glancing at my watch. “I’m leaving… Will you allow me to see you out, Olga Nikolaevna?”

Olga looked at me, then at the Count.

“Where will I go?” she whispered. “I can’t go to him.”

“Yes, yes, of course, you can’t go to him anymore,” said the Count. “Who can guarantee that he won’t beat you again? No, no!”

I paced around the room. Silence fell. I walked from corner to corner, and my friend and my mistress watched my steps. It seemed to me that I understood both this silence and these glances. There was something expectant, impatient in them. I put down my hat and sat on the sofa.

“Ahem,” muttered the Count, rubbing his hands impatiently. “Ahem… Such are the affairs…”

It struck half past one. The Count quickly glanced at his watch, frowned, and began to pace the room. From the glances he cast at me, it was clear that he wanted to tell me something, something necessary, but delicate, unpleasant.

“Listen, Seryozha!” he finally decided, sitting next to me and whispering in my ear. “You, my dear fellow, don’t take offense… You will, of course, understand my situation, and my request will not seem strange or audacious to you.”

“Speak quickly! Don’t chew the rag!”

“You see, the thing is… that… Leave, my dear fellow! You are bothering us… She will stay with me… Forgive me for sending you away, but… you will understand my impatience.”

“Alright.”

My friend was disgusting. If I weren’t so squeamish, I might have crushed him like a beetle when he, trembling as if with fever, asked me to leave him with Urbénina. The poetic “girl in red,” who dreamed of a spectacular death, raised by forests and an angry lake, he, a relaxed anchorite soaked through with alcohol and ill, wanted to take! No, she shouldn’t even be a verst from him!

I approached her.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

She nodded.

“Should I leave here? Yes?” I asked, trying to read the truth on her pretty, flushed face. “Yes?”

With a barely perceptible movement of her long black eyelashes, she answered: “Yes.”

“Have you thought about it?”

She turned away from me, as one turns away from an annoying wind. She didn’t want to talk. And what was there to talk about? You can’t answer a long topic briefly, and there was neither place nor time for long speeches.

I took my hat and left without saying goodbye. Later, Olga told me that immediately after I left, as soon as the sound of my footsteps merged with the sound of the wind and the garden, the drunken Count was already embracing her. And she, closing her eyes, pressing her mouth and nostrils shut, could barely stand from a feeling of disgust. There was even a moment when she almost broke free from his embrace and ran to the lake. There were moments when she tore at her hair, cried. It was not easy to sell oneself.

Leaving the house and heading towards the stable where my Zorka stood, I had to pass by the manager’s house. I looked in the window. In the dim light of a heavily turned up, smoking lamp, Pyotr Egorych sat at the table. I could not see his face. It was covered by his hands. But in his entire thick, clumsy figure, there was so much grief, longing, and despair that one did not need to see his face to understand his state of mind. Two bottles stood before him. One empty, the other just opened. Both were vodka bottles. The poor fellow sought peace not within himself, not in people, but in alcohol.

Five minutes later, I was riding home. The darkness was terrible. The lake angrily surged and seemed to be enraged that I, such a sinner, having just witnessed a sinful deed, dared to disturb its stern peace. In the darkness, I could not see the lake. It seemed that an invisible monster was roaring, that the darkness itself enveloping me was roaring.

I stopped Zorka, closed my eyes, and pondered amidst the monster’s roar.

“What if I turn back now and destroy them?”

Terrible malice raged in my soul… All the little good and honest that remained in me after a prolonged moral decay, all that had survived corruption, that I had cherished, nurtured, been proud of, was insulted, spat upon, splashed with mud!

Earlier, I had known corrupt women, bought them, studied them, but they did not have the innocent blush and sincere blue eyes that I saw that May morning when I walked through the forest to the Tyenevo fair… I, myself corrupted to the core, forgave, preached tolerance for all vice, condescended to weakness… I was of the conviction that one cannot demand that dirt not be dirt, and one cannot blame the gold coins that, by force of circumstances, fall into dirt… But before, I did not know that gold coins could dissolve in dirt and mix with it into a single mass. So, gold is soluble!

A strong gust of wind snatched my hat from me and carried it into the surrounding darkness. The detached hat, in flight, swished across Zorka’s muzzle. She was startled, reared up, and galloped along the familiar road.

Upon arriving home, I collapsed into bed. Polikarp, who offered to help me undress, was cursed at for no reason.

“He’s a devil himself,” Polikarp grumbled, moving away from the bed.

“What did you say? What did you say?” I jumped up.

“You don’t serve two masses to a deaf priest.”

“Aha… you dare to be insolent to me!” I trembled, pouring all my bitterness on the poor footman. “Get out! I don’t want your spirit here, you scoundrel! Get out!”

And, without waiting for the man to leave the room, I collapsed into bed and sobbed like a boy. My strained nerves could not bear it. Powerless anger, insulted feelings, jealousy — everything had to come out one way or another.

“The husband killed his wife!” my parrot squawked, ruffling its sparse feathers…

Under the influence of this cry, the thought occurred to me that Urbénin could have killed his wife…

As I fell asleep, I saw a murder. The nightmare was suffocating, tormenting… It seemed to me that my hands were stroking something cold, and that if I only opened my eyes, I would see a corpse… It seemed to me that Urbénin was standing at the head of the bed, looking at me with pleading eyes…

After the described night, a lull set in.

I stayed home, only allowing myself to go out for official business. I had accumulated a huge amount of work, so it was impossible to be bored. From morning till evening, I sat at my desk and diligently wrote or interrogated people who had fallen into my investigative clutches. I was no longer drawn to Karneyevka, to the Count’s estate.

I gave up on Olga. What’s lost from the wagon is lost; and she was precisely that which had fallen from my wagon and, as I thought, was irretrievably lost. I did not think of her and did not want to think of her.

“Foolish, depraved trash!” I treated her every time she appeared in my imagination during my intense work.

Only occasionally, perhaps, when I lay down to sleep or woke up in the morning, did various moments from my acquaintance and brief life with Olga come to mind. I remembered: The Stone Tomb, the forest house where the “girl in red” lived, the road to Tyenevo, the meeting in the cave… and my heart would begin to beat harder… I felt a sharp pain… But all this was short-lived. The bright memories quickly faded under the pressure of heavy memories. What poetry of the past could withstand the filth of the present? And now, having finished with Olga, I no longer looked at this “poetry” as before… Now I looked at it as an optical illusion, a lie, hypocrisy… and it lost half of its charm in my eyes.

As for the Count, he completely disgusted me. I was glad I didn’t see him, and it always angered me when his mustachioed face timidly appeared in my imagination.

He sent me letters every day, imploring me not to mope and to visit “the no longer lonely hermit.” To obey his letters would have been unpleasant for me.

“It’s over!” I thought. “Thank God… I’m fed up…”

I decided to break off relations with the count, and this resolution didn’t cost me the slightest struggle. Now I wasn’t the same as three weeks ago, when after an argument about Pshekhotsky, I could barely stay home. The lure was gone…

Stuck at home, I got bored and wrote a letter to Doctor Pavel Ivanovich, asking him to come over for a chat. For some reason, I didn’t receive a reply to my letter and sent another. The second received the same response as the first… Evidently, the dear “vole” was pretending to be angry… Poor fellow, having been rejected by Nadya Kalinina, he blamed me for his misfortune. He had the right to be angry, and if he had never been angry before, it was because he didn’t know how.

“When did he manage to learn?” I wondered, not receiving a reply to my letters.

In the third week of my persistent, unavoidable confinement, the count visited me. After scolding me for not visiting him and not replying to his letters, he sprawled out on the sofa and, before starting to snore, spoke about his favorite topic – women…

“I understand,” he said, lazily squinting his eyes and placing his hands behind his head, “you’re delicate and scrupulous. You don’t visit me for fear of disrupting our duet… interfering… An untimely guest is worse than a Tatar, but a guest during a honeymoon is worse than the horned devil. I understand you. But, my friend, you forget that you are a friend, not a guest, that you are loved, respected… Your presence would only complete the harmony… And what harmony, my dear fellow! Such harmony that I can’t even describe it to you!”

The count pulled a hand from under his head and waved it.

“I can’t even figure out for myself if I’m living well with her or badly. Even the devil couldn’t figure it out! There are indeed moments when I’d give half my life for an ‘encore,’ but then there are days when you walk from corner to corner like a madman and are ready to howl…”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t understand this Olga, brother. She’s some kind of fever, not a woman… In a fever, there’s heat, then chills, and so it is with her, five changes a day. One moment she’s cheerful, the next so bored that she swallows tears and prays… One moment she loves me, then she doesn’t… There are moments when she caresses me like no woman has ever caressed me before. But then there are times when it’s like this: You wake up accidentally, open your eyes, and see a face turned towards you… something terrible, wild… It’s distorted, that face, with malice, with disgust… When you see something like that, all the charm is gone… And she often looks at me like that…”

“With disgust?”

“Yes, exactly!… I just don’t understand… She got together with me, as she assures, only out of love, and yet not a night passes when I don’t see that kind of face. How to explain it? It’s starting to seem to me, which I, of course, don’t want to believe, that she can’t stand me, and only gave herself to me because of the trinkets I buy for her now. She loves trinkets terribly! In a new dress, she can stand in front of the mirror from morning till night; because of a ruined ruffle, she can cry day and night… Terribly vain! Most of all, she likes that I’m a count. If I weren’t a count, she wouldn’t have loved me. Not a single dinner or supper passes without her reproaching me with tears that I don’t surround myself with aristocratic society. She, you see, would like to reign in that society… Strange!”

The count fixed his murky gaze on the ceiling and fell into thought. To my great surprise, I noticed that this time, contrary to his habit, he was sober. This struck and even touched me.

“You’re normal today,” I said, “neither drunk nor asking for vodka. What does this dream mean?”

“Just that! No time to drink, I’ve been thinking all the time… I must tell you, Seryozha, I’ve fallen seriously, not jokingly, for her. I liked her terribly. And it’s understandable… She’s a rare, extraordinary woman, not to mention her appearance. Her mind isn’t special, but how much feeling, elegance, freshness!… It’s impossible to compare her to my usual Amalias, Angelicas, and Grushas, whose love I’ve enjoyed until now. She’s something from another world, a world unknown to me.”

“Philosophize away!” I laughed.

“I got carried away, as if I had fallen in love! But now I see that I’m trying in vain to square a zero. That was a mask that caused a false alarm in me. The bright blush of innocence turns out to be red lead, a kiss of love – a request to buy a new dress… I took her into my house as a wife, but she conducts herself like a mistress who gets paid. But now it’s over! I’m calming the anxiety in my soul and starting to see Olga as a mistress… It’s over!”

“Well, what about the husband?”

“The husband? Hmm… And what do you think happened to him?”

“I think it’s hard to imagine a more unfortunate person than him now.”

“You think so? Don’t bother… He’s such a scoundrel, such a rogue, that I don’t pity him at all. A rogue can never be unhappy; he’ll always find a way out…”

“Why are you cursing him so much?”

“Because he’s a swindler. You know I respected him, I trusted him like a friend… Even you – everyone generally considered him an honest, decent person, incapable of deceit. And yet he was robbing me, plundering me! Using his position as manager, he disposed of my property as he pleased. He only didn’t take what couldn’t be moved.”

I, who knew Urbénin as a man of the highest honesty and selflessness, hearing the count’s words, jumped up as if stung and approached the count.

“You caught him stealing?” I asked.

“No, but I know about his thieving escapades from reliable sources.”

“What kind of sources, may I ask?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t accuse a man in vain. Olga told me everything about him. Even before she was his wife, she saw with her own eyes how he sent carts of slaughtered chickens and geese to the city. Not once did she see my geese and chickens going as gifts to some benefactors with whom his high school student son lodges. Moreover, she saw him sending flour, millet, and lard there as well. Let’s say all this is trifles, but do these trifles belong to him? It’s not about the cost, but the principle. The principle is offended! Then… She saw a wad of money in his cupboard. When she asked whose money it was and where he got it, he asked her not to blab that he had money. My dear fellow, you know he’s as poor as a church mouse! His salary is barely enough to live on… Explain to me, then, where did he get this money?”

“And you, you fool, believe the words of that little viper?” I cried out, outraged to the core. “It’s not enough for her that she ran away from him and disgraced him throughout the district. She also had to betray him! Such a small, insignificant body, and how much vileness it hides!… Chickens, geese, millet… owner, owner! Your political-economic sense, your agricultural stupidity are offended by the fact that he sent slaughtered poultry as a gift for the holiday, which foxes and polecats would have eaten if they hadn’t been slaughtered and given away, but have you ever checked the enormous reports that Urbénin submits to you? Have you counted the thousands and tens of thousands? No! What’s the point of talking to you? You’re stupid and brutish. You’d love to lock up your mistress’s husband, but you don’t know how!”

“My connection with Olga has nothing to do with it. Husband or not, if he stole, I must openly call him a thief. But let’s leave the thievery aside. Tell me: is it honest or dishonest to receive a salary and lie around drunk for days without waking up? He’s drunk every day! Not a day goes by when I don’t see him writing nonsense! It’s disgusting and low! Decent people don’t do things like that.”

“That’s why he drinks, because he’s decent,” I said.

“You have some passion for defending such gentlemen. But I’ve decided to be ruthless. Today I sent him his severance pay and asked him to vacate the place for another. My patience has run out.”

I deemed it unnecessary to try and convince the count that he was unfair, impractical, and foolish. This wasn’t the time to defend Urbénin to the count.

About five days later, I heard that Urbénin, along with his high school son and daughter, had moved to the city. They told me he was drunk and half-dead on the way to the city, and that he fell off the cart twice. The high school student and Sasha cried the whole way.

A little later, after Urbénin’s departure, I, against my will, had to visit the count’s estate. Thieves had broken the lock of one of the count’s stables and stolen several expensive saddles. The investigating magistrate, i.e., me, was informed, and I had to go, willy-nilly.

I found the count drunk and angry. He was pacing through all the rooms, looking for refuge from his anguish and not finding it.

“I’m tormented by this Olga!” he said, waving his hand. “She got angry with me this morning, threatened to drown herself, left the house, and as you can see, she’s still not back. I know she won’t drown herself, but it’s still unpleasant. Yesterday she sulked all day and broke dishes, the day before yesterday she gorged herself on chocolate. The devil knows what kind of nature she has!”

I comforted the count as best I could and sat down to dine with him.

“No, it’s time to stop these childish games,” he muttered throughout dinner. “It’s time, otherwise it’s foolish and ridiculous. And besides, I confess, she’s starting to annoy me with her sharp transitions. I want something quiet, constant, modest, like Nadya Kalinina, you know… A wonderful girl!”

After dinner, walking in the garden, I met the “drowned woman.” Seeing me, she blushed terribly and – strange woman – laughed with happiness. Shame on her face mingled with joy, grief with happiness. Glancing at me sideways, she ran up and, without a word, hung around my neck.

“I love you,” she whispered, squeezing my neck. “I missed you so much that if you hadn’t come, I would have died.”

I embraced her and silently led her to the arbor. Ten minutes later, as I was parting with her, I took a twenty-five ruble note from my pocket and gave it to her. Her eyes widened.

“Why is this?”

“I’m paying you for today’s love.”

Olga didn’t understand and continued to look at me in surprise.

“You see, there are women,” I explained, “who love for money. They are for sale. They should be paid money. Take it then! If you take from others, why won’t you take from me? I don’t want favors!”

However cynical I was in inflicting this insult, Olga didn’t understand me. She didn’t yet know life and didn’t understand what “women for sale” meant.

It was a beautiful August day.

The sun was warming like summer, the blue sky gently beckoned into the distance, but a premonition of autumn already hung in the air. In the green foliage of the thoughtful forests, faded leaves were already turning golden, and the darkened fields looked wistful and sad.

A premonition of the inevitable heavy autumn also settled within us. It wasn’t hard to foresee that the climax was already near. Some day, thunder had to strike and rain had to fall to refresh the stuffy atmosphere! Before a thunderstorm, when dark, leaden clouds gather in the sky, it feels stuffy, and a moral stuffiness already sat within us. It manifested in everything: in our movements, smiles, speeches.

I was riding in a light charabanc. Next to me sat Nadya, the justice of the peace’s daughter. She was pale as snow, her chin and lips trembled as if before crying, her deep eyes were full of sorrow, and yet she laughed the whole way and pretended to be extremely cheerful.

Ahead and behind us, carriages of all kinds, eras, and calibers moved. Riders and amazons galloped on either side. Count Karneev, dressed in a green hunting suit, looking more like a jester’s than a hunting outfit, bent forward and sideways, bounced mercilessly on his black horse. Looking at his bent body and the expression of pain that flashed across his drawn face again and again, one might have thought he was riding a horse for the first time. A new double-barreled shotgun dangled on his back, and a bag hung at his side, in which a shot snipe was stirring.

The highlight of the cavalcade was Olenka Urbénina. Sitting on a black horse gifted to her by the count, dressed in a black amazone riding habit and with a white feather in her hat, she no longer resembled the girl in red who we had met in the forest a few months ago. Now there was something majestic, “grand-dame” about her figure.

Every flick of the whip, every smile – everything was calculated for aristocracy, for majesty. There was something provocative, incendiary in her movements and smiles. She arrogantly and foppishly held her head high and, from the height of her horse, poured contempt on the whole company, as if the loud remarks directed at her by our virtuous ladies meant nothing to her. She flaunted and coquetted with her impudence, her position “with the count,” as if she didn’t know that she had already bored the count and that he was waiting every minute for an opportunity to get rid of her.

“The count wants to drive me away!” she told me with a loud laugh as the cavalcade was leaving the courtyard – so she knew her position and understood it…

But why the loud laughter? I looked at her and wondered: where could this forest commoner have gotten so much vivacity? When had she managed to learn to sway so gracefully in the saddle, proudly flare her nostrils, and flaunt imperious gestures?

“A depraved woman is like a pig,” Doctor Pavel Ivanych told me. “When she’s seated at the table, she puts her feet on the table…”

But this explanation is too simple. No one could have been as biased against Olga as I was, and I would have been the first to cast a stone at her; but a vague voice of truth whispered to me that it wasn’t vivacity, not the bragging of a well-fed, contented woman, but desperation, a premonition of a close and inevitable denouement.

Chapter VIII

 

We were returning from a hunt, which we had set out for early in the morning. The hunt was unsuccessful. Near the swamps, where we had placed great hopes, we met a company of hunters who told us that the game had been spooked. We managed to send three snipe and one duckling to the next world – that was all that fell to the lot of a dozen hunters. Eventually, one of the amazons developed a toothache, and we had to hurry back. We returned by a beautiful road across a field where recently reaped rye sheaves yellowed, with grim forests in view… On the horizon, the count’s church and house gleamed white. To their right, the mirror-like surface of the lake stretched widely, to their left, the Stone Grave loomed dark…

“What a terrible woman!” Nadya whispered to me every time Olga drew level with our charabanc. “How terrible she is! She is as evil as she is beautiful… How long ago were you a groomsman at her wedding? She hasn’t even worn out her shoes since then, and she’s already wearing someone else’s silk and flaunting someone else’s diamonds… It’s hard to believe this strange and rapid metamorphosis… If she has such instincts, she could at least be tactful and wait a year or two…”

“She’s in a hurry to live! No time to wait!” I sighed.

“And do you know what’s happening to her husband?”

“They say he’s drinking…”

“Yes… Papa was in town the day before yesterday and saw him riding in a cab from somewhere. Head, you know, tilted to one side, no hat, dirt on his face… A ruined man! Terrible poverty, they say: nothing to eat, rent unpaid. Poor little Sasha sits all day without eating. Papa described all this to the count… But you know the count! He’s honest, kind, but he doesn’t like to think deeply or reason. ‘I’ll send him a hundred rubles,’ he says. And he took and sent them… I think there could have been no greater insult to Urbénin than to send him money… He’ll be offended by this count’s handout and will drink even more…”

“Yes, the count is foolish,” I said. “He could have sent that money through me and in my name.”

“He had no right to send him money! Do I have the right to feed you if I’m choking you and you hate me?”

“That’s true…”

We fell silent and into thought… The thought of Urbénin’s fate was always heavy for me; now, with the woman who had ruined him flaunting before my eyes, this thought gave rise to a whole series of heavy thoughts in me… What would become of him and his children? How would she end up? In what moral mire would this frail, pathetic count end his days?

Next to me sat a being, the only one decent and worthy of respect… I knew only two people in our district whom I could love and respect, who alone had the right to turn away from me, because they stood above me… These were Nadezhda Kalinina and Doctor Pavel Ivanovich… What awaited them?

“Nadezhda Nikolaevna!” I said to her. “Without wishing to, I have caused you no small harm and, less than anyone, have the right to count on your frankness. But, I swear to you, no one will understand you as I will. Your sorrow is my sorrow, your happiness is my happiness… If I ask you a question now, don’t suspect idle curiosity. Tell me, my dear, why do you allow that pygmy count to approach you? What prevents you from driving him away and not listening to his vile pleasantries? After all, his courtship does no credit to a decent woman! Why do you give these gossips cause to put your name next to his?”

Nadya looked at me with her clear eyes and, as if reading sincerity on my face, smiled cheerfully.

“What are they saying?” she asked.

“They say that your papa and you are trying to catch the count, and that the count will, in the end, make a fool of you.”

“They don’t know the count, and that’s why they say that!” Nadya flared up. “Shameless gossips! They are used to seeing only bad things in people… The good is beyond their comprehension!”

“And you found good in him?”

“Yes, I did! You should be the first to know that I wouldn’t have allowed him near me if I weren’t sure of his honest intentions!”

“So, your relationship has already reached the stage of ‘honest intentions’?” I asked, surprised. “Soon… And what do you need his honest intentions for?”

“You want to know?” she asked, and her eyes sparkled. “Those gossips don’t lie: I want to marry him! Don’t make a surprised face and don’t smile! You’ll say that marrying without love is dishonest and all the other things that have been said a thousand times, but… what am I to do? Feeling like superfluous furniture in this world is very hard… It’s terrifying to live without knowing a purpose… When this man, whom you dislike so much, makes me his wife, I will then have a purpose in life… I will reform him, I will teach him to stop drinking, teach him to work… Look at him! Now he doesn’t look like a human being, but I will make him one.”

“And so on and so forth,” I said. “You’ll save his enormous fortune, do good deeds… The entire district will bless you and see you as an angel sent to comfort the unfortunate… You’ll be a mother and raise his children… Yes, a great task! You’re a clever girl, and you reason like a schoolboy!”

“Let my idea be worthless, let it be ridiculous and naive, but I live by it… Under its influence, I’ve become healthier and more cheerful… Don’t disappoint me then! Let me be disappointed myself, but not now, but sometime… later, in the distant future… Let’s leave this conversation!”

“One more indiscreet question: are you expecting a proposal?”

“Yes… Judging by his note, which I received from him today, my fate will be decided this evening… today… He writes to me that he has something very important to say… My answer, he writes, will depend on the happiness of his whole life…”

“Thank you for your frankness,” I said.

The meaning of the note Nadya received was clear to me. A vile proposal awaited the poor girl… I decided to save her from it.

“We’ve reached our forest,” the count said, drawing level with our charabanc. “Would you like to make a stop, Nadezhda Nikolaevna?”

And, without waiting for an answer, he clapped his hands and commanded in a loud, rattling tenor:

“Halt!”

We settled on the edge of the forest. The sun had hidden behind the trees, coloring only the tops of the tallest alders in golden crimson and playing on the golden cross of the count’s church visible in the distance. Disturbed hobbies and orioles flew overhead. One of the men fired a shot, further alarming the feathered kingdom. An incessant bird concert arose. This concert has its charm in spring and summer, but when the approach of cold autumn is felt in the air, it irritates the nerves and reminds one of the coming migration.

An evening freshness wafted from the thicket. The ladies’ noses turned blue, and the chilly count began to rub his hands. Most opportunely, the smell of burnt samovar and the clinking of teacups wafted through the air. One-eyed Kuzma, puffing and stumbling in the tall grass, dragged over a box of cognac. We began to warm ourselves.

A long walk in the fresh, cool air stimulates the appetite better than any appetizing drops. After it, cured fish, caviar, fried partridges, and other food caress the eyes like roses on an early spring morning.

“You’re smart today,” I said to the count, cutting myself a piece of cured fish. “Smarter than ever. It’s hard to arrange anything more wisely…”

“We arranged this together with the count!” Kalinin giggled, winking at the coachmen who were carrying bags of snacks, wine, and dishes from the charabancs. “The picnic will be glorious… There’ll be champagne at the end…”

The justice of the peace’s face this time shone with such contentment as never before. Did he not think that his Nadya would receive a proposal that evening? Had he not saved the champagne to congratulate the young couple? I looked intently at his face, but, as usual, I read nothing but reckless contentment, satiation, and dull importance spread throughout his solid figure.

We eagerly attacked the snacks. Only two were indifferent to the edible luxury spread before us on the rugs: Olga and Nadya Kalinina. The former stood aside and, leaning against the back of the charabanc, stared motionlessly and silently at the game bag the count had thrown to the ground. A shot snipe was stirring in the game bag. Olga followed the movements of the unfortunate bird as if waiting for its death.

Nadya sat next to me and looked indifferently at the cheerfully chewing mouths.

“When will all this end?” her tired eyes seemed to ask.

I offered her a caviar sandwich. She thanked me and put it aside. Evidently, she wasn’t in the mood to eat.

“Olga Nikolaevna! Why don’t you sit down?” the count shouted to Olga.

Olga didn’t answer and continued to stand motionless, like a statue, and look at the bird.

“Some people are so heartless,” I said, approaching Olga. “Can you, a woman, really contemplate the torment of this snipe so indifferently? Instead of watching it writhe, you’d do better to order it put out of its misery.”

“Others suffer, so let him suffer too,” Olga said, not looking at me and frowning.

“Who else is suffering?”

“Leave me alone!” she croaked. “I’m not in the mood to talk to you today… or to your foolish count! Get away from me!”

She glared at me with eyes full of malice and tears. Her face was pale, her lips trembled.

“What a change!” I said, picking up the game bag and finishing off the snipe. “What a tone! Stunned! Completely stunned!”

“Leave me alone, I tell you! I’m not in the mood for jokes!”

“What’s wrong, my beauty?”

Olga looked me up and down and turned away.

“That’s the tone one uses with depraved and mercenary women,” she said. “You consider me such… well, go to those saints then!… I’m worse here, meaner than anyone… When you rode with that virtuous Nadya, you were afraid to look at me… Well, go to them! Why are you standing there? Go!”

“Yes, you are worse and meaner than anyone here,” I said, feeling anger gradually overcome me. “Yes, you are depraved and mercenary.”

“Yes, I remember how you offered me cursed money… Then I didn’t understand its meaning, but now I do…”

Anger took hold of my entire being. And this anger was as strong as the love that had once begun to awaken in me for the girl in red… And who, what stone, would have remained indifferent? I saw before me beauty, thrown into the mud by merciless fate. Neither youth, nor beauty, nor grace had been spared… Now, when this woman seemed more beautiful to me than ever, I felt what a loss nature had suffered in her person, and a tormenting rage at the injustice of fate, at the order of things, filled my soul…

In moments of anger, I can’t control myself. I don’t know what else Olga would have had to listen to from me if she hadn’t turned her back to me and walked away. She quietly headed towards the trees and soon disappeared behind them… It seemed to me that she had cried…

“You, gracious ladies and gentlemen!” I heard Kalinin’s speech. “On this day, when we have all gathered for… for the purpose of uniting… We are all here together, all acquainted with each other, all having fun, and we owe this long-desired union of ours to none other than our luminary, the star of our province… You, Count, don’t be embarrassed… The ladies understand whom I’m speaking of… Heh-heh-heh!… Well, let’s continue… Since we owe all this to our enlightened and young… young… Count Karneev, I propose we drink this toast to… But someone’s coming! Who is it?”

Towards the edge of the forest where we were sitting, from the direction of the count’s estate, a carriage was approaching…

“Who could that be?” the count wondered, pointing his binoculars towards the carriage. “Hmm… strange… It must be travelers… Ah, no! I see Kajetan Kazimirovich’s mug… Who is he with?”

And the count suddenly jumped up as if stung… His face turned deathly pale, the binoculars fell from his hands. His eyes darted around like those of a trapped mouse, and, as if pleading for help, stopped first on me, then on Nadya… Not everyone noticed his confusion, because the attention of most was drawn to the approaching carriage.

“Seryozha, come here for a moment!” he whispered, grabbing my arm and leading me aside. “My dear friend, I implore you, as a friend, as the best of men… No questions, no questioning glances, no surprise! I’ll tell you everything later! I swear not a single jot will remain a secret to you… This is such a misfortune in my life, such a misfortune that I cannot express it to you! You’ll know everything, but now, no questions! Help me!”

Meanwhile, the carriage was getting closer and closer… Finally, it stopped, and our count’s foolish secret became the district’s property. From the carriage, puffing and smiling, stepped Pshekhotsky, dressed in a new chichunchov suit. Behind him, a young lady, about 23 years old, nimbly jumped out. She was a tall, slender blonde with regular but unlikable features and blue eyes. I only remember those blue, expressionless eyes, a powdered nose, a heavy but luxurious dress, and several massive bracelets on both arms… I remember that the smell of evening dampness and spilled cognac gave way to the pungent scent of some perfume.

“How many of you are here!” the stranger said in broken Russian. “It must be very fun! Hello, Alexis!”

She approached Alexis and offered him her cheek. The count quickly kissed it and anxiously glanced at his guests.

“My wife, I recommend her!” he mumbled. “And these, Sozya, are my good acquaintances… Hmm… I have a cough.”

“And I just arrived! Kajetan tells me: rest! But I say, why should I rest if I slept the whole way! And I’d rather go hunting! I got dressed and went… Kajetan, where are my cigarettes?”

Pshekhotsky jumped up to the blonde and offered her a golden cigarette case.

“And this is my wife’s brother…” the count continued to mumble, pointing at Pshekhotsky. “Help me then!” he nudged my elbow. “Save me, for God’s sake!”

They say that Kalinin felt unwell and that Nadya, wishing to help him, couldn’t get up. They say that many rushed to get into their carriages and leave. I didn’t see any of this. I remember that I went into the forest and, looking for a path, without looking ahead, went wherever my feet took me (One hundred and forty lines are crossed out here in Kamyshev’s manuscript.  —  A. Ch.)

…………………….

Pieces of sticky clay hung on my feet, and I was covered in mud when I came out of the forest. Probably, I had to jump over a stream, but I don’t remember the circumstances of that. As if I had been severely beaten with sticks, so tired and tormented did I feel. I needed to go to the count’s estate, mount Zorka, and ride. But I didn’t do that, instead I went home on foot. I couldn’t bear to see either the count or his cursed estate (At this point in the manuscript, a pretty female head with features distorted by horror is drawn in ink. Everything written below it is meticulously crossed out. The upper half of the next page is also crossed out, and through a solid ink blot, only one word can be deciphered: “temple.”  —  A. Ch.)

…………………….

My path lay along the lake shore. The water monster was already beginning to roar its evening song. High waves with white crests covered the entire vast surface. There was a hum and roar in the air. A cold, damp wind pierced me to the bones. To the left was the angry lake, and to the right came the monotonous rustle of the harsh forest. I felt alone with nature, as if face to face. It seemed all its wrath, all this noise and roar, were for my head alone. In other circumstances, I might have felt timid, but now I barely noticed the giants around me. What was the wrath of nature compared to the storm that raged within me? (Also crossed out here.  —  A. Ch.)

…………………….

Arriving home, I fell into bed without undressing.

“Again, you shameless eyes, you swam in the lake with your clothes on!” grumbled Polikarp, pulling off my wet and dirty clothes. “Again, my punishment! Still noble, educated, but worse than any chimney sweep… I don’t know what they taught you in university.”

Unable to bear any human voice or face, I wanted to shout at Polikarp to leave me alone, but my words stuck in my throat. My tongue was as weak and exhausted as my entire body. However painful it was, I had to let Polikarp strip everything from me, even my soaked underwear.

“If only he’d turn over!” grumbled my servant, turning me from side to side like a small doll. “Tomorrow, your pay! No, no… not for any money! I’ve had enough, you fool! May I perish if I stay!”

The fresh, warm linen did not warm or soothe me. I trembled so violently from both anger and fear that my teeth chattered. The fear was inexplicable… Neither ghosts, nor spirits from graves, nor even the portrait of my predecessor, Pospelov, hanging above my head, frightened me. He did not take his lifeless eyes off me and seemed to wink them, but I was not at all discomforted when I looked at him. My future was not transparent, but still, it could be said with greater probability that nothing threatened me, that there were no black clouds nearby. Death was not near, illnesses were not frightening to me, I attached no importance to personal misfortunes… What was I afraid of and why were my teeth chattering?

My anger was also incomprehensible to me… The count’s “secret” could not have angered me so much. I cared neither for the count nor for his marriage, which he had hidden from me.

The state of my soul at that time can only be explained by a nervous breakdown and exhaustion. Any other explanation is beyond me.

After Polikarp left, I covered my head, intending to fall asleep. It was dark and quiet… The parrot stirred restlessly in its cage, and the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock from Polikarp’s room reached me, but otherwise, peace and quiet reigned. Physical and mental exhaustion took their toll, and I began to fall asleep… I felt some weight gradually falling off me, how the hateful images in my consciousness were replaced by mist… I even remember starting to dream. I dreamt that on a bright winter morning, I was walking along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg and, having nothing better to do, gazed into shop windows. My soul was light and cheerful… There was no need to rush, nothing to do – absolute freedom… The awareness that I was far from my village, from the count’s estate and the angry, cold lake, further put me in a peaceful, cheerful mood. I stopped at the largest window and began to examine women’s hats… The hats were familiar to me… In one of them, I saw Olga, in another Nadya, the third I saw on the day of the hunt on the blond head of the suddenly arrived Sozya… Under the hats, familiar faces smiled… When I wanted to say something to them, all three merged into one large, red face. It angrily moved its eyes and stuck out its tongue… Someone behind me squeezed my neck…

“The husband killed his wife!” the red face cried out. I shuddered, cried out, and, as if stung, jumped out of bed… My heart was pounding terribly, and cold sweat appeared on my forehead.

“The husband killed his wife!” the parrot repeated. “Give me some sugar! How stupid you are! Fool!”

“It’s the parrot…” I reassured myself, lying back down in bed. “Thank God…”

A monotonous murmur was heard… It was the rain drumming on the roof… The clouds I had seen in the west when I walked along the lake shore now covered the entire sky. Lightning flashed faintly and illuminated the portrait of the late Pospelov… Thunder boomed right above my head…

“The last thunderstorm of this summer,” I thought.

I remembered one of the first thunderstorms… Exactly the same thunder had once roared in the forest, when I was in the forester’s hut for the first time… I and the girl in red stood by the window then and looked at the pines, which the lightning illuminated… Fear gleamed in the eyes of the beautiful creature. She told me that her mother had died from lightning and that she herself yearned for a spectacular death… She would have liked to dress as the richest aristocrats of the district dressed. She sensed that luxury of attire suited her beauty. And, conscious of her vain grandeur, proud of it, she would have wanted to ascend the Stone Grave and die spectacularly there.

Her dream came true… though not on the Stone… (Almost an entire page is haphazardly crossed out here. Only a few words are spared, offering no clue to understanding what was crossed out.  —  A. Ch.)

Having lost all hope of falling asleep, I got up and sat on the bed. The quiet murmur of the rain gradually turned into an angry roar, which I so loved when my soul was free from fear and anger… Now, this roar seemed ominous to me. One thunderclap followed another.

“The husband killed his wife!” croaked the parrot…

This was his last phrase… Closing my eyes in cowardly fear, I groped for the cage in the darkness and hurled it into the corner…

“To the devils with you!” I cried, hearing the clinking of the cage and the parrot’s squeak…

Poor, noble bird! The flight into the corner didn’t come cheap for him… The next day, his cage contained a cold corpse. Why did I kill him? If his favorite phrase about the husband who killed his wife remin… (Unfortunately, it’s crossed out again here. It’s noticeable that Kamyshev crossed things out not while writing, but afterwards… Towards the end of the story, I will draw special attention to these crossed-out sections.  —  A. Ch.)

My predecessor Pospelov’s mother, giving me the apartment, charged me for all the furniture, even for photographs of people I didn’t know. But she didn’t take a single kopeck from me for the dear parrot. On the eve of her departure for Finland, she said goodbye to her noble bird all night. I remember the sobs and laments that accompanied this farewell. I remember the tears with which she asked me to keep her friend until her return. I gave her my honest word that her parrot would not regret having met me. And I did not keep that word. I killed the bird. I can imagine what the old woman would say if she knew the fate of her screamer!

Someone gently knocked on my window. The small house I lived in was one of the outermost along the road, and I often heard knocks on the window, especially in bad weather when travelers sought lodging for the night. This time, it wasn’t travelers knocking. Going to the window and waiting for lightning to flash, I saw the dark silhouette of some tall and thin man. He stood before the window and seemed to shiver from the cold. I opened the window.

“Who’s there? What do you want?” I asked.

“Sergei Petrovich, it’s me!” I heard a plaintive voice, such as greatly chilled and frightened people speak. “It’s me! To you, my dear friend!”

In the plaintive voice of the dark silhouette, I recognized, to my great surprise, the voice of my friend, Doctor Pavel Ivanovich. The visit of the “vole,” who led a regular life and went to bed before midnight, was incomprehensible. What could have made him change his rules and appear at my place at two in the morning, and in such terrible weather besides?

“What do you want?” I asked, silently sending the unexpected guest to hell.

“Excuse me, my dear… I wanted to knock on the door, but your Polikarp is probably sleeping like a dead man now… I decided to knock on the window.”

“But what do you want?”

Pavel Ivanych approached my window and mumbled something incomprehensible. He was trembling and looked drunk.

“I’m listening!” I said, losing patience.

“You… you, I see, are angry, but… if you knew everything that happened, you would stop being angry about such trifles as interrupted sleep and an untimely visit… No time for sleep now! My God! I’ve lived in this world for three decades and only today, for the first time, am I so terribly unhappy! I’m unhappy, Sergei Petrovich!”

“Oh, what happened? And what does it matter to me? I can barely stand on my feet… I don’t care about other people!”

“Sergei Petrovich!” the “vole” said in a weeping voice, stretching out a rain-soaked hand in the darkness towards my face. “Honest man! My friend!”

And then I heard a man crying. The doctor was crying.

“Pavel Ivanych, go home!” I said after a moment of silence. “I can’t talk to you now… I’m afraid of both my mood and yours. We won’t understand each other…”

“My dear!” the doctor said in an imploring voice. “Marry her.”

“You’re out of your mind!” I said, slamming the window shut…

After the parrot, the doctor was the second victim of my mood. I did not invite him into the room and slammed the window in his face. Two rude, inappropriate outbursts, for which I would have challenged even a woman to a duel. (The last phrase is written above a crossed-out line, in which one can make out: “would have torn off his head and smashed all the windows.”  —  A. Ch.) But the meek and gentle “vole” had no concept of a duel. He didn’t know what it meant to be angry.

A couple of minutes later, lightning flashed, and I, looking at the window, saw the bent figure of my guest. His posture this time was pleading, expectant, like a beggar watching for alms. He was probably waiting for me to forgive him and allow him to speak.

Fortunately, my conscience stirred. I felt sorry for myself, sorry that nature had instilled so much harshness and vileness in me! My base soul was as hard as flint, just like my healthy body… (What follows is a plastically pretentious interpretation of the author’s emotional resilience. The sight of human sorrows, blood, forensic autopsies, etc., supposedly make no impression on him. This entire passage has a boastful, naive, and insincere tone. It is striking in its crudeness, and I have omitted it. It is not important for characterizing Kamyshev.  —  A. Ch.) I went to the window and opened it.

“Come into the room!” I said.

“No time!… Every minute is precious! Poor Nadya poisoned herself, and the doctor can’t leave her… We barely managed to save the poor girl… Isn’t that a misfortune? And you can not listen, slam the window?”

“Is she alive, after all?”

“After all… One doesn’t speak of the unfortunate in such a tone, my good friend! Who would have thought that such a clever, honest nature would want to part with life because of such a subject as the count? No, my friend, to the misfortune of people, women cannot be perfect! However clever a woman may be, whatever perfections she may be endowed with, there is still a nail in her that prevents her and others from living… Take Nadya, for example… What did she do that for? Self-esteem and self-esteem! A morbid self-esteem! To spite you, she decided to marry this count… She needed neither his money nor his noble birth… She only needed to satisfy her monstrous self-esteem… And suddenly, failure!… You know his wife arrived… It turns out this debauchee is married… And they also say that women are resilient, that they can endure better than men!… Where is the resilience here, if such a pathetic reason makes one grab for phosphorus matches? That’s not resilience, but vanity!”

“You’ll catch a cold…”

“What I saw just now is worse than any cold… Those eyes, that paleness… ah! To unrequited love, to a failed attempt to spite you, a failed suicide was added… A greater misfortune is hard to imagine!… My dear friend, if you have even a drop of compassion, if… if you saw her… well, why wouldn’t you come to her? You loved her! If you don’t love her anymore, then why not sacrifice your freedom for her? Human life is precious, and one can give… everything for it! Save a life!”

Someone knocked loudly on my door. I shuddered… My heart bled!… I don’t believe in premonitions, but this time my anxiety was not in vain… Someone was knocking at my door from the street…

“Who’s there?” I shouted from the window…

“At your grace’s service!”

“What do you need?”

“A letter from the count, Your Honor! Someone’s been killed!”

A dark figure, wrapped in a sheepskin coat, approached the window and, grumbling about the weather, handed me a letter… I quickly moved away from the window, lit a candle, and read the following:

“For God’s sake, forget everything in the world and come at once. Olga has been killed. I’ve lost my head and will go mad any moment. Your A. K.”

Olga killed! At that short phrase, my head spun and my eyes darkened… I sat on the bed and, unable to think, let my hands fall.

“Is that you, Pavel Ivanych?” I heard the voice of the peasant who had been sent. “And I was just about to come to you… And there’s a letter for you too.”

Five minutes later, the “vole” and I were sitting in a covered carriage and driving to the count’s estate… Rain drummed on the roof of the carriage, and dazzling lightning flashed before us again and again.

The roar of the lake could be heard…

The last act of the drama was beginning, and two of the characters were traveling to see a soul-rending scene.

“Well, what do you think awaits us?” I asked Pavel Ivanych on the way.

“I don’t think anything… I don’t know…”

“I don’t know either…”

“Hamlet once regretted that the Lord of heaven and earth forbade the sin of suicide, and now I regret that fate made me a doctor… I deeply regret it!”

“I’m afraid that in turn, I might have to regret that I’m an investigating magistrate,” I said. “If the count hasn’t confused murder with suicide and if Olga really was killed, then my poor nerves will suffer!”

“You can refuse this case…”

I looked at Pavel Ivanych questioningly and, of course, thanks to the darkness, saw nothing… How did he know that I could refuse this case? I was Olga’s lover, but who knew that besides Olga herself and, perhaps, Pshekhotsky, who once treated me to applause?…

“Why do you think I can refuse?” I asked the “vole.”

“Well… You can get sick, resign… None of this is at all dishonorable, because there’s someone to replace you, but a doctor is in completely different circumstances…”

“Only that?” I thought.

The carriage, after a long, killing drive over clayey ground, finally stopped at the entrance. Two windows directly above the entrance were brightly lit; a faint light broke through from the outermost right window, which led from Olga’s bedroom; all the other windows looked like dark patches. On the stairs, Sychiha met us. She looked at me with her piercing eyes, and her wrinkled face creased into a malicious, mocking smile.

“You’re in for a surprise!” her eyes said.

She probably thought we had come to party and didn’t know that there was sorrow in the house.

“I draw your attention,” I said to Pavel Ivanovich, pulling off the old woman’s cap and revealing a completely bald head. “This witch is ninety years old, my soul. If you and I ever had to dissect this subject, we would strongly disagree. You would find senile brain atrophy, while I would assure you that this is the smartest and most cunning creature in our entire district… A devil in a skirt!”

Entering the hall, I was struck. The scene I saw here was completely unexpected. All the chairs and sofas were occupied by people… In the corners and near the windows, too, stood groups of people. Where could they have come from? If someone had told me before that I would meet these people here, I would have burst out laughing. Their presence in the count’s house at a time when, perhaps, the deceased or dying Olga lay in one of the rooms, was so incredible and inappropriate. This was the Gypsy choir of master-Gypsy Karpov from the “London” restaurant, the very choir known to the reader from one of the first chapters. When I entered, my old acquaintance Tina detached herself from one of the groups and, recognizing me, cried out joyfully. A smile spread across her pale, swarthy face when I offered her my hand, and tears sprang from her eyes when she tried to say something to me… Tears prevented her from speaking, and I didn’t get a single word from her. I turned to the other Gypsies, and they explained their presence to me in this way. In the morning, the count sent them a telegram to the city, demanding that the entire choir, in its full composition, absolutely had to be at the count’s estate by 9 PM. They, fulfilling this “order,” got on the train and were already in this hall by eight o’clock…

“And we dreamed of bringing pleasure to His Excellency and the distinguished guests… We know so many new romances!… And suddenly…”

And suddenly, a peasant arrived on horseback with the news that a brutal murder had been committed during the hunt, and with an order to prepare Olga Nikolaevna’s bed. They didn’t believe the peasant because he was “drunk as a pig,” but when a noise was heard on the stairs and a black body was carried through the hall, there could be no more doubt…

“And now we don’t know what to do! We can’t stay here… When a priest is here, cheerful people need to leave… And besides, all the singers are alarmed and crying… They can’t be in a house with a deceased person… We need to leave, and yet they don’t want to give us horses! His Excellency the Count is ill and admits no one, and the servants respond with mockery to our request for horses… We can’t walk in such weather and on such a dark night! The servants are generally terribly rude!… When we asked for a samovar for our ladies, we were told to go to hell…”

All these complaints ended in a tearful appeal to my generosity: would I not arrange carriages for them so they could leave this “cursed” house?

“If the horses aren’t in the paddock and the coachmen aren’t dispersed, then you will leave,” I said. “I will order it…”

The poor fellows, dressed in clownish costumes and accustomed to coquetting with their dashing manners, looked very ill-suited with their solemn faces and indecisive poses. My promise to send them to the station somewhat stirred them up. The men’s whispers turned into loud chatter, and the women stopped crying…

Then, passing into the count’s study through a whole enfilade of dark, unlit rooms, I peeked into one of the many doors and saw a soul-touching scene. At a table near the humming samovar sat Sozya and her brother Pshekhotsky… Sozya, dressed in a light blouse, but still wearing the same bracelets and rings, sniffed something from a vial and, languidly, sipped fastidiously from a cup. Her eyes were tear-stained… Probably, the event during the hunt had greatly upset her nerves and long spoiled her mood. Pshekhotsky, with the same wooden face as before, gulped large mouthfuls from a saucer and said something to his sister. Judging by the mentor-like expression on his face and his manners, he was calming her and urging her not to cry.

The count, it goes without saying, I found in the most disheveled state of mind. The flabby and frail man had become thinner and more gaunt than before… He was pale, and his lips trembled as if in a fever. His head was wrapped in a white handkerchief, from which a sharp smell of vinegar filled the room. At my entrance, he jumped up from the sofa on which he was lying and, wrapping the folds of his dressing gown around him, rushed towards me…

“Eh? Eh?” he began, trembling and choking. “Well?”

And, uttering several indistinct sounds, he dragged me by the sleeve to the sofa and, waiting for me to sit down, pressed himself against me like a frightened dog and began to pour out his complaint…

“Who could have expected it? Eh? Wait, my dear, I’ll cover myself with a plaid… I have a fever… Killed, poor thing! And how barbarically killed! Still alive, but the district doctor says she’ll die tonight… A terrible day!… This… may the devil take her completely, my wife, arrived out of the blue… This is my most unfortunate mistake. I, Seryozha, was married drunk in St. Petersburg. I hid it from you, I was ashamed, but now she’s here, and you can see her… Look and suffer… Oh, accursed weakness! Under the influence of the moment and vodka, I am capable of doing anything you want! My wife’s arrival is the first gift, the scandal with Olga is the second… I’m waiting for the third… I know what else will happen… I know! I’ll go mad!”

After crying, drinking three glasses of vodka, and calling himself an ass, a scoundrel, and a drunkard, the count, with a tongue muddled by agitation, described the drama that had taken place during the hunt… He told me approximately the following.

About 20-30 minutes after I left, when the surprise about Sozya’s arrival had somewhat subsided and when Sozya, having made acquaintance with the company, began to act as hostess, the company suddenly heard a piercing, soul-rending cry. This cry came from the forest and was repeated by an echo four times. It was so unusual that the people who heard it jumped to their feet, the dogs barked, and the horses pricked up their ears. The cry was unnatural, but the count managed to recognize a woman’s voice in it… Despair and horror resounded in it… That’s how women must cry out when they see a ghost or the sudden death of a child… The alarmed guests looked at the count, the count at them… For three minutes, a deathly silence reigned…

And while the gentlemen exchanged glances and remained silent, the coachmen and footmen ran to the place from where the cry had been heard. The first messenger of sorrow was the footman, old Ilya. He ran from the forest to the clearing and, pale, with dilated pupils, tried to say something, but breathlessness and agitation long prevented him from speaking. Finally, overcoming himself and crossing himself, he uttered:

“The mistress has been killed!”

Which mistress? Who killed her? But Ilya gave no answer to these questions… The role of the second messenger fell to a man they did not expect, and whose appearance struck them terribly. Both the unexpected appearance and the appearance of this man were striking… When the count saw him and remembered that Olga was walking in the forest, his heart froze and his legs buckled from a terrible premonition.

It was Pyotr Egorych Urbénin, the count’s former manager and Olga’s husband. At first, the company heard heavy footsteps and the crackling of brushwood… It seemed as if a bear was making its way from the forest to the clearing. Then, the massive body of the unfortunate Pyotr Egorych appeared… Coming out into the clearing and seeing the company, he took a step back and stopped dead in his tracks. For two minutes, he remained silent and motionless, thus allowing himself to be examined… He was wearing his everyday grey jacket and trousers, quite worn… He had no hat on his head, and his disheveled hair stuck to his sweaty forehead and temples… His face, usually crimson, and often crimson-blue, was pale this time… His eyes stared madly, unnaturally wide… His lips and hands trembled…

But what was most striking, what first drew the attention of the stunned onlookers, were his bloody hands… Both hands and cuffs were thickly covered in blood, as if they had been washed in a blood bath.

After a three-minute stupor, Urbénin, as if waking from a dream, sat on the grass cross-legged and groaned. The dogs, sensing something unusual, surrounded him and began to bark… Sweeping the company with his cloudy eyes, Urbénin covered his face with both hands, and a new stupor set in…

“Olga, Olga, what have you done!” he groaned.

Muffled sobs burst from his chest and shook his Herculean shoulders… When he removed his hands from his face, the company saw blood on his cheeks and forehead, which had transferred from his hands to his face…

Reaching this point, the count waved his hand, convulsively drank a glass of vodka, and continued:

“My memories get confused further on. As you can imagine, everything that happened so overwhelmed me that I lost the ability to think… I don’t remember anything that happened afterwards! I only remember that men brought some body from the forest, dressed in a torn, bloody dress… I couldn’t look at it! They put it in the carriage and drove away… I heard no groans, no crying… They say that dagger that she always carried with her was plunged into her side… remember it? I gave her that thing. A blunt dagger, blunter than the edge of this glass… What strength, then, one must have to plunge it in! I love Caucasian weapons, brother, but now, to hell with these weapons! Tomorrow I’ll order it thrown out!…”

The count drank another glass of vodka and continued:

“But what a shame! What vileness! We bring her to the house… Everyone, you know, in despair, in horror. And suddenly, may the devil take them, these Gypsies, a reckless singing is heard!… They lined up and started, scoundrels, to yell!… They wanted, you see, to greet us with flair, but it turned out very inopportunely… It’s like Ivanushka the Fool, who, meeting a funeral, was delighted and shouted: ‘You’ll drag and drag and never finish!’ Yes, brother! I wanted to please the guests, invited the Gypsies, and it turned into nonsense. One shouldn’t invite Gypsies, but doctors and clergy. And now I don’t know what to do! What should I do? I don’t know these formalities, customs. Whom to call, whom to send for… Maybe the police are needed here, a prosecutor… I understand nothing, kill me!… Thank goodness, Father Jeremiah, having heard about the scandal, came to administer the sacraments, otherwise I wouldn’t have thought to invite him. I beg you, my friend, take on all these troubles! By God, I’m going mad! My wife’s arrival, murder… brrr!… Where is my wife now? Have you seen her?”

“I saw her. She’s drinking tea with Pshekhotsky.”

“With her brother, then… Pshekhotsky is a rogue! When I secretly fled St. Petersburg, he sniffed out my escape and attached himself… The amount of money he swindled from me during all this time is unbelievable!”

I didn’t have time for a long conversation with the count. I got up and headed for the door.

“Listen,” the count stopped me. “Um… will this Urbénin stab me?”

“And did he stab Olga?”

“Obviously, he did… I only wonder where he came from! What devils brought him to the forest? And why precisely this forest! Let’s say he hid there and waited for us, but how did he know that I would want to stop exactly there and not somewhere else?”

“You don’t understand anything,” I said. “By the way, once and for all, I ask you… If I take on this case, please don’t voice your opinions to me… You will only bother to answer my questions, nothing more.”

Leaving the count, I went to the room where Olga lay… (Two lines are crossed out here.  —  A. Ch.)

In the room, a small blue lamp burned, dimly illuminating faces… It was impossible to read or write by its light. Olga lay on her bed. Her head was bandaged; only her extremely pale, pointed nose and the lids of her closed eyes were visible. Her chest, when I entered, was exposed: an ice pack was being placed on it (I draw the reader’s attention to one circumstance. Kamyshev, who loves to pontificate about the state of his soul everywhere, even in descriptions of his clashes with Polikarp, says nothing about the impression the sight of dying Olga made on him. I believe this omission is deliberate.  —  A. Ch.) So, Olga was not yet dead. Two doctors were bustling around her. When I entered, Pavel Ivanych, squinting his eyes, endlessly sniffing and puffing, was listening to her heart.

The district doctor, an extremely tired and seemingly ill man, sat by the bed in an armchair and, deep in thought, pretended to be counting her pulse. Father Jeremiah, having just finished his duty, was wrapping a cross in his stole and preparing to leave…

“And you, Pyotr Egorych, don’t grieve!” he said, sighing and looking into the corner. “Everything is God’s will; turn to God.”

In the corner, on a stool, sat Urbénin. He had changed so much that I barely recognized him. The idleness and drunkenness of recent times had heavily affected both his clothing and his appearance: his clothes were worn out, his face too.

The poor man sat motionless and, propping his head with his fists, did not take his eyes off the bed… His hands and face were still covered in blood… Washing had been forgotten…

Oh, the prophecy of my soul and my poor bird!

When my noble, self-killed bird cried out the phrase about the husband who killed his wife, Urbénin always appeared on the scene in my imagination. Why?… I knew that jealous husbands often kill unfaithful wives, yet at the same time, I knew that Urbénins don’t kill people… And I dismissed the thought of the possibility of Olga’s murder by her husband as absurd.

“Is it him or not him?” I asked myself, looking at his unhappy face.

And, frankly, I did not give myself an affirmative answer, despite the count’s story and the blood I saw on his hands and face.

“If he had killed her, he would have long since washed the blood from his hands and face…” I recalled the saying of a detective friend. “Murderers can’t stand the blood of their victims.”

If I had wanted to rack my brains, I would have remembered many such situations, but I should not have jumped ahead and filled my head with premature conclusions.

“My respects!” the district doctor addressed me. “Very glad that at least you came… Tell me, please, who is the master here?”

“There is no master here… Chaos reigns here…” I said.

“A very nice saying, but nevertheless, it doesn’t make things any easier for me,” the district doctor coughed acerbically. “For three hours I’ve been asking, begging for a bottle of port or champagne, and not one person has condescended to my pleas! Everyone is as deaf as grouse! Ice was just brought now, although I ordered it three hours ago. What is this? A person is dying, and they act as if they’re laughing! The count is pleased to drink liqueurs in his study, and they can’t bring a glass here! I send to the city, to the pharmacy, – they say the horses are exhausted and there’s no one to go because everyone’s drunk… I want to send to my hospital for medicines and bandages, and they do me a favor: they give me some drunkard who can barely stand. I sent him two hours ago, and what? They say he just left! Well, isn’t this an outrage? Everyone’s drunk, rude, uncouth!… Everyone’s some kind of idiot! I swear to God, it’s the first time in my life I’ve seen such heartless people!”

The doctor’s indignation was justified. He was not exaggerating at all, quite the opposite… An entire night wouldn’t be enough to vent his bile on all the disorder and outrage that took place in the count’s estate. The servants, demoralized by idleness and anarchy, were repulsive. There was no lackey who could not serve as a type of a man who had lived too long and grown fat.

I went to get wine. After giving two or three slaps, I procured both champagne and valerian drops, which immensely pleased the medics. An hour later (I must also draw the reader’s attention to another very important circumstance. For 2-3 hours, Mr. Kamyshev does nothing but pace from room to room, argue with doctors and servants, liberally hand out slaps, and so on. … Do you recognize the investigating magistrate in him? He is apparently in no hurry and tries to kill time with something. Obviously, “he knows the killer.” Then, the search of Sychikha’s house and the interrogation of the gypsies described below, unmotivated by anything and more akin to mockery than interrogation, could only have been carried out to stall for time.  —  A. Ch.), a feldsher arrived from the hospital and brought everything necessary with him.

Pavel Ivanych managed to pour a tablespoon of champagne into Olga’s mouth. She made a swallowing motion and groaned. Then something like Hoffmann’s drops was injected under her skin.

“Olga Nikolaevna!” the district doctor shouted, bending towards her ear. “Olga Ni-ko-la-evna!”

“It’s difficult to expect her to regain consciousness!” Pavel Ivanych sighed. “Much blood has been lost, and, besides, the blow to the head with some blunt object was probably accompanied by a concussion.”

Whether there was a concussion or not, it was not my place to decide, but Olga simply opened her eyes and asked for a drink… The stimulants had taken effect on her.

“You can now ask what you need…” Pavel Ivanych nudged my elbow. “Ask.”

I approached the bed… Olga’s eyes were fixed on me.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“Olga Nikolaevna!” I began. “Do you recognize me?”

Olga looked at me for a few seconds and closed her eyes.

“Yes!” she groaned. “Yes!”

“I am Zinovyev, the investigating magistrate. I had the honor of knowing you and even, if you recall, was a groomsman at your wedding…”

“Is that you?” Olga whispered, extending her left hand forward. “Sit down…”

“She’s delirious!” sighed the “vole.”

“I am Zinovyev, the investigator…” I continued. “If you remember, I was present at the hunt… How do you feel?”

“Ask questions to the point!” the district doctor whispered to me. “I can’t guarantee that consciousness will last…”

“Please, don’t teach me!” I said, offended. “I know what to say… Olga Nikolaevna,” I continued, addressing Olga, “please try to recall the events of the past day. I will help you… At one o’clock in the afternoon, you mounted your horse and went hunting with the company… The hunt lasted about four hours… Then followed a halt at the edge of the forest… Do you remember?”

“And you… and you… killed.”

“The snipe? After I finished off the shot snipe, you winced and withdrew from the company… You went into the forest… (This evasion of a question of primary importance had only one goal: to stretch out time and wait for the loss of consciousness, when Olga would no longer be able to name the killer. A characteristic maneuver, and it’s surprising that the doctors didn’t appreciate it properly.  —  A. Ch.) Now, please gather all your strength, exert your memory. In the forest, during your walk, you were attacked by a person unknown to us. I ask you as an investigating magistrate, who was it?”

Olga opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Tell us the name of this person! Besides me, there are three others here…”

Olga shook her head negatively.

“You must name him,” I continued. “He will suffer a severe punishment… The law will exact a high price for his brutality! He will go to penal servitude… (All of this is only naive at first glance. Obviously, Kamyshev needed to make Olga understand what severe consequences her confession would have for the killer. If the killer is dear to her, ergo — she must remain silent.  —  A. Ch.) I’m waiting.”

Olga smiled and shook her head negatively. Further interrogation led to nothing. I didn’t get another word or movement from Olga. At a quarter to five, she passed away.

Chapter IX

 

Around seven in the morning, the village elder and the witnesses I had summoned arrived. Going to the crime scene was impossible: the rain that had started during the night was still pouring, as if from a bucket. Small puddles had turned into lakes. The gray sky looked severe and promised no sun; the soaked trees, sadly drooping their branches, showered a whole hail of large drops with every gust of wind. It was impossible to go, and perhaps unnecessary: traces of the crime, such as bloodstains, human footprints, etc., had probably been washed away by the rain during the night. But formality demanded that the crime scene be inspected, so I postponed this trip until the police arrived, and in the meantime, I began roughly drafting the protocol and conducting interrogations. First of all, I questioned the Gypsies. The poor singers had spent the whole night in the halls, waiting for horses to take them to the station. But they were not given horses; the servants sent them to the count, warning them at the same time that His Excellency had forbidden anyone to “be let in.” Nor were they given a samovar, which they had requested in the morning. This more than strange, uncertain situation in a stranger’s house where a deceased woman lay, the uncertainty about the hour of departure, and the damp, gloomy weather  —  all this plunged the poor Gypsy men and women into such anguish that they lost weight and turned pale in one night. They wandered from corner to corner, as if frightened or awaiting a strict verdict. My interrogation further increased their emotional burden. Firstly, my lengthy interrogation long delayed their departure from the “cursed” house, and secondly, it frightened them. The simple people, imagining that they were strongly suspected of murder, began to tearfully assure me that they were not guilty and knew nothing. Tina, seeing me as an official, completely forgot our past relationship and, speaking to me, trembled and swooned with fear like a flogged girl. To my request not to worry and to my assurances that I saw them only as witnesses, assistants to justice, they declared to me in unison that they had never been witnesses, knew nothing, and hoped that God would spare them from close acquaintance with judicial folk in the future as well.

I asked them what road they had taken from the station, whether they had ridden through the forest where the murder occurred, whether any of them had separated from the company, even for a short time, and whether they had heard Olga’s soul-rending cry (If all this was necessary for Mr. Kamyshev, wouldn’t it have been easier to question the coachmen who drove the Roma?  —  A. Ch.) This interrogation led to nothing. The frightened Gypsies dispatched two young men from the choir and sent them to the village to hire carriages. The poor wretches passionately wanted to leave. To their misfortune, in the village, where rumors of the murder in the forest were already circulating, people looked suspiciously at the swarthy envoys and, detaining them, brought them to me. Only in the evening did the exhausted choir get rid of the nightmare and breathe freely, having hired five peasant carts at three times the price and left the count’s house. Subsequently, they were paid for their arrival, but no one paid them for the moral torment they suffered in the count’s chambers…

Having interrogated them, I searched Sychikha’s belongings (Why? Let’s assume that all this was done by the investigating magistrate while drunk or half-asleep; then why write about it? Wouldn’t it be better to hide these crude errors from the reader?  —  A. Ch.) In her trunks, I found a mountain of all sorts of old woman’s junk, but, having rummaged through all the worn-out caps and darned stockings, I found neither money nor precious things that the old woman had stolen from the count and his guests… Nor did I find the things that had once been stolen from Tina… Obviously, the hag had another hiding place, known only to her…

I am not presenting my protocol, preliminary information, and inspection here… It is lengthy, and I have forgotten it… I am briefly summarizing it in general terms here… First of all, I described the state in which I found Olga, and in full detail presented my interrogation of her. From this interrogation, it was clear that Olga gave me conscious answers and consciously concealed the name of the killer from me. She did not want the killer to suffer punishment, and this inevitably leads to the assumption that the criminal was dear and close to her.

The inspection of the dress, conducted by me together with the district police officer who arrived shortly, revealed a great deal… The Amazon’s riding habit, velvet with a silk lining, was still damp… The right side, where the hole made by the dagger was located, was soaked with blood and in places bore blood clots… The bleeding was heavy, and it was surprising that Olga did not die on the spot. The left side was also bloody… The left sleeve was torn at the shoulder and at the wrist… The upper two buttons were torn off, and we did not find them during the inspection. The Amazon’s skirt, black cashmere, was found terribly crumpled: it was crumpled when Olga was carried from the forest to the carriage and from the carriage to the bed. Then it was pulled off Olga and, disfiguredly crumpled, thrown under the bed. It was torn at the waist; this longitudinal tear, seven vershoks long, probably occurred during carrying and pulling off; it could also have been made during her lifetime: Olga, who did not like to do mending and did not know to whom to give the skirt for repair, could have hidden this tear under the kazakin. I think that the wild fury of the criminal, which the prosecutor’s assistant later emphasized in his speech, had nothing to do with it here. The right side of the waistband and the right pocket were soaked with blood. The handkerchief and glove that lay in this pocket were two shapeless, rusty-colored lumps. Across the entire skirt, from the waistband to the end of the train, were scattered bloodstains of various sizes and shapes… Most of them were imprints of bloody fingers and palms, belonging, as was later revealed during interrogation, to the coachmen and footmen who carried Olga… The chemise was bloodied, and most of all on the right side, where there was a hole made by a cutting instrument. As in the kazakin, there were tears on the left shoulder and near the wrist… The cuff was half torn off.

The items Olga had with her, such as a gold watch, a long gold chain, a diamond brooch, earrings, rings, and a purse with silver coins, were found with her clothing. It was clear that the perpetrator was not driven by mercenary motives.

The forensic medical autopsy, performed in my presence by the “vole” and the district doctor the day after Olga’s death, ultimately yielded a very lengthy protocol, which I will summarize here. During the external examination, the doctors found the following injuries: On the head, at the border of the left temporal and parietal bones, a wound one and a half inches long, penetrating to the bone. The edges of the wound were uneven and not straight… It was inflicted by a blunt instrument, probably, as we later concluded, the blade of a dagger. On the neck, at the level of the cervical vertebra, a red band was observed, shaped like a semicircle and circularly encompassing the posterior half of the neck. Throughout this band, injuries to the skin and minor bruises were noted. On the left hand, one vershok above the wrist, four blue spots were found: one on the back of the hand and the other three on the palm. They resulted from pressure and, most likely, fingers… This is further confirmed by the fact that a small abrasion, made by a fingernail, was observed on one of the spots… Corresponding to the location of these spots, as the reader will recall, the left sleeve of the kazakin was torn and the left cuff of the chemise was half torn off… Between the fourth and fifth ribs, on a line imaginarily drawn vertically downwards from the middle of the armpit, there was a large, gaping wound, one inch long. Its edges were even, as if cut, saturated with liquid and clotted blood… The wound was penetrating… It was made by a cutting instrument and, as is evident from the preliminary information gathered, a dagger, the width of which perfectly corresponded to the size of the wound.

The internal examination showed damage to the right lung and pleura, inflammation of the lung, and hemorrhage into the pleural cavity.

The doctors, as far as I remember, gave approximately the following conclusion: a) death occurred from anemia, which followed a significant loss of blood; the blood loss is explained by the presence of a gaping wound on the right side of the chest; b) the head wound should be classified as a severe injury, and the chest wound as undoubtedly fatal; the latter should be recognized as the direct cause of death; c) the head wound was inflicted by a blunt instrument, and the chest wound by a cutting instrument, probably double-edged; d) all the above-described injuries could not have been self-inflicted by the deceased; and e) there was probably no attempt to dishonor the woman.

To avoid delay and repetition, I will immediately present to the reader the picture of the murder, sketched by me under the first impression of the inspections, two or three interrogations, and reading the autopsy protocol.

Olga, having separated from the company, was walking in the forest. Lost in thought or yielding to sad reflections (the reader remembers her mood on that ill-fated evening), she wandered far into the thicket. There she met the killer. As she stood under a tree, lost in thought, a person approached her and spoke to her… This person was not suspicious, otherwise she would have cried for help, but that cry would not have been soul-rending. After speaking with her, the killer grabbed her left hand, so forcefully that he tore the sleeve of her kazakin and chemise and left a mark in the form of four spots. It was probably then that she cried out the cry heard by the company — a cry of pain, and probably, having read his intention in the killer’s face and movements. Whether wishing her not to cry out again, or perhaps under the influence of malicious feeling, he grabbed her by the chest near the collar, as evidenced by the two torn upper buttons and the red band found by the doctors on her neck… The killer, grabbing her by the chest and shaking her, tightened the gold chain she wore around her neck… The friction and pressure of the chain caused the band. Then the killer struck her on the head with some blunt object, such as a stick or, perhaps, even the blade of the dagger that hung at Olga’s waist. Coming into a frenzy or finding that this one wound was insufficient, he unsheathed the dagger and forcefully plunged it into her right side — I say: forcefully, because the dagger was blunt.

Such is the grim picture that I was entitled to sketch based on the above data. The question of who the killer was seemed not difficult and resolved itself. Firstly, the killer was not driven by mercenary motives, but by some others… Therefore, there was no need to suspect some lost tramp or ragged individuals engaged in fishing on the lake. The victim’s scream could not have disarmed a robber: removing a brooch and a watch would have been a matter of a second…

Secondly, Olga deliberately did not name the killer to me, which she would not have done if the killer had been a simple robber. Obviously, the killer was dear to her, and she did not want him to be subjected to severe punishment because of her… Such people could have been her mad father, her husband whom she did not love but probably felt guilty towards, or the count, to whom she perhaps felt indebted in her heart… The mad father, on the evening of the murder, as the servants later testified, sat in his forest hut and spent the entire evening composing a letter to the police chief, asking him to curb imaginary thieves who supposedly surrounded the madman’s apartment day and night… The count, both before and at the moment of the murder, did not separate from the company. All the weight of suspicion thus fell solely on the unfortunate Urbénin. His sudden appearance, demeanor, and so on could only serve as good evidence.

Thirdly, Olga’s life recently consisted of one continuous romance. This romance was of the kind that usually ends in criminal proceedings. An old, loving husband, infidelity, jealousy, beatings, flight to a lover-count a month or two after the wedding… If the beautiful heroine of such a romance is killed, do not look for thieves and swindlers, but investigate the heroes of the novel. On this third point, the most suitable hero-killer was still Urbénin…

I conducted the preliminary inquiry in the mosaic living room, where I once loved to lounge on soft sofas and flirt with Gypsy women… The first person I interrogated was Urbénin. He was brought to me from Olga’s room, where he was still sitting in the corner on a stool, his eyes fixed on the empty bed… For a minute he stood before me in silence, looking at me indifferently, then, probably guessing that I intended to speak to him as an investigating magistrate, he spoke in the voice of a weary man, broken by grief and anguish:

“Interrogate other witnesses, Sergei Petrovich, and me later… I can’t…”

Urbénin considered himself a witness, or thought he was considered one…

“No, I need to interrogate you right now,” I said. “Please sit down…”

Urbénin sat opposite me and bowed his head. He was tired and ill, answered reluctantly, and I with great difficulty extracted his testimony.

He testified that he was Pyotr Egorych Urbénin, a nobleman, 50 years old, of the Orthodox faith. He owned an estate in the neighboring K. district, where he served by election and for two three-year terms was an honorary justice of the peace. Having gone bankrupt, he mortgaged the estate and found it necessary to enter service. He became the count’s manager six years ago. Loving agronomy, he was not ashamed to serve a private person and believes that only fools are ashamed of labor. He received his salary from the count regularly, and he had nothing to complain about. From his first marriage, he has a son and a daughter, etc., etc.

He married Olga out of passionate love. He struggled long and painfully with his feelings, but neither common sense nor the logic of a practical elderly mind could do anything: he had to succumb to his feelings and marry. He knew that Olga was not marrying him for love, but considering her highly moral, he decided to be content with only her fidelity and friendship, which he hoped to earn.

When he reached the point where disappointment and insult to his gray hairs began, Urbénin asked permission not to speak about “the past, which the Lord will forgive her,” or at least to postpone the conversation about it until later.

“I can’t… It’s too hard… And you saw it yourself.”

“Alright, let’s leave that for next time… Just tell me now: is it true that you beat your wife? They say that once, finding a note from the count on her, you struck her…”

“That’s not true… I only grabbed her hand, and she burst into tears and ran off to complain that evening…”

“Were you aware of her relationship with the count?”

“I asked to postpone this conversation… And what’s the point?”

“Just answer this one question, which is of great importance… Were you aware of your wife’s relationship with the count?”

“Of course…”

“I’ll write that down, and as for the rest concerning your wife’s infidelity, we’ll leave it until next time… Now we’ll move on to something else, namely: I’d like you to explain to me how you ended up in the forest yesterday, where Olga Nikolaevna was killed… After all, as you say, you were in the city… How did you find yourself in the forest?”

“Yes, sir, I live in the city, with my cousin, ever since I lost my position… I was looking for a job and drinking out of grief… I drank particularly heavily this month… Last week, for example, I don’t remember at all, because I drank without stopping… The day before yesterday, I got drunk too… in a word, I was lost… Lost forever!..”

“You wanted to explain how you ended up in the forest yesterday…”

“Yes, sir… Yesterday morning I woke up early, around four o’clock… My head ached from yesterday’s drinking, my whole body ached as if in a fever… I lay on the bed, saw the sun rising through the window, and I remembered… various things… It became heavy… Suddenly I wanted to see her, to see her at least once, perhaps for the last time. And malice gripped me, and anguish… I pulled a hundred rubles from my pocket, which the count had sent me, looked at them, and began to trample them with my feet… I trampled and trampled, and decided to go and throw this charity in his face. No matter how hungry and ragged I was, I could not sell my honor, and any attempt to buy it I considered an insult to my person. So, you see, I wanted to see Olya, and to him, the seducer, to throw the money in his face. And this desire gripped me so much that I almost went mad. I had no money to come here. I couldn’t spend his hundred rubles on myself. I walked. Thankfully, I met a familiar peasant on the way, who drove me eighteen versts for a dime, otherwise I would still be walking. The peasant dropped me off in Tyenevo. From there I walked here and arrived around four o’clock.”

“Did anyone see you here at that time?”

“Yes, sir. The watchman Nikolai was sitting at the gate and told me that the masters were not home and that they were hunting. I was exhausted, but the desire to see my wife was stronger than the pain. I had to walk to the hunting ground without a minute’s rest. I didn’t go by road, but through the woods… Every tree is familiar to me, and it’s as difficult for me to get lost in the count’s forests as in my own apartment.”

“But by going through the forest instead of along the road, you could have missed the hunters.”

“No, sir, I kept to the road the whole time, and so close that I could hear not only the shots but also the conversation.”

“So, you didn’t expect to meet your wife in the forest?”

Urbénin looked at me in surprise and, after thinking for a moment, replied:

“The question, excuse me, is strange. One cannot assume that one will meet a wolf, and to assume terrible misfortunes is even more impossible: God sends them suddenly. Take this terrible case, for example… I am walking through the Olkhov Forest, expecting no grief, because I already have much grief, and suddenly I hear a terrible cry. The cry was so sharp that it seemed to me as if someone had cut my ear… I ran towards the cry…”

Urbénin’s mouth twisted to the side, his chin trembled. He blinked his eyes and sobbed.

“I ran to the cry and suddenly I see… Olya lying there. Her hair and forehead covered in blood, her face horrible. I start shouting, calling her name… She doesn’t move… I kiss her, I lift her up.”

Urbénin choked and covered his face with his sleeve. A minute later, he continued:

“I didn’t see the scoundrel… when I ran to her, I heard someone’s hasty steps… Probably he was running away.”

“All of this is wonderfully invented, Pyotr Egorych,” I said. “But you know, investigators don’t readily believe in such rare coincidences as a murder coinciding with your accidental walk and so on. It’s well-invented, but it explains very little.”

“What do you mean, ‘invented’?” Urbénin asked, wide-eyed. “I didn’t invent anything, sir…”

Urbénin suddenly blushed and stood up.

“As if you suspect me…” he muttered. “One can, of course, suspect anyone, but you, Sergei Petrovich, have known me for a long time… It’s a sin for you to brand me with such suspicion… You know me, after all.”

“I know you — that’s true… but my personal opinions have nothing to do with it here… The law grants personal opinions only to the jurors; the investigator has only evidence at his disposal… There’s a lot of evidence, Pyotr Egorych.”

Urbénin looked at me in fright and shrugged.

“But whatever the evidence may be,” he said, “you must understand… Well, could I possibly… I! And whom?! To kill a quail or a snipe, perhaps, but a human… a human who is dearer to me than life, than my salvation… the mere thought of whom illuminated my gloomy state like the sun… And suddenly you suspect!”

Urbénin waved his hand and sat down.

“Here, I already want to die, and you insult me further! It would be good if it were an unfamiliar official insulting me, but it’s you, Sergei Petrovich… Allow me to leave, sir!”

“You may… I will interrogate you again tomorrow, but for now, Pyotr Egorych, I must take you into custody… I hope that by tomorrow’s interrogation you will appreciate the full importance of the evidence against you, will not waste time unnecessarily, and will confess. I am convinced that Olga Nikolaevna was killed by you… I will tell you nothing more today… You may go.”

I said this and bent over my papers… Urbénin looked at me in bewilderment, stood up, and somehow strangely spread his arms.

“Are you joking or… serious?” he said.

“This is no time for jokes between us…” I said. “You may go.”

Urbénin still remained standing. I looked at him. He was pale and stared bewilderedly at my papers.

“And why are your hands bloody, Pyotr Egorych?” I asked.

He looked at his hands, which were still covered in blood, and wiggled his fingers.

“Why blood?… Hmm… If that’s one of the pieces of evidence, then it’s a poor one… When I picked up the bloody Olga, I couldn’t help but get blood on my hands… I wasn’t wearing gloves, after all.”

“You just told me that when you saw your wife, you shouted, called for help… Why did no one hear your cry?”

“I don’t know, the sight of Olya so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t shout loudly… Anyway, I don’t know anything… There’s no need for me to justify myself, and it’s not in my nature.”

“You hardly shouted… After killing your wife, you ran away and were terribly shocked when you saw people at the clearing.”

“I didn’t even notice your people. I had no time for people.”

With that, Urbénin’s interrogation ended for now. After him, Urbénin was taken into custody and locked in one of the count’s outbuildings.

The next day or the day after, Assistant Prosecutor Polugradov arrived from the city — a man whom I cannot remember without spoiling my mood. Imagine a tall and thin man, about thirty years old, cleanly shaven, with curly hair like a lamb, and elegantly dressed; his facial features were delicate, but so dry and lacking in substance that it was easy to guess the emptiness and foppishness of the individual portrayed; his voice was quiet, sweet, and cloyingly polite.

He arrived early in the morning in a hired carriage with two suitcases. First, with a deeply worried expression and affectedly complaining of fatigue, he inquired if there was accommodation for him in the count’s house. At my command, he was given a small but very cozy and bright room, where everything was provided for him, from a marble washbasin to matches.

“L-listen, my dear! Get me some warm water!” he began, settling into the room and fastidiously sniffing the air. “Man, I tell you! Warm water, please…”

And, before getting down to business, he spent a long time dressing, washing, and combing his hair; he even brushed his teeth with red powder and spent about three minutes trimming his sharp, pink fingernails.

“Well then,” he finally began, flipping through our protocols, “what’s the matter?”

I told him what the matter was, without omitting a single detail…

“And have you been to the crime scene?”

“No, not yet.”

The assistant prosecutor winced, ran his white, feminine hand over his freshly washed forehead, and paced the room.

“I don’t understand the reasons why you haven’t been there yet,” he mumbled: “that should have been done first, I believe. Did you forget or did you not consider it necessary?”

“Neither the one nor the other: yesterday I waited for the police, and today I’ll go.”

“Nothing is left there now: it’s been raining all day, and you gave the criminal time to cover his tracks. At least, did you put a guard there? No? I-I don’t understand!”

And the dandy authoritatively shrugged.

“Drink your tea, or it will get cold,” I said in the tone of an indifferent person.

“I like it cold.”

The assistant prosecutor bent over the papers and, sniffling throughout the room, began to read in a low voice, occasionally interjecting his remarks and corrections. Twice his mouth twisted into a mocking smile: the goose-footed one (Kamyshev needlessly scolds the prosecutor’s assistant. This prosecutor is only to blame because his face displeased Mr. Kamyshev. It would have been more honest to confess either to inexperience or to intentional errors.  —  A. Ch.) somehow disliked both my protocol and the doctors’ protocol. In the cleaned and washed official, the pedant, stuffed with self-importance and a sense of his own dignity, was strongly expressed.

At noon we were at the crime scene. It was pouring rain. Of course, we found neither spots nor tracks: everything had been washed away by the rain. Somehow, I managed to find a button, missing from the murdered Olga’s riding habit, and the assistant prosecutor picked up some red pulp, which later turned out to be a red tobacco wrapper. At first, we stumbled upon a bush with two broken side branches; the assistant prosecutor was pleased with these branches: they could have been broken by the criminal, and therefore would indicate the direction the criminal took after killing Olga. But the prosecutor’s joy was in vain: soon we found many bushes with broken branches and plucked leaves; it turned out that cattle had passed through the crime scene.

Having sketched a plan of the area and questioned the coachmen we brought with us about the position in which Olga was found, we drove back, feeling like we had achieved nothing. When we investigated the scene, an outside observer might have detected laziness, sluggishness in our movements… Perhaps our movements were partly paralyzed by the fact that the criminal was already in our hands and, therefore, there was no need to embark on Lekokian analyses.

Returning from the forest, Polugradov again spent a long time washing and dressing, again demanding warm water. Having finished his toilette, he expressed a desire to interrogate Urbénin once more. During this interrogation, poor Pyotr Egorych said nothing new: he continued to deny his guilt and dismissed our evidence as worthless.

“I even wonder how I can be suspected,” he said, shrugging, “it’s strange!”

“Don’t be naive, my dear fellow!” Polugradov told him, “no one will suspect you without reason, and if they suspect you, it means they have reasons!”

“But whatever the reasons, however strong the evidence, one must reason humanly! I cannot kill… do you understand? I cannot… So, what are your evidences worth?”

“Well!” the assistant prosecutor waved his hand, “trouble with these intelligent criminals: you can explain it to a peasant, but try talking to this one! ‘I can’t… humanly…’ they always hit on psychology!”

“I am not a criminal,” Urbénin retorted, offended, “I ask you to be more careful in your expressions…”

“Shut up, my dear fellow! We have no time to apologize to you and listen to your grievances… If you don’t want to confess, then don’t, – just allow us to consider you a liar…”

“As you wish,” Urbénin grumbled, “you can do whatever you want with me now… it’s your power…”

Urbénin waved his hand and continued, looking out the window:

“It doesn’t matter to me anyway: life is ruined.”

“Listen, Pyotr Egorych,” I said, “yesterday and the day before yesterday you were so overcome with grief that you could barely stand and could hardly utter laconic answers; today, on the contrary, you have such a flourishing, comparatively speaking of course, and cheerful appearance and even launch into lengthy discourses. Grieving people usually have no time for conversations, but you not only talk at length but also express petty dissatisfaction. How do you explain such a sharp change?”

“And how do you explain it?” Urbénin asked, squinting his eyes at me mockingly.

“I explain it by the fact that you’ve forgotten your role. It’s hard to act for a long time: you either forget the role, or you get tired of it…”

“That’s an investigator’s fabrication,” Urbénin grinned, “and it does credit to your resourcefulness… Yes, you’re right: a big change has occurred in me…”

“Can you explain it?”

“Certainly, I don’t find it necessary to hide: yesterday I was so crushed and overwhelmed by my grief that I thought of taking my own life or… going mad… but last night I had a change of heart… the thought occurred to me that death had freed Olya from a dissolute life, snatched her from the dirty hands of that scoundrel, my destroyer; I am not jealous of death: let Olga rather belong to death than to the count; this thought cheered me up and strengthened me; now there is no such heaviness in my soul.”

“Cleverly conceived!” Polugradov hissed through his teeth, shaking his leg. “He’s quick with an answer!”

“I feel that I am speaking sincerely, and it surprises me that you, educated people, cannot distinguish sincerity from pretense! However, prejudice is too strong a feeling; it is difficult not to make mistakes under its influence; I understand your position, I imagine what will happen when, believing your evidence, they begin to judge me… I imagine: they will take into account my brutal physiognomy, my drunkenness… I do not have a brutal appearance, but prejudice will take its toll…”

“All right, all right, enough,” Polugradov said, bending over the papers, “you may go…”

After Urbénin left, we proceeded to interrogate the count. His Excellency appeared for the interrogation in a dressing gown and with a vinegar compress on his head; having made Polugradov’s acquaintance, he sprawled in an armchair and began to give his testimony:

“I’ll tell you everything, from the very beginning… Well, how is your chairman Lyonsky doing now? Still not divorced from his wife? I met him by chance in St. Petersburg… Gentlemen, why don’t you order something for yourselves? It’s somehow more cheerful to talk with cognac… and that Urbénin is guilty of this murder, I have no doubt…”

And the count told us all that the reader already knows. At the prosecutor’s request, he recounted in full detail his life with Olga and, describing the charms of living with a pretty woman, became so carried away that he smacked his lips several times and winked.

From his testimony, I learned a very important detail that is unknown to the reader. I learned that Urbénin, while living in the city, constantly bombarded the count with letters; in some letters he cursed, in others he begged for his wife back, promising to forget all insults and dishonor; the poor man clung to these letters like a straw.

After interrogating two or three coachmen, the assistant prosecutor had a hearty dinner, read me an entire instruction, and left. Before leaving, he visited the outbuilding where the arrested Urbénin was being held and informed the latter that our suspicion of his guilt had become a certainty. Urbénin waved his hand and asked permission to attend his wife’s funeral; the latter was granted to him.

Polugradov did not lie to Urbénin: yes, our suspicion had become a certainty, we were convinced that we knew the criminal and that he was already in our hands; but this certainty did not last long within us!…

Chapter X

 

One fine morning, as I was sealing a package to send Urbénin to the city, to the prison castle, I heard a terrible commotion. Looking out the window, I saw an entertaining sight: a dozen burly young men were dragging one-eyed Kuzma out of the servants’ kitchen.

Kuzma, pale and disheveled, resisted with his feet on the ground and, unable to defend himself with his hands, struck his enemies with his large head.

“Your Honor, please come here!” Ilya said to me, alarmed. “He doesn’t want to go!”

“Who doesn’t want to go?”

“The murderer.”

“Which murderer?”

“Kuzma… he killed, Your Honor… Pyotr Egorych is suffering for nothing… by God, sir…”

I went out into the yard and headed towards the servants’ kitchen, where Kuzma, having already broken free from the strong hands, was showering slaps right and left…

“What’s the matter?” I asked, approaching the crowd…

And they told me something strange and unexpected.

“Your Honor, Kuzma killed!”

“They’re lying!” Kuzma wailed, “God strike me, they’re lying!”

“Then why, you son of a devil, were you washing off blood if your conscience is clear? Wait, Your Honor will sort everything out!”

The circuit rider Trifon, passing by the river, noticed Kuzma diligently washing something. Trifon initially thought he was doing laundry, but on closer inspection, he saw a padded jacket and a waistcoat. It seemed strange to him: woolens are not usually washed.

“What are you doing?” Trifon shouted.

Kuzma became flustered. Looking even more closely, Trifon noticed brown stains on the padded jacket…

“I immediately guessed it was blood… I went to the kitchen and told our people; they waited and saw him drying the padded jacket in the garden at night. Well, naturally, they were scared. Why would he wash it if he’s not guilty? So, he has a crooked soul if he’s hiding something… We thought and thought and dragged him to Your Honor… We drag him, and he backs away and spits in our faces. Why would he back away if he’s not guilty?”

From further interrogation, it turned out that Kuzma had gone into the forest just before the murder, at the time when the count and his guests were sitting at the edge of the forest and drinking tea. He had not participated in carrying Olga, and therefore could not have gotten blood on himself.

Brought to my room, Kuzma at first could not utter a word from agitation; rolling the white of his single eye, he crossed himself and muttered oaths…

“Calm down, tell me, and I will let you go,” I told him.

Kuzma fell at my feet and, stammering, began to swear by God…

“May I perish if it was me… May neither my father nor my mother… Your Honor! God strike my soul…”

“Did you go into the forest?”

“That’s right, sir, I went… I served cognac to the masters and, excuse me, took a little sip; it went to my head and I wanted to lie down, so I went, lay down, and fell asleep… And who killed and how, I don’t know and have no idea… Truly, I tell you!”

“And why were you washing off blood?”

“I was afraid that something might be thought… that I might be taken as a witness…”

“And where did the blood on your padded jacket come from?”

“I cannot know, Your Honor.”

“How can you not know? It’s your padded jacket, isn’t it?”

“That’s true, it’s mine, but I cannot know: I saw the blood when I was already awake.”

“So, then, you stained your padded jacket with blood in your sleep?”

“Exactly so…”

“Well, go now, brother, think about it… You’re talking nonsense; think about it, you’ll tell me tomorrow… Go.”

The next day, when I woke up, I was informed that Kuzma wished to speak with me. I ordered him to be brought in.

“Have you thought it over?” I asked him.

“Exactly so,” he replied, “I have thought it over…”

“So, where did the blood on your padded jacket come from?”

“Your Excellency, as if in a dream I remember: something comes to mind, as if in a fog, but whether it’s true or not, I can’t tell.”

“What do you remember?”

Kuzma raised his eye, thought, and said:

“Something strange… as if in a dream or a fog… I’m lying on the grass drunk and dozing, or perhaps completely asleep… I just hear someone walking by, stomping loudly… I open my eye and see, as if in unconsciousness or a dream: some gentleman approaches me, bends down and wipes his hands on the skirts of my coat… wiped them on the skirts, and then smeared his hand on my waistcoat… like this.”

“What kind of gentleman was this?”

“I cannot know; I only remember that it was not a peasant, but a gentleman… in master’s clothes, but what kind of gentleman, what his face was like, I don’t remember at all.”

“What color were his clothes?”

“Who knows! Maybe white, or maybe black… I only remember it was a gentleman, and I remember nothing else… Oh, yes, I remembered! Bending down, he wiped his hands and said: ‘Drunken scoundrel!'”

“Did you dream this?”

“I don’t know… maybe I did… But where did the blood come from then?”

“The gentleman you saw, does he resemble Pyotr Egorych?”

“As if not… but maybe it was him… Only he wouldn’t use such language as ‘scoundrel’.”

“You remember… go, sit down and remember… maybe you’ll recall it somehow.”

“I obey.”

This unexpected intrusion of one-eyed Kuzma into an almost finished novel created an inscrutable confusion. I was completely lost and did not know how to understand Kuzma: he absolutely denied his guilt, and the preliminary investigation was against his guilt: Olga was not killed for mercenary purposes, and, according to the doctors, there was “probably no attempt on her honor”; one could only assume that Kuzma killed and did not pursue any of these goals only because he was heavily drunk and lost his judgment or got scared, which did not fit the circumstances of the murder?

But if Kuzma was not guilty, why did he not explain the presence of blood on his padded jacket and why did he invent dreams and hallucinations? Why did he drag in a gentleman whom he saw and heard, but remembered so little that he even forgot the color of his clothes?

Polugradov flew in again.

“You see!” he said. “If you had inspected the crime scene immediately, believe me, everything would be clear as day now! If you had interrogated all the servants immediately, we would have known then who carried Olga Nikolaevna and who did not, but now we cannot even determine how far this drunkard lay from the crime scene!”

For about two hours, he struggled with Kuzma, but the latter did not provide him with anything new; he said that in a half-sleep he saw a gentleman, that the gentleman wiped his hands on his coat tails and called him a “drunken scoundrel,” but who this gentleman was, what his face and clothes were like, he did not say.

“How much cognac did you drink?”

“I drank half a bottle.”

“But maybe it wasn’t cognac?”

“No, sir, real fine champagne…”

“Ah, you even know the names of wines!” the assistant prosecutor chuckled…

“How can I not know! Thank God, I’ve been serving the masters for three decades, it’s time to learn…”

For some reason, the assistant prosecutor needed a confrontation between Kuzma and Urbénin… Kuzma stared at Urbénin for a long time, shook his head, and said:

“No, I don’t remember… maybe it was Pyotr Egorych, and maybe not… Who knows!”

Polugradov waved his hand and left, leaving me to choose the real murderer from the two.

The investigation dragged on… Urbénin and Kuzma were confined in the detention house located in the village where my apartment was. Poor Pyotr Egorych was deeply disheartened; he had become haggard, his hair had turned gray, and he had fallen into a religious mood; twice he sent for me, asking for a copy of the penal code; apparently, he was interested in the extent of the impending punishment.

“What will happen to my children?” he asked me during one of the interrogations. “If I were alone, your mistake would not cause me grief, but I need to live… to live for my children! They will perish without me, and I… am unable to part with them! What are you doing to me?!”

When the guards began to address him informally (“ty”) and when he had to walk twice from my village to the city and back under guard, in front of people he knew, he fell into despair and became nervous.

“These are not lawyers!” he shouted throughout the detention house, “these are cruel, heartless boys who spare neither people nor truth! I know why I’m sitting here, I know! By shifting the blame onto me, they want to conceal the real culprit! The count killed, and if not the count, then his mercenary!”

When he learned of Kuzma’s detention, he was initially very happy.

“So the mercenary has been found!” he told me, “he has been found!”

But soon, when he saw that he was not being released, and when he was informed of Kuzma’s testimony, he became saddened again.

“Now I am lost,” he said, “completely lost: to get out of detention, this crooked devil, Kuzma, will sooner or later name me, will say that I wiped my hands on his coat tails. But they saw that my hands were not wiped!”

Sooner or later, our doubts had to be resolved.

At the end of November of the same year, when snowflakes swirled outside my windows, and the lake looked like an endless white desert, Kuzma wished to see me: he sent the guard to tell me that he had “made up his mind.” I ordered him to be brought to me.

“I am very glad that you have finally made up your mind,” I greeted him, “it’s time to stop hiding things and leading us by the nose like little children. So, what have you decided?”

Kuzma did not answer; he stood in the middle of my room and silently, without blinking, looked at me… Fear shone in his eyes; and he himself had the appearance of a very frightened person: he was pale and trembling, cold sweat streamed down his face.

“Well, tell me, what have you decided?” I repeated.

“Something so strange that you couldn’t invent anything stranger…” he uttered. “Yesterday I remembered what kind of tie that gentleman had, and last night I thought about it and remembered the face itself.”

“So who was it?”

Kuzma smiled painfully and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“It’s scary to say, Your Honor, please allow me not to say: it’s so strangely wonderful, I think it was a dream or a hallucination…”

“But who appeared to you?”

“No, please allow me not to say: if I say, you will condemn me… Allow me to think and tell you tomorrow… I’m afraid.”

“Bah!” I was angry. “Why did you bother me if you don’t want to talk? Why did you come here?”

“I thought I would say, but now I’m scared. No, Your Honor, let me go… I’ll tell you tomorrow… If I tell you, you’ll be so angry that I’ll get worse than Siberia – you’ll condemn me…”

I got angry and ordered Kuzma to be taken away (A fine investigator! Instead of continuing the interrogation and eliciting useful testimony, he got angry  —  an occupation not part of an official’s duties. However, I hardly believe any of this… If Mr. Kamyshev cared little for his duties, then simple human curiosity should have compelled him to continue the interrogation.  —  A. Ch.) That same evening, so as not to waste time and put an end once and for all to the tiresome “murder case,” I went to the detention house and deceived Urbénin, telling him that Kuzma had named him as the killer.

“I expected this…” Urbénin said, waving his hand, “it doesn’t matter to me…”

Solitary confinement had greatly affected Urbénin’s bear-like health: he had turned yellow and lost almost half his weight. I promised him to order the guards to let him walk in the corridor during the day and even at night.

“There’s no need to fear that you will leave,” I said.

Urbénin thanked me and, after I left, was already walking in the corridor: his door was no longer locked.

Leaving him, I knocked on the door behind which Kuzma was sitting.

“Well, have you decided?” I asked.

“No, sir…” a weak voice was heard, “let the prosecutor come, I’ll tell him, but I won’t tell you.”

“As you wish…”

The next morning, everything was resolved.

The guard Yegor ran to me and reported that one-eyed Kuzma had been found dead in his bed. I went to the detention cell and confirmed it… The healthy, tall peasant, who just yesterday was full of life and inventing various stories for his release, was motionless and cold as a stone… I will not describe my horror and that of the guards: it is understandable to the reader. To me, Kuzma was important as an accused or a witness; to the guards, he was a prisoner, for whose death or escape they would be severely punished… Our horror was all the greater because the autopsy confirmed a violent death… Kuzma had died of strangulation… Convinced that he had been strangled, I began to look for the culprit and did not look for long… He was close by…

I went to Urbénin’s cell and, unable to control myself, forgetting that I was an investigator, called him a murderer in the sharpest and harshest terms.

“Wasn’t your unfortunate wife’s death enough for you, scoundrel,” I said, “you needed the death of a man who exposed you! And after this, you will continue your dirty, thieving comedy!”

Urbénin turned terribly pale and swayed…

“You’re lying!” he cried, striking his chest with his fist.

“I am not lying! You shed crocodile tears over our evidence, mocked them… There were moments when I wanted to believe you more than the evidence… oh, you’re a good actor!… But now I won’t believe you, even if blood flows from your eyes instead of these actor’s, false tears! Tell me, did you kill Kuzma?”

“You are either drunk, or you are mocking me! Sergei Petrovich, every patience and humility has its limits! I cannot bear this!”

And Urbénin, his eyes flashing, pounded his fist on the table.

“Yesterday I had the indiscretion of giving you freedom,” I continued, “I allowed you what other prisoners are not allowed: to walk in the corridor. And now, as if in gratitude, you go to the door of that unfortunate Kuzma at night and strangle a sleeping man! Know that you have ruined not only Kuzma: because of you, the guards will be in trouble.”

“What have I done, my God?” Urbénin said, clutching his head.

“You want to know the proof? Here it is… your door, by my order, was unlocked… the foolish servants unlocked the door and forgot to hide the lock… all cells are locked with the same locks… You took your key at night and, going into the corridor, unlocked your neighbor’s door with it… After strangling him, you locked the door and inserted the key into your own lock.”

“Why would I strangle him? Why?”

“Because he named you… Had I not told you this news yesterday, he would have remained alive… It’s sinful and shameful, Pyotr Egorych!”

“Sergei Petrovich, young man!” the murderer suddenly spoke in a tender, soft voice, grabbing my hand. “You are an honest and decent man… Do not ruin and stain yourself with unjust suspicions and rash accusations! You cannot understand how cruelly and painfully you have offended me by burdening my innocent soul with a new accusation… I am a martyr, Sergei Petrovich! Be afraid to offend a martyr! There will come a time when you will have to apologize to me, and that time will come soon… They won’t really accuse me! But this apology will not satisfy you… Instead of attacking me and insulting me so terribly, you would do better, as a human being — I don’t say, as a friend: you have already abandoned our good relations — you would do better to question me… As a witness and your assistant, I would be more useful to justice than in the role of the accused. Take this new accusation, for example… I could tell you many things: I didn’t sleep at night and heard everything…”

“What did you hear?”

“At night, around two o’clock… it was dark… I hear someone quietly walking in the corridor and touching my door… walked and walked, and then opened my door and entered.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know: it was dark — I didn’t see… He stood in my cell for a minute and left… and exactly as you say, he took the key from my door and unlocked the neighbor’s cell. About two minutes later I heard gasping, and then a struggle. I thought it was the guard walking around and struggling, and I mistook the gasping for snoring, otherwise I would have raised an alarm.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “There’s no one here to kill Kuzma but you. The duty guards were asleep. The wife of one of them, who didn’t sleep all night, testified that all three guards slept like logs during the night and didn’t leave their beds for a minute; the poor fellows didn’t know that such beasts could exist in this pitiful prison. They have served here for more than twenty years, and in all that time they haven’t had a single escape, let alone such an abomination as murder. Now their lives, thanks to you, are turned upside down; and I will also suffer for not sending you to the prison castle and giving you the freedom to walk in the corridors here. Thank you!”

This was my last conversation with Urbénin. I never spoke with him again, except for the two or three questions he asked me as a witness while sitting in the dock…

My novel is titled “criminal,” and now that “the case of Olga Urbénina’s murder” has been complicated by a new murder, little understood and in many respects mysterious, the reader is entitled to expect the novel to enter its most interesting and lively phase. The discovery of the criminal and the motives of the crime constitutes a wide field for the display of wit and mental flexibility. Here, ill will and cunning wage war with knowledge, a war interesting in all its manifestations…

I waged war, and the reader has the right to expect from me a description of the means that gave me victory, and he is probably waiting for the investigative subtleties with which Gaboriau’s and our Shklyarevsky’s novels shine so brightly; and I am ready to justify the reader’s expectations, but… one of the main characters leaves the battlefield without waiting for the end of the battle — he is not made a participant in the victory; everything that he had done previously is in vain — and he joins the crowd of spectators. This character is your humble servant. The day after the described conversation with Urbénin, I received an invitation, or rather, an order, to resign. The gossip and conversations of our district gossips did their job… My dismissal was also greatly aided by the murder in the detention house, the testimonies taken by the assistant prosecutor secretly from me from the servants, and, if the reader remembers, the blow I inflicted on a peasant’s head with an oar during one of the past night’s binges. The peasant opened a case. There was a major reshuffle. In just two days, I had to hand over the murder case to the investigator for particularly important cases.

Thanks to the rumors and newspaper reports, the entire prosecutor’s office was stirred up. The prosecutor visited the count’s estate every other day and took part in the interrogations. The protocols of our doctors were sent to the medical board and further. There was even talk of exhuming the bodies and a new examination, which, by the way, would have led to nothing.

Urbénin was dragged to the provincial city twice to assess his mental faculties, and both times he was found to be normal. I began to figure as a witness (A role, of course, more suitable for Mr. Kamyshev than that of an investigator: in the Urbénin case, he could not have been an investigator.  —  A. Ch.) The new investigators became so engrossed that even my Polycarp became a witness.

A year after my resignation, when I was living in Moscow, I received a summons calling me to the hearing of the Urbénin case. I rejoiced at the opportunity to see again the places to which habit drew me, and I went. The count, who lived in St. Petersburg, did not go and sent a medical certificate instead.

The case was heard in our district town, in a department of the district court. Polugradov, the same one who brushed his teeth with red powder four times a day, prosecuted; a certain Smirnyaev, a tall, thin blond with a sentimental face and long, smooth hair, defended. The jurors consisted entirely of townspeople and peasants; only four of them were literate, while the others, when Urbénin’s letters to his wife were given to them for examination, sweated and were embarrassed. The foreman was the shopkeeper Ivan Demyanych, the same one who gave his name to my deceased parrot.

Upon entering the courtroom, I did not recognize Urbénin: he had become completely gray and had aged by about twenty years. I expected to read on his face indifference to his fate and apathy, but my expectations were mistaken — Urbénin took a passionate interest in the trial: he challenged three jurors, gave lengthy explanations, and cross-examined witnesses; he absolutely denied his guilt and questioned every witness who did not speak in his favor for a very long time.

Witness Pshekhotsky testified in court that I had lived with the deceased Olga.

“That’s a lie!” Urbénin shouted, “He’s a liar! I don’t believe my wife, but I believe him!”

When I was giving testimony, the defense attorney asked me about my relationship with Olga and confronted me with Pshekhotsky’s testimony, who had once applauded me. To tell the truth would mean to testify in favor of the defendant: the more depraved the wife, the more lenient the jury would be towards an Othello-husband – I understood this… On the other hand, my truth would offend Urbénin… hearing it, he would feel an incurable pain… I deemed it better to lie.

“No!” I said.

The prosecutor, in his speech, vividly describing Olga’s murder, drew particular attention to the killer’s savagery, his malice… “An old, worn-out voluptuary saw a girl, beautiful and young. Knowing the full horror of her situation in her mad father’s house, he lured her to him with a piece of bread, a home, and colorful rooms… She agreed: a wealthy old husband is still more bearable than a mad father and poverty. But she is young, and youth, gentlemen of the jury, has its inalienable rights… A girl raised on novels and amidst nature, sooner or later had to fall in love…” and so on in the same vein. It ended with “he, who gave her nothing but his old age and colorful rags, seeing his prey slipping away, falls into the rage of an animal whose nose has been touched with a hot iron. He loved animalistically and must hate animalistically,” and so on.

Accusing Urbénin of Kuzma’s murder, Polugradov pointed to the cunning, well-thought-out and weighed thieving methods that accompanied the murder of “a sleeping man who had the indiscretion to testify against him the day before. And that Kuzma wanted to tell the investigator precisely about him, I believe you have no doubt about that.”

The defense attorney Smirnyaev did not deny Urbénin’s guilt; he only asked for recognition that Urbénin acted under the influence of affect, and for leniency. Describing how painful the feeling of jealousy can be, he brought Shakespeare’s Othello as a witness. He viewed this “all-human type” comprehensively, quoting various critics, and delved into such thickets that the chairman had to stop him with the remark that “knowledge of foreign literature is not obligatory for jurors.”

Taking advantage of the last word, Urbénin called God to witness that he was guilty of neither deed nor thought.

“Personally, I don’t care where I am: whether in this district, where everything reminds me of my undeserved shame and my wife, or at penal servitude, but the fate of my children troubles me.”

And, turning to the public, Urbénin cried and asked for his children to be taken in.

“Take them. The count, of course, will not miss the opportunity to show off his generosity, but I have already warned the children: they will not take a single crumb from him.”

Noticing me among the public, he looked at me with imploring eyes and said:

“Protect my children from the count’s benevolence.”

He had seemingly forgotten about the impending verdict and surrendered entirely to the thought of his children. He spoke of them until he was stopped by the chairman.

The jurors deliberated briefly. Urbénin was found unequivocally guilty and received no leniency on any count.

He was sentenced to deprivation of all civil rights and exile to penal servitude for 15 years.

Such a high price he paid for his meeting on a May morning with the poetic “girl in red”…

More than eight years have passed since the events described. Some participants in the drama have died and are now decayed, others are serving punishment for their sin, still others drag out their lives, struggling with everyday boredom and awaiting death from day to day.

Much has changed in eight years… Count Karneev, who never ceased to hold the most sincere friendship for me, has now completely succumbed to alcoholism. His estate, which was the scene of the drama, has passed from him into the hands of his wife and Pshekhotsky. He is now poor and lives at my expense. Sometimes, in the evening, lying on my sofa in my room, he loves to recall the past.

“It would be good to listen to the Gypsies now,” he mutters, “go, Seryozha, for some cognac!”

I too have changed. My strength is gradually leaving me, and I feel health and youth draining from my body. There is no longer that physical strength, no agility, no endurance that I once boasted of, staying awake for several nights in a row and drinking quantities that I can barely lift now.

Wrinkles appear one after another on my face, my hair thins, my voice grows coarse and weak… Life has passed…

I remember the past as if it were yesterday. As in a fog, I see places and faces of people. I have no strength to be impartial towards them; I love and hate them with the same intensity as before, and not a day passes without me, seized by a feeling of indignation or hatred, clutching my head. The count is still repulsive to me, Olga disgusting, Kalinin ridiculous in his dull conceit. I consider evil to be evil, sin to be sin.

But there are often moments when, gazing at the portrait on my table, I feel an irresistible desire to walk with the “girl in red” through the forest under the rustle of tall pines and press her to my chest, despite everything. In these moments, I forgive both lies and falling into a dirty abyss, ready to forgive everything so that even a fraction of the past might be repeated… Wearied by urban boredom, I would like to hear again the roar of the lake giant and rush along its shore on my Zorka… I would forgive and forget everything to walk again on the Tyenevo road and meet the gardener Franz with his vodka barrel and jockey cap… There are moments when I am even ready to shake a hand stained with blood and talk with the good-natured Pyotr Egorych about religion, harvest, public education… I would like to see “Shchur,” and his Nadezhka…

Life is wild, unruly, and restless, like the lake on an August night… Many victims have vanished forever beneath its dark waves… A heavy sediment lies at the bottom…

But why do I love it at certain moments? Why do I forgive it and rush towards it with my soul, like a tender son, like a bird released from its cage?…

The life I see now through the window of my room reminds me of a gray circle: gray color and no shades, no bright glimpses…

But, closing my eyes and remembering the past, I see a rainbow, such as the solar spectrum gives… Yes, it was turbulent there, but it was brighter there…

1. Zinoviev.

End

At the bottom of the manuscript it was written: My dearest Sir, Mr. Editor! I ask that the proposed novel (or novella, as you wish) be published, if possible, without abridgements, cuts, or insertions. However, changes can be made by agreement with the author. In case of unsuitability, please preserve the manuscript for return. My (temporary) residence is in Moscow, on Tverskaya Street, in the “England” rooms. Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev. P. S. Remuneration — at the discretion of the editorial board. Year and date.

Now, having introduced the reader to Kamyshev’s novel, I continue the interrupted conversation with him. First of all, I must warn you that the promise I gave the reader at the beginning of the novella has not been kept: Kamyshev’s novel has not been published without omissions, not in toto, as I promised, but significantly abridged. The fact is that “Drama on the Hunt” could not be printed in the newspaper mentioned in the first chapter of this novella: the newspaper ceased to exist when the manuscript went to print… The present editorial board, which sheltered Kamyshev’s novel, found it impossible to print it without cuts. Every time, throughout the printing, they sent me proofs of individual chapters with the request to “change.” I, however, did not want to take on the sin of altering someone else’s work, and found it better and more useful to omit entirely rather than change an inconvenient passage. By agreement with me, the editorial board omitted many passages that struck them with their cynicism, verbosity, and negligence in literary refinement. These omissions and cuts required caution and time — the reason why many chapters were delayed. Among other things, we omitted two descriptions of nocturnal orgies. One orgy took place in the count’s house, the other on the lake. The description of Polycarp’s library and his original manner of reading was omitted: this passage was found to be too stretched and exaggerated.

Most of all, I championed and the editorial board disliked most of all the chapter describing the desperate card game that raged among the count’s servants. The most passionate players were the gardener Franz and old woman Sychikha; they mainly played “stukolka” and “three leaves.” During the investigation, Kamyshev, passing by one of the gazebos and looking into it, saw a frantic game: Sychikha, Franz, and… Pshekhotsky were playing. They were playing “stukolka,” blind, with a stake of 90 kopecks; the stake reached 30 rubles. Kamyshev sat down with the players and “cleaned them out” like partridges. The outplayed Franz, wanting to continue the game, went to the lake where he hid his money. Kamyshev tracked his path and, noticing where he hid his money, stole from the gardener, leaving him not a single kopeck. He gave the money to the fisherman Mikhei. This strange philanthropy perfectly characterizes the impulsive investigator, but it is described so carelessly and the partners’ conversations are so riddled with gems of profanity that the editorial board did not even agree to changes.

Several descriptions of Olga’s meetings with Kamyshev were omitted; one explanation of his with Nadya Kalinina, etc., was skipped. But I think that what has been published is enough to characterize my hero. Sapienti sat (wise enough, Latin)…

Exactly three months later, the editorial caretaker Andrei reported to me the arrival of “the gentleman with the cockade.”

“Ask him in!” I said.

Kamyshev entered, as rosy-cheeked, healthy, and handsome as three months ago. His steps were still silent… He placed his hat on the window so carefully that one might think he was placing some heavy object… In his blue eyes, something childlike, infinitely good-natured, still shone…

“I’m bothering you again!” he began, smiling and carefully sitting down. “Forgive me, for God’s sake! Well? What verdict has been passed on my manuscript?”

“Guilty, but deserving of clemency,” I said.

Kamyshev laughed and blew his nose into a fragrant handkerchief.

“So, exile to the fireplace fire?” he asked.

“No, why so strict? It doesn’t deserve punitive measures, we will apply correctional ones.”

“Does it need correcting?”

“Yes, some things… by mutual agreement…”

We were silent for a quarter of a minute. My heart was pounding terribly, and my temples throbbed, but showing that I was agitated was not part of my plan.

“By mutual agreement,” I repeated. “Last time you told me that the plot of your novella was based on a true event.”

“Yes, and now I’m ready to repeat the same thing. If you’ve read my novel, then… I have the honor to introduce myself: Zinovyev.”

“So, it was you who was Olga Nikolaevna’s best man?..”

“Both best man and family friend. Don’t you agree I’m likable in this manuscript?” Kamyshev laughed, stroking his knee and blushing, “Good-looking? I should be beaten, but there’s no one to do it.”

“Well then… I like your novella: it’s better and more interesting than many crime novels… Only we, by mutual agreement, will have to make some very significant changes to it…”

“That’s possible. For example, what do you find necessary to change?”

“The very habitus of the novel, its physiognomy. In it, as a crime novel, everything is there: crime, evidence, investigation, even fifteen years of hard labor for dessert, but the most essential thing is missing.”

“What exactly?”

“There’s no real culprit…”

Kamyshev’s eyes widened, and he sat up.

“Frankly, I don’t understand you,” he said after a moment of silence. “If you don’t consider the person who stabbed and strangled to be the real culprit, then… I don’t know whom to consider. Of course, a criminal is a product of society, and society is guilty, but… if one delves into higher considerations, then one should stop writing novels and take up essays.”

“Oh, what higher considerations are there here! It wasn’t Urbénin who killed!”

“How so?” Kamyshev asked, moving closer to me.

“Not Urbénin!”

“Perhaps. Humanum est errare (to err is human, Latin) — and investigators are imperfect: judicial errors are common under the moon. You find that we made a mistake?”

“No, you didn’t make a mistake, but wished to make one.”

“Excuse me, I don’t understand you again,” Kamyshev chuckled, “if you find that the investigation led to an error, and even, as I try to understand you, to a deliberate error, then it would be interesting to know your view. In your opinion, who killed?”

“You!!”

Kamyshev looked at me with surprise, almost with horror, blushed, and stepped back. Then he turned away, went to the window, and laughed.

“What a cranberry!” he mumbled, breathing on the window and nervously drawing a monogram on it.

I looked at his drawing hand and, it seemed, recognized in it that very iron, muscular hand which alone could, in one go, strangle the sleeping Kuzma, tear apart Olga’s fragile body. The thought that I saw a murderer before me filled my soul with an unusual feeling of horror and fear… not for myself —  no!  —  but for him, for this handsome and graceful giant… for humanity in general…

“You killed!” I repeated.

“If you’re not joking, then congratulations on the discovery,” Kamyshev laughed, still not looking at me. “However, judging by the tremor in your voice and your paleness, it’s hard to assume you’re joking. You’re so nervous!”

Kamyshev turned his flushed face to me and, trying to smile, continued:

“It’s curious where such a thought could have come to you! Did I write something like that in my novel – that’s curious, by God… Please tell me! It’s worth experiencing this feeling once in a lifetime, when people look at you as if you’re a murderer.”

“You are the murderer,” I said, “and you can’t even hide it: you gave yourself away in the novel, and even now you’re acting poorly.”

“That’s quite interesting — it would be fascinating to hear, honestly.”

“If it’s fascinating, then listen.”

I jumped up and, agitated, paced the room. Kamyshev peeked behind the door and closed it more tightly. This caution betrayed him.

“What are you afraid of?” I asked.

Kamyshev coughed awkwardly and waved his hand.

“I’m not afraid of anything, it’s just… I just looked behind the door. And you needed that too? Well, tell me.”

“May I interrogate you?”

“As much as you like.”

“I warn you, I am not an investigator and not skilled at interrogation; do not expect order and system, and therefore, please do not distract or confuse me. First of all, tell me, where did you disappear to after you left the forest edge where you were reveling after the hunt?”

“The novella says: I went home.”

“In the novella, the description of your path is carefully crossed out. Did you go through that forest?”

“Yes.”

“And could you, therefore, have met Olga there?”

“Yes, I could,” Kamyshev chuckled.

“And you met her.”

“No, I didn’t meet her.”

“During the investigation, you forgot to interrogate one very important witness, namely yourself… Did you hear the victim’s scream?”

“No… Well, my dear fellow, you’re not a master of interrogation at all…”

This familiar “my dear fellow” offended me: it didn’t quite fit with the apologies and embarrassment with which our conversation began. Soon I noticed that Kamyshev looked at me condescendingly, from above, and almost admired my inability to untangle myself from the mass of questions that agitated me…

“Let’s assume you didn’t meet Olga in the forest,” I continued, “though, by the way, it was harder for Urbénin to meet Olga than for you, since Urbénin didn’t know she was in the forest, and therefore wasn’t looking for her, while you, being drunk and enraged, couldn’t help but look for her. You surely looked for her — otherwise why would you have gone home through the forest and not by the road… But let’s assume you didn’t see her… How do you explain your gloomy, almost furious mood on the evening of that ill-fated day? What prompted you to kill the parrot that screamed about a husband who killed his wife? It seems to me that it reminded you of your villainy… That night you were called to the count’s house, and instead of immediately getting to work, you delayed until the police arrived for almost a whole day and, probably, without even realizing it yourself… Only those investigators who know the criminal delay like that… You knew him… Furthermore — Olga didn’t name the killer because he was dear to her… If her husband was the killer, she would have named him. If she was able to inform on him to her lover, the count, it would have cost her nothing to accuse him of murder: she didn’t love him, and he wasn’t dear to her… She loved you, and you were dear to her… she spared you… Allow me also to ask why you delayed asking her a direct question when she regained consciousness for a moment? Why did you ask her completely irrelevant questions? Allow me to think that you did all this to stall for time, so she wouldn’t name you. Olga then dies… In your novel, you don’t say a word about the impressions her death made on you… Here I see caution: you don’t forget to write about the glasses of wine you drink, but such an important event as the death of the ‘girl in red’ passes without a trace in the novel… Why?”

“Continue, continue…”

“You conducted the investigation disgracefully… It’s hard to believe that you, an intelligent and very cunning person, didn’t do this on purpose. Your entire investigation resembles a letter intentionally written with grammatical errors — the exaggeration gives you away… Why didn’t you inspect the crime scene? Not because you forgot about it or considered it unimportant, but because you were waiting for the rain to wash away your tracks. You write little about the interrogation of the servants. Therefore, Kuzma was not interrogated by you until he was caught washing the caftan… You evidently had no need to involve him in the case. Why didn’t you interrogate the guests who were carousing with you at the edge of the forest? They saw the bloodied Urbénin and heard Olga’s scream — they should have been interrogated. But you didn’t do it because at least one of them might have remembered during the interrogation that you had gone into the forest and disappeared shortly before the murder. Subsequently, they were probably interrogated, but they had already forgotten this circumstance…”

“Clever!” Kamyshev murmured, rubbing his hands, “continue, continue!”

“Is what I’ve said not enough for you? To conclusively prove that Olga was killed by you, I should also remind you that you were her lover, a lover who was exchanged for a man you despised! A husband can kill out of jealousy, a lover, I suppose, too… Let’s move on to Kuzma… Judging by the last interrogation, which took place on the eve of his death, he had you in mind; you wiped your hands on his caftan, and you called him scum… If it wasn’t you, then why did you interrupt the interrogation at the most interesting point? Why didn’t you ask about the color of the murderer’s tie when Kuzma told you he remembered what color it was? Why did you give Urbénin his freedom precisely when Kuzma had already remembered the killer’s name? Why not earlier or later? Obviously, you needed to pin the blame on someone, you needed someone who would be walking around the corridor at night… So, you killed Kuzma, fearing that he would name you.”

“Enough!” Kamyshev said, laughing, “That’s enough! You’ve gotten so agitated and pale that you’re about to faint. Don’t continue. Indeed, you’re right: I killed.”

Silence fell. I walked from corner to corner. Kamyshev did the same.

“I killed,” Kamyshev continued, “you caught the secret by the tail, and that’s your luck. Few will succeed in this: more than half of your readers will curse old Urbénin and marvel at my investigative mind and reason.”

A colleague entered my office and interrupted our conversation. Noticing that I was busy and agitated, this colleague lingered around my desk, looked curiously at Kamyshev, and then left. After his departure, Kamyshev went to the window and began to breathe on the glass.

“Eight years have passed since then,” he began after some silence, “and for eight years I carried a secret within me. But a secret and living blood are incompatible in an organism; one cannot know with impunity what the rest of humanity does not know. For all eight years I felt like a martyr. Not conscience tormented me, no! Conscience  —  that’s a given… and I don’t pay attention to it: it’s perfectly drowned out by reasoning about its elasticity. When reason doesn’t work, I drown it with wine and women. With women I still have the same success  —  that’s à propos (by the way, French). What tormented me was something else: all the time it seemed strange to me that people looked at me as an ordinary person; not a single living soul looked at me inquisitively even once in all eight years; it seemed strange to me that I didn’t need to hide; I harbor a terrible secret, and suddenly I walk the streets, attend dinners, flirt with women! For a criminal, such a situation is unnatural and tormenting. I wouldn’t have been tormented if I had to hide and be secretive. Psychosis, my dear fellow! In the end, some kind of defiance came over me… I suddenly wanted to pour myself out: to spit on everyone’s heads, to blurt out my secret to everyone… to do something… special… And I wrote this novella  —  an act by which only a simpleton would have difficulty recognizing in me a person with a secret… Every page is a clue… Isn’t that right? You probably understood right away… When I wrote, I took into account the level of the average reader…”

We were interrupted again. Andrei entered and brought two glasses of tea on a tray… I quickly sent him away…

“And now it feels lighter, as if,” Kamyshev chuckled, “you look at me now as an extraordinary person, as a person with a secret, and I feel myself in a natural position… But… it’s already three o’clock, and a cab is waiting for me…”

“Wait, put down your hat… You’ve told me what led you to authorship, now tell me: how did you kill?”

“Do you wish to know this in addition to what you’ve read? As you wish… I killed under the influence of affect. Nowadays, people smoke and drink tea under the influence of affect. You, in your agitation, took my glass instead of yours and are smoking more often than usual… Life is a continuous affect… or so it seems to me… When I went into the forest, I was far from the thought of murder; I went there with only one purpose: to find Olga and continue to sting her… When I’m drunk, I always feel the need to sting… I met her two hundred paces from the edge of the forest… She was standing under a tree and thoughtfully looking at the sky… I called out to her… Seeing me, she smiled and stretched out her hands to me…”

“Don’t scold me, I’m unhappy!” she said.

That evening, she was so beautiful that I, drunk, forgot everything in the world and held her in my embrace… She began to swear to me that she had never loved anyone but me… and this was true: she loved me… And, in the midst of her vows, she suddenly thought to say a disgusting phrase: “How unhappy I am! If I hadn’t married Urbénin, I could have married the count now!” This phrase was a bucket of cold water for me… All the pent-up anger inside me boiled over… I was seized by a feeling of disgust, revulsion… I grabbed the small, vile creature by the shoulder and threw her to the ground, like throwing a ball. My malice reached its peak… Well… and I finished her off… I just finished her off… The story with Kuzma is clear to you…

I looked at Kamyshev. I saw neither remorse nor regret on his face. “I just finished her off” was said as casually as “I just smoked a cigarette.” In turn, a feeling of malice and disgust seized me too… I turned away.

“And Urbénin is there, at hard labor?” I asked softly.

“Yes… They say he died on the way, but that’s still unknown… Why?”

“Why… An innocent man is suffering, and you ask: ‘Why?'”

“What should I do? Go and confess?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, that’s debatable! I wouldn’t mind replacing Urbénin, but I won’t surrender without a fight… Let them take me if they want, but I won’t go to them myself. Why didn’t they take me when I was in their hands? At Olga’s funeral, I sobbed so much and had such hysterics that even blind people could have seen the truth… It’s not my fault that they are… foolish.”

“I find you repulsive,” I said.

“That’s natural… And I find myself repulsive…”

Silence fell… I opened the ledger and mechanically began reading numbers… Kamyshev picked up his hat.

“I see you’re suffocated by my presence,” he said, “by the way: would you like to see Count Karneev? There he is, sitting in the cab!”

I went to the window and looked out… In the cab, with his back to us, sat a small, hunched figure in a worn hat and with a faded collar. It was difficult to recognize a participant in the drama!

“I found out that Urbénin’s son lives here in Moscow, in Andreev’s rooms,” Kamyshev said. “I want to arrange for the count to accept charity from him… Let at least one be punished! But, however, adieu!”

Kamyshev nodded and quickly left. I sat down at the table and fell into bitter thoughts.

I felt stifled.