Podgorin climbed the stairs to the platform and sat down. Just beyond the fence were a boundary ditch and bank and further off were the broad fields flooded in moonlight. Podgorin knew that there was a wood exactly opposite, about two miles from the estate, and he thought that he could distinguish a dark strip in the distance. Quails and corncrakes were calling. Now and then, from the direction of the wood, came the cry of a cuckoo which couldn’t sleep either.
He heard footsteps. Someone was coming across the garden towards the tower.
A dog barked.
‘Beetle!’ a woman’s voice softly called. ‘Come back, Beetle!’
He could hear someone entering the tower down below and a moment later a black dog – an old friend of Podgorin’s – appeared on the bank. It stopped, looked up towards where Podgorin was sitting and wagged its tail amicably. Soon afterwards a white figure rose from the black ditch like a ghost and stopped on the bank as well. It was Nadezhda.
‘Can you see something there?’ she asked the dog, glancing upwards.
She didn’t see Podgorin but probably sensed that he was near, since she was smiling and her pale, moonlit face was happy. The tower’s black shadow stretching over the earth, far into the fields, that motionless white figure with the blissfully smiling, pale face, the black dog and both their shadows – all this was just like a dream.
‘Someone is there,’ Nadezhda said softly.
She stood waiting for him to come down or to call her up to him, so that he could at last declare his love – then both would be happy on that calm, beautiful night. White, pale, slender, very lovely in the moonlight, she awaited his caresses. She was weary of perpetually dreaming of love and happiness and was unable to conceal her feelings any longer. Her whole figure, her radiant eyes, her fixed happy smile, betrayed her innermost thoughts. But he felt awkward, shrank back and didn’t make a sound, not knowing whether to speak, whether to make the habitual joke out of the situation or whether to remain silent. He felt annoyed and his only thought was that here, in a country garden on a moonlit night, close to a beautiful, loving, thoughtful girl, he felt the same apathy as on Little Bronny Street: evidently this type of romantic situation had lost its fascination, like that prosaic depravity. Of no consequence to him now were those meetings on moonlit nights, those white shapes with slim waists, those mysterious shadows, towers, country estates and characters such as Sergey Sergeich, and people like himself, Podgorin, with his icy indifference, his constant irritability, his inability to adapt to reality and take what it had to offer, his wearisome, obsessive craving for what did not and never could exist on earth. And now, as he sat in that tower, he would have preferred a good fireworks display, or some moonlight procession, or Varvara reciting Nekrasov’s The Railway again. He would rather another woman was standing there on the bank where Nadezhda was: this other woman would have told him something absolutely fascinating and new that had nothing to do with love or happiness. And if she did happen to speak of love, this would have been a summons to those new, lofty, rational aspects of existence on whose threshold we are perhaps already living and of which we sometimes seem to have premonitions.
‘There’s no one there,’ Nadezhda said.
She stood there for another minute or so, then she walked quietly towards the wood, her head bowed. The dog ran on ahead. Podgorin could see her white figure for quite a long time. ‘To think how it’s all turned out, though …’ he repeated to himself as he went back to the outhouse.
He had no idea what he could say to Sergey Sergeich or Tatyana the next day or the day after that, or how he would treat Nadezhda. And he felt embarrassed, frightened and bored in advance. How was he going to fill those three long days which he had promised to spend here? He remembered the conversation about second sight and Sergey Sergeich quoting the lines:
Before he had time to groan
A bear came and knocked him prone.
He remembered that tomorrow, to please Tatyana, he would have to smile at those well-fed, chubby little girls – and he decided to leave.
At half past five in the morning Sergey Sergeich appeared on the terrace of the main house in his Bokhara dressing-gown and tasselled fez. Not losing a moment, Podgorin went over to him to say goodbye.
‘I have to be in Moscow by ten,’ he said, looking away. ‘I’d completely forgotten I’m expected at the Notary Public’s office. Please excuse me. When the others are up please tell them that I apologize. I’m dreadfully sorry.’
In his hurry he didn’t hear Sergey Sergeich’s answer and he kept looking round at the windows of the big house, afraid that the ladies might wake up and stop him going. He was ashamed he felt so nervous. He sensed that this was his last visit to Kuzminki, that he would never come back. As he drove away he glanced back several times at the outhouse where once he had spent so many happy days. But deep down he felt coldly indifferent, not at all sad.
At home the first thing he saw on the table was the note he’d received the day before: ‘Dear Misha,’ he read. ‘You’ve completely forgotten us, please come and visit us soon.’ And for some reason he remembered Nadezhda whirling round in the dance, her dress billowing, revealing her legs in their flesh-coloured stockings …
Ten minutes later he was at his desk working – and he didn’t give Kuzminki another thought.
Ionych
I
When visitors to the county town of S— complained of the monotony and boredom of life there, the local people would reply, as if in self-defence, that the very opposite was the case, that life there was in fact extremely good, that the town had a library, a theatre, a club, that there was the occasional ball and – finally – that there were intelligent, interesting and agreeable families with whom to make friends. And they would single out the Turkins as the most cultivated and gifted family.
This family lived in its own house on the main street, next door to the Governor’s. Ivan Petrovich Turkin, a stout, handsome, dark-haired man with sideburns, would organize amateur theatricals for charity – and he himself played the parts of elderly generals, when he would cough most amusingly. He had a copious stock of funny stories, riddles and proverbs, was a great wag and humorist, and you could never tell from his expression whether he was serious or joking. His wife, Vera Iosifovna, a thin, attractive woman with pince-nez, wrote short stories and novels which she loved reading to her guests. Their young daughter Yekaterina Ivanovna played the piano. In short, each Turkin had some particular talent. The Turkins were convivial hosts and cheerfully displayed their talents to their guests with great warmth and lack of pretension. Their large stone house was spacious, and cool in summer. Half of its windows opened onto a shady old garden where nightingales sang in spring. When they had visitors the clatter of knives came from the kitchen and the yard would smell of fried onion – all of which invariably heralded a lavish and tasty supper.
And no sooner had Dr Dmitry Ionych Startsev been appointed local medical officer and taken up residence at Dyalizh, about six miles away, then he too was told that – as a man of culture – he simply must meet the Turkins. One winter’s day he was introduced to Ivan Petrovich in the street. They chatted about the weather, the theatre, cholera – and an invitation followed. One holiday in spring (it was Ascension Day), after seeing his patients, Startsev set off for town to relax a little and at the same time to do a spot of shopping. He went there on foot, without hurrying himself (as yet he had no carriage and pair), and all the way he kept humming: ‘’Ere I had drunk from life’s cup of tears.’