Once, at supper, the engineer and I ate a whole lobster together. Going home then, I remembered that at supper the engineer had twice addressed me as ‘‘my most gentle,’’ and I reasoned that I was being petted in this house like a big, unhappy dog that has lost its master, that I was an amusement, and when they tired of me, they would chase me away like a dog. I felt ashamed and pained, pained to the point of tears, as if I had been insulted, and, looking at the heavens, I vowed to put an end to all this.
The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikovs’. Late in the evening, when it was quite dark and pouring rain, I walked down Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, looking at the windows. The Azhogins were already asleep, and only in one of the end windows was there a light; it was the old Azhogin woman in her bedroom, doing embroidery to the light of three candles, imagining she was fighting prejudice. Our house was dark, and in the house across the street, at the Dolzhikovs’, there was light in the windows, but nothing could be seen through the flowers and curtains. I kept walking up and down the street; the cold March rain poured down on me. I heard my father come back from the club; he knocked at the gate, a minute later there was light in the window, and I saw my sister walking hurriedly with a lamp, straightening her thick hair with one hand as she went. Then father paced up and down the drawing room and talked about something, rubbing his hands, and my sister sat motionless in an armchair, thinking about something, not listening to him.
But then they left, the light went out... I turned to look at the engineer’s house—there, too, it was dark now. In the darkness, under the rain, I felt myself hopelessly lonely, abandoned to my fate, felt that, compared with this solitude of mine, compared with my suffering, the present and that which still lay ahead of me in life, all my deeds, desires, and all that I had thought and said till now, were terribly petty. Alas, the deeds and thoughts of living beings are far less significant than their sorrows! And without giving myself a clear account of what I was doing, I pulled with all my might on the doorbell at the Dolzhikovs’ gate, tore it off, and ran down the street like a little boy, feeling afraid and thinking that now they were sure to come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to catch my breath, the only thing to be heard was the sound of the rain and a night watchman rapping on an iron bar somewhere far away.
For a whole week, I didn’t go to the Dolzhikovs’. The tricot suit got sold. There was no painting work, and again I starved, earning ten or twenty kopecks a day, wherever I could, by heavy, unpleasant work. Floundering knee-deep in cold mud, straining my chest, I wanted to stifle my memories, as if taking revenge on myself for all those cheeses and potted meats I had been treated to at the engineer’s; but all the same, as soon as I went to bed, hungry and wet, my sinful imagination began at once to paint wonderful, seductive pictures, and I confessed to myself in amazement that I was in love, passionately in love, and I would fall asleep soundly and healthily, feeling that this life of hard labor only made my body stronger and younger.
On one of those evenings, it snowed unseasonably, and the wind blew from the north as if winter was coming again. On returning from work that evening, I found Marya Viktorovna in my room. She was sitting in her fur coat, holding both hands in her muff.
‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she asked, raising her intelligent, clear eyes, while I was greatly embarrassed from joy and stood at attention before her, as before my father when he was about to beat me; she looked into my face, and I could see from her eyes that she understood why I was embarrassed.
‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she repeated. ‘‘If you don’t want to come, here, I’ve come myself.’’
She stood up and came close to me.
‘‘Don’t abandon me,’’ she said, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘‘I’m alone, completely alone!’’
She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:
‘‘Alone! It’s hard for me to live, very hard, and I have no one in the whole world except you. Don’t abandon me!’’
Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears, she smiled; we were silent for a while, then I embraced and kissed her, getting a bloody scratch on my cheek as I did so from the pin that held her hat.
And we began talking as if we had been close to each other for a long, long time...
X
SOME TWO DAYS later, she sent me to Dubechnya, and I was unspeakably glad of it. On my way to the station, and then sitting on the train, I laughed for no reason, and people looked at me as if I was drunk. It was snowing, and there were morning frosts, but the roads had already darkened, and rooks, crowing, flitted over them.
At first I planned to set up quarters for the two of us, Masha and me, in the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov’s wing, but it turned out that it had long been inhabited by pigeons and ducks, and it would be impossible to clean it out without destroying a multitude of nests. I had, willy-nilly, to go to the inhospitable rooms of the big house with jalousies. The muzhiks called this house a mansion; it had more than twenty rooms and no furniture except the piano and a child’s chair that lay in the attic, and if Masha had brought all her furniture from town, even then we would not have managed to get rid of this impression of gloomy emptiness and coldness. I chose three smaller rooms with windows on the garden, and cleaned them from early morning till night, putting in new window glass, hanging wallpaper, filling the cracks and holes in the floor. It was easy, pleasant work. Time and again I ran to the river to see if the ice was breaking up; I kept imagining that the starlings had flown back. And at night, thinking about Masha, I listened, with an inexpressibly sweet feeling, with a thrilling joy, to the sound of the rats and the wind howling and knocking above the ceiling; it seemed as though some old household spirit was coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; at the end of March, a lot more poured down, but it melted quickly, as if by magic, the spring waters flowed stormily, and by the beginning of April the starlings were already making their racket, and yellow butterflies flew about the garden. The weather was wonderful. Every day towards evening, I headed for town to meet Masha, and what a pleasure it was to go barefoot on the drying, still-soft road! Halfway there, I would sit down and look at the town, not venturing to go nearer. The sight of it perplexed me. I kept thinking: how would my acquaintances treat me when they learned of my love? What would my father say? Especially perplexing was the thought that my life had become more complicated, and I had totally lost the ability to control it, and, like a big balloon, it was carrying me God knows where. I no longer thought of how to provide nourishment for myself, how to live, but thought—I truly can’t remember of what.
Masha would come in a carriage; I would get in with her, and we would go to Dubechnya together, merry, free. Or, after waiting till sunset, I would return home displeased, downcast, puzzling over why Masha hadn’t come, and by the gates of the estate or in the garden, a sweet phantom— she!—would meet me unexpectedly! It turned out that she had come by train and walked from the station. How festive it was! In a simple woolen dress, in a kerchief, with a modest parasol, but tightly laced, trim, in expensive imported shoes—this was a talented actress playing the little tradeswoman. We looked over our domain, deciding which room was whose, where we would have alleys, the kitchen garden, the apiary. We already had chickens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were ours. We already had oats, clover, timothy, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds ready for sowing, and we examined it all each time and had long discussions of what the harvest might be, and everything Masha said seemed to me remarkably intelligent and beautiful. This was the happiest time of my life.