‘Sergey Petrovich, I beg you, please stop the Count from making any more remarks about this girl. He might go too far – from sheer habit! That girl’s a most worthy person, in the highest degree!’
This ‘most worthy person, in the highest degree’ was a girl of about nineteen, with beautiful fair hair, kind blue eyes and long curls. She was dressed in a bright red frock, halfway between a child’s and a young girl’s. Her little legs, as straight as needles in their red stockings, reposed in tiny, almost childish shoes. The whole time I admired her, those round shoulders kept shrinking coquettishly, as if they were cold and as if my gaze were biting them.
‘What a well-developed figure for a girl with such a young face!’ whispered the Count. Ever since his earliest days he had lost all capacity for respecting women and could only look upon them from the viewpoint of a depraved animal.
As for me, I well remember the fine feelings that began to glow within me. I was still a poet and in the presence of forests, a May evening and the first glimmerings of the evening star I could only view women with the eyes of a poet. I looked at the ‘girl in red’ with the same veneration with which I was accustomed to look at the forests, at the azure sky. At that time I still possessed a modicum of sentimentality, inherited from my German mother.
‘Who is she?’ asked the Count.
‘She’s the daughter of Skvortsov the forester, Your Excellency,’ replied Urbenin.
‘Is she the same Olenka whom the one-eyed peasant was talking about?’
‘Yes, he did mention her name,’ the manager replied, looking at me with large, beseeching eyes.
The girl in red let us go by without paying us the least attention, it seemed. Her eyes were looking somewhere to the side, but as someone who was an expert on women I felt that the pupils of her eyes were fixed on me.
‘Which one is the Count?’ I heard her whisper behind me.
‘The one with the long moustache,’ the schoolboy replied.
And we heard silvery laughter behind us. But it was the laughter of disenchantment. She had thought that I was the Count, owner of those vast forests and the wide lake – not that pigmy with the haggard face and long moustache.
I heard a deep sigh from Urbenin’s chest. That man of iron could barely move.
‘Tell your manager to go away,’ I whispered to the Count. ‘He’s either ill… or drunk.’
‘You don’t look very well, Pyotr Yegorych,’ the Count said, turning to Urbenin. ‘I don’t need you just now, so I won’t detain you.’
‘Don’t worry, Your Excellency. Thank you for your concern, but I’m not ill.’
I looked back. The red patch didn’t move and watched us as we left.
Poor little fair-haired girl! Did I imagine for one moment, on that serenest of May nights, that she would later become the heroine of my troubled novel?
And now, as I write these lines, the autumn rain angrily lashes my warm windows and somewhere above me the wind is howling. I gaze at the dark window and against a background of nocturnal gloom I try hard to recapture in my imagination that dear heroine of mine. I can see her with her innocently childlike, naïve, kind little face and loving eyes, and I want to throw down my pen, tear up, burn all that I have written so far. Why disturb the memory of that young, innocent creature?
But here, next to my inkwell, is her photograph. There that fair little head appears with all the vain grandeur of a beautiful woman who has plumbed the depths of depravity. Her eyes, so weary but proud in that depravity, are motionless: here she is that very snake, the harmfulness of whose bite Urbenin would not have considered exaggerated.
She blew a kiss to that storm – and the storm broke the flower off at its very root. Much was taken – but then, too high a price had been paid. The reader will forgive her sins.
IV
We walked through the forest.
Pine trees are boring in their silent monotony: they are all the same height, they all look exactly the same and they do not change with the seasons, knowing neither death nor vernal renewal. On the other hand they are attractive in their very gloominess – so still, so silent, as if they are thinking melancholy thoughts.
‘Shouldn’t we go back?’ suggested the Count.
This question was unanswered. The Pole couldn’t have cared less where he went, Urbenin didn’t think he had any say in the matter and I was only too delighted with the cool of the forest and the resinous air to turn back. Besides, we had to while away the time somehow until nightfall, even if this meant simply strolling about. The very thought of the wild night that was approaching was accompanied by a delicious sinking of the heart. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I was dreaming of it and already mentally anticipating its pleasures. Judging by the impatience with which the Count constantly looked at his watch, it was obvious that he too was going through agonies of expectation. We felt that we understood one another.
Near the forester’s cottage that nestled in a small clearing among the pines, we were greeted by the loud melodious barking of two flame-coloured dogs, glossy and as supple as eels, and of a breed that was unfamiliar to me. When they recognized Urbenin they joyfully wagged their tails and ran towards him, from which I gathered that the manager was a frequent visitor to the forester’s cottage. Next to the cottage we were met by a bootless and capless lad with large freckles on his astonished face. For a minute he surveyed us in silence, with wide-open eyes and then, when he recognized the Count, he produced a loud ‘Ah!’ and dashed headlong into the cottage.
‘I know why he ran off,’ laughed the Count. ‘I remember him… it’s Mitka.’
The Count was not mistaken. Less than a minute later Mitka emerged from the cottage with a glass of vodka and half a tumbler of water on a tray.
‘Your good health, Your Excellency,’ he said, smiling all over his stupid, surprised face as he served the Count.
The Count downed the vodka and then took a drink of water – but for once he didn’t frown. About a hundred paces from the cottage stood an iron bench, as old as the pines. We sat down on it and contemplated the May evening in all its tranquil beauty. Frightened crows flew cawing above our heads, the song of nightingales drifted towards us from all sides – nothing else broke the all-pervading silence.
The Count was incapable of remaining silent, even on calm evenings in May, when the voice of humans is least agreeable.
‘I don’t know whether you’ll be satisfied,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I’ve ordered fish soup and game for supper. We’ll have some cold sturgeon and sucking-pig with horseradish to go with the vodka.’
As if they were angered by these prosaic words, the poetic pines suddenly shook their crowns and a gentle rustle ran through the forest. A fresh breeze wafted over the clearing and played with the grass.
‘Down boys!’ Urbenin shouted to the flame-coloured dogs that were preventing him from lighting his cigarette with their endearments. ‘I think it’s going to rain tonight, I can feel it in the air. It’s been so terribly hot today that you don’t have to be a learned professor to forecast rain. It will be good for the corn.’
‘And what’s the good of corn to you,’ I wondered, ‘if the Count’s going to squander the money on drink? No point in the rain troubling itself either.’
Again a breeze ran through the forest, but this time it was stronger. The pines and grass made a louder murmur.
‘Let’s go home.’
We stood up and lazily ambled back to the cottage.
‘It’s better to be a fair-haired Olenka,’ I said, turning to Urbenin, ‘and live here among the wild animals than an investigating magistrate and live among people. It’s more peaceful… isn’t that so, Pyotr Yegorych?’
‘It doesn’t matter what you are, as long as you have peace of mind, Sergey Petrovich.’