‘Are you scared of storms?’ I asked Olenka.
She pressed her cheek to her round shoulder and looked at me with the trustfulness of a child.
‘Yes I am,’ she whispered after a moment’s thought. ‘My mother was killed by a storm. It was even in the papers… Mother was crossing an open field and she was crying. She led a really wretched life in this world. God took pity on her and killed her with his heavenly electricity.’
‘How do you know there’s electricity in heaven?’
‘I’ve learned about it. Did you know that people killed in storms or in war, and women who have died after a difficult labour, go to paradise! You won’t find that in any books, but it’s true. My mother’s in paradise now. I think that one day I’ll be killed in a storm and I too will go to paradise. Are you an educated man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you won’t laugh at me. Now, this is how I’d like to die. To put on the most fashionable, expensive dress – like the one I saw that rich, local landowner Sheffer wearing the other day – and deck my arms with bracelets… Then to stand on the very top of Stone Grave and let myself be struck by lightning, in full view of everyone. A terrifying thunderclap, you know, and then – the end!’
‘What a wild fantasy!’ I laughed, peering into those eyes that were filled with holy terror at the thought of a terrible but dramatic death. ‘So, you don’t want to die in an ordinary dress?’
‘No,’ replied Olenka, with a shake of the head. ‘To die, so that everyone can see me!’
‘The frock you’re wearing now is nicer than any fashionable and expensive dress. It suits you. It makes you look like a red flower from the green woods.’
‘No, that’s not true,’ Olenka innocently sighed. ‘It’s a cheap dress, it can’t possibly be nice.’
The Count came over to the window with the obvious intention of having a little chat with pretty Olenka. My friend can speak three European languages, but he can’t speak to women. He looked somewhat out of his element as he came and stood near us, smiled inanely, mumbled an inarticulate ‘Hmmm… y-y-yes…’ and then retraced his steps to the carafe of vodka.
‘When you came into the room,’ I told Olenka, ‘you were singing “I love the storms of early May”. Haven’t those lines been set to music?’
‘No, I just sing all the poetry I know, after my own fashion.’
Just then I happened to look round. Urbenin was watching us. In his eyes I could read hatred and malice, which didn’t in the least suit his kind, gentle face. ‘He can’t be jealous, can he?’ I wondered.
The poor devil noted my quizzical look, rose from his chair and went out into the hall to fetch something. Even from his walk it was obvious that he was highly agitated. The thunderclaps, each louder and more resounding than the last, became more and more frequent. The lightning continually tinted the sky, the pines and the wet earth with its pleasant but dazzling light. It would be ages before the rain stopped. I walked away from the window to the book stand and started inspecting Olenka’s library. ‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you what you are’ – but for all that wealth of books, arranged in perfect symmetry on those shelves, it was difficult to assess in any way Olenka’s intellectual level and ‘educational attainments’. It was all a rather peculiar hotchpotch: three readers; one of Born’s books;16 Yevtushevsky’s Mathematics Problem Book;17 Lermontov (vol. 2); Shklyarevsky; the journal The Task;18 a cookery book; Miscellany.19 I could enumerate even more books, but just as I was taking Miscellany from the shelf and began turning the pages, the door to the other room opened and in came a person who immediately distracted my attention from Olenka’s ‘educational attainments’. This was a tall, muscular man in cotton-print dressing-gown, tattered slippers and with a rather original face: a mass of dark blue veins, it was embellished with a pair of sergeant’s whiskers and sideburns, and on the whole it put me in mind of a bird’s. The entire face seemed to have thrust itself forward in an apparent attempt to converge at the tip of the nose. Such faces, I think, are called ‘pitcher-snouts’.20 This character’s small head reposed on a long, thin neck with a large Adam’s apple and rocked like a starling-box in the wind. With his dull green eyes this strange man surveyed us, and then he stared at the Count.
‘Are all the doors locked?’ he asked in a pleading voice.
The Count glanced at me and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Don’t worry, Papa!’ Olenka said. ‘They’re all locked. Go back to your room.’
‘Is the barn locked?’
‘He’s a bit funny in the head… he gets like that sometimes,’ Urbenin whispered, appearing from the hall. ‘He’s afraid of burglars and as you can see he’s always fussing about the doors. Nikolay Yefimych!’ he said, turning to this strange individual. ‘Go back to your room and sleep. Don’t worry, everything’s locked.’
‘Are the windows locked?’
Nikolay Yefimych quickly went to every window, checked the locks and then, without so much as a glance at us, shuffled back to his room in his slippers.
‘Now and then he comes over all peculiar, poor devil,’ Urbenin started explaining the moment he’d left the room. ‘He’s a fine, decent chap really, a family man… it’s really very sad. Almost every summer he goes a bit dotty.’
I glanced at Olenka. Sheepishly, hiding her face from us, she began tidying the books I had disturbed. She was obviously ashamed of her crazy father.
‘The carriage is here, Your Excellency!’ Urbenin announced. ‘You can drive back now if you wish.’
‘But how on earth did that carriage get here?’ I asked.
‘I sent for it.’
A minute later I was sitting in the carriage with the Count, fuming as I listened to the peals of thunder.
‘So, that Pyotr just bundled us out of the cottage, blast him!’ I growled, getting really angry. ‘He didn’t let us have a proper look at Olenka! I wouldn’t have eaten her! Silly old fool! He was simply bursting with jealousy the whole time. He’s in love with that girl.’
‘Oh yes! Fancy that – I noticed it too! And he was so jealous he didn’t want to let us into the cottage – he only sent for the carriage out of sheer jealousy! Ha ha!’
‘ “The later love comes the more it burns”… Really, it’s very hard not to fall for that girl in red, my friend, if you see her every day as we saw her today! She’s devilishly pretty! Only, she’s not his sort. He ought to understand that and not be so egotistically jealous. All right, love if you like, but don’t stop others – all the more so if you realize the girl’s not meant for you! Really, what a blockhead!’
‘Do you remember how he flared up when Kuzma mentioned her name over tea?’ sniggered the Count. ‘I thought he was going to thrash the lot of us then – you don’t go defending a woman’s good name so fiercely if you’ve no feelings for her.’
‘But some men will do that… however, that’s not the point. The crux of the matter is this: if he could order us around like that today, how does he treat small fry who are at his beck and call? He probably won’t let stewards, managers, huntsmen and other nobodies of this world go anywhere near her. Love and jealousy can make a man unjust, callous, misanthropic. I’ll wager that because of Olenka he’s tormented the life out of more than one servant under his command. Therefore you’d do well to take his complaints about your poor employees, about the need to dismiss this one or the other, with a pinch of salt. In general, his authority must be curbed for the time being. Love will pass – and then there’ll be nothing to fear. He’s really quite a decent fellow.’