‘My affair with Olga has nothing to do with it. Whether he’s her husband or not, once he’s stolen I must openly declare him a thief. But let’s leave this swindling to one side. Tell me: is it or isn’t it dishonest to be paid a salary and lie around for days on end, constantly drunk? Every day he’s drunk! Not one day passes without my seeing him reeling around. Respectable people don’t behave like that!’
‘He gets drunk because he’s respectable.’ I commented.
‘You appear to have some sort of passion for standing up for gentlemen like him. But I’ve decided to show no mercy. Today I paid him off and asked him to clear out and make room for someone else. My patience is exhausted.’
I felt it was superfluous to try and convince the Count that he was being unfair, impractical and stupid: I had no intention of defending Urbenin against the Count.
Five days later I heard that Urbenin had gone to live in town with his schoolboy son and little daughter. They told me that he was dead drunk when they drove there and that he fell off the cart twice. The schoolboy and Sasha cried the whole way.
XVII
Soon after Urbenin’s departure I was obliged to stay for a while – much against my wishes – on the Count’s estate. One of the Count’s stables had been broken into and thieves had made off with several valuable saddles. The investigating magistrate (that is, me) was informed and, nolens volens,46 I had to go there.
I found the Count drunk and angry. He was marching through all the rooms, seeking refuge from his anguish, but to no avail.
‘That Olga’s more than I can take,’ he said, waving his arm. ‘She lost her temper with me this morning, threatened to drown herself, stormed out of the house – and as you can see, there’s still no sign of her. I know she wouldn’t drown herself, but it’s a rotten business all the same. All yesterday she sulked and kept smashing crockery… The day before she gorged herself on chocolate. God only knows what kind of person she really is!’
I consoled the Count as best I could and sat down to dinner with him.
‘No, it’s time she stopped behaving like a child,’ he muttered during dinner. ‘It’s high time – otherwise all this might turn into a stupid farce. Besides, I have to admit that she’s already beginning to bore me with her sharp changes of mood. I need someone quiet and steady, modest – like Nadezhda Nikolayevna, you know. A splendid girl!’
When I was strolling in the garden after dinner I met the ‘drowned girl’. When she saw me she turned crimson and – strange woman! – she laughed for happiness. The shame on her face mingled with joy, the grief with happiness. Giving me a sheepish look, she ran towards me and hung on my neck without a word.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, squeezing my neck. ‘I’ve been pining for you so much that I would have died if you hadn’t come.’
I embraced her and silently led her to one of the summer-houses. Ten minutes later, when I was saying goodbye, I took a twenty-five rouble note from my pocket and gave it to her.
‘What’s that for?’
‘I’m paying you for today’s love.’
Olga didn’t understand and kept looking at me in amazement.
‘You see, there are women,’ I explained, ‘who love for money. They’re prostitutes. They have to be paid for with money. So take it! If you accept money from others, why don’t you want to take it from me? I don’t need any favours!’
However cynical this insult, Olga still didn’t understand. As yet she had no knowledge of life and didn’t understand the meaning of ‘venal’ women.
XVIII
It was a fine day in August. The sun shone with all the warmth of summer, the blue sky fondly beckoned one into the distance, but there was already a feeling of autumn in the air. Leaves that had come to the end of their lives were turning gold in the green foliage of the pensive forest, while the darkening fields had a wistful, melancholy look.
Presentiments of inescapable, oppressive autumn took hold of us too and it was not difficult to foresee that things would very soon come to a head. At some time the thunder had to rumble and the rain start pouring to freshen the humid air! It is usually close and sultry before a thunderstorm, when dark, leaden clouds approach, but we were already being stifled morally: this was evident in everything – in our movements, our smiles, in whatever we said.
I was riding in a light wagonette. Beside me sat Nadenka, the JP’s daughter. She was as white as a sheet, her chin and lips trembling as if she were about to cry, her deep eyes were full of sorrow. But still she laughed the whole way, pretending that she was feeling extremely cheerful.
In front of us and behind us carriages of all kinds, ages and sizes were on the move. Gentlemen and ladies on horseback rode on either side. Count Karneyev, clad in a green shooting outfit that was more like a clown’s than a huntsman’s, leant forward and to one side as he mercilessly bounced up and down on his black horse. Looking at his bent body and the pained expression that constantly flitted across his haggard face you would think that he was riding a horse for the very first time. A new double-barrelled gun was slung across his back, while at his side hung a game bag, in which a wounded woodcock was writhing.
Olenka Urbenin was the shining jewel of the cavalcade. Seated on her black horse – a gift from the Count – and dressed in a black riding habit, with a white feather in her hat, she no longer resembled the ‘girl in red’, whom we had met in the forest only a few months before. Now there was something majestic about her, something of the grande dame. Every flourish of her whip, every smile – everything was calculated to appear aristocratic, magnificent. In her movements and smiles there was something provocative and inflammatory. She held her head high with snobbish affectation, and from the height of her horse she poured scorn on the whole company, as if she couldn’t care less about the loud remarks directed at her by our local ladies of virtue. She was defiant, playing the coquette with her arrogance, with her position at the Count’s – just as if she were unaware that the Count was sick and tired of her and that he was just waiting for the chance to get rid of her.
‘The Count wants to throw me out,’ she told me with a loud laugh after the cavalcade had ridden out of the courtyard. So, she must have known the position she was in – and she understood it.
But why that loud laughter? As I looked at her I was quite bewildered: where did that common forest dweller get so much energy from? When had she found time to learn to sit so gracefully in the saddle, to twitch her nostrils so proudly and to show off with such imperious gestures?
‘A dissolute woman is the same as a pig,’ Dr Pavel Ivanych told me. ‘Seat her at the table and she’ll plonk her legs on it.’
But this explanation was too simple. No one could have been more taken with Olga than I was, yet I would have been the first to throw stones at her. However, the vague voice of truth whispered to me that this was not the energy, nor the boastfulness, of a happy, contented woman, but despair, a presentiment of the imminent, inevitable denouement.
We were returning from the shoot, for which we had set off early that morning. It had been a failure. Just by the marshes, on which we had been pinning great hopes, we met a party of huntsmen who told us that all the game had been frightened off. We managed to dispatch three woodcock and one duck to the next world – that was all that fell to the lot of ten huntsmen. Finally, one of the ladies developed toothache, so we had to hurry back. We took the beautiful path across the fields, where sheaves of newly harvested rye showed yellow against the dark background of the gloomy forest. On the horizon appeared the white church and the house on the Count’s estate. To the right stretched the mirror-like surface of the lake, to the left loomed the dark mass of Stone Grave.