Verochka

Ivan Alekseyich Ognev remembers how, on that August evening, he opened the glass door with a ring and stepped out onto the terrace. He was wearing at the time a light cloak and a wide-brimmed straw hat – the very one that, together with a pair of jackboots, now lies gathering dust under his bed. In one hand he carried a big bundle of books and notebooks, in the other a thick, gnarled walking stick.

Behind the door, lighting his way with a lamp, stood the master of the house, Kuznetsov, a bald old man with a long grey beard, wearing a pique jacket as white as snow. The old man smiled good-humoredly and nodded his head.

“Farewell, old fellow!” Ognev called to him.

Kuznetsov set the lamp down on a little table and came out onto the terrace. Two long, narrow shadows stepped across the stairs toward the flower beds, swayed, and came to rest with their heads against the trunks of the lindens.

“Farewell, and thank you once again, my dear fellow!” said Ivan Alekseyich. “Thank you for your hospitality, for your kindness, for your affection... Never, to the end of my days, shall I forget how you have received me. You are a good man, and your daughter is a good girl, and everyone here is kind, cheerful, hospitable... Such splendid people that I don’t know how to say it!”

From the fullness of his feelings, and under the influence of the home-brewed liqueur he had just drunk, Ognev spoke in the singsong voice of a seminarian and was so moved that he expressed his feelings not so much in words as in the blinking of his eyes and the twitching of his shoulders. Kuznetsov, also a little tipsy and touched, reached out to the young man and kissed him.

“I’ve grown used to you people, like a hunting dog!” Ognev went on. “I’ve been tramping over here almost every day, spent the night here a good ten times, and drunk so much of that liqueur that it frightens me now to think of it. But the main thing I’m grateful for, Gavriil Petrovich, is your assistance and help. Without you I’d still be fussing over my statistics come October. I shall write as much in the preface: I consider it my duty to express my gratitude to the chairman of the M— district zemstvo board, Kuznetsov, for his kind assistance. Statistics has a br-r-illiant future ahead of it! My deepest bow to Vera Gavrilovna, and give my thanks to the doctors, to both magistrates, and to your secretary – I’ll never forget their help! And now, old fellow, let us embrace and exchange one last kiss.”

The melted Ognev kissed the old man once more and began to go down the steps; on the last step he turned round and asked:

“Shall we ever see one another again?”

“God knows!” answered the old man. “Most likely never!”

“Yes, true enough! You couldn’t be lured to Petersburg with a fresh loaf of bread, and I’m hardly likely ever to find myself in this district again. Well, farewell!”

“You might have left the books here!” Kuznetsov called after him. “What do you want dragging such a weight along for? I’d have sent them on to you tomorrow with one of my people.”

But Ognev was no longer listening and was already walking swiftly away from the house. His heart, warmed by wine, felt merry and warm and sad all at once... He walked along thinking how often in life one happens to meet good people, and how sad it is that nothing remains of these meetings but memories. It happens sometimes that cranes flash across the horizon, a faint wind carries their plaintive, rapturous cry, and a minute later, no matter how greedily you peer into the blue distance, you will not make out so much as a speck, will not hear a single sound – just so do people, with their faces and their talk, flash across our lives and sink into our past, leaving nothing behind but paltry traces of memory. Having lived since early spring in the N— district, and having spent nearly every day with the hospitable Kuznetsovs, Ivan Alekseyich had grown as used to the old man, to his daughter, to the servants, as if they were his own family; he had studied to the last detail the whole house, the cozy terrace, the turnings of the avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the bathhouse; but he had only to step out of the gate now, and all of it would turn into a memory and lose its real meaning for him forever, and a year or two would pass, and all these dear images would grow dim in his mind, on a level with fictions and figments of fancy.

“There is nothing in life more precious than people!” thought the moved Ognev, striding down the avenue toward the gate. “Nothing!”

In the garden it was quiet and warm. There was a smell of mignonette, tobacco-plant, and heliotrope, which had not yet finished blooming in the flower beds. The spaces between the bushes and the tree trunks were full of mist – not thick, but soft, thoroughly steeped in moonlight – and what stayed long afterward in Ognev’s memory was how the wisps of fog, like ghosts, moved quietly but visibly, one behind another, across the avenues. The moon stood high above the garden, and somewhere below it, toward the east, transparent misty patches went drifting. The whole world seemed to consist only of black silhouettes and wandering white shadows, and Ognev, who was watching mist on a moonlit August evening for almost the first time in his life, thought that what he saw was not nature but a stage set, where clumsy pyrotechnists, wishing to light the garden with white Bengal fire, had hidden themselves under the bushes and, along with the light, had let loose white smoke into the air as well.

As Ognev approached the garden gate, a dark shadow separated itself from the low fence and came toward him.

“Vera Gavrilovna!” he said, delighted. “You’re here? I was looking and looking for you, wanted to say goodbye... Farewell, I’m off!”

“So early? It’s only eleven o’clock.”

“No, it’s time! I have five versts to walk, and I still have to pack. I must be up early tomorrow...”

Before Ognev stood Kuznetsov’s daughter, Vera, a girl of twenty-one, as usual melancholy, carelessly dressed, and interesting. Girls who dream a great deal and spend whole days lying about reading anything that comes to hand, who are bored and mournful, generally dress carelessly. In those of them whom nature has endowed with taste and an instinct for beauty, this slight carelessness of dress lends a peculiar charm. At any rate, Ognev, remembering pretty little Verochka afterward, could never picture her without the loose blouse that gathered in deep folds at the waist and yet never touched her figure, without the lock of hair that had escaped onto her forehead from her high coiffure, without that red knitted shawl with the little shaggy balls along its edges, which of an evening, like a flag in still weather, hung dejectedly from Verochka’s shoulder, and by day lay crumpled in the front hall among the men’s caps, or on the chest in the dining room, where the old cat slept upon it without ceremony. From that shawl, and from the folds of the blouse, there breathed a free indolence, a love of home, a good nature. Perhaps because Vera pleased Ognev, he was able to read into every button and every little ruffle something warm, cozy, naive, something so good and poetic as is precisely what is lacking in women who are insincere, devoid of a feeling for beauty, and cold.

Verochka was well built, had a regular profile, and beautiful curling hair. To Ognev, who in his life had seen little of women, she seemed a beauty.

“I’m off!” he said, taking leave of her by the gate. “Don’t remember me unkindly! Thank you for everything!”

In the same singsong seminarian’s voice in which he had spoken to the old man, blinking and twitching his shoulders in the same way, he began to thank Vera for her hospitality, her kindness, her warmth.

“I wrote about you to my mother in every letter,” he said. “If everyone were like you and your father, life on earth would be nothing but Shrovetide. What splendid people you all are here! All simple, warm- hearted, sincere folk.”

“Where are you going now?” asked Vera.

“Now I’m going to my mother’s in Oryol, I’ll stay with her a couple of weeks, and then – to Petersburg, to work.”

“And after that?”

“After that? I’ll work straight through the winter, and in spring I’ll be off again to some district or other to gather material. Well, may you be happy, may you live to be a hundred... don’t remember me unkindly. We shan’t see each other again.”

Ognev bent down and kissed Verochka’s hand. Then, in a silent agitation, he adjusted his cloak, took a firmer grip on his bundle of books, was silent a moment, and said:

“What a lot of mist has come down!”

“Yes. Haven’t you forgotten anything here?”

“What would I have forgotten? I don’t think so...”

For a few seconds Ognev stood silent, then turned awkwardly toward the gate and went out of the garden.

“Wait, I’ll walk with you as far as our woods,” said Vera, coming out after him.

They walked along the road. Now the trees no longer screened the open space, and one could see the sky and the distance. As though covered with a veil, all of nature hid behind a transparent, matte haze, through which its beauty smiled cheerfully; the mist, thicker and whiter in places, lay unevenly about the haystacks and bushes, or drifted in wisps across the road, hugging the ground as though trying not to obscure the open space. Through the haze the whole road could be seen as far as the woods, with dark ditches along its sides and small bushes growing in the ditches that hindered the wisps of mist from wandering. Half a verst from the gate the dark line of Kuznetsov’s woods showed black.

“Why has she come with me? I’ll have to see her back again!” thought Ognev, but, glancing at Vera’s profile, he smiled tenderly and said:

“I don’t feel like leaving on such a fine evening. It’s a real evening for romance, with the moon, and the stillness, and all the trimmings. Do you know, Vera Gavrilovna? I’m twenty-nine years old, but never once in my life have I had a love affair. In my whole life, not a single romantic episode, so that of rendezvous a meeting (French: rendez-vous)., of avenues for sighing and kisses, I know only by hearsay. It isn’t normal! In town, sitting in one’s rooms, one doesn’t notice this gap, but out here, in the open air, one feels it keenly... It makes one feel almost aggrieved!”

“Why is that, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know. Probably there was never time for it in my whole life, or perhaps I simply never happened to meet women who... In general I have few acquaintances, and I go nowhere.”

For some three hundred paces the young people walked in silence. Ognev glanced at Verochka’s bare head and her shawl, and in his soul, one after another, the spring and summer days rose up again; that had been a time when, far from his gray Petersburg lodgings, enjoying the kindness of good people, and nature, and work he loved, he had scarcely noticed how the morning dawns gave way to evening ones, and how, one after another, prophesying the end of summer, first the nightingale had ceased to sing, then the quail, and a little later the corncrake... Time had flown by unnoticed, which meant that life had been good and easy... He began to recall aloud how reluctantly he, a man of little means, unaccustomed to travel and to people, had come at the end of April to this N— district, where he had expected to meet with boredom, solitude, and indifference to statistics, which, in his opinion, now occupies the most prominent place among the sciences. Arriving one April morning in the district town of N., he had put up at the inn of Ryabukhin, an Old Believer, where, for twenty kopecks a day, they gave him a bright, clean room on condition that he smoke outside. Having rested and inquired who in the district served as chairman of the zemstvo board, he had gone at once on foot to Gavriil Petrovich. He had had to walk four versts through luxuriant meadows and young groves. Under the clouds, filling the air with silver sound, larks had trembled, and over the greening plowland, flapping their wings with a grave and stately air, rooks had wheeled.

“Good Lord,” Ognev had marveled then, “can it be that the air here is always like this, or does it only smell so today, in honor of my arrival?”

Expecting a dry, businesslike reception, he had entered the Kuznetsovs’ house timidly, looking from under his brows and shyly tugging at his little beard. The old man had at first wrinkled his forehead and had not understood why the young man and his statistics should have any need of the zemstvo board, but when the other had explained at length what statistical material was and where it was to be gathered, Gavriil Petrovich had grown animated, had begun to smile, and with a childlike curiosity had started peering into his notebooks... That same evening Ivan Alekseyich had already been sitting at the Kuznetsovs’ table at supper, growing quickly tipsy on the strong liqueur, and, looking at the placid faces and unhurried movements of his new acquaintances, had felt throughout his whole body a sweet, drowsy laziness, the kind that makes one want to sleep, to stretch, to smile. And his new acquaintances had looked him over good-humoredly and asked whether his father and mother were living, how much he earned a month, whether he often went to the theater...

Ognev recalled his trips about the townships, the picnics, the fishing expeditions, the excursion the whole company had made to the convent to see the abbess Marfa, who had presented every one of her guests with a little beaded purse; he recalled the heated, endless, purely Russian arguments, in which the disputants, spraying spittle and pounding their fists on the table, fail to understand and interrupt one another, without noticing that they contradict themselves in every sentence, keep changing the subject every moment, and, after arguing for two or three hours, burst out laughing:

“The devil knows what we were arguing about! We began about someone’s health and ended with a requiem!”

“And do you remember how you and I and the doctor rode on horseback to Shestovo?” Ivan Alekseyich was saying to Vera, as he walked with her toward the woods. “We met a holy fool there, too. I gave him a five-kopeck piece, and he crossed himself three times and threw my coin into the rye. Good Lord, I’m carrying away with me so many impressions that if it were possible to gather them into a compact mass, one would get a fine ingot of gold! I can’t understand why it is that clever, feeling people crowd themselves into the capitals and don’t come out here. Is there really more room and more truth on the Nevsky, in those great damp houses, than there is here? Truly, my furnished rooms, packed from top to bottom with artists, scholars, and journalists, have always struck me as a piece of prejudice.”

Twenty paces from the woods, across the road, lay a small, narrow bridge with posts at its corners, which always, during evening walks, served the Kuznetsovs and their guests as a sort of little way station. From here those who wished could tease the forest echo, and one could see how the road disappeared into the black clearing.

“Well, here’s the bridge!” said Ognev. “This is where you must turn back...”

Vera stopped and caught her breath.

“Let’s sit down a while,” she said, seating herself on one of the posts. “Before parting, when people say goodbye, they usually sit down first.”

Ognev settled himself beside her on his bundle of books and went on talking. She was breathing heavily from the walk and was looking not at Ivan Alekseyich but off to one side, so that he could not see her face.

“And then suddenly, in ten years or so, we’ll meet again,” he was saying. “What will we be like then? You’ll be by that time a venerable mother of a family, and I the author of some venerable, useless statistical compilation, as thick as forty thousand such compilations. We’ll meet and recall the old days... Now we feel the present, it fills us and stirs us, but then, when we meet, we shan’t even remember the date, or the month, or even the year, when we saw each other for the last time on this little bridge. You, I daresay, will have changed... Tell me, will you have changed?”

Vera gave a start and turned her face to him.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just asking you...”

“Forgive me, I didn’t hear what you were saying.”

Only now did Ognev notice a change in Vera. She was pale, was catching her breath, and the trembling of her breathing communicated itself to her hands, her lips, her head, and from her coiffure there had escaped onto her forehead not one lock, as usual, but two... Evidently she was avoiding looking him straight in the eyes and, trying to mask her agitation, kept now adjusting her collar, which seemed to be cutting into her neck, now shifting her red shawl from one shoulder to the other...

“You seem to be cold,” said Ognev. “It’s not altogether healthy to sit about in the mist. Let me see you nach Haus home (German: nach Hause)..”

Vera said nothing.

“What’s the matter with you?” Ivan Alekseyich smiled. “You’re silent and you don’t answer my questions. Are you unwell, or are you angry? Eh?”

Vera pressed her palm firmly to the cheek turned toward Ognev, and at once jerked it sharply away again.

“This is a dreadful position...” she whispered, an expression of intense pain on her face. “Dreadful!”

“How is it dreadful?” asked Ognev, shrugging his shoulders and not concealing his surprise. “What’s the matter?”

Still breathing heavily and trembling in her shoulders, Vera turned her back to him, looked at the sky for half a minute, and said:

“I need to talk to you, Ivan Alekseyich...”

“I’m listening.”

“It may seem strange to you... you’ll be surprised, but it’s all the same to me now...”

Ognev shrugged his shoulders once more and prepared himself to listen.

“It’s this...” Verochka began, bowing her head and twisting one of the little balls of her shawl between her fingers. “You see, I wanted to tell you... this... It will seem strange to you, and... foolish, but I... I can’t go on.”

Vera’s speech dissolved into an unclear murmuring and suddenly broke off in weeping. The girl covered her face with the shawl, bent lower still, and wept bitterly. Ivan Alekseyich cleared his throat in embarrassment and, astonished, not knowing what to say or do, looked hopelessly about him. From lack of practice with weeping and tears, his own eyes began to itch.

“Now, now, come now!” he began to mutter, at a loss. “Vera Gavrilovna, what’s all this for, I ask you? My dear girl, are you... are you ill? Or has someone offended you? Tell me, perhaps I might... be able to help...”

When he, trying to comfort her, allowed himself carefully to take her hands away from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:

“I... I love you!”

These words, simple and ordinary, were spoken in plain human language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera, rose, and, on the heels of his embarrassment, felt fright.

The sadness, the warmth, the sentimental mood that had been breathed into him by the farewell and the liqueur, suddenly vanished, giving way to a sharp, unpleasant feeling of awkwardness. It was as if something had turned over inside him; he looked sidelong at Vera, and now, after she had declared her love to him and cast off the unapproachability that so becomes a woman, she seemed to him somehow shorter, plainer, duller.

“What is this, then?” he asked himself in horror. “But do I... love her or not? There’s a problem for you!”

But she, now that the chief and heaviest thing had at last been said, was already breathing easily and freely. She too had risen, and, looking straight into Ivan Alekseyich’s face, began to speak quickly, unrestrainedly, ardently.

As a man suddenly frightened cannot afterward recall the order in which the sounds of the catastrophe that stunned him followed one another, so Ognev does not remember Vera’s words and phrases. What has stayed with him is only the substance of her speech, herself, and the impression that her speech produced in him. He remembers, as it were, her voice, half choked and somewhat hoarse with agitation, and an extraordinary music and passion in its intonation. Weeping, laughing, tears sparkling on her lashes, she told him that from the very first days of their acquaintance he had struck her by his originality, his intelligence, his kind, clever eyes, his aims and purposes in life; that she had come to love him passionately, madly, and deeply; that whenever, in summer, she came in from the garden into the house and saw his cloak in the hall, or heard his voice from a distance, her heart would go cold with a foreboding of happiness; that even his empty jokes made her laugh, that in every figure in his notebooks she saw something extraordinarily wise and grand, that his gnarled walking stick seemed to her more beautiful than the trees.

And the woods, and the wisps of mist, and the black ditches along the sides of the road, seemed to grow hushed, listening to her, while something bad and strange was going on in Ognev’s soul... In declaring her love, Vera was captivatingly lovely, spoke beautifully and passionately, but he felt not delight, not the joy of living, as he would have wished, but only a feeling of compassion for Vera, pain and regret that on his account a good person should be suffering. God knows whether it was bookish reason speaking in him, or whether it was the invincible habit of objectivity that so often hinders people from living, but only that Vera’s raptures and suffering seemed to him cloying, unserious, and at the same time something within him rebelled and whispered that all he now saw and heard, from the standpoint of nature and personal happiness, was more serious than any statistics, books, or truths... And he grew angry and blamed himself, though he did not understand wherein exactly his guilt lay.

To complete his discomfiture, he decidedly did not know what to say to her, and yet speak he must. To say outright “I do not love you” was beyond his strength, and to say “yes” he could not, because, however he searched, he could not find even a spark of it in his soul...

He said nothing, while she meanwhile went on saying that for her there was no happiness higher than to see him, to follow him, this very moment, wherever he might wish, to be his wife and his helpmate, that if he left her she would die of grief...

“I cannot stay here any longer!” she said, wringing her hands. “I’ve grown sick of this house, and this wood, and this air. I cannot bear perpetual peace and an aimless life, I cannot bear our colorless, pallid people, who all resemble one another like drops of water! They’re all warm-hearted and good-natured because they’re well fed, because they don’t suffer, don’t struggle... But I want precisely those great, damp houses where people suffer, where they’re hardened by labor and want...”

And this too seemed to Ognev cloying and unserious. When Vera had finished, he still did not know what to say, but to remain silent was impossible, and he began to mutter:

“I, Vera Gavrilovna, am very grateful to you, though I feel that I have done nothing to deserve such... feeling... on your part. In the second place, as an honest man, I must say that... happiness is founded on equality – that is, when both sides... love equally...”

But at once Ognev grew ashamed of his mumbling and fell silent. He felt that at that moment his face had been stupid, guilty, flat, that it had been strained and drawn... Vera, it seemed, had managed to read the truth on his face, for she suddenly grew serious, turned pale, and let her head droop.

“You must forgive me,” Ognev muttered, unable to bear the silence. “I respect you so much that... it pains me!”

Vera turned abruptly and walked quickly back toward the house. Ognev followed after her.

“No, don’t!” said Vera, waving her hand at him. “Don’t come, I’ll get there myself...”

“No, all the same... I can’t not see you back...”

Whatever Ognev said, every word of it to the very last seemed to him repellent and flat. The feeling of guilt grew in him with every step. He was angry, clenched his fists, and cursed his own coldness and his inability to conduct himself with women. Trying to rouse himself, he looked at Verochka’s handsome figure, at her braid, and at the tracks her small feet left on the dusty road, recalled her words and her tears, but all this only touched him, and did not stir him to feeling.

“Ah, but one cannot love by force!” he told himself, and at the same time thought: “Then when shall I ever love, if not by force? I’m nearly thirty already! I’ve never met a woman better than Vera, and never shall. Oh, this wretched old age! Old age at thirty!”

Vera walked ahead of him, faster and faster, not looking back, her head bowed. It seemed to him that with grief she had grown thinner, narrower in the shoulders...

“I can imagine what’s happening in her soul now!” he thought, looking at her back. “No doubt she’s so ashamed, so hurt, that she wants to die! Good Lord, there’s so much life, poetry, meaning in all this, that a stone would be moved – and I... I’m stupid and absurd!”

At the gate Vera glanced at him fleetingly and, stooping, wrapping herself in her shawl, walked quickly off down the avenue.

Ivan Alekseyich was left alone. Making his way back to the woods, he walked slowly, stopping every now and then and looking back at the gate with such an expression in his whole figure as though he did not believe himself. He searched with his eyes along the road for the tracks of Verochka’s feet, and could not believe that the girl who had pleased him so much had only just declared her love to him, and that he had refused her so clumsily, so gracelessly! For the first time in his life he had to convince himself by experience how little a man is master of his own good will, and to feel for himself the position of a decent and warm-hearted man who, against his own will, causes his neighbor cruel, undeserved suffering.

His conscience ached, and when Vera had disappeared from sight, it began to seem to him that he had lost something very precious, something close to him, that he would never find again. He felt that with Vera some part of his youth had slipped away from him, and that the minutes he had lived through so fruitlessly would never come again.

Reaching the little bridge, he stopped and fell to thinking. He wanted to find the cause of his strange coldness. That it lay not outside him but within himself was plain to him. He confessed to himself honestly that this was not the reasoning coldness that clever people so often boast of, nor the coldness of a self-loving fool, but simply an infirmity of soul, an incapacity to feel beauty deeply, a premature old age acquired through his upbringing, through the disorderly struggle for a crust of bread, through a roving, homeless, unmarried life.

From the bridge he went slowly, as though unwillingly, into the woods. Here, where amid the black, dense darkness bright patches of moonlight showed here and there in sharp relief, where he felt nothing but his own thoughts, he was seized with a passionate desire to get back what he had lost.

And Ivan Alekseyich remembers that he turned back again. Spurring himself on with memories, forcibly conjuring up Vera in his imagination, he walked quickly toward the house. Along the road and in the garden the mist had already lifted, and a clear moon looked down from the sky as though freshly washed; only in the east was there still mist and gloom... Ognev remembers his cautious steps, the dark windows, the thick scent of heliotrope and mignonette. The familiar dog Karo, wagging his tail in a friendly way, came up to him and sniffed his hand... This was the only living creature that saw him walk twice around the house, stand for a while by Vera’s dark window, and, with a wave of his hand and a deep sigh, go out of the garden.

An hour later he was already in the little town, and, worn out, shattered, leaning his body and his hot face against the gate of the inn, was knocking with the door-ring. Somewhere in the town a dog, half asleep, was barking, and, as though in answer to his knocking, they began ringing on the iron sounding-board by the church...

“Roaming about at night...” grumbled the Old Believer landlord, in a long shirt like a woman’s nightgown, as he opened the gate for him. “Instead of roaming about, you’d do better to say your prayers to God.”

Going into his room, Ivan Alekseyich sank down onto the bed and gazed for a long, long while at the candle flame, then shook his head and began to pack...