The Wife

I

I received the following letter:

"Dear sir, Pavel Andreitch! Not far from us, in the village of Pestrovo, to be exact, some deplorable things are happening, which I consider it my duty to report. All the peasants of that village sold their huts and all their belongings and resettled to Tomsk province, but did not reach it and have come back. Here, of course, they now have nothing; everything belongs to others; three or four families have settled into a single hut, so that the population of each hut is no fewer than fifteen souls of both sexes, not counting the small children, and in the end there is nothing to eat, there is famine, an epidemic of famine fever or typhus is going through the whole place; every last one of them is sick. The feldsher says: you come into a hut and what do you see? Everyone sick, everyone delirious, one laughing, one climbing the wall; the huts stink, there is no one to fetch water or bring it in, and their only food is frozen potatoes. What can the feldsher and Sobol (our zemstvo doctor) do, when before medicine what they need is bread, which they do not have? The zemstvo board refuses on the grounds that these people have already been struck from its rolls and are now registered in Tomsk province, and besides there is no money. In reporting this to you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not to refuse the speediest help. Your well-wisher."

Evidently it was written by the feldsher herself, or by that doctor with the animal surname. Zemstvo doctors and feldshers, year in and year out, are convinced day after day that they can do nothing, and all the same they go on drawing a salary from people who live on nothing but frozen potatoes, and all the same, for some reason, they consider themselves entitled to judge whether I am humane or not.

Unsettled by the anonymous letter, and by the fact that every morning some peasants or other came to the servants’ kitchen and knelt down there, and by the fact that one night twenty sacks of rye had been dragged out of the barn after the wall had been broken through beforehand, and by the general oppressive mood that was kept up by conversation, by the newspapers, and by bad weather – unsettled by all this, I worked listlessly and without success. I was writing "A History of Railways"; it was necessary to read a great many Russian and foreign books, pamphlets, journal articles, it was necessary to click away at the abacus, to leaf through logarithm tables, to think and write, then read again, click and think; but the moment I picked up a book or began to think, my thoughts grew tangled, my eyes screwed shut, and I would get up from the desk with a sigh and start pacing through the large rooms of my empty country house. When I grew tired of pacing, I would stop at the window in my study and, looking across my wide yard, across the pond and the bare young birch grove, and across the great field covered with newly fallen, melting snow, I could see on the horizon, on a hill, a heap of brown huts, from which an uneven black band of dirty road ran down across the white field. This was Pestrovo, the very place my anonymous author had written of. If not for the crows, which, foretelling rain or snowy weather, wheeled cawing over the pond and the field, and if not for the knocking in the carpenter’s shed, this little world, of which there was now so much talk, would have seemed like the Dead Sea – so still, so motionless, so lifeless and dull was everything here.

Unease kept me from working and concentrating; I did not know what it was, and wanted to think it was disillusionment. Indeed, I had left my post in the Ministry of Ways of Communication and come here to the country in order to live in peace and occupy myself with literature on social questions. That had long been my cherished dream. And now I had to bid farewell both to peace and to literature, to leave everything and busy myself with nothing but the peasants. And this was unavoidable, because, as I was convinced, besides myself there was positively no one in the whole district to help the starving. I was surrounded by people uneducated, undeveloped, indifferent, in the vast majority dishonest, or else honest but scatterbrained and frivolous, like, for instance, my wife. There was no relying on such people, and yet leaving the peasants to the mercy of fate was equally impossible; which meant there was nothing for it but to submit to necessity and take upon myself the setting of the peasants in order.

I began by deciding to donate five thousand silver roubles for the benefit of the starving. And this did not diminish my unease but only increased it. When I stood at the window or walked about the rooms, I was tormented by a question that had not existed before: how was this money to be handled? To order bread bought and go round the huts distributing it – that is beyond the strength of one man, to say nothing of the risk, in one’s haste, of giving a well-fed man or a kulak twice as much as a starving one. I did not trust the administration. All these zemstvo captains and tax inspectors were young men, and I regarded them with the same distrust I felt toward the whole of contemporary youth, materialistic and devoid of ideals. The zemstvo board, the township offices, and all the district chancelleries in general likewise inspired in me not the slightest desire to turn to them for help. I knew that these institutions, having attached themselves like leeches to the zemstvo and treasury pie, kept their mouths open every day of the year, ready to attach themselves to some third pie as well.

It occurred to me to invite the neighboring landowners and propose that they organize in my house something in the nature of a committee or center, to which all donations would flow and from which relief and directions would be issued throughout the district; such an organization, allowing for private conferences and broad, free oversight, answered entirely to my views; but I pictured the refreshments, the dinners, the suppers, and the noise, idleness, chatter, and bad manners that this motley district company would inevitably bring into my house, and I hastened to abandon the idea.

As for my household, help or support from them was the last thing I could expect. Of my first family, my father’s, once large and noisy, there survived only the governess, m-lle Marie, or, as she was called now, Marya Gerasimovna, a thoroughly insignificant person. This small, tidy old woman of about seventy, dressed in a light gray gown and a cap with white ribbons, resembling a porcelain doll, always sat in the drawing room reading a book. When I walked past her, knowing the cause of my brooding, she would invariably say:

"What would you have, Pasha? I said before that this is how it would be. You can judge by our own servants."

My second family, that is, my wife Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the ground floor, where she occupied every room. She dined, slept, and received her guests downstairs, entirely unconcerned with how I dined, how I slept, or whom I received. Our relations were simple and unstrained, but cold, empty, and dull, as between people who have long been strangers to one another, so that even our living on adjoining floors did not resemble closeness. The passionate, restless love, now sweet, now bitter as wormwood, that Natalya Gavrilovna had once stirred in me, no longer existed; nor did the old outbursts, the loud quarrels, the reproaches, the complaints, and those explosions of hatred that usually ended, on the wife’s side, with a trip abroad or to relatives, and on mine, with sending her money little by little, but often, so as to sting my wife’s pride the oftener. (My proud, self-regarding wife and her kin live at my expense, and my wife, for all her wishing it, cannot refuse my money – this gave me pleasure and was the sole consolation in my grief.) Now, when we chanced to meet downstairs in the corridor or in the yard, I would bow, she would smile amiably; we would speak of the weather, of how it was time, it seemed, to put in the double window-frames, and of someone who had driven past along the dam with sleigh-bells ringing, and all the while I would read on her face: "I am faithful to you and do not besmirch your honorable name, which you love so, you are clever and do not trouble me – we are quits."

I assured myself that love had long since gone out in me and that my work had absorbed me too deeply for me to think seriously about my relations with my wife. But alas – I only thought so. When my wife talked loudly downstairs, I listened attentively to her voice, though not a single word could be made out. When she played the piano downstairs, I would stand up and listen. When her carriage or her saddle horse was brought round, I would go to the window and wait for her to come out of the house, then watch as she got into the carriage or onto the horse and drove out of the yard. I felt that something was not right within my soul, and I was afraid that the expression of my eyes and face might betray me. I would follow my wife with my eyes and then wait for her return, so as to see her face, her shoulders, her fur coat, her hat once more in the window; I felt bored, sad, endlessly sorry for something, and I wanted, in her absence, to walk through her rooms, and I wanted the question that my wife and I had failed to settle, because our characters did not suit each other, to be settled of its own accord, the sooner the better, by the natural course of things – that is, for this handsome twenty-seven-year-old woman to grow old the sooner, and for my own head to turn gray and bald the sooner.

Once, during breakfast, my steward Vladimir Prohoritch reported to me that the Pestrovo peasants had already begun stripping the thatch from their roofs to feed their livestock; Marya Gerasimovna looked at me with fear and bewilderment.

"What can I do?" I said to her. "One man in the field is no warrior, and I have never in my life felt such loneliness as now. I would give a great deal to find, in the whole district, even one man I could rely on."

"Why not invite Ivan Ivanitch," said Marya Gerasimovna.

"Why, indeed!" I remembered, and rejoiced. "That’s the idea! C’est raison" – that is sensible (French) – I sang, going off to my study to write a letter to Ivan Ivanitch, – "C’est raison, c’est raison..."

II

Of the whole mass of acquaintances who, once, twenty-five to thirty-five years ago, used to drink in this house, eat, come dressed up for the holidays, fall in love, marry, and bore everyone with talk of their splendid hounds and horses, only one remained alive: Ivan Ivanitch Bragin. At one time he had been very active, talkative, loud, and given to falling in love, and was famous for his extreme views and for a certain particular expression of the face that charmed not only women but men as well; now, though, he had grown quite old, had run to fat, and was living out his days without views and without expression. He arrived the day after receiving my letter, in the evening, just as the samovar had been brought into the dining room and little Marya Gerasimovna was cutting a lemon.

"Delighted to see you, my friend," I said cheerfully, going to meet him. "And you keep getting stouter!"

"That’s not stoutness, that’s swelling," he answered. "The bees stung me."

With the familiarity of a man who laughs at his own girth, he took me by the waist with both hands and laid his soft, big head, its hair combed forward onto the brow in the Ukrainian fashion, against my chest, and burst into a thin, old man’s laugh.

"And you keep getting younger!" he brought out through his laughter. "I don’t know what dye you use on your hair and beard, I wish they’d tell me." Wheezing and out of breath, he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek. "I wish they’d tell me..." he repeated. "But surely, my dear fellow, you’re not forty yet?"

"Ha, already forty-six!" I laughed.

Ivan Ivanitch smelled of tallow candles and kitchen smoke, and it suited him. His large, swollen, unwieldy body was buttoned into a long frock coat, resembling a coachman’s caftan, with hooks and loops instead of buttons and a high waist, and it would have been strange if he had smelled, say, of eau de cologne. In his double, long-unshaven, bluish chin, bristly as a burdock, in his bulging eyes, in his shortness of breath, and in the whole clumsy, unkempt figure, voice, laugh, and manner of speech, it was hard to recognize that trim, engaging talker whom the district husbands had once been jealous of on their wives’ account.

"I need you very much, my friend," I said, once we were seated in the dining room drinking tea. "I want to organize some sort of relief for the starving, and I don’t know how to go about it. So perhaps you would be so kind as to advise me on something."

"Yes, yes, yes..." said Ivan Ivanitch, sighing. "So, so, so..."

"I would not trouble you, but truly, my dear fellow, there is positively no one else to turn to. You know what people are like here."

"So, so, so... Yes..."

I thought: a serious, businesslike conference lay ahead, one in which anyone might take part, regardless of position or personal relations, so should I not invite Natalya Gavrilovna?

"Tres faciunt collegium!" – three make a council (Latin) – I said cheerfully. "What if we were to invite Natalya Gavrilovna? What do you think? Fenya," I turned to the maid, "ask Natalya Gavrilovna to be so good as to come up to us, this very minute if possible. Tell her: a very important matter."

A little later Natalya Gavrilovna came in. I rose to meet her and said:

"Forgive us, Natalie, for troubling you. We are discussing here a very important matter, and the happy thought occurred to us of availing ourselves of your good counsel, which you will not refuse us. Sit down, I beg you."

Ivan Ivanitch kissed Natalya Gavrilovna’s hand, and she kissed the top of his head, and then, once everyone had sat down at the table, he, gazing at her tearfully and blissfully, reached toward her and kissed her hand again. She was dressed in black and carefully done up, and there was a scent of fresh perfume about her: evidently she was getting ready to go out, or expecting someone. Coming into the dining room, she simply and amicably held out her hand to me and smiled at me just as amiably as at Ivan Ivanitch – I liked that; but as she talked she moved her fingers, leaned back sharply and often against the back of her chair, and spoke quickly, and this unevenness in her speech and movements irritated me and reminded me of her native city – Odessa, where the society of men and women had once worn me out with its bad tone.

"I want to do something for the starving," I began, and after a short pause continued: "Money, of course, is a great thing, but to limit oneself to a mere monetary donation and rest content with that would be to buy oneself off from the chief concerns. Help must consist of money, but chiefly of a correct and serious organization. Let us think, gentlemen, and do something."

Natalya Gavrilovna looked at me questioningly and shrugged her shoulders, as though wishing to say: "What do I know about it?"

"Yes, yes, the famine..." Ivan Ivanitch muttered. "Indeed... Yes..."

"The situation is serious," I said, "and help is needed at the earliest. I suppose the first point of whatever rules we are to work out ought to be precisely speed. As in the military: a quick eye, speed, and drive."

"Yes, speed..." Ivan Ivanitch brought out sleepily and limply, as though dropping off. "Only there’s nothing to be done. The land didn’t yield, so there... no eye and no drive will get anywhere with it... An act of nature... You can’t go against God and fate..."

"Yes, but man has been given a head precisely in order to struggle against the elements."

"Eh? Yes... That’s so, so... Yes."

Ivan Ivanitch sneezed into his handkerchief, revived, and, as though he had only just woken up, looked round at me and my wife.

"Nothing came up for me either," he laughed in his thin voice, winking slyly, as though this were in fact very funny. "No money, no bread, but the yard’s full of laborers, like Count Sheremetyev’s. I’d like to chase them off by the scruff, but somehow I feel sorry for them."

Natalya Gavrilovna laughed and began questioning Ivan Ivanitch about his household affairs. Her presence gave me a pleasure I had not felt in a long time, and I was afraid to look at her lest my glance somehow betray my hidden feeling. Our relations were such that this feeling might have seemed unexpected and absurd. My wife talked with Ivan Ivanitch and laughed, not in the least embarrassed that she was in my house and that I was not laughing.

"Well, gentlemen, what shall we do?" I asked, having waited out a pause. "I suppose that first of all, as quickly as possible, we ought to open a subscription. We, Natalie, will write to our friends in the capital and in Odessa and draw them into contributing. Once we have gathered some small sum, we will set about buying bread and fodder for the livestock, and you, Ivan Ivanitch, will be so good as to take charge of distributing the relief. Relying in every respect on the tact and good management proper to you, we for our part will allow ourselves only to express the wish that, before handing out relief, you acquaint yourself in detail, on the spot, with all the circumstances of the case, and also, which is very important, keep watch that bread be given only to those in genuine need, but by no means to drunkards, idlers, or kulaks."

"Yes, yes, yes..." Ivan Ivanitch muttered. "So, so, so..."

"Well, there’s no cooking up any porridge with this slobbering old ruin," I thought, and felt irritation rising in me.

"I’m sick of these starving people, the devil take them! And they’re forever taking offense, forever taking offense," Ivan Ivanitch went on, sucking at the lemon rind. "The hungry take offense at the well-fed. And those who have bread take offense at the hungry. Yes... Hunger makes a man go wild, go stupid, turns him savage. Hunger’s no joke. A hungry man will talk rough, and steal, and maybe worse besides... One has to understand."

Ivan Ivanitch choked on his tea, coughed, and shook all over with a creaking, strangled laugh.

"There was a business near Po – Poltava!" he brought out, waving both hands against the laughter and coughing that kept him from speaking. "There was a business near Poltava! Some three years after the Emancipation, when there was famine here in two districts, the late Fyodor Fyodoritch, God rest him, comes to me and calls me to his place. Come along, come along, he says – pestered me like a knife to the throat. Why not? Let’s go, I say. Well, off we went. It was toward evening, snow was falling lightly. We’re driving up to his estate already at night, and suddenly out of the woods – bang! and again – bang! Ah, you devil... I jumped out of the sledge, I look – in the dark a man’s running at me, sinking in the snow up to his knees; I grabbed him round the shoulders with my arm, just so, and knocked the gun clean out of his hands, then another one turned up, and I caught him one across the back of the head, so that he grunted and went nose-first into the snow – I was a strong fellow then, a heavy hand; I dealt with the two of them, and I look, and Fedya’s already sitting astride a third. We took three young fellows prisoner, well, we tied their hands behind them, so they couldn’t do themselves or us any harm, and led the fools into the kitchen. And it makes you angry, and it’s shameful to look at them: the peasants were men we knew, and good people too, one felt sorry for them. Gone quite out of their wits with fright. One weeps and begs forgiveness, another glares like a wild beast and curses, a third gets down on his knees and prays to God. And I say to Fedya: don’t hold it against them, let the rascals go! He fed them, gave each a pood of flour, and let them go: off with you, then! So that’s how it was... The Kingdom of Heaven, eternal rest to him! He understood and didn’t take offense, but there were those who did, and how many people they ruined! Yes... Over one wretched pot-house at Klyuchki, eleven men were sent to the penal battalions. Yes... And now, look, it’s just the same... On Thursday the investigator Anisyin stayed the night with me, and he was telling me about some landowner or other... Yes... In the night they broke through the wall of the landowner’s barn and dragged out twenty sacks of rye. When the landowner learned in the morning what a crime had happened to him, he fired off a telegram to the governor at once, then another to the public prosecutor, a third to the police captain, a fourth to the investigator... You know how they fear a man who likes to make trouble... The authorities got into a flap, and the whole business started up. They searched two villages."

"Excuse me, Ivan Ivanitch," I said. "It was twenty sacks of rye stolen from me, and it was I who telegraphed the governor. I telegraphed Petersburg too. But it was not at all out of a love of making trouble, as you were pleased to put it, and not because I took offense. In any matter I look first of all at the question of principle. Whether it is the well-fed man or the hungry one who steals is a matter of indifference to the law."

"Yes, yes..." Ivan Ivanitch muttered, embarrassed. "Of course... So, yes..."

Natalya Gavrilovna flushed.

"There are people..." she said, and stopped; she made an effort to appear indifferent, but could not sustain it and looked me in the eyes with a hatred I knew all too well. "There are people," she said, "for whom hunger and human grief exist only so that they may vent on them their own base, petty character."

I was embarrassed and shrugged my shoulders.

"I mean it in general," she went on. "There are people entirely indifferent, devoid of any feeling of compassion, who nevertheless do not walk past human grief, but meddle in it out of fear that things might get along without them. For their vanity nothing is sacred."

"There are people," I said gently, "who possess an angelic character, but who express their splendid thoughts in such a form that it becomes difficult to tell an angel from a woman trading in the Odessa bazaar."

I confess this was unfortunately put.

My wife looked at me as though it cost her a great effort to hold her tongue. Her sudden outburst, and then her ill-timed eloquence on the subject of my wish to help the starving, were, to say the least, out of place; when I had invited her upstairs, I had expected quite a different attitude, both toward myself and toward my intentions. I cannot say definitely what I had expected, but the expectation had pleasantly stirred me. Now I saw that to go on talking of the starving would be painful and, perhaps, not very wise.

"Yes..." Ivan Ivanitch muttered, beside the point. "That merchant Burov has some four hundred thousand, maybe more. I said to him: ’Come now, namesake, hand over a hundred or two hundred thousand to the starving. You’ll die all the same, you can’t take it with you to the next world.’ Took offense. But die one must, after all. Death’s no joke either."

Silence fell again.

"So then, it seems, there is nothing for it but to make peace with loneliness," I sighed. "One man in the field is no warrior. Well, no matter! I shall try to wage war alone. Perhaps the war on hunger will go better than the war on indifference."

"They’re waiting for me downstairs," said Natalya Gavrilovna. She rose from the table and turned to Ivan Ivanitch: "So you’ll come down to me for a moment? I’m not saying goodbye to you."

And she went out.

Ivan Ivanitch was already on his seventh glass, gasping, smacking his lips, sucking now at his mustache, now at the lemon rind. He mumbled something sleepily and limply, and I did not listen and waited for him to leave. At last, with an air as though he had come to me for no other purpose than to drink his fill of tea, he rose and began to take his leave. Seeing him off, I said:

"So then, you have given me no advice at all."

"Eh? I’m a raw sort of fellow, gone dull," he answered. "What advice have I got? And you worry for nothing... I don’t know, truly, why you worry so? Don’t worry, my dear fellow! There’s nothing to it at all, I swear before God..." he whispered tenderly and sincerely, soothing me as one soothes a child. "Nothing at all, I swear!"

"How can there be nothing? The peasants are stripping the roofs off their huts, and there’s talk somewhere of typhus already."

"Well, what of it? Next year the harvest will come in, there’ll be new roofs, and if we die of typhus, other people will live after us. Everyone has to die anyway, sooner or later. Don’t worry, handsome!"

"I cannot help worrying," I said, irritated.

We were standing in the dimly lit front hall. Ivan Ivanych suddenly took me by the elbow and, evidently about to say something very important, looked at me in silence for half a minute.

"Pavel Andreitch!" he said quietly, and on his fat, frozen face and in his dark eyes there suddenly flared up that particular expression he had once been famous for, genuinely captivating. "Pavel Andreitch, let me tell you as a friend: change your disposition! It’s hard, being around you! My dear fellow, it’s hard!"

He looked intently into my face; the fine expression died out, his gaze grew dull, and he began mumbling limply, wheezing:

"Yes, yes... forgive an old man... nonsense... Yes..." Making his heavy way down the stairs, spreading his arms for balance and showing me his huge fat back and red neck, he gave the unpleasant impression of some kind of crab.

"You ought to go off somewhere, your excellency," he muttered. "To Petersburg, or abroad... Why live here and waste the golden years? You’re a young man, healthy, rich... Yes... Eh, if I were younger, I’d bolt like a hare, and only the wind would whistle in my ears!"

III

My wife’s outburst brought back to mind our married life together. In the old days, after every such flare-up we had always been drawn irresistibly to each other; we would come together and set off all the dynamite that had accumulated in our souls over time. And now, after Ivan Ivanych left, I felt strongly drawn to my wife. I wanted to go downstairs and tell her that her behavior at tea had insulted me, that she was cruel, petty, and that with her shopkeeper’s mind she had never once risen to understanding what I say and what I do. I walked back and forth through the rooms for a long while, working out what I would say to her, and guessing what she would answer.

That restlessness which had been wearing me down of late, on this evening after Ivan Ivanych left, I felt in some particularly grating form. I could neither sit nor stand, but walked and walked, keeping only to the lit rooms and staying close to the one where Marya Gerasimovna sat. It was a feeling very much like the one I had once experienced on the North Sea during a storm, when everyone was afraid the ship, carrying no cargo or ballast, would capsize. And that evening I understood that my restlessness was not disappointment, as I had thought before, but something else — though what exactly, I did not understand, and this irritated me all the more.

"I’ll go to her," I decided. "And I can invent a pretext. I’ll say I need Ivan Ivanych, that’s all."

I went downstairs and, unhurried, crossed the front hall and the drawing room over the carpets. Ivan Ivanych was sitting in the parlor on the sofa, drinking tea again and mumbling. My wife stood facing him, holding on to the back of an armchair. On her face was that quiet, sweet, submissive expression with which people listen to holy fools and simpletons, when they suppose some special, hidden meaning in trivial words and mutterings. In my wife’s expression and pose there seemed to me something psychopathic, or monastic, and her rooms, with their old-fashioned furniture, the sleeping birds in cages, and the smell of geranium — low-ceilinged, half-dark, very warm — reminded me of the chambers of an abbess, or of some pious old general’s widow.

I went into the parlor. My wife showed neither surprise nor confusion, and looked at me sternly and calmly, as if she had known I would come.

"Forgive me," I said gently. "I’m very glad, Ivan Ivanych, that you haven’t left yet. I forgot to ask you upstairs — do you happen to know the name and patronymic of the chairman of our zemstvo board?"

"Andrei Stanislavovich. Yes..."

"Merci," I said, and took out my notebook and wrote it down.

A silence fell, during which my wife and Ivan Ivanych were, no doubt, waiting for me to leave; my wife did not believe I actually needed the chairman of the zemstvo board — I could see that in her eyes.

"Well, I’ll be off, my beauty," Ivan Ivanych mumbled, once I had paced up and down the parlor a couple of times and then sat down by the fireplace.

"No," Natalya Gavrilovna said quickly, touching his arm. "Another quarter of an hour... Please."

Evidently she did not want to be left alone with me, without witnesses.

"Well then, I’ll wait a quarter of an hour too," I thought.

"Ah, it’s snowing!" I said, standing up and looking out the window. "Splendid snow! Ivan Ivanych," I went on, pacing about the parlor, "I’m quite sorry I’m not a hunter. Imagine the pleasure of chasing hares and wolves through snow like that!"

My wife, standing still in one spot without turning her head, only glancing sideways, followed my movements; she wore the sort of expression as if I were hiding a sharp knife or a revolver in my pocket.

"Ivan Ivanych, take me hunting sometime," I went on gently. "I’ll be very, very grateful to you."

At that moment a guest came into the parlor. He was a gentleman unknown to me, about forty, tall, thickset, bald, with a large light-brown beard and small eyes. Judging by his rumpled, baggy clothes and his manners, I took him for a sexton or a schoolteacher, but my wife introduced him to me as Doctor Sobol.

"Very, very glad to make your acquaintance!" the doctor said loudly, in a tenor voice, shaking my hand firmly and smiling artlessly. "Very glad!"

He sat down at the table, took a glass of tea, and said loudly:

"You wouldn’t happen to have any rum or cognac? Be so kind, Olya," he said, turning to the maid, "have a look in the little cupboard, I’ve gotten chilled."

I sat back down by the fireplace, watched, listened, and now and then put in some word to the general conversation. My wife smiled amiably at her guests and kept a sharp eye on me, as though on some wild animal; my presence weighed on her, and this stirred up in me jealousy, vexation, and a stubborn wish to cause her pain. My wife, I thought, these cozy rooms, this spot by the fireplace — they are mine, have long been mine. But for some reason some doddering Ivan Ivanych or Sobol has more right to them than I do. Now I was seeing my wife not through a window but close beside me, in her ordinary domestic surroundings, the very thing I now lack in my declining years, and despite her hatred of me, I miss her, the way I once missed my mother and my nurse as a child, and I feel that now, in my advancing age, I love her more purely and more highly than I loved her before — and that is why I want to go up to her, press my heel hard on her toes, cause her pain, and smile while doing it.

"Monsieur Yenot," I said, turning to the doctor, "how many hospitals do we have in the district?"

"Sobol..." my wife corrected.

"Two, sir," Sobol answered.

"And how many dead fall to the share of each hospital every year?"

"Pavel Andreitch, I need to speak with you," my wife said to me.

She excused herself to the guests and went out into the next room. I got up and followed her.

"You will go straight back up to your rooms this instant," she said.

"You are ill-bred," I said.

"You will go straight back up to your rooms this instant," she repeated sharply, and looked into my face with hatred.

She was standing so close that if I had leaned forward a little, my beard would have touched her face.

"But what is it?" I said. "What have I suddenly done wrong?"

Her chin trembled, she hurriedly wiped her eyes, glanced briefly at herself in the mirror, and whispered:

"The old story is starting up again. You, of course, won’t leave. Well, as you like. I’ll leave myself, and you can stay."

She, with a resolute face, and I, shrugging my shoulders and trying to smile mockingly, went back into the parlor. New guests were already there: some elderly lady and a young man in spectacles. Without greeting the new arrivals or taking leave of the old ones, I went off to my own rooms.

After what had happened at tea and then downstairs, it became clear to me that our "domestic happiness," which we had already begun to forget these last two years, was being renewed again on account of some trivial, senseless causes, and that neither I nor my wife could stop it now, and that tomorrow or the day after, following on the outburst of hatred, as I could judge from the experience of past years, something vile was bound to happen that would overturn the whole order of our life. So then, in these two years, I thought, starting to pace through my rooms, we had not grown any wiser, colder, or calmer. So then there would again be tears, shouting, curses, trunks packed, abroad, and then the constant sickly fear that she was there, abroad, disgracing me with some dandy, an Italian or a Russian, again the refusal of a passport, letters, a round, hollow loneliness, missing her, and then in five years old age, gray hair... I walked about imagining what could not be, how she, beautiful, having filled out a little, was embracing some man I did not know... Already certain that this was bound to happen, why, I asked myself in despair, why in one of our old quarrels long past had I not given her a divorce, or why had she not left me then, altogether, forever? Then there would be none of this longing for her now, this hatred, this anxiety, and I would be living out my days in peace, working, thinking of nothing...

A carriage with two lamps drove into the yard, then wide sledges with a troika. My wife was evidently having an evening party.

Until midnight it was quiet downstairs, and I heard nothing, but at midnight chairs began to be moved, dishes clattered. Supper, then. Then chairs were moved again, and from beneath the floor I seemed to hear a noise; they were shouting, it seemed, hurrah. Marya Gerasimovna was already asleep, and in the whole upper floor there was only myself; in the parlor the portraits of my ancestors, worthless and cruel people, looked down at me from the walls, and in the study the reflection of my lamp in the window blinked at me unpleasantly. And with an envious, jealous feeling toward whatever was going on downstairs, I listened and thought: "I am the master here; if I wanted to, I could scatter the whole respectable company in a single minute." But I knew this was nonsense, that no one could be scattered, and that the word "master" meant nothing. One can consider oneself the master as much as one likes, married, rich, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and at the same time not know what any of it means.

After supper someone downstairs began to sing in a tenor voice.

"After all, nothing in particular has happened!" I assured myself. "Why am I so agitated? Tomorrow I won’t go down to her, that’s all — and that will be the end of our quarrel."

At a quarter past one I went to bed.

"Have the guests downstairs already left?" I asked Alexei, who was undressing me.

"Just so, they’ve left."

"And why were they shouting hurrah?"

"Alexei Dmitritch Mahonov made a donation to the starving of a thousand poods of flour and a thousand roubles in money. And the old lady — I don’t know her name — promised to set up a soup kitchen on her estate for a hundred and fifty people. Thank God, sir... From Natalya Gavrilovna came this decision: all the gentry are to gather here every Friday."

"To gather here, downstairs?"

"Just so. Before supper they read out a paper: from August up to this day Natalya Gavrilovna has collected some eight thousand in money, not counting grain. Thank God, sir... The way I see it, your excellency, if the mistress troubles herself for the saving of her soul, she’ll collect a great deal. There’s rich folk here about."

Having dismissed Alexei, I put out the light and pulled the covers over my head.

"Really, why am I so anxious?" I thought. "What force draws me to the starving, like a moth to a flame? I don’t know them, don’t understand them, have never seen them and don’t love them. Where does this restlessness come from, then?"

I suddenly crossed myself under the blanket.

"But what do you make of her?" I said to myself, thinking of my wife. "A whole committee in this house, kept secret from me. Why secret? Why a conspiracy? What have I done to them?"

Ivan Ivanych is right: I need to leave!

I woke the next day with a firm resolve — to leave as soon as possible. The details of the previous day — the conversation over tea, my wife, Sobol, the supper, my fears — wore on me, and I was glad I would soon be rid of the surroundings that reminded me of it all. While I was drinking my coffee, my steward Vladimir Prohorych gave me a long report on various matters. He had saved the most pleasant item for the end.

"The thieves who stole our rye from us have been found," he reported, smiling. "Yesterday the investigator arrested three peasants in Pestrovo."

"Get out!" I shouted at him, seized with terrible anger, and for no reason at all grabbed the basket of biscuits and threw it on the floor.

IV

After breakfast I rubbed my hands together and thought: I ought to go to my wife and announce my departure to her. What for? Who needs it? No one needs it, I answered myself, but then why not announce it, especially since it will bring her nothing but pleasure? Besides, to leave after yesterday’s quarrel without saying a single word to her would not be quite tactful: she might think I had taken fright at her, and, perhaps, the thought that she had driven me out of my own house would weigh on her. Nor would it hurt to tell her that I am donating five thousand, and to give her a few pieces of advice about the organization of the relief, and to warn her that her inexperience in so complicated and weighty a matter might lead to the most lamentable results. In a word, I was drawn to my wife, and while I was inventing various pretexts for going to her, a firm conviction had already settled in me that I would most certainly do it.

When I went to her, it was still light and the lamps had not yet been lit. She was sitting in her sitting room, which lay between the parlor and the bedroom, and, bent low over the table, was writing something quickly. Seeing me, she gave a start, rose from behind the table, and stood in such a pose as though she were shielding her papers from me.

"Forgive me, I’ll only be a moment," I said, and, I don’t know why, felt embarrassed. "I’ve learned by chance that you, Natalie, are organizing relief for the starving."

"Yes, I am organizing it. But that is my affair," she answered.

"Yes, it is your affair," I said gently. "I am glad of it, because it entirely answers to my own intentions. I am asking your permission to take part in it."

"Forgive me, I cannot allow you that," she answered, looking away.

"But why not, Natalie?" I asked quietly. "Why not? I too am well fed, and I too want to help the starving."

"I don’t know what business it is of yours," she said, smiling contemptuously and shrugging one shoulder. "Nobody is asking you."

"And nobody is asking you either, and yet you have set up a whole committee in my house!" I said.

"I am asked, but you, believe me, will never be asked by anyone. Go and help somewhere where they don’t know you."

"For God’s sake, don’t speak to me in that tone."

I tried to be gentle, and with all the strength of my soul I entreated myself not to lose my composure. In the first minutes it was pleasant to me to be near my wife. Something soft, domestic, young, feminine, exquisite in the highest degree, was breathing on me – precisely what was so lacking on my floor of the house, and in my life generally. My wife was wearing a wrapper of pink flannel – it made her look much younger, and gave a softness to her quick, sometimes abrupt movements. Her fine dark hair, the mere sight of which had once roused passion in me, had, from her having sat bent over for so long, come loose from its pins and fallen into disorder, but this only made it seem to me still more luxuriant and rich. And yet all this is banal to the point of triteness. Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps not even good-looking, not elegant, but this was my wife, with whom I had once lived and with whom I would still be living to this day, had it not been for her unfortunate character; this was the one person on the whole earth whom I loved. Now, on the eve of my departure, knowing that I would not even see her through a window any longer, she, even stern and cold, answering me with a proud, contemptuous smile, seemed to me alluring; I was proud of her, and admitted to myself that to leave her was frightening and impossible.

"Pavel Andreitch," she said after a silence, "for two years we have not troubled each other and have lived in peace. Why has it suddenly become so necessary for you to go back to the past? Yesterday you came to insult and humiliate me," she went on, raising her voice, her face flushing and her eyes flashing with hatred, "but restrain yourself, don’t do it, Pavel Andreitch! Tomorrow I will file a petition, they will give me a passport, and I will go, I will go, I will go! I will go into a convent, into a home for widows, into an almshouse..."

"Into a madhouse!" I shouted, unable to restrain myself.

"Even into a madhouse! Better, better!" she went on shouting, her eyes shining. "Today, when I was in Pestrovo, I envied the starving, sick peasant women, because they don’t live with a man like you. They are honest and free, while I, by your gracious leave, am a parasite, wasting away in idleness, eating your bread, spending your money, and paying you with my freedom and with some sort of faithfulness that nobody needs. Because you won’t give me a passport, I am obliged to guard your honest name – which you don’t have."

I ought to have kept silent. Clenching my teeth, I walked quickly out into the drawing room, but at once came back and said:

"I earnestly request that there be no more of these gatherings, conspiracies, and conspiratorial quarters in my house! Into my house I admit only those I am acquainted with, and all that rabble of yours, if they wish to occupy themselves with philanthropy, may look for some other place to do it. I will not allow people in my house to shout hurrah at night from joy that they can exploit a lunatic like you!"

My wife, wringing her hands and giving a long moan, as though her teeth ached, walked quickly, pale, from corner to corner. I waved my hand and went out into the drawing room. I was choking with fury, and at the same time trembling with fear that I would not restrain myself and would do or say something I would repent of for the rest of my life. And I clenched my hands tightly, thinking that by this I was holding myself in check.

Having drunk some water and calmed down a little, I went back to my wife. She was standing in the same posture, as if shielding the table with its papers from me. Tears were slowly running down her cold, pale face. I was silent a moment and said to her with bitterness, but now without anger:

"How little you understand me! How unjust you are to me! I swear on my honor, I came to you with pure motives, with the single wish – to do good!"

"Pavel Andreitch," she said, folding her arms across her chest, and her face took on a suffering, pleading expression, such as frightened, weeping children have when they beg not to be punished. "I know perfectly well you will refuse me, but I ask all the same. Force yourself, do a good deed just once in your life. I beg you, go away from here! That is the only thing you can do for the starving. Go away, and I will forgive you everything, everything!"

"You wrong me needlessly, Natalie," I sighed, feeling suddenly a peculiar rush of humility. "I have already decided to go, but I will not go before I have done something for the starving. That is my duty."

"Ah!" she said quietly, and frowned with impatience. "You can build a fine railway or a bridge, but for the starving you can do nothing. Do understand that!"

"Indeed? Yesterday you reproached me with indifference, and with being devoid of all feeling of compassion. How well you know me!" I said with a smile. "You believe in God, so let God be my witness that I am troubled day and night..."

"I see that you are troubled, but hunger and compassion have nothing to do with it. You are troubled because the starving get along without you, and because the zemstvo and everyone else who is helping have no need of your guidance."

I was silent for a moment, to master my irritation, and said:

"I came to speak with you about business. Sit down. Sit down, please."

She did not sit down.

"Sit down, please!" I repeated, and pointed her to a chair.

She sat down. I sat down too, thought a moment, and said:

"I ask you to take seriously what I am going to say. Listen... Moved by love for your neighbor, you have taken upon yourself the organizing of relief for the starving. Against this, of course, I have nothing to say; I sympathize with you entirely and am ready to give you every assistance, whatever our relations may be. But with all my respect for your mind and heart – and heart," I repeated, "I cannot allow such a difficult, complicated, and responsible matter as the organizing of relief to remain in your hands alone. You are a woman, you are inexperienced, unacquainted with life, too trustful and impulsive. You have surrounded yourself with helpers whom you don’t know at all. I do not exaggerate if I say that, under the conditions named, your activity will inevitably bring about two unfortunate consequences. First, our district will be left entirely without help, and second, for your own mistakes and the mistakes of your helpers you will have to pay not only out of your own pocket, but with your reputation. Losses and oversights, let us suppose, I will cover, but who will give you back your good name? When, in consequence of poor oversight and omissions, a rumor spreads that you – and consequently I – have made two hundred thousand out of this affair, will your helpers come to your aid then?"

She was silent.

"Not out of vanity, as you would put it," I went on, "but simply out of calculation, so that the starving should not be left without help, and you without your good name, I consider it my moral duty to interfere in your affairs."

"Speak more briefly," said my wife.

"You will be so kind," I went on, "as to show me how much has come in up to today on the income side, and how much you have already spent. Then, of every new contribution, in money or in kind, and of every new expenditure, you will inform me daily. You will also give me, Natalie, a list of your helpers. Perhaps they are entirely respectable people, I do not doubt it, but inquiries must nevertheless be made."

She was silent. I got up and walked about the room.

"Well, let us get to work," I said, and sat down at her table.

"Are you serious about this?" she asked, looking at me with bewilderment and fright.

"Natalie, be reasonable!" I said imploringly, seeing by her face that she wanted to protest. "I beg you, trust entirely to my experience and my honesty!"

"I still don’t understand what it is you want!"

"Show me how much you have already collected and how much you have spent."

"I have no secrets. Anyone may look. Here."

On the table lay some five school exercise books, several sheets of covered writing paper, a map of the district, and a quantity of scraps of paper of every size. Dusk was coming on. I lit a candle.

"Excuse me, I can’t see anything here yet," I said, turning over the notebooks. "Where is your record of the receipt of donations in money?"

"That can be seen from the subscription lists."

"Yes, but a proper record is needed as well!" I said, smiling at her naivete. "Where are the letters with which you received the donations, in money and in kind? Pardon me, a small practical hint, Natalie: these letters must be kept. You should number each letter and enter it in a separate record. You should do the same with your own letters. However, I will do all this myself."

"Do it, do it..." she said.

I was very pleased with myself. Carried away by the living, interesting business, the little table, the naive notebooks, and the charm this work in my wife’s company promised me, I was afraid that my wife would suddenly interrupt me and upset everything with some unexpected outburst, and so I hurried, and made an effort with myself not to attach any importance to the fact that her lips were trembling and that she kept looking about her, timid and bewildered, like a trapped animal.

"Here is what, Natalie," I said, without looking at her. "Allow me to take all these papers and notebooks upstairs with me. I will look them over there, get acquainted with them, and tomorrow tell you my opinion. Have you any other papers?" I asked, gathering the notebooks and sheets into bundles.

"Take them, take everything!" said my wife, helping me gather the papers into bundles, and large tears ran down her face. "Take everything! This is all that was left me in life... Take away the last of it."

"Ah, Natalie, Natalie!" I sighed reproachfully. Disorderly, jostling me in the chest with her elbow and brushing my face with her hair, she pulled a drawer out of the table and began throwing papers from it onto the table for me; loose coins scattered onto my knees and onto the floor.

"Take everything..." she said in a hoarse voice. Having thrown out the papers, she moved away from me and, clutching her head with both hands, fell onto the couch. I gathered up the money, put it back in the drawer, and locked it, so as not to lead the servants into temptation; then I took the whole armful of papers and went to my own rooms. Passing my wife, I stopped, and looking at her back and her trembling shoulders, said:

"What a child you still are, Natalie! Ah, ah! Listen, Natalie: when you understand how serious and responsible this business is, you yourself will be the first to thank me. I swear it to you."

Having come to my own rooms, I unhurriedly set to work on the papers. The notebooks were not bound with a cord, there were no numbers on the pages. The entries were made in various hands – evidently anyone who wished ran the notebooks. In the lists of donations in kind, no price was set down for the goods. But allow me – that rye, which now stands at 1 ruble 15 kopecks, may in two months rise in price to 2 rubles 15 kopecks. How can this be done so? Then, "given to A. M. Sobol, 32 rubles." When given? For what given? Where is the supporting document? There is nothing here, and one can make nothing of it. In the event of a legal inquiry, these papers would only obscure the matter.

"How naive she is!" I marveled. "What a child she still is!"

I felt both vexed and amused.

V

My wife had already collected eight thousand; adding my five to it makes thirteen. For a beginning that is very good. The business that had so interested and troubled me is at last in my hands; I am doing what others did not want to do and could not do, I am fulfilling my duty, I am organizing a proper and serious relief effort for the starving.

Everything, it seems, is proceeding in accordance with my intentions and wishes, but why does my restlessness not leave me! For the space of four hours I examined my wife’s papers, clarifying their meaning and correcting the errors, but instead of peace I felt as though some stranger were standing behind me, running a rough palm down my back. What was I lacking? The organization of relief had fallen into reliable hands, the starving would be fed – what more was needed?

This light, four-hour work had for some reason exhausted me, so that I could neither sit bent over nor write. From below there came now and then muffled groans – it was my wife sobbing. My ever-meek, sleepy, and sanctimonious Alexei kept coming up to the table to trim the candles, and glanced at me strangely.

"No, I must go away!" I decided at last, worn out. "Farther away from these magnificent impressions. I will leave tomorrow."

I gathered up the papers and notebooks and went to my wife. When, feeling great weariness and exhaustion, I pressed the papers and notebooks to my chest with both arms, and, passing through the bedroom, caught sight of my trunks, weeping reached me from under the floor...

"You’re a gentleman of the bedchamber?" someone whispered in my ear. "Very pleased. But all the same you’re a reptile."

"All nonsense, nonsense, nonsense..." I muttered, going down the stairs. "Nonsense... And it’s nonsense too, that vanity or ambition is what drives me... What foolishness! Will they give me a star for the starving, or make me a director of a department? Nonsense, nonsense! And before whom, in this village, would I be vain?"

I was tired, terribly tired, and something kept whispering in my ear: "Very pleased. But all the same you’re a reptile." For some reason I remembered a line from some old poem I had once known as a child: "How pleasant it is to be kind!"

My wife was lying on the couch in the same posture – face down, clutching her head with both hands. She was weeping. A maid stood near her with a frightened, bewildered face. I sent the maid away, laid the papers on the table, thought a moment, and said:

"Here is your chancellery, Natalie. Everything is in order, everything is excellent, and I am very pleased. Tomorrow I am leaving."

She went on weeping. I went out into the drawing room and sat down there in the dark. My wife’s sobs, her sighs, seemed to accuse me of something, and, to justify myself, I went back over our whole quarrel, beginning with the unlucky idea that had come into my head of inviting my wife to the conference, and ending with the notebooks and this weeping. This was an ordinary attack of our marital hatred, ugly and senseless, of which there had been many since our wedding, but what did the starving have to do with it? How could it have happened that they fell under our hot hand? It was as if we, chasing each other, had accidentally run into a sanctuary and started a fight there.

"Natalie," I say quietly from the drawing room, "enough, enough!"

To put an end to the weeping and to this tormenting state, one must go to one’s wife and comfort her, be gentle with her, or apologize; but how is it to be done, so that she will believe me? How can I convince a wild duckling, living in captivity and hating me, that it is dear to me and that I feel for its suffering? I had never known my wife, and therefore had never known what or how to speak with her about. Her outward appearance I knew well and valued at its worth, but her inner, moral world, her mind, her outlook on life, the frequent changes in her mood, her eyes full of hatred, her haughtiness, the wide reading with which she sometimes astonished me, or, for instance, that nun-like expression, as yesterday – all this was unknown and incomprehensible to me. When, in my clashes with her, I tried to determine what sort of person she was, my psychology went no further than such definitions as flighty, frivolous, an unfortunate character, feminine logic – and for me that seemed entirely sufficient. But now, while she was weeping, I had a passionate desire to know more.

The crying stopped. I went to my wife. She was sitting on the couch, her head propped on both hands, staring at the fire, thoughtful and still.

"I’m leaving tomorrow morning," I said.

She said nothing. I walked across the room, sighed, and said:

"Natalie, when you asked me to leave, you said you’d forgive me everything. So you consider me at fault before you. Please, calmly and in a few words, state exactly what my fault is."

"I’m exhausted. Some other time," said my wife.

"What fault?" I went on. "What have I done? You’ll say: you’re young, you’re beautiful, you want to live, and I’m nearly twice your age and you hate me — but is that a fault? I didn’t force you into marrying me. Well, fine — if you want to live free, go, I’ll give you your freedom. Go, love whomever you like. I’ll even give you a divorce."

"I don’t need that," she said. "You know, I loved you once, and I always thought of myself as older than you. All that is nothing. Your fault isn’t that you’re older and I’m younger, or that I might love someone else if I were free — it’s that you’re an oppressive man, a hater, an egoist."

"I don’t know. Maybe," I said.

"Please, go. You want to gnaw at me until morning, but I’m warning you, I’m quite worn out and I can’t answer you. You gave me your word you’d leave — I’m very grateful for that, and I need nothing more."

My wife wanted me to leave, but it wasn’t easy for me to do it. I felt weak, and I was afraid of my large, comfortless, sickening rooms. As a child, whenever something hurt, I used to press myself against my mother or my nurse, and burying my face in the folds of her warm dress, it seemed to me I was hiding from the pain. So now, too, it seemed to me that from my own unease I could hide only here, in this small room, near my wife. I sat down and shielded my eyes from the light with my hand. It was quiet.

"What fault?" my wife said after a long silence, looking at me with eyes red and bright from tears. "You’re excellently educated and well brought up, very honest, upright, full of principle — but somehow it always comes out that wherever you go, you bring with you a kind of suffocation, a weight, something deeply insulting, humiliating. You have an honest way of thinking, and so you hate the whole world. You hate believers, because faith is a sign of ignorance and backwardness, and at the same time you hate unbelievers, because they have no faith and no ideals; you hate old people for their backwardness and conservatism, and young people for their freethinking. The interests of the people and of Russia are dear to you, and so you hate the people, because you suspect a thief or a robber in every one of them. You hate everyone. You’re a man of principle, always standing on the ground of the law, and so you’re forever suing your peasants and your neighbors. Twenty sacks of rye were stolen from you, and out of your love of order you complained about the peasants to the governor and every authority there is, and complained about the local authorities to Petersburg. The ground of the law! — my wife said, and laughed. On the strength of the law, and in the interests of morality, you won’t give me a passport. So there’s a morality, and a law, that says a young, healthy, proud woman should spend her life in idleness, in misery, in constant fear, and receive for it room and board from a man she doesn’t love. You know the law admirably, you’re very honest and very upright, you respect marriage and the family — and what has it all come to? In your whole life you haven’t done one good deed, everyone hates you, you’re at odds with everyone, and in the seven years you’ve been married you haven’t lived seven months with your wife. You’ve had no wife, and I’ve had no husband. It’s impossible to live with a man like you, there’s no strength for it. In the first years I was afraid of you, and now I’m ashamed of you. And so the best years went by. Fighting with you, I ruined my own character — I became sharp, coarse, timid, suspicious... Ah, what’s the use talking? As if you’d ever want to understand. Go, with God’s blessing."

My wife lay back on the couch and grew thoughtful.

"And what a wonderful, enviable life it could have been!" she said quietly, looking pensively into the fire. "What a life! There’s no getting it back now."

Whoever has lived through a winter in the country and knows those long, dull, silent evenings, when even the dogs stop barking out of boredom and the clock itself seems to grow weary of ticking, and whoever, on such evenings, has been troubled by an awakened conscience and paced restlessly from place to place, wanting now to drown it out, now to puzzle it through — that person will understand what relief and pleasure a woman’s voice gave me, sounding in that small, cozy room and telling me that I was a bad man. I did not understand what my conscience wanted, and my wife, like an interpreter, explained the sense of my unease to me in her own womanly but lucid way. How often before, in moments of great disquiet, I had guessed that the whole secret lay not with the starving, but in the fact that I was not the kind of man I ought to be.

My wife rose with an effort and came over to me.

"Pavel Andreitch," she said, smiling sadly. "Forgive me, I don’t believe you — you won’t leave. But I’ll ask you once more. Call it" — she pointed to her papers — "self-deception, women’s logic, a mistake, whatever you like, but don’t stand in my way. It’s all that’s left me in life." She turned away and fell silent. "Before, I had nothing at all. I spent my youth fighting with you. Now I’ve seized on this, and I’ve come back to life — I’m happy. It seems to me this is how I’ve found a way to justify my existence."

"Natalie, you’re a good woman, a woman of ideas," I said, gazing at my wife in something like rapture, "and everything you do and say is fine and intelligent."

To hide my agitation, I walked across the room.

"Natalie," I went on after a moment, "before I go, I ask you — as a special favor — help me do something for the starving."

"What can I do?" said my wife, and shrugged. "Except perhaps the subscription list?"

She rummaged through her papers and found the subscription list.

"Donate something in money," she said, and by her tone it was plain she set no real store by her own subscription list. "There’s no other way you can take part in this."

I took the list and signed it: A person unnamed — 5000.

There was something not quite right in that "unnamed" — something false, something vain — but I understood this only when I noticed that my wife had flushed deeply and hastily thrust the list into the pile of papers. We were both ashamed. I felt that I absolutely had to smooth over this awkwardness at once, whatever it cost, or else I’d be ashamed of it later, on the train and in Petersburg. But how to smooth it over? What to say?

"I give your work my blessing, Natalie," I said sincerely, "and I wish you every success in it. But allow me, in parting, to give you one piece of advice. Natalie, be more careful with Sobol, and with your helpers generally — don’t put your trust in them. I won’t say they’re dishonest, but they’re not gentry; they’re people without an idea, without ideals or faith, without any purpose in life, without settled principles, and the whole meaning of their existence rests on the ruble. The ruble, the ruble, and the ruble!" I sighed. "They love easy, unearned bread, and in that respect, the more educated they are, the more dangerous they are to the work."

My wife went to the couch and lay down.

"Ideas, ideals," she said, listless and unwilling, "principle, purpose in life, settled principles... Those are the words you always use when you want to belittle someone, or wound them, or say something unpleasant. That’s just what you’re like! If a man with your views and your way with people were let anywhere near this work, it would be ruined on the very first day. It’s time you understood that."

She sighed and was silent a while.

"It’s a coarseness of manner, Pavel Andreitch," she said. "You’re educated, you’re well brought up, but underneath it all — what a Scythian you still are! It’s because you lead such a shut-in, hate-filled life, seeing no one, reading nothing but your engineering books. And yet there are good people in the world, good books! Yes... But I’m tired, and it’s hard for me to talk. I need to sleep."

"Then I’m off, Natalie," I said.

"Yes, yes... Merci..."

I stood there a moment longer and went back upstairs. An hour later — it was half past one — I came back down again, candle in hand, to speak with my wife. I didn’t know what I would say to her, but I felt I had to tell her something important, something necessary. She wasn’t in her sitting room. The door to the bedroom was shut.

"Natalie, are you asleep?" I asked quietly.

There was no answer. I stood by the door a while, sighed, and went into the drawing room. There I sat down on the sofa, blew out the candle, and sat in the dark until dawn.

VI

I set out for the station at ten in the morning. There was no frost, but heavy wet snow was falling from the sky, and an unpleasant damp wind was blowing.

We passed the pond, then the birch grove, and began climbing the hill along the road visible from my windows. I looked back for one last glimpse of my house, but nothing could be seen through the snow. A little farther on, dark huts appeared ahead, as if through a fog. That was Pestrovo.

"If I ever go out of my mind," I thought, "Pestrovo will be to blame. It’s haunting me."

We drove into the village street. Every roof on every hut was whole — not one stripped bare — so my steward had lied to me. A boy is pulling a sledge with a little girl and a baby on it; another boy, three years old, his head wrapped up peasant-woman-style and wearing enormous mittens, is trying to catch falling snowflakes with his tongue and laughing. A cart of brushwood comes toward us, a peasant walking beside it, and it’s impossible to tell whether his hair is gray or his beard is simply white with snow. He recognizes my coachman, smiles, says something to him, and mechanically pulls off his cap to me. Dogs run out of the yards and look my horses over with curiosity. Everything is quiet, ordinary, plain. The resettlers have come back, there’s no bread, in the huts "some are laughing, some are climbing the walls" — but all of this is so plain that it’s hard to believe it’s really happening. No bewildered faces, no voices crying for help, no weeping, no cursing — only stillness all around, the ordinary run of life, children, sledges, dogs with their tails curled up. Neither the children nor the peasant we passed are troubled — so why am I so troubled?

Watching the smiling peasant, the boy in his huge mittens, the huts, remembering my wife, I understood now that there was no disaster that could defeat these people; it seemed to me the air itself already smelled of victory, and I felt proud, ready to shout to them that I was with them too — but the horses carried us out of the village into open country, the snow began to whirl, the wind howled, and I was left alone with my thoughts. Out of that vast multitude of people carrying out the people’s work, life itself had cast me out, as a useless, incompetent, bad man. I was an obstacle, a small particle of the people’s calamity — I had been beaten, thrown out, and now I was hurrying to the station to get away and hide myself in Petersburg, in a hotel on Bolshaya Morskaya.

An hour later we reached the station. A watchman with a badge, and my coachman, carried my trunks into the ladies’ waiting room. Nikanor the coachman, his coat-skirt tucked into his belt, in felt boots, soaked through with snow and pleased that I was leaving, smiled at me warmly and said:

"A good journey to you, Your Excellency. God grant it goes well."

By the way — everyone calls me "Your Excellency," though I’m only a collegiate councillor, a gentleman of the bedchamber. The watchman told me the train hadn’t yet left the neighboring station. There was nothing to do but wait. I went outside and, my head heavy from the sleepless night, my legs barely carrying me from exhaustion, walked without any purpose toward the water tower. There wasn’t a soul around.

"Why am I going?" I asked myself. "What’s waiting for me there? Acquaintances I’ve already left behind, loneliness, restaurant dinners, noise, electric lighting that makes my eyes ache... Where am I going, and why? Why am I going?"

And it felt strange, somehow, to leave without having spoken with my wife. It seemed to me I had left her in uncertainty. Before leaving, I should have told her she was right — that I really am a bad man.

As I turned back from the water tower, the stationmaster appeared in the doorway — the man I’d already complained about twice to his superiors; turning up his coat collar, hunching against the wind and snow, he came up to me and, two fingers raised to his cap, told me with a flustered, strainedly deferential, hate-filled face that the train would be twenty minutes late, and would I care to wait in the warm.

"Thank you," I answered, "but I don’t think I’ll be going, after all. Tell my coachman to wait. I’ll think it over a while longer."

I walked back and forth along the platform, thinking: should I go, or not? By the time the train came in, I had decided not to go. At home, bewilderment awaited me, and probably my wife’s mockery, the gloomy upper floor, and my own unease — but at my age, that was still easier, somehow more homelike, than two days’ travel with strangers to Petersburg, where every minute I would be aware that my life was of no use or need to anyone, and drawing to its close. No — better home, whatever might come of it. I left the station. Going back home in broad daylight, where everyone had been so glad to see me leave, felt awkward. I could spend the rest of the day, until evening, at some neighbor’s house. But whose? With some I was on strained terms, others I didn’t know at all. I thought it over and remembered Ivan Ivanitch.

"Drive to Bragin’s!" I told the coachman, climbing into the sledge.

"It’s a long way," sighed Nikanor. "Twenty-eight versts, maybe, or a full thirty."

"Please, my good man," I said, in a tone as though Nikanor had any right to refuse. "Let’s go, please!"

Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that, properly speaking, they ought to have harnessed Muzhik or Chizhik in the shafts instead of Cherkess, and, hesitating, as if waiting for me to change my mind, gathered up the reins in his mittens, rose a little, thought a moment, and only then swung the whip.

"A whole string of senseless actions," I thought, hiding my face from the snow. "I’ve lost my mind. Well, let it be so..."

At one point, on a very steep, sharp descent, Nikanor cautiously walked the horses down halfway, but midway down they suddenly tore loose and carried us downward at a terrifying speed; he gave a start, threw up his elbows, and shouted in a wild, frantic voice I had never heard from him before:

"Hey! Let’s give the general a ride! Run ’em to death, he’ll buy new ones, my darlings! Look out, we’ll run someone down!"

Only now, with the breath knocked out of me by our extraordinary speed, did I notice that he was thoroughly drunk — he must have had a drink at the station. Down at the bottom of the ravine the ice cracked; a lump of packed, manure-blackened snow, kicked up from the road, struck me painfully in the face. The bolted horses carried us up the next hill at the same headlong speed as down the last, and before I could even shout to Nikanor, my team was already flying along level ground, through an old fir forest, tall firs stretching their white shaggy paws toward me from every side.

"I’ve lost my mind, the coachman’s drunk," I thought. "Good!"

I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He broke into a fit of coughing from laughter, laid his head on my chest, and said what he always says when he meets me:

"And you keep getting younger. I don’t know what dye you use on your hair and beard — I wish they’d give me some."

"I’ve come to return your visit, Ivan Ivanitch," I lied. "Don’t hold it against me — I’m a city man, full of prejudices, I keep track of visits."

"Delighted, my dear fellow! I’ve lost my wits with age, but I still love an honor. Yes."

By his voice and his blissfully smiling face I could tell my visit had flattered him greatly. In the front hall, two peasant women took my fur coat off me, and a peasant in a red shirt hung it on the hook. And when Ivan Ivanitch and I went into his small study, two barefoot little girls were sitting on the floor looking at a bound volume of an illustrated magazine; seeing us, they jumped up and ran off, and at once a tall, thin old woman in spectacles came in, bowed to me gravely, gathered up a cushion from the couch and the magazine from the floor, and went out. From the neighboring rooms came the ceaseless sound of whispering and the patter of bare feet.

"And I’m expecting the doctor for dinner," said Ivan Ivanitch. "He promised to stop by on his way from his rounds. Yes. He dines with me every Wednesday, God grant him health." He leaned toward me and kissed me on the neck. "You’ve come, my dear fellow, so that means you’re not angry," he whispered, wheezing. "Don’t be angry, my dear. Yes. It may sting a little, but there’s no need to be angry. There’s only one thing I ask of God before I die: to live with everyone in peace and harmony, honestly. Yes."

"Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I’ll put my feet up on the armchair," I said, feeling that in my great exhaustion I could hardly be myself; I sank deeper into the couch and stretched my feet out onto the armchair. After the snow and wind my face was burning, and it seemed my whole body was drinking in the warmth and growing weaker from it. "It’s good here," I went on, "warm, soft, cozy... And goose quills," I laughed, glancing at the writing desk, "a sand-shaker for blotting..."

"Eh? Yes, yes... That writing desk, and this little mahogany cabinet, were made for my father by a self-taught joiner, Gleb Butyga, a serf of General Zhukov’s. Yes... A great artist, in his own line."

Listlessly, in the tone of a man dropping off to sleep, he began telling me about the joiner Butyga. I listened. Then Ivan Ivanitch went into the next room to show me a chest of drawers of rosewood, remarkable for its beauty and its cheapness. He rapped his finger on the chest, then drew my attention to a tiled stove with a pattern such as you’d never find anywhere nowadays. And he rapped his finger on the stove too. From the chest, the tiled stove, the armchairs, and the pictures worked in wool and silk on canvas, in sturdy, unlovely frames, there breathed a good-natured, well-fed contentment. When you remembered that all these objects had stood in these very places, in this very order, back when I was still a child and used to come here with my mother for name-day visits, it was hard to believe they could ever cease to exist.

I thought: what a terrible difference between Butyga and me! Butyga, who above all built solidly and soundly and saw that as the main thing, had attached some special significance to human long life; he gave no thought to death, and probably scarcely believed in its possibility. I, on the other hand, when I built my iron and stone bridges, meant to stand for a thousand years, could never keep myself from thinking: "This isn’t lasting. It’s for nothing." If, in time, some perceptive historian of art should happen to set eyes on Butyga’s cabinet and my bridge, he would say: "Here are two remarkable men, each in his own way. Butyga loved people and could not admit the thought that they might die and crumble away, and so, in making his furniture, he had an immortal man in mind; the engineer Asorin, though, loved neither people nor life — even in his happiest moments of creation, thoughts of death, of ruin, of finitude, were never repugnant to him, and so, just look, how paltry, how finite, how timid and pitiful these lines of his are"...

"I only heat these rooms," Ivan Ivanych muttered, showing me through his rooms. "Ever since my wife died and my son was killed in the war, I’ve kept the front rooms shut up. Yes... there..."

He unlocked one door, and I saw a big room with four columns, an old pianoforte, and a heap of peas on the floor; a smell of cold and damp raw material came at us.

"And in the other room there are garden benches," Ivan Ivanych muttered. "No one to dance a mazurka now... I keep it shut."

A noise was heard. Doctor Sobol had arrived. While he rubbed his hands, cold from outside, and put his wet beard in order, I managed to notice, first, that his life was very dull and it pleased him to see Ivan Ivanych and me, and, second, that he was a simple, naive man. He looked at me as though I were delighted to see him and took the greatest interest in him.

"Two nights without sleep!" he said, looking at me naively and combing his hair. "One night with a woman in labor, and the other, the whole night through, bedbugs bit me – I was staying at a peasant’s. I want to sleep, you understand, like the devil himself."

With the air of a man certain this could bring me nothing but pleasure, he took my arm and led me to the dining room. His naive eyes, his rumpled frock coat, his cheap necktie, and the smell of iodoform made an unpleasant impression on me; I felt myself in poor company. When we sat down at the table he poured me vodka, and I drank it, smiling helplessly; he put a piece of ham on my plate – and I ate it obediently.

"Repetitio est mater studiorum," said Sobol, hurrying to drink a second glass. "Would you believe it, from sheer joy at seeing good people, even my sleepiness has gone. I’m a peasant, gone wild out here in the backwoods, coarsened, but I’m still, gentlemen, an educated man, and I tell you honestly: it’s hard living without people!"

They served cold suckling pig with horseradish and sour cream, then a rich, very hot cabbage soup with pork, and buckwheat kasha, from which the steam rose in a column. The doctor went on talking, and I soon became convinced that he was a weak, outwardly disorderly, and unhappy man. Three glasses had made him drunk; he grew unnaturally animated, ate a great deal, grunting and smacking his lips, and by now addressed me in the Italian fashion as "Excellency." Looking at me naively, as though certain I was delighted to see him and to listen to him, he told me that he had long since parted from his wife and gave her three-quarters of his salary; that she lived in town with his children – a boy and a girl, whom he adored; that he loved another woman, a widowed landowner, an educated woman, but saw her rarely, since he was occupied with his work from morning till night and had no free time at all.

"The whole day either at the hospital or out on my rounds," he told me, "and, I swear to you, Excellency, not only do I have no time to go see the woman I love, I don’t even have time to read a book. Ten years without reading anything! Ten years, Excellency! And as for the material side of things, why, ask Ivan Ivanych here: sometimes there’s not even enough for tobacco."

"But then you have moral satisfaction," I said.

"What’s that?" he asked, squinting one eye. "No, let’s rather drink."

I listened to the doctor and, from my usual habit, applied to him my customary measures – materialist, idealist, the ruble, herd instinct, and so on – but not one of these measures fit him even approximately; and, strange thing, as long as I merely listened and looked at him, he was, as a man, entirely clear to me, but the moment I began applying my measures to him, then, for all his frankness and simplicity, he became an extraordinarily complicated, tangled, and incomprehensible nature. Could this man, I asked myself, embezzle other people’s money, abuse someone’s trust, have a taste for easy bread got for nothing? And now this question, once so serious and weighty to me, seemed naive, petty, and coarse.

They served pie, then, remember, with long intervals during which we drank a cordial, they served a sauce of pigeon, something made of giblets, roast suckling pig, duck, partridges, cauliflower, dumplings, curds with milk, kissel, and, at the end, pancakes with jam. At first, especially with the soup and the kasha, I ate with great appetite, but afterward I chewed and swallowed mechanically, smiling helplessly and tasting nothing at all. From the hot soup and from the heat that was in the room my face burned fiercely. Ivan Ivanych and Sobol were red as well.

"To your wife’s health," said Sobol. "She’s fond of me. Tell her the court physician sends his regards."

"A lucky woman, by God!" sighed Ivan Ivanych. "Never fussed, never troubled herself, never bustled about, and it’s turned out that she’s now the first person in the whole district. Nearly the whole business is in her hands, and everyone’s around her: the doctor, the district officials, the ladies. With real people it all comes about somehow of itself. Yes... An apple tree doesn’t have to trouble itself so that apples grow on it – they grow by themselves."

"It’s the indifferent who don’t trouble themselves," I said.

"Eh? Yes, yes..." Ivan Ivanych mumbled, not having heard properly. "That’s true... One ought to be indifferent. So, so... Exactly... Just be honest before God and men, and let the rest go hang."

"Excellency," Sobol said solemnly, "look at the nature around us: stick your nose or your ear out of your collar and it’ll be bitten off; stay out in the field one hour and you’ll be buried in snow. And the village is just the same as it was under Rurik, hasn’t changed a bit, the same Pechenegs and Polovtsians. All we know how to do is burn, go hungry, and wage war with nature every which way. Now what was I saying? Yes! If you think it over properly, look closely and pick apart this whole mess, if you’ll pardon the expression, why, it isn’t life at all, it’s a fire in a theater! Whoever falls down there, or screams in fright and thrashes about, is the first enemy of order. One has to stand up straight and keep both eyes open – and not so much as a peep. There’s no time then for sniveling and fussing over trifles. When you’re up against the elements, you must set the elements against them – be as hard and unyielding as stone. Isn’t that so, grandfather?" he turned to Ivan Ivanych and laughed. "I’m a woman myself, a rag, a sourpuss of sourpusses, and that’s exactly why I can’t stand sourness. I don’t like petty feelings! One man mopes, another funks it, a third will walk in here right now and say: ’Well, look at that, they’ve put away ten courses and gone on talking about the starving!’ Petty and stupid! A fourth will reproach you, Excellency, for being rich. Forgive me, Excellency," he went on loudly, pressing his hand to his heart, "but the fact that you’ve set our investigator to work, that he’s out hunting your thieves day and night – forgive me, that too is petty on your part. I’m drunk, that’s why I say it, but do you understand, it’s petty!"

"Who’s asking him to trouble himself, I don’t understand?" I said, getting up; I suddenly felt unbearably ashamed and hurt, and I started pacing about the table. "Who’s asking him to trouble himself? I never asked for any such thing... The devil take him entirely!"

"Arrested three and let them go. Turned out to be the wrong ones, and now he’s after new ones," Sobol laughed. "Sins!"

"And I never asked him to trouble himself either," I said, ready to weep from agitation. "What’s it all for, what’s it for? Granted, I was wrong, I behaved badly, granted – but why must they go to such trouble to make me even more wrong?"

"There, there, there, there!" said Sobol, calming me. "There! I’m drunk, that’s why I said it. My tongue is my enemy. Well now," he sighed, "we’ve eaten, we’ve had our cordial, and now it’s time to lie down."

He got up from the table, kissed Ivan Ivanych on the head, and, swaying from being so well fed, walked out of the dining room. Ivan Ivanych and I smoked in silence.

"I don’t sleep after dinner, my dear fellow," said Ivan Ivanych, "but you go along to the sitting-room and rest."

I agreed. In the dim, hot-heated room called the sitting-room stood long, wide couches against the walls, sturdy and heavy, the work of the joiner Butyga; on them lay high, soft, white bedding, made up, no doubt, by the old woman in spectacles. On one bed, his face to the back of the couch, without his coat and without his boots, Sobol already lay asleep; another awaited me. I took off my coat, took off my boots, and, yielding to weariness, to the spirit of Butyga that hovered over the quiet sitting-room, and to Sobol’s gentle, affectionate snoring, lay down obediently.

And at once I began to dream of my wife, her room, the stationmaster with his hating face, heaps of snow, a fire in a theater... I dreamed of the peasants who had dragged twenty sacks of rye out of my barn...

"All the same it’s a good thing the investigator let them go," I say.

I wake at the sound of my own voice, look for a moment in perplexity at Sobol’s broad back, at the buckle of his waistcoat and his thick heels, then lie down again and fall asleep.

When I woke the second time it was already dark. Sobol was asleep. My mind was at peace, and I wanted to get home as soon as possible. I dressed and came out of the sitting-room. Ivan Ivanych sat in his study in a big armchair, perfectly motionless, staring at one point, and it was clear that he had been sitting in that same state of stupor the whole time I had slept.

"Good!" I said, yawning. "I have such a feeling as if I’d just woken after breaking the fast at Easter. I’ll be coming to see you often now. Tell me, has my wife ever dined with you?"

"S-she... sh-she does, s-sometimes," Ivan Ivanych mumbled, making an effort to stir. "Last Saturday she dined here. Yes... She’s fond of me."

After a silence I said:

"Do you remember, Ivan Ivanych, you told me I had a bad character and that it was hard to be around me? But what would I have to do for the character to be different?"

"I don’t know, my dear boy... I’m a raw sort of man, gone flabby, I can’t give advice anymore... Yes... And I said it to you back then because I’m fond of you, and I’m fond of your wife, and I was fond of your father... Yes. I’ll be dead soon, and what need have I to hide things from you, or to lie? So I say it plainly: I’m fond of you, deeply fond, but I don’t respect you. No, I don’t respect you."

He turned to me and said in a whisper, gasping for breath:

"It’s impossible to respect you, my dear boy. To look at, you seem a real man enough. Your looks and bearing are like the French President Carnot’s – I saw his picture in the Illustration the other day... yes... You talk grandly, and you’re clever, and you’ve got your rank, one can’t reach up to you with one’s hand, but, my dear boy, your soul isn’t the real thing... There’s no strength in it... Yes."

"A Scythian, in a word," I laughed. "But what about my wife? Tell me something about my wife. You know her better than I do."

I wanted to talk about my wife, but Sobol came in and interrupted.

"Slept, washed up," he said, looking at me naively, "I’ll have a bit of tea with rum, and then home."

VII

It was already past seven in the evening. From the front hall to the porch, besides Ivan Ivanych, we were seen off with lamentations and wishes for every blessing by the women, the old woman in spectacles, the little girls, and the peasant, while around the horses in the dark some people with lanterns stood and wandered about, instructing our drivers how and where best to go, and wishing us a good journey. The horses, the sleighs, and the people were all white with snow.

"Where does he get so many people from?" I asked, as my troika and the doctor’s pair drove at a walk out of the yard.

"They’re all his serfs," said Sobol. "The Emancipation hasn’t reached him yet. Some of them are the old servants living out their days, well, there are various orphans too, who have nowhere else to go; and some of them just stay on by force, you couldn’t drive them off. A queer old man!"

Again the fast driving, the extraordinary voice of the drunken Nikanor, the wind, and the clinging snow, climbing into my eyes, my mouth, into every fold of my fur coat...

"How I’m being carried along!" I think, while my bells ring out together with the doctor’s, the wind whistles, the drivers whoop, and under this frenzied noise I recall all the details of this strange, wild day, unique in my life, and it seems to me that I really have gone out of my mind, or else become another man. As though the man I was before today has already grown foreign to me.

The doctor drove behind and talked the whole time loudly with his driver. Now and then he caught up with me, drove alongside, and, with that same naive certainty that this could give me nothing but pleasure, offered me cigarettes, asked for matches. And then, drawing even with me, he suddenly stood up full length in the sleigh, waved the sleeves of his fur coat, which were nearly twice as long as his arms, and shouted:

"Lash them, Vaska! Race past the thousand-ruble horses! Hey, kittens!"

And the doctor’s "kittens," to the loud, gloating laughter of Sobol and his Vaska, tore off ahead. My Nikanor took offense and reined the troika in, but as soon as the doctor’s bells could no longer be heard, he raised his elbows, whooped, and my troika, as if gone mad, tore off in pursuit. We drove into some village. Lights flashed by, the silhouettes of huts, someone shouted: "Look at them, devils!" We must have galloped some two versts, and still the street stretched on with no end in sight. When we drew level with the doctor and slowed down, he asked for matches and said:

"There, try feeding that street! And there are five such streets here, sir. Stop! Stop!" he shouted. "Turn in at the inn! We need to warm up and rest the horses."

We stopped by the inn.

"In my parish there’s more than one such little village," the doctor was saying, opening the heavy door with its shrieking pulley and letting me go in ahead of him. "In broad daylight you look down such a street and can’t see the end of it, and there are side lanes besides, and all you can do is scratch the back of your neck. Hard to do anything about it."

We went into the "clean" room, where there was a strong smell of tablecloths, and at our entrance a sleepy peasant in a waistcoat and shirt worn outside his trousers jumped up from the bench. Sobol asked for beer, and I for tea.

"Hard to do anything about it," Sobol was saying. "Your wife believes in it, I bow before her and respect her, but I myself don’t believe deeply in it. So long as our relations to the common people bear the character of ordinary charity, as in orphanages or almshouses, so long will we only be dodging, dissembling, deceiving ourselves and nothing more. Our relations ought to be businesslike, founded on calculation, knowledge, and justice. My Vaska has been my laborer his whole life; his crop failed, he’s hungry and sick. If I give him now fifteen kopecks a day, what I want by it is to restore him to his former condition as a laborer, that is, I’m above all guarding my own interests, and yet for some reason I call these fifteen kopecks assistance, relief, a good deed. Now let’s put it this way. By the most modest reckoning, counting seven kopecks a head and five souls to a family, to feed a thousand families would need three hundred and fifty rubles a day. That figure defines our proper, businesslike obligation to those thousand families. And yet we give not three hundred and fifty a day but only ten, and we say this is relief, assistance, that for it your wife and all the rest of us are exceptionally splendid people, and long live humaneness. So it goes, my dear fellow! Ah, if only we talked a little less about humaneness, and did a little more counting, reasoning, and dealt with our obligations conscientiously! How many among us are such humane, sensitive people, who go running honestly from yard to yard with subscription lists, but don’t pay their tailors or their cooks. There’s no logic in our life, that’s what it is! Logic!"

We were silent a while. I worked out a reckoning in my head and said:

"I’ll feed a thousand families for two hundred days. Come by tomorrow to talk it over."

I was pleased that it had come out so simply, and glad that Sobol answered me even more simply:

"All right."

We paid what was owed and left the inn.

"I do love getting mixed up in things like this," said Sobol, getting into the sleigh. "Excellency, lend me a match: I left mine at the inn."

A quarter of an hour later his pair fell behind, and through the noise of the blizzard his bells could no longer be heard. Arriving home, I walked through my rooms, trying to think things over and define my position for myself as clearly as I could; I had not a single phrase, not a single word ready for my wife. My mind would not work.

Having thought of nothing, I went downstairs to my wife. She was standing in her room, still in the same pink dressing gown and in the same posture, as though shielding her papers from me. Her face showed bewilderment and mockery. It was clear that, on learning I had come back, she had prepared herself not to cry, not to plead, not to defend herself as she had the day before, but to laugh at me, to answer me with contempt, and to act decisively. Her face said: if that’s how it is, then farewell.

"Natalie, I haven’t left," I said, "but this isn’t a trick. I’ve gone out of my mind, grown old, fallen ill, become another man – think what you like... From my former self I’ve recoiled in horror, in horror, I despise him and I’m ashamed of him, and the new man who has been in me since yesterday won’t let me leave. Don’t drive me away, Natalie!"

She looked intently into my face, believed me, and uneasiness flashed in her eyes. Enchanted by her presence, warmed by the heat of her room, I muttered as if in delirium, stretching my hands out to her:

"I tell you: besides you, I have no one close to me. Not for one minute have I stopped missing you, and only stubborn pride kept me from admitting it. That past, when we lived as husband and wife, cannot be brought back, and it needn’t be, but make me your servant, take all my fortune and give it away to whomever you like. I’m at peace, Natalie, I am content... I’m at peace."

My wife, who had been staring intently and curiously into my face, suddenly gave a low cry, burst into tears, and ran out into the next room. I went upstairs to my own rooms.

An hour later I was already sitting at my desk, writing my "History of Railways," and the starving did not keep me from doing it. Now I no longer feel any uneasiness. Neither the disorders I saw the other day when I went round the huts in Pestrovo with my wife and Sobol, nor the ominous rumors, nor the mistakes of the people around me, nor my approaching old age – nothing troubles me. Just as flying shells and bullets in war do not keep soldiers from talking about their own affairs, from eating and mending their boots, so the starving do not keep me from sleeping peacefully and attending to my own personal affairs. In my house, in the yard, and far around, work is boiling away that Doctor Sobol calls a "charitable orgy"; my wife often comes in to me and anxiously casts her eyes about my rooms, as if looking for something more to give away to the starving, so as "to find a justification for her life," and I see that, thanks to her, soon nothing will be left of our fortune, and we shall be poor, but this does not trouble me, and I smile at her cheerfully. What will come next, I do not know.