hurried start and ran away. In the parlour I was met by Ivan Semyonitch. 'How's this, my good sir, are you alone?' he asked me, with a queer twitch of his left eyelid. 'Yes, I've come alone,' I stammered. Sidorenko went off into a sudden guffaw and departed into the next room.
I had never been in such a foolish position; it was too devilishly disgusting! But there was nothing to be done. I began walking up and down the room. 'What was the fat pig laughing at?' I wondered. Matrona Semyonovna came into the room with a stocking in her hands and sat down in the window. I began talking to her. Meanwhile tea was brought in. Varia came downstairs, pale and sorrowful. The retired lieutenant made jokes about Kolosov. 'I know,' said he, 'what sort of customer he is; you couldn't tempt him here with lollipops now, I expect!' Varia hurriedly got up and went away. Ivan Semyonitch looked after her and gave a sly whistle. I glanced at him in perplexity. 'Can it be,' I wondered, 'that he knows all about it?' And the lieutenant, as though divining my thoughts, nodded his head affirmatively. Directly after tea I got up and took leave. 'You, my good sir, we shall see again,' observed the lieutenant. I did not say a word in reply…. I began to feel simply frightened of the man.
On the steps a cold and trembling hand clutched at mine; I looked round: Varia. 'I must speak to you,' she whispered. 'Come to-morrow rather earlier, straight into the garden. After dinner papa is asleep; no one will interfere with us.' I pressed her hand without a word, and we parted.
Next day, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I was in Ivan Semyonitch's garden. In the morning I had not seen Kolosov, though he had come to see me. It was a grey autumn day, but soft and warm. Delicate yellow blades of grass nodded over the blanching turf; the nimble tomtits were hopping about the bare dark-brown twigs; some belated larks were hurriedly running about the paths; a hare was creeping cautiously about among the greens; a herd of cattle wandered lazily over the stubble. I found Varia in the garden under the apple-tree on the little garden-seat; she was wearing a dark dress, rather creased; her weary eyes, the dejected droop of her hair, seemed to express genuine suffering.
I sat down beside her. We were both silent. For a long while she kept twisting a twig in her hand; she bent her head, and uttered: 'Andrei Nikolaevitch….' I noticed at once, by the twitching of her lips, that she was getting ready to cry, and began consoling her, assuring her hotly of Andrei's devotion…. She heard me, nodded her head mournfully, articulated some indistinct words, and then was silent but did not cry. The first moments I had dreaded most of all had gone off fairly well. She began little by little to talk about Andrei. 'I know that he does not love me now,' she repeated: 'God be with him! I can't imagine how I am to live without him…. I don't sleep at nights, I keep weeping…. What am I to do! What am I to do! …' Her eyes filled with tears. 'I thought him so kind … and here …' Varia wiped her eyes, cleared her throat, and sat up. 'It seems such a little while ago,' she went on: 'he was reading to me out of Pushkin, sitting with me on this bench….' Varia's naive communicativeness touched me. I listened in silence to her confessions; my soul was slowly filled with a bitter, torturing bliss; I could not take my eyes off that pale face, those long, wet eyelashes, and half-parted, rather parched lips…. And meanwhile I felt … Would you care to hear a slight psychological analysis of my emotions at that moment? in the first place I was tortured by the thought that it was not I that was loved, not I that as making Varia suffer: secondly, I was delighted at her confidence; I knew she would be grateful to me for giving her an opportunity of expressing her sorrow: thirdly, I was inwardly vowing to myself to bring Kolosov and Varia together again, and was deriving consolation from the consciousness of my magnanimity … in the fourth place, I hoped, by my self-sacrifice, to touch Varia's heart; and then … You see I do not spare myself; no, thank God! it's high time!
But from the bell-tower of the monastery near it struck five o'clock; the evening was coming on rapidly. Varia got up hastily, thrust a little note into my hand, and went off towards the house. I overtook her, promised to bring Andrei to her, and stealthily, like a happy lover, crept out by the little gate into the field. On the note was written in an unsteady hand the words: To Andrei Nikolaevitch.
Next day I set off early in the morning to Kolosov's. I'm bound to confess that, although I assured myself that my intentions were not only honourable, but positively brimful of great-hearted self-sacrifice, I was yet conscious of a certain awkwardness, even timidity. I arrived at Kolosov's. There was with him a fellow called Puzyritsin, a former student who had never taken his degree, one of those authors of sensational novels of the so-called 'Moscow' or 'grey' school. Puzyritsin was a very good-natured and shy person, and was always preparing to be an hussar, in spite of his thirty-three years. He belonged to that class of people who feel it absolutely necessary, once in the twenty-four hours, to utter a phrase after the pattern of, 'The beautiful always falls into decay in the flower of its splendour; such is the fate of the beautiful in the world,' in order to smoke his pipe with redoubled zest all the rest of the day in a circle of 'good comrades.' On this account he was called an idealist. Well, so Puzyritsin was sitting with Kolosov reading him some 'fragment.' I began to listen; it was all about a youth, who loves a maiden, kills her, and so on. At last Puzyritsin finished and retreated. His absurd production, solemnly bawling voice, his presence altogether, had put Kolosov into a mood of sarcastic irritability. I felt that I had come at an unlucky moment, but there was nothing to be done for it; without any kind of preface, I handed Andrei Varia's note.
Kolosov looked at me in perplexity, tore open the note, ran his eyes over it, said nothing, but smiled composedly. 'Oh, ho!' he said at last; 'so you've been at Ivan Semyonitch's?'
'Yes, I was there yesterday, alone,' I answered abruptly and resolutely.
'Ah!…' observed Kolosov ironically, and he lighted his pipe. 'Andrei,' I said to him, 'aren't you sorry for her?… If you had seen her tears…'
And I launched into an eloquent description of my visit of the previous day. I was genuinely moved. Kolosov did not speak, and smoked his pipe.
'You sat with her under the apple-tree in the garden,' he said at last. 'I remember in May I, too, used to sit with her on that seat…. The apple-tree was in blossom, the fresh white flowers fell upon us sometimes; I held both Varia's hands… we were happy then…. Now the apple-blossom is over, and the apples on the tree are sour.'
I flew into a passion of noble indignation, began reproaching Andrei for coldness, for cruelty, argued with him that he had no right to abandon a girl so suddenly, after awakening in her a multitude of new emotions; I begged him at least to go and say good-bye to Varia. Kolosov heard me to the end.
'Admitting,' he said to me, when, agitated and exhausted, I flung myself into an armchair, 'that you, as my friend, may be allowed to criticise me. But hear my defence, at least, though…'
Here he paused for a little while and smiled curiously. 'Varia's an excellent girl,' he went on, 'and has done me no wrong whatever…. On the contrary, I am greatly, very greatly indebted to her. I have left off going to see her for a very simple reason—I have left off caring for her….'
'But why? why?' I interrupted him.
'Goodness knows why. While I loved her, I was entirely hers; I never thought of the future, and everything, my whole life, I shared with her … now this passion has died out in me…. Well, you would tell me to be a humbug, to play at being in love, wouldn't you? But what for? from pity for her? If she's a decent girl, she won't care for such charity herself, but if she is glad to be consoled by my … my sympathy, well, she's not good for much!'
Kolosov's carelessly offhand expressions offended me, perhaps, the more because they were applied to the woman with whom I was secretly in love…. I fired up. 'Stop,' I said to him; 'stop! I know why you have given up going to see Varia.'
'Why?'
'Taniusha has forbidden you to.'
In uttering these words, I fancied I was dealing a most cutting blow at Andrei. Taniusha was a very 'easy- going' young lady, black-haired, dark, five-and-twenty, free in her manners, and devilishly clever, a Shtchitov in petticoats. Kolosov quarrelled with her and made it up again half a dozen times in a month. She was passionately fond of him, though sometimes, during their misunderstandings, she would vow and declare that she thirsted for his blood…. And Andrei, too, could not get on without her. Kolosov looked at me, and responded serenely, 'Perhaps so.'
'Not perhaps so,' I shouted, 'but certainly!'
Kolosov at last got sick of my reproaches…. He got up and put on his cap.
'Where are you going?'
'For a walk; you and Puzyritsin have given me a headache between you.'
'You are angry with me?'
'No,' he answered, smiling his sweet smile, and holding out his hand to me.
'Well, anyway, what do you wish me to tell Varia?'
'Eh?' … He thought a little. 'She told you,' he said, 'that we had read Pushkin together…. Remind her of one line of Pushkin's.' 'What line? what line?' I asked impatiently. 'This one:
