He saw the heads of the sleeping Lara and Katenka on the snow-white pillows. The cleanness of the linen, the cleanness of the rooms, the purity of their profiles, merging with the purity of the night, the snow, the stars, and the moon into one equisignificant wave, passed through the doctor’s heart, making him exult and weep from the feeling of the triumphant purity of existence.
“Lord! Lord!” he was ready to whisper. “And all this for me! How have I deserved so much? How have You allowed me to approach You, how have You let me wander onto Your priceless earth, under Your stars, to the feet of this reckless, luckless, unmurmuring, beloved woman?”
It was three o’clock in the morning when Yuri Andreevich raised his eyes from the desk and the paper. From the detached concentration he had gone into over his head, he was returning to himself, to reality, happy, strong, at peace. Suddenly, in the silence of the distant expanses that spread beyond the window, he heard a mournful, dismal sound.
He went into the unlit next room to look out the window from there. During the hours he had spent writing, the windowpanes had become thickly frosted over, and he could see nothing through them. Yuri Andreevich pulled away the rolled-up rug placed at the bottom of the front door to stop the draft, threw his coat over his shoulders, and went out to the porch.
The white fire with which the snowy expanse was enveloped and blazing in the light of the moon blinded him. At first he could not focus his eyes and saw nothing. But after a moment he heard a drawn-out, hollow, whining howl, muffled by the distance, and then he noticed at the edge of the clearing, beyond the ravine, four elongated shadows no bigger than little dashes.
The wolves were standing side by side, their muzzles turned towards the house, and, raising their heads, were howling at the moon or at its silver reflection in Mikulitsyn’s windows. For a few moments they stood motionless, but as soon as Yuri Andreevich realized they were wolves, they lowered their behinds like dogs and trotted away from the clearing as if the doctor’s thought had reached them. The doctor had no time to figure out in which direction they had vanished.
“Unpleasant news!” he thought. “That’s all we needed. Can they have a lair somewhere nearby, quite close to us? Maybe even in the ravine? How frightening! And unfortunately there’s also Samdevyatov’s Savraska in the stable. It’s probably the horse they scented.”
He decided for the time being to say nothing to Lara, so as not to frighten her, went in, locked the front door, closed the hall doors connecting the cold and warm parts of the house, stopped all the cracks and openings, and went to the desk.
The lamp was burning as brightly and welcomingly as before. But he no longer felt like writing. He could not calm down. Nothing but wolves and other threatening complications went through his mind. And he was also tired. At that moment Lara woke up.
“And you’re still burning and glimmering, my dear, bright candle!” Lara said softly in a moist, sleep-congested whisper. “Sit here next to me for a minute. I’ll tell you the dream I had.”
And he put out the lamp.
9
Again a day went by in quiet madness. A child’s sled turned up in the house. Flushed Katenka, in her little fur coat, laughing loudly, came sliding onto the uncleared paths of the front garden from the ice hill the doctor had made for her, packing the snow down tightly with a shovel and pouring water over it. A smile fixed on her face, she endlessly climbed back up the hill, pulling her sled on a string.
It was freezing cold and getting noticeably colder. Outside it was sunny. The snow turned yellow under the noontime rays, and into its honey yellowness poured a sweet sediment of orange thickness from the early-falling evening.
With yesterday’s laundry and bathing, Lara had filled the house with dampness. The windows were covered with crumbly hoarfrost, the steam-dampened wallpaper was covered from floor to ceiling with black streaks. The rooms became dark and cheerless. Yuri Andreevich carried firewood and water, continued the unfinished examination of the house with unceasing discoveries all the time, and helped Lara, who had been busy since morning with constantly emerging household chores.
Time and again in the heat of some task their hands came together and remained that way, the load picked up to be carried was set down before it reached its destination, and a haze of invincible tenderness rushed to disarm them. Time and again everything dropped from their hands and left their heads. Minutes passed and turned into hours, and it was getting late, and they both came to their senses, horrified, remembering the neglected Katenka or the unfed and unwatered horse, and they rushed headlong to make up for and amend what had been left undone, and suffered from remorse.
The doctor’s head throbbed from lack of sleep. It was filled with a sweet haze, like a hangover, and there was an aching, blissful weakness in his whole body. He waited impatiently for evening to go back to his interrupted night’s work.
The preliminary half of the work was performed for him by that sleepy mist that filled him, and covered everything around him, and enwrapped his thoughts. The general diffuseness it imparted to everything went in the direction that preceded the exactness of the final embodiment. Like the vagueness of first drafts, the languid idleness of the whole day served as a necessary preparation for a laborious night.
The idleness of fatigue left nothing untouched, untransformed. Everything underwent changes and acquired a different look.
Yuri Andreevich felt that his dreams of a more settled life in Varykino were not to be realized, that the hour of his separation from Lara was at hand, that he would inevitably lose her, and after that the incentive to live, and maybe even life itself. Anguish gnawed at his heart. But still greater was his longing for the coming of evening and the desire to weep out this anguish in expressions that would make everyone weep.
The wolves he had been remembering all day were no longer wolves in the snow under the moon, but became the theme of wolves, the representation of a hostile power that had set itself the goal of destroying the doctor and Lara or driving them from Varykino. The idea of this hostility, developing, attained such force by evening as if the tracks of an antediluvian monster had been discovered in Shutma and a fairy-tale dragon of gigantic proportions, thirsting for the doctor’s blood and hungering for Lara, were lying in the ravine.
Evening came. As he had yesterday, the doctor lit the lamp on the desk. Lara and Katenka went to bed earlier than the day before.
What he had written during the previous night fell into two categories. The familiar things, in newly revised versions, were written out in clean, calligraphic copies. The new things were sketched out with abbreviations and ellipses, in an illegible scrawl.
