In deciphering these daubs, the doctor felt the usual disappointment. Last night these fragmentary drafts had moved him to tears and astounded him by the unexpectedness of certain strokes of luck. Now it was just these imaginary strokes of luck that stopped him and upset him, standing out sharply as too forced.
All his life he had dreamed of an originality that was smoothed over and muted, externally unrecognizable and hidden under the cover of conventional and habitual form; all his life he had striven to elaborate this restrained, unpretentious style, through which the reader and listener would grasp the content without noticing what enabled them to do so. All his life he had worked for this inconspicuous style, which would attract no one’s attention, and kept being horrified at how far he still was from this ideal.
In yesterday’s sketches he had wanted, using means of a simplicity verging on prattle and reaching the intimacy of the lullaby, to express his mixed mood of love and fear and anguish and courage, so as to have it pour out as if apart from words, by itself.
Now, the next day, looking through these trials, he found that they lacked a supporting plot that would join the disconnecting lines together. Gradually reworking what he had written, Yuri Andreevich began in the same lyrical manner to tell the legend of Egory the Brave.2 He started with a sweeping pentameter that allowed for great scope. But the euphony characteristic of this meter, regardless of content, annoyed him by its conventional, false melodiousness. He abandoned the pompous meter with its caesura, cramming his lines into four feet, the way one struggles against verbosity in prose. Writing became more difficult and more alluring. The work went at a livelier pace, but still some superfluous garrulity got into it. He forced himself to shorten the lines still more. The words were crowded into trimeters, the last traces of sleepiness fell from the writer, he awakened, took fire, the narrowness of the available space itself told him how to fill it. Subjects barely named in words began to stand out in relief within the frame of reference. He heard the pace of a horse stepping over the surface of the poem, as one can hear the clop of a horse’s amble in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George galloped on horseback across the boundless expanse of the steppe; Yuri Andreevich saw him from behind growing smaller as he moved away. Yuri Andreevich wrote with feverish haste, barely managing to set down the words and lines arriving all in their place and apropos.
He did not notice how Lara got out of bed and came over to the desk. She seemed delicate and slender and taller than she really was in her floor-length nightgown. Yuri Andreevich gave a start when she unexpectedly rose up beside him, pale, afraid, and, stretching out her arm, asked in a whisper:
“Do you hear? A dog is howling. Two, even. Ah, how frightening, what a bad omen! Let’s wait somehow till morning, and then leave, leave. I won’t stay here a moment longer.”
An hour later, after much persuasion, Larissa Fyodorovna calmed down and went back to sleep. Yuri Andreevich went out to the porch. The wolves were closer than the night before and vanished still more quickly. And again Yuri Andreevich had no time to make out which way they went. They stood in a group, he had no time to count them. He fancied there were more of them.
10
The thirteenth day of their stay in Varykino arrived, in its circumstances no different from the previous ones. Wolves had howled in the same way in the evening, after disappearing for a time in the middle of the week. Again taking them for dogs, Larissa Fyodorovna had resolved in the same way to leave the next morning, frightened by the bad omen. In the same way states of equilibrium alternated in her with fits of anguished uneasiness, natural in a hardworking woman unaccustomed to daylong outpourings of the heart and the idle, impermissible luxury of immoderate caresses.
Everything repeated itself exactly, so that when, on that morning of the second week, Larissa Fyodorovna again, as so many times before, began preparing for the return trip, one might have thought the week and a half they had lived through in the interim had never been.
Again it was damp in the rooms, which were dark owing to the bleakness of the gray, overcast day. The cold had lessened; at any moment snow might start pouring from the dark sky covered with low clouds. Yuri Andreevich was succumbing to the mental and physical fatigue caused by a continual lack of sleep. His thoughts were confused, his strength was undermined, weakness made him feel chilled, and, shivering and rubbing his hands, he paced the unheated room, not knowing what Larissa Fyodorovna would decide and what, according to her decision, he would have to undertake.
Her intentions were not clear. Right then she would have given half her life for the two of them not to be so chaotically free, but forced to submit to any strict order, established once and for all, for them to go to work, to have duties, to be able to live sensibly and honestly.
She began her day as usual, made the beds, tidied up and swept the rooms, made breakfast for the doctor and Katya. Then she began to pack and asked the doctor to hitch up the horse. She had taken a firm and inflexible decision to leave.
Yuri Andreevich did not try to dissuade her. Their return to town in the heat of the arrests there after their recent disappearance was completely foolhardy. But it was scarcely more reasonable to sit there alone and unarmed in the midst of this dreadful winter desert, full of its own menace.
Besides that, the last armloads of hay, which the doctor had raked up in the nearby sheds, were coming to an end, and there were no more to be expected. Of course, had it been possible to settle here more permanently, the doctor would have made the rounds of the neighborhood and seen to replenishing the stock of fodder and provisions. But for a brief and problematic stay, it was not worthwhile starting such reconnoitering. And, waving his hand at it all, the doctor went to harness up.
He was not skillful at it. Samdevyatov had taught him how. Yuri Andreevich kept forgetting his instructions. With inexperienced hands he nevertheless did all that was needed. Having fastened the bow to the shafts with a studded leather strap, he tied its metal-tipped end in a knot on one of the shafts, winding it around several times, then, placing his leg against the horse’s side, he pulled and tightened the ends of the collar, after which, having finished the rest, he brought the horse to the porch, tethered her, and went to tell Lara that they could make ready.
He found her in extreme disarray. She and Katenka were dressed to leave, everything was packed, but Larissa Fyodorovna was wringing her hands and, holding back tears and asking Yuri Andreevich to sit down for a moment, throwing herself into the armchair, then getting up, and—frequently interrupting herself with the exclamation “Right?”—spoke very quickly, in an incoherent patter, on a high, singsong, and plaintive note:
“It’s not my fault. I myself don’t know how this came about. But we really can’t go now. It will be dark soon. Night will find us on the road. There in your dreadful forest. Right? I’ll do what you tell me, but myself, of my own will, I can’t decide on it. Something’s holding me back. My heart isn’t in it. Do as you know best. Right? Why are you silent, why don’t you say something? We lolled around all morning, spent half the day on God knows what. Tomorrow it won’t be the same, we’ll be more careful, right? Maybe we should stay one more day? We’ll get up early tomorrow and set out at daybreak, at seven or even six in the morning. What do you think? You’ll heat the stove, do some writing here for one extra evening, we’ll spend one more night here. Ah, it would be so incomparable, so magical! Why don’t you answer? Again I’m at fault for something, wretch that I am!”
