Then she ran toward the gates.
“Good-by!” she called back.
Then for some moments I heard her running. I had no desire to return home, and there was nothing to return home for. For a while I stood there lost in thought, and then I turned slowly back to look once more at the house she lived in, that house which was so old and innocent and dear to me; and the windows of the mezzanine looked down on me like eyes, seeming to understand everything. I walked past the terrace and sat on a bench by the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness of an ancient elm, and once again I gazed up at the house. I could see the windows of the mezzanine, where Missy slept, and the bright light shining there, but this light turned later to a faintly glowing green—she had pulled a shade over the lamp. Shadows stirred.… I was filled with a sense of tenderness and calm contentment—a contentment which came with my discovery that I had fallen helplessly in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy with the knowledge that Leda, who disliked and perhaps hated me, was lying in bed in one of those rooms only a few yards away. I sat there, straining my ears, waiting to see whether Zhenia would come out, and I fancied I heard voices coming from the mezzanine.
An hour passed. The green lamp went out, and no more shadows could be seen. The moon rode high over the house, shining on the pathways and the sleeping garden. The dahlias and roses in the flower bed in front of the house could be seen distinctly, and everything seemed to be of one color. It grew very cold. I left the garden, picked up my coat from the road, and made my way slowly home.
The following day when I went to see the Volchaninovs after dinner, the glass door leading to the garden was wide open. I sat down for a while on the terrace, expecting to see Zhenia appear from behind the flower beds or along one of the pathways, or perhaps I would hear the sound of her voice coming from the house. Then I went through the drawing room and the dining room. There was no one to be seen. From the dining room I walked down a long corridor that led to the reception room, and back again. Several doors opened on the corridor, and from behind one of them came the voice of Leda.
“To the crow somewhere … God …” she was saying in a loud, singsong voice, probably dictating. “God sent a piece of cheese … To the crow … somewhere … Who’s there?” she called out suddenly, hearing my footsteps.
“It is I.”
“Oh, excuse me, I cannot come out just now. I am giving Dasha her lesson.”
“Is Yekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”
“No, she left this morning with my sister. They are going to stay with an aunt in Penza province, and in the winter they will probably go abroad.” She added after a moment’s pause: “God sent … the cr-ow … so-me- where … a pie-ce of chee-se … Have you written it down?”
I went out in the reception room without a thought in my head, gazing at the pond and the village in the distance, while her voice followed me: “A pie-ce of chee-se … God sent the crow somewhere a piece of cheese …”
And I went back by the way I had come on the day when I first visited the house, only this time in reverse. I went from the courtyard into the garden and along the side of the house until I reached the avenue of lime trees.… There I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note which read: “I told my sister everything, and she says I must never see you again. I’m weak, and dare not anger her by disobeying her. God grant you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how many bitter tears Mama and I have shed!”
I went down the dark avenue of firs past the rotting fence.… In the fields where the rye was once ripening and the quail were screaming, now hobbled horses and cows were grazing. Here and there on the low hills the winter crops were already showing green. A sobering mood took hold of me, the things I had said at the Volchaninovs’ filled me with shame, and I was as bored with life as I ever was before. When I reached home, I packed my things, and I left that evening for St. Petersburg.
I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Not long ago, when on my way to the Crimea, I met Belokurov on the train. He was wearing the familiar peasant jacket and embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: “Thank you for your good wishes.” We fell into conversation. He had sold his old estate and bought another, smaller one in Lyubov Ivanovna’s name. There was little he could tell me about the Volchaninovs. He told me Leda was still living at Shelkovka, teaching children at her school. Little by little she had succeeded in gathering around her a circle of friends who agreed with her and who were able to form a strong party, and at the last zemstvo election they had “gotten rid” of Balagin, the man who had kept the whole district under his thumb in the old days. As for Zhenia, all he knew was that she had left home, and he did not know where she was.
I am beginning to forget the house with the mezzanine, but sometimes when I am painting or reading, for no reason at all, quite suddenly, I find myself remembering the green lamp at the window and the sound of my footsteps echoing through the fields of the night as I walked home on the day I was in love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And sometimes too—but this happens more rarely—when I am weighed down with melancholy and loneliness, I am the prey of other confused thoughts, and it seems to me that I, too, am being remembered, and she is waiting for me, and we shall meet again.…
Missy, where are you?
1 The zemstvo was the elective district council in pre-revolutionary Russia.
2 The Varangian chieftain who settled in Novgorov in 862 and is regarded as the founder of Russia.
I
AT half past eight in the morning they drove out of town.
The highway was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding a fierce warmth on the earth, but there was still snow in the ditches and the forests. The long, dark, cruel winter had only just come to an end, spring came suddenly, but for Maria Vasilyevna sitting in the horsecart, there was nothing new or interesting in the warmth of the sun, or in the languid, luminous forests warmed with the breath of spring, or in the flocks of dark birds flying over the puddles in the fields—puddles as large as lakes—or in the marvelous and unfathomable sky into which it seemed one could plunge with such joy. For thirteen years she had been a schoolteacher, and during the course of these years she had gone so often to the town for her salary that the times were past counting; and whether it was spring, as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and she always and invariably longed for only one thing: to get there as quickly as possible.
She felt she had been living here for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again the school and again the road.
