The band finished the march, and a minute later began playing a lively waltz for the opening of the ball.
'Good God, can nothing really be done?' moaned Olga Ivanovna. 'Nikolay, you are a doctor and ought to know what to do! You must understand that I can't bear the loss of him! I can't survive it.'
The doctor, who did not know how to talk to weeping women, heaved a sigh, and paced slowly about the drawing-room. There followed a succession of oppressive pauses interspersed with weeping and the questions which lead to nothing. The band had already played a quadrille, a polka, and another quadrille. It got quite dark. In the adjoining room, the maid lighted the lamp; and all the while the doctor kept his hat in his hands, and seemed trying to say something. Several times Olga Ivanovna went off to her son, sat by him for half an hour, and came back again into the drawing-room; she was continually breaking into tears and lamentations. The time dragged agonisingly, and it seemed as though the evening had no end.
At midnight, when the band had played the cotillion and ceased altogether, the doctor got ready to go.
'I will come again to-morrow,' he said, pressing the mother's cold hand. 'You go to bed.'
After putting on his greatcoat in the passage and picking up his walking-stick, he stopped, thought a minute, and went back into the drawing-room.
'I'll come to-morrow, Olga,' he repeated in a quivering voice. 'Do you hear?'
She did not answer, and it seemed as though grief had robbed her of all power of speech. In his greatcoat and with his stick still in his hand, the doctor sat down beside her, and began in a soft, tender half-whisper, which was utterly out of keeping with his heavy, dignified figure:
'Olga! For the sake of your sorrow which I share. . . . Now, when falsehood is criminal, I beseech you to tell me the truth. You have always declared that the boy is my son. Is that the truth?'
Olga Ivanovna was silent.
'You have been the one attachment in my life,' the doctor went on, 'and you cannot imagine how deeply my feeling is wounded by falsehood . . . . Come, I entreat you, Olga, for once in your life, tell me the truth. . . . At these moments one cannot lie. Tell me that Misha is not my son. I am waiting.'
'He is.'
Olga Ivanovna's face could not be seen, but in her voice the doctor could hear hesitation. He sighed.
'Even at such moments you can bring yourself to tell a lie,' he said in his ordinary voice. 'There is nothing sacred to you! Do listen, do understand me. . . . You have been the one only attachment in my life. Yes, you were depraved, vulgar, but I have loved no one else but you in my life. That trivial love, now that I am growing old, is the one solitary bright spot in my memories. Why do you darken it with deception? What is it for?'
'I don't understand you.'
'Oh my God!' cried Tsvyetkov. 'You are lying, you understand very well!' he cried more loudly, and he began pacing about the drawing-room, angrily waving his stick. 'Or have you forgotten? Then I will remind you! A father's rights to the boy are equally shared with me by Petrov and Kurovsky the lawyer, who still make you an allowance for their son's education, just as I do! Yes, indeed! I know all that quite well! I forgive your lying in the past, what does it matter? But now when you have grown older, at this moment when the boy is dying, your lying stifles me! How sorry I am that I cannot speak, how sorry I am!'
The doctor unbuttoned his overcoat, and still pacing about, said:
'Wretched woman! Even such moments have no effect on her! Even now she lies as freely as nine years ago in the Hermitage Restaurant! She is afraid if she tells me the truth I shall leave off giving her money, she thinks that if she did not lie I should not love the boy! You are lying! It's contemptible!'
The doctor rapped the floor with his stick, and cried:
'It's loathsome. Warped, corrupted creature! I must despise you, and I ought to be ashamed of my feeling. Yes! Your lying has stuck in my throat these nine years, I have endured it, but now it's too much—too much.'
From the dark corner where Olga Ivanovna was sitting there came the sound of weeping. The doctor ceased speaking and cleared his throat. A silence followed. The doctor slowly buttoned up his over-coat, and began looking for his hat which he had dropped as he walked about.
'I lost my temper,' he muttered, bending down to the floor. 'I quite lost sight of the fact that you cannot attend to me now. . . . God knows what I have said. . . . Don't take any notice of it, Olga.'
He found his hat and went towards the dark corner.
'I have wounded you,' he said in a soft, tender half-whisper, 'but once more I entreat you, tell me the truth; there should not be lying between us. . . . I blurted it out, and now you know that Petrov and Kurovsky are no secret to me. So now it is easy for you to tell me the truth.'
Olga Ivanovna thought a moment, and with perceptible hesitation, said:
'Nikolay, I am not lying—Misha is your child.'
'My God,' moaned the doctor, 'then I will tell you something more: I have kept your letter to Petrov in which you call him Misha's father! Olga, I know the truth, but I want to hear it from you! Do you hear?'
Olga Ivanovna made no reply, but went on weeping. After waiting for an answer the doctor shrugged his shoulders and went out.
'I will come to-morrow,' he called from the passage.
All the way home, as he sat in his carriage, he was shrugging his shoulders and muttering:
'What a pity that I don't know how to speak! I haven't the gift of persuading and convincing. It's evident she does not understand me since she lies! It's evident! How can I make her see? How?'
TOO EARLY!
THE bells are ringing for service in the village of Shalmovo. The sun is already kissing the earth on the horizon; it has turned crimson and will soon disappear. In Semyon's pothouse, which has lately changed its name and become a restaurant—a title quite out of keeping with the wretched little hut with its thatch torn off its roof, and its couple of dingy windows—two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been employed in a nail factory, has been turned off for drunkenness and idleness, and now lives upon his old wife, who begs for alms. He is thin and weak, with a mangy-looking little beard, speaks with a hissing sound, and after every word twitches the right side of his face and jerkily shrugs his right shoulder. The other, Ignat Ryabov, a sturdy, broad-shouldered peasant who never does anything and is everlastingly silent, is sitting in the corner under a big string of bread rings. The door, opening inwards, throws a thick shadow upon him, so that Slyunka and Semyon the publican can see nothing but his patched knees, his long fleshy nose, and a big tuft of hair which has escaped from the thick uncombed tangle covering his head. Semyon, a sickly little man, with a pale face and a long sinewy neck, stands behind his counter, looks mournfully at the string of bread rings, and coughs meekly.
'You think it over now, if you have any sense,' Slyunka says to him, twitching his cheek. 'You have the thing lying by unused and get no sort of benefit from it. While we need it. A sportsman without a gun is like a sacristan without a voice. You ought to understand that, but I see you don't understand it, so you can have no real sense. . . . Hand it over!'
'You left the gun in pledge, you know!' says Semyon in a thin womanish little voice, sighing deeply, and not taking his eyes off the string of bread rings. 'Hand over the rouble you borrowed, and then take your gun.'
'I haven't got a rouble. I swear to you, Semyon Mitritch, as God sees me: you give me the gun and I will go to-day with Ignashka and bring it you back again. I'll bring it back, strike me dead. May I have happiness neither in this world nor the next, if I don't.'
'Semyon Mitritch, do give it,' Ignat Ryabov says in his bass, and his voice betrays a passionate desire to get what he asks for.
'But what do you want the gun for?' sighs Semyon, sadly shaking his head. 'What sort of shooting is there now? It's still winter outside, and no game at all but crows and jackdaws.'
'Winter, indeed,' says Slyunka, hooing the ash out of his pipe with his finger, 'it is early yet of course, but you never can tell with the snipe. The snipe's a bird that wants watching. If you are unlucky, you may sit waiting at home, and miss his flying over, and then you must wait till autumn. . . . It is a business! The snipe is not a rook. . . . Last year he was flying the week before Easter, while the year before we had to wait till the week after Easter! Come, do us a favour, Semyon Mitritch, give us the gun. Make us pray for you for ever. As ill-luck would have it, Ignashka has pledged his gun for drink too. Ah, when you drink you feel nothing, but now . . . ah, I wish I had never looked at it, the cursed vodka! Truly it is the blood of Satan! Give it us, Semyon Mitritch!'
'I won't give it you,' says Semyon, clasping his yellow hands on his breast as though he were going to pray.
