must end it.
'But how? What can I do?' he asked himself, and looked imploringly at the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.
But the sky and the trees were mute. His noble ideas were no help, and his common sense whispered that the agonising question could have no solution but a stupid one, and that to-day's scene with the messenger was not the last one of its kind. It was terrible to think what was in store for him!
As he returned home the sun was setting. By now it seemed to him that the problem was incapable of solution. He could not accept the accomplished fact, and he could not refuse to accept it, and there was no intermediate course. When, taking off his hat and fanning himself with his handkerchief, he was walking along the road, and had only another mile and a half to go before he would reach home, he heard bells behind him. It was a very choice and successful combination of bells, which gave a clear crystal note. No one had such bells on his horses but the police captain, Medovsky, formerly an officer in the hussars, a man in broken-down health, who had been a great rake and spendthrift, and was a distant relation of Pyotr Mihalitch. He was like one of the family at the Ivashins' and had a tender, fatherly affection for Zina, as well as a great admiration for her.
'I was coming to see you,' he said, overtaking Pyotr Mihalitch. 'Get in; I'll give you a lift.'
He was smiling and looked cheerful. Evidently he did not yet know that Zina had gone to live with Vlassitch; perhaps he had been told of it already, but did not believe it. Pyotr Mihalitch felt in a difficult position.
'You are very welcome,' he muttered, blushing till the tears came into his eyes, and not knowing how to lie or what to say. 'I am delighted,' he went on, trying to smile, 'but . . . Zina is away and mother is ill.'
'How annoying!' said the police captain, looking pensively at Pyotr Mihalitch. 'And I was meaning to spend the evening with you. Where has Zinaida Mihalovna gone?'
'To the Sinitskys', and I believe she meant to go from there to the monastery. I don't quite know.'
The police captain talked a little longer and then turned back. Pyotr Mihalitch walked home, and thought with horror what the police captain's feelings would be when he learned the truth. And Pyotr Mihalitch imagined his feelings, and actually experiencing them himself, went into the house.
'Lord help us,' he thought, 'Lord help us!'
At evening tea the only one at the table was his aunt. As usual, her face wore the expression that seemed to say that though she was a weak, defenceless woman, she would allow no one to insult her. Pyotr Mihalitch sat down at the other end of the table (he did not like his aunt) and began drinking tea in silence.
'Your mother has had no dinner again to-day,' said his aunt. 'You ought to do something about it, Petrusha. Starving oneself is no help in sorrow.'
It struck Pyotr Mihalitch as absurd that his aunt should meddle in other people's business and should make her departure depend on Zina's having gone away. He was tempted to say something rude to her, but restrained himself. And as he restrained himself he felt the time had come for action, and that he could not bear it any longer. Either he must act at once or fall on the ground, and scream and bang his head upon the floor. He pictured Vlassitch and Zina, both of them progressive and self-satisfied, kissing each other somewhere under a maple tree, and all the anger and bitterness that had been accumulating in him for the last seven days fastened upon Vlassitch.
'One has seduced and abducted my sister,' he thought, 'another will come and murder my mother, a third will set fire to the house and sack the place. . . . And all this under the mask of friendship, lofty ideas, unhappiness!'
'No, it shall not be!' Pyotr Mihalitch cried suddenly, and he brought his fist down on the table.
He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room. In the stable the steward's horse was standing ready saddled. He got on it and galloped off to Vlassitch.
There was a perfect tempest within him. He felt a longing to do something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it all his life afterwards. Should he call Vlassitch a blackguard, slap him in the face, and then challenge him to a duel? But Vlassitch was not one of those men who do fight duels; being called a blackguard and slapped in the face would only make him more unhappy, and would make him shrink into himself more than ever. These unhappy, defenceless people are the most insufferable, the most tiresome creatures in the world. They can do anything with impunity. When the luckless man responds to well-deserved reproach by looking at you with eyes full of deep and guilty feeling, and with a sickly smile bends his head submissively, even justice itself could not lift its hand against him.
'No matter. I'll horsewhip him before her eyes and tell him what I think of him,' Pyotr Mihalitch decided.
He was riding through his wood and waste land, and he imagined Zina would try to justify her conduct by talking about the rights of women and individual freedom, and about there being no difference between legal marriage and free union. Like a woman, she would argue about what she did not understand. And very likely at the end she would ask, 'How do you come in? What right have you to interfere?'
'No, I have no right,' muttered Pyotr Mihalitch. 'But so much the better. . . . The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, the better.'
It was sultry. Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste places the peewits called plaintively. Everything betokened rain, but he could not see a cloud in the sky. Pyotr Mihalitch crossed the boundary of his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often went along this road and knew every bush, every hollow in it. What now in the far distance looked in the dusk like a dark cliff was a red church; he could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on the gate and the calves that were always grazing in the church enclosure. Three-quarters of a mile to the right of the church there was a copse like a dark blur -- it was Count Koltonovitch's. And beyond the church Vlassitch's estate began.
From behind the church and the count's copse a huge black storm-cloud was rising, and there were ashes of white lightning.
'Here it is!' thought Pyotr Mihalitch. 'Lord help us, Lord help us!'
The horse was soon tired after its quick gallop, and Pyotr Mihalitch was tired too. The storm-cloud looked at him angrily and seemed to advise him to go home. He felt a little scared.
'I will prove to them they are wrong,' he tried to reassure himself. 'They will say that it is free-love, individual freedom; but freedom means self-control and not subjection to passion. It's not liberty but license!'
He reached the count's big pond; it looked dark blue and frowning under the cloud, and a smell of damp and
