began to recall the past, but at once I felt uneasy, as though I had accidentally peeped into a dark, damp corner. I remembered my comrades and friends, and my first thought was how I should blush in confusion if ever I met any of them. What was I now? What had I to think of and to do? Where was I to go? What was I living for?
I could make nothing of it. I only knew one thing -- that I must make haste to pack my things and be off. Before the old man's visit my position as a flunkey had a meaning; now it was absurd. Tears dropped into my open portmanteau; I felt insufferably sad; but how I longed to live! I was ready to embrace and include in my short life every possibility open to man. I wanted to speak, to read, and to hammer in some big factory, and to stand on watch, and to plough. I yearned for the Nevsky Prospect, for the sea and the fields -- for every place to which my imagination travelled. When Zinaida Fyodorovna came in, I rushed to open the door for her, and with peculiar tenderness took off her fur coat. The last time!
We had two other visitors that day besides the old man. In the evening when it was quite dark, Gruzin came to fetch some papers for Orlov. He opened the table-drawer, took the necessary papers, and, rolling them up, told me to put them in the hall beside his cap while he went in to see Zinaida Fyodorovna. She was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, with her arms behind her head. Five or six days had already passed since Orlov went on his tour of inspection, and no one knew when he would be back, but this time she did not send telegrams and did not expect them. She did not seem to notice the presence of Polya, who was still living with us. 'So be it, then,' was what I read on her passionless and very pale face. Like Orlov, she wanted to be unhappy out of obstinacy. To spite herself and everything in the world, she lay for days together on the sofa, desiring and expecting nothing but evil for herself. Probably she was picturing to herself Orlov's return and the inevitable quarrels with him; then his growing indifference to her, his infidelities; then how they would separate; and perhaps these agonising thoughts gave her satisfaction. But what would she have said if she found out the actual truth?
'I love you, Godmother,' said Gruzin, greeting her and kissing her hand. 'You are so kind! And so dear
He sat down with a sigh and tenderly stroked her hand.
'Let me spend an hour with you, my dear,' he said. 'I don't want to go home, and it's too early to go to the Birshovs'. The Birshovs are keeping their Katya's birthday to-day. She is a nice child!'
I brought him a glass of tea and a decanter of brandy. He slowly and with obvious reluctance drank the tea, and returning the glass to me, asked timidly:
'Can you give me . . . something to eat, my friend? I have had no dinner.'
We had nothing in the flat. I went to the restaurant and brought him the ordinary rouble dinner.
'To your health, my dear,' he said to Zinaida Fyodorovna, and he tossed off a glass of vodka. 'My little girl, your godchild, sends you her love. Poor child! she's rickety. Ah, children, children!' he sighed. 'Whatever you may say, Godmother, it is nice to be a father. Dear
He drank some more. Pale and lean, with his dinner-napkin over his chest like a little pinafore, he ate greedily, and raising his eyebrows, kept looking guiltily, like a little boy, first at Zinaida Fyodorovna and then at me. It seemed as though he would have begun crying if I had not given him the grouse or the jelly. When he had satisfied his hunger he grew more lively, and began laughingly telling some story about the Birshov household, but perceiving that it was tiresome and that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not laughing, he ceased. And there was a sudden feeling of dreariness. After he had finished his dinner they sat in the drawing-room by the light of a single lamp, and did not speak; it was painful to him to lie to her, and she wanted to ask him something, but could not make up her mind to. So passed half an hour. Gruzin glanced at his watch.
'I suppose it's time for me to go.'
'No, stay a little. . . . We must have a talk.'
Again they were silent. He sat down to the piano, struck one chord, then began playing, and sang softly, 'What does the coming day bring me?' but as usual he got up suddenly and tossed his head.
'Play something,' Zinaida Fyodorovna asked him.
'What shall I play?' he asked, shrugging his shoulders. 'I have forgotten everything. I've given it up long ago.'
Looking at the ceiling as though trying to remember, he played two pieces of Tchaikovsky with exquisite expression, with such warmth, such insight! His face was just as usual -- neither stupid nor intelligent -- and it seemed to me a perfect marvel that a man whom I was accustomed to see in the midst of the most degrading, impure surroundings, was capable of such purity, of rising to a feeling so lofty, so far beyond my reach. Zinaida Fyodorovna's face glowed, and she walked about the drawing-room in emotion.
'Wait a bit, Godmother; if I can remember it, I will play you something,' he said; 'I heard it played on the violoncello.'
Beginning timidly and picking out the notes, and then gathering confidence, he played Saint-Saens's 'Swan Song.' He played it through, and then played it a second time.
'It's nice, isn't it?' he said.
Moved by the music, Zinaida Fyodorovna stood beside him and asked:
'Tell me honestly, as a friend, what do you think about me?'
'What am I to say?' he said, raising his eyebrows. 'I love you and think nothing but good of you. But if you wish that I should speak generally about the question that interests you,' he went on, rubbing his sleeve near the elbow and frowning, 'then, my dear, you know. . . . To follow freely the promptings of the heart does not always give good people happiness. To feel free and at the same time to be happy, it seems to me, one must not conceal from oneself that life is coarse, cruel, and merciless in its conservatism, and one must retaliate with what it deserves -- that is, be as coarse and as merciless in one's striving for freedom. That's what I think.'
'That's beyond me,' said Zinaida Fyodorovna, with a mournful smile. 'I am exhausted already. I am so exhausted that I wouldn't stir a finger for my own salvation.'
'Go into a nunnery.'
He said this in jest, but after he had said it, tears glistened in Zinaida Fyodorovna's eyes and then in his.
'Well,' he said, 'we've been sitting and sitting, and now we must go. Good-bye, dear Godmother. God give you health.'
