The Complete Short Novels

desperate, betray her yourself. But the time will come when it will all turn into a memory, and you’ll reason coldly and regard it as completely trifling...’

And Laptev, tired, slightly drunk, looked at his handsome head, his black, clipped beard, and it seemed he understood why women so loved this spoiled, self-confident, and physically charming man.

After supper Panaurov did not stay at home but went to his other apartment. Laptev went out to see him off. In the whole town, Panaurov was the only one who wore a top hat, and next to the gray fences, the pitiful three- windowed houses, and the clumps of nettles, his elegant, foppish figure, his top hat and orange gloves, produced each time a strange and sad impression.

After taking leave of him, Laptev returned home unhurriedly. The moon shone brightly, one could see every straw on the ground, and it seemed to Laptev as though the moonlight was caressing his uncovered head, as though someone was stroking his hair with down.

‘‘I’m in love!’’ he said aloud, and he suddenly wanted to run, overtake Panaurov, embrace him, forgive him, give him a lot of money, and then run off somewhere to the fields, the groves, and keep running without looking back.

At home he saw Yulia Sergeevna’s forgotten parasol on a chair, seized it, and greedily kissed it. The parasol was of silk, no longer new, held by an elastic band; the handle was of simple, cheap white bone. Laptev opened it and held it over him, and it seemed to him that there was even a smell of happiness around him.

He settled more comfortably and, without letting go of the parasol, began writing to one of his friends in Moscow:

‘‘My dear Kostya, here is news for you: I am in love again! I say again, because some six years ago I was in love with a Moscow actress with whom I never even managed to get acquainted, and for the last year and a half I have been living with the ‘individual’ known to you—a woman neither young nor beautiful. Ah, dear heart, how generally unlucky I have been in love! I have never had success with women, and if I say again, it is only because it is somehow sad and disappointing to confess to my own self that my youth has passed entirely without love, and that in a real way I am in love for the first time only now, when I am thirty-four. So let it be in love again.

‘‘If you only knew what a girl she is! She cannot be called a beauty—her face is broad, and she is very thin—but what a wonderful expression of kindness, what a smile! Her voice, when she speaks, sings and rings. She never gets into conversation with me, I do not know her, but when I am near her, I sense in her a rare, extraordinary being pervaded with intelligence and lofty aspirations. She is religious, and you cannot imagine how that touches me and elevates her in my eyes. On this point I am ready to argue endlessly with you. You are right, let it be your way, but even so, I like it when she prays in church. She is a provincial, but she studied in Moscow, loves our Moscow, dresses in Moscow fashion, and for that I love her, love her, love her... I can see you frowning and getting up to give me a long lecture on what love is, and who can and cannot be loved, and so on and so forth. But, dear Kostya, before I fell in love, I myself also knew perfectly well what love was.

‘‘My sister thanks you for your greetings. She often remembers how she once took Kostya Kochevoy to place him in the preparatory class, and to this day she calls you poor, because she’s kept a memory of you as an orphan boy. And so, poor orphan, I am in love. So far it is a secret, do not say anything there to the ‘individual’ known to you. That, I think, will get settled by itself, or ‘shape up,’ as the footman says in Tolstoy...’⁴

Having finished the letter, Laptev went to bed. His eyes closed of themselves from fatigue, but for some reason, he could not sleep; it seemed that the street noises interfered. The herd was driven past, and the horn was blown, then the bells soon rang for the early liturgy. Now a cart went creaking by, then came the voice of some peasant woman going to market. And the sparrows were chirping all the while.

II

IT WAS A gay, festive morning. At around ten o’clock, Nina Fyodorovna, wearing a brown dress, neatly combed, was brought out to the drawing room, supported under both arms, and there she promenaded a little and stood for a while at the open window, and her smile was broad, naive, and looking at her reminded one of the local artist, a drunken fellow, who said hers was a face on an icon and wanted to paint her in a Russian Shrovetide scene. And to everybody— the children, the servants, even her brother Alexei Fyodorych and herself—it suddenly appeared a certainty that she would unfailingly recover. The girls chased their uncle with shrill laughter, trying to catch him, and the house became noisy.

Strangers came to ask after her health, bringing prosphoras, ⁵ saying that prayer services had been held for her that day in almost all the churches. She did charitable work in her town and was loved. She gave charity with extraordinary ease, just like her brother Alexei, who gave money very easily, without considering whether he should give or not. Nina Fyodorovna paid for poor pupils, gave money to old women for tea, sugar, preserves, fitted out needy brides, and if a newspaper happened into her hands, she first looked whether there was any appeal for help or notice of someone in distress.

In her hands now was a bundle of notes by means of which various poor people, her proteges, took goods from the grocery store, and which the merchant had sent her the day before with a request for the payment of eighty- two roubles.

‘‘Just look how much they’ve taken, shameless folk!’’ she said, barely making out her bad handwriting on the notes. ‘‘No joke! Eighty-two! I’m just not going to pay it!’’

‘‘I’ll pay it today,’’ said Laptev.

‘‘Why should you? Why?’’ Nina Fyodorovna became alarmed. ‘‘It’s enough that I get two hundred and fifty a month from you and our brother. Lord save you,’’ she added quietly, so that the servants would not hear.

‘‘Well, and I run through twenty-five hundred a month,’’ he said. ‘‘I repeat to you once more, my dear: you have as much right to spend money as Fyodor and I. Understand that once and for all. Father had the three of us, and of every three kopecks, one is yours.’’

But Nina Fyodorovna did not understand and had an expression as if she was mentally resolving some very difficult problem. And this obtuseness in money matters always disturbed and confused Laptev. Besides, he suspected that she had personal debts of which she was embarrassed to tell him, and which made her suffer.

Footsteps were heard, and heavy breathing: this was the doctor coming up the stairs, disheveled and uncombed, as usual.

‘‘Roo-roo-roo,’’ he hummed. ‘‘Roo-roo.’’

To avoid meeting him, Laptev went out to the dining room, then downstairs to his own rooms. It was clear to him that to become more intimate with the doctor and visit his house informally was an impossible thing; even to meet this ‘‘plug horse,’’ as Panaurov called him, was unpleasant. And that was why he so rarely saw Yulia Sergeevna. He now realized that her father was not at home, that if he brought Yulia Sergeevna her parasol now,