The Complete Short Novels

then most likely he would find her at home alone, and his heart was wrung with joy. Quickly, quickly!

He took the parasol and, in great excitement, flew off on the wings of love. It was hot outside. In the doctor’s enormous courtyard, overgrown with weeds and nettles, some two dozen boys were playing with a ball. These were all children of the tenants, workers who lived in three old, unsightly wings that the doctor intended to renovate every year and kept putting it off. Healthy, ringing voices resounded. Far to one side, near her porch, stood Yulia Sergeevna, her hands behind her back, watching the game.

‘‘Hello!’’ called Laptev.

She turned to look. Usually he saw her indifferent, cold, or, as yesterday, tired, but now her expression was lively and frisky, like the boys playing with the ball.

‘‘Look, in Moscow they never play so merrily,’’ she said, coming towards him. ‘‘Anyhow, they don’t have such big courtyards there, there’s no room to run around. And papa has just gone to your house,’’ she added, glancing back at the children.

‘‘I know, but I’ve come to see you, not him,’’ said Laptev, admiring her youth, which he had not noticed before, and which he seemed to have discovered in her only today; it was as if he was seeing her slender white neck with its golden chain for the first time today. ‘I’ve come to see you...’ he repeated. ‘‘My sister sends you your parasol, you forgot it yesterday.’’

She reached out to take the parasol, but he clutched it to his breast and said passionately, irrepressibly, yielding again to the sweet ecstasy he had experienced the previous night, sitting under the parasol:

‘‘I beg you, give it to me. I’ll keep it as a souvenir of you... of our acquaintance. It’s so wonderful!’’

‘‘Take it,’’ she said and blushed. ‘‘But there’s nothing wonderful about it.’’

He looked at her in rapture, silently, and not knowing what to say.

‘‘Ah, what am I doing keeping you out in this heat?’’ she said after some silence and laughed. ‘‘Let’s go inside.’’

‘‘But won’t I be disturbing you?’’

They went into the front hall. Yulia Sergeevna ran up the stairs, her dress rustling, white with little blue flowers.

‘‘It’s impossible to disturb me,’’ she said, stopping on the stairs, ‘‘I never do anything. Every day is a holiday for me, from morning till evening.’’

‘‘For me, what you’re saying is incomprehensible,’’ he said, going up to her. ‘‘I grew up in a milieu where people worked every day, all of them without exception, both the men and the women.’’

‘‘But if there’s nothing to do?’’ she asked.

‘‘You must set up your life on such conditions that labor will be necessary. Without labor, there can be no pure and joyful life.’’

He again clutched the parasol to his breast and said softly, unexpectedly for himself, not recognizing his own voice:

‘‘If you would consent to be my wife, I’d give anything. I’d give anything... There’s no price, no sacrifice I wouldn’t go to.’’

She gave a start and looked at him in surprise and fear.

‘‘What, what are you saying!’’ she said, turning pale. ‘‘It’s impossible, I assure you. Forgive me.’’

Then quickly, with the same rustling of her dress, she went further up and disappeared through the door.

Laptev understood what this meant, and his mood changed at once, abruptly, as if the light had suddenly gone out in his soul. Feeling the shame, the humiliation, of a man who has been scorned, who is disliked, repulsive, maybe vile, whom people flee from, he left the house.

‘‘ ‘I’d give anything,’ ’’ he mocked himself, going home in the heat and remembering the details of his proposal. ‘‘ ‘I’d give anything’—utterly merchantlike. Much need there is for your anything!’’

Everything he had just said seemed to him stupid to the point of revulsion. Why had he lied about growing up in a milieu where everybody worked without exception? Why had he spoken in an admonitory tone about a pure and joyful life? That was not intelligent, not interesting, false—false Moscow-style. But now a mood of indifference gradually set in, such as criminals lapse into after a harsh sentence, and he thought that, thank God, everything was now past, and there was not that terrible unknowing, there was no need to spend whole days waiting, languishing, thinking about one and the same thing; now everything was clear; he had to abandon any hope of personal happiness, to live without desires, without hopes, not to dream, not to wait, but so that there would not be this boredom he was so sick of nursing, he could be occupied with other people’s affairs, other people’s happiness, and then old age would set in imperceptibly, life would come to an end—and nothing would be needed anymore. It already made no difference to him, he did not want anything and could reason coldly, but there was some heaviness in his face, especially under his eyes, his forehead was taut as rubber—tears were ready to burst out. Feeling weak all over, he went to bed and in five minutes was fast asleep.

III

THE PROPOSAL LAPTEV had made so unexpectedly brought Yulia Sergeevna to despair.

She knew Laptev only slightly and had become acquainted with him by chance; he was a rich man, a representative of the well-known Moscow firm of Fyodor Laptev and Sons, always very serious, apparently intelligent, preoccupied with his sister’s illness; it had seemed to her that he never paid any attention to her, and she herself was totally indifferent to him—and suddenly this declaration on the stairs, this pitiful, admiring face...

The proposal had confused her by its suddenness, and by the fact that the word ‘‘wife’’ had been uttered, and by the fact that she had had to answer with a refusal. She no longer remembered what she had said to Laptev, but she went on smarting from the traces of that impulsive, unpleasant feeling with which she had refused him. She did not like him; he had the look of a shopkeeper, was personally uninteresting, she could not have responded otherwise than by refusal, but all the same, she felt awkward, as if she had acted badly.

‘‘My God, without even going in, right on the stairs,’’ she said in despair, addressing the little icon that hung at the head of her bed, ‘‘and without courting me beforehand, but somehow strangely, peculiarly...’