beings are far less significant than their sorrows! And without giving myself a clear account of what I was doing, I pulled with all my might on the doorbell at the Dolzhikovs’ gate, tore it off, and ran down the street like a little boy, feeling afraid and thinking that now they were sure to come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to catch my breath, the only thing to be heard was the sound of the rain and a night watchman rapping on an iron bar somewhere far away.
For a whole week, I didn’t go to the Dolzhikovs’. The tricot suit got sold. There was no painting work, and again I starved, earning ten or twenty kopecks a day, wherever I could, by heavy, unpleasant work. Floundering knee- deep in cold mud, straining my chest, I wanted to stifle my memories, as if taking revenge on myself for all those cheeses and potted meats I had been treated to at the engineer’s; but all the same, as soon as I went to bed, hungry and wet, my sinful imagination began at once to paint wonderful, seductive pictures, and I confessed to myself in amazement that I was in love, passionately in love, and I would fall asleep soundly and healthily, feeling that this life of hard labor only made my body stronger and younger.
On one of those evenings, it snowed unseasonably, and the wind blew from the north as if winter was coming again. On returning from work that evening, I found Marya Viktorovna in my room. She was sitting in her fur coat, holding both hands in her muff.
‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she asked, raising her intelligent, clear eyes, while I was greatly embarrassed from joy and stood at attention before her, as before my father when he was about to beat me; she looked into my face, and I could see from her eyes that she understood why I was embarrassed.
‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she repeated. ‘‘If you don’t want to come, here, I’ve come myself.’’
She stood up and came close to me.
‘‘Don’t abandon me,’’ she said, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘‘I’m alone, completely alone!’’
She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:
‘‘Alone! It’s hard for me to live, very hard, and I have no one in the whole world except you. Don’t abandon me!’’
Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears, she smiled; we were silent for a while, then I embraced and kissed her, getting a bloody scratch on my cheek as I did so from the pin that held her hat.
And we began talking as if we had been close to each other for a long, long time...
X
SOME TWO DAYS later, she sent me to Dubechnya, and I was unspeakably glad of it. On my way to the station, and then sitting on the train, I laughed for no reason, and people looked at me as if I was drunk. It was snowing, and there were morning frosts, but the roads had already darkened, and rooks, crowing, flitted over them.
At first I planned to set up quarters for the two of us, Masha and me, in the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov’s wing, but it turned out that it had long been inhabited by pigeons and ducks, and it would be impossible to clean it out without destroying a multitude of nests. I had, willy-nilly, to go to the inhospitable rooms of the big house with jalousies. The muzhiks called this house a mansion; it had more than twenty rooms and no furniture except the piano and a child’s chair that lay in the attic, and if Masha had brought all her furniture from town, even then we would not have managed to get rid of this impression of gloomy emptiness and coldness. I chose three smaller rooms with windows on the garden, and cleaned them from early morning till night, putting in new window glass, hanging wallpaper, filling the cracks and holes in the floor. It was easy, pleasant work. Time and again I ran to the river to see if the ice was breaking up; I kept imagining that the starlings had flown back. And at night, thinking about Masha, I listened, with an inexpressibly sweet feeling, with a thrilling joy, to the sound of the rats and the wind howling and knocking above the ceiling; it seemed as though some old household spirit was coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; at the end of March, a lot more poured down, but it melted quickly, as if by magic, the spring waters flowed stormily, and by the beginning of April the starlings were already making their racket, and yellow butterflies flew about the garden. The weather was wonderful. Every day towards evening, I headed for town to meet Masha, and what a pleasure it was to go barefoot on the drying, still-soft road! Halfway there, I would sit down and look at the town, not venturing to go nearer. The sight of it perplexed me. I kept thinking: how would my acquaintances treat me when they learned of my love? What would my father say? Especially perplexing was the thought that my life had become more complicated, and I had totally lost the ability to control it, and, like a big balloon, it was carrying me God knows where. I no longer thought of how to provide nourishment for myself, how to live, but thought—I truly can’t remember of what.
Masha would come in a carriage; I would get in with her, and we would go to Dubechnya together, merry, free. Or, after waiting till sunset, I would return home displeased, downcast, puzzling over why Masha hadn’t come, and by the gates of the estate or in the garden, a sweet phantom— she!—would meet me unexpectedly! It turned out that she had come by train and walked from the station. How festive it was! In a simple woolen dress, in a kerchief, with a modest parasol, but tightly laced, trim, in expensive imported shoes—this was a talented actress playing the little tradeswoman. We looked over our domain, deciding which room was whose, where we would have alleys, the kitchen garden, the apiary. We already had chickens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were ours. We already had oats, clover, timothy, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds ready for sowing, and we examined it all each time and had long discussions of what the harvest might be, and everything Masha said seemed to me remarkably intelligent and beautiful. This was the happiest time of my life.
Soon after Saint Thomas’s Sunday,16 we were married in our parish church, in the village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubechnya. Masha wanted everything to be done modestly; at her wish, we had peasant lads as best men, the beadle did all the singing, and we came home from church in a small, jolty tarantass, and she herself did the driving. Our only guest from town was my sister Cleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the wedding. My sister wore a white dress and gloves. During the ceremony, she cried quietly from tenderness and joy, the expression of her face was motherly, infinitely kind. She was drunk with our happiness and smiled as though she was inhaling sweet fumes, and, looking at her during our wedding, I understood that for her there was nothing higher in the world than love, earthly love, and that she dreamed of it secretly, timorously, but constantly and passionately. She embraced and kissed Masha and, not knowing how to express her rapture, kept saying to her about me: ‘‘He’s kind! He’s very kind!’’
Before leaving us, she changed into her ordinary dress and led me to the garden to talk with me one to one.
‘‘Father is very upset that you didn’t write anything to him,’’ she said. ‘‘You should have asked his blessing. But essentially he’s very pleased. He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of all society, and that under the influence of Marya Viktorovna, you’ll take a more serious attitude towards life. In the evenings we talk only about you, and yesterday he even used the phrase ‘our Misail.’ That made me glad. Evidently he has something in mind, and it seems he wants to show you an example of magnanimity and be the first to start talking about a reconciliation. It’s very possible that he’ll come to see you one of these days.’’
