carefully later on; but one dress, with a wide, bell-shaped skirt and big sleeves interested her, and for a moment she looked at it seriously and attentively.
'That's not bad,' she said.
'Yes, it would suit you very well,' said I. 'Very well.'
And I admired the dress, only because she liked it, and went on tenderly:
'A wonderful, lovely dress! Lovely, wonderful, Masha. My dear Masha!'
And tears began to drop on the fashion-plate.
'Wonderful Masha....' I murmured. 'Dear, darling Masha....'
She went and lay down and I sat still for an hour and looked at the illustrations.
'You should not have opened the windows,' she called from the bedroom. 'I'm afraid it will be cold. Look how the wind is blowing in!'
I read the miscellany, about the preparation of cheap fish, and the size of the largest diamond in the world. Then I chanced on the picture of the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, and bare shoulders, a brilliant, dazzling figure, well up in music and painting and literature, and how insignificant and brief my share in her life seemed to be!
Our coming together, our marriage, was only an episode, one of many in the life of this lively, highly gifted creature. All the best things in the world, as I have said, were at her service, and she had them for nothing; even ideas and fashionable intellectual movements served her pleasure, a diversion in her existence, and I was only the coachman who drove her from one infatuation to another. Now I was no longer necessary to her; she would fly away and I should be left alone.
As if in answer to my thoughts a desperate scream suddenly came from the yard:
'Mur-der!'
It was a shrill female voice, and exactly as though it were trying to imitate it, the wind also howled dismally in the chimney. Half a minute passed and again it came through the sound of the wind, but as though from the other end of the yard:
'Mur-der!'
'Misail, did you hear that?' said my wife in a hushed voice. 'Did you hear?'
She came out of the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and stood listening and staring out of the dark window.
'Somebody is being murdered!' she muttered. 'It only wanted that!'
I took my gun and went out; it was very dark outside; a violent wind was blowing so that it was hard to stand up. I walked to the gate and listened; the trees were moaning; the wind went whistling through them, and in the garden the idiot's dog was howling. Beyond the gate it was pitch dark; there was not a light on the railway. And just by the wing, where the offices used to be, I suddenly heard a choking cry:
'Mur-der!'
'Who is there?' I called.
Two men were locked in a struggle. One had nearly thrown the other, who was resisting with all his might. And both were breathing heavily.
'Let go!' said one of them and I recognised Ivan Cheprakov. It was he who had cried out in a thin, falsetto voice. 'Let go, damn you, or I'll bite your hands!'
The other man I recognised as Moissey. I parted them and could not resist hitting Moissey in the face twice. He fell down, then got up, and I struck him again.
'He tried to kill me,' he muttered. 'I caught him creeping to his mother's drawer.... I tried to shut him up in the wing for safety.'
Cheprakov was drunk and did not recognise me. He stood gasping for breath as though trying to get enough wind to shriek again.
I left them and went back to the house. My wife was lying on the bed, fully dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not keep back the fact that I had struck Moissey.
'Living in the country is horrible,' she said. 'And what a long night it is!'
'Mur-der!' we heard again, a little later.
'I'll go and part them,' I said.
'No. Let them kill each other,' she said with an expression of disgust.
She lay staring at the ceiling, listening, and I sat near her, not daring to speak and feeling that it was my fault that screams of 'murder' came from the yard and the night was so long.
We were silent and I waited impatiently for the light to peep in at the window. And Masha looked as though she had wakened from a long sleep and was astonished to find herself, so clever, so educated, so refined, cast away in this miserable provincial hole, among a lot of petty, shallow people, and to think that she could have so far forgotten herself as to have been carried away by one of them and to have been his wife for more than half a year. It seemed to me that we were all the same to her—myself, Moissey, Cheprakov; all swept together into the drunken, wild scream of 'murder'—myself, our marriage, our work, and the muddy roads of autumn; and when she breathed or stirred to make herself more comfortable I could read in her eyes: 'Oh, if the morning would come quicker!'
In the morning she went away.
I stayed at Dubechnia for another three days, waiting for her; then I moved all our things into one room, locked it, and went to town. When I rang the bell at the engineer's, it was evening, and the lamps were alight in Great Gentry Street. Pavel told me that nobody was at home; Victor Ivanich had gone to Petersburg and Maria Victorovna must be at a rehearsal at the Azhoguins'. I remember the excitement with which I went to the Azhoguins', and how my heart thumped and sank within me, as I went up-stairs and stood for a long while on the landing, not daring to enter that temple of the Muses! In the hall, on the table, on the piano, on the stage, there were candles burning; all in threes, for the first performance was fixed for the thirteenth, and the dress rehearsal was on Monday—the unlucky day. A fight against prejudice! All the lovers of dramatic art were assembled; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest Miss Azhoguin were walking about the stage, reading their parts. Radish was standing still in a corner all by himself, with his head against the wall, looking at the stage with adoring eyes, waiting for the beginning of the rehearsal. Everything was just the same!
I went toward my hostess to greet her, when suddenly everybody began to say 'Ssh' and to wave their hands to tell me not to make such a noise. There was a silence. The top of the piano was raised, a lady sat down, screwing up her short-sighted eyes at the music, and Masha stood by the piano, dressed up, beautiful, but beautiful in an odd new way, not at all like the Masha who used to come to see me at the mill in the spring. She began to sing:
'Why do I love thee, straight night?'
It was the first time since I had known her that I had heard her sing. She had a fine, rich, powerful voice, and to hear her sing was like eating a ripe, sweet-scented melon. She finished the song and was applauded. She smiled and looked pleased, made play with her eyes, stared at the music, plucked at her dress exactly like a bird which has broken out of its cage and preens its wings at liberty. Her hair was combed back over her ears, and she had a sly defiant expression on her face, as though she wished to challenge us all, or to shout at us, as though we were horses: 'Gee up, old things!'
And at that moment she must have looked very like her grandfather, the coachman.
'You here, too?' she asked, giving me her hand. 'Did you hear me sing? How did you like it?' And, without waiting for me to answer she went on: 'You arrived very opportunely. I'm going to Petersburg for a short time to- night. May I?'
At midnight I took her to the station. She embraced me tenderly, probably out of gratitude, because I did not pester her with useless questions, and she promised to write to me, and I held her hands for a long time and kissed them, finding it hard to keep back my tears, and not saying a word.
And when the train moved, I stood looking at the receding lights, kissed her in my imagination and whispered:
'Masha dear, wonderful Masha!...'
I spent the night at Mikhokhov, at Karpovna's, and in the morning I worked with Radish, upholstering the furniture at a rich merchant's, who had married his daughter to a doctor.
