upstairs, and God be with you!'
My wife lay down on the couch and sank into thought.
'And how splendid, how enviable life might have been!' she said softly, looking reflectively into the fire. 'What a life it might have been! There's no bringing it back now.'
Any one who has lived in the country in winter and knows those long dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too bored to bark and even the clocks seem weary of ticking, and any one who on such evenings has been troubled by awakening conscience and has moved restlessly about, trying now to smother his conscience, now to interpret it, will understand the distraction and the pleasure my wife's voice gave me as it sounded in the snug little room, telling me I was a bad man. I did not understand what was wanted of me by my conscience, and my wife, translating it in her feminine way, made clear to me in the meaning of my agitation. As often before in the moments of intense uneasiness, I guessed that the whole secret lay, not in the starving peasants, but in my not being the sort of a man I ought to be.
My wife got up with an effort and came up to me.
'Pavel Andreitch,' she said, smiling mournfully, 'forgive me, I don't believe you: you are not going away, but I will ask you one more favour. Call this'—she pointed to her papers—'self-deception, feminine logic, a mistake, as you like; but do not hinder me. It's all that is left me in life.' She turned away and paused. 'Before this I had nothing. I have wasted my youth in fighting with you. Now I have caught at this and am living; I am happy.... It seems to me that I have found in this a means of justifying my existence.'
'Natalie, you are a good woman, a woman of ideas,' I said, looking at my wife enthusiastically, 'and everything you say and do is intelligent and fine.'
I walked about the room to conceal my emotion.
'Natalie,' I went on a minute later, 'before I go away, I beg of you as a special favour, help me to do something for the starving peasants!'
'What can I do?' said my wife, shrugging her shoulders. 'Here's the subscription list.'
She rummaged among the papers and found the subscription list.
'Subscribe some money,' she said, and from her tone I could see that she did not attach great importance to her subscription list; 'that is the only way in which you can take part in the work.'
I took the list and wrote: 'Anonymous, 5,000.'
In this 'anonymous' there was something wrong, false, conceited, but I only realized that when I noticed that my wife flushed very red and hurriedly thrust the list into the heap of papers. We both felt ashamed; I felt that I must at all costs efface this clumsiness at once, or else I should feel ashamed afterwards, in the train and at Petersburg. But how efface it? What was I to say?
'I fully approve of what you are doing, Natalie,' I said genuinely, 'and I wish you every success. But allow me at parting to give you one piece of advice, Natalie; be on your guard with Sobol, and with your assistants generally, and don't trust them blindly. I don't say they are not honest, but they are not gentlefolks; they are people with no ideas, no ideals, no faith, with no aim in life, no definite principles, and the whole object of their life is comprised in the rouble. Rouble, rouble, rouble!' I sighed. 'They are fond of getting money easily, for nothing, and in that respect the better educated they are the more they are to be dreaded.'
My wife went to the couch and lay down.
'Ideas,' she brought out, listlessly and reluctantly, 'ideas, ideals, objects of life, principles....you always used to use those words when you wanted to insult or humiliate some one, or say something unpleasant. Yes, that's your way: if with your views and such an attitude to people you are allowed to take part in anything, you would destroy it from the first day. It's time you understand that.'
She sighed and paused.
'It's coarseness of character, Pavel Andreitch,' she said. 'You are well-bred and educated, but what a... Scythian you are in reality! That's because you lead a cramped life full of hatred, see no one, and read nothing but your engineering books. And, you know, there are good people, good books! Yes... but I am exhausted and it wearies me to talk. I ought to be in bed.'
'So I am going away, Natalie,' I said.
'Yes... yes....
I stood still for a little while, then went upstairs. An hour later—it was half-past one—I went downstairs again with a candle in my hand to speak to my wife. I didn't know what I was going to say to her, but I felt that I must say some thing very important and necessary. She was not in her study, the door leading to her bedroom was closed.
'Natalie, are you asleep?' I asked softly.
There was no answer.
I stood near the door, sighed, and went into the drawing-room. There I sat down on the sofa, put out the candle, and remained sitting in the dark till the dawn.
VI
I went to the station at ten o'clock in the morning. There was no frost, but snow was falling in big wet flakes and an unpleasant damp wind was blowing.
We passed a pond and then a birch copse, and then began going uphill along the road which I could see from my window. I turned round to take a last look at my house, but I could see nothing for the snow. Soon afterwards dark huts came into sight ahead of us as in a fog. It was Pestrovo.
'If I ever go out of my mind, Pestrovo will be the cause of it,' I thought. 'It persecutes me.'
We came out into the village street. All the roofs were intact, not one of them had been pulled to pieces; so my bailiff had told a lie. A boy was pulling along a little girl and a baby in a sledge. Another boy of three, with his head wrapped up like a peasant woman's and with huge mufflers on his hands, was trying to catch the flying snowflakes on his tongue, and laughing. Then a wagon loaded with fagots came toward us and a peasant walking beside it, and there was no telling whether his beard was white or whether it was covered with snow. He recognized my coachman, smiled at him and said something, and mechanically took off his hat to me. The dogs ran out of the yards and looked inquisitively at my horses. Everything was quiet, ordinary, as usual. The emigrants had returned, there was no bread; in the huts 'some were laughing, some were delirious'; but it all looked so ordinary that one could not believe it really was so. There were no distracted faces, no voices whining for help, no weeping, nor abuse, but all around was stillness, order, life, children, sledges, dogs with dishevelled tails. Neither the children nor the peasant we met were troubled; why was I so troubled?
Looking at the smiling peasant, at the boy with the huge mufflers, at the huts, remembering my wife, I realized there was no calamity that could daunt this people; I felt as though there were already a breath of victory in the air. I felt proud and felt ready to cry out that I was with them too; but the horses were carrying us away from the village into the open country, the snow was whirling, the wind was howling, and I was left alone with my thoughts. Of the million people working for the peasantry, life itself had cast me out as a useless, incompetent, bad man. I was a hindrance, a part of the people's calamity; I was vanquished, cast out, and I was hurrying to the station to go away and hide myself in Petersburg in a hotel in Bolshaya Morskaya.
An hour later we reached the station. The coachman and a porter with a disc on his breast carried my trunks into the ladies' room. My coachman Nikanor, wearing high felt boots and the skirt of his coat tucked up through his belt, all wet with the snow and glad I was going away, gave me a friendly smile and said:
'A fortunate journey, your Excellency. God give you luck.'
Every one, by the way, calls me 'your Excellency,' though I am only a collegiate councillor and a kammer- junker. The porter told me the train had not yet left the next station; I had to wait. I went outside, and with my head heavy from my sleepless night, and so exhausted I could hardly move my legs, I walked aimlessly towards the pump. There was not a soul anywhere near.
'Why am I going?' I kept asking myself. 'What is there awaiting me there? The acquaintances from whom I have come away, loneliness, restaurant dinners, noise, the electric light, which makes my eyes ache. Where am I going, and what am I going for? What am I going for?'
And it seemed somehow strange to go away without speaking to my wife. I felt that I was leaving her in uncertainty. Going away, I ought to have told that she was right, that I really was a bad man.
When I turned away from the pump, I saw in the doorway the station-master, of whom I had twice made complaints to his superiors, turning up the collar of his coat, shrinking from the wind and the snow. He came up to me, and putting two fingers to the peak of his cap, told me with an expression of helpless confusion, strained
