Fifty-Two Stories

It seemed absurd to Pyotr Mikhailych that his aunt should interfere in what was none of her business and think her departure was connected with Zina’s leaving. He wanted to say something insolent, but restrained himself. And, as he restrained himself, he felt that the time had come to act, and that he could no longer stand it. To act at once, or to fall down, scream, and beat his head on the floor. He imagined Vlasich and Zina, two self-satisfied liberals, kissing each other somewhere under a maple tree, and everything oppressive and malignant that had accumulated in him over the past seven days heaped itself on Vlasich.

“One seduced and stole my sister,” he thought, “another will come and put a knife in my mother, a third will set my house on fire or rob me…And all that in the guise of personal friendship, lofty ideas, suffering!”

“No, it will never be!” Pyotr Mikhailych suddenly cried out and banged his fist on the table.

He jumped up and ran out of the dining room. In the stable stood the steward’s saddled horse. He mounted it and galloped off to Vlasich.

A whole storm rose up in his soul. He felt the need to do something outrageous, drastic, even if he would repent of it for the rest of his life. Call Vlasich a scoundrel, slap him in the face, and challenge him to a duel? But Vlasich was not the sort to fight a duel; the scoundrel and the slap would make him still more miserable, and he would withdraw still more deeply into himself. These miserable, uncomplaining people are the most unbearable, the most oppressive people. They can do anything with impunity. When such a miserable person, in response to a deserved reproach, looks at you with deep, guilty eyes, smiles painfully, and obediently offers his head, it seems that justice itself will be unable to raise a hand against him.

“Never mind. I’ll hit him with my whip in front of her and say all sorts of insolent things to him,” Pyotr Mikhailych decided.

He rode through his woods and wastelands, and imagined how Zina, to justify her act, would talk about women’s rights, about personal freedom, and about there being no difference between religious and civil marriage. She would argue in her womanly way about things she does not understand. And probably in the end she would ask: “How do you enter into it? What right have you got to interfere?”

“Yes, I have no right,” Pyotr Mikhailych muttered. “So much the better…The more rude, the less right, the better.”

It was stifling. Swarms of mosquitoes hung low over the ground, and in the wastelands lapwings wept pitifully. Everything portended rain, but there was not a single cloud. Pyotr Mikhailych crossed his boundary and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often took this road and knew every little bush, every pothole on it. What now in the twilight looked like a dark cliff far ahead of him in the twilight was a red church; he could picture it to himself in minute detail, even the stucco of the front gate and the calves that always grazed inside the fence. Half a mile to the right of the gate was a dark grove that belonged to Count Koltovich. And beyond the grove Vlasich’s land already began.

From behind the church and the count’s grove an enormous black cloud was looming up, with pale lightning flashing in it.

“Here it comes!” thought Pyotr Mikhailych. “Help us, Lord, help us!”

The horse soon became tired from going so quickly, and Pyotr Mikhailych was tired as well. The dark cloud looked at him angrily, as if advising him to go back home. He felt a little frightened.

“I’ll prove to them that they’re not right!” he tried to encourage himself. “They’ll say that this is free love, personal freedom; but freedom is in abstinence, not in subjection to passions. What they have is depravity, not freedom!”

Here was the count’s big pond; the cloud turned it dark blue and gloomy, it smelled of dampness and slime. By the dam two willows, an old one and a young one, leaned tenderly towards each other. Two weeks earlier, Pyotr Mikhailych and Vlasich had come there on foot, singing in low voices the old student song: “Not to love means to bury your young life…” A pathetic song!

There was a rumble of thunder as Pyotr Mikhailych rode through the grove, and the trees rustled and bent in the wind. He had to hurry. There was no more than a mile left to go from the grove across the meadow to Vlasich’s estate. Here old birches stood on both sides of the road. They looked as sad and miserable as their master Vlasich, and were as gaunt and lanky as he. Big raindrops splashed on the birches and the grass; the wind died down at once, and there was a smell of wet soil and poplars. Then Vlasich’s fence appeared with its yellow acacia, which was also gaunt and lanky; where the grillwork had fallen down, you could see the neglected orchard.