Fifty-Two Stories

Maria Sergeevna was standing on the terrace. I silently embraced her and greedily started kissing her eyebrows, temples, neck…

In my room she told me that she had loved me for a long time, more than a year. She swore her love for me, wept, begged me to take her away with me. I kept bringing her to the window, so as to see her face in the moonlight, and she seemed like a beautiful dream to me, and I hurried to embrace her tightly, so as to believe in its reality. I had not experienced such raptures for a long time…But all the same, far off somewhere in the depths of my soul, I felt a certain awkwardness, and I was out of sorts. There was something troubling and burdensome in her love for me, as there was in Dmitri Petrovich’s friendship. It was a great, serious love, with tears and oaths, while I didn’t want anything serious—no tears, no oaths, no talk about the future. Let this moonlit night flash by in our lives like a bright meteor—and basta.

At exactly three o’clock she left my room, and as I followed her with my gaze, standing in the doorway, Dmitri Petrovich suddenly appeared at the end of the corridor. Running into him, she gave a start and made way for him, and disgust was written all over her. He smiled somehow strangely, coughed, and came into my room.

“I forgot my cap here yesterday,” he said, not looking at me.

He found his cap, put it on with both hands, then looked at my embarrassed face, at my slippers, and said in a strange, husky voice, not quite his own:

“I was probably predestined not to understand anything. If you understand something, then…I congratulate you. It’s all dark in my eyes.”

And he went out with a little cough. Then I saw through the window how he hitched up the horses by the stable. His hands were trembling, he was in a hurry and kept glancing at the house; he was probably frightened. Then he got into the tarantass and with a strange expression, as if fearing pursuit, whipped up the horses.

A little later I myself left. The sun was already rising, and the previous day’s mist timidly pressed itself to the bushes and hummocks. Forty Martyrs, who had already managed to have a drink somewhere, sat on the box and mouthed drunken nonsense.

“I’m a free man!” he cried to the horses. “Hey, you beauties! I’m a hereditary, honorary citizen, if you want to know!”

Dmitri Petrovich’s fear, which was on my mind, communicated itself to me. I thought about what had happened and understood nothing. I looked at the rooks, and found it strange and frightening that they were flying.

“Why did I do it?” I asked myself in bewilderment and despair. “Why did it happen precisely like this, and not some other way? To whom and for what was it necessary that she should love me seriously and that he should come to the room to get his cap? What has the cap got to do with it?”

That same day I left for Petersburg, and since then I have not seen Dmitri Petrovich and his wife even once. People say they’re still living together.

1892

BIG VOLODYA AND LITTLE VOLODYA

“LET ME! I WANT TO DRIVE MYSELF! I’ll sit beside the coachman!” Sofya Lvovna said loudly. “Coachman, wait, I’ll sit on the box with you.”

She was standing up in the sledge, and her husband Vladimir Nikitych and her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhailych were holding her by the arms to keep her from falling. The troika raced along quickly.

“I said not to give her cognac,” Vladimir Nikitych whispered vexedly to his companion. “What a one, really!”

The colonel knew from experience that in such women as his wife Sofya Lvovna violent, slightly drunken gaiety is usually followed by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that now, when they came home, instead of sleeping, he would have to fuss with compresses and drops.

“Whoa!” cried Sofya Lvovna. “I want to drive!”

She was genuinely happy and triumphant. Over the past two months, ever since her wedding day, she had been beset by the thought that her marriage to Colonel Yagich was of convenience and, as they say, par dépit.¹ Tonight, in a suburban restaurant, she had finally become convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years, he was so trim, adroit, supple, he quipped and sang along with the Gypsies so nicely. Really, nowadays older people are a thousand times more interesting than the young, and it looks as if old age and youth have exchanged roles. The colonel was two years older than her father, but could this circumstance have any meaning, if, in all conscience, there was immeasurably more of life’s force, vigor, and freshness in him than in her, though she was only twenty-three?

“Oh, my dearest!” she thought. “My wonderful one!”