The Romancer

There was a man named Foma Varaxin, a cabinetmaker, aged twenty-five, a most absurd man with a large skull, flattened at the temples and elongated behind above the nape; this top-heavy skull tilted up his cropped head, and Foma walked the earth with his broad nose stuck up in the air, so that from a distance he gave the jaunty impression of wishing to cry out:

“Here, touch me, you just try!”

A single glance, however, at his nondescript face with its mouth of generous proportions and neutral-tinted eyes showed him to be just a good-natured fellow looking happily embarrassed over something or other.

His comrade, Alexei Somov, who was also a cabinet-maker, once told Foma:

“Your mug looks awful dreary! Why don’t you stick on a pair of eyebrows or something. There’s nothing on the whole panel except a nose, and that’s as bad a job I’ve ever seen!”

“That is so,” agreed Foma, fingering his upper lip. “Features couldn’t exactly be called handsome, but then didn’t Polly say I had fine eyes!”

“Don’t you believe it. She says that to get you to treat her to an extra bottle of beer.”

Alexei was two years Foma’s junior, but he had spent five months in prison for politics, read many books, and when he was loath or unable or too lazy to understand a comrade he used to say:

“That’s a bourgeois prejudice. Utopia. You must know the history of culture. You don’t understand the class contradictions.”

He introduced Foma into a circle where little sharp-nosed Comrade Mark, waving hands that resembled bird’s feet, rattled off an account of the labour movement in the West. These narrations had an instant appeal for Foma, and after several lectures he pressed a varnish-stained hand to his chest and gushed:

“That’s the stuff, Alexei! That’s just about right! It does exist…”

Dry sardonic Somov, screwing up his greenish eyes and pursing his lips, asked:

“What does?”

“That same attraction people have towards unity – it does! Now take me. It’s all the same to me whether it’s a fire, or a religious procession, or a public fair – I always feel myself drawn terribly strong to any kind of place where people are gathered. People! Now take the church – why do I like to go to church? A gathering of souls, that’s why!”

“You’ll get over that!” Alexei assured him with an ironical grin. “When you grasp the idea…”

Foma thumped himself on the chest and cried joyously:

“I have grasped it! Here’s where it is! I grasped it from the very first. Now it’s a joy to me like Our Lady of all the afflicted…”

“Off he goes!”

“No, wait a minute. ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Isn’t that it? Thai’s the idea!”

“Don’t be silly – that’s the Gospel!”

“What of that? The idea is always the same, it strikes me. It may take on different shapes and different forms but the image is the same! It’s the Mother of Love! Isn’t that so?”

When Alexei was angry his upper lip curled, his sharp nose quivered, and his green pupils grew round like a bird’s. In a dry voice that crackled oddly on its high notes, and in words that sounded like snaps, Alexei impressively and at great length tried to prove to his comrade that he was a Utopian, that his class consciousness was dormant and would probably never be awakened because Foma had been brought up in a clergyman’s home where his mother served as cook and where his soul was poisoned by bourgeois prejudices and superstitions.

“But Alexei!” Foma exclaimed in an earnest tone, “it wasn’t poisoned – so help me God! Quite the contrary! When I was a kid, frinstance, I didn’t go to church at all. Good Lord, you don’t think I’m lying, do you? That happened afterwards, when I began to read books, and in general was drawn towards people! It isn’t a matter of church-going, but a – you know – communion of souls! That’s the idea! Now, what’s it all about? Brothers, shame on you, how can you live like that? You’re not beasts, are you? It’s a matter of inspiring love and conscience, Alexei, that’s the important thing it seems to me! Isn’t that right?”

“No, it isn’t right!” snapped Alexei, his anger rising and his cheeks breaking out in patches of red, and Foma often had the impression that Alexei’s words rapped his nose like cards in that game people played.

Foma maintained an embarrassed silence, stroking his head and now and then making a timid attempt in a guilty voice to appease Ms comrade:

“I understand, Alexei. I really do! Of course – there’s the struggle! Nobody’s denying that – that’s where you’ve got to sit tight!”

Then he would suddenly meander off, and begin to argue in an earnest tone:

“You see, I was only thinking about man. Now, what is man. generally speaking? I’m not a chisel, am I? Now, say some one began using you as a chisel, they’d start using a mallet on you – that’s what I mean, don’t you see! A man’s not a tool, is he? Then, there’s the struggle, to be sure – you can’t get away from that! By all means – the struggle! But the apostolic, you know, idea – that er… general er… universal concord… peace on earth and goodwill among men…”

Sometimes Alexei would say nothing and fix his comrade with a long contemptuous stare. Then he would begin in a cutting voice, as though he were snipping off Foma’s ears:

“No you’re stupid! It’s a muddle-head you are, a hopeless muddle-head!”

Or he would threaten him, icily and impressively:

“You wait – we’ll soon begin to read the history of culture – you’ll see.”

Foma then felt very small. Incomprehensible words always exercised a depressing effect on him, inspired a reverential awe for the people who used them and elicited strange associations of ideas. Utopia he visualized as a hummocky swamp all covered with a stunted overgrowth, while over the chilly knolls, with arms outstretched, walks a woman clad all in white with the face of Our Lady, as always, filled with the vast sadness of the Mother – and she walks in silence with mute tears in her eyes. He had more than once heard the words “religious cult,” and culture he envisaged as a divine service, something in the nature of a solemn matins at Easter. It slowly dawned on him that this wise science could untie all the knots of life’s tangled problems, reduce all thoughts to proper order and bathe the variegated tints of life in a single steady mellow light. He spoke a lot, rapturously and breathlessly and always looked his interlocutor straight in the face with lack-lustre, tipsy-looking eyes. Every new thought that entered his mind evoked a torrent of words – he would wave his arras and cry in low and delighted tones:

“Wonderful! That’s just it! So simple!”

At first his comrades of the circle and workshop lent him an attentive ear out of curiosity, but they soon discovered that Foma was simply a chatterbox, and Yegor Kashin, the dour-faced fitter, advised him more than once:

“Cut your tongue in halves, windbag!”

Rut this did not cool Foma’s ardour – he surveyed everyone with a friendly glance and babbled on like a gushing spring brook.

When he came to the first lesson on the history of culture and found that it was to be given by a plump little blue-eyed young lady with smooth hair and a thick braid hanging down her back he was sadly puzzled, and tried all the time to avoid looking at the young lady.

He noticed, however, that she was ill at ease, trying in vain to impart a serious expression to her childish face, speaking hurriedly, incoherently, and when asked a question her face blushed crimson and her eyes blinked swiftly in confusion. She was so white and dainty that she stirred in him a feeling of pity.

“Clearly the first time,” thought Foma, studiously examining the dark damp wall above her head. He was surprised to hear her speak about lightning, the clouds, sunset, the heroes of fables and Greek myths – he could not see the connection and complained about it to Alexei on their way home:

“That was a flop, Alexei! On a subject like that they should have put a different person entirely, a serious man, some one with grey in his hair like… and a deep voice… make it sound like some one was reading the Twelve Gospels!”

Somov too was disgruntled and snorted:

“Fancy appointing that froggish little thing for such a job! A fat lot I care who the Evil Serpent is… We know who he is all right – tell us better how to destroy him…”

“Better she’d had just read straight off that thick little book!” said Foma deprecatingly, but soon forgetting the unfortunate lesson, he rambled on in his usual tone of benign dreamer: “Isn’t it wonderful, brother, a little person like that coming into our rough company – here, sec you, this is what I know, will you just listen! Wonderful! By getting closer to each other…”

“Talking drivel again!” Alexei brusquely stemmed the verbal tide.

“Why is it drivel?” Foma persisted gently, kindly. “You talk about class – now what kind of class is she? Simply a generous-hearted little girl. She feels sort of conscious-stricken living among people of our like, and so she…”

“When will all that treacle ooze out of you?” cried Somov in annoyance. “What’s conscience got to do with it? Simply necessity – conscience be hanged! If she had another place to go to, she’d find something easier and wouldn’t come to us, don’t kid yourself!”

Foma looked down the street at the flaming beads of the lamp lights and asked:

“So you think she does it because she’s obliged to?”

“Of course…”

“You think so?” said Varaxin with a backward toss of his head. “I don’t believe it somehow!”

“Why not?”

“What’s the sense in doing a thing because you’re obliged to? If I’m a cabinet-maker and used to my job – why should I do the work of a common carpenter? She’s kind of whittling logs…”

Alexei spat, saying:

“Let her whittle logs…”

At the second lesson Foma seemed to catch a glimpse of interesting ideas in the girl’s words which stirred his heart, and when she had finished he asked:

“Comrade Liza, will you lend me that book until next time?”

“Certainly,” she said, looking obviously pleased.

Then Foma walked by her side through the streets of the town, and was careful not to touch her with his elbow. They walked up a hilly street, on both sides of which the little houses of the suburb gazed at them through darkened windows. A lamp burned at the top of the street, casting a trembling patch of dull yellow around, and the damp gloom of the autumn night was filled with the odours of rotting wood and refuse.

Foma, coughing discreetly and trying to express himself elegantly, asked Liza:

“Then, I can take it for granted that in ancient times man spoke a single language – is that so?”

“Yes, the Aryans,” a low voice answered him.

“And that’s been proved, has it?”

“Definitely proved.”

“Fine! Thai’s wonderful! Then all the nations that are now scattered were once devoted to the unity of life, hence in ancient times people were united by a single common idea – y-yes…”

His words, however, shaped themselves laboriously, and he was thinking not of ancient limes but of the little figure of the girl hurrying uphill half a pace in front of him on his left. Cloaked in the darkness she looked smaller than she was. Foma noticed that every time she passed a lighted window she bent her head and tried to slip quickly out of the patch of light.

“Wonderful!” he thought, not ceasing to talk and seeming to become a dual personality, as it were. “Such a little person, without fear, amid strange men, at night, in such a lonely spot… Wonderful!”

To keep his hands from gesticulating he thrust them into his pockets. This was uncustomary and constraining.

“Aren’t you afraid of drunks?” he asked.

She answered quickly, softly:

“Oh, I’m dreadfully afraid! There are so many of them around here…”

“Yes,” said Foma with a sigh, “they drink an unconscionable lot! The point is – life wants filling up, but there isn’t anything to fill it with! I mean life in the sense of the soul. Wine, we know, enriches the fancy. You can’t blame people harshly – is it a man’s fault that he’s obliged to sustain life by fancies?”

“I don’t blame them!” exclaimed Liza, slowing her pace. “I understand. What you said is so true, so very true!”

That cheered Foma up – he never remembered any one ever having agreed with him. Drawing his hands out of his pockets and tapping the book under his jacket he resumed in earnest confidential tones:

“Now, frinstance, if books were more accessible – that would be a different matter! Generally speaking, there’s no reason to be afraid of people, I assure you they deserve the fullest interest and compassion in the empty lives they lead. The fact of the matter is there is very little of everything, as you know, and that’s why everybody’s wild. No comforts of any kind, a man’s only friend is just naked fate with the awful face of poverty and vice, as the poet has it. But then, of course, when people like you will come down in large numbers from the summit – it’ll certainly give to life something that’ll make it worthy of man…”

Liza walked still more slowly, holding her skirt with one hand, while she passed the other hand across her face, saying with a sigh:

“Yes, yes, that’s true!”

“Fyodor Grigorievich,” Foma went on, interrupting her, “the son of the clergyman in whose place my mother lived – a good woman, my mother was, but she’s dead – Fyodor Grigorievich who’ll now soon be a professor, he used to say, when arguing with his father: ‘To live is to know!’ Very simple! Supposing I live and don’t know what I am, the why and wherefore and all that – now could you call that living? Just eking out an existence under the exploitation of all kinds of sinister forces originating in man and prejudices created by him – isn’t that so?”

“To live is to know!” repeated Liza. “That’s just the thing, comrade – you have such a wonderfully broad outlook…”

Foma did not remember what else he said, but this was the first time in his life that he had spoken so much, so boldly and ardently. They parted at the gate of a large two-storied house with columns on the façade, and Liza, shaking his hand, earnestly asked him:

“Thursday and Monday – don’t forget! After seven I’m at home, I’ll wait till nine – you won’t forget?”

“With the greatest pleasure!” cried Foma, stamping his foot on the pavement. “Awfully grateful! Splendid!”

All night long till morning he roamed about the streets with his head reared in the air, mentally composing ardent invocatory speeches about the necessity of rendering aid by word and deed to people who had still failed to grasp the intrinsic ideas: to live and to know. He felt very happy. The grey sky of autumn seemed to yawn before him and out of the deep blue gulf words tumbled like falling stars, beautiful rich words that formed themselves into shining ranks of good and kindly thoughts on life and men, and these thoughts left Foma astonished before their unconquerable simplicity, their truth and force.

Thursday found Foma sitting in Liza’s room, seeing nothing except the tense glance of her blue eyes which, he could see, were trying to follow the drift of his words, while he looked into their blue depths and spoke:

“Then it looks, figurely speaking, as if the idea about the triumph of light over darkness is of heavenly origin?”

“If you like, yes – but – still – why must you have the heavenly?”

“It kind of looks nicer! And so – the main idea is the Sun that sheds around it the force of life! That’s wonderful and quite right. I went out of town yesterday – to Yarillo, you know – to watch the sunset! Quite easy and simple to imagine the way it’s all described – serpent, swords, the struggle, the defeat of darkness and then the sunrise in a triumphant blaze! There wasn’t any sunrise, though, it was raining, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve seen the sunrise many a time, and I’ll make it a point to see it on a clear day, I will!”

He looked round and took a liking to the clean cosy little room with the white bed in the corner chastely screened in a soft veil of gloom. On a table before Foma lay numerous books, others stood slanting on a shelf, the walls were hung with familiar photographs of writers and learned men with long hair and melancholy faces. Rubbing his palms covered with callouses and stained with varnish, Foma laughed softly to himself and went on:

“Wonderful, comrade, there I was sitting on a steep bank with my legs over the side, when a dog comes up, kind of beggarly looking dog it was, you know, all covered with dirt and burs, with grey whiskers on its face. Hungry, old and homeless. Comes up and sits down near me and also watches: there was the sky flaming yellow and red, blue figures kept on changing, the rays broke ’em up and set ’em alight again, golden rivers flowed past – and we, a man and a dog, sat watching, just like that. Generally speaking, comrade, nobody knows for certain what a dog really is, you know, and what it’s attitude is to the sun? Maybe it also – mind you, I don’t know, it’s just fantasy – but why shouldn’t a dog be able to understand what the sun means, if it feels cold and warmth and can look at the sky? Now, a pig – that’s another matter, of course! D’you know, I even joked with it – d’you understand, says I, who the real creator of life is, eh? It looked at me out of the corner of its e)e and moved off a little… Surprising how every living thing on earth is mistrustful and cautious of one another – very sad, when you come to think of it! Mind you, maybe it’s silly, but when I read those two chapters I all of a sudden, you know, seemed to realize it for the first time – why, the sun! The sun – extraordinary simple!”

“You’ve read two chapters?” Foma heard her ask.

The question struck him as sounding sort of strict.

“Only two,” he returned, and for some reason began fingering the chair on which he sat. “We’ve got a lot of work just now, you know, an urgent job. Klobistyaev, the merchant, is giving his daughter away in marriage– the son-in-law’s going to live with them – and we’re touching up a dining room suite. Splendid furniture he bought, fine antique workmanship – solid oak, you know…”

He saw the girl’s eyes close wearily, and that instantly made him tongue-tied and threw him into confusion. Foma resumed not without an effort, smiling embarrassedly:

“Maybe I’m chattering too much – pardon me please!”

The young lady exclaimed hastily:

“Oh no! Your talk is so interesting. I’ve only just started work, and it’s very important for me to study the mentality of people who… people of your class.”

Foma brightened up again, became emboldened, and, waving his arms in the air, broke into song, like a bird at sunrise.

“Allow me to say that people of my kind are like little children – timid, you know! Between ourselves, frinstance, we crafts men very rarely have heart to heart talks. Yet every one would like to say something about himself – because – well, you know, a man sees very little kindness, and… if you bear in mind that every one had a mother… and was used to being caressed, it’s… a very sad thing!”

He moved up to the little hostess with his chair – something creaked with a snap and a thick book dropped on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” said Foma. “Very little elbow-room in here!” Dropping his voice, he continued in a mysterious undertone: “I want to tell you how remarkably true it is that it’s no good for a man to live by himself! Of course, unity of interests among the workers is a very good thing – I understand that – but interest is not the whole story – there’s a mighty lot in a man’s soul besides that! A man definitely wants to lay bare his soul, show it in full dress parade, in all its magnitude… A man’s a young creature, as you know! Not in years, of course, but taking it as life as a whole – life’s not an old story, is it? Eh? And suddenly, there you are, nobody wants to listen to anything – and there you have it – loneliness of the soul… dumbness and death of thought! I don’t agree with it – the unity of people is absolutely necessary, isn’t it? Unity of interests – all right… but how can one explain the loneliness and the awful misery at times? You see…”

“I don’t quite follow you,” said Liza, and her voice once more sounded teacher-like and strict.

Foma regarded her smilingly, and she, with knitted brows, returned his look with a very intent stare that once more dampened his enthusiasm. With a lift of her shoulders she drew her plait over her breast and her fingers moved swiftly twining and untwining the black ribbon, while she said in an unnaturally deep voice:

“That’s rather a strange argument. While admitting the unity of interests…”

“You see, the point is,” broke in Foma, “if one ray is here, another there, there won’t be any warmth… all the rays must be merged into one, isn’t that so?”

“Well, yes, but what do you call a ray?”

“My soul, and yours – there you have the rays of the sun, figurely speaking.”

When Foma took his leave he thought Liza looked at him suspiciously and shrank back, and when he shook her hand she tried to pull it back.

And again he wandered nearly all night through the deserted streets of the sleepy town, rousing the night watchmen dozing at the house entrances, and exciting the interest of the policemen on their night rounds.

He recalled the things he had spoken and made a wry face, feeling that he had bungled things and had not said what he wanted to.

“Funny!” he thought, “when I went to her I had everything so pat in my head. Next time I’ll rehearse it properly…

He suddenly stopped, remembering that Liza had not told him when he could come again.

“She’s forgotten! I’ve been speaking too much!”

And then again he escorted her home at nights, and all the way he bombarded her with his rapturous speeches, confided to her, before he was aware of it, the secrets of an awakened soul, not noticing that she listened to him in silence, answered his questions in monosyllables and no longer invited him to come to her warm little room.

“Why, I believe you’re a romancer!” she once exclaimed with a feeling akin to regret, and looking him squarely in the face she shook her head deprecatingly.

Foma was disconcerted by a word that was reminiscent of romance and love, and he laughed softly while Liza continued:

“How strange! Of course, I understand romanticism, but…”

She spoke long and didactically, and Foma could not understand what it was all about.

And gradually it became a necessity for him to see Liza – her eyes produced on him a heady pleasant sensation and elicited new words, kindled oddly fervent thoughts. Seeing her surrounded by a close ring of workers listening attentively and thoughtfully to her low persuasive voice, seeing her white hands fluttering like little doves in the semi-dusk of the room, her dark brows moving above the blue eyes and rosy lips quivering like budding petals.

Foma thought:

“That’s the Idea! To all the afflicted I bring joy…”

And he pictured to himself a cool babbling brook meandering down the hillside to a parched valley where the trees stand forlorn and dusty, their faded leaves drooping wearily, while the living water makes its way to their roots.

And he recalled the lovely fairy tale of the little girl lost in the woods – how she wandered into the cave of the dwarfs and sat among them trustfully, filled with love and goodwill to every living thing.

Sometimes Liza, warming to her subject, grew excited, stammered, found difficulty in choosing her words, and her eyes darted anxiously over the faces of her audience. At such moments Foma sat tense and breathless, he felt an urge to intervene and help her out with the missing words and – so painful was the ordeal to him – that he even perspired with the tension.

“Alexei!” he said to Somov, gesticulating. “What a wonderful thing it is when a pure person like that – almost a child she is! – comes to people and says: excuse me, that’s not so, it’s all wrong, you don’t see the main thing – the idea of the world’s unity! Extraordinary! Just like a fairy tale, eh?”

Alexei threw him a look out of the corner of his eye and muttered sarcastically:

“Mind you don’t melt, you’ll make the floor dirty!”

“Don’t be silly! Why, you yourself – you believe, you feel it…”

Somov curled his lip and snubbed his comrade with an angry snort:

“You’d better listen more and chatter less. And don’t start explaining to people what you don’t understand yourself. You just look, you haven’t made yourself too popular – you get on people’s nerves with your talk…”

“I get on people’s nerves?” queried Foma incredulously.

One day he had a toothache which he assiduously tried to relieve by stuffing cotton wool saturated in varnish into the cavity; he even bought some creosote, though he considered it injurious, but the pain was not allayed and he was unable to attend the lesson.

Late in the evening Somov, looking gloomy and disgruntled, came into the workshop, and calling Foma aside, demanded sternly:

“What were you talking about with Liza the day before yesterday?”

“Me? Oh, various things. Why?”

Alexei, his lips twisted, looked at him askance and, drawing at his cigarette, asked:

“Complained about being lonely, eh?”

“Complained? Me? Nothing of the kind! I just happened to mention it…”

“You ought to lake better care of your words!”

“Did you see her home?”

“Sure.”

“What did she loll you about me?” asked Foma, stroking his swollen cheek.

“What I’m telling you – you’re a muddle-headed fellow.”

“No, really?”

Somov studied the smoking tip of his cigarette and said with a sneer:

“You can take it from me! That’s what she said!”

“Never mind!” exclaimed Foma, and even his tooth seemed to ache less. “I’ll prove to her that…”

“Look here,” said Alexei with a sardonic grin, kicking aside the shavings on the floor, “let me give you a bit of advice – or better I’ll tell you what happened to me once. When I was in prison I saw a girl, one of the educated sort, during the promenade, and went nuts over her right off the bat, just like you…”

“You don’t say!” Foma exclaimed in astonishment.

But Alexei, his face as wry as though he too suffered from toothache, went on without looking at his pal:

“We tapped out messages to each other at night and all that kind of thing… I started that stuff about loneliness, and it worked out pretty rotten, my dear fellow, let me tell you!”

“You don’t say!” repeated Foma in a soft whisper, waving his hands. “What makes you think – who said I was in love? Where did you get the idea?”

“Come on, kid your grandmother! I advise you to drop it…”

“That’s nonsense, Alexei!” said Foma, pressing a hand to his heart and feeling that it was beating with astonishing rapidity, as though at once frightened and overjoyed. “Good Lord, who the devil would have thought it? That’s extraordinary, that is! The thing never entered my mind! But what’s the use? Though, on second thought, she’s made up her mind to go with us fellows, and – well, so what? Very simple, I should say! Supposing we put it like this: let a person melt in our insipid midst like a pinch of salt, and satiate…”

Somov crushed the cigarette end slowly between his fingers, stared around and started whistling between his teeth. Seeing that his comrade had no desire to listen to him Foma sighed and remarked:

“That damned tooth’s a nuisance – hurts…”

“Mind something else doesn’t start hurting!” Alexei warned him, concealing his eves under his lashes, then suddenly resumed in a tone Foma had never heard him use before:

“Look here, if we’re going to talk this thing out – though I’m not gifted with the gab – let me tell you this. People say that you’re a muddle-headed fellow – I say it myself… it’s only true – sometimes you talk such piffle, fit to make a fellow sick. Still… I always hear you – I mean listen…”

He sat on a work-bench, his back bent and his shoulders, elbows and knees sticking out in sharp angularities, and he looked as though he had been knocked together out of odd fragments of wood. Stroking his stiff dark hair he continued slowly and quietly:

“What I like about you is that you’re somehow like a little child – you put faith in everything you know…

“Alexei – that’s just it!” cried Foma, leaning over to him confidentially. “D’you remember me telling you about Fyodor Grigorievich? He says the same thing. His father’s all for faith. But he says, even behind faith there’s a certain amount of knowledge, for without it no interpretation of life is possible…”

“You chuck that, my boy!” advised Somov. “I don’t understand that…”

“No, but can’t you see, it’s very simple! First knowledge – then faith! Its the mother of faith, it gives it birth – you just think – how can a man have faith unless he has knowledge? Comrade Mark and Vassili, if you ask me – they simply don’t believe in the power of knowledge, that’s why they talk against faith in general…”

Somov regarded him with a sorrowful ironical look and observed with a shake of the head:

“It’s hard to talk with you! Crammed yourself chock-full with all kinds of drivel, and it looks to me you’ll never get rid of it. Let me tell you – I’m sorry for you! Get me? And lake my advice – leave Liza alone!”

Foma Varaxin forced a reluctant laugh and screwed up his eyes like a stroked cat.

No, I’ll see this thing through. I will, right full ahead! I’ll ask her – that’s a wonderful idea! Now, what’ll she say, eh?”

“What arc you going to ask her?” enquired Alexei drily.

“Generally, I’ll ask her about complete unity. Word and deed – is that it?”

Somov drew out a cigarette with a trembling hand and put it into his mouth the wrong end. He bit off the moistened end, spat it out on the floor, flung the cigarette after it and asked:

“Do you love her, or what? Might as well say it!”

To which Foma replied without a moment’s hesitation:

“Yes, of course, very much… I mean, if you hadn’t mentioned it – I might not have guessed it perhaps – but now it’s clear! When I speak with her I feel so happy and light, as though I really were a child, upon my word!”

“Good-bye,” muttered Alexei, thrusting out his hand, and made for the door. He stopped in the depths of the workshop, looking small and dark, and asked in a quiet voice:

“Damn it, maybe you only just made it up?”

“What?”

“That love of yours?”

“You’re a funny chap!” exclaimed Foma. “You said it yourself. I didn’t make am thing up. I simply didn’t grasp the fact yet… it was you…

“I’m a fool too!” said Somov and disappeared.

What with excitement and agonizingly anxious visions of his forthcoming meeting with Liza, Foma forgot his toothache and began pacing backwards and forwards among the rustling shavings. An oil lamp burned smokily on the wall, dimly illuminating the yellow strips of boards stacked on racks overhead, a pile of curly shavings in the corner on which lay sprawled the little body of a sleeping boy, the dark work-benches, the curved legs of chairs and boards gripped in vices.

“Wonderful!” thought Foma rubbing his hands together vigorously.

He conjured up a simple, delightful life with a clever and loving little wife full of understanding and able to find an answer to every question. Around her are dear friends and comrades, and she. herself is dear and near.

“Beautiful!”

Then will come exile – that’s sure to come! Somewhere far away in a lonely little village snowed up to the roofs and lost amid dark towering forests – forests towering to the very sky – he sits alone with her, studying. The walls are lined with shelves of thick impressive-looking books that tell you everything you want to know, and they both pass mentally from one to another of them by the bright ways of human thought. Outside there reigns a frozen hush, the white snow has wrapped the earth in a downy cloak and above it hangs the low cupola of the northern skies. Inside the room it is warm, clean and cosy, the fire in the stove dances in vivid yellow tongues of flame, the shadows dart silently along the walls and in a little cot by one of them lies another sweet bit of humanity born into the world to fight for the unity of all mankind into a single family of friends, workers, creators. The wintry sky of this cold country is painted by flaming sunsets, reminiscent of the primeval days when, the first childish thoughts of men were born, when the invincible idea of uniting all mankind, the idea of the triumph of light was first nourished in men’s minds.

Foma Varaxin did not believe in dawdling – Sunday saw him dressed in his best suit, one side of which, for some unaccountable reason, was longer than the other, and the collar of which evinced an inclination to climb to the back of his head: he put on shirt with a starched front and frayed cuffs, donned a blue necktie with red spots, hunched his shoulders high and went forth to visit Liza.

The bright winter day was bedecked in hoarfrost and velvet draperies of snow, strengthening in Foma’s breast a joyous resolve inspiring him with words bright and pure. The telegraph wires, white and shaggy with hoar-frost, stretched prettily in the air straight towards the street where lived the girl whom Foma had already more than once and without any shadow of doubt mentally called his bride and wife. It was a glorious day, a joyous day, resplendent with light and silver scintillations.

“Oh, it’s you!” said Liza, opening the door of her room.

“Are you coming in or going out?” asked Foma, smiling and giving her hand a hearty squeeze.

“I’m going out,” she said, her face twisted with pain, as she blew on her fingers and shook them in front of her face. She had a little sealskin cap on her head and her left hand was gloved.

“Well, I won’t keep you long!” promised Foma, settling himself into a chair in his overcoat and slapping his knee with his cap.

“Why do you look so radiant?” asked Liza, her blue eyes travelling over his figure.

He took his time, regarding her with an affectionate searching look – she was so like an apple, small, round and rosy.

“A little doll!” it flashed through his mind.

She walked to and fro between the door and the window, her heels clicking on the floor. She glanced through the window, then at the visitor with wrinkled brows, and swaying slightly, moved slowly towards the door. It seemed to him that her face looked sterner and more preoccupied than usual.

“Perhaps she feels what’s coming?” he thought.

“I’ll explain why I look radiant.” said Foma aloud and invited her: “Sit down, please!”

She shrugged her shoulders and reluctantly, irresolutely sat down facing him.

“Well?”

Foma leaned towards her, put out a yellow-nailed varnish-stained hand, and began in a low, soft, tender voice:

“Do you know. Comrade Liza. I want to tell you just one word.” He rose to his feet, pointed his finger in front of him and exclaimed in an impressive tone: “Full ahead!”

“What’s that?” asked Liza, smiling.

“Let me explain: imagine a steamboat on the river, engines throttled down because the fairway’s unfamiliar. Then the situation becomes clear. ‘Half speed!’ yells the captain down to the engine room, and then, when all’s plain sailing, the captain commands: ‘Full ahead!”’

Liza opened her eyes in a puzzled look, silently biting her lips with little white teeth.

“You don’t understand?” queried Foma, moving up closer.

“N-no! Who’s the captain?”

“The captain? You! And me – we’re both captains of our lives – you and me! We have the right to command our own destiny – isn’t that so?”

“Why, yes, but – what’s it all about?” exclaimed the girl, laughing.

Foma held his arms out to her and repeated in broken accents:

“Full ahead, comrade! You know us, me and all the rest – come to us, come with us to complete unity!”

Liza stood up. It seemed to him that a shadow passed over her face and chased the bloom from her cheeks, quenched the shining light of her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” she said, lifting her shoulders. “It goes without saving – of course I am with you… What makes you speak of it? What is the matter?”

Foma seized her hands in his own hard palms, shook them and almost shouted:

“It goes without saying! Wonderful, comrade! I knew it… of course you’ll – you’ll do it!”

“Do what?” she questioned nervously, snatching her fingers away. “Don’t shout, there are other people in the house… Do what?”

Her voice sounded angry and a little indignant. Foma caught the note and hastened to explain:

“Marry me – that’s what I propose! Right full ahead! D’you imagine what it’ll be like – our life, comrade? What a holiday it’ll be…”

Standing before her, with bis arms frantically sawing the air, he began to sketch the long pondered scenes of their life together, their work, pictures of life in exile, and as he spoke his voice dropped lower and lower, for Liza seemed to be melting before his gaze, dwindling and shrinking and receding further and further away.

“Good God, how stupid!” he heard a muffled distressed exclamation. “How vulgar!”

It seemed to Foma as if somebody had imperceptibly sprung at him and clenched a hand over his mouth so hard that his heart instantly stopped beating and he gasped for breath.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Foma!” he heard a low indignant voice saying. “It’s simply – why, it’s awful! It’s stupid – don’t you see? Oh, how disgusting, how silly!”

It seemed to him that the girl was shrinking into the wall, burying herself among the portraits, and her face grew as grey and lifeless as the photographs above her head. She pulled her plait with one hand and fanned the air in front of her with the other, shrinking ever smaller and speaking in a low but sharp voice:

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to regard me only as a woman?”

Foma spread his hands and stammered:

“Why? Not a woman, but generally… as people – you and me…”

“What kind of comradeship is this?” she asked. “What am I to think of you now? Why did you have to insult me, why?”

Foma had no recollection of how he left the little room with the many photographs on the walls, how he took his leave of Liza and what she said at parting – she had utterly dwindled and merged into the grey smudge of the rigid tutorial faces, had become one with them, inspiring, as they did, a cold stern deference.

He paced the streets, seeing nothing but misty circles before his eyes, and pulled his cap down low over his head, musing concentratedly, obstinately, drearily:

“Why stupid? Of what should I be ashamed? Vulgar? A woman? What’s wrong with a woman? Does that matter so much? If there are two souls united in a single idea – what if it is a woman?”

And he pulled his cap lower. His head felt cold, as though it had been stocked with ice and the sense of chilliness was so keen that his heart ached with a dull pain, as if he had been breathing asphyxiating fumes in an ill-ventilated room.

He caught up with a funeral procession. A soldier was being buried. Four stalwarts in uniforms, taking broad even strides, carried the coffin on their shoulders, and it swung measuredly from side to side in the frosty air. In front walked a drummer, adroitly beating a tattoo with his drumsticks, scattering into the air the impressive roll of his drum. Behind marched a platoon of soldiers with shouldered rifles. The soldiers wore black ear-caps tied under their chins and they all seemed to he wounded with deep gashes.

Alongside the coffin ran a little dun dog with its tail between its legs, and when the drum ceased beating the burial roll, it ran closer to the coffin, and when the drumsticks resumed their music it darted back with a timorous plaintive whimper.

Foma took off his cap with a great effort, leaned against a fence and watched the strange soldiers go by, shuddering with the cold that filled his breast and thinking, as though enquiring of some one: “Why ashamed?”

1910