5

On entering my room, I sat down on the couch without lighting the candles, and froze, became rooted to the spot at the terrible and wonderful thing that had so suddenly and unexpectedly happened in my life. I sat, having lost all sense of place and time. The room and the garden were already sunk in the darkness of the rain clouds, and in the garden, beyond the open windows, everything was rustling, trembling, and I was ever more frequently and brightly lit up by a quick, blue-green flame, which in that very same second disappeared. The quickness and strength of this thunderless light was increasing all the time, and then the room was suddenly lit up to an implausible degree of visibility, a rush of fresh wind came at me, and there was such a noise from the garden, as if it had been seized by horror: see that, the earth and sky are catching fire! I leapt up, with difficulty closed the windows, one after another, catching their frames and overcoming the wind that was tugging me about, and I went running on tiptoe through the dark corridors to the dining room: I would not have thought to have been bothered at that time about the open windows in the dining room and drawing room, where the storm could have broken the window panes, but I went running all the same, and even with great anxiety. All the windows in the dining room and drawing room proved closed – I saw this in blue-green illumination, in the colour and brightness of which there was something truly unearthly, revealing itself everywhere at once, like quick eyes, making all the window frames huge and visible to the last transom, and then immediately drowning them in dense gloom, leaving for a second in one’s dazzled vision a trace of something tinny and red. And when I went quickly into my own room, as though afraid that something might have happened there without me, an angry whisper was heard from the darkness:

“Where have you been? I’m scared, light a light quickly…”

I struck a match and saw Sonya sitting on the couch in just her nightshirt and with nothing but shoes on her feet.

“Or no, no, don’t,” she said hastily, “come here to me quickly, put your arms around me, I’m afraid…”

I sat down submissively and put my arms around her cold shoulders. She began whispering:

“Well, kiss me then, kiss me, take me completely, I’ve not been with you for a whole week!”

And she pushed herself and me firmly back onto the couch cushions.

At that same moment, in her dressing gown and with a candle in her hand, Natalie flung herself in at the threshold of the open doorway. She saw us at once, but all the same cried out unconsciously:

“Sonya, where are you? I’m terribly afraid…”

And immediately she disappeared. Sonya rushed after her.

6

A year later she married Meschersky. She was married in his village of Blagodatnoye in an empty church – we and other relatives and friends on his and on her sides did not receive Invitations to the wedding. And the newly-weds did not make the usual visits after the wedding either, they left immediately for the Crimea.

In January of the following year, on Tatyana’s Day, there was a ball for Voronezh students in the Nobles’ Assembly Rooms in Voronezh. Already a Moscow student, I was spending Christmas-tide at home, in the country, and that evening went to Voronezh. The train arrived all white, its smoke filled with the snow of a blizzard, and on the way from the station into town, as the cabman’s sledge was carrying me to the Nobles’ Hotel, the lights of the streetlamps could scarcely be glimpsed through the blizzard. But after the country, this urban blizzard and the urban lights were exciting, promising the imminent pleasure of going into a warm, even too warm a room of the old provincial hotel, asking for a samovar and starting to get changed, to get ready for the long night of the ball and the carousing of students until dawn. In the time that had passed since that terrible night at the Cherkasovs’, and then since her marriage, I had gradually recovered – or in any event I had grown used to the condition of a man mentally ill, which is what I secretly was, and outwardly I lived like everybody else.

When I got there, the ball had only just begun, but the grand staircase and its landing were already filled with new arrivals, and from the main ballroom, from its musicians’ gallery, a regimental band was drowning out, muffling everything, resounding sonorously in the mournfully exultant beats of a waltz. Still fresh from the frost, in my nice new full-dress uniform, which made me immoderately refined, excessively polite, as I forced my way in the crowd over the red carpet of the staircase, I went up onto the landing and entered the particularly dense and already hot crowd which was crammed together in front of the doors into the ballroom, and for some reason I began forcing my way further forward so insistently that I was probably taken for the master of ceremonies with pressing business in the ballroom. And I did finally force my way through, then stopped on the threshold, listening to the floods and peals of the orchestra just above my head, and gazing at the sparkling ripples of the chandeliers and the dozens of couples, flashing in great variety beneath them in the waltz – and then I suddenly drew back: one couple from that spinning crowd had stood out for me all of a sudden, flying ever closer to me among all the others in quick and nimble glissades. I recoiled, looking at how large and burly he was, somewhat stooped in his waltzing, all black with his shiny black hair and tailcoat, and light with that lightness which some bulky people surprise you with when dancing, and at how tall she was with her hair piled up high for the ball, in a white gown and elegant gold shoes, leaning back somewhat as she span around, with lowered eyes, and with her arm in a white elbow-length glove placed on his shoulder and bent in a way that made the arm look like the neck of a swan. For an instant her black eyelashes fluttered up straight at me, the blackness of her eyes sparkled very close by, but at that point he, with the application of a bulky man, sliding nimbly on his polished toes, turned her sharply, her lips parted slightly in a sigh on the turn, there was a flash of the silvery hem of her gown, and they set off back again, moving away in glissades. I squeezed through once more into the crowd on the landing, forced my way out of it and stood for a moment… Through the doors of the room that was opposite me at an angle and still completely empty and cool, two girl students in Little Russian costume could be seen standing idly waiting behind a champagne refreshment bar – a pretty blonde and a wiry, dark-faced Cossack beauty almost twice as tall as the other. I went in, and with a bow proffered a hundred-rouble note. Banging their heads together and laughing, they pulled a heavy bottle out from a bucket of ice under the bar and exchanged irresolute glances – there were no opened bottles yet. I went behind the bar and in a minute had dashingly popped the cork. Then I cheerfully offered them a glass – Gaudeamus igitur! – and drank down the remainder, one glass after another, by myself. They looked at me at first with surprise, then with pity:

“Oh dear, but you’re terribly pale as it is!”

I finished drinking and left at once. In the hotel I asked for a bottle of Caucasian brandy in my room and started drinking by the teacup in the hope that my heart would burst.

And another year and a half went by. And one day at the end of May, when I had again come home from Moscow, the messenger from the station brought a telegram from her in Blagodatnoye: “Alexei Nikolayevich died suddenly this morning from stroke.” My father crossed himself and said:

“May he rest in peace. How awful. Forgive me, God, I never liked him, but it’s awful just the same. I mean, he wasn’t even forty yet. And I’m awfully sorry for her – a widow at such an age, and with a babe in arms… I’ve never seen her – he was such a nice man that he never once brought her here to see me – but they say she’s charming. So what’s to be done now? Neither I nor Mama can travel more than a hundred and fifty kilometres at our age, of course – you must go…”

It was impossible to refuse – what grounds did I have for refusing? And I would not have been able to refuse in that semi-insanity into which I had suddenly been plunged once again by this unexpected news. I knew one thing: I would see her! The pretext for the meeting was terrible, but legitimate.

We sent a telegram in reply, and the next day, at the time of sundown in May, horses from Blagodatnoye conveyed me in half an hour from the station to the estate. Approaching it along a rise in the ground beside water meadows, I saw while still at a distance that on the west side of the house, facing towards the still-light sunset, all the windows in the reception hall were covered with shutters, and I quaked at the terrible thought: he lay behind them, and she was there too! In the courtyard, densely overgrown with young grass, the bells of two troikas belonging to some other people were rattling from time to time beside the coach house, but there was not a soul about, apart from the coachmen on the boxes – both the visitors and the servants were already standing inside the house for the office for the dead. Everywhere there was the quietness of sundown in the countryside in May, the springtime purity, freshness and newness of everything – of the air of the fields and the river, of that dense young grass in the courtyard, of the densely flowering garden that approached the house from the rear and the south side, but on the low front porch, by the wide-open doors into the lobby, upright against the wall leant the large, yellow-brocaded lid of a coffin. In the delicate chill of the evening air there was the strong smell of sweet pear blossom, its white denseness showing milky white in the south-eastern part of the garden against the flat and, because of that milkiness, matt horizon, where pink Jupiter alone was burning. And the youth, the beauty of it all, and the thought of her beauty and youth, and of her having once loved me, suddenly so tore my heart apart with grief, happiness and a need for love that, leaping out of the carriage by the porch, I felt myself to be as though before an abyss – how was I to step into this house, to see her face to face once more after three years apart, and already a widow, a mother! And nonetheless I went into the gloom and incense of that terrible hall, speckled with the yellow lights of candles, into the blackness of the people standing with those lights before the coffin, which was raised at an angle with its head towards the near corner, lit up from above by a large, red lamp before the gold rizas of the icons, and from below by the flickering silver lustre of three tall church candles – I went in to the words and singing of the clergymen as they walked around the coffin censing and bowing, and immediately lowered my head so as not to see the yellow brocade on the coffin and the face of the dead man, and, most of all, afraid of seeing her. Someone handed me a lighted candle. I took it and started holding it, feeling the way that, trembling, it warmed and illumined my face, which was drawn with pallor, and I listened with dull submissiveness to those calls and the clanking of the censer, seeing from under my brows the solemn and sweet-smelling smoke floating up to the ceiling, and suddenly, lifting my face, I nonetheless saw her – in front of everyone, in mourning dress, with a candle in her hand lighting up her cheek and the goldenness of her hair – and, as if from an icon, I could no longer tear my eyes away from her. When all had fallen silent, and it had started to smell of snuffed candles, and everyone had begun to move cautiously and gone to kiss her hand, I waited to be the last to approach her. And having approached, I glanced with the horror of rapture at the monastic elegance of the black dress which made her especially chaste, at the pure, youthful beauty of her face, lashes and eyes, which dropped at the sight of me, I bowed ever so low, kissing her hand, in a barely audible voice said everything that had to be said in compliance with decorum and kinship, and asked permission to leave at once and spend the night in the garden, in the old rotunda in which I had slept when coming to Blagodatnoye when still a schoolboy – Meschersky’s bedroom for hot summer nights had been there. She replied without raising her eyes:

“I’ll give orders straight away for you to be taken there and supper served you.”

In the morning, after the burial service and interment, I left without delay.

Saying goodbye, we again exchanged only a few words, and again did not look one another in the eye.