and that: I got into debt; I lost my health…. So one night, as I lay in my bed, thinking, «My God, why should I suffer so? What am I to do, since I can’t get over loving her?… There, I can’t, and that’s all about it!» into the room walked Matrona. I had hidden her for the time at a farmhouse a mile and a half from my house. I was frightened. «What? have they discovered you even there?» «No, Piotr Petrovitch,» said she, «no one disturbs me at Bubnova; but will that last long? My heart,» she said, «is torn, Piotr Petrovitch; I am sorry for you, my dear one; never shall I forget your goodness, Piotr Petrovitch, but now I’ve come to say good-bye to you.» «What do you mean, what do you mean, you mad girl?… Good-bye, how good-bye?»… «Yes… I am going to give myself up.» «But I’ll lock you up in a garret, mad girl!… Do you mean to destroy me? Do you want to kill me, or what?» The girl was silent; she looked on the floor. «Come, speak, speak!» «I can’t bear to cause you any more trouble, Piotr Petrovitch.» Well, one might talk to her as one pleased… «But do you know, little fool, do you know, mad…»

And Piotr Petrovitch sobbed bitterly.

‘Well, what do you think?’ he went on, striking the table with his fist and trying to frown, while the tears still coursed down his flushed cheeks; ‘the girl gave herself up…. She went and gave herself up…’

‘The horses are ready,’ the overseer cried triumphantly, entering the room.

We both stood up.

‘What became of Matrona?’ I asked.

Karataev waved his hand.

* * * * *

A year after my meeting with Karataev, I happened to go to Moscow. One day, before dinner, for some reason or other I went into a _café_ in the Ohotny row—an original Moscow _café_. In the billiard-room, across clouds of smoke, I caught glimpses of flushed faces, whiskers, old-fashioned Hungarian coats, and new-fangled Slavonic costumes.

Thin little old men in sober surtouts were reading the Russian papers. The waiters flitted airily about with trays, treading softly on the green carpets. Merchants, with painful concentration, were drinking tea. Suddenly a man came out of the billiard-room, rather dishevelled, and not quite steady on his legs. He put his hands in his pockets, bent his head, and looked aimlessly about.

‘Ba, ba, ba! Piotr Petrovitch!… How are you?’

Piotr Petrovitch almost fell on my neck, and, slightly staggering, drew me into a small private room.

‘Come here,’ he said, carefully seating me in an easy-chair; ‘here you will be comfortable. Waiter, beer! No, I mean champagne! There, I’ll confess, I didn’t expect; I didn’t expect… Have you been here long? Are you staying much longer? Well, God has brought us, as they say, together.’

‘Yes, do you remember…’

‘To be sure, I remember; to be sure, I remember!’ he interrupted me hurriedly; ‘it’s a thing of the past…’

‘Well, what are you doing here, my dear Piotr Petrovitch?’

‘I’m living, as you can see. Life’s first-rate here; they’re a merry lot here. Here I’ve found peace.’

And he sighed, and raised his eyes towards heaven.

‘Are you in the service?’

‘No, I’m not in the service yet, but I think I shall enter. But what’s the service?… People are the chief thing. What people I have got to know here!…’

A boy came in with a bottle of champagne on a black tray.

‘There, and this is a good fellow…. Isn’t that true, Vasya, that you’re a good fellow? To your health!’

The boy stood a minute, shook his head, decorously smiled, and went out.

‘Yes, there are capital people here,’ pursued Piotr Petrovitch; ‘people of soul, of feeling…. Would you like me to introduce you?—such jolly chaps…. They’ll all be glad to know you. I say… Bobrov is dead; that’s a sad thing.’

‘What Bobrov?’

‘Sergay Bobrov; he was a capital fellow; he took me under his wing as an ignoramus from the wilds. And Panteley Gornostaev is dead. All dead, all!’

‘Have you been living all the time in Moscow? You haven’t been away to the country?’

‘To the country!… My country place is sold.’

‘Sold?’

‘By auction…. There! what a pity you didn’t buy it.’

‘What are you going to live on, Piotr Petrovitch?’

‘I shan’t die of hunger; God will provide when I’ve no money. I shall have friends. And what is money…. Dust and ashes! Gold is dust!’

He shut his eyes, felt in his pocket, and held out to me in the palm of his hand two sixpences and a penny.

‘What’s that? Isn’t it dust and ashes’ (and the money flew on the floor). ‘But you had better tell me, have you read Polezhaev?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you seen Motchalov in Hamlet?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘You’ve not seen him, not seen him!…’ (And Karataev’s face turned pale; his eyes strayed uneasily; he turned away; a faint spasm passed over his lips.) ‘Ah, Motchalov, Motchalov! «To die—to sleep!»‘ he said in a thick voice:

‘No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die—to sleep!’

‘To sleep—to sleep,’ he muttered several times.

‘Tell me, please,’ I began; but he went on with fire:

‘Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Nymph in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered.’

And he dropped his head on the table. He began stammering and talking at random. ‘Within a month’! he delivered with fresh fire:

‘A little month, or ere those shoes were old, With which she followed my poor father’s body, Like Niobe—all tears; why she, even she— O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourned longer!’

He raised a glass of champagne to his lips, but did not drink off the wine, and went on:

‘For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?… But I’m a dull and muddy mettled-rascal, Who calls me coward? gives me the lie i’ the throat? … Why I should take it; for it cannot be, But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall To make oppression bitter.’

Karataev put down the glass and grabbed at his head. I fancied I understood him.

‘Well, well,’ he said at last, ‘one must not rake up the past. Isn’t that so?’ (and he laughed). ‘To your health!’

‘Shall you stay in Moscow?’ I asked him.

‘I shall die in Moscow!’

‘Karataev!’ called a voice in the next room; ‘Karataev, where are you? Come here, my dear fellow!’

‘They’re calling me,’ he said, getting up heavily from his seat. ‘Good-bye; come and see me if you can; I live in….’

But next day, through unforeseen circumstances, I was obliged to leave Moscow, and I never saw Piotr Petrovitch Karataev again.

XIX

THE TRYST

I was sitting in a birchwood in autumn, about the middle of September. From early morning a fine rain had been falling, with intervals from time to time of warm sunshine; the weather was unsettled. The sky was at one time overcast with soft white clouds, at another it suddenly cleared in parts for an instant, and then behind the parting clouds could be seen a blue, bright and tender as a beautiful eye. I sat looking about and listening. The leaves faintly rustled over my head; from the sound of them alone one could tell what time of year it was. It was not the gay laughing tremor of the spring, nor the subdued whispering, the prolonged gossip of the summer, nor the chill and timid faltering of late autumn, but a scarcely audible, drowsy chatter. A slight breeze was faintly humming in the tree-tops. Wet with the rain, the copse in its inmost recesses was for ever changing as the sun shone or hid behind a cloud; at one moment it was all a radiance, as though suddenly everything were smiling in it; the slender stems of the thinly-growing birch-trees took all at once the soft lustre of white silk, the tiny leaves lying on the earth were on a sudden flecked and flaring with purplish gold, and the graceful stalks of the high, curly bracken, decked already in their autumn colour, the hue of an over-ripe grape, seemed interlacing in endless tangling crisscross before one’s eyes; then suddenly again everything around was faintly bluish; the glaring tints died away instantaneously, the birch-trees stood all white and lustreless, white as fresh-fallen snow, before the cold rays of the winter sun have caressed it; and slily, stealthily there began drizzling and whispering through the wood the finest rain. The leaves on the birches were still almost all green, though perceptibly paler; only here and there stood one young leaf, all red or golden, and it was a sight to see how it flamed in the sunshine when the sunbeams suddenly pierced with tangled flecks of light through the thick network of delicate twigs, freshly washed by the sparkling rain. Not one bird could be heard; all were in hiding and silent, except that at times there rang out the metallic, bell-like sound of the jeering tomtit. Before halting in this birch copse I had been through a wood of tall aspen-trees with my dog. I confess I have no great liking for that tree, the aspen, with its pale-lilac trunk and the greyish-green metallic leaves which it flings high as it can, and unfolds in a quivering fan in the air; I do not care for the eternal shaking of its