with thirty degrees of frost. She’s leaving her country, and her people; but I understand her doing it. Whom is she leaving here behind her? What people has she seen? Kurnatovsky and Bersenyev and our humble selves; and these are the best she’s seen. What is there to regret about it? One thing’s bad; I’m told her husband—the devil, how that word sticks in my throat!—Insarov, I’m told, is spitting blood; that’s a bad lookout. I saw him the other day: his face—you could model Brutus from it straight off. Do you know who Brutus was, Uvar Ivanovitch?’

‘What is there to know? a man to be sure.’

‘Precisely so: he was a «man.» Yes he’s a wonderful face, but unhealthy, very unhealthy.’

‘For fighting… it makes no difference,’ observed Uvar Ivanovitch.

‘For fighting it makes no difference, certainly; you are pleased to express yourself with great justice to-day; but for living it makes all the difference. And you see she wants to live with him a little while.’

‘A youthful affair,’ responded Uvar Ivanovitch.

‘Yes, a youthful, glorious, bold affair. Death, life, conflict, defeat, triumph, love, freedom, country…. Good God, grant as much to all of us! That’s a very different thing from sitting up to one’s neck in a bog, and pretending it’s all the same to you, when in fact it really is all the same. While there—the strings are tuned to the highest pitch, to play to all the world or to break!’

Shubin’s head sank on to his breast.

‘Yes,’ he resumed, after a prolonged silence, ‘Insarov deserves her. What nonsense, though! No one deserves her… Insarov… Insarov … What’s the use of pretended modesty? We’ll own he’s a fine fellow, he stands on his own feet, though up to the present he has done no more than we poor sinners; and are we such absolutely worthless dirt? Am I such dirt, Uvar Ivanovitch? Has God been hard on me in every way? Has He given me no talents, no abilities? Who knows, perhaps, the name of Pavel Shubin will in time be a great name? You see that bronze farthing there lying on your table. Who knows; some day, perhaps in a century, that bronze will go to a statue of Pavel Shubin, raised in his honour by a grateful posterity!’

Uvar Ivanovitch leaned on his elbow and stared at the enthusiastic artist.

‘That’s a long way off,’ he said at last with his usual gesture; ‘we’re speaking of other people, why bring in yourself?’

‘O great philosopher of the Russian world!’ cried Shubin, ‘every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it’s not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose; one doesn’t know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength! That’s how I would cast you in bronze. You aimed a just reproach at my egoism and vanity! Yes! yes! it’s useless talking of one’s-self; it’s useless bragging. We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere—either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, self-absorbed, or darkness and subterranean chaos, or idle babblers and wooden sticks. Or else they are like this: they study themselves to the most shameful detail, and are for ever feeling the pulse of every sensation and reporting to themselves: «That’s what I feel, that’s what I think.» A useful, rational occupation! No, if we only had some sensible men among us, that girl, that delicate soul, would not have run away from us, would not have slipped off like a fish to the water! What’s the meaning of it, Uvar Ivanovitch? When will our time come? When will men be born among us?’

‘Give us time,’ answered Uvar Ivanovitch; ‘they will be——’

‘They will be? soil of our country! force of the black earth! thou hast said: they will be. Look, I will write down your words. But why are you putting out the candle?’

‘I’m going to sleep; good-bye.’

XXXI

Shubin had spoken truly. The unexpected news of Elena’s marriage nearly killed Anna Vassilyevna. She took to her bed. Nikolai Artemyevitch insisted on her not admitting her daughter to her presence; he seemed to be enjoying the opportunity of showing himself in the fullest sense the master of the house, with all the authority of the head of the family; he made an incessant uproar in the household, storming at the servants, and constantly saying: ‘I will show you who I am, I will let you know—you wait a little!’ While he was in the house, Anna Vassilyevna did not see Elena, and had to be content with Zoya, who waited on her very devotedly, but kept thinking to herself: ‘Diesen Insarof vorziehen—und wem?’ But directly Nikolai Artemyevitch went out—and that happened pretty often, Augustina Christianovna had come back in sober earnest—Elena went to her mother, and a long time her mother gazed at her in silence and in tears.

This dumb reproach, more deeply than any other, cut Elena to the heart; at such moments she felt, not remorse, but a deep, boundless pity akin to remorse.

‘Mamma, dear mamma!’ she would repeat, kissing her hands; ‘what was I to do? I’m not to blame, I loved him, I could not have acted differently. Throw the blame on fate for throwing me with a man whom papa doesn’t like, and who is taking me away from you.’

‘Ah!’ Anna Vassilyevna cut her short, ‘don’t remind me of that. When I think where you mean to go, my heart is ready to burst!’

‘Dear mamma,’ answered Elena, ‘be comforted; at least, it might have been worse; I might have died.’

‘But, as it is, I don’t expect to see you again. Either you will end your days there in a tent somewhere’—Anna Vassilyevna pictured Bulgaria as something after the nature of the Siberian swamps,—’or I shall not survive the separation——’

‘Don’t say that, mamma dearest, we shall see each other again, please God. There are towns in Bulgaria just as there are here.’

‘Fine towns there, indeed! There is war going on there now; wherever you go, I suppose they are firing cannons off all the while… Are you meaning to set off soon?’

‘Soon… if only papa. He means to appeal to the authorities; he threatens to separate us.’

Anna Vassilyevna turned her eyes heavenwards.

‘No, Lenotchka, he will not do that. I would not myself have consented to this marriage. I would have died first; but what’s done can’t be undone, and I will not let my daughter be disgraced.’

So passed a few days. At last Anna Vassilyevna plucked up her courage, and one evening she shut herself up alone with her husband in her room. The whole house was hushed to catch every sound. At first nothing was to be heard; then Nikolai Artemyevitch’s voice began to tune up, then a quarrel broke out, shouts were raised, even groans were discerned…. Already Shubin was plotting with the maids and Zoya to rush in to the rescue; but the uproar in the bedroom began by degrees to grow less, passed into quiet talk, and ceased. Only from time to time a faint sob was to be heard, and then those, too, were still. There was the jingling of keys, the creak of a bureau being unfastened…. The door was opened, and Nikolai Artemyevitch appeared. He looked surlily at every one who met him, and went out to the club; while Anna Vassilyevna sent for Elena, embraced her warmly, and, with bitter tears flowing down her cheeks, she said:

‘Everything is settled, he will not make a scandal, and there is nothing now to hinder you from going—from abandoning us.’

‘You will let Dmitri come to thank you?’ Elena begged her mother, as soon as the latter had been restored a little.

‘Wait a little, my darling, I cannot bear yet to see the man who has come between us. We shall have time before you go.’

‘Before we go,’ repeated Elena mournfully.

Nikolai Artemyevitch had consented ‘not to make a scandal,’ but Anna Vassilyevna did not tell her daughter what a price he had put on his consent. She did not tell her that she had promised to pay all his debts, and had given him a thousand roubles down on the spot. Moreover, he had declared decisively to Anna Vassilyevna that he had no wish to meet Insarov, whom he persisted in calling ‘the Montenegrin vagrant,’ and when he got to the club, he began, quite without occasion, talking of Elena’s marriage, to his partner at cards, a retired general of engineers. ‘You have heard,’ he observed with a show of carelessness, ‘my daughter, through the higher education, has gone and married a student.’ The general looked at him through his spectacles, muttered, ‘H’m!’ and asked him what stakes would he play for.

XXXII

The day of departure drew near. November was already over; the latest date for starting had come. Insarov had long ago made his preparations, and was burning with anxiety to get out of Moscow as soon as possible. And the doctor was urging him on. ‘You need a warm climate,’ he told him; ‘you will not get well here.’ Elena, too, was fretting with impatience; she was worried by Insarov’s pallor, and his emaciation. She often looked with involuntary terror at his changed face. Her position in her parents’ house had become insupportable. Her mother mourned over her, as over the dead, while her father treated her with contemptuous coldness; the approaching separation secretly pained him too, but he regarded it as his duty—the duty of an offended father—to disguise his feelings, his weakness. Anna Vassilyevna at