FullReads

Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs’, the glass door was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from behind the flower-bed or from one of the avenues, or to hear her voice come from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda’s voice:

“To the crow somewhere … God …”–she spoke slowly and distinctly, and was probably dictating–” … God sent a piece of cheese…. To the crow … somewhere…. Who is there?” she called out suddenly as she heard my footsteps.

“It is I.”

“Oh! excuse me. I can’t come out just now. I am teaching Masha.”

“Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

“No. She and my sister left to-day for my Aunt’s in Penga, and in the winter they are probably going abroad.” She added after a short silence: “To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?”

I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:

“A piece of cheese…. To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of cheese.”

And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: “I have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,” I read. “I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried.”

Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence. …Over the fields where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs’, and once more it became tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that evening for Petersburg.

* * *

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a poddiovka, wearing an embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: “Quite well, thanks be to God.” He began to talk. He had sold his estate and bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyabov Ivanovna. He told me a little about the Volchaninovs. Lyda, he said, still lived at Sholkovka and taught the children in the school; little by little she succeeded in gathering round herself a circle of sympathetic people, who formed a strong party, and at the last Zemstvo election they drove out Balaguin, who up till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of Genya Bielokurov said that she did not live at home and he did not know where she was.

I have already begun to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly–without rhyme or reason–I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet….

Missyuss, where are you?