Tales of the Wilderness Part 13

The lamp seemed to go out and something warm lay over his eyes. The palm of a hand. Nina's words were calm at first; then they grew frantic.

"Leave her, leave her, darling! Come to me, to me who wants you! What if she doesn't love you? I do, I love you ..."

He was silent.

"You say nothing? I will give you all; you shall have everything!

Come to me, to me who will give to you so gladly! She is as dead; she needs nothing! Do you hear? You have me ... I will take all the suffering on myself ..."

The lamp streamed forth clearly again. A little grey clod of humanity fell on to the maiden's narrow bed.

It was so intensely dark that the blackness seemed to close in on one like a great wall, and it was difficult to see two paces ahead. Close to the barracks some men were bawling to the music of a mouth-organ.

Under cover of the gloom someone whistled between his fingers, babbling insolence and nonsense. The torches glowed through the tangled network of branches and leaves like globes of fire.

Agrenev walked along, carrying a lantern, by the light of which he mechanically picked his steps; close to his heels, Nina hurried through the darkness and puddles. On every side there was the rustling of pines, hundreds of them, their immense stems towering upwards into obscurity. Although invisible, their presence could be felt. The place was wild and dreary, odours of earth, moss, and pine- sap mingled together in an overpowering perfume; it was the heart of a vast primeval forest. Agrenev murmured as if to himself:

"No, Nina, I do not love you. I want nothing from you.... Anna ...

her father ordered her to marry me.... Ancient blood.... Anna told me she would never love.... Asya is growing up under her influence.... I love my little daughter ... yet she is strange too ... she looks at me with vacant eyes ... my daughter! I stole her mother out of a void! I go home and lie down alone ... or I go to Anna and she receives me with compressed lips. I do not want a daughter from you, Nina ... Why should I? To-morrow will ... be the same as yesterday."

By the door of his house in the engineer's quarters, he remembered Nina, and all at once became solicitous:

"You will catch cold, my dear. It will be terrible for you getting back ..."

He stood before her a moment silently; then stretched out his hand:

"Well, the best of luck, my dear!"

A band of youths strolled by. One of them flashed a lantern-light on the doorway.

"Aha! Sky-larking with the engineers! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

They began chattering among themselves and sang in chorus a ribald doggerel:

"Once upon a time a wench Appeared before a judge's bench.."

III

Before he went to bed Agrenev laid out cards to play Patience, ate a cold supper, stood a long time staring at the light from under Anna's door, then knocked.

"Come in."

He entered for a moment, and found her sitting at a table with a book, which she laid down upon an open copybook diary. When, when is he to know what is written there?

He spoke curtly:

"I go to Moscow the first thing to-morrow on Detachment. Here is some money for the housekeeping."

"Thanks. When do you return?"

"In a week--that is, Friday next week. Is there anything you need?"

"No thanks." She rose, came close and kissed him on the cheek near his lips. "A safe journey. Goodbye. Do not waken Asya."

And she turned away, sat down at the table, and took up her book again.

In the early hours of the morning a horse was yoked, and Agrenev drove with Bitska over the main road to the station. It was wet. The sombre figures of workmen were dimly seen through the rain and darkness, hastening to the factory. The staff drove round in a motor as the shrill sound of the factory horn split the silence.

Bitska in a bowler-hat, red-faced, with thin whiskers such as are worn by the Letts, looked gravely round:

"You have not slept, Robert Edouardovitch?" asked Agrenev.

"No, I have not, and I am not in a good humour either." The man was silent a moment, then burst out; "Now I am forty years, and my vife she is eighteen. I am in vants of an earnest housekeeper. But my vife, she is always jesting and dragging me by the--how do you call it--the beard! And laughing and larking...." His little narrow eyes wrinkled up into a wry smile: "Ah, the larking vench!"

THE WOLF'S RAVINE

In childhood, as a small lad, Alexander Alexandrovitch Agrenev had heard from listening to his mother's conversation how--lo and behold!

one morning at 9 o'clock Nina Kallistratovna Zamotkina had proceeded with her daughter to Doctor Chasovnikov's flat, in order to deliver a slap in the face to his wife for having broken up the family hearth by a liaison with Paul Alexander Zamotkin, Nina Kallistratovna's husband.

The child Agrenev had vividly pictured to himself how Nina Kallistratovna had walked, holding her daughter with one hand, an attache-case in the other: of course her bearing must have been singular, as she was going to the flat to administer a slap in the face; no doubt she had walked either in a squatting or a bandy-legged fas.h.i.+on. The family hearth must have been something extremely valuable, as she was going to deliver a slap in the face on its account--perhaps it was some kind of stove.

It was highly interesting--in the child's imagination--to picture Nina Kallistratovna entering the flat, swinging back her arm, and delivering the slap: her gait, her arms, the flat--all had a sudden hidden and exceedingly curious meaning for the child.

This had remained out of his childhood memories of the little town and province, where all had seemed unusual as childhood itself.

Now in the Wolf's Ravine Agrenev recalled this incident, and he brooded bitterly over the certainty that no one would ever deliver a slap in the face on his account! What vulgarity--slaps in the face!... and a slap in the face was no solution.

It was now autumn, and as he stood in the ravine waiting for Olya, the cranes flew low over his head, stretching themselves out like arrows and crying discordantly. A wintry sulphurous light overspread the eastern sky, and the blue crest of the Vega shone out above him tremendous and triumphant, sweeping up into the very heart of the flaming sunset.

On a sudden, Olya arrived, her figure darkly silhouetted an instant-- a tiny insignificant atom--against the vastness of the hill and sky as she stood poised on the brink of the ravine; then she clambered down its precipitous side to Agrenev.

Alexander Alexandrovitch Agrenev, mining engineer and married man, and Olya Andreevna Golovkina!

She was a school teacher, who, after pa.s.sing through the eight cla.s.ses of her college, now resided with her aunt. She was always known as Olya Golovkina, although she bore the ancient Russian surname made famous in the time of Peter the Great by Senator Golovkin. But even in the time of Peter the Great this name had sunk into the gutter and had left in this town a street Golovkinskaya, and in that same Golovkinskaya Street a house, by the letting of which Olya's aunt made her living.

Agrenev knew that the aunt--whose name he had never heard--was an old maid, and that she had one joy--Olya. He knew she sat at her window without a lamp throughout the evenings, waiting for Olya; and that for this reason her niece, on leaving him, went round by the back- way, in order to obviate suspicion.

Nothing was ever said of the aunt in a personal way; the name was uttered only indirectly, as though applying to a substance and not to a human being.

Olya was a very charming girl, of whom it was difficult to say anything definite: such a pretty provincial maid, like a slender willow-reed.

The town lay over hillocks and fields and the ancient quarries, all its energies flowing out from the factory at the further end--and a casual conversation which occured in the spring at the beginning of Agrenev's acquaintance with Olya was characteristic alike of the town and of her. Agrenev had said apropos of something: