dropped down quite low, and a wonderful, magical evening was descending upon the thoroughly heated earth.
“I slept too long,” Katerina Lvovna said to Aksinya as she seated herself on the rug under the blossoming apple tree to have tea. “What could it mean, Aksinyushka?” she asked the cook, wiping the saucer with a napkin herself.
“What’s that, my dear?”
“It wasn’t like in a dream, but a cat kept somehow nudging into me wide awake.”
“Oh, what are you saying?”
“Really, a cat nudging.”
Katerina Lvovna told how the cat was nudging into her.
“And why were you caressing him?”
“Well, that’s just it! I myself don’t know why I caressed him.”
“A wonder, really!” the cook exclaimed.
“I can’t stop marveling myself.”
“It’s most certainly about somebody sidling up to you, or something else like that.”
“But what exactly?”
“Well, what exactly – that’s something nobody can explain to you, my dear, what exactly, only there will be something.”
“I kept seeing a crescent moon in my dream and then there was this cat,” Katerina Lvovna went on.
“A crescent moon means a baby.”
Katerina Lvovna blushed.
“Shouldn’t I send Sergei here to your honor?” Aksinya hazarded, offering herself as a confidante.
“Well, after all,” replied Katerina Lvovna, “you’re right, go and send him: I’ll have tea with him here.”
“Just what I say, send him here,” Aksinya concluded, and she waddled duck-like to the garden gate.
Katerina Lvovna also told Sergei about the cat.
“Sheer fantasy,” replied Sergei.
“Then why is it, Seryozha, that I’ve never had this fantasy before?”
“There’s a lot that never was before! Before I used just to look at you and pine away, but now – ho-ho! – I have your whole white body.”
Sergei embraced Katerina Lvovna, spun her in the air, and playfully landed her on the fluffy rug.
“Oh, my head is spinning!” said Katerina Lvovna. “Seryozha, come here; sit beside me,” she called, lying back and stretching herself out in a luxurious pose.
The young fellow, bending down, went under the low apple tree, all bathed in white flowers, and sat on the rug at Katerina Lvovna’s feet.
“So you pined for me, Seryozha?”
“How I pined!”
“How did you pine? Tell me about it.”
“How can I tell about it? Is it possible to describe how you pine? I was heartsick.”
“Why is it, Seryozha, that I didn’t feel you were suffering over me? They say you can feel it.”
Sergei was silent.
“And why did you sing songs, if you were longing for me? Eh? Didn’t I hear you singing in the gallery?” Katerina Lvovna went on asking tenderly.
“So what if I sang songs? A mosquito also sings all his life, but it’s not for joy,” Sergei answered drily.
There was a pause. Katerina Lvovna was filled with the highest rapture from these confessions of Sergei.
She wanted to talk, but Sergei sulked and kept silent.
“Look, Seryozha, what paradise, what paradise!” Katerina Lvovna exclaimed, looking through the dense branches of the blossoming apple tree that covered her at the clear blue sky in which there hung a fine full moon.
The moonlight coming through the leaves and flowers of the apple tree scattered the most whimsical bright spots over Katerina Lvovna’s face and whole recumbent body; the air was still; only a light, warm breeze faintly stirred the sleepy leaves and spread the subtle fragrance of blossoming herbs and trees. There was a breath of something languorous, conducive to laziness, sweetness, and obscure desires.
Receiving no answer, Katerina Lvovna fell silent again and went on looking at the sky through the pale pink apple blossoms. Sergei, too, was silent; only he was not interested in the sky. His arms around his knees, he stared fixedly at his boots.
A golden night! Silence, light, fragrance, and beneficent, vivifying warmth. Far across the ravine, beyond the garden, someone struck up a resounding song; by the fence, in the bird-cherry thicket, a nightingale trilled and loudly throbbed; in a cage on a tall pole a sleepy quail began to rave, and a fat horse sighed languidly behind the stable wall, and outside the garden fence a merry pack of dogs raced noiselessly across the green and disappeared into the dense black shadow of the half-ruined old salt depots.
Katerina Lvovna propped herself on her elbow and looked at the tall garden grass; and the grass played with the moonbeams, broken up by the flowers and leaves of the trees. It was all gilded by these intricate bright spots, which flashed and trembled on it like live, fiery butterflies, or as if all the grass under the trees had been caught in a lunar net and were swaying from side to side.
“Ah, Seryozhechka, how lovely!” Katerina Lvovna exclaimed, looking around.
Sergei looked around indifferently.
“Why are you so joyless, Seryozha? Or are you already tired of my love?”
“Why this empty talk!” Sergei answered drily, and, bending down, he lazily kissed Katerina Lvovna.
“You’re a deceiver, Seryozha,” Katerina Lvovna said jealously, “you’re insubstantial.”
“Such words don’t even apply to me,” Sergei replied in a calm tone.
“Then why did you kiss me that way?”
Sergei said nothing at all.
“It’s only husbands and wives,” Katerina Lvovna went on, playing with his curls, “who shake the dust off each other’s lips like that. Kiss me so that these young apple blossoms over us fall to the ground. Like this, like this,” Katerina Lvovna whispered, twining around her lover and kissing him with passionate abandon.
“Listen to what I tell you, Seryozha,” Katerina Lvovna began a little later. “Why is it that the one and only word they say about you is that you’re a deceiver?”
“Who’s been yapping about me like that?”
“Well, people talk.”
“Maybe I deceived the unworthy ones.”
“And why were you fool enough to deal with unworthy ones? With unworthy ones there shouldn’t be any love.”
“Go
