and bathe in the lake in your clothes, everyone will say: “He has no sense! He’s an empty-headed fellow!” And so that reputation will be noised about the whole world! Foolhardiness is suitable for merchants, but not for noblemen… Noblemen must have regard to their place in the world…’
‘All right! Enough, enough…’
‘Sergey Petrovich, don’t keep company with that Count. If you want to have a friend, who could be better than Doctor Pavel Ivanovich? He goes about shabbily dressed, but how clever he is!’
I was melted by Polycarp’s sincerity… I wanted to say an affectionate word to him…
‘What novel are you reading now?’ I asked.
‘The Count of Monte Cristo. That’s a Count for you! That’s a real Count! Not like that filthy Count you go around with.’
After tea I again sat down to work and worked until my eyelids began to droop and my tired eyes to close… When I went to bed I ordered Polycarp to wake me at five o’clock.
The next morning, before six o’clock, whistling gaily and knocking off the heads of the field flowers, I was walking towards Tenevo, where the church fête to which my friend ‘Screw’ had invited me to come was being celebrated that day. It was a glorious morning. Happiness itself appeared to be hanging above the earth, and, reflected in every dewdrop, enticed the soul of the passer-by to itself. The woods enwrapped in morning light were quiet and motionless as if listening to my footsteps, and the chirping brotherhood of birds met me with expressions of mistrust and alarm… The air, filled with the verdancy of spring, caressed my healthy lungs with its softness. I breathed it in, and casting my enraptured eyes over the whole distant prospect, I felt the spring and youth, and it seemed to me that the young birches, the grass at the roadside, and the ceaselessly humming cockchafers shared these feelings with me.
‘Why is it that out there in the world men crowd together in their miserable hovels, in their narrow and limited ideas,’ I thought, ‘while here they have so much space for life and thought? Why do they not come here?’
And my poetic imagination refused to be disturbed by thoughts of winter and of bread, those two sorrows that drive poets into cold, prosaic Petersburg and uncleanly Moscow, where fees are paid for verse, but no inspiration can be found.
Peasants’ carts and landowners’ britzkas hurrying to church or to market passed me constantly as I trudged along. All the time I had to take off my cap in answer to the courteous bows of the muzhiks and the landowners of my acquaintance. They all offered to give me a lift, but to walk was pleasanter than to drive, and I refused all their offers. Among others the Count’s gardener, Franz, in a blue jacket and a jockey cap, passed me on a racing droshky… He looked lazily at me with his sleepy, sour eyes and touched his cap in a still more lazy fashion. Behind him a twelve-gallon barrel with iron hoops, evidently for vodka, was tied to the droshky… Franz’s disagreeable phiz and his barrel somewhat disturbed my poetical mood, but very soon poetry triumphed again when I heard the sound of wheels behind me, and looking round I saw a heavy wagonette drawn by a pair of bays, and in the heavy wagonette, on a leathern cushion on a sort of box seat, was my new acquaintance, ‘the girl in red’, who two days before had spoken to me about the ‘electricity that had killed her mother’. Olenka’s pretty, freshly washed and somewhat sleepy face beamed and blushed slightly when she saw me striding along the footpath that separated the wood from the road. She nodded merrily to me and smiled in the affable manner of an old acquaintance.
‘Good morning!’ I shouted to her.
She kissed her hand to me and disappeared from my sight, together with her heavy wagonette, without giving me enough time to admire her fresh, pretty face. This day she was not dressed in red. She wore a sort of dark green costume with large buttons and a broad-brimmed straw hat, but even in this garb she pleased me no less than she had done before. I would have talked to her with pleasure, and I would gladly have heard her voice. I wanted to gaze into her deep eyes in the brilliancy of the sun, as I had gazed into them that night by the flashes of lightning. I wanted to take her down from the ugly wagonette and propose that she should walk beside me for the rest of the way, and I certainly would have done so if it had not been for the ‘rules of society’. For some reason it appeared to me that she would have gladly agreed to this proposal. It was not without some cause that she had twice looked back at me as the wagonette disappeared behind some old alders!
It was about six versts from the place of my abode to Tenevo — nothing of a distance for a young man on a fine morning. Shortly after six I was already making my way between loaded carts and the booths of the fair towards the Tenevo church. Notwithstanding the early hour and the fact that the liturgy in the church was not over as yet, the noise of trade was already in the air. The squeaking of cart wheels, the neighing of horses, the lowing of cattle, and the sounds of toy trumpets were intermixed with the cries OF gipsy horse-dealers and the songs of muzhiks, who had already found time to get drunk. What numbers of gay, idle faces! What types! What beauty there was in the movements of these masses, bright with brilliant coloured dresses, on which the morning sun poured its light! All this many-thousand-headed crowd swarmed, moved, made a noise in order to finish the business they had to do in a few hours, and to disperse by the evening, leaving after them, on the market place as a sort of remembrance, refuse of hay, oats spilt here and there, and nutshells… The people, in dense crowds, were going to and coming from the church.
The cross that surmounts the church emitted golden rays, bright as those of the sun. It glittered and seemed to be aflame with golden fire. Beneath it the cupola of the church was burning with the same fire, and the freshly painted green dome shone in the sun, and beyond the sparkling cross the clear blue sky stretched out in the far distance. I passed through the crowds in the churchyard and entered the church. The liturgy had only just begun and the Gospel was being read. The silence of the church was only broken by the voice of the reader and the footsteps of the incense-bearing deacon. The people stood silent and immovable, gazing with reverence through the wide-open holy gates of the altar and listening to the drawling voice of the reader. Village decorum, or, to speak more correctly, village propriety, strictly represses every inclination to violate the reverend quiet of the church. I always felt ashamed when in a church anything caused me to smile or speak. Unfortunately it is seldom that I do not meet some of my acquaintances who, I regret to say, are only too numerous, and it generally happens that I have hardly entered the church before I am accosted by one of the ‘intelligentsia’ who, after a long introduction about the weather, begins a conversation on his own trivial affairs. I answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but I am too considerate to refuse to give him any attention. While I talk I glance bashfully at my neighbours who are praying, fearing that my idle chatter may wound them.
This time, as usual, I did not escape from acquaintances. When I entered the church I saw my heroine standing close to the door - that same ‘girl in red’ whom I had met on the way to Tenevo.
Poor little thing! There she stood, red as a crawfish, and perspiring in the midst of the crowd, casting imploring glances on all those faces in the search for a deliverer. She had stuck fast in the densest crowd and, unable to move either forward or backward, looked like a bird who was being tightly squeezed in a fist. When she saw me she smiled bitterly and began nodding her pretty chin.
‘For God’s sake, escort me to the front!’ she said, seizing hold of my sleeve, it is terribly stuffy here - and so crowded… I beg you!’
‘In front it will be as crowded,’ I replied.
‘But there, all the people are well dressed and respectable… Here are only common people. A place is reserved for us in front… You, too, ought to be there…’
So she was red not because it was stuffy and crowded in the church. Her little head
