down to dinner when he sent me to you… Before dinner he was fishing from the bathing cabin, sir… What answer can I take?’
I opened the letter and read the following:
My Dear Lecoq,
If you are still alive, well, and have not forgotten your ever-drunken friend, do not delay a moment. Get dressed immediately and come to me. I only arrived last night and am already dying from ennui. The impatience I feel to see you knows no bounds. I wanted to drive over to see you and carry you off to my den, but the heat has utterly exhausted me. I simply sit about, fanning myself. Well, how are you? How is your clever Ivan Dem’yanych? Are you still at war with your scolding Polycarp? Come quickly and tell me everything.
Your A. K.
It was not necessary to look at the signature to recognize the drunken, sprawling, ugly handwriting of my friend, Count Alexey Karnéev. The shortness of the letter, its pretension to a certain playfulness and vivacity proved that my friend, with his limited capacities, must have torn up much notepaper before he was able to compose this epistle.
The pronoun ‘which’ was absent from this letter, and adverbs were carefully avoided - both being grammatical forms that were seldom achieved by the Count at a single sitting. ‘What answer can I take, sir?’ the muzhik repeated. At first I did not reply to this question, and every decent, honest man in my place would have hesitated too. The Count was fond of me, and quite sincerely obtruded his friendship on me. I, on my part, felt nothing like friendship for the Count; I even disliked him. It would therefore have been more honest to reject his friendship once for all than to go to him and dissimulate. Besides, to go to the Count’s meant to plunge once more into the life my Polycarp had characterized as a ‘pigsty’, which two years before during the Count’s residence on his estate and until he left for Petersburg had injured my health and dried up my brain. That loose, unaccustomed life so full of show and drunken madness, had not yet shattered my constitution, but it had made me known throughout the province… Yet I was popular…
My reason told me the whole truth, a blush of shame for the not distant past suffused my face, my heart sank with fear that I would not possess sufficient manliness to refuse to go to the Count’s, but I did not hesitate long. The struggle lasted not more than a minute.
‘Give my compliments to the Count,’ I said to his messenger, ‘and thank him for thinking of me… Tell him I am busy, and that… Tell him that I…’
And at the very moment my tongue was about to pronounce a decisive ‘No’, I was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of dullness… Here I was, a young man, full of life, strength and desires, who by the decrees of fate had been cast into this forest village, seized by a sensation of ennui, of loneliness…
I remembered the Count’s gardens with the exuberant vegetation of their cool conservatories, and the semi-darkness of the narrow, neglected avenues… Those avenues protected from the sun by arches of the entwined branches of old limes know me well; they also know the women who sought my love in semi-darkness… I remembered the luxurious drawing-room with the sweet indolence of its velvet sofas, heavy curtains and thick carpets, soft as down, with the laziness so common to young healthy animals… I recalled my drunken audacity, limitless in its scope, its satanic pride and its contempt for life. My large body wearied by sleep again longed for movement…
‘Tell him I’ll come!’
The muzhik bowed and retired.
‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let that devil in!’ Polycarp grumbled, quickly turning over the pages of his book in a purposeless manner.
‘Put that book away and go and saddle Zorka,’ I said. ‘Look sharp!’
‘Look sharp! Oh, of course, certainly… I’m just going to rush off… It would be all right if he were going on business, but he’s just off on some spree!’
This was said in an undertone, but loud enough for me to hear it. Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest weapon I could use in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous custom of allowing his venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the ear or a flood of vituperation… When Polycarp had gone into the yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been prevented from reading. It was The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’ dreadful romance… My civilized fool read everything, beginning with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed matter he only approved of exciting, sensational novels with ‘celebrated personages’, poison and subterranean passages; all the rest he dubbed ‘nonsense’. I shall have again to refer to his reading, now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the Count’s estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless, although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake… On my right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless, my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara, if there could only be a storm!’ I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.
The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that broke the grave-like silence of the sleeping lake. The sun looked at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the distant banks opposite. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received light from the lake and not from the sun.
The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick cloud of mosquitoes along the bank of the lake, and far away on the water, scarcely moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.
CHAPTER II
I did not ride in a straight line as I had to make a circuit along the road that skirted the circular lake. It was only possible to go in a straight line by boat, while those who went by the road had to make a large detour, the distance being almost eight versts farther. All the way, looking across the lake, I could see beyond it the muddy banks opposite, on which the bright strip of a blossoming cherry orchard gleamed white, while farther still I could see the roofs of the Count’s barns dotted all over with many coloured pigeons, and rising still higher the small white belfry of the Count’s chapel. At the foot of the muddy banks was the bathing cabin with sailcloth nailed on the sides and sheets hanging to dry on its railings. I saw all this, and it appeared to me as if only a verst separated me from my friend the Count, yet in order to reach his estate I had to ride about sixteen versts.
On the way, I thought of my strange relationship with the Count. I was interested in examining and trying to define it, but the task proved beyond me. However much I thought, I could come to no satisfactory decision, and at last I arrived at the conclusion that I was a bad judge of myself and of men in general. The people who knew both the Count and me had an explanation for our mutual connection. The narrower-minded, who
