During that fortnight he and I met every day. He came to dinner regularly and stayed on till
midnight. But though he said -- and I knew he was speaking the truth -- that he had no life apart
from me, yet he never spent the whole day with me, and tried to go on with his ordinary
occupations. Our outward relations remained unchanged to the very day of our marriage: we
went on saying "you" and not "thou" to each other; he did not even kiss my hand; he did not
seek, but even avoided, opportunities of being alone with me. It was as if he feared to yield to
the harmful excess of tenderness he felt. I don't know which of us had changed; but I now felt
myself entirely his equal; I no longer found in him the pretence of simplicity which had
displeased me earlier; and I often delighted to see in him, not a grown man inspiring respect and
awe but a loving and wildly happy child. "How mistaken I was about him!" I often thought; "he
is just such another human being as myself!" It seemed to me now, that his whole character was
before me and that I thoroughly understood it. And how simple was every feature of his
character, and how congenial to my own! Even his plans for our future life together were just my
plans, only more clearly and better expressed in his words.
The weather was bad just then, and we spent most of our time indoors. The corner between
the piano and the window was the scene of our best intimate talks. The candle light was
reflected on the blackness of the window near us; from time to time drops struck the glistening
pane and rolled down. The rain pattered on the roof; the water splashed in a puddle under the
spout; it felt damp near the window; but our corner seemed all the brighter and warmer and
happier for that.
"Do you know, there is something I have long wished to say to you," he began one night when
we were sitting up late in our corner; "I was thinking of it all the time you were playing."
"Don't say it, I know all about it," I replied.
"All right! mum's the word!"
"No! what is it?" I asked.
"Well, it is this. You remember the story I told you about A and B?"
"I should just think I did! What a stupid story! Lucky that it ended as it did!"
"Yes. I was very near destroying my happiness by my own act. You saved me. But the main
thing is that I was always telling lies then, and I'm ashamed of it, and I want to have my say out
now."
"Please don't! you really mustn't!"
"Don't be frightened," he said, smiling. "I only want to justify myself. When I began then, I
meant to argue."
"It is always a mistake to argue," I said.
"Yes, I argued wrong. After all my disappointments and mistakes in life, I told myself firmly
when I came to the country this year, that love was no more for me, and that all I had to do was
to grow old decently. So for a long time, I was unable to clear up my feeling towards you, or to
make out where it might lead me. I hoped, and I didn't hope: at one time I thought you were
trifling with me; at another I felt sure of you but could not decide what to do. But after that
evening, you remember when we walked in the garden at night, I got alarmed: the present
happiness seemed too great to be real. What if I allowed myself to hope and then failed? But of
course I was thinking only of myself, for I am disgustingly selfish."
He stopped and looked at me.
"But it was not all nonsense that I said then. It was possible and right for me to have fears. I
take so much from you and can give so little. You are still a child, a bud that has yet to open;
you have never been in love before, and I..."
"Yes, do tell me the truth...." I began, and then stopped, afraid of his answer. "No, never
mind," I added.
"Have I been in love before? is that it?" he said, guessing my thoughts at once. "That I can
tell you. No, never before -- nothing a t all like what I feel now." But a sudden painful
recollection seemed to flash across his mind. "No," he said sadly; "in this too I need your
compassion, in order to have the right to love you. Well, was I not bound to think twice before
saying that I loved you? What do I give you? love, no doubt."
"and is that little?" I asked, looking him in the face.
"Yes, my dear, it is little to give you," he continued; "you have youth and beauty. I often lie
awake at night from happiness, and all the time I think of our future life together. I have lived
through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life
in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and
who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some
use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor -- such is my idea of happiness. And
then, on the top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps -- what more can the hear of
man desire?"
"It should be enough," I said.
"Enough for me whose youth is over," he went on, "but not for you. Life is still before you,
and you will perhaps seek happiness, and perhaps find it, in something different. You think now
that this is happiness, because you love me."
"You are wrong," I said; "I have always desired just that quiet domestic life and prized it.
And you only say just what I have thought."
He smiled.
"So you think, my dear; but that is not enough for you. You have youth and beauty," he
repeated thoughtfully.
But I was angry because he disbelieved me and seemed to cast my youth and beauty in my
teeth.
"Why do you love me then?" I asked angrily; "for my youth or for myself?"
"I don't know, but I love you," he answered, looking at me with his attentive and attractive
gaze.
I did not reply and involuntarily looked into his eyes. Suddenly a strange thing happened to
me: first I ceased to see what was around me; then his face seemed to vanish till only the eyes
were left, shining over against mine; next the eyes seemed to be in my own head, and then all
became confused -- I could see nothing and was forced to shut my eyes, in order to break loose
from the feeling of pleasure and fear which his gaze was producing in me ...
The day before our wedding day, the weather cleared up towards evening. The rains which
had begun in summer gave place to clear weather, and we had our first autumn evening, bright
and cold. It was a wet, cold, shining world, and the garden showed for the first time the
spaciousness and color and bareness of autumn. the sky was clear, cold, and pale. I went to bed
happy in the thought that tomorrow, our wedding day, would be fine. I awoke with the sun, and
the thought that this very day... seemed alarming and surprising. I went out into the garden. the
sun had just risen and shone fitfully through the meager yellow leaves of the lime avenue. The
path was strewn with rustling leaves, clusters of mountain ash berries hung red and wrinkled on
the boughs, with a sprinkling of frost-bitten crumpled leaves; the dahlias were black and
wrinkled. the first rime lay like silver on the pale green of the grass and on the broken burdock
plants round the house. In the clear cold sky there was not, and could not be, a single cloud.
"Can it possibly be today?" I asked myself, incredulous of my own happiness. "Is it possible
that I shall wake tomorrow, not here but in that strange house with the pillars? Is it possible that
I shall never again wait for his coming and meet him, and sit up late with Katya to talk about
him? Shall I never sit with him beside the piano in our drawing room? never see him off and
feel uneasy about him on dark nights?" But I remembered that he promised yesterday to pay a
last visit, and that Katya had insisted on my trying on my wedding dress, and had said "For
tomorrow". I believed for a moment that it was all real, and then doubted again. "Can it be that
after today I shall be living there with a mother-in-law, without Nadezhda or Grigori or Katya?
Shall I go to bed without kissing my old nurse good night and hearing her say, while she signs
me with the cross from old custom, "Good night, Miss"? Shall I never again teach Sonya and
play with her and knock through the wall to her in the morning and hear her hearty laugh? Shall
I become from today someone that I myself do not know? and is a new world, that will realize
my hopes and desires, opening before me? and will that new world last for ever?" alone with
these thoughts I was depressed and impatient for his arrival. He cam early, and it required his
presence to convince me that I should really be his wife that very day, and the prospect ceased to
frighten me.
Before dinner we walked to our church, to attend a memorial service for my father.
"If only he were living now!" I thought as we were returning and I leant silently on the arm of
him who had been the dearest friend of the object of my thoughts. During the service, while I
pressed my forehead against the cold stone of the chapel floor, I called up my father so vividly; I
was so convinced that he understood me and approved my choice, that I felt as if his spirit were
still hovering over us and blessing me. And my recollections and hopes, my joy and sadness,
made up one solemn and satisfied feeling which was in harmony with the fresh still air, the
silence, the bare fields and pale sky, from which the bright but powerless rays, trying in vain to
burn my cheek, fell over all the landscape. My companion seemed to understand and share my
feeling. He walked slowly and silently; and his face, at which I glanced from time to time,
expressed the same serious mood between joy and sorrow which I shared with nature.
Suddenly he turned to me, and I saw that he intended to speak. "Suppose he starts some other
subject than that which is in my mind?" I thought. But he began to speak of my father and did
not even name him.
"He once said to me in just, "you should marry my Masha"," he began.
"He would have been happy now," I answered, pressing closer the arm which held mine.
"You were a child then," he went on, looking into my eyes; "I loved those eyes and used to
kiss them only because they were like his, never thinking they would be so dear to me for their
own sake. I used to call you Masha then."
"I want you to say 'thou' to me," I said.
"I was just going to," he answered; "I feel for the first time that thou art entirely mine;" and
his calm happy gaze that drew me to him rested on me.
We went on along the foot path over the beaten and trampled stubble; our voices and
footsteps were the only sounds. On one side the brownish stubble stretched over a hollow to a
distant leafless wood; across it at some distance a peasant was noiselessly ploughing a black
strip which grew wider and wider. A drove of horses scattered under the hill seemed close to us.
On the other side, as far as the garden and our house peeping through the trees, a field of winter
corn, thawed by the sun, showed black with occasional patches of green. The winter sun shone
over everything, and everything was covered with long gossamer spider's webs, which floated in
the air round us, lay on the frost-dried stubble, and got into our eyes and hair and clothes. When
we spoke, the sound of our voices hung in the motionless air above us, as if we two were alone
in the whole world -- alone under that azure vault, in which the beams of the winter sun played
and flashed without scorching.
I too wished to say "thou" to him, but I felt ashamed.
"Why dost thou walk so fast?" I said quickly and almost in a whisper; I could not help
blushing.
He slackened his pace, and the gaze he turned on me was even more affectionate, gay, and
happy.
At home we found that his mother and the inevitable guests had arrived already, and I was
never alone with him again till we came out of church to drive to Nikolskoe.
The church was nearly empty: I just caught a glimpse of his mother standing up straight on a
mat by the choir and of Katya wearing a cap with purple ribbons and with tears on her cheeks,
and of two or three of our servants looking curiously at me. I did not look at him, but felt his
presence there beside me. I attended to the words of the prayers and repeated them, but they
found no echo in my heart. Unable to pray, I looked listlessly at the icons, the candles, the
embroidered cross on the priest's cope, the screen, and the window, and took nothing in. I only
felt that something strange was being done to me. At last the priest turned to us with the cross in
his hand, congratulated us, and said, "I christened you and by God's mercy have lived to marry
you." Katya and his mother kissed us, and Grigori's voice was heard, calling up the carriage.
But I was only frightened and disappointed: all was over, but nothing extraordinary, nothing
worthy of the Sacrament I had just received, had taken place in myself. He and I exchanged
kisses, but the kiss seemed strange and not expressive of our feeling. "Is this all?" I thought. We
went out of church, the sound of wheels reverberated under the vaulted roof, the fresh air blew
on my face, he put on his hat and handed me into the carriage. Through the window I could see
a frosty moon with a halo round it. He sat down beside me and shut the door after him. I felt a
sudden pang. The assurance of his proceedings seemed to me insulting. Katya called out that I
should put something on my head; the wheels rumbled on the stone and then moved along the
soft road, and we were off. Huddling in a corner, I looked out at the distant fields and the road
flying past in the cold glitter of the moon. Without looking at him, I felt his presence beside me.
"Is this all I have got from the moment, of which I expected so much?" I thought; and still it
seemed humiliating and insulting to be sitting alone with him, and so close. I turned to him,
intending to speak; but the words would not come, as if my love had vanished, giving place to a
feeling of mortification and alarm.
"Till this moment I did not believe it was possible," he said in a low voice in answer to my
look.
"But I am afraid somehow," I said.
"Afraid of me, my dear?" he said, taking my hand and bending over it.
My hand lay lifeless in his, and the cold at my heart was painful.
"Yes," I whispered.
But at that moment my heart began to beat faster, my hand trembled and pressed his, I grew
hot, my eyes sought his in the half darkness, and all at once I felt that I did not fear him, that this
fear was love -- a new love still more tender and stronger than the old. I felt that I was wholly
his, and that I was happy in his power over me.
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