Fifty-Two Stories

Abogin was silent. The carriage, rocking and clattering over the stones, drove up the sandy bank and rolled on. Kirilov twisted in anguish and looked around. Behind, through the scant light of the stars, the road and the willows on the riverbank could be seen, merging with the darkness. To the right lay the plain, as level and boundless as the sky; on it here and there, in the distance, probably on the peat bogs, dim lights were burning. To the left, parallel to the road, stretched a hill, all curly with small shrubs, and above the hill a big half-moon hung motionless, red, slightly veiled with mist, and surrounded by small clouds, which seemed to be watching it from all sides and keeping it from going away.

In the whole of nature there was a feeling of something hopeless, sick; the earth, like a fallen woman who sits alone in a dark room trying not to think about her past, languished in memories of spring and summer and waited apathetically for the inevitable winter. Wherever you looked, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep and cold pit, from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon would ever get out…

The closer the carriage came to its goal, the more impatient Abogin grew. He fidgeted, jumped up, peered over the coachman’s shoulder. And when the carriage finally stopped by the porch, prettily draped in striped canvas, and he looked at the lighted windows on the first floor, one could hear how his breath quavered.

“If something happens…I won’t survive it,” he said, going into the front hall with the doctor and nervously rubbing his hands. “But I don’t hear any commotion, meaning so far everything’s all right,” he added, listening to the stillness.

In the front hall no sound of voices or footsteps could be heard, and the whole house seemed asleep, despite the bright lights. Now the doctor and Abogin, who until then had been in the dark, could see each other. The doctor was tall, stooped-shouldered, slovenly dressed, and had an unattractive face. Something unpleasantly sharp, unfriendly, and severe was expressed by his lips, thick as a Negro’s, his aquiline nose, and his sluggish, indifferent gaze. His disheveled head, sunken temples, the premature gray in his long, narrow beard, through which his chin showed, the pale gray color of his skin, and his careless, awkward manners—the callousness of it all suggested the notion of years of poverty, ill luck, weariness of life and people. Looking at his whole dry figure, it was hard to believe that this man had a wife, that he could weep over a child. Abogin embodied something else. He was a thickset, sturdy blond man, with a big head and large but soft facial features, elegantly dressed in the latest fashion. In his bearing, his tightly buttoned frock coat, his mane, and his face one could sense something noble, leonine; he walked with his head erect and his chest thrust out, spoke in a pleasant baritone, and the way he took off his scarf or touched his hair betrayed a fine, almost feminine elegance. Even his pallor and the childlike fear with which he kept glancing up the stairs as he took his coat off, did not harm his bearing or diminish the satiety, healthiness, and aplomb which his whole figure breathed.

“There’s nobody, not a sound,” he said, going up the stairs. “No commotion. God grant…!”

He led the doctor through the front hall into the big drawing room, where a black grand piano was darkly outlined and a chandelier hung in a white dust cover; from there the two went on to a small, very snug and pretty sitting room, filled with a pleasant rosy half-light.

“Well, you sit here, doctor,” said Abogin, “and I…right away. I’ll go have a look and let them know.”

Kirilov remained alone. The luxury of the sitting room, the pleasant half-light, and the very fact of his presence in a stranger’s unfamiliar house, which had the character of an adventure, evidently did not move him. He sat in an armchair and examined his hands burnt by carbolic acid. He looked only fleetingly at the bright red lampshade, the cello case, and, leaning towards the side where the clock was ticking, noticed a stuffed wolf as sturdy and sated as Abogin himself.

It was quiet…Somewhere far away in the adjoining rooms someone loudly uttered the sound “Ah!” and there was the clinking of a glass door, probably of a cupboard, and everything became quiet again. Having waited for about five minutes, Kirilov stopped studying his hands and raised his eyes to the door behind which Abogin had disappeared.

On the threshold of that door stood Abogin, but not the one who had gone out. His expression of satiety and refined elegance had vanished; his face, his hands, and his posture were distorted by a repulsive expression of something like horror or a tormenting physical pain. His nose, lips, moustache, all his features were moving and seemed to be trying to detach themselves from his face, while his eyes were as if laughing from pain…