ONE Sunday evening in spring Volodia, a plain, shy, sickly lad of seventeen, was sitting, a prey to melancholy, in a summer-house on the country place of the Shumikins. His gloomy reflections flowed in three different channels. In the first place, to-morrow, Monday, he would have to take an examination in mathematics. He knew that if he did not pass he would be expelled from school, as he had already been two years in the sixth grade. In the second place, his pride suffered constant agony during his visits to the Shumikins, who were rich people with aristocratic pretensions. He imagined that Madame Shumikin and her nieces looked down upon his mother and himself as poor relations and dependents, and that they made fun of his mother and did not respect her. He had once overheard Madame Shumikin saying on the terrace to her cousin Anna Feodorovna that she was still pretending to be young, and that she never paid her debts and had a great hankering after other people's shoes and cigarettes. Every day Volodia would implore his mother not to go to the Shumikins' again. He painted for her the humiliating role which she played among these people, he entreated her and spoke rudely to her, but the spoiled, frivolous woman, who had wasted two fortunes in her day, her own and her husband's, yearned for high life and refused to understand him, so that twice every week Volodia was obliged to accompany her to the hated house.
In the third place, the lad could not free himself for
a moment from a certain strange, unpleasant feeling
that was entirely new to him. He imagined himself to
be in love with Anna Feodorovna, the cousin and guest
of Madame Shumikin. Anna Feodorovna was a
talkative, lively, laughing little lady of thirty; healthy, rosy, and strong, with plump shoulders, a plump chin, and an eternal smile on her thin lips. She was neither pretty nor young. Volodia knew this perfectly well, and for that very reason he was unable to refrain from thinking of her, from watching her as she bent her plump shoulders over her croquet mallet, or, as she, after much laughter and running up and down-stairs, sank all out of breath into a chair, and with half-closed eyes pretended that she felt a tightness and strangling across the chest. She was married, and her husband was a staid architect who came down into the country once a week, had a long sleep, and then returned to the city. This feeling on Volodia's part began with an unreasoning hatred of the architect, and a sensation of joy whenever he returned to the city.
And now, as he sat in the summer-house thinking
about to-morrow's examination and his mother, whom
every one laughed at, he felt a great longing to see
Nyuta, as the Shumikins called Anna Feodorovna, and to hear her laughter and the rustling of her dress. This longing did not resemble the pure, poetic love of which he had read in novels, and of which he dreamed every night as he went to bed. It was a strange and incomprehensible thing, and he was ashamed and afraid of it as of something wicked and wrong which he hardly dared to acknowledge even to himself.
"This is not love," he thought. "One does not fall
in love with a woman of thirty. It is simply a little
intrigue; yes, it is a little intrigue."
Thinking about intrigues, he remembered his
invincible shyness, his lack of a moustache, his freckles, his little eyes, and pictured himself standing beside Nyuta. The contrast was impossible. So he hastened to imagine himself handsome and bold and witty, dressed in the latest fashion. . . .
In the very heat of his imaginings, as he sat huddled
in a dark corner of the summer-house with his eyes
fixed on the ground, he heard light footsteps
approaching. Some one was hurrying down the garden
path. The footsteps ceased and a figure clad in white
gleamed in the doorway.
"Is any one there?" asked a woman's voice.
Volodia recognised the voice and raised his head in alarm.
"Who is there?" asked Nyuta, stepping into the
summer-house. "Ah, is it you, Volodia? What are
you doing in there ? Brooding ? How can you always
be brooding and brooding? It's enough to drive you crazy!"
Volodia rose and looked at Nyuta in confusion. She was on her way back from the bath-house; a Turkish towel hung across her shoulders, and a few damp locks of hair had escaped from under her white silk kerchief and were clinging to her forehead. She exhaled the cool, damp odour of the river, and the scent of almond soap. The upper button of her blouse was undone, so that her neck and throat were visible to the lad.