'No,' the servant girl answered, 'the baron's not living here.'
'To America!' I repealed involuntarily. 'But he will come back?'
'We don't know about that. May be he won't come back at all.'
'And what was his surname, the baron's?' The girl stared at me.
'You don't know his name? We simply called him the baron.--Hi! Piotr!' she shouted, seeing I was pushing in. 'Come here; here's a stranger keeps asking questions.'
From the house came the clumsy figure of a sturdy workman.
'What is it? What do you want?' he asked in a sleepy voice; and having heard me sullenly, he repeated what the girl had told me.
'A carpenter. They're all carpenters in this street.'
'Well, but can I see your master later on?'
'What for? Of course. You can always see him.... To be sure, he's always at his business here. Only go away now. Such a time in the morning, upon my soul!'
'Well, but that negro?' I asked suddenly.
The workman looked in perplexity first at me, then at the servant girl.
'What negro?' he said at last. 'Go away, sir. You can come later. You can talk to the master.'
I went out into the street. The gate slammed at once behind me, sharply and heavily, with no groan this time.
I carefully noted the street and the house, and went away, but not home--I was conscious of a sort of disillusionment. Everything that had happened to me was so strange, so unexpected, and meanwhile what a stupid conclusion to it! I had been persuaded, I had been convinced, that I should see in that house the room I knew, and in the middle of it my father, the baron, in the dressing-gown, and with a pipe.... And instead of that, the master of the house was a carpenter, and I could go and see him as much as I liked--and order furniture of him, I dare say.
My father had gone to America. And what was left for me to do?... To tell my mother everything, or to bury for ever the very memory of that meeting? I positively could not resign myself to the idea that such a supernatural, mysterious beginning should end in such a senseless, ordinary conclusion!
I did not want to return home, and walked at random away from the town.
I walked with downcast head, without thought, almost without sensation, but utterly buried in myself. A rhythmic hollow and angry noise raised me from my numbness. I lifted my head; it was the sea roaring and moaning fifty paces from me. I saw I was walking along the sand of the dunes. The sea, set in violent commotion by the storm in the night, was white with foam to the very horizon, and the sharp crests of the long billows rolled one after another and broke on the flat shore. I went nearer to it, and walked along the line left by the ebb and flow of the tides on the yellow furrowed sand, strewn with fragments of trailing seaweed, broken shells, and snakelike ribbons of sea-grass. Gulls, with pointed wings, flying with a plaintive cry on the wind out of the remote depths of the air, soared up, white as snow against the grey cloudy sky, fell abruptly, and seeming to leap from wave to wave, vanished again, and were lost like gleams of silver in the streaks of frothing foam. Several of them, I noticed, hovered persistently over a big rock, which stood up alone in the midst of the level uniformity of the sandy shore. Coarse seaweed was growing in irregular masses on one side of the rock; and where its matted tangles rose above the yellow line, was something black, something longish, curved, not very large.... I looked attentively.... Some dark object was lying there, lying motionless beside the rock.... This object grew clearer, more defined the nearer I got to it....