• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1332 0

not have a single grey hair, no one would have taken him for forty, and he remembered Varenka saying that it was only in Russia that people considered themselves old at the age of fifty, that in France a fifty-year-old man considered himself dans la force de l‘âge,aw and a forty-year-old un jeune homme.ax But what did the counting of years mean if he felt himself young in his soul, as he had been twenty years ago? Was it not youth, the feeling he experienced now, when, coming out to the edge of the wood again from the other side, he saw in the bright light of the sun’s slanting rays Varenka’s graceful figure, in a yellow dress and with her basket, walking with a light step past the trunk of an old birch, and when this impression from the sight of Varenka merged with the sight, which struck him with its beauty, of a yellowing field of oats bathed in the slanting light, and of an old wood far beyond the field, spotted with yellow, melting into the blue distance? His heart was wrung with joy. A feeling of tenderness came over him. He felt resolved. Varenka, who had just crouched down to pick a mushroom, stood up with a supple movement and looked over her shoulder. Throwing his cigar away, Sergei Ivanovich walked towards her with resolute strides.

v

‘Varvara Andreevna, when I was still very young, I made up for myself an ideal of the woman I would love and whom I would be happy to call my wife. I have lived a long life, and now for the first time I have met in you what I have been seeking. I love you and offer you my hand.’

Sergei Ivanovich was saying this to himself when he was just ten steps away from Varenka. Kneeling down and protecting a mushroom from Grisha with her hands, she was calling little Masha.

‘Here, here! There are small ones! Lots!’ she said in her sweet, mellow voice.

Seeing Sergei Ivanovich approaching, she did not get up and did not change her position, but everything told him that she felt him approaching and was glad of it.

‘So, did you find any?’ she asked, turning her beautiful, quietly smiling face to him from behind the white kerchief.

‘Not one,’ said Sergei Ivanovich. ‘And you?’

She did not answer him, busy with the children around her.

‘That one, too, by the branch.’ She pointed Masha to a small mushroom, its resilient pink cap cut across by a dry blade of grass it had sprung up under. She stood up when Masha picked the mushroom, breaking it into two white halves. ‘This reminds me of my childhood,’ she added, stepping away from the children with Sergei Ivanovich.

They went on silently for a few steps. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak. She guessed what it was about and her heart was gripped by the excitement of joy and fear. They went far enough away so that no one could hear them, and still he did not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to remain silent. After a silence it would have been easier to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms; but against her own will, as if inadvertently, Varenka said:

‘So you didn’t find any? But then there are always fewer inside the wood.’

Sergei Ivanovich sighed and made no answer. He was vexed that she had begun talking about mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to her first words about her childhood; but, as if against his will, after being silent for a while, he commented on her last words.

‘I’ve heard only that the white boletus grows mostly on the edge, though I’m unable to identify it.’

Several more minutes passed, they went still further away from the children and were completely alone. Varenka’s heart was pounding so that she could hear it, and she felt herself blush, then turn pale, then blush again.

To be the wife of a man like Koznyshev, after her situation with Mme Stahl, seemed to her the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain that she was in love with him. And now it was to be decided. She was frightened. Frightened that he would speak, and that he would not.

He had to declare himself now or never; Sergei Ivanovich felt it, too. Everything in Varenka’s gaze, colour, lowered