‘To sleep—to sleep,’ he muttered
several times.
‘Tell me, please,’ I began; but he went
on with fire:
’Who would bear the whips and scorns
of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the
proud man’s contumely,
The insolence of office and the
spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy
takes
When he himself might his quietus
make
With a bare bodkin? Nymph in
thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.’
And he dropped his head on the table. He began
stammering and talking at random. ‘Within
a month’! he delivered with fresh fire:
’A little month, or ere those shoes
were old,
With which she followed my poor
father’s body,
Like Niobe—all tears;
why she, even she—
O God! a beast, that wants discourse
of reason,
Would have mourned longer!’
He raised a glass of champagne to his lips, but did
not drink off the wine, and went on:
’For Hecuba! What’s
Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep
for her?... But I’m a dull and muddy
mettled-rascal, Who calls me coward? gives me the
lie i’ the throat? ... Why I should take
it; for it cannot be, But I am pigeon-livered and
lack gall To make oppression bitter.’
Karataev put down the glass and grabbed at his head.
I fancied I understood him.
‘Well, well,’ he said at last, ’one
must not rake up the past. Isn’t that so?’
(and he laughed). ‘To your health!’
‘Shall you stay in Moscow?’ I asked him.
‘I shall die in Moscow!’
‘Karataev!’ called a voice in the next
room; ’Karataev, where are you? Come here,
my dear fellow!’
‘They’re calling me,’ he said, getting
up heavily from his seat. ‘Good-bye; come
and see me if you can; I live in....’
But next day, through unforeseen circumstances, I
was obliged to leave
Moscow, and I never saw Piotr Petrovitch Karataev
again.
THE TRYST
I was sitting in a birchwood in autumn, about the
middle of September. From early morning a fine
rain had been falling, with intervals from time to
time of warm sunshine; the weather was unsettled.
The sky was at one time overcast with soft white clouds,
at another it suddenly cleared in parts for an instant,
and then behind the parting clouds could be seen a
blue, bright and tender as a beautiful eye. I
sat looking about and listening. The leaves faintly
rustled over my head; from the sound of them alone
one could tell what time of year it was. It was
not the gay laughing tremor of the spring, nor the
subdued whispering, the prolonged gossip of the summer,
nor the chill and timid faltering of late autumn,
but a scarcely audible, drowsy chatter. A slight
breeze was faintly humming in the tree-tops.
Wet with the rain, the copse in its inmost recesses
was for ever changing as the sun shone or hid behind
