The Chorus Girl and Other Stories | Page 4

knotted stick.
Behind the door, holding the lamp to show the way, stood the master of
the house, Kuznetsov, a bald old man with a long grey beard, in a
snow-white piqué jacket. The old man was smiling cordially and
nodding his head.
"Good-bye, old fellow!" said Ognev.
Kuznetsov put the lamp on a little table and went out to the verandah.
Two long narrow shadows moved down the steps towards the
flower-beds, swayed to and fro, and leaned their heads on the trunks of
the lime-trees.
"Good-bye and once more thank you, my dear fellow!" said Ivan
Alexeyitch. "Thank you for your welcome, for your kindness, for your
affection. . . . I shall never forget your hospitality as long as I live. You
are so good, and your daughter is so good, and everyone here is so kind,
so good-humoured and friendly . . . Such a splendid set of people that I
don't know how to say what I feel!"
From excess of feeling and under the influence of the home-made wine
he had just drunk, Ognev talked in a singing voice like a divinity

student, and was so touched that he expressed his feelings not so much
by words as by the blinking of his eyes and the twitching of his
shoulders. Kuznetsov, who had also drunk a good deal and was touched,
craned forward to the young man and kissed him.
"I've grown as fond of you as if I were your dog," Ognev went on. "I've
been turning up here almost every day; I've stayed the night a dozen
times. It's dreadful to think of all the home-made wine I've drunk. And
thank you most of all for your co-operation and help. Without you I
should have been busy here over my statistics till October. I shall put in
my preface: 'I think it my duty to express my gratitude to the President
of the District Zemstvo of N----, Kuznetsov, for his kind co-operation.'
There is a brilliant future before statistics! My humble respects to Vera
Gavrilovna, and tell the doctors, both the lawyers and your secretary,
that I shall never forget their help! And now, old fellow, let us embrace
one another and kiss for the last time!"
Ognev, limp with emotion, kissed the old man once more and began
going down the steps. On the last step he looked round and asked:
"Shall we meet again some day?"
"God knows!" said the old man. "Most likely not!"
"Yes, that's true! Nothing will tempt you to Petersburg and I am never
likely to turn up in this district again. Well, good-bye!"
"You had better leave the books behind!" Kuznetsov called after him.
"You don't want to drag such a weight with you. I would send them by
a servant to-morrow!"
But Ognev was rapidly walking away from the house and was not
listening. His heart, warmed by the wine, was brimming over with
good-humour, friendliness, and sadness. He walked along thinking how
frequently one met with good people, and what a pity it was that
nothing was left of those meetings but memories. At times one catches
a glimpse of cranes on the horizon, and a faint gust of wind brings their
plaintive, ecstatic cry, and a minute later, however greedily one scans
the blue distance, one cannot see a speck nor catch a sound; and like
that, people with their faces and their words flit through our lives and
are drowned in the past, leaving nothing except faint traces in the
memory. Having been in the N---- District from the early spring, and
having been almost every day at the friendly Kuznetsovs', Ivan
Alexeyitch had become as much at home with the old man, his

daughter, and the servants as though they were his own people; he had
grown familiar with the whole house to the smallest detail, with the
cosy verandah, the windings of the avenues, the silhouettes of the trees
over the kitchen and the bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the
gate all this would be changed to memory and would lose its meaning
as reality for ever, and in a year or two all these dear images would
grow as dim in his consciousness as stories he had read or things he had
imagined.
"Nothing in life is so precious as people!" Ognev thought in his
emotion, as he strode along the avenue to the gate. "Nothing!"
It was warm and still in the garden. There was a scent of the mignonette,
of the tobacco-plants, and of the heliotrope, which were not yet over in
the flower-beds. The spaces between the bushes and the tree-trunks
were filled with a fine soft mist soaked through and through with
moonlight, and, as Ognev long remembered, coils of mist that