The Chorus Girl and Other Stories | Page 5

looked
like phantoms slowly but perceptibly followed one another across the
avenue. The moon stood high above the garden, and below it
transparent patches of mist were floating eastward. The whole world
seemed to consist of nothing but black silhouettes and wandering white
shadows. Ognev, seeing the mist on a moonlight August evening
almost for the first time in his life, imagined he was seeing, not nature,
but a stage effect in which unskilful workmen, trying to light up the
garden with white Bengal fire, hid behind the bushes and let off clouds
of white smoke together with the light.
When Ognev reached the garden gate a dark shadow moved away from
the low fence and came towards him.
"Vera Gavrilovna!" he said, delighted. "You here? And I have been
looking everywhere for you; wanted to say good-bye. . . . Good-bye; I
am going away!"
"So early? Why, it's only eleven o'clock."
"Yes, it's time I was off. I have a four-mile walk and then my packing. I
must be up early to-morrow."
Before Ognev stood Kuznetsov's daughter Vera, a girl of
one-and-twenty, as usual melancholy, carelessly dressed, and attractive.
Girls who are dreamy and spend whole days lying down, lazily reading
whatever they come across, who are bored and melancholy, are usually
careless in their dress. To those of them who have been endowed by

nature with taste and an instinct of beauty, the slight carelessness adds
a special charm. When Ognev later on remembered her, he could not
picture pretty Verotchka except in a full blouse which was crumpled in
deep folds at the belt and yet did not touch her waist; without her hair
done up high and a curl that had come loose from it on her forehead;
without the knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the edge which hung
disconsolately on Vera's shoulders in the evenings, like a flag on a
windless day, and in the daytime lay about, crushed up, in the hall near
the men's hats or on a box in the dining-room, where the old cat did not
hesitate to sleep on it. This shawl and the folds of her blouse suggested
a feeling of freedom and laziness, of good-nature and sitting at home.
Perhaps because Vera attracted Ognev he saw in every frill and button
something warm, naïve, cosy, something nice and poetical, just what is
lacking in cold, insincere women that have no instinct for beauty.
Verotchka had a good figure, a regular profile, and beautiful curly hair.
Ognev, who had seen few women in his life, thought her a beauty.
"I am going away," he said as he took leave of her at the gate. "Don't
remember evil against me! Thank you for everything!"
In the same singing divinity student's voice in which he had talked to
her father, with the same blinking and twitching of his shoulders, he
began thanking Vera for her hospitality, kindness, and friendliness.
"I've written about you in every letter to my mother," he said. "If
everyone were like you and your dad, what a jolly place the world
would be! You are such a splendid set of people! All such genuine,
friendly people with no nonsense about you."
"Where are you going to now?" asked Vera.
"I am going now to my mother's at Oryol; I shall be a fortnight with her,
and then back to Petersburg and work."
"And then?"
"And then? I shall work all the winter and in the spring go somewhere
into the provinces again to collect material. Well, be happy, live a
hundred years . . . don't remember evil against me. We shall not see
each other again."
Ognev stooped down and kissed Vera's hand. Then, in silent emotion,
he straightened his cape, shifted his bundle of books to a more
comfortable position, paused, and said:
"What a lot of mist!"

"Yes. Have you left anything behind?"
"No, I don't think so. . . ."
For some seconds Ognev stood in silence, then he moved clumsily
towards the gate and went out of the garden.
"Stay; I'll see you as far as our wood," said Vera, following him out.
They walked along the road. Now the trees did not obscure the view,
and one could see the sky and the distance. As though covered with a
veil all nature was hidden in a transparent, colourless haze through
which her beauty peeped gaily; where the mist was thicker and whiter it
lay heaped unevenly about the stones, stalks, and bushes or drifted in
coils over the road, clung close to the earth and seemed trying not to
conceal the view. Through the haze they could see all the road as far as
the wood, with dark ditches at the sides and tiny bushes which grew in
the ditches