And we began talking to each other as though we had been on the closest terms for ages and ages.

X

Two days later she sent me to Dubetchnya and I was unutterably delighted to go.  As I walked towards the station and afterwards, as I was sitting in the train, I kept laughing from no apparent cause, and people looked at me as though I were drunk.  Snow was falling, and there were still frosts in the mornings, but the roads were already dark-coloured and rooks hovered over them, cawing.

At first I had intended to fit up an abode for us two, Masha and me, in the lodge at the side opposite Madame Tcheprakov’s lodge, but it appeared that the doves and the ducks had been living there for a long time, and it was impossible to clean it without destroying a great number of nests.  There was nothing for it but to live in the comfortless rooms of the big house with the sunblinds.  The peasants called the house the palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it, and the only furniture was a piano and a child’s arm-chair lying in the attic.  And if Masha had brought all her furniture from the town we should even then have been unable to get rid of the impression of immense emptiness and cold.  I picked out three small rooms with windows looking into the garden, and worked from early morning till night, setting them to rights, putting in new panes, papering the walls, filling up the holes and chinks in the floors.  It was easy, pleasant work.  I was continually running to the river to see whether the ice were not going; I kept fancying that starlings were flying.  And at night, thinking of Masha, I listened with an unutterably sweet feeling, with clutching delight to the noise of the rats and the wind droning and knocking above the ceiling.  It seemed as though some old house spirit were coughing in the attic.

The snow was deep; a great deal had fallen even at the end of March, but it melted quickly, as though by magic, and the spring floods passed in a tumultuous rush, so that by the beginning of April the starlings were already noisy, and yellow butterflies were flying in the garden.  It was exquisite weather.  Every day, towards evening, I used to walk to the town to meet Masha, and what a delight it was to walk with bare feet along the gradually drying, still soft road.  Half-way I used to sit down and look towards the town, not venturing to go near it.  The sight of it troubled me.  I kept wondering how the people I knew would behave to me when they heard of my love.  What would my father say?  What troubled me particularly was the thought that my life was more complicated, and that I had completely lost all power to set it right, and that, like a balloon, it was bearing me away, God knows whither.  I no longer considered the problem how to earn my daily bread, how to live, but thought about —­I really don’t know what.