The other I recognized as Moisey.  I separated them, and as I did so I could not resist hitting Moisey two blows in the face.  He fell down, then got up again, and I hit him once more.

“He tried to kill me,” he muttered.  “He was trying to get at his mamma’s chest. . . .  I want to lock him up in the lodge for security.”

Tcheprakov was drunk and did not recognize me; he kept drawing deep breaths, as though he were just going to shout “help” again.

I left them and went back to the house; my wife was lying on her bed; she had dressed.  I told her what had happened in the yard, and did not conceal the fact that I had hit Moisey.

“It’s terrible to live in the country,” she said.

“And what a long night it is.  Oh dear, if only it were over!”

“He-e-elp!” we heard again, a little later.

“I’ll go and stop them,” I said.

“No, let them bite each other’s throats,” she said with an expression of disgust.

She was looking up at the ceiling, listening, while I sat beside her, not daring to speak to her, feeling as though I were to blame for their shouting “help” in the yard and for the night’s seeming so long.

We were silent, and I waited impatiently for a gleam of light at the window, and Masha looked all the time as though she had awakened from a trance and now was marvelling how she, so clever, and well-educated, so elegant, had come into this pitiful, provincial, empty hole among a crew of petty, insignificant people, and how she could have so far forgotten herself as ever to be attracted by one of these people, and for more than six months to have been his wife.  It seemed to me that at that moment it did not matter to her whether it was I, or Moisey, or Tcheprakov; everything for her was merged in that savage drunken “help”—­I and our marriage, and our work together, and the mud and slush of autumn, and when she sighed or moved into a more comfortable position I read in her face:  “Oh, that morning would come quickly!”

In the morning she went away.  I spent another three days at Dubetchnya expecting her, then I packed all our things in one room, locked it, and walked to the town.  It was already evening when I rang at the engineer’s, and the street lamps were burning in Great Dvoryansky Street.  Pavel told me there was no one at home; Viktor Ivanitch had gone to Petersburg, and Mariya Viktorovna was probably at the rehearsal at the Azhogins’.  I remember with what emotion I went on to the Azhogins’, how my heart throbbed and fluttered as I mounted the stairs, and stood waiting a long while on the landing at the top, not daring to enter that temple of the muses!  In the big room there were lighted candles everywhere, on a little table, on the piano, and on the stage, everywhere in threes; and the first performance was fixed for the thirteenth, and now the first rehearsal was on a Monday, an unlucky day.  All part of the war against superstition!  All the devotees of the scenic art were gathered together; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest sisters were walking about the stage, reading their parts in exercise books.  Apart from all the rest stood Radish, motionless, with the side of his head pressed to the wall as he gazed with adoration at the stage, waiting for the rehearsal to begin.  Everything as it used to be.