XVI

In the evening she got ready to go to the town. Of late she had
taken to going often to the town and staying the night there. In
her absence I could not work, my hands felt weak and limp; our huge
courtyard seemed a dreary, repulsive, empty hole. The garden was
full of angry noises, and without her the house, the trees, the
horses were no longer "ours."

I did not go out of the house, but went on sitting at her table
beside her bookshelf with the books on land work, those old favourites
no longer wanted and looking at me now so shamefacedly. For whole
hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn
night, black as soot, came on outside, I kept examining her old
glove, or the pen with which she always wrote, or her little scissors.
I did nothing, and realized clearly that all I had done before,
ploughing, mowing, chopping, had only been because she wished it.
And if she had sent me to clean a deep well, where I had to stand
up to my waist in deep water, I should have crawled into the well
without considering whether it was necessary or not. And now when
she was not near, Dubetchnya, with its ruins, its untidiness, its
banging shutters, with its thieves by day and by night, seemed to
me a chaos in which any work would be useless. Besides, what had I
to work for here, why anxiety and thought about the future, if I
felt that the earth was giving way under my feet, that I had played
my part in Dubetchnya, and that the fate of the books on farming
was awaiting me too? Oh, what misery it was at night, in hours of
solitude, when I was listening every minute in alarm, as though I
were expecting someone to shout that it was time for me to go away!