Let’s begin.’

‘All right, let’s begin,’ said Liza.

The first adagio went fairly smoothly, although Panshin made more than one mistake. He played his own compositions and whatever he had studied very nicely, but he was bad at reading music at first sight. Consequently the second part of the Sonata – a fairly fast allegro – was a disaster: at the twentieth bar Panshin, already two bars behind, gave up and pushed his chair back with a laugh.

‘No, I can’t play today!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s a good thing Lemm didn’t hear us – he’d’ve had a fit.’

Liza stood up, closed the piano and turned to Panshin.

‘What shall we do now?’ she asked.

‘I knew you’d ask that! You can never sit about with your arms folded. Well, if you like, let’s do some drawing while it’s still light enough. Maybe another muse, the muse of drawing – what was she called? I forget – will be kinder to me. Where’s your album? I remember my landscape’s not yet done.’

Liza went into the next room to find her album while Panshin, left alone, drew a cambric handkerchief out of his pocket, rubbed his nails and scrutinized his hands. They were very beautiful and white; on his left thumb he wore a spiral gold ring. Liza returned. Panshin sat down by the window and opened the album.

‘Aha!’ he exclaimed. ‘I see you’ve begun to copy my landscape – and splendidly. Very good indeed! It’s just that here – please let me have a pencil – the shadows aren’t filled in strongly enough. Look.’

And Panshin made several brisk long strokes. He always drew one and the same landscape: in the foreground were large dishevelled trees and in the background fields with jagged mountains on the horizon. Liza looked over his shoulder as he worked.

‘In drawing, as generally in life,’ said Panshin, bending his head to right and left, ‘the main thing is dexterity and daring.’

At that moment Lemm entered the room and, giving a drily formal bow, tried to withdraw, but Panshin threw the album and pencil to one side and barred his exit.

‘Where are you off to, my dear Christopher Fyodorych? Aren’t you going to stay for tea?’

‘I am going home,’ said Lemm in a gloomy voice. ‘My head aches.’

‘Well, that’s nothing. You stay here. We’ll discuss Shakespeare.’

‘My head aches,’ the old man repeated.

‘In your absence we tried the Beethoven Sonata,’ Panshin went on, amiably taking him by the waist and smiling brightly, ‘but the whole thing was hopeless. Just imagine it, I couldn’t play two notes in a row correctly.’

‘You would besser your romance haf played again,’ Lemm retorted, removing Panshin’s hands, and went out of the room.

Liza ran after him. She caught up with him at the porch.

‘Christopher Fyodorych, please listen,’ she said in German, accompanying him to the gate across the short green grass of the yard, ‘I’m to blame for hurting you. Forgive me.’

Lemm did not answer.

‘I showed Vladimir Nikolaich your cantata because I was sure he would appreciate it – and he did really like it very much.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in Russian, and then added in his own language: ‘But he cannot understand anything; can’t you see that? He’s a dilettante – that’s all there is to it!’

‘You’re being unfair to him,’ Liza replied. ‘He understands everything, and he can do almost everything.’

‘Yes, if it’s second-rate, lightweight stuff, all done in a hurry. What he does is liked and he’s liked and he’s pleased with himself – well, good luck to him! But I’m not annoyed; this cantata and I are both old fools. I’m a little ashamed, but it doesn’t matter.’

‘Forgive me, Christopher Fyodorych,’ Liza repeated.

‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,’ he repeated, again in Russian. ‘You’re a kind girl…. But here’s someone coming to see you. Good-bye. You’re a very kind girl.’

And Lemm set off with hurried step towards the gate, through which there had just entered a gentleman who was unknown to him dressed in a grey overcoat and wide straw hat. Bowing courteously to him (he bowed to all the new faces he saw in the town of O…, but made it a rule of his to turn his back on those he knew), Lemm walked past and disappeared beyond the fence. The newcomer stared after him in astonishment and then, glancing in Liza’s direction, went straight up to her.

VII

‘YOU won’t recognize me,’ he said, taking off his hat, ‘but I’ve recognized you even though ten years have passed since I last saw you.