He that is able to receive it,
let him receive it.

(Matthew xix, 10–10)

I

This took place in early spring. It was the second uninterrupted day of our journey. Every so often passengers who were only going short distances would enter the railway carriage and leave it again, but there were three people who, like myself, had boarded the train at its point of origin and were still travelling: a plain, elderly lady with an exhausted-looking face, who was smoking cigarettes and was dressed in a hat and coat that might almost have been those of a man; her companion, a talkative man of about forty, with trim, new luggage; and another man who was rather small of stature and whose movements were nervous and jerky – he was not yet old, but his curly hair had obviously turned grey prematurely, and his eyes had a peculiar light in them as they flickered from one object to another. He was dressed in an old coat that looked as though it might have been made by an expensive tailor; it had a lambskin collar, and he wore a tall cap of the same material. Whenever he unfastened his coat, a long-waisted jacket and a Russian embroidered shirt came into view. Another peculiar thing about this man was that every now and again he uttered strange sounds, as if he were clearing his throat or beginning to laugh, but breaking off in silence.

Throughout the entire duration of the journey this man studiously avoided talking to any of the other passengers or becoming acquainted with them. If anyone spoke to him he would reply curtly and abruptly; he spent the time reading, looking out of the window, smoking or taking from his old travelling-bag the provisions he had brought with him and then sipping tea or munching a snack.

I had the feeling that his solitude was weighing him down, and I tried several times to engage him in conversation. Each time our eyes met, however, which was frequently, as we were sitting obliquely opposite one another, he would turn away and start reading his book or gazing out of the window.

Shortly before evening on that second day, the train stopped at a large station, and the nervous man stepped outside, fetched some boiling water and made tea for himself. The man with the smart luggage, a lawyer, as I later discovered, went to have a glass of tea in the station buffet with his travelling companion, the cigarette-smoking lady in the man’s coat.

During their absence several new passengers entered the carriage. They included a tall, clean-shaven old man whose face was creased all over in wrinkles; he was evidently a merchant, and he wore a polecat fur coat and a cloth cap that had an enormous peak. He sat down opposite the places temporarily vacated by the lawyer and the lady, and immediately launched into a conversation with a young man who looked like a salesclerk and who had also entered the carriage at this station.

My seat was diagonally opposite theirs, and since the train was not in motion I could, when no one was passing down the carriage, overhear snatches of what they were saying. The merchant started off by telling the other man that he was on his way to visit his estate, which lay just one stop down the line; then, as such men always do, they began to discuss trade and prices, the current state of the Moscow market, and eventually, as always, they arrived at the subject of the Nizhny Novgorod summer fair.1 The salesclerk embarked on a description of the drinking and antics of a certain rich merchant they both knew, but the old man would not hear him out; instead, he began to talk about the jamborees he himself had taken part in at Kunavino2 in days gone by. Of his role in these he was evidently proud, and it was with open delight that he related how once, when he and this same mutual acquaintance had been drunk together in Kunavino, they had got up to some mischief of a kind that he could only describe in whispers. The salesclerk’s guffaw filled the entire carriage, and the old man laughed along with him, exposing a couple of yellow teeth to view.

Not expecting to hear anything of interest, I rose and left my seat with the aim of taking a stroll along the platform until it was time for the train to depart. In the doorway I bumped into the lawyer and the lady, who were chattering animatedly to one another as they found their way back to their seats.

‘You won’t have time,’ the talkative lawyer said to me. ‘The second bell’s going to go any minute now.’

And so it was: before I had even reached the end of the line of carriages the bell rang. When I got back to my seat I found the lawyer and the lady deep in energetic conversation. The old merchant sat opposite them in silence, looking severely in front of him and chewing his teeth from time to time in disapproval.

‘So then she just told her husband straight out,’ the lawyer was saying with a smile as I made my way past him. ‘She said she couldn’t and wouldn’t live with him any more, because…’

And he began to say something else, something I could not make out. More passengers came trooping in behind me; then the guard walked down the carriage, followed by a porter in a tremendous hurry, and for quite a long time there ensued such an uproar that no conversation could possibly be heard. When things had quietened down again and I could once more hear the lawyer’s voice, the conversation had evidently passed from the particular to the general.

The lawyer was saying that the question of divorce was very much the object of public discussion in Europe just now, and that cases of this type were cropping up in our own country with an ever-increasing degree of frequency. Noticing that his voice had become the only one in the carriage, the lawyer cut short his homily and turned to the old man.

‘There was none of that sort of thing in the old days, was there?’ he said, smiling affably.

The old man was about to reply, but at that moment the train began to move and, taking off his cap, he began crossing himself and reciting a prayer in a whisper. The lawyer waited politely, averting his gaze. When he had finished his prayer and his thrice-repeated crossing of himself, the old man put his cap fairly and squarely back on his head, rearranged himself in his seat, and began to speak.

‘Oh there was, sir. It’s just that there wasn’t so much of it, that’s all,’ he said. ‘You can’t expect anything else nowadays. They’ve all gotten that well educated.’

As the train began to gather speed it kept rattling over points, and it was not easy to hear what he was saying. I was interested, however, and I shifted my seat so as to be closer to him. The interest of my neighbour, the nervous man with the light in his eyes, had also plainly been aroused, and he continued to listen while staying where he was.

‘But what’s wrong with education?’ said the lady, with a scarcely perceptible smile. ‘Was it really better to get married in the old way, with the bride and bridegroom never even setting eyes on one another beforehand?’ she continued, replying, as many women do, not to what the person she was addressing had actually said, but to what she thought he was going to say.