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II
    The Stranger
    The little girl was wrapped from head to knee in a thick woolen muffler and ran about the yard like a chicken. Zhenya wanted to go to the Tartar girl and speak to her. And at that moment a casement window flew open. “Kol’ka!” Aksinya called. The child, who looked like a peasant’s bundle with felt boots hastily attached, ran into the porter’s quarters.
    To take schoolwork into the yard always meant brooding so long over some comment on a rule that it lost all sense, with the result that one had to return home and start all over again. On the very doorstep, the rooms began to weave their spell, with their special twilight, their coolness and their always surprising familiarity; it emanated from the furniture standing in its proper place for all time. The future could not be foreseen, but it could be seen when one stepped into the house from outside. Here its plan was made evident —the distribution of those forces to which it would be subjected. And there was no dream blown in by the movement of the air in the street that the spirit of the house did not swiftly dissipate at the very door of the entrance hall.
    This time it was Lermontov. Zhenya opened the book in the middle and bent back the covers till they met. When Seryozha did this at home, she always protested against this “ugly habit.” But outside it was something else again.
    Prokhov set the ice machine on the ground and entered the house. When he opened the door to the Spit-senskys’ hallway, the devilish yelps of the general’s short-haired dogs could be heard. The door shut with a bang.
    Meanwhile, the Terek roared like a lioness with a shaggy mane and roared on, as was only proper. Zhenya was wondering whether all this took place on the “back” or on the “backbone.” She was too lazy to look it up and “the golden clouds from faraway southern lands” had barely accompanied the Terek to the north, when she collided with Prokhov on the doorstep of the general’s kitchen, a pail and bast mop in hand.
    The orderly put down the pail, leaned over and, taking the ice machine apart, started to wash it. The August sun pierced the leaves and settled on the soldier’s loins. Blazing-hot, it penetrated the coarse uniform cloth and soaked it through like turpentine.
    The yard was large, with many meaningful corners. The paving in the center had long gone unrepaired; thick, curly grass had long since overgrown the stones. In the hours after lunch the grass smelled like a sour medicine, like a hospital, in the noonday heat. One end of the yard, between the porter’s lodge and the coachhouse, bordered on somebody else’s garden.
    Zhenya went to the place where the firewood was stacked. She wedged a flat log under the ladder which leaned against it to prevent it from slipping, and sat, uncomfortable and strained, as if in a game, on one of the middle rungs. Then she got up, climbed higher, put the book on the top step and attempted to deal with the “Demon.” Then she discovered that it was more comfortable sitting below and made her way down, leaving the book on the woodpile, without noticing it—because it was just then that she discovered something on the other side of the garden that she had never suspected. As if under a spell, she stood open-mouthed.
    In the strange garden there were no bushes, and the ancient trees, stretching their lower branches through the foliage as into dark night, sheltered the garden beneath, which lay in a constant, solemn but airy twilight, from which it never emerged. The branches were forked, painted violet by the weather, covered with gray lichens, and left open a view of an empty, little-used street on the other side of the garden. There a yellow acacia stood. Its leaves were now dry, shrunken and falling.
    Transformed by the dusky garden from this world into another, the empty side street shone like an event in a dream,