From the early morning onwards, the sky was filled with rainclouds; it was quiet, not hot and boring, as it is on gray gloomy days, when storm clouds have loomed for a long duration over the field and you wait for a rain that never comes. Veterinarian Ivan Ivanich and schoolteacher Burkin had already tired of traveling, and the field appeared endless to them. Far off ahead, barely even visible, were the windmills of Mironosytska, to the right stretched a line of hills and then disappeared far beyond the town, and both of them knew this was the bank of the river, where there were meadows, green willows, small farms, and if one stood atop one of the hills, then from there the exact same gigantic field was visible, the telegraph and train, which from a distance looked similar to a crawling caterpillar, but in clear weather even the town is visible from there. Now, in the quiet weather, when all of nature appeared meek and thoughtful, Ivan Ivanich and Burkin were struck with love towards this field, and both thought about how great, how beautiful this country is.
   — The last time we were in the barn of the mayor of Prokofiya, — said Burkin, — you were planning to tell some kind of story.
   —Yes, I wanted to talk about my brother then.
   Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath in and lit up a pipe to begin to tell the story, but exactly at the same time the rain arrived. And after five minutes strong, heavy rain was already falling, and it was hard to predict when it would stop. Ivan Ivanich and Burkin stopped and wondered in amazement; the dogs, already wet, stood with their tails between their legs and looked at them sweetly.
   —We need to get cover somewhere, — said Burkin. —Let’s go to Alekhin’s. It is close by.
   —Let’s go.
   They turned to the side and walked along a trimmed field, straight, then taking a right, not diverting from the path. Soon  appeared poplars, a garden, then the red roofs of barns; the river shimmered, and the view opened of a wide meadow with a windmill and a white bathhouse. This was Sofino, where Alekhin lived.
   The windmill was turning, choking off the sound of the rain; the dam was shaking. Here around the wagons stood wet horses lowering their heads, and people were walking, having covered themselves with sacks. It was damp, muddy, uncomfortable, and the look of the the river was cold and nasty. Ivan Ivanich and Burkin had already experienced the feeling of wetness, dirtiness, whole body discomfort, legs became heavier from mud, and when, crossing the dam, they walked up towards the main barn, they were quiet, as if they had become angry at one another.
   In one of the rooms a thresher was heard; the door was open, and dust poured from there. On the threshold stood Alekhin himself, forty years old, tall, sturdy, with long hair, more akin to a professor or an artist than a landholder. He wore a white, long unwashed shirt with a corded belt, leggings instead of pants, and to his boots were also stuck mud and straw. Nose and eyes were black from dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanich and Burkin and visibly became very jovial.
      — Please, gentlemen, come in, — he said, smiling. —I’ll be right there, this minute.
   The house was large, with two floors. Alekhin lived below in two vaulted rooms with small windows, where the house steward once lived; here was a simple arrangment and it smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harnesses. Up above, in the entertaining rooms, he went only rarely, when guests came in. Ivan Ivanich and Burkin encountered the maid inside the house, a young woman so beautiful, that they both stopped at the same moment and stood staring at one another.
   —You cannot imagine how happy I am to see you, gentlemen, — said Alekhin, entering the room after them. — I was not expecting you here! Pelageya, — he turned towards the housemaid, — let us give our guests something to change into. On that account, I will change as well. Only I need to go wash first,  it seems that I have not bathed since the spring. Gentlemen, if you would please walk to the bathing area, while they are getting things ready here.  
   Beautiful Pelageya, so delicate and so soft in appearance, carried the sheets and soap, and Alekhin went to the bathing hole with his guests. — Yes, its been a while since I have taken a bath, — he said while undressing. — I have a bath house, as you can see, a good one at that, father built it, but all the same one never washes themselves anyways.  
   He sat on the stool and washed his long hair and neck, and the water around him turned brown.
   — Yes, I confess… — said Ivan Ivanich energetically, glancing at his head.
   — It has been a while now since I took a bath…— Alekhin repeated confusedly and once again rinsed himself, and the water around him turned dark-blue, like ink.
   Ivan Ivanich went out, threw himself in the water with a noise and swam under the rain, swinging his arms widely and producing waves, and on the waves rocked white lilies; he swam all the way to the center of the river and dived, and after a minute appeared in another spot and swam further, and dived again trying to reach the bottom. “Oh, my goodness… — he repeated, enjoying himself. — Oh, my goodness…” He swam to the windmill, talked about something with a villager and turned around, and laid in the middle of the river, putting his face under the rain. Burkin and Alekhin had already got dressed and prepared to leave, but he kept swimming and diving.
    —Oh, my goodness…— he said. — Oh, Lord have mercy.
   — And it shall be unto you! — Burkin shouted at him.
   They returned to the house. And only when they lit the lamp above the large dining room, and both Burkin and Ivan Ivanich sat down in armchairs, dressed in silk bathrobes and warm shoes, but Alekhin himself walked around the dining room washed, clean shaven, in a new jacket, evidently, enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes, light shoes, and when beautiful Pelageya, noiselessly stepping across the carpet and smiling softly, served tea with jam on a tray, only then did Ivan Ivanich get to the story, and it seemed that not only were Burkin and Alekhin listening to him, but also old and young women and soldiers, peacefully and sternly looking out from golden picture frames.
   —We are two brothers, — he began, — myself, Ivan Ivanich, and the other— Nikolai Ivanich, younger by two years. I went into the sciences, became a veterinarian, but from nineteen years old Nikolai worked already in the house of government. Our father Chimsha-Himalaysky came from the ranks of army recruits, but having acquired the position of officer, left to us an inherited nobility and title. After his death, they stripped the title from us over debts, but in any event, we spent a childhood freely in the country. We passed day and night in the field and the forest, just like village children, watched horses, peeled bast, caught fish, and other things of this sort… but you know, if someone just once in his life has caught a fish, or seen the migrating thrushes in winter on a clear, chill day as they moved in flocks over the trees, that person is already not a city dweller, and it will tug at his freedom until death itself. My brother felt dreary at the tax bureau. Years passed and he always remained in the same place, wrote the same papers and thought only about the very same thing; how to get to the country. And this dreariness of his expressed itself little by little in a concrete wish, with the dream to buy himself a small estate somewhere on the shore of a river or lake.
   He was a kind, timid person, I loved him, but this wish to shut himself for all of life at his own estate I never could sympathize with. It was common to say that a person needs only three arshins of soil. But you know, it is a corpse that needs three arshins, not even a person. And they also say now that if our intelligentsia has an affinity towards the land and aspires towards a country estate, then it is just as well. But, these estates are practically equal to the same three arshins of land. To depart from the city, the struggle, the living noise, to depart and hide onself on an estate— it is not life, it is egoism, sloth, it is a unique type of monasticism, but monasticism without self-fulfillment. A human being does not need three arshins of land, nor an estate, but all the earthly sphere, all nature, where in the open terrain they could manifest all the traits and particularities of their free soul.
   My brother Nikolai, sitting in his office in the chancellery, dreamed about how he would eat his own shchi, from which a delicious smell goes through the whole home, to eat green herbs, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on a bench behind the gate and look at the field and forest. Books on land cultivation and all the advice in almanacs constituted his joy, his soul’s preferred sustenance; he loved to read magazines too, but was reading only advertisements inside them, a certain number of desyatins of land for sale, and a meadow with a farm, a river, a garden, a mill, a freshwater pond. In his mind he envisioned paths through the garden, flowers, fruits, birdhouses, carp in the ponds and, you know, all the like. These imagined pictures were varied, looking upon the advertisements which he happened to come across, but somehow in all of them there had to be gooseberries. He could not picture one country estate, or one poetic nook without gooseberries.
   —Country life has its comforts, — he was saying, once — You sit on the balcony, drinking tea, and on the pond your ducks are swimming, it smells so pleasantly and… and gooseberries grow.
    He drew the plan of his estate, and every time the plan came out the same way: a) manor house, b) servant’s dwelling, c) vegetable garden, d) gooseberries. He lived thriftily: he did not eat or drink much, dressed lord knows how, as if impoverished, and saved and put everything in the bank. He was terribly skimpy. It was painful for me to look upon him, and that which I gave to him and sent on holidays he would also hide away. If the person was already given to the idea, you could do nothing about it.
   Years went by, he was transferred to a different government office, he was already forty years old, and he still read advertisements in the magazines and saved up. Then, I hear he got married. All with that same same goal, in order to purchase for himself a small estate with gooseberries, he married an elderly, unattractive widow, without any emotion, but only because she brought in all the money. With her he also lived miserly, kept her almost starving and put her money in the bank in his name. Before she was married to a postmaster and was used to having pirogies and brandy with him, but with her second husband even black bread was not seen much; she withered away from such a life, indeed, she took her three years and gave her soul to God. And of course my brother did not even think for one minute that he was at fault in her death. Money, like vodka, makes a person strange. In the city we had a merchant who died. Before his death, he ordered a plate of honey to be served and ate all of his money and winning cards together with the honey, so it would not be delivered to anyone. Once at the station I was inspecting the herds, and at this time one scalper fell under the train engine and lost his leg. We carry him to the hospital, blood is gushing— a fearful sight, and he only asks that his leg be found, so he could be at peace; inside the boot in his cut-off leg were twenty rubles, so that they would not be lost.
   —You are already drifting off the subject— said Burkin.
   — After the after the death of his wife, — continued Ivan Ivanich, thinking for half a minute,— my brother started to look for an estate. Of course, though he looked five years, all the same you will err and buy not that completely, which you dreamed of. Brother Nickolai, with a transfer of debt through a broker, bought 120 desyatins of land with a manor house, a servant’s quarters, a yard, but no fruit orchard, or gooseberries, or pond with ducks; there was a river, but the water in it was coffee colored, since along one side was a brick factory, and the other — an bone incinerator. But little did my Nikolai Ivanich get upset; he ordered himself twenty bushes of gooseberries, planted and became accustomed to life as a landowner.
  Last year I went to visit him. I will go visit, I think, and see how it is and what is there. In his letters my brother called his estate Chumbaraklova Place; Himalayskaya, too. I arrived to “Himalayskaya, too” after one half day. It was hot. Everywhere were ditches, fences, planted rows of firs, — and you do not know how to cross the yard, where to leave a horse. I am walking towards the house and a red, fat dog, resembling a pig, comes to meet me. She wants to bark, but is lazy. The cook exited the kitchen, barefoot, fat, also resembling a pig, and said the baron was taking a rest after lunch. I enter my brother’s room, he sits on the bed, knees covered in a blanket; he had aged, filled out, become pudgy; his cheeks, nose and lips stretched out in front, — just one look, and he will snort in the blanket.
    We embraced and shed tears from happiness and from the sad thought that sometime we were young, but now both gray and it was time to die. He got dressed and led to show me around his estate.
   — Well, how are you getting along here? — I asked.  
   —Very good, thank God, I am doing well.              
   This was already not the former timid, poor bureaucrat, but a genuine landholder, a baron. He had settled in here, got used to  and acquired a taste for it; he ate a lot, washed in the bathhouse, gained weight, already sued the company at both factories and took offense when the villagers did not call him “your worship”. Over his soul, he occupied himself astutely, as a baron, and created good works not simply, but with pretension. And which good works? He treated villagers for all ailments with soda and castor oil, and held a service of thanksgiving on his saint’s day among the villagers, but then put out the half bucket, he thought this was obliged. Oh, these terrible half buckets! Today an overweight landlord drags a villager to the local judge for damages, but tomorrow on the festival day he puts out a half bucket for them, and they drink and shout hurrah, and bow down before him, drunk. A change in life for the better, satiety and idleness develop in a Russian person conceitedness, baseness itself. Nikolai Ivanich, who in the bureau of treasury once feared to possess his own views, now spoke only truths, and with a tone just like a minister’s: “Education is essential, but for the nation it is premature.” “Corporal punishment is harmful in general, but in some cases useful and irreplaceable.”
   —I understand the nation and know how to deal with them. — he said. It only takes me to wag a finger, and the people will do anything for me I want them to.”
   And mind you all of this was said with a clever, kind smile. He repeated it twenty times: “We, the gentry”, “I, as a noble”; obviously, he did not remember, that our grandfather was a villager, and our father— a soldier. Even our last name Chimsha-Himalaysky, in essence contradictory, seemed to him now very distinguished, sonorous and pleasing.
   But the matter is not about him, but me myself. I want to tell you, such a change occurred in me in these few hours I was at his estate. In the evening, as we were drinking tea, the cook served a full plate of gooseberries on the table. It was not purchased, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanich laughed and looked for a minute at the gooseberries, silent, with tears, — he was unable to speak from excitement, then put one berry in his mouth, looked at me with the excitement of a child who had finally received his favorite toy and said:
   — How delicious!   
   And he ate greedily and was repeating:
   — Oh, how delicious! You must try it!
   It was hard and sour, but, as Pushkin said, “Elevating a deception to us, is more cherished than the darkness of truth.” I saw a happy person, whose precious dream had obviously come to be a reality, who achieved goals in life, obtained that, which he wanted, who was content with his fate, with his own self. To my thoughts about human happiness, something sad always mixed in for some reason, especially now, in view of a happy person, an burdensome feeling seized me, close to despair. The night was especially difficult. They laid out a bed for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear how he slept, and how he stood up and went to the plate with the gooseberries and took some berries. I reasoned: in essence, how many contented, happy people! What a crushing power this is! You take a glance at this life: baseness and idleness of the strong, ignorance and conformity of the weak, amidst impossible poverty, crowdedness, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies… Meanwhile, in all of the houses and on the streets it is quiet, peaceful; out of fifty thousand living in the city, not one who would shout out, loudly growing indignant. We see those who go to the market for groceries, when it is day they eat, night they sleep, who say their nonsense, get married, grow older, kindly drag their deceased to the cemetery, but we do not see and hear those who suffer, and that which is awful in life happens somewhere behind the curtains. Everything is quiet, calm, and just one mute statistic protests: how many had lost their mind, how many drank to excess, how many children perished from malnourishment… and such order obviously is necessary; obviously, the happy feel good only because the unhappy carry their burden in silence, and without this silence happiness would be unfeasible. It is a common hypnosis. It is needed, so that behind the door of each contented, happy person someone would stand with a hammer and would remind them constantly with a thump what unhappiness is, that however happy they are, life sooner or later will show them its claws and misfortune will happen, sickness, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear them, like now they do not see or hear others. Yet there is no person with a hammer, the happy person lives to themself, and trivial daily preoccupations trouble him gently, like wind through poplars, — and everything carries on alright.     
    — On that night it became clear to me that I was also happy and contented, — continued Ivan Ivanich, standing up. — Over lunch I also felt the inclination to preach how to live, how to believe, how to manage a nation. I was also saying, that light is learning, education is necessary, but that for humble people only grammar is suitable enough. Freedom is a blessing, I was saying, unthinkable to live without it, as if without air, but one must wait a bit. Yes, I spoke like that, but now I am asking: to wait in whose name? — asked Ivan Ivanich, looking angrily at Burkin. —To wait in whose name, I am asking you? In the name of what reckoning? They say to me, that everything is not immediate, every idea comes into existence gradually, in its own time. But who says this? Where is the proof, that it is fair? You cite the natural order of things, the lawfulness of an occurrence, but is there order and lawfulness in the fact that I, a living, thinking person, need to stand by a ditch and wait, while it becomes grown over or covered with dirt in the same time which, maybe, I could leap over or construct a bridge across? Again, to wait in whose name? To wait, while there is no strength to live, and meanwhile to live is necessary and one wants to live! I departed then from my brother in the early morning, and from that time on it became unbearable for me to be in the city. Silence and calm oppress me, I am afraid to look at the windows, because now for me, there is no sight more troubling than a happy family, sitting around a table and drinking tea. I am already old and not suited for battle, I am not fit and even hate to. I only grieve mentally, get irritated, vexed, at night my head burns from a stream of thoughts, and I cannot sleep… Oh, if only I was young!
   Ivan Ivanich walked in agitation from on corner to the other and repeated:
   —If only I were young!
   He suddenly came up to Alekhin and started to shake his hand, first one hand, then the other.
   —Pavel Constantinich, — he said, with a begging voice, — do not be unsettled, do not let them put you to sleep! You are still youthful, strong, bright, do not stop doing good! There is no happiness and there does not need to be, but if there is any sense and purpose in life, then this sense and purpose is entirely not in our happiness, but in something more rational and great. Do good!
     All of this Ivan Ivanich said with a pitiful, entreating smile, as if he was asking personally for himself.   
  Next all three of them sat in armchairs on different ends of the dining room and remained silent. Ivan Ivanich’s story did not satisfy Burkin or Alekhin. When the generals and ladies peered out of gold frames, who in the twilight seemed alive, to listen to a story about a poor bureaucrat who ate gooseberries, it was boring. It was desirable for some reason to speak and hear about elegant people, about women. And the fact that they were sitting in the dining room, where everything— the chandelier in the glass case, and the armchairs, and carpets under their feet said that these people themselves, who looked now from the frames, once here walked, sat, drank tea, and that here now quietly walked the beautiful Pelageya, — this was better than all the stories.
   Alekhin was about to fall asleep; he got up for work early, at three o’ clock in the morning, and now his eyes were sticking together, but he feared that without him the guests would begin to talk about something interesting, and he did not leave. Whether it was smart, or fair, what Ivan Ivanich was saying, he did not figure; the guests did not talk about a croup, or about hay, not or tar, but something that did not have a direct correlation to his life, and he was happy and wanted for them to continue…
   —Well, time to go to bed, — said Burkin, getting out of his chair. —Allow me to wish you goodnight.        
   Alekhin said farewell and left to his rooms below, but the guests remained upstairs. Both of them spent the night in a large room, where two large wooden beds with carved decorations stood, and in the corner a cross made from ivory; from their wide, chilly beds, which beautiful Pelageya laid out for them, pleasantly wafted the smell of fresh sheets.
   Ivan Ivanich silently undressed and laid down.
   —Lord, pardon us sinners! He said and covered his head. From his pipe laying on the table it smelled strongly of tobacco, and Burkin did not sleep for a long time, and could not understand where this burdensome smell came from. The rain pounded upon the windows the whole night through.