So all traces were lost of my ... my father; so he vanished into silence and darkness never to return. My mother and I never spoke of him; only one day, I remember, she expressed surprise that I had never told her before of my strange dream; and added, ‘It must mean he really....’, but did not utter all her thought. My mother was ill a long while, and even after her recovery our former close relations never returned. She was ill at ease with me to the day of her death.... Ill at ease was just what she was. And that is a trouble there is no cure for. Anything may be smoothed over, memories of even the most tragic domestic incidents gradually lose their strength and bitterness; but if once a sense of being ill at ease installs itself between two closely united persons, it can never be dislodged! I never again had the dream that had once so agitated me; I no longer ‘look for’ my father; but sometimes I fancied--and even now I fancy--that I hear, as it were, distant wails, as it were, never silent, mournful plaints; they seem to sound somewhere behind a high wall, which cannot be crossed; they wring my heart, and I weep with closed eyes, and am never able to tell what it is, whether it is a living man moaning, or whether I am listening to the wild, long-drawn-out howl of the troubled sea. And then it passes again into the muttering of some beast, and I fall asleep with anguish and horror in my heart. POEMS IN PROSE I [1878] THE COUNTRY The last day of July; for a thousand versts around, Russia, our native land. An unbroken blue flooding the whole sky; a single cloudlet upon it, half floating, half fading away. Windlessness, warmth ... air like new milk! Larks are trilling; pouter-pigeons cooing; noiselessly the swallows dart to and fro; horses are neighing and munching; the dogs do not bark and stand peaceably wagging their tails. A smell of smoke and of hay, and a little of tar, too, and a little of hides. The hemp, now in full bloom, sheds its heavy, pleasant fragrance. A deep but sloping ravine. Along its sides willows in rows, with big heads above, trunks cleft below. Through the ravine runs a brook; the tiny pebbles at its bottom are all aquiver through its clear eddies. In the distance, on the border-line between earth and heaven, the bluish streak of a great river. Along the ravine, on one side, tidy barns, little storehouses with close-shut doors; on the other side, five or six pinewood huts with boarded roofs. Above each roof, the high pole of a pigeon-house; over each entry a little short-maned horse of wrought iron. The window-panes of faulty glass shine with all the colours of the rainbow. Jugs of flowers are painted on the shutters. Before each door, a little bench stands prim and neat; on the mounds of earth, cats are basking, their transparent ears pricked up alert; beyond the high door-sills, is the cool dark of the outer rooms.