The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rendezvous, by Ivan Turgenev

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Title: The Rendezvous
1907

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Translator: Herman Bernstein

Release Date: October 17, 2007 [EBook #23056]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RENDEZVOUS ***

Produced by David Widger

THE RENDEZVOUS

By Ivan Turgenev

Translated by Herman Bernstein.

Copyright, 1907, by P. P. Collier & Son.

I was sitting in a birch grove in autumn, near the middle of September.
It had been drizzling ever since morning; occasionally the sun shone
warmly;--the weather was changeable. Now the sky was overcast with
watery white clouds, now it suddenly cleared up for an instant, and then
the bright, soft azure, like a beautiful eye, appeared from beyond the
dispersed clouds. I was sitting looking about me and listening. The
leaves were slightly rustling over my head; and by their very rustle one
could tell what season of the year it was. It was not the gay, laughing
palpitation of spring; not a soft whispering, nor the lingering chatter
of summer, nor the timid and cold lisping of late autumn, but a barely
audible, drowsy prattle. A faint breeze was whisking over the tree-tops.
The interior of the grove, moist from the rain, was forever changing,
as the sun shone or hid beyond the clouds; now the grove was all
illuminated as if everything in it had burst into a smile; the trunks of
the birch trees suddenly assumed the soft reflection of white silk;
the small leaves which lay scattered on the ground all at once became
variegated and flashed up like red gold; and the pretty stalks of the
tall, branchy ferns, already tinted in their autumn hue, resembling the
color of overripe grapes, appeared here and there tangling and crossing
one another. Now again everything suddenly turned blue; the bright
colors died out instantaneously, the birch trees stood all white,
lustreless, like snow which had not yet been touched by the coldly
playing rays of the winter sun--and stealthily, slyly, a drizzling rain
began to sprinkle and whisper over the forest. The leaves on the birches
were almost all green yet, though they had