The younger sister, Zhenia, remained silent during the conversation about the zemstvo. She never took part in serious conversations, not being considered grown-up in the family, and they always called her by the pet name Missy, because she used to call her governess Miss when she was a child. All the time she examined me curiously, and when I was turning the pages of the photograph album she kept saying: “There’s my uncle … there’s my godfather …” and she kept pointing at the photographs. In her childish way she pressed her shoulder against mine, and I clearly saw her small undeveloped breasts, her thin shoulders, her braided hair, and her slim waist tightly drawn in by a belt.
We played croquet and lawn tennis, wandered about the garden, drank tea, and sat a long while over supper. After the high-columned empty ballroom where I lived, I felt pleasantly comfortable in this small cozy house where there were no oleographs hanging on the walls, and the servants were addressed as “you,” and not as “thou,” and everything seemed pure and youthful thanks to the presence of Leda and Missy, and the atmosphere breathed a sense of order. At supper Leda again talked to Belokurov about the zemstvo, about Balagin, about school libraries. She was a lively, sincere, and persuasive young woman, and it was interesting to listen to her although she spoke in a loud voice a great deal, perhaps because she was accustomed to speaking in this way at school. On the other hand, my friend Pyotr Petrovich still clung to the habit of his student days, reducing all discussion to argument. He spoke in a bored and languid voice, at vast length, with an obvious desire to be taken for a man of intelligence and progressive views. Gesticulating, he knocked a sauceboat over with his cuff, and it made a large pool on the tablecloth, but it seemed that no one noticed it except me.
When we made our way home, the night was dark and still.
“I call it good breeding,” Belokurov sighed, “not so much when you don’t upset a sauceboat over the tablecloth, but when you don’t notice it if someone else does. Yes, they are an admirably cultured family. I’m out of touch with nice people—terribly out of touch. It’s all the fault of business, business!”
He went on to discuss all the hard work which goes with being a landed proprietor. And I thought: “What a ponderous, lazy, good-for-nothing he is!” Whenever he spoke seriously, he kept saying “Er—er—” painfully drawling out his hesitations, and he worked exactly as he talked, slowly, always getting behindhand, never on time. Nor did I have any great belief in his business sense, for the letters I gave him to post remained in his pocket for weeks.
“The worst of it is,” he muttered as we walked along together, “the worst of it is that you go on working and no one has any sympathy for you. No sympathy at all!”
II
Soon I started calling on the Volchaninovs. Usually I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life. All the time they would be talking on the terrace, and I would hear the rustle of skirts and the whispering sound of pages being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the sight of Leda receiving patients during the day, giving out books, and going off to the village bareheaded under a sunshade, while in the evenings she would declaim in a loud voice about the zemstvo and about schools. She was a beautiful, slender, unfailingly correct young woman with thin, sensitive lips, and whenever a serious discussion got under way she would say to me coldly: “This won’t interest you.”
I was unsympathetic to her. She disapproved of me because I was a landscape painter and my paintings did not represent the needs of the people, and she felt therefore that I was indifferent to all her deepest beliefs. I remember riding along the shores of Lake Baikal and meeting a Buryat girl on horseback. She wore a shirt and blue sailcloth trousers. I asked her to sell me her pipe, and while we were talking, she gazed contemptuously at my European features and my hat. A moment later, bored with my conversation, she uttered a wild yell and galloped away. In exactly the same way Leda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she showed no signs of her dislike, but I could feel it, and sitting on the bottom step of the terrace, I gave way to my sense of irritation and said that to treat peasants without being a doctor was to deceive them, and it was easy to be charitable if one was the owner of five thousand acres.
Her sister Missy had no such cares and spent her life in complete idleness, as I did. When she awoke in the morning she would take a book onto the terrace and read it in a deep armchair, her feet scarcely touching the ground, or she would hide away with the book somewhere in the avenue of lime trees, or she would pass through the gate into the open fields. She spent the day reading, her eyes glued avidly on the page, and only an occasional weary and listless glance, and her extreme pallor, showed how exhausted she became from reading. When I came on the scene and when she saw me, she would blush a little, put the book aside, and gazing at me with her enormous eyes, she would tell me in her high-spirited way about everything that had happened: how the chimney in the servants’ quarters had caught fire or how one of the workmen had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually wore a light-colored blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We took walks together and gathered cherries to make into preserves or went boating together, and when she jumped up to reach the cherries or pulled on the oars, her thin and delicate arms gleamed through her wide sleeves. Or else I sketched, and she would stand there beside me, watching breathlessly.
One Sunday at the end of July, I went over to see the Volchaninovs around nine o’clock in the morning. I went through the park, staying far from the house, looking for white mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer, marking the places where I found them so that I could pick them later with Zhenia. A warm wind was blowing. I could see Zhenia and her mother coming back from church, both wearing light holiday dresses, and Zhenia was holding on to her hat because of the strong wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the terrace.
Being a man without any care in the world, always seeking some justification for a life of perpetual idleness, I found these mornings on summer holidays on the estate especially charming. When the gardens were all green and wet with dew, shining joyously in the sun, and when the oleanders and the mignonettes spread their perfume all round the house, and when the young people have just returned from church and are drinking tea in the garden, and when they are all joyful and charmingly dressed, and when you know that all these healthy, beautiful, well-fed people will be doing nothing all day, at such times I long for life to be always like this. So I thought as I wandered about the garden, ready to pursue my careless wanderings all day and all summer.
Zhenia came from the house carrying a basket. She had an expression on her face suggesting that she knew, or felt, she would find me in the garden. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked me a question she went ahead of me so that she could see my face.
“Yesterday,” she said, “a miracle happened in our village. Pelageya, the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines were any use to her, but yesterday an old woman whispered something over her, and she has recovered.”
“This is of no importance,” I said. “No need to go to old women or sick people to find miracles. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is beyond our understanding is a miracle.”
“Aren’t you afraid of things you can’t understand?”
“No, I march boldly up to the incomprehensible, and refuse to submit to it. I am superior to all these phenomena. Men should realize they are superior to lions and tigers and stars, they are greater than anything in nature, greater than the things they profess not to understand which they call miracles. Otherwise we are not men, but mice, afraid of everything.”
Zhenia supposed that because I was a painter I must know a good deal and could accurately divine anything I did not know. She longed for me to lead her into the realm
of the eternal and the beautiful, into that higher world where she thought I was at home, and she talked to me about God, about life everlasting, and about the miraculous. And I, who refuse to believe that I and my imagination will perish forever after my death, would reply: “Yes, people are immortal.” “Yes, eternal life awaits us.” And she would listen and believe and never demand proof.
We were going home when she suddenly paused and said: “Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she? I adore her passionately and I would lay down my life for her at any moment. Tell me”—Zhenia touched my sleeve with her finger—“tell me why you are always arguing with her? Why do you get so irritated?”
“Because she is wrong.”
Zhenia gave her head a protesting shake, and tears came to her eyes. “That’s incomprehensible!” she said.
At that very moment Leda had just returned from somewhere and was standing near the steps with a riding whip in her hands, a slender beautiful figure in the streaming sunlight. She was giving orders to one of the laborers. Then, in a great hurry and talking loudly, she received two or three patients, and with a businesslike, preoccupied air she went through all the rooms of the house, opening one cupboard after another, and then she went to the mezzanine; it took some time to find her and call her for dinner, and by the time she came down we had already finished the soup. Somehow I remember all these little details and love to dwell on them, and I remember everything that happened that day even though nothing of great importance occurred. After lunch Zhenia read, lying in a deep armchair, while I sat on the lowest step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast, and a fine, thin rain began to fall. It was warm, the wind had dropped, and it seemed the day would never come to an end. Yekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace with a fan. She was very sleepy.
“Oh, Mama,” Zhenia said, kissing her hand. “It’s not good for you to sleep during the day.”
They adored each other. When one went into the garden the other would stand on the terrace and call out: “Hello, Zhenia!” or “Mama, where are you?” They always prayed together, and they shared the same beliefs, and understood each other very well, even when they said nothing. And their attitude toward people was exactly the same. Yekaterina Pavlovna soon grew accustomed to my presence and became fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days, she would send out to ask whether I was well. And she had an enthusiastic way of looking at my drawings, and she would relate what was happening as openly and freely as Missy, and she often confided her domestic secrets to me.
She was in awe of her elder daughter. Leda never cared for endearments, and always spoke seriously: she lived her own life, and to her mother and sister she was as sacred and mysterious as an admiral sitting in his cabin is to his sailors.
“Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she?” her mother used to say.
Now as the rain fell softly we spoke about Leda.
“Yes, she is a remarkable person,” her mother said, adding in a low conspiratorial voice, with a nervous glance over her shoulder: “You have to search far and wide for people like that. Even so, I am beginning to be a bit worried. The school, the dispensary, books—they are all very well, but why go to extremes? She is twenty-four, and it is time she was thinking seriously about herself. If you spend your time with books and dispensaries, you find that life slips by without your being aware of it.… She ought to be married.”
Zhenia, pale from reading and with her hair in disorder, lifted her head and said, as though to herself, but looking at her mother: “Mama dear, it is all in the hands of God!”
Then she plunged back into her book.
Belokurov came over, wearing a peasant jacket and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, and when it grew dark we spent a long time over supper, and once more Leda spoke about her schools and about Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb. When I left the Volchaninovs that evening, I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day with the melancholy consciousness that everything in the world comes to an end, however long it may last. Zhenia saw us to the gate, and perhaps because I had spent the whole day with her from morning to night, I felt strangely lonely and bored without her, and I realized how dear to me this charming family had become, and for the first time during all that summer I was overcome with the desire to paint.
“Tell me, why do you lead such a boring, colorless life?” I asked Belokurov as we were walking home. “As for me, my life is difficult, boring, and monotonous because I am a painter, different from other people, and I have been eaten up with envy and dissatisfaction with myself and misgivings over my work ever since I was quite young. I shall always be poor, and a vagabond, but as for you—you are a normal, healthy man, a landowner, a gentleman—why then is your life so uninteresting? Why do you get so little out of life? Why, for instance, don’t you fall in love with Leda or Zhenia?”
“You forget I love another woman,” Belokurov answered.
He was referring to his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the little house. I used to see the lady every day. She would be walking in the garden, plump and massive, pompous as a fatted goose, wearing Russian costume with strings of beads, always carrying a sunshade, and the servants would call her for meals and tea. Some three years before this she had taken one of the small houses for the summer, and she had stayed on with Belukurov, and apparently she proposed to stay there forever. She was ten years older than he was, and she kept a strict watch over him, so much so that when he left the house he had to ask her permission. She often gave way to deep, masculine sobs, and then I would send word to her that unless she stopped, I would have to give up my apartment; and she always stopped.
When we came home, Belokurov sat down on my sofa, brooding and frowning, while I began pacing up and down the carpet, aware of a sweet emotion stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I felt a desire to talk about the Volchaninovs.
“Leda could only fall in love with a zemstvo worker, someone who is just as fascinated by hospitals and schools as she is,” I said. “For the sake of a young woman like that a man should be prepared to become a zemstvo worker, and even wear out a pair of iron boots, as in the fairy story. And then there’s Missy! What an adorable person she is!”
Then Belokurov began to talk at great length, with his drawling “er-er-er,” about the disease of the age—pessimism. He spoke with confidence, and by his tone it might be thought I was having an argument with him. Hundreds of miles of empty, monotonous, burned-out steppe were no drearier than this man who sat and talked and gave no sign of ever going away.
“It’s not a question of pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably. “It’s just that ninety-nine out of a hundred people don’t have any brains.”
Belukurov took this as a personal remark, and he walked out, deeply insulted.
III
“The prince is staying at Malozyomovo and sends you his greetings,” Leda said, coming in and taking off her gloves. “He had a lot of interesting things to say. He promised to raise the question of a medical center at Malozyomovo at the provincial assembly, but he says there’s not much hope.” And then, turning to me, she said: “Please excuse me, I was forgetting that this cannot be of the slightest interest to you.”
I was irritated by her remark.
“Why shouldn’t it be interesting to me?” I asked with a shrug. “You don’t care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question interests me greatly.”
“Yes?”
“It does indeed. In my opinion a medical center at Malozyomovo is quite unnecessary.”
My irritation was communicated to her. She looked at me, half closed her eyes, and said: “Then what is necessary? Paintings of landscapes?”
“No, landscapes aren’t necessary. You don’t need anything there!”
She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper, which had just come in the mail. A moment later she said quietly, evidently restraining her deep feelings: “L
ast week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a medical center near by, she would still be alive. Even landscape painters, I should think, might have convictions on this subject.”
“I have very definite convictions, I assure you,” I answered, while she took refuge behind her newspaper as though unwilling to listen to me. “In my opinion, medical centers, schools, libraries, dispensaries—all these under present conditions only serve to keep the people enslaved. They are being held down with heavy chains, and you are not breaking the chains, you are only adding new links to them. That’s what I think!”
She raised her eyes to me and smiled scornfully, but I went on, trying to catch the thread of my ideas: “What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all those Annas, Mouras, Pelageyas, bend their backs from early morning to late at night, fall ill from working beyond their strength, spend their whole lives worrying about their sick and starving children, always dreading death and disease, always having to doctor themselves, fading early and aging quickly and dying in foul-smelling filth! Their children grow up, and then it is the same story all over again, and hundreds of years pass by, and millions of people are still living worse than the beasts—in perpetual fear, for the sake of a crust of bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having time to think about their souls, never having time to remember they are made in the image and likeness of God. Cold, hunger, animal fear, the heavy burden of toil—these are like the drifts of snow, cutting them off from the pathways leading them to spiritual activity, to everything that distinguishes a man from a beast, to the only thing that makes life worth living. You come to their aid with your hospitals and schools, but you are not delivering them from their shackles. On the contrary, you are forcing them deeper and deeper into slavery, for by introducing new prejudices into their lives you increase the number of their wants, not to mention the fact that they have to pay the zemstvo for the drugs and the books, and so they have to work harder than ever!”
Forty Stories Page 27