Yegor Semiónovitch and Tánya often quarrelled and said disagreeable
things to one another. This morning they had both been irritated, and
Tánya burst out crying and went to her room, coming down neither to
dinner nor to tea At first Yegor Semiónovitch marched about, solemn and
dignified, as if wishing to give everyone to understand that for him
justice and order were the supreme interests of life. But he was unable
to keep this up for long; his spirits fell, and he wandered about the
park and sighed, "Akh, my God!" At dinner he ate nothing, and at last,
tortured by his conscience, he knocked softly at the closed door, and
called timidly:
"Tánya! Tánya!"
Through the door came a Weak voice, tearful but determined:
"Leave me alone!... I implore you."
The misery of father and daughter reacted on the whole household,
even on the labourers in the garden. Kovrin, as usual, was immersed
in his own interesting work, but at last even he felt tired and
uncomfortable. He determined to interfere, and disperse the cloud
before evening. He knocked at Tánya's door, and was admitted.
"Come, come! What a shame!" he began jokingly; and then looked with
surprise at her tear-stained and afflicted face covered with red spots.
"Is it so serious, then? Well, well!"
"But if you knew how he tortured me!" she said, and a flood of
tears gushed out of her big eyes. "He tormented me!" she continued,
wringing her hands. "I never said a word to him.... I only said there
was no need to keep unnecessary labourers, if ... if we can get day
workmen.... You know the men have done nothing for the whole week. I
... I only said this, and he roared at me, and said a lot of things ...
most offensive ... deeply insulting. And all for nothing."
"Never mind!" said Kovrin, straightening her hair. "You have had your
scoldings and your cryings, and that is surely enough. You can't keep
up this for ever ... it is not right ... all the more since you know he
loves you infinitely."
"He has ruined my whole life," sobbed Tánya. "I never hear anything but
insults and affronts. He regards me as superfluous in his own house.
Let him! He will have cause! I shall leave here to-morrow, and study
for a position as telegraphist.... Let him!"
"Come, come. Stop crying, Tánya. It does you no good.... You are both
irritable and impulsive, and both in the wrong. Come, and I will make
peace!"
Kovrin spoke gently and persuasively, but Tánya continued to cry,
twitching her shoulders and wringing her hands as if she had been
overtaken by a real misfortune. Kovrin felt all the sorrier owing to
the smallness of the cause of her sorrow. What a trifle it took to make
this little creature unhappy for a whole day, or, as she had expressed
it, for a whole life! And as he consoled Tánya, it occurred to him
that except this girl and her father there was not one in the world
who loved him as a kinsman; and had it not been for them, he, left
fatherless and motherless in early childhood, must have lived his whole
life without feeling one sincere caress, or tasting ever that simple,
unreasoning love which we feel only for those akin to us by blood. And
he felt that his tired, strained nerves, like magnets, responded to the
nerves of this crying, shuddering girl. He felt, too, that he could
never love a healthy, rosy-cheeked woman; but pale, weak, unhappy Tánya
appealed to him.
He felt pleasure in looking at her hair and her shoulders; and he
pressed her hand, and wiped away her tears.... At last she ceased
crying. But she still continued to complain of her father, and of her
insufferable life at home, imploring Kovrin to try to realise her
position. Then by degrees she began to smile, and to sigh that God had
cursed her with such a wicked temper; and in the end laughed aloud,
called herself a fool, and ran out of the room. A little later Kovrin
went into the garden. Yegor Semiónovitch and Tánya, as if nothing had
happened, We were walking side by side up the alley, eating rye-bread
and salt, we both were very hungry.
V
Pleased with his success as peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. As
he sat on a bench and mused, he heal'd the rattle of a carnage and a
woman's laugh--visitors evidently again. Shadows fell in the garden,
the sound of a violin, the music of a woman's voice reached him almost
inaudibly; and this reminded him of the Black Monk. Whither, to what
country, to what planet, had that optical absurdity flown? Hardly had
he called to mind the legend and painted in imagination the black
apparition in the rye-field when from behind the pine trees opposite
to him, walked inaudibly--without the faintest rustling--a man of
middle height. His grey head was uncovered, he was dressed in black,
and barefooted like a beggar. On his pallid, corpse-like face stood out
sharply a number of black spots. Nodding his head politely the stranger
or beggar walked noiselessly to the bench and sat down, and Kovrin
recognised the Black Monk. For a minute they looked at one another,
Kovrin with astonishment, but the monk kindly and, as before, with a
sly expression on his face.
"But you are a mirage," said Kovrin. "Why are you here, and why do you
sit in one place? That is not in accordance with the legend."
"It is all the same," replied the monk softly, turning his face towards
Kovrin. "The legend, the mirage, I--all are products of your own
excited imagination. I am a phantom."
"That is to say you don't exist?" asked Kovrin. "Think as you like,"
replied the monk, smiling faintly. "I exist in your imagination, and as
your imagination is a part of Nature, I must exist also in Nature."
"You have a clever, a distinguished face--it seems to me as if in
reality you had lived more than a thousand years," said Kovrin. "I did
not know that my imagination was capable of creating such a phenomenon.
Why do you look at me with such rapture? Are you pleased with me?"
"Yes. For you are one of the few who can justly be named the elected
of God. You serve eternal truth. Your thoughts, your intentions, your
astonishing science, all your life bear the stamp of divinity, a
heavenly impress; they are dedicated to the rational and the beautiful,
and that is, to the Eternal."
"You say, to eternal truth. Then can eternal truth be accessible and
necessary to men if there is no eternal life?"
"There is eternal life," said the monk.
"You believe in the immortality of men."
"Of course. For you, men, there awaits a great and a beautiful future.
And the more the world has of men like you the nearer will this future
be brought. Without you, ministers to the highest principles, living
freely and consciously, humanity would be nothing; developing in the
natural order it must wait the end of its earthly history. But you,
by some thousands of years, hasten it into the kingdom of eternal
truth--and in this is your high service. You embody in yourself the
blessing of God which rested upon the people."
"And what is the object of eternal life?" asked Kovrin.
"The same as all life--enjoyment. True enjoyment is in knowledge,
and eternal life presents innumerable, inexhaustible fountains of
knowledge; it is in this sense it was said: 'In My Father's house are
many mansions....'"
"You cannot conceive what a joy it is to me to listen to you," said
Kovrin, rubbing his hands with delight.
"I am glad."
"Yet I know that when you leave me I shall be tormented by doubt as
to your reality. You are a phantom, a hallucination. But that means
that I am psychically diseased, that I am not in a normal state?"
"What if you are? That need not worry you. You are ill because you
have overstrained your powers, because you have borne your health in
sacrifice to one idea, and the time is near when you will sacrifice not
merely it but your life also. What more could you desire? It is what
all gifted and noble natures aspire to."
"But if I am psychically diseased, how can I trust myself?"
"And how do you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts
have not also seen visions? Genius, they tell you now, is akin to
insanity. Believe me, the healthy and the normal are but ordinary
men--the herd. Fears as to a nervous age, over-exhaustion and
degeneration can trouble seriously only those whose aims in life lie in
the present--that is the herd."
"The Romans had as their ideal: _mens sana in corpore sano._"
"All that the Greeks and Romans said is not true. Exaltations,
aspirations, excitements, ecstacies--all those things which distinguish
poets, prophets, martyrs to ideas from ordinary men are incompatible
with the animal life, that is, with physical health. I repeat, if you
wish to be healthy and normal go with the herd."
"How strange that you should repeat what I myself have so often
thought!" said Kovrin. "It seems as if you had watched me and listened
to my secret thoughts. But do not talk about me. What do you imply by
the words: eternal truth?"
The monk made no answer. Kovrin looked at him, but could not make out
his face. His features clouded and melted away; his head and arms
disappeared; his body faded into the bench and into the twilight, and
vanished utterly.
"The hallucination has gone," said Kovrin, laughing. "It is a pity."
He returned to the house lively and happy. What the Black Monk had said
to him flattered, not his self-love, but his soul, his whole being. To
be the elected, to minister to eternal truth, to stand in the ranks of
those who hasten by thousands of years the making mankind worthy of
the kingdom of Christ, to deliver humanity from thousands of years of
struggle, sin, and suffering, to give to one idea everything, youth,
strength, health, to die for the general welfare--what an exalted, what
a glorious ideal! And when through his memory flowed his past life, a
life pure and chaste and full of labour, when he remembered what he had
learnt and what he had taught, he concluded that in the words of the
monk there was no exaggeration. Through the park, to meet him, came
Tánya. She was wearing a different dress from that in which he had last
seen her.
"You here?" she cried. "We were looking for you, looking.... But
what has happened?" she asked in surprise, looking into his glowing,
enraptured face, and into his eyes, now full of tears. "How strange you
are, Andrusha!"
"I am satisfied, Tánya," said Kovrin, laying his hand upon her
shoulder. "I am more than satisfied; I am happy! Tánya, dear Tánya, you
are inexpressibly dear to me. Tánya, I am so glad!"
He kissed both her hands warmly, and continued: "I have just lived
through the brightest, most wonderful, most unearthly moments.... But
I cannot tell you all, for you would call me mad, or refuse to believe
me.... Let me speak of you! Tánya, I love you, and have long loved
you. To have you near me, to meet you ten times a day, has become a
necessity for me. I do not know how I shall live without you when I go
home."
"No!" laughed Tánya. "You will forget us all in two days. We are little
people, and you are a great man."
"Let us talk seriously," said he. "I will take you with me, Tánya! Yes?
You will come? You will be mine?"
Tánya cried "What?" and tried to laugh again. But the laugh did not
come, and, instead, red spots stood out on her cheeks. She breathed
quickly, and walked on rapidly into the park.
"I did not think ... I never thought of this ... never thought," she
said, pressing her hands together as if in despair.
But Kovrin hastened after her, and, with the same glowing, enraptured
face, continued to speak.
"I wish for a love which will take possession of me altogether, and
this love only you, Tánya, can give me. I am happy! How happy!"
She was overcome, bent, withered up, and seemed suddenly to have aged
ten years. But Kovrin found her beautiful, and loudly expressed his
ecstacy: "How lovely she is!"