When she had gone Piotr Petrovich began to tell me about her. The girl,
he said, was of a good family and her name was Lydia Volchaninov, and
the estate, on which she lived with her mother and sister, was called,
like the village on the other side of the pond, Sholkovka. Her father
had once occupied an eminent position in Moscow and died a privy
councillor. Notwithstanding their large means, the Volchaninovs always
lived in the village, summer and winter, and Lydia was a teacher in the
Zemstvo School at Sholkovka and earned twenty-five roubles a month. She
only spent what she earned on herself and was proud of her independence.
"They are an interesting family," said Bielokurov. "We ought to go and
see them. They will be very glad to see you."
One afternoon, during a holiday, we remembered the Volchaninovs and went
over to Sholkovka. They were all at home. The mother, Ekaterina
Pavlovna, had obviously once been handsome, but now she was stouter
than her age warranted, suffered from asthma, was melancholy and
absent-minded as she tried to entertain me with talk about painting.
When she heard from her daughter that I might perhaps come over to
Sholkovka, she hurriedly called to mind a few of my landscapes which she
had seen in exhibitions in Moscow, and now she asked what I had tried to
express in them. Lydia, or as she was called at home, Lyda, talked more
to Bielokurov than to me. Seriously and without a smile, she asked him
why he did not work for the Zemstvo and why up till now he had never
been to a Zemstvo meeting.
"It is not right of you, Piotr Petrovich," she said reproachfully. "It
is not right. It is a shame."
"True, Lyda, true," said her mother. "It is not right."
"All our district is in Balaguin's hands," Lyda went on, turning to me.
"He is the chairman of the council and all the jobs in the district are
given to his nephews and brothers-in-law, and he does exactly as he
likes. We ought to fight him. The young people ought to form a strong
party; but you see what our young men are like. It is a shame, Piotr
Petrovich."
The younger sister, Genya, was silent during the conversation about the
Zemstvo. She did not take part in serious conversations, for by the
family she was not considered grown-up, and they gave her her baby-name,
Missyuss, because as a child she used to call her English governess
that. All the time she examined me curiously and when I looked at the
photograph-album she explained: "This is my uncle.... That is my
godfather," and fingered the portraits, and at the same time touched me
with her shoulder in a childlike way, and I could see her small,
undeveloped bosom, her thin shoulders, her long, slim waist tightly
drawn in by a belt.
We played croquet and lawn-tennis, walked in the garden, had tea, and
then a large supper. After the huge pillared hall, I felt out of tune in
the small cosy house, where there were no oleographs on the walls and
the servants were treated considerately, and everything seemed to me
young and pure, through the presence of Lyda and Missyuss, and
everything was decent and orderly. At supper Lyda again talked to
Bielokurov about the Zemstvo, about Balaguin, about school libraries.
She was a lively, sincere, serious girl, and it was interesting to
listen to her, though she spoke at length and in a loud voice--perhaps
because she was used to holding forth at school. On the other hand,
Piotr Petrovich, who from his university days had retained the habit of
reducing any conversation to a discussion, spoke tediously, slowly, and
deliberately, with an obvious desire to be taken for a clever and
progressive man. He gesticulated and upset the sauce with his sleeve and
it made a large pool on the table-cloth, though nobody but myself seemed
to notice it.
When we returned home the night was dark and still.
"I call it good breeding," said Bielokurov, with a sigh, "not so much
not to upset the sauce on the table, as not to notice it when some one
else has done it. Yes. An admirable intellectual family. I'm rather out
of touch with nice people. Ah! terribly. And all through business,
business, business!"
He went on to say what hard work being a good farmer meant. And I
thought: What a stupid, lazy lout! When we talked seriously he would
drag it out with his awful drawl--er, er, er--and he works just as he
talks--slowly, always behindhand, never up to time; and as for his being
businesslike, I don't believe it, for he often keeps letters given him
to post for weeks in his pocket.
"The worst of it is," he murmured as he walked along by my side, "the
worst of it is that you go working away and never get any sympathy from
anybody."