I began to frequent the Volchaninovs' house. Usually I sat on the bottom
step of the veranda. I was filled with dissatisfaction, vague discontent
with my life, which had passed so quickly and uninterestingly, and I
thought all the while how good it would be to tear out of my breast my
heart which had grown so weary. There would be talk going on on the
terrace, the rustling of dresses, the fluttering of the pages of a
book. I soon got used to Lyda receiving the sick all day long, and
distributing books, and I used often to go with her to the village,
bareheaded, under an umbrella. And in the evening she would hold forth
about the Zemstvo and schools. She was very handsome, subtle, correct,
and her lips were thin and sensitive, and whenever a serious
conversation started she would say to me drily:
"This won't interest you."
I was not sympathetic to her. She did not like me because I was a
landscape-painter, and in my pictures did not paint the suffering of the
masses, and I seemed to her indifferent to what she believed in. I
remember once driving along the shore of the Baikal and I met a Bouryat
girl, in shirt and trousers of Chinese cotton, on horseback: I asked her
if she would sell me her pipe and, while we were talking, she looked
with scorn at my European face and hat, and in a moment she got bored
with talking to me, whooped and galloped away. And in exactly the same
way Lyda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she never showed her
dislike of me, but I felt it, and, as I sat on the bottom step of the
terrace, I had a certain irritation and said that treating the peasants
without being a doctor meant deceiving them, and that it is easy to be
a benefactor when one owns four thousand acres.
Her sister, Missyuss, had no such cares and spent her time in complete
idleness, like myself. As soon as she got up in the morning she would
take a book and read it on the terrace, sitting far back in a lounge
chair so that her feet hardly touched the ground, or she would hide
herself with her book in the lime-walk, or she would go through the gate
into the field. She would read all day long, eagerly poring over the
book, and only through her looking fatigued, dizzy, and pale sometimes,
was it possible to guess how much her reading exhausted her. When she
saw me come she would blush a little and leave her book, and, looking
into my face with her big eyes, she would tell me of things that had
happened, how the chimney in the servants' room had caught fire, or how
the labourer had caught a large fish in the pond. On week-days she
usually wore a bright-coloured blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We used to
go out together and pluck cherries for jam, in the boat, and when she
jumped to reach a cherry, or pulled the oars, her thin, round arms would
shine through her wide sleeves. Or I would make a sketch and she would
stand and watch me breathlessly.
One Sunday, at the end of June, I went over to the Volchaninovs in the
morning about nine o'clock. I walked through the park, avoiding the
house, looking for mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer,
and marking them so as to pick them later with Genya. A warm wind was
blowing. I met Genya and her mother, both in bright Sunday dresses,
going home from church, and Genya was holding her hat against the wind.
They told me they were going to have tea on the terrace.
As a man without a care in the world, seeking somehow to justify his
constant idleness, I have always found such festive mornings in a
country house universally attractive. When the green garden, still moist
with dew, shines in the sun and seems happy, and when the terrace smells
of mignonette and oleander, and the young people have just returned from
church and drink tea in the garden, and when they are all so gaily
dressed and so merry, and when you know that all these healthy,
satisfied, beautiful people will do nothing all day long, then you long
for all life to be like that. So I thought then as I walked through the
garden, quite prepared to drift like that without occupation or purpose,
all through the day, all through the summer.
Genya carried a basket and she looked as though she knew that she would
find me there. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked
me a question she stood in front of me to see my face.
"Yesterday," she said, "a miracle happened in our village. Pelagueya,
the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines
were any good, but yesterday an old woman muttered over her and she got
better."
"That's nothing," I said. "One should not go to sick people and old
women for miracles. Is not health a miracle? And life itself? A miracle
is something incomprehensible."
"And you are not afraid of the incomprehensible?"
"No. I like to face things I do not understand and I do not submit to
them. I am superior to them. Man must think himself higher than lions,
tigers, stars, higher than anything in nature, even higher than that
which seems incomprehensible and miraculous. Otherwise he is not a man,
but a mouse which is afraid of everything."
Genya thought that I, as an artist, knew a great deal and could guess
what I did not know. She wanted me to lead her into the region of the
eternal and the beautiful, into the highest world, with which, as she
thought, I was perfectly familiar, and she talked to me of God, of
eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who did not admit that I and my
imagination would perish for ever, would reply: "Yes. Men are immortal.
Yes, eternal life awaits us." And she would listen and believe me and
never asked for proof.
As we approached the house she suddenly stopped and said:
"Our Lyda is a remarkable person, isn't she? I love her dearly and would
gladly sacrifice my life for her at any time. But tell me"--Genya
touched my sleeve with her finger--"but tell me, why do you argue with
her all the time? Why are you so irritated?"
"Because she is not right."
Genya shook her head and tears came to her eyes.
"How incomprehensible!" she muttered.
At that moment Lyda came out, and she stood by the balcony with a
riding-whip in her hand, and looked very fine and pretty in the
sunlight as she gave some orders to a farm-hand. Bustling about and
talking loudly, she tended two or three of her patients, and then with a
businesslike, preoccupied look she walked through the house, opening one
cupboard after another, and at last went off to the attic; it took some
time to find her for dinner and she did not come until we had finished
the soup. Somehow I remember all these, little details and love to dwell
on them, and I remember the whole of that day vividly, though nothing
particular happened. After dinner Genya read, lying in her lounge chair,
and I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The sky was
overcast and a thin fine rain began to fall. It was hot, the wind had
dropped, and it seemed the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came
out on to the terrace with a fan, looking very sleepy.
"O, mamma," said Genya, kissing her hand. "It is 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 look at the trees and call: "Hello!" "Genya!"
or "Mamma, dear, where are you?" They always prayed together and shared
the same faith, and they understood each other very well, even when they
were silent. And they treated other people in exactly the same way.
Ekaterina Pavlovna also soon got used to me and became attached to me,
and when I did not turn up for a few days she would send to inquire if I
was well. And she too used to look admiringly at my sketches, and with
the same frank loquacity she would tell me things that happened, and she
would confide her domestic secrets to me.
She revered her elder daughter. Lyda never came to her for caresses, and
only talked about serious things: she went her own way and to her mother
and sister she was as sacred and enigmatic as the admiral, sitting in
his cabin, to his sailors.
"Our Lyda is a remarkable person," her mother would often say; "isn't
she?"
And, now, as the soft rain fell, we spoke of Lyda:
"She is a remarkable woman," said her mother, and added in a low voice
like a conspirator's as she looked round, "such as she have to be looked
for with a lamp in broad daylight, though you know, I am beginning to be
anxious. The school, pharmacies, books--all very well, but why go to
such extremes? She is twenty-three and it is time for her to think
seriously about herself. If she goes on with her books and her
pharmacies she won't know how life has passed.... She ought to marry."
Genya, pale with reading, and with her hair ruffled, looked up and said,
as if to herself, as she glanced at her mother:
"Mamma, dear, everything depends on the will of God."
And once more she plunged into her book.
Bielokurov came over in a _poddiovka_, wearing an embroidered shirt. We
played croquet and lawn-tennis, and when it grew dark we had a long
supper, and Lyda once more spoke of her schools and Balaguin, who had
got the whole district into his own hands. As I left the Volchaninovs
that night I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day, with a
sad consciousness that everything ends, however long it may be. Genya
took me to the gate, and perhaps, because she had spent the whole day
with me from the beginning to end, I felt somehow lonely without her,
and the whole kindly family was dear to me: and for the first time
during the whole of that summer I had a desire to work.
"Tell me why you lead such a monotonous life," I asked Bielokurov, as we
went home. "My life is tedious, dull, monotonous, because I am a
painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy,
discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but
you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman--why do you live
so tamely and take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven't you
fallen in love with Lyda or Genya?"
"You forget that I love another woman," answered Bielokurov.
He meant his mistress, Lyabor Ivanovna, who lived with him in the
orchard house. I used to see the lady every day, very stout, podgy,
pompous, like a fatted goose, walking in the garden in a Russian
head-dress, always with a sunshade, and the servants used to call her to
meals or tea. Three years ago she rented a part of his house for the
summer, and stayed on to live with Bielokurov, apparently for ever. She
was ten years older than he and managed him very strictly, so that he
had to ask her permission to go out. She would often sob and make
horrible noises like a man with a cold, and then I used to send and tell
her that I'm if she did not stop I would go away. Then she would stop.
When we reached home, Bielokurov sat down on the divan and frowned and
brooded, and I began to pace up and down the hall, feeling a sweet
stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I wanted to talk
about the Volchaninovs.
"Lyda could only fall in love with a Zemstvo worker like herself, some
one who is run off his legs with hospitals and schools," I said. "For
the sake of a girl like that a man might not only become a Zemstvo
worker, but might even become worn out, like the tale of the iron boots.
And Missyuss? How charming Missyuss is!"
Bielokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of
the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and
argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened
steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that,
sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.
"The point is neither pessimism nor optimism," I said irritably, "but
that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no sense."
Bielokurov took this to mean himself, was offended, and went away.