After that Startseff was always meaning to go to the Turkins’ again, but
he was kept very busy in the hospital, and for the life of him could not
win an hour’s leisure for himself. More than a year of solitude and toil
thus went by, until one day a letter in a blue envelope was brought to
him from the city.
Madame Turkin had long been a sufferer from headaches, but since Kitty
had begun to frighten her every day by threatening to go away to the
conservatory her attacks had become more frequent. All the doctors in
the city had treated her and now, at last, it was the country doctor’s
turn. Madame Turkin wrote him a moving appeal in which she implored him
to come, and relieve her sufferings. Startseff went, and after that he
began to visit the Turkins often, very often. The fact was, he did help
Madame Turkin a little, and she hastened to tell all her guests what a
wonderful and unusual physician he was, but it was not Madame Turkin’s
headaches that took Startseff to the house.
One evening, on a holiday, when Katherine had finished her long,
wearisome exercises on the piano, they all went into the dining-room and
had sat there a long time drinking tea while Turkin told some of those
funny stories of his. Suddenly a bell rang. Some one had to go to the
front door to meet a newly come guest, and Startseff took advantage of
the momentary confusion to whisper into Katherine’s ear with intense
agitation:
“For heaven’s sake come into the garden with me, I beseech you! Don’t
torment me!”
She shrugged her shoulders as if in doubt as to what he wanted of her,
but rose, nevertheless, and went out with him.
“You play for three or four hours a day on the piano, and then go and
sit with your mother, and I never have the slightest chance to talk to
you. Give me just one quarter of an hour, I implore you!”
Autumn was approaching, and the old garden, its paths strewn with fallen
leaves, was quiet and melancholy. The early twilight was falling.
“I have not seen you for one whole week,” Startseff went on. “If you
only knew what agony that has been for me! Let us sit down. Listen to
me!”
The favourite haunt of both was a bench under an old spreading
maple-tree. On this they took their seats.
“What is it you want?” asked Katherine in a hard, practical voice.
“I have not seen you for one whole week. I have not heard you speak for
such a long time! I long madly for the sound of your voice. I hunger for
it! Speak to me now!”
He was carried away by her freshness and the candid expression of her
eyes and cheeks. He even saw in the fit of her dress something
extraordinarily touching and sweet in its simplicity and artless grace.
And at the same time, with all her innocence, she seemed to him
wonderfully clever and precocious for her years. He could talk to her of
literature or art or anything he pleased and could pour out his
complaints to her about the life he led and the people he met, even if
she did sometimes laugh for no reason when he was talking seriously, or
jump up and run into the house. Like all the young ladies in S., she
read a great deal. Most people there read very little, and, indeed, it
was said in the library that if it were not for the girls, and the young
Jews, the building might as well be closed. This reading of Katherine’s
was an endless source of pleasure to Startseff. Each time he met her he
would ask her with emotion what she had been reading, and would listen
enchanted as she told him.
“What have you read this week since we last saw one another?” he now
asked. “Tell me, I beg you.”
“I have been reading Pisemski.”
“What have you been reading of Pisemski’s?”
“‘The Thousand Souls,’” answered Kitty. “What a funny name Pisemski had:
Alexei Theofilaktitch!”
“Where are you going?” cried Startseff in terror as she suddenly jumped
up and started toward the house. “I absolutely must speak to you. I want
to tell you something! Stay with me, if only for five minutes, I implore
you!”
She stopped as if she meant to answer him, and then awkwardly slipped a
note into his hand and ran away into the house where she took her seat
at the piano once more.
“Meet me in the cemetery at Demetti’s grave to-night at eleven,”
Startseff read.
“How absurd!” he thought, when he had recovered himself a little. “Why
in the cemetery? What is the sense of that?”
The answer was clear: Kitty was fooling. Who would think seriously of
making a tryst at night in a cemetery far outside the city when it would
have been so easy to meet in the street or in the public gardens? Was it
becoming for him, a government doctor and a serious-minded person, to
sigh and receive notes and wander about a cemetery, and do silly things
that even schoolboys made fun of? How would this little adventure end?
What would his friends say if they knew of it? These were Startseff’s
reflections, as he wandered about among the tables at the club that
evening, but at half past ten he suddenly changed his mind and drove to
the cemetery.
He had his own carriage and pair now, and a coachman named Panteleimon
in a long velvet coat. The moon was shining. The night was still and
mellow, but with an autumnal softness. The dogs barked at him as he
drove through the suburbs and out through the city gates. Startseff
stopped his carriage in an alley on the edge of the town and continued
his way to the cemetery on foot.
“Every one has his freaks,” he reflected. “Kitty is freakish, too, and,
who knows, perhaps she was not joking and may come after all.”
He abandoned himself to this faint, groundless hope, and it intoxicated
him.
He crossed the fields for half a mile. The dark band of trees in the
cemetery appeared in the distance like a wood or a large garden, then a
white stone wall loomed up before him, and soon, by the light of the
moon, Startseff was able to read the inscription over the gate: “Thy
hour also approacheth—” He went in through a little side gate, and his
eye was struck first by the white crosses and monuments on either side
of a wide avenue, and by their black shadows and the shadows of the tall
poplars that bordered the walk. Around him, on all sides, he could see
the same checkering of white and black, with the sleeping trees brooding
over the white tombstones. The night did not seem so dark as it had
appeared in the fields. The fallen leaves of the maples, like tiny
hands, lay sharply defined upon the sandy walks and marble slabs, and
the inscriptions on the tombstones were clearly legible. Startseff was
struck with the reflection that he now saw for the first and perhaps the
last time a world unlike any other, a world that seemed to be the very
cradle of the soft moonlight, where there was no life, no, not a breath
of it; and yet, in every dark poplar, in every grave he felt the
presence of a great mystery promising life, calm, beautiful, and
eternal. Peace and sadness and mercy rose with the scent of autumn from
the graves, the leaves, and the faded flowers.
Profoundest silence lay over all; the stars looked down from heaven with
deep humility. Startseff’s footsteps sounded jarring and out of place.
It was only when the church-bells began to ring the hour, and he
imagined himself lying dead under the ground for ever, that some one
seemed to be watching him, and he thought suddenly that here were not
silence and peace, but stifling despair and the dull anguish of
nonexistence.
Demetti’s grave was a little chapel surmounted by an angel. An Italian
opera troupe had once come to S., and one of its members had died there.
She had been buried here, and this monument had been erected to her
memory. No one in the city any longer remembered her, but the shrine
lamp hanging in the doorway sparkled in the moon’s rays and seemed to be
alight.
No one was at the grave, and who should come there at midnight?
Startseff waited, and the moonlight kindled all the passion in him. He
ardently painted in his imagination the longed-for kiss and the embrace.
He sat down beside the monument for half an hour, and then walked up and
down the paths with his hat in his hand, waiting and thinking. How many
girls, how many women, were lying here under these stones who had been
beautiful and enchanting, and who had loved and glowed with passion in
the night under the caresses of their lovers! How cruelly does Mother
Nature jest with mankind! How bitter to acknowledge it! So thought
Startseff and longed to scream aloud that he did not want to be jested
with, that he wanted love at any price. Around him gleamed not white
blocks of marble, but beautiful human forms timidly hiding among the
shadows of the trees. He felt keen anguish.
Then, as if a curtain had been drawn across the scene, the moon vanished
behind a cloud and darkness fell about him. Startseff found the gate
with difficulty in the obscurity of the autumn night, and then wandered
about for more than an hour in search of the alley where he had left his
carriage.
“I am so tired, I am ready to drop,” he said to Panteleimon.
And, as he sank blissfully into his seat, he thought:
“Oh dear, I must not get fat!”