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."
II
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.
III
"The Prince is on a visit to Malozyomov and sends you his regards," said
Lyda to her mother, as she came in and took off her gloves. "He told me
many interesting things. He promised to bring forward in the Zemstvo
Council the question of a medical station at Malozyomov, but he says
there is little hope." And turning to me, she said: "Forgive me, I keep
forgetting that you are not interested."
I felt irritated.
"Why not?" I asked and shrugged my shoulders. "You don't care about my
opinion, but I assure you, the question greatly interests me."
"Yes?"
"In my opinion there is absolutely no need for a medical station at
Malozyomov."
My irritation affected her: she gave a glance at me, half closed her
eyes and said:
"What is wanted then? Landscapes?"
"Not landscapes either. Nothing is wanted there."
She finished taking off her gloves and took up a newspaper which had
just come by post; a moment later, she said quietly, apparently
controlling herself:
"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if a medical man had been
available she would have lived. However, I suppose landscape-painters
are entitled to their opinions."
"I have a very definite opinion, I assure you," said I, and she took
refuge behind the newspaper, as though she did not wish to listen. "In
my opinion medical stations, schools, libraries, pharmacies, under
existing conditions, only lead to slavery. The masses are caught in a
vast chain: you do not cut it but only add new links to it. That is my
opinion."
She looked at me and smiled mockingly, and I went on, striving to catch
the thread of my ideas.
"It does not matter that Anna should die in childbirth, but it does
matter that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelagueyas, from dawn to sunset
should be grinding away, ill from overwork, all their lives worried
about their starving sickly children; all their lives they are afraid of
death and disease, and have to be looking after themselves; they fade in
youth, grow old very early, and die in filth and dirt; their children as
they grow up go the same way and hundreds of years slip by and millions
of people live worse than animals--in constant dread of never having a
crust to eat; but the horror of their position is that they have no time
to think of their souls, no time to remember that they are made in the
likeness of God; hunger, cold, animal fear, incessant work, like drifts
of snow block all the ways to spiritual activity, to the very thing that
distinguishes man from the animals, and is the only thing indeed that
makes life worth living. You come to their assistance with hospitals and
schools, but you do not free them from their fetters; on the contrary,
you enslave them even more, since by introducing new prejudices into
their lives, you increase the number of their demands, not to mention
the fact that they have to pay the Zemstvo for their drugs and
pamphlets, and therefore, have to work harder than ever."
"I will not argue with you," said Lyda. "I have heard all that." She put
down her paper. "I will only tell you one thing, it is no good sitting
with folded hands. It is true, we do not save mankind, and perhaps we do
make mistakes, but we do what we can and we are right. The highest and
most sacred truth for an educated being--is to help his neighbours, and
we do what we can to help. You do not like it, but it is impossible to
please everybody."
"True, Lyda, true," said her mother.
In Lyda's presence her courage always failed her, and as she talked she
would look timidly at her, for she was afraid of saying something
foolish or out of place: and she never contradicted, but would always
agree: "True, Lyda, true."
"Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets
and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality,
just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden,"
I said. "You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these
people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work."
"Ah! My God, but we must do something!" said Lyda exasperatedly, and I
could tell by her voice that she thought my opinions negligible and
despised me.
"It is necessary," I said, "to free people from hard physical work. It
is necessary to relieve them of their yoke, to give them breathing
space, to save them from spending their whole lives in the kitchen or
the byre, in the fields; they should have time to take thought of their
souls, of God and to develop their spiritual capacities. Every human
being's salvation lies in spiritual activity--in his continual search for
truth and the meaning of life. Give them some relief from rough, animal
labour, let them feel free, then you will see how ridiculous at bottom
your pamphlets and pharmacies are. Once a human being is aware of his
vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art, and
not with trifles like that."
"Free them from work?" Lyda gave a smile. "Is that possible?"
"Yes.... Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and
country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being
spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of
us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us,
rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be
free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should
invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands
to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their
health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did
not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco
factories and distilleries--what a lot of free time we should have! We
should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all
work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work
together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of
it--truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual,
poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."
"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and
deny education."
"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on
the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of
understanding--the kind of education we have had from the time of Riurik:
and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not education is
wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not
schools are wanted but universities."
"You deny medicine too."
"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as
natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if
you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause--physical labour, and
there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which cures,"
I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are directed
not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the
general--they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the
soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, like
pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber life.
We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly educated
people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets.
All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing
needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to
them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the
body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still
remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends
to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in
vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and
the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his
position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of
the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state
of things. And I don't want to work and will not.... Nothing is wanted,
so let the world go to hell."