words dangerous to so young a girl.
Genya looked sadly at her sister and mother and went out.
"People generally talk like that," said Lyda, "when they want to excuse
their indifference. It is easier to deny hospitals and schools than to
come and teach."
"True, Lyda, true," her mother agreed.
"You say you will not work," Lyda went on. "Apparently you set a high
price on your work, but do stop arguing. We shall never agree, since I
value the most imperfect library or pharmacy, of which you spoke so
scornfully just now, more than all the landscapes in the world." And at
once she turned to her mother and began to talk in quite a different
tone: "The Prince has got very thin, and is much changed since the last
time he was here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy."
She talked to her mother about the Prince to avoid talking to me. Her
face was burning, and, in order to conceal her agitation, she bent over
the table as if she were short-sighted and made a show of reading the
newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went
home.
IV
All was quiet outside: the village on the other side of the pond was
already asleep, not a single light was to be seen, and on the pond there
was only the faint reflection of the stars. By the gate with the stone
lions stood Genya, waiting to accompany me.
"The village is asleep," I said, trying to see her face in the darkness,
and I could see her dark sad eyes fixed on me. "The innkeeper and the
horse-stealers are sleeping quietly, and decent people like ourselves
quarrel and irritate each other."
It was a melancholy August night--melancholy because it already smelled
of the autumn: the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted
the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side. Stars fell
frequently, Genya walked beside me on the road and tried not to look at
the sky, to avoid seeing the falling stars, which somehow frightened
her.
"I believe you are right," she said, trembling in the evening chill. "If
people could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon
burst everything."
"Certainly. We are superior beings, and if we really knew all the power
of the human genius and lived only for higher purposes then we should
become like gods. But this will never be. Mankind will degenerate and of
their genius not a trace will be left."
When the gate was out of sight Genya stopped and hurriedly shook my
hand.
"Good night," she said, trembling; her shoulders were covered only with
a thin blouse and she was shivering with cold. "Come to-morrow."
I was filled with a sudden dread of being left alone with my inevitable
dissatisfaction with myself and people, and I, too, tried not to see the
falling stars.
"Stay with me a little longer," I said. "Please."
I loved Genya, and she must have loved me, because she used to meet me
and walk with me, and because she looked at me with tender admiration.
How thrillingly beautiful her pale face was, her thin nose, her arms,
her slenderness, her idleness, her constant reading. And her mind? I
suspected her of having an unusual intellect: I was fascinated by the
breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the
strong, handsome Lyda, who did not love me. Genya liked me as a painter,
I had conquered her heart by my talent, and I longed passionately to
paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen, who would
one day possess with me the trees, the fields, the river, the dawn, all
Nature, wonderful and fascinating, with whom, as with them, I have felt
helpless and useless.
"Stay with me a moment longer," I called. "I implore you."
I took off my overcoat and covered her childish shoulders. Fearing that
she would look queer and ugly in a man's coat, she began to laugh and
threw it off, and as she did so, I embraced her and began to cover her
face, her shoulders, her arms with kisses.
"Till to-morrow," she whispered timidly as though she was afraid to
break the stillness of the night. She embraced me: "We have no secrets
from one another. I must tell mamma and my sister.... Is it so terrible?
Mamma will be pleased. Mamma loves you, but Lyda!"
She ran to the gates.
"Good-bye," she called out.
For a couple of minutes I stood and heard her running. I had no desire
to go home, there was nothing there to go for. I stood for a while lost
in thought, and then quietly dragged myself back, to have one more look
at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple, old house, which
seemed to look at me with the windows of the mezzanine for eyes, and to
understand everything. I walked past the terrace, sat down on a bench by
the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm-tree, and looked
at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyuss had her
room, shone a bright light, and then a faint green glow. The lamp had
been covered with a shade. Shadows began to move.... I was filled with
tenderness and a calm satisfaction, to think that I could let myself be
carried away and fall in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the
thought that only a few yards away in one of the rooms of the house lay
Lyda who did not love me, and perhaps hated me. I sat and waited to see
if Genya would come out. I listened attentively and it seemed to me they
were sitting in the mezzanine.
An hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer
visible. The moon hung high above the house and lit the sleeping garden
and the avenues: I could distinctly see the dahlias and roses in the
flower-bed in front of the house, and all seemed to be of one colour. It
was very cold. I left the garden, picked up my overcoat in the road, and
walked slowly home.
Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs', the glass door
was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from
behind the flower-bed or from one of the avenues, or to hear her voice
come from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the
dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I
went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were
several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda's
voice:
"To the crow somewhere ... God ..."--she spoke slowly and distinctly, and
was probably dictating--" ... God sent a piece of cheese.... To the crow
... somewhere.... Who is there?" she called out suddenly as she heard my
footsteps.
"It is I."
"Oh! excuse me. I can't come out just now. I am teaching Masha."
"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"
"No. She and my sister left to-day for my Aunt's in Penga, and in the
winter they are probably going abroad." She added after a short silence:
"To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?"
I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and
looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:
"A piece of cheese.... To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of
cheese."
And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only
reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then
along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: "I
have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,"
I read. "I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you
happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried."
Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence....Over the fields
where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled
horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn
was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was
ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became
tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that
evening for Petersburg.
I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met
Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a poddiovka, wearing an
embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: "Quite
well, thanks be to God." He began to talk. He had sold his estate and
bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyabov Ivanovna. He told me a
little about the Volchaninovs. Lyda, he said, still lived at Sholkovka
and taught the children in the school; little by little she succeeded in
gathering round herself a circle of sympathetic people, who formed a
strong party, and at the last Zemstvo election they drove out Balaguin,
who up till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of Genya
Bielokurov said that she did not live at home and he did not know where
she was.
I have already begun to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and
only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly--without rhyme
or reason--I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my
own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in
love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I
am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that
I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet....
Missyuss, where are you? TYPHUS
IN a smoking-compartment of the mail-train from Petrograd to Moscow sat
a young lieutenant, Klimov by name. Opposite him sat an elderly man with
a clean-shaven, shipmaster's face, to all appearances a well-to-do Finn
or Swede, who all through the journey smoked a pipe and talked round and
round the same subject.
"Ha! you are an officer! My brother is also an officer, but he is a
sailor. He is a sailor and is stationed at Kronstadt. Why are you going
to Moscow?"
"I am stationed there."
"Ha! Are you married?"
"No. I live with my aunt and sister."
"My brother is also an officer, but he is married and has a wife and
three children. Ha!"
The Finn looked surprised at something, smiled broadly and fatuously as
he exclaimed, "Ha," and every now and then blew through the stem of his
pipe. Klimov, who was feeling rather unwell, and not at all inclined to
answer questions, hated him with all his heart. He thought how good it
would be to snatch his gurgling pipe out of his hands and throw it under
the seat and to order the Finn himself into another car.
"They are awful people, these Finns and ... Greeks," he thought.
"Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the
earth. What is the good of them?"
And the thought of Finns and Greeks filled him with a kind of nausea. He
tried to compare them with the French and the Italians, but the idea of
those races somehow roused in him the notion of organ-grinders, naked
women, and the foreign oleographs which hung over the chest of drawers
in his aunt's house.
The young officer felt generally out of sorts. There seemed to be no
room for his arms and legs, though he had the whole seat to himself; his
mouth was dry and sticky, his head was heavy and his clouded thoughts
seemed to wander at random, not only in his head, but also outside it
among the seats and the people looming in the darkness. Through the
turmoil in his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of voices,
the rattle of the wheels, the slamming of doors. Bells, whistles,
conductors, the tramp of the people on the platforms came oftener than
usual. The time slipped by quickly, imperceptibly, and it seemed that
the train stopped every minute at a station as now and then there would
come up the sound of metallic voices:
"Is the post ready?"
"Ready."
It seemed to him that the stove-neater came in too often to look at the
thermometer, and that trains never stopped passing and his own train was
always roaring over bridges. The noise, the whistle, the Finn, the
tobacco smoke--all mixed with the ominous shifting of misty shapes,
weighed on Klimov like an intolerable nightmare. In terrible anguish he
lifted up his aching head, looked at the lamp whose light was encircled
with shadows and misty spots; he wanted to ask for water, but his dry
tongue would hardly move, and he had hardly strength enough to answer
the Finn's questions. He tried to lie down more comfortably and sleep,
but he could not succeed; the Finn fell asleep several times, woke up
and lighted his pipe, talked to him with his "Ha!" and went to sleep
again; and the lieutenant could still not find room for his legs on the
seat, and all the while the ominous figures shifted before his eyes.
At Spirov he got out to have a drink of water. He saw some people
sitting at a table eating hurriedly.
"How can they eat?" he thought, trying to avoid the smell of roast meat
in the air and seeing the chewing mouths, for both seemed to him utterly
disgusting and made him feel sick.
A handsome lady was talking to a military man in a red cap, and she
showed magnificent white teeth when she smiled; her smile, her teeth,
the lady herself produced in Klimov the same impression of disgust as
the ham and the fried cutlets. He could not understand how the military
man in the red cap could bear to sit near her and look at her healthy
smiling face.
After he had drunk some water, he went back to his place. The Finn sat
and smoked. His pipe gurgled and sucked like a galoche full of holes in
dirty weather.
"Ha!" he said with some surprise. "What station is this?"
"I don't know," said Klimov, lying down and shutting his mouth to keep
out the acrid tobacco smoke.
"When do we get to Tver."
"I don't know. I am sorry, I ... I can't talk. I am not well. I have a
cold."
The Finn knocked out his pipe against the window-frame and began to talk
of his brother, the sailor. Klimov paid no more attention to him and
thought in agony of his soft, comfortable bed, of the bottle of cold
water, of his sister Katy, who knew so well how to tuck him up and
cosset him. He even smiled when there flashed across his mind his
soldier-servant Pavel, taking off his heavy, close-fitting boots and
putting water on the table. It seemed to him that he would only have to
lie on his bed and drink some water and his nightmare would give way to
a sound, healthy sleep.
"Is the post ready?" came a dull voice from a distance.
"Ready," answered a loud, bass voice almost by the very window.
It was the second or third station from Spirov.
Time passed quickly, seemed to gallop along, and there would be no end
to the bells, whistles, and stops. In despair Klimov pressed his face
into the corner of the cushion, held his head in his hands, and again
began to think of his sister Katy and his orderly Pavel; but his sister
and his orderly got mixed up with the looming figures and whirled about
and disappeared. His breath, thrown back from the cushion, burned his
face, and his legs ached and a draught from the window poured into his
back, but, painful though it was, he refused to change his position....
A heavy, drugging torpor crept over him and chained his limbs.
When at length he raised his head, the car was quite light. The
passengers were putting on their overcoats and moving about. The train
stopped. Porters in white aprons and number-plates bustled about the
passengers and seized their boxes. Klimov put on his greatcoat
mechanically and left the train, and he felt as though it were not
himself walking, but some one else, a stranger, and he felt that he was
accompanied by the heat of the train, his thirst, and the ominous,
lowering figures which all night long had prevented his sleeping.
Mechanically he got his luggage and took a cab. The cabman charged him
one rouble and twenty-five copecks for driving him to Povarska Street,
but he did not haggle and submissively took his seat in the sledge. He
could still grasp the difference in numbers, but money had no value to
him whatever.
At home Klimov was met by his aunt and his sister Katy, a girl of
eighteen. Katy had a copy-book and a pencil in her hands as she greeted
him, and he remembered that she was preparing for a teacher's
examination. He took no notice of their greetings and questions, but
gasped from the heat, and walked aimlessly through the rooms until he
reached his own, and then he fell prone on the bed. The Finn, the red
cap, the lady with the white teeth, the smell of roast meat, the
shifting spot in the lamp, filled his mind and he lost consciousness and
did not hear the frightened voices near him.
When he came to himself he found himself in bed, undressed, and noticed
the water-bottle and Pavel, but it did not make him any more comfortable
nor easy. His legs and arms, as before, felt cramped, his tongue clove
to his palate, and he could hear the chuckle of the Finn's pipe.... By
the bed, growing out of Pavel's broad back, a stout, black-bearded
doctor was bustling.
"All right, all right, my lad," he murmured. "Excellent, excellent....
Jist so, jist so...."
The doctor called Klimov "my lad." Instead of "just so," he said "jist
saow," and instead of "yes," "yies."
"Yies, yies, yies," he said. "Jist saow, jist saow.... Don't be
downhearted!"
The doctor's quick, careless way of speaking, his well-fed face, and the
condescending tone in which he said "my lad" exasperated Klimov.
"Why do you call me 'my lad'?" he moaned. "Why this familiarity, damn it
all?"
And he was frightened by the sound of his own voice. It was so dry,
weak, and hollow that he could hardly recognise it.
"Excellent, excellent," murmured the doctor, not at all offended. "Yies,
yies. You mustn't be cross."
And at home the time galloped away as alarmingly quickly as in the
train.... The light of day in his bedroom was every now and then changed
to the dim light of evening.... The doctor never seemed to leave the
bedside, and his "Yies, yies, yies," could be heard at every moment.
Through the room stretched an endless row of faces; Pavel, the Finn,
Captain Taroshevich, Sergeant Maximenko, the red cap, the lady with the
white teeth, the doctor. All of them talked, waved their hands, smoked,
ate. Once in broad daylight Klimov saw his regimental priest, Father
Alexander, in his stole and with the host in his hands, standing by the
bedside and muttering something with such a serious expression as Klimov
had never seen him wear before. The lieutenant remembered that Father
Alexander used to call all the Catholic officers Poles, and wishing to
make the priest laugh, he exclaimed:
"Father Taroshevich, the Poles have fled to the woods."
But Father Alexander, usually a gay, light-hearted man, did not laugh
and looked even more serious, and made the sign of the cross over
Klimov. At night, one after the other, there would come slowly creeping
in and out two shadows. They were his aunt and his sister. The shadow of
his sister would kneel down and pray; she would bow to the ikon, and her
grey shadow on the wall would bow, too, so that two shadows prayed to
God. And all the time there was a smell of roast meat and of the Finn's
pipe, but once Klimov could detect a distinct smell of incense. He
nearly vomited and cried:
"Incense! Take it away."
There was no reply. He could only hear priests chanting in an undertone
and some one running on the stairs.
When Klimov recovered from his delirium there was not a soul in the
bedroom. The morning sun flared through the window and the drawn
curtains, and a trembling beam, thin and keen as a sword, played on the
water-bottle. He could hear the rattle of wheels--that meant there was no
more snow in the streets. The lieutenant looked at the sunbeam, at the
familiar furniture and the door, and his first inclination was to laugh.
His chest and stomach trembled with a sweet, happy, tickling laughter.
From head to foot his whole body was filled with a feeling of infinite
happiness, like that which the first man must have felt when he stood
erect and beheld the world for the first time. Klimov had a passionate
longing for people, movement, talk. His body lay motionless; he could
only move his hands, but he hardly noticed it, for his whole attention
was fixed on little things. He was delighted with his breathing and with
his laughter; he was delighted with the existence of the water-bottle,
the ceiling, the sunbeam, the ribbon on the curtain. God's world, even
in such a narrow corner as his bedroom, seemed to him beautiful, varied,
great. When the doctor appeared the lieutenant thought how nice his
medicine was, how nice and sympathetic the doctor was, how nice and
interesting people were, on the whole.
"Yies, yies, yies," said the doctor. "Excellent, excellent. Now we are
well again. Jist saow. Jist saow."
The lieutenant listened and laughed gleefully. He remembered the Finn,
the lady with the white teeth, the train, and he wanted to eat and
smoke.
"Doctor," he said, "tell them to bring me a slice of rye bread and salt,
and some sardines...."
The doctor refused. Pavel did not obey his order and refused to go for
bread. The lieutenant could not bear it and began to cry like a thwarted
child.
"Ba-by," the doctor laughed. "Mamma! Hush-aby!"
Klimov also began to laugh, and when the doctor had gone, he fell sound
asleep. He woke up with the same feeling of joy and happiness. His aunt
was sitting by his bed.
"Oh, aunty!" He was very happy. "What has been the matter with me?"
"Typhus."
"I say! And now I am well, quite well! Where is Katy?"
"She is not at home. She has probably gone to see some one after her
examination."
The old woman bent over her stocking as she said this; her lips began to
tremble; she turned her face away and suddenly began to sob. In her
grief, she forgot the doctor's orders and cried:
"Oh! Katy! Katy! Our angel is gone from us! She is gone!"
She dropped her stocking and stooped down for it, and her cap fell off
her head. Klimov stared at her grey hair, could not understand, was
alarmed for Katy, and asked:
"But where is she, aunty?"
The old woman, who had already forgotten Klimov and remembered only her
grief, said:
"She caught typhus from you and ... and died. She was buried the day
before yesterday."
This sudden appalling piece of news came home to Klimov's mind, but
dreadful and shocking though it was it could not subdue the animal joy
which thrilled through the convalescent lieutenant. He cried, laughed,
and soon began to complain that he was given nothing to eat.
Only a week later, when, supported by Pavel, he walked in a dressing-
gown to the window, and saw the grey spring sky and heard the horrible
rattle of some old rails being carried by on a lorry, then his heart
ached with sorrow and he began to weep and pressed his forehead against
the window-frame.
"How unhappy I am!" he murmured. "My God, how unhappy I am!"
And joy gave way to his habitual weariness and a sense of his
irreparable loss. GOOSEBERRIES
FROM early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was
still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds
hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes. Ivan
Ivanich, the veterinary surgeon, and Bourkin, the schoolmaster, were
tired of walking and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mirousky, to the right
stretched away to disappear behind the village a line of hills, and they
knew that it was the bank of the river; meadows, green willows,
farmhouses; and from one of the hills there could be seen a field as
endless, telegraph-posts, and the train, looking from a distance like a
crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the town. In the calm
weather when all Nature seemed gentle and melancholy, Ivan Ivanich and
Bourkin were filled with love for the fields and thought how grand and
beautiful the country was.
"Last time, when we stopped in Prokofyi's shed," said Bourkin, "you were
going to tell me a story."
"Yes. I wanted to tell you about my brother."
Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath and lighted his pipe before beginning
his story, but just then the rain began to fall. And in about five
minutes it came pelting down and showed no signs of stopping. Ivan
Ivanich stopped and hesitated; the dogs, wet through, stood with their
tails between their legs and looked at them mournfully.
"We ought to take shelter," said Bourkin. "Let us go to Aliokhin. It is
close by."
"Very well."
They took a short cut over a stubble-field and then bore to the right,
until they came to the road. Soon there appeared poplars, a garden, the
red roofs of granaries; the river began to glimmer and they came to a
wide road with a mill and a white bathing-shed. It was Sophino, where
Aliokhin lived.