have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health
of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that,"
the doctor went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least want to reproach you
or make a scene. We've had scenes and reproaches enough; it's time to
make an end of them. . . . This is what I want to say to you: you are
free, and can live as you like."
There was a silence. She began crying quietly.
"I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,"
Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you love that young man, love him; if
you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy, and I am a
wreck, and haven't long to live. In short . . . you understand me."
He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and
speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Riss, and
used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now she
really did long to go abroad.
"You see, I hide nothing from you," she added, with a sigh. "My whole
soul lies open before you. And I beg you again, be generous, get me a
passport."
"I repeat, you are free."
She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression of his
face. She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret
meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their
intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish
object in them. And when she looked searchingly into his face, it seemed
to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as in a cat's.
"When shall I get the passport?" she asked softly.
He suddenly had an impulse to say "Never"; but he restrained himself and
said:
"When you like."
"I shall only go for a month."
"You'll go to Riss for good. I'll get you a divorce, take the blame on
myself, and Riss can marry you."
"But I don't want a divorce!" Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly, with an
astonished face. "I am not asking you for a divorce! Get me a passport,
that's all."
"But why don't you want the divorce?" asked the doctor, beginning to
feel irritated. "You are a strange woman. How strange you are! If you
are fond of him in earnest and he loves you too, in your position you
can do nothing better than get married. Can you really hesitate between
marriage and adultery?"
"I understand you," she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful,
vindictive expression came into her face. "I understand you perfectly.
You are sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me, to force this
divorce on me. Thank you very much; I am not such a fool as you think. I
won't accept the divorce and I won't leave you--I won't, I won't! To
begin with, I don't want to lose my position in society," she continued
quickly, as though afraid of being prevented from speaking. "Secondly, I
am twenty-seven and Riss is only twenty-three; he'll be tired of me in a
year and throw me over. And what's more, if you care to know, I'm not
certain that my feeling will last long . . . so there! I'm not going to
leave you."
"Then I'll turn you out of the house!" shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch,
stamping. "I shall turn you out, you vile, loathsome woman!"
"We shall see!" she said, and went out.
It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table
moving the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically.
"My dear Sir. . . . Little foot."
Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph
taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it for a
long time. It was a family group: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law,
his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the rôle
of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, dropsical
privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his mother-in-law, a stout lady
with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to
distraction and helped her in everything; if her daughter were
strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only
have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small
predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her
mother's; she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And
Nikolay Yevgrafitch himself in the photograph looked such a guileless
soul, such a kindly, good fellow, so open and simple-hearted; his whole
face was relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile of a divinity
student, and he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of
beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give
him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he
used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart
is cold and loveless."
And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a
village priest, with his democratic bringing up--a plain, blunt,
straightforward man--could have so helplessly surrendered to the power
of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature was so
utterly alien to him.
When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the
servant came into his study.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five roubles you
promised her yesterday."
TALENT
AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays at
the house of an officer's widow, was sitting on his bed, given up to the
depression of morning. It was beginning to look like autumn out of
doors. Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick layers; there was a
cold, piercing wind, and with a plaintive wail the trees were all
bending on one side. He could see the yellow leaves whirling round in
the air and on the earth. Farewell, summer! This melancholy of nature is
beautiful and poetical in its own way, when it is looked at with the
eyes of an artist, but Yegor Savvitch was in no humour to see beauty. He
was devoured by ennui and his only consolation was the thought that by
to-morrow he would not be there. The bed, the chairs, the tables, the
floor, were all heaped up with cushions, crumpled bed-clothes, boxes.
The floor had not been swept, the cotton curtains had been taken down
from the windows. Next day he was moving, to town.
His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire
horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of
her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time
been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going
away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking,
and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to
say. With her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at
it with rapture and sadness. And Yegor Savvitch was shaggy to a hideous
extent, so that he looked like a wild animal. His hair hung down to his
shoulder-blades, his beard grew from his neck, from his nostrils, from
his ears; his eyes were lost under his thick overhanging brows. It was
all so thick, so matted, that if a fly or a beetle had been caught in
his hair, it would never have found its way out of this enchanted
thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He was tired. When
Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging
eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass:
"I cannot marry."
"Why not?" Katya asked softly.
"Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage
is out of the question. An artist must be free."
"But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?"
"I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general. . . . Famous
authors and painters have never married."
"And you, too, will be famous--I understand that perfectly. But put
yourself in my place. I am afraid of my mother. She is stern and
irritable. When she knows that you won't marry me, and that it's all
nothing . . . she'll begin to give it to me. Oh, how wretched I am! And
you haven't paid for your rooms, either! . . . ."
"Damn her! I'll pay."
Yegor Savvitch got up and began walking to and fro.
"I ought to be abroad!" he said. And the artist told her that nothing
was easier than to go abroad. One need do nothing but paint a picture
and sell it.
"Of course!" Katya assented. "Why haven't you painted one in the
summer?"
"Do you suppose I can work in a barn like this?" the artist said ill-
humouredly. "And where should I get models?"
Some one banged the door viciously in the storey below. Katya, who was
expecting her mother's return from minute to minute, jumped up and ran
away. The artist was left alone. For a long time he walked to and fro,
threading his way between the chairs and the piles of untidy objects of
all sorts. He heard the widow rattling the crockery and loudly abusing
the peasants who had asked her two roubles for each cart. In his disgust
Yegor Savvitch stopped before the cupboard and stared for a long while,
frowning at the decanter of vodka.
"Ah, blast you!" he heard the widow railing at Katya. "Damnation take
you!"
The artist drank a glass of vodka, and the dark cloud in his soul
gradually disappeared, and he felt as though all his inside was smiling
within him. He began dreaming. . . . His fancy pictured how he would
become great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see
distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the shops would sell
his photographs, with what envy his friends would look after him. He
tried to picture himself in a magnificent drawing-room surrounded by
pretty and adoring women; but the picture was misty, vague, as he had
never in his life seen a drawing-room. The pretty and adoring women were
not a success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not
even one respectable girl. People who know nothing about life usually
picture life from books, but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either. He had
tried to read Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.
"It won't burn, drat the thing!" the widow bawled down below, as she set
the samovar. "Katya, give me some charcoal!"
The dreamy artist felt a longing to share his hopes and dreams with some
one. He went downstairs into the kitchen, where the stout widow and
Katya were busy about a dirty stove in the midst of charcoal fumes from
the samovar. There he sat down on a bench close to a big pot and began:
"It's a fine thing to be an artist! I can go just where I like, do what
I like. One has not to work in an office or in the fields. I've no
superiors or officers over me. . . . I'm my own superior. And with all
that I'm doing good to humanity!"
And after dinner he composed himself for a "rest." He usually slept till
the twilight of evening. But this time soon after dinner he felt that
some one was pulling at his leg. Some one kept laughing and shouting his
name. He opened his eyes and saw his friend Ukleikin, the landscape
painter, who had been away all the summer in the Kostroma district.
"Bah!" he cried, delighted. "What do I see?"
There followed handshakes, questions.
"Well, have you brought anything? I suppose you've knocked off hundreds
of sketches?" said Yegor Savvitch, watching Ukleikin taking his
belongings out of his trunk.
"H'm! . . . Yes. I have done something. And how are you getting on? Have
you been painting anything?"
Yegor Savvitch dived behind the bed, and crimson in the face, extracted
a canvas in a frame covered with dust and spider webs.
"See here. . . . A girl at the window after parting from her betrothed.
In three sittings. Not nearly finished yet."
The picture represented Katya faintly outlined sitting at an open
window, from which could be seen a garden and lilac distance. Ukleikin
did not like the picture.
"H'm! . . . There is air and . . . and there is expression," he said.
"There's a feeling of distance, but . . . but that bush is screaming . .
. screaming horribly!"
The decanter was brought on to the scene.
Towards evening Kostyliov, also a promising beginner, an historical
painter, came in to see Yegor Savvitch. He was a friend staying at the
next villa, and was a man of five-and-thirty. He had long hair, and wore
a blouse with a Shakespeare collar, and had a dignified manner. Seeing
the vodka, he frowned, complained of his chest, but yielding to his
friends' entreaties, drank a glass.
"I've thought of a subject, my friends," he began, getting drunk. "I
want to paint some new . . . Herod or Clepentian, or some blackguard of
that description, you understand, and to contrast with him the idea of
Christianity. On the one side Rome, you understand, and on the other
Christianity. . . . I want to represent the spirit, you understand? The
spirit!"
And the widow downstairs shouted continually:
"Katya, give me the cucumbers! Go to Sidorov's and get some kvass, you
jade!"
Like wolves in a cage, the three friends kept pacing to and fro from one
end of the room to the other. They talked without ceasing, talked, hotly
and genuinely; all three were excited, carried away. To listen to them
it would seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands. And it
never occurred to either of them that time was passing, that every day
life was nearing its close, that they had lived at other people's
expense a great deal and nothing yet was accomplished; that they were
all bound by the inexorable law by which of a hundred promising
beginners only two or three rise to any position and all the others draw
blanks in the lottery, perish playing the part of flesh for the cannon.
. . . They were gay and happy, and looked the future boldly in the face!
At one o'clock in the morning Kostyliov said good-bye, and smoothing out
his Shakespeare collar, went home. The landscape painter remained to
sleep at Yegor Savvitch's. Before going to bed, Yegor Savvitch took a
candle and made his way into the kitchen to get a drink of water. In the
dark, narrow passage Katya was sitting, on a box, and, with her hands
clasped on her knees, was looking upwards. A blissful smile was straying
on her pale, exhausted face, and her eyes were beaming.
"Is that you? What are you thinking about?" Yegor Savvitch asked her.
"I am thinking of how you'll be famous," she said in a half-whisper. "I
keep fancying how you'll become a famous man. . . . I overheard all your
talk. . . . I keep dreaming and dreaming. . . ."
Katya went off into a happy laugh, cried, and laid her hands reverently
on her idol's shoulders.
AN ARTIST'S STORY
I
IT was six or seven years ago when I was living in one of the districts
of the province of T----, on the estate of a young landowner called
Byelokurov, who used to get up very early, wear a peasant tunic, drink
beer in the evenings, and continually complain to me that he never met
with sympathy from any one. He lived in the lodge in the garden, and I
in the old seigniorial house, in a big room with columns, where there
was no furniture except a wide sofa on which I used to sleep, and a
table on which I used to lay out patience. There was always, even in
still weather, a droning noise in the old Amos stoves, and in thunder-
storms the whole house shook and seemed to be cracking into pieces; and
it was rather terrifying, especially at night, when all the ten big
windows were suddenly lit up by lightning.
Condemned by destiny to perpetual idleness, I did absolutely nothing.
For hours together I gazed out of window at the sky, at the birds, at
the avenue, read everything that was brought me by post, slept.
Sometimes I went out of the house and wandered about till late in the
evening.
One day as I was returning home, I accidentally strayed into a place I
did not know. The sun was already sinking, and the shades of evening lay
across the flowering rye. Two rows of old, closely planted, very tall
fir-trees stood like two dense walls forming a picturesque, gloomy
avenue. I easily climbed over the fence and walked along the avenue,
slipping over the fir-needles which lay two inches deep on the ground.
It was still and dark, and only here and there on the high tree-tops the
vivid golden light quivered and made rainbows in the spiders' webs.
There was a strong, almost stifling smell of resin. Then I turned into a
long avenue of limes. Here, too, all was desolation and age; last year's
leaves rusted mournfully under my feet and in the twilight shadows
lurked between the trees. From the old orchard on the right came the
faint, reluctant note of the golden oriole, who must have been old too.
But at last the limes ended. I walked by an old white house of two
storeys with a terrace, and there suddenly opened before me a view of a
courtyard, a large pond with a bathing-house, a group of green willows,
and a village on the further bank, with a high, narrow belfry on which
there glittered a cross reflecting the setting sun.
For a moment it breathed upon me the fascination of something near and
very familiar, as though I had seen that landscape at some time in my
childhood.
At the white stone gates which led from the yard to the fields, old-
fashioned solid gates with lions on them, were standing two girls. One
of them, the elder, a slim, pale, very handsome girl with a perfect
haystack of chestnut hair and a little obstinate mouth, had a severe
expression and scarcely took notice of me, while the other, who was
still very young, not more than seventeen or eighteen, and was also slim
and pale, with a large mouth and large eyes, looked at me with
astonishment as I passed by, said something in English, and was overcome
with embarrassment. And it seemed to me that these two charming faces,
too, had long been familiar to me. And I returned home feeling as though
I had had a delightful dream.
One morning soon afterwards, as Byelokurov and I were walking near the
house, a carriage drove unexpectedly into the yard, rustling over the
grass, and in it was sitting one of those girls. It was the elder one.
She had come to ask for subscriptions for some villagers whose cottages
had been burnt down. Speaking with great earnestness and precision, and
not looking at us, she told us how many houses in the village of
Siyanovo had been burnt, how many men, women, and children were left
homeless, and what steps were proposed, to begin with, by the Relief
Committee, of which she was now a member. After handing us the
subscription list for our signatures, she put it away and immediately
began to take leave of us.
"You have quite forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said to Byelokurov
as she shook hands with him. "Do come, and if Monsieur N. (she mentioned
my name) cares to make the acquaintance of admirers of his work, and
will come and see us, mother and I will be delighted."
I bowed.
When she had gone Pyotr Petrovitch began to tell me about her. The girl
was, he said, of good family, and her name was Lidia Voltchaninov, and
the estate on which she lived with her mother and sister, like the
village on the other side of the pond, was called Shelkovka. Her father
had once held an important position in Moscow, and had died with the
rank of privy councillor. Although they had ample means, the
Voltchaninovs lived on their estate summer and winter without going
away. Lidia was a teacher in the Zemstvo school in her own village, and
received a salary of twenty-five roubles a month. She spent nothing on
herself but her salary, and was proud of earning her own living.
"An interesting family," said Byelokurov. "Let us go over one day. They
will be delighted to see you."
One afternoon on a holiday we thought of the Voltchaninovs, and went to
Shelkovka to see them. They--the mother and two daughters --were at
home. The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who at one time had been handsome,
but now, asthmatic, depressed, vague, and over-feeble for her years,
tried to entertain me with conversation about painting. Having heard
from her daughter that I might come to Shelkovka, she had hurriedly
recalled two or three of my landscapes which she had seen in exhibitions
in Moscow, and now asked what I meant to express by them. Lidia, or as
they called her Lida, talked more to Byelokurov than to me. Earnest and
unsmiling, she asked him why he was not on the Zemstvo, and why he had
not attended any of its meetings.
"It's not right, Pyotr Petrovitch," she said reproachfully. "It's not
right. It's too bad."
"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented. "It isn't right."
"Our whole district is in the hands of Balagin," Lida went on,
addressing me. "He is the chairman of the Zemstvo Board, and he has
distributed all the posts in the district among his nephews and sons-in-
law; and he does as he likes. He ought to be opposed. The young men
ought to make a strong party, but you see what the young men among us
are like. It's a shame, Pyotr Petrovitch!"
The younger sister, Genya, was silent while they were talking of the
Zemstvo. She took no part in serious conversation. She was not looked
upon as quite grown up by her family, and, like a child, was always
called by the nickname of Misuce, because that was what she had called
her English governess when she was a child. She was all the time looking
at me with curiosity, and when I glanced at the photographs in the
album, she explained to me: "That's uncle . . . that's god-father,"
moving her finger across the photograph. As she did so she touched me
with her shoulder like a child, and I had a close view of her delicate,
undeveloped chest, her slender shoulders, her plait, and her thin little
body tightly drawn in by her sash.
We played croquet and lawn tennis, we walked about the garden, drank
tea, and then sat a long time over supper. After the huge empty room
with columns, I felt, as it were, at home in this small snug house where
there were no oleographs on the walls and where the servants were spoken
to with civility. And everything seemed to me young and pure, thanks to
the presence of Lida and Misuce, and there was an atmosphere of
refinement over everything. At supper Lida talked to Byelokurov again of
the Zemstvo, of Balagin, and of school libraries. She was an energetic,
genuine girl, with convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her,
though she talked a great deal and in a loud voice--perhaps because she
was accustomed to talking at school. On the other hand, Pyotr
Petrovitch, who had retained from his student days the habit of turning
every conversation into an argument, was tedious, flat, long-winded, and
unmistakably anxious to appear clever and advanced. Gesticulating, he
upset a sauce-boat with his sleeve, making a huge pool on the
tablecloth, but no one except me appeared to notice it.
It was dark and still as we went home.
"Good breeding is shown, not by not upsetting the sauce, but by not
noticing it when somebody else does," said Byelokurov, with a sigh.
"Yes, a splendid, intellectual family! I've dropped out of all decent
society; it's dreadful how I've dropped out of it! It's all through
work, work, work!"
He talked of how hard one had to work if one wanted to be a model
farmer. And I thought what a heavy, sluggish fellow he was! Whenever he
talked of anything serious he articulated "Er-er" with intense effort,
and worked just as he talked--slowly, always late and behind-hand. I had
little faith in his business capacity if only from the fact that when I
gave him letters to post he carried them about in his pocket for weeks
together.
"The hardest thing of all," he muttered as he walked beside me-- "the
hardest thing of all is that, work as one may, one meets with no
sympathy from any one. No sympathy!"
II
I took to going to see the Voltchaninovs. As a rule I sat on the lower
step of the terrace; I was fretted by dissatisfaction with myself; I was
sorry at the thought of my life passing so rapidly and uninterestingly,
and felt as though I would like to tear out of my breast the heart which
had grown so heavy. And meanwhile I heard talk on the terrace, the
rustling of dresses, the pages of a book being turned. I soon grew
accustomed to the idea that during the day Lida received patients, gave
out books, and often went into the village with a parasol and no hat,
and in the evening talked aloud of the Zemstvo and schools. This slim,
handsome, invariably austere girl, with her small well-cut mouth, always
said dryly when the conversation turned on serious subjects:
"That's of no interest to you."