Startsev kept meaning to go to the Turkins' again, but there was a great
deal of work in the hospital, and he was unable to find free time. In
this way more than a year passed in work and solitude. But one day a
letter in a light blue envelope was brought him from the town.
Vera Iosifovna had been suffering for some time from migraine, but now
since Kitten frightened her every day by saying that she was going away
to the Conservatoire, the attacks began to be more frequent. All the
doctors of the town had been at the Turkins'; at last it was the
district doctor's turn. Vera Iosifovna wrote him a touching letter in
which she begged him to come and relieve her sufferings. Startsev went,
and after that he began to be often, very often at the Turkins'.... He
really did something for Vera Iosifovna, and she was already telling all
her visitors that he was a wonderful and exceptional doctor. But it was
not for the sake of her migraine that he visited the Turkins' now....
It was a holiday. Ekaterina Ivanovna finished her long, wearisome
exercises on the piano. Then they sat a long time in the dining-room,
drinking tea, and Ivan Petrovitch told some amusing story. Then there
was a ring and he had to go into the hall to welcome a guest; Startsev
took advantage of the momentary commotion, and whispered to Ekaterina
Ivanovna in great agitation:
"For God's sake, I entreat you, don't torment me; let us go into the
garden!"
She shrugged her shoulders, as though perplexed and not knowing what he
wanted of her, but she got up and went.
"You play the piano for three or four hours," he said, following her;
"then you sit with your mother, and there is no possibility of speaking
to you. Give me a quarter of an hour at least, I beseech you."
Autumn was approaching, and it was quiet and melancholy in the old
garden; the dark leaves lay thick in the walks. It was already beginning
to get dark early.
"I haven't seen you for a whole week," Startsev went on, "and if you
only knew what suffering it is! Let us sit down. Listen to me."
They had a favourite place in the garden; a seat under an old spreading
maple. And now they sat down on this seat.
"What do you want?" said Ekaterina Ivanovna drily, in a matter-of-fact
tone.
"I have not seen you for a whole week; I have not heard you for so long.
I long passionately, I thirst for your voice. Speak."
She fascinated him by her freshness, the naïve expression of her eyes
and cheeks. Even in the way her dress hung on her, he saw something
extraordinarily charming, touching in its simplicity and naïve grace;
and at the same time, in spite of this naïveté, she seemed to him
intelligent and developed beyond her years. He could talk with her about
literature, about art, about anything he liked; could complain to her of
life, of people, though it sometimes happened in the middle of serious
conversation she would laugh inappropriately or run away into the house.
Like almost all girls of her neighbourhood, she had read a great deal
(as a rule, people read very little in S----, and at the lending library
they said if it were not for the girls and the young Jews, they might as
well shut up the library). This afforded Startsev infinite delight; he
used to ask her eagerly every time what she had been reading the last
few days, and listened enthralled while she told him.
"What have you been reading this week since I saw you last?" he asked
now. "Do please tell me."
"I have been reading Pisemsky."
"What exactly?"
"'A Thousand Souls,'" answered Kitten. "And what a funny name Pisemsky
had--Alexey Feofilaktitch!"
"Where are you going?" cried Startsev in horror, as she suddenly got up
and walked towards the house. "I must talk to you; I want to explain
myself.... Stay with me just five minutes, I supplicate you!"
She stopped as though she wanted to say something, then awkwardly thrust
a note into his hand, ran home and sat down to the piano again.
"Be in the cemetery," Startsev read, "at eleven o'clock to-night, near
the tomb of Demetti."
"Well, that's not at all clever," he thought, coming to himself. "Why
the cemetery? What for?"
It was clear: Kitten was playing a prank. Who would seriously dream of
making an appointment at night in the cemetery far out of the town, when
it might have been arranged in the street or in the town gardens? And
was it in keeping with him--a district doctor, an intelligent, staid
man--to be sighing, receiving notes, to hang about cemeteries, to do
silly things that even schoolboys think ridiculous nowadays? What would
this romance lead to? What would his colleagues say when they heard of
it? Such were Startsev's reflections as he wandered round the tables at
the club, and at half-past ten he suddenly set off for the cemetery.
By now he had his own pair of horses, and a coachman called Panteleimon,
in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was still warm, warm as
it is in autumn. Dogs were howling in the suburb near the
slaughter-house. Startsev left his horses in one of the side-streets at
the end of the town, and walked on foot to the cemetery.
"We all have our oddities," he thought. "Kitten is odd, too; and--who
knows?--perhaps she is not joking, perhaps she will come"; and he
abandoned himself to this faint, vain hope, and it intoxicated him.
He walked for half a mile through the fields; the cemetery showed as a
dark streak in the distance, like a forest or a big garden. The wall of
white stone came into sight, the gate.... In the moonlight he could read
on the gate: "The hour cometh." Startsev went in at the little gate, and
before anything else he saw the white crosses and monuments on both
sides of the broad avenue, and the black shadows of them and the
poplars; and for a long way round it was all white and black, and the
slumbering trees bowed their branches over the white stones. It seemed
as though it were lighter here than in the fields; the maple-leaves
stood out sharply like paws on the yellow sand of the avenue and on the
stones, and the inscriptions on the tombs could be clearly read. For the
first moments Startsev was struck now by what he saw for the first time
in his life, and what he would probably never see again; a world not
like anything else, a world in which the moonlight was as soft and
beautiful, as though slumbering here in its cradle, where there was no
life, none whatever; but in every dark poplar, in every tomb, there was
felt the presence of a mystery that promised a life peaceful, beautiful,
eternal. The stones and faded flowers, together with the autumn scent of
the leaves, all told of forgiveness, melancholy, and peace.
All was silence around; the stars looked down from the sky in the
profound stillness, and Startsev's footsteps sounded loud and out of
place, and only when the church clock began striking and he imagined
himself dead, buried there for ever, he felt as though some one were
looking at him, and for a moment he thought that it was not peace and
tranquillity, but stifled despair, the dumb dreariness of
non-existence....
Demetti's tomb was in the form of a shrine with an angel at the top. The
Italian opera had once visited S---- and one of the singers had died;
she had been buried here, and this monument put up to her. No one in the
town remembered her, but the lamp at the entrance reflected the
moonlight, and looked as though it were burning.
There was no one, and, indeed, who would come here at midnight? But
Startsev waited, and as though the moonlight warmed his passion, he
waited passionately, and, in imagination, pictured kisses and embraces.
He sat near the monument for half an hour, then paced up and down the
side avenues, with his hat in his hand, waiting and thinking of the many
women and girls buried in these tombs who had been beautiful and
fascinating, who had loved, at night burned with passion, yielding
themselves to caresses. How wickedly Mother Nature jested at man's
expense, after all! How humiliating it was to recognise it!
Startsev thought this, and at the same time he wanted to cry out that he
wanted love, that he was eager for it at all costs. To his eyes they
were not slabs of marble, but fair white bodies in the moonlight; he saw
shapes hiding bashfully in the shadows of the trees, felt their warmth,
and the languor was oppressive....
And as though a curtain were lowered, the moon went behind a cloud, and
suddenly all was darkness. Startsev could scarcely find the gate--by now
it was as dark as it is on an autumn night. Then he wandered about for
an hour and a half, looking for the side-street in which he had left his
horses.
"I am tired; I can scarcely stand on my legs," he said to Panteleimon.
And settling himself with relief in his carriage, he thought: "Och! I
ought not to get fat!"