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."
She did not like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape
painter and did not in my pictures portray the privations of the
peasants, and that, as she fancied, I was indifferent to what she
put such faith in. I remember when I was travelling on the banks
of Lake Baikal, I met a Buriat girl on horseback, wearing a shirt
and trousers of blue Chinese canvas; I asked her if she would sell
me her pipe. While we talked she looked contemptuously at my European
face and hat, and in a moment she was bored with talking to me; she
shouted to her horse and galloped on. And in just the same way Lida
despised me as an alien. She never outwardly expressed her dislike
for me, but I felt it, and sitting on the lower step of the terrace,
I felt irritated, and said that doctoring peasants when one was not
a doctor was deceiving them, and that it was easy to be benevolent
when one had six thousand acres.
Meanwhile her sister Misuce had no cares, and spent her life in
complete idleness just as I did. When she got up in the morning she
immediately took up a book and sat down to read on the terrace in
a deep arm-chair, with her feet hardly touching the ground, or hid
herself with her book in the lime avenue, or walked out into the
fields. She spent the whole day reading, poring greedily over her
book, and only from the tired, dazed look in her eyes and the extreme
paleness of her face one could divine how this continual reading
exhausted her brain. When I arrived she would flush a little, leave
her book, and looking into my face with her big eyes, would tell
me eagerly of anything that had happened--for instance, that the
chimney had been on fire in the servants' hall, or that one of the
men had caught a huge fish in the pond. On ordinary days she usually
went about in a light blouse and a dark blue skirt. We went for
walks together, picked cherries for making jam, went out in the
boat. When she jumped up to reach a cherry or sculled in the boat,
her thin, weak arms showed through her transparent sleeves. Or I
painted a sketch, and she stood beside me watching rapturously.
One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about
nine o clock in the morning. I walked about the park, keeping a
good distance from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of which
there was a great number that summer, and noting their position so
as to come and pick them afterwards with Genya. There was a warm
breeze. I saw Genya and her mother both in light holiday dresses
coming home from church, Genya holding her hat in the wind. Afterwards
I heard them having tea on the terrace.
For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for my
perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in our country-houses
in the summer have always had a particular charm. When the green
garden, still wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks
radiant with happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and
oleander near the house, when the young people have just come back
from church and are having breakfast in the garden, all so charmingly
dressed and gay, and one knows that all these healthy, well-fed,
handsome people are going to do nothing the whole long day, one
wishes that all life were like that. Now, too, I had the same
thought, and walked about the garden prepared to walk about like
that, aimless and unoccupied, the whole day, the whole summer.
Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as though
she knew she would find me in the garden, or had a presentiment of
it. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked a question
she walked a little ahead so as to see my face.
"A miracle happened in the village yesterday," she said. "The lame
woman Pelagea has been ill the whole year. No doctors or medicines
did her any good; but yesterday an old woman came and whispered
something over her, and her illness passed away."
"That's nothing much," I said. "You mustn't look for miracles only
among sick people and old women. Isn't health a miracle? And life
itself? Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle."
"And aren't you afraid of what is beyond understanding?"
"No. Phenomena I don't understand I face boldly, and am not overwhelmed
by them. I am above them. Man ought to recognise himself as superior
to lions, tigers, stars, superior to everything in nature, even
what seems miraculous and is beyond his understanding, or else he
is not a man, but a mouse afraid of everything."
Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and could
guess correctly what I did not know. She longed for me to initiate
her into the domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful--into that
higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home. And
she talked to me of God, of the eternal life, of the miraculous.
And I, who could never admit that my self and my imagination would
be lost forever after death, answered: "Yes, men are immortal";
"Yes, there is eternal life in store for us." And she listened,
believed, and did not ask for proofs.
As we were going home she stopped suddenly and said:
"Our Lida is a remarkable person--isn't she? I love her very
dearly, and would be ready to give my life for her any minute. But
tell me"--Genya touched my sleeve with her finger--"tell me,
why do you always argue with her? Why are you irritated?"
"Because she is wrong."
Genya shook her head and tears came into her eyes.
"How incomprehensible that is!" she said. At that minute Lida had
just returned from somewhere, and standing with a whip in her hand,
a slim, beautiful figure in the sunlight, at the steps, she was
giving some orders to one of the men. Talking loudly, she hurriedly
received two or three sick villagers; then with a busy and anxious
face she walked about the rooms, opening one cupboard after another,
and went upstairs. It was a long time before they could find her
and call her to dinner, and she came in when we had finished our
soup. All these tiny details I remember with tenderness, and that
whole day I remember vividly, though nothing special happened. After
dinner Genya lay in a long arm-chair reading, while I sat upon the
bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was
overcast with clouds, and it began to spot with fine rain. It was
hot; the wind had dropped, and it seemed as though the day would
never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace, looking
drowsy and carrying a fan.
"Oh, mother," said Genya, kissing her hand, "it's not good for you
to sleep in the day."
They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other
would stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call
"Aa--oo, Genya!" or "Mother, where are you?" They always said their
prayers together, and had the same faith; and they understood each
other perfectly even when they did not speak. And their attitude
to people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used
to me and fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days,
sent to ask if I were well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with
enthusiasm, and with the same openness and readiness to chatter as
Misuce, she told me what had happened, and confided to me her
domestic secrets.
She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not
care for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived
her life apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and
enigmatic a person as the admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is
to the sailors.
"Our Lida is a remarkable person," the mother would often say.
"Isn't she?"
Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.
"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an
undertone, like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: "You
wouldn't easily find another like her; only, do you know, I am
beginning to be a little uneasy. The school, the dispensary, books
--all that's very good, but why go to extremes? She is three-and-twenty,
you know; it's time for her to think seriously of herself. With her
books and her dispensary she will find life has slipped by without
having noticed it. . . . She must be married."
Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her
head and said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:
"Mother, everything is in God's hands."
And again she buried herself in her book.
Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet
and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over supper and
talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole
district under his thumb. As I went away from the Voltchaninovs
that evening, I carried away the impression of a long, long idle
day, with a melancholy consciousness that everything ends in this
world, however long it may be.
Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with
me all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without her, and
that all that charming family were near and dear to me, and for the
first time that summer I had a yearning to paint.
"Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?" I asked
Byelokurov as I went home. "My life is dreary, difficult, and
monotonous because I am an artist, a strange person. From my earliest
days I've been wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction, distrust in my
work. I'm always poor, I'm a wanderer, but you--you're a healthy,
normal man, a landowner, and a gentleman. Why do you live in such
an uninteresting way? Why do you get so little out of life? Why
haven't you, for instance, fallen in love with Lida or Genya?"
"You forget that I love another woman," answered Byelokurov.
He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge
with him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and
dignified, not unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the
Russian national dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and
the servant was continually calling her in to dinner or to tea.
Three years before she had taken one of the lodges for a summer
holiday, and had settled down at Byelokurov's apparently forever.
She was ten years older than he was, and kept a sharp hand over
him, so much so that he had to ask her permission when he went out
of the house. She often sobbed in a deep masculine note, and then
I used to send word to her that if she did not leave off, I should
give up my rooms there; and she left off.
When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned
thoughtfully, and I began walking up and down the room, conscious
of a soft emotion as though I were in love. I wanted to talk about
the Voltchaninovs.
"Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as
devoted to schools and hospitals as she is," I said. "Oh, for the
sake of a girl like that one might not only go into the Zemstvo,
but even wear out iron shoes, like the girl in the fairy tale. And
Misuce? What a sweet creature she is, that Misuce!"
Byelokurov, drawling out "Er--er," began a long-winded disquisition
on the malady of the age--pessimism. He talked confidently, in a
tone that suggested that I was opposing him. Hundreds of miles of
desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep
depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know
when he will go.
"It's not a question of pessimism or optimism," I said irritably;
"its simply that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no sense."
Byelokurov took this as aimed at himself, was offended, and went
away.