Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE

AN ARTIST’S STORY

I

This was six or seven years ago, when I was living in one of the districts of T—— province, on the estate of the landowner Belokurov, a young man who got up very early, went about in a vest, drank beer in the evenings, and kept complaining to me that he met with no sympathy anywhere or from anyone. He lived in a cottage in the garden, and I in the old mansion, in a huge hall with columns, where there was no furniture except a wide sofa on which I slept and a table on which I played patience. Here, even in calm weather, something always howled in the old Amosov stoves,¹ but during a thunderstorm the whole house trembled and seemed to crack to pieces, and it was a little frightening, especially at night, when all ten big windows were suddenly lit up by lightning.

Condemned by fate to permanent idleness, I was doing decidedly nothing. I spent whole hours looking out my windows at the sky, the birds, the avenues, read everything that came in the mail, slept. Sometimes I left the house and wandered about somewhere till late in the evening.

Once, returning home, I accidentally wandered onto an unfamiliar estate. The sun was already hiding, and evening shadows stretched across the flowering rye. Two rows of old, closely planted, very tall fir trees stood like two solid walls, forming a beautiful, gloomy avenue. I easily climbed the fence and went down this avenue, slipping on the fir needles that lay inches-thick on the ground. It was quiet, dark, and only high in the treetops did a bright golden light tremble here and there and play iridescently on the spiderwebs. There was a strong, almost stifling, smell of fir needles. Then I turned down a long linden avenue. Here, too, there was old age and desolation; last year’s leaves rustled sorrowfully under my feet, and shadows hid in the twilight between the trees. To the right, in an old orchard, an oriole sang reluctantly, in a weak voice—it must have been a little old lady, too. But now the lindens also ended; I passed a white house with a terrace and a mezzanine, and before me there unexpectedly opened up a view of the manor yard and a wide pond with a bathing house, a stand of green willows, a village on the other side, with a tall, slender belfry, the cross of which blazed, reflecting the setting sun. For a moment I felt the enchantment of something dear and very familiar, as if I had already seen this same panorama sometime in my childhood.

And by the white stone gateway that led from the yard into the fields, by the sturdy old gates with their lions, stood two girls. One of them, the elder, slender, pale, very beautiful, with a whole mass of chestnut hair on her head, with a small, stubborn mouth, had a stern expression and barely paid any attention to me; the other, still very young—she was seventeen or eighteen years old, not more— also slender and pale, with a big mouth and big eyes, looked at me in surprise as I passed by, said something in English, and became embarrassed, and it seemed to me that these two sweet faces had also been long familiar to me. And I returned home feeling as if I had had a good dream.

Soon after that, around noon one day, as Belokurov and I were strolling near the house, a spring carriage, swishing through the grass, unexpectedly drove into the yard, with one of those girls sitting in it. It was the older one. She had come with a subscription list, seeking aid for the victims of a fire. Without looking at us, she told us very seriously and in detail how many houses had burned down in the village of Siyanovo, how many men, women, and children had been left without a roof, and what the committee for the victims, of which she was now a member, intended to undertake as a first step. After having us sign it, she put the list away and at once began taking her leave.

“You’ve quite forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovich,” she said to Belokurov, giving him her hand. “Come over, and if Monsieur X” (she said my name) “wishes to have a look at how some admirers of his talent live, and is so good as to visit us, mama and I will be very glad.”

I bowed.

When she left, Pyotr Petrovich told me the story. This girl, in his words, was from a good family, her name was Lydia Volchaninova, and the estate she lived on with her mother and sister was called Shelkovka, the same as the one across the pond. Her father had once occupied a prominent position in Moscow and had died with the rank of privy councillor. Although they were well off, the Volchaninovs lived permanently in the country, summer and winter, and Lydia was a teacher in a zemstvo² school in her own Shelkovka and earned twenty-five roubles a month. She spent only this money on herself and was proud to be living at her own expense.

“An interesting family,” said Belokurov. “We might go and see them sometime. They’d be very glad to have you.”

After dinner once, on a feast day, we remembered the Volchaninovs and went to visit them in Shelkovka. They, the mother and both daughters, were at home. The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, evidently beautiful once but now flabby beyond her years, suffering from shortness of breath, sad, distracted, tried to engage me in a conversation about painting. Having learned from her daughter that I might visit Shelkovka, she had hastily recalled two or three landscapes of mine that she had seen at exhibitions in Moscow, and now asked me what I had meant to express in them. Lydia, or Lida, as they called her at home, talked more with Belokurov than with me. Serious, unsmiling, she asked him why he did not serve in the zemstvo and why he had never yet come to a single zemstvo meeting.

“It’s not good, Pyotr Petrovich,” she said reproachfully. “It’s not good. It’s a shame.”

“True, Lida, true,” her mother agreed. “It’s not good.”

“Our whole district is in the hands of Balagin,” Lida went on, turning to me. “He himself is the chairman of the board, and he’s given all the posts in the district to his nephews and sons-in-law and does whatever he likes. We must fight. The young people should form a strong party, but you see what kind of young people we have. It’s a shame, Pyotr Petrovich!”

While we talked about the zemstvo, the younger sister, Zhenya, was silent. She did not take part in serious conversations, the family did not consider her grown up yet, and called her Missyus, like a little girl, because that was what she had called Miss, her governess, as a child. She kept looking at me with curiosity, and when I glanced through the photograph album, she explained to me: “That’s my uncle … That’s my godfather,” and moved her little finger over the portraits, and at that moment she touched me childishly with her shoulder, and I could see close-up her weak, undeveloped breast, her slender shoulders, her braid, and her thin body, tightly bound with a sash.

We played croquet and lawn tennis, strolled about the garden, had tea, and then a long supper. After the enormous, empty hall with columns, I felt somehow ill at ease in this small, cozy house in which there were no oleographs on the walls and the servants were addressed formally, and everything seemed young and pure to me, owing to the presence of Lida and Missyus, and everything breathed respectability. Over supper Lida again talked with Belokurov about the zemstvo, about Balagin, about the school libraries. She was a lively, sincere girl, with deep convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her, though she talked a lot and loudly—perhaps because she was used to talking at school. On the other hand, my Pyotr Petrovich, who from his student days had kept the manner of turning every conversation into an argument, spoke dully, listlessly, and at length, with the obvious wish of appearing to be an intelligent and progressive man. Gesticulating, he overturned the sauceboat with his sleeve, and a big puddle formed on the tablecloth, but, except for me, no one seemed to notice it.

When we returned home, it was dark and still.

“Good manners doesn’t mean not spilling sauce on the tablecloth, but not noticing when someone else does,” said Belokurov, and he sighed. “Yes, a wonderful, intellectual family. I’ve lost touch with good people, indeed I have! I’m always busy, busy, busy!”

He talked of how much one had to work if one wanted to be a model farmer. And I thought: what a sluggish and lazy fellow he is! When he talked about something serious, he drawled and strained, “E-e-eh,” and he worked the same way as he talked—slow, always late, missing all deadlines. I had little faith in his business abilities, if only because when I asked him to mail some letters for me, he carried them around in his pockets for weeks.

“The hardest thing of all,” he muttered, walking beside me, “the hardest thing of all is to work and get no sympathy from anybody No sympathy at all!”

II

I began to visit the Volchaninovs. Usually I sat on the bottom step of the terrace; dissatisfaction with myself oppressed me, I felt sorry for my life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking how good it would be to tear this heart, which had grown so heavy, out of my breast. And all the while there would be talking on the terrace, one could hear the rustling of dresses and the leafing-through of books. I soon became accustomed to Lida’s receiving sick people in the afternoon, handing out books, and often leaving for the village, bare-headed³ under her parasol, and in the evening talking loudly about the zemstvo and schools. This slender, beautiful, invariably severe girl, with her small, gracefully outlined mouth, would turn to me whenever a practical conversation began, and say drily:

“This is of no interest to you.”

She did not find me sympathetic. She disliked me because I was a landscape painter and did not portray the needs of the people in my pictures, and because I was, as it seemed to her, indifferent to what she so strongly believed in. I remember once riding along the shore of Baikal and meeting a Buryat⁴ girl in a shirt and blue dungaree trousers, on horseback; I asked her if she would sell me her pipe, and as we spoke, she looked scornfully at my European face and my hat, and after a minute got sick of talking to me, whooped, and galloped off. In the same way, Lida scorned the alien in me. She did not express her indisposition towards me in any external way, but I sensed it and, sitting on the bottom step of the terrace, felt annoyed and said that to treat peasants without being a doctor was to deceive them and that it was easy to be philanthropic when one owned five thousand acres.

But her sister, Missyus, had no cares and spent her life in total idleness, as I did. When she got up in the morning, she at once took a book and started reading, sitting on the terrace in a deep armchair, so that her little feet barely touched the ground, or she hid herself with a book in the linden avenue, or went out the gates into the fields. She read for the whole day, peering greedily into her book, and only because her eyes sometimes became tired, dazed, and her face very pale, could you guess that this reading wearied her brain. When I came, she would blush slightly on seeing me, put her book down, and, looking into my face with her big eyes, tell me excitedly about things that had happened: for instance, that there had been a chimney fire in the servants’ quarters or that some worker had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually went about in a pale blouse and a dark blue skirt. We took walks together, picked cherries for preserves, went for boat rides, and when she jumped up to reach a cherry, or handled the oars, her thin, weak arms showed through her loose sleeves. Or else I would paint a study, and she would stand beside me and watch with admiration.

One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Volchaninovs’ in the morning, around nine o’clock. I walked through the park, keeping away from the house, and looked for mushrooms, which were very numerous that summer, and marked the places, in order to pick them later with Zhenya. A warm breeze was blowing. I saw Zhenya and her mother, both in pale festive dresses, walking from church to the house, and Zhenya keeping her hat from blowing off in the wind. Then I heard them having tea on the terrace.

For a carefree man like me, seeking to justify his constant idleness, these festive summer mornings on our country estates have always been extremely attractive. When a green garden, still moist with dew, shines all over in the sun and looks happy, when there is a smell of mignonette and oleander around the house, the young people have just come back from church and are having tea in the garden, and when everyone is so nicely dressed and cheerful, and when you know that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people will do nothing all day long, then you want all of life to be like that. And now I was thinking the same thing and walking in the garden, ready to walk that way, idly and aimlessly, all day, all summer.

Zhenya came with a basket; she looked as if she knew or anticipated that she would find me in the garden. We picked mushrooms and talked, and when she asked about something, she went ahead so as to see my face.

“Yesterday a miracle took place in our village,” she said. “Lame Pelageya was sick for a whole year, no doctors or medicines helped her, but yesterday an old woman whispered something and it went away.”

“That’s no matter,” I said. “We shouldn’t look for miracles only around sick people and old women. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is incomprehensible is a miracle.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what’s incomprehensible?”

“No. I approach phenomena that I don’t understand with good cheer and don’t give in to them. I’m above them. Man should be aware that he is above lions, tigers, stars, above everything in nature, even above what is incomprehensible and seems miraculous, otherwise he’s not a man but a mouse afraid of everything.”

Zhenya thought that, being an artist, I knew a lot and could make right guesses about what I did not know. She would have liked me to lead her into the region of the eternal and the beautiful, that higher world where, in her opinion, I was at home, and she talked to me about God, about eternal life, about the miraculous. And, unable to conceive that I and my imagination would perish forever after death, I replied: “Yes, people are immortal,” “Yes, eternal life awaits us.” And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.

As we walked towards the house, she suddenly stopped and said:

“Our Lida is a remarkable person. Isn’t it so? I love her dearly and could sacrifice my life for her at any moment. But tell me,” Zhenya touched my sleeve with her finger, “tell me, why do you argue with her all the time? Why are you annoyed?”

“Because she’s wrong.”

Zhenya shook her head, and tears came to her eyes.

“It’s so incomprehensible!” she said.

At that moment Lida had just returned from somewhere and, standing by the porch with a whip in her hand, trim, beautiful, lit by the sun, was giving orders to a workman. Hurrying and talking loudly, she received two or three patients, then, with a busy, preoccupied air, she went through the rooms, opening first one cupboard, then another, and went up to the mezzanine; they spent a long time looking for her and calling her to dinner, and she came when we had already finished the soup. For some reason I remember and love all these little details, and I remember that whole day vividly, though nothing special happened. After dinner Zhenya read, lying in a deep armchair, and I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky clouded over, and a fine, light rain began to drizzle. It was hot, the wind had died down long ago, and it seemed the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out to us on the terrace, sleepy, holding a fan.

“Oh, mama,” said Zhenya, kissing her hand, “it’s not good for you to sleep in the afternoon.”

They adored each other. Whenever one went to the garden, the other would stand on the terrace and, looking at the trees, call: “Hallo-o-o, Zhenya!” or “Mamochka, where are you?” They always prayed together, and both had the same beliefs and understood each other very well even when they were silent. And their attitude towards people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, soon became accustomed and attached to me, and when I did not appear for two or three days, she would send to find out if I was well. She, too, looked at my studies with admiration, and, as loquaciously and candidly as Missyus, told me about things that had happened and often entrusted me with her domestic secrets.

She stood in awe of her elder daughter. Lida was never tender, she spoke only about serious things; she lived her own separate life and for her mother and sister was as sacred and slightly mysterious a personage as an admiral who always remains in his cabin is for his sailors.

“Our Lida is a remarkable person,” the mother often said. “Isn’t it so?”

And now, as the rain drizzled, we talked of Lida.

“She’s a remarkable person,” the mother said and added in a conspiratorial half-whisper, looking around fearfully: “It would be hard to find the like of her anywhere, though, you know, I’m beginning to worry a little. School, first-aid kits, books—it’s all very good, but why go to extremes? She’s nearly twenty-four, it’s time she thought seriously about herself. With all these books and first-aid kits, she won’t see how life is passing by … She should marry.”

Zhenya, pale from reading, her hair disheveled, raised her head and, looking at her mother, said as if to herself:

“Mamochka, it all depends on God’s will!”

And again she immersed herself in reading.

Belokurov came in a vest and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, then, when it grew dark, had a long supper, and Lida again talked about schools and about Balagin, who had the whole district in his hands. Leaving the Volchaninovs’ that evening, I went away with the impression of a very long, idle day, and the sad awareness that everything in this world, however long, comes to an end. Zhenya accompanied us to the gate, and perhaps because she had spent the whole day with me from morning till evening, I felt that without her I was somehow dull and that this whole dear family was close to me; and for the first time all summer I wanted to paint.

“Tell me, why is your life so dull, so colorless?” I asked Belokurov, walking home with him. “My life is dull, heavy, monotonous, because I’m an artist, a strange man, from my youth I’ve been chafed by jealousy, dissatisfaction with myself, lack of faith in what I’m doing, I’m always poor, I’m a vagabond, but you, you’re a healthy, normal person, a landowner, a squire—why do you live so uninterestingly, why do you take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven’t you fallen in love with Lida or Zhenya yet?”

“You forget that I love another woman,” Belokurov replied.

He was speaking of his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the cottage. Every day I saw this lady, very stout, plump, imposing, like a well-fed goose, strolling in the garden, in a Russian costume with beads, always under a parasol, and a serving girl kept calling her, now to eat, now to have tea. Some three years before she had rented one of the cottages as a dacha and had simply gone on living at Belokurov’s, apparently forever. She was a good ten years older than he and ruled him so strictly that, whenever he went away from the house, he had to ask her permission. She sobbed frequently in a male voice, and then I would send word that unless she stopped I would give up my lodgings, and she would stop.

When we came home, Belokurov sat on the sofa and frowned pensively, and I began pacing the hall, feeling a quiet excitement, as if I were in love. I wanted to talk about the Volchaninovs.

“Lida can only fall in love with a zemstvo activist, whose passions are the same as hers—hospitals and schools,” I said. “Oh, for the sake of such a girl you could not only join the zemstvo, but even wear out a pair of iron shoes, as in the old tale.⁵ And Missyus? How lovely this Missyus is!”

Belokurov, with his drawn out “E-e-eh,” began talking at length about the disease of the age—pessimism. He spoke confidently and in such a tone as if I were arguing with him. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, scorched steppe cannot produce such gloom as one man when he sits and talks and nobody knows when he will leave.

“The point isn’t pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably, “but that ninety-nine people out of a hundred are witless.”

Belokurov took it personally, became offended, and left.

III

“The prince is visiting in Malozyomovo and sends you his greetings,” Lida was saying to her mother, having returned from somewhere and taking off her gloves. “He tells many interesting things … He promises to raise the question of a dispensary in Malozyomovo again in the provincial assembly, but he says there’s little hope.” And turning to me, she said: “Excuse me, I keep forgetting that this cannot be of interest to you.”

I felt annoyed.

“Why not?” I asked and shrugged my shoulders. “You have no wish to know my opinion, but I assure you the question is of lively interest to me.”

“It is?”

“Yes, it is. In my opinion there’s no need at all for a dispensary in Malozyomovo.”

My annoyance communicated itself to her; she looked at me, narrowing her eyes, and asked:

“What do they need? Landscapes?”

“No need for landscapes either. They don’t need anything.”

She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper that had just been brought from the post office; after a minute she said softly, obviously restraining herself:

“Last week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a dispensary nearby, she would still be alive. And it seems to me that gentleman landscape painters ought to have some sort of convictions in that regard.”

“I have very definite convictions in that regard, I assure you,” I replied, but she shielded herself from me with the newspaper as if she did not wish to listen. “In my opinion, dispensaries, schools, libraries, first-aid kits, under the existing conditions, only serve enslavement. The people are fettered with a great chain, and you don’t cut the chain, you merely add new links to it—there’s my conviction for you.”

She raised her eyes to me and smiled derisively, while I went on trying to grasp my main thought:

“What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelageyas bend their backs from early morning till dark, get sick from overwork, tremble all their lives for their hungry and sick children, fear death and sickness all their lives, get treated all their lives, fade early, age early, and die in dirt and stench; their children grow up and start the same tune, and so hundreds of years go by, and billions of people live worse than animals—only for the sake of a crust of bread, knowing constant fear. The whole horror of their situation is that they have no time to think of their souls, no time to remember their image and likeness;⁶hunger, cold, animal fear, a mass of work, like a snowslide, bar all the paths to spiritual activity, to what precisely distinguishes man from animal and is the only thing worth living for. You come to their aid with hospitals and schools, but that doesn’t free them from bondage, but, on the contrary, enslaves them still more, because, by introducing new prejudices in their life, you increase the number of their needs, not to mention that they must pay the zemstvo for their little pills and primers, and that means bending their backs even more.”

“I won’t argue with you,” said Lida, lowering the newspaper. “I’ve already heard it all. I’ll tell you just one thing: it’s impossible to sit with folded arms. True, we’re not saving mankind, and maybe we’re mistaken in many ways, but we do what we can, and we’re right. The highest and holiest task for a cultured person is to serve his neighbor, and we try to serve as we can. You don’t like it, but one can’t please everyone.”

“True, Lida, true,” said the mother.

She was always timid in Lida’s presence, and kept glancing at her anxiously when she spoke, afraid of saying something unnecessary or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but always agreed—true, Lida, true.

“Dispensaries, peasant literacy, books with pathetic precepts and jokes cannot diminish either ignorance or mortality, any more than the light from your windows can illuminate this huge garden,” I said. “You give nothing with your interference in these people’s lives, you only create new needs, new pretexts for work.”

“Ah, my God, but something must be done!” Lida said with vexation, and from her tone it was clear that she considered my arguments worthless and despised them.

“The people must be freed from heavy physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lightened, they must be given a respite, so that they don’t spend their whole lives at the stove, the washtub, and in the fields, but also have time to think about their souls, about God, to give wider scope to their spiritual capacities. Every man’s calling lies in spiritual activity—in a constant search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it so that crude, brutish labor is not necessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you’ll see what a mockery these books and first-aid kits essentially are. Once a man is conscious of his true calling, he can be satisfied only by religion, the sciences, the arts, and not these trifles.”

“Free them from labor!” Lida grinned. “Is that really possible?”

“Yes. Take a share of their work on yourself. If all of us, city and country dwellers, all of us without exception, agreed to divide up the work expended by mankind in general to satisfy its physical needs, the portion for each of us might be no more than two or three hours a day. Imagine that all of us, rich and poor, work only three hours a day, and the rest of our time is left free. Imagine, too, that in order to depend still less on our bodies and to work less, we invent machines to work for us, and try to reduce the number of our needs to the minimum. We train ourselves and our children not to fear hunger and cold, so that we don’t constantly tremble for their health as Anna, Mavra, and Pelageya do. Imagine that we don’t get treated, don’t keep pharmacies, tobacco factories, distilleries—what a lot of free time we’d have in the end! All of us together would devote this leisure to the arts and sciences. As peasants sometimes get together to mend a road, so all of us together would seek truth and the meaning of life, and—I’m certain of it—the truth would be discovered very soon, man would be delivered from this constant, tormenting, oppressive fear, and even from death itself.”

“You contradict yourself, however,” said Lida. “You say science, science, yet you reject literacy.”

“Literacy, when a man can only use it to read pothouse signboards and occasional books that he doesn’t understand—such literacy has been with us since the time of Rurik, Gogol’s Petrushka⁷has been reading for a long time, and yet the village remains to this day what it was under Rurik. What we need is not literacy, but the freedom to give wide scope to our spiritual capacities. We need not schools but universities.”

“You reject medicine as well.”

“Yes. It would be needed only for the study of illnesses as phenomena of nature, not for their treatment. If we’re to treat something, it should be not illnesses but their causes. Remove the main cause—physical work—and there will be no illnesses. I don’t recognize the science of treatment,” I went on excitedly. “The arts and sciences, when genuine, aspire not to temporary, not to specific purposes, but to the eternal and the general—they seek truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they’re harnessed to the needs and evils of the day, to first-aid kits and libraries, they only complicate and clutter life. We have lots of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, there are lots of literate people, but no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All our intelligence, all our inner energies have gone to satisfying temporary, passing needs … Among scientists, writers, and artists, work is at the boil, the comforts of life increase every day thanks to them, bodily needs multiply, and yet the truth is still far off, and man still remains the most predatory and slovenly of animals, and the tendency in the majority of mankind is towards degeneration and the permanent loss of all vitality. In such conditions an artist’s life has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his role, since it turns out that, in reality, he is working for the amusement of a predatory, slovenly animal and supporting the existing order of things. But I don’t want to work and will not … Nothing’s any use, let the earth go to hell and gone!”

“Missyuska, leave us,” Lida said to her sister, obviously finding my words harmful for such a young girl.

Zhenya looked sadly at her sister and mother and left.

“Such nice things are commonly said when one wants to justify one’s indifference,” said Lida. “To reject hospitals and schools is easier than to treat or teach people.”

“True, Lida, true,” the mother agreed.

“You threaten to stop working,” Lida went on. “Obviously you value your works highly. But let’s stop arguing, we’ll never see eye to eye, because I place the least perfect of all little libraries and first-aid kits, which you’ve just spoken of with such scorn, above all the landscape paintings in the world.” And straightaway, turning to her mother, she began in a completely different tone: “The prince has lost a lot of weight and is greatly changed since he visited us. They sent him to Vichy”⁸

She told her mother about the prince, so as not to speak with me. Her face was burning, and to conceal her agitation, she bent low to the table, as if she were nearsighted, pretending to read the newspaper. My presence was disagreeable. I said good-night and went home.

IV

Outside it was quiet; the village on the other side of the pond was already asleep, there was not a single light to be seen, and only the pale reflections of stars shone faintly on the pond. By the gate with the lions Zhenya stood motionless, waiting to see me off.

“Everyone’s asleep in the village,” I said to her, trying to make out her face in the darkness, and I saw her dark, sorrowful eyes directed at me. “The tavernkeeper and the horse thieves are sleeping peacefully, and we respectable people annoy each other and argue.”

It was a sad August night—sad because autumn was already in the air; covered by a purple cloud, the moon was rising, barely lighting up the road and the dark fields of winter wheat on either side. There were lots of falling stars. Zhenya walked down the road beside me, trying not to look at the sky, so as not to see the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.

“I think you’re right,” she said, shivering from the night’s dampness. “If all people together could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon know everything.”

“Of course. We are higher beings, and if we were really conscious of the whole power of human genius and lived only for higher purposes, then in the end we would become like gods. But that will never be—mankind will degenerate, and there won’t be any trace of genius left.”

When the gates could no longer be seen, Zhenya stopped and hastily pressed my hand.

“Good night,” she said, shivering; her shoulders were covered only by a little blouse, and she hunched up from the cold. “Come tomorrow.”

The thought that I would be left alone, annoyed, dissatisfied with myself and with other people, gave me an eerie feeling; and now I myself tried not to look at the falling stars.

“Spend another moment with me,” I said. “I beg you.”

I loved Zhenya. It must be that I loved her for meeting me and seeing me off, for looking at me tenderly and with admiration. How touchingly beautiful her pale face was, her slender neck, her slender arms, her frailty, her idleness, her books! And her intelligence? I suspected that she was of uncommon intelligence, I admired the breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the severe and beautiful Lida, who did not like me. Zhenya liked me as an artist, I had won her heart with my talent, I passionately wanted to paint for her alone, and I dreamed of her as my little queen who, together with me, would one day possess these trees, fields, mists, the dawn, this nature, wonderful, enchanting, but in the midst of which I had till then felt myself hopelessly lonely and useless.

“Stay another moment,” I asked. “I implore you.”

I took off my coat and covered her chilled shoulders; she, afraid of looking ridiculous and unattractive in a man’s coat, laughed and threw it off, and at that moment I embraced her and began to shower kisses on her face, shoulders, hands.

“Till tomorrow!” she whispered, and cautiously, as if afraid of breaking the silence of the night, embraced me. “We have no secrets from each other, I must tell mama and my sister everything at once … It’s so scary! Mama’s nothing, mama likes you, but Lida!”

She ran towards the gates.

“Good-bye!” she called.

And then for about two minutes I listened to her running. I had no wish to go home, nor any reason to go there. I stood for a while in thought and quietly trudged back, to look again at the house where she lived, a dear, naïve old house, which seemed to look at me with the windows of its mezzanine as if with eyes, and to understand everything. I went past the terrace, sat down on a bench by the tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm, and looked at the house from there. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyus lived, there was a flash of bright light, then a peaceful green—the lamp had been covered with a shade. Shadows moved about … I was filled with tenderness, quietude, and satisfaction with myself—satisfaction that I could be carried away and fall in love—and at the same time I felt discomfort at the thought that just then, a few steps away from me, in one of the rooms of that house, lived Lida, who did not like, and perhaps hated, me. I sat and kept waiting, in case Zhenya came out, listening, and it seemed to me that there was talking in the mezzanine.

About an hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows could no longer be seen. The moon had risen high over the house, lighting up the sleeping garden, the paths; the dahlias and roses in the flower garden in front of the house were clearly visible and seemed to be all of the same color. It was getting very cold. I left the garden, picked up my coat on the road, and unhurriedly plodded home.

When I came to the Volchaninovs’ the next day after dinner, the glass door to the garden was wide open. I sat on the terrace, expecting that Zhenya would appear at any moment on the tennis court beyond the flower garden, or on one of the paths, or that her voice would come from inside; then I went to the drawing room, the dining room. There was not a soul. From the dining room I walked down the long corridor to the front hall, then back. There were several doors in the corridor, and behind one of them Lida’s voice rang out.

“To a crow somewhere … God …” she said loudly and slowly, probably dictating. “God sent a piece of cheese … To a crow … somewhere … ⁹ Who’s there?” she suddenly called out, hearing my footsteps.

“It’s me.”

“Ah! Excuse me, I can’t come right now, I’m busy with Dasha.”

“Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

“No, she and my sister left this morning to visit our aunt in Penza province. And in the winter they will probably go abroad …” she added after a pause. “To a crow somewhere … God sent a pie-e-ece of che-e-ese … Have you written that?”

I went out to the front hall and, not thinking of anything, stood and looked from there at the pond and the village, and the words came to me:

“A piece of cheese … To a crow somewhere God sent a piece of cheese …”

And I left the estate by the same road I had come there on the first time, only in reverse: from the yard to the garden, past the house, then down the linden avenue … There a boy caught up with me and gave me a note. “I told my sister everything, and she demands that I part with you,” I read. “It is beyond me to upset her by my disobedience. Forgive me, and God grant you happiness. If you only knew how bitterly mama and I are weeping!”

Then the dark avenue of firs, the collapsed fence … In the field where rye was flowering then and quail were calling, cows and hobbled horses now wandered. Here and there on the hills the winter wheat showed bright green. A sober, everyday mood came over me, and I felt ashamed of everything I had said at the Volchaninovs, and bored with life, as before. I went home, packed, and left that evening for Petersburg.

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Recently, going to the Crimea, I met Belokurov on the train. As usual, he was wearing his vest and embroidered shirt, and when I asked how he was getting along, he said: “By your prayers.” We got to talking. He had sold his estate and bought another, a smaller one, in Lyubov Ivanovna’s name. Of the Volchaninovs he said little. Lida, according to him, was still living at Shelkovka and teaching children in the school; she had gradually succeeded in gathering a circle of people sympathetic to her, who had formed themselves into a strong party and, at the last zemstvo elections, had “ousted” Balagin, who till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of Zhenya, Belokurov told me only that she was not living at home and he did not know where she was.

I am beginning to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and only rarely, while painting or reading, will I suddenly recall, as if at random, now the green light in the window, now the sound of my own footsteps in the fields at night, as I, in love, made my way home, rubbing my hands from the cold. And still more rarely, at moments when solitude weighs on me and I feel sad, I dimly remember, and for some reason I am gradually beginning to think that I, too, am remembered, waited for, and that we will meet …

Missyus, where are you?

APRIL 1896