Fifty-Two Stories

IONYCH

I

When newcomers to the provincial capital S. complained about the boredom and monotony of life, the local people, as if to justify themselves, said that, on the contrary, life in S. was very good, that there was a library, a theater, a club; there were balls; that, finally, there were intelligent, interesting, agreeable families, with whom one could strike up an acquaintance. And they would point to the Turkin family as the most cultivated and talented.

This family lived on the main street, next door to the governor, in their own house. Ivan Petrovich Turkin himself, a stout, handsome, dark-haired man with side-whiskers, organized amateur theatricals for charitable purposes, and himself played old generals and coughed very amusingly. He knew many anecdotes, charades, sayings, liked to joke and be witty, and always had such an expression that it was impossible to tell whether he was joking or being serious. His wife, Vera Iosifovna, a thin, nice-looking lady in a pince-nez, wrote long stories and novels, and willingly read them aloud to her guests. Their daughter, Ekaterina Ivanovna, a young girl, played the piano. In short, each member of the family had a certain talent. The Turkins received guests cordially and displayed their talents for them cheerfully, with heartfelt simplicity. Their big stone house was spacious and cool in the summer; half the windows looked out on the old, shady garden, where nightingales sang in springtime; when there were guests in the house, there was a chopping of knives in the kitchen, the smell of fried onions in the yard—and each time this presaged an abundant and delicious supper.

And Doctor Dmitri Ionych Startsev, when he had just been appointed zemstvo doctor¹ and settled in Dyalizh, six miles from S., was also told that, as a cultivated man, he must make the acquaintance of the Turkins. One winter day, in the street, he was introduced to Ivan Petrovich; they chatted about the weather, the theater, cholera, and an invitation ensued. In the spring, on a holiday—it was the Ascension²—after receiving his patients, Startsev went to town for a little diversion and incidentally to buy something or other. He went on foot, unhurriedly (he did not yet own horses), murmuring a song:

When I’d not yet drunk tears from the cup of life…³

In town he had dinner, strolled in the garden, then Ivan Petrovich’s invitation came to his mind somehow of itself, and he decided to call on the Turkins, to see what sort of people they were.

“Welcome if you please,” said Ivan Petrovich, meeting him on the porch. “Very, very glad to see such an agreeable guest. Come, I’ll introduce you to my better half. I’ve been telling him, Verochka,” he went on, as he introduced the doctor to his wife, “I’ve been telling him that he has no right of passage to sit in his hospital, that he should devote his leisure time to society. Don’t you agree, dearest?”

“Sit here,” Vera Iosifovna said, seating her guest beside her. “You may pay court to me. My husband is a jealous Othello, but we’ll try to behave so that he doesn’t notice anything…”

“Ah, my ducky, my little rascal…,” Ivan Petrovich murmured tenderly and kissed her on the forehead. “You’ve come just in time.” He turned back to the guest. “My better half has written a biggy novel, and tonight she’ll read it aloud.”

“Jeanchik,” Vera Iosifovna said to her husband, “dites que l’on nous donne du thé.”⁴

Startsev was introduced to Ekaterina Ivanovna, an eighteen-year-old girl, who resembled her mother very much, was just as thin and nice-looking. Her expression was still childlike and her waist slender, delicate; and her maidenly, already developed breast, beautiful and healthy, spoke of springtime, a real springtime. Then they drank tea with preserves, with honey, with sweets, and with very tasty cookies that melted in the mouth. With the coming of evening, guests gradually gathered, and Ivan Petrovich looked at each of them with his laughing eyes and said:

“Welcome if you please.”

Then they all sat in the drawing room with very serious faces, and Vera Iosifovna read her novel. She began thus: “It was freezing cold…” The windows were wide open, one could hear knives chopping in the kitchen, and there was a smell of frying onions…The soft, deep armchairs were comfortable, the lamps flickered so soothingly in the twilight of the drawing room; and now, on a summer evening, when voices and laughter drifted in from outside and a whiff of lilacs came from the yard, it was hard to understand how it could be freezing cold and how the setting sun was shining its cold rays on the snowy plain and the lone wayfarer walking down the road. Vera Iosifovna read about how a young, beautiful countess established schools, hospitals, and libraries on her estate, and how she fell in love with an itinerant artist—about something that never happens in life, and yet listening to it was pleasant, comfortable, and such nice, peaceful thoughts came into your head that you had no wish to get up…

“None too bad…,” Ivan Petrovich pronounced quietly.

And one of the guests, listening and in his thoughts carried off somewhere very far away, said barely audibly:

“Yes…indeed…”

An hour went by, then another. In the town park nearby an orchestra played and a choir sang. When Vera Iosifovna closed her notebook, they kept silent for some five minutes and listened to “Luchinushka,”⁵ which the choir was singing, and this song told of something that was not in the novel and that had happened in real life.

“Do you publish your work in magazines?” Startsev asked Vera Iosifovna.

“No,” she said, “I don’t publish anywhere. I write and hide it in the bookcase. Why publish?” she explained. “We have means enough.”

And for some reason they all sighed.

“Now you play something, Kotik,” Ivan Petrovich said to his daughter.

They raised the lid of the grand piano and opened the scores that lay ready there. Ekaterina Ivanovna sat down and struck the keys with both hands; and then at once struck them again with all her might, and again, and again. Her shoulders and breast shook, she stubbornly struck in the same place, and it seemed she would not stop until she had driven the keys into the piano. The drawing room was filled with thunder; everything thundered: the floor, the ceiling, the furniture…Ekaterina Ivanovna played a difficult piece, interesting precisely in its difficulty, long and monotonous, and Startsev, listening to it, pictured stones pouring down a high mountain, pouring and pouring, and he would have liked them to stop pouring soon, and at the same time Ekaterina Ivanovna, rosy with effort, strong, energetic, with a lock of hair falling across her forehead, pleased him very much. After the winter spent in Dyalizh, among sick people and peasants, to sit in a drawing room, to look at this young, graceful, and probably pure being, and to listen to these noisy, tedious, but all the same cultivated sounds, was so pleasant, so new…

“Well, Kotik, tonight you played better than ever,” Ivan Petrovich said with tears in his eyes, when his daughter finished and got up. “ ‘Die now, Denis, you’ll never write better.’ ”⁶

They all surrounded her, congratulated her, marveled, assured her that it was long since they had heard such music, and she listened silently, smiling slightly, and triumph was written all over her.

“Wonderful! Superb!”

“Wonderful,” Startsev said as well, succumbing to the general enthusiasm. “Where did you study music?” he asked Ekaterina Ivanovna. “At the conservatory?”

“No, I’m still just preparing for the conservatory, and meanwhile I’ve been studying here with Madame Zavlovsky.”

“Have you finished your studies in the local high school?”

“Oh, no!” Vera Iosifovna answered for her. “We invited teachers to the house. In high school or boarding school, you’ll agree, there may be bad influences; while a girl is growing up, she should remain under the influence of her mother alone.”

“But all the same I’m going to the conservatory,” said Ekaterina Ivanovna.

“No, Kotik loves her mama. Kotik is not going to upset her papa and mama.”

“No, I’m going! I’m going!” Ekaterina Ivanovna said, jokingly and capriciously, and stamped her little foot.

At supper Ivan Petrovich displayed his talents. Laughing with his eyes only, he told anecdotes, cracked jokes, asked amusing questions and answered them himself, and all the while spoke his extraordinary language, elaborated during long exercises in witticism, and obviously long since become habitual to him: biggy, none too bad, I hummingly thank you…

But that was not all. When the guests, sated and content, were crowding in the front hall sorting out their coats and canes, bustling about them was the lackey Pavlusha, or Pava, as he was called there, a boy of about fourteen, short-haired, with plump cheeks.

“Go on, Pava, perform!” Ivan Petrovich said to him.

Pava assumed a pose, raised his arm, and said in a tragic tone:

“Die, wretched woman!”

And they all laughed.

“Amusing,” thought Startsev, going outside.

He stopped at a restaurant and drank some beer, then went home to Dyalizh on foot. He walked and sang to himself all the way:

“Thy voice for me, affectionate and languid…”⁷

Having walked six miles and then gone to bed, he did not feel the least bit tired; on the contrary, it seemed to him that he would gladly have walked another fifteen.

“None too bad…,” he remembered, falling asleep, and he laughed.

II

Startsev kept thinking about visiting the Turkins, but there was a great deal of work in the hospital, and he could never find any free time. More than a year went by like that, in toil and solitude; but then a letter in a blue envelope was brought from town…

Vera Iosifovna had been suffering from migraine for a long time, but lately, when Kotik threatened every day that she was going to the conservatory, the attacks began to recur more frequently. All the doctors in town visited the Turkins, and finally the zemstvo doctor’s turn came. Vera Iosifovna wrote him a touching letter, asking him to come and ease her suffering. Startsev came and after that started visiting the Turkins often, very often…In fact he helped Vera Iosifovna a little, and she was already telling all her guests that he was an extraordinary, amazing doctor. But he no longer went to the Turkins’ on account of her migraine…

A holiday. Ekaterina Ivanovna finished her long, wearisome piano exercises. Then they sat in the dining room for a long time having tea, and Ivan Petrovich was telling some funny story. But the bell rang; he had to go to the front hall to meet some guest; Startsev profited from the moment of confusion and said to Ekaterina Ivanovna in a whisper, greatly agitated:

“For God’s sake, I beg you, don’t torment me, let’s go to the garden!”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if perplexed and wondering what he wanted from her, but she got up and went.

“You spend three or four hours playing the piano,” he said, walking after her, “then you sit with Mama, and there’s no possibility of talking with you. Grant me at least a quarter of an hour, I beg you.”

Autumn was coming, and in the old garden it was quiet, sad, and dark leaves lay along the paths. Dusk fell early.

“I haven’t seen you for a whole week,” Startsev went on, “and if you only knew what suffering it is! Let’s sit down. Listen to me.”

They both had a favorite place in the garden: a bench under an old spreading maple. And now they sat down on that bench.

“What can I do for you?” Ekaterina Ivanovna asked in a dry, business-like tone.

“I haven’t seen you for a whole week, I haven’t heard you for so long. I passionately want, I yearn for your voice. Speak.”

He admired her freshness, the naïve expression of her eyes and cheeks. Even in the way her dress sat on her, he saw something extraordinarily sweet, touching in its simple and naïve grace. And at the same time, despite this naïveté, she seemed to him very intelligent and developed beyond her age. He could talk with her about literature, about art, about anything; he could complain to her about life, about people, though it would happen during a serious conversation that she would suddenly start laughing inappropriately or run off into the house. Like nearly all the girls in S., she read a great deal (in general people read little in S., and in the local library they said that if it were not for the girls and the young Jews, they could just as well close the library); that delighted Startsev no end, and he excitedly asked her each time what she had been reading lately and listened, enchanted, as she told him.

“What have you been reading this week, while we haven’t seen each other?” he asked now. “Speak, I beg you.”

“I’ve been reading Pisemsky.”⁸

“What exactly?”

“A Thousand Souls,” Kotik replied. “And what a funny name Pisemsky has: Alexei Feofilaktych!”

“Where are you going?” Startsev said, horrified, when she suddenly got up and walked towards the house. “I’ve got to talk to you, I must tell you…Stay with me for at least five minutes! I beseech you!”

She stopped as if she wished to say something, then awkwardly thrust a note into his hand and ran into the house, and there sat down at the piano again.

“Tonight, at eleven o’clock,” Startsev read, “be in the cemetery by Demetti’s memorial.”

“Well, that’s not smart at all,” he thought, having come to his senses. “Why the cemetery? What for?”

It was clear: Kotik was fooling. Indeed, who would seriously conceive of scheduling a meeting at night, far from town, in a cemetery, when it could easily be arranged on the street, in the town park? And was it fitting for him, a zemstvo doctor, an intelligent, serious man, to sigh, to receive little notes, to drag himself to cemeteries, to do stupid things that even schoolboys would laugh at nowadays? What would this love affair come to? What would his colleagues say when they learned of it? So Startsev was thinking as he wandered among the tables in his club, and at half past ten he suddenly up and drove to the cemetery.

He already had his own pair of horses and the coachman Panteleimon in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was quiet, warm, but warm in an autumnal way. In the outskirts, by the slaughterhouse, dogs were howling. Startsev left the horses at the edge of town, in one of the lanes, and went to the cemetery on foot. “People have their oddities,” he thought. “Kotik is also an odd one and—who knows?—maybe she’s not joking and will come,” and he surrendered to this weak, futile hope, and it intoxicated him.

He walked half a mile across a field. The cemetery appeared in the distance as a dark strip, like a grove or a big garden. He saw the white stone fence, the gate…In the moonlight one could read on the gate: “The hour is nigh…” Startsev went through the gate, and first of all he saw white crosses and tombstones on both sides of a wide alley, and the dark shadows cast by them and the poplars; and the white and black stretched far around, and sleepy trees bowed their branches over the white. It seemed brighter here than in the field; the maple leaves, looking like paws, were sharply outlined on the yellow sand of the alleys and on the slabs, and the inscriptions on the tombstones were clearly visible. In the first moments, Startsev was struck by what he was now seeing for the first time in his life and would probably not chance to see again: a world unlike anything else—a world where moonlight was so lovely and gentle, as if this were its cradle, where there was no life, no, no, but in each dark poplar, in each grave, one felt the presence of a mystery, promising a quiet, beautiful, eternal life. Along with the scent of autumn leaves, the tombstones and the withered flowers breathed of forgiveness, sorrow, and peace.

All around there was silence; stars looked down from the sky in profound humility, and the sound of Startsev’s footsteps was loud and out of place. And only when the clock began to strike in the church and he imagined himself dead, buried there for all eternity, did it seem to him that someone was looking at him, and for a moment he thought that this was not peace and quiet, but the blank anguish of non-being, suppressed despair…

The Demetti memorial was in the form of a chapel with an angel on top. Once the Italian opera was passing through S. One of the singers died, was buried, and this memorial was set up. No one in town remembered her, but the lamp over the entrance reflected the moonlight and looked like it was burning.

No one was there. Who would come there at midnight? But Startsev waited, and, as if the moonlight were warming the passion in him, he waited passionately, his imagination picturing kisses, embraces. He sat by the memorial for about half an hour, then strolled in the side alleys, hat in hand, waiting and thinking about the many women and girls buried here in these graves, who had been beautiful, charming, who had loved, had burned with passion at night, yielding to caresses. What wicked tricks, indeed, Mother Nature plays on human beings, how vexing the awareness of it! So Startsev thought, and at the same time he felt like crying out that he wanted, that he was waiting for love at all costs; it was no longer pieces of marble that showed white before him, but beautiful bodies, he saw shapes that modestly hid in the shade of the trees, he felt warmth, and this languor was becoming oppressive…

And like the lowering of a curtain, the moon went behind a cloud, and suddenly everything around became dark. Startsev barely managed to find the gate—it was already as dark as on an autumn night. Then he wandered for an hour and a half, looking for the lane where he had left his horses.

“I’m tired, I can barely keep my feet,” he said to Panteleimon.

And, delightedly seating himself in the carriage, he thought:

“Oof, I’d better not gain weight!”

III

The next day, in the evening, he went to the Turkins’ to propose. But this turned out to be awkward, because Ekaterina Ivanovna was in her room having her hair done by a hairdresser. She was getting ready for an evening dance at the club.

Again he had to sit for a long time in the dining room having tea. Ivan Petrovich, seeing that the guest was pensive and bored, took some notes from his waistcoat pocket and read an amusing letter from a German manager about how all the lockitudes on the estate were broken, and there was a crashing of the wallery.

“And they’ll probably provide no small dowry,” thought Startsev, listening distractedly.

After a sleepless night, he was in a stunned state, as if he had been given something sweet and somniferous; his heart was foggy, but joyful, warm, and at the same time some cold, heavy little snippet in his head was reasoning:

“Stop before it’s too late! Is she any match for you? She’s spoiled, capricious, she sleeps till two, and you’re a churchwarden’s son, a country doctor…”

“Well, what then?” he thought. “So be it!”

“Besides, if you marry her,” the little snippet went on, “her family will make you drop your zemstvo work and live in town.”

“Well, what of it?” he thought. “If it’s town, it’s town. They’ll give a dowry, we’ll buy furniture…”

Finally Ekaterina Ivanovna came in wearing a ball gown, décolleté, pretty, clean, and Startsev admired her so much and went into such rapture that he could not utter a single word, but only looked at her and laughed.

She started saying goodbye, and he—there was no longer any reason for him to stay—stood up, said it was time he went home: his patients were waiting.

“Nothing to be done,” said Ivan Petrovich. “Go, then, and on your way take Kotik to the club.”

Outside it was drizzling rain, very dark, and only by Panteleimon’s rough coughing could they tell where the horses were. They put up the hood.

“I lie on the rug,” said Ivan Petrovich, seating his daughter in the carriage, “he lies like a rug…Touch ’em up! Goodbye if you please!”

They drove off.

“I went to the cemetery last night,” Startsev began. “That was so ungenerous and unmerciful on your part…”

“You went to the cemetery?”

“Yes, I was there and waited for you till nearly two o’clock. I suffered…”

“Suffer, then, if you don’t understand jokes.”

Ekaterina Ivanovna, pleased that she had so cleverly played a joke on the amorous man and that he was so much in love, laughed loudly and suddenly cried out in fright, because just then the horses turned sharply through the gates of the club, and the carriage tilted. Startsev put his arm around Ekaterina Ivanovna’s waist, and she, frightened, pressed herself to him. He could not help himself and kissed her passionately on the lips, on the chin, and tightened his embrace.

“Enough,” she said drily.

A moment later she was no longer in the carriage, and the policeman by the lit-up entrance of the club yelled at Panteleimon in a disgusting voice:

“What’re you stopping for, you old crow? Keep driving!”

Startsev went home, but soon came back. At midnight, in a borrowed tailcoat and a stiff white cravat that somehow kept sticking out and trying to slip from the collar, he was sitting in the club drawing room and saying to Ekaterina Ivanova with enthusisasm:

“Oh, how little they know who have never loved! I think no one has yet described love correctly, and it’s hardly possible to describe this tender, joyful, tormenting feeling, and anyone who has experienced it at least once will not try to convey it in words. What’s the use of preambles and descriptions? What’s the use of unnecessary eloquence? My love is boundless…I ask you, I beg you,” Startsev finally brought out, “be my wife!”

“Dmitri Ionych,” Ekaterina Ivanovna said with a very serious expression, having thought a little. “Dmitri Ionych, I am very grateful to you for the honor, I respect you, but…” She stood up and remained standing, “But, I’m sorry, I cannot be your wife. Let’s talk seriously, Dmitri Ionych, you know I love art more than anything in the world, I madly love, I adore music, I’ve devoted my whole life to it. I want to be an artist, I want fame, success, freedom, and you want me to go on living in this town, to go on with this empty, useless life, which has become unbearable to me. To become a wife—oh, no, I’m sorry! A human being should strive for a lofty, brilliant goal, and family life would bind me forever. Dmitri Ionych” (she smiled slightly, because in saying “Dmitri Ionych” she remembered “Alexei Feofilaktych”), “Dmitri Ionych, you are a kind, noble, intelligent man, you are the best…” Tears came to her eyes. “I feel for you with all my heart, but…but you’ll understand…”

And, to keep herself from bursting into tears, she turned away and left the drawing room.

Startsev’s heart stopped beating anxiously. On leaving the club, he first of all took off the stiff cravat and drew a deep breath. He was slightly ashamed, and his vanity was wounded—he had not expected a refusal—and he could not believe that all his dreams, longings, and hopes had brought him to such a silly end, as in a little amateur play. And he was sorry for his feeling, for his love, so sorry that it seemed he might just burst into tears or whack Panteleimon’s broad back as hard as he could with his umbrella.

For three days he was fit for nothing, did not eat, did not sleep, but when the rumor reached him that Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone to Moscow to enter the conservatory, he calmed down and began to live as before.

Afterwards, remembering occasionally how he had wandered in the cemetery, or how he had driven all over town looking for a tailcoat, he stretched lazily and said:

“So much bother, really!”

IV

Four years went by. Startsev already had a large practice in town. Every morning he hurriedly received patients at his hospital in Dyalizh, then went to his patients in town, went now not with a pair but with a troika with little bells, and came home late at night. He gained weight, grew stout, and did not like going on foot, because he suffered from shortness of breath. Panteleimon, too, gained weight, and the wider he grew, the more pitifully he sighed and complained of his bitter lot: he was sick of driving!

Startsev visited many houses and met many people, but he did not become close with anyone. The local inhabitants’ conversations, views of life, and even their looks irritated him. Experience gradually taught him that when you play cards with a local inhabitant or dine with him, he is a peaceable, good-natured, and even rather intelligent man, but the moment you start talking with him about something non-edible, for instance politics or science, he gets nonplussed or goes off into such stupid and spiteful philosophy that all you can do is wave your hand and walk away. Even when Startsev once tried talking with a liberal inhabitant and said that, thank God, mankind was progressing, and that a time would come when they could dispense with passports and capital punishment, the inhabitant looked at him askance and incredulously and asked:

“So anybody could go down the street and put a knife into whoever he wants?” And when Startsev, in company, at supper or tea, said that one must work, that it was impossible to live without working, everybody took it as a reproach and became angry and obnoxiously quarrelsome. With all that, the inhabitants did nothing, decidedly nothing, were not interested in anything, and it was simply impossible to think up something to talk about with them. So Startsev avoided conversation, and only ate and played whist, and when he happened upon a festive dinner in some house, and they invited him to take part, he sat down and ate silently, looking into his plate; and everything they talked about then was uninteresting, unjust, and stupid; he felt irritated, edgy, but he said nothing, and because he was always sternly silent and looked into his plate, he became known in town as “the pouting Pole,” though he had never been a Pole.

He avoided such amusements as the theater and concerts, but he did play whist every evening for about three hours, with pleasure. He had another amusement, which he was drawn into imperceptibly, little by little: this was taking from his pocket in the evening the banknotes he had earned from his practice, and it would happen that his pockets were all stuffed with these banknotes—yellow and green, smelling of perfume, or vinegar, or incense, or whale oil—adding up to some seventy roubles; and when he collected several hundred, he took them to the Mutual Credit Society and deposited them in his account.

In all the four years since Ekaterina Ivanovna’s departure, he had been to the Turkins’ only twice, at the invitation of Vera Iosifovna, who was still being treated for migraine. Each summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to visit her parents, but he had not seen her once; it somehow did not happen.

But now four years had gone by. On one quiet, warm morning a letter was brought to him in the hospital. Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionych that she missed him very much and urged him to visit them and ease her suffering, and incidentally today was her birthday. Below was a postscript: “I join in Mama’s invitation. K.”

Startsev thought it over and in the evening went to the Turkins’.

“Ah, welcome if you please!” Ivan Petrovich met him, smiling with his eyes only. “Bonzhurings!”

Vera Iosifovna, already much aged, her hair white, shook Startsev’s hand, sighed affectedly, and said:

“You don’t want to court me, Doctor, you never visit us, I’m already too old for you. But here a young girl has come, maybe she will have more luck.”

And Kotik? She had grown thinner, paler, become more beautiful and shapely; but she was already Ekaterina Ivanovna and not Kotik; the former freshness and expression of childlike naïveté were no longer there. Her gaze and her manners had something new in them—timid and guilty, as if here, in the Turkins’ home, she no longer felt herself at home.

“It’s been so long!” she said, offering Startsev her hand, and one could see that her heart was beating anxiously; and looking into his face intently, with curiosity, she went on: “How you’ve filled out! You’re tanned, you’ve matured, but on the whole you’ve changed very little.”

Now, too, he liked her, liked her very much, but there was already something missing in her, or something superfluous—he himself was unable to tell which precisely, but something kept him from feeling as he used to. He did not like her paleness, her new expression, her weak smile, voice, and a little later he no longer liked her dress, the armchair she was sitting in, did not like something in the past, when he had almost married her. He remembered his love, the dreams and hopes that had excited him four years ago—and he became embarrassed.

They had tea with cake. Then Vera Iosifovna read a novel aloud, read about things that never happen in life, and Startsev listened, looked at her beautiful gray head, and waited for her to finish.

“Giftless,” he thought, “isn’t the one who can’t write stories, but the one who writes them and can’t conceal it.”

“None too bad,” said Ivan Petrovich.

Then Ekaterina Ivanovna played the piano long and noisily, and when she finished, she was long thanked and admired.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t marry her,” thought Startsev.

She looked at him, and was apparently waiting for him to invite her to the garden, but he said nothing.

“So, let’s talk,” she said, going up to him. “How is your life? What are you up to? How are things? I’ve been thinking about you all these days,” she went on nervously. “I wanted to send you a letter, wanted to go myself to see you in Dyalizh, and was already set on going, but then changed my mind—God knows how you feel about me now. I waited for you with such excitement today. For God’s sake, let’s go to the garden.”

They went to the garden and sat there on the bench under the old maple tree, like four years ago. It was dark.

“So how are you getting on?” Ekaterina Ivanovna asked.

“Not bad, inching away,” Startsev replied.

And he could not think up anything more. They fell silent.

“I’m excited,” Ekaterina Ivanovna said and covered her face with her hands, “but pay no attention. I feel so good at home, I’m so glad to see everybody, and I can’t get used to it. So many memories! I thought we’d go on talking till morning.”

Now he saw her face up close, her shining eyes, and here, in the darkness, she looked younger than in the room, and it was even as if her former childlike expression had come back to her. And indeed she looked at him with naïve curiosity, as if she wished to examine more closely and understand the man who had once loved her so ardently, with such tenderness and such ill luck; her eyes thanked him for that love. And he remembered everything that had been, all the smallest details, how he had wandered in the cemetery, how later, towards morning, he had come home, exhausted, and he suddenly felt sad and sorry for the past. A little fire lit up in his soul.

“Do you remember how I took you to the club one evening?” he said. “It was raining then, dark…”

The little fire was burning brighter in his soul, and now he wanted to talk, to complain about life…

“Ahh!” he said with a sigh. “You ask how I’m getting along. How do we get along here? We don’t. We age, gain weight, go to seed. Day and night—swift in flight, life goes by drably, without impressions, without thoughts…Daytime lucre, and evening the club, the company of cardplayers, alcoholics, poseurs, whom I can’t stand. What’s the good of it?”

“But you have work, a noble purpose in life. You liked so much to talk about your hospital. I was sort of strange then, I fancied myself a great pianist. Nowadays all girls play the piano, and I also played, like all of them, and there was nothing special in me: I’m as much a pianist as Mama is a writer. And, of course, I didn’t understand you then, but later, in Moscow, I often thought of you. I thought only of you. What happiness it is to be a zemstvo doctor, to help those who suffer, to serve people. What happiness!” Ekaterina Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. “When I thought of you in Moscow, you appeared to me so ideal, so lofty…”

Startsev thought of the banknotes he so enjoyed taking from his pockets in the evenings, and the fire in his soul went out.

He got up to go to the house. She took him under the arm.

“You’re the best of the people I’ve known in my life,” she went on. “We’ll see each other, we’ll talk, won’t we? Promise me that. I’m not a pianist, I no longer have any illusions on that account, and I won’t play or talk about music in your presence.”

When they went into the house, and in the evening light Startsev saw her face and her sad, grateful, searching eyes directed at him, he felt uneasy and thought again:

“It’s a good thing I didn’t marry then.”

He started saying goodbye.

“You have no right of passage to leave without supper,” Ivan Petrovich said, seeing him to the door. “It’s quite perpendicular on your part. Go on, perform!” he said, addressing Pava in the front hall. Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with a moustache, assumed a pose, raised his arm, and said in a tragic tone:

“Die, wretched woman!”

All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage and looking at the dark house and garden that had once been so precious and dear to him, he remembered it all at once—Vera Iosifovna’s novels, and Kotik’s noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovich’s witticisms, and Pava’s tragic pose—and thought, if the most talented people in the whole town are so giftless, what kind of town can it be.

Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.

“You don’t come to see us. Why?” she wrote. “I fear you’ve changed towards us; I fear it, and I’m frightened at the very thought of it. Set me at peace, come and tell me that all is well.

“It’s necessary that I speak to you. Yours, E. T.”

He read this letter, pondered, and said to Pava:

“Tell them, my dear boy, that I cannot come today, I’m very busy. I’ll come, say, in three days or so.”

But three days went by, then a week, and he did not go. Once, passing by the Turkins’ house, he remembered that he should stop by if only for a minute, but he pondered and…did not stop by.

And he never visited the Turkins again.

V

A few more years have gone by. Startsev has gained still more weight, grown fat, breathes heavily, and now walks with his head thrown back. When he rides, plump, red, in his troika with little bells, and Panteleimon, also plump and red, with a beefy neck, sits on the box, stretching his straight, as if wooden, arms out in front of him, and shouts at the passersby: “Keep ri-i-ight!” the picture is impressive, and it looks as if it is not a man riding, but a pagan god. He has an enormous practice in town, has no time to catch his breath, and already owns an estate and two houses in town, and is on the lookout for a third, more profitable one, and when they tell him in the Mutual Credit Society about some house that is up for sale, he goes to the house unceremoniously, and, passing through the rooms, paying no attention to the undressed women and childen who stare at him in astonishment and fear, jabs at all the doors with his stick, and says:

“Is this the study? Is this a bedroom? And what’s this?”

And all the while he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his forehead.

He has much on his hands, but even so he has not left his post at the zemstvo; he is devoured by greed, he wants to keep it up both here and there. In Dyalizh and in town they now call him simply Ionych. “Where’s Ionych off to?” or “Shouldn’t we invite Ionych to the consultation?”

Probably because his throat is swollen with fat, his voice has changed and become high and shrill. His character has also changed: he has become difficult, irritable. When he receives patients, he is usually angry, raps his stick impatiently on the floor, and shouts in his unpleasant voice:

“Kindly just answer my questions! No talking!”

He is solitary. His life is dull, nothing interests him.

In all the time he has lived in Dyalizh, the love for Kotik was his only joy, and probably the last. In the evenings he plays whist at the club and then sits alone at a big table and eats supper. The servant Ivan, the oldest and most respected one, waits on him. He is served Lafite No. 17, and everybody—the staff of the club, the chef, and the waiter—already knows what he likes and what he does not like, they try their best to please him, or for all they know he will suddenly get angry and rap his stick on the floor.

While eating supper, he occasionally turns and interferes in some conversation:

“What’s that about? Eh? Who?”

And when it so happens that at some neighboring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks:

“Which Turkins do you mean? The ones whose daughter plays the piano?”

That is all that can be said about him.

And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovich has not aged, has not changed at all, is still witty and tells jokes as before; Vera Iosifovna reads her novels to guests as eagerly as before, with heartfelt simplicity. And Kotik plays the piano for four hours every day. She has aged noticeably, is frequently unwell, and goes to the Crimea every autumn with her mother. Seeing them off at the station, Ivan Petrovich, as the train departs, wipes his tears and calls out:

“Goodbye if you please!”

And waves his handkerchief.

1898