Forty Stories

The House with the Mezzanine

AN ARTIST’S STORY

I

SOME six or seven years ago, when I was living in T— — province, I stayed on the estate of a young landowner called Belokurov, a man who always rose very early, dressed himself in one of those sleeveless jackets worn by peasants, drank beer in the evenings, and perpetually complained to me that he could never find anyone who sympathized with him. He lived in a little house in the garden, while I lived in the old mansion in the huge columned ballroom with no furniture except the wide sofa on which I slept and the table on which I played patience. Even on calm days there was always the sound of moaning in the ancient stoves, and during a thunderstorm the whole house shook as though on the point of collapse; and it was rather terrifying, especially at night, when the ten great windows blazed in the flashes of lightning.

I was doomed by fate to a life of permanent idleness, and did nothing whatever. For whole hours I gazed out of the windows at the sky, the birds, the avenues of trees, and read whatever the mails brought me, and slept. Sometimes I slipped away from the house and wandered about aimlessly until late at night.

Once on my way home I happened upon an estate I had never seen before. The sun was already setting, and the evening shadows lay over the ripening rye. There were two rows of ancient, towering fir trees, planted so close together that they formed two parallel walls enclosing an avenue of somber beauty. I climbed easily over a fence and walked down the avenue, my feet slipping on a two-inch-thick carpet of fir needles. It was quiet and dark but for the occasional gleams of golden light shimmering high in the treetops, painting the spiders’ webs in rainbow colors. Suffocating and overpowering was the fragrance of the pines. I soon turned into a long avenue of lime trees. Here, too, everything spoke of neglect and age. Last year’s leaves rustled mournfully beneath my feet, and shadows lurked in the twilight between the trees. From an ancient orchard on my right a gold-hammer sang feebly and listlessly; it gave the impression of being very old. And then the lime trees came to an end, and I went past a white house with a terrace and a mezzanine, and quite suddenly there unfolded before my eyes a view of the manorial courtyard with a large pond, a bathhouse, a huddle of green willows, and a village beyond the pond dominated by a high and slender belfry crowned with a cross blazing in the light of the setting sun. For a moment I was under the spell of something very dear and familiar to me: it was as though I had seen this same scene in the days of my childhood.

An old and sturdy gate, the white stone gateposts adorned with lions, led from the courtyard into open fields; here two young women were standing. The older of the two was thin and pale and very pretty, with great masses of chestnut hair piled high on her head, and she had a small straight mouth and a severe expression. She scarcely glanced at me. The other was still quite young, hardly more than seventeen or eighteen, and she too was thin and pale, but her lips were full and her enormous eyes followed me with a look of surprise as I walked past. She said some words in English and looked embarrassed. I felt I had known these charming faces all my life. I went home with the feeling that I had experienced a pleasant dream.

Soon afterwards, around noon, I was walking with Belokurov near the house when the grass rustled beneath a spring carriage as it came into our courtyard; the older of the two girls was sitting in it. She had come to collect subscriptions in aid of the victims of a fire. Without looking at us, she spoke gravely and in great detail about the number of houses which had burned down in the village of Siyanovo, the number of men, women, and children rendered homeless, and the measures proposed by the committee for the relief of the victims, for she was herself a member of the committee. She gave us the subscription list so that we could write down our names, then she put the list away, and prepared to take her leave.

“You have completely forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovich.” She addressed Belokurov, offering him her hand. “Do come and visit with us, and if Monsieur N. [she mentioned my name] would like to see how his admirers live, and if he would care to come, then Mama and I would be only too pleased.”

I bowed.

When she had gone, Pyotr Petrovich began to tell me about her. According to him, she was a young woman of good family, her name was Lydia Volchaninova, and the estate on which she lived with her mother and sister was called Shelkovka, like the village on the other side of the pond. Her father had occupied an important post in Moscow, and held the rank of privy councilor when he died. Although they possessed considerable wealth, the Volchaninovs lived in the country all the year round, never leaving the estate. Lydia was a teacher in the zemstvo ¹ school in her home village of Shelkovka, and earned twenty-five rubles a month. This was all the money she spent on herself, and she was proud of earning her own living.

“They’re an interesting family,” said Belokurov. “We might go over and see them. They will be delighted to see you.”

One afternoon on a holiday we remembered the Volchaninovs and drove over to see them. The mother and the two daughters were at home. It was obvious that Yekaterina Pavlovna, the mother, had once been pretty, but she had become more bloated than her years warranted, and she was short-winded, melancholy, and absent-minded. She tried to entertain me with talk about painting. Learning from her daughter that I might visit Shelkovka, she hurriedly called to mind two or three landscapes of mine she had seen on exhibition in Moscow, and now asked me what I was attempting to express in them. Lydia, or, as she was called at home, Leda, talked more to Belokurov than to me. Grave and unsmiling, she asked him why he did not work in the zemstvo, and why he had never attended a single one of its meetings.

“It’s not right, Pyotr Petrovich,” she said reproachfully. “It’s not right at all—it’s a shame!”

“True, Leda, true,” her mother agreed. “It’s a shame!”

“All of our district is in Balagin’s hands,” Leda went on, turning to me. “He is the chairman of the local council, and all official business in the district goes to his nephews and brothers-in-law, and he does exactly as he pleases. We must fight him! We young people ought to form a strong party, but you see what kind of young people we have among us. For shame, Pyotr Petrovich!”

The younger sister, Zhenia, remained silent during the conversation about the zemstvo. She never took part in serious conversations, not being considered grown-up in the family, and they always called her by the pet name Missy, because she used to call her governess Miss when she was a child. All the time she examined me curiously, and when I was turning the pages of the photograph album she kept saying: “There’s my uncle … there’s my godfather …” and she kept pointing at the photographs. In her childish way she pressed her shoulder against mine, and I clearly saw her small undeveloped breasts, her thin shoulders, her braided hair, and her slim waist tightly drawn in by a belt.

We played croquet and lawn tennis, wandered about the garden, drank tea, and sat a long while over supper. After the high-columned empty ballroom where I lived, I felt pleasantly comfortable in this small cozy house where there were no oleographs hanging on the walls, and the servants were addressed as “you,” and not as “thou,” and everything seemed pure and youthful thanks to the presence of Leda and Missy, and the atmosphere breathed a sense of order. At supper Leda again talked to Belokurov about the zemstvo, about Balagin, about school libraries. She was a lively, sincere, and persuasive young woman, and it was interesting to listen to her although she spoke in a loud voice a great deal, perhaps because she was accustomed to speaking in this way at school. On the other hand, my friend Pyotr Petrovich still clung to the habit of his student days, reducing all discussion to argument. He spoke in a bored and languid voice, at vast length, with an obvious desire to be taken for a man of intelligence and progressive views. Gesticulating, he knocked a sauceboat over with his cuff, and it made a large pool on the tablecloth, but it seemed that no one noticed it except me.

When we made our way home, the night was dark and still.

“I call it good breeding,” Belokurov sighed, “not so much when you don’t upset a sauceboat over the tablecloth, but when you don’t notice it if someone else does. Yes, they are an admirably cultured family. I’m out of touch with nice people—terribly out of touch. It’s all the fault of business, business!”

He went on to discuss all the hard work which goes with being a landed proprietor. And I thought: “What a ponderous, lazy, good-for-nothing he is!” Whenever he spoke seriously, he kept saying “Er—er—” painfully drawling out his hesitations, and he worked exactly as he talked, slowly, always getting behindhand, never on time. Nor did I have any great belief in his business sense, for the letters I gave him to post remained in his pocket for weeks.

“The worst of it is,” he muttered as we walked along together, “the worst of it is that you go on working and no one has any sympathy for you. No sympathy at all!”

II

Soon I started calling on the Volchaninovs. Usually I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life. All the time they would be talking on the terrace, and I would hear the rustle of skirts and the whispering sound of pages being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the sight of Leda receiving patients during the day, giving out books, and going off to the village bareheaded under a sunshade, while in the evenings she would declaim in a loud voice about the zemstvo and about schools. She was a beautiful, slender, unfailingly correct young woman with thin, sensitive lips, and whenever a serious discussion got under way she would say to me coldly: “This won’t interest you.”

I was unsympathetic to her. She disapproved of me because I was a landscape painter and my paintings did not represent the needs of the people, and she felt therefore that I was indifferent to all her deepest beliefs. I remember riding along the shores of Lake Baikal and meeting a Buryat girl on horseback. She wore a shirt and blue sailcloth trousers. I asked her to sell me her pipe, and while we were talking, she gazed contemptuously at my European features and my hat. A moment later, bored with my conversation, she uttered a wild yell and galloped away. In exactly the same way Leda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she showed no signs of her dislike, but I could feel it, and sitting on the bottom step of the terrace, I gave way to my sense of irritation and said that to treat peasants without being a doctor was to deceive them, and it was easy to be charitable if one was the owner of five thousand acres.

Her sister Missy had no such cares and spent her life in complete idleness, as I did. When she awoke in the morning she would take a book onto the terrace and read it in a deep armchair, her feet scarcely touching the ground, or she would hide away with the book somewhere in the avenue of lime trees, or she would pass through the gate into the open fields. She spent the day reading, her eyes glued avidly on the page, and only an occasional weary and listless glance, and her extreme pallor, showed how exhausted she became from reading. When I came on the scene and when she saw me, she would blush a little, put the book aside, and gazing at me with her enormous eyes, she would tell me in her high-spirited way about everything that had happened: how the chimney in the servants’ quarters had caught fire or how one of the workmen had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually wore a light-colored blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We took walks together and gathered cherries to make into preserves or went boating together, and when she jumped up to reach the cherries or pulled on the oars, her thin and delicate arms gleamed through her wide sleeves. Or else I sketched, and she would stand there beside me, watching breathlessly.

One Sunday at the end of July, I went over to see the Volchaninovs around nine o’clock in the morning. I went through the park, staying far from the house, looking for white mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer, marking the places where I found them so that I could pick them later with Zhenia. A warm wind was blowing. I could see Zhenia and her mother coming back from church, both wearing light holiday dresses, and Zhenia was holding on to her hat because of the strong wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the terrace.

Being a man without any care in the world, always seeking some justification for a life of perpetual idleness, I found these mornings on summer holidays on the estate especially charming. When the gardens were all green and wet with dew, shining joyously in the sun, and when the oleanders and the mignonettes spread their perfume all round the house, and when the young people have just returned from church and are drinking tea in the garden, and when they are all joyful and charmingly dressed, and when you know that all these healthy, beautiful, well-fed people will be doing nothing all day, at such times I long for life to be always like this. So I thought as I wandered about the garden, ready to pursue my careless wanderings all day and all summer.

Zhenia came from the house carrying a basket. She had an expression on her face suggesting that she knew, or felt, she would find me in the garden. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked me a question she went ahead of me so that she could see my face.

“Yesterday,” she said, “a miracle happened in our village. Pelageya, the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines were any use to her, but yesterday an old woman whispered something over her, and she has recovered.”

“This is of no importance,” I said. “No need to go to old women or sick people to find miracles. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is beyond our understanding is a miracle.”

“Aren’t you afraid of things you can’t understand?”

“No, I march boldly up to the incomprehensible, and refuse to submit to it. I am superior to all these phenomena. Men should realize they are superior to lions and tigers and stars, they are greater than anything in nature, greater than the things they profess not to understand which they call miracles. Otherwise we are not men, but mice, afraid of everything.”

Zhenia supposed that because I was a painter I must know a good deal and could accurately divine anything I did not know. She longed for me to lead her into the realm of the eternal and the beautiful, into that higher world where she thought I was at home, and she talked to me about God, about life everlasting, and about the miraculous. And I, who refuse to believe that I and my imagination will perish forever after my death, would reply: “Yes, people are immortal.” “Yes, eternal life awaits us.” And she would listen and believe and never demand proof.

We were going home when she suddenly paused and said: “Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she? I adore her passionately and I would lay down my life for her at any moment. Tell me”—Zhenia touched my sleeve with her finger—“tell me why you are always arguing with her? Why do you get so irritated?”

“Because she is wrong.”

Zhenia gave her head a protesting shake, and tears came to her eyes. “That’s incomprehensible!” she said.

At that very moment Leda had just returned from somewhere and was standing near the steps with a riding whip in her hands, a slender beautiful figure in the streaming sunlight. She was giving orders to one of the laborers. Then, in a great hurry and talking loudly, she received two or three patients, and with a businesslike, preoccupied air she went through all the rooms of the house, opening one cupboard after another, and then she went to the mezzanine; it took some time to find her and call her for dinner, and by the time she came down we had already finished the soup. Somehow I remember all these little details and love to dwell on them, and I remember everything that happened that day even though nothing of great importance occurred. After lunch Zhenia read, lying in a deep armchair, while I sat on the lowest step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast, and a fine, thin rain began to fall. It was warm, the wind had dropped, and it seemed the day would never come to an end. Yekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace with a fan. She was very sleepy.

“Oh, Mama,” Zhenia said, kissing her hand. “It’s not good for you to sleep during the day.”

They adored each other. When one went into the garden the other would stand on the terrace and call out: “Hello, Zhenia!” or “Mama, where are you?” They always prayed together, and they shared the same beliefs, and understood each other very well, even when they said nothing. And their attitude toward people was exactly the same. Yekaterina Pavlovna soon grew accustomed to my presence and became fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days, she would send out to ask whether I was well. And she had an enthusiastic way of looking at my drawings, and she would relate what was happening as openly and freely as Missy, and she often confided her domestic secrets to me.

She was in awe of her elder daughter. Leda never cared for endearments, and always spoke seriously: she lived her own life, and to her mother and sister she was as sacred and mysterious as an admiral sitting in his cabin is to his sailors.

“Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she?” her mother used to say.

Now as the rain fell softly we spoke about Leda.

“Yes, she is a remarkable person,” her mother said, adding in a low conspiratorial voice, with a nervous glance over her shoulder: “You have to search far and wide for people like that. Even so, I am beginning to be a bit worried. The school, the dispensary, books—they are all very well, but why go to extremes? She is twenty-four, and it is time she was thinking seriously about herself. If you spend your time with books and dispensaries, you find that life slips by without your being aware of it.… She ought to be married.”

Zhenia, pale from reading and with her hair in disorder, lifted her head and said, as though to herself, but looking at her mother: “Mama dear, it is all in the hands of God!”

Then she plunged back into her book.

Belokurov came over, wearing a peasant jacket and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, and when it grew dark we spent a long time over supper, and once more Leda spoke about her schools and about Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb. When I left the Volchaninovs that evening, I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day with the melancholy consciousness that everything in the world comes to an end, however long it may last. Zhenia saw us to the gate, and perhaps because I had spent the whole day with her from morning to night, I felt strangely lonely and bored without her, and I realized how dear to me this charming family had become, and for the first time during all that summer I was overcome with the desire to paint.

“Tell me, why do you lead such a boring, colorless life?” I asked Belokurov as we were walking home. “As for me, my life is difficult, boring, and monotonous because I am a painter, different from other people, and I have been eaten up with envy and dissatisfaction with myself and misgivings over my work ever since I was quite young. I shall always be poor, and a vagabond, but as for you—you are a normal, healthy man, a landowner, a gentleman—why then is your life so uninteresting? Why do you get so little out of life? Why, for instance, don’t you fall in love with Leda or Zhenia?”

“You forget I love another woman,” Belokurov answered.

He was referring to his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the little house. I used to see the lady every day. She would be walking in the garden, plump and massive, pompous as a fatted goose, wearing Russian costume with strings of beads, always carrying a sunshade, and the servants would call her for meals and tea. Some three years before this she had taken one of the small houses for the summer, and she had stayed on with Belukurov, and apparently she proposed to stay there forever. She was ten years older than he was, and she kept a strict watch over him, so much so that when he left the house he had to ask her permission. She often gave way to deep, masculine sobs, and then I would send word to her that unless she stopped, I would have to give up my apartment; and she always stopped.

When we came home, Belokurov sat down on my sofa, brooding and frowning, while I began pacing up and down the carpet, aware of a sweet emotion stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I felt a desire to talk about the Volchaninovs.

“Leda could only fall in love with a zemstvo worker, someone who is just as fascinated by hospitals and schools as she is,” I said. “For the sake of a young woman like that a man should be prepared to become a zemstvo worker, and even wear out a pair of iron boots, as in the fairy story. And then there’s Missy! What an adorable person she is!”

Then Belokurov began to talk at great length, with his drawling “er-er-er,” about the disease of the age—pessimism. He spoke with confidence, and by his tone it might be thought I was having an argument with him. Hundreds of miles of empty, monotonous, burned-out steppe were no drearier than this man who sat and talked and gave no sign of ever going away.

“It’s not a question of pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably. “It’s just that ninety-nine out of a hundred people don’t have any brains.”

Belukurov took this as a personal remark, and he walked out, deeply insulted.

III

“The prince is staying at Malozyomovo and sends you his greetings,” Leda said, coming in and taking off her gloves. “He had a lot of interesting things to say. He promised to raise the question of a medical center at Malozyomovo at the provincial assembly, but he says there’s not much hope.” And then, turning to me, she said: “Please excuse me, I was forgetting that this cannot be of the slightest interest to you.”

I was irritated by her remark.

“Why shouldn’t it be interesting to me?” I asked with a shrug. “You don’t care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question interests me greatly.”

“Yes?”

“It does indeed. In my opinion a medical center at Malozyomovo is quite unnecessary.”

My irritation was communicated to her. She looked at me, half closed her eyes, and said: “Then what is necessary? Paintings of landscapes?”

“No, landscapes aren’t necessary. You don’t need anything there!”

She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper, which had just come in the mail. A moment later she said quietly, evidently restraining her deep feelings: “Last week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a medical center near by, she would still be alive. Even landscape painters, I should think, might have convictions on this subject.”

“I have very definite convictions, I assure you,” I answered, while she took refuge behind her newspaper as though unwilling to listen to me. “In my opinion, medical centers, schools, libraries, dispensaries—all these under present conditions only serve to keep the people enslaved. They are being held down with heavy chains, and you are not breaking the chains, you are only adding new links to them. That’s what I think!”

She raised her eyes to me and smiled scornfully, but I went on, trying to catch the thread of my ideas: “What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all those Annas, Mouras, Pelageyas, bend their backs from early morning to late at night, fall ill from working beyond their strength, spend their whole lives worrying about their sick and starving children, always dreading death and disease, always having to doctor themselves, fading early and aging quickly and dying in foul-smelling filth! Their children grow up, and then it is the same story all over again, and hundreds of years pass by, and millions of people are still living worse than the beasts—in perpetual fear, for the sake of a crust of bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having time to think about their souls, never having time to remember they are made in the image and likeness of God. Cold, hunger, animal fear, the heavy burden of toil—these are like the drifts of snow, cutting them off from the pathways leading them to spiritual activity, to everything that distinguishes a man from a beast, to the only thing that makes life worth living. You come to their aid with your hospitals and schools, but you are not delivering them from their shackles. On the contrary, you are forcing them deeper and deeper into slavery, for by introducing new prejudices into their lives you increase the number of their wants, not to mention the fact that they have to pay the zemstvo for the drugs and the books, and so they have to work harder than ever!”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Leda said, putting down her newspaper. “I’ve heard all that before. I will say only one thing—it is no good sitting with folded arms. True, we are not saving mankind, and perhaps we are making a great many mistakes, but we do what we can, and—we are right! The great and holy task of a civilized man is to serve his neighbors, and we are trying to serve them as best we can. You may not like it, but it is impossible to please everyone.”

“True, Leda, true,” said her mother.

Her mother’s courage always failed her in Leda’s presence, and while she was talking she would look timidly at her daughter, afraid of saying anything superfluous or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but would always agree with her: “True, Leda, true!”

“Teaching the peasants to read and write, giving them books full of wretched moralizings and quaint adages, and building medical centers can no more diminish their ignorance or decrease the death rate than the lamp in your window can light up the whole of your vast garden,” I said. “You are not giving them anything by interfering in their lives. You only create new wants, and make them have to work more.”

“Good heavens, something has to be done!” Leda said angrily, and I could tell from her voice that she thought my arguments completely worthless, and despised them.

“You must free people from hard physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lifted from them, they must be given a breathing space so that they don’t have to spend their whole lives at the stove and the washtub and in the fields. They should have time to think about their souls and about God, and time to develop their spiritual faculties. The salvation of every human being lies in spiritual activity—in the continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it unnecessary for them to work at rough physical labor, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery all these books and dispensaries really are! Once a man is aware of his true vocation, he can only be satisfied with religion, science, and art—not with those other trifles!”

“Free them from work?” Leda gave a smile. “Is that possible?”

“Yes, if we take upon ourselves a share of the work. If all of us, townspeople and country people alike, all without exception, agreed to share the work which is expended to satisfy the physical needs of mankind, then perhaps none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked only three hours a day, then the rest of our time would be free. And then, in order to be still less dependent upon our bodies and upon physical labor, imagine that we invent machines which will take the place of labor, and imagine that we make an effort to reduce our requirements to the minimum. We should harden ourselves and our children, so that they would no longer fear hunger and cold, and then we wouldn’t be perpetually worrying about health, as the Annas, Mouras, and Pelageyas of the world worry! If we didn’t take medicines and maintain dispensaries, tobacco factories, and distilleries—what a lot of free time we would have after all! We would all—all of us together—devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the peasants sometimes work communally to repair and mend the roads, so all of us together, the whole community, would search together for truth and the meaning of life, and—I am sure of it—the truth would be very soon discovered, and man would be delivered from his continual, agonizing, oppressive fear of death, and even death itself might be conquered.”

“But you are contradicting yourself,” Leda said. “You keep talking about science while denying the need for literacy.”

“What is the good of literacy when men have nothing to read but the signs on public houses and occasional books which they don’t understand? We have had that kind of literacy since the days of Rurik.² Gogol’s Petrushka has been reading for a long time now, but the villages haven’t changed since the time of Rurik. What is needed is not literacy, but freedom for the full development of men’s spiritual faculties. What we need is not schools, but universities.”

“So you are opposed to medicine too?”

“Yes, medicine should be required only for the study of diseases as natural phenomena, not for their cure. It is no use treating diseases, unless we treat the causes. Remove the chief cause, physical labor, and there will be no diseases. I don’t admit the existence of a science that cures diseases!” I went on excitedly. “True science and true art are not directed toward temporary or partial ends, but they are directed toward the eternal and the universal—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek after God and the soul, and when they are harnessed to our everyday evils and necessities—when they are harnessed to dispensaries and libraries—then they only complicate and burden life! We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, and we have plenty of literate people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and poets. All our intelligence, all our spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs.… Scientists, writers, and painters are hard at work, and thanks to them the comforts of life are increasing daily. The demands of the body multiply, but the truth is still far away, and man continues to be an entirely rapacious and filthy animal, and everything is tending toward the degeneration of the greater part of mankind and the decay of human vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist becomes meaningless, and the more talented he is, the stranger and more incomprehensible becomes the role he plays in society, for he would appear to be working only for the amusement of rapacious and filthy animals while he supports the established order. I have no desire to work, and I won’t work!… Nothing is any use! Let the world go reeling to hell!”

“Missy, leave the room,” Leda said to her sister, apparently thinking my words would have a bad effect on a young girl.

Zhenia looked sadly at her mother and sister, and went out.

“People usually say these charming things when they want to justify their own callousness,” Leda said. “Denying the usefulness of hospitals and schools is easier than curing diseases and teaching.”

“True, Leda, true,” her mother agreed.

“You were threatening to give up working,” Leda went on. “Apparently you place a high value on your works of art. Let us give up arguing, for we shall never agree on anything, and I regard the most imperfect library or dispensary as of infinitely greater value than all the landscapes in the world.” Suddenly she turned to her mother and began speaking in an entirely different tone of voice. “The prince is very thin, and he has changed a lot since he was last here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy.”

She went on talking to her mother about the prince to avoid talking to me. Her face was burning, and to conceal her agitation she bent low over the table as though she were nearsighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went home.

IV

It was very quiet outside. The village on the further side of the pond was already asleep, and there was not a light anywhere to be seen. Only on the pond lay the pale reflection of the glimmering stars. At the gate with the lions Zhenia was waiting to accompany me on my walk.

“They’ve all gone to sleep in the village,” I said, trying to make out her face in the darkness. I could see her dark mournful eyes gazing at me fixedly. “The innkeeper and the horse thieves are fast asleep, at peace, while we, who should know better, quarrel and antagonize one another.”

It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because there was already a breath of autumn in the air. The moon was rising behind a purple cloud, shedding scarcely any light along the road and the dark fields of winter wheat stretching away on both sides. At times a shooting star would fall. Zhenia walked beside me, and she avoided looking up at the sky so as not to see the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.

“I think you are right,” she said, trembling in the damp night air. “If all the people were to devote themselves to spiritual activities, they would soon come to know everything.”

“Of course. We are higher beings, and if we really realized the full power of human genius and lived only for higher things, then we would ultimately become like gods. But it will never happen. Mankind will degenerate and no traces of that genius will ever be found.”

When we could no longer see the gates, Zhenia paused and hurriedly pressed my hand.

“Good night,” she said, trembling. She had nothing but the thin blouse over her shoulders, and she was shivering with cold. “Come tomorrow.”

I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone in a mood of irritation and annoyance with myself and others, and I too tried not to look at the falling stars.

“Please stay with me a little longer,” I said. “Please.”

I was in love with Zhenia. I must have loved her because she met me when I came and always walked with me a little way when I went home, and because she looked at me with tender, admiring glances. Her pale face, her slender neck, her thin hands, her delicacy and her laziness and her books—all these held a wistful appeal for me. And her intelligence? I surmised she had a remarkable intelligence and I was fascinated with the breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the austere and beautiful Leda, who had no love for me. Zhenia liked me because I was a painter. I had conquered her heart with my talent, and I longed passionately to paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen who would one day inherit with me all these trees, fields, mists, and dawns, all those miraculous and enchanting scenes from nature where until now I had felt so hopelessly lonely and unwanted.

“Please stay a little longer,” I begged her. “Only a little longer.”

I took off my overcoat and covered her shivering shoulders; and becase she was afraid of looking funny and ugly in a man’s coat she laughed and threw it off, and then I put my arms round her and began to cover her face, her shoulders, her hands, with kisses.

“Until tomorrow,” she whispered, and gently, as though afraid of breaking the silence of the night, she embraced me. “We have no secrets from each other now. Quickly I must tell everything to Mama and my sister.… I’m so afraid! I’m not afraid of Mama, for she loves you, but my sister …”

Then she ran toward the gates.

“Good-by!” she called back.

Then for some moments I heard her running. I had no desire to return home, and there was nothing to return home for. For a while I stood there lost in thought, and then I turned slowly back to look once more at the house she lived in, that house which was so old and innocent and dear to me; and the windows of the mezzanine looked down on me like eyes, seeming to understand everything. I walked past the terrace and sat on a bench by the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness of an ancient elm, and once again I gazed up at the house. I could see the windows of the mezzanine, where Missy slept, and the bright light shining there, but this light turned later to a faintly glowing green—she had pulled a shade over the lamp. Shadows stirred.… I was filled with a sense of tenderness and calm contentment—a contentment which came with my discovery that I had fallen helplessly in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy with the knowledge that Leda, who disliked and perhaps hated me, was lying in bed in one of those rooms only a few yards away. I sat there, straining my ears, waiting to see whether Zhenia would come out, and I fancied I heard voices coming from the mezzanine.

An hour passed. The green lamp went out, and no more shadows could be seen. The moon rode high over the house, shining on the pathways and the sleeping garden. The dahlias and roses in the flower bed in front of the house could be seen distinctly, and everything seemed to be of one color. It grew very cold. I left the garden, picked up my coat from the road, and made my way slowly home.

The following day when I went to see the Volchaninovs after dinner, the glass door leading to the garden was wide open. I sat down for a while on the terrace, expecting to see Zhenia appear from behind the flower beds or along one of the pathways, or perhaps I would hear the sound of her voice coming from the house. Then I went through the drawing room and the dining room. There was no one to be seen. From the dining room I walked down a long corridor that led to the reception room, and back again. Several doors opened on the corridor, and from behind one of them came the voice of Leda.

“To the crow somewhere … God …” she was saying in a loud, singsong voice, probably dictating. “God sent a piece of cheese … To the crow … somewhere … Who’s there?” she called out suddenly, hearing my footsteps.

“It is I.”

“Oh, excuse me, I cannot come out just now. I am giving Dasha her lesson.”

“Is Yekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

“No, she left this morning with my sister. They are going to stay with an aunt in Penza province, and in the winter they will probably go abroad.” She added after a moment’s pause: “God sent … the cr-ow … so-me-where … a pie-ce of chee-se … Have you written it down?”

I went out in the reception room without a thought in my head, gazing at the pond and the village in the distance, while her voice followed me: “A pie-ce of chee-se … God sent the crow somewhere a piece of cheese …”

And I went back by the way I had come on the day when I first visited the house, only this time in reverse. I went from the courtyard into the garden and along the side of the house until I reached the avenue of lime trees.… There I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note which read: “I told my sister everything, and she says I must never see you again. I’m weak, and dare not anger her by disobeying her. God grant you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how many bitter tears Mama and I have shed!”

I went down the dark avenue of firs past the rotting fence.… In the fields where the rye was once ripening and the quail were screaming, now hobbled horses and cows were grazing. Here and there on the low hills the winter crops were already showing green. A sobering mood took hold of me, the things I had said at the Volchaninovs’ filled me with shame, and I was as bored with life as I ever was before. When I reached home, I packed my things, and I left that evening for St. Petersburg.

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Not long ago, when on my way to the Crimea, I met Belokurov on the train. He was wearing the familiar peasant jacket and embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: “Thank you for your good wishes.” We fell into conversation. He had sold his old estate and bought another, smaller one in Lyubov Ivanovna’s name. There was little he could tell me about the Volchaninovs. He told me Leda was still living at Shelkovka, teaching children at her school. Little by little she had succeeded in gathering around her a circle of friends who agreed with her and who were able to form a strong party, and at the last zemstvo election they had “gotten rid” of Balagin, the man who had kept the whole district under his thumb in the old days. As for Zhenia, all he knew was that she had left home, and he did not know where she was.

I am beginning to forget the house with the mezzanine, but sometimes when I am painting or reading, for no reason at all, quite suddenly, I find myself remembering the green lamp at the window and the sound of my footsteps echoing through the fields of the night as I walked home on the day I was in love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And sometimes too—but this happens more rarely—when I am weighed down with melancholy and loneliness, I am the prey of other confused thoughts, and it seems to me that I, too, am being remembered, and she is waiting for me, and we shall meet again.…

Missy, where are you?

1896

¹ The zemstvo was the elective district council in pre-revolutionary Russia.

² The Varangian chieftain who settled in Novgorov in 862 and is regarded as the founder of Russia.