Selected Stories

The House with the Mansard

An Artist’s Story

I

IT HAPPENED six or seven years ago, when I was living in one of the districts of the province of T—, on the estate of a landowner called Byelokurov, a young man who got up very early, went about in a long sleeveless peasant coat, drank beer in the evenings, and was always complaining to me that he never met with sympathy from anyone, anywhere. He lived in a lodge in the garden, and I in the old manor house, in an enormous salon with columns, where the only furniture was a wide divan on which I slept, and a table at which I played patience. Here, even in calm weather, there was always a humming sound in the old Amos stoves, and during a thunderstorm the whole house shook as though it were about to crack into pieces; this was somewhat frightening, especially at night, when the ten great windows were suddenly lit up by a flash of lightning.

Condemned by fate to a life of perpetual idleness, I did absolutely nothing. For hours at a time I gazed out the window at the sky, the birds, the garden walks, read everything that was brought me by the post, and slept. Occasionally I left the house and wandered about till late in the evening.

One day as I was returning home I unexpectedly came upon an estate I had never seen before. The sun was already sinking, and evening shadows lay across the flowering rye. Two rows of towering old fir trees, so densely planted that they formed almost solid walls, enclosed an avenue of somber beauty. I climbed the fence with no difficulty, and proceeded along the avenue, slipping on the fir needles which lay almost two inches deep on the ground. It was still and dark but for a shimmer of golden light high in the tree-tops, which here and there cast rainbows on the spider webs. The fragrance of fir needles was almost suffocating. I soon turned into a long avenue of lime trees. Here, too, everything was desolate and aged; last year’s leaves rustled mournfully underfoot, and shadows lurked among the trees. From an ancient orchard on the right came the faint, reluctant note of an oriole—the bird, too, was probably old. And then the lime trees came to an end; I walked by a white house with a veranda and a mansard roof, and there suddenly opened before me a view of a courtyard, a wide pond with a bathhouse, a clump of willows, and on the farther bank a village with a tall, slender belfry on which a cross glowed in the last rays of the setting sun. For a moment I was under the spell of something familiar and very dear to me, as though I had seen this very same landscape at some time in my childhood.

At the white stone gateway that led from the courtyard to the open fields—a solid, old-fashioned pair of gates adorned with lions—stood two girls. One of them, the elder, slender, pale, and very beautiful, with masses of auburn hair and a stubborn little mouth, looked very severe and scarcely took any notice of me; the other, however, still very young—not more than seventeen or eighteen—also slender and pale, but with a large mouth and large eyes, gazed at me with astonishment as I walked by, said something in English, then looked confused; and it seemed to me that I had also known these two charming faces at some remote time. I returned home feeling as if I had had a dream.

Not long after this, one midday when Byelokurov and I were taking a walk near the house, there was an unexpected rustling of grass and a carriage drove into the yard; in it sat one of the girls I had seen—the elder. She had come with a subscription list to ask help for the victims of a fire. Without looking at us she very seriously and precisely told us how many houses in the village of Siyanovo had burned down, the number of men, women, and children left homeless, and what steps the relief committee, of which she was a member, proposed to take. She gave us the list to sign, then put it away and immediately said good-bye.

“You’ve quite forgotten us, Pyotr Petrovich,” she said to Byelokurov, as she gave him her hand. “Come and see us, and if Monsieur N— (she mentioned my name) would care to see how the admirers of his talent live, and will come with you, my mother and I would be delighted.”

I bowed.

When she had gone Pyotr Petrovich began telling me about her. The girl, he said, was of a good family; her name was Lidia Volchaninova, and both the estate on which she lived with her mother and sister and the village on the other side of the pond were called Shelkovka. Her father had once held a prominent position in Moscow, and had died with the rank of privy councilor. Although they had ample means, the Volchaninovs lived in the country summer and winter, never leaving their estate; Lidia taught in the zemstvo school in Shelkovka, her own village, and received a salary of twentyfive rubles a month. She spent nothing on herself but what she earned, and was proud of being self-supporting.

“An interesting family,” said Byelokurov. “Let us go and visit them one day. They will be delighted to see you.”

One day after dinner—it was a holiday—we thought of the Volchaninovs and set out for Shelkovka to see them. We found the mother and both daughters at home. The mother, Yekaterina Pavlovna, who apparently had once been beautiful but now was stouter than her age warranted, suffered from asthma, and was melancholy and absent-minded. She undertook to entertain me with talk about painting. Having learned from her daughter that I might perhaps visit Shelkovka, she had hastily called to mind two or three of my landscapes that she had seen at exhibitions in Moscow, and now asked me what I had intended to express by them. Lidia, or, as she was called at home, Lida, talked more to Byelokurov than to me. Serious and unsmiling, she asked him why he did not work in the zemstvo, and why he had never attended any of its meetings.

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

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

“Our whole district is in the hands of Balagin,” Lida continued, turning to me. “He’s the chairman of the board, and he’s distributed all the district offices among his nephews and sons-in-law, and he does whatever he likes. He ought to be opposed. We young people ought to form a strong party. But you see what our young men are like. It’s a shame, Pyotr Petrovich!”

The younger sister, Zhenya, remained silent while they talked of the zemstvo. She took no part in serious conversation, being considered not quite grown up by her family; they still called her “Misuce,” as though she were a little girl, because as a child that was her way of saying “Mrs.” to her governess. She kept looking at me with curiosity, and when I examined the photograph album she explained it to me: “That’s my uncle … that’s my godfather …” and she drew her little finger across the portraits, childishly brushing against me with her shoulder, and I could see her delicate, undeveloped bosom, her thin shoulders, her plait, and her slender little body tightly drawn in by a sash.

We played croquet and lawn tennis, walked about in the garden, drank tea, and then sat a long time over supper. After the huge, empty salon with columns, I felt somehow at home in this small, cozy house in which there were no oleographs on the walls and the servants were addressed politely; it all seemed very young and pure, thanks to the presence of Lida and Misuce, and everything breathed integrity. At supper Lida again spoke to Byelokurov about the zemstvo, Balagin, and school libraries. She was a spirited, sincere girl with convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her, though she talked a great deal and in a loud voice—perhaps because she was accustomed to speaking in school. My friend Pyotr Petrovich, on the other hand, who from his student days had retained the habit of reducing every conversation to an argument, was tedious, vapid, and long-winded, and spoke with the obvious desire of appearing to be a clever man with progressive views. Gesticulating, he overturned the sauceboat with his cuff, making a large pool on the tablecloth, which apparently was noticed by no one but me.

The night was dark and still as we walked home.

“Good breeding does not consist in not upsetting the sauceboat, but in not noticing it if someone else does,” said Byelokurov, with a sigh. “Yes, an admirable, intellectual family. I’m terribly out of touch with nice people, terribly! And all because of work, work, work!”

He talked of how hard one had to work if one wanted to be a model farmer. And I thought: what a muddled, slothful fellow he is! When he spoke of anything serious his exertion expressed itself in a prolonged series of “er-er-er’s” and he worked exactly as he spoke—slowly, always late, never getting anything done on time. I had no faith in his capacity for business, if only because the letters I gave him to post remained in his pocket for weeks.

“And the hardest thing of all,” he muttered, as he walked along beside me, “the hardest thing of all is that you work and work, and never get any sympathy from anyone. No sympathy whatsoever!”

II

I began to frequent the Volchaninovs’. Generally I sat on the lowest step of the veranda; oppressed by dissatisfaction with myself, and filled with regrets for my life, which was passing so rapidly and uninterestingly, I was forever thinking how good it would be to tear out of my breast the heart that had grown so heavy. Meanwhile, they talked on the veranda, and I could hear the rustling of their dresses and of pages being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the idea that during the day Lida received the sick, distributed books, and frequently went to the village carrying a parasol but without a hat, and in the evening talked in a loud voice about the zemstvo and schools. Whenever the conversation turned on practical matters, this slender, beautiful, invariably austere girl with the exquisitely chiseled little mouth would turn to me and in a dry tone say, “This won’t interest you. …”

She did not find me sympathetic. She disliked me for being a landscape painter and not depicting the needs of the people in my pictures, and also for being indifferent, as she thought, to what she so strongly believed in. I remember once driving along the shore of Lake Baikal and meeting a Buryat girl on horseback, dressed in a shirt and trousers of blue Chinese cotton; I asked her if she would sell me her pipe, and as we talked she stared contemptuously at my European features and my hat; in a moment she grew bored talking to me, and with a wild shout galloped away. In exactly the same way Lida despised me as an alien. She gave no outward sign of her dislike, but I could feel it; and as I sat there on the lowest step of the veranda I experienced a feeling of irritation, and remarked that treating peasants when one was not a doctor was to deceive them, and that it was easy to be philanthropic when one had over five thousand acres of land.

Her sister, Misuce, had no such cares, and spent her life in complete idleness, as I did. As soon as she got up in the morning she would take up a book and start to read, sitting on the veranda in a deep armchair, her feet scarcely touching the floor; or she would seclude herself in the avenue of lime trees, or walk beyond the gates into a field. She spent the entire day poring over a book, but only an occasional tired, dazed look and the extreme pallor of her face revealed that this reading was a mental strain. When I arrived, as soon as she caught sight of me she would flush slightly, drop her book, and, looking into my face with her large eyes, would eagerly tell me whatever had happened—that the chimney in the servants’ quarters had been on fire, or that one of the workmen had caught a big fish in the pond. On ordinary days she usually wore a light blouse and a dark blue skirt. We took walks together, picked cherries for jam, went rowing in the boat; and when she jumped up to reach a cherry or when she pulled the oars, her thin, delicate arms could be seen through the wide, transparent sleeves of her blouse. Sometimes I would sketch while she stood by my side and watched me with delight.

One Sunday at the end of July I arrived at the Volchaninovs’ about nine o’clock in the morning. I walked through the park, keeping at a distance from the house, looking for white mushrooms, which were plentiful that summer, and marking the places where I found them so that later I could come and gather them with Zhenya. A warm breeze was blowing. I saw Zhenya and her mother, both in light holiday dresses, walking home from church, Zhenya holding her hat against the wind. Afterwards I could hear them having tea on the veranda.

For a carefree person like myself, ever seeking an excuse for perpetual idleness, these festive summer mornings in country houses have always held a singular charm. When the garden, all green and sparkling with dew, lies radiant and joyous in the sunshine, when there is a fragrance of mignonette and oleander near the house, when young people, all charmingly dressed and gay, having just returned from church, are drinking tea in the garden, and when one knows that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to do nothing the whole day long, then one wishes that all of life could be like this. These are the thoughts I had as I walked in the garden, and I was quite prepared to stroll about, without occupation and without aim, the whole day, the whole summer.

Zhenya came with a basket; her expression revealed that she had known, or at any rate felt, that she would find me in the garden. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked me a question she walked a little ahead in order to see my face.

“Yesterday a miracle took place in the village,” she said. “Lame Pelageya has been ill a whole year, and no doctors or medicines did her any good, but yesterday an old woman whispered something over her, and she isn’t ill any more!”

“That’s of no importance,” I said. “You don’t have to seek miracles only among the sick and the old. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Anything that is beyond understanding is a miracle.”

“But aren’t you afraid of what you don’t understand?”

“No, I approach phenomena that I do not understand boldly, and do not defer to them. I am above them. Man must recognize his superiority to lions, tigers, the stars, to everything in nature, even to what is beyond understanding and appears to be miraculous, otherwise he is not a man but a mouse, afraid of everything.”

Zhenya thought that, being an artist, I knew a great deal and could accurately divine what I did not know. She longed for me to lead her into the domain of the eternal and the beautiful, to that higher realm where, in her opinion, I was quite at home, and she talked to me of God, eternal life, and the miraculous. And I, unwilling to admit that my self and my imagination would perish forever after death, replied, “Yes, man is immortal.” And she listened, believed, and never demanded proof.

As we walked toward the house she suddenly stopped and said, “Our Lida is a remarkable person. Don’t you think so? I love her with all my heart; I would readily sacrifice my life for her. But tell me”—Zhenya touched my sleeve with her finger—“tell me why you always argue with her. Why do you become so irritated?”

“Because she is wrong.”

Zhenya shook her head in protest, and tears came into her eyes. “That is inconceivable!” she exclaimed.

At that moment Lida, having just returned from somewhere, was standing near the veranda with a riding whip in her hand, a graceful, beautiful figure in the bright sunlight, giving orders to one of the workmen. Bustling about and talking loudly, she took care of two or three sick people, then, with a preoccupied, businesslike expression, walked from room to room, opening one cupboard after another, finally going to the attic. It was a long time before they could find her to call her to dinner, and by the time she came we had already finished the soup.

For some reason I remember and love all these petty details and, although nothing special happened, I still have a vivid memory of that whole day. After dinner Zhenya read, lying in the deep armchair, and I sat on the lowest step of the veranda. We did not talk. The sky was overcast, and a thin, fine rain began to fall. It was hot; the wind had gone down, and it seemed as though the day would never end. Yekaterina Pavlovna, still heavy with sleep, came out onto the veranda carrying a fan.

“Oh, Mama,” said Zhenya, kissing her hand, “it’s not good for you to sleep during the day!”

They adored each other. When one of them went into the garden, the other stood on the veranda looking toward the trees and called, “Oo-hoo, Zhenya!” or “Mamochka, where are you?” They always said their prayers together, sharing an identical faith, and understood each other perfectly, even without words. And their attitude toward people was the same. Yekaterina Pavlovna also became accustomed to my presence, and soon grew attached to me; when I did not come for two or three days she sent to ask if I was well. She, too, gazed admiringly at my sketches, and with the same candor and talkativeness as Misuce, told me everything that happened, often confiding to me her domestic secrets.

She stood in awe of her elder daughter. Lida was never affectionate, and spoke only of serous matters; she lived a life apart, and to her mother and sister was the sacred, somewhat enigmatic figure that an admiral, sequestered in his cabin, is to his sailors. “Our Lida is a remarkable person,” her mother would often say, “isn’t she?”

And now, as the soft rain fell, we talked of Lida.

“She is a remarkable person,” said her mother; then, with a cautious glance over her shoulder, she added in a conspiratorial undertone, “You’d have to search with a lantern by daylight to find another like her! But, you know, I’m beginning to be somewhat alarmed. The school, the dispensary, books—that’s all very well, but why go to extremes? She’s almost twenty-four, you know; it’s time she thought seriously about herself. If you go on like that with books and dispensaries, you don’t see that life is passing. … She ought to marry.”

Zhenya, pale from reading, her hair in disorder, raised her head and spoke as if to herself, while looking at her mother. “Mamochka, it all rests with God’s will.” And again she was immersed in her book.

Byelokurov arrived wearing his peasant coat and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, when it grew dark sat a long time over supper, and Lida again talked about schools and Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb.

As I left the Volchaninovs’ that evening, I carried away the impression of a long, long, idle day, and a melancholy awareness that everything in this world, however long it may last, comes to an end. Zhenya accompanied us to the gateway, and perhaps because I had spent the entire day from beginning to end with her, I began to feel that I should be lonely without her, that this whole charming family was very close to me; and for the first time all summer I had a desire to paint.

“Tell me, why do you lead such a dull, colorless life?” I asked Byelokurov as we walked home together. “My life is dull, difficult, monotonous, because I am a painter, an odd person; from my youth I have been torn by envy, dissatisfaction with myself, and misgivings about my work, and I have always been poor, a vagabond. But you—you’re a healthy, normal man, a landowner and a gentleman—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?”

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

He was referring to his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who was living in the lodge with him. Every day I used to see this lady, plump, podgy, and pompous as a fattened goose, walking about the garden, always with a parasol, dressed in the Russian national costume and strings of beads. The servant was continually calling her either to a meal or to drink tea. Three years before, she had rented one of the lodges for the summer, and had stayed on, apparently forever. She was ten years older than he, and kept him well in hand, so much so that he even had to ask her permission to leave the house. She was given to sobbing in loud, masculine tones, and I used to send word to say that if she did not stop I would give up my room. She stopped.

When we reached home Byelokurov seated himself on the divan and, with a scowl, fell to pondering; I walked up and down the room, stirred by a sweet emotion, as if I were in love. I wanted to talk about the Volchaninovs.

“Lida could fall in love only with a member of the zemstvo, someone who is just as fascinated by hospitals and schools as she is,” I said. “Oh, for the sake of such a girl, not only could one become a member of the zemstvo, but even, as in the fairy tale, wear out a pair of iron boots. And Misuce? How adorable that Misuce is!”

Byelokurov, with his drawling “er-er-er,” held forth at length on the malady of the age—pessimism. He spoke emphatically, in a tone that suggested I was debating with him. Hundreds of versts of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression that is induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going.

“It’s not a question of either pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably. “It’s simply that ninety-nine out of a hundred people have no brains.”

Byelokurov took this as a reflection on himself, was offended, and went away.

III

“The prince is visiting in Maloziomovo, and sends you his greetings,” said Lida, removing her gloves as she came in. “He had a great deal of interesting news. … And he promised to raise the question of a medical station at Maloziomovo again at the next meeting of the provincial assembly, but he says there’s not much hope.” Then, turning to me, she added, “Excuse me, I keep forgetting that this sort of thing can be of no interest to you.”

I felt exasperated. “Why of no interest to me?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders. “You don’t care to hear my opinions, but I assure you, the question is of the greatest interest to me.”

“It is?”

“Yes, it is. In my opinion there is absolutely no need for a medical station at Maloziomovo.”

My irritation communicated itself to her. “And what is there a need for—landscape paintings?”

“No, not for landscape paintings either. There is no need for anything there.”

She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper which had just come by post; a moment later, in a quiet voice, evidently trying to control herself, she said, “Last week Anna died in childbirth; if there had been a medical station in the neighborhood she would be alive now. It seems to me that even landscape painters ought to have some sort of convictions about this matter.”

“I have very definite convictions about it, I assure you,” I replied. But she hid behind the newspaper as if unwilling to hear me. “In my opinion, medical stations, schools, libraries, dispensaries, under existing conditions, serve only to enslave the people. They are fettered by a great chain, and you do not sever the chain, you simply add new links to it—those are my convictions.”

She raised her eyes to my face and smiled derisively, but I went on, trying to catch hold of my main idea.

“What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelageyas are oppressed by work from morning till night, and are all ill from overwork; their entire lives they’re trembling for their sick and hungry children and doctoring themselves in fear of sickness and death; they fade early, age early, and die in filth and stench. Their children grow up and it’s the same story, and so it goes on for hundreds of years, millions of people living worse than animals—in constant dread, and all for a mere crust of bread. The whole horror of their situation lies in the fact that they never have time to think of their souls, never have time to recollect their own image and likeness; hunger, cold, animal fear, massive work, like an avalanche, block all roads to spiritual activity—to the very thing that distinguishes a human being from an animal, to the only thing that makes life worth living. You come to their aid with hospitals and schools, but this does not free them from their shackles; on the contrary, it further enslaves them, since, by introducing new prejudices, you increase the number of their wants; not to mention the fact that they have to pay the zemstvo for their drugs and books, which only increases their burden.”

“I am not going to argue with you,” said Lida, putting down her newspaper. “I’ve heard all that before. I will say only one thing: it is impossible just to sit with your hands in your lap. True, we are not saving mankind, and perhaps we do make mistakes; but we do what we can—and in that we are right. The highest and most sacred task of a civilized man is to serve his neighbor, and we are endeavoring to serve as best we can. You may not like it, but then, one can’t please everyone.”

“True, Lida, true,” said her mother.

She was always timid in Lida’s presence, anxiously glancing at her whenever she wanted to speak, fearful of saying something superfluous or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but always concurred: true, Lida, true.

“Teaching the peasants to read and write, giving them books of wretched little precepts and adages, and medical stations, can no more lessen their ignorance or lower their death rate than the light from your windows can illuminate this huge garden,” I said. “You’re not giving them anything; by meddling in the lives of these people you do nothing but create new needs, new obligations to work.”

“Oh, my God! But we must do something!” exclaimed Lida irately. Her tone made it evident that she considered my arguments trifling and contemptible.

“The people must be freed from heavy physical labor,” I said. “They must be relieved of their yoke, given a respite, so that they do not spend their whole lives at the stove, at the washtub, in the fields, but may also have time to think of their souls, of God, and to develop their spiritual faculties. This spiritual activity—the continual search for truth and the meaning of life—is the vocation of every human being. Make it unnecessary for them to work like beasts of burden, let them feel that they are free, and you will see what a mockery these books and dispensaries are. Once a man becomes conscious of his true vocation, he can be satisfied only by religion, science, art—not by these trifles.”

“Free them from work!” Lida smiled. “Do you really think that is possible?”

“Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labor. If all of us, city and country dwellers alike, everyone without exception, would agree to divide among ourselves the work that is expended in satisfying the physical needs of mankind, each of us would be required to work perhaps two or three hours a day, no more. Imagine if we all, rich and poor alike, worked only three hours a day, and were free the rest of the time! Imagine too, if in order to depend still less upon our bodies, and to work less, we were to invent machines to replace our work, and tried to reduce the quantity of our needs to the minimum! We would harden ourselves and our children, so that they should not fear hunger and cold, and we should not continually tremble for their health like Anna, Mavra, and Pelageya. Imagine if we no longer doctored ourselves, maintained dispensaries, tobacco factories, distilleries—what a lot of free time we should have as a result! All of us together would devote this leisure to science and the arts. Just as the peasants sometimes work as a community to repair the roads, so all of us, as a community, would search for truth and the meaning of life, and—I am convinced of this—the truth would very soon be discovered, mankind would be delivered from this perpetual, agonizing, oppressive fear of death, and even from death itself.”

“But you are contradicting yourself,” said Lida. “You keep talking about science, but you reject literacy.”

“Literacy, when a man can use it only to read tavern signs, or an occasional book that he doesn’t understand—that kind of literacy we have had since the time of Rurik; Gogol’s Petrushka has long been able to read, and yet, as the village was in Rurik’s day, so it has remained. It is not literacy that is needed, but the freedom for a wide development of our spiritual faculties. It is not schools that are needed, but universities!”

“And you reject medicine, too.”

“Yes, it would be required only for the study of diseases as natural phenomena, and not for their cure. If anything is treated, let it be the cause of the disease rather than the disease itself. Remove the principal cause, physical labor, and there will be no disease. I do not acknowledge a science that cures,” I continued, growing excited. “Science and art, when they are genuine, aspire not to temporary, not to partial goals, but to the eternal and the universal—they seek the truth and the meaning of life; they seek God, the soul, and when they are harnessed to the necessities and the evils of the day, to dispensaries, to libraries, they can only complicate and encumber life. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of literate men; but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All of our intellectual and spiritual energies have gone into the satisfaction of temporary, passing needs. … Scientists, writers, and painters work hard; thanks to them, the comforts of life increase daily, the demands of the body are multiplied; meanwhile, truth is a long way off, and man continues to be the most rapacious, the most unclean of animals, and everything tends to the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the permanent loss of all the vital capacities. In such conditions, the life of the artist has no meaning, and the more talented he is the more bizarre and incomprehensible is his role, as, on examination, it appears that he is working for the amusement of a rapacious, filthy animal, and supporting the existing order. I don’t care to work for this, and I will not … Nothing is of any use; let the world sink to the depths of hell!”

“Misuce, leave the room!” said Lida, evidently considering my language pernicious to so young a girl.

Zhenya looked mournfully from her sister to her mother, and went out.

“Such charming things are generally said when people wish to justify their indifference,” said Lida. “It is easier to denounce schools and hospitals than it is to teach or heal.”

“True, Lida, true,” her mother said.

“You threaten to give up working,” Lida continued. “You obviously have a high regard for your work. Let us stop arguing; we shall never agree, since I value the most imperfect of these libraries and dispensaries, of which you have just spoken so contemptuously, more highly than all the landscape paintings in the world.” She abruptly turned to her mother and began speaking in a quite different tone. “The prince is very much changed, and much thinner than when he was last with us. They are sending him to Vichy.”

She went on talking to her mother about the prince in order to avoid speaking to me. Her face was burning, and to conceal her agitation she bent low over the table as if she were shortsighted, and pretended to read the newspaper. My presence was disagreeable to her. I took my leave and went home.

IV

Outside all was quiet; the village on the other side of the pond was already asleep and not a light was to be seen but for the pale reflections of the stars on the water. At the gate with the lions Zhenya was standing motionless, waiting to walk a little way with me.

“Everyone is asleep in the village,” I said, trying to discern her face in the darkness. I could see her sad, dark eyes fixed upon me. “The innkeeper and the horse thieves are sleeping peacefully, while we respectable people argue and irritate each other.”

It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because already there was a scent of autumn in the air. The moon was rising behind a purple cloud, barely lighting the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side of it. From time to time a star fell. Zhenya walked along the road beside me, trying not to look at the sky, to avoid seeing the shooting stars, which for some reason frightened her.

“I think that you are right,” she said, shivering from the damp night air. “If people, all together, could devote themselves to spiritual activity, soon they would know everything.”

“Of course! We are higher beings, and if we actually realized the full power of human genius, and lived only for higher purposes, ultimately we should become like gods. But that will never be—mankind will degenerate, and not a trace of genius will remain.”

When the gates were out of sight, Zhenya stopped and hastily shook my hand.

“Good night,” she said, shivering; her shoulders were covered with nothing but a thin blouse, and she was shrinking from the cold. “Come tomorrow.”

The thought of being left alone in this irritated state of dissatisfaction both with myself and other people terrified me, and I, too, tried not to look at the falling stars.

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

I was in love with Zhenya. I think I loved her because she always met me when I came, and walked with me when I went away; because her face, when she looked at me, was rapt and tender. How touchingly beautiful were her pale face, her slender neck and arms, her weakness, her idleness, her books! And her mind? I surmised that hers was a remarkable intellect; I was enchanted by the scope of her ideas, perhaps because she thought so differently from the austere and beautiful Lida, who did not like me. Zhenya loved me because I was an artist; I had conquered her heart with my talent, and I had a passionate desire to paint only for her; I dreamed of her as my little queen, who one day would hold sway with me over these trees, these fields, the mists, the dawn—all this miraculous, bewitching nature, in whose midst I had till now felt hopelessly alone and useless.

“Stay with me a moment longer,” I pleaded. “I entreat you!”

I took off my coat and put it over her chilly shoulders; she laughed and flung it off, afraid of looking ugly or absurd in a man’s coat, and at that instant I took her in my arms and covered her face, her shoulders, her hands, with kisses. …

“Till tomorrow,” she whispered, and cautiously, as though fearing to violate the stillness of the night, embraced me. “We have no secrets from one another. I must tell my mother and sister at once. … It’s frightening! Mama’s all right, she likes you—but Lida!”

She ran back toward the gate.

“Good-bye!” she called.

For a moment I stood listening to the sound of her running footsteps. I had no desire to go home; there was no reason for me to go there. I stood lost in thought, then slowly made my way back, to look once more at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple old house, with the mansard windows that seemed to be peering down at me like eyes, understanding everything. I walked past the veranda and sat on a bench near the tennis court in the darkness under an ancient elm tree, from where I could look at the house. In the windows of the mansard, where Misuce had her room, there was bright light, then a soft green glow—someone had put a shade over the lamp. Shadows moved about. … I was filled with tenderness, serenity, and satisfaction with myself—satisfaction that I could let myself be carried away and fall in love; and at the same time I was made uneasy by the thought that at this very moment, only a few paces from me, in one of the rooms of that house, was Lida, who did not like me, perhaps even hated me. I sat there waiting to see if Zhenya would come out, and as I listened for her it seemed to me that I could hear the sound of voices in the mansard.

An hour passed. The green light was extinguished, and the shadows were seen no more. The moon stood high above the house, shedding its light upon the sleeping garden and its paths; dahlias and the roses in the flower bed at the front of the house were clearly visible, and everything seemed to be of one color. It began to grow cold. I left the garden, picked up my coat on the road, and slowly made my way home.

When I arrived at the Volchaninovs’ the following day after dinner, the glass door into the garden stood wide open. I sat down on the veranda, expecting that at any moment Zhenya would appear from behind the flower bed on the lawn, in one of the avenues, or that I should hear her voice from within the house. I went into the drawing room, then into the dining room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining room I walked down a long corridor to the entrance hall and back again. There were several doors in this corridor and through one of them I heard Lida’s voice.

“To the crow somewhere … God …” She was speaking in a loud, distinct voice, probably dictating. “God sent a piece of cheese … to the crow … somewhere. … Who’s there?” she suddenly called, hearing my step.

“It is I.”

“Oh! Excuse me, I can’t come out to you just now; I’m giving Dasha her lesson.”

“Is Yekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

“No, she and my sister left this morning for a visit to my aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad,” she added after a pause. “God sent … the crow … a piece … of cheese. … Have you written it?”

I went back by the same way I had come that first day, but in reverse; from the courtyard to the garden, past the house, then along the avenue of lime trees. … At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who handed me a note: “I told my sister everything, and she insists that we part,” I read. “I could not bring myself to hurt her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If you only knew how bitterly Mama and I are weeping!”

Then came the dark avenue of fir trees, and the broken-down fence. … In the field where then the rye had been in flower and quails had called, now there were cattle grazing, and hobbled horses. Here and there the winter corn was bright green on the hills. A sober, prosaic mood took possession of me, and I felt ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs’, and bored with life, as I had been before. When I got home I packed my things, and that evening went to Petersburg.

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Not long ago, on my way to the Crimea, I met Byelokurov in the train. He still wore his peasant coat and an embroidered shirt, and when I asked him how he was he replied, “Thanks to your prayers.” We began to talk and he told me he had sold his estate and bought a smaller one, which he had put in Lyubov Ivanovna’s name. He could tell me little about the Volchaninovs. Lida, he said, was still living in Shelkovka, and teaching in the school; gradually she had succeeded in gathering round her a circle of people who were in sympathy with her ideas, and who formed a strong party; at the last zemstvo elections they had ousted Balagin, who until then had held the whole district under his thumb. About Zhenya he could tell me only that she no longer lived at home, and that he did not know where she was.

I am beginning to forget the house with the mansard, and only now and then, when I am painting or reading, suddenly, for no apparent reason, I recall the green light in the window, the sound of my footsteps echoing through the field at night as I walked home, in love, and chafing my cold hands. And even more rarely, when I am oppressed by loneliness and feeling sad, I dimly remember, and little by little begin to feel that I too am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet. …

Misuce, where are you?

—1896