Five Great Short Stories Page 6

“You forget that I love another woman,” answered Bielokurov.

  He meant his mistress Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the orchard house. I used to see the lady every day, very stout, podgy, pompous, like a fatted goose, walking in the garden in a Russian head-dress, always with a sunshade, and the servants used to call her to meals or tea. Three years ago she rented a part of his house for the summer, and stayed on to live with Bielokurov, apparently for ever. She was ten years older than he and managed him very strictly, so that he had to ask her permission to go out. She would often sob and make horrible noises like a man with a cold, and then I used to send and tell her that if she did not stop I would go away. Then she would stop.

  When we reached home, Bielokurov sat down on the divan and frowned and brooded, and I began to pace up and down the hall, feeling a sweet stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I wanted to talk about the Volchaninovs.

  “Lyda could only fall in love with a Zemstvo worker like herself, some one who is run off his legs with hospitals and schools,” I said. “For the sake of a girl like that a man might not only become a Zemstvo worker, but might even become worn out, like the tale of the iron boots. And Missyuss? How charming Missyuss is!”

  Bielokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of the disease of the century—pessimism. He spoke confidently and argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that, sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.

  “The point is neither pessimism nor optimism,” I said irritably, “but that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no sense.”

  Bielokurov took this to mean himself, was offended, and went away.

  III

  “THE PRINCE is on a visit to Malozyomov and sends you his regards,” said Lyda to her mother, as she came in and took off her gloves. “He told me many interesting things. He promised to bring forward in the Zemstvo Council the question of a medical station at Malozyomov, but he says there is little hope.” And turning to me, she said: “Forgive me, I keep forgetting that you are not interested.”

  I felt irritated.

  “Why not?” I asked and shrugged my shoulders. “You don’t care about my opinion, but I assure you, the question greatly interests me.”

  “Yes?”

  “In my opinion there is absolutely no need for a medical station at Malozyomov.”

  My irritation affected her: she gave a glance at me, half closed her eyes and said:

  “What is wanted then? Landscapes?”

  “Not landscapes either. Nothing is wanted there.”

  She finished taking off her gloves and took up a newspaper which had just come by post; a moment later, she said quietly, apparently controlling herself:

  “Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if a medical man had been available she would have lived. However, I suppose landscape-painters are entitled to their opinions.”

  “I have a very definite opinion, I assure you,” said I, and she took refuge behind the newspaper, as though she did not wish to listen. “In my opinion medical stations, schools, libraries, pharmacies, under existing conditions, only lead to slavery. The masses are caught in a vast chain: you do not cut it but only add new links to it. That is my opinion.”

  She looked at me and smiled mockingly, and I went on, striving to catch the thread of my ideas.

  “It does not matter that Anna should die in childbirth, but it does matter that all these Annas, Marfas, Pelagueyas, from dawn to sunset should be grinding away, ill from overwork, all their lives worried about their starving sickly children; all their lives they are afraid of death and disease, and have to be looking after themselves; they fade in youth, grow old very early, and die in filth and dirt; their children as they grow up go the same way and hundreds of years slip by and millions of people live worse than animals—in constant dread of never having a crust to eat; but the horror of their position is that they have no time to think of their souls, no time to remember that they are made in the likeness of God; hunger, cold, animal fear, incessant work, like drifts of snow block all the ways to spiritual activity, to the very thing that distinguishes man from the animals, and is the only thing indeed that makes life worth living. You come to their assistance with hospitals and schools, but you do not free them from their fetters; on the contrary, you enslave them even more, since by introducing new prejudices into their lives, you increase the number of their demands, not to mention the fact that they have to pay the Zemstvo for their drugs and pamphlets, and therefore, have to work harder than ever.”

  “I will not argue with you,” said Lyda. “I have heard all that.” She put down her paper. “I will only tell you one thing, it is no good sitting with folded hands. It is true, we do not save mankind, and perhaps we do make mistakes, but we do what we can and we are right. The highest and most sacred truth for an educated being—is to help his neighbours, and we do what we can to help. You do not like it, but it is impossible to please everybody.”

  “True, Lyda, true,” said her mother.

  In Lyda’s presence her courage always failed her, and as she talked she would look timidly at her, for she was afraid of saying something foolish or out of place: and she never contradicted, but would always agree: “True, Lyda, true.”

  “Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality, just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden,” I said. “You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work.”

  “Ah! My God, but we must do something!” said Lyda exasperatedly, and I could tell by her voice that she thought my opinions negligible and despised me.

  “It is necessary,” I said, “to free people from hard physical work. It is necessary to relieve them of their yoke, to give them breathing space, to save them from spending their whole lives in the kitchen or the byre, in the fields; they should have time to take thought of their souls, of God and to develop their spiritual capacities. Every human being’s salvation lies in spiritual activity—in his continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Give them some relief from rough, animal labour, let them feel free, then you will see how ridiculous at bottom your pamphlets and pharmacies are. Once a human being is aware of his vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art, and not with trifles like that.”

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

  “Yes. . . . Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco factories and distilleries—what a lot of free time we should have! We should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of it—truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual, poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself.”

  “But you contradict yourself,” said Lyda. “You talk about service and deny education.”

  “I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of understanding—the kind of education we have had from the time of Rurik: and village life has remained exactly as
it was then. Not education is wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not schools are wanted but universities.”

  “You deny medicine too.”

  “Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as natural phenomena, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if you don’t cure their causes. Remove the chief cause—physical labour, and there will be no diseases. I don’t acknowledge the science which cures,” I went on excitedly. “Science and art, when they are true, are directed not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the general—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, like pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber life. We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly educated people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs. . . . Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state of things. And I don’t want to work and will not. . . . Nothing is wanted, so let the world go to hell.”

  “Missyuss, go away,” said Lyda to her sister, evidently thinking my words dangerous to so young a girl.

  Genya looked sadly at her sister and mother and went out.

  “People generally talk like that,” said Lyda, “when they want to excuse their indifference. It is easier to deny hospitals and schools than to come and teach.”

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

  “You say you will not work,” Lyda went on. “Apparently you set a high price on your work, but do stop arguing. We shall never agree, since I value the most imperfect library or pharmacy, of which you spoke so scornfully just now, more than all the landscapes in the world.” And at once she turned to her mother and began to talk in quite a different tone: “The Prince has got very thin, and is much changed since the last time he was here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy.”

  She talked to her mother about the Prince to avoid talking to me. Her face was burning, and, in order to conceal her agitation, she bent over the table as if she were short-sighted and made a show of reading the newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went home.

  IV

  ALL WAS QUIET outside: the village on the other side of the pond was already asleep, not a single light was to be seen, and on the pond there was only the faint reflection of the stars. By the gate with the stone lions stood Genya, waiting to accompany me.

  “The village is asleep,” I said, trying to see her face in the darkness, and I could see her dark sad eyes fixed on me. “The innkeeper and the horse-stealers are sleeping quietly, and decent people like ourselves quarrel and irritate each other.”

  It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because it already smelled of the autumn: the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side. Stars fell frequently, Genya walked beside me on the road and tried not to look at the sky, to avoid seeing the falling stars, which somehow frightened her.

  “I believe you are right,” she said, trembling in the evening chill. “If people could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon burst everything.”

  “Certainly. We are superior beings, and if we really knew all the power of the human genius and lived only for higher purposes then we should become like gods. But this will never be. Mankind will degenerate and of their genius not a trace will be left.”

  When the gate was out of sight Genya stopped and hurriedly shook my hand.

  “Good night,” she said, trembling; her shoulders were covered only with a thin blouse and she was shivering with cold. “Come to-morrow.”

  I was filled with a sudden dread of being left alone with my inevitable dissatisfaction with myself and people, and I, too, tried not to see the falling stars.

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

  I loved Genya, and she must have loved me, because she used to meet me and walk with me, and because she looked at me with tender admiration. How thrillingly beautiful her pale face was, her thin nose, her arms, her slenderness, her inactivity, her constant reading. And her mind? I suspected her of having an unusual intellect: I was fascinated by the breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the strong, handsome Lyda, who did not love me. Genya liked me as a painter, I had conquered her heart by my talent, and I longed passionately to paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen, who would one day possess with me the trees, the fields, the river, the dawn, all Nature, wonderful and fascinating, with whom, as with them, I have felt hopeless and useless.

  “Stay with me a moment longer,” I called. “I implore you.”

  I took off my overcoat and covered her childish shoulders. Fearing that she would look queer and ugly in a man’s coat, she began to laugh and threw it off, and as she did so, I embraced her and began to cover her face, her shoulders, her arms with kisses.

  “Till to-morrow,” she whispered timidly as though she was afraid to break the stillness of the night. She embraced me: “We have no secrets from one another. I must tell mamma and my sister. . . . Is it so terrible? Mamma will be pleased. Mamma loves you, but Lyda!”

  She ran to the gates.

  “Good-bye,” she called out.

  For a couple of minutes I stood and heard her running. I had no desire to go home, there was nothing there to go for. I stood for a while lost in thought, and then quietly dragged myself back, to have one more look at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple, old house, which seemed to look at me with the windows of the mezzanine for eyes, and to understand everything. I walked past the terrace, sat down on a bench by the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm-tree, and looked at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyuss had her room, shone a bright light, and then a faint green glow. The lamp had been covered with a shade. Shadows began to move. . . . I was filled with tenderness and a calm satisfaction, to think that I could let myself be carried away and fall in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the thought that only a few yards away in one of the rooms of the house lay Lyda who did not love me, and perhaps hated me. I sat and waited to see if Genya would come out. I listened attentively and it seemed to me they were sitting in the mezzanine.

  An hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer visible. The moon hung high above the house and lit the sleeping garden and the avenues: I could distinctly see the dahlias and roses in the flower-bed in front of the house, and all seemed to be of one colour. It was very cold. I left the garden, picked up my overcoat in the road, and walked slowly home.

  Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs’, the glass door was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from behind the flower-bed or from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda’s voice:

  “To the crow somewhere . . . God . . .”—she spoke slowly and distinctly, and was probably dictating—“. . . God sent a piece of cheese . . . To the crow . . . somewhere . . . Who is there?” she called out suddenly as she heard my footsteps.

  “It is I.”

  “Oh! excuse me. I can’t come out just now. I am teaching Masha.”
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  “Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

  “No. She and my sister left today for my Aunt’s in Penza, and in the winter they are probably going abroad.” She added after a short silence: “To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?”

  I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:

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

  And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: “I have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,” I read. “I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried.”

  Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence. . . . Over the fields where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs’, and once more it became tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that evening for Petersburg.

  I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a poddiovka, wearing an embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: “Quite well, thanks be to God.” He began to talk. He had sold his estate and bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyubov Ivanovna. He told me a little about the Volchaninovs. Lyda, he said, still lived at Sholkovka and taught the children in the school. Little by little she succeeded in gathering round herself a circle of sympathetic people, who formed a strong party, and at the last Zemstvo election they drove out Balaguin, who up till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of Genya Bielokurov said that she did not live at home and he did not know where she was.