Fifty-Two Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Welcome if you please.”

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

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

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

“Yes…indeed…”

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

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

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

And for some reason they all sighed.

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

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

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