Fifty-Two Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So much bother, really!”

IV

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

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

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