Fifty-Two Stories

Now he saw her face up close, her shining eyes, and here, in the darkness, she looked younger than in the room, and it was even as if her former childlike expression had come back to her. And indeed she looked at him with naïve curiosity, as if she wished to examine more closely and understand the man who had once loved her so ardently, with such tenderness and such ill luck; her eyes thanked him for that love. And he remembered everything that had been, all the smallest details, how he had wandered in the cemetery, how later, towards morning, he had come home, exhausted, and he suddenly felt sad and sorry for the past. A little fire lit up in his soul.

“Do you remember how I took you to the club one evening?” he said. “It was raining then, dark…”

The little fire was burning brighter in his soul, and now he wanted to talk, to complain about life…

“Ahh!” he said with a sigh. “You ask how I’m getting along. How do we get along here? We don’t. We age, gain weight, go to seed. Day and night—swift in flight, life goes by drably, without impressions, without thoughts…Daytime lucre, and evening the club, the company of cardplayers, alcoholics, poseurs, whom I can’t stand. What’s the good of it?”

“But you have work, a noble purpose in life. You liked so much to talk about your hospital. I was sort of strange then, I fancied myself a great pianist. Nowadays all girls play the piano, and I also played, like all of them, and there was nothing special in me: I’m as much a pianist as Mama is a writer. And, of course, I didn’t understand you then, but later, in Moscow, I often thought of you. I thought only of you. What happiness it is to be a zemstvo doctor, to help those who suffer, to serve people. What happiness!” Ekaterina Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. “When I thought of you in Moscow, you appeared to me so ideal, so lofty…”

Startsev thought of the banknotes he so enjoyed taking from his pockets in the evenings, and the fire in his soul went out.

He got up to go to the house. She took him under the arm.

“You’re the best of the people I’ve known in my life,” she went on. “We’ll see each other, we’ll talk, won’t we? Promise me that. I’m not a pianist, I no longer have any illusions on that account, and I won’t play or talk about music in your presence.”

When they went into the house, and in the evening light Startsev saw her face and her sad, grateful, searching eyes directed at him, he felt uneasy and thought again:

“It’s a good thing I didn’t marry then.”

He started saying goodbye.

“You have no right of passage to leave without supper,” Ivan Petrovich said, seeing him to the door. “It’s quite perpendicular on your part. Go on, perform!” he said, addressing Pava in the front hall. Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with a moustache, assumed a pose, raised his arm, and said in a tragic tone:

“Die, wretched woman!”

All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage and looking at the dark house and garden that had once been so precious and dear to him, he remembered it all at once—Vera Iosifovna’s novels, and Kotik’s noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovich’s witticisms, and Pava’s tragic pose—and thought, if the most talented people in the whole town are so giftless, what kind of town can it be.

Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.

“You don’t come to see us. Why?” she wrote. “I fear you’ve changed towards us; I fear it, and I’m frightened at the very thought of it. Set me at peace, come and tell me that all is well.

“It’s necessary that I speak to you. Yours, E. T.”

He read this letter, pondered, and said to Pava:

“Tell them, my dear boy, that I cannot come today, I’m very busy. I’ll come, say, in three days or so.”

But three days went by, then a week, and he did not go. Once, passing by the Turkins’ house, he remembered that he should stop by if only for a minute, but he pondered and…did not stop by.

And he never visited the Turkins again.

V

A few more years have gone by. Startsev has gained still more weight, grown fat, breathes heavily, and now walks with his head thrown back. When he rides, plump, red, in his troika with little bells, and Panteleimon, also plump and red, with a beefy neck, sits on the box, stretching his straight, as if wooden, arms out in front of him, and shouts at the passersby: “Keep ri-i-ight!” the picture is impressive, and it looks as if it is not a man riding, but a pagan god. He has an enormous practice in town, has no time to catch his breath, and already owns an estate and two houses in town, and is on the lookout for a third, more profitable one, and when they tell him in the Mutual Credit Society about some house that is up for sale, he goes to the house unceremoniously, and, passing through the rooms, paying no attention to the undressed women and childen who stare at him in astonishment and fear, jabs at all the doors with his stick, and says:

“Is this the study? Is this a bedroom? And what’s this?”