Forty Stories

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” Leda said, putting down her newspaper. “I’ve heard all that before. I will say only one thing—it is no good sitting with folded arms. True, we are not saving mankind, and perhaps we are making a great many mistakes, but we do what we can, and—we are right! The great and holy task of a civilized man is to serve his neighbors, and we are trying to serve them as best we can. You may not like it, but it is impossible to please everyone.”

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

  Her mother’s courage always failed her in Leda’s presence, and while she was talking she would look timidly at her daughter, afraid of saying anything superfluous or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but would always agree with her: “True, Leda, true!”

  “Teaching the peasants to read and write, giving them books full of wretched moralizings and quaint adages, and building medical centers can no more diminish their ignorance or decrease the death rate than the lamp in your window can light up the whole of your vast garden,” I said. “You are not giving them anything by interfering in their lives. You only create new wants, and make them have to work more.”

  “Good heavens, something has to be done!” Leda said angrily, and I could tell from her voice that she thought my arguments completely worthless, and despised them.

  “You must free people from hard physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lifted from them, they must be given a breathing space so that they don’t have to spend their whole lives at the stove and the washtub and in the fields. They should have time to think about their souls and about God, and time to develop their spiritual faculties. The salvation of every human being lies in spiritual activity—in the continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it unnecessary for them to work at rough physical labor, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery all these books and dispensaries really are! Once a man is aware of his true vocation, he can only be satisfied with religion, science, and art—not with those other trifles!”

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

  “Yes, if we take upon ourselves a share of the work. If all of us, townspeople and country people alike, all without exception, agreed to share the work which is expended to satisfy the physical needs of mankind, then perhaps none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked only three hours a day, then the rest of our time would be free. And then, in order to be still less dependent upon our bodies and upon physical labor, imagine that we invent machines which will take the place of labor, and imagine that we make an effort to reduce our requirements to the minimum. We should harden ourselves and our children, so that they would no longer fear hunger and cold, and then we wouldn’t be perpetually worrying about health, as the Annas, Mouras, and Pelageyas of the world worry! If we didn’t take medicines and maintain dispensaries, tobacco factories, and distilleries—what a lot of free time we would have after all! We would all—all of us together—devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the peasants sometimes work communally to repair and mend the roads, so all of us together, the whole community, would search together for truth and the meaning of life, and—I am sure of it—the truth would be very soon discovered, and man would be delivered from his continual, agonizing, oppressive fear of death, and even death itself might be conquered.”

  “But you are contradicting yourself,” Leda said. “You keep talking about science while denying the need for literacy.”

  “What is the good of literacy when men have nothing to read but the signs on public houses and occasional books which they don’t understand? We have had that kind of literacy since the days of Rurik.2 Gogol’s Petrushka has been reading for a long time now, but the villages haven’t changed since the time of Rurik. What is needed is not literacy, but freedom for the full development of men’s spiritual faculties. What we need is not schools, but universities.”

  “So you are opposed to medicine too?”

  “Yes, medicine should be required only for the study of diseases as natural phenomena, not for their cure. It is no use treating diseases, unless we treat the causes. Remove the chief cause, physical labor, and there will be no diseases. I don’t admit the existence of a science that cures diseases!” I went on excitedly. “True science and true art are not directed toward temporary or partial ends, but they are directed toward the eternal and the universal—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek after God and the soul, and when they are harnessed to our everyday evils and necessities—when they are harnessed to dispensaries and libraries—then they only complicate and burden life! We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, and we have plenty of literate people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and poets. All our intelligence, all our spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs.… Scientists, writers, and painters are hard at work, and thanks to them the comforts of life are increasing daily. The demands of the body multiply, but the truth is still far away, and man continues to be an entirely rapacious and filthy animal, and everything is tending toward the degeneration of the greater part of mankind and the decay of human vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist becomes meaningless, and the more talented he is, the stranger and more incomprehensible becomes the role he plays in society, for he would appear to be working only for the amusement of rapacious and filthy animals while he supports the established order. I have no desire to work, and I won’t work!… Nothing is any use! Let the world go reeling to hell!”

  “Missy, leave the room,” Leda said to her sister, apparently thinking my words would have a bad effect on a young girl.

  Zhenia looked sadly at her mother and sister, and went out.

  “People usually say these charming things when they want to justify their own callousness,” Leda said. “Denying the usefulness of hospitals and schools is easier than curing diseases and teaching.”

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

  “You were threatening to give up working,” Leda went on. “Apparently you place a high value on your works of art. Let us give up arguing, for we shall never agree on anything, and I regard the most imperfect library or dispensary as of infinitely greater value than all the landscapes in the world.” Suddenly she turned to her mother and began speaking in an entirely different tone of voice. “The prince is very thin, and he has changed a lot since he was last here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy.”

  She went on talking to her mother about the prince to avoid talking to me. Her face was burning, and to conceal her agitation she bent low over the table as though she were nearsighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went home.

  IV

  It was very quiet outside. The village on the further side of the pond was already asleep, and there was not a light anywhere to be seen. Only on the pond lay the pale reflection of the glimmering stars. At the gate with the lions Zhenia was waiting to accompany me on my walk.

  “They’ve all gone to sleep in the village,” I said, trying to make out her face in the darkness. I could see her dark mournful eyes gazing at me fixedly. “The innkeeper and the horse thieves are fast asleep, at peace, while we, who should know better, quarrel and antagonize one another.”

  It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because there was already a breath of autumn in the air. The moon was rising behind a purple cloud, shedding scarcely any light along the road and the dark fields of winter wheat stretching away on both sides. At times a shooting star would fall. Zhenia walked beside me, and she avoided looking up at the sky so as not to see the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.

  “I think you are right,” she said, trembling in the damp night air. “If all the people were to devote themselves to spiritual activities, they would soon come to know everything.”

  “Of course. We are higher beings, and if we really realiz
ed the full power of human genius and lived only for higher things, then we would ultimately become like gods. But it will never happen. Mankind will degenerate and no traces of that genius will ever be found.”

  When we could no longer see the gates, Zhenia paused and hurriedly pressed my hand.

  “Good night,” she said, trembling. She had nothing but the thin blouse over her shoulders, and she was shivering with cold. “Come tomorrow.”

  I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone in a mood of irritation and annoyance with myself and others, and I too tried not to look at the falling stars.

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

  I was in love with Zhenia. I must have loved her because she met me when I came and always walked with me a little way when I went home, and because she looked at me with tender, admiring glances. Her pale face, her slender neck, her thin hands, her delicacy and her laziness and her books—all these held a wistful appeal for me. And her intelligence? I surmised she had a remarkable intelligence and I was fascinated with the breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the austere and beautiful Leda, who had no love for me. Zhenia liked me because I was a painter. I had conquered her heart with my talent, and I longed passionately to paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen who would one day inherit with me all these trees, fields, mists, and dawns, all those miraculous and enchanting scenes from nature where until now I had felt so hopelessly lonely and unwanted.

  “Please stay a little longer,” I begged her. “Only a little longer.”

  I took off my overcoat and covered her shivering shoulders; and becase she was afraid of looking funny and ugly in a man’s coat she laughed and threw it off, and then I put my arms round her and began to cover her face, her shoulders, her hands, with kisses.

  “Until tomorrow,” she whispered, and gently, as though afraid of breaking the silence of the night, she embraced me. “We have no secrets from each other now. Quickly I must tell everything to Mama and my sister.… I’m so afraid! I’m not afraid of Mama, for she loves you, but my sister …”

  Then she ran toward the gates.

  “Good-by!” she called back.

  Then for some moments I heard her running. I had no desire to return home, and there was nothing to return home for. For a while I stood there lost in thought, and then I turned slowly back to look once more at the house she lived in, that house which was so old and innocent and dear to me; and the windows of the mezzanine looked down on me like eyes, seeming to understand everything. I walked past the terrace and sat on a bench by the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness of an ancient elm, and once again I gazed up at the house. I could see the windows of the mezzanine, where Missy slept, and the bright light shining there, but this light turned later to a faintly glowing green—she had pulled a shade over the lamp. Shadows stirred.… I was filled with a sense of tenderness and calm contentment—a contentment which came with my discovery that I had fallen helplessly in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy with the knowledge that Leda, who disliked and perhaps hated me, was lying in bed in one of those rooms only a few yards away. I sat there, straining my ears, waiting to see whether Zhenia would come out, and I fancied I heard voices coming from the mezzanine.

  An hour passed. The green lamp went out, and no more shadows could be seen. The moon rode high over the house, shining on the pathways and the sleeping garden. The dahlias and roses in the flower bed in front of the house could be seen distinctly, and everything seemed to be of one color. It grew very cold. I left the garden, picked up my coat from the road, and made my way slowly home.

  The following day when I went to see the Volchaninovs after dinner, the glass door leading to the garden was wide open. I sat down for a while on the terrace, expecting to see Zhenia appear from behind the flower beds or along one of the pathways, or perhaps I would hear the sound of her voice coming from the house. Then I went through the drawing room and the dining room. There was no one to be seen. From the dining room I walked down a long corridor that led to the reception room, and back again. Several doors opened on the corridor, and from behind one of them came the voice of Leda.

  “To the crow somewhere … God …” she was saying in a loud, singsong voice, probably dictating. “God sent a piece of cheese … To the crow … somewhere … Who’s there?” she called out suddenly, hearing my footsteps.

  “It is I.”

  “Oh, excuse me, I cannot come out just now. I am giving Dasha her lesson.”

  “Is Yekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

  “No, she left this morning with my sister. They are going to stay with an aunt in Penza province, and in the winter they will probably go abroad.” She added after a moment’s pause: “God sent … the cr-ow … so-me-where … a pie-ce of chee-se … Have you written it down?”

  I went out in the reception room without a thought in my head, gazing at the pond and the village in the distance, while her voice followed me: “A pie-ce of chee-se … God sent the crow somewhere a piece of cheese …”

  And I went back by the way I had come on the day when I first visited the house, only this time in reverse. I went from the courtyard into the garden and along the side of the house until I reached the avenue of lime trees.… There I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note which read: “I told my sister everything, and she says I must never see you again. I’m weak, and dare not anger her by disobeying her. God grant you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how many bitter tears Mama and I have shed!”

  I went down the dark avenue of firs past the rotting fence.… In the fields where the rye was once ripening and the quail were screaming, now hobbled horses and cows were grazing. Here and there on the low hills the winter crops were already showing green. A sobering mood took hold of me, the things I had said at the Volchaninovs’ filled me with shame, and I was as bored with life as I ever was before. When I reached home, I packed my things, and I left that evening for St. Petersburg.

  I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Not long ago, when on my way to the Crimea, I met Belokurov on the train. He was wearing the familiar peasant jacket and embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: “Thank you for your good wishes.” We fell into conversation. He had sold his old estate and bought another, smaller one in Lyubov Ivanovna’s name. There was little he could tell me about the Volchaninovs. He told me Leda was still living at Shelkovka, teaching children at her school. Little by little she had succeeded in gathering around her a circle of friends who agreed with her and who were able to form a strong party, and at the last zemstvo election they had “gotten rid” of Balagin, the man who had kept the whole district under his thumb in the old days. As for Zhenia, all he knew was that she had left home, and he did not know where she was.

  I am beginning to forget the house with the mezzanine, but sometimes when I am painting or reading, for no reason at all, quite suddenly, I find myself remembering the green lamp at the window and the sound of my footsteps echoing through the fields of the night as I walked home on the day I was in love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And sometimes too—but this happens more rarely—when I am weighed down with melancholy and loneliness, I am the prey of other confused thoughts, and it seems to me that I, too, am being remembered, and she is waiting for me, and we shall meet again.…

  Missy, where are you?

  1896

  1 The zemstvo was the elective district council in pre-revolutionary Russia.

  2 The Varangian chieftain who settled in Novgorov in 862 and is regarded as the founder of Russia.

  In the Horsecart

  AT half past eight in the morning they drove out of town.

  The highway was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding a fierce warmth on the earth, but there was still snow in the ditches and the forests. The long, dark, cruel winter had only just come to an end, spring came suddenly, but for Maria Vasilyevna sitting in the horsecart, there was nothing new or int
eresting in the warmth of the sun, or in the languid, luminous forests warmed with the breath of spring, or in the flocks of dark birds flying over the puddles in the fields—puddles as large as lakes—or in the marvelous and unfathomable sky into which it seemed one could plunge with such joy. For thirteen years she had been a schoolteacher, and during the course of these years she had gone so often to the town for her salary that the times were past counting; and whether it was spring, as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and she always and invariably longed for only one thing: to get there as quickly as possible.

  She felt she had been living here for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again the school and again the road.

  Of all that had happened to her before her appointment as a schoolteacher, she remembered very little. She had forgotten nearly everything. Once she had a father and mother—they lived in Moscow in a large apartment near the Red Gate—but of this period in her life the memories were as fluid and confused as dreams. Her father died when she was ten years old; her mother soon afterward.… She had a brother, an officer; at first they wrote to each other, and then he lost the habit of answering her letters. Of her former possessions only the photograph of her mother remained, but the damp air at school had faded it, and now nothing could be seen except the hair and eyebrows.

  They had driven for two miles along the road when old Semyon, who held the reins, turned to her and said: “They’ve caught one of the town officials—taken him away somewhere. Said he and some Germans killed Alexeyev, the mayor, in Moscow.”