Stories
Yegor Semyonych sighed and was silent for a time.
“Maybe it’s egoism, but I’ll tell you frankly: I don’t want Tanya to get married. I’m afraid! There’s a fop with a fiddle who comes here and scrapes away; I know Tanya won’t marry him, I know it very well, but I hate the sight of him! Generally, my boy, I’m a great eccentric. I admit it.”
Yegor Semyonych got up and paced the room in agitation, and it was evident that he wanted to say something very important, but could not decide to do it.
“I love you dearly and I’ll speak frankly with you,” he finally decided, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “My attitude to certain ticklish questions is simple, I say straight out what I think, and I can’t stand so-called hidden thoughts. I’ll say straight out: you are the only man to whom I would not be afraid to marry my daughter. You’re intelligent, and a man of heart, and you wouldn’t let my beloved work perish. And the main reason is—I love you like a son … and I’m proud of you. If you and Tanya should somehow have a romance, then—why, I’d be very glad and even happy. I say it straight out, without mincing, as an honest man.”
Kovrin laughed. Yegor Semyonych opened the door to go out, but stopped on the threshold.
“If you and Tanya had a son, I’d make a horticulturist of him,” he said, pondering. “However, that is but vain dreaming … Good night.”
Left alone, Kovrin lay down more comfortably and began on the articles. One was entitled “On Intermediate Crops,” another “A Few Words Concerning the Note by Mr. Z. on Turning Over the Soil for a New Garden,” a third “More on Budding with Dormant Eyes,” and the rest were in the same vein. But what an uneasy, uneven tone, what nervous, almost morbid defiance! Here was an article with what one would think was the most peaceable title and indifferent content: the subject was the Russian Antonov apple tree. Yet Yegor Semyonych began it with audiatur altera pars and ended with sapienti sat,4 and between these two pronouncements there was a whole fountain of venomous words of all sorts addressed to “the learned ignorance of our patented Messers the Horticulturists who observe nature from the height of their lecterns,” or to M. Gaucher, “whose success was created by amateurs and dilettantes,” followed by an inappropriately forced and insincere regret that it was no longer possible to give peasants a birching for stealing fruit and breaking the trees while they are at it.
“This is beautiful, sweet, and healthy work, but here, too, there are passions and war,” thought Kovrin. “It must be that everywhere and in all occupations, people with ideas are nervous and marked by high sensitivity. It probably has to be that way”
He thought of Tanya, who loved Yegor Semyonych’s articles so much. Small of stature, pale, so skinny that you could see her collarbones; her eyes wide open, dark, intelligent, always peering somewhere and seeking something; her gait like her father’s— small, hurried steps. She talks a lot, likes to argue, and accompanies every phrase, even the most insignificant, with expressive looks and gestures. She must be nervous in the highest degree.
Kovrin began to read further, but understood nothing and dropped it. The pleasant excitement, the same with which he had danced the mazurka and listened to the music earlier, now oppressed him and evoked a great many thoughts. He got up and began pacing the room, thinking about the black monk. It occurred to him that if he alone had seen this strange, supernatural monk, it meant that he was ill and had gone as far as hallucinations. This thought alarmed him, but not for long.
“But I’m quite well, and I do no one any harm, so there’s nothing bad in my hallucination,” he thought and felt good again.
He sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands, holding back the incomprehensible joy that filled his whole being, then he paced about again and sat down to work. But the thoughts he read in the book did not satisfy him. He wanted something gigantic, boundless, staggering. Towards morning he undressed and reluctantly went to bed: he did have to sleep!
When he heard the footsteps of Yegor Semyonych leaving for the gardens, Kovrin rang the bell and told the servant to bring some wine. He drank several glasses of Lafite with pleasure, then pulled the blanket over his head; his consciousness went dim, and he fell asleep.
IV
Yegor Semyonych and Tanya often quarreled and said unpleasant things to each other.
One morning they had a squabble over something. Tanya began to cry and went to her room. She did not come out for dinner or for tea. Yegor Semyonych first went about all pompous, puffed up, as if wishing to make it known that for him the interests of justice and order were higher than anything in the world, but soon his character failed him and he lost his spirits. He wandered sadly through the park and kept sighing: “Ah, my God, my God!”—and did not eat a single crumb at dinner. Finally, guilty, suffering remorse, he knocked on the locked door and timidly called:
“Tanya! Tanya!”
And in answer to him a weak voice, exhausted from tears and at the same time resolute, came from behind the door:
“Leave me alone, I beg you.”
The suffering of the masters affected the entire household, even the people who worked in the garden. Kovrin was immersed in his interesting work, but in the end he, too, felt dull and awkward. To disperse the general bad mood somehow, he decided to intervene and before evening knocked on Tanya’s door. He was admitted.
“Aie, aie, what a shame!” he began jokingly, looking in surprise at Tanya’s tear-stained, mournful face, covered with red spots. “Can it be so serious? Aie, aie!”
“But if you only knew how he torments me!” she said, and tears, bitter, abundant tears, poured from her big eyes. “He wears me out!” she went on, wringing her hands. “I didn’t say anything to him … not anything … I just said there was no need to keep … extra workers, if… if it’s possible to hire day laborers whenever we like. The … the workers have already spent a whole week doing nothing … I … I just said it, and he began to shout and said … a lot of insulting … deeply offensive things to me. What for?”
“Come, come,” said Kovrin, straightening her hair. “You’ve quarreled, cried, and enough. You mustn’t be angry for so long, it’s not nice … especially since he loves you no end.”
“He’s ruined my … my whole life,” Tanya went on, sobbing. “All I hear is insults and offense. He considers me useless in his house. So, then? He’s right. I’ll leave here tomorrow, get hired as a telegraph girl… Let him …”
“Well, well, well … Don’t cry, Tanya. Don’t cry, my dear … You’re both hot-tempered, irritable, you’re both to blame. Come, I’ll make peace between you.”
Kovrin spoke tenderly and persuasively, and she went on crying, her shoulders shaking and her hands clenched, as if some terrible misfortune had actually befallen her. He felt the more sorry for her because, though her grief was not serious, she suffered deeply. What trifles sufficed to make this being unhappy for a whole day, and perhaps even all her life! As he comforted Tanya, Kovrin was thinking that, apart from this girl and her father, there were no people to be found in the whole world who loved him like their own, like family; that if it were not for these two persons, he, who had lost his father and mother in early childhood, might have died without knowing genuine tenderness and that naïve, unreasoning love which one feels only for very close blood relations. And he felt that the nerves of this crying, shaking girl responded, like iron to a magnet, to his own half-sick, frayed nerves. He never could have loved a healthy, strong, red-cheeked woman, but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya he liked very much.
And he gladly stroked her hair and shoulders, pressed her hands and wiped her tears … Finally she stopped crying. She went on for a long time complaining about her father and her difficult, unbearable life in this house, imploring Kovrin to put himself in her place; then she gradually began to smile and sigh about God having given her such a bad character, in the end burst into loud laughter, called herself a fool, and ran out of the room.
When Kovrin went out to the garden a little
later, Yegor Semyonych and Tanya were strolling side by side along the walk, as if nothing had happened, and they were both eating black bread and salt, because they were both hungry.
V
Pleased that he had succeeded so well in the role of peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. As he sat on a bench and reflected, he heard the rattle of carriages and women’s laughter—that was guests arriving. When the evening shadows began to lengthen in the garden, he vaguely heard the sounds of a violin and voices singing, and that reminded him of the black monk. Where, in what country or on what planet, was that optical incongruity racing about now?
No sooner had he remembered the legend and pictured in his imagination the dark phantom he had seen in the rye field, than there stepped from behind a pine tree just opposite him, inaudibly, without the slightest rustle, a man of average height, with a bare, gray head, all in dark clothes and barefoot, looking like a beggar, and his black eyebrows stood out sharply on his pale, deathly face. Nodding his head affably, this beggar or wanderer noiselessly approached the bench and sat down, and Kovrin recognized him as the black monk. For a moment the two looked at each other—Kovrin with amazement, and the monk tenderly and, as before, a little slyly, with the expression of one who keeps his own counsel.
“But you are a mirage,” said Kovrin. “Why are you here and sitting in one place? It doesn’t agree with the legend.”
“That makes no difference,” the monk answered after a moment, in a low voice, turning his face to him. “The legend, the mirage, and I—it is all a product of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”
“So you don’t exist?” asked Kovrin.
“Think as you like,” said the monk, and he smiled faintly. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, which means that I, too, exist in nature.”
“You have a very old, intelligent, and highly expressive face, as if you really have lived more than a thousand years,” said Kovrin. “I didn’t know that my imagination was capable of creating such phenomena. But why are you looking at me with such rapture? Do you like me?”
“Yes. You are one of the few who are justly called the chosen of God. You serve the eternal truth. Your thoughts and intentions, your astonishing science and your whole life bear a divine, heavenly imprint, because they are devoted to the reasonable and the beautiful—that is, to what is eternal.”
“You said: the eternal truth … But can people attain to eternal truth and do they need it, if there is no eternal life?”
“There is eternal life,” said the monk.
“You believe in people’s immortality?”
“Yes, of course. A great, magnificent future awaits you people. And the more like you there are on earth, the sooner that future will be realized. Without you servants of the higher principle, who live consciously and freely, mankind would be insignificant; developing in natural order, it would wait a long time for the end of its earthly history. But you will lead it into the kingdom of eternal truth several thousand years earlier—and in that lies your high worth. You incarnate in yourselves the blessing of God that rests upon people.”
“And what is the goal of eternal life?” asked Kovrin.
“The same as of any life—enjoyment. True enjoyment is in knowledge, and eternal life will provide countless and inexhaustible sources for knowledge, and in that sense it is said: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’”5
“If you only knew how nice it is to listen to you!” said Kovrin, rubbing his hands with pleasure.
“I’m very glad.”
“But I know: when you leave, I’ll be troubled by the question of your essence. You’re a phantom, a hallucination. Meaning that I’m mentally ill, abnormal?”
“Suppose you are. What is so troubling? You’re ill because you worked beyond your strength and got tired, and that means you sacrificed your health to an idea, and the time is near when you will also give your life to it. What could be better? That is generally what all noble natures, endowed from on high, strive for.”
“If I know that I am mentally ill, then can I believe myself?”
“And how do you know that people of genius, whom the whole world believes, did not also see phantoms? Learned men now say that genius is akin to madness. My friend, only the ordinary herd people are healthy and normal. Reflections on this nervous age, fatigue, degeneracy, and so on, can seriously worry only those who see the goal of life in the present, that is, herd people.”
“The Romans said: mens sana in corpore sano.”6
“Not everything that the Romans or Greeks said was true. An exalted state, excitement, ecstasy—all that distinguishes the prophets, the poets, the martyrs for an idea, from ordinary people—runs counter to the animal side of man, that is, to his physical health. I repeat: if you want to be healthy and normal, join the herd.”
“Strange, you’re repeating what often goes through my own head,” said Kovrin. “It’s as if you had spied and eavesdropped on my innermost thoughts. But let’s not talk about me. What do you mean by eternal truth?”
The monk did not reply. Kovrin looked at him and could not make out his face: his features were dim and blurred. Then the monk’s head and hands began to disappear; his body mingled with the bench and the evening twilight, and he vanished completely.
“The hallucination is over!” said Kovrin, and he laughed. “Too bad.”
He went back to the house cheerful and happy. The little that the black monk had said to him had flattered not his vanity but his whole soul, his whole being. To be a chosen one, to serve the eternal truth, to stand in the ranks of those who will make mankind worthy of the Kingdom of God several thousand years earlier, that is, deliver people from several thousand extra years of struggle, sin, and suffering, to give everything to that idea—youth, strength, health, to be ready to die for the common good—what a lofty, what a happy fate! His past, pure, chaste, filled with toil, raced through his memory, he remembered all that he had studied and what he taught others, and he decided that there was no exaggeration in the monk’s words.
Tanya came walking towards him through the park. She was wearing a different dress.
“You’re here?” she said. “And we’ve been looking and looking for you … But what’s the matter?” she said in surprise, seeing his rapturous, radiant face and his eyes brimming with tears. “You’re so strange, Andryusha.”
“I’m contented, Tanya,” said Kovrin, placing his hands on her shoulders. “I’m more than contented, I’m happy! Tanya, dear Tanya, you’re an extremely sympathetic being. Dear Tanya, I’m so glad, so glad!”
He warmly kissed both her hands and went on:
“I’ve just lived through some bright, wondrous, unearthly moments. But I can’t tell you everything, because you’ll call me mad or you won’t believe me. Let’s talk about you. Dear, nice Tanya! I love you and I’m used to loving you. To have you near, to meet you a dozen times a day, has become a necessity for my soul. I don’t know how I’ll do without you when I go back home.”
“Well!” Tanya laughed. “You’ll forget us in two days. We’re little people, and you’re a great man.”
“No, let’s talk seriously!” he said. “I’ll take you with me, Tanya. Yes? Will you go with me? Do you want to be mine?”
“Well!” said Tanya, and again she wanted to laugh, but the laughter did not come out, and red spots appeared on her face.
She started breathing fast, and quickly went, not towards the house, but further into the park.
“I wasn’t thinking of that … I wasn’t!” she said, clasping her hands as if in despair.
And Kovrin followed her, saying with the same radiant, rapturous face:
“I want a love that will capture the whole of me, and only you, Tanya, can give me that love. I’m happy! Happy!”
She was stunned, she bent, shrank, and seemed to grow ten years older, but he found her lovely and expressed his rapture aloud: “How beautiful she is!”
VI
On learning from Kovrin not only that the romance was under way, but that there was even to be a wedding, Yegor Semyonych paced up and down for a long time, trying to conceal his agitation. His hands began to tremble, his neck swelled and turned purple, he ordered his racing droshky harnessed and drove off somewhere. Tanya, seeing how he whipped up the horse and how far down, almost to the ears, he had pulled his cap, understood his mood, locked herself in her room, and cried all day.
The peaches and plums were already ripe in the conservatory; the packing and sending of these delicate and capricious goods to Moscow called for much attention, work, and trouble. The summer being very hot and dry, it was necessary to water every tree, which took a lot of time and labor, and besides that multitudes of caterpillars appeared, which the workers, and even Yegor Semyonych and Tanya, squashed in their fingers, to Kovrin’s great disgust. With all that it was necessary to receive the fall orders for fruit and trees and carry on a vast correspondence. And at the busiest time, when nobody seemed to have a single free moment, the time came for work in the fields, which took half the workers from the gardens; Yegor Semyonych, deeply tanned, worn out, angry, galloped off now to the gardens, now to the fields, and shouted that he was being torn to pieces and that he was going to put a bullet through his head.
And on top of that there was the bustling over the trousseau, something to which the Pesotskys attached great importance; the snick of scissors, the rattle of sewing machines, the burning smell of irons, the fussiness of the dressmaker, a nervous, easily offended lady, made everyone in the house dizzy. And, as if by design, guests came every day, who had to be entertained, fed, and even put up overnight. But all this hard labor passed unobserved, as in a fog. Tanya felt as if love and happiness had caught her unawares, though for some reason she had been certain since the age of fourteen that Kovrin would marry precisely her. She was amazed, perplexed, did not believe herself… Sometimes she would be flooded with such joy that she wanted to fly up to the clouds and there pray to God, but then she would suddenly remember that in August she had to part with her own nest and leave her father, or else the thought would come, God knows from where, that she was insignificant, small, and unworthy of such a great man as Kovrin— and she would go to her room, lock herself in, and weep bitterly for several hours. When guests came, she would suddenly think that Kovrin was remarkably handsome and that all the women were in love with him and envied her, and her soul would be filled with rapture and pride, as if she had conquered the whole world, but he had only to smile affably to some young lady, and she would tremble with jealousy, go to her room, and—tears again. These new feelings took complete possession of her, she helped her father mechanically, and did not notice the peaches, or the caterpillars, or the workers, or how quickly the time raced by.