“It’s not right, Pyotr Petrovich,” she said reproachfully. “It’s not right at all—it’s a shame!”
“True, Leda, true,” her mother agreed. “It’s a shame!”
“All of our district is in Balagin’s hands,” Leda went on, turning to me. “He is the chairman of the local council, and all official business in the district goes to his nephews and brothers-in-law, and he does exactly as he pleases. We must fight him! We young people ought to form a strong party, but you see what kind of young people we have among us. For shame, Pyotr Petrovich!”
The younger sister, Zhenia, remained silent during the conversation about the zemstvo. She never took part in serious conversations, not being considered grown-up in the family, and they always called her by the pet name Missy, because she used to call her governess Miss when she was a child. All the time she examined me curiously, and when I was turning the pages of the photograph album she kept saying: “There’s my uncle … there’s my godfather …” and she kept pointing at the photographs. In her childish way she pressed her shoulder against mine, and I clearly saw her small undeveloped breasts, her thin shoulders, her braided hair, and her slim waist tightly drawn in by a belt.
We played croquet and lawn tennis, wandered about the garden, drank tea, and sat a long while over supper. After the high-columned empty ballroom where I lived, I felt pleasantly comfortable in this small cozy house where there were no oleographs hanging on the walls, and the servants were addressed as “you,” and not as “thou,” and everything seemed pure and youthful thanks to the presence of Leda and Missy, and the atmosphere breathed a sense of order. At supper Leda again talked to Belokurov about the zemstvo, about Balagin, about school libraries. She was a lively, sincere, and persuasive young woman, and it was interesting to listen to her although she spoke in a loud voice a great deal, perhaps because she was accustomed to speaking in this way at school. On the other hand, my friend Pyotr Petrovich still clung to the habit of his student days, reducing all discussion to argument. He spoke in a bored and languid voice, at vast length, with an obvious desire to be taken for a man of intelligence and progressive views. Gesticulating, he knocked a sauceboat over with his cuff, and it made a large pool on the tablecloth, but it seemed that no one noticed it except me.
When we made our way home, the night was dark and still.
“I call it good breeding,” Belokurov sighed, “not so much when you don’t upset a sauceboat over the tablecloth, but when you don’t notice it if someone else does. Yes, they are an admirably cultured family. I’m out of touch with nice people—terribly out of touch. It’s all the fault of business, business!”
He went on to discuss all the hard work which goes with being a landed proprietor. And I thought: “What a ponderous, lazy, good-for-nothing he is!” Whenever he spoke seriously, he kept saying “Er—er—” painfully drawling out his hesitations, and he worked exactly as he talked, slowly, always getting behindhand, never on time. Nor did I have any great belief in his business sense, for the letters I gave him to post remained in his pocket for weeks.
“The worst of it is,” he muttered as we walked along together, “the worst of it is that you go on working and no one has any sympathy for you. No sympathy at all!”
II
Soon I started calling on the Volchaninovs. Usually I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life. All the time they would be talking on the terrace, and I would hear the rustle of skirts and the whispering sound of pages being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the sight of Leda receiving patients during the day, giving out books, and going off to the village bareheaded under a sunshade, while in the evenings she would declaim in a loud voice about the zemstvo and about schools. She was a beautiful, slender, unfailingly correct young woman with thin, sensitive lips, and whenever a serious discussion got under way she would say to me coldly: “This won’t interest you.”
I was unsympathetic to her. She disapproved of me because I was a landscape painter and my paintings did not represent the needs of the people, and she felt therefore that I was indifferent to all her deepest beliefs. I remember riding along the shores of Lake Baikal and meeting a Buryat girl on horseback. She wore a shirt and blue sailcloth trousers. I asked her to sell me her pipe, and while we were talking, she gazed contemptuously at my European features and my hat. A moment later, bored with my conversation, she uttered a wild yell and galloped away. In exactly the same way Leda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she showed no signs of her dislike, but I could feel it, and sitting on the bottom step of the terrace, I gave way to my sense of irritation and said that to treat peasants without being a doctor was to deceive them, and it was easy to be charitable if one was the owner of five thousand acres.
Her sister Missy had no such cares and spent her life in complete idleness, as I did. When she awoke in the morning she would take a book onto the terrace and read it in a deep armchair, her feet scarcely touching the ground, or she would hide away with the book somewhere in the avenue of lime trees, or she would pass through the gate into the open fields. She spent the day reading, her eyes glued avidly on the page, and only an occasional weary and listless glance, and her extreme pallor, showed how exhausted she became from reading. When I came on the scene and when she saw me, she would blush a little, put the book aside, and gazing at me with her enormous eyes, she would tell me in her high-spirited way about everything that had happened: how the chimney in the servants’ quarters had caught fire or how one of the workmen had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually wore a light-colored blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We took walks together and gathered cherries to make into preserves or went boating together, and when she jumped up to reach the cherries or pulled on the oars, her thin and delicate arms gleamed through her wide sleeves. Or else I sketched, and she would stand there beside me, watching breathlessly.
One Sunday at the end of July, I went over to see the Volchaninovs around nine o’clock in the morning. I went through the park, staying far from the house, looking for white mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer, marking the places where I found them so that I could pick them later with Zhenia. A warm wind was blowing. I could see Zhenia and her mother coming back from church, both wearing light holiday dresses, and Zhenia was holding on to her hat because of the strong wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the terrace.
Being a man without any care in the world, always seeking some justification for a life of perpetual idleness, I found these mornings on summer holidays on the estate especially charming. When the gardens were all green and wet with dew, shining joyously in the sun, and when the oleanders and the mignonettes spread their perfume all round the house, and when the young people have just returned from church and are drinking tea in the garden, and when they are all joyful and charmingly dressed, and when you know that all these healthy, beautiful, well-fed people will be doing nothing all day, at such times I long for life to be always like this. So I thought as I wandered about the garden, ready to pursue my careless wanderings all day and all summer.
Zhenia came from the house carrying a basket. She had an expression on her face suggesting that she knew, or felt, she would find me in the garden. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked me a question she went ahead of me so that she could see my face.
“Yesterday,” she said, “a miracle happened in our village. Pelageya, the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines were any use to her, but yesterday an old woman whispered something over her, and she has recovered.”
“This is of no importance,” I said. “No need to go to old women or sick people to find miracles. Isn’t health a
