miracle? And life itself? Whatever is beyond our understanding is a miracle.”
“Aren’t you afraid of things you can’t understand?”
“No, I march boldly up to the incomprehensible, and refuse to submit to it. I am superior to all these phenomena. Men should realize they are superior to lions and tigers and stars, they are greater than anything in nature, greater than the things they profess not to understand which they call miracles. Otherwise we are not men, but mice, afraid of everything.”
Zhenia supposed that because I was a painter I must know a good deal and could accurately divine anything I did not know. She longed for me to lead her into the realm of the eternal and the beautiful, into that higher world where she thought I was at home, and she talked to me about God, about life everlasting, and about the miraculous. And I, who refuse to believe that I and my imagination will perish forever after my death, would reply: “Yes, people are immortal.” “Yes, eternal life awaits us.” And she would listen and believe and never demand proof.
We were going home when she suddenly paused and said: “Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she? I adore her passionately and I would lay down my life for her at any moment. Tell me”—Zhenia touched my sleeve with her finger—“tell me why you are always arguing with her? Why do you get so irritated?”
“Because she is wrong.”
Zhenia gave her head a protesting shake, and tears came to her eyes. “That’s incomprehensible!” she said.
At that very moment Leda had just returned from somewhere and was standing near the steps with a riding whip in her hands, a slender beautiful figure in the streaming sunlight. She was giving orders to one of the laborers. Then, in a great hurry and talking loudly, she received two or three patients, and with a businesslike, preoccupied air she went through all the rooms of the house, opening one cupboard after another, and then she went to the mezzanine; it took some time to find her and call her for dinner, and by the time she came down we had already finished the soup. Somehow I remember all these little details and love to dwell on them, and I remember everything that happened that day even though nothing of great importance occurred. After lunch Zhenia read, lying in a deep armchair, while I sat on the lowest step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast, and a fine, thin rain began to fall. It was warm, the wind had dropped, and it seemed the day would never come to an end. Yekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace with a fan. She was very sleepy.
“Oh, Mama,” Zhenia said, kissing her hand. “It’s not good for you to sleep during the day.”
They adored each other. When one went into the garden the other would stand on the terrace and call out: “Hello, Zhenia!” or “Mama, where are you?” They always prayed together, and they shared the same beliefs, and understood each other very well, even when they said nothing. And their attitude toward people was exactly the same. Yekaterina Pavlovna soon grew accustomed to my presence and became fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days, she would send out to ask whether I was well. And she had an enthusiastic way of looking at my drawings, and she would relate what was happening as openly and freely as Missy, and she often confided her domestic secrets to me.
She was in awe of her elder daughter. Leda never cared for endearments, and always spoke seriously: she lived her own life, and to her mother and sister she was as sacred and mysterious as an admiral sitting in his cabin is to his sailors.
“Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she?” her mother used to say.
Now as the rain fell softly we spoke about Leda.
“Yes, she is a remarkable person,” her mother said, adding in a low conspiratorial voice, with a nervous glance over her shoulder: “You have to search far and wide for people like that. Even so, I am beginning to be a bit worried. The school, the dispensary, books—they are all very well, but why go to extremes? She is twenty-four, and it is time she was thinking seriously about herself. If you spend your time with books and dispensaries, you find that life slips by without your being aware of it.… She ought to be married.”
Zhenia, pale from reading and with her hair in disorder, lifted her head and said, as though to herself, but looking at her mother: “Mama dear, it is all in the hands of God!”
Then she plunged back into her book.
Belokurov came over, wearing a peasant jacket and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, and when it grew dark we spent a long time over supper, and once more Leda spoke about her schools and about Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb. When I left the Volchaninovs that evening, I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day with the melancholy consciousness that everything in the world comes to an end, however long it may last. Zhenia saw us to the gate, and perhaps because I had spent the whole day with her from morning to night, I felt strangely lonely and bored without her, and I realized how dear to me this charming family had become, and for the first time during all that summer I was overcome with the desire to paint.
“Tell me, why do you lead such a boring, colorless life?” I asked Belokurov as we were walking home. “As for me, my life is difficult, boring, and monotonous because I am a painter, different from other people, and I have been eaten up with envy and dissatisfaction with myself and misgivings over my work ever since I was quite young. I shall always be poor, and a vagabond, but as for you—you are a normal, healthy man, a landowner, a gentleman— why then is your life so uninteresting? Why do you get so little out of life? Why, for instance, don’t you fall in love with Leda or Zhenia?”
“You forget I love another woman,” Belokurov answered.
He was referring to his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the little house. I used to see the lady every day. She would be walking in the garden, plump and massive, pompous as a fatted goose, wearing Russian costume with strings of beads, always carrying a sunshade, and the servants would call her for meals and tea. Some three years before this she had taken one of the small houses for the summer, and she had stayed on with Belukurov, and apparently she proposed to stay there forever. She was ten years older than he was, and she kept a strict watch over him, so much so that when he left the house he had to ask her permission. She often gave way to deep, masculine sobs, and then I would send word to her that unless she stopped, I would have to give up my apartment; and she always stopped.
When we came home, Belokurov sat down on my sofa, brooding and frowning, while I began pacing up and down the carpet, aware of a sweet emotion stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I felt a desire to talk about the Volchaninovs.
“Leda could only fall in love with a zemstvo worker, someone who is just as fascinated by hospitals and schools as she is,” I said. “For the sake of a young woman like that a man should be prepared to become a zemstvo worker, and even wear out a pair of iron boots, as in the fairy story. And then there’s Missy! What an adorable person she is!”
