“Katya, how are you going to live when you’ve squandered all your father’s money?”
“We’ll see then,” she replies.
“That money deserves a more serious attitude, my friend. A good man earned it by honest labor.”
“You already told me about that. I know.”
First we drive through the field, then through the evergreen forest that can be seen from my window. I still find nature beautiful, though a demon whispers to me that none of these pines and firs, birds and white clouds in the sky will notice my absence when I die three or four months from now. Katya enjoys driving the horse and is pleased that the weather is nice and that I’m sitting beside her. She’s in fine spirits and doesn’t say anything sharp.
“You’re a very good man, Nikolai Stepanych,” she says. “You’re a rare specimen, and there’s no actor who could play you. Even a bad actor could play me, or Mikhail Fyodorych, for instance, but no one could play you. And I envy you, envy you terribly! Because what am I the picture of? What?”
She thinks for a moment and asks:
“I’m a negative phenomenon—right, Nikolai Stepanych?”
“Right,” I answer.
“Hm … What am I to do?”
What answer can I give her? It’s easy to say “work,” or “give what you have to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it’s easy to say, I don’t know how to answer.
My general-practitioner colleagues, when they teach medical treatment, advise one “to individualize each particular case.” One need only follow that advice to be convinced that the remedies recommended by textbooks as the best and wholly suitable for the standard case, prove completely unsuitable in particular cases. The same is true for moral illnesses.
But answer I must, and so I say:
“You have too much free time, my friend. You must occupy yourself with something. Why indeed don’t you become an actress again, since you have the calling?”
“I can’t.”
“Your tone and manner make it seem that you’re a victim. I don’t like that, my friend. It’s your own fault. Remember, you started by getting angry at people and their ways, but you did nothing to make them better. You didn’t fight the evil, you got tired, and you are the victim not of the struggle, but of your own weakness. Well, of course, you were young then, inexperienced, but now everything might go differently. Really, try it again! You’ll work and serve holy art …”
“Don’t dissemble, Nikolai Stepanych,” Katya interrupts me. “Let’s agree once and for all: we can talk about actors, about actresses, or writers, but we’ll leave art alone. You’re a wonderful, rare person, but you don’t understand art well enough to regard it in good conscience as holy. You have neither the feel nor the ear for art. You’ve been busy all your life, and you’ve had no time to acquire the feel for it. Generally … I don’t like these conversations about art!” she goes on nervously. “I really don’t! It has been trivialized enough, thank you!”
“Trivialized by whom?”
“Some have trivialized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by familiarity, clever people by philosophy.”
“Philosophy has nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, it has. If anybody starts philosophizing, it means he doesn’t understand.”
To keep things from turning sharp, I hasten to change the subject and then remain silent for a long time. Only when we come out of the forest and turn towards Katya’s place do I come back to the former conversation and ask:
“You still haven’t answered me: why don’t you want to be an actress?”
“Nikolai Stepanych, this is cruel, finally!” she cries out and suddenly blushes all over. “You want me to speak the truth aloud? All right, if that … if that’s your pleasure! I have no talent! No talent and … and enormous vanity! There!”
Having made this confession, she turns her face away from me and grips the reins hard to hide the trembling of her hands.
As we approach her place, we can already see Mikhail Fyodorovich in the distance, strolling about the gate, impatiently waiting for us.
“Again this Mikhail Fyodorych!” Katya says with vexation. “Rid me of him, please! I’m sick of him, he’s played out … Enough of him!”
Mikhail Fyodorovich should have gone abroad long ago, but he keeps postponing his departure each week. Certain changes have taken place in him lately: he has become somehow pinched, wine now makes him tipsy, which never happened before, and his black eyebrows have begun to turn gray When our charabanc stops at the gate, he doesn’t conceal his joy and impatience. He bustles about, helps me and Katya out of the carriage, hurriedly asks questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that meek, prayerful, pure something that I noticed only in his eyes before is now spread all over his face. He’s glad, and at the same time ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of this habit of visiting Katya every evening, and he finds it necessary to motivate his coming by some obvious absurdity, such as: “I was passing by on business, thought why don’t I stop for a moment.”
The three of us go in; first we have tea, then on the table appear the two long-familiar decks of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle of Crimean champagne. Our topics of conversation are not new, they’re all the same as in the winter. The university, students, literature, theater all come in for it; the air gets thicker and stuffier with malignant gossip, it is poisoned by the breath not of two toads now, as in the winter, but of all three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the laugh that resembles a harmonica, the maid who serves us also hears an unpleasant, cracked laughter, like that of a vaudeville general: haw, haw, haw …
V
There are terrible nights of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which among the people are known as sparrow nights. There was one such sparrow night in my personal life …
