‘‘Our doorbell’s broken,’’ he said, yawning sleepily. ‘‘It’s long been in need of repair.’’
Yulia unsealed the telegram and read: ‘‘We drink your health. Yartsev, Kochevoy.’’
‘‘Ah, what fools!’’ she said and laughed; her soul felt light and gay.
Going back to her room, she quietly washed, dressed, then packed for a long time, till dawn, and at noon she left for Moscow.
XII
DURING HOLY WEEK the Laptevs were at the Art School for a picture exhibition. They went there as a household, Moscow fashion, taking along the two girls, the governess, and Kostya.
Laptev knew the names of all the well-known artists and never missed a single exhibition. Sometimes at his dacha in the summer, he himself painted landscapes in oils, and it seemed to him that he had considerable taste, and that if he had studied, he would perhaps have made a good artist. When abroad, he would sometimes visit antique shops, look at old things with the air of a connoisseur and utter his opinion, purchase something or other; the antiquarian would charge him whatever he liked, and afterwards the purchased thing would lie in the carriage house, nailed up in a box, until it disappeared no one knew where. Or else, stopping at a print shop, he would spend a long time attentively examining paintings, bronzes, make various observations, and suddenly buy some homemade frame or a box of trashy paper. The paintings he had at home were all of large size, but bad; the good ones were poorly hung. It happened to him more than once to pay a high price for things that later turned out to be crude fakes. And remarkably, though generally timid in life, he was extremely bold and self-assured at picture exhibitions. Why?
Yulia Sergeevna, like her husband, looked at paintings through her fist or with binoculars, and was surprised that the people in the paintings were as if alive, and the trees as if real; but she had no understanding, and it seemed to her that many of the pictures at the exhibition were alike, and that the whole aim of art lay precisely in this, that the people and objects in the pictures, when looked at through the fist, should stand out as if real.
‘‘This forest is by Shishkin,’’19 her husband explained to her. ‘‘He always paints one and the same thing... But pay attention to this: such purple snow has never existed... And this boy’s left arm is shorter than his right.’’
When everyone was tired, and Laptev went looking for Kostya so as to go home, Yulia stopped in front of a small landscape and gazed at it indifferently. In the foreground a rivulet, a wooden bridge across it, a path on the other side disappearing into the dark grass, a field, then to the right a piece of forest, a bonfire nearby: it must have been a night pasture. And in the distance, the last glow of the sunset.
Yulia imagined herelf walking across the little bridge, then down the path further and further, and it is quiet all around, drowsy corncrakes cry, the fire flickers far ahead. And for some reason, it suddenly seemed to her that she had seen those same clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and the forest, and the fields long ago and many times; she felt lonely, and she wanted to walk, walk, walk down the path; and where the sunset’s glow was, there rested the reflection of something unearthly, eternal.
‘‘How well it’s painted!’’ she said, surprised that she had suddenly understood the painting. ‘‘Look, Alyosha! Do you see how quiet it is?’’
She tried to explain why she liked this landscape so much, but neither her husband nor Kostya understood her. She kept looking at the landscape with a sad smile, and the fact that the others found nothing special in it troubled her; then she began walking around the rooms again and looking at the pictures, she wanted to understand them, and it no longer seemed to her that many pictures at the exhibition were alike. When, on returning home, she paid attention for the first time to the big painting that hung over the grand piano in the drawing room, she felt animosity towards it and said:
‘‘Who on earth wants to have such pictures!’’
And after that the gilded cornices, the Venetian mirrors with flowers, and pictures like the one that hung over the grand piano, as well as the discussions of her husband and Kostya about art, aroused in her a feeling of boredom and vexation and sometimes even hatred.
Life flowed on as usual from day to day, promising nothing special. The theater season was over, the warm time was coming. The weather remained excellent all the while. One morning the Laptevs were going to the district court to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the court to defend someone. They were delayed at home and arrived at the court when the examination of the witnesses had already begun. A reserve soldier was accused of burglary. Many of the witnesses were washerwomen; they testified that the accused often visited the woman who ran the laundry; on the eve of the Elevation, 20 he came late at night and began asking for money for the hair of the dog, but no one gave him any; then he left, but came back an hour later and brought some beer and mint gingerbreads for the girls. They drank and sang songs almost till daybreak, and when they looked in the morning, the lock on the attic door was broken and laundry was missing: three men’s shirts, a skirt, and two sheets. Kostya asked each witness mockingly whether she had drunk the beer brought by the accused on the eve of the Elevation. Evidently what he was driving at was that the washerwomen had stolen from themselves. He delivered his speech without the least excitement, looking angrily at the jury.
He explained what was burglary and what was simple theft. He spoke in great detail, persuasively, displaying an extraordinary capacity for talking at length and in a serious tone about something everybody always knew. And it was hard to understand what he was actually after. From his long speech, the foreman of the jury could only come to the following conclusion: ‘‘There was burglary but no theft, because the washerwomen drank up the laundry themselves, or if there was theft, then there was no burglary.’’ But he evidently said precisely what was necessary, because his speech moved the jury and the public, and they liked it very much. When the verdict of acquittal was announced, Yulia nodded to Kostya and later firmly shook his hand.
In May the Laptevs moved to their summer house in Sokolniki. By then Yulia was pregnant.
XIII
MORE THAN A year went by. In Sokolniki, not far from the tracks of the Yaroslavl Railway, Yulia and Yartsev were sitting on the grass; a little to one side, Kochevoy lay with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky. All three had had enough of walking and were waiting for the local six o’clock train to pass before going home to have tea.
‘‘Mothers see something extraordinary in their children— that’s the way nature arranged it,’’ Yulia was saying. ‘‘A mother stands for hours by a little bed, looking at her baby’s little ears, little eyes, little nose, and admiring them. If someone else kisses her child, the poor woman thinks it gives the person great pleasure. And the mother talks about nothing but her child. I know this weakness in mothers and keep an eye on myself, but really, my Olya is extraordinary. How she gazes while she’s nursing! How she laughs! She’s only eight months old, but by God, I haven’t seen such intelligent eyes even in a three-year-old.’’
‘‘Tell us, by the way,’’ asked Yartsev, ‘‘whom do you love more: your husband or your child?’’
