The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories

mushrooms and talked, and whenever she asked me a question she stood in front of me to see my face.

'Yesterday,' she said, 'a miracle happened in our village. Pelagueya, the cripple, has been ill for a whole year, and no doctors or medicines were any good, but yesterday an old woman muttered over her and she got better.'

'That's nothing,' I said. 'One should not go to sick people and old women for miracles. Is not health a miracle? And life itself? A miracle is something incomprehensible.'

'And you are not afraid of the incomprehensible?'

'No. I like to face things I do not understand and I do not submit to them. I am superior to them. Man must think himself higher than lions, tigers, stars, higher than anything in nature, even higher than that which seems incomprehensible and miraculous. Otherwise he is not a man, but a mouse which is afraid of everything.'

Genya thought that I, as an artist, knew a great deal and could guess what I did not know. She wanted me to lead her into the region of the eternal and the beautiful, into the highest world, with which, as she thought, I was perfectly familiar, and she talked to me of God, of eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who did not admit that I and my imagination would perish for ever, would reply: 'Yes. Men are immortal. Yes, eternal life awaits us.' And she would listen and believe me and never asked for proof.

As we approached the house she suddenly stopped and said:

'Our Lyda is a remarkable person, isn't she? I love her dearly and would gladly sacrifice my life for her at any time. But tell me'—Genya touched my sleeve with her finger—'but tell me, why do you argue with her all the time? Why are you so irritated?'

'Because she is not right.'

Genya shook her head and tears came to her eyes.

'How incomprehensible!' she muttered.

At that moment Lyda came out, and she stood by the balcony with a riding-whip in her hand, and looked very fine and pretty in the sunlight as she gave some orders to a farm-hand. Bustling about and talking loudly, she tended two or three of her patients, and then with a businesslike, preoccupied look she walked through the house, opening one cupboard after another, and at last went off to the attic; it took some time to find her for dinner and she did not come until we had finished the soup. Somehow I remember all these, little details and love to dwell on them, and I remember the whole of that day vividly, though nothing particular happened. After dinner Genya read, lying in her lounge chair, and I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The sky was overcast and a thin fine rain began to fall. It was hot, the wind had dropped, and it seemed the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out on to the terrace with a fan, looking very sleepy.

'O, mamma,' said Genya, kissing her hand. 'It is 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 look at the trees and call: 'Hello!' 'Genya!' or 'Mamma, dear, where are you?' They always prayed together and shared the same faith, and they understood each other very well, even when they were silent. And they treated other people in exactly the same way. Ekaterina Pavlovna also soon got used to me and became attached to me, and when I did not turn up for a few days she would send to inquire if I was well. And she too used to look admiringly at my sketches, and with the same frank loquacity she would tell me things that happened, and she would confide her domestic secrets to me.

She revered her elder daughter. Lyda never came to her for caresses, and only talked about serious things: she went her own way and to her mother and sister she was as sacred and enigmatic as the admiral, sitting in his cabin, to his sailors.

'Our Lyda is a remarkable person,' her mother would often say; 'isn't she?'

And, now, as the soft rain fell, we spoke of Lyda:

'She is a remarkable woman,' said her mother, and added in a low voice like a conspirator's as she looked round, 'such as she have to be looked for with a lamp in broad daylight, though you know, I am beginning to be anxious. The school, pharmacies, books—all very well, but why go to such extremes? She is twenty-three and it is time for her to think seriously about herself. If she goes on with her books and her pharmacies she won't know how life has passed.... She ought to marry.'

Genya, pale with reading, and with her hair ruffled, looked up and said, as if to herself, as she glanced at her mother:

'Mamma, dear, everything depends on the will of God.'

And once more she plunged into her book.

Bielokurov came over in a poddiovka, wearing an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn-tennis, and when it grew dark we had a long supper, and Lyda once more spoke of her schools and Balaguin, who had got the whole district into his own hands. As I left the Volchaninovs that night I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day, with a sad consciousness that everything ends, however long it may be. Genya took me to the gate, and perhaps, because she had spent the whole day with me from the beginning to end, I felt somehow lonely without her, and the whole kindly family was dear to me: and for the first time during the whole of that summer I had a desire to work.

'Tell me why you lead such a monotonous life,' I asked Bielokurov, as we went home. 'My life is tedious, dull, monotonous, because I am a painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy, discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman— why do you live so tamely and take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven't you fallen in love with Lyda or Genya?'

'You forget that I love another woman,' answered Bielokurov.

He meant his mistress, Lyabor Ivanovna, who lived with him in the orchard house. I used to see the lady every day, very stout, podgy, pompous, like a fatted goose, walking in the garden in a Russian head-dress, always with a sunshade, and the servants used to call her to meals or tea. Three years ago she rented a part of his house for the summer, and stayed on to live with Bielokurov, apparently for ever. She was ten years older than he and managed him very strictly, so that he had to ask her permission to go out. She would often sob and make horrible noises like a man with a cold, and then I used to send and tell her that I'm if she did not stop I would go away. Then she would stop.

When we reached home, Bielokurov sat down on the divan and frowned and brooded, and I began to pace up and down the hall, feeling a sweet stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I wanted to talk about the Volchaninovs.

'Lyda could only fall in love with a Zemstvo worker like herself, some one who is run off his legs with hospitals and schools,' I said. 'For the sake of a girl like that a man might not only become a Zemstvo worker, but might even become worn out, like the tale of the iron boots. And Missyuss? How charming Missyuss is!'

Bielokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of the disease of the century—pessimism. He spoke confidently and argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that, sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.

'The point is neither pessimism nor optimism,' I said irritably, 'but that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no sense.'

Bielokurov took this to mean himself, was offended, and went away.

III

'The Prince is on a visit to Malozyomov and sends you his regards,' said Lyda to her mother, as she came in and took off her gloves. 'He told me many interesting things. He promised to bring forward in the Zemstvo Council the question of a medical station at Malozyomov, but he says there is little hope.' And turning to me, she said: 'Forgive me, I keep forgetting that you are not interested.'

I felt irritated.

'Why not?' I asked and shrugged my shoulders. 'You don't care about my opinion, but I assure you, the question greatly interests me.'

'Yes?'