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Anton Chekhov -
An Artist's Story
I II
III IV
II I took to going to see the Voltchaninovs. As a rule I sat on the
lower step of the terrace; I was fretted by dissatisfaction with
myself; I was sorry at the thought of my life passing so rapidly
and uninterestingly, and felt as though I would like to tear out
of my breast the heart which had grown so heavy. And meanwhile I
heard talk on the terrace, the rustling of dresses, the pages of
a book being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the idea that
during the day Lida received patients, gave out books, and often
went into the village with a parasol and no hat, and in the
evening talked aloud of the Zemstvo and schools. This slim,
handsome, invariably austere girl, with her small well-cut
mouth, always said dryly when the conversation turned on serious
subjects:
"That's of no interest to you."
She did not like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape
painter and did not in my pictures portray the privations of the
peasants, and that, as she fancied, I was indifferent to what
she put such faith in. I remember when I was travelling on the
banks of Lake Baikal, I met a Buriat girl on horseback, wearing
a shirt and trousers of blue Chinese canvas; I asked her if she
would sell me her pipe. While we talked she looked
contemptuously at my European face and hat, and in a moment she
was bored with talking to me; she shouted to her horse and
galloped on. And in just the same way Lida despised me as an
alien. She never outwardly expressed her dislike for me, but I
felt it, and sitting on the lower step of the terrace, I felt
irritated, and said that doctoring peasants when one was not a
doctor was deceiving them, and that it was easy to be benevolent
when one had six thousand acres.
Meanwhile her sister Misuce had no cares, and spent her life in
complete idleness just as I did. When she got up in the morning
she immediately took up a book and sat down to read on the
terrace in a deep arm-chair, with her feet hardly touching the
ground, or hid herself with her book in the lime avenue, or
walked out into the fields. She spent the whole day reading,
poring greedily over her book, and only from the tired, dazed
look in her eyes and the extreme paleness of her face one could
divine how this continual reading exhausted her brain. When I
arrived she would flush a little, leave her book, and looking
into my face with her big eyes, would tell me eagerly of
anything that had happened -- for instance, that the chimney had
been on fire in the servants' hall, or that one of the men had
caught a huge fish in the pond. On ordinary days she usually
went about in a light blouse and a dark blue skirt. We went for
walks together, picked cherries for making jam, went out in the
boat. When she jumped up to reach a cherry or sculled in the
boat, her thin, weak arms showed through her transparent
sleeves. Or I painted a sketch, and she stood beside me watching
rapturously.
One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about
nine o clock in the morning. I walked about the park, keeping a
good distance from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of
which there was a great number that summer, and noting their
position so as to come and pick them afterwards with Genya.
There was a warm breeze. I saw Genya and her mother both in
light holiday dresses coming home from church, Genya holding her
hat in the wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the
terrace.
For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for
my perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in our
country-houses in the summer have always had a particular charm.
When the green garden, still wet with dew, is all sparkling in
the sun and looks radiant with happiness, when there is a scent
of mignonette and oleander near the house, when the young people
have just come back from church and are having breakfast in the
garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and one knows that
all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to do
nothing the whole long day, one wishes that all life were like
that. Now, too, I had the same thought, and walked about the
garden prepared to walk about like that, aimless and unoccupied,
the whole day, the whole summer.
Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as
though she knew she would find me in the garden, or had a
presentiment of it. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and when
she asked a question she walked a little ahead so as to see my
face.
"A miracle happened in the village yesterday," she said. "The
lame woman Pelagea has been ill the whole year. No doctors or
medicines did her any good; but yesterday an old woman came and
whispered something over her, and her illness passed away."
"That's nothing much," I said. "You mustn't look for miracles
only among sick people and old women. Isn't health a miracle?
And life itself? Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle."
"And aren't you afraid of what is beyond understanding?"
"No. Phenomena I don't understand I face boldly, and am not
overwhelmed by them. I am above them. Man ought to recognise
himself as superior to lions, tigers, stars, superior to
everything in nature, even what seems miraculous and is beyond
his understanding, or else he is not a man, but a mouse afraid
of everything."
Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and
could guess correctly what I did not know. She longed for me to
initiate her into the domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful --
into that higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at
home. And she talked to me of God, of the eternal life, of the
miraculous. And I, who could never admit that my self and my
imagination would be lost forever after death, answered: "Yes,
men are immortal"; "Yes, there is eternal life in store for us."
And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.
As we were going home she stopped suddenly and said:
"Our Lida is a remarkable person -- isn't she? I love her very
dearly, and would be ready to give my life for her any minute.
But tell me" -- Genya touched my sleeve with her finger -- "tell
me, why do you always argue with her? Why are you irritated?"
"Because she is wrong."
Genya shook her head and tears came into her eyes.
"How incomprehensible that is!" she said. At that minute Lida
had just returned from somewhere, and standing with a whip in
her hand, a slim, beautiful figure in the sunlight, at the
steps, she was giving some orders to one of the men. Talking
loudly, she hurriedly received two or three sick villagers; then
with a busy and anxious face she walked about the rooms, opening
one cupboard after another, and went upstairs. It was a long
time before they could find her and call her to dinner, and she
came in when we had finished our soup. All these tiny details I
remember with tenderness, and that whole day I remember vividly,
though nothing special happened. After dinner Genya lay in a
long arm-chair reading, while I sat upon the bottom step of the
terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast with clouds,
and it began to spot with fine rain. It was hot; the wind had
dropped, and it seemed as though the day would never end.
Ekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace, looking drowsy and
carrying a fan.
"Oh, mother," said Genya, kissing her hand, "it's not good for
you to sleep in the day."
They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other
would stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call
"Aa--oo, Genya!" or "Mother, where are you?" They always said
their prayers together, and had the same faith; and they
understood each other perfectly even when they did not speak.
And their attitude to people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna,
too, grew quickly used to me and fond of me, and when I did not
come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were well. She,
too, gazed at my sketches with enthusiasm, and with the same
openness and readiness to chatter as Misuce, she told me what
had happened, and confided to me her domestic secrets.
She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not
care for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she
lived her life apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred
and enigmatic a person as the admiral, always sitting in his
cabin, is to the sailors.
"Our Lida is a remarkable person," the mother would often say.
"Isn't she?"
Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.
"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an
undertone, like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: "You
wouldn't easily find another like her; only, do you know, I am
beginning to be a little uneasy. The school, the dispensary,
books -- all that's very good, but why go to extremes? She is
three-and-twenty, you know; it's time for her to think seriously
of herself. With her books and her dispensary she will find life
has slipped by without having noticed it. . . . She must be
married."
Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her
head and said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:
"Mother, everything is in God's hands."
And again she buried herself in her book.
Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played
croquet and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over
supper and talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who
had the whole district under his thumb. As I went away from the
Voltchaninovs that evening, I carried away the impression of a
long, long idle day, with a melancholy consciousness that
everything ends in this world, however long it may be.
Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been
with me all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without
her, and that all that charming family were near and dear to me,
and for the first time that summer I had a yearning to paint.
"Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?" I
asked Byelokurov as I went home. "My life is dreary, difficult,
and monotonous because I am an artist, a strange person. From my
earliest days I've been wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction,
distrust in my work. I'm always poor, I'm a wanderer, but you --
you're a healthy, normal man, a landowner, and a gentleman. Why
do you live in such an uninteresting way? Why do you get so
little out of life? Why haven't you, for instance, fallen in
love with Lida or Genya?"
"You forget that I love another woman," answered Byelokurov.
He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the
lodge with him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund,
and dignified, not unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden,
in the Russian national dress and beads, always carrying a
parasol; and the servant was continually calling her in to
dinner or to tea. Three years before she had taken one of the
lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down at
Byelokurov's apparently forever. She was ten years older than he
was, and kept a sharp hand over him, so much so that he had to
ask her permission when he went out of the house. She often
sobbed in a deep masculine note, and then I used to send word to
her that if she did not leave off, I should give up my rooms
there; and she left off.
When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned
thoughtfully, and I began walking up and down the room,
conscious of a soft emotion as though I were in love. I wanted
to talk about the Voltchaninovs.
"Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as
devoted to schools and hospitals as she is," I said. "Oh, for
the sake of a girl like that one might not only go into the
Zemstvo, but even wear out iron shoes, like the girl in the
fairy tale. And Misuce? What a sweet creature she is, that
Misuce!"
Byelokurov, drawling out "Er--er," began a long-winded
disquisition on the malady of the age -- pessimism. He talked
confidently, in a tone that suggested that I was opposing him.
Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe
cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and
talks, and one does not know when he will go.
"It's not a question of pessimism or optimism," I said
irritably; "its simply that ninety-nine people out of a hundred
have no sense."
Byelokurov took this as aimed at himself, was offended, and went
away.
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