The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
you are! You look sunburnt and more manly, but on the whole you have
changed very little."
Now, too, he thought her attractive, very attractive, but there was
something lacking in her, or else something superfluous--he could not
himself have said exactly what it was, but something prevented him from
feeling as before. He did not like her pallor, her new expression, her
faint smile, her voice, and soon afterwards he disliked her clothes,
too, the low chair in which she was sitting; he disliked something in
the past when he had almost married her. He thought of his love, of the
dreams and the hopes which had troubled him four years before--and he
felt awkward.
They had tea with cakes. Then Vera Iosifovna read aloud a novel; she
read of things that never happen in real life, and Startsev listened,
looked at her handsome grey head, and waited for her to finish.
"People are not stupid because they can't write novels, but because they
can't conceal it when they do," he thought.
"Not badsome," said Ivan Petrovitch.
Then Ekaterina Ivanovna played long and noisily on the piano, and when
she finished she was profusely thanked and warmly praised.
"It's a good thing I did not marry her," thought Startsev.
She looked at him, and evidently expected him to ask her to go into the
garden, but he remained silent.
"Let us have a talk," she said, going up to him. "How are you getting
on? What are you doing? How are things? I have been thinking about you
all these days," she went on nervously. "I wanted to write to you,
wanted to come myself to see you at Dyalizh. I quite made up my mind to
go, but afterwards I thought better of it. God knows what your attitude
is towards me now; I have been looking forward to seeing you to-day with
such emotion. For goodness' sake let us go into the garden."
They went into the garden and sat down on the seat under the old maple,
just as they had done four years before. It was dark.
"How are you getting on?" asked Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"Oh, all right; I am jogging along," answered Startsev.
And he could think of nothing more. They were silent.
"I feel so excited!" said Ekaterina Ivanovna, and she hid her face in
her hands. "But don't pay attention to it. I am so happy to be at home;
I am so glad to see every one. I can't get used to it. So many memories!
I thought we should talk without stopping till morning."
Now he saw her face near, her shining eyes, and in the darkness she
looked younger than in the room, and even her old childish expression
seemed to have come back to her. And indeed she was looking at him with
naïve curiosity, as though she wanted to get a closer view and
understanding of the man who had loved her so ardently, with such
tenderness, and so unsuccessfully; her eyes thanked him for that love.
And he remembered all that had been, every minute detail; how he had
wandered about the cemetery, how he had returned home in the morning
exhausted, and he suddenly felt sad and regretted the past. A warmth
began glowing in his heart.
"Do you remember how I took you to the dance at the club?" he asked. "It
was dark and rainy then ..."
The warmth was glowing now in his heart, and he longed to talk, to rail
at life....
"Ech!" he said with a sigh. "You ask how I am living. How do we live
here? Why, not at all. We grow old, we grow stout, we grow slack. Day
after day passes; life slips by without colour, without expressions,
without thoughts.... In the daytime working for gain, and in the evening
the club, the company of card-players, alcoholic, raucous-voiced
gentlemen whom I can't endure. What is there nice in it?"
"Well, you have work--a noble object in life. You used to be so fond of
talking of your hospital. I was such a queer girl then; I imagined
myself such a great pianist. Nowadays all young ladies play the piano,
and I played, too, like everybody else, and there was nothing special
about me. I am just such a pianist as my mother is an authoress. And of
course I didn't understand you then, but afterwards in Moscow I often
thought of you. I thought of no one but you. What happiness to be a
district doctor; to help the suffering; to be serving the people! What
happiness!" Ekaterina Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. "When I thought
of you in Moscow, you seemed to me so ideal, so lofty...."
Startsev thought of the notes he used to take out of his pockets in the
evening with such pleasure, and the glow in his heart was quenched.
He got up to go into the house. She took his arm.
"You are the best man I've known in my life," she went on. "We will see
each other and talk, won't we? Promise me. I am not a pianist; I am not
in error about myself now, and I will not play before you or talk of
music."
When they had gone into the house, and when Startsev saw in the
lamplight her face, and her sad, grateful, searching eyes fixed upon
him, he felt uneasy and thought again:
"It's a good thing I did not marry her then."
He began taking leave.
"You have no human right to go before supper," said Ivan Petrovitch as
he saw him off. "It's extremely perpendicular on your part. Well, now,
perform!" he added, addressing Pava in the hall.
Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with moustaches, threw himself
into an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic voice:
"Unhappy woman, die!"
All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage, and looking at
the dark house and garden which had once been so precious and so dear,
he thought of everything at once--Vera Iosifovna's novels and Kitten's
noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovitch's jokes and Pava's tragic posturing,
and thought if the most talented people in the town were so futile, what
must the town be?
Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"You don't come and see us--why?" she wrote to him. "I am afraid that
you have changed towards us. I am afraid, and I am terrified at the very
thought of it. Reassure me; come and tell me that everything is well.
"I must talk to you.--Your E. I."
* * * * *
He read this letter, thought a moment, and said to Pava:
"Tell them, my good fellow, that I can't come to-day; I am very busy.
Say I will come in three days or so."
But three days passed, a week passed; he still did not go. Happening
once to drive past the Turkins' house, he thought he must go in, if only
for a moment, but on second thoughts ... did not go in.
And he never went to the Turkins' again.
V
Several more years have passed. Startsev has grown stouter still, has
grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head
thrown back. When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells
and his team of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the
face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms
stiffly out before him as though they were made of wood, and shouts to
those he meets: "Keep to the ri-i-ight!" it is an impressive picture;
one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his
chariot. He has an immense practice in the town, no time to breathe, and
already has an estate and two houses in the town, and he is looking out
for a third more profitable; and when at the Mutual Credit Bank he is
told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the house without ceremony,
and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of half-dressed women
and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm, he prods at the
doors with his stick, and says:
"Is that the study? Is that a bedroom? And what's here?"
And as he does so he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his brow.
He has a great deal to do, but still he does not give up his work as
district doctor; he is greedy for gain, and he tries to be in all places
at once. At Dyalizh and in the town he is called simply "Ionitch":
"Where is Ionitch off to?" or "Should not we call in Ionitch to a
consultation?"
Probably because his throat is covered with rolls of fat, his voice has
changed; it has become thin and sharp. His temper has changed, too: he
has grown ill-humoured and irritable. When he sees his patients he is
usually out of temper; he impatiently taps the floor with his stick, and
shouts in his disagreeable voice:
"Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions! Don't talk
so much!"
He is solitary. He leads a dreary life; nothing interests him.
During all the years he had lived at Dyalizh his love for Kitten had
been his one joy, and probably his last. In the evenings he plays _vint_
at the club, and then sits alone at a big table and has supper. Ivan,
the oldest and most respectable of the waiters, serves him, hands him
Lafitte No. 17, and every one at the club--the members of the committee,
the cook and waiters--know what he likes and what he doesn't like and do
their very utmost to satisfy him, or else he is sure to fly into a rage
and bang on the floor with his stick.
As he eats his supper, he turns round from time to time and puts in his
spoke in some conversation:
"What are you talking about? Eh? Whom?"
And when at a neighbouring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks:
"What Turkins are you speaking of? Do you mean the people whose daughter
plays on the piano?"
That is all that can be said about him.
And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovitch has grown no older; he is not changed
in the least, and still makes jokes and tells anecdotes as of old. Vera
Iosifovna still reads her novels aloud to her visitors with eagerness
and touching simplicity. And Kitten plays the piano for four hours every
day. She has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn
goes to the Crimea with her mother. When Ivan Petrovitch sees them off
at the station, he wipes his tears as the train starts, and shouts:
"Good-bye, if you please."
And he waves his handkerchief.
THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY
IT is, as a rule, after losing heavily at cards or after a drinking-bout
when an attack of dyspepsia is setting in that Stepan Stepanitch Zhilin
wakes up in an exceptionally gloomy frame of mind. He looks sour,
rumpled, and dishevelled; there is an expression of displeasure on his
grey face, as though he were offended or disgusted by something. He
dresses slowly, sips his Vichy water deliberately, and begins walking
about the rooms.
"I should like to know what b-b-beast comes in here and does not shut
the door!" he grumbles angrily, wrapping his dressing-gown about him and
spitting loudly. "Take away that paper! Why is it lying about here? We
keep twenty servants, and the place is more untidy than a pot-house. Who
was that ringing? Who the devil is that?"
"That's Anfissa, the midwife who brought our Fedya into the world,"
answers his wife.
"Always hanging about ... these cadging toadies!"
"There's no making you out, Stepan Stepanitch. You asked her yourself,
and now you scold."
"I am not scolding; I am speaking. You might find something to do, my
dear, instead of sitting with your hands in your lap trying to pick a
quarrel. Upon my word, women are beyond my comprehension! Beyond my
comprehension! How can they waste whole days doing nothing? A man works
like an ox, like a b-beast, while his wife, the partner of his life,
sits like a pretty doll, sits and does nothing but watch for an
opportunity to quarrel with her husband by way of diversion. It's time
to drop these schoolgirlish ways, my dear. You are not a schoolgirl, not
a young lady; you are a wife and mother! You turn away? Aha! It's not
agreeable to listen to the bitter truth!"
"It's strange that you only speak the bitter truth when your liver is
out of order."
"That's right; get up a scene."
"Have you been out late? Or playing cards?"