In an impulse of tender love that suddenly flooded my heart, in tears, for some reason remembering our mother, our childhood, I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed her.
‘‘What’s the matter with you?’’ I asked. ‘‘You’re suffering, I’ve seen it for a long time. Tell me, what’s the matter?’’
‘‘I’m frightened...’ she said, trembling.
‘‘But what’s the matter?’’ I insisted. ‘‘For God’s sake, be open with me!’’
‘‘I will, I will be open with you, I’ll tell you the whole truth. Concealing it from you is so hard, so painful! Misail, I’m in love...’ she went on in a whisper. ‘‘I’m in love, I’m in love... I’m happy, but why am I so frightened?’’
There was the sound of footsteps, Dr. Blagovo appeared among the trees in his silk shirt and high boots. Evidently they had arranged a meeting here by the apple tree. Seeing him, she rushed to him impulsively, with a pained cry, as if he was being taken from her:
‘‘Vladimir! Vladimir!’’
She pressed herself to him and looked greedily into his face, and only now did I notice how thin and pale she had become recently. It was especially noticeable by her lace collar, which I had long known and which now lay more loosely than ever around her long and slender neck. The doctor became embarrassed but recovered at once and said, smoothing her hair:
‘‘Well, come, come...Why so nervous? You see, I’m here.’’
We were silent, glancing shyly at each other. Then the three of us walked on, and I heard the doctor say to me:
‘‘Cultured life has not yet begun with us. The old men comfort themselves that if there’s nothing now, there was something in the forties or the sixties;22 that’s the old men, but you and I are young, our brains have not yet been touched by marasmus senilis, and we cannot comfort ourselves with such illusions. Russia began in the year 862, 23 but cultured Russia, in my understanding, has never yet begun.’’
But I didn’t enter into these reflections. Strange as it was, I didn’t want to believe that my sister was in love, that she was now walking and holding this stranger’s hand, looking tenderly at him. My sister, this nervous, intimidated, downtrodden, unfree being, loves a man who is already married and has children! I felt sorry about something, precisely what I didn’t know; the doctor’s presence was now unpleasant for some reason, and I simply couldn’t understand what could come of this love of theirs.
XV
MASHA AND I were driving to Kurilovka for the blessing of the school. 24
‘‘Autumn, autumn, autumn...’ Masha was saying softly, looking around. ‘‘Summer’s over. There are no birds, and only the pussywillows are still green.’’
Yes, summer was over. The days are clear, warm, but the mornings are chilly, the shepherds now go out in sheepskin coats, and in our garden the dew on the asters doesn’t dry the whole day. You hear plaintive noises, and there’s no telling whether it’s a shutter whining on its rusty hinges or the cranes flying—and you feel so good and want so much to live!
‘‘Summer’s over...’ Masha was saying. ‘‘Now you and I can sum things up. We’ve worked a lot, thought a lot, we’re the better for it—honor and glory to us—we’ve succeeded at personal improvement; but did these successes of ours have any noticeable influence on the life around us, were they of any use to anyone? No. The ignorance, the physical filth, the drunkenness, the shockingly high infant mortality—it all remains as it was, and the fact that you plowed and sowed, and I spent money and read books, hasn’t made things better for anyone. Obviously we worked only for ourselves and had broad minds only for ourselves.’’
Such reasoning disconcerted me, and I didn’t know what to think.
‘‘We were sincere from beginning to end,’’ I said, ‘‘and whoever is sincere is right.’’
‘‘Who disputes that? We were right, but we did not rightly accomplish what we were right about. First of all, our external methods themselves—aren’t they mistaken? You want to be useful to people, but the very fact of your buying an estate precludes from the start all possibility of doing anything useful for them. Then, if you work, dress, and eat like a muzhik, by your own authority you legitimize, as it were, these heavy, clumsy clothes of theirs, their terrible cottages, their stupid beards... On the other hand, suppose you work a long time, very long, all your life, and in the end you get some practical results, but what are they, these results of yours, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, degeneracy? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of fighting are needed here, strong, bold, quick! If you really want to be useful, leave the narrow circle of ordinary activity and try to act upon the masses as a whole! What’s needed first of all is loud, energetic preaching. Why is art—music, for instance—so vital, so popular, and in fact so strong? Because a musician or a singer acts upon thousands at once. Dear, dear art!’’ she went on, looking dreamily at the sky. ‘‘Art gives wings and carries you far, far away! Whoever is sick of filth, of petty pennyworth interests, whoever is outraged, insulted, and indignant, can find peace and satisfaction only in the beautiful.’’
As we drove up to Kurilovka, the weather was clear, joyful. In some yards the threshing was under way, there was a smell of rye straw. Bright red rowanberries showed behind the wattle fences, and the trees all around, wherever you looked, were all gold or red. Bells were ringing in the bell towers, icons were being carried to the school, and they were singing ‘‘The Fervent Intercessor.’’ And how transparent the air, how high the pigeons flew!
A prayer service was held in the schoolroom. Then the Kurilovka peasants presented Masha with an icon, and the Dubechnya peasants with a big plaited bread and a gilded salt cellar. And Masha broke into sobs.
‘‘And if anything unnecessary was said, or there was any displeasure, forgive us,’’ said one old man, and he bowed to her and to me.
As we drove home, Masha kept turning to look back at the school; the green roof, which I had painted, now glistened in the sun, and we could see it for a long time. And I felt that the glances Masha cast at it now were farewell glances.
XVI
IN THE EVENING she got ready for town.
Lately she had often gone to town and spent the night there. In her absence, I was unable to work, my hands would drop and go weak; our big yard seemed a dull, disgusting wasteland, the orchard rustled angrily, and without her, the house, the trees, the horses were, for me, no longer ‘‘ours.’’
I didn’t go anywhere out of the house but kept sitting at her desk, by her bookcase with the books on farming, those former favorites, now no longer needed, looking at me so abashedly. For hours at a time, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn night, black as soot, was falling outside the windows, I would examine her old glove, or the pen she always wrote with, or her little scissors; I did nothing and was clearly aware that if I had done something before, if I had plowed, mowed, chopped wood, it was only because she wanted it. And if she had sent me to clean a deep well, where I’d have to stand up to my waist in water, I’d have gone into the well, regardless of whether it was necessary or not. But now, when she was not around, Dubechnya, with its decay, unkemptness, banging shutters, thieves by night and by day, seemed to me a chaos in which any work would be useless. And why should I work here, why worry and think about the future, if I felt that the ground was disappearing from under me, that my role here in Dubechnya had been played, in short, that the same lot awaited me as had befallen the books on farming? Oh, what anguish it was at night, in the hours of solitude, when I listened every moment with anxiety, as if waiting for someone to cry out to me that it was time to go. I wasn’t sorry for Dubechnya, I was sorry for my love, whose autumn had obviously also come. What enormous happiness it is to love and be loved, and how terrible to feel that you’re beginning to fall from that high tower!