When she had driven off Pyotr Petrovich started telling me about her. He said that the girl was of good family and that her name was Lidiya Volchaninov. The estate on which she lived with her mother and sister – like the large village on the other side of the pond – was called Shelkovka. Her father had once held an important post in Moscow and was a high-ranking civil servant when he died. Although they were very well-off, the Volchaninovs never left their estate, summer or winter. Lidiya taught in their own rural school in Shelkovka, at a monthly salary of twenty-five roubles. She spent nothing else besides this money on herself and was proud of earning her own living.
‘An interesting family,’ said Belokurov. ‘We’ll go and visit them one day if you like. They’d be delighted to see you.’
One day after dinner (it was some sort of holiday) we remembered the Volchaninovs and went over to see them at Shelkovka. The mother and her two daughters were at home. Yekaterina Pavlovna, the mother, obviously once very pretty but now plump for her age, sad, short-winded and absent-minded, tried to entertain me with talk about painting. Having learnt from her daughter that I might be coming to see them at Shelkovka she hurriedly mentioned two or three of my landscapes that she had seen at Moscow exhibitions, and now she asked me what I wanted to express in them. Lidiya – or Lida as she was called at home – talked more to Belokurov than to me. Serious and unsmiling, she asked him why he wasn’t on the local council and had so far never attended a single meeting.
‘It’s not right!’ she said reproachfully. ‘It’s not right. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
‘That’s true, perfectly true,’ her mother agreed. ‘It’s just not right!’
‘The whole district is under Balagin’s thumb,’ Lida continued, turning to me. ‘He himself is chairman of the council, he’s handed out all the jobs in the district to his nephews and sons-in-law, and he does just what he likes. We must take a stand. The young people must form a pressure group, but you can see for yourself what our young people are like. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Pyotr Petrovich!’
While we were discussing the local council, Zhenya, the younger sister, said nothing. She never took part in serious conversations: in that family she wasn’t considered grown-up at all – just as if she were a little girl they called her Missy, the name she had given her governess as a child. The whole time she kept looking at me inquisitively and when I was examining the photographs in the album she explained: ‘That’s Uncle… that’s my godfather…’ and she ran her finger over the photographs, touching me with her shoulder like a child, so that I had a close view of her delicate, undeveloped bosom, her slender shoulders, her plait and her slim, tight-belted waist.
We played croquet and tennis, strolled in the garden, drank tea, after which we had a leisurely supper. After that vast, empty colonnaded ballroom I somehow felt at home in that small, cosy house where there were no oleographs on the walls and where the servants were spoken to politely. Thanks to Lida and Missy, everything seemed so pure and youthfuclass="underline" it was all so civilized. Over supper Lida again talked to Belokurov about the council, about Balagin and school libraries. She was a vivacious, sincere girl with strong views. And it was fascinating listening to her, although she said a lot, and in a loud voice – perhaps because that was how she was used to speaking in school. On the other hand my friend Pyotr Petrovich, who still retained the student habit of turning everything into an argument, spoke boringly, listlessly and longwindedly – he was obviously most anxious to appear advanced and clever. He waved his arms about and upset a sauceboat with his sleeve, so that a large pool of gravy formed on the tablecloth. But I was the only one who seemed to notice it.
It was quiet and dark when we returned.
‘Good breeding isn’t that you don’t upset gravy on tablecloths, but that you don’t notice when someone else does it,’ sighed Belokurov. ‘Yes, they’re a splendid, cultured family. I’m out of touch with refined people – ever so badly out of touch! Nothing but work, work, work!’
He spoke of all the work involved in being a model farmer. But I thought to myself: what an unpleasant, lazy fellow! Whenever he spoke about anything serious he would laboriously drag out his words with a great deal of ‘er’s and ‘erring’. And he worked as he spoke – slowly, always late, always missing deadlines. I had little confidence in his efficiency, if only because he carried around for weeks on end in his pockets the letters I’d given him to post.
‘The hardest thing,’ he muttered as he walked beside me, ‘is not having your work appreciated by anyone! You get no thanks at all!’
II
I became a regular visitor at the Volchaninovs. Usually I would sit on the bottom step of the terrace, depressed by feelings of dissatisfaction with myself, regretting that my life was passing so quickly, so uninterestingly. I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest. Just then they were talking on the terrace and I could hear the rustle of dresses, the sound of someone turning over pages in a book. I soon became used to Lida receiving the sick and handing out books during the day. Often she would go off to the village with a parasol over her bare head, while in the evenings she would hold forth in a loud voice about councils and schools. Whenever the conversation turned to serious matters, that slim, pretty, invariably severe young lady with her small, finely modelled mouth, would coldly tell me:
‘That’s of no interest to you.’
I did not appeal to her at all. She did not like me because I was a landscape painter who did not portray the hardships of the common people in my canvases and because – so she thought – I was indifferent to all her deepest beliefs. I remember, when I was once travelling along the shores of Lake Baikal2 I met a young Buryat3 girl on horseback, wearing a smock and cotton trousers. I asked her to sell me her pipe, but while we were talking she looked contemptuously at my European face and hat. All of a sudden she became tired of talking and galloped off, uttering wild yells. And in the same way Lida looked down on me, because we were from different worlds. She didn’t express her dislike openly, but I could sense it. Sitting on the bottom step of the terrace I felt irritated and told her that dishing out treatment to peasants without being a doctor was a fraud: it was easy enough to play the Good Samaritan when one had five thousand acres of one’s own.
But her sister Missy didn’t have a care in the world. Like me, she lived a life of complete idleness. The moment she got up in the morning she would take a book and sit reading in a deep armchair on the terrace with her feet barely touching the ground; or she would escape with her book to the lime-tree avenue, or go beyond the gates into the open fields. She would read all day long, eagerly poring over her book and one could only tell from her occasionally tired and glazed look, and her extreme pallor, how taxing this really was for her. When I came she would blush slightly on seeing me, put down her book, look into my face with her big eyes and tell me enthusiastically what had been happening – for example, that the chimney in the servants’ quarters had caught fire, or that a workman had hooked a large fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually went around in a brightly coloured blouse and navy blue skirt. We would go for walks together, pick cherries for jam or go boating and whenever she jumped up to reach the cherries or plied the oars her thin, delicate arms showed through her full sleeves. Occasionally, I would sketch while she stood beside me, looking on admiringly.