In town he dined, took a stroll in the park, and then he suddenly remembered Ivan Petrovich’s invitation and decided to call on the Turkins and see what kind of people they were.
‘Good day – if you please!’ Ivan Petrovich said, meeting him on the front steps. ‘Absolutely, overwhelmingly delighted to see such a charming visitor! Come in, I’ll introduce you to my good lady wife. Verochka,’ he went on, introducing the doctor to his wife, ‘I’ve been telling him that he has no right at all under Roman law to stay cooped up in that hospital – he should devote his leisure time to socializing. Isn’t that so, my sweet?’
‘Please sit here,’ Vera Iosifovna said, seating the guest beside her. ‘You are permitted to flirt with me. My husband’s as jealous as Othello, but we’ll try and behave so that he doesn’t notice a thing.’
‘Oh, my sweet little chick-chick!’ Ivan Petrovich muttered tenderly, planting a kiss on her forehead. ‘You’ve timed your visit to perfection!’ he added, turning once more to his guest. ‘My good lady wife’s written a real whopper of a novel and she’s going to read it out loud this evening.’
‘Jean, my pet,’ Vera Iosifovna told her husband. ‘Dites que l’on nous donne du thé.’
Startsev was introduced to Yekaterina Ivanovna, an eighteen-year-old girl who was the image of her mother – and just as thin and attractive. Her waist was slim and delicate, and her expression was still that of a child. And her youthful, already well-developed, beautiful, healthy bosom hinted at spring, true spring. Then they had tea with jam, honey, chocolates, and very tasty pastries that simply melted in one’s mouth.
Towards evening more guests began to arrive and Ivan Petrovich would look at them with his laughing eyes and say: ‘Good evening – if you please!’
Then they all sat in the drawing-room with very serious expressions, and Vera Iosifovna read from her novel, which began: ‘The frost was getting harder …’ The windows were wide open and they could hear the clatter of knives in the kitchen; the smell of fried onion drifted over from the yard … To be sitting in those soft armchairs was highly relaxing and the lamps winked so very invitingly in the twilight of the drawing-room; and now, on an early summer’s evening, when the sound of voices and laughter came from the street and the scent of lilac wafted in from outside, it was difficult to understand all that claptrap about how the frost was getting harder and ‘the setting sun was illuminating with its cold rays the lonely wayfarer crossing a snowy plain’. Vera Iosifovna read how a beautiful young countess established schools, hospitals and libraries in her village and how she fell in love with a wandering artist. She read of things that never happen in real life. All the same, it was pleasantly soothing to hear about them – and they evoked such serene and delightful thoughts that one was reluctant to get up.
‘Not awfully baddish!’ Ivan Petrovich said softly.
One of the guests, whose thoughts were wandering far, far away as he listened, remarked: ‘Yes … indeed …’
One hour passed, then another. In the municipal park close by a band was playing and a choir was singing. For five minutes after Vera Iosifovna had closed her manuscript everyone sat in silence listening to the choir singing ‘By Rushlight’, a song that conveyed what really happens in life and what was absent from the novel.
‘Do you have your works published in magazines?’ Startsev asked Vera Iosifovna.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I don’t publish them anywhere … I hide away what I’ve written in a cupboard. And why publish?’ she explained. ‘It’s not as if we need the money.’
And for some reason everyone sighed.
‘And now, Pussycat, play us something,’ Ivan Petrovich told his daughter.
They raised the piano lid and opened some music that happened to be lying there ready. Yekaterina Ivanovna sat down and struck the keys with both hands. And then she immediately struck them again, with all her might – and again and again. Her shoulders and bosom quivered, relentlessly she kept hammering away in the same place and it seemed that she had no intention of stopping until she had driven those keys deep into the piano. The drawing-room was filled with the sound of thunder. Everything reverberated – floor, ceiling, furniture. Yekaterina Ivanovna played a long, difficult, monotonous passage that was interesting solely on account of its difficulty. As Startsev listened he visualized large boulders rolling from the top of a high mountain, rolling and forever rolling – and he wanted the rolling to quickly stop. And at the same time, Yekaterina Ivanovna, her face pink from the exertion, strong and brimful of energy, with a lock of hair tumbling onto her forehead, struck him as most attractive. And how pleasant and refreshing it was, after a winter spent in Dyalizh among patients and peasants, to be sitting in that drawing-room, to be looking at that young, exquisite and most probably innocent creature, to be listening to those deafening, tiresome, yet civilized sounds.
‘Well, Pussycat! You’ve really excelled yourself today!’ Ivan Petrovich said with tears in his eyes, rising to his feet when his daughter had finished. ‘ “Die now Denis, you’ll never write better!” ’
They all surrounded and congratulated her, expressed their admiration and assured her that it was a long, long time since they had heard such a performance, while she listened in silence, faintly smiling – and triumph was written all over her figure.
‘Wonderful! Excellent!’ Startsev exclaimed too, yielding to the general mood of enthusiasm.
‘Where did you study music?’ he asked Yekaterina. ‘At the Conservatoire?’
‘No, I’m still only preparing for it, but in the meantime I’ve been having lessons with Madame Zavlovsky.’
‘Did you go to the local high school?’
‘Oh no!’ intervened Vera Iosifovna. ‘We engaged private tutors. At high school or boarding-school, you must agree, one could meet with bad influences. A growing girl should be under the influence of her mother and no one else.’
‘I’m going to the Conservatoire all the same,’ Yekaterina retorted.
‘No, Pussycat loves her Mama. Pussycat’s not going to upset Mama and Papa, is she?’
‘I will go, I will!’ replied Yekaterina half-joking, acting like a naughty child and stamping her little foot.
Over supper Ivan Petrovich was able to display his talents. He told funny stories, laughing only with his eyes; he joked, he set absurd riddles and solved them himself, perpetually talking in his own weird lingo that had been cultivated by lengthy practice in the fine art of wit and which had evidently become second nature to him by now:
‘A real whopper! – not awfully baddish! – thanking you most convulsively!’
But that was not all. When the guests, replete and contented, crowded in the hall, sorting out their coats and canes, Pavlushka the footman (or Peacock as he was nicknamed), a boy of about fourteen with cropped hair and chubby cheeks, kept bustling around them.
‘Now, Peacock, perform!’ Ivan Petrovich told him.
Peacock struck a pose and raised one arm aloft.
‘Die, wretched woman!’ he declaimed in tragic accents. And everyone roared with laughter.
‘Most entertaining!’ thought Startsev as he went out into the street. He called at a restaurant and drank some beer before setting off for Dyalizh. All the way he kept humming: ‘Thy voice for me is dear and languorous.’
After a six-mile walk he went to bed, not feeling in the least tired: on the contrary, he felt that he could have walked another thirteen miles with the greatest pleasure.
‘Not awfully baddish!’ he remembered as he dozed off. And he burst out laughing.
II
Startsev had always been intending to visit the Turkins again, but he was so overloaded with work in the hospital that it was impossible to find a spare moment. This way more than a year passed in hard work and solitude. But one day someone from town brought him a letter in a light blue envelope.