A moment later she was no longer in the carriage, and the policeman by the lit-up entrance of the club yelled at Panteleimon in a disgusting voice:
“What’re you stopping for, you old crow? Keep driving!”
Startsev went home, but soon came back. At midnight, in a borrowed tailcoat and a stiff white cravat that somehow kept sticking out and trying to slip from the collar, he was sitting in the club drawing room and saying to Ekaterina Ivanova with enthusisasm:
“Oh, how little they know who have never loved! I think no one has yet described love correctly, and it’s hardly possible to describe this tender, joyful, tormenting feeling, and anyone who has experienced it at least once will not try to convey it in words. What’s the use of preambles and descriptions? What’s the use of unnecessary eloquence? My love is boundless…I ask you, I beg you,” Startsev finally brought out, “be my wife!”
“Dmitri Ionych,” Ekaterina Ivanovna said with a very serious expression, having thought a little. “Dmitri Ionych, I am very grateful to you for the honor, I respect you, but…” She stood up and remained standing, “But, I’m sorry, I cannot be your wife. Let’s talk seriously, Dmitri Ionych, you know I love art more than anything in the world, I madly love, I adore music, I’ve devoted my whole life to it. I want to be an artist, I want fame, success, freedom, and you want me to go on living in this town, to go on with this empty, useless life, which has become unbearable to me. To become a wife—oh, no, I’m sorry! A human being should strive for a lofty, brilliant goal, and family life would bind me forever. Dmitri Ionych” (she smiled slightly, because in saying “Dmitri Ionych” she remembered “Alexei Feofilaktych”), “Dmitri Ionych, you are a kind, noble, intelligent man, you are the best…” Tears came to her eyes. “I feel for you with all my heart, but…but you’ll understand…”
And, to keep herself from bursting into tears, she turned away and left the drawing room.
Startsev’s heart stopped beating anxiously. On leaving the club, he first of all took off the stiff cravat and drew a deep breath. He was slightly ashamed, and his vanity was wounded—he had not expected a refusal—and he could not believe that all his dreams, longings, and hopes had brought him to such a silly end, as in a little amateur play. And he was sorry for his feeling, for his love, so sorry that it seemed he might just burst into tears or whack Panteleimon’s broad back as hard as he could with his umbrella.
For three days he was fit for nothing, did not eat, did not sleep, but when the rumor reached him that Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone to Moscow to enter the conservatory, he calmed down and began to live as before.
Afterwards, remembering occasionally how he had wandered in the cemetery, or how he had driven all over town looking for a tailcoat, he stretched lazily and said:
“So much bother, really!”
IV
Four years went by. Startsev already had a large practice in town. Every morning he hurriedly received patients at his hospital in Dyalizh, then went to his patients in town, went now not with a pair but with a troika with little bells, and came home late at night. He gained weight, grew stout, and did not like going on foot, because he suffered from shortness of breath. Panteleimon, too, gained weight, and the wider he grew, the more pitifully he sighed and complained of his bitter lot: he was sick of driving!
Startsev visited many houses and met many people, but he did not become close with anyone. The local inhabitants’ conversations, views of life, and even their looks irritated him. Experience gradually taught him that when you play cards with a local inhabitant or dine with him, he is a peaceable, good-natured, and even rather intelligent man, but the moment you start talking with him about something non-edible, for instance politics or science, he gets nonplussed or goes off into such stupid and spiteful philosophy that all you can do is wave your hand and walk away. Even when Startsev once tried talking with a liberal inhabitant and said that, thank God, mankind was progressing, and that a time would come when they could dispense with passports and capital punishment, the inhabitant looked at him askance and incredulously and asked:
“So anybody could go down the street and put a knife into whoever he wants?” And when Startsev, in company, at supper or tea, said that one must work, that it was impossible to live without working, everybody took it as a reproach and became angry and obnoxiously quarrelsome. With all that, the inhabitants did nothing, decidedly nothing, were not interested in anything, and it was simply impossible to think up something to talk about with them. So Startsev avoided conversation, and only ate and played whist, and when he happened upon a festive dinner in some house, and they invited him to take part, he sat down and ate silently, looking into his plate; and everything they talked about then was uninteresting, unjust, and stupid; he felt irritated, edgy, but he said nothing, and because he was always sternly silent and looked into his plate, he became known in town as “the pouting Pole,” though he had never been a Pole.
He avoided such amusements as the theater and concerts, but he did play whist every evening for about three hours, with pleasure. He had another amusement, which he was drawn into imperceptibly, little by little: this was taking from his pocket in the evening the banknotes he had earned from his practice, and it would happen that his pockets were all stuffed with these banknotes—yellow and green, smelling of perfume, or vinegar, or incense, or whale oil—adding up to some seventy roubles; and when he collected several hundred, he took them to the Mutual Credit Society and deposited them in his account.
In all the four years since Ekaterina Ivanovna’s departure, he had been to the Turkins’ only twice, at the invitation of Vera Iosifovna, who was still being treated for migraine. Each summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to visit her parents, but he had not seen her once; it somehow did not happen.
But now four years had gone by. On one quiet, warm morning a letter was brought to him in the hospital. Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionych that she missed him very much and urged him to visit them and ease her suffering, and incidentally today was her birthday. Below was a postscript: “I join in Mama’s invitation. K.”
Startsev thought it over and in the evening went to the Turkins’.
“Ah, welcome if you please!” Ivan Petrovich met him, smiling with his eyes only. “Bonzhurings!”
Vera Iosifovna, already much aged, her hair white, shook Startsev’s hand, sighed affectedly, and said:
“You don’t want to court me, Doctor, you never visit us, I’m already too old for you. But here a young girl has come, maybe she will have more luck.”
And Kotik? She had grown thinner, paler, become more beautiful and shapely; but she was already Ekaterina Ivanovna and not Kotik; the former freshness and expression of childlike naïveté were no longer there. Her gaze and her manners had something new in them—timid and guilty, as if here, in the Turkins’ home, she no longer felt herself at home.
“It’s been so long!” she said, offering Startsev her hand, and one could see that her heart was beating anxiously; and looking into his face intently, with curiosity, she went on: “How you’ve filled out! You’re tanned, you’ve matured, but on the whole you’ve changed very little.”
Now, too, he liked her, liked her very much, but there was already something missing in her, or something superfluous—he himself was unable to tell which precisely, but something kept him from feeling as he used to. He did not like her paleness, her new expression, her weak smile, voice, and a little later he no longer liked her dress, the armchair she was sitting in, did not like something in the past, when he had almost married her. He remembered his love, the dreams and hopes that had excited him four years ago—and he became embarrassed.
They had tea with cake. Then Vera Iosifovna read a novel aloud, read about things that never happen in life, and Startsev listened, looked at her beautiful gray head, and waited for her to finish.