“Giftless,” he thought, “isn’t the one who can’t write stories, but the one who writes them and can’t conceal it.”
“None too bad,” said Ivan Petrovich.
Then Ekaterina Ivanovna played the piano long and noisily, and when she finished, she was long thanked and admired.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t marry her,” thought Startsev.
She looked at him, and was apparently waiting for him to invite her to the garden, but he said nothing.
“So, let’s talk,” she said, going up to him. “How is your life? What are you up to? How are things? I’ve been thinking about you all these days,” she went on nervously. “I wanted to send you a letter, wanted to go myself to see you in Dyalizh, and was already set on going, but then changed my mind—God knows how you feel about me now. I waited for you with such excitement today. For God’s sake, let’s go to the garden.”
They went to the garden and sat there on the bench under the old maple tree, like four years ago. It was dark.
“So how are you getting on?” Ekaterina Ivanovna asked.
“Not bad, inching away,” Startsev replied.
And he could not think up anything more. They fell silent.
“I’m excited,” Ekaterina Ivanovna said and covered her face with her hands, “but pay no attention. I feel so good at home, I’m so glad to see everybody, and I can’t get used to it. So many memories! I thought we’d go on talking till morning.”
Now he saw her face up close, her shining eyes, and here, in the darkness, she looked younger than in the room, and it was even as if her former childlike expression had come back to her. And indeed she looked at him with naïve curiosity, as if she wished to examine more closely and understand the man who had once loved her so ardently, with such tenderness and such ill luck; her eyes thanked him for that love. And he remembered everything that had been, all the smallest details, how he had wandered in the cemetery, how later, towards morning, he had come home, exhausted, and he suddenly felt sad and sorry for the past. A little fire lit up in his soul.
“Do you remember how I took you to the club one evening?” he said. “It was raining then, dark…”
The little fire was burning brighter in his soul, and now he wanted to talk, to complain about life…
“Ahh!” he said with a sigh. “You ask how I’m getting along. How do we get along here? We don’t. We age, gain weight, go to seed. Day and night—swift in flight, life goes by drably, without impressions, without thoughts…Daytime lucre, and evening the club, the company of cardplayers, alcoholics, poseurs, whom I can’t stand. What’s the good of it?”
“But you have work, a noble purpose in life. You liked so much to talk about your hospital. I was sort of strange then, I fancied myself a great pianist. Nowadays all girls play the piano, and I also played, like all of them, and there was nothing special in me: I’m as much a pianist as Mama is a writer. And, of course, I didn’t understand you then, but later, in Moscow, I often thought of you. I thought only of you. What happiness it is to be a zemstvo doctor, to help those who suffer, to serve people. What happiness!” Ekaterina Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. “When I thought of you in Moscow, you appeared to me so ideal, so lofty…”
Startsev thought of the banknotes he so enjoyed taking from his pockets in the evenings, and the fire in his soul went out.
He got up to go to the house. She took him under the arm.
“You’re the best of the people I’ve known in my life,” she went on. “We’ll see each other, we’ll talk, won’t we? Promise me that. I’m not a pianist, I no longer have any illusions on that account, and I won’t play or talk about music in your presence.”
When they went into the house, and in the evening light Startsev saw her face and her sad, grateful, searching eyes directed at him, he felt uneasy and thought again:
“It’s a good thing I didn’t marry then.”
He started saying goodbye.
“You have no right of passage to leave without supper,” Ivan Petrovich said, seeing him to the door. “It’s quite perpendicular on your part. Go on, perform!” he said, addressing Pava in the front hall. Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with a moustache, assumed a pose, raised his arm, and said in a tragic tone:
“Die, wretched woman!”
All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage and looking at the dark house and garden that had once been so precious and dear to him, he remembered it all at once—Vera Iosifovna’s novels, and Kotik’s noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovich’s witticisms, and Pava’s tragic pose—and thought, if the most talented people in the whole town are so giftless, what kind of town can it be.
Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.
“You don’t come to see us. Why?” she wrote. “I fear you’ve changed towards us; I fear it, and I’m frightened at the very thought of it. Set me at peace, come and tell me that all is well.
“It’s necessary that I speak to you. Yours, E. T.”
He read this letter, pondered, and said to Pava:
“Tell them, my dear boy, that I cannot come today, I’m very busy. I’ll come, say, in three days or so.”
But three days went by, then a week, and he did not go. Once, passing by the Turkins’ house, he remembered that he should stop by if only for a minute, but he pondered and…did not stop by.
And he never visited the Turkins again.
V
A few more years have gone by. Startsev has gained still more weight, grown fat, breathes heavily, and now walks with his head thrown back. When he rides, plump, red, in his troika with little bells, and Panteleimon, also plump and red, with a beefy neck, sits on the box, stretching his straight, as if wooden, arms out in front of him, and shouts at the passersby: “Keep ri-i-ight!” the picture is impressive, and it looks as if it is not a man riding, but a pagan god. He has an enormous practice in town, has no time to catch his breath, and already owns an estate and two houses in town, and is on the lookout for a third, more profitable one, and when they tell him in the Mutual Credit Society about some house that is up for sale, he goes to the house unceremoniously, and, passing through the rooms, paying no attention to the undressed women and childen who stare at him in astonishment and fear, jabs at all the doors with his stick, and says:
“Is this the study? Is this a bedroom? And what’s this?”
And all the while he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his forehead.
He has much on his hands, but even so he has not left his post at the zemstvo; he is devoured by greed, he wants to keep it up both here and there. In Dyalizh and in town they now call him simply Ionych. “Where’s Ionych off to?” or “Shouldn’t we invite Ionych to the consultation?”
Probably because his throat is swollen with fat, his voice has changed and become high and shrill. His character has also changed: he has become difficult, irritable. When he receives patients, he is usually angry, raps his stick impatiently on the floor, and shouts in his unpleasant voice:
“Kindly just answer my questions! No talking!”
He is solitary. His life is dull, nothing interests him.
In all the time he has lived in Dyalizh, the love for Kotik was his only joy, and probably the last. In the evenings he plays whist at the club and then sits alone at a big table and eats supper. The servant Ivan, the oldest and most respected one, waits on him. He is served Lafite No. 17, and everybody—the staff of the club, the chef, and the waiter—already knows what he likes and what he does not like, they try their best to please him, or for all they know he will suddenly get angry and rap his stick on the floor.
While eating supper, he occasionally turns and interferes in some conversation: