“Tania, Tania!”
And in answer he heard on the other side of the door a weak voice exhausted with crying, but still very positive, reply:
“Leave me alone, I beg you!”
The master’s trouble affected the whole house, even the people working in the garden were under its influence. Kovrin was immersed in his own interesting work, but at last he too became sad and felt awkward. In order in some measure to dissipate the general gloomy mood he decided to intervene, and early in the evening he knocked at Tania’s door. He was admitted.
“Oh, oh, what a shame!” he began jokingly, looking with astonishment at Tania’s tear-stained, sad little face that was all covered with red blotches. “Is it possible it is so serious? Oh, oh!”
“If you only knew how he tortures me!” she said, and tears—bitter, plentiful tears—welled up in her large eyes. “He has worn me quite out!” she continued, wringing her hands. “I said nothing to him . . . nothing at all. . . . I only said there is no need to keep . . . extra workmen if . . . if it is possible to get day labourers whenever they are wanted. Why, why the workmen have been doing nothing for a whole week. . . . I . . . I only said this and he shouted at me and he told me . . . many offensive, many deeply insulting things. Why, why?”
“Enough! Enough!” Kovrin said as he arranged a lock of her hair. “You have abused each other, you have wept, and that’s enough. One must not be angry for long, that’s wrong . . . all the more because he loves you tenderly.”
“He . . . he has spoilt my whole life,” Tania continued. “I am only insulted and . . . wounded here. He considers me superfluous in his house. What am I to do? He is right. I’ll go away from here to-morrow and become a telegraph girl. . . . Let him . . .”
“Well, well, well. . . . Tania, don’t cry. You mustn’t, my dear. . . . You are both hot-headed, irritable, and you are both in fault. Come along, I’ll make peace between you.”
Kovrin spoke affectionately and persuasively, but she continued to cry, her shoulders shaking and her hands clenched, as if a terrible misfortune had befallen her. He was all the more sorry for her because her grief was not serious, yet she suffered deeply. What trifles were sufficient to make this poor creature unhappy for a whole day, yes, perhaps even for her whole life! While comforting Tania, Kovrin thought that besides this girl and her father he might search the whole world without being able to find any other people who loved him as one of their family. If it had not been for these two people perhaps he, who had lost both his parents in his early childhood, would not have known to his very death what sincere affection was, nor that naïve, uncritical love that only exists between very near blood relatives. And he felt that his half-diseased, overtaxed nerves were drawn towards the nerves of this weeping, shuddering girl as iron is drawn to the magnet. He could never love a healthy, strong, red-cheeked woman, but pale, fragile, unhappy Tania attracted him.
He was pleased to stroke her hair, pat her shoulders, press her hands and wipe away her tears. At last she stopped crying; but for a long time she continued to complain about her father, and of her difficult, unbearable life in that house, begging Kovrin to enter into her position; then she gradually began to smile and to sigh that God had given her such a bad character, and at last she laughed aloud, called herself a fool and ran out of the room.
Shortly after, when Kovrin went into the garden, Egor Semenych and Tania were walking together in the avenue eating black bread and salt (they were both hungry), as if nothing had happened.
CHAPTER V Red Spots
DELIGHTED THAT the part of peacemaker had been successful, Kovrin went into the park. While sitting on a bench thinking he heard the sound of wheels and of girls’ laughter—visitors had arrived. When the shades of evening had begun to settle down on the gardens faint sounds of a violin and of voices singing reached his ear, and this reminded him of the black monk. Where, in what land or on what planet was that optical incongruity now being borne?
He had scarcely remembered the legend, and recalled to his memory the dark vision he had seen in the rye field, when just before him a middle-sized man with a bare grey head and bare feet, who looked like a beggar, came silently out of the pine wood, walking with small, unheard steps. On his pale, deathlike face the black eyebrows stood out sharply. Nodding affably this beggar or pilgrim came noiselessly and sat down on the bench. Kovrin recognized in him the black monk. For a minute they looked at each other—Kovrin with astonishment; the monk in a kindly and, as on the previous occasion, in a somewhat cunning manner, and with a self-complacent expression.
“But you are a mirage,” Kovrin exclaimed; “why are you here and sitting in one place too? That is not in accordance with the legend.”
“That’s all the same,” the monk replied after a pause, in a low quiet voice, turning his face towards Kovrin. “The mirage, the legend and I are all the products of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”
“Then, you do not exist?” Kovrin asked.
“Think what you like,” the monk answered with a faint smile. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, consequently I exist in nature too.”
“You have a very old, clever and expressive face; just as if you had really existed for more than a thousand years,” Kovrin said. “I did not know that my imagination was capable of creating such phenomena. But why are you looking at me with such rapture? Do I please you?”
“Yes. You are one of the few who are justly called the chosen of God. You serve the eternal truth. Your thoughts, your intentions, your extraordinary science and your whole life bear the godlike, the heavenly stamp, as they are devoted to the reasonable and the beautiful, that is to say, to that which is eternal.”
“You said the eternal truth. . . . But can people attain to the eternal truth, and is it necessary for them if there is no eternal life?”
“There is eternal life,” the monk answered.
“Do you believe in the immortality of man?”
“Yes, of course. A great brilliant future awaits you men. And the more men like you there are on earth, the sooner this future will be realized. Without you, the servants of the first cause, you who live with discernment and in freedom, the human race would, indeed, be insignificant. Developing in a natural way it would long have waited for the end of its earthly history. You are leading it to the kingdom of eternal truth several thousand years sooner—and in this lies your great service. . . . You incarnate in yourselves the blessing with which God has honoured mankind.”
“But what is the object of eternal life?” Kovrin asked.
“The same as of all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment is knowledge, and eternal life offers numberless and inexhaustible sources of knowledge; this is the meaning of: ‘in my Father’s House are many mansions.’”
“If you only knew how pleasant it is to listen to you,” Kovrin said, rubbing his hands with satisfaction.
“I’m very pleased.”
“But I know that when you go away I will be troubled about your reality. You are a vision, a hallucination. Consequently I am physically ill, I am not normal.”
“And what of that! Why are you troubled? You are ill because you have worked beyond your strength and you are exhausted, which means that you have sacrificed your health to an idea, and the time is near when you will sacrifice your life to it too. What could be better? It is the object to which all noble natures, gifted from above, constantly aspire.”