“But I’m quite well, and I do no one any harm, so there’s nothing bad in my hallucination,” he thought and felt good again.
He sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands, holding back the incomprehensible joy that filled his whole being, then he paced about again and sat down to work. But the thoughts he read in the book did not satisfy him. He wanted something gigantic, boundless, staggering. Towards morning he undressed and reluctantly went to bed: he did have to sleep!
When he heard the footsteps of Yegor Semyonych leaving for the gardens, Kovrin rang the bell and told the servant to bring some wine. He drank several glasses of Lafite with pleasure, then pulled the blanket over his head; his consciousness went dim, and he fell asleep.
IV
Yegor Semyonych and Tanya often quarreled and said unpleasant things to each other.
One morning they had a squabble over something. Tanya began to cry and went to her room. She did not come out for dinner or for tea. Yegor Semyonych first went about all pompous, puffed up, as if wishing to make it known that for him the interests of justice and order were higher than anything in the world, but soon his character failed him and he lost his spirits. He wandered sadly through the park and kept sighing: “Ah, my God, my God!”—and did not eat a single crumb at dinner. Finally, guilty, suffering remorse, he knocked on the locked door and timidly called:
“Tanya! Tanya!”
And in answer to him a weak voice, exhausted from tears and at the same time resolute, came from behind the door:
“Leave me alone, I beg you.”
The suffering of the masters affected the entire household, even the people who worked in the garden. Kovrin was immersed in his interesting work, but in the end he, too, felt dull and awkward. To disperse the general bad mood somehow, he decided to intervene and before evening knocked on Tanya’s door. He was admitted.
“Aie, aie, what a shame!” he began jokingly, looking in surprise at Tanya’s tear-stained, mournful face, covered with red spots. “Can it be so serious? Aie, aie!”
“But if you only knew how he torments me!” she said, and tears, bitter, abundant tears, poured from her big eyes. “He wears me out!” she went on, wringing her hands. “I didn’t say anything to him … not anything … I just said there was no need to keep … extra workers, if… if it’s possible to hire day laborers whenever we like. The … the workers have already spent a whole week doing nothing … I … I just said it, and he began to shout and said … a lot of insulting … deeply offensive things to me. What for?”
“Come, come,” said Kovrin, straightening her hair. “You’ve quarreled, cried, and enough. You mustn’t be angry for so long, it’s not nice … especially since he loves you no end.”
“He’s ruined my … my whole life,” Tanya went on, sobbing. “All I hear is insults and offense. He considers me useless in his house. So, then? He’s right. I’ll leave here tomorrow, get hired as a telegraph girl… Let him …”
“Well, well, well … Don’t cry, Tanya. Don’t cry, my dear … You’re both hot-tempered, irritable, you’re both to blame. Come, I’ll make peace between you.”
Kovrin spoke tenderly and persuasively, and she went on crying, her shoulders shaking and her hands clenched, as if some terrible misfortune had actually befallen her. He felt the more sorry for her because, though her grief was not serious, she suffered deeply. What trifles sufficed to make this being unhappy for a whole day, and perhaps even all her life! As he comforted Tanya, Kovrin was thinking that, apart from this girl and her father, there were no people to be found in the whole world who loved him like their own, like family; that if it were not for these two persons, he, who had lost his father and mother in early childhood, might have died without knowing genuine tenderness and that naïve, unreasoning love which one feels only for very close blood relations. And he felt that the nerves of this crying, shaking girl responded, like iron to a magnet, to his own half-sick, frayed nerves. He never could have loved a healthy, strong, red-cheeked woman, but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya he liked very much.
And he gladly stroked her hair and shoulders, pressed her hands and wiped her tears … Finally she stopped crying. She went on for a long time complaining about her father and her difficult, unbearable life in this house, imploring Kovrin to put himself in her place; then she gradually began to smile and sigh about God having given her such a bad character, in the end burst into loud laughter, called herself a fool, and ran out of the room.
When Kovrin went out to the garden a little later, Yegor Semyonych and Tanya were strolling side by side along the walk, as if nothing had happened, and they were both eating black bread and salt, because they were both hungry.
V
Pleased that he had succeeded so well in the role of peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. As he sat on a bench and reflected, he heard the rattle of carriages and women’s laughter—that was guests arriving. When the evening shadows began to lengthen in the garden, he vaguely heard the sounds of a violin and voices singing, and that reminded him of the black monk. Where, in what country or on what planet, was that optical incongruity racing about now?
No sooner had he remembered the legend and pictured in his imagination the dark phantom he had seen in the rye field, than there stepped from behind a pine tree just opposite him, inaudibly, without the slightest rustle, a man of average height, with a bare, gray head, all in dark clothes and barefoot, looking like a beggar, and his black eyebrows stood out sharply on his pale, deathly face. Nodding his head affably, this beggar or wanderer noiselessly approached the bench and sat down, and Kovrin recognized him as the black monk. For a moment the two looked at each other—Kovrin with amazement, and the monk tenderly and, as before, a little slyly, with the expression of one who keeps his own counsel.
“But you are a mirage,” said Kovrin. “Why are you here and sitting in one place? It doesn’t agree with the legend.”
“That makes no difference,” the monk answered after a moment, in a low voice, turning his face to him. “The legend, the mirage, and I—it is all a product of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”
“So you don’t exist?” asked Kovrin.
“Think as you like,” said the monk, and he smiled faintly. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, which means that I, too, exist in nature.”
“You have a very old, intelligent, and highly expressive face, as if you really have lived more than a thousand years,” said Kovrin. “I didn’t know that my imagination was capable of creating such phenomena. But why are you looking at me with such rapture? Do you like me?”
“Yes. You are one of the few who are justly called the chosen of God. You serve the eternal truth. Your thoughts and intentions, your astonishing science and your whole life bear a divine, heavenly imprint, because they are devoted to the reasonable and the beautiful—that is, to what is eternal.”
“You said: the eternal truth … But can people attain to eternal truth and do they need it, if there is no eternal life?”
“There is eternal life,” said the monk.
“You believe in people’s immortality?”
“Yes, of course. A great, magnificent future awaits you people. And the more like you there are on earth, the sooner that future will be realized. Without you servants of the higher principle, who live consciously and freely, mankind would be insignificant; developing in natural order, it would wait a long time for the end of its earthly history. But you will lead it into the kingdom of eternal truth several thousand years earlier—and in that lies your high worth. You incarnate in yourselves the blessing of God that rests upon people.”