Ivan Ivanych paced the room in agitation and repeated:
“If only I were young!”
He suddenly went up to Alekhin and began pressing him by one hand, then the other.
“Pavel Konstantinych!” he said in an entreating voice, “don’t settle in, don’t let yourself fall asleep! As long as you’re young, strong, energetic, don’t weary of doing good! There is no happiness and there shouldn’t be, and if there is any meaning and purpose in life, then that meaning and purpose are not at all in our happiness, but in something more intelligent and great. Do good!”
And Ivan Ivanych said all this with a pitiful, pleading smile, as if he were asking personally for himself.
Then all three sat in armchairs at different ends of the drawing room and were silent. Ivan Ivanych’s story satisfied neither Burkin nor Alekhin. With generals and ladies gazing from gilded frames, looking alive in the twilight, it was boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries. For some reason they would have preferred to speak and hear about fine people, about women. And the fact that they were sitting in a drawing room where everything—the covered chandelier, the armchairs, the carpets under their feet—said that here those very people now gazing from the frames had once walked, sat, drunk tea, and that the beautiful Pelageya now walked noiselessly here, was better than any story.
Alekhin had a strong desire to sleep; farming got him up early, before three in the morning, and his eyes kept closing, but he was afraid that the guests would start telling something interesting without him, and he would not leave. Whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was intelligent or correct, he did not try to figure out; his guests were not talking of grain, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on …
“However, it’s time for bed,” said Burkin, getting up. “Allow me to wish you good-night.”
Alekhin took leave of them and went to his room below, while the guests stayed upstairs. They were both put for the night in a big room with two old, carved wooden beds in it, and with an ivory crucifix in the corner. Their beds, wide and cool, made up by the beautiful Pelageya, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.
Ivan Ivanych silently undressed and lay down.
“Lord, forgive us sinners!” he said, and pulled the covers over his head.
His pipe, left on the table, smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin lay awake for a long time and still could not figure out where that heavy odor was coming from.
Rain beat on the windows all night.
AUGUST 1898
A MEDICAL CASE
A professor received a telegram from the Lialikovs’ factory asking him to come quickly. The daughter of a certain Mrs. Lialikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was sick—nothing more could be understood from the long, witlessly composed telegram. The professor did not go himself, but sent his intern Korolev in his place.
He had to go two stations away from Moscow and then some three miles by carriage. A troika was sent to the station to pick Korolev up; the driver wore a hat with a peacock feather, and to all questions responded with a loud military “No, sir!” or “Yes, sir!” It was Saturday evening, the sun was setting. Crowds of workers came walking from the factory to the station and bowed to the horses that were bringing Korolev. And he was enchanted by the evening, and the country houses and dachas along the way, and the birches, and that quiet mood all around, when it seemed that, together with the workers, the fields, the woods, and the sun were preparing to rest on the eve of the holy day—to rest and perhaps to pray …
He was born and grew up in Moscow, did not know the countryside and had never been interested in factories or visited them. But he had chanced to read about factories and to visit factory owners and talk with them; and when he saw some factory in the distance or up close, he thought each time of how quiet and peaceful everything was outside, and how inside there must be the impenetrable ignorance and obtuse egoism of the owners, the tedious, unhealthy labor of the workers, squabbles, vodka, vermin. And now, as the workers deferentially and timorously stepped aside before the carriage, in their faces, caps, and gait he could discern physical uncleanness, drunkenness, nervousness, perplexity
They drove through the factory gates. On both sides flashed workers’ cottages, women’s faces, linen and blankets on the porches. “Watch out!” cried the driver, not reining in the horses. Then came a wide yard with no grass, and in it five huge buildings with smokestacks, standing separate from each other, warehouses, barracks, and over everything lay some sort of gray coating, as of dust. Here and there, like oases in the desert, were pathetic little gardens and the green or red roofs of the houses where the management lived. The driver suddenly reined in the horses, and the carriage stopped at a house newly painted gray; there was a front garden with dust-covered lilacs, and a strong smell of paint on the yellow porch.
“Come in, doctor,” women’s voices said from the hall and the front room, followed by sighs and whispers. “Come in, we’ve been waiting … it’s very bad. Come in here.”
Mrs. Lialikov, a stout, elderly lady in a black silk dress with fashionable sleeves, but, judging by her face, a simple and illiterate one, looked at the doctor with anxiety and hesitated, not daring to offer him her hand. Beside her stood a person with short hair and a pince-nez, in a bright multicolored blouse, skinny and no longer young. The servants called her Christina Dmitrievna, and Korolev figured that she was a governess. It was probably she, as the most educated person in the house, who had been charged with meeting and receiving the doctor, because she at once began hastily explaining the causes of the illness in minute, nagging detail, but without saying who was ill or what was the matter.
The doctor and the governess sat and talked, while the mistress stood motionless by the door, waiting. Korolev understood from the conversation that the ill person was Liza, a girl of twenty, Mrs. Lialikov’s only daughter, the heiress; she had long been ill and had been treated by various doctors, and during the past night, from evening till morning, she had had such a pounding of the heart that no one in the house had slept for fear she might die.
“She’s been sickly, you might say, from childhood,” Christina Dmitrievna went on recounting in a sing-song voice, wiping her lips with her hand now and then. “The doctors say it’s nerves, but when she was little, the doctors drove her scrofula inside, so I think it might come from that.”
They went to see the patient. Quite grown-up, big, tall, but not pretty, resembling her mother, with the same small eyes and broad, overly developed lower face, her hair undone, the blanket drawn up to her chin, she gave Korolev the impression at first of a wretched, woebegone creature who had been taken in and given shelter here out of pity, and it was hard to believe that she was the heiress to five huge buildings.
“And so,” Korolev began, “we’ve come to take care of you. How do you do.”
He introduced himself and shook her hand—a big, cold, uncomely hand. She sat up and, obviously long accustomed to doctors, not caring that her shoulders and breast were uncovered, allowed herself to be auscultated.
“My heart pounds,” she said. “All last night, it was so terrible … I nearly died of fright! Give me something for it!”
“I will, I will! Calm down.”
Korolev examined her and shrugged his shoulders.