"Tanya! Tanya!"
Through the door came a weak voice, tearful but deter- mined.
"Leave me alone! . . . I implore you."
The misery of father and daughter reacted on the whole household, even on the labourers in the garden. Kovrin, as usual, was immersed in his own interesting work, but at last even he felt tired and uncomfortable. He determined to inter- fere, and disperse the cloud before evening. He knocked at Tanya's door, and was admitted.
"Come, come! What a shame!" he began jokingly; and then looked with surprise at her tear-stained and afflicted face covered with red spots. "Is it so serious, then? Well, well!"
"But if you knew how he tortured me!" she said, and a flood of tears gushed out of her big eyes. "He tormented me!" she continued, wringing her hands. "I never said 3 word to him. ... I only said there was no need to keep unnecessary labourers, if . . . if we can get day workmen. . . . You know the men have done nothing for the whole week. I ... I only said this, and he roared at me, and said a lot of things . . . most offensive • . • deeply insulting. And all for nothing."
"Never mind!" said Kovrin, straightening her hair. "You have had your scoldings and your cryings, and that is surely enough. You can't keep up this for ever . . . it is not right . . . all the more since you know he loves you infinitely.''
"He has ruined my whole life," sobbed Tanya. "I never hear anything but insults and affronts. He regards me a!- superfluous in his own house. Let him! He will have cause I I shall leave here to-morrow, and study for a position as telegraphist. • . . Let him!"
"Come, come. Stop crying, Tanya. It does you no good. . . . You are both irritable and impulsive, and both in the wrong. Come, and I will make peace!"
Kovrin spoke gently and persuasively, but Tanya con- tinued to cry, twitching her shoulders and wringing her hands as if she had been overtaken by a real misfortune. Kovrin felt all the sorrier owing to the smallness of the cause of her sorrow. What a trifle it took to make this little creature un- happy for a whole day, or, as she had expressed it, for a whole life! And as he consoled Tanya, it occurred to him that except this girl and her father there was not one in the world who loved him as a kinsman; and had it not been for them, he, left fatherless and motherless in early childhood, must have lived his whole life without feeling one sincere caress, or tasting ever that simple, unreasoning love which we feel only for those akin to us by blood. And he felt that his tired, strained nerves, like magnets, responded to the nerves of this crying, shuddering girl. He felt, too, that he could never love a healthy, rosy-cheeked woman; but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya appealed to him.
He felt pleasure in looking at her hair and her shoulders ; and he pressed her hand, and wiped away her tears. . . . At last she ceased crying. But she still continued to complain of her father, and of her insufferable life at home, imploring Kovrin to try to realise her position. Then by degrees she began to smile, and to sigh that God had cursed her with such a wicked temper; and in the end laughed aloud, called herself a fool, and ran out of the room.
A little later Kovrin went into the garden. Yegor Semiono- vich and Tanya, as if nothing had happened, were walking side by side up the alley, eating rye-bread and salt. Both were very hungry.
v
rleased with his success as peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. As he sat on a bench and mused, he heard the rattle of a carriage and a woman's laugh—visitors evidently again. Shadows fell in the garden, the sound of a violin, the music of a woman's voice reached him almost inaudibly; and this reminded him of the Black Monk. Whither, to what country, to what pianet, had that optical absurdity flown?
Hardly had he called to mind the legend and painted in imagination the black apparition in the rye-field when from behind the pine trees opposite to him, walked inaudibly— without the faintest rustling—a man of middle height. His grey head was uncovered, he was dressed in black, and bare- footed like a beggar. On his pallid, corpse-like face stood out sharply a number of black spots. Nodding his head politely the stranger or beggar walked noiselessly to the bench and sat down, and Kovrin recognised the Black Monk. For a minute they looked at one another, Kovrin with astonishment, but the monk kindly and, as, before, with a sly expression on his face.
"But you are a mirage," said Kovrin. "Why are you here, and why do you sit in one place? That is not in ac- cordance with the legend."
"It is all the same," replied the monk softly, turning his face toward Kovrin. "The legend, the mirage, 1—all are products of your own excited imagination. I am a phantom."
"That is to say you don't exist?" asked Kovrin.
"Think as you like," replied the monk, smiling faintly. "I exist in your imagination, and as your imagination is a part of Nature, I must exist also in Nature."
"You have a clever, a distinguished face—it seems to me as if in reality you had lived more than a thousand years," said Kovrin. "I did not know that my imagination was capable of creating such a phenomenon. Why do you look at me with such rapture? Are you pleased with me?"
"Yes. For you are one of the few who can justly be named the elected of God. You serve eternal truth. Your thoughts, your intentions, your astonishing science, all your life bear the stamp of divinity, a heavenly impress; they are dedicated to the rational and the beautiful, and that is, to the Eternal."
"You say, to eternal truth. Then can eternal truth be accessible and necessary to men if there is no eternal life?"
"There is eternal life," said the monk.
"You believe in the immortality of men."
"Of course. For you, men, there awaits a great and a beautiful future. And the more the world has of men like you the nearer will this future be brought. Without you, ministers to the highest principles, living freely and con- sciously, humanity would be nothing; developing in the nat- ural order it must wait the end of its earthly history. But you, by some thousands of years, hasten it into the kingdom of eternal truth—and in this is your high service. You em- body in yourself the blessing of God which rested upon the people."
"And what is the object of eternal life?" asked Kovrin.
"The same as all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment is in knowledge, and eternal life presents innumerable, inexhaust- ible fountains of knowledge; it is in this sense it was said: 'In My Father's house are many mansions. . . .' "
"You cannot conceive what a joy it is to me to listen to you," said Kovrin, rubbing his hands with delight.
"I am glad.''
"Yet I know that when you leave me I shall be tormented by doubt as to your reality. You are a phantom, a halluci- nation. But that means that I am physically diseased, that I am not in a normal state?"
"What if you are? That need not worry you. You are ill because you have overstrained your powers, because you have borne your health in sacrifice to one idea, and the time is near when you will sacrifice not merely it but your life also. What more could you desire? It is what all gifted and noble natures aspire to."
"But if I am physically diseased, how can I trust myself?"
"And how do you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts have not also seen visions? Genius, they tell you now, is akin to insanity. Believe me, the healthy and the normal are but ordinary men—the herd. Fears as to a nervous age, over-exhaustion and degeneration can trouble seriously only those whose aims in life lie in the present— that is the herd."