He had dinner in to^, he strolled in the park. Then Mr. Turkin's invitation suddenly crossed his mind, and he decided to call and see what the family was like.
Mr. Turkin welcomed him in the porch. 'Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. Delighted indeed to see so charming a guest. Come along, I'll introduce you to the wife.
'I was telling him, Vera dear—' he went on, presenting the doctor to his wife. 'He ain't got no statutory right, I was telling him, to coop himself up in that hospital. He should devote his leisure to society, shouldn't he, love?'
'Do sit here,' said Mrs. Turkin, placing the guest next to her. 'You can be my new boy-friend. My husband is jealous—oh, he's quite the Othello !—but we'll try to behave so he won't notice anything.'
'Now, now, ducky!' Mr. Turkin muttered tenderly, kissing her forehead. 'Oh, you are naughty!'
'You're in luck,' he added, turning to the doctor again. 'Mrs. T. has written a whacking great Novel, and today she's going to read it to us.'
Mrs. Turkin turned to her husband. 'Dites que I'on nous donne du the, dear.'
Startsev was introduced to Catherine: a girl of eighteen, very much like her mother. Also slim and pretty, she still had a rather childlike expression. Her waist was soft and slender. So beautiful, healthy and well-developed were her youthful breasts that she seemed like the very breath of springtime.
They had tea with jam and honey, sweets and delicious cakes which melted in the mouth. As evening drew on other guests gradually arrived. Mr. Turkin fixed each of them with his grin.
'Pleased to meet you, I'm sure.'
Then they all sat in the drawing-room, looking very earnest, while Mrs. Turkin read her Novel, which began: 'The frost had set in.' The windows were wide open, a clatter of knives was heard from the kitchen, there was a smell of fried onions. It was relaxing to sit in the deep, soft arm-chairs. The lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room that, on this late spring evening— with voices and laughter borne from the street, with the scent of lilac wafting from outside—it was hard to grasp this stuff about the frost setting in and the dying sun illuminating with its chill rays a traveller on his lonely journey over some snow-covered plain. Mrs. Turkin was reading about a beautiful young countess who ran schools, hospitals and libraries in her village, and who fell in love with a wandering artist. These were not things which happen in real life, but they made you feel nice and cosy, they evoked peaceful, serene thoughts—and so no one wanted to get up.
'Not so dusty,' said Mr. Turkin softly.
One of the audience had been carried away by a long, long train of thought.
'No indeed,' he said in a voice barely audible.
An hour passed, then another. In the municipal park near by a band was playing, a choir sang. No one spoke for five minutes or so after Mrs. Turkin had closed her manuscript. They were listening to the choir singing 'Rushlight': a song which conveyed the real-life atmosphere which the Novel lacked.
'Do you publish your stories in the magazines?' Startsev asked Mrs. Turkin.
'No, never,' she answered. 'I keep my writings in a cupboard. Why publish!' she explained. 'It's not as though we were badly off'
For some reason everyone sighed.
'Now, Pussy, you play us something,' Mr. Turkin told his daughter.
They put the lid of the grand piano up, they opened some music which was lying ready. Catherine sat down. She struck the keys with both hands. Then she immediately struck them again as hard as she could, and then again and again. Her shoulders and bosom quivered, and she kept hitting the same place as if she did not mean to stop until she had driven those keys right inside the instrument. The drawing- room resounded with the din as everything—floor, ceiling, furniture— reverberated.
Catherine was playing a difficult passage—its interest lay in its very difficulty. It was long and tedious. Startsev, as he listened, pictured a fall of rocks down a high mountain: on, on they tumbled while he very much wished they wouldn't. Yet Catherine—pink from her exertions, strong and vigorous, with a lock of hair falling over her forehead—greatly attracted him.
What a pleasant new sensation it was, after a winter in Dyalizh among patients and peasants: to sit in a drawing-room watching this young, exquisite and probably innocent creature, and hearing this noisy, tiresome—yet cultured—racket.
'Well, Pussy, you played better than ever today,' said Mr. Turkin
with tears in his eyes after his daughter had finished and stood up. 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.'
They all crowded round with their congratulations and admiration, declaring that they hadn't heard such a performance for ages. She listened in silence with a faint smile, her whole figure radiating triumph.
'Marvellous! Splendid!'
Infected by the general enthusiasm, Startsev too said how marvellous it had been. 'Where did you study?' he asked Catherine. 'At the Conservatory?'
'No, I'm still at the pre-Conservatory stage. Meanwhile I've been taking lessons here, with Madame Zavlovsky.'
'Did you go to the local high school?'
'No indeed, we engaged private tutors,' Mrs. Turkin answered for her. 'There might be bad influences in a high school or a boarding school, you know. A growing girl should be under no influence but that of her mother.'
'All the same, I am going to the Conservatory,' Catherine said.
'No. Pussy loves Mummy, Pussy won't upset Mummy and Daddy.'
'I will go there, I will,' joked Catherine, playing up like a naughty child and stamping her foot.
At supper it was Mr. Turkin's turn to display his talents. Laughing with his eyes alone, he told funny stories, he joked, he propounded absurd riddles, he answered them himself—talking all the time in an extraordinary lingo evolved by long practice in the exercise of wit . . . by now it was obviously second nature to him.
'Whacking great,' 'Not so dusty,' 'Thanking you most unkindly '
Nor was this all. When the guests; contented and replete, were jammed in the hall looking for coats and sticks, the footman Paul— nicknamed Peacock, a boy of about fourteen with cropped hair and full cheeks—bustled around them.
'Come on then, Peacock, perform!' Mr. Turkin said.
Peacock struck an attitude, threw up an arm.
'Unhappy woman, die!' he uttered in a tragic voice. And everyone roared with laughter.
'Great fun,' thought Startsev, going out in the street.
He called at a restaurant and had a beer before setting off home for Dyalizh. During the walk he hummed 'Your Voice to me both Languorous and Tender.'
Going to bed, he did not feel at all tired after his six-mile walk— fir from it, he felt he could have walked another fifteen with pleasure.
'Not so dusty,' he remembered as he was falling asleep. And laughed.
II
Startsev kept meaning to visit the Turkins again, but just couldn't find a free hour, being so very busy at his hospital. Then, after more than a year of such solitary toil, a letter in a light blue envelope arrived from town.
Mrs. Turkin had had migraine for years, but recently—what with Pussy now scaring her daily with talk of going to the Conservatory— these attacks had increased. The town doctors had all attended the Turkins, now it was the country doctor's turn. Mrs. Turkin wrote him a touching letter, asking him to come and relieve her sufferings. Startsev went, and then became a frequent—a very frequent—visitor at the Turkins'.
He really did help Mrs. Turkin a bit, and she was now telling all her guests what an extraordinary, what an admirable doctor he was. But it was no migraine that brought him to the Turkins' now!
On one of his free days, after Catherine had completed her lengthy, exhausting piano exercises, they had sat for a long time over tea in the dining-room while Mr. Turkin told a funny story. Suddenly the doorbell rang. He had to go into the hall to greet a visitor, and Startsev took advantage of the brief confusion.