'For God's sake, I beg you, don't torment me,' he whispered; much agitated, to Catherine. 'Let's go in the garden.'
She shrugged her shoulders as if puzzled to know what he wanted of her, but she did get up and go.
'You play the piano for three or four hours on end,' he said .as he followed her. 'Then you sit with your mother, and one can never have a word with you. Give me a quarter ofan hour, I beg you.'
Autumn was approaching. The old garden was quiet and sad, dark leaves lay on the paths and the evenings were drawing in.
'I haven't seen you for a week,' Startsev went on. 'If only you knew how I suffer. Come and sit down, and hear what I have to say.'
They had their favourite place in the garden: a bench under a broad old maple, which was where they now sat.
'What do you require?' asked Catherine in a dry, matter-of-fact voice.
'I haven't seen you for a week, or heard your voice all that time. I long, I yearn to hear you speak. Say something.'
He was fascinated by her freshness, by the innocent expression ofher eyes and cheeks. Even in the cut of her dress he saw something unusually lovely, touching in its simplicity and naive gracefulness. And yet, despite this innocence, he found her very intelligent, very mature for her age. He could talk to her about literature, art or anything else. He could complain about life or people to her, though she was liable to laugh suddenly in the wrong place during a serious conversation. Qr she would run off into the house. Like almost all the local girls, she was a great reader. (Few people in the town read much. 'If it wasn't for the girls and the young Jews we might just as well shut up shop,' they used to say in the town library.) Her reading pleased Startsev no end. He always made a great fuss of asking what she had read in the last few days, and he would listen, fascinated, as she told him.
'What,' he asked her, 'have you read since we met last week? Please tell me.'
'Pisernsky.'
'Which book?'
'A Thousand Souls' answered Pussy. 'What a funny name Pisernsky had: Alexis Feofilaktovich.'
'Hey, where are you off to?' Startsev was aghast when she suddenly stood up and made for the house. 'I must talk to you, I've some explaining to do. Stay with me just five minutes, I implore you.'
She stopped as if meaning to say something, then awkwardly thrust a note into his hand and ran to the house, where she sat do^n at the piano again.
'Be in the cemetery near Demetti's tomb at .eleven o'clock tonight,' Startsev read.
'This is really rather silly,' he thought, collecting his wits. 'Why the cemetery? What's the point?'
It was one ofPussy's little games, obviously. But really, who would seriously think of an assignation in a cemetery far outside to^n at night-time, when it could so easily be arranged in the street or municipal park? And was it not beneath him—a country doctor, an intelligent, respectable man—to be sighing, receiving billets-doux, hanging round cemeteries and doing things so silly that even schoolboys laugh at them these days? Where would this affair end? What would his colleagues say when they found out? Such were Startsev's thoughts as he wandered among the tables at his club. But at half-past ten he suddenly got up and drove off to the cemetery.
By now he had his own pair ofhorses and a coachman, Panteleymon, complete with velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was quiet and warm, but with a touch of autumn in the air. Dogs were howling near a suburban slaughterhouse. Leaving his carriage in a lane on the edge of to^, Startsev walked on to the cemetery alone.
'We all have our quirks, Pussy included,' thought he. 'Perhaps— who knows—perhaps she wasn't joking. Perhaps she will come.' Yielding to this feeble, insubstantial hope, he felt intoxicated by it.
He walked through fields for a quarter of a mile. The cemetery showed up: a dark strip in the distance resembling a wood or large garden. The white stone wall came into view and the gate. The words on the gate were legible in the moonlight: 'The hour cometh
when ' Startsev went through the side-gate and the first things to
catch his eye were white crosses and tombstones on both sides ofa broad avenue, and black shadows cast by them and by the poplars. There was an extensive panorama in black and white, with sleepy trees drooping their branches over the whiteness below. It seemed lighter here than in the fields. Maple leaves like paws stood out sharply against the yellow sand of paths and against gravestones, and the inscriptions on the monuments were clearly visible. Startsev was struck at once by what he was now seeing for the first time in his life and would probably never see again: a world unlike any other . . . where moonlight was as lovely and soft as if this were its cradle, where there was no living thing, but where each dark poplar and tomb seemed to hold the secret promise of a life tranquil, splendid, everlasting. Mingled with the autumnal smell of leaves, the gravestones and faded flowers breathed forgiveness, melancholy and peace.
It was silent all around. The stars looked down from the sky in utter quiescence, while Startsev's footsteps sounded harsh and out of place. Only when the church clock began to strike, and he fancied himself dead and buried here for ever, did he feel as if someone was watching him. This was not peace and quiet, it seemed for a moment, but the dull misery ofnothingness: a kind of choked despair.
Demetti's tomb was in the form of a shrine with an angel on top. An Italian opera company had once passed through town, one of the singers had died, they had buried her here, and they had put up this monument. She was no longer remembered in town, but the lamp over the entrance reflected the moon and seemed alight.
There was no one about—as ifanyone would come here at midnight! Yet Startsev waited, waited passionately, as if the moonlight were inflaming his desires. He imagined kisses and embraces. He sat near the tomb for about half an hour, then strolled up and down the side-paths with his hat in his hand, waiting. He reflected that in these graves lay buried many women and girls who had been beautiful and entrancing, who had loved and burned with passion in the night, yielding to caresses. Really, what a rotten joke Nature does play on man! And how painful to be conscious of it! So Startsev thought, while wishing to shout aloud that he wanted love, that he expected it—at whatever cost. The white shapes before his eyes were no longer slabs of marble, but beautiful bodies. He saw shapely forms modestly hiding in the shadows ofthe trees, and he sensed their warmth until desire grew hard to bear.
Then, like the drop of a curtain, the moon vanished behind clouds and everything was suddenly dark. Startsev had trouble finding the gate, for the darkness was now truly autumnal. Then he wandered about for an hour and a half looking for the lane where he had left his horses.
'I'm dead on my feet,' he told Panteleymon.
'Dear me, one really should watch one's weight,' he reflected as he settled down luxuriously in his carriage.
III
Next evening he set off for the Turkins' to propose to Catherine. But it turned out inconveniently because she was in her room with her hairdresser in attendance, and was going to a dance at the club.
He found himselflet in for another ofthose long tea-drinking sessions in the dining-room. Seeing his guest bored and preoccupied, Mr. Turkin took some jottings from his waistcoat pocket and read out a funny letter from a German estate-manager about how all the 'racks' on the property had 'gone to lock and ruin', and how the old place had been so knocked about that it had become 'thoroughly bashful'.
'They're bound to put up a decent dowry', thought Startsev, listening absent-mindedly.
After his sleepless night he felt stupefied, felt as if he had been drugged with some sweet sleeping potion. His sensations were confused, but warm and happy. And yet