Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [117]
One afternoon on a holiday we remembered the Volchaninovs and drove over to see them. The mother and the two daughters were at home. It was obvious that Yekaterina Pavlovna, the mother, had once been pretty, but she had become more bloated than her years warranted, and she was short-winded, melancholy, and absent-minded. She tried to entertain me with talk about painting. Learning from her daughter that I might visit Shelkovka, she hurriedly called to mind two or three landscapes of mine she had seen on exhibition in Moscow, and now asked me what I was attempting to express in them. Lydia, or, as she was called at home, Leda, talked more to Belokurov than to me. Grave and unsmiling, she asked him why he did not work in the zemstvo, and why he had never attended a single one of its meetings.
“It’s not right, Pyotr Petrovich,” she said reproachfully. “It’s not right at all—it’s a shame!”
“True, Leda, true,” her mother agreed. “It’s a shame!”
“All of our district is in Balagin’s hands,” Leda went on, turning to me. “He is the chairman of the local council, and all official business in the district goes to his nephews and brothers-in-law, and he does exactly as he pleases. We must fight him! We young people ought to form a strong party, but you see what kind of young people we have among us. For shame, Pyotr Petrovich!”
The younger sister, Zhenia, remained silent during the conversation about the zemstvo. She never took part in serious conversations, not being considered grown-up in the family, and they always called her by the pet name Missy, because she used to call her governess Miss when she was a child. All the time she examined me curiously, and when I was turning the pages of the photograph album she kept saying: “There’s my uncle … there’s my godfather …” and she kept pointing at the photographs. In her childish way she pressed her shoulder against mine, and I clearly saw her small undeveloped breasts, her thin shoulders, her braided hair, and her slim waist tightly drawn in by a belt.
We played croquet and lawn tennis, wandered about the garden, drank tea, and sat a long while over supper. After the high-columned empty ballroom where I lived, I felt pleasantly comfortable in this small cozy house where there were no oleographs hanging on the walls, and the servants were addressed as “you,” and not as “thou,” and everything seemed pure and youthful thanks to the presence of Leda and Missy, and the atmosphere breathed a sense of order. At supper Leda again talked to Belokurov about the zemstvo, about Balagin, about school libraries. She was a lively, sincere, and persuasive young woman, and it was interesting to listen to her although she spoke in a loud voice a great deal, perhaps because she was accustomed to speaking in this way at school. On the other hand, my friend Pyotr Petrovich still clung to the habit of his student days, reducing all discussion to argument. He spoke in a bored and languid voice, at vast length, with an obvious desire to be taken for a man of intelligence and progressive views. Gesticulating, he knocked a sauceboat over with his cuff, and it made a large pool on the tablecloth, but it seemed that no one noticed it except me.
When we made our way home, the night was dark and still.
“I call it good breeding,” Belokurov sighed, “not so much when you don’t upset a sauceboat over the tablecloth, but when you don’t notice it if someone else does. Yes, they are an admirably cultured family. I’m out of touch with nice people—terribly out of touch. It’s all the fault of business, business!”
He went on to discuss all the hard work which goes with being a landed proprietor. And I thought: “What a ponderous, lazy, good-for-nothing he is!” Whenever he spoke seriously, he kept saying “Er—er—” painfully drawling out his hesitations, and he worked exactly as he talked, slowly, always getting behindhand, never on time. Nor did I have any great belief in his business sense, for the letters I gave him to post remained in his pocket for weeks.
“The worst of it is,” he muttered as we walked along