Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [118]
II
Soon I started calling on the Volchaninovs. Usually I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life. All the time they would be talking on the terrace, and I would hear the rustle of skirts and the whispering sound of pages being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the sight of Leda receiving patients during the day, giving out books, and going off to the village bareheaded under a sunshade, while in the evenings she would declaim in a loud voice about the zemstvo and about schools. She was a beautiful, slender, unfailingly correct young woman with thin, sensitive lips, and whenever a serious discussion got under way she would say to me coldly: “This won’t interest you.”
I was unsympathetic to her. She disapproved of me because I was a landscape painter and my paintings did not represent the needs of the people, and she felt therefore that I was indifferent to all her deepest beliefs. I remember riding along the shores of Lake Baikal and meeting a Buryat girl on horseback. She wore a shirt and blue sailcloth trousers. I asked her to sell me her pipe, and while we were talking, she gazed contemptuously at my European features and my hat. A moment later, bored with my conversation, she uttered a wild yell and galloped away. In exactly the same way Leda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she showed no signs of her dislike, but I could feel it, and sitting on the bottom step of the terrace, I gave way to my sense of irritation and said that to treat peasants without being a doctor was to deceive them, and it was easy to be charitable if one was the owner of five thousand acres.
Her sister Missy had no such cares and spent her life in complete idleness, as I did. When she awoke in the morning she would take a book onto the terrace and read it in a deep armchair, her feet scarcely touching the ground, or she would hide away with the book somewhere in the avenue of lime trees, or she would pass through the gate into the open fields. She spent the day reading, her eyes glued avidly on the page, and only an occasional weary and listless glance, and her extreme pallor, showed how exhausted she became from reading. When I came on the scene and when she saw me, she would blush a little, put the book aside, and gazing at me with her enormous eyes, she would tell me in her high-spirited way about everything that had happened: how the chimney in the servants’ quarters had caught fire or how one of the workmen had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually wore a light-colored blouse and a dark-blue skirt. We took walks together and gathered cherries to make into preserves or went boating together, and when she jumped up to reach the cherries or pulled on the oars, her thin and delicate arms gleamed through her wide sleeves. Or else I sketched, and she would stand there beside me, watching breathlessly.
One Sunday at the end of July, I went over to see the Volchaninovs around nine o’clock in the morning. I went through the park, staying far from the house, looking for white mushrooms, which were very plentiful that summer, marking the places where I found them so that I could pick them later with Zhenia. A warm wind was blowing. I could see Zhenia and her mother coming back from church, both wearing light holiday dresses, and Zhenia was holding on to her hat because of the strong wind. Afterwards I heard them having tea on the terrace.
Being a man without any care in the world, always seeking some justification for a life of perpetual idleness, I found these mornings on summer holidays on the estate especially charming. When the gardens were all green and wet with dew, shining joyously in the sun, and when the oleanders and the mignonettes spread their