Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [120]
She was in awe of her elder daughter. Leda never cared for endearments, and always spoke seriously: she lived her own life, and to her mother and sister she was as sacred and mysterious as an admiral sitting in his cabin is to his sailors.
“Our Leda is a remarkable person, isn’t she?” her mother used to say.
Now as the rain fell softly we spoke about Leda.
“Yes, she is a remarkable person,” her mother said, adding in a low conspiratorial voice, with a nervous glance over her shoulder: “You have to search far and wide for people like that. Even so, I am beginning to be a bit worried. The school, the dispensary, books—they are all very well, but why go to extremes? She is twenty-four, and it is time she was thinking seriously about herself. If you spend your time with books and dispensaries, you find that life slips by without your being aware of it.… She ought to be married.”
Zhenia, pale from reading and with her hair in disorder, lifted her head and said, as though to herself, but looking at her mother: “Mama dear, it is all in the hands of God!”
Then she plunged back into her book.
Belokurov came over, wearing a peasant jacket and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, and when it grew dark we spent a long time over supper, and once more Leda spoke about her schools and about Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb. When I left the Volchaninovs that evening, I carried away an impression of a long, long idle day with the melancholy consciousness that everything in the world comes to an end, however long it may last. Zhenia saw us to the gate, and perhaps because I had spent the whole day with her from morning to night, I felt strangely lonely and bored without her, and I realized how dear to me this charming family had become, and for the first time during all that summer I was overcome with the desire to paint.
“Tell me, why do you lead such a boring, colorless life?” I asked Belokurov as we were walking home. “As for me, my life is difficult, boring, and monotonous because I am a painter, different from other people, and I have been eaten up with envy and dissatisfaction with myself and misgivings over my work ever since I was quite young. I shall always be poor, and a vagabond, but as for you—you are a normal, healthy man, a landowner, a gentleman—why then is your life so uninteresting? Why do you get so little out of life? Why, for instance, don’t you fall in love with Leda or Zhenia?”
“You forget I love another woman,” Belokurov answered.
He was referring to his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the little house. I used to see the lady every day. She would be walking in the garden, plump and massive, pompous as a fatted goose, wearing Russian costume with strings of beads, always carrying a sunshade, and the servants would call her for meals and tea. Some three years before this she had taken one of the small houses for the summer, and she had stayed on with Belukurov, and apparently she proposed to stay there forever. She was ten years older than he was, and she kept a strict watch over him, so much so that when he left the house he had to ask her permission. She often gave way to deep, masculine sobs, and then I would send word to her that unless she stopped, I would have to give up my apartment; and she always stopped.
When we came home, Belokurov sat down on my sofa, brooding and frowning, while I began pacing up and down the carpet, aware of a sweet emotion stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I felt a desire to talk about the Volchaninovs.
“Leda could only fall in love with a zemstvo worker, someone who is just as fascinated by hospitals and schools as she is,” I said. “For the sake of a young woman like that a man should