Chapter 5
Glad that he had been so successful in the part of peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. Sitting on a garden seat, thinking, he heard the rattle of a carriage and a feminine laugh — visitors were arriving. When the shades of evening began falling on the garden, the sounds of the violin and singing voices reached him indistinctly, and that reminded him of the black monk. Where, in what land or in what planet, was that optical absurdity moving now?
Hardly had he recalled the legend and pictured in his imagination the dark apparition he had seen in the rye-field, when, from behind a pine-tree exactly opposite, there came out noiselessly, without the slightest rustle, a man of medium height with uncovered grey head, all in black, and barefooted like a beggar, and his black eyebrows stood out conspicuously on his pale, death-like face. Nodding his head graciously, this beggar or pilgrim came noiselessly to the seat and sat down, and Kovrin recognised him as the black monk.
For a minute they looked at one another, Kovrin with amazement, and the monk with friendliness, and, just as before, a little slyness, as though he were thinking something to himself.
“But you are a mirage,” said Kovrin. “Why are you here and sitting still? That does not fit in with the legend.”
“That does not matter,” the monk answered in a low voice, not immediately turning his face towards him. “The legend, the mirage, and I are all the products of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”
“Then you don’t exist?” said Kovrin.
“You can think as you like,” said the monk, with a faint smile. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in nature.”
“You have a very old, wise, and extremely expressive face, as though you really had lived more than a thousand years,” said Kovrin. “I did not know that my imagination was capable of creating such phenomena. But why do you look at me with such enthusiasm? Do you like me?”
“Yes, you are one of those few who are justly called the chosen of God. You do the service of eternal truth. Your thoughts, your designs, the marvellous studies you are engaged in, and all your life, bear the Divine, the heavenly stamp, seeing that they are consecrated to the rational and the beautiful — that is, to what is eternal.”
“You said ‘eternal truth.’ . . . But is eternal truth of use to man and within his reach, if there is no eternal life?”
“There is eternal life,” said the monk.
“Do you believe in the immortality of man?”
“Yes, of course. A grand, brilliant future is in store for you men. And the more there are like you on earth, the sooner will this future be realised. Without you who serve the higher principle and live in full understanding and freedom, mankind would be of little account; developing in a natural way, it would have to wait a long time for the end of its earthly history. You will lead it some thousands of years earlier into the kingdom of eternal truth — and therein lies your supreme service. You are the incarnation of the blessing of God, which rests upon men.”
“And what is the object of eternal life?” asked Kovrin.
“As of all life — enjoyment. True enjoyment lies in knowledge, and eternal life provides innumerable and inexhaustible sources of knowledge, and in that sense it has been said: ‘In My Father’s house there are many mansions.’ “
“If only you knew how pleasant it is to hear you!” said Kovrin, rubbing his hands with satisfaction.
“I am very glad.”
“But I know that when you go away I shall be worried by the question of your reality. You are a phantom, an hallucination. So I am mentally deranged, not normal?”
“What if you are? Why trouble yourself? You are ill because you have overworked and exhausted yourself, and that means that you have sacrificed your health to the idea, and the time is near at hand when you will give up life itself to it. What could be better? That is the goal towards which all divinely endowed, noble natures strive.”
“If I know I am mentally affected, can I trust myself?”
“And are you sure that the men of genius, whom all men trust, did not see phantoms, too? The learned say now that genius is allied to madness. My friend, healthy and normal people are only the common herd. Reflections upon the neurasthenia of the age, nervous exhaustion and degeneracy, et cetera, can only seriously agitate those who place the object of life in the present — that is, the common herd.”
“The Romans used to say: Mens sana in corpore sano.”
“Not everything the Greeks and the Romans said is true. Exaltation, enthusiasm, ecstasy — all that distinguishes prophets, poets, martyrs for the idea, from the common folk — is repellent to the animal side of man — that is, his physical health. I repeat, if you want to be healthy and normal, go to the common herd.”
“Strange that you repeat what often comes into my mind,” said Kovrin. “It is as though you had seen and overheard my secret thoughts. But don’t let us talk about me. What do you mean by ‘eternal truth’?”
The monk did not answer. Kovrin looked at him and could not distinguish his face. His features grew blurred and misty. Then the monk’s head and arms disappeared; his body seemed merged into the seat and the evening twilight, and he vanished altogether.
“The hallucination is over,” said Kovrin; and he laughed. “It’s a pity.”
He went back to the house, light-hearted and happy. The little the monk had said to him had flattered, not his vanity, but his whole soul, his whole being. To be one of the chosen, to serve eternal truth, to stand in the ranks of those who could make mankind worthy of the kingdom of God some thousands of years sooner — that is, to free men from some thousands of years of unnecessary struggle, sin, and suffering; to sacrifice to the idea everything — youth, strength, health; to be ready to die for the common weal — what an exalted, what a happy lot! He recalled his past — pure, chaste, laborious; he remembered what he had learned himself and what he had taught to others, and decided that there was no exaggeration in the monk’s words.
Tanya came to meet him in the park: she was by now wearing a different dress.
“Are you here?” she said. “And we have been looking and looking for you. . . . But what is the matter with you?” she asked in wonder, glancing at his radiant, ecstatic face and eyes full of tears. “How strange you are, Andryusha!”
“I am pleased, Tanya,” said Kovrin, laying his hand on her shoulders. “I am more than pleased: I am happy. Tanya, darling Tanya, you are an extraordinary, nice creature. Dear Tanya, I am so glad, I am so glad!”
He kissed both her hands ardently, and went on:
“I have just passed through an exalted, wonderful, unearthly moment. But I can’t tell you all about it or you would call me mad and not believe me. Let us talk of you. Dear, delightful Tanya! I love you, and am used to loving you. To have you near me, to meet you a dozen times a day, has become a necessity of my existence; I don’t know how I shall get on without you when I go back home.”
“Oh,” laughed Tanya, “you will forget about us in two days. We are humble people and you are a great man.”
“No; let us talk in earnest!” he said. “I shall take you with me, Tanya. Yes? Will you come with me? Will you be mine?”
“Come,” said Tanya, and tried to laugh again, but the laugh would not come, and patches of colour came into her face.
She began breathing quickly and walked very quickly, but not to the house, but further into the park.
“I was not thinking of it . . . I was not thinking of it,” she said, wringing her hands in despair.
And Kovrin followed her and went on talking, with the same radiant, enthusiastic face:
“I want a love that will dominate me altogether; and that love only you, Tanya, can give me. I am happy! I am happy!”
She was overwhelmed, and huddling and shrinking together, seemed ten years older all at once, while he thought her beautiful and expressed his rapture aloud:
“How lovely she is!”
Chapter 6
Learning from Kovrin that not only a romance had been got up, but that there would even be a wedding, Yegor Semyonitch spent a long time in pacing from one corner of the room to the other, trying to conceal his agitation. His hands began trembling, his neck swelled and turned purple, he ordered his racing droshky and drove off somewhere. Tanya, seeing how he lashed the horse, and seeing how he pulled his cap over his ears, understood what he was feeling, shut herself up in her room, and cried the whole day.
In the hot-houses the peaches and plums were already ripe; the packing and sending off of these tender and fragile goods to Moscow took a great deal of care, work, and trouble. Owing to the fact that the summer was very hot and dry, it was necessary to water every tree, and a great deal of time and labour was spent on doing it. Numbers of caterpillars made their appearance, which, to Kovrin’s disgust, the labourers and even Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya squashed with their fingers. In spite of all that, they had already to book autumn orders for fruit and trees, and to carry on a great deal of correspondence. And at the very busiest time, when no one seemed to have a free moment, the work of the fields carried off more than half their labourers from the garden. Yegor Semyonitch, sunburnt, exhausted, ill-humoured, galloped from the fields to the garden and back again; cried that he was being torn to pieces, and that he should put a bullet through his brains.
Then came the fuss and worry of the trousseau, to which the Pesotskys attached a good deal of importance. Every one’s head was in a whirl from the snipping of the scissors, the rattle of the sewing-machine, the smell of hot irons, and the caprices of the dressmaker, a huffy and nervous lady. And, as ill-luck would have it, visitors came every day, who had to be entertained, fed, and even put up for the night. But all this hard labour passed unnoticed as though in a fog. Tanya felt that love and happiness had taken her unawares, though she had, since she was fourteen, for some reason been convinced that Kovrin would marry her and no one else. She was bewildered, could not grasp it, could not believe herself. . . . At one minute such joy would swoop down upon her that she longed to fly away to the clouds and there pray to God, at another moment she would remember that in August she would have to part from her home and leave her father; or, goodness knows why, the idea would occur to her that she was worthless — insignificant and unworthy of a great man like Kovrin — and she would go to her room, lock herself in, and cry bitterly for several hours. When there were visitors, she would suddenly fancy that Kovrin looked extraordinarily handsome, and that all the women were in love with him and envying her, and her soul was filled with pride and rapture, as though she had vanquished the whole world; but he had only to smile politely at any young lady for her to be trembling with jealousy, to retreat to her room — and tears again. These new sensations mastered her completely; she helped her father mechanically, without noticing peaches, caterpillars or labourers, or how rapidly the time was passing.
It was almost the same with Yegor Semyonitch. He worked from morning till night, was always in a hurry, was irritable, and flew into rages, but all of this was in a sort of spellbound dream. It seemed as though there were two men in him: one was the real Yegor Semyonitch, who was moved to indignation, and clutched his head in despair when he heard of some irregularity from Ivan Karlovitch the gardener; and another — not the real one — who seemed as though he were half drunk, would interrupt a business conversation at half a word, touch the gardener on the shoulder, and begin muttering:
“Say what you like, there is a great deal in blood. His mother was a wonderful woman, most high-minded and intelligent. It was a pleasure to look at her good, candid, pure face; it was like the face of an angel. She drew splendidly, wrote verses, spoke five foreign languages, sang. . . . Poor thing! she died of consumption. The Kingdom of Heaven be hers.”
The unreal Yegor Semyonitch sighed, and after a pause went on:
“When he was a boy and growing up in my house, he had the same angelic face, good and candid. The way he looks and talks and moves is as soft and elegant as his mother’s. And his intellect! We were always struck with his intelligence. To be sure, it’s not for nothing he’s a Master of Arts! It’s not for nothing! And wait a bit, Ivan Karlovitch, what will he be in ten years’ time? He will be far above us!”
But at this point the real Yegor Semyonitch, suddenly coming to himself, would make a terrible face, would clutch his head and cry:
“The devils! They have spoilt everything! They have ruined everything! They have spoilt everything! The garden’s done for, the garden’s ruined!”
Kovrin, meanwhile, worked with the same ardour as before, and did not notice the general commotion. Love only added fuel to the flames. After every talk with Tanya he went to his room, happy and triumphant, took up his book or his manuscript with the same passion with which he had just kissed Tanya and told her of his love. What the black monk had told him of the chosen of God, of eternal truth, of the brilliant future of mankind and so on, gave peculiar and extraordinary significance to his work, and filled his soul with pride and the consciousness of his own exalted consequence. Once or twice a week, in the park or in the house, he met the black monk and had long conversations with him, but this did not alarm him, but, on the contrary, delighted him, as he was now firmly persuaded that such apparitions only visited the elect few who rise up above their fellows and devote themselves to the service of the idea.
One day the monk appeared at dinner-time and sat in the dining-room window. Kovrin was delighted, and very adroitly began a conversation with Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya of what might be of interest to the monk; the black-robed visitor listened and nodded his head graciously, and Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya listened, too, and smiled gaily without suspecting that Kovrin was not talking to them but to his hallucination.
Imperceptibly the fast of the Assumption was approaching, and soon after came the wedding, which, at Yegor Semyonitch’s urgent desire, was celebrated with “a flourish” — that is, with senseless festivities that lasted for two whole days and nights. Three thousand roubles’ worth of food and drink was consumed, but the music of the wretched hired band, the noisy toasts, the scurrying to and fro of the footmen, the uproar and crowding, prevented them from appreciating the taste of the expensive wines and wonderful delicacies ordered from Moscow.
Continues tomorrow…
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