Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,122

spent a whole week doing nothing … I … I just said it, and he began to shout and said … a lot of insulting … deeply offensive things to me. What for?”

“Come, come,” said Kovrin, straightening her hair. “You’ve quarreled, cried, and enough. You mustn’t be angry for so long, it’s not nice … especially since he loves you no end.”

“He’s ruined my … my whole life,” Tanya went on, sobbing. “All I hear is insults and offense. He considers me useless in his house. So, then? He’s right. I’ll leave here tomorrow, get hired as a telegraph girl… Let him …”

“Well, well, well … Don’t cry, Tanya. Don’t cry, my dear … You’re both hot-tempered, irritable, you’re both to blame. Come, I’ll make peace between you.”

Kovrin spoke tenderly and persuasively, and she went on crying, her shoulders shaking and her hands clenched, as if some terrible misfortune had actually befallen her. He felt the more sorry for her because, though her grief was not serious, she suffered deeply. What trifles sufficed to make this being unhappy for a whole day, and perhaps even all her life! As he comforted Tanya, Kovrin was thinking that, apart from this girl and her father, there were no people to be found in the whole world who loved him like their own, like family; that if it were not for these two persons, he, who had lost his father and mother in early childhood, might have died without knowing genuine tenderness and that naïve, unreasoning love which one feels only for very close blood relations. And he felt that the nerves of this crying, shaking girl responded, like iron to a magnet, to his own half-sick, frayed nerves. He never could have loved a healthy, strong, red-cheeked woman, but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya he liked very much.

And he gladly stroked her hair and shoulders, pressed her hands and wiped her tears … Finally she stopped crying. She went on for a long time complaining about her father and her difficult, unbearable life in this house, imploring Kovrin to put himself in her place; then she gradually began to smile and sigh about God having given her such a bad character, in the end burst into loud laughter, called herself a fool, and ran out of the room.

When Kovrin went out to the garden a little later, Yegor Semyonych and Tanya were strolling side by side along the walk, as if nothing had happened, and they were both eating black bread and salt, because they were both hungry.

V

Pleased that he had succeeded so well in the role of peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. As he sat on a bench and reflected, he heard the rattle of carriages and women’s laughter—that was guests arriving. When the evening shadows began to lengthen in the garden, he vaguely heard the sounds of a violin and voices singing, and that reminded him of the black monk. Where, in what country or on what planet, was that optical incongruity racing about now?

No sooner had he remembered the legend and pictured in his imagination the dark phantom he had seen in the rye field, than there stepped from behind a pine tree just opposite him, inaudibly, without the slightest rustle, a man of average height, with a bare, gray head, all in dark clothes and barefoot, looking like a beggar, and his black eyebrows stood out sharply on his pale, deathly face. Nodding his head affably, this beggar or wanderer noiselessly approached the bench and sat down, and Kovrin recognized him as the black monk. For a moment the two looked at each other—Kovrin with amazement, and the monk tenderly and, as before, a little slyly, with the expression of one who keeps his own counsel.

“But you are a mirage,” said Kovrin. “Why are you here and sitting in one place? It doesn’t agree with the legend.”

“That makes no difference,” the monk answered after a moment, in a low voice, turning his face to him. “The legend, the mirage, and I—it is all a product of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”

“So you don’t exist?” asked Kovrin.

“Think as you like,” said the monk, and he smiled faintly. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, which means that I, too, exist in nature.”

“You have a very old, intelligent, and highly expressive face, as if you really have lived more than a thousand years,” said Kovrin. “I didn’t know that my imagination was capable