Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,147

the fields. She read for the whole day, peering greedily into her book, and only because her eyes sometimes became tired, dazed, and her face very pale, could you guess that this reading wearied her brain. When I came, she would blush slightly on seeing me, put her book down, and, looking into my face with her big eyes, tell me excitedly about things that had happened: for instance, that there had been a chimney fire in the servants’ quarters or that some worker had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually went about in a pale blouse and a dark blue skirt. We took walks together, picked cherries for preserves, went for boat rides, and when she jumped up to reach a cherry, or handled the oars, her thin, weak arms showed through her loose sleeves. Or else I would paint a study, and she would stand beside me and watch with admiration.

One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Volchaninovs’ in the morning, around nine o’clock. I walked through the park, keeping away from the house, and looked for mushrooms, which were very numerous that summer, and marked the places, in order to pick them later with Zhenya. A warm breeze was blowing. I saw Zhenya and her mother, both in pale festive dresses, walking from church to the house, and Zhenya keeping her hat from blowing off in the wind. Then I heard them having tea on the terrace.

For a carefree man like me, seeking to justify his constant idleness, these festive summer mornings on our country estates have always been extremely attractive. When a green garden, still moist with dew, shines all over in the sun and looks happy, when there is a smell of mignonette and oleander around the house, the young people have just come back from church and are having tea in the garden, and when everyone is so nicely dressed and cheerful, and when you know that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people will do nothing all day long, then you want all of life to be like that. And now I was thinking the same thing and walking in the garden, ready to walk that way, idly and aimlessly, all day, all summer.

Zhenya came with a basket; she looked as if she knew or anticipated that she would find me in the garden. We picked mushrooms and talked, and when she asked about something, she went ahead so as to see my face.

“Yesterday a miracle took place in our village,” she said. “Lame Pelageya was sick for a whole year, no doctors or medicines helped her, but yesterday an old woman whispered something and it went away.”

“That’s no matter,” I said. “We shouldn’t look for miracles only around sick people and old women. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is incomprehensible is a miracle.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what’s incomprehensible?”

“No. I approach phenomena that I don’t understand with good cheer and don’t give in to them. I’m above them. Man should be aware that he is above lions, tigers, stars, above everything in nature, even above what is incomprehensible and seems miraculous, otherwise he’s not a man but a mouse afraid of everything.”

Zhenya thought that, being an artist, I knew a lot and could make right guesses about what I did not know. She would have liked me to lead her into the region of the eternal and the beautiful, that higher world where, in her opinion, I was at home, and she talked to me about God, about eternal life, about the miraculous. And, unable to conceive that I and my imagination would perish forever after death, I replied: “Yes, people are immortal,” “Yes, eternal life awaits us.” And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.

As we walked towards the house, she suddenly stopped and said:

“Our Lida is a remarkable person. Isn’t it so? I love her dearly and could sacrifice my life for her at any moment. But tell me,” Zhenya touched my sleeve with her finger, “tell me, why do you argue with her all the time? Why are you annoyed?”

“Because she’s wrong.”

Zhenya shook her head, and tears came to her eyes.

“It’s so incomprehensible!” she said.

At that moment Lida had just returned from somewhere and, standing by the porch with a whip in her hand, trim, beautiful, lit by the sun, was giving orders to a workman. Hurrying and talking loudly, she received two or three patients, then,