out hunting, I, too, gave lessons in how to live, how to believe, how to govern the people. I, too, said that knowledge is light, that education is necessary, but that for simple people literacy is enough for now. Freedom is good, I said, it’s like air, we can’t do without it, but we must wait. Yes, that was what I said, but now I ask: wait in the name of what?” Ivan Ivanych asked, looking angrily at Burkin. “Wait in the name of what, I ask you? In the name of what considerations? They tell me that it can’t be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in due time. But who says that? Where are the proofs that it’s so? You refer to the natural order of things, to the lawfulness of phenomena, but is there order and lawfulness in the fact that I, a living and thinking man, must stand at a ditch and wait until it gets overgrown or silted up, when I could perhaps jump over it or build a bridge across it? And, again, wait in the name of what? Wait, when you haven’t the strength to live, and yet you must live and want to live!
“I left my brother’s early the next morning, and since then it has become unbearable for me to live in town. I’m oppressed by the peace and quiet, I’m afraid to look in the windows, because there’s no more painful spectacle for me now than a happy family sitting around a table and drinking tea. I’m old and not fit for struggle, I’m not even capable of hatred. I only grieve inwardly, become irritated, vexed, my head burns at night from a flood of thoughts, and I can’t sleep … Ah, if only I were young!”
Ivan Ivanych paced the room in agitation and repeated:
“If only I were young!”
He suddenly went up to Alekhin and began pressing him by one hand, then the other.
“Pavel Konstantinych!” he said in an entreating voice, “don’t settle in, don’t let yourself fall asleep! As long as you’re young, strong, energetic, don’t weary of doing good! There is no happiness and there shouldn’t be, and if there is any meaning and purpose in life, then that meaning and purpose are not at all in our happiness, but in something more intelligent and great. Do good!”
And Ivan Ivanych said all this with a pitiful, pleading smile, as if he were asking personally for himself.
Then all three sat in armchairs at different ends of the drawing room and were silent. Ivan Ivanych’s story satisfied neither Burkin nor Alekhin. With generals and ladies gazing from gilded frames, looking alive in the twilight, it was boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries. For some reason they would have preferred to speak and hear about fine people, about women. And the fact that they were sitting in a drawing room where everything—the covered chandelier, the armchairs, the carpets under their feet—said that here those very people now gazing from the frames had once walked, sat, drunk tea, and that the beautiful Pelageya now walked noiselessly here, was better than any story.
Alekhin had a strong desire to sleep; farming got him up early, before three in the morning, and his eyes kept closing, but he was afraid that the guests would start telling something interesting without him, and he would not leave. Whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was intelligent or correct, he did not try to figure out; his guests were not talking of grain, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on …
“However, it’s time for bed,” said Burkin, getting up. “Allow me to wish you good-night.”
Alekhin took leave of them and went to his room below, while the guests stayed upstairs. They were both put for the night in a big room with two old, carved wooden beds in it, and with an ivory crucifix in the corner. Their beds, wide and cool, made up by the beautiful Pelageya, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.
Ivan Ivanych silently undressed and lay down.
“Lord, forgive us sinners!” he said, and pulled the covers over his head.
His pipe, left on the table, smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin lay awake for a long time and still could not figure out where that heavy odor was coming from.
Rain beat on the windows all night.
AUGUST 1898
A MEDICAL CASE
A