Chapter II

After that Startseff was always meaning to go to the Turkins’ again, but he was kept very busy in the hospital, and for the life of him could not win an hour’s leisure for himself. More than a year of solitude and toil thus went by, until one day a letter in a blue envelope was brought to him from the city.

Madame Turkin had long been a sufferer from headaches, but since Kitty had begun to frighten her every day by threatening to go away to the conservatory her attacks had become more frequent. All the doctors in the city had treated her and now, at last, it was the country doctor’s turn. Madame Turkin wrote him a moving appeal in which she implored him to come, and relieve her sufferings. Startseff went, and after that he began to visit the Turkins often, very often. The fact was, he did help Madame Turkin a little, and she hastened to tell all her guests what a wonderful and unusual physician he was, but it was not Madame Turkin’s headaches that took Startseff to the house.

One evening, on a holiday, when Katherine had finished her long, wearisome exercises on the piano, they all went into the dining-room and had sat there a long time drinking tea while Turkin told some of those funny stories of his. Suddenly a bell rang. Some one had to go to the front door to meet a newly come guest, and Startseff took advantage of the momentary confusion to whisper into Katherine’s ear with intense agitation:

“For heaven’s sake come into the garden with me, I beseech you! Don’t torment me!”

She shrugged her shoulders as if in doubt as to what he wanted of her, but rose, nevertheless, and went out with him.

“You play for three or four hours a day on the piano, and then go and sit with your mother, and I never have the slightest chance to talk to you. Give me just one quarter of an hour, I implore you!”

Autumn was approaching, and the old garden, its paths strewn with fallen leaves, was quiet and melancholy. The early twilight was falling.

“I have not seen you for one whole week,” Startseff went on. “If you only knew what agony that has been for me! Let us sit down. Listen to me!”

The favourite haunt of both was a bench under an old spreading maple-tree. On this they took their seats.

“What is it you want?” asked Katherine in a hard, practical voice.

“I have not seen you for one whole week. I have not heard you speak for such a long time! I long madly for the sound of your voice. I hunger for it! Speak to me now!”

He was carried away by her freshness and the candid expression of her eyes and cheeks. He even saw in the fit of her dress something extraordinarily touching and sweet in its simplicity and artless grace. And at the same time, with all her innocence, she seemed to him wonderfully clever and precocious for her years. He could talk to her of literature or art or anything he pleased and could pour out his complaints to her about the life he led and the people he met, even if she did sometimes laugh for no reason when he was talking seriously, or jump up and run into the house. Like all the young ladies in S., she read a great deal. Most people there read very little, and, indeed, it was said in the library that if it were not for the girls, and the young Jews, the building might as well be closed. This reading of Katherine’s was an endless source of pleasure to Startseff. Each time he met her he would ask her with emotion what she had been reading, and would listen enchanted as she told him.

“What have you read this week since we last saw one another?” he now asked. “Tell me, I beg you.”

“I have been reading Pisemski.”

“What have you been reading of Pisemski’s?”

“‘The Thousand Souls,’” answered Kitty. “What a funny name Pisemski had: Alexei Theofilaktitch!”

“Where are you going?” cried Startseff in terror as she suddenly jumped up and started toward the house. “I absolutely must speak to you. I want to tell you something! Stay with me, if only for five minutes, I implore you!”

She stopped as if she meant to answer him, and then awkwardly slipped a note into his hand and ran away into the house where she took her seat at the piano once more.

“Meet me in the cemetery at Demetti’s grave to-night at eleven,” Startseff read.

“How absurd!” he thought, when he had recovered himself a little. “Why in the cemetery? What is the sense of that?”

The answer was clear: Kitty was fooling. Who would think seriously of making a tryst at night in a cemetery far outside the city when it would have been so easy to meet in the street or in the public gardens? Was it becoming for him, a government doctor and a serious-minded person, to sigh and receive notes and wander about a cemetery, and do silly things that even schoolboys made fun of? How would this little adventure end? What would his friends say if they knew of it? These were Startseff’s reflections, as he wandered about among the tables at the club that evening, but at half past ten he suddenly changed his mind and drove to the cemetery.

He had his own carriage and pair now, and a coachman named Panteleimon in a long velvet coat. The moon was shining. The night was still and mellow, but with an autumnal softness. The dogs barked at him as he drove through the suburbs and out through the city gates. Startseff stopped his carriage in an alley on the edge of the town and continued his way to the cemetery on foot.

“Every one has his freaks,” he reflected. “Kitty is freakish, too, and, who knows, perhaps she was not joking and may come after all.”

He abandoned himself to this faint, groundless hope, and it intoxicated him.

He crossed the fields for half a mile. The dark band of trees in the cemetery appeared in the distance like a wood or a large garden, then a white stone wall loomed up before him, and soon, by the light of the moon, Startseff was able to read the inscription over the gate: “Thy hour also approacheth—” He went in through a little side gate, and his eye was struck first by the white crosses and monuments on either side of a wide avenue, and by their black shadows and the shadows of the tall poplars that bordered the walk. Around him, on all sides, he could see the same checkering of white and black, with the sleeping trees brooding over the white tombstones. The night did not seem so dark as it had appeared in the fields. The fallen leaves of the maples, like tiny hands, lay sharply defined upon the sandy walks and marble slabs, and the inscriptions on the tombstones were clearly legible. Startseff was struck with the reflection that he now saw for the first and perhaps the last time a world unlike any other, a world that seemed to be the very cradle of the soft moonlight, where there was no life, no, not a breath of it; and yet, in every dark poplar, in every grave he felt the presence of a great mystery promising life, calm, beautiful, and eternal. Peace and sadness and mercy rose with the scent of autumn from the graves, the leaves, and the faded flowers.

Profoundest silence lay over all; the stars looked down from heaven with deep humility. Startseff’s footsteps sounded jarring and out of place. It was only when the church-bells began to ring the hour, and he imagined himself lying dead under the ground for ever, that some one seemed to be watching him, and he thought suddenly that here were not silence and peace, but stifling despair and the dull anguish of nonexistence.

Demetti’s grave was a little chapel surmounted by an angel. An Italian opera troupe had once come to S., and one of its members had died there. She had been buried here, and this monument had been erected to her memory. No one in the city any longer remembered her, but the shrine lamp hanging in the doorway sparkled in the moon’s rays and seemed to be alight.

No one was at the grave, and who should come there at midnight? Startseff waited, and the moonlight kindled all the passion in him. He ardently painted in his imagination the longed-for kiss and the embrace. He sat down beside the monument for half an hour, and then walked up and down the paths with his hat in his hand, waiting and thinking. How many girls, how many women, were lying here under these stones who had been beautiful and enchanting, and who had loved and glowed with passion in the night under the caresses of their lovers! How cruelly does Mother Nature jest with mankind! How bitter to acknowledge it! So thought Startseff and longed to scream aloud that he did not want to be jested with, that he wanted love at any price. Around him gleamed not white blocks of marble, but beautiful human forms timidly hiding among the shadows of the trees. He felt keen anguish.

Then, as if a curtain had been drawn across the scene, the moon vanished behind a cloud and darkness fell about him. Startseff found the gate with difficulty in the obscurity of the autumn night, and then wandered about for more than an hour in search of the alley where he had left his carriage.

“I am so tired, I am ready to drop,” he said to Panteleimon.

And, as he sank blissfully into his seat, he thought:

“Oh dear, I must not get fat!”