Short Fiction, Anton Chekhov [websites to read books for free .TXT] 📗

a particular charm. When the green garden, still wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks radiant with happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and oleander near the house, when the young people have just come back from church and are having breakfast in the garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and one knows that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to do nothing the whole long day, one wishes that all life were like that. Now, too, I had the same thought, and walked about the garden prepared to walk about like that, aimless and unoccupied, the whole day, the whole summer.

Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as though she knew she would find me in the garden, or had a presentiment of it. We gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked a question she walked a little ahead so as to see my face.

“A miracle happened in the village yesterday,” she said. “The lame woman Pelagea has been ill the whole year. No doctors or medicines did her any good; but yesterday an old woman came and whispered something over her, and her illness passed away.”

“That’s nothing much,” I said. “You mustn’t look for miracles only among sick people and old women. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle.”

“And aren’t you afraid of what is beyond understanding?”

“No. Phenomena I don’t understand I face boldly, and am not overwhelmed by them. I am above them. Man ought to recognise himself as superior to lions, tigers, stars, superior to everything in nature, even what seems miraculous and is beyond his understanding, or else he is not a man, but a mouse afraid of everything.”

Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and could guess correctly what I did not know. She longed for me to initiate her into the domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful⁠—into that higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home. And she talked to me of God, of the eternal life, of the miraculous. And I, who could never admit that my self and my imagination would be lost forever after death, answered: “Yes, men are immortal”; “Yes, there is eternal life in store for us.” And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.

As we were going home she stopped suddenly and said:

“Our Lida is a remarkable person⁠—isn’t she? I love her very dearly, and would be ready to give my life for her any minute. But tell me”⁠—Genya touched my sleeve with her finger⁠—“tell me, why do you always argue with her? Why are you irritated?”

“Because she is wrong.”

Genya shook her head and tears came into her eyes.

“How incomprehensible that is!” she said. At that minute Lida had just returned from somewhere, and standing with a whip in her hand, a slim, beautiful figure in the sunlight, at the steps, she was giving some orders to one of the men. Talking loudly, she hurriedly received two or three sick villagers; then with a busy and anxious face she walked about the rooms, opening one cupboard after another, and went upstairs. It was a long time before they could find her and call her to dinner, and she came in when we had finished our soup. All these tiny details I remember with tenderness, and that whole day I remember vividly, though nothing special happened. After dinner Genya lay in a long armchair reading, while I sat upon the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky was overcast with clouds, and it began to spot with fine rain. It was hot; the wind had dropped, and it seemed as though the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out on the terrace, looking drowsy and carrying a fan.

“Oh, mother,” said Genya, kissing her hand, “it’s not good for you to sleep in the day.”

They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call “Aa⁠—oo, Genya!” or “Mother, where are you?” They always said their prayers together, and had the same faith; and they understood each other perfectly even when they did not speak. And their attitude to people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used to me and fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with enthusiasm, and with the same openness and readiness to chatter as Misuce, she told me what had happened, and confided to me her domestic secrets.

She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not care for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived her life apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and enigmatic a person as the admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is to the sailors.

“Our Lida is a remarkable person,” the mother would often say. “Isn’t she?”

Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.

“She is a remarkable girl,” said her mother, and added in an undertone, like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: “You wouldn’t easily find another like her; only, do you know, I am beginning to be a little uneasy. The school, the dispensary, books⁠—all that’s very good, but why go to extremes? She is three-and-twenty, you know; it’s time for her to think seriously of herself. With her books and her dispensary she will find life has slipped by without having noticed it.⁠ ⁠… She must be married.”

Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:

“Mother, everything is in God’s hands.”

And again she buried herself in her book.

Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long