Forty Stories (21 page)

A CARRIAGE drawn by four plump, beautiful horses drove through the so-called Red Gate of the N–– — Monastery, and the monks and lay brothers crowding round the rooms of the hostel reserved for the gentry recognized the coachman and the horses from afar, and they knew that the lady sitting in the carriage was their own dear, familiar Princess Vera Gavrilovna.

An old man in livery jumped off the box and helped the Princess down. She raised her dark veil, and without hurrying went up to the priests to receive their blessing, and then with a gracious nod to the lay brothers she made her way into the hostel.

“I suppose you have missed your Princess,” she said to the monk who brought in her things. “I haven’t come to see you for a whole month! Well, here I am! Behold your princess! And where is the archbishop? Dear God, I am burning with impatience to see him. Such a wonderful, wonderful old man! You should be proud to have such an archbishop!”

When the archbishop came to see her, the Princess uttered an excited squeal, crossed her hands over her breasts, and went up to him to receive his blessing.

“No, no! Let me kiss your hand!” she said, seizing his hand and greedily kissing it three times. “How glad I am, holy father, to see you at last! No doubt you forgot your Princess, but I assure you not a moment passed when I was not thinking about your dear monastery. How good it is to be here! This surrender of
life to God, far from the vanities of the world, has a special charm of its own, holy father, and I feel this with all my soul, though I cannot put it into words!”

The Princess’s cheeks reddened, and tears came to her eyes. She went on talking fervently while the archbishop, an old man of seventy, grave, homely, and timid, remained silent, only occasionally interrupting with some abrupt soldierlike sentences: “Certainly, Your Highness … Quite so … I understand …”

“Will Your Highness deign to spend some time with us?” he asked.

“I shall stay the night with you, and tomorrow I’m going to stay with Claudia Nikolayevna—it’s a long time since I’ve visited her—and the day after tomorrow I shall come back to you for three or four days. I want to rest my soul among you, holy father.”

The Princess loved to stay at the N–– — Monastery. For the last two years it had been her favorite resort, and every summer she spent some part of every month there, sometimes staying for two or three days, sometimes for a whole week. The gentle lay brothers, the silence, the low ceilings, the smell of cypresses, the unpretentious meals, the cheap curtains on the windows—all these things touched her, moved her, and disposed her to contemplation and good thoughts. It was enough for her to spend half an hour in the hostel and then she would feel that she too was weak and unassuming and that she smelled of cypress wood; and the past vanished into the distance, losing its significance. Although she was only twenty-nine, it occurred to the Princess that she resembled the archbishop and that, like him, she was not created for the enjoyment of wealth or of love or of earthly splendors, but for the sake of a tranquil, secluded life, as full of shadows as the hostel.

So it happens that quite suddenly and unexpectedly a ray of light will gleam in the dark cell of a monk given over to fasting and absorbed in prayer, or a bird will alight on the window of his
cell and sing its song, and the stern monk will find himself involuntarily smiling, and there will flow into his heart, from underneath the heavy burden of his sorrows for all the sins he has committed, a joy which is entirely without sin, just as a silent fountain will flow from beneath a stone. The Princess believed that she was the vehicle of just such consolations from the outside world as the ray of light or the bird. Her gay, inviting smile, her benignant gaze, her voice, her jokes—in fact everything about her, even her small well-formed figure in a simple black dress, was meant to arouse in simple austere people a feeling of joy and tenderness. Everyone looking at her must think: “God has sent us an angel.” And feeling that everyone must inevitably think in this way, she smiled still more invitingly and tried to look like a little bird.

After drinking tea and taking a rest, she went for a walk. The sun was already setting. From the monastery gardens there came to the Princess the moist fragrance of freshly watered mignonettes, and from the church came the soft singing of men’s voices, which seemed very charming and melancholy when heard from a distance. It was the time of vespers. In the dark windows where the flames of the icon lamps shed their gentle glow, in the shadows, and in the figure of the old monk sitting on the church porch with a collection box in his hands, there was such tranquillity and peace that the Princess felt moved to tears.

Outside the gate there were benches set along the avenue which lay between the birch trees and the monastery wall. On these the evening had already descended, and every moment the light was growing darker.… The Princess walked along the avenue, sat down on a bench, and fell to thinking.

She thought how good it would be if she could spend the rest of her days in the monastery, where life was as quiet and tranquil as a summer evening; and how wonderful if she could completely forget her dissolute and ungrateful husband, the Prince, and her vast estates, and the creditors who came to torment her every day, and her misfortunes, and her maid Dasha, who had given
her a particularly impertinent look that very morning. How good it would be to sit there on the bench for the remainder of her days, looking past the birch trees to the tufts of evening mist flowing at the foot of the mountains, or watching the rooks flying away to their nests far, far above the forest like a black cloud or a veil set against the sky, and the two lay brothers–one astride a piebald horse, the other on foot—who were driving out the horses for the night, rejoicing in their freedom and frolicking like children, their young voices ringing out clearly and musically in the motionless air, so that she could distinguish every word. How good to be sitting there, listening to the silence, while the wind stirred and stroked the tops of the birch trees, and a frog rustled the leaves of another year, and the clock high on the wall struck the quarter.… One could sit there for hours without moving, thinking, thinking.…

An old woman carrying a sack over her shoulder came along the path. It occurred to the Princess that it would be good to stop her and say something friendly and sincere, to help her on her way.… But the old woman did not once turn her head, and she vanished round the corner.

Not long afterward a tall man with a gray beard and a straw hat came along the avenue. As he passed the Princess, he took off his hat and bowed, and from the large bald spot on his head and the sharp, crooked nose the Princess recognized him as the doctor, Mikhail Ivanovich, who had been in her service five years before on her estate at Dubovki. Someone had told her, she remembered, that the doctor’s wife had died the previous year, and she wanted to tender her sympathy and comfort him.

“I am sure you don’t recognize me, Doctor,” the Princess said with her inviting smile.

“Of course I recognize you, Princess,” the doctor replied, and once again he took off his hat.

“Oh, thank you, I was so afraid you had forgotten your Princess. People only remember their enemies, and forget their friends. Have you come here to pray?”

“I come here every Saturday night, because it is my duty. I’m the doctor here.”

“Well, how are you?” the Princess asked, sighing. “I heard about the death of your wife. How terrible it must have been for you!”

“Yes, Princess, it was a terrible misfortune for me.”

“What can we do? We must bear our misfortunes humbly. Not a hair falls from a man’s head but by the will of eternal Providence.”

“True, Princess.”

To the Princess’s sweet and friendly smiles and sighs the doctor answered coldly and dryly: “True, Princess.” And the expression of his face was cold and dry.

“What else can I say to him?” the Princess wondered.

“It is such a long time since we met,” she went on. “Five years! Think of all the water which has flown under the bridges in that time! So many changes have taken place, it is terrible to think about them! You know I am married now?… I’m not a countess any more, but a princess. And I have separated from my husband.”

“Yes, I heard about it.”

“God has sent me many trials. I am sure you have heard that I am almost ruined. My Dubovki, Kiryakovo, and Sofino estates have been sold to pay the debts of my miserable husband. There is only Baronovo and Mikhaltsevo left. It’s a terrible thing to look back over the past! So much has changed, so many misfortunes, and so many mistakes!”

“Yes, Princess, many mistakes.”

The Princess was a little put out. She knew she had made mistakes, but they were of such an intimate character that she thought she alone could think about them, or speak about them. She could not resist asking: “What mistakes were you thinking about?”

“You mentioned them, and you know them,” the doctor said, and smiled. “Why should we talk about them?”

“Do tell me, Doctor. I should be so grateful to you. And please don’t stand on ceremony with me. I love hearing the truth.”

“I am not judging you, Princess.”

“Not judging me indeed! What a tone you have! Then you really must know something! Tell me!”

“If you want me to, then I shall have to. Only I regret I am not a man with a clever tongue, and people do not always understand me.”

The doctor thought for a moment, and said: “There were a great number of mistakes, but in my opinion the most important was the spirit … the spirit prevailing on all your estates. As you see, I don’t know how to express myself very well. Chiefly I mean the lack of love, the loathing of people in general which could be felt as a positive force on all of them. Your entire way of living was built upon that loathing. Loathing the human voices, the faces of people, the scruffs of their necks, the way they walked … in a word, loathing everything that went to make up the human condition. At all the doors and on the stairways stand well-fed, ill-mannered, lazy grooms in livery who refuse to allow ill-dressed people into the house. In the hallway there are chairs with high backs especially placed there so that whenever you give balls or entertain, the servants won’t dirty the tapestries on the walls with the back of their heads; and in all the rooms there are thick carpets so that no human footsteps can be heard; and everyone who visits you is invariably commanded to speak softly and as little as possible, and never to say anything which would produce the least unpleasantness on your mind or on your nerves. And in your private sitting room you don’t shake hands with people or ask them to sit down—just as you don’t shake hands with me or ask me to sit down.…”

“Oh, please do sit down, if you wish,” the Princess said, holding out her hands and smiling. “Tell me, why are you so angry about such utterly unimportant things?”

“Why should I be angry?” The doctor laughed, but his face
reddened, and he removed his hat and waved it about as he went on hotly: “To tell you the truth, I have been waiting for a long time for the opportunity to say these things to you.… I wanted to tell you that you have the Napoleonic way of regarding mankind—men are just cannon fodder. At least Napoleon had some ideas. You—you have nothing except your loathing!”

“Do I have a loathing for people?” The Princess smiled, shrugging her shoulders in amazement. “Do I?”

“Yes, you do! You want facts? Very well! At Mikhaltsevo there are three former cooks of yours living on charity—they went blind in your kitchens from the heat of the stoves. All the health, strength, and beauty that pours from your tens of thousands of acres is given over by you and your parasites to your grooms and footmen and coachmen. All these two-legged animals are brought up to become flunkies, stuffers of food, vulgarians, men who have departed from ‘the image and likeness of God.’… They might have been young doctors, agricultural experts, teachers, intellectuals, but, God in heaven, you tear them away from honest work, and for the sake of a crust of bread you make them play in your puppet shows, and that’s enough to make any decent man ashamed. Men like that can’t remain in your service for three years without becoming hypocrites, slanderers, and flatterers.… Is that good? Your Polish overseers, those scoundrels and spies, with names like Kasimir and Gaëtan, prowl from morning to night over your tens of thousands of acres and to please you they try to skin every ox three times over! Excuse me if I speak at random, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t regard the simple folk on your estates as though they were living people. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to visit you—you never regarded them as anything more than decoration. They were not living people. But the most important thing—the one that revolts me most of all—is that you possessed a fortune of more than a million rubles, and you did nothing for the people—nothing at all!”

The Princess sat there with a look of amazement, shock, and
fear. She did not know what to say or how to behave. No one had ever spoken to her in that tone of voice. The doctor’s unpleasantly angry voice, his fumbling and stuttering, came like a harsh grating sound on her ears and on her brain: until she felt that the gesticulating doctor was beating her around the head with his hat.

“It’s not true at all,” she answered softly in an imploring voice. “I’ve done a lot of good things for people, and you know it!”

“Stuff and nonsense!” the doctor shouted at her. “Can you possibly maintain that your philanthropic works were undertaken for a serious purpose—weren’t they just puppets being pulled on strings! They were nothing more than a farce from beginning to end! You were playing a game of loving your neighbor—such an obvious game that even children and stupid peasant women understood what you were doing! Take your—what do you call it?—rest home for homeless old women, of which I was appointed a kind of head doctor, and in which you played the role of honorary patroness. God have mercy on us, what a wonderful institution that was! You built a house with parquet flooring, and there was a weather vane on the roof, and a dozen old women were rounded up from the villages and made to sleep under blankets of some woolen stuff and sheets of Dutch linen, and given candy to eat!”