PAGE 8
The Black Monk
by
“But I am all right, and I am doing no harm to any one; so there is no harm in my hallucinations,” he thought; and he felt happy again.
He sat down on the sofa and clasped his hands round his head. Restraining the unaccountable joy which filled his whole being, he then paced up and down again, and sat down to his work. But the thought that he read in the book did not satisfy him. He wanted something gigantic, unfathomable, stupendous. Towards morning he undressed and reluctantly went to bed: he ought to sleep.
When he heard the footsteps of Yegor Semyonitch going out into the garden, Kovrin rang the bell and asked the footman to bring him some wine. He drank several glasses of Lafitte, then wrapped himself up, head and all; his consciousness grew clouded and he fell asleep.
IV
Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya often quarrelled and said nasty things to each other.
They quarrelled about something that morning. Tanya burst out crying and went to her room. She would not come down to dinner nor to tea. At first Yegor Semyonitch went about looking sulky and dignified, as though to give every one to understand that for him the claims of justice and good order were more important than anything else in the world; but he could not keep it up for long, and soon sank into depression. He walked about the park dejectedly, continually sighing: “Oh, my God! My God!” and at dinner did not eat a morsel. At last, guilty and conscience-stricken, he knocked at the locked door and called timidly:
“Tanya! Tanya!”
And from behind the door came a faint voice, weak with crying but still determined:
“Leave me alone, if you please.”
The depression of the master and mistress was reflected in the whole household, even in the labourers working in the garden. Kovrin was absorbed in his interesting work, but at last he, too, felt dreary and uncomfortable. To dissipate the general ill-humour in some way, he made up his mind to intervene, and towards evening he knocked at Tanya’s door. He was admitted.
“Fie, fie, for shame!” he began playfully, looking with surprise at Tanya’s tear-stained, woebegone face, flushed in patches with crying. “Is it really so serious? Fie, fie!”
“But if you knew how he tortures me!” she said, and floods of scalding tears streamed from her big eyes. “He torments me to death,” she went on, wringing her hands. “I said nothing to him . . . nothing . . . I only said that there was no need to keep . . . too many labourers . . . if we could hire them by the day when we wanted them. You know . . . you know the labourers have been doing nothing for a whole week. . . . I . . . I . . . only said that, and he shouted and . . . said . . . a lot of horrible insulting things to me. What for?”
“There, there,” said Kovrin, smoothing her hair. “You’ve quarrelled with each other, you’ve cried, and that’s enough. You must not be angry for long–that’s wrong . . . all the more as he loves you beyond everything.”
“He has . . . has spoiled my whole life,” Tanya went on, sobbing. “I hear nothing but abuse and . . . insults. He thinks I am of no use in the house. Well! He is right. I shall go away to-morrow; I shall become a telegraph clerk. . . . I don’t care. . . .”
“Come, come, come. . . . You mustn’t cry, Tanya. You mustn’t, dear . . . . You are both hot-tempered and irritable, and you are both to blame. Come along; I will reconcile you.”
Kovrin talked affectionately and persuasively, while she went on crying, twitching her shoulders and wringing her hands, as though some terrible misfortune had really befallen her. He felt all the sorrier for her because her grief was not a serious one, yet she suffered extremely. What trivialities were enough to make this little creature miserable for a whole day, perhaps for her whole life! Comforting Tanya, Kovrin thought that, apart from this girl and her father, he might hunt the world over and would not find people who would love him as one of themselves, as one of their kindred. If it had not been for those two he might very likely, having lost his father and mother in early childhood, never to the day of his death have known what was meant by genuine affection and that naive, uncritical love which is only lavished on very close blood relations; and he felt that the nerves of this weeping, shaking girl responded to his half-sick, overstrained nerves like iron to a magnet. He never could have loved a healthy, strong, rosy-cheeked woman, but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya attracted him.