«Never mind!» said Kovrin, straightening her hair. «You have had your scoldings and your cryings, and that is surely enough. You can’t keep up this for ever … it is not right … all the more since you know he loves you infinitely.»
«He has ruined my whole life,» sobbed Tánya. «I never hear anything but insults and affronts. He regards me as superfluous in his own house. Let him! He will have cause! I shall leave here to-morrow, and study for a position as telegraphist…. Let him!»
«Come, come. Stop crying, Tánya. It does you no good…. You are both irritable and impulsive, and both in the wrong. Come, and I will make peace!»
Kovrin spoke gently and persuasively, but Tánya continued to cry, twitching her shoulders and wringing her hands as if she had been overtaken by a real misfortune. Kovrin felt all the sorrier owing to the smallness of the cause of her sorrow. What a trifle it took to make this little creature unhappy for a whole day, or, as she had expressed it, for a whole life! And as he consoled Tánya, it occurred to him that except this girl and her father there was not one in the world who loved him as a kinsman; and had it not been for them, he, left fatherless and motherless in early childhood, must have lived his whole life without feeling one sincere caress, or tasting ever that simple, unreasoning love which we feel only for those akin to us by blood. And he felt that his tired, strained nerves, like magnets, responded to the nerves of this crying, shuddering girl. He felt, too, that he could never love a healthy, rosy-cheeked woman; but pale, weak, unhappy Tánya appealed to him.
He felt pleasure in looking at her hair and her shoulders; and he pressed her hand, and wiped away her tears…. At last she ceased crying. But she still continued to complain of her father, and of her insufferable life at home, imploring Kovrin to try to realise her position. Then by degrees she began to smile, and to sigh that God had cursed her with such a wicked temper; and in the end laughed aloud, called herself a fool, and ran out of the room. A little later Kovrin went into the garden. Yegor Semiónovitch and Tánya, as if nothing had happened, We were walking side by side up the alley, eating rye-bread and salt, we both were very hungry.
V
Pleased with his success as peacemaker, Kovrin went into the park. As he sat on a bench and mused, he heal’d the rattle of a carnage and a woman’s laugh—visitors evidently again. Shadows fell in the garden, the sound of a violin, the music of a woman’s voice reached him almost inaudibly; and this reminded him of the Black Monk. Whither, to what country, to what planet, had that optical absurdity flown? Hardly had he called to mind the legend and painted in imagination the black apparition in the rye-field when from behind the pine trees opposite to him, walked inaudibly—without the faintest rustling—a man of middle height. His grey head was uncovered, he was dressed in black, and barefooted like a beggar. On his pallid, corpse-like face stood out sharply a number of black spots. Nodding his head politely the stranger or beggar walked noiselessly to the bench and sat down, and Kovrin recognised the Black Monk. For a minute they looked at one another, Kovrin with astonishment, but the monk kindly and, as before, with a sly expression on his face.
«But you are a mirage,» said Kovrin. «Why are you here, and why do you sit in one place? That is not in accordance with the legend.»
«It is all the same,» replied the monk softly, turning his face towards Kovrin. «The legend, the mirage, I—all are products of your own excited imagination. I am a phantom.»
«That is to say you don’t exist?» asked Kovrin. «Think as you like,» replied the monk, smiling faintly. «I exist in your imagination, and as your imagination is a part of Nature, I must exist also in Nature.»
«You have a clever, a distinguished face—it seems to me as if in reality you had lived more than a thousand years,» said Kovrin. «I did not know that my imagination was capable of creating such a phenomenon. Why do you look at me with such rapture? Are you pleased with me?»
«Yes. For you are one of the few who can justly be named the elected of God. You serve eternal truth. Your thoughts, your intentions, your astonishing science, all your life bear the stamp of divinity, a heavenly impress; they are dedicated to the rational and the beautiful, and that is, to the Eternal.»
«You say, to eternal truth. Then can eternal truth be accessible and necessary to men if there is no eternal life?»
«There is eternal life,» said the monk.
«You believe in the immortality of men.»
«Of course. For you, men, there awaits a great and a beautiful future. And the more the world has of men like you the nearer will this future be brought. Without you, ministers to the highest principles, living freely and consciously, humanity would be nothing; developing in the natural order it must wait the end of its earthly history. But you, by some thousands of years, hasten it into the kingdom of eternal truth—and in this is your high service. You embody in yourself the blessing of God which rested upon the people.»
«And what is the object of eternal life?» asked Kovrin.
«The same as all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment is in knowledge, and eternal life presents innumerable, inexhaustible fountains of knowledge; it is in this sense it was said: ‘In My Father’s house are many mansions….'»
«You cannot conceive what a joy it is to me to listen to you,» said Kovrin, rubbing his hands with delight.
«I am glad.»
«Yet I know that when you leave me I shall be tormented by doubt as to your reality. You are a phantom, a hallucination. But that means that I am psychically diseased, that I am not in a normal state?» «What if you are? That need not worry you. You are ill because you have overstrained your powers, because you have borne your health in sacrifice to one idea, and the time is near when you will sacrifice not merely it but your life also. What more could you desire? It is what all gifted and noble natures aspire to.»
«But if I am psychically diseased, how can I trust myself?»
«And how do you know that the men of genius whom all the world trusts have not also seen visions? Genius, they tell you now, is akin to insanity. Believe me, the healthy and the normal are but ordinary men—the herd. Fears as to a nervous age, over-exhaustion and degeneration can trouble seriously only those whose aims in life lie in the present—that is the herd.»
«The Romans had as their ideal: mens sana in corpore sano.»
«All that the Greeks and Romans said is not true. Exaltations, aspirations, excitements, ecstacies—all those things which distinguish poets, prophets, martyrs to ideas from ordinary men are incompatible with the animal life, that is, with physical health. I repeat, if you wish to be healthy and normal go with the herd.»
«How strange that you should repeat what I myself have so often thought!» said Kovrin. «It seems as if you had watched me and listened to my secret thoughts. But do not talk about me. What do you imply by the words: eternal truth?»
The monk made no answer. Kovrin looked at him, but could not make out his face. His features clouded and melted away; his head and arms disappeared; his body faded into the bench and into the twilight, and vanished utterly.
«The hallucination has gone,» said Kovrin, laughing. «It is a pity.»
He returned to the house lively and happy. What the Black Monk had said to him flattered, not his self-love, but his soul, his whole being. To be the elected, to minister to eternal truth, to stand in the ranks of those who hasten by thousands of years the making mankind worthy of the kingdom of Christ, to deliver humanity from thousands of years of struggle, sin, and suffering, to give to one idea everything, youth, strength, health, to die for the general welfare—what an exalted, what a glorious ideal! And when through his memory flowed his past life, a life pure and chaste and full of labour, when he remembered what he had learnt and what he had taught, he concluded that in the words of the monk there was no exaggeration. Through the park, to meet him, came Tánya. She was wearing a different dress from that in which he had last seen her.
«You here?» she cried. «We were looking for you, looking…. But what has happened?» she asked in surprise, looking into his glowing, enraptured face, and into his eyes, now full of tears. «How strange you are, Andrusha!»
«I am satisfied, Tánya,» said Kovrin, laying his hand upon her shoulder. «I am more than satisfied; I am happy! Tánya, dear Tánya, you are inexpressibly dear to me. Tánya, I am so glad!»
He kissed both her hands warmly, and continued: «I have just lived through the brightest, most wonderful, most unearthly moments…. But I cannot tell you all, for you would call me mad, or refuse to believe me…. Let me speak of you! Tánya, I love you, and have
