And that was all he could think of saying. They were silent.
“I am so excited!” said Katherine, covering her face with her hands. “But don’t pay any attention to me. I am so glad to be at home, I am so glad to see every one again that I cannot get used to it. How many memories we have between us! I thought you and I would talk without stopping until morning!”
He saw her face and her shining eyes more closely now, and she looked younger to him than she had in the house. Even her childish expression seemed to have returned. She was gazing at him with naïve curiosity, as if she wanted to see and understand more clearly this man who had once loved her so tenderly and so unhappily. Her eyes thanked him for his love. And he remembered all that had passed between them down to the smallest detail, remembered how he had wandered about the cemetery and had gone home exhausted at dawn. He grew suddenly sad and felt sorry to think that the past had vanished for ever. A little flame sprang up in his heart.
“Do you remember how I took you to the club that evening?” he asked. “It was raining and dark——”
The little flame was burning more brightly, and now he wanted to talk and to lament his dull life.
“Alas!” he sighed. “You ask what I have been doing! What do we all do here? Nothing! We grow older and fatter and more sluggish. Day in, day out our colourless life passes by without impressions, without thoughts. It is money by day and the club by night, in the company of gamblers and inebriates whom I cannot endure. What is there in that?”
“But you have your work, your noble end in life. You used to like so much to talk about your hospital. I was a queer girl then, I thought I was a great pianist. All girls play the piano these days, and I played, too; there was nothing remarkable about me. I am as much of a pianist as mamma is an author. Of course I didn’t understand you then, but later, in Moscow, I often thought of you. I thought only of you. Oh, what a joy it must be to be a country doctor, to help the sick and to serve the people! Oh, what a joy!” Katherine repeated with exaltation. “When I thought of you while I was in Moscow you seemed to me to be so lofty and ideal——”
Startseff remembered the little bills which he took out of his pockets every evening with such pleasure, and the little flame went out.
He rose to go into the house. She took his arm.
“You are the nicest person I have ever known in my life,” she continued. “We shall see one another and talk together often, shan’t we? Promise me that! I am not a pianist, I cherish no more illusions about myself, and shall not play to you or talk music to you any more.”