“‘The Thousand Souls,’” answered Kitty. “What a funny name Pisemski had: Alexei Theofilaktitch!”
“Where are you going?” cried Startseff in terror as she suddenly jumped up and started toward the house. “I absolutely must speak to you. I want to tell you something! Stay with me, if only for five minutes, I implore you!”
She stopped as if she meant to answer him, and then awkwardly slipped a note into his hand and ran away into the house where she took her seat at the piano once more.
“Meet me in the cemetery at Demetti’s grave to-night at eleven,” Startseff read.
“How absurd!” he thought, when he had recovered himself a little. “Why in the cemetery? What is the sense of that?”
The answer was clear: Kitty was fooling. Who would think seriously of making a tryst at night in a cemetery far outside the city when it would have been so easy to meet in the street or in the public gardens? Was it becoming for him, a government doctor and a serious-minded person, to sigh and receive notes and wander about a cemetery, and do silly things that even schoolboys made fun of? How would this little adventure end? What would his friends say if they knew of it? These were Startseff’s reflections, as he wandered about among the tables at the club that evening, but at half past ten he suddenly changed his mind and drove to the cemetery.
He had his own carriage and pair now, and a coachman named Panteleimon in a long velvet coat. The moon was shining. The night was still and mellow, but with an autumnal softness. The dogs barked at him as he drove through the suburbs and out through the city gates. Startseff stopped his carriage in an alley on the edge of the town and continued his way to the cemetery on foot.
“Every one has his freaks,” he reflected. “Kitty is freakish, too, and, who knows, perhaps she was not joking and may come after all.”
He abandoned himself to this faint, groundless hope, and it intoxicated him.
He crossed the fields for half a mile. The dark band of trees in the cemetery appeared in the distance like a wood or a large garden, then a white stone wall loomed up before him, and soon, by the light of the moon, Startseff was able to read the inscription over the gate: “Thy hour also approacheth—” He went in through a little side gate, and his eye was struck first by the white crosses and monuments on either side of a wide avenue, and by their black shadows and the shadows of the tall poplars that bordered the walk. Around him, on all sides, he could see the same checkering of white and black, with the sleeping trees brooding over the white tombstones. The night did not seem so dark as it had appeared in the fields. The fallen leaves of the maples, like tiny hands, lay sharply defined upon the sandy walks and marble slabs, and the inscriptions on the tombstones were clearly legible. Startseff was struck with the reflection that he now saw for the first and perhaps the last time a world unlike any other, a world that seemed to be the very cradle of the soft moonlight, where there was no life, no, not a breath of it; and yet, in every dark poplar, in every grave he felt the presence of a great mystery promising life, calm, beautiful, and eternal. Peace and sadness and mercy rose with the scent of autumn from the graves, the leaves, and the faded flowers.