Why we should read--

by S. P. B. Mais

And now by way of a change let me just lightly give the plots of the following few stories. In Polinka we are simply invited to listen to the conversation over the counter of a little milliner and a draper's assistant who loves her and objects to her being led astray by a young medical student. The poignancy of the tale lies in the fact that the conversation, which is quite tragic, has to take place in public and therefore covered by discussions about buttons and corsets.

Anynta describes the misery of a kept mistress of a medical student who is tired of her.

The Two Volodyas shows us a girl who has married one elderly Volodya pining for the affection of another Volodya, who treats her as a child who has to be humoured. He told her that she was like a little dog waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed: "Tara-ra-boom-dee-ay ... tara-ra-boom-dee-ay."

The Trousseau gives us a pathetic picture of a wife and daughter in some dull, out-the-way place preparing year in, year out, material for her "bottom drawer," the girl after all dying before she met anyone who wanted to marry her.

The Help-Mate describes the doings of a suspicious husband who finds that his wife is corresponding secretly: he offers to set his wife free in order that she may marry her lover. We hear of a mother-in-law who aids her daughter in her immorality delightfully touched in in a phrase that cuts like a lash: "A stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything: if her daughter were strangling someone the mother would not have protested but would only have screened her with her skirts."

The wife refuses to accept a divorce because it will lower her status and perhaps her lover will throw her over. He is younger than she is.

In An Artist's Story we get some invaluable hints on the problem of the education of the masses.

"'The whole horror of their position,'" says the artist, "'lies in their never having time to think of their souls, of their image and resemblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block for them every way to spiritual activity—that is, to what distinguishes man from the brutes and what is the only thing which makes life worth living—the people must be freed from hard physical labour: we must lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and in the fields, but may also have time to think of God—may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of man is spiritual activity, the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us, townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two or three hours a day. What is needed is not elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities. If one must cure, it should not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause—physical labour—and then there will be no disease. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs.'"

The story itself, however, concerns the love of an artist for a girl who disobeys the dictates of her heart and gives up her happiness at her sister's behest without question. The passage where the artist hears that his chance of real abiding love has been snatched from him is peculiarly Tchehov-like at his most poignant. He goes, full of hope and ecstasy, to meet his beloved and hears her sister, who dislikes him, giving a dictation lesson.