Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (560 page)

“I beg you never to make such suggestions again,” I burst out suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“It is not that I consider it humiliating, of course, but we are not agreed about anything; on the contrary, our views are entirely opposed, for in a day or two — to-morrow — I shall give up going to the prince’s, as I find there is absolutely no work for me to do there.”

“But you are going and sitting there with him — that is the work.”

“Such ideas are degrading.”

“I don’t understand; but if you are so squeamish, don’t take money from him, but simply go.  You will distress him horribly, he has already become attached to you, I assure you. . . .  However, as you please. . . .”  He was evidently put out.

“You say, don’t ask for money, but thanks to you I did a mean thing to-day: you did not warn me, and I demanded my month’s salary from him to-day.”

“So you have seen to that already; I confess I did not expect you to ask for it; but how sharp you all are nowadays!  There are no young people in these days, Tatyana Pavlovna.”  He was very spiteful: I was awfully angry too.

“I ought to have had things out with you . . . you made me do it, I don’t know now how it’s to be.”

“By the way, Sonia, give Arkady back his sixty roubles at once; and you, my dear fellow, don’t be angry at our repaying it so quickly.  I can guess from your face that you have some enterprise in your mind and that you need it. . . .  So invest it . . . or something of the sort.”

“I don’t know what my face expresses, but I did not expect mother would have told you of that money when I so particularly asked her. . . .”  I looked at my mother with flashing eyes, I cannot express how wounded I felt.

“Arkasha, darling, for God’s sake forgive me, I couldn’t possibly help speaking of it. . . .”

“My dear fellow, don’t make a grievance of her telling me your secrets: besides, she did it with the best intentions — it was simply a mother’s longing to boast of her son’s feeling for her.  But I assure you I should have guessed without that you were a capitalist.  All your secrets are written on your honest countenance.  He has ‘his idea,’ Tatyana Pavlovna, as I told you.”

“Let’s drop my honest countenance,” I burst out again.  “I know that you often see right through things, but in some cases you see no further than your own nose, and I have marvelled at your powers of penetration.  Well then, I have ‘my idea.’  That you should use that expression, of course, was an accident, but I am not afraid to admit it; I have ‘an idea’ of my own, I am not afraid and I am not ashamed of it.”

“Don’t be ashamed, that’s the chief thing.”

“And all the same I shall never tell it you.”

“That’s to say you won’t condescend to; no need to, my dear fellow, I know the nature of your idea as it is; in any case it implies:

         Into the wilderness I flee.

Tatyana Pavlovna, my notion is that he wants . . . to become a Rothschild, or something of the kind, and shut himself up in his grandeur. . . .  No doubt he’ll magnanimously allow us a pension, though perhaps he won’t allow me one — but in any case he will vanish from our sight.  Like the new moon he has risen, only to set again.”

I shuddered in my inmost being; of course, it was all chance; he knew nothing of my idea and was not speaking about it, though he did mention Rothschild; but how could he define my feelings so precisely, my impulse to break with them and go away?  He divined everything and wanted to defile beforehand with his cynicism the tragedy of fact.  That he was horribly angry, of that there could be no doubt.

“Mother, forgive my hastiness, for I see that there’s no hiding things from Andrey Petrovitch in any case,” I said, affecting to laugh and trying if only for a moment to turn it into a joke.

“That’s the very best thing you can do, my dear fellow, to laugh.  It is difficult to realize how much every one gains by laughing even in appearance; I am speaking most seriously.  He always has an air, Tatyana Pavlovna, of having something so important on his mind, that he is quite abashed at the circumstance himself.”

“I must ask you in earnest, Andrey Petrovitch, to be more careful what you say.”

“You are right, my dear boy; but one must speak out once for all, so as never to touch upon the matter again.  You have come to us from Moscow, to begin making trouble at once.  That’s all we know as yet of your object in coming.  I say nothing, of course, of your having come to surprise us in some way.  And all this month you have been snorting and sneering at us.  Yet you are obviously an intelligent person, and as such you might leave such snorting and sneering to those who have no other means of avenging themselves on others for their own insignificance.  You are always shutting yourself up, though your honest countenance and your rosy cheeks bear witness that you might look every one straight in the face with perfect innocence.  He’s a neurotic; I can’t make out, Tatyana Pavlovna, why they are all neurotic nowadays. . .?”

“If you did not even know where I was brought up, you are not likely to know why a man’s neurotic.”

“Oh, so that’s the key to it!  You are offended at my being capable of forgetting where you were brought up!”

“Not in the least.  Don’t attribute such silly ideas to me.  Mother!  Andrey Petrovitch praised me just now for laughing; let us laugh — why sit like this!  Shall I tell you a little anecdote about myself?  Especially as Andrey Petrovitch knows nothing of my adventures.”

I was boiling.  I knew this was the last time we should be sitting together like this, that when I left that house I should never enter it again, and so on the eve of it all I could not restrain myself.  He had challenged me to such a parting scene himself.

“That will be delightful, of course, if it is really amusing,” he observed, looking at me searchingly.  “Your manners were rather neglected where you were brought up, my dear fellow, though they are pretty passable.  He is charming to-day, Tatyana Pavlovna, and it’s a good thing you have undone that bag at last.”

But Tatyana Pavlovna frowned; she did not even turn round at his words, but went on untying the parcels and laying out the good things on some plates which had been brought in.  My mother, too, was sitting in complete bewilderment, though she had misgivings, of course, and realized that there would be trouble between us.  My sister touched my elbow again.

3

“I simply want to tell you all,” I began, with a very free-and-easy air, “how a father met for the first time a dearly loved son: it happened ‘wherever you were brought up’ . . .”

“My dear fellow, won’t it be . . . a dull story?  You know, tous les genres. . . .”

“Don’t frown, Andrey Petrovitch, I am not speaking at all with the object you imagine.  All I want is to make every one laugh.”

“Well, God hears you, my dear boy.  I know that you love us all . . . and don’t want to spoil our evening,” he mumbled with a sort of affected carelessness.

“Of course, you have guessed by my face that I love you?”

“Yes, partly by your face, too.”

“Just as I guessed from her face that Tatyana Pavlovna’s in love with me.  Don’t look at me so ferociously, Tatyana Pavlovna, it is better to laugh! it is better to laugh!”

She turned quickly to me, and gave me a searching look which lasted half a minute.

“Mind now,” she said, holding up her finger at me, but so earnestly that her words could not have referred to my stupid joke, but must have been meant as a warning in case I might be up to some mischief.

“Andrey Petrovitch, is it possible you don’t remember how we met for the first time in our lives?”

“Upon my word I’ve forgotten, my dear fellow, and I am really very sorry.  All that I remember is that it was a long time ago . . . and took place somewhere. . . .”

“Mother, and don’t you remember how you were in the country, where I was brought up, till I was six or seven I believe, or rather were you really there once, or is it simply a dream that I saw you there for the first time?  I have been wanting to ask you about it for a long time, but I’ve kept putting it off; now the time has come.”

“To be sure, Arkasha, to be sure I stayed with Varvara Stepanovna three times; my first visit was when you were only a year old, I came a second time when you were nearly four, and afterwards again when you were six.”

“Ah, you did then; I have been wanting to ask you about it all this month.”

My mother seemed overwhelmed by a rush of memories, and she asked me with feeling:

“Do you really mean, Arkasha, that you remembered me there?”

“I don’t know or remember anything, only something of your face remained in my heart for the rest of my life, and the fact, too, that you were my mother.  I recall everything there as though it were a dream, I’ve even forgotten my nurse.  I have a faint recollection of Varvara Stepanovna, simply that her face was tied up for toothache.  I remember huge trees near the house — lime-trees I think they were — then sometimes the brilliant sunshine at the open windows, the little flower garden, the little paths and you, mother, I remember clearly only at one moment when I was taken to the church there, and you held me up to receive the sacrament and to kiss the chalice; it was in the summer, and a dove flew through the cupola, in at one window and out at another. . . .”

“Mercy on us, that’s just how it was,” cried my mother, throwing up her hands, “and the dear dove I remember, too, now.  With the chalice just before you, you started, and cried out, ‘a dove, a dove.’”

“Your face or something of the expression remained in my memory so distinctly that I recognized you five years after in Moscow, though nobody there told me you were my mother.  But when I met Andrey Petrovitch for the first time, I was brought from the Andronikovs’; I had been vegetating quietly and happily with them for five years on end.  I remember their flat down to the smallest detail, and all those ladies who have all grown so much older here; and the whole household, and how Andronikov himself used to bring the provisions, poultry, fish, and sucking-pigs from the town in a fish-basket.  And how at dinner instead of his wife, who always gave herself such airs, he used to help the soup, and how we all laughed at his doing it, he most of all.  The young ladies there used to teach me French.  But what I liked best of all was Krylov’s Fables.  I learned a number of them by heart and every day I used to recite one to Andronikov . . . going straight into his tiny study to do so without considering whether he were busy or not.  Well, it was through a fable of Krylov’s that I got to know you, Andrey Petrovitch.  I see you are beginning to remember.”

“I do recall something, my dear fellow, that you repeated something to me . . . a fable or a passage from ‘Woe from Wit,’ I fancy.  What a memory you have, though!”

“A memory!  I should think so! it’s the one thing I’ve remembered all my life.”

“That’s all right, that’s all right, my dear fellow, you are quite waking me up.”

He actually smiled; as soon as he smiled, my mother and sister smiled after him, confidence was restored; but Tatyana Pavlovna, who had finished laying out the good things on the table and settled herself in a corner, still bent upon me a keen and disapproving eye.  “This is how it happened,” I went on: “one fine morning there suddenly appeared the friend of my childhood, Tatyana Pavlovna, who always made her entrance on the stage of my existence with dramatic suddenness.  She took me away in a carriage to a grand house, to sumptuous apartments.  You were staying at Madame Fanariotov’s, Andrey Petrovitch, in her empty house, which she had bought from you; she was abroad at that time.  I always used to wear short jackets; now all of a sudden I was put into a pretty little blue greatcoat, and a very fine shirt.  Tatyana Pavlovna was busy with me all day and bought me lots of things; I kept walking through all the empty rooms, looking at myself in all the looking- glasses.  And wandering about in the same way the next morning, at ten o clock, I walked quite by chance into your study.  I had seen you already the evening before, as soon as I was brought into the house, but only for an instant on the stairs.  You were coming downstairs to get into your carriage and drive off somewhere; you were staying alone in Moscow then, for a short time after a very long absence, so that you had engagements in all directions and were scarcely ever at home.  When you met Tatyana Pavlovna and me you only drawled ‘Ah!’ and did not even stop.”

“He describes it with a special love,” observed Versilov, addressing Tatyana Pavlovna; she turned away and did not answer.

“I can see you now as you were then, handsome and flourishing.  It is wonderful how much older and less good-looking you have grown in these years; please forgive this candour, you were thirty-seven even then, though.  I gazed at you with admiration; what wonderful hair you had, almost jet black, with a brilliant lustre without a trace of grey; moustaches and whiskers, like the setting of a jewel: I can find no other expression for it; your face of an even pallor; not like its sickly pallor to-day, but like your daughter, Anna Andreyevna, whom I had the honour of seeing this morning; dark, glowing eyes, and gleaming teeth, especially when you laughed.  And you did laugh, when you looked round as I came in; I was not very discriminating at that time, and your smile rejoiced my heart.  That morning you were wearing a dark blue velvet jacket, a sulphur coloured necktie, and a magnificent shirt with Alençon lace on it; you were standing before the looking-glass with a manuscript in your hand, and were busy declaiming Tchatsky’s monologue, and especially his last exclamation:  ‘A coach, I want a coach.’”

“Good heavens!” cried Versilov.  “Why, he’s right!  Though I was only in Moscow for so short a time, I undertook to play Tchatsky in an amateur performance at Alexandra Petrovna Vitovtov’s in place of Zhileyko, who was ill!”

“Do you mean to say you had forgotten it?” laughed Tatyana Pavlovna.

“He has brought it back to my mind!  And I own that those few days in Moscow were perhaps the happiest in my life!  We were still so young then . . . and all so fervently expecting something. . . .  It was then in Moscow I unexpectedly met so much. . . .  But go on, my dear fellow: this time you’ve done well to remember it all so exactly. . . .”