Poor Folk and Other Stories (22 page)

For a long time he searched, most diligently, but was soon overtaken by new sensations which he had hardly ever experienced before. At first casually and absent-mindedly, then with attentiveness, and finally with intense curiosity, he began to look around him. The crowds and the life of the street, the noise, the movement, the novelty of his situation – all the pettiness and commonplace rubbish which the practical and busy citizen of St Petersburg tired of long ago in his fruitless but agitated quest for the possibility of settling down in the peace and quiet of a warm nest somewhere, a nest
gained by sweat, toil, and various other means – all this tastelessly coarse ‘prose' and tedium aroused in Ordynov a sort of quietly joyful, luminous sensation. His pale cheeks were visited by a faint blush, his eyes gleamed as with reawakened hope, and with deep, eager breaths he began to draw into himself the fresh, cold air. His mood had improved beyond all recognition.

He had always led a quiet and completely solitary existence. Three years earlier, having received his degree and having become as far as was possible independent, he had gone to the house of a certain old man, of whom hitherto he had known only from hearsay, waiting for a long time until a liveried butler had consented to announce his presence for the second time. Then, entering a lofty, dark and deserted reception room, thoroughly dreary, of a kind still common in old-fashioned, upper-class family homes which have been spared by time, he had set eyes on the old man, bedecked with medal-ribbons and bedizened with grey hair, a friend and former colleague of his father's, who was his guardian. The old man handed him a pinch of money. It turned out to be a very insignificant sum; it was what remained of the proceeds from the auction of his great grandfather's legacy, which had been sold to pay off debts. Ordynov took possession of it with indifference, said farewell to his guardian for ever, and went out on to the street. It was an autumn evening, cold and gloomy; the young man was reflective, and a kind of unconscious sadness was tearing at his heart. His eyes had a burning light in them; he felt feverish, hot and cold by turns. On his way he calculated that he could live on the means he had at his disposal for two or three years – even, with intervals of hunger, for four. Darkness had practically fallen now, and it was spitting with rain. He took the first room that was offered to him, moving into it within the hour. There he shut himself up as though in a monastery cell, as though he had renounced the world for good. By the end of two years he had become a complete recluse.

He had become a recluse without noticing it; during this time it never once occurred to him that there was another kind of life – bustling, noisy, eternally surging, eternally changing, eternally calling and impossible, in the end, to avoid. It was true that he could not help hearing about it, but he had no familiarity with it, and never sought it out. From his earliest childhood he had lived apart from others; now this tendency grew more marked. He was devoured by a passion that is the deepest, most insatiable known to man, one
which drains his entire life from him, and which leaves a creature such as Ordynov not one single foothold in the sphere of practical, everyday activity. This passion was book-learning. During this time it gnawed away his youth, poisoned his rest at night with a slow, intoxicating venom, deprived him of wholesome food and fresh air (something which never entered his stuffy cubicle) – and yet, in the ecstasy of his passion, Ordynov refused to notice it. He was young, and for the time being he asked no more. His passion had made him an infant as far as his life in the outer world was concerned, and he was already for ever incapable of making certain good folk stand aside when the necessity arose to mark off some sort of space for himself among them. For some resourceful people book-learning is a kind of ready capital; Ordynov's passion was an armament directed against himself.

In him it took the form of an unconscious drive, rather than a logically intelligible impulse towards instructionandknowledge – and thus it had been in every other activity, no matter how trivial, in which he had engaged. Even as a child he had had a reputation for oddity, and had been unlike his companions. He had never known his parents; because of his strange, unsociable character he had suffered the inhumanity and crude taunts of his fellow children, which had made him truly unsociable and morose, and little by little he had become addicted to seclusion. But never, not even in the present instance, was there any order or preordained system in his solitary studies; all he knew now was the first ecstasy, the first fever, the first delirium of the artist. He was creating a system for himself; it had obsessed him for years, and little by little the vague, obscure, but somehow wonderfully gratifying outline of an idea was taking shape within his soul;the idea was embodied in a new, lucid form, and this form cried out to be released from his soul, tormenting it; he was as yet only timidly aware of its originality, truth and distinc-tiveness: the creative achievement was already announcingitself to his energies; it was forming and establishing itself. But the day of creative realization was as yet far off, perhaps very far off – perhaps quite unattainable!

Now he wandered about the streets like an alien outcast, like an anchorite who had suddenly emerged from his silent wilderness into the bustling, noisy city. Everything appeared new and strange to him. But such was his alienation from the world which seethed and rumbled about him that it did not even occur to him to be surprised
by the odd sensation he experienced. He seemed not to notice his own withdrawnness; on the contrary, a joyful feeling, bordering on the tipsiness a hungry man feels when he is given food and drink after a long period of starvation, had arisen within him; though it was, of course, strange that such a trivial novelty as a change of rooms was able to agitate and obscure the reason of a citizen of St Petersburg, even Ordynov; but then, it was also true that until that time he had never once gone out ‘on business'.

More and more he found it pleasing to wander about the streets. He stared at everything like a
flâneur
^*

Even now, however, true to his habitual mood, he read the scene that brightly unfolded before him as if it were a book, between the lines. Everything had an effect on him; he did not miss a single impression and he surveyed the faces of the passers-by with a thoughtful gaze, studied the physiognomy of everyone around him, and listened with affection to the talk of the ordinary people as though in everything he were finding the verification of the conclusions he had reached in the silence of his solitary nights. Often some trivial detail would strike him, giving rise to an idea, and for the first time he started to feel annoyed for having buried himself alive in his cell in the way he had done. Here everything moved faster; his pulse was firm and quick, his intelligence, which had been stifled by solitude, and was sharpened and ennobled only by intense, exalted activity, now functioned swiftly, calmly and boldly. What was more, he had conceived an unconscious desire somehow to squeeze himself into this life which was alien to him, and whose existence he had until this moment only known or, rather, sensed with the instinct of an artist. He found his heart beginning to throb with the pain of love and sympathy. He looked more intently at the people who passed him; but they were strangers, preoccupied and taken up with their own thoughts… And little by little Ordynov found his carefree mood beginning to wear off; reality was already weighing him down, implanting in him a kind of involuntary fear born of respect. He began to grow tired of the influx of new impressions, hitherto unfamiliar to him, like a sick man who has risen for the first time from his bed and has collapsed, exhausted by the light, the brilliance, the hurly-burly of life, the noise and gaudy tumult of the crowds in their headlong flight past him, bewildered and made giddy by their movement. He grew sad and dejected. He started to have fears about his life, about the whole of his endeavour,
and even about the future. A new thought was destroying his peace of mind. It had suddenly occurred to him that all his life he had been alone, that no one had ever loved him, and that he himself had succeeded in loving no one, either. Some of the passers-by with whom at the outset of his walk he had entered into casual conversation were now giving him coarse, strange looks. He saw that they took him for a madman or at least for a most peculiar eccentric, which was not, after all, very far off the mark. He remembered that everyone had always found being in his presence rather difficult, that even in his childhood everyone had avoided him because of his brooding, stubborn character, that his feeling for others had always manifested itself in an awkward, depressed sort of way, and had been imperceptible to them; though such a fellow-feeling had existed in him, there had not been discernible in it any sense of psychological equality, a circumstance which had tormented him as a boy, when he had not resembled the other children, his peers, in any way. Now he remembered and pondered the fact that always, at all times, people had shunned him and avoided him.

Without noticing it, he had reached a district of St Petersburg that lay far from the city centre. After consuming a meal of sorts in a solitary inn, he set off again to continue his wandering. Again he passed through many streets and squares. Beyond them stretched long yellow and grey fences, and instead of well-to-do houses he began to encounter small, thoroughly ramshackle cottages and also the colossal buildings of factories – ugly, blackened and red, with tall smokestacks. Everywhere it was lonely and desolate; everything somehow had a sullen, hostile stare: so, at least, it seemed to Ordy-nov. It was already evening. At the end of a long lane he came out on to a small square where a parish church was situated.

Without really thinking about it, he went inside. A service had just ended; the church was almost completely empty, and only two old women were still kneeling by the entrance. The votary, a grey-headed old man, was putting out the candles. Rays from the setting sun were flooding down from above in a broad stream through the narrow window of the cupola, bathing one of the chapels in a sea of brilliant light; but they were growing fainter and fainter, and as the dense gloom beneath the vaulted arches grew blacker, the more brightly here and there shone the gilded icons, illumined by the nickering sheen of lamps and candles. In a sudden fit of anguish, which disturbed him deeply from within, and with a sense of some
how labouring under a heavy weight, Ordynov leaned against the wall in the darkest corner of the church and for a moment lost consciousness. He regained it as the even, hollow sound of two parishioners walking into the church reverberated under the arches. He raised his eyes, and was seized by an indescribable curiosity at the sight of these two strangers. They were an old man and a young woman. The old man was tall, still erect and vigorous, but emaciated and deathly pale. At first sight one might have taken him for a merchant visiting from some place far away. He wore a long, black fur caftan, which was evidently his Sunday best, and it was unfastened. Underneath the caftan another long-skirted Russian garment was visible, buttoned tightly all the way down. His bare neck was carelessly tied with a bright red kerchief; he was holding a fur hat. His long, straggling beard, which was half grey, reached down to his chest, and from under lowering beetle brows his eyes glittered with a hectic, inflamed light, haughty and staring. The woman was about twenty, and she was wonderfully beautiful. She was wearing an expensive, blue winter jacket lined with fur, and her head was covered with a white satin kerchief tied beneath her chin. She walked with her eyes lowered, and a kind of reflective haughtiness, suffused throughout her entire figure, was echoed sadly and poignantly in the sweet contours of her childishly tender, gentle face. There was something strange about this unusual couple.

The old man came to a halt in the centre of the church and bowed to all four points of the compass, even though the church was quite deserted; his female companion did likewise. Then he took her by the hand and led her up to a large localicon of the Virgin, in whose name the church had been built, which shone near the alter in a blinding rathance of candles, rediance in a mounting that burned with gold and precious stones. The votary, being the only person left in the church, bowed to the old man with respect, who nodded his head in response. The woman fell prostrate before the icon. The old man lifted up the end of the veil which hung at the base of the icon and covered her head with it. The sound of muffled sobbing was heard in the church.

Ordynov was startled by the solemnity of this scene, and awaited its conclusion with impatience. After a couple of minutes or so, the woman raised her head, and again the bright light of the icon-lamp illuminated her attractive features. Ordynov started, and took a step forward. She had already given her arm to the old man, and they
both quietly left the church. Tears were stinging her shadowed, dark-blue eyes, which were lowered beneath long, glittering eyelashes that stood out against the milky whiteness of her features, and were rolling down her blanched cheeks. At her lips a smile flickered; but her face bore the traces of some indeterminate, childlike fear and of a mysterious horror. She was pressing herself fearfully against the old man, and it was evident that she was trembling all over with emotion.

Startled, and whipped on by a pleasurable and stubborn emotion that was unfamiliar to him, Ordynov quickly ran after them and crossed their path as they were coming out of the church porch. The old man gave him a stern, hostile look; she also glanced at him, but without curiosity and in an absent-minded manner, as though she were preoccupied by another, more remote thought. Ordynov had followed them without having any clear idea of why he had done it. By now it was completely dark; he continued to follow them at a distance. The old man and the young woman emerged on to the broad main street, which was muddy and full of various kinds of manufacturing premises, flour-dealers' shops and eating houses, and led straight to the city gates. They turned off it into a long, narrow lane which had long fences running either side of it, flanking the enormous blackened wall of a four-storey tenement building, through whose gates it was possible to reach another main street, also busy and crowded. The couple were already approaching this building; suddenly the old man turned round and looked at Ordynov with impatience. The young man drew up short, as though he had been rooted to the spot; he himself realized the strangeness of the impulse by which he had been carried away. The old man turned round and stared a second time, as though wishing to confirm that his threatening look had produced the effect he desired, then both he and the young woman passed through the narrow gateway into the yard. Ordynov turned back.