Stories (11 page)

In reply I sent Katya a long and, I confess, very boring letter. Among other things, I wrote to her: “I have not infrequently had occasion to exchange words with old actors, the noblest of people, who accorded me their sympathy; from talking with them I was able to see that their activity is directed not so much by their own reason and freedom as by fashion and the mood of society; the best of them had been obliged, during their lives, to play in tragedies, and in operettas, and in Parisian farces, and in fairy pageants, yet they always had the same feeling of following a straig
ht path and being useful. And so, as you see, the cause of the evil must be sought not in actors, but deeper, in the art itself and how the whole society relates to it.” This letter only annoyed Katya. She replied to me: “You and I are singing in different operas. I wrote to you not about the noblest of people, who accorded you their sympathy, but about a band of swindlers who have nothing in common with nobility. They’re a herd of wild people, who wound up on the stage only because they wouldn’t have been accepted anywhere else, and who call themselves artists only out of insolence. Not a single talen
t, but a lot of giftless people, drunkards, intriguers, and gossips. I can’t tell you how bitter it is for me that the art I love so much has
fallen into the hands of people I find hateful; how bitter that the best people see evil only from a distance, do not want to come closer, and, instead of intervening, write heavy-handed commonplaces and totally needless moral pronouncements …” and so on, all in the same vein.

A little more time went by, and I received this letter: “I have been brutally deceived. I cannot live any longer. You may dispose of my money as you see fit. I loved you as a father and my only friend. Forgive me.”

It turned out that her
he
also belonged to the “herd of wild people.” Later I was able to guess from certain hints that there had been an attempt at suicide. It seems Katya tried to poison herself. It must be supposed that she was seriously ill afterwards, because the next letter I received was from Yalta, where, in all likelihood, the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me contained
a request to send her a thousand roubles in Yalta as soon as possible, and it ended like this: “Excuse me for such a gloomy letter. Yesterday I buried my baby.” After spending about a year in the Crimea, she returned home.

She had been away for about four years, and for all those four years, I must confess, I played a rather strange and unenviable role in regard to her. When she had announced to me earlier that she was going to become an actress, and then wrote to me about her love, when she was periodically possessed by a spirit of prodigality and I had time and again to send her, on her demand, now a thousand, now two thousand roubles, when she wrote to me about her intention to die and then about the death of the baby, I was at a loss each time and all my concern for her fate expressed itself only
in my thinking a lot and writing long, boring letters, which I might as well not have written. And yet I had taken the place of her real father and loved her like a daughter!

Now Katya lives half a mile from me. She has rented a five-room apartment, and has furnished it quite comfortably and in her own taste. If anyone should undertake to depict her furnishings, the predominant mood of the picture would be indolence. Soft couches, soft seats for an indolent body, carpets for indolent feet, pale, dull, or matte colors for indolent eyes; for an indolent soul, an abundance of cheap fans on the walls and little pictures in which an originality of execution dominates content, a superfluity of little tables and shelves filled with totally useless and worthless
objects, shapeless rags for curtains … All that, along with the fear of bright colors, symmetry, and open space, testifies not only to inner indolence but also to a perversion of natural taste. For whole days Katya lies on a couch and reads books, mostly novels and stories. She leaves the house only once a day, in the afternoon, to come and see me.

I’m working, and Katya is sitting not far away on the sofa, silent and wrapped in a shawl, as if she felt cold. Either because I find her sympathetic, or because I became accustomed t
o her frequent visits when she was still a little girl, her presence does not keep me from concentrating. From time to time I mechanically ask her some question, and she gives me a very brief answer; or, to rest for a moment, I turn to her and watch her pensively looking through some medical journal or newspaper. And then I notice that her face no longer has its former trustful expression. Her expression is cold now, indifferent, distracted, as with passengers who have to wait a long time for a train. She still dresses beautifully and simply, but carelessly; you can see that her clothes and hair have t
o put up with a lot from the couches and rocking chairs she lies in all day long. And she’s not as curious as she used to be. She asks me no questions now, as if she has already experienced everything in life and doesn’t expect to hear anything new.

Towards four o’clock there begins to be movement in the hall and the drawing room. Liza has come home from the conservatory and brought some girlfriends with her. They can be heard playing the piano, trying out their voices, and laughing. Yegor is setting the table in the dining room and clattering the dishes.

“Good-bye,” says Katya. “I won’t see your family today. They must excuse me. I have no time. Come by.”

As I see her off to the front door, she looks me up and down sternly and says in vexation:

“And you keep losing weight! Why don’t you see a doctor? I’ll go and invite Sergei Fyodorovich. Let him examine you.”

“There’s no need, Katya.”

“I don’t understand where your family is looking! Good ones they are!”

She puts her coat on impetuously, and as she does so, two or three hairpins are bound to fall from her carelessly done hair. S
he’s too lazy to put it right, and she has no time; she awkwardly tucks the loose strands under her hat and leaves.

When I go into the dining room, my wife asks me:

“Was Katya with you just now? Why didn’t she stop and see us? It’s even strange …”

“Mama!” Liza says to her reproachfully. “If she doesn’t want to, God be with her. We’re not going to kneel to her.”

“As you like, but it’s disdainful. To sit in your study for three hours and not give us a thought! However, as she likes.”

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is incomprehensible to me, and one probably has to be a woman to understand it. I’ll bet my life that of the hundred and fifty-odd young men I see almost every day in my auditorium, and the hundred older ones I have to meet each week, it would be hard to find even one who is able to understand their hatred and loathing for Katya’s past—that is, for her pregnancy out of wedlock and her illegitimate child; and at the same time I simply cannot recall even one woman or girl among those I know who would not consciously or instinctively share those feeling
s. And that is not because women are purer or more virtuous than men: purity and virtue scarcely differ from vice, if they’re not free of malice. I explain it simply by the backwardness of women. The dejected feeling of compassion and pained conscience experienced by a contemporary man at the sight of misfortune speak much more to me of culture and moral development than do hatred and loathing. Contemporary women are as tearful and coarse of heart as in the Middle Ages. And, in my opinion, those who advise that they be educated like men are quite reasonable.

My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for her ingratitude, for her pride, for her eccentricity, and for a whole host of vices that one woman is always able to find in another.

Besides my family and myself, we also have dining with us two or three of my daughter’s girlfriends, and Alexander Adolfovich Gnekker, Liza’s admirer and the pretender to her hand. He is a blond young man, no more than thirty, of average height, very stout, broad-shouldered, with red side-whiskers at his ears and a waxed little mustache that gives his plump, smooth face a sort of toylike expression. He is wearing a very short jacket, a bright-colored waistcoat, trousers of a large checked pattern, very wide above and very narrow below, and yellow shoes without heels. He has prominent crayfish ey
es, his tie resembles a crayfish tail, and it seems to me that the whole of the young man exudes a smell of
crayfish soup. He calls on us every day, but no one in my family knows what his origins are, where he studied, or what he lives on. He neither plays nor sings, but is somehow connected with music and singing, sells somebody’s grand pianos somewhere, is often at the conservatory, is acquainted with all the celebrities, and takes a hand in concerts. He pronounces on music with great authority, and I’ve noticed that everybody willingly agrees with him.

Rich people are always surrounded by spongers; so are people of science and art. It seems no science or art in the world is fr
ee of the presence of “foreign bodies” like this Mr. Gnekker. I’m not a musician, and may be mistaken concerning this Gnekker, whom, moreover, I know only slightly. But his authority, and the dignity with which he stands by the piano and listens while someone sings or plays, strike me as all too suspicious.

You can be a gentleman and a privy councillor a hundred times over, but if you have a daughter, nothing can protect you from the bourgeois vulgarity that is often introduced into your house and into your state of mind by courtships, proposals, and weddings. I, for instance, am quite unable to reconcile myself to the solemn expression my wife acquires each time Gnekker sits down with us, nor can I be reconciled to the bottles of Lafite, port, and sherry that are served only for his sake, to give him ocular evidence of the luxury and largesse of our life. I also can’t stand Liza’s jerky laugh
ter, which she learned at the conservatory
, or her way of narrowing her eyes when we have gentleman visitors. And above all I simply cannot understand why it is that I am visited every day by and have dinner every day with a being who is totally alien to my habits, my learning, the whole mode of my life, and who is totally different from the people I like. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that he is “the fiancé,” but even so I don’t understand his presence; it arouses the same perplexity in me as if a Zulu were seated at my table. And it also seems strange to me that my daughter, whom I am accustomed to consider a child, should love that
necktie, those eyes, those soft cheeks …

Formerly I either liked dinner or was indifferent to it, but now it arouses nothing but boredom and vexation in me. Ever since I became an Excellency
¹³
and was made dean of the faculty, my family has for some reason found it necessary to change our menu and dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes I became accustomed to as a student and a doctor, I’m now fed puréed soup with some sort
of white icicles floating in it, and kidneys in Madeira. Renown and the rank of general have deprived me forever of cabbage soup, and tasty pies, and goose with apples, and bream with kasha.
¹⁴
They have also deprived me of the maid Agasha, a talkative old woman, quick to laugh, instead of whom the dinner is now served by Yegor, a dumb and arrogant fellow with a white glove on his right hand. The intermissions are short, but they seem far too long, because there is nothing to fill them. Gone are the former gaiety, unconstrained conversation, jokes, laughter, gone is the mutual tenderness and joy that animated my children, my wife and myself when we used to come together in the dining room; for a busy man like me, dinner was a time to rest and see my wife and children, and for them it was a f
estive time—short, it’s true, but bright and joyful— when they knew that for half an hour I belonged not to science, not to my students, but to them alone and no one else. No more the ability to get drunk on a single glass, no more Agasha, no more bream with kasha, no more the noise produced by small dinner scandals, like a fight between the cat and dog under the table or the bandage falling from Katya’s cheek into her plate of soup.

Describing our present-day dinners is as unappetizing as eating them. My wife’s face has an expression of solemnity, an assumed gravity, and her usual worry. She glances uneasily over our plates and says: “I see you don’t like the roast … Tell me: don’t you really?” And I have to answer: “You needn’t worry, my dear, the roast is quite delicious.” And she: “You always stand up for me, Nikolai Stepanych, and never tell the truth. Why, then, has Alexander Adolfovich eaten so little?” and it goes on in the same vein throughout the meal. Liza laughs jerkily and narrows her eyes. I look at
the two of them, and only now, at dinner, does it become perfectly clear to me that their inner life escaped my observation long ago. I have the feeling that once upon a time I lived at home with a real family, but now I’m the dinner guest of someone who is not my real wife and am looking at someone who is not the real Liza. An abrupt change has taken place in them both, I missed the long process by which this change came about, and it’s no wonder I don’t understand anything. Why did the change take place? I don’t know. Maybe the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength tha
n He gave me. Since childhood I’ve been accustomed to standing up to external circumstances, and I’ve become rather seasoned; such catastrophes in life as renown, the
rank of general, the change from well-being to living beyond one’s means, acquaintance with the nobility, and so on, have barely touched me, and I’ve remained safe and sound; but on my weak, unseasoned wife and Liza it all fell like a big block of snow, and crushed them.

The young ladies and Gnekker are talking about fugues, counterpoint, about singers and pianists, about Bach and Brahms, and my wife, afraid to be suspected of musical ignorance, smiles at them sympathetically and murmurs: “That’s lovely … Really? You don’t say …” Gnekker eats gravely, cracks jokes gravely, and listens condesc
endingly to the young ladies’ observations. Every once in a while he feels a desire to speak bad French, and then for some reason he finds it necessary to address me as
votre excellence.