Stories (14 page)

All this refers to so-called belles-lettres.

As for serious Russian articles, for instance on sociology, art, and
so on, I avoid reading them out of sheer timidity. In my childhood and youth I was for some reason afraid of doormen and theater ushers, and that fear has stayed with me. I’m afraid of them even now. They say we fear only what we don’t understand. And, indeed, it’s very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear. The extraordinary importance, the facetiously pontifical tone, the familiar treatment of
foreign authors, the knack of augustly pouring from empty into void—I find it all incomprehensible, frightening, and nothing like the modesty and gentlemanly calm tone I’m accustomed to in reading what doctors and natural scientists write. Not only articles, it’s even painful for me to read the translations done or edited by serious Russian people. The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and
sic’s
that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me lik
e an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.

I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor’s rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don’t think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reve
rse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions, and of all sorts of criminality are the usual adornments of serious articles. And that, as young doctors like to put it in their articles, is the
ultima ratio
!
¹⁹
Such relations cannot fail to be reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, and therefore I’m not surprised in the least that in the new books our literature has acquired over the last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink ga
llons of vodka and the heroines are insufficiently chaste.

I read my French books and keep glancing out the window, which is open; I see the teeth of my fence, two or three scrawny
trees, and beyond the fence a road, a field, then a wide strip of evergreen forest. I often admire how a certain little boy and girl, both towheaded and ragged, climb up the fence and laugh at my bald head. In their bright little eyes I read: “Go
up, thou bald head!”
²⁰
They’re probably the only people who care nothing about m
y rank and renown.

Now I don’t have visitors every day. I will mention only the visits of Nikolai and Pyotr Ignatievich. Nikolai usually co
mes on feast days,
²¹
seemingly on business, but more just to s
ee me. He arrives rather tipsy, which never happens with him in the winter.

“What’s up?” I ask, coming to meet him in the front hall.

“Your Excellency!” he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with the rapture of a lover. “Your Excellency! May God punish me! May I be struck by lightning on this very spot!
Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus
!”
²²

And he greedily kisses me on the shoulders, sleeves, buttons.

“Is everything all right with you there?” I ask him.

“Your Excellency! As God lives …”

He won’t stop swearing needlessly by God, I soon get sick of him and send him to the kitchen, where they serve him dinner. Pyotr Ignatievich also comes on feast days, especially to see how I am and to share his thoughts with me. He usually sits by my desk, modest, neat, sensible, not daring to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and all the while, in his soft, even little voice, smoothly and bookishly, he tells me what he thinks are various extremely interesting and spicy bits of news that he has come across in journals and books. These items are all alike and boil down to this: a certain French
man made a discovery; another man—a German—caught him out, by proving that this discovery had already been made in 1870 by some American; and a third—also a German—outwitted them both, proving that they were a pair of dupes who mistook air bubbles for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Pyotr Ignatievich tells everything at length, thoroughly, as if defending a thesis, with a detailed list of his printed sources, trying not to make any mistakes in the dates, or in the numbers of the journals, or in names, and he never simply says Petit, but al
ways Jean-Jacques Petit. Occasionally he stays for dinner with us, and then he tells the same spicy stories all through dinner, which plunges everyone at the table into gloom. If Gnekker and Liza start talking about fugues and counterpoint, about Brahms and Bach, he
modestly looks down and gets embarrassed; he’s ashamed that such banalities sh
ould be talked about in the presence of such serious people as he and I.

In my present mood five minutes are enough to make me as sick of him as if I’d seen and heard him for all eternity I hate the wretched fellow. I wither from his soft, even voice and bookish language, I grow dumb from his stories … He has the best feelings for me and talks with me only to give me pleasure, and I pay him back by looking at him point-blank, as if I wanted to hypnotize him, and thinking: “Go away, go away, go away …” But he doesn’t succumb to my mental suggestion and stays, stays, stays …

All the while he stays with me, I’m unable to rid myself of the thought: “It’s quite possible that when I die, he’ll be appointed to replace me,” and in my imagination my poor auditorium looks like an oasis in which the spring has dried up, and I’m unpleasant, silent, and sullen with Pyotr Ignatievich, as if he were to blame for these thoughts and not I myself. When he begins his habitual praise of German scientists, I no longer joke good-naturedly, as before, but mutter sullenly:

“Your Germans are asses …”

This is like the episode when the late professor Nikita Krylov, swimming at Revel
²³
once with Pirogov, got angry with the water for being very cold and swore: “Scoundrelly Germans!” I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatievich, and only when he leaves, and I see his gray hat flash outside the window, beyond the fence, do I want to call out to him and say: “Forgive me, my dear fellow!”

Our dinners are more boring than in winter. The same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. Formerly I suffered his presence silently, but now I send little barbs at him, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by spiteful feeling, I often say simply stupid things and don’t know why I say them. It happened once that I gave Gnekker a long, scornful look and then, out of nowhere, fired off at him:

And the most vexing thing is that the hen Gnekker proves to be much smarter than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he sticks to the following tactics: he responds
to my barbs with an indulgent silence (the old man’s cracked, what’s the point of talking to him?), or good-naturedly makes fun of me. It’s astonishing how paltry a man can become! I’m capable of dreaming all through dinner of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, and how Liza and my wife will realize their mistake, and how I will taunt them—to have such absurd dreams when I’ve
got one foot in the grave!

Misunderstandings also happen now which I knew before only from hearsay Ashamed as I am, I’ll describe one that occurred the other day after dinner.

I’m sitting in my room smoking my pipe. My wife comes in as usual, sits down, and begins saying how nice it would be now, while it’s still warm and I have free time, to go to Kharkov and there find out what sort of man our Gnekker is.

“All right, I’ll go …” I agree.

My wife, pleased with me, gets up and goes to the door, but comes back at once and says:

“Incidentally, one more request. I know you’ll be angry, but it is my duty to warn you … Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanych, but there has begun to be talk among all our neighbors and acquaintances that you visit Katya rather often. She’s intelligent, educated, I don’t dispute it, one may enjoy spending time with her, but at your age and with your social position, you know, it’s somehow strange to find pleasure in her company … Besides, her reputation is such that …”

All the blood suddenly drains from my brain, sparks shoot from my eyes, I jump up and, clutching my head, stamping my feet, shout in a voice not my own:

“Leave me! Leave me! Get out!”

My face is probably terrible, my voice strange, because my wife suddenly turns pale and cries out loudly in a desperate voice, also somehow not her own. At our cries, Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor come running in …

“Leave me!” I shout. “Get out! Out!”

My legs go numb, as if they’re not there, I feel myself fall into someone’s arms, briefly hear someone weeping, and sink into a swoon that lasts for two or three hours.

Now about Katya. She calls on me every day towards evening, and, of course, neighbors and acquaintances cannot fail to notice it. She comes for just a minute and takes me for a ride with her. She
has her own horse and a new charabanc, bought this summer. Generally, she lives in grand style: she has rented an expensive separate summer house with a big garden and moved all her town furniture into it; keeps two maids, a coachman … I often ask her:

“Katya, how are you going to live when you’ve squandered all your father’s money?”

“We’ll see then,” she replies.

“That money deserves a more serious attitude, my friend. A good man earned it by honest labor.”

“You already told me about that. I know.”

First we drive through the field, then through the evergreen forest that can be seen from my window. I still find nature beautiful, though a demon whispers to me that none of these pines an
d firs, birds and white clouds in the sky will notice my absence when I die three or four months from now. Katya enjoys driving the horse and is pleased that the weather is nice and that I’m sitting beside her. She’s in fine spirits and doesn’t say anything sharp.

“You’re a very good man, Nikolai Stepanych,” she says. “You’re a rare specimen, and there’s no actor who could play you. Even a bad actor could play me, or Mikhail Fyodorych, for instance, but no one could play you. And I envy you, envy you terribly! Because what am I the picture of? What?”

She thinks for a moment and asks:

“I’m a negative phenomenon—right, Nikolai Stepanych?”

“Right,” I answer.

“Hm … What am I to do?”

What answer can I give her? It’s easy to say “work,” or “give what you have to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it’s easy to say, I don’t know how to answer.

My general-practitioner colleagues, when they teach medical treatment, advise one “to individualize each particular case.” One need only follow that advice to be convinced that the remedies recommended by textbooks as the best and wholly suitable for the standard case, prove completely unsuitable in particular cases. The same is true for moral illnesses.

But answer I must, and so I say:

“You have too much free time, my friend. You must occupy yourself with something. Why indeed don’t you become an actress again, since you have the calling?”

“I can’t.”

“Your tone and manner make it seem that you’re a victim. I don’t like that, my friend. It’s your own fault. Remember, you started by getting angry at people and their ways, but you did nothing to make them better. You didn’t fight the evil, you got tired, and you are the victim not of the struggle, but of your own weakness. Well, of course, you were young then, inexperienced, but now everything might go differently. Really, try it again! You’ll work and serve holy art …”

“Don’t dissemble, Nikolai Stepanych,” Katya interrupts me. “Let’s agree once and for all: we can talk about actors, about actresses, or writers, but we’ll leave art alone. You’re a wonderful, rare person, but you don’t understand art well enough to regard it in good conscience as holy. You have neither the feel nor the ear for art. You’ve been busy all your life, and you’ve had no time to acquire the feel for it. Generally … I don’t like these conversations about art!” she goes on nervously. “I really don’t! It has been trivialized enough, thank you!”

“Trivialized by whom?”

“Some have trivialized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by familiarity, clever people by philosophy.”

“Philosophy has nothing to do with it.”

“Yes, it has. If anybody starts philosophizing, it means he doesn’t understand.”

To keep things from turning sharp, I hasten to change the subject and then remain silent for a long time. Only when we come out of the forest and turn towards Katya’s place do I come back to the former conversation and ask:

“You still haven’t answered me: why don’t you want to be an actress?”

“Nikolai Stepanych, this is cruel, finally!” she cries out and suddenly blushes all over. “You want me to speak the truth aloud? All right, if that … if that’s your pleasure! I have no talent! No talent and … and enormous vanity! There!”

Having made this confession, she turns her face away from me and grips the reins hard to hide the trembling of her hands.

As we approach her place, we can already see Mikhail Fyodorovich in the distance, strolling about the gate, impatiently waiting for us.

“Again this Mikhail Fyodorych!” Katya says with vexation. “Rid me of him, please! I’m sick of him, he’s played out … Enough of him!”

Mikhail Fyodorovich should have gone abroad long ago, but he keeps postponing his departure each week. Certain changes have taken place in him lately: he has become somehow pinched, wine now makes him tipsy, which never happened before, and his black eyebrows have begun to turn gray When our charabanc stops at the gate, he doesn’t conceal his joy and impatience. He bustles about, helps me and Katya out of the carriage, hurriedly asks questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that meek, prayerful, pure something that I noticed only in his eyes before is now spread all over his face. He’s glad, a
nd at the same time ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of this habit of visiting Katya every evening, and he finds it necessary to motivate his coming by some obvious absurdity, such as: “I was passing by on business, thought why don’t I stop for a moment.”