OF the girls Woloda took the strange view that, although he wished that
they should have enough to eat, should sleep well, be well dressed,
and avoid making such mistakes in French as would shame him before
strangers, he would never admit that they could think or feel like human
beings, still less that they could converse with him sensibly about
anything. Whenever they addressed to him a serious question (a thing, by
the way, which he always tried to avoid), such as asking his opinion on
a novel or inquiring about his doings at the University, he invariably
pulled a grimace, and either turned away without speaking or answered
with some nonsensical French phrase--“Comme c’est tres jolie!” or the
like. Or again, feigning to look serious and stolidly wise, he would say
something absolutely meaningless and bearing no relation whatever to the
question asked him, or else suddenly exclaim, with a look of
pretended unconsciousness, the word bulku or poyechali or kapustu,
[Respectively, “roll of butter,” “away,” and “cabbage.”] or something of
the kind; and when, afterwards, I happened to repeat these words to him
as having been told me by Lubotshka or Katenka, he would always remark:
“Hm! So you actually care about talking to them? I can see you are a
duffer still”--and one needed to see and near him to appreciate the
profound, immutable contempt which echoed in this remark. He had been
grown-up now two years, and was in love with every good-looking woman
that he met; yet, despite the fact that he came in daily contact with
Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and
was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love
with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the
fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh
in his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people
feel for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness
which, at a first encounter with anything fair and pretty, leads a man
to say to himself, “Ah! I shall meet much more of the same kind during
my life,” but at all events Woloda had never yet looked upon Katenka
with a man’s eyes.
All that summer Woloda appeared to find things very wearisome--a fact
which arose out of that contempt for us all which, as I have said,
he made no effort to conceal. His expression of face seemed to be
constantly saying, “Phew! how it bores me to have no one to speak to!”
The first thing in the morning he would go out shooting, or sit reading
a book in his room, and not dress until luncheon time. Indeed, if
Papa was not at home, he would take his book into that meal, and go on
reading it without addressing so much as a single word to any one of us,
who felt, somehow, guilty in his presence. In the evening, too, he would
stretch himself on a settee in the drawing-room, and either go to sleep,
propped on his elbow, or tell us farcical stories--sometimes stories so
improper as to make Mimi grow angry and blush, and ourselves die with
laughter. At other times he would not condescend to address a single
serious word to any member of the family except Papa or (occasionally)
myself. Involuntarily I offended against his view of girls, seeing that
I was not so afraid of seeming affectionate as he, and, moreover, had
not such a profound and confirmed contempt for young women. Yet several
times that summer, when driven by lack of amusement to try and engage
Lubotshka and Katenka in conversation, I always encountered in them such
an absence of any capacity for logical thinking, and such an ignorance
of the simplest, most ordinary matters (as, for instance, the nature of
money, the subjects studied at universities, the effect of war, and so
forth), as well as such indifference to my explanations of such matters,
that these attempts of mine only ended in confirming my unfavourable
opinion of feminine ability.
I remember one evening when Lubotshka kept repeating some unbearably
tedious passage on the piano about a hundred times in succession, while
Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing
no one in particular as he muttered, “Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a
musician! WHAT a Beethoven!” (he always pronounced the composer’s name
with especial irony). “Wrong again! Now--a second time! That’s it!”
and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and
somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject--love. I was in
the right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by loftily defining
love as the wish to acquire in another what one does not possess in
oneself. To this Katenka retorted that, on the contrary, love is not
love at all if a girl desires to marry a man for his money alone, but
that, in her opinion, riches were a vain thing, and true love only the
affection which can stand the test of separation (this I took to be a
hint concerning her love for Dubkoff). At this point Woloda, who must
have been listening all the time, raised himself on his elbow, and cried
out some rubbish or another; and I felt that he was right.
Apart from the general faculties (more or less developed in different
persons) of intellect, sensibility, and artistic feeling, there also
exists (more or less developed in different circles of society, and
especially in families) a private or individual faculty which I may
call APPREHENSION. The essence of this faculty lies in sympathetic
appreciation of proportion, and in identical understanding of things.
Two individuals who possess this faculty and belong to the same social
circle or the same family apprehend an expression of feeling precisely
to the same point, namely, the point beyond which such expression
becomes mere phrasing. Thus they apprehend precisely where commendation
ends and irony begins, where attraction ends and pretence begins, in a
manner which would be impossible for persons possessed of a different
order of apprehension. Persons possessed of identical apprehension view
objects in an identically ludicrous, beautiful, or repellent light; and
in order to facilitate such identical apprehension between members of
the same social circle or family, they usually establish a language,
turns of speech, or terms to define such shades of apprehension as exist
for them alone. In our particular family such apprehension was common
to Papa, Woloda, and myself, and was developed to the highest pitch,
Dubkoff also approximated to our coterie in apprehension, but Dimitri,
though infinitely more intellectual than Dubkoff, was grosser in this
respect. With no one, however, did I bring this faculty to such a point
as with Woloda, who had grown up with me under identical conditions.
Papa stood a long way from us, and much that was to us as clear as “two
and two make four” was to him incomprehensible. For instance, I and
Woloda managed to establish between ourselves the following terms, with
meanings to correspond. Izium [Raisins.] meant a desire to boast of
one’s money; shishka [Bump or swelling.] (on pronouncing which one had
to join one’s fingers together, and to put a particular emphasis upon
the two sh’s in the word) meant anything fresh, healthy, and comely, but
not elegant; a substantive used in the plural meant an undue partiality
for the object which it denoted; and so forth, and so forth. At the same
time, the meaning depended considerably upon the expression of the
face and the context of the conversation; so that, no matter what new
expression one of us might invent to define a shade of feeling the other
could immediately understand it by a hint alone. The girls did not share
this faculty of apprehension, and herein lay the chief cause of our
moral estrangement, and of the contempt which we felt for them.
It may be that they too had their “apprehension,” but it so little ran
with ours that, where we already perceived the “phrasing,” they still
saw only the feeling--our irony was for them truth, and so on. At that
time I had not yet learnt to understand that they were in no way
to blame for this, and that absence of such apprehension in no way
prevented them from being good and clever girls. Accordingly I looked
down upon them. Moreover, having once lit upon my precious idea of
“frankness,” and being bent upon applying it to the full in myself, I
thought the quiet, confiding nature of Lubotshka guilty of secretiveness
and dissimulation simply because she saw no necessity for digging up and
examining all her thoughts and instincts. For instance, the fact that
she always signed the sign of the cross over Papa before going to bed,
that she and Katenka invariably wept in church when attending requiem
masses for Mamma, and that Katenka sighed and rolled her eyes about when
playing the piano--all these things seemed to me sheer make-believe, and
I asked myself: “At what period did they learn to pretend like grown-up
people, and how can they bring themselves to do it?”