"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor, "the engineer's one thing and she's
another. Really, my dear fellow, you mustn't be nasty to her; go
and see her sometimes. For instance, let's go and see her tomorrow
evening. What do you say?"
He persuaded me. The next evening I put on my new serge trousers,
and in some agitation I set off to Miss Dolzhikov's. The footman
did not seem so haughty and terrible, nor the furniture so gorgeous,
as on that morning when I had come to ask a favour. Mariya Viktorovna
was expecting me, and she received me like an old acquaintance,
shaking hands with me in a friendly way. She was wearing a grey
cloth dress with full sleeves, and had her hair done in the style
which we used to call "dogs' ears," when it came into fashion in
the town a year before. The hair was combed down over the ears, and
this made Mariya Viktorovna's face look broader, and she seemed to
me this time very much like her father, whose face was broad and
red, with something in its expression like a sledge-driver. She was
handsome and elegant, but not youthful looking; she looked thirty,
though in reality she was not more than twenty-five.
"Dear Doctor, how grateful I am to you," she said, making me sit
down. "If it hadn't been for him you wouldn't have come to see me.
I am bored to death! My father has gone away and left me alone, and
I don't know what to do with myself in this town."
Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned,
where I lived.
"Do you spend on yourself nothing but what you earn?" she asked.
"No."
"Happy man!" she sighed. "All the evil in life, it seems to me,
comes from idleness, boredom, and spiritual emptiness, and all this
is inevitable when one is accustomed to living at other people's
expense. Don't think I am showing off, I tell you truthfully: it
is not interesting or pleasant to be rich. 'Make to yourselves
friends of the mammon of unrighteousness' is said, because there
is not and cannot be a mammon that's righteous."
She looked round at the furniture with a grave, cold expression,
as though she wanted to count it over, and went on:
"Comfort and luxury have a magical power; little by little they
draw into their clutches even strong-willed people. At one time
father and I lived simply, not in a rich style, but now you see
how! It is something monstrous," she said, shrugging her shoulders;
"we spend up to twenty thousand a year! In the provinces!"
"One comes to look at comfort and luxury as the invariable privilege
of capital and education," I said, "and it seems to me that the
comforts of life may be combined with any sort of labour, even the
hardest and dirtiest. Your father is rich, and yet he says himself
that it has been his lot to be a mechanic and an oiler."
She smiled and shook her head doubtfully: "My father sometimes eats
bread dipped in kvass," she said. "It's a fancy, a whim!"
At that moment there was a ring and she got up.
"The rich and well-educated ought to work like everyone else," she
said, "and if there is comfort it ought to be equal for all. There
ought not to be any privileges. But that's enough philosophizing.
Tell me something amusing. Tell me about the painters. What are
they like? Funny?"
The doctor came in; I began telling them about the painters, but,
being unaccustomed to talking, I was constrained, and described
them like an ethnologist, gravely and tediously. The doctor, too,
told us some anecdotes of working men: he staggered about, shed
tears, dropped on his knees, and, even, mimicking a drunkard, lay
on the floor; it was as good as a play, and Mariya Viktorovna laughed
till she cried as she looked at him. Then he played on the piano
and sang in his thin, pleasant tenor, while Mariya Viktorovna stood
by and picked out what he was to sing, and corrected him when he
made a mistake.
"I've heard that you sing, too?" I enquired.
"Sing, too!" cried the doctor in horror. "She sings exquisitely, a
perfect artist, and you talk of her 'singing too'! What an idea!"
"I did study in earnest at one time," she said, answering my question,
"but now I have given it up."
Sitting on a low stool she told us of her life in Petersburg, and
mimicked some celebrated singers, imitating their voice and manner
of singing. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album, then of
me; she did not draw well, but both the portraits were like us. She
laughed, and was full of mischief and charming grimaces, and this
suited her better than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness,
and it seemed to me that she had been talking just before about
wealth and luxury, not in earnest, but in imitation of someone. She
was a superb comic actress. I mentally compared her with our young
ladies, and even the handsome, dignified Anyuta Blagovo could not
stand comparison with her; the difference was immense, like the
difference between a beautiful, cultivated rose and a wild briar.
We had supper together, the three of us. The doctor and Mariya
Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with brandy in it;
they clinked glasses and drank to friendship, to enlightenment, to
progress, to liberty, and they did not get drunk but only flushed,
and were continually, for no reason, laughing till they cried. So
as not to be tiresome I drank claret too.
"Talented, richly endowed natures," said Miss Dolzhikov, "know how
to live, and go their own way; mediocre people, like myself for
instance, know nothing and can do nothing of themselves; there is
nothing left for them but to discern some deep social movement, and
to float where they are carried by it."
"How can one discern what doesn't exist?" asked the doctor.
"We think so because we don't see it."
"Is that so? The social movements are the invention of the new
literature. There are none among us."
An argument began.
"There are no deep social movements among us and never have been,"
the doctor declared loudly. "There is no end to what the new
literature has invented! It has invented intellectual workers in
the country, and you may search through all our villages and find
at the most some lout in a reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who
will make four mistakes in spelling a word of three letters. Cultured
life has not yet begun among us. There's the same savagery, the
same uniform boorishness, the same triviality, as five hundred years
ago. Movements, currents there have been, but it has all been petty,
paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary interests--and one cannot
see anything important in them. If you think you have discerned a
deep social movement, and in following it you devote yourself to
tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation of insects from
slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate you, Madam.
We must study, and study, and study and we must wait a bit with our
deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet; and
to tell the truth, we don't know anything about them."
"You don't know anything about them, but I do," said Mariya Viktorovna.
"Goodness, how tiresome you are to-day!"
"Our duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where
there is knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies
only in knowledge. I drink to science!"
"There is no doubt about one thing: one must organize one's life
somehow differently," said Mariya Viktorovna, after a moment's
silence and thought. "Life, such as it has been hitherto, is not
worth having. Don't let us talk about it."
As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.
"Did you like her?" asked the doctor; "she's nice, isn't she?"
On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through
the holidays we went to see her almost every day. There was never
anyone there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that
she had no friends in the town but the doctor and me. We spent our
time for the most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought
some book or magazine and read aloud to us. In reality he was the
first well-educated man I had met in my life: I cannot judge whether
he knew a great deal, but he always displayed his knowledge as
though he wanted other people to share it. When he talked about
anything relating to medicine he was not like any one of the doctors
in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar impression upon me, and I
fancied that if he liked he might have become a real man of science.
And he was perhaps the only person who had a real influence upon
me at that time. Seeing him, and reading the books he gave me, I
began little by little to feel a thirst for the knowledge which
would have given significance to my cheerless labour. It seemed
strange to me, for instance, that I had not known till then that
the whole world was made up of sixty elements, I had not known what
oil was, what paints were, and that I could have got on without
knowing these things. My acquaintance with the doctor elevated me
morally too. I was continually arguing with him and, though I usually
remained of my own opinion, yet, thanks to him, I began to perceive
that everything was not clear to me, and I began trying to work out
as far as I could definite convictions in myself, that the dictates
of conscience might be definite, and that there might be nothing
vague in my mind. Yet, though he was the most cultivated and best
man in the town, he was nevertheless far from perfection. In his
manners, in his habit of turning every conversation into an argument,
in his pleasant tenor, even in his friendliness, there was something
coarse, like a divinity student, and when he took off his coat and
sat in his silk shirt, or flung a tip to a waiter in the restaurant,
I always fancied that culture might be all very well, but the Tatar
was fermenting in him still.
At Epiphany he went back to Petersburg. He went off in the morning,
and after dinner my sister came in. Without taking off her fur coat
and her cap she sat down in silence, very pale, and kept her eyes
fixed on the same spot. She was chilled by the frost and one could
see that she was upset by it.
"You must have caught cold," I said.
Her eyes filled with tears; she got up and went out to Karpovna
without saying a word to me, as though I had hurt her feelings. And
a little later I heard her saying, in a tone of bitter reproach:
"Nurse, what have I been living for till now? What? Tell me, haven't
I wasted my youth? All the best years of my life to know nothing
but keeping accounts, pouring out tea, counting the halfpence,
entertaining visitors, and thinking there was nothing better in the
world! Nurse, do understand, I have the cravings of a human being,
and I want to live, and they have turned me into something like a
housekeeper. It's horrible, horrible!"
She flung her keys towards the door, and they fell with a jingle
into my room. They were the keys of the sideboard, of the kitchen
cupboard, of the cellar, and of the tea-caddy, the keys which my
mother used to carry.
"Oh, merciful heavens!" cried the old woman in horror. "Holy Saints
above!"
Before going home my sister came into my room to pick up the keys,
and said:
"You must forgive me. Something queer has happened to me lately."