A few paces from the ‘Russian tree,’ at a little table in front of
Weber’s coffee-house, there was sitting a good-looking man, about
thirty, of medium height, thin and dark, with a manly and pleasant face.
He sat bending forward with both arms leaning on his stick, with the
calm and simple air of a man to whom the idea had not occurred that any
one would notice him or pay any attention to him. His large expressive
golden-brown eyes were gazing deliberately about him, sometimes screwed
up to keep the sunshine out of them, and then watching fixedly some
eccentric figure that passed by him while a childlike smile faintly
stirred his fine moustache and lips, and his prominent short chin. He
wore a roomy coat of German cut, and a soft grey hat hid half of his
high forehead. At the first glance he made the impression of an honest,
sensible, rather self-confident young man such as there are many in the
world. He seemed to be resting from prolonged labours and to be
deriving all the more simple-minded amusement from the scene spread out
before him because his thoughts were far away, and because they moved
too, those thoughts, in a world utterly unlike that which surrounded him
at the moment. He was a Russian; his name was Grigory Mihalovitch
Litvinov.
We have to make his acquaintance, and so it will be well to relate in a
few words his past, which presents little of much interest or
complexity.
He was the son of an honest retired official of plebeian extraction, but
he was educated, not as one would naturally expect, in the town, but in
the country. His mother was of noble family, and had been educated in a
government school. She was a good-natured and very enthusiastic
creature, not devoid of character, however. Though she was twenty years
younger than her husband, she remodelled him, as far as she could, drew
him out of the petty official groove into the landowner’s way of life,
and softened and refined his harsh and stubborn character. Thanks to
her, he began to dress with neatness, and to behave with decorum; he
came to respect learned men and learning, though, of course, he never
took a single book in his hand; he gave up swearing, and tried in every
way not to demean himself. He even arrived at walking more quietly and
speaking in a subdued voice, mostly of elevated subjects, which cost him
no small effort. ‘Ah! they ought to be flogged, and that’s all about
it!’ he sometimes thought to himself, but aloud he pronounced: ‘Yes,
yes, that’s so ... of course; it is a great question.’ Litvinov’s mother
set her household too upon a European footing; she addressed the
servants by the plural ‘you’ instead of the familiar ‘thou,’ and never
allowed any one to gorge himself into a state of lethargy at her table.
As regards the property belonging to her, neither she nor her husband
was capable of looking after it at all. It had been long allowed to run
to waste, but there was plenty of land, with all sorts of useful
appurtenances, forest-lands and a lake, on which there had once stood a
factory, which had been founded by a zealous but unsystematic owner, and
had flourished in the hands of a scoundrelly merchant, and gone utterly
to ruin under the superintendence of a conscientious German manager.
Madame Litvinov was contented so long as she did not dissipate her
fortune or contract debts. Unluckily she could not boast of good health,
and she died of consumption in the very year that her son entered the
Moscow university. He did not complete his course there owing to
circumstances of which the reader will hear more later on, and went
back to his provincial home, where he idled away some time without work
and without ties, almost without acquaintances. Thanks to the
disinclination for active service of the local gentry, who were,
however, not so much penetrated by the Western theory of the evils of
‘absenteeism,’ as by the home-grown conviction that ‘one’s own shirt is
the nearest to one’s skin,’ he was drawn for military service in 1855,
and almost died of typhus in the Crimea, where he spent six months in a
mud-hut on the shore of the Putrid Sea, without ever seeing a single
ally. After that, he served, not of course without unpleasant
experiences, on the councils of the nobility, and after being a little
time in the country, acquired a passion for farming. He realised that
his mother’s property, under the indolent and feeble management of his
infirm old father, did not yield a tenth of the revenue it might yield,
and that in experienced and skilful hands it might be converted into a
perfect gold mine. But he realised, too, that experience and skill were
just what he lacked--and he went abroad to study agriculture and
technology--to learn them from the first rudiments. More than four years
he had spent in Mecklenburg, in Silesia, and in Carlsruhe, and he had
travelled in Belgium and in England. He had worked conscientiously and
accumulated information; he had not acquired it easily; but he had
persevered through his difficulties to the end, and now with confidence
in himself, in his future, and in his usefulness to his neighbours,
perhaps even to the whole countryside, he was preparing to return home,
where he was summoned with despairing prayers and entreaties in every
letter from his father, now completely bewildered by the emancipation,
the re-division of lands, and the terms of redemption--by the new régime
in short. But why was he in Baden?
Well, he was in Baden because he was from day to day expecting the
arrival there of his cousin and betrothed, Tatyana Petrovna Shestov. He
had known her almost from childhood, and had spent the spring and summer
with her at Dresden, where she was living with her aunt. He felt sincere
love and profound respect for his young kinswoman, and on the conclusion
of his dull preparatory labours, when he was preparing to enter on a new
field, to begin real, unofficial duties, he proposed to her as a woman
dearly loved, a comrade and a friend, to unite her life with his--for
happiness and for sorrow, for labour and for rest, ‘for better, for
worse’ as the English say. She had consented, and he had returned to
Carlsruhe, where his books, papers and properties had been left.... But
why was he at Baden, you ask again?
Well, he was at Baden, because Tatyana’s aunt, who had brought her up,
Kapitolina Markovna Shestov, an old unmarried lady of fifty-five, a most
good-natured, honest, eccentric soul, a free thinker, all aglow with the
fire of self-sacrifice and abnegation, an _esprit fort_ (she read
Strauss, it is true she concealed the fact from her niece) and a
democrat, sworn opponent of aristocracy and fashionable society, could
not resist the temptation of gazing for once on this aristocratic
society in such a fashionable place as Baden.... Kapitolina Markovna
wore no crinoline and had her white hair cut in a round crop, but luxury
and splendour had a secret fascination for her, and it was her favourite
pastime to rail at them and express her contempt of them. How could one
refuse to gratify the good old lady? But Litvinov was so quiet and
simple, he gazed so self-confidently about him, because his life lay so
clearly mapped out before him, because his career was defined, and
because he was proud of this career, and rejoiced in it as the work of
his own hands.