M---- VILLAGE, _6th June 1850_.
I have been here for three days, my dear fellow, and, as I promised, I
take up my pen to write to you. It has been drizzling with fine rain
ever since the morning; I can’t go out; and I want a little chat with
you, too. Here I am again in my old home, where--it’s a dreadful thing
to say--I have not been for nine long years. Really, as you may fancy,
I have become quite a different man. Yes, utterly different, indeed; do
you remember, in the drawing-room, the little tarnished looking-glass
of my great-grandmother’s, with the queer little curly scrolls in
the corners--you always used to be speculating on what it had seen a
hundred years ago--directly I arrived, I went up to it, and I could
not help feeling disconcerted. I suddenly saw how old and changed I
had become in these last years. But I am not alone in that respect. My
little house, which was old and tottering long ago, will hardly hold
together now, it is all on the slant, and seems sunk into the ground.
My dear Vassilievna, the housekeeper (you can’t have forgotten her;
she used to regale you with such capital jam), is quite shrivelled up
and bent; when she saw me, she could not call out, and did not start
crying, but only moaned and choked, sank helplessly into a chair, and
waved her hand. Old Terenty has some spirit left in him still; he holds
himself up as much as ever, and turns out his feet as he walks. He
still wears the same yellow nankeen breeches, and the same creaking
goatskin slippers, with high heels and ribbons, which touched you so
much sometimes, … but, mercy on us!--how the breeches flap about his
thin legs nowadays! how white his hair has grown! and his face has
shrunk up into a sort of little fist. When he speaks to me, when he
begins directing the servants, and giving orders in the next room, it
makes me laugh and feel sorry for him. All his teeth are gone, and he
mumbles with a whistling, hissing sound. On the other hand, the garden
has got on wonderfully. The modest little plants of lilac, acacia, and
honeysuckle (do you remember, we planted them together?) have grown
into splendid, thick bushes. The birches, the maples--all that has
spread out and grown tall; the avenues of lime-trees are particularly
fine. I love those avenues, I love the tender grey, green colour, and
the delicate fragrance of the air under their arching boughs; I love
the changing net-work of rings of light on the dark earth--there is no
sand here, you know. My favourite oak sapling has grown into a young
oak tree. Yesterday I spent more than an hour in the middle of the day
on a garden bench in its shade. I felt very happy. All about me the
grass was deliciously luxuriant; a rich, soft, golden light lay upon
everything; it made its way even into the shade … and the birds one
could hear! You’ve not forgotten, I expect, that birds are a passion
of mine? The turtle-doves cooed unceasingly; from time to time there
came the whistle of the oriole; the chaffinch uttered its sweet little
refrain; the blackbirds quarrelled and twittered; the cuckoo called far
away; suddenly, like a mad thing, the woodpecker uttered its shrill
cry. I listened and listened to this subdued, mingled sound, and did
not want to move, while my heart was full of something between languor
and tenderness.
And it’s not only the garden that has grown up: I am continually coming
across sturdy, thick-set lads, whom I cannot recognise as the little
boys I used to know in old days. Your favourite, Timosha, has turned
into a Timofay, such as you could never imagine. You had fears in those
days for his health, and predicted consumption; but now you should just
see his huge, red hands, as they stick out from the narrow sleeves of
his nankeen coat, and the stout rounded muscles that stand out all
over him! He has a neck like a bull’s, and a head all over tight, fair
curls--a regular Farnese Hercules. His face, though, has changed less
than the others’; it is not even much larger in circumference, and
the good-humoured, ‘gaping’--as you used to say--smile has remained
the same. I have taken him to be my valet; I got rid of my Petersburg
fellow at Moscow; he was really too fond of putting me to shame, and
making me feel the superiority of his Petersburg manners. Of my dogs I
have not found one; they have all passed away. Nefka lived longer than
any of them--and she did not live till my return, as Argos lived till
the return of Ulysses; she was not fated to look once more with her
lustreless eyes on her master and companion in the chase. But Shavka
is all right, and barks as hoarsely as ever, and has one ear torn just
the same, and burrs sticking to his tail,--all just as it should be. I
have taken up my abode in what was your room. It is true the sun beats
down upon it, and there are a lot of flies in it; but there is less
of the smell of the old house in it than in the other rooms. It’s a
queer thing; that musty, rather sour, faint smell has a powerful effect
on my imagination; I don’t mean that it’s disagreeable to me, quite
the contrary, but it produces melancholy, and, at last, depression. I
am very fond, just as you are, of podgy old chests with brass plates,
white armchairs with oval backs, and crooked legs, fly-blown glass
lustres, with a big egg of lilac tinsel in the centre--of all sorts
of ancestral furniture, in fact. But I can’t stand seeing it all
continually; a sort of agitated dejection (it is just that) takes
possession of me. In the room where I have established myself, the
furniture is of the most ordinary, home-made description. I have left,
though, in the corner, a long narrow set of shelves, on which there is
an old-fashioned set of blown green and blue glasses, just discernible
through the dust. And I have had hung on the wall that portrait of a
woman--you remember, in the black frame?--that you used to call the
portrait of Manon Lescaut. It has got rather darker in these nine
years; but the eyes have the same pensive, sly, and tender look, the
lips have the same capricious, melancholy smile, and the half-plucked
rose falls as softly as ever from her slender fingers. I am greatly
amused by the blinds in my room. They were once green, but have been
turned yellow by the sun; on them are depicted, in dark colours,
scenes from d’Arlencourt’s _Hermit_. On one curtain the hermit, with
an immense beard, goggle-eyes, and sandals on his feet, is carrying
off a young lady with dishevelled locks to the mountains. On another
one, there is a terrific combat going on between four knights wearing
birettas, and with puffs on their shoulders; one, much foreshortened,
lies slain--in fact, there are pictures of all sorts of horrors, while
all about there is such unbroken peace, and the blinds themselves
throw such soft light on the ceiling.… A sort of inward calm has come
upon me since I have been settled here; one wants to do nothing, one
wants to see no one, one looks forward to nothing, one is too lazy for
thought, but not too lazy for musing; two different things, as you know
well. Memories of childhood, at first, came flooding upon me--wherever
I went, whatever I looked at, they surged up on all sides, distinct,
to the smallest detail, and, as it were, immovable, in their clearly
defined outlines.… Then these memories were succeeded by others, then …
then I gradually turned away from the past, and all that was left was
a sort of drowsy heaviness in my heart. Fancy! as I was sitting on the
dike, under a willow, I suddenly and unexpectedly burst out crying,
and should have gone on crying a long while, in spite of my advanced
years, if I had not been put to shame by a passing peasant woman, who
stared at me with curiosity, then, without turning her face towards me,
gave a low bow from the waist, and passed on. I should be very glad
to remain in the same mood (I shan’t do any more crying, of course)
till I go away from here; that is, till September, and should be very
sorry if any of my neighbours should take it into his head to call
on me. However there is no danger, I fancy, of that; I have no near
neighbours here. You will understand me, I’m sure; you know yourself,
by experience, how often solitude is beneficial … I need it now after
wanderings of all sorts.
But I shan’t be dull. I have brought a few books with me, and I have a
pretty fair library here. Yesterday, I opened all the bookcases, and
was a long while rummaging about among the musty books. I found many
curious things I had not noticed before: _Candide_, in a manuscript
translation of somewhere about 1770; newspapers and magazines of
the same period; _the Triumphant Chameleon_ (that is, Mirabeau),
_le Paysan Perverti_, etc. I came across children’s books, my own,
and my father’s, and my grandmother’s, and even, fancy, my great
grandmother’s; in one dilapidated French grammar in a particoloured
binding, was written in fat letters: ‘Ce livre appartient à Mlle
Eudoxie de Lavrine,’ and it was dated 1741. I saw books I had brought
at different times from abroad, among others, Goethe’s _Faust_. You’re
not aware, perhaps, that there was a time when I knew _Faust_ by heart
(the first part, of course) word for word; I was never tired of
reading it.… But other days, other dreams, and for the last nine years,
it has so happened, that I have scarcely had a Goethe in my hand. It
was with an indescribable emotion that I saw the little book I knew so
well, again (a poor edition of 1828). I brought it away with me, lay
down on the bed, and began to read. How all that splendid first scene
affected me! The entrance of the Spirit of the Earth, the words, you
remember--‘on the tide of life, in the whirl of creation,’ stirred a
long unfamiliar tremor and shiver of ecstasy. I recalled everything:
Berlin, and student days, and Fräulein Clara Stick, and Zeidelmann
in the _rôle_ of Mephistopheles, and the music of Radzivil, and all
and everything.… It was a long while before I could get to sleep: my
youth rose up and stood before me like a phantom; it ran like fire,
like poison through my veins, my heart leaped and would not be still,
something plucked at its chords, and yearnings began surging up.…
You see what fantasies your friend gives himself up to, at almost
forty, when he sits in solitude in his solitary little house! What
if any one could have peeped at me! Well, what? I shouldn’t have
been a bit ashamed of myself. To be ashamed is a sign of youth, too;
and I have begun (do you know how?) to notice that I’m getting old.
I’ll tell you how. I try in these days to make as much as I can of
my happy sensations, and to make little of my sad ones, and in the
days of my youth I did just the opposite. At times, one used to carry
about one’s melancholy as if it were a treasure, and be ashamed of a
cheerful mood.… But for all that, it strikes me, that in spite of all
my experience of life, there is something in the world, friend Horatio,
which I have not experienced, and that ‘something’ almost the most
important.
Oh, what have I worked myself up to! Farewell for the present! What are
you about in Petersburg? By the way; Savely, my country cook, wishes
to send his duty to you. He too is older, but not very much so, he is
grown rather corpulent, stouter all over. He is as good as ever at
chicken-soup, with stewed onions, cheesecakes with goffered edges, and
peagoose--peagoose is the famous dish of the steppes, which makes your
tongue white and rough for twenty-four hours after. On the other hand,
he roasts the meat as he always did, so that you can hammer on the
plate with it--hard as a board. But I must really say, good-bye!
Yours, P. B.