"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor. "The engineer is one thing and she is
another. Really, my good fellow, you mustn't offend her. Go and see her
some time. Let us go to-morrow evening. Will you?"
He persuaded me. Next evening I donned my serge suit and with some
perturbation set out to call on Miss Dolyhikov. The footman did not seem
to me so haughty and formidable, or the furniture so oppressive, as on
the morning when I had come to ask for work. Maria Victorovna was
expecting me and greeted me as an old friend and gave my hand a warm,
friendly grip. She was wearing a grey dress with wide sleeves, and had
her hair done in the style which when it became the fashion a year later
in our town, was called "dog's ears." The hair was combed back over the
ears, and it made Maria Victorovna's face look broader, and she looked
very like her father, whose face was broad and red and rather like a
coachman's. She was handsome and elegant, but not young; about thirty to
judge by her appearance, though she was not more than twenty-five.
"Dear doctor!" she said, making me sit down. "How grateful I am to him.
But for him, you would not have come. I am bored to death! My father has
gone and left me alone, and I do not know what to do with myself."
Then she began to ask where I was working, how much I got, and where I
lived.
"Do you only spend what you earn on yourself?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You are a happy man," she replied. "All the evil in life, it seems to
me, comes from boredom and idleness, and spiritual emptiness, which are
inevitable when one lives at other people's expense. Don't think I'm
showing off. I mean it sincerely. It is dull and unpleasant to be rich.
Win friends by just riches, they say, because as a rule there is and can
be no such thing as just riches."
She looked at the furniture with a serious, cold expression, as though
she was making an inventory of it, and went on:
"Ease and comfort possess a magic power. Little by little they seduce
even strong-willed people. Father and I used to live poorly and simply,
and now you see how we live. Isn't it strange?" she said with a shrug.
"We spend twenty thousand roubles a year! In the provinces!"
"Ease and comfort must not be regarded as the inevitable privilege of
capital and education," I said. "It seems to me possible to unite the
comforts of life with work, however hard and dirty it may be. Your
father is rich, but, as he says, he used to be a mechanic, and just a
lubricator."
She smiled and shook her head thoughtfully.
"Papa sometimes eats _tiurya_," she said, "but only out of caprice."
A bell rang and she got up.
"The rich and the educated ought to work like the rest," she went on,
"and if there is to be any comfort, it should be accessible to all.
There should be no privileges. However, that's enough philosophy. Tell
me something cheerful. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"
The doctor came. I began to talk about the painters, but, being unused
to it, I felt awkward and talked solemnly and ponderously like an
ethnographist. The doctor also told a few stories about working people.
He rocked to and fro and cried, and fell on his knees, and when he was
depicting a drunkard, lay flat on the floor. It was as good as a play,
and Maria Victorovna laughed until she cried. Then he played the piano
and sang in his high-pitched tenor, and Maria Victorovna stood by him
and told him what to sing and corrected him when he made a mistake.
"I hear you sing, too," said I.
"Too?" cried the doctor. "She is a wonderful singer, an artist, and you
say--too! Careful, careful!"
"I used to study seriously," she replied, "but I have given it up now."
She sat on a low stool and told us about her life in Petersburg, and
imitated famous singers, mimicking their voices and mannerisms; then she
sketched the doctor and myself in her album, not very well, but both
were good likenesses. She laughed and made jokes and funny faces, and
this suited her better than talking about unjust riches, and it seemed
to me that what she had said about "riches and comfort" came not from
herself, but was just mimicry. She was an admirable comedian. I compared
her mentally with the girls of our town, and not even the beautiful,
serious Aniuta Blagovo could stand up against her; the difference was as
vast as that between a wild and a garden rose.
We stayed to supper. The doctor and Maria Victorovna drank red wine,
champagne, and coffee with cognac; they touched glasses and drank to
friendship, to wit, to progress, to freedom, and never got drunk, but
went rather red and laughed for no reason until they cried. To avoid
being out of it I, too, drank red wine.
"People with talent and with gifted natures," said Miss Dolyhikov, "know
how to live and go their own way; but ordinary people like myself know
nothing and can do nothing by themselves; there is nothing for them but
to find some deep social current and let themselves be borne along by
it."
"Is it possible to find that which does not exist?" asked the doctor.
"It doesn't exist because we don't see it."
"Is that so? Social currents are the invention of modern literature.
They don't exist here."
A discussion began.
"We have no profound social movements; nor have we had them," said the
doctor. "Modern literature has invented a lot of things, and modern
literature invented intellectual working men in village life, but go
through all our villages and you will only find Mr. Cheeky Snout in a
jacket or black frock coat, who will make four mistakes in the word
'one.' Civilised life has not begun with us yet. We have the same
savagery, the same slavery, the same nullity as we had five hundred
years ago. Movements, currents--all that is so wretched and puerile
mixed up with such vulgar, catch-penny interests--and one cannot take it
seriously. You may think you have discovered a large social movement,
and you may follow it and devote your life in the modern fashion to such
problems as the liberation of vermin from slavery, or the abolition of
meat cutlets--and I congratulate you, madam. But we have to learn,
learn, learn, and there will be plenty of time for social movements; we
are not up to them yet, and upon my soul, we don't understand anything
at all about them."
"You don't understand, but I do," said Maria Victorovna. "Good Heavens!
What a bore you are to-night."
"It is our business to learn and learn, to try and accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, because serious social movements come where there
is knowledge, and the future happiness of mankind lies in science.
Here's to science!"
"One thing is certain. Life must somehow be arranged differently," said
Maria Victorovna, after some silence and deep thought, "and life as it
has been up to now is worthless. Don't let us talk about it."
When we left her the Cathedral clock struck two.
"Did you like her?" asked the doctor. "Isn't she a dear girl?"
We had dinner at Maria Victorovna's on Christmas Day, and then we went
to see her every day during the holidays. There was nobody besides
ourselves, and she was right when she said she had no friends in the
town but the doctor and me. We spent most of the time talking, and
sometimes the doctor would bring a book or a magazine and read aloud.
After all, he was the first cultivated man I had met. I could not tell
if he knew much, but he was always generous with his knowledge because
he wished others to know too. When he talked about medicine, he was not
like any of our local doctors, but he made a new and singular
impression, and it seemed to me that if he had wished he could have
become a genuine scientist. And perhaps he was the only person at that
time who had any real influence over me. Meeting him and reading the
books he gave me, I began gradually to feel a need for knowledge to
inspire the tedium of my work. It seemed strange to me that I had not
known before such things as that the whole world consisted of sixty
elements. I did not know what oil or paint was, and I could do without
knowing. My acquaintance with the doctor raised me morally too. I used
to argue with him, and though I usually stuck to my opinion, yet,
through him, I came gradually to perceive that everything was not clear
to me, and I tried to cultivate convictions as definite as possible so
that the promptings of my conscience should be precise and have nothing
vague about them. Nevertheless, educated and fine as he was, far and
away the best man in the town, he was by no means perfect. There was
something rather rude and priggish in his ways and in his trick of
dragging talk down to discussion, and when he took off his coat and sat
in his shirt and gave the footman a tip, it always seemed to me that
culture was just a part of him, with the rest untamed Tartar.
After the holidays he left once more for Petersburg. He went in the
morning and after dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off
her furs, she sat silent, very pale, staring in front of her. She began
to shiver and seemed to be fighting against some illness.
"You must have caught a cold," I said.
Her eyes filled with tears. She rose and went to Karpovna without a
word to me, as though I had offended her. And a little later I heard her
speaking in a tone of bitter reproach.
"Nurse, what have I been living for, up to now? What for? Tell me;
haven't I wasted my youth? During the last years I have had nothing but
making up accounts, pouring out tea, counting the copecks, entertaining
guests, without a thought that there was anything better in the world!
Nurse, try to understand me, I too have human desires and I want to live
and they have made a housekeeper of me. It is awful, awful!"
She flung her keys against the door and they fell with a clatter in my
room. They were the keys of the side-board, the larder, the cellar, and
the tea-chest--the keys my mother used to carry.
"Oh! Oh! Saints above!" cried my old nurse in terror. "The blessed
saints!"
When she left, my sister came into my room for her keys and said:
"Forgive me. Something strange has been going on in me lately."