Yes, yes, began Piotr Gavrilovitch; those were painful days... and I
would rather not recall them.... But I have made you a promise; I shall
have to tell you the whole story. Listen.
I
I was living at that time (the winter of 1835) in Moscow, in the house
of my aunt, the sister of my dead mother. I was eighteen; I had only
just passed from the second into the third course in the faculty 'of
Language' (that was what it was called in those days) in the Moscow
University. My aunt was a gentle, quiet woman--a widow. She lived in a
big, wooden house in Ostozhonka, one of those warm, cosy houses such as,
I fancy, one can find nowhere else but in Moscow. She saw hardly any
one, sat from morning till night in the drawing-room with two
companions, drank the choicest tea, played patience, and was continually
requesting that the room should be fumigated. Thereupon her companions
ran into the hall; a few minutes later an old servant in livery would
bring in a copper pan with a bunch of mint on a hot brick, and stepping
hurriedly upon the narrow strips of carpet, he would sprinkle the mint
with vinegar. White fumes always puffed up about his wrinkled face, and
he frowned and turned away, while the canaries in the dining-room
chirped their hardest, exasperated by the hissing of the smouldering
mint.
I was fatherless and motherless, and my aunt spoiled me. She placed the
whole of the ground floor at my complete disposal. My rooms were
furnished very elegantly, not at all like a student's rooms in fact:
there were pink curtains in the bedroom, and a muslin canopy, adorned
with blue rosettes, towered over my bed. Those rosettes were, I'll own,
rather an annoyance to me; to my thinking, such 'effeminacies' were
calculated to lower me in the eyes of my companions. As it was, they
nicknamed me 'the boarding-school miss.' I could never succeed in
forcing myself to smoke. I studied--why conceal my shortcomings?--very
lazily, especially at the beginning of the course. I went out a great
deal. My aunt had bestowed on me a wide sledge, fit for a general, with
a pair of sleek horses. At the houses of 'the gentry' my visits were
rare, but at the theatre I was quite at home, and I consumed masses of
tarts at the restaurants. For all that, I permitted myself no breach of
decorum, and behaved very discreetly, _en jeune homme de bonne
maison_. I would not for anything in the world have pained my kind
aunt; and besides I was naturally of a rather cool temperament.