“I’ll give you half an hour. Fire away!”
Later on she used to bring in pictures of the actors and actresses she
worshipped--whole dozens of them. Then several times she tried to take
part in amateur theatricals, and finally when she left College she
declared to me she was born to be an actress.
I never shared Katy’s enthusiasms for the theatre. My opinion is that
if a play is good then there’s no need to trouble the actors for it to
make the proper impression; you can be satisfied merely by reading it.
If the play is bad, no acting will make it good.
When I was young I often went to the theatre, and nowadays my family
takes a box twice a year and carries me off for an airing there. Of
course this is not enough to give me the right to pass verdicts on the
theatre; but I will say a few words about it. In my opinion the theatre
hasn’t improved in the last thirty or forty years. I can’t find any
more than I did then, a glass of clean water, either in the corridors
or the foyer. Just as they did then, the attendants fine me sixpence
for my coat, though there’s nothing illegal in wearing a warm coat in
winter. Just as it did then, the orchestra plays quite unnecessarily
in the intervals, and adds a new, gratuitous impression to the one
received from the play. Just as they did then, men go to the bar in the
intervals and drink spirits. If there is no perceptible improvement in
little things, it will be useless to look for it in the bigger things.
When an actor, hide-bound in theatrical traditions and prejudices,
tries to read simple straightforward monologue: “To be or not to be,”
not at all simply, but with an incomprehensible and inevitable hiss and
convulsions over his whole body, or when he tries to convince me that
Chazky, who is always talking to fools and is in love with a fool, is
a very clever man and that “The Sorrows of Knowledge” is not a boring
play,--then I get from the stage a breath of the same old routine
that exasperated me forty years ago when I was regaled with classical
lamentation and beating on the breast. Every time I come out of the
theatre a more thorough conservative than I went in.
It’s quite possible to convince the sentimental, self-confident crowd
that the theatre in its present state is an education. But not a man
who knows what true education is would swallow this. I don’t know what
it may be in fifty or a hundred years, but under present conditions the
theatre can only be a recreation. But the recreation is too expensive
for continual use, and robs the country of thousands of young, healthy,
gifted men and women, who if they had not devoted themselves to
the theatre would be excellent doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses,
or officers. It robs the public of its evenings, the best time for
intellectual work and friendly conversation. I pass over the waste of
money and the moral injuries to the spectator when he sees murder,
adultery, or slander wrongly treated on the stage.
But Katy’s opinion was quite the opposite. She assured me that even in
its present state the theatre is above lecture-rooms and books, above
everything else in the world. The theatre is a power that unites in
itself all the arts, and the actors are men with a mission. No separate
art or science can act on the human soul so strongly and truly as the
stage; and therefore it is reasonable that a medium actor should enjoy
much greater popularity than the finest scholar or painter. No public
activity can give such delight and satisfaction as the theatrical.
So one fine day Katy joined a theatrical company and went away, I
believe, to Ufa, taking with her a lot of money, a bagful of rainbow
hopes, and some very high-class views on the business.
Her first letters on the journey were wonderful. When I read them I was
simply amazed that little sheets of paper could contain so much youth,
such transparent purity, such divine innocence, and at the same time
so many subtle, sensible judgments, that would do honour to a sound
masculine intelligence. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her
friends, her successes and failures--she did not write about them, she
sang. Every line breathed the confidence which I used to see in her
face; and with all this a mass of grammatical mistakes and hardly a
single stop.
Scarce six months passed before I received a highly poetical
enthusiastic letter, beginning, “I have fallen in love.” She enclosed a
photograph of a young man with a clean-shaven face, in a broad-brimmed
hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulders. The next letters were just
as splendid, but stops already began to appear and the grammatical
mistakes to vanish. They had a strong masculine scent. Katy began
to write about what a good thing it would be to build a big theatre
somewhere in the Volga, but on a cooperative basis, and to attract
the rich business-men and shipowners to the undertaking. There would
be plenty of money, huge receipts, and the actors would work in
partnership.... Perhaps all this is really a good thing, but I can’t
help thinking such schemes could only come from a man’s head.
Anyhow for eighteen months or a couple of years everything seemed
to be all right. Katy was in love, had her heart in her business
and was happy. But later on I began to notice clear symptoms of a
decline in her letters. It began with Katy complaining about her
friends. This is the first and most ominous sign. If a young scholar
or littérateur begins his career by complaining bitterly about other
scholars or littérateurs, it means that he is tired already and not
fit for his business. Katy wrote to me that her friends would not
come to rehearsals and never knew their parts; that they showed an
utter contempt for the public in the absurd plays they staged and
the manner they behaved. To swell the box-office receipts--the only
topic of conversation--serious actresses degrade themselves by singing
sentimentalities, and tragic actors sing music-hall songs, laughing at
husbands who are deceived and unfaithful wives who are pregnant. In
short, it was amazing that the profession, in the provinces, was not
absolutely dead. The marvel was that it could exist at all with such
thin, rotten blood in its veins.
In reply I sent Katy a long and, I confess, a very tedious letter.
Among other things I wrote: “I used to talk fairly often to actors in
the past, men of the noblest character, who honoured me with their
friendship. From my conversations with them I understood that their
activities were guided rather by the whim and fashion of society than
by the free working of their own minds. The best of them in their
lifetime had to play in tragedy, in musical comedy, in French farce,
and in pantomime; yet all through they considered that they were
treading the right path and being useful. You see that this means
that you must look for the cause of the evil, not in the actors, but
deeper down, in the art itself and the attitude of society towards
it.” This letter of mine only made Katy cross. “You and I are playing
in different operas. I didn’t write to you about men of the noblest
character, but about a lot of sharks who haven’t a spark of nobility in
them. They are a horde of savages who came on the stage only because
they wouldn’t be allowed anywhere else. The only ground they have for
calling themselves artists is their impudence. Not a single talent
among them, but any number of incapables, drunkards, intriguers, and
slanderers. I can’t tell you how bitterly I feel it that the art I love
so much is fallen into the hands of people I despise. It hurts me that
the best men should be content to look at evil from a distance and
not want to come nearer. Instead of taking an active part, they write
ponderous platitudes and useless sermons....” and more in the same
strain.
A little while after I received the following: “I have been inhumanly
deceived. I can’t go on living any more. Do as you think fit with my
money. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Forgive me.”
So it appeared that _he_ too belonged to the horde of savages. Later
on, I gathered from various hints, that there was an attempt at
suicide. Apparently, Katy tried to poison herself. I think she must
have been seriously ill afterwards, for I got the following letter from
Yalta, where most probably the doctors had sent her. Her last letter
to me contained a request that I should send her at Yalta a thousand
roubles, and it ended with the words: “Forgive me for writing such a
sad letter. I buried my baby yesterday.” After she had spent about a
year in the Crimea she returned home.
She had been travelling for about four years, and during these four
years I confess that I occupied a strange and unenviable position in
regard to her. When she announced to me that she was going on to the
stage and afterwards wrote to me about her love; when the desire to
spend took hold of her, as it did periodically, and I had to send her
every now and then one or two thousand roubles at her request; when
she wrote that she intended to die, and afterwards that her baby was
dead,--I was at a loss every time. All my sympathy with her fate
consisted in thinking hard and writing long tedious letters which might
as well never have been written. But then I was _in loco parentis_ and
I loved her as a daughter.
Katy lives half a mile away from me now. She took a five-roomed
house and furnished it comfortably, with the taste that was born in
her. If anyone were to undertake to depict her surroundings, then the
dominating mood of the picture would be indolence. Soft cushions, soft
chairs for her indolent body; carpets for her indolent feet; faded,
dim, dull colours for her indolent eyes; for her indolent soul, a
heap of cheap fans and tiny pictures on the walls, pictures in which
novelty of execution was more noticeable than content; plenty of
little tables and stands, set out with perfectly useless and worthless
things, shapeless scraps instead of curtains.... All this, combined
with a horror of bright colours, of symmetry, and space, betokened a
perversion of the natural taste as well as indolence of the soul. For
whole days Katy lies on the sofa and reads books, mostly novels and
stories. She goes outside her house but once in the day, to come and
see me.
I work. Katy sits on the sofa at my side. She is silent, and wraps
herself up in her shawl as though she were cold. Either because she
is sympathetic to me, or I because I had got used to her continual
visits while she was still a little girl, her presence does not prevent
me from concentrating on my work. At long intervals I ask her some
question or other, mechanically, and she answers very curtly; or, for
a moment’s rest, I turn towards her and watch how she is absorbed
in looking through some medical review or newspaper. And then I see
that the old expression of confidence in her face is there no more.
Her expression now is cold, indifferent, distracted, like that of a
passenger who has to wait a long while for his train. She dresses as
she used--well and simply, but carelessly. Evidently her clothes and
her hair suffer not a little from the sofas and hammocks on which she
lies for days together. And she is not curious any more. She doesn’t
ask me questions any more, as if she had experienced everything in life
and did not expect to hear anything new.
About four o’clock there is a sound of movement in the hall and the
drawing-room. It’s Liza come back from the Conservatoire, bringing her
friends with her. You can hear them playing the piano, trying their
voices and giggling. Yegor is laying the table in the dining-room and
making a noise with the plates.
“Good-bye,” says Katy. “I shan’t go in to see your people. They must
excuse me. I haven’t time. Come and see me.”
When I escort her into the hall, she looks me over sternly from head to
foot, and says in vexation:
“You get thinner and thinner. Why don’t you take a cure? I’ll go to
Sergius Fiodorovich and ask him to come. You must let him see you.”
“It’s not necessary, Katy.”
“I can’t understand why your family does nothing. They’re a nice lot.”
She puts on her jacket with her rush. Inevitably, two or three
hair-pins fall out of her careless hair on to the floor. It’s too much
bother to tidy her hair now; besides she is in a hurry. She pushes the
straggling strands of hair untidily under her hat and goes away.
As soon as I come into the dining-room, my wife asks:
“Was that Katy with you just now? Why didn’t she come to see us. It
really is extraordinary....”
“Mamma!” says Liza reproachfully, “If she doesn’t want to come, that’s
her affair. There’s no need for us to go on our knees.”
“Very well; but it’s insulting. To sit in the study for three hours,
without thinking of us. But she can do as she likes.”
Varya and Liza both hate Katy. This hatred is unintelligible to me;
probably you have to be a woman to understand it. I’ll bet my life on
it that you’ll hardly find a single one among the hundred and fifty
young men I see almost every day in my audience, or the hundred old
ones I happen to meet every week, who would be able to understand why
women hate and abhor Katy’s past, her being pregnant and unmarried and
her illegitimate child. Yet at the same time I cannot bring to mind
a single woman or girl of my acquaintance who would not cherish such
feelings, either consciously or instinctively. And it’s not because
women are purer and more virtuous than men. If virtue and purity are
not free from evil feeling, there’s precious little difference between
them and vice. I explain it simply by the backward state of women’s
development. The sorrowful sense of compassion and the torment of
conscience, which the modern man experiences when he sees distress have
much more to tell me about culture and moral development than have
hatred and repulsion. The modern woman is as lachrymose and as coarse
in heart as she was in the middle ages. And in my opinion those who
advise her to be educated like a man have wisdom on their side.
But still my wife does not like Katy, because she was an actress,
and for her ingratitude, her pride, her extravagances, and all the
innumerable vices one woman can always discover in another.
Besides myself and my family we have two or three of my daughter’s
girl friends to dinner and Alexander Adolphovich Gnekker, Liza’s
admirer and suitor. He is a fair young man, not more than thirty years
old, of middle height, very fat, broad shouldered, with reddish hair
round his ears and a little stained moustache, which give his smooth
chubby face the look of a doll’s. He wears a very short jacket, a
fancy waistcoat, large-striped trousers, very full on the hip and very
narrow in the leg, and brown boots without heels. His eyes stick out
like a lobster’s, his tie is like a lobster’s tail, and I can’t help
thinking even that the smell of lobster soup clings about the whole
of this young man. He visits us every day; but no one in the family
knows where he comes from, where he was educated, or how he lives. He
cannot play or sing, but he has a certain connection with music as well
as singing, for he is agent for somebody’s pianos, and is often at the
Academy. He knows all the celebrities, and he manages concerts. He
gives his opinion on music with great authority and I have noticed that
everybody hastens to agree with him.
Rich men always have parasites about them. So do the sciences and the
arts. It seems that there is no science or art in existence, which
is free from such “foreign bodies” as this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a
musician and perhaps I am mistaken about Gnekker, besides I don’t know
him very well. But I can’t help suspecting the authority and dignity
with which he stands beside the piano and listens when anyone is
singing or playing.
You may be a gentleman and a privy councillor a hundred times over; but
if you have a daughter you can’t be guaranteed against the pettinesses
that are so often brought into your house and into your own humour, by
courtings, engagements, and weddings. For instance, I cannot reconcile
myself to my wife’s solemn expression every time Gnekker comes to our
house, nor to those bottles of Château Lafitte, port, and sherry which
are put on the table only for him, to convince him beyond doubt of
the generous luxury in which we live. Nor can I stomach the staccato
laughter which Liza learned at the Academy, and her way of screwing up
her eyes, when men are about the house. Above all, I can’t understand
why it is that such a creature should come to me every day and have
dinner with me--a creature perfectly foreign to my habits, my science,
and the whole tenour of my life, a creature absolutely unlike the men I
love. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that that is “the
bridegroom,” but still I can’t understand why he’s there. It disturbs
my mind just as much as if a Zulu were put next to me at table.
Besides, it seems strange to me that my daughter whom I used to think
of as a baby should be in love with that necktie, those eyes, those
chubby cheeks.
Formerly, I either enjoyed my dinner or was indifferent about it.
Now it does nothing but bore and exasperate me. Since I was made an
Excellency and Dean of the Faculty, for some reason or other my family
found it necessary to make a thorough change in our menu and the dinner
arrangements. Instead of the simple food I was used to as a student and
a doctor, I am now fed on potage-puree, with some _sossoulki_ swimming
about in it, and kidneys in Madeira. The title of General and my renown
have robbed me for ever of _schi_ and savoury pies, and roast goose
with apple sauce, and bream with _kasha._ They robbed me as well of my
maid servant Agasha, a funny, talkative old woman, instead of whom I
am now waited on by Yegor, a stupid, conceited fellow who always has
a white glove in his right hand. The intervals between the courses are
short, but they seem terribly long. There is nothing to fill them. We
don’t have any more of the old good-humour, the familiar conversations,
the jokes and the laughter; no more mutual endearments, or the gaiety
that used to animate my children, my wife, and myself when we met at
the dinner table. For a busy man like me dinner was a time to rest and
meet my friends, and a feast for my wife and children, not a very long
feast, to be sure, but a gay and happy one, for they knew that for half
an hour I did not belong to science and my students, but solely to
them and to no one else. No more chance of getting tipsy on a single
glass of wine, no more Agasha, no more bream with _kasha,_ no more the
old uproar to welcome our little _contretemps_ at dinner, when the cat
fought the dog under the table, or Katy’s head-band fell down her cheek
into her soup.
Our dinner nowadays is as nasty to describe as to eat. On my wife’s
face there is pompousness, an assumed gravity, and the usual anxiety.
She eyes our plates nervously: “I see you don’t like the meat?...
Honestly, don’t you like it?” And I must answer, “Don’t worry, my dear.
The meat is very good.” She: “You’re always taking my part, Nicolai
Stiepanich. You never tell the truth. Why has Alexander Adolphovich
eaten so little?” and the same sort of conversation for the whole of
dinner. Liza laughs staccato and screws up her eyes. I look at both of
them, and at this moment at dinner here I can see quite clearly that
their inner lives have slipped out of my observation long ago. I feel
as though once upon a time I lived at home with a real family, but now
I am dining as a guest with an unreal wife and looking at an unreal
Liza. There has been an utter change in both of them, while I have lost
sight of the long process that led up to the change. No wonder I don’t
understand anything. What was the reason of the change? I don’t know.
Perhaps the only trouble is that God did not give my wife and daughter
the strength He gave me. From my childhood I have been accustomed to
resist outside influences and have been hardened enough. Such earthly
catastrophes as fame, being made General, the change from comfort to
living above my means, acquaintance with high society, have scarcely
touched me. I have survived safe and sound. But it all fell down like
an avalanche on my weak, unhardened wife and Liza, and crushed them.
Gnekker and the girls talk of fugues and counter-fugues; singers
and pianists, Bach and Brahms, and my wife, frightened of being
suspected of musical ignorance, smiles sympathetically and murmurs:
“Wonderful.... Is it possible?... Why?...” Gnekker eats steadily,
jokes gravely, and listens condescendingly to the ladies’ remarks. Now
and then he has the desire to talk bad French, and then he finds it
necessary for some unknown reason to address me magnificently, “Votre
Excellence.”
And I am morose. Apparently I embarrass them all and they embarrass me.
I never had any intimate acquaintance with class antagonism before,
but now something of the kind torments me indeed. I try to find only
bad traits in Gnekker. It does not take long and then I am tormented
because one of my friends has not taken his place as bridegroom. In
another way too his presence has a bad effect upon me. Usually, when
I am left alone with myself or when I am in the company of people I
love, I never think of my merits; and if I begin to think about them
they seem as trivial as though I had become a scholar only yesterday.
But in the presence of a man like Gnekker my merits appear to me like
an extremely high mountain, whose summit is lost in the clouds, while
Gnekkers move about the foot, so small as hardly to be seen.
After dinner I go up to my study and light my little pipe, the only one
during the whole day, the sole survivor of my old habit of smoking from
morning to night. My wife comes into me while I am smoking and sits
down to speak to me. Just as in the morning, I know beforehand what the
conversation will be.
“We ought to talk seriously, Nicolai Stiepanovich,” she begins. “I mean
about Liza. Why won’t you attend?”
“Attend to what?”
“You pretend you don’t notice anything. It’s not right: It’s not right
to be unconcerned. Gnekker has intentions about Liza. What do you say
to that?”
“I can’t say he’s a bad man, because I don’t know him; but I’ve told
you a thousand times already that I don’t like him.”
“But that’s impossible ... impossible....” She rises and walks about in
agitation.
“It’s impossible to have such an attitude to a serious matter,”
she says. “When our daughter’s happiness is concerned, we must put
everything personal aside. I know you don’t like him.... Very well....
But if we refuse him now and upset everything, how can you guarantee
that Liza won’t have a grievance against us for the rest of her life?
Heaven knows there aren’t many young men nowadays. It’s quite likely
there won’t be another chance. He loves Liza very much and she likes
him, evidently. Of course he hasn’t a settled position. But what is
there to do? Please God, he’ll get a position in time. He comes of a
good family, and he’s rich.”
“How did you find that out?”
“He said so himself. His father has a big house in Kharkov and an
estate outside. You must certainly go to Kharkov.”
“Why?”
“You’ll find out there. You have acquaintances among the professors
there. I’d go myself. But I’m a woman. I can’t.”
“I will not go to Kharkov,” I say morosely.
My wife gets frightened; a tormented expression comes over her face.
“For God’s sake, Nicolai Stiepanich,” she implores, sobbing, “For God’s
sake help me with this burden! It hurts me.”
It is painful to look at her.
“Very well, Varya,” I say kindly, “If you like--very well I’ll go to
Kharkov, and do everything you want.”
She puts her handkerchief to her eyes and goes to cry in her room. I am
left alone.
A little later they bring in the lamp. The familiar shadows that
have wearied me for years fall from the chairs and the lamp-shade on
to the walls and the floor. When I look at them it seems that it’s
night already, and the cursed insomnia has begun. I lie down on the
bed; then I get up and walk about the room then lie down again. My
nervous excitement generally reaches its highest after dinner, before
the evening. For no reason I begin to cry and hide my head in the
pillow. All the while I am afraid somebody may come in; I am afraid I
shall die suddenly; I am ashamed of my tears; altogether, something
intolerable is happening in my soul. I feel I cannot look at the lamp
or the books or the shadows on the floor, or listen to the voices in
the drawing-room any more. Some invisible, mysterious force pushes me
rudely out of my house. I jump up, dress hurriedly, and go cautiously
out into the street so that the household shall not notice me. Where
shall I go?
The answer to this question has long been there in my brain: “To Katy.”