As usual she is lying on the Turkish divan or the couch and reading
something. Seeing me she lifts her head languidly, sits down, and gives
me her hand.
“You are always lying down like that,” I say after a reposeful silence.
“It’s unhealthy. You’d far better be doing something.”
“Ah?”
“You’d far better be doing something, I say.”
“What?... A woman can be either a simple worker or an actress.”
“Well, then--if you can’t become a worker, be an actress.”
She is silent.
“You had better marry,” I say, half-joking.
“There’s no one to marry: and no use if I did.”
“You can’t go on living like this.”
“Without a husband? As if that mattered. There are as many men as you
like, if you only had the will.”
“This isn’t right, Katy.”
“What isn’t right?”
“What you said just now.”
Katy sees that I am chagrined, and desires to soften the bad impression.
“Come. Let’s come here. Here.”
She leads me into a small room, very cosy, and points to the writing
table.
“There. I made it for you. You’ll work here. Come every day and bring
your work with you. They only disturb you there at home.... Will you
work here? Would you like to?”
In order not to hurt her by refusing, I answer that I shall work with
her and that I like the room immensely. Then we both sit down in the
cosy room and begin to talk.
The warmth, the cosy surroundings, the presence of a sympathetic being,
rouses in me now not a feeling of pleasure as it used but a strong
desire to complain and grumble. Anyhow it seems to me that if I moan
and complain I shall feel better.
“It’s a bad business, my dear,” I begin with a sigh. “Very bad.”
“What is the matter?”
“I’ll tell you what is the matter. The best and most sacred right
of kings is the right to pardon. And I have always felt myself a
king so long as I used this right prodigally. I never judged, I was
compassionate, I pardoned everyone right and left. Where others
protested and revolted I only advised and persuaded. All my life
I’ve tried to make my society tolerable to the family of students,
friends and servants. And this attitude of mine towards people, I know,
educated every one who came into contact with me. But now I am king no
more. There’s something going on in me which belongs only to slaves.
Day and night evil thoughts roam about in my head, and feelings which I
never knew before have made their home in my soul. I hate and despise;
I’m exasperated, disturbed, and afraid. I’ve become strict beyond
measure, exacting, unkind, and suspicious. Even the things which in the
past gave me the chance of making an extra pun, now bring me a feeling
of oppression. My logic has changed too. I used to despise money alone;
now I cherish evil feelings, not to money, but to the rich, as if they
were guilty. I used to hate violence and arbitrariness; now I hate the
people who employ violence, as if they alone are to blame and not all
of us, who cannot educate one another. What does it all mean? If my new
thoughts and feelings come from a change of my convictions, where could
the change have come from? Has the world grown worse and I better, or
was I blind and indifferent before? But if the change is due to the
general decline of my physical and mental powers--I am sick and losing
weight every day--then I’m in a pitiable position. It means that my new
thoughts are abnormal and unhealthy, that I must be ashamed of them and
consider them valueless....”
“Sickness hasn’t anything to do with it,” Katy interrupts. “Your eyes
are opened--that’s all. You’ve begun to notice things you didn’t want
to notice before for some reason. My opinion is that you must break
with your family finally first of all and then go away.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“You don’t love them any more. Then, why do you behave unfairly? And is
it a family! Mere nobodies. If they died to-day, no one would notice
their absence to-morrow.”
Katy despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. It’s
scarcely possible nowadays to speak of the right of people to despise
one another. But if you accept Katy’s point of view and own that such a
right exists, you will notice that she has the same right to despise my
wife and Liza as they have to hate her.
“Mere nobodies!” she repeats. “Did you have any dinner to-day? It’s a
wonder they didn’t forget to tell you dinner was ready. I don’t know
how they still remember that you exist.”
“Katy!” I say sternly. “Please be quiet.”
“You don’t think it’s fun for me to talk about them, do you? I wish I
didn’t know them at all. You listen to me, dear. Leave everything and
go away: go abroad--the quicker, the better.”
“What nonsense! What about the University?”
“And the University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it
all. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your
pupils? Have you many famous scholars? Count them up. But to increase
the number of doctors who exploit the general ignorance and make
hundreds of thousands,--there’s no need to be a good and gifted man.
You aren’t wanted.”
“My God, how bitter you are!” I get terrified. “How bitter you are. Be
quiet, or I’ll go away. I can’t reply to the bitter things you say.”
The maid enters and calls us to tea. Thank God, our conversation
changes round the samovar. I have made my moan, and now I want to
indulge another senile weakness--reminiscences. I tell Katy about
my past, to my great surprise with details that I never suspected I
had kept safe in my memory. And she listens to me with emotion, with
pride, holding her breath. I like particularly to tell how I once was a
student at a seminary and how I dreamed of entering the University.
“I used to walk in the seminary garden,” I tell her, “and the wind
would bring the sound of a song and the thrumming of an accordion from
a distant tavern, or a _troika_ with bells would pass quickly by the
seminary fence. That would be quite enough to fill not only my breast
with a sense of happiness, but my stomach, legs, and hands. As I heard
the sound of the accordion or the bells fading away, I would see myself
a doctor and paint pictures, one more glorious than another. And, you
see, my dreams came true. There were more things I dared to dream of.
I have been a favourite professor thirty years, I have had excellent
friends and an honourable reputation. I loved and married when I was
passionately in love. I had children. Altogether, when I look back
the whole of my life seems like a nice, clever composition. The only
thing I have to do now is not to spoil the _finale._ For this, I must
die like a man. If death is really a danger then I must meet it as
becomes a teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian State. But I
am spoiling the _finale._ I am drowning, and I run to you and beg for
help, and you say: ‘Drown. It’s your duty.’”
At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall. Katy and I both
recognise it and say:
“That must be Mikhail Fiodorovich.”
And indeed in a minute Mikhail Fiodorovich, my colleague, the
philologist, enters. He is a tall, well-built man about fifty years
old, clean shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a
good man and an admirable friend. He belongs to an old aristocratic
family, a prosperous and gifted house which has played a notable _rôle_
in the history of our literature and education. He himself is clever,
gifted, and highly educated, but not without his eccentricities.
To a certain extent we are all eccentric, queer fellows, but his
eccentricities have an element of the exceptional, not quite safe for
his friends. Among the latter I know not a few who cannot see his many
merits clearly because of his eccentricities.
As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
“How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It’s hellishly cold.”
Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately
begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably
ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare’s
grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously.
His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his
tender, easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and
provocativeness don’t tire one’s ears, and one very soon gets used
to it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the
university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the
table.
“O Lord,” he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows,
“there are some funny people in the world.”
“Who?” asks Katy.
“I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot
N---- on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse
jowl of his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife,
and his students, who won’t come to his lectures. ‘Well,’ I think to
myself, ‘he’s seen me. It’s all up--no hope for me...’”
And so on in the same strain. Or he begins like this,
“Yesterday I was at Z’s public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do
wonder how our _alma mater_ dares to show the public such an ass, such
a double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he’s a European fool. Good Lord,
you won’t find one like him in all Europe--not even if you looked in
daytime, and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were
sucking a stick of barley-sugar--su--su--su. He gets a fright because
he can’t make out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just
keep moving, hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all
you can’t make out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it’s so
terrific. It can only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at
the Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with
it!”
Immediately an abrupt change of subject.
“I had to make the speech; three years ago. Nicolai Stiepanovich will
remember. It was hot, close. My full uniform was tight under my arms,
tight as death. I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half,
two hours. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘thank God I’ve only ten pages left.’ And
I had four pages of peroration that I needn’t read at all. ‘Only six
pages then,’ I thought. Imagine it. I just gave a glance in front of me
and saw sitting next to each other in the front row a general with a
broad ribbon and a bishop. The poor devils were bored stiff. They were
staring about madly to stop themselves from going to sleep. For all
that they are still trying to look attentive, to make some appearance
of understanding what I’m reading, and look as though they like it.
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘if you like it, then you shall have it. I’ll spite
you.’ So I set to and read the four pages, every word.”
When he speaks only his eyes and eyebrows smile as it is generally with
the ironical. At such moments there is no hatred or malice in his eyes
but a great deal of acuteness and that peculiar fox-cunning which you
can catch only in very observant people. Further, about his eyes I have
noticed one more peculiarity. When he takes his glass from Katy, or
listens to her remarks, or follows her with a glance as she goes out of
the room for a little while, then I catch in his look something humble,
prayerful, pure....
The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a big piece of
cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne, a thoroughly
bad wine which Katy got to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail
Fiodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelves and sets them out
for patience. If one may believe his assurances, some games of patience
demand a great power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless
while he sets out the cards he amuses himself by talking continually.
Katy follows his cards carefully, helping him more by mimicry than
words. In the whole evening she drinks no more than two small glasses
of wine, I drink only a quarter of a glass, the remainder of the bottle
falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink any amount without ever
getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty
order, and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
“Science, thank God, has had her day,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich very
slowly. “She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel
the desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the
soil of prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence
of prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics
and philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have
no sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of
externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they
lost by that?”
“Flies haven’t any scientific knowledge either,” I say; “but what does
that prove?”
“It’s no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between
ourselves. I’m more cautious than you think. I shan’t proclaim it from
the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that
science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to
crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It’s not for
you and me to destroy it. God forbid!”
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
“Our public is degenerate nowadays,” Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. “I
don’t speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should
be able to work and think decently. ‘Sadly I look at the men of our
time’--it’s quite true in this connection.”
“Yes, they’re frightfully degenerate,” Katy agrees. “Tell me, had you
one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?”
“I don’t know how it is with the other professors,--but somehow I don’t
recollect that it ever happened to me.”
“In my lifetime I’ve seen a great many of your students and young
scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had
the luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily
interesting person. Everything’s dull and incapable, swollen and
pretentious....”
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression
that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my
daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale
and are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such
penny-dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons
with the glorious past. Any indictment, even if it’s made in a company
of ladies, should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise
it isn’t an indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don’t
see any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don’t find
it any worse now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in
this case has its value, says that students nowadays are neither better
nor worse than their predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present
pupils, I wouldn’t say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain
precision. I know their defects and there’s no need for me to take
refuge in a mist of commonplaces. I don’t like the way they smoke,
and drink spirits, and marry late; or the way they are careless
and indifferent to the point of allowing students to go hungry in
their midst, and not paying their debts into “The Students’ Aid
Society.” They are ignorant of modern languages and express themselves
incorrectly in Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist,
complained to me that he had to lecture twice as often because of
their incompetent knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of
meteorology. They are readily influenced by the most modern writers,
and some of those not the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to
classics like Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and
their worldly unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability
to distinguish between great and small. They solve all difficult
questions which have a more or less social character (emigration,
for instance) by getting up subscriptions, but not by the method of
scientific investigation and experiment, though this is at their full
disposal, and, above all, corresponds to their vocation. They readily
become house-doctors, assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or
consulting doctors, and they are prepared to keep these positions until
they are forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal
initiative are quite as necessary in science, as, for instance, in art
or commerce. I have pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or
successors. Therefore I love them and am concerned for them, but I’m
not proud of them ... and so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it’s only in a
cowardly and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and
distraction. All of them are by nature accidental and transitory, and
are completely dependent on the conditions of life. Ten years will
be enough for them to disappear or give place to new and different
defects, which are quite indispensable, but will in their turn give
the timid a fright. Students’ shortcomings often annoy me, but the
annoyance is nothing in comparison with the joy I have had these thirty
years in speaking with my pupils, lecturing to them, studying their
relations and comparing them with people of a different class.
Mikhail Fiodorovich is a slanderer. Katy listens and neither of them
notices how deep is the pit into which they are drawn by such an
outwardly innocuous recreation as condemning one’s neighbours. They
don’t realise how a simple conversation gradually turns into mockery
and derision, or how they both begin even to employ the manners of
calumny.
“There are some queer types to be found,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich.
“Yesterday I went to see our friend Yegor Pietrovich. There I found a
student, one of your medicos, a third-year man, I think. His face ...
rather in the style of Dobroliubov--the stamp of profound thought on
his brow. We began to talk. ‘My dear fellow--an extraordinary business.
I’ve just read that some German or other--can’t remember his name--has
extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain--idiotine.’ Do you know
he really believed it, and produced an expression of respect on his
face, as much as to say, ‘See, what a power we are.’”
“The other day I went to the theatre. I sat down. Just in front of me
in the next row two people were sitting: one, ‘one of the chosen,’
evidently a law student, the other a whiskery medico. The medico was as
drunk as a cobbler. Not an atom of attention to the stage. Dozing and
nodding. But the moment some actor began to deliver a loud monologue,
or just raised his voice, my medico thrills, digs his neighbour in the
ribs. ‘What’s he say? Something noble?’ ‘Noble,’ answers ‘the chosen.’
“‘Brrravo!’ bawls the medico. ‘No--ble. Bravo.’ You see the drunken
blockhead didn’t come to the theatre for art, but for something noble.
He wants nobility.”
Katy listens and laughs. Her laugh is rather strange. She breathes out
in swift, rhythmic, and regular alternation with her inward breathing.
It’s as though she were playing an accordion. Of her face, only her
nostrils laugh. My heart fails me. I don’t know what to say. I lose my
temper, crimson, jump up from my seat and cry:
“Be quiet, won’t you? Why do you sit here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? I’ve had enough.”
In vain I wait for them to stop their slanders. I prepare to go home.
And it’s time, too. Past ten o’clock.
“I’ll sit here a little longer,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich, “if you give
me leave, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“You have my leave,” Katy answers.
“_Bene._ In that case, order another bottle, please.”
Together they escort me to the hall with candles in their hands. While
I’m putting on my overcoat, Mikhail Fiodorovich says:
“You’ve grown terribly thin and old lately. Nicolai Stiepanovich.
What’s the matter with you? Ill?
“Yes, a little.”
“And he will not look after himself,” Katy puts in sternly.
“Why don’t you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God
helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your
family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I
go abroad, I’ll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I’m off next week.”
I came away from Katy’s irritated, frightened by the talk about
my illness and discontented with myself. “And why,” I ask myself,
“shouldn’t I be attended by one of my colleagues?” Instantly I see how
my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a
little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent
me from reading the truth in his face: “At the moment I don’t see
anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to
break off your work....” And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn’t have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I
sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about
the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also
about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I
read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a
hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe
that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining
in it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death
will take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep
as the sky, as bright, as striking ... but no! I think of myself, of
my wife, Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts
are not good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment
my attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous
Arakheev wrote in one of his intimate letters: “All good in the world
is inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good.”
Which means that everything is ugly, there’s nothing to live for,
and the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I
surprise myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are
accidental and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think
immediately:
“If that’s true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads.” And
I swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go
to her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no
family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev
thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole
being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my
limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed
and soon fall asleep.
And then--insomnia.