took up his ruler from the table. "You are drunk. Don't dare come and
see your father in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you
can repeat it to your depraved sister, that you'll get nothing from me,
either of you. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and
if they suffer for their disobedience and obstinacy I do not pity them.
You can go whence you came. It has pleased God to chastise me with you,
but I will bear the trial with resignation, and, like Job, I will find
consolation in my sufferings and in unremitting labour. You must not
cross my threshold till you have mended your ways. I am a just man, all
I tell you is for your benefit, and if you desire your own good you
ought to remember all your life what I say and have said to you. . . ."
I waved my hand in despair and went away. I don't remember what happened
afterwards, that night and next day.
I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and
singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting:
"Better-than-nothing!" XX
If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose
would be: "Nothing passes away." I believe that nothing passes away
without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has
significance for our present and our future existence.
What I have been through has not been for nothing. My great troubles, my
patience, have touched people's hearts, and now they don't call me
"Better-than-nothing," they don't laugh at me, and when I walk by the
shops they don't throw water over me. They have grown used to my being a
workman, and see nothing strange in my carrying a pail of paint and
putting in windows, though I am of noble rank; on the contrary, people
are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate
workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained
his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry
without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen;
instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the
workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now
that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have
to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account
of some twopenny-halfpenny job. People are civil to me, they address me
politely, and in the houses where I work, they offer me tea, and send to
enquire whether I wouldn't like dinner. Children and young girls often
come and look at me with curiosity and compassion.
One day I was working in the Governor's garden, painting an arbour there
to look like marble. The Governor, walking in the garden, came up to the
arbour and, having nothing to do, entered into conversation with me, and
I reminded him how he had once summoned me to an interview with him. He
looked into my face intently for a minute, then made his mouth like a
round "O," flung up his hands, and said: "I don't remember!"
I have grown older, have become silent, stern, and austere, I rarely
laugh, and I am told that I have grown like Radish, and that like him I
bore the workmen by my useless exhortations.
Mariya Viktorovna, my former wife, is living now abroad, while her
father is constructing a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces, and
is buying estates there. Dr. Blagovo is also abroad. Dubetchnya has
passed again into the possession of Madame Tcheprakov, who has bought it
after forcing the engineer to knock the price down twenty per cent.
Moisey goes about now in a bowler hat; he often drives into the town in
a racing droshky on business of some sort, and stops near the bank. They
say he has already bought up a mortgaged estate, and is constantly
making enquiries at the bank about Dubetchnya, which he means to buy
too. Poor Ivan Tcheprakov was for a long while out of work, staggering
about the town and drinking. I tried to get him into our work, and for a
time he painted roofs and put in window-panes in our company, and even
got to like it, and stole oil, asked for tips, and drank like a regular
painter. But he soon got sick of the work, and went back to Dubetchnya,
and afterwards the workmen confessed to me that he had tried to persuade
them to join him one night and murder Moisey and rob Madame Tcheprakov.
My father has greatly aged; he is very bent, and in the evenings walks
up and down near his house. I never go to see him.
During an epidemic of cholera Prokofy doctored some of the shopkeepers
with pepper cordial and pitch, and took money for doing so, and, as I
learned from the newspapers, was flogged for abusing the doctors as he
sat in his shop. His shop boy Nikolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still
alive and, as always, she loves and fears her Prokofy. When she sees me,
she always shakes her head mournfully, and says with a sigh: "Your life
is ruined."
On working days I am busy from morning till night. On holidays, in fine
weather, I take my tiny niece (my sister reckoned on a boy, but the
child is a girl) and walk in a leisurely way to the cemetery. There I
stand or sit down, and stay a long time gazing at the grave that is so
dear to me, and tell the child that her mother lies here.
Sometimes, by the graveside, I find Anyuta Blagovo. We greet each other
and stand in silence, or talk of Kleopatra, of her child, of how sad
life is in this world; then, going out of the cemetery we walk along in
silence and she slackens her pace on purpose to walk beside me a little
longer. The little girl, joyous and happy, pulls at her hand, laughing
and screwing up her eyes in the bright sunlight, and we stand still and
join in caressing the dear child.
When we reach the town Anyuta Blagovo, agitated and flushing crimson,
says good-bye to me and walks on alone, austere and respectable. . . .
And no one who met her could, looking at her, imagine that she had just
been walking beside me and even caressing the child. AT A COUNTRY HOUSE
PAVEL ILYITCH RASHEVITCH walked up and down, stepping softly on the
floor covered with little Russian plaids, and casting a long shadow on
the wall and ceiling while his guest, Meier, the deputy examining
magistrate, sat on the sofa with one leg drawn up under him smoking and
listening. The clock already pointed to eleven, and there were sounds of
the table being laid in the room next to the study.
"Say what you like," Rashevitch was saying, "from the standpoint of
fraternity, equality, and the rest of it, Mitka, the swineherd, is
perhaps a man the same as Goethe and Frederick the Great; but take your
stand on a scientific basis, have the courage to look facts in the face,
and it will be obvious to you that blue blood is not a mere prejudice,
that it is not a feminine invention. Blue blood, my dear fellow, has an
historical justification, and to refuse to recognize it is, to my
thinking, as strange as to refuse to recognize the antlers on a stag.
One must reckon with facts! You are a law student and have confined your
attention to the humane studies, and you can still flatter yourself with
illusions of equality, fraternity, and so on; I am an incorrigible
Darwinian, and for me words such as lineage, aristocracy, noble blood,
are not empty sounds."
Rashevitch was roused and spoke with feeling. His eyes sparkled, his
pince-nez would not stay on his nose, he kept nervously shrugging his
shoulders and blinking, and at the word "Darwinian" he looked jauntily
in the looking-glass and combed his grey beard with both hands. He was
wearing a very short and shabby reefer jacket and narrow trousers; the
rapidity of his movements, his jaunty air, and his abbreviated jacket
all seemed out of keeping with him, and his big comely head, with long
hair suggestive of a bishop or a veteran poet, seemed to have been fixed
on to the body of a tall, lanky, affected youth. When he stood with his
legs wide apart, his long shadow looked like a pair of scissors.
He was fond of talking, and he always fancied that he was saying
something new and original. In the presence of Meier he was conscious of
an unusual flow of spirits and rush of ideas. He found the examining
magistrate sympathetic, and was stimulated by his youth, his health, his
good manners, his dignity, and, above all, by his cordial attitude to
himself and his family. Rashevitch was not a favourite with his
acquaintances; as a rule they fought shy of him, and, as he knew,
declared that he had driven his wife into her grave with his talking,
and they called him, behind his back, a spiteful creature and a toad.
Meier, a man new to the district and unprejudiced, visited him often and
readily and had even been known to say that Rashevitch and his daughters
were the only people in the district with whom he felt as much at home
as with his own people. Rashevitch liked him too, because he was a young
man who might be a good match for his elder daughter, Genya.
And now, enjoying his ideas and the sound of his own voice, and looking
with pleasure at the plump but well-proportioned, neatly cropped,
correct Meier, Rashevitch dreamed of how he would arrange his daughter's
marriage with a good man, and then how all his worries over the estate
would pass to his son-in-law. Hateful worries! The interest owing to the
bank had not been paid for the last two quarters, and fines and arrears
of all sorts had mounted up to more than two thousand.
"To my mind there can be no doubt," Rashevitch went on, growing more and
more enthusiastic, "that if a Richard Coeur-de-Lion, or Frederick
Barbarossa, for instance, is brave and noble those qualities will pass
by heredity to his son, together with the convolutions and bumps of the
brain, and if that courage and nobility of soul are preserved in the son
by means of education and exercise, and if he marries a princess who is
also noble and brave, those qualities will be transmitted to his
grandson, and so on, until they become a generic characteristic and pass
organically into the flesh and blood. Thanks to a strict sexual
selection, to the fact that high-born families have instinctively
guarded themselves against marriage with their inferiors, and young men
of high rank have not married just anybody, lofty, spiritual qualities
have been transmitted from generation to generation in their full
purity, have been preserved, and as time goes on have, through exercise,
become more exalted and lofty. For the fact that there is good in
humanity we are indebted to nature, to the normal, natural, consistent
order of things, which has throughout the ages scrupulously segregated
blue blood from plebeian. Yes, my dear boy, no low lout, no cook's son
has given us literature, science, art, law, conceptions of honour and
duty . . . . For all these things mankind is indebted exclusively to the
aristocracy, and from that point of view, the point of view of natural
history, an inferior Sobakevitch by the very fact of his blue blood is
superior and more useful than the very best merchant, even though the
latter may have built fifteen museums. Say what you like! And when I
refuse to shake hands with a low lout or a cook's son, or to let him sit
down to table with me, by that very act I am safeguarding what is the
best thing on earth, and am carrying out one of Mother Nature's finest
designs for leading us up to perfection. . ."
Rashevitch stood still, combing his beard with both hands; his shadow,
too, stood still on the wall, looking like a pair of scissors.
"Take Mother-Russia now," he went on, thrusting his hands in his pockets
and standing first on his heels and then on his toes. "Who are her best
people? Take our first-rate painters, writers, composers . . . . Who are
they? They were all of aristocratic origin. Pushkin, Lermontov,
Turgenev, Gontcharov, Tolstoy, they were not sexton's children."
"Gontcharov was a merchant," said Meier.
"Well, the exception only proves the rule. Besides, Gontcharov's genius
is quite open to dispute. But let us drop names and turn to facts. What
would you say, my good sir, for instance, to this eloquent fact: when
one of the mob forces his way where he has not been permitted before,
into society, into the world of learning, of literature, into the
Zemstvo or the law courts, observe, Nature herself, first of all,
champions the higher rights of humanity, and is the first to wage war on
the rabble. As soon as the plebeian forces himself into a place he is
not fit for he begins to ail, to go into consumption, to go out of his
mind, and to degenerate, and nowhere do we find so many puny, neurotic
wrecks, consumptives, and starvelings of all sorts as among these
darlings. They die like flies in autumn. If it were not for this
providential degeneration there would not have been a stone left
standing of our civilization, the rabble would have demolished
everything. Tell me, if you please, what has the inroad of the
barbarians given us so far? What has the rabble brought with it?"
Rashevitch assumed a mysterious, frightened expression, and went on:
"Never has literature and learning been at such low ebb among us as now.
The men of to-day, my good sir, have neither ideas nor ideals, and all
their sayings and doings are permeated by one spirit-to get all they can
and to strip someone to his last thread. All these men of to-day who
give themselves out as honest and progressive people can be bought at a
rouble a piece, and the distinguishing mark of the 'intellectual' of to-
day is that you have to keep strict watch over your pocket when you talk
to him, or else he will run off with your purse." Rashevitch winked and
burst out laughing. "Upon my soul, he will!" he said, in a thin, gleeful
voice. "And morals! What of their morals?" Rashevitch looked round
towards the door. "No one is surprised nowadays when a wife robs and
leaves her husband. What's that, a trifle! Nowadays, my dear boy, a chit
of a girl of twelve is scheming to get a lover, and all these amateur
theatricals and literary evenings are only invented to make it easier to
get a rich merchant to take a girl on as his mistress. . . . Mothers
sell their daughters, and people make no bones about asking a husband at
what price he sells his wife, and one can haggle over the bargain, you
know, my dear. . . ."
Meier, who had been sitting motionless and silent all the time, suddenly
got up from the sofa and looked at his watch.
"I beg your pardon, Pavel Ilyitch," he said, "it is time for me to be
going."
But Pavel Ilyitch, who had not finished his remarks, put his arm round
him and, forcibly reseating him on the sofa, vowed that he would not let
him go without supper. And again Meier sat and listened, but he looked
at Rashevitch with perplexity and uneasiness, as though he were only now
beginning to understand him. Patches of red came into his face. And when
at last a maidservant came in to tell them that the young ladies asked
them to go to supper, he gave a sigh of relief and was the first to walk
out of the study.
At the table in the next room were Rashevitch's daughters, Genya and
Iraida, girls of four-and-twenty and two-and-twenty respectively, both
very pale, with black eyes, and exactly the same height. Genya had her
hair down, and Iraida had hers done up high on her head. Before eating
anything they each drank a wineglassful of bitter liqueur, with an air
as though they had drunk it by accident for the first time in their
lives and both were overcome with confusion and burst out laughing.
"Don't be naughty, girls," said Rashevitch.
Genya and Iraida talked French with each other, and Russian with their
father and their visitor. Interrupting one another, and mixing up French
words with Russian, they began rapidly describing how just at this time
in August, in previous years, they had set off to the boarding school
and what fun it had been. Now there was nowhere to go, and they had to
stay at their home in the country, summer and winter without change.
Such dreariness!
"Don't be naughty, girls," Rashevitch said again.
He wanted to be talking himself. If other people talked in his presence,
he suffered from a feeling like jealousy.
"So that's how it is, my dear boy," he began, looking affectionately at
Meier. "In the simplicity and goodness of our hearts, and from fear of
being suspected of being behind the times, we fraternize with, excuse
me, all sorts of riff-raff, we preach fraternity and equality with
money-lenders and innkeepers; but if we would only think, we should see
how criminal that good-nature is. We have brought things to such a pass,
that the fate of civilization is hanging on a hair. My dear fellow, what
our forefathers gained in the course of ages will be to-morrow, if not
to-day, outraged and destroyed by these modern Huns. . . ."
After supper they all went into the drawing-room. Genya and Iraida
lighted the candles on the piano, got out their music. . . . But their
father still went on talking, and there was no telling when he would
leave off. They looked with misery and vexation at their egoist-father,
to whom the pleasure of chattering and displaying his intelligence was
evidently more precious and important than his daughters' happiness.
Meier, the only young man who ever came to their house, came-they knew-
for the sake of their charming, feminine society, but the irrepressible
old man had taken possession of him, and would not let him move a step
away.
"Just as the knights of the west repelled the invasions of the Mongols,
so we, before it is too late, ought to unite and strike together against
our foe," Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his
right hand. "May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as
a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy
sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as
a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his
ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his
ugly face," Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger in
front of him. "In his ugly face!"
"I can't do that," Meier brought out, turning away.
"Why not?" Rashevitch answered briskly, anticipating a prolonged and
interesting argument. "Why not?"
"Because I am of the artisan class myself!"
As he said this Meier turned crimson, and his neck seemed to swell, and
tears actually gleamed in his eyes.
"My father was a simple workman," he said, in a rough, jerky voice, "but
I see no harm in that."
Rashevitch was fearfully confused. Dumbfoundered, as though he had been
caught in the act of a crime, he gazed helplessly at Meier, and did not
know what to say. Genya and Iraida flushed crimson, and bent over their
music; they were ashamed of their tactless father. A minute passed in
silence, and there was a feeling of unbearable discomfort, when all at
once with a sort of painful stiffness and inappropriateness, there
sounded in the air the words:
"Yes, I am of the artisan class, and I am proud of it!"
Thereupon Meier, stumbling awkwardly among the furniture, took his
leave, and walked rapidly into the hall, though his carriage was not yet
at the door.
"You'll have a dark drive to-night," Rashevitch muttered, following him.
"The moon does not rise till late to-night."
They stood together on the steps in the dark, and waited for the horses
to be brought. It was cool.
"There's a falling star," said Meier, wrapping himself in his overcoat.
"There are a great many in August."
When the horses were at the door, Rashevitch gazed intently at the sky,
and said with a sigh:
"A phenomenon worthy of the pen of Flammarion. . . ."
After seeing his visitor off, he walked up and down the garden,
gesticulating in the darkness, reluctant to believe that such a queer,
stupid misunderstanding had only just occurred. He was ashamed and vexed
with himself. In the first place it had been extremely incautious and
tactless on his part to raise the damnable subject of blue blood,
without finding out beforehand what his visitor's position was.
Something of the same sort had happened to him before; he had, on one
occasion in a railway carriage, begun abusing the Germans, and it had
afterwards appeared that all the persons he had been conversing with
were German. In the second place he felt that Meier would never come and
see him again. These intellectuals who have risen from the people are
morbidly sensitive, obstinate and slow to forgive.
"It's bad, it's bad," muttered Rashevitch, spitting; he had a feeling of
discomfort and loathing as though he had eaten soap. "Ah, it's bad!"
He could see from the garden, through the drawing-room window, Genya by
the piano, very pale, and looking scared, with her hair down. She was
talking very, very rapidly. . . . Iraida was walking up and down the
room, lost in thought; but now she, too, began talking rapidly with her
face full of indignation. They were both talking at once. Rashevitch
could not hear a word, but he guessed what they were talking about.
Genya was probably complaining that her father drove away every decent
person from the house with his talk, and to-day he had driven away from
them their one acquaintance, perhaps a suitor, and now the poor young
man would not have one place in the whole district where he could find
rest for his soul. And judging by the despairing way in which she threw
up her arms, Iraida was talking probably on the subject of their dreary
existence, their wasted youth. . . .
When he reached his own room, Rashevitch sat down on his bed and began
to undress. He felt oppressed, and he was still haunted by the same
feeling as though he had eaten soap. He was ashamed. As he undressed he
looked at his long, sinewy, elderly legs, and remembered that in the
district they called him the "toad," and after every long conversation
he always felt ashamed. Somehow or other, by some fatality, it always
happened that he began mildly, amicably, with good intentions, calling
himself an old student, an idealist, a Quixote, but without being
himself aware of it, gradually passed into abuse and slander, and what
was most surprising, with perfect sincerity criticized science, art and
morals, though he had not read a book for the last twenty years, had
been nowhere farther than their provincial town, and did not really know
what was going on in the world. If he sat down to write anything, if it
were only a letter of congratulation, there would somehow be abuse in
the letter. And all this was strange, because in reality he was a man of
feeling, given to tears. Could he be possessed by some devil which hated
and slandered in him, apart from his own will?
"It's bad," he sighed, as he lay down under the quilt. "It's bad."
His daughters did not sleep either. There was a sound of laughter and
screaming, as though someone was being pursued; it was Genya in
hysterics. A little later Iraida was sobbing too. A maidservant ran
barefoot up and down the passage several times. . . .
"What a business! Good Lord! . . ." muttered Rashevitch, sighing and
tossing from side to side. "It's bad."
He had a nightmare. He dreamt he was standing naked, as tall as a
giraffe, in the middle of the room, and saying, as he flicked his finger
before him:
"In his ugly face! his ugly face! his ugly face!"
He woke up in a fright, and first of all remembered that a
misunderstanding had happened in the evening, and that Meier would
certainly not come again. He remembered, too, that he had to pay the
interest at the bank, to find husbands for his daughters, that one must
have food and drink, and close at hand were illness, old age,
unpleasantnesses, that soon it would be winter, and that there was no
wood. . . .
It was past nine o'clock in the morning. Rashevitch slowly dressed,
drank his tea and ate two hunks of bread and butter. His daughters did
not come down to breakfast; they did not want to meet him, and that
wounded him. He lay down on his sofa in his study, then sat down to his
table and began writing a letter to his daughters. His hand shook and
his eyes smarted. He wrote that he was old, and no use to anyone and
that nobody loved him, and he begged his daughters to forget him, and
when he died to bury him in a plain, deal coffin without ceremony, or to
send his body to Harkov to the dissecting theatre. He felt that every
line he wrote reeked of malice and affectation, but he could not stop,
and went on writing and writing.
"The toad!" he suddenly heard from the next room; it was the voice of
his elder daughter, a voice with a hiss of indignation. "The toad!"
"The toad!" the younger one repeated like an echo. "The toad!" A FATHER
"I ADMIT I have had a drop. . . . You must excuse me. I went into a beer
shop on the way here, and as it was so hot had a couple of bottles. It's
hot, my boy."
Old Musatov took a nondescript rag out of his pocket and wiped his
shaven, battered face with it.