As a rule she is lying on the sofa or in a lounge-chair reading. Seeing
me, she raises her head languidly, sits up, and shakes hands.
“You are always lying down,” I say, after pausing and taking breath.
“That’s not good for you. You ought to occupy yourself with something.”
“What?”
“I say you ought to occupy yourself in some way.”
“With what? A woman can be nothing but a simple workwoman or an
actress.”
“Well, if you can’t be a workwoman, be an actress.”
She says nothing.
“You ought to get married,” I say, half in jest.
“There is no one to marry. There’s no reason to, either.”
“You can’t live like this.”
“Without a husband? Much that matters; I could have as many men as I
like if I wanted to.”
“That’s ugly, Katya.”
“What is ugly?”
“Why, what you have just said.”
Noticing that I am hurt and wishing to efface the disagreeable
impression, Katya says:
“Let us go; come this way.”
She takes me into a very snug little room, and says, pointing to the
writing-table:
“Look... I have got that ready for you. You shall work here. Come here
every day and bring your work with you. They only hinder you there at
home. Will you work here? Will you like to?”
Not to wound her by refusing, I answer that I will work here, and that
I like the room very much. Then we both sit down in the snug little room
and begin talking.
The warm, snug surroundings and the presence of a sympathetic person
does not, as in old days, arouse in me a feeling of pleasure, but an
intense impulse to complain and grumble. I feel for some reason that if
I lament and complain I shall feel better.
“Things are in a bad way with me, my dear--very bad....”
“What is it?”
“You see how it is, my dear; the best and holiest right of kings is the
right of mercy. And I have always felt myself a king, since I have made
unlimited use of that right. I have never judged, I have been indulgent,
I have readily forgiven every one, right and left. Where others have
protested and expressed indignation, I have only advised and persuaded.
All my life it has been my endeavour that my society should not be a
burden to my family, to my students, to my colleagues, to my servants.
And I know that this attitude to people has had a good influence on all
who have chanced to come into contact with me. But now I am not a king.
Something is happening to me that is only excusable in a slave; day and
night my brain is haunted by evil thoughts, and feelings such as I never
knew before are brooding in my soul. I am full of hatred, and contempt,
and indignation, and loathing, and dread. I have become excessively
severe, exacting, irritable, ungracious, suspicious. Even things that
in old days would have provoked me only to an unnecessary jest and a
good-natured laugh now arouse an oppressive feeling in me. My reasoning,
too, has undergone a change: in old days I despised money; now I harbour
an evil feeling, not towards money, but towards the rich as though they
were to blame: in old days I hated violence and tyranny, but now I hate
the men who make use of violence, as though they were alone to blame,
and not all of us who do not know how to educate each other. What is
the meaning of it? If these new ideas and new feelings have come from
a change of convictions, what is that change due to? Can the world have
grown worse and I better, or was I blind before and indifferent? If this
change is the result of a general decline of physical and intellectual
powers--I am ill, you know, and every day I am losing weight--my
position is pitiable; it means that my new ideas are morbid and
abnormal; I ought to be ashamed of them and think them of no
consequence....”
“Illness has nothing to do with it,” Katya interrupts me; “it’s simply
that your eyes are opened, that’s all. You have seen what in old days,
for some reason, you refused to see. To my thinking, what you ought to
do first of all, is to break with your family for good, and go away.”
“You are talking nonsense.”
“You don’t love them; why should you force your feelings? Can you call
them a family? Nonentities! If they died today, no one would notice
their absence tomorrow.”
Katya despises my wife and Liza as much as they hate her. One can hardly
talk at this date of people’s having a right to despise one another. But
if one looks at it from Katya’s standpoint and recognizes such a right,
one can see she has as much right to despise my wife and Liza as they
have to hate her.
“Nonentities,” she goes on. “Have you had dinner today? How was it they
did not forget to tell you it was ready? How is it they still remember
your existence?”
“Katya,” I say sternly, “I beg you to be silent.”
“You think I enjoy talking about them? I should be glad not to know
them at all. Listen, my dear: give it all up and go away. Go abroad. The
sooner the better.”
“What nonsense! What about the University?”
“The University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it, anyway.
You have been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your pupils? Are
many of them celebrated scientific men? Count them up! And to multiply
the doctors who exploit ignorance and pile up hundreds of thousands for
themselves, there is no need to be a good and talented man. You are not
wanted.”
“Good heavens! how harsh you are!” I cry in horror. “How harsh you are!
Be quiet or I will go away! I don’t know how to answer the harsh things
you say!”
The maid comes in and summons us to tea. At the samovar our
conversation, thank God, changes. After having had my grumble out,
I have a longing to give way to another weakness of old age,
reminiscences. I tell Katya about my past, and to my great astonishment
tell her incidents which, till then, I did not suspect of being still
preserved in my memory, and she listens to me with tenderness, with
pride, holding her breath. I am particularly fond of telling her how I
was educated in a seminary and dreamed of going to the University.
“At times I used to walk about our seminary garden...” I would tell her.
“If from some faraway tavern the wind floated sounds of a song and
the squeaking of an accordion, or a sledge with bells dashed by the
garden-fence, it was quite enough to send a rush of happiness, filling
not only my heart, but even my stomach, my legs, my arms.... I would
listen to the accordion or the bells dying away in the distance and
imagine myself a doctor, and paint pictures, one better than another.
And here, as you see, my dreams have come true. I have had more than I
dared to dream of. For thirty years I have been the favourite professor,
I have had splendid comrades, I have enjoyed fame and honour. I have
loved, married from passionate love, have had children. In fact, looking
back upon it, I see my whole life as a fine composition arranged with
talent. Now all that is left to me is not to spoil the end. For that I
must die like a man. If death is really a thing to dread, I must meet
it as a teacher, a man of science, and a citizen of a Christian country
ought to meet it, with courage and untroubled soul. But I am spoiling
the end; I am sinking, I fly to you, I beg for help, and you tell me
‘Sink; that is what you ought to do.’”
But here there comes a ring at the front-door. Katya and I recognize it,
and say:
“It must be Mihail Fyodorovitch.”
And a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mihail Fyodorovitch,
a tall, well-built man of fifty, clean-shaven, with thick grey hair
and black eyebrows, walks in. He is a good-natured man and an excellent
comrade. He comes of a fortunate and talented old noble family which has
played a prominent part in the history of literature and enlightenment.
He is himself intelligent, talented, and very highly educated, but has
his oddities. To a certain extent we are all odd and all queer fish,
but in his oddities there is something exceptional, apt to cause anxiety
among his acquaintances. I know a good many people for whom his oddities
completely obscure his good qualities.
Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
“Good-evening. Are you having tea? That’s just right. It’s diabolically
cold.”
Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once begins
talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is the
continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and drollery
as in Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He is always talking about serious
things, but he never speaks seriously. His judgments are always harsh
and railing, but, thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness
and abuse do not jar upon the ear, and one soon grows used to them.
Every evening he brings with him five or six anecdotes from the
University, and he usually begins with them when he sits down to table.
“Oh, Lord!” he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows ironically. “What
comic people there are in the world!”
“Well?” asks Katya.
“As I was coming from my lecture this morning I met that old idiot N.
N---- on the stairs.... He was going along as usual, sticking out his
chin like a horse, looking for some one to listen to his grumblings
at his migraine, at his wife, and his students who won’t attend his
lectures. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘he has seen me--I am done for now; it is all
up....’”
And so on in the same style. Or he will begin like this:
“I was yesterday at our friend Z. Z----‘s public lecture. I wonder how
it is our alma mater--don’t speak of it after dark--dare display in
public such noodles and patent dullards as that Z. Z---- Why, he is a
European fool! Upon my word, you could not find another like him all
over Europe! He lectures--can you imagine?--as though he were sucking
a sugar-stick--sue, sue, sue;... he is in a nervous funk; he can hardly
decipher his own manuscript; his poor little thoughts crawl along like
a bishop on a bicycle, and, what’s worse, you can never make out what he
is trying to say. The deadly dulness is awful, the very flies expire. It
can only be compared with the boredom in the assembly-hall at the yearly
meeting when the traditional address is read--damn it!”
And at once an abrupt transition:
“Three years ago--Nikolay Stepanovitch here will remember it--I had to
deliver that address. It was hot, stifling, my uniform cut me under the
arms--it was deadly! I read for half an hour, for an hour, for an hour
and a half, for two hours.... ‘Come,’ I thought; ‘thank God, there are
only ten pages left!’ And at the end there were four pages that there
was no need to read, and I reckoned to leave them out. ‘So there are
only six really,’ I thought; ‘that is, only six pages left to read.’
But, only fancy, I chanced to glance before me, and, sitting in the
front row, side by side, were a general with a ribbon on his breast and
a bishop. The poor beggars were numb with boredom; they were staring
with their eyes wide open to keep awake, and yet they were trying to put
on an expression of attention and to pretend that they understood what I
was saying and liked it. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘since you like it you shall
have it! I’ll pay you out;’ so I just gave them those four pages too.”
As is usual with ironical people, when he talks nothing in his face
smiles but his eyes and eyebrows. At such times there is no trace
of hatred or spite in his eyes, but a great deal of humour, and that
peculiar fox-like slyness which is only to be noticed in very observant
people. Since I am speaking about his eyes, I notice another peculiarity
in them. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to her speaking,
or looks after her as she goes out of the room for a moment, I notice in
his eyes something gentle, beseeching, pure....
The maid-servant takes away the samovar and puts on the table a large
piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne--a
rather poor wine of which Katya had grown fond in the Crimea. Mihail
Fyodorovitch takes two packs of cards off the whatnot and begins to play
patience. According to him, some varieties of patience require great
concentration and attention, yet while he lays out the cards he does not
leave off distracting his attention with talk. Katya watches his cards
attentively, and more by gesture than by words helps him in his play.
She drinks no more than a couple of wine-glasses of wine the whole
evening; I drink four glasses, and the rest of the bottle falls to the
share of Mihail Fyodorovitch, who can drink a great deal and never get
drunk.
Over our patience we settle various questions, principally of the
higher order, and what we care for most of all--that is, science and
learning--is more roughly handled than anything.
“Science, thank God, has outlived its day,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch
emphatically. “Its song is sung. Yes, indeed. Mankind begins to feel
impelled to replace it by something different. It has grown on the soil
of superstition, been nourished by superstition, and is now just as much
the quintessence of superstition as its defunct granddames, alchemy,
metaphysics, and philosophy. And, after all, what has it given to
mankind? Why, the difference between the learned Europeans and the
Chinese who have no science is trifling, purely external. The Chinese
know nothing of science, but what have they lost thereby?”
“Flies know nothing of science, either,” I observe, “but what of that?”
“There is no need to be angry, Nikolay Stepanovitch. I only say this
here between ourselves... I am more careful than you think, and I am not
going to say this in public--God forbid! The superstition exists in
the multitude that the arts and sciences are superior to agriculture,
commerce, superior to handicrafts. Our sect is maintained by that
superstition, and it is not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!”
After patience the younger generation comes in for a dressing too.
“Our audiences have degenerated,” sighs Mihail Fyodorovitch. “Not to
speak of ideals and all the rest of it, if only they were capable of
work and rational thought! In fact, it’s a case of ‘I look with mournful
eyes on the young men of today.’”
“Yes; they have degenerated horribly,” Katya agrees. “Tell me, have you
had one man of distinction among them for the last five or ten years?”
“I don’t know how it is with the other professors, but I can’t remember
any among mine.”
“I have seen in my day many of your students and young scientific men
and many actors--well, I have never once been so fortunate as to meet--I
won’t say a hero or a man of talent, but even an interesting man. It’s
all the same grey mediocrity, puffed up with self-conceit.”
All this talk of degeneration always affects me as though I had
accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter. It
offends me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on such worn-out
commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as degeneration and absence
of ideals, or on references to the splendours of the past. Every
accusation, even if it is uttered in ladies’ society, ought to be
formulated with all possible definiteness, or it is not an accusation,
but idle disparagement, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, I have been lecturing for thirty years, but I notice
neither degeneration nor lack of ideals, and I don’t find that the
present is worse than the past. My porter Nikolay, whose experience of
this subject has its value, says that the students of today are neither
better nor worse than those of the past.
If I were asked what I don’t like in my pupils of today, I should answer
the question, not straight off and not at length, but with sufficient
definiteness. I know their failings, and so have no need to resort
to vague generalities. I don’t like their smoking, using spirituous
beverages, marrying late, and often being so irresponsible and careless
that they will let one of their number be starving in their midst while
they neglect to pay their subscriptions to the Students’ Aid Society.
They don’t know modern languages, and they don’t express themselves
correctly in Russian; no longer ago than yesterday my colleague, the
professor of hygiene, complained to me that he had to give twice as many
lectures, because the students had a very poor knowledge of physics and
were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are readily carried away
by the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not
first-rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability
to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of
practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that have
more or less a social character (for instance the migration question)
they settle by studying monographs on the subject, but not by way of
scientific investigation or experiment, though that method is at their
disposal and is more in keeping with their calling. They gladly become
ward-surgeons, assistants, demonstrators, external teachers, and are
ready to fill such posts until they are forty, though independence,
a sense of freedom and personal initiative, are no less necessary
in science than, for instance, in art or commerce. I have pupils and
listeners, but no successors and helpers, and so I love them and am
touched by them, but am not proud of them. And so on, and so on....
Such shortcomings, however numerous they may be, can only give rise to
a pessimistic or fault-finding temper in a faint-hearted and timid
man. All these failings have a casual, transitory character, and are
completely dependent on conditions of life; in some ten years they will
have disappeared or given place to other fresh defects, which are all
inevitable and will in their turn alarm the faint-hearted. The students’
sins often vex me, but that vexation is nothing in comparison with the
joy I have been experiencing now for the last thirty years when I talk
to my pupils, lecture to them, watch their relations, and compare them
with people not of their circle.
Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and
neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent
diversion of finding fault with their neighbours is gradually drawing
them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk passes into
malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both beginning to drop
into the habits and methods of slander.
“Killing types one meets with,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch. “I went
yesterday to our friend Yegor Petrovitch’s, and there I found a studious
gentleman, one of your medicals in his third year, I believe. Such a
face!... in the Dobrolubov style, the imprint of profound thought on his
brow; we got into talk. ‘Such doings, young man,’ said I. ‘I’ve read,’
said I, ‘that some German--I’ve forgotten his name--has created from
the human brain a new kind of alkaloid, idiotine.’ What do you think?
He believed it, and there was positively an expression of respect on his
face, as though to say, ‘See what we fellows can do!’ And the other day
I went to the theatre. I took my seat. In the next row directly in front
of me were sitting two men: one of ‘us fellows’ and apparently a law
student, the other a shaggy-looking figure, a medical student. The
latter was as drunk as a cobbler. He did not look at the stage at all.
He was dozing with his nose on his shirt-front. But as soon as an actor
begins loudly reciting a monologue, or simply raises his voice, our
friend starts, pokes his neighbour in the ribs, and asks, ‘What is
he saying? Is it elevating?’ ‘Yes,’ answers one of our fellows.
‘B-r-r-ravo!’ roars the medical student. ‘Elevating! Bravo!’ He had gone
to the theatre, you see, the drunken blockhead, not for the sake of art,
the play, but for elevation! He wanted noble sentiments.”
Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange laugh; she catches her
breath in rhythmically regular gasps, very much as though she were
playing the accordion, and nothing in her face is laughing but her
nostrils. I grow depressed and don’t know what to say. Beside myself, I
fire up, leap up from my seat, and cry:
“Do leave off! Why are you sitting here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? Give over!”
And without waiting for them to finish their gossip I prepare to go
home. And, indeed, it is high time: it is past ten.
“I will stay a little longer,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch. “Will you allow
me, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“I will,” answers Katya.
“_Bene!_ In that case have up another little bottle.”
They both accompany me with candles to the hall, and while I put on my
fur coat, Mihail Fyodorovitch says:
“You have grown dreadfully thin and older looking, Nikolay Stepanovitch.
What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
“Yes; I am not very well.”
“And you are not doing anything for it...” Katya puts in grimly.
“Why don’t you? You can’t go on like that! God helps those who help
themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your wife and daughter, and
make my apologies for not having been to see them. In a day or two,
before I go abroad, I shall come to say good-bye. I shall be sure to. I
am going away next week.”
I come away from Katya, irritated and alarmed by what has been said
about my being ill, and dissatisfied with myself. I ask myself whether I
really ought not to consult one of my colleagues. And at once I imagine
how my colleague, after listening to me, would walk away to the window
without speaking, would think a moment, then would turn round to me
and, trying to prevent my reading the truth in his face, would say in
a careless tone: “So far I see nothing serious, but at the same time,
_collega_, I advise you to lay aside your work....” And that would
deprive me of my last hope.
Who is without hope? Now that I am diagnosing my illness and prescribing
for myself, from time to time I hope that I am deceived by my own
illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the albumen and the sugar I
find, and in regard to my heart, and in regard to the swellings I
have twice noticed in the mornings; when with the fervour of the
hypochondriac I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take
a different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon
something comforting. All that is petty.
Whether the sky is covered with clouds or the moon and the stars are
shining, I turn my eyes towards it every evening and think that death is
taking me soon. One would think that my thoughts at such times ought
to be deep as the sky, brilliant, striking.... But no! I think about
myself, about my wife, about Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in
general; my thoughts are evil, petty, I am insincere with myself, and
at such times my theory of life may be expressed in the words the
celebrated Araktcheev said in one of his intimate letters: “Nothing good
can exist in the world without evil, and there is more evil than good.”
That is, everything is disgusting; there is nothing to live for, and the
sixty-two years I have already lived must be reckoned as wasted. I
catch myself in these thoughts, and try to persuade myself that they are
accidental, temporary, and not deeply rooted in me, but at once I think:
“If so, what drives me every evening to those two toads?”
And I vow to myself that I will never go to Katya’s again, though I know
I shall go next evening.
Ringing the bell at the door and going upstairs, I feel that I have no
family now and no desire to bring it back again. It is clear that the
new Araktcheev thoughts are not casual, temporary visitors, but have
possession of my whole being. With my conscience ill at ease, dejected,
languid, hardly able to move my limbs, feeling as though tons were added
to my weight, I get into bed and quickly drop asleep.
And then--insomnia!