Every Thursday we had visitors.
I ordered a piece of roast beef from the restaurant and telephoned to
Eliseyev's to send us caviare, cheese, oysters, and so on. I bought
playing-cards. Polya was busy all day getting ready the tea-things and
the dinner service. To tell the truth, this spurt of activity came as a
pleasant change in our idle life, and Thursdays were for us the most
interesting days.
Only three visitors used to come. The most important and perhaps the
most interesting was the one called Pekarsky--a tall, lean man of five
and forty, with a long hooked nose, with a big black beard, and a bald
patch on his head. His eyes were large and prominent, and his expression
was grave and thoughtful like that of a Greek philosopher. He was on the
board of management of some railway, and also had some post in a bank;
he was a consulting lawyer in some important Government institution, and
had business relations with a large number of private persons as a
trustee, chairman of committees, and so on. He was of quite a low grade
in the service, and modestly spoke of himself as a lawyer, but he had a
vast influence. A note or card from him was enough to make a celebrated
doctor, a director of a railway, or a great dignitary see any one
without waiting; and it was said that through his protection one might
obtain even a post of the Fourth Class, and get any sort of unpleasant
business hushed up. He was looked upon as a very intelligent man, but
his was a strange, peculiar intelligence. He was able to multiply 213 by
373 in his head instantaneously, or turn English pounds into German
marks without help of pencil or paper; he understood finance and railway
business thoroughly, and the machinery of Russian administration had no
secrets for him; he was a most skilful pleader in civil suits, and it
was not easy to get the better of him at law. But that exceptional
intelligence could not grasp many things which are understood even by
some stupid people. For instance, he was absolutely unable to understand
why people are depressed, why they weep, shoot themselves, and even kill
others; why they fret about things that do not affect them personally,
and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Shtchedrin.... Everything
abstract, everything belonging to the domain of thought and feeling, was
to him boring and incomprehensible, like music to one who has no ear. He
looked at people simply from the business point of view, and divided
them into competent and incompetent. No other classification existed for
him. Honesty and rectitude were only signs of competence. Drinking,
gambling, and debauchery were permissible, but must not be allowed to
interfere with business. Believing in God was rather stupid, but
religion ought be safeguarded, as the common people must have some
principle to restrain them, otherwise they would not work. Punishment is
only necessary as deterrent. There was no need to go away for holidays,
as it was just as nice in town. And so on. He was a widower and had no
children, but lived on a large scale, as though he had a family, and
paid three thousand roubles a year for his flat.
The second visitor, Kukushkin, an actual civil councillor though a young
man, was short, and was conspicuous for his extremely unpleasant
appearance, which was due to the disproportion between his fat, puffy
body and his lean little face. His lips were puckered up suavely, and
his little trimmed moustaches looked as though they had been fixed on
with glue. He was a man with the manners of a lizard. He did not walk,
but, as it were, crept along with tiny steps, squirming and sniggering,
and when he laughed he showed his teeth. He was a clerk on special
commissions, and did nothing, though he received a good salary,
especially in the summer, when special and lucrative jobs were found for
him. He was a man of personal ambition, not only to the marrow of his
bones, but more fundamentally--to the last drop of his blood; but even
in his ambitions he was petty and did not rely on himself, but was
building his career on the chance favour flung him by his superiors. For
the sake of obtaining some foreign decoration, or for the sake of having
his name mentioned in the newspapers as having been present at some
special service in the company of other great personages, he was ready
to submit to any kind of humiliation, to beg, to flatter, to promise. He
flattered Orlov and Pekarsky from cowardice, because he thought they
were powerful; he flattered Polya and me because we were in the service
of a powerful man. Whenever I took off his fur coat he tittered and
asked me: "Stepan, are you married?" and then unseemly vulgarities
followed--by way of showing me special attention. Kukushkin flattered
Orlov's weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blasé ways; to please him
he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised
persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at
supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and
perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond
of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor
is perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy
street-walker on the Nevsky Prospect, but to listen to him you would
think he was contaminated by all the vices of East and West combined,
that he was an honourary member of a dozen iniquitous secret societies
and was already marked by the police. Kukushkin lied about himself in an
unconscionable way, and they did not exactly disbelieve him, but paid
little heed to his incredible stories.
The third guest was Gruzin, the son of a worthy and learned general; a
man of Orlov's age, with long hair, short-sighted eyes, and gold
spectacles. I remember his long white fingers, that looked like a
pianist's; and, indeed, there was something of a musician, of a
virtuoso, about his whole figure. The first violins in orchestras look
just like that. He used to cough, suffered from migraine, and seemed
invalidish and delicate. Probably at home he was dressed and undressed
like a baby. He had finished at the College of Jurisprudence, and had at
first served in the Department of Justice, then he was transferred to
the Senate; he left that, and through patronage had received a post in
the Department of Crown Estates, and had soon afterwards given that up.
In my time he was serving in Orlov's department; he was his head-clerk,
but he said that he should soon exchange into the Department of Justice
again. He took his duties and his shifting about from one post to
another with exceptional levity, and when people talked before him
seriously of grades in the service, decorations, salaries, he smiled
good-naturedly and repeated Prutkov's aphorism: "It's only in the
Government service you learn the truth." He had a little wife with a
wrinkled face, who was very jealous of him, and five weedy-looking
children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he was only fond of his
children when he saw them, and on the whole was rather indifferent to
his family, and made fun of them. He and his family existed on credit,
borrowing wherever they could at every opportunity, even from his
superiors in the office and porters in people's houses. His was a flabby
nature; he was so lazy that he did not care what became of himself, and
drifted along heedless where or why he was going. He went where he was
taken. If he was taken to some low haunt, he went; if wine was set
before him, he drank--if it were not put before him, he abstained; if
wives were abused in his presence, he abused his wife, declaring she had
ruined his life--when wives were praised, he praised his and said quite
sincerely: "I am very fond of her, poor thing!" He had no fur coat and
always wore a rug which smelt of the nursery. When at supper he rolled
balls of bread and drank a great deal of red wine, absorbed in thought,
strange to say, I used to feel almost certain that there was something
in him of which perhaps he had a vague sense, though in the bustle and
vulgarity of his daily life he had not time to understand and appreciate
it. He played a little on the piano. Sometimes he would sit down at the
piano, play a chord or two, and begin singing softly:
"What does the coming day bring to me?"
But at once, as though afraid, he would get up and walk from the piano.
The visitors usually arrived about ten o'clock. They played cards in
Orlov's study, and Polya and I handed them tea. It was only on these
occasions that I could gauge the full sweetness of a flunkey's life.
Standing for four or five hours at the door, watching that no one's
glass should be empty, changing the ash-trays, running to the table to
pick up the chalk or a card when it was dropped, and, above all,
standing, waiting, being attentive without venturing to speak, to cough,
to smile--is harder, I assure you, is harder than the hardest of field
labour. I have stood on watch at sea for four hours at a stretch on
stormy winter nights, and to my thinking it is an infinitely easier
duty.
They used to play cards till two, sometimes till three o'clock at night,
and then, stretching, they would go into the dining-room to supper, or,
as Orlov said, for a snack of something. At supper there was
conversation. It usually began by Orlov's speaking with laughing eyes of
some acquaintance, of some book he had lately been reading, of a new
appointment or Government scheme. Kukushkin, always ingratiating, would
fall into his tone, and what followed was to me, in my mood at that
time, a revolting exhibition. The irony of Orlov and his friends knew no
bounds, and spared no one and nothing. If they spoke of religion, it was
with irony; they spoke of philosophy, of the significance and object of
life--irony again, if any one began about the peasantry, it was with
irony.
There is in Petersburg a species of men whose specialty it is to jeer at
every aspect of life; they cannot even pass by a starving man or a
suicide without saying something vulgar. But Orlov and his friends did
not jeer or make jokes, they talked ironically. They used to say that
there was no God, and personality was completely lost at death; the
immortals only existed in the French Academy. Real good did not and
could not possibly exist, as its existence was conditional upon human
perfection, which was a logical absurdity. Russia was a country as poor
and dull as Persia. The intellectual class was hopeless; in Pekarsky's
opinion the overwhelming majority in it were incompetent persons, good
for nothing. The people were drunken, lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We
had no science, our literature was uncouth, our commerce rested on
swindling--"No selling without cheating." And everything was in that
style, and everything was a subject for laughter.
Towards the end of supper the wine made them more good-humoured, and
they passed to more lively conversation. They laughed over Gruzin's
family life, over Kukushkin's conquests, or at Pekarsky, who had, they
said, in his account book one page headed _Charity_ and another
_Physiological Necessities_. They said that no wife was faithful; that
there was no wife from whom one could not, with practice, obtain
caresses without leaving her drawing-room while her husband was sitting
in his study close by; that girls in their teens were perverted and knew
everything. Orlov had preserved a letter of a schoolgirl of fourteen: on
her way home from school she had "hooked an officer on the Nevsky," who
had, it appears, taken her home with him, and had only let her go late
in the evening; and she hastened to write about this to her school
friend to share her joy with her. They maintained that there was not and
never had been such a thing as moral purity, and that evidently it was
unnecessary; mankind had so far done very well without it. The harm done
by so-called vice was undoubtedly exaggerated. Vices which are punished
by our legal code had not prevented Diogenes from being a philosopher
and a teacher. Cæsar and Cicero were profligates and at the same time
great men. Cato in his old age married a young girl, and yet he was
regarded as a great ascetic and a pillar of morality.
At three or four o'clock the party broke up or they went off together
out of town, or to Officers' Street, to the house of a certain Varvara
Ossipovna, while I retired to my quarters, and was kept awake a long
while by coughing and headache.