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Title: Youth
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Date: 1856
Language: en
Topics: youth, autobiographical, fiction
Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2637

Leo Tolstoy

Youth

I. WHAT I CONSIDER TO HAVE BEEN THE BEGINNING OF MY YOUTH

I have said that my friendship with Dimitri opened up for me a new view

of my life and of its aim and relations. The essence of that view lay in

the conviction that the destiny of man is to strive for moral

improvement, and that such improvement is at once easy, possible, and

lasting. Hitherto, however, I had found pleasure only in the new ideas

which I discovered to arise from that conviction, and in the forming of

brilliant plans for a moral, active future, while all the time my life

had been continuing along its old petty, muddled, pleasure-seeking

course, and the same virtuous thoughts which I and my adored friend

Dimitri (“my own marvellous Mitia,” as I used to call him to myself in a

whisper) had been wont to exchange with one another still pleased my

intellect, but left my sensibility untouched. Nevertheless there came a

moment when those thoughts swept into my head with a sudden freshness

and force of moral revelation which left me aghast at the amount of time

which I had been wasting, and made me feel as though I must at once—that

very second—apply those thoughts to life, with the firm intention of

never again changing them.

It is from that moment that I date the beginning of my youth.

I was then nearly sixteen. Tutors still attended to give me lessons, St.

Jerome still acted as general supervisor of my education, and,

willy-nilly, I was being prepared for the University. In addition to my

studies, my occupations included certain vague dreamings and ponderings,

a number of gymnastic exercises to make myself the finest athlete in the

world, a good deal of aimless, thoughtless wandering through the rooms

of the house (but more especially along the maidservants’ corridor), and

much looking at myself in the mirror. From the latter, however, I always

turned away with a vague feeling of depression, almost of repulsion. Not

only did I feel sure that my exterior was ugly, but I could derive no

comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I

could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever,

or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its

features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small

grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to

be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less,

since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover,

plenty of strength for my years, every feature in my face was of the

meek, sleepy-looking, indefinite type. Even refinement was lacking in

it, since, on the contrary, it precisely resembled that of a

simple-looking moujik, while I also had the same big hands and feet as

he. At the time, all this seemed to me very shameful.

II. SPRINGTIME

Easter of the year when I entered the University fell late in April, so

that the examinations were fixed for St. Thomas’s Week, [Easter week.]

and I had to spend Good Friday in fasting and finally getting myself

ready for the ordeal.

Following upon wet snow (the kind of stuff which Karl Ivanitch used to

describe as “a child following, its father”), the weather had for three

days been bright and mild and still. Not a clot of snow was now to be

seen in the streets, and the dirty slush had given place to wet, shining

pavements and coursing rivulets. The last icicles on the roofs were fast

melting in the sunshine, buds were swelling on the trees in the little

garden, the path leading across the courtyard to the stables was soft

instead of being a frozen ridge of mud, and mossy grass was showing

green between the stones around the entrance-steps. It was just that

particular time in spring when the season exercises the strongest

influence upon the human soul—when clear sunlight illuminates

everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under one’s

feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when the

bright blue sky is streaked with long, transparent clouds.

For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the

birth of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive

in a great town than in the country. One sees less, but one feels more.

I was standing near the window—through the double frames of which the

morning sun was throwing its mote-flecked beams upon the floor of what

seemed to me my intolerably wearisome schoolroom—and working out a long

algebraical equation on the blackboard. In one hand I was holding a

ragged, long-suffering “Algebra” and in the other a small piece of chalk

which had already besmeared my hands, my face, and the elbows of my

jacket. Nicola, clad in an apron, and with his sleeves rolled up, was

picking out the putty from the window-frames with a pair of nippers, and

unfastening the screws. The window looked out upon the little garden. At

length his occupation and the noise which he was making over it arrested

my attention. At the moment I was in a very cross, dissatisfied frame of

mind, for nothing seemed to be going right with me. I had made a mistake

at the very beginning of my algebra, and so should have to work it out

again; twice I had let the chalk drop. I was conscious that my hands and

face were whitened all over; the sponge had rolled away into a corner;

and the noise of Nicola’s operations was fast getting on my nerves. I

had a feeling as though I wanted to fly into a temper and grumble at

some one, so I threw down chalk and “Algebra” alike, and began to pace

the room. Then suddenly I remembered that to-day we were to go to

confession, and that therefore I must refrain from doing anything wrong.

Next, with equal suddenness I relapsed into an extraordinarily

goodhumoured frame of mind, and walked across to Nicola.

“Let me help you, Nicola,” I said, trying to speak as pleasantly as I

possibly could. The idea that I was performing a meritorious action in

thus suppressing my ill-temper and offering to help him increased my

good-humour all the more.

By this time the putty had been chipped out, and the screws removed,

yet, though Nicola pulled with might and main at the cross-piece, the

window-frame refused to budge.

“If it comes out as soon as he and I begin to pull at it together,” I

thought, “it will be rather a shame, as then I shall have nothing more

of the kind to do to-day.”

Suddenly the frame yielded a little at one side, and came out.

“Where shall I put it?” I said.

“Let ME see to it, if you please,” replied Nicola, evidently surprised

as well as, seemingly, not over-pleased at my zeal. “We must not leave

it here, but carry it away to the lumber-room, where I keep all the

frames stored and numbered.”

“Oh, but I can manage it,” I said as I lifted it up. I verily believe

that if the lumber-room had been a couple of versts away, and the frame

twice as heavy as it was, I should have been the more pleased. I felt as

though I wanted to tire myself out in performing this service for

Nicola. When I returned to the room the bricks and screws had been

replaced on the windowsill, and Nicola was sweeping the debris, as well

as a few torpid flies, out of the open window. The fresh, fragrant air

was rushing into and filling all the room, while with it came also the

dull murmur of the city and the twittering of sparrows in the garden.

Everything was in brilliant light, the room looked cheerful, and a

gentle spring breeze was stirring Nicola’s hair and the leaves of my

“Algebra.” Approaching the window, I sat down upon the sill, turned my

eyes downwards towards the garden, and fell into a brown study.

Something new to me, something extraordinarily potent and unfamiliar,

had suddenly invaded my soul. The wet ground on which, here and there, a

few yellowish stalks and blades of bright-green grass were to be seen;

the little rivulets glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of

earth and tiny chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the

lilac, with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window;

the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush below; the

blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had lately melted off

it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous air and radiant sunlight—all

spoke to me, clearly and unmistakably, of something new and beautiful,

of something which, though I cannot repeat it here as it was then

expressed to me, I will try to reproduce so far as I understood it.

Everything spoke to me of beauty, happiness, and virtue—as three things

which were both easy and possible for me—and said that no one of them

could exist without the other two, since beauty, happiness, and virtue

were one. “How did I never come to understand that before?” I cried to

myself. “How did I ever manage to be so wicked? Oh, but how good, how

happy, I could be—nay, I WILL be—in the future! At once, at once—yes,

this very minute—I will become another being, and begin to live

differently!” For all that, I continued sitting on the window-sill,

continued merely dreaming, and doing nothing. Have you ever, on a

summer’s day, gone to bed in dull, rainy weather, and, waking just at

sunset, opened your eyes and seen through the square space of the

window—the space where the linen blind is blowing up and down, and

beating its rod upon the window-sill—the rain-soaked, shadowy, purple

vista of an avenue of lime-trees, with a damp garden path lit up by the

clear, slanting beams of the sun, and then suddenly heard the joyous

sounds of bird life in the garden, and seen insects flying to and fro at

the open window, and glittering in the sunlight, and smelt the fragrance

of the rain-washed air, and thought to yourself, “Am I not ashamed to be

lying in bed on such an evening as this?” and, leaping joyously to your

feet, gone out into the garden and revelled in all that welter of life?

If you have, then you can imagine for yourself the overpowering

sensation which was then possessing me.

III. DREAMS

“To-day I will make my confession and purge myself of every sin,” I

thought to myself. “Nor will I ever commit another one.” At this point I

recalled all the peccadilloes which most troubled my conscience. “I will

go to church regularly every Sunday, as well as read the Gospel at the

close of every hour throughout the day. What is more, I will set aside,

out of the cheque which I shall receive each month after I have gone to

the University, two-and-a-half roubles” (a tenth of my monthly

allowance) “for people who are poor but not exactly beggars, yet without

letting any one know anything about it. Yes, I will begin to look out

for people like that—orphans or old women—at once, yet never tell a soul

what I am doing for them.

“Also, I will have a room here of my very own (St. Jerome’s, probably),

and look after it myself, and keep it perfectly clean. I will never let

any one do anything for me, for every one is just a human being like

myself. Likewise I will walk every day, not drive, to the University.

Even if some one gives me a drozhki [Russian phaeton.] I will sell it,

and devote the money to the poor. Everything I will do exactly and

always” (what that “always” meant I could not possibly have said, but at

least I had a vivid consciousness of its connoting some kind of prudent,

moral, and irreproachable life). “I will get up all my lectures

thoroughly, and go over all the subjects beforehand, so that at the end

of my first course I may come out top and write a thesis. During my

second course also I will get up everything beforehand, so that I may

soon be transferred to the third course, and at eighteen come out top in

the examinations, and receive two gold medals, and go on to be Master of

Arts, and Doctor, and the first scholar in Europe. Yes, in all Europe I

mean to be the first scholar.—Well, what next?” I asked myself at this

point. Suddenly it struck me that dreams of this sort were a form of

pride—a sin which I should have to confess to the priest that very

evening, so I returned to the original thread of my meditations. “When

getting up my lectures I will go to the Vorobievi Gori, [Sparrow Hills—a

public park near Moscow.] and choose some spot under a tree, and read my

lectures over there. Sometimes I will take with me something to

eat—cheese or a pie from Pedotti’s, or something of the kind. After that

I will sleep a little, and then read some good book or other, or else

draw pictures or play on some instrument (certainly I must learn to play

the flute). Perhaps SHE too will be walking on the Vorobievi Gori, and

will approach me one day and say, ‘Who are you?’ and I shall look at

her, oh, so sadly, and say that I am the son of a priest, and that I am

happy only when I am there alone, quite alone. Then she will give me her

hand, and say something to me, and sit down beside me. So every day we

shall go to the same spot, and be friends together, and I shall kiss

her. But no! That would not be right! On the contrary, from this day

forward I never mean to look at a woman again. Never, never again do I

mean to walk with a girl, nor even to go near one if I can help it. Yet,

of course, in three years’ time, when I have come of age, I shall marry.

Also, I mean to take as much exercise as ever I can, and to do

gymnastics every day, so that, when I have turned twenty-five, I shall

be stronger even than Rappo. On my first day’s training I mean to hold

out half a pood [The Pood = 40 Russian pounds.] at arm’s length for five

minutes, and the next day twenty-one pounds, and the third day

twenty-two pounds, and so on, until at last I can hold out four poods in

each hand, and be stronger even than a porter. Then, if ever any one

should try to insult me or should begin to speak disrespectfully of HER,

I shall take him so, by the front of his coat, and lift him up an arshin

[The arshin = 2 feet 3 inches.] or two with one hand, and just hold him

there, so that he may feel my strength and cease from his conduct. Yet

that too would not be right. No, no, it would not matter; I should not

hurt him, merely show him that I—”

Let no one blame me because the dreams of my youth were as foolish as

those of my childhood and boyhood. I am sure that, even if it be my fate

to live to extreme old age and to continue my story with the years, I,

an old man of seventy, shall be found dreaming dreams just as impossible

and childish as those I am dreaming now. I shall be dreaming of some

lovely Maria who loves me, the toothless old man, as she might love a

Mazeppa; of some imbecile son who, through some extraordinary chance,

has suddenly become a minister of state; of my suddenly receiving a

windfall of a million of roubles. I am sure that there exists no human

being, no human age, to whom or to which that gracious, consolatory

power of dreaming is totally a stranger. Yet, save for the one general

feature of magic and impossibility, the dreams of each human being, of

each age of man, have their own distinguishing characteristics. At the

period upon which I look as having marked the close of my boyhood and

the beginning of my youth, four leading sentiments formed the basis of

my dreams. The first of those sentiments was love for HER—for an

imaginary woman whom I always pictured the same in my dreams, and whom I

somehow expected to meet some day and somewhere. This she of mine had a

little of Sonetchka in her, a little of Masha as Masha could look when

she stood washing linen over the clothes-tub, and a little of a certain

woman with pearls round her fair white neck whom I had once seen long,

long ago at a theatre, in a box below our own. My second sentiment was a

craving for love. I wanted every one to know me and to love me. I wanted

to be able to utter my name—Nicola Irtenieff—and at once to see every

one thunderstruck at it, and come crowding round me and thanking me for

something or another, I hardly knew what. My third sentiment was the

expectation of some extraordinary, glorious happiness that was

impending—some happiness so strong and assured as to verge upon ecstasy.

Indeed, so firmly persuaded was I that very, very soon some unexpected

chance would suddenly make me the richest and most famous man in the

world that I lived in constant, tremulous expectation of this magic good

fortune befalling me. I was always thinking to myself that “IT is

beginning,” and that I should go on thereafter to attain everything that

a man could wish for. Consequently, I was for ever hurrying from place

to place, in the belief that “IT” must be “beginning” just where I

happened not to be. Lastly, my fourth and principal sentiment of all was

abhorrence of myself, mingled with regret—yet a regret so blended with

the certain expectation of happiness to which I have referred that it

had in it nothing of sorrow. It seemed to me that it would be so easy

and natural for me to tear myself away from my past and to remake it—to

forget all that had been, and to begin my life, with all its relations,

anew—that the past never troubled me, never clung to me at all. I even

found a certain pleasure in detesting the past, and in seeing it in a

darker light than the true one. This note of regret and of a curious

longing for perfection were the chief mental impressions which I

gathered from that new stage of my growth—impressions which imparted new

principles to my view of myself, of men, and of God’s world. O good and

consoling voice, which in later days, in sorrowful days when my soul

yielded silently to the sway of life’s falseness and depravity, so often

raised a sudden, bold protest against all iniquity, as well as

mercilessly exposed the past, commanded, nay, compelled, me to love only

the pure vista of the present, and promised me all that was fair and

happy in the future! O good and consoling voice! Surely the day will

never come when you are silent?

IV. OUR FAMILY CIRCLE

PAPA was seldom at home that spring. Yet, whenever he was so, he seemed

extraordinarily cheerful as he either strummed his favourite pieces on

the piano or looked roguishly at us and made jokes about us all, not

excluding even Mimi. For instance, he would say that the Tsarevitch

himself had seen Mimi at the rink, and fallen so much in love with her

that he had presented a petition to the Synod for divorce; or else that

I had been granted an appointment as secretary to the Austrian

ambassador—a piece of news which he imparted to us with a perfectly

grave face. Next, he would frighten Katenka with some spiders (of which

she was very much afraid), engage in an animated conversation with our

friends Dubkoff and Nechludoff, and tell us and our guests, over and

over again, his plans for the year. Although these plans changed almost

from day to day, and were for ever contradicting one another, they

seemed so attractive that we were always glad to listen to them, and

Lubotshka, in particular, would glue her eyes to his face, so as not to

lose a single word. One day his plan would be that he should leave my

brother and myself at the University, and go and live with Lubotshka in

Italy for two years. Next, the plan would be that he should buy an

estate on the south coast of the Crimea, and take us for an annual visit

there; next, that we should migrate en masse to St. Petersburg; and so

forth. Yet, in addition to this unusual cheerfulness of his, another

change had come over him of late—a change which greatly surprised me.

This was that he had had some fashionable clothes made—an olive-coloured

frockcoat, smart trousers with straps at the sides, and a long wadded

greatcoat which fitted him to perfection. Often, too, there was a

delightful smell of scent about him when he came home from a party—more

especially when he had been to see a lady of whom Mimi never spoke but

with a sigh and a face that seemed to say: “Poor orphans! How dreadful!

It is a good thing that SHE is gone now!” and so on, and so on. From

Nicola (for Papa never spoke to us of his gambling) I had learnt that he

(Papa) had been very fortunate in play that winter, and so had won an

extraordinary amount of money, all of which he had placed in the bank

after vowing that he would play no more that spring. Evidently, it was

his fear of being unable to resist again doing so that was rendering him

anxious to leave for the country as soon as possible. Indeed, he ended

by deciding not to wait until I had entered the University, but to take

the girls to Petrovskoe immediately after Easter, and to leave Woloda

and myself to follow them at a later season.

All that winter, until the opening of spring, Woloda had been

inseparable from Dubkoff, while at the same time the pair of them had

cooled greatly towards Dimitri. Their chief amusements (so I gathered

from conversations overheard) were continual drinking of champagne,

sledge-driving past the windows of a lady with whom both of them

appeared to be in love, and dancing with her—not at children’s parties,

either, but at real balls! It was this last fact which, despite our love

for one another, placed a vast gulf between Woloda and myself. We felt

that the distance between a boy still taking lessons under a tutor and a

man who danced at real, grown-up balls was too great to allow of their

exchanging mutual ideas. Katenka, too, seemed grown-up now, and read

innumerable novels; so that the idea that she would some day be getting

married no longer seemed to me a joke. Yet, though she and Woloda were

thus grown-up, they never made friends with one another, but, on the

contrary, seemed to cherish a mutual contempt. In general, when Katenka

was at home alone, nothing but novels amused her, and they but slightly;

but as soon as ever a visitor of the opposite sex called, she at once

grew lively and amiable, and used her eyes for saying things which I

could not then understand. It was only later, when she one day informed

me in conversation that the only thing a girl was allowed to indulge in

was coquetry—coquetry of the eyes, I mean—that I understood those

strange contortions of her features which to every one else had seemed a

matter for no surprise at all. Lubotshka also had begun to wear what was

almost a long dress—a dress which almost concealed her goose-shaped

feet; yet she still remained as ready a weeper as ever. She dreamed now

of marrying, not a hussar, but a singer or an instrumentalist, and

accordingly applied herself to her music with greater diligence than

ever. St. Jerome, who knew that he was going to remain with us only

until my examinations were over, and so had obtained for himself a new

post in the family of some count or another, now looked with contempt

upon the members of our household. He stayed indoors very little, took

to smoking cigarettes (then all the rage), and was for ever whistling

lively tunes on the edge of a card. Mimi daily grew more and more

despondent, as though, now that we were beginning to grow up, she looked

for nothing good from any one or anything.

When, on the day of which I am speaking, I went in to luncheon I found

only Mimi, Katenka, Lubotshka, and St. Jerome in the dining-room. Papa

was away, and Woloda in his own room, doing some preparation work for

his examinations in company with a party of his comrades: wherefore he

had requested that lunch should be sent to him there. Of late, Mimi had

usually taken the head of the table, and as none of us had any respect

for her, luncheon had lost most of its refinement and charm. That is to

say, the meal was no longer what it had been in Mamma’s or our

grandmother’s time, namely, a kind of rite which brought all the family

together at a given hour and divided the day into two halves. We allowed

ourselves to come in as late as the second course, to drink wine in

tumblers (St. Jerome himself set us the example), to roll about on our

chairs, to depart without saying grace, and so on. In fact, luncheon had

ceased to be a family ceremony. In the old days at Petrovskoe, every one

had been used to wash and dress for the meal, and then to repair to the

drawing-room as the appointed hour (two o’clock) drew near, and pass the

time of waiting in lively conversation. Just as the clock in the

servants’ hall was beginning to whirr before striking the hour, Foka

would enter with noiseless footsteps, and, throwing his napkin over his

arm and assuming a dignified, rather severe expression, would say in

loud, measured tones: “Luncheon is ready!” Thereupon, with pleased,

cheerful faces, we would form a procession—the elders going first and

the juniors following, and, with much rustling of starched petticoats

and subdued creaking of boots and shoes—would proceed to the

dining-room, where, still talking in undertones, the company would seat

themselves in their accustomed places. Or, again, at Moscow, we would

all of us be standing before the table ready-laid in the hall, talking

quietly among ourselves as we waited for our grandmother, whom the

butler, Gabriel, had gone to acquaint with the fact that luncheon was

ready. Suddenly the door would open, there would come the faint swish of

a dress and the sound of footsteps, and our grandmother—dressed in a

mob-cap trimmed with a quaint old lilac bow, and wearing either a smile

or a severe expression on her face according as the state of her health

inclined her—would issue from her room. Gabriel would hasten to precede

her to her arm-chair, the other chairs would make a scraping sound, and,

with a feeling as though a cold shiver (the precursor of appetite) were

running down one’s back, one would seize upon one’s damp, starched

napkin, nibble a morsel or two of bread, and, rubbing one’s hands softly

under the table, gaze with eager, radiant impatience at the steaming

plates of soup which the butler was beginning to dispense in order of

ranks and ages or according to the favour of our grandmother.

On the present occasion, however, I was conscious of neither excitement

nor pleasure when I went in to luncheon. Even the mingled chatter of

Mimi, the girls, and St. Jerome about the horrible boots of our Russian

tutor, the pleated dresses worn by the young Princesses Kornakoff, and

so forth (chatter which at any other time would have filled me with a

sincerity of contempt which I should have been at no pains to conceal—at

all events so far as Lubotshka and Katenka were concerned), failed to

shake the benevolent frame of mind into which I had fallen. I was

unusually good-humoured that day, and listened to everything with a

smile and a studied air of kindness. Even when I asked for the kvas I

did so politely, while I lost not a moment in agreeing with St. Jerome

when he told me that it was undoubtedly more correct to say “Je peux”

than “Je puis.” Yet, I must confess to a certain disappointment at

finding that no one paid any particular attention to my politeness and

good-humour. After luncheon, Lubotshka showed me a paper on which she

had written down a list of her sins: upon which I observed that,

although the idea was excellent so far as it went, it would be still

better for her to write down her sins on her SOUL—“a very different

matter.”

“Why is it ‘a very different matter’?” asked Lubotshka.

“Never mind: that is all right; you do not understand me,” and I went

upstairs to my room, telling St. Jerome that I was going to work, but in

reality purposing to occupy the hour and a half before confession time

in writing down a list of my daily tasks and duties which should last me

all my life, together with a statement of my life’s aim, and the rules

by which I meant unswervingly to be guided.

V. MY RULES

I TOOK some sheets of paper, and tried, first of all, to make a list of

my tasks and duties for the coming year. The paper needed ruling, but,

as I could not find the ruler, I had to use a Latin dictionary instead.

The result was that, when I had drawn the pen along the edge of the

dictionary and removed the latter, I found that, in place of a line, I

had only made an oblong smudge on the paper, since the dictionary was

not long enough to reach across it, and the pen had slipped round the

soft, yielding corner of the book. Thereupon I took another piece of

paper, and, by carefully manipulating the dictionary, contrived to rule

what at least RESEMBLED lines. Dividing my duties into three sections—my

duties to myself, my duties to my neighbour, and my duties to God—I

started to indite a list of the first of those sections, but they seemed

to me so numerous, and therefore requiring to be divided into so many

species and subdivisions, that I thought I had better first of all write

down the heading of “Rules of My Life” before proceeding to their

detailed inscription. Accordingly, I proceeded to write “Rules of My

Life” on the outside of the six sheets of paper which I had made into a

sort of folio, but the words came out in such a crooked and uneven

scrawl that for long I sat debating the question, “Shall I write them

again?”—for long, sat in agonised contemplation of the ragged

handwriting and disfigured title-page. Why was it that all the beauty

and clarity which my soul then contained came out so misshapenly on

paper (as in life itself) just when I was wishing to apply those

qualities to what I was thinking at the moment?

“The priest is here, so please come downstairs and hear his directions,”

said Nicola as he entered.

Hurriedly concealing my folio under the table-cloth, I looked at myself

in the mirror, combed my hair upwards (I imagined this to give me a

pensive air), and descended to the divannaia, [Room with divans, or

ante-room] where the table stood covered with a cloth and had an ikon

and candles placed upon it. Papa entered just as I did, but by another

door: whereupon the priest—a grey-headed old monk with a severe, elderly

face—blessed him, and Papa kissed his small, squat, wizened hand. I did

the same.

“Go and call Woldemar,” said Papa. “Where is he? Wait a minute, though.

Perhaps he is preparing for the Communion at the University?”

“No, he is with the Prince,” said Katenka, and glanced at Lubotshka.

Suddenly the latter blushed for some reason or another, and then

frowned. Finally, pretending that she was not well, she left the room,

and I followed her. In the drawing-room she halted, and began to pencil

something fresh on her paper of peccadilloes.

“Well, what new sin have you gone and committed?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied with another blush. All at once we heard

Dimitri’s voice raised in the hall as he took his leave of Woloda.

“It seems to me you are always experiencing some new temptation,” said

Katenka, who had entered the room behind us, and now stood looking at

Lubotshka.

What was the matter with my sister I could not conceive, but she was now

so agitated that the tears were starting from her eyes. Finally her

confusion grew uncontrollable, and vented itself in rage against both

herself and Katenka, who appeared to be teasing her.

“Any one can see that you are a FOREIGNER!” she cried (nothing offended

Katenka so much as to be called by that term, which is why Lubotshka

used it). “Just because I have the secret of which you know,” she went

on, with anger ringing through her tone, “you purposely go and upset me!

Please do understand that it is no joking matter.”

“Do you know what she has gone and written on her paper, Nicolinka?”

cried Katenka, much infuriated by the term “foreigner.” “She has written

down that—”

“Oh, I never could have believed that you could be so cruel!” exclaimed

Lubotshka, now bursting into open sobbing as she moved away from us.

“You chose that moment on purpose! You spend your whole time in trying

to make me sin! I’ll never go to YOU again for sympathy and advice!”

VI. CONFESSION

With these and other disjointed impressions in my mind, I returned to

the divannaia. As soon as every one had reassembled, the priest rose and

prepared to read the prayer before confession. The instant that the

silence was broken by the stern, expressive voice of the monk as he

recited the prayer—and more especially when he addressed to us the

words: “Reveal thou all thy sins without shame, concealment, or

extenuation, and let thy soul be cleansed before God: for if thou

concealest aught, then great will be thy sin”—the same sensation of

reverent awe came over me as I had felt during the morning. I even took

a certain pleasure in recognising this condition of mine, and strove to

preserve it, not only by restraining all other thoughts from entering my

brain, but also by consciously exerting myself to feel no other

sensation than this same one of reverence.

Papa was the first to go to confession. He remained a long, long time in

the room which had belonged to our grandmother, and during that time the

rest of us kept silence in the divannaia, or only whispered to one

another on the subject of who should precede whom. At length, the voice

of the priest again reading the prayer sounded from the doorway, and

then Papa’s footsteps. The door creaked as he came out, coughing and

holding one shoulder higher than the other, in his usual way, and for

the moment he did not look at any of us.

“YOU go now, Luba,” he said presently, as he gave her cheek a

mischievous pinch. “Mind you tell him everything. You are my greatest

sinner, you know.”

Lubotshka went red and pale by turns, took her memorandum paper out of

her apron, replaced it, and finally moved away towards the doorway with

her head sunk between her shoulders as though she expected to receive a

blow upon it from above. She was not long gone, and when she returned

her shoulders were shaking with sobs.

At length—next after the excellent Katenka (who came out of the doorway

with a smile on her face)—my turn arrived. I entered the dimly-lighted

room with the same vague feeling of awe, the same conscious eagerness to

arouse that feeling more and more in my soul, that had possessed me up

to the present moment. The priest, standing in front of a reading-desk,

slowly turned his face to me.

I was not more than five minutes in the room, but came out from it happy

and (so I persuaded myself) entirely cleansed—a new, a morally reborn

individual. Despite the fact that the old surroundings of my life now

struck me as unfamiliar (even though the rooms, the furniture, and my

own figure—would to heavens that I could have changed my outer man for

the better in the same way that I believed myself to have changed my

inner I—were the same as before), I remained in that comfortable

attitude of mine until the very moment of bedtime.

Yet, no sooner had I begun to grow drowsy with the conning over of my

sins than in a flash I recollected a particularly shameful sin which I

had suppressed at confession time. Instantly the words of the prayer

before confession came back to my memory and began sounding in my ears.

My peace was gone for ever. “For if thou concealest aught, then great

will be thy sin.” Each time that the phrase recurred to me I saw myself

a sinner for whom no punishment was adequate. Long did I toss from side

to side as I considered my position, while expecting every moment to be

visited with the divine wrath—to be struck with sudden death,

perhaps!—an insupportable thought! Then suddenly the reassuring thought

occurred to me: “Why should I not drive out to the monastery when the

morning comes, and see the priest again, and make a second confession?”

Thereafter I grew calmer.

VII. THE EXPEDITION TO THE MONASTERY

Several times that night I woke in terror at the thought that I might be

oversleeping myself, and by six o’clock was out of bed, although the

dawn was hardly peeping in at the window. I put on my clothes and boots

(all of which were lying tumbled and unbrushed beside the bed, since

Nicola, of course had not been in yet to tidy them up), and, without a

prayer said or my face washed, emerged, for the first time in my life,

into the street ALONE.

Over the way, behind the green roof of a large building, the dim, cold

dawn was beginning to blush red. The keen frost of the spring morning

which had stiffened the pools and mud and made them crackle under my

feet now nipped my face and hands also. Not a cab was to be seen, though

I had counted upon one to make the journey out and home the quicker.

Only a file of waggons was rumbling along the Arbat Prospect, and a

couple of bricklayers talking noisily together as they strode along the

pavement. However, after walking a verst or so I began to meet men and

women taking baskets to market or going with empty barrels to fetch the

day’s water supply; until at length, at the cross streets near the Arbat

Gate, where a pieman had set up his stall and a baker was just opening

his shop, I espied an old cabman shaking himself after indulging in a

nap on the box of his be-scratched old blue-painted, hobble-de-hoy wreck

of a drozhki. He seemed barely awake as he asked twenty copecks as the

fare to the monastery and back, but came to himself a moment afterwards,

just as I was about to get in, and, touching up his horse with the spare

end of the reins, started to drive off and leave me. “My horse wants

feeding,” he growled, “I can’t take you, barin.[Sir]”

With some difficulty and a promise of FORTY copecks I persuaded him to

stop. He eyed me narrowly as he pulled up, but nevertheless said: “Very

well. Get in, barin.” I must confess that I had some qualms lest he

should drive me to a quiet corner somewhere, and then rob me, but I

caught hold of the collar of his ragged driving-coat, close to where his

wrinkled neck showed sadly lean above his hunched-up back, and climbed

on to the blue-painted, curved, rickety scat. As we set off along

Vozdvizhenka Street, I noticed that the back of the drozhki was covered

with a strip of the same greenish material as that of which his coat was

made. For some reason or another this reassured me, and I no longer felt

nervous of being taken to a quiet spot and robbed.

The sun had risen to a good height, and was gilding the cupolas of the

churches, when we arrived at the monastery. In the shade the frost had

not yet given, but in the open roadway muddy rivulets of water were

coursing along, and it was through fast-thawing mire that the horse went

clip-clopping his way. Alighting, and entering the monastery grounds, I

inquired of the first monk whom I met where I could find the priest whom

I was seeking.

“His cell is over there,” replied the monk as he stopped a moment and

pointed towards a little building up to which a flight of steps led.

“I respectfully thank you,” I said, and then fell to wondering what all

the monks (who at that moment began to come filing out of the church)

must be thinking of me as they glanced in my direction. I was neither a

grown-up nor a child, while my face was unwashed, my hair unbrushed, my

clothes tumbled, and my boots unblacked and muddy. To what class of

persons were the brethren assigning me—for they stared at me hard

enough? Nevertheless I proceeded in the direction which the young priest

had pointed out to me.

An old man with bushy grey eyebrows and a black cassock met me on the

narrow path to the cells, and asked me what I wanted. For a brief moment

I felt inclined to say “Nothing,” and then run back to the drozhki and

drive away home; but, for all its beetling brows, the face of the old

man inspired confidence, and I merely said that I wished to see the

priest (whom I named).

“Very well, young sir; I will take you to him,” said the old man as he

turned round. Clearly he had guessed my errand at a stroke. “The father

is at matins at this moment, but he will soon be back,” and, opening a

door, the old man led me through a neat hall and corridor, all lined

with clean matting, to a cell.

“Please to wait here,” he added, and then, with a kind, reassuring

glance, departed.

The little room in which I found myself was of the smallest possible

dimensions, but extremely neat and clean. Its furniture only consisted

of a small table (covered with a cloth, and placed between two equally

small casement-windows, in which stood two pots of geraniums), a stand

of ikons, with a lamp suspended in front of them, a bench, and two

chairs. In one corner hung a wall clock, with little flowers painted on

its dial, and brass weights to its chains, while upon two nails driven

into a screen (which, fastened to the ceiling with whitewashed pegs,

probably concealed the bed) hung a couple of cassocks. The windows

looked out upon a whitewashed wall, about two arshins distant, and in

the space between them there grew a small lilac-bush.

Not a sound penetrated from without, and in the stillness the measured,

friendly stroke of the clock’s pendulum seemed to beat quite loudly. The

instant that I found myself alone in this calm retreat all other

thoughts and recollections left my head as completely as though they had

never been there, and I subsided into an inexpressibly pleasing kind of

torpor. The rusty alpaca cassocks with their frayed linings, the worn

black leather bindings of the books with their metal clasps, the

dull-green plants with their carefully watered leaves and soil, and,

above all, the abrupt, regular beat of the pendulum, all spoke to me

intimately of some new life hitherto unknown to me—a life of unity and

prayer, of calm, restful happiness.

“The months, the years, may pass,” I thought to myself, “but he remains

alone—always at peace, always knowing that his conscience is pure before

God, that his prayer will be heard by Him.” For fully half an hour I sat

on that chair, trying not to move, not even to breathe loudly, for fear

I should mar the harmony of the sounds which were telling me so much,

and ever the pendulum continued to beat the same—now a little louder to

the right, now a little softer to the left.

VIII. THE SECOND CONFESSION

Suddenly the sound of the priest’s footsteps roused me from this

reverie.

“Good morning to you,” he said as he smoothed his grey hair with his

hand. “What can I do for you?”

I besought him to give me his blessing, and then kissed his small,

wizened hand with great fervour. After I had explained to him my errand

he said nothing, but moved away towards the ikons, and began to read the

exhortation: whereupon I overcame my shame, and told him all that was in

my heart. Finally he laid his hands upon my head, and pronounced in his

even, resonant voice the words: “My son, may the blessing of Our

Heavenly Father be upon thee, and may He always preserve thee in

faithfulness, loving-kindness, and meekness. Amen.”

I was entirely happy. Tears of joy coursed down my face as I kissed the

hem of his cassock and then raised my head again. The face of the priest

expressed perfect tranquillity. So keenly did I feel the joy of

reconciliation that, fearing in any way to dispel it, I took hasty leave

of him, and, without looking to one side of me or the other (in order

that my attention might not be distracted), left the grounds and

re-entered the rickety, battered drozhki. Yet the joltings of the

vehicle and the variety of objects which flitted past my eyes soon

dissipated that feeling, and I became filled with nothing but the idea

that the priest must have thought me the finest-spirited young man he

had ever met, or ever would meet, in the whole of his life. Indeed, I

reflected, there could not be many such as myself—of that I felt sure,

and the conviction produced in me the kind of complacency which craves

for self-communication to another. I had a great desire to unbosom

myself to some one, and as there was no one else to speak to, I

addressed myself to the cabman.

“Was I very long gone?” I asked him.

“No, not very long,” he replied. He seemed to have grown more cheerful

under the influence of the sunshine. “Yet now it is a good while past my

horse’s feeding-time. You see, I am a night cabman.”

“Well, I only seemed to myself to be about a minute,” I went on. “Do you

know what I went there for?” I added, changing my seat to the well of

the drozhki, so as to be nearer the driver.

“What business is it of mine? I drive a fare where he tells me to go,”

he replied.

“Yes, but, all the same, what do you think I went there for?” I

persisted.

“I expect some one you know is going to be buried there, so you went to

see about a plot for the grave.”

“No, no, my friend. Still, DO you know what I went there for?”

“No, of course I cannot tell, barin,” he repeated.

His voice seemed to me so kind that I decided to edify him by relating

the cause of my expedition, and even telling him of the feeling which I

had experienced.

“Shall I tell you?” I said. “Well, you see,”—and I told him all, as well

as inflicted upon him a description of my fine sentiments. To this day I

blush at the recollection.

“Well, well!” said the cabman non-committally, and for a long while

afterwards he remained silent and motionless, except that at intervals

he adjusted the skirt of his coat each time that it was jerked from

beneath his leg by the joltings of his huge boot on the drozhki’s step.

I felt sure that he must be thinking of me even as the priest had done.

That is to say, that he must be thinking that no such fine-spirited

young man existed in the world as I. Suddenly he shot at me:

“I tell you what, barin. You ought to keep God’s affairs to yourself.”

“What?” I said.

“Those affairs of yours—they are God’s business,” he repeated, mumbling

the words with his toothless lips.

“No, he has not understood me,” I thought to myself, and said no more to

him till we reached home.

Although it was not my original sense of reconciliation and reverence,

but only a sort of complacency at having experienced such a sense, that

lasted in me during the drive home (and that, too, despite the

distraction of the crowds of people who now thronged the sunlit streets

in every direction), I had no sooner reached home than even my spurious

complacency was shattered, for I found that I had not the forty copecks

wherewith to pay the cabman! To the butler, Gabriel, I already owed a

small debt, and he refused to lend me any more. Seeing me twice run

across the courtyard in quest of the money, the cabman must have divined

the reason, for, leaping from his drozhki, he—notwithstanding that he

had seemed so kind—began to bawl aloud (with an evident desire to punch

my head) that people who do not pay for their cab-rides are swindlers.

None of my family were yet out of bed, so that, except for the servants,

there was no one from whom to borrow the forty copecks. At length, on my

most sacred, sacred word of honour to repay (a word to which, as I could

see from his face, he did not altogether trust), Basil so far yielded to

his fondness for me and his remembrance of the many services I had done

him as to pay the cabman. Thus all my beautiful feelings ended in smoke.

When I went upstairs to dress for church and go to Communion with the

rest I found that my new clothes had not yet come home, and so I could

not wear them. Then I sinned headlong. Donning my other suit, I went to

Communion in a sad state of mental perturbation, and filled with

complete distrust of all my finer impulses.

IX. HOW I PREPARED MYSELF FOR THE EXAMINATIONS

On the Thursday in Easter week Papa, my sister, Katenka, and Mimi went

away into the country, and no one remained in my grandmother’s great

house but Woloda, St. Jerome, and myself. The frame of mind which I had

experienced on the day of my confession and during my subsequent

expedition to the monastery had now completely passed away, and left

behind it only a dim, though pleasing, memory which daily became more

and more submerged by the impressions of this emancipated existence.

The folio endorsed “Rules of My Life” lay concealed beneath a pile of

school-books. Although the idea of the possibility of framing rules, for

every occasion in my life and always letting myself be guided by them

still pleased me (since it appeared an idea at once simple and

magnificent, and I was determined to make practical application of it),

I seemed somehow to have forgotten to put it into practice at once, and

kept deferring doing so until such and such a moment. At the same time,

I took pleasure in the thought that every idea which now entered my head

could be allotted precisely to one or other of my three sections of

tasks and duties—those for or to God, those for or to my neighbour, and

those for or to myself. “I can always refer everything to them,” I said

to myself, “as well as the many, many other ideas which occur to me on

one subject or another.” Yet at this period I often asked myself, “Was I

better and more truthful when I only believed in the power of the human

intellect, or am I more so now, when I am losing the faculty of

developing that power, and am in doubt both as to its potency and as to

its importance?” To this I could return no positive answer.

The sense of freedom, combined with the spring-like feeling of vague

expectation to which I have referred already, so unsettled me that I

could not keep myself in hand—could make none but the sorriest of

preparations for my University ordeal. Thus I was busy in the schoolroom

one morning, and fully aware that I must work hard, seeing that

to-morrow was the day of my examination in a subject of which I had the

two whole questions still to read up; yet no sooner had a breath of

spring come wafted through the window than I felt as though there were

something quite different that I wished to recall to my memory. My hands

laid down my book, my feet began to move of themselves, and to set me

walking up and down the room, and my head felt as though some one had

suddenly touched in it a little spring and set some machine in motion—so

easily and swiftly and naturally did all sorts of pleasing fancies of

which I could catch no more than the radiancy begin coursing through it.

Thus one hour, two hours, elapsed unperceived. Even if I sat down

determinedly to my book, and managed to concentrate my whole attention

upon what I was reading, suddenly there would sound in the corridor the

footsteps of a woman and the rustle of her dress. Instantly everything

would escape my mind, and I would find it impossible to remain still any

longer, however much I knew that the woman could only be either Gasha or

my grandmother’s old sewing-maid moving about in the corridor. “Yet

suppose it should be SHE all at once?” I would say to myself. “Suppose

IT is beginning now, and I were to lose it?” and, darting out into the

corridor, I would find, each time, that it was only Gasha. Yet for long

enough afterwards I could not recall my attention to my studies. A

little spring had been touched in my head, and a strange mental ferment

started afresh. Again, that evening I was sitting alone beside a tallow

candle in my room. Suddenly I looked up for a moment—to snuff the

candle, or to straighten myself in my chair—and at once became aware of

nothing but the darkness in the corners and the blank of the open

doorway. Then, I also became conscious how still the house was, and felt

as though I could do nothing else than go on listening to that

stillness, and gazing into the black square of that open doorway, and

gradually sinking into a brown study as I sat there without moving. At

intervals, however, I would get up, and go downstairs, and begin

wandering through the empty rooms. Once I sat a long while in the small

drawing-room as I listened to Gasha playing “The Nightingale” (with two

fingers) on the piano in the large drawing-room, where a solitary candle

burned. Later, when the moon was bright, I felt obliged to get out of

bed and to lean out of the window, so that I might gaze into the garden,

and at the lighted roof of the Shaposnikoff mansion, the straight tower

of our parish church, and the dark shadows of the fence and the

lilac-bush where they lay black upon the path. So long did I remain

there that, when I at length returned to bed, it was ten o’clock in the

morning before I could open my eyes again.

In short, had it not been for the tutors who came to give me lessons, as

well as for St. Jerome (who at intervals, and very grudgingly, applied a

spur to my self-conceit) and, most of all, for the desire to figure as

“clever” in the eyes of my friend Nechludoff (who looked upon

distinctions in University examinations as a matter of first-rate

importance)—had it not been for all these things, I say, the spring and

my new freedom would have combined to make me forget everything I had

ever learnt, and so to go through the examinations to no purpose

whatsoever.

X. THE EXAMINATION IN HISTORY

ON the 16th of April I entered, for the first time, and under the wing

of St. Jerome, the great hall of the University. I had driven there with

St. Jerome in our smart phaeton and wearing the first frockcoat of my

life, while the whole of my other clothes—even down to my socks and

linen—were new and of a grander sort. When a Swiss waiter relieved me of

my greatcoat, and I stood before him in all the beauty of my attire, I

felt almost sorry to dazzle him so. Yet I had no sooner entered the

bright, carpeted, crowded hall, and caught sight of hundreds of other

young men in gymnasium [The Russian gymnasium = the English grammar or

secondary school.] uniforms or frockcoats (of whom but a few threw me an

indifferent glance), as well as, at the far end, of some solemn-looking

professors who were seated on chairs or walking carelessly about among

some tables, than I at once became disabused of the notion that I should

attract the general attention, while the expression of my face, which at

home, and even in the vestibule of the University buildings, had denoted

only a kind of vague regret that I should have to present so important

and distinguished an appearance, became exchanged for an expression of

the most acute nervousness and dejection. However, I soon picked up

again when I perceived sitting at one of the desks a very badly,

untidily dressed gentleman who, though not really old, was almost

entirely grey. He was occupying a seat quite at the back of the hall and

a little apart from the rest, so I hastened to sit down beside him, and

then fell to looking at the candidates for examination, and to forming

conclusions about them. Many different figures and faces were there to

be seen there; yet, in my opinion, they all seemed to divide themselves

into three classes. First of all, there were youths like myself,

attending for examination in the company of their parents or tutors.

Among such I could see the youngest Iwin (accompanied by Frost) and

Ilinka Grap (accompanied by his old father). All youths of this class

wore the early beginnings of beards, sported prominent linen, sat

quietly in their places, and never opened the books and notebooks which

they had brought with them, but gazed at the professors and examination

tables with ill-concealed nervousness. The second class of candidates

were young men in gymnasium uniforms. Several of them had attained to

the dignity of shaving, and most of them knew one another. They talked

loudly, called the professors by their names and surnames, occupied

themselves in getting their subjects ready, exchanged notebooks, climbed

over desks, fetched themselves pies and sandwiches from the vestibule,

and ate them then and there merely lowering their heads to the level of

a desk for propriety’s sake. Lastly, the third class of candidates

(which seemed a small one) consisted of oldish men—some of them in frock

coats, but the majority in jackets, and with no linen to be seen. These

preserved a serious demeanour, sat by themselves, and had a very dingy

look. The man who had afforded me consolation by being worse dressed

than myself belonged to this class. Leaning forward upon his elbows, and

running his fingers through his grey, dishevelled hair as he read some

book or another, he had thrown me only a momentary glance—and that not a

very friendly one—from a pair of glittering eyes. Then, as I sat down,

he had frowned grimly, and stuck a shiny elbow out to prevent me from

coming any nearer. On the other hand, the gymnasium men were

over-sociable, and I felt rather afraid of their proximity. One of them

did not hesitate to thrust a book into my hands, saying, “Give that to

that fellow over there, will you?” while another of them exclaimed as he

pushed past me, “By your leave, young fellow!” and a third made use of

my shoulder as a prop when he wanted to scramble over a desk. All this

seemed to me a little rough and unpleasant, for I looked upon myself as

immensely superior to such fellows, and considered that they ought not

to treat me with such familiarity. At length, the names began to be

called out. The gymnasium men walked out boldly, answered their

questions (apparently) well, and came back looking cheerful. My own

class of candidates were much more diffident, as well as appeared to

answer worse. Of the oldish men, some answered well, and some very

poorly. When the name “Semenoff” was called out my neighbour with the

grey hair and glittering eyes jostled me roughly, stepped over my legs,

and went up to one of the examiners’ tables. It was plain from the

aspect of the professors that he answered well and with assurance, yet,

on returning to his place, he did not wait to see where he was placed on

the list, but quietly collected his notebooks and departed. Several

times I shuddered at the sound of the voice calling out the names, but

my turn did not come in exact alphabetical order, though already names

had begun to be called beginning with “I.”

“Ikonin and Tenieff!” suddenly shouted some one from the professors’ end

of the hall.

“Go on, Ikonin! You are being called,” said a tall, red-faced gymnasium

student near me. “But who is this BARtenieff or MORtenieff or somebody?

I don’t know him.”

“It must be you,” whispered St. Jerome loudly in my ear.

“MY name is IRtenieff,” I said to the red-faced student. “Do you think

that was the name they were calling out?”

“Yes. Why on earth don’t you go up?” he replied. “Lord, what a dandy!”

he added under his breath, yet not so quietly but that I failed to hear

the words as they came wafted to me from below the desk. In front of me

walked Ikonin—a tall young man of about twenty-five, who was one of

those whom I had classed as oldish men. He wore a tight brown frockcoat

and a blue satin tie, and had wisps of flaxen hair carefully brushed

over his collar in the peasant style. His appearance had already caught

my attention when we were sitting among the desks, and had given me an

impression that he was not bad-looking. Also I had noticed that he was

very talkative. Yet what struck me most about his physiognomy was a

tuft, of queer red hairs which he had under his chin, as well as, still

more, a strange habit of continually unbuttoning his waistcoat and

scratching his chest under his shirt.

Behind the table to which we were summoned sat three Professors, none of

whom acknowledged our salutations. A youngish professor was shuffling a

bundle of tickets like a pack of cards; another one, with a star on his

frockcoat, was gazing hard at a gymnasium student, who was repeating

something at great speed about Charles the Great, and adding to each of

his sentences the word nakonetz [= the English colloquialism “you

know.”] while a third one—an old man in spectacles—proceeded to bend his

head down as we approached, and, peering at us through his glasses,

pointed silently to the tickets. I felt his glance go over both myself

and Ikonin, and also felt sure that something about us had displeased

him (perhaps it was Ikonin’s red hairs), for, after taking another look

at the pair of us, he motioned impatiently to us to be quick in taking

our tickets. I felt vexed and offended—firstly, because none of the

professors had responded to our bows, and, secondly, because they

evidently coupled me with Ikonin under the one denomination of

“candidates,” and so were condemning me in advance on account of

Ikonin’s red hairs. I took my ticket boldly and made ready to answer,

but the professor’s eye passed over my head and alighted upon Ikonin.

Accordingly, I occupied myself in reading my ticket. The questions

printed on it were all familiar to me, so, as I silently awaited my

turn, I gazed at what was passing near me, Ikonin seemed in no way

diffident—rather the reverse, for, in reaching for his ticket, he threw

his body half-way across the table. Then he gave his long hair a shake,

and rapidly conned over what was written on his ticket. I think he had

just opened his mouth to answer when the professor with the star

dismissed the gymnasium student with a word of commendation, and then

turned and looked at Ikonin. At once the latter seemed taken back, and

stopped short. For about two minutes there was a dead silence.

“Well?” said the professor in the spectacles.

Once more Ikonin opened his mouth, and once more remained silent.

“Come! You are not the only one to be examined. Do you mean to answer or

do you not?” said the youngish professor, but Ikonin did not even look

at him. He was gazing fixedly at his ticket and uttered not a single

word. The professor in the spectacles scanned him through his glasses,

then over them, then without them (for, indeed, he had time to take them

off, to wipe their lenses carefully, and to replace them). Still not a

word from Ikonin. All at once, however, a smile spread itself over his

face, and he gave his long hair another shake. Next he reached across

the table, laid down his ticket, looked at each of the professors in

turn and then at myself, and finally, wheeling round on his heels, made

a gesture with his hand and returned to the desks. The professors stared

blankly at one another.

“Bless the fellow!” said the youngish professor. “What an original!”

It was now my turn to move towards the table, but the professors went on

talking in undertones among themselves, as though they were unaware of

my presence. At the moment, I felt firmly persuaded that the three of

them were engrossed solely with the question of whether I should merely

PASS the examination or whether I should pass it WELL, and that it was

only swagger which made them pretend that they did not care either way,

and behave as though they had not seen me.

When at length the professor in the spectacles turned to me with an air

of indifference, and invited me to answer, I felt hurt, as I looked at

him, to think that he should have so undeceived me: wherefore I answered

brokenly at first. In time, however, things came easier to my tongue,

and, inasmuch as all the questions bore upon Russian history (which I

knew thoroughly), I ended with eclat, and even went so far, in my desire

to convince the professors that I was not Ikonin and that they must not

in anyway confound me with him, as to offer to draw a second ticket. The

professor in the spectacles, however, merely nodded his head, said “That

will do,” and marked something in his register. On returning to the

desks, I at once learnt from the gymnasium men (who somehow seemed to

know everything) that I had been placed fifth.

XI. MY EXAMINATION IN MATHEMATICS

AT the subsequent examinations, I made several new acquaintances in

addition to the Graps (whom I considered unworthy of my notice) and Iwin

(who for some reason or other avoided me). With some of these new

friends I grew quite intimate, and even Ikonin plucked up sufficient

courage to inform me, when we next met, that he would have to undergo

re-examination in history—the reason for his failure this time being

that the professor of that faculty had never forgiven him for last

year’s examination, and had, indeed, “almost killed” him for it.

Semenoff (who was destined for the same faculty as myself—the faculty of

mathematics) avoided every one up to the very close of the examinations.

Always leaning forward upon his elbows and running his fingers through

his grey hair, he sat silent and alone. Nevertheless, when called up for

examination in mathematics (he had no companion to accompany him), he

came out second. The first place was taken by a student from the first

gymnasium—a tall, dark, lanky, pale-faced fellow who wore a black folded

cravat and had his cheeks and forehead dotted all over with pimples. His

hands were shapely and slender, but their nails were so bitten to the

quick that the finger-ends looked as though they had been tied round

with strips of thread. All this seemed to me splendid, and wholly

becoming to a student of the first gymnasium. He spoke to every one, and

we all made friends with him. To me in particular his walk, his every

movement, his lips, his dark eyes, all seemed to have in them something

extraordinary and magnetic.

On the day of the mathematical examination I arrived earlier than usual

at the hall. I knew the syllabus well, yet there were two questions in

the algebra which my tutor had managed to pass over, and which were

therefore quite unknown to me. If I remember rightly, they were the

Theory of Combinations and Newton’s Binomial. I seated myself on one of

the back benches and pored over the two questions, but, inasmuch as I

was not accustomed to working in a noisy room, and had even less time

for preparation than I had anticipated, I soon found it difficult to

take in all that I was reading.

“Here he is. This way, Nechludoff,” said Woloda’s familiar voice behind

me.

I turned and saw my brother and Dimitri—their gowns unbuttoned, and

their hands waving a greeting to me—threading their way through the

desks. A moment’s glance would have sufficed to show any one that they

were second-course students—persons to whom the University was as a

second home. The mere look of their open gowns expressed at once disdain

for the “mere candidate” and a knowledge that the “mere candidate’s”

soul was filled with envy and admiration of them. I was charmed to think

that every one near me could now see that I knew two real second-course

students: wherefore I hastened to meet them half-way.

Woloda, of course, could not help vaunting his superiority a little.

“Hullo, you smug!” he said. “Haven’t you been examined yet?”

“No.”

“Well, what are you reading? Aren’t you sufficiently primed?”

“Yes, except in two questions. I don’t understand them at all.”

“Eh, what?”—and Woloda straightway began to expound to me Newton’s

Binomial, but so rapidly and unintelligibly that, suddenly reading in my

eyes certain misgivings as to the soundness of his knowledge, he glanced

also at Dimitri’s face. Clearly, he saw the same misgivings there, for

he blushed hotly, though still continuing his involved explanations.

“No; hold on, Woloda, and let me try and do it,” put in Dimitri at

length, with a glance at the professors’ corner as he seated himself

beside me.

I could see that my friend was in the best of humours. This was always

the case with him when he was satisfied with himself, and was one of the

things in him which I liked best. Inasmuch as he knew mathematics well

and could speak clearly, he hammered the question so thoroughly into my

head that I can remember it to this day. Hardly had he finished when St.

Jerome said to me in a loud whisper, “A vous, Nicolas,” and I followed

Ikonin out from among the desks without having had an opportunity of

going through the OTHER question of which I was ignorant. At the table

which we now approached were seated two professors, while before the

blackboard stood a gymnasium student, who was working some formula

aloud, and knocking bits off the end of the chalk with his too vigorous

strokes. He even continued writing after one of the Professors had said

to him “Enough!” and bidden us draw our tickets. “Suppose I get the

Theory of Combinations?” I thought to myself as my tremulous fingers

took a ticket from among a bundle wrapped in torn paper. Ikonin, for his

part, reached across the table with the same assurance, and the same

sidelong movement of his whole body, as he had done at the previous

examination. Taking the topmost ticket without troubling to make further

selection, he just glanced at it, and then frowned angrily.

“I always draw this kind of thing,” he muttered.

I looked at mine. Horrors! It was the Theory of Combinations!

“What have you got?” whispered Ikonin at this point.

I showed him.

“Oh, I know that,” he said.

“Will you make an exchange, then?”

“No. Besides, it would be all the same for me if I did,” he contrived to

whisper just as the professor called us up to the blackboard. “I don’t

feel up to anything to-day.”

“Then everything is lost!” I thought to myself. Instead of the brilliant

result which I had anticipated I should be for ever covered with

shame—more so even than Ikonin! Suddenly, under the very eyes of the

professor, Ikonin turned to me, snatched my ticket out of my hands, and

handed me his own. I looked at his ticket. It was Newton’s Binomial!

The professor was a youngish man, with a pleasant, clever expression of

face—an effect chiefly due to the prominence of the lower part of his

forehead.

“What? Are you exchanging tickets, gentlemen?” he said.

“No. He only gave me his to look at, professor,” answered Ikonin—and,

sure enough, the word “professor” was the last word that he uttered

there. Once again, he stepped backwards towards me from the table, once

again he looked at each of the professors in turn and then at myself,

once again he smiled faintly, and once again he shrugged his shoulders

as much as to say, “It is no use, my good sirs.” Then he returned to the

desks. Subsequently, I learnt that this was the third year he had vainly

attempted to matriculate.

I answered my question well, for I had just read it up; and the

professor, kindly informing me that I had done even better than was

required, placed me fifth.

XII. MY EXAMINATION IN LATIN

All went well until my examination in Latin. So far, a gymnasium student

stood first on the list, Semenoff second, and myself third. On the

strength of it I had begun to swagger a little, and to think that, for

all my youth, I was not to be despised.

From the first day of the examinations, I had heard every one speak with

awe of the Professor of Latin, who appeared to be some sort of a wild

beast who battened on the financial ruin of young men (of those, that is

to say, who paid their own fees) and spoke only in the Greek and Latin

tongues. However, St. Jerome, who had coached me in Latin, spoke

encouragingly, and I myself thought that, since I could translate Cicero

and certain parts of Horace without the aid of a lexicon, I should do no

worse than the rest. Yet things proved otherwise. All the morning the

air had been full of rumours concerning the tribulations of candidates

who had gone up before me: rumours of how one young fellow had been

accorded a nought, another one a single mark only, a third one greeted

with abuse and threatened with expulsion, and so forth. Only Semenoff

and the first gymnasium student had, as usual, gone up quietly, and

returned to their seats with five marks credited to their names. Already

I felt a prescience of disaster when Ikonin and myself found ourselves

summoned to the little table at which the terrible professor sat in

solitary grandeur.

The terrible professor turned out to be a little thin, bilious-looking

man with hair long and greasy and a face expressive of extraordinary

sullenness. Handing Ikonin a copy of Cicero’s Orations, he bid him

translate. To my great astonishment Ikonin not only read off some of the

Latin, but even managed to construe a few lines to the professor’s

prompting. At the same time, conscious of my superiority over such a

feeble companion, I could not help smiling a little, and even looking

rather contemptuous, when it came to a question of analysis, and Ikonin,

as on previous occasions, plunged into a silence which promised never to

end. I had hoped to please the professor by that knowing, slightly

sarcastic smile of mine, but, as a matter of fact, I contrived to do

quite the contrary.

“Evidently you know better than he, since you are laughing,” he said to

me in bad Russian. “Well, we shall see. Tell me the answer, then.”

Later I learnt that the professor was Ikonin’s guardian, and that Ikonin

actually lived with him. I lost no time in answering the question in

syntax which had been put to Ikonin, but the professor only pulled a

long face and turned away from me.

“Well, your turn will come presently, and then we shall see how much you

know,” he remarked, without looking at me, but proceeding to explain to

Ikonin the point on which he had questioned him.

“That will do,” he added, and I saw him put down four marks to Ikonin in

his register. “Come!” I thought to myself. “He cannot be so strict after

all.”

When Ikonin had taken his departure the professor spent fully five

minutes—five minutes which seemed to me five hours—in setting his books

and tickets in order, in blowing his nose, in adjusting and sprawling

about on his chair, in gazing down the hall, and in looking here, there,

and everywhere—in doing everything, in fact, except once letting his eye

rest upon me. Yet even that amount of dissimulation did not seem to

satisfy him, for he next opened a book, and pretended to read it, for

all the world as though I were not there at all. I moved a little nearer

him, and gave a cough.

“Ah, yes! You too, of course! Well, translate me something,” he

remarked, handing me a book of some kind. “But no; you had better take

this,” and, turning over the leaves of a Horace, he indicated to me a

passage which I should never have imagined possible of translation.

“I have not prepared this,” I said.

“Oh! Then you only wish to answer things which you have got by heart, do

you? Indeed? No, no; translate me that.”

I started to grope for the meaning of the passage, but each questioning

look which I threw at the professor was met by a shake of the head, a

profound sigh, and an exclamation of “No, no!” Finally he banged the

book to with such a snap that he caught his finger between the covers.

Angrily releasing it, he handed me a ticket containing questions in

grammar, and, flinging himself back in his chair, maintained a menacing

silence. I should have tried to answer the questions had not the

expression of his face so clogged my tongue that nothing seemed to come

from it right.

“No, no! That’s not it at all!” he suddenly exclaimed in his horrible

accent as he altered his posture to one of leaning forward upon the

table and playing with the gold signet-ring which was nearly slipping

from the little finger of his left hand. “That is not the way to prepare

for serious study, my good sir. Fellows like yourself think that, once

they have a gown and a blue collar to their backs, they have reached the

summit of all things and become students. No, no, my dear sir. A subject

needs to be studied FUNDAMENTALLY,” and so on, and so on.

During this speech (which was uttered with a clipped sort of intonation)

I went on staring dully at his lowered eyelids. Beginning with a fear

lest I should lose my place as third on the list, I went on to fear lest

I should pass at all. Next, these feelings became reinforced by a sense

of injustice, injured self-respect, and unmerited humiliation, while the

contempt which I felt for the professor as some one not quite (according

to my ideas) “comme il faut”—a fact which I deduced from the shortness,

strength, and roundness of his nails—flared up in me more and more and

turned all my other feelings to sheer animosity. Happening, presently,

to glance at me, and to note my quivering lips and tear-filled eyes, he

seemed to interpret my agitation as a desire to be accorded my marks and

dismissed: wherefore, with an air of relenting, he said (in the presence

of another professor who had just approached):

“Very well; I will accord you a ‘pass’” (which signified two marks),

“although you do not deserve it. I do so simply out of consideration for

your youth, and in the hope that, when you begin your University career,

you will learn to be less light-minded.”

The concluding phrase, uttered in the hearing of the other professor

(who at once turned his eyes upon me, as though remarking, “There! You

see, young man!”) completed my discomfiture. For a moment, a mist swam

before my eyes—a mist in which the terrible professor seemed to be far

away, as he sat at his table while for an instant a wild idea danced

through my brain. “What if I DID do such a thing?” I thought to myself.

“What would come of it?” However, I did not do the thing in question,

but, on the contrary, made a bow of peculiar reverence to each of the

professors, and with a slight smile on my face—presumably the same smile

as that with which I had derided Ikonin—turned away from the table.

This piece of unfairness affected me so powerfully at the time that, had

I been a free agent, I should have attended for no more examinations. My

ambition was gone (since now I could not possibly be third), and I

therefore let the other examinations pass without any exertion, or even

agitation, on my part. In the general list I still stood fourth, but

that failed to interest me, since I had reasoned things out to myself,

and come to the conclusion that to try for first place was stupid—even

“bad form:” that, in fact, it was better to pass neither very well nor

very badly, as Woloda had done. This attitude I decided to maintain

throughout the whole of my University career, notwithstanding that it

was the first point on which my opinion had differed from that of my

friend Dimitri.

Yet, to tell the truth, my thoughts were already turning towards a

uniform, a “mortar-board,” and the possession of a drozhki of my own, a

room of my own, and, above all, freedom of my own. And certainly the

prospect had its charm.

XIII. I BECOME GROWN-UP

When, on May 8th, I returned home from the final, the divinity,

examination, I found my acquaintance, the foreman from Rozonoff’s,

awaiting me. He had called once before to fit me for my gown, as well as

for a tunic of glossy black cloth (the lapels of which were, on that

occasion, only sketched in chalk), but to-day he had come to bring me

the clothes in their finished state, with their gilt buttons wrapped in

tissue paper.

Donning the garments, and finding them splendid (notwithstanding that

St. Jerome assured me that the back of the tunic wrinkled badly), I went

downstairs with a complacent smile which I was powerless to banish from

my face, and sought Woloda, trying the while to affect unconsciousness

of the admiring looks of the servants, who came darting out of the hall

and corridor to gaze upon me with ravished eyes. Gabriel, the butler,

overtook me in the salle, and, after congratulating me with much

empressement, handed me, according to instructions from my father, four

bank-notes, as well as informed me that Papa had also given orders that,

from that day forth, the groom Kuzma, the phaeton, and the bay horse

Krassavchik were to be entirely at my disposal. I was so overjoyed at

this not altogether expected good-fortune that I could no longer feign

indifference in Gabriel’s presence, but, flustered and panting, said the

first thing which came into my head (“Krassavchik is a splendid

trotter,” I think it was). Then, catching sight of the various heads

protruding from the doors of the hall and corridor, I felt that I could

bear no more, and set off running at full speed across the salle,

dressed as I was in the new tunic, with its shining gilt buttons. Just

as I burst into Woloda’s room, I heard behind me the voices of Dubkoff

and Nechludoff, who had come to congratulate me, as well as to propose a

dinner somewhere and the drinking of much champagne in honour of my

matriculation. Dimitri informed me that, though he did not care for

champagne, he would nevertheless join us that evening and drink my

health, while Dubkoff remarked that I looked almost like a colonel, and

Woloda omitted to congratulate me at all, merely saying in an acid way

that he supposed we should now—i.e. in two days time—be off into the

country. The truth was that Woloda, though pleased at my matriculation,

did not altogether like my becoming as grown-up as himself. St. Jerome,

who also joined us at this moment, said in a very pompous manner that

his duties were now ended, and that, although he did not know whether

they had been well done or ill, at least he had done his best, and must

depart to-morrow to his Count’s. In replying to their various remarks I

could feel, in spite of myself, a pleased, agreeable, faintly

self-sufficient smile playing over my countenance, as well as could

remark that that smile, communicated itself to those to whom I was

speaking.

So here was I without a tutor, yet with my own private drozhki, my name

printed on the list of students, a sword and belt of my own, and a

chance of an occasional salute from officials! In short, I was grownup

and, I suppose, happy.

Finally, we arranged to go out and dine at five o’clock, but since

Woloda presently went off to Dubkoff’s, and Dimitri disappeared in his

usual fashion (saying that there was something he MUST do before

dinner), I was left with two whole hours still at my disposal. For a

time I walked through the rooms of the house, and looked at myself in

all the mirrors—firstly with the tunic buttoned, then with it

unbuttoned, and lastly with only the top button fastened. Each time it

looked splendid. Eventually, though anxious not to show any excess of

delight, I found myself unable to refrain from crossing over to the

coach-house and stables to gaze at Krassovchik, Kuzma, and the drozhki.

Then I returned and once more began my tour of the rooms, where I looked

at myself in all the mirrors as before, and counted my money over in my

pocket—my face smiling happily the while. Yet not an hour had elapsed

before I began to feel slightly ennuye—to feel a shade of regret that no

one was present to see me in my splendid position. I began to long for

life and movement, and so sent out orders for the drozhki to be got

ready, since I had made up my mind to drive to the Kuznetski Bridge and

make some purchases.

In this connection I recalled how, after matriculating, Woloda had gone

and bought himself a lithograph of horses by Victor Adam and some pipes

and tobacco: wherefore I felt that I too must do the same. Amid glances

showered upon me from every side, and with the sunlight reflected from

my buttons, cap-badge, and sword, I drove to the Kuznetski Bridge,

where, halting at a Picture shop, I entered it with my eyes looking to

every side. It was not precisely horses by Adam which I meant to buy,

since I did not wish to be accused of too closely imitating Woloda;

wherefore, out of shame for causing the obsequious shopmen such

agitation as I appeared to do, I made a hasty selection, and pitched

upon a water-colour of a woman’s head which I saw displayed in the

window—price twenty roubles. Yet no sooner had I paid the twenty roubles

over the counter than my heart smote me for having put two such

beautifully dressed shop-assistants to so much trouble for such a

trifle. Moreover, I fancied that they were regarding me with some

disdain. Accordingly, in my desire to show them what manner of man I

was, I turned my attention to a silver trifle which I saw displayed in a

show-case, and, recognising that it was a porte-crayon (price eighteen

roubles), requested that it should forthwith be wrapped in paper for me.

Next, the money paid, and the information acquired that splendid pipes

and tobacco were to be obtained in an adjacent emporium, I bowed to the

two shopmen politely, and issued into the street with the picture under

my arm. At the shop next door (which had painted on its sign-board a

negro smoking a cigar) I bought (likewise out of a desire to imitate no

one) some Turkish tobacco, a Stamboul hookah, and two pipes. On coming

out of the shop, I had just entered the drozhki when I caught sight of

Semenoff, who was walking hurriedly along the pavement with his head

bent down. Vexed that he should not have recognised me, I called out to

him pretty loudly, “Hold on a minute!” and, whipping up the drozhki,

soon overtook him.

“How do you do?” I said.

“My respects to you,” he replied, but without stopping.

“Why are you not in your University uniform?” I next inquired.

At this he stopped short with a frown, and parted his white teeth as

though the sun were hurting his eyes. The next moment, however, he threw

a glance of studied indifference at my drozhki and uniform, and

continued on his way.

From the Kuznetski Bridge, I drove to a confectioner’s in Tverskaia

Street, and, much as I should have liked it to be supposed that it was

the newspapers which most interested me, I had no choice but to begin

falling upon tartlet after tartlet. In fact, for all my bashfulness

before a gentleman who kept regarding me with some curiosity from behind

a newspaper, I ate with great swiftness a tartlet of each of the eight

different sorts which the confectioner kept.

On reaching home, I experienced a slight touch of stomach-ache, but paid

no attention to it, and set to work to inspect my purchases. Of these,

the picture so much displeased me that, instead of having it framed and

hung in my room, as Woloda had done with his, I took pains to hide it

behind a chest of drawers, where no one could see it. Likewise, though I

also found the porte-crayon distasteful, I was able, as I laid it on my

table, to comfort myself with the thought that it was at least a SILVER

article—so much capital, as it were—and likely to be very useful to a

student. As for the smoking things, I decided to put them into use at

once, and try their capabilities.

Unsealing the four packages, and carefully filling the Stamboul pipe

with some fine-cut, reddish-yellow Turkish tobacco, I applied a hot

cinder to it, and, taking the mouthpiece between my first and second

fingers (a position of the hand which greatly caught my fancy), started

to inhale the smoke.

The smell of the tobacco seemed delightful, yet something burnt my mouth

and caught me by the breath. Nevertheless, I hardened my heart, and

continued to draw abundant fumes into my interior. Then I tried blowing

rings and retaining the smoke. Soon the room became filled with blue

vapours, while the pipe started to crackle and the tobacco to fly out in

sparks. Presently, also, I began to feel a smarting in my mouth and a

giddiness in my head. Accordingly, I was on the point of stopping and

going to look at myself and my pipe in the mirror, when, to my surprise,

I found myself staggering about. The room was whirling round and round,

and as I peered into the mirror (which I reached only with some

difficulty) I perceived that my face was as white as a sheet. Hardly had

I thrown myself down upon a sofa when such nausea and faintness swept

over me that, making up my mind that the pipe had proved my death, I

expected every moment to expire. Terribly frightened, I tried to call

out for some one to come and help me, and to send for the doctor.

However, this panic of mine did not last long, for I soon understood

what the matter with me was, and remained lying on the sofa with a

racking headache and my limbs relaxed as I stared dully at the stamp on

the package of tobacco, the Pipe-tube coiled on the floor, and the odds

and ends of tobacco and confectioner’s tartlets which were littered

about. “Truly,” I thought to myself in my dejection and disillusionment,

“I cannot be quite grown-up if I cannot smoke as other fellows do, and

should be fated never to hold a chibouk between my first and second

fingers, or to inhale and puff smoke through a flaxen moustache!”

When Dimitri called for me at five o’clock, he found me in this

unpleasant predicament. After drinking a glass of water, however, I felt

nearly recovered, and ready to go with him.

“So much for your trying to smoke!” said he as he gazed at the remnants

of my debauch. “It is a silly thing to do, and waste of money as well. I

long ago promised myself never to smoke. But come along; we have to call

for Dubkoff.”

XIV. HOW WOLODA AND DUBKOFF AMUSED THEMSELVES

THE moment that Dimitri entered my room I perceived from his face,

manner of walking, and the signs which, in him, denoted ill-humour—a

blinking of the eyes and a grim holding of his head to one side, as

though to straighten his collar—that he was in the coldly-correct frame

of mind which was his when he felt dissatisfied with himself. It was a

frame of mind, too, which always produced a chilling effect upon my

feelings towards him. Of late I had begun to observe and appraise my

friend’s character a little more, but our friendship had in no way

suffered from that, since it was still too young and strong for me to be

able to look upon Dimitri as anything but perfect, no matter in what

light I regarded him. In him there were two personalities, both of which

I thought beautiful. One, which I loved devotedly, was kind, mild,

forgiving, gay, and conscious of being those various things. When he was

in this frame of mind his whole exterior, the very tone of his voice,

his every movement, appeared to say: “I am kind and good-natured, and

rejoice in being so, and every one can see that I so rejoice.” The other

of his two personalities—one which I had only just begun to apprehend,

and before the majesty of which I bowed in spirit—was that of a man who

was cold, stern to himself and to others, proud, religious to the point

of fanaticism, and pedantically moral. At the present moment he was, as

I say, this second personality.

With that frankness which constituted a necessary condition of our

relations I told him, as soon as we entered the drozhki, how much it

depressed and hurt me to see him, on this my fete-day in a frame of mind

so irksome and disagreeable to me.

“What has upset you so?” I asked him. “Will you not tell me?”

“My dear Nicolas,” was his slow reply as he gave his head a nervous

twitch to one side and blinked his eyes, “since I have given you my word

never to conceal anything from you, you have no reason to suspect me of

secretiveness. One cannot always be in exactly the same mood, and if I

seem at all put out, that is all there is to say about it.”

“What a marvellously open, honourable character his is!” I thought to

myself, and dropped the subject.

We drove the rest of the way to Dubkoff’s in silence. Dubkoff’s flat was

an unusually fine one—or, at all events, so it seemed to me. Everywhere

were rugs, pictures, gardenias, striped hangings, photographs, and

curved settees, while on the walls hung guns, pistols, pouches, and the

mounted heads of wild beasts. It was the appearance of this apartment

which made me aware whom, it was that Woloda had imitated in the scheme

of his own sitting-room. We found Dubkoff and Woloda engaged in cards,

while seated also at the table, and watching the game with close

attention, was a gentleman whom I did not know, but who appeared to be

of no great importance, judging by the modesty of his attitude. Dubkoff

himself was in a silk dressing-gown and soft slippers, while

Woloda—seated opposite him on a divan—was in his shirtsleeves, as well

as (to judge by his flushed face and the impatient, cursory glance which

he gave us for a second as he looked up from the cards) much taken up

with the game. On seeing me, he reddened still more.

“Well, it is for you to deal,” he remarked to Dubkoff. In an instant I

divined that he did not altogether relish my becoming acquainted with

the fact that he gambled. Yet his expression had nothing in it of

confusion—only a look which seemed to me to say: “Yes, I play cards, and

if you are surprised at that, it is only because you are so young. There

is nothing wrong about it—it is a necessity at our age.” Yes, I at once

divined and understood that.

Instead of dealing, however, Dubkoff rose and shook hands with us; after

which he bade us both be seated, and then offered us pipes, which we

declined.

“Here is our DIPLOMAT, then—the hero of the day!” he said to me, “Good

Lord! how you look like a colonel!”

“H-m!” I muttered in reply, though once more feeling a complacent smile

overspread my countenance.

I stood in that awe of Dubkoff which a sixteen-year-old boy naturally

feels for a twenty-seven-year-old man of whom his elders say that he is

a very clever young man who can dance well and speak French, and who,

though secretly despising one’s youth, endeavours to conceal the fact.

Yet, despite my respect for him, I somehow found it difficult and

uncomfortable, throughout my acquaintanceship with him, to look him in

the eyes, I have since remarked that there are three kinds of men whom I

cannot face easily, namely those who are much better than myself, those

who are much worse, and those between whom and myself there is a mutual

determination not to mention some particular thing of which we are both

aware. Dubkoff may have been a much better fellow than myself, or he may

have been a much worse; but the point was that he lied very frequently

without recognising the fact that I was aware of his doing so, yet had

determined not to mention it.

“Let us play another round,” said Woloda, hunching one shoulder after

the manner of Papa, and reshuffling the cards.

“How persistent you are!” said Dubkoff. “We can play all we want to

afterwards. Well, one more round, then.”

During the play, I looked at their hands. Woloda’s hands were large and

red, whilst in the crook of the thumb and the way in which the other

fingers curved themselves round the cards as he held them they so

exactly resembled Papa’s that now and then I could not help thinking

that Woloda purposely held the cards thus so as to look the more like a

grownup. Yet the next moment, looking at his face, I could see that he

had not a thought in his mind beyond the game. Dubkoff’s hands, on the

contrary, were small, puffy, and inclined to clench themselves, as well

as extremely neat and small-fingered. They were just the kind of hands

which generally display rings, and which are most to be seen on persons

who are both inclined to use them and fond of objets de vertu.

Woloda must have lost, for the gentleman who was watching the play

remarked that Vladimir Petrovitch had terribly bad luck, while Dubkoff

reached for a note book, wrote something in it, and then, showing Woloda

what he had written, said:

“Is that right?”

“Yes.” said Woloda, glancing with feigned carelessness at the note book.

“Now let us go.”

Woloda took Dubkoff, and I gave Dimitri a lift in my drozhki.

“What were they playing at?” I inquired of Dimitri.

“At piquet. It is a stupid game. In fact, all such games are stupid.”

“And were they playing for much?”

“No, not very much, but more than they ought to.”

“Do you ever play yourself?”

“No; I swore never to do so; but Dubkoff will play with any one he can

get hold of.”

“He ought not to do that,” I remarked. “So Woloda does not play so well

as he does?”

“Perhaps Dubkoff ought not to, as you say, yet there is nothing

especially bad about it all. He likes playing, and plays well, but he is

a good fellow all the same.”

“I had no idea of this,” I said.

“We must not think ill of him,” concluded Dimitri, “since he is a simply

splendid fellow. I like him very much, and always shall like him, in

spite of his weakness.”

For some reason or another the idea occurred to me that, just BECAUSE

Dimitri stuck up so stoutly for Dubkoff, he neither liked nor respected

him in reality, but was determined, out of stubbornness and a desire not

to be accused of inconstancy, never to own to the fact. He was one of

those people who love their friends their life long, not so much because

those friends remain always dear to them, as because, having

once—possibly mistakenly—liked a person, they look upon it as

dishonourable to cease ever to do so.

XV. I AM FETED AT DINNER

Dubkoff and Woloda knew every one at the restaurant by name, and every

one, from the waiters to the proprietor, paid them great respect. No

time was lost in allotting us a private room, where a bottle of iced

champagne-upon which I tried to look with as much indifference as I

could—stood ready waiting for us, and where we were served with a most

wonderful repast selected by Dubkoff from the French menu. The meal went

off most gaily and agreeably, notwithstanding that Dubkoff, as usual,

told us blood-curdling tales of doubtful veracity (among others, a tale

of how his grandmother once shot dead three robbers who were attacking

her—a recital at which I blushed, closed my eyes, and turned away from

the narrator), and that Woloda reddened visibly whenever I opened my

mouth to speak—which was the more uncalled for on his part, seeing that

never once, so far as I can remember, did I say anything shameful. After

we had been given champagne, every one congratulated me, and I drank

“hands across” with Dimitri and Dubkoff, and wished them joy. Since,

however, I did not know to whom the bottle of champagne belonged (it was

explained to me later that it was common property), I considered that,

in return, I ought to treat my friends out of the money which I had

never ceased to finger in my pocket. Accordingly, I stealthily extracted

a ten-rouble note, and, beckoning the waiter to my side, handed him the

money, and told him in a whisper (yet not so softly but that every one

could hear me, seeing that every one was staring at me in dead silence)

to “bring, if you please, a half-bottle of champagne.” At this Woloda

reddened again, and began to fidget so violently, and to gaze upon

myself and every one else with such a distracted air, that I felt sure I

had somehow put my foot in it. However, the half-bottle came, and we

drank it with great gusto. After that, things went on merrily. Dubkoff

continued his unending fairy tales, while Woloda also told funny

stories—and told them well, too—in a way I should never have credited

him: so that our laughter rang long and loud. Their best efforts lay in

imitation, and in variants of a certain well-known saw. “Have you ever

been abroad?” one would say to the other, for instance. “No,” the one

interrogated would reply, “but my brother plays the fiddle.” Such

perfection had the pair attained in this species of comic absurdity that

they could answer any question by its means, while they would also

endeavour to unite two absolutely unconnected matters without a previous

question having been asked at all, yet say everything with a perfectly

serious face and produce a most comic effect. I too began to try to be

funny, but as soon as ever I spoke they either looked at me askance or

did not look at me until I had finished: so that my anecdotes fell flat.

Yet, though Dubkoff always remarked, “Our DIPLOMAT is lying, brother,” I

felt so exhilarated with the champagne and the company of my elders that

the remark scarcely touched me. Only Dimitri, though he drank level with

the rest of us, continued in the same severe, serious frame of mind—a

fact which put a certain check upon the general hilarity.

“Now, look here, gentlemen,” said Dubkoff at last. “After dinner we

ought to take the DIPLOMAT in hand. How would it be for him to go with

us to see Auntie? There we could put him through his paces.”

“Ah, but Nechludoff will not go there,” objected Woloda.

“O unbearable, insupportable man of quiet habits that you are!” cried

Dubkoff, turning to Dimitri. “Yet come with us, and you shall see what

an excellent lady my dear Auntie is.”

“I will neither go myself nor let him go,” replied Dimitri.

“Let whom go? The DIPLOMAT? Why, you yourself saw how he brightened up

at the very mention of Auntie.”

“It is not so much that I WILL NOT LET HIM go,” continued Dimitri,

rising and beginning to pace the room without looking at me, “as that I

neither wish him nor advise him to go. He is not a child now, and if he

must go he can go alone—without you. Surely you are ashamed of this,

Dubkoff?—ashamed of always wanting others to do all the wrong things

that you yourself do?”

“But what is there so very wrong in my inviting you all to come and take

a cup of tea with my Aunt?” said Dubkoff, with a wink at Woloda. “If you

don’t like us going, it is your affair; yet we are going all the same.

Are you coming, Woloda?”

“Yes, yes,” assented Woloda. “We can go there, and then return to my

rooms and continue our piquet.”

“Do you want to go with them or not?” said Dimitri, approaching me.

“No,” I replied, at the same time making room for him to sit down beside

me on the divan. “I did not wish to go in any case, and since you advise

me not to, nothing on earth will make me go now. Yet,” I added a moment

later, “I cannot honestly say that I have NO desire to go. All I say is

that I am glad I am not going.”

“That is right,” he said. “Live your own life, and do not dance to any

one’s piping. That is the better way.”

This little tiff not only failed to mar our hilarity, but even increased

it. Dimitri suddenly reverted to the kindly mood which I loved best—so

great (as I afterwards remarked on more than one occasion) was the

influence which the consciousness of having done a good deed exercised

upon him. At the present moment the source of his satisfaction was the

fact that he had stopped my expedition to “Auntie’s.” He grew

extraordinarily gay, called for another bottle of champagne (which was

against his rules), invited some one who was a perfect stranger into our

room, plied him with wine, sang “Gaudeamus igitur,” requested every one

to join him in the chorus, and proposed that we should and rink at the

Sokolniki. [Mews.]

“Let us enjoy ourselves to-night,” he said with a laugh. “It is in

honour of his matriculation that you now see me getting drunk for the

first time in my life.”

Yet somehow this merriment sat ill upon him. He was like some

good-natured father or tutor who is pleased with his young charges, and

lets himself go for their amusement, yet at the same time tries to show

them that one can enjoy oneself decently and in an honourable manner.

However, his unexpected gaiety had an infectious influence upon myself

and my companions, and the more so because each of us had now drunk

about half a bottle of champagne.

It was in this pleasing frame of mind that I went out into the main

salon to smoke a cigarette which Dubkoff had given me. In rising I

noticed that my head seemed to swim a little, and that my legs and arms

retained their natural positions only when I bent my thoughts

determinedly upon them. At other moments my legs would deviate from the

straight line, and my arms describe strange gestures. I concentrated my

whole attention upon the members in question, forced my hands first to

raise themselves and button my tunic, and then to smooth my hair (though

they ruffled my locks in doing so), and lastly commanded my legs to

march me to the door—a function which they duly performed, though at one

time with too much reluctance, and at another with too much ABANDON (the

left leg, in particular, coming to a halt every moment on tiptoe). Some

one called out to me, “Where are you going to? They will bring you a

cigar-light directly,” but I guessed the voice to be Woloda’s, and,

feeling satisfied, somehow, that I had succeeded in divining the fact,

merely smiled airily in reply, and continued on my way.

XVI. THE QUARREL

In the main salon I perceived sitting at a small table a short, squat

gentleman of the professional type. He had a red moustache, and was

engaged in eating something or another, while by his side sat a tall,

clean-shaven individual with whom he was carrying on a conversation in

French. Somehow the aspect of these two persons displeased me; yet I

decided, for all that, to light my cigarette at the candelabrum which

was standing before them. Looking from side to side, to avoid meeting

their gaze, I approached the table, and applied my cigarette to the

flame. When it was fairly alight, I involuntarily threw a glance at the

gentleman who was eating, and found his grey eyes fixed upon me with an

expression of intense displeasure. Just as I was turning away his red

moustache moved a little, and he said in French:

“I do not like people to smoke when I am dining, my good sir.”

I murmured something inaudible.

“No, I do not like it at all,” he went on sternly, and with a glance at

his clean-shaven companion, as though inviting him to admire the way in

which he was about to deal with me. “I do not like it, my good sir, nor

do I like people who have the impudence to puff their smoke up one’s

very nose.”

By this time I had gathered that it was myself he was scolding, and at

first felt as though I had been altogether in the wrong.

“I did not mean to inconvenience you,” I said.

“Well, if you did not suppose you were being impertinent, at least I

did! You are a cad, young sir!” he shouted in reply.

“But what right have you to shout at me like that?” I exclaimed, feeling

that it was now HE that was insulting ME, and growing angry accordingly.

“This much right,” he replied, “that I never allow myself to be

overlooked by any one, and that I always teach young fellows like

yourself their manners. What is your name, young sir, and where do you

live?”

At this I felt so hurt that my teeth chattered, and I felt as though I

were choking. Yet all the while I was conscious of being in the wrong,

and so, instead of offering any further rudeness to the offended one,

humbly told him my name and address.

“And MY name, young sir,” he returned, “is Kolpikoff, and I will trouble

you to be more polite to me in future.—However, You will hear from me

again” (“vous aurez de mes nouvelles”—the conversation had been carried

on wholly in French), was his concluding remark.

To this I replied, “I shall be delighted,” with an infusion of as much

hauteur as I could muster into my tone. Then, turning on my heel, I

returned with my cigarette—which had meanwhile gone out—to our own room.

I said nothing, either to my brother or my friends, about what had

happened (and the more so because they were at that moment engaged in a

dispute of their own), but sat down in a corner to think over the

strange affair. The words, “You are a cad, young sir,” vexed me more and

more the longer that they sounded in my ears. My tipsiness was gone now,

and, in considering my conduct during the dispute, the uncomfortable

thought came over me that I had behaved like a coward.

“Yet what right had he to attack me?” I reflected. “Why did he not

simply intimate to me that I was annoying him? After all, it may have

been he that was in the wrong. Why, too, when he called me a young cad,

did I not say to him, ‘A cad, my good sir, is one who takes offence’? Or

why did I not simply tell him to hold his tongue? That would have been

the better course. Or why did I not challenge him to a duel? No, I did

none of those things, but swallowed his insults like a wretched coward.”

Still the words, “You are a cad, young sir,” kept sounding in my ears

with maddening iteration. “I cannot leave things as they are,” I at

length decided as I rose to my feet with the fixed intention of

returning to the gentleman and saying something outrageous to

him—perhaps, also, of breaking the candelabrum over his head if occasion

offered. Yet, though I considered the advisability of this last measure

with some pleasure, it was not without a good deal of trepidation that I

re-entered the main salon. As luck would have it, M. Kolpikoff was no

longer there, but only a waiter engaged in clearing the table. For a

moment I felt like telling the waiter the whole story, and explaining to

him my innocence in the matter, but for some reason or another I thought

better of it, and once more returned, in the same hazy condition of

mind, to our own room.

“What has become of our DIPLOMAT?” Dubkoff was just saying. “Upon him

now hang the fortunes of Europe.”

“Oh, leave me alone,” I said, turning moodily away. Then, as I paced the

room, something made me begin to think that Dubkoff was not altogether a

good fellow. “There is nothing very much to admire in his eternal jokes

and his nickname of ‘DIPLOMAT,’” I reflected. “All he thinks about is to

win money from Woloda and to go and see his ‘Auntie.’ There is nothing

very nice in all that. Besides, everything he says has a touch of

blackguardism in it, and he is forever trying to make people laugh. In

my opinion he is simply stupid when he is not absolutely a brute.” I

spent about five minutes in these reflections, and felt my enmity

towards Dubkoff continually increasing. For his part, he took no notice

of me, and that angered me the more. I actually felt vexed with Woloda

and Dimitri because they went on talking to him.

“I tell you what, gentlemen: the DIPLOMAT ought to be christened,” said

Dubkoff suddenly, with a glance and a smile which seemed to me derisive,

and even treacherous. “Yet, O Lord, what a poor specimen he is!”

“You yourself ought to be christened, and you yourself are a sorry

specimen!” I retorted with an evil smile, and actually forgetting to

address him as “thou.” [In Russian as in French, the second person

singular is the form of speech used between intimate friends.]

This reply evidently surprised Dubkoff, but he turned away

good-humouredly, and went on talking to Woloda and Dimitri. I tried to

edge myself into the conversation, but, since I felt that I could not

keep it up, I soon returned to my corner, and remained there until we

left.

When the bill had been paid and wraps were being put on, Dubkoff turned

to Dimitri and said: “Whither are Orestes and Pedalion going now? Home,

I suppose, to talk about love. Well, let US go and see my dear Auntie.

That will be far more entertaining than your sour company.”

“How dare you speak like that, and laugh at us?” I burst out as I

approached him with clenched fists. “How dare you laugh at feelings

which you do not understand? I will not have you do it! Hold your

tongue!” At this point I had to hold my own, for I did not know what to

say next, and was, moreover, out of breath with excitement. At first

Dubkoff was taken aback, but presently he tried to laugh it off, and to

take it as a joke. Finally I was surprised to see him look crestfallen,

and lower his eyes.

“I NEVER laugh at you or your feelings. It is merely my way of

speaking,” he said evasively.

“Indeed?” I cried; yet the next moment I felt ashamed of myself and

sorry for him, since his flushed, downcast face had in it no other

expression than one of genuine pain.

“What is the matter with you?” said Woloda and Dimitri simultaneously.

“No one was trying to insult you.”

“Yes, he DID try to insult me!” I replied.

“What an extraordinary fellow your brother is!” said Dubkoff to Woloda.

At that moment he was passing out of the door, and could not have heard

what I said. Possibly I should have flung myself after him and offered

him further insult, had it not been that just at that moment the waiter

who had witnessed my encounter with Kolpikoff handed me my greatcoat,

and I at once quietened down—merely making such a pretence of having had

a difference with Dimitri as was necessary to make my sudden appeasement

appear nothing extraordinary. Next day, when I met Dubkoff at Woloda’s,

the quarrel was not raked up, yet he and I still addressed each other as

“you,” and found it harder than ever to look one another in the face.

The remembrance of my scene with Kolpikoff—who, by the way, never sent

me “de ses nouvelles,” either the following day or any day

afterwards—remained for years a keen and unpleasant memory. Even so much

as five years after it had happened I would begin fidgeting and

muttering to myself whenever I remembered the unavenged insult, and was

fain to comfort myself with the satisfaction of recollecting the sort of

young fellow I had shown myself to be in my subsequent affair with

Dubkoff. In fact, it was only later still that I began to regard the

matter in another light, and both to recall with comic appreciation my

passage of arms with Kolpikoff, and to regret the undeserved affront

which I had offered my good friend Dubkoff.

When, at a later hour on the evening of the dinner, I told Dimitri of my

affair with Kolpikoff, whose exterior I described in detail, he was

astounded.

“That is the very man!” he cried. “Don’t you know that this precious

Kolpikoff is a known scamp and sharper, as well as, above all things, a

coward, and that he was expelled from his regiment by his brother

officers because, having had his face slapped, he would not fight? But

how came you to let him get away?” he added, with a kindly smile and

glance. “Surely he could not have said more to you than he did when he

called you a cad?”

“No,” I admitted with a blush.

“Well, it was not right, but there is no great harm done,” said Dimitri

consolingly.

Long afterwards, when thinking the matter over at leisure, I suddenly

came to the conclusion that it was quite possible that Kolpikoff took

the opportunity of vicariously wiping off upon me the slap in the face

which he had once received, just as I myself took the opportunity of

vicariously wiping off upon the innocent Dubkoff the epithet “cad” which

Kolpikoff had just applied to me.

XVII. I GET READY TO PAY SOME CALLS

On awaking next morning my first thoughts were of the affair with

Kolpikoff. Once again I muttered to myself and stamped about the room,

but there was no help for it. To-day was the last day that I was to

spend in Moscow, and it was to be spent, by Papa’s orders, in my paying

a round of calls which he had written out for me on a piece of paper—his

first solicitude on our account being not so much for our morals or our

education as for our due observance of the convenances. On the piece of

paper was written in his swift, broken hand-writing: “(1) Prince Ivan

Ivanovitch WITHOUT FAIL; (2) the Iwins WITHOUT FAIL; (3) Prince Michael;

(4) the Princess Nechludoff and Madame Valakhina if you wish.” Of course

I was also to call upon my guardian, upon the rector, and upon the

professors.

These last-mentioned calls, however, Dimitri advised me not to pay:

saying that it was not only unnecessary to do so, but not the thing.

However, there were the other visits to be got through. It was the first

two on the list—those marked as to be paid “WITHOUT FAIL”—that most

alarmed me. Prince Ivan Ivanovitch was a commander-in-chief, as well as

old, wealthy, and a bachelor. Consequently, I foresaw that vis-a-vis

conversation between him and myself—myself a sixteen-year-old

student!—was not likely to be interesting. As for the Iwins, they too

were rich—the father being a departmental official of high rank who had

only on one occasion called at our house during my grandmother’s time.

Since her death, I had remarked that the younger Iwin had fought shy of

us, and seemed to give himself airs. The elder of the pair, I had heard,

had now finished his course in jurisprudence, and gone to hold a post in

St. Petersburg, while his brother Sergius (the former object of my

worship) was also in St. Petersburg, as a great fat cadet in the Corps

of Pages.

When I was a young man, not only did I dislike intercourse with people

who thought themselves above me, but such intercourse was, for me, an

unbearable torture, owing partly to my constant dread of being snubbed,

and partly to my straining every faculty of my intellect to prove to

such people my independence. Yet, even if I failed to fulfil the latter

part of my father’s instructions, I felt that I must carry out the

former. I paced my room and eyed my clothes ready disposed on chairs—the

tunic, the sword, and the cap. Just as I was about to set forth, old

Grap called to congratulate me, bringing with him Ilinka. Grap pere was

a Russianised German and an intolerably effusive, sycophantic old man

who was more often than not tipsy. As a rule, he visited us only when he

wanted to ask for something, and although Papa sometimes entertained him

in his study, old Grap never came to dinner with us. With his

subserviency and begging propensities went such a faculty of good-humour

and a power of making himself at home that every one looked upon his

attachment to us as a great honour. For my part, however, I never liked

him, and felt ashamed when he was speaking.

I was much put out by the arrival of these visitors, and made no effort

to conceal the fact. Upon Ilinka I had been so used to look down, and he

so used to recognise my right to do so, that it displeased me to think

that he was now as much a matriculated student as myself. In some way he

appeared to me to have made a POINT of attaining that equality. I

greeted the pair coldly, and, without offering them any refreshment

(since it went against the grain to do so, and I thought they could ask

for anything, if they wanted it, without my first inviting them to state

their requirements), gave orders for the drozhki to be got ready. Ilinka

was a good-natured, extremely moral, and far from stupid young fellow;

yet, for all that, what people call a person of moods. That is to say,

for no apparent reason he was for ever in some PRONOUNCED frame of

mind—now lachrymose, now frivolous, now touchy on the very smallest

point. At the present moment he appeared to be in the last-named mood.

He kept looking from his father to myself without speaking, except when

directly addressed, at which times he smiled the self-deprecatory,

forced smile under which he was accustomed to conceal his feelings, and

more especially that feeling of shame for his father which he must have

experienced in our house.

“So, Nicolas Petrovitch,” the old man said to me, following me

everywhere about the room as I went through the operation of dressing,

while all the while his fat fingers kept turning over and over a silver

snuff-box with which my grandmother had once presented me, “as soon as

ever I heard from my son that you had passed your examinations so well

(though of course your abilities are well-known to everyone), I at once

came to congratulate you, my dear boy. Why, I have carried you on my

shoulders before now, and God knows that I love you as though you were

my own son. My Ilinka too has always been fond of you, and feels quite

at home with you.”

Meanwhile the said Ilinka remained sitting silently by the window,

apparently absorbed in contemplation of my three-cornered cap, and every

now and then angrily muttering something in an undertone.

“Now, I also wanted to ask you, Nicolas Petrovitch.” His father went on,

“whether my son did well in the examinations? He tells me that he is

going to be in the same faculty as yourself, and that therefore you will

be able to keep an eye on him, and advise him, and so on.”

“Oh, yes, I suppose he passed well,” I replied, with a glance at Ilinka,

who, conscious of my gaze, reddened violently and ceased to move his

lips about. “And might he spend the day with you?” was the father’s next

request, which he made with a deprecatory smile, as though he stood in

actual awe of me, yet always keeping so close to me, wherever I moved,

that the fumes of the drink and tobacco in which he had been indulging

were constantly perceptible to my nostrils. I felt greatly vexed at his

placing me in such a false position towards his son, as well as at his

distracting my attention from what was, to me, a highly important

operation—namely, the operation of dressing; while, over and above all,

I was annoyed by the smell of liquor with which he followed me about.

Accordingly, I said very coldly that I could not have the pleasure of

Ilinka’s company that day, since I should be out.

“Ah! I suppose you are going to see your sister?” put in Ilinka with a

smile, but without looking at me. “Well, I too have business to attend

to.” At this I felt even more put out, as well as pricked with

compunction; so, to soften my refusal a little, I hastened to say that

the reason why I should not be at home that day was that I had to call

upon the PRINCE Ivan Ivanovitch, the PRINCESS Kornakoff, and the

Monsieur Iwin who held such an influential post, as well as, probably,

to dine with the PRINCESS Nechludoff (for I thought that, on learning

what important folk I was in the habit of mixing with, the Graps would

no longer think it worth while to pretend to me). However, just as they

were leaving, I invited Ilinka to come and see me another day; but he

only murmured something unintelligible, and it was plain that he meant

never to set foot in the house again.

When they had departed, I set off on my round of calls. Woloda, whom I

had asked that morning to come with me, in order that I might not feel

quite so shy as when altogether alone, had declined on the ground that

for two brothers to be seen driving in one drozhki would appear so

horribly “proper.”

XVIII. THE VALAKHIN FAMILY

Accordingly I set off alone. My first call on the route lay at the

Valakhin mansion. It was now three years since I had seen Sonetchka, and

my love for her had long become a thing of the past, yet there still

lingered in my heart a sort of clear, touching recollection of our

bygone childish affection. At intervals, also, during those three years,

I had found myself recalling her memory with such force and vividness

that I had actually shed tears, and imagined myself to be in love with

her again, but those occasions had not lasted more than a few minutes at

a time, and had been long in recurring.

I knew that Sonetchka and her mother had been abroad—that, in fact, they

had been so for the last two years. Also, I had heard that they had been

in a carriage accident, and that Sonetchka’s face had been so badly cut

with the broken glass that her beauty was marred. As I drove to their

house, I kept recalling the old Sonetchka to my mind, and wondering what

she would look like when I met her. Somehow I imagined that, after her

two years’ sojourn abroad, she would look very tall, with a beautiful

waist, and, though sedate and imposing, extremely attractive. Somehow,

also, my imagination refused to picture her with her face disfigured

with scars, but, on the contrary, since I had read somewhere of a lover

who remained true to his adored one in spite of her disfigurement with

smallpox, strove to imagine that I was in love with Sonetchka, for the

purpose of priding myself on holding to my troth in spite of her

scars—Yet, as a matter of fact, I was not really in love with her during

that drive, but having once stirred up in myself old MEMORIES of love,

felt PREPARED to fall into that condition, and the more so because, of

late, my conscience had often been pricking me for having discarded so

many of my old flames.

The Valakhins lived in a neat little wooden mansion approached by a

courtyard. I gained admittance by ringing a bell (then a rarity in

Moscow), and was received by a mincing, smartly-attired page. He either

could not or made no attempt to inform me whether there was any one at

home, but, leaving me alone in the dark hall, ran off down a still

darker corridor. For a long time I waited in solitude in this gloomy

place, out of which, in addition to the front door and the corridor,

there only opened a door which at the moment was closed. Rather

surprised at the dismal appearance of the house, I came to the

conclusion that the reason was that its inmates were still abroad. After

five minutes, however, the door leading into the salon was opened by the

page boy, who then conducted me into a neat, but not richly furnished,

drawing-room, where presently I was joined by Sonetchka.

She was now seventeen years old, and very small and thin, as well as of

an unhealthy pallor of face. No scars at all were visible, however, and

the beautiful, prominent eyes and bright, cheerful smile were the same

as I had known and loved in my childhood. I had not expected her to look

at all like this, and therefore could not at once lavish upon her the

sentiment which I had been preparing on the way. She gave me her hand in

the English fashion (which was then as much a novelty as a door-bell),

and, bestowing upon mine a frank squeeze, sat down on the sofa by my

side.

“Ah! how glad I am to see you, my dear Nicolas!” she said as she looked

me in the face with an expression of pleasure so sincere that in the

words “my dear Nicolas” I caught the purely friendly rather than the

patronising note. To my surprise she seemed to me simpler, kinder, and

more sisterly after her foreign tour than she had been before it. True,

I could now see that she had two small scars between her nose and

temples, but her wonderful eyes and smile fitted in exactly with my

recollections, and shone as of old.

“But how greatly you have changed!” she went on. “You are quite grown-up

now. And I-I-well, what do you think of me?”

“I should never have known you,” I replied, despite the fact that at the

moment I was thinking that I should have known her anywhere and always.

“Why? Am I grown so ugly?” she inquired with a movement of her head.

“Oh, no, decidedly not!” I hastened to reply. “But you have grown taller

and older. As for being uglier, why, you are even—

“Yes, yes; never mind. Do you remember our dances and games, and St.

Jerome, and Madame Dorat?” (As a matter of fact, I could not recollect

any Madame Dorat, but saw that Sonetchka was being led away by the joy

of her childish recollections, and mixing them up a little). “Ah! what a

lovely time it was!” she went on—and once more there shone before me the

same eyes and smile as I had always carried in my memory. While she had

been speaking, I had been thinking over my position at the present

moment, and had come to the conclusion that I was in love with her. The

instant, however, that I arrived at that result my careless, happy mood

vanished, a mist seemed to arise before me which concealed even her eyes

and smile, and, blushing hotly, I became tongue-tied and ill-at-ease.

“But times are different now,” she went on with a sigh and a little

lifting of her eyebrows. “Everything seems worse than it used to be, and

ourselves too. Is it not so, Nicolas?”

I could return her no answer, but sat silently looking at her.

“Where are those Iwins and Kornakoffs now? Do you remember them?” she

continued, looking, I think, with some curiosity at my blushing,

downcast countenance. “What splendid times we used to have!”

Still I could not answer her.

The next moment, I was relieved from this awkward position by the entry

of old Madame Valakhin into the room. Rising, I bowed, and straightway

recovered my faculty of speech. On the other hand, an extraordinary

change now took place in Sonetchka. All her gaiety and bonhomie

disappeared, her smile became quite a different one, and, except for the

point of her shortness of stature, she became just the lady from abroad

whom I had expected to find in her. Yet for this change there was no

apparent reason, since her mother smiled every whit as pleasantly, and

expressed in her every movement just the same benignity, as of old.

Seating herself in her arm-chair, the old lady signed to me to come and

sit beside her; after which she said something to her daughter in

English, and Sonetchka left the room—a fact which still further helped

to relieve me. Madame then inquired after my father and brother, and

passed on to speak of her great bereavement—the loss of her husband.

Presently, however, she seemed to become sensible of the fact that I was

not helping much in the conversation, for she gave me a look as much as

to say: “If, now, my dear boy, you were to get up, to take your leave,

and to depart, it would be well.” But a curious circumstance had

overtaken me. While she had been speaking of her bereavement, I had

recalled to myself, not only the fact that I was in love, but the

probability that the mother knew of it: whereupon such a fit of

bashfulness had come upon me that I felt powerless to put any member of

my body to its legitimate use. I knew that if I were to rise and walk I

should have to think where to plant each foot, what to do with my head,

what with my hands, and so on. In a word, I foresaw that I should be

very much as I had been on the night when I partook too freely of

champagne, and therefore, since I felt uncertain of being able to manage

myself if I DID rise, I ended by feeling UNABLE to rise. Meanwhile, I

should say, Sonetchka had returned to the room with her work, and seated

herself in a far corner—a corner whence, as I was nevertheless sensible,

she could observe me. Madame must have felt some surprise as she gazed

at my crimson face and noted my complete immobility, but I decided that

it was better to continue sitting in that absurd position than to risk

something unpleasant by getting up and walking. Thus I sat on and on, in

the hope that some unforeseen chance would deliver me from my

predicament. That unforeseen chance at length presented itself in the

person of an unforeseen young man, who entered the room with an air of

being one of the household, and bowed to me politely as he did so:

whereupon Madame rose, excused herself to me for having to speak with

her “homme d’affaires,” and finally gave me a glance which said: “Well,

if you DO mean to go on sitting there for ever, at least I can’t drive

you away.” Accordingly, with a great effort I also rose, but, finding it

impossible to do any leave-taking, moved away towards the door, followed

by the pitying glances of mother and daughter. All at once I stumbled

over a chair, although it was lying quite out of my route: the reason

for my stumbling being that my whole attention was centred upon not

tripping over the carpet. Driving through the fresh air, however—where

at first I muttered and fidgeted about so much that Kuzma, my coachman,

asked me what was the matter—I soon found this feeling pass away, and

began to meditate quietly concerning my love for Sonetchka and her

relations with her mother, which had appeared to me rather strange.

When, afterwards, I told my father that mother and daughter had not

seemed on the best of terms with one another, he said:

“Yes, Madame leads the poor girl an awful life with her meanness. Yet,”

added my father with a greater display of feeling than a man might

naturally conceive for a mere relative, “she used to be such an

original, dear, charming woman! I cannot think what has made her change

so much. By the way, you didn’t notice a secretary fellow about, did

you? Fancy a Russian lady having an affaire with a secretary!”

“Yes, I saw him,” I replied.

“And was he at least good-looking?”

“No, not at all.”

“It is extraordinary!” concluded Papa, with a cough and an irritable

hoist of his shoulder.

“Well, I am in love!” was my secret thought to myself as I drove along

in my drozhki.

XIX. THE KORNAKOFFS

MY second call on the route lay at the Kornakoffs’, who lived on the

first floor of a large mansion facing the Arbat. The staircase of the

building looked extremely neat and orderly, yet in no way

luxurious—being lined only with drugget pinned down with highly-polished

brass rods. Nowhere were there any flowers or mirrors to be seen. The

salon, too, with its polished floor, which I traversed on my way to the

drawing-room, was decorated in the same cold, severe, unostentatious

style. Everything in it looked bright and solid, but not new, and

pictures, flower-stands, and articles of bric-a-brac were wholly absent.

In the drawing-room I found some of the young princesses seated, but

seated with the sort of correct, “company” air about them which gave one

the impression that they sat like that only when guests were expected.

“Mamma will be here presently,” the eldest of them said to me as she

seated herself by my side. For the next quarter of an hour, this young

lady entertained me with such an easy flow of small-talk that the

conversation never flagged a moment. Yet somehow she made so patent the

fact that she was just entertaining me that I felt not altogether

pleased. Amongst other things, she told me that their brother Stephen

(whom they called Etienne, and who had been two years at the College of

Cadets) had now received his commission. Whenever she spoke of him, and

more particularly when she told me that he had flouted his mother’s

wishes by entering the Hussars, she assumed a nervous air, and

immediately her sisters, sitting there in silence, also assumed a

nervous air. When, again, she spoke of my grandmother’s death, she

assumed a MOURNFUL air, and immediately the others all did the same.

Finally, when she recalled how I had once struck St. Jerome and been

expelled from the room, she laughed and showed her bad teeth, and

immediately all the other princesses laughed and showed their bad teeth

too.

Next, the Princess-Mother herself entered—a little dried-up woman, with

a wandering glance and a habit of always looking at somebody else when

she was addressing one. Taking my hand, she raised her own to my lips

for me to kiss it—which otherwise, not supposing it to be necessary, I

should not have done.

“How pleased I am to see you!” she said with her usual clearness of

articulation as she gazed at her daughters. “And how like your mother

you look! Does he not, Lise?”

Lise assented, though I knew for a fact that I did not resemble my

mother in the least.

“And what a grown-up you have become! My Etienne, you will remember, is

your second cousin. No, not second cousin—what is it, Lise? My mother

was Barbara Dimitrievna, daughter of Dimitri Nicolaevitch, and your

grandmother was Natalia Nicolaevna.”

“Then he is our THIRD cousin, Mamma,” said the eldest girl.

“Oh, how you always confuse me!” was her mother’s angry reply. “Not

third cousin, but COUSIN GERMAN—that is your relationship to Etienne. He

is an officer now. Did you know it? It is not well that he should have

his own way too much. You young men need keeping in hand, or—! Well, you

are not vexed because your old aunt tells you the plain truth? I always

kept Etienne strictly in hand, for I found it necessary to do so.”

“Yes, that is how our relationship stands,” she went on. “Prince Ivan

Ivanovitch is my uncle, and your late mother’s uncle also. Consequently

I must have been your mother’s first cousin—no, second cousin. Yes, that

is it. Tell me, have you been to call on Prince Ivan yet?”

I said no, but that I was just going to.

“Ah, is it possible?” she cried. “Why, you ought to have paid him the

first call of all! Surely you know that he stands to you in the position

of a father? He has no children of his own, and his only heirs are

yourself and my children. You ought to pay him all possible deference,

both because of his age, and because of his position in the world, and

because of everything else. I know that you young fellows of the present

day think nothing of relationships and are not fond of old men, yet do

you listen to me, your old aunt, for I am fond of you, and was fond of

your mother, and had a great—a very great-liking and respect for your

grandmother. You must not fail to call upon him on any account.”

I said that I would certainly go, and since my present call seemed to me

to have lasted long enough, I rose, and was about to depart, but she

restrained me.

“No, wait a minute,” she cried. “Where is your father, Lise? Go and tell

him to come here. He will be so glad to see you,” she added, turning to

me.

Two minutes later Prince Michael entered. He was a short, thick-set

gentleman, very slovenly dressed and ill-shaven, yet wearing such an air

of indifference that he looked almost a fool. He was not in the least

glad to see me—at all events he did not intimate that he was; but the

Princess (who appeared to stand in considerable awe of him) hastened to

say:

“Is not Woldemar here” (she seemed to have forgotten my name) “exactly

like his mother?” and she gave her husband a glance which forced him to

guess what she wanted. Accordingly he approached me with his usual

passionless, half-discontented expression, and held out to me an

unshaven cheek to kiss.

“Why, you are not dressed yet, though you have to go out soon!” was the

Princess’s next remark to him in the angry tone which she habitually

employed in conversation with her domestics. “It will only mean your

offending some one again, and trying to set people against you.”

“In a moment, in a moment, mother,” said Prince Michael, and departed. I

also made my bows and departed.

This was the first time I had heard of our being related to Prince Ivan

Ivanovitch, and the news struck me unpleasantly.

XX. THE IWINS

As for the prospect of my call upon the Prince, it seemed even more

unpleasant. However, the order of my route took me first to the Iwins,

who lived in a large and splendid mansion in Tverskaia Street. It was

not without some nervousness that I entered the great portico where a

Swiss major-domo stood armed with his staff of office.

To my inquiry as to whether any one was at home he replied: “Whom do you

wish to see, sir? The General’s son is within.”

“And the General himself?” I asked with forced assurance.

“I must report to him your business first. What may it be, sir?” said

the major-domo as he rang a bell. Immediately the gaitered legs of a

footman showed themselves on the staircase above; whereupon I was seized

with such a fit of nervousness that I hastily bid the lacquey say

nothing about my presence to the General, since I would first see his

son. By the time I had reached the top of the long staircase, I seemed

to have grown extremely small (metaphorically, I mean, not actually),

and had very much the same feeling within me as had possessed my soul

when my drozhki drew up to the great portico, namely, a feeling as

though drozhki, horse, and coachman had all of them grown extremely

small too. I found the General’s son lying asleep on a sofa, with an

open book before him. His tutor, Monsieur Frost, under whose care he

still pursued his studies at home, had entered behind me with a sort of

boyish tread, and now awoke his pupil. Iwin evinced no particular

pleasure at seeing me, while I also seemed to notice that, while talking

to me, he kept looking at my eyebrows. Although he was perfectly polite,

I conceived that he was “entertaining” me much as the Princess Valakhin

had done, and that he not only felt no particular liking for me, but

even that he considered my acquaintance in no way necessary to one who

possessed his own circle of friends. All this arose out of the idea that

he was regarding my eyebrows. In short, his bearing towards me appeared

to be (as I recognised with an awkward sensation) very much the same as

my own towards Ilinka Grap. I began to feel irritated, and to interpret

every fleeting glance which he cast at Monsieur Frost as a mute inquiry:

“Why has this fellow come to see me?”

After some conversation he remarked that his father and mother were at

home. Would I not like to visit them too?

“First I will go and dress myself,” he added as he departed to another

room, notwithstanding that he had seemed to be perfectly well dressed

(in a new frockcoat and white waistcoat) in the present one. A few

minutes later he reappeared in his University uniform, buttoned up to

the chin, and we went downstairs together. The reception rooms through

which we passed were lofty and of great size, and seemed to be richly

furnished with marble and gilt ornaments, chintz-covered settees, and a

number of mirrors. Presently Madame Iwin met us, and we went into a

little room behind the drawing-room, where, welcoming me in very

friendly fashion, she seated herself by my side, and began to inquire

after my relations.

Closer acquaintance with Madame (whom I had seen only twice before, and

that but for a moment on each occasion) impressed me favourably. She was

tall, thin, and very pale, and looked as though she suffered from

chronic depression and fatigue. Yet, though her smile was a sad one, it

was very kind, and her large, mournful eyes, with a slight cast in their

vision, added to the pathos and attractiveness of her expression. Her

attitude, while not precisely that of a hunchback, made her whole form

droop, while her every movement expressed languor. Likewise, though her

speech was deliberate, the timbre of her voice, and the manner in which

she lisped her r’s and l’s, were very pleasing to the ear. Finally, she

did not “ENTERTAIN” me. Unfortunately, the answers which I returned to

her questions concerning my relations seemed to afford her a painful

interest, and to remind her of happier days: with the result that when,

presently, her son left the room, she gazed at me in silence for a

moment, and then burst into tears. As I sat there in mute bewilderment,

I could not conceive what I had said to bring this about. At first I

felt sorry for her as she sat there weeping with downcast eyes. Next I

began to think to myself: “Ought I not to try and comfort her, and how

ought that to be done?” Finally, I began to feel vexed with her for

placing me in such an awkward position. “Surely my appearance is not so

moving as all that?” I reflected. “Or is she merely acting like this to

see what I shall do under the circumstances?”

“Yet it would not do for me to go,” I continued to myself, “for that

would look too much as though I were fleeing to escape her tears.”

Accordingly I began fidgeting about on my seat, in order to remind her

of my presence.

“Oh, how foolish of me!” at length she said, as she gazed at me for a

moment and tried to smile. “There are days when one weeps for no reason

whatever.” She felt about for her handkerchief, and then burst out

weeping more violently than before.

“Oh dear! How silly of me to be for ever crying like this! Yet I was so

fond of your mother! We were such friends! We-we—”

At this point she found her handkerchief, and, burying her face in it,

went on crying. Once more I found myself in the same protracted dilemma.

Though vexed, I felt sorry for her, since her tears appeared to be

genuine—even though I also had an idea that it was not so much for my

mother that she was weeping as for the fact that she was unhappy, and

had known happier days. How it would all have ended I do not know, had

not her son reappeared and said that his father desired to see her.

Thereupon she rose, and was just about to leave the room, when the

General himself entered. He was a small, grizzled, thick-set man, with

bushy black eyebrows, a grey, close-cropped head, and a very stern,

haughty expression of countenance.

I rose and bowed to him, but the General (who was wearing three stars on

his green frockcoat) not only made no response to my salutation, but

scarcely even looked at me; so that all at once I felt as though I were

not a human being at all, but only some negligible object such as a

settee or window; or, if I were a human being, as though I were quite

indistinguishable from such a negligible object.

“Then you have not yet written to the Countess, my dear?” he said to his

wife in French, and with an imperturbable, yet determined, expression on

his countenance.

“Good-bye, Monsieur Irtenieff,” Madame said to me, in her turn, as she

made a proud gesture with her head and looked at my eyebrows just as her

son had done. I bowed to her, and again to her husband, but my second

salutation made no more impression upon him than if a window had just

been opened or closed. Nevertheless the younger Iwin accompanied me to

the door, and on the way told me that he was to go to St. Petersburg

University, since his father had been appointed to a post in that city

(and young Iwin named a very high office in the service).

“Well, his Papa may do whatsoever he likes,” I muttered to myself as I

climbed into the drozhki, “but at all events I will never set foot in

that house again. His wife weeps and looks at me as though I were the

embodiment of woe, while that old pig of a General does not even give me

a bow. However, I will get even with him some day.” How I meant to do

that I do not know, but my words nevertheless came true.

Afterwards, I frequently found it necessary to remember the advice of my

father when he said that I must cultivate the acquaintanceship of the

Iwins, and not expect a man in the position of General Iwin to pay any

attention to a boy like myself. But I had figured in that position long

enough.

XXI. PRINCE IVAN IVANOVITCH

“Now for the last call—the visit to Nikitskaia Street,” I said to Kuzma,

and we started for Prince Ivan Ivanovitch’s mansion.

Towards the end, a round of calls usually brings one a certain amount of

self-assurance: consequently I was approaching the Prince’s abode in

quite a tranquil frame of mind, when suddenly I remembered the Princess

Kornakoff’s words that I was his heir, and at the same moment caught

sight of two carriages waiting at the portico. Instantly, my former

nervousness returned.

Both the old major-domo who opened the door to me, and the footman who

took my coat, and the two male and three female visitors whom I found in

the drawing-room, and, most of all, Prince Ivan Ivanovitch himself (whom

I found clad in a “company” frockcoat and seated on a sofa) seemed to

look at me as at an HEIR, and so to eye me with ill-will. Yet the Prince

was very gracious and, after kissing me (that is to say, after pressing

his cold, dry, flabby lips to my cheek for a second), asked me about my

plans and pursuits, jested with me, inquired whether I still wrote

verses of the kind which I used to indite in honour of my grandmother’s

birthdays, and invited me to dine with him that day. Nevertheless, in

proportion as he grew the kinder, the more did I feel persuaded that his

civility was only intended to conceal from me the fact that he disliked

the idea of my being his heir. He had a custom (due to his false teeth,

of which his mouth possessed a complete set) of raising his upper lip a

little as he spoke, and producing a slight whistling sound from it; and

whenever, on the present occasion, he did so it seemed to me that he was

saying to himself: “A boy, a boy—I know it! And my heir, too—my heir!”

When we were children, we had been used to calling the Prince “dear

Uncle;” but now, in my capacity of heir, I could not bring my tongue to

the phrase, while to say “Your Highness,” as did one of the other

visitors, seemed derogatory to my self-esteem. Consequently, never once

during that visit did I call him anything at all. The personage,

however, who most disturbed me was the old Princess who shared with me

the position of prospective inheritor, and who lived in the Prince’s

house. While seated beside her at dinner, I felt firmly persuaded that

the reason why she would not speak to me was that she disliked me for

being her co-heir, and that the Prince, for his part, paid no attention

to our side of the table for the reason that the Princess and myself

hoped to succeed him, and so were alike distasteful in his sight.

“You cannot think how I hated it all!” I said to Dimitrieff the same

evening, in a desire to make a parade of disliking the notion of being

an heir (somehow I thought it the thing to do). “You cannot think how I

loathed the whole two hours that I spent there!—Yet he is a fine-looking

old fellow, and was very kind to me,” I added—wishing, among other

things, to disabuse my friend of any possible idea that my loathing had

arisen out of the fact that I had felt so small. “It is only the idea

that people may be classing me with the Princess who lives with him, and

who licks the dust off his boots. He is a wonderful old man, and good

and considerate to everybody, but it is awful to see how he treats the

Princess. Money is a detestable thing, and ruins all human relations.

“Do you know, I think it would be far the best thing for me to have an

open explanation with the Prince,” I went on; “to tell him that I

respect him as a man, but think nothing of being his heir, and that I

desire him to leave me nothing, since that is the only condition on

which I can, in future, visit his house.”

Instead of bursting out laughing when I said this, Dimitri pondered

awhile in silence, and then answered:

“You are wrong. Either you ought to refrain from supposing that people

may be classing you with this Princess of whom you speak, or, if you DO

suppose such a thing, you ought to suppose further that people are

thinking what you yourself know quite well—namely, that such thoughts

are so utterly foreign to your nature that you despise them and would

never make them a basis for action. Suppose, however, that people DO

suppose you to suppose such a thing—Well, to sum up,” he added, feeling

that he was getting a little mixed in his pronouncements, “you had much

better not suppose anything of the kind.”

My friend was perfectly right, though it was not until long, long

afterwards that experience of life taught me the evil that comes of

thinking—still worse, of saying—much that seems very fine; taught me

that there are certain thoughts which should always be kept to oneself,

since brave words seldom go with brave deeds. I learnt then that the

mere fact of giving utterance to a good intention often makes it

difficult, nay, impossible, to carry that good intention into effect.

Yet how is one to refrain from giving utterance to the brave,

self-sufficient impulses of youth? Only long afterwards does one

remember and regret them, even as one incontinently plucks a flower

before its blooming, and subsequently finds it lying crushed and

withered on the ground.

The very next morning I, who had just been telling my friend Dimitri

that money corrupts all human relations, and had (as we have seen)

squandered the whole of my cash on pictures and Turkish pipes, accepted

a loan of twenty roubles which he suggested should pay for my travelling

expenses into the country, and remained a long while thereafter in his

debt!

XXII. INTIMATE CONVERSATION WITH MY FRIEND

THIS conversation of ours took place in a phaeton on the way to

Kuntsevo. Dimitri had invited me in the morning to go with him to his

mother’s, and had called for me after luncheon; the idea being that I

should spend the evening, and perhaps also pass the night, at the

country-house where his family lived. Only when we had left the city and

exchanged its grimy streets and the unbearably deafening clatter of its

pavements for the open vista of fields and the subdued grinding of

carriage-wheels on a dusty high road (while the sweet spring air and

prospect enveloped us on every side) did I awake from the new

impressions and sensations of freedom into which the past two days had

plunged me. Dimitri was in his kind and sociable mood. That is to say,

he was neither frowning nor blinking nervously nor straightening his

neck in his collar. For my own part, I was congratulating myself on

those noble sentiments which I have expressed above, in the belief that

they had led him to overlook my shameful encounter with Kolpikoff, and

to refrain from despising me for it. Thus we talked together on many an

intimate subject which even a friend seldom mentions to a friend. He

told me about his family whose acquaintance I had not yet made—about his

mother, his aunt, and his sister, as also about her whom Woloda and

Dubkoff believed to be his “flame,” and always spoke of as “the lady

with the chestnut locks.” Of his mother he spoke with a certain cold and

formal commendation, as though to forestall any further mention of her;

his aunt he extolled enthusiastically, though with a touch of

condescension in his tone; his sister he scarcely mentioned at all, as

though averse to doing so in my presence; but on the subject of “the

lady with the chestnut locks” (whose real name was Lubov Sergievna, and

who was a grown-up young lady living on a family footing with the

Nechludoffs) he discoursed with animation.

“Yes, she is a wonderful woman,” he said with a conscious reddening of

the face, yet looking me in the eyes with dogged temerity. “True, she is

no longer young, and even rather elderly, as well as by no means

good-looking; but as for loving a mere featherhead, a mere beauty—well,

I never could understand that, for it is such a silly thing to do.”

(Dimitri said this as though he had just discovered a most novel and

extraordinary truth.) “I am certain, too, that such a soul, such a heart

and principles, as are hers are not to be found elsewhere in the world

of the present day.” (I do not know whence he had derived the habit of

saying that few good things were discoverable in the world of the

present day, but at all events he loved to repeat the expression, and it

somehow suited him.)

“Only, I am afraid,” he went on quietly, after thus annihilating all

such men as were foolish enough to admire mere beauty, “I am afraid that

you will not understand or realise her quickly. She is modest, even

secretive, and by no means fond of exhibiting her beautiful and

surprising qualities. Now, my mother—who, as you will see, is a noble,

sensible woman—has known Lubov Sergievna, for many years; yet even to

this day she does not properly understand her. Shall I tell you why I

was out of temper last evening when you were questioning me? Well, you

must know that the day before yesterday Lubov asked me to accompany her

to Ivan Yakovlevitch’s (you have heard of him, I suppose? the fellow who

seems to be mad, but who, in reality, is a very remarkable man). Well,

Lubov is extremely religious, and understands Ivan Yakovlevitch to the

full. She often goes to see him, and converses with him, and gives him

money for the poor—money which she has earned herself. She is a

marvellous woman, as you will see. Well, I went with her to Ivan’s, and

felt very grateful to her for having afforded me the opportunity of

exchanging a word with so remarkable a man; but my mother could not

understand our action at all, and discerned in it only superstition.

Consequently, last night she and I quarrelled for the first time in our

lives. A very bitter one it was, too,” he concluded, with a convulsive

shrug of his shoulders, as though the mention of it recalled the

feelings which he had then experienced.

“And what are your intentions about it all?” I inquired, to divert him

from such a disagreeable recollection. “That is to say, how do you

imagine it is going to turn out? Do you ever speak to her about the

future, or about how your love or friendship are going to end?”

“Do you mean, do I intend to marry her eventually?” he inquired, in his

turn, with a renewed blush, but turning himself round and looking me

boldly in the face.

“Yes, certainly,” I replied as I settled myself down. “We are both of us

grown-up, as well as friends, so we may as well discuss our future life

as we drive along. No one could very well overlook or overhear us now.”

“Why should I NOT marry her?” he went on in response to my reassuring

reply. “It is my aim—as it should be the aim of every honourable man—to

be as good and as happy as possible; and with her, if she should still

be willing when I have become more independent, I should be happier and

better than with the greatest beauty in the world.”

Absorbed in such conversation, we hardly noticed that we were

approaching Kuntsevo, or that the sky was becoming overcast and

beginning to threaten rain. On the right, the sun was slowly sinking

behind the ancient trees of the Kuntsevo park—one half of its brilliant

disc obscured with grey, subluminous cloud, and the other half sending

forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking

relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing

against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch

contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above a

young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little

further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion

could be seen projecting above a belt of trees and undergrowth—one side

of them reflecting the glittering rays of the sun, and the other side

harmonising with the more louring portion of the heavens. Below us, and

to the left, showed the still blue of a pond where it lay surrounded

with pale-green laburnums—its dull, concave-looking depths repeating the

trees in more sombre shades of colour over the surface of a hillock.

Beyond the water spread the black expanse of a ploughed field, with the

straight line of a dark-green ridge by which it was bisected running far

into the distance, and there joining the leaden, threatening horizon.

On either side of the soft road along which the phaeton was pursuing the

even tenour of its way, bright-green, tangled, juicy belts of rye were

sprouting here and there into stalk. Not a motion was perceptible in the

air, only a sweet freshness, and everything looked extraordinarily clear

and bright. Near the road I could see a little brown path winding its

way among the dark-green, quarter-grown stems of rye, and somehow that

path reminded me vividly of our village, and somehow (through some

connection of thought) the idea of that village reminded me vividly of

Sonetchka, and so of the fact that I was in love with her.

Notwithstanding my fondness for Dimitri and the pleasure which his

frankness had afforded me, I now felt as though I desired to hear no

more about his feelings and intentions with regard to Lubov Sergievna,

but to talk unstintedly about my own love for Sonetchka, who seemed to

me an object of affection of a far higher order. Yet for some reason or

another I could not make up my mind to tell him straight out how

splendid it would seem when I had married Sonetchka and we were living

in the country—of how we should have little children who would crawl

about the floor and call me Papa, and of how delighted I should be when

he, Dimitri, brought his wife, Lubov Sergievna, to see us, wearing an

expensive gown. Accordingly, instead of saying all that, I pointed to

the setting sun, and merely remarked: “Look, Dimitri! How splendid!”

To this, however, Dimitri made no reply, since he was evidently

dissatisfied at my answering his confession (which it had cost him much

to make) by directing his attention to natural objects (to which he was,

in general, indifferent). Upon him Nature had an effect altogether

different to what she had upon myself, for she affected him rather by

her industry than by her beauty—he loved her rather with his intellect

than with his senses.

“I am absolutely happy,” I went on, without noticing that he was

altogether taken up with his own thoughts and oblivious of anything that

I might be saying. “You will remember how told you about a girl with

whom I used to be in love when was a little boy? Well, I saw her again

only this morning, and am now infatuated with her.” Then I told

him—despite his continued expression of indifference—about my love, and

about all my plans for my future connubial happiness. Strangely enough,

no sooner had I related in detail the whole strength of my feelings than

I instantly became conscious of its diminution.

The rain overtook us just as we were turning into the avenue of

birch-trees which led to the house, but it did not really wet us. I only

knew that it was raining by the fact that I felt a drop fall, first on

my nose, and then on my hand, and heard something begin to patter upon

the young, viscous leaves of the birch-trees as, drooping their curly

branches overhead, they seemed to imbibe the pure, shining drops with an

avidity which filled the whole avenue with scent. We descended from the

carriage, so as to reach the house the quicker through the garden, but

found ourselves confronted at the entrance-door by four ladies, two of

whom were knitting, one reading a book, and the fourth walking to and

fro with a little dog. Thereupon, Dimitri began to present me to his

mother, sister, and aunt, as well as to Lubov Sergievna. For a moment

they remained where they were, but almost instantly the rain became

heavier.

“Let us go into the verandah; you can present him to us there,” said the

lady whom I took to be Dimitri’s mother, and we all of us ascended the

entrance-steps.

XXIII. THE NECHLUDOFFS

From the first, the member of this company who struck me the most was

Lubov Sergievna, who, holding a lapdog in her arms and wearing stout

laced boots, was the last of the four ladies to ascend the staircase,

and twice stopped to gaze at me intently and then kiss her little dog.

She was anything but good-looking, since she was red-haired, thin,

short, and slightly crooked. What made her plain face all the plainer

was the queer way in which her hair was parted to one side (it looked

like the wigs which bald women contrive for themselves). However much I

should have liked to applaud my friend, I could not find a single comely

feature in her. Even her brown eyes, though expressive of good-humour,

were small and dull—were, in fact, anything but pretty; while her hands

(those most characteristic of features), were though neither large nor

ill-shaped, coarse and red.

As soon as we reached the verandah, each of the ladies, except Dimitri’s

sister Varenika—who also had been regarding me attentively out of her

large, dark-grey eyes—said a few words to me before resuming her

occupation, while Varenika herself began to read aloud from a book which

she held on her lap and steadied with her finger.

The Princess Maria Ivanovna was a tall, well-built woman of forty. To

judge by the curls of half-grey hair which descended below her cap one

might have taken her for more, but as soon as ever one observed the

fresh, extraordinarily tender, and almost wrinkleless face, as well as,

most of all, the lively, cheerful sparkle of the large eyes, one

involuntarily took her for less. Her eyes were black and very frank, her

lips thin and slightly severe, her nose regular and slightly inclined to

the left, and her hands ringless, large, and almost like those of a man,

but with finely tapering fingers. She wore a dark-blue dress fastened to

the throat and sitting closely to her firm, still youthful waist—a waist

which she evidently pinched. Lastly, she held herself very upright, and

was knitting a garment of some kind. As soon as I stepped on to the

verandah she took me by the hand, drew me to her as though wishing to

scrutinise me more closely, and said, as she gazed at me with the same

cold, candid glance as her son’s, that she had long known me by report

from Dimitri, and that therefore, in order to make my acquaintance

thoroughly, she had invited me to stay these twenty-four hours in her

house.

“Do just as you please here,” she said, “and stand on no ceremony

whatever with us, even as we shall stand on none with you. Pray walk,

read, listen, or sleep as the mood may take you.”

Sophia Ivanovna was an old maid and the Princess’s younger sister,

though she looked the elder of the two. She had that exceedingly

overstuffed appearance which old maids always present who are short of

stature but wear corsets. It seemed as though her healthiness had

shifted upwards to the point of choking her, her short, fat hands would

not meet below her projecting bust, and the line of her waist was

scarcely visible at all.

Notwithstanding that the Princess Maria Ivanovna had black hair and

eyes, while Sophia Ivanovna had white hair and large, vivacious,

tranquilly blue eyes (a rare combination), there was a great likeness

between the two sisters, for they had the same expression, nose, and

lips. The only difference was that Sophia’s nose and lips were a trifle

coarser than Maria’s, and that, when she smiled, those features inclined

towards the right, whereas Maria’s inclined towards the left. Sophia, to

judge by her dress and coiffure, was still youthful at heart, and would

never have displayed grey curls, even if she had possessed them. Yet at

first her glance and bearing towards me seemed very proud, and made me

nervous, whereas I at once felt at home with the Princess. Perhaps it

was only Sophia’s stoutness and a certain resemblance to portraits of

Catherine the Great that gave her, in my eyes, a haughty aspect, but at

all events I felt quite intimidated when she looked at me intently and

said, “Friends of our friends are our friends also.” I became reassured

and changed my opinion about her only when, after saying those words,

she opened her mouth and sighed deeply. It may be that she owed her

habit of sighing after every few words—with a great distention of the

mouth and a slight drooping of her large blue eyes—to her stoutness, yet

it was none the less one which expressed so much good-humour that I at

once lost all fear of her, and found her actually attractive. Her eyes

were charming, her voice pleasant and musical, and even the flowing

lines of her fullness seemed to my youthful vision not wholly lacking in

beauty.

I had imagined that Lubov Sergievna, as my friend’s friend, would at

once say something friendly and familiar to me; yet, after gazing at me

fixedly for a while, as though in doubt whether the remark she was about

to make to me would not be too friendly, she at length asked me what

faculty I was in. After that she stared at me as before, in evident

hesitation as to whether or not to say something civil and familiar,

until, remarking her perplexity, I besought her with a look to speak

freely. Yet all she then said was, “They tell me the Universities pay

very little attention to science now,” and turned away to call her

little dog.

All that evening she spoke only in disjointed fragments of this

kind—fragments which had no connection either with the point or with one

another; yet I had such faith in Dimitri, and he so often kept looking

from her to me with an expression which mutely asked me, “Now, what do

you think of that?” that, though I entirely failed to persuade myself

that in Lubov Sergievna there was anything to speak of, I could not bear

to express the thought, even to myself.

As for the last member of the family, Varenika, she was a well-developed

girl of sixteen. The only good features in her were a pair of dark-grey

eyes,—which, in their expression of gaiety mingled with quiet attention,

greatly resembled those of her aunt—a long coil of flaxen hair, and

extremely delicate, beautiful hands.

“I expect, Monsieur Nicolas, you find it wearisome to hear a story begun

from the middle?” said Sophia Ivanovna with her good-natured sigh as she

turned over some pieces of clothing which she was sewing. The reading

aloud had ceased for the moment because Dimitri had left the room on

some errand or another.

“Or perhaps you have read Rob Roy before?” she added.

At that period I thought it incumbent upon me, in virtue of my student’s

uniform, to reply in a very “clever and original” manner to every

question put to me by people whom I did not know very well, and regarded

such short, clear answers as “Yes,” “No,” “I like it,” or “I do not care

for it,” as things to be ashamed of. Accordingly, looking down at my new

and fashionably-cut trousers and the glittering buttons of my tunic, I

replied that I had never read Rob Roy, but that it interested me greatly

to hear it, since I preferred to read books from the middle rather than

from the beginning.

“It is twice as interesting,” I added with a self-satisfied smirk; “for

then one can guess what has gone before as well as what is to come

after.”

The Princess smiled what I thought was a forced smile, but one which I

discovered later to be her only one.

“Well, perhaps that is true,” she said. “But tell me, Nicolas (you will

not be offended if I drop the Monsieur)—tell me, are you going to be in

town long? When do you go away?”

“I do not know quite. Perhaps to-morrow, or perhaps not for some while

yet,” I replied for some reason or another, though I knew perfectly well

that in reality we were to go to-morrow.

“I wish you could stop longer, both for your own sake and for

Dimitri’s,” she said in a meditative manner. “At your age friendship is

a weak thing.”

I felt that every one was looking at me, and waiting to see what I

should say—though certainly Varenika made a pretence of looking at her

aunt’s work. I felt, in fact, as though I were being put through an

examination, and that it behoved me to figure in it as well as possible.

“Yes, to ME Dimitri’s friendship is most useful,” I replied, “but to HIM

mine cannot be of any use at all, since he is a thousand times better

than I.” (Dimitri could not hear what I said, or I should have feared

his detecting the insincerity of my words.)

Again the Princess smiled her unnatural, yet characteristically natural,

smile.

“Just listen to him!” she said. “But it is YOU who are the little

monster of perfection.”

“‘Monster of perfection,’” I thought to myself. “That is splendid. I

must make a note of it.”

“Yet, to dismiss yourself, he has been extraordinarily clever in that

quarter,” she went on in a lower tone (which pleased me somehow) as she

indicated Lubov Sergievna with her eyes, “since he has discovered in our

poor little Auntie” (such was the pet name which they gave Lubov) “all

sorts of perfections which I, who have known her and her little dog for

twenty years, had never yet suspected. Varenika, go and tell them to

bring me a glass of water,” she added, letting her eyes wander again.

Probably she had bethought her that it was too soon, or not entirely

necessary, to let me into all the family secrets. “Yet no—let HIM go,

for he has nothing to do, while you are reading. Pray go to the door, my

friend,” she said to me, “and walk about fifteen steps down the passage.

Then halt and call out pretty loudly, ‘Peter, bring Maria Ivanovna a

glass of iced water’”—and she smiled her curious smile once more.

“I expect she wants to say something about me in my absence,” I thought

to myself as I left the room. “I expect she wants to remark that she can

see very clearly that I am a very, very clever young man.”

Hardly had I taken a dozen steps when I was overtaken by Sophia

Ivanovna, who, though fat and short of breath, trod with surprising

lightness and agility.

“Merci, mon cher,” she said. “I will go and tell them myself.”

XXIV. LOVE

SOPHIA IVANOVNA, as I afterwards came to know her, was one of those

rare, young-old women who are born for family life, but to whom that

happiness has been denied by fate. Consequently all that store of their

love which should have been poured out upon a husband and children

becomes pent up in their hearts, until they suddenly decide to let it

overflow upon a few chosen individuals. Yet so inexhaustible is that

store of old maids’ love that, despite the number of individuals so

selected, there still remains an abundant surplus of affection which

they lavish upon all by whom they are surrounded—upon all, good or bad,

whom they may chance to meet in their daily life.

Of love there are three kinds—love of beauty, the love which denies

itself, and practical love.

Of the desire of a young man for a young woman, as well as of the

reverse instance, I am not now speaking, for of such tendresses I am

wary, seeing that I have been too unhappy in my life to have been able

ever to see in such affection a single spark of truth, but rather a

lying pretence in which sensuality, connubial relations, money, and the

wish to bind hands or to unloose them have rendered feeling such a

complex affair as to defy analysis. Rather am I speaking of that love

for a human being which, according to the spiritual strength of its

possessor, concentrates itself either upon a single individual, upon a

few, or upon many—of love for a mother, a father, a brother, little

children, a friend, a compatriot—of love, in short, for one’s neighbour.

Love of beauty consists in a love of the sense of beauty and of its

expression. People who thus love conceive the object of their affection

to be desirable only in so far as it arouses in them that pleasurable

sensation of which the consciousness and the expression soothes the

senses. They change the object of their love frequently, since their

principal aim consists in ensuring that the voluptuous feeling of their

adoration shall be constantly titillated. To preserve in themselves this

sensuous condition, they talk unceasingly, and in the most elegant

terms, on the subject of the love which they feel, not only for its

immediate object, but also for objects upon which it does not touch at

all. This country of ours contains many such individuals—individuals of

that well-known class who, cultivating “the beautiful,” not only

discourse of their cult to all and sundry, but speak of it pre-eminently

in FRENCH. It may seem a strange and ridiculous thing to say, but I am

convinced that among us we have had in the past, and still have, a large

section of society—notably women—whose love for their friends, husbands,

or children would expire to-morrow if they were debarred from dilating

upon it in the tongue of France!

Love of the second kind—renunciatory love—consists in a yearning to

undergo self-sacrifice for the object beloved, regardless of any

consideration whether such self-sacrifice will benefit or injure the

object in question. “There is no evil which I would not endure to show

both the world and him or her whom I adore my devotion.” There we have

the formula of this kind of love. People who thus love never look for

reciprocity of affection, since it is a finer thing to sacrifice

yourself for one who does not comprehend you. Also, they are always

painfully eager to exaggerate the merits of their sacrifice; usually

constant in their love, for the reason that they would find it hard to

forego the kudos of the deprivations which they endure for the object

beloved; always ready to die, to prove to him or to her the entirety of

their devotion; but sparing of such small daily proofs of their love as

call for no special effort of self-immolation. They do not much care

whether you eat well, sleep well, keep your spirits up, or enjoy good

health, nor do they ever do anything to obtain for you those blessings

if they have it in their power; but, should you be confronting a bullet,

or have fallen into the water, or stand in danger of being burnt, or

have had your heart broken in a love affair—well, for all these things

they are prepared if the occasion should arise. Moreover, people

addicted to love of such a self-sacrificing order are invariably proud

of their love, exacting, jealous, distrustful, and—strange to

tell—anxious that the object of their adoration should incur perils (so

that they may save it from calamity, and console it thereafter) and even

be vicious (so that they may purge it of its vice).

Suppose, now, that you are living in the country with a wife who loves

you in this self-sacrificing manner. You may be healthy and contented,

and have occupations which interest you, while, on the other hand, your

wife may be too weak to superintend the household work (which, in

consequence, will be left to the servants), or to look after the

children (who, in consequence, will be left to the nurses), or to put

her heart into any work whatsoever: and all because she loves nobody and

nothing but yourself. She may be patently ill, yet she will say not a

word to you about it, for fear of distressing you. She may be patently

ennuyee, yet for your sake she will be prepared to be so for the rest of

her life. She may be patently depressed because you stick so

persistently to your occupations (whether sport, books, farming, state

service, or anything else) and see clearly that they are doing you harm;

yet, for all that, she will keep silence, and suffer it to be so. Yet,

should you but fall sick—and, despite her own ailments and your prayers

that she will not distress herself in vain, your loving wife will remain

sitting inseparably by your bedside. Every moment you will feel her

sympathetic gaze resting upon you and, as it were, saying: “There! I

told you so, but it is all one to me, and I shall not leave you.” In the

morning you maybe a little better, and move into another room. The room,

however, will be insufficiently warmed or set in order; the soup which

alone you feel you could eat will not have been cooked; nor will any

medicine have been sent for. Yet, though worn out with night watching,

your loving wife will continue to regard you with an expression of

sympathy, to walk about on tiptoe, and to whisper unaccustomed and

obscure orders to the servants. You may wish to be read to—and your

loving wife will tell you with a sigh that she feels sure you will be

unable to hear her reading, and only grow angry at her awkwardness in

doing it; wherefore you had better not be read to at all. You may wish

to walk about the room—and she will tell you that it would be far better

for you not to do so. You may wish to talk with some friends who have

called—and she will tell you that talking is not good for you. At

nightfall the fever may come upon you again, and you may wish to be left

alone whereupon your loving wife, though wasted, pale, and full of

yawns, will go on sitting in a chair opposite you, as dusk falls, until

her very slightest movement, her very slightest sound, rouses you to

feelings of anger and impatience. You may have a servant who has lived

with you for twenty years, and to whom you are attached, and who would

tend you well and to your satisfaction during the night, for the reason

that he has been asleep all day and is, moreover, paid a salary for his

services; yet your wife will not suffer him to wait upon you. No;

everything she must do herself with her weak, unaccustomed fingers (of

which you follow the movements with suppressed irritation as those pale

members do their best to uncork a medicine bottle, to snuff a candle, to

pour out physic, or to touch you in a squeamish sort of way). If you are

an impatient, hasty sort of man, and beg of her to leave the room, you

will hear by the vexed, distressed sounds which come from her that she

is humbly sobbing and weeping behind the door, and whispering

foolishness of some kind to the servant. Finally if you do not die, your

loving wife—who has not slept during the whole three weeks of your

illness (a fact of which she will constantly remind you)—will fall ill

in her turn, waste away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of

any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you have

regained your normal state of health she will express to you her

self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of

benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to

yourself and to every one else in your vicinity.

The third kind of love—practical love—consists of a yearning to satisfy

every need, every desire, every caprice, nay, every vice, of the being

beloved. People who love thus always love their life long, since, the

more they love, the more they get to know the object beloved, and the

easier they find the task of loving it—that is to say, of satisfying its

desires. Their love seldom finds expression in words, but if it does so,

it expresses itself neither with assurance nor beauty, but rather in a

shamefaced, awkward manner, since people of this kind invariably have

misgivings that they are loving unworthily. People of this kind love

even the faults of their adored one, for the reason that those faults

afford them the power of constantly satisfying new desires. They look

for their affection to be returned, and even deceive themselves into

believing that it is returned, and are happy accordingly: yet in the

reverse case they will still continue to desire happiness for their

beloved one, and try by every means in their power—whether moral or

material, great or small—to provide it.

Such practical love it was—love for her nephew, for her niece, for her

sister, for Lubov Sergievna, and even for myself, because I loved

Dimitri—that shone in the eyes, as well as in the every word and

movement, of Sophia Ivanovna.

Only long afterwards did I learn to value her at her true worth. Yet

even now the question occurred to me: “What has made Dimitri—who

throughout has tried to understand love differently to other young

fellows, and has always had before his eyes the gentle, loving Sophia

Ivanovna—suddenly fall so deeply in love with the incomprehensible Lubov

Sergievna, and declare that in his aunt he can only find good QUALITIES?

Verily it is a true saying that ‘a prophet hath no honour in his own

country.’ One of two things: either every man has in him more of bad

than of good, or every man is more receptive to bad than to good. Lubov

Sergievna he has not known for long, whereas his aunt’s love he has

known since the day of his birth.”

XXV. I BECOME BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS

WHEN I returned to the verandah, I found that they were not talking of

me at all, as I had anticipated. On the contrary, Varenika had laid

aside the book, and was engaged in a heated dispute with Dimitri, who,

for his part, was walking up and down the verandah, and frowningly

adjusting his neck in his collar as he did so. The subject of the

quarrel seemed to be Ivan Yakovlevitch and superstition, but it was too

animated a difference for its underlying cause not to be something which

concerned the family much more nearly. Although the Princess and Lubov

Sergievna were sitting by in silence, they were following every word,

and evidently tempted at times to take part in the dispute; yet always,

just when they were about to speak, they checked themselves, and left

the field clear for the two principles, Dimitri and Varenika. On my

entry, the latter glanced at me with such an indifferent air that I

could see she was wholly absorbed in the quarrel and did not care

whether she spoke in my presence or not. The Princess too looked the

same, and was clearly on Varenika’s side, while Dimitri began, if

anything, to raise his voice still more when I appeared, and Lubov

Sergievna, for her part, observed to no one in particular: “Old people

are quite right when they say, ‘Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse

pouvait.’”

Nevertheless this quotation did not check the dispute, though it somehow

gave me the impression that the side represented by the speaker and her

friend was in the wrong. Although it was a little awkward for me to be

present at a petty family difference, the fact that the true relations

of the family revealed themselves during its progress, and that my

presence did nothing to hinder that revelation, afforded me considerable

gratification.

How often it happens that for years one sees a family cover themselves

over with a conventional cloak of decorum, and preserve the real

relations of its members a secret from every eye! How often, too, have I

remarked that, the more impenetrable (and therefore the more decorous)

is the cloak, the harsher are the relations which it conceals! Yet, once

let some unexpected question—often a most trivial one (the colour of a

woman’s hair, a visit, a man’s horses, and so forth)—arise in that

family circle, and without any visible cause there will also arise an

ever-growing difference, until in time the cloak of decorum becomes

unequal to confining the quarrel within due bounds, and, to the dismay

of the disputants and the astonishment of the auditors, the real and

ill-adjusted relations of the family are laid bare, and the cloak, now

useless for concealment, is bandied from hand to hand among the

contending factions until it serves only to remind one of the years

during which it successfully deceived one’s perceptions. Sometimes to

strike one’s head violently against a ceiling hurts one less than just

to graze some spot which has been hurt and bruised before: and in almost

every family there exists some such raw and tender spot. In the

Nechludoff family that spot was Dimitri’s extraordinary affection for

Lubov Sergievna, which aroused in the mother and sister, if not a

jealous feeling, at all events a sense of hurt family pride. This was

the grave significance which underlay, for all those present, the

seeming dispute about Ivan Yakovlevitch and superstition.

“In anything that other people deride and despise you invariably profess

to see something extraordinarily good!” Varenika was saying in her clear

voice, as she articulated each syllable with careful precision.

“Indeed?” retorted Dimitri with an impatient toss of his head. “Now, in

the first place, only a most unthinking person could ever speak of

DESPISING such a remarkable man as Ivan Yakovlevitch, while, in the

second place, it is YOU who invariably profess to see nothing good in

what confronts you.”

Meanwhile Sophia Ivanovna kept looking anxiously at us as she turned

first to her nephew, and then to her niece, and then to myself. Twice

she opened her mouth as though to say what was in her mind and drew a

deep sigh.

“Varia, PLEASE go on reading,” she said at length, at the same time

handing her niece the book, and patting her hand kindly. “I wish to know

whether he ever found HER again” (as a matter of fact, the novel in

question contained not a word about any one finding any one else). “And,

Mitia dear,” she added to her nephew, despite the glum looks which he

was throwing at her for having interrupted the logical thread of his

deductions, “you had better let me poultice your cheek, or your teeth

will begin to ache again.”

After that the reading was resumed. Yet the quarrel had in no way

dispelled the calm atmosphere of family and intellectual harmony which

enveloped this circle of ladies.

Clearly deriving its inspiration and character from the Princess Maria

Ivanovna, it was a circle which, for me, had a wholly novel and

attractive character of logicalness mingled with simplicity and

refinement. That character I could discern in the daintiness, good

taste, and solidity of everything about me, whether the handbell, the

binding of the book, the settee, or the table. Likewise, I divined it in

the upright, well-corseted pose of the Princess, in her pendant curls of

grey hair, in the manner in which she had, at our first introduction,

called me plain “Nicolas” and “he,” in the occupations of the ladies

(the reading and the sewing of garments), and in the unusual whiteness

of their hands. Those hands, en passant, showed a family feature common

to all—namely, the feature that the flesh of the palm on the outer side

was rosy in colour, and divided by a sharp, straight line from the pure

whiteness of the upper portion of the hand. Still more was the character

of this feminine circle expressed in the manner in which the three

ladies spoke Russian and French—spoke them, that is to say, with perfect

articulation of syllables and pedantic accuracy of substantives and

prepositions. All this, and more especially the fact that the ladies

treated me as simply and as seriously as a real grown-up—telling me

their opinions, and listening to my own (a thing to which I was so

little accustomed that, for all my glittering buttons and blue facings,

I was in constant fear of being told: “Surely you do not think that we

are talking SERIOUSLY to you? Go away and learn something”)—all this, I

say, caused me to feel an entire absence of restraint in this society. I

ventured at times to rise, to move about, and to talk boldly to each of

the ladies except Varenika (whom I always felt it was unbecoming, or

even forbidden, for me to address unless she first spoke to me).

As I listened to her clear, pleasant voice reading aloud, I kept

glancing from her to the path of the flower-garden, where the rain-spots

were making small dark circles in the sand, and thence to the

lime-trees, upon the leaves of which the rain was pattering down in

large detached drops shed from the pale, shimmering edge of the livid

blue cloud which hung suspended over us. Then I would glance at her

again, and then at the last purple rays of the setting sun where they

were throwing the dense clusters of old, rain-washed birches into

brilliant relief. Yet again my eyes would return to Varenika, and, each

time that they did so, it struck me afresh that she was not nearly so

plain as at first I had thought her.

“How I wish that I wasn’t in love already!” I reflected, “or that

Sonetchka was Varenika! How nice it would be if suddenly I could become

a member of this family, and have the three ladies for my mother, aunt,

and wife respectively!” All the time that these thoughts kept passing

through my head I kept attentively regarding Varenika as she read, until

somehow I felt as though I were magnetising her, and that presently she

must look at me. Sure enough, at length she raised her head, threw me a

glance, and, meeting my eyes, turned away.

“The rain does not seem to stop,” she remarked.

Suddenly a new feeling came over me. I began to feel as though

everything now happening to me was a repetition of some similar

occurrence before—as though on some previous occasion a shower of rain

had begun to fall, and the sun had set behind birch-trees, and I had

been looking at her, and she had been reading aloud, and I had

magnetised her, and she had looked up at me. Yes, all this I seemed to

recall as though it had happened once before.

“Surely she is not—SHE?” was my thought. “Surely IT is not beginning?”

However, I soon decided that Varenika was not the “SHE” referred to, and

that “it” was not “beginning.” “In the first place,” I said to myself,

“Varenika is not at all BEAUTIFUL. She is just an ordinary girl whose

acquaintance I have made in the ordinary way, whereas the she whom I

shall meet somewhere and some day and in some not ordinary way will be

anything but ordinary. This family pleases me so much only because

hitherto I have never seen anybody. Such things will always be happening

in the future, and I shall see many more such families during my life.”

XXVI. I SHOW OFF

AT tea time the reading came to an end, and the ladies began to talk

among themselves of persons and things unknown to me. This I conceived

them to be doing on purpose to make me conscious (for all their kind

demeanour) of the difference which years and position in the world had

set between them and myself. In general discussions, however, in which I

could take part I sought to atone for my late silence by exhibiting that

extraordinary cleverness and originality to which I felt compelled by my

University uniform. For instance, when the conversation turned upon

country houses, I said that Prince Ivan Ivanovitch had a villa near

Moscow which people came to see even from London and Paris, and that it

contained balustrading which had cost 380,000 roubles. Likewise, I

remarked that the Prince was a very near relation of mine, and that,

when lunching with him the same day, he had invited me to go and spend

the entire summer with him at that villa, but that I had declined, since

I knew the villa well, and had stayed in it more than once, and that all

those balustradings and bridges did not interest me, since I could not

bear ornamental work, especially in the country, where I liked

everything to be wholly countrified. After delivering myself of this

extraordinary and complicated romance, I grew confused, and blushed so

much that every one must have seen that I was lying. Both Varenika, who

was handing me a cup of tea, and Sophia Ivanovna, who had been gazing at

me throughout, turned their heads away, and began to talk of something

else with an expression which I afterwards learnt that good-natured

people assume when a very young man has told them a manifest string of

lies—an expression which says, “Yes, we know he is lying, and why he is

doing it, the poor young fellow!”

What I had said about Prince Ivan Ivanovitch having a country villa, I

had related simply because I could find no other pretext for mentioning

both my relationship to the Prince and the fact that I had been to

luncheon with him that day; yet why I had said all I had about the

balustrading costing 380,000 roubles, and about my having several times

visited the Prince at that villa (I had never once been there—more

especially since the Prince possessed no residences save in Moscow and

Naples, as the Nechludoffs very well knew), I could not possibly tell

you. Neither in childhood nor in adolescence nor in riper years did I

ever remark in myself the vice of falsehood—on the contrary, I was, if

anything, too outspoken and truthful. Yet, during this first stage of my

manhood, I often found myself seized with a strange and unreasonable

tendency to lie in the most desperate fashion. I say advisedly “in the

most desperate fashion,” for the reason that I lied in matters in which

it was the easiest thing in the world to detect me. On the whole I think

that a vain-glorious desire to appear different from what I was,

combined with an impossible hope that the lie would never be found out,

was the chief cause of this extraordinary impulse.

After tea, since the rain had stopped and the after-glow of sunset was

calm and clear, the Princess proposed that we should go and stroll in

the lower garden, and admire her favourite spots there. Following my

rule to be always original, and conceiving that clever people like

myself and the Princess must surely be above the banalities of

politeness, I replied that I could not bear a walk with no object in

view, and that, if I DID walk, I liked to walk alone. I had no idea that

this speech was simply rude; all I thought was that, even as nothing

could be more futile than empty compliments, so nothing could be more

pleasing and original than a little frank brusquerie. However, though

much pleased with my answer, I set out with the rest of the company.

The Princess’s favourite spot of all was at the very bottom of the lower

garden, where a little bridge spanned a narrow piece of swamp. The view

there was very restricted, yet very intimate and pleasing. We are so

accustomed to confound art with nature that, often enough, phenomena of

nature which are never to be met with in pictures seem to us unreal, and

give us the impression that nature is unnatural, or vice versa; whereas

phenomena of nature which occur with too much frequency in pictures seem

to us hackneyed, and views which are to be met with in real life, but

which appear to us too penetrated with a single idea or a single

sentiment, seem to us arabesques. The view from the Princess’s favourite

spot was as follows. On the further side of a small lake, over-grown

with weeds round its edges, rose a steep ascent covered with bushes and

with huge old trees of many shades of green, while, overhanging the lake

at the foot of the ascent, stood an ancient birch tree which, though

partly supported by stout roots implanted in the marshy bank of the

lake, rested its crown upon a tall, straight poplar, and dangled its

curved branches over the smooth surface of the pond—both branches and

the surrounding greenery being reflected therein as in a mirror.

“How lovely!” said the Princess with a nod of her head, and addressing

no one in particular.

“Yes, marvellous!” I replied in my desire to show that had an opinion of

my own on every subject. “Yet somehow it all looks to me so terribly

like a scheme of decoration.”

The Princess went on gazing at the scene as though she had not heard me,

and turning to her sister and Lubov Sergievna at intervals, in order to

point out to them its details—especially a curved, pendent bough, with

its reflection in the water, which particularly pleased her. Sophia

Ivanovna observed to me that it was all very beautiful, and that she and

her sister would sometimes spend hours together at this spot; yet it was

clear that her remarks were meant merely to please the Princess. I have

noticed that people who are gifted with the faculty of loving are seldom

receptive to the beauties of nature. Lubov Sergievna also seemed

enraptured, and asked (among other things), “How does that birch tree

manage to support itself? Has it stood there long?” Yet the next moment

she became absorbed in contemplation of her little dog Susetka, which,

with its stumpy paws pattering to and fro upon the bridge in a mincing

fashion, seemed to say by the expression of its face that this was the

first time it had ever found itself out of doors. As for Dimitri, he

fell to discoursing very logically to his mother on the subject of how

no view can be beautiful of which the horizon is limited. Varenika alone

said nothing. Glancing at her, I saw that she was leaning over the

parapet of the bridge, her profile turned towards me, and gazing

straight in front of her. Something seemed to be interesting her deeply,

or even affecting her, since it was clear that she was oblivious to her

surroundings, and thinking neither of herself nor of the fact that any

one might be regarding her. In the expression of her large eyes there

was nothing but wrapt attention and quiet, concentrated thought, while

her whole attitude seemed so unconstrained and, for all her shortness,

so dignified that once more some recollection or another touched me and

once more I asked myself, “Is IT, then, beginning?” Yet again I assured

myself that I was already in love with Sonetchka, and that Varenika was

only an ordinary girl, the sister of my friend. Though she pleased me at

that moment, I somehow felt a vague desire to show her, by word or deed,

some small unfriendliness.

“I tell you what, Dimitri,” I said to my friend as I moved nearer to

Varenika, so that she might overhear what I was going to say, “it seems

to me that, even if there had been no mosquitos here, there would have

been nothing to commend this spot; whereas “—and here I slapped my

cheek, and in very truth annihilated one of those insects—“it is simply

awful.”

“Then you do not care for nature?” said Varenika without turning her

head.

“I think it a foolish, futile pursuit,” I replied, well satisfied that I

had said something to annoy her, as well as something original. Varenika

only raised her eyebrows a little, with an expression of pity, and went

on gazing in front of her as calmly as before.

I felt vexed with her. Yet, for all that, the rusty, paint-blistered

parapet on which she was leaning, the way in which the dark waters of

the pond reflected the drooping branch of the overhanging birch tree (it

almost seemed to me as though branch and its reflection met), the rising

odour of the swamp, the feeling of crushed mosquito on my cheek, and her

absorbed look and statuesque pose—many times afterwards did these things

recur with unexpected vividness to my recollection.

XXVII. DIMITRI

WHEN we returned to the house from our stroll, Varenika declined to sing

as she usually did in the evenings, and I was conceited enough to

attribute this to my doing, in the belief that its reason lay in what I

had said on the bridge. The Nechludoffs never had supper, and went to

bed early, while to-night, since Dimitri had the toothache (as Sophia

Ivanovna had foretold), he departed with me to his room even earlier

than usual. Feeling that I had done all that was required of me by my

blue collar and gilt buttons, and that every one was very pleased with

me, I was in a gratified, complacent mood, while Dimitri, on the other

hand, was rendered by his quarrel with his sister and the toothache both

taciturn and gloomy. He sat down at the table, got out a couple of

notebooks—a diary and the copy-book in which it was his custom every

evening to inscribe the tasks performed by or awaiting him—and,

continually frowning and touching his cheek with his hand, continued

writing for a while.

“Oh, DO leave me alone!” he cried to the maid whom Sophia Ivanovna sent

to ask him whether his teeth were still hurting him, and whether he

would not like to have a poultice made. Then, saying that my bed would

soon be ready for me and that he would be back presently, he departed to

Lubov Sergievna’s room.

“What a pity that Varenika is not good-looking and, in general,

Sonetchka!” I reflected when I found myself alone. “How nice it would be

if, after I have left the University, I could go to her and offer her my

hand! I would say to her, ‘Princess, though no longer young, and

therefore unable to love passionately, I will cherish you as a dear

sister. And you,’ I would continue to her mother, ‘I greatly respect;

and you, Sophia Ivanovna, I value highly. Therefore say to me, Varenika

(since I ask you to be my wife), just the simple and direct word YES.’

And she would give me her hand, and I should press it, and say, ‘Mine is

a love which depends not upon words, but upon deeds.’ And suppose,” next

came into my head, “that Dimitri should suddenly fall in love with

Lubotshka (as Lubotshka has already done with him), and should desire to

marry her? Then either one or the other of us would have to resign all

thought of marriage. Well, it would be splendid, for in that case I

should act thus. As soon as I had noticed how things were, I should make

no remark, but go to Dimitri and say, ‘It is no use, my friend, for you

and I to conceal our feelings from one another. You know that my love

for your sister will terminate only with my life. Yet I know all; and

though you have deprived me of all hope, and have rendered me an unhappy

man, so that Nicolas Irtenieff will have to bewail his misery for the

rest of his existence, yet do you take my sister,’ and I should lay his

hand in Lubotshka’s. Then he would say to me, ‘No, not for all the

world!’ and I should reply, ‘Prince Nechludoff, it is in vain for you to

attempt to outdo me in nobility. Not in the whole world does there exist

a more magnanimous being than Nicolas Irtenieff.’ Then I should salute

him and depart. In tears Dimitri and Lubotshka would pursue me, and

entreat me to accept their sacrifice, and I should consent to do so,

and, perhaps, be happy ever afterwards—if only I were in love with

Varenika.” These fancies tickled my imagination so pleasantly that I

felt as though I should like to communicate them to my friend; yet,

despite our mutual vow of frankness, I also felt as though I had not the

physical energy to do so.

Dimitri returned from Lubov Sergievna’s room with some toothache

capsules which she had given him, yet in even greater pain, and

therefore in even greater depression, than before. Evidently no bedroom

had yet been prepared for me, for presently the boy who acted as

Dimitri’s valet arrived to ask him where I was to sleep.

“Oh, go to the devil!” cried Dimitri, stamping his foot. “Vasika,

Vasika, Vasika!” he went on, the instant that the boy had left the room,

with a gradual raising of his voice at each repetition. “Vasika, lay me

out a bed on the floor.”

“No, let ME sleep on the floor,” I objected.

“Well, it is all one. Lie anywhere you like,” continued Dimitri in the

same angry tone. “Vasika, why don’t you go and do what I tell you?”

Evidently Vasika did not understand what was demanded of him, for he

remained where he was.

“What is the matter with you? Go and lay the bed, Vasika, I tell you!”

shouted Dimitri, suddenly bursting into a sort of frenzy; yet Vasika

still did not understand, but, blushing hotly, stood motionless.

“So you are determined to drive me mad, are you?”—and leaping from his

chair and rushing upon the boy, Dimitri struck him on the head with the

whole weight of his fist, until the boy rushed headlong from the room.

Halting in the doorway, Dimitri glanced at me, and the expression of

fury and pain which had sat for a moment on his countenance suddenly

gave place to such a boyish, kindly, affectionate, yet ashamed,

expression that I felt sorry for him, and reconsidered my intention of

leaving him to himself. He said nothing, but for a long time paced the

room in silence, occasionally glancing at me with the same deprecatory

expression as before. Then he took his notebook from the table, wrote

something in it, took off his jacket and folded it carefully, and,

stepping into the corner where the ikon hung, knelt down and began to

say his prayers, with his large white hands folded upon his breast. So

long did he pray that Vasika had time to bring a mattress and spread it,

under my whispered directions, on the floor. Indeed, I had undressed and

laid myself down upon the mattress before Dimitri had finished. As I

contemplated his slightly rounded back and the soles of his feet (which

somehow seemed to stick out in my direction in a sort of repentant

fashion whenever he made his obeisances), I felt that I liked him more

than ever, and debated within myself whether or not I should tell him

all I had been fancying concerning our respective sisters. When he had

finished his prayers, he lay down upon the bed near me, and, propping

himself upon his elbow, looked at me in silence, with a kindly, yet

abashed, expression. Evidently he found it difficult to do this, yet

meant thus to punish himself. Then I smiled and returned his gaze, and

he smiled back at me.

“Why do you not tell me that my conduct has been abominable?” he said.

“You have been thinking so, have you not?”

“Yes,” I replied; and although it was something quite different which

had been in my mind, it now seemed to me that that was what I had been

thinking. “Yes, it was not right of you, nor should I have expected it

of you.” It pleased me particularly at that moment to call him by the

familiar second person singular. “But how are your teeth now?” I added.

“Oh, much better. Nicolinka, my friend,” he went on, and so feelingly

that it sounded as though tears were standing in his eyes, “I know and

feel that I am bad, but God sees how I try to be better, and how I

entreat Him to make me so. Yet what am I to do with such an unfortunate,

horrible nature as mine? What am I to do with it? I try to keep myself

in hand and to rule myself, but suddenly it becomes impossible for me to

do so—at all events, impossible for me to do so unaided. I need the help

and support of some one. Now, there is Lubov Sergievna; SHE understands

me, and could help me in this, and I know by my notebook that I have

greatly improved in this respect during the past year. Ah, my dear

Nicolinka”—he spoke with the most unusual and unwonted tenderness, and

in a tone which had grown calmer now that he had made his

confession—“how much the influence of a woman like Lubov could do for

me! Think how good it would be for me if I could have a friend like her

to live with when I have become independent! With her I should be

another man.”

And upon that Dimitri began to unfold to me his plans for marriage, for

a life in the country, and for continual self-discipline.

“Yes, I will live in the country,” he said, “and you shall come to see

me when you have married Sonetchka. Our children shall play together.

All this may seem to you stupid and ridiculous, yet it may very well

come to pass.”

“Yes, it very well may” I replied with a smile, yet thinking how much

nicer it would be if I married his sister.

“I tell you what,” he went on presently; “you only imagine yourself to

be in love with Sonetchka, whereas I can see that it is all rubbish, and

that you do not really know what love means.”

I did not protest, for, in truth, I almost agreed with him, and for a

while we lay without speaking.

“Probably you have noticed that I have been in my old bad humour today,

and have had a nasty quarrel with Varia?” he resumed. “I felt bad about

it afterwards—more particularly since it occurred in your presence.

Although she thinks wrongly on some subjects, she is a splendid girl and

very good, as you will soon recognise.”

His quick transition from mention of my love affairs to praise of his

sister pleased me extremely, and made me blush, but I nevertheless said

nothing more about his sister, and we went on talking of other things.

Thus we chattered until the cocks had crowed twice. In fact, the pale

dawn was already looking in at the window when at last Dimitri lay down

upon his bed and put out the candle.

“Well, now for sleep,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied, “but—”

“But what?”

“Now nice it is to be alive in the daylight!”

“Yes, it IS a splendid thing!” he replied in a voice which, even in the

darkness, enabled me to see the expression of his cheerful, kindly eyes

and boyish smile.

XXVIII. IN THE COUNTRY

Next day Woloda and myself departed in a post-chaise for the country.

Turning over various Moscow recollections in my head as we drove along,

I suddenly recalled Sonetchka Valakhin—though not until evening, and

when we had already covered five stages of the road. “It is a strange

thing,” I thought, “that I should be in love, and yet have forgotten all

about it. I must start and think about her,” and straightway I proceeded

to do so, but only in the way that one thinks when travelling—that is to

say, disconnectedly, though vividly. Thus I brought myself to such a

condition that, for the first two days after our arrival home, I somehow

considered it incumbent upon me always to appear sad and moody in the

presence of the household, and especially before Katenka, whom I looked

upon as a great connoisseur in matters of this kind, and to whom I threw

out a hint of the condition in which my heart was situated. Yet, for all

my attempts at dissimulation and assiduous adoption of such signs of

love sickness as I had occasionally observed in other people, I only

succeeded for two days (and that at intervals, and mostly towards

evening) in reminding myself of the fact that I was in love, and

finally, when I had settled down into the new rut of country life and

pursuits, I forgot about my affection for Sonetchka altogether.

We arrived at Petrovskoe in the night time, and I was then so soundly

asleep that I saw nothing of the house as we approached it, nor yet of

the avenue of birch trees, nor yet of the household—all of whom had long

ago betaken themselves to bed and to slumber. Only old hunchbacked

Foka—bare-footed, clad in some sort of a woman’s wadded nightdress, and

carrying a candlestick—opened the door to us. As soon as he saw who we

were, he trembled all over with joy, kissed us on the shoulders,

hurriedly put on his felt slippers, and started to dress himself

properly. I passed in a semi-waking condition through the porch and up

the steps, but in the hall the lock of the door, the bars and bolts, the

crooked boards of the flooring, the chest, the ancient candelabrum

(splashed all over with grease as of old), the shadows thrown by the

crooked, chill, recently-lighted stump of candle, the perennially dusty,

unopened window behind which I remembered sorrel to have grown—all was

so familiar, so full of memories, so intimate of aspect, so, as it were,

knit together by a single idea, that I suddenly became conscious of a

tenderness for this quiet old house. Involuntarily I asked myself, “How

have we, the house and I, managed to remain apart so long?” and,

hurrying from spot to spot, ran to see if all the other rooms were still

the same. Yes, everything was unchanged, except that everything had

become smaller and lower, and I myself taller, heavier, and more filled

out. Yet, even as I was, the old house received me back into its arms,

and aroused in me with every board, every window, every step of the

stairs, and every sound the shadows of forms, feelings, and events of

the happy but irrevocable past. When we entered our old night nursery,

all my childish fears lurked once more in the darkness of the corners

and doorway. When we passed into the drawing-room, I could feel the old

calm motherly love diffusing itself from every object in the apartment.

In the breakfast-room, the noisy, careless merriment of childhood seemed

merely to be waiting to wake to life again. In the divannaia (whither

Foka first conducted us, and where he had prepared our beds)

everything—mirror, screen, old wooden ikon, the lumps on the walls

covered with white paper—seemed to speak of suffering and of death and

of what would never come back to us again.

We got into bed, and Foka, bidding us good-night, retired.

“It was in this room that Mamma died, was it not?” said Woloda.

I made no reply, but pretended to be asleep. If I had said anything I

should have burst into tears. On awaking next morning, I beheld Papa

sitting on Woloda’s bed in his dressing gown and slippers and smoking a

cigar. Leaping up with a merry hoist of the shoulders, he came over to

me, slapped me on the back with his great hand, and presented me his

cheek to press my lips to.

“Well done, DIPLOMAT!” he said in his most kindly jesting tone as he

looked at me with his small bright eyes. “Woloda tells me you have

passed the examinations well for a youngster, and that is a splendid

thing. Unless you start and play the fool, I shall have another fine

little fellow in you. Thanks, my dear boy. Well, we will have a grand

time of it here now, and in the winter, perhaps, we shall move to St.

Petersburg. I only wish the hunting was not over yet, or I could have

given you some amusement in THAT way. Can you shoot, Woldemar? However,

whether there is any game or not, I will take you out some day. Next

winter, if God pleases, we will move to St. Petersburg, and you shall

meet people, and make friends, for you are now my two young grown-ups. I

have been telling Woldemar that you are just starting on your careers,

whereas my day is ended. You are old enough now to walk by yourselves,

but, whenever you wish to confide in me, pray do so, for I am no longer

your nurse, but your friend. At least, I will be your friend and comrade

and adviser as much as I can and more than that I cannot do. How does

that fall in with your philosophy, eh, Koko? Well or ill, eh?”

Of course I said that it fell in with it entirely, and, indeed, I really

thought so. That morning Papa had a particularly winning, bright, and

happy expression on his face, and these new relations between us, as of

equals and comrades, made me love him all the more.

“Now, tell me,” he went on, “did you call upon all our kinsfolk and the

Iwins? Did you see the old man, and what did he say to you? And did you

go to Prince Ivan’s?”

We continued talking so long that, before we were fully dressed, the sun

had left the window of the divannaia, and Jakoff (the same old man who

of yore had twirled his fingers behind his back and always repeated his

words) had entered the room and reported to Papa that the carriage was

ready.

“Where are you going to?” I asked Papa.

“Oh, I had forgotten all about it!” he replied, with a cough and the

usual hoisting of his shoulder. “I promised to go and call upon

Epifanova to-day. You remember Epifanova—‘la belle Flamande’—don’t you,

who used to come and see your Mamma? They are nice people.” And with a

self-conscious shrug of his shoulders (so it appeared to me) Papa left

the room.

During our conversation, Lubotshka had more than once come to the door

and asked “Can I come in?” but Papa had always shouted to her that she

could not do so, since we were not dressed yet.

“What rubbish!” she replied. “Why, I have seen you in your

dressing-gown.”

“Never mind; you cannot see your brothers without their inexpressibles,”

rejoined Papa. “If they each of them just go to the door, let that be

enough for you. Now go. Even for them to SPEAK to you in such a neglige

costume is unbecoming.”

“How unbearable you are!” was Lubotshka’s parting retort. “Well, at

least hurry up and come down to the drawing-room, for Mimi wants to see

them.”

As soon as Papa had left the room, I hastened to array myself in my

student’s uniform, and to repair to the drawing-room.

Woloda, on the other hand, was in no hurry, but remained sitting on his

bed and talking to Jakoff about the best places to find plover and

snipe. As I have said, there was nothing in the world he so much feared

as to be suspected of any affection for his father, brother, and sister;

so that, to escape any expression of that feeling, he often fell into

the other extreme, and affected a coldness which shocked people who did

not comprehend its cause. In the hall, I collided with Papa, who was

hurrying towards the carriage with short, rapid steps. He had a new and

fashionable Moscow greatcoat on, and smelt of scent. On seeing me, he

gave a cheerful nod, as much as to say, “Do you remark my splendour?”

and once again I was struck with the happy expression of face which I

had noted earlier in the morning.

The drawing-room looked the same lofty, bright room as of Yore, with its

brown English piano, and its large open windows looking on to the green

trees and yellowish-red paths of the garden. After kissing Mimi and

Lubotshka, I was approaching Katenka for the same purpose when it

suddenly struck me that it might be improper for me to salute her in

that fashion. Accordingly I halted, silent and blushing. Katenka, for

her part, was quite at her ease as she held out a white hand to me and

congratulated me on my passing into the University. The same thing took

place when Woloda entered the drawing-room and met Katenka. Indeed, it

was something of a problem how, after being brought up together and

seeing one another daily, we ought now, after this first separation, to

meet again. Katenka had grown better-looking than any of us, yet Woloda

seemed not at all confused as, with a slight bow to her, he crossed over

to Lubotshka, made a jesting remark to her, and then departed somewhere

on some solitary expedition.

XXIX. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE GIRLS AND OURSELVES

OF the girls Woloda took the strange view that, although he wished that

they should have enough to eat, should sleep well, be well dressed, and

avoid making such mistakes in French as would shame him before

strangers, he would never admit that they could think or feel like human

beings, still less that they could converse with him sensibly about

anything. Whenever they addressed to him a serious question (a thing, by

the way, which he always tried to avoid), such as asking his opinion on

a novel or inquiring about his doings at the University, he invariably

pulled a grimace, and either turned away without speaking or answered

with some nonsensical French phrase—“Comme c’est tres jolie!” or the

like. Or again, feigning to look serious and stolidly wise, he would say

something absolutely meaningless and bearing no relation whatever to the

question asked him, or else suddenly exclaim, with a look of pretended

unconsciousness, the word bulku or poyechali or kapustu, [Respectively,

“roll of butter,” “away,” and “cabbage.”] or something of the kind; and

when, afterwards, I happened to repeat these words to him as having been

told me by Lubotshka or Katenka, he would always remark:

“Hm! So you actually care about talking to them? I can see you are a

duffer still”—and one needed to see and near him to appreciate the

profound, immutable contempt which echoed in this remark. He had been

grown-up now two years, and was in love with every good-looking woman

that he met; yet, despite the fact that he came in daily contact with

Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and

was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love

with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the

fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh in

his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people feel

for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness

which, at a first encounter with anything fair and pretty, leads a man

to say to himself, “Ah! I shall meet much more of the same kind during

my life,” but at all events Woloda had never yet looked upon Katenka

with a man’s eyes.

All that summer Woloda appeared to find things very wearisome—a fact

which arose out of that contempt for us all which, as I have said, he

made no effort to conceal. His expression of face seemed to be

constantly saying, “Phew! how it bores me to have no one to speak to!”

The first thing in the morning he would go out shooting, or sit reading

a book in his room, and not dress until luncheon time. Indeed, if Papa

was not at home, he would take his book into that meal, and go on

reading it without addressing so much as a single word to any one of us,

who felt, somehow, guilty in his presence. In the evening, too, he would

stretch himself on a settee in the drawing-room, and either go to sleep,

propped on his elbow, or tell us farcical stories—sometimes stories so

improper as to make Mimi grow angry and blush, and ourselves die with

laughter. At other times he would not condescend to address a single

serious word to any member of the family except Papa or (occasionally)

myself. Involuntarily I offended against his view of girls, seeing that

I was not so afraid of seeming affectionate as he, and, moreover, had

not such a profound and confirmed contempt for young women. Yet several

times that summer, when driven by lack of amusement to try and engage

Lubotshka and Katenka in conversation, I always encountered in them such

an absence of any capacity for logical thinking, and such an ignorance

of the simplest, most ordinary matters (as, for instance, the nature of

money, the subjects studied at universities, the effect of war, and so

forth), as well as such indifference to my explanations of such matters,

that these attempts of mine only ended in confirming my unfavourable

opinion of feminine ability.

I remember one evening when Lubotshka kept repeating some unbearably

tedious passage on the piano about a hundred times in succession, while

Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing

no one in particular as he muttered, “Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a

musician! WHAT a Beethoven!” (he always pronounced the composer’s name

with especial irony). “Wrong again! Now—a second time! That’s it!” and

so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and

somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject—love. I was in the

right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by loftily defining love

as the wish to acquire in another what one does not possess in oneself.

To this Katenka retorted that, on the contrary, love is not love at all

if a girl desires to marry a man for his money alone, but that, in her

opinion, riches were a vain thing, and true love only the affection

which can stand the test of separation (this I took to be a hint

concerning her love for Dubkoff). At this point Woloda, who must have

been listening all the time, raised himself on his elbow, and cried out

some rubbish or another; and I felt that he was right.

Apart from the general faculties (more or less developed in different

persons) of intellect, sensibility, and artistic feeling, there also

exists (more or less developed in different circles of society, and

especially in families) a private or individual faculty which I may call

APPREHENSION. The essence of this faculty lies in sympathetic

appreciation of proportion, and in identical understanding of things.

Two individuals who possess this faculty and belong to the same social

circle or the same family apprehend an expression of feeling precisely

to the same point, namely, the point beyond which such expression

becomes mere phrasing. Thus they apprehend precisely where commendation

ends and irony begins, where attraction ends and pretence begins, in a

manner which would be impossible for persons possessed of a different

order of apprehension. Persons possessed of identical apprehension view

objects in an identically ludicrous, beautiful, or repellent light; and

in order to facilitate such identical apprehension between members of

the same social circle or family, they usually establish a language,

turns of speech, or terms to define such shades of apprehension as exist

for them alone. In our particular family such apprehension was common to

Papa, Woloda, and myself, and was developed to the highest pitch,

Dubkoff also approximated to our coterie in apprehension, but Dimitri,

though infinitely more intellectual than Dubkoff, was grosser in this

respect. With no one, however, did I bring this faculty to such a point

as with Woloda, who had grown up with me under identical conditions.

Papa stood a long way from us, and much that was to us as clear as “two

and two make four” was to him incomprehensible. For instance, I and

Woloda managed to establish between ourselves the following terms, with

meanings to correspond. Izium [Raisins.] meant a desire to boast of

one’s money; shishka [Bump or swelling.] (on pronouncing which one had

to join one’s fingers together, and to put a particular emphasis upon

the two sh’s in the word) meant anything fresh, healthy, and comely, but

not elegant; a substantive used in the plural meant an undue partiality

for the object which it denoted; and so forth, and so forth. At the same

time, the meaning depended considerably upon the expression of the face

and the context of the conversation; so that, no matter what new

expression one of us might invent to define a shade of feeling the other

could immediately understand it by a hint alone. The girls did not share

this faculty of apprehension, and herein lay the chief cause of our

moral estrangement, and of the contempt which we felt for them.

It may be that they too had their “apprehension,” but it so little ran

with ours that, where we already perceived the “phrasing,” they still

saw only the feeling—our irony was for them truth, and so on. At that

time I had not yet learnt to understand that they were in no way to

blame for this, and that absence of such apprehension in no way

prevented them from being good and clever girls. Accordingly I looked

down upon them. Moreover, having once lit upon my precious idea of

“frankness,” and being bent upon applying it to the full in myself, I

thought the quiet, confiding nature of Lubotshka guilty of secretiveness

and dissimulation simply because she saw no necessity for digging up and

examining all her thoughts and instincts. For instance, the fact that

she always signed the sign of the cross over Papa before going to bed,

that she and Katenka invariably wept in church when attending requiem

masses for Mamma, and that Katenka sighed and rolled her eyes about when

playing the piano—all these things seemed to me sheer make-believe, and

I asked myself: “At what period did they learn to pretend like grown-up

people, and how can they bring themselves to do it?”

XXX. HOW I EMPLOYED MY TIME

Nevertheless, the fact that that summer I developed a passion for music

caused me to become better friends with the ladies of our household than

I had been for years. In the spring, a young fellow came to see us,

armed with a letter of introduction, who, as soon as ever he entered the

drawing-room, fixed his eyes upon the piano, and kept gradually edging

his chair closer to it as he talked to Mimi and Katenka. After

discoursing awhile of the weather and the amenities of country life, he

skilfully directed the conversation to piano-tuners, music, and pianos

generally, and ended by saying that he himself played—and in truth he

did sit down and perform three waltzes, with Mimi, Lubotshka, and

Katenka grouped about the instrument, and watching him as he did so. He

never came to see us again, but his playing, and his attitude when at

the piano, and the way in which he kept shaking his long hair, and, most

of all, the manner in which he was able to execute octaves with his left

hand as he first of all played them rapidly with his thumb and little

finger, and then slowly closed those members, and then played the

octaves afresh, made a great impression upon me. This graceful gesture

of his, together with his easy pose and his shaking of hair and

successful winning of the ladies’ applause by his talent, ended by

firing me to take up the piano. Convinced that I possessed both talent

and a passion for music, I set myself to learn, and, in doing so, acted

just as millions of the male—still more, of the female—sex have done who

try to teach themselves without a skilled instructor, without any real

turn for the art, or without the smallest understanding either of what

the art can give or of what ought to be done to obtain that gift. For me

music (or rather, piano-playing) was simply a means of winning the

ladies’ good graces through their sensibility. With the help of Katenka

I first learnt the notes (incidentally breaking several of them with my

clumsy fingers), and then—that is to say, after two months of hard work,

supplemented by ceaseless twiddling of my rebellious fingers on my knees

after luncheon, and on the pillow when in bed—went on to “pieces,” which

I played (so Katenka assured me) with “soul” (“avec ame”), but

altogether regardless of time.

My range of pieces was the usual one—waltzes, galops, “romances,”

“arrangements,” etcetera; all of them of the class of delightful

compositions of which any one with a little healthy taste could point

out a selection among the better class works contained in any volume of

music and say, “These are what you ought NOT to play, seeing that

anything worse, less tasteful, and more silly has never yet been

included in any collection of music,”—but which (probably for that very

reason) are to be found on the piano of every Russian lady. True, we

also possessed an unfortunate volume which contained Beethoven’s “Sonate

Pathetique” and the C minor Sonata (a volume lamed for life by the

ladies—more especially by Lubotshka, who used to discourse music from it

in memory of Mamma), as well as certain other good pieces which her

teacher in Moscow had given her; but among that collection there were

likewise compositions of the teacher’s own, in the shape of clumsy

marches and galops—and these too Lubotshka used to play! Katenka and I

cared nothing for serious works, but preferred, above all things, “Le

Fou” and “The Nightingale”—the latter of which Katenka would play until

her fingers almost became invisible, and which I too was beginning to

execute with much vigour and some continuity. I had adopted the gestures

of the young man of whom I have spoken, and frequently regretted that

there were no strangers present to see me play. Soon, however, I began

to realise that Liszt and Kalkbrenner were beyond me, and that I should

never overtake Katenka. Accordingly, imagining that classical music was

easier (as well as, partly, for the sake of originality), I suddenly

came to the conclusion that I loved abstruse German music. I began to go

into raptures whenever Lubotshka played the “Sonate Pathetique,” and

although (if the truth be told) that work had for years driven me to the

verge of distraction, I set myself to play Beethoven, and to talk of him

as “Beethoven.” Yet through all this chopping and changing and pretence

(as I now conceive) there may have run in me a certain vein of talent,

since music sometimes affected me even to tears, and things which

particularly pleased me I could strum on the piano afterwards (in a

certain fashion) without the score; so that, had any one taught me at

that period to look upon music as an end, a grace, in itself, and not

merely as a means for pleasing womenfolk with the velocity and

pseudo-sentiment of one’s playing, I might possibly have become a

passable musician.

The reading of French novels (of which Woloda had brought a large store

with him from Moscow) was another of my amusements that summer. At that

period Monte Cristo and Taine’s works had just appeared, while I also

revelled in stories by Sue, Dumas, and Paul de Kock. Even their most

unnatural personages and events were for me as real as actuality, and

not only was I incapable of suspecting an author of lying, but, in my

eyes, there existed no author at all. That is to say, the various

personages and events of a book paraded themselves before me on the

printed page as personages and events that were alive and real; and

although I had never in my life met such characters as I there read

about, I never for a second doubted that I should one day do so. I

discovered in myself all the passions described in every novel, as well

as a likeness to all the characters—heroes and villains impartially—who

figured therein, just as a suspicious man finds in himself the signs of

every possible disease when reading a book on medicine. I took pleasure

both in the cunning designs, the glowing sentiments, the tumultuous

events, and the character-drawing of these works. A good man was of the

goodness, a bad man of the badness, possible only to the imagination of

early youth. Likewise I found great pleasure in the fact that it was all

written in French, and that I could lay to heart the fine words which

the fine heroes spoke, and recall them for use some day when engaged in

some noble deed. What quantities of French phrases I culled from those

books for Kolpikoff’s benefit if I should ever meet him again, as well

as for HERS, when at length I should find her and reveal to her my love!

For them both I prepared speeches which should overcome them as soon as

spoken! Upon novels, too, I founded new ideals of the moral qualities

which I wished to attain. First of all, I wished to be NOBLE in all my

deeds and conduct (I use the French word noble instead of the Russian

word blagorodni for the reason that the former has a different meaning

to the latter—as the Germans well understood when they adopted noble as

nobel and differentiated it from ehrlich); next, to be strenuous; and

lastly, to be what I was already inclined to be, namely, comme il faut.

I even tried to approximate my appearance and bearing to that of the

heroes who possessed these qualities. In particular I remember how in

one of the hundred or so novels which I read that summer there was a

very strenuous hero with heavy eyebrows, and that I so greatly wished to

resemble him (I felt that I did so already from a moral point of view)

that one day, when looking at my eyebrows in the glass, I conceived the

idea of clipping them, in order to make them grow bushier.

Unfortunately, after I had started to do so, I happened to clip one spot

rather shorter than the rest, and so had to level down the rest to

it-with the result that, to my horror, I beheld myself eyebrow-less, and

anything but presentable. However, I comforted myself with the

reflection that my eyebrows would soon sprout again as bushy as my

hero’s, and was only perplexed to think how I could explain the

circumstance to the household when they next perceived my eyebrow-less

condition. Accordingly I borrowed some gunpowder from Woloda, rubbed it

on my temples, and set it alight. The powder did not fire properly, but

I succeeded in singeing myself sufficiently to avert all suspicion of my

pranks. And, indeed, afterwards, when I had forgotten all about my hero,

my eyebrows grew again, and much thicker than they had been before.

XXXI. “COMME IL FAUT”

SEVERAL times in the course of this narrative I have hinted at an idea

corresponding to the above French heading, and now feel it incumbent

upon me to devote a whole chapter to that idea, which was one of the

most ruinous, lying notions which ever became engrafted upon my life by

my upbringing and social milieu.

The human race may be divided into several categories—rich and poor,

good and bad, military and civilian, clever and stupid, and so forth,

and so forth. Yet each man has his own favourite, fundamental system of

division which he unconsciously uses to class each new person with whom

he meets. At the time of which I am speaking, my own favourite,

fundamental system of division in this respect was into people “comme il

faut” and people “comme il ne faut pas”—the latter subdivided, again,

into people merely not “comme il faut” and the lower orders. People

“comme il faut” I respected, and looked upon as worthy to consort with

me as my equals; the second of the above categories I pretended merely

to despise, but in reality hated, and nourished towards them a kind of

feeling of offended personality; while the third category had no

existence at all, so far as I was concerned, since my contempt for them

was too complete. This “comme il faut”-ness of mine lay, first and

foremost, in proficiency in French, especially conversational French. A

person who spoke that language badly at once aroused in me a feeling of

dislike. “Why do you try to talk as we do when you haven’t a notion how

to do it?” I would seem to ask him with my most venomous and quizzing

smile. The second condition of “comme il faut”-ness was long nails that

were well kept and clean; the third, ability to bow, dance, and

converse; the fourth—and a very important one—indifference to

everything, and a constant air of refined, supercilious ennui. Moreover,

there were certain general signs which, I considered, enabled me to

tell, without actually speaking to a man, the class to which he

belonged. Chief among these signs (the others being the fittings of his

rooms, his gloves, his handwriting, his turn-out, and so forth) were his

feet. The relation of boots to trousers was sufficient to determine, in

my eyes, the social status of a man. Heelless boots with angular toes,

wedded to narrow, unstrapped trouser-ends—these denoted the vulgarian.

Boots with narrow, round toes and heels, accompanied either by tight

trousers strapped under the instep and fitting close to the leg or by

wide trousers similarly strapped, but projecting in a peak over the

toe—these meant the man of mauvais genre; and so on, and so on.

It was a curious thing that I who lacked all ability to become “comme il

faut,” should have assimilated the idea so completely as I did. Possibly

it was the fact that it had cost me such enormous labour to acquire that

brought about its strenuous development in my mind. I hardly like to

think how much of the best and most valuable time of my first sixteen

years of existence I wasted upon its acquisition. Yet every one whom I

imitated—Woloda, Dubkoff, and the majority of my acquaintances—seemed to

acquire it easily. I watched them with envy, and silently toiled to

become proficient in French, to bow gracefully and without looking at

the person whom I was saluting, to gain dexterity in small-talk and

dancing, to cultivate indifference and ennui, and to keep my fingernails

well trimmed (though I frequently cut my finger-ends with the scissors

in so doing). And all the time I felt that so much remained to be done

if I was ever to attain my end! A room, a writing-table, an equipage I

still found it impossible to arrange “comme il faut,” however much I

fought down my aversion to practical matters in my desire to become

proficient. Yet everything seemed to arrange itself properly with other

people, just as though things could never have been otherwise! Once I

remember asking Dubkoff, after much zealous and careful labouring at my

finger-nails (his own were extraordinarily good), whether his nails had

always been as now, or whether he had done anything to make them so: to

which he replied that never within his recollection had he done anything

to them, and that he could not imagine a gentleman’s nails possibly

being different. This answer incensed me greatly, for I had not yet

learnt that one of the chief conditions of “comme il faut”-ness was to

hold one’s tongue about the labour by which it had been acquired. “Comme

il faut”-ness I looked upon as not only a great merit, a splendid

accomplishment, an embodiment of all the perfection which must strive to

attain, but as the one indispensable condition without which there could

never be happiness, nor glory, nor any good whatsoever in this world.

Even the greatest artist or savant or benefactor of the human race would

at that time have won from me no respect if he had not also been “comme

il faut.” A man possessed of “comme il faut”-ness stood higher than, and

beyond all possible equality with, such people, and might well leave it

to them to paint pictures, to compose music, to write books, or to do

good. Possibly he might commend them for so doing (since why should not

merit be commended where-ever it be found?), but he could never stand ON

A LEVEL with them, seeing that he was “comme il faut” and they were

not—a quite final and sufficient reason. In fact, I actually believe

that, had we possessed a brother or a father or a mother who had not

been “comme il faut,” I should have declared it to be a great misfortune

for us, and announced that between myself and them there could never be

anything in common. Yet neither waste of the golden hours which I

consumed in constantly endeavouring to observe the many arduous,

unattainable conditions of “comme il faut”-ness (to the exclusion of any

more serious pursuit), nor dislike of and contempt for nine-tenths of

the human race, nor disregard of all the beauty that lay outside the

narrow circle of “comme il faut”-ness comprised the whole of the evil

which the idea wrought in me. The chief evil of all lay in the notion

acquired that a man need not strive to become a tchinovnik, [Official.]

a coachbuilder, a soldier, a savant, or anything useful, so long only as

he was “comme il faut “—that by attaining the latter quality he had done

all that was demanded of him, and was even superior to most people.

Usually, at a given period in youth, and after many errors and excesses,

every man recognises the necessity of his taking an active part in

social life, and chooses some branch of labour to which to devote

himself. Only with the “comme il faut” man does this rarely happen. I

have known, and know, very, very many people—old, proud, self-satisfied,

and opinionated—who to the question (if it should ever present itself to

them in their world) “Who have you been, and what have you ever done?”

would be unable to reply otherwise than by saying,

“Je fus un homme tres comme il faut,”

Such a fate was awaiting myself.

XXXII. YOUTH

Despite the confusion of ideas raging in my head, I was at least young,

innocent, and free that summer—consequently almost happy.

Sometimes I would rise quite early in the morning, for I slept on the

open verandah, and the bright, horizontal beams of the morning sun would

wake me up. Dressing myself quickly, I would tuck a towel and a French

novel under my arm, and go off to bathe in the river in the shade of a

birch tree which stood half a verst from the house. Next, I would

stretch myself on the grass and read—raising my eyes from time to time

to look at the surface of the river where it showed blue in the shade of

the trees, at the ripples caused by the first morning breeze, at the

yellowing field of rye on the further bank, and at the bright-red sheen

of the sunlight as it struck lower and lower down the white trunks of

the birch-trees which, ranged in ranks one behind the other, gradually

receded into the remote distance of the home park. At such moments I

would feel joyously conscious of having within me the same young, fresh

force of life as nature was everywhere exuding around me. When, however,

the sky was overcast with grey clouds of morning and I felt chilly after

bathing, I would often start to walk at random through the fields and

woods, and joyously trail my wet boots in the fresh dew. All the while

my head would be filled with vivid dreams concerning the heroes of my

last-read novel, and I would keep picturing to myself some leader of an

army or some statesman or marvellously strong man or devoted lover or

another, and looking round me in, a nervous expectation that I should

suddenly descry HER somewhere near me, in a meadow or behind a tree.

Yet, whenever these rambles led me near peasants engaged at their work,

all my ignoring of the existence of the “common people” did not prevent

me from experiencing an involuntary, overpowering sensation of

awkwardness; so that I always tried to avoid their seeing me. When the

heat of the day had increased, it was not infrequently my habit—if the

ladies did not come out of doors for their morning tea—to go rambling

through the orchard and kitchen-garden, and to pluck ripe fruit there.

Indeed, this was an occupation which furnished me with one of my

greatest pleasures. Let any one go into an orchard, and dive into the

midst of a tall, thick, sprouting raspberry-bed. Above will be seen the

clear, glowing sky, and, all around, the pale-green, prickly stems of

raspberry-trees where they grow mingled together in a tangle of

profusion. At one’s feet springs the dark-green nettle, with its slender

crown of flowers, while the broad-leaved burdock, with its bright-pink,

prickly blossoms, overtops the raspberries (and even one’s head) with

its luxuriant masses, until, with the nettle, it almost meets the

pendent, pale-green branches of the old apple-trees where apples, round

and lustrous as bone, but as yet unripe, are mellowing in the heat of

the sun. Below, again, are seen young raspberry-shoots, twining

themselves around the partially withered, leafless parent plant, and

stretching their tendrils towards the sunlight, with green,

needle-shaped blades of grass and young, dew-coated pods peering through

last year’s leaves, and growing juicily green in the perennial shade, as

though they care nothing for the bright sunshine which is playing on the

leaves of the apple-trees above them. In this density there is always

moisture—always a smell of confined, perpetual shade, of cobwebs, fallen

apples (turning black where they roll on the mouldy sod), raspberries,

and earwigs of the kind which impel one to reach hastily for more fruit

when one has inadvertently swallowed a member of that insect tribe with

the last berry. At every step one’s movements keep flushing the sparrows

which always make their home in these depths, and one hears their fussy

chirping and the beating of their tiny, fluttering wings against the

stalks, and catches the low buzzing of a bumble bee somewhere, and the

sound of the gardener’s footsteps (it is half-daft Akim) on the path as

he hums his eternal sing-song to himself. Then one mutters under one’s

breath, “No! Neither he nor any one else shall find me here!” yet still

one goes on stripping juicy berries from their conical white pilasters,

and cramming them into one’s mouth. At length, one’s legs soaked to the

knees as one repeats, over and over again, some rubbish which keeps

running in one’s head, and one’s hands and nether limbs (despite the

protection of one’s wet trousers) thoroughly stung with the nettles, one

comes to the conclusion that the sun’s rays are beating too straight

upon one’s head for eating to be any longer desirable, and, sinking down

into the tangle of greenery, one remains there—looking and listening,

and continuing in mechanical fashion to strip off one or two of the

finer berries and swallow them.

At eleven o’clock—that is to say, when the ladies had taken their

morning tea and settled down to their occupations—I would repair to the

drawing-room. Near the first window, with its unbleached linen blind

lowered to exclude the sunshine, but through the chink of which the sun

kept throwing brilliant circles of light which hurt the eye to look at

them, there would be standing a screen, with flies quietly parading the

whiteness of its covering. Behind it would be seated Mimi, shaking her

head in an irritable manner, and constantly shifting from spot to spot

to avoid the sunshine as at intervals it darted her from somewhere and

laid a streak of flame upon her hand or face. Through the other three

windows the sun would be throwing three squares of light, crossed with

the shadows of the window-frames, and where one of these patches marked

the unstained floor of the room there would be lying, in accordance with

invariable custom, Milka, with her ears pricked as she watched the flies

promenading the lighted space. Seated on a settee, Katenka would be

knitting or reading aloud as from time to time she gave her white

sleeves (looking almost transparent in the sunshine) an impatient shake,

or tossed her head with a frown to drive away some fly which had settled

upon her thick auburn hair and was now buzzing in its tangles. Lubotshka

would either be walking up and down the room (her hands clasped behind

her) until the moment should arrive when a movement would be made

towards the garden, or playing some piece of which every note had long

been familiar to me. For my own part, I would sit down somewhere, and

listen to the music or the reading until such time as I myself should

have an opportunity of performing on the piano. After luncheon I would

condescend to take the girls out riding (since to go for a mere walk at

that hour seemed to me unsuitable to my years and position in the

world), and these excursions of ours—in which I often took my companions

through unaccustomed spots and dells—were very pleasant. Indeed, on some

of these occasions I grew quite boyish, and the girls would praise my

riding and daring, and pretend that I was their protector. In the

evening, if we had no guests with us, tea (served in the dim verandah),

would be followed by a walk round the homestead with Papa, and then I

would stretch myself on my usual settee, and read and ponder as of old,

as I listened to Katenka or Lubotshka playing. At other times, if I was

alone in the drawing-room and Lubotshka was performing some old-time

air, I would find myself laying my book down, and gazing through the

open doorway on to the balcony at the pendent, sinuous branches of the

tall birch-trees where they stood overshadowed by the coming night, and

at the clear sky where, if one looked at it intently enough, misty,

yellowish spots would appear suddenly, and then disappear again. Next,

as I listened to the sounds of the music wafted from the salon, and to

the creaking of gates and the voices of the peasant women when the

cattle returned to the village, I would suddenly bethink me of Natalia

Savishna and of Mamma and of Karl Ivanitch, and become momentarily sad.

But in those days my spirit was so full of life and hope that such

reminiscences only touched me in passing, and soon fled away again.

After supper and (sometimes) a night stroll with some one in the garden

(for I was afraid to walk down the dark avenues by myself), I would

repair to my solitary sleeping-place on the verandah—a proceeding which,

despite the countless mosquitos which always devoured me, afforded me

the greatest pleasure. If the moon was full, I frequently spent whole

nights sitting up on my mattress, looking at the light and shade,

listening to the sounds or stillness, dreaming of one matter and another

(but more particularly of the poetic, voluptuous happiness which, in

those days, I believed was to prove the acme of my felicity) and

lamenting that until now it had only been given to me to IMAGINE things.

No sooner had every one dispersed, and I had seen lights pass from the

drawing-room to the upper chambers (whence female voices would presently

be heard, and the noise of windows opening and shutting), than I would

depart to the verandah, and walk up and down there as I listened

attentively to the sounds from the slumbering mansion. To this day,

whenever I feel any expectation (no matter how small and baseless) of

realising a fraction of some happiness of which I may be dreaming, I

somehow invariably fail to picture to myself what the imagined happiness

is going to be like.

At the least sound of bare footsteps, or of a cough, or of a snore, or

of the rattling of a window, or of the rustling of a dress, I would leap

from my mattress, and stand furtively gazing and listening, thrown,

without any visible cause, into extreme agitation. But the lights would

disappear from the upper rooms, the sounds of footsteps and talking give

place to snores, the watchman begin his nightly tapping with his stick,

the garden grow brighter and more mysterious as the streaks of light

vanished from the windows, the last candle pass from the pantry to the

hall (throwing a glimmer into the dewy garden as it did so), and the

stooping figure of Foka (decked in a nightcap, and carrying the candle)

become visible to my eyes as he went to his bed. Often I would find a

great and fearful pleasure in stealing over the grass, in the black

shadow of the house, until I had reached the hall window, where I would

stand listening with bated breath to the snoring of the boy, to Foka’s

gruntings (in the belief that no one heard him), and to the sound of his

senile voice as he drawled out the evening prayers. At length even his

candle would be extinguished, and the window slammed down, so that I

would find myself utterly alone; whereupon, glancing nervously from side

to side, lest haply I should see the white woman standing near a

flower-bed or by my couch, I would run at full speed back to the

verandah. Then, and only then, I would lie down with my face to the

garden, and, covering myself over, so far as possible, from the

mosquitos and bats, fall to gazing in front of me as I listened to the

sounds of the night and dreamed of love and happiness.

At such times everything would take on for me a different meaning. The

look of the old birch trees, with the one side of their curling branches

showing bright against the moonlit sky, and the other darkening the

bushes and carriage-drive with their black shadows; the calm, rich

glitter of the pond, ever swelling like a sound; the moonlit sparkle of

the dewdrops on the flowers in front of the verandah; the graceful

shadows of those flowers where they lay thrown upon the grey stonework;

the cry of a quail on the far side of the pond; the voice of some one

walking on the high road; the quiet, scarcely audible scrunching of two

old birch trees against one another; the humming of a mosquito at my car

under the coverlet; the fall of an apple as it caught against a branch

and rustled among the dry leaves; the leapings of frogs as they

approached almost to the verandah-steps and sat with the moon shining

mysteriously on their green backs—all these things took on for me a

strange significance—a significance of exceeding beauty and of infinite

love. Before me would rise SHE, with long black tresses and a high bust,

but always mournful in her fairness, with bare hands and voluptuous

arms. She loved me, and for one moment of her love I would sacrifice my

whole life!—But the moon would go on rising higher and higher, and

shining brighter and brighter, in the heavens; the rich sparkle of the

pond would swell like a sound, and become ever more and more brilliant,

while the shadows would grow blacker and blacker, and the sheen of the

moon more and more transparent: until, as I looked at and listened to

all this, something would say to me that SHE with the bare hands and

voluptuous arms did not represent ALL happiness, that love for her did

not represent ALL good; so that, the more I gazed at the full,

high-riding moon, the higher would true beauty and goodness appear to me

to lie, and the purer and purer they would seem—the nearer and nearer to

Him who is the source of all beauty and all goodness. And tears of a

sort of unsatisfied, yet tumultuous, joy would fill my eyes.

Always, too, I was alone; yet always, too, it seemed to me that,

although great, mysterious Nature could draw the shining disc of the

moon to herself, and somehow hold in some high, indefinite place the

pale-blue sky, and be everywhere around me, and fill of herself the

infinity of space, while I was but a lowly worm, already defiled with

the poor, petty passions of humanity—always it seemed to me that,

nevertheless, both Nature and the moon and I were one.

XXXIII. OUR NEIGHBOURS

ON the first day after our arrival, I had been greatly astonished that

Papa should speak of our neighbours, the Epifanovs, as “nice people,”

and still more so that he should go to call upon them. The fact was that

we had long been at law over some land with this family. When a child, I

had more than once heard Papa raging over the litigation, abusing the

Epifanovs, and warning people (so I understood him) against them.

Likewise, I had heard Jakoff speak of them as “our enemies” and “black

people” and could remember Mamma requesting that their names should

never be mentioned in her presence, nor, indeed, in the house at all.

From these data I, as a child, had arrived at the clear and assured

conviction that the Epifanovs were foemen of ours who would at any time

stab or strangle both Papa and his sons if they should ever come across

them, as well as that they were “black people”, in the literal sense of

the term. Consequently, when, in the year that Mamma died, I chanced to

catch sight of Avdotia (“La Belle Flamande”) on the occasion of a visit

which she paid to my mother, I found it hard to believe that she did not

come of a family of negroes. All the same, I had the lowest possible

opinion of the family, and, for all that we saw much of them that

summer, continued to be strongly prejudiced against them. As a matter of

fact, their household only consisted of the mother (a widow of fifty,

but a very well-preserved, cheery old woman), a beautiful daughter named

Avdotia, and a son, Peter, who was a stammerer, unmarried, and of very

serious disposition.

For the last twenty years before her husband’s death, Madame Epifanov

had lived apart from him—sometimes in St. Petersburg, where she had

relatives, but more frequently at her village of Mitishtchi, which stood

some three versts from ours. Yet the neighbourhood had taken to

circulating such horrible tales concerning her mode of life that

Messalina was, by comparison, a blameless child: which was why my mother

had requested her name never to be mentioned. As a matter of fact, not

one-tenth part of the most cruel of all gossip—the gossip of

country-houses—is worthy of credence; and although, when I first made

Madame’s acquaintance, she had living with her in the house a clerk

named Mitusha, who had been promoted from a serf, and who, curled,

pomaded, and dressed in a frockcoat of Circassian pattern, always stood

behind his mistress’s chair at luncheon, while from time to time she

invited her guests to admire his handsome eyes and mouth, there was

nothing for gossip to take hold of. I believe, too, that since the

time—ten years earlier—when she had recalled her dutiful son Peter from

the service, she had wholly changed her mode of living. It seems her

property had never been a large one—merely a hundred souls or so—[This

refers, of course, to the days of serfdom.]and that during her previous

life of gaiety she had spent a great deal. Consequently, when, some ten

years ago, those portions of the property which had been mortgaged and

re-mortgaged had been foreclosed upon and compulsorily sold by auction,

she had come to the conclusion that all these unpleasant details of

distress upon and valuation of her property had been due not so much to

failure to pay the interest as to the fact that she was a woman:

wherefore she had written to her son (then serving with his regiment) to

come and save his mother from her embarrassments, and he, like a dutiful

son—conceiving that his first duty was to comfort his mother in her old

age—had straightway resigned his commission (for all that he had been

doing well in his profession, and was hoping soon to become

independent), and had come to join her in the country.

Despite his plain face, uncouth demeanour, and fault of stuttering,

Peter was a man of unswerving principles and of the most extraordinary

good sense. Somehow—by small borrowings, sundry strokes of business,

petitions for grace, and promises to repay—he contrived to carry on the

property, and, making himself overseer, donned his father’s greatcoat

(still preserved in a drawer), dispensed with horses and carriages,

discouraged guests from calling at Mitishtchi, fashioned his own

sleighs, increased his arable land and curtailed that of the serfs,

felled his own timber, sold his produce in person, and saw to matters

generally. Indeed, he swore, and kept his oath, that, until all

outstanding debts were paid, he would never wear any clothes than his

father’s greatcoat and a corduroy jacket which he had made for himself,

nor yet ride in aught but a country waggon, drawn by peasants’ horses.

This stoical mode of life he sought to apply also to his family, so far

as the sympathetic respect which he conceived to be his mother’s due

would allow of; so that, although, in the drawing-room, he would show

her only stuttering servility, and fulfil all her wishes, and blame any

one who did not do precisely as she bid them, in his study or his office

he would overhaul the cook if she had served up so much as a duck

without his orders, or any one responsible for sending a serf (even

though at Madame’s own bidding) to inquire after a neighbour’s health or

for despatching the peasant girls into the wood to gather wild

raspberries instead of setting them to weed the kitchen-garden.

Within four years every debt had been repaid, and Peter had gone to

Moscow and returned thence in a new jacket and tarantass. [A two-wheeled

carriage.] Yet, despite this flourishing position of affairs, he still

preserved the stoical tendencies in which, to tell the truth, he took a

certain vague pride before his family and strangers, since he would

frequently say with a stutter: “Any one who REALLY wishes to see me will

be glad to see me even in my dressing-gown, and to eat nothing but

shtchi [Cabbage-soup.] and kasha [Buckwheat gruel.] at my table.” “That

is what I eat myself,” he would add. In his every word and movement

spoke pride based upon a consciousness of having sacrificed himself for

his mother and redeemed the property, as well as contempt for any one

who had not done something of the same kind.

The mother and daughter were altogether different characters from Peter,

as well as altogether different from one another. The former was one of

the most agreeable, uniformly good-tempered, and cheerful women whom one

could possibly meet. Anything attractive and genuinely happy delighted

her. Even the faculty of being pleased with the sight of young people

enjoying themselves (it is only in the best-natured of elderly folk that

one meets with that TRAIT) she possessed to the full. On the other hand,

her daughter was of a grave turn of mind. Rather, she was of that

peculiarly careless, absent-minded, gratuitously distant bearing which

commonly distinguishes unmarried beauties. Whenever she tried to be gay,

her gaiety somehow seemed to be unnatural to her, so that she always

appeared to be laughing either at herself or at the persons to whom she

was speaking or at the world in general—a thing which, possibly, she had

no real intention of doing. Often I asked myself in astonishment what

she could mean when she said something like, “Yes, I know how terribly

good-looking I am,” or, “Of course every one is in love with me,” and so

forth. Her mother was a person always busy, since she had a passion for

housekeeping, gardening, flowers, canaries, and pretty trinkets. Her

rooms and garden, it is true, were small and poorly fitted-up, yet

everything in them was so neat and methodical, and bore such a general

air of that gentle gaiety which one hears expressed in a waltz or polka,

that the word “toy” by which guests often expressed their praise of it

all exactly suited her surroundings. She herself was a “toy”—being

petite, slender, fresh-coloured, small, and pretty-handed, and

invariably gay and well-dressed. The only fault in her was that a slight

over-prominence of the dark-blue veins on her little hands rather marred

the general effect of her appearance. On the other hand, her daughter

scarcely ever did anything at all. Not only had she no love for trifling

with flowers and trinkets, but she neglected her personal exterior, and

only troubled to dress herself well when guests happened to call. Yet,

on returning to the room in society costume, she always looked extremely

handsome—save for that cold, uniform expression of eyes and smile which

is common to all beauties. In fact, her strictly regular, beautiful face

and symmetrical figure always seemed to be saying to you, “Yes, you may

look at me.”

At the same time, for all the mother’s liveliness of disposition and the

daughter’s air of indifference and abstraction, something told one that

the former was incapable of feeling affection for anything that was not

pretty and gay, but that Avdotia, on the contrary, was one of those

natures which, once they love, are willing to sacrifice their whole life

for the man they adore.

XXXIV. MY FATHER’S SECOND MARRIAGE

MY father was forty-eight when he took as his second wife Avdotia

Vassilievna Epifanov.

I suspect that when, that spring, he had departed for the country with

the girls, he had been in that communicatively happy, sociable mood in

which gamblers usually find themselves who have retired from play after

winning large stakes. He had felt that he still had a fortune left to

him which, so long as he did not squander it on gaming, might be used

for our advancement in life. Moreover, it was springtime, he was

unexpectedly well supplied with ready money, he was alone, and he had

nothing to do. As he conversed with Jakoff on various matters, and

remembered both the interminable suit with the Epifanovs and Avdotia’s

beauty (it was a long while since he had seen her), I can imagine him

saying: “How do you think we ought to act in this suit, Jakoff? My idea

is simply to let the cursed land go. Eh? What do you think about it?” I

can imagine, too, how, thus interrogated, Jakoff twirled his fingers

behind his back in a deprecatory sort of way, and proceeded to argue

that it all the same, “Peter Alexandritch, we are in the right.”

Nevertheless, I further conjecture, Papa ordered the dogcart to be got

ready, put on his fashionable olive-coloured driving-coat, brushed up

the remnants of his hair, sprinkled his clothes with scent, and, greatly

pleased to think that he was acting a la seignior (as well as, even

more, revelling in the prospect of soon seeing a pretty woman), drove

off to visit his neighbours.

I can imagine, too, that when the flustered housemaid ran to inform

Peter Vassilievitch that Monsieur Irtenieff himself had called, Peter

answered angrily, “Well, what has he come for?” and, stepping softly

about the house, first went into his study to put on his old soiled

jacket, and then sent down word to the cook that on no account

whatever—no, not even if she were ordered to do so by the mistress

herself—was she to add anything to luncheon.

Since, later, I often saw Papa with Peter, I can form a very good idea

of this first interview between them. I can imagine that, despite Papa’s

proposal to end the suit in a peaceful manner, Peter was morose and

resentful at the thought of having sacrificed his career to his mother,

and at Papa having done nothing of the kind—a by no means surprising

circumstance, Peter probably said to himself. Next, I can see Papa

taking no notice of this ill-humour, but cracking quips and jests, while

Peter gradually found himself forced to treat him as a humorist with

whom he felt offended one moment and inclined to be reconciled the next.

Indeed, with his instinct for making fun of everything, Papa often used

to address Peter as “Colonel;” and though I can remember Peter once

replying, with an unusually violent stutter and his face scarlet with

indignation, that he had never been a c-c-colonel, but only a

l-l-lieutenant, Papa called him “Colonel” again before another five

minutes were out.

Lubotshka told me that, up to the time of Woloda’s and my arrival from

Moscow, there had been daily meetings with the Epifanovs, and that

things had been very lively, since Papa, who had a genius for arranging,

everything with a touch of originality and wit, as well as in a simple

and refined manner, had devised shooting and fishing parties and

fireworks for the Epifanovs’ benefit. All these festivities—so said

Lubotshka—would have gone off splendidly but for the intolerable Peter,

who had spoilt everything by his puffing and stuttering. After our

coming, however, the Epifanovs only visited us twice, and we went once

to their house, while after St. Peter’s Day (on which, it being Papa’s

nameday, the Epifanovs called upon us in common with a crowd of other

guests) our relations with that family came entirely to an end, and, in

future, only Papa went to see them.

During the brief period when I had opportunities of seeing Papa and

Dunetchka (as her mother called Avdotia) together, this is what I

remarked about them. Papa remained unceasingly in the same buoyant mood

as had so greatly struck me on the day after our arrival. So gay and

youthful and full of life and happy did he seem that the beams of his

felicity extended themselves to all around him, and involuntarily

communicated to them a similar frame of mind. He never stirred from

Avdotia’s side so long as she was in the room, but either kept on plying

her with sugary-sweet compliments which made me feel ashamed for him or,

with his gaze fixed upon her with an air at once passionate and

complacent, sat hitching his shoulder and coughing as from time to time

he smiled and whispered something in her ear. Yet throughout he wore the

same expression of raillery as was peculiar to him even in the most

serious matters.

As a rule, Avdotia herself seemed to catch the infection of the

happiness which sparkled at this period in Papa’s large blue eyes; yet

there were moments also when she would be seized with such a fit of

shyness that I, who knew the feeling well, was full of sympathy and

compassion as I regarded her embarrassment. At moments of this kind she

seemed to be afraid of every glance and every movement—to be supposing

that every one was looking at her, every one thinking of no one but her,

and that unfavourably. She would glance timidly from one person to

another, the colour coming and going in her cheeks, and then begin to

talk loudly and defiantly, but, for the most part, nonsense; until

presently, realising this, and supposing that Papa and every one else

had heard her, she would blush more painfully than ever. Yet Papa never

noticed her nonsense, for he was too much taken up with coughing and

with gazing at her with his look of happy, triumphant devotion. I

noticed, too, that, although these fits of shyness attacked Avdotia,

without any visible cause, they not infrequently ensued upon Papa’s

mention of one or another young and beautiful woman. Frequent

transitions from depression to that strange, awkward gaiety of hers to

which I have referred before the repetition of favourite words and turns

of speech of Papa’s; the continuation of discussions with others which

Papa had already begun—all these things, if my father had not been the

principal actor in the matter and I had been a little older, would have

explained to me the relations subsisting between him and Avdotia. At the

time, however, I never surmised them—no, not even when Papa received

from her brother Peter a letter which so upset him that not again until

the end of August did he go to call upon the Epifanovs’. Then, however,

he began his visits once more, and ended by informing us, on the day

before Woloda and I were to return to Moscow, that he was about to take

Avdotia Vassilievna Epifanov to be his wife.

XXXV. HOW WE RECEIVED THE NEWS

Yet, even on the eve of the official announcement, every one had learnt

of the matter, and was discussing it. Mimi never left her room that day,

and wept copiously. Katenka kept her company, and only came out for

luncheon, with a grieved expression on her face which was manifestly

borrowed from her mother. Lubotshka, on the contrary, was very cheerful,

and told us after luncheon that she knew of a splendid secret which she

was going to tell no one.

“There is nothing so splendid about your secret,” said Woloda, who did

not in the least share her satisfaction. “If you were capable of any

serious thought at all, you would understand that it is a very bad

lookout for us.”

Lubotshka stared at him in amazement, and said no more. After the meal

was over, Woloda made a feint of taking me by the arm, and then, fearing

that this would seem too much like “affection,” nudged me gently by the

elbow, and beckoned me towards the salon.

“You know, I suppose, what the secret is of which Lubotshka was

speaking?” he said when he was sure that we were alone. It was seldom

that he and I spoke together in confidence: with the result that,

whenever it came about, we felt a kind of awkwardness in one another’s

presence, and “boys began to jump about” in our eyes, as Woloda

expressed it. On the present occasion, however, he answered the

excitement in my eyes with a grave, fixed look which said: “You need not

be surprised, for we are brothers, and we have to consider an important

family matter.” I understood him, and he went on:

“You know, I suppose, that Papa is going to marry Avdotia Epifanov?”

I nodded, for I had already heard so. “Well, it is not a good thing,”

continued Woloda.

“Why so?”

“Why?” he repeated irritably. “Because it will be so pleasant, won’t it,

to have this stuttering ‘colonel’ and all his family for relations!

Certainly she seems nice enough, as yet; but who knows what she will

turn out to be later? It won’t matter much to you or myself, but

Lubotshka will soon be making her debut, and it will hardly be nice for

her to have such a ‘belle mere’ as this—a woman who speaks French badly,

and has no manners to teach her.”

Although it seemed odd to hear Woloda criticising Papa’s choice so

coolly, I felt that he was right.

“Why is he marrying her?” I asked.

“Oh, it is a hole-and-corner business, and God only knows why,” he

answered. “All I know is that her brother, Peter, tried to make

conditions about the marriage, and that, although at first Papa would

not hear of them, he afterwards took some fancy or knight-errantry or

another into his head. But, as I say, it is a hole-and-corner business.

I am only just beginning to understand my father “—the fact that Woloda

called Papa “my father” instead of “Papa” somehow hurt me—“and though I

can see that he is kind and clever, he is irresponsible and frivolous to

a degree that—Well, the whole thing is astonishing. He cannot so much as

look upon a woman calmly. You yourself know how he falls in love with

every one that he meets. You know it, and so does Mimi.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“What I say. Not long ago I learnt that he used to be in love with Mimi

herself when he was a young man, and that he used to send her poetry,

and that there really was something between them. Mimi is heart-sore

about it to this day”—and Woloda burst out laughing.

“Impossible!” I cried in astonishment.

“But the principal thing at this moment,” went on Woloda, becoming

serious again, and relapsing into French, “is to think how delighted all

our relations will be with this marriage! Why, she will probably have

children!”

Woloda’s prudence and forethought struck me so forcibly that I had no

answer to make. Just at this moment Lubotshka approached us.

“So you know?” she said with a joyful face.

“Yes,” said Woloda. “Still, I am surprised at you, Lubotshka. You are no

longer a baby in long clothes. Why should you be so pleased because Papa

is going to marry a piece of trash?”

At this Lubotshka’s face fell, and she became serious.

“Oh, Woloda!” she exclaimed. “Why ‘a piece of trash’ indeed? How can you

dare to speak of Avdotia like that? If Papa is going to marry her she

cannot be ‘trash.’”

“No, not trash, so to speak, but—”

“No ‘buts’ at all!” interrupted Lubotshka, flaring up. “You have never

heard me call the girl whom you are in love with ‘trash!’ How, then, can

you speak so of Papa and a respectable woman? Although you are my elder

brother, I won’t allow you to speak like that! You ought not to!”

“Mayn’t I even express an opinion about—”

“No, you mayn’t!” repeated Lubotshka. “No one ought to criticise such a

father as ours. Mimi has the right to, but not you, however much you may

be the eldest brother.”

“Oh you don’t understand anything,” said Woloda contemptuously. “Try and

do so. How can it be a good thing that a ‘Dunetchka’ of an Epifanov

should take the place of our dead Mamma?”

For a moment Lubotshka was silent. Then the tears suddenly came into her

eyes.

“I knew that you were conceited, but I never thought that you could be

cruel,” she said, and left us.

“Pshaw!” said Woloda, pulling a serio-comic face and make-believe,

stupid eyes. “That’s what comes of arguing with them.” Evidently he felt

that he was at fault in having so far forgot himself as to descend to

discuss matters at all with Lubotshka.

Next day the weather was bad, and neither Papa nor the ladies had come

down to morning tea when I entered the drawing-room. There had been cold

rain in the night, and remnants of the clouds from which it had

descended were still scudding across the sky, with the sun’s luminous

disc (not yet risen to any great height) showing faintly through them.

It was a windy, damp, grey morning. The door into the garden was

standing open, and pools left by the night’s rain were drying on the

damp-blackened flags of the terrace. The open door was swinging on its

iron hinges in the wind, and all the paths looked wet and muddy. The old

birch trees with their naked white branches, the bushes, the turf, the

nettles, the currant-trees, the elders with the pale side of their

leaves turned upwards—all were dashing themselves about, and looking as

though they were trying to wrench themselves free from their roots. From

the avenue of lime-trees showers of round, yellow leaves were flying

through the air in tossing, eddying circles, and strewing the wet road

and soaked aftermath of the hayfield with a clammy carpet. At the

moment, my thoughts were wholly taken up with my father’s approaching

marriage and with the point of view from which Woloda regarded it. The

future seemed to me to bode no good for any of us. I felt distressed to

think that a woman who was not only a stranger but young should be going

to associate with us in so many relations of life, without having any

right to do so—nay, that this young woman was going to usurp the place

of our dead mother. I felt depressed, and kept thinking more and more

that my father was to blame in the matter. Presently I heard his voice

and Woloda’s speaking together in the pantry, and, not wishing to meet

Papa just then, had just left the room when I was pursued by Lubotshka,

who said that Papa wanted to see me.

He was standing in the drawing-room, with his hand resting on the piano,

and was gazing in my direction with an air at once grave and impatient.

His face no longer wore the youthful, gay expression which had struck me

for so long, but, on the contrary, looked sad. Woloda was walking about

the room with a pipe in his hand. I approached my father, and bade him

good morning.

“Well, my children,” he said firmly, with a lift of his head and in the

peculiarly hurried manner of one who wishes to announce something

obviously unwelcome, but no longer admitting of reconsideration, “you

know, I suppose, that I am going to marry Avdotia Epifanov.” He paused a

moment. “Hitherto I had had no desire for any one to succeed your

mother, but”—and again he paused—“it-it is evidently my fate. Dunetchka

is an excellent, kind girl, and no longer in her first youth. I hope,

therefore, my children, that you will like her, and she, I know, will be

sincerely fond of you, for she is a good woman. And now,” he went on,

addressing himself more particularly to Woloda and myself, and having

the appearance of speaking hurriedly in order to prevent us from

interrupting him, “it is time for you to depart, while I myself am going

to stay here until the New Year, and then to follow you to Moscow

with”—again he hesitated a moment—“my wife and Lubotshka.” It hurt me to

see my father standing as though abashed and at fault before us, so I

moved a little nearer him, but Woloda only went on walking about the

room with his head down, and smoking.

“So, my children, that is what your old father has planned to do,”

concluded Papa—reddening, coughing, and offering Woloda and myself his

hands. Tears were in his eyes as he said this, and I noticed, too, that

the hand which he was holding out to Woloda (who at that moment chanced

to be at the other end of the room) was shaking slightly. The sight of

that shaking hand gave me an unpleasant shock, for I remembered that

Papa had served in 1812, and had been, as every one knew, a brave

officer. Seizing the great veiny hand, I covered it with kisses, and he

squeezed mine hard in return. Then, with a sob amid his tears, he

suddenly threw his arms around Lubotshka’s dark head, and kissed her

again and again on the eyes. Woloda pretended that he had dropped his

pipe, and, bending down, wiped his eyes furtively with the back of his

hand. Then, endeavouring to escape notice, he left the room.

XXXVI. THE UNIVERSITY

THE wedding was to take place in two weeks’ time, but, as our lectures

had begun already, Woloda and myself were forced to return to Moscow at

the beginning of September. The Nechludoffs had also returned from the

country, and Dimitri (with whom, on parting, I had made an agreement

that we should correspond frequently with the result, of course, that we

had never once written to one another) came to see us immediately after

our arrival, and arranged to escort me to my first lecture on the

morrow.

It was a beautiful sunny day. No sooner had I entered the auditorium

than I felt my personality entirely disappear amid the swarm of

light-hearted youths who were seething tumultuously through every

doorway and corridor under the influence of the sunlight pouring through

the great windows. I found the sense of being a member of this huge

community very pleasing, yet there were few among the throng whom I

knew, and that only on terms of a nod and a “How do you do, Irtenieff?”

All around me men were shaking hands and chatting together—from every

side came expressions of friendship, laughter, jests, and badinage.

Everywhere I could feel the tie which bound this youthful society in

one, and everywhere, too, I could feel that it left me out. Yet this

impression lasted for a moment only, and was succeeded, together with

the vexation which it had caused, by the idea that it was best that I

should not belong to that society, but keep to my own circle of

gentlemen; wherefore I proceeded to seat myself upon the third bench,

with, as neighbours, Count B., Baron Z., the Prince R., Iwin, and some

other young men of the same class with none of whom, however, was

acquainted save with Iwin and Count B. Yet the look which these young

gentlemen threw at me at once made me feel that I was not of their set,

and I turned to observe what was going on around me. Semenoff, with

grey, matted hair, white teeth, and tunic flying open, was seated a

little distance off, and leaning forward on his elbows as he nibbled a

pen, while the gymnasium student who had come out first in the

examinations had established himself on the front bench, and, with a

black stock coming half-way up his cheek, was toying with the silver

watch-chain which adorned his satin waistcoat. On a bench in a raised

part of the hall I could descry Ikonin (evidently he had contrived to

enter the University somehow!), and hear him fussily proclaiming, in all

the glory of blue piped trousers which completely hid his boots, that he

was now seated on Parnassus. Ilinka—who had surprised me by giving me a

bow not only cold, but supercilious, as though to remind me that here we

were all equals—was just in front of me, with his legs resting in free

and easy style on another bench (a hit, somehow I thought, at myself),

and conversing with a student as he threw occasional glances in my

direction. Iwin’s set by my side were talking in French, yet every word

which I overheard of their conversation seemed to me both stupid and

incorrect (“Ce n’est pas francais,” I thought to myself), while all the

attitudes, utterances, and doings of Semenoff, Ilinka, and the rest

struck me as uniformly coarse, ungentlemanly, and “comme il ne faut

pas.”

Thus, attached to no particular set, I felt isolated and unable to make

friends, and so grew resentful. One of the students on the bench in

front of me kept biting his nails, which were raw to the quick already,

and this so disgusted me that I edged away from him. In short, I

remember finding my first day a most depressing affair.

When the professor entered, and there was a general stir and a cessation

of chatter, I remember throwing a scornful glance at him, as also that

he began his discourse with a sentence which I thought devoid of

meaning. I had expected the lecture to be, from first to last, so clever

that not a word ought to be taken from or added to it. Disappointed in

this, I at once proceeded to draw beneath the heading “First Lecture”

with which I had adorned my beautifully-bound notebook no less than

eighteen faces in profile, joined together in a sort of chaplet, and

only occasionally moved my hand along the page in order to give the

professor (who, I felt sure, must be greatly interested in me) the

impression that I was writing something. In fact, at this very first

lecture I came to the decision which I maintained to the end of my

course, namely, that it was unnecessary, and even stupid, to take down

every word said by every professor.

At subsequent lectures, however, I did not feel my isolation so

strongly, since I made several acquaintances and got into the way of

shaking hands and entering into conversation. Yet for some reason or

another no real intimacy ever sprang up between us, and I often found

myself depressed and only feigning cheerfulness. With the set which

comprised Iwin and “the aristocrats,” as they were generally known, I

could not make any headway at all, for, as I now remember, I was always

shy and churlish to them, and nodded to them only when they nodded to

me; so that they had little inducement to desire my acquaintance. With

most of the other students, however, this arose from quite a different

cause. As soon as ever I discerned friendliness on the part of a

comrade, I at once gave him to understand that I went to luncheon with

Prince Ivan Ivanovitch and kept my own drozhki. All this I said merely

to show myself in the most favourable light in his eyes, and to induce

him to like me all the more; yet almost invariably the only result of my

communicating to him the intelligence concerning the drozhki and my

relationship to Prince Ivan Ivanovitch was that, to my astonishment, he

at once adopted a cold and haughty bearing towards me.

Among us we had a Crown student named Operoff—a very modest,

industrious, and clever young fellow, who always offered one his hand

like a slab of wood (that is to say, without closing his fingers or

making the slightest movement with them); with the result that his

comrades often did the same to him in jest, and called it the “deal

board” way of shaking hands. He and I nearly always sat next to one

another, and discussed matters generally. In particular he pleased me

with the freedom with which he would criticise the professors as he

pointed out to me with great clearness and acumen the merits or demerits

of their respective ways of teaching and made occasional fun of them.

Such remarks I found exceedingly striking and diverting when uttered in

his quiet, mincing voice. Nevertheless he never let a lecture pass

without taking careful notes of it in his fine handwriting, and

eventually we decided to join forces, and to do our preparation

together. Things had progressed to the point of his always looking

pleased when I took my usual seat beside him when, unfortunately, I one

day found it necessary to inform him that, before her death, my mother

had besought my father never to allow us to enter for a government

scholarship, as well as that I myself considered Crown students, no

matter how clever, to be-“well, they are not GENTLEMEN,” I concluded,

though beginning to flounder a little and grow red. At the moment

Operoff said nothing, but at subsequent lectures he ceased to greet me

or to offer me his board-like hand, and never attempted to talk to me,

but, as soon as ever I sat down, he would lean his head upon his arm,

and purport to be absorbed in his notebooks. I was surprised at this

sudden coolness, but looked upon it as infra dig, “pour un jeune homme

de bonne maison” to curry favour with a mere Crown student of an

Operoff, and so left him severely alone—though I confess that his

aloofness hurt my feelings. On one occasion I arrived before him, and,

since the lecture was to be delivered by a popular professor whom

students came to hear who did not usually attend such functions, I found

almost every seat occupied. Accordingly I secured Operoff’s place for

myself by spreading my notebooks on the desk before it; after which I

left the room again for a moment. When I returned I perceived that my

paraphernalia had been relegated to the bench behind, and the place

taken by Operoff himself. I remarked to him that I had already secured

it by placing my notebooks there.

“I know nothing about that,” he replied sharply, yet without looking up

at me.

“I tell you I placed my notebooks there,” I repeated, purposely trying

to bluster, in the hope of intimidating him. “Every one saw me do it,” I

added, including the students near me in my glance. Several of them

looked at me with curiosity, yet none of them spoke.

“Seats cannot be booked here,” said Operoff. “Whoever first sits down in

a place keeps it,” and, settling himself angrily where he was, he

flashed at me a glance of defiance.

“Well, that only means that you are a cad,” I said.

I have an idea that he murmured something about my being “a stupid young

idiot,” but I decided not to hear it. What would be the use, I asked

myself, of my hearing it? That we should brawl like a couple of manants

over less than nothing? (I was very fond of the word manants, and often

used it for meeting awkward junctures.) Perhaps I should have said

something more had not, at that moment, a door slammed and the professor

(dressed in a blue frockcoat, and shuffling his feet as he walked)

ascended the rostrum.

Nevertheless, when the examination was about to come on, and I had need

of some one’s notebooks, Operoff remembered his promise to lend me his,

and we did our preparation together.

XXXVII. AFFAIRS OF THE HEART

Affaires du coeur exercised me greatly that winter. In fact, I fell in

love three times. The first time, I became passionately enamoured of a

buxom lady whom I used to see riding at Freitag’s riding-school; with

the result that every day when she was taking a lesson there (that is to

say, every Tuesday and Friday) I used to go to gaze at her, but always

in such a state of trepidation lest I should be seen that I stood a long

way off, and bolted directly I thought her likely to approach the spot

where I was standing. Likewise, I used to turn round so precipitately

whenever she appeared to be glancing in my direction that I never saw

her face well, and to this day do not know whether she was really

beautiful or not.

Dubkoff, who was acquainted with her, surprised me one day in the

riding-school, where I was lurking concealed behind the lady’s grooms

and the fur wraps which they were holding, and, having heard from

Dimitri of my infatuation, frightened me so terribly by proposing to

introduce me to the Amazon that I fled incontinently from the school,

and was prevented by the mere thought that possibly he had told her

about me from ever entering the place again, or even from hiding behind

her grooms, lest I should encounter her.

Whenever I fell in love with ladies whom I did not know, and especially

married women, I experienced a shyness a thousand times greater than I

had ever felt with Sonetchka. I dreaded beyond measure that my divinity

should learn of my passion, or even of my existence, since I felt sure

that, once she had done so, she would be so terribly offended that I

should never be forgiven for my presumption. And indeed, if the Amazon

referred to above had ever come to know how I used to stand behind the

grooms and dream of seizing her and carrying her off to some country

spot—if she had ever come to know how I should have lived with her

there, and how I should have treated her, it is probable that she would

have had very good cause for indignation! But I always felt that, once I

got to know her, she would straightway divine these thoughts, and

consider herself insulted by my acquaintance.

As my second affaire du coeur, I, (for the third time) fell in love with

Sonetchka when I saw her at her sister’s. My second passion for her had

long since come to an end, but I became enamoured of her this third time

through Lubotshka sending me a copy-book in which Sonetchka had copied

some extracts from Lermontoff’s The Demon, with certain of the more

subtly amorous passages underlined in red ink and marked with pressed

flowers. Remembering how Woloda had been wont to kiss his inamorata’s

purse last year, I essayed to do the same thing now; and really, when

alone in my room in the evenings and engaged in dreaming as I looked at

a flower or occasionally pressed it to my lips, I would feel a certain

pleasantly lachrymose mood steal over me, and remain genuinely in love

(or suppose myself to be so) for at least several days.

Finally, my third affaire du coeur that winter was connected with the

lady with whom Woloda was in love, and who used occasionally to visit at

our house. Yet, in this damsel, as I now remember, there was not a

single beautiful feature to be found—or, at all events, none of those

which usually pleased me. She was the daughter of a well-known Moscow

lady of light and leading, and, petite and slender, wore long flaxen

curls after the English fashion, and could boast of a transparent

profile. Every one said that she was even cleverer and more learned than

her mother, but I was never in a position to judge of that, since,

overcome with craven bashfulness at the mere thought of her intellect

and accomplishments, I never spoke to her alone but once, and then with

unaccountable trepidation. Woloda’s enthusiasm, however (for the

presence of an audience never prevented him from giving vent to his

rapture), communicated itself to me so strongly that I also became

enamoured of the lady. Yet, conscious that he would not be pleased to

know that two brothers were in love with the same girl, I never told him

of my condition. On the contrary, I took special delight in the thought

that our mutual love for her was so pure that, though its object was, in

both cases, the same charming being, we remained friends and ready, if

ever the occasion should arise, to sacrifice ourselves for one another.

Yet I have an idea that, as regards self-sacrifice, he did not quite

share my views, for he was so passionately in love with the lady that

once he was for giving a member of the diplomatic corps, who was said to

be going to marry her, a slap in the face and a challenge to a duel;

but, for my part, I would gladly have sacrificed my feelings for his

sake, seeing that the fact that the only remark I had ever addressed to

her had been on the subject of the dignity of classical music, and that

my passion, for all my efforts to keep it alive, expired the following

week, would have rendered it the more easy for me to do so.

XXXVIII. THE WORLD

As regards those worldly delights to which I had intended, on entering

the University, to surrender myself in imitation of my brother, I

underwent a complete disillusionment that winter. Woloda danced a great

deal, and Papa also went to balls with his young wife, but I appeared to

be thought either too young or unfitted for such delights, and no one

invited me to the houses where balls were being given. Yet, in spite of

my vow of frankness with Dimitri, I never told him (nor any one else)

how much I should have liked to go to those dances, and how I felt hurt

at being forgotten and (apparently) taken for the philosopher that I

pretended to be.

Nevertheless, a reception was to be given that winter at the Princess

Kornakoff’s, and to it she sent us personal invitations—to myself among

the rest! Consequently, I was to attend my first ball. Before starting,

Woloda came into my room to see how I was dressing myself—an act on his

part which greatly surprised me and took me aback. In my opinion (it

must be understood) solicitude about one’s dress was a shameful thing,

and should be kept under, but he seemed to think it a thing so natural

and necessary that he said outright that he was afraid I should be put

out of countenance on that score. Accordingly, he bid me don my patent

leather boots, and was horrified to find that I wanted to put on gloves

of peau de chamois. Next, he adjusted my watch-chain in a particular

manner, and carried me off to a hairdresser’s near the Kuznetski Bridge

to have my locks coiffured. That done, he withdrew to a little distance

and surveyed me.

“Yes, he looks right enough now” said he to the hairdresser.

“Only—couldn’t you smooth those tufts of his in front a little?” Yet,

for all that Monsieur Charles treated my forelocks with one essence and

another, they persisted in rising up again when ever I put on my hat. In

fact, my curled and tonsured figure seemed to me to look far worse than

it had done before. My only hope of salvation lay in an affectation of

untidiness. Only in that guise would my exterior resemble anything at

all. Woloda, apparently, was of the same opinion, for he begged me to

undo the curls, and when I had done so and still looked unpresentable,

he ceased to regard me at all, but throughout the drive to the

Kornakoffs remained silent and depressed.

Nevertheless, I entered the Kornakoffs’ mansion boldly enough, and it

was only when the Princess had invited me to dance, and I, for some

reason or another (though I had driven there with no other thought in my

head than to dance well), had replied that I never indulged in that

pastime, that I began to blush, and, left solitary among a crowd of

strangers, became plunged in my usual insuperable and ever-growing

shyness. In fact, I remained silent on that spot almost the whole

evening!

Nevertheless, while a waltz was in progress, one of the young princesses

came to me and asked me, with the sort of official kindness common to

all her family, why I was not dancing. I can remember blushing hotly at

the question, but at the same time feeling—for all my efforts to prevent

it—a self-satisfied smile steal over my face as I began talking, in the

most inflated and long-winded French, such rubbish as even now, after

dozens of years, it shames me to recall. It must have been the effect of

the music, which, while exciting my nervous sensibility, drowned (as I

supposed) the less intelligible portion of my utterances. Anyhow, I went

on speaking of the exalted company present, and of the futility of men

and women, until I had got myself into such a tangle that I was forced

to stop short in the middle of a word of a sentence which I found myself

powerless to conclude.

Even the worldly-minded young Princess was shocked by my conduct, and

gazed at me in reproach; whereat I burst out laughing. At this critical

moment, Woloda, who had remarked that I was conversing with great

animation, and probably was curious to know what excuses I was making

for not dancing, approached us with Dubkoff. Seeing, however, my smiling

face and the Princess’s frightened mien, as well as overhearing the

appalling rubbish with which I concluded my speech, he turned red in the

face, and wheeled round again. The Princess also rose and left me. I

continued to smile, but in such a state of agony from the consciousness

of my stupidity that I felt ready to sink into the floor. Likewise I

felt that, come what might, I must move about and say something, in

order to effect a change in my position. Accordingly I approached

Dubkoff, and asked him if he had danced many waltzes with her that

night. This I feigned to say in a gay and jesting manner, yet in reality

I was imploring help of the very Dubkoff to whom I had cried “Hold your

tongue!” on the night of the matriculation dinner. By way of answer, he

made as though he had not heard me, and turned away. Next, I approached

Woloda, and said with an effort and in a similar tone of assumed gaiety:

“Hullo, Woloda! Are you played out yet?” He merely looked at me as much

as to say, “You wouldn’t speak to me like that if we were alone,” and

left me without a word, in the evident fear that I might continue to

attach myself to his person.

“My God! Even my own brother deserts me!” I thought to myself.

Yet somehow I had not the courage to depart, but remained standing where

I was until the very end of the evening. At length, when every one was

leaving the room and crowding into the hall, and a footman slipped my

greatcoat on to my shoulders in such a way as to tilt up my cap, I gave

a dreary, half-lachrymose smile, and remarked to no one in particular:

“Comme c’est gracieux!”

XXXIX. THE STUDENTS’ FEAST

NOTWITHSTANDING that, as yet, Dimitri’s influence had kept me from

indulging in those customary students’ festivities known as kutezhi or

“wines,” that winter saw me participate in such a function, and carry

away with me a not over-pleasant impression of it. This is how it came

about.

At a lecture soon after the New Year, Baron Z.—a tall, light-haired

young fellow of very serious demeanour and regular features—invited us

all to spend a sociable evening with him. By “us all”, I mean all the

men more or less “comme il faut”, of our course, and exclusive of Grap,

Semenoff, Operoff, and commoners of that sort. Woloda smiled

contemptuously when he heard that I was going to a “wine” of first

course men, but I looked to derive great and unusual pleasure from this,

to me, novel method of passing the time. Accordingly, punctually at the

appointed hour of eight I presented myself at the Baron’s.

Our host, in an open tunic and white waistcoat, received his guests in

the brilliantly lighted salon and drawing-room of the small mansion

where his parents lived—they having given up their reception rooms to

him for the evening for purposes of this party. In the corridor could be

seen the heads and skirts of inquisitive domestics, while in the

dining-room I caught a glimpse of a dress which I imagined to belong to

the Baroness herself. The guests numbered a score, and were all of them

students except Herr Frost (in attendance upon Iwin) and a tall,

red-faced gentleman who was superintending the feast and who was

introduced to every one as a relative of the Baron’s and a former

student of the University of Dorpat. At first, the excessive brilliancy

and formal appointments of the reception-rooms had such a chilling

effect upon this youthful company that every one involuntarily hugged

the walls, except a few bolder spirits and the ex-Dorpat student, who,

with his waistcoat already unbuttoned, seemed to be in every room, and

in every corner of every room, at once, and filled the whole place with

his resonant, agreeable, never-ceasing tenor voice. The remainder of the

guests preferred either to remain silent or to talk in discreet tones of

professors, faculties, examinations, and other serious and interesting

matters. Yet every one, without exception, kept watching the door of the

dining-room, and, while trying to conceal the fact, wearing an

expression which said: “Come! It is time to begin.” I too felt that it

was time to begin, and awaited the beginning with pleasurable

impatience.

After footmen had handed round tea among the guests, the Dorpat student

asked Frost in Russian:

“Can you make punch, Frost?”

“Oh ja!” replied Frost with a joyful flourish of his heels, and the

other went on:

“Then do you set about it” (they addressed each other in the second

person singular, as former comrades at Dorpat). Frost accordingly

departed to the dining-room, with great strides of his bowed, muscular

legs, and, after some walking backwards and forwards, deposited upon the

drawing-room table a large punchbowl, accompanied by a ten-pound sugar

loaf supported on three students’ swords placed crosswise. Meanwhile,

the Baron had been going round among his guests as they sat regarding

the punch-bowl, and addressing them, with a face of immutable gravity,

in the formula: “I beg of you all to drink of this loving-cup in student

fashion, that there may be good-fellowship among the members of our

course. Unbutton your waistcoats, or take them off altogether, as you

please.” Already the Dorpat student had divested himself of his tunic

and rolled up his white shirt-sleeves above his elbows, and now,

planting his feet firmly apart, he proceeded to set fire to the rum in

the punch-bowl.

“Gentlemen, put out the candles!” he cried with a sudden shout so loud

and insistent that we seemed all of us to be shouting at once. However,

we still went on silently regarding the punch-bowl and the white shirt

of the Dorpat student, with a feeling that a moment of great solemnity

was approaching.

“Put out the lights, Frost, I tell you!” the Dorpat student shouted

again. Evidently the punch was now sufficiently burnt. Accordingly every

one helped to extinguish the candles, until the room was in total

darkness save for a spot where the white shirts and hands of the three

students supporting the sugarloaf on their crossed swords were lit up by

the lurid flames from the bowl. Yet the Dorpat student’s tenor voice was

not the only one to be heard, for in different quarters of the room

resounded chattering and laughter. Many had taken off their tunics

(especially students whose garments were of fine cloth and perfectly

new), and I now did the same, with a consciousness that “IT” was

“beginning.” There had been no great festivity as yet, but I felt

assured that things would go splendidly when once we had begun drinking

tumblers of the potion that was now in course of preparation.

At length, the punch was ready, and the Dorpat student, with much

bespattering of the table as he did so, ladled the liquor into tumblers,

and cried: “Now, gentlemen, please!” When we had each of us taken a

sticky tumbler of the stuff into our hands, the Dorpat student and Frost

sang a German song in which the word “Hoch!” kept occurring again and

again, while we joined, in haphazard fashion, in the chorus. Next we

clinked glasses together, shouted something in praise of punch, crossed

hands, and took our first drink of the sweet, strong mixture. After that

there was no further waiting; the “wine” was in full swing. The first

glassful consumed, a second was poured out. Yet, for all that I began to

feel a throbbing in my temples, and that the flames seemed to be turning

purple, and that every one around me was laughing and shouting, things

seemed lacking in real gaiety, and I somehow felt that, as a matter of

fact, we were all of us finding the affair rather dull, and only

PRETENDING to be enjoying it. The Dorpat student may have been an

exception, for he continued to grow more and more red in the face and

more and more ubiquitous as he filled up empty glasses and stained the

table with fresh spots of the sweet, sticky stuff. The precise sequence

of events I cannot remember, but I can recall feeling strongly attracted

towards Frost and the Dorpat student that evening, learning their German

song by heart, and kissing them each on their sticky-sweet lips; also

that that same evening I conceived a violent hatred against the Dorpat

student, and was for pushing him from his chair, but thought better of

it; also that, besides feeling the same spirit of independence towards

the rest of the company as I had felt on the night of the matriculation

dinner, my head ached and swam so badly that I thought each moment would

be my last; also that, for some reason or another, we all of us sat down

on the floor and imitated the movements of rowers in a boat as we sang

in chorus, “Down our mother stream the Volga;” also that I conceived

this procedure on our part to be uncalled for; also that, as I lay prone

upon the floor, I crossed my legs and began wriggling about like a

tsigane; [Gipsy dancer.] also that I ricked some one’s neck, and came to

the conclusion that I should never have done such a thing if I had not

been drunk; also that we had some supper and another kind of liquor, and

that I then went to the door to get some fresh air; also that my head

seemed suddenly to grow chill, and that I noticed, as I drove away, that

the scat of the vehicle was so sharply aslant and slippery that for me

to retain my position behind Kuzma was impossible; also that he seemed

to have turned all flabby, and to be waving about like a dish clout. But

what I remember best is that throughout the whole of that evening I

never ceased to feel that I was acting with excessive stupidity in

pretending to be enjoying myself, to like drinking a great deal, and to

be in no way drunk, as well as that every one else present was acting

with equal stupidity in pretending those same things. All the time I had

a feeling that each one of my companions was finding the festivities as

distasteful as I was myself; but, in the belief that he was the only one

doing so, felt himself bound to pretend that he was very merry, in order

not to mar the general hilarity. Also, strange to state, I felt that I

ought to keep up this pretence for the sole reason that into a

punch-bowl there had been poured three bottles of champagne at nine

roubles the bottle and ten bottles of rum at four—making seventy roubles

in all, exclusive of the supper. So convinced of my folly did I feel

that, when, at next day’s lecture, those of my comrades who had been at

Baron Z.‘s party seemed not only in no way ashamed to remember what they

had done, but even talked about it so that other students might hear of

their doings, I felt greatly astonished. They all declared that it had

been a splendid “wine,” that Dorpat students were just the fellows for

that kind of thing, and that there had been consumed at it no less than

forty bottles of rum among twenty guests, some of whom had dropped

senseless under the table! That they should care to talk about such

things seemed strange enough, but that they should care to lie about

them seemed absolutely unintelligible.

XL. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS

That winter, too, I saw a great deal both of Dimitri who often looked us

up, and of his family, with whom I was beginning to stand on intimate

terms.

The Nechludoffs (that is to say, mother, aunt, and daughter) always

spent their evenings at home, at which time the Princess liked young men

to visit her—at all events young men of the kind whom she described as

able to spend an evening without playing cards or dancing. Yet such

young fellows must have been few and far between, for, although I went

to the Nechludoffs almost every evening, I seldom found other guests

present. Thus, I came to know the members of this family and their

several dispositions well enough to be able to form clear ideas as to

their mutual relations, and to be quite at home amid the rooms and

furniture of their house. Indeed, so long as no other guests were

present, I felt entirely at my ease. True, at first I used to feel a

little uncomfortable when left alone in the room with Varenika, for I

could not rid myself of the idea that, though far from pretty, she

wished me to fall in love with her; but in time this nervousness of mine

began to lessen, since she always looked so natural, and talked to me so

exactly as though she were conversing with her brother or Lubov

Sergievna, that I came to look upon her simply as a person to whom it

was in no way dangerous or wrong to show that I took pleasure in her

company. Throughout the whole of our acquaintance she appeared to me

merely a plain, though not positively ugly, girl, concerning whom one

would never ask oneself the question,

“Am I, or am I not, in love with her?” Sometimes I would talk to her

direct, but more often I did so through Dimitri or Lubov Sergievna; and

it was the latter method which afforded me the most pleasure. I derived

considerable gratification from discoursing when she was there, from

hearing her sing, and, in general, from knowing that she was in the same

room as myself; but it was seldom now that any thoughts of what our

future relations might ever be, or that any dreams of self-sacrifice for

my friend if he should ever fall in love with my sister, came into my

head. If any such ideas or fancies occurred to me, I felt satisfied with

the present, and drove away all thoughts about the future.

Yet, in spite of this intimacy, I continued to look upon it as my

bounden duty to keep the Nechludoffs in general, and Varenika in

particular, in ignorance of my true feelings and tastes, and strove

always to appear altogether another young man than what I really was—to

appear, indeed, such a young man as could never possibly have existed. I

affected to be “soulful” and would go off into raptures and exclamations

and impassioned gestures whenever I wished it to be thought that

anything pleased me, while, on the other hand, I tried always to seem

indifferent towards any unusual circumstance which I myself perceived or

which I had had pointed out to me. I aimed always at figuring both as a

sarcastic cynic divorced from every sacred tie and as a shrewd observer,

as well as at being accounted logical in all my conduct, precise and

methodical in all my ways of life, and at the same time contemptuous of

all materiality. I may safely say that I was far better in reality than

the strange being into whom I attempted to convert myself; yet, whatever

I was or was not, the Nechludoffs were unfailingly kind to me, and

(happily for myself) took no notice (as it now appears) of my

play-acting. Only Lubov Sergievna, who, I believe, really believed me to

be a great egoist, atheist, and cynic, had no love for me, but

frequently disputed what I said, flew into tempers, and left me

petrified with her disjointed, irrelevant utterances. Yet Dimitri held

always to the same strange, something more than friendly, relations with

her, and used to say not only that she was misunderstood by every one,

but that she did him a world of good. This, however, did not prevent the

rest of his family from finding fault with his infatuation.

Once, when talking to me about this incomprehensible attachment,

Varenika explained the matter thus: “You see, Dimitri is a selfish

person. He is very proud, and, for all his intellect, very fond of

praise, and of surprising people, and of always being FIRST, while

little Auntie” (the general nickname for Lubov Sergievna) “is innocent

enough to admire him, and at the same time devoid of the tact to conceal

her admiration. Consequently she flatters his vanity—not out of

pretence, but sincerely.”

This dictum I laid to heart, and, when thinking it over afterwards,

could not but come to the conclusion that Varenika was very sensible;

wherefore I was glad to award her promotion thenceforth in my regard.

Yet, though I was always glad enough to assign her any credit which

might arise from my discovering in her character any signs of good sense

or other moral qualities, I did so with strict moderation, and never ran

to any extreme pitch of enthusiasm in the process. Thus, when Sophia

Ivanovna (who was never weary of discussing her niece) related to me

how, four years ago, Varenika had suddenly given away all her clothes to

some peasant children without first asking permission to do so, so that

the garments had subsequently to be recovered, I did not at once accept

the fact as entitling Varenika to elevation in my opinion, but went on

giving her good advice about the unpracticalness of such views on

property.

When other guests were present at the Nechludoffs (among them,

sometimes, Woloda and Dubkoff) I used to withdraw myself to a remote

plane, and, with the complacency and quiet consciousness of strength of

an habitue of the house, listen to what others were saying without

putting in a remark myself. Yet everything that these others said seemed

to me so immeasurably stupid that I used to feel inwardly amazed that

such a clever, logical woman as the Princess, with her equally logical

family, could listen to and answer such rubbish. Had it, however,

entered into my head to compare what, others said with what I myself

said when there alone, I should probably have ceased to feel surprise.

Still less should I have continued to feel surprise had I not believed

that the women of our own household—Avdotia, Lubotshka, and Katenka—were

superior to the rest of their sex, for in that case I should have

remembered the kind of things over which Avdotia and Katenka would laugh

and jest with Dubkoff from one end of an evening to the other. I should

have remembered that seldom did an evening pass but Dubkoff would first

have, an argument about something, and then read in a sententious voice

either some verses beginning “Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive”

or extracts from The Demon. In short, I should have remembered what

nonsense they used to chatter for hours at a time.

It need hardly be said that, when guests were present, Varenika paid

less attention to me than when we were alone, as well as that I was

deprived of the reading and music which I so greatly loved to hear. When

talking to guests, she lost, in my eyes, her principal charm—that of

quiet seriousness and simplicity. I remember how strange it used to seem

to me to hear her discoursing on theatres and the weather to my brother

Woloda! I knew that of all things in the world he most despised and

shunned banality, and that Varenika herself used to make fun of forced

conversations on the weather and similar matters. Why, then, when

meeting in society, did they both of them talk such intolerable

nothings, and, as it were, shame one another? After talks of this kind I

used to feel silently resentful against Woloda, as well as next day to

rally Varenika on her overnight guests. Yet one result of it was that I

derived all the greater pleasure from being one of the Nechludoffs’

family circle. Also, for some reason or another I began to prefer

meeting Dimitri in his mother’s drawing-room to being with him alone.

XLI. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS

At this period, indeed, my friendship with Dimitri hung by a hair. I had

been criticising him too long not to have discovered faults in his

character, for it is only in first youth that we love passionately and

therefore love only perfect people. As soon as the mists engendered by

love of this kind begin to dissolve, and to be penetrated by the clear

beams of reason, we see the object of our adoration in his true shape,

and with all his virtues and failings exposed. Some of those failings

strike us with the exaggerated force of the unexpected, and combine with

the instinct for novelty and the hope that perfection may yet be found

in a fellow-man to induce us not only to feel coldness, but even

aversion, towards the late object of our adoration. Consequently,

desiring it no longer, we usually cast it from us, and pass onwards to

seek fresh perfection. For the circumstance that that was not what

occurred with respect to my own relation to Dimitri, I was indebted to

his stubborn, punctilious, and more critical than impulsive attachment

to myself—a tie which I felt ashamed to break. Moreover, our strange vow

of frankness bound us together. We were afraid that, if we parted, we

should leave in one another’s power all the incriminatory moral secrets

of which we had made mutual confession. At the same time, our rule of

frankness had long ceased to be faithfully observed, but, on the

contrary, proved a frequent cause of constraint, and brought about

strange relations between us.

Almost every time that winter that I went upstairs to Dimitri’s room, I

used to find there a University friend of his named Bezobiedoff, with

whom he appeared to be very much taken up. Bezobiedoff was a small,

slight fellow, with a face pitted over with smallpox, freckled,

effeminate hands, and a huge flaxen moustache much in need of the comb.

He was invariably dirty, shabby, uncouth, and uninteresting. To me,

Dimitri’s relations with him were as unintelligible as his relations

with Lubov Sergievna, and the only reason he could have had for choosing

such a man for his associate was that in the whole University there was

no worse-looking student than Bezobiedoff. Yet that alone would have

been sufficient to make Dimitri extend him his friendship, and, as a

matter of fact, in all his intercourse with this fellow he seemed to be

saying proudly: “I care nothing who a man may be. In my eyes every one

is equal. I like him, and therefore he is a desirable acquaintance.”

Nevertheless I could not imagine how he could bring himself to do it,

nor how the wretched Bezobiedoff ever contrived to maintain his awkward

position. To me the friendship seemed a most distasteful one.

One night, I went up to Dimitri’s room to try and get him to come down

for an evening’s talk in his mother’s drawing-room, where we could also

listen to Varenika’s reading and singing, but Bezobiedoff had

forestalled me there, and Dimitri answered me curtly that he could not

come down, since, as I could see for myself, he had a visitor with him.

“Besides,” he added, “what is the fun of sitting there? We had much

better stay HERE and talk.”

I scarcely relished the prospect of spending a couple of hours in

Bezobiedoff’s company, yet could not make up my mind to go down alone;

wherefore, cursing my friend’s vagaries, I seated myself in a

rocking-chair, and began rocking myself silently to and fro. I felt

vexed with them both for depriving me of the pleasures of the

drawing-room, and my only hope as I listened irritably to their

conversation was that Bezobiedoff would soon take his departure. “A nice

guest indeed to be sitting with!” I thought to myself when a footman

brought in tea and Dimitri had five times to beg Bezobiedoff to have a

cup, for the reason that the bashful guest thought it incumbent upon him

always to refuse it at first and to say, “No, help yourself.” I could

see that Dimitri had to put some restraint upon himself as he resumed

the conversation. He tried to inveigle me also into it, but I remained

glum and silent.

“I do not mean to let my face give any one the suspicion that I am

bored” was my mental remark to Dimitri as I sat quietly rocking myself

to and fro with measured beat. Yet, as the moments passed, I found

myself—not without a certain satisfaction—growing more and more inwardly

hostile to my friend. “What a fool he is!” I reflected. “He might be

spending the evening agreeably with his charming family, yet he goes on

sitting with this brute!—will go on doing so, too, until it is too late

to go down to the drawing-room!” Here I glanced at him over the back of

my chair, and thought the general look of his attitude and appearance so

offensive and repellant that at the moment I could gladly have offered

him some insult, even a most serious one.

At last Bezobiedoff rose, but Dimitri could not easily let such a

delightful friend depart, and asked him to stay the night. Fortunately,

Bezobiedoff declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off,

Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so,

and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had

sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got

rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance at

myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. “How can he go on

walking about the room and grinning like that?” was my inward

reflection.

“What are you so angry about?” he asked me suddenly as he halted in

front of my chair.

“I am not in the least angry,” I replied (as people always do answer

under such circumstances). “I am merely vexed that you should play-act

to me, and to Bezobiedoff, and to yourself.”

“What rubbish!” he retorted. “I never play-act to any one.”

“I have in mind our rule of frankness,” I replied, “when I tell you that

I am certain you cannot bear this Bezobiedoff any more than I can. He is

an absolute cad, yet for some inexplicable reason or another it pleases

you to masquerade before him.”

“Not at all! To begin with, he is a splendid fellow, and—”

“But I tell you it IS so. I also tell you that your friendship for Lubov

Sergievna is founded on the same basis, namely, that she thinks you a

god.”

“And I tell you once more that it is not so.”

“Oh, I know it for myself,” I retorted with the heat of suppressed

anger, and designing to disarm him with my frankness. “I have told you

before, and I repeat it now, that you always seem to like people who say

pleasant things to you, but that, as soon as ever I come to examine your

friendship, I invariably find that there exists no real attachment

between you.”

“Oh, but you are wrong,” said Dimitri with an angry straightening of the

neck in his collar. “When I like people, neither their praise nor their

blame can make any difference to my opinion of them.”

“Well, dreadful though it may seem to you, I confess that I myself often

used to hate my father when he abused me, and to wish that he was dead.

In the same way, you—”

“Speak for yourself. I am very sorry that you could ever have been so—”

“No, no!” I cried as I leapt from my chair and faced him with the

courage of exasperation. “It is for YOURSELF that you ought to feel

sorry—sorry because you never told me a word about this fellow. You know

that was not honourable of you. Nevertheless, I will tell YOU what I

think of you,” and, burning to wound him even more than he had wounded

me, I set out to prove to him that he was incapable of feeling any real

affection for anybody, and that I had the best of grounds (as in very

truth I believed I had) for reproaching him. I took great pleasure in

telling him all this, but at the same time forgot that the only

conceivable purpose of my doing so—to force him to confess to the faults

of which I had accused him—could not possibly be attained at the present

moment, when he was in a rage. Had he, on the other hand, been in a

condition to argue calmly, I should probably never have said what I did.

The dispute was verging upon an open quarrel when Dimitri suddenly

became silent, and left the room. I pursued him, and continued what I

was saying, but he did not answer. I knew that his failings included a

hasty temper, and that he was now fighting it down; wherefore I cursed

his good resolutions the more in my heart.

This, then, was what our rule of frankness had brought us to—the rule

that we should “tell one another everything in our minds, and never

discuss one another with a third person!” Many a time we had exaggerated

frankness to the pitch of making mutual confession of the most shameless

thoughts, and of shaming ourselves by voicing to one another proposals

or schemes for attaining our desires; yet those confessions had not only

failed to draw closer the tie which united us, but had dissipated

sympathy and thrust us further apart, until now pride would not allow

him to expose his feelings even in the smallest detail, and we employed

in our quarrel the very weapons which we had formerly surrendered to one

another—the weapons which could strike the shrewdest blows!

XLII. OUR STEPMOTHER

Notwithstanding that Papa had not meant to return to Moscow before the

New Year, he arrived in October, when there was still good riding to

hounds to be had in the country. He alleged as his reason for changing

his mind that his suit was shortly to come on before the Senate, but

Mimi averred that Avdotia had found herself so ennuyee in the country,

and had so often talked about Moscow and pretended to be unwell, that

Papa had decided to accede to her wishes. “You see, she never really

loved him—she and her love only kept buzzing about his ears because she

wanted to marry a rich man,” added Mimi with a pensive sigh which said:

“To think what a certain other person could have done for him if only he

had valued her!”

Yet that “certain other person” was unjust to Avdotia, seeing that the

latter’s affection for Papa—the passionate, devoted love of

self-abandonment—revealed itself in her every look and word and

movement. At the same time, that love in no way hindered her, not only

from being averse to parting with her adored husband, but also from

desiring to visit Madame Annette’s and order there a lovely cap, a hat

trimmed with a magnificent blue ostrich feather, and a blue Venetian

velvet bodice which was to expose to the public gaze the snowy, well

shaped breast and arms which no one had yet gazed upon except her

husband and maids. Of course Katenka sided with her mother and, in

general, there became established between Avdotia and ourselves, from

the day of her arrival, the most extraordinary and burlesque order of

relations. As soon as she stepped from the carriage, Woloda assumed an

air of great seriousness and ceremony, and, advancing towards her with

much bowing and scraping, said in the tone of one who is presenting

something for acceptance:

“I have the honour to greet the arrival of our dear Mamma, and to kiss

her hand.”

“Ah, my dear son!” she replied with her beautiful, unvarying smile.

“And do not forget the younger son,” I said as I also approached her

hand, with an involuntary imitation of Woloda’s voice and expression.

Had our stepmother and ourselves been certain of any mutual affection,

that expression might have signified contempt for any outward

manifestation of our love. Had we been ill-disposed towards one another,

it might have denoted irony, or contempt for pretence, or a desire to

conceal from Papa (standing by the while) our real relations, as well as

many other thoughts and sentiments. But, as a matter of fact, that

expression (which well consorted with Avdotia’s own spirit) simply

signified nothing at all—simply concealed the absence of any definite

relations between us. In later life I often had occasion to remark, in

the case of other families whose members anticipated among themselves

relations not altogether harmonious, the sort of provisional, burlesque

relations which they formed for daily use; and it was just such

relations as those which now became established between ourselves and

our stepmother. We scarcely ever strayed beyond them, but were polite to

her, conversed with her in French, bowed and scraped before her, and

called her “chere Maman”—a term to which she always responded in a tone

of similar lightness and with her beautiful, unchanging smile. Only the

lachrymose Lubotshka, with her goose feet and artless prattle, really

liked our stepmother, or tried, in her naive and frequently awkward way,

to bring her and ourselves together: wherefore the only person in the

world for whom, besides Papa, Avdotia had a spark of affection was

Lubotshka. Indeed, Avdotia always treated her with a kind of grave

admiration and timid deference which greatly surprised me.

From the first Avdotia was very fond of calling herself our stepmother

and hinting that, since children and servants usually adopt an unjust

and hostile attitude towards a woman thus situated, her own position was

likely to prove a difficult one. Yet, though she foresaw all the

unpleasantness of her predicament, she did nothing to escape from it by

(for instance) conciliating this one, giving presents to that other one,

and forbearing to grumble—the last a precaution which it would have been

easy for her to take, seeing that by nature she was in no way exacting,

as well as very good-tempered. Yet, not only did she do none of these

things, but her expectation of difficulties led her to adopt the

defensive before she had been attacked. That is to say, supposing that

the entire household was designing to show her every kind of insult and

annoyance, she would see plots where no plots were, and consider that

her most dignified course was to suffer in silence—an attitude of

passivity as regards winning AFfection which of course led to

DISaffection. Moreover, she was so totally lacking in that faculty of

“apprehension” to which I have already referred as being highly

developed in our household, and all her customs were so utterly opposed

to those which had long been rooted in our establishment, that those two

facts alone were bound to go against her. From the first, her mode of

life in our tidy, methodical household was that of a person only just

arrived there. Sometimes she went to bed late, sometimes early;

sometimes she appeared at luncheon, sometimes she did not; sometimes she

took supper, sometimes she dispensed with it. When we had no guests with

us she more often than not walked about the house in a semi-nude

condition, and was not ashamed to appear before us—even before the

servants—in a white chemise, with only a shawl thrown over her bare

shoulders. At first this Bohemianism pleased me, but before very long it

led to my losing the last shred of respect which I felt for her. What

struck me as even more strange was the fact that, according as we had or

had not guests, she was two different women. The one (the woman figuring

in society) was a young and healthy, but rather cold, beauty, a person

richly dressed, neither stupid nor clever, and unfailingly cheerful. The

other woman (the one in evidence when no guests were present) was

considerably past her first youth, languid, depressed, slovenly, and

ennuyee, though affectionate. Frequently, as I looked at her when,

smiling, rosy with the winter air, and happy in the consciousness of her

beauty, she came in from a round of calls and, taking off her hat, went

to look at herself in a mirror; or when, rustling in her rich, decollete

ball dress, and at once shy and proud before the servants, she was

passing to her carriage; or when, at one of our small receptions at

home, she was sitting dressed in a high silken dress finished with some

sort of fine lace about her soft neck, and flashing her unvarying, but

lovely, smile around her—as I looked at her at such times I could not

help wondering what would have been said by persons who had been

ravished to behold her thus if they could have seen her as I often saw

her, namely, when, waiting in the lonely midnight hours for her husband

to return from his club, she would walk like a shadow from room to room,

with her hair dishevelled and her form clad in a sort of

dressing-jacket. Presently, she would sit down to the piano and, her

brows all puckered with the effort, play over the only waltz that she

knew; after which she would pick up a novel, read a few pages somewhere

in the middle of it, and throw it aside. Next, repairing in person to

the dining-room, so as not to disturb the servants, she would get

herself a cucumber and some cold veal, and eat it standing by the

window-sill—then once more resume her weary, aimless, gloomy wandering

from room to room. But what, above all other things, caused estrangement

between us was that lack of understanding which expressed itself chiefly

in the peculiar air of indulgent attention with which she would listen

when any one was speaking to her concerning matters of which she had no

knowledge. It was not her fault that she acquired the unconscious habit

of bending her head down and smiling slightly with her lips only when

she found it necessary to converse on topics which did not interest her

(which meant any topic except herself and her husband); yet that smile

and that inclination of the head, when incessantly repeated, could

become unbearably wearisome. Also, her peculiar gaiety—which always

sounded as though she were laughing at herself, at you, and at the world

in general—was gauche and anything but infectious, while her sympathy

was too evidently forced. Lastly, she knew no reticence with regard to

her ceaseless rapturising to all and sundry concerning her love for

Papa. Although she only spoke the truth when she said that her whole

life was bound up with him, and although she proved it her life long, we

considered such unrestrained, continual insistence upon her affection

for him bad form, and felt more ashamed for her when she was descanting

thus before strangers even than we did when she was perpetrating bad

blunders in French. Yet, although, as I have said, she loved her husband

more than anything else in the world, and he too had a great affection

for her (or at all events he had at first, and when he saw that others

besides himself admired her beauty), it seemed almost as though she

purposely did everything most likely to displease him—simply to prove to

him the strength of her love, her readiness to sacrifice herself for his

sake, and the fact that her one aim in life was to win his affection!

She was fond of display, and my father too liked to see her as a beauty

who excited wonder and admiration; yet she sacrificed her weakness for

fine clothes to her love for him, and grew more and more accustomed to

remain at home in a plain grey blouse. Again, Papa considered freedom

and equality to be indispensable conditions of family life, and hoped

that his favourite Lubotshka and his kind-hearted young wife would

become sincere friends; yet once again Avdotia sacrificed herself by

considering it incumbent upon her to pay the “real mistress of the

house,” as she called Lubotshka, an amount of deference which only

shocked and annoyed my father. Likewise, he played cards a great deal

that winter, and lost considerable sums towards the end of it,

wherefore, unwilling, as usual, to let his gambling affairs intrude upon

his family life, he began to preserve complete secrecy concerning his

play; yet Avdotia, though often ailing, as well as, towards the end of

the winter, enceinte, considered herself bound always to sit up (in a

grey blouse, and with her hair dishevelled) for my father when, at, say,

four or five o’clock in the morning, he returned home from the club

ashamed, depleted in pocket, and weary. She would ask him

absent-mindedly whether he had been fortunate in play, and listen with

indulgent attention, little nods of her head, and a faint smile upon her

face as he told her of his doings at the club and begged her, for about

the hundredth time, never to sit up for him again. Yet, though Papa’s

winnings or losings (upon which his substance practically depended) in

no way interested her, she was always the first to meet him when he

returned home in the small hours of the morning. This she was incited to

do, not only by the strength of her devotion, but by a certain secret

jealousy from which she suffered. No one in the world could persuade her

that it was REALLY from his club, and not from a mistress’s, that Papa

came home so late. She would try to read love secrets in his face, and,

discerning none there, would sigh with a sort of enjoyment of her grief,

and give herself up once more to the contemplation of her unhappiness.

As the result of these and many other constant sacrifices which occurred

in Papa’s relations with his wife during the latter months of that

winter (a time when he lost much, and was therefore out of spirits),

there gradually grew up between the two an intermittent feeling of tacit

hostility—of restrained aversion to the object of devotion of the kind

which expresses itself in an unconscious eagerness to show the object in

question every possible species of petty annoyance.

XLIII. NEW COMRADES

The winter had passed imperceptibly and the thaw begun when the list of

examinations was posted at the University, and I suddenly remembered

that I had to return answers to questions in eighteen subjects on which

I had heard lectures delivered, but with regard to some of which I had

taken no notes and made no preparation whatever. It seems strange that

the question “How am I going to pass?” should never have entered my

head, but the truth is that all that winter I had been in such a state

of haze through the delights of being both grown-up and “comme il faut”

that, whenever the question of the examinations had occurred to me, I

had mentally compared myself with my comrades, and thought to myself,

“They are certain to pass, and as most of them are not ‘comme il faut,’

and I am therefore their personal superior, I too am bound to come out

all right.” In fact, the only reason why I attended lectures at all was

that I might become an habitue of the University, and obtain Papa’s

leave to go in and out of the house. Moreover, I had many acquaintances

now, and often enjoyed myself vastly at the University. I loved the

racket, talking, and laughter in the auditorium, the opportunities for

sitting on a back bench, and letting the measured voice of the professor

lure one into dreams as one contemplated one’s comrades, the occasional

runnings across the way for a snack and a glass of vodka (sweetened by

the fearful joy of knowing that one might be hauled before the professor

for so doing), the stealthy closing of the door as one returned to the

auditorium, and the participation in “course versus course” scuffles in

the corridors. All this was very enjoyable.

By the time, however, that every one had begun to put in a better

attendance at lectures, and the professor of physics had completed his

course and taken his leave of us until the examinations came on, and the

students were busy collecting their notebooks and arranging to do their

preparation in parties, it struck me that I also had better prepare for

the ordeal. Operoff, with whom I still continued on bowing, but

otherwise most frigid, terms, suddenly offered not only to lend me his

notebooks, but to let me do my preparation with himself and some other

students. I thanked him, and accepted the invitation—hoping by that

conferment of honour completely to dissipate our old misunderstanding;

but at the same time I requested that the gatherings should always be

held at my home, since my quarters were so splendid! To this the

students replied that they meant to take turn and turn about—sometimes

to meet at one fellow’s place, sometimes at another’s, as might be most

convenient.

The first of our reunions was held at Zuchin’s, who had a small

partition-room in a large building on the Trubni Boulevard. The opening

night I arrived late, and entered when the reading aloud had already

begun. The little apartment was thick with tobacco-smoke, while on the

table stood a bottle of vodka, a decanter, some bread, some salt, and a

shin-bone of mutton. Without rising, Zuchin asked me to have some vodka

and to doff my tunic.

“I expect you are not accustomed to such entertainment,” he added.

Every one was wearing a dirty cotton shirt and a dickey. Endeavouring

not to show my contempt for the company, I took off my tunic, and lay

down in a sociable manner on the sofa. Zuchin went on reading aloud and

correcting himself with the help of notebooks, while the others

occasionally stopped him to ask a question, which he always answered

with ability, correctness, and precision. I listened for a time with the

rest, but, not understanding much of it, since I had not been present at

what had been read before, soon interpolated a question.

“Hullo, old fellow! It will be no good for you to listen if you do not

know the subject,” said Zuchin. “I will lend you my notebooks, and then

you can read it up by to-morrow, and I will explain it to you.”

I felt rather ashamed of my ignorance. Also, I felt the truth of what he

said; so I gave up listening, and amused myself by observing my new

comrades. According to my classification of humanity, into persons

“comme il faut” and persons not “comme il faut,” they evidently belonged

to the latter category, and so aroused in me not only a feeling of

contempt, but also a certain sensation of personal hostility, for the

reason that, though not “comme il faut,” they accounted me their equal,

and actually patronised me in a sort of good-humoured fashion. What in

particular excited in me this feeling was their feet, their dirty nails

and fingers, a particularly long talon on Operoff’s obtrusive little

finger, their red shirts, their dickeys, the chaff which they

good-naturedly threw at one another, the dirty room, a habit which

Zuchin had of continually snuffling and pressing a finger to his nose,

and, above all, their manner of speaking—that is to say, their use and

intonation of words. For instance, they said “flat” for fool, “just the

ticket” for exactly, “grandly” for splendidly, and so on—all of which

seemed to me either bookish or disagreeably vulgar. Still more was my

“comme il faut” refinement disturbed by the accents which they put upon

certain Russian—and, still more, upon foreign—words. Thus they said

dieYATelnost for DIEyatelnost, NARochno for naROChno, v’KAMinie for

v’kaMINie, SHAKespeare for ShakesPEARe, and so forth.

Yet, for all their insuperably repellent exterior, I could detect

something good in these fellows, and envied them the cheerful

good-fellowship which united them in one. Consequently, I began to feel

attracted towards them, and made up my mind that, come what might, I

would become of their number. The kind and honourable Operoff I knew

already, and now the brusque, but exceptionally clever, Zuchin (who

evidently took the lead in this circle) began to please me greatly. He

was a dark, thick-set little fellow, with a perennially glistening,

polished face, but one that was extremely lively, intellectual, and

independent in its expression. That expression it derived from a low,

but prominent, forehead, deep black eyes, short, bristly hair, and a

thick, dark beard which looked as though it stood in constant need of

trimming. Although, too, he seemed to think nothing of himself (a trail

which always pleased me in people), it was clear that he never let his

brain rest. He had one of those expressive faces which, a few hours

after you have seen them for the first time, change suddenly and

entirely to your view. Such a change took place, in my eyes, with regard

to Zuchin’s face towards the end of that evening. Suddenly, I seemed to

see new wrinkles appear upon its surface, its eyes grow deeper, its

smile become a different one, and the whole face assume such an altered

aspect that I scarcely recognised it.

When the reading was ended, Zuchin, the other students, and myself

manifested our desire to be “comrades all” by drinking vodka until

little remained in the bottle. Thereupon Zuchin asked if any one had a

quarter-rouble to spare, so that he could send the old woman who looked

after him to buy some more; yet, on my offering to provide the money, he

made as though he had not heard me, and turned to Operoff, who pulled

out a purse sewn with bugles, and handed him the sum required.

“And mind you don’t get drunk,” added the giver, who himself had not

partaken of the vodka.

“By heavens!” answered Zuchin as he sucked the marrow out of a mutton

bone (I remember thinking that it must be because he ate marrow that he

was so clever). “By heavens!” he went on with a slight smile (and his

smile was of the kind that one involuntarily noticed, and somehow felt

grateful for), “even if I did get drunk, there would be no great harm

done. I wonder which of us two could look after himself the better—you

or I? Anyway I am willing to make the experiment,” and he slapped his

forehead with mock boastfulness. “But what a pity it is that Semenoff

has disappeared! He has gone and completely hidden himself somewhere.”

Sure enough, the grey-haired Semenoff who had comforted me so much at my

first examination by being worse dressed than myself, and who, after

passing the second examination, had attended his lectures regularly

during the first month, had disappeared thereafter from view, and never

been seen at the University throughout the latter part of the course.

“Where is he?” asked some one.

“I do not know” replied Zuchin. “He has escaped my eye altogether. Yet

what fun I used to have with him! What fire there was in the man! and

what an intellect! I should be indeed sorry if he has come to grief—and

come to grief he probably has, for he was no mere boy to take his

University course in instalments.”

After a little further conversation, and agreeing to meet again the next

night at Zuchin’s, since his abode was the most central point for us

all, we began to disperse. As, one by one, we left the room, my

conscience started pricking me because every one seemed to be going home

on foot, whereas I had my drozhki. Accordingly, with some hesitation I

offered Operoff a lift. Zuchin came to the door with us, and, after

borrowing a rouble of Operoff, went off to make a night of it with some

friends. As we drove along, Operoff told me a good deal about Zuchin’s

character and mode of life, and on reaching home it was long before I

could get to sleep for thinking of the new acquaintances I had made. For

many an hour, as I lay awake, I kept wavering between the respect which

their knowledge, simplicity, and sense of honour, as well as the poetry

of their youth and courage, excited in my regard, and the distaste which

I felt for their outward man. In spite of my desire to do so, it was at

that time literally impossible for me to associate with them, since our

ideas were too wholly at variance. For me, life’s meaning and charm

contained an infinitude of shades of which they had not an inkling, and

vice versa. The greatest obstacles of all, however, to our better

acquaintance I felt to be the twenty roubles’ worth of cloth in my

tunic, my drozhki, and my white linen shirt; and they appeared to me

most important obstacles, since they made me feel as though I had

unwittingly insulted these comrades by displaying such tokens of my

wealth. I felt guilty in their eyes, and as though, whether I accepted

or rejected their acquittal and took a line of my own, I could never

enter into equal and unaffected relations with them. Yet to such an

extent did the stirring poetry of the courage which I could detect in

Zuchin (in particular) overshadow the coarse, vicious side of his nature

that the latter made no unpleasant impression upon me.

For a couple of weeks I visited Zuchin’s almost every night for purposes

of work. Yet I did very little there, since, as I have said, I had lost

ground at the start, and, not having sufficient grit in me to catch up

my companions by solitary study, was forced merely to PRETEND that I was

listening to and taking in all they were reading. I have an idea, too,

that they divined my pretence, since I often noticed that they passed

over points which they themselves knew without first inquiring of me

whether I did the same. Yet, day by day, I was coming to regard the

vulgarity of this circle with more indulgence, to feel increasingly

drawn towards its way of life, and to find in it much that was poetical.

Only my word of honour to Dimitri that I would never indulge in

dissipation with these new comrades kept me from deciding also to share

their diversions.

Once, I thought I would make a display of my knowledge of literature,

particularly French literature, and so led the conversation to that

theme. Judge, then, of my surprise when I discovered that not only had

my companions been reading the foreign passages in Russian, but that

they had studied far more foreign works than I had, and knew and could

appraise English, and even Spanish, writers of whom I had never so much

as heard! Likewise, Pushkin and Zhukovski represented to them

LITERATURE, and not, as to myself, certain books in yellow covers which

I had once read and studied when a child. For Dumas and Sue they had an

almost equal contempt, and, in general, were competent to form much

better and clearer judgments on literary matters than I was, for all

that I refused to recognise the fact. In knowledge of music, too, I

could not beat them, and was astonished to find that Operoff played the

violin, and another student the cello and piano, while both of them were

members of the University orchestra, and possessed a wide knowledge of

and appreciation of good music. In short, with the exception of the

French and German languages, my companions were better posted at every

point than I was, yet not the least proud of the fact. True, I might

have plumed myself on my position as a man of the world, but Woloda

excelled me even in that. Wherein, then, lay the height from which I

presumed to look down upon these comrades? In my acquaintanceship with

Prince Ivan Ivanovitch? In my ability to speak French? In my drozhki? In

my linen shirt? In my finger-nails? “Surely these things are all

rubbish,” was the thought which would come flitting through my head

under the influence of the envy which the good-fellowship and kindly,

youthful gaiety displayed around me excited in my breast. Every one

addressed his interlocutor in the second person singular. True, the

familiarity of this address almost approximated to rudeness, yet even

the boorish exterior of the speaker could not conceal a constant

endeavour never to hurt another one’s feelings. The terms “brute” or

“swine,” when used in this good-natured fashion, only convulsed me, and

gave me cause for inward merriment. In no way did they offend the person

addressed, or prevent the company at large from remaining on the most

sincere and friendly footing. In all their intercourse these youths were

delicate and forbearing in a way that only very poor and very young men

can be. However much I might detect in Zuchin’s character and amusements

an element of coarseness and profligacy, I could also detect the fact

that his drinking-bouts were of a very different order to the puerility

with burnt rum and champagne in which I had participated at Baron Z.‘s.

XLIV. ZUCHIN AND SEMENOFF

Although I do not know what class of society Zuchin belonged to, I know

that, without the help either of means or social position, he had

matriculated from the Seventh Gymnasium. At that time he was

eighteen—though he looked much older—and very clever, especially in his

powers of assimilation. To him it was easier to survey the whole of some

complicated subject, to foresee its various parts and deductions, than

to use that knowledge, when gained, for reasoning out the exact laws to

which those deductions were due. He knew that he was clever, and of the

fact he was proud; yet from that very pride arose the circumstance that

he treated every one with unvarying simplicity and good-nature.

Moreover, his experience of life must have been considerable, for

already he had squandered much love, friendship, activity, and money.

Though poor and moving only in the lower ranks of society, there was

nothing which he had ever attempted for which he did not thenceforth

feel the contempt, the indifference, or the utter disregard which were

bound to result from his attaining his goal too easily. In fact, the

very ardour with which he applied himself to a new pursuit seemed to be

due to his contempt for what he had already attained, since his

abilities always led him to success, and therefore to a certain right to

despise it. With the sciences it was the same. Though little interested

in them, and taking no notes, he knew mathematics thoroughly, and was

uttering no vain boast when he said that he could beat the professor

himself. Much of what he heard said in lectures he thought rubbish, yet

with his peculiar habit of unconsciously practical roguishness he

feigned to subscribe to all that the professors thought important, and

every professor adored him. True, he was outspoken to the authorities,

but they none the less respected him. Besides disliking and despising

the sciences, he despised all who laboured to attain what he himself had

mastered so easily, since the sciences, as he understood them, did not

occupy one-tenth part of his powers. In fact, life, as he saw it from

the student’s standpoint, contained nothing to which he could devote

himself wholly, and his impetuous, active nature (as he himself often

said) demanded life complete: wherefore he frequented the drinking-bout

in so far as he could afford it, and surrendered himself to dissipation

chiefly out of a desire to get as far away from himself as possible.

Consequently, just as the examinations were approaching, Operoff’s

prophecy to me came true, for Zuchin wasted two whole weeks in this

fashion, and we had to do the latter part of our preparation at another

student’s. Yet at the first examination he reappeared with pale, haggard

face and tremulous hands, and passed brilliantly into the second course!

The company of roisterers of which Zuchin had been the leader since its

formation at the beginning of the term consisted of eight students,

among whom, at first, had been numbered Ikonin and Semenoff; but the

former had left under the strain of the continuous revelry in which the

band had indulged in the early part of the term, and the latter seceded

later for reasons which were never wholly explained. In its early days

this band had been looked upon with awe by all the fellows of our

course, and had had its exploits much discussed. Of these exploits the

leading heroes had been Zuchin and, towards the end of the term,

Semenoff, but the latter had come to be generally shunned, and to cause

disturbances on the rare occasions when he attended a lecture. Just

before the examinations began, he rounded off his drinking exploits in a

most energetic and original fashion, as I myself had occasion to witness

(through my acquaintanceship with Zuchin). This is how it was. One

evening we had just assembled at Zuchin’s, and Operoff, reinforcing a

candlestick with a candle stuck in a bottle, had just plunged his nose

into his notebooks and begun to read aloud in his thin voice from his

neatly-written notes on physics, when the landlady entered the room, and

informed Zuchin that some one had brought a note for him... [The

remainder of this chapter is omitted in the original.]

XLV. I COME TO GRIEF

At length the first examination—on differentials and integrals—drew

near, but I continued in a vague state which precluded me from forming

any clear idea of what was awaiting me. Every evening, after consorting

with Zuchin and the rest, the thought would occur to me that there was

something in my convictions which I must change—something wrong and

mistaken; yet every morning the daylight would find me again satisfied

to be “comme il faut,” and desirous of no change whatsoever.

Such was the frame of mind in which I attended for the first

examination. I seated myself on the bench where the princes, counts, and

barons always sat, and began talking to them in French, with the not

unnatural result that I never gave another thought to the answers which

I was shortly to return to questions in a subject of which I knew

nothing. I gazed supinely at other students as they went up to be

examined, and even allowed myself to chaff some of them.

“Well, Grap,” I said to Ilinka (who, from our first entry into the

University, had shaken off my influence, had ceased to smile when I

spoke to him, and always remained ill-disposed towards me), “have you

survived the ordeal?”

“Yes,” retorted Ilinka. “Let us see if YOU can do so.”

I smiled contemptuously at the answer, notwithstanding that the doubt

which he had expressed had given me a momentary shock. Once again,

however, indifference overlaid that feeling, and I remained so entirely

absent-minded and supine that, the very moment after I had been examined

(a mere formality for me, as it turned out) I was making a dinner

appointment with Baron Z. When called out with Ikonin, I smoothed the

creases in my uniform, and walked up to the examiner’s table with

perfect sang froid.

True, a slight shiver of apprehension ran down my back when the young

professor—the same one as had examined me for my matriculation—looked me

straight in the face as I reached across to the envelope containing the

tickets. Ikonin, though taking a ticket with the same plunge of his

whole body as he had done at the previous examinations, did at least

return some sort of an answer this time, though a poor one. I, on the

contrary, did just as he had done on the two previous occasions, or even

worse, since I took a second ticket, yet for a second time returned no

answer. The professor looked me compassionately in the face, and said in

a quiet, but determined, voice:

“You will not pass into the second course, Monsieur Irtenieff. You had

better not complete the examinations. The faculty must be weeded out.

The same with you, Monsieur Ikonin.”

Ikonin implored leave to finish the examinations, as a great favour, but

the professor replied that he (Ikonin) was not likely to do in two days

what he had not succeeded in doing in a year, and that he had not the

smallest chance of passing. Ikonin renewed his humble, piteous appeals,

but the professor was inexorable.

“You can go, gentlemen,” he remarked in the same quiet, resolute voice.

I was only too glad to do so, for I felt ashamed of seeming, by my

silent presence, to be joining in Ikonin’s humiliating prayers for

grace. I have no recollection of how I threaded my way through the

students in the hall, nor of what I replied to their questions, nor of

how I passed into the vestibule and departed home. I was offended,

humiliated, and genuinely unhappy.

For three days I never left my room, and saw no one, but found relief in

copious tears. I should have sought a pistol to shoot myself if I had

had the necessary determination for the deed. I thought that Ilinka Grap

would spit in my face when he next met me, and that he would have the

right to do so; that Operoff would rejoice at my misfortune, and tell

every one of it; that Kolpikoff had justly shamed me that night at the

restaurant; that my stupid speeches to Princess Kornikoff had had their

fitting result; and so on, and so on. All the moments in my life which

had been for me most difficult and painful recurred to my mind. I tried

to blame some one for my calamity, and thought that some one must have

done it on purpose—must have conspired a whole intrigue against me.

Next, I murmured against the professors, against my comrades, Woloda,

Dimitri, and Papa (the last for having sent me to the University at

all). Finally, I railed at Providence for ever having let me see such

ignominy. Believing myself ruined for ever in the eyes of all who knew

me, I besought Papa to let me go into the hussars or to the Caucasus.

Naturally, Papa was anything but pleased at what had happened; yet, on

seeing my passionate grief, he comforted me by saying that, though it

was a bad business, it might yet be mended by my transferring to another

faculty. Woloda, who also saw nothing very terrible in my misfortune,

added that at least I should not be put out of countenance in a new

faculty, since I should have new comrades there. As for the ladies of

the household, they neither knew nor cared what either an examination or

a plucking meant, and condoled with me only because they saw me in such

distress. Dimitri came to see me every day, and was very kind and

consolatory throughout; but for that very reason he seemed to me to have

grown colder than before. It always hurt me and made me feel

uncomfortable when he came up to my room and seated himself in silence

beside me, much as a doctor might scat himself by the bedside of an

awkward patient. Sophia Ivanovna and Varenika sent me books for which I

had expressed a wish, as also an invitation to go and see them, but in

that very thoughtfulness of theirs I saw only proud, humiliating

condescension to one who had fallen beyond forgiveness. Although, in

three days’ time, I grew calmer, it was not until we departed for the

country that I left the house, but spent the time in nursing my grief

and wandering, fearful of all the household, through the various rooms.

One evening, as I was sitting deep in thought and listening to Avdotia

playing her waltz, I suddenly leapt to my feet, ran upstairs, got out

the copy-book whereon I had once inscribed “Rules of My Life,” opened

it, and experienced my first moment of repentance and moral resolution.

True, I burst into tears once more, but they were no longer tears of

despair. Pulling myself together, I set about writing out a fresh set of

rules, in the assured conviction that never again would I do a wrong

action, waste a single moment on frivolity, or alter the rules which I

now decided to frame.

How long that moral impulse lasted, what it consisted of, and what new

principles I devised for my moral growth I will relate when speaking of

the ensuing and happier portion of my early manhood.