The doctor came in. I began telling about housepainters but was abashed, being unaccustomed, and spoke like an ethnographer, gravely and ploddingly. The doctor also told a few anecdotes from the workmanly life. He staggered, wept, fell on his knees, and, in portraying a drunkard, even lay on the floor. It was a real actor’s performance, and Marya Viktorovna, as she watched him, laughed to the point of tears. Then he played the piano and sang in his pleasant, thin tenor, and Marya Viktorovna stood beside him, choosing what he should sing and correcting him when he made mistakes.
‘‘I hear that you also sing?’’ I asked.
‘‘Also!’’ The doctor was horrified. ‘‘She’s a wonderful singer, an artist, and you say ‘also’! That’s a bit much!’’
‘‘I once studied seriously,’’ she said in answer to my question, ‘‘but now I’ve dropped it.’’
Sitting on a low stool, she told us about her life in Petersburg and impersonated well-known singers, mimicking their voices and manners of singing; she drew the doctor in her album, then me; she drew badly, but we both came out looking like ourselves. She laughed, was mischievous, grimaced sweetly, and this suited her more than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness, and it seemed to me that what she had said to me earlier about riches and comfort wasn’t serious but was an imitation of someone. She was a superb comic actress. I mentally placed her beside our young ladies, and even the beautiful, grave Anyuta Blagovo could not bear comparison with her; the difference was enormous, as between a fine cultivated rose and a wild brier.
The three of us had dinner. The doctor and Marya Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with cognac; they clinked glasses and toasted friendship, reason, progress, freedom, and they didn’t get drunk, but only turned red and often laughed loudly for no reason, to the point of tears. So as not to seem dull, I also drank red wine.
‘‘Talented, richly endowed natures,’’ said Miss Dolzhikov, ‘‘know how to live and follow their own path; but average people, like me, for instance, don’t know anything and can’t do anything themselves; nothing remains for them but to pick out some deep social current and float off where it takes them.’’
‘‘Is it possible to pick out what’s not there?’’ asked the doctor.
‘‘Not there, because we don’t see it.’’
‘‘Is that so? Social currents are an invention of the new literature. We don’t have any.’’
An argument began.
‘‘We don’t have and never have had any deep social currents,’’ the doctor said loudly. ‘‘What has the new literature not invented! It has also invented some sort of intellectual laborers in the villages, but go around all our villages and you’ll find only some Disrespect-Trough12 in a jacket or a black frock coat who makes four spelling errors in the word ‘although.’ Our cultural life hasn’t begun yet. The same savagery, the same overall boorishness, the same worthlessness as five hundred years ago. Currents, trends, but all this is petty, miserable, hitched to a banal groatsworth of little interests—how can we see anything serious in it? If you imagine you’ve picked out some deep social current and, following it, devote your life to such tasks in the contemporary taste as liberating insects from slavery or abstaining from beef cutlets, then—I congratulate you, madam. Study is what we must do, study and study, and let’s wait a little with social currents: we haven’t grown up to them yet and, in all conscience, understand nothing about them.’’
‘‘You don’t understand, but I do,’’ said Marya Viktorovna. ‘‘You’re God knows how boring today!’’
‘‘Our business is to study and study, to try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, because serious social currents are there where knowledge is, and the happiness of future mankind lies only in knowledge. I drink to learning!’’
‘‘One thing is unquestionable: one should set up one’s life somehow differently,’’ said Marya Viktorovna, after some silence and reflection, ‘‘and life as it has been so far is worth nothing. We won’t talk about it.’’
As we left her house, it was already striking two at the cathedral.
‘‘Did you like her?’’ asked the doctor. ‘‘Nice, isn’t she?’’
On Christmas day we dined with Marya Viktorovna and then, in the course of all the holidays, went to see her almost every day. No one visited her except us, and she was right when she said that, except for me and the doctor, she had no acquaintances in town. We spent most of the time talking: occasionally the doctor brought along some book or magazine and read aloud to us. Essentially, he was the first educated man I had met in my life. I can’t judge how much he knew, but he constantly showed his knowledge, because he wanted others to know as well. When he talked about something related to medicine, he bore no resemblance to any of our town doctors but produced a new, special impression, and it seemed to me that if he had wanted to, he could have become a real scientist. And this was perhaps the only man who had a serious influence on me at that time. Seeing him and reading the books he gave me, I gradually began to feel a need for knowledge that would inspire my cheerless labor. It now seemed strange to me that I hadn’t known before, for example, that the entire world consists of sixty elements, hadn’t known what linseed oil was, what paints were, and somehow could have done without this knowledge. Acquaintance with the doctor raised me morally as well. I often argued with him, and though I usually stuck to my own opinion, still, owing to him, I gradually began to notice that not everything was clear to me, and I then tried to work out for myself some possibly definite convictions, so that the dictates of my conscience would be definite and have nothing vague about them. Nevertheless, this best and most educated man in town was still far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of reducing every conversation to an argument, in his pleasant tenor voice, and even in his gentleness, there was something slightly coarse, something of the seminarian,13 and when he took off his frock coat and remained in nothing but his silk shirt, or when he tossed a tip to a waiter in a tavern, it seemed to me each time that culture is culture, but there was still a Tartar fermenting in him.
At the Baptism,14 he left for Petersburg again. He left in the morning, and after dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off her coat and hat, she sat silently, very pale, and stared at one spot. She was shivering but clearly trying to carry on.
‘‘You must have caught a cold,’’ I said.
Her eyes filled with tears, she got up and went to Karpovna without saying a word to me, as if I had offended her. A little later, I heard her speaking in a tone of bitter reproach:
‘‘Nanny, what have I been living for till now? Why? Tell me: haven’t I ruined my youth? To spend the best years of your life doing nothing but writing down expenses, pouring tea, counting kopecks, entertaining guests, and thinking that there was nothing higher than that in the world! Nanny, understand, I, too, have human needs, and I want to live, but I’ve been made into some sort of housekeeper. It’s terrible, terrible!’’
She flung the keys through the doorway, and they landed in my room with a jingle. These were the keys to the sideboard, the pantry, the cellar, and the tea chest—the same keys my mother once carried.
‘‘Ah, oh, dear hearts!’’ the old woman was horrified. ‘‘Saints in heaven!’’
Before going home, my sister came to my room to pick up the keys and said:
‘‘Excuse me. Something strange has been happening to me lately.’’
VIII
ONCE, COMING HOME from Marya Viktorovna’s late in the evening, I found in my room a young police officer in a new uniform; he was sitting at my table and leafing through a book.
‘‘At last!’’ he said, getting up and stretching. ‘‘This is the third time I’ve come to you. The governor orders you to come to him tomorrow at exactly nine o’clock in the morning. Without fail.’’
He had me sign a statement that I would carry out His Excellency’s order punctually, and left. This late visit from a police officer and the unexp
ected invitation to the governor’s affected me in a most oppressive manner. From early childhood, a fear of gendarmes, policemen, magistrates had remained in me, and I was now tormented by anguish, as if I was indeed guilty of something. And I was quite unable to fall asleep. Nanny and Prokofy were also agitated and couldn’t sleep. Besides that, nanny had an earache; she moaned and began to cry several times from the pain. Hearing that I was not asleep, Prokofy cautiously came into my room with a lamp and sat at the table.
‘‘You ought to drink some pepper vodka...’ he said, pondering. ‘‘In this vale, once you’ve had a drink, it feels all right. And if mama took a drop of pepper vodka in her ear, it would be a great benefit.’’
Between two and three o’clock, he got ready to go to the slaughterhouse for meat. I knew I wouldn’t sleep before morning, and to while away the time till nine o’clock, I went with him. We walked with a lantern, and his boy, Nikolka, about thirteen years old, with blue spots on his face from the cold and the look of a perfect robber, drove after us with the sledge, urging the horse on in a husky voice.
‘‘Must be they’re going to punish you at the governor’s,’’ Prokofy said to me on the way. ‘‘There’s governor’s learning, there’s archimandrite’s learning, there’s officer’s learning, there’s doctor’s learning, for every title there’s its learning. But you don’t keep to your learning, and you shouldn’t be allowed.’’
The slaughterhouse was beyond the cemetery, and I had previously seen it only from a distance. It was three dismal sheds surrounded by a gray fence, and on hot summer days, when the wind blew from that direction, it gave off a choking stench. Now, going into the yard, I couldn’t see the sheds in the darkness, I kept running into horses and sledges, empty or already loaded with meat; people with lanterns walked about cursing repulsively. Prokofy and Nikolka cursed as vilely, and a constant noise of cursing, coughing, and the whinnying of horses hung in the air.
It smelled of corpses and dung. The melting snow was mixed with mud, and it seemed to me in the darkness that I was walking on pools of blood.
Having filled the sledges with meat, we went to the butcher shop at the market. Dawn was breaking. Cooks with baskets and elderly ladies in overcoats walked by one after the other. Prokofy, with a meat axe in his hand, in a blood-spattered white apron, swore terribly, crossed himself towards the church, shouted loudly enough for the whole marketplace to hear, claiming that he was giving the meat away at cost and was even losing on it. He short-weighed, short-changed, the cooks saw it, but, deafened by his shouting, did not protest but only called him a hangman. As he raised and lowered his terrible meat axe, he assumed picturesque poses and, with a ferocious look, emitted a loud ‘‘Hack!’’ each time, and I was afraid he would indeed cut off somebody’s head or arm.
I stayed in the butcher shop all morning, and when I finally went to the governor’s, my coat smelled of meat and blood. I was in such a mental state as if, on somebody’s orders, I was going for bear with a spear. I remember a high stairway with a striped runner, and a young official in a tailcoat with bright buttons, who silently pointed me to the door with both hands and ran to announce me. I entered a reception hall in which the furnishings were luxurious but cold and tasteless, and the tall, narrow mirrors between the windows and the bright yellow curtains struck the eye especially unpleasantly; one could see that the governors changed but the furnishings remained the same. The young official again pointed me to the door with both hands, and I went to a big green desk behind which stood an army general with a Vladimir on his neck.15
‘‘Mr. Poloznev, I have asked you to appear,’’ he began, holding some letter in his hand and opening his mouth round and wide like an O, ‘‘I have asked you to appear in order to announce to you the following. Your esteemed father has addressed the provincial marshal of the nobility in writing and verbally, asking him to summon you and bring to your attention all the incompatibility of your behavior with the rank of a nobleman, which you have the honor of bearing. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, correctly supposing that your behavior may be a temptation, and finding that on his part, persuasion alone would be insufficient here, and that serious administrative intervention was necessary, has presented me in this letter with his considerations concerning you, which I share.’’
He said this quietly, respectfully, standing at attention as if I was his superior, and looking at me without any severity. His face was flabby, worn, all wrinkled, there were bags hanging under his eyes, his hair was dyed, and generally it was impossible to tell by his appearance how old he was— forty or sixty.
‘‘I hope,’’ he went on, ‘‘that you will appreciate the delicacy of the esteemed Alexander Pavlovich, who has addressed me not officially but in a private manner. I have also summoned you unofficially, and I am speaking to you not as a governor but as a sincere admirer of your parent. And so I ask you either to change your behavior and return to the duties proper to your rank, or, to avoid temptation, to relocate in another place, where people do not know you and where you can occupy yourself with whatever you like. Otherwise I shall have to take extreme measures.’’
He stood silently for about half a minute, with his mouth open, looking at me.
‘‘Are you a vegetarian?’’ he asked.
‘‘No, Your Excellency, I eat meat.’’
He sat down and drew some paper towards him; I bowed and left.
It wasn’t worth going to work before dinner. I went home to sleep, but could not fall asleep because of the unpleasant, morbid feeling brought upon me by the slaughterhouse and the talk with the governor, and, waiting till evening, upset, gloomy, I went to see Marya Viktorovna. I told her about my visit to the governor, and she looked at me in perplexity, as if she didn’t believe me, and suddenly laughed merrily, loudly, impetuously, as only good-natured, easily amused people know how to laugh.
‘‘If I were to tell that in Petersburg!’’ she said, nearly dropping with laughter and leaning on her desk. ‘‘If I were to tell that in Petersburg!’’
IX
WE NOW SAW each other often, about twice a day. Almost every day after dinner she came to the cemetery and, while waiting for me, read the inscriptions on the crosses and tombstones; sometimes she went into the church and, standing beside me, watched me work. The silence, the naïve work of the artists and gilders, Radish’s reasonings, and the fact that externally I was no different from the other craftsmen and worked, like them, only in a vest and old shoes, and that they addressed me familiarly—all this was new to her and moved her. Once, in her presence, the artist who was painting the dove up top shouted to me:
‘‘Misail, bring me some whiting!’’
I fetched him some whiting, and as I came down the flimsy scaffolding afterwards, she watched me, moved to tears and smiling.
‘‘How nice you are!’’ she said.
The memory had stayed with me since childhood of how a green parrot belonging to one of our wealthy people escaped its cage, and how after that the beautiful bird wandered about town for a whole month, lazily flying from one garden to another, lonely, shelterless. And Marya Viktorovna reminded me of that bird.
‘‘I now have positively nowhere to go except the cemetery,’’ she said to me, laughing. ‘‘This town bores me to the point of loathing. At the Azhogins’ they read, sing, lisp, I can’t bear them lately; your sister is unsociable, Mlle. Blagovo hates me for some reason, I don’t like the theater. What do you suggest I do?’’
When I called on her, I smelled of paint and turpentine, my hands were dark—and she liked that; she also wanted me to come to her not otherwise than in my ordinary working clothes; but those clothes hampered me in the drawing room, I was embarrassed, as if I was wearing a uniform, and therefore, when I went to her, I always put on my new tricot suit. And she didn’t like it.
‘‘But confess, you don’t quite feel comfortable in your new role,’’ she said to me once. ‘‘Your working costume hampers you, you feel awkward in it. Tell m
e, isn’t that because you have no assurance and are not satisfied? The very kind of work you’ve chosen, this painting spell of yours, can it be that it satisfies you?’’ she asked, laughing. ‘‘I know painting makes things prettier and more durable, but these things belong to the townspeople, the rich, and in the end constitute a luxury. Besides, you yourself have said more than once that each man should procure his bread with his own hands, while you procure money, not bread. Why don’t you stick to the literal meaning of your words? You should procure precisely bread, that is, you should plow, sow, mow, thresh, or do something that has a direct relation to farming, for instance, tend cattle, till the earth, build cottages...’
She opened a pretty bookcase that stood by her desk and said:
‘‘I’m saying all this because I want to initiate you into my secret. Voilà! This is my farming library. Here are fields, and kitchen garden, and orchard, and cattle yard, and apiary. I read them avidly and in terms of theory have already studied everything to the last jot. My dream, my sweet dream, is to go to our Dubechnya as soon as March comes. It’s wonderful there, marvelous! Isn’t that so? For the first year I’ll observe things and get accustomed to them, and the next year I’ll work myself in a real way, give it my all, as they say. Father has promised me Dubechnya, and I can do whatever I like with it.’’
All flushed, excited to the point of tears, and laughing, she dreamed aloud of how she would live in Dubechnya and what an interesting life it would be. And I envied her. March was already near, the days were getting longer and longer, and on bright sunny afternoons the roofs dripped and it smelled of spring. I would have liked to go to the country myself.
And when she said she would move to live in Dubechnya, I vividly pictured how I would remain alone in town, and I felt jealous of her bookcase and of farming. I didn’t know and didn’t like farming, and was about to tell her that farming was a slavish occupation, but remembered that my father had said something like that more than once, and kept silent.
The Complete Short Novels Page 50