“However,” he added, after reflecting a while, “I think I promised to tell you how I came to get married. So listen. First of all, I must tell you that my wife is no longer in the world of the living; secondly . . . but, secondly, I see that I will have to tell you the story of my youth, otherwise you won’t understand anything about it . . . But don’t you want to go to sleep?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Splendid! Listen . . . There is Mr. Kantagryukhin in the next room, snoring away—so commonly! I was born of poor parents—I say parents, because tradition has it that as well as a mother I had a father! I don’t remember him; they say he was not too clever, had a big nose, freckles, and red hair and took snuff up one nostril; his picture hung in my mother’s bedroom, in a red tunic with a black collar up to his ears, as ugly as can be. I used to be taken past him to be whipped and on such occasions my mother used to always point to him and say: ‘He would really give it to you.’ You can imagine how that encouraged me. I had no brothers or sisters; or rather, to be quite accurate, I had a poor devil of a little brother with the English disease* at the back of his neck, but somehow or other he died very quickly . . . And what business had the English disease to come all the way to the Government of Kursk and the District of Shchigrovo, you might ask? But that’s by the way. My mother took my education in hand with all the impetuous earnestness of the steppe-land-owner’s lady: she took it in hand from the red-letter day of my birth until the advent of my sixteenth year. . . . You follow the thread of my discourse?”
“Of course I do, please go on.”
“Very well. On the advent of my sixteenth year, my mother, without an instant’s delay, went and dismissed my French tutor, who was a German called Philippovich, from the Ukrainian Greeks. She took me to Moscow, entered me at the University, and yielded up her soul to the Almighty, leaving me in the charge of my uncle, Koltun-Babur, the lawyer, a bird whose fame had spread even outside the district of Shchigrovo. My uncle Koltun-Babur, the lawyer, fleeced me good and proper . . . But that again is by the way. When I entered the University—I must give my mother all credit for it—I was pretty well prepared; but, even then, a lack of originality could be detected in me. My childhood had been in no way different from the childhood of quantities of other young gentlemen. I grew up in the same stupid, sluggish way, as if underneath a feather-bed. I began repeating verses by heart at the same early age, and languishing under the pretext of a dreamy predilection . . . for what?—Oh, for the beautiful of course . . . and so on. At the University I didn’t strike out a new course; I immediately got into a set. Times were different then . . . but perhaps you don’t know what these sets are? I remember Schiller said somewhere:
Gefährlich ist’s den Leu zu wecken
Und schrecklich ist des Tigers Zahn,
Doch das schrecklichste der Schrecken
Das ist der Mensch in seinem Wahn!
“I assure you he didn’t mean to say that: he meant to say: ‘Das ist ein “set” in der Stadt Moskau.’”
“What do you see that’s so awful about a set?” I asked.
My neighbor seized hold of his night-cap and pushed it forward over his nose.
“What do I see that’s so awful?” he exclaimed. “I’ll tell you: a set is the destruction of all individual development; a set is a hideous substitute for society, for women, for life; a set . . . Oh, just wait; I’ll tell you what a set is like! It’s a lazy, sluggish way of living together, and as such has significance and an appearance of reason; it replaces conversation by argument, induces a habit of fruitless chatter, distracts you from solitary and useful work, gives you a literary itch, and finally deprives you of all freshness and integrity of soul. A set is just triviality and boredom masquerading as brotherliness and friendship, a combination of misunderstandings and pretensions under the guise of frankness and sympathy. In a set, thanks to the right all your friends have, at every hour and every minute, to put their unwashed fingers right into your heart, no one has any clean, untouched place left in his soul; in a set every empty rhetorician, every conceited genius, every premature old man, is received with reverence, every talentless versifier with esoteric ideas is carried shoulder-high; in a set, young lads of seventeen talk slyly and sagely of women and love, but with women they are silent or else they talk the language of books to them—and what they talk about! A set is the forcing-house for a subtilized eloquence; in a set, everyone watches his neighbour as sharply as so many police officials . . . Oh, a set! It’s not a set at all: it’s a vicious circle which has been the undoing of more than one decent man.”
“No, that’s exaggerated, if I may say so,” I interrupted him.
My neighbor looked at me in silence.
“It may be, the Lord knows, it may be. You see, people like myself have only one pleasure left—exaggeration. Anyway, that’s how I spent four years in Moscow. I cannot describe to you, my dear sir, how quickly, how terribly quickly, that time passed; besides, it saddens and mortifies me to remember. You would get up in the morning and it would be like going down-hill on a sledge . . . You look, and you’re already at the end of the run; already it’s evening, and a sleepy servant is helping you on with your frock-coat—you dress and wander around to see a friend, you smoke a pipe, you drink weak tea by the glassful and talk about German philosophy, love, the eternal sunshine of the spirit, and other abstruse topics. But even there I met original, individual people: with some people, force themselves as they might, struggle as they might to accustom themselves to the yoke, nature nevertheless prevailed. I alone was unlucky enough to let myself be molded like soft wax, and my wretched nature put up not the slightest resistance! Meanwhile I had reached the age of twenty-one. I became master of my inheritance, or, more accurately, of that part of my inheritance which my guardian had thought fit to let me have. I gave full powers for the administration of all my estates to a freed serf in my employment named Vasily Kudryashov and went abroad, to Berlin. I lived abroad, as I have already had the pleasure of telling you, for three years. And what of it? Even there, even abroad, I remained the same unoriginal creature. First of all, I need not tell you that I did not learn the slightest thing about Europe or the European way of life; I listened to German professors and read German books, on their native soil . . . That was the only difference. I lived a solitary, monastic sort of life. I made the acquaintance of retired Russian lieutenants, stricken, as I was, with a thirst for knowledge, and incidentally very slow in the uptake and with no gift of self-expression; I hobnobbed with dull-witted families from Penza and other corn-growing provinces; I crawled round the coffee-houses, read the papers, went to the theater in the evening. I had but a slight acquaintance with the natives, talked to them with a sense of strain, and entertained none of them except two or three importunate youths of Jewish origin who constantly came running to me and borrowed money from me—since der Russe is a gullible creature. A strange trick of fate eventually brought me to the house of one of my professors. This is how it was: I asked to see him to enter my name for a course, and he suddenly went and asked me to his house one evening. This professor had two daughters, about twenty-seven, strapping girls, good luck to them—magnificent noses, ringlet-curls, pale blue eyes, red hands with white nails. One was called Linchen, the other Minchen. I began to go often to the professor’s house. I must explain that this professor was, not exactly stupid, but a bit cracked; when he was lecturing, he spoke quite consecutively; but at home he lisped and kept his spectacles up on his forehead; incidentally he was an extremely learned man . . . And what next? Suddenly I thought I was in love with Linchen—and I thought so for a whole six months. It’s true that I spoke to her little—I just looked at her, rather; but I used to read aloud to her various touching compositions, and squeeze her hands furtively, and in the evening I used to dream beside her, staring at the moon, or else simply looking up. Besides, she made such excellent coffee! . . . What else could I want, I thought. One thing confused me: even in the so-called moments o
f indescribable bliss, somehow or other I felt queer in the pit of my stomach, and a depressing, cold shudder ran over my belly. Eventually I could bear my happiness no longer and ran away. After this I spent two more whole years abroad: I was in Italy. In Rome I stood in front of the Transfiguration, in Florence, in front of the Venus; I would suddenly plunge into an extravagant rapture, as if a violent fit had come over me; in the evenings I wrote verses, began a diary; in a word, there too I behaved the same as everybody else. Meanwhile, how easy it would have been to be original. For instance, I don’t understand the first thing about painting and sculpture. . . . Why not say so aloud? . . . No, quite impossible! Off I went to take a Cicerone and run around looking at frescoes. . . .”
He lowered his gaze again, and again took off his night-cap.
“So, at last, I returned to my native land,” he continued in a tired voice. “I came to Moscow. In Moscow I underwent a surprising change. Abroad I had been rather silent, but there I suddenly began to talk with unexpected briskness and at the same time I put on goodness knows what airs. There were amiable people who thought I was practically a genius; ladies listened sympathetically to my spoutings, but I did not manage to stay at the height of my glory. One fine morning a story about me began to circulate (I don’t know who brought it to the light of day: it must have been one of those old maids of the male sex who swarm in Moscow), but it started, and began putting out shoots and tendrils, like a strawberry plant. I got entangled, tried to jump clear, to burst the clinging threads—I couldn’t do it . . . I went away. Even in that, I showed my absurdity. I had only to wait quietly for the end of the trouble, like waiting for the end of a nettle-rash, and the same amiable people would again have opened their doors to me, the same ladies would again have smiled at my remarks. But that’s the whole trouble: I’m not an original man. It was conscience, I beg you to remark, which suddenly awoke in me: I felt somehow ashamed of chattering, chattering without pause, chattering away—yesterday in Arbat, to-day in Truba, to-morrow in Sivtsev Vrazhok, and always on the same themes . . . But if they asked for it? Look at the real champions in this line of business: they find no difficulty about it; on the contrary, it’s exactly what they need; some of them will work away with their tongues for twenty years, and all the time in the same direction. . . . What self-confidence and conceit can do to you! I had it too, conceit, and even now it’s not completely dead. But the trouble is, I’ll say it again, that I’m not an original man, I have got caught between two stools: nature should either have vouchsafed me much more conceit, or should have given me none at all. But I had a really hard time in my early days; on top of it, my journey abroad had finally ruined my fortune, and I didn’t want to marry some merchant’s widow with a young body, but already flabby as a jelly—so I went home to the country. I think,” added my neighbor, with another sidelong look at me, “that I can pass over in silence the first impressions of country life, allusions to the beauty of nature, the quiet charm of solitude and so on!”
“You can indeed,” I rejoined.
“The more so,” continued the narrator, “that it is all nonsense, at least so far as I am concerned. In the country I was as bored as a locked-up puppy. Although I must admit that on the way home—it was spring—when for the first time I drove past the familiar birch-wood, my head began to spin and my heart to beat with a vague, sweet feeling of anticipation. But those vague feelings of anticipation, as you know, are never realized; on the contrary, other things are realized instead which you don’t at all expect, like cattle diseases, arrears of rent, sales by public auction and so on and so forth. Existing from hand to mouth, from one day to another, with the help of my bailiff Yakov, who had superseded my previous agent, and who in the course of time proved to be just as much of a swindler, if not more, and on top of that poisoned my existence with the smell of his tarred boots, I remembered one day about a family I knew in the neighborhood, consisting of a retired colonel’s widow and two daughters, ordered my drozhky to be harnessed and drove over to see them. For me that day must remain for ever memorable: six months later I married the colonel’s widow’s second daughter!”
The narrator lowered his head and raised his hands to heaven.
“And incidentally,” he added with some warmth, “I wouldn’t wish you to have a bad opinion of the dead lady. Heaven forbid! She was the noblest, best-hearted of creatures, a creature full of affection and of infinite capacity for self-sacrifice, though, it must be admitted, between ourselves, that if I had not had the misfortune to lose her, I would probably have been in no position to converse with you to-day, because in my shed the beam is still extant from which on more than one occasion I planned to hang myself! . . .
“There are certain pears,” he began again, after a short pause, “which need to lie for some time underground in a cellar, in order to find their true flavor; my late wife was evidently another of Nature’s works with the same quality. It is only now that I do her full justice. It is only now, for instance, that the memory of certain evenings which I spent with her before our marriage has ceased to awake the slightest bitterness in me, but on the contrary moves me almost to tears. They were people of no fortune; their house, which was very old, wooden but comfortable, stood on a hill between a garden that had run riot and an overgrown courtyard. At the foot of the hill a river flowed by, hardly visible through thick foliage. A big terrace led from the house to the garden, and in front of the terrace lay an oblong bed which was a mass of roses; at each end of the bed grew two acacias, which the late master had trained to the shape of a screw while they were still young. A little farther on, in the very heart of a raspberry thicket which had been let go and had run wild, stood a summer-house, elaborately painted inside, but so old and decrepit outside that it gave one an eerie feeling to look at it. From the terrace a glass door led into the drawing-room; and in the drawing-room this is what met the curious eye of the spectator: tiled stoves in the corners, on the right a broken-down piano, littered with manuscript music, a sofa covered in a faded blue stuff with a whitish design, a round table, two cabinets with nicknacks in porcelain and beads from the time of Catherine the Great, on the wall the well-known portrait of the blonde girl with the little dove in her bosom and the upturned eyes, on the table a vase of fresh roses. You see how exactly I describe it. In that drawing-room, on that terrace, was played out the whole tragi-comedy of my love. My neighbor was an ill-natured woman with a permanent ill-natured wheeze in her throat, a nagging cantankerous creature; one of her daughters, Vera, was in no way different from the ordinary run of young country ladies; the other, Sofya—with Sofya I fell in love. The two sisters had another room, a bedroom, which they shared, with two pure little wooden beds, little yellowish albums, mignonette, and portraits of their friends, rather badly done in pencil (outstanding among them was a gentleman with an unusually energetic expression and an even more energetic signature, who in his youth had aroused unlimited expectations, but who ended, as we all do, nowhere at all); busts of Goethe and Schiller, German books, withered wreaths and other objects kept for memory’s sake. Into this room I went but rarely and reluctantly; I found something stifling about it. Besides, it is an extraordinary thing, but I liked Sofya best when I was sitting with my back to her, or perhaps even when I was thinking or rather dreaming about her, especially in the evening, on the terrace. Then I would look at the sunset, at the trees, at the slender green leaves, already growing dark, but still sharply defined against the rosy sky; Sofya would be sitting in the drawing-room at the piano, constantly playing over some favorite, passionately brooding phrase of Beethoven’s; the ill-natured old woman would be snoring peacefully as she sat on the sofa; in the dining-room, in a flood of warm light, Vera would be bustling about preparing tea; the samovar would be whistling fancifully, as if it was pleased about something; there would be the cheerful crackle of breaking pretzels, the musical chime of spoons on cups; the canary, which had trilled away unmercifully all day, had suddenly fallen silent, with only
an occasional chirrup, as if asking about something; a small, transparent cloud went by and a few raindrops fell . . . And I sat, and sat, and listened, and listened, and looked, and my heart expanded, and I thought again that I must be in love. So, under the influence of such an evening, I asked the old woman one day for her daughter’s hand, and two months later I got married. I thought I was in love with her. . . . Even now, though it’s high time I did, I still don’t know whether I was in love with Sofya. She was a good-natured, intelligent, silent creature, with a warm heart, but, goodness knows why, whether it was from having lived so long in the country, or from some other cause, she had at the bottom of her soul (if the soul has such a thing as a bottom) a secret wound, or, to put it better, a running sore, which nothing could heal, and neither she nor I could even put a name to it. Of course, I didn’t guess the existence of this wound until after our marriage. Worry myself about it as I might, nothing helped. When I was a child, I had a pet siskin, which a cat had once caught in its claws; though he had been saved and healed, my poor siskin never recovered; he pouted, he languished, he stopped singing. . . . The end of the story was that one night a rat found its way into his open cage and bit his beak off, as a result of which he finally made up his mind to die. I don’t know what cat had held my wife between its paws, but anyway she too pouted and languished like my poor siskin. Sometimes she plainly wanted to shake it off, to leap for joy in the fresh air, in the sunshine, in complete freedom; she would try to—and then roll herself up into a ball again. And yet she loved me; how many times did she assure me that she had nothing more to wish for—and then, devil take it, her eyes would go all dull. I wondered if there wasn’t some story in her past life. I made inquiries; I could find nothing. Well, now, you can form your own opinion: an original man would have shrugged his shoulders, perhaps heaved a couple of sighs, and then set about leading his own life; but I, like the unoriginal creature I am, began casting an eye up at the beams. My wife had so far succumbed to the habits of an old maid—Beethoven, walks at night, mignonette, correspondence with friends, albums—that she was quite unable to accustom herself to any new way of life, particularly to that of mistress of a house; and you must admit it was ridiculous for a married woman to languish under a nameless regret and sing, of an evening: ‘Awake her not at dawn.’
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