VIII
FINALLY, IN ORDER to go on definitively to the nineteenth, I’ll meanwhile say briefly and, so to speak, in passing, that I found them all, that is, Versilov, my mother, and my sister (whom I was seeing for the first time in my life), in difficult circumstances, almost destitute or verging on destitution. I had already learned of that in Moscow, but I had never supposed what I saw. Ever since childhood I had been used to picturing this man, this “future father of mine,” almost in some sort of halo, and couldn’t imagine him otherwise than in the forefront everywhere. Versilov had never lived in the same apartment with my mother, but had always rented a separate one for her; he did it, of course, out of those mean “proprieties” of theirs. But here they were all living together in the same wooden wing, in a lane of the Semyonovsky quarter.4 All their things had been pawned, so that I even gave my mother, in secret from Versilov, my secret sixty roubles. Precisely secret, because I had saved them from my pocket money, the five roubles a month allotted me, over the course of two years; the saving began from the first day of my idea, and therefore Versilov was not to know even a word of this money. I trembled over it.
This help was a mere drop. My mother worked, my sister also took in sewing; Versilov lived idly, was capricious, and went on living with a great many of his former, rather expensive habits. He grumbled terribly, especially at dinner, and all his manners were completely despotic. But my mother, my sister, Tatyana Pavlovna, and the whole family of the late Andronikov (a certain department head, deceased three months earlier, who at the time had managed Versilov’s affairs), which consisted of countless women, stood in awe of him as of an idol. I could never have pictured such a thing. I’ll note that nine years earlier he had been incomparably more elegant. I’ve already said that he remained with some sort of halo in my dreams, and therefore I could not imagine how it was possible to become so aged and shabby only some nine years later: I at once felt sadness, pity, shame. The sight of him was one of the most painful of my first impressions on arrival. However, he was by no means an old man yet, he was only forty-five; and as I studied him further, I found something even more striking in his good looks than what had survived in my memory. There was less brilliance than then, less of the external, even of the elegant, but it was as if life had imprinted on his face something much more interesting than was there before.
And yet destitution was only the tenth or twentieth part of his misfortunes, and I knew it only too well. Besides destitution, there was something immeasurably more serious—not to mention that there was still hope of winning the litigation over an inheritance that Versilov had started a year before against the Princes Sokolsky, and Versilov might receive in the nearest future an estate worth seventy thousand and maybe a bit more. I’ve already said above that this Versilov had run through three inheritances in his life, and here he was going to be rescued again by an inheritance! The case was to be decided in court in the shortest time. That was why I came. True, no one gave out money on hope, there was nowhere to borrow, and meanwhile they bore with it.
But Versilov did not go to anyone, though he sometimes left for the whole day. Over a year ago, he had already been driven out of society. That story, despite all my efforts, remained unclear to me in its main points, despite my whole month of life in Petersburg. Was Versilov guilty or not—that was what mattered to me, that was what I had come for! Everybody turned away from him, including, by the way, all the influential nobility, with whom he had been especially able to maintain relations all his life, owing to rumors of a certain extremely low and—what’s worst of all in the eyes of the “world”—scandalous act he was supposed to have committed over a year before in Germany, and even of a slap in the face he had received then, much too publicly, precisely from one of the Sokolsky princes, and to which he had not responded with a challenge. Even his children (the legitimate ones), his son and daughter, turned away from him and lived separately. True, both the son and the daughter floated in the highest circle, through the Fanariotovs and old Prince Sokolsky (Versilov’s former friend). However, looking at him more closely during that whole month, what I saw was an arrogant man, whom society had not excluded from its circle, but rather who had himself driven society away from him—so independent an air he had. But did he have the right to that air—that’s what troubled me! I absolutely had to find out the whole truth in the very shortest time, for I had come to judge this man. My own power I still concealed from him, but I had either to acknowledge him, or to spurn him altogether. And the latter would be all too painful for me, and I suffered. I’ll finally make a full confession: this man was dear to me!
And meanwhile I lived in the same apartment with them, worked, and barely refrained from being rude. In fact, I did not refrain. Having lived with them for a month, I became more convinced every day that I simply couldn’t turn to him for final explanations. The proud man stood right in front of me as a riddle that insulted me deeply. He was even nice and jocular with me, but I sooner wanted a quarrel than such jokes. All my conversations with him always bore some sort of ambiguity in them, that is, quite simply some strange mockery on his part. At the very beginning, he did not meet me seriously when I came from Moscow. I could in no way understand why he did that. True, he achieved the result that he remained impenetrable to me; but I could not have lowered myself to beg for serious treatment from him. And besides, he had astonishing and irresistible ways about him, which I didn’t know how to deal with. In short, he treated me like the greenest adolescent—something I was almost unable to bear, though I knew it would be like that. Consequently, I myself stopped speaking seriously and waited; I even almost stopped speaking entirely. I was waiting for a certain person, on whose arrival in Petersburg I could definitively learn the truth; in that lay my last hope. In any case, I was prepared to break with him definitively and had already taken all the measures. I pitied my mother, but . . . “either him or me”—that was what I wanted to suggest to her and my sister. Even the day had been fixed; but meanwhile I went to work.
Chapter Two
I
ON THAT NINETEENTH day of the month, I was also to receive my first pay for the first month of my Petersburg service at my “private” post. They never even asked me about this post, but simply sent me there, it seems, on the very first day of my arrival. That was very crude, and I was almost obliged to protest. The post turned out to be in the house of old Prince Sokolsky. But to protest right then would have meant breaking with them at once, which, though it didn’t frighten me at all, would have harmed my essential aims, and therefore I accepted the post silently for the time being, my silence protecting my dignity. I’ll explain from the outset that this Prince Sokolsky, a rich man and a privy councillor,5 was in no way related to those Princes Sokolsky from Moscow (impoverished wretches for several generations in a row) with whom Versilov had his lawsuit. They were merely namesakes. Nevertheless, the old prince took great interest in them and especially liked one of these princes, the head of the family, so to speak—a young officer. Still recently, Versilov had had enormous influence on this old man’s affairs and had been his friend, a strange friend, because the poor prince, as I noticed, was terribly afraid of him, not only at the time when I entered, but, it seems, throughout their friendship. However, they hadn’t seen each other for a long time; the dishonorable act Versilov was accused of concerned precisely the prince’s family; but Tatyana Pavlovna turned up, and it was through her mediation that I was placed with the old man, who wanted to have “a young man” in his office. It so happened that he also wanted terribly much to do Versilov a good turn, to make, so to speak, a first step, and Versilov allowed it. The old prince made the arrangements in the absence of his daughter, a general’s widow, who probably would not have allowed him this step. Of that later, but I’ll note that it was this strangeness of his relations with Versilov that struck me in his favor. It stood to reason that if the head of the insulted family still went on respecting Versilov, it meant that the rumor spre
ad about Versilov’s baseness was absurd or at least ambiguous. It was partly this circumstance that forced me not to protest at taking the post: in taking it, I precisely hoped to verify all that.
This Tatyana Pavlovna played a strange role at the time when I found her in Petersburg. I had almost forgotten about her entirely and had never expected that she had such significance. Previously, she had come my way three or four times in my Moscow life, appearing from God knows where, on somebody’s instructions, each time I had to be settled somewhere—on entering Touchard’s little boarding school,6 or two and a half years later, when I was transferred to high school and lodged in the quarters of the unforgettable Nikolai Semyonovich. Having appeared, she’d spend the whole day with me, inspecting my linen, my clothes, drive with me to Kuznetsky and downtown, buy me everything I needed, in short, set up my whole trousseau to the last little box and penknife; and she would hiss at me all the while, scold me, reprimand me, quiz me, hold up to me the example of some other fantastic boys, her acquaintances and relations, who supposedly were all better than I was, and, really, she even pinched me and positively shoved me, even several times, and painfully. Once she had settled me and installed me in place, she would vanish without a trace for several years. So it was she who, just as I arrived, appeared and got me installed again. She was a small, dry little figure, with a sharp, birdlike little nose and sharp, birdlike little eyes. She served Versilov like a slave, and bowed down to him as to a pope, but out of conviction. But I soon noticed with astonishment that she was decidedly respected by everyone and everywhere, and, above all—decidedly everywhere and everyone knew her. Old Prince Sokolsky treated her with extraordinary deference; so did his family; so did those proud Versilov children; so did the Fanariotovs—and yet she lived by doing sewing, washing some sort of lace, taking work from a shop. She and I quarreled from the first word, because she decided to hiss at me at once, as she had done six years before; after that we kept quarreling every day; but that did not prevent us from talking occasionally, and, I confess, by the end of the month I began to like her—for the independence of her character, I suppose. However, I did not inform her of that.
I understood at once that I had been assigned a post with this ailing old man solely in order to “amuse” him, and that the whole job lay in that. Naturally, that humiliated me, and I was going to take measures at once; but soon afterwards the old eccentric produced a sort of unexpected impression in me, something like pity, and by the end of the month I grew somehow strangely attached to him, or at least I dropped my intention to be rude. He was, incidentally, no more than sixty. Here a whole story came out. A year and a half earlier he had suddenly had a fit; he had gone somewhere and had lost his mind on the way, so that something like a scandal had occurred, which was talked about in Petersburg. As is proper in such cases, he was immediately taken abroad, but about five months later he suddenly reappeared, and in perfect health, though he did leave government service. Versilov maintained seriously (and with notable warmth) that there was no insanity involved, but merely some sort of nervous fit. I immediately noticed this warmth of Versilov’s. However, I will note that I myself all but shared his opinion. The old man just seemed awfully light-minded at times, which didn’t go with his years, and they said he hadn’t been that way at all before. They said that before he had been some sort of adviser somewhere and had once somehow distinguished himself greatly in some mission he had been charged with. Having known him for a whole month, I would never have supposed any special ability in him for being an adviser. They noticed (though I did not) that after his fit a sort of special inclination developed in him to get married quickly, and that he supposedly set about this idea more than once in that year and a half. This was supposedly known in society, and was of interest to the right people. But since this impulse was far too discordant with the interests of certain persons around the prince, the old man was watched on all sides. His own family was small; he had been a widower for twenty years and had only one daughter, the general’s widow, who was now expected any day from Moscow, a young person whose character he unquestionably feared. But he had no end of various distant relations, mostly on his deceased wife’s side, who were all but destitute; besides, there was a multitude of various wards, male and female, who received his benefactions, and who all expected a share of his inheritance, and so they all assisted the general’s widow in supervising the old man. On top of that, ever since he was a young man, he had had a certain quirk—only I don’t know whether it was ridiculous or not—of marrying off impoverished girls. He had been marrying them off for twentyfive years on end—distant relations, or stepdaughters of his wife’s cousins, or his goddaughters; he even married off his doorkeeper’s daughter. He started by taking them into his house while they were still little girls, brought them up with governesses and French-women, then educated them in the best schools, and in the end gave them away with a dowry. All this constantly crowded around him. The wards, naturally, once they married, would produce more girls, all the girls thus produced also aimed at becoming wards, he had to go everywhere to baptisms, all this showed up with congratulations on his birthdays, and he found it all extremely agreeable.
On entering his service, I noticed at once that a certain painful conviction had nested in the old man’s mind—and it was quite impossible not to notice it—that everyone in society had supposedly begun to look at him strangely, that everyone had supposedly begun to treat him differently than before, when he had been in good health; this impression did not leave him even in the merriest social gatherings. The old man became insecure, began noticing something in everyone’s eyes. The thought that he was still suspected of insanity obviously tormented him; even me he sometimes studied with mistrust. And if he had learned that someone was spreading or maintaining this rumor about him, I believe this gentlest of men would have become his eternal enemy. It is this circumstance that I ask you to take note of. I will add that this also decided me from the first day not to be rude to him; I was even glad if I sometimes had the chance to cheer him up or divert him; I don’t think this confession can cast a shadow on my dignity.
The greater part of his money was invested. After his illness, he had joined a big shareholding company, a very solid one, by the way. And though the business was conducted by the others, he was also very interested in it, came to the shareholders’ meetings, was elected a founding member, sat on the board, delivered long speeches, refuted, made noise, all with obvious pleasure. He very much liked making speeches: at least everyone could see his intelligence. And in general he began to be terribly fond of inserting especially profound things and bons mots into his conversation, even in his most intimate private life; that I understand only too well. In his house, downstairs, something like a home office was set up, and a clerk took care of the business, the accounts, and the bookkeeping, and also managed the household. This clerk, who served, besides, in a government post, would have been quite enough by himself; but, at the wish of the prince, they added me as well, as if to assist the clerk; but I was transferred at once to the study and often had no work in front of me, no papers, no books, not even for pretense.
I’m writing now like a man who has long since sobered up, and in many respects almost like an outsider; but how shall I depict my sadness of that time (which I vividly recall right now), as it lodged itself in my heart, and, above all, my agitation of that time, which would reach such a troubled and fervid state that I even didn’t sleep at night—from my impatience, from the riddles that I set myself.
II
ASKING FOR MONEY is a vile affair, even when it’s your salary, if you feel somewhere in the folds of your conscience that you haven’t quite earned it. Meanwhile, the day before, my mother and sister were whispering together, in secret from Versilov (“so as not to upset Andrei Petrovich”), intending to go to a pawnshop with an icon from her icon stand, which for some reason was very dear to her. I was working for fifty roubles a month, but I had no idea how I would rece
ive it; when I was appointed here, nobody told me anything. Some three days earlier, meeting the clerk downstairs, I had asked him who was responsible for the salaries here. The man looked at me with the smile of one astonished (he didn’t like me):
“But do you get a salary?”
I thought that right after my reply he would add:
“And what for, sir?”
But he only answered drily that he “knew nothing” and buried himself in his ruled notebook, in which he was copying out accounts from some scraps of paper.
He was not unaware, however, that I did do something. Two weeks earlier I had sat for exactly four days over a job he himself had given me, making a copy from a rough draft, and it had almost come down to rewriting it. It was a whole crowd of the prince’s “thoughts,” which he had prepared to submit to the shareholders’ committee. I had to put it together into a whole and touch up the style. Afterwards I spent a whole day sitting over this paper with the prince, and he argued with me very vehemently, though he remained pleased; only I don’t know whether he submitted the paper or not. I won’t even mention the two or three letters, also on business, which I wrote at his request.
It was also vexing for me to ask for my salary, because I had already decided to give up my position, anticipating that I’d be forced to leave here as well, owing to ineluctable circumstances. Waking up that morning and getting dressed upstairs in my little closet, I felt my heart pound, and though I spat as I entered the prince’s house, I again felt the same agitation: that morning the person was to arrive here, the woman from whose arrival I expected an explanation of all that tormented me! This was precisely the prince’s daughter, General Akhmakov’s widow, the young woman of whom I have already spoken and who was at bitter enmity with Versilov. At last I’ve written that name! Of course, I had never seen her, and could not imagine how I would speak to her, or whether I would; but I imagined to myself (perhaps on sufficient grounds) that her arrival would disperse the darkness that surrounded Versilov in my eyes. I couldn’t remain firm: it was terribly vexing that from the very first step I was so pusillanimous and awkward; it was terribly curious, and above all disgusting—three full impressions. I remember that whole day by heart!
The Adolescent Page 5