A common story

by Ivan Goncharov

  "No, I won't/'

  " Half an hour, Alexandr, do you understand ; no longer. If you refuse, I must think that you never had the least scrap of affection for me."

  She made the request with such feeling, so persuasively, that Alexandr had not the heart to refuse, and with bent head he went in after her. Piotr Ivanitch was alone in his study.

  "Have I deserved nothing but neglect from you, Alexandr?" asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna, making him sit down by the fire.

  " You are mistaken; it is not neglect," he answered.

  " What does that mean ? how am I to understand it ? how many times have I written to you and invited you to come to me; you never came; at last you even gave up answering my letters."

  " It was not neglect"

  "What then!"

  u Oh !" said Alexandr sighing. " Good-bye, ma tante?

  " Stop ! what have I done to you ? what's the matter with you, Alexandr ? Why are you like this ? why are you indifferent to everything, why do you go nowhere, and live in company not fit for you ? "

  " I don't know, I like this way of living; to live so suits me."

  " Suits you ? Do you find food for your mind and your heart in such a life, in such people ? "

  Alexandr nodded.

  " You are pretending, Alexandr; you are very unhappy about something, and you won't speak of it. In old days you found some one to confide your troubles to; you knew you could always find consolation or at least sympathy; have you no one now ? "

  " No one!"

  " You trust in no one ? "

  "No one."

  p

  " Do you never think of your poor mother—her love for you—her fondness? Has it never struck you that here perhaps is one who loves you, if not as she does, at least as a sister or, still more, as a friend?"

  "Good-bye, ma tante " he said.

  " Good-bye, Alexandr, I will not detain you any more," replied his aunt. There were tears in her eyes.

  Alexandr was just taking his hat, then he laid it down and looked at Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  " No, I cannot run away from you; I have not the strength to do it," he said ; " what are you doing to me ? "

  " Be the old Alexandr again, if only for one minute. Tell me, confide in me all."

  u Yes, I cannot keep it from you; I will tell you all that is in my heart," he said. " You ask why I hide myself away from the world, why I am indifferent to everything, why I don't visit even you ? . . . . what is the reason ? You must understand that for a long time past life has been hateful to me, and I have chosen for myself the kind of existence in which it is least perceptibly so. I want nothing, I seek nothing except peace, the slumber of the soul. I have thoroughly seen through all the emptiness and all the nothingness of life, and I despise it profoundly. The activity and bustle, the anxieties and sensations, I am sick of it all. I don't want to seek and try for anything: I have no aims, because what you go after, you attain—and then you see it was all a dream. All pleasures are less for me; I have grown indifferent to them. In the polite world, in society, I feel more intensely the evils of life, but alone at home, away from the herd, I vegetate; whatever chance befalls me in that slumber I observe neither mankind nor myself. I do nothing, and see nothing of my own or other's actions and am at ease, and all is indifferent to me—happiness I cannot have, but I am not a prey to unhappiness."

  " It's awful, Alexandr," said his aunt; " such indifference to everything at your age." ^ ~~~ -

  He made a gesture of despair.

  " But there are tears in your eyes; you are still just the same; don't disguise it, don't check your feelings, give them vent."

  "What for? I shall be none the better for it. I shall only suffer more acutely. This evening has lowered me in my own eyes. I saw clearly that I have no right to blame

  any one for my misery. I have myself been the ruin of my life. I dreamed of glory, goodness knows why, and neglected _ my work; I made a failure of my humble occupation, and 1 now I cannot make up for the past; it's too late ! I avoided J the herd, I despised it; but that German, for all his grand deep soul and poetic nature, does not renounce the world or avoid the herd; he is proud of its applause. He understands that he is a scarcely perceptible link in the endless chain of humanity; he too knows all I do ; suffering is not strange to him. You heard how he put the whole of life into his music, its bliss and its pains, the delight and the torture of the soul. He understands it. How petty, how worthless in my own eyes I suddenly become to-day, I with my misery, my sufferings! . . . . He awakened in me the bitter consciousness that I am proud and feeble. Ah! why did you invite me ? Good-bye; let me go."

  " Then am I to blame, Alexandr ? Could I awaken any bitter consciousness—I ? "

  " Yes, that's what's so terrible! Your pure angel-face, ma tante, your gentle words and kind hand .... all agitates -and touches me. I long to weep, I long to live again, I yearn;—and what's the use ? "

  "Why ask what's the use? Stay with us always, and if you consider me only partly worthy of your affection, perhaps you will find consolation in some other; I am not the only one .... you will be appreciated. You will marry .... will love . . . ." she said feebly.

  " I marry! what an idea ? Can you imagine I would entrust my happiness to a woman, even if I felt any love for her, which also is impossible ? Or do you imagine I could undertake to make a woman happy ? No, I know we should be deceiving one another and both be deceiving ourselves. My uncle, Piotr Ivanitch, and experience have taught me."

  " Piotr Ivanitch 1 ah, he has much to answer for!" said Lizaveta Alexandrovna with a sigh; " but you would have done well not to listen to him .... and you would have been happy in marriage."

  " Yes, in the country, I daresay; but now .... No, ma tante, marriage is not for me. I cannot disguise it from myself now, when I cease to care for any one, and be happy; and I could not even Jielp seeing when my wife was disguising her feelings; * we should both have to play a

  part, just as, for instance, you and my uncle play your parts."

  " We ? " said Lizaveta Alexandrovna in bewilderment and dismay.

  "Yes, you! Tell me, are you as happy as you once dreamed of being?"

  "Not as I dreamed of being, but happy in a different way from my dreams, more rationally, possibly even more so —isn't it all the same ? " replied Lizaveta Alexandrovna in confusion : " and you too "

  " More rationally ! Ah, ma (ante, you would never have said that: one see's my uncle's hand ! I know that's happiness according to his system : more rational, I daresay, but happier ? Why, everything is happiness with him, he has no unhappiness. Confound him ! No! my life is a failure ; I am worn out, weary of life."

  Both were silent. Alexandr glanced towards his hat, his aunt was trying to find some way to detain him longer.

  " But your talent! " she said, suddenly reviving.

  " Oh, ma tantey you want to make fun of us ! You have forgotten the proverb,' Let sleeping dogs lie.' I have no talent, absolutely none. I have feeling, I had a fertile brain; I took my dreams for genius and wrote. Not long ago I came upon one of the old scribbles I used to perpetrate, and I reaci it though it was ridiculous even to me. My uncle was right in making me burn all there was. Ah, if I could but recall the past, I would make a very different use of it!"

  "Don't be so utterly pessimistic !" she said; "every one of us has to bear some heavy cross."

  "Who has got a cross?" asked Piotr Ivanitch, entering the room, "How do you do? May I congratulate you, t Alexandr! is it you ? "

  i Piotr Ivanitch was bent and moved his legs with ^ ' difficulty.

  " Yes, but not the kind of cross you imagine," said Lizaveta Alexandrovna; " I am speaking of the crosses Alexandr has to put up with."

  " What has he to put up with now ? " asked Piotr Ivanitch, lowering himself with the greatest precaution into an armchair. " Ugh ! what pain! what a visitation it is!"

  Lizaveta Alexandrovna helped him to sit down, laid a cushion behind his back, and put a foot-stool und
er his feet.

  " What's wrong with you, uncle ? " asked Alexandr.

  " You see it's a heavy cross I have to bear ! Ugh; my back! A cross, yes, it is a cross; I have brought it on myself though ! Ah, my God 1"

  " You will sit so much ; you know the climate here," said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. "The doctor told you to take more exercise, but no; in the morning he is writing, in the evening playing cards."

  " What, am I to go gaping about the streets wasting my time ? "

  " That's why you are punished."

  "There's no escaping this trouble here if you want to attend to your work. Who is there who doesn't suffer with his back ? It's almost a distinct mark of a business man ; ah, one can't straighten one's spine ! Well, what are you doing, Alexandr."

  " Just the same as ever."

  "Ah, well, then your back won't ache. It's really astonishing!"

  " What are you astonished at; are not you yourself

  partly to blame for his having become " said Lizaveta

  Alexandrovna.

  " I ? well, I like that! I taught him to do nothing ! "

  " Certainly, uncle, there is nothing for you to be astonished at," said Alexandr. "You were partly to blame because you understood my nature from the first, and in spite of that you tried to build it up afresh ; as a man of experience you ought to have seen that it was impossible—you started a conflict in me between two opposing views of life and could not reconcile them ; what has come of it ? Everything in me has been reduced to a state of doubt, a kind of chaos!"

  " Ugh ! my back ! " groaned Piotr Ivanitch. " Chaos !— why, I tried to create something out of chaos !"

  "Yes, and what did you create? You showed me life in all its most hideous nakedness, and at an age when I ought only to have understood its bright side. And by way of guiding my heart in its attachments you taught me not to feel, but to examine, to analyse, to be on my guard with men. I analysed them—and ceased to love hem !" " How could I know ? You see you're such a headlong

  fellow; I thought that that would teach you to make more allowance for them. I know them, but I don't hate them."

  "What, then, do you love your fellow-men?" asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  " I get on with them."

  " Get on with them! w she repeated monotonously.

  " And he would get on with them," said Piotr Ivanitch, " but he had been already too much spoilt in the country by his aunt and yellow flowers; that's why he found it so difficult to grow out of it."

  " Then I believed in myself," Alexandr began again ; " you showed me I was worse than others, and I fell to hating myself./Finally, with one blow, without warning or compassion, you tore away my fairest dream ; I thought I had a spark of poetic genius; you taught me the bitter lesson that I was not fit to devote myself to literature; you tore that fancy out of my heart at the cost of anguish and offered me instead a task which was repulsive to me. Had it not been for you, I should have been writing. ,,

  " Yes, and have become known to the public as a writer without talent,* put in Piotr Ivanitch.

  "What have I to do with the public? I should have taken trouble on my own account, I should have ascribed any failures to spite, envy, ill-will, and by degrees I should have grown used to the idea that it was useless to write, and should have taken to something else of myself. How can you be surprised that, when I had found out everything, I lost heart?"

  " Well, what do you say?" asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  "I don't want to say anything; what answer is one to make to such absurdity ? Am I to blame that when you came here you imagined that everything here was yellow flowers, and love and friendship, that people did nothing but write poetry some of them while the others listened to it, or sometimes just for a change took to prose ? .... I tried to make you see that man in general, everywhere, but especially here, has to work, and to work hard too, even to the point of getting backache. Any other man in your place would be blessing his stars. You have not felt want nor sickness nor any real sorrow. What, haven't you loved, will you say? Haven't you had enough of it?

  twice you have been in love. In time you will marry; a career is before you; only apply yourself; and with it a fortune. Do everything like every one else, and destiny J will not pass you over; you will have your share. It's I ridiculous to regard oneself as some one grand and excep-/ tional when one has not been created so! Come, what ' have you to complain of? "

  "I don't blame you, uncle, quite the contrary. I can appreciate your intentions, and thank you from my heart for them. What can one do since they failed ? Don't blame me either. We did not understand each other, that's where our trouble arose! What suits and is pleasant to you, and to some others perhaps, is disagreeable to me."

  " Pleasant to me and some others, perhaps." .... it's not at all as you say, my dear fellow ! do you suppose that I'm the only person who thinks and acts as I taught you to think and act ? Look round you; consider the mass of men, the herd as you call it, not as they live in the country— it takes a long while for anything to reach them—but the mass of civilised, thinking, acting men of to-day; what do they want, what are they striving after, what is their view ? and you will see it's precisely as I taught you. The demands I made of you did not originate with me."

  " With whom then ? " asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  u With the age."

  " And must one absolutely fall in with every idea of one's age ? " she demanded. " Are they all so right, all so true ? "

  " All are right!" replied Piotr Ivanitch.

  " What! is it true that one must go more by reason than by feeling? That one must not yield to the heart, but must restrain all demonstrations of emotion, and not give way to spontaneous impulses, not believe in them ? "

  "Yes," said Piotr Ivanitch.

  " That one must always act on a system, trust very little in people, reckon everything as uncertain, and live only for oneself?"

  " Yes."

  " And is it right that love is not the chief thing in life, that one must care more for one's work than for one's dearest ones, that one must not count on any one's devotion, but must believe that love will end in coldness, estrangement,

  or habit ? that friendship is all a matter of habit ? Is all that true?"

  " It was always true," said Piotr Ivanitch, " only in former days men would not believe it, but now it has become commonplace truism."

  " And is it right that one should consider, and calculate and deliberate over everything and not let oneself forget, and dream and be lured on by a sham, even though one might be happy so ? "

  " It's right because it's rational," said Piotr Ivanitch.

  " And is it true that one ought to be guided by prudence even with those nearest your heart—with your wife, for example ? "

  "I never have had such a pain in my back—ah?" said Piotr Ivanitch, shrinking in his chair.

  " Oh, your back! It's a glorious age indeed !"

  " Yes, a very glorious age, my dear; nothing is done like that by caprice; in everything there is prudence, reason, experience, gradual progress, and consequently success; everything is struggling towards improvement and progress."

  " There may be truth in your words, uncle," said Alexandr, "but it's no comfort to me. I comprehend everything after your theory. I look at things with your eyes; I am a disciple of your school; but meantime life is a weariness to me—grievous, insupportable. Why is that ? "

  "Oh, because you are not suited to the new order of things. For all the mistakes you charged me with just now," said Piotr Ivanitch, after an instant's thought, " I have one great justification; do you remember when you first arrived here, after five minutes' talk with you, I advised you to go back ? You would not listen to me. Why do you attack me now, then ? I told you beforehand that you were not fitted for the existing order of things, and you trusted to my guidance, asked for my advice, and talked in grand style of contemporary triumphs of science, of the struggles of humanity, of the practical bent of the age—well, there y
ou are ! It wasn't possible for me to be looking after you like a nurse from morning till night; why should 1 ? I couldn't be your sponsor, or even put a handkerchief over your mouth at night to keep the flies off. I told you the fact because you ask for it; and what has come of it is nothing to do with me. You are not a baby, nor a fool, you can

  reason for yourself. Then, instead of doing your work, you're first groaning over some girl's fickleness, then weeping over a separation from a friend, first wretched over the emptiness of your heart, then over its fulness; what sort of life is that ? Why, it's misery ! Look at the young men of to-day; they are young men worth having; they all seem boiling over with intelligent activity and energy. How skilfully and easily they steer their way through all the nonsense, which—in your old jargon—is called ' passionate emotion,' ' spiritual agonies,' and devil knows what!"

  " How easily you talk!" said Lizaveta Alexandrovna; " have you no pity for Alexandr ? "

  " No. If he had a pain in his back, I should pity him ; that not an idea, nor a dream, nor romantic, but a real sorrow .... Ugh !"

  " Tell me, at least, uncle, what I had better do now ? How with your good sense do you solve that problem ? "

  " What_y_ou should do ? why, go back.Jo the country." I / "To the country!" repeatecTXizaveta Alexandrovna; "are / you mad, Piotr ivanitch ? What can he do there ? " { "To the country ! " repeated Alexandr, and both looked

  at Piotr Ivanitch.

  "Yes, to the country; there you would be with your " mother and be a comfort to her. You are seeking a peaceful life now; there is everything to agitate you here; and what place could be more peaceful than there by the lake, with your aunt. Upon my word, I would go ! And who knows ? perhaps you may .... Ugh ! "

  He clutched at his spine.

  In a fortnight Alexandr had sent in his resignation and had come to fake leave of his uncle and aunt. Alexandr and his aunt were mournful and silent. Tears were shining in Lizaveta Alexandrovna's eyes. Piotr Ivanitch was the only one who talked.

  " Neither career nor fortune ! " he said, shaking his head ; " was it worth while coming ? you are a disgrace to the name of Adouev !"