Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

by Leo Tolstoy

  But another voice came mildly from the opposite corner of the hall: ‘I do not wish to bow my knees before him,’ said the voice, which Albert immediately recognized as Delésov’s. ‘Wherein is he great? Why should we bow before him? Did he behave honourably and justly? Has he been of any use to society? Don’t we know how he borrowed money and did not return it, and how he carried away his fellow-artist’s violin and pawned it? …’ (‘O God, how does he know all that?’ thought Albert, hanging his head still lower.) ‘Do we not know how he flattered the most insignificant people, flattered them for the sake of money?’ Delésov continued – ‘Don’t we know how he was expelled from the theatre? And how Anna Ivánovna wanted to send him to the police?’ (‘O God! That is all true, but defend me, Thou who alone knowest why I did it!’ muttered Albert.)

  ‘Cease, for shame!’ Petróv’s voice began again. ‘What right have you to accuse him? Have you lived his life? Have you experienced his rapture?’ (‘True, true!’ whispered Albert.) ‘Art is the highest manifestation of power in man. It is given to a few of the elect, and raises the chosen one to such a height as turns the head and makes it difficult for him to remain sane. In Art, as in every struggle, there are heroes who have devoted themselves entirely to its service and have perished without having reached the goal.’ Petróv stopped, and Albert raised his head and cried out: ‘True, true!’ but his voice died away without a sound.

  ‘It does not concern you,’ said the artist Petróv, turning to him severely. ‘Yes, humiliate and despise him,’ he continued, ‘but yet he is the best and happiest of you all.’

  Albert, who had listened to these words with rapture in his soul, could not restrain himself, and went up to his friend wishing to kiss him.

  ‘Go away! I do not know you!’ Petróv said. ‘Go your way, or you won’t get there.’

  ‘Just see how the drink’s got hold of you! You won’t get there,’ shouted a policeman at the crossroad.

  Albert stopped, collected his strength and, trying not to stagger, turned into the side street.

  Only a few more steps were left to Anna Ivánovna’s door. From the hall of her house the light fell on the snow in the courtyard, and sledges and carriages stood at the gate.

  Holding onto the banister with his numbed hands, he ran up the steps and rang. The sleepy face of a maid appeared in the opening of the doorway, and she looked angrily at Albert. ‘You can’t!’ she cried. ‘The orders are not to let you in,’ and she slammed the door to. The sound of music and of women’s voices reached the steps. Albert sat down, leaned his head against the wall, and closed his eyes. Immediately a throng of disconnected but kindred visions beset him with renewed force, engulfed him in their waves, and bore him away into the free and beautiful realm of dreams. ‘Yes, he was the best and happiest!’ ran involuntarily through his imagination. The sounds of a polka came through the door. These sounds also told him that he was the best and happiest. The bells in the nearest church rang out for early service, and these bells also said: ‘Yes, he is the best and happiest!’ … ‘I will go back to the hall,’ thought Albert. ‘Petróv must tell me much more.’ But there was no one in the hall now, and instead of the artist Petróv, Albert himself stood on the platform and played on the violin all that the voice had said before. But the violin was of strange construction; it was made of glass and it had to be held in both hands and slowly pressed to the breast to make it produce sounds. The sounds were the most delicate and delightful Albert had ever heard. The closer he pressed the violin to his breast the more joyful and tender he felt. The louder the sounds grew the faster the shadows dispersed and the brighter the walls of the hall were lit up by transparent light. But it was necessary to play the violin very warily so as not to break it. He played the glass instrument very carefully and well. He played such things as he felt no one would ever hear again. He was beginning to grow tired when another distant, muffled sound distracted his attention. It was the sound of a bell, but it spoke words: ‘Yes,’ said the bell, droning somewhere high up and far away, ‘he seems to you pitiful, you despise him, yet he is the best and happiest of men! No one will ever again play that instrument.’

  These familiar words suddenly seemed so wise, so new, and so true, to Albert that he stopped playing and, trying not to move, raised his arms and eyes to heaven. He felt that he was beautiful and happy. Although there was no one else in the hall he expanded his chest and stood on the platform with head proudly erect so that all might see him. Suddenly someone’s hand lightly touched his shoulder; he turned and saw a woman in the faint light. She looked at him sadly and shook her head deprecatingly. He immediately realized that what he was doing was bad, and felt ashamed of himself. ‘Whither?’ he asked her. She again gave him a long fixed look and sadly inclined her head. It was she – none other than she whom he loved, and her garments were the same; on her full white neck a string of pearls, and her superb arms bare to above the elbow. She took his hand and led him out of the hall. ‘The exit is on the other side,’ said Albert, but without replying she smiled and led him out. At the threshold of the hall Albert saw the moon and some water. But the water was not below as it usually is, nor was the moon a white circle in one place up above as it usually is. Moon and water were together and everywhere – above, below, at the sides, and all around them both. Albert threw himself with her into the moon and the water, and realized that he could now embrace her, whom he loved more than anything in the world. He embraced her and felt unutterable happiness. ‘Is this not a dream?’ he asked himself. But no! It was more than reality: it was reality and recollection combined. Then he felt that the unutterable bliss he had at that moment enjoyed had passed and would never return. ‘What am I weeping for?’ he asked her. She looked at him silently and sadly. Albert understood what she meant by that. ‘But how can it be, since I am alive?’ he muttered. Without replying or moving she looked straight before her. ‘This is terrible! How can I explain to her that I am alive?’ he thought with horror. ‘O Lord! I am alive, do understand me!’ he whispered.

  ‘He is the best and happiest!’ a voice was saying. But something was pressing more and more heavily on Albert. Whether it was the moon and the water, her embraces, or his tears, he did not know, but he felt he would not be able to say all that was necessary, and that soon all would be over.

  Two visitors, leaving Anna Ivánovna’s house, stumbled over Albert, who lay stretched out on the threshold. One of them went back and called the hostess.

  ‘Why, this is inhuman!’ he said. ‘You might let a man freeze like that!’

  ‘Ah, that Albert! I’m sick to death of him!’ replied the hostess. ‘Ánnushka, lay him down somewhere in a room,’ she said to the maid.

  ‘But I am alive – why bury me?’ muttered Albert, as they carried him insensible into the room.

  1 In addition to its proper meaning, the word ‘artist’ was used in Russian to denote a thief, or a man dexterous at anything, good or bad.

  2 Opera by Bellini, produced in 1831.

  3 Lucia di Lammermoor, an opera by Donizetti, produced in 1835.

  4 Robert the Devil, an opera by Meyerbeer, produced in 1831, or possibly the allusion may be to Roberto Devereux by Donizetti.

  5 Pauline Viardot-Garcia. A celebrated operatic singer with whom Turgenev had a close friendship for many years.

  6 Rubini. An Italian tenor who had great success in Russia in the 1840s.

  7 Angidina Bosio, an Italian singer, who was in Petersburg in 1856–9.

  8 Luigi Lablache. He was regarded as the chief basso of his time.

  9 ‘And even if the clouds do hide it The sun remains for ever clear.’

  10 ‘I, too, have lived and enjoyed.’

  11 To be free to go from place to place it was necessary to have a properly stamped passport from the police.

  FAMILY HAPPINESS

  A NOVEL

  Translated by J. D. Duff

  PART I

  Chapter I

  WE were in mourning for
my mother, who had died in the autumn, and I spent all that winter alone in the country with Kátya and Sónya.

  Kátya was an old friend of the family, our governess who had brought us all up, and I had known and loved her since my earliest recollections. Sónya was my younger sister. It was a dark and sad winter which we spent in our old house of Pokróvskoe. The weather was cold and so windy that the snowdrifts came higher than the windows; the panes were almost always dimmed by frost, and we seldom walked or drove anywhere throughout the winter. Our visitors were few, and those who came brought no addition of cheerfulness or happiness to the household. They all wore sad faces and spoke low, as if they were afraid of waking someone; they never laughed, but sighed and often shed tears as they looked at me and especially at little Sónya in her black frock. The feeling of death clung to the house; the air was still filled with the grief and horror of death. My mother’s room was kept locked; and whenever I passed it on my way to bed, I felt a strange uncomfortable impulse to look into that cold empty room.

  I was then seventeen; and in the very year of her death my mother was intending to move to Petersburg, in order to take me into society. The loss of my mother was a great grief to me; but I must confess to another feeling behind that grief – a feeling that though I was young and pretty (so everybody told me), I was wasting a second winter in the solitude of the country. Before the winter ended, this sense of dejection, solitude, and simple boredom increased to such an extent that I refused to leave my room or open the piano or take up a book. When Kátya urged me to find some occupation, I said that I did not feel able for it; but in my heart I said, ‘What is the good of it? What is the good of doing anything, when the best part of my life is being wasted like this?’ And to this question, tears were my only answer.

  I was told that I was growing thin and losing my looks; but even this failed to interest me. What did it matter? For whom? I felt that my whole life was bound to go on in the same solitude and helpless dreariness, from which I had myself no strength and even no wish to escape. Towards the end of winter Kátya became anxious about me and determined to make an effort to take me abroad. But money was needed for this, and we hardly knew how our affairs stood after my mother’s death. Our guardian, who was to come and clear up our position, was expected every day.

  In March he arrived.

  ‘Well, thank God!’ Kátya said to me one day, when I was walking up and down the room like a shadow, without occupation, without a thought, and without a wish. ‘Sergéy Mikháylych has arrived; he has sent to inquire about us and means to come here for dinner. You must rouse yourself, dear Máshechka,’ she added, ‘or what will he think of you? He was so fond of you all.’

  Sergéy Mikháylych was our near neighbour, and, though a much younger man, had been a friend of my father’s. His coming was likely to change our plans and to make it possible to leave the country; and also I had grown up in the habit of love and regard for him; and when Kátya begged me to rouse myself, she guessed rightly that it would give me especial pain to show to disadvantage before him, more than before any other of our friends. Like everyone in the house, from Kátya and his god-daughter Sónya down to the helper in the stables, I loved him from old habit; and also he had a special significance for me, owing to a remark which my mother had once made in my presence. ‘I should like you to marry a man like him,’ she said. At the time this seemed to me strange and even unpleasant. My ideal husband was quite different: he was to be thin, pale, and sad; and Sergéy Mikháylych was middle-aged, tall, robust, and always, as it seemed to me, in good spirits. But still my mother’s words stuck in my head; and even six years before this time, when I was eleven, and he still said ‘thou’ to me, and played with me, and called me by the pet-name of ‘violet’ – even then I sometimes asked myself in a fright, ‘What shall I do, if he suddenly wants to marry me?’

  Before our dinner, to which Kátya made an addition of sweets and a dish of spinach, Sergéy Mikháylych arrived. From the window I watched him drive up to the house in a small sleigh; but as soon as it turned the corner, I hastened to the drawing-room, meaning to pretend that his visit was a complete surprise. But when I heard his tramp and loud voice and Kátya’s footsteps in the hall, I lost patience and went to meet him myself. He was holding Kátya’s hand, talking loud, and smiling. When he saw me, he stopped and looked at me for a time without bowing. I was uncomfortable and felt myself blushing.

  ‘Can this be really you?’ he said in his plain decisive way, walking towards me with his arms apart. ‘Is so great a change possible? How grown-up you are! I used to call you “violet”, but now you are a rose in full bloom!’

  He took my hand in his own large hand and pressed it so hard that it almost hurt. Expecting him to kiss my hand, I bent towards him, but he only pressed it again and looked straight into my eyes with the old firmness and cheerfulness in his face.

  It was six years since I had seen him last. He was much changed – older and darker in complexion; and he now wore whiskers which did not become him at all; but much remained the same – his simple manner, the large features of his honest open face, his bright intelligent eyes, his friendly, almost boyish, smile.

  Five minutes later he had ceased to be a visitor and had become the friend of us all, even of the servants, whose visible eagerness to wait on him proved their pleasure at his arrival.

  He behaved quite unlike the neighbours who had visited us after my mother’s death. They had thought it necessary to be silent when they sat with us, and to shed tears. He, on the contrary, was cheerful and talkative, and said not a word about my mother, so that this indifference seemed strange to me at first and even improper on the part of so close a friend. But I understood later that what seemed indifference was sincerity, and I felt grateful for it. In the evening Kátya poured out tea, sitting in her old place in the drawing-room, where she used to sit in my mother’s lifetime; Sónya and I sat near him; our old butler Grigóri had hunted out one of my father’s pipes and brought it to him; and he began to walk up and down the room as he used to do in past days.

  ‘How many terrible changes there are in this house, when one thinks of it all!’ he said, stopping in his walk.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kátya with a sigh; and then she put the lid on the samovar and looked at him, quite ready to burst out crying.

  ‘I suppose you remember your father?’ he said, turning to me.

  ‘Not clearly,’ I answered.

  ‘How happy you would have been together now!’ he added in a low voice, looking thoughtfully at my face above the eyes. ‘I was very fond of him,’ he added in a still lower tone, and it seemed to me that his eyes were shining more than usual.

  ‘And now God has taken her too!’ said Kátya; and at once she laid her napkin on the teapot, took out her handkerchief, and began to cry.

  ‘Yes, the changes in this house are terrible,’ he repeated, turning away. ‘Sónya, show me your toys,’ he added after a little and went off to the parlour. When he had gone, I looked at Kátya with eyes full of tears.

  ‘What a splendid friend he is!’ she said. And, though he was no relation, I did really feel a kind of warmth and comfort in the sympathy of this good man.

  I could hear him moving about in the parlour with Sónya, and the sound of her high childish voice. I sent tea to him there; and I heard him sit down at the piano and strike the keys with Sónya’s little hands.

  Then his voice came – ‘Márya Alexándrovna, come here and play something.’

  I liked his easy behaviour to me and his friendly tone of command; I got up and went to him.

  ‘Play this,’ he said, opening a book of Beethoven’s music at the adagio of the Moonlight Sonata. ‘Let me hear how you play,’ he added, and went off to a corner of the room, carrying his cup with him.

  I somehow felt that with him it was impossible to refuse or to say beforehand that I played badly: I sat down obediently at the piano and began to play as well as I could; yet I was afraid of criticism, be
cause I knew that he understood and enjoyed music. The adagio suited the remembrance of past days evoked by our conversation at tea, and I believe that I played it fairly well. But he would not let me play the scherzo. ‘No,’ he said, coming up to me; ‘you don’t play that right; don’t go on; but the first movement was not bad; you seem to be musical.’ This moderate praise pleased me so much that I even reddened. I felt it pleasant and strange that a friend of my father’s, and his contemporary, should no longer treat me like a child but speak to me seriously. Kátya now went upstairs to put Sónya to bed, and we were left alone in the parlour.

  He talked to me about my father, and about the beginning of their friendship and the happy days they had spent together, while I was still busy with lesson-books and toys; and his talk put my father before me in quite a new light, as a man of simple and delightful character. He asked me too about my tastes, what I read and what I intended to do, and gave me advice. The man of mirth and jest who used to tease me and make me toys had disappeared; here was a serious, simple, and affectionate friend, for whom I could not help feeling respect and sympathy. It was easy and pleasant to talk to him; and yet I felt an involuntary strain also. I was anxious about each word I spoke: I wished so much to earn for my own sake the love which had been given me already merely because I was my father’s daughter.

  After putting Sónya to bed, Kátya joined us and began to complain to him of my apathy, about which I had said nothing.

  ‘So she never told me the most important thing of all!’ he said, smiling and shaking his head reproachfully at me.

  ‘Why tell you?’ I said. ‘It is very tiresome to talk about, and it will pass off.’ (I really felt now, not only that my dejection would pass off, but that it had already passed off, or rather had never existed.)

  ‘It is a bad thing,’ he said, ‘not to be able to stand solitude. Can it be that you are a young lady?’