Translated by Constance Garnett
Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Anton Chekhov – A Tedious Story – Contents
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III
As usual she is lying on the Turkish divan or the couch and reading something. Seeing me she lifts her head languidly, sits down, and gives me her hand.
“You are always lying down like that,” I say after a reposeful silence. “It’s unhealthy. You’d far better be doing something.”
“Ah?”
“You’d far better be doing something, I say.”
“What?… A woman can be either a simple worker or an actress.”
“Well, then—if you can’t become a worker, be an actress.”
She is silent.
“You had better marry,” I say, half-joking.
“There’s no one to marry: and no use if I did.”
“You can’t go on living like this.”
“Without a husband? As if that mattered. There are as many men as you like, if you only had the will.”
“This isn’t right, Katy.”
“What isn’t right?”
“What you said just now.”
Katy sees that I am chagrined, and desires to soften the bad impression.
“Come. Let’s come here. Here.”
She leads me into a small room, very cosy, and points to the writing table.
“There. I made it for you. You’ll work here. Come every day and bring your work with you. They only disturb you there at home…. Will you work here? Would you like to?”
In order not to hurt her by refusing, I answer that I shall work with her and that I like the room immensely. Then we both sit down in the cosy room and begin to talk.
The warmth, the cosy surroundings, the presence of a sympathetic being, rouses in me now not a feeling of pleasure as it used but a strong desire to complain and grumble. Anyhow it seems to me that if I moan and complain I shall feel better.
“It’s a bad business, my dear,” I begin with a sigh. “Very bad.”
“What is the matter?”
“I’ll tell you what is the matter. The best and most sacred right of kings is the right to pardon. And I have always felt myself a king so long as I used this right prodigally. I never judged, I was compassionate, I pardoned everyone right and left. Where others protested and revolted I only advised and persuaded. All my life I’ve tried to make my society tolerable to the family of students, friends and servants. And this attitude of mine towards people, I know, educated every one who came into contact with me. But now I am king no more. There’s something going on in me which belongs only to slaves. Day and night evil thoughts roam about in my head, and feelings which I never knew before have made their home in my soul. I hate and despise; I’m exasperated, disturbed, and afraid. I’ve become strict beyond measure, exacting, unkind, and suspicious. Even the things which in the past gave me the chance of making an extra pun, now bring me a feeling of oppression. My logic has changed too. I used to despise money alone; now I cherish evil feelings, not to money, but to the rich, as if they were guilty. I used to hate violence and arbitrariness; now I hate the people who employ violence, as if they alone are to blame and not all of us, who cannot educate one another. What does it all mean? If my new thoughts and feelings come from a change of my convictions, where could the change have come from? Has the world grown worse and I better, or was I blind and indifferent before? But if the change is due to the general decline of my physical and mental powers—I am sick and losing weight every day—then I’m in a pitiable position. It means that my new thoughts are abnormal and unhealthy, that I must be ashamed of them and consider them valueless….”
“Sickness hasn’t anything to do with it,” Katy interrupts. “Your eyes are opened—that’s all. You’ve begun to notice things you didn’t want to notice before for some reason. My opinion is that you must break with your family finally first of all and then go away.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“You don’t love them any more. Then, why do you behave unfairly? And is it a family! Mere nobodies. If they died to-day, no one would notice their absence to-morrow.”
Katy despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. It’s scarcely possible nowadays to speak of the right of people to despise one another. But if you accept Katy’s point of view and own that such a right exists, you will notice that she has the same right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.
“Mere nobodies!” she repeats. “Did you have any dinner to-day? It’s a wonder they didn’t forget to tell you dinner was ready. I don’t know how they still remember that you exist.”
“Katy!” I say sternly. “Please be quiet.”
“You don’t think it’s fun for me to talk about them, do you? I wish I didn’t know them at all. You listen to me, dear. Leave everything and go away: go abroad—the quicker, the better.”
“What nonsense! What about the University?”
“And the University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it all. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your pupils? Have you many famous scholars? Count them up. But to increase the number of doctors who exploit the general ignorance and make hundreds of thousands,—there’s no need to be a good and gifted man. You aren’t wanted.”
“My God, how bitter you are!” I get terrified. “How bitter you are. Be quiet, or I’ll go away. I can’t reply to the bitter things you say.”
The maid enters and calls us to tea. Thank God, our conversation changes round the samovar. I have made my moan, and now I want to indulge another senile weakness—reminiscences. I tell Katy about my past, to my great surprise with details that I never suspected I had kept safe in my memory. And she listens to me with emotion, with pride, holding her breath. I like particularly to tell how I once was a student at a seminary and how I dreamed of entering the University.
“I used to walk in the seminary garden,” I tell her, “and the wind would bring the sound of a song and the thrumming of an accordion from a distant tavern, or a troika with bells would pass quickly by the seminary fence. That would be quite enough to fill not only my breast with a sense of happiness, but my stomach, legs, and hands. As I heard the sound of the accordion or the bells fading away, I would see myself a doctor and paint pictures, one more glorious than another. And, you see, my dreams came true. There were more things I dared to dream of. I have been a favourite professor thirty years, I have had excellent friends and an honourable reputation. I loved and married when I was passionately in love. I had children. Altogether, when I look back the whole of my life seems like a nice, clever composition. The only thing I have to do now is not to spoil the finale. For this, I must die like a man. If death is really a danger then I must meet it as becomes a teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian State. But I am spoiling the finale. I am drowning, and I run to you and beg for help, and you say: ‘Drown. It’s your duty.'”
At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall. Katy and I both recognise it and say:
“That must be Mikhail Fiodorovich.”
And indeed in a minute Mikhail Fiodorovich, my colleague, the philologist, enters. He is a tall, well-built man about fifty years old, clean shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a good man and an admirable friend. He belongs to an old aristocratic family, a prosperous and gifted house which has played a notable rôle in the history of our literature and education. He himself is clever, gifted, and highly educated, but not without his eccentricities. To a certain extent we are all eccentric, queer fellows, but his eccentricities have an element of the exceptional, not quite safe for his friends. Among the latter I know not a few who cannot see his many merits clearly because of his eccentricities.
As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety bass:
“How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It’s hellishly cold.”
Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare’s grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously. His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his tender, easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and provocativeness don’t tire one’s ears, and one very soon gets used to it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the table.
“O Lord,” he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows, “there are some funny people in the world.”
“Who?” asks Katy.
“I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot N—— on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse jowl of his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife, and his students, who won’t come to his lectures. ‘Well,’ I think to myself, ‘he’s seen me. It’s all up—no hope for And so on in the same strain. Or he begins like this,
“Yesterday I was at Z’s public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do wonder how our alma mater dares to show the public such an ass, such a double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he’s a European fool. Good Lord, you won’t find one like him in all Europe—not even if you looked in daytime, and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were sucking a stick of barley-sugar—su—su—su. He gets a fright because he can’t make out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just keep moving, hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all you can’t make out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it’s so terrific. It can only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at the Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with it!”
Immediately an abrupt change of subject.
“I had to make the speech; three years ago. Nicolai Stiepanovich will remember. It was hot, close. My full uniform was tight under my arms, tight as death. I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘thank God I’ve only ten pages left.’ And I had four pages of peroration that I needn’t read at all. ‘Only six pages then,’ I thought. Imagine it. I just gave a glance in front of me and saw sitting next to each other in the front row a general with a broad ribbon and a bishop. The poor devils were bored stiff. They were staring about madly to stop themselves from going to sleep. For all that they are still trying to look attentive, to make some appearance of understanding what I’m reading, and look as though they like it. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘if you like it, then you shall have it. I’ll spite you.’ So I set to and read the four pages, every word.”
When he speaks only his eyes and eyebrows smile as it is generally with the ironical. At such moments there is no hatred or malice in his eyes but a great deal of acuteness and that peculiar fox-cunning which you can catch only in very observant people. Further, about his eyes I have noticed one more peculiarity. When he takes his glass from Katy, or listens to her remarks, or follows her with a glance as she goes out of the room for a little while, then I catch in his look something humble, prayerful, pure….
The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a big piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne, a thoroughly bad wine which Katy got to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail Fiodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelves and sets them out for patience. If one may believe his assurances, some games of patience demand a great power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless while he sets out the cards he amuses himself by talking continually. Katy follows his cards carefully, helping him more by mimicry than words. In the whole evening she drinks no more than two small glasses of wine, I drink only a quarter of a glass, the remainder of the bottle falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink any amount without ever getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty order, and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
“Science, thank God, has had her day,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich very slowly. “She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel the desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the soil of prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence of prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics and philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have no sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they lost by that?”
“Flies haven’t any scientific knowledge either,” I say; “but what does that prove?”
“It’s no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between ourselves. I’m more cautious than you think. I shan’t proclaim it from the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It’s not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!”
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
“Our public is degenerate nowadays,” Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. “I don’t speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to work and think decently. ‘Sadly I look at the men of our time’—it’s quite true in this connection.”
“Yes, they’re frightfully degenerate,” Katy agrees. “Tell me, had you one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?”
“I don’t know how it is with the other professors,—but somehow I don’t recollect that it ever happened to me.”
“In my lifetime I’ve seen a great many of your students and young scholars, a great many actors…. What happened? I never once had the luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily interesting person. Everything’s dull and incapable, swollen and pretentious….”
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the glorious past. Any indictment, even if it’s made in a company of ladies, should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise it isn’t an indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don’t see any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don’t find it any worse now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in this case has its value, says that students nowadays are neither better nor worse than their predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present pupils, I wouldn’t say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain precision. I know their defects and there’s no need for me to take refuge in a mist of commonplaces. I don’t like the way they smoke, and drink spirits, and marry late; or the way they are careless and indifferent to the point of allowing students to go hungry in their midst, and not paying their debts into “The Students’ Aid Society.” They are ignorant of modern languages and express themselves incorrectly in Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist, complained to me that he had to lecture twice as often because of their incompetent knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of meteorology. They are readily influenced by the most modern writers, and some of those not the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to classics like Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and their worldly unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability to distinguish between great and small. They solve all difficult questions which have a more or less social character (emigration, for instance) by getting up subscriptions, but not by the method of scientific investigation and experiment, though this is at their full disposal, and, above all, corresponds to their vocation. They readily become house-doctors, assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or consulting doctors, and they are prepared to keep these positions until they are forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are quite as necessary in science, as, for instance, in art or commerce. I have pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or successors. Therefore I love them and am concerned for them, but I’m not proud of them … and so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it’s only in a cowardly and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and distraction. All of them are by nature accidental and transitory, and are completely dependent on the conditions of life. Ten years will be enough for them to disappear or give place to new and different defects, which are quite indispensable, but will in their turn give the timid a fright. Students’ shortcomings often annoy me, but the annoyance is nothing in comparison with the joy I have had these thirty years in speaking with my pupils, lecturing to them, studying their relations and comparing them with people of a different class.
Mikhail Fiodorovich is a slanderer. Katy listens and neither of them notices how deep is the pit into which they are drawn by such an outwardly innocuous recreation as condemning one’s neighbours. They don’t realise how a simple conversation gradually turns into mockery and derision, or how they both begin even to employ the manners of calumny.
“There are some queer types to be found,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich. “Yesterday I went to see our friend Yegor Pietrovich. There I found a student, one of your medicos, a third-year man, I think. His face … rather in the style of Dobroliubov—the stamp of profound thought on his brow. We began to talk. ‘My dear fellow—an extraordinary business. I’ve just read that some German or other—can’t remember his name—has extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain—idiotine.’ Do you know he really believed it, and produced an expression of respect on his face, as much as to say, ‘See, what a power we are.'”
“The other day I went to the theatre. I sat down. Just in front of me in the next row two people were sitting: one, ‘one of the chosen,’ evidently a law student, the other a whiskery medico. The medico was as drunk as a cobbler. Not an atom of attention to the stage. Dozing and nodding. But the moment some actor began to deliver a loud monologue, or just raised his voice, my medico thrills, digs his neighbour in the ribs. ‘What’s he say? Something noble?’ ‘Noble,’ answers ‘the chosen.’
“‘Brrravo!’ bawls the medico. ‘No—ble. Bravo.’ You see the drunken blockhead didn’t come to the theatre for art, but for something noble. He wants nobility.”
Katy listens and laughs. Her laugh is rather strange. She breathes out in swift, rhythmic, and regular alternation with her inward breathing. It’s as though she were playing an accordion. Of her face, only her nostrils laugh. My heart fails me. I don’t know what to say. I lose my temper, crimson, jump up from my seat and cry:
“Be quiet, won’t you? Why do you sit here like two toads, poisoning the air with your breath? I’ve had enough.”
In vain I wait for them to stop their slanders. I prepare to go home. And it’s time, too. Past ten o’clock.
“I’ll sit here a little longer,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich, “if you give me leave, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“You have my leave,” Katy answers.
“Bene. In that case, order another bottle, please.”
Together they escort me to the hall with candles in their hands. While I’m putting on my overcoat, Mikhail Fiodorovich says:
“You’ve grown terribly thin and old lately. Nicolai Stiepanovich. What’s the matter with you? Ill?
“Yes, a little.”
“And he will not look after himself,” Katy puts in sternly.
“Why don’t you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I go abroad, I’ll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I’m off next week.”
I came away from Katy’s irritated, frightened by the talk about my illness and discontented with myself. “And why,” I ask myself, “shouldn’t I be attended by one of my colleagues?” Instantly I see how my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent me from reading the truth in his face: “At the moment I don’t see anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to break off your work….” And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn’t have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining in it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death will take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep as the sky, as bright, as striking … but no! I think of myself, of my wife, Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts are not good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment my attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous Arakheev wrote in one of his intimate letters: “All good in the world is inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good.” Which means that everything is ugly, there’s nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I surprise myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are accidental and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think immediately:
“If that’s true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads.” And I swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go to her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed and soon fall asleep.
And then—insomnia.
Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Anton Chekhov – A Tedious Story – Contents
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