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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Youth, by Leo Tolstoy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Youth
+
+Author: Leo Tolstoy
+
+Translator: C. J. Hogarth
+
+Posting Date: January 10, 2009 [EBook #2637]
+Release Date: May, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Adamson
+
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH
+
+By Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi
+
+
+Translated by C. J. Hogarth
+
+
+
+
+I. WHAT I CONSIDER TO HAVE BEEN THE BEGINNING OF MY YOUTH
+
+I have said that my friendship with Dimitri opened up for me a new view
+of my life and of its aim and relations. The essence of that view lay
+in the conviction that the destiny of man is to strive for moral
+improvement, and that such improvement is at once easy, possible, and
+lasting. Hitherto, however, I had found pleasure only in the new ideas
+which I discovered to arise from that conviction, and in the forming of
+brilliant plans for a moral, active future, while all the time my life
+had been continuing along its old petty, muddled, pleasure-seeking
+course, and the same virtuous thoughts which I and my adored friend
+Dimitri ("my own marvellous Mitia," as I used to call him to myself in
+a whisper) had been wont to exchange with one another still pleased my
+intellect, but left my sensibility untouched. Nevertheless there came
+a moment when those thoughts swept into my head with a sudden freshness
+and force of moral revelation which left me aghast at the amount of
+time which I had been wasting, and made me feel as though I must at
+once--that very second--apply those thoughts to life, with the firm
+intention of never again changing them.
+
+It is from that moment that I date the beginning of my youth.
+
+I was then nearly sixteen. Tutors still attended to give me lessons,
+St. Jerome still acted as general supervisor of my education, and,
+willy-nilly, I was being prepared for the University. In addition to my
+studies, my occupations included certain vague dreamings and ponderings,
+a number of gymnastic exercises to make myself the finest athlete in the
+world, a good deal of aimless, thoughtless wandering through the rooms
+of the house (but more especially along the maidservants' corridor), and
+much looking at myself in the mirror. From the latter, however, I always
+turned away with a vague feeling of depression, almost of repulsion. Not
+only did I feel sure that my exterior was ugly, but I could derive no
+comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I
+could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever,
+or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its
+features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small
+grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror,
+to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less,
+since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover,
+plenty of strength for my years, every feature in my face was of the
+meek, sleepy-looking, indefinite type. Even refinement was lacking
+in it, since, on the contrary, it precisely resembled that of a
+simple-looking moujik, while I also had the same big hands and feet as
+he. At the time, all this seemed to me very shameful.
+
+
+
+
+II. SPRINGTIME
+
+Easter of the year when I entered the University fell late in April, so
+that the examinations were fixed for St. Thomas's Week, [Easter week.]
+and I had to spend Good Friday in fasting and finally getting myself
+ready for the ordeal.
+
+Following upon wet snow (the kind of stuff which Karl Ivanitch used to
+describe as "a child following, its father"), the weather had for three
+days been bright and mild and still. Not a clot of snow was now to be
+seen in the streets, and the dirty slush had given place to wet, shining
+pavements and coursing rivulets. The last icicles on the roofs were fast
+melting in the sunshine, buds were swelling on the trees in the little
+garden, the path leading across the courtyard to the stables was soft
+instead of being a frozen ridge of mud, and mossy grass was showing
+green between the stones around the entrance-steps. It was just that
+particular time in spring when the season exercises the strongest
+influence upon the human soul--when clear sunlight illuminates
+everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under one's
+feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when the
+bright blue sky is streaked with long, transparent clouds.
+
+For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the
+birth of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive
+in a great town than in the country. One sees less, but one feels more.
+I was standing near the window--through the double frames of which the
+morning sun was throwing its mote-flecked beams upon the floor of what
+seemed to me my intolerably wearisome schoolroom--and working out a
+long algebraical equation on the blackboard. In one hand I was holding a
+ragged, long-suffering "Algebra" and in the other a small piece of chalk
+which had already besmeared my hands, my face, and the elbows of my
+jacket. Nicola, clad in an apron, and with his sleeves rolled up, was
+picking out the putty from the window-frames with a pair of nippers, and
+unfastening the screws. The window looked out upon the little garden. At
+length his occupation and the noise which he was making over it arrested
+my attention. At the moment I was in a very cross, dissatisfied frame of
+mind, for nothing seemed to be going right with me. I had made a mistake
+at the very beginning of my algebra, and so should have to work it out
+again; twice I had let the chalk drop. I was conscious that my hands and
+face were whitened all over; the sponge had rolled away into a corner;
+and the noise of Nicola's operations was fast getting on my nerves. I
+had a feeling as though I wanted to fly into a temper and grumble at
+some one, so I threw down chalk and "Algebra" alike, and began to
+pace the room. Then suddenly I remembered that to-day we were to go to
+confession, and that therefore I must refrain from doing anything
+wrong. Next, with equal suddenness I relapsed into an extraordinarily
+goodhumoured frame of mind, and walked across to Nicola.
+
+"Let me help you, Nicola," I said, trying to speak as pleasantly as I
+possibly could. The idea that I was performing a meritorious action in
+thus suppressing my ill-temper and offering to help him increased my
+good-humour all the more.
+
+By this time the putty had been chipped out, and the screws removed,
+yet, though Nicola pulled with might and main at the cross-piece, the
+window-frame refused to budge.
+
+"If it comes out as soon as he and I begin to pull at it together," I
+thought, "it will be rather a shame, as then I shall have nothing more
+of the kind to do to-day."
+
+Suddenly the frame yielded a little at one side, and came out.
+
+"Where shall I put it?" I said.
+
+"Let ME see to it, if you please," replied Nicola, evidently surprised
+as well as, seemingly, not over-pleased at my zeal. "We must not leave
+it here, but carry it away to the lumber-room, where I keep all the
+frames stored and numbered."
+
+"Oh, but I can manage it," I said as I lifted it up. I verily believe
+that if the lumber-room had been a couple of versts away, and the frame
+twice as heavy as it was, I should have been the more pleased. I felt
+as though I wanted to tire myself out in performing this service for
+Nicola. When I returned to the room the bricks and screws had been
+replaced on the windowsill, and Nicola was sweeping the debris, as well
+as a few torpid flies, out of the open window. The fresh, fragrant air
+was rushing into and filling all the room, while with it came also the
+dull murmur of the city and the twittering of sparrows in the garden.
+Everything was in brilliant light, the room looked cheerful, and a
+gentle spring breeze was stirring Nicola's hair and the leaves of my
+"Algebra." Approaching the window, I sat down upon the sill, turned my
+eyes downwards towards the garden, and fell into a brown study.
+
+Something new to me, something extraordinarily potent and unfamiliar,
+had suddenly invaded my soul. The wet ground on which, here and there,
+a few yellowish stalks and blades of bright-green grass were to be seen;
+the little rivulets glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of
+earth and tiny chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the
+lilac, with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window;
+the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush below; the
+blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had lately melted off
+it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous air and radiant sunlight--all
+spoke to me, clearly and unmistakably, of something new and beautiful,
+of something which, though I cannot repeat it here as it was then
+expressed to me, I will try to reproduce so far as I understood it.
+Everything spoke to me of beauty, happiness, and virtue--as three things
+which were both easy and possible for me--and said that no one of them
+could exist without the other two, since beauty, happiness, and virtue
+were one. "How did I never come to understand that before?" I cried to
+myself. "How did I ever manage to be so wicked? Oh, but how good, how
+happy, I could be--nay, I WILL be--in the future! At once, at once--yes,
+this very minute--I will become another being, and begin to live
+differently!" For all that, I continued sitting on the window-sill,
+continued merely dreaming, and doing nothing. Have you ever, on a
+summer's day, gone to bed in dull, rainy weather, and, waking just
+at sunset, opened your eyes and seen through the square space of the
+window--the space where the linen blind is blowing up and down, and
+beating its rod upon the window-sill--the rain-soaked, shadowy, purple
+vista of an avenue of lime-trees, with a damp garden path lit up by the
+clear, slanting beams of the sun, and then suddenly heard the joyous
+sounds of bird life in the garden, and seen insects flying to and fro at
+the open window, and glittering in the sunlight, and smelt the fragrance
+of the rain-washed air, and thought to yourself, "Am I not ashamed to be
+lying in bed on such an evening as this?" and, leaping joyously to your
+feet, gone out into the garden and revelled in all that welter of
+life? If you have, then you can imagine for yourself the overpowering
+sensation which was then possessing me.
+
+
+
+
+III. DREAMS
+
+"To-day I will make my confession and purge myself of every sin," I
+thought to myself. "Nor will I ever commit another one." At this point I
+recalled all the peccadilloes which most troubled my conscience. "I will
+go to church regularly every Sunday, as well as read the Gospel at the
+close of every hour throughout the day. What is more, I will set aside,
+out of the cheque which I shall receive each month after I have gone
+to the University, two-and-a-half roubles" (a tenth of my monthly
+allowance) "for people who are poor but not exactly beggars, yet without
+letting any one know anything about it. Yes, I will begin to look out
+for people like that--orphans or old women--at once, yet never tell a
+soul what I am doing for them.
+
+"Also, I will have a room here of my very own (St. Jerome's, probably),
+and look after it myself, and keep it perfectly clean. I will never let
+any one do anything for me, for every one is just a human being like
+myself. Likewise I will walk every day, not drive, to the University.
+Even if some one gives me a drozhki [Russian phaeton.] I will sell
+it, and devote the money to the poor. Everything I will do exactly and
+always" (what that "always" meant I could not possibly have said, but at
+least I had a vivid consciousness of its connoting some kind of
+prudent, moral, and irreproachable life). "I will get up all my lectures
+thoroughly, and go over all the subjects beforehand, so that at the
+end of my first course I may come out top and write a thesis. During my
+second course also I will get up everything beforehand, so that I may
+soon be transferred to the third course, and at eighteen come out top in
+the examinations, and receive two gold medals, and go on to be Master of
+Arts, and Doctor, and the first scholar in Europe. Yes, in all Europe I
+mean to be the first scholar.--Well, what next?" I asked myself at this
+point. Suddenly it struck me that dreams of this sort were a form of
+pride--a sin which I should have to confess to the priest that very
+evening, so I returned to the original thread of my meditations.
+"When getting up my lectures I will go to the Vorobievi Gori, [Sparrow
+Hills--a public park near Moscow.] and choose some spot under a tree,
+and read my lectures over there. Sometimes I will take with me something
+to eat--cheese or a pie from Pedotti's, or something of the kind. After
+that I will sleep a little, and then read some good book or other, or
+else draw pictures or play on some instrument (certainly I must learn to
+play the flute). Perhaps SHE too will be walking on the Vorobievi Gori,
+and will approach me one day and say, 'Who are you?' and I shall look at
+her, oh, so sadly, and say that I am the son of a priest, and that I am
+happy only when I am there alone, quite alone. Then she will give me her
+hand, and say something to me, and sit down beside me. So every day we
+shall go to the same spot, and be friends together, and I shall kiss
+her. But no! That would not be right! On the contrary, from this day
+forward I never mean to look at a woman again. Never, never again do I
+mean to walk with a girl, nor even to go near one if I can help it. Yet,
+of course, in three years' time, when I have come of age, I shall
+marry. Also, I mean to take as much exercise as ever I can, and to do
+gymnastics every day, so that, when I have turned twenty-five, I shall
+be stronger even than Rappo. On my first day's training I mean to hold
+out half a pood [The Pood = 40 Russian pounds.] at arm's length for
+five minutes, and the next day twenty-one pounds, and the third day
+twenty-two pounds, and so on, until at last I can hold out four poods
+in each hand, and be stronger even than a porter. Then, if ever any one
+should try to insult me or should begin to speak disrespectfully of HER,
+I shall take him so, by the front of his coat, and lift him up an arshin
+[The arshin = 2 feet 3 inches.] or two with one hand, and just hold him
+there, so that he may feel my strength and cease from his conduct. Yet
+that too would not be right. No, no, it would not matter; I should not
+hurt him, merely show him that I--"
+
+Let no one blame me because the dreams of my youth were as foolish as
+those of my childhood and boyhood. I am sure that, even if it be my fate
+to live to extreme old age and to continue my story with the years, I,
+an old man of seventy, shall be found dreaming dreams just as impossible
+and childish as those I am dreaming now. I shall be dreaming of some
+lovely Maria who loves me, the toothless old man, as she might love a
+Mazeppa; of some imbecile son who, through some extraordinary chance,
+has suddenly become a minister of state; of my suddenly receiving a
+windfall of a million of roubles. I am sure that there exists no human
+being, no human age, to whom or to which that gracious, consolatory
+power of dreaming is totally a stranger. Yet, save for the one general
+feature of magic and impossibility, the dreams of each human being, of
+each age of man, have their own distinguishing characteristics. At the
+period upon which I look as having marked the close of my boyhood and
+the beginning of my youth, four leading sentiments formed the basis
+of my dreams. The first of those sentiments was love for HER--for an
+imaginary woman whom I always pictured the same in my dreams, and whom I
+somehow expected to meet some day and somewhere. This she of mine had a
+little of Sonetchka in her, a little of Masha as Masha could look when
+she stood washing linen over the clothes-tub, and a little of a certain
+woman with pearls round her fair white neck whom I had once seen long,
+long ago at a theatre, in a box below our own. My second sentiment was a
+craving for love. I wanted every one to know me and to love me. I wanted
+to be able to utter my name--Nicola Irtenieff--and at once to see every
+one thunderstruck at it, and come crowding round me and thanking me for
+something or another, I hardly knew what. My third sentiment was
+the expectation of some extraordinary, glorious happiness that was
+impending--some happiness so strong and assured as to verge upon
+ecstasy. Indeed, so firmly persuaded was I that very, very soon some
+unexpected chance would suddenly make me the richest and most famous
+man in the world that I lived in constant, tremulous expectation of this
+magic good fortune befalling me. I was always thinking to myself
+that "IT is beginning," and that I should go on thereafter to attain
+everything that a man could wish for. Consequently, I was for
+ever hurrying from place to place, in the belief that "IT" must be
+"beginning" just where I happened not to be. Lastly, my fourth and
+principal sentiment of all was abhorrence of myself, mingled with
+regret--yet a regret so blended with the certain expectation of
+happiness to which I have referred that it had in it nothing of sorrow.
+It seemed to me that it would be so easy and natural for me to tear
+myself away from my past and to remake it--to forget all that had been,
+and to begin my life, with all its relations, anew--that the past never
+troubled me, never clung to me at all. I even found a certain pleasure
+in detesting the past, and in seeing it in a darker light than the true
+one. This note of regret and of a curious longing for perfection were
+the chief mental impressions which I gathered from that new stage of my
+growth--impressions which imparted new principles to my view of myself,
+of men, and of God's world. O good and consoling voice, which in later
+days, in sorrowful days when my soul yielded silently to the sway of
+life's falseness and depravity, so often raised a sudden, bold
+protest against all iniquity, as well as mercilessly exposed the
+past, commanded, nay, compelled, me to love only the pure vista of the
+present, and promised me all that was fair and happy in the future! O
+good and consoling voice! Surely the day will never come when you are
+silent?
+
+
+
+
+IV. OUR FAMILY CIRCLE
+
+PAPA was seldom at home that spring. Yet, whenever he was so, he seemed
+extraordinarily cheerful as he either strummed his favourite pieces on
+the piano or looked roguishly at us and made jokes about us all, not
+excluding even Mimi. For instance, he would say that the Tsarevitch
+himself had seen Mimi at the rink, and fallen so much in love with her
+that he had presented a petition to the Synod for divorce; or else
+that I had been granted an appointment as secretary to the Austrian
+ambassador--a piece of news which he imparted to us with a perfectly
+grave face. Next, he would frighten Katenka with some spiders (of which
+she was very much afraid), engage in an animated conversation with our
+friends Dubkoff and Nechludoff, and tell us and our guests, over and
+over again, his plans for the year. Although these plans changed almost
+from day to day, and were for ever contradicting one another, they
+seemed so attractive that we were always glad to listen to them, and
+Lubotshka, in particular, would glue her eyes to his face, so as not to
+lose a single word. One day his plan would be that he should leave my
+brother and myself at the University, and go and live with Lubotshka
+in Italy for two years. Next, the plan would be that he should buy an
+estate on the south coast of the Crimea, and take us for an annual visit
+there; next, that we should migrate en masse to St. Petersburg; and so
+forth. Yet, in addition to this unusual cheerfulness of his, another
+change had come over him of late--a change which greatly surprised
+me. This was that he had had some fashionable clothes made--an
+olive-coloured frockcoat, smart trousers with straps at the sides, and a
+long wadded greatcoat which fitted him to perfection. Often, too, there
+was a delightful smell of scent about him when he came home from a
+party--more especially when he had been to see a lady of whom Mimi never
+spoke but with a sigh and a face that seemed to say: "Poor orphans! How
+dreadful! It is a good thing that SHE is gone now!" and so on, and
+so on. From Nicola (for Papa never spoke to us of his gambling) I had
+learnt that he (Papa) had been very fortunate in play that winter, and
+so had won an extraordinary amount of money, all of which he had
+placed in the bank after vowing that he would play no more that spring.
+Evidently, it was his fear of being unable to resist again doing so that
+was rendering him anxious to leave for the country as soon as possible.
+Indeed, he ended by deciding not to wait until I had entered the
+University, but to take the girls to Petrovskoe immediately after
+Easter, and to leave Woloda and myself to follow them at a later season.
+
+All that winter, until the opening of spring, Woloda had been
+inseparable from Dubkoff, while at the same time the pair of them had
+cooled greatly towards Dimitri. Their chief amusements (so I gathered
+from conversations overheard) were continual drinking of champagne,
+sledge-driving past the windows of a lady with whom both of them
+appeared to be in love, and dancing with her--not at children's parties,
+either, but at real balls! It was this last fact which, despite our love
+for one another, placed a vast gulf between Woloda and myself. We felt
+that the distance between a boy still taking lessons under a tutor and
+a man who danced at real, grown-up balls was too great to allow of their
+exchanging mutual ideas. Katenka, too, seemed grown-up now, and read
+innumerable novels; so that the idea that she would some day be getting
+married no longer seemed to me a joke. Yet, though she and Woloda were
+thus grown-up, they never made friends with one another, but, on the
+contrary, seemed to cherish a mutual contempt. In general, when Katenka
+was at home alone, nothing but novels amused her, and they but slightly;
+but as soon as ever a visitor of the opposite sex called, she at once
+grew lively and amiable, and used her eyes for saying things which I
+could not then understand. It was only later, when she one day informed
+me in conversation that the only thing a girl was allowed to indulge
+in was coquetry--coquetry of the eyes, I mean--that I understood those
+strange contortions of her features which to every one else had seemed a
+matter for no surprise at all. Lubotshka also had begun to wear what
+was almost a long dress--a dress which almost concealed her goose-shaped
+feet; yet she still remained as ready a weeper as ever. She dreamed
+now of marrying, not a hussar, but a singer or an instrumentalist, and
+accordingly applied herself to her music with greater diligence than
+ever. St. Jerome, who knew that he was going to remain with us only
+until my examinations were over, and so had obtained for himself a new
+post in the family of some count or another, now looked with contempt
+upon the members of our household. He stayed indoors very little, took
+to smoking cigarettes (then all the rage), and was for ever whistling
+lively tunes on the edge of a card. Mimi daily grew more and more
+despondent, as though, now that we were beginning to grow up, she looked
+for nothing good from any one or anything.
+
+When, on the day of which I am speaking, I went in to luncheon I found
+only Mimi, Katenka, Lubotshka, and St. Jerome in the dining-room. Papa
+was away, and Woloda in his own room, doing some preparation work for
+his examinations in company with a party of his comrades: wherefore he
+had requested that lunch should be sent to him there. Of late, Mimi had
+usually taken the head of the table, and as none of us had any respect
+for her, luncheon had lost most of its refinement and charm. That is
+to say, the meal was no longer what it had been in Mamma's or our
+grandmother's time, namely, a kind of rite which brought all the family
+together at a given hour and divided the day into two halves. We allowed
+ourselves to come in as late as the second course, to drink wine in
+tumblers (St. Jerome himself set us the example), to roll about on our
+chairs, to depart without saying grace, and so on. In fact, luncheon had
+ceased to be a family ceremony. In the old days at Petrovskoe, every one
+had been used to wash and dress for the meal, and then to repair to the
+drawing-room as the appointed hour (two o'clock) drew near, and pass
+the time of waiting in lively conversation. Just as the clock in the
+servants' hall was beginning to whirr before striking the hour, Foka
+would enter with noiseless footsteps, and, throwing his napkin over his
+arm and assuming a dignified, rather severe expression, would say in
+loud, measured tones: "Luncheon is ready!" Thereupon, with pleased,
+cheerful faces, we would form a procession--the elders going first and
+the juniors following, and, with much rustling of starched petticoats
+and subdued creaking of boots and shoes--would proceed to the
+dining-room, where, still talking in undertones, the company would seat
+themselves in their accustomed places. Or, again, at Moscow, we would
+all of us be standing before the table ready-laid in the hall, talking
+quietly among ourselves as we waited for our grandmother, whom the
+butler, Gabriel, had gone to acquaint with the fact that luncheon was
+ready. Suddenly the door would open, there would come the faint swish
+of a dress and the sound of footsteps, and our grandmother--dressed in a
+mob-cap trimmed with a quaint old lilac bow, and wearing either a smile
+or a severe expression on her face according as the state of her health
+inclined her--would issue from her room. Gabriel would hasten to precede
+her to her arm-chair, the other chairs would make a scraping sound, and,
+with a feeling as though a cold shiver (the precursor of appetite)
+were running down one's back, one would seize upon one's damp, starched
+napkin, nibble a morsel or two of bread, and, rubbing one's hands softly
+under the table, gaze with eager, radiant impatience at the steaming
+plates of soup which the butler was beginning to dispense in order of
+ranks and ages or according to the favour of our grandmother.
+
+On the present occasion, however, I was conscious of neither excitement
+nor pleasure when I went in to luncheon. Even the mingled chatter of
+Mimi, the girls, and St. Jerome about the horrible boots of our Russian
+tutor, the pleated dresses worn by the young Princesses Kornakoff, and
+so forth (chatter which at any other time would have filled me with
+a sincerity of contempt which I should have been at no pains to
+conceal--at all events so far as Lubotshka and Katenka were concerned),
+failed to shake the benevolent frame of mind into which I had fallen. I
+was unusually good-humoured that day, and listened to everything with
+a smile and a studied air of kindness. Even when I asked for the kvas I
+did so politely, while I lost not a moment in agreeing with St. Jerome
+when he told me that it was undoubtedly more correct to say "Je peux"
+than "Je puis." Yet, I must confess to a certain disappointment at
+finding that no one paid any particular attention to my politeness and
+good-humour. After luncheon, Lubotshka showed me a paper on which
+she had written down a list of her sins: upon which I observed that,
+although the idea was excellent so far as it went, it would be still
+better for her to write down her sins on her SOUL--"a very different
+matter."
+
+"Why is it 'a very different matter'?" asked Lubotshka.
+
+"Never mind: that is all right; you do not understand me," and I went
+upstairs to my room, telling St. Jerome that I was going to work, but in
+reality purposing to occupy the hour and a half before confession time
+in writing down a list of my daily tasks and duties which should last me
+all my life, together with a statement of my life's aim, and the rules
+by which I meant unswervingly to be guided.
+
+
+
+
+V. MY RULES
+
+I TOOK some sheets of paper, and tried, first of all, to make a list of
+my tasks and duties for the coming year. The paper needed ruling, but,
+as I could not find the ruler, I had to use a Latin dictionary instead.
+The result was that, when I had drawn the pen along the edge of the
+dictionary and removed the latter, I found that, in place of a line, I
+had only made an oblong smudge on the paper, since the dictionary was
+not long enough to reach across it, and the pen had slipped round the
+soft, yielding corner of the book. Thereupon I took another piece of
+paper, and, by carefully manipulating the dictionary, contrived to
+rule what at least RESEMBLED lines. Dividing my duties into three
+sections--my duties to myself, my duties to my neighbour, and my duties
+to God--I started to indite a list of the first of those sections, but
+they seemed to me so numerous, and therefore requiring to be divided
+into so many species and subdivisions, that I thought I had better first
+of all write down the heading of "Rules of My Life" before proceeding to
+their detailed inscription. Accordingly, I proceeded to write "Rules of
+My Life" on the outside of the six sheets of paper which I had made into
+a sort of folio, but the words came out in such a crooked and uneven
+scrawl that for long I sat debating the question, "Shall I write
+them again?"--for long, sat in agonised contemplation of the ragged
+handwriting and disfigured title-page. Why was it that all the beauty
+and clarity which my soul then contained came out so misshapenly
+on paper (as in life itself) just when I was wishing to apply those
+qualities to what I was thinking at the moment?
+
+"The priest is here, so please come downstairs and hear his directions,"
+said Nicola as he entered.
+
+Hurriedly concealing my folio under the table-cloth, I looked at myself
+in the mirror, combed my hair upwards (I imagined this to give me a
+pensive air), and descended to the divannaia, [Room with divans, or
+ante-room] where the table stood covered with a cloth and had an ikon
+and candles placed upon it. Papa entered just as I did, but by another
+door: whereupon the priest--a grey-headed old monk with a severe,
+elderly face--blessed him, and Papa kissed his small, squat, wizened
+hand. I did the same.
+
+"Go and call Woldemar," said Papa. "Where is he? Wait a minute, though.
+Perhaps he is preparing for the Communion at the University?"
+
+"No, he is with the Prince," said Katenka, and glanced at Lubotshka.
+Suddenly the latter blushed for some reason or another, and then
+frowned. Finally, pretending that she was not well, she left the room,
+and I followed her. In the drawing-room she halted, and began to pencil
+something fresh on her paper of peccadilloes.
+
+"Well, what new sin have you gone and committed?" I asked.
+
+"Nothing," she replied with another blush. All at once we heard
+Dimitri's voice raised in the hall as he took his leave of Woloda.
+
+"It seems to me you are always experiencing some new temptation," said
+Katenka, who had entered the room behind us, and now stood looking at
+Lubotshka.
+
+What was the matter with my sister I could not conceive, but she was
+now so agitated that the tears were starting from her eyes. Finally her
+confusion grew uncontrollable, and vented itself in rage against both
+herself and Katenka, who appeared to be teasing her.
+
+"Any one can see that you are a FOREIGNER!" she cried (nothing offended
+Katenka so much as to be called by that term, which is why Lubotshka
+used it). "Just because I have the secret of which you know," she went
+on, with anger ringing through her tone, "you purposely go and upset me!
+Please do understand that it is no joking matter."
+
+"Do you know what she has gone and written on her paper, Nicolinka?"
+cried Katenka, much infuriated by the term "foreigner." "She has written
+down that--"
+
+"Oh, I never could have believed that you could be so cruel!" exclaimed
+Lubotshka, now bursting into open sobbing as she moved away from us.
+"You chose that moment on purpose! You spend your whole time in trying
+to make me sin! I'll never go to YOU again for sympathy and advice!"
+
+
+
+
+VI. CONFESSION
+
+With these and other disjointed impressions in my mind, I returned to
+the divannaia. As soon as every one had reassembled, the priest rose
+and prepared to read the prayer before confession. The instant that
+the silence was broken by the stern, expressive voice of the monk as
+he recited the prayer--and more especially when he addressed to us
+the words: "Reveal thou all thy sins without shame, concealment, or
+extenuation, and let thy soul be cleansed before God: for if thou
+concealest aught, then great will be thy sin"--the same sensation of
+reverent awe came over me as I had felt during the morning. I even took
+a certain pleasure in recognising this condition of mine, and strove to
+preserve it, not only by restraining all other thoughts from entering
+my brain, but also by consciously exerting myself to feel no other
+sensation than this same one of reverence.
+
+Papa was the first to go to confession. He remained a long, long time in
+the room which had belonged to our grandmother, and during that time
+the rest of us kept silence in the divannaia, or only whispered to one
+another on the subject of who should precede whom. At length, the voice
+of the priest again reading the prayer sounded from the doorway, and
+then Papa's footsteps. The door creaked as he came out, coughing and
+holding one shoulder higher than the other, in his usual way, and for
+the moment he did not look at any of us.
+
+"YOU go now, Luba," he said presently, as he gave her cheek a
+mischievous pinch. "Mind you tell him everything. You are my greatest
+sinner, you know."
+
+Lubotshka went red and pale by turns, took her memorandum paper out of
+her apron, replaced it, and finally moved away towards the doorway with
+her head sunk between her shoulders as though she expected to receive
+a blow upon it from above. She was not long gone, and when she returned
+her shoulders were shaking with sobs.
+
+At length--next after the excellent Katenka (who came out of the doorway
+with a smile on her face)--my turn arrived. I entered the dimly-lighted
+room with the same vague feeling of awe, the same conscious eagerness to
+arouse that feeling more and more in my soul, that had possessed me up
+to the present moment. The priest, standing in front of a reading-desk,
+slowly turned his face to me.
+
+I was not more than five minutes in the room, but came out from it happy
+and (so I persuaded myself) entirely cleansed--a new, a morally reborn
+individual. Despite the fact that the old surroundings of my life now
+struck me as unfamiliar (even though the rooms, the furniture, and my
+own figure--would to heavens that I could have changed my outer man for
+the better in the same way that I believed myself to have changed
+my inner I--were the same as before), I remained in that comfortable
+attitude of mine until the very moment of bedtime.
+
+Yet, no sooner had I begun to grow drowsy with the conning over of my
+sins than in a flash I recollected a particularly shameful sin which
+I had suppressed at confession time. Instantly the words of the prayer
+before confession came back to my memory and began sounding in my ears.
+My peace was gone for ever. "For if thou concealest aught, then great
+will be thy sin." Each time that the phrase recurred to me I saw myself
+a sinner for whom no punishment was adequate. Long did I toss from side
+to side as I considered my position, while expecting every moment to
+be visited with the divine wrath--to be struck with sudden death,
+perhaps!--an insupportable thought! Then suddenly the reassuring thought
+occurred to me: "Why should I not drive out to the monastery when the
+morning comes, and see the priest again, and make a second confession?"
+Thereafter I grew calmer.
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE EXPEDITION TO THE MONASTERY
+
+Several times that night I woke in terror at the thought that I might
+be oversleeping myself, and by six o'clock was out of bed, although the
+dawn was hardly peeping in at the window. I put on my clothes and boots
+(all of which were lying tumbled and unbrushed beside the bed, since
+Nicola, of course had not been in yet to tidy them up), and, without a
+prayer said or my face washed, emerged, for the first time in my life,
+into the street ALONE.
+
+Over the way, behind the green roof of a large building, the dim, cold
+dawn was beginning to blush red. The keen frost of the spring morning
+which had stiffened the pools and mud and made them crackle under my
+feet now nipped my face and hands also. Not a cab was to be seen, though
+I had counted upon one to make the journey out and home the quicker.
+Only a file of waggons was rumbling along the Arbat Prospect, and a
+couple of bricklayers talking noisily together as they strode along the
+pavement. However, after walking a verst or so I began to meet men and
+women taking baskets to market or going with empty barrels to fetch the
+day's water supply; until at length, at the cross streets near the Arbat
+Gate, where a pieman had set up his stall and a baker was just opening
+his shop, I espied an old cabman shaking himself after indulging in a
+nap on the box of his be-scratched old blue-painted, hobble-de-hoy wreck
+of a drozhki. He seemed barely awake as he asked twenty copecks as the
+fare to the monastery and back, but came to himself a moment afterwards,
+just as I was about to get in, and, touching up his horse with the spare
+end of the reins, started to drive off and leave me. "My horse wants
+feeding," he growled, "I can't take you, barin.[Sir]"
+
+With some difficulty and a promise of FORTY copecks I persuaded him to
+stop. He eyed me narrowly as he pulled up, but nevertheless said: "Very
+well. Get in, barin." I must confess that I had some qualms lest he
+should drive me to a quiet corner somewhere, and then rob me, but I
+caught hold of the collar of his ragged driving-coat, close to where his
+wrinkled neck showed sadly lean above his hunched-up back, and climbed
+on to the blue-painted, curved, rickety scat. As we set off along
+Vozdvizhenka Street, I noticed that the back of the drozhki was covered
+with a strip of the same greenish material as that of which his coat was
+made. For some reason or another this reassured me, and I no longer felt
+nervous of being taken to a quiet spot and robbed.
+
+The sun had risen to a good height, and was gilding the cupolas of the
+churches, when we arrived at the monastery. In the shade the frost had
+not yet given, but in the open roadway muddy rivulets of water were
+coursing along, and it was through fast-thawing mire that the horse went
+clip-clopping his way. Alighting, and entering the monastery grounds, I
+inquired of the first monk whom I met where I could find the priest whom
+I was seeking.
+
+"His cell is over there," replied the monk as he stopped a moment and
+pointed towards a little building up to which a flight of steps led.
+
+"I respectfully thank you," I said, and then fell to wondering what all
+the monks (who at that moment began to come filing out of the church)
+must be thinking of me as they glanced in my direction. I was neither a
+grown-up nor a child, while my face was unwashed, my hair unbrushed,
+my clothes tumbled, and my boots unblacked and muddy. To what class
+of persons were the brethren assigning me--for they stared at me hard
+enough? Nevertheless I proceeded in the direction which the young priest
+had pointed out to me.
+
+An old man with bushy grey eyebrows and a black cassock met me on the
+narrow path to the cells, and asked me what I wanted. For a brief moment
+I felt inclined to say "Nothing," and then run back to the drozhki and
+drive away home; but, for all its beetling brows, the face of the old
+man inspired confidence, and I merely said that I wished to see the
+priest (whom I named).
+
+"Very well, young sir; I will take you to him," said the old man as he
+turned round. Clearly he had guessed my errand at a stroke. "The father
+is at matins at this moment, but he will soon be back," and, opening
+a door, the old man led me through a neat hall and corridor, all lined
+with clean matting, to a cell.
+
+"Please to wait here," he added, and then, with a kind, reassuring
+glance, departed.
+
+The little room in which I found myself was of the smallest possible
+dimensions, but extremely neat and clean. Its furniture only consisted
+of a small table (covered with a cloth, and placed between two equally
+small casement-windows, in which stood two pots of geraniums), a stand
+of ikons, with a lamp suspended in front of them, a bench, and two
+chairs. In one corner hung a wall clock, with little flowers painted on
+its dial, and brass weights to its chains, while upon two nails driven
+into a screen (which, fastened to the ceiling with whitewashed pegs,
+probably concealed the bed) hung a couple of cassocks. The windows
+looked out upon a whitewashed wall, about two arshins distant, and in
+the space between them there grew a small lilac-bush.
+
+Not a sound penetrated from without, and in the stillness the measured,
+friendly stroke of the clock's pendulum seemed to beat quite loudly.
+The instant that I found myself alone in this calm retreat all other
+thoughts and recollections left my head as completely as though they had
+never been there, and I subsided into an inexpressibly pleasing kind of
+torpor. The rusty alpaca cassocks with their frayed linings, the
+worn black leather bindings of the books with their metal clasps, the
+dull-green plants with their carefully watered leaves and soil, and,
+above all, the abrupt, regular beat of the pendulum, all spoke to me
+intimately of some new life hitherto unknown to me--a life of unity and
+prayer, of calm, restful happiness.
+
+"The months, the years, may pass," I thought to myself, "but he remains
+alone--always at peace, always knowing that his conscience is pure
+before God, that his prayer will be heard by Him." For fully half
+an hour I sat on that chair, trying not to move, not even to breathe
+loudly, for fear I should mar the harmony of the sounds which were
+telling me so much, and ever the pendulum continued to beat the
+same--now a little louder to the right, now a little softer to the left.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE SECOND CONFESSION
+
+Suddenly the sound of the priest's footsteps roused me from this
+reverie.
+
+"Good morning to you," he said as he smoothed his grey hair with his
+hand. "What can I do for you?"
+
+I besought him to give me his blessing, and then kissed his small,
+wizened hand with great fervour. After I had explained to him my errand
+he said nothing, but moved away towards the ikons, and began to read the
+exhortation: whereupon I overcame my shame, and told him all that was in
+my heart. Finally he laid his hands upon my head, and pronounced in
+his even, resonant voice the words: "My son, may the blessing of
+Our Heavenly Father be upon thee, and may He always preserve thee in
+faithfulness, loving-kindness, and meekness. Amen."
+
+I was entirely happy. Tears of joy coursed down my face as I kissed the
+hem of his cassock and then raised my head again. The face of the
+priest expressed perfect tranquillity. So keenly did I feel the joy of
+reconciliation that, fearing in any way to dispel it, I took hasty leave
+of him, and, without looking to one side of me or the other (in order
+that my attention might not be distracted), left the grounds and
+re-entered the rickety, battered drozhki. Yet the joltings of the
+vehicle and the variety of objects which flitted past my eyes soon
+dissipated that feeling, and I became filled with nothing but the idea
+that the priest must have thought me the finest-spirited young man he
+had ever met, or ever would meet, in the whole of his life. Indeed, I
+reflected, there could not be many such as myself--of that I felt sure,
+and the conviction produced in me the kind of complacency which craves
+for self-communication to another. I had a great desire to unbosom
+myself to some one, and as there was no one else to speak to, I
+addressed myself to the cabman.
+
+"Was I very long gone?" I asked him.
+
+"No, not very long," he replied. He seemed to have grown more cheerful
+under the influence of the sunshine. "Yet now it is a good while past my
+horse's feeding-time. You see, I am a night cabman."
+
+"Well, I only seemed to myself to be about a minute," I went on. "Do you
+know what I went there for?" I added, changing my seat to the well of
+the drozhki, so as to be nearer the driver.
+
+"What business is it of mine? I drive a fare where he tells me to go,"
+he replied.
+
+"Yes, but, all the same, what do you think I went there for?" I
+persisted.
+
+"I expect some one you know is going to be buried there, so you went to
+see about a plot for the grave."
+
+"No, no, my friend. Still, DO you know what I went there for?"
+
+"No, of course I cannot tell, barin," he repeated.
+
+His voice seemed to me so kind that I decided to edify him by relating
+the cause of my expedition, and even telling him of the feeling which I
+had experienced.
+
+"Shall I tell you?" I said. "Well, you see,"--and I told him all, as
+well as inflicted upon him a description of my fine sentiments. To this
+day I blush at the recollection.
+
+"Well, well!" said the cabman non-committally, and for a long while
+afterwards he remained silent and motionless, except that at intervals
+he adjusted the skirt of his coat each time that it was jerked from
+beneath his leg by the joltings of his huge boot on the drozhki's step.
+I felt sure that he must be thinking of me even as the priest had done.
+That is to say, that he must be thinking that no such fine-spirited
+young man existed in the world as I. Suddenly he shot at me:
+
+"I tell you what, barin. You ought to keep God's affairs to yourself."
+
+"What?" I said.
+
+"Those affairs of yours--they are God's business," he repeated, mumbling
+the words with his toothless lips.
+
+"No, he has not understood me," I thought to myself, and said no more to
+him till we reached home.
+
+Although it was not my original sense of reconciliation and reverence,
+but only a sort of complacency at having experienced such a sense,
+that lasted in me during the drive home (and that, too, despite the
+distraction of the crowds of people who now thronged the sunlit streets
+in every direction), I had no sooner reached home than even my spurious
+complacency was shattered, for I found that I had not the forty copecks
+wherewith to pay the cabman! To the butler, Gabriel, I already owed
+a small debt, and he refused to lend me any more. Seeing me twice run
+across the courtyard in quest of the money, the cabman must have divined
+the reason, for, leaping from his drozhki, he--notwithstanding that he
+had seemed so kind--began to bawl aloud (with an evident desire to punch
+my head) that people who do not pay for their cab-rides are swindlers.
+
+None of my family were yet out of bed, so that, except for the servants,
+there was no one from whom to borrow the forty copecks. At length, on my
+most sacred, sacred word of honour to repay (a word to which, as I could
+see from his face, he did not altogether trust), Basil so far yielded to
+his fondness for me and his remembrance of the many services I had done
+him as to pay the cabman. Thus all my beautiful feelings ended in smoke.
+When I went upstairs to dress for church and go to Communion with the
+rest I found that my new clothes had not yet come home, and so I could
+not wear them. Then I sinned headlong. Donning my other suit, I went
+to Communion in a sad state of mental perturbation, and filled with
+complete distrust of all my finer impulses.
+
+
+
+
+IX. HOW I PREPARED MYSELF FOR THE EXAMINATIONS
+
+On the Thursday in Easter week Papa, my sister, Katenka, and Mimi went
+away into the country, and no one remained in my grandmother's great
+house but Woloda, St. Jerome, and myself. The frame of mind which I
+had experienced on the day of my confession and during my subsequent
+expedition to the monastery had now completely passed away, and left
+behind it only a dim, though pleasing, memory which daily became more
+and more submerged by the impressions of this emancipated existence.
+
+The folio endorsed "Rules of My Life" lay concealed beneath a pile of
+school-books. Although the idea of the possibility of framing rules, for
+every occasion in my life and always letting myself be guided by
+them still pleased me (since it appeared an idea at once simple and
+magnificent, and I was determined to make practical application of it),
+I seemed somehow to have forgotten to put it into practice at once, and
+kept deferring doing so until such and such a moment. At the same time,
+I took pleasure in the thought that every idea which now entered my
+head could be allotted precisely to one or other of my three sections of
+tasks and duties--those for or to God, those for or to my neighbour, and
+those for or to myself. "I can always refer everything to them," I said
+to myself, "as well as the many, many other ideas which occur to me on
+one subject or another." Yet at this period I often asked myself, "Was I
+better and more truthful when I only believed in the power of the
+human intellect, or am I more so now, when I am losing the faculty of
+developing that power, and am in doubt both as to its potency and as to
+its importance?" To this I could return no positive answer.
+
+The sense of freedom, combined with the spring-like feeling of vague
+expectation to which I have referred already, so unsettled me that
+I could not keep myself in hand--could make none but the sorriest of
+preparations for my University ordeal. Thus I was busy in the schoolroom
+one morning, and fully aware that I must work hard, seeing that
+to-morrow was the day of my examination in a subject of which I had
+the two whole questions still to read up; yet no sooner had a breath of
+spring come wafted through the window than I felt as though there were
+something quite different that I wished to recall to my memory. My hands
+laid down my book, my feet began to move of themselves, and to set me
+walking up and down the room, and my head felt as though some one
+had suddenly touched in it a little spring and set some machine in
+motion--so easily and swiftly and naturally did all sorts of pleasing
+fancies of which I could catch no more than the radiancy begin coursing
+through it. Thus one hour, two hours, elapsed unperceived. Even if I
+sat down determinedly to my book, and managed to concentrate my whole
+attention upon what I was reading, suddenly there would sound in the
+corridor the footsteps of a woman and the rustle of her dress. Instantly
+everything would escape my mind, and I would find it impossible to
+remain still any longer, however much I knew that the woman could only
+be either Gasha or my grandmother's old sewing-maid moving about in the
+corridor. "Yet suppose it should be SHE all at once?" I would say to
+myself. "Suppose IT is beginning now, and I were to lose it?" and,
+darting out into the corridor, I would find, each time, that it was only
+Gasha. Yet for long enough afterwards I could not recall my attention to
+my studies. A little spring had been touched in my head, and a strange
+mental ferment started afresh. Again, that evening I was sitting alone
+beside a tallow candle in my room. Suddenly I looked up for a moment--to
+snuff the candle, or to straighten myself in my chair--and at once
+became aware of nothing but the darkness in the corners and the blank of
+the open doorway. Then, I also became conscious how still the house was,
+and felt as though I could do nothing else than go on listening to that
+stillness, and gazing into the black square of that open doorway, and
+gradually sinking into a brown study as I sat there without moving.
+At intervals, however, I would get up, and go downstairs, and begin
+wandering through the empty rooms. Once I sat a long while in the small
+drawing-room as I listened to Gasha playing "The Nightingale" (with two
+fingers) on the piano in the large drawing-room, where a solitary candle
+burned. Later, when the moon was bright, I felt obliged to get out of
+bed and to lean out of the window, so that I might gaze into the garden,
+and at the lighted roof of the Shaposnikoff mansion, the straight
+tower of our parish church, and the dark shadows of the fence and the
+lilac-bush where they lay black upon the path. So long did I remain
+there that, when I at length returned to bed, it was ten o'clock in the
+morning before I could open my eyes again.
+
+In short, had it not been for the tutors who came to give me lessons, as
+well as for St. Jerome (who at intervals, and very grudgingly, applied
+a spur to my self-conceit) and, most of all, for the desire to figure
+as "clever" in the eyes of my friend Nechludoff (who looked upon
+distinctions in University examinations as a matter of first-rate
+importance)--had it not been for all these things, I say, the spring and
+my new freedom would have combined to make me forget everything I
+had ever learnt, and so to go through the examinations to no purpose
+whatsoever.
+
+
+
+
+X. THE EXAMINATION IN HISTORY
+
+ON the 16th of April I entered, for the first time, and under the wing
+of St. Jerome, the great hall of the University. I had driven there with
+St. Jerome in our smart phaeton and wearing the first frockcoat of my
+life, while the whole of my other clothes--even down to my socks and
+linen--were new and of a grander sort. When a Swiss waiter relieved me
+of my greatcoat, and I stood before him in all the beauty of my attire,
+I felt almost sorry to dazzle him so. Yet I had no sooner entered the
+bright, carpeted, crowded hall, and caught sight of hundreds of other
+young men in gymnasium [The Russian gymnasium = the English grammar or
+secondary school.] uniforms or frockcoats (of whom but a few threw me an
+indifferent glance), as well as, at the far end, of some solemn-looking
+professors who were seated on chairs or walking carelessly about among
+some tables, than I at once became disabused of the notion that I should
+attract the general attention, while the expression of my face, which at
+home, and even in the vestibule of the University buildings, had denoted
+only a kind of vague regret that I should have to present so important
+and distinguished an appearance, became exchanged for an expression
+of the most acute nervousness and dejection. However, I soon picked
+up again when I perceived sitting at one of the desks a very badly,
+untidily dressed gentleman who, though not really old, was almost
+entirely grey. He was occupying a seat quite at the back of the hall and
+a little apart from the rest, so I hastened to sit down beside him, and
+then fell to looking at the candidates for examination, and to forming
+conclusions about them. Many different figures and faces were there to
+be seen there; yet, in my opinion, they all seemed to divide themselves
+into three classes. First of all, there were youths like myself,
+attending for examination in the company of their parents or tutors.
+Among such I could see the youngest Iwin (accompanied by Frost) and
+Ilinka Grap (accompanied by his old father). All youths of this class
+wore the early beginnings of beards, sported prominent linen, sat
+quietly in their places, and never opened the books and notebooks which
+they had brought with them, but gazed at the professors and examination
+tables with ill-concealed nervousness. The second class of candidates
+were young men in gymnasium uniforms. Several of them had attained to
+the dignity of shaving, and most of them knew one another. They talked
+loudly, called the professors by their names and surnames, occupied
+themselves in getting their subjects ready, exchanged notebooks, climbed
+over desks, fetched themselves pies and sandwiches from the vestibule,
+and ate them then and there merely lowering their heads to the level
+of a desk for propriety's sake. Lastly, the third class of candidates
+(which seemed a small one) consisted of oldish men--some of them in
+frock coats, but the majority in jackets, and with no linen to be seen.
+These preserved a serious demeanour, sat by themselves, and had a very
+dingy look. The man who had afforded me consolation by being worse
+dressed than myself belonged to this class. Leaning forward upon his
+elbows, and running his fingers through his grey, dishevelled hair as he
+read some book or another, he had thrown me only a momentary glance--and
+that not a very friendly one--from a pair of glittering eyes. Then, as I
+sat down, he had frowned grimly, and stuck a shiny elbow out to prevent
+me from coming any nearer. On the other hand, the gymnasium men were
+over-sociable, and I felt rather afraid of their proximity. One of them
+did not hesitate to thrust a book into my hands, saying, "Give that to
+that fellow over there, will you?" while another of them exclaimed as he
+pushed past me, "By your leave, young fellow!" and a third made use of
+my shoulder as a prop when he wanted to scramble over a desk. All this
+seemed to me a little rough and unpleasant, for I looked upon myself as
+immensely superior to such fellows, and considered that they ought not
+to treat me with such familiarity. At length, the names began to
+be called out. The gymnasium men walked out boldly, answered their
+questions (apparently) well, and came back looking cheerful. My own
+class of candidates were much more diffident, as well as appeared to
+answer worse. Of the oldish men, some answered well, and some very
+poorly. When the name "Semenoff" was called out my neighbour with the
+grey hair and glittering eyes jostled me roughly, stepped over my legs,
+and went up to one of the examiners' tables. It was plain from the
+aspect of the professors that he answered well and with assurance, yet,
+on returning to his place, he did not wait to see where he was placed
+on the list, but quietly collected his notebooks and departed. Several
+times I shuddered at the sound of the voice calling out the names, but
+my turn did not come in exact alphabetical order, though already names
+had begun to be called beginning with "I."
+
+"Ikonin and Tenieff!" suddenly shouted some one from the professors' end
+of the hall.
+
+"Go on, Ikonin! You are being called," said a tall, red-faced gymnasium
+student near me. "But who is this BARtenieff or MORtenieff or somebody?
+I don't know him."
+
+"It must be you," whispered St. Jerome loudly in my ear.
+
+"MY name is IRtenieff," I said to the red-faced student. "Do you think
+that was the name they were calling out?"
+
+"Yes. Why on earth don't you go up?" he replied. "Lord, what a dandy!"
+he added under his breath, yet not so quietly but that I failed to hear
+the words as they came wafted to me from below the desk. In front of
+me walked Ikonin--a tall young man of about twenty-five, who was one of
+those whom I had classed as oldish men. He wore a tight brown frockcoat
+and a blue satin tie, and had wisps of flaxen hair carefully brushed
+over his collar in the peasant style. His appearance had already caught
+my attention when we were sitting among the desks, and had given me an
+impression that he was not bad-looking. Also I had noticed that he was
+very talkative. Yet what struck me most about his physiognomy was a
+tuft, of queer red hairs which he had under his chin, as well as, still
+more, a strange habit of continually unbuttoning his waistcoat and
+scratching his chest under his shirt.
+
+Behind the table to which we were summoned sat three Professors, none of
+whom acknowledged our salutations. A youngish professor was shuffling a
+bundle of tickets like a pack of cards; another one, with a star on his
+frockcoat, was gazing hard at a gymnasium student, who was repeating
+something at great speed about Charles the Great, and adding to each
+of his sentences the word nakonetz [= the English colloquialism "you
+know."] while a third one--an old man in spectacles--proceeded to bend
+his head down as we approached, and, peering at us through his glasses,
+pointed silently to the tickets. I felt his glance go over both myself
+and Ikonin, and also felt sure that something about us had displeased
+him (perhaps it was Ikonin's red hairs), for, after taking another look
+at the pair of us, he motioned impatiently to us to be quick in taking
+our tickets. I felt vexed and offended--firstly, because none of the
+professors had responded to our bows, and, secondly, because they
+evidently coupled me with Ikonin under the one denomination of
+"candidates," and so were condemning me in advance on account of
+Ikonin's red hairs. I took my ticket boldly and made ready to answer,
+but the professor's eye passed over my head and alighted upon Ikonin.
+Accordingly, I occupied myself in reading my ticket. The questions
+printed on it were all familiar to me, so, as I silently awaited my
+turn, I gazed at what was passing near me, Ikonin seemed in no way
+diffident--rather the reverse, for, in reaching for his ticket, he threw
+his body half-way across the table. Then he gave his long hair a shake,
+and rapidly conned over what was written on his ticket. I think he
+had just opened his mouth to answer when the professor with the star
+dismissed the gymnasium student with a word of commendation, and then
+turned and looked at Ikonin. At once the latter seemed taken back, and
+stopped short. For about two minutes there was a dead silence.
+
+"Well?" said the professor in the spectacles.
+
+Once more Ikonin opened his mouth, and once more remained silent.
+
+"Come! You are not the only one to be examined. Do you mean to answer
+or do you not?" said the youngish professor, but Ikonin did not even
+look at him. He was gazing fixedly at his ticket and uttered not a
+single word. The professor in the spectacles scanned him through his
+glasses, then over them, then without them (for, indeed, he had time
+to take them off, to wipe their lenses carefully, and to replace them).
+Still not a word from Ikonin. All at once, however, a smile spread
+itself over his face, and he gave his long hair another shake. Next he
+reached across the table, laid down his ticket, looked at each of the
+professors in turn and then at myself, and finally, wheeling round on
+his heels, made a gesture with his hand and returned to the desks. The
+professors stared blankly at one another.
+
+"Bless the fellow!" said the youngish professor. "What an original!"
+
+It was now my turn to move towards the table, but the professors went on
+talking in undertones among themselves, as though they were unaware of
+my presence. At the moment, I felt firmly persuaded that the three of
+them were engrossed solely with the question of whether I should merely
+PASS the examination or whether I should pass it WELL, and that it was
+only swagger which made them pretend that they did not care either way,
+and behave as though they had not seen me.
+
+When at length the professor in the spectacles turned to me with an air
+of indifference, and invited me to answer, I felt hurt, as I looked at
+him, to think that he should have so undeceived me: wherefore I answered
+brokenly at first. In time, however, things came easier to my tongue,
+and, inasmuch as all the questions bore upon Russian history (which I
+knew thoroughly), I ended with eclat, and even went so far, in my desire
+to convince the professors that I was not Ikonin and that they must not
+in anyway confound me with him, as to offer to draw a second ticket. The
+professor in the spectacles, however, merely nodded his head, said "That
+will do," and marked something in his register. On returning to the
+desks, I at once learnt from the gymnasium men (who somehow seemed to
+know everything) that I had been placed fifth.
+
+
+
+
+XI. MY EXAMINATION IN MATHEMATICS
+
+AT the subsequent examinations, I made several new acquaintances in
+addition to the Graps (whom I considered unworthy of my notice) and
+Iwin (who for some reason or other avoided me). With some of these new
+friends I grew quite intimate, and even Ikonin plucked up sufficient
+courage to inform me, when we next met, that he would have to undergo
+re-examination in history--the reason for his failure this time being
+that the professor of that faculty had never forgiven him for last
+year's examination, and had, indeed, "almost killed" him for it.
+Semenoff (who was destined for the same faculty as myself--the
+faculty of mathematics) avoided every one up to the very close of the
+examinations. Always leaning forward upon his elbows and running his
+fingers through his grey hair, he sat silent and alone. Nevertheless,
+when called up for examination in mathematics (he had no companion
+to accompany him), he came out second. The first place was taken by a
+student from the first gymnasium--a tall, dark, lanky, pale-faced fellow
+who wore a black folded cravat and had his cheeks and forehead dotted
+all over with pimples. His hands were shapely and slender, but their
+nails were so bitten to the quick that the finger-ends looked as though
+they had been tied round with strips of thread. All this seemed to me
+splendid, and wholly becoming to a student of the first gymnasium.
+He spoke to every one, and we all made friends with him. To me in
+particular his walk, his every movement, his lips, his dark eyes, all
+seemed to have in them something extraordinary and magnetic.
+
+On the day of the mathematical examination I arrived earlier than usual
+at the hall. I knew the syllabus well, yet there were two questions
+in the algebra which my tutor had managed to pass over, and which were
+therefore quite unknown to me. If I remember rightly, they were the
+Theory of Combinations and Newton's Binomial. I seated myself on one of
+the back benches and pored over the two questions, but, inasmuch as I
+was not accustomed to working in a noisy room, and had even less time
+for preparation than I had anticipated, I soon found it difficult to
+take in all that I was reading.
+
+"Here he is. This way, Nechludoff," said Woloda's familiar voice behind
+me.
+
+I turned and saw my brother and Dimitri--their gowns unbuttoned, and
+their hands waving a greeting to me--threading their way through the
+desks. A moment's glance would have sufficed to show any one that they
+were second-course students--persons to whom the University was as a
+second home. The mere look of their open gowns expressed at once disdain
+for the "mere candidate" and a knowledge that the "mere candidate's"
+soul was filled with envy and admiration of them. I was charmed to think
+that every one near me could now see that I knew two real second-course
+students: wherefore I hastened to meet them half-way.
+
+Woloda, of course, could not help vaunting his superiority a little.
+
+"Hullo, you smug!" he said. "Haven't you been examined yet?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, what are you reading? Aren't you sufficiently primed?"
+
+"Yes, except in two questions. I don't understand them at all."
+
+"Eh, what?"--and Woloda straightway began to expound to me Newton's
+Binomial, but so rapidly and unintelligibly that, suddenly reading in my
+eyes certain misgivings as to the soundness of his knowledge, he glanced
+also at Dimitri's face. Clearly, he saw the same misgivings there, for
+he blushed hotly, though still continuing his involved explanations.
+
+"No; hold on, Woloda, and let me try and do it," put in Dimitri at
+length, with a glance at the professors' corner as he seated himself
+beside me.
+
+I could see that my friend was in the best of humours. This was always
+the case with him when he was satisfied with himself, and was one of the
+things in him which I liked best. Inasmuch as he knew mathematics well
+and could speak clearly, he hammered the question so thoroughly into my
+head that I can remember it to this day. Hardly had he finished when St.
+Jerome said to me in a loud whisper, "A vous, Nicolas," and I followed
+Ikonin out from among the desks without having had an opportunity of
+going through the OTHER question of which I was ignorant. At the table
+which we now approached were seated two professors, while before the
+blackboard stood a gymnasium student, who was working some formula
+aloud, and knocking bits off the end of the chalk with his too vigorous
+strokes. He even continued writing after one of the Professors had said
+to him "Enough!" and bidden us draw our tickets. "Suppose I get the
+Theory of Combinations?" I thought to myself as my tremulous fingers
+took a ticket from among a bundle wrapped in torn paper. Ikonin, for
+his part, reached across the table with the same assurance, and the
+same sidelong movement of his whole body, as he had done at the previous
+examination. Taking the topmost ticket without troubling to make further
+selection, he just glanced at it, and then frowned angrily.
+
+"I always draw this kind of thing," he muttered.
+
+I looked at mine. Horrors! It was the Theory of Combinations!
+
+"What have you got?" whispered Ikonin at this point.
+
+I showed him.
+
+"Oh, I know that," he said.
+
+"Will you make an exchange, then?"
+
+"No. Besides, it would be all the same for me if I did," he contrived to
+whisper just as the professor called us up to the blackboard. "I don't
+feel up to anything to-day."
+
+"Then everything is lost!" I thought to myself. Instead of the brilliant
+result which I had anticipated I should be for ever covered with
+shame--more so even than Ikonin! Suddenly, under the very eyes of the
+professor, Ikonin turned to me, snatched my ticket out of my hands, and
+handed me his own. I looked at his ticket. It was Newton's Binomial!
+
+The professor was a youngish man, with a pleasant, clever expression of
+face--an effect chiefly due to the prominence of the lower part of his
+forehead.
+
+"What? Are you exchanging tickets, gentlemen?" he said.
+
+"No. He only gave me his to look at, professor," answered Ikonin--and,
+sure enough, the word "professor" was the last word that he uttered
+there. Once again, he stepped backwards towards me from the table, once
+again he looked at each of the professors in turn and then at myself,
+once again he smiled faintly, and once again he shrugged his shoulders
+as much as to say, "It is no use, my good sirs." Then he returned to the
+desks. Subsequently, I learnt that this was the third year he had vainly
+attempted to matriculate.
+
+I answered my question well, for I had just read it up; and the
+professor, kindly informing me that I had done even better than was
+required, placed me fifth.
+
+
+
+
+XII. MY EXAMINATION IN LATIN
+
+All went well until my examination in Latin. So far, a gymnasium student
+stood first on the list, Semenoff second, and myself third. On the
+strength of it I had begun to swagger a little, and to think that, for
+all my youth, I was not to be despised.
+
+From the first day of the examinations, I had heard every one speak with
+awe of the Professor of Latin, who appeared to be some sort of a wild
+beast who battened on the financial ruin of young men (of those, that is
+to say, who paid their own fees) and spoke only in the Greek and
+Latin tongues. However, St. Jerome, who had coached me in Latin, spoke
+encouragingly, and I myself thought that, since I could translate Cicero
+and certain parts of Horace without the aid of a lexicon, I should do
+no worse than the rest. Yet things proved otherwise. All the morning the
+air had been full of rumours concerning the tribulations of candidates
+who had gone up before me: rumours of how one young fellow had been
+accorded a nought, another one a single mark only, a third one greeted
+with abuse and threatened with expulsion, and so forth. Only Semenoff
+and the first gymnasium student had, as usual, gone up quietly, and
+returned to their seats with five marks credited to their names. Already
+I felt a prescience of disaster when Ikonin and myself found ourselves
+summoned to the little table at which the terrible professor sat in
+solitary grandeur.
+
+The terrible professor turned out to be a little thin, bilious-looking
+man with hair long and greasy and a face expressive of extraordinary
+sullenness. Handing Ikonin a copy of Cicero's Orations, he bid him
+translate. To my great astonishment Ikonin not only read off some of
+the Latin, but even managed to construe a few lines to the professor's
+prompting. At the same time, conscious of my superiority over such a
+feeble companion, I could not help smiling a little, and even looking
+rather contemptuous, when it came to a question of analysis, and Ikonin,
+as on previous occasions, plunged into a silence which promised never
+to end. I had hoped to please the professor by that knowing, slightly
+sarcastic smile of mine, but, as a matter of fact, I contrived to do
+quite the contrary.
+
+"Evidently you know better than he, since you are laughing," he said to
+me in bad Russian. "Well, we shall see. Tell me the answer, then."
+
+Later I learnt that the professor was Ikonin's guardian, and that Ikonin
+actually lived with him. I lost no time in answering the question in
+syntax which had been put to Ikonin, but the professor only pulled a
+long face and turned away from me.
+
+"Well, your turn will come presently, and then we shall see how much you
+know," he remarked, without looking at me, but proceeding to explain to
+Ikonin the point on which he had questioned him.
+
+"That will do," he added, and I saw him put down four marks to Ikonin in
+his register. "Come!" I thought to myself. "He cannot be so strict after
+all."
+
+When Ikonin had taken his departure the professor spent fully five
+minutes--five minutes which seemed to me five hours--in setting his
+books and tickets in order, in blowing his nose, in adjusting and
+sprawling about on his chair, in gazing down the hall, and in looking
+here, there, and everywhere--in doing everything, in fact, except once
+letting his eye rest upon me. Yet even that amount of dissimulation did
+not seem to satisfy him, for he next opened a book, and pretended to
+read it, for all the world as though I were not there at all. I moved a
+little nearer him, and gave a cough.
+
+"Ah, yes! You too, of course! Well, translate me something," he
+remarked, handing me a book of some kind. "But no; you had better take
+this," and, turning over the leaves of a Horace, he indicated to me a
+passage which I should never have imagined possible of translation.
+
+"I have not prepared this," I said.
+
+"Oh! Then you only wish to answer things which you have got by heart, do
+you? Indeed? No, no; translate me that."
+
+I started to grope for the meaning of the passage, but each questioning
+look which I threw at the professor was met by a shake of the head, a
+profound sigh, and an exclamation of "No, no!" Finally he banged the
+book to with such a snap that he caught his finger between the covers.
+Angrily releasing it, he handed me a ticket containing questions in
+grammar, and, flinging himself back in his chair, maintained a menacing
+silence. I should have tried to answer the questions had not the
+expression of his face so clogged my tongue that nothing seemed to come
+from it right.
+
+"No, no! That's not it at all!" he suddenly exclaimed in his horrible
+accent as he altered his posture to one of leaning forward upon the
+table and playing with the gold signet-ring which was nearly slipping
+from the little finger of his left hand. "That is not the way to prepare
+for serious study, my good sir. Fellows like yourself think that, once
+they have a gown and a blue collar to their backs, they have reached the
+summit of all things and become students. No, no, my dear sir. A subject
+needs to be studied FUNDAMENTALLY," and so on, and so on.
+
+During this speech (which was uttered with a clipped sort of intonation)
+I went on staring dully at his lowered eyelids. Beginning with a fear
+lest I should lose my place as third on the list, I went on to fear lest
+I should pass at all. Next, these feelings became reinforced by a sense
+of injustice, injured self-respect, and unmerited humiliation, while the
+contempt which I felt for the professor as some one not quite (according
+to my ideas) "comme il faut"--a fact which I deduced from the shortness,
+strength, and roundness of his nails--flared up in me more and more and
+turned all my other feelings to sheer animosity. Happening, presently,
+to glance at me, and to note my quivering lips and tear-filled eyes, he
+seemed to interpret my agitation as a desire to be accorded my marks and
+dismissed: wherefore, with an air of relenting, he said (in the presence
+of another professor who had just approached):
+
+"Very well; I will accord you a 'pass'" (which signified two marks),
+"although you do not deserve it. I do so simply out of consideration for
+your youth, and in the hope that, when you begin your University career,
+you will learn to be less light-minded."
+
+The concluding phrase, uttered in the hearing of the other professor
+(who at once turned his eyes upon me, as though remarking, "There! You
+see, young man!") completed my discomfiture. For a moment, a mist swam
+before my eyes--a mist in which the terrible professor seemed to be far
+away, as he sat at his table while for an instant a wild idea danced
+through my brain. "What if I DID do such a thing?" I thought to myself.
+"What would come of it?" However, I did not do the thing in question,
+but, on the contrary, made a bow of peculiar reverence to each of the
+professors, and with a slight smile on my face--presumably the same
+smile as that with which I had derided Ikonin--turned away from the
+table.
+
+This piece of unfairness affected me so powerfully at the time that, had
+I been a free agent, I should have attended for no more examinations.
+My ambition was gone (since now I could not possibly be third), and I
+therefore let the other examinations pass without any exertion, or even
+agitation, on my part. In the general list I still stood fourth, but
+that failed to interest me, since I had reasoned things out to myself,
+and come to the conclusion that to try for first place was stupid--even
+"bad form:" that, in fact, it was better to pass neither very well nor
+very badly, as Woloda had done. This attitude I decided to maintain
+throughout the whole of my University career, notwithstanding that it
+was the first point on which my opinion had differed from that of my
+friend Dimitri.
+
+Yet, to tell the truth, my thoughts were already turning towards a
+uniform, a "mortar-board," and the possession of a drozhki of my own,
+a room of my own, and, above all, freedom of my own. And certainly the
+prospect had its charm.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. I BECOME GROWN-UP
+
+When, on May 8th, I returned home from the final, the divinity,
+examination, I found my acquaintance, the foreman from Rozonoff's,
+awaiting me. He had called once before to fit me for my gown, as well
+as for a tunic of glossy black cloth (the lapels of which were, on that
+occasion, only sketched in chalk), but to-day he had come to bring me
+the clothes in their finished state, with their gilt buttons wrapped in
+tissue paper.
+
+Donning the garments, and finding them splendid (notwithstanding that
+St. Jerome assured me that the back of the tunic wrinkled badly), I went
+downstairs with a complacent smile which I was powerless to banish from
+my face, and sought Woloda, trying the while to affect unconsciousness
+of the admiring looks of the servants, who came darting out of the hall
+and corridor to gaze upon me with ravished eyes. Gabriel, the butler,
+overtook me in the salle, and, after congratulating me with much
+empressement, handed me, according to instructions from my father, four
+bank-notes, as well as informed me that Papa had also given orders that,
+from that day forth, the groom Kuzma, the phaeton, and the bay horse
+Krassavchik were to be entirely at my disposal. I was so overjoyed at
+this not altogether expected good-fortune that I could no longer feign
+indifference in Gabriel's presence, but, flustered and panting, said
+the first thing which came into my head ("Krassavchik is a splendid
+trotter," I think it was). Then, catching sight of the various heads
+protruding from the doors of the hall and corridor, I felt that I
+could bear no more, and set off running at full speed across the salle,
+dressed as I was in the new tunic, with its shining gilt buttons. Just
+as I burst into Woloda's room, I heard behind me the voices of Dubkoff
+and Nechludoff, who had come to congratulate me, as well as to propose
+a dinner somewhere and the drinking of much champagne in honour of my
+matriculation. Dimitri informed me that, though he did not care for
+champagne, he would nevertheless join us that evening and drink my
+health, while Dubkoff remarked that I looked almost like a colonel, and
+Woloda omitted to congratulate me at all, merely saying in an acid way
+that he supposed we should now--i.e. in two days time--be off into the
+country. The truth was that Woloda, though pleased at my matriculation,
+did not altogether like my becoming as grown-up as himself. St. Jerome,
+who also joined us at this moment, said in a very pompous manner that
+his duties were now ended, and that, although he did not know whether
+they had been well done or ill, at least he had done his best, and must
+depart to-morrow to his Count's. In replying to their various remarks
+I could feel, in spite of myself, a pleased, agreeable, faintly
+self-sufficient smile playing over my countenance, as well as could
+remark that that smile, communicated itself to those to whom I was
+speaking.
+
+So here was I without a tutor, yet with my own private drozhki, my
+name printed on the list of students, a sword and belt of my own, and a
+chance of an occasional salute from officials! In short, I was grownup
+and, I suppose, happy.
+
+Finally, we arranged to go out and dine at five o'clock, but since
+Woloda presently went off to Dubkoff's, and Dimitri disappeared in
+his usual fashion (saying that there was something he MUST do before
+dinner), I was left with two whole hours still at my disposal. For a
+time I walked through the rooms of the house, and looked at myself
+in all the mirrors--firstly with the tunic buttoned, then with it
+unbuttoned, and lastly with only the top button fastened. Each time it
+looked splendid. Eventually, though anxious not to show any excess of
+delight, I found myself unable to refrain from crossing over to the
+coach-house and stables to gaze at Krassovchik, Kuzma, and the drozhki.
+Then I returned and once more began my tour of the rooms, where I looked
+at myself in all the mirrors as before, and counted my money over in my
+pocket--my face smiling happily the while. Yet not an hour had elapsed
+before I began to feel slightly ennuye--to feel a shade of regret that
+no one was present to see me in my splendid position. I began to long
+for life and movement, and so sent out orders for the drozhki to be got
+ready, since I had made up my mind to drive to the Kuznetski Bridge and
+make some purchases.
+
+In this connection I recalled how, after matriculating, Woloda had gone
+and bought himself a lithograph of horses by Victor Adam and some pipes
+and tobacco: wherefore I felt that I too must do the same. Amid glances
+showered upon me from every side, and with the sunlight reflected from
+my buttons, cap-badge, and sword, I drove to the Kuznetski Bridge,
+where, halting at a Picture shop, I entered it with my eyes looking to
+every side. It was not precisely horses by Adam which I meant to buy,
+since I did not wish to be accused of too closely imitating Woloda;
+wherefore, out of shame for causing the obsequious shopmen such
+agitation as I appeared to do, I made a hasty selection, and pitched
+upon a water-colour of a woman's head which I saw displayed in the
+window--price twenty roubles. Yet no sooner had I paid the twenty
+roubles over the counter than my heart smote me for having put two
+such beautifully dressed shop-assistants to so much trouble for such
+a trifle. Moreover, I fancied that they were regarding me with some
+disdain. Accordingly, in my desire to show them what manner of man I
+was, I turned my attention to a silver trifle which I saw displayed in
+a show-case, and, recognising that it was a porte-crayon (price eighteen
+roubles), requested that it should forthwith be wrapped in paper for me.
+Next, the money paid, and the information acquired that splendid pipes
+and tobacco were to be obtained in an adjacent emporium, I bowed to the
+two shopmen politely, and issued into the street with the picture under
+my arm. At the shop next door (which had painted on its sign-board a
+negro smoking a cigar) I bought (likewise out of a desire to imitate no
+one) some Turkish tobacco, a Stamboul hookah, and two pipes. On coming
+out of the shop, I had just entered the drozhki when I caught sight of
+Semenoff, who was walking hurriedly along the pavement with his head
+bent down. Vexed that he should not have recognised me, I called out
+to him pretty loudly, "Hold on a minute!" and, whipping up the drozhki,
+soon overtook him.
+
+"How do you do?" I said.
+
+"My respects to you," he replied, but without stopping.
+
+"Why are you not in your University uniform?" I next inquired.
+
+At this he stopped short with a frown, and parted his white teeth as
+though the sun were hurting his eyes. The next moment, however, he
+threw a glance of studied indifference at my drozhki and uniform, and
+continued on his way.
+
+From the Kuznetski Bridge, I drove to a confectioner's in Tverskaia
+Street, and, much as I should have liked it to be supposed that it was
+the newspapers which most interested me, I had no choice but to begin
+falling upon tartlet after tartlet. In fact, for all my bashfulness
+before a gentleman who kept regarding me with some curiosity from behind
+a newspaper, I ate with great swiftness a tartlet of each of the eight
+different sorts which the confectioner kept.
+
+On reaching home, I experienced a slight touch of stomach-ache, but paid
+no attention to it, and set to work to inspect my purchases. Of these,
+the picture so much displeased me that, instead of having it framed and
+hung in my room, as Woloda had done with his, I took pains to hide it
+behind a chest of drawers, where no one could see it. Likewise, though I
+also found the porte-crayon distasteful, I was able, as I laid it on my
+table, to comfort myself with the thought that it was at least a SILVER
+article--so much capital, as it were--and likely to be very useful to
+a student. As for the smoking things, I decided to put them into use at
+once, and try their capabilities.
+
+Unsealing the four packages, and carefully filling the Stamboul pipe
+with some fine-cut, reddish-yellow Turkish tobacco, I applied a hot
+cinder to it, and, taking the mouthpiece between my first and second
+fingers (a position of the hand which greatly caught my fancy), started
+to inhale the smoke.
+
+The smell of the tobacco seemed delightful, yet something burnt my mouth
+and caught me by the breath. Nevertheless, I hardened my heart, and
+continued to draw abundant fumes into my interior. Then I tried blowing
+rings and retaining the smoke. Soon the room became filled with blue
+vapours, while the pipe started to crackle and the tobacco to fly out
+in sparks. Presently, also, I began to feel a smarting in my mouth and
+a giddiness in my head. Accordingly, I was on the point of stopping and
+going to look at myself and my pipe in the mirror, when, to my surprise,
+I found myself staggering about. The room was whirling round and
+round, and as I peered into the mirror (which I reached only with some
+difficulty) I perceived that my face was as white as a sheet. Hardly had
+I thrown myself down upon a sofa when such nausea and faintness swept
+over me that, making up my mind that the pipe had proved my death, I
+expected every moment to expire. Terribly frightened, I tried to call
+out for some one to come and help me, and to send for the doctor.
+
+However, this panic of mine did not last long, for I soon understood
+what the matter with me was, and remained lying on the sofa with a
+racking headache and my limbs relaxed as I stared dully at the stamp on
+the package of tobacco, the Pipe-tube coiled on the floor, and the odds
+and ends of tobacco and confectioner's tartlets which were littered
+about. "Truly," I thought to myself in my dejection and disillusionment,
+"I cannot be quite grown-up if I cannot smoke as other fellows do, and
+should be fated never to hold a chibouk between my first and second
+fingers, or to inhale and puff smoke through a flaxen moustache!"
+
+When Dimitri called for me at five o'clock, he found me in this
+unpleasant predicament. After drinking a glass of water, however, I felt
+nearly recovered, and ready to go with him.
+
+"So much for your trying to smoke!" said he as he gazed at the remnants
+of my debauch. "It is a silly thing to do, and waste of money as well. I
+long ago promised myself never to smoke. But come along; we have to call
+for Dubkoff."
+
+
+
+
+XIV. HOW WOLODA AND DUBKOFF AMUSED THEMSELVES
+
+THE moment that Dimitri entered my room I perceived from his face,
+manner of walking, and the signs which, in him, denoted ill-humour--a
+blinking of the eyes and a grim holding of his head to one side, as
+though to straighten his collar--that he was in the coldly-correct frame
+of mind which was his when he felt dissatisfied with himself. It was
+a frame of mind, too, which always produced a chilling effect upon my
+feelings towards him. Of late I had begun to observe and appraise my
+friend's character a little more, but our friendship had in no way
+suffered from that, since it was still too young and strong for me to
+be able to look upon Dimitri as anything but perfect, no matter in what
+light I regarded him. In him there were two personalities, both of
+which I thought beautiful. One, which I loved devotedly, was kind, mild,
+forgiving, gay, and conscious of being those various things. When he was
+in this frame of mind his whole exterior, the very tone of his voice,
+his every movement, appeared to say: "I am kind and good-natured, and
+rejoice in being so, and every one can see that I so rejoice." The other
+of his two personalities--one which I had only just begun to apprehend,
+and before the majesty of which I bowed in spirit--was that of a man who
+was cold, stern to himself and to others, proud, religious to the point
+of fanaticism, and pedantically moral. At the present moment he was, as
+I say, this second personality.
+
+With that frankness which constituted a necessary condition of our
+relations I told him, as soon as we entered the drozhki, how much it
+depressed and hurt me to see him, on this my fete-day in a frame of mind
+so irksome and disagreeable to me.
+
+"What has upset you so?" I asked him. "Will you not tell me?"
+
+"My dear Nicolas," was his slow reply as he gave his head a nervous
+twitch to one side and blinked his eyes, "since I have given you my word
+never to conceal anything from you, you have no reason to suspect me of
+secretiveness. One cannot always be in exactly the same mood, and if I
+seem at all put out, that is all there is to say about it."
+
+"What a marvellously open, honourable character his is!" I thought to
+myself, and dropped the subject.
+
+We drove the rest of the way to Dubkoff's in silence. Dubkoff's flat was
+an unusually fine one--or, at all events, so it seemed to me. Everywhere
+were rugs, pictures, gardenias, striped hangings, photographs, and
+curved settees, while on the walls hung guns, pistols, pouches, and the
+mounted heads of wild beasts. It was the appearance of this apartment
+which made me aware whom, it was that Woloda had imitated in the scheme
+of his own sitting-room. We found Dubkoff and Woloda engaged in cards,
+while seated also at the table, and watching the game with close
+attention, was a gentleman whom I did not know, but who appeared to be
+of no great importance, judging by the modesty of his attitude.
+Dubkoff himself was in a silk dressing-gown and soft slippers, while
+Woloda--seated opposite him on a divan--was in his shirtsleeves, as well
+as (to judge by his flushed face and the impatient, cursory glance which
+he gave us for a second as he looked up from the cards) much taken up
+with the game. On seeing me, he reddened still more.
+
+"Well, it is for you to deal," he remarked to Dubkoff. In an instant I
+divined that he did not altogether relish my becoming acquainted with
+the fact that he gambled. Yet his expression had nothing in it of
+confusion--only a look which seemed to me to say: "Yes, I play cards,
+and if you are surprised at that, it is only because you are so young.
+There is nothing wrong about it--it is a necessity at our age." Yes, I
+at once divined and understood that.
+
+Instead of dealing, however, Dubkoff rose and shook hands with us; after
+which he bade us both be seated, and then offered us pipes, which we
+declined.
+
+"Here is our DIPLOMAT, then--the hero of the day!" he said to me, "Good
+Lord! how you look like a colonel!"
+
+"H-m!" I muttered in reply, though once more feeling a complacent smile
+overspread my countenance.
+
+I stood in that awe of Dubkoff which a sixteen-year-old boy naturally
+feels for a twenty-seven-year-old man of whom his elders say that he is
+a very clever young man who can dance well and speak French, and who,
+though secretly despising one's youth, endeavours to conceal the fact.
+Yet, despite my respect for him, I somehow found it difficult and
+uncomfortable, throughout my acquaintanceship with him, to look him in
+the eyes, I have since remarked that there are three kinds of men whom I
+cannot face easily, namely those who are much better than myself, those
+who are much worse, and those between whom and myself there is a mutual
+determination not to mention some particular thing of which we are both
+aware. Dubkoff may have been a much better fellow than myself, or he may
+have been a much worse; but the point was that he lied very frequently
+without recognising the fact that I was aware of his doing so, yet had
+determined not to mention it.
+
+"Let us play another round," said Woloda, hunching one shoulder after
+the manner of Papa, and reshuffling the cards.
+
+"How persistent you are!" said Dubkoff. "We can play all we want to
+afterwards. Well, one more round, then."
+
+During the play, I looked at their hands. Woloda's hands were large and
+red, whilst in the crook of the thumb and the way in which the other
+fingers curved themselves round the cards as he held them they so
+exactly resembled Papa's that now and then I could not help thinking
+that Woloda purposely held the cards thus so as to look the more like a
+grownup. Yet the next moment, looking at his face, I could see that he
+had not a thought in his mind beyond the game. Dubkoff's hands, on the
+contrary, were small, puffy, and inclined to clench themselves, as well
+as extremely neat and small-fingered. They were just the kind of hands
+which generally display rings, and which are most to be seen on persons
+who are both inclined to use them and fond of objets de vertu.
+
+Woloda must have lost, for the gentleman who was watching the play
+remarked that Vladimir Petrovitch had terribly bad luck, while Dubkoff
+reached for a note book, wrote something in it, and then, showing Woloda
+what he had written, said:
+
+"Is that right?"
+
+"Yes." said Woloda, glancing with feigned carelessness at the note book.
+"Now let us go."
+
+Woloda took Dubkoff, and I gave Dimitri a lift in my drozhki.
+
+"What were they playing at?" I inquired of Dimitri.
+
+"At piquet. It is a stupid game. In fact, all such games are stupid."
+
+"And were they playing for much?"
+
+"No, not very much, but more than they ought to."
+
+"Do you ever play yourself?"
+
+"No; I swore never to do so; but Dubkoff will play with any one he can
+get hold of."
+
+"He ought not to do that," I remarked. "So Woloda does not play so well
+as he does?"
+
+"Perhaps Dubkoff ought not to, as you say, yet there is nothing
+especially bad about it all. He likes playing, and plays well, but he is
+a good fellow all the same."
+
+"I had no idea of this," I said.
+
+"We must not think ill of him," concluded Dimitri, "since he is a simply
+splendid fellow. I like him very much, and always shall like him, in
+spite of his weakness."
+
+For some reason or another the idea occurred to me that, just BECAUSE
+Dimitri stuck up so stoutly for Dubkoff, he neither liked nor respected
+him in reality, but was determined, out of stubbornness and a desire not
+to be accused of inconstancy, never to own to the fact. He was one of
+those people who love their friends their life long, not so much
+because those friends remain always dear to them, as because, having
+once--possibly mistakenly--liked a person, they look upon it as
+dishonourable to cease ever to do so.
+
+
+
+
+XV. I AM FETED AT DINNER
+
+Dubkoff and Woloda knew every one at the restaurant by name, and every
+one, from the waiters to the proprietor, paid them great respect. No
+time was lost in allotting us a private room, where a bottle of iced
+champagne-upon which I tried to look with as much indifference as I
+could--stood ready waiting for us, and where we were served with a most
+wonderful repast selected by Dubkoff from the French menu. The meal went
+off most gaily and agreeably, notwithstanding that Dubkoff, as usual,
+told us blood-curdling tales of doubtful veracity (among others, a tale
+of how his grandmother once shot dead three robbers who were attacking
+her--a recital at which I blushed, closed my eyes, and turned away from
+the narrator), and that Woloda reddened visibly whenever I opened my
+mouth to speak--which was the more uncalled for on his part, seeing that
+never once, so far as I can remember, did I say anything shameful. After
+we had been given champagne, every one congratulated me, and I drank
+"hands across" with Dimitri and Dubkoff, and wished them joy. Since,
+however, I did not know to whom the bottle of champagne belonged (it was
+explained to me later that it was common property), I considered that,
+in return, I ought to treat my friends out of the money which I had
+never ceased to finger in my pocket. Accordingly, I stealthily extracted
+a ten-rouble note, and, beckoning the waiter to my side, handed him the
+money, and told him in a whisper (yet not so softly but that every one
+could hear me, seeing that every one was staring at me in dead silence)
+to "bring, if you please, a half-bottle of champagne." At this Woloda
+reddened again, and began to fidget so violently, and to gaze upon
+myself and every one else with such a distracted air, that I felt sure
+I had somehow put my foot in it. However, the half-bottle came, and we
+drank it with great gusto. After that, things went on merrily. Dubkoff
+continued his unending fairy tales, while Woloda also told funny
+stories--and told them well, too--in a way I should never have credited
+him: so that our laughter rang long and loud. Their best efforts lay in
+imitation, and in variants of a certain well-known saw. "Have you ever
+been abroad?" one would say to the other, for instance. "No," the
+one interrogated would reply, "but my brother plays the fiddle." Such
+perfection had the pair attained in this species of comic absurdity
+that they could answer any question by its means, while they would also
+endeavour to unite two absolutely unconnected matters without a previous
+question having been asked at all, yet say everything with a perfectly
+serious face and produce a most comic effect. I too began to try to be
+funny, but as soon as ever I spoke they either looked at me askance or
+did not look at me until I had finished: so that my anecdotes fell flat.
+Yet, though Dubkoff always remarked, "Our DIPLOMAT is lying, brother," I
+felt so exhilarated with the champagne and the company of my elders that
+the remark scarcely touched me. Only Dimitri, though he drank level with
+the rest of us, continued in the same severe, serious frame of mind--a
+fact which put a certain check upon the general hilarity.
+
+"Now, look here, gentlemen," said Dubkoff at last. "After dinner we
+ought to take the DIPLOMAT in hand. How would it be for him to go with
+us to see Auntie? There we could put him through his paces."
+
+"Ah, but Nechludoff will not go there," objected Woloda.
+
+"O unbearable, insupportable man of quiet habits that you are!" cried
+Dubkoff, turning to Dimitri. "Yet come with us, and you shall see what
+an excellent lady my dear Auntie is."
+
+"I will neither go myself nor let him go," replied Dimitri.
+
+"Let whom go? The DIPLOMAT? Why, you yourself saw how he brightened up
+at the very mention of Auntie."
+
+"It is not so much that I WILL NOT LET HIM go," continued Dimitri,
+rising and beginning to pace the room without looking at me, "as that I
+neither wish him nor advise him to go. He is not a child now, and if he
+must go he can go alone--without you. Surely you are ashamed of this,
+Dubkoff?--ashamed of always wanting others to do all the wrong things
+that you yourself do?"
+
+"But what is there so very wrong in my inviting you all to come and take
+a cup of tea with my Aunt?" said Dubkoff, with a wink at Woloda. "If you
+don't like us going, it is your affair; yet we are going all the same.
+Are you coming, Woloda?"
+
+"Yes, yes," assented Woloda. "We can go there, and then return to my
+rooms and continue our piquet."
+
+"Do you want to go with them or not?" said Dimitri, approaching me.
+
+"No," I replied, at the same time making room for him to sit down beside
+me on the divan. "I did not wish to go in any case, and since you advise
+me not to, nothing on earth will make me go now. Yet," I added a moment
+later, "I cannot honestly say that I have NO desire to go. All I say is
+that I am glad I am not going."
+
+"That is right," he said. "Live your own life, and do not dance to any
+one's piping. That is the better way."
+
+This little tiff not only failed to mar our hilarity, but even increased
+it. Dimitri suddenly reverted to the kindly mood which I loved best--so
+great (as I afterwards remarked on more than one occasion) was the
+influence which the consciousness of having done a good deed exercised
+upon him. At the present moment the source of his satisfaction was
+the fact that he had stopped my expedition to "Auntie's." He grew
+extraordinarily gay, called for another bottle of champagne (which was
+against his rules), invited some one who was a perfect stranger into our
+room, plied him with wine, sang "Gaudeamus igitur," requested every one
+to join him in the chorus, and proposed that we should and rink at the
+Sokolniki. [Mews.]
+
+"Let us enjoy ourselves to-night," he said with a laugh. "It is in
+honour of his matriculation that you now see me getting drunk for the
+first time in my life."
+
+Yet somehow this merriment sat ill upon him. He was like some
+good-natured father or tutor who is pleased with his young charges, and
+lets himself go for their amusement, yet at the same time tries to show
+them that one can enjoy oneself decently and in an honourable manner.
+However, his unexpected gaiety had an infectious influence upon myself
+and my companions, and the more so because each of us had now drunk
+about half a bottle of champagne.
+
+It was in this pleasing frame of mind that I went out into the main
+salon to smoke a cigarette which Dubkoff had given me. In rising I
+noticed that my head seemed to swim a little, and that my legs and
+arms retained their natural positions only when I bent my thoughts
+determinedly upon them. At other moments my legs would deviate from the
+straight line, and my arms describe strange gestures. I concentrated my
+whole attention upon the members in question, forced my hands first to
+raise themselves and button my tunic, and then to smooth my hair (though
+they ruffled my locks in doing so), and lastly commanded my legs to
+march me to the door--a function which they duly performed, though at
+one time with too much reluctance, and at another with too much ABANDON
+(the left leg, in particular, coming to a halt every moment on tiptoe).
+Some one called out to me, "Where are you going to? They will bring you
+a cigar-light directly," but I guessed the voice to be Woloda's, and,
+feeling satisfied, somehow, that I had succeeded in divining the fact,
+merely smiled airily in reply, and continued on my way.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. THE QUARREL
+
+In the main salon I perceived sitting at a small table a short, squat
+gentleman of the professional type. He had a red moustache, and was
+engaged in eating something or another, while by his side sat a tall,
+clean-shaven individual with whom he was carrying on a conversation in
+French. Somehow the aspect of these two persons displeased me; yet I
+decided, for all that, to light my cigarette at the candelabrum which
+was standing before them. Looking from side to side, to avoid meeting
+their gaze, I approached the table, and applied my cigarette to the
+flame. When it was fairly alight, I involuntarily threw a glance at the
+gentleman who was eating, and found his grey eyes fixed upon me with an
+expression of intense displeasure. Just as I was turning away his red
+moustache moved a little, and he said in French:
+
+"I do not like people to smoke when I am dining, my good sir."
+
+I murmured something inaudible.
+
+"No, I do not like it at all," he went on sternly, and with a glance at
+his clean-shaven companion, as though inviting him to admire the way in
+which he was about to deal with me. "I do not like it, my good sir, nor
+do I like people who have the impudence to puff their smoke up one's
+very nose."
+
+By this time I had gathered that it was myself he was scolding, and at
+first felt as though I had been altogether in the wrong.
+
+"I did not mean to inconvenience you," I said.
+
+"Well, if you did not suppose you were being impertinent, at least I
+did! You are a cad, young sir!" he shouted in reply.
+
+"But what right have you to shout at me like that?" I exclaimed, feeling
+that it was now HE that was insulting ME, and growing angry accordingly.
+
+"This much right," he replied, "that I never allow myself to be
+overlooked by any one, and that I always teach young fellows like
+yourself their manners. What is your name, young sir, and where do you
+live?"
+
+At this I felt so hurt that my teeth chattered, and I felt as though I
+were choking. Yet all the while I was conscious of being in the wrong,
+and so, instead of offering any further rudeness to the offended one,
+humbly told him my name and address.
+
+"And MY name, young sir," he returned, "is Kolpikoff, and I will trouble
+you to be more polite to me in future.--However, You will hear from me
+again" ("vous aurez de mes nouvelles"--the conversation had been carried
+on wholly in French), was his concluding remark.
+
+To this I replied, "I shall be delighted," with an infusion of as much
+hauteur as I could muster into my tone. Then, turning on my heel, I
+returned with my cigarette--which had meanwhile gone out--to our own
+room.
+
+I said nothing, either to my brother or my friends, about what had
+happened (and the more so because they were at that moment engaged in
+a dispute of their own), but sat down in a corner to think over the
+strange affair. The words, "You are a cad, young sir," vexed me more and
+more the longer that they sounded in my ears. My tipsiness was gone now,
+and, in considering my conduct during the dispute, the uncomfortable
+thought came over me that I had behaved like a coward.
+
+"Yet what right had he to attack me?" I reflected. "Why did he not
+simply intimate to me that I was annoying him? After all, it may have
+been he that was in the wrong. Why, too, when he called me a young cad,
+did I not say to him, 'A cad, my good sir, is one who takes offence'? Or
+why did I not simply tell him to hold his tongue? That would have been
+the better course. Or why did I not challenge him to a duel? No, I did
+none of those things, but swallowed his insults like a wretched coward."
+
+Still the words, "You are a cad, young sir," kept sounding in my ears
+with maddening iteration. "I cannot leave things as they are," I
+at length decided as I rose to my feet with the fixed intention
+of returning to the gentleman and saying something outrageous to
+him--perhaps, also, of breaking the candelabrum over his head if
+occasion offered. Yet, though I considered the advisability of this
+last measure with some pleasure, it was not without a good deal of
+trepidation that I re-entered the main salon. As luck would have it, M.
+Kolpikoff was no longer there, but only a waiter engaged in clearing the
+table. For a moment I felt like telling the waiter the whole story, and
+explaining to him my innocence in the matter, but for some reason or
+another I thought better of it, and once more returned, in the same hazy
+condition of mind, to our own room.
+
+"What has become of our DIPLOMAT?" Dubkoff was just saying. "Upon him
+now hang the fortunes of Europe."
+
+"Oh, leave me alone," I said, turning moodily away. Then, as I paced the
+room, something made me begin to think that Dubkoff was not altogether a
+good fellow. "There is nothing very much to admire in his eternal jokes
+and his nickname of 'DIPLOMAT,'" I reflected. "All he thinks about is to
+win money from Woloda and to go and see his 'Auntie.' There is nothing
+very nice in all that. Besides, everything he says has a touch of
+blackguardism in it, and he is forever trying to make people laugh. In
+my opinion he is simply stupid when he is not absolutely a brute."
+I spent about five minutes in these reflections, and felt my enmity
+towards Dubkoff continually increasing. For his part, he took no notice
+of me, and that angered me the more. I actually felt vexed with Woloda
+and Dimitri because they went on talking to him.
+
+"I tell you what, gentlemen: the DIPLOMAT ought to be christened," said
+Dubkoff suddenly, with a glance and a smile which seemed to me derisive,
+and even treacherous. "Yet, O Lord, what a poor specimen he is!"
+
+"You yourself ought to be christened, and you yourself are a sorry
+specimen!" I retorted with an evil smile, and actually forgetting to
+address him as "thou." [In Russian as in French, the second person
+singular is the form of speech used between intimate friends.]
+
+This reply evidently surprised Dubkoff, but he turned away
+good-humouredly, and went on talking to Woloda and Dimitri. I tried to
+edge myself into the conversation, but, since I felt that I could not
+keep it up, I soon returned to my corner, and remained there until we
+left.
+
+When the bill had been paid and wraps were being put on, Dubkoff turned
+to Dimitri and said: "Whither are Orestes and Pedalion going now? Home,
+I suppose, to talk about love. Well, let US go and see my dear Auntie.
+That will be far more entertaining than your sour company."
+
+"How dare you speak like that, and laugh at us?" I burst out as I
+approached him with clenched fists. "How dare you laugh at feelings
+which you do not understand? I will not have you do it! Hold your
+tongue!" At this point I had to hold my own, for I did not know what
+to say next, and was, moreover, out of breath with excitement. At first
+Dubkoff was taken aback, but presently he tried to laugh it off, and to
+take it as a joke. Finally I was surprised to see him look crestfallen,
+and lower his eyes.
+
+"I NEVER laugh at you or your feelings. It is merely my way of
+speaking," he said evasively.
+
+"Indeed?" I cried; yet the next moment I felt ashamed of myself and
+sorry for him, since his flushed, downcast face had in it no other
+expression than one of genuine pain.
+
+"What is the matter with you?" said Woloda and Dimitri simultaneously.
+"No one was trying to insult you."
+
+"Yes, he DID try to insult me!" I replied.
+
+"What an extraordinary fellow your brother is!" said Dubkoff to Woloda.
+At that moment he was passing out of the door, and could not have heard
+what I said. Possibly I should have flung myself after him and offered
+him further insult, had it not been that just at that moment the waiter
+who had witnessed my encounter with Kolpikoff handed me my greatcoat,
+and I at once quietened down--merely making such a pretence of having
+had a difference with Dimitri as was necessary to make my sudden
+appeasement appear nothing extraordinary. Next day, when I met Dubkoff
+at Woloda's, the quarrel was not raked up, yet he and I still addressed
+each other as "you," and found it harder than ever to look one another
+in the face.
+
+The remembrance of my scene with Kolpikoff--who, by the way, never
+sent me "de ses nouvelles," either the following day or any day
+afterwards--remained for years a keen and unpleasant memory. Even so
+much as five years after it had happened I would begin fidgeting and
+muttering to myself whenever I remembered the unavenged insult, and was
+fain to comfort myself with the satisfaction of recollecting the sort
+of young fellow I had shown myself to be in my subsequent affair with
+Dubkoff. In fact, it was only later still that I began to regard the
+matter in another light, and both to recall with comic appreciation my
+passage of arms with Kolpikoff, and to regret the undeserved affront
+which I had offered my good friend Dubkoff.
+
+When, at a later hour on the evening of the dinner, I told Dimitri of
+my affair with Kolpikoff, whose exterior I described in detail, he was
+astounded.
+
+"That is the very man!" he cried. "Don't you know that this precious
+Kolpikoff is a known scamp and sharper, as well as, above all things,
+a coward, and that he was expelled from his regiment by his brother
+officers because, having had his face slapped, he would not fight? But
+how came you to let him get away?" he added, with a kindly smile and
+glance. "Surely he could not have said more to you than he did when he
+called you a cad?"
+
+"No," I admitted with a blush.
+
+"Well, it was not right, but there is no great harm done," said Dimitri
+consolingly.
+
+Long afterwards, when thinking the matter over at leisure, I suddenly
+came to the conclusion that it was quite possible that Kolpikoff took
+the opportunity of vicariously wiping off upon me the slap in the face
+which he had once received, just as I myself took the opportunity of
+vicariously wiping off upon the innocent Dubkoff the epithet "cad" which
+Kolpikoff had just applied to me.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. I GET READY TO PAY SOME CALLS
+
+On awaking next morning my first thoughts were of the affair with
+Kolpikoff. Once again I muttered to myself and stamped about the room,
+but there was no help for it. To-day was the last day that I was to
+spend in Moscow, and it was to be spent, by Papa's orders, in my
+paying a round of calls which he had written out for me on a piece of
+paper--his first solicitude on our account being not so much for our
+morals or our education as for our due observance of the convenances. On
+the piece of paper was written in his swift, broken hand-writing: "(1)
+Prince Ivan Ivanovitch WITHOUT FAIL; (2) the Iwins WITHOUT FAIL; (3)
+Prince Michael; (4) the Princess Nechludoff and Madame Valakhina if you
+wish." Of course I was also to call upon my guardian, upon the rector,
+and upon the professors.
+
+These last-mentioned calls, however, Dimitri advised me not to pay:
+saying that it was not only unnecessary to do so, but not the thing.
+However, there were the other visits to be got through. It was the first
+two on the list--those marked as to be paid "WITHOUT FAIL"--that most
+alarmed me. Prince Ivan Ivanovitch was a commander-in-chief, as well
+as old, wealthy, and a bachelor. Consequently, I foresaw that vis-a-vis
+conversation between him and myself--myself a sixteen-year-old
+student!--was not likely to be interesting. As for the Iwins, they too
+were rich--the father being a departmental official of high rank who had
+only on one occasion called at our house during my grandmother's time.
+Since her death, I had remarked that the younger Iwin had fought shy of
+us, and seemed to give himself airs. The elder of the pair, I had heard,
+had now finished his course in jurisprudence, and gone to hold a post
+in St. Petersburg, while his brother Sergius (the former object of my
+worship) was also in St. Petersburg, as a great fat cadet in the Corps
+of Pages.
+
+When I was a young man, not only did I dislike intercourse with people
+who thought themselves above me, but such intercourse was, for me, an
+unbearable torture, owing partly to my constant dread of being snubbed,
+and partly to my straining every faculty of my intellect to prove to
+such people my independence. Yet, even if I failed to fulfil the latter
+part of my father's instructions, I felt that I must carry out
+the former. I paced my room and eyed my clothes ready disposed on
+chairs--the tunic, the sword, and the cap. Just as I was about to set
+forth, old Grap called to congratulate me, bringing with him Ilinka.
+Grap pere was a Russianised German and an intolerably effusive,
+sycophantic old man who was more often than not tipsy. As a rule, he
+visited us only when he wanted to ask for something, and although Papa
+sometimes entertained him in his study, old Grap never came to dinner
+with us. With his subserviency and begging propensities went such a
+faculty of good-humour and a power of making himself at home that every
+one looked upon his attachment to us as a great honour. For my part,
+however, I never liked him, and felt ashamed when he was speaking.
+
+I was much put out by the arrival of these visitors, and made no effort
+to conceal the fact. Upon Ilinka I had been so used to look down, and he
+so used to recognise my right to do so, that it displeased me to think
+that he was now as much a matriculated student as myself. In some way
+he appeared to me to have made a POINT of attaining that equality. I
+greeted the pair coldly, and, without offering them any refreshment
+(since it went against the grain to do so, and I thought they could ask
+for anything, if they wanted it, without my first inviting them to state
+their requirements), gave orders for the drozhki to be got ready. Ilinka
+was a good-natured, extremely moral, and far from stupid young fellow;
+yet, for all that, what people call a person of moods. That is to say,
+for no apparent reason he was for ever in some PRONOUNCED frame of
+mind--now lachrymose, now frivolous, now touchy on the very smallest
+point. At the present moment he appeared to be in the last-named mood.
+He kept looking from his father to myself without speaking, except
+when directly addressed, at which times he smiled the self-deprecatory,
+forced smile under which he was accustomed to conceal his feelings, and
+more especially that feeling of shame for his father which he must have
+experienced in our house.
+
+"So, Nicolas Petrovitch," the old man said to me, following me
+everywhere about the room as I went through the operation of dressing,
+while all the while his fat fingers kept turning over and over a silver
+snuff-box with which my grandmother had once presented me, "as soon as
+ever I heard from my son that you had passed your examinations so well
+(though of course your abilities are well-known to everyone), I at once
+came to congratulate you, my dear boy. Why, I have carried you on my
+shoulders before now, and God knows that I love you as though you were
+my own son. My Ilinka too has always been fond of you, and feels quite
+at home with you."
+
+Meanwhile the said Ilinka remained sitting silently by the window,
+apparently absorbed in contemplation of my three-cornered cap, and every
+now and then angrily muttering something in an undertone.
+
+"Now, I also wanted to ask you, Nicolas Petrovitch." His father went
+on, "whether my son did well in the examinations? He tells me that he is
+going to be in the same faculty as yourself, and that therefore you will
+be able to keep an eye on him, and advise him, and so on."
+
+"Oh, yes, I suppose he passed well," I replied, with a glance at Ilinka,
+who, conscious of my gaze, reddened violently and ceased to move his
+lips about. "And might he spend the day with you?" was the father's next
+request, which he made with a deprecatory smile, as though he stood in
+actual awe of me, yet always keeping so close to me, wherever I moved,
+that the fumes of the drink and tobacco in which he had been indulging
+were constantly perceptible to my nostrils. I felt greatly vexed at his
+placing me in such a false position towards his son, as well as at
+his distracting my attention from what was, to me, a highly important
+operation--namely, the operation of dressing; while, over and above all,
+I was annoyed by the smell of liquor with which he followed me about.
+Accordingly, I said very coldly that I could not have the pleasure of
+Ilinka's company that day, since I should be out.
+
+"Ah! I suppose you are going to see your sister?" put in Ilinka with a
+smile, but without looking at me. "Well, I too have business to
+attend to." At this I felt even more put out, as well as pricked with
+compunction; so, to soften my refusal a little, I hastened to say that
+the reason why I should not be at home that day was that I had to
+call upon the PRINCE Ivan Ivanovitch, the PRINCESS Kornakoff, and the
+Monsieur Iwin who held such an influential post, as well as, probably,
+to dine with the PRINCESS Nechludoff (for I thought that, on learning
+what important folk I was in the habit of mixing with, the Graps would
+no longer think it worth while to pretend to me). However, just as they
+were leaving, I invited Ilinka to come and see me another day; but he
+only murmured something unintelligible, and it was plain that he meant
+never to set foot in the house again.
+
+When they had departed, I set off on my round of calls. Woloda, whom I
+had asked that morning to come with me, in order that I might not feel
+quite so shy as when altogether alone, had declined on the ground that
+for two brothers to be seen driving in one drozhki would appear so
+horribly "proper."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. THE VALAKHIN FAMILY
+
+Accordingly I set off alone. My first call on the route lay at the
+Valakhin mansion. It was now three years since I had seen Sonetchka,
+and my love for her had long become a thing of the past, yet there
+still lingered in my heart a sort of clear, touching recollection of our
+bygone childish affection. At intervals, also, during those three years,
+I had found myself recalling her memory with such force and vividness
+that I had actually shed tears, and imagined myself to be in love with
+her again, but those occasions had not lasted more than a few minutes at
+a time, and had been long in recurring.
+
+I knew that Sonetchka and her mother had been abroad--that, in fact,
+they had been so for the last two years. Also, I had heard that they had
+been in a carriage accident, and that Sonetchka's face had been so badly
+cut with the broken glass that her beauty was marred. As I drove
+to their house, I kept recalling the old Sonetchka to my mind, and
+wondering what she would look like when I met her. Somehow I imagined
+that, after her two years' sojourn abroad, she would look very tall,
+with a beautiful waist, and, though sedate and imposing, extremely
+attractive. Somehow, also, my imagination refused to picture her with
+her face disfigured with scars, but, on the contrary, since I had read
+somewhere of a lover who remained true to his adored one in spite of her
+disfigurement with smallpox, strove to imagine that I was in love with
+Sonetchka, for the purpose of priding myself on holding to my troth in
+spite of her scars--Yet, as a matter of fact, I was not really in love
+with her during that drive, but having once stirred up in myself old
+MEMORIES of love, felt PREPARED to fall into that condition, and the
+more so because, of late, my conscience had often been pricking me for
+having discarded so many of my old flames.
+
+The Valakhins lived in a neat little wooden mansion approached by a
+courtyard. I gained admittance by ringing a bell (then a rarity in
+Moscow), and was received by a mincing, smartly-attired page. He either
+could not or made no attempt to inform me whether there was any one
+at home, but, leaving me alone in the dark hall, ran off down a still
+darker corridor. For a long time I waited in solitude in this gloomy
+place, out of which, in addition to the front door and the corridor,
+there only opened a door which at the moment was closed. Rather
+surprised at the dismal appearance of the house, I came to the
+conclusion that the reason was that its inmates were still abroad. After
+five minutes, however, the door leading into the salon was opened by the
+page boy, who then conducted me into a neat, but not richly furnished,
+drawing-room, where presently I was joined by Sonetchka.
+
+She was now seventeen years old, and very small and thin, as well as of
+an unhealthy pallor of face. No scars at all were visible, however, and
+the beautiful, prominent eyes and bright, cheerful smile were the same
+as I had known and loved in my childhood. I had not expected her to look
+at all like this, and therefore could not at once lavish upon her the
+sentiment which I had been preparing on the way. She gave me her hand in
+the English fashion (which was then as much a novelty as a door-bell),
+and, bestowing upon mine a frank squeeze, sat down on the sofa by my
+side.
+
+"Ah! how glad I am to see you, my dear Nicolas!" she said as she looked
+me in the face with an expression of pleasure so sincere that in the
+words "my dear Nicolas" I caught the purely friendly rather than the
+patronising note. To my surprise she seemed to me simpler, kinder, and
+more sisterly after her foreign tour than she had been before it.
+True, I could now see that she had two small scars between her nose
+and temples, but her wonderful eyes and smile fitted in exactly with my
+recollections, and shone as of old.
+
+"But how greatly you have changed!" she went on. "You are quite grown-up
+now. And I-I-well, what do you think of me?"
+
+"I should never have known you," I replied, despite the fact that at the
+moment I was thinking that I should have known her anywhere and always.
+
+"Why? Am I grown so ugly?" she inquired with a movement of her head.
+
+"Oh, no, decidedly not!" I hastened to reply. "But you have grown taller
+and older. As for being uglier, why, you are even--
+
+"Yes, yes; never mind. Do you remember our dances and games, and St.
+Jerome, and Madame Dorat?" (As a matter of fact, I could not recollect
+any Madame Dorat, but saw that Sonetchka was being led away by the joy
+of her childish recollections, and mixing them up a little). "Ah! what
+a lovely time it was!" she went on--and once more there shone before me
+the same eyes and smile as I had always carried in my memory. While she
+had been speaking, I had been thinking over my position at the present
+moment, and had come to the conclusion that I was in love with her. The
+instant, however, that I arrived at that result my careless, happy mood
+vanished, a mist seemed to arise before me which concealed even her eyes
+and smile, and, blushing hotly, I became tongue-tied and ill-at-ease.
+
+"But times are different now," she went on with a sigh and a little
+lifting of her eyebrows. "Everything seems worse than it used to be, and
+ourselves too. Is it not so, Nicolas?"
+
+I could return her no answer, but sat silently looking at her.
+
+"Where are those Iwins and Kornakoffs now? Do you remember them?"
+she continued, looking, I think, with some curiosity at my blushing,
+downcast countenance. "What splendid times we used to have!"
+
+Still I could not answer her.
+
+The next moment, I was relieved from this awkward position by the entry
+of old Madame Valakhin into the room. Rising, I bowed, and straightway
+recovered my faculty of speech. On the other hand, an extraordinary
+change now took place in Sonetchka. All her gaiety and bonhomie
+disappeared, her smile became quite a different one, and, except for the
+point of her shortness of stature, she became just the lady from abroad
+whom I had expected to find in her. Yet for this change there was no
+apparent reason, since her mother smiled every whit as pleasantly, and
+expressed in her every movement just the same benignity, as of old.
+Seating herself in her arm-chair, the old lady signed to me to come
+and sit beside her; after which she said something to her daughter in
+English, and Sonetchka left the room--a fact which still further helped
+to relieve me. Madame then inquired after my father and brother, and
+passed on to speak of her great bereavement--the loss of her husband.
+Presently, however, she seemed to become sensible of the fact that I was
+not helping much in the conversation, for she gave me a look as much as
+to say: "If, now, my dear boy, you were to get up, to take your leave,
+and to depart, it would be well." But a curious circumstance had
+overtaken me. While she had been speaking of her bereavement, I had
+recalled to myself, not only the fact that I was in love, but the
+probability that the mother knew of it: whereupon such a fit of
+bashfulness had come upon me that I felt powerless to put any member of
+my body to its legitimate use. I knew that if I were to rise and walk I
+should have to think where to plant each foot, what to do with my head,
+what with my hands, and so on. In a word, I foresaw that I should
+be very much as I had been on the night when I partook too freely of
+champagne, and therefore, since I felt uncertain of being able to manage
+myself if I DID rise, I ended by feeling UNABLE to rise. Meanwhile, I
+should say, Sonetchka had returned to the room with her work, and
+seated herself in a far corner--a corner whence, as I was nevertheless
+sensible, she could observe me. Madame must have felt some surprise as
+she gazed at my crimson face and noted my complete immobility, but I
+decided that it was better to continue sitting in that absurd position
+than to risk something unpleasant by getting up and walking. Thus I sat
+on and on, in the hope that some unforeseen chance would deliver me from
+my predicament. That unforeseen chance at length presented itself in the
+person of an unforeseen young man, who entered the room with an air
+of being one of the household, and bowed to me politely as he did so:
+whereupon Madame rose, excused herself to me for having to speak with
+her "homme d'affaires," and finally gave me a glance which said: "Well,
+if you DO mean to go on sitting there for ever, at least I can't drive
+you away." Accordingly, with a great effort I also rose, but, finding it
+impossible to do any leave-taking, moved away towards the door, followed
+by the pitying glances of mother and daughter. All at once I stumbled
+over a chair, although it was lying quite out of my route: the reason
+for my stumbling being that my whole attention was centred upon not
+tripping over the carpet. Driving through the fresh air, however--where
+at first I muttered and fidgeted about so much that Kuzma, my coachman,
+asked me what was the matter--I soon found this feeling pass away,
+and began to meditate quietly concerning my love for Sonetchka and her
+relations with her mother, which had appeared to me rather strange.
+When, afterwards, I told my father that mother and daughter had not
+seemed on the best of terms with one another, he said:
+
+"Yes, Madame leads the poor girl an awful life with her meanness. Yet,"
+added my father with a greater display of feeling than a man might
+naturally conceive for a mere relative, "she used to be such an
+original, dear, charming woman! I cannot think what has made her change
+so much. By the way, you didn't notice a secretary fellow about, did
+you? Fancy a Russian lady having an affaire with a secretary!"
+
+"Yes, I saw him," I replied.
+
+"And was he at least good-looking?"
+
+"No, not at all."
+
+"It is extraordinary!" concluded Papa, with a cough and an irritable
+hoist of his shoulder.
+
+"Well, I am in love!" was my secret thought to myself as I drove along
+in my drozhki.
+
+
+
+
+XIX. THE KORNAKOFFS
+
+MY second call on the route lay at the Kornakoffs', who lived on the
+first floor of a large mansion facing the Arbat. The staircase of
+the building looked extremely neat and orderly, yet in no
+way luxurious--being lined only with drugget pinned down with
+highly-polished brass rods. Nowhere were there any flowers or mirrors to
+be seen. The salon, too, with its polished floor, which I traversed
+on my way to the drawing-room, was decorated in the same cold, severe,
+unostentatious style. Everything in it looked bright and solid, but
+not new, and pictures, flower-stands, and articles of bric-a-brac were
+wholly absent. In the drawing-room I found some of the young princesses
+seated, but seated with the sort of correct, "company" air about them
+which gave one the impression that they sat like that only when guests
+were expected.
+
+"Mamma will be here presently," the eldest of them said to me as she
+seated herself by my side. For the next quarter of an hour, this young
+lady entertained me with such an easy flow of small-talk that the
+conversation never flagged a moment. Yet somehow she made so patent
+the fact that she was just entertaining me that I felt not altogether
+pleased. Amongst other things, she told me that their brother Stephen
+(whom they called Etienne, and who had been two years at the College of
+Cadets) had now received his commission. Whenever she spoke of him,
+and more particularly when she told me that he had flouted his
+mother's wishes by entering the Hussars, she assumed a nervous air,
+and immediately her sisters, sitting there in silence, also assumed
+a nervous air. When, again, she spoke of my grandmother's death, she
+assumed a MOURNFUL air, and immediately the others all did the same.
+Finally, when she recalled how I had once struck St. Jerome and been
+expelled from the room, she laughed and showed her bad teeth, and
+immediately all the other princesses laughed and showed their bad teeth
+too.
+
+Next, the Princess-Mother herself entered--a little dried-up woman, with
+a wandering glance and a habit of always looking at somebody else when
+she was addressing one. Taking my hand, she raised her own to my lips
+for me to kiss it--which otherwise, not supposing it to be necessary, I
+should not have done.
+
+"How pleased I am to see you!" she said with her usual clearness of
+articulation as she gazed at her daughters. "And how like your mother
+you look! Does he not, Lise?"
+
+Lise assented, though I knew for a fact that I did not resemble my
+mother in the least.
+
+"And what a grown-up you have become! My Etienne, you will remember, is
+your second cousin. No, not second cousin--what is it, Lise? My mother
+was Barbara Dimitrievna, daughter of Dimitri Nicolaevitch, and your
+grandmother was Natalia Nicolaevna."
+
+"Then he is our THIRD cousin, Mamma," said the eldest girl.
+
+"Oh, how you always confuse me!" was her mother's angry reply. "Not
+third cousin, but COUSIN GERMAN--that is your relationship to Etienne.
+He is an officer now. Did you know it? It is not well that he should
+have his own way too much. You young men need keeping in hand, or--!
+Well, you are not vexed because your old aunt tells you the plain truth?
+I always kept Etienne strictly in hand, for I found it necessary to do
+so."
+
+"Yes, that is how our relationship stands," she went on. "Prince Ivan
+Ivanovitch is my uncle, and your late mother's uncle also. Consequently
+I must have been your mother's first cousin--no, second cousin. Yes,
+that is it. Tell me, have you been to call on Prince Ivan yet?"
+
+I said no, but that I was just going to.
+
+"Ah, is it possible?" she cried. "Why, you ought to have paid him the
+first call of all! Surely you know that he stands to you in the position
+of a father? He has no children of his own, and his only heirs are
+yourself and my children. You ought to pay him all possible deference,
+both because of his age, and because of his position in the world, and
+because of everything else. I know that you young fellows of the present
+day think nothing of relationships and are not fond of old men, yet do
+you listen to me, your old aunt, for I am fond of you, and was fond of
+your mother, and had a great--a very great-liking and respect for your
+grandmother. You must not fail to call upon him on any account."
+
+I said that I would certainly go, and since my present call seemed to
+me to have lasted long enough, I rose, and was about to depart, but she
+restrained me.
+
+"No, wait a minute," she cried. "Where is your father, Lise? Go and tell
+him to come here. He will be so glad to see you," she added, turning to
+me.
+
+Two minutes later Prince Michael entered. He was a short, thick-set
+gentleman, very slovenly dressed and ill-shaven, yet wearing such an air
+of indifference that he looked almost a fool. He was not in the least
+glad to see me--at all events he did not intimate that he was; but the
+Princess (who appeared to stand in considerable awe of him) hastened to
+say:
+
+"Is not Woldemar here" (she seemed to have forgotten my name) "exactly
+like his mother?" and she gave her husband a glance which forced him
+to guess what she wanted. Accordingly he approached me with his usual
+passionless, half-discontented expression, and held out to me an
+unshaven cheek to kiss.
+
+"Why, you are not dressed yet, though you have to go out soon!" was the
+Princess's next remark to him in the angry tone which she habitually
+employed in conversation with her domestics. "It will only mean your
+offending some one again, and trying to set people against you."
+
+"In a moment, in a moment, mother," said Prince Michael, and departed. I
+also made my bows and departed.
+
+This was the first time I had heard of our being related to Prince Ivan
+Ivanovitch, and the news struck me unpleasantly.
+
+
+
+
+XX. THE IWINS
+
+As for the prospect of my call upon the Prince, it seemed even more
+unpleasant. However, the order of my route took me first to the Iwins,
+who lived in a large and splendid mansion in Tverskaia Street. It was
+not without some nervousness that I entered the great portico where a
+Swiss major-domo stood armed with his staff of office.
+
+To my inquiry as to whether any one was at home he replied: "Whom do you
+wish to see, sir? The General's son is within."
+
+"And the General himself?" I asked with forced assurance.
+
+"I must report to him your business first. What may it be, sir?" said
+the major-domo as he rang a bell. Immediately the gaitered legs of a
+footman showed themselves on the staircase above; whereupon I was
+seized with such a fit of nervousness that I hastily bid the lacquey say
+nothing about my presence to the General, since I would first see his
+son. By the time I had reached the top of the long staircase, I seemed
+to have grown extremely small (metaphorically, I mean, not actually),
+and had very much the same feeling within me as had possessed my soul
+when my drozhki drew up to the great portico, namely, a feeling as
+though drozhki, horse, and coachman had all of them grown extremely
+small too. I found the General's son lying asleep on a sofa, with an
+open book before him. His tutor, Monsieur Frost, under whose care he
+still pursued his studies at home, had entered behind me with a sort
+of boyish tread, and now awoke his pupil. Iwin evinced no particular
+pleasure at seeing me, while I also seemed to notice that, while talking
+to me, he kept looking at my eyebrows. Although he was perfectly polite,
+I conceived that he was "entertaining" me much as the Princess Valakhin
+had done, and that he not only felt no particular liking for me, but
+even that he considered my acquaintance in no way necessary to one who
+possessed his own circle of friends. All this arose out of the idea that
+he was regarding my eyebrows. In short, his bearing towards me appeared
+to be (as I recognised with an awkward sensation) very much the same as
+my own towards Ilinka Grap. I began to feel irritated, and to interpret
+every fleeting glance which he cast at Monsieur Frost as a mute inquiry:
+"Why has this fellow come to see me?"
+
+After some conversation he remarked that his father and mother were at
+home. Would I not like to visit them too?
+
+"First I will go and dress myself," he added as he departed to another
+room, notwithstanding that he had seemed to be perfectly well dressed
+(in a new frockcoat and white waistcoat) in the present one. A few
+minutes later he reappeared in his University uniform, buttoned up to
+the chin, and we went downstairs together. The reception rooms through
+which we passed were lofty and of great size, and seemed to be richly
+furnished with marble and gilt ornaments, chintz-covered settees, and
+a number of mirrors. Presently Madame Iwin met us, and we went into
+a little room behind the drawing-room, where, welcoming me in very
+friendly fashion, she seated herself by my side, and began to inquire
+after my relations.
+
+Closer acquaintance with Madame (whom I had seen only twice before, and
+that but for a moment on each occasion) impressed me favourably. She
+was tall, thin, and very pale, and looked as though she suffered from
+chronic depression and fatigue. Yet, though her smile was a sad one, it
+was very kind, and her large, mournful eyes, with a slight cast in their
+vision, added to the pathos and attractiveness of her expression. Her
+attitude, while not precisely that of a hunchback, made her whole form
+droop, while her every movement expressed languor. Likewise, though her
+speech was deliberate, the timbre of her voice, and the manner in which
+she lisped her r's and l's, were very pleasing to the ear. Finally, she
+did not "ENTERTAIN" me. Unfortunately, the answers which I returned to
+her questions concerning my relations seemed to afford her a painful
+interest, and to remind her of happier days: with the result that when,
+presently, her son left the room, she gazed at me in silence for a
+moment, and then burst into tears. As I sat there in mute bewilderment,
+I could not conceive what I had said to bring this about. At first I
+felt sorry for her as she sat there weeping with downcast eyes. Next I
+began to think to myself: "Ought I not to try and comfort her, and how
+ought that to be done?" Finally, I began to feel vexed with her for
+placing me in such an awkward position. "Surely my appearance is not so
+moving as all that?" I reflected. "Or is she merely acting like this to
+see what I shall do under the circumstances?"
+
+"Yet it would not do for me to go," I continued to myself, "for that
+would look too much as though I were fleeing to escape her tears."
+Accordingly I began fidgeting about on my seat, in order to remind her
+of my presence.
+
+"Oh, how foolish of me!" at length she said, as she gazed at me for a
+moment and tried to smile. "There are days when one weeps for no reason
+whatever." She felt about for her handkerchief, and then burst out
+weeping more violently than before.
+
+"Oh dear! How silly of me to be for ever crying like this! Yet I was so
+fond of your mother! We were such friends! We-we--"
+
+At this point she found her handkerchief, and, burying her face in it,
+went on crying. Once more I found myself in the same protracted dilemma.
+Though vexed, I felt sorry for her, since her tears appeared to be
+genuine--even though I also had an idea that it was not so much for my
+mother that she was weeping as for the fact that she was unhappy, and
+had known happier days. How it would all have ended I do not know, had
+not her son reappeared and said that his father desired to see her.
+Thereupon she rose, and was just about to leave the room, when the
+General himself entered. He was a small, grizzled, thick-set man, with
+bushy black eyebrows, a grey, close-cropped head, and a very stern,
+haughty expression of countenance.
+
+I rose and bowed to him, but the General (who was wearing three stars
+on his green frockcoat) not only made no response to my salutation, but
+scarcely even looked at me; so that all at once I felt as though I were
+not a human being at all, but only some negligible object such as a
+settee or window; or, if I were a human being, as though I were quite
+indistinguishable from such a negligible object.
+
+"Then you have not yet written to the Countess, my dear?" he said to his
+wife in French, and with an imperturbable, yet determined, expression on
+his countenance.
+
+"Good-bye, Monsieur Irtenieff," Madame said to me, in her turn, as she
+made a proud gesture with her head and looked at my eyebrows just as her
+son had done. I bowed to her, and again to her husband, but my second
+salutation made no more impression upon him than if a window had just
+been opened or closed. Nevertheless the younger Iwin accompanied me to
+the door, and on the way told me that he was to go to St. Petersburg
+University, since his father had been appointed to a post in that city
+(and young Iwin named a very high office in the service).
+
+"Well, his Papa may do whatsoever he likes," I muttered to myself as I
+climbed into the drozhki, "but at all events I will never set foot in
+that house again. His wife weeps and looks at me as though I were the
+embodiment of woe, while that old pig of a General does not even give
+me a bow. However, I will get even with him some day." How I meant to do
+that I do not know, but my words nevertheless came true.
+
+Afterwards, I frequently found it necessary to remember the advice of
+my father when he said that I must cultivate the acquaintanceship of the
+Iwins, and not expect a man in the position of General Iwin to pay any
+attention to a boy like myself. But I had figured in that position long
+enough.
+
+
+
+
+XXI. PRINCE IVAN IVANOVITCH
+
+"Now for the last call--the visit to Nikitskaia Street," I said to
+Kuzma, and we started for Prince Ivan Ivanovitch's mansion.
+
+Towards the end, a round of calls usually brings one a certain amount
+of self-assurance: consequently I was approaching the Prince's abode in
+quite a tranquil frame of mind, when suddenly I remembered the Princess
+Kornakoff's words that I was his heir, and at the same moment caught
+sight of two carriages waiting at the portico. Instantly, my former
+nervousness returned.
+
+Both the old major-domo who opened the door to me, and the footman who
+took my coat, and the two male and three female visitors whom I found in
+the drawing-room, and, most of all, Prince Ivan Ivanovitch himself (whom
+I found clad in a "company" frockcoat and seated on a sofa) seemed to
+look at me as at an HEIR, and so to eye me with ill-will. Yet the Prince
+was very gracious and, after kissing me (that is to say, after pressing
+his cold, dry, flabby lips to my cheek for a second), asked me about
+my plans and pursuits, jested with me, inquired whether I still wrote
+verses of the kind which I used to indite in honour of my grandmother's
+birthdays, and invited me to dine with him that day. Nevertheless, in
+proportion as he grew the kinder, the more did I feel persuaded that his
+civility was only intended to conceal from me the fact that he disliked
+the idea of my being his heir. He had a custom (due to his false teeth,
+of which his mouth possessed a complete set) of raising his upper lip a
+little as he spoke, and producing a slight whistling sound from it; and
+whenever, on the present occasion, he did so it seemed to me that he was
+saying to himself: "A boy, a boy--I know it! And my heir, too--my heir!"
+
+When we were children, we had been used to calling the Prince "dear
+Uncle;" but now, in my capacity of heir, I could not bring my tongue
+to the phrase, while to say "Your Highness," as did one of the other
+visitors, seemed derogatory to my self-esteem. Consequently, never
+once during that visit did I call him anything at all. The personage,
+however, who most disturbed me was the old Princess who shared with me
+the position of prospective inheritor, and who lived in the Prince's
+house. While seated beside her at dinner, I felt firmly persuaded that
+the reason why she would not speak to me was that she disliked me for
+being her co-heir, and that the Prince, for his part, paid no attention
+to our side of the table for the reason that the Princess and myself
+hoped to succeed him, and so were alike distasteful in his sight.
+
+"You cannot think how I hated it all!" I said to Dimitrieff the same
+evening, in a desire to make a parade of disliking the notion of being
+an heir (somehow I thought it the thing to do). "You cannot think how
+I loathed the whole two hours that I spent there!--Yet he is a
+fine-looking old fellow, and was very kind to me," I added--wishing,
+among other things, to disabuse my friend of any possible idea that my
+loathing had arisen out of the fact that I had felt so small. "It is
+only the idea that people may be classing me with the Princess who lives
+with him, and who licks the dust off his boots. He is a wonderful old
+man, and good and considerate to everybody, but it is awful to see how
+he treats the Princess. Money is a detestable thing, and ruins all human
+relations.
+
+"Do you know, I think it would be far the best thing for me to have
+an open explanation with the Prince," I went on; "to tell him that I
+respect him as a man, but think nothing of being his heir, and that
+I desire him to leave me nothing, since that is the only condition on
+which I can, in future, visit his house."
+
+Instead of bursting out laughing when I said this, Dimitri pondered
+awhile in silence, and then answered:
+
+"You are wrong. Either you ought to refrain from supposing that people
+may be classing you with this Princess of whom you speak, or, if you
+DO suppose such a thing, you ought to suppose further that people are
+thinking what you yourself know quite well--namely, that such thoughts
+are so utterly foreign to your nature that you despise them and would
+never make them a basis for action. Suppose, however, that people DO
+suppose you to suppose such a thing--Well, to sum up," he added, feeling
+that he was getting a little mixed in his pronouncements, "you had much
+better not suppose anything of the kind."
+
+My friend was perfectly right, though it was not until long, long
+afterwards that experience of life taught me the evil that comes of
+thinking--still worse, of saying--much that seems very fine; taught me
+that there are certain thoughts which should always be kept to oneself,
+since brave words seldom go with brave deeds. I learnt then that
+the mere fact of giving utterance to a good intention often makes it
+difficult, nay, impossible, to carry that good intention into
+effect. Yet how is one to refrain from giving utterance to the brave,
+self-sufficient impulses of youth? Only long afterwards does one
+remember and regret them, even as one incontinently plucks a flower
+before its blooming, and subsequently finds it lying crushed and
+withered on the ground.
+
+The very next morning I, who had just been telling my friend Dimitri
+that money corrupts all human relations, and had (as we have seen)
+squandered the whole of my cash on pictures and Turkish pipes, accepted
+a loan of twenty roubles which he suggested should pay for my travelling
+expenses into the country, and remained a long while thereafter in his
+debt!
+
+
+
+
+XXII. INTIMATE CONVERSATION WITH MY FRIEND
+
+THIS conversation of ours took place in a phaeton on the way to
+Kuntsevo. Dimitri had invited me in the morning to go with him to his
+mother's, and had called for me after luncheon; the idea being that
+I should spend the evening, and perhaps also pass the night, at the
+country-house where his family lived. Only when we had left the city and
+exchanged its grimy streets and the unbearably deafening clatter of
+its pavements for the open vista of fields and the subdued grinding of
+carriage-wheels on a dusty high road (while the sweet spring air
+and prospect enveloped us on every side) did I awake from the new
+impressions and sensations of freedom into which the past two days had
+plunged me. Dimitri was in his kind and sociable mood. That is to say,
+he was neither frowning nor blinking nervously nor straightening his
+neck in his collar. For my own part, I was congratulating myself on
+those noble sentiments which I have expressed above, in the belief that
+they had led him to overlook my shameful encounter with Kolpikoff, and
+to refrain from despising me for it. Thus we talked together on many
+an intimate subject which even a friend seldom mentions to a friend. He
+told me about his family whose acquaintance I had not yet made--about
+his mother, his aunt, and his sister, as also about her whom Woloda and
+Dubkoff believed to be his "flame," and always spoke of as "the lady
+with the chestnut locks." Of his mother he spoke with a certain cold and
+formal commendation, as though to forestall any further mention of
+her; his aunt he extolled enthusiastically, though with a touch of
+condescension in his tone; his sister he scarcely mentioned at all, as
+though averse to doing so in my presence; but on the subject of "the
+lady with the chestnut locks" (whose real name was Lubov Sergievna,
+and who was a grown-up young lady living on a family footing with the
+Nechludoffs) he discoursed with animation.
+
+"Yes, she is a wonderful woman," he said with a conscious reddening of
+the face, yet looking me in the eyes with dogged temerity. "True, she
+is no longer young, and even rather elderly, as well as by no means
+good-looking; but as for loving a mere featherhead, a mere beauty--well,
+I never could understand that, for it is such a silly thing to do."
+(Dimitri said this as though he had just discovered a most novel and
+extraordinary truth.) "I am certain, too, that such a soul, such a heart
+and principles, as are hers are not to be found elsewhere in the world
+of the present day." (I do not know whence he had derived the habit
+of saying that few good things were discoverable in the world of the
+present day, but at all events he loved to repeat the expression, and it
+somehow suited him.)
+
+"Only, I am afraid," he went on quietly, after thus annihilating all
+such men as were foolish enough to admire mere beauty, "I am afraid
+that you will not understand or realise her quickly. She is modest,
+even secretive, and by no means fond of exhibiting her beautiful and
+surprising qualities. Now, my mother--who, as you will see, is a noble,
+sensible woman--has known Lubov Sergievna, for many years; yet even to
+this day she does not properly understand her. Shall I tell you why I
+was out of temper last evening when you were questioning me? Well, you
+must know that the day before yesterday Lubov asked me to accompany her
+to Ivan Yakovlevitch's (you have heard of him, I suppose? the fellow who
+seems to be mad, but who, in reality, is a very remarkable man). Well,
+Lubov is extremely religious, and understands Ivan Yakovlevitch to the
+full. She often goes to see him, and converses with him, and gives
+him money for the poor--money which she has earned herself. She is a
+marvellous woman, as you will see. Well, I went with her to Ivan's,
+and felt very grateful to her for having afforded me the opportunity
+of exchanging a word with so remarkable a man; but my mother could not
+understand our action at all, and discerned in it only superstition.
+Consequently, last night she and I quarrelled for the first time in our
+lives. A very bitter one it was, too," he concluded, with a convulsive
+shrug of his shoulders, as though the mention of it recalled the
+feelings which he had then experienced.
+
+"And what are your intentions about it all?" I inquired, to divert
+him from such a disagreeable recollection. "That is to say, how do you
+imagine it is going to turn out? Do you ever speak to her about the
+future, or about how your love or friendship are going to end?"
+
+"Do you mean, do I intend to marry her eventually?" he inquired, in his
+turn, with a renewed blush, but turning himself round and looking me
+boldly in the face.
+
+"Yes, certainly," I replied as I settled myself down. "We are both of us
+grown-up, as well as friends, so we may as well discuss our future life
+as we drive along. No one could very well overlook or overhear us now."
+
+"Why should I NOT marry her?" he went on in response to my reassuring
+reply. "It is my aim--as it should be the aim of every honourable
+man--to be as good and as happy as possible; and with her, if she
+should still be willing when I have become more independent, I should be
+happier and better than with the greatest beauty in the world."
+
+Absorbed in such conversation, we hardly noticed that we were
+approaching Kuntsevo, or that the sky was becoming overcast and
+beginning to threaten rain. On the right, the sun was slowly sinking
+behind the ancient trees of the Kuntsevo park--one half of its brilliant
+disc obscured with grey, subluminous cloud, and the other half sending
+forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking
+relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing
+against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch
+contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above
+a young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little
+further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion
+could be seen projecting above a belt of trees and undergrowth--one side
+of them reflecting the glittering rays of the sun, and the other side
+harmonising with the more louring portion of the heavens. Below us, and
+to the left, showed the still blue of a pond where it lay surrounded
+with pale-green laburnums--its dull, concave-looking depths repeating
+the trees in more sombre shades of colour over the surface of a hillock.
+Beyond the water spread the black expanse of a ploughed field, with the
+straight line of a dark-green ridge by which it was bisected running far
+into the distance, and there joining the leaden, threatening horizon.
+
+On either side of the soft road along which the phaeton was pursuing the
+even tenour of its way, bright-green, tangled, juicy belts of rye were
+sprouting here and there into stalk. Not a motion was perceptible in the
+air, only a sweet freshness, and everything looked extraordinarily clear
+and bright. Near the road I could see a little brown path winding its
+way among the dark-green, quarter-grown stems of rye, and somehow that
+path reminded me vividly of our village, and somehow (through some
+connection of thought) the idea of that village reminded me vividly of
+Sonetchka, and so of the fact that I was in love with her.
+
+Notwithstanding my fondness for Dimitri and the pleasure which his
+frankness had afforded me, I now felt as though I desired to hear no
+more about his feelings and intentions with regard to Lubov Sergievna,
+but to talk unstintedly about my own love for Sonetchka, who seemed to
+me an object of affection of a far higher order. Yet for some reason
+or another I could not make up my mind to tell him straight out how
+splendid it would seem when I had married Sonetchka and we were living
+in the country--of how we should have little children who would crawl
+about the floor and call me Papa, and of how delighted I should be when
+he, Dimitri, brought his wife, Lubov Sergievna, to see us, wearing an
+expensive gown. Accordingly, instead of saying all that, I pointed to
+the setting sun, and merely remarked: "Look, Dimitri! How splendid!"
+
+To this, however, Dimitri made no reply, since he was evidently
+dissatisfied at my answering his confession (which it had cost him much
+to make) by directing his attention to natural objects (to which he
+was, in general, indifferent). Upon him Nature had an effect altogether
+different to what she had upon myself, for she affected him rather by
+her industry than by her beauty--he loved her rather with his intellect
+than with his senses.
+
+"I am absolutely happy," I went on, without noticing that he was
+altogether taken up with his own thoughts and oblivious of anything that
+I might be saying. "You will remember how told you about a girl with
+whom I used to be in love when was a little boy? Well, I saw her
+again only this morning, and am now infatuated with her." Then I told
+him--despite his continued expression of indifference--about my love,
+and about all my plans for my future connubial happiness. Strangely
+enough, no sooner had I related in detail the whole strength of my
+feelings than I instantly became conscious of its diminution.
+
+The rain overtook us just as we were turning into the avenue of
+birch-trees which led to the house, but it did not really wet us. I only
+knew that it was raining by the fact that I felt a drop fall, first on
+my nose, and then on my hand, and heard something begin to patter upon
+the young, viscous leaves of the birch-trees as, drooping their curly
+branches overhead, they seemed to imbibe the pure, shining drops with an
+avidity which filled the whole avenue with scent. We descended from the
+carriage, so as to reach the house the quicker through the garden, but
+found ourselves confronted at the entrance-door by four ladies, two of
+whom were knitting, one reading a book, and the fourth walking to and
+fro with a little dog. Thereupon, Dimitri began to present me to his
+mother, sister, and aunt, as well as to Lubov Sergievna. For a moment
+they remained where they were, but almost instantly the rain became
+heavier.
+
+"Let us go into the verandah; you can present him to us there," said the
+lady whom I took to be Dimitri's mother, and we all of us ascended the
+entrance-steps.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII. THE NECHLUDOFFS
+
+From the first, the member of this company who struck me the most was
+Lubov Sergievna, who, holding a lapdog in her arms and wearing stout
+laced boots, was the last of the four ladies to ascend the staircase,
+and twice stopped to gaze at me intently and then kiss her little dog.
+She was anything but good-looking, since she was red-haired, thin,
+short, and slightly crooked. What made her plain face all the plainer
+was the queer way in which her hair was parted to one side (it looked
+like the wigs which bald women contrive for themselves). However much I
+should have liked to applaud my friend, I could not find a single comely
+feature in her. Even her brown eyes, though expressive of good-humour,
+were small and dull--were, in fact, anything but pretty; while her hands
+(those most characteristic of features), were though neither large nor
+ill-shaped, coarse and red.
+
+As soon as we reached the verandah, each of the ladies, except Dimitri's
+sister Varenika--who also had been regarding me attentively out of
+her large, dark-grey eyes--said a few words to me before resuming her
+occupation, while Varenika herself began to read aloud from a book which
+she held on her lap and steadied with her finger.
+
+The Princess Maria Ivanovna was a tall, well-built woman of forty. To
+judge by the curls of half-grey hair which descended below her cap one
+might have taken her for more, but as soon as ever one observed the
+fresh, extraordinarily tender, and almost wrinkleless face, as well
+as, most of all, the lively, cheerful sparkle of the large eyes, one
+involuntarily took her for less. Her eyes were black and very frank, her
+lips thin and slightly severe, her nose regular and slightly inclined to
+the left, and her hands ringless, large, and almost like those of a man,
+but with finely tapering fingers. She wore a dark-blue dress fastened
+to the throat and sitting closely to her firm, still youthful waist--a
+waist which she evidently pinched. Lastly, she held herself very
+upright, and was knitting a garment of some kind. As soon as I stepped
+on to the verandah she took me by the hand, drew me to her as though
+wishing to scrutinise me more closely, and said, as she gazed at me with
+the same cold, candid glance as her son's, that she had long known me
+by report from Dimitri, and that therefore, in order to make my
+acquaintance thoroughly, she had invited me to stay these twenty-four
+hours in her house.
+
+"Do just as you please here," she said, "and stand on no ceremony
+whatever with us, even as we shall stand on none with you. Pray walk,
+read, listen, or sleep as the mood may take you."
+
+Sophia Ivanovna was an old maid and the Princess's younger sister,
+though she looked the elder of the two. She had that exceedingly
+overstuffed appearance which old maids always present who are short
+of stature but wear corsets. It seemed as though her healthiness had
+shifted upwards to the point of choking her, her short, fat hands
+would not meet below her projecting bust, and the line of her waist was
+scarcely visible at all.
+
+Notwithstanding that the Princess Maria Ivanovna had black hair and
+eyes, while Sophia Ivanovna had white hair and large, vivacious,
+tranquilly blue eyes (a rare combination), there was a great likeness
+between the two sisters, for they had the same expression, nose, and
+lips. The only difference was that Sophia's nose and lips were a trifle
+coarser than Maria's, and that, when she smiled, those features inclined
+towards the right, whereas Maria's inclined towards the left. Sophia, to
+judge by her dress and coiffure, was still youthful at heart, and would
+never have displayed grey curls, even if she had possessed them. Yet at
+first her glance and bearing towards me seemed very proud, and made me
+nervous, whereas I at once felt at home with the Princess. Perhaps it
+was only Sophia's stoutness and a certain resemblance to portraits of
+Catherine the Great that gave her, in my eyes, a haughty aspect, but at
+all events I felt quite intimidated when she looked at me intently and
+said, "Friends of our friends are our friends also." I became reassured
+and changed my opinion about her only when, after saying those words,
+she opened her mouth and sighed deeply. It may be that she owed her
+habit of sighing after every few words--with a great distention of the
+mouth and a slight drooping of her large blue eyes--to her stoutness,
+yet it was none the less one which expressed so much good-humour that
+I at once lost all fear of her, and found her actually attractive. Her
+eyes were charming, her voice pleasant and musical, and even the flowing
+lines of her fullness seemed to my youthful vision not wholly lacking in
+beauty.
+
+I had imagined that Lubov Sergievna, as my friend's friend, would at
+once say something friendly and familiar to me; yet, after gazing at me
+fixedly for a while, as though in doubt whether the remark she was about
+to make to me would not be too friendly, she at length asked me what
+faculty I was in. After that she stared at me as before, in evident
+hesitation as to whether or not to say something civil and familiar,
+until, remarking her perplexity, I besought her with a look to speak
+freely. Yet all she then said was, "They tell me the Universities pay
+very little attention to science now," and turned away to call her
+little dog.
+
+All that evening she spoke only in disjointed fragments of this
+kind--fragments which had no connection either with the point or with
+one another; yet I had such faith in Dimitri, and he so often kept
+looking from her to me with an expression which mutely asked me, "Now,
+what do you think of that?" that, though I entirely failed to persuade
+myself that in Lubov Sergievna there was anything to speak of, I could
+not bear to express the thought, even to myself.
+
+As for the last member of the family, Varenika, she was a well-developed
+girl of sixteen. The only good features in her were a pair of dark-grey
+eyes,--which, in their expression of gaiety mingled with quiet
+attention, greatly resembled those of her aunt--a long coil of flaxen
+hair, and extremely delicate, beautiful hands.
+
+"I expect, Monsieur Nicolas, you find it wearisome to hear a story begun
+from the middle?" said Sophia Ivanovna with her good-natured sigh as she
+turned over some pieces of clothing which she was sewing. The reading
+aloud had ceased for the moment because Dimitri had left the room on
+some errand or another.
+
+"Or perhaps you have read Rob Roy before?" she added.
+
+At that period I thought it incumbent upon me, in virtue of my student's
+uniform, to reply in a very "clever and original" manner to every
+question put to me by people whom I did not know very well, and regarded
+such short, clear answers as "Yes," "No," "I like it," or "I do not care
+for it," as things to be ashamed of. Accordingly, looking down at my new
+and fashionably-cut trousers and the glittering buttons of my tunic, I
+replied that I had never read Rob Roy, but that it interested me greatly
+to hear it, since I preferred to read books from the middle rather than
+from the beginning.
+
+"It is twice as interesting," I added with a self-satisfied smirk;
+"for then one can guess what has gone before as well as what is to come
+after."
+
+The Princess smiled what I thought was a forced smile, but one which I
+discovered later to be her only one.
+
+"Well, perhaps that is true," she said. "But tell me, Nicolas (you will
+not be offended if I drop the Monsieur)--tell me, are you going to be in
+town long? When do you go away?"
+
+"I do not know quite. Perhaps to-morrow, or perhaps not for some while
+yet," I replied for some reason or another, though I knew perfectly well
+that in reality we were to go to-morrow.
+
+"I wish you could stop longer, both for your own sake and for
+Dimitri's," she said in a meditative manner. "At your age friendship is
+a weak thing."
+
+I felt that every one was looking at me, and waiting to see what I
+should say--though certainly Varenika made a pretence of looking at
+her aunt's work. I felt, in fact, as though I were being put through an
+examination, and that it behoved me to figure in it as well as possible.
+
+"Yes, to ME Dimitri's friendship is most useful," I replied, "but to HIM
+mine cannot be of any use at all, since he is a thousand times better
+than I." (Dimitri could not hear what I said, or I should have feared
+his detecting the insincerity of my words.)
+
+Again the Princess smiled her unnatural, yet characteristically natural,
+smile.
+
+"Just listen to him!" she said. "But it is YOU who are the little
+monster of perfection."
+
+"'Monster of perfection,'" I thought to myself. "That is splendid. I
+must make a note of it."
+
+"Yet, to dismiss yourself, he has been extraordinarily clever in that
+quarter," she went on in a lower tone (which pleased me somehow) as she
+indicated Lubov Sergievna with her eyes, "since he has discovered in our
+poor little Auntie" (such was the pet name which they gave Lubov) "all
+sorts of perfections which I, who have known her and her little dog for
+twenty years, had never yet suspected. Varenika, go and tell them to
+bring me a glass of water," she added, letting her eyes wander again.
+Probably she had bethought her that it was too soon, or not entirely
+necessary, to let me into all the family secrets. "Yet no--let HIM go,
+for he has nothing to do, while you are reading. Pray go to the door, my
+friend," she said to me, "and walk about fifteen steps down the passage.
+Then halt and call out pretty loudly, 'Peter, bring Maria Ivanovna a
+glass of iced water'"--and she smiled her curious smile once more.
+
+"I expect she wants to say something about me in my absence," I thought
+to myself as I left the room. "I expect she wants to remark that she can
+see very clearly that I am a very, very clever young man."
+
+Hardly had I taken a dozen steps when I was overtaken by Sophia
+Ivanovna, who, though fat and short of breath, trod with surprising
+lightness and agility.
+
+"Merci, mon cher," she said. "I will go and tell them myself."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV. LOVE
+
+SOPHIA IVANOVNA, as I afterwards came to know her, was one of those
+rare, young-old women who are born for family life, but to whom that
+happiness has been denied by fate. Consequently all that store of their
+love which should have been poured out upon a husband and children
+becomes pent up in their hearts, until they suddenly decide to let it
+overflow upon a few chosen individuals. Yet so inexhaustible is that
+store of old maids' love that, despite the number of individuals so
+selected, there still remains an abundant surplus of affection which
+they lavish upon all by whom they are surrounded--upon all, good or bad,
+whom they may chance to meet in their daily life.
+
+Of love there are three kinds--love of beauty, the love which denies
+itself, and practical love.
+
+Of the desire of a young man for a young woman, as well as of the
+reverse instance, I am not now speaking, for of such tendresses I am
+wary, seeing that I have been too unhappy in my life to have been able
+ever to see in such affection a single spark of truth, but rather a
+lying pretence in which sensuality, connubial relations, money, and
+the wish to bind hands or to unloose them have rendered feeling such a
+complex affair as to defy analysis. Rather am I speaking of that love
+for a human being which, according to the spiritual strength of its
+possessor, concentrates itself either upon a single individual, upon
+a few, or upon many--of love for a mother, a father, a brother,
+little children, a friend, a compatriot--of love, in short, for one's
+neighbour.
+
+Love of beauty consists in a love of the sense of beauty and of its
+expression. People who thus love conceive the object of their affection
+to be desirable only in so far as it arouses in them that pleasurable
+sensation of which the consciousness and the expression soothes the
+senses. They change the object of their love frequently, since their
+principal aim consists in ensuring that the voluptuous feeling of their
+adoration shall be constantly titillated. To preserve in themselves
+this sensuous condition, they talk unceasingly, and in the most elegant
+terms, on the subject of the love which they feel, not only for its
+immediate object, but also for objects upon which it does not touch at
+all. This country of ours contains many such individuals--individuals
+of that well-known class who, cultivating "the beautiful," not only
+discourse of their cult to all and sundry, but speak of it pre-eminently
+in FRENCH. It may seem a strange and ridiculous thing to say, but I am
+convinced that among us we have had in the past, and still have, a
+large section of society--notably women--whose love for their friends,
+husbands, or children would expire to-morrow if they were debarred from
+dilating upon it in the tongue of France!
+
+Love of the second kind--renunciatory love--consists in a yearning
+to undergo self-sacrifice for the object beloved, regardless of any
+consideration whether such self-sacrifice will benefit or injure the
+object in question. "There is no evil which I would not endure to show
+both the world and him or her whom I adore my devotion." There we have
+the formula of this kind of love. People who thus love never look
+for reciprocity of affection, since it is a finer thing to sacrifice
+yourself for one who does not comprehend you. Also, they are always
+painfully eager to exaggerate the merits of their sacrifice; usually
+constant in their love, for the reason that they would find it hard to
+forego the kudos of the deprivations which they endure for the object
+beloved; always ready to die, to prove to him or to her the entirety of
+their devotion; but sparing of such small daily proofs of their love
+as call for no special effort of self-immolation. They do not much care
+whether you eat well, sleep well, keep your spirits up, or enjoy good
+health, nor do they ever do anything to obtain for you those blessings
+if they have it in their power; but, should you be confronting a bullet,
+or have fallen into the water, or stand in danger of being burnt, or
+have had your heart broken in a love affair--well, for all these
+things they are prepared if the occasion should arise. Moreover, people
+addicted to love of such a self-sacrificing order are invariably
+proud of their love, exacting, jealous, distrustful, and--strange to
+tell--anxious that the object of their adoration should incur perils (so
+that they may save it from calamity, and console it thereafter) and even
+be vicious (so that they may purge it of its vice).
+
+Suppose, now, that you are living in the country with a wife who loves
+you in this self-sacrificing manner. You may be healthy and contented,
+and have occupations which interest you, while, on the other hand,
+your wife may be too weak to superintend the household work (which,
+in consequence, will be left to the servants), or to look after the
+children (who, in consequence, will be left to the nurses), or to put
+her heart into any work whatsoever: and all because she loves nobody and
+nothing but yourself. She may be patently ill, yet she will say not a
+word to you about it, for fear of distressing you. She may be patently
+ennuyee, yet for your sake she will be prepared to be so for the rest
+of her life. She may be patently depressed because you stick so
+persistently to your occupations (whether sport, books, farming, state
+service, or anything else) and see clearly that they are doing you harm;
+yet, for all that, she will keep silence, and suffer it to be so. Yet,
+should you but fall sick--and, despite her own ailments and your prayers
+that she will not distress herself in vain, your loving wife will remain
+sitting inseparably by your bedside. Every moment you will feel her
+sympathetic gaze resting upon you and, as it were, saying: "There! I
+told you so, but it is all one to me, and I shall not leave you." In the
+morning you maybe a little better, and move into another room. The room,
+however, will be insufficiently warmed or set in order; the soup which
+alone you feel you could eat will not have been cooked; nor will any
+medicine have been sent for. Yet, though worn out with night watching,
+your loving wife will continue to regard you with an expression of
+sympathy, to walk about on tiptoe, and to whisper unaccustomed and
+obscure orders to the servants. You may wish to be read to--and your
+loving wife will tell you with a sigh that she feels sure you will be
+unable to hear her reading, and only grow angry at her awkwardness in
+doing it; wherefore you had better not be read to at all. You may wish
+to walk about the room--and she will tell you that it would be far
+better for you not to do so. You may wish to talk with some friends who
+have called--and she will tell you that talking is not good for you. At
+nightfall the fever may come upon you again, and you may wish to be
+left alone whereupon your loving wife, though wasted, pale, and full of
+yawns, will go on sitting in a chair opposite you, as dusk falls, until
+her very slightest movement, her very slightest sound, rouses you to
+feelings of anger and impatience. You may have a servant who has lived
+with you for twenty years, and to whom you are attached, and who would
+tend you well and to your satisfaction during the night, for the reason
+that he has been asleep all day and is, moreover, paid a salary for
+his services; yet your wife will not suffer him to wait upon you. No;
+everything she must do herself with her weak, unaccustomed fingers (of
+which you follow the movements with suppressed irritation as those pale
+members do their best to uncork a medicine bottle, to snuff a candle, to
+pour out physic, or to touch you in a squeamish sort of way). If you are
+an impatient, hasty sort of man, and beg of her to leave the room, you
+will hear by the vexed, distressed sounds which come from her that
+she is humbly sobbing and weeping behind the door, and whispering
+foolishness of some kind to the servant. Finally if you do not die,
+your loving wife--who has not slept during the whole three weeks of your
+illness (a fact of which she will constantly remind you)--will fall ill
+in her turn, waste away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of
+any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you
+have regained your normal state of health she will express to you
+her self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of
+benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to
+yourself and to every one else in your vicinity.
+
+The third kind of love--practical love--consists of a yearning to
+satisfy every need, every desire, every caprice, nay, every vice, of the
+being beloved. People who love thus always love their life long, since,
+the more they love, the more they get to know the object beloved,
+and the easier they find the task of loving it--that is to say, of
+satisfying its desires. Their love seldom finds expression in words, but
+if it does so, it expresses itself neither with assurance nor beauty,
+but rather in a shamefaced, awkward manner, since people of this kind
+invariably have misgivings that they are loving unworthily. People of
+this kind love even the faults of their adored one, for the reason that
+those faults afford them the power of constantly satisfying new
+desires. They look for their affection to be returned, and even
+deceive themselves into believing that it is returned, and are happy
+accordingly: yet in the reverse case they will still continue to
+desire happiness for their beloved one, and try by every means in their
+power--whether moral or material, great or small--to provide it.
+
+Such practical love it was--love for her nephew, for her niece, for
+her sister, for Lubov Sergievna, and even for myself, because I loved
+Dimitri--that shone in the eyes, as well as in the every word and
+movement, of Sophia Ivanovna.
+
+Only long afterwards did I learn to value her at her true worth. Yet
+even now the question occurred to me: "What has made Dimitri--who
+throughout has tried to understand love differently to other young
+fellows, and has always had before his eyes the gentle, loving Sophia
+Ivanovna--suddenly fall so deeply in love with the incomprehensible
+Lubov Sergievna, and declare that in his aunt he can only find good
+QUALITIES? Verily it is a true saying that 'a prophet hath no honour in
+his own country.' One of two things: either every man has in him more
+of bad than of good, or every man is more receptive to bad than to good.
+Lubov Sergievna he has not known for long, whereas his aunt's love he
+has known since the day of his birth."
+
+
+
+
+XXV. I BECOME BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS
+
+WHEN I returned to the verandah, I found that they were not talking
+of me at all, as I had anticipated. On the contrary, Varenika had laid
+aside the book, and was engaged in a heated dispute with Dimitri, who,
+for his part, was walking up and down the verandah, and frowningly
+adjusting his neck in his collar as he did so. The subject of the
+quarrel seemed to be Ivan Yakovlevitch and superstition, but it was too
+animated a difference for its underlying cause not to be something which
+concerned the family much more nearly. Although the Princess and Lubov
+Sergievna were sitting by in silence, they were following every word,
+and evidently tempted at times to take part in the dispute; yet always,
+just when they were about to speak, they checked themselves, and left
+the field clear for the two principles, Dimitri and Varenika. On my
+entry, the latter glanced at me with such an indifferent air that
+I could see she was wholly absorbed in the quarrel and did not care
+whether she spoke in my presence or not. The Princess too looked the
+same, and was clearly on Varenika's side, while Dimitri began, if
+anything, to raise his voice still more when I appeared, and Lubov
+Sergievna, for her part, observed to no one in particular: "Old people
+are quite right when they say, 'Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
+pouvait.'"
+
+Nevertheless this quotation did not check the dispute, though it somehow
+gave me the impression that the side represented by the speaker and her
+friend was in the wrong. Although it was a little awkward for me to be
+present at a petty family difference, the fact that the true relations
+of the family revealed themselves during its progress, and that my
+presence did nothing to hinder that revelation, afforded me considerable
+gratification.
+
+How often it happens that for years one sees a family cover themselves
+over with a conventional cloak of decorum, and preserve the real
+relations of its members a secret from every eye! How often, too, have
+I remarked that, the more impenetrable (and therefore the more decorous)
+is the cloak, the harsher are the relations which it conceals! Yet, once
+let some unexpected question--often a most trivial one (the colour of
+a woman's hair, a visit, a man's horses, and so forth)--arise in that
+family circle, and without any visible cause there will also arise an
+ever-growing difference, until in time the cloak of decorum becomes
+unequal to confining the quarrel within due bounds, and, to the dismay
+of the disputants and the astonishment of the auditors, the real and
+ill-adjusted relations of the family are laid bare, and the cloak,
+now useless for concealment, is bandied from hand to hand among the
+contending factions until it serves only to remind one of the years
+during which it successfully deceived one's perceptions. Sometimes to
+strike one's head violently against a ceiling hurts one less than just
+to graze some spot which has been hurt and bruised before: and in
+almost every family there exists some such raw and tender spot. In the
+Nechludoff family that spot was Dimitri's extraordinary affection
+for Lubov Sergievna, which aroused in the mother and sister, if not a
+jealous feeling, at all events a sense of hurt family pride. This
+was the grave significance which underlay, for all those present, the
+seeming dispute about Ivan Yakovlevitch and superstition.
+
+"In anything that other people deride and despise you invariably profess
+to see something extraordinarily good!" Varenika was saying in her clear
+voice, as she articulated each syllable with careful precision.
+
+"Indeed?" retorted Dimitri with an impatient toss of his head. "Now,
+in the first place, only a most unthinking person could ever speak of
+DESPISING such a remarkable man as Ivan Yakovlevitch, while, in the
+second place, it is YOU who invariably profess to see nothing good in
+what confronts you."
+
+Meanwhile Sophia Ivanovna kept looking anxiously at us as she turned
+first to her nephew, and then to her niece, and then to myself. Twice
+she opened her mouth as though to say what was in her mind and drew a
+deep sigh.
+
+"Varia, PLEASE go on reading," she said at length, at the same time
+handing her niece the book, and patting her hand kindly. "I wish to
+know whether he ever found HER again" (as a matter of fact, the novel in
+question contained not a word about any one finding any one else). "And,
+Mitia dear," she added to her nephew, despite the glum looks which he
+was throwing at her for having interrupted the logical thread of his
+deductions, "you had better let me poultice your cheek, or your teeth
+will begin to ache again."
+
+After that the reading was resumed. Yet the quarrel had in no way
+dispelled the calm atmosphere of family and intellectual harmony which
+enveloped this circle of ladies.
+
+Clearly deriving its inspiration and character from the Princess
+Maria Ivanovna, it was a circle which, for me, had a wholly novel
+and attractive character of logicalness mingled with simplicity and
+refinement. That character I could discern in the daintiness, good
+taste, and solidity of everything about me, whether the handbell, the
+binding of the book, the settee, or the table. Likewise, I divined it in
+the upright, well-corseted pose of the Princess, in her pendant curls
+of grey hair, in the manner in which she had, at our first introduction,
+called me plain "Nicolas" and "he," in the occupations of the ladies
+(the reading and the sewing of garments), and in the unusual whiteness
+of their hands. Those hands, en passant, showed a family feature common
+to all--namely, the feature that the flesh of the palm on the outer side
+was rosy in colour, and divided by a sharp, straight line from the pure
+whiteness of the upper portion of the hand. Still more was the character
+of this feminine circle expressed in the manner in which the three
+ladies spoke Russian and French--spoke them, that is to say, with
+perfect articulation of syllables and pedantic accuracy of substantives
+and prepositions. All this, and more especially the fact that the ladies
+treated me as simply and as seriously as a real grown-up--telling me
+their opinions, and listening to my own (a thing to which I was so
+little accustomed that, for all my glittering buttons and blue facings,
+I was in constant fear of being told: "Surely you do not think that we
+are talking SERIOUSLY to you? Go away and learn something")--all this, I
+say, caused me to feel an entire absence of restraint in this society. I
+ventured at times to rise, to move about, and to talk boldly to each
+of the ladies except Varenika (whom I always felt it was unbecoming, or
+even forbidden, for me to address unless she first spoke to me).
+
+As I listened to her clear, pleasant voice reading aloud, I kept
+glancing from her to the path of the flower-garden, where the
+rain-spots were making small dark circles in the sand, and thence to
+the lime-trees, upon the leaves of which the rain was pattering down in
+large detached drops shed from the pale, shimmering edge of the livid
+blue cloud which hung suspended over us. Then I would glance at her
+again, and then at the last purple rays of the setting sun where they
+were throwing the dense clusters of old, rain-washed birches into
+brilliant relief. Yet again my eyes would return to Varenika, and, each
+time that they did so, it struck me afresh that she was not nearly so
+plain as at first I had thought her.
+
+"How I wish that I wasn't in love already!" I reflected, "or that
+Sonetchka was Varenika! How nice it would be if suddenly I could become
+a member of this family, and have the three ladies for my mother, aunt,
+and wife respectively!" All the time that these thoughts kept passing
+through my head I kept attentively regarding Varenika as she read, until
+somehow I felt as though I were magnetising her, and that presently she
+must look at me. Sure enough, at length she raised her head, threw me a
+glance, and, meeting my eyes, turned away.
+
+"The rain does not seem to stop," she remarked.
+
+Suddenly a new feeling came over me. I began to feel as though
+everything now happening to me was a repetition of some similar
+occurrence before--as though on some previous occasion a shower of rain
+had begun to fall, and the sun had set behind birch-trees, and I
+had been looking at her, and she had been reading aloud, and I had
+magnetised her, and she had looked up at me. Yes, all this I seemed to
+recall as though it had happened once before.
+
+"Surely she is not--SHE?" was my thought. "Surely IT is not beginning?"
+However, I soon decided that Varenika was not the "SHE" referred to, and
+that "it" was not "beginning." "In the first place," I said to myself,
+"Varenika is not at all BEAUTIFUL. She is just an ordinary girl whose
+acquaintance I have made in the ordinary way, whereas the she whom I
+shall meet somewhere and some day and in some not ordinary way will
+be anything but ordinary. This family pleases me so much only because
+hitherto I have never seen anybody. Such things will always be happening
+in the future, and I shall see many more such families during my life."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI. I SHOW OFF
+
+AT tea time the reading came to an end, and the ladies began to talk
+among themselves of persons and things unknown to me. This I conceived
+them to be doing on purpose to make me conscious (for all their kind
+demeanour) of the difference which years and position in the world had
+set between them and myself. In general discussions, however, in which I
+could take part I sought to atone for my late silence by exhibiting that
+extraordinary cleverness and originality to which I felt compelled by
+my University uniform. For instance, when the conversation turned upon
+country houses, I said that Prince Ivan Ivanovitch had a villa near
+Moscow which people came to see even from London and Paris, and that
+it contained balustrading which had cost 380,000 roubles. Likewise, I
+remarked that the Prince was a very near relation of mine, and that,
+when lunching with him the same day, he had invited me to go and spend
+the entire summer with him at that villa, but that I had declined, since
+I knew the villa well, and had stayed in it more than once, and that all
+those balustradings and bridges did not interest me, since I could
+not bear ornamental work, especially in the country, where I liked
+everything to be wholly countrified. After delivering myself of this
+extraordinary and complicated romance, I grew confused, and blushed so
+much that every one must have seen that I was lying. Both Varenika, who
+was handing me a cup of tea, and Sophia Ivanovna, who had been gazing at
+me throughout, turned their heads away, and began to talk of something
+else with an expression which I afterwards learnt that good-natured
+people assume when a very young man has told them a manifest string of
+lies--an expression which says, "Yes, we know he is lying, and why he is
+doing it, the poor young fellow!"
+
+What I had said about Prince Ivan Ivanovitch having a country villa, I
+had related simply because I could find no other pretext for mentioning
+both my relationship to the Prince and the fact that I had been to
+luncheon with him that day; yet why I had said all I had about the
+balustrading costing 380,000 roubles, and about my having several times
+visited the Prince at that villa (I had never once been there--more
+especially since the Prince possessed no residences save in Moscow and
+Naples, as the Nechludoffs very well knew), I could not possibly tell
+you. Neither in childhood nor in adolescence nor in riper years did I
+ever remark in myself the vice of falsehood--on the contrary, I was, if
+anything, too outspoken and truthful. Yet, during this first stage of
+my manhood, I often found myself seized with a strange and unreasonable
+tendency to lie in the most desperate fashion. I say advisedly "in the
+most desperate fashion," for the reason that I lied in matters in which
+it was the easiest thing in the world to detect me. On the whole I
+think that a vain-glorious desire to appear different from what I was,
+combined with an impossible hope that the lie would never be found out,
+was the chief cause of this extraordinary impulse.
+
+After tea, since the rain had stopped and the after-glow of sunset was
+calm and clear, the Princess proposed that we should go and stroll in
+the lower garden, and admire her favourite spots there. Following my
+rule to be always original, and conceiving that clever people like
+myself and the Princess must surely be above the banalities of
+politeness, I replied that I could not bear a walk with no object in
+view, and that, if I DID walk, I liked to walk alone. I had no idea that
+this speech was simply rude; all I thought was that, even as nothing
+could be more futile than empty compliments, so nothing could be more
+pleasing and original than a little frank brusquerie. However, though
+much pleased with my answer, I set out with the rest of the company.
+
+The Princess's favourite spot of all was at the very bottom of the lower
+garden, where a little bridge spanned a narrow piece of swamp. The view
+there was very restricted, yet very intimate and pleasing. We are so
+accustomed to confound art with nature that, often enough, phenomena of
+nature which are never to be met with in pictures seem to us unreal, and
+give us the impression that nature is unnatural, or vice versa; whereas
+phenomena of nature which occur with too much frequency in pictures seem
+to us hackneyed, and views which are to be met with in real life,
+but which appear to us too penetrated with a single idea or a single
+sentiment, seem to us arabesques. The view from the Princess's favourite
+spot was as follows. On the further side of a small lake, over-grown
+with weeds round its edges, rose a steep ascent covered with bushes and
+with huge old trees of many shades of green, while, overhanging the lake
+at the foot of the ascent, stood an ancient birch tree which, though
+partly supported by stout roots implanted in the marshy bank of the
+lake, rested its crown upon a tall, straight poplar, and dangled its
+curved branches over the smooth surface of the pond--both branches and
+the surrounding greenery being reflected therein as in a mirror.
+
+"How lovely!" said the Princess with a nod of her head, and addressing
+no one in particular.
+
+"Yes, marvellous!" I replied in my desire to show that had an opinion
+of my own on every subject. "Yet somehow it all looks to me so terribly
+like a scheme of decoration."
+
+The Princess went on gazing at the scene as though she had not heard me,
+and turning to her sister and Lubov Sergievna at intervals, in order to
+point out to them its details--especially a curved, pendent bough, with
+its reflection in the water, which particularly pleased her. Sophia
+Ivanovna observed to me that it was all very beautiful, and that she and
+her sister would sometimes spend hours together at this spot; yet it was
+clear that her remarks were meant merely to please the Princess. I have
+noticed that people who are gifted with the faculty of loving are
+seldom receptive to the beauties of nature. Lubov Sergievna also seemed
+enraptured, and asked (among other things), "How does that birch tree
+manage to support itself? Has it stood there long?" Yet the next moment
+she became absorbed in contemplation of her little dog Susetka, which,
+with its stumpy paws pattering to and fro upon the bridge in a mincing
+fashion, seemed to say by the expression of its face that this was the
+first time it had ever found itself out of doors. As for Dimitri, he
+fell to discoursing very logically to his mother on the subject of how
+no view can be beautiful of which the horizon is limited. Varenika
+alone said nothing. Glancing at her, I saw that she was leaning over
+the parapet of the bridge, her profile turned towards me, and gazing
+straight in front of her. Something seemed to be interesting her deeply,
+or even affecting her, since it was clear that she was oblivious to her
+surroundings, and thinking neither of herself nor of the fact that any
+one might be regarding her. In the expression of her large eyes there
+was nothing but wrapt attention and quiet, concentrated thought, while
+her whole attitude seemed so unconstrained and, for all her shortness,
+so dignified that once more some recollection or another touched me and
+once more I asked myself, "Is IT, then, beginning?" Yet again I assured
+myself that I was already in love with Sonetchka, and that Varenika was
+only an ordinary girl, the sister of my friend. Though she pleased me at
+that moment, I somehow felt a vague desire to show her, by word or deed,
+some small unfriendliness.
+
+"I tell you what, Dimitri," I said to my friend as I moved nearer to
+Varenika, so that she might overhear what I was going to say, "it seems
+to me that, even if there had been no mosquitos here, there would have
+been nothing to commend this spot; whereas "--and here I slapped my
+cheek, and in very truth annihilated one of those insects--"it is simply
+awful."
+
+"Then you do not care for nature?" said Varenika without turning her
+head.
+
+"I think it a foolish, futile pursuit," I replied, well satisfied that I
+had said something to annoy her, as well as something original. Varenika
+only raised her eyebrows a little, with an expression of pity, and went
+on gazing in front of her as calmly as before.
+
+I felt vexed with her. Yet, for all that, the rusty, paint-blistered
+parapet on which she was leaning, the way in which the dark waters of
+the pond reflected the drooping branch of the overhanging birch tree (it
+almost seemed to me as though branch and its reflection met), the rising
+odour of the swamp, the feeling of crushed mosquito on my cheek, and
+her absorbed look and statuesque pose--many times afterwards did these
+things recur with unexpected vividness to my recollection.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII. DIMITRI
+
+WHEN we returned to the house from our stroll, Varenika declined to
+sing as she usually did in the evenings, and I was conceited enough to
+attribute this to my doing, in the belief that its reason lay in what
+I had said on the bridge. The Nechludoffs never had supper, and went to
+bed early, while to-night, since Dimitri had the toothache (as Sophia
+Ivanovna had foretold), he departed with me to his room even earlier
+than usual. Feeling that I had done all that was required of me by my
+blue collar and gilt buttons, and that every one was very pleased with
+me, I was in a gratified, complacent mood, while Dimitri, on the other
+hand, was rendered by his quarrel with his sister and the toothache
+both taciturn and gloomy. He sat down at the table, got out a couple of
+notebooks--a diary and the copy-book in which it was his custom every
+evening to inscribe the tasks performed by or awaiting him--and,
+continually frowning and touching his cheek with his hand, continued
+writing for a while.
+
+"Oh, DO leave me alone!" he cried to the maid whom Sophia Ivanovna sent
+to ask him whether his teeth were still hurting him, and whether he
+would not like to have a poultice made. Then, saying that my bed would
+soon be ready for me and that he would be back presently, he departed to
+Lubov Sergievna's room.
+
+"What a pity that Varenika is not good-looking and, in general,
+Sonetchka!" I reflected when I found myself alone. "How nice it would be
+if, after I have left the University, I could go to her and offer her
+my hand! I would say to her, 'Princess, though no longer young, and
+therefore unable to love passionately, I will cherish you as a dear
+sister. And you,' I would continue to her mother, 'I greatly respect;
+and you, Sophia Ivanovna, I value highly. Therefore say to me, Varenika
+(since I ask you to be my wife), just the simple and direct word YES.'
+And she would give me her hand, and I should press it, and say, 'Mine is
+a love which depends not upon words, but upon deeds.' And suppose,"
+next came into my head, "that Dimitri should suddenly fall in love with
+Lubotshka (as Lubotshka has already done with him), and should desire to
+marry her? Then either one or the other of us would have to resign all
+thought of marriage. Well, it would be splendid, for in that case I
+should act thus. As soon as I had noticed how things were, I should make
+no remark, but go to Dimitri and say, 'It is no use, my friend, for you
+and I to conceal our feelings from one another. You know that my love
+for your sister will terminate only with my life. Yet I know all; and
+though you have deprived me of all hope, and have rendered me an unhappy
+man, so that Nicolas Irtenieff will have to bewail his misery for the
+rest of his existence, yet do you take my sister,' and I should lay
+his hand in Lubotshka's. Then he would say to me, 'No, not for all the
+world!' and I should reply, 'Prince Nechludoff, it is in vain for you to
+attempt to outdo me in nobility. Not in the whole world does there exist
+a more magnanimous being than Nicolas Irtenieff.' Then I should salute
+him and depart. In tears Dimitri and Lubotshka would pursue me, and
+entreat me to accept their sacrifice, and I should consent to do so,
+and, perhaps, be happy ever afterwards--if only I were in love with
+Varenika." These fancies tickled my imagination so pleasantly that I
+felt as though I should like to communicate them to my friend; yet,
+despite our mutual vow of frankness, I also felt as though I had not the
+physical energy to do so.
+
+Dimitri returned from Lubov Sergievna's room with some toothache
+capsules which she had given him, yet in even greater pain, and
+therefore in even greater depression, than before. Evidently no bedroom
+had yet been prepared for me, for presently the boy who acted as
+Dimitri's valet arrived to ask him where I was to sleep.
+
+"Oh, go to the devil!" cried Dimitri, stamping his foot. "Vasika,
+Vasika, Vasika!" he went on, the instant that the boy had left the room,
+with a gradual raising of his voice at each repetition. "Vasika, lay me
+out a bed on the floor."
+
+"No, let ME sleep on the floor," I objected.
+
+"Well, it is all one. Lie anywhere you like," continued Dimitri in the
+same angry tone. "Vasika, why don't you go and do what I tell you?"
+
+Evidently Vasika did not understand what was demanded of him, for he
+remained where he was.
+
+"What is the matter with you? Go and lay the bed, Vasika, I tell you!"
+shouted Dimitri, suddenly bursting into a sort of frenzy; yet Vasika
+still did not understand, but, blushing hotly, stood motionless.
+
+"So you are determined to drive me mad, are you?"--and leaping from his
+chair and rushing upon the boy, Dimitri struck him on the head with the
+whole weight of his fist, until the boy rushed headlong from the room.
+Halting in the doorway, Dimitri glanced at me, and the expression of
+fury and pain which had sat for a moment on his countenance suddenly
+gave place to such a boyish, kindly, affectionate, yet ashamed,
+expression that I felt sorry for him, and reconsidered my intention of
+leaving him to himself. He said nothing, but for a long time paced the
+room in silence, occasionally glancing at me with the same deprecatory
+expression as before. Then he took his notebook from the table, wrote
+something in it, took off his jacket and folded it carefully, and,
+stepping into the corner where the ikon hung, knelt down and began to
+say his prayers, with his large white hands folded upon his breast. So
+long did he pray that Vasika had time to bring a mattress and spread it,
+under my whispered directions, on the floor. Indeed, I had undressed
+and laid myself down upon the mattress before Dimitri had finished. As I
+contemplated his slightly rounded back and the soles of his feet (which
+somehow seemed to stick out in my direction in a sort of repentant
+fashion whenever he made his obeisances), I felt that I liked him more
+than ever, and debated within myself whether or not I should tell him
+all I had been fancying concerning our respective sisters. When he had
+finished his prayers, he lay down upon the bed near me, and, propping
+himself upon his elbow, looked at me in silence, with a kindly, yet
+abashed, expression. Evidently he found it difficult to do this, yet
+meant thus to punish himself. Then I smiled and returned his gaze, and
+he smiled back at me.
+
+"Why do you not tell me that my conduct has been abominable?" he said.
+"You have been thinking so, have you not?"
+
+"Yes," I replied; and although it was something quite different which
+had been in my mind, it now seemed to me that that was what I had been
+thinking. "Yes, it was not right of you, nor should I have expected it
+of you." It pleased me particularly at that moment to call him by the
+familiar second person singular. "But how are your teeth now?" I added.
+
+"Oh, much better. Nicolinka, my friend," he went on, and so feelingly
+that it sounded as though tears were standing in his eyes, "I know
+and feel that I am bad, but God sees how I try to be better, and how I
+entreat Him to make me so. Yet what am I to do with such an unfortunate,
+horrible nature as mine? What am I to do with it? I try to keep myself
+in hand and to rule myself, but suddenly it becomes impossible for me
+to do so--at all events, impossible for me to do so unaided. I need
+the help and support of some one. Now, there is Lubov Sergievna; SHE
+understands me, and could help me in this, and I know by my notebook
+that I have greatly improved in this respect during the past year.
+Ah, my dear Nicolinka"--he spoke with the most unusual and unwonted
+tenderness, and in a tone which had grown calmer now that he had made
+his confession--"how much the influence of a woman like Lubov could do
+for me! Think how good it would be for me if I could have a friend like
+her to live with when I have become independent! With her I should be
+another man."
+
+And upon that Dimitri began to unfold to me his plans for marriage, for
+a life in the country, and for continual self-discipline.
+
+"Yes, I will live in the country," he said, "and you shall come to see
+me when you have married Sonetchka. Our children shall play together.
+All this may seem to you stupid and ridiculous, yet it may very well
+come to pass."
+
+"Yes, it very well may" I replied with a smile, yet thinking how much
+nicer it would be if I married his sister.
+
+"I tell you what," he went on presently; "you only imagine yourself to
+be in love with Sonetchka, whereas I can see that it is all rubbish, and
+that you do not really know what love means."
+
+I did not protest, for, in truth, I almost agreed with him, and for a
+while we lay without speaking.
+
+"Probably you have noticed that I have been in my old bad humour today,
+and have had a nasty quarrel with Varia?" he resumed. "I felt bad about
+it afterwards--more particularly since it occurred in your presence.
+Although she thinks wrongly on some subjects, she is a splendid girl and
+very good, as you will soon recognise."
+
+His quick transition from mention of my love affairs to praise of his
+sister pleased me extremely, and made me blush, but I nevertheless said
+nothing more about his sister, and we went on talking of other things.
+
+Thus we chattered until the cocks had crowed twice. In fact, the pale
+dawn was already looking in at the window when at last Dimitri lay down
+upon his bed and put out the candle.
+
+"Well, now for sleep," he said.
+
+"Yes," I replied, "but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Now nice it is to be alive in the daylight!"
+
+"Yes, it IS a splendid thing!" he replied in a voice which, even in the
+darkness, enabled me to see the expression of his cheerful, kindly eyes
+and boyish smile.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII. IN THE COUNTRY
+
+Next day Woloda and myself departed in a post-chaise for the country.
+Turning over various Moscow recollections in my head as we drove along,
+I suddenly recalled Sonetchka Valakhin--though not until evening, and
+when we had already covered five stages of the road. "It is a strange
+thing," I thought, "that I should be in love, and yet have forgotten all
+about it. I must start and think about her," and straightway I proceeded
+to do so, but only in the way that one thinks when travelling--that is
+to say, disconnectedly, though vividly. Thus I brought myself to such a
+condition that, for the first two days after our arrival home, I somehow
+considered it incumbent upon me always to appear sad and moody in the
+presence of the household, and especially before Katenka, whom I looked
+upon as a great connoisseur in matters of this kind, and to whom I threw
+out a hint of the condition in which my heart was situated. Yet, for
+all my attempts at dissimulation and assiduous adoption of such signs
+of love sickness as I had occasionally observed in other people, I
+only succeeded for two days (and that at intervals, and mostly towards
+evening) in reminding myself of the fact that I was in love, and
+finally, when I had settled down into the new rut of country life and
+pursuits, I forgot about my affection for Sonetchka altogether.
+
+We arrived at Petrovskoe in the night time, and I was then so soundly
+asleep that I saw nothing of the house as we approached it, nor yet of
+the avenue of birch trees, nor yet of the household--all of whom had
+long ago betaken themselves to bed and to slumber. Only old hunchbacked
+Foka--bare-footed, clad in some sort of a woman's wadded nightdress, and
+carrying a candlestick--opened the door to us. As soon as he saw who
+we were, he trembled all over with joy, kissed us on the shoulders,
+hurriedly put on his felt slippers, and started to dress himself
+properly. I passed in a semi-waking condition through the porch and up
+the steps, but in the hall the lock of the door, the bars and bolts,
+the crooked boards of the flooring, the chest, the ancient candelabrum
+(splashed all over with grease as of old), the shadows thrown by the
+crooked, chill, recently-lighted stump of candle, the perennially dusty,
+unopened window behind which I remembered sorrel to have grown--all was
+so familiar, so full of memories, so intimate of aspect, so, as it were,
+knit together by a single idea, that I suddenly became conscious of a
+tenderness for this quiet old house. Involuntarily I asked myself,
+"How have we, the house and I, managed to remain apart so long?" and,
+hurrying from spot to spot, ran to see if all the other rooms were still
+the same. Yes, everything was unchanged, except that everything had
+become smaller and lower, and I myself taller, heavier, and more filled
+out. Yet, even as I was, the old house received me back into its arms,
+and aroused in me with every board, every window, every step of the
+stairs, and every sound the shadows of forms, feelings, and events of
+the happy but irrevocable past. When we entered our old night nursery,
+all my childish fears lurked once more in the darkness of the corners
+and doorway. When we passed into the drawing-room, I could feel the old
+calm motherly love diffusing itself from every object in the apartment.
+In the breakfast-room, the noisy, careless merriment of childhood seemed
+merely to be waiting to wake to life again. In the divannaia
+(whither Foka first conducted us, and where he had prepared our beds)
+everything--mirror, screen, old wooden ikon, the lumps on the walls
+covered with white paper--seemed to speak of suffering and of death and
+of what would never come back to us again.
+
+We got into bed, and Foka, bidding us good-night, retired.
+
+"It was in this room that Mamma died, was it not?" said Woloda.
+
+I made no reply, but pretended to be asleep. If I had said anything I
+should have burst into tears. On awaking next morning, I beheld Papa
+sitting on Woloda's bed in his dressing gown and slippers and smoking a
+cigar. Leaping up with a merry hoist of the shoulders, he came over to
+me, slapped me on the back with his great hand, and presented me his
+cheek to press my lips to.
+
+"Well done, DIPLOMAT!" he said in his most kindly jesting tone as he
+looked at me with his small bright eyes. "Woloda tells me you have
+passed the examinations well for a youngster, and that is a splendid
+thing. Unless you start and play the fool, I shall have another fine
+little fellow in you. Thanks, my dear boy. Well, we will have a grand
+time of it here now, and in the winter, perhaps, we shall move to St.
+Petersburg. I only wish the hunting was not over yet, or I could have
+given you some amusement in THAT way. Can you shoot, Woldemar? However,
+whether there is any game or not, I will take you out some day. Next
+winter, if God pleases, we will move to St. Petersburg, and you shall
+meet people, and make friends, for you are now my two young grown-ups.
+I have been telling Woldemar that you are just starting on your careers,
+whereas my day is ended. You are old enough now to walk by yourselves,
+but, whenever you wish to confide in me, pray do so, for I am no longer
+your nurse, but your friend. At least, I will be your friend and comrade
+and adviser as much as I can and more than that I cannot do. How does
+that fall in with your philosophy, eh, Koko? Well or ill, eh?"
+
+Of course I said that it fell in with it entirely, and, indeed, I really
+thought so. That morning Papa had a particularly winning, bright, and
+happy expression on his face, and these new relations between us, as of
+equals and comrades, made me love him all the more.
+
+"Now, tell me," he went on, "did you call upon all our kinsfolk and the
+Iwins? Did you see the old man, and what did he say to you? And did you
+go to Prince Ivan's?"
+
+We continued talking so long that, before we were fully dressed, the sun
+had left the window of the divannaia, and Jakoff (the same old man who
+of yore had twirled his fingers behind his back and always repeated his
+words) had entered the room and reported to Papa that the carriage was
+ready.
+
+"Where are you going to?" I asked Papa.
+
+"Oh, I had forgotten all about it!" he replied, with a cough and
+the usual hoisting of his shoulder. "I promised to go and call upon
+Epifanova to-day. You remember Epifanova--'la belle Flamande'--don't
+you, who used to come and see your Mamma? They are nice people." And
+with a self-conscious shrug of his shoulders (so it appeared to me) Papa
+left the room.
+
+During our conversation, Lubotshka had more than once come to the door
+and asked "Can I come in?" but Papa had always shouted to her that she
+could not do so, since we were not dressed yet.
+
+"What rubbish!" she replied. "Why, I have seen you in your
+dressing-gown."
+
+"Never mind; you cannot see your brothers without their inexpressibles,"
+rejoined Papa. "If they each of them just go to the door, let that be
+enough for you. Now go. Even for them to SPEAK to you in such a neglige
+costume is unbecoming."
+
+"How unbearable you are!" was Lubotshka's parting retort. "Well, at
+least hurry up and come down to the drawing-room, for Mimi wants to see
+them."
+
+As soon as Papa had left the room, I hastened to array myself in my
+student's uniform, and to repair to the drawing-room.
+
+Woloda, on the other hand, was in no hurry, but remained sitting on
+his bed and talking to Jakoff about the best places to find plover and
+snipe. As I have said, there was nothing in the world he so much feared
+as to be suspected of any affection for his father, brother, and sister;
+so that, to escape any expression of that feeling, he often fell into
+the other extreme, and affected a coldness which shocked people who did
+not comprehend its cause. In the hall, I collided with Papa, who was
+hurrying towards the carriage with short, rapid steps. He had a new and
+fashionable Moscow greatcoat on, and smelt of scent. On seeing me, he
+gave a cheerful nod, as much as to say, "Do you remark my splendour?"
+and once again I was struck with the happy expression of face which I
+had noted earlier in the morning.
+
+The drawing-room looked the same lofty, bright room as of Yore, with its
+brown English piano, and its large open windows looking on to the green
+trees and yellowish-red paths of the garden. After kissing Mimi and
+Lubotshka, I was approaching Katenka for the same purpose when it
+suddenly struck me that it might be improper for me to salute her in
+that fashion. Accordingly I halted, silent and blushing. Katenka, for
+her part, was quite at her ease as she held out a white hand to me and
+congratulated me on my passing into the University. The same thing took
+place when Woloda entered the drawing-room and met Katenka. Indeed,
+it was something of a problem how, after being brought up together and
+seeing one another daily, we ought now, after this first separation, to
+meet again. Katenka had grown better-looking than any of us, yet Woloda
+seemed not at all confused as, with a slight bow to her, he crossed over
+to Lubotshka, made a jesting remark to her, and then departed somewhere
+on some solitary expedition.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE GIRLS AND OURSELVES
+
+OF the girls Woloda took the strange view that, although he wished that
+they should have enough to eat, should sleep well, be well dressed,
+and avoid making such mistakes in French as would shame him before
+strangers, he would never admit that they could think or feel like human
+beings, still less that they could converse with him sensibly about
+anything. Whenever they addressed to him a serious question (a thing, by
+the way, which he always tried to avoid), such as asking his opinion on
+a novel or inquiring about his doings at the University, he invariably
+pulled a grimace, and either turned away without speaking or answered
+with some nonsensical French phrase--"Comme c'est tres jolie!" or the
+like. Or again, feigning to look serious and stolidly wise, he would say
+something absolutely meaningless and bearing no relation whatever to the
+question asked him, or else suddenly exclaim, with a look of
+pretended unconsciousness, the word bulku or poyechali or kapustu,
+[Respectively, "roll of butter," "away," and "cabbage."] or something of
+the kind; and when, afterwards, I happened to repeat these words to him
+as having been told me by Lubotshka or Katenka, he would always remark:
+
+"Hm! So you actually care about talking to them? I can see you are a
+duffer still"--and one needed to see and near him to appreciate the
+profound, immutable contempt which echoed in this remark. He had been
+grown-up now two years, and was in love with every good-looking woman
+that he met; yet, despite the fact that he came in daily contact with
+Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and
+was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love
+with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the
+fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh
+in his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people
+feel for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness
+which, at a first encounter with anything fair and pretty, leads a man
+to say to himself, "Ah! I shall meet much more of the same kind during
+my life," but at all events Woloda had never yet looked upon Katenka
+with a man's eyes.
+
+All that summer Woloda appeared to find things very wearisome--a fact
+which arose out of that contempt for us all which, as I have said,
+he made no effort to conceal. His expression of face seemed to be
+constantly saying, "Phew! how it bores me to have no one to speak to!"
+The first thing in the morning he would go out shooting, or sit reading
+a book in his room, and not dress until luncheon time. Indeed, if
+Papa was not at home, he would take his book into that meal, and go on
+reading it without addressing so much as a single word to any one of us,
+who felt, somehow, guilty in his presence. In the evening, too, he would
+stretch himself on a settee in the drawing-room, and either go to sleep,
+propped on his elbow, or tell us farcical stories--sometimes stories so
+improper as to make Mimi grow angry and blush, and ourselves die with
+laughter. At other times he would not condescend to address a single
+serious word to any member of the family except Papa or (occasionally)
+myself. Involuntarily I offended against his view of girls, seeing that
+I was not so afraid of seeming affectionate as he, and, moreover, had
+not such a profound and confirmed contempt for young women. Yet several
+times that summer, when driven by lack of amusement to try and engage
+Lubotshka and Katenka in conversation, I always encountered in them such
+an absence of any capacity for logical thinking, and such an ignorance
+of the simplest, most ordinary matters (as, for instance, the nature of
+money, the subjects studied at universities, the effect of war, and so
+forth), as well as such indifference to my explanations of such matters,
+that these attempts of mine only ended in confirming my unfavourable
+opinion of feminine ability.
+
+I remember one evening when Lubotshka kept repeating some unbearably
+tedious passage on the piano about a hundred times in succession, while
+Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing
+no one in particular as he muttered, "Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a
+musician! WHAT a Beethoven!" (he always pronounced the composer's name
+with especial irony). "Wrong again! Now--a second time! That's it!"
+and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and
+somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject--love. I was in
+the right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by loftily defining
+love as the wish to acquire in another what one does not possess in
+oneself. To this Katenka retorted that, on the contrary, love is not
+love at all if a girl desires to marry a man for his money alone, but
+that, in her opinion, riches were a vain thing, and true love only the
+affection which can stand the test of separation (this I took to be a
+hint concerning her love for Dubkoff). At this point Woloda, who must
+have been listening all the time, raised himself on his elbow, and cried
+out some rubbish or another; and I felt that he was right.
+
+Apart from the general faculties (more or less developed in different
+persons) of intellect, sensibility, and artistic feeling, there also
+exists (more or less developed in different circles of society, and
+especially in families) a private or individual faculty which I may
+call APPREHENSION. The essence of this faculty lies in sympathetic
+appreciation of proportion, and in identical understanding of things.
+Two individuals who possess this faculty and belong to the same social
+circle or the same family apprehend an expression of feeling precisely
+to the same point, namely, the point beyond which such expression
+becomes mere phrasing. Thus they apprehend precisely where commendation
+ends and irony begins, where attraction ends and pretence begins, in a
+manner which would be impossible for persons possessed of a different
+order of apprehension. Persons possessed of identical apprehension view
+objects in an identically ludicrous, beautiful, or repellent light; and
+in order to facilitate such identical apprehension between members of
+the same social circle or family, they usually establish a language,
+turns of speech, or terms to define such shades of apprehension as exist
+for them alone. In our particular family such apprehension was common
+to Papa, Woloda, and myself, and was developed to the highest pitch,
+Dubkoff also approximated to our coterie in apprehension, but Dimitri,
+though infinitely more intellectual than Dubkoff, was grosser in this
+respect. With no one, however, did I bring this faculty to such a point
+as with Woloda, who had grown up with me under identical conditions.
+Papa stood a long way from us, and much that was to us as clear as "two
+and two make four" was to him incomprehensible. For instance, I and
+Woloda managed to establish between ourselves the following terms, with
+meanings to correspond. Izium [Raisins.] meant a desire to boast of
+one's money; shishka [Bump or swelling.] (on pronouncing which one had
+to join one's fingers together, and to put a particular emphasis upon
+the two sh's in the word) meant anything fresh, healthy, and comely, but
+not elegant; a substantive used in the plural meant an undue partiality
+for the object which it denoted; and so forth, and so forth. At the same
+time, the meaning depended considerably upon the expression of the
+face and the context of the conversation; so that, no matter what new
+expression one of us might invent to define a shade of feeling the other
+could immediately understand it by a hint alone. The girls did not share
+this faculty of apprehension, and herein lay the chief cause of our
+moral estrangement, and of the contempt which we felt for them.
+
+It may be that they too had their "apprehension," but it so little ran
+with ours that, where we already perceived the "phrasing," they still
+saw only the feeling--our irony was for them truth, and so on. At that
+time I had not yet learnt to understand that they were in no way
+to blame for this, and that absence of such apprehension in no way
+prevented them from being good and clever girls. Accordingly I looked
+down upon them. Moreover, having once lit upon my precious idea of
+"frankness," and being bent upon applying it to the full in myself, I
+thought the quiet, confiding nature of Lubotshka guilty of secretiveness
+and dissimulation simply because she saw no necessity for digging up and
+examining all her thoughts and instincts. For instance, the fact that
+she always signed the sign of the cross over Papa before going to bed,
+that she and Katenka invariably wept in church when attending requiem
+masses for Mamma, and that Katenka sighed and rolled her eyes about when
+playing the piano--all these things seemed to me sheer make-believe, and
+I asked myself: "At what period did they learn to pretend like grown-up
+people, and how can they bring themselves to do it?"
+
+
+
+
+XXX. HOW I EMPLOYED MY TIME
+
+Nevertheless, the fact that that summer I developed a passion for music
+caused me to become better friends with the ladies of our household
+than I had been for years. In the spring, a young fellow came to see us,
+armed with a letter of introduction, who, as soon as ever he entered the
+drawing-room, fixed his eyes upon the piano, and kept gradually
+edging his chair closer to it as he talked to Mimi and Katenka. After
+discoursing awhile of the weather and the amenities of country life, he
+skilfully directed the conversation to piano-tuners, music, and pianos
+generally, and ended by saying that he himself played--and in truth
+he did sit down and perform three waltzes, with Mimi, Lubotshka, and
+Katenka grouped about the instrument, and watching him as he did so. He
+never came to see us again, but his playing, and his attitude when at
+the piano, and the way in which he kept shaking his long hair, and, most
+of all, the manner in which he was able to execute octaves with his left
+hand as he first of all played them rapidly with his thumb and little
+finger, and then slowly closed those members, and then played the
+octaves afresh, made a great impression upon me. This graceful gesture
+of his, together with his easy pose and his shaking of hair and
+successful winning of the ladies' applause by his talent, ended by
+firing me to take up the piano. Convinced that I possessed both talent
+and a passion for music, I set myself to learn, and, in doing so, acted
+just as millions of the male--still more, of the female--sex have done
+who try to teach themselves without a skilled instructor, without any
+real turn for the art, or without the smallest understanding either of
+what the art can give or of what ought to be done to obtain that gift.
+For me music (or rather, piano-playing) was simply a means of winning
+the ladies' good graces through their sensibility. With the help of
+Katenka I first learnt the notes (incidentally breaking several of them
+with my clumsy fingers), and then--that is to say, after two months of
+hard work, supplemented by ceaseless twiddling of my rebellious fingers
+on my knees after luncheon, and on the pillow when in bed--went on to
+"pieces," which I played (so Katenka assured me) with "soul" ("avec
+ame"), but altogether regardless of time.
+
+My range of pieces was the usual one--waltzes, galops, "romances,"
+"arrangements," etcetera; all of them of the class of delightful
+compositions of which any one with a little healthy taste could point
+out a selection among the better class works contained in any volume
+of music and say, "These are what you ought NOT to play, seeing that
+anything worse, less tasteful, and more silly has never yet been
+included in any collection of music,"--but which (probably for that very
+reason) are to be found on the piano of every Russian lady. True, we
+also possessed an unfortunate volume which contained Beethoven's "Sonate
+Pathetique" and the C minor Sonata (a volume lamed for life by the
+ladies--more especially by Lubotshka, who used to discourse music from
+it in memory of Mamma), as well as certain other good pieces which her
+teacher in Moscow had given her; but among that collection there were
+likewise compositions of the teacher's own, in the shape of clumsy
+marches and galops--and these too Lubotshka used to play! Katenka and
+I cared nothing for serious works, but preferred, above all things, "Le
+Fou" and "The Nightingale"--the latter of which Katenka would play until
+her fingers almost became invisible, and which I too was beginning to
+execute with much vigour and some continuity. I had adopted the gestures
+of the young man of whom I have spoken, and frequently regretted that
+there were no strangers present to see me play. Soon, however, I began
+to realise that Liszt and Kalkbrenner were beyond me, and that I should
+never overtake Katenka. Accordingly, imagining that classical music was
+easier (as well as, partly, for the sake of originality), I suddenly
+came to the conclusion that I loved abstruse German music. I began to
+go into raptures whenever Lubotshka played the "Sonate Pathetique," and
+although (if the truth be told) that work had for years driven me to the
+verge of distraction, I set myself to play Beethoven, and to talk of him
+as "Beethoven." Yet through all this chopping and changing and pretence
+(as I now conceive) there may have run in me a certain vein of talent,
+since music sometimes affected me even to tears, and things which
+particularly pleased me I could strum on the piano afterwards (in a
+certain fashion) without the score; so that, had any one taught me at
+that period to look upon music as an end, a grace, in itself, and
+not merely as a means for pleasing womenfolk with the velocity and
+pseudo-sentiment of one's playing, I might possibly have become a
+passable musician.
+
+The reading of French novels (of which Woloda had brought a large store
+with him from Moscow) was another of my amusements that summer. At that
+period Monte Cristo and Taine's works had just appeared, while I also
+revelled in stories by Sue, Dumas, and Paul de Kock. Even their most
+unnatural personages and events were for me as real as actuality, and
+not only was I incapable of suspecting an author of lying, but, in
+my eyes, there existed no author at all. That is to say, the various
+personages and events of a book paraded themselves before me on the
+printed page as personages and events that were alive and real; and
+although I had never in my life met such characters as I there read
+about, I never for a second doubted that I should one day do so. I
+discovered in myself all the passions described in every novel, as
+well as a likeness to all the characters--heroes and villains
+impartially--who figured therein, just as a suspicious man finds in
+himself the signs of every possible disease when reading a book on
+medicine. I took pleasure both in the cunning designs, the glowing
+sentiments, the tumultuous events, and the character-drawing of these
+works. A good man was of the goodness, a bad man of the badness,
+possible only to the imagination of early youth. Likewise I found great
+pleasure in the fact that it was all written in French, and that I could
+lay to heart the fine words which the fine heroes spoke, and recall them
+for use some day when engaged in some noble deed. What quantities of
+French phrases I culled from those books for Kolpikoff's benefit if I
+should ever meet him again, as well as for HERS, when at length I should
+find her and reveal to her my love! For them both I prepared speeches
+which should overcome them as soon as spoken! Upon novels, too, I
+founded new ideals of the moral qualities which I wished to attain.
+First of all, I wished to be NOBLE in all my deeds and conduct (I use
+the French word noble instead of the Russian word blagorodni for the
+reason that the former has a different meaning to the latter--as
+the Germans well understood when they adopted noble as nobel and
+differentiated it from ehrlich); next, to be strenuous; and lastly,
+to be what I was already inclined to be, namely, comme il faut. I even
+tried to approximate my appearance and bearing to that of the heroes who
+possessed these qualities. In particular I remember how in one of the
+hundred or so novels which I read that summer there was a very strenuous
+hero with heavy eyebrows, and that I so greatly wished to resemble him
+(I felt that I did so already from a moral point of view) that one
+day, when looking at my eyebrows in the glass, I conceived the idea of
+clipping them, in order to make them grow bushier. Unfortunately, after
+I had started to do so, I happened to clip one spot rather shorter than
+the rest, and so had to level down the rest to it-with the result
+that, to my horror, I beheld myself eyebrow-less, and anything but
+presentable. However, I comforted myself with the reflection that my
+eyebrows would soon sprout again as bushy as my hero's, and was only
+perplexed to think how I could explain the circumstance to the household
+when they next perceived my eyebrow-less condition. Accordingly I
+borrowed some gunpowder from Woloda, rubbed it on my temples, and set
+it alight. The powder did not fire properly, but I succeeded in singeing
+myself sufficiently to avert all suspicion of my pranks. And, indeed,
+afterwards, when I had forgotten all about my hero, my eyebrows grew
+again, and much thicker than they had been before.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI. "COMME IL FAUT"
+
+SEVERAL times in the course of this narrative I have hinted at an idea
+corresponding to the above French heading, and now feel it incumbent
+upon me to devote a whole chapter to that idea, which was one of the
+most ruinous, lying notions which ever became engrafted upon my life by
+my upbringing and social milieu.
+
+The human race may be divided into several categories--rich and poor,
+good and bad, military and civilian, clever and stupid, and so forth,
+and so forth. Yet each man has his own favourite, fundamental system of
+division which he unconsciously uses to class each new person with
+whom he meets. At the time of which I am speaking, my own favourite,
+fundamental system of division in this respect was into people "comme il
+faut" and people "comme il ne faut pas"--the latter subdivided, again,
+into people merely not "comme il faut" and the lower orders. People
+"comme il faut" I respected, and looked upon as worthy to consort with
+me as my equals; the second of the above categories I pretended merely
+to despise, but in reality hated, and nourished towards them a kind
+of feeling of offended personality; while the third category had no
+existence at all, so far as I was concerned, since my contempt for
+them was too complete. This "comme il faut"-ness of mine lay, first and
+foremost, in proficiency in French, especially conversational French. A
+person who spoke that language badly at once aroused in me a feeling of
+dislike. "Why do you try to talk as we do when you haven't a notion how
+to do it?" I would seem to ask him with my most venomous and quizzing
+smile. The second condition of "comme il faut"-ness was long nails
+that were well kept and clean; the third, ability to bow, dance,
+and converse; the fourth--and a very important one--indifference to
+everything, and a constant air of refined, supercilious ennui. Moreover,
+there were certain general signs which, I considered, enabled me
+to tell, without actually speaking to a man, the class to which he
+belonged. Chief among these signs (the others being the fittings of his
+rooms, his gloves, his handwriting, his turn-out, and so forth) were his
+feet. The relation of boots to trousers was sufficient to determine, in
+my eyes, the social status of a man. Heelless boots with angular toes,
+wedded to narrow, unstrapped trouser-ends--these denoted the vulgarian.
+Boots with narrow, round toes and heels, accompanied either by tight
+trousers strapped under the instep and fitting close to the leg or by
+wide trousers similarly strapped, but projecting in a peak over the
+toe--these meant the man of mauvais genre; and so on, and so on.
+
+It was a curious thing that I who lacked all ability to become "comme il
+faut," should have assimilated the idea so completely as I did. Possibly
+it was the fact that it had cost me such enormous labour to acquire that
+brought about its strenuous development in my mind. I hardly like to
+think how much of the best and most valuable time of my first sixteen
+years of existence I wasted upon its acquisition. Yet every one whom I
+imitated--Woloda, Dubkoff, and the majority of my acquaintances--seemed
+to acquire it easily. I watched them with envy, and silently toiled to
+become proficient in French, to bow gracefully and without looking at
+the person whom I was saluting, to gain dexterity in small-talk and
+dancing, to cultivate indifference and ennui, and to keep my fingernails
+well trimmed (though I frequently cut my finger-ends with the scissors
+in so doing). And all the time I felt that so much remained to be done
+if I was ever to attain my end! A room, a writing-table, an equipage
+I still found it impossible to arrange "comme il faut," however much
+I fought down my aversion to practical matters in my desire to become
+proficient. Yet everything seemed to arrange itself properly with other
+people, just as though things could never have been otherwise! Once I
+remember asking Dubkoff, after much zealous and careful labouring at my
+finger-nails (his own were extraordinarily good), whether his nails had
+always been as now, or whether he had done anything to make them so: to
+which he replied that never within his recollection had he done anything
+to them, and that he could not imagine a gentleman's nails possibly
+being different. This answer incensed me greatly, for I had not yet
+learnt that one of the chief conditions of "comme il faut"-ness was to
+hold one's tongue about the labour by which it had been acquired.
+"Comme il faut"-ness I looked upon as not only a great merit, a splendid
+accomplishment, an embodiment of all the perfection which must strive to
+attain, but as the one indispensable condition without which there could
+never be happiness, nor glory, nor any good whatsoever in this world.
+Even the greatest artist or savant or benefactor of the human race would
+at that time have won from me no respect if he had not also been "comme
+il faut." A man possessed of "comme il faut"-ness stood higher than, and
+beyond all possible equality with, such people, and might well leave it
+to them to paint pictures, to compose music, to write books, or to do
+good. Possibly he might commend them for so doing (since why should not
+merit be commended where-ever it be found?), but he could never stand
+ON A LEVEL with them, seeing that he was "comme il faut" and they were
+not--a quite final and sufficient reason. In fact, I actually believe
+that, had we possessed a brother or a father or a mother who had not
+been "comme il faut," I should have declared it to be a great misfortune
+for us, and announced that between myself and them there could never
+be anything in common. Yet neither waste of the golden hours which
+I consumed in constantly endeavouring to observe the many arduous,
+unattainable conditions of "comme il faut"-ness (to the exclusion of any
+more serious pursuit), nor dislike of and contempt for nine-tenths of
+the human race, nor disregard of all the beauty that lay outside the
+narrow circle of "comme il faut"-ness comprised the whole of the evil
+which the idea wrought in me. The chief evil of all lay in the notion
+acquired that a man need not strive to become a tchinovnik, [Official.]
+a coachbuilder, a soldier, a savant, or anything useful, so long only
+as he was "comme il faut "--that by attaining the latter quality he had
+done all that was demanded of him, and was even superior to most people.
+
+Usually, at a given period in youth, and after many errors and excesses,
+every man recognises the necessity of his taking an active part in
+social life, and chooses some branch of labour to which to devote
+himself. Only with the "comme il faut" man does this rarely happen.
+I have known, and know, very, very many people--old, proud,
+self-satisfied, and opinionated--who to the question (if it should ever
+present itself to them in their world) "Who have you been, and what have
+you ever done?" would be unable to reply otherwise than by saying,
+
+"Je fus un homme tres comme il faut,"
+
+Such a fate was awaiting myself.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII. YOUTH
+
+Despite the confusion of ideas raging in my head, I was at least young,
+innocent, and free that summer--consequently almost happy.
+
+Sometimes I would rise quite early in the morning, for I slept on the
+open verandah, and the bright, horizontal beams of the morning sun would
+wake me up. Dressing myself quickly, I would tuck a towel and a French
+novel under my arm, and go off to bathe in the river in the shade of
+a birch tree which stood half a verst from the house. Next, I would
+stretch myself on the grass and read--raising my eyes from time to time
+to look at the surface of the river where it showed blue in the shade
+of the trees, at the ripples caused by the first morning breeze, at the
+yellowing field of rye on the further bank, and at the bright-red sheen
+of the sunlight as it struck lower and lower down the white trunks of
+the birch-trees which, ranged in ranks one behind the other, gradually
+receded into the remote distance of the home park. At such moments I
+would feel joyously conscious of having within me the same young, fresh
+force of life as nature was everywhere exuding around me. When, however,
+the sky was overcast with grey clouds of morning and I felt chilly after
+bathing, I would often start to walk at random through the fields and
+woods, and joyously trail my wet boots in the fresh dew. All the while
+my head would be filled with vivid dreams concerning the heroes of my
+last-read novel, and I would keep picturing to myself some leader of an
+army or some statesman or marvellously strong man or devoted lover or
+another, and looking round me in, a nervous expectation that I should
+suddenly descry HER somewhere near me, in a meadow or behind a tree.
+Yet, whenever these rambles led me near peasants engaged at their work,
+all my ignoring of the existence of the "common people" did not
+prevent me from experiencing an involuntary, overpowering sensation of
+awkwardness; so that I always tried to avoid their seeing me. When the
+heat of the day had increased, it was not infrequently my habit--if the
+ladies did not come out of doors for their morning tea--to go rambling
+through the orchard and kitchen-garden, and to pluck ripe fruit there.
+Indeed, this was an occupation which furnished me with one of my
+greatest pleasures. Let any one go into an orchard, and dive into the
+midst of a tall, thick, sprouting raspberry-bed. Above will be seen the
+clear, glowing sky, and, all around, the pale-green, prickly stems
+of raspberry-trees where they grow mingled together in a tangle of
+profusion. At one's feet springs the dark-green nettle, with its slender
+crown of flowers, while the broad-leaved burdock, with its bright-pink,
+prickly blossoms, overtops the raspberries (and even one's head) with
+its luxuriant masses, until, with the nettle, it almost meets the
+pendent, pale-green branches of the old apple-trees where apples, round
+and lustrous as bone, but as yet unripe, are mellowing in the heat
+of the sun. Below, again, are seen young raspberry-shoots, twining
+themselves around the partially withered, leafless parent plant,
+and stretching their tendrils towards the sunlight, with green,
+needle-shaped blades of grass and young, dew-coated pods peering through
+last year's leaves, and growing juicily green in the perennial shade, as
+though they care nothing for the bright sunshine which is playing on the
+leaves of the apple-trees above them. In this density there is always
+moisture--always a smell of confined, perpetual shade, of cobwebs,
+fallen apples (turning black where they roll on the mouldy sod),
+raspberries, and earwigs of the kind which impel one to reach hastily
+for more fruit when one has inadvertently swallowed a member of that
+insect tribe with the last berry. At every step one's movements keep
+flushing the sparrows which always make their home in these depths, and
+one hears their fussy chirping and the beating of their tiny, fluttering
+wings against the stalks, and catches the low buzzing of a bumble bee
+somewhere, and the sound of the gardener's footsteps (it is half-daft
+Akim) on the path as he hums his eternal sing-song to himself. Then one
+mutters under one's breath, "No! Neither he nor any one else shall
+find me here!" yet still one goes on stripping juicy berries from their
+conical white pilasters, and cramming them into one's mouth. At length,
+one's legs soaked to the knees as one repeats, over and over again, some
+rubbish which keeps running in one's head, and one's hands and nether
+limbs (despite the protection of one's wet trousers) thoroughly stung
+with the nettles, one comes to the conclusion that the sun's rays
+are beating too straight upon one's head for eating to be any longer
+desirable, and, sinking down into the tangle of greenery, one remains
+there--looking and listening, and continuing in mechanical fashion to
+strip off one or two of the finer berries and swallow them.
+
+At eleven o'clock--that is to say, when the ladies had taken their
+morning tea and settled down to their occupations--I would repair to
+the drawing-room. Near the first window, with its unbleached linen blind
+lowered to exclude the sunshine, but through the chink of which the sun
+kept throwing brilliant circles of light which hurt the eye to look at
+them, there would be standing a screen, with flies quietly parading the
+whiteness of its covering. Behind it would be seated Mimi, shaking her
+head in an irritable manner, and constantly shifting from spot to spot
+to avoid the sunshine as at intervals it darted her from somewhere and
+laid a streak of flame upon her hand or face. Through the other three
+windows the sun would be throwing three squares of light, crossed with
+the shadows of the window-frames, and where one of these patches marked
+the unstained floor of the room there would be lying, in accordance with
+invariable custom, Milka, with her ears pricked as she watched the flies
+promenading the lighted space. Seated on a settee, Katenka would be
+knitting or reading aloud as from time to time she gave her white
+sleeves (looking almost transparent in the sunshine) an impatient shake,
+or tossed her head with a frown to drive away some fly which had settled
+upon her thick auburn hair and was now buzzing in its tangles. Lubotshka
+would either be walking up and down the room (her hands clasped behind
+her) until the moment should arrive when a movement would be made
+towards the garden, or playing some piece of which every note had long
+been familiar to me. For my own part, I would sit down somewhere, and
+listen to the music or the reading until such time as I myself should
+have an opportunity of performing on the piano. After luncheon I would
+condescend to take the girls out riding (since to go for a mere walk
+at that hour seemed to me unsuitable to my years and position in
+the world), and these excursions of ours--in which I often took my
+companions through unaccustomed spots and dells--were very pleasant.
+Indeed, on some of these occasions I grew quite boyish, and the
+girls would praise my riding and daring, and pretend that I was their
+protector. In the evening, if we had no guests with us, tea (served in
+the dim verandah), would be followed by a walk round the homestead with
+Papa, and then I would stretch myself on my usual settee, and read and
+ponder as of old, as I listened to Katenka or Lubotshka playing. At
+other times, if I was alone in the drawing-room and Lubotshka was
+performing some old-time air, I would find myself laying my book down,
+and gazing through the open doorway on to the balcony at the pendent,
+sinuous branches of the tall birch-trees where they stood overshadowed
+by the coming night, and at the clear sky where, if one looked at it
+intently enough, misty, yellowish spots would appear suddenly, and then
+disappear again. Next, as I listened to the sounds of the music wafted
+from the salon, and to the creaking of gates and the voices of the
+peasant women when the cattle returned to the village, I would suddenly
+bethink me of Natalia Savishna and of Mamma and of Karl Ivanitch, and
+become momentarily sad. But in those days my spirit was so full of life
+and hope that such reminiscences only touched me in passing, and soon
+fled away again.
+
+After supper and (sometimes) a night stroll with some one in the garden
+(for I was afraid to walk down the dark avenues by myself), I would
+repair to my solitary sleeping-place on the verandah--a proceeding
+which, despite the countless mosquitos which always devoured me,
+afforded me the greatest pleasure. If the moon was full, I frequently
+spent whole nights sitting up on my mattress, looking at the light and
+shade, listening to the sounds or stillness, dreaming of one matter
+and another (but more particularly of the poetic, voluptuous happiness
+which, in those days, I believed was to prove the acme of my felicity)
+and lamenting that until now it had only been given to me to IMAGINE
+things. No sooner had every one dispersed, and I had seen lights pass
+from the drawing-room to the upper chambers (whence female voices would
+presently be heard, and the noise of windows opening and shutting), than
+I would depart to the verandah, and walk up and down there as I listened
+attentively to the sounds from the slumbering mansion. To this day,
+whenever I feel any expectation (no matter how small and baseless) of
+realising a fraction of some happiness of which I may be dreaming, I
+somehow invariably fail to picture to myself what the imagined happiness
+is going to be like.
+
+At the least sound of bare footsteps, or of a cough, or of a snore, or
+of the rattling of a window, or of the rustling of a dress, I would
+leap from my mattress, and stand furtively gazing and listening, thrown,
+without any visible cause, into extreme agitation. But the lights would
+disappear from the upper rooms, the sounds of footsteps and talking give
+place to snores, the watchman begin his nightly tapping with his stick,
+the garden grow brighter and more mysterious as the streaks of light
+vanished from the windows, the last candle pass from the pantry to the
+hall (throwing a glimmer into the dewy garden as it did so), and the
+stooping figure of Foka (decked in a nightcap, and carrying the candle)
+become visible to my eyes as he went to his bed. Often I would find
+a great and fearful pleasure in stealing over the grass, in the black
+shadow of the house, until I had reached the hall window, where I would
+stand listening with bated breath to the snoring of the boy, to Foka's
+gruntings (in the belief that no one heard him), and to the sound of his
+senile voice as he drawled out the evening prayers. At length even his
+candle would be extinguished, and the window slammed down, so that I
+would find myself utterly alone; whereupon, glancing nervously from
+side to side, lest haply I should see the white woman standing near
+a flower-bed or by my couch, I would run at full speed back to the
+verandah. Then, and only then, I would lie down with my face to
+the garden, and, covering myself over, so far as possible, from the
+mosquitos and bats, fall to gazing in front of me as I listened to the
+sounds of the night and dreamed of love and happiness.
+
+At such times everything would take on for me a different meaning. The
+look of the old birch trees, with the one side of their curling branches
+showing bright against the moonlit sky, and the other darkening the
+bushes and carriage-drive with their black shadows; the calm, rich
+glitter of the pond, ever swelling like a sound; the moonlit sparkle
+of the dewdrops on the flowers in front of the verandah; the graceful
+shadows of those flowers where they lay thrown upon the grey stonework;
+the cry of a quail on the far side of the pond; the voice of some one
+walking on the high road; the quiet, scarcely audible scrunching of two
+old birch trees against one another; the humming of a mosquito at my car
+under the coverlet; the fall of an apple as it caught against a
+branch and rustled among the dry leaves; the leapings of frogs as they
+approached almost to the verandah-steps and sat with the moon shining
+mysteriously on their green backs--all these things took on for me a
+strange significance--a significance of exceeding beauty and of infinite
+love. Before me would rise SHE, with long black tresses and a high bust,
+but always mournful in her fairness, with bare hands and voluptuous
+arms. She loved me, and for one moment of her love I would sacrifice
+my whole life!--But the moon would go on rising higher and higher, and
+shining brighter and brighter, in the heavens; the rich sparkle of the
+pond would swell like a sound, and become ever more and more brilliant,
+while the shadows would grow blacker and blacker, and the sheen of the
+moon more and more transparent: until, as I looked at and listened to
+all this, something would say to me that SHE with the bare hands and
+voluptuous arms did not represent ALL happiness, that love for her
+did not represent ALL good; so that, the more I gazed at the full,
+high-riding moon, the higher would true beauty and goodness appear to me
+to lie, and the purer and purer they would seem--the nearer and nearer
+to Him who is the source of all beauty and all goodness. And tears of a
+sort of unsatisfied, yet tumultuous, joy would fill my eyes.
+
+Always, too, I was alone; yet always, too, it seemed to me that,
+although great, mysterious Nature could draw the shining disc of the
+moon to herself, and somehow hold in some high, indefinite place the
+pale-blue sky, and be everywhere around me, and fill of herself the
+infinity of space, while I was but a lowly worm, already defiled with
+the poor, petty passions of humanity--always it seemed to me that,
+nevertheless, both Nature and the moon and I were one.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII. OUR NEIGHBOURS
+
+ON the first day after our arrival, I had been greatly astonished that
+Papa should speak of our neighbours, the Epifanovs, as "nice people,"
+and still more so that he should go to call upon them. The fact was that
+we had long been at law over some land with this family. When a child,
+I had more than once heard Papa raging over the litigation, abusing
+the Epifanovs, and warning people (so I understood him) against them.
+Likewise, I had heard Jakoff speak of them as "our enemies" and "black
+people" and could remember Mamma requesting that their names should
+never be mentioned in her presence, nor, indeed, in the house at all.
+
+From these data I, as a child, had arrived at the clear and assured
+conviction that the Epifanovs were foemen of ours who would at any time
+stab or strangle both Papa and his sons if they should ever come across
+them, as well as that they were "black people", in the literal sense of
+the term. Consequently, when, in the year that Mamma died, I chanced to
+catch sight of Avdotia ("La Belle Flamande") on the occasion of a visit
+which she paid to my mother, I found it hard to believe that she did
+not come of a family of negroes. All the same, I had the lowest possible
+opinion of the family, and, for all that we saw much of them that
+summer, continued to be strongly prejudiced against them. As a matter
+of fact, their household only consisted of the mother (a widow of fifty,
+but a very well-preserved, cheery old woman), a beautiful daughter named
+Avdotia, and a son, Peter, who was a stammerer, unmarried, and of very
+serious disposition.
+
+For the last twenty years before her husband's death, Madame Epifanov
+had lived apart from him--sometimes in St. Petersburg, where she had
+relatives, but more frequently at her village of Mitishtchi, which
+stood some three versts from ours. Yet the neighbourhood had taken
+to circulating such horrible tales concerning her mode of life that
+Messalina was, by comparison, a blameless child: which was why my mother
+had requested her name never to be mentioned. As a matter of fact,
+not one-tenth part of the most cruel of all gossip--the gossip of
+country-houses--is worthy of credence; and although, when I first made
+Madame's acquaintance, she had living with her in the house a clerk
+named Mitusha, who had been promoted from a serf, and who, curled,
+pomaded, and dressed in a frockcoat of Circassian pattern, always stood
+behind his mistress's chair at luncheon, while from time to time she
+invited her guests to admire his handsome eyes and mouth, there was
+nothing for gossip to take hold of. I believe, too, that since the
+time--ten years earlier--when she had recalled her dutiful son Peter
+from the service, she had wholly changed her mode of living. It seems
+her property had never been a large one--merely a hundred souls or
+so--[This refers, of course, to the days of serfdom.]and that during her
+previous life of gaiety she had spent a great deal. Consequently,
+when, some ten years ago, those portions of the property which had been
+mortgaged and re-mortgaged had been foreclosed upon and compulsorily
+sold by auction, she had come to the conclusion that all these
+unpleasant details of distress upon and valuation of her property had
+been due not so much to failure to pay the interest as to the fact that
+she was a woman: wherefore she had written to her son (then serving with
+his regiment) to come and save his mother from her embarrassments, and
+he, like a dutiful son--conceiving that his first duty was to comfort
+his mother in her old age--had straightway resigned his commission (for
+all that he had been doing well in his profession, and was hoping soon
+to become independent), and had come to join her in the country.
+
+Despite his plain face, uncouth demeanour, and fault of stuttering,
+Peter was a man of unswerving principles and of the most extraordinary
+good sense. Somehow--by small borrowings, sundry strokes of business,
+petitions for grace, and promises to repay--he contrived to carry on the
+property, and, making himself overseer, donned his father's greatcoat
+(still preserved in a drawer), dispensed with horses and carriages,
+discouraged guests from calling at Mitishtchi, fashioned his own
+sleighs, increased his arable land and curtailed that of the serfs,
+felled his own timber, sold his produce in person, and saw to matters
+generally. Indeed, he swore, and kept his oath, that, until all
+outstanding debts were paid, he would never wear any clothes than his
+father's greatcoat and a corduroy jacket which he had made for himself,
+nor yet ride in aught but a country waggon, drawn by peasants' horses.
+This stoical mode of life he sought to apply also to his family, so far
+as the sympathetic respect which he conceived to be his mother's due
+would allow of; so that, although, in the drawing-room, he would show
+her only stuttering servility, and fulfil all her wishes, and blame any
+one who did not do precisely as she bid them, in his study or his
+office he would overhaul the cook if she had served up so much as a
+duck without his orders, or any one responsible for sending a serf (even
+though at Madame's own bidding) to inquire after a neighbour's health
+or for despatching the peasant girls into the wood to gather wild
+raspberries instead of setting them to weed the kitchen-garden.
+
+Within four years every debt had been repaid, and Peter had gone to
+Moscow and returned thence in a new jacket and tarantass. [A two-wheeled
+carriage.] Yet, despite this flourishing position of affairs, he still
+preserved the stoical tendencies in which, to tell the truth, he took
+a certain vague pride before his family and strangers, since he would
+frequently say with a stutter: "Any one who REALLY wishes to see me
+will be glad to see me even in my dressing-gown, and to eat nothing but
+shtchi [Cabbage-soup.] and kasha [Buckwheat gruel.] at my table." "That
+is what I eat myself," he would add. In his every word and movement
+spoke pride based upon a consciousness of having sacrificed himself for
+his mother and redeemed the property, as well as contempt for any one
+who had not done something of the same kind.
+
+The mother and daughter were altogether different characters from Peter,
+as well as altogether different from one another. The former was one of
+the most agreeable, uniformly good-tempered, and cheerful women whom one
+could possibly meet. Anything attractive and genuinely happy delighted
+her. Even the faculty of being pleased with the sight of young people
+enjoying themselves (it is only in the best-natured of elderly folk that
+one meets with that TRAIT) she possessed to the full. On the other
+hand, her daughter was of a grave turn of mind. Rather, she was of that
+peculiarly careless, absent-minded, gratuitously distant bearing which
+commonly distinguishes unmarried beauties. Whenever she tried to be gay,
+her gaiety somehow seemed to be unnatural to her, so that she always
+appeared to be laughing either at herself or at the persons to whom she
+was speaking or at the world in general--a thing which, possibly, she
+had no real intention of doing. Often I asked myself in astonishment
+what she could mean when she said something like, "Yes, I know how
+terribly good-looking I am," or, "Of course every one is in love with
+me," and so forth. Her mother was a person always busy, since she had
+a passion for housekeeping, gardening, flowers, canaries, and pretty
+trinkets. Her rooms and garden, it is true, were small and poorly
+fitted-up, yet everything in them was so neat and methodical, and bore
+such a general air of that gentle gaiety which one hears expressed in
+a waltz or polka, that the word "toy" by which guests often expressed
+their praise of it all exactly suited her surroundings. She herself
+was a "toy"--being petite, slender, fresh-coloured, small, and
+pretty-handed, and invariably gay and well-dressed. The only fault in
+her was that a slight over-prominence of the dark-blue veins on her
+little hands rather marred the general effect of her appearance. On the
+other hand, her daughter scarcely ever did anything at all. Not only had
+she no love for trifling with flowers and trinkets, but she neglected
+her personal exterior, and only troubled to dress herself well when
+guests happened to call. Yet, on returning to the room in society
+costume, she always looked extremely handsome--save for that cold,
+uniform expression of eyes and smile which is common to all beauties. In
+fact, her strictly regular, beautiful face and symmetrical figure always
+seemed to be saying to you, "Yes, you may look at me."
+
+At the same time, for all the mother's liveliness of disposition and the
+daughter's air of indifference and abstraction, something told one that
+the former was incapable of feeling affection for anything that was
+not pretty and gay, but that Avdotia, on the contrary, was one of those
+natures which, once they love, are willing to sacrifice their whole life
+for the man they adore.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV. MY FATHER'S SECOND MARRIAGE
+
+MY father was forty-eight when he took as his second wife Avdotia
+Vassilievna Epifanov.
+
+I suspect that when, that spring, he had departed for the country with
+the girls, he had been in that communicatively happy, sociable mood in
+which gamblers usually find themselves who have retired from play after
+winning large stakes. He had felt that he still had a fortune left to
+him which, so long as he did not squander it on gaming, might be
+used for our advancement in life. Moreover, it was springtime, he was
+unexpectedly well supplied with ready money, he was alone, and he had
+nothing to do. As he conversed with Jakoff on various matters, and
+remembered both the interminable suit with the Epifanovs and Avdotia's
+beauty (it was a long while since he had seen her), I can imagine him
+saying: "How do you think we ought to act in this suit, Jakoff? My idea
+is simply to let the cursed land go. Eh? What do you think about it?"
+I can imagine, too, how, thus interrogated, Jakoff twirled his fingers
+behind his back in a deprecatory sort of way, and proceeded to argue
+that it all the same, "Peter Alexandritch, we are in the right."
+Nevertheless, I further conjecture, Papa ordered the dogcart to be got
+ready, put on his fashionable olive-coloured driving-coat, brushed up
+the remnants of his hair, sprinkled his clothes with scent, and, greatly
+pleased to think that he was acting a la seignior (as well as, even
+more, revelling in the prospect of soon seeing a pretty woman), drove
+off to visit his neighbours.
+
+I can imagine, too, that when the flustered housemaid ran to inform
+Peter Vassilievitch that Monsieur Irtenieff himself had called, Peter
+answered angrily, "Well, what has he come for?" and, stepping softly
+about the house, first went into his study to put on his old soiled
+jacket, and then sent down word to the cook that on no account
+whatever--no, not even if she were ordered to do so by the mistress
+herself--was she to add anything to luncheon.
+
+Since, later, I often saw Papa with Peter, I can form a very good idea
+of this first interview between them. I can imagine that, despite Papa's
+proposal to end the suit in a peaceful manner, Peter was morose and
+resentful at the thought of having sacrificed his career to his mother,
+and at Papa having done nothing of the kind--a by no means surprising
+circumstance, Peter probably said to himself. Next, I can see Papa
+taking no notice of this ill-humour, but cracking quips and jests, while
+Peter gradually found himself forced to treat him as a humorist with
+whom he felt offended one moment and inclined to be reconciled the next.
+Indeed, with his instinct for making fun of everything, Papa often used
+to address Peter as "Colonel;" and though I can remember Peter once
+replying, with an unusually violent stutter and his face scarlet
+with indignation, that he had never been a c-c-colonel, but only a
+l-l-lieutenant, Papa called him "Colonel" again before another five
+minutes were out.
+
+Lubotshka told me that, up to the time of Woloda's and my arrival from
+Moscow, there had been daily meetings with the Epifanovs, and that
+things had been very lively, since Papa, who had a genius for arranging,
+everything with a touch of originality and wit, as well as in a simple
+and refined manner, had devised shooting and fishing parties and
+fireworks for the Epifanovs' benefit. All these festivities--so said
+Lubotshka--would have gone off splendidly but for the intolerable Peter,
+who had spoilt everything by his puffing and stuttering. After our
+coming, however, the Epifanovs only visited us twice, and we went once
+to their house, while after St. Peter's Day (on which, it being Papa's
+nameday, the Epifanovs called upon us in common with a crowd of other
+guests) our relations with that family came entirely to an end, and, in
+future, only Papa went to see them.
+
+During the brief period when I had opportunities of seeing Papa and
+Dunetchka (as her mother called Avdotia) together, this is what I
+remarked about them. Papa remained unceasingly in the same buoyant mood
+as had so greatly struck me on the day after our arrival. So gay and
+youthful and full of life and happy did he seem that the beams of
+his felicity extended themselves to all around him, and involuntarily
+communicated to them a similar frame of mind. He never stirred from
+Avdotia's side so long as she was in the room, but either kept on plying
+her with sugary-sweet compliments which made me feel ashamed for him
+or, with his gaze fixed upon her with an air at once passionate and
+complacent, sat hitching his shoulder and coughing as from time to time
+he smiled and whispered something in her ear. Yet throughout he wore
+the same expression of raillery as was peculiar to him even in the most
+serious matters.
+
+As a rule, Avdotia herself seemed to catch the infection of the
+happiness which sparkled at this period in Papa's large blue eyes; yet
+there were moments also when she would be seized with such a fit of
+shyness that I, who knew the feeling well, was full of sympathy and
+compassion as I regarded her embarrassment. At moments of this kind she
+seemed to be afraid of every glance and every movement--to be supposing
+that every one was looking at her, every one thinking of no one but
+her, and that unfavourably. She would glance timidly from one person to
+another, the colour coming and going in her cheeks, and then begin
+to talk loudly and defiantly, but, for the most part, nonsense; until
+presently, realising this, and supposing that Papa and every one else
+had heard her, she would blush more painfully than ever. Yet Papa never
+noticed her nonsense, for he was too much taken up with coughing and
+with gazing at her with his look of happy, triumphant devotion. I
+noticed, too, that, although these fits of shyness attacked Avdotia,
+without any visible cause, they not infrequently ensued upon Papa's
+mention of one or another young and beautiful woman. Frequent
+transitions from depression to that strange, awkward gaiety of hers
+to which I have referred before the repetition of favourite words and
+turns of speech of Papa's; the continuation of discussions with others
+which Papa had already begun--all these things, if my father had not
+been the principal actor in the matter and I had been a little older,
+would have explained to me the relations subsisting between him and
+Avdotia. At the time, however, I never surmised them--no, not even when
+Papa received from her brother Peter a letter which so upset him that
+not again until the end of August did he go to call upon the Epifanovs'.
+Then, however, he began his visits once more, and ended by informing
+us, on the day before Woloda and I were to return to Moscow, that he was
+about to take Avdotia Vassilievna Epifanov to be his wife.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV. HOW WE RECEIVED THE NEWS
+
+Yet, even on the eve of the official announcement, every one had learnt
+of the matter, and was discussing it. Mimi never left her room that
+day, and wept copiously. Katenka kept her company, and only came out
+for luncheon, with a grieved expression on her face which was manifestly
+borrowed from her mother. Lubotshka, on the contrary, was very cheerful,
+and told us after luncheon that she knew of a splendid secret which she
+was going to tell no one.
+
+"There is nothing so splendid about your secret," said Woloda, who did
+not in the least share her satisfaction. "If you were capable of any
+serious thought at all, you would understand that it is a very bad
+lookout for us."
+
+Lubotshka stared at him in amazement, and said no more. After the meal
+was over, Woloda made a feint of taking me by the arm, and then, fearing
+that this would seem too much like "affection," nudged me gently by the
+elbow, and beckoned me towards the salon.
+
+"You know, I suppose, what the secret is of which Lubotshka was
+speaking?" he said when he was sure that we were alone. It was seldom
+that he and I spoke together in confidence: with the result that,
+whenever it came about, we felt a kind of awkwardness in one another's
+presence, and "boys began to jump about" in our eyes, as Woloda
+expressed it. On the present occasion, however, he answered the
+excitement in my eyes with a grave, fixed look which said: "You need not
+be surprised, for we are brothers, and we have to consider an important
+family matter." I understood him, and he went on:
+
+"You know, I suppose, that Papa is going to marry Avdotia Epifanov?"
+
+I nodded, for I had already heard so. "Well, it is not a good thing,"
+continued Woloda.
+
+"Why so?"
+
+"Why?" he repeated irritably. "Because it will be so pleasant, won't
+it, to have this stuttering 'colonel' and all his family for relations!
+Certainly she seems nice enough, as yet; but who knows what she will
+turn out to be later? It won't matter much to you or myself, but
+Lubotshka will soon be making her debut, and it will hardly be nice
+for her to have such a 'belle mere' as this--a woman who speaks French
+badly, and has no manners to teach her."
+
+Although it seemed odd to hear Woloda criticising Papa's choice so
+coolly, I felt that he was right.
+
+"Why is he marrying her?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, it is a hole-and-corner business, and God only knows why,"
+he answered. "All I know is that her brother, Peter, tried to make
+conditions about the marriage, and that, although at first Papa would
+not hear of them, he afterwards took some fancy or knight-errantry or
+another into his head. But, as I say, it is a hole-and-corner business.
+I am only just beginning to understand my father "--the fact that Woloda
+called Papa "my father" instead of "Papa" somehow hurt me--"and though I
+can see that he is kind and clever, he is irresponsible and frivolous to
+a degree that--Well, the whole thing is astonishing. He cannot so much
+as look upon a woman calmly. You yourself know how he falls in love with
+every one that he meets. You know it, and so does Mimi."
+
+"What do you mean?" I said.
+
+"What I say. Not long ago I learnt that he used to be in love with Mimi
+herself when he was a young man, and that he used to send her poetry,
+and that there really was something between them. Mimi is heart-sore
+about it to this day"--and Woloda burst out laughing.
+
+"Impossible!" I cried in astonishment.
+
+"But the principal thing at this moment," went on Woloda, becoming
+serious again, and relapsing into French, "is to think how delighted all
+our relations will be with this marriage! Why, she will probably have
+children!"
+
+Woloda's prudence and forethought struck me so forcibly that I had no
+answer to make. Just at this moment Lubotshka approached us.
+
+"So you know?" she said with a joyful face.
+
+"Yes," said Woloda. "Still, I am surprised at you, Lubotshka. You are no
+longer a baby in long clothes. Why should you be so pleased because Papa
+is going to marry a piece of trash?"
+
+At this Lubotshka's face fell, and she became serious.
+
+"Oh, Woloda!" she exclaimed. "Why 'a piece of trash' indeed? How can you
+dare to speak of Avdotia like that? If Papa is going to marry her she
+cannot be 'trash.'"
+
+"No, not trash, so to speak, but--"
+
+"No 'buts' at all!" interrupted Lubotshka, flaring up. "You have never
+heard me call the girl whom you are in love with 'trash!' How, then, can
+you speak so of Papa and a respectable woman? Although you are my elder
+brother, I won't allow you to speak like that! You ought not to!"
+
+"Mayn't I even express an opinion about--"
+
+"No, you mayn't!" repeated Lubotshka. "No one ought to criticise such a
+father as ours. Mimi has the right to, but not you, however much you may
+be the eldest brother."
+
+"Oh you don't understand anything," said Woloda contemptuously. "Try
+and do so. How can it be a good thing that a 'Dunetchka' of an Epifanov
+should take the place of our dead Mamma?"
+
+For a moment Lubotshka was silent. Then the tears suddenly came into her
+eyes.
+
+"I knew that you were conceited, but I never thought that you could be
+cruel," she said, and left us.
+
+"Pshaw!" said Woloda, pulling a serio-comic face and make-believe,
+stupid eyes. "That's what comes of arguing with them." Evidently he felt
+that he was at fault in having so far forgot himself as to descend to
+discuss matters at all with Lubotshka.
+
+Next day the weather was bad, and neither Papa nor the ladies had come
+down to morning tea when I entered the drawing-room. There had been
+cold rain in the night, and remnants of the clouds from which it had
+descended were still scudding across the sky, with the sun's luminous
+disc (not yet risen to any great height) showing faintly through
+them. It was a windy, damp, grey morning. The door into the garden was
+standing open, and pools left by the night's rain were drying on the
+damp-blackened flags of the terrace. The open door was swinging on its
+iron hinges in the wind, and all the paths looked wet and muddy. The old
+birch trees with their naked white branches, the bushes, the turf,
+the nettles, the currant-trees, the elders with the pale side of their
+leaves turned upwards--all were dashing themselves about, and looking as
+though they were trying to wrench themselves free from their roots. From
+the avenue of lime-trees showers of round, yellow leaves were flying
+through the air in tossing, eddying circles, and strewing the wet
+road and soaked aftermath of the hayfield with a clammy carpet. At the
+moment, my thoughts were wholly taken up with my father's approaching
+marriage and with the point of view from which Woloda regarded it. The
+future seemed to me to bode no good for any of us. I felt distressed to
+think that a woman who was not only a stranger but young should be going
+to associate with us in so many relations of life, without having any
+right to do so--nay, that this young woman was going to usurp the place
+of our dead mother. I felt depressed, and kept thinking more and more
+that my father was to blame in the matter. Presently I heard his voice
+and Woloda's speaking together in the pantry, and, not wishing to meet
+Papa just then, had just left the room when I was pursued by Lubotshka,
+who said that Papa wanted to see me.
+
+He was standing in the drawing-room, with his hand resting on the piano,
+and was gazing in my direction with an air at once grave and impatient.
+His face no longer wore the youthful, gay expression which had struck me
+for so long, but, on the contrary, looked sad. Woloda was walking about
+the room with a pipe in his hand. I approached my father, and bade him
+good morning.
+
+"Well, my children," he said firmly, with a lift of his head and in
+the peculiarly hurried manner of one who wishes to announce something
+obviously unwelcome, but no longer admitting of reconsideration, "you
+know, I suppose, that I am going to marry Avdotia Epifanov." He paused
+a moment. "Hitherto I had had no desire for any one to succeed your
+mother, but"--and again he paused--"it-it is evidently my fate.
+Dunetchka is an excellent, kind girl, and no longer in her first youth.
+I hope, therefore, my children, that you will like her, and she, I know,
+will be sincerely fond of you, for she is a good woman. And now," he
+went on, addressing himself more particularly to Woloda and myself, and
+having the appearance of speaking hurriedly in order to prevent us from
+interrupting him, "it is time for you to depart, while I myself am
+going to stay here until the New Year, and then to follow you to Moscow
+with"--again he hesitated a moment--"my wife and Lubotshka." It hurt me
+to see my father standing as though abashed and at fault before us, so
+I moved a little nearer him, but Woloda only went on walking about the
+room with his head down, and smoking.
+
+"So, my children, that is what your old father has planned to do,"
+concluded Papa--reddening, coughing, and offering Woloda and myself his
+hands. Tears were in his eyes as he said this, and I noticed, too, that
+the hand which he was holding out to Woloda (who at that moment chanced
+to be at the other end of the room) was shaking slightly. The sight of
+that shaking hand gave me an unpleasant shock, for I remembered that
+Papa had served in 1812, and had been, as every one knew, a brave
+officer. Seizing the great veiny hand, I covered it with kisses, and
+he squeezed mine hard in return. Then, with a sob amid his tears, he
+suddenly threw his arms around Lubotshka's dark head, and kissed her
+again and again on the eyes. Woloda pretended that he had dropped his
+pipe, and, bending down, wiped his eyes furtively with the back of his
+hand. Then, endeavouring to escape notice, he left the room.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI. THE UNIVERSITY
+
+THE wedding was to take place in two weeks' time, but, as our lectures
+had begun already, Woloda and myself were forced to return to Moscow at
+the beginning of September. The Nechludoffs had also returned from the
+country, and Dimitri (with whom, on parting, I had made an agreement
+that we should correspond frequently with the result, of course, that we
+had never once written to one another) came to see us immediately
+after our arrival, and arranged to escort me to my first lecture on the
+morrow.
+
+It was a beautiful sunny day. No sooner had I entered the auditorium
+than I felt my personality entirely disappear amid the swarm of
+light-hearted youths who were seething tumultuously through every
+doorway and corridor under the influence of the sunlight pouring through
+the great windows. I found the sense of being a member of this huge
+community very pleasing, yet there were few among the throng whom I
+knew, and that only on terms of a nod and a "How do you do, Irtenieff?"
+
+All around me men were shaking hands and chatting together--from every
+side came expressions of friendship, laughter, jests, and badinage.
+Everywhere I could feel the tie which bound this youthful society in
+one, and everywhere, too, I could feel that it left me out. Yet this
+impression lasted for a moment only, and was succeeded, together with
+the vexation which it had caused, by the idea that it was best that
+I should not belong to that society, but keep to my own circle of
+gentlemen; wherefore I proceeded to seat myself upon the third bench,
+with, as neighbours, Count B., Baron Z., the Prince R., Iwin, and
+some other young men of the same class with none of whom, however, was
+acquainted save with Iwin and Count B. Yet the look which these young
+gentlemen threw at me at once made me feel that I was not of their set,
+and I turned to observe what was going on around me. Semenoff, with
+grey, matted hair, white teeth, and tunic flying open, was seated a
+little distance off, and leaning forward on his elbows as he nibbled
+a pen, while the gymnasium student who had come out first in the
+examinations had established himself on the front bench, and, with a
+black stock coming half-way up his cheek, was toying with the silver
+watch-chain which adorned his satin waistcoat. On a bench in a raised
+part of the hall I could descry Ikonin (evidently he had contrived to
+enter the University somehow!), and hear him fussily proclaiming, in all
+the glory of blue piped trousers which completely hid his boots, that he
+was now seated on Parnassus. Ilinka--who had surprised me by giving me a
+bow not only cold, but supercilious, as though to remind me that here we
+were all equals--was just in front of me, with his legs resting in free
+and easy style on another bench (a hit, somehow I thought, at myself),
+and conversing with a student as he threw occasional glances in my
+direction. Iwin's set by my side were talking in French, yet every word
+which I overheard of their conversation seemed to me both stupid and
+incorrect ("Ce n'est pas francais," I thought to myself), while all
+the attitudes, utterances, and doings of Semenoff, Ilinka, and the rest
+struck me as uniformly coarse, ungentlemanly, and "comme il ne faut
+pas."
+
+Thus, attached to no particular set, I felt isolated and unable to make
+friends, and so grew resentful. One of the students on the bench in
+front of me kept biting his nails, which were raw to the quick already,
+and this so disgusted me that I edged away from him. In short, I
+remember finding my first day a most depressing affair.
+
+When the professor entered, and there was a general stir and a cessation
+of chatter, I remember throwing a scornful glance at him, as also
+that he began his discourse with a sentence which I thought devoid of
+meaning. I had expected the lecture to be, from first to last, so clever
+that not a word ought to be taken from or added to it. Disappointed in
+this, I at once proceeded to draw beneath the heading "First Lecture"
+with which I had adorned my beautifully-bound notebook no less than
+eighteen faces in profile, joined together in a sort of chaplet, and
+only occasionally moved my hand along the page in order to give the
+professor (who, I felt sure, must be greatly interested in me) the
+impression that I was writing something. In fact, at this very first
+lecture I came to the decision which I maintained to the end of my
+course, namely, that it was unnecessary, and even stupid, to take down
+every word said by every professor.
+
+At subsequent lectures, however, I did not feel my isolation so
+strongly, since I made several acquaintances and got into the way of
+shaking hands and entering into conversation. Yet for some reason or
+another no real intimacy ever sprang up between us, and I often found
+myself depressed and only feigning cheerfulness. With the set which
+comprised Iwin and "the aristocrats," as they were generally known, I
+could not make any headway at all, for, as I now remember, I was always
+shy and churlish to them, and nodded to them only when they nodded to
+me; so that they had little inducement to desire my acquaintance. With
+most of the other students, however, this arose from quite a different
+cause. As soon as ever I discerned friendliness on the part of a
+comrade, I at once gave him to understand that I went to luncheon with
+Prince Ivan Ivanovitch and kept my own drozhki. All this I said merely
+to show myself in the most favourable light in his eyes, and to induce
+him to like me all the more; yet almost invariably the only result of
+my communicating to him the intelligence concerning the drozhki and my
+relationship to Prince Ivan Ivanovitch was that, to my astonishment, he
+at once adopted a cold and haughty bearing towards me.
+
+Among us we had a Crown student named Operoff--a very modest,
+industrious, and clever young fellow, who always offered one his hand
+like a slab of wood (that is to say, without closing his fingers or
+making the slightest movement with them); with the result that his
+comrades often did the same to him in jest, and called it the "deal
+board" way of shaking hands. He and I nearly always sat next to one
+another, and discussed matters generally. In particular he pleased me
+with the freedom with which he would criticise the professors as he
+pointed out to me with great clearness and acumen the merits or demerits
+of their respective ways of teaching and made occasional fun of them.
+Such remarks I found exceedingly striking and diverting when uttered
+in his quiet, mincing voice. Nevertheless he never let a lecture
+pass without taking careful notes of it in his fine handwriting,
+and eventually we decided to join forces, and to do our preparation
+together. Things had progressed to the point of his always looking
+pleased when I took my usual seat beside him when, unfortunately, I one
+day found it necessary to inform him that, before her death, my mother
+had besought my father never to allow us to enter for a government
+scholarship, as well as that I myself considered Crown students, no
+matter how clever, to be-"well, they are not GENTLEMEN," I concluded,
+though beginning to flounder a little and grow red. At the moment
+Operoff said nothing, but at subsequent lectures he ceased to greet me
+or to offer me his board-like hand, and never attempted to talk to me,
+but, as soon as ever I sat down, he would lean his head upon his arm,
+and purport to be absorbed in his notebooks. I was surprised at this
+sudden coolness, but looked upon it as infra dig, "pour un jeune
+homme de bonne maison" to curry favour with a mere Crown student of
+an Operoff, and so left him severely alone--though I confess that his
+aloofness hurt my feelings. On one occasion I arrived before him,
+and, since the lecture was to be delivered by a popular professor whom
+students came to hear who did not usually attend such functions, I found
+almost every seat occupied. Accordingly I secured Operoff's place for
+myself by spreading my notebooks on the desk before it; after which I
+left the room again for a moment. When I returned I perceived that my
+paraphernalia had been relegated to the bench behind, and the place
+taken by Operoff himself. I remarked to him that I had already secured
+it by placing my notebooks there.
+
+"I know nothing about that," he replied sharply, yet without looking up
+at me.
+
+"I tell you I placed my notebooks there," I repeated, purposely trying
+to bluster, in the hope of intimidating him. "Every one saw me do it,"
+I added, including the students near me in my glance. Several of them
+looked at me with curiosity, yet none of them spoke.
+
+"Seats cannot be booked here," said Operoff. "Whoever first sits down
+in a place keeps it," and, settling himself angrily where he was, he
+flashed at me a glance of defiance.
+
+"Well, that only means that you are a cad," I said.
+
+I have an idea that he murmured something about my being "a stupid young
+idiot," but I decided not to hear it. What would be the use, I asked
+myself, of my hearing it? That we should brawl like a couple of manants
+over less than nothing? (I was very fond of the word manants, and often
+used it for meeting awkward junctures.) Perhaps I should have said
+something more had not, at that moment, a door slammed and the professor
+(dressed in a blue frockcoat, and shuffling his feet as he walked)
+ascended the rostrum.
+
+Nevertheless, when the examination was about to come on, and I had need
+of some one's notebooks, Operoff remembered his promise to lend me his,
+and we did our preparation together.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII. AFFAIRS OF THE HEART
+
+Affaires du coeur exercised me greatly that winter. In fact, I fell in
+love three times. The first time, I became passionately enamoured of a
+buxom lady whom I used to see riding at Freitag's riding-school; with
+the result that every day when she was taking a lesson there (that is to
+say, every Tuesday and Friday) I used to go to gaze at her, but always
+in such a state of trepidation lest I should be seen that I stood a long
+way off, and bolted directly I thought her likely to approach the spot
+where I was standing. Likewise, I used to turn round so precipitately
+whenever she appeared to be glancing in my direction that I never
+saw her face well, and to this day do not know whether she was really
+beautiful or not.
+
+Dubkoff, who was acquainted with her, surprised me one day in the
+riding-school, where I was lurking concealed behind the lady's grooms
+and the fur wraps which they were holding, and, having heard from
+Dimitri of my infatuation, frightened me so terribly by proposing to
+introduce me to the Amazon that I fled incontinently from the school,
+and was prevented by the mere thought that possibly he had told her
+about me from ever entering the place again, or even from hiding behind
+her grooms, lest I should encounter her.
+
+Whenever I fell in love with ladies whom I did not know, and especially
+married women, I experienced a shyness a thousand times greater than I
+had ever felt with Sonetchka. I dreaded beyond measure that my divinity
+should learn of my passion, or even of my existence, since I felt sure
+that, once she had done so, she would be so terribly offended that I
+should never be forgiven for my presumption. And indeed, if the Amazon
+referred to above had ever come to know how I used to stand behind the
+grooms and dream of seizing her and carrying her off to some country
+spot--if she had ever come to know how I should have lived with her
+there, and how I should have treated her, it is probable that she would
+have had very good cause for indignation! But I always felt that, once
+I got to know her, she would straightway divine these thoughts, and
+consider herself insulted by my acquaintance.
+
+As my second affaire du coeur, I, (for the third time) fell in love with
+Sonetchka when I saw her at her sister's. My second passion for her had
+long since come to an end, but I became enamoured of her this third time
+through Lubotshka sending me a copy-book in which Sonetchka had copied
+some extracts from Lermontoff's The Demon, with certain of the more
+subtly amorous passages underlined in red ink and marked with pressed
+flowers. Remembering how Woloda had been wont to kiss his inamorata's
+purse last year, I essayed to do the same thing now; and really, when
+alone in my room in the evenings and engaged in dreaming as I looked at
+a flower or occasionally pressed it to my lips, I would feel a certain
+pleasantly lachrymose mood steal over me, and remain genuinely in love
+(or suppose myself to be so) for at least several days.
+
+Finally, my third affaire du coeur that winter was connected with the
+lady with whom Woloda was in love, and who used occasionally to visit
+at our house. Yet, in this damsel, as I now remember, there was not a
+single beautiful feature to be found--or, at all events, none of those
+which usually pleased me. She was the daughter of a well-known Moscow
+lady of light and leading, and, petite and slender, wore long flaxen
+curls after the English fashion, and could boast of a transparent
+profile. Every one said that she was even cleverer and more learned
+than her mother, but I was never in a position to judge of that, since,
+overcome with craven bashfulness at the mere thought of her intellect
+and accomplishments, I never spoke to her alone but once, and then
+with unaccountable trepidation. Woloda's enthusiasm, however (for the
+presence of an audience never prevented him from giving vent to his
+rapture), communicated itself to me so strongly that I also became
+enamoured of the lady. Yet, conscious that he would not be pleased to
+know that two brothers were in love with the same girl, I never told him
+of my condition. On the contrary, I took special delight in the thought
+that our mutual love for her was so pure that, though its object was, in
+both cases, the same charming being, we remained friends and ready, if
+ever the occasion should arise, to sacrifice ourselves for one another.
+Yet I have an idea that, as regards self-sacrifice, he did not quite
+share my views, for he was so passionately in love with the lady that
+once he was for giving a member of the diplomatic corps, who was said
+to be going to marry her, a slap in the face and a challenge to a duel;
+but, for my part, I would gladly have sacrificed my feelings for his
+sake, seeing that the fact that the only remark I had ever addressed to
+her had been on the subject of the dignity of classical music, and that
+my passion, for all my efforts to keep it alive, expired the following
+week, would have rendered it the more easy for me to do so.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII. THE WORLD
+
+As regards those worldly delights to which I had intended, on entering
+the University, to surrender myself in imitation of my brother, I
+underwent a complete disillusionment that winter. Woloda danced a great
+deal, and Papa also went to balls with his young wife, but I appeared
+to be thought either too young or unfitted for such delights, and no one
+invited me to the houses where balls were being given. Yet, in spite of
+my vow of frankness with Dimitri, I never told him (nor any one else)
+how much I should have liked to go to those dances, and how I felt hurt
+at being forgotten and (apparently) taken for the philosopher that I
+pretended to be.
+
+Nevertheless, a reception was to be given that winter at the Princess
+Kornakoff's, and to it she sent us personal invitations--to myself among
+the rest! Consequently, I was to attend my first ball. Before starting,
+Woloda came into my room to see how I was dressing myself--an act on
+his part which greatly surprised me and took me aback. In my opinion (it
+must be understood) solicitude about one's dress was a shameful thing,
+and should be kept under, but he seemed to think it a thing so natural
+and necessary that he said outright that he was afraid I should be put
+out of countenance on that score. Accordingly, he bid me don my patent
+leather boots, and was horrified to find that I wanted to put on gloves
+of peau de chamois. Next, he adjusted my watch-chain in a particular
+manner, and carried me off to a hairdresser's near the Kuznetski Bridge
+to have my locks coiffured. That done, he withdrew to a little distance
+and surveyed me.
+
+"Yes, he looks right enough now" said he to the hairdresser.
+"Only--couldn't you smooth those tufts of his in front a little?" Yet,
+for all that Monsieur Charles treated my forelocks with one essence and
+another, they persisted in rising up again when ever I put on my hat. In
+fact, my curled and tonsured figure seemed to me to look far worse than
+it had done before. My only hope of salvation lay in an affectation of
+untidiness. Only in that guise would my exterior resemble anything at
+all. Woloda, apparently, was of the same opinion, for he begged me to
+undo the curls, and when I had done so and still looked unpresentable,
+he ceased to regard me at all, but throughout the drive to the
+Kornakoffs remained silent and depressed.
+
+Nevertheless, I entered the Kornakoffs' mansion boldly enough, and it
+was only when the Princess had invited me to dance, and I, for some
+reason or another (though I had driven there with no other thought in
+my head than to dance well), had replied that I never indulged in that
+pastime, that I began to blush, and, left solitary among a crowd of
+strangers, became plunged in my usual insuperable and ever-growing
+shyness. In fact, I remained silent on that spot almost the whole
+evening!
+
+Nevertheless, while a waltz was in progress, one of the young princesses
+came to me and asked me, with the sort of official kindness common to
+all her family, why I was not dancing. I can remember blushing hotly
+at the question, but at the same time feeling--for all my efforts
+to prevent it--a self-satisfied smile steal over my face as I began
+talking, in the most inflated and long-winded French, such rubbish as
+even now, after dozens of years, it shames me to recall. It must
+have been the effect of the music, which, while exciting my nervous
+sensibility, drowned (as I supposed) the less intelligible portion of my
+utterances. Anyhow, I went on speaking of the exalted company present,
+and of the futility of men and women, until I had got myself into such
+a tangle that I was forced to stop short in the middle of a word of a
+sentence which I found myself powerless to conclude.
+
+Even the worldly-minded young Princess was shocked by my conduct, and
+gazed at me in reproach; whereat I burst out laughing. At this critical
+moment, Woloda, who had remarked that I was conversing with great
+animation, and probably was curious to know what excuses I was making
+for not dancing, approached us with Dubkoff. Seeing, however, my smiling
+face and the Princess's frightened mien, as well as overhearing the
+appalling rubbish with which I concluded my speech, he turned red in
+the face, and wheeled round again. The Princess also rose and left me. I
+continued to smile, but in such a state of agony from the consciousness
+of my stupidity that I felt ready to sink into the floor. Likewise I
+felt that, come what might, I must move about and say something, in
+order to effect a change in my position. Accordingly I approached
+Dubkoff, and asked him if he had danced many waltzes with her that
+night. This I feigned to say in a gay and jesting manner, yet in reality
+I was imploring help of the very Dubkoff to whom I had cried "Hold your
+tongue!" on the night of the matriculation dinner. By way of answer, he
+made as though he had not heard me, and turned away. Next, I approached
+Woloda, and said with an effort and in a similar tone of assumed gaiety:
+"Hullo, Woloda! Are you played out yet?" He merely looked at me as much
+as to say, "You wouldn't speak to me like that if we were alone," and
+left me without a word, in the evident fear that I might continue to
+attach myself to his person.
+
+"My God! Even my own brother deserts me!" I thought to myself.
+
+Yet somehow I had not the courage to depart, but remained standing where
+I was until the very end of the evening. At length, when every one was
+leaving the room and crowding into the hall, and a footman slipped my
+greatcoat on to my shoulders in such a way as to tilt up my cap, I gave
+a dreary, half-lachrymose smile, and remarked to no one in particular:
+"Comme c'est gracieux!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX. THE STUDENTS' FEAST
+
+NOTWITHSTANDING that, as yet, Dimitri's influence had kept me from
+indulging in those customary students' festivities known as kutezhi or
+"wines," that winter saw me participate in such a function, and carry
+away with me a not over-pleasant impression of it. This is how it came
+about.
+
+At a lecture soon after the New Year, Baron Z.--a tall, light-haired
+young fellow of very serious demeanour and regular features--invited us
+all to spend a sociable evening with him. By "us all", I mean all the
+men more or less "comme il faut", of our course, and exclusive of
+Grap, Semenoff, Operoff, and commoners of that sort. Woloda smiled
+contemptuously when he heard that I was going to a "wine" of first
+course men, but I looked to derive great and unusual pleasure from this,
+to me, novel method of passing the time. Accordingly, punctually at the
+appointed hour of eight I presented myself at the Baron's.
+
+Our host, in an open tunic and white waistcoat, received his guests
+in the brilliantly lighted salon and drawing-room of the small mansion
+where his parents lived--they having given up their reception rooms to
+him for the evening for purposes of this party. In the corridor could
+be seen the heads and skirts of inquisitive domestics, while in the
+dining-room I caught a glimpse of a dress which I imagined to belong to
+the Baroness herself. The guests numbered a score, and were all of
+them students except Herr Frost (in attendance upon Iwin) and a tall,
+red-faced gentleman who was superintending the feast and who was
+introduced to every one as a relative of the Baron's and a former
+student of the University of Dorpat. At first, the excessive brilliancy
+and formal appointments of the reception-rooms had such a chilling
+effect upon this youthful company that every one involuntarily hugged
+the walls, except a few bolder spirits and the ex-Dorpat student, who,
+with his waistcoat already unbuttoned, seemed to be in every room, and
+in every corner of every room, at once, and filled the whole place with
+his resonant, agreeable, never-ceasing tenor voice. The remainder of the
+guests preferred either to remain silent or to talk in discreet tones of
+professors, faculties, examinations, and other serious and interesting
+matters. Yet every one, without exception, kept watching the door of
+the dining-room, and, while trying to conceal the fact, wearing an
+expression which said: "Come! It is time to begin." I too felt that
+it was time to begin, and awaited the beginning with pleasurable
+impatience.
+
+After footmen had handed round tea among the guests, the Dorpat student
+asked Frost in Russian:
+
+"Can you make punch, Frost?"
+
+"Oh ja!" replied Frost with a joyful flourish of his heels, and the
+other went on:
+
+"Then do you set about it" (they addressed each other in the second
+person singular, as former comrades at Dorpat). Frost accordingly
+departed to the dining-room, with great strides of his bowed, muscular
+legs, and, after some walking backwards and forwards, deposited upon the
+drawing-room table a large punchbowl, accompanied by a ten-pound sugar
+loaf supported on three students' swords placed crosswise. Meanwhile,
+the Baron had been going round among his guests as they sat regarding
+the punch-bowl, and addressing them, with a face of immutable gravity,
+in the formula: "I beg of you all to drink of this loving-cup in student
+fashion, that there may be good-fellowship among the members of our
+course. Unbutton your waistcoats, or take them off altogether, as you
+please." Already the Dorpat student had divested himself of his tunic
+and rolled up his white shirt-sleeves above his elbows, and now,
+planting his feet firmly apart, he proceeded to set fire to the rum in
+the punch-bowl.
+
+"Gentlemen, put out the candles!" he cried with a sudden shout so loud
+and insistent that we seemed all of us to be shouting at once. However,
+we still went on silently regarding the punch-bowl and the white shirt
+of the Dorpat student, with a feeling that a moment of great solemnity
+was approaching.
+
+"Put out the lights, Frost, I tell you!" the Dorpat student shouted
+again. Evidently the punch was now sufficiently burnt. Accordingly
+every one helped to extinguish the candles, until the room was in total
+darkness save for a spot where the white shirts and hands of the three
+students supporting the sugarloaf on their crossed swords were lit up by
+the lurid flames from the bowl. Yet the Dorpat student's tenor voice
+was not the only one to be heard, for in different quarters of the
+room resounded chattering and laughter. Many had taken off their tunics
+(especially students whose garments were of fine cloth and perfectly
+new), and I now did the same, with a consciousness that "IT" was
+"beginning." There had been no great festivity as yet, but I felt
+assured that things would go splendidly when once we had begun drinking
+tumblers of the potion that was now in course of preparation.
+
+At length, the punch was ready, and the Dorpat student, with much
+bespattering of the table as he did so, ladled the liquor into tumblers,
+and cried: "Now, gentlemen, please!" When we had each of us taken a
+sticky tumbler of the stuff into our hands, the Dorpat student and Frost
+sang a German song in which the word "Hoch!" kept occurring again and
+again, while we joined, in haphazard fashion, in the chorus. Next we
+clinked glasses together, shouted something in praise of punch, crossed
+hands, and took our first drink of the sweet, strong mixture. After that
+there was no further waiting; the "wine" was in full swing. The first
+glassful consumed, a second was poured out. Yet, for all that I began to
+feel a throbbing in my temples, and that the flames seemed to be turning
+purple, and that every one around me was laughing and shouting, things
+seemed lacking in real gaiety, and I somehow felt that, as a matter
+of fact, we were all of us finding the affair rather dull, and only
+PRETENDING to be enjoying it. The Dorpat student may have been an
+exception, for he continued to grow more and more red in the face and
+more and more ubiquitous as he filled up empty glasses and stained the
+table with fresh spots of the sweet, sticky stuff. The precise sequence
+of events I cannot remember, but I can recall feeling strongly attracted
+towards Frost and the Dorpat student that evening, learning their German
+song by heart, and kissing them each on their sticky-sweet lips; also
+that that same evening I conceived a violent hatred against the Dorpat
+student, and was for pushing him from his chair, but thought better of
+it; also that, besides feeling the same spirit of independence towards
+the rest of the company as I had felt on the night of the matriculation
+dinner, my head ached and swam so badly that I thought each moment would
+be my last; also that, for some reason or another, we all of us sat down
+on the floor and imitated the movements of rowers in a boat as we sang
+in chorus, "Down our mother stream the Volga;" also that I conceived
+this procedure on our part to be uncalled for; also that, as I lay
+prone upon the floor, I crossed my legs and began wriggling about like a
+tsigane; [Gipsy dancer.] also that I ricked some one's neck, and came to
+the conclusion that I should never have done such a thing if I had not
+been drunk; also that we had some supper and another kind of liquor, and
+that I then went to the door to get some fresh air; also that my head
+seemed suddenly to grow chill, and that I noticed, as I drove away, that
+the scat of the vehicle was so sharply aslant and slippery that for me
+to retain my position behind Kuzma was impossible; also that he seemed
+to have turned all flabby, and to be waving about like a dish clout.
+But what I remember best is that throughout the whole of that evening
+I never ceased to feel that I was acting with excessive stupidity in
+pretending to be enjoying myself, to like drinking a great deal, and to
+be in no way drunk, as well as that every one else present was acting
+with equal stupidity in pretending those same things. All the time I had
+a feeling that each one of my companions was finding the festivities as
+distasteful as I was myself; but, in the belief that he was the only one
+doing so, felt himself bound to pretend that he was very merry, in order
+not to mar the general hilarity. Also, strange to state, I felt that
+I ought to keep up this pretence for the sole reason that into a
+punch-bowl there had been poured three bottles of champagne at nine
+roubles the bottle and ten bottles of rum at four--making seventy
+roubles in all, exclusive of the supper. So convinced of my folly did
+I feel that, when, at next day's lecture, those of my comrades who had
+been at Baron Z.'s party seemed not only in no way ashamed to remember
+what they had done, but even talked about it so that other students
+might hear of their doings, I felt greatly astonished. They all declared
+that it had been a splendid "wine," that Dorpat students were just the
+fellows for that kind of thing, and that there had been consumed at it
+no less than forty bottles of rum among twenty guests, some of whom had
+dropped senseless under the table! That they should care to talk about
+such things seemed strange enough, but that they should care to lie
+about them seemed absolutely unintelligible.
+
+
+
+
+XL. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS
+
+That winter, too, I saw a great deal both of Dimitri who often looked
+us up, and of his family, with whom I was beginning to stand on intimate
+terms.
+
+The Nechludoffs (that is to say, mother, aunt, and daughter) always
+spent their evenings at home, at which time the Princess liked young men
+to visit her--at all events young men of the kind whom she described
+as able to spend an evening without playing cards or dancing. Yet such
+young fellows must have been few and far between, for, although I went
+to the Nechludoffs almost every evening, I seldom found other guests
+present. Thus, I came to know the members of this family and their
+several dispositions well enough to be able to form clear ideas as
+to their mutual relations, and to be quite at home amid the rooms
+and furniture of their house. Indeed, so long as no other guests were
+present, I felt entirely at my ease. True, at first I used to feel a
+little uncomfortable when left alone in the room with Varenika, for
+I could not rid myself of the idea that, though far from pretty, she
+wished me to fall in love with her; but in time this nervousness of mine
+began to lessen, since she always looked so natural, and talked to me
+so exactly as though she were conversing with her brother or Lubov
+Sergievna, that I came to look upon her simply as a person to whom it
+was in no way dangerous or wrong to show that I took pleasure in her
+company. Throughout the whole of our acquaintance she appeared to me
+merely a plain, though not positively ugly, girl, concerning whom one
+would never ask oneself the question,
+
+"Am I, or am I not, in love with her?" Sometimes I would talk to her
+direct, but more often I did so through Dimitri or Lubov Sergievna; and
+it was the latter method which afforded me the most pleasure. I derived
+considerable gratification from discoursing when she was there, from
+hearing her sing, and, in general, from knowing that she was in the
+same room as myself; but it was seldom now that any thoughts of what our
+future relations might ever be, or that any dreams of self-sacrifice for
+my friend if he should ever fall in love with my sister, came into my
+head. If any such ideas or fancies occurred to me, I felt satisfied with
+the present, and drove away all thoughts about the future.
+
+Yet, in spite of this intimacy, I continued to look upon it as my
+bounden duty to keep the Nechludoffs in general, and Varenika in
+particular, in ignorance of my true feelings and tastes, and strove
+always to appear altogether another young man than what I really was--to
+appear, indeed, such a young man as could never possibly have existed. I
+affected to be "soulful" and would go off into raptures and exclamations
+and impassioned gestures whenever I wished it to be thought that
+anything pleased me, while, on the other hand, I tried always to seem
+indifferent towards any unusual circumstance which I myself perceived or
+which I had had pointed out to me. I aimed always at figuring both as a
+sarcastic cynic divorced from every sacred tie and as a shrewd observer,
+as well as at being accounted logical in all my conduct, precise and
+methodical in all my ways of life, and at the same time contemptuous of
+all materiality. I may safely say that I was far better in reality than
+the strange being into whom I attempted to convert myself; yet, whatever
+I was or was not, the Nechludoffs were unfailingly kind to me,
+and (happily for myself) took no notice (as it now appears) of my
+play-acting. Only Lubov Sergievna, who, I believe, really believed me
+to be a great egoist, atheist, and cynic, had no love for me, but
+frequently disputed what I said, flew into tempers, and left me
+petrified with her disjointed, irrelevant utterances. Yet Dimitri held
+always to the same strange, something more than friendly, relations with
+her, and used to say not only that she was misunderstood by every one,
+but that she did him a world of good. This, however, did not prevent the
+rest of his family from finding fault with his infatuation.
+
+Once, when talking to me about this incomprehensible attachment,
+Varenika explained the matter thus: "You see, Dimitri is a selfish
+person. He is very proud, and, for all his intellect, very fond of
+praise, and of surprising people, and of always being FIRST, while
+little Auntie" (the general nickname for Lubov Sergievna) "is innocent
+enough to admire him, and at the same time devoid of the tact to
+conceal her admiration. Consequently she flatters his vanity--not out of
+pretence, but sincerely."
+
+This dictum I laid to heart, and, when thinking it over afterwards,
+could not but come to the conclusion that Varenika was very sensible;
+wherefore I was glad to award her promotion thenceforth in my regard.
+Yet, though I was always glad enough to assign her any credit which
+might arise from my discovering in her character any signs of good sense
+or other moral qualities, I did so with strict moderation, and never
+ran to any extreme pitch of enthusiasm in the process. Thus, when Sophia
+Ivanovna (who was never weary of discussing her niece) related to me
+how, four years ago, Varenika had suddenly given away all her clothes to
+some peasant children without first asking permission to do so, so that
+the garments had subsequently to be recovered, I did not at once accept
+the fact as entitling Varenika to elevation in my opinion, but went
+on giving her good advice about the unpracticalness of such views on
+property.
+
+When other guests were present at the Nechludoffs (among them,
+sometimes, Woloda and Dubkoff) I used to withdraw myself to a remote
+plane, and, with the complacency and quiet consciousness of strength
+of an habitue of the house, listen to what others were saying without
+putting in a remark myself. Yet everything that these others said seemed
+to me so immeasurably stupid that I used to feel inwardly amazed that
+such a clever, logical woman as the Princess, with her equally logical
+family, could listen to and answer such rubbish. Had it, however,
+entered into my head to compare what, others said with what I myself
+said when there alone, I should probably have ceased to feel surprise.
+Still less should I have continued to feel surprise had I not
+believed that the women of our own household--Avdotia, Lubotshka, and
+Katenka--were superior to the rest of their sex, for in that case I
+should have remembered the kind of things over which Avdotia and Katenka
+would laugh and jest with Dubkoff from one end of an evening to the
+other. I should have remembered that seldom did an evening pass but
+Dubkoff would first have, an argument about something, and then read in
+a sententious voice either some verses beginning "Au banquet de la vie,
+infortune convive" or extracts from The Demon. In short, I should have
+remembered what nonsense they used to chatter for hours at a time.
+
+It need hardly be said that, when guests were present, Varenika paid
+less attention to me than when we were alone, as well as that I was
+deprived of the reading and music which I so greatly loved to hear. When
+talking to guests, she lost, in my eyes, her principal charm--that of
+quiet seriousness and simplicity. I remember how strange it used to seem
+to me to hear her discoursing on theatres and the weather to my brother
+Woloda! I knew that of all things in the world he most despised and
+shunned banality, and that Varenika herself used to make fun of forced
+conversations on the weather and similar matters. Why, then, when
+meeting in society, did they both of them talk such intolerable
+nothings, and, as it were, shame one another? After talks of this kind
+I used to feel silently resentful against Woloda, as well as next day to
+rally Varenika on her overnight guests. Yet one result of it was that
+I derived all the greater pleasure from being one of the Nechludoffs'
+family circle. Also, for some reason or another I began to prefer
+meeting Dimitri in his mother's drawing-room to being with him alone.
+
+
+
+
+XLI. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS
+
+At this period, indeed, my friendship with Dimitri hung by a hair. I
+had been criticising him too long not to have discovered faults in his
+character, for it is only in first youth that we love passionately and
+therefore love only perfect people. As soon as the mists engendered by
+love of this kind begin to dissolve, and to be penetrated by the clear
+beams of reason, we see the object of our adoration in his true shape,
+and with all his virtues and failings exposed. Some of those failings
+strike us with the exaggerated force of the unexpected, and combine with
+the instinct for novelty and the hope that perfection may yet be
+found in a fellow-man to induce us not only to feel coldness, but
+even aversion, towards the late object of our adoration. Consequently,
+desiring it no longer, we usually cast it from us, and pass onwards
+to seek fresh perfection. For the circumstance that that was not what
+occurred with respect to my own relation to Dimitri, I was indebted to
+his stubborn, punctilious, and more critical than impulsive attachment
+to myself--a tie which I felt ashamed to break. Moreover, our strange
+vow of frankness bound us together. We were afraid that, if we parted,
+we should leave in one another's power all the incriminatory moral
+secrets of which we had made mutual confession. At the same time, our
+rule of frankness had long ceased to be faithfully observed, but, on
+the contrary, proved a frequent cause of constraint, and brought about
+strange relations between us.
+
+Almost every time that winter that I went upstairs to Dimitri's room,
+I used to find there a University friend of his named Bezobiedoff, with
+whom he appeared to be very much taken up. Bezobiedoff was a small,
+slight fellow, with a face pitted over with smallpox, freckled,
+effeminate hands, and a huge flaxen moustache much in need of the comb.
+He was invariably dirty, shabby, uncouth, and uninteresting. To me,
+Dimitri's relations with him were as unintelligible as his relations
+with Lubov Sergievna, and the only reason he could have had for choosing
+such a man for his associate was that in the whole University there was
+no worse-looking student than Bezobiedoff. Yet that alone would have
+been sufficient to make Dimitri extend him his friendship, and, as a
+matter of fact, in all his intercourse with this fellow he seemed to be
+saying proudly: "I care nothing who a man may be. In my eyes every one
+is equal. I like him, and therefore he is a desirable acquaintance."
+Nevertheless I could not imagine how he could bring himself to do it,
+nor how the wretched Bezobiedoff ever contrived to maintain his awkward
+position. To me the friendship seemed a most distasteful one.
+
+One night, I went up to Dimitri's room to try and get him to come down
+for an evening's talk in his mother's drawing-room, where we could
+also listen to Varenika's reading and singing, but Bezobiedoff had
+forestalled me there, and Dimitri answered me curtly that he could not
+come down, since, as I could see for myself, he had a visitor with him.
+
+"Besides," he added, "what is the fun of sitting there? We had much
+better stay HERE and talk."
+
+I scarcely relished the prospect of spending a couple of hours in
+Bezobiedoff's company, yet could not make up my mind to go down
+alone; wherefore, cursing my friend's vagaries, I seated myself in a
+rocking-chair, and began rocking myself silently to and fro. I
+felt vexed with them both for depriving me of the pleasures of the
+drawing-room, and my only hope as I listened irritably to their
+conversation was that Bezobiedoff would soon take his departure. "A nice
+guest indeed to be sitting with!" I thought to myself when a footman
+brought in tea and Dimitri had five times to beg Bezobiedoff to have a
+cup, for the reason that the bashful guest thought it incumbent upon him
+always to refuse it at first and to say, "No, help yourself." I could
+see that Dimitri had to put some restraint upon himself as he resumed
+the conversation. He tried to inveigle me also into it, but I remained
+glum and silent.
+
+"I do not mean to let my face give any one the suspicion that I am
+bored" was my mental remark to Dimitri as I sat quietly rocking myself
+to and fro with measured beat. Yet, as the moments passed, I found
+myself--not without a certain satisfaction--growing more and more
+inwardly hostile to my friend. "What a fool he is!" I reflected. "He
+might be spending the evening agreeably with his charming family, yet he
+goes on sitting with this brute!--will go on doing so, too, until it is
+too late to go down to the drawing-room!" Here I glanced at him over
+the back of my chair, and thought the general look of his attitude and
+appearance so offensive and repellant that at the moment I could gladly
+have offered him some insult, even a most serious one.
+
+At last Bezobiedoff rose, but Dimitri could not easily let such a
+delightful friend depart, and asked him to stay the night. Fortunately,
+Bezobiedoff declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off,
+Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so,
+and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had
+sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got
+rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance
+at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. "How can he go
+on walking about the room and grinning like that?" was my inward
+reflection.
+
+"What are you so angry about?" he asked me suddenly as he halted in
+front of my chair.
+
+"I am not in the least angry," I replied (as people always do answer
+under such circumstances). "I am merely vexed that you should play-act
+to me, and to Bezobiedoff, and to yourself."
+
+"What rubbish!" he retorted. "I never play-act to any one."
+
+"I have in mind our rule of frankness," I replied, "when I tell you that
+I am certain you cannot bear this Bezobiedoff any more than I can. He is
+an absolute cad, yet for some inexplicable reason or another it pleases
+you to masquerade before him."
+
+"Not at all! To begin with, he is a splendid fellow, and--"
+
+"But I tell you it IS so. I also tell you that your friendship for Lubov
+Sergievna is founded on the same basis, namely, that she thinks you a
+god."
+
+"And I tell you once more that it is not so."
+
+"Oh, I know it for myself," I retorted with the heat of suppressed
+anger, and designing to disarm him with my frankness. "I have told you
+before, and I repeat it now, that you always seem to like people who say
+pleasant things to you, but that, as soon as ever I come to examine
+your friendship, I invariably find that there exists no real attachment
+between you."
+
+"Oh, but you are wrong," said Dimitri with an angry straightening of the
+neck in his collar. "When I like people, neither their praise nor their
+blame can make any difference to my opinion of them."
+
+"Well, dreadful though it may seem to you, I confess that I myself often
+used to hate my father when he abused me, and to wish that he was dead.
+In the same way, you--"
+
+"Speak for yourself. I am very sorry that you could ever have been so--"
+
+"No, no!" I cried as I leapt from my chair and faced him with the
+courage of exasperation. "It is for YOURSELF that you ought to feel
+sorry--sorry because you never told me a word about this fellow. You
+know that was not honourable of you. Nevertheless, I will tell YOU what
+I think of you," and, burning to wound him even more than he had wounded
+me, I set out to prove to him that he was incapable of feeling any real
+affection for anybody, and that I had the best of grounds (as in very
+truth I believed I had) for reproaching him. I took great pleasure
+in telling him all this, but at the same time forgot that the only
+conceivable purpose of my doing so--to force him to confess to the
+faults of which I had accused him--could not possibly be attained at the
+present moment, when he was in a rage. Had he, on the other hand, been
+in a condition to argue calmly, I should probably never have said what I
+did.
+
+The dispute was verging upon an open quarrel when Dimitri suddenly
+became silent, and left the room. I pursued him, and continued what I
+was saying, but he did not answer. I knew that his failings included a
+hasty temper, and that he was now fighting it down; wherefore I cursed
+his good resolutions the more in my heart.
+
+This, then, was what our rule of frankness had brought us to--the rule
+that we should "tell one another everything in our minds, and never
+discuss one another with a third person!" Many a time we had exaggerated
+frankness to the pitch of making mutual confession of the most shameless
+thoughts, and of shaming ourselves by voicing to one another proposals
+or schemes for attaining our desires; yet those confessions had not
+only failed to draw closer the tie which united us, but had dissipated
+sympathy and thrust us further apart, until now pride would not allow
+him to expose his feelings even in the smallest detail, and we employed
+in our quarrel the very weapons which we had formerly surrendered to one
+another--the weapons which could strike the shrewdest blows!
+
+
+
+
+XLII. OUR STEPMOTHER
+
+Notwithstanding that Papa had not meant to return to Moscow before the
+New Year, he arrived in October, when there was still good riding to
+hounds to be had in the country. He alleged as his reason for changing
+his mind that his suit was shortly to come on before the Senate, but
+Mimi averred that Avdotia had found herself so ennuyee in the country,
+and had so often talked about Moscow and pretended to be unwell, that
+Papa had decided to accede to her wishes. "You see, she never really
+loved him--she and her love only kept buzzing about his ears because she
+wanted to marry a rich man," added Mimi with a pensive sigh which said:
+"To think what a certain other person could have done for him if only he
+had valued her!"
+
+Yet that "certain other person" was unjust to Avdotia, seeing that
+the latter's affection for Papa--the passionate, devoted love of
+self-abandonment--revealed itself in her every look and word and
+movement. At the same time, that love in no way hindered her, not only
+from being averse to parting with her adored husband, but also from
+desiring to visit Madame Annette's and order there a lovely cap, a hat
+trimmed with a magnificent blue ostrich feather, and a blue Venetian
+velvet bodice which was to expose to the public gaze the snowy, well
+shaped breast and arms which no one had yet gazed upon except her
+husband and maids. Of course Katenka sided with her mother and, in
+general, there became established between Avdotia and ourselves, from
+the day of her arrival, the most extraordinary and burlesque order of
+relations. As soon as she stepped from the carriage, Woloda assumed an
+air of great seriousness and ceremony, and, advancing towards her with
+much bowing and scraping, said in the tone of one who is presenting
+something for acceptance:
+
+"I have the honour to greet the arrival of our dear Mamma, and to kiss
+her hand."
+
+"Ah, my dear son!" she replied with her beautiful, unvarying smile.
+
+"And do not forget the younger son," I said as I also approached her
+hand, with an involuntary imitation of Woloda's voice and expression.
+
+Had our stepmother and ourselves been certain of any mutual affection,
+that expression might have signified contempt for any outward
+manifestation of our love. Had we been ill-disposed towards one another,
+it might have denoted irony, or contempt for pretence, or a desire to
+conceal from Papa (standing by the while) our real relations, as well
+as many other thoughts and sentiments. But, as a matter of fact, that
+expression (which well consorted with Avdotia's own spirit) simply
+signified nothing at all--simply concealed the absence of any definite
+relations between us. In later life I often had occasion to remark, in
+the case of other families whose members anticipated among themselves
+relations not altogether harmonious, the sort of provisional, burlesque
+relations which they formed for daily use; and it was just such
+relations as those which now became established between ourselves and
+our stepmother. We scarcely ever strayed beyond them, but were polite
+to her, conversed with her in French, bowed and scraped before her, and
+called her "chere Maman"--a term to which she always responded in a tone
+of similar lightness and with her beautiful, unchanging smile. Only the
+lachrymose Lubotshka, with her goose feet and artless prattle, really
+liked our stepmother, or tried, in her naive and frequently awkward way,
+to bring her and ourselves together: wherefore the only person in the
+world for whom, besides Papa, Avdotia had a spark of affection was
+Lubotshka. Indeed, Avdotia always treated her with a kind of grave
+admiration and timid deference which greatly surprised me.
+
+From the first Avdotia was very fond of calling herself our stepmother
+and hinting that, since children and servants usually adopt an unjust
+and hostile attitude towards a woman thus situated, her own position
+was likely to prove a difficult one. Yet, though she foresaw all the
+unpleasantness of her predicament, she did nothing to escape from it by
+(for instance) conciliating this one, giving presents to that other one,
+and forbearing to grumble--the last a precaution which it would have
+been easy for her to take, seeing that by nature she was in no way
+exacting, as well as very good-tempered. Yet, not only did she do none
+of these things, but her expectation of difficulties led her to adopt
+the defensive before she had been attacked. That is to say, supposing
+that the entire household was designing to show her every kind of insult
+and annoyance, she would see plots where no plots were, and consider
+that her most dignified course was to suffer in silence--an attitude
+of passivity as regards winning AFfection which of course led to
+DISaffection. Moreover, she was so totally lacking in that faculty
+of "apprehension" to which I have already referred as being highly
+developed in our household, and all her customs were so utterly opposed
+to those which had long been rooted in our establishment, that those two
+facts alone were bound to go against her. From the first, her mode of
+life in our tidy, methodical household was that of a person only
+just arrived there. Sometimes she went to bed late, sometimes early;
+sometimes she appeared at luncheon, sometimes she did not; sometimes she
+took supper, sometimes she dispensed with it. When we had no guests
+with us she more often than not walked about the house in a semi-nude
+condition, and was not ashamed to appear before us--even before the
+servants--in a white chemise, with only a shawl thrown over her bare
+shoulders. At first this Bohemianism pleased me, but before very long
+it led to my losing the last shred of respect which I felt for her. What
+struck me as even more strange was the fact that, according as we had or
+had not guests, she was two different women. The one (the woman figuring
+in society) was a young and healthy, but rather cold, beauty, a person
+richly dressed, neither stupid nor clever, and unfailingly cheerful.
+The other woman (the one in evidence when no guests were present) was
+considerably past her first youth, languid, depressed, slovenly, and
+ennuyee, though affectionate. Frequently, as I looked at her when,
+smiling, rosy with the winter air, and happy in the consciousness of her
+beauty, she came in from a round of calls and, taking off her hat, went
+to look at herself in a mirror; or when, rustling in her rich, decollete
+ball dress, and at once shy and proud before the servants, she was
+passing to her carriage; or when, at one of our small receptions at
+home, she was sitting dressed in a high silken dress finished with some
+sort of fine lace about her soft neck, and flashing her unvarying, but
+lovely, smile around her--as I looked at her at such times I could
+not help wondering what would have been said by persons who had been
+ravished to behold her thus if they could have seen her as I often saw
+her, namely, when, waiting in the lonely midnight hours for her husband
+to return from his club, she would walk like a shadow from room to
+room, with her hair dishevelled and her form clad in a sort of
+dressing-jacket. Presently, she would sit down to the piano and, her
+brows all puckered with the effort, play over the only waltz that she
+knew; after which she would pick up a novel, read a few pages somewhere
+in the middle of it, and throw it aside. Next, repairing in person
+to the dining-room, so as not to disturb the servants, she would get
+herself a cucumber and some cold veal, and eat it standing by the
+window-sill--then once more resume her weary, aimless, gloomy wandering
+from room to room. But what, above all other things, caused estrangement
+between us was that lack of understanding which expressed itself chiefly
+in the peculiar air of indulgent attention with which she would listen
+when any one was speaking to her concerning matters of which she had no
+knowledge. It was not her fault that she acquired the unconscious habit
+of bending her head down and smiling slightly with her lips only when
+she found it necessary to converse on topics which did not interest her
+(which meant any topic except herself and her husband); yet that smile
+and that inclination of the head, when incessantly repeated, could
+become unbearably wearisome. Also, her peculiar gaiety--which always
+sounded as though she were laughing at herself, at you, and at the world
+in general--was gauche and anything but infectious, while her sympathy
+was too evidently forced. Lastly, she knew no reticence with regard
+to her ceaseless rapturising to all and sundry concerning her love for
+Papa. Although she only spoke the truth when she said that her whole
+life was bound up with him, and although she proved it her life long,
+we considered such unrestrained, continual insistence upon her affection
+for him bad form, and felt more ashamed for her when she was descanting
+thus before strangers even than we did when she was perpetrating bad
+blunders in French. Yet, although, as I have said, she loved her husband
+more than anything else in the world, and he too had a great affection
+for her (or at all events he had at first, and when he saw that others
+besides himself admired her beauty), it seemed almost as though she
+purposely did everything most likely to displease him--simply to prove
+to him the strength of her love, her readiness to sacrifice herself
+for his sake, and the fact that her one aim in life was to win his
+affection! She was fond of display, and my father too liked to see her
+as a beauty who excited wonder and admiration; yet she sacrificed her
+weakness for fine clothes to her love for him, and grew more and
+more accustomed to remain at home in a plain grey blouse. Again, Papa
+considered freedom and equality to be indispensable conditions of family
+life, and hoped that his favourite Lubotshka and his kind-hearted young
+wife would become sincere friends; yet once again Avdotia sacrificed
+herself by considering it incumbent upon her to pay the "real mistress
+of the house," as she called Lubotshka, an amount of deference which
+only shocked and annoyed my father. Likewise, he played cards a great
+deal that winter, and lost considerable sums towards the end of it,
+wherefore, unwilling, as usual, to let his gambling affairs intrude upon
+his family life, he began to preserve complete secrecy concerning his
+play; yet Avdotia, though often ailing, as well as, towards the end of
+the winter, enceinte, considered herself bound always to sit up (in a
+grey blouse, and with her hair dishevelled) for my father when, at,
+say, four or five o'clock in the morning, he returned home from the
+club ashamed, depleted in pocket, and weary. She would ask him
+absent-mindedly whether he had been fortunate in play, and listen with
+indulgent attention, little nods of her head, and a faint smile upon her
+face as he told her of his doings at the club and begged her, for about
+the hundredth time, never to sit up for him again. Yet, though Papa's
+winnings or losings (upon which his substance practically depended)
+in no way interested her, she was always the first to meet him when he
+returned home in the small hours of the morning. This she was incited
+to do, not only by the strength of her devotion, but by a certain secret
+jealousy from which she suffered. No one in the world could persuade her
+that it was REALLY from his club, and not from a mistress's, that Papa
+came home so late. She would try to read love secrets in his face, and,
+discerning none there, would sigh with a sort of enjoyment of her grief,
+and give herself up once more to the contemplation of her unhappiness.
+
+As the result of these and many other constant sacrifices which occurred
+in Papa's relations with his wife during the latter months of that
+winter (a time when he lost much, and was therefore out of spirits),
+there gradually grew up between the two an intermittent feeling of tacit
+hostility--of restrained aversion to the object of devotion of the kind
+which expresses itself in an unconscious eagerness to show the object in
+question every possible species of petty annoyance.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII. NEW COMRADES
+
+The winter had passed imperceptibly and the thaw begun when the list
+of examinations was posted at the University, and I suddenly remembered
+that I had to return answers to questions in eighteen subjects on which
+I had heard lectures delivered, but with regard to some of which I had
+taken no notes and made no preparation whatever. It seems strange that
+the question "How am I going to pass?" should never have entered my
+head, but the truth is that all that winter I had been in such a state
+of haze through the delights of being both grown-up and "comme il faut"
+that, whenever the question of the examinations had occurred to me, I
+had mentally compared myself with my comrades, and thought to myself,
+"They are certain to pass, and as most of them are not 'comme il faut,'
+and I am therefore their personal superior, I too am bound to come out
+all right." In fact, the only reason why I attended lectures at all
+was that I might become an habitue of the University, and obtain Papa's
+leave to go in and out of the house. Moreover, I had many acquaintances
+now, and often enjoyed myself vastly at the University. I loved the
+racket, talking, and laughter in the auditorium, the opportunities for
+sitting on a back bench, and letting the measured voice of the professor
+lure one into dreams as one contemplated one's comrades, the occasional
+runnings across the way for a snack and a glass of vodka (sweetened by
+the fearful joy of knowing that one might be hauled before the professor
+for so doing), the stealthy closing of the door as one returned to the
+auditorium, and the participation in "course versus course" scuffles in
+the corridors. All this was very enjoyable.
+
+By the time, however, that every one had begun to put in a better
+attendance at lectures, and the professor of physics had completed his
+course and taken his leave of us until the examinations came on, and the
+students were busy collecting their notebooks and arranging to do their
+preparation in parties, it struck me that I also had better prepare
+for the ordeal. Operoff, with whom I still continued on bowing, but
+otherwise most frigid, terms, suddenly offered not only to lend me his
+notebooks, but to let me do my preparation with himself and some other
+students. I thanked him, and accepted the invitation--hoping by that
+conferment of honour completely to dissipate our old misunderstanding;
+but at the same time I requested that the gatherings should always
+be held at my home, since my quarters were so splendid! To this the
+students replied that they meant to take turn and turn about--sometimes
+to meet at one fellow's place, sometimes at another's, as might be most
+convenient.
+
+The first of our reunions was held at Zuchin's, who had a small
+partition-room in a large building on the Trubni Boulevard. The opening
+night I arrived late, and entered when the reading aloud had already
+begun. The little apartment was thick with tobacco-smoke, while on the
+table stood a bottle of vodka, a decanter, some bread, some salt, and a
+shin-bone of mutton. Without rising, Zuchin asked me to have some vodka
+and to doff my tunic.
+
+"I expect you are not accustomed to such entertainment," he added.
+
+Every one was wearing a dirty cotton shirt and a dickey. Endeavouring
+not to show my contempt for the company, I took off my tunic, and lay
+down in a sociable manner on the sofa. Zuchin went on reading aloud
+and correcting himself with the help of notebooks, while the others
+occasionally stopped him to ask a question, which he always answered
+with ability, correctness, and precision. I listened for a time with the
+rest, but, not understanding much of it, since I had not been present at
+what had been read before, soon interpolated a question.
+
+"Hullo, old fellow! It will be no good for you to listen if you do not
+know the subject," said Zuchin. "I will lend you my notebooks, and then
+you can read it up by to-morrow, and I will explain it to you."
+
+I felt rather ashamed of my ignorance. Also, I felt the truth of what
+he said; so I gave up listening, and amused myself by observing my
+new comrades. According to my classification of humanity, into persons
+"comme il faut" and persons not "comme il faut," they evidently belonged
+to the latter category, and so aroused in me not only a feeling of
+contempt, but also a certain sensation of personal hostility, for the
+reason that, though not "comme il faut," they accounted me their equal,
+and actually patronised me in a sort of good-humoured fashion. What in
+particular excited in me this feeling was their feet, their dirty nails
+and fingers, a particularly long talon on Operoff's obtrusive
+little finger, their red shirts, their dickeys, the chaff which they
+good-naturedly threw at one another, the dirty room, a habit which
+Zuchin had of continually snuffling and pressing a finger to his nose,
+and, above all, their manner of speaking--that is to say, their use and
+intonation of words. For instance, they said "flat" for fool, "just the
+ticket" for exactly, "grandly" for splendidly, and so on--all of which
+seemed to me either bookish or disagreeably vulgar. Still more was my
+"comme il faut" refinement disturbed by the accents which they put upon
+certain Russian--and, still more, upon foreign--words. Thus they said
+dieYATelnost for DIEyatelnost, NARochno for naROChno, v'KAMinie for
+v'kaMINie, SHAKespeare for ShakesPEARe, and so forth.
+
+Yet, for all their insuperably repellent exterior, I could detect
+something good in these fellows, and envied them the cheerful
+good-fellowship which united them in one. Consequently, I began to feel
+attracted towards them, and made up my mind that, come what might, I
+would become of their number. The kind and honourable Operoff I knew
+already, and now the brusque, but exceptionally clever, Zuchin (who
+evidently took the lead in this circle) began to please me greatly.
+He was a dark, thick-set little fellow, with a perennially glistening,
+polished face, but one that was extremely lively, intellectual, and
+independent in its expression. That expression it derived from a low,
+but prominent, forehead, deep black eyes, short, bristly hair, and a
+thick, dark beard which looked as though it stood in constant need of
+trimming. Although, too, he seemed to think nothing of himself (a trail
+which always pleased me in people), it was clear that he never let his
+brain rest. He had one of those expressive faces which, a few hours
+after you have seen them for the first time, change suddenly and
+entirely to your view. Such a change took place, in my eyes, with regard
+to Zuchin's face towards the end of that evening. Suddenly, I seemed
+to see new wrinkles appear upon its surface, its eyes grow deeper, its
+smile become a different one, and the whole face assume such an altered
+aspect that I scarcely recognised it.
+
+When the reading was ended, Zuchin, the other students, and myself
+manifested our desire to be "comrades all" by drinking vodka until
+little remained in the bottle. Thereupon Zuchin asked if any one had a
+quarter-rouble to spare, so that he could send the old woman who looked
+after him to buy some more; yet, on my offering to provide the money,
+he made as though he had not heard me, and turned to Operoff, who pulled
+out a purse sewn with bugles, and handed him the sum required.
+
+"And mind you don't get drunk," added the giver, who himself had not
+partaken of the vodka.
+
+"By heavens!" answered Zuchin as he sucked the marrow out of a mutton
+bone (I remember thinking that it must be because he ate marrow that he
+was so clever). "By heavens!" he went on with a slight smile (and his
+smile was of the kind that one involuntarily noticed, and somehow felt
+grateful for), "even if I did get drunk, there would be no great harm
+done. I wonder which of us two could look after himself the better--you
+or I? Anyway I am willing to make the experiment," and he slapped his
+forehead with mock boastfulness. "But what a pity it is that Semenoff
+has disappeared! He has gone and completely hidden himself somewhere."
+
+Sure enough, the grey-haired Semenoff who had comforted me so much at
+my first examination by being worse dressed than myself, and who, after
+passing the second examination, had attended his lectures regularly
+during the first month, had disappeared thereafter from view, and never
+been seen at the University throughout the latter part of the course.
+
+"Where is he?" asked some one.
+
+"I do not know" replied Zuchin. "He has escaped my eye altogether. Yet
+what fun I used to have with him! What fire there was in the man! and
+what an intellect! I should be indeed sorry if he has come to grief--and
+come to grief he probably has, for he was no mere boy to take his
+University course in instalments."
+
+After a little further conversation, and agreeing to meet again the next
+night at Zuchin's, since his abode was the most central point for
+us all, we began to disperse. As, one by one, we left the room, my
+conscience started pricking me because every one seemed to be going home
+on foot, whereas I had my drozhki. Accordingly, with some hesitation
+I offered Operoff a lift. Zuchin came to the door with us, and, after
+borrowing a rouble of Operoff, went off to make a night of it with some
+friends. As we drove along, Operoff told me a good deal about Zuchin's
+character and mode of life, and on reaching home it was long before I
+could get to sleep for thinking of the new acquaintances I had made. For
+many an hour, as I lay awake, I kept wavering between the respect which
+their knowledge, simplicity, and sense of honour, as well as the poetry
+of their youth and courage, excited in my regard, and the distaste which
+I felt for their outward man. In spite of my desire to do so, it was at
+that time literally impossible for me to associate with them, since
+our ideas were too wholly at variance. For me, life's meaning and charm
+contained an infinitude of shades of which they had not an inkling,
+and vice versa. The greatest obstacles of all, however, to our better
+acquaintance I felt to be the twenty roubles' worth of cloth in my
+tunic, my drozhki, and my white linen shirt; and they appeared to
+me most important obstacles, since they made me feel as though I had
+unwittingly insulted these comrades by displaying such tokens of my
+wealth. I felt guilty in their eyes, and as though, whether I accepted
+or rejected their acquittal and took a line of my own, I could never
+enter into equal and unaffected relations with them. Yet to such an
+extent did the stirring poetry of the courage which I could detect in
+Zuchin (in particular) overshadow the coarse, vicious side of his nature
+that the latter made no unpleasant impression upon me.
+
+For a couple of weeks I visited Zuchin's almost every night for purposes
+of work. Yet I did very little there, since, as I have said, I had lost
+ground at the start, and, not having sufficient grit in me to catch up
+my companions by solitary study, was forced merely to PRETEND that I was
+listening to and taking in all they were reading. I have an idea, too,
+that they divined my pretence, since I often noticed that they passed
+over points which they themselves knew without first inquiring of me
+whether I did the same. Yet, day by day, I was coming to regard the
+vulgarity of this circle with more indulgence, to feel increasingly
+drawn towards its way of life, and to find in it much that was poetical.
+Only my word of honour to Dimitri that I would never indulge in
+dissipation with these new comrades kept me from deciding also to share
+their diversions.
+
+Once, I thought I would make a display of my knowledge of literature,
+particularly French literature, and so led the conversation to that
+theme. Judge, then, of my surprise when I discovered that not only had
+my companions been reading the foreign passages in Russian, but that
+they had studied far more foreign works than I had, and knew and could
+appraise English, and even Spanish, writers of whom I had never so
+much as heard! Likewise, Pushkin and Zhukovski represented to them
+LITERATURE, and not, as to myself, certain books in yellow covers which
+I had once read and studied when a child. For Dumas and Sue they had
+an almost equal contempt, and, in general, were competent to form much
+better and clearer judgments on literary matters than I was, for all
+that I refused to recognise the fact. In knowledge of music, too, I
+could not beat them, and was astonished to find that Operoff played the
+violin, and another student the cello and piano, while both of them were
+members of the University orchestra, and possessed a wide knowledge
+of and appreciation of good music. In short, with the exception of the
+French and German languages, my companions were better posted at every
+point than I was, yet not the least proud of the fact. True, I might
+have plumed myself on my position as a man of the world, but Woloda
+excelled me even in that. Wherein, then, lay the height from which I
+presumed to look down upon these comrades? In my acquaintanceship with
+Prince Ivan Ivanovitch? In my ability to speak French? In my drozhki?
+In my linen shirt? In my finger-nails? "Surely these things are all
+rubbish," was the thought which would come flitting through my head
+under the influence of the envy which the good-fellowship and kindly,
+youthful gaiety displayed around me excited in my breast. Every one
+addressed his interlocutor in the second person singular. True, the
+familiarity of this address almost approximated to rudeness, yet
+even the boorish exterior of the speaker could not conceal a constant
+endeavour never to hurt another one's feelings. The terms "brute" or
+"swine," when used in this good-natured fashion, only convulsed me, and
+gave me cause for inward merriment. In no way did they offend the person
+addressed, or prevent the company at large from remaining on the most
+sincere and friendly footing. In all their intercourse these youths were
+delicate and forbearing in a way that only very poor and very young men
+can be. However much I might detect in Zuchin's character and amusements
+an element of coarseness and profligacy, I could also detect the fact
+that his drinking-bouts were of a very different order to the puerility
+with burnt rum and champagne in which I had participated at Baron Z.'s.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV. ZUCHIN AND SEMENOFF
+
+Although I do not know what class of society Zuchin belonged to, I
+know that, without the help either of means or social position, he
+had matriculated from the Seventh Gymnasium. At that time he was
+eighteen--though he looked much older--and very clever, especially in
+his powers of assimilation. To him it was easier to survey the whole of
+some complicated subject, to foresee its various parts and deductions,
+than to use that knowledge, when gained, for reasoning out the exact
+laws to which those deductions were due. He knew that he was clever,
+and of the fact he was proud; yet from that very pride arose the
+circumstance that he treated every one with unvarying simplicity
+and good-nature. Moreover, his experience of life must have been
+considerable, for already he had squandered much love, friendship,
+activity, and money. Though poor and moving only in the lower ranks of
+society, there was nothing which he had ever attempted for which he
+did not thenceforth feel the contempt, the indifference, or the utter
+disregard which were bound to result from his attaining his goal too
+easily. In fact, the very ardour with which he applied himself to a
+new pursuit seemed to be due to his contempt for what he had already
+attained, since his abilities always led him to success, and therefore
+to a certain right to despise it. With the sciences it was the
+same. Though little interested in them, and taking no notes, he knew
+mathematics thoroughly, and was uttering no vain boast when he said
+that he could beat the professor himself. Much of what he heard said
+in lectures he thought rubbish, yet with his peculiar habit of
+unconsciously practical roguishness he feigned to subscribe to all that
+the professors thought important, and every professor adored him. True,
+he was outspoken to the authorities, but they none the less respected
+him. Besides disliking and despising the sciences, he despised all who
+laboured to attain what he himself had mastered so easily, since the
+sciences, as he understood them, did not occupy one-tenth part of his
+powers. In fact, life, as he saw it from the student's standpoint,
+contained nothing to which he could devote himself wholly, and his
+impetuous, active nature (as he himself often said) demanded life
+complete: wherefore he frequented the drinking-bout in so far as he
+could afford it, and surrendered himself to dissipation chiefly out of
+a desire to get as far away from himself as possible. Consequently,
+just as the examinations were approaching, Operoff's prophecy to me came
+true, for Zuchin wasted two whole weeks in this fashion, and we had to
+do the latter part of our preparation at another student's. Yet at the
+first examination he reappeared with pale, haggard face and tremulous
+hands, and passed brilliantly into the second course!
+
+The company of roisterers of which Zuchin had been the leader since
+its formation at the beginning of the term consisted of eight students,
+among whom, at first, had been numbered Ikonin and Semenoff; but the
+former had left under the strain of the continuous revelry in which the
+band had indulged in the early part of the term, and the latter seceded
+later for reasons which were never wholly explained. In its early
+days this band had been looked upon with awe by all the fellows of our
+course, and had had its exploits much discussed. Of these exploits
+the leading heroes had been Zuchin and, towards the end of the term,
+Semenoff, but the latter had come to be generally shunned, and to cause
+disturbances on the rare occasions when he attended a lecture. Just
+before the examinations began, he rounded off his drinking exploits in a
+most energetic and original fashion, as I myself had occasion to witness
+(through my acquaintanceship with Zuchin). This is how it was. One
+evening we had just assembled at Zuchin's, and Operoff, reinforcing a
+candlestick with a candle stuck in a bottle, had just plunged his nose
+into his notebooks and begun to read aloud in his thin voice from his
+neatly-written notes on physics, when the landlady entered the room,
+and informed Zuchin that some one had brought a note for him... [The
+remainder of this chapter is omitted in the original.]
+
+
+
+
+XLV. I COME TO GRIEF
+
+At length the first examination--on differentials and integrals--drew
+near, but I continued in a vague state which precluded me from forming
+any clear idea of what was awaiting me. Every evening, after consorting
+with Zuchin and the rest, the thought would occur to me that there was
+something in my convictions which I must change--something wrong and
+mistaken; yet every morning the daylight would find me again satisfied
+to be "comme il faut," and desirous of no change whatsoever.
+
+Such was the frame of mind in which I attended for the first
+examination. I seated myself on the bench where the princes, counts,
+and barons always sat, and began talking to them in French, with the not
+unnatural result that I never gave another thought to the answers
+which I was shortly to return to questions in a subject of which I
+knew nothing. I gazed supinely at other students as they went up to be
+examined, and even allowed myself to chaff some of them.
+
+"Well, Grap," I said to Ilinka (who, from our first entry into the
+University, had shaken off my influence, had ceased to smile when I
+spoke to him, and always remained ill-disposed towards me), "have you
+survived the ordeal?"
+
+"Yes," retorted Ilinka. "Let us see if YOU can do so."
+
+I smiled contemptuously at the answer, notwithstanding that the doubt
+which he had expressed had given me a momentary shock. Once again,
+however, indifference overlaid that feeling, and I remained so entirely
+absent-minded and supine that, the very moment after I had been examined
+(a mere formality for me, as it turned out) I was making a dinner
+appointment with Baron Z. When called out with Ikonin, I smoothed
+the creases in my uniform, and walked up to the examiner's table with
+perfect sang froid.
+
+True, a slight shiver of apprehension ran down my back when the young
+professor--the same one as had examined me for my matriculation--looked
+me straight in the face as I reached across to the envelope containing
+the tickets. Ikonin, though taking a ticket with the same plunge of his
+whole body as he had done at the previous examinations, did at least
+return some sort of an answer this time, though a poor one. I, on the
+contrary, did just as he had done on the two previous occasions, or even
+worse, since I took a second ticket, yet for a second time returned no
+answer. The professor looked me compassionately in the face, and said in
+a quiet, but determined, voice:
+
+"You will not pass into the second course, Monsieur Irtenieff. You had
+better not complete the examinations. The faculty must be weeded out.
+The same with you, Monsieur Ikonin."
+
+Ikonin implored leave to finish the examinations, as a great favour, but
+the professor replied that he (Ikonin) was not likely to do in two days
+what he had not succeeded in doing in a year, and that he had not the
+smallest chance of passing. Ikonin renewed his humble, piteous appeals,
+but the professor was inexorable.
+
+"You can go, gentlemen," he remarked in the same quiet, resolute voice.
+
+I was only too glad to do so, for I felt ashamed of seeming, by my
+silent presence, to be joining in Ikonin's humiliating prayers for
+grace. I have no recollection of how I threaded my way through the
+students in the hall, nor of what I replied to their questions, nor
+of how I passed into the vestibule and departed home. I was offended,
+humiliated, and genuinely unhappy.
+
+For three days I never left my room, and saw no one, but found relief
+in copious tears. I should have sought a pistol to shoot myself if I had
+had the necessary determination for the deed. I thought that Ilinka Grap
+would spit in my face when he next met me, and that he would have the
+right to do so; that Operoff would rejoice at my misfortune, and tell
+every one of it; that Kolpikoff had justly shamed me that night at the
+restaurant; that my stupid speeches to Princess Kornikoff had had their
+fitting result; and so on, and so on. All the moments in my life which
+had been for me most difficult and painful recurred to my mind. I tried
+to blame some one for my calamity, and thought that some one must have
+done it on purpose--must have conspired a whole intrigue against me.
+Next, I murmured against the professors, against my comrades, Woloda,
+Dimitri, and Papa (the last for having sent me to the University at
+all). Finally, I railed at Providence for ever having let me see such
+ignominy. Believing myself ruined for ever in the eyes of all who knew
+me, I besought Papa to let me go into the hussars or to the Caucasus.
+Naturally, Papa was anything but pleased at what had happened; yet, on
+seeing my passionate grief, he comforted me by saying that, though it
+was a bad business, it might yet be mended by my transferring to another
+faculty. Woloda, who also saw nothing very terrible in my misfortune,
+added that at least I should not be put out of countenance in a new
+faculty, since I should have new comrades there. As for the ladies of
+the household, they neither knew nor cared what either an examination or
+a plucking meant, and condoled with me only because they saw me in
+such distress. Dimitri came to see me every day, and was very kind and
+consolatory throughout; but for that very reason he seemed to me to
+have grown colder than before. It always hurt me and made me feel
+uncomfortable when he came up to my room and seated himself in silence
+beside me, much as a doctor might scat himself by the bedside of an
+awkward patient. Sophia Ivanovna and Varenika sent me books for which I
+had expressed a wish, as also an invitation to go and see them, but
+in that very thoughtfulness of theirs I saw only proud, humiliating
+condescension to one who had fallen beyond forgiveness. Although, in
+three days' time, I grew calmer, it was not until we departed for the
+country that I left the house, but spent the time in nursing my grief
+and wandering, fearful of all the household, through the various rooms.
+
+One evening, as I was sitting deep in thought and listening to Avdotia
+playing her waltz, I suddenly leapt to my feet, ran upstairs, got out
+the copy-book whereon I had once inscribed "Rules of My Life," opened
+it, and experienced my first moment of repentance and moral resolution.
+True, I burst into tears once more, but they were no longer tears of
+despair. Pulling myself together, I set about writing out a fresh set
+of rules, in the assured conviction that never again would I do a wrong
+action, waste a single moment on frivolity, or alter the rules which I
+now decided to frame.
+
+How long that moral impulse lasted, what it consisted of, and what new
+principles I devised for my moral growth I will relate when speaking of
+the ensuing and happier portion of my early manhood.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Youth, by Leo Tolstoy
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