Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (558 page)

“Oh, what scoundrels you are!”

She may have been on the verge of tears, but something different happened.  Lifting her thin little arm, she gave the student a slap in the face which could not have been more dexterously delivered.  It did come with a smack!  He would have rushed at her, swearing, but I held him back, and the girl had time to run away.  We began quarrelling at once.  I told him all I had been saving up against him in those days.  I told him he was the paltriest commonplace fool without the trace of an idea.  He swore at me. . . .  (I had once explained to him that I was illegitimate), then we spat at each other, and I’ve never seen him since.  I felt frightfully vexed with myself that evening, but not so much the next day, and by the day after I had quite forgotten it.  And though I sometimes thought of that girl again, it was only casually, for a moment.  It was only after I had been a fortnight in Petersburg, I suddenly recalled the whole scene.  I remembered it, and I was suddenly so ashamed that tears of shame literally ran down my cheeks.  I was wretched the whole evening, and all that night, and I am rather miserable about it now.  I could not understand at first how I could have sunk to such a depth of degradation, and still less how I could have forgotten it without feeling shame or remorse.  It is only now that I understand what was at the root of it; it was all due to my “idea.”  Briefly, I conclude that, having something fixed, permanent and overpowering in one’s mind in which one is terribly absorbed, one is, as it were, removed by it from the whole world, and everything that happens, except the one great thing, slips by one.  Even one’s impressions are hardly formed correctly.  And what matters most — one always has an excuse.  However much I worried my mother at that time, however disgracefully I neglected my sister, “Oh, I’ve my ‘idea,’ nothing else matters,” was what I said to myself, as it were.  If I were slighted and hurt, I withdrew in my mortification and at once said to myself, “Ah, I’m humiliated, but still I have my idea, and they know nothing about that.”  The “idea” comforted me in disgrace and insignificance.  But all the nasty things I did took refuge, as it were, under the “idea.”  It, so to speak, smoothed over everything, but it also put a mist before my eyes; and such a misty understanding of things and events may, of course, be a great hindrance to the “idea” itself, to say nothing of other things.

Now for another anecdote.

On the 1st of April last year, Marie Ivanovna was keeping her name- day; some visitors, though only a few, came for the evening.  Suddenly Agrafena rushed in, out of breath, announcing that a baby was crying in the passage before the kitchen, and that she didn’t know what to do.  We were all excited at the news.  We went out and saw a bark basket, and in the basket a three or four weeks old child, crying.  I picked up the basket and took it into the kitchen.  Then I immediately found a folded note:  “Gracious benefactors, show kind charity to the girl christened Arina, and we will join with her to send our tears to the Heavenly throne for you for ever, and congratulate you on your name-day,                                         Persons unknown to you.”

Then Nikolay Semyonovitch, for whom I have such a respect, greatly disappointed me.  He drew a very long face and decided to send the child at once to the Foundling Home.  I felt very sad.  They lived very frugally but had no children, and Nikolay Semyonovitch was always glad of it.  I carefully took little Arina out of the basket and held her up under the arms.  The basket had that sour, pungent odour characteristic of a small child which has not been washed for a long time.  I opposed Nikolay Semyonovitch, and suddenly announced that I would keep the child at my expense.  In spite of his gentleness he protested with some severity, and, though he ended by joking, he adhered to his intention in regard to the foundling.  I got my way, however.  In the same block of buildings, but in a different wing, there lived a very poor carpenter, an elderly man, given to drink, but his wife, a very healthy and still youngish peasant woman, had only just lost a baby, and, what is more, the only child she had had in eight years of marriage, also a girl, and by a strange piece of luck also called Arina.  I call it good luck, because while we were arguing in the kitchen, the woman, hearing of what had happened, ran in to look at the child, and when she learned that it was called Arina, she was greatly touched.  She still had milk, and unfastening her dress she put the baby to her breast.  I began persuading her to take the child home with her, saying I would pay for it every month.  She was afraid her husband would not allow it, but she took it for the night.  Next morning, her husband consented to her keeping it for eight roubles a month, and I immediately paid him for the first month in advance.  He at once spent the money on drink.  Nikolay Semyonovitch, still with a strange smile, agreed to guarantee that the money should be paid regularly every month.  I would have given my sixty roubles into Nikolay Semyonovitch’s keeping as security, but he would not take it.  He knew, however, that I had the money, and trusted me.  Our momentary quarrel was smoothed over by this delicacy on his part.  Marie Ivanovna said nothing, but wondered at my undertaking such a responsibility.  I particularly appreciated their delicacy in refraining from the slightest jest at my expense, but, on the contrary, taking the matter with proper seriousness.  I used to run over to the carpenter’s wife three times a day, and at the end of a week I slipped an extra three roubles into her hand without her husband’s knowledge.  For another three I bought a little quilt and swaddling clothes.  But ten days later little Arina fell ill.  I called in a doctor at once, he wrote a prescription, and we were up all night, tormenting the mite with horrid medicine.  Next day he declared that he had been sent for too late, and answered my entreaties — which I fancy were more like reproaches — by saying with majestic evasiveness:  “I am not God.”  The baby’s little tongue and lips and whole mouth were covered with a minute white rash, and towards evening she died, gazing at me with her big black eyes, as though she understood already.  I don’t know why I never thought to take a photograph of the dead baby.  But will it be believed, that I cried that evening, and, in fact, I howled as I had never let myself do before, and Marie Ivanovna had to try to comfort me, again without the least mockery either on her part or on Nikolay Semyonovitch’s.  The carpenter made a little coffin, and Marie Ivanovna finished it with a frill and a pretty little pillow, while I bought flowers and strewed them on the baby.  So they carried away my poor little blossom, whom it will hardly be believed I can’t forget even now.  A little afterwards, however, this sudden adventure made me reflect seriously.  Little Arina had not cost me much, of course; the coffin, the burial, the doctor, the flowers, and the payment to the carpenter’s wife came altogether to thirty roubles.  As I was going to Petersburg I made up this sum from the forty roubles sent me by Versilov for the journey, and from the sale of various articles before my departure, so that my capital remained intact.  But I thought:  “If I am going to be turned aside like this I shan’t get far.”  The affair with the student showed that the “idea” might absorb me till it blurred my impressions and drew me away from the realities of life.  The incident with little Arina proved, on the contrary, that no “idea” was strong enough to absorb me, at least so completely that I should not stop short in the face of an overwhelming fact and sacrifice to it at once all that I had done for the “idea” by years of labour.  Both conclusions were nevertheless true.

CHAPTER VI

1

My hopes were not fully realized.  I did not find them alone though Versilov was not at home, Tatyana Pavlovna was sitting with my mother, and she was, after all, not one of the family.  Fully half of my magnanimous feelings disappeared instantly.  It is wonderful how hasty and changeable I am; in such cases a straw, a grain of sand is enough to dissipate my good mood and replace it by a bad one.  My bad impressions, I regret to say, are not so quickly dispelled, though I am not resentful. . . . When I went in, I had a feeling that my mother immediately and hastily broke off what she was saying to Tatyana Pavlovna; I fancied they were talking very eagerly.  My sister turned from her work only for a moment to look at me and did not come out of her little alcove again.  The flat consisted of three rooms.  The room in which we usually sat, the middle room or drawing-room, was fairly large and almost presentable.  In it were soft, red armchairs and a sofa, very much the worse for wear, however (Versilov could not endure covers on furniture); there were rugs of a sort and several tables, including some useless little ones.  On the right was Versilov’s room, cramped and narrow with one window; it was furnished with a wretched-looking writing-table covered with unused books and crumpled papers, and an equally wretched-looking easy chair with a broken spring that stuck up in one corner and often made Versilov groan and swear.  On an equally threadbare sofa in this room he used to sleep.  He hated this study of his, and I believe he never did anything in it; he preferred sitting idle for hours together in the drawing-room.  On the left of the drawing-room there was another room of the same sort in which my mother and sister slept.  The drawing-room was entered from the passage at the end of which was the kitchen, where the cook, Lukerya, lived, and when she cooked, she ruthlessly filled the whole flat with the smell of burnt fat.  There were moments when Versilov cursed his life and fate aloud on account of the smell from the kitchen, and in that one matter I sympathized with him fully; I hated that smell, too, though it did not penetrate to my room: I lived upstairs in an attic under the roof, to which I climbed by a very steep and shaky ladder.  The only things worth mentioning in it were a semicircular window, a low-pitched ceiling, a sofa covered with American leather on which at night Lukerya spread sheets and put a pillow for me.  The rest of the furniture consisted of two articles, a perfectly plain deal table and a wooden rush-bottomed chair.  We still preserved, however, some relics of former comfort.  In the drawing- room, for instance, we had a fairly decent china lamp, and on the wall hung a large and splendid engraving of the Sistine Madonna; facing it on the other wall was an immense and expensive photograph of the cast-bronze gates of the cathedral of Florence.  In the corner of the same room was a shrine of old-fashioned family ikons, one of which had a gilt-silver setting — the one they had meant to pawn, while another (the image of Our Lady) had a velvet setting embroidered in pearls.  Under the ikons hung a little lamp which was lighted on every holiday. Versilov evidently had no feeling for the ikons in their inner meaning and religious significance, but he restrained himself.  He merely screwed up his eyes, sometimes complaining that the lamplight reflected in the gilt setting hurt them, but he did not hinder my mother from lighting the lamp.

I usually entered in gloomy silence, looking away into some corner, and sometimes without even greeting anyone.  As a rule I returned earlier than to-day, and they used to send my dinner to me upstairs.  Going into the room I said, “Good evening, mother,” a thing I had never done before.  Though even this time I was unable from a sort of bashfulness to make myself look at her, and I sat down in the opposite corner of the room.  I was awfully tired, but I did not think of that.

“That lout of yours still walks in as rudely as ever,” Tatyana Pavlovna hissed at me.  She had been in the habit in old days of using abusive epithets to me and it had become an established tradition between us.

My mother faltered “Good evening” to me, using the formal mode of address, and evidently embarrassed at my greeting her.  “Your dinner has been ready a long while,” she added, almost overcome by confusion:  “I hope the soup is not cold, I will order the cutlets at once. . . .”  She was hastily jumping up to go to the kitchen and, for the first time perhaps during that whole month, I felt ashamed that she should run about to wait on me so humbly, though till that moment I had expected it of her.

“Thank you very much, mother, I have had dinner already.  May I stay and rest here if I am not in the way?”

“Oh . . . of course. . . . how can you ask, pray sit down. . . .”

“Don’t worry yourself, mother, I won’t be rude to Andrey Petrovitch again,” I rapped out all at once.

“Good heavens! how noble of him,” cried Tatyana Pavlovna.  “Sonia darling, you don’t mean to say you still stand on ceremony with him?  Who is he to be treated with such deference, and by his own mother, too!  Look at you, why you behave as though you were afraid of him, it is disgraceful.”

“I should like it very much, mother, if you would call me Arkasha.”

“Oh . . . yes . . . certainly, yes I will,” my mother said hurriedly.  I . . . don’t always . . . henceforward I will.”

She blushed all over.  Certainly her face had at times a great charm. . . .  It had a look of simplicity, but by no means of stupidity.  It was rather pale and anaemic, her cheeks were very thin, even hollow; her forehead was already lined by many wrinkles, but there were none round her eyes, and her eyes were rather large and wide open, and shone with a gentle and serene light which had drawn me to her from the very first day.  I liked her face, too, because it did not look particularly depressed or drawn; on the contrary, her expression would have been positively cheerful, if she had not been so often agitated, sometimes almost panic-stricken over trifles, starting up from her seat for nothing at all, or listening in alarm to anything new that was said, till she was sure that all was well and as before.  What mattered to her was just that all should be as before; that there should be no change, that nothing new should happen, not even new happiness. . . .  It might have been thought that she had been frightened as a child.  Besides her eyes, I liked the oval of her rather long face, and I believe if it had been a shade less broad across the cheekbones she might have been called beautiful, not only in her youth but even now.  She was not more than thirty-nine, but grey hairs were already visible in her chestnut hair.