Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (563 page)

“My dear fellow, she never was, if you will have it,” he assured me, at once dropping into his habitual manner with me, with which I was so familiar, and by which I was so enraged, that is he was apparently all sincerity and open-heartedness, but if one looked more closely there was nothing in him but the deepest irony: “she never was.  The Russian woman never is a woman.”

“Is the Polish woman, the French woman?  Or the Italian, the passionate Italian, that’s the sort to fascinate the civilized upper-class Russian of the type of Versilov?”

“Well, I certainly did not expect to meet a Slavophil,” laughed Versilov.

I remember his story, word for word: he began talking with great readiness indeed, and with evident pleasure.  It was quite clear to me, that he had come up not to have a gossip with me, and not to pacify my mother either, but with some other object.

2

“Your mother and I have spent these twenty years together in silence,” he began, prattling on (it was utterly affected and unnatural), “and all that passed between us took place in silence.  The chief characteristic of our twenty years’ connection has been its — dumbness.  I believe we have never once quarrelled.  It is true I have often gone away and left her alone, but it has always ended in my coming back.  Nous revenons toujours; indeed, it’s a fundamental characteristic of men; it’s due to their magnanimity.  If marriage depended on women alone, not a single marriage would last.  Meekness, submissiveness, self-abasement, and at the same time firmness, strength, real strength, that’s your mother’s character.  Take note, that she’s the best of all the women I’ve met in my life.  And that she has strength I can bear witness: I have seen how that strength has supported her.  When it’s a matter, I won’t say of convictions — convictions are out of the question — but what they look upon as convictions, and so, to their thinking, sacred, she is ready to face torture.  Well, I leave you to judge, whether I am much like a torturer.  That’s why I have preferred to remain silent about almost everything, and not simply because it was more convenient, and I confess I don’t regret it.  In this way our life has gone on of itself on broad and humane lines, so that indeed I take no credit to myself for it.  I must say by the way in parenthesis, that for some reason she never believed in my humanity, and so was always in a tremor; but, though she has trembled, she has never given in to any advanced ideas.  They are so good at that, while we never understand that sort of thing, and in fact they are much better at managing things for themselves than we are.  They are able to go on living their own lives in positions most unnatural to them, and in positions most strange to them they remain always the same.  But we can’t do that.”

“Who are ‘they’?  I don’t quite understand you.”

“The people, my dear fellow, I’m speaking of the common people.  They have shown their great living force, and their historical breadth both morally and politically.  But, to come back to ourselves, I may remark about your mother, that she is not always dumb; your mother sometimes speaks, but she speaks in such a way that you see at once that you simply waste time in talking to her, even though you might have been preparing her for five years beforehand.  Moreover, she makes the most unexpected objections.  Note again, that I am far from calling her a fool; on the contrary, she has intelligence of a sort, and even remarkable intelligence; though perhaps you will not believe in her intelligence. . . .”

“Why not?  What I don’t believe is that you really believe in her intelligence yourself, and are not pretending.”

“Yes?  You look upon me as such a chameleon?  My dear fellow, I am allowing you a little too much licence . . . like a spoilt son. . . .  So be it for the time.”

“Tell me if you can the truth about my father.”

“About Makar Ivanovitch?  Makar Ivanovitch was, as you are aware, a house-serf, who, so to speak, had a yearning for glory of a sort. . . .”

“I bet that at this minute you feel envious of him!”

“On the contrary, my dear fellow, on the contrary, and if you like I am very glad to see you in such a flippant mood; I swear that I am in a penitent frame of mind, and just now, at this moment, I regret a thousand times over all that happened twenty years ago.  And besides, God knows, it all happened quite accidentally . . . well, and, so far as in me lay, humanely too; — as I conceived of an act of humanity in those days anyway.  Oh, in those days we were all boiling over with zeal for doing good, for serving the public weal, for a higher ideal; we disapproved of class distinctions, of the privileges of our rank, of our property and even of usury, at least some of us did. . . .  I declare we did.  There were not many of us, but we said good things, and sometimes, I assure you, did good things, too.”

“That was when you sobbed on his shoulder.”

“I am ready to agree with you on every point beforehand.  By the way, you heard of that shoulder from me, and so, at this moment, you are making spiteful use of my frankness and confidence in you; but you must admit that there was not so much harm in that episode as might seem at the first glance, especially for that period.  To be sure we were only making a beginning then.  Of course it was a pose, but I did not know at the time that it was a pose.  Have you, for instance, never posed in practical affairs?”

“I was rather sentimental downstairs, just now, and as I came up here I felt horribly ashamed at the thought that you might imagine I had been posing.  It is true in some cases, though one’s feelings are sincere, one makes a display of one’s feelings.  I swear that everything I said downstairs was absolutely genuine.”

“That’s exactly it; you have very successfully defined it in a phrase, ‘though one’s feelings are sincere one makes a display of one’s self’; but do you know it was just the same with me.  Though I was making a display of them, my sobs were perfectly genuine.  I don’t deny that Makar Ivanovitch might, if he had been wittily disposed, have looked upon my sobs as the climax of mockery, but in those days he was too honest to be so clear-sighted.  I don’t know whether he felt sorry for me or not.  I remember that I had a great desire that he should.”

“Do you know,” I interrupted him, “you’re jeering now when you say that?  And in fact, all this last month whenever you have talked to me, you have been jeering.  Why have you done so, whenever you have talked with me?”

“You think so?” he answered mildly; “you are very suspicious; however, if I do laugh it’s not at you, or, at least not only at you, don’t be uneasy.  But I am not laughing now, and then — in short I did everything I could then, and, believe me, not for my personal advantage.  We, that is, superior people, unlike the common people, do not know how to act for our personal advantage: on the contrary, we made a mess of it as far as we possibly could, and I suspect that that was considered among us in those days ‘our higher advantage,’ in an exalted sense of course.  The present generation of advanced people are much keener on the main chance than we were.  Even before our ‘sin’ I explained the whole position to Makar Ivanovitch with extraordinary directness.  I am ready to admit now, that a great deal need not have been explained at all, especially with such directness; to say nothing of humanity it would have been far more polite, but . . . but there’s no pulling up when you once begin dancing, and want to cut a fine caper.  And perhaps our cravings for the fine and exalted only amount to that in reality.  All my life I have never been able to make up my mind about it.  However, that is too deep a subject for our superficial conversation, but I assure you I am sometimes ready to die with shame, when I recall it.  I offered him at the time three thousand roubles, and I remember he did not say a word and I did all the talking.  Only fancy, I imagined that he was afraid of me, that is of my rights of ownership over him, and I remember I did my utmost to reassure him; I kept trying to persuade him to have no apprehension, but to tell me his wishes frankly and without sparing me.  By way of guarantee I promised him, that if he did not accept my terms, that is three thousand with freedom (for himself and his wife, of course) — and a journey wherever he pleased (without his wife, of course) — then let him say so straight out, and I would at once give him his freedom, let his wife go, and compensate them both with the same three thousand, I believe, and they should not go away from me, but I would go away myself in solitude for three years to Italy.  Mon ami, I should not have taken Mlle. Sapozhkov with me to Italy, you may be sure of that.  I was extremely pure at that epoch.  And, do you know, Makar Ivanovitch knew perfectly well that I should do as I promised; but he still remained silent, and only when I was about to throw myself on his neck, for the third time, he drew back, waved his hand, and went out of the room with a certain lack of ceremony, indeed, which I assure you surprised me at the time.  I caught a glimpse of myself in the looking-glass and I can’t forget it.

“As a rule when they don’t speak it’s worst of all, and he was a gloomy character, and I must confess that far from feeling sure of him I was awfully afraid of him, when I summoned him to my study.  In that class there are types, and many of them, who are, so to speak, the very incarnation of all that’s ill-bred, and one’s more afraid of that than a beating.  Sic.  And what a risk I was running, what a risk!  Why, what if he had begun shouting for all the servants to hear, had howled, this village Uriah, what would have become of me, such a juvenile David, and what should I have done then?  That’s why I trotted out the three thousand first of all, that was instinctive; but luckily I was mistaken: this Makar Ivanovitch was something quite different.”

“Tell me, had you ‘sinned’ then?  You said just now that you summoned the husband beforehand.”

“Well, do you see . . . that is . . . as one understands it. . . .”

“Oh, you had then.  You said just now you were mistaken in him, that he was something different; how different?”

“Well, how exactly I don’t know to this day, but somehow different, and, do you know, positively very decent.  I think so because in the end I felt more than ever ashamed to face him.  Next day he agreed to the journey, without any words, but without, of course, forgetting one of the inducements I had offered him.”

“He took the money?”

“I should think so!  And you know, my dear fellow, in that point he surprised me too.  I had not, of course, three thousand at the time in my pocket, but I procured seven hundred and handed it over to him as the first instalment; and what do you think?  He demanded the remaining two thousand three hundred from me in the form of a credit note made payable to a certain merchant for security.  And two years later, by means of that credit note, he got the money out of me before a court, and with interest too, so that he surprised me again, especially as he had literally gone collecting funds for building a church, and has been a pilgrim ever since, that is, for the last twenty years.  I don’t understand what a pilgrim should want money of his own for . . . money which is such a worldly thing. . . .  I offered the money at the minute of course with perfect sincerity, and, so to speak, in the first flush of feeling, but afterwards, after the lapse of so many minutes, I might naturally have thought better of it . . . and might have reckoned that he would spare me . . . or, so to say, spare US, me and her, and would have waited for a time at least.  But he lost no time however. . . .”

Here I must make a necessary note.  If my mother were to outlive M. Versilov, she would have been left literally without a farthing in her old age, had it not been for Makar Ivanovitch’s three thousand, which had been doubled long ago by the accumulation of interest, and which he had the previous year left her intact in his will.  He had seen through Versilov even in those days.

“You told me once that Makar Ivanovitch had come several times on a visit to you, and always stayed at mother’s lodgings?”

“Yes, my dear boy: and I must confess at first I was awfully frightened of these visits.  He has come six or seven times altogether during this period, that is, the last twenty years, and on the first occasions I used to hide myself if I were in the house when he arrived.  At first I could not make out what it meant, and why he had turned up.  But afterwards I thought that from certain points of view it was by no means so stupid on his part.  Afterwards it somehow occurred to me to feel curious about him; I came out to have a look at him, and formed, I assure you, a very original impression of him.  This was on his third or fourth visit, at the time when I had just been appointed a mediator, and when, of course, I was getting all my energies to work to study Russia.  I heard from him a very great deal that was new to me.  I found in him, besides, what I had never expected to find: a sort of benign serenity, an evenness of temper, and what was more surprising than anything, something almost like gaiety.  Not the faintest allusion to THAT (tu comprends) and a very great capacity for talking sense, and talking extremely well, that is, with none of that silly servantish profundity, which I confess to you I can’t endure, democratic as I am, and with none of those far-fetched Russian expressions which ‘the genuine Russian peasant’ makes use of in novels and on the stage.  At the same time very little about religion, unless one begins upon the subject, and most charming descriptions of the monastery and monastic life, if one asks questions about it.  And above all — respectfulness, that modest courtesy, just that courtesy which is essential for the truest equality, and without which, indeed, in my opinion, one cannot be really superior.  The truest good-breeding is in such cases attained through the complete absence of conceit, and the man shows himself secure in his self-respect in his own station of life whatever that may be, and whatever fate may befall him.  This power of respecting one’s self in one’s own position is extremely rare, as rare, anyway, as real personal dignity. . . .  You will see that for yourself if you live long enough.  But what struck me most of all, especially later on, and not at the beginning,” added Versilov, “was the fact that this Makar had an extraordinary stateliness, and was, I assure you, very handsome.  It is true he was old, but —