Poor Folk and Other Stories (13 page)

Your latest actions and letters have frightened, shocked and amazed me; however, the things Fedora has told me have explained everything. But why did you despair in this fashion and fall into the abyss into which you have fallen, Makar Alekseyevich? Your explanations have not satisfied me one little bit. Consider: was I not right when I insisted on accepting the advantageous post I was offered? What is more, my most recent adventure has frightened me in earnest. You say your love for me has compelled you to keep yourself in hiding from me. I was already able to see that I was greatly indebted to you when you kept assuring me that you were only spending your savings on me, savings you told me you had put by just in case. But now that I have discovered you had no such savings at all, that having found out about my straitened circumstances and having been touched by them you decided to spend your salary, which you had drawn in advance, and had even sold your clothes when I was ill – now, faced with the revelation of all this, I find myself in such an agonizingly difficult position that I still do not know how to construe all this, or what to think of it. Oh, Makar Alekseyevich! You should have rested content with the first of your good deeds towards me, which were prompted by compassion and familial affection, and not have squandered money on unnecessary things. You have betrayed our friendship, Makar Alekseyevich, because you have not been frank with me, and now, when I see that you spent the very last money you had on smart clothes, on sweets, on walks, on the theatre and on books – now I am paying dearly with remorse for my unforgivable frivolity (for I accepted all those things from you without troubling myself about you); and everything by means of which you wanted to give me enjoyment has now turned into bitterness for me, and has left in me nothing but a futile remorse. I have observed your despondency of late, and although I myself had a depressing sense that something was afoot, I never dreamed of this. How can it be? How could you let yourself sink to this depth of
despondency, Makar Alekseyevich? What will people think of you, what will people say about you now, all those who know you? You, whom I and everyone else respected for your kindheartedness, your modesty and wisdom – you have fallen prey to a repulsive vice which no one has ever noticed in you before. What do you think I felt when Fedora told me you had been found drunk in the street and had been taken back to your lodgings by the police? I was paralysed with amazement, even though I had been expecting something untoward, as you had been missing for four days. Have you thought, Makar Alekseyevich, of what your superiors will say when they discover the true reason for your absence? You say that everyone is laughing at you; that everyone has found out about our friendship and that your neighbours are making sarcastic remarks about me. Please do not pay any attention to this, Makar Alekseyevich, and, for the love of God, take a hold of yourself. I am also frightened by this encounter you had with those officers; I have heard vague rumours about it. Please will you explain to me what that is all about? You say in your letter that you were afraid to be open with me, that you were afraid that if you told me about it you would lose my friendship, that you were in despair about what to do in order to help me in my illness, that you sold everything in order to support me and keep me from going into hospital, that you got yourself into debt to the very limit of your credit, and that every day you have unpleasant scenes with your landlady – but I must tell you that, in doing so, you have chosen the wrong course of action. Now, however, I have learned all. You were too ashamed to make me realize that I was the cause of your unhappy position, yet now, by your behaviour, you have succeeded in bringing me twice as much woe. All this has shocked me, Makar Alekseyevich. Oh, my friend! Unhappiness is an infectious disease. Poor and unhappy people ought to steer clear of one another, so as not to catch a greater degree of infection. I have brought you unhappiness such as you never experienced earlier in the modest and isolated existence you have led. All this is tormenting me and making me waste away with grief.

Please write me a frank account of what happened to you and how you could have come to behave like that. If you can, please set my mind at rest. It is not self-regard that compels me to write to you now about my peace of mind, but my friendship and love for you, which nothing will ever efface from my heart. Goodbye. I await
your reply with impatience. You do not properly know me, Makar Alekseyevich.

Well, since all that is now over and things are gradually returning to how they were before, I will tell you this, little mother: you are worried about what people will think of me, but I hasten to assure you, Varvara Alekseyevna, that my self-esteem is what matters to me before all else. As a consequence of which, and with reference to my misfortunes and all these disorderly events, I beg to inform you that none of my superiors know anything about them, nor are likely to do so, and will therefore all continue to treat me with respect, as before. I am afraid of only one thing: loose tongues. The landlady in our house over here has been shouting her head off, but now that with the help of your ten rubles I have paid off part of my debt to her she merely grumbles, and that is all. As for the others, they turn a blind eye; as long as one doesn't try to borrow money from them, they don't care. And to conclude my explanations I shall tell you, little mother, that I value your respect for me more highly than anything else in the world and am consoled by it now in my temporary state of confusion. Thank God that the first impact and the worst of the trouble is now over, and that you have construed it in such a way as not to consider me a false friend and a selfish brute for keeping you here and deceiving you, not having the strength to part with you, and loving you as my little angel. I have set zealously to work now and have begun to discharge my duties well. Yevstafy Ivanovich did not say a word when I walked past him yesterday. I will not conceal from you, little mother, that my debts and the shabby condition of my wardrobe are causing me considerable pain, but that is nothing to worry about, either, and I beseech you not to despair in that regard, little mother. If you will send me another fifty copecks, Varenka, then those fifty copecks too, will pierce my heart. So this is what it has come to now, this is what it has come to! It is not I, old fool that I am, who am helping you, but you, my poor
little orphan, who are helping me! Fedora did well to get the money. For the moment I have no hope of getting any, little mother, but as soon as there is hope of my doing so I will write and tell you all about it. But it is loose tongues, loose tongues that worry me most of all. Goodbye, my little angel. I kiss your hand and implore you to get well again. I do not write in more detail because I am in a hurry to get to work, since I wish by dint of zeal and effort to make amends for my dereliction of duty; I shall put off a further account of all that happened to me and of my adventure with the officers until the evening.

Oh, Varenka, Varenka! Now it is you who are the guilty one. Your letter completely flabbergasted me and put me off my balance, and it is only now, when in my spare time I have managed to search the innermost corners of my heart, that I realize I was right, absolutely right. I speak not of my drunken binge (bother it, little mother, bother it!), but of the fact that I love you and that it was not at all unreasonable of me to fall in love with you, not unreasonable of me at all. You don't know anything about it, little mother; yet if only you knew why it happened, why I could do no other but to fall in love with you, you would not say those things. That is only your reason talking; I am certain that your heart says something else entirely.

My little mother, I myself do not know and cannot properly remember what took place between those officers and me. I must tell you, my little angel, that in the time leading up to that event I had been in the most terrible state of distress. You must bear in mind that for the whole of the previous month I had been, so to say, hanging by the merest thread. My situation was a thoroughly wretched one. I had been keeping myself to myself, seeing neither you nor the other people in the house; but my landlady kept raising a terrible hullabaloo. In other circumstances that might not have mattered to me. Let the miserable woman shout as much as she wanted to – but in the first place there was the shame of it, and in the second there was the fact that, God knows how, she had learned
of our friendship and kept shouting such things about it to the whole house that I was frozen with horror and stopped up my ears. The trouble was, however, that the others did not stop up theirs, but, on the contrary, strained them in order to hear. Even now, little mother, I don't know where to hide myself…

And then, my little angel, all this devil's brew of every kind of affliction completely overwhelmed me. I suddenly started to hear strange things from Fedora: that an unworthy suitor had appeared on your doorstep and had insulted you by making an unworthy proposal; that he had indeed insulted you, deeply insulted you, I judged by my own reactions, little mother, because I
myself
felt deeply insulted. At that point, my little angel, I lost my wits entirely: I went into a panic and completely lost control. Varenka, my friend, I ran out in an impossible rage; I wanted to go and confront him, the blackguard; I didn't know what I wanted to do – so great was my determination that no one should insult you, my little angel! Yes, I was in a sorry state. It was raining, there was sleet, it was a horribly depressing day… I was almost on the point of turning back… Then, little mother, came my fall. I met Yemelya,
^*
that's Yemelyan Ilyich – he's a clerk, or rather he was, he's not one any more, because he's been dismissed from our department. I don't even know what he does now, he toils away at something or another there; well, I went with him. Then – but Varenka, I cannot really think that you will derive much enjoyment from hearing about your friend is misfortunes, about the calamities that have befallen him and the ordeals he has endured. On the evening of the third day, Yemelya egged me on, and I went to see that officer who had insulted you. I found out his address from our yardkeeper. If you want to know the truth, little mother, I have long been aware of that fine fellow; I used to keep an eye on him when he was lodging in our house. I can see now that I committed an improper act, as I was not my right self when I was announced to him. Quite honestly, Varenka, I can't remember any of it; all I remember is that there were an awful lot of officers in his place, or perhaps I was seeing double – God knows. I can't remember what I said, either. All I remember is that in my righteous indignation I said a great many things. Well, then they turfed me out and threw me down the stairs – actually, they didn't quite do that, but just shoved me out. You already know how I got home, Varenka; that's all there is to tell. Of course, I brought myself discredit and my pride took a knock, but after all, no one else apart
from yourself knows anything about it; and if that is so, then it's just the same as if the whole thing had never happened. Perhaps it is – what do you think, Varenka? The only thing I know for certain is that in our house last year Aksenty Osipovich made a similar attack on the personal honour of Pyotr Petrovich, only in secret, he did it in secret. He made him go into the nightwatchman's room with him, I saw it all through a crack in the door; and there he did what was necessary to settle the matter, but in a decent manner, as no one saw what took place except myself; well, and it didn't bother me, or rather, that is, I didn't tell anyone about it. Well, after that Pyotr Petrovich and Aksenty Osipovich stopped getting at each other. Pyotr Petrovich is a proud man, you know, so he didn't tell anyone, and even now they still bow to each other and shake hands with each other. I will not contest, Varenka, to you I would not dare to contest that I have sunk very low and, what is even more terrible, have lost in terms of my own self-regard; but this was doubtless written in my stars from birth, this must be my fate – and there is no escaping fate, as well you know. Well, that is a full account of my misfortunes and calamities, Varenka, that is everything that happened at that time, even if you do not care to read it. I am somewhat unwell, my little mother, and have lost all playfulness of feeling. And so now, testifying to my devotion, love and respect for you, I remain, my dear madam, Varvara Alekseyevna,

I have read both your letters, and how they made me sigh! Listen, my friend: you are either hiding something from me and only telling me a part of all your unpleasant experiences, or… to be honest, Makar Alekseyevich, your letters still show the signs of a certain confusion… for goodness' sake come and see me, come and see me today; and listen, come and have dinner with us, you know you are welcome. I do not know how you are, and whether you have patched things up with your landlady. You write nothing about all that, as if you were hiding something on purpose. So until we meet,
my friend; you must promise to come and see us today; and you would do best to come and eat with us every day. Fedora is a very good cook. Goodbye.

You are glad, little mother, that God has sent you an opportunity of doing one good deed in exchange for another, and of showing your gratitude. I have faith in that, Varenka, I have faith in the goodness of your angel's heart, and I say this not as a rebuke – but please do not reproach me, as you have done, for squandering my money in my old age. Yes, if you really must insist that I have sinned, then what is there to be done about it? I have sinned; only it costs me much to hear such things from you, my little friend. You must not be angry with me for saying this; in my breast there is nothing but pain and hurt, little mother. Poor folk are capricious – that is the way nature makes them. This is not the first time I have felt it. The poor man is a severe critic; he looks at God's world from a different angle, he furtively sizes up each person he meets, looks about him with a troubled gaze, and listens carefully to every word he overhears – are people talking about him? Are they saying he is not much to look at, wondering about what he is feeling, what he is like from this point of view and that point of view? And Varenka, everyone knows that a poor man is worth less than an old rag, and cannot hope for respect from anyone, whatever they may write, those scribblers, whatever they may write! The poor man will remain the same as he has always been. And why will he remain the same? Because, according to their lights, the poor man must be turned inside out; he must have no privacy, no dignity of any kind! Yemelya told me the other day that some people somewhere organized a whip-round for him, and that a sort of official check was made of every copeck that was paid to him. They thought they were giving him their money out of charity – but they weren't: they were paying for having a poor man exhibited to them. Even charity is conducted
in a peculiar way nowadays, little mother… but perhaps it has always been like that – who knows! Either they don't know how to do it, or they're past masters at it – one or the other. Perhaps you didn't know that; well, there you are! In any other field of knowledge you can count us out, but here we're experts! And how does it come to be that a poor man knows all this and thinks all these things? Why, because he has experience! Because, for example, he knows that there is at his side a gentleman who is going to a restaurant, saying to himself: ‘What is that ragged clerk going to eat today? I'm going to have
sauté papillotte
, while he is probably going to have kasha with no butter. But what business is it of his, what I'm going to eat? There is a type of man, Varenka, who thinks only about things like that. And they go about, the shameless lampoonists, looking to see whether you put the whole of your foot down on the pavement or just the tips of your toes; look, they say, such-and-such a clerk from such-and-such a department, a titular councillor, is going around with his bare toes sticking out of his boots, and the elbows of his jacket worn through – and then they go home and write about it all and then have this rubbish printed… But what business is it of his that my elbows are worn through? Indeed, if you will forgive me a coarse expression, Varenka, I will even go so far as to say that on this account the poor man has a modesty that is equivalent to your own maidenly reticence. I mean, you wouldn't – please forgive my vulgarity – unveil yourself in front of everyone, would you? In precisely the same way the poor man doesn't like people to look into his hideaway to see what his private life is like. And so there was no need to insult me, Varenka, taking sides with my enemies who assail the honour and personal dignity of an honest man.

And as I sat in the office today I felt such an ungainly fool, such a bedraggled old idiot that I nearly burned up with shame. I was so ashamed of myself, Varenka! After all, it's not surprising one feels ashamed when one is bare elbows are peeping through one's sleeves and the buttons on one's jacket are hanging by threads. And as luck would have it, my desk was in the most terrible mess! In spite of myself, my spirits sank. What can I say?… Stepan Karlovich himself began discussing my work with me today; he talked and talked, and then added, almost casually: ‘Oh, Makar Alekseyevich, old chap!' – and didn't finish the rest of what he'd intended to say. But I guessed what it was, and I blushed so violently that even my bald patch turned red. It was really an insignificant event, yet it nevertheless made me feel anxious and prompted me to gloomy thoughts.
What if the others overheard? O God forbid that they should have overheard anything! I must confess that I suspect, strongly suspect a certain little fellow. I mean, it is nothing to them, those villains! They will inform on me! They will give away all the details of a man is private life for a brass copeck; they hold nothing sacred.

I now know whose doing this is. It is Ratazyayev's doing. Yes, he must know someone in our department who overheard the conversation and who repeated it all to him with bits added on; or perhaps he told the story to the people in his own department and it found its way to ours. Whatever the truth may be, everyone in our lodging-house knows the whole story right down to the last detail, and they point to your window; I know that they do this. When I went to have dinner with you yesterday, they all put their heads out of their windows; the landlady said that the devil had taken up with the infant, and then she called you an indecent name. But all that was nothing compared to Ratazyayev is villainous intention of putting you and myself into literature and describing us in an elegant satire; he told me of this himself, and some of the more kindly disposed of our lodgers have also informed me of it. I no longer know what to think about anything, and I do not know what to do. There is no use in trying to conceal our sin, we have incurred God's anger, my little angel! You said you would send me a book, little mother, to keep me from being bored. Fie upon it, the book, little mother! What is a book? It is just a fable with faces! Novels are rubbish, too, written as rubbish, merely for idle people to read: believe me, little mother, trust my experience of many years. And if they come telling you about some Shakespeare or other, saying ‘Look, there is Shakespeare – he is literature' – then be aware that Shakespeare is rubbish, too, it's all the purest rubbish, and all made simply for the purpose of lampoonery!