Poor Folk and Other Stories (6 page)

II

Initially, until we – Mother and I, that is – had grown accustomed to our new abode, we both found life in Anna Fyodorovna's house a strange and in some ways terrifying experience. Anna Fyodorovna lived in a house of her own on the Sixth Line. There were only five habitable rooms in the house. Three of them were occupied by Anna Fyodorovna and my female cousin Sasha, whom she was bringing up – Sasha was just a child, an orphan who had no father or mother. We lived in one of the remaining rooms, and the other, next to ours, housed a poor student named Pokrovsky, Anna Fyodorovna's lodger. Anna Fyodorovna lived very well, better than one might have supposed; but the sources of her capital were mysterious, as were
the tasks that kept her busy. She was always bustling about, always preoccupied; went out by carriage or on foot several times a day; but what she did, what preoccupied her and why, I was never able to fathom. The circle of her acquaintances was large and varied. She had a constant stream of visitors, and Lord only knows what kind of people they were, always calling on some sort of business and only for a moment or two. Mother would always take me off to our room as soon as the doorbell rang. Anna Fyodorovna was always terribly angry with Mother because of this, and was forever saying that we were too proud, proud beyond our means, and that it would be a matter if we had something to be proud about, and kept going on like that for whole hours on end. At that time I did not understand these accusations of pride; it is only now that I think I know, or can at least surmise, why Mother was unable to make up her mind to go and live in Anna Fyodorovna's house. Anna Fyodorovna was a malicious woman; she tormented us constantly. It is to this day a mystery to me why she invited us to go and live with her. At the outset she was reasonably pleasant to us, but then, when she realized that we were helpless and had nowhere to go, she displayed her true colours. Later on she became quite affectionate towards me, affectionate in a vulgar sort of way that verged on flattery, but initially I had to put up with everything that Mother had to put up with. She was on at us every minute of the day; all she ever did was remind us that she was our benefactress. She would introduce us to strangers as her poor relatives, a helpless widow and orphan whom she had given shelter in her home out of mercy, for the sake of Christian charity. At table she would watch every mouthful we took, but if we did not eat, there would be more trouble: she would say that we were turning up our noses at what she offered us, that it was not good enough for us, that we were ungrateful. She constantly criticized Father, saying that he had wanted to be better than other people, and a fat lot of good that had done him; he had left his wife and daughter to sink or swim, and if they had not had a female relative with a charitable, compassionate, Christian soul, they might, God only knew, have perished of hunger on the street. The things she said! Listening to her, one felt less bitterness than revulsion. Mother was constantly in tears; her health was getting worse from day to day, she was visibly wasting away, yet all the while she and I were working from morning to night, taking in orders for sewing, which thoroughly displeased Anna Fyodorovna; she kept repeating
that her home was not a fashion shop. But we had to clothe ourselves, we had to put money by for unforeseeable expenses, we simply had to have money of our own. We were saving just in case it proved possible to move somewhere else in time. But doing the work, Mother lost what little good health she had left: she was growing weaker with each day that passed. Her illness, like a canker, was visibly undermining her life and was bringing her close to the grave. I saw it all, felt it all, suffered it all: it was all happening before my eyes! Day followed day, and every one of them was the same as the others. We lived a quiet life, not like a life in town at all. Anna Fyodorovna gradually calmed down as she began fully to realize the extent of her power. But no one ever dared to contradict her. Our room was separated from her half of the house by a corridor, and next to us, as I have already mentioned, lived Pokrovsky. He taught Sasha French and German, history, geography – ‘all the sciences', as Anna Fyodorovna used to say, providing him in return for this with board and lodging; Sasha was a nimble-minded girl, though she was playful and naughty; at that time she was thirteen. Anna Fyodorovna made it known to Mother that she would consider it not a bad idea for me to start lessons with Pokrovsky too, since they were not teaching me properly at my boarding-school. Mother readily agreed, and for a whole year I took lessons from Pokrovsky together with Sasha. Pokrovsky was poor – a very poor young man; his health did not permit him to follow any continuous course of study, and it was merely out of habit that we referred to him as ‘the student'. He lived modestly, peacefully, and quietly, and no sound of him could be heard from our room. His appearance was rather odd; so awkwardly did he walk, so awkwardly did he bow, and so strangely did he speak that at first I could not look at him without laughing. Sasha was forever playing pranks on him, especially when he was giving us our lessons. Also, he had an irritabledisposition – heconstantly got angry, losing his temper over the merest trifles, shouted at us, complained about us and frequently went off to his room in a rage, without having completed the lesson. Left to himself, however, he would sit poring over his books for days on end. He had a lot of books, and they were all expensive, rare ones. He gave lessons in a few other places as well, and received some kind of payment for them; as soon as he had any money, he would at once go out and buy books. In time I got to know him better, more intimately. He was the kindest and most worthy of men, better than
any I have ever met. Mother respected him deeply. He eventually became my best friend – after Mother, that is, of course. At first, grown-up girl or not, I caused just as much mischief as Sasha, and for hours on end we would rack our brains trying to think of ways to tease Pokrovsky and wear out his patience. He was really comical when he lost his temper, and for us this was a great source of fun. (I am truly ashamed to remember that now.) On one occasion we tormented him about something almost to the point of tears, and I distinctly heard him whisper: ‘Wicked children!' I suddenly grew embarrassed; I felt ashamed, and sickened, and sorry for him. I remember that I blushed to the roots of my hair, and with tears in my eyes begged him to calm himself and not be offended by our stupid pranks; but he closed the book, leaving our lesson unfinished, and went off to his room. I spent all that day in an agony of remorse. The thought that we children had reduced him to tears by our cruel behaviour was unbearable to me. I rediance that we had been waiting for him to burst into tears; that was what we had wanted. We had succeeded in exasperating him beyond the limits of his endurance; we had compelled him, poor, unfortunate man, to remember his cruel destiny. I lay awake all night with vexation, sadness and remorse. They say that remorse brings relief to the soul – on the contrary. I do not know how it was, but vanity also managed to get mixed up in my unhappiness. I did not want him to view me as a child. By that time I was already fifteen. From that day onward I began to torture my imagination, creating thousands of plans to make Pokrovsky alter his opinion of me. But now I was afflicted by a chronic timidity and shyness: in my present situation I could not for the life of me make my mind up about anything, and I confined myself to dreams alone (and God knows, what dreams they were!). But I did stop playing pranks with Sasha. Pokrovsky stopped losing his temper with us; but that was not sufficient for my vanity. I shall now say a few words about the strangest, most curious and most pathetic human being of all those it has been my fortune to meet. I speak of him now, at precisely this moment in my notes, because until that time I had scarcely paid him any attention – but now everything that concerned Pokrovsky suddenly acquired a special interest for me. There sometimes used to appear in our household a little old man, grey-haired, shabbily dressed, mud-bespattered, awkward and clumsy – in short, impossibly strange. From a first glance at him one might have thought he was ashamed of something;
he looked as though he had something on his conscience. This made him constantly huddle himself up and make faces to himself in a peculiar sort of way; he had such odd mannerisms and made such strange grimaces that one might, without being very much mistaken, have supposed him to be not in his right mind. He would come to our house and stand in the entrance hall outside the glass doors, not daring to come inside. If he saw one of us going past – Sasha or myself, or one of the servants whom he knew to be kindly disposed towards him – he would immediately start waving, beckoning to himself, and making various signs, and it was only when one nodded to him and called to him – the prearranged signal that there were no visitors in the house and that he might enter whenever he wished to – only then would the old man quietly open the door, smile with delight, rub his hands with satisfaction and proceed straight on tiptoe to Pokrovsky's room. This was Pokrovsky's father. I later discovered most of the details of this poor old man's story. He had once had a government position somewhere, had no abilities whatsoever and had occupied the lowliest and most insignificant post in the service. On the death of his first wife (the mother of our ‘student' Pokrovsky), he had taken it into his head to marry a second time, and married a tradesman's daughter. His new wife turned the household upside down; she would leave no one alone, took everyone in hand. At that time our ‘student' Pokrovsky was only a child of about ten years old. His stepmother hated him. But fate smiled on little Pokrovsky. The landowner Bykov, who knew the government clerk Pokrovsky and had once been his benefactor, took the child into his care and found him a place in some school or other. He took an interest in the boy because he had known his dead mother, who as a girl had received the good favours of Anna Fyodorovna and had been married by her to the government clerk Pokrovsky. Moved by generosity, Mr Bykov, a friend and intimate acquaintance of Anna Fyodorovna's, had given the sum of five thousand rubles as a dowry for the bride. Where that money had gone, no one knew. That was the story as Anna Fyodorovna told it to me; the istudent' Pokrovsky never liked talking about his family circumstances. They say that his mother was very good-looking, and I find it strange that she should have made such a poor marriage to such an insignificant man… She died when she was still quite young, about four years after the marriage. From school young Pokrovsky went to some gymnasium or other, and then on to university. But Mr Bykov, who made very
frequent visits to St Petersburg, did not stop his patronage with that. Because of his disturbed state of health, Pokrovsky was unable to continue his studies at the university. Mr Bykov introduced him to Anna Fyodorovna with his own personal recommendation, and thus the young Pokrovsky was taken into the household as a dependant, on condition that he teach Sasha everything that might be required. Meanwhile, old Pokrovsky, demented by his wife's cruelty, abandoned himself to the very worst of vices, and was almost constantly drunk. His wife used to beat him, banished him to the kitchen and reduced him to a state in which he grew accustomed to her beatings and did not complain of her maltreatment of him. He was not yet really all that old, but his self-destructive inclinations had practically turned him into a dotard. The only sign of decent human feeling he ever showed was his boundless love for his son. People used to say that the young Pokrovsky was the spitting image of his dead mother. Might it not have been the memory of his kindly first wife that had inspired the ruined old man's heart with such an infinite love for him? The old man could speak of nothing but his son, and called to see him without fail two times a week. He did not dare to call more often, because the young Pokrovsky could not stand his father is visits. Of all the young man is faults, the principal and most grievous was unquestionably his lack of respect for his father. It should, of course, be added that the old man could on occasion be the most intolerable creature in the world. For one thing, he was horribly inquisitive, and for another, by his comments and questions, which were invariably of a most trivial and incoherent kind, he constantly interfered with his son is studies and would sometimes even turn up drunk. Little by little, the son managed to wean his father away from his vices, his inquisitiveness and his compulsive talking, and finally reached a stage where the old man obeyed him, as though he were an oracle, in all things, and did not dare to open his mouth without his son is permission. The poor old man could not sufficiently admire and dote upon his Petenka (as he called his son). Whenever he called to visit him, he nearly always had a worried, timid look, probably because he did not know how his son would receive him. He would usually spend a long time hesitating whether to come in or not, and if I chanced to be there, he would question me for about twenty minutes, asking me about ‘Petenka' and how his health was, what kind of mood he was in, whether he was engaged in any important study, what he was actually doing – whether he was writing or
absorbed in reflection. When I had sufficiently raised his spirits and put his mind at rest, the old man would finally make up his mind to come in and very quietly, very gingerly, he would open the door, and begin by putting his head round it; if he saw that his son was not in a bad temper and nodded to him, he would slowly enter the room, take off his overcoat and his hat – which was always squashed, full of holes, and ragged-brimmed – and hang both on a hook, performing the action slowly and inaudibly; then he would sit down carefully on a chair somewhere, never taking his eyes off his son, following his every movement in an attempt to guess the frame of mind his Petenka was in. If his son was even slightly in a bad mood and the old man was able to observe this, he would at once rise from his seat and explain: ‘I only dropped in for a moment, Petenka. I've been out for a long walk, I was passing, and looked in to take a rest.' And then silently and obediently he would take his hat and overcoat, slowly open the door once again and go out, smiling to his son, smiling forcedly in order to keep to himself the misery that seethed within him, and not show it to his son.