Alexander would have liked to sink through the earth. But Pyotr Ivanych pitilessly looked him straight in the eye and awaited an answer. “Sometimes… true… I did bring…” said Alexander, lowering his eyes.
“So again–sometimes. Not every day. That’s indeed superfluous. Moreover, tell me what all this cost you. I don’t want you spending your money for me; it’s enough that you’re taking trouble. Give me the bill. So, for a long time Surkov talked nonsense. ‘They’re always,’ he says, ‘the two of them, either on foot or in the carriage, taking the air together where there are the fewest people.’”
At these words Alexander was a bit bent out of shape: he stretched out his legs under the desk and suddenly drew them in close again.
“I shook my head in doubt,” his uncle continued. “‘Would he be taking walks every day!’ I say. ‘Ask people…’ he says. ‘I’ll do better to ask him himself,’ I say… It isn’t true, is it?”
“I did several times… walk with her… it’s true…”
“So, not every day. I didn’t ask you to do that. I knew he was lying. ‘So,’ I tell him, ‘What’s the importance of that? She’s a widow, has no men close to her. Alexander’s a modest fellow–not like you, you man-about-town. So, she takes him along; she can’t go about alone.’ He won’t buy that. ‘No,’ he says, ‘you won’t fool me! I know. He’s always with her at the theater. I’m the one,’ he says, ‘who’ll get her a box, sometimes, Heaven knows with how much trouble and he’ll sit in it!’ Here I couldn’t stand it and burst out laughing. ‘That’s the way you’d have it,’ I think, ‘idiot!’ Oh, my, Alexander! You’re a real nephew! Only I feel bad that you’ve gone to so much trouble for me.”
Alexander felt he was undergoing torture. Large drops of sweat fell from his brow. He barely heard what his uncle was saying and didn’t look at him or his aunt.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna was sorry for him. She shook her head at her husband, reproaching him for torturing his nephew. But Pyotr Ivanych didn’t stop.
“Out of jealousy Surkov took it into his head to assure me that you were up to your ears in love with Tafayeva. ‘No,’ I tell him, ‘look, that’s not true. After all that happened to him, he won’t fall in love. He knows women too well and scorns them.’ Isn’t that so?”
Alexander, without raising his eyes, nodded his head.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna suffered for him. “Pyotr Ivanych!” she said, so as somehow to change the subject.
“Well? What?”
“Just now a servant came with a letter from the Lukyanovs.”
“I know, good. Where was I?”
“Pyotr Ivanych, you’ve started dropping cigar ash on my flowers again. What is this?”
“No matter, dear. They say ash furthers growth. So, I wanted to say…”
“So, isn’t it time we dined, Pyotr Ivanych?”
“Good, tell them to serve! You’ve rightly mentioned dinner. Surkov says that you, Alexander, dine there almost every day, and that’s the reason, he says, you’re not at home lately on Fridays. He pretends you spend whole days together, just you two… The Devil knows what lies he told, I got fed up; I finally got rid of him. So, the result is, he lied. Today’s Friday and here you are!”
Alexander shifted from one foot to the other and bent his head to the left shoulder.
“I’m extremely, extremely grateful to you. This is–the service of both a friend and a relative!” concluded Pyotr Ivanych. “Surkov is convinced he has nothing to gain and has withdrawn. ‘She imagines,’ he says, ‘I shall be pining for her–she’s mistaken! And I even wanted,’ he says, ‘to renovate an apartment completely from scratch and Heaven knows what intentions I had,’ he says. ‘She perhaps didn’t even dream of such happiness as was being prepared for her. I would even,’ he says, ‘not have been averse to marrying her, had she been able to hook me. Now it’s all over. You gave me the right advice, Pyotr Ivanych,’ he says. ‘I shall save both money and time!’ And now the fellow plays the part of Byron, he walks around in such gloom and doesn’t ask for money! I, too, shall say it’s all over! Your mission’s accomplished, Alexander, and well done!… Pardon me, please… I’ll make it up to you somehow. When you need money, ask me. Liza! Have a good wine served us for dinner; we’ll drink to the success of this business.”
Pyotr Ivanych left the room. Lizaveta Alexandrovna, unnoticed, looked at Alexander twice and seeing that he was not saying a word, also left to give some orders to the servants.
Alexander sat as if unconscious and kept staring at his knees. At last he raised his head, looked around–no one was there. He took a deep breath, looked at his watch–four o’clock. He hastily seized his hat, waved his hand in the direction his uncle had gone, and quietly, on tiptoe and looking round in all directions, made it to the vestibule, where he took his overcoat in hand, rushed headlong down the stairs and drove off to Tafayeva’s.
Surkov didn’t lie; Alexander did love Yuliya. He experienced the first attacks of this love almost with horror, as if it was some kind of infection. Both fear and shame tormented him: fear of again being subject to all the whims of his own and another person’s heart, shame before others, above all before his uncle. He would have paid dearly to hide it from him. It wasn’t long ago, three months before, that he had so proudly and decisively renounced love, he’d even written an epitaph in verse to this restless emotion and read it to his uncle, he’d at last openly scorned women–and suddenly again was at a woman’s feet! Once more a proof of childish impetuosity. Heavens! When would he be free of his uncle’s inescapable influence? Was his life never to take on its own special unexpected shape, but always to go according to Pyotr Ivanych’s predictions?
This thought drove him to despair. He would have been glad to run away from any new love. But how escape? What was the difference between love for Nadenka and love for Yuliya? First love is nothing but an unfortunate error of the heart which demands food, and the heart in those years is so undiscriminating that it accepts whatever first comes its way. But Yuliya! She was, indeed, no capricious girl who didn’t understand him, or herself, or love. She was a woman in full maturity, weak in body but with energy of spirit–for love; she was all love! She recognized no other conditions for happiness and life. Is love but an idle act?–it’s also a gift, and Yuliya was a genius at it. This was the love he had dreamt of, a conscious, reasonable, but at the same time powerful love which knew nothing beyond its own sphere.
“I don’t sigh for joy like an animal,” he told himself. “My spirit does not die, but a more important process, a higher one, occurs in me: I am aware of my happiness, I reason about it, and it is fuller, though perhaps quieter. How nobly, unaffectedly, completely without pretense Yuliya gave herself to her feeling! It was as if she’d been waiting for someone to understand love deeply–and the someone came. He, like a legal owner, proudly entered into ownership of inherited wealth and was obediently acknowledged. What comfort, what bliss, thought Alexander on the way to her from his uncle’s, to know that there is a being in the world who, wherever she might be, whatever doing, remembers him, directs all thoughts, occupations, actions–everything toward one point and one idea, the beloved! It’s like the man with a double. Whatever he hears, whatever he sees, whatever he goes past or is passed by, everything is verified as an impression of the other, the double. The impression is known to both, both have learned each other by heart–and then the verified impression is accepted and confirmed in indelible lines in the soul. The double rejects his own sensations if they cannot be shared or accepted by the other. One loves what the other loves and hates what the other hates. They live inseparably in one thought, one feeling; they have one spiritual eye, one ear, one mind, one soul…”
“Sir, which place is it in Liteiny?” asked the cab driver.
Yuliya loved Alexander more than he her. She was not even conscious of the whole strength of her love and did not muse on it. She loved for the first time-that wouldn’t have been anything–it’s impossible t
o fall in love straight away for the second time. But the misfortune was that her heart was developed to the utmost, formed by novels and prepared not for a first love, but for that romantic love which exists in certain novels, but not in nature, and which is always unhappy because it is impossible in reality. Meanwhile Yuliya’s mind did not find any healthy food in her reading of certain novels and so it lagged behind her heart. She could not at all imagine a simple quiet love without stormy outbursts and immoderate tenderness. She would at once have stopped loving anyone who did not fall at her feet at a suitable moment, who didn’t swear loyalty to her with all the powers of his soul, who dared not to burn her up and reduce her to ash in his embraces, or presumed to work at another occupation beside love, who did not drink drop by drop from the chalice of life in her tears and kisses alone.
This was the source of the dreaminess that created a special world for her. No sooner did something in the normal world take place not in accord with the laws of her special world than her heart was disturbed and she suffered. Her woman’s organism, weak even without this, was subject to shock, often a quite powerful one. Frequent excitements irritated her nerves and finally caused them to break down completely. This is why many women have a pensiveness and sadness without reason, a gloomy view of life; this is why a harmonious and wisely constructed order of human existence created on the basis of immutable law seems to them a heavy chain; this is why, in a word, reality frightens them, compelling them to construct a fata morgana world.
Who had tried prematurely and so wrongly to cultivate Yuliya’s heart and leave her mind alone?… Who? Why that classical triumvirate of pedagogues whom the parents had invited to come to take a young mind into their care, open it to the movements and causes of all things, raise the curtain of the past and show what is under us, over us, and in our very selves–a difficult assignment! But then three nations were called upon for this important undertaking. The parents themselves abstained from educating their child, assuming that their whole task would end when, on the recommendation of good friends, they hired a Frenchman, Poulet, to teach French literature and other subjects; then a German, Schmidt, because it was the custom to begin, though by no means to complete, German studies; and finally, a Russian teacher, Ivan Ivanych.
“Indeed, they’re all so unkempt,” the mother said, “always dressed so badly, looking worse than a lackey, even smelling sometimes of wine…”
“How can we do without a Russian teacher?–that’s impossible!” decided the father. “Don’t worry; I’ll find a cleaner one.”
So the Frenchman took up his task. Both mother and father paid him special attention. They invited him into the house as a guest, treated him very respectfully; he was a very expensive Frenchman.
It was easy for him to teach Yuliya. Thanks to a governess, she chattered in French, read and wrote almost without errors. It remained for M. Poulet only to busy her with compositions. He assigned her various subjects, now to describe the sunrise, now to define love and friendship, again to write a congratulatory letter to her parents or pour out her sorrow at separating from her girlfriend.
But from her window Yuliya could only see the sun set behind the house of the merchant Girin, she had never separated from her friends, and friendship and love… so here for the first time an idea of these feelings flashed through her mind. One must learn about them some time.
After exhausting his whole supply of these subjects, Poulet at last resolved to start with that sacred slender notebook on whose title page was printed in bold letters Cours de littérature française. Who of us does not remember this notebook? Two months later Yuliya knew French literature by heart, that is, the content of the slender notebook, and three months after that, she had forgotten it, though fatal traces remained. She knew there had been Voltaire and sometimes charged him with Les Martyres, but attributed Le Dictionnaire philosophique to Chateaubriand. She called Montaigne M-r Mountain and mentioned him alongside Hugo. She said of Molière that he writes for the theater. Of Racine she learned by heart the famous speech: “A peine nous sortions des portes de Trézènes.” 10
In mythology she very much liked the comedy played out by Vulcan, Mars and Venus. She was about to defend Vulcan, but after learning he was crippled and clumsy and a blacksmith besides, she defected right away to side with Mars. She fell in love too with the myth about Semele and Jupiter and about Apollo’s exile and his pranks on earth, taking it all just as it is written and not suspecting any other meaning in these tales. Did the Frenchman himself suspect any–Heaven knows! To her questions about the religion of the ancients he would answer, wrinkling his brow, with importance: “Stupidities. But that beast of a Vulcan must have looked pretty peculiar… don’t you think?” He added then, winking an eye and stroking her hand, “What would you have done in Venus’ place?” She didn’t answer, but blushed for the first time in her life without knowing why.
The Frenchman finally perfected Yuliya’s education by acquainting her not theoretically but practically with the new school of French literature. He gave her Le manuscrit vert, Les sept péchés capitaux, and L’âne mort 11 along with a whole army of books which were then overrunning France and Europe.
The poor girl eagerly threw herself into this limitless flood. What geniuses these writers, Janin, Balzac, Drouineau, seemed to her–along with a whole string of heroes! What was the pitiful tale about Vulcan compared to their marvelous portrayals? Venus was pure innocence compared to these new characters! Yuliya eagerly read the new school and is probably still reading them now.
Meanwhile, just as the Frenchman only got so far, the thorough German did not manage even to get through the grammar. He very pompously set up tables of declensions and conjugations and thought up various intricate means of memorizing case endings; he explained that sometimes the prefix zu- is placed at the end, and so forth.
But when he was asked to teach literature, the poor fellow was taken with fright. They showed him the Frenchman’s notebook. He shook his head and said you couldn’t teach that in German; but there was Aller’s anthology, in which all writers were represented with excerpts of their works. He didn’t get off so easily, though; they kept at him to acquaint Yuliya with various writers, as had M. Poulet.
Finally the German promised and went home in deep thought. He opened, or, rather, uncovered a cupboard, removed one door altogether and leaned it against the wall because for a long time the cupboard had had neither latch nor lock–from it he took some old boots, half a block of sugar, a bottle of snuff, a carafe of vodka and a crust of black bread, then a broken coffee grinder, further a razor with a piece of soap and a brush in a tin of pomade, old suspenders, a whetstone for his penknife and still more junk of the sort. Finally, behind all this a book appeared, then another, a third and a fourth–yes, five by count–all there. He clapped them, one against the other–dust rose in a cloud, like smoke, and solemnly shrouded the pedagogue’s head.
The first book was Gessner’s Idylls. “Gut! ” said the German and read through the idyll about the broken pitcher with enjoyment. He turned over the second book: The Gotha Almanac for 1804. He leafed through: in it were the dynasties of European rulers, pictures of various castles, waterfalls. “Sehr gut,” said the German. The third was the Bible; he laid it aside, piously muttering, “Nein! ” The fourth was Jung’s “Nights” 12 ; he shook his head and muttered, “Nein! ” The last was Weisse. 13 And the German smiled triumphantly: “Da habe ich’s! ”14 When they mentioned the existence of Schiller, Goethe and others, he shook his head and stubbornly insisted, “Nein! ”
Yuliya yawned as soon as the German translated the first page from Weisse for her and then she stopped listening. Thus, only one thing from the German stayed in her memory, that the prefix zu- is sometimes placed at the end.
And her Russian teacher? He did his duty even more conscientiously than the German. Almost to the point of tears he assured Yuliya that a substantive or a verb are a so-called part of speech, and a preposition is one too
, and he finally got her to accept this and learn by heart definitions of all the parts of speech. She could even enumerate in one breath all the prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs, and when the teacher solemnly interrogated her, “And what are the exclamations of fear or surprise?” she at once without drawing in breath blurted out, “Ach, och, ech, alas, oh, ah, well, oh my!” Her instructor was in ecstasy.
She recognized certain truths even of syntax, but could never apply them in practice and kept making grammatical mistakes for the rest of her life.
As for history, she knew that Alexander the Great had existed, that he fought a lot of wars, was super brave… and, of course, very handsome… but what he or his age had meant in addition neither her teacher nor she thought to ask. Indeed, even Kaidanov doesn’t go into that very much in his history books.
When literature was requested of her teacher, he dragged in a pile of old, worn books. Among them were Kantemir and Sumarokov, then Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Ozerov. Her family were amazed. They carefully turned over one book, sniffed it, then tossed it out and asked for something newer. The teacher brought Karamzin. But to read Karamzin after the new French school! Yuliya read Poor Liza and a few pages from Letters of a Russian Traveller and gave them back.
The poor pupil had lots of breaks between these studies without any high-minded healthy nourishment for thought! Her mind began to fall asleep and her heart to sound an alarm. But at this point an obliging cousin turned up and at the right moment brought her several chapters of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, The Caucasian Prisoner, and so on. And the young girl experienced the sweetness of Russian verse. She learned Onegin by heart and it never left her night table. Even her cousin, like her other instructors, didn’t know how to explain to her the meaning and merits of this work. She took Tatyana as her role model and in her thoughts she repeated to her ideal hero the flaming lines from Tatyana’s letter, and her heart ached and throbbed. Yuliya’s imagination at times sought Onegin, at times one of the pale, sad, and disillusioned heroes of the new school of writers.
An Ordinary Story Page 25
