by Leo Tolstoy
Although that saying, which afterwards would bolster my spirits more than once, did comfort me a bit, the fact that I had been sent not bread and water but a whole dinner and even sweet rolls required serious thought. If they hadn’t sent sweet rolls, that would have meant that confinement was the punishment, but now it turned out that I still hadn’t been punished, that I had only been separated from the others like some dangerous person, and the punishment still lay ahead. While I was engaged in the solution to that problem, a key turned in the lock of my cell and St-Jérôme came into the room with a stern, official expression on his face.
‘Let’s go and see your grandmother,’ he said, without looking at me.
Before leaving the room, I wanted to brush off the sleeves of my jacket, which were covered with chalk dust, but St-Jérôme said that it wasn’t necessary, as if I were already in such a pitiful mental state that my appearance wasn’t worth troubling over.
As St-Jérôme led me by the arm through the salon, Katenka, Lyubochka and Volodya looked at me exactly the same way that we looked at the convicts led past our windows every Monday. And when I went up to Grandmother’s chair with the intention of kissing her hand, she turned away and put it under her mantilla.
‘Yes, my dear,’ she said after a rather lengthy silence, during which she gazed at me from head to toe with such an expression that I didn’t know where to look or what to do with my hands, ‘I can say that you have held my love in high regard and been a genuine comfort to me. Monsieur St-Jérôme, who undertook your education at my request,’ she added, drawing out every word, ‘now no longer wishes to remain in my home. Why? Because of you, my dear. I had hoped that you would be grateful,’ she continued after a pause and in a tone that showed that her words had been prepared beforehand, ‘for his efforts and care, that you would appreciate his services, but you, you sniveller, you little boy, have dared to raise your hand against him. Very well! Excellent!! I, too, am starting to think that you’re incapable of understanding nobler treatment, that for you other, baser means are required. Now apologize to him,’ she added in a severe, peremptory voice, pointing at St-Jérôme. ‘Do you hear?’
I looked in the direction of Grandmother’s hand, but on seeing St-Jérôme’s frock coat, I turned away and remained standing where I was, again feeling my heart sink.
‘What’s this? Do you really not hear what I’m saying to you?’
My whole body shuddered, but I didn’t move from my place.
‘Koko!’ Grandmother said, no doubt sensing the anguish I was feeling. ‘Koko,’ she said in a no longer peremptory but tender voice, ‘is this you?’
‘Grandmother, I won’t apologize to him for anything,’ I said and then stopped, realizing that if I said another word, I wouldn’t be able to hold back the tears that were welling up within me.
‘I’m ordering you. I’m asking you. What is wrong with you?’
‘I … I … don’t … want to … I can’t …,’ I stammered, and the tears pent up in my breast suddenly broke through the barrier that had been holding them and burst out in a desperate torrent.
‘C’est ainsi que vous obéissez à votre seconde mère, c’est ainsi que vous reconnaissez ses bontés?’28 St-Jérôme said in a tragical voice. ‘À genoux!’
‘My goodness, if she had seen this!’ Grandmother said, turning away from me and wiping the tears that were filling her own eyes, ‘if she had seen … It’s all for the best. She wouldn’t have survived this grief, she wouldn’t have survived it.’
And Grandmother wept harder and harder. I wept, too, but I still had no thought of apologizing.
‘Tranquillisez-vous au nom du ciel, madame la comtesse,’29 St-Jérôme said.
But Grandmother was no longer listening to him. She covered her face with her hands, and her sobbing rapidly passed into gasping and hysteria. Mimi and Gasha ran into the room with frightened faces; there was an odour of spirits of some kind, and the whole house erupted in running about and whispering.
‘Admire your deed,’ St-Jérôme said as he led me back upstairs.
‘My goodness, what have I done? What a terrible criminal I am!’
No sooner had St-Jérôme gone downstairs after telling me to go to my room than, without a thought about what I was doing, I started to run down the main staircase to the front door.
Whether I meant to run away from home for good or drown myself, I don’t recall; I know only that after covering my face with my hands to keep from seeing anyone, I ran farther and farther down the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ a familiar voice suddenly asked me. ‘You’re just the one I want, my good fellow.’
I tried to run past him, but Papa grabbed me by the arm and said in a stern voice, ‘Come along with me, dear fellow!’ And he led me into the small sitting room. ‘What possessed you to touch the portfolio in my study?’ he added, taking hold of my ear. ‘Well? Why don’t you answer me? Well?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
‘So you don’t know what came over you, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know,’ he repeated, pulling my ear each time. ‘Will you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong in the future? Will you? Will you?’
Despite the excruciating pain in my ear, I didn’t cry out, but felt a pleasant mental sensation. As soon as Papa let go of my ear, I grabbed his hand and started to kiss it.
‘Hit me again,’ I said through my tears, ‘harder and more painfully. I’m a vile, worthless, miserable person!’
‘What is the matter with you?’ he said, lightly pushing me away.
‘No, nothing will make me go,’ I said, tightly holding on to his frock coat. ‘Everyone hates me, I know that, but listen to me for heaven’s sake, protect me or send me away. I can’t live with him. He’s always trying to humiliate me and makes me kneel before him. He wants to flog me. I can’t allow it. I’m not a little child. I won’t tolerate it. I’ll die. I’ll kill myself. He told Grandmother that I’m worthless, and now she’s sick and will die because of me. I … with … him … for heaven’s sake, beat me … why … do … they … tor … ment … ?’
I was choking on my tears. I sat down on the sofa, and unable to say anything more, fell with my head on his knees, sobbing so hard I thought I would certainly die that very instant.
‘What are you talking about, little fellow?’ Papa asked sympathetically, leaning over me.
‘He’s a tyrant, a torturer … I’ll die … No one loves me!’ I said, barely able to pronounce the words and shaking with convulsions.
Papa picked me up in his arms and carried me to my bedroom. I fell asleep.
When I awoke, it was already very late, only one candle was burning beside my bed, and Mimi, Lyubochka and our family doctor were sitting nearby. It was apparent from their faces that they were worried about my health. But I felt so good after my twelve-hour sleep that I would have jumped out of bed at once, had I been willing to disappoint their belief that I was very ill.
SEVENTEEN
Hatred
Yes, it was a genuine feeling of hatred, not the to me unbelievable kind written about only in novels, the one that supposedly enjoys doing harm to another person, but rather the kind that inspires an uncontrollable aversion in you for someone who is nonetheless entitled to your respect, and that makes his hair, his neck, his way of walking, the sound of his voice, and all his parts and movements odious to you, while at the same time some mysterious power draws you to him and compels you to follow his smallest movements with anxious attention. That’s how I felt about St-Jérôme.
St-Jérôme had been with us a year and a half. Reflecting dispassionately on him now, I find that he was a good Frenchman, but a Frenchman to the utmost degree. He wasn’t stupid – he was, in fact, quite learned, and scrupulously carried out his duties with us – but he possessed the features common to all his countrymen, yet so opposed to the Russi
an character, of frivolous egoism, vanity, impudence and ignorant self-assurance. And I didn’t care for any of that. It goes without saying that Grandmother had explained her views on corporal punishment to him and that he didn’t dare beat us, but even so he often threatened us, and especially me, with a birch rod and pronounced the word ‘fouetter’30 so revoltingly (something like ‘fouatter’) and in such a tone of voice that it was as if flogging me would have given him the greatest pleasure.
I wasn’t at all afraid of the pain of the punishment, since I had never known it, but the very idea that St-Jérôme could strike me left me in a state of muffled rage and despair.
Karl Ivanych had in moments of irritation used a ruler or his braces to deal with us, but I recall it without the slightest resentment. Even if at the time I’m speaking of (when I was fourteen) Karl Ivanych had given me a thrashing, I would have calmly put up with the blows. I loved Karl Ivanych and remembered him for as long as I remembered myself, and was used to regarding him as a member of our family. St-Jérôme, however, was a smug, conceited person for whom I felt only the involuntary respect that all ‘grown-ups’ inspired in me. Karl Ivanych was an absurd old man, a ‘tutor’, whom I loved with all my heart, but still ranked below myself in my childish understanding of social position.
St-Jérôme, on the other hand, was an educated, handsome young dandy who tried to be on equal terms with everyone. Karl Ivanych always scolded and punished us without rancour, so it was clear he considered it an unpleasant but necessary duty. St-Jérôme, however, loved to drape himself in the role of preceptor. It was obvious when he punished us that he was doing it more for his own pleasure than our benefit. He was infatuated with his own splendour. His florid French phrases, which he spoke with a heavy stress on the last syllable with an accent circonflexe,31 were for me unspeakably obnoxious. When Karl Ivanych got angry, he would say in Russian, ‘It’s a puppet show, you naughty boy, you Spaniard flea.’32 St-Jérôme would call us ‘mauvais sujet’, ‘vilain garnement’,33 and so on, names that injured my pride.
Karl Ivanych made us kneel facing the corner, and the punishment lay in the physical pain produced by that position; St-Jérôme, squaring his chest and making a grandiose gesture with his hand, would cry in a tragical voice, ‘À genoux, mauvais sujet!’ and order us to kneel facing him and beg his forgiveness. The punishment lay in the humiliation.
I wasn’t punished again, and no one even reminded me of what had happened, but I still couldn’t forget any of what I had gone through – the despair, shame, fear and loathing of those two days. Even though St-Jérôme had, as it seemed, from that time washed his hands of me, having virtually nothing to do with me, I still couldn’t get used to regarding him with indifference. Every time our eyes met, it seemed to me that the hostility expressed in my own was too conspicuous, and I quickly assumed an expression of unconcern, but then it would seem to me that he had seen through my pretence, and I would blush and turn away.
In short, it was extremely difficult to have any relationship with him at all.
EIGHTEEN
The Maids’ Room
I felt more and more alone, and my main pleasures were solitary reflections and observations. I’ll speak of the subject of those reflections in the next chapter; the theatre of my observations, however, was primarily the maids’ room, where for me a highly interesting and touching romance was underway. Its heroine, needless to say, was Masha. She was in love with Vasily, who had known her even before she was taken into service, and who had promised to marry her then. The fate that separated them five years earlier had brought them back together in Grandmother’s house, although it had also placed a barrier between their love for each other in the form of Nikolay, Masha’s uncle, who wouldn’t even hear of marriage to Vasily, whom he regarded as ‘incompatible’ and ‘unbridled’.
The barrier had resulted in the previously self-possessed and rather negligent Vasily suddenly falling in love with Masha, and doing so as only a pomaded, pink-shirted servant who worked as a tailor could.
Even though the expressions of his love were often bizarre and incongruous (whenever he ran into Masha, for example, he would always try to inflict pain by pinching or hitting her, or hugging her so hard she could barely breathe), the love itself was sincere, as shown by the fact that the first time Nikolay refused him the hand of his niece, Vasily ‘took to drink’ from grief, and began to hang about taverns and get into brawls – in a word, to behave so badly that he more than once suffered the disgrace of a jail cell. But those actions and their consequences had, it seemed, a merit in Masha’s eyes, and made her love him even more. Whenever Vasily was ‘detained by the police’, she would weep for days, complain of her bitter lot to Gasha (who took an active interest in the unhappy lovers’ affairs) and, scorning the abuse and blows of her uncle, secretly run to the station house to visit and calm her friend.
Reader, do not disdain the society into which I am taking you. If the strings of love and sympathy still vibrate in your own heart, then in the maids’ room, too, they’ll find sounds with which to resonate. Whether you care to follow me or not, I’ll go to the stairway landing from which all that happens in the maids’ room may be seen. There’s the wide shelf of the stove with an iron, a cardboard doll with a battered nose, a basin and a ewer on it; there’s the windowsill, where a chunk of black wax, a spool of silk thread, a partly eaten cucumber and a box of sweets are scattered; and there’s the large red table on which new sewing waits under a calico-wrapped brick, and at which she’s sitting in my favourite pink cotton dress and a blue kerchief that particularly attracts my attention. She’s sewing, and as she pauses from time to time to scratch her head with the blunt end of her needle or reposition a candle, I watch her and think, ‘Why, with her light-blue eyes, long chestnut braid and firm bosom, wasn’t she born a lady? How it would become her to sit in a drawing room in a bonnet with pink ribbons and a crimson silk dressing gown, not the kind that Mimi wears, but the one I saw on Tverskoy Boulevard. She would be working with an embroidery frame, and I would gaze at her in the mirror, and whatever she wanted, I would do; I would help her with her pelerine or serve her dinner myself …’
What an appalling figure Vasily makes with his drunkard’s face and the narrow frock coat he wears over a filthy, untucked-in pink shirt! In every movement of his body, in every bend of his back, I seem to detect unquestionable signs of the terrible punishment he endures.
‘What, again, Vasya?’ Masha said, sticking her needle in a pin cushion, but without looking up at him as he entered.
‘Well, what of it? Can any good really come from him?’ Vasily answered. ‘Just let him finish it, one way or the other. As it is, I’m going under for nothing, and all on account of him.’
‘Will you have some tea?’ asked Nadezha, another chambermaid.
‘I thank you kindly. Why does he hate me, that thief uncle of yours? Because I’ve got real clothes of my own, because of my strut, because of the way I walk? One word: it’s a shame!’ Vasily concluded with a wave of his hand.
‘You should be humble,’ Masha said, biting off the thread, ‘but you always …’
‘I haven’t got the strength for it, that’s what!’
At that moment the sound of Grandmother’s door was heard, followed by the grumbling voice of Gasha coming up the stairs.
‘Just try and please her when she herself doesn’t know what she wants. A cussed life of hard labour! If there’s one thing I wish – forgive my sin, O Lord,’ she muttered, waving her hands.
‘My respects to you, Agafya Mikhailovna,’ Vasily said, getting up to greet her.
‘You? Spare me your respects,’ she menacingly replied, looking at him. ‘What are you doing here? Is the maids’ room really a place for men?’
‘I wanted to enquire after your health,’ Vasily timidly answered.
‘I’ll pop off soon enough, that’s the kind of health!’ Agafya Mikhailovna shouted e
ven more angrily.
Vasily started to laugh.
‘There’s nothing to laugh about, and if I say get going, then march! Why, the rascal wants to get married, too, the scoundrel! Well, march! Get going!’
And stomping her feet, Agafya Mikhailovna went into her room, slamming the door so hard the glass in the windows rattled.
For a long time she could be heard on the other side of the partition abusing everything and everyone and cursing her life, as she tossed her things about and pulled the ears of her favourite cat. Finally, the door opened and with a pitiful meow the cat came flying out, flung by its tail.
‘Maybe I’ll come for tea another time,’ Vasily whispered. ‘Till then.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Nadezha said with a wink. ‘I’ll check on the samovar.’
‘Yes, I’ll put an end to it myself,’ Vasily continued, moving closer to Masha after Nadezha left the room. ‘Either I’ll go straight to the countess and say, “One way or the other,” or else I’ll … give it all up and run far, far away, I truly will, so help me God.’
‘But what about me?’
‘You’re the only one I feel sorry for, or else this body of mine would have been lo-ong gone, it truly would, so help me God.’
‘Why don’t you let me wash your shirts for you, Vasya?’ Masha asked after a pause. ‘Look how dirty this one is,’ she added, taking a hold of his collar.
Just then Grandmother’s little bell was heard downstairs, and Gasha came back out of her room.
‘Well now, what are you trying to get from her, you scoundrel?’ she said, pushing Vasily towards the door after he quickly stood up. ‘You brought the girl to this and you’re still pestering her? It’s clear you like to see her cry, you shameless rascal. Out! And don’t let me catch you here again. What do you see in him?’ she continued to Masha after Vasily had left. ‘Hasn’t your uncle beaten you enough over him today? No, it’s always got to be your way: “I won’t marry anyone but Vasily Gruskov.” Fool!’
