by Leo Tolstoy
Dmitry came back from Lyubov Sergeyevna with some tooth drops she had given him, but suffering even more and, as a consequence, even more morose. The bed still hadn’t been made up for me, and a boy, Dmitry’s servant, came to ask where I would be sleeping.
‘Get out of here!’ Dmitry shouted, stamping his foot. As soon as the boy left, he started shouting, ‘Vaska! Vaska! Vaska!’ each time louder than before. ‘Vaska! Make up my bed on the floor.’
‘Oh no, better for me to sleep on the floor,’ I said.
‘Well, what does it matter? Make the bed anywhere,’ Dmitry continued in the same angry tone. ‘Vaska! Why aren’t you doing it?’
But Vaska apparently didn’t understand what was required of him and stood there without moving.
‘Well, what’s the matter with you? Make up the bed, make up the bed! Vaska! Vaska!’ Dmitry started shouting, suddenly flying into something like a rage.
But Vaska, still not understanding and now frightened, remained where he was.
‘So, you have sworn to des … to infuriate me?’
And jumping up from his chair and running over to the boy, Dmitry struck him several times on the head with all his might, and Vaska ran out of the room. Stopping at the door, Dmitry glanced back at me, and the expression of rage and cruelty that had been on his face a second before was replaced by such a childishly meek, remorseful and loving one that I felt sorry for him, and as much as I wanted to look away, I couldn’t bring myself to. He said nothing, but silently walked around the room a long time, occasionally glancing at me with the same expression imploring forgiveness, and then got a copybook out of his desk, wrote something in it, took off his coat, folded it carefully, went over to the corner where the icon hung, crossed his large white hands over his chest and began to pray. He prayed so long that Vaska managed in the meantime to bring a mattress and spread it out on the floor, according to my whispered instructions. I undressed and lay down on the bed on the floor and Dmitry continued to pray as before. Looking at his slightly round-shouldered back and the soles of his shoes, which were humbly stuck out in front of me as he prostrated himself, I loved him even more and kept thinking, ‘Shall I tell him my daydream about our sisters or not?’ Ending his prayer, Dmitry lay down on his bed with his head towards me and, resting on his elbows, silently gazed at me for a long time with an affectionate, remorseful expression. It was clearly hard for him, but he seemed to be punishing himself. I looked at him and smiled. He smiled back.
‘Well, why don’t you say it, that my behaviour was despicable?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that what you were thinking?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, for even though I had been thinking about something else, it really did seem to me that it had in fact been about that. ‘Yes, it was very bad and I never expected it of you,’ I said, taking particular pleasure in the fact that I was using the familiar form of address. ‘Well, how are your teeth?’ I added.
‘Better. Ah, Nikolenka, my friend!’ Dmitry said so affectionately that I think there were tears in his gleaming eyes, ‘I know and feel how bad I am, and God sees how much I want to be a better person, and I ask Him to make me one, but what am I to do if I have such an unfortunate, loathsome character? What am I to do? I try to restrain myself and improve, but it’s impossible to do it suddenly, and impossible alone. I need someone to support me, to help me. And that’s Lyubov Sergeyevna. She understands me and has helped me a lot with this. I know from my own journal entries that I’ve improved a lot in the last year. Oh, Nikolenka, dear friend!’ he continued with unaccustomed affection and a calmer tone after that admission, ‘how much the influence of a woman like her means! My goodness, how fine it could be with a friend like her after I’m on my own! I’m a completely different person with her.’
And Dmitry immediately began to elaborate on his plans for marriage, a life in the country and constant work on himself.
‘I’ll live in the country and you’ll come to visit me, it may be, and you’ll be married to Sonyechka,’ he said. ‘Our children will play. It may all sound ridiculous and silly, but it really could happen.’
‘Certainly it could and very likely it will!’ I said, smiling and thinking that it would be even better if I married his sister.
‘You know what I’ll say to you?’ he said, after falling silent for a while. ‘You only imagine that you’re in love with Sonyechka, whereas I see that it’s nothing and that you still don’t know what real feeling is.’
I didn’t object, since I almost agreed with him. We fell silent again for a while.
‘You’ve probably noticed that I was in a foul mood today and had a bad argument with Varya. It was terribly unpleasant for me later, especially because it happened in front of you. Although her thinking about a lot of things isn’t what it should be, she’s a splendid girl, a very fine one, as you’ll see when you get to know her better.’
His shift in the conversation from my not being in love to praise for his sister delighted me and made me blush, but I still didn’t say anything to him about her, and we continued to talk about other things.
We chattered like that until the second cockcrow, and the pale light of dawn was already visible in the window when Dmitry turned around in his bed to put out the candle.
‘Well, let’s go to sleep now,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but there’s one other thing.’
‘What?’
‘Isn’t life wonderful?’
‘Yes, it is wonderful,’ he answered in such a voice that in the darkness I seemed to see his childlike smile and and the expression in his merry, affectionate eyes.
TWENTY-EIGHT
In the Country
Volodya and I left for the country the next day by mail coach. Sorting through various Moscow memories along the way, I recalled Sonyechka Valakhina, but only in the evening after we had gone five stages. ‘How strange,’ I thought, ‘that I’m in love but have completely forgotten about it! I must think about her.’ And I started to do so the way it happens on the road, disconnectedly but vividly, reaching the point in my reflections that after I got to the country, I for some reason found it necessary to seem sad and abstracted with the entire household, but especially with Katenka, whom I considered a great expert in such matters, and to whom I gave a hint of the state of my heart. But despite my efforts to pretend to others and myself, and my deliberate adoption of all the signs that I had noticed in other people in love, I only remembered that I was in love two days, and even then not continuously but mainly in the evening; and in the end, as I entered the new round of country life and activities, I completely forgot about my love for Sonyechka.
We arrived in Petrovskoye late at night, and I was in such a deep slumber that I saw neither the house, nor the birch avenue, nor any of the household, all of whom had gone to bed long before and were sound asleep anyway. Stooped old Foka, barefoot with a candle in his hand and wearing some quilted jacket of his wife’s, threw back the bolt. Seeing who it was, he trembled with joy, kissed us both on the shoulder, quickly put away his felt sleeping mat and got dressed. I had passed through the outer entrance and up the steps not yet fully awake, but the front-door bolt, the warped floorboards, the bin, the old candlestick streaked with tallow as of old, the shadows from the candle’s cold, just lit wick, the perpetually dusty, never removed double window, beyond which, as I remembered, a rowan grew – all of it was so familiar, so full of memories so completely in accord with each other as to seem united in a single thought, that I suddenly felt the caress of that dear old house. The question spontaneously presented itself: how could we, the house and I, have been without each other so long? and I hurried off to see if the other rooms were still the same. Everything was the same, only it had been made smaller, lower, while I seemed to have become taller, heavier and coarser. But the house joyfully took me in its embrace even as I was, and with every floorboard, every window, every step of the stairway, every creak
, it awakened in me a host of images, feelings and events from the happy, irrecoverable past. We came to our old bedroom – all the terrors of childhood were still hidden in its dark corners and doorways; we passed through it to the drawing room – the same quiet, tender mother’s love suffused everything in it; we crossed the salon – the carefree clamour of childhood gaiety had, it seemed, merely been suspended and was waiting to be brought back to life. In the bedroom behind the sitting room, where Foka led us and made up our beds, it seemed that everything – the mirror, the screen, the old wooden icon, every irregularity in the white paper-covered wall – it seemed that everything there spoke of suffering and death and of what would never, ever be again.
We lay down, and Foka said good night to us and left.
‘Isn’t this the room where maman died?’ Volodya said.
I pretended to be asleep and didn’t answer. If I had said anything, I would have started to cry. When I awoke the next morning, Papa, in a dressing gown and low, imported boots and a cigar between his teeth, was sitting on Volodya’s bed and laughing and talking. He jumped up with a merry shrug, came over to me, slapped me on the back with his large hand and presented his cheek, pressing it against my lips.
‘Well, excellent, thank you, Diplomat!’ he said with characteristic jesting affection, while gazing at me with his small, gleaming eyes. ‘Volodya says that you did well in your examinations, like a brave fellow – well, splendid! When you want to use your head, you’re my splendid chap, too. Thank you, my friend. We’ll have a splendid time here now, and then maybe in the winter we’ll move to Petersburg. Too bad the coursing season’s over, or else I would have shown the two of you a good time. Well, can you still shoot, Woldemar? There’s plenty of game left and I might even go out with you myself sometime. Well, God willing, we’ll move to Petersburg in the winter, and the two of you will see people and make connections. You’re my grown-up fellows now. I was just saying to Woldemar that the two of you are on your own feet now and my part is done, since you can get along by yourselves, but if you want to consult with me, then do. I’m not your guardian any more but your friend, or at least I’ll try to be a friend and comrade and adviser in whatever way I can, and nothing else. How does that suit your philosophy, Koko? Eh? All right or not? Eh?’
Obviously, I said it was excellent and I really thought it was. Papa had that day a kind of especially attractive, gay, happy expression, and the new relationship with me as with an equal, a comrade, made me love him even more.
‘Well, tell me then, did you see all the relatives? The Ivins? The old man? What did he say to you?’ he proceeded to question me. ‘You did see Prince Ivan Ivanych, didn’t you?’
And we talked so long without getting dressed that the sun was already starting to move from the sitting-room windows, and Yakov (who was just as old and who still wriggled his fingers behind his back and said ‘once again’) came in to tell Papa that the buggy was ready.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Papa said with a ‘vexed’ look and a cough, ‘I promised to stop by the Yepifanovs today. You remember Yepifanova, La belle Flamande, who used to visit your maman? They’re splendid people.’ And with a diffident shrug, as it seemed to me, he left the room.
Lyubochka had during our chattering already come to the door several times and kept asking, ‘May I join us?’56 but each time Papa had yelled through the door, ‘No, you certainly may not, since we aren’t dressed.’
‘Well, what’s so awful about that? I’ve seen you in your dressing gown before.’
‘You can’t see your brothers in their “unmentionables”,’ Papa had yelled to her, ‘but if each knocks on the door to you, will that be enough? Go ahead and knock. It would be indecent for them even to talk to you in such dishabille.’
‘Oh, how unbearable you all are! At least come down to the drawing room as quickly as you can. Mimi so wants to see you,’ Lyubochka had yelled back.
As soon as Papa left, I quickly put on my student frock coat and went down to the drawing room, while Volodya, on the contrary, didn’t hurry at all, but sat for a long time upstairs talking to Yakov about where to find snipe and woodcock. As I’ve said, there was nothing in the world he was more afraid of than tender moments with his little brother or sister or his ‘pappie’, as he put it, and, in avoiding any expression of feeling, he went to the other extreme of coldness, which often painfully offended those who didn’t understand the reason for it. In the entryway I ran into Papa as he was going out to the carriage with short, rapid steps. He was wearing his fashionable new Moscow frock coat and smelled of scent. Catching sight of me, he gaily tipped his head, as if to say, ‘Splendid, no?’ and I was struck again by the happy expression in his eyes that I had noticed earlier in the morning.
The drawing room was still the same bright, lofty room with its yellowish English piano and large open windows looking out onto merry green trees and reddish-yellow garden paths. After I had kissed Mimi and Lyubochka and was going over to Katenka, it suddenly occurred to me that it wouldn’t be proper to kiss her any more, and I came to a halt, blushing in silence. Katenka, however, wasn’t embarrassed, and holding out her little white hand, she congratulated me on entering the university. The same thing happened when Volodya came into the room and saw Katenka. It really was hard to decide how, after growing up together and seeing each other every day all that time, we should now greet each other after our first separation. Katenka blushed much more than the rest of us, but Volodya wasn’t flustered in the least, and after a slight bow to Katenka, he went to Lyubochka, with whom he also chatted briefly but not seriously, before going out for a walk somewhere by himself.
TWENTY-NINE
Our Relationship with the Girls
Volodya had such a peculiar view of the girls that, although he might take an interest in whether they had enough to eat or slept well or were properly dressed or made mistakes in French that might embarrass him in front of strangers, he wouldn’t allow the idea that they could think or feel anything human, and even less the possibility of discussing anything with them. Whenever they happened to address some serious question to him (something they naturally tried to avoid), or asked his opinion of some novel or about his work at the university, he would make a face at them and walk away without speaking, or answer with some fractured French phrase – com si tri joli57 or the like, or make a solemn, deliberately stupid face and utter some word having no meaning or relation to the question at all, or with a blank stare say ‘rolls’ or ‘let’s go’ or ‘cabbage’ or something of the kind. Whenever I happened to repeat things to him that Lyubochka or Katenka had told me, he would say, ‘Hm! So you’re still discussing things with them? No, I can see that you’re still in a bad way.’
But it was necessary to see and hear him at that moment to appreciate the deep, unwavering contempt in the sentence. Volodya had been a grown-up for two years and constantly in love with all the pretty women he met, but although he and Katenka saw each other every day, and she had been wearing long dresses for two years and getting prettier with each passing day, the idea that he might fall in love with her never occurred to him. Whether it was because the prosaic memories of childhood – the wagonette, the splash apron, the naughtiness – were still too fresh in his mind, or because of the aversion that very young people have for everything home-bred, or because of the general human tendency to pass by anything good and excellent met with for the first time, so that one says, ‘Oh, I’ll see a good deal of that in my life’ – whatever the reason, at the time he still didn’t regard Katenka as a woman.
Volodya was clearly very bored that whole summer, his boredom coming from his scorn for us, which, as I’ve mentioned, he made no effort to hide. The permanent expression on his face said, ‘Ugh! How boring, and no one to talk to!’ In the morning he would either go shooting by himself or, without getting dressed until dinner, read a book in his room. If
Papa was out, he would even bring the book to dinner, continuing to read without talking to any of us, which made us all feel as if we were somehow at fault. In the evening he would lie with his feet up on the sofa in the drawing room and doze while propped on his arm, or else talk dreadful nonsense with a straight face, and sometimes not altogether decent nonsense either, which made Mimi furious and her face turn red in blotches, while we died of laughter; yet never with anyone in our family, except for Papa and sometimes me, did ever he deign to speak seriously. I involuntarily adopted my brother’s view of the girls, although I wasn’t as afraid of tenderness as he was, and my scorn for them was still far from being as hard or as deep. I even tried several times from boredom that summer to be friendlier with Lyubochka and Katenka and to talk to them, but each time I found so little capacity in them for logical thought, and such ignorance of the simplest, most ordinary things – such as, for example, what money is, or what’s studied at a university, or what war is – and such indifference to the explanation of those things, that those efforts of mine only confirmed my unfavourable opinion even more.
