Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

A BORING STORY

FROM AN OLD MAN’S NOTES

I

There is in Russia an honored professor named Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, a privy councillor and chevalier. He has so many Russian and foreign decorations that when he has to wear them all, the students call him “the iconostasis.”¹ His acquaintances are of the most aristocratic sort; at least for the last twenty-five or thirty years in Russia there is not and has not been a single famous scholar with whom he has not been closely acquainted. Now he has no one to be friends with, but if we speak of the past, the long list of his glorious friends ends with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin and the poet Nekrasov,² who offered him the warmest and most sincere friendship. He is a member of all the Russian and three foreign universities. And so on and so forth. All this and many other things that might be said constitute what is known as my name.

This name of mine is popular. In Russia it is known to every literate person, and abroad it is mentioned from podiums with the addition of well-known and esteemed. It is one of those few fortunate names which it is considered bad tone to abuse or take in vain, in public or in print. And so it should be. For my name is closely connected with the notion of a man who is famous, richly endowed, and unquestionably useful. I’m as staunch and hardworking as a camel, which is important, and I’m talented, which is still more important. Besides that, be it said in passing, I’m a well-bred, modest, and honorable fellow. Never have I poked my nose into literature and politics, or sought popularity in polemics with ignoramuses, or given speeches either at dinners or over the graves of my colleagues … Generally, there is not a single blot on my learned name, and it has nothing to complain of. It is happy.

The bearer of this name, that is, myself, has the look of a sixty-two-year-old man with a bald head, false teeth, and an incurable tic. As my name is brilliant and beautiful, so I myself am dull and ugly. My head and hands shake from weakness; my neck, as with one of Turgenev’s heroines,³ resembles the fingerboard of a double bass, my chest is sunken, my shoulders narrow. When I speak or read, my mouth twists to one side; when I smile, my whole face is covered with an old man’s deathly wrinkles. There is nothing imposing in my pathetic figure; except perhaps that when I have my tic, I acquire some peculiar expression, which evokes in anyone looking at me the stern and imposing thought: “This man will evidently die soon.”

I still lecture fairly well; I can hold the attention of my listeners for two hours at a stretch, as I used to. My passion, the literary quality of my exposition, and my humor make almost unnoticeable the defects of my voice, which is dry, shrill, and sing-song, like a hypocrite’s. But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I’ve lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished and timid. I often write something other than what I mean; when I get to the end, I no longer remember the beginning. I often forget ordinary words, and always have to waste much energy avoiding superfluous phrases and unnecessary parenthetical clauses in my writing—both clearly witnessing to a decline of mental activity. And, remarkably, the simpler the writing, the more excruciating is the strain. With a learned article I feel myself far more free and intelligent than with a letter of congratulations or a report. Another thing: it’s easier for me to write in German or English than in Russian.

As for my present way of life, first of all I must make note of the insomnia from which I’ve been suffering lately. If I were to be asked: What now constitutes the main and fundamental feature of your existence? I would answer: Insomnia. As before, out of habit, I get undressed and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but I wake up again before two o’clock, and with a feeling as if I haven’t slept at all. I have to get up and light the lamp. For an hour or two I pace the room from corner to corner and gaze at the long-familiar paintings and photographs. When I get tired of pacing, I sit down at my desk. I sit motionless, not thinking about anything and not feeling any desires; if there’s a book lying in front of me, I mechanically draw it towards me and read without any interest. Thus, recently, in a single night I mechanically read an entire novel with the strange title What the Swallow Sang.⁴ Or else, to occupy my attention, I make myself count to a thousand or picture the face of one of my colleagues and begin recalling: in what year and under what circumstances did he take up his post? I like listening to sounds. Two doors away my daughter Liza says something rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the living room with a candle and unfailingly drops the box of matches, or a cupboard creaks from dryness, or the lamp flame suddenly starts to hum—and for some reason all these sounds trouble me.

Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep. A long, wearisome time goes by before the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bearer of good tidings. Once he crows, I know that in an hour the hall porter will wake up below and, coughing gruffly, come upstairs for something. And then little by little the air outside the windows will turn pale, voices will be heard in the street …

My day begins with the coming of my wife. She enters my room in a petticoat, her hair not yet done, but already washed, smelling of flower cologne, and with the air of having come in by chance, and each time she says one and the same thing:

“Excuse me, I’ll only stay a moment … You didn’t sleep again?”

Then she puts out the lamp, sits down by the desk and begins to talk. I’m no prophet, but I know beforehand what the talk will be about. It is the same every morning. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she suddenly remembers our son, an officer serving in Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty roubles—that mainly serves as the theme of our conversation.

“Of course, it’s difficult for us,” my wife sighs, “but until he finally gets on his feet, it’s our duty to help him. The boy is in a foreign land, his pay is small … However, if you like, next month we’ll send him not fifty but forty What do you think?”

Everyday experience might have convinced my wife that expenses are not diminished by our frequent talking about them, but my wife does not recognize experience and tells me regularly each morning about our officer, and that the price of bread has gone down, thank God, but sugar has gone up two kopecks—and all this in such a tone as if she were telling me some news.

I listen, mechanically saying yes, and strange, useless thoughts come over me, probably because I haven’t slept all night. I look at my wife and am astonished, like a child. In perplexity, I ask myself: Can it be that this old, very stout, ungainly woman with a dull expression of petty care and fear over a crust of bread, with eyes clouded by constant thoughts of debt and poverty, only capable of talking about expenses and only smiling at bargains—can it be that this woman was once that same slender Varya whom I passionately loved for her good, clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello loved Desdemona, “that she did pity” my science? Can this be that same wife Varya who once bore me a son?

I peer intently into the flabby, ungainly old woman’s face, searching for my Varya in her, but nothing has survived from the past except her fear for my health and her way of calling my salary our salary and my hat our hat. It pains me to look at her, and to comfort her at least a little I let her say whatever she likes, and even say nothing when she judges people unfairly or chides me for not having a practice or publishing textbooks.

Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I have not had my tea yet and becomes alarmed.

“What am I doing sitting here?” she says, getting up. “The samovar has long been on the table, and I sit here chattering. Lord, I’ve become so forgetful!”

She goes out quickly but stops in the doorway to say:

“We owe Yegor for five months. Do you know that? It won’t do to fall behind with the servants’ pay, I’ve said so many times! Paying ten roubles a month is much easier than going five months and paying fifty!”

She gets through the door, stops again, and says:

“There’s no one I pity so much as our poor Liza. The girl studies at the conservatory, she’s always in good society, and she’s dressed God knows how. It’s shameful to go out in such a coat. If she were someone else’s daughter, it would be nothing, but everybody knows her father is a famous professor, a privy councillor!”

And, having reproached me with my name and rank, she finally leaves. So my day begins. The sequel is no better.

While I’m having tea, my Liza comes in with her coat and hat on, holding some scores, all ready to go to the conservatory. She’s twenty-two years old. She looks younger, is pretty, and slightly resembles my wife when she was young. She kisses me tenderly on the temple and on the hand, and says:

“Good morning, papa. Are you well?”

As a child she was very fond of ice cream, and I often took her to the pastry shop. For her, ice cream was the measure of all that was beautiful. If she wanted to praise me, she would say: “You’re ice cream, papa.” One little finger was named pistachio, another vanilla, another raspberry, and so on. Usually, when she came and said good morning to me, I would take her on my knee and, kissing her fingers, repeat:

“Vanilla … pistachio … lemon …”

And now, for old times’ sake, I kiss Liza’s fingers, murmuring: “Pistachio … vanilla … lemon …” but it turns out all wrong. I’m cold as ice cream and feel ashamed. When my daughter comes to me and brushes my temple with her lips, I give a start as if I’d been stung by a bee, smile tensely, and turn my face away. Ever since I began to suffer from insomnia, a question has been lodged in my brain like a nail: my daughter often sees me, an old man, a celebrity, blush painfully because I owe money to a servant; she sees how often the worry over petty debts makes me abandon my work and spend whole hours pacing back and forth, pondering, but why has she never once come to me, in secret from her mother, and whispered: “Father, here is my watch, my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses … Pawn it all, you need money …”? Why, seeing how her mother and I, surrendering to a false feeling, try to hide our poverty from people, does she not give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? Not that I’d accept any watch, or bracelets, or sacrifices, God forbid—I don’t need that.

And then I also remember my son, the officer in Warsaw. He’s an intelligent, honest, and sober man. But I don’t find that enough. I think if I had an old father and if I knew that he had moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I would give my officer’s post to someone else and go to do day labor. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What’s the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man. But enough of that.

At a quarter to ten I must go to my dear boys and give a lecture. I get dressed and follow a road that has been familiar to me for thirty years now and has its own history for me. Here is a big gray house with a pharmacy; a small house once stood there, and in it there was a beer parlor; in that beer parlor I thought over my dissertation and wrote my first love letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page with the heading “Historia morbi.”⁵ Here is the grocery shop; it was formerly run by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, then by a fat woman who loved students because “each of them has a mother”; now there’s a red-haired shopkeeper sitting there, a very indifferent man, who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy university gates, which have long needed repair; the bored caretaker in a sheepskin coat, his besom, the heaps of snow … Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a fresh boy, come from the provinces, who imagines that the temple of learning really is a temple. In the history of Russian pessimism, the general decrepitude of the university buildings, the gloomy corridors, the grimy walls, the inadequate light, the dismal look of the stairs, cloakrooms and benches, occupy one of the foremost places in the series of causes predisposing … And here is our garden. It seems to have become neither better nor worse since I was a student. I don’t like it. It would be much smarter if, instead of consumptive lindens, yellow acacias, and sparse trimmed lilacs, there were tall pines and handsome oaks growing here. The student, whose mood is largely created by the surroundings of his place of learning, should see at every step only the lofty, the strong, the graceful … God save him from scrawny trees, broken windows, gray walls, and doors upholstered with torn oilcloth.

When I come to my entrance, the door opens wide, and I am met by my old colleague, coeval, and namesake, the porter Nikolai. Letting me in, he grunts and says:

“Freezing, Your Excellency!”

Or else, if my coat is wet:

“Raining, Your Excellency!”

Then he runs ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the office, he carefully helps me off with my coat, and meanwhile manages to tell me some university news. Owing to the close acquaintance that exists among all university porters and caretakers, he knows everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the chancellery, in the rector’s office, in the library What doesn’t he know! For instance, when the latest news is the retirement of the rector or a dean, I hear him name the candidates as he talks with the young caretakers, and explain straight off that so-and-so will not be approved by the minister, that so-and-so will decline, and then go into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers received in the chancellery, about a secret talk that supposedly took place between the minister and a member of the board, and so on. Generally, apart from these details, he almost always turns out to be right. The character references he gives for each candidate are original, but also correct. If you need to know in which year someone defended his thesis, or took up his post, or retired, or died, avail yourself of the vast memory of this old soldier, and he will tell you not only the year, the month, and the day, but also the details that accompanied this or that circumstance. Only one who loves can remember so well.

He is the guardian of university tradition. From his porter predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life, has added to this wealth a considerable quantity of his own goods, acquired during his service, and, if you wish, will tell you many tales both long and short. He can tell of extraordinary wise men who knew all, of remarkably hard workers who didn’t sleep for weeks at a time, of numerous martyrs and victims of science; with him good triumphs over evil, the weak always overcome the strong, the wise the stupid, the humble the proud, the young the old … There is no need to take all these legends and tall tales at face value, but sift them and what you need will be left in the filter: our good traditions and the names of true heroes recognized by all.

In our society all information about the world of scholars is summed up in anecdotes about the extraordinary absentmindedness of old professors and two or three quips ascribed to Gruber, or to me, or to Babukhin.⁶ For educated society that is not enough. If it loved learning, scholars and students as much as Nikolai does, its literature would long have had whole epics, sagas, and saints’ lives, such as it unfortunately does not have now.

Having told me the news, Nikolai puts a solemn expression on his face, and we begin to talk business. If at that moment some outsider should hear how freely Nikolai handles terminology, he might think that he was a scholar disguised as a soldier. Incidentally, the rumors about the learnedness of university caretakers are greatly exaggerated. True, Nikolai knows more than a hundred Latin names, can assemble a skeleton, prepare a slide on occasion, make the students laugh with some long, learned citation, but so unsophisticated a thing as the theory of the circulation of the blood is as obscure for him now as twenty years ago.

At the table in my office, bending low over a book or a slide, sits my prosector Pyotr Ignatievich, a hardworking, humble, but untalented man of about thirty-five, already bald and with a big stomach. He works from morning to night, reads voluminously, remembers everything he reads excellently—and in that respect he’s not a man, he’s pure gold; in all the rest he’s a cart horse, or, to put it differently, an educated dolt. The characteristic features that distinguish the cart horse from a talented man are these: his horizon is narrow and sharply limited by his profession; outside his profession he is as naïve as a child. I remember coming into the office one morning and saying:

“Imagine, what a misfortune! They say Skobelev⁷ is dead.”

Nikolai crossed himself, but Pyotr Ignatievich turned to me and asked:

“Which Skobelev is that?”

Another time—this was a little earlier—I announced that Professor Perov⁸ had died. Dear old Pyotr Ignatievich asked:

“What did he teach?”

I believe if Patti⁹ started singing right in his ear, if hordes of Chinese invaded Russia, even if there was an earthquake, he wouldn’t stir a single limb and would quite calmly go on peering with his screwed-up eye into his microscope. In short, Hecuba is nothing to him.¹⁰ I’d pay dearly to see how that dry crust sleeps with his wife.

Another feature: a fanatical faith in the infallibility of science and above all of everything the Germans write. He’s sure of himself, of his slides, he knows the goal of life, and is totally unacquainted with the doubts and disappointments that turn talented heads gray. A slavish worship of authority and a lack of any need for independent thinking. To talk him out of anything is difficult, to argue with him is impossible. Try arguing with a person who is profoundly convinced that the best science is medicine, the best people are doctors, the best traditions are medical traditions. The nefarious past of medicine has survived only in one tradition—the white tie now worn by doctors; for the scientist and for the educated man in general, only university-wide traditions can exist, with no divisions into medical, legal, and so on, but Pyotr Ignatievich finds it hard to agree with that, and he is prepared to argue with you till doomsday

His future I can picture clearly In his lifetime he will prepare several hundred slides of an extraordinary neatness, write a lot of dry but quite decent papers, make a dozen or so conscientious translations, but he won’t set the world on fire. To set the world on fire, you need fantasy, inventiveness, intuition, and Pyotr Ignatievich has nothing of the sort. To put it briefly, in science he is not a master, but a servant.

Pyotr Ignatievich, Nikolai and I are talking in low voices. We’re slightly ill at ease. You feel something peculiar when the auditorium murmurs like the sea behind the door. In thirty years I’ve never gotten used to that feeling, and I experience it every morning. I nervously button my frock coat, ask Nikolai unnecessary questions, get angry … It looks as if I turn coward, yet this is not cowardice, but something else I can neither name nor describe.

I needlessly look at my watch and say:

“Well, we must go.”

And we proceed in the following order: in front walks Nikolai with the slides or atlases, I come after him, and after me, his head humbly lowered, strides the cart horse; or else, if necessary, a cadaver is carried in first, after the cadaver walks Nikolai, and so on. At my appearance, the students rise, then sit down, and the murmur of the sea suddenly grows still. Calm ensues.

I know what I will lecture about, but I don’t know how I will lecture, what I will begin with and where I will end. There is not a single ready-made phrase in my head. But I have only to look over the auditorium (it is built as an amphitheater) and pronounce the stereotypical “In the last lecture we stopped at …” for a long string of phrases to come flying out of my soul and—there the province goes scrawling!¹¹ I speak irrepressibly quickly, passionately, and it seems no power can stem the flow of my speech. To lecture well, that is, not boringly and with some profit for your listeners, you must have not only talent but a certain knack and experience, you must possess a very clear notion of your own powers, of those to whom you are lecturing, and of what makes up the subject of your talk. Besides that, you must be self-possessed, keenly observant, and not lose your field of vision even for a second.

A good conductor, as he conveys a composer’s thought, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, gestures now towards the drum, now towards the French horn, and so on. It is the same with me when I lecture. Before me are a hundred and fifty faces, no two alike, and three hundred eyes looking me straight in the face. My goal is to conquer this many-headed hydra. If, as I lecture, I have at every moment a clear notion of the degree of its attention and the power of its comprehension, then it is in my control. My other adversary sits inside myself. It is the infinite diversity of forms, phenomena, and laws, and the host of thoughts, my own and other people’s, that they call forth. At every moment I must be adroit enough to snatch what is most important and necessary from this vast material and, in pace with my speech, to clothe my thinking in such form as will be accessible to the hydra’s understanding and arouse its attention, and at the same time I must observe keenly that the thoughts are conveyed, not as they accumulate, but in a certain order necessary for the correct composition of the picture I wish to paint. Furthermore, I try to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and precise, my phrasing as simple and elegant as possible. At every moment I must rein myself in and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, it’s no little work. I have to figure at one and the same time as a scientist, a pedagogue, and an orator, and it’s a bad business if the orator in you overwhelms the pedagogue and scientist, or the other way round.

You lecture for a quarter, a half hour, and then you notice that the students have started looking up at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatievich, one feels for his handkerchief, another tries to settle more comfortably, a third smiles at his own thoughts … This means their attention is flagging. Measures must be taken. Availing myself of the first opportunity, I make some quip. All hundred and fifty faces smile broadly, eyes shine merrily, there is a momentary murmur of the sea … I, too, laugh. Attention has been refreshed, and I can go on.

No argument, no amusement or game ever gave me such pleasure as lecturing. Only while lecturing could I give myself entirely to passion and understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets but exists in reality. And I imagine that Hercules, after the most piquant of his great deeds, did not feel such sweet exhaustion as I experienced each time after a lecture.

That was before. Now lectures are nothing but torture for me. Before half an hour has gone by, I begin to feel an insuperable weakness in my legs and shoulders; I sit down in a chair, but I’m not accustomed to lecturing while seated; after a minute I get up, go on standing, then sit down again. My mouth is dry, my voice is hoarse, my head spins … To conceal my condition from my listeners, I keep drinking water, cough, blow my nose frequently, as if I were bothered by a cold, produce inappropriate quips, and in the end announce the break sooner than I should. But the main thing is that I’m ashamed.

My conscience and intelligence tell me that the best thing I could do now is give the boys a farewell lecture, speak my last words to them, bless them, and yield my place to a man who is younger and stronger than I. But, God be my judge, I lack the courage to follow my conscience.

Unfortunately, I’m not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know very well that I have no more than another six months to live; it would seem I should now be most occupied with questions about the darkness beyond the grave and the visions that will haunt my sepulchral sleep. But for some reason my soul rejects those questions, though my mind is aware of all their importance. As twenty or thirty years ago, so now in the face of death I am interested only in science. Breathing my last, I will still believe that science is the most important, the most beautiful and necessary thing in man’s life, that it has always been and always will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by science will man conquer nature and himself. This faith may be naïve and incorrect in its foundations, but it is not my fault that I believe thus and not otherwise; in myself I cannot overcome this faith.

But that is not the point. I only ask indulgence for my weakness and the understanding that to tear away from his lectern and his students a man who has greater interest in the fate of bone marrow than in the final goal of the universe, is tantamount to having him nailed up in his coffin without waiting till he’s dead.

From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I’ve been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry.

It is not easy to live through such moments.

II

After the lecture I sit at home and work. I read journals or dissertations, or prepare the next lecture, or sometimes I write something. I work with many breaks, because I’m obliged to receive visitors.

The bell rings. It’s a colleague stopping by to talk shop. He comes into my room with his hat and stick, hands me the one and the other, and says:

“For a moment, a moment! Sit down, collega ! Just a couple of words!”

At first we try to show each other that we are both extraordinarily polite and very glad to see each other. I offer him an armchair, and he offers me an armchair; as we do so we cautiously stroke each other’s waists, touch each other’s buttons, and it looks as if we’re palpating each other and are afraid of getting burnt. We both laugh, though we haven’t said anything funny. Sitting down, we lean our heads towards each other and begin talking in low voices. Cordially disposed as we are to each other, we can’t help gilding our talk with all sorts of Orientalia, like: “As you were pleased to observe so justly,” or “As I have already had the honor of telling you,” nor can we help laughing if one of us produces some witticism, even an unfortunate one. Having finished his shop talk, my colleague abruptly stands up and, waving his hat in the direction of my work, starts taking his leave. Again we palpate each other and laugh. I see him to the front hall; there I help my colleague into his coat, but he does everything to avoid this high honor. Then as Yegor opens the door, my colleague assures me that I am going to catch cold, as I make a show of even being ready to follow him outside. And when I finally return to my study, my face goes on smiling, probably from inertia.

A short while later the bell rings again. Someone comes into the front hall, spends a long time removing his things, coughs. Yegor announces that a student has appeared. Show him in, I order. A moment later a pleasant-looking young man comes in. It’s already a year since our relations became strained: he gives me execrable answers at examinations, and I give him F’s. Every year I wind up with about seven of these fine fellows, whom, to use student language, I grill or flunk. Those who can’t pass the examination owing to inability or illness usually bear their cross patiently and don’t bargain with me; those who do bargain and come to see me at home are the broad, sanguine natures, whose failure at an examination spoils their appetite and interferes with their regular attendance at the opera. The former I treat benignly; the latter I grill for the whole year.

“Sit down,” I say to the visitor. “What do you have to say?”

“Excuse me for bothering you, Professor …” he begins, stammering and not looking in my face. “I wouldn’t have ventured to bother you if it hadn’t been … I’ve taken your examination five times and … and failed. I beg you, be so kind as to pass me, because …”

The argument that all lazy students give in their own favor is ever the same: they have passed all their courses splendidly and failed only mine, which is the more surprising since they have always studied my subject most diligently and have an excellent knowledge of it; if they have failed, it is owing to some inexplicable misunderstanding.

“Excuse me, my friend,” I say to the visitor, “but I cannot pass you. Go read over the lectures and come back. Then we’ll see.”

A pause. The urge comes over me to torment the student a bit for liking beer and the opera more than science, and I say with a sigh:

“In my opinion, the best thing you can do now is abandon the study of medicine entirely. If, with your abilities, you cannot manage to pass the examination, then you obviously have neither the desire nor the vocation for being a doctor.”

The sanguine fellow pulls a long face.

“Excuse me, Professor,” he grins, “but that would be strange on my part, to say the least. To study for five years and suddenly … quit!”

“Why, yes! It’s better to waste five years than to spend your whole life afterwards doing something you don’t like.”

But I feel sorry for him at once and hasten to say:

“However, you know best. So, do a little more reading and come back.”

“When?” the lazy fellow asks in a hollow voice.

“Whenever you like. Even tomorrow.”

And in his kindly eyes I read: “Yes, I can come, but you’ll throw me out again, you brute!”

“Of course,” I say, “you won’t acquire any more knowledge by taking the examination with me another fifteen times, but it will season your character. And thanks be for that.”

Silence ensues. I get up and wait for the visitor to leave, but he stands there, looks out the window, pulls at his little beard, and thinks. It becomes boring.

The sanguine fellow’s voice is pleasant, juicy, his eyes are intelligent, mocking, his face is good-natured, somewhat flabby from frequent consumption of beer and prolonged lying on the sofa; clearly he could tell me a lot of interesting things about the opera, about his amorous adventures, about friends he likes, but, unfortunately, to speak of such things isn’t done. And I’d have listened eagerly.

“Professor! I give you my word of honor that if you pass me, I’ll…”

As soon as it comes to the “word of honor,” I wave my hands and sit down at my desk. The student thinks a moment longer and says dejectedly:

“In that case, good-bye … Excuse me.”

“Good-bye, my friend. Be well.”

He walks irresolutely to the front hall, slowly puts his coat on, and, as he goes out, again probably thinks for a long time. Having come up with nothing to apply to me except “the old devil,” he goes to a bad restaurant, drinks beer and has dinner, and then goes home to sleep. May you rest in peace, honest laborer!

A third ring. A young doctor comes in, wearing a new black two-piece suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, and, sure enough, a white tie. He introduces himself. I invite him to sit down and ask what I can do for him. Not without excitement, the young priest of science begins telling me that he passed his doctoral examination this year and that the only thing he has left to do is write a dissertation. He would like to work for a while with me, under my guidance, and I would greatly oblige him if I gave him a topic for a dissertation.

“I would be very glad to be of use, collega,” I say, “but let’s first agree on what a dissertation is. In the accepted understanding, the word refers to a piece of writing that represents a product of independent work. Isn’t that so? A piece of writing on someone else’s topic, produced under someone else’s guidance, goes by a different name …”

The doctoral candidate is silent. I flare up and jump to my feet.

“Why do you all come to me? I don’t understand it,” I shout angrily. “Am I running a shop or something? I don’t deal in topics! For the thousand and first time I beg you all to leave me in peace! Forgive my indelicacy, but I’m finally sick of it!”

The doctoral candidate is silent, only a slight color appears around his cheekbones. His face expresses profound respect for my famous name and learning, but by his eyes I can see that he despises my voice, and my pathetic figure, and my nervous gestures. I seem odd to him in my wrath.

“I’m not running a shop!” I say angrily. “And it’s an astonishing thing! Why don’t you want to be independent? Why are you so against freedom?”

I talk a lot, but he remains silent. In the end I gradually calm down and, of course, give in. The doctoral candidate will get a topic from me that isn’t worth a brass farthing, will write under my guidance a dissertation that nobody needs, will stand with dignity through a boring defense, and receive a learned degree that he has no use for.

The rings could follow one another endlessly, but here I’ll limit myself to only four. The bell rings a fourth time, and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress, a dear voice …

Eighteen years ago my oculist colleague died, leaving a seven-year-old daughter, Katya, and sixty thousand roubles. In his will he appointed me her guardian. Katya lived in my family till she was ten, then was sent to boarding school and spent only the summer months in my house, during vacations. I had no time to occupy myself with her upbringing, I observed her only in snatches and therefore can say very little about her childhood.

The first thing I remember and love in my memories is this—the extraordinary trustfulness with which she came into my home, and let herself be treated by doctors, and which always shone on her little face. She might be sitting somewhere out of the way, with a bandaged cheek, but she was sure to be looking attentively at something; if just then she should see me writing or looking through a book, or my wife bustling about, or the cook in the kitchen peeling potatoes, or the dog playing, her eyes would invariably express the same thing—namely: “All that goes on in this world is beautiful and wise.” She was inquisitive and liked very much to talk with me. She would sit at the desk facing me, following my movements, and ask questions. She was interested in knowing what I read, what I did at the university, whether I was afraid of cadavers, what I did with my salary.

“Do the students fight at the university?” she would ask.

“Yes, they do, dear.”

“Do you make them stand on their knees?”

“I do.”

And she thought it was funny that the students fought and that I made them stand on their knees, and she laughed. She was a meek, patient, and kind child. Not seldom I happened to see how things were taken from her, or she was punished for no reason, or her curiosity went unsatisfied; at those moments the constant expression of trustfulness on her face would be mixed with sadness—and that was all. I wasn’t able to intercede for her, but only felt a longing, when I saw her sadness, to draw her to me and pity her in the tone of an old nanny: “My dear little orphan!”

I also remember that she liked to dress well and sprinkle herself with scent. In that respect she was like me. I, too, like fine clothes and good scent.

I regret that I had no time or wish to follow the beginning and development of the passion that already filled Katya by the time she was fourteen or fifteen years old. I’m referring to her passionate love for the theater. When she came home from boarding school for vacation and lived with us, she spoke of nothing else with such pleasure and such ardor as of plays and actors. She wore us out with her constant talk about the theater. My wife and children didn’t listen to her. I was the only one who lacked the courage to deny her my attention. When she had a wish to share her raptures, she would come to my study and say in a pleading voice:

“Nikolai Stepanych, let me talk with you about the theater!”

I would point to the clock and say:

“I’ll give you half an hour. Go on.”

Later she started bringing home dozens of portraits of the actors and actresses she adored; then she tried a few times to take part in amateur productions, and finally, when she finished school, she announced to me that she was born to be an actress.

I never shared Katya’s theatrical infatuation. I think, if a play is good, there’s no need to bother with actors for it to make the proper impression; it’s enough simply to read it. And if a play is bad, no performance will make it good.

In my youth I often went to the theater, and now my family reserves a box twice a year and takes me for an “airing.” Of course, that is not enough to give one the right to judge about the theater, but I will say a little about it. In my opinion, the theater has become no better than it was thirty or forty years ago. As before, I can never find a glass of clean water either in the corridors or in the theater lobby. As before, the ushers fine me twenty kopecks for my coat, though there’s nothing reprehensible about wearing warm clothes in winter. As before, they needlessly play music during the intermissions, adding to the impression of the play a new and unwanted one. As before, men go to the buffet during intermissions to drink alcoholic beverages. If no progress is to be seen in small things, it would be futile to start looking for it in major things. When an actor, bound from head to foot in theatrical traditions and preconceptions, tries to read the simple, ordinary monologue “To be or not to be” not simply, but for some reason with an inevitable hissing and convulsing of his whole body, or when he tries to convince me by one means or another that Chatsky, who talks so much with fools and loves a foolish woman, is a very intelligent man, and that Woe from Wit¹² is not a boring play, I feel the same routine wafting from the stage that I already found boring forty years ago, when I was treated to a classical howling and beating of the breast. And I leave the theater each time more conservative than when I entered it.

The sentimental and gullible crowd may be convinced that the theater in its present form is a school. But no one acquainted with school in the true sense can be caught on that hook. I don’t know what will happen in fifty or a hundred years, but in the present circumstances the theater can serve only as entertainment. But this entertainment is too expensive for us to go on resorting to it. It robs the country of thousands of young, healthy, and talented men and women, who, if they had not devoted themselves to the theater, might have been good doctors, tillers of the soil, teachers, army officers; it robs the public of the evening hours—the best hours for mental labor and friendly conversation. To say nothing of the money spent and of the moral losses suffered by the spectator, who sees murder, adultery, and slander incorrectly interpreted on stage.

But Katya was of quite a different opinion. She assured me that the theater, even in its present state, was higher than the auditorium, higher than books, higher than anything in the world. The theater was a force that united all the arts in itself, and actors were missionaries. No art or science by itself was capable of having so strong and so sure an effect on the human soul as the stage, and it was not without reason that an actor of the average sort enjoyed far greater popularity in the country than the best scholar or artist. And no public activity could afford such pleasure and satisfaction as that of the stage.

And one fine day Katya joined a troupe and left—for Ufa, I think—taking with her a lot of money, a host of bright expectations, and aristocratic views of the matter.

Her first letters from the road were extraordinary. I read them and was simply amazed that those small pages could contain so much youth, inner purity, holy innocence, together with subtle, sensible opinions that would have done credit to a sound male mind. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her comrades, her successes and failures—she did not so much describe as sing them; every line breathed the trustfulness I was accustomed to seeing in her face—and with all that, a mass of grammatical errors and an almost total lack of punctuation.

Before half a year went by, I received a highly poetical and rapturous letter, beginning with the words: “I am in love.” Enclosed in this letter was a photograph showing a young, clean-shaven man in a broad-brimmed hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulder. The letters that followed this one were as splendid as before, but punctuation marks appeared in them, the grammatical errors disappeared, and they gave off a strong male smell. Katya began writing to me about how good it would be to build a big theater somewhere on the Volga, as a stock company, to be sure, and to attract rich merchants and shipowners to the enterprise; there would be lots of money, enormous receipts, the actors would perform on cooperative principles … Maybe it was all indeed good, but it seemed to me that such ideas could only proceed from a man’s head.

Be that as it may, for a year or two everything appeared to prosper. Katya was in love, believed in her work, and was happy; but then I began to notice clear signs of a decline in her letters. It began with Katya complaining to me about her comrades—that was the first and most ominous symptom. If a young scholar or writer begins his activity by complaining bitterly about scholars or writers, it means he’s already worn out and not fit for work. Katya wrote to me that her comrades did not attend rehearsals and never learned their parts; that the preposterous plays they produced and the way they behaved on stage betrayed in each of them a total lack of respect for the public; in the interest of the box office, which was all they talked about, dramatic actresses lowered themselves to singing chansonettes, and tragic actors sang ditties making fun of cuckolded husbands and the pregnancies of unfaithful wives, and so on. Generally, it was a wonder that provincial theater had not died out yet, and that it could hold on by such a thin and rotten little thread.

In reply I sent Katya a long and, I confess, very boring letter. Among other things, I wrote to her: “I have not infrequently had occasion to exchange words with old actors, the noblest of people, who accorded me their sympathy; from talking with them I was able to see that their activity is directed not so much by their own reason and freedom as by fashion and the mood of society; the best of them had been obliged, during their lives, to play in tragedies, and in operettas, and in Parisian farces, and in fairy pageants, yet they always had the same feeling of following a straight path and being useful. And so, as you see, the cause of the evil must be sought not in actors, but deeper, in the art itself and how the whole society relates to it.” This letter only annoyed Katya. She replied to me: “You and I are singing in different operas. I wrote to you not about the noblest of people, who accorded you their sympathy, but about a band of swindlers who have nothing in common with nobility. They’re a herd of wild people, who wound up on the stage only because they wouldn’t have been accepted anywhere else, and who call themselves artists only out of insolence. Not a single talent, but a lot of giftless people, drunkards, intriguers, and gossips. I can’t tell you how bitter it is for me that the art I love so much has fallen into the hands of people I find hateful; how bitter that the best people see evil only from a distance, do not want to come closer, and, instead of intervening, write heavy-handed commonplaces and totally needless moral pronouncements …” and so on, all in the same vein.

A little more time went by, and I received this letter: “I have been brutally deceived. I cannot live any longer. You may dispose of my money as you see fit. I loved you as a father and my only friend. Forgive me.”

It turned out that her he also belonged to the “herd of wild people.” Later I was able to guess from certain hints that there had been an attempt at suicide. It seems Katya tried to poison herself. It must be supposed that she was seriously ill afterwards, because the next letter I received was from Yalta, where, in all likelihood, the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me contained a request to send her a thousand roubles in Yalta as soon as possible, and it ended like this: “Excuse me for such a gloomy letter. Yesterday I buried my baby.” After spending about a year in the Crimea, she returned home.

She had been away for about four years, and for all those four years, I must confess, I played a rather strange and unenviable role in regard to her. When she had announced to me earlier that she was going to become an actress, and then wrote to me about her love, when she was periodically possessed by a spirit of prodigality and I had time and again to send her, on her demand, now a thousand, now two thousand roubles, when she wrote to me about her intention to die and then about the death of the baby, I was at a loss each time and all my concern for her fate expressed itself only in my thinking a lot and writing long, boring letters, which I might as well not have written. And yet I had taken the place of her real father and loved her like a daughter!

Now Katya lives half a mile from me. She has rented a five-room apartment, and has furnished it quite comfortably and in her own taste. If anyone should undertake to depict her furnishings, the predominant mood of the picture would be indolence. Soft couches, soft seats for an indolent body, carpets for indolent feet, pale, dull, or matte colors for indolent eyes; for an indolent soul, an abundance of cheap fans on the walls and little pictures in which an originality of execution dominates content, a superfluity of little tables and shelves filled with totally useless and worthless objects, shapeless rags for curtains … All that, along with the fear of bright colors, symmetry, and open space, testifies not only to inner indolence but also to a perversion of natural taste. For whole days Katya lies on a couch and reads books, mostly novels and stories. She leaves the house only once a day, in the afternoon, to come and see me.

I’m working, and Katya is sitting not far away on the sofa, silent and wrapped in a shawl, as if she felt cold. Either because I find her sympathetic, or because I became accustomed to her frequent visits when she was still a little girl, her presence does not keep me from concentrating. From time to time I mechanically ask her some question, and she gives me a very brief answer; or, to rest for a moment, I turn to her and watch her pensively looking through some medical journal or newspaper. And then I notice that her face no longer has its former trustful expression. Her expression is cold now, indifferent, distracted, as with passengers who have to wait a long time for a train. She still dresses beautifully and simply, but carelessly; you can see that her clothes and hair have to put up with a lot from the couches and rocking chairs she lies in all day long. And she’s not as curious as she used to be. She asks me no questions now, as if she has already experienced everything in life and doesn’t expect to hear anything new.

Towards four o’clock there begins to be movement in the hall and the drawing room. Liza has come home from the conservatory and brought some girlfriends with her. They can be heard playing the piano, trying out their voices, and laughing. Yegor is setting the table in the dining room and clattering the dishes.

“Good-bye,” says Katya. “I won’t see your family today. They must excuse me. I have no time. Come by.”

As I see her off to the front door, she looks me up and down sternly and says in vexation:

“And you keep losing weight! Why don’t you see a doctor? I’ll go and invite Sergei Fyodorovich. Let him examine you.”

“There’s no need, Katya.”

“I don’t understand where your family is looking! Good ones they are!”

She puts her coat on impetuously, and as she does so, two or three hairpins are bound to fall from her carelessly done hair. She’s too lazy to put it right, and she has no time; she awkwardly tucks the loose strands under her hat and leaves.

When I go into the dining room, my wife asks me:

“Was Katya with you just now? Why didn’t she stop and see us? It’s even strange …”

“Mama!” Liza says to her reproachfully. “If she doesn’t want to, God be with her. We’re not going to kneel to her.”

“As you like, but it’s disdainful. To sit in your study for three hours and not give us a thought! However, as she likes.”

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is incomprehensible to me, and one probably has to be a woman to understand it. I’ll bet my life that of the hundred and fifty-odd young men I see almost every day in my auditorium, and the hundred older ones I have to meet each week, it would be hard to find even one who is able to understand their hatred and loathing for Katya’s past—that is, for her pregnancy out of wedlock and her illegitimate child; and at the same time I simply cannot recall even one woman or girl among those I know who would not consciously or instinctively share those feelings. And that is not because women are purer or more virtuous than men: purity and virtue scarcely differ from vice, if they’re not free of malice. I explain it simply by the backwardness of women. The dejected feeling of compassion and pained conscience experienced by a contemporary man at the sight of misfortune speak much more to me of culture and moral development than do hatred and loathing. Contemporary women are as tearful and coarse of heart as in the Middle Ages. And, in my opinion, those who advise that they be educated like men are quite reasonable.

My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for her ingratitude, for her pride, for her eccentricity, and for a whole host of vices that one woman is always able to find in another.

Besides my family and myself, we also have dining with us two or three of my daughter’s girlfriends, and Alexander Adolfovich Gnekker, Liza’s admirer and the pretender to her hand. He is a blond young man, no more than thirty, of average height, very stout, broad-shouldered, with red side-whiskers at his ears and a waxed little mustache that gives his plump, smooth face a sort of toylike expression. He is wearing a very short jacket, a bright-colored waistcoat, trousers of a large checked pattern, very wide above and very narrow below, and yellow shoes without heels. He has prominent crayfish eyes, his tie resembles a crayfish tail, and it seems to me that the whole of the young man exudes a smell of crayfish soup. He calls on us every day, but no one in my family knows what his origins are, where he studied, or what he lives on. He neither plays nor sings, but is somehow connected with music and singing, sells somebody’s grand pianos somewhere, is often at the conservatory, is acquainted with all the celebrities, and takes a hand in concerts. He pronounces on music with great authority, and I’ve noticed that everybody willingly agrees with him.

Rich people are always surrounded by spongers; so are people of science and art. It seems no science or art in the world is free of the presence of “foreign bodies” like this Mr. Gnekker. I’m not a musician, and may be mistaken concerning this Gnekker, whom, moreover, I know only slightly. But his authority, and the dignity with which he stands by the piano and listens while someone sings or plays, strike me as all too suspicious.

You can be a gentleman and a privy councillor a hundred times over, but if you have a daughter, nothing can protect you from the bourgeois vulgarity that is often introduced into your house and into your state of mind by courtships, proposals, and weddings. I, for instance, am quite unable to reconcile myself to the solemn expression my wife acquires each time Gnekker sits down with us, nor can I be reconciled to the bottles of Lafite, port, and sherry that are served only for his sake, to give him ocular evidence of the luxury and largesse of our life. I also can’t stand Liza’s jerky laughter, which she learned at the conservatory, or her way of narrowing her eyes when we have gentleman visitors. And above all I simply cannot understand why it is that I am visited every day by and have dinner every day with a being who is totally alien to my habits, my learning, the whole mode of my life, and who is totally different from the people I like. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that he is “the fiancé,” but even so I don’t understand his presence; it arouses the same perplexity in me as if a Zulu were seated at my table. And it also seems strange to me that my daughter, whom I am accustomed to consider a child, should love that necktie, those eyes, those soft cheeks …

Formerly I either liked dinner or was indifferent to it, but now it arouses nothing but boredom and vexation in me. Ever since I became an Excellency¹³ and was made dean of the faculty, my family has for some reason found it necessary to change our menu and dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes I became accustomed to as a student and a doctor, I’m now fed puréed soup with some sort of white icicles floating in it, and kidneys in Madeira. Renown and the rank of general have deprived me forever of cabbage soup, and tasty pies, and goose with apples, and bream with kasha.¹⁴ They have also deprived me of the maid Agasha, a talkative old woman, quick to laugh, instead of whom the dinner is now served by Yegor, a dumb and arrogant fellow with a white glove on his right hand. The intermissions are short, but they seem far too long, because there is nothing to fill them. Gone are the former gaiety, unconstrained conversation, jokes, laughter, gone is the mutual tenderness and joy that animated my children, my wife and myself when we used to come together in the dining room; for a busy man like me, dinner was a time to rest and see my wife and children, and for them it was a festive time—short, it’s true, but bright and joyful— when they knew that for half an hour I belonged not to science, not to my students, but to them alone and no one else. No more the ability to get drunk on a single glass, no more Agasha, no more bream with kasha, no more the noise produced by small dinner scandals, like a fight between the cat and dog under the table or the bandage falling from Katya’s cheek into her plate of soup.

Describing our present-day dinners is as unappetizing as eating them. My wife’s face has an expression of solemnity, an assumed gravity, and her usual worry. She glances uneasily over our plates and says: “I see you don’t like the roast … Tell me: don’t you really?” And I have to answer: “You needn’t worry, my dear, the roast is quite delicious.” And she: “You always stand up for me, Nikolai Stepanych, and never tell the truth. Why, then, has Alexander Adolfovich eaten so little?” and it goes on in the same vein throughout the meal. Liza laughs jerkily and narrows her eyes. I look at the two of them, and only now, at dinner, does it become perfectly clear to me that their inner life escaped my observation long ago. I have the feeling that once upon a time I lived at home with a real family, but now I’m the dinner guest of someone who is not my real wife and am looking at someone who is not the real Liza. An abrupt change has taken place in them both, I missed the long process by which this change came about, and it’s no wonder I don’t understand anything. Why did the change take place? I don’t know. Maybe the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than He gave me. Since childhood I’ve been accustomed to standing up to external circumstances, and I’ve become rather seasoned; such catastrophes in life as renown, the rank of general, the change from well-being to living beyond one’s means, acquaintance with the nobility, and so on, have barely touched me, and I’ve remained safe and sound; but on my weak, unseasoned wife and Liza it all fell like a big block of snow, and crushed them.

The young ladies and Gnekker are talking about fugues, counterpoint, about singers and pianists, about Bach and Brahms, and my wife, afraid to be suspected of musical ignorance, smiles at them sympathetically and murmurs: “That’s lovely … Really? You don’t say …” Gnekker eats gravely, cracks jokes gravely, and listens condescendingly to the young ladies’ observations. Every once in a while he feels a desire to speak bad French, and then for some reason he finds it necessary to address me as votre excellence.

And I am morose. Obviously I inhibit them all, and they inhibit me. Never before have I been closely acquainted with class antagonism, but now I’m tormented precisely by something of that sort. I try to find only bad features in Gnekker, quickly find them, and am tormented that in the suitor’s place there sits a man not of my circle. His presence affects me badly in yet another respect. Usually, when I’m by myself or in the company of people I like, I never think of my own merits, and if I do begin to think of them, they seem as insignificant to me as if I had become a scientist only yesterday; but in the presence of people like Gnekker, my merits seem like a lofty mountain, its peak disappearing into the clouds, while at its foot, barely visible to the eye, the Gnekkers shift about.

After dinner I go to my study and there light my pipe, the only one of the whole day, a leftover from a long-past bad habit of puffing smoke from morning till night. While I’m smoking, my wife comes in and sits down to talk with me. Just as in the morning, I know beforehand what the talk will be about.

“I must have a serious talk with you, Nikolai Stepanych,” she begins. “It’s about Liza … Why aren’t you paying attention?”

“Meaning what?”

“You make it seem as if you don’t notice anything, but that’s not good. It’s impossible to be unconcerned … Gnekker has intentions towards Liza … What do you say?”

“That he’s a bad man I cannot say, since I don’t know him, but that I dislike him, I’ve already told you a thousand times.”

“But this is impossible … impossible …”

She gets up and paces in agitation.

“It’s impossible to deal this way with such a serious step …” she says. “When it’s a question of your daughter’s happiness, you must set aside everything personal. I know you dislike him … Very well … If we reject him now, break it all off, what assurance do you have that Liza won’t complain about us for the rest of her life? There aren’t so many suitors nowadays, and it may so happen that no other party comes along … He loves Liza very much, and she apparently likes him … Of course, he has no definite position, but what can we do? God willing, he’ll get himself established somewhere in time. He’s from a good family and he’s rich.”

“How do you know that?”

“He said so. His father has a big house in Kharkov and an estate near Kharkov. In short, Nikolai Stepanych, you absolutely must go to Kharkov.”

“What for?”

“You can make inquiries … You have acquaintances among the professors there, they’ll help you. I’d go myself, but I’m a woman. I can’t …”

“I won’t go to Kharkov,” I say morosely.

My wife gets alarmed, and an expression of tormenting pain appears on her face.

“For God’s sake, Nikolai Stepanych!” she implores me, sobbing. “For God’s sake, relieve me of this burden! I’m suffering!”

It’s becoming painful to look at her.

“Very well, Varya,” I say tenderly. “If you wish, so be it, I’ll go to Kharkov and do whatever you like.”

She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes to her room to cry. I remain alone.

A little later a lamp is brought in. Familiar shadows I’ve long since grown weary of are cast on the walls and floor by the chairs and the lamp shade, and when I look at them, it seems to me that it’s already night and that my cursed insomnia is beginning. I lie down, then get up and pace the room, then lie down again … Usually after dinner, before evening, my nervous agitation reaches its highest pitch. I start weeping for no reason and hide my head under the pillow. In those moments I’m afraid somebody may come in, afraid I may die suddenly; I’m ashamed of my tears, and generally there is something unbearable in my soul. I feel that I can no longer stand the sight of my lamp, the books, the shadows on the floor, or the sound of voices coming from the drawing room. Some invisible and incomprehensible force is roughly pushing me out of the house. I jump up, hastily put on my coat and hat, and cautiously, so that the family won’t notice, go outside. Where to?

The answer to that question has long been sitting in my brain: to Katya.

III

As usual, she’s lying on a Turkish divan or couch and reading something. On seeing me, she raises her head indolently, sits up, and gives me her hand.

“And you’re always lying down,” I say, after pausing briefly to rest. “That’s unhealthy. You ought to find something to do!”

“Eh?”

“I said, you ought to find something to do.”

“What? A woman can only be a menial worker or an actress.”

“Well, then? If you can’t be a worker, be an actress.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you get married?” I say half jokingly.

“There’s nobody to marry. And no reason to.”

“You can’t live like this.”

“Without a husband? A lot it matters! There are men all over, if anybody’s interested.”

“That’s not nice, Katya.”

“What’s not nice?”

“What you just said.”

Noticing that I’m upset, and wishing to smooth over the bad impression, Katya says:

“Come. Over here. Look.”

She leads me to a small, very cozy room and says, pointing to the writing table:

“Look … I’ve made it ready for you. You can work here. Come every day and bring your work. At home they only bother you. Will you work here? Do you want to?”

To avoid upsetting her by saying no, I reply that I will work in her place and that I like the room very much. Then the two of us sit down in this cozy room and begin to talk.

The warmth, the cozy atmosphere, and the presence of a sympathetic person now arouse in me not a feeling of contentment, as before, but a strong urge to complain and grumble. For some reason it seems to me that if I murmur and complain a bit I’ll feel better.

“Things are bad, my dear!” I begin with a sigh. “Very bad …”

“What’s wrong?”

“The thing is this, my friend. The best and most sacred right of kings is the right to show mercy. And I always felt myself a king, because I made boundless use of that right. I never judged, I was tolerant, I willingly forgave everybody right and left. Where others protested and were indignant, I merely advised and persuaded. All my life I tried only to make my company bearable for my family, students, colleagues, and servants. And this attitude of mine towards people, I know, was an education to all those around me. But now I’m no longer a king. Something is going on inside me that is fit only for slaves: spiteful thoughts wander through my head day and night, and feelings such as I’ve never known before are nesting in my soul. I hate and despise, I feel indignant, outraged, afraid. I’ve become excessively severe, demanding, irritable, ungracious, suspicious. Even something that before would have given me an occasion for one more quip and a good-natured laugh, now produces a heavy feeling in me. My logic has also changed in me: before I only despised money, now I harbor a spiteful feeling not for money but for the rich, as if they were to blame; before I hated violence and tyranny, but now I hate the people who use violence, as if they alone were to blame and not all of us, because we’re unable to educate each other. What does it mean? If my new thoughts and feelings proceed from a change of convictions, where could that change have come from? Has the world become worse and I better, or was I blind and indifferent before? And if this change has proceeded from a general decline of physical and mental powers—I’m sick and losing weight every day—then my situation is pathetic: it means that my new thoughts are abnormal, unhealthy, that I should be ashamed of them and consider them worthless …”

“Sickness has nothing to do with it,” Katya interrupts me. “It’s simply that your eyes have been opened, that’s all. You’ve seen something that for some reason you didn’t want to notice before. In my opinion, you must first of all break with your family and leave.”

“What you’re saying is absurd.”

“You don’t love them, so why this duplicity? And is that a family? Nonentities! They could die today, and tomorrow nobody would notice they were gone.”

Katya despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. In our day one can hardly talk of people’s right to despise each other. But if one takes Katya’s point of view and acknowledges that such a right exists, one can see that after all she has the same right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.

“Nonentities!” she repeats. “Did you have dinner today? How is it they didn’t forget to call you to the dining room? How is it they still remember your existence?”

“Katya,” I say sternly, “I ask you to be quiet.”

“And do you think I enjoy talking about them? I’d be glad not to know them at all. Listen to me, my dear: drop everything and leave. Go abroad. The sooner the better.”

“What nonsense! And the university?”

“The university, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it anyway. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years now, and where are your disciples? Have you produced many famous scientists? Count them up! And to multiply the number of doctors who exploit ignorance and make hundreds of thousands, there’s no need to be a good and talented man. You’re superfluous.”

“My God, how sharp you are!” I say, horrified. “How sharp you are! Be quiet, or I’ll leave! I don’t know how to reply to your sharpness!”

The maid comes in and invites us to have tea. At the samovar our conversation changes, thank God. Since I’ve already complained, I want to give free rein to my other old man’s weakness— reminiscence. I tell Katya about my past and, to my great astonishment, inform her of such details as I didn’t even suspect were still preserved in my memory. And she listens to me with tenderness, with pride, with bated breath. I especially like telling her how I once studied at the seminary¹⁵ and dreamed of going to university.

“I used to walk in our seminary garden …” I tell her. “The squeak of an accordion and a song from a far-off tavern would come on the wind, or a troika with bells would race past the seminary fence, and that was already quite enough for a sense of happiness suddenly to fill not only my breast, but even my stomach, legs, arms … I’d listen to the accordion or to the fading sound of the bells, and imagine myself a doctor and paint pictures—one better than the other. And so, as you see, my dreams have come true. I’ve received more than I dared dream of. For thirty years I’ve been a beloved professor, have had excellent colleagues, have enjoyed honorable renown. I’ve loved, married for passionate love, had children. In short, looking back, my whole life seems to me like a beautiful composition, executed with talent. Now it only remains for me not to ruin the finale. For that I must die like a human being. If death is indeed a danger, I must meet it as befits a teacher, a scientist, and the citizen of a Christian country: cheerfully and with a peaceful soul. But I’m ruining the finale. I’m drowning, I run to you asking for help, and you say to me: drown, that’s how it should be.”

But here the bell rings in the front hall. Katya and I recognize it and say:

“That must be Mikhail Fyodorovich.”

And, indeed, a moment later in comes my colleague, the philologist Mikhail Fyodorovich, a tall, well-built man of around fifty, clean-shaven, with thick gray hair and black eyebrows. He is a kind man and an excellent comrade. He comes from an old aristocratic family, very fortunate and talented, which has played a notable role in the history of our literature and education. He himself is intelligent, talented, very cultivated, but not without his oddities. To a certain degree we’re all odd, we’re all eccentrics, but his oddities seem to his acquaintances to be something exceptional and not entirely harmless. Among those acquaintances I know not a few who are totally unable to see his many virtues through his oddities.

He comes into the room, slowly removes his gloves, and says in a velvety bass:

“Good evening. Having tea? That’s quite appropriate. It’s hellishly cold.”

Then he sits at the table, takes a glass, and immediately starts talking. The most characteristic thing in his manner of talking is his permanently jocular tone, a sort of blend of philosophy and banter, as with Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He always talks about serious things, but never talks seriously. His opinions are always sharp, abusive, but owing to his soft, smooth, jocular tone, it somehow turns out that his sharpness and abuse do not grate on the ear, and you quickly get used to them. Every evening he brings along five or six anecdotes from university life, and when he sits at the table, he usually begins with them.

“Oh, Lord!” he sighs, with a mocking movement of his black eyebrows. “Such comedians there are in the world!”

“And so?” asks Katya.

“I’m leaving after my lecture, and on the stairs I meet that old idiot of ours, X … He’s walking along with his horse’s jaw thrust out as usual, looking for somebody to complain to about his migraine, his wife, and the students, who don’t want to attend his lectures. Well, I think, he’s seen me—that’s it, I’m lost…”

And so on in the same vein. Or else he begins like this:

“Yesterday I was at our Y’s public lecture. It surprises me that our alma mater—not to speak of the devil—ventures to show the public such patent oafs and dimwits as this Y. He’s a fool on a European scale! Good heavens, you wouldn’t find another like him in all of Europe, not even with a candle in broad daylight! He lectures, if you can imagine, just as if he’s sucking a candy: ssk-ssk-ssk … He gets cold feet, can’t make out his own notes, his wretched little thoughts barely move, like a monk on a bicycle, and above all there’s no way to tell what he’s trying to say. Flies die of boredom. The boredom can only be compared with what we have in our big auditorium at commencement, when the traditional speech is being read, devil take it.”

And at once a sharp transition:

“Some three years ago, as our Nikolai Stepanych remembers, I had to deliver that speech. Hot, stuffy, uniform tight under the arms—you could die! I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours … Well, I think, thank God, only ten pages left. And at the conclusion there were four pages I could omit altogether, so I counted on not reading them. That leaves only six, I thought. Then, imagine, I glance up and see some beribboned general and a bishop sitting next to each other in the front row. The poor souls are stiff with boredom, they roll their eyes so as not to fall asleep, and yet they still try to keep an attentive look on their faces and pretend that they like and understand my lecture. Well, I think, since you like it, you’re going to get it! For spite! And I up and read all four pages.”

When he talks, only his eyes and eyebrows smile, as generally with people given to mockery. There is no hatred or spite in his eyes at these moments, but a good deal of sharpness and that peculiar foxy cunning that is seen only in very observant people. To go on about his eyes, I’ve noticed another peculiarity in them. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to some remark of hers, or follows her with his eyes when she momentarily leaves the room for some reason, I notice in his glance something meek, prayerful, pure …

The maid removes the samovar and puts a big piece of cheese and some fruit on the table, along with a bottle of Crimean champagne, a rather bad wine that Katya came to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail Fyodorovich takes two decks of cards from the shelf and lays out a game of patience. According to him, some varieties of patience call for considerable cleverness and concentration, but he still never stops entertaining himself with talk, even while he plays. Katya follows the cards attentively and helps him more with looks than with words. She drinks no more than two glasses of wine all evening, I drink a quarter of a glass; the rest of the bottle falls to Mikhail Fyodorovich, who can drink a lot and never gets drunk.

Over patience we resolve various questions, mostly of a higher order, and what gets the most punishment from us is what we love most—that is, science.

“Science has outlived itself, thank God,” Mikhail Fyodorovich says measuredly “Its song has been sung. Yes, sir. Mankind is already beginning to feel the need to replace it with something else. It sprang from the soil of superstition, was nourished by superstition, and is now as much the quintessence of superstition as the grandmothers it has outlived: alchemy, metaphysics, and philosophy. And what, indeed, has it given people? The difference between learned Europeans and the Chinese, who have no science themselves, is quite negligible and purely external. The Chinese don’t know science, but what have they lost because of it?”

“Flies don’t know science either,” I say, “but what of that?”

“You needn’t get angry, Nikolai Stepanych. I’m saying it here, among us … I’m more cautious than you think, and am not about to say it publicly, God forbid! The superstition persists among the masses that science and the arts are higher than agriculture and trade, higher than the handicrafts. Our sect feeds on that superstition, and it’s not for you or me to destroy it. God forbid!”

Over patience the younger generation also comes in for rough treatment.

“Our public has become paltry these days,” sighs Mikhail Fyodorovich. “I’m not even talking about ideals and all that, but they don’t even know how to work or think properly! It’s precisely: ‘In sorrow I gaze upon our generation.’”¹⁶

“Yes, terribly paltry,” Katya agrees. “Tell me, have you had at least one outstanding student in the last five or ten years?”

“I don’t know about other professors, but I don’t remember any among mine.”

“I’ve seen lots of students in my time, and your young scientists, and lots of actors … And what? Never once was I deemed worthy of meeting not only a hero or a talent, but even simply an interesting human being. They’re all gray, giftless, puffed up with pretensions …”

All these conversations about paltriness give me the feeling each time of having accidentally overheard some nasty conversation about my own daughter. It offends me that the accusations are so sweeping and built on such worn-out commonplaces, such bogeys, as paltriness, lack of ideals, or references to the beautiful past. Any accusation, even if it’s spoken in the company of ladies, must be formulated as definitely as possible, otherwise it’s not an accusation but empty maligning, unworthy of decent people.

I’m an old man, I’ve been teaching for thirty years, but I don’t see any paltriness or lack of ideals, nor do I find it worse now than before. My porter Nikolai, whose experience in this case is valid, says that today’s students are no better or worse than before.

If I were asked what I do not like in my present students, I would not answer at once or at length, but I would be sufficiently definite. I know their shortcomings and therefore have no need to resort to a fog of commonplaces. I do not like it that they smoke, use alcoholic beverages, and marry late; that they are careless and often indifferent to such a degree that they suffer people to go hungry in their midst and do not pay into the student aid society. They don’t know modern languages and speak Russian incorrectly; just yesterday a colleague of mine, a hygienist, complained to me that he had to lecture twice as long, because they have a poor knowledge of physics and are totally unacquainted with meteorology. They willingly submit to the influence of modern writers, and not even the best of them, but are completely indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish great from small betrays most of all their everyday impracticality All difficult questions of a more or less social character (resettlement, for instance) they solve by subscriptions, and not by means of scientific research and experiment, though the latter are entirely at their disposal and best correspond to their purposes. They willingly become orderlies, assistants, laboratory technicians, adjuncts, and are ready to occupy those positions till the age of forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are no less necessary in science than, for instance, in art or in trade. I have students and auditors, but no helpers or heirs, and therefore, though I feel love and tenderness for them, I am not proud of them. And so on and so forth.

Such shortcomings, numerous though they are, can produce a pessimistic or abusive spirit only in a fainthearted and timid man. They all have an accidental, transient character and are totally dependent on life’s circumstances; some ten years are enough for them to disappear or yield their place to new and different shortcomings, which it is impossible to do without and which, in their turn, will frighten the fainthearted. I’m often vexed by my students’ sins, but this vexation is nothing compared with the joy I’ve experienced for thirty years, when I talk with my students, lecture to them, study their relations, and compare them with people in other circles.

Mikhail Fyodorovich maligns, Katya listens, and neither notices what a deep abyss this apparently innocent amusement of judging their neighbors draws them into. They don’t feel how their simple conversation gradually turns into jeering and scoffing, and how they both even start using slanderous methods.

“Some specimens are killingly funny,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “Yesterday I come to our Yegor Petrovich and find a studiosus, one of your medics, in his third year, I think. A face in the … the Dobrolyubov¹⁷ style, the stamp of profundity on his brow. We get to talking. ‘Thus and so, young man,’ I say. ‘I read that some German—I forget his name—has obtained a new alkaloid, idiotine, from the human brain.’ And what do you think? He believed me and his face even showed respect: That’s our boys for you! Then the other day I come to the theater. I sit down. In the row just in front of me these two are sitting: one of ‘our boyth,’ apparently doing law, the other all disheveled—a medic. The medic is drunk as a cobbler. Pays zero attention to the stage. Keeps dozing and nodding his head. But as soon as some actor starts loudly reciting a monologue or simply raises his voice, my medic gives a start, nudges his neighbor in the side, and asks: ‘What’s he saying? Something no-o-oble?’ ‘Something noble,’ answers the one from our boyth. ‘Brrravo!’ bawls the medic. ‘Something no-o-oble! Bravo!’ You see, the drunken blockhead has come to the theater not for art but for nobility. He’s after nobility.”

And Katya listens and laughs. Her laughter is somehow strange: her inhalations alternate quickly and in regular rhythm with her exhalations, as if she were playing the harmonica, and yet all that laughs on her face are her nostrils. I’m dispirited and don’t know what to say. Beside myself, I explode, jump up from my place and shout:

“Be quiet, finally! What are you doing sitting here like two toads poisoning the air with your breath? Enough!”

And without waiting for them to finish their maligning, I prepare to go home. And it’s high time: past ten o’clock.

“I’ll stay a little longer,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “May I, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”

“You may,” Katya answers.

“Bene. In that case tell them to serve another little bottle.”

The two of them see me off to the front door with candles, and while I’m putting my coat on, Mikhail Fyodorovich says:

“You’ve grown terribly thin and old recently, Nikolai Stepanych. What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“Yes, I’m a bit ill.”

“And he won’t be treated …” Katya puts in glumly.

“Why won’t you be treated? My dear man, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Regards to your family and my apologies for not visiting them. One of these days, before I go abroad, I’ll stop and say good-bye. Without fail! I leave next week.”

I go out of Katya’s annoyed, frightened by the talk of my illness, and displeased with myself. I ask myself: should I not, indeed, consult one of my colleagues? And I immediately imagine how my colleague, having auscultated me, goes silently to the window, ponders, then turns to me, and, trying to keep me from reading the truth on his face, says in an indifferent tone: “So far I see nothing special, but all the same, collega, I’d advise you to stop working …” And that will deprive me of my last hope.

Who doesn’t have hopes? Now, diagnosing myself and treating myself, there are moments when I hope that my own ignorance is deceiving me, that I’m also mistaken about the protein and sugar I find in myself, and about my heart, and about the swelling I’ve noticed twice now in the morning; re-reading the manuals on therapy with the zeal of a hypochondriac and changing my medications daily, I keep thinking I’ll hit on something comforting. It’s all paltry

Whether the sky is covered with clouds, or the moon and stars are shining in it, each time I return home, I look up at it and think that death will soon take me. One would think that at such moments my thoughts should be deep as the sky, bright, striking … But no! I think about myself, my wife, Liza, Gnekker, my students, people in general; my thoughts are bad, paltry, I’m tricking myself, and in those moments my worldview can be expressed in the words which the famous Arakcheev¹⁸ said in one of his private letters: “Nothing good in the world can be without bad, and there is always more bad than good.” That is, everything is muck, there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I’ve lived should be considered a waste. I catch myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself that they are accidental, temporary, and not lodged deeply in me, but at once I think:

“If so, then what is it that draws you to those two toads every evening?”

And I swear to myself that I will not go to Katya’s anymore, though I know I’ll go to her again tomorrow.

Ringing my doorbell and then going up the stairs, I feel that I no longer have a family and have no wish to return to it. Clearly, the new Arakcheevian thoughts are not lodged in me accidentally or temporarily, but govern my whole being. With a sick conscience, dejected, indolent, barely moving my limbs, as if a thousand pounds had been added to my weight, I lie down in bed and soon fall asleep.

And then—insomnia …

IV

Summer comes, and life changes.

One fine morning Liza enters my room and says in a joking tone:

“Let’s go, Your Excellency. Everything’s ready.”

My Excellency is taken outside, put into a carriage, and driven somewhere. I ride along and, having nothing better to do, read the signboards from right to left. The word “pothouse” comes out “esuohtop.” That would suit an ancient Egyptian: the pharaoh Esuohtop. I go on over a field past the cemetery, which makes precisely no impression on me at all, though I’ll soon be lying in it; then I go through a woods and another field. Nothing interesting. After a two-hour drive, My Excellency is led into the bottom floor of a summer house and installed in a very cheerful little room with light blue wallpaper.

At night there’s the usual insomnia, but in the morning I’m not awake and listening to my wife, but lying in bed. I don’t sleep, but experience that drowsy, half-oblivious state when you know you’re not asleep, and yet have dreams. At noon I get up and, out of habit, sit at my desk, but I don’t work now, I entertain myself with the French books in yellow covers that Katya sends me. Of course, it would be more patriotic to read Russian authors, but I confess I’m not especially in favor of them. Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products. Even the best products of handicraft cannot be called remarkable and cannot be praised without a “but.” The same can be said of all the literary novelties I’ve read over the last ten or fifteen years: not one is remarkable, and there’s no avoiding a “but.” Intelligent, noble, but not talented; talented, noble, but not intelligent; or, finally, talented, intelligent, but not noble.

I’m not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don’t satisfy me either. But they’re less boring than the Russian ones, and not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work—a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don’t have. I can’t remember a single new book in which the author doesn’t do his best, from the very first page, to entangle himself in all possible conventions and private deals with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological analysis, a third must have “a warm attitude towards humanity,” a fourth purposely wallows for whole pages in descriptions of nature, lest he be suspected of tendentiousness … One insists on being a bourgeois in his work, another an aristocrat, etc. Contrivance, caution, keeping one’s own counsel, but no freedom nor courage to write as one wishes, and therefore no creativity.

All this refers to so-called belles-lettres.

As for serious Russian articles, for instance on sociology, art, and so on, I avoid reading them out of sheer timidity. In my childhood and youth I was for some reason afraid of doormen and theater ushers, and that fear has stayed with me. I’m afraid of them even now. They say we fear only what we don’t understand. And, indeed, it’s very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear. The extraordinary importance, the facetiously pontifical tone, the familiar treatment of foreign authors, the knack of augustly pouring from empty into void—I find it all incomprehensible, frightening, and nothing like the modesty and gentlemanly calm tone I’m accustomed to in reading what doctors and natural scientists write. Not only articles, it’s even painful for me to read the translations done or edited by serious Russian people. The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.

I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor’s rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don’t think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reverse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions, and of all sorts of criminality are the usual adornments of serious articles. And that, as young doctors like to put it in their articles, is the ultima ratio !¹⁹ Such relations cannot fail to be reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, and therefore I’m not surprised in the least that in the new books our literature has acquired over the last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink gallons of vodka and the heroines are insufficiently chaste.

I read my French books and keep glancing out the window, which is open; I see the teeth of my fence, two or three scrawny trees, and beyond the fence a road, a field, then a wide strip of evergreen forest. I often admire how a certain little boy and girl, both towheaded and ragged, climb up the fence and laugh at my bald head. In their bright little eyes I read: “Go up, thou bald head!”²⁰They’re probably the only people who care nothing about my rank and renown.

Now I don’t have visitors every day. I will mention only the visits of Nikolai and Pyotr Ignatievich. Nikolai usually comes on feast days,²¹ seemingly on business, but more just to see me. He arrives rather tipsy, which never happens with him in the winter.

“What’s up?” I ask, coming to meet him in the front hall.

“Your Excellency!” he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with the rapture of a lover. “Your Excellency! May God punish me! May I be struck by lightning on this very spot! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus !”²²

And he greedily kisses me on the shoulders, sleeves, buttons.

“Is everything all right with you there?” I ask him.

“Your Excellency! As God lives …”

He won’t stop swearing needlessly by God, I soon get sick of him and send him to the kitchen, where they serve him dinner. Pyotr Ignatievich also comes on feast days, especially to see how I am and to share his thoughts with me. He usually sits by my desk, modest, neat, sensible, not daring to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and all the while, in his soft, even little voice, smoothly and bookishly, he tells me what he thinks are various extremely interesting and spicy bits of news that he has come across in journals and books. These items are all alike and boil down to this: a certain Frenchman made a discovery; another man—a German—caught him out, by proving that this discovery had already been made in 1870 by some American; and a third—also a German—outwitted them both, proving that they were a pair of dupes who mistook air bubbles for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Pyotr Ignatievich tells everything at length, thoroughly, as if defending a thesis, with a detailed list of his printed sources, trying not to make any mistakes in the dates, or in the numbers of the journals, or in names, and he never simply says Petit, but always Jean-Jacques Petit. Occasionally he stays for dinner with us, and then he tells the same spicy stories all through dinner, which plunges everyone at the table into gloom. If Gnekker and Liza start talking about fugues and counterpoint, about Brahms and Bach, he modestly looks down and gets embarrassed; he’s ashamed that such banalities should be talked about in the presence of such serious people as he and I.

In my present mood five minutes are enough to make me as sick of him as if I’d seen and heard him for all eternity I hate the wretched fellow. I wither from his soft, even voice and bookish language, I grow dumb from his stories … He has the best feelings for me and talks with me only to give me pleasure, and I pay him back by looking at him point-blank, as if I wanted to hypnotize him, and thinking: “Go away, go away, go away …” But he doesn’t succumb to my mental suggestion and stays, stays, stays …

All the while he stays with me, I’m unable to rid myself of the thought: “It’s quite possible that when I die, he’ll be appointed to replace me,” and in my imagination my poor auditorium looks like an oasis in which the spring has dried up, and I’m unpleasant, silent, and sullen with Pyotr Ignatievich, as if he were to blame for these thoughts and not I myself. When he begins his habitual praise of German scientists, I no longer joke good-naturedly, as before, but mutter sullenly:

“Your Germans are asses …”

This is like the episode when the late professor Nikita Krylov, swimming at Revel²³ once with Pirogov, got angry with the water for being very cold and swore: “Scoundrelly Germans!” I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatievich, and only when he leaves, and I see his gray hat flash outside the window, beyond the fence, do I want to call out to him and say: “Forgive me, my dear fellow!”

Our dinners are more boring than in winter. The same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. Formerly I suffered his presence silently, but now I send little barbs at him, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by spiteful feeling, I often say simply stupid things and don’t know why I say them. It happened once that I gave Gnekker a long, scornful look and then, out of nowhere, fired off at him:

Eagles may fly lower than the hen,

But no hen ever soared into the clouds … ²⁴

And the most vexing thing is that the hen Gnekker proves to be much smarter than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he sticks to the following tactics: he responds to my barbs with an indulgent silence (the old man’s cracked, what’s the point of talking to him?), or good-naturedly makes fun of me. It’s astonishing how paltry a man can become! I’m capable of dreaming all through dinner of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, and how Liza and my wife will realize their mistake, and how I will taunt them—to have such absurd dreams when I’ve got one foot in the grave!

Misunderstandings also happen now which I knew before only from hearsay Ashamed as I am, I’ll describe one that occurred the other day after dinner.

I’m sitting in my room smoking my pipe. My wife comes in as usual, sits down, and begins saying how nice it would be now, while it’s still warm and I have free time, to go to Kharkov and there find out what sort of man our Gnekker is.

“All right, I’ll go …” I agree.

My wife, pleased with me, gets up and goes to the door, but comes back at once and says:

“Incidentally, one more request. I know you’ll be angry, but it is my duty to warn you … Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanych, but there has begun to be talk among all our neighbors and acquaintances that you visit Katya rather often. She’s intelligent, educated, I don’t dispute it, one may enjoy spending time with her, but at your age and with your social position, you know, it’s somehow strange to find pleasure in her company … Besides, her reputation is such that …”

All the blood suddenly drains from my brain, sparks shoot from my eyes, I jump up and, clutching my head, stamping my feet, shout in a voice not my own:

“Leave me! Leave me! Get out!”

My face is probably terrible, my voice strange, because my wife suddenly turns pale and cries out loudly in a desperate voice, also somehow not her own. At our cries, Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor come running in …

“Leave me!” I shout. “Get out! Out!”

My legs go numb, as if they’re not there, I feel myself fall into someone’s arms, briefly hear someone weeping, and sink into a swoon that lasts for two or three hours.

Now about Katya. She calls on me every day towards evening, and, of course, neighbors and acquaintances cannot fail to notice it. She comes for just a minute and takes me for a ride with her. She has her own horse and a new charabanc, bought this summer. Generally, she lives in grand style: she has rented an expensive separate summer house with a big garden and moved all her town furniture into it; keeps two maids, a coachman … I often ask her:

“Katya, how are you going to live when you’ve squandered all your father’s money?”

“We’ll see then,” she replies.

“That money deserves a more serious attitude, my friend. A good man earned it by honest labor.”

“You already told me about that. I know.”

First we drive through the field, then through the evergreen forest that can be seen from my window. I still find nature beautiful, though a demon whispers to me that none of these pines and firs, birds and white clouds in the sky will notice my absence when I die three or four months from now. Katya enjoys driving the horse and is pleased that the weather is nice and that I’m sitting beside her. She’s in fine spirits and doesn’t say anything sharp.

“You’re a very good man, Nikolai Stepanych,” she says. “You’re a rare specimen, and there’s no actor who could play you. Even a bad actor could play me, or Mikhail Fyodorych, for instance, but no one could play you. And I envy you, envy you terribly! Because what am I the picture of? What?”

She thinks for a moment and asks:

“I’m a negative phenomenon—right, Nikolai Stepanych?”

“Right,” I answer.

“Hm … What am I to do?”

What answer can I give her? It’s easy to say “work,” or “give what you have to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it’s easy to say, I don’t know how to answer.

My general-practitioner colleagues, when they teach medical treatment, advise one “to individualize each particular case.” One need only follow that advice to be convinced that the remedies recommended by textbooks as the best and wholly suitable for the standard case, prove completely unsuitable in particular cases. The same is true for moral illnesses.

But answer I must, and so I say:

“You have too much free time, my friend. You must occupy yourself with something. Why indeed don’t you become an actress again, since you have the calling?”

“I can’t.”

“Your tone and manner make it seem that you’re a victim. I don’t like that, my friend. It’s your own fault. Remember, you started by getting angry at people and their ways, but you did nothing to make them better. You didn’t fight the evil, you got tired, and you are the victim not of the struggle, but of your own weakness. Well, of course, you were young then, inexperienced, but now everything might go differently. Really, try it again! You’ll work and serve holy art …”

“Don’t dissemble, Nikolai Stepanych,” Katya interrupts me. “Let’s agree once and for all: we can talk about actors, about actresses, or writers, but we’ll leave art alone. You’re a wonderful, rare person, but you don’t understand art well enough to regard it in good conscience as holy. You have neither the feel nor the ear for art. You’ve been busy all your life, and you’ve had no time to acquire the feel for it. Generally … I don’t like these conversations about art!” she goes on nervously. “I really don’t! It has been trivialized enough, thank you!”

“Trivialized by whom?”

“Some have trivialized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by familiarity, clever people by philosophy.”

“Philosophy has nothing to do with it.”

“Yes, it has. If anybody starts philosophizing, it means he doesn’t understand.”

To keep things from turning sharp, I hasten to change the subject and then remain silent for a long time. Only when we come out of the forest and turn towards Katya’s place do I come back to the former conversation and ask:

“You still haven’t answered me: why don’t you want to be an actress?”

“Nikolai Stepanych, this is cruel, finally!” she cries out and suddenly blushes all over. “You want me to speak the truth aloud? All right, if that … if that’s your pleasure! I have no talent! No talent and … and enormous vanity! There!”

Having made this confession, she turns her face away from me and grips the reins hard to hide the trembling of her hands.

As we approach her place, we can already see Mikhail Fyodorovich in the distance, strolling about the gate, impatiently waiting for us.

“Again this Mikhail Fyodorych!” Katya says with vexation. “Rid me of him, please! I’m sick of him, he’s played out … Enough of him!”

Mikhail Fyodorovich should have gone abroad long ago, but he keeps postponing his departure each week. Certain changes have taken place in him lately: he has become somehow pinched, wine now makes him tipsy, which never happened before, and his black eyebrows have begun to turn gray When our charabanc stops at the gate, he doesn’t conceal his joy and impatience. He bustles about, helps me and Katya out of the carriage, hurriedly asks questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that meek, prayerful, pure something that I noticed only in his eyes before is now spread all over his face. He’s glad, and at the same time ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of this habit of visiting Katya every evening, and he finds it necessary to motivate his coming by some obvious absurdity, such as: “I was passing by on business, thought why don’t I stop for a moment.”

The three of us go in; first we have tea, then on the table appear the two long-familiar decks of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle of Crimean champagne. Our topics of conversation are not new, they’re all the same as in the winter. The university, students, literature, theater all come in for it; the air gets thicker and stuffier with malignant gossip, it is poisoned by the breath not of two toads now, as in the winter, but of all three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the laugh that resembles a harmonica, the maid who serves us also hears an unpleasant, cracked laughter, like that of a vaudeville general: haw, haw, haw …

V

There are terrible nights of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which among the people are known as sparrow nights. There was one such sparrow night in my personal life …

I wake up past midnight and suddenly jump out of bed. It seems to me for some reason that I’m suddenly just about to die. Why does it seem so? There’s not a feeling in my body that would point to an imminent end, but my soul is oppressed by such terror as if I had suddenly seen some enormous, sinister glow.

I quickly light the lamp, drink water straight from the carafe, then rush to the open window. The weather outside is magnificent. There’s a smell of hay and of something else very good. I can see the teeth of the fence, the sleepy, scrawny trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of the forest; a calm, very bright moon in the sky, and not a single cloud. Silence, not a leaf stirs. I feel as if everything is looking at me and listening in on how I’m going to die …

Eerie. I close the window and run to my bed. I feel my pulse and, not finding it in my wrist, search for it in my temples, then under my chin, then again in my wrist, and it’s all cold, clammy with sweat. My breath comes quicker and quicker, my body trembles, all my insides are stirred up, my face and bald head feel as if they’re covered with cobwebs.

What to do? Call the family? No, no need. I don’t know what my wife and Liza will do if they come to me.

I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes, and wait, wait … My back is cold, it’s as if it were being drawn into me, and I have the feeling that death will surely come at me from behind, on the sly …

“Kee-wee, kee-wee!” a piping suddenly sounds in the silence of the night, and I don’t know where it is—in my breast, or outside?

“Kee-wee, kee-wee!”

My God, how frightening! I’d drink more water, but I’m scared to open my eyes and afraid to raise my head. The terror I feel is unconscious, animal, and I’m unable to understand why I’m frightened: is it because I want to live, or because a new, still unknown pain awaits me?

Upstairs, through my ceiling, someone either moans or laughs … I listen. Shortly afterwards I hear footsteps on the stairs. Someone hurriedly comes down, then goes back up. A moment later there are footsteps downstairs again; someone stops by my door, listening.

“Who’s there?” I cry.

The door opens, I boldly open my eyes and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes tearful.

“You’re not asleep, Nikolai Stepanych?” she asks.

“What is it?”

“For God’s sake, go and look at Liza. Something’s the matter with her …”

“All right … with pleasure …” I mutter, very pleased that I’m not alone. “All right… this minute.”

I follow my wife, listen to what she tells me, and understand nothing in my agitation. Bright spots from her candle leap over the steps of the stairway, our long shadows quiver, my legs get tangled in the skirts of my dressing gown, I’m out of breath, and it seems to me as if something is pursuing me and wants to seize me by the back. “I’m going to die right now, here on the stairs,” I think. “Right now …” But the stairs and the dark corridor with the Italian window are behind us, and we go into Liza’s room. She’s sitting on her bed in nothing but her nightgown, her bare feet hanging down, and moaning.

“Oh, my God … oh, my God!” she murmurs, squinting at our candle. “I can’t, I can’t …”

“Liza, my child,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

Seeing me, she cries out and throws herself on my neck.

“My kind papa …” she sobs, “my good papa … My dearest little papa … I don’t know what’s wrong with me … I’m so sick at heart!”

She embraces me, kisses me, and babbles tender words such as I heard from her when she was a little girl.

“Calm yourself, my child, God be with you,” I say. “You mustn’t cry. I’m sick at heart, too.”

I try to cover her with a blanket, my wife gives her a drink, the two of us fuss confusedly around the bed; my shoulder brushes her shoulder, and in that moment the recollection comes to me of how we used to bathe our children together.

“Help her, help her!” my wife implores. “Do something!”

But what can I do? I can’t do anything. The girl has some burden on her heart, but I don’t know or understand anything, and can only murmur:

“Never mind, never mind… It will go away… Sleep, sleep …

As if on purpose, a dog’s howling suddenly comes from our yard, first soft and uncertain, then loud, in two voices. I’ve never ascribed any particular significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the hooting of owls, but now my heart is painfully wrung and I hasten to explain this howling to myself.

“Nonsense …” I think. “The influence of one organism on another. My intense nervous strain transmitted itself to my wife, to Liza, to the dog, that’s all … This sort of transmission explains presentiments, premonitions …”

When I go back to my room a little later to write a prescription for Liza, I no longer think I’ll die soon, I simply feel a heaviness, a tedium, in my soul, so that I’m even sorry I didn’t die suddenly. I stand motionless for a long time in the middle of the room, trying to think up something to prescribe for Liza, but the moaning through the ceiling quiets down, and I decide not to prescribe anything, and still I stand there …

There’s a dead silence, such a silence that, as some writer has said, it even rings in your ears. Time moves slowly, the strips of moonlight on the windowsill don’t change their position, as if frozen … Dawn is still far off

But now the gate in the fence creaks, someone steals up and, breaking a branch from one of the scrawny trees, cautiously taps on the window with it.

“Nikolai Stepanych!” I hear a whisper. “Nikolai Stepanych!”

I open the window, and think I’m dreaming: by the window, pressing herself to the wall, stands a woman in a black dress, brightly lit by the moon, gazing at me with big eyes. The moon makes her face look pale, stern, and fantastic, as if made of marble. Her chin trembles.

“It’s me …” she says. “Me … Katya!”

In the moonlight all women’s eyes look big and black, people look taller and paler, which is probably why I didn’t recognize her at first.

“What’s the matter?”

“Forgive me,” she says. “For some reason I felt unbearably sick at heart … I couldn’t stand it and came here … There was light in your window and … and I decided to knock … Excuse me … Oh, if only you knew how sick at heart I am! What are you doing now?”

“Nothing … Insomnia.”

“I had a sort of presentiment. Anyhow, it’s nonsense.”

Her eyebrows rise, her eyes glisten with tears, and her whole face lights up with that familiar, long-absent expression of trustfulness.

“Nikolai Stepanych!” she says imploringly, reaching out to me with both arms. “My dear, I beg you … I implore you … If you don’t disdain my friendship and my respect for you, agree to do what I ask you!”

“What is it?”

“Take my money from me!”

“Well, what will you think up next! Why should I need your money?”

“You’ll go somewhere for a cure … You need a cure. Will you take it? Yes? Yes, my dearest?”

She peers greedily into my face and repeats:

“You’ll take it? Yes?”

“No, my friend, I won’t…” I say. “Thank you.”

She turns her back to me and hangs her head. I probably refused her in such a tone as to prohibit any further discussion of money.

“Go home to bed,” I say. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”

“So you don’t consider me your friend?” she asks glumly.

“I didn’t say that. But your money is of no use to me now.”

“Forgive me …” she says, lowering her voice a whole octave. “I understand you … To be indebted to a person like me … a retired actress … Anyhow, good-bye …”

And she leaves so quickly that I don’t even have time to say good-bye to her.

VI

I’m in Kharkov.

Since it would be useless, and beyond my strength, to struggle with my present mood, I’ve decided that the last days of my life will be irreproachable at least in the formal sense; if I’m not right in my attitude towards my family, which I’m perfectly aware of, I will try to do what they want me to do. If it’s go to Kharkov, I go to Kharkov. Besides, I’ve become so indifferent to everything lately that it makes absolutely no difference to me where I go, to Kharkov, to Paris, or to Berdichev.²⁵

I arrived here around noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. On the train I got seasick and suffered from the drafts, so now I’m sitting on the bed, holding my head and waiting for my tic. I ought to go and see the professors I know here, but I haven’t the urge or the strength.

The old servant on my floor comes to ask whether I have bed linen. I keep him for about five minutes and ask him several questions about Gnekker, on whose account I’ve come here. The servant turns out to be a native of Kharkov, knows it like the palm of his hand, but doesn’t remember a single house that bears the name of Gnekker. I ask about country estates—same answer.

The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three … These last months of my life, as I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my whole life. And never before was I able to be so reconciled to the slowness of time as now. Before, when I waited at the station for a train or sat at an examination, a quarter of an hour seemed like an eternity, but now I can spend the whole night sitting motionless on my bed and think with perfect indifference that tomorrow the night will be just as long and colorless, and the night after …

In the corridor it strikes five o’clock, six, seven … It’s getting dark.

There’s a dull pain in my cheek—the tic is beginning. To occupy myself with thoughts, I put myself in my former point of view, when I was not indifferent, and ask: why am I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sitting in this small hotel room, on this bed with its strange gray blanket? Why am I looking at this cheap tin washbasin and listening to the trashy clock clanking in the corridor? Can all this be worthy of my fame and my high station among people? And my response to these questions is a smile. The naïveté with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the exclusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I’m well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in Niva and World Illustrated,²⁶ I’ve even read my own biography in a certain German magazine—and what of it? I’m sitting all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm … Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway workers, the inconvenience of the passport system,²⁷ expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior—all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives. How, then, does the exclusiveness of my position manifest itself? Suppose I’m famous a thousand times over, that I’m a hero and the pride of my motherland; all the newspapers publish bulletins about my illness, expressions of sympathy come to me by mail from colleagues, students, the public; but all that will not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in anguish, in utter solitude … No one’s to blame for that, of course, but, sinner that I am, I dislike my popular name. It seems to me that it has betrayed me.

Around ten o’clock I fall asleep and, despite my tic, sleep soundly and would go on sleeping for a long time if no one woke me up. Shortly after one o’clock there is a sudden knock at the door.

“Who’s there?”

“Telegram!”

“You might have brought it tomorrow,” I grumble as I take the telegram from the servant. “Now I won’t fall back to sleep.”

“Sorry, sir. You had a light burning, I thought you weren’t asleep.”

I open the telegram and look at the signature first: from my wife. What does she want?

“Yesterday Gnekker and Liza secretly married. Come back.”

I read this telegram and am frightened for a moment. What frightens me is not what Gnekker and Liza have done, but the indifference with which I receive the news of their marriage. They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

I lie down in bed again and begin inventing thoughts to occupy myself with. What to think about? It seems everything has already been thought through, and there’s nothing now that is capable of stirring my mind.

When dawn comes I’m sitting in bed with my arms around my knees and, since I have nothing to do, am trying to know myself. “Know yourself”²⁸—what splendid and useful advice; too bad the ancients never thought of showing how to use this advice.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.

And now I examine myself: what do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, and students to love in us not the name, not the brand or label, but the ordinary person. What else? I’d like to have helpers and heirs. What else? I’d like to wake up in a hundred years and have at least a glimpse of what’s happened with science. I’d like to live another ten years or so … And what more?

Nothing more. I think, I think for a long time, and can’t think up anything else. And however much I think, however widely my thought ranges, it’s clear to me that my wishes lack some chief thing, some very important thing. In my predilection for science, in my wish to live, in this sitting on a strange bed and trying to know myself, in all the thoughts, feelings, and conceptions I form about everything, something general is lacking that would unite it all into a single whole. Each feeling and thought lives separately in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theater, literature, students, and in all the pictures drawn by my imagination, even the most skillful analyst would be unable to find what is known as a general idea or the god of the living man.

And if there isn’t that, there’s nothing.

Given such poverty, a serious illness, the fear of death, the influence of circumstances or of people, would be enough to overturn and smash to pieces all that I used to consider my worldview, and in which I saw the meaning and joy of my life. And therefore it’s not at all surprising that I should darken the last months of my life with thoughts and feelings worthy of a slave and a barbarian, and that I’m now indifferent and do not notice the dawn. When a man lacks that which is higher and stronger than any external influence, a good cold really is enough to make him lose his balance and begin to see an owl in every bird and hear a dog’s howl in every sound. And at that moment all his pessimism or optimism, together with his thoughts great and small, have the significance of mere symptoms and nothing more.

I am defeated. If so, there’s no point in continuing to think, no point in talking. I’ll sit and silently wait for what comes.

In the morning the servant brings me tea and a copy of the local newspaper. I mechanically read through the announcements on the first page, the editorial, the excerpts from other newspapers and magazines, the news reports … In the news I find, among other things, the following item: “Yesterday our famous scientist, the acclaimed professor Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, arrived in Kharkov on the express train and is staying at such-and-such hotel.”

Evidently, great names are created so as to live by themselves, apart from their bearers. Now my name is peacefully going about Kharkov; in some three months, inscribed in gold letters on a tombstone, it will shine like the sun itself—while I’m already covered with moss …

A light tap at the door. Someone wants me.

“Who’s there? Come in!”

The door opens and I step back in surprise, hastily closing the skirts of my dressing gown. Katya stands before me.

“Good morning,” she says, breathing heavily after climbing the stairs. “You didn’t expect me? I … I’ve come here, too.”

She sits down and continues, stammering and not looking at me.

“Why don’t you wish me good morning? I’ve come, too … today … I found out you were in this hotel and looked you up.”

“I’m very glad to see you,” I say, shrugging my shoulders, “but I’m surprised … It’s as if you dropped from the sky. Why are you here?”

“Me? I … simply up and came.”

Silence. Suddenly she gets up impetuously and steps towards me.

“Nikolai Stepanych!” she says, turning pale and clasping her hands to her breast. “Nikolai Stepanych! I can’t live like this any longer! I can’t! For the love of God, tell me quickly, this very moment: what am I to do? Tell me, what am I to do?”

“But what can I say?” I’m perplexed. “There’s nothing.”

“Tell me, I implore you!” she goes on, choking and trembling all over. “I swear to you, I can’t live like this any longer! It’s beyond my strength!”

She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back, wrings her hands, stamps her feet; her hat has fallen off her head and dangles from an elastic, her hair is disheveled.

“Help me! Help me!” she implores. “I can’t go on!”

She takes a handkerchief from her traveling bag, and along with it pulls out several letters that fall from her knees onto the floor. I pick them up from the floor and on one of them recognize Mikhail Fyodorovich’s handwriting, and unintentionally read a bit of one word—“passionat …”

“There’s nothing I can tell you, Katya,” I say.

“Help me!” she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. “You’re my father, my only friend! You’re intelligent, educated, you’ve lived a long time! You’ve been a teacher! Tell me: what am I to do?”

“In all conscience, Katya, I don’t know …”

I’m at a loss, embarrassed, touched by her sobbing, and barely able to keep my feet.

“Let’s have breakfast, Katya,” I say with a forced smile. “Enough crying!”

And I add at once in a sinking voice:

“I’ll soon be no more, Katya …”

“Just one word, one word!” she weeps, holding her arms out to me. “What am I to do?”

“You’re a strange one, really …” I murmur. “I don’t understand! Such a clever girl and suddenly—there you go, bursting into tears! …

Silence ensues. Katya straightens her hair, puts her hat on, then crumples the letters and stuffs them into her bag—and all this silently and unhurriedly Her face, breast, and gloves are wet with tears, but the expression of her face is already dry, severe … I look at her and feel ashamed that I’m happier than she is. I’ve noticed the absence in me of what my philosopher colleagues call a general idea only shortly before death, in the twilight of my days, but the soul of this poor thing has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!

“Let’s have breakfast, Katya,” I say.

“No, thank you,” she replies coldly.

Another minute passes in silence.

“I don’t like Kharkov,” I say. “Much too gray. A gray sort of city.”

“Yes, perhaps so … Not pretty … I won’t stay long … Passing through. I’m leaving today.”

“Where for?”

“The Crimea … I mean, the Caucasus.”

“Ah. For long?”

“I don’t know.”

Katya gets up and, smiling coldly, gives me her hand without looking at me.

I want to ask: “So you won’t be at my funeral?” But she doesn’t look at me, her hand is cold, like a stranger’s. I silently walk with her to the door … Now she has left my room and walks down the long corridor without looking back. She knows I’m following her with my eyes and will probably look back from the turn.

No, she didn’t look back. The black dress flashed a last time, the footsteps faded away … Farewell, my treasure!

NOVEMBER 1889