Текст книги "The Adolescent"

Автор книги: Федор Достоевский

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My prince knew nothing as yet about the probable arrival of his daughter, and assumed she would return from Moscow maybe in a week. But I learned of it the evening before, quite by accident: Tatyana Pavlovna, who had received a letter from the general’s widow, let it slip to my mother in my presence. Though they whispered and used remote phrases, I guessed it. Of course, I wasn’t eavesdropping; I simply couldn’t help listening when I saw my mother suddenly become so agitated at the news of this woman’s arrival. Versilov was not at home.

I didn’t want to inform the old man of it, because I couldn’t help noticing in all that time how afraid he was of her coming. He had even let slip three days earlier, though timidly and remotely, that he was afraid of her coming on account of me—that is, that on account of me he would get a scolding. I must add, however, that in family relations he still maintained his independence and domination, especially in managing money. My first conclusion about him was that he was a real woman; but then I had to re-conclude, in the sense that, even if he was a woman, all the same there remained in him at times a sort of stubbornness, if not real courage. There were moments when it was almost impossible to do anything with his apparently cowardly and susceptible character. Versilov explained it to me later in more detail. I mention now, with curiosity, that he and I hardly ever spoke of the general’s widow—that is, avoided speaking, as it were; I especially avoided it, and he in turn avoided speaking of Versilov, and I surmised at once that he wouldn’t answer me, if I were to ask any of the ticklish questions that interested me so much.

If anyone wants to know what we talked about during that whole month, I will reply that, essentially, it was about everything in the world, but all of it somehow strange. I very much liked the extreme artlessness with which he treated me. I sometimes studied the man with extreme perplexity, asking myself, “Where was he sitting before? He’s just right for our high school, and for the fourth class at that—he’d make the nicest schoolmate.” I also wondered more than once at his face: it looked extremely serious (almost handsome) and dry; thick, gray, curly hair, an open gaze; and his whole figure was lean, of a good height; but his face had a sort of unpleasant, almost indecent property of changing suddenly from the extraordinarily serious to the much-too-playful, so that someone seeing it for the first time would never expect it. I spoke of it with Versilov, who heard me out with curiosity; it seemed he hadn’t expected me to be able to make such observations; yet he observed in passing that this property had appeared in the prince after his illness and maybe only quite recently.

We talked for the most part about two abstract subjects: about God and his being—that is, whether he exists or not—and about women. The prince was very religious and sentimental. In his office hung an enormous icon case with an icon lamp. But something would come over him—and he’d suddenly begin to doubt God’s existence and say astonishing things, obviously challenging me to reply. My attitude to this idea was rather indifferent, generally speaking, but even so the two of us would get carried away, and always sincerely. Generally, even now I recall all those conversations with pleasure. But the sweetest thing of all for him was to chat about women, and since I, given my dislike of conversations on that topic, could not be a good interlocutor, he would sometimes even get upset.

He had just begun talking in this vein as I came in that morning. I found him in a playful mood, while the previous evening I had left him extremely sad for some reason. Yet I absolutely had to be done that day with the matter of my salary—before the arrival of certain persons. I calculated that we would be interruptedthat day without fail (not for nothing was my heart pounding)—and then perhaps I wouldn’t venture to talk about money. But since one couldn’t just start talking about money, I naturally got angry at my own stupidity and, as I remember it now, vexed at some much-too-merry question he asked me, I fired all my views of women at him at once, and that with extreme ardor. But the result was that he got still more carried away, worse luck for me.

III

“ . . . I DON’T LIKE WOMEN, because they’re rude, because they’re awkward, because they’re not independent, and because they wear indecent clothes,” I concluded my lengthy tirade incoherently.

“Have mercy, dear heart!” he cried, terribly amused, which made me still angrier.

I’m yielding and trifling only in trifles, but I will never yield in the main thing. In trifles, in certain social manners, one can do God knows what with me, and I’ve always cursed this trait in myself. Out of some stinking good naturedness, I have sometimes been ready to yes even some society fop, seduced solely by his courtesy, or to get into an argument with a fool, which is most unpardonable. All from lack of self-control and from having grown up in a corner. You go away angry and swearing that tomorrow it won’t be repeated, but tomorrow the same thing happens again. That’s why I’ve sometimes been taken almost for a sixteen-year-old. But instead of acquiring self-control, I prefer even now to shut myself up still more in a corner, though it be in the most misanthropic way: “Maybe I’m awkward, but—farewell!” I say that seriously and forever. However, I am by no means writing this apropos of the prince, and not even apropos of our conversation that time.

“I am by no means saying it for your amusement,” I almost shouted at him, “I am simply voicing a conviction.”

“But how is it that women are rude and indecently dressed? That’s novel.”

“They’re rude. Go to the theater, go for a promenade. Every man knows the right side, they come towards each other and pass each other, he on the right and I on the right. A woman, that is, a lady—I’m speaking of ladies—comes stomping straight at you, without even noticing you, as if it were your unfailing duty to jump aside and yield her the way. I’m ready to yield, as to a weaker being, but why is it her right, why is she so sure I must do it—that’s what’s offensive! I always spit when I run into them. And after that they cry that they’re humiliated and demand equality; what kind of equality is it, if she tramples me down or stuffs my mouth full of sand!”

“Sand!”

“Yes. Because they’re indecently dressed; only a depraved man can fail to notice that. They shut the doors in courts when a case gets to indecency; why then do they allow it in the streets, where there are a lot more people? They pad themselves quite openly with some frou-frou behind, to show that they’re belles-femmes. Openly! I can’t help noticing it, and any young man will notice it, and a child, a beginning little boy, will also notice it. It’s base. Let old philanderers admire it and run after them with their tongues hanging out, but there are pure young people who must be protected. The only thing left to do is spit. She goes down the boulevard and leaves a four-foot train behind her sweeping the dust; how about the one behind her: you either have to run ahead or jump aside, otherwise she’ll stuff five pounds of sand in your nose and mouth. Besides, it’s silk, and she frays it on the stones for three miles, just for the sake of fashion, and her husband earns five hundred roubles a year in the Senate: ⁷there’s where the bribes are sitting! I always spit on it, I spit and berate them out loud.”

Though I’m writing down this conversation somewhat humorously here, and in a way characteristic of me then, the thinking is still mine.

“And get away with it?” the prince became curious.

“I spit and walk away. Naturally, she feels it, but she doesn’t let it show, she stomps on majestically without turning her head. And there was only one time that I berated a couple of them quite seriously, both with trains, on the boulevard—naturally, not in nasty words, I merely observed out loud that trains were offensive.”

“That’s how you put it?”

“Of course. First, she’s trampling on social conventions, and second, she’s raising dust; and the boulevard is for everybody: I walk there, another person walks there, a third, Fyodor, Ivan, it makes no difference. So I spoke it all out. And generally I don’t like the female gait, if you look from behind; I spoke that out, too, but in a hint.”

“My friend, you could have gotten into a serious incident: they could have dragged you to the justice of the peace!”

“They could have done nothing at all. There were no grounds for complaint: a man walks by and talks to himself. Every man has the right to voice his conviction into the air. I was speaking abstractly, I wasn’t addressing them. They themselves did the pestering: they started berating me, they were much nastier than I was: milksop, ought to go without dinner, nihilist, hand him over to the police, and that I started pestering them because they were alone and weak women, and that if there had been a man with them, I’d have put my tail between my legs at once. I told them coolly that they should stop bothering me, and that I would cross to the other side. And in order to prove to them that I’m not afraid of their men and am ready to accept their challenge, I will follow twenty steps behind them right to their house, then stand in front of their house and wait for their men. And so I did.”

“Really?”

“Of course, it was stupid, but I was worked up. They dragged me for over three miles, in hot weather, as far as the institutes, went into a one-story wooden house—quite a decent one, I must admit—and you could see lots of flowers inside, two canaries, three lapdogs, and some framed prints. I stood in the middle of the street in front of the house for about half an hour. They peeked out on the sly three times or so, and then drew all the blinds. Finally, an official came out of the gate, an elderly man; judging by his looks, he had been asleep and had been awakened on purpose; he was wearing, not quite a house robe, but something very informal; he stood by the gate, put his hands behind his back, and started looking at me, and I at him. He would glance away, then look at me again, and suddenly he began to smile at me. I turned around and left.”

“My friend, this is something Schilleresque! ⁸It has always surprised me: you’ve got ruddy cheeks, your face is bursting with health, and—such a, one might say, aversion to women! How is it possible that at your age a woman does not make a certain impression? When I was just eleven, mon cher, my tutor observed to me that I gazed too much at the statues in the Summer Garden.” ⁹“You’d like terribly for me to go and visit some local Josephine and come to let you know. There’s no need. I myself, when I was just thirteen, saw a woman’s nakedness, all of it; since then I’ve felt this loathing.”

“Seriously? But, cher enfant, a beautiful, fresh woman smells just like an apple, what’s there to loathe?”

“In my former little boarding school, at Touchard’s, even before high school, I had a comrade—Lambert. He used to beat me, because he was more than three years older, and I served him and took his boots off. When he went to confirmation, the abbé Rigaud visited him to congratulate him on his first communion, ¹⁰and the two rushed in tears to embrace each other, and the abbé Rigaud started pressing him to his breast terribly hard, with various gestures. I also wept and was very envious. When his father died, he left school, and I didn’t see him for two years, but after two years I met him in the street. He said he would come to see me. I was already in high school and was living with Nikolai Semyonovich. He came in the morning, showed me five hundred roubles, and told me to come with him. Though he had beaten me two years earlier, he had always needed me, not only for his boots; he used to tell me everything. He told me that he had stolen the money that day from his mother’s cashbox, having duplicated the key, because his father’s money was all his by law, and she dared not keep it from him, and that the abbé Rigaud had come the day before to admonish him—came in, stood over him and started whimpering, portraying horror, and raising his arms to the sky, “and I pulled my knife and said I’d cut his throat ” (he pronounced it thghroat). We drove to Kuznetsky. On the way, he told me that his mother had relations with the abbé Rigaud, and that he had noticed it, and that he spat on it all, and that everything they said about communion was rubbish. He said a lot more, and I was frightened. In Kuznetsky he bought a double-barreled shotgun, a game bag, cartridges, a horsewhip, and then also a pound of candy. We drove out of town to shoot, and on our way met a birdcatcher with his cages; Lambert bought a canary from him. In the woods he let the canary out, because it couldn’t fly far after being in a cage, and began shooting at it, but missed. It was the first time in his life he had shot a gun, but he had been wanting to buy a gun for a long time, still at Touchard’s, and we had long dreamed of a gun. He was as if spluttering. His hair was terribly black, his face white and red-cheeked like a mask, his nose long and aquiline, such as Frenchmen have, his teeth white, his eyes black. He tied the canary to a branch with a thread, and with both barrels, point-blank, from four inches away, blasted it twice, and it scattered into a hundred little feathers. Then we went back, stopped at a hotel, took a room, began eating and drinking champagne; a lady came . . . I was very struck, I remember, by how magnificently she was dressed, in green silk. Here I saw all that . . . what I told you about . . . Afterwards, when we started drinking again, he began to taunt her and abuse her; she was sitting there without her dress; he had taken her dress away, and when she began cursing and asking for her dress, so that she could put it on, he started whipping her as hard as he could on her bare shoulders with the whip. I stood up and seized him by the hair, so deftly that I threw him to the floor at once. He seized a fork and stuck it into my thigh. Then people rushed in, hearing the shouting, and I managed to escape. Since then the memory of nakedness has been loathsome to me; believe me, she was a beauty.”

As I talked, the prince’s face changed from playful to very sad.

“ Mon pauvre enfant! ⁴I’ve always been convinced that there were a great many unhappy days in your childhood.”

“Please don’t worry.”

“But you were alone, you told me so yourself, though there was this Lambert. The way you described it: the canary, the confirmation with tears on each other’s breasts, and then, after a year or so, he speaks of his mother and this abbot . . . O, mon cher, this children question of our time is simply frightful: while these little golden heads, with their curls and innocence, in their earliest childhood, flutter before you and look at you with their bright laughter and bright little eyes—they’re like God’s angels or lovely little birds; but later . . . but later it so happens that it would be better for them not to grow up at all!”

“How unnerved you are, Prince! As if you had children yourself. You don’t have children and never will.”

“ Tiens!” ⁵His face changed instantly. “In fact, Alexandra Petrovna—the day before yesterday, heh, heh!—Alexandra Petrovna Sinitsky—I think you must have met her here about three weeks ago—imagine, suddenly, the day before yesterday, to my cheerful remark that if I marry now, at least I can rest assured that I won’t have children—suddenly she says to me, and even with a sort of spite, ‘On the contrary, you precisely will, such a one as you will unfailinglyhave children, even in the very first year, you’ll see.’ Heh, heh! And everybody imagined for some reason that I’d suddenly get married; but, though it’s spiteful, you must agree it’s witty.”

“Witty, but offensive.”

“Well, cher enfant, one cannot be offended by just anybody. What I appreciate most of all in people is wittiness, which is evidently disappearing, and what Alexandra Petrovna is going to say—who can take that into account!”

“What, what did you say?” I latched on. “Not by just anybody . . . precisely so! Not everybody’s worth paying attention to—an excellent rule! That is precisely what I need. I’ll write it down. You occasionally say the nicest things, Prince.”

He beamed all over.

“ N’est-ce pas? ⁶Cher enfant, true wit is disappearing more and more. Eh, mais . . . C’est moi qui connais les femmes. ⁷Believe me, every woman’s life, whatever she may preach, is an eternal search for someone to submit to . . . a thirst for submission, so to speak. And note—without a single exception.”

“Perfectly true, splendid!” I cried in delight. At another time we would have launched at once into philosophical reflections on the subject, for a whole hour, but it was as if something suddenly bit me, and I blushed all over. I imagined that, by praising his bons mots, I was sucking up to him on account of the money, and that he would be sure to think of that when I began to ask. I mention it now on purpose.

“Prince, I humbly request that you pay me right now the fifty roubles you owe me for this month,” I blurted out all at once, irritated to the point of rudeness.

I remember (just as I remember that whole morning in minute detail) that a scene then took place between us that was most vile in its real truth. At first he didn’t understand me, looked for a long time and did not understand what money I was talking about. It was only natural that he never imagined I should receive a salary—and what for? True, he started assuring me later that he had forgotten, and, when he grasped it, he instantly started taking out the fifty roubles, but he became hurried and even turned red. Seeing how things were, I stood up and declared sharply that I could not accept the money now, that I had obviously been told of the salary either mistakenly or deceitfully, so that I would not reject the post, and that I now understood only too well that I had no reason to be paid, because there wasn’t any work. The prince became frightened and started assuring me that I had worked terribly much, and that I would have still more work, and that fifty roubles was so insignificant that he, on the contrary, would increase it, because it was his duty, and that he himself had negotiated with Tatyana Pavlovna, but had “unpardonably forgotten all about it.” I flared up and announced definitively that it would be mean of me to receive a salary for scandalous stories of how I had accompanied two trains to the institutes, that I had not been hired to amuse him, but to occupy myself with business, but since there was no business, it must be terminated, etc., etc. I couldn’t even have imagined that it was possible to be as frightened as he was after these words of mine. Naturally, the end was that I stopped objecting, and he did stick me with the fifty roubles: to this day I blush to recall that I accepted it! Things always end in meanness in this world, and, worst of all, he almost managed to convince me then that I had unquestionably earned it, and I had the foolishness to believe it, and with that it was somehow decidedly impossible not to take it.

“ Cher, cher enfant!” he exclaimed, kissing and embracing me (I confess, I myself was about to weep, devil knows why, though I instantly restrained myself, and even now, as I write, color comes to my face). “Dear friend, you’re now like one of my own; in this month you’ve become like a piece of my own heart! In ‘society’ there is only ‘society’ and nothing more; Katerina Nikolaevna” (his daughter) “is a brilliant woman, and I’m proud of it, but she often offends me, my dear, very, very often . . . Well, and these girls ( elles sont charmantes ⁸) and their mothers, who come on birthdays—they only bring their embroidery, but they don’t know how to say anything. I’ve accumulated sixty pillows with their embroidery, all dogs and deer. I love them very much, but with you I’m almost as if with my own—and not with a son, but a brother, and I especially like it when you object; you’re literary, you’ve read, you know how to admire . . .”

“I’ve read nothing and am not literary at all. I’ve read whatever happened along, but in the past two years I haven’t read at all and don’t intend to.”

“Why not?”

“I have other goals.”

“Cher . . . it’s a pity to say at the end of your life, as I do, je sais tout, mais je ne sais rien de bon. ⁹I decidedly do not know why I’ve lived in the world! But . . . I owe you so much . . . and I even wanted . . .”

He broke off somehow suddenly, went limp, and became pensive. After a shock (and with him the shocks could come every other minute, God knows why), he usually seemed to lose his good sense for a while and be unable to control himself; however, he would soon put himself to rights, so it was all harmless. We sat for a minute. His lower lip, which was very thick, hung down . . . Most of all, I was surprised that he had suddenly mentioned his daughter, and with such candor. Of course, I ascribed it to his being upset.

“ Cher enfant, you’re not angry that I address you familiarly, are you?” suddenly escaped him.

“Not in the least. I confess, in the beginning, the first few times, I was slightly offended and also wanted to address you familiarly, but I saw it was stupid, because you surely don’t do it to humiliate me.”

He was no longer listening and had forgotten his question.

“Well, how’s your father?” he suddenly raised his pensive eyes to me.

I simply jumped. First, he had designated Versilov as my father—something he had never allowed himself with me; and, second, he had begun speaking of Versilov, something that had never happened before.

“Sits without money and mopes,” I replied briefly, burning with curiosity myself.

“Yes, about money. Their case is to be decided today in the district court, and I’m waiting for Prince Seryozha and what he’ll come with. He promised to come to me straight from court. Their whole destiny is involved; it’s sixty or eighty thousand. Of course, I’ve also always wished the best for Andrei Petrovich” (Versilov, that is), “and it seems he’ll come out the winner and the princes will be left with nothing. Law!”

“In court today?” I exclaimed, struck.

The thought that Versilov had neglected to inform me even of that struck me in the extreme. “That means he said nothing to mother, or maybe to anybody,” it occurred to me all at once. “What character!

“And is Prince Sokolsky in Petersburg?” another thought suddenly struck me.

“Since yesterday. Straight from Berlin, especially for this day.”

Another extremely important piece of news for me. “And he’ll come here today, this man who gave hima slap!”

“Well, what of it?” The prince’s whole face suddenly changed. “He still preaches God as he used to, and, and . . . maybe still goes after the girls, after unfledged little girls? Heh, heh! Right now, too, there’s a most amusing anecdote hatching . . . Heh, heh!”

“Who preaches? Who goes after the girls?”

“Andrei Petrovich! Would you believe, he pestered us all back then like a burr—what do we eat, what do we think?—or almost like that. Frightened us and purified us: ‘If you’re religious, why don’t you go and become a monk?’ He demanded almost that. Mais quelle idée! ¹⁰Even if it’s right, isn’t it too severe? It was me especially that he liked to frighten with the Last Judgment, me of all people.”

“I haven’t noticed any of that, and I’ve lived with him for a month now,” I replied, listening impatiently. It was terribly vexing that he hadn’t quite come to his senses and mumbled so incoherently.

“He just doesn’t say it now, but, believe me, it’s so. The man is clever, indisputably, and deeply educated; but is that the right kind of intelligence? It all happened to him after his three years abroad. And, I confess, he shocked me very much . . . he shocked everybody . . . Cher enfant, j’aime le bon Dieu ¹¹. . . I believe, I believe as much as I can, but—I was certainly beside myself then. Suppose I used a frivolous method, but I did it on purpose, in vexation—and besides, the essence of my objection was as serious as it has been from the beginning of the world: ‘If there is a supreme being,’ I say to him, ‘and it exists personally, and not in the form of some sort of spirit poured over creation in the form of a liquid or whatever (because that is still more difficult to understand)—where, then, does it live?’ My friend, c’était bête, ¹²undoubtedly, but that’s what all objections boil down to. Un domicile ¹³; is an important matter. He was terribly angry. He converted to Catholicism there.”

“I’ve also heard about that idea. Nonsense, surely.”

“I assure you by all that’s holy. Look at him well . . . However, you say he’s changed. Well, but at that time he tormented us all so! Would you believe, he behaved as if he were a saint and his relics were about to be revealed. ¹¹He demanded an account of our behavior from us, I swear to you! Relics! En voilà une autre! ¹⁴Well, let him be a monk or an anchorite—but here’s a man going around in a tailcoat and all the rest . . . and then suddenly—his relics! A strange wish for a man of the world and, I confess, a strange taste. I don’t say anything about it: of course, it’s all holy, and anything can happen . . . Besides, it’s all de l’inconnu, ¹⁵but for a man of the world it’s even indecent. If it should somehow happen to me, or they should offer it to me, I swear I’d refuse. Why, suddenly I’m dining today in a club, and then suddenly—I reveal myself! No, I’d be a laughing-stock! I told him all that then . . . He wore chains.” ¹²

I turned red with anger.

“Did you see the chains yourself ?”

“I didn’t myself, but . . .”

“Then I declare to you that it’s all a lie, a tissue of vile machinations and enemy slander, that is, of one enemy, the chiefest and most inhuman one, because he has only one enemy—your daughter!”

The prince flushed in his turn.

“ Mon cher, I beg you and I insist that in the future my daughter’s name never be mentioned again in my presence together with this vile story.”

I rose slightly. He was beside himself; his chin was trembling.

“ Cette histoire infâme! ¹⁶. . . I didn’t believe it, I never wanted to believe it, but . . . they tell me: believe it, believe it, I . . .”

Here the valet suddenly came in again and announced a visitor. I sank back down on my chair.

IV

TWO LADIES CAME in, both young, one the stepdaughter of one of the cousins of the prince’s late wife, or something of the sort, his ward, for whom he had already allotted a dowry, and who (I note it for the future) had money of her own; the other was Anna Andreevna Versilov, Versilov’s daughter, three years older than I, who lived with her brother at Mme. Fanariotov’s and whom before then I had seen only once in my life, fleetingly in the street, though I had already had a skirmish with her brother, also fleetingly, in Moscow (quite possibly I’ll mention that skirmish later on, if there’s room, though essentially it’s not worth it). This Anna Andreevna had been a special favorite of the prince’s since childhood (Versilov’s acquaintance with the prince began terribly long ago). I was so embarrassed by what had just transpired that I didn’t even stand up when they came in, though the prince stood up to meet them; and afterwards I thought it embarrassing to stand up, and remained in my place. Above all, I was thrown off, because the prince had been shouting at me just three minutes before, and I still didn’t know whether I should leave or not. But my old man had already forgotten everything completely, as was his wont, and was all pleasantly animated at the sight of the girls. He even managed, with a quick change of physiognomy and a sort of mysterious wink, to whisper to me hastily, just before they came in:

“Take a look at Olympiada, look closely, closely . . . I’ll tell you later . . .”

I looked at her quite closely and found nothing special: not a very tall girl, plump, and with extremely ruddy cheeks. Her face, however, was rather pleasant, the kind that the materialists like. Her expression was kind, perhaps, but with a wrinkle. She could not have been especially brilliant intellectually, at least not in a higher sense, but one could see cunning in her eyes. No more than nineteen years old. In short, nothing remarkable. We’d have called her a “pillow” in high school. (If I describe her in such detail, it’s solely because I’ll need it in the future.)

By the way, everything I’ve been describing so far, with such apparently unnecessary detail, all leads to the future and will be needed there. It will all echo in its own place: I’ve been unable to avoid it; and if it’s boring, I beg you not to read it.

Versilov’s daughter was quite a different sort of person. Tall, even slightly lean; an elongated and remarkably pale face, but black, fluffy hair; big, dark eyes, a profound gaze; small and red lips, a fresh mouth. The first woman whose gait did not fill me with loathing; however, she was thin and lean. The expression of her face was not entirely kind, but imposing; twenty-two years old. Hardly a single external feature resembling Versilov, and yet, by some miracle, an extraordinary resemblance to him in her facial expression. I don’t know if she was good-looking; that’s a matter of taste. Both women were dressed very modestly, so it’s not worth describing. I expected to be offended at once by some look or gesture from Miss Versilov, and I prepared myself; for her brother had offended me in Moscow, at our very first confrontation in life. She couldn’t have known me by my face, but she had certainly heard that I visited the prince. Everything the prince proposed or did aroused interest and was an event among that whole heap of his relations and “expectant ones”—the more so his sudden partiality for me. I knew positively that the prince was very interested in the fate of Anna Andreevna and was seeking a fiancé for her. But it was more difficult to find a fiancé for Miss Versilov than for the ones who embroidered on canvas.