Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (457 page)

In reality he first discovered Dasha. He began teaching the quiet child even before Varvara Petrovna had begun to think about her. I repeat again, it was wonderful how children took to him. Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushin had been taught by him from the age of eight till eleven (Stepan Trofimovitch took no fees, of course, for his lessons, and would not on any account have taken payment from the Drozdovs). But he fell in love with the charming child and used to tell her poems of a sort about the creation of the world, about the earth, and the history of humanity. His lectures about the primitive peoples and primitive man were more interesting than the Arabian Nights. Liza, who was ecstatic over these stories, used to mimic Stepan Trofimovitch very funnily at home. He heard of this and once peeped in on her unawares. Liza, overcome with confusion, flung herself into his arms and shed tears; Stepan Trofimovitch wept too with delight. But Liza soon after went away, and only Dasha was left. When Dasha began to have other teachers, Stepan Trofimovitch gave up his lessons with her, and by degrees left off noticing her. Things went on like this for a long time. Once when she was seventeen he was struck by her prettiness. It happened at Varvara Petrovna’s table. He began to talk to the young girl, was much pleased with her answers, and ended by offering to give her a serious and comprehensive course of lessons on the history of Russian literature. Varvara Petrovna approved, and thanked him for his excellent idea, and Dasha was delighted. Stepan Trofimovitch proceeded to make special preparations for the lectures, and at last they began. They began with the most ancient period. The first lecture went off enchantingly. Varvara Petrovna was present. When Stepan Trofimovitch had finished, and as he was going informed his pupil that the next time he would deal with “The Story of the Expedition of Igor,” Varvara Petrovna suddenly got up and announced that there would be no more lessons. Stepan Trofimovitch winced, but said nothing, and Dasha flushed crimson. It put a stop to the scheme, however. This had happened just three years before Varvara Petrovna’s unexpected fancy.

Poor Stepan Trofimovitch was sitting alone free from all misgivings. Plunged in mournful reveries he had for some time been looking out of the window to see whether any of his friends were coining. But nobody would come. It was drizzling. It was turning cold, he would have to have the stove heated. He sighed. Suddenly a terrible apparition flashed upon his eyes:

Varvara Petrovna in such weather and at such an unexpected hour to see him! And on foot! He was so astounded that he forgot to put on his coat, and received her as he was, in his everlasting pink-wadded dressing-jacket.

“
Ma bonne amie!”
he cried faintly, to greet her. “You’re alone; I’m glad; I can’t endure your friends. How you do smoke! Heavens, what an atmosphere! You haven’t finished your morning tea and it’s nearly twelve o’clock. It’s your idea of bliss — disorder! You take pleasure in dirt. What’s that torn paper on the floor? Nastasya, Nastasya! What is your Nastasya about? Open the window, the casement, the doors, fling everything wide open. And we’ll go into the drawing-room. I’ve come to you on a matter of importance. And you sweep up, my good woman, for once in your life.”

“They make such a muck!” Nastasya whined in a voice of plaintive exasperation.

“Well, you must sweep, sweep it up fifteen times a day! You’ve a wretched drawing-room” (when they had gone into the drawing-room). “Shut the door properly. She’ll be listening. You must have it repapered. Didn’t I send a paperhanger to you with patterns? Why didn’t you choose one? Sit down, and listen. Do sit down, I beg you. Where are you off to? Where are you off to I Where are you off to?

“I’ll be back directly,” Stepan Trofimovitch cried from the next room. “Here, I am again.”

“Ah,- you’ve changed your coat.” She scanned him mockingly. (He had flung his coat on over the dressing-jacket.) “Well, certainly that’s more suited to our subject. Do sit down, I entreat you.”

She told him everything at once, abruptly and impressively She hinted at the eight thousand of which he stood in such terrible need. She told him in detail of the dowry. Stepan Trofimovitch sat trembling, opening his eyes wider and wider. He heard it all, but he could not realise it clearly. He tried to speak, but his voice kept breaking. All he knew was that everything would be as she said, that to protest and refuse to agree would be useless, and that he was a married man irrevocably.

“
Mais, ma bonne amie! . . .
for the third time, and at my age . . . and to such a child.” He brought out at last,
“Mais, c’est une enfant!”

“A child who is twenty years old, thank God. Please don’t roll your eyes, I entreat you, you’re not on the stage. You’re very clever and learned, but you know nothing at all about life. You will always want a nurse to look after you. I shall die, and what will become of you? She will be a good nurse to you; she’s a modest girl, strong-willed, reasonable; besides, I shall be here too, I shan’t die directly. She’s fond of home, she’s an angel of gentleness. This happy thought came to me in Switzerland. Do you understand if I tell you myself that she is an angel of gentleness!” she screamed with sudden fury. “Your house is dirty, she will bring in order, cleanliness. Everything will shine like a mirror. Good gracious, do you expect me to go on my knees to you with such a treasure, to enumerate all the advantages, to court you! Why, you ought to be on your knees. . . . Oh, you shallow, shallow, faint-hearted man!”

“But . . . I’m an old man!”

“What do your fifty-three years matter! Fifty is the middle of life, not the end of it. You are a handsome man and you know it yourself. You know, too, what a respect she has for you. If I die, what will become of her? But married to you she’ll be at peace, and I shall be at peace. You have renown, a name, a loving heart. You receive a pension which I look upon as an obligation. You will save her perhaps, you will save her! In any case you will be doing her an honour. You will form her for life, you will develop her heart, you will direct her ideas. How many people come to grief nowadays because their ideas are wrongly directed. By that time your book will be ready, and you will at once set people talking about you again.”

“I am, in fact,” he muttered, at once flattered by Varvara Petrovna’s adroit insinuations. “I was just preparing to sit down to my ‘Tales from Spanish History.’”

“Well, there you are. It’s just come right.”

“But . . . she? Have you spoken to her?”

“Don’t worry about her. And there’s no need for you to be inquisitive. Of course, you must ask her yourself, entreat her to do you the honour, you understand? But don’t be uneasy. I shall be here. Besides, you love her.’’

Stepan Trofimovitch felt giddy. The walls were going round. There was one terrible idea underlying this to which he could

not reconcile himself.

“
Excellente amie”
his voice quivered suddenly. “I could never have conceived that you would make up your mind to give me in marriage to another . . . woman.”

“You’re not a girl, Stepan Trofimovitch. Only girls are given in marriage. Yon are taking a wife,” Varvara Petrovna hissed malignantly.

“
Oui, j’ai pris un mot pour un autre. Mais c’est egal.”
He gazed at her with a hopeless air.

“I see that
e’est egal,”
she muttered contemptuously through her teeth. “Good heavens! Why he’s going to faint. Nastasya, Nastasya, water!”

But water was not needed. He came to himself. Varvara Petrovna took up her umbrella.

“I see it’s no use talking to you now. . . .”

“
Oui, oui, je suis incapable.”

“Bat by to-morrow you’ll have rested and thought it over. Stay at home. If anything happens let me know, even if it’s at night. Don’t write letters, I shan’t read them. To-morrow I’ll come again at this time alone, for a final answer, and I trust it will be satisfactory. Try to have nobody here and no untidiness, for the place isn’t fit to be seen. Nastasya, Nastasya!”

The next day, of course, he consented, and, indeed, he could do nothing else. There was one circumstance . . .

VIII

Stepan Trofimovitch’s estate, as we used to call it (which consisted of fifty souls, reckoning in the old fashion, and bordered on Skvoreshniki), was not really his at all, but his first wife’s, and so belonged now to his son Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky. Stepan Trofimovitch was simply his trustee, and so, when the nestling was full-fledged, he had given his father a formal authorisation to manage the estate. This transaction was a profitable one for the young man. He received as much as a thousand roubles a year by way of revenue from the estate, though under the new regime it could not have yielded more than five hundred, and possibly not that. God knows how such an arrangement had arisen. The whole sum, however, was sent the young man by Varvara Petrovna, and Stepan Trofimovitch had nothing to do with a single rouble of it. On the other hand, the whole revenue from the land remained in his pocket, and he had, besides, completely ruined the estate, letting it to a mercenary rogue, and without the knowledge of Varvara Petrovna selling the timber which gave the estate its chief value. He had some time before he sold the woods bit by bit. It was worth at least eight thousand, yet he had only received five thousand for it. But he sometimes lost too much at the club, and was afraid to ask Varvara Petrovna for the money. She clenched her teeth when she heard at last of everything. And now, all at once, his son announced that he was coming himself to sell his property for what he could get for it, and commissioned his father to take steps promptly to arrange the sale. It was clear that Stepan Trofimovitch, being a generous and disinterested man, felt ashamed of his treatment of
ce cher enfant
(whom he had seen for the last time nine years before as a student in Petersburg). The estate might originally have been worth thirteen Or fourteen thousand. Now it was doubtful whether anyone would give five for it. No doubt Stepan Trofimovitch was fully entitled by the terms of the trust to sell the wood, and taking into account the incredibly large yearly revenue of a thousand roubles which had been sent punctually for so many years, he could have put up a good defence of his management. But Stepan Trofimovitch was a generous man of exalted impulses. A wonderfully fine inspiration occurred to his mind: when Petrusha returned, to lay on the table before him the maximum price of fifteen thousand roubles without a hint at the sums that had been sent him hitherto, and warmly and with tears to press
ce cher fils
to his heart, and so to make an end of all accounts between them. He began cautiously and indirectly unfolding this picture before Varvara Petrovna. He hinted that this would add a peculiarly noble note to their friendship . . . to their “idea.” This would set the parents of the last generation — and people of the last generation generally — in such a disinterested and magnanimous light in comparison with the new frivolous and socialistic younger generation. He said a great deal more, but Varvara Petrovna was obstinately silent. At last she informed him airily that she was prepared to buy their estate, and to pay for it the maximum price, that is, six or seven thousand (though four would have been a fair price for it). Of the remaining eight thousand which had vanished with the woods she said not a word.

This conversation took place a month before the match was proposed to- him. Stepan Trofimovitch was overwhelmed, and began to ponder. There might in the past have been a hope that his soft would not come, after all — an outsider, that is to say, might have hoped so. Stepan Trofimovitch as a father would; have indignantly rejected the insinuation that he could entertain such a hope. Anyway queer rumours had hitherto been reaching us about Petrusha. To begin with, on completing his studies at the university six years before, he had hung about in Petersburg without getting work. Suddenly we got the news that he had taken part in issuing some anonymous manifesto and that he was implicated in the affair. Then he suddenly turned up abroad in Switzerland at Geneva — he had escaped, very likely.

“It’s surprising to me,” Stepan Trofimovitch commented, greatly disconcerted. “Petrusha,
c’est une si pauvre tete!
He’s good, noble-hearted, very sensitive, and I was so delighted with him in Petersburg, comparing him with the young people of to-day. But
c’est un pauvre sire, tout de meme.. . .
And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it ... second-hand, of course. And for me, for me, think what it means! I have so many enemies here and more still
there,
they’ll put it down to the father’s influence. Good God! Petrusha a revolutionist! What times we live in!”

Very soon, however, Petrusha sent his exact address from Switzerland for money to be sent him as usual; so he. could not be exactly an exile. And now, after four years abroad, he was suddenly making his appearance again in his own country”, and announced that he would arrive shortly, so there could be no charge against him. What was more, some one seemed to be interested in him and protecting him. He wrote now from the south of Russia, where he was busily engaged in some private but important business. All this was capital, but where was his father to get that other seven or eight thousand, to make up a suitable price for the estate? And what if there should be an outcry, and instead of that imposing picture it should come to a lawsuit? Something told Stepan Trofimovitch that the sensitive Petrusha would not relinquish anything that was to his interest. “Why is it — as I’ve noticed,” Stepan Trofimovitch whispered to me once, “why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible skinflints, so avaricious, so keen over property, and, in fact, the more socialistic, the more extreme they are, the keener they are over property . . . why is it? Can that, too, come from sentimentalism?” I don’t know whether there is any truth in this observation of Stepan Trofimovitch’s. I only know that Petrusha had somehow got wind of the sale of the woods and the rest of it, and that Stepan Trofimovitch was aware of the fact. I happened, too, to read some of Petrusha’s letters to his father. He wrote extremely rarely, once a year, or even less often. Only recently, to inform him of his approaching visit, he had sent two letters, one almost immediately after the other. All his letters were short, dry, consisting only of instructions, and as the father and son had, since their meeting in Petersburg, adopted the fashionable “thou” and “thee,” Petrusha’s letters had a striking resemblance to the missives that used to be sent by landowners of the old school from the town to their serfs whom they had left in charge of their estates. And now suddenly this eight thousand which would solve the difficulty would be wafted to him by Varvara Petrovna’s proposition. And at the same time she made him distinctly feel that it never could be wafted to him from anywhere else. Of course Stepan Trofimovitch consented.