A Dreary Story

(From the notes of an old man)

There is in Russia an honored professor, one Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, a Privy Councillor and holder of orders; he has so many Russian and foreign decorations that when he has occasion to put them all on, the students call him the iconostasis. His acquaintance is of the most aristocratic kind; at least, for the last 25 to 30 years there has not been, in Russia, a single famous scholar with whom he has not been closely acquainted. Nowadays there is no one left for him to be friends with, but if we speak of the past, the long list of his illustrious friends closes with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the poet Nekrasov, who honored him with the most sincere and warm friendship. He is a member of every Russian university and of three foreign ones. And so on, and so forth. All this, and much else that might still be said, makes up what is called my name.

This name of mine is a popular one. In Russia it is known to every literate person, and abroad it is mentioned from the lecture platform with the addition of "well-known" and "esteemed." It belongs to that small number of fortunate names which it is considered bad form to abuse, or to take in vain, either in public or in print. And so it should be. For bound up closely with my name is the notion of a man who is famous, richly gifted, and unquestionably useful. I am industrious and hardy as a camel, which matters, and talented, which matters even more. Besides, I might add, I am a well-bred, modest, and honest fellow. Never have I stuck my nose into literature or politics, never sought popularity by sparring with ignoramuses, never delivered speeches at dinners or at the graves of colleagues... In short, there is not one blot on my scholarly name, and it has nothing to complain of. It is a happy name.

The bearer of this name, that is, I myself, present the picture of a man of 62, with a bald head, false teeth, and an incurable tic. As brilliant and handsome as my name is, just so dull and ugly am I myself. My head and hands shake from weakness; my neck, like that of one of Turgenev’s heroines, resembles the neck of a double bass, my chest is sunken, my back narrow. When I speak or lecture, my mouth twists to one side; when I smile, my whole face is covered with the deathly wrinkles of old age. There is nothing imposing in my pitiful figure; only, perhaps, when I am in the grip of my tic, some special expression comes over me which must, in anyone who glances at me, call up the grim and weighty thought: "It looks as though this man will die soon."

I still lecture, as before, not badly; as before, I can hold my listeners’ attention for two hours running. My ardor, the literary quality of my delivery, and my humor make the flaws of my voice almost unnoticeable, though it is dry, harsh, and singsong, like a bigot’s. But I write badly. That little piece of my brain in charge of the writing faculty has refused to serve any longer. My memory has weakened, there is not enough sequence in my thoughts, and whenever I set them down on paper, it seems to me every time that I have lost the feel for their organic connection, that the construction is monotonous, the sentence poor and timid. Often I write not what I mean to; when I write the ending, I no longer remember the beginning. Often I forget ordinary words, and I always have to spend a great deal of energy avoiding, in my writing, superfluous phrases and unnecessary subordinate clauses — both of which plainly testify to the decline of mental power. And it is remarkable that the simpler the letter, the more agonizing my effort. Over a scientific article I feel far freer and cleverer than over a congratulatory letter or a memorandum. One more thing: it is easier for me to write in German or English than in Russian.

As for my present manner of life, I must first of all note the insomnia from which I have been suffering of late. If I were asked what now forms the chief and fundamental feature of my existence, I would answer: insomnia. As before, out of habit, at exactly midnight I undress and go to bed. I fall asleep quickly, but wake up around two, with the feeling that I have not slept at all. I have to get out of bed and light the lamp. For an hour or two I walk from corner to corner of the room and study pictures and photographs long familiar to me. When walking grows tiresome, I sit down at my desk. I sit motionless, thinking of nothing and feeling no desires; if there is a book lying before me, I draw it toward myself mechanically and read without the slightest interest. So it was that recently, in one night, I mechanically read through an entire novel with the strange title "What the Swallow Sang." Or else, to occupy my attention, I make myself count to a thousand, or I picture the face of one of my colleagues and begin to recall in what year and under what circumstances he entered the service. I like to listen to sounds. Now, two rooms away, my daughter Liza will quickly say something in her sleep; now my wife will cross the hall with a candle and invariably drop the matchbox; now a warped cupboard will creak, or the burner in the lamp will suddenly hum — and all these sounds, for some reason, stir me.

Not to sleep at night means to feel oneself abnormal every single minute, and so I wait impatiently for morning and for the day, when I have the right not to sleep. A great deal of wearisome time passes before a cock crows in the yard. That is my first herald of good news. As soon as he crows, I already know that in an hour the porter downstairs will wake and, coughing crossly, will go up the stairs for some reason. And then, little by little, the air outside the windows will begin to pale, and voices will ring out in the street...

My day begins with my wife’s arrival. She comes in to me in her petticoat, uncombed, but already washed, smelling of flower cologne, and with the air of having come in by accident, and every time she says the same thing:

"Forgive me, I’ve just come for a minute... You still haven’t slept?"

Then she puts out the lamp, sits down by the table, and begins to talk. I am no prophet, but I know in advance what will be said. Every morning it is the same. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she suddenly remembers our son the officer, serving in Warsaw. After the twentieth of every month we send him 50 rubles — this is chiefly what furnishes the topic for our conversation.

"Of course it’s hard on us," my wife sighs, "but until he’s finally on his own feet, we’re obliged to help him. The boy’s in a foreign land, the pay is small... Still, 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 do not grow smaller from our talking about them often, but my wife does not acknowledge experience, and punctually every morning tells me both about our officer and about how bread, thank God, has grown cheaper while sugar has gone up two kopecks — and all this in a tone as though she were reporting news to me.

I listen, chime in mechanically, and, probably because I have not slept the night, strange, needless thoughts take hold of me. I look at my wife and marvel like a child. In bewilderment I ask myself: can it really be that this old, very stout, clumsy woman, with the dull expression of petty worry and fear before a crust of bread, with a gaze clouded by constant thoughts of debts and want, who knows how to talk of nothing but expenses and to smile only at cheapness — can it really be that this woman was once that same slender Varya whom I fell passionately in love with for her fine, clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, like Othello with Desdemona, for her "compassion" for my science? Can this really be that same wife of mine, Varya, who once bore me a son?

I peer intently into the face of the damp, ungainly old woman, searching in her for my Varya, but of the past all that has survived in her is her fear for my health, and her habit of calling my salary "our" salary, my cap "our" cap. It hurts me to look at her, and, to comfort her at least a little, I let her say whatever she likes, and even keep silent when she judges people unfairly or scolds me for not taking up private practice and not publishing textbooks.

Our conversation always ends the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I have not yet had my tea, and takes fright.

"What am I doing, sitting here?" she says, rising. "The samovar’s been on the table forever, and here I am chattering. What a scatterbrain I’ve become, Lord!"

She walks off quickly and stops at the door to say:

"We owe Yegor for five months. Did you know that? One shouldn’t let a servant’s wages pile up, how many times have I said it! Paying ten rubles for one month is far easier than fifty for five!"

Having gone out the door, she stops again and says:

"I’m sorry for no one so much as for our poor Liza. The girl studies at the conservatory, is always in good company, and yet God knows how she’s dressed. Such a little coat that it’s a shame to show herself in the street. If she were someone else’s daughter, it would be nothing, but everyone knows her father is a famous professor, a Privy Councillor!"

And having reproached me with my own name and rank, she finally goes off. So my day begins. It goes on no better.

As I drink my tea, my Liza comes in to me, in her little coat, her cap, and with her music, already quite ready to go to the conservatory. She is 22. She looks younger, is good-looking, and resembles my wife a little as she was in her youth. She kisses me tenderly on the temple and the hand, and says:

"Good morning, Papa dear. Are you well?"

As a child she was very fond of ice cream, and I often had to take her to a confectioner’s. Ice cream was, for her, the measure of everything beautiful. If she wanted to praise me, she would say: "Papa, you’re cream." One of her little fingers was called pistachio, another cream, a third raspberry, and so on. Usually, when in the mornings she came to greet me, I would sit her on my knee and, kissing her little fingers, would murmur:

"Cream... pistachio... lemon..."

And now, out of old habit, I kiss Liza’s fingers and mutter: "pistachio... cream... lemon..." but it comes out quite different. I am as cold as ice cream, and I am ashamed. When my daughter comes in to me and touches my temple with her lips, I shudder, as though a bee had stung my temple, I smile with an effort and turn my face away. Ever since I began suffering from insomnia, a question has sat in my brain like a nail: my daughter often sees how I, an old man, a famous man, blush painfully because I owe money to a footman; she sees how the worry over petty debts often forces me to drop my work and pace from corner to corner for hours on end thinking — why, then, has she never once, secretly from her mother, come to me and whispered: "Father, here are my watch, my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses... Pawn all of it, you need the money..."? Why, seeing how her mother and I, yielding to some false feeling, try to hide our poverty from people, does she not give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? I would not have accepted any watch, any bracelets, any sacrifice, God forbid — that is not what I need.

Apropos, I also recall my son, the officer in Warsaw. He is an intelligent, honest, sober man. But that is not enough for me. I think that if I had an old father, and if I knew that he had moments of being ashamed of his poverty, I would have given the officer’s post to someone else and hired myself out as a laborer. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What are they for? Only a narrow or embittered man can nurse an evil feeling against ordinary people for the crime of not being heroes. But enough of this.

At a quarter to ten I must go to lecture to my dear boys. I dress and walk along a road that has been familiar to me for 30 years now and that has, for me, its own history. Here is the big gray house with the pharmacy; once there stood, on this spot, a small house, and in it a beer-hall; in that beer-hall I used to think over my dissertation and wrote my first love letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a sheet headed "Historia morbi" (case history, in Latin). Here is the grocer’s shop; once a little Jew kept it, who sold me cigarettes on credit, then a fat woman, who was fond of students because "each of them has a mother"; now a red-haired merchant sits there, a very indifferent man, who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy, long-unrepaired gates of the university; a bored caretaker in a sheepskin coat, a broom, heaps of snow... On a fresh young man, newly arrived from the provinces and imagining that the temple of learning is really a temple, such gates cannot produce a wholesome impression. In general, the dilapidation of the university buildings, the gloominess of the corridors, the grime on the walls, the shortage of light, the dismal look of the stairs, the coat-pegs, and the benches occupy one of the first places among the causes predisposing toward the history of Russian pessimism... And here is our garden. Since I was a student, it seems, it has grown neither better nor worse. I do not love it. It would be far wiser if, instead of the consumptive lindens, the yellow acacia, and the sparse, clipped lilac, tall pines and good oaks grew here. A student, whose mood is largely shaped by his surroundings, ought at every step, in the place where he studies, to see before him only what is lofty, strong, and graceful... God keep him from stunted trees, broken windows, gray walls, and doors upholstered in torn oilcloth.

As I approach my entrance, the door flies open and I am met by my old fellow-servant, my contemporary and namesake, the porter Nikolai. Having let me in, he grunts and says:

"A hard frost, Your Excellency!"

Or, if my fur coat is wet:

"Rain, Your Excellency!"

Then he runs ahead of me and opens every door along my way. In my study he carefully takes my coat off me, and at the same time manages to report to me some piece of university news. Thanks to the close acquaintance that exists among all the university porters and watchmen, he knows everything that happens in the four faculties, in the chancellery, in the rector’s office, in the library. What does he not know? When our burning question of the day happens to be, say, the resignation of the rector or a dean, I hear him, talking with the young watchmen, name the candidates and explain in the same breath that such-and-such a one will not be confirmed by the minister, that such-and-such a one will refuse it himself, then launch into fantastic details about certain mysterious papers received in the chancellery, about a secret conversation the minister supposedly had with the trustee, and so on. If you set aside these details, he turns out, on the whole, almost always to be right. The characterizations he gives to each of the candidates are peculiar, but likewise accurate. If you need to know in what year someone defended his dissertation, entered the service, retired, or died, then call to your aid the enormous memory of this soldier, and he will not only tell you the year, month, and day, but will also report the details that accompanied that particular circumstance. Only one who loves can remember like that.

He is the keeper of the university’s traditions. From his predecessor-porters he inherited a great many legends from university life, added to this wealth a good deal of his own acquiring, gathered over his years of service, and, if you like, he will tell you many long and short stories. He can tell you of extraordinary sages who knew everything, of remarkable toilers who went without sleep for weeks, of the numerous martyrs and victims of learning; in his telling good always triumphs over evil, the weak always defeats the strong, the wise the foolish, the modest the proud, the young the old... There is no need to take all these legends and tall tales at face value, but strain them, and what remains on the filter is just what is needed: our good traditions and the names of true heroes, acknowledged by all.

In our society all the information about the world of scholars is exhausted by anecdotes about the extraordinary absent-mindedness of old professors and by two or three witticisms attributed now to Gruber, now to me, now to Babukhin. For an educated society, this is little enough. If it loved learning, scholars, and students as Nikolai does, its literature would long ago have had whole epics, sagas, and saints’ lives, which, unfortunately, it does not have now.

Having reported the news to me, Nikolai gives his face a stern expression, and our businesslike conversation begins. If some outsider were to overhear, at such a moment, how freely Nikolai handles technical terminology, he might well think this was a scholar disguised as a soldier. I might add that the talk about the learning of university watchmen is greatly exaggerated. It is true that Nikolai knows more than a hundred Latin names, can assemble a skeleton, can sometimes prepare a specimen, can make the students laugh with some long learned quotation, but, for instance, the simple theory of blood circulation is as dark to him now as it was 20 years ago.

At the desk in my study, bent low over a book or a specimen, sits my prosector Pyotr Ignatyevich, an industrious, modest, but untalented man of about 35, already bald and with a large belly. He works from morning till night, reads a great deal, remembers perfectly everything he has read — and in this respect he is not a man but gold; in every other respect he is a dray-horse, or, as they also say, a learned dullard. The traits characteristic of the dray-horse, distinguishing him from a man of talent, are these: his horizon is narrow and sharply confined to his specialty; outside his specialty he is naive as a child. I recall how one morning I came into my study and said:

"Imagine, what a misfortune! They say Skobelev has died."

Nikolai crossed himself, and Pyotr Ignatyevich turned to me and asked:

"Which Skobelev is that?"

On another occasion — this was somewhat earlier — I announced that Professor Perov had died. My dear Pyotr Ignatyevich asked:

"And what did he lecture on?"

I think that if Patti herself struck up a song right in his ear, if hordes of Chinese soldiers invaded Russia, if an earthquake struck, he would not move a single limb, and would go on peacefully peering with a narrowed eye into his microscope. In a word, Hecuba is nothing to him. I would give a good deal to see how this dry stick sleeps with his wife.

Another trait: a fanatical faith in the infallibility of science, and chiefly in everything the Germans write. He is confident in himself, in his specimens, he knows the purpose of life, and is quite unacquainted with the doubts and disillusionments that turn talents gray. A slavish worship of authorities and no need whatever to think independently. It is hard to talk him out of anything, impossible to argue with him. Just try arguing with a man who is deeply convinced that the best of all sciences is medicine, the best of all people are doctors, the best of all traditions are medical traditions. Of the unhappy medical past, only one tradition has survived — the white necktie doctors now wear; for a scholar, and indeed for any educated man in general, only traditions common to the whole university can exist, without any division into medical, legal, and so on, but Pyotr Ignatyevich finds it hard to agree with this, and is ready to argue with you until the Last Judgment.

His future is plain to me. Over the whole course of his life he will prepare several hundred specimens of extraordinary cleanliness, will write a great many dry, quite decent papers, will produce a dozen conscientious translations, but he will not invent gunpowder. Gunpowder requires imagination, inventiveness, the gift of guessing, and Pyotr Ignatyevich has nothing of the kind. In short, he is not a master in science, but a laborer.

Pyotr Ignatyevich, Nikolai, and I speak in low voices. We feel a little uneasy. One feels something particular when the lecture hall roars like the sea behind the door. In 30 years I have not grown used to this feeling, and I experience it every morning. I nervously button my frock coat, ask Nikolai unnecessary questions, grow irritable... It looks as though I were funking it, but it is not cowardice, it is something else which I am unable either to name or to describe.

For no reason at all I glance at my watch and say:

"Well then? Time to go."

And we proceed in this order: Nikolai walks in front with the specimens or the atlases, I follow him, and behind me, his head modestly bowed, plods the dray-horse; or else, if it is called for, a corpse is carried ahead on a stretcher, and behind the corpse walks Nikolai, and so on. At my appearance the students rise, then sit down, and the roar of the sea suddenly falls silent. A calm sets in.

I know what I am going to lecture on, but I do not know how I shall lecture, how I shall begin or how I shall end. There is not a single ready-made phrase in my head. But I need only survey the hall — it is built for me as an amphitheater — and pronounce the stock phrase "in the last lecture we stopped at...," and phrases come flying out of my soul in a long procession, and — off it goes! I speak irrepressibly fast, passionately, and it seems there is no power that could interrupt the flow of my speech. To lecture well, that is, without tedium and with benefit to one’s listeners, one needs, besides talent, also skill and experience; one needs the clearest possible conception of one’s own powers, of those one is lecturing to, and of what constitutes the subject of one’s speech. Besides that, one must be a man who keeps his own counsel, watches sharply, and never for a single second loses sight of the field.

A good conductor, in conveying a composer’s thought, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, makes a gesture now toward the drum, now toward 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 straight into my face. My goal is to conquer this many-headed hydra. If, every minute while I lecture, I have a clear conception of the degree of its attention and the strength of its comprehension, then it is in my power. My other opponent sits within myself. It is the endless variety of forms, phenomena, and laws, and the multitude of thoughts, my own and others’, conditioned by them. Every minute I must have the dexterity to snatch out of this enormous material the most important and necessary thing, and, just as quickly as my speech flows, to clothe my thought in a form accessible to the hydra’s understanding and capable of rousing its attention, while at the same time watching sharply that the thoughts are conveyed not as they happen to accumulate, but in a certain order, necessary for the correct composition of the picture I want to paint. Further, I try to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and precise, my sentences as simple and handsome as possible. Every minute I must rein myself in and remember that I have at my disposal only an hour and forty minutes. In a word, there is no small amount of work in it. At one and the same time one must play the part of scholar, pedagogue, and orator, and it goes badly if the orator gets the better of the pedagogue and the scholar in you, or the other way round.

You lecture for a quarter of an hour, half an hour, and then you notice that the students are beginning to glance up at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatyevich, one reaches for his handkerchief, another sits more comfortably, a third smiles at his own thoughts... This means their attention is tired. Measures must be taken. Seizing the first convenient moment, I make some sort of pun. All hundred and fifty faces break into broad smiles, eyes flash merrily, the roar of the sea is briefly heard again... I laugh too. Attention has been refreshed, and I can go on.

No sport, no amusement or game, has ever given me such delight as lecturing. Only at a lecture could I give myself wholly over to passion, and understand that inspiration is not a poet’s invention but really exists. And I think Hercules, after the most piquant of his labors, did not feel the sweet exhaustion that I felt every time after a lecture.

That was before. Now, at lectures, I feel nothing but torment. Not half an hour passes before I begin to feel an invincible weakness in my legs and shoulders; I sit down in a chair, but I am not used to lecturing sitting down; a minute later I get up, go on standing, then sit down again. My mouth goes dry, my voice grows hoarse, my head spins... To hide my condition from my listeners, I keep drinking water, coughing, blowing my nose frequently, as if a cold were bothering me, make puns that miss the mark, and end up announcing the break earlier than I should. But above all, I am ashamed.

My conscience and my mind tell me that the very best thing I could now do would be to give the boys a farewell lecture, to say a last word to them, to bless them, and to yield my place to a man younger and stronger than I. But let God be my judge — I do not have the courage to act according to my conscience.

Unfortunately, I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian. I know perfectly well that I have no more than half a year left to live; one would think that by now I ought to be most occupied with questions of the darkness beyond the grave and of the visions that will visit my sleep in the tomb. But for some reason my soul does not want to know these questions, though my mind is well aware of their whole importance. As 20 or 30 years ago, so now, on the threshold of death, only science interests me. Drawing my last breath, I shall still believe that science is the most important, the most beautiful and necessary thing in the life of man, that it has always been and will always be the highest manifestation of love, and that only through it alone will man conquer nature and himself. This faith is, perhaps, naive and unjust in its foundation, but I am not to blame for believing so and not otherwise; and I cannot overcome this faith within myself.

But that is not the point. I only ask that my weakness be indulged, and that it be understood that to tear away from the lectern and from his students a man to whom the fate of bone marrow matters more than the final purpose of the universe is the same as taking him and nailing him into his coffin before he has died.

From my insomnia, and from the strained struggle with my mounting weakness, something strange happens to me. In the middle of a lecture tears suddenly rise to my throat, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch out my hands and complain aloud. I want to shout out, in a loud voice, that I, a famous man, have been sentenced to death by fate, that in some six months’ time another man will already be master here in this hall. I want to shout that I am poisoned; new thoughts, such as I never knew before, have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such a moment my situation seems to me so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats, and, in panic terror, with a desperate cry, to rush for the exit.

It is not easy to live through such minutes.

II

After the lecture I sit at home and work. I read journals, dissertations, or prepare for the next lecture, sometimes I write something. I work with interruptions, since I have to receive visitors.

A bell rings. It is a colleague, come to talk business. He comes in to me with his hat and his cane, and, holding both out toward me, says:

"Just for a moment, a moment! Stay seated, collega! Only two words!"

The first thing we do is try to show each other that we are both extraordinarily polite and very glad to see one another. I seat him in an armchair, and he seats me; meanwhile we cautiously pat each other on the waist, touch each other’s buttons, and it looks as though we are feeling each other over, afraid of getting burned. Both of us laugh, though we have said nothing funny. Once seated, we lean our heads toward each other and begin to speak in low voices. However cordially disposed we may be toward one another, we cannot help gilding our speech with all sorts of chinoiserie, of the kind: "you have been pleased to observe correctly," or "as I already had the honor to tell you," and we cannot help bursting out laughing if either of us makes a joke, even an unsuccessful one. Having finished discussing business, my colleague rises abruptly and, waving his hat toward my work, begins to take his leave. Again we feel each other over and laugh. I see him off to the front hall; there I help my colleague into his fur coat, but he does everything he can to avoid this high honor. Then, as Yegor opens the door, my colleague assures me that I will catch cold, and I make as if I were ready to go with him even out into the street. And when at last I return to my study, my face is still smiling, out of sheer inertia, I suppose.

A little later, another ring. Someone comes into the front hall, undresses at length, and coughs. Yegor reports that a student has come. I say: show him in. A minute later a young man of pleasant appearance comes in to me. It is a year now that he and I have been on strained terms: he answers me abominably at examinations, and I give him failing marks. Of such fine fellows, whom I, to use the students’ expression, "chase" or "flunk," I get about seven a year. Those of them who fail an exam for lack of ability or because of illness usually bear their cross patiently and do not haggle with me; it is only the sanguine ones, the broad natures, for whom a delay in examinations spoils the appetite and interferes with regular attendance at the opera, who haggle and come calling at my home. The first sort I go easy on; the second I chase for a whole year.

"Sit down," I say to my guest. "What have you to say?"

"Forgive me, professor, for troubling you..." he begins, stammering and not looking me in the face. "I would not have dared to trouble you if not for... I have taken your examination five times already and... failed. I beg you, be so kind as to give me a passing mark, because..."

The argument all the idlers bring forward in their own favor is always the same one: they passed brilliantly in every other subject and failed only in mine, and this is the more surprising in that they always worked very hard at my subject and know it excellently; they failed only because of some incomprehensible misunderstanding.

"Forgive me, my friend," I say to my guest, "I cannot give you a passing mark. Go and study the lectures a little more, and come back. Then we shall see."

A pause. I feel the urge to torment the student a little for loving beer and the opera more than science, and I say with a sigh:

"In my opinion, the best thing you could do now is to leave the medical faculty altogether. If, with your abilities, you can in no way manage to pass the examination, then evidently you have neither the desire nor the calling to be a doctor."

The sanguine fellow’s face falls.

"Forgive me, professor," he smirks, "but that would be strange of me, to say the least. To study five years and then suddenly... quit!"

"Well, yes! Better to waste five years for nothing than to spend your whole life afterward doing work you don’t love."

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

"Still, it’s up to you. So then, read a bit more and come back."

"When?" the idler asks dully.

"Whenever you like. Tomorrow, even."

And in his good-natured eyes I read: "I can come, all right, but you’ll just chase me off again, you brute!"

"Of course," I say, "you won’t grow any more learned for having been examined by me another fifteen times, but it will build character in you. And thank goodness for that."

A silence falls. I rise and wait for my guest to leave, but he stands there, looking at the window, tugging at his little beard, thinking. It grows tedious.

The sanguine fellow has a pleasant, rich voice, clever, mocking eyes, a good-natured face somewhat worn from frequent beer and long stretches lying on the sofa; apparently he could tell me a great deal that would interest me about the opera, about his romantic escapades, about the comrades he’s fond of, but unfortunately it isn’t the done thing to speak of such things. And I would gladly listen.

"Professor! I give you my word of honor that if you mark me satisfactory, I..."

As soon as matters reach "word of honor," I wave my hands and sit down at my desk. The student thinks for another minute and says despondently:

"In that case, farewell... Forgive me."

"Farewell, my friend. Good health to you."

He walks irresolutely into the hall, dresses slowly there, and, once out on the street, no doubt goes on thinking for a long time; having thought up nothing but "old devil" to apply to me, he goes off to some bad restaurant to drink beer and dine, and afterward home to sleep. Peace to your ashes, honest toiler!

The third ring. In comes a young doctor in a new black suit, gold spectacles, and, naturally, a white tie. He introduces himself. I ask him to sit and inquire what he wants. Not without agitation, the young priest of science tells me that this year he passed the examination for doctoral candidacy and that all that remains for him now is to write his dissertation. He would like to work under me, under my guidance, and he would be exceedingly obliged to me if I gave him a topic for the dissertation.

"Delighted to be of use, colleague," I say, "but first let us agree on what a dissertation is. By that word we generally mean a work that is the product of independent creative effort. Isn’t that so? A work written on someone else’s topic and under someone else’s guidance is called something else..."

The would-be doctor is silent. I flare up and jump to my feet.

"Why do all of you keep coming to me, I don’t understand?" I shout angrily. "Do I run a shop? I don’t trade in topics! For the thousandth-and-first time I ask you all to leave me in peace! Forgive my rudeness, but I’ve had enough of this, finally!"

The would-be doctor is silent, and only a faint flush comes out on his cheekbones. His face expresses deep respect for my famous name and learning, but from his eyes I can see that he despises both my voice and my pitiful figure and my nervous gesticulating. In my anger I strike him as an eccentric.

"I don’t run a shop!" I go on, angry. "And it’s a strange business! Why won’t you be independent? Why is freedom so repugnant to you?"

I talk a great deal, and he keeps silent the whole time. In the end I gradually quiet down and, of course, give in. The would-be doctor will get a topic from me not worth a kopeck, will write, under my supervision, a dissertation nobody needs, will defend it with dignity in a tedious public disputation, and will receive a degree that is of no use to him.

The bell might go on ringing one caller after another without end, but here I will limit myself to just four. The fourth ring sounds, and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress, a dear voice...

Eighteen years ago my colleague the oculist died and left behind a seven-year-old daughter, Katya, and some sixty thousand rubles. In his will he named me her guardian. Until the age of ten Katya lived in my family, then was placed in a boarding institute and stayed with us only in the summer months, during vacations. I never had the time to occupy myself with her upbringing; I observed her only in snatches, and so I can say very little about her childhood.

The first thing I remember and cherish in memory is the extraordinary trustfulness with which she entered my house, was treated by doctors, and which always shone on her little face. She might be sitting somewhere off in a corner with her cheek bound up, and would invariably be looking at something with attention; whether she was watching me write and turn the pages of books, or my wife bustling about, or the cook peeling potatoes in the kitchen, or the dog playing, her eyes always, unfailingly, expressed one and the same thing: "Everything that happens in this world is beautiful and wise." She was curious and very fond of talking with me. She would sit at the table across from me, watch my movements, and ask questions. She was interested to know what I was reading, what I did at the university, whether I was afraid of corpses, where I put my salary.

"Do the students fight at the university?" she would ask.

"They fight, my dear."

"And do you make them kneel?"

"I do."

And she found it funny that the students fought and that I made them kneel, and she laughed. She was a gentle, patient, and good child. Often I happened to see something taken from her, or her punished for nothing, or her curiosity left unsatisfied; at such times the constant expression of trustfulness on her face was joined by something else — sadness, and that was all. I did not know how to stand up for her, and only, when I saw the sadness, felt a wish to draw her to me and pity her in the tone of an old nurse: "My poor little orphan!"

I also remember that she loved dressing well and sprinkling herself with perfume. In this she resembled me. I too love handsome clothes and good perfume.

I regret that I had neither the time nor the inclination to trace the beginning and development of the passion that had already fully taken hold of Katya by the time she was fourteen or fifteen. I mean her passionate love of the theater. When she came to us from the institute for vacations and lived with us, there was nothing she spoke of with such pleasure and such fervor as plays and actors. She wore us out with her constant talk of the theater. My wife and the children did not listen to her. I alone lacked the courage to refuse her my attention. Whenever the urge came upon her to share her raptures, she would come into my study and say in a pleading tone:

"Nikolai Stepanych, allow me to talk with you about the theater!"

I would point to my watch and say:

"I give you half an hour. Begin."

Later she began bringing home whole dozens of portraits of actors and actresses, before whom she worshipped; then she tried her hand a few times at amateur theatricals, and finally, when she finished her course, announced to me that she had been born to be an actress.

I never shared Katya’s theatrical enthusiasms. To my mind, if a play is good, then for it to make its proper impression there is no need to trouble actors over it: a mere reading will do. And if a play is bad, no acting will make it good.

In my youth I often went to the theater, and even now, twice a year, my family takes a box and drives me out "for an airing." Of course that is not enough to give one the right to judge the theater, but I will say a little about it all the same. In my opinion the theater has not become any better than it was thirty or forty years ago. Now as before, neither in the theater corridors nor in the foyer can I ever find a glass of clean water. Now as before, the ushers fine me twenty kopecks for my fur coat, though there is nothing reprehensible in wearing warm clothing in winter. Now as before, during the intervals music plays for no reason at all, adding to the impression made by the play some further, unasked-for impression. Now as before, men go off to the buffet during the intervals to drink spirits. If there is no progress to be seen in small things, it would be futile of me to look for it in large ones. When an actor, entangled from head to foot in theatrical traditions and prejudices, tries to deliver the plain, ordinary soliloquy "To be or not to be" not simply, but for some reason invariably with a hiss and convulsions through his whole body, or when he tries to convince me, come what may, that Chatsky, who talks so much with fools and is in love with a fool, is a very intelligent man and that "Woe from Wit" is not a tedious play, then from the stage there blows on me that very same routine that already bored me forty years ago, when I was regaled with classical howlings and beating of the breast. And every time I come out of the theater more of a conservative than when I went in.

A sentimental and credulous crowd can be persuaded that the theater, in its present form, is a school. But no one acquainted with a school in its true sense will be caught on that hook. I don’t know what will happen in fifty or a hundred years, but under present conditions the theater can serve only as an entertainment. And this entertainment is too costly to go on making use of. It takes from the state thousands of young, healthy, and talented men and women who, had they not devoted themselves to the theater, might have been good doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses, officers; it takes from the public its evening hours — the best time for mental work and companionable conversation. I say nothing of the money spent, nor of the moral losses the spectator sustains when he sees murder, adultery, or slander wrongly treated upon the stage.

Katya, however, was of quite a different opinion. She assured me that the theater, even in its present form, was higher than lecture halls, higher than books, higher than anything else on earth. The theater is a force uniting all the arts in itself alone, and actors are missionaries. No art and no science taken separately is capable of acting so powerfully and so truly upon the human soul as the stage, and it is no accident, therefore, that an actor of middling ability enjoys, in the state, far greater popularity than the very best scholar or artist. And no public activity can afford such delight and satisfaction as the stage.

And one fine day Katya joined a troupe and went off, to Ufa I believe, taking with her a great deal of money, a host of rosy hopes, and aristocratic views of the matter.

Her first letters on the road were remarkable. I read them and simply marveled how such small sheets of paper could hold so much youth, purity of soul, sacred naivety, and at the same time such fine, sensible judgments as would have done credit to a good masculine mind. The Volga, the countryside, the towns she visited, her comrades, her successes and failures — she did not describe them, she sang their praises; every line breathed the trustfulness I was used to seeing on her face — and, along with all that, a mass of grammatical errors, and almost no punctuation marks at all.

Not half a year had passed before I received a letter of the highest poetic rapture, beginning with the words: "I have fallen in love." Attached to this letter was a photograph showing a young man with a shaved face, a broad-brimmed hat, and a plaid thrown over his shoulder. The letters that followed were as magnificent as ever, but punctuation marks now appeared in them, the grammatical errors vanished, and they smelled strongly of a man. Katya took to writing to me that it would be good to build a large theater somewhere on the Volga, on a joint-stock basis, and to draw the wealthy merchantry and steamship owners into the enterprise; there would be plenty of money, the receipts would be enormous, the actors would perform on a cooperative basis... Perhaps all this really was good, but it seems to me that such contrivances could only come out of a man’s head.

Be that as it may, for a year and a half or two, everything appeared to go well: Katya was in love, believed in her work, and was happy; but afterward I began to notice clear signs of decline in her letters. It began with Katya complaining to me about her fellow actors — the first and most ominous symptom; if a young scholar or writer begins his career by bitterly complaining about scholars or writers, it means he is already worn out and no good for the work. Katya wrote to me that her comrades did not attend rehearsals and never knew their parts; in the staging of absurd plays and in the manner of carrying themselves on stage, each of them showed a complete disrespect for the public; in the interest of the box office, which was all anyone talked about, the dramatic actresses stooped to singing music-hall songs, and the tragedians sang couplets mocking cuckolded husbands and the pregnancies of unfaithful wives, and so on. On the whole one had to marvel that provincial theater had not yet perished and how it could hold on by so thin and rotten a thread.

In reply I sent Katya a long and, I confess, very tedious letter. Among other things I wrote to her: "I have often had occasion to talk with old actors, the noblest of people, who honored me with their friendship; from talking with them I could understand that their activity was guided not so much by their own reason and freedom as by fashion and the mood of society; the best of them had, in their time, to act in tragedy, and in operetta, and in Parisian farces, and in fairy spectacles, and always, equally, it seemed to them that they were walking a straight path and doing good. So, as you see, the cause of the evil must be sought not in the actors, but deeper, in art itself and in society’s whole attitude toward it." This letter of mine only irritated Katya. She answered me: "You and I are singing from different scores. I did not write to you about the noblest people who honored you with their friendship, but about a gang of swindlers who have nothing in common with nobility. This is a herd of wild people who ended up on the stage only because they wouldn’t have been accepted anywhere else, and who call themselves artists only because they are insolent. Not one talent among them, but plenty of nonentities, drunkards, intriguers, gossips. I cannot tell you how bitter it is to me that the art I love so much has fallen into the hands of people I detest; bitter that the best people see the evil only from a distance, do not wish to come closer, and instead of intervening, write commonplaces and useless moralizing in a heavy-handed style..." and so on, all in that vein.

A little more time passed, and I received this letter: "I have been inhumanly deceived. I cannot go on living. Dispose of my money as you see fit. I loved you as a father and my only friend. Forgive me."

It turned out that he too belonged to the "herd of wild people." Later, from certain hints, I was able to guess that there had been an attempt at suicide. I believe Katya tried to poison herself. One must suppose she was seriously ill afterward, since the next letter I received came already from Yalta, whither, in all likelihood, the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me contained a request that I send her a thousand rubles to Yalta as quickly as possible, and it ended thus: "Forgive me that the letter is so gloomy. Yesterday I buried my child." Having lived about a year in the Crimea, she came home.

She traveled about for some four years, and throughout all those four years, I must admit, I played a rather unenviable and strange role with respect to her. When earlier she announced to me that she was going on the stage, and then wrote to me of her love; when a spirit of extravagance would periodically seize her and I had, time and again, at her request, to send her a thousand or two thousand rubles; when she wrote to me of her intention to die and then of her child’s death — every time I was at a loss, and my whole share in her fate was expressed only in the fact that I thought a great deal and wrote long, tedious letters that I might just as well not have written at all. And yet I had stood in for her a father, and loved her as a daughter!

Now Katya lives half a verst from me. She has rented a five-room apartment and furnished it quite comfortably, with the taste peculiar to her. If someone were to undertake to paint her surroundings, the dominant mood in the picture would come out as laziness. For the lazy body — soft couches, soft footstools; for lazy feet — carpets; for lazy eyesight — faded, dull, or matte colors; for the lazy soul — a profusion on the walls of cheap fans and small pictures, in which originality of execution outweighs content, an excess of little tables and shelves crowded with utterly useless and worthless objects, shapeless rags in place of curtains... All this, together with a fear of bright colors, symmetry, and open space, testifies, apart from spiritual indolence, to a perversion of natural taste as well. Katya lies on the couch for whole days reading books, chiefly novels and stories. She goes out of the house only once a day, in the afternoon, to see me.

I work, and Katya sits not far from me on the divan, silent, wrapped in a shawl as if she were cold. Whether because she is dear to me, or because I grew accustomed to her frequent visits when she was still a little girl, her presence does not keep me from concentrating. Now and then I put some question to her mechanically, and she gives a very short answer; or else, to rest a moment, I turn to her and watch how, lost in thought, she leafs through some medical journal or newspaper. And at such moments I notice that her face no longer wears its former expression of trustfulness. The expression now is cold, indifferent, distracted, like that of passengers who must wait a long time for their train. She dresses as beautifully and simply as ever, but carelessly; one can see that her dress and her hairstyle suffer no little from the couches and rocking chairs on which she lies for whole days. And she is no longer curious as she used to be. She asks me no more questions, as if she had already experienced everything in life and expected to hear nothing new.

Toward the end of the fourth hour, movement begins in the hall and the drawing room. This is Liza back from the conservatory, bringing her friends with her. One can hear them playing the piano, trying their voices, laughing loudly; in the dining room Yegor is laying the table and clattering the dishes.

"Farewell," says Katya. "I won’t stop in on your people today. Let them excuse me. I have no time. Come and see me."

When I see her out to the front hall, she looks me over sternly from head to foot and says with vexation:

"You’re getting thinner and thinner! Why don’t you get treatment? I’ll go to Sergei Fyodorovich and ask him to come. Let him examine you."

"No need, Katya."

"I don’t understand what your family is thinking of! A fine lot, I must say."

She pulls on her fur coat abruptly, and at that moment two or three hairpins invariably fall to the floor from her carelessly done hair. She is too lazy and has no time to fix it; she awkwardly tucks the fallen curls under her hat and leaves.

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

"Was Katya just here? Why didn’t she stop in to see us? That’s even strange..."

"Mama!" Liza says to her reproachfully. "If she doesn’t want to, then God be with her. We’re not going to get down on our knees for her."

"As you like, but it’s a slight. To sit in the study for three hours and not think of us once. Well, as she pleases."

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is incomprehensible to me, and no doubt one must be a woman to understand it. I will stake my head that among those hundred and fifty young men whom I see almost daily in my lecture hall, and among the hundred older ones I happen to meet every week, there is scarcely a single one who would know how to understand hatred and revulsion for Katya’s past, that is, for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and an illegitimate child; and at the same time I cannot recall a single woman or girl of my acquaintance who does not, consciously or instinctively, nurse these feelings in herself. And this is not because woman is more virtuous or purer than man: virtue and purity differ little from vice if they are not free of malice. I explain it simply as the backwardness of women. The mournful feeling of compassion and the pang of conscience that a modern man experiences when he sees misfortune tell me far more about culture and moral growth than hatred and revulsion do. The modern woman is as prone to tears and as coarse of heart as she was in the Middle Ages. And in my opinion those act with entire good sense who advise that she be brought up as a man is.

My wife dislikes Katya also for having been an actress, for ingratitude, for pride, for eccentricity, and for all those numerous vices that one woman always manages to find in another.

Besides myself and my family, two or three of my daughter’s friends dine with us, as does Alexander Adolfovich Gnekker, an admirer of Liza’s and an aspirant to her hand. He is a young blond man, no more than thirty, of medium height, very stout, broad-shouldered, with reddish side-whiskers by his ears and a waxed little mustache that gives his full, smooth face a kind of toylike expression. He is dressed in a very short jacket, a colored waistcoat, trousers with a large check, very wide at the top and very narrow at the bottom, and yellow heelless shoes. His eyes are protuberant, crab-like, his necktie resembles a crab’s neck, and it even seems to me that this whole young man gives off a smell of bisque soup. He comes to us every day, but no one in my family knows what his origins are, where he was educated, or on what means he lives. He neither plays nor sings, but has some connection to both music and singing, sells someone’s pianos somewhere, is often at the conservatory, is acquainted with all the celebrities, and directs matters at concerts; he judges music with great authority, and I have noticed that people readily agree with him.

Wealthy people always have hangers-on around them; so do the sciences and the arts. It seems there is no art or science on earth free of the presence of "foreign bodies" such as this Mr. Gnekker. I am no musician, and perhaps I am mistaken about Gnekker, whom, besides, I know little. But his authority, and the dignity with which he stands by the piano listening when someone sings or plays, strike me as altogether too suspicious.

You may be a gentleman a hundred times over and a privy councillor besides, but if you have a daughter, you are guaranteed against nothing — not against the vulgarity that courtship, matchmaking, and a wedding often bring into your house and into your mood. I, for instance, can in no way reconcile myself to the solemn expression that comes over my wife’s face every time Gnekker sits with us, nor can I reconcile myself to those bottles of lafite, port, and sherry that are set out solely on his account, so that he may see with his own eyes how broadly and splendidly we live. Nor can I stomach Liza’s abrupt little laugh, which she picked up at the conservatory, nor her habit of narrowing her eyes whenever there are men present. And above all I simply cannot understand why it is that this creature, utterly foreign to my habits, to my science, to the whole fabric of my life, utterly unlike the people I love, comes to me every day and dines with me every day. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that "he’s her intended," but I still do not understand his presence; it rouses in me the same bewilderment as if a Zulu had been seated at table with me. And it also strikes me as strange that my daughter, whom I am used to thinking of as a child, is in love with that necktie, those eyes, those soft cheeks...

I used to be fond of dinner, or indifferent to it; now it arouses nothing in me but boredom and irritation. Ever since I became His Excellency and served a term as dean of the faculty, my family has for some reason found it necessary to change our menu and our dinner arrangements entirely. In place of the simple dishes I was used to when I was a student and a young physician, I am now fed cream soup with little white icicles floating in it, and kidneys in Madeira. My general’s rank and my fame have robbed me forever of cabbage soup, and tasty pies, and goose with apples, and bream with buckwheat porridge. They have also robbed me of the maid Agasha, a talkative, giggling old woman, in whose place dinner is now served by Yegor, a dull and haughty fellow with a white glove on his right hand. The intervals are short but seem excessively long, because there is nothing to fill them with. Gone is the old cheerfulness, the easy conversation, the jokes, the laughter, gone the mutual fondness and that joy that used to stir the children, my wife, and me when we gathered, as we used to, in the dining room; for me, a busy man, dinner was a time of rest and of reunion, and for my wife and children a holiday — short, true, but bright and joyful — when they knew that for half an hour I belonged not to science, not to the students, but to them alone and no one else. Gone now is the knack of growing merry on a single glass, gone is Agasha, gone the bream with porridge, gone the commotion that always used to greet our little dinner-table scandals, like a cat and dog fighting under the table, or the dressing falling off Katya’s cheek into a plate of soup.

To describe the present-day dinner is as unappetizing as eating it. My wife’s face wears solemnity, an assumed importance, and the habitual expression of anxiety. She looks anxiously over our plates and says: "I can see you don’t care for the roast... Tell me: you don’t like it, do you?" And I must answer: "You needn’t worry, my dear, the roast is very tasty." And she: "You always take my side, Nikolai Stepanych, and you never tell the truth. Why did Alexander Adolfovich eat so little, then?" and so on in the same vein throughout the whole dinner. Liza gives her abrupt little laugh and narrows her eyes. I look at the two of them, and only now, at dinner, does it become entirely clear to me that the inner life of both of them slipped from my observation long ago. I have the feeling that once I used to live at home with a real family, and now I am dining as a guest with a wife who is not real and looking at a Liza who is not real. A sharp change has taken place in both of them; I missed the long process by which the change came about, and it is no wonder that I understand nothing. Why did the change come about? I don’t know. Perhaps the whole trouble is that God did not give my wife and daughter the same strength he gave me. From childhood I was used to standing up against outside influences and hardened myself sufficiently; such worldly catastrophes as fame, a general’s rank, the passage from contentment to living beyond one’s means, acquaintance with the nobility, and so on, scarcely touched me, and I remained whole and unharmed; but upon my weak, unhardened wife and Liza all this came down like a great snow-mass and crushed them.

The young ladies and Gnekker talk of fugues, counterpoint, singers and pianists, of Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of being suspected of musical ignorance, smiles at them sympathetically and murmurs: "That’s charming... Is that so? Do tell..." Gnekker eats with solemn dignity, jokes with solemn dignity, and listens condescendingly to the young ladies’ remarks. Now and then the wish comes over him to speak in bad French, and then, for some reason, he finds it necessary to address me as votre excellence.

And I am gloomy. Evidently I embarrass all of them, and they embarrass me. Never before had I been closely acquainted with class antagonism, but now something very like it torments me. I try to find only bad traits in Gnekker, soon find them, and am tormented that in the place of a suitor sits a man not of my circle. His presence has a bad effect on me in another respect as well. Ordinarily, when I am left alone with myself, or am in the company of people I love, I never think about my own merits, and if I do begin to think of them, they appear to me as insignificant, as if I had become a scholar only yesterday; but in the presence of people like Gnekker, my merits seem to me a towering mountain whose peak vanishes into the clouds, while at its foot Gnekkers, barely visible to the eye, go about their business.

After dinner I go to my study and light my little pipe there, the one indulgence of the whole day surviving from an old, bad habit of smoking from morning till night. When I smoke, my wife comes in and sits down to talk with me. Just as in the morning, I already know in advance what our conversation will be about.

"We ought to have a serious talk, you and I, Nikolai Stepanych," she begins. "It’s about Liza... Why don’t you pay any attention?"

"How do you mean?"

"You act as though you notice nothing, but that’s not good. You can’t just be careless about it... Gnekker has intentions where Liza is concerned... What do you say to that?"

"That he’s a bad man I can’t say, since I don’t know him, but that I don’t like him – I’ve told you that a thousand times already."

"But it can’t go on like this... it can’t..."

She gets up and paces about in agitation.

"You can’t treat a serious step this way," she says. "When a daughter’s happiness is at stake, one has to set aside everything personal. I know you don’t like him... Fine... But if we refuse him now, and break the whole thing off, what guarantee do you have that Liza won’t spend her whole life reproaching us for it? Suitors aren’t exactly plentiful these days, and it may well be that no other match turns up... He’s very fond of Liza, and it seems she’s fond of him too... Of course he has no settled position, but what’s to be done? God willing, in time he’ll find his place somewhere. He comes from a good family, and he’s wealthy."

"How do you know that?"

"He told me so. His father has a large house in Kharkov and an estate near Kharkov. In short, Nikolai Stepanych, you really must go to Kharkov."

"What for?"

"You’ll find out about him there... You have professor acquaintances there, they’ll help you. I would go myself, but I’m a woman. I can’t..."

"I’m not going to Kharkov," I say sullenly.

My wife takes fright, and her face takes on an expression of tormented pain.

"For God’s sake, Nikolai Stepanych!" she implores me, sobbing. "For God’s sake, take this weight off me! I’m suffering!"

It becomes painful for me to look at her.

"All right, Varya," I say gently. "If you like, then very well, I’ll go to Kharkov and do everything you want."

She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes off to her room to cry. I am left alone.

A little later they bring in the lamp. From the armchairs and the lampshade long-familiar, long-tiresome shadows fall on the walls and floor, and as I look at them it seems to me that night has already come and that my accursed insomnia is already beginning. I lie down on the bed, then get up and pace the room, then lie down again... Usually after dinner, toward evening, my nervous agitation reaches its highest pitch. I start crying for no reason and bury my head under the pillow. At such times I’m afraid someone might come in, afraid of dying suddenly, ashamed of my tears, and altogether something unbearable gathers in my soul. I feel that I can no longer bear the sight of my lamp, or my books, or the shadows on the floor, cannot bear to hear the voices coming from the drawing room. Some invisible, incomprehensible force shoves me roughly out of my apartment. I jump up, dress hurriedly, and, careful not to be noticed by the household, go out into the street. Where to go?

The answer to that question has long since settled in my brain: to Katya’s.

III

As usual, she is lying on the Turkish divan or on the couch, reading something. Seeing me, she lazily raises her head, sits up, and holds out her hand to me.

"Still lying down," I say, after a pause, once I’ve caught my breath. "That’s not healthy. You ought to occupy yourself with something!"

"What?"

"I said, you ought to occupy yourself with something."

"With what? A woman can only be a simple working woman or an actress."

"Well then? If you can’t go into service, go on the stage."

Silence.

"You should get married," I say, half in jest.

"There’s no one to marry. And no reason to, either."

"One can’t live like this."

"Without a husband? A great matter! There are as many men as you like, if only one had the wish."

"That’s not becoming of you, Katya."

"What’s not becoming?"

"Why, what you just said."

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

"Let’s go. Come here. Look."

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

"There... I’ve prepared it for you. You’ll work here. Come every day and bring your work with you. At home they only get in your way. Will you work here? Would you like to?"

So as not to grieve her with a refusal, I answer that yes, I’ll work at her place, and that I like the room very much. Then we both sit down in the cozy little room and begin talking.

The warmth, the snug surroundings, and the presence of someone I’m fond of now stir in me not a feeling of pleasure, as before, but a strong urge to complain and grumble. For some reason it seems to me that if I grumble and complain, I’ll feel easier.

"Things are bad, my dear!" I begin with a sigh. "Very bad..."

"What is it?"

"You see how it is, my friend. The finest and holiest right of kings is the right of pardon. And I always felt myself a king, since I made boundless use of that right. I never judged, I was lenient, I forgave everyone gladly, left and right. Where others protested and were indignant, I merely advised and persuaded. My whole life I strove only to make my company bearable – for my family, for the students, for my colleagues, for the servants. And this attitude of mine toward people, I know, educated everyone who happened to be near me. But now I’m no longer a king. Something is going on inside me that befits only slaves: in my head, day and night, wicked thoughts wander about, and in my soul feelings I never knew before have built their nest. I hate, and I despise, and I’m indignant, and I’m outraged, and I’m afraid. I’ve grown excessively strict, demanding, irritable, disagreeable, suspicious. Even what used to give me occasion only for an extra pun and a good-natured laugh now gives birth in me to a heavy feeling. My very logic has changed: before, I despised only money, but now I nurse an angry feeling not toward money but toward the rich, as though they were to blame; before, I hated violence and arbitrary tyranny, but now I hate the people who use violence, as though they alone were to blame, and not all of us, who don’t know how to raise one another properly. What does this mean? If these new thoughts and new feelings have come from a change in my convictions, then where could that change have come from? Has the world grown worse, and I better, or was I blind and indifferent before? And if this change has come from the general decline of my physical and mental powers – for I am ill, after all, and losing weight every day – then my position is pitiable: it would mean my new thoughts are abnormal, unhealthy, and I ought to be ashamed of them and consider them worthless..."

"Illness has nothing to do with it," Katya breaks in. "Your eyes have simply been opened, that’s all. You’ve seen what before, for some reason, you didn’t want to notice. To my mind, the first thing you need to do is break with your family for good and leave."

"You’re talking nonsense."

"You no longer love them, so why twist your soul about it? And is that even a family? Nonentities! If they died today, tomorrow no one would even notice they were gone."

Katya despises my wife and daughter every bit as fiercely as they hate her. It’s hardly possible, in our day, to speak of anyone’s right to despise another. But if one takes Katya’s point of view and grants that such a right exists, still one has to admit she has exactly as much right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.

"Nonentities!" she repeats. "Did you have dinner today? However did they manage not to forget to call you to the dining room? How is it they still remember you exist?"

"Katya," I say sternly, "I ask you to be quiet."

"And do you think it’s fun for me to talk about them? I’d be glad not to know them at all. Listen to me, my dear: drop everything and go away. Go abroad. The sooner the better."

"What nonsense! And the university?"

"The university too. What is it to you? There’s no use in it anyway. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years already, and where are your pupils? How many famous scholars have you produced? Go on, count them! And to multiply those doctors who exploit ignorance and make hundreds of thousands, for that you don’t need to be a talented or a good man. You’re superfluous."

"My God, how harsh you are!" I say, horrified. "How harsh! Stop, or I’ll leave! I don’t know how to answer your harsh words!"

The maid comes in and calls us to tea. Around the samovar our conversation, thank God, changes. Having already had my complaint out, I want now to give free rein to another of my old man’s weaknesses – reminiscence. I tell Katya about my past, and to my great astonishment, I recall for her details I never suspected were still whole in my memory. And she listens to me with tenderness, with pride, holding her breath. I especially love telling her how I once studied at the seminary and how I dreamed of entering the university.

"I remember walking about our seminary garden," I recount. "The wind would carry over the strumming of a concertina and a song from some distant tavern, or a troika with its bells would go racing past the seminary fence, and that alone was already quite enough for a feeling of happiness to suddenly fill not only my chest but even my stomach, my legs, my arms... You’d listen to the concertina, or to the bells fading away, and all the while imagine yourself a doctor, and paint pictures for yourself, each one finer than the last. And now, as you see, my dreams have come true. I got more than I dared to dream of. For thirty years I was a beloved professor, I had excellent colleagues, I enjoyed an honorable reputation. I loved, I married for passionate love, I had children. In short, if I look back, my whole life presents itself to me as a beautiful, skillfully made composition. Now all that remains for me is not to spoil the finale. For that I need to die like a human being. If death really is a danger, then it must be met as befits a teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian state: cheerfully and with a tranquil soul. But I am spoiling the finale. I am drowning, I run to you, I beg for help, and you tell me: keep drowning, that’s just how it should be."

But now a ring sounds in the hall. Katya and I recognize it and say:

"That must be Mikhail Fyodorovich."

And indeed, a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mikhail Fyodorovich, comes in – tall, well built, about fifty, with thick gray hair, black eyebrows, and clean-shaven. He is a kind man and a splendid colleague. He comes from an old noble family, a fairly fortunate and gifted one, that plays a notable role in the history of our literature and learning. He himself is intelligent, talented, very well educated, but not without his oddities. To some degree all of us are odd, all of us are eccentrics, but his oddities are something exceptional, and not entirely safe for his acquaintances. Among these last I know quite a few who, on account of his oddities, fail entirely to see his many virtues.

Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says, in a velvety bass:

"Good evening. Having tea? Just the thing. It’s devilishly cold."

Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass for himself, and at once begins talking. The most characteristic thing about his manner of speaking is a constantly jesting tone, a sort of cross between philosophy and buffoonery, like Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He always talks about serious things, but never talks seriously. His opinions are always sharp, quarrelsome, but thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone it somehow comes about that the sharpness and the quarrelsomeness don’t grate on the ear, and you get used to them quickly. Every evening he brings with him some five or six anecdotes from university life, and usually begins with these as soon as he sits down at the table.

"Oh, Lord," he sighs, wiggling his black eyebrows mockingly. "The comedians one finds in this world!"

"What is it?" Katya asks.

"I’m walking today from a lecture and I meet on the stairs that old idiot, our so-and-so... Walking along, as usual, with his horse’s chin thrust forward, looking for someone to complain to about his migraine, and his wife, and the students who won’t come to his lectures. Well, I think, he’s spotted me – now I’m done for, it’s all over..."

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

"I was at our so-and-so’s public lecture yesterday. I’m amazed how our alma mater nursing mother, here: the university (Latin)., God rest her, brings herself to put such blockheads and card-carrying dullards on display before the public as this fellow. Why, he’s a European fool! Have mercy, you couldn’t find another one like him anywhere in Europe with a lantern in broad daylight! He reads, if you can picture it, as if he were sucking on a lozenge: mm-mm-mm... Got flustered, can barely make out his own manuscript, his wretched little thoughts crawl along at the speed of an archimandrite riding a bicycle, and the main thing is, you can’t for the life of you work out what he’s trying to say. Deadly dull, flies drop dead. That dullness can only be compared to the kind we get at our assembly hall on prize day, when they read out the traditional speech, devil take it."

And then at once a sharp turn:

"About three years ago – Nikolai Stepanovich here remembers – it fell to me to read that speech. Hot, stifling, the uniform pinching under the arms – sheer death! I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours... ’Well,’ I think, ’thank God, there’s only ten pages left.’ And at the end I had four pages that could easily have gone unread, and I meant to skip them. So, I think, there’s really only six left. But picture this, I glance ahead for a moment and see: in the front row, sitting side by side, some general with a ribbon and a bishop. The poor fellows are frozen stiff with boredom, straining their eyes to keep from falling asleep, and still, all the same, trying to put on an expression of attention, pretending my reading makes sense to them and that they like it. Well, I think, if you like it, here you are then! Out of spite! I took it and read all four pages."

When he talks, it’s only his eyes and eyebrows that smile, as is generally the case with mocking people. There is, at such moments, no hatred and no malice in his eyes, but a great deal of sharpness and that peculiar foxlike cunning one can only notice in very observant people. To go on about his eyes, I’ve noticed one more peculiarity of theirs. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to some remark of hers, or follows her with his gaze when she happens to step out of the room for a moment, I notice in his look something meek, something like a prayer, something pure...

The maid clears away the samovar and sets on the table a large piece of cheese, fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne – a rather poor wine, which Katya took a liking to when she was living in the Crimea. Mikhail Fyodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelf and lays out a game of patience. By his own account, some games of patience require a great deal of ingenuity and attention, but nevertheless, while laying them out, he never stops entertaining himself with talk. Katya watches his cards attentively and helps him more with her expression than with words. She drinks no more than two glasses of wine the whole evening; I drink a quarter of a glass; the rest of the bottle falls to Mikhail Fyodorovich’s share, who can drink a great deal and never gets drunk.

Over the game of patience we settle various questions, mostly of the higher order, and it’s the thing we love most – namely, science – that gets it worst of all.

"Science, thank God, has outlived its age," says Mikhail Fyodorovich, deliberately. "Its song is already sung. Yes indeed. Humanity is already beginning to feel the need to replace it with something else. It grew up on the soil of prejudices, was nursed on prejudices, and now forms just such a quintessence of prejudices as its own defunct grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics, and philosophy. And really, what has it given people? Between educated Europeans and the Chinese, who have no sciences of their own, the difference is the merest trifle, purely external. The Chinese knew no science, but what did they lose by it?"

"Flies know no science either," I say, "but so what?"

"You’re angry for nothing, Nikolai Stepanych. I’m only saying this here, between the two of us... I’m more careful than you think, and I won’t be saying it in public, God forbid! The crowd lives by the prejudice that the sciences and the arts stand above farming, above trade, above the crafts. Our sect feeds on that prejudice, and it’s not for you and me to go knocking it down. God forbid!"

Over the patience-cards the young people come in for their share too.

"Our public has gotten shallower these days," sighs Mikhail Fyodorovich. "I won’t even speak of ideals and all that, but if only they knew how to work and think properly! It’s just as the poem says: ’Sadly I look upon our generation.’"

"Yes, dreadfully shallow," Katya agrees. "Tell me, in the last five or ten years has there been even one outstanding student of yours?"

"I don’t know how it is with other professors, but among my own I can’t recall one."

"In my time I’ve seen a great many students and your young scientists, and a great many actors too... And what of it? Not once have I been fortunate enough to meet a hero, or even a talent – let alone simply an interesting person. It’s all gray, untalented, puffed up with pretensions..."

These conversations about the shallowing of the young always produce on me the impression of having accidentally overheard some ugly talk about my own daughter. It stings me that the accusations are sweeping, and are built on such long-worn commonplaces, such bugbears, as "shallowing," "the absence of ideals," or an appeal to some beautiful past. Any accusation, even one voiced in ladies’ company, ought to be formulated with the greatest possible precision, or else it isn’t an accusation at all but idle slander, unworthy of decent people.

I am an old man, I’ve been in service thirty years now, but I notice no shallowing, no absence of ideals, and I do not find that things are worse now than before. My porter, Nikolai, whose experience in this matter has its own worth, says that today’s students are neither better nor worse than the old ones.

If I were asked what it is I dislike in my present-day pupils, I would not answer at once, and not at length, but with sufficient precision. I know their shortcomings, and so I have no need to take refuge in the fog of commonplaces. I dislike that they smoke tobacco, that they drink spirits, and that they marry late; that they are careless and often so indifferent that they let their own fellows go hungry among them and do not pay their dues to the students’ mutual aid society. They do not know modern languages and they express themselves incorrectly in Russian; only yesterday a colleague of mine, a hygienist, complained to me that he has to lecture twice as much now, because they know physics poorly and are utterly unacquainted with meteorology. They readily fall under the influence of the newest writers, even the lesser ones, yet are perfectly indifferent to such classics as, say, Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and it is in just this inability to tell the great from the small that their impracticality in life shows itself most. Any troublesome question of a more or less public character (the question of resettlement, say) they settle by petition and subscription lists rather than by scientific inquiry and experiment, though the latter path is entirely open to them and answers far better to their calling. They readily become house physicians, assistants, laboratory hands, externs, and are content to hold such posts until they are forty, though independence, a feeling of freedom, and personal initiative are no less needed in science than, say, in art or in trade. I have pupils and listeners, but no helpers and no heirs, and so I love them and am moved by them, but I am not proud of them. And so on, and so on...

Shortcomings of this kind, however many there may be, can breed a pessimistic or querulous mood only in a faint-hearted, timid man. All of them are accidental, passing in character, and depend entirely on the conditions of life; ten years or so is enough for them to vanish, or to yield their place to other, new shortcomings, which cannot be done without and which will in their turn frighten the faint-hearted. The sins of my students often vex me, but that vexation is nothing beside the joy I have felt these thirty years in talking with my pupils, in lecturing to them, in observing their relations with one another and comparing them with people outside their circle.

Mikhail Fyodorovich runs down the young, Katya listens, and neither of them notices into what a deep pit this seemingly innocent amusement – sitting in judgment on one’s neighbors – is drawing them, little by little. They do not feel how a plain conversation is gradually turning into mockery and derision, and how both of them are beginning to resort even to outright slander.

"You run into the funniest characters," says Mikhail Fyodorovich. "Yesterday I go to see our Yegor Petrovich and find some student there, one of your own medical men, third year I think. A face like this... in the Dobrolyubov style, the stamp of deep thought on his brow. We got to talking. ’Such and such is the state of things, young man,’ I say. ’I read,’ I say, ’that some German – forgot his name – has extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain, called idiotine.’ And what do you think? He believed it, and even put on a look of respect on his face – there, that shows what we’re made of! And then, the other day, I go to the theater. I sit down. Right in front of me, in the next row, sit two fellows: one ’of ours,’ apparently a law student, the other, shaggy-haired – a medical man. The medical man is drunk as a cobbler. Not a glance at the stage. Just dozing, nodding off. But the moment some actor starts declaiming a monologue loudly, or simply raises his voice, my medical man gives a start, elbows his neighbor, and asks: ’What’d he say? Was that n-o-ble?’ ’Noble,’ answers the one of ours. ’Bravo!’ bellows the medical man. ’N-o-ble! Bravo!’ You understand, the drunken blockhead came to the theater not for art but for nobility. Nobility is what he wants."

And Katya listens and laughs. Her laughter has something strange in it: the inhalations follow the exhalations quickly and with perfect rhythmic regularity – rather as though she were playing an accordion – and only her nostrils seem to laugh, on her face. As for me, I lose heart and do not know what to say. Beside myself, I flare up, jump to my feet, and shout:

"Be quiet, for God’s sake! What are you doing, sitting there like two toads, poisoning the air with your breathing? Enough!"

And, without waiting for them to finish running people down, I get ready to go home. And it’s high time too: it’s past ten.

"And I’ll sit a while longer," says Mikhail Fyodorovich. "You’ll allow it, Yekaterina Vladimirovna?"

"I’ll allow it," answers Katya.

"Bene. In that case, tell them to bring up another little bottle."

Both of them see me off to the front hall with candles, and while I am putting on my fur coat Mikhail Fyodorovich says:

"You’ve grown terribly thin and old lately, Nikolai Stepanovich. What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?"

"Yes, a little unwell."

"And won’t see a doctor..." Katya puts in glumly.

"Why on earth won’t you? How can you go on like that? God helps those who help themselves, my dear fellow. Give my regards to your family and apologize that I don’t call. One of these days, before I go abroad, I’ll come to say goodbye. Without fail! I leave next week."

I come away from Katya’s irritated, frightened by all this talk of my illness, and displeased with myself. I ask myself: shouldn’t I really see one of my colleagues about treatment? And at once I picture how a colleague, having heard me out, would walk silently to the window, think a while, then turn back to me and, trying to keep me from reading the truth on his face, say in an indifferent tone: "For the moment I see nothing in particular, but all the same, colleague, I would advise you to give up your work"... And that would strip me of my last hope.

Who is without hopes? Now, when I diagnose myself and treat myself, there are moments when I hope my own ignorance is deceiving me, that I am mistaken about the albumin and the sugar I find in myself, and about my heart, and about the swellings I have already twice seen on myself in the mornings; when, with a hypochondriac’s zeal, I reread the textbooks of therapeutics and change my medicines every day, it always seems to me that I am about to stumble on something comforting. It is all petty, all of it.

Whether the sky is covered in cloud or the moon and stars are shining on it, every time I come home I look up at it and think that death will soon take me. One would think that at such a moment my thoughts ought to be deep as the sky, bright, striking... But no! I think about myself, about my wife, about Liza, about Gnekker, about the students, about people in general; I think meanly, pettily, I dodge and dissemble before myself, and at such moments my whole outlook on the world might be expressed in the words that the famous Arakcheyev once wrote in one of his private letters: "Nothing good in this world can exist without the bad, and there is always more bad than good." That is: everything is vile, there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years already lived must be reckoned as wasted. I catch myself in such thoughts and try to persuade myself that they are accidental, temporary, and do not sit deep in me, but at once I think:

"If that’s so, then why is it that every evening something draws you to those two toads?"

And I swear to myself never to go to Katya’s again, though I know perfectly well that tomorrow I shall go to her all the same.

Tugging the bell-pull at my own door and then climbing the stairs, I feel that I no longer have a family, and no wish to get one back. It is plain that these new, Arakcheyev-like thoughts sit in me not by accident and not for a moment, but hold my whole being in their grip. With a guilty conscience, dejected, listless, scarcely able to move my limbs, as though a thousand extra pounds had been added to me, I lie down in bed and soon fall asleep.

And then – the sleeplessness again...

IV

Summer comes, and life changes.

One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says, in a jesting tone:

"Come along, your excellency. It’s ready."

My excellency is led out into the street, seated in a cab, and driven off. I ride along and, having nothing else to do, read the shop-signs from right to left. Out of the word "tavern" comes "nrevat." That would do nicely for a baronial surname: Baron Nrevat. Farther on I pass a field, and then a cemetery, which produces not the slightest impression on me, though I shall soon be lying in one myself; then I pass through a wood, and then a field again. Nothing of interest. After a two-hour drive my excellency is led into the ground floor of a country house and installed in a small, very cheerful little room with blue wallpaper.

At night, as before, there is sleeplessness, but in the mornings now I no longer keep watch and listen for my wife, but lie in bed. I am not asleep, but I live through a drowsy state, a half-oblivion, in which you know you are not sleeping and yet you see dreams. At noon I get up and sit, out of habit, at my desk, but I no longer work; instead I amuse myself with the yellow-covered French novels that Katya sends me. It would, of course, be more patriotic to read Russian authors, but, I must confess, I do not feel any particular fondness for them. Excepting two or three of the old men, the whole of present-day literature strikes me not as literature at all, but as a kind of cottage industry, existing only to be encouraged, though nobody much cares to make use of its wares. The very best of these homespun wares cannot be called remarkable, and cannot be honestly praised without a "but"; and the same must be said of all the literary novelties I have read in the last ten or fifteen years: not one remarkable one, and not one without its "however." Clever, high-minded, but untalented; talented, high-minded, but not clever; or, at the very best – talented, clever, but not high-minded.

I will not say that the French novels are talented, clever, and high-minded all at once. Nor do they satisfy me. But they are not as dreary as the Russian ones, and in them it is not a rarity to find the chief element of creative work – a feeling of personal freedom – which the Russian authors lack. I cannot recall a single one of these Russian novelties in which the author has not, from the very first page, taken care to entangle himself in all manner of conventions and contracts with his own conscience. One is afraid to speak of a naked body, another has bound himself hand and foot with psychological analysis, a third must have "a warm attitude toward mankind," a fourth deliberately smears whole pages with descriptions of nature so as not to be suspected of having a tendency... One wants at all costs to be, in his works, a petty bourgeois; another wants at all costs to be a gentleman, and so on. Deliberateness, caution, a mind always minding itself – but no freedom, no courage to write as one likes, and hence no creative work either.

All this applies to what is called belles-lettres.

As for serious Russian articles – on sociology, on art, and the rest – I simply do not read them, out of sheer timidity. As a child and as a young man I felt, for some reason, a dread of hall porters and theater ushers, and that dread has stayed with me to this day. I am afraid of them even now. They say that only what is not understood seems frightful. And indeed, it is very hard to understand why hall porters and ushers are so consequential, so haughty, and so majestically rude. Reading serious articles, I feel exactly the same vague dread. The extraordinary self-importance, the playful, general’s tone, the familiar way of handling foreign authors, the knack of pouring with dignity from one empty vessel into another – all this is, to me, incomprehensible, frightening, and quite unlike the modesty and gentlemanly, quiet tone I am used to from reading our physician-writers and our naturalists. Not only the articles themselves, but even the translations made or edited by serious Russian people are hard for me to read. The vain, condescending tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s footnotes that keep breaking my concentration, the question marks and the "sic"s in brackets scattered generously by the translator through the whole article or book – all this strikes me as an assault both on the person of the author and on my own independence as a reader.

Once I was invited to serve as an expert witness in the circuit court; in the recess one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the crude manner in which the prosecutor treated the defendants, among whom were two educated women. It seems to me I did not exaggerate in the least when I answered my colleague that this manner was no cruder than the manner in which the authors of serious articles treat one another. Indeed, their relations with each other are so crude that one can speak of them only with a heavy heart. Toward one another, and toward the writers they criticize, they behave either with an excess of deference, sparing nothing of their own dignity, or else, on the contrary, they handle them far more boldly than I do in these notes, or in my thoughts about my future son-in-law Gnekker. Charges of unaccountability, of impure motives, and even of every sort of criminal wrongdoing are the customary ornament of a serious article. And that, as the young doctors like to say in their little papers, is ultima ratio! Such manners cannot help but leave their mark on the morals of the younger generation of writers, and so I am not in the least surprised that in the novelties our belles-lettres has acquired these last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink a great deal of vodka and the heroines are none too chaste.

I read my French novels and glance now and then at the window, which stands open; I can see the pickets of my little front garden, two or three scrawny trees, and beyond the fence the road, a field, and farther off a broad strip of fir forest. Often I watch with pleasure how a boy and a girl, both flaxen-haired and ragged, climb up on the fence and laugh at my bald head. In their bright little eyes I read: "come here, baldy!" These are very nearly the only people in the world who care nothing either for my reputation or for my rank.

Visitors are not an everyday matter with me now. I will mention only the calls of Nikolai and Pyotr Ignatyevich. Nikolai usually comes to see me on holidays, ostensibly on business, but really just to see me. He arrives thoroughly tipsy, a thing that never happens with him in winter.

"What have you got to say?" I ask him, going out to him in the hall.

"Your excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with the rapture of a man in love. "Your excellency! Strike me dead if I lie! Let the thunder kill me on this very spot! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus!"

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

"Is everything well with all of you?" I ask him.

"Your excellency! As before God..."

He does not stop swearing oaths for no reason at all, soon wearies me, and I send him off to the kitchen, where he is given dinner. Pyotr Ignatyevich also comes to see me on holidays, specially in order to look in on me and share his thoughts. He generally sits by the table, modest, neat, sober-minded, not venturing to cross his legs or lean on the table; and the whole time, in a quiet, even little voice, smoothly and bookishly, he tells me various pieces of news that he finds, in his own opinion, very interesting and piquant, gleaned from journals and books. All these pieces of news resemble one another and come down to a single pattern: one Frenchman makes a discovery, a second – a German – catches him out, proving that the discovery was already made back in 1870 by some American, and a third – also a German – outwits them both, proving to them that they have both made fools of themselves, having mistaken air bubbles under the microscope for a dark pigment. Pyotr Ignatyevich, even when he means to make me laugh, tells his stories at length, exhaustively, exactly as though defending a dissertation, with a detailed listing of the literary sources he has used, taking care not to err in a single number or journal issue or name, and never simply saying "Petit," but always "Jean Jacques Petit." It happens that he stays to dine with us, and then, through the whole dinner, he tells the same piquant stories, casting gloom over everyone at table. If Gnekker and Liza happen to start talking, in his presence, about fugues and counterpoint, about Brahms and Bach, he modestly lowers his eyes and grows embarrassed; he is ashamed that, in the presence of such serious people as himself and me, anyone should talk of such trivialities.

In my present state of mind, five minutes are enough for him to bore me as though I had been seeing and listening to him for a whole eternity. I hate the poor fellow. His quiet, even voice and his bookish language wear me out; his stories make me stupid... He harbors only the best feelings toward me and talks to me only in order to give me pleasure, and I repay him by staring straight at him as though I meant to hypnotize him, thinking: "Go away, go away, go away"... But he does not yield to mental suggestion, and sits, and sits, and sits...

While he sits with me I can never rid myself of the thought: "it’s very possible that when I die they’ll appoint him to my chair," and my poor lecture hall pictures itself to me as an oasis where the stream has dried up, and I grow ungracious with Pyotr Ignatyevich, silent, sullen, as though he, and not I, were to blame for such thoughts. When he begins, as is his habit, to sing the praises of the German scientists, I no longer tease him good-naturedly as I once did, but mutter sullenly:

"Your Germans are asses..."

This is rather like the late Professor Nikita Krylov, who, bathing once with Pirogov at Reval and growing angry at the water, which was very cold, cursed: "Scoundrelly Germans!" I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatyevich, and it is only when he leaves, and I see his gray hat flash past the window beyond the front garden, that I want to call after him: "Forgive me, my dear fellow!"

Dinner is duller with us now than it was in winter. That same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with me nearly every day. Before, I bore his presence in silence; now I let fly little barbs at his expense, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by my own spite, I often say downright foolish things and do not know why I say them. So it happened once that, having gazed a long while at Gnekker with contempt, I blurted out, apropos of nothing:

Eagles may at times fly lower than the hens do,

But hens can never rise as high up as the clouds...

And the most vexing thing of all is that this hen Gnekker turns out to be a good deal cleverer than this eagle of a professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he keeps to a single tactic: he answers my barbs with condescending silence (the old man’s gone off his head, why bother arguing with him?), or else he good-naturedly jokes back at me. One has to marvel at just how shallow a man can grow! I am capable of spending an entire dinner dreaming of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, how Liza and my wife will see their mistake, and how I will taunt them for it – absurd daydreams of this kind, and this at a time when I already stand with one foot in the grave!

There are misunderstandings now, too, of a kind I once knew only by hearsay. Much as it shames me, I shall set down one of them, which happened the other day, after dinner.

I sit in my room, smoking my pipe. My wife comes in, as usual, sits down, and begins saying that it would be a good thing now, while it is warm and there is time to spare, to go to Kharkov and find out what sort of man this Gnekker of ours really is.

"Very well, I’ll go..." I agree.

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

"By the way, one more request. I know you’ll be angry, but it’s my duty to warn you... Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanych, but all our friends and neighbors have begun saying that you visit Katya far too often. She’s clever, educated, I won’t argue that, it’s pleasant to spend time with her, but at your age, and in your position in society, it’s somehow strange, you know, to take such pleasure in her company... Besides, she has such a reputation that..."

All the blood suddenly drains from my brain, sparks fly from my eyes, I leap up and, clutching my head, stamping my feet, cry out in a voice not my own:

"Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me!"

My face must be dreadful, my voice strange, for my wife suddenly turns pale and gives a loud cry, in a voice that is likewise not her own, a desperate voice. At our cries Liza comes running in, and Gnekker, and then Yegor...

"Leave me alone!" I shout. "Get out! Leave me alone!"

My legs go numb, as though they were not there at all, I feel myself falling into someone’s arms, then for a short while I hear weeping, and sink into a faint that lasts two or three hours.

Now, about Katya. She comes to see me every day, toward evening, and this, of course, cannot escape the notice of the neighbors or our friends. She comes for a moment and carries me off with her for a drive. She has her own horse and a new little dogcart, bought this summer. In general she lives on a grand footing: she has rented an expensive private cottage with a large garden and has moved her whole town household into it, has two maids, a coachman... I often ask her:

"Katya, what will you live on once you’ve squandered your father’s money?"

"We’ll see," she answers.

"That money, my friend, deserves to be treated more seriously. It was earned by a good man, through honest labor."

"You’ve already told me that. I know."

At first we drive across the field, then through the fir forest that can be seen from my window. Nature still seems beautiful to me, though a demon whispers to me that all these pines and firs, the birds and the white clouds in the sky, will not notice my absence three or four months from now, when I am dead. Katya loves to handle the horse, and is pleased that the weather is fine and that I am sitting beside her. She is in good spirits and says nothing sharp.

"You’re a very good man, Nikolai Stepanych," she says. "You’re a rare specimen, and there isn’t an actor alive who could play you. Me, or Mikhail Fyodorych, say – even a bad actor could play us, but nobody could play you. And I envy you, I envy you terribly! What am I, after all? What am I?"

She thinks for a moment and asks me:

"Nikolai Stepanych, I’m a negative phenomenon, aren’t I? Yes?"

"Yes," I answer.

"Hm... So what am I to do?"

What am I to answer her? It’s easy to say "work," or "give away your property to the poor," or "know thyself," and precisely because it’s easy to say, I don’t know what to answer.

My colleagues, the internists, when they teach how to treat patients, advise "individualizing each separate case." One has only to follow that advice to be convinced that the remedies recommended in the textbooks as the very best, entirely suited to the general template, turn out to be quite useless in particular cases. The same is true of moral ailments.

But I have to answer something, so I say:

"You have too much free time on your hands, my friend. You absolutely must take something up. Really, why not go back on the stage, if you have a calling for it?"

"I can’t."

"Your tone and manner are as though you were a victim. I don’t like that, my friend. You’re at fault yourself. Remember, you began by getting angry at people and at the way things are arranged, but you did nothing to make either any better. You didn’t fight against the evil, you simply wore yourself out, and you’re a victim not of struggle but of your own powerlessness. Well, of course, you were young then, inexperienced – now everything might go quite differently. Really, go into it! You’ll work, you’ll serve holy art..."

"Don’t be sly with me, Nikolai Stepanych," Katya breaks in. "Let’s agree once and for all: we can talk about actors, about actresses, about writers, but let’s leave art in peace. You’re a splendid, rare man, but you don’t understand art well enough to consider it holy in good conscience. You have neither a feel nor an ear for art. Your whole life you’ve been busy, and you never had time to acquire that feel. In general... I don’t like these conversations about art!" she goes on nervously. "I don’t like them! They’ve already been vulgarized enough, thank you very much!"

"Who’s vulgarized it?"

"Drunkards have vulgarized it with their drunkenness, the newspapers with their familiarity, clever people with their philosophy."

"Philosophy has nothing to do with it."

"It has everything to do with it. If a man philosophizes about it, that means he doesn’t understand it."

So the matter won’t come to sharp words, I hurry to change the subject, and then I am silent for a long while. Only when we drive out of the forest and head toward Katya’s dacha do I return to the earlier conversation and ask:

"You still haven’t answered me: why don’t you want to go on the stage?"

"Nikolai Stepanych, this is cruel, after all!" she cries out, and suddenly turns quite red. "You want me to say the truth out loud? Very well, if that’s... if that pleases you! I have no talent! No talent, and... and a great deal of self-regard! There!"

Having made this confession, she turns her face away from me, and to hide the trembling in her hands, she gives the reins a hard tug.

As we drive up to her dacha, we can already see from a distance Mikhail Fyodorovich, walking about near the gate and waiting for us impatiently.

"That Mikhail Fyodorych again!" Katya says with vexation. "Get rid of him for me, please! I’m sick of him, he’s worn out... To the devil with him!"

Mikhail Fyodorovich has long needed to go abroad, but every week he puts off his departure. Lately certain changes have come over him: he has grown somehow sunken, has begun to get tipsy on wine, which never used to happen to him before, and his black eyebrows are starting to turn gray. When our trap stops at the gate, he does not hide his joy and his impatience. He bustles about helping Katya and me down, hurries to ask questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that meek, imploring, pure look that I used to notice only in his eyes is now spread over his whole face. He is glad, and at the same time he is ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of this habit of coming to Katya’s every evening, and he finds it necessary to justify his visit with some obvious absurdity, along the lines of: "I was driving past on business and thought, why not stop in for a minute."

The three of us go inside; first we drink tea, then on the table appear the two decks of cards I know so well by now, a big piece of cheese, fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne. The topics of our conversation are nothing new, the same ones as in winter. It goes hard for the university, and the students, and literature, and the theater; the air grows thick and stifling from the slander, and it is no longer just two toads, as in winter, poisoning it with their breath, but three whole ones now. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the laugh that sounds like an accordion, the maid who waits on us now hears yet another unpleasant, rattling laugh, the kind generals laugh with in vaudevilles: heh-heh-heh...

V

There are terrible nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which the common folk call sparrow nights. One such sparrow night occurred in my own personal life as well...

I wake after midnight and suddenly jump up out of bed. For some reason it seems to me that I am about to die suddenly. Why does it seem so? There is not a single sensation in my body pointing to a swift end, but my soul is oppressed by such a horror as if I had suddenly seen a huge, ominous glow in the sky.

I quickly light a lamp, drink water straight from the carafe, then hurry to the open window. The weather outside is magnificent. It smells of hay and something else, something very good. I can see the pickets of the fence, the sleepy, scrawny little trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of forest; in the sky a calm, very bright moon, and not a single cloud. Silence – not a leaf stirs. It seems to me that everything is watching me and listening to hear how I am going to die...

It’s eerie. I close the window and run to the bed. I feel for my pulse, and not finding it in my wrist, I search for it at my temples, then at my chin, then at my wrist again, and all this while my skin is cold, clammy with sweat. My breathing grows faster and faster, my body trembles, all my insides are astir, and on my face and on my bald head there is a sensation as though a cobweb were settling on them.

What is to be done? Call the family? No, no need. I don’t understand what my wife and Liza would do if they came in to me.

I bury my head under the pillow, close my eyes, and wait, wait... My back feels cold, as though it is drawing in on itself, and I have the feeling that death will surely come up on me from behind, quietly...

"Kivi-kivi!" a squeak suddenly rings out in the nighttime silence, and I don’t know where it’s coming from: from inside my chest, or from the street?

"Kivi-kivi!"

My God, how frightening! I would drink some more water, but it’s frightening even to open my eyes, and I’m afraid to lift my head. My terror is unaccountable, animal, and I simply cannot understand why I am afraid: is it because I want to live, or because some new, still unknown pain awaits me?

Overhead, beyond the ceiling, someone is either groaning or laughing... I listen. A little later, footsteps sound on the stairs. Someone hurries down, then goes up again. A minute later the footsteps sound below once more; someone stops by my door and listens.

"Who’s there?" I shout.

The door opens, I boldly open my eyes, and I see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes are swollen with weeping.

"Aren’t you asleep, Nikolai Stepanych?" she asks.

"What do you want?"

"For God’s sake, go to Liza and look at her. Something’s the matter with her..."

"Very well... gladly..." I mutter, very glad that I am not alone. "Very well... This minute."

I follow my wife, listen to what she is telling me, and understand nothing at all from agitation. Bright patches from her candle leap up the steps of the staircase, our long shadows tremble, my feet get tangled in the skirts of my dressing gown, I am gasping for breath, and it seems to me that something is chasing after me and wants to seize me by the back. "I am going to die right here, on this staircase," I think. "Right now..." But now we have passed the staircase, the dark corridor with the Italian window, and we enter Liza’s room. She is sitting up on the bed in nothing but her shift, her bare feet hanging down, and she is moaning.

"Oh, my God... oh, my God!" she mutters, squinting against the light of our candle. "I can’t, I can’t..."

"Liza, my child," I say. "What’s the matter with you?" Seeing me, she cries out and throws herself on my neck.

"My good papa..." she sobs, "my dear papa... my little darling, my sweet... I don’t know what’s the matter with me... It’s so heavy!"

She embraces me, kisses me, and babbles endearments such as I used to hear from her when she was still a child.

"Calm down, my child, God be with you," I say. "There’s no need to cry. I feel heavy myself."

I try to cover her up, my wife gives her something to drink, and the two of us bustle disorderly about the bed; with my shoulder I jostle hers, and at that moment I remember how we once used to bathe our children together.

"Well, help her, help her!" my wife implores. "Do something!"

What can I do? Nothing. There is some heaviness on the girl’s soul, but I understand nothing, I know nothing, and I can only mutter.

"Nothing, nothing... It will pass... Sleep, sleep..."

As if on purpose, a dog’s howl suddenly sounds in our yard, quiet and hesitant at first, then loud, in two voices. I have never attached any importance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the cry of owls, but now my heart contracts painfully, and I hasten to explain this howling to myself.

"Nonsense..." I think. "The influence of one organism on another. My strong nervous strain has communicated itself to my wife, to Liza, to the dog, that’s all... This transmission is what explains presentiments, forebodings..."

When, a little later, I return to my own room to write out a prescription for Liza, I am no longer thinking that I will soon die, but simply my soul is heavy, sick with tedium, so that I even regret I did not die suddenly. For a long while I stand motionless in the middle of the room, trying to think what I might prescribe for Liza, but the groans beyond the ceiling fall silent, and I decide to prescribe nothing, and still I stand there...

The silence is deathly, such a silence that, as some writer once put it, it even rings in the ears. Time moves slowly, the strips of moonlight on the windowsill do not shift their position, as though frozen... Dawn is still a long way off.

But now, in the front garden, the little gate creaks, someone is creeping along, and, having broken off a branch from one of the scrawny little trees, taps it cautiously against the window.

"Nikolai Stepanych!" I hear a whisper. "Nikolai Stepanych!"

I open the window, and it seems to me I am seeing a dream: below the window, pressed against the wall, stands a woman in a black dress, brightly lit by the moon, looking at me with large eyes. Her face is pale, stern, and fantastical in the moonlight, as if made of marble, her chin trembling.

"It’s me..." she says. "It’s... Katya!"

In moonlight all women’s eyes seem large and black, people seem taller and paler, and that is probably why I did not recognize her at first.

"What do you want?"

"Forgive me," she says. "For some reason it suddenly became unbearably heavy for me... I couldn’t stand it and drove over here... There was a light in your window, and... and I decided to knock... Excuse me... Ah, if you knew how heavy it was for me! What are you doing right now?"

"Nothing... Insomnia."

"I had some kind of presentiment. Though, never mind, it’s nothing."

Her eyebrows rise, her eyes glisten with tears, and her whole face lights up, as if illumined by a familiar expression, long unseen, of trustfulness.

"Nikolai Stepanych!" she says imploringly, stretching out both hands to me. "My dear one, I beg you... I implore you... If you don’t scorn my friendship and my respect for you, then agree to my request!"

"What is it?"

"Take my money from me!"

"Well, now what’s this you’ve thought up! What do I need your money for?"

"You’ll go somewhere to be treated... You need treatment. Will you take it? Yes? My dear, yes?"

She peers avidly into my face and repeats:

"Yes? Will you take it?"

"No, my friend, I won’t take it..." I say. "Thank you."

She turns her back to me and bows her head. Probably I had refused her in a tone that allowed for no further talk of money.

"Go home and sleep," I say. "We’ll see each other tomorrow."

"So you don’t consider me your friend?" she asks dejectedly.

"I’m not saying that. But your money is no use to me now."

"Forgive me..." she says, dropping her voice a whole octave. "I understand you... To be beholden to a person like me... a retired actress... Well, then, goodbye..."

And she leaves so quickly that I don’t even manage to say goodbye to her.

VI

I am in Kharkov.

Since it would be useless, and beyond my strength, to struggle against my present mood, I have decided that the last days of my life shall be irreproachable, at least in their outward form; if I am in the wrong toward my family, which I am perfectly aware of, then I will try to do as they wish. If it is to be Kharkov, then let it be Kharkov. Besides, I have grown so indifferent to everything lately that it is genuinely all the same to me where I go — to Kharkov, to Paris, or to Berdichev.

I arrived here around noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. The train shook me about and chilled me with its drafts, and now I sit on the bed, holding my head, waiting for the tic. I ought to go and see the professors I know here today, but I have neither the wish nor the strength.

An old corridor waiter comes in and asks whether I need bed linen. I keep him back for five minutes and put a few questions to him about Gnekker, the man for whose sake I came here. The waiter turns out to be a native of Kharkov and knows the city like the back of his hand, but he cannot recall any house that goes by the name of Gnekker. I ask about estates — the same result.

In the corridor a clock strikes one, then two, then three... The last months of my life, while I wait for death, seem to me far longer than the whole of my life before them. And never before have I known how to make my peace with the slowness of time as I do now. Once, waiting for a train at a station, or sitting through an examination, a quarter of an hour would seem an eternity; now I can sit motionless on the bed all night and think, with perfect indifference, that tomorrow will be just such another long, colorless night, and the day after that...

In the corridor the clock strikes five, six, seven... It grows dark.

A dull pain starts in my cheek — the tic is beginning. To occupy myself with some thought, I put myself back at the old point of view, from the time when I was not yet indifferent, and I ask: why is it that I, a famous man, a privy councillor, am sitting in this small hotel room, on this bed with its strange gray blanket? Why am I looking at this cheap tin washstand and listening to the wretched clock rattling in the corridor? Is any of this worthy of my fame and my exalted standing among men? And to these questions I answer myself with a smile. How naive I find myself now, for having once, in my youth, exaggerated the importance of that exceptional position which the famous are supposed to enjoy. I am well known, my name is spoken with reverence, my portrait has appeared in both the Niva and the World Illustration, I have even read my own biography in a German journal — and what does it come to? Here I sit, utterly alone, in a strange city, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm... Family squabbles, the mercilessness of creditors, the rudeness of railway servants, the inconveniences of the passport system, the expensive and unwholesome food at the buffets, the general ignorance and coarseness in people’s dealings with one another — all this, and much else too long to list, touches me no less than it would the pettiest townsman, known only to his own back street. In what, then, does the exceptional nature of my position consist? Suppose I am famous a thousand times over, suppose I am a hero my country is proud of; bulletins about my illness are printed in every newspaper, letters of sympathy from colleagues, students, and the public are already on their way to me by post — none of it will keep me from dying on a strange bed, in anguish, in utter solitude... No one, of course, is to blame for this, but, sinner that I am, I have come not to love my famous name. It seems to me as though it has deceived me.

Around ten o’clock I fall asleep, and despite the tic I sleep soundly, and would have slept long, had I not been woken. Shortly after one o’clock a sudden knock comes at the door.

"Who’s there?"

"A telegram!"

"You might have brought it tomorrow," I say crossly, taking the telegram from the corridor man. "Now I won’t get back to sleep."

"Beg pardon, sir. You had your light on, so I thought you weren’t asleep."

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

"Yesterday Gnekker secretly married Liza. Come back."

I read this telegram and am frightened, but only for a moment. What frightens me is not what Liza and Gnekker have done, but my own indifference in the face of the news of their marriage. They say philosophers and true sages are indifferent. That is not true — indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

I lie down again and try to think what I might occupy my mind with. What is there to think about? It seems everything has already been thought through, and there is nothing left now capable of stirring my mind.

When it grows light, I sit up in bed with my arms around my knees, and, for want of anything else to do, try to know myself. "Know thyself" is excellent and useful advice; it is only a pity the ancients never thought to indicate how one is to make use of it.

In the past, whenever I wanted to understand someone, myself included, I paid attention not to actions, in which everything is a matter of convention, but to desires. Tell me what you want, and I will tell you who you are.

And now I put myself to the test: what do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, and students to love in us not the name, not the firm, not the label, but ordinary people. What else? I should like to have assistants and heirs. What else? I should like to wake up a hundred years from now and get even one glimpse of what will have become of science. I should like to live another ten years or so... What else is there?

And beyond that, nothing. I think, and think for a long time, and can come up with nothing more. And however much I think, and wherever my thoughts scatter to, it is plain to me that something is missing from my desires — something essential, something very important. In my devotion to science, in my wish to go on living, in this sitting on a strange bed and striving to know myself, in all the thoughts, feelings, and notions I form about everything, there is no single thread that would bind it all into one whole. Every feeling and every thought lives on in me apart from the rest, and in all my judgments about science, theater, literature, my students, and in all the pictures my imagination draws, not even the most skillful analyst would find what is called a general idea, or the god of a living man. And if that is missing, then it means nothing is there at all.

Given such poverty, it took no more than a serious illness, the fear of death, the pressure of circumstance and of people, to turn everything I once took for my worldview, everything in which I once saw the meaning and joy of my life, upside down and scatter it to rags. There is nothing surprising, then, in the fact that I have darkened these last months of my life with thoughts and feelings worthy of a slave and a barbarian, that I am now indifferent and take no notice of the dawn. When a man lacks something higher and stronger than every outside influence pressing on him, then, truly, a bad cold is enough to unbalance him and set him seeing an owl in every bird, a dog’s howl in every sound. And all his pessimism or optimism, with its great thoughts and its small ones, amounts at such a time to nothing more than a symptom.

I am beaten. If that is so, there is no point in going on thinking, no point in talking any further. I will sit and wait, in silence, to see what happens.

In the morning the corridor man brings me tea and a copy of the local newspaper. Mechanically I read through the advertisement on the front page, the leading article, extracts from other papers and journals, the local notes... And among the local notes I find this item: "Yesterday, by the express train, our celebrated scholar, the distinguished professor Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, arrived in Kharkov and put up at such-and-such a hotel."

Evidently famous names are made to lead a life of their own, apart from those who bear them. My name is at this moment strolling serenely about Kharkov; in three months’ time it will be inscribed in gilt letters on a gravestone and will shine there like the sun itself — at the very time when I shall already be covered in moss...

A light knock at the door. Someone needs me.

"Who’s there? Come in!"

The door opens, and, taken aback, I step back and hurry to draw the skirts of my dressing gown together. Before me stands Katya.

"Hello," she says, breathing hard from the stairs. "You didn’t expect me? I didn’t either... I’ve come here too."

She sits down and goes on, stammering, not looking at me:

"Why don’t you say hello? I’ve come too... today... I found out you were at this hotel and came to see you."

"Very glad to see you," I say, shrugging, "but I am surprised... You seem to have dropped straight out of the sky. What are you doing here?"

"Me? Oh... I simply upped and came."

Silence. Suddenly she rises abruptly and comes toward me.

"Nikolai Stepanych!" she says, turning pale and pressing her hands to her breast. "Nikolai Stepanych! I can’t go on living like this! I can’t! For the love of God, tell me now, this minute — what am I to do? Tell me, what am I to do?"

"What can I possibly say?" I ask, at a loss. "There’s nothing I can do."

"Tell me, I beg you!" she goes on, gasping and trembling all over. "I swear to you, I cannot go on living like this! I haven’t the strength!"

She sinks into a chair and begins to sob. She has thrown her head back, wrings her hands, stamps her feet; her hat has slipped off her head and dangles on its elastic, her hair has come undone.

"Help me! Help me!" she pleads. "I can’t go on!"

She takes a handkerchief out of her traveling bag, and with it several letters spill from her lap onto the floor. I gather them up from the floor, and on one of them I recognize Mikhail Fyodorovich’s hand, and against my will I catch a scrap of some word — "...passion...".

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

"Help me!" she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. "You are my father, my only friend! You are intelligent, educated, you have lived a long life! You were a teacher! Tell me, then — what am I to do?"

"On my honor, Katya — I don’t know..."

I am at a loss, embarrassed, moved by her sobbing, and can hardly stand on my feet.

"Come, Katya, let’s have breakfast," I say, with a forced smile. "That’s enough crying!"

And at once I add, in a voice that has fallen:

"I shall soon be gone, Katya..."

"Just one word, just one word!" she weeps, stretching her hands out to me. "What am I to do?"

"What a strange girl you are, really..." I mutter. "I don’t understand it! So sensible, and then all at once — there she goes, crying..."

Silence falls. Katya puts her hair right, puts her hat back on, then crumples the letters and stuffs them into her bag — all this in silence, unhurried. Her face, her bodice, and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression has already gone dry, stern... I look at her, and I am ashamed that I am happier than she is. This absence of what my fellow philosophers call the general idea I noticed in myself only shortly before my death, in the twilight of my days, but the soul of this poor girl has known no shelter and will know none, her whole life, her whole life!

"Come, Katya, let’s have breakfast," I say.

"No, thank you," she answers coldly.

Another minute passes in silence.

"I don’t care for Kharkov," I say. "Too gray. Some sort of gray town."

"Yes, perhaps... Not a pretty place... I’m only here in passing. I’m leaving again today."

"Where to?"

"To the Crimea... that is, the Caucasus."

"I see. For long?"

"I don’t know."

Katya gets up, and, with a cold smile, without looking at me, holds out her hand.

I want to ask: "So you won’t come to my funeral, then?" But she is not looking at me, and her hand is cold, as though it belonged to a stranger. In silence I see her to the door... There she goes, out from me, walking down the long corridor, without looking back. She knows I am watching her go, and she will probably look back at the turn.

No, she did not look back. The black dress flashed past for the last time, the footsteps died away... Farewell, my treasure!