Her happiness animated her. Her cheeks glowed, her eyes flashed with unwonted brilliance. How zealously she played the hostess, how gaily she. chatted! There was not a shadow left of the momentary glimpse of sadness.
The dawn was already filling half the heavens with light when Adouev took his seat in the boat. The boatmen in expectation of the promised reward, spit into their hands and were beginning to rise from their seats as before, plying the oars with all their might.
" Go slower !" said Alexandr, " another half rouble for vodka!"
They looked at him and then at one another. One scratched his throat, the other his back, and they began to row, scarcely moving the oars, hardly touching the water. The boat swam on like a swan.
" And uncle wants to convince me that happiness is a chimaera, that one cannot believe unreservedly in anything,
that life he is too bad ! Why does he want to deceive
me so cruelly? No, this is life! So I imagined it to myself, so it must be, so it is, and so it shall be! Otherwise it is not life!"
A soft morning breeze was lightly blowing from the north. Alexandr gave a little shiver, from the breeze and from his memories, then yawned and, wrapping himself in his coat, fell into reverie.
CHAPTER V.
Adouev had reached the zenith of his happiness. He had nothing more to wish for. His official duties, his journalistic work were all forgotten and thrown aside. They had already passed him over at his office ; he would not have noticed it at all, except that his uncle reminded him of
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98 A COMMON STORY
the fact. Piotr I van itch advised him to give up trifling, but Alexandr at the word "trifling" shrugged his shoulders, smiled compassionately and said nothing. His uncle, seeing that his representations were useless, also shrugged his shoulders, smiled compassionately and said nothing.
Alexandr obviously avoided him. He had lost all kind of trust in his gloomy prognostications, and feared his cold views of love in general and his offensive insinuations as to his relations with Nadinka in especial.
There was something of triumph, of mystery in Alexandr's deportment, his glance, his whole bearing. He behaved with other people, like some rich capitalist on Exchange with petty tradesmen, condescendingly, with consideration, thinking to himself, " poor creatures ! which of you is master of a treasure like mine ? which of you can feel like me ? whose mighty soul " and so on.
He was convinced that he was the only person in the world who so loved and was so loved. However, he not only avoided his uncle, but all the " herd" as he said. He was either worshipping his divinity, or sitting at home in his study alone, brooding over his bliss, analysing it, dissecting it to infinity. He called this creating a world of his ozvn, and sitting in solitude he certainly did create for himself a world of some kind out of nothing and lived for the most part in it, and he went to his office rarely and reluctantly, calling it—"a miserable necessity."
Behold him sitting in his armchair! Before him some sheets of paper, on which were carelessly jotted a few lines of poetry. He is either bending over the manuscript, making some correction or adding a few lines, or doubled up in the depths of his armchair dreaming. On his lips a smile is playing; it is clear that it is not long since they tasted the full " cup " of bliss.
All around is still. Only in the distance'from the great street is heard the rumbling of carriages, and from time to time Yevsay, weary of cleaning shoes, talking aloud to himself: " mus'n't forget; borrowed a ha'porth of vinegar some time ago at the shop and a penn'orth of cabbage, must pay it to-morrow, or the man, maybe, won't trust me again—such a cur as he is 1 Sell bread by the pound—like the famine year—it's a shame! Oh, Lord, I'm tired ! There, I'll just
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finish that boot—and then to bed. At Grahae they've been abed this long time, no doubt; it's very^HKerent from here ! When will the Lord grant I see "
Here he gave a loud sigh, breathed on the boot, and began again to polish it with the brush. He considered this occupation a most important one, and almost his sole ' duty, and measured the value of a servant and even of a man principally by his skill in cleaning boots; he cleaned them himself with a kind of passionate ardour. " Do • stop, Yevsay! you prevent me doing my work with your ' fooling!" cried Adouev.
" Fooling !" Yevsay muttered to himself; " it's not I but you that are fooling, and I am doing work. Just see how he's mudded his boots, one can scarcely get them clean." He put the boots on the table and looked lovingly at the brilliant polish on the leather.
" Get along ! polishing like that fooling !" he added.
Alexandr grew always more deeply buried in his dreams of Nadinka and then in his dreams of authorship.
There was nothing on the table. Everything which recalled his former occupations, his office duties, his journalistic work, lay under the table or in the cupboard or under the bed. " The very sight of such sordid things," he said, "frightens the creative impulse, and it takes flight like the nightingale from a thicket, at the sudden creaking of grating wheels on the road."
Often the dawn found him over some lyric. Every hour not spent at the Lubetzkys was devoted to composition. He wrote poetry and read it to Nadinka; she would copy it out on superfine paper and learn it by heart, and he experienced " the poet's highest bliss—hearing his own creations from beloved lips."
" You are my muse," he said to her; " be the Vesta of the sacred fire which burns within my breast; if you abandon it, it will die out."
Then he sent verses under noms-de-plume to the magazines. They printed them because they were not bad, in parts not without force, and all animated by ardent feeling, and the style was good.
Nadinka was proud of his love and called him " my poet"
" Yes, yours, yours. for ever," he added. Fame seemed
to smile before hiro, and Nadinka, he thought, would twine him the laurels to crown his brow, and then . . . . " Life, life, how fair a thing thou art! " he exclaimed. " And my uncle? He would destroy, he would corrupt my loving heart, he would pervert it."
And he avoided his uncle, did not go to see him for whole weeks, then months. And if when they did meet, the conversation turned on matters of feeling, he kept a contemptuous silence or listened like a man whose convictions cannot be shaken by any arguments. He considered his judgments infallible, his feelings and opinions unsuitable, and decided in future to be guided only by them, declaring that he was no longer a boy and why should he be bound by the opinions of others, and so on.
But his uncle was always the same; he never asked his nephew about anything and did not or would not notice his whims. He was as cordial with him as before, and lightly reproached him for coming so rarely to see him.
" My wife is angry with you," he said : "she was accustomed to regard you as a relation: we dine every day at home; you must come in."
But Alexandr rarely went in, for he had no time; in the morning at the office, after dinner till night at the Lubet-zkys ; night came, and at night he entered the " world of his own " he had created, and continued to create there. And besides it did him no harm to sleep a little sometimes.
In prose composition he was less happy. He wrote a play, two novels, some sketches and travels. His activity was amazing, the paper seemed to burn under his pen. His play and one of his novels he showed at first to his uncle and asked him to say whether they would do. His uncle read a few pages at random and handed it back, writing above—"It will do to light the fire !"
Alexandr was furious and sent them to the magazines, but they returned him both of them. In two places on the margin of the play was noted in pencil " not bad," and that was all. On the novel the following criticisms were often to be met with: " weak, untrue, unreal, tedious, not worked out" and so on, and at the end it was said "there is noticeable throughout an ignorance of the heart, an excess of fervour, unreality, everything stilted, no real human being in it—the hero is a monstrosity—such people don't exist—