" Of course I I have made it already."
" How so ? "
" I have marked out for myself a sphere of activity and I don't wish to go beyond it. I am a householder here ; that's my career. 1 am fed and clothed; I have enough for that."
"And very badly clothed now," remarked his uncle. " And is that all you want ? "
« Yes, all."
" But the attraction of intellectual and spiritual pleasures, and art?" Piotr Ivanitch was beginning mimicking Alexandra intonation. " You might go forwards; yours is a higher vocation; your duty summons you to noble activity. And your strivings for what is higher—have you forgotten ? "
" Confound them ! " said Alexandr uneasily. " You too, uncle have begun to be high-flown. This never attacked you before. Isn't it for my benefit ? It's trouble thrown away ! I did strive for something .... do you recollect what came ofit?"
" I remember that you wanted to be a minister all of a sudden, and then an author. Still you have proved that you can work and be something in time. But it's long and weary waiting, we want it all at once; we don't succeed, and we lose heart"
"But I don't want to strive for something higher. I have found a place for myself, and I shall stay there for ever. I have found some simple, unsophisticated people; it's no matter that they're limited in intellect. I play draughts and go fishing with them—and it's capital! Let me be punished, as you consider, for it, let me be deprived of rewards, honour, money, a higher vocation—and all that you are so in love with. I have renounced for ever "
"You want, Alexandr, to pretend to be contented and indifferent to everything, but your vexation effervesces even in your words; you are speaking as though with tears instead of words. You are full of bitterness; you don't know what to vent it on, because you alone are to blame."
" So be it! " said Alexandr.
Piotr Ivanitch looked at him without speaking. He had_ g rown thin again. His eyes were sunk en. On his cheeks and brows premature wnnkles were visible.
His uncle was alarmed. Spiritual suffering he scarcely believed in, but he was afraid that the beginning of some physical disease lay hid under this exhaustion. " I declare," he thought, " the boy is going out of his mind, and then to break it to his mother; what a correspondence ! she would be certain to come up here too."
" Come in and see us," he said; " my wife is very anxious to see you."
" I can't, uncle."
" Is it nice of you to forget her ? "
" Perhaps it's very nasty of me, but, for goodness* sake, excuse me and don't expect me now. Wait a little while longer, I will come."
"Well, as you please," said Piotr Ivanitch. With a wave of the hand he went off home.
He told his wife he gave up Alexandr and that he must do as he likes—that he, Piotr Ivanitch, had done all he could, and now washed his hands of him.
After his rupture with Julia, Alexandr had flung himself into a whirl of riotous amusements.
In a little while his freedom with noisy festivities and a life without care made him forget Julia and his troubles. But all this constant repetition of suppers at restaurants, with the same blear-eyed faces, of the stupid and drunken talk of his companions day after day, with his stomach constantly out of order into the bargain—no, this was not to his taste. The delicate organisation of body and soul in Alexandr, attuned to a note of melancholy and pathos, could not endure these dissipations.
He shut himself up alone in his room, in solitude with his forgotten books. But his book fell out of his hands, and his pen refused to obey the breath of inspiration. Schiller, Goethe, Byron showed him the dark side of mankind; the bright side he did not notice—that he had not attained to.
But how happy he had been at times in that room ! he had not been alone then; a vision of splendour had been near him then, by day it had beckoned him to earnest work, by night it had kept watch over his pillow. Dreams had been his companions in those days, the future had been clothed in mist, but not a gloomy mist presaging storm, but the mist of morning veiling the brilliance of dawn. Behind this mist something was hidden, doubtless, happiness. But now, not his room only, but the whole world was empty for him, and within himself all was chill dreariness.
Looking at life, questioning his heart and his head, he perceived with horror that there was neither within or without a single ideal left nor a single bright hope; all now lay
behind him ; the mist had parted ; behind it stretched the desert of bald reality. Good Heavens! what an immense void ! what a dreary comfortless prospect 1
The past was over, the future was ruined, happiness was not; all had been a dream, and still he had to live !
What he wanted he did not know himself; but how much he did not want!
His head seemed as though it were in a fog. He did not sleep, but seemed in a lethargy. Disquieting thoughts were drawn out in an unending series in his brain. He thought: "what could attract him? Seductive hope, happy heedlessness, was no more! he knew all that was before him. Success, a struggle along the path that leads to honour? What was there in that for him? Was it worth while for twenty or thirty years to fight like a fish against the ice ? And would it cheer his heart ? A consolation truly to the spirit for a few men to bow low to one while they are cursing one very likely in their hearts!
What of love ? Ah, that was worse! He knew it by heart, and had lost even the power of loving. And as though in irony his memory officiously recalled to him Nadinka, not the innocent, simple-hearted Nadinka—that was never recalled to him—but invariably Nadinka the traitress, with all her surroundings : the trees, the little path, the flowers, and among all this the wily one, with the smile he knew so well, with her blush of shame and passion—and all for another, not for him !
With a frown he clutched at his heart. He believed in no one and nothing, and never forgot himself in enjoyment; he tasted pleasure as a man without appetite tastes dainties, coldly, knowing that satiety presses close upon it, that nothing can ever fill up the void in his heart; that if one trusts oneself to passion, it will deceive one and only agitate the heart, and add fresh wounds to the old ones. When he saw people united by love forgetting everything in their happiness, he smiled ironically and thought: "Wait a little, you will change your minds."
He dreaded feeling a desire, knowing that often at the moment of attaining what one desires, Fate snatches happiness out of one's hands, and substitutes something altogether
different, some wretched thing which one does not want at all, and if in the end it does grant one's desire, it first tortures, wearies out, and degrades one in one's eyes, and then throws it as men throw sop to a dog after just making him crawl to the dainty morsel, look at it, balance it on his nose, roll it in the dust, stand on his hind paws and then— good dog, have it!
He dreaded the periodical interchange of happiness and unhappiness in life. He foresaw no pleasures, but pain was always inevitably before one; there was no escaping that— all men were subject to that general law; to all, as he thought, there were allotted equal parts of pain and happiness. Happiness was over for him ; and what kind of happiness was it? A phantom, a cheat. Only pain was real, and that was all before him. There were sickness and old age, and losses and perhaps even want. All these strokes of destiny, as his auntie in the country called them, were in store for him ; and what were the compensations ? His high poetic vocation had forsaken him ; they impose a wearisome burden on him, and call it duty! All that is left him are the pitiful rewards—money, comfort, rank. Confound them!
So he brooded in melancholy, and saw no outlet from this slough of doubt.
His despair drew the tears from his eyes—'tears of mortification, envy, ill-will to all men—the bitterest of tears. He felt acute regret that he had not listened to his moth er, an d jiad ever left his obscure Country place.