" Then am I to blame, Alexandr ? Could I awaken any bitter consciousness—I ? "
" Yes, that's what's so terrible! Your pure angel-face, ma tante, your gentle words and kind hand .... all agitates -and touches me. I long to weep, I long to live again, I yearn;—and what's the use ? "
"Why ask what's the use? Stay with us always, and if you consider me only partly worthy of your affection, perhaps you will find consolation in some other; I am not the only one .... you will be appreciated. You will marry .... will love . . . ." she said feebly.
" I marry! what an idea ? Can you imagine I would entrust my happiness to a woman, even if I felt any love for her, which also is impossible ? Or do you imagine I could undertake to make a woman happy ? No, I know we should be deceiving one another and both be deceiving ourselves. My uncle, Piotr Ivanitch, and experience have taught me."
" Piotr Ivanitch 1 ah, he has much to answer for!" said Lizaveta Alexandrovna with a sigh; " but you would have done well not to listen to him .... and you would have been happy in marriage."
" Yes, in the country, I daresay; but now .... No, ma tante, marriage is not for me. I cannot disguise it from myself now, when I cease to care for any one, and be happy; and I could not even Jielp seeing when my wife was disguising her feelings; * we should both have to play a
part, just as, for instance, you and my uncle play your parts."
" We ? " said Lizaveta Alexandrovna in bewilderment and dismay.
"Yes, you! Tell me, are you as happy as you once dreamed of being?"
"Not as I dreamed of being, but happy in a different way from my dreams, more rationally, possibly even more so —isn't it all the same ? " replied Lizaveta Alexandrovna in confusion : " and you too "
" More rationally ! Ah, ma (ante, you would never have said that: one see's my uncle's hand ! I know that's happiness according to his system : more rational, I daresay, but happier ? Why, everything is happiness with him, he has no unhappiness. Confound him ! No! my life is a failure ; I am worn out, weary of life."
Both were silent. Alexandr glanced towards his hat, his aunt was trying to find some way to detain him longer.
" But your talent! " she said, suddenly reviving.
" Oh, ma tantey you want to make fun of us ! You have forgotten the proverb,' Let sleeping dogs lie.' I have no talent, absolutely none. I have feeling, I had a fertile brain; I took my dreams for genius and wrote. Not long ago I came upon one of the old scribbles I used to perpetrate, and I reaci it though it was ridiculous even to me. My uncle was right in making me burn all there was. Ah, if I could but recall the past, I would make a very different use of it!"
"Don't be so utterly pessimistic !" she said; "every one of us has to bear some heavy cross."
"Who has got a cross?" asked Piotr Ivanitch, entering the room, "How do you do? May I congratulate you, t Alexandr! is it you ? "
i Piotr Ivanitch was bent and moved his legs with ^ ' difficulty.
" Yes, but not the kind of cross you imagine," said Lizaveta Alexandrovna; " I am speaking of the crosses Alexandr has to put up with."
" What has he to put up with now ? " asked Piotr Ivanitch, lowering himself with the greatest precaution into an armchair. " Ugh ! what pain! what a visitation it is!"
Lizaveta Alexandrovna helped him to sit down, laid a cushion behind his back, and put a foot-stool under his feet.
" What's wrong with you, uncle ? " asked Alexandr.
" You see it's a heavy cross I have to bear ! Ugh; my back! A cross, yes, it is a cross; I have brought it on myself though ! Ah, my God 1"
" You will sit so much ; you know the climate here," said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. "The doctor told you to take more exercise, but no; in the morning he is writing, in the evening playing cards."
" What, am I to go gaping about the streets wasting my time ? "
" That's why you are punished."
"There's no escaping this trouble here if you want to attend to your work. Who is there who doesn't suffer with his back ? It's almost a distinct mark of a business man ; ah, one can't straighten one's spine ! Well, what are you doing, Alexandr."
" Just the same as ever."
"Ah, well, then your back won't ache. It's really astonishing!"
" What are you astonished at; are not you yourself
partly to blame for his having become " said Lizaveta
Alexandrovna.
" I ? well, I like that! I taught him to do nothing ! "
" Certainly, uncle, there is nothing for you to be astonished at," said Alexandr. "You were partly to blame because you understood my nature from the first, and in spite of that you tried to build it up afresh ; as a man of experience you ought to have seen that it was impossible—you started a conflict in me between two opposing views of life and could not reconcile them ; what has come of it ? Everything in me has been reduced to a state of doubt, a kind of chaos!"
" Ugh ! my back ! " groaned Piotr Ivanitch. " Chaos !— why, I tried to create something out of chaos !"
"Yes, and what did you create? You showed me life in all its most hideous nakedness, and at an age when I ought only to have understood its bright side. And by way of guiding my heart in its attachments you taught me not to feel, but to examine, to analyse, to be on my guard with men. I analysed them—and ceased to love hem !" " How could I know ? You see you're such a headlong
fellow; I thought that that would teach you to make more allowance for them. I know them, but I don't hate them."
"What, then, do you love your fellow-men?" asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
" I get on with them."
" Get on with them! w she repeated monotonously.
" And he would get on with them," said Piotr Ivanitch, " but he had been already too much spoilt in the country by his aunt and yellow flowers; that's why he found it so difficult to grow out of it."
" Then I believed in myself," Alexandr began again ; " you showed me I was worse than others, and I fell to hating myself./Finally, with one blow, without warning or compassion, you tore away my fairest dream ; I thought I had a spark of poetic genius; you taught me the bitter lesson that I was not fit to devote myself to literature; you tore that fancy out of my heart at the cost of anguish and offered me instead a task which was repulsive to me. Had it not been for you, I should have been writing. ,,
" Yes, and have become known to the public as a writer without talent,* put in Piotr Ivanitch.
"What have I to do with the public? I should have taken trouble on my own account, I should have ascribed any failures to spite, envy, ill-will, and by degrees I should have grown used to the idea that it was useless to write, and should have taken to something else of myself. How can you be surprised that, when I had found out everything, I lost heart?"
" Well, what do you say?" asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
"I don't want to say anything; what answer is one to make to such absurdity ? Am I to blame that when you came here you imagined that everything here was yellow flowers, and love and friendship, that people did nothing but write poetry some of them while the others listened to it, or sometimes just for a change took to prose ? .... I tried to make you see that man in general, everywhere, but especially here, has to work, and to work hard too, even to the point of getting backache. Any other man in your place would be blessing his stars. You have not felt want nor sickness nor any real sorrow. What, haven't you loved, will you say? Haven't you had enough of it?