Moreover, up to the age of seventy-five he was as strong as a young man, was present at all the great balls and dinners, took part in every ceremonial assembly and annual function, whether it was of an agricultural or medical or fire insurance society or of the Society of Natural Philosophy . . . and, on the top of it all, perhaps because of it, preserved to old age some degree of human feeling and a certain warmth of heart.
No greater contrast to the sanguine Senator, who was always in motion and only occasionally visited his home, can possibly be imagined than my father, who hardly ever went out of his courtyard, hated the whole official world and was everlastingly freakish and discontented. We also had eight horses ( very poor ones) , but our stable was something like an almshouse for broken-down nags; my father kept them partly for the sake of appearances and partly so that the two coachmen and the two postillions should have something to do, besides fetching the Moscow News and getting up cock-fights, which they did very successfully between the coachhouse and the neighbour's yard.
My father had scarcely been in the service at all; educated by a French tutor, in the house of a devoutly religious aunt, he entered the lzmaylovsky regiment as a sergeant at sixteen, served until the accession of Paul, and retired with the rank of
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captain i n the Guards. I n 180 1 he went abroad and remained until the end of 181 1 , wandering from one country to another.
He returned with my mother three months before my birth, and after the fire of Moscow he spent a year on his estate in the province of Tver, and then returned to live in Moscow, trying to order his life so as to be as solitary and dreary as possible. His brother's liveliness hindered him in this.
After the Senator left us, everything in the house began to assume a more and more gloomy aspect. The walls, the furniture, the servants, everything bore a look of discontent and suspicion, and I need hardly say that my father himself was of all the most discontented. The unnatural stillness, the whispers and cautious footsteps of the servants, did not suggest attentive solicitude, but oppression and terror. In the rooms everything was stationary; for five or six years the same books would lie in the very same places with the same markers in them. In my father's bedroom and study the furniture was not moved nor the windows opened for years together. When he went away into the country he took the key of his room in his pocket, that they might not venture to scrub the floor or wash the walls in his absence.
UNTIL I WAS ten years old I noticed nothing strange or special in my position; it seemed to me simple and natural that I should be living in my father's house; that in his part of it I should be on my best behaviour, while my mother lived in another part of the house, in which I could be as noisy and mischievous as I liked.
The Senator spoiled me and gave me presents, Calot carried me about in his arms, Vera Artamonovna dressed me, put me to bed, and gave me my bath, Madame Proveau took me out for walks and talked to me in German; everything went on in its regular way, yet I began pondering on things.
Stray remarks, carelessly uttered words, began to attract my attention. Old Madame Proveau and all the servants were devoted to my mother, while they feared and disliked my father.
The scenes which sometimes took place between them were often
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the subject of conversation bet,..,·een Madame Proveau and Verd Artamonovna, both of whom always took my mother's side.
My mother certainly had a good deal to put up with. Being an extremely kind-hParted woman, with no strength of will, she was completely crushed by my father, and, as always happens with \veak characters, put up a desperate opposition in trifling matters and things of no consequence. Unhappily, in these trifling matters my father was nearly always in the right, and the dispute always ended for him in triumph.
'If I were in the mistress's place,' Madame Proveau would say, for instance, 'I would simply go straight back to Stuttgart; much comfort she gets-nothing but fads and unpleasantness, and deadly dullness.'
'To be sure,' Vera Artamonovna would assent, 'but that's what ties her, hand and foot,' and she would point with her knittingneedle towards me. 'How can she take him with her-what to?
And as for leaving him here alone, with the way we live-why, even if one was no relation, one would have pity on him ! '
Children i n general have far more insight than is supposed ; they are quickly distracted and forget for a time what has struck them, but they go back to it persistently, especially if it is anything mysterious or frightPning and with wonderful perseverance and ingenuity they go on probing until they reach the truth.
Once I became curious, ,..,·ithin a few ,..,·eeks I had found o·,a all the details of my father's meeting with my mother, had heard how she had brought herself to leave her parents' home, how she had been hidden at the Senator's in the Russian Embassy at Cassel, and had crossed the frontier dressed as a boy; all this I found out without putting a single question to anyone.
The first result of these discoveries was to estrange me from my father because of the scenes of which I have spoken. I had seen them before, but I used to think all that quite normal-part of the regular order of things; for I was so accustomed to the fact that everyone in the house, not excepting the Senator, was afraid of my father, and that he \vas given to scolding everyone, that I saw nothing strange in it. Now I began to think so no longer, and the thought that some of it was endured on my account sometimes threw a dark, oppressive cloud over my bright, childish imagination.
A second idea that took root in me from that time was that I was far less dependPnt on my fathPr than children are as a rule.
I liked this f0eling of indept>ndence which I imagined for myself.
Two or three years later two of my father's old comrades in the regiment, P. K. Essen, the Governor-General of Orenburg,
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and A. N. Bakhmetev, formerly Governor in Bessarabia, a general who had lost his leg at Borodino, were sitting with my father. My room was next to the ballroom in which they were. Among other things my father told them that he had been speaking to Prince Yusupov about putting me into the civil service.
'There's no time to be lost,' he added ; 'you know that it will take him years to reach any kind of decent rank in the service.'
'vVhat a strange idea, dear friend, to make him a clerk,' Essen said, good-naturedly. 'Leave it to me, and I will get him into the Ural Cossacks. We'll get him a commission, that's all that matters: after that he will make his \vay, like the rest of us.'