The frightened old woman, who had intended as well to ask for some dish made of flour or cereals, would fall upon the kvas and salad, making a show of eating a terrific meal.
But it is noteworthy thnt she, or any of the others, had only to begin eating meat during a fast for my father, though he never touched Lenten food himself, to say, shaking his head sadly:
'I should not have thought it was worth-while for you, Anna Yakimovna, to forsake the customs of your forefathers for the last few years of your life. I sin and eat meat, as comports with my many infirmities; but you, as you're allowed, thank God, have kept the fasts all your l ife and suddenly . . . what an example for them.'
He motioned towards the servants. And the poor old woman had to betake herself to kvas and salad again.
These scenes made me very indignant; sometimes I was so bold as to intervene nnd remind him of the contrary opinion he had expressed. Then my father would rise from his seat, take off his velvet cap by the tassel and, holding it in the air, thank me for the lesson and beg pardon for his forgetfulness; then he would say to the old lady:
'It's a terrible age! It's no wonder you cat meat during a fast, when children teach their parents! \Vhat are we coming to? It's dreadful to think of it' Luckily you and I won't see it.'
After dinner my father lay down to rest for an hour and a half. The servants at once dispersed to beer-shops and eatinghouses. At seven o'clock tea was served ; then sometimes someone would arrive, the Senator more often than any one: it was a time of leisure for all of us. The Senator usually brought various items of ne\vs and told them eagerly. My father affected complete inattention as he listened to him: he assumed a serious face, when his brother had expected him to be dying of laughter, and would cross-question him, as though he had not heard the point, when the Senator had been telling some astonishing story.
The Senator came in for it in a very different way when he
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
78
contradicted or differed from his younger brother (which rarely happened, however) , and sometimes, indeed, 'vhen he did not contradict at all, if my father ,..,·as particularly ill-humoured. In these tragi-comic scenes, what was funniest \Vas the Senator's natural vehemence and my father's factitious sang froid.
'\Yell, you are ill to-day,' the Senator would say impatiently, and he would seize his hat and rush off.
Once in his vexation he could not open the door and pushed at it with all his might, saying, 'What a confounded door!' My father went up, coolly opened the door inwards, and in a perfectly composed voice observed:
'This door does its duty: it opens this way, and you try to open it that way, and lose your temper.'
It may 110t be out of place to mention that the Senator was two years older than my father and addressed him in the second person singular, while the latter as the younger brother used the plural form, 'you.'
\Vhen the Senator had gone, my father would retire to his bedroom, would each time inquire whether the gates were closed, would receive an answer in the affirmative, \Vould express doubts on the subject but do nothing to make sure. Then began a lengthy routine of washings, fomentations, and medicines; his valet made ready on a little table by the bed a perfect arsenal of diffNent objects-phials, nightlights, pill-boxes. The old man as a rule read for an hour Bourrienne's !11emorial de Saint Helene6
and other memoirs; then came the night.
Such was our household v11hen I left it in 1 834: so I found it in 1 840, and so it continued until his death in 1 846.
At thirty, when I returned from exile, I realised that my father had been right in many things, that he had unhappily an offensively good understanding of men. But was it my fault that he preached thP truth itself in a way so provoking to a youthful heart? His mind. chilled by a long life in a circie of depraved men, put him on his guard against everyone. and his callous heart did not cravP for rPconciliation ; so he remained on hostile
[{'!"IllS \Vith PW'fVOIIP on earth.
I found him i� 1 839, <Jnd still more so in 1 842, weak and really ill. Tlw Senator w<Js dead, the dPsol<� tion <�bout him was greater than ever <Jml he PVPll had a different v<Jlct: but he himself was li This book is not by Bourrit•nnc but by E. de Las Cases ( Paris, 18Z3-4) .
( A .S.)
Nursery and University
79
just the same: only his physical powers were changed ; there was the same spiteful intelligepce, the same tenacious memory, he still persecuted everyone over trifles, and Sonnenberg, still unchanged, had his nomad's camp in the old house as before, and ran errands.
Only then did I apprecia te all the cheerlessness of his life; I looked with an a ching heart at the melancholy significance of this lonely, abandoned existence, dying out in the arid, harsh, stony wilderness which he had created about himself, but which he had not the will to change ; he knew this; he saw death approaching and, overcoming weakness and infirmity, he jealously and obstinately controlled himself. I was dreadfully sorry for the old man, but there was nothing to be done: he was unapproachable.
Sometimes I passed softly by his study where, sitting in a hard, uncomfortable, deep &rmchair, surrounded by his dogs, he was playing all alone with my three-year-old son. It seemed as though the clenched hands and numbed nerves of the old man relaxed at the sight of the child, and he found rest from the incessant agitation, conflict, and vexation in which he had kept himself, as his dying hand touched the cradle.
Tl1e l!n inersitr
t /
Oh, years of boundless ecstasies,
Of visions bright and free!
Where now your mirth untouched br spite,
Your hopeful toil and noin· glee?
N. P. 0GARE.\", Humorous Verse
IN sf>ITE OF the lame general's sinister predictions my father nevertheless put my name down with Prince N. B. Yusnpov for employment in the Kremlin Department. I signed a paper and there the matter ended ; I heard nothing more of the service, except that about three years later Yusupov sent the Palace architect, who always shouted as though he were standing on the scaffolding of the fifth storey and there giving orders to workmen in the basement, to announce that I had received the first
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
80
officer's grade. All these miracles, I may remark in passing, were unnecessary, for I rose at one jump, with the grades I received in the service, by passing the examination for my degree-it was not worth-while giving oneself much trouble for the sake of two or three years' seniority. And meanwhile this supposed post in the service almost prevented me from entering the university.
The Council, seeing that I was reckoned as in the office of the Kremlin Department, refused me the right to take the examination.
For those in the government service there were special afterdinner courses of study, extremely limited in scope and qualifying one for entrance into the so-called 'committee examinations.'
All the wealthy idlers, the young noblemen's sons who had learnt nothing, all those who did not want to serve in the army and were in a hurry to get the rank of assessor took the 'committee examinations' ; they were by way of being gold mines presented to the old professors, who coached them privatissime for twenty roubles a lesson.