Rudin

'Oh, you mustn't believe him,' said Darya Mihailovna. 'Don't you know him?'

But the offended French lady could not be pacified for a long while, and kept muttering something to herself.

'You need not believe me,' continued Pigasov coolly, 'but I assure you I told the simple truth. Who should know if not I? After that perhaps you won't believe that our neighbour, Madame Tchepuz, Elena Antonovna, told me herself, mind herself, that she had murdered her nephew?'

'What an invention!'

'Wait a minute, wait a minute! Listen and judge for yourselves. Mind, I don't want to slander her, I even like her as far as one can like a woman. She hasn't a single book in her house except a calendar, and she can't read except aloud, and that exercise throws her into a violent perspiration, and she complains then that her eyes feel bursting out of her head.... In short, she's a capital woman, and her servant girls grow fat. Why should I slander her?'

'You see,' observed Darya Mihailovna, 'African Semenitch has got on his hobbyhorse, now he will not be off it to-night.'

'My hobby! But women have three at least, which they are never off, except, perhaps, when they're asleep.'

'What three hobbies are those?'

'Reproof, reproach, recrimination.'

'Do you know, African Semenitch,' began Darya Mihailovna, 'you cannot be so bitter against women for nothing. Some woman or other must have——'

'Done me an injury, you mean?' Pigasov interrupted.

Darya Mihailovna was rather embarrassed; she remembered Pigasov's unlucky marriage, and only nodded.

'One woman certainly did me an injury,' said Pigasov, 'though she was a good, very good one.'

'Who was that?'

'My mother,' said Pigasov, dropping his voice.

'Your mother? What injury could she have done you?'

'She brought me into the world.'

Darya Mihailovna frowned.

'Our conversation,' she said, 'seems to have taken a gloomy turn. Constantin, play us Thalberg's new etude. I daresay the music will soothe African Semenitch. Orpheus soothed savage beasts.'

Konstantin Diomiditch took his seat at the piano, and played the etude very fairly well. Natalya Alexyevna at first listened attentively, then she bent over her work again.

'Merci, c'est charmant,' observed Darya Mihailovna, 'I love Thalberg. Il est si distingue. What are you thinking of, African Semenitch?'

'I thought,' began African Semenitch slowly, 'that there are three kinds of egoists; the egoists who live themselves and let others live; the egoists who live themselves and don't let others live; and the egoists who don't live themselves and don't let others live. Women, for the most part, belong to the third class.'

'That's polite! I am very much astonished at one thing, African Semenitch; your confidence in your convictions; of course you can never be mistaken.'

'Who says so? I make mistakes; a man, too, may be mistaken. But do you know the difference between a man's mistakes and a woman's? Don't you know? Well, here it is; a man may say, for example, that twice two makes not four, but five, or three and a half; but a woman will say that twice two makes a wax candle.'

'I fancy I've heard you say that before. But allow me to ask what connection had your idea of the three kinds of egoists with the music you have just been hearing?'

'None at all, but I did not listen to the music.'

'Well, "incurable I see you are, and that is all about it,"' answered Darya Mihailovna, slightly altering Griboyedov's line. 'What do you like, since you don't care for music? Literature?'

'I like literature, only not our contemporary literature.'

'Why?'

'I'll tell you why. I crossed the Oka lately in a ferry boat with a gentleman. The ferry got fixed in a narrow place; they had to drag the carriages ashore by hand. This gentleman had a very heavy coach. While the ferrymen were straining themselves to drag the coach on to the bank, the gentleman groaned so, standing in the ferry, that one felt quite sorry for him.... Well, I thought, here's a fresh illustration of the system of division of labour! That's just like our modern literature; other people do the work, and it does the groaning.'

Darya Mihailovna smiled.

'And that is called expressing contemporary life,' continued Pigasov indefatigably, 'profound sympathy with the social question and so on. ... Oh, how I hate those grand words!'

'Well, the women you attack so—they at least don't use grand words.'

Pigasov shrugged his shoulders.

'They don't use them because they don't understand them.'

Darya Mihailovna flushed slightly.

'You are beginning to be impertinent, African Semenitch!' she remarked with a forced smile.

There was complete stillness in the room.

'Where is Zolotonosha?' asked one of the boys suddenly of Bassistoff.

'In the province of Poltava, my dear boy,' replied Pigasov, 'in the centre of Little Russia.' (He was glad of an opportunity of changing the conversation.) 'We were talking of literature,' he continued, 'if I had money to spare, I would at once become a Little Russian poet.'

'What next? a fine poet you would make!' retorted Darya Mihailovna. 'Do you know Little Russian?'

'Not a bit; but it isn't necessary.'

'Not necessary?'

'Oh no, it's not necessary. You need only take a sheet of paper and write at the top "A Ballad," then begin like this, "Heigho, alack, my destiny!" or "the Cossack Nalivaiko was sitting on a hill and then on the mountain, under the green tree the birds are singing, grae, voropae, gop, gop!" or something of that kind. And the thing's done. Print it and publish it. The Little Russian will read it, drop his head into his hands and infallibly burst into tears—he is such a sensitive soul!'

'Good heavens!' cried Bassistoff. 'What are you saying? It's too absurd for anything. I have lived in Little Russia, I love it and know the language... "grae, grae, voropae" is absolute nonsense.'

'It may be, but the Little Russian will weep all the same. You speak of the "language."... But is there a Little Russian language? Is it a language, in your opinion? an independent language? I would pound my best friend in a mortar before I'd agree to that.'

Bassistoff was about to retort.

'Leave him alone!' said Darya Mihailovna, 'you know that you will hear nothing but paradoxes from him.'

Pigasov smiled ironically. A footman came in and announced the arrival of Alexandra Pavlovna and her brother.

Darya Mihailovna rose to meet her guests.

'How do you do, Alexandrine?' she began, going up to her, 'how good of you to come!... How are you, Sergei Pavlitch?'

Volintsev shook hands with Darya Mihailovna and went up to Natalya Alexyevna.

'But how about that baron, your new acquaintance, is he coming to-day?' asked Pigasov.

'Yes, he is coming.'

'He is a great philosopher, they say; he is just brimming over with Hegel, I suppose?'

Darya Mihailovna made no reply, and making Alexandra Pavlovna sit down on the sofa, established herself near her.

'Philosophies,' continued Pigasov, 'are elevated points of view! That's another abomination of mine; these elevated points of view. And what can one see from above? Upon my soul, if you want to buy a horse, you don't look at it from a steeple!'

'This baron was going to bring you an essay?' said Alexandra Pavlovna.

'Yes, an essay,' replied Darya Mihailovna, with exaggerated carelessness, 'on the relation of commerce to manufactures in Russia. ... But don't be afraid; we will not read it here.... I did not invite you for that. Le baron est aussi aimable que savant. And he speaks Russian beautifully! C'est un vrai torrent... il vous entraine!

'He speaks Russian so beautifully,' grumbled Pigasov, 'that he deserves a eulogy in French.'