I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor’s rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don’t think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reverse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions, and of all sorts of criminality are the usual adornments of serious articles. And that, as young doctors like to put it in their articles, is the ultima ratio !19 Such relations cannot fail to be reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, and therefore I’m not surprised in the least that in the new books our literature has acquired over the last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink gallons of vodka and the heroines are insufficiently chaste.
I read my French books and keep glancing out the window, which is open; I see the teeth of my fence, two or three scrawny trees, and beyond the fence a road, a field, then a wide strip of evergreen forest. I often admire how a certain little boy and girl, both towheaded and ragged, climb up the fence and laugh at my bald head. In their bright little eyes I read: “Go up, thou bald head!”20They’re probably the only people who care nothing about my rank and renown.
Now I don’t have visitors every day. I will mention only the visits of Nikolai and Pyotr Ignatievich. Nikolai usually comes on feast days,21 seemingly on business, but more just to see me. He arrives rather tipsy, which never happens with him in the winter.
“What’s up?” I ask, coming to meet him in the front hall.
“Your Excellency!” he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with the rapture of a lover. “Your Excellency! May God punish me! May I be struck by lightning on this very spot! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus !”22
And he greedily kisses me on the shoulders, sleeves, buttons.
“Is everything all right with you there?” I ask him.
“Your Excellency! As God lives …”
He won’t stop swearing needlessly by God, I soon get sick of him and send him to the kitchen, where they serve him dinner. Pyotr Ignatievich also comes on feast days, especially to see how I am and to share his thoughts with me. He usually sits by my desk, modest, neat, sensible, not daring to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and all the while, in his soft, even little voice, smoothly and bookishly, he tells me what he thinks are various extremely interesting and spicy bits of news that he has come across in journals and books. These items are all alike and boil down to this: a certain Frenchman made a discovery; another man—a German—caught him out, by proving that this discovery had already been made in 1870 by some American; and a third—also a German—outwitted them both, proving that they were a pair of dupes who mistook air bubbles for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Pyotr Ignatievich tells everything at length, thoroughly, as if defending a thesis, with a detailed list of his printed sources, trying not to make any mistakes in the dates, or in the numbers of the journals, or in names, and he never simply says Petit, but always Jean-Jacques Petit. Occasionally he stays for dinner with us, and then he tells the same spicy stories all through dinner, which plunges everyone at the table into gloom. If Gnekker and Liza start talking about fugues and counterpoint, about Brahms and Bach, he modestly looks down and gets embarrassed; he’s ashamed that such banalities should be talked about in the presence of such serious people as he and I.
In my present mood five minutes are enough to make me as sick of him as if I’d seen and heard him for all eternity I hate the wretched fellow. I wither from his soft, even voice and bookish language, I grow dumb from his stories … He has the best feelings for me and talks with me only to give me pleasure, and I pay him back by looking at him point-blank, as if I wanted to hypnotize him, and thinking: “Go away, go away, go away …” But he doesn’t succumb to my mental suggestion and stays, stays, stays …
All the while he stays with me, I’m unable to rid myself of the thought: “It’s quite possible that when I die, he’ll be appointed to replace me,” and in my imagination my poor auditorium looks like an oasis in which the spring has dried up, and I’m unpleasant, silent, and sullen with Pyotr Ignatievich, as if he were to blame for these thoughts and not I myself. When he begins his habitual praise of German scientists, I no longer joke good-naturedly, as before, but mutter sullenly:
“Your Germans are asses …”
This is like the episode when the late professor Nikita Krylov, swimming at Revel23 once with Pirogov, got angry with the water for being very cold and swore: “Scoundrelly Germans!” I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatievich, and only when he leaves, and I see his gray hat flash outside the window, beyond the fence, do I want to call out to him and say: “Forgive me, my dear fellow!”
Our dinners are more boring than in winter. The same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. Formerly I suffered his presence silently, but now I send little barbs at him, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by spiteful feeling, I often say simply stupid things and don’t know why I say them. It happened once that I gave Gnekker a long, scornful look and then, out of nowhere, fired off at him:
Eagles may fly lower than the hen,
But no hen ever soared into the clouds … 24
And the most vexing thing is that the hen Gnekker proves to be much smarter than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he sticks to the following tactics: he responds to my barbs with an indulgent silence (the old man’s cracked, what’s the point of talking to him?), or good-naturedly makes fun of me. It’s astonishing how paltry a man can become! I’m capable of dreaming all through dinner of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, and how Liza and my wife will realize their mistake, and how I will taunt them—to have such absurd dreams when I’ve got one foot in the grave!
Misunderstandings also happen now which I knew before only from hearsay Ashamed as I am, I’ll describe one that occurred the other day after dinner.
I’m sitting in my room smoking my pipe. My wife comes in as usual, sits down, and begins saying how nice it would be now, while it’s still warm and I have free time, to go to Kharkov and there find out what sort of man our Gnekker is.
“All right, I’ll go …” I agree.
My wife, pleased with me, gets up and goes to the door, but comes back at once and says:
“Incidentally, one more request. I know you’ll be angry, but it is my duty to warn you … Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanych, but there has begun to be talk among all our neighbors and acquaintances that you visit Katya rather often. She’s intelligent, educated, I don’t dispute it, one may enjoy spending time with her, but at your age and with your social position, you know, it’s somehow strange to find pleasure in her company … Besides, her reputation is such that …”
All the blood suddenly drains from my brain, sparks shoot from my eyes, I jump up and, clutching my head, stamping my feet, shout in a voice not my own: