Of course, a father had suddenly appeared, whom I had never had before. This thought intoxicated me both while I was packing in Moscow and on the train. The fact of a father was nothing, and I disliked tender feelings, but this man did not want to know me and humiliated me, while all those years I had dreamed long and hard of him (if one can say that about dreaming). Each of my dreams since childhood had echoed with him, had hovered around him, had in the final result come down to him. I don’t know whether I hated or loved him, but he filled all my future, all my reckoning in life, with himself—and that happened on its own, it went together with my growing up.
Yet another powerful circumstance influenced my departure from Moscow, yet another temptation, which even then, three months before leaving (that is, when there had not yet been any mention of Petersburg), made my heart heave and pound! I was also drawn into this unknown ocean because I could enter it directly as the lord and master even of other people’s destinies, and what people! But it was magnanimous and not despotic feelings that seethed in me—I warn you beforehand, so there will be no mistaking my words. Versilov might think (if he deigned to think about me) that this was a little boy coming, a recent high-school student, an adolescent, for whom the whole world was a marvel. And yet I already knew all his innermost secrets and had a most important document on me, for which (now I know it for certain) he would have given several years of his life, if I had revealed the whole secret to him then. However, I notice that I’m setting a lot of riddles. Feelings can’t be described without facts. Besides, more than enough will be said about all that in its place; that’s why I’ve taken up the pen. And to write this way is like raving or a cloud.
VIII
FINALLY, IN ORDER to go on definitively to the nineteenth, I’ll meanwhile say briefly and, so to speak, in passing, that I found them all, that is, Versilov, my mother, and my sister (whom I was seeing for the first time in my life), in difficult circumstances, almost destitute or verging on destitution. I had already learned of that in Moscow, but I had never supposed what I saw. Ever since childhood I had been used to picturing this man, this “future father of mine,” almost in some sort of halo, and couldn’t imagine him otherwise than in the forefront everywhere. Versilov had never lived in the same apartment with my mother, but had always rented a separate one for her; he did it, of course, out of those mean “proprieties” of theirs. But here they were all living together in the same wooden wing, in a lane of the Semyonovsky quarter.4 All their things had been pawned, so that I even gave my mother, in secret from Versilov, my secret sixty roubles. Precisely secret, because I had saved them from my pocket money, the five roubles a month allotted me, over the course of two years; the saving began from the first day of my idea, and therefore Versilov was not to know even a word of this money. I trembled over it.
This help was a mere drop. My mother worked, my sister also took in sewing; Versilov lived idly, was capricious, and went on living with a great many of his former, rather expensive habits. He grumbled terribly, especially at dinner, and all his manners were completely despotic. But my mother, my sister, Tatyana Pavlovna, and the whole family of the late Andronikov (a certain department head, deceased three months earlier, who at the time had managed Versilov’s affairs), which consisted of countless women, stood in awe of him as of an idol. I could never have pictured such a thing. I’ll note that nine years earlier he had been incomparably more elegant. I’ve already said that he remained with some sort of halo in my dreams, and therefore I could not imagine how it was possible to become so aged and shabby only some nine years later: I at once felt sadness, pity, shame. The sight of him was one of the most painful of my first impressions on arrival. However, he was by no means an old man yet, he was only forty-five; and as I studied him further, I found something even more striking in his good looks than what had survived in my memory. There was less brilliance than then, less of the external, even of the elegant, but it was as if life had imprinted on his face something much more interesting than was there before.
And yet destitution was only the tenth or twentieth part of his misfortunes, and I knew it only too well. Besides destitution, there was something immeasurably more serious—not to mention that there was still hope of winning the litigation over an inheritance that Versilov had started a year before against the Princes Sokolsky, and Versilov might receive in the nearest future an estate worth seventy thousand and maybe a bit more. I’ve already said above that this Versilov had run through three inheritances in his life, and here he was going to be rescued again by an inheritance! The case was to be decided in court in the shortest time. That was why I came. True, no one gave out money on hope, there was nowhere to borrow, and meanwhile they bore with it.