“My friend, I see you want to make up for what you lost downstairs. You’re obviously repentant, and since with us to repent means immediately to fall upon someone again, you don’t want to miss the mark with me a second time. I came early, you haven’t cooled off yet, and, besides, you have difficulty putting up with criticism. But sit down, for God’s sake, I’ve come to tell you something; that’s right, thank you. From what you said to your mother downstairs, on your way out, it’s only too clear that it will be better, even in any case, if we live separately. I’ve come in order to persuade you to do it as softly as possible and without a scandal, so as not to upset or frighten your mother still more. Even the fact that I’ve come here myself has already cheered her up; she somehow believes that we’ll still manage to be reconciled, well, and everything will go as before. I think if you and I laughed loudly now once or twice, we’d fill their timid hearts with delight. They may be simple hearts, but they are sincerely and artlessly loving, why shouldn’t we pamper them on occasion? Well, that’s one thing. Second: why should we necessarily part still with a thirst for vengeance, with a grinding of teeth, with curses, and so on? Without any doubt, it won’t do at all for us to go hanging on each other’s necks, but we can part, so to speak, with mutual respect, isn’t that true, eh?”
“That’s all nonsense! I promise I’ll move out without a scandal—and enough. Are you going to this trouble because of my mother? Yet to me it seems that my mother’s peace makes decidedly no difference to you, and you’re only saying it.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You speak to me decidedly as to a child!”
“My friend, I’m ready to ask your forgiveness for it a thousand times, and for all you’ve laid to my account, for all those years of your childhood and so on, but, cher enfant, what will come of it? You’re intelligent enough not to want to wind up in such a stupid position. I say nothing of the fact that even up to this moment I quite fail to understand the character of your reproaches: indeed, what is it, essentially, that you blame me for? That you weren’t born a Versilov? Or what? Bah! you laugh scornfully and wave your arms—does that mean no?”
“Believe me, no. Believe me, I find no honor in being named Versilov.”
“Let’s leave honor out of it; besides, your answer was bound to be democratic. But if so, what do you blame me for?”
“Tatyana Pavlovna just said everything I needed to know and never could understand before: that you didn’t send me to be a cobbler, consequently I should be grateful. I fail to understand why I’m not grateful even now, when I’ve been brought to reason. Or is it your proud blood speaking, Andrei Petrovich?”
“Probably not. And, besides, you must agree that all your outbursts downstairs, instead of falling on me, as you meant, only tyrannized and tormented her. Yet it seems it’s not for you to judge her. And how is she guilty before you? Explain to me also, by the way, my friend: why was it and with what purpose that you spread it around in school, and in high school, and all your life, and in front of every first comer, as I’ve heard, that you are illegitimate? I’ve heard that you did it with a sort of special eagerness. And yet it’s all nonsense and vile slander: you are legitimate, a Dolgoruky, the son of Makar Ivanych Dolgoruky, a respectable man, remarkable for his intelligence and character. And if you have received higher education, that is in fact owing to your former master, Versilov, but what of it? Above all, by proclaiming your illegitimacy, which in itself is a slander, you thereby revealed your mother’s secret and, out of some sort of false pride, dragged your mother to judgment before the first scum to come along. My friend, that is very ignoble, the more so as your mother is not personally guilty of anything: hers is the purest character, and if she is not Mrs. Versilov, it is solely because she is still married.”
“Enough, I agree with you completely, and I believe so much in your intelligence that I fully hope you will stop this already too-lengthy scolding of me. You have such a love of measure; and yet everything has its measure, even your sudden love of my mother. This will be better: since you’ve ventured to come to me and sit here for a quarter or half an hour (I still don’t know what for; well, let’s suppose it’s for my mother’s peace of mind)—and, moreover, you talk to me with such eagerness, in spite of what happened downstairs, it would be better if you told me about my father—this Makar Ivanovich, the wanderer. 42I’d like to hear about him precisely from you; I’ve long meant to ask you. Since we’re parting, and maybe for a long time, I’d also like very much to get an answer from you to this question: how is it possible that in this whole twenty years you could have no effect on my mother’s prejudices, and now also my sister’s, enough to dispel with your civilizing influence the surrounding darkness of her original milieu? Oh, I’m not talking about her purity! Even without that she has always been infinitely superior to you morally, forgive me, but . . . this is merely an infinitely superior corpse. Only Versilov lives, and all the rest around him, and everything connected with him, vegetates under the unfailing condition that it has the honor of nourishing him with its forces, its living juices. But wasn’t she alive once? Wasn’t there something you loved in her? Wasn’t she a woman once?”
“My friend, if you like, she never was,” he answered me, twisting at once into that former manner he had had with me, which I remembered so well, and which infuriated me so much; that is, he was apparently the most sincere simpleheartedness, but look—and everything in him was just the deepest mockery, so that sometimes I couldn’t figure out his face at all, “she never was! A Russian woman can never be a woman.”
“And a Polish woman, a French woman, can be? Or an Italian, a passionate Italian woman, there’s what’s capable of captivating a civilized Russian man of a higher milieu like Versilov?”
“Well, who would have expected to run into a Slavophile?” 43Versilov laughed.
I remember his story word for word; he even began talking with great eagerness and obvious pleasure. It was all too clear to me that he had by no means come to me for a chat, and not at all so as to calm my mother, but probably with other goals in mind.
II
“ALL THESE TWENTY years, your mother and I have lived in complete silence,” he began his palaver (affected and unnatural in the highest degree), “and all that has been between us has taken place in silence. The main quality of our twenty-year-long liaison has been—speechlessness. I don’t think we even quarreled once. True, I often went away and left her alone, but in the end I always came back. Nous revenons toujours, 22that’s a fundamental quality of men; it’s owing to their magnanimity. If the matter of marriage depended on women alone, no marriage would stay together. Humility, meekness, lowliness, and at the same time firmness, strength, real strength—that is your mother’s character. Note that she’s the best of all the women I’ve met in the world. And that there is strength in her—that I can testify to; I’ve seen how that strength nourishes her. Where it’s a matter, I wouldn’t say of convictions, there can be no proper convictions here, but of what they consider convictions, which, to their minds, also means sacred, there even torture would be to no avail. Well, but you can judge for yourself: do I look like a torturer? That’s why I preferred to be silent about almost everything, not only because it’s easier, and, I confess, I don’t regret it. In this way everything went over by itself, broadly and humanely, so that I don’t even ascribe to myself any praise for it. I’ll say, by the way, in parenthesis, that for some reason I suspect she never believed in my humaneness, and therefore always trembled; but while trembling, at the same time she never yielded to any culture. They somehow know how to do it, and there’s something here that we don’t understand, and generally they know better than we how to manage their own affairs. They can go on living in their own way in situations that are most unnatural for them, and remain completely themselves in situations that are most not their own. We can’t do that.”
“They who? I don’t quite understand you.”