"Excuse me," I answered. "I really don't know which is more disgusting: Russian unseemliness or the German faculty of accumulation by honest toil."
"What an unseemly idea!" exclaimed the General.
"What a Russian idea!" exclaimed the Frenchman.
I laughed; I had an intense desire to provoke them.
"Well, I should prefer to dwell all my life in a Kirgiz tent," I cried, "than bow down to the German idol."
"What idol?" cried the General, beginning to be angry in earnest.
"The German faculty for accumulating wealth. I've not
been here long, but yet all I have been able to observe and verify revolts my Tatar blood. My God I I don't want any such virtue I I succeeded yesterday in making a round of eight miles, and it's all exactly as in the edifying German picture-books: there is here in every house a vcder horribly virtuous and extraordinarily honest-—so honest that you are afraid to go near him. I can't endure honest people whom one is afraid to go near. Every such German x/ater has a family, and in the evening they read improving books aloud. Elms and chestnut trees rustle over the house. The sun is setting; there is a stork on the roof, and everything is extraordinarily practical and touching. . . . Don't be angry. General; let me teU it in a touching style. I remember how my father used to read similar books to my mother and me under the lime trees in the garden. ... So I am in a position to judge. And in what comjdete bondage and submission every such family is here. They all work like oxen and all save money like Jews. Suppose the u/jifey has saved up so many gulden and is reckoning on giving • his son a trade or a bit of land; to do so, he gives his daughter no dowry, and she becomes an old maid. To do so, the youngest son is sold into bondage or into the army, and the money is added to the family capital. This is actually done here; I've been making inquiries. All this is done from nothing but honesty, from such intense honesty that the younger son who is sold believes that he is sold from nothing but honesty: and that is the ideal when the victim himself rejoices at being led to the sacrifice. What more? Why, the elder son is no better off: he has an Amalia and their hearts are united, but they can't be married because the pile of gulden is not large enough. They, too, wait with perfect morality and good faith, and go to lixe sacrifice with a smile. Amalia's cheeks grow thin and hollow. At last, in twenty years, their prosperity is increased; the gulden have been honestly and virtuously accumulating. The voter gives his blessing to the forty-year-old son and his Amalia of tiiirty-five, whose chest has grown hollow and whose nose has turned red. . . . With that he weeps, reads them a moral sermon, and dies. The eldest son becomes himself a virtuous ifoter and begins the same story over again. In that way, in fifty or seventy years, the grandson of tiie first vater really has a considerable capital, and he leaves it to his son, and he to his, and he to his, till in five or six generations one of them is a Baron Rothschild or goodness knows who. Come, isn't that a majestic spectacle? A hundred or two hundred
years of continuous toil, patience, intelligence, honesty, character, determination, prudence, the stork on the roofl What more do you want? Why, there's nothing loftier than that; and from that standpoint they are beginning to judge the whole world and to punish the guilty; that is, any who are ever so Uttle imlike them. Well, so tiiat's the point: I would rather waste my substance in liie Russian style or grow rich at roulette. I don't care to be Goppe and Co. in five generations. I want money for myself, and I don't look upon myself as something subordinate to capital and necessary to it. I know that I have been talking awful nonsense, but, never mind, such are my convictions."
"I don't know whether there is much truth in what you have been saying," said the General thoughtfully, "but I do know you begin to give yourself insufferable airs as soon as you are permitted to forget yourself in the least ..."
As his habit was, he broke off without finishing. If our , General began to speak of anything in the slightest degree more important than his ordinary everyday conversation, he never finished his sentences. The Frenchman Ustened carelessly with rather wide-open eyes; he had scarcely understood anything of what I had said. Polina gazed with haughty indifference. She seemed not to hear my words, or anything else that was said that day af table.
CHAPTER V
SHE was unusually thoughtful, but directly we got up from table she bade me escort her for a walk. We took the children and went into the park towards the fountain.
As I felt particularly excited, I blurted out the crude and stupid question: why the Marquis de Grieux, our Frenchman, no longer escorted her when she went out anywhere, and did not even speak to her for days together.
"Because he is a rascal," she answered me strangely.
I had never heard her speak like that of De Grieux, and I received it in silence, afraid to interpret her irritability.
"Have you noticed that he is not on good terms with the General to-day?"
"You want to know what is the matter?" she answered
dryly and irritably. "You know that the General is completely mortgaged to him; all his property is his, and if Granny doesn't die, the Frenchman will come into possession of everything that is mortgaged to him."
"And is it true that everything is mortgaged? I had heard it, but I did not know that everything was."
"To be sure it is."
"Then farewell to Mile. Blanche," said I. "She won't be the General's wife, then! Do you know, it strikes me the General is so much in love that he may shoot himself if MUe. Blanche throws him over. It is dangerous to be so much in love at his age."
"I fancy that something will happen to him, too," Polina Alexandrovna observed musingly.
"And how splendid that would be!" I cried. "They couldn't have shown more coarsely that she was only marrying him for his money! There's no regard for decency, even; there's no ceremony about it whatever. That's wonderful! And about Granny—could there be an57thing more comic and sordid than to be continually sending telegram after telegram: 'Is she dead, is she dead?'? How do you Uke it, Polina Alexandrovna?"
"That's all nonsense," she said, interrupting me with an air of disgust. "I wonder at your being in such good ^irits. What are you so pleased about? Surely not at having lost my money?"
"Why did you give it to me to lose? I told you I could not play for other people—especially for you! I obey you, whatever you order me to do, but I can't answer for the result. I warned you that nothing would come of it. Are you very much upset at losing so much money? What do jrou want so much for?"
"Why these questions?"
"Why, you promised to explain to me . . . Listen: I am absolutely convinced that when I begin playing for myself (and I've got twelve friedrichs d'or) I shall win. Then you can borrow as much from me as you like."
She made a contemptuous grimace.
"Don't be angry with me for such a suggestion," I went on.
"I am so deeply conscious that I am nothing beside you ^that
is, in your eyes—that you may even borrow money from me. Presents from me cannot insult you. Besides, I lost yours."
She looked at me quickly, and seeing that I was speaking irritably and sarcastically, interrupted the conversation again.
"There's nothing of interest to you in my circumstances. If you want to know, I'm simply in debt. I've borrowed money and I wanted to repay it. I had the strange and mad idea that I should be sure to win here at the gambling table. Why I had the idea I can't understand, but I believed in it. Who knows, perhaps I beUeved it because no other alternative was left me."
"Or because it was quite necessary you should win. It's exactly like a drowning man clutching at a straw. You will admit that if he were not drowning he would not look at a straw as a branch of a tree."