"It is time for you to have your milk," said Tanya to her husband.
"No, not yet," he answered, sitting down on the lowest step. "You drink it. I 'ilo not want it."
Tanya timidly exchanged glances with her father, and said in a guilty voice:
"You know very well that the milk does you good."
"Yes, any amount of good," laughed Kovrin. "I con- gratulate you, I have gained a pound in weight since last Friday." He pressed his hands to his head and said in a pained voice: "Why . . . why have you cured me? Bro- mide mixtures, idleness, warm baths, watching in trivial terror over every mouthful, every step . . . all this in the end will drive me to idiocy. I had gone out of my mind . . . I had the mania of greatness. . . . But for all that I was bright, active, and ever happy. ... I was interesting and original. Now I have become rational and solid, just like the rest of the world. I am a mediocrity, and it is tiresome for me to live. . • . Oh, how crudly . . . how cruelly you have treated me! I had hallucinations . . . but what harm did that cause to anyone? I ask you what harm?"
"God only knows what you mean!" sighed Yegor Semiono- vich. "It is stupid even to listen to you."
"Then you need not listen."
The presence of others, especially of Yegor Semionovich, now irritated Kovrin; he answered his father-in-law drily, coldly, even rudely, and could not look on him without con- tempt and hatred. And Yegor Semionovich felt confused, and coughed guiltily, although he could not see how he in the wrong. Unable to understand the cause of such a sud- den reversal of their former hearty relations, Tanya leaned against her father, and looked with alarm into his eyes. It was becoming plain to her that their relations every day grew worse and worse, that her father had aged greatly, and that her husband had become irritable, capricious, excitable, and uninteresting. She no longer laughed and sang, she ate nothing, and whole nights never slept, but lived under the weight of some impending terror, torturing herself so much that she lay insensible from dinner-time till evening. \\"hen the service was being held, it had seemed to her that her father was crying; and now as she sat on the terrace she made an effort not to think of it.
"How happy were Buddha and Mahomet and Shakespeare that their kind-hearted kinsmen and doctors did not cure them of ecstasy and inspiration!" said Kovrin. "If Ma- homet had taken potassium bromide for his nerves, worked only two hours a day, and drunk milk, that astonishing man would have left as little behind him as his dog. Doctors and kind-hearted relatives only do their best to make human- ity stupid, and the time will come when mediocrity will be considered genius, and humanity will perish. If you only had some idea," concluded Kovrin peevishly, "if you only had some idea how grateful I am!"
He felt strong irritation, and to prevent himself saying too much, rose and went into the house. It was a windless night, and into the window was borne the smell of tobacco plants and jalap. Through the windows of the great dark hall, on the floor and on the piano, fell the moonrays. Kovrin re- called the raptures of the summer before, when the air, as now, was full of the smell of jalap and the moonrays poured through the window. . . . To awaken the mood of last year he went to his own room, lighted a strong cigar, and ordered the servant to bring him wine. But now the cigar was bitter and distasteful, and the wine had lost its flavour of the year before. How much it means to get out of practice! From a ;;ingle cigar, and two sips of wine, his head went round. and he was obliged to take bromide of potassium.
Before going to bed Tanya said to him:
"Listen. Father worships you, but you are annoyed with Jtim about something, and that is killing him. Look at his face; he is growing old, not by days but by hours! I im- plore you, Andriusha, for the love of Christ, for the sake of your dead father, for the sake of my peace of mind—be kind to him again! "
"I cannot, and I do not want to."
"But why?" Tanya trembled all over. "Explain to me why!"
"Because I do not like him; that is all," answered Kovrin carelessly, shrugging his shoulders. "But better not talk of that; he isyour father."
"I cannot, cannot understand," said Tanya. She pressed her hands to her forehead and fixed her eyes on one point. "Something terrible, something incomprehensible is going on in this house. You, Andriusha, have changed; you are no longer yourself. . . . You—a clever, an exceptional man— get irritated over trifles. . . . You are annoyed by such little things that at any other time you yourself would have re- fused to believe it. No . . . do not be angry, do not be angry," she continued, kissing his hands, and frightened by her own words. "You are clever, good, and noble. You will be just to father. He is so good."
"He is not good, but merely good-humoured. These vaudeville uncles—of your father's type—with well-fed, easy- going faces, are characters in their way, and once used to amuse me, whether in novels, in comedies, or in life. But they are now hateful to me. They are egoists to the marrow of their bones. . . . Most disgusting of all is their satiety, and this stomachic, purely bovine—or sHinish—optimism."
Tanya sat on the bed, and laid her head on a pillow.
"This is torture!" she said; and from her voice it was plain that she was utterly weary and found it hard tc. speak.
"Since last winter not a moment of rest. . . . It is terrible, my God! l suffer . . ."
"Yes, of course! I am Herod, and you and your papa thf massacred infants. Of course !"
His face seemed to Tanya ugly and disagreeable. The ex- pression of hatred and contempt did not suit it. She even observed that something was lacking in his face: ever since his hair had been cut off, it seemed changed. She felt al'\ almost irresistible desire to say something insulting, but re ■ strained herself in time, and overcome with terror, went ou<, of the bedroom.
ix
Kovrin received an independent chair. His inaugural ad- dre^ was fixed for the 2nd of December, and a notice to that tffect was posted in the corridors of the University. But when the day came a telegram was received by the Universitv authorities that he could not fulfill the engagement, owing to illness.
Blood came from his throat. He spat it up, and twice in one month it flowed in streams. He felt terribly weak, and fell into a somnolent condition. But this illness did not frighten him, for he knew that his dead mother had lived with the same complaint more than ten years. His doctors, too, declared that there was no danger, and advised him merely not to worry, to lead a regular life, and to talk less.
In January the lecture was postponed for the same reason, and in February it was too late to begin the course. It was postponed till the following year.
He no longer lived with Tanya, but with another woman, older than himself, who looked after him as if he were 3- child. His temper was calm and obedient; he submitted willingly, and when Varvara Nikolayevna—that was her name—made arrangements for taking him to the Crimea, he consented to go, although he felt that from the change n(} good would come.
They reached Sevastopol late one evening, and stopped there to rest, intending to drive to Yalta on the following day. Both were tired by the journey. Varvara Nikolayevna drank tea, and went to bed. But Kovrin remained up. An hour before leaving home for the railway station he had re- ceived a letter from Tanya, which he had not read; and the thought of this letter caused him unpleasant agitation. In the depths of his heart he knew that his marriage with Tanya had been a mistake. He was glad that he was finally parted from her; but the remembrance of this woman, who towards the last had seemed to turn into a walking, living mummy, in which all had died except the great, clever eyes, awakened ir. him only pity and vexation against himself. The writing on the envelope reminded him that two years before he had been guilty of cruelty and injustice, and that he had avenged on people in no way guilty his spiritual vacuity, his solitude, his disenchantment with life. . . . He remembered how he had once torn into fragments his dissertation and all the ar- ticles written by him since the time of his illness, and thrown them out of the window, how the fragments flew in the wind and rested on the trees and flowers; in every page he had seen strange and baseless pretensions, frivolous irritation, and a mania for greatness. And all this had produced upon him an impression that he had written a description of his own faults. Yet when the last copybook had been torn up and thrown out of the window, he felt bitterness and vexation, and went to his wife and spoke to her cruelly. Heavens, how he had ruined her life! He remembered how once, wishing to cause her pain, he had told her that her father had played in their romance an unusual role, and had even asked him to marry her; and Yegor Semionovich, happening to over- hear him, had rushed into the room, so dumb with consterna- tion that he could not utter a word, but only stamped his feet on one spot and bellowed strangely as if his tongue had been cut out. And Tanya, looking at her father, cried out in a heart-rending voice, and fell insensible on the floor. It was hideous.