'In that case good-bye,' he says despondently. 'I'm sorry.'
'Good-bye, dear boy. Look after yourself.'
He walks hesitantly into the hall, slowly dons his coat and goes into the street, where he probably ponders the matter further, but without hitting on anything new beyond the term 'old devil' with reference to myself. He goes into a cheap restaurant for some beer and a meal, then returns home to bed. May your bones rest in peace, honest toiler!
The bell rings for the third time, and a young doctor comes in— wearing a new black suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, the inevitable white tie. He introduces himself, I sit him downwn and ask what I can do for him. Somewhat nervous, this youthful devotee of scholarship tells me that he has this year passed the examination qualifying him to go on to a doctorate, and all he has to do now is to write his thesis. He would like me to be his supervisor, and I should oblige him greatly by giving him a research subject.
'Delighted to be ofassistance, dear colleague,' say I. 'But can we first agree about what a research thesis is? The term normally implies a dissertation based on original work—or am I wrong ?—while a composition written on someone else's subject, under someone else's supervision, is given a rather different name '
The doctorate-seeker remains silent.
'Why do you all come to me? That's what I don't see!' I blaze out angrily, leaping from my chair. 'Think I'm running a shop? I'm not hawking research theses! Why won't you all leave me in peace, for the umpteenth time! I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I'm absolutely sick and tired of it!'
The doctorate-seeker makes no reply beyond a slight flush in the region of the cheek-bones. Though his face expresses deep respect for my distinguished reputation and erudition, I can read in his eyes how he despises my voice, miserable figure and nervous gestures. Angry, I seem a kind of freak to him.
'I'm not keeping a shop!' I say wrathfully. 'But why won't any of you be original, that's what baffles me? Why do you hate freedom so?'
I talk a great deal, he says nothing. In the end I gradually calm do^n —and give in, of course. He'll receive a subject from me not worth a brass farthing, write an utterly pointless thesis under my supervision, hold his ownwn in a tedious disputation, and obtain an academic degree of no possible use to him.
Sometimes the bell never seems to stop ringing, but I shall confine myself here to four visits only. With the fourth ring I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress and a well-loved voice.
Eighteen years ago an oculist colleague of mine died, leaving his seven-year-old daughter Katya and about sixty thousand roubles. He appointed me guardian in his will, and Katya lived with us as one ofthe family till she was ten, after which she went to boarding-school and spent only the summer holidays in my home. Having no time to attend to her upbringing, I only observed her sporadically, which is why 1 can't say much about her childhood.
My first memory of her—and one that I'm very fond of—is the amazing trustfulness with which she entered my house, which showed in her manner towards the doctors who treated her, and which always glowed in her little face. She would sit somewhere out ofthe way with cheek bandaged, and she was always examining something attentively. I might be writing or leafing through some books while my wife busied herself about the house, the cook peeled potatoes in the kitchen, or the dog played—seeing which things, her eyes always retained the same unchanging expression.
'All things in this world are beautiful and rational,' they seemed to say.
She was inquisitive and much enjoyed talking to me, sitting on the other side of my desk, watching my movements and asking questions— curious to know what I was reading, what my job was at the university, whether I was afraid of corpses, and what I did with my salary.
'Do the students have fights at the university?' she asks.
'Yes, dear.'
'And do you make them go do^ on their knees?'
'I do.'
She was tickled by theidea ofstudent fights—and ofme making them kneel—and she laughed. She was an affectionate, patient, good child. I often chanced to see something taken off her—or saw her punished for something that she hadn't done, or with her curiosity left unsatisfied. Her unfailing expression of trustfulness took on a tinge of sadness at such times, but that was all.
I was incapable of standing up for her and only when I saw her sadness did I long to draw her to myselfand console her in the voice of an old nanny, calling her my 'poor darling orphan'.
I remember too how fond she was of dressing up and using scent, in which she resembled me, for I too like fine clothes and good scent.
I regret that I lacked the time and inclination to observe the origin and development of the great passion which engulfed Katya when she was fourteen or fifteen. I mean her passion for the stage. When she came home from school for the summer holidays, she spoke ofnot^ng with such delight and eagerness as plays and actors, wea^nng us with her incessant talk of the theatre. My wife and children wouldn't listen, and only I was too cowardly to deny her an audience. When she felt an urge to share her enthusiasm, she would come into my study.
'Nicholas Stepanovich, let me talk to you about the theatre,' she would plead.
I would point to the clock.
'You can have half an hour,' I'd say. 'Commence.'
Later she began bringing home dozens of portraits of actors and actresses whom she adored. Then she tried to take part in amateur theatricals several times, until finally, when her schooldays were over, she informed me that she was born to become an actress.
I never shared Katya's enthusiasm for the theatre. Ifa play's any good, one can gain a true impression without troubling actors, I think— one only needs to read it. And if the play's bad, no acting will make it good.
As a young man I often went to the theatre, and now my family takes a box twice a year and 'gives me an airing'. That's not enough to entitle me to judge the theatre, of course, but I shan't say much about it. I don't think the theatre's any better now than it was thirty or forty years ago. I still can't find a glass of clean water in corridors or foyer. Attendants still fine me twenty copecks for my coat, though there's nothing discreditable about wearing warm clothes in winter. The orchestra still plays in the intervals without the slightest need, adding to the impression already conveyed by the play a furttar new and quite uncalled for impression. The men still go to the bar in the intervals and drink spirits. Where there's no progress in small things it would be idle to seek it in matters of substance. When an actor, swathed from head to foot in theatrical traditions and preconceptions, tries to declaim a simple, straightforward soliloquy like 'To be or not to be' in a manner anything but simple, and somehow inevitably attended with hissings and convulsions ofhis entire frame, when he tries to convince me at all costs that Chatsky—who spends so much time talking to fools and falls in love with a foolish girl—is a highly intelligent man, and that Woe from Wit isn't a boring play, then the stage seems to exhale that same ritual tedium which used to bore me forty years ago when they regaled me with bellowings and breast-beatings in the classical manner. And I always come out ofthe theatre more conservative than I went in.
You may convince the sentimental, gullible rabble that the theatre as at present constituted is a school, but that lure won't work on anyone who knows what a school really is. What may happen in fifty or a hundred years, I can't say, but the theatre can only be a form of entertainment under present conditions. Yet this entertainment costs too much for us to continue enjoying it. It deprives the country of thousands ofhealthy, able young men and women who light have become good doctors, husbandmen, schoolmistresses and officers, had they not devoted themselves to the stage. It deprives the public ofthe evening hours, which are best for intellectual work and friendly converse— not to mention the waste of money, and the moral damage to the theatre-goer who sees murder, adultery or slander improperly handled on the stage.