Towards four o'clock movement begins in hall and drawing-room— Liza is back from the Conservatory, and has brought some girl friends with her. They are heard playing the piano, exercising their voices and laughing. In the dining-room Yegor lays the table with a clatter of crockery.
'Good-bye,' Katya says. 'I shan't call on your family today. I hope they'll excuse me, I haven't time. Do come and see me again.'
As I escort her to the hall she looks me up and down severely.
'You keep getting thinner,' she says regretfully. 'Why don't you see a doctor? I'll call on Sergey Fyodorovich and ask him to look you over.'
'Don't do that, Katya.'
'What's your family playing at? That's what I don't see! A fine lot they are, I must say.'
She puts her coat on abruptly, and inevitably a couple of pins fall from her carelessly dressed hair to the floor. She's too lazy to do her hair, hasn't the time. She awkwardly hides the straying locks under her hat and leaves.
I enter the dining-room.
'Wasn't that Katya with you just now ?' my wife asks. 'Why didn't she come and see us? It's rather peculiar '
'Mother,' says Liza reproachfully, 'ifshe doesn't want to, never mind. We can't very well go down on bended knee.'
'Say what you like, but it is rather off-hand. To spend three hours in the study without one thought for us. Oh, anyway, let her suit herself.'
Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is quite beyond me, one must probably be a woman to appreciate it. Among the hundred and fifty young men whom I see almost daily in my lecture-theatre, and among the hundred or so older men whom I run across every week, there's barely one, I'd stake my life, capable of understanding this hatred and disgust for Katya's past—her pregnancy and the illegitimate child, in other words. And yet I can't recall one woman or girl of my acquaintance who wouldn't harbour such sentiments, consciously or unconsciously. Nor is this because woman is purer and more virtuous than man, for virtue and purity differ precious little from vice unless they're free from malice. I attribute it simply to women's backwardness. The despondency, the sympathy, the conscience-pangs which the spectacle of misery evokes in your modern male—they say a lot more for his cultural and moral level than would hatred and disgust. Now, your female is as tearful and insensitive today as she was in the Middle Ages, and those who advocate educating her like a man are being perfectly sensible, or so I believe.
My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for being ungrateful, proud and eccentric, and for all those many other vices which one woman can always find in another.
Besides myself and my family, two or three of my daughter's girl friends lunch with us, as also does Alexander Adolfovich Gnekker— Liza's admirer and a suitor for her hand. He is a fair-haired young man under thirty, of medium height, very stout and broad-shouldered, with ginger dundreary whiskers near his ears and a tinted little moustache which makes his plump, smooth face look like a toy. He wears a very short jacket, a gaudy waistcoat, trousers very broad on top, very narrow do^n below and patterned in large checks, and yellow heelless boots. He has bulging eyes like a crayfish, his tie resembles a crayfish's neck. The young man's whole person gives off a smell of crayfish soup, or so it seems to me. He visits us daily, but no one in the family knows where he comes from, where he went to school, or what his means are. He doesn't play or sing, but he's somehow implicated in singing and music as a salesman for someone or other's pianos who's always in and out of the Conservatory, knowing all the celebrities and officiating at concerts. He criticizes music with a great air of authority, and I've noticed that people are quick to agree with him.
As rich men are always surrounded by toadies, so are science and the arts. There seems to be no art, no branch ofleaming free from 'foreign bodies' offriend Gnekker's ilk. Not being a musician, I may be wrong about Gnekker—not that I know him very well, anyway. But his authority seems to me rather suspect, as does his air of profundity when he stands by a piano listening to someone sing or play.
You may be a gentleman and a leading member of your profession a hundred times over, but once you have a daughter there's nothing to protect you from the lower-class vulgarity so frequently obtruded upon your home and mood by courtship, marriage negotiations and wedding. For instance, I simply can't abide the triumphant look on my wife's face when Gnekker's in the house, and I can't put up with bottles of Chateau Lafite, port and sherry served solely to provide him with ocular evidence of our generous and lavish way of life. Neither can I stomach Liza's laugh which she has picked up at the Conservatory, or her trick of screwing up her eyes when we have men in the house. Least of all can I comprehend why I should be visited daily by —and lunch daily with—a creature so totally alien to my habits, my studies and the whole tenor of my life, who is also so utterly different from anyone dear to me. My wife and the servants mysteriously whisper about him being 'Liza's young man', but I still can't see what he's doing here, and I feel as nonplussed as if they'd sat a Zulu down beside me at table. What also seems odd is that my daughter, whom I'm used to regarding as a child, should love this tie, these eyes, these soft cheeks.
In the old days I used to enjoy my lunch, or was indifferent to it. But now it only bores and irritates me. Since I became a professor, since I've been a Dean of Faculty, my family has found it necessary to make a complete change in our menu and lunching procedures for some reason.
Instead of the simple dishes familiar to me as student and ordinary doctor, I'm now given 'puree'—or soup with things like white icicles floating in it—and kidneys in Madeira. Professorial rank and fame have for ever cut me off from cabbage stew, tasty pies, goose and apple, bream and kasha. They have also robbed me of our maid Agasha, a chatty old woman who liked a bit of a laugh, and in whose stead a dim, haughty creature called Yegor, with a white glove on his right hand, now serves meals. The intervals between courses arc short, but seem excessively long because there's nothing to occupy them. Our former gaiety, the carefree talk, the jokes, the laughs, the expressions of fondness for each other, the delight which used to stir the children, my wife and myself whenever we met in our dining-room—these arc all things of the past. To a busy nun like mysclflunch was a time for relaxation and sociability, while for my wife and children it was a holiday—brief indeed, but bright and gay—when, for one half hour, they knew that I belonged not to science, not to my students ... but to them, and them alone. Now I've lost the knack of growing merry on one glass of wine, and there's no more Agasha, no more bream and kasha, no more uproar such as once greeted minor meal-time scandals like the cat and dog fi ghting under the table, or Katya's bandage falling off her cheek into a bowl of soup.
To describe my present style oflunch is as unappetizing as the eating of it. Solemn in its pompous affectation, my wife's face wears its usual careworn expression.
'I see you don't like the joint,' says she with an a^rious glance at our plates. 'Now, you don't like it, do you? Tell me.'
'Don't worry, dear,' I have to answer, 'the joint's very nice.'
'You always agree with me, Nicholas,' says she. 'You never tell the truth. Dut why is Mr. Gnekker eating so little?'
So it goes on right through the meal, with Liza laughing her staccato laugh and screwing up her eyes. I watch them both, and only now at lunch does it da^n on me that their inner life has long since vanished from my field of vision. Once I lived at home with a real family, I feel, but now I'm just the lunch-guest of a spurious wife, looking at a spurious Liza. A great change has taken place in them both, but I have missed the long process by which it occurred, so no wonder I can't make sense of anything. What caused that change I don't know. The trouble is, perhaps, that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than he granted me. I've been used to holding out against external pressures since boyhood, I've steeled myself pretty well. Such disasters in life as fame, reaching the top of one's profession, abandoning modest comfort for living above one's means, acquaintance with celebrities and all that—these things have barely touched me, I've kept a whole skin. Dut on my weak, unternpered wife and Liza the whole business has collapsed like an avalanche of snow, crushing them.