The maid takes the samovar away, and serves a large piece of cheese, some fruit and a bottle of Crimean champagne—a poorish vintage of which Katya had been fond in the Crimea. Picking up two packs of cards from the shelves, Michael Fyodorovich plays patience. But though he claims that certain forms of patience require much imagination and attention, he doesn't pause from his conversational diversions as he plays. Katya follows his cards keenly, helping him more by mime than words. She drinks no more than two glasses of wine in an evening, and I drink a quarter of a glass.
The rest of the bottle devolves upon Michael Fyodorovich, who can put away a great deal without ever getting drunk.
We discuss various problems, mainly on the loftiest level, during the game of patience, and our great love—science—comes in for rougher treatment than anything else.
'Science has had its day, thank God,' enunciates Michael Fyodorovich. 'It's day is done, indeed it is, and mankind already feels the need for some substitute. Science grew out of superstition, it was fed on superstition, and it now represents superstition s quintessence, like its outmoded granddams—alchemy, metaphysics and philosophy. And what have people got out of it, anyway ? Between learned Europeans and the entirely unscientific Chinese, there's precious little difference, isn't there—and that purely external ? The Chinese have done without science, and what have they missed?'
'Flies don't have science either,' I say. 'What of it?'
'Don't be angry, Nicholas, I only say this here, you know, it's between us three. I'm more discreet than you think, I wouldn't talk this way in public—God forbid! The masses hold the superstitious view that science and the arts are a cut above agriculture, trade and handicraft. Our section of society lives on this superstition, and God forbid that you and I should destroy it.'
As the game of patience proceeds, the younger generation also finds itself in hot water.
'Our people have gone to seed,' sighs Michael Fyodorovich. 'I say nothing of ideals and all that, but if they could only work and think sensibly! It's Lermontov's "How sadly I regard the present generation" all over again.'
'Yes, they've degenerated terribly,' Katya agrees. 'Tell me, have you had one outstanding student in the last five or six years ?'
'I can't speak for other professors, but I don't remember any, somehow.'
'I've seen many students in my day, many of your young scholars, many actors. And what do you think ? Not once have I been privileged to meet an ordinary interesting person among them, let alone any star performers or high flyers. They're all so dim, so mediocre, so puffed up with pretensions '
All this talk about things going to the bad—it always affects me as if I'd accidentally overheard unpleasant gossip about my daughter. I'm insulted by the sweeping nature of indictments built on such hackneyed truisms and bugbears as degeneracy, lack of idealism and harking back to the good old days. Every criticism—even one expressed in ladies' company—should be formulated with maximum precision, or else it isn't criticism, it's just baseless calumny unworthy of a decent man.
I'm an old man, I've been in university work for thirty years, but I see no degeneration or lack of idealism, I don't think things are worse now than they used to be. My porter Nicholas, whose experience has some bearing on the matter, calls today's students no better and no worse than those who went before.
If asked what I dislike about my present students, I shouldn't answer at once or say much, but I should be adequately specific. Knowing their defects, I don't need to resort to a fog of platitude. I dislike their smoking, spirit-drinking, marrying late in life, and being so happy-go- lucky—and often so callous—that they condone starvation among their fellows by not paying their dues to the students' aid society. They don't know modern languages, nor do they express themselves in correct Russian. Only yesterday a colleague—a specialist in hygiene—was complaining to me that he has to give twice as many lectures because their physics is weak and they're wholly ignorant of meteorology.
They gladly fall under the influence of the latest writers, and not the best ones at that, but they're quite indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus or Pascal, say, and this inability to distinguish great from small reveals their lack of practical experience more than anything else. All difficult problems of a more or less social nature—for instance, that of colonizing unpopulated areas of the country—they decide by getting up a public subscription, not by scientific investigation and experiment, though this last procedure is well within their grasp and has a close bearing on their mission in life. They gladly become assistant surgeons, registrars, demonstrators and housemen, and they're ready to do these jobs up to the age of forty, though independence, a feeling of freedom and personal initiative are just as much needed in science as in art or commerce. I have pupils and audiences, but no helpers and successors. So I like them, I'm enthusiastic about them—but without being proud ofthem. And so on and so forth.
However numerous such defects may be, they can breed a pessimistic or abusive mood only in a poor-spirited, feeble individual. They're all adventitious and temporary, they derive exclusively from living conditions. A few decades will see them vanish or yield to other, new defects such as cannot be avoided, and will also alarm the craven- hearted in their tum. Students' misdemeanours often annoy me, but such vexation is nothing to the thirty years of enjoyment which I've had through talking and lecturing to my pupils, keeping an eye on their attitudes and comparing them with people in different walks of life.
Michael Fyodorovich casts his aspersions, and Katya listens, neither noticing the bottomless pit into which they are gradually sucked by the patently innocent diversion of condemning their neighbour. They don't sense how ordinary talk gradually turns into sneering and scoffing, or how they both start employing the techniques ofdownright muck-raking.
'You meet some really killing characters!' says Michael Fyodorovich. 'I dropped in on friend Yegor Petrovich yesterday, where I run across a student type, one of your medicals—in his third year, I think. He has a face in—well, in the Dobrolyubov style, with that stamp of profundity on his brow. We get talking.
'"Oh yes, young man," say I, "I was reading that some German, whose name I forget, has extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain—idiotin." 'Know what ? He falls for it! And even adopts a respectful expression, as if to say "Good for us!" Then I went to the theatre the other day. I take my seat. Just in front, in the next row, sit a couple of them—one a member of the Chosen Race and evidently a law student, and the other shaggy creature a medico. The medical boy's as tight as a coot, pays no attention to the stage at all, andjust snoozes away, nodding his head. But as soon as some actor launches into a noisy soliloquy, or simply raises his voice, my medico starts and pokes his neighbour in the ribs.
"'What's that?" he asks. "Noble sentiments, eh?"
' "Yes indeed," answers the Chosen One.
'"Hurray!" bellows our medico. "Elevating stuff, this! Bravo!"
'This drunken clot hasn't come to the theatre for ar t, you see, but for noble sentiments. He wants to be edified!'
Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange kind of guffaw, breathing in and out in rapid, even rhythm, as if playing a concertina, while her nostrils are the only part of her face to express amusement. But I feel do^n«st, and don't know what to say. I lose my temper, I flare up, I leap from my seat.
'Why don't you just shut up?' I shout. 'Why sit here poisoning the air with your breath like a couple of toads? Stop it!'
Without waiting for an end to their calumnies, I prepare to go home. It's high time anyway, gone ten o'clock.