My Universities
What was it that had killed him? I remembered that once, sitting in a public-house, pouring some beer into my glass and growing a trifle tipsy, he suddenly said to me: 'Do you know, Maximich, what the best song in the world is?" He bent across the table and looking into my eyes with the look of a kind bear, he sang softly and sadly in a low bass voice:
"Quand j'étais petit — Je n'étais pas grand; Jallais 4 VPécole
Comme les petits enfants..."
As he sang it, his eyes grew misty with tears.
MY UNIVERSITY DAYS Zot
"A charming song, upon my word. Such a simplicity lies in it and, you know, such a funny sadness." He translated the words into Russian for me, and I could not understand what it was that brought tears of rapture to the eyes of this big and hairy clever man. Afterwards — I met not a few people who had been killed by this 'funny sadness."
A few months later; life, sternly but carefully bringing me up, reminded me of Petrovsky, forcing me to go through one of the most dismal impressions of all my existence. .
In Moscow, in a filthy public-house somewhere near the Sukharev town, a long lanky man in spectacles sat down at a table opposite to me. His bony face, pointed beard, sparse whiskers reminded me of Doré's drawings of Don Quixote. He wore a blue suit, not belonging to him, and nainsook grey trousers that were too short for him and had patched knees. One foot was in a rubber shoe — the other in a leather sole. Twisting his whiskers that were pointed like needles, he looked at me hungrily, with dim eyes, then stood up, arranging the eye-glasses on the grey brows and, shaking on his feet, groping with his hands like a blind man, he came up to me:
"Lawyer Gladkoff."
He traced his signature in the air with a flourish of his dirty fingers — and repeated imposingly:
"Alexei Gladkoff."
He spoke hoarsely and twirled his neck about as though strangled by a loop unseen to me.
aad MY UNIVERSITY DAYS
Of course, he proved to be a man of noble heart, who had suffered for his disinterested service on the altar of truth and had been thrust by its enemies down to the 'depths of life." Now he was standing at the head of the order of "Saint Aquavita," copying petitions for the theatres, protecting oppressed innocence and also shooting at the hearts and purses of poor, loving merchants' wives. 'The Russian — and still more his woman — loves to suffer: suffering, or the tales of it, is the moral mustard without which nothing can penetrate into the heart, fattened by the varied and abundant food of the flesh."
I had observed already many people of that type. I had been used to treat them with distrust, but always with intense interest. In a man climbing obstinately upwards, the interest for people who have fallen down from above is very logical. Also the so-called ''fallen people," the dark sinners, are often richer morally and even of a finer quality than the acknowledged godly beings which I considered already in my youth very like the wax figures in a panopticon.
About two hours later I was lying next to Gladkoff on the wooden benches of a dismal night-barrack. Lying with his head resting on his arms, his body stretched out like a rod, the advocate consoled me with aphorisms of a wolf-like fierceness, his small beard stuck out like a devil's tail that trembled every time he coughed; he was touchingly pitiful in his powerless fury, and, like a hedgehog, arrayed himself in the quills of caustic words.
Over our heads hung the vaulted ceiling uk a base- —
ment; a rusty, nauseous dampness trickled down the walls; an acid smell of putrefying earth rose from the
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floor; in the shadows unknown bodies roamed and snored, wrapped in ragged clothing. The window, with thick iron bars, looked into a hole laid out with bricks; a cat sat in it, evidently a sick one, for it mewed plaintively. On the wooden benches under the window sat in a Turkish pose a hideously fat hairy human being; he was mending his trousers by the light of a candle-end and hoarsely howling a troparion to the Virgin Mary. Having sung it, he soundly smacked his fat lips and began the hymn all over again.
"Pimen Masloff, a chemist and a genius," recommended Gladkoff. In this hole a few more geniuses lay about, among them the "'illustre'" pianist Bragin, a clever little man who looked like a youth, although he had silver threads in his wavy hair and blue bags under his eyes. I was surprised by the duplicity of his face: a bitter smile was irreconciliably contradicted by the sad beauty of his feminine eyes, his lips were thin and the wicked smile seemed stuck to them immovably forever. In the morning Gladkoff said to me: "Now we are going to consecrate, as a knight of the order of Aquavita, a new follower, this one. Watch; this is a marvellous ceremony."
He pointed out to me a young curly-headed man in a shirt, without trousers. _He was purple with everlasting drink; the blue pupils of his eyes were congealed in the bloodshot eyeballs. He was sitting on one of the wooden benches; in front of him stood the fat chemist, painting his cheeks with fuchsine and his brows and whiskers with a burnt cork.
"Don't do that," muttered the curly-headed one, dangling his bare legs about, while Gladkoff was telling me, twisting his whiskers:
"He's a merchant's son, a student; it's the fifth week that he's drinking with us. He's spent all he had in drink, money and clothes!"
Then appeared a round, fat woman. The bridge of her nose had fallen through or been knocked out and she had insolent, provoking eyes; she brought a bundle of bast-mats with her and threw it on the benches, saying:
"The vestments are ready."
"Let us dress him!" cried Gladkoff. Five people, grey and hairy, roamed like phantoms in the darkness of the basement; the "pianist"? was blowing assiduously at some coals on a frying-pan. From time to time they threw to each other disconnected short words.
"Move on!"
"Sh-sh, be quiet!"
"What are you up to?"
They dragged the benches into the middle of the basement. Masloff attired himself in a chasuble of bast-mats, put on a pasteboard calotte, and Gladkoff was disguised as a deacon.
Four men seized the curly-headed student by the arms and legs.
"No. Don't, please don't," he sighed, as they laid him on the bench.
"Choir ready?" shouted the advocate, brandishing the frying-pan and dispersing smoke over the lying man; coals crackled in it and a blue smoke of smouldering leaves rose from them. The man lay on the bench, wrinkling up his nose. He coughed, shutting his eyes, twisting his feet like a fly and striking the boards with his soles.
"Hear!" announced Gladkoff, wrapped up in the bast-mats. He became terribly like a caricature, twisting his neck very sharply and shaking about his head, making a weird grimace.
Masloff, standing at the feet of the student, began declaiming in nasal tones:
"Brothers! Let us appeal to the Devil to rest the soul of the freshly deceased youth Sakov from drink and Babylonian vice. May Satan accept him with honour and joy and sink him in the abominations of hell forever and ever!"
Five hairy tramps, standing in a thick line on the right side of the benches, sullenly sang the blas- -phemous song; their hoarse voices rang dully and smothered in the stone hole. The part of the preceptor was played by Bragin; he conducted with a graceful movement of his right hand, while the left one was lifted in a gesture of warning.
It was hard to surprise me with shamelessness — I had seen too much of it in different shapes — but those people were singing something abominable, displaying by the combination of shameless words and pictures a really devilish imagination, a boundless depravity. Neither before nor after that day did I hear of anything equally refined and despairing in its depravity. Five throats were pouring on one man a stream of poisonous filth. They did it without any enthusiasm, as something which was a duty; they did not treat it as a joke — they were officiating — and it was clear that it did not happen for the first time, for the ceremony of a man's extermination was performed smoothly, connectedly and solemnly, as in a church.
Entirely horrified by what I saw, I listened to the peculiar nasal exclamations of Gladkoff, to the cynical reading of the "chemist," to the smothered singing of the choir, and watched the man who was being buried alive and at whose corpse a blasphemous liturgy was being officiated. Lying with hands folded on the breast, he moved his lips, muttering something, winked with wide-open eyes, smiling a silly smile, and from time to time trembled frightenedly, trying to jump off the benches; then the choir pressed him gently and silently back to the boards.
Probably the ceremony would have appeared less repulsive had the dirty phantoms regarded it as a joke and a game, had they laughed over it even with the laugh of cynics, with the laugh of despair of "people that have been," that are disfigured by life and are bitterly thwarted by it. But, no; they treated their doings with the. surly intensity of murderers, they behaved like pagan priests bringing a sacrifice to the spirit of a sickly and vengefully unbridled imagination.
Stunned and helpless, I felt that a terrible weight was oppressing me, pushing me into an impassable mire; it seemed as though these people were burying me, too. I remember that I smiled, a stupid and disconcerted smile, and there was a moment when I wanted to implore:
_ "Stop that — it is wrong — it is terrible — it is not a joke at all."
The sharp voice of the "pianist" especially tore at my ear; he howled ecstatically, shutting his eyes, throwing back his head and straining his neck. His
howl, drowning the hoarse voices of the other singers, _
swam in the smoky fog and displayed with a peculiar sensuality the abomination of the words. I was filled with a savage longing to growl and wail.
"The grave!" cried Gladkoff, brandishing the frying-pan that served as the incensory. The choir roared with all its strength:
'Approach, approach,
Grave, grave .. ."
and in came the woman with the broken nose-bridge quite naked. She came dancing about as she went; her flabby body trembled, her fat legs were covered with purple bruises and scars and blue swollen veins.
Masloff met her with an indecent gesture which was repeated by Gladkoff; the woman, yelping out obscenities, embraced them each in turn, then the choir lifted her by her arms and legs and placed her on the bench near the deceased.
"Oh — oh! Don't!" he cried, shrieking, again attempting to get off from the bench, but he was pressed back to it, and then, to a new dancing but nevertheless dismal tune of a disgusting song, the woman, bending down on him, shaking her greyish and dirty wallets of breasts over him, began silently to perform over him an obscene parody of physical communion.
Here I remembered the ''Queen Margot'' — the most beautiful dream of my life. Something exploded in my breast and [ rushed at those remaining fragments of people, knocking their teeth out with my fists.
...Towards the evening I found myself under the bank of the railway line, on a heap of sleepers; the fingers of my hands were broken and bruised,
blood was flowing from them, while my left eye was swollen and sore. From the sky, as dirty as the earth, fell a thin autumn rain; I drew out trusses of wet, faded grass and, wiping with it my face and hands, thought of what had just been exhibited to me.
I was a healthy lad and possessed of an unusual strength. I could make nine times, without hurrying, the sign of the cross with an eighty-pound weight in my hand, easily carried about sacks of flour weighing two hundred pounds each — but in that hour I felt myself quite emptied and weak, like a sick child. I wanted to cry from a feeling of bitter offense. I had sought greedily for a communion with the beauty of life of which so temptingly spoke the books I had read. I wanted to admire with gladness something that would imbue me with strength to live. The time had come for me to experience the joys of life, for I felt oftener and oftener the flow and impulse of fury. It rose in a dark and hot wave to my breast, blinding the reason; its power transformed my sharp attention to people in a feeling of repulsion and contempt for them. It was painfully annoying to find that I was continually meeting on my way things filthy and stupid, pitiful and strange.
It was anguishing to recall "the ceremony" in the night-barrack; the ear was drilled by the cry of Gladkoff:
"The grave!"
and before my eyes drifted asunder the repellent body
of the woman — like a heap of wicked and lustful abomination in which one had wanted to bury a living being.
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And here I remembered the licentiousness of the "Monastic life" of Petrovsky and felt how innocent is the raging of flesh in healthy people in comparison to the fury of putridness which has not lost entirely the outward aspect of man.
There — there was a certain idolatry of beauty there; half-savage people prayed out of an overflow of strength, considering that overflow as a sin and a chastisement, perhaps revolting in a phantom-like hope for freedom, fearing to "ruin their soul" in the insatiable thirst of the body.
Here impotence has sunk to a dismal despair, to an abominable and revengeful derision of that instinct that incessantly sows afresh the fields of life ravaged by death and is the stimulant of all the beauty of the world. Here the very root of life was obscurely undermined through the poisoning of its mysteriously beautiful sources by the pus of a sickly imagination.
But what must life be like, high up over there, whence people fall so terribly low?
VI
At that time, evidently with the view of educating me, fate made me undergo the tragi-comical emotions of a first love.
A group of friends had planned to go boating on the Oka and I was charged to ask the couple C to join our party. The C 's had recently arrived from France and I had not yet met them. I went to their house for the first time on that evening.
They lived in the basement of an old house whose entrance was adorned by a huge pool of dirty water; this pool never dried up in the spring and sometimes not even in summer. Crows and dogs used it as a looking-glass, while pigs bathed in it.
In a rather pensive state of mind, I tumbled into these people, totally strange to me, like a stone rolling from a hill — and perturbed all the inhabitants of it. A fat, middle-sized man emerged from the door and confronted me sullenly, barring my way into the next room. He had a neat, flaxen beard and kind eyes.
Trying to improve his rather untidy appearance, he asked me, ungraciously:
"What do you want?"
And added, impressively:
"Before coming in, one should always knock at the door."
Behind his back, in the dimness of the room, something resembling a large white bird was fluttering and tossing about. A voice clear and gay rang out:
"Particularly, if you visit married people." Rather crossly I asked them whether they were the people I was looking for, and at the affirmative answer of the man, who looked like a prosperous shopkeeper, I explained what I had come for.
"You say that C sent you" inquired the man, steadily and pensively, stroking his hand, and at that very moment turned round, starting and exclaiming as if in pain:
"Oh, Olga!"
At the convulsive movement of his hand, I guessed that he had been pinched in the part of his body which is usually not spoken of probably because it is situated slightly below the back.
A young, slim girl came and stood in his place, holding the door-posts and looking at me with a smile in her blue eyes.
"Who are you? A policeman?'
"No, it is only my trousers," I answered, politely, and she laughed.
Her laugh was not offensive, for in her eyes shone the smile for which I had waited so long. Evidently it was my dress that roused her hilarity. I wore the blue trousers of a policeman, and, instead of a shirt,
the white jacket of a cook. It is a very practical
garment; playing the part of a waistcoat and buttoning up to the neck, it avoids the necessity of a shirt. Someone's shooting-boots and the wide hat of an Italian bandit put the finishing touch to my attire.
Dragging me into the room and pushing me onto a chair, she asked, standing by:
"Why are you dressed so funnily?"
'Why funnily?"
'Don't be cross," she advised in a friendly way.
Such a strange girl; who could be angry with her?
The bearded gentleman, sitting on the bed, was busy rolling one cigarette after the other. I asked, looking at him:
"Is this your father, or brother?"
"Her husband," he answered, with assurance.
"Why do you ask?" she laughed.
I stood staring at her; then, after some reflection: "Please forgive me!" I said.
Our conversation continued in this laconic style for about five minutes, but I felt myself capable of sitting motionless in that basement for hours, days, years, looking at the narrow oval face of the lady and at her caressing eyes. Her small lower lip was slightly thicker than the upper one and looked a trifle swollen; her thick chestnut-coloured hair, cut short, formed for her a sumptuous head-dress, falling in soft ringlets over her rosy ears and flushed girlish cheeks. Her hands were very pretty; as she stood, holding the posts of the door, I could see her arms bare up to the shoulder. She was dressed in a strangely simple way: in a white lace blouse with wide sleeves and an equally white, neatly-cut skirt. But the most wonderful thing was her eyes; they shone so gaily, caressingly, with such friendly curiosity. And there was no doubt whatsoever! She smiled with the smile that is so intensely needed to the heart of a man twenty years of age, whose heart, injured by the brutality of life, thirsts for affection.
"There will be a pouring rain in a moment," announced her husband, blowing smoke into his beard.
I looked at the window: the sky was cloudless and
the stars shone brightly. I realised then that my presence was offensive to the man, and I went away, my soul full of a peaceful gladness, as when one meets something which, secretly even to oneself, one has sought for a long time.
All the night I roamed in the field, admiring gently the caressing radiance of the blue eyes, and at dawn I was perfectly convinced that the little lady was no mate for the bearded old bear with the kind eyes of a contented cat. I even pitied her, the poor thing! Fancy living with a man who kept bread-crumbs in his beard!
And the next day we drove in the boat down the troubled waters of the Oka, along the high bank formed of broad layers of many-coloured snarl. The day was the finest one since the world's creation; the sun was wonderfully brilliant and the sky seemed arrayed for a feast; the air over the river was impregnated with a smell of ripe strawberries; all the people suddenly remembered that they really were perfect people and this filled me with joyful affection for them. Even the husband of the lady of my heart proved to be a remarkable person: he did not get into the same boat as his wife, where I sat at the oars, and behaved the whole day in a wonderfully clever way. At the beginning he told us all a lot of curious things about old Gladstone, and after this, having drunk a jug of excellent milk, he lay down under a bush and slept until the evening with the sleep of a new-born babe. Our boat, of course, came first to the place of the picnic, and as I carried my lady onto the shore in my arms she said:
"How strong you are.
I felt myself capable of overthrowing any tower in the place and told the lady that I could carry her in my arms to the town; that was at a distance of seven kilometers. She laughed gently, caressing me with her eyes; they shone in front of me the whole day, and I felt convinced, of course, that they shone for me alone.
The whole thing went on with a rapidity very natural to a woman who had met a rather interesting specimen of an animal, and to a healthy youth who needed the tenderness of a woman. I learnt soon that, in spite of her youthful appearance, she was ten years older than myself, that she had been educated in a school for '"'noble maidens'"' in Bielostok, had been engaged to the Commandant of the Winter Palace and lived in Paris, where she had studied and learnt obstetrics. It appeared that her mother, too, had been a mid-wife and had assisted at my arrival in this world. I took this to be an omen and rejoiced over it.
Her acquaintance with the Bohemian crowd as well as with emigrants, with one of whom she had a short love affair, also a wandering life of starvation or something very near to it, in all the basements and attics of Paris, Petersburg and Vienna, all this had transformed this schoolgirl into a complicated, queer and intensely interesting piece of humanity. Light and swift as a titmouse, she observed life and people with the sharp curiosity of a clever young animal. She knew how to sing provoking French songs, smoked' very gracefully, could draw very cleverly, acted charmingly in theatricals; she also sewed all her frocks and trimmed hats. As to obstetrics, she never bothered about it. "I have nursed four cases," she
used to say, "but they gave a death rate of seventyfive per cent."
This left her forever with a distaste for the work of indirectly assisting in the increase of humanity. As to her direct participation in this honourable occupation, it was proved by the existence of her daughter, a charming and beautiful child of four. She used to speak of herself in the tone with which one speaks of a person whom one knows very well and who therefore bores one. But sometimes she spoke of herself in a certain amazement; her eyes then would shine brightly and grow dark and a slightly timid smile would pass through them, the shy smile of a child.
I was intensely conscious of her acute and tenacious mind; I knew her to be of a higher culture than myself. I noticed the kind and a trifle condescending way she had with other people; she was, of course, incomparably more attractive than all the other women and girls I knew. The careless style of her conversation used to astound me, and I thought: this person, while knowing all that is known to my revolutionary-minded friends, knows also something more valuable, but she looks at everything from aside, observing with the smile of a grown-up person the charm- 'ing, although dangerous, childish frolics that she had indulged in at one time.
The basement where she lived was divided into two rooms: a small kitchen, which served also as an entrance, and a large room with three windows looking out on the street and two onto the dirty, littered yard. It was a comfortable enough place for the workshop of a shoemaker, but not for a refined little woman who had lived in Paris, in the sacred city of
the Great Revolution, in the town of Moliére, Beaumarchais, Hugo and other great men. There were many other things inadequate to the picture and its frame; they all affected me very sharply, and among other feelings excited a great pity for the woman. She, however, did not notice all these things which, to my mind, ought to have been offensive to her.
She worked from morning till night, in the morning busying herself with the kitchen and the house, and when that was finished she sat down at a large table under the window and made pencil drawings the whole day, copying photographs of different local personalities, tracing maps, colouring cartagrams, helping her husband to make statistical reviews for the Zemstvo. The dust of the street blew from the open window onto her hair; the fat, thick shadows of the passers-by glided on the papers. She sang as she worked, and, growing tired of sitting, she would jump up and waltz with her chair or play with the child. In spite of the quantities of dirty work which fell to her task, she was always as clean as a cat.
Her husband was placid and lazy. He liked lying in bed reading translated novels, especially those of the elder Dumas. 'This clears the cells of the brain," he said. It pleased him to observe life from the "strictly scientific point of view." He called his dinner "the partaking of food," and after having eaten, used to say:
"The conveyance of the digestive juice from the stomach to the different cells of our organism demands absolute rest."
And forgetting to shake the crumbs out of his beard, he would lie down on his bed, read Dumas or
Xavier de Montespan with absorption for a few minutes, and then, for two or three hours, whistle lyrical songs through his nose, his fair moustache moving gently as if something unseen was buried under it. On waking up he would stare for a long time pensively at the cracks in the ceiling; then remembering suddenly:
"All the same, Kusma was wrong in his interpretation of the idea of Parnell!'
And he would go and argue with Kusma, telling his wife:
"Please finish up for me the account of the horseless peasants from the Maidan district. I will soon be back."
He came back about midnight or later in a very cheerful state of mind.
"Well, you know, I thoroughly defeated Kusma to-day! He has a fine memory for quotations, the scoundrel, but I don't give him any points in this. And, what is more, do you know that he has no comprehension of Gladstone's policy in the East, the curious fellow!"
He continually spoke of Binet, Richet and the hygiene of the brain and, sitting at home in bad weather, busied himself educating the daughter of his wife, a child born accidentally somewhere between two love stories.
"Liolia, you must chew carefully when you eat; this facilitates the digestion and helps the stomach to transmute the digestive juice into a more assimilative conglomeration of chemical substance."
After dinner, having attained the state of "'absolute rest,"' he would put the child to bed and send it
to sleep with stories of the following nature: "And so, after the bloodthirsty and ambitious Bonaparte had usurped the power..."
His wife used to cry with laughter listening to these lectures, but he was not angry with her, and he soon went to sleep himself. The little girl, after having played a while with his silken beard, also went to sleep, curled up together like a ball. I made great friends with her; she listened to me with greater interest than she did to the lectures of Boleslav on the bloodthirsty usurper and Josephine's mournful love of him, and this excited a curious feeling of jealousy on the part of Boleslav.
"I protest, Peshkov!"' he would say. 'The child must be introduced to the fundamental principles of the human relations with actuality and only then acquainted with it. If you knew Fnglish and could read 'The Hygiene of a Child's Soul'..." He himself knew only one word in English, I think, and that was: "good-bye." He was twice as old as J, but had the curiosity of a young poodle. He liked to gossip and to show off as a man to whom all the mysteries of not only Russian but also foreign revolutionary circles are well known. However, he was perhaps actually well informed. Mysterious people used to come often to see him; they all behaved like tragic actors who incidentally have to play the parts of simpletons. At his house I met the revolutionist Sabunaeff in a red, clumsily set-on wig and a speckled suit of clothes which was much too narrow and short for him.
And one day, as I came to Boleslav, I found there an alert little man with a small head, resembling a hair-dresser. He wore a pair of checkered trousers,
a grey waistcoat and creaking boots. Boleslav pushed me into the kitchen and whispered:
"This man comes from Paris. He has an important message for Korolenko. Please arrange that he should See Dieu.
I undertook to do it, but it appeared that someone pointed out the newly-arrived to Korolenko in the street, and V. G. sagaciously remarked: ''No, I do 'not want to have anything to do with that coxcomb."
Boleslav was hurt for his Parisian friend and for the '"'work of revolution," and for two days sat concocting a letter to Korolenko; he tried every style from the infuriated and stern to the affectionately reproving, and then burned these samples of epistolic literature in the fire. Very soon there occurred a great number of arrests in Moscow, Nijni, Vladimir, and the man in the checkered trousers proved to be the "famous" Landeson-Harting, chronologically the first provocator I had ever seen.
Apart from all this, the husband of my beloved one was a good fellow, a trifle sentimental and comically overburdened with "'scientific knowledge." He had been heard to say himself:
"The life's aim of a man belonging to the 'intelligentsia' is an uninterrupted accumulation of scientific luggage in the view of distributing it disinterestedly among the masses of the people."
My love, growing deeper, became a torture. I would sit in the basement, watching the lady of my heart as she worked, bent over the table, and get gloomily in-
toxicated with the desire of taking her into my arms, carrying her somewhere away from this cursed basement, crowded with a large double bed, an ancient and heavy sofa, where slept the child, and many tables on which dusty books and papers lay spread out. Strange feet hurried rapidly past the window — sometimes the head of a homeless dog would peep in — it was stuffy; a smell of mud, warmed by the sun, came in a gust from the street. The slight, girlish figure sat gently humming a song and grating on the paper with a pen or a pencil, her eyes, blue as cornflowers, smiled at me caressingly. I loved that woman deliriously, madly, and I pitied her with an evil-minded longing.
"Tell me some more about yourself,' she would propose.
And I would start telling her, but she would stop me, in a few minutes, saying:
"This is not about yourself."
I realised myself that all that I said applied not to myself, but to something in which I was blindly entangled. I felt that I must try to find myself in this varied and complicated confusion of impressions and facts which I had gone through, but I felt helpless and frightened and did not know where to begin. Who am IJ and what am I? This question troubled me very seriously. I was angry with life, for it had already inspired me with the abasing stupidity of attempting suicide. I could not understand the people around me, their lives seemed to me all wrong, unjustifiably stupid and filthy. A sharpened curiosity troubled me, the curiosity of a man who for some reason or other wants to have a look into all the dark corners of existence; into the depths of all the mys-
teries of life, and sometimes I felt myself capable of committing a crime merely out of curiosity. I was ready to murder someone, only to know what would happen to me next?
It seemed to me, that should I find my own self, a loathsome man, entangled in a solid net of strange feelings and thoughts, I would appear before the eyes of the lady of my heart, a delirious and raving person who would frighten her and repulse her. I had at first to undergo some inner transformation. I was so sure that this was the only woman who was capable not only to help me to become sensible of my own self, but that she could also effect some magic, after which I would be immediately set free from the captivity of dark inpressions; I would cast something out of my soul forever and it would blaze with the fire of a great power and of a great joy.
The careless tone with which she spoke of her own self and the condescending way in which she treated other people, convinced me firmly that this human being knew something which was beyond common knowledge. That she had her own key to all the riddles of life, and that this was the reason why she was always gay, always sure of herself. Perhaps I loved her most of all for all that I could not understand in her; anyway, I loved her with all the power and passion of youth. It was a torture to me to have to restrain this passion — for it consumed me physically and drained all my strength. It would have been easier for me to bear had I been of a simpler and more brutal turn of mind, but I believed that one's relations with a woman are not limited to the act of physical union, with which I was acquainted in its
poorest and crudest shape; this act filled me with repulsion, in spite of my being a strong and rather sensual lad with an excitable imagination.
I cannot realise how this romantic dream of mine had formed itself and how it lived in my imagination, but I was perfectly convinced that beyond what was known to me, there was something that I was ignorant of, and in it lay the great mysterious meaning of the communion between a man and a woman. I believed that something great, something full of joy and even full of terror was buried in the first embrace and that a man was transformed by living through that joy. I do not think that I drew these fanciful ideas from the novels I had read; they grew and developed themselves out of a spirit of contradiction to reality, for:
"I have come into the world not to acquiesce."
And, besides, I had a dim and strange recollection: as if somewhere beyond the limits of reality, sometime in my early childhood, I had experienced a strong explosion of the soul, a sweet tremor born of the perception, more so of the presentiment of harmony, and lived then through a joy more brilliant than is the sun in the morning, when it rises. It might have been still in the days wvhen I lay under my mother's breast, and this happy explosion of her nervous energy was transmitted to me by a warm shock which created my soul and was the first to light it for life; perhaps it was this supreme moment of happiness, experienced by my mother, which left its mark on my whole life by rousing in me a tremulous expectation of something
uncommonly beautiful coming to one through the woman.
When one does not know — one imagines. And the most perfect knowledge obtained by man is the knowledge of loving a woman, of worshipping her beauty; all the beauty there is in the world is born from a man's love for a woman.
One day, as I was out bathing, I dived from the stern of the barge into the water, struck my breast against the wall-tie and, catching my foot in the rope, hung down headfirst in the water and choked. A drayman pulled me out; they shook me back to life, tearing the skin off my body, and as a result I got a hemorrhage of the throat and had to get into bed and swallow ice.
My lady came to me, sat by my bed-side, and, asking how the whole thing happened, stroked my head with a dear, gentle hand, while her eyes drew dark and looked troubled.
I asked whether she had noticed that I loved her?
"Yes," she said, smiling cautiously, "I have noticed it — and it is all very wrong, although I, too, have learnt to love you." Of course, having heard these words, the whole earth trembled and the trees in the garden turned round in a gay dance. I was struck dumb with rapture, so unexpected was my joy, and buried my head in her knees. Had I not also pressed her hard against me, I would have probably flown out of the window like a soap-bubble.
"Don't move, it is bad for you," she said severely, trying to put my head back to the pillow. "And don't fidget, or else I will go. You are altogether a very
mad person; I did not think that such people existed. We will talk over our feelings and the whole situation as soon as you are up and well."
A few days after this I was sitting in the field on the edge of a ravine; underneath, in the bushes, rustled the wind. A grey sky threatened us with rain. Simple, business-like words a woman spoke to me of the difference in our years, told me that I ought to go on with my studies and that it was premature to burden myself with a wife and a child. It all was depressingly true and was said in the tone of a mother, which fact excited still more my love and respect for the dear woman. I felt unutterably sad and happy as I listened to her tender words; it was the first time that anyone had spoken to me like that.
I sat staring into the mouth of the ravine, where the bushes, shaken by the wind, streamed along like a green river, and vowed that I should repay her tender kindness with all the strength of my soul. "Before deciding anything, we must think it over carefully." I heard her soft voice. She was striking her knees with the branch of a nut-tree and looking towards the town which lay hidden among the green hills of the gardens.
"Of course, I must talk the matter over with Boleslav. He feels there is something wrong and behaves very nervously. And I hate dramatic situations."
Everything was very sad and lovely, but something funny and vulgar was bound to take place. My trousers were too large for me in the waist and I pinned them up with a long brass pin, about three inches long.
The sharp edge of the pin was continuously tearing gently at the skin — and, at an awkward moment, the
whole pin struck into my rib. I managed to pull it out, unnoticed, and felt, to my horror, that blood was streaming out of the deep scratch and staining the trousers. I wore no underclothes and the cook's jacket reached only to the waist.
How was I to get up and walk with my wet trousers clinging to my body?
Realizing the comical side of the incident and deeply indignant with the offensive shape it had taken, I began to talk with great excitement in the unnatural way of an actor who has forgotten his part.
She listened to me for a few moments, attentively at first, then with evident astonishment, and finally said:
"What pompous words! You have suddenly ceased to be yourself!"
This helped to stagger me altogether and I shut up, strangled with emotion.
"It is time to go; it will rain very soon."
"I will remain here."
"Why?"
What answer could I give her?
"You are angry with me?" she asked, tenderly looking at my face.
"Oh, no, only with myself."
"There is no need for you to be angry with yourself, either," she advised, getting up to go. And I could not get up, sitting helplessly in a warm pool. It seemed to me that my blood streaming out of my side, murmured like a brook; in a moment she will hear that noise and ask:
"What is that?"
"Go away," I prayed mentally. She granted me
kindly a few more tender words and departed, following the ravine along its edge and swaying gracefully on her pretty legs as she went.
I watched her supple form grow smaller and smaller as the distance between us became greater, then I lay on the ground, overcome by the shock of the consciousness that my first love would be an unhappy one.
Of course, that also was the case: her husband shed a shower of tears, sentimental nonsense and pitiful words, and she had not the courage to swim over to my side across those sticky waters.
"He is so helpless, you are so strong," she told me with tears in her eyes. "He said to me: 'If you leave me, I will perish like a flower without sun.' "
I could not help laughing, as I rememebered the short little legs, the feminine hips and the round belly of the flower. Flies lived in his beard, there was always food for them there.
She added, smiling:
"Yes, I know it sounds funny; but all the same, he is very miserable."
-"I am, too."
"Oh, you are young, you are strong...
Then, for the first time, I think, I began to hate weak natures. In the future and in more earnest cases I often had occasion to observe how tragically helpless are the strong when surrounded by the weak, what a lot of valuable energy of heart and brains is wasted in order to support the useless existence of those who are doomed to perdition.
Very soon after that, in a state which was bordering on madness, I left the town, and for two years roamed about the roads of Russia like a will-o'-the-wisp. I
made the tour of the Pokoljie, the Don, the Ukraine and Crimea and the Caucasus, went through the most varied experiences and impressions, got hardened and still more bitter, but kept the image of the woman I loved untarnished in my soul, although I met some who were both cleverer and better.
After more than two years had gone by and while I was in Tiflis in the autumn, some one announced to me that she had come back from Paris and had rejoiced at the news that I lived in the same town. I, a strong youth of twenty-three, fell down in a swoon for the first time in my life. I could not bring myself to go to her, but very soon she asked me, through some friends of hers, to come to see her.
She seemed to me still lovelier and dearer, always the same girlish figure, the same tender flush on her cheeks and caressing radiance of the corn-flower eyes. Her husband had remained in France, but her daughter, swift and graceful as a little goat, was with her.
As I went to her, a storm rose over the town, a storm with thunder and lightning, the rain roared and a powerful stream flew in a rapid current along the street from the hill of St. David, digging out the stones of the pavement. The howling of the wind, the angry splash of the water, the rumbling of destruction shattered the house, the window-panes rattled, a blue light poured into the room and everything around seemed to be precipitated into a wet and fathomless abyss.
The frightened child buried herself in her pillows, while we stood at the window, blinded by the explosions of the sky and, for an unknown reason, spoke in a whisper.
"I have never seen a storm like this before," rattled at my side the words of the woman I loved.
And all of a sudden she asked:
"Well, are you cured of your love for me?"
"No."'
She seemed surprised and went on, still in a whisper:
'How changed you are! You have become quite another man."
She slowly sank into a chair next to the window and, blinded by a terrible flash of lightning, started and pressed her hands over her eyes and whispered again:
"People speak a lot about you here. Why did you come? Tell me what you have been doing all this time."
My God, how small she was and how perfect!
I sat and talked to her until midnight, telling her everything, as if in confession. The austere manifestations of nature always act as a stimulant on me, filling me with boisterous gaiety. I think I spoke well — her attention and the concentrated glance of her wide-open eyes proved it tome. Sometimes she would whisper:
"This is terrible."
As I went away, I noticed that she said good-bye to me without the protecting smile of a grown-up person, which always hurt me a little in the past. I followed the wet streets, watching how the sharp circle of the moon cut through the torn clouds, and my head reeled from happiness. On the next day, I sent her something that resembled verses — she used to recite them
often afterwards, and I can recall them still in my memory.
My lady!
For a caress, for a tender glance
A skilful conjurer gives
Himself up to captivity,
He is adept in the art
Of creating small joys
Out of trifles, out of nothing. Take the gay captive! — Perhaps out of small joys He might create a great happiness, Has the world after all not been created Out of the mere dust grains of matter! — Oh, yes! The world is not a cheerful creation, Its joys are niggardly and poor, But still it has some funny things in it — For instance: Your humble servant — And it also has things of beauty: Meaning — you! — You!
But — silence! What are the blunt nails of words When compared to your heart, The most beautiful of all the flowers Of the earth, who has so few of them?
This, of course, can hardly be called poetry, but it was composed in gay sincerity.
Here I am again, sitting opposite a human being that seems to me to be the best one in the world, and, therefore, the one I most need. She has a blue dress on; it wraps her like a soft, scented cloud, without hiding the fine lines of her body. She plays with the strings of her belt and speaks to me in the most wonderful, uncommon words; I watch every movement of
her small fingers with rosy nails, and feel myself like a violin which is being tuned by a clever musician. I want to die, I want somehow to inhale this woman into my soul, that she should remain there forever. My body sings in a languorous tension, painfully acute, and it seems to me that my heart will explode in a moment. I read my first story to her; it had just been published, but I cannot remember what she thought of it; I think she was surprised:
"So you have started writing prose?"
It seems to me that I can hear her coming from afar as in a dream:
"I have thought a lot about you in these years. Is it possible that it is through me that you have had to experience all these hardships?"
I tell her something about there being nothing hard or terrible in the world where she lives.
"What a dear youare.. ."
I want madly to take her into my arms, but they are so ridiculously long and heavy; I do not dare to touch her, I am so afraid of hurting her, and so I stand, shaking from the impetuous beating of my heart and murmur:
"Come and live with me. Please, do come and live with me!" .
She laughs — softly and shyly. Her eyes shine dazzlingly — she goes to the other end of the room and from there: "Let us do like this: you will go to Nijni — and I will remain here and think it all over and write to you," she says.
I bow to her respectfully, like the hero of a novel I read some time ago and turn away, walking on clouds.
In the winter she came to me in Nijni, together with her daughter.
"When a poor man marries, even the night is too short," says a wise proverb, half-sadly, half-mockingly. I verified through personal experience the deep truth of it.
We rented, for two roubles a month, a whole palace, an old bath-house in the garden of a priest. I lived in the forefront, while my wife established herself in the one big room which served at the same time as a drawing-room. The palace was hardly adjusted for married life; it froze in all the corners and grooves. When I worked at night I wrapped myself up in all the clothes I possessed, covered myself with a carpet and in spite of this acquired a very strong rheumatism. This was hardly credible considering my health and endurance, of which at that time I felt very proud.
The room itself was a trifle warmer, but when I lighted the stove, all our abode was filled with a smell of putridness, soap and steaming bath-rooms. The girl, who looked like a little graceful china doll with lovely eyes, became nervous and suffered from headaches. And in the spring the bath-house was invaded by spiders and ear-wigs in great quantities; both mother and daughter were convulsed with fear of them and I spent hours trying to kill them with an india-rubber shoe. The small windows were thickly overgrown with bushes of elder and wild raspberries, the room was always gloomy and the capricious and alcoholic priest would not let me either root out or clip the bushes.
Of course, we might have found a more comfortable
262 MY UNIVERSITY. DAYS
domicile, but we owed money to the priest and he liked me and refused to let us go.
"You will get used to it," he would say. "And if not, then pay your debts and you may go where you like, even to the English."
He did not like English people, affirming:
"They are a lazy nation; the only thing they ever invented is playing patience and they do not know how to fight."
He was a huge fellow, with a round red face and a broad red beard. He drank so heavily that he could not officiate in church any more, and was miserably, tearfully in love with a small, sharp-nosed and dark little seamstress, who resembled a jack-daw.
He used to tell me of her treacheries, and shaking off the tears from his beard with the palm of his hand, he would say:
"IT can well guess that she is a worthless woman, but she reminds me of Saint Thymiama, and for that — I love her."
I looked carefully through the saints' calendar, but did not succeed in finding a saint of that name.
He was highly indignant with me for being an unbeliever and shattered my soul with the following arguments in favour of faith: "My son, you must look at the matter from a practical point of view: there are not many unbelievers, while believers can be counted in millions! And why is that? Because as the fish liveth not without water, so does the soul not live outside the church. Is that not convincing enough? Therefore — let us drink to it!"
"I do not drink, I have rheumatism."
He would poke his fork into a herring, lift it threateningly up in the air, and say:
"This, too, comes: from lack of faith — "
I spent sleepless nights, feeling miserably and cruelly ashamed of this bath-house before my wife; of the impossibility which often arose to buy meat for dinner or a plaything for the little girl; of all this cursed, ridiculous poverty. Poverty is a vice, which personally did nor trouble or torment me, but for the little refined woman and particularly for her daughter such an existence was debasing — it was hell.
In the night, sitting in my corner at the table, copying out petitions, appeals and cassations, writing stories, I used to grind my teeth together and curse myself, humanity, fate and love.
The lady behaved as generously as a mother who does not want her son to notice her troubles. Not one complaint over this mean existence ever broke loose from her lips; the harder the circumstances of our life became, the braver rang her voice, the brighter her laugh. From morning till night she drew portraits of priests, of their deceased wives, sketched district maps — the Zemstvo was granted a gold medal for these maps at some exhibition. And when the orders for portraits ran out, she trimmed Paris hats for the ladies and girls of our street out of bits of stuff, straw and wire. I knew nothing of ladies' hats, but I suppose there was something humorous and comical hidden in them; for the milliner herself, as she tried the head-dress which she had. just made before the glass, used to choke with convulsive laughter. But I noticed that the hats had a strange influence on their buyers — having arrayed their heads with speckled hen-nests, they
walked about the streets with proudly protruding bosoms.
I worked in a lawyer's office and wrote stories for the local paper at two kopecks the line. In the evening at the tea-table, if there were no guests my wife would give me vivid descriptions of how the Emperor Alexander II visited the Girls' School in Bielostok and distributed sweets among the "noble maidens."
My wife spoke to me with enthusiasm of Paris; I knew it already from different books, especially from the fine work of Maxime du Camp; she, on her side, knew the Paris of Montmartre and the hurly-burly life of the Quartier Latin. Those stories excited me far more than wine and I composed hymns to the woman, feeling that it is through love of her that the beauty of life is born. Most of all I liked when she told me of her own love-stories; she spoke of them very charmingly, with great sincerity, which, at times, rather baffled me. With great humour, in a few light words, like the trace of a finely-sharpened pencil, she would draw the comic figure of General Rhebinder, her suitor, who, having once upon a time shot an aurochs before the Tsar had had time to do so, cried after the wounded animal:
"I beg your pardon, Your Imperial Highness."
She spoke of the Russian emigrants and I always felt in her words a hidden smile of condescension. At times her sincerity approached a certain ingenuous
1From which some of them miraculously got into a family way and often some pretty girl would disappear while going hunting with the Tsar in the Bielorieg forest, and afterwards one would
hear of her married in Petersburg. Those visits used to give food to the most marvellous legends. \
MY UNIVERSITY DAYS 205,
cynicism; she would pass her sharp and pink tongue like that of a cat over her lips with relish and her eyes would sparkle in an uncommon way. It seemed to me sometimes that a light of fastidiousness shone in them, but oftener than otherwise I used to see her as a little girl, playing passionately with her dolls.
One day she told me:
"When a Russian is in love, he is always rather talkative and heavy — sometimes he is even repulsive, owing to his eloquence. It is only the French who know how to love beautifully — love for them is very nearly a religion."
After this I involuntarily became more careful and restrained in regard to her.
About the women of France she used to say:
"You do not always find passionate tenderness in them, but they substitute it splendidly with cheerful, elaborated sensuality. Love is their art." She used to speak of all this very seriously, in sermonising tones. It was not exactly the knowledge I sought for, but still it was some kind of knowledge, and I listened to it greedily. "Between Russian and French women there is, I think, the same difference as between fruit and sweets made of fruit," she told me on one moonlight night, as we sat in the summer house in the garden. She herself was a sweet.
She was greatly surprised when in the first days of our married life, I, in an inspiration, exposed to her my romantic ideas on the relations between man and woman.
"Are you serious? Do you really think like that?" she asked, lying in my arms, under the blue light of the moon.
Her pink body seemed transparent and an intoxicating, bitter smell of almonds emanated from it. Her long fingers played pensively with my stock of hair, she watched my face with wide-opened, anxious eyes and smiled with a certain diffidence. "Dear God," she exclaimed, jumping on to the floor, and began to walk up and down in the room, passing from light to shadow, the satin of her skin flashing in the rays of the moon, her bare feet noiselessly touching the floor. And coming up to me again and stroking my cheeks with the palms of her hands, she said, with the intonation of a mother: "You ought to have begun life with a girl, yes, yes! And not with me... ."
And when I took her in my arms, she began to cry softly, saying:
"You know how I love you, don't you? I have never known more joy than I have with you — that is the truth, believe me. Never have I loved so tenderly and gently, with such a light heart. I am wonderfully happy with you; but, all the same, I tell you: we have made a mistake. I am not what you need. It is I who have made the mistake..."
I could not understand her, her words frightened me, and I hastily changed the trail of her thought in the joy of caresses. However, I retained those terrible words in my memory and, a few days later, after having shed tears of rapture, she repeated again, longingly:
"Oh, if only I had been a young girl..."
I remember a storm raged in the garden on that night, branches of elder struck against the window panes, the wind howled like a wolf in the chimney;
it was gloomy and cold in our room and the unglued wall-paper rustled in the corners.
When we had earned a few roubles, we invited friends to come and see us, and arranged luxurious suppers for them, with meat, vodka and beer and sweet cakes, and enjoyed ourselves tremendously. My Paisian lady, who had a splendid appetite, liked Russian food: the "sitchong," a cow's stomach stuffed with buckwheat porridge and the grease of a goose; pies with codliver oil and sheatfish, potato soup with mutton.
She founded the order of "'greedy little bellies." It was joined by about a dozen people, who enjoyed eating and drinking and who could indefatigably talk of the mysteries of the kitchen with esthetic knowledge and great eloquence. I was interested in mysteries of another quality, ate very little and the process of saturation did not attract me and remained outside my esthetical requirements. '"They are futile people," I used to say of the "greedy little bellies." 'As everyone is, if he is properly shaken," she would answer. 'Heine has said, 'we are all naked under our clothes'!"'
She knew quantities of sceptical quotations, but I did not think she always made use of them at the right moment.
She enjoyed "shaking" her neighbours of the opposite sex and did it with extreme ease. Unrelentingly cheerful, witty, supple as a snake, she could rapidly arouse a boisterous animation and excite emotions of not very superior nature. It was sufficient for a man to remain talking to her for a few minutes, and his
ears would redden, then become purple, his eyes would - moisten with languor and watch her as a goat watches cabbage.
"A majestic woman!" announced a certain substitute of the lawyer, an unsuccessful nobleman who had the moles of Dmitri the Impostor and a belly as big as a cupola.
A fair-haired Jaroslav schoolboy composed poetry in her honour — always in dactylic verse. I thought the poems dreadful but she cried with laughter over them.
"Why do you provoke them?" I would ask.
"It is Just as amusing as fishing trout. It is called — flirting. No woman who respects herself can do without it."
And sometimes she would ask, smiling and looking into my eyes: "Are you jealous?"
No, I was not jealous, but all this rather interfered with my life. I did not like vulgar and mean people. I was a cheerful person and knew that laughing is the best capacity of man. I thought clowns and professional comic actors very incapable people, and was certain that I could make people laugh much better than they did. And I often succeeded in making our friends laugh till they rocked with tears and pain.
"Oh, dear!" she would say then, "what a wonderful comic actor you might have made! You simply must go on the stage!"
She acted herself with success in private theatricals, and even professional theatre-managers invited her to go on the stage.
"{ love the stage, but I am afraid of what is behind
the scenes," she said. She was truthful in all her thoughts, desires and words.
"You philosophise much too much," she would preach to me. "Life, after all, is simple and brutal; one ought not to complicate it by seeking for some deep meaning in it, one ought only to learn how to reduce its brutality. You will never attain more than that."
I felt that in her philosophy there was a good deal of gynecology and that "the course of obstetrics" served her as a Bible. She told me herself how stunned she was after reading the first scientific book, on leaving school.
"Being a naive child, I felt as if a brick had been hurled on to my head, as if I had fallen from the clouds into mud; I cried pitifully because I could believe no longer, but very soon I felt harsh but firm ground under my feet. What I regretted the most was God. I felt myself so perfectly in touch with Him, and there He was — suddenly dispersed as in the smoke of a cigarette, together with Him disappearing the dream of a heavenly beatitude of Love. And in school we all thought such a lot and so well about love!"
I could not get over her girlishly Parisian nihilism. It happened in the night that I would get up from my work and go and watch her sleeping; in bed she seemed still smaller, prettier, more beautiful. I watched her and reflected with great bitterness on her distorted soul and confused existence. And my pity for her augmented my love.
Our literary tastes clashed implacably: I read rapturously Balzac, Flaubert, while she preferred Paul Feval, Octave Feuillet, Paul de Kock and especially
"Ta Fille Girot, Ma Femme." She considered this book to be the wittiest one she knew, although I thought it dull as a code of laws. But in spite of this, our relations were of a very fine nature — we never lost interest in each other and passion did not die out. However, on the third year of our union, I began to notice a sinister creaking in my soul which became more resounding and noticeable as time went on. I studied the whole time greedily and read a lot, uninterruptedly, and began to give myself up to literary work seriously; our guests palled more and more on me; they were all such poor-minded people, but they became more numerous, for both my wife and I earned more money and the suppers and dinners augmented consequently in number.
Life seemed to her a kind of panopticon, and as men did not carry the preserving inscription "Pray not to touch with your hands" — it happened sometimes that she approached them too incautiously and they estimated her curiosity much too much to their own advantage. Many misunderstandings arose owing to this and I always had to solve them. I did this at times rather unrestrainedly and probably not very cleverly; the man whose ears I boxed one day, complained: "Well, I will admit I was wrong! But to box my ears as if I was a mere boy, that is too much of a good thing! I am nearly twice as old as that ruffian and he pulls my ears for me! If he had only struck me — that would have been a trifle more decents
Apparently I did not know how to punish people in accordance with their self-respect.
My wife treated the stories I had written with a
certain indifference, but this to a certain point did not affect me: for I could not believe myself to be a serious writer and looked upon my work in the paper as a means of existence, although I often experienced already the deep waves of a strange emotion. But, one morning, as I read to her "The Old Woman Isergil"' which I had written in one stroke in that night, she fell asleep. At first this did not offend me; I stopped reading and sat watching her, buried in my thoughts.
She was leaning with her small dear head on the back of the old sofa, her mouth was half-opened, and she breathed peacefully and softly, like a child. Through the elder branches the morning sun peeped into the room, its golden stains lay like flowers of air on her breast and on her knees.
I got up quickly and went into the garden, feeling painfully the deep sting of the offence and oppressed with doubts of my own capacities.
In all the days I had lived I had seen women doing the work of slavery, living in dirt and depravity, in misery or in shallow and satisfied vulgar satiety. Only one beautiful memory had I retained from my childhood, '"The Queen Margot," but a whole chain of other impressions separated me from this. I thought that the history of Isergil would be appreciated by women, would excite in them the desire of beauty and freedom. And now — the woman who was nearest of all to me had remained unmoved by my story — and had fallen asleep over it.
Why was that? Did the bell which life had cast in my breast not resound loudly enough?
I had taken this woman into my heart, in the place of amother. I had waited and believed that she would
272 +. MY UNIVERSITY DAYS
rear me with intoxicating honey, which would rouse my creative power; I expected that her influence would soften the brutality which had been inoculated in me by life.
This was thirty years ago and I recall it all now with a smile in my heart. But at that time, the indisputable right of the human being to sleep whenever it likes had caused me to suffer intensely.
I believed that if you speak gaily of things that are sad the sadness is dispelled.
And I suspected that there lived in the world a cunning Someone, who enjoyed watching people suffer: that there existed a certain evil spirit, who was the author of human dramas and an adept in ruining life. I considered the unseen dramatist as my personal enemy and tried not to get caught in his traps.
I remember reading with great indignation in Oldenburg's book, "Buddha — His Life, Learning and Society," that "every existence means — suffering." I had not experienced many of the joys of life, but the bitter cruelties of it I considered incidental, not usual. Having read carefully through the solid work of the archbishop Khrisanf, "The Religion of the East," I revolted still more at the idea that the world was based on fear, gloominess and torture and I refused to accept this to be true. And having lived intensely through a state of religious enthusiasm, I felt affronted by the fruitlessness of it. The distaste for suffering excited in me a hatred for all dramas and I learnt to turn them with great skill into light comedies.
Of course — it is not necessary to say all this in order to explain that what is usually called a "family drama," ripened gradually between the lady in question and myself, although we both tried hard to prevent it from developing. I only philosophised a little over this, in the desire to mention the curious curves of the road I followed, in my attempts to find my own self.
My wife, owing to her cheery nature, was also incapable of playing dramatic parts at home, the parts which are so attractive to super-"'psychological" Russians of both sexes. Nevertheless, the gloomy dactylic verses of the white-lashed schoolboy acted on her like an autumn rain. He used to write them out carefully in a round and beautiful handwriting on little slips of paper, which he secretly stuck into anything he could get hold of — in books, hats and even in the sugar-basin. I used to find those carefully folded sheets of paper and give them to her, saying:
"Accept this new attempt to subdue your heart!"
At first these Cupid's paper arrows did not affect her; she read me aloud the verses which had no end and we laughed heartily together over the lines:
~ "TJ am with you by day and by night; All that you do finds its way to my heart, The touch of your hand, the bend of your head. Your voice is like that of a tender turtle-dove, While I, in my dreams, like a hawk turn round above you."
But one day, having read one of these boyish reports, she said, pensively: "All the same, I am sorry for him!' I remember feeling sorry for someone else,
but she, from that moment, ceased to read the poetry aloud.
The poet, a steady youth, about four years older than I, was a silent person with a tendency for drink and a marvellous capacity for sitting in one place. Coming at two o'clock for dinner, on Sundays, he would sit until two o'clock at night in motionless silence. He was a clerk at a lawyer's as I was, and used to amaze his good-natured chief by his absentmindedness; he worked carelessly and was often wont to say in a hoarse bass voice:
"The whole thing is rubbish!"
"And what is not rubbish?"
"How shall I say?" he would ask thoughtfully, lifting his dull grey eyes to the ceiling and never added anything else. He was uncommonly, unnaturally dull; this was what aggravated me the most. He used to get slowly drunk, and then snuffled mockingly with his nose. Apart from that, I noticed nothing particular about him, for there is a law on the strength of which the man who makes love to one's wife is always a bad man.
Some rich relation from the Ukraine used to send him fifty roubles a month, which was a great sum at that time. He brought sweets to my wife every Sunday and on her name-day presented her with an alarmclock, representing a bronze trunk of a tree on which an owl tormented an adder. This dreadful instrument always woke me up one hour and seven minutes before the time.
My wife, ceasing to flirt with the schoolboy, began treating him with the tenderness of a woman who feels herself guilty of having disturbed the peace of
a man's soul. I asked her what she thought would be the end of this sad story?
"I do not know,"' she answered; "I have no definite feeling for him, but I want to shake him. Something has gone to sleep in his heart and I think that I could succeed in waking that something up."
I knew she was speaking the truth: she wanted to wake up everything and everyone, and always with great success: as soon as she woke a man up — the beast would wake in him, too. I reminded her of Circe, but this did not restrain her desire to ''shake"' men and I could see how thick grew the flock of sheep, bulls and pigs around me.
My friends would generously come and tell me shocking and dismal legends concerning my married life, but I was straightforward and coarse and warned the authors of these stories: "Take care, or I will give you a beating."
Some of them would try to justify themselves by lying, and very few were offended by my treatment of them. And my wife used to say:
"Believe me, you will obtain nothing by brutality; people will only gossip more. As to yourself, you are not jealous, are you?"
- Yes, I was too young and too confident to be jealous. But these are feelings, thoughts and conjectures, of which one speaks only with the woman one loves and with no one else. There is such an hour in the communion with a woman, when one becomes a stranger to oneself and opens one's heart to her, as a believer does before his God.