II
They turned out on to the road. Over a high white wall, as massive as that of a fortress, rose a villa, ingeniously and stridently built after the pattern of a stylish Russian gynaeceum, with seahorses and dragons on the roof, the shutters ornamented with variegated flowers and herbs, and carved doorways, with twisted little bottle-shaped colonnades on the balconies. This pretentious, gingerbread-like construction produced a ponderous and incoherent impression in the full blaze of the Crimean sky, against the background of the aerial grey-bluish mountains, amid the dark, pensive, elegant cypresses and powerful plane-trees, covered from top to bottom with plush-like moss, in proximity to the beautiful joyous sea. But the owner of the villa, Pavel Arkadievitch Zavalishine—an ex-cornet of cavalry, afterwards an estate-agent, later on an attorney in a big port town in the south, and now a well-known dealer in naphtha, a shipowner, and the president of the stock exchange committee—was conscious of no incongruity.
“I am a Russian, and I have the right to despise all those renaissances, rococos, and gothics,” he would shout sometimes, striking his chest. “We’re not bound by what they think abroad. We’ve had enough of that in the past. We’ve bowed down to them enough. We have our own strong, original, creative power, and for a Russian gentleman like me there is only one thing to do, and that is to spit on all this foreignness.”
The table was already laid on the enormous lower balcony. They were waiting for Zavalishine, who had just arrived from town and was changing his clothes in his bedroom. Anna Georgievna was leaning languidly back in a rocking-chair, overcome with the heat. She wore a light peignoir of Moldavian stuff, gold-embroidered with large sleeves slit up underneath almost to the shoulders. She was still very handsome, with a heavy, assured, superb beauty—the beauty of a plump, well-preserved brunette of the southern type.
“Good morning, Doctor,” she said in a deep voice, and with a slight burr. “Why didn’t you guess that we wanted you yesterday? I had such a migraine.”
Without raising herself from the armchair, she lazily stretched out her hand to Ivan Nikolaevitch, while her drooping sleeve revealed her round, full shoulder with its white vaccination mark, the small blue veins in the inner curve of the elbow, and a dark, pretty little mole slightly higher up the arm. Anna Georgievna (she insisted for some reason or other on being called “Nina” instead of Anna) knew the value of her hands and liked to show them.
The doctor leaned over the outstretched hand so respectfully that she had to pull it away by force.
“You see what a gallant doctor we have,” she said as she glanced at Voskresenski with laughing, caressing eyes. “You never kiss ladies’ hands. What a bear you are! Come here, and I’ll make your tie for you. You dress goodness knows how.”
The student came up awkwardly and, as he leaned over her, he caught through the strong aroma of her perfume the smell of her hair as the light agile fingers ran round his neck.
Voskresenski was chaste in the straightforward, healthy meaning of the word. Naturally, from the time that he entered his Lycée, he could not help learning everything about the most intimate relations of the sexes, but he never dreamed of doing what his comrades boasted of openly. The tranquil, healthy blood of an old Church family showed itself in him. For all that, he had no sanctimonious, hypocritical anathemas for the “shameless men.” He would listen indifferently to what was said on the subject and he would make no protest against those little anecdotes without which no conversation is possible in Russian intellectual society.
He knew well what Anna Georgievna’s constant playfulness really meant. When saying “good morning” or “goodbye,” she would keep his hand lingeringly in her soft, feminine and, at the same time, strong, fingers. Under the mask of playfulness, she liked to ruffle his hair, sometimes called him patronisingly by the diminutive of his name, and would say in front of him risky things with a double meaning. If by any chance they were looking over an album together or happened to be leaning side by side over the balcony watching a steamer out at sea, she would always press against him with her large bust and he would feel her hot breath on his neck, while the curls of her hard hair tickled his cheek.
And she roused in the student a medley of strange, mixed feelings—fear, shame, passionate desire and disgust. When he thought about her she seemed to him just as exaggerated and unnatural as southern Nature. Her eyes seemed much too expressive and liquid, her hair much too dark, her lips unnaturally bright. The lazy, backward, unprincipled, sensual southern woman could be detected in every one of her movements, in every smile. If she came too close to him he could even detect, through her clothes, the warmth oozing up from her large, over-developed body.
Two schoolboys, Voskresenski’s pupils, and three little girls were seated at the table dangling their feet. Voskresenski glanced at them sideways as he stooped, and suddenly he felt ashamed of himself, ashamed for them and particularly for their mother’s warm bare hands which were moving so close to his lips. Unexpectedly he drew himself up and said with a red face and a hoarse voice:
“Excuse me, I’ll tie it myself.”
Zavalishine was now on the balcony dressed in a fantastic national costume, a silk kaftan with a blue silk Russian shirt and high patent leather boots. This costume, which he always wore at home, made him resemble one of those provincial contractors who are so willing to exploit to the merchant-class their large Russian nature and their clothes in the Russian style. The likeness was completed by a heavy gold chain across his stomach which tinkled with dozens of trinkets.
Zavalishine came towards the group with a quick, heavy step, carrying his head high and smoothing picturesquely each side of his fluffy beard, which was turning slightly grey. As he came, the children jumped up from the table. Anna Georgievna rose slowly from her rocking-chair.
“Good morning, Ivan Nikolaevitch. Good morning, Cicero,” said Zavalishine, as he stretched out his hand carelessly to the doctor and the student. “I have kept you waiting, perhaps? Boris, grace.”
Boris, with a frightened expression, jabbered out: “Our Father, which art in Heaven.”
“Now, gentlemen,” said Zavalishine, waving towards the table. “Doctor, some vodka?”
The hors d’oeuvre were laid on a small side table. The doctor approached it, walking like a buffoon, stooping a little, bowing, clicking his heels together and rubbing his hands.
“A man was once offered some vodka,” he began, as usual trying to be funny, “and he answered ‘No, thank you; firstly, I don’t drink, secondly, it’s too early, and thirdly, I’ve had a drink already.’ ”
“Twentieth edition,” observed Zavalishine. “Have some caviar.”
He pushed over to the doctor a large wooden bucket in which a silver fish-basin of caviar was standing in ice.
“How can you drink vodka in such heat?” Anna Georgievna exclaimed, with a grimace.
Her husband looked at her solemnly, as he held to his lips a silver embossed goblet.
“There’s no harm in vodka for a Russian man,” he replied imposingly.
And the doctor, having finished his glass, quacked loudly and added in the bass voice of a deacon:
“This was in time, anyhow. Well, Pavel Arkadievitch? Does Father Meleti order a third one?”
A man in a dress suit was serving at table. Formerly he used to wear something like a coachman’s sleeveless coat, but one fine day Anna Georgievna discovered that it was improper for masters and servants to deck themselves out almost in the same costumes, and she insisted on a European dress for the footmen. On the other hand, all the dining-room furniture and ornaments displayed that restless, racking style which is called Russian decadence. Instead of a table, there was a long chest, closed on every side, and as one sat in front of it it was impossible to move one’s feet forward. One had to keep them cramped all the time, while one’s knees would be painfully knocking against the protuberances of the carved ornaments and one had to stretch to reach one’s plate. The heavy, low chairs, with high backs and widespread arms, were hard and uncomfortable, like wooden stage thrones. The wooden cans for kvass, the water-jugs and the wine ewers were of such monstrous dimensions and of such absurd shapes that one had to stand up to pour out from them. And all these things were carved, burnished, and adorned with multicoloured peacocks, fish, flowers, and the inevitable cock.
“One eats nowhere as one does in Russia,” Zavalishine began in a juicy voice, arranging his napkin in his collar with his white hairy hands. “Yes, Mr. Student, I know you don’t like to hear that, but unfortunately, that’s how it is. Take fish, to begin with. Where in the whole world will you find another Astrakan caviar? And the sterlets from Kama, the sturgeons, the salmon from the Dvina, the fish from Belozer? Be kind enough to tell me if you can find in France anything to match the Ladoga fish or the Gatchina trout. I’d just like you to find them! I beg you to do it with all my heart. Now take game: we have everything you can wish for and everything in abundance: wood-hens, heath-hens, duck, snipe, pheasants from the Caucasus, woodcocks. Then just think of our Tcherkass meat, Rostov sucking-pig, the Nijni cucumber, the Moscow milk-calf. In a word, we’ve got everything … Serguei, give me some more botvinia soup.”
Pavel Arkadievitch ate a great deal in an unpleasant and gluttonly way. He must have had hungry days in his youth, thought the student, looking at him sideways. Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, Zavalishine would put too large a morsel into his mouth and then there would be a long torturing pause, during which he would chew with objectionable haste while he looked at his interlocutor with his eyes starting out of his head, grunting, moving his eyebrows and impatiently shaking his head and even his whole body. During such pauses, Voskresenski would lower his eyes so as to conceal his antipathy.
“Wine, Doctor?” Zavalishine offered it with careless politeness. “Let me recommend this little white label. It’s Orianda ’93. Your glass, Demosthenes.”
“I don’t drink, Pavel Arkadievitch. You’ll excuse me.”
“This is as‑ton‑ishing. A young man who doesn’t drink and doesn’t smoke. It’s a bad sign.” Zavalishine suddenly raised his voice severely. “A bad sign. I’m always suspicious of a young fellow who neither drinks nor smokes. He’s either a miser or a gambler or a loose-liver. Pardon, I’m not referring to you, Mr. Empedocles. Another glass, Doctor? This is Orianda—really not half a bad sort of little wine. One asks oneself why one should get from the sausage-merchants different Moselle wines and other kinds of sourness, when they make such delicious wine right at home in our own Mother Russia. Eh, what do you think, Professor?” He addressed the student in his provoking way.
Voskresenski gave a forced smile.
“Everyone to his own taste.”
“ ‘De gustibus?’ I know. I’ve had a little learning, too, in my time. Besides, somewhere or other—it doesn’t matter where or how—the great Dostoevsky has expressed the same idea. Wine, of course, is nothing in itself, mere Kinderspiel, but the principle is important. The principle is important, I tell you,” he suddenly shouted. “If I am a true Russian, then everything round me must be Russian. And I want to spit on the Germans and the French. And on the Jews too. Isn’t it so, Doctor? Am I not speaking the truth?”
“Ye‑es; in fact—the principle—that is, of course, yes,” Iliashenko said vaguely in his bass voice and with a gesture of doubt.
“I’m proud of being a Russian,” Zavalishine went on with heat. “Oh, I see perfectly that my convictions seem merely funny to you, Mr. Student, and, so to speak, barbarous. But what about it? Take me as I am. I speak my thoughts and opinions straight out, because I’m a straight man, a real Russian, who is accustomed to speaking his mind. Yes, I say, straight out to everyone: we’ve had enough of standing on our hind legs before Europe. Let her be afraid of us, not we of her. Let them feel that the last decisive powerful word is for the great, glorious, healthy Russian people and not for those cockroaches’ remains! Glory be to God …” Zavalishine suddenly crossed himself expansively, looked up at the ceiling, and gave a sob. “Thank God that you can find now more and more of those people who are beginning to understand that the short-tailed German jacket is already cracking on the mighty Russian shoulders. These people are not ashamed of their language, of their faith, of their country, and confidently they stretch out their hands to the wise Government and say: ‘Lead us.’ ”
“Paul, you’re getting excited,” Anna Georgievna remarked lazily.
“I’m not getting in the least excited,” her husband snarled angrily. “I’m only expressing what every honest Russian subject ought to think and feel. Perhaps someone is not of my opinion? Well then, let him answer me. I am ready to listen with pleasure to a different opinion. There, for instance, it seems funny to Mr. Vozdvijenski …”
The student did not raise his downcast eyes, but became pale and his nostrils quivered and dilated.
“My name is Voskresenski,” he said in a low voice.
“I beg your pardon, that’s exactly what I meant to say: Voznesenski. I beg your pardon. Well, I just ask you this: instead of making wry faces, hadn’t you better break down my arguments, show me my error, prove that I’m not right? I say this one thing: we’re spitting into our own soup. They’re selling our holy, mighty, adored country to any sort of foreign riffraff. Who manage our naphtha? The Sheenies, the Armenians, the Americans. In whose hands are the coal, the mines, the steamers, the electricity? In the hands of Sheenies, Belgians, Germans. Who have got the sugar factories? The Sheenies, the Germans, the Poles. And above all, everywhere, the Sheeny, the Sheeny, the Sheeny. … Who are our doctors? Sheenies. Who are our chemists, bankers, barristers? To Hell with the whole lot of you! The whole of our Russian literature dances to the Sheenies’ tune and never gets out of it. Why are you making such terrible eyes at me, Anitchka? You don’t know what that means? I’ll explain later. Yes, there’s point in the joke that every Sheeny is a born Russian littérateur. Oh, my goodness, the Sheenies, the Israelites, the Zionists, the Innocents oppressed, the Holy Tribe. I’ll say just this.”—Zavalishine struck the edge of the table loudly and fiercely with his outstretched finger—“I’ll say just this: Here, wherever you turn, you’re confronted with the mug of some noble affronted nation. Liberty, Language, National Rights. And we go into ecstasies under their noses. Oh, poor cultured Finland! Oh, unhappy enslaved Poland! Ah, the great tormented Jewish race. … Beat us, my pigeons, despise us, trample us under your feet, sit on our backs and drive! B‑ut no—” Zavalishine roared in a threatening voice, growing suddenly scarlet and rolling his eyes. “No,” he repeated, striking himself on the chest with all his force. “This scandal is going to end. Up till now, the Russian people has been only scratching himself, half asleep; but tomorrow, with God’s blessing, he will awake. And then he will shake off from himself the mischievous Radical in‑tel‑lec‑tuals as a dog would a flea, and will squeeze so tightly in his mighty palm all these innocents oppressed, all these dirty little Sheenies, Ukrainians, and Poles, that the sap will spurt out from them on all sides. And to Europe he will merely say: ‘Stand up, you dog.’ ”
“Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” the doctor broke in with a voice like a gramophone.
The schoolboys, who had been frightened at first by the shouting, burst into a loud laugh at this, but Anna Georgievna said with a look of suffering:
“Paul, why do you go on like this in front of the children?”
Zavalishine drained a glass of wine at a gulp and poured out another hastily.
“Pardon, it slipped out. But I will say this, I was expressing my convictions just now, honestly and sincerely at least. Now let them—that is, I meant to say, let Mr. Student here, let him refute what I say, let him convince me. I’m ready for him. It would be very much more honest than to evade it by wry little smiles.”
Voskresenski shrugged his shoulders slowly.
“I’m not smiling at all.”
“Ah! You don’t even give yourself the trouble of answering? Of course. That is the be‑s‑t of all. You stand so high above any discussion or proofs?”
“No, not in the least above. But it’s like this—we’ll never understand each other. What’s the use of getting angry and spoiling one’s temper?”
“Quite so. I understand. You’re too high and mighty then?” Zavalishine was getting drunk and beginning to roar. “Ah, it’s a pity, a great pity, my precious youth. It would have been such a treat to enjoy the milk of your wisdom.”
At this instant Voskresenski raised his eyes towards Zavalishine for the first time. Suddenly he felt a wave of keen hatred for his round, light, protruding eyes, for his red nose, that seemed to be torn at the nostrils, for his white, bald, retreating forehead and his preposterous beard. And instinctively, as if against his will, he began to speak in a faint, stifled voice that was almost a stranger’s.
“You insist on dragging me into a discussion. But I assure you that it’s useless. Everything that you were good enough to express just now with such fire, I have heard and read hundreds of times. Hostility to everything European, a rancorous spite against kindred races, ecstasy before the might of the Russian fist, and so on, and soon … All this has been said, written, and preached on every doorstep. But what has the people here to do with it all, Pavel Arkadievitch?—that’s what I don’t understand. That’s what I cannot understand. The people—that is to say, not your valet or your porter or your workmen, but the people who composes the whole of Russia—the obscure muzhik, the troglodyte, the cave man, why have you buttoned him up in your national dreams? He is silent because he is thriving. You had better not touch him. Leave him in peace. It is not for you or for me to guess at his silence—”
“Allow me! My knowledge of the people is no worse than yours—”
“No,” the student interrupted impertinently. “Allow me now, please. You were good enough, a few minutes ago, to reproach me for laughing at your verbiage. Well, I will tell you now that there is nothing funny in it, just as there is nothing terrible. Your ideal, the a‑all-Rus‑sian f‑ist squeezing the sap out of all the little peoples, is dangerous to no one, but is merely repulsive, like every symbol of violence. You’re not a malady, not an ulcer, you are simply an inevitable, annoying rash, a kind of measles. But your comedy of the large Russian nature, all these symbols of yours—your Russian kaftan, your patriotic tears—yes, all this is really funny.”
“Ah, excellent. Go on, young man, in the same spirit,” Zavalishine said caustically with a grimace on his lips. “It’s a delicious system of polemics, isn’t it. Doctor?”
For his part Voskresenski felt in his heart that he was speaking loosely, clumsily, and confusedly, but he could not stop now. In his brain there was the sensation of a strange, cold void. His feet had become slack and heavy and his heart seemed to have fallen somewhere deep down and to be quivering there and breaking from too frequent strokes.
“What does the system matter? To the devil with it!” he exclaimed, and this exclamation flew out unexpectedly in such a full, strong sound that he suddenly experienced a fierce and joyous pleasure. “I have been too silent during these two months to pick and choose a system. Yes. One is ashamed and pitiful and amused in turn at your comedy, Pavel Arkadievitch. You know the strolling minstrels who sing in the recreation gardens in summer? You know the sort of thing—the hackneyed Russian song. It is something torturingly false, impudent, disgraceful. The same with you: ‘The Russian soup, the Russian kacha—our mother Russia.’ Have you ever had a look at the people’s soups? Have you ever had a real taste of it? One day with something to eat, and the next day with nothing at all. Have you tasted the peasants’ bread? Have you seen their children with swollen stomachs and legs like wheels? And in your house your cook gets sixty roubles a month, and the valet wears dress clothes, and the sterliadka is steamed. That’s how you are in everything. Russian patience. Russian iron endurance. But with what horrors of slavery, on what a bloodstained road was this patience bought! It is even ludicrous! Russian invincible health—give way to the shoulder there!—the Russian giant strength—have we got it in this huge, overworked, overstrained, famished, drunken man? And then, to cap everything, the frantic yell: ‘Down with European coats and dress clothes! Let us go back to our good, glorious, vast and picturesque Russian national clothes.’ And then, to the amusement of your servants, you masquerade in a Russian kaftan at seven roubles a yard with a moire lining. All your nationalism is silklined. My God! and when you start talking about the Russian songs, what rubbish! In it you hear the sea, and see the steppe, you catch the voice of the forest and some kind of boundless daring. But there is no truth in all this: you hear nothing, you feel nothing beyond the sick groaning or the drunken hiccup. And you do not see any kind of large steppe, because it has no existence, and there is only a sweating face distorted by torture, swollen veins, bloodshot eyes, an open, sanguinary mouth …”
“For you clergy it is easier to see from the belfry,” Zavalishine sneered scornfully.
But the student only waved him aside and went on:
“Then Russian architecture came into fashion, if you please. Carved cocks, some sort of wooden dressers, mugs, ewers, sunflowers, armchairs and benches on which it is impossible to sit, with idiotic covers. Good Lord! but don’t you feel how all this accentuates the frightful poverty of our national life, the narrowness and the lack of fantasy? A grey crepuscular creation, a Papuan architecture. A game, that’s what it is precisely. A vile game, if all this is done purposely to lead the fools and gapers by the nose; a miserable one if it is merely a fashionable fad, a sort of stupid disguise, as if the doctors in charge of a hospital were suddenly to put on hospital dressing-gowns and dance a cancan in them. That’s what it is, your Russian fashion with the moire lining.”
Something caught Voskresenski at the throat and he became silent. Now for the first time he realised that, in the course of his rambling speech, he had unconsciously risen to his feet and was banging his fists on the table.
“Perhaps you’d like to add something more, young man?” Zavalishine asked with forced politeness and in a voice of exaggerated softness. He was white, his lips were grimacing and twitching and the ends of his full beard shook visibly.
“That’s all,” the student answered in a dull tone. “There’s nothing else. …”
“Then kindly let me have the last word.” Zavalishine rose from his place and threw down his napkin.
“Convictions are convictions, and fidelity to them is a respectable virtue. But all the same, I have to answer for my children, to my country, and my Church. Yes, I am obliged to defend them from evil, from deteriorating influences. And so—I ask you to forgive me—but one of us, either I or you, will have to retire from their education.”
Voskresenski made a sign with his head without speaking. Pavel Arkadievitch wheeled round sharply and left the table with long strides. But he stopped at the door. He was stifling with rage. He felt that the student had shown a moral superiority in this absurd discussion, a superiority obtained, not by conviction of thought, not by arguments, but by a youthful, untrammelled and, though nonsensical, a beautiful passion. And he wanted, before leaving the room, to give the tutor the last insult, a heavier one, with more sting in it. …
“My man will bring you the money due to you upstairs,” he said through his nose in a jerky, self-satisfied way. “And also, as arranged, your journey money.”
And he went out, banging the door so noisily that the cut glass rang and vibrated on the table.
For a long time everyone was awkwardly silent on the balcony.
Voskresenski, with cold trembling fingers, was making bread pills as he bent low over the table. It seemed to him that even little six-year-old Vavotchka was looking at him with curiosity and contemptuous pity.
Shall I go after him and slap his face? Challenge him to a duel? How badly and miserably it has all turned out! Shall I give him back his money? Throw it in his face? Faugh! what a miserable business.
All these reflections flashed at random through his brain.
“Dear Sachenka,” Anna Georgievna spoke in a caressing voice as if to a child, “don’t attach any importance to this. It really isn’t worth it. In an hour he will admit that he was wrong, and he’ll apologise. To tell you the truth, you, too, said a good deal to him.”
He made no answer. He wanted, more than anything in the world, to get up at once and go somewhere far away, to hide in some dark, cool corner; but a complex, torturing indecision chained him to his place. The doctor began to speak about something or other too loudly and in an unnatural, detached tone. “That’s because he’s ashamed on my account,” Voskresenski thought to himself, and he listened, scarcely understanding the words:
“One of my acquaintances who knows Arabic very well used to compare Arabian sayings with our Russian ones. There are some most curious parallels. For instance, the Arabs say: ‘Honesty is a diamond, which makes a pauper the Sultan’s equal.’ And in Russian it comes out: ‘What about honesty if there’s nothing to eat?’ The same about hospitality. The Arabian proverb says …”
Voskresenski rose suddenly. Without looking at anyone, his eyes downcast, he went awkwardly round the table and rushed across the balcony to the flower garden, where there was a sweet and heavy scent of roses. Behind him, he could hear Anna Georgievna’s troubled voice:
“Sachenka, Alexander Petrovitch, where are you going? We’re having dessert at once …”