A House of Gentlefolk Part 9

"Why did I marry her? I was young and inexperienced; I was deceived, I was carried away by a beautiful exterior. I knew no women. I knew nothing. G.o.d grant you may make a happier marriage! but let me tell you, you can be sure of nothing."

"I too might be unhappy," said Lisa (her voice had begun to be unsteady), "but then I ought to submit, I don't know how to say it; but if we do not submit"--

Lavretsky clenched his hands and stamped with his foot.

"Don't be angry, forgive me," Lisa faltered hurriedly.

At that instant Marya Dmitrievna came in. Lisa got up and was going away.

"Stop a minute," Lavretsky cried after her unexpectedly. "I have a great favour to beg of your mother and you; to pay me a visit in my new abode.

You know, I have had a piano sent over; Lemm is staying with me; the lilac is in flower now; you will get a breath of country air, and you can return the same day--will you consent?" Lisa looked towards her mother; Marya Dmitrievna was a.s.suming an expression of suffering; but Lavretsky did not give her time to open her mouth; he at once kissed both her hands. Marya Dmitrievna, who was always susceptible to demonstrations of feeling, and did not at all antic.i.p.ate such effusivements from the "dolt," was melted and gave her consent. While she was deliberating which day to fix, Lavretsky went up to Lisa, and, still greatly moved, whispered to her aside: "Thank you, you are a good girl; I was to blame." And her pale face glowed with a bright, shy smile; her eyes smiled too--up to that instant she had been afraid she had offended him.

"Vladimir Nikolaitch can come with us?" inquired Marya Dmitrievna.

"Yes," replied Lavretsky, "but would it not be better to be just a family party?"

"Well, you know, it seems," began Marya Dmitrievna. "But as you please,"

she added.

It was decided to take Lenotchka and Shurotchka. Marfa Timofyevna refused to join in the expedition.

"It is hard for me, my darling," she said, "to give my old bones a shaking; and to be sure there's nowhere for me to sleep at your place: besides, I can't sleep in a strange bed. Let the young folks go frolicking."

Lavretsky did not succeed in being alone again with Lisa; but he looked at her in such a way that she felt her heart at rest, and a little ashamed, and sorry for him. He pressed her hand warmly at parting; left alone, she fell to musing.

Chapter XXV

When Lavretsky reached home, he was met at the door of the drawing-room by a tall, thin man, in a thread-bare blue coat, with a wrinkled, but lively face, with disheveled grey whiskers, a long straight nose, and small fiery eyes. This was Mihalevitch, who had been his friend at the university. Lavretsky did not at first recognise him, but embraced him warmly directly he told his name.

They had not met since their Moscow days. Torrents of exclamations and questions followed; long-buried recollections were brought to light.

Hurriedly smoking pipe after pipe, tossing off tea at a gulp, and gesticulating with his long hands, Mihalevitch related his adventures to Lavretsky; there was nothing very inspiriting in them, he could not boast of success in his undertakings--but he was constantly laughing a hoa.r.s.e, nervous laugh. A month previously he had received a position in the private counting-house of a spirit-tax contractor, two hundred and fifty miles from the town of O-----, and hearing of Lavretsky returned from abroad he had turned out of his way so as to see his old friend.

Mihalevitch and talked as impetuously as in his youth; made as much noise and was as effervescent as of old. Lavretsky was about to acquaint him with his new position, but Mihalevitch interrupted him, muttering hurriedly, "I have heard, my dear fellow, I have heard--who could have antic.i.p.ated it?" and at once turned the conversation upon general subjects.

"I must set off to-morrow, my dear fellow," he observed; "to-day if you will excuse it, we will sit up late. I want above all to know what you are like, what are your views and convictions, what you have become, what life has taught you." (Mihalevitch still preserved the phraseology of 1830.) "As for me, I have changed in much; the waves of life have broken over my breast--who was it said that?--though in what is important, essential I have not changed; I believe as of old in the good, the true: but I do not only believe--I have faith now, yes, I have faith, faith. Listen, you know I write verses; there is no poetry in them, but there is truth. I will read you aloud my last poem; I have expressed my truest convictions in it. Listen." Mihalevitch fell to reading his poem: it was rather long, and ended with the following lines:

"I gave myself to new feelings with all my heart, And my soul became as a child's!

And I have burnt all I adored And now adore all that I burnt."

As he uttered the two last lines, Mihalevitch all but shed tears; a slight spasm--the sign of deep emotion--pa.s.sed over his wide mouth, his ugly face lighted up. Lavretsky listened, and listened to him--and the spirit of antagonism was aroused in him; he was irritated by the ever-ready enthusiasm of the Moscow student, perpetually at boiling-point. Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed a heated argument had broken out between them, one of these endless arguments, of which only Russians are capable. After a separation of many years spent in two different worlds, with no clear understanding of the other's ideas or even of their own, catching at words and replying only in words, they disputed about the most abstract subjects, and they disputed as though it were a matter of life and death for both: they shouted and vociferated so that every one in the house was startled, and poor Lemm, who had locked himself up in his room directly after Mihalevitch arrived, was bewildered, and began even to feel vaguely alarmed.

"What are you after all? a pessimist?" cried Mihalevitch at one o'clock in the night.

"Are pessimists usually like this?" replied Lavretsky. "They are usually all pale and sickly--would you like me to lift you with one hand?"

"Well, if you are not a pessimist you are a scepteec, that's still worse." Mihalevitch's talk had a strong flavour of his mother-country, Little Russia. "And what right have you to be a scepteec? You have had ill-luck in life, let us admit; that was not your fault; you were born with a pa.s.sionate loving heart, and you were unnaturally kept out of the society of women: the first woman you came across was bound to deceive you."

"She deceived you too," observed Lavretsky grimly.

"Granted, granted; I was the tool of destiny in it--what nonsense I talk, though--there is no such thing as destiny; it is an old habit of expressing things inexactly. But what does that prove?"

"It proves this, that they distorted me from my childhood."

"Well, it's for you to straighten yourself! What's the good of being a man, a male animal? And however that may be, is it possible, is it permissible, to reduce a personal, so to speak, fact to a general law, to an infallible principle?"

"How a principle?" interrupted Lavretsky; "I don't admit--"

"No, it is your principle, your principle," Mihalevitch interrupted in his turn.

"You are an egoist, that's what it is!" he was thundering an hour later: "you wanted personal happiness, you wanted enjoyment in life, you wanted to live only for yourself."

"What do you mean by personal happiness?"

"And everything deceived you; everything crumbled away under your feet."

"What do you mean by personal happiness, I ask you?"

"And it was bound to crumble away. Either you sought support where it could not be found, or you built your house on s.h.i.+fting sands, or--"

"Speak more plainly, or I can't understand you."

"Or--you may laugh if you like--or you had no faith, no warmth of heart; intellect, nothing but one farthing's worth of intellect... you are simply a pitiful, antiquated Voltairean, that's what you are!"

"I'm a Voltairean?"

"Yes, like your father, and you yourself do not suspect it."

"After that," exclaimed Lavretsky, "I have the right to call you a fanatic."

"Alas!" replied Mihalevitch with a contrite air, "I have not so far deserved such an exalted t.i.tle, unhappily."

"I have found out now what to call you," cried the same Mihalevitch, at three o'clock in the morning. "You are not a sceptic, nor a pessimist, nor a Voltairean, you are a loafer, and you are a vicious loafer, a conscious loafer, not a simple loafer. Simple loafers lie on the stove and do nothing because they don't know how to do anything; they don't think about anything either, but you are a man of ideas--and yet you lie on the stove; you could do something--and you do nothing; you lie idle with a full stomach and look down from above and say, 'It's best to lie idle like this, because whatever people do, is all rubbish, leading to nothing.'"

"And from what do you infer that I lie idle?" Lavretsky protested stoutly. "Why do you attribute such ideas to me?"

"And, besides that, you are all, all the tribe of you," continued Mihalevitch, "cultivated loafers. You know which leg the German limps on, you know what's amiss with the English and the French, and your pitiful culture goes to make it worse, your shameful idleness, your abominable inactivity is justified by it. Some are even proud of it: 'I'm such a clever fellow,' they say, 'I do nothing, while these fools are in a fuss.' Yes! and there are fine gentlemen among us--though I don't say this as to you--who reduce their whole life to a kind of stupor of boredom, get used to it, live in it, like--like a mushroom in white sauce," Mihalevitch added hastily, and he laughed at his own comparison. "Oh! this stupor of boredom is the ruin of Russians. Ours is the age for work, and the sickening loafer"...

"But what is all this abuse about?" Lavretsky clamoured in his turn.

"Work--doing--you'd better say what is to be done, instead of abusing me, Desmosthenes of Poltava!"

"There, what a thing to ask! I can't tell you that brother; that every one ought to know for himself," retorted the Desmosthenes ironically.

"A landowner, a n.o.bleman, and not know what to do? You have no faith, or else you would know; no faith--and no intuition."

"Let me at least have time to breathe; you don't let me have time to look round," Lavretsky besought him.

"Not a minute, nor a second!" retorted Mihalevitch with an imperious wave of the hand. "Not one second: death does not delay, and life ought not to delay."