“No, not really,” I replied. “It’s particularly well put, that a woman is a great power, though I don’t know why you connect it with work. And that one can’t help working when one has no money—you know yourself.”
“But now it’s enough,” he turned to my mother, who was beaming all over (when he addressed me, she gave a start), “at least for right now, I don’t want to see any hand work, I ask for my own sake. You, Arkady, as a youth of our time, are surely a bit of a socialist. Well, would you believe it, my friend, those who have the greatest love of idleness are from the eternally laboring people!”
“Maybe not idleness, but rest.”
“No, precisely idleness, total do-nothingness, that’s the ideal! I knew one eternally laboring man, though not from the people; he was a rather developed man and able to generalize. All his life, maybe every day, he dreamed passionately and sweetly of the most total idleness, carrying his ideal to the absolute—to the boundless independence, to the eternal freedom of dreaming and idle contemplation. It went on like that till he broke down completely at work. He couldn’t mend; he died in the hospital. I’m sometimes seriously ready to conclude that the notion of the delights of labor was thought up by idle people, of the virtuous sort, naturally. It’s one of those ‘Geneva ideas’ from the end of the last century.33 Tatyana Pavlovna, two days ago I cut out an advertisement from the newspaper. Here it is.” He took a scrap of paper from his waistcoat pocket. “It’s from one of those endless students, who know classical languages and mathematics and are ready to relocate, live in a garret, or anywhere.
Now listen: ‘Female teacher prepares for all institutions of learning’ (for all, listen to that) ‘and gives lessons in arithmetic’—just one line, but a classic! Prepares for institutions of learning—of course, that also means in arithmetic? No, she mentions arithmetic separately. This—this is pure starvation, this is the ultimate degree of need. The touching thing here is precisely this lack of skill: obviously she never prepared herself to be a teacher, and is hardly able to teach anything. But it’s either drown herself, or drag her last rouble to the newspaper and advertise that she prepares for all institutions of learning and, on top of that, gives lessons in arithmetic. Per tutto mondo e in altri siti.”20
“Ah, Andrei Petrovich, she must be helped! Where does she live?” exclaimed Tatyana Pavlovna.
“Oh, there are lots of them!” He put the address in his pocket. “This bag is full of all sorts of treats—for you, Liza, and for you, Tatyana Pavlovna; Sofya and I don’t like sweets. You, too, if you please, young man. I bought it all myself at Eliseevs’ and Ballet’s.34 For too long we’ve been ‘sitting hungry,’ as Lukerya says.” (N.B. None of us ever sat hungry.) “There are grapes, bonbons, duchesse pears, and a strawberry tart; I even bought some excellent liqueur; also nuts. It’s curious, Tatyana Pavlovna, ever since childhood I’ve loved nuts, you know, the simplest kinds. Liza takes after me: she also likes to crack nuts like a squirrel. But there’s nothing lovelier, Tatyana Pavlovna, than chancing sometimes, among your childhood memories, to imagine yourself momentarily in the woods, in the bushes, when you were gathering nuts . . . The days are almost autumnal, but clear, sometimes so fresh, you hide in the thicket, you wander off into the forest, there’s a smell of leaves . . . Do I see something sympathetic in your look, Arkady Makarovich?”
“The first years of my childhood were also spent in the country.”
“Why, no, I believe you were living in Moscow . . . if I’m not mistaken.”
“He was living with the Andronikovs in Moscow when you came that time; but before then he lived with your late aunt, Varvara Stepanovna, in the country,” Tatyana Pavlovna picked up.
“Sofya, here’s the money, put it away. They promised to give me five thousand one of these days.”
“So there’s no more hope for the princes?” asked Tatyana Pavlovna.
“None whatsoever, Tatyana Pavlovna.”
“I’ve always sympathized with you, Andrei Petrovich, and all of yours, and have been a friend of your house; but, though the princes are strangers to me, by God, I feel sorry for them. Don’t be angry, Andrei Petrovich.”
“I have no intention of sharing, Tatyana Pavlovna.”
“Of course, you know my thinking, Andrei Petrovich. They would have stopped the litigation if you had offered to go halves with them at the very beginning; now, of course, it’s too late. However, I won’t venture to judge . . . I say it because the deceased certainly wouldn’t have cut them out of his will.”
“Not only wouldn’t have cut them out, he’d certainly have left everything to them and cut out just me alone, if he’d been able to do it and had known how to write a will properly; but now the law is with me—and it’s finished. I cannot and do not want to share, Tatyana Pavlovna, and the matter ends there.”
He uttered this even with anger, which he rarely allowed himself. Tatyana Pavlovna quieted down. Mother lowered her eyes somehow sadly: Versilov knew that she approved of Tatyana Pavlovna’s opinion.
“It’s the slap in Ems!” I thought to myself. The document procured by Kraft, which I had in my pocket, would fare badly if it fell into his hands. I suddenly felt that it was all still hanging on my neck; this thought, in connection with all the rest, of course, had an irritating effect on me.
“Arkady, I wish you’d dress better, my friend; you’re not dressed badly, but in view of things to come, there’s a good Frenchman I might recommend to you, a most conscientious man, and with taste.”
“I beg you never to make me such offers,” I suddenly ripped out.
“Why’s that?”
“I, of course, do not find it humiliating, but we are not in such agreement; on the contrary, we even disagree, because one day, tomorrow, I’ll stop going to the prince’s, seeing not the least work to do there . . .”
“But the fact that you go there, that you sit with him—is already work!”
“Such notions are humiliating.”
“I don’t understand; however, if you’re so ticklish, don’t take money from him, just go there. You’ll upset him terribly; he’s already stuck on you, you can be sure . . . However, as you wish . . .”
He was obviously displeased.
“You tell me not to ask for money, but thanks to you I did a mean thing today. You didn’t warn me, and today I demanded my month’s salary from him.”
“So you’ve already taken care of it; and, I’ll confess, I thought you’d never begin to ask. How adroit you’ve all now become, though! There are no young people these days, Tatyana Pavlovna.”
He was terribly irritated; I also became terribly angry.
“I ought to have settled accounts with you . . . it was you who made me do it—now I don’t know how to be.”
“By the way, Sophie, give Arkady back his sixty roubles immediately; and you, my friend, don’t be angry at the hasty reckoning. I can guess from your face that you have some enterprise in mind, and that you’re in need of . . . working capital . . . or something like that.”
“I don’t know what my face expresses, but I never expected of mama that she would tell you about that money, since I asked her not to.” I looked at my mother, flashing my eyes. I can’t even express how offended I was.
“Arkasha, darling, forgive me, for God’s sake, there was no way I couldn’t tell him . . .”
“My friend, don’t hold it against her that she revealed your secrets,” he turned to me. “Besides, she did it with good intentions—a mother simply wanted to boast of her son’s feelings. But believe me, I’d have guessed that you’re a capitalist even without that. All your secrets are written on your honest face. He has ‘his idea,’ Tatyana Pavlovna, I told you so.”
“Let’s forget my honest face,” I went on ripping out. “I know you often see through things, though in other cases no further than a chicken’s nose— and your perceptive abilities have surprised me. Well, yes, I do have my ‘idea.’ The fact that you put it that way is, of course, accidental, but I’m not afraid to admit it: I have an ‘idea.’ I’m not afraid and not ashamed.”
“Above all, don’t be ashamed.”
“But all the same I won’t ever reveal it to you.”
“That is, you won’t deign to reveal it. No need, my friend, I know the essence of your idea even so; in any case, it’s this: ‘To the desert I withdraw . . .’35 Tatyana Pavlovna! I think he wants . . . to become Rothschild, or something like that, and withdraw into his grandeur. Naturally, he will magnanimously grant you and me a pension—or maybe he won’t grant me one—but in any case, that will be the last we see
