The wood was still and damp. Having cried his fill, he played for a while with a beetle nervously moving its feelers, and then had quite a time crushing it beneath a stone as he tried to repeat the initial, juicy scrunch. Presently he noticed that it had begun to drizzle. Then he got up from the ground, found a familiar footpath and, stumbling over roots, started to run with vague vengeful thoughts of getting back to the manor: he would hide there, he would spend the winter there, subsisting on cheese and jam from the pantry.
The footpath meandered for ten minutes or so through the wood, descended to the river, which was all covered with circles from the raindrops, and five minutes later there hove into sight the sawmill, its footbridge where you sank in up to the ankles in sawdust, and the path upward, and then—through the bare lilac bushes—the house. He crept along the wall, saw that the drawing room window was open, climbed up by the drainpipe onto the green, peeling cornice and rolled over the windowsill.
Once inside the drawing room, he stopped and listened. A daguerreotype of his maternal grandfather—black sidewhiskers, violin in hand—stared down at him, but then completely vanished, dissolving in the glass, as soon as he regarded the portrait from one side—a melancholy amusement that he never omitted when he entered the drawing room. Having thought for a moment and moved his upper lip, which caused the platinum wire on his front teeth to travel freely up and down, he cautiously opened the door, wincing at the sound of the vibrant echo which had too hastily occupied the house upon the departure of its owners, and then darted along the corridor and thence up the stairs into the attic.
The attic was a special one, with a small window through which one could look down at the staircase, at the brown gleam of its balustrade that curved gracefully lower down and vanished in the penumbra. The house was absolutely quiet. A little later, from downstairs, from his father’s study, came the muffled ring of a telephone. The ringing continued with intervals for quite a while. Then again there was silence.
He settled himself on a box. Next to it was a similar case, but open and with books in it. A lady’s bicycle, the green net of its rear wheel torn, stood on its head in the corner, between an unplaned board propped against the wall and an enormous trunk. After a few minutes Luzhin grew bored, as when one’s throat is wrapped in flannel and one is forbidden to go out. He touched the gray dusty books in the open box, leaving black imprints on them. Besides books there was a shuttlecock with one feather, a large photograph (of a military band), a cracked chessboard, and some other not very interesting things.
In this way an hour went by. Suddenly he heard the noise of voices and the whine of the front door. Taking a cautious look through the little window he saw below his father, who like a young boy ran up the stairs and then, before reaching the landing, descended swiftly again, throwing his knees out on either side. The voices below were now clear: the butler’s, the coachman’s, the watchman’s.
A minute later the staircase again came to life; this time his mother came quickly up it, hitching up her skirt, but she also stopped short of the landing, leaning, instead, over the balustrade, and then swiftly, with arms spread out, she went down again. Finally, after another minute had passed, they all went up in a posse—his father’s bald head glistened, the bird on mother’s hat swayed like a duck on a troubled pond, and the butler’s gray crew cut bobbed up and down; at the rear, leaning at every moment over the balustrade, came the coachman, the watchman, and for some reason the milkmaid Akulina, and finally a black-bearded peasant from the water mill, future inhabitant of future nightmares. It was he, as the strongest, who carried Luzhin down from the attic to the carriage.
Chapter 2
Luzhin senior, the Luzhin who wrote books, often thought of how his son would turn out. Through his books (and they all, except for a forgotten novel called Fumes, were written for boys, youths and high school students and came in sturdy colorful covers) there constantly flitted the image of a fair-haired lad, “headstrong,” “brooding,” who later turned into a violinist or a painter, without losing his moral beauty in the process.
The barely perceptible peculiarity that distinguished his son from all those children who, in his opinion, were destined to become completely unremarkable people (given that such people exist) he interpreted as the secret stir of talent, and bearing firmly in mind the fact that his deceased father-in-law had been a composer (albeit a somewhat arid one and susceptible, in his mature years, to the doubtful splendors of virtuosity), he more than once, in a pleasant dream resembling a lithograph, descended with a candle at night to the drawing room where a Wünderkind, dressed in a white nightshirt that came down to his heels, would be playing on an enormous, black piano.
It seemed to him that everybody ought to see how exceptional his son was; it seemed to him that strangers, perhaps, could make better sense of it than he himself. The school he had selected for his son was particularly famous for the attention it paid to the so-called “inner” life of its pupils, and for its humaneness, thoughtfulness, and friendly insight.
Tradition had it that during the early part of its existence the teachers had played with the boys during the long recess: the physics master, looking over his shoulder, would squeeze a lump of snow into a ball; the mathematics master would get a hard little ball in the ribs as he made a run in lapta (Russian baseball); and even the headmaster himself would be there, cheering the game on with jolly ejaculations.
Such games in common no longer took place, but the idyllic fame had remained. His son’s class master was the Russian literature teacher, a good acquaintance of Luzhin the writer and incidentally not a bad lyric poet who had put out a collection of imitations of Anacreon. “Drop in,” he had said on the day when Luzhin first brought his son to school. “Any Thursday around twelve.” Luzhin dropped in. The stairs were deserted and quiet. Passing through the hall to the staff room he heard a muffled, multivocal roar of laughter coming from Class Two. In the ensuing silence, his steps rang out with a stressed sonority on the yellow parquetry of the long hall. In the staff room, at a large table covered with baize (which reminded one of examinations), the teacher sat writing a letter.
Since the time of his son’s entrance to the school he had not spoken to the teacher and now, visiting him a month later, he was full of titillating expectation, of a certain anxiety and timidity—of all those feelings he had once experienced as a youth in his university uniform when he went to see the editor of a literary review to whom he had shortly before sent his first story.
And now, just as then, instead of the words of delighted amazement he had vaguely expected (as when you wake up in a strange town, expecting, with your eyes still shut, an extraordinary, blazing morning), instead of all those words which he himself would so willingly have provided, had it not been for the hope that nonetheless they would eventually come—he heard chilly and dull phrases that proved the teacher understood his son even less than he did. On the subject of any kind of hidden talent not a single word was uttered.
Inclining his pale bearded face with two pink grooves on either side of the nose, from which he carefully removed his tenacious pince-nez, and rubbing his eyes with his palm, the teacher began to speak first, saying that the boy might do better than he did, that the boy seemed not to get on with his companions, that the boy did not run about much during the recess period.… “The boy undoubtedly has ability,” said the teacher, concluding his eye-rubbing, “but we notice a certain listlessness.” At this moment a bell was generated somewhere downstairs, and then bounded upstairs and passed unbearably shrilly throughout the whole building.
After this there were two or three seconds of the most complete silence—and suddenly everything came to life and burst into noise; desk lids banged and the hall filled with talking and the stamp of feet. “The long recess,” said the teacher. “If you like we’ll go down to the yard, and you can watch the boys at play.”
These descended the stone stairs swiftly, hugging the balustrade and sliding the soles of their sandals over the step rims well polished by use. Downstairs amid the crowded darkness of coat racks they changed their shoes; some of them sat on the broad windowsills, grunting as they hastily tied their shoelaces. Suddenly he caught sight of his son, who, all hunched up, was disgustedly taking his boots from a cloth bag.
A hurrying, tow-haired boy bumped into
