“What else can I say to him?” the Princess wondered.
“It is such a long time since we met,” she went on. “Five years! Think of all the water which has flown under the bridges in that time! So many changes have taken place, it is terrible to think about them! You know I am married now?… I’m not a countess any more, but a princess. And I have separated from my husband.”
“Yes, I heard about it.”
“God has sent me many trials. I am sure you have heard that I am almost ruined. My Dubovki, Kiryakovo, and Sofino estates have been sold to pay the debts of my miserable husband. There is only Baronovo and Mikhaltsevo left. It’s a terrible thing to look back over the past! So much has changed, so many misfortunes, and so many mistakes!”
“Yes, Princess, many mistakes.”
The Princess was a little put out. She knew she had made mistakes, but they were of such an intimate character that she thought she alone could think about them, or speak about them. She could not resist asking: “What mistakes were you thinking about?”
“You mentioned them, and you know them,” the doctor said, and smiled. “Why should we talk about them?”
“Do tell me, Doctor. I should be so grateful to you. And please don’t stand on ceremony with me. I love hearing the truth.”
“I am not judging you, Princess.”
“Not judging me indeed! What a tone you have! Then you really must know something! Tell me!”
“If you want me to, then I shall have to. Only I regret I am not a man with a clever tongue, and people do not always understand me.”
The doctor thought for a moment, and said: “There were a great number of mistakes, but in my opinion the most important was the spirit … the spirit prevailing on all your estates. As you see, I don’t know how to express myself very well. Chiefly I mean the lack of love, the loathing of people in general which could be felt as a positive force on all of them. Your entire way of living was built upon that loathing. Loathing the human voices, the faces of people, the scruffs of their necks, the way they walked … in a word, loathing everything that went to make up the human condition. At all the doors and on the stairways stand well-fed, ill-mannered, lazy grooms in livery who refuse to allow ill-dressed people into the house. In the hallway there are chairs with high backs especially placed there so that whenever you give balls or entertain, the servants won’t dirty the tapestries on the walls with the back of their heads; and in all the rooms there are thick carpets so that no human footsteps can be heard; and everyone who visits you is invariably commanded to speak softly and as little as possible, and never to say anything which would produce the least unpleasantness on your mind or on your nerves. And in your private sitting room you don’t shake hands with people or ask them to sit down—just as you don’t shake hands with me or ask me to sit down.…”
“Oh, please do sit down, if you wish,” the Princess said, holding out her hands and smiling. “Tell me, why are you so angry about such utterly unimportant things?”
“Why should I be angry?” The doctor laughed, but his face reddened, and he removed his hat and waved it about as he went on hotly: “To tell you the truth, I have been waiting for a long time for the opportunity to say these things to you.… I wanted to tell you that you have the Napoleonic way of regarding mankind—men are just cannon fodder. At least Napoleon had some ideas. You—you have nothing except your loathing!”
“Do I have a loathing for people?” The Princess smiled, shrugging her shoulders in amazement. “Do I?”
“Yes, you do! You want facts? Very well! At Mikhaltsevo there are three former cooks of yours living on charity—they went blind in your kitchens from the heat of the stoves. All the health, strength, and beauty that pours from your tens of thousands of acres is given over by you and your parasites to your grooms and footmen and coachmen. All these two-legged animals are brought up to become flunkies, stuffers of food, vulgarians, men who have departed from ‘the image and likeness of God.’… They might have been young doctors, agricultural experts, teachers, intellectuals, but, God in heaven, you tear them away from honest work, and for the sake of a crust of bread you make them play in your puppet shows, and that’s enough to make any decent man ashamed. Men like that can’t remain in your service for three years without becoming hypocrites, slanderers, and flatterers.… Is that good? Your Polish overseers, those scoundrels and spies, with names like Kasimir and Gaetan, prowl from morning to night over your tens of thousands of acres and to please you they try to skin every ox three times over! Excuse me if I speak at random, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t regard the simple folk on your estates as though they were living people. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to visit you—you never regarded them as anything more than decoration. They were not living people. But the most important thing—the one that revolts me most of all—is that you possessed a fortune of more than a million rubles, and you did nothing for the people— nothing at all!”
The Princess sat there with a look of amazement, shock, and fear. She did not know what to say or how to behave. No one had ever spoken to her in that tone of voice. The doctor’s unpleasantly angry voice, his fumbling and stuttering, came like a harsh grating sound on her ears and on her brain: until she felt that the gesticulating doctor was beating her around the head with his hat.
“It’s not true at all,” she answered softly in an imploring voice. “I’ve done a lot of good things for people, and you know it!”
“Stuff and nonsense!” the doctor shouted at her. “Can you possibly maintain that your philanthropic works were undertaken for a serious purpose—weren’t they just puppets being pulled on strings! They were nothing more than a farce from beginning to end! You were playing a game of loving your neighbor—such an obvious game that even children and stupid peasant women understood what you were doing! Take your—what do you call it?—rest home for homeless old women, of which I was appointed a kind of head doctor, and in which you played the role of honorary patroness. God have mercy on us, what a wonderful institution that was! You built a house with parquet flooring, and there was a weather vane on the roof, and a dozen old women were rounded up from the villages and made to sleep under blankets of some woolen stuff and sheets of Dutch linen, and given candy to eat!”
The doctor laughed maliciously into his hat, and went on speaking rapidly, stammering out the words.
“What a game, eh? The lower-ranking officials in the rest home kept the sheets and blankets locked up, because they were afraid the old women would spoil them—’ Let the devil’s pepper-pots sleep on the floor!’ The old women didn’t dare sit on the beds, or put on their jackets, or walk on the smooth parquet floors. Everything was arranged for display purposes only, and everything was hidden away from the old women as though they were thieves; and so they had to be clothed and fed on the sly by charitable persons. Day and night these old women prayed God to deliver them from their prison as soon as possible, and they prayed to be delivered from the edifying discourses of the fat swine into whose care they had been entrusted by you. And what did the higher-ranking
