“But I thought you were brought up in Moscow, if I am not mistaken.”
“He was living in Moscow at the Andronikovs’ when you went there; but till then he used to live in the country with your aunt, Varvara Stepanovna,” Tatyana Pavlovna put in.
“Sonia, here’s some money, put it away. I promise you, in a few days, five thousand.”
“So there’s no hope then for the Sokolskys?” asked Tatyana Pavlovna.
“Absolutely none, Tatyana Pavlovna.”
“I have always sympathized with you and all of yours, Andrey Petrovitch, and I have always been a friend of the family, but though the Sokolskys are strangers, yet, upon my word, I am sorry for them. Don’t be angry, Andrey Petrovitch.”
“I have no intention of going shares with them, Tatyana Pavlovna!”
“You know my idea, of course, Andrey Petrovitch; they would have settled the case out of court, if at the very beginning you had offered to go halves with them; now, of course, it is too late. Not that I venture to criticize. . . . I say so because I don’t think the deceased would have left them out of his will altogether.”
“Not only he wouldn’t have left them out, he’d have certainly left them everything, and would have left none out but me, if he’d known how to do things and to write a will properly; but as it is, the law’s on my side, and it’s settled. I can’t go shares, and I don’t want to, Tatyana Pavlovna, and that is the end of the matter.”
He spoke with real exasperation, a thing he rarely allowed himself to do. Tatyana Pavlovna subsided. My mother looked down mournfully. Versilov knew that she shared Tatyana Pavlovna’s views.
“He has not forgotten that slap in the face at Ems,” I thought to myself. The document given me by Kraft and at that moment in my pocket would have a poor chance if it had fallen into his hands. I suddenly felt that the whole responsibility was still weighing upon me, and this idea, together with all the rest, had, of course, an irritating effect upon me.
“Arkady, I should like you to be better dressed, my dear fellow; your suit is all right, but for future contingencies I might recommend you to an excellent Frenchman, most conscientious and possessed of taste.”
“I beg you never to make such suggestions again,” I burst out suddenly.
“What’s that?”
“It is not that I consider it humiliating, of course, but we are not agreed about anything; on the contrary, our views are entirely opposed, for in a day or two — to-morrow — I shall give up going to the prince’s, as I find there is absolutely no work for me to do there.”
“But you are going and sitting there with him — that is the work.”
“Such ideas are degrading.”
“I don’t understand; but if you are so squeamish, don’t take money from him, but simply go. You will distress him horribly, he has already become attached to you, I assure you. . . . However, as you please. . . .” He was evidently put out.
“You say, don’t ask for money, but thanks to you I did a mean thing to-day: you did not warn me, and I demanded my month’s salary from him to-day.”
“So you have seen to that already; I confess I did not expect you to ask for it; but how sharp you all are nowadays! There are no young people in these days, Tatyana Pavlovna.” He was very spiteful: I was awfully angry too.
“I ought to have had things out with you . . . you made me do it, I don’t know now how it’s to be.”
“By the way, Sonia, give Arkady back his sixty roubles at once; and you, my dear fellow, don’t be angry at our repaying it so quickly. I can guess from your face that you have some enterprise in your mind and that you need it. . . . So invest it . . . or something of the sort.”
“I don’t know what my face expresses, but I did not expect mother would have told you of that money when I so particularly asked her. . . .” I looked at my mother with flashing eyes, I cannot express how wounded I felt.
“Arkasha, darling, for God’s sake forgive me, I couldn’t possibly help speaking of it. . . .”
“My dear fellow, don’t make a grievance of her telling me your secrets: besides, she did it with the best intentions — it was simply a mother’s longing to boast of her son’s feeling for her. But I assure you I should have guessed without that you were a capitalist. All your secrets are written on your honest countenance. He has ‘his idea,’ Tatyana Pavlovna, as I told you.”
“Let’s drop my honest countenance,” I burst out again. “I know that you often see right through things, but in some cases you see no further than your own nose, and I have marvelled at your powers of penetration. Well then, I have ‘my idea.’ That you should use that expression, of course, was an accident, but I am not afraid to admit it; I have ‘an idea’ of my own, I am not afraid and I am not ashamed of it.”
“Don’t be ashamed, that’s the chief thing.”
“And all the same I shall never tell it you.”
“That’s to say you won’t condescend to; no need to, my dear fellow, I know the nature of your idea as it is; in any case it implies:
Into the wilderness I flee.
Tatyana Pavlovna, my notion is that he wants . . . to become a Rothschild, or something of the kind, and shut himself up in his grandeur. . . . No doubt he’ll magnanimously allow us a pension, though perhaps he won’t allow me one — but in any case he will vanish from our sight. Like the new moon he has risen, only to set again.”
I shuddered in my inmost being; of course, it was all chance; he knew nothing of my idea and was not speaking about it, though he did mention Rothschild; but how could he define my feelings so precisely, my impulse to break with them and go away? He divined everything and wanted to defile beforehand with his cynicism the tragedy of fact. That he was horribly angry, of that there could be no doubt.
“Mother, forgive my hastiness, for I see that there’s no hiding things from Andrey Petrovitch in any case,” I said, affecting to laugh and trying if only for a moment to turn it into a joke.
“That’s the very best thing you can do, my dear fellow, to laugh. It is difficult to realize how much every one gains by laughing even in appearance; I am speaking most seriously. He always has an air, Tatyana Pavlovna, of having something so important on his mind, that he is quite abashed at the circumstance himself.”
“I must ask you in earnest, Andrey Petrovitch, to be more careful what you say.”
“You are right, my dear boy; but one must speak out once for all, so as never to touch upon the matter again. You have come to us from Moscow, to begin making trouble at once. That’s all we know as yet of your object in coming. I say nothing, of course, of your having come to surprise us in some way. And all this month you have been snorting and sneering at us. Yet you are obviously an intelligent person, and as such you might leave such snorting and sneering to those who have no other means of avenging themselves on others for their own insignificance. You are always shutting yourself up, though your honest countenance and your rosy cheeks bear witness that you might look every one straight in the face with perfect innocence. He’s a neurotic; I can’t make out, Tatyana Pavlovna, why they are all neurotic nowadays. . . ?”
“If you did not even know where I was brought up, you are not likely to know why a man’s neurotic.”
“Oh, so that’s the key to it! You are offended at my being capable of forgetting where you were brought up!”
“Not in the least. Don’t attribute such silly ideas to me. Mother! Andrey Petrovitch praised me just now for laughing; let us laugh — why sit like this! Shall I tell you a little anecdote about myself? Especially as Andrey Petrovitch knows nothing of my adventures.”
I was boiling. I knew this was the last time we should be sitting together like this, that when I left that house I should never enter it again, and so on the eve of it all I could not restrain myself. He had challenged me to such a parting scene himself.
“That will be delightful, of course, if it is really amusing,” he observed, looking at me searchingly. “Your manners were rather neglected where you were brought up, my dear fellow, though they are pretty passable. He is charming to-day, Tatyana Pavlovna, and it’s a good thing you have undone that bag at last.”
But Tatyana Pavlovna frowned; she did not even turn round at his words, but went on untying the parcels and laying out the good things on some plates which had been brought in. My mother, too, was sitting in complete bewilderment, though she had misgivings, of course, and realized that there would be trouble between us. My sister touched my elbow again.
3
“I simply want to tell you all,” I began, with a very free-and-easy air, “how a father met for the first time a
