The Adolescent

“But you know,” I suddenly added, “it seems to me that despite all your yearning, you must have been extremely happy then.”

He laughed gaily.

“You’re particularly apt in your observations today,” he said. “Well, yes, I was happy, and how could I be unhappy with such yearning? There’s no one freer and happier than a Russian European wanderer from our thousand. I say it, truly, without laughing, and there’s much that’s serious here. Yes, I wouldn’t exchange my yearning for any other happiness. In this sense I’ve always been happy, my dear, all my life. And out of happiness I came to love your mama then for the first time in my life.”

“How, for the first time in your life?”

“Precisely so. In my wandering and yearning, I suddenly came to love her as never before, and sent for her at once.”

“Oh, tell me about that, too, tell me about mama!”

“But that’s why I invited you, and, you know,” he smiled gaily, “I was afraid you’d forgiven me mama on account of Herzen or some sort of little conspiracy . . .”

Chapter Eight

I

SINCE WE WENT on talking all evening then and sat till it was night, I won’t quote the whole conversation, but will just set down something that explained to me, finally, one mysterious point in his life.

I’ll begin by saying that for me there’s no doubt that he loved mama, and if he abandoned her and “unmarried” her when he went away, it was, of course, because he had become too bored or something of the sort, which, however, happens with everyone in the world, but which is always hard to explain. Abroad, however, after a long while, he suddenly began to love mama again from afar, that is, in thought, and sent for her. “Whimsicality,” they may say, but I say something else: in my opinion, here was all that can possibly be serious in human life, despite the apparent slip-slop, which I, perhaps, partly make allowances for. But I swear that I put this European yearning of his beyond question and not only on a par with, but incomparably higher than, any contemporary practical activity in the building of railroads. His love for mankind I acknowledge as a most sincere and profound feeling, without any tricks; and his love for mama as something completely unquestionable, though maybe a bit fantastic. Abroad, “in yearning and happiness,” and, I’ll add, in the strictest monastic solitude (this particular information I received later through Tatyana Pavlovna), he suddenly remembered mama—remembered precisely her “sunken cheeks”—and sent for her at once.

“My friend,” escaped him, among other things, “I suddenly realized that my serving the idea did not free me, as a moral and reasonable being, from the duty of making at least one person happy in practice during the course of my life.”

“Can such a bookish thought really have been the cause of it all?” I asked in perplexity.

“It’s not a bookish thought. However, perhaps it is. Here, though, everything comes together, for I did love your mama really, sincerely, not bookishly. If I hadn’t loved her so much, I wouldn’t have sent for her, but would have ‘made happy’ some passing German man or woman, once I had thought up the idea. And I would set it down as a commandment for any developed man to make at least one being happy in his life, unfailingly and in something, but to do it in practice, that is, in reality; just as I would set it down as a law or an obligation for every peasant to plant at least one tree in his life, in view of the deforestation of Russia; though one tree would be too little, he can be ordered to plant a tree every year. The superior and developed man, pursuing a superior thought, sometimes departs entirely from the essential, becomes ridiculous, capricious, and cold, I’d even simply say stupid, and not only in practical life, but, in the end, even stupid in his theories. Thus, the duty of occupying oneself with the practical, and of making at least one existing being happy, would in fact set everything right and refresh the benefactor himself. As a theory, it’s very funny; but if it became a practice and turned into a custom, it wouldn’t be stupid at all. I experienced it for myself: as soon as I began to develop this idea of a new commandment—at first, naturally, as a joke—I suddenly began to realize the full extent of my love for your mother, which lay hidden in me. Till then I had never realized that I loved her. While I lived with her I merely enjoyed her, while she had her good looks, but then I became capricious. Only in Germany did I realize that I loved her. It began with her sunken cheeks, which I could never remember and sometimes couldn’t even see without a pain in my heart—a literal pain, real, physical. There are painful memories, my dear, which cause actual pain; nearly everyone has them, only people forget them; but it happens that they suddenly remember later, even only some feature, and then they can’t get rid of it. I began to recall a thousand details of my life with Sonya; in the end they came to my memory of themselves, pouring in a mass, and all but tormented me while I waited for her. Most of all I was tormented by the memory of her eternal abasement before me, and of her eternally considering herself infinitely inferior to me in all respects— imagine, even the physical. She became ashamed and blushed when I sometimes looked at her hands and fingers, which were not at all aristocratic. And not her fingers only, she was ashamed of everything in herself, despite the fact that I loved her beauty. She had always been shy with me to the point of wildness, but the bad thing was that a glimpse of some sort of fear, as it were, showed in this shyness. In short, she considered herself a worthless or even almost indecent thing next to me. Truly, once in a while, at the beginning, I sometimes thought she still considered me her master and was afraid, but it wasn’t that at all. And yet I swear she was better able than anyone else to understand my shortcomings, and never in my life have I met a woman with such a subtle and discerning heart. Oh, how unhappy she was in the beginning, while she was still so good looking, when I demanded that she dress up. There was self-love in it, and also some other offended feeling: she realized that she could never be a lady, and that wearing clothes that weren’t for her only made her ridiculous. As a woman, she didn’t want to feel ridiculous in her clothes, and she realized that every woman had to wear dresses that were hers—something that thousands and hundreds of thousands of women will never realize, so long as they’re dressed fashionably. She was afraid of my mocking look—that’s what it was! But it was especially sad for me to recall her deeply astonished look, which I often caught on me during all our time. It bespoke a perfect understanding of her fate and of the future in store for her, so that it even made me feel bad, though, I confess, I didn’t get into any conversations with her then, and treated it all somehow condescendingly. And, you know, she wasn’t always so timorous and wild as she is now; even now it happens that she suddenly gets as merry and pretty as a twenty-year-old; and then, when she was young, she sometimes liked very much to chatter and laugh, in her own company, of course—with the girls, with the women of the household; and how startled she’d be when I unexpectedly found her laughing sometimes, how quickly she’d blush and look at me timorously! Once, not long before I left for abroad, that is, almost on the eve of my unmarrying her, I came into her room and found her alone, at the little table, without any work, leaning her elbow on the table, and deep in thought. It almost never happened with her that she would sit like that, without work. By then I had long ceased to caress her. I managed to approach very softly, on tiptoe, and suddenly embrace and kiss her . . . She jumped up—and I’ll never forget that rapture, that happiness on her face, and suddenly it all changed quickly to a blush, and her eyes flashed. Do you know what I read in that flashing glance? ‘You’re giving me charity—that’s what!’ She sobbed hysterically, under the pretext that I had frightened her, but even then I fell to thinking. And in general, all such recollections are a very hard thing, my friend. It’s the same as how, in a great artist’s poems, there are sometimes such painful scenes that you remember them with pain all your life afterwards—for instance, Othello’s last monologue in Shakespeare, Evgeny at Tatyana’s feet, or the escaped convict meeting a child, a little girl, on a cold night, by a well, in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.³⁶ It pierces your heart once, and the wound remains forever after. Oh, how I waited for Sonya and how I wanted to embrace her quickly! I dreamed with