CHAPTER V

Details of Home Life—Men of the Eighteenth Century in Russia—A Day at Home—Guests and Visitors—Sonnenberg—Servants.

THE dulness and monotony of our house became more intolerable with every year. But for the prospect of University life, my new friendship, my interest in politics, and my lively turn of character, I must either have run away or died of the life.

My father was seldom cheerful; as a rule he was dissatisfied with everyone and everything. He was a man of unusual intelligence and powers of observation, who had seen and heard a great deal and remembered it; he was a finished man of the world and could be exceedingly pleasant and interesting; but he did not choose to be so, and sank deeper and deeper into a state of morbid solitude.

What precisely it was that infused so much bile and bitterness into his blood, it is hard to say. No period of passion, of great misfortunes, mistakes, and losses, had ever taken place in his life. I could never fully understand the source of that bitter scorn and irritation which filled his heart, of his distrust and avoidance of mankind,and of the disgust that preyed upon him. Perhaps he took with him to the grave some recollection which he never confided to any ear; perhaps it was merely due to the combination of two things so incongruous as the eighteenth century and Russian life; and there was a third factor, the traditional idleness of his class, which had a terrible power of producing unreasonable tempers.

In Europe, especially in France, the eighteenth century produced an extraordinary type of man, which combined all the weaknesses of the Regency with all the strength of Spartans or Romans. Half like Faublas and half like Regulus, these men opened wide the doors of revolution and were the first to rush into it, jostling one another in their haste to pass out by the “window” of the guillotine. Our age has ceased to produce those strong, complete natures; but last century evoked them everywhere, even in countries where they were not needed and where their development was bound to be distorted. In Russia, men who were exposed to the influence of this powerful European current, did not make history, but they became unlike other men. Foreigners at home and foreigners abroad, spoilt for Russia by European prejudices and for Europe by Russian habits, they were a living contradiction in terms and sank into an artificial life of sensual enjoyment and monstrous egoism.

Such was the most conspicuous figure at Moscow in those days, Prince Yusúpov, a Tatar prince, agrand seigneurof European reputation, and a Russian grandee of brilliant intellect and great fortune. He was surrounded by a whole pleiad of grey-haired Don Juans and freethinkers—suchmen as Masalski, Santi, and the rest. They were all men of considerable mental development and culture; but they had nothing to do, and they rushed after pleasure, loved and petted their precious selves, genially gave themselves absolution for all transgressions, exalted the love of eating to the height of a Platonic passion, and lowered love for women into a kind of gluttonous epicureanism.

Old Yusúpov was a sceptic and abon-vivant; he had been the friend of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, of Diderot and Casti; and his artistic taste was beyond question. You may convince yourself of this by a single visit to his palace outside Moscow and a glance at his pictures, if his heir has not sold them yet by auction. At eighty, this luminary was setting in splendour, surrounded by beauty in marble and colour, and also in flesh and blood. Púshkin, who dedicated a noble Epistle to him,[38]used to converse with Yusúpov in his country-house; and Gonzaga, to whom Yusúpov dedicated his theatre, used to paint there.

38.To a Great Man(1830).

By his education and service in the Guards, by his birth and connexions, my father belonged to the same circle; but neither temperament nor health allowed him to lead a life of dissipation to the age of seventy, and he went to the opposite extreme. He determined to secure a life of solitude, and found it intensely tedious—all the more tedious because he had sought it merely for his own sake. A strong will was degraded into stubborn wilfulness, and unused powers spoilt his temper and made it difficult.

At the time of his education European civilisation was so new in Russia that a man of culture necessarily became less of a Russian. To the end of his life he wrote French with more ease and correctness than Russian, and he literally never read a Russian book, not even the Bible. The Bible, indeed, he did not read even in other languages; he knew, by hearsay and from extracts, the matter of Holy Scripture in general, and felt no curiosity to examine further. He did respect Derzhávin and Krylóv, the first because he had written an ode on the death of his uncle, Prince Meshcherski, and the latter, because they had acted together as seconds in a duel. When my father heard that the Emperor Alexander was reading Karamzín’sHistory of the Russian Empire, he tried it himself but soon laid it aside: “Nothing but old Slavonic names! Who can take an interest in all that?”—such was his disparaging criticism.

His contempt for mankind was unconcealed and without exceptions. Never, under any circumstances, did he rely on anyone, and I don’t remember that he ever preferred a considerable request in any quarter; and he never did anything to oblige other people. All he asked of others was to maintain appearances:les apparences, les convenances—his moral code consisted of these alone. He excused much, or rather shut his eyes to much: but any breach of decent forms enraged him to such a degree that he became incapable of the least indulgence or sympathy. I puzzled so long over this unfairness that I ended by understanding it: he was convinced beforehand that any man is capable of any bad action, and refrains from it only because it does not pay, or for want of opportunity; but in any breach of politeness he found personaloffence, and disrespect to himself, or “middle-class breeding,” which, in his opinion, excluded a man from all decent society.

“The heart of man,” he used to say, “is hidden, and nobody knows what another man feels. I have too much business of my own to attend to other people, let alone judging their motives. But I cannot live in the same room with an ill-bred man: he offends me,il me froisse. Otherwise he may be the best man in the world; if so, he will go to Heaven; but I have no use for him. The most important thing in life, more important than soaring intellect or erudition, issavoir vivre, to do the right thing always, never to thrust yourself forward, to be perfectly polite to everyone and familiar with nobody.”

All impulsiveness and frankness my father disliked and called familiarity; and all display of feeling passed with him for sentimentality. He regularly represented himself as superior to all such trivialities; but what that higher object was, for the sake of which he sacrificed his feelings, I have no idea. And when this proud old man, with his clear understanding and sincere contempt of mankind, played this part of a passionless judge, whom did he mean to impress by the performance? A woman whose will he had broken, though she never tried to oppose him; a boy whom his own treatment drove from mere naughtiness to positive disobedience; and a score of footmen whom he did not reckon as human beings!

And how much strength and endurance was spent for this object, how much persistence! How surprising the consistency with which the part was played to the very end, in spite of old age and disease! The heart of man is indeed hidden.

At the time of my arrest, and later when I was going into exile, I saw that the old man’s heart was much more open than I supposed to love and even to tenderness. But I never thanked him for this; for I did not know how he would have taken my thanks.

As a matter of course, he was not happy. Always on his guard, discontented with everyone, he suffered when he saw the feelings he inspired in every member of the household. Smiles died away and talk stopped whenever he came into the room. He spoke of this with mockery and resented it; but he made no concession whatever and went his own way with steady perseverance. Stinging mockery and cool contemptuous irony were the weapons which he could wield with the skill of an artist, and he used them equally against us and against the servants. There are few things that a growing boy resents more; and, in fact, up to the time of my imprisonment I was on bad terms with my father and carried on a petty warfare against him, with the men and maids for my allies.

For the rest, he had convinced himself that he was dangerously ill, and was constantly under treatment. He had a doctor resident in the house and was visited by two or three other physicians; and at least three consultations took place each year. His sour looks and constant complaints of his health (which was not really so bad) soon reduced the number of our visitors. He resented this; yet he never remonstrated or invited any friend to the house. An air of terrible boredom reigned in our house, especially in the endless winter evenings. The whole suite of drawing-rooms was lit up by a single pair of lamps; andthere the old man walked up and down, a stooping figure with his hands behind his back; he wore cloth boots, a velvet skull-cap, and a warm jacket of white lamb-skin; he never spoke a word, and three or four brown dogs walked up and down with him.

As melancholy grew on him, so did his wish to save, but it was entirely misapplied. His management of his land was not beneficial either to himself or to his serfs. The head man and his underlings robbed both their master and the peasants. In certain matters there was strict economy: candle-ends were saved and light French wine was replaced by sour wine from the Crimea; on the other hand, a whole forest was felled without his knowledge on one estate, and he paid the market price for his own oats on another. There were men whom he permitted to steal; thus a peasant, whom he made collector of theobrókat Moscow, and who was sent every summer to the country, to report on the head man and the farm-work, the garden and the timber, grew rich enough to buy a house in Moscow after ten years’ service. From childhood I hated this factotum: I was present once when he thrashed an old peasant in our court-yard; in my fury I caught him by the beard and nearly fainted myself. From that time I could never bear the sight of him. He died in 1845. Several times I asked my father where this man got the money to buy a house.

“The result of sober habits,” he said; “that man never took a drop in his life.”

Every year about Shrovetide our peasants from the Government of Penza brought their payments in kind toMoscow. It was a fortnight’s journey for the carts, laden with carcasses of pork, sucking-pigs, geese, chickens, rye, eggs, butter, and even linen. The arrival of the peasants was a regular field-day for all our servants, who robbed and cheated the visitors right and left, without any right to do so. The coachman charged for the water their horses drank, and the women charged for a warm place by the fire, while the aristocrats of the servants’ hall expected each to get a sucking-pig and a piece of cloth, or a goose and some pounds of butter. While the peasants remained in the court-yard, the servants feasted continuously: soup was always boiling and sucking-pigs roasting, and the servants’ hall reeked perpetually of onions, burning fat, and bad whiskey. During the last two days Bakai never came into the hall, but sat in the kitchen-passage, dressed in an old livery overcoat, without jacket or waistcoat underneath it; and other servants grew older visibly and darker in complexion. All this my father endured calmly enough, knowing that it must be so and that reform was impossible.

These provisions always arrived in a frozen condition, and thereupon my father summoned his cook Spiridon and sent him to the markets to enquire about prices. The cook reported astonishingly low figures, lower by half than was actually offered. My father called him a fool and sent for his factotum and a dealer in fruit named Slepushkin. Both expressed horror at the cook’s figures, made enquiries, and quoted prices a little higher. Finally Slepushkin offered to take the whole in a lump—eggs, sucking-pigs, butter, rye, and all,—“to save you,bátyushka, from further worry.” The price he offered was of course a trifle higher than the cook had mentioned. Myfather consented: to celebrate the occasion, Slepushkin presented him with some oranges and gingerbread, and the cook with a note for 200roubles. And the most extraordinary part of this transaction was that it was repeated exactly every year.

Slepushkin enjoyed my father’s favour and often borrowed money of him; and the strange way in which he did it showed his profound knowledge of my father’s character.

He would borrow 500roublesfor two months, and two days before payment was due, he would present himself at our house, carrying a currant-loaf on a dish and 500roubleson the top of the loaf. My father took the money, and the borrower bowed low and begged, though unsuccessfully, to kiss his benefactor’s hand. But Slepushkin would turn up again a week later and ask for a loan of 1,500roubles. He got it and again paid his debt on the nail; and my father considered him a pattern of honesty. A week later, Slepushkin would borrow a still larger sum. Thus in the course of a year he secured 5,000roublesin ready money to use in his business; and for this he paid, by way of interest, a couple of currant-loaves, a few pounds of figs and walnuts, and perhaps a hundred oranges and Crimean apples.

I shall end this subject by relating how my father lost nearly a thousand acres of valuable timber on one of the estates which had come to him from his brother, the Senator.

In the forties Count Orlóv, wishing to buy land for his sons, offered a price for this estate, which was in theGovernment of Tver. The parties came to terms, and it seemed that the transaction was complete. But when the Count went to examine his purchase, he wrote to my father that a forest marked upon the plan of the estate had simply disappeared.

“There!” said my father, “Orlóv is a clever man of course; he was involved in the conspiracy too.[39]He has written a book on finance; but when it comes to business, he is clearly no good. Necker[40]over again! I shall send a friend of my own to look at the place, not a conspirator but an honest man who understands business.”

39.See p.207.

40.Jacques Necker (1732-1804), Minister of Finance under Louis XVI; the husband of Gibbon’s first love, and the father of Mme. de Staël.

But alas! the honest man came back and reported that the forest had disappeared; all that remained was a fringe of trees, which made it impossible to detect the truth from the high road or from the manor-house. After the division between the brothers, my uncle had paid five visits to the place, but had seen nothing!

That our way of life may be thoroughly understood, I shall describe a whole day from the beginning. They were all alike, and this very monotony was the most killing part of it all. Our life went on like an English clock with the regulator put back—with a slow and steady movement and a loud tick for each second.

At ten in the morning, the valet who sat in the room next the bedroom, informed Vyéra Artamónovna, formerly my nurse, that the master was getting up; and she went off to prepare coffee, which my father drank alone in his study. The house now assumed a differentaspect: the servants began to clean the rooms or at least to make a pretence of doing something. The servants’ hall, empty till then, began to fill up; and even Macbeth, the big Newfoundland dog, sat down before the stove and stared unwinkingly at the fire.

Over his coffee my father read theMoscow Gazetteand theJournal de St. Petersburg. It may be worth mentioning that the newspapers were warmed to save his hands from contact with the damp sheets, and that he read the political news in the French version, finding it clearer than the Russian. For some time he took in theHamburg Gazette, but could not pardon the Germans for using German print; he often pointed out to me the difference between French and German type, and said that the curly tails of the Gothic letters tried his eyes. Then he ordered theJournal de Francfortfor a time, but finally contented himself with the native product.

When he had read the newspaper, he noticed for the first time the presence of Sonnenberg in the room. When Niko reached the age of fifteen, Sonnenberg professed to start a shop; but having nothing to sell and no customers, he gave it up, when he had spent such savings as he had in this useful form of commerce; yet he still called himself “a commercial agent.” He was then much over forty, and at that pleasant age he lived like the fowls of the air or a boy of fourteen; he never knew to-day where he would sleep or how he would secure a dinner to-morrow. He enjoyed my father’s favour to a certain extent: what that amounted to, we shall see presently.

In 1840 my father bought the house next to ours, alarger and better house, with a garden, which had belonged to Countess Rostopchín, wife of the famous governor of Moscow. We moved into it. Then he bought a third house, for no reason except that it was adjacent. Two of these houses stood empty; they were never let because tenants would give trouble and might cause fires—both houses were insured, by the way—and they were never repaired, so that both were in a fair way to fall down. Sonnenberg was permitted to lodge in one of these houses, but on conditions: (1) he must never open the yard-gates after 10 p.m. (as the gates were never shut, this was an easy condition); (2) he was to provide fire-wood at his own expense (he did in fact buy it of our coachman); and (3) he was to serve my father as a kind of private secretary, coming in the morning to ask for orders, dining with us, and returning in the evening, when there was no company, to entertain his employer with conversation and the news.

The duties of his place may seem simple enough; but my father contrived to make it so bitter that even Sonnenberg could not stand it continuously, though he was familiar with all the privations that can befall a man with no money and no sense, with a feeble body, a pock-marked face, and German nationality. Every two years or so, the secretary declared that his patience was at an end. He packed up his traps, got together by purchase or barter some odds and ends of disputable value and doubtful quality, and started off for the Caucasus. Misfortune dogged him relentlessly. Either his horse—he drove his own horse as far as Tiflis and Redut-Kale—came down with him in dangerous places inhabited by Don Cossacks; or half his wares were stolen; or his two-wheeled cartbroke down and his French scent-bottles wasted their sweetness on the broken wheel at the foot of Mount Elbruz; he was always losing something, and when he had nothing else to lose, he lost his passport. Nearly a year would pass, and then Sonnenberg, older, more unkempt, and poorer than before, with fewer teeth and less hair than ever, would turn up humbly at our house, with a stock of Persian powder against fleas and bugs, faded silk for dressing-gowns, and rusty Circassian daggers; and down he settled once more in the empty house, to buy his own fire-wood and run errands by way of rent.

As soon as he noticed Sonnenberg, my father began a little campaign at once. He acknowledged by a bow enquiries as to his health; then he thought a little, and asked (this just as an example of his methods), “Where do you buy your hair-oil?”

I should say that Sonnenberg, though the plainest of men, thought himself a regular Don Juan: he was careful about his clothes and wore a curling wig of a golden-yellow colour.

“I buy it of Buis, on the Kuznetsky Bridge,” he answered abruptly, rather nettled; and then he placed one foot on the other, like a man prepared to defend himself.

“What do you call that scent?”

“Night-violet,” was the answer.

“The man is cheating you. Violet is a delicate scent, but this stuff is strong and unpleasant, the sort of thing embalmers use for dead bodies. In the weak condition of my nerves, it makes me feel ill. Please tell them to bring me some eau-de-cologne.”

Sonnenberg made off himself to fetch the bottle.

“Oh, no! you’d better call someone. If you come nearer me yourself, I shall faint.” Sonnenberg, who counted on his hair-oil to captivate the maids, was deeply injured.

When he had sprinkled the room with eau-de-cologne, my father set about inventing errands: there was French snuff and English magnesia to be ordered, and a carriage advertised for sale to be looked at—not that my father ever bought anything. Then Sonnenberg bowed and disappeared till dinner-time, heartily glad to get away.

The next to appear on the scene was the cook. Whatever he had bought or put on the slate, my father always objected to the price.

“Dear, dear! how high prices are! Is nothing coming in from the country?”

“No, indeed, Sir,” answered the cook; “the roads are very bad just now.”

“Well, you and I must buy less, until they’re mended.”

Next he sat down at his writing table, where he wrote orders for his bailiff or examined his accounts, and scolded me in the intervals of business. He consulted his doctor also; but his chief occupation was to quarrel with his valet, Nikíta. Nikíta was a perfect martyr. He was a short, red-faced man with a hot temper, and might have been created on purpose to annoy my father and draw down reproofs upon himself. The scenes that took place between the two every day might have furnished material for a comedy, but it was all serious to them. Knowing that the man was indispensable to him, my father often put up with his rudeness; yet, in spite of thirty years ofcomplete failure, he still persisted in lecturing him for his faults. The valet would have found the life unendurable, if he had not possessed one means of relief: he was generally tipsy by dinner-time. My father, though this did not escape him, did not go beyond indirect allusions to the subject: for instance, he would say that a piece of brown bread and salt prevented a man from smelling of spirits. When Nikita had taken too much, he shuffled his feet in a peculiar way while handing the dishes; and my father, on noticing this, used to invent a message for him at once; for instance, he would send him to the barber’s to ask if he had changed his address. Then he would say to me in French: “I know he won’t go; but he’s not sober; he might drop a soup plate and stain the cloth and give me a start. Let him take a turn; the fresh air will do him good.”

On these occasions, the valet generally made some reply, or, if not, muttered to himself as he left the room. Then the master called him back with unruffled composure, and asked him, “What did you say to me?”

“I said nothing at all to you.”

“Then who are you talking to? Except you and me, there is nobody in this room or the next.”

“I was talking to myself.”

“A very dangerous thing: madness often begins in that way.”

The valet went off in a fury to his room, which was next to his master’s bedroom. There he read theMoscow Gazetteand made wigs for sale. Probably to relieve his feelings, he took snuff furiously, and the snuff was so strong or the membrane of his nose so weak, that he always sneezed six or seven times after a pinch.

The master’s bell rang and the valet threw down the hair in his hands and answered the bell.

“Is that you sneezing?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Then, bless you!”—and a motion of the hand dismissed the valet.

On the eve of each Ash Wednesday all the servants came, according to the old custom, to ask pardon of their master for offences; and on these solemn occasions my father came into the drawing-room accompanied by his valet. He always pretended that he could not recognise some of the people.

“Who is that decent old man, standing in that corner?” he would ask the valet.

“Danilo, the coachman,” was the impatient answer; for Nikita knew this was all play-acting.

“Dear, dear! how changed he is! I really believe it is drinking too much that ages them so fast. What does he do now?”

“He drives fire-wood.”

My father made a face as if he were suffering severe pain. “Drives wood? What do you mean? Wood is not driven, it is conveyed in a cart. Thirty years might have taught you to speak better.... Well, Danilo, God in His mercy has permitted me to meet you yet another year. I pardon you all your offences throughout the year, your waste of my oats and your neglect of my horses; and you must pardon me. Go on with your work while strength lasts; and now that Lent is beginning, I adviseyou to take rather less spirits: at our years it is bad for the health, and the Church forbids it.” This was the kind of way in which he spoke to them all on this occasion.

We dined at four: the dinner lasted a long time and was very tiresome. Spiridon was an excellent cook; but his parsimony as well as my father’s made the meal rather unsatisfying, though there were a number of courses. My father used to put bits for the dogs in a red jar that stood beside his place; he also fed them off his fork, a proceeding which was deeply resented by the servants and therefore by myself also; but I do not know why.

Visitors, rare in general, were especially rare at dinner. I only remember one, whose appearance at the table had power at times to smoothe the frown from my father’s face, General Nikolai Bakhmétyev. He had given up active service long ago; but he and my father had been gay young subalterns together in the Guards, in the time of Catherine; and, while her son was on the throne, both had been court-martialled, Bakhmétyev for fighting a duel, and my father for acting as a second. Later, the one had gone off to foreign parts as a tourist, the other to Ufá as Governor. Bakhmétyev was a big man, healthy and handsome even in old age: he enjoyed his dinner and his glass of wine, he enjoyed cheerful conversation, and other things as well. He boasted that in his day he had eaten a hundred meat patties at a sitting; and, at sixty, he could eat a dozen buckwheat cakes swimming in a pool of butter, with no fear of consequences. I witnessed his feats of this kind more than once.

He had some faint influence over my father and couldcontrol him to some extent. When he saw that his friend was in too bad a temper, he would put on his hat and march away. “I’m off for the present,” he would say; “you’re not well, and dull to-night. I meant to dine with you but I can’t stand sour faces at my dinner.Gehorsamer Diener!” Then my father would say to me, by way of explanation: “What life there is in that old man yet! He may thank God for his good health; he can’t feel for poor sufferers like me; in this awful frost he rushes about in his sledge and thinks nothing of it, at this season; but I thank my Creator every morning for waking up with the breath still in my body. There is truth in the proverb—it’s ill talking between a full man and a fasting.” More indulgence than this it was impossible to expect from my father.

Family dinners were given occasionally to near relations, but these entertainments proceeded rather from deep design than from mere warmth of heart. Thus my uncle, the Senator, was always invited to a party at our house for his birthday, February 20, and we were invited by him for St. John’s Day, June 24, which was my father’s birthday; this arrangement not only set an edifying example of brotherly love, but also saved each of them from giving a much larger entertainment at his own house.

There were some regular guests as well. Sonnenberg appeared at dinnerex officio; he had prepared himself by a bumper of brandy and a sardine eaten beforehand, and declined the tiny glass of stale brandy offered him. My last French tutor was an occasional guest—an old miser and scandal-monger, with an impudent face. M. Thirié constantly made the mistake of filling his glass with wineinstead of beer. My father would say to him, “If you remember that the wine is on your right, you will not make the mistake in future”: and Thirié crammed a great pinch of snuff into his large and crooked nose, and spilt the snuff over his plate.

One of these visitors was an exceedingly comic figure, a short, bald old man, who always wore a short, tight tail-coat, and a waistcoat which ended where a modern waistcoat begins. His name was Dmitri Pimyónov, and he always looked twenty years out of date, reminding you of 1810 in 1830, and of 1820 in 1840. He was interested in literature, but his natural capacity was small, and he had been brought up on the sentimental phrases of Karamzín, or Marmontel and Marivaux. Dmítriev was his master in poetry; and he had been tempted to make some experiments of his own on that slippery track which is trod by Russian authors—his first publication was a translation of La Rochefoucauld’sPensées, and his second a treatise onFemale Beauty and Charm. But his chief distinction was, not that he had once published books which nobody ever read, but that, if he once began to laugh, he could not stop, but went on till he crowed convulsively like a child with whooping-cough. He was aware of this, and therefore took his precautions when he felt it coming on: he pulled out his handkerchief, looked at his watch, buttoned up his coat, and covered his face with both hands; then, when the paroxysm was imminent, he got up, turned his face to the wall, and stood in that position suffering torments, for half an hour or longer; at last, red in the face and worn out by his exertions, he sat down againand mopped his bald head; and for a long time an occasional sob heaved his body.

He was a kindly man, but awkward and poor and a man of letters. Consequently my father attached no importance to him and considered him as “below the salt” in all respects; but he was well aware of this tendency to convulsive laughter, and used to make his guest laugh to such an extent that other people could not help laughing too in an uncomfortable fashion. Then the author of all this merriment, with a slight smile on his own lips, used to look at us as a man looks at puppies when they are rioting.

My father sometimes played dreadful tricks on this unlucky admirer ofFemale Beauty and Charm.

A Colonel of Engineers was announced by the servant one day. “Bring him in,” said my father, and then he turned to Pimyónov and said, “Please be careful before him: he is unfortunate enough to have a very peculiar stammer”—here he gave a very successful imitation of the Colonel—“I know you are easily amused, but please restrain yourself.”

That was quite enough: before the officer had spoken three words, Pimyónov pulled out his handkerchief, made an umbrella out of his hand, and finally sprang to his feet.

The officer looked on in surprise, while my father said to me with perfect composure: “What can be the matter with our friend? He is suffering from spasms of some kind: order a glass of cold water for him at once, and bring eau-de-cologne.”

But in these cases Pimyónov clutched his hat and vanished. Home he went, shouting with laughter for amile or so, stopping at the crossings, and leaning against the lamp-posts.

For several years he dined at our house every second Sunday, with few exceptions; and my father was equally vexed, whether he came or failed to come. He was not kind to Pimyónov, but the worthy man took the long walk, in spite of that, until he died. There was nothing laughable about his death: he was a solitary old bachelor, and, when his long illness was nearing the end, he looked on while his housekeeper robbed him of the very sheets upon his bed and then left him without attendance.

But the real martyrs of our dinner-table were certain old and feeble ladies, who held a humble and uncertain position in the household of Princess Khovanski, my father’s sister. For the sake of change, or to get information about our domestic affairs—whether the heads of the family had quarrelled, whether the cook had beaten his wife and been detected by his master, whether a maid had slipped from the path of virtue—these old people sometimes came on a saint’s day to spend the day. I ought to mention that these old widows had known my father forty or fifty years earlier in the house of the Princess Meshcherski, where they were brought up for charity. During this interval between their precarious youth and unsettled old age, they had quarrelled for twenty years with husbands, tried to keep them sober, nursed them when paralysed, and buried them. One had fought the battle of life in Bessarabia with a husband on half-pay and a swarm of children; another, together with her husband, had been a defendant for years in the criminalcourts; and all these experiences had left on them the traces of life in provincial towns—a dread of those who have power in this world, a spirit of humility and also of blind fanaticism.

Their presence often gave rise to astonishing scenes.

“Are you not well, that you are eating nothing, Anna Yakimovna?” my father would ask.

Then Anna Yakimovna, the widow of some obscure official, an old woman with a worn faded face and a perpetual smell of camphor, apologised with eyes and fingers as she answered: “Excuse me,bátyushka—I am really quite ashamed; but, you know, by old custom to-day is a Fast-day.”

“What a nuisance! You are too scrupulous,mátushka: ‘not that which entereth into a man defileth a man but that which cometh out’: whatever you eat, the end is the same. But we ought to watch ‘what cometh out of the mouth,’ and that means scandal against our neighbours. I think you should dine at home on such days. Suppose a Turk were to turn up, he might want pilaus; but my house is not a hotel where each can order what he wants.” This terrified the old woman who had intended to ask for some milk pudding; but she now attacked thekvassand the salad, and made a pretence of eating enormously.

But if she, or any of them, began to eat meat on a Fast-day, then my father (who never fasted himself) would shake his head sorrowfully and say: “Do you really think it worth while, Anna Yakimovna, to give up the ancient custom, when you have so few years still to live? I, poor sinner, don’t fast myself, because I have many diseases; but you may thank God for your health, considering your age, and you have kept the fasts all your life; and nowall of a sudden—think what an example tothem—” pointing to the servants. And the poor old woman once more fell upon thekvassand the salad.

These scenes filled me with disgust, and I sometimes ventured to defend the victim by pointing out the desire of conformity which he expressed at other times. Then it was my father’s custom to get up and take off his velvet skull-cap by the tassel: holding it over his head, he would thank me for my lecture and beg me to excuse his forgetfulness. Then he would say to the old lady: “These are terrible times! Little wonder that you neglect the Fast, when children teach their parents! What are we coming to? It is an awful prospect; but fortunately you and I will not live to see it.”

After dinner my father generally lay down for an hour and a half, and the servants at once made off to the taverns and tea-shops. Tea was served at seven, and we sometimes had a visitor at that hour, especially my uncle, the Senator. This was a respite for us; for he generally brought a budget of news with him and produced it with much vivacity. Meanwhile my father put on an air of absolute indifference, keeping perfectly grave over the most comic stories, and questioning the narrator, as if he could not see the point, when he was told of any striking fact.

The Senator came off much worse, when he occasionally contradicted or disagreed with his younger brother, and sometimes even without contradicting him, if my father happened to be specially out of humour. In these serio-comic scenes, the most comic feature was the contrastbetween my uncle’s natural vehemence and my father’s artificial composure. “Oh, you’re not well to-day,” my uncle would say at last, and then snatch his hat and go off in a hurry. One day he was unable in his anger to open the door. “Damn that door!” he said, and kicked it with all his might. My father walked slowly up to the door, opened it, and said with perfect calmness, “The door works perfectly: but it opens outwards, and you try to open it inwards and get angry with it.” I may mention that the Senator, being two years older than my father, always addressed him as “thou,” while my father said “you” as a mark of respect for seniority.

When my uncle had gone, my father went to his bedroom; but first he always enquired whether the gates of the court were shut, and expressed some doubt when he was told they were, though he never took any steps to ascertain the facts. And now began the long business of undressing: face and hands were washed, fomentations applied and medicines swallowed; the valet placed on the table near the bed a whole arsenal of phials, nightlights, and pill-boxes. For about an hour the old man read memoirs of some kind, very often Bourrienne’sMemorial de St. Hélène. And so the day ended.

Such was the life I left in 1834, and such I found it in 1840, and such it remained down to my father’s death in 1846. When I returned from exile at the age of thirty, I realised that my father was right in many respects, and that he, to his misfortune, knew the world only too well. But did I deserve that he should preach even the truth in a manner so repulsive to the heart of youth? His intelligence,chilled by a long life spent in a corrupt society, made him suspicious of all the world; his feelings were not warm and did not crave for reconciliation; and therefore he remained at enmity with all his fellow-creatures.

In 1839, and still more in 1842, found him feeble and suffering from symptoms which were not imaginary. My uncle’s death had left him more solitary than ever; even his old valet had gone, but he was just the same; his bodily strength had failed him, but his cruel wit and his memory were unaffected; he still carried on the same petty tyranny, and the same old Sonnenberg still pitched his camp in our old house and ran errands as before.

For the first time, I realised the sadness of that life and watched with an aching heart that solitary deserted existence, fading away in the parched and stony desert which he had created around him by his own actions, but was powerless to change. He knew his powerlessness, and he saw death approaching, and held out jealously and stubbornly. I felt intense pity for the old man, but I could do nothing—he was inaccessible.

I sometimes walked past his study and saw him sitting in his deep armchair, a hard, uncomfortable seat; he had his dogs round him and was playing with my three-year-old son, just the two together. It seemed to me that the sight of this child relaxed the clutching fingers and stiffening nerves of old age, and that, when his dying hand touched the cradle of infancy, he could rest from the anxiety and irritable strife in which his whole life had been spent.

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