The Bet, and other stories

pains me to look at her, and to console her, if only a little, I let her talk as she pleases, and I am silent even when she judges people unjustly, or scolds me because I do not practise and do not publish text-books. Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I have not yet had tea, and gives a start: “Why am I sitting down?” she says, getting up. “The samovar has been on the table a long while, and I sit chatting. How forgetful I am? Good gracious!” She hurries away, but stops at the door to say: “We owe Yegor five months’ wages. Do you realise it? It’s a bad thing to let the servants’ wages run on. I’ve said so often. It’s much easier to pay ten roubles every month than fifty for five!” Outside the door she stops again: “I pity our poor Liza more than anybody. The girl studies at the Conservatoire. She’s always in good society, and the Lord only knows how she’s dressed. That fur-coat of hers! It’s a sin to show yourself in the street in it. If she had a different father, it would do, but everyone knows he is a famous professor, a privy councillor.” So, having reproached me for my name and title, she goes away at last. Thus begins my day. It does not improve. When I have drunk my tea, Liza comes in, in a fur-coat and hat, with her music, ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two. She looks younger. She is pretty, rather like my wife when she was young. She kisses me tenderly on my forehead and my hand. “Good morning, Papa. Quite well?” As a child she adored ice-cream, and I often had to take her to a confectioner’s. Ice-cream was her standard of beauty. If she wanted to praise me, she used to say: “Papa, you are ice-creamy.” One finger she called the pistachio, the other the cream, the third the raspberry finger and so on. And when she came to say good morning, I used to lift her on to my knees and kiss her fingers, and say: “The cream one, the pistachio one, the lemon one.” And now from force of habit I kiss Liza’s fingers and murmur: “Pistachio one, cream one, lemon one.” But it does not sound the same. I am cold like the ice-cream and I feel ashamed. When my daughter comes in and touches my forehead with her lips I shudder as though a bee had stung my forehead, I smile constrainedly and turn away my face. Since my insomnia began a question has been driving like a nail into my brain. My daughter continually sees how terribly I, an old man, blush because I owe the servant his wages; she sees how often the worry of small debts forces me to leave my work and to pace the room from corner to corner for hours, thinking; but why hasn’t she, even once, come to me without telling her mother and whispered: “Father, here’s my watch, bracelets, earrings, dresses.... Pawn them all.... You need money”? Why, seeing how I and her mother try to hide our poverty, out of false pride--why does she not deny herself the luxury of music lessons? I would not accept the watch, the bracelets, or her sacrifices--God forbid!--I do not want that. Which reminds me of my son, the Warsaw officer. He is a clever, honest, and sober fellow. But that doesn’t mean very much. If I had an old father, and I knew that there were moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I think I would give up my commission to someone else and hire myself out as a navvy. These thoughts of the children poison me. What good are they? Only a mean and irritable person can take refuge in thinking evil of ordinary people because they are not heroes. But enough of that. At a quarter to ten I have to go and lecture to my dear boys. I dress myself and walk the road I have known these thirty years. For me it has a history of its own. Here is a big grey building with a chemist’s shop beneath. A tiny house once stood there, and it was a beer-shop. In this beer-shop I thought out my thesis, and wrote my first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil on a scrap of paper that began “Historia Morbi.” Here is a grocer’s shop. It used to belong to a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, and later on to a fat woman who loved students “because every one of them had a mother.” Now a red-headed merchant sits there, a very nonchalant man, who drinks tea from a copper tea-pot. And here are the gloomy gates of the University that have not been repaired for years; a weary porter in a sheepskin coat, a broom, heaps of snow ... Such gates cannot produce a good impression on a boy who comes fresh from the provinces and imagines that the temple of science is really a temple. Certainly, in the history of Russian pessimism, the age of university buildings, the dreariness of the corridors, the smoke-stains on the walls, the meagre light, the dismal appearance of the stairs, the clothes-pegs and the benches, hold one of the foremost places in the series of predisposing causes. Here is our garden. It does not seem to have grown any better or any worse since I was a student. I do not like it. It would be much more sensible if tall pine-trees and fine oaks grew there instead of consumptive lime-trees, yellow acacias and thin clipped lilac. The student’s mood is created mainly by every one of the surroundings in which he studies; therefore he must see everywhere before him only what is great and strong and exquisite. Heaven preserve him from starveling trees, broken windows, and drab walls and doors covered with torn oilcloth. As I approach my main staircase the door is open wide. I am met by my old friend, of the same age and name as I, Nicolas the porter. He grunts as he lets me in: “It’s frosty, Your Excellency.” Or if my coat is wet: “It’s raining a bit, Your Excellency.” Then he runs in front of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the study he carefully takes off my coat and at the same time manages to tell me some university news. Because of the close acquaintance that exists between all the University porters and keepers, he knows all that happens in the four faculties, in the registry, in the chancellor’s cabinet, and the library. He knows everything. When, for instance, the resignation of the rector or dean is under discussion, I hear him talking to the junior porters, naming candidates and explaining offhand that so and so will not be approved by the Minister, so and so will himself refuse the honour; then he plunges into fantastic details of some mysterious papers received in the registry, of a secret conversation which appears to have taken place between the Minister and the curator, and so on. These details apart, he is almost always right. The impressions he forms of each candidate are original, but also true. If you want to know who read his thesis, joined the staff, resigned or died in a particular year, then you must seek the assistance of this veteran’s colossal memory. He will not only name you the year, month, and day, but give you the accompanying details of this or any other event. Such memory is the privilege of love. He is the guardian of the university traditions. From the porters before him he inherited many legends of the life of the university. He added to this wealth much of his own and if you like he will tell you many stories, long or short. He can tell you of extraordinary savants who knew _everything,_ of remarkable scholars who did not sleep for weeks on end, of numberless martyrs to science; good triumphs over evil with him. The weak always conquer the strong, the wise man the fool, the modest the proud, the young the old. There is no need to take all these legends and stories for sterling; but filter them, and you will find what you want in your filter, a noble tradition and the names of true heroes acknowledged by all. In our society all the information about the learned world consists entirely of anecdotes of the extraordinary absent-mindedness of old professors, and of a handful of jokes, which are ascribed to Guber or to myself or to Baboukhin. But this is too little for an educated society. If it loved science, savants and students as Nicolas loves them, it would long ago have had a literature of whole epics, stories, and biographies. But unfortunately this is yet to be. The news told, Nicolas looks stern and we begin to talk business. If an outsider were then to hear how freely Nicolas uses the jargon, he would be inclined to think that he was a scholar, posing as a soldier. By the way, the rumours of the university-porter’s erudition are very exaggerated. It is true that Nicolas knows more than a hundred Latin tags, can put a skeleton together and on occasion make a preparation, can make the students laugh with a long learned quotation, but the simple theory of the circulation of the blood is as dark to him now as it was twenty years ago. At the table in my room, bent low over a book or a preparation, sits my dissector, Peter Ignatievich. He is a hardworking, modest man of thirty-five without any gifts, already bald and with a big belly. He works from morning to night, reads tremendously and remembers everything he has read. In this respect he is not merely an excellent man, but a man of gold; but in all others he is a cart-horse, or if you like a learned blockhead. The characteristic traits of a cart-horse which distinguish him from a creature of talent are these. His outlook is narrow, absolutely bounded by his specialism. Apart from his own subject he is as naive as a child. I remember once entering the room and saying: “Think what bad luck! They say, Skobielev is dead.” Nicolas crossed himself; but Peter Ignatievich turned to me: “Which Skobielev do you mean?” Another time,--some time earlier--I announced that Professor Pierov was dead. That darling Peter Ignatievich asked: “What was his subject?” I imagine that if Patti sang into his ear, or Russia were attacked by hordes of Chinamen, or there was an earthquake, he would not lift a finger, but would go on in the quietest way with his eye screwed over his microscope. In a word: “What’s Hecuba to him?” I would give anything to see how this dry old stick goes to bed with his wife. Another trait: a fanatical belief in the infallibility of science, above all in everything that the Germans write. He is sure of himself and his preparations, knows the purpose of life, is absolutely ignorant of the doubts and disillusionments that turn talents grey,--a slavish worship of the authorities, and not a shadow of need to think for himself. It is hard to persuade him and quite impossible to discuss with him. Just try a discussion with a man who is profoundly convinced that the best science is medicine, the best men doctors, the best traditions--the medical! From the ugly past of medicine only one tradition has survived,--the white necktie that doctors wear still. For a learned, and more generally for an educated person there can exist only a general university tradition, without any division into traditions of medicine, of law, and so on. But it’s quite impossible for Peter Ignatievich to agree with that; and he is ready to argue it with you till doomsday. His future is quite plain to me. During the whole of his life he will make several hundred preparations of extraordinary purity, will write any number of dry, quite competent, essays, will make about ten scrupulously accurate translations; but he won’t invent gunpowder. For gunpowder, imagination is wanted, inventiveness, and a gift for divination, and Peter Ignatievich has nothing of the kind. In short, he is not a master of science but a labourer. Peter Ignatievich, Nicolas, and I whisper together. We are rather strange to ourselves. One feels something quite particular, when the audience booms like the sea behind the door. In thirty years I have not