The Bet, and other stories
My sanguine friend has a pleasant, succulent voice, clever, amusing
eyes, a good-natured face, rather puffed by assiduity to beer and much
resting on the sofa. Evidently he could tell me many interesting things
about the opera, about his love affairs, about the friends he adores;
but, unfortunately, it is not the thing. And I would so eagerly listen!
“On my word of honour, Professor, if you give me a ‘satis’ I’ll....”
As soon as it gets to “my word of honour,” I wave my hands and sit down
to the table. The student thinks for a while and says, dejectedly:
“In that case, good-bye.... Forgive me!”
“Good-bye, my friend.... Good-bye!”
He walks irresolutely into the hall, slowly puts on his coat, and, when
he goes into the street, probably thinks again for a long while; having
excogitated nothing better than “old devil” for me, he goes to a cheap
restaurant to drink beer and dine, and then home to sleep. Peace be to
your ashes, honest labourer!
A third ring. Enters a young doctor in a new black suit, gold-rimmed
spectacles and the inevitable white necktie. He introduces himself.
I ask him to take a seat and inquire his business. The young priest
of science begins to tell me, not without agitation, that he passed
his doctor’s examination this year, and now has only to write his
dissertation. He would like to work with me, under my guidance; and
I would do him a great kindness if I would suggest a subject for his
dissertation.
“I should be delighted to be of use to you, mon cher confrère,” I
say. “But first of all, let us come to an agreement as to what is a
dissertation. Generally we understand by this, work produced as the
result of an independent creative power. Isn’t that so? But a work
written on another’s subject, under another’s guidance, has a different
name.”
The aspirant is silent. I fire up and jump out of my seat. “Why do you
all come to me? I can’t understand,” I cry out angrily. “Do I keep a
shop? I don’t sell theses across the counter. For the one thousandth
time I ask you all to leave me alone. Forgive my rudeness, but I’ve got
tired of it at last!”
The aspirant is silent. Only, a tinge of colour shows on his cheek.
His face expresses his profound respect for my famous name and my
erudition, but I see in his eyes that he despises my voice, my pitiable
figure, my nervous gestures. When I am angry I seem to him a very queer
fellow.
“I do not keep a shop,” I storm. “It’s an amazing business! Why don’t
you want to be independent? Why do you find freedom so objectionable?”
I say a great deal, but he is silent. At last by degrees I grow calm,
and, of course, surrender. The aspirant will receive a valueless
subject from me, will write under my observation a needless thesis,
will pass his tedious disputation _cum laude_ and will get a useless
and learned degree.
The rings follow in endless succession, but here I confine myself
to four. The fourth ring sounds, and I hear the familiar steps, the
rustling dress, the dear voice.
Eighteen years ago my dear friend, the oculist, died and left behind
him a seven year old daughter, Katy, and sixty thousand roubles. By
his will he made me guardian. Katy lived in my family till she was
ten. Afterwards she was sent to College and lived with me only in
her holidays in the summer months. I had no time to attend to her
education. I watched only by fits and starts; so that I can say very
little about her childhood.
The chief thing I remember, the one I love to dwell upon in memory,
is the extraordinary confidence which she had when she entered my
house, when she had to have the doctor,--a confidence which was always
shining in her darling face. She would sit in a corner somewhere
with her face tied up, and would be sure to be absorbed in watching
something. Whether she was watching me write and read books, or my wife
bustling about, or the cook peeling the potatoes in the kitchen or
the dog playing about--her eyes invariably expressed the same thing:
“Everything that goes on in this world,--everything is beautiful and
clever.” She was inquisitive and adored to talk to me. She would sit at
the table opposite me, watching my movements and asking questions. She
is interested to know what I read, what I do at the University, if I’m
not afraid of corpses, what I do with my money.
“Do the students fight at the University?” she would ask.
“They do, my dear.”
“You make them go down on their knees?”
“I do.”
And it seemed funny to her that the students fought and that I made
them go down on their knees, and she laughed. She was a gentle, good,
patient child.
Pretty often I happened to see how something was taken away from her,
or she was unjustly punished, or her curiosity was not satisfied. At
such moments sadness would be added to her permanent expression of
confidence--nothing more. I didn’t know how to take her part, but when
I saw her sadness, I always had the desire to draw her close to me and
comfort her in an old nurse’s voice: “My darling little orphan!”
I remember too she loved to be well dressed and to sprinkle herself
with scents. In this she was like me. I also love good clothes and fine
scents.
I regret that I had neither the time nor the inclination to watch the
beginnings and the growth of the passion which had completely taken
hold of Katy when she was no more than fourteen or fifteen. I mean her
passionate love for the theatre. When she used to come from the College
for her holidays and live with us, nothing gave her such pleasure and
enthusiasm to talk about as plays and actors. She used to tire us
with her incessant conversation about the theatre. I alone hadn’t the
courage to deny her my attention. My wife and children did not listen
to her. When she felt the desire to share her raptures she would come
to my study and coax: “Nicolai Stiepanich, do let me speak to you about
the theatre.”
I used to show her the time and say:
“I’ll give you half an hour. Fire away!”
Later on she used to bring in pictures of the actors and actresses she
worshipped--whole dozens of them. Then several times she tried to take
part in amateur theatricals, and finally when she left College she
declared to me she was born to be an actress.
I never shared Katy’s enthusiasms for the theatre. My opinion is that
if a play is good then there’s no need to trouble the actors for it to
make the proper impression; you can be satisfied merely by reading it.
If the play is bad, no acting will make it good.
When I was young I often went to the theatre, and nowadays my family
takes a box twice a year and carries me off for an airing there. Of
course this is not enough to give me the right to pass verdicts on the
theatre; but I will say a few words about it. In my opinion the theatre
hasn’t improved in the last thirty or forty years. I can’t find any
more than I did then, a glass of clean water, either in the corridors
or the foyer. Just as they did then, the attendants fine me sixpence
for my coat, though there’s nothing illegal in wearing a warm coat in
winter. Just as it did then, the orchestra plays quite unnecessarily
in the intervals, and adds a new, gratuitous impression to the one
received from the play. Just as they did then, men go to the bar in the
intervals and drink spirits. If there is no perceptible improvement in
little things, it will be useless to look for it in the bigger things.
When an actor, hide-bound in theatrical traditions and prejudices,
tries to read simple straightforward monologue: “To be or not to be,”
not at all simply, but with an incomprehensible and inevitable hiss and
convulsions over his whole body, or when he tries to convince me that
Chazky, who is always talking to fools and is in love with a fool, is
a very clever man and that “The Sorrows of Knowledge” is not a boring
play,--then I get from the stage a breath of the same old routine
that exasperated me forty years ago when I was regaled with classical
lamentation and beating on the breast. Every time I come out of the
theatre a more thorough conservative than I went in.
It’s quite possible to convince the sentimental, self-confident crowd
that the theatre in its present state is an education. But not a man
who knows what true education is would swallow this. I don’t know what
it may be in fifty or a hundred years, but under present conditions the
theatre can only be a recreation. But the recreation is too expensive
for continual use, and robs the country of thousands of young, healthy,
gifted men and women, who if they had not devoted themselves to
the theatre would be excellent doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses,
or officers. It robs the public of its evenings, the best time for
intellectual work and friendly conversation. I pass over the waste of
money and the moral injuries to the spectator when he sees murder,
adultery, or slander wrongly treated on the stage.
But Katy’s opinion was quite the opposite. She assured me that even in
its present state the theatre is above lecture-rooms and books, above
everything else in the world. The theatre is a power that unites in
itself all the arts, and the actors are men with a mission. No separate
art or science can act on the human soul so strongly and truly as the
stage; and therefore it is reasonable that a medium actor should enjoy
much greater popularity than the finest scholar or painter. No public
activity can give such delight and satisfaction as the theatrical.
So one fine day Katy joined a theatrical company and went away, I
believe, to Ufa, taking with her a lot of money, a bagful of rainbow
hopes, and some very high-class views on the business.
Her first letters on the journey were wonderful. When I read them I was
simply amazed that little sheets of paper could contain so much youth,
such transparent purity, such divine innocence, and at the same time
so many subtle, sensible judgments, that would do honour to a sound
masculine intelligence. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her
friends, her successes and failures--she did not write about them, she
sang. Every line breathed the confidence which I used to see in her
face; and with all this a mass of grammatical mistakes and hardly a
single stop.
Scarce six months passed before I received a highly poetical
enthusiastic letter, beginning, “I have fallen in love.” She enclosed a
photograph of a young man with a clean-shaven face, in a broad-brimmed
hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulders. The next letters were just
as splendid, but stops already began to appear and the grammatical
mistakes to vanish. They had a strong masculine scent. Katy began
to write about what a good thing it would be to build a big theatre
somewhere in the Volga, but on a cooperative basis, and to attract
the rich business-men and shipowners to the undertaking. There would
be plenty of money, huge receipts, and the actors would work in
partnership.... Perhaps all this is really a good thing, but I can’t
help thinking such schemes could only come from a man’s head.
Anyhow for eighteen months or a couple of years everything seemed
to be all right. Katy was in love, had her heart in her business
and was happy. But later on I began to notice clear symptoms of a
decline in her letters. It began with Katy complaining about her
friends. This is the first and most ominous sign. If a young scholar
or littérateur begins his career by complaining bitterly about other
scholars or littérateurs, it means that he is tired already and not
fit for his business. Katy wrote to me that her friends would not
come to rehearsals and never knew their parts; that they showed an
utter contempt for the public in the absurd plays they staged and
the manner they behaved. To swell the box-office receipts--the only