The Bet, and other stories
didn’t know them at all. You listen to me, dear. Leave everything and
go away: go abroad--the quicker, the better.”
“What nonsense! What about the University?”
“And the University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it
all. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your
pupils? Have you many famous scholars? Count them up. But to increase
the number of doctors who exploit the general ignorance and make
hundreds of thousands,--there’s no need to be a good and gifted man.
You aren’t wanted.”
“My God, how bitter you are!” I get terrified. “How bitter you are. Be
quiet, or I’ll go away. I can’t reply to the bitter things you say.”
The maid enters and calls us to tea. Thank God, our conversation
changes round the samovar. I have made my moan, and now I want to
indulge another senile weakness--reminiscences. I tell Katy about
my past, to my great surprise with details that I never suspected I
had kept safe in my memory. And she listens to me with emotion, with
pride, holding her breath. I like particularly to tell how I once was a
student at a seminary and how I dreamed of entering the University.
“I used to walk in the seminary garden,” I tell her, “and the wind
would bring the sound of a song and the thrumming of an accordion from
a distant tavern, or a _troika_ with bells would pass quickly by the
seminary fence. That would be quite enough to fill not only my breast
with a sense of happiness, but my stomach, legs, and hands. As I heard
the sound of the accordion or the bells fading away, I would see myself
a doctor and paint pictures, one more glorious than another. And, you
see, my dreams came true. There were more things I dared to dream of.
I have been a favourite professor thirty years, I have had excellent
friends and an honourable reputation. I loved and married when I was
passionately in love. I had children. Altogether, when I look back
the whole of my life seems like a nice, clever composition. The only
thing I have to do now is not to spoil the _finale._ For this, I must
die like a man. If death is really a danger then I must meet it as
becomes a teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian State. But I
am spoiling the _finale._ I am drowning, and I run to you and beg for
help, and you say: ‘Drown. It’s your duty.’”
At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall. Katy and I both
recognise it and say:
“That must be Mikhail Fiodorovich.”
And indeed in a minute Mikhail Fiodorovich, my colleague, the
philologist, enters. He is a tall, well-built man about fifty years
old, clean shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a
good man and an admirable friend. He belongs to an old aristocratic
family, a prosperous and gifted house which has played a notable _rôle_
in the history of our literature and education. He himself is clever,
gifted, and highly educated, but not without his eccentricities.
To a certain extent we are all eccentric, queer fellows, but his
eccentricities have an element of the exceptional, not quite safe for
his friends. Among the latter I know not a few who cannot see his many
merits clearly because of his eccentricities.
As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
“How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It’s hellishly cold.”
Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately
begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably
ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare’s
grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously.
His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his
tender, easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and
provocativeness don’t tire one’s ears, and one very soon gets used
to it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the
university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the
table.
“O Lord,” he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows,
“there are some funny people in the world.”
“Who?” asks Katy.
“I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot
N---- on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse
jowl of his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife,
and his students, who won’t come to his lectures. ‘Well,’ I think to
myself, ‘he’s seen me. It’s all up--no hope for me...’”
And so on in the same strain. Or he begins like this,
“Yesterday I was at Z’s public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do
wonder how our _alma mater_ dares to show the public such an ass, such
a double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he’s a European fool. Good Lord,
you won’t find one like him in all Europe--not even if you looked in
daytime, and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were
sucking a stick of barley-sugar--su--su--su. He gets a fright because
he can’t make out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just
keep moving, hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all
you can’t make out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it’s so
terrific. It can only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at
the Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with
it!”
Immediately an abrupt change of subject.
“I had to make the speech; three years ago. Nicolai Stiepanovich will
remember. It was hot, close. My full uniform was tight under my arms,
tight as death. I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half,
two hours. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘thank God I’ve only ten pages left.’ And
I had four pages of peroration that I needn’t read at all. ‘Only six
pages then,’ I thought. Imagine it. I just gave a glance in front of me
and saw sitting next to each other in the front row a general with a
broad ribbon and a bishop. The poor devils were bored stiff. They were
staring about madly to stop themselves from going to sleep. For all
that they are still trying to look attentive, to make some appearance
of understanding what I’m reading, and look as though they like it.
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘if you like it, then you shall have it. I’ll spite
you.’ So I set to and read the four pages, every word.”
When he speaks only his eyes and eyebrows smile as it is generally with
the ironical. At such moments there is no hatred or malice in his eyes
but a great deal of acuteness and that peculiar fox-cunning which you
can catch only in very observant people. Further, about his eyes I have
noticed one more peculiarity. When he takes his glass from Katy, or
listens to her remarks, or follows her with a glance as she goes out of
the room for a little while, then I catch in his look something humble,
prayerful, pure....
The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a big piece of
cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne, a thoroughly
bad wine which Katy got to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail
Fiodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelves and sets them out
for patience. If one may believe his assurances, some games of patience
demand a great power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless
while he sets out the cards he amuses himself by talking continually.
Katy follows his cards carefully, helping him more by mimicry than
words. In the whole evening she drinks no more than two small glasses
of wine, I drink only a quarter of a glass, the remainder of the bottle
falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink any amount without ever
getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty
order, and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
“Science, thank God, has had her day,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich very
slowly. “She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel
the desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the
soil of prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence
of prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics
and philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have
no sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of
externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they
lost by that?”
“Flies haven’t any scientific knowledge either,” I say; “but what does
that prove?”
“It’s no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between
ourselves. I’m more cautious than you think. I shan’t proclaim it from
the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that
science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to
crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It’s not for
you and me to destroy it. God forbid!”
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
“Our public is degenerate nowadays,” Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. “I
don’t speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should
be able to work and think decently. ‘Sadly I look at the men of our
time’--it’s quite true in this connection.”
“Yes, they’re frightfully degenerate,” Katy agrees. “Tell me, had you
one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?”
“I don’t know how it is with the other professors,--but somehow I don’t
recollect that it ever happened to me.”
“In my lifetime I’ve seen a great many of your students and young
scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had
the luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily
interesting person. Everything’s dull and incapable, swollen and
pretentious....”
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression
that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my
daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale
and are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such
penny-dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons
with the glorious past. Any indictment, even if it’s made in a company
of ladies, should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise
it isn’t an indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don’t
see any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don’t find
it any worse now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in
this case has its value, says that students nowadays are neither better
nor worse than their predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present
pupils, I wouldn’t say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain
precision. I know their defects and there’s no need for me to take
refuge in a mist of commonplaces. I don’t like the way they smoke,
and drink spirits, and marry late; or the way they are careless
and indifferent to the point of allowing students to go hungry in
their midst, and not paying their debts into “The Students’ Aid
Society.” They are ignorant of modern languages and express themselves
incorrectly in Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist,
complained to me that he had to lecture twice as often because of
their incompetent knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of
meteorology. They are readily influenced by the most modern writers,
and some of those not the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to
classics like Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and
their worldly unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability
to distinguish between great and small. They solve all difficult
questions which have a more or less social character (emigration,
for instance) by getting up subscriptions, but not by the method of
scientific investigation and experiment, though this is at their full
disposal, and, above all, corresponds to their vocation. They readily