The Bet, and other stories
become house-doctors, assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or
consulting doctors, and they are prepared to keep these positions until
they are forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal
initiative are quite as necessary in science, as, for instance, in art
or commerce. I have pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or
successors. Therefore I love them and am concerned for them, but I’m
not proud of them ... and so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it’s only in a
cowardly and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and
distraction. All of them are by nature accidental and transitory, and
are completely dependent on the conditions of life. Ten years will
be enough for them to disappear or give place to new and different
defects, which are quite indispensable, but will in their turn give
the timid a fright. Students’ shortcomings often annoy me, but the
annoyance is nothing in comparison with the joy I have had these thirty
years in speaking with my pupils, lecturing to them, studying their
relations and comparing them with people of a different class.
Mikhail Fiodorovich is a slanderer. Katy listens and neither of them
notices how deep is the pit into which they are drawn by such an
outwardly innocuous recreation as condemning one’s neighbours. They
don’t realise how a simple conversation gradually turns into mockery
and derision, or how they both begin even to employ the manners of
calumny.
“There are some queer types to be found,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich.
“Yesterday I went to see our friend Yegor Pietrovich. There I found a
student, one of your medicos, a third-year man, I think. His face ...
rather in the style of Dobroliubov--the stamp of profound thought on
his brow. We began to talk. ‘My dear fellow--an extraordinary business.
I’ve just read that some German or other--can’t remember his name--has
extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain--idiotine.’ Do you know
he really believed it, and produced an expression of respect on his
face, as much as to say, ‘See, what a power we are.’”
“The other day I went to the theatre. I sat down. Just in front of me
in the next row two people were sitting: one, ‘one of the chosen,’
evidently a law student, the other a whiskery medico. The medico was as
drunk as a cobbler. Not an atom of attention to the stage. Dozing and
nodding. But the moment some actor began to deliver a loud monologue,
or just raised his voice, my medico thrills, digs his neighbour in the
ribs. ‘What’s he say? Something noble?’ ‘Noble,’ answers ‘the chosen.’
“‘Brrravo!’ bawls the medico. ‘No--ble. Bravo.’ You see the drunken
blockhead didn’t come to the theatre for art, but for something noble.
He wants nobility.”
Katy listens and laughs. Her laugh is rather strange. She breathes out
in swift, rhythmic, and regular alternation with her inward breathing.
It’s as though she were playing an accordion. Of her face, only her
nostrils laugh. My heart fails me. I don’t know what to say. I lose my
temper, crimson, jump up from my seat and cry:
“Be quiet, won’t you? Why do you sit here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? I’ve had enough.”
In vain I wait for them to stop their slanders. I prepare to go home.
And it’s time, too. Past ten o’clock.
“I’ll sit here a little longer,” says Mikhail Fiodorovich, “if you give
me leave, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“You have my leave,” Katy answers.
“_Bene._ In that case, order another bottle, please.”
Together they escort me to the hall with candles in their hands. While
I’m putting on my overcoat, Mikhail Fiodorovich says:
“You’ve grown terribly thin and old lately. Nicolai Stiepanovich.
What’s the matter with you? Ill?
“Yes, a little.”
“And he will not look after himself,” Katy puts in sternly.
“Why don’t you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God
helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your
family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I
go abroad, I’ll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I’m off next week.”
I came away from Katy’s irritated, frightened by the talk about
my illness and discontented with myself. “And why,” I ask myself,
“shouldn’t I be attended by one of my colleagues?” Instantly I see how
my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a
little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent
me from reading the truth in his face: “At the moment I don’t see
anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to
break off your work....” And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn’t have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I
sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about
the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also
about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I
read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a
hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe
that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining
in it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death
will take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep
as the sky, as bright, as striking ... but no! I think of myself, of
my wife, Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts
are not good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment
my attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous
Arakheev wrote in one of his intimate letters: “All good in the world
is inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good.”
Which means that everything is ugly, there’s nothing to live for,
and the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I
surprise myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are
accidental and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think
immediately:
“If that’s true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads.” And
I swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go
to her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no
family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev
thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole
being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my
limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed
and soon fall asleep.
And then--insomnia.
IV
The summer comes and life changes.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a joking tone:
“Come, Your Excellency. It’s all ready.”
They lead My Excellency into the street, put me into a cab and drive me
away. For want of occupation I read the signboards backwards as I go.
The word “Tavern” becomes “Nrevat.” That would do for a baron’s name:
Baroness Nrevat. Beyond, I drive across the field by the cemetery,
which produces no impression upon me whatever, though I’ll soon
lie there. After a two hours’ drive, My Excellency is led into the
ground-floor of the bungalow, and put into a small, lively room with a
light-blue paper.
Insomnia at night as before, but I am no more wakeful in the morning
and don’t listen to my wife, but lie in bed. I don’t sleep, but I
am in a sleepy state, half-forgetfulness, when you know you are not
asleep, but have dreams. I get up in the afternoon, and sit down at
the table by force of habit, but now I don’t work any more but amuse
myself with French yellow-backs sent me by Katy. Of course it would
be more patriotic to read Russian authors, but to tell the truth I’m
not particularly disposed to them. Leaving out two or three old ones,
all the modern literature doesn’t seem to me to be literature but a
unique home industry which exists only to be encouraged, but the goods
are bought with reluctance. The best of these homemade goods can’t be
called remarkable and it’s impossible to praise it sincerely without a
saving “but”; and the same must be said of all the literary novelties
I’ve read during the last ten or fifteen years. Not one remarkable,
and you can’t dispense with “but.” They have cleverness, nobility, and
no talent; talent, nobility and no cleverness; or finally, talent,
cleverness, but no nobility.
I would not say that French books have talent, cleverness, and
nobility. Nor do they satisfy me. But they are not so boring as the
Russian; and it is not rare to find in them the chief constituent
of creative genius--the sense of personal freedom, which is lacking
to Russian authors. I do not recall one single new book in which
from the very first page the author did not try to tie himself up in
all manner of conventions and contracts with his conscience. One is
frightened to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot
by psychological analysis, a third must have “a kindly attitude to
his fellow-men,” the fourth heaps up whole pages with descriptions of
nature on purpose to avoid any suspicion of a tendency.... One desires
to be in his books a bourgeois at all costs, another at all costs an
aristocrat. Deliberation, cautiousness, cunning: but no freedom, no
courage to write as one likes, and therefore no creative genius.
All this refers to _belles-lettres,_ so-called.
As for serious articles in Russian, on sociology, for instance, or
art and so forth, I don’t read them, simply out of timidity. For
some reason in my childhood and youth I had a fear of porters and
theatre attendants, and this fear has remained with me up till now.
Even now I am afraid of them. It is said that only that which one
cannot understand seems terrible. And indeed it is very difficult to
understand why hall-porters and theatre attendants are so pompous
and haughty and importantly polite. When I read serious articles, I
have exactly the same indefinable fear. Their portentous gravity,
their playfulness, like an archbishop’s, their over-familiar
attitude to foreign authors, their capacity for talking dignified
nonsense--“filling a vacuum with emptiness”--it is all inconceivable
to me and terrifying, and quite unlike the modesty and the calm and
gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed when reading our writers on
medicine and the natural sciences. Not only articles; I have difficulty
also in reading translations even when they are edited by serious
Russians. The presumptuous benevolence of the prefaces, the abundance
of notes by the translator (which prevents one from concentrating), the
parenthetical queries and _sics,_ which are so liberally scattered
over the book or the article by the translator--seem to me an assault
on the author’s person, as well as on my independence as a reader.
Once I was invited as an expert to the High Court. In the interval
one of my fellow-experts called my attention to the rude behaviour
of the public prosecutor to the prisoners, among whom were two women
intellectuals. I don’t think I exaggerated at all when I replied to
my colleague that he was not behaving more rudely than authors of
serious articles behave to one another. Indeed their behaviour is so
rude that one speaks of them with bitterness. They behave to each other
or to the writers whom they criticise either with too much deference,
careless of their own dignity, or, on the other hand, they treat them
much worse than I have treated Gnekker, my future son-in-law, in
these notes and thoughts of mine. Accusations of irresponsibility, of
impure intentions, of any kind of crime even, are the usual adornment
of serious articles. And this, as our young medicos love to say in
their little articles--quite _ultima ratio._ Such an attitude must