“I find these reproaches vile and repulsive! I need nothing from you! Nothing! I’d sooner die of hunger than eat even one more crumb of yours! Here’s your wretched money! Take it!”
The mother pressed herself against the wall and started waving her hands, as if it were not her son standing before her, but a phantom.
“What have I done wrong?” she wept. “What?”
The son waved his hand, just like his father, and ran outside. Shiryaev’s house stood isolated by a gully that cut through the steppe for three miles. Its edges were overgrown with young oaks and alders, and a stream ran along the bottom. One side of the house looked onto the gully, the other onto the open field. There were no wooden or wattle fences. Instead there were all sorts of outbuildings, pressing close to each other as they surrounded the small space in front of the house, which was considered the yard and where chickens, ducks, and pigs walked about.
Having gone outside, the student went down the muddy road to the field. A penetrating autumnal dampness filled the air. The road was muddy, little puddles glistened here and there, and from the grass of the yellow field peered autumn itself: dismal, putrid, dark. On the right side of the road was a kitchen garden, all dug up, gloomy, with occasional sunflowers rising from it, their downcast heads already black.
Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to go to Moscow on foot, to go as he was, without a hat, in tattered boots, and without a kopeck. At the hundredth mile, his dishevelled and frightened father would catch up with him, start begging him to come back or to accept the money, but he would not even glance at him, and would keep going, going…Bare forests would be supplanted by dismal fields, the fields by forests; soon the earth would turn white with the first snow and the streams would be covered with sheet ice…Somewhere near Kursk or Serpukhov, exhausted and starving, he would fall down and die. His body would be found, and in all the newspapers the report would appear that in such-and-such place the student so-and-so had died of hunger…
A white dog with a dirty tail, who had been wandering about the kitchen garden looking for something, glanced at him and trudged after him…
He walked along the road and thought about his death, about his family’s grief, his father’s moral torment, and at the same time he pictured to himself all sorts of adventures on the road, one more whimsical than the other, picturesque places, scary nights, chance encounters. He imagined a procession of women pilgrims, a hut in the forest with one little window, which shone brightly in the darkness; he stands by the window, asks for a night’s lodging…they let him in and—suddenly he sees robbers. Or better stilclass="underline" he comes upon a big manor house, where, on learning who he is, they give him food and drink, play the piano for him, listen to his complaints, and the owner’s beautiful daughter falls in love with him.
Preoccupied with his grief and similar thoughts, young Shiryaev kept walking and walking…Far, far ahead against a background of gray clouds an inn appeared darkly; still further beyond the inn, right on the horizon, a small bump could be seen; that was the railroad station. This bump reminded him of the connection that existed between the place where he now stood and Moscow, in which streetlights burned, carriages rattled, lectures were given. He nearly burst into tears from anguish and impatience. This solemn nature with its order and beauty, this deathly silence all around, disgusted him to the point of despair, of hatred!
“Watch out!” he heard a loud voice behind him.
An old lady landowner of his acquaintance drove by him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her and smiled with his whole face. And he immediately caught himself in this smile, which did not go at all with his dark mood. Where had it come from, if his whole soul was filled with vexation and anguish?
And he thought that nature herself probably gave man this ability to lie, so that even in difficult moments of inner tension he could keep the secrets of his nest, the way a fox or a wild duck keeps them. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they are, it is hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are secret. For instance, on account of some falsehood, the father of the lady landowner who had just driven by bore the wrath of Tsar Nicholas for half his life, her husband had been a gambler, of her four sons not one of them had made anything of himself. One can imagine how many terrible scenes took place in her family, how many tears were shed. And yet the old woman seemed happy, content, and responded to his smile with a smile. The student remembered his friends who talked reluctantly about their families, remembered his mother, who almost always lied when she had to talk about her husband and children…
Until nightfall Pyotr walked around on roads far from home, abandoning himself to cheerless thoughts. When rain began to sprinkle, he headed for home. On his way back, he decided to talk with his father at all costs, to make him understand once and for all that it was difficult and frightening to live with him.
At home he found silence. His sister Varvara lay behind the partition, moaning sightly from a headache. His mother, with a surprised and guilty look, sat beside her on a trunk, mending Arkhipka’s trousers. Evgraf Ivanych paced from window to window, frowning at the weather. From his gait, his cough, and even the crown of his head, one could see that he felt guilty.
“So you’ve changed your mind about leaving today?” he asked.
The student felt sorry for him, but, overcoming that feeling, he said at once:
“Listen…I must talk seriously with you…Yes, seriously…I’ve always respected you and…never dared to talk with you in this tone, but your behavior…your latest act…”
The father looked out the window and said nothing. The student, as if searching for words, rubbed his forehead and went on in strong agitation:
“Not a dinner or a tea goes by without you raising a ruckus. Your bread sticks in all of our throats. There’s nothing more insulting, more humiliating than being reproached by a crust of bread…You may be our father, but nobody, neither God nor nature, gave you the right to insult and humiliate us so deeply, to vent your own bad spirits on the weak. You torment my mother, depersonalize her, my sister is hopelessly downtrodden, and I…”
“It’s not your business to teach me,” the father said.
“No, it is my business! You can bully me as much as you like, but leave Mother alone! I won’t allow you to torment Mother!” the student went on, flashing his eyes. “You’re spoiled because nobody has ever dared to go against you. We trembled, we went dumb, but that’s all over now! Crude, ill-bred man! You’re crude…understand? Crude, difficult, callous! The peasants can’t stand you either!”
The student had lost his thread by then and no longer spoke, but seemed to fire off separate words. Evgraf Ivanovich listened and said nothing, as if stunned; but suddenly his neck turned purple, color crept over his face, and he stirred.
“Keep silent!” he yelled.
“Fine!” His son would not be stopped. “You don’t like listening to the truth? Excellent! All right! Start shouting! Excellent!”
“Keep silent, I tell you!” Evgraf Ivanovich roared.
Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway with an astonished face, very pale; she wanted to say something and could not, but only moved her fingers.
“It’s your fault!” Shiryaev yelled at her. “You brought him up this way!”
“I don’t want to live in this house anymore!” the student yelled, weeping and looking spitefully at his mother. “I don’t want to live with you!”
The daughter Varvara cried out behind the partition and burst into loud sobs. Shiryaev waved his hand and ran out of the house.
The student went to his room and quietly lay down. Until midnight he lay motionless and without opening his eyes. He did not feel anger or shame, but some sort of indefinite inner pain. He did not blame his father, did not pity his mother, did not suffer remorse; it was clear to him that everyone in the house now felt the same sort of pain, but who was to blame, who suffered more, who less, God only knew…