“Where’s Kleopatra?” Axinya asked softly, in a fluster, holding her breath; “and where is your cap, my dear? Your wife, you say, has gone to Petersburg?”
She had been our servant in our mother’s time, and used once to give Kleopatra and me our baths, and to her we were still children who had to be talked to for their good. For a quarter of an hour or so she laid before me all the reflections which she had with the sagacity of an old servant been accumulating in the stillness of that kitchen, all the time since we had seen each other. She said that the doctor could be forced to marry Kleopatra; he only needed to be thoroughly frightened; and that if an appeal were promptly written the bishop would annul the first marriage; that it would be a good thing for me to sell Dubetchnya without my wife’s knowledge, and put the money in the bank in my own name; that if my sister and I were to bow down at my father’s feet and ask him properly, he might perhaps forgive us; that we ought to have a service sung to the Queen of Heaven.…
“Come, go along, my dear, and speak to him,” she said, when she heard my father’s cough. “Go along, speak to him; bow down, your head won’t drop off.”
I went in. My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a fireman’s watch tower—something peculiarly stiff and tasteless. Going into the study I stood still where I could see this drawing. I did not know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember that when I saw his lean face, his red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck, and as Axinya had told me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer villa with the Gothic windows, and the fat turret, restrained me.
“Good evening,” I said.
He glanced at me, and at once dropped his eyes on his drawing.
“What do you want?” he asked, after waiting a little.
“I have come to tell you my sister’s very ill. She can’t live very long,” I added in a hollow voice.
“Well,” sighed my father, taking off his spectacles, and laying them on the table. “What thou sowest that shalt thou reap. What thou sowest,” he repeated, getting up from the table, “that shalt thou reap. I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I begged you, I besought you to give up your errors; I reminded you of your duty, of your honour, of what you owed to your forefathers whose traditions we ought to preserve as sacred. Did you obey me? You scorned my counsels, and obstinately persisted in clinging to your false ideals; worse still you drew your sister into the path of error with you, and led her to lose her moral principles and sense of shame. Now you are both in a bad way. Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!”
As he said this he walked up and down the room. He probably imagined that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and me. I was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever, and spoke with difficulty in a husky voice.
“And I beg you, too, to remember,” I said, “on this very spot I besought you to understand me, to reflect, to decide with me how and for what we should live, and in answer you began talking about our forefathers, about my grandfather who wrote poems. One tells you now that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and you go on again about your forefathers, your traditions.… And such frivolity in your old age, when death is close at hand, and you haven’t more than five or ten years left!”
“What have you come here for?” my father asked sternly, evidently offended at my reproaching him for his frivolity.
“I don’t know. I love you, I am unutterably sorry that we are so far apart—so you see I have come. I love you still, but my sister has broken with you completely. She does not forgive you, and will never forgive you now. Your very name arouses her aversion for the past, for life.”
“And who is to blame for it?” cried my father. “It’s your fault, you scoundrel!”
“Well, suppose it is my fault?” I said. “I admit I have been to blame in many things, but why is it that this life of yours, which you think binding upon us, too—why is it so dreary, so barren? How is it that in not one of these houses you have been building for the last thirty years has there been anyone from whom I might have learnt how to live, so as not to be to blame? There is not one honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are nests of damnation, where mothers and daughters are made away with, where children are tortured.… My poor mother!” I went on in despair. “My poor sister! One has to stupefy oneself with vodka, with cards, with scandal; one must become a scoundrel, a hypocrite, or go on drawing plans for years and years, so as not to notice all the horrors that lie hidden in these houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and all that time it has not produced one man of service to our country—not one. You have stifled in the germ everything in the least living and bright. It’s a town of shopkeepers, publicans, counting-house clerks, canting hypocrites; it’s a useless, unnecessary town, which not one soul would regret if it suddenly sank through the earth.”
“I don’t want to listen to you, you scoundrel!” said my father, and he took up his ruler from the table. “You are drunk. Don’t dare come and see your father in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you can repeat it to your depraved sister, that you’ll get nothing from me, either of you. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer for their disobedience and obstinacy I do not pity them. You can go whence you came. It has pleased God to chastise me with you, but I will bear the trial with resignation, and, like Job, I will find consolation in my sufferings and in unremitting labour. You must not cross my threshold till you have mended your ways. I am a just man, all I tell you is for your benefit, and if you desire your own good you ought to remember all your life what I say and have said to you.…”
I waved my hand in despair and went away. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, that night and next day.
I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting:
“Better-than-nothing!”
XX
If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.” I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.
What I have been through has not been for nothing. My great troubles, my patience, have touched people’s hearts, and now they don’t call me “Better-than-nothing,” they don’t laugh at me, and when I walk by the shops they don’t throw water over me. They have grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing strange in my carrying a pail of paint and putting in windows, though I am of noble rank; on the contrary, people are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen; instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account of some twopenny-halfpenny job. People are civil to me, they address me politely, and in the houses where I work, they offer me tea, and send to enquire whether I wouldn’t like dinner. Children and young girls often come and look at me with curiosity and compassion.