V
I ONLY WANT to say that I never could find out or make a satisfactory surmise as to precisely how it started between him and my mother. I’m fully prepared to believe, as he assured me himself last year, with a blush on his face, even though he told about it all with a most unconstrained and “witty” air, that there was not the least romance, and that it all happened just so. I believe it was just so, and that little phrase just so is charming, but still I always wanted to find out precisely how it came about with them. I myself have hated all this vileness all my life and hate it still. Of course, here it’s by no means only shameless curiosity on my part. I will note that until last year I hardly knew my mother; from my infancy I had been handed over to other people, for Versilov’s comfort, but of that later; and therefore I’m quite unable to imagine what her face could have been like at that time. If she was not really so good-looking, then what in her could have attracted such a man as Versilov was at that time? This question is important for me in that it highlights the man from an extremely curious side. That is why I ask it, and not out of depravity. He himself, this gloomy and closed man, with that sweet simpleheartedness he took from devil knows where (as if out of his pocket) when he saw it was necessary—he himself told me that he was quite a “silly young pup” then, not that he was sentimental, but just so, he had recently read Anton the Wretch and Polinka Sachs3—two literary works that had a boundless civilizing influence on our then rising generation. He added that it was perhaps because of Anton the Wretch that he had come to the estate then—and he added it extremely seriously. What form could the beginning between this “silly pup” and my mother have taken? It has just occurred to me that if I had at least one reader, he would probably burst out laughing at me, as at a most ridiculous adolescent who, having preserved his stupid innocence, barges with his reasonings and solutions into things he doesn’t understand. Yes, indeed, I still don’t understand, though I confess it not at all out of pride, because I know how stupid this inexperience at the age of twenty can be; only I will tell the gentleman that he himself does not understand, and I will prove it to him. True, I know nothing about women, and I don’t want to know, because I’ll spit on that all my life and I’ve given my word. But nevertheless I know for certain that one woman attracts you by her beauty, or whatever it is, from the first moment; another you have to chew over for half a year before you understand what’s in her; and to make her out and fall in love with her, it’s not enough to look and simply be ready for anything, on top of that you have to be somehow gifted. I’m convinced of that, even though I know nothing, and if it were otherwise, then all women would have to be reduced at once to the level of simple domestic animals and kept around only in that guise. Maybe a lot of people would like that.
I know positively from several hands that my mother was not a beauty, though I haven’t seen her portrait from that time, which exists somewhere. That means it was impossible to fall in love with her at first sight. For mere “amusement,” Versilov could have chosen another girl, and there was one like that, and unmarried besides, Anfisa Konstantinovna Sapozhkov, a house maid. And a man who arrived with Anton the Wretch and, on the basis of his rights as a landowner, violated the sacredness of marriage, even though it was of his household serf, would be very ashamed in his own eyes, because, I repeat, no more than a few months ago, that is, twenty years later, he spoke extremely seriously of this Anton the Wretch. Yet Anton only had a horse taken from him, and here it’s a wife! It means something very peculiar happened, and that was why Mlle. Sapozhkov lost (or won, in my opinion). I bothered him with all these questions a couple of times last year, when it was possible to talk with him (because it was not always possible to talk with him), and I noticed that, despite all his worldliness and the space of twenty years, he somehow made an extremely wry face. But I insisted. At least I remember him once murmuring somehow strangely, with that air of worldly squeamishness he repeatedly allowed himself with me, that my mother was a person of the defenseless sort, whom you don’t really fall in love with—on the contrary, not at all—but for some reason suddenly fall to pitying, for their meekness, is it, or for what, anyhow? No one ever knows, but you go on pitying for a long time; you pity and grow attached . . . “In short, my dear, it sometimes so happens that you cannot even rid yourself of it.” That’s what he told me; and if it really was so, then I’m forced to regard him as less of a stupid pup at that time than he gives himself out to have been. And that was just what I needed.
Anyhow, he started assuring me then that my mother fell in love with him out of “lowliness”: he might just as well have said out of serfdom! He lied in order to show off, lied against conscience, against honor and nobility!
I’ve said all this, of course, in some sort of praise of my mother, and yet I’ve already stated that I knew nothing about how she was then. Moreover, I precisely know all the imperviousness of that milieu and of those pathetic notions in which she had hardened since childhood and in which she remained afterwards for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, the harm was done. Incidentally, I must correct myself: having soared into the clouds, I forgot about the fact which, on the contrary, ought to have been put forward first of all—namely, that it started between them directly with the harm. (I hope the reader will not put on airs to the extent of not understanding at once what I mean to say.) In short, it started between them precisely in a landowner’s way, even though Mlle. Sapozhkov was bypassed. But here I’ll step in and state beforehand that I am by no means contradicting myself. For what, O Lord, what could a man like Versilov possibly have talked about at that time with a person like my mother, even in the event of the most irresistible love? I’ve heard from depraved people that very often, when a man comes together with a woman, he starts in complete silence, which, of course, is the height of monstrosity and nausea; nevertheless, Versilov, even if he had wanted to, would have been unable to start in any other way with my mother. Could he have started by explaining Polinka Sachs to her? And moreover, they couldn’t be bothered with Russian literature; on the contrary, according to his own words (he got carried away once), they hid in the corners, waited for each other on stairways, bounced away from each other like rubber balls, red-faced, if somebody passed by, and the “tyrant landowner” trembled before the least washer-woman, despite all his serf-owning rights. But though it started in a landowner’s way, it turned out to be not quite so, and, essentially, it’s still impossible to explain anything. There’s even more darkness. The sheer dimensions to which their love developed already constitute a riddle, because the first condition of men like Versilov is to drop the girl immediately once the goal is achieved. That, however, is not how it turned out. For a depraved “young pup” (and they were all depraved, all of them to a man—both progressives and retrogrades) to sin with a pretty, flirtatious serving girl (and my mother was not flirtatious) was not only possible but inevitable, especially considering his novelistic status as a young widower, and his idleness. But to fall in love for one’s whole life—that is too much. I can’t guarantee that he loved her, but that he dragged her with him all his life is quite true.
I’ve posed many questions, but there is one most important question which, I’ll note, I’ve never dared to ask my mother directly, though I’ve become quite close to her over the last year and, moreover, as a crude and ungrateful pup who finds them guilty before him, have been quite unceremonious with her. The question is the following: How could she, she herself, already married for half a year, and crushed, too, by all the notions of the legitimacy of marriage, crushed like a strengthless fly, she, who respected her Makar Ivanovich as nothing less than some sort of God, how could she, in a matter of two weeks, go so far as such a sin? For my mother wasn’t a depraved woman, was she? On the contrary, I’ll say now beforehand, that it is even difficult to imagine anyone being purer in soul, and that for all her life afterwards. The only possible explanation is that she did it unawares, that is, not in the sense that lawyers now affirm about their murderers and thieves, but under that strong impression which, given a certain simpleheartedness in the victim, takes over fatally and tragically. Who knows, maybe she fell desperately in love . . . with the fashion of his clothes, with the Parisian parting of his hair, with his French talk, precisely French, of which she understood not a sound, that romance he sang at the piano, fell in love with something she had never seen or heard before (and he was very handsome), and at the same time fell in love, to the point of prostration, with all of him, with all his fashions and romances. I’ve heard that that sometimes happened with serving girls in the time of serfdom, and with the most honest of them. I understand that, and he’s a scoundrel who explains it by serfdom and “lowliness” alone! And so it means that this young man could have enough of that direct and seductive power in him to attract a being hitherto so pure and, above all, a being so completely different from himself, from a totally different world and different land, and to such obvious ruin? That it was to ruin—that I hope my mother has always understood; only when she went to it, she wasn’t thinking of ruin at all; but it’s always like that with these “defenseless” ones: they know it’s ruin, and yet they get into it.