Virgin Soil (Volume 1)/Chapter 14
XIV
A fortnight more passed. Everything went its accustomed way. Sipyagin arranged the duties of the day, if not like a minister, at least like the director of a department, and maintained the same lofty, humane, and somewhat fastidious deportment; Kolya had his lessons; Anna Zaharovna fretted in continual, suppressed anger; visitors came, talked, skirmished at cards, and apparently were not bored; Valentina Mihalovna continued to amuse herself with Nezhdanov, though a shade of something like good-natured irony was blended with her amenities. With Marianna, Nezhdanov grew unmistakably intimate, and to his surprise found that her temper was even enough, and that he could talk to her about anything without coming into violent opposition. In her company he twice visited the school, though at his first visit he was convinced that he could do nothing there. The reverend deacon was in full possession of it with Sipyagin's consent, and, indeed, by his wish. The worthy father taught reading and writing fairly, though on an old-fashioned method; but at examinations he propounded questions decidedly ridiculous; for instance, he one day asked Garasei, 'How would he explain the expression, "the waters in the firmament"?' to which Garasei, by the instruction of the same worthy father, was to reply, 'That is inexplicable.'
Moreover, the school, such as it was, was closed soon after─for the summer months─till autumn. Remembering the exhortation of Paklin and of others, Nezhdanov tried, too, to make friends with the peasants; but soon he realised that he was simply, so far as his powers of observation enabled him, studying them, not doing propaganda work at all. He had spent almost the whole of his life in town, and between him and the country people there was a gulf over which he could not cross. Nezhdanov succeeded in exchanging a few words with the drunkard Kirill, and even with Mendeley; but, strange to say, he was, as it were, afraid of them, and, except some very brief abuse of things in general, he got nothing out of them. Another peasant, called Fityuev, nonplussed him utterly. This peasant had a face of exceptional energy, almost that of some brigand chief.. . . 'Come, he's sure to be some use,' Nezhdanov thought.. . . But Fityuev turned out to be a wretched outcast; the mir had taken his land away from him, because he a healthy and positively powerful man─could not work.
'I can't!' Fityuev would sob, with deep inward groans, and with a long-drawn sigh; 'I can't work! kill me! or I shall lay hands on myself!' And he would end by begging alms─a halfpenny for a crust of bread.. . . And a face out of a canvas of Rinaldo Rinaldini!
The factory folk, too, were no good to Nezhdanov; all these fellows were either terribly lively or terribly gloomy . . . and Nezhdanov could not get on at all with them. He wrote a long letter on this subject to his friend Silin, complaining bitterly of his own incapacity, and ascribing it to his wretched education and disgusting artistic temperament! He suddenly came to the conclusion that his vocation, in propaganda work, was with the written, not the spoken, living word; but the pamphlets he planned did not work out. Everything he tried to put on paper made on him the same impression of something false, far-fetched, artificial in tone and language, and twice─oh horror! he caught himself unconsciously wandering off into verse or into a sceptical, personal effusion. He positively brought himself─an extraordinary sign of confidence and intimacy!─to speak of this to Marianna . . . and was again surprised by finding a fellow-feeling in her, of course not with his literary bent, but with the moral malady which he was suffering from, and with which she, too, was familiar. Marianna was quite as much up in arms against all things artistic as he was; yet the reason she had not loved and married Markelov was in reality just that there was not a trace of the artistic nature in him! Marianna, of course, had not the courage to recognise this even to herself; but we know that it is what remains a half-suspected secret for ourselves that is strongest in us.
So the days went by slowly, unequally, but not drearily.
Something curious was taking place in Nezhdanov. He was discontented with himself, with his activity, or rather his inactivity; his words almost constantly had a ring of bitter and biting self-reproach; but in his soul─somewhere very deep within it─there was a kind of happiness, a sense of a certain peace. Whether it was the result of the country quiet, the fresh air, the summer, the good food, and the easy life, or whether it came from the fact that he was now, for the first time in his life, tasting the sweetness of close contact with a woman's soul─it would be hard to say; but, in fact, his heart was light, even though he complained─and sincerely─to his friend Silin.
This frame of mind was, however, suddenly and violently destroyed in a single day.
On the morning of that day he received a note from Vassily Nikolaevitch, in which he was directed in conjunction with Markelov, while awaiting further instructions, at once to make friends with and come to an understanding with the aforementioned Solomin, and a certain merchant, Golushkin, an Old Believer, living in S———. This note threw Nezhdanov into violent agitation; he could read reproach for his inactivity in it. The bitterness, that had all this time only raged in words, was stirred up again from the bottom of his heart.
Kallomyetsev came to dinner greatly perturbed and exasperated. 'Imagine,' he cried in a voice almost lachrymose, 'what a horrible thing I have just read in the paper: my friend, my dear Mihail, the Servian prince, has been murdered by some miscreants in Belgrade! This is what these Jacobins and revolutionists come to, if we don't put a firm stop to them!' Sipyagin 'begged leave to remark' that this revolting murder was probably not the work of Jacobins, whose existence can hardly be supposed in Servia,' but of men of the party of Karageorgievitch, the enemies of Obrenovitch.. . . But Kallomyetsev would hear nothing, and, in the same lachrymose voice, began again describing how the murdered prince had loved him, what a splendid gun he had given him! . . . Gradually branching off and getting more and more indignant, Kallomyetsev turned from foreign Jacobins to home-bred Nihilists and Socialists, and at last broke into a perfect philippic. Clutching a large, white roll with both hands, and breaking it in half over his soup-plate, quite in the style of real Parisians at the 'Café Riche,' he expressed his longing to crush, to grind to powder, all who were in opposition to any one or anything whatever! That was precisely his expression. ' It is high time,' he declared, lifting his spoon to his mouth, 'it's high time!' he repeated, as he gave his glass to the servant for sherry. He referred reverentially to the great Moscow journalists─and Ladislas, notre bon et cher Ladislas─was continually on his lips. And all through this he kept his eyes on Nezhdanov as though to transfix him with them. 'There, that's for you!' he seemed to say. 'Take that! I mean it for you! And there's more like it!' At last Nezhdanov could endure it no longer, and he began to retort. His voice, it is true, was a little uncertain and hoarse─not from fear, of course; he began to champion the hopes, the principles, the ideals of the younger generation. Kallomyetsev at once answered in a high pipe indignation in him was always expressed by falsetto and began to be abusive.
Sipyagin majestically took Nezhdanov's part; Valentina Mihalovna, too, agreed with her husband; Anna Zaharovna tried to distract Kolya's attention, and cast looks of fury in all directions from under her cap; Marianna sat as though turned to stone.
But suddenly, on hearing the name of Ladislas uttered for the twentieth time, Nezhdanov fired up, and with a blow on the table he cried: 'A fine authority! As though we didn't know what kind of a creature this Ladislas is! He, a hired puppet from his birth up, and nothing more!'
'Ah─a─a─so that─that's', whined Kallomyetsev, stuttering with fury.. . . 'Is that how you allow yourself to refer to a man who enjoys the respect of persons of position like Count Blazenkrampf and Prince Kovrizhkin!'
Nezhdanov shrugged his shoulders. A great recommendation truly; Prince Kovrizhkin, the flunkey enthusiast———'
'Ladislas is my friend,' shrieked Kallomyetsev; 'he's my comrade . . . and I———'
'So much the worse for you,' interrupted Nezhdanov; 'it implies that you share his way of thinking, and my remarks apply to you as well.'
Kallomyetsev was livid with wrath.
'Wh-what! You l-laugh! You─you ought─instantly─be———'
'What are you pleased to do with me instantly?' Nezhdanov interrupted a second time with ironical politeness.
There is no knowing how this scuffle between the two enemies would have ended, if Sipyagin had not cut it short at the very commencement. Raising his voice and assuming an air in which it was hard to say which was the predominant element─the solemn authority of the statesman, or the dignity of the master of the house─he declared with calm insistence that he did not wish to hear any such intemperate expressions at his table; that he had long ago made it his rule (he corrected himself─his sacred rule) to respect every sort of conviction, but only on the understanding (here he raised his forefinger, adorned with a signet ring) that they were maintained within the limits of decorum and good breeding; that though on the one hand he could not but censure a certain intemperance in the language of Mr. Nezhdanov, pardonable, however, at his years, on the other hand he could not approve of the severity of Mr. Kallomyetsev's attacks on persons of the opposite camp, a severity to be attributed, however, to his zeal for the public welfare.
`Under my roof', so he concluded, 'under the roof of the Sipyagins, there are neither Jacobins nor puppets, there are only well-meaning people, who, when once they understand one another, are bound to end by shaking hands!'
Nezhdanov and Kallomyetsev both held their peace, but they did not shake hands; apparently the hour of mutual comprehension had not come for them. Quite the contrary; they had never felt such intense mutual hatred. The dinner was concluded in unpleasant and awkward silence; Sipyagin tried to relate a diplomatic anecdote, but fairly gave it up in despair half-way through. Marianna stared doggedly at her plate. She did not care to show the sympathy aroused in her by Nezhdanov's remarks─not from cowardice, oh no! but she felt bound before everything not to betray herself to Madame Sipyagin. She felt her penetrating, persistent eyes fixed on her. And Madame Sipyagin did actually keep her eyes fixed on her, on her and Nezhdanov. His unexpected outburst at first astounded the sharp-witted lady; then all of a sudden she saw, as it were, a light upon it, so much so that involuntarily she murmured. Ah! . . . she suddenly divined that Nezhdanov was drifting away from her─Nezhdanov, who had so lately been in her grasp. Then something must have happened. . . . Could it be Marianna? Yes, of course it was Marianna . . . He attracted her . . . yes, and he . . .
'Steps must be taken,' was how she concluded her reflections, and meanwhile Kallomyetsev was choking with indignation. Even when playing preference, two hours later, he uttered the words, 'Pass!' or 'I buy!' with an aching heart, and in his voice could be heard a hoarse tremolo of wounded feeling, though he put on an appearance of 'being above it'! Sipyagin alone was in reality positively pleased with the whole scene. He had had a chance to show the power of his eloquence, to still the rising storm. . . . He knew Latin, and Virgil's Quos ego! was familiar to him. He did not consciously compare himself to Neptune quelling the tempest; but he thought of him with a sort of sympathy.