Virgin Soil (Volume 1)/Chapter 2

by Ivan Turgenev

II

At the sight of visitors in his room, he stopped short in the doorway, took them all in in a glance, flung off his cap, dropped the books straight on to the floor, and without a word went up to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. His handsome white face, which looked still whiter from the deep red of his wavy chestnut hair, expressed dissatisfaction and annoyance.

Mashurina turned slightly away, biting her lip; Ostrodumov growled: 'At last!'

Paklin was the first to approach Nezhdanov.

'What's wrong with you, Alexey Dmitrievitch, Hamlet of Russia? Has any one offended you? or is it a causeless melancholy?'

'Stop that, please, Mephistopheles of Russia,' answered Nezhdanov irritably. 'I'm not equal to a contest with you in dull smartness.'

Paklin laughed.

'You don't express yourself very accurately; if it's smart, it's not dull; if it's dull, it's not smart.'

'Very well, very well. . . . You 're a witty fellow, we all know.'

'And you 're in a highly nervous condition,' Paklin drawled; 'or has something really happened?'

'Nothing has happened in special; but what's happened is that one can't set one's foot into the street in this filthy town, in Petersburg, without coming across some meanness, idiocy, hideous injustice, rottenness! Life here's impossible any longer.'

'So that's why you've advertised in the paper for a place as tutor and are ready to go away,' Ostrodumov growled again.

'I should think so; I shall get away from here with all the pleasure in life! If only some fool can be found to give me a situation!'

'You must first do your duty here,' said Mashurina significantly, still looking away.

'And that is?' queried Nezhdanov, turning sharply round to her.

Mashurina pressed her lips tightly together. 'Ostrodumov will tell you.'

Nezhdanov turned to Ostrodumov. But the latter only cleared his throat and grunted: 'Wait a bit.'

'No, joking apart now, really', interposed Paklin; 'you have heard something's gone wrong?'

Nezhdanov bounded up on the bed, as though some force were tossing him upwards.

'What more would you have going wrong? he shouted, his voice suddenly growing loud. 'Half Russia's dying of hunger. The Moscow Gazette's triumphant; they're going to introduce classicism; the students' benefit clubs are prohibited; everywhere there's spying, persecution, betrayal, lying, and treachery we can't advance a step in any direction . . . and all that's not enough for him he looks for something fresh to go wrong, he thinks I'm joking. . . . Basanov's arrested,' he added, dropping his voice a little; 'they told me at the library.'

Ostrodumov and Mashurina both at once raised their heads.

'My dear fellow, Alexey Dmitrievitch,' began Paklin, 'you are excited─no wonder. . .. But had you forgotten what an age and what a country we live in? Why, among us a drowning man has to make for himself the very straw he's to clutch at! What's the good of being sentimental over it? One must face the worst, my dear fellow, and not fly into a rage, like a baby———'

'Ah, don't, please!' Nezhdanov interrupted fretfully, and his face worked as if he were in pain. 'You, we all know, are a man of energy, you 're afraid of nothing and nobody———'

'Me afraid of nobody———!' Paklin was beginning.

'Who could have betrayed Basanov?' Nezhdanov went on. ' I don't understand it!'

'Why, to be sure, a friend. They're grand hands at that─friends are. You must be on the look-out with them! I, for instance, had a friend, and a capital fellow he seemed; thought such a lot of me, of my reputation! One day he came to me. . . . "Fancy!" he cried, "the ridiculous slanders they've been spreading about you; they declare you poisoned your own uncle; that you were introduced into some house, and at once took a seat with your back to the lady of the house, and persisted in sitting so the whole evening! And that she fairly cried, yes, cried at the insult! What absurdity! what inanity! what fools can believe such a story?" And what followed? Why, a year later I quarrelled with that very friend. . . . And he writes in a letter of farewell: "You who killed your own uncle! You who were not ashamed to insult a respectable lady by sitting with your back to her! . . ." and so on, and so on. That's what friends are!'

Ostrodumov exchanged glances with Mashurina. 'Alexey Dmitrievitch!' he blurted in his heavy bass─he obviously wanted to cut short the useless eruption of words that was beginning─'a letter has come from Vassily Nikolaevitch from Moscow.'

Nezhdanov gave a slight start and looked down.

'What does he write?' he asked at last.

'Well . . . they want me and her'─Ostrodumov indicated Mashurina─'to go.'

'What? they ask for her too?'

'Yes.'

'Well, where's the difficulty?'

'Why, of course the difficulty's─money.'

Nezhdanov got up from the bed and went up to the window.

'Is a great deal wanted?'

'Fifty roubles . . . can't do with less.'

Nezhdanov was silent for a space.

'I haven't got it now,' he muttered at last, drumming on the pane with his finger-tips; 'but . . . I could get it I will get it. Have you the letter?'

'The letter? It . . . that's to say . . . of course.'

'But why do you always keep things back from me?' cried Paklin. Haven't I deserved your confidence? Even if I didn't fully sympathise . . . with what you are undertaking, could you suppose me capable of turning traitor or chattering?'

'Unintentionally . . . perhaps!' Ostrodumov said in his deep notes.

'Neither intentionally nor unintentionally. There's Madame Mashurina looking at me with a smile . . . but I say———'

'I'm not smiling,' snapped Mashurina.

'But I say,' pursued Paklin, 'that you, gentlemen, have no intuition; that you don't know how to distinguish who are your real friends! If a man laughs, you think he's not serious . . .'

'To be sure!' Mashurina snapped again.

'Here, for instance,' Paklin hurried on with renewed vigour, this time not even replying to Mashurina, 'you are in want of money . . . and Nezhdanov hasn't it at the moment . . . well, I can let you have it.'

Nezhdanov turned quickly round from the window.

'No . . . no, . . . what for? I will get it . . . I will draw part of my allowance in advance. . . . They do owe me something, if I remember. But, I say, Ostrodumov; show the letter.'

Ostrodumov first remained for some time motionless; then he looked round, then he stood up, bent right down, and, tucking up his trouser, pulled out of the leg of his high boot a carefully folded ball of blue paper; having pulled this ball out, he, for some unknown reason, blew on it and gave it to Nezhdanov.

The latter took the paper, unfolded it, read it attentively, and handed it to Mashurina. . . . She first got up from her chair, then she too read it, and returned it to Nezhdanov, though Paklin was holding out his hand for it. Nezhdanov shrugged his shoulders and passed the mysterious letter to Paklin. Paklin, in his turn, ran his eyes over it, and, compressing his lips with great significance, he laid it in solemn silence on the table. Then Ostrodumov took it, lighted a large match, which diffused a strong smell of brimstone, and first raising the paper high above his head, as though he would show it to all present, he burned it up completely in the match, not sparing his fingers, and flung the ashes into the stove. No one uttered a single word, no one even moved, during this operation. The eyes of all were cast down. Ostrodumov had a concentrated and businesslike air. Nezhdanov's face looked wrathful; there were signs in Paklin of being ill at ease; Mashurina might have been at a solemn mass.

So passed two minutes. . . . Then a slight awkwardness came over all of them. Paklin first felt the necessity of breaking the silence.

'Well, then,' he began, 'is my sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland accepted, or not? Am I permitted to contribute, if not fifty roubles, at least twenty-five or thirty, to the common cause?'

Nezhdanov all at once flew into a perfect fury. His irritability had been growing, it seemed. . . . The solemn burning of the letter had by no means allayed it; it was only waiting for an excuse to break out.

'I have told you already that it's not wanted, not wanted . . . not wanted! I won't allow it and I won't accept it. I'll get the money, I'll get it directly. I don't need help from anyone!'

'All right, my dear fellow,' observed Paklin. 'I see, though you are a revolutionist, you 're not a democrat!'

'Say at once that I'm an aristocrat!'

'Well, you are an aristocrat, really . . . to a certain degree.'

Nezhdanov gave a forced laugh.

'So you mean to hint at my being an illegitimate son. You needn't trouble, my kind friend. . . . Without your aid, I'm not likely to forget that.'

Paklin flung up his arms in despair.

'Alyosha, upon my word, what is the matter with you? How could you take my words like that! I don't know you to-day.' Nezhdanov made an impatient gesture of the head and shoulders. 'Basanov's arrest has upset you, but, you know, he used to behave so imprudently———'

'He used not to conceal his convictions,' Mashurina put in gloomily: 'it's not for us to find fault with him!'

'Of course; only he ought to have thought of others too, who may be compromised by him now.'

'Why do you suppose that of him?' . . . Ostrodumov boomed in his turn: 'Basanov's a man of strong will; he will never betray any one. As for prudence . . . let me tell you, we're not all equally able to be prudent, Mr. Paklin!'

Paklin was offended, and was about to retort, but Nezhdanov stopped him.

'Gentlemen,' he cried, be so good as to let politics alone for a time, please!'

A silence followed.

'I met Skoropihin to-day,' Paklin began at last, 'our great national critic and aesthetic enthusiast. What an intolerable creature! He's for ever boiling over and frothing, for all the world like a bottle of bad sour kvas. . . . The waiter, as he runs, holds it down with his finger instead of a cork, a fat raisin sticks in the neck─it goes on bubbling and hissing─and when once all the foam's flown out of it, all that's left at the bottom is a few drops of villainous sour stuff, which quenches no one's thirst, but only gives one a stomach-ache! . . . A most pernicious individual for young people to have to do with!'

The comparison Paklin had made, though true and apt, called up no smile on any one's face. Only Ostrodumov observed that young people who were capable of taking an interest in aesthetic criticism deserved no pity, even if Skoropihin did lead them astray.

'But really, one moment,' Paklin exclaimed with warmth the less sympathy he met with, the hotter he got, 'here we have a question, not political we admit, but important for all that. To listen to Skoropihin, every ancient work of art is no good, for the very reason that it is ancient. . . . If that's so, art is nothing but a fashion, and it's not worth while to talk seriously about it! If there is nothing stable, eternal in it then away with it! In science, in mathematics, for instance, you don't regard Euler, Laplace, Hauss as antiquated imbeciles, do you? Are you prepared to reckon them as authorities, while Raphael and Mozart are fools? Does your pride revolt against their authority? The canons of art are more difficult to arrive at, than the laws of science . . . agreed; but they exist, and any one who doesn't see them, is blind; whether wilfully or not, makes no difference!'

Paklin ceased . . . and no one uttered a

sound, as though all of them were holding water in their mouths, as though all were a little ashamed of him. Only Ostrodumov growled: 'And, all the same, I don't feel the least sorry for young men who are led astray by Skoropihin',

'Oh, go to the devil with you!' thought Paklin. 'I'm off!'

He had come to see Nezhdanov with the object of communicating to him his views as to procuring the Polar Star from abroad (the Bell had already ceased to exist), but the conversation had taken such a turn, that it seemed better not even to raise this question. Paklin was already reaching after his cap, when suddenly, without any premonitory noise or knocking, there was heard in the anteroom a marvellously pleasant, manly, and mellow baritone, the very sound of which had somehow a suggestion of exceptional good breeding, good education, and even good perfume.

'Is Mr. Nezhdanov at home?'

They all looked at one another in amazement.

'Mr. Nezhdanov at home?' repeated the baritone.

'Yes,' answered Nezhdanov at last.

The door was opened discreetly and smoothly, and slowly removing his glossy hat from his comely short-cropped head, a man of about forty, tall, well-made, and dignified, came into the room. He was dressed in a very handsome cloth coat, with a superb beaver collar, though the month of April was drawing to its close. He struck all, Nezhdanov, Paklin, even Mashurina . . . even Ostrodumov! by the elegant self- possession of his carriage and the cordial ease of his address. They all instinctively rose on his entrance.