Part 6 (1/2)
Fedor Ivanovich Lavretsky (we must ask our reader's permission to break off the thread of the story for a time) sprang from a n.o.ble family of long descent. The founder of the race migrated from Prussia during the reign of Basil the Blind,[A] and was favored with a grant of two hundred _chetverts_[B] of land in the district of Biejetsk.
Many of his descendants filled various official positions, and were appointed to governors.h.i.+ps in distant places, under princes and influential personages, but none of them obtained any great amount of property, or arrived at a higher dignity, than that of inspector of the Czar's table.
[Footnote A: In the fifteenth century.]
[Footnote B: An old measure of land, variously estimated at from two to six acres.]
The richest and most influential of all the Lavretskys was Fedor Ivanovich's paternal great-grandfather Andrei, a man who was harsh, insolent, shrewd, and crafty. Even up to the present day men have never ceased to talk about his despotic manners, his furious temper, his senseless prodigality, and his insatiable avarice. He was very tall and stout, his complexion was swarthy, and he wore no beard. He lisped, and he generally seemed half asleep. But the more quietly he spoke, the more did all around him tremble. He had found a wife not unlike himself. She had a round face, a yellow complexion, prominent eyes, and the nose of a hawk. A gypsy by descent, pa.s.sionate and vindictive in temper, she refused to yield in any thing to her husband, who all but brought her to her grave, and whom, although she had been eternally squabbling with him, she could net bear long to survive.
Andrei's son, Peter, our Fedor's grandfather, did not take after his father. He was a simple country gentleman; rather odd, noisy in voice and slow in action, rough but not malicious, hospitable, and devoted to coursing. He was more than thirty years old when he inherited from his father two thousand souls,[A] all in excellent condition; but he soon began to squander his property, a part of which he disposed of by sale, and he spoilt his household. His large, warm, and dirty rooms were full of people of small degree, known and unknown, who swarmed in from all sides like c.o.c.kroaches. All these visitors gorged themselves with whatever came in their way, drank their fill to intoxication, and carried off what they could, extolling and glorifying their affable host. As for their host, when he was out of humor with them, he called them scamps and parasites; but when deprived of their company, he soon found himself bored.
[Footnote A: Male serfs.]
The wife of Peter Andreich was a quiet creature whom he had taken from a neighboring family in acquiescence with his father's choice and command. Her name was Anna Pavlovna. She never interfered in any thing, received her guests cordially, and went out into society herself with pleasure--although ”it was death” to her, to use her own phrase, to have to powder herself. ”They put a felt cap on your head,”
she used to say in her old age; ”they combed all your hair straight up on end, they smeared it with grease, they strewed it with flour, they stuck it full of iron pins; you couldn't wash it away afterwards. But to pay a visit without powdering was impossible. People would have taken offence. What a torment it was!” She liked to drive fast, and was ready to play at cards from morning until evening. When her husband approached the card-table, she was always in the habit of covering with her hand the trumpery losses scored up against her; but she had made over to him, without reserve, all her dowry, all the money she had. She brought him two children--a son named Ivan, our Fedor's father, and a daughter, Glafira.[A]
[Footnote A: The accent should be on the second syllable of this name.]
Ivan was not brought up at home, but in the house of an old and wealthy maiden aunt, Princess Kubensky. She styled him her heir (if it had not been for that, his father would not have let him go), dressed him like a doll, gave him teachers of every kind, and placed him under the care of a French tutor--an ex-abbe, a pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau--a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles an adroit and subtle intriguer--”the very _fine fleur_ of the emigration,” as she expressed herself; and she ended by marrying this _fine fleur_ when she was almost seventy years old. She transferred all her property to his name, and soon afterwards, rouged, perfumed with amber _a la Richelieu_, surrounded by negro boys, Italian grey-hounds, and noisy parrots, she died, stretched on a crooked silken couch of the style of Louis the Fifteenth, with an enamelled snuff-box of Pet.i.tot's work in her hands--and died deserted by her husband. The insinuating M.
Courtin had preferred to take himself and her money off to Paris.
Ivan was in his twentieth year when this unexpected blow struck him.
We speak of the Princess's marriage, not her death. In his aunt's house, in which he had suddenly pa.s.sed from the position of a wealthy heir to that of a hanger-on, he would not slay any longer. In Petersburg, the society in which he had grown up closed its doors upon him. For the lower ranks of the public service, and the laborious and obscure life they involved, he felt a strong repugnance. All this, it must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of the Emperor Alexander I[A]. He was obliged, greatly against his will, to return to his father's country house. Dirty, poor, and miserable did the paternal nest seem to him. The solitude and the dullness of a retired country life offended him at every step. He was devoured by ennui; besides, every one in the house, except his mother, regarded him with unloving eyes. His father disliked his metropolitan habits, his dress-coats and s.h.i.+rt-frills, his books, his flute, his cleanliness--from which he justly argued that his son regarded him with a feeling of aversion. He was always grumbling at his son, and complaining of his conduct.
[Footnote A: When corruption was the rule in the public service.]
”Nothing we have here pleases him,” he used to say. ”He is so fastidious at table, he eats nothing. He cannot bear the air and the smell of the room. The sight of drunken people upsets him; and as to beating anyone before him, you musn't dare to do it. Then he won't enter the service; his health is delicate, forsooth! Bah! What an effeminate creature!--and all because his head is full of Voltaire!”
The old man particularly disliked Voltaire, and also the ”infidel”
Diderot, although he had never read a word of their works. Reading was not in his line.
Peter Andreich was not mistaken. Both Diderot and Voltaire really were in his son's head; and not they alone. Rousseau and Raynal and Helvetius also, and many other similar writers, were in his head; but in his head only. Ivan Petrovich's former tutor, the retired Abbe and encyclopaedist, had satisfied himself with pouring all the collective wisdom of the eighteenth century over his pupil; and so the pupil existed, saturated with it. It held its own in him without mixing with his blood, without sinking into his mind, without resolving into fixed convictions. And would it be reasonable to ask for convictions from a youngster half a century ago, when we have not even yet acquired any?
Ivan Petrovich disconcerted the visitors also in his father's house.
He was too proud to have anything to do with them; they feared him.
With his sister Glafira, too, who was twelve years his senior, he did not at all agree. This Glafira was a strange being. Plain, deformed, meagre--with staring and severe eyes, and with thin, compressed lips--she, in her face and her voice, and in her angular and quick movements, resembled her grandmother, the gipsy Andrei's wife.
Obstinate, and fond of power, she would not even hear of marriage.
Ivan Petrovich's return home was by no means to her taste. So long as the Princess Kubensky kept him with her, Glafira had hoped to obtain at least half of her father's property; and in her avarice, as well as in other points, she resembled her grandmother. Besides this, Glafira was jealous of her brother. He had been educated so well; he spoke French so correctly, with a Parisian accent; and she scarcely knew how to say ”_Bonjour_” and ”_Comment vous portez vous_?” It is true that her parents were entirely ignorant of French, but that did not make things any better for her.
As to Ivan Petrovich, he did not know what to do with himself for vexation and ennui; he had not spent quite a year in the country, but even this time seemed to him like ten years. It was only with his mother that he was at ease in spirit; and for whole hours he used to sit in her low suite of rooms listening to the good lady's simple, unconnected talk, and stuffing himself with preserves. It happened that among Anna Pavlovna's maids there was a very pretty girl named Malania. Intelligent and modest, with calm, sweet eyes, and finely-cut features, she pleased Ivan Petrovich from the very first, and he soon fell in love with her. He loved her timid gait, her modest replies, her gentle voice, her quiet smile. Every day she seemed to him more attractive than before. And she attached herself to Ivan Petrovich with the whole strength of her soul--as only Russian girls know how to devote themselves--and gave herself to him. In a country house no secret can be preserved long; in a short time almost every one knew of the young master's fondness for Malania. At last the news reached Peter Andreich himself. At another time it is probable that he would have paid very little attention to so unimportant an affair; but he had long nursed a grudge against his son, and he was delighted to have an opportunity of disgracing the philosophical exquisite from St.
Petersburg. There ensued a storm, attended by noise and outcry.
Malania was locked up in the store-room.[A] Ivan Petrovich was summoned into his father's presence. Anna Pavlovna also came running to the scene of confusion, and tried to appease her husband; but he would not listen to a word she said. Like a hawk, he pounced upon his son charging him with immorality, atheism, and hypocrisy. He eagerly availed himself of so good an opportunity of discharging on him all his long-gathered spite against the Princess Kubensky, and overwhelmed him with insulting expressions.
[Footnote A: A sort of closet under the stairs.]
At first Ivan Petrovich kept silence, and maintained his hold over himself; but when his father thought fit to threaten him with a disgraceful punishment, he could bear it no longer. ”Ah!” he thought, ”the infidel Diderot is going to be brought forward again. Well, then, I will put his teaching in action.” And so with a quiet and even voice, although with a secret shuddering in all his limbs, he told his father that it was a mistake to accuse him of immorality; that he had no intention of justifying his fault, but that he was ready to make amends for it, and that all the more willingly, inasmuch as he felt himself superior to all prejudices; and, in fact--that he was ready to marry Malania. In uttering these words Ivan Petrovich undoubtedly attained the end he had in view. Peter Andreich was so confounded that he opened his eyes wide, and for a moment was struck dumb; but he immediately recovered his senses, and then and there, just as he was, wrapped in a dressing-gown trimmed with squirrels' fur, and with slippers on his bare feet, he rushed with clenched fists at his son, who, as if on purpose, had dressed his hair that day _a la t.i.tus_, and had put on a blue dress-coat, quite new and made in the English fas.h.i.+on, ta.s.selled boots, and dandified, tight-fitting buckskin pantaloons. Anna Pavlovna uttered a loud shriek, and hid her face in her hands; meanwhile her son ran right through the house, jumped into the court-yard, threw himself first into the kitchen garden and then into the flower garden, flew across the park into the road, and ran and ran, without once looking back, until at last he ceased to hear behind him the sound of his father's heavy feet, the loud and broken cries with which his father sobbed out, ”Stop, villain! Stop, or I will curse you!”
Ivan Petrovich took refuge in the house of a neighbor,[A] and his father returned home utterly exhausted, and bathed in perspiration.