The Adolescent

“Indeed, Alexander Semyonovich, how is our dear patient today?” Versilov inquired. If I hadn’t been so shaken, I would have been terribly curious, first thing, to follow Versilov’s relations with this old man, which I had already thought about the day before. I was struck most of all now by the extremely soft and pleasant expression on Versilov’s face; there was something perfectly sincere in it. I have already observed, I believe, that Versilov’s face became astonishingly beautiful as soon as he turned the least bit simplehearted.

“We keep on quarreling,” replied the doctor.

“With Makar Ivanovich? I don’t believe it; it’s impossible to quarrel with him.”

“He won’t obey me; he doesn’t sleep at night . . .”

“Stop it now, Alexander Semyonovich, enough grumbling,” laughed Makar Ivanovich. “Well, Andrei Petrovich, dear heart, what have they done with our young lady? Here she’s been clucking and worrying all morning,” he added, pointing to mama.

“Oh, Andrei Petrovich,” mama exclaimed, greatly worried indeed, “tell us quickly, don’t torment us: what did they decide about the poor thing?”

“Our young lady has been sentenced!”

“Oh!” mama cried out.

“Not to Siberia, don’t worry—only to a fifteen-rouble fine. It turned into a comedy!”

He sat down, the doctor sat down, too. They were talking about Tatyana Pavlovna, and I still knew nothing at all about this story. I was sitting to the left of Makar Ivanovich, and Liza sat down opposite me to the right; she evidently had her own special grief today, with which she had come to mama; the expression on her face was anxious and a

The thing was that Tatyana Pavlovna had gone before the justice of the peace that morning with her cook. The case was trifling in the highest degree; I’ve already mentioned that the spiteful Fi

Versilov recounted it all jokingly and with extraordinary merriment, so that even mama burst out laughing; he impersonated Tatyana Pavlovna, and the midshipman, and the cook. The cook a

“What a one, really!” Mama shook her head, very pleased both by the news and by Andrei Petrovich’s account, but casting anxious glances at Liza on the sly.

“She’s been a willful young lady from early on,” Makar Ivanovich smiled.

“Bile and idleness,” the doctor retorted.

“Me willful, me bile and idleness?” Tatyana Pavlovna suddenly came in, apparently very pleased with herself. “Alexander Semyonovich, you of all people shouldn’t go talking nonsense; you knew when you were ten years old what sort of idle woman I was, and as for my bile, you’ve been treating it for a whole year and can’t cure it, so shame on you. Well, enough of your jeering at me. Thank you, Andrei Petrovich, for taking the trouble to come to court. Well, how are you, Makarushka, it’s you I’ve come to see, not this one” (she pointed at me, but at the same time gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder; I’d never seen her in such a merry state of mind before).

“Well, so?” she concluded, suddenly turning to the doctor and frowning worriedly.

“This one doesn’t want to stay in bed, but sitting up like this only wears him out.”

“I’ll just sit a wee bit with people,” Makar Ivanovich murmured, his face as pleading as a child’s.

“Yes, we love that, we do; we love chatting in a little circle, when people gather round us; I know Makarushka,” said Tatyana Pavlovna.

“And, oh, what a speedy one he is,” the old man smiled again, turning to the doctor. “And you don’t give ear to speech; wait, let me say it. I’ll lie down, dear heart, I’ve heard, but to our minds what it means is, ‘Once you lie down, you may not get up again’—that, my friend, is what’s standing back of me.”

“Well, yes, I just knew it, a popular prejudice: ‘I’ll lie down, yes,’ they say, ‘and for all I know, I won’t get up again’—that’s what people are very often afraid of, and they’d rather spend the time of their illness on their feet than go to the hospital. And you, Makar Ivanovich, are simply yearning, yearning for your dear freedom, for the open road; that’s all your illness; you’re not used to living in the same place for long. Aren’t you what’s known as a wanderer? Well, and with our people vagrancy almost turns into a passion. I’ve noticed it more than once in our people. Our people are mostly vagrants.”

“So Makar is a vagrant, in your opinion?” Tatyana Pavlovna picked up.

“Oh, not in that sense; I was using the word in its general sense. Well, so he’s a religious vagrant, a pious one, but a vagrant all the same. In a good, respectable sense, but a vagrant . . . From a medical point of view, I . . .”

“I assure you,” I suddenly addressed the doctor, “that the vagrants are sooner you and I, and everybody else here, and not this old man, from whom you and I have something to learn, because there are firm things in his life, and we, all of us here, have nothing firm in our lives . . . However, you could hardly understand that.”