The Adolescent

“They who? I don’t quite understand you.”

“The people, my friend, I’m speaking of the people. They have demonstrated this great, vital force and historical breadth both morally and politically. But to return to what we were saying, I’ll observe about your mother that she’s not always silent; your mother occasionally says things, but says them in such a way that you see straight off that you’ve only wasted your time talking, even if you’ve spent five years beforehand gradually preparing her. Besides, her objections are quite unexpected. Note once again that I don’t consider her a fool at all; on the contrary, there’s a certain kind of intelligence here, and even a most remarkable intelligence; however, maybe you won’t believe me about her intelligence . . .”

“Why not? I only don’t believe that you really believe in her intelligence yourself, and are not pretending.”

“Oh? You consider me such a chameleon? My friend, I allow you a bit too much . . . as a spoiled son . . . but let it remain so for this time.”

“Tell me about my father—the truth, if you can.”

“Concerning Makar Ivanovich? Makar Ivanovich is, as you already know, a household serf, who had, so to speak, a desire for a certain glory . . .”

“I’ll bet that at this moment you envy him for something!”

“On the contrary, my friend, on the contrary, and, if you wish, I’m very glad to see you in such whimsical spirits; I swear that precisely now I am in a highly repentant humor, and precisely now, at this moment, and maybe for the thousandth time, I impotently regret all that happened twenty years ago. Besides, as God is my witness, it all happened quite inadvertently . . . well, and afterwards, as far as it was in my power, also humanely; at least so far as I then understood the endeavor of humaneness. Oh, we were all boiling over then with the zeal to do good, to serve civic goals, high ideas; we condemned ranks, our inherited rights, estates, and even moneylenders, at least some of us did . . . I swear to you. We weren’t many, but we spoke well and, I assure you, we sometimes even acted well.”

“That was when you wept on his shoulder?”

“My friend, I agree with you in everything beforehand; by the way, you heard about the shoulder from me, which means that at this moment you are making wicked use of my own simpleheartedness and trustfulness; but you must agree that that shoulder really wasn’t as bad as it seems at first sight, especially for that time; we were only begi

“Just now, downstairs, I waxed a little sentimental, and felt very ashamed, as I was coming up here, at the thought that you might think I was faking. It’s true that on some occasions, though your feelings are sincere, you sometimes pretend; but downstairs just now it was all natural.”

“That’s precisely it; you’ve defined it very happily in a single phrase: ‘though your feelings are sincere, all the same you pretend.’ Well, that’s exactly how it was with me: though I was pretending, I wept quite sincerely. I won’t dispute that Makar Ivanovich might have taken that shoulder as an added mockery, if he had been more clever; but his honesty then stood in the way of his perspicacity. Only I don’t know whether he pitied me then or not; I remember I very much wanted that.”

“You know,” I interrupted him, “you’re mocking now, too, as you say that. And generally all the time, whenever you spoke to me during this whole month, you did it mockingly. Why did you always do that when you spoke to me?”

“You think so?” he replied meekly. “You’re very suspicious. However, if I do laugh, it’s not at you, or at least not at you alone, rest assured. But I’m not laughing now, and back then—in short, I did all I could then, and, believe me, not for my own benefit. We, that is, the beautiful people, as opposed to the common folk, did not know at all how to act for our own benefit then; on the contrary, we always mucked things up for ourselves as much as possible, and I confess, among us then we considered that some sort of ‘higher benefit of our own’—in a higher sense, naturally. The present generation of advanced people is much more grasping than we were. At that time, even before the sin, I explained everything to Makar Ivanovich with extraordinary directness. I now agree that much of it didn’t need to be explained at all, still less with such directness; to say nothing of humaneness, it would simply have been more polite. But try restraining yourself when you’re dancing away, and want to perform a nice little step! And maybe such are the demands of the beautiful and the lofty44 in reality, all my life I’ve been unable to resolve that. However, it’s too profound a theme for our superficial conversation, but I swear to you that I sometimes die of shame when I remember it. I offered him three thousand roubles then, and, I remember, he said nothing, I alone did the talking. Imagine, I fancied he was afraid of me, that is, of my serf-owning rights, and, I remember, I tried as hard as I could to encourage him; I persuaded him not to be afraid of anything and to voice all his wishes, and even with all possible criticism. As a guarantee, I gave him my word that if he didn’t accept my conditions, that is, the three thousand, freedom (for him and his wife, naturally), and that he should go off on a journey any which way (without his wife, naturally)—he should tell me so directly, and I would at once grant him his freedom, let him have his wife, reward them both with the same three thousand, I believe, and it would not be they who would go off any which way, but I myself would go away to Italy for three years, all alone. Mon ami, I wouldn’t have taken Mlle. Sapozhkov to Italy, I assure you; I was extremely pure at that time. And what then? This Makar understood excellently well that I would do just what I said; but he went on saying nothing, and only when I was about to fall down before him a third time, he drew back, waved his arm, and went out even somewhat unceremoniously, I assure you, which even surprised me then. I saw myself for a moment in the mirror then, and ca

“Tell me, was there a sin? You said you sent for the husband even before the sin?”

“That depends, you see, on how you understand . . .”

“Meaning there was. You just said you were mistaken about him, that he was something different. What was different?”

“Precisely what, I don’t know even now. But it was something else, and, you know, even quite respectable; I conclude that because by the end I felt three times more ashamed in his presence. The very next day he agreed to go on a journey, without a word—naturally, not forgetting any of the rewards I had offered.”

“He took the money?”

“What else! You know, my friend, on this point he even quite surprised me. Naturally, I didn’t happen to have three thousand in my pocket at the time, but I got hold of seven hundred roubles and handed them to him to start with. And what then? He requested the remaining two thousand three hundred from me, just to be sure, in the form of a promissory note in the name of some merchant. Two years later he used this letter to request the money from me through the court, and with interest, so that he surprised me again, the more so as he literally went about collecting money for building a church of God, and since then he’s been wandering for twenty years. I don’t understand why a wanderer needs so much money for himself . . . money’s such a worldly thing . . . At that moment, of course, I offered it sincerely and, so to speak, with an initial fervor, but later, when so much time had passed, I naturally might have thought better of it . . . and I hoped he would at least spare me . . . or, so to speak, spare us, her and me, would at least wait. However, he didn’t even wait . . .”