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he did not understand what child he was

talking about, and even as though he was surprised to hear that he had

a little son in the house. The story may have been exaggerated, yet it

must have been something like the truth.

 

Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly

playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so,

and even to his own direct disadvantage, as, for instance, in the

present case. This habit, however, is characteristic of a very great

number of people, some of them very clever ones, not like Fyodor

Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch carried the business through

vigorously, and was appointed, with Fyodor Pavlovitch, joint

guardian of the child, who had a small property, a house and land,

left him by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, pass into this cousin’s

keeping, but as the latter had no family of his own, and after

securing the revenues of his estates was in haste to return at once to

Paris, he left the boy in charge of one of his cousins, a lady

living in Moscow. It came to pass that, settling permanently in

Paris he, too, forgot the child, especially when the Revolution of

February broke out, making an impression on his mind that he

remembered all the rest of his life. The Moscow lady died, and Mitya

passed into the care of one of her married daughters. I believe he

changed his home a fourth time later on. I won’t enlarge upon that

now, as I shall have much to tell later of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s

firstborn, and must confine myself now to the most essential facts

about him, without which I could not begin my story.

 

In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch, was

the only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s three sons who grew up in the

belief that he had property, and that he would be independent on

coming of age. He spent an irregular boyhood and youth. He did not

finish his studies at the gymnasium, he got into a military school,

then went to the Caucasus, was promoted, fought a duel, and was

degraded to the ranks, earned promotion again, led a wild life, and

spent a good deal of money. He did not begin to receive any income

from Fyodor Pavlovitch until he came of age, and until then got into

debt. He saw and knew his father, Fyodor Pavlovitch, for the first

time on coming of age, when he visited our neighbourhood on purpose to

settle with him about his property. He seems not to have liked his

father. He did not stay long with him, and made haste to get away,

having only succeeded in obtaining a sum of money, and entering into

an agreement for future payments from the estate, of the revenues

and value of which he was unable (a fact worthy of note), upon this

occasion, to get a statement from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch

remarked for the first time then (this, too, should be noted) that

Mitya had a vague and exaggerated idea of his property. Fyodor

Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with this, as it fell in with his

own designs. He gathered only that the young man was frivolous,

unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated, and that if he

could only obtain ready money he would be satisfied, although only, of

course, a short time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take advantage

of this fact, sending him from time to time small doles,

instalments. In the end, when four years later, Mitya, losing

patience, came a second time to our little town to settle up once

for all with his father, it turned out to his amazement that he had

nothing, that it was difficult to get an account even, that he had

received the whole value of his property in sums of money from

Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was perhaps even in debt to him, that by

various agreements into which he had, of his own desire, entered at

various previous dates, he had no right to expect anything more, and

so on, and so on. The young man was overwhelmed, suspected deceit

and cheating, and was almost beside himself. And, indeed, this

circumstance led to the catastrophe, the account of which forms the

subject of my first introductory story, or rather the external side of

it. But before I pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor

Pavlovitch’s other two sons, and of their origin.

Chapter 3

The Second Marriage and the Second Family

 

VERY shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his hands

Fyodor Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted

eight years. He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very

young girl, from another province, where he had gone upon some small

piece of business in company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch

was a drunkard and a vicious debauchee he never neglected investing

his capital, and managed his business affairs very successfully,

though, no doubt, not over-scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the

daughter of an obscure deacon, and was left from childhood an orphan

without relations. She grew up in the house of a general’s widow, a

wealthy old lady of good position, who was at once her benefactress

and tormentor. I do not know the details, but I have only heard that

the orphan girl, a meek and gentle creature, was once cut down from

a halter in which she was hanging from a nail in the loft, so terrible

were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting nagging of this

old woman, who was apparently not bad-hearted but had become an

insufferable tyrant through idleness.

 

Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him

and he was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed

an elopement to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she

would not on any account have married him if she had known a little

more about him in time. But she lived in another province; besides,

what could a little girl of sixteen know about it, except that she

would be better at the bottom of the river than remaining with her

benefactress. So the poor child exchanged a benefactress for a

benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not get a penny this time, for the

general’s widow was furious. She gave them nothing and cursed them

both. But he had not reckoned on a dowry; what allured him was the

remarkable beauty of the innocent girl, above all her innocent

appearance, which had a peculiar attraction for a vicious

profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser types of

feminine beauty.

 

“Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor,” he used to say

afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this

might, of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had

received no dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her “from

the halter,” he did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel

that she had “wronged” him, he took advantage of her phenomenal

meekness and submissiveness to trample on the elementary decencies

of marriage. He gathered loose women into his house, and carried on

orgies of debauchery in his wife’s presence. To show what a pass

things had come to, I may mention that Grigory, the gloomy, stupid,

obstinate, argumentative servant, who had always hated his first

mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna, took the side of his new mistress. He

championed her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner little

befitting a servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels and drove

all the disorderly women out of the house. In the end this unhappy

young woman, kept in terror from her childhood, fell into that kind of

nervous disease which is most frequently found in peasant women who

are said to be “possessed by devils.” At times after terrible fits

of hysterics she even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor

Pavlovitch two sons, Ivan and Alexey, the eldest in the first year

of marriage and the second three years later. When she died, little

Alexey was in his fourth year, and, strange as it seems, I know that

he remembered his mother all his life, like a dream, of course. At her

death almost exactly the same thing happened to the two little boys as

to their elder brother, Mitya. They were completely forgotten and

abandoned by their father. They were looked after by the same

Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they were found by the

tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother. She was still

alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the insult done

her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as to her

Sofya’s manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous

surroundings she declared aloud two or three times to her retainers:

 

“It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.”

 

Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s

widow suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor

Pavlovitch’s house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she

did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had

not seen for those eight years, came in to her drunk. The story is

that instantly upon seeing him, without any sort of explanation, she

gave him two good, resounding slaps on the face, seized him by a

tuft of hair, and shook him three times up and down. Then, without a

word, she went straight to the cottage to the two boys. Seeing, at the

first glance, that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she promptly

gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and announcing that she would

carry off both the children she wrapped them just as they were in a

rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her own town.

Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word, and

when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow

and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for orphans.”

“You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she

drove away.

 

Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good

thing, and did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to

any proposition in regard to his children’s education. As for the

slaps she had given him, he drove all over the town telling the story.

 

It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she left

the boys in her will a thousand roubles each “for their instruction,

and so that all be spent on them exclusively, with the condition

that it be so portioned out as to last till they are twenty-one, for

it is more than adequate provision for such children. If other

people think fit to throw away their money, let them.” I have not read

the will myself, but I heard there was something queer of the sort,

very whimsically expressed. The principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch

Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility of the province, turned out, however,

to be an honest man. Writing to Fyodor Pavlovitch, and discerning at

once that he could extract nothing from him for his children’s

education (though the latter never directly refused but only

procrastinated as he always did in such cases, and was, indeed, at

times effusively sentimental), Yefim Petrovitch took a personal

interest in the orphans. He became especially fond of the younger,

Alexey, who lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the

reader to note this from the beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man

of a generosity and humanity rarely to be met with, the young people

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