The Adolescent

“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 . . .”

(I’ll make a necessary nota bene

here: if my mother should happen to outlive Mr. Versilov, she would be left literally without a kopeck in her old age, if it weren’t for that three thousand of Makar Ivanovich’s, which had long been doubled by interest, and which he left to her in its entirety, to a rouble, last year in his will. He had divined Versilov even then.)

“You once said that Makar Ivanovich came to visit you several times, and always stayed in my mother’s apartment?”

“Yes, my friend, and I confess, at first I was terribly afraid of those visits. In all this period, in twenty years, he came only six or seven times, and on the first occasions, if I was at home, I hid myself. I didn’t even understand at first what it meant and why he came. But then, owing to certain considerations, it seemed to me that it was not at all that stupid on his part. Then, by chance, I decided out of curiosity to go and look at him, and, I assure you, my impression was most original. This was his third or fourth visit, precisely at the time when I was about to become an arbiter of the peace and when, naturally, I was setting out with all my strength to study Russia. I even heard a great many new things from him. Besides, I met in him precisely what I had never expected to meet: a sort of good humor, an evenness of character, and, most surprisingly, all but mirth. Not the slightest allusion to that

(tu comprends²³), and, in the highest degree, an ability to talk sense and to talk excellently well, that is, without that stupid homegrown profundity, which, I confess, I cannot stand, despite all my democratism, and without all those strained Russicisms in which ‘real Russian people’ speak in novels or on stage. With all that, extremely little about religion, unless you brought it up yourself, and even quite nice stories of their own sort about monasteries and monastery life, if you yourself became curious. And above all—deference, that modest deference, precisely the deference that is necessary for the highest equality, moreover, without which, in my opinion, one cannot attain to superiority. Precisely here, through the lack of the least arrogance, one attains to the highest respectability, and there appears a person who undoubtedly respects himself, and precisely whatever the situation he finds himself in, and whatever his destiny happens to be. This ability to respect oneself in one’s own situation—is extremely rare in the world, at least as rare as a true sense of one’s own dignity . . . You’ll see for yourself, once you’ve lived. But what struck me most afterwards, precisely afterwards, and not at the beginning” (Versilov added), “was that this Makar was of extremely stately appearance and, I assure you, was extremely handsome. True, he was old, but Dark-faced, tall, and straight,⁴⁶

simple and grave; I even marveled at how my poor Sofya could have preferred me then; he was fifty then, but was still such a fine fellow, and I was such a whirligig beside him. However, I remember he was already unpardonably gray then, which meant he was just as gray when he married her . . . That might have had an influence.”

This Versilov had the most scoundrelly high-toned manner: having said (when it was impossible not to) several quite clever and beautiful things, suddenly to end on purpose with some stupidity like this surmise about Makar Ivanovich’s gray hair and its influence on my mother. He did it on purpose, probably not knowing why himself, from a stupid society habit. To listen to him—it seemed he was speaking very seriously, and yet within himself he was faking or laughing.

III

I DON’T UNDERSTAND why I was suddenly overcome then by terrible anger. Generally, I recall some of my outbursts in those minutes with great displeasure. I suddenly got up from my chair.