desire to wring—not a confession… no, indeed! but, at least, one warm word of kinship from Ivan Matveitch? Didn’t I know what he was, and how little he was like all that I pictured in my dreams as a father!… But I was so lonely, so alone on earth! And then, that thought, ever recurring, gave me no rest: ‘Did not she love him? She must have loved him for something?’
Three years more slipped by. Nothing changed in the monotonous round of life, marked out and arranged for us. Viktor was growing into a boy. I was eight years older and would gladly have looked after him, but Mr. Ratsch opposed my doing so. He gave him a nurse, who had orders to keep strict watch that the child was not ‘spoilt,’ that is, not to allow me to go near him. And Viktor himself fought shy of me. One day Mr. Ratsch came into my room, perturbed, excited, and angry. On the previous evening unpleasant rumours had reached me about my stepfather; the servants were talking of his having been caught embezzling a considerable sum of money, and taking bribes from a merchant.
‘You can assist me,’ he began, tapping impatiently on the table with his fingers. ‘Go and speak for me to Ivan Matveitch.’
‘Speak for you? On what ground? What about?’
‘Intercede for me…. I’m not like a stranger any way… I’m accused… well, the fact is, I may be left without bread to eat, and you, too.’
‘But how can I go to him? How can I disturb him?’
‘What next! You have a right to disturb him!’
‘What right, Ivan Demianitch?’
‘Come, no humbug…. He cannot refuse you, for many reasons. Do you mean to tell me you don’t understand that?’
He looked insolently into my eyes, and I felt my cheeks simply burning. Hatred, contempt, rose up within me, surged in a rush upon me, drowning me.
‘Yes, I understand you, Ivan Demianitch,’ I answered at last—my own voice seemed strange to me—’and I am not going to Ivan Matveitch, and I will not ask him for anything. Bread, or no bread!’
Mr. Ratsch shivered, ground his teeth, and clenched his fists.
‘All right, wait a bit, your highness!’ he muttered huskily. ‘I won’t forget it!’ That same day, Ivan Matveitch sent for him, and, I was told, shook his cane at him, the very cane which he had once exchanged with the Due de la Rochefoucauld, and cried, ‘You be a scoundrel and extortioner! I put you outside!’ Ivan Matveitch could hardly speak Russian at all, and despised our ‘coarse jargon,’ ce jargon vulgaire et rude. Some one once said before him, ‘That same’s self-understood.’ Ivan Matveitch was quite indignant, and often afterwards quoted the phrase as an example of the senselessness and absurdity of the Russian tongue. ‘What does it mean, that same’s self-understood?’ he would ask in Russian, with emphasis on each syllable. ‘Why not simply that’s understood, and why same and self?’
Ivan Matveitch did not, however, dismiss Mr. Ratsch, he did not even deprive him of his position. But my stepfather kept his word: he never forgot it.
I began to notice a change in Ivan Matveitch. He was low-spirited, depressed, his health broke down a little. His fresh, rosy face grew yellow and wrinkled; he lost a front tooth. He quite ceased going out, and gave up the reception-days he had established for the peasants, without the assistance of the priest, sans le concours du clergé. On such days Ivan Matveitch had been in the habit of going in to the peasants in the hall or on the balcony, with a rose in his buttonhole, and putting his lips to a silver goblet of vodka, he would make them a speech something like this: ‘You are content with my actions, even as I am content with your zeal, whereat I rejoice truly. We are all brothers; at our birth we are equal; I drink your health!’ He bowed to them, and the peasants bowed to him, but only from the waist, no prostrating themselves to the ground, that was strictly forbidden. The peasants were entertained with good cheer as before, but Ivan Matveitch no longer showed himself to his subjects. Sometimes he interrupted my reading with exclamations: ‘La machine se détraque! Cela se gâte!’ Even his eyes—those bright, stony eyes—began to grow dim and, as it were, smaller; he dozed oftener than ever and breathed hard in his sleep. His manner with me was unchanged; only a shade of chivalrous deference began to be perceptible in it. He never failed to get up—though with difficulty—from his chair when I came in, conducted me to the door, supporting me with his hand under my elbow, and instead of Suzon began to call me sometimes, ‘ma chère demoiselle,’ sometimes, ‘mon Antigone.’ M. le Commandeur died two years after my mother’s death; his death seemed to affect Ivan Matveitch far more deeply. A contemporary had disappeared: that was what distressed him. And yet in later years M. le Commandeur’s sole service had consisted in crying, ‘Bien joué, mal réussi!’ every time Ivan Matveitch missed a stroke, playing billiards with Mr. Ratsch; though, indeed, too, when Ivan Matveitch addressed him at table with some such question as: ‘N’est-ce pas, M. le Commandeur, c’est Montesquieu qui a dit cela dans ses Lettres Persanes?’ he had still, sometimes dropping a spoonful of soup on his ruffle, responded profoundly: ‘Ah, Monsieur de Montesquieu? Un grand écrivain, monsieur, un grand écrivain!’ Only once, when Ivan Matveitch told him that ‘les théophilanthropes ont eu pourtant du bon!’ the old man cried in an excited voice, ‘Monsieur de Kolontouskoi’ (he hadn’t succeeded in the course of twenty years in learning to pronounce his patron’s name correctly), ‘Monsieur de Kolontouskoi! Leur fondateur, l’instigateur de cette secte, ce La Reveillère Lepeaux était un bonnet rouge!’ ‘Non, non,’ said Ivan Matveitch, smiling and rolling together a pinch of snuff: ‘des fleurs, des jeunes vierges, le culte de la Nature… ils out eu du bon, ils out eu du bon!’…I was always surprised at the extent of Ivan Matveitch’s knowledge, and at the uselessness of his knowledge to himself.
Ivan Matveitch was perceptibly failing, but he still put a good face on it. One day, three weeks before his death, he had a violent attack of giddiness just after dinner. He sank into thought, said, ‘C’est la fin,’ and pulling himself together with a sigh, he wrote a letter to Petersburg to his sole heir, a brother with whom he had had no intercourse for twenty years. Hearing that Ivan Matveitch was unwell, a neighbour paid him a visit—a German, a Catholic—once a distinguished physician, who was living in retirement in his little place in the country. He was very rarely at Ivan Matveitch’s, but the latter always received him with special deference, and in fact had a great respect for him. He was almost the only person in the world he did respect. The old man advised Ivan Matveitch to send for a priest, but Ivan Matveitch responded that ‘ces messieurs et moi, nous n’avons rien à nous dire,’ and begged him to change the subject. On the neighbour’s departure, he gave his valet orders to admit no one in future.
Then he sent for me. I was frightened when I saw him; there were blue patches under his eyes, his face looked drawn and stiff, his jaw hung down. ‘Vous voila grande, Suzon,’ he said, with difficulty articulating the consonants, but still trying to smile (I was then nineteen), ‘vous allez peut-être bientót rester seule. Soyez toujours sage et vertueuse. C’est la dernière récommandation d’un’—he coughed—’d’un vieillard qui vous veut du bien. Je vous ai recommandé à mon frère et je ne doute pas qu’il ne respecte mes volontés….’ He coughed again, and anxiously felt his chest. ‘Du reste, j’esèpre encore pouvoir faire quelque chose pour vous… dans mon testament.’ This last phrase cut me to the heart, like a knife. Ah, it was really too… too contemptuous and insulting! Ivan Matveitch probably ascribed to some other feeling—to a feeling of grief or gratitude—what was expressed in my face, and as though wishing to comfort me, he patted me on the shoulder, at the same time, as usual, gently repelling me, and observed: ‘Voyons, mon enfant, du courage! Nous sommes tous mortels! Et puis il n’y a pas encore de danger. Ce n’est qu’une précaution que j’ai cru devoir prendre…. Allez!’
Again, just as when he had summoned me after my mother’s death, I longed to shriek at him, ‘But I’m your daughter! your daughter!’ But I thought in those words, in that cry of the heart, he would doubtless hear nothing but a desire to assert my rights, my claims on his property, on his money…. Oh, no, for nothing in the world would I say a word to this man, who had not once mentioned my mother’s name to me, in whose eyes I was of so little account that he did not even trouble himself to ascertain whether I was aware of my parentage! Or, perhaps, he suspected, even knew it, and did not wish ‘to raise a dust’ (a favourite saying of his, almost the only Russian expression he ever used), did not care to deprive himself of a good reader with a young voice! No! no! Let him go on wronging his daughter, as he had wronged her mother! Let him carry both sins to the grave! I swore it, I swore he should not hear from my lips the word which must have something of a sweet and holy sound
