Chapter 42 (2)

It was during this period that his elder sister’s husband died. Hearing that their brother was in prison, the two sisters came to get him out. As is always the case, they knew nothing of the manner of life of their Nikolinka. The two sisters adored him, regarded him as a genius, and were impatiently awaiting the moment when he would appear to the world in all his power and glory.

They were met by various disillusionments which surprised them the more as they were so unexpected. On the morning after their arrival, taking with them Count Chotkewicz, a friend of Sazonov’s, with them, they went to buy him out as a surprise. Chotkewicz left them in the carriage and went away promising to return in a minute with their brother. Hour after hour passed, Nikolinka did not appear ... no doubt the formalities take a long time, thought the ladies waiting wearily in the cab.... At last Chotkewicz ran up alone, flushed in the face, and smelling strongly of spirituous liquor. He announced that Sazonov would be with them directly; that he was just giving a farewell lunch to his companions and treating them to wine; that this was the usual thing. This was rather a stab to the tender hearts of the fair travellers ... but ... but here at last their Nikolinka, solid, stout, and perspiring, flung himself into their arms, and they set off homewards satisfied and happy.

They had heard something ... about some Italian woman ... an ardent daughter of Italy, unable to resist the genius from the hyperborean north, who had been enchanted by her southern voice and the fire of her eyes.... Blushing and abashed, they indicated the timid desire to make her acquaintance. He agreed to everything, and went home. Two days later the sisters planned a second surprise for their brother, which was even less successful than the first.

At eleven o’clock one hot morning the sisters set off to have a look at this Francesca da Rimini and her _ménage_ with Nikolinka. The younger sister opened the door, and stopped short.... In the small drawing-room Sazonov was sitting on the carpeted floor in extreme deshabille, and beside him the stout Signora P., scantily veiled in a light dressing-gown. The signora was laughing with the full force of her lusty Italian lungs at something Nikolinka was telling her. Beside them stood a pail of ice, and in it, tilted on one side, was a bottle of champagne.

What happened next I do not know, but the effect produced was strong and lasting. The younger sister came to consult me about this incident, of which she spoke with tears and sobs. I tried to comfort her by assurances that the first days after Clichy were different from the average.

All this was followed by a prosaic move into smaller lodgings.... The valet, who was a master at putting on a cravat of impenetrably solid silk and adroitly sticking a pearl pin into it, was dismissed, and after him the pin itself appeared in a shop window.

So passed another five years. Sazonov went to Paris from Switzerland, and then went back again from Paris to Switzerland. To get rid of the buxom Italian, he devised the most original plan—he married her and then left her.

Something had come between us; he did not treat me openly in a matter that was very dear to my heart. I could not get over it.

Meantime a new epoch was beginning for Russia, Sazonov was eager to take part in it: wrote articles[96] that were unsuccessful, tried to return to Russia and did not succeed, and finally left Paris. For a long while nothing was heard of him.

One day a Russian who had just come from Switzerland to London said to me: ‘An old friend of yours was buried the day before I left Geneva.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Sazonov; and only fancy, there was not one Russian at his funeral.’

And it sent a stab to my heart to think with remorse that I had abandoned him for so long....

(_Written in 1863._)

II

THE ENGELSONS

They are both dead. He was not more than thirty-five; she was younger.

He died ten years ago in Jersey: his coffin was followed to the grave by his widow, his child, and a sturdily built, dishevelled-looking old man with large, marked, rough features; in his face were mingled genius and frenzy, fanaticism and irony, the intensity of an Old Testament prophet and a Jacobin of the year 1793. That old man was Pierre Leroux.

She died at the beginning of 1865 in Spain. I heard of her death a few months later.

I have not heard where the child is.

The man of whom I am speaking was once near and dear to me; he first tended deep wounds when they were fresh; he was a brother, a sister to me. She, scarcely knowing what she was doing, estranged him from me. He became my enemy....

The news of her death brought them back to my memory again....

I took up the manuscript I had written about them in 1859, and read it through by way of psalter over the dead.

For a long time I hesitated whether to print it or not, and only lately decided to do so. My intention is good, and my story is true. I do not want to cast reproaches on their grave, but together with the reader to trace once again, in fresh instances, the intricate, morbid warping of character in the last generation under Nicholas.

CHÂTEAU BOISSIÈRE, _December 31, 1865_.

I

At the beginning of 1850 a Russian arrived in Nice with his wife. They were pointed out to me on the parade. They both belonged to the class who were waiting for the turn of the tide: he was thin, pale, consumptive, with reddish fair hair; she was a beauty who had faded early, worn-out, half-shattered, exhausted.

A doctor living in the household of a Russian lady told me that the fair gentleman had been a Lyceum student, that he was reading _Vom andern Ufer_, that he had been mixed up in the Petrashev case, and consequently wished to make my acquaintance. I answered that I was always glad to meet a good Russian, especially a Lyceum student, and one who had had a hand in a case of which I knew little, but which had been for me like the olive branch brought by the dove to Noah’s ark.

Some days passed without my seeing either the doctor or the new Russian. Suddenly between nine and ten one evening a card was brought me; it was he. Karl Vogt and I were sitting in the dining-room. I told the servant to ask the visitor upstairs into the drawing-room, and went upstairs before the rest. There I found him, pale, trembling, apparently in a feverish condition. He could scarcely tell me his name; when he was a little calmer, he jumped up from his chair, rushed at me, kissed me effusively, and before I could quite recover myself, with the words, ‘So at last I am really seeing you,’ he kissed my hand. ‘What are you about? Upon my soul!’ I said, but by then he was in tears.

I looked at him in perplexity; was this nervous instability or simply madness?

Apologising and showering compliments on me, he told me with extraordinary rapidity and much gesticulation that I had saved his life, and this was how. Desperate with acute depression in Petersburg, expelled from the Lyceum for some nonsense or other, disgusted with a job in the service which he had been obliged to accept, and seeing no solution for himself personally, nor for things in general, he had made up his mind to poison himself, and a few hours before carrying out his design went wandering aimlessly about the streets: came to Izler’s and picked up a volume of the _Notes of the Fatherland_. My article, ‘A propos of a Drama,’ was in it. Reading it gradually absorbed his attention; he felt better, he felt ashamed of having so weakly given in to sorrow and despair when public interests were springing up on all sides and calling for all who were young, for all who had strength, and instead of taking poison Engelson asked for half a bottle of madeira, read the article over again, and from that time became my ardent admirer.

He sat on till late at night, and went away asking leave to come again soon. Through his tangled talk, continually interspersed with anecdotes and digressions, one could see a richly endowed brain, unmistakable dialectic ability, and, still more clearly, something warped and distorted that flung him from one extreme to the other, from an indignation intensified by sorrow, and made poignant by misfortune, to ironical clowning, from tears to affectation.

He left me with a strange impression. At first I did not quite believe in him, then I was tired by him—he seemed to affect one’s nerves too much; but by degrees I grew used to his oddities, and was glad of an original person to break the monotonous boredom induced by the vast majority of Western Europeans.

Engelson had read a great deal and studied a great deal, he was a linguist and a philologist, and brought into everything the scepticism with which we are so familiar, and which exacts so high a price for the pain it leaves. In old days they would have said of him that he had read himself silly. His over-stimulated intellectual activity was too much for the strength of his frail organism. Wine, with which he conquered fatigue and stimulated himself, fanned his thoughts and imagination into long, bright tongues of fire, that were rapidly consuming his sick body.

His disorderly living and drinking, his perpetual, irritable mental activity, his conspicuous many-sidedness and his conspicuous futility, his utter idleness, his extreme violence of feeling and extreme apathy, vividly recalled the past to me, in spite of the immense difference between all this and our old ways in Moscow. Again I heard the sounds not only of my own language but of my own thought. He had been a witness of the reign of terror in Petersburg after 1848, and he knew the literary circles. Entirely cut off from Russia as I was at that time, I listened greedily to his accounts.

We took to seeing each other often, nearly every evening.

His wife, too, was a strange creature. Her face, by nature handsome, was racked by neuralgic pains and a sort of restless anxiety. She was a Russified-Norwegian, and spoke Russian with a slight accent which suited her. As a rule she was more silent and reserved than he. Their home life was not cheerful: there was something nervous, _unheimlich_, strained, about them; there was something lacking in their life, and something superfluous in it, and one felt this continually like electricity, unseen and menacing, in the air.

I often found them in the large room which served them as bedroom and sitting-room in the hotel, in a state of utter prostration. She, with tear-stained eyes, helpless in one corner; he pale as death, with white lips, distraught, and silent in the other.... So they would sit at times for whole hours, whole days together, and that a few yards from the dark blue Mediterranean, from groves of orange-trees, to which everything—the sapphire sky and the bright noisy gaiety of southern life—invited one. They did not actually quarrel; it was not a case of jealousy nor estrangement, nor any tangible cause, indeed.... He would suddenly get up, go to her, fall on his knees and sometimes with sobs repeat: ‘I have been your ruin, my child, your ruin!’ and she would weep and believe that he had been her ruin. ‘When shall I die and leave him in freedom?’ she used to say to me.

All this was new to me, and I felt so sorry for them that I wanted to cry with them, and even more to say to them: ‘Oh, come, come, you are not so miserable and not so bad, you are both splendid people; let us take a boat and drown sorrow in the dark blue sea.’ I did do this sometimes, and succeeded in drawing them out of themselves. But by next morning the paroxysm would return.... They were somehow so on each other’s nerves, and had reached such an hysterical _impasse_, that the slightest word destroyed the harmony and, as it were, called up furies again from the bottom of their hearts.

I sometimes fancied that, continually tearing open their wounds, they found a sort of stinging enjoyment in the pain; that this gnawing at each other had become necessary to them, like vodka or pickle. But unfortunately the physique of both was unmistakably beginning to be exhausted; they were on the high road to the lunatic asylum or the grave.

Her mind, by no means without talents, was undisciplined and at the same time depraved; her character was far more complex, and in a certain sense she had far more fortitude and strength than he had. Moreover, she had not a shade of the unity, the consistency, that unhappy consistency which he retained even in the most violent extremes and the sharpest contradictions. In her, side by side with her despair, her desire to die, her habit of moaning and groaning, there was a thirst for worldly pleasures and a concealed coquetry, a love for dress and luxury, denied as it were intentionally, to spite herself. She was always dressed becomingly and with taste. She longed to be an emancipated woman according to the ideas of the period, and the victim of an immense, original, psychic unhappiness, like George Sand’s heroines ... but her old accustomed, traditional life dragged her like a heavy weight towards quite a different sphere.

What gave poetic charm to Engelson, and did much to make up for his defects, and what served as a safety-valve for himself, she could not understand. She could not follow his racing thought, his rapid transitions from despair to wit and laughter, from candid mirth to candid tears. She lagged behind, losing the thread, distracted.... His caricatures of his own gloomy thoughts were beyond her comprehension. When Engelson, after a perfect feast of puns and jokes, mockery and teasing, getting more and more into the spirit of the thing, began acting regular scenes at which one could only laugh helplessly, she would go out of the room, exasperated; she was offended at ‘his unseemly behaviour before outsiders.’ He usually noticed this, and as nothing could stop him when once he was set going, he would play the fool more extravagantly than ever, and then waltz round with her and ask her with glowing cheeks and perspiring brows: ‘_Ach, mein lieber Gott, Alexandra Christianovna, war es denn nicht respectabel?_’ She would weep more than ever, till he suddenly changed, grew gloomy and morose, drank glass after glass of brandy, and went home, or simply fell asleep upon the sofa.

Next day I had to reconcile them and make the peace, and he so earnestly kissed her hands and so funnily asked to be forgiven his sins, that even she could not restrain herself sometimes and laughed with us.

I must explain in what these performances, which were such a source of woe to poor Alexandra Christianovna, consisted. Engelson’s comic talent was unmistakable and immense; such biting satire was never equalled by Levassor, hardly by Grasso at his best, and Gorbunov in some of his stories. Moreover, half of it was improvised; he would bring in additions and variations while preserving the same framework. If he had cared to train and develop this gift, he would certainly have been in the foremost ranks of _satirical_ comedians, but Engelson never trained nor developed anything in himself. Talents shot up like vigorous wild plants and were choked in his unstable soul, both by domestic cares which took up half his time, and by his habit of catching at everything in the world from philology and chemistry to political economy and philosophy. In this respect Engelson was a typical Russian, although his father was of Finnish extraction.

He acted everything in the world—officials and Russian gentlemen, priests and police-constables; but the best of his performances were concerned with Nicholas, for whom he had a profound, sincere, and active hatred. He would take a chair _à la_ Napoleon, sit astride it, and sternly ride up to a corps on parade ... epaulettes, hats, casques shaking all round him ... it is Nicholas at a review; he is moved to wrath, and, turning his horse, says to the commanding officer, ‘Bad’; the commanding officer listens with reverent awe, looks after Nicholas, and then, dropping his voice and gasping with fury, whispers to the general of the division: ‘You appear, your Excellency, to be busy about something else and not your duties. What a wretched division! what regimental commanders! I’ll teach them.’

The general of the division turns redder and redder, and pounces on the first colonel he comes across, and so from one grade to the next, with incredibly true, almost imperceptible nuances, the Imperial ‘bad’ passes down to the sergeant, at whom the squadron commanding officer swears like a trooper, and who, without answering, pokes the scabbard of his sword with all his might into the ribs of the nearest soldier, who has done nothing.

Engelson would portray with amazing fidelity, not only the characteristics of each rank, but also each man’s movement as he tugged at his horse in his fury and then raged at it for not standing still.

Another performance was of a more peaceful kind. The Emperor Nicholas is dancing the French quadrille. _Vis-à-vis_ is a foreign diplomat, on one side a general, stiff as on parade, on the other a civilian grandee. This was a perfect _chef-d’œuvre_. Engelson would take one of us for his partner. The flower of it all was Nicholas—playing the autocratic Tsar over the quadrille, the conscious firmness of every step, the brilliant perfection of each movement, together with the indulgent and gracious glance at his partner, which is transformed at once into a command to the general, and warning not to forget himself to the civilian gentleman. To describe this in words is impossible. The general, who, rigidly erect, with his elbows a little rounded, with strained attention walks in time through the figures under the stern observation of his gracious monarch, and the distracted civilian with his legs shaking under him from terror, with a smile on his face and almost a tear in his eye—all this was performed so that a man who had never seen Nicholas could thoroughly grasp the agonising ordeal of an imperial quadrille, and the danger of having the Most High as a _vis-à-vis_. I forgot to say that the foreign diplomat was the only one who danced with studied negligence and great finish, concealing the uncomfortable feeling of uneasiness of which the most valiant is conscious when he has a lighted cigar close to a barrel of gunpowder.

But although Engelson’s grimacing and foolery roused his wife’s indignation, it does not follow that there was any more unison or harmony about her; quite the contrary, there was an absolute chaos in her head, that was destructive of all order, of all consistency, and made her impossible to cope with. In her case I learnt for the first time how little you can do with logic in discussion with a woman, especially when the discussion relates to practical affairs. In Engelson the lack of harmony was like the mental confusion after a fire, after a funeral, after a crime perhaps; but in her case it was like an untidy room in which everything is flung about higgledy-piggledy—children’s toys, a wedding dress, a prayer-book, a novel of George Sand’s, slippers, flowers, plates. In her half-conscious ideas and half-undermined beliefs, in her claims to an impossible freedom and to independence of all customary external bonds, there was something suggestive of a child of eight, a girl of eighteen, and an old woman of eighty. Many times I told her that. And, strange to say, even her face was prematurely faded; it looked old from the absence of some of her teeth, and at the same time it retained a childish expression.

Engelson was entirely to blame for the chaos in her mind.

His wife was the spoilt child of a mother who had adored her. An elderly, phlegmatic official of Swedish origin sought her in marriage when she was eighteen. In a moment of childish caprice and vexation with her mother, she agreed to marry him. She wanted to be her own mistress and sit at the head of the table.

When the honeymoon of freedom, visits, and fine clothes was over, the bride was insufferably bored; although her husband behaved with strict propriety, took her to the theatre and arranged evening tea-parties for her, she had an aversion for him; she struggled with him for three or four years, grew tired of it, and went back to her mother. They were divorced. Her mother died, and she was left alone, suffering and melancholy, with her health prematurely broken in the struggle with her absurd marriage, with emptiness and hunger in her heart and an idle brain.

It was just at this time that Engelson was expelled from the Lyceum. He was nervous, irritable, and, with a passionate yearning for love and a morbid lack of confidence in himself, was consumed by _amour-propre_.... He had made her acquaintance while her mother was living, and they became great friends after her death. It would have been strange if he had not fallen in love with her. Whether the feeling were likely to be lasting or not, he was bound to love her passionately; everything helped to bring this about ... the fact that she was a woman without a husband, a widow and not a widow, a bride and not a bride, and that she was pining for something, was in love with another man, and made miserable by her love. This other was an ‘energetic young fellow,’ an officer and a literary man, but a desperate gambler. They quarrelled over this invincible passion for play; later on, he shot himself.

Engelson never left her side; he comforted her, amused her, occupied her. It was his first and last love. She wanted to study, or rather to learn without studying; he undertook to be her Mentor—she asked for books.

The first book Engelson gave her was Feuerbach’s _Das Wesen des Christenthums_. He took the place of commentator, and day by day he pulled from under the feet of his Héloïse, who could not step on firm ground for the Chinese shoes of her early Christian training, the prop by means of which she might somehow have kept her balance.

Emancipation from the traditional morality, said Goethe, never leads to good unless the mind has grown strong; indeed, only reason is worthy to replace the religion of duty. Here was a woman sleeping the deep slumber of moral security, lulled by traditions and full of the dreams natural to a patriarchal soul, tinged with Christianity, tinged with romantic and moral notions; and Engelson tried to educate her at one blow on the method of English nurses, who, when the baby screams from stomach-ache, pour a glass of gin into its mouth. He flung into her immature, childish conceptions a rankling ferment with which men are rarely equal to coping, which he himself could not cope with but only understand.

Overwhelmed by the overthrow of all her moral conceptions and all her religious convictions, and finding in Engelson himself nothing but doubt, nothing but irony and denial of the old, she lost the only compass, the only guide she had left, and was like a boat adrift at sea, twisting and turning without a rudder. The equilibrium arrived at by life itself, resting—like the opposite weights of a pendulum—on absurdities which exclude each other and are maintained by so doing, was broken.

She flung herself into reading with avidity, understanding and not understanding, and mixing up the philosophy of her nurses with the philosophy of Hegel, sentimental socialism with the economic conceptions of conventional housekeeping. With all that, her health grew worse, boredom and misery continued; she pined and grew thin, had a desperate longing to go abroad, and was afraid of persecutions and enemies of some sort.

After a prolonged struggle, Engelson, rallying all his forces, said to her: ‘You want to travel; how can you go alone?... You will meet with all sorts of unpleasantness, you will be lost without a friend, without a protector with the right to protect you. You know that I would lay down my life for you ... give me your hand—I will care for you, soothe you, watch over you.... I will be your father, your mother, your nurse, and your husband, but it must be legally. I will be with you, near you....’

This was said by a man under thirty, and passionately in love. She was touched, and accepted him as her husband unconditionally. A short time afterwards they went abroad.

Such was the past of my new acquaintances. When Engelson told me all this, when he bitterly complained that this marriage had been the ruin of them both, and I saw for myself how they were fretting away in a sort of moral furnace which they intentionally fanned, I came to the conviction that this unhappiness was due to their having known too little of each other beforehand, their being too closely bound together now, their having built their life too much on personal feeling, and their putting too much faith in being husband and wife. If they could have parted, each might have sighed in freedom, have grown calm, and perhaps begun to blossom afresh. Time would have shown whether they were really so necessary to each other; in any case, the delirium would have been broken for a time without catastrophe. I did not conceal my opinion from Engelson; he agreed with me. But all this was a _mirage_; in reality he had not the strength to leave her, nor she to take the plunge.... They secretly _wanted_ to hover on the brink of these resolutions without carrying them into execution.

My view was too sane and simple to be correct in regard to such intricately pathological characters and such sick nerves.

II

The type to which Engelson belonged was at that time rather new to me. At the beginning of the ’forties I had seen such a type only in embryo. It developed in Petersburg towards the end of Byelinsky’s career, and was formed after I left and before Tchernyshevsky appeared. It was the type of the Petrashev group and their friends. That group was made up of young and gifted men, extremely intelligent and extremely cultured, but nervous, morbid, and warped by their surroundings. Among them there was no example of striking stupidity, no one who wrote ungrammatically—those types belong to quite a different period; but in them there was something degenerate, abnormal.

The followers of Petrashev made a bold and ardent dash into activity, and astonished all Russia by the _Dictionary of Foreign Words_. The intense mental activity of the ’forties was their heritage, and they passed straight from German philosophy into Fourier’s phalanstery, into becoming followers of Kant.

Surrounded by petty and worthless people, proud of the attentions of the police, and conscious of their own superiority, from the very time they left school they prized too highly their negative achievement, or rather their possible achievement. This led to immoderate vanity—not that youthful healthy vanity becoming in a lad who dreams of a great future, becoming in a man in the fulness of his powers and in the fulness of activity, not that which in old days has led men to perform miracles of daring and to endure chains and death for the sake of glory, but, on the contrary, a morbid vanity, hindering all work through its vast pretensions, irritable, ready to take offence, conceited to the point of rudeness, and at the same time diffident.

Between their pretensions and their appreciation by their neighbours the distance was immeasurable. Society will not accept blank cheques for the future, but insists on work being completed before giving personal recognition. They had little power of hard work and perseverance; they only had enough of each for understanding and assimilating what had been worked out by others. They wanted to have harvests for the intention of sowing, and to be rewarded for having their granaries full. ‘The insulting way in which they were overlooked by society’ worried them, made them unjust to others, and reduced them to despair and _Fratzenhaftigkeit_.

In the person of Engelson I studied the difference between that generation and our own. Later on I met many men not so talented, not so cultured, but with the same obviously morbid warp in all their composition.

A terrible sin lies at the door of the government of Nicholas in this moral destruction of a generation, in this spiritual depraving of its children. The wonder is that the strong and healthy, though warped, still survived. Every one knows the celebrated list of instructions to teachers in the Cadet Corps. In the Lyceum things were better, but of late years it, too, had incurred the hatred of Nicholas. The whole system of government education lay in instilling the religion of obedience, leading up to power as its reward. The feelings of the young, naturally radiant, were coarsely driven inwards, and replaced by ambition and jealous, envious rivalry. What did not perish came out sick, deranged.... Together with burning pride, they were inoculated with a sort of spiritlessness, a sense of impotence, of fatigue before beginning work. Young men became hypochondriacal, suspicious, tired before they were twenty. They were all tainted with the passion for introspection, self-analysis, self-accusation; they scrupulously believed their psychic experiences, and loved making endless confessions and giving descriptions of neurotic incidents of their lives. In later years it happened to me several times to receive the confessions not only of men but of women belonging to this category. After watching with sympathy their remorse, their pathological self-castigation, which approached gross calumny upon themselves, I at last came to the conviction that this was only one of the forms of the same vanity. One had but to cease protesting and sympathising and to agree with the repentant sinners, to see how readily malignant and how mercilessly vindictive these Magdalens—of both sexes—became. With them, like the Christian priest before the mighty of this world, you are only privileged solemnly to absolve their sins and to keep silent.

These nervous people, though excessively ready to take offence, shuddering like a sensitive plant at the faintest rough handling, are incredibly harsh in their own language. As a rule, when it came to revenging themselves, there was no moderation in their language—a terrible defect of taste, which betrays a profound contempt for the person addressed and an insulting indulgence for self. This lack of restraint among Russians comes from the homes of landowners, from government offices and army barracks; but how is it that it has survived and developed in the younger generation whilst skipping ours? That is a psychological problem.

In our old student circles we scolded each other roundly, argued roughly and emphatically, but in the most violent fray something remained outside the pale.... For our nervous friends of Engelson’s generation this limit did not exist, they did not think it necessary to restrain themselves; for the sake of a vain and momentary vindictiveness, for the sake of getting the upper hand in an argument, they spared nothing, and I have often, with horror and amazement, seen them—including Engelson himself—without a trace of pity, fling the most precious pearls into the corrosive fluid of their bitterness, ‘and weep afterwards.’ With the change of the nervous current, remorse would follow, and entreaties for forgiveness from the outraged idol. They are not fastidious, and pour filth into the very cup from which they drink.

Their repentances are sincere, but do not prevent repetitions of the offence. Some spring regulating and controlling the action of the wheels within them is broken; the wheels turn with tenfold swiftness, doing no work, but injuring the machine; harmonious combination is broken, the æsthetic mean is lost; there is no living with them, and there is no living for them themselves.

Happiness does not exist for them, they are not able to take care of it. The slightest cause provokes them to ruthless antagonism and makes them behave rudely with every one near them. By irony they have ruined and spoilt as much in life as the Germans have by mawkish sentimentality. Strange to say, these people are greedily anxious to be loved, they seek enjoyment, and when they lift the cup to their lips some evil spirit jogs their arm, the wine is spilt upon the floor, and the cup, passionately flung down, rolls in the mud.

III

The Engelsons soon went away to Rome and Naples; they meant to be away for six months, and returned in six weeks. Seeing nothing, they trailed their boredom about Italy, sorrowed in Rome and grieved in Naples, and at last made up their minds to come back to Nice—‘to you for healing,’ he wrote to me from Genoa.

Their gloomy depression had increased while they were away. In addition to their nervous hysteria, there were now quarrels which assumed a more and more exasperated and envenomed character. Engelson was to blame for his unrestrained language and cruel words, but she always provoked them, provoked them intentionally, with secret spite and peculiar success in his most good-natured moments; he was never allowed to forget himself for an instant.

Engelson was incapable of holding his tongue; talking to me was a comfort to him, and so he used to tell me everything, even more than he ought, which was awkward for me. I felt that I could not be so open with them as they were with me. Talking came easy to him, complaining comforted him for a time—it did not me.

One day, sitting in a little tavern with me, Engelson said that he was being worn out in the daily struggle, that there was no way of escape from it, that again the thought of cutting short his life seemed to him the only salvation.... With his nervous impulsiveness it might well be expected that if a pistol or a glass of poison did come in his way he would sooner or later make an attempt with one or the other.

I was sorry for him. And both of them were to be pitied. She might have been a happy woman if her husband had been a man of serene temper who would have known how to develop her slowly, to be light-hearted in his merriment, and in case of need to influence her, not merely by persuasion but also by authority—grave authority, without irony. There are immature natures which cannot guide themselves, just as there are persons of lymphatic constitution who need a corset to escape curvature of the spine.

While I was thinking of that, Engelson, going on with his talk, came to the same conclusion himself. ‘That woman does not love me,’ he said, ‘and cannot love me; what she does understand and looks for in me is bad, and what is good in me is so much Chinese to her. She is corrupted by bourgeois ideas, by her external _Respektabilität_, her petty domesticity. We torment each other, we are tormenting each other to death; I see that clearly.’

It seemed to me that if a man could talk in that way of the woman nearest to him, the chief tie between them was broken. And so I admitted to him that, having watched their life together for a long time past with deep sympathy, I had often asked myself why they went on living together. ‘Your wife is pining for Petersburg, for her brothers and her old nurse; why don’t you arrange for her to go home, and you to remain here?’

‘I’ve thought of it a thousand times; it’s the one thing I wish for. But in the first place, she has no one to go with; and in the second, she would be bored to death in Petersburg.’

‘Well, but she’s bored to death here. As for having no one to send her with, that’s a relic of our old Russian notions. You can take your wife to the steamer at Stettin, and the steamer will find its way by itself. If you haven’t the money, I’ll lend it you.’

‘You’re right, and that’s what I shall certainly do. I am sorry for her, my heart aches for her, all the love I have in me I have concentrated on her. I sought in her not only a wife, but a creature whom I could develop and educate after my own fancy. I thought that she would be my child—the task was beyond my strength. But who could have guessed that I should find such contradictions, such stubbornness?’—he paused, and then added: ‘To tell you all I think—she needs a different husband ... if a man turned up worthy of her whom she could love, I would give her up to him, and we should both recover—that would be better than Petersburg.’

I took all this _au pied de la lettre_. That he was sincere, there is no doubt. That is just the difficulty with these impulsive, uncontrolled creatures; they can, like good actors, enter so thoroughly into different parts, and so identify themselves with them, that a cardboard dagger seems to them the real thing, and they shed genuine tears over ‘Hecuba.’

We were then living together at Ste. Hélène. Two days after my conversation with Engelson, Madame Engelson, with a tear-stained face, came into the drawing-room late in the evening, a candle in her hand; she set the candle on the table, and said she wanted to have a little talk with me. We sat down ... after a brief and obscure prelude touching upon the fate which pursued her, on Engelson’s unfortunate character and her own, she announced that she had made up her mind to return to Petersburg, and did not know how to do it. ‘You alone have influence over him; persuade him to let me go really. I know that in moments of vexation he is ready in words to put me in the posting-chaise at once, but all that is only words. Persuade him, save us both, and give me your word to look after him just at first, comfort him ... it will be hard for him, he is ill and nervous.’ And again sobbing, she hid her face in her handkerchief.

I did not believe in the depth of her woe, but I saw very clearly what a false move I had made by speaking openly to Engelson; it was evident to me that he had repeated our conversation to her.

I had no choice left; I repeated my own words to her, softening them in form. She got up, thanked me, and added that if she did not go she would throw herself into the sea; that she had that evening been burning a great many papers, and wished to put some others in a sealed packet in my keeping. It was clear to me that she was by no means so passionately anxious to go away, but through some self-indulgent caprice wanted to drag on and pine away in melancholy. Moreover, I saw that, if she were wavering without any settled plan, he was not wavering but distinctly did not want her to go. She had great power over him; she knew this, and, building upon it, allowed him to rage, to rear, to foam at the bit, knowing that, however he might jib, things would go not as he willed but as she willed.

She never forgave me for my advice; she feared my influence, though she had unmistakable proof of my powerlessness.

For ten days there was no talk about going away. Then followed periodical skirmishes. Once or twice a week she would come to me with tear-stained eyes and announce that now all was over, and that next day she would get ready to go to Petersburg or to the bottom of the sea. Engelson would come out of his room, twitching convulsively, with a green face and trembling hands; he would vanish for some ten hours, and would come back covered with dust, exhausted and rather drunk, would take a passport to be viséd, or obtain a permit for Genoa; then it would all subside again and fall back into the everyday routine.

Externally, Madame Engelson was completely reconciled with me, but from that time she began to conceive something like a hatred for me. Before that she had disputed with me and been angry without concealing it ... now she became extraordinarily amiable. She was annoyed that I had seen through something; that I had not been touched by her tragic destiny or taken her for an unhappy victim, but had looked on her as a capricious invalid; that, far from shedding tears of platonic sympathy with her, I doubted whether she did not find enjoyment rather than distress in tears, heartrending scenes, explanations lasting several hours, and so on and so on.

Time passed, and by degrees much was changed. With the rapidity which only occurs in nervous invalids she regained her health, became more lively, and even more careful of her dress. And although the most nonsensical things would lead again to the old scenes between her and Engelson, to a farewell _à la_ Socrates before the hemlock, and to a readiness to follow in Sappho’s footsteps to the bottom of the sea, yet on the whole things went better. The woman who had been for ever lying down from weakness, for ever exhausted, drew herself up as erect as Sixtus V., and began to grow so stout that one day poor Kolya, sitting at dinner and looking at her full bosom, said, shaking his head: ‘_Sehr viel Milch_.’

It was evident that some new interest was occupying her, that something had awakened her from her morbid lethargy. From the time of my open explanation with her, she had begun a persistent game, thinking over every move, like the gamblers _du Café Régent_, and patiently correcting her mistakes. Sometimes she betrayed herself and made a blunder, carried too far in one direction or the other, but she steadily returned to her original plan. This plan went now beyond the tightening of her grip over Engelson, and beyond revenging herself on me; she aimed at nothing less than getting us all, the whole household, in her power, and taking advantage of Natalie’s being more and more seriously ill to control the education of the children and our whole life—or, if she failed, breaking off my relations with Engelson at all costs.

But before she could obtain complete success, there were many very difficult moves to be taken, painful concessions, cat-like tactics, and much patient waiting: she accomplished a great deal, but not everything. Engelson’s incessant chatter hindered her as much as my open eyes.

She might have made a better use of the energy, the force and the persistence which she wasted on her craftily interwoven schemes ... but personal feeling and vanity intoxicate people, and, once entering upon the dark game of intrigue, it is hard to stop and hard to see anything clearly. As a rule, light is only brought into the room after the crime has been committed; that is how it is that both the catastrophe and the sting of conscience are irremediable.

IV

... Of the misfortunes that fell upon me in 1851 and 1852 I speak in another place. Engelson brought me much comfort in my sorrow. I should have stayed a long time with him near the graveyard, but the restless vanity of his wife had no pity even on mourning.

Some weeks after the funeral, Engelson, agitated and melancholy, with evident reluctance and evidently not of his own initiative, asked me whether I were not thinking of entrusting the education of my children to his wife.

I answered that the children, except the eldest, Sasha, were going to Paris with Marya Kasparovna Reihel, and I openly admitted that I could not accept his suggestion.

My answer wounded him, and it hurt me to wound him. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘speaking honestly, do you think your wife competent to educate children?’

‘No,’ Engelson answered, ‘but ... but perhaps it’s a _planche de salut_ for her; she is just as wretched as ever, and it would mean your trusting her, and a new duty.’

‘Yes, but if the experiment didn’t answer?’

‘You are right; let us say no more about it; it is sad.’

Engelson really agreed with me, and said no more. But she had not expected so simple an answer; on this question I would not give in, and she would not, and, beside herself with vexation, she immediately made up her mind to take Engelson away from Nice. Three days later he told me he was going to Genoa.

‘What is the matter?’ I asked; ‘and why are you going so soon?’

‘Well, you see for yourself my wife does not get on with you, nor with your friends, so I’ve made up my mind ... and perhaps it is for the best.’

And next day they went away.

Afterwards I left Nice. On my way through Genoa we met peaceably. Surrounded by our friends, among whom were Medici, Pisacane, Cosenz, and Mordini, she seemed calmer and better in health. Nevertheless, she could not let slip any chance for having a spiteful dig at me. I moved away, said nothing; that was no use. Even when I had gone to Lugano she kept up her poisoned _petits points_, and this in the rare postscripts to her husband’s letters, as though with his _visa_.

At last these pin-pricks, at a time when I was utterly crushed by grief and distress, drove me out of all patience. I had done nothing to deserve them, nothing to provoke them. On getting one of her spiteful postscripts saying that Engelson would still have to pay dearly for his whole-hearted devotion to friends who would do nothing for him, I wrote to Engelson that it was time to put a stop to this.

‘I do not understand,’ I wrote, ‘why your wife has got a grudge against me. If it is because I did not give my children into her keeping, surely that is no justification for it?’ I reminded him of our last conversation, and added: ‘We know that Saturn devoured his own children, but for any one to show his gratitude to his friends for their sympathy by bestowing his children’s education on them is something unheard of.’

She never forgave me that sally, but, what is far more remarkable, he never forgave me for it either, though at first he showed no sign of resenting it ... but he reproached me with those words a year later....

I went to London; Engelson settled for the winter in Genoa, and afterwards moved to Paris.[97]

V

The proverb, ‘He who has not been in the sea has not prayed to God,’ may be varied in this way: the woman who has not had children does not know what disinterested devotion is, and this is particularly true of married women; in them childlessness almost always develops a coarse egoism—if, that is, some impersonal interest does not incidentally save them. The old maid has some belated yearnings that soften her, she is still seeking and still hoping: the childless woman with a husband has reached her haven successfully; at first she instinctively grieves at having no children, then she takes comfort and lives for her own pleasure, and, if she is not successful in that, for _her own sorrow_, or for somebody else’s displeasure, somebody else’s sorrow, if it is only her maid’s. The birth of a child may save her. A child trains its mother in sacrifice, in giving way, in eagerly spending her time not on herself, and trains her to indifference to all external reward, recognition, gratitude. A mother does not keep an account with a baby; she requires nothing from it but to be well, to be hungry, to sleep—and to smile. Without drawing the woman out of the home, the baby transforms her into a citizen.

It is quite a different thing when another woman’s child comes for any reason whatever, and especially unavoidably, into the house of a childless woman. She will perhaps dress it up and play with it, but only when she cares to; she will spoil it when she is pleased to; at all other times the child will knock in vain at the doors of the heart that has grown hard or slothful from self-indulgence. In short, the child can reckon upon all the spoiling and pampering which would be given to a dog or a canary, but nothing more.

One of our friends had a daughter whose mother was a young widow. With a view to the mother’s marrying again, an attempt was made to get the child away, and she was kidnapped in the father’s absence. After a prolonged search the little girl was found; but the father, having been turned out of France, could not come to Paris to fetch her, and besides he had not the money. Not knowing what to do with her, he asked Engelson to take her for a little while. Engelson consented, but very quickly regretted it. The child was naughty—indeed, considering the irregular way in which she had been brought up, it is quite likely she was very naughty; but, all the same, her naughtiness was that of a child of five years old, and Engelson was too humane and understanding to be capable of turning against a child for naughtiness. And indeed the trouble was not that she was naughty; the child hindered, not him so much as his wife, though she never did anything. Engelson, with a sort of exasperation, complained to me in his letters of the child!

In regard to her father, Engelson wrote to me: ‘Is it not strange that H., who once agreed with you that my wife was _not a suitable person to bring up your children_, has entrusted his _own daughter to her_?’

He knew perfectly well that the father had not chosen Madame Engelson to bring up his little girl, but had been forced by actual necessity to have recourse to her assistance. There was something so cruel, so ungenerous in this remark that it sent a pang to my heart. I could not get used to this lack of mercy, this brutality of language which did not hesitate at anything! Intensely malignant insinuations which may in a moment of irritation occur to any one’s mind, but which we could not bring our lips to utter, are spoken by people like Engelson with readiness and enjoyment at the slightest tiff.

Giving full vent to his irritation, Engelson in his letter incidentally attacked Tessier too, and other friends, and even Proudhon, for whom he had a great respect. Together with Engelson’s letter came one from Tessier, who was also in Paris; he made some friendly jests about Engelson’s ‘tempers and tantrums,’ without suspecting that the latter had been writing about him. I disliked the position of a sort of negative treachery, and I wrote to Engelson that it was a shame to talk in that abusive way of men with whom life itself has brought us into intimate relations; that they were, any way, good people, as he knew himself. In conclusion, I told him that it was a shame to exaggerate everything so, and to be sighing and groaning and reduced to despair over the naughtiness of a child of five.

This was enough. My ardent admirer, the friend who had kissed my hand in his enthusiasm, who came to me to share every grief and offered to shed his blood and lay down his life for me, not in word but in deed ... this man, bound to me by his own confession and by my misfortunes, of which he was the witness, by the coffin which we had followed together, forgot everything. His vanity was wounded ... he wanted to revenge himself, and he did revenge himself.

Four days later I received from him the following reply:—

‘_February 2nd, 1853._

‘There are rumours that you have decided to come here;—Marya
Kasparovna is, I believe, recovering (last week, any way, she
seemed in better spirits, got up for five minutes, and has an
appetite). Concerning the commission you gave me in regard to
T., all I have to tell you is that the things the General asks
him to get ready are not at T.’s, but were left by them at
Vogt’s in Geneva, and that Madame T. thinks your silence _peu
gracieux_, and adds that a correspondence with you could not
cause them any inconvenience.