Everyone, indeed, loved this young man wherever he
went, and it was so from his earliest childhood. When he entered the household
of his patron and benefactor, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, he gained the hearts of
all the family, so that they looked on him quite as their own child. Yet he
entered the house at such a tender age that he could not have acted from design
nor artfulness in winning affection. So that the gift of making himself loved directly
and unconsciously was inherent in him, in his very nature, so to speak. It was
the same at school, though he seemed to be just one of those children who are
distrusted, sometimes ridiculed, and even disliked by their schoolfellows. He
was dreamy, for instance, and rather solitary. From his earliest childhood he
was fond of creeping into a corner to read, and yet he was a general favourite
all the while he was at school. He was rarely playful or merry, but anyone
could see at the first glance that this was not from any sullenness. On the
contrary he was bright and good-tempered. He never tried to show off among his schoolfellows.
Perhaps because of this, he was never afraid of anyone, yet the boys immediately
understood that he was not proud of his fearlessness and seemed to be unaware
that he was bold and courageous. He never resented an insult. It would happen that
an hour after the offence he would address the offender or answer some question
with as trustful and candid an expression as though nothing had happened
between them. And it was not that he seemed to have forgotten or intentionally
forgiven the affront, but simply that he did not regard it as an affront, and
this completely conquered and captivated the boys. He had one characteristic
which made all his schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top want to mock
at him, not from malice but because it amused them. This characteristic was a wild
fanatical modesty and chastity. He could not bear to hear certain words and
certain conversations about women. There are "certain" words and
conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in schools. Boys pure in mind
and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and
even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would
sometimes hesitate to speak. More than that, much that soldiers have no
knowledge or conception of is familiar to quite young children of our
intellectual and higher classes. There is no moral depravity, no real corrupt
inner cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of it, and it is often looked
upon among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation.
Seeing that Alyosha Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of
"that," they used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and
shout nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried
to hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults in
silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with being a
"regular girl," and what's more they looked upon it with compassion as
a weakness. He was always one of the best in the class but was never first.
At the time of Yefim Petrovitch's death Alyosha had
two more years to complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable widow
went almost immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with her
whole family, which consisted only of women and girls. Alyosha went to live in
the house of two distant relations of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies whom he had
never seen before. On what terms she lived with them he did not know himself.
It was very characteristic of him, indeed, that he never cared at whose expense
he was living. In that respect he was a striking contrast to his elder brother
Ivan, who struggled with poverty for his first two years in the university,
maintained himself by his own efforts, and had from childhood been bitterly
conscious of living at the expense of his benefactor. But this strange trait in
Alyosha's character must not, I think, criticised too severely, for at the
slightest acquaintance with him anyone would have perceived that Alyosha was
one of those youths, almost of the type of religious enthusiast, who, if they
were suddenly to come into possession of a large fortune, would not hesitate to
give it away for the asking, either for good works or perhaps to a clever
rogue. In general he seemed scarcely to know the value of money, not, of
course, in a literal sense. When he was given pocket-money, which he never
asked for, he was either terribly careless of it so that it was gone in a
moment, or he kept it for weeks together, not knowing what to do with it.
In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov, a man
very sensitive on the score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the
following judgment, after getting to know Alyosha: "Here is perhaps the
one man in the world whom you might leave alone without a penny,in the centre
of an unknown town of a million inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he
would not die of cold and hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once;
and if he were not, he would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him
no effort or humiliation. And to shelter him would be no burden, but, on the
contrary, would probably be looked on as a pleasure.
"He did not finish his studies at the
gymnasium. A year before the end of the course he suddenly announced to the
ladies that he was going to see his father about a plan which had occurred to
him. They were sorry and unwilling to let him go. The journey was not an expensive
one, and the ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a parting present from
his benefactor's family. They provided him liberally with money and even fitted
him out with new clothes and linen. But he returned half the money they gave
him, saying that he intended to go third class. On his arrival in the town he made
no answer to his father's first inquiry why he had come before completing his
studies, and seemed, so they say, unusually thoughtful. It soon became apparent
that he was looking for his mother's tomb. He practically acknowledged at the
time that that was the only object of his visit. But it can hardly have been the whole reason of it. It is more
probable that he himself did not understand and could not explain what had
suddenly arisen in his soul, and drawn him irresistibly into a new, unknown,
but inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovitch could not show him where his second wife
was buried, for he had never visited her grave since he had thrown earth upon
her coffin, and in the course of years had entirely forgotten where she was
buried.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, by the way, had for some time
previously not been living in our town. Three or four years after his wife's
death he had gone to the south of Russia and finally turned up in Odessa, where
he spent several years. He made the acquaintance at first, in his own words,
"of a lot of low Jews, Jewesses, and Jewkins," and ended by being received
by "Jews high and low alike." It may be presumed that at this period
he developed a peculiar faculty for making and hoarding money. He finally
returned to our town only three years before Alyosha's arrival. His former
acquaintances found him looking terribly aged, although he was by no means an
old man. He behaved not exactly with more dignity but with more effrontery. The
former buffoon showed an insolent propensity for making buffoons of others. His
depravity with women was not as it used to be, but even more revolting. In a short
time he opened a great number of new taverns in the district. It was evident
that he had perhaps a hundred thousand roubles or not much less. Many of the
inhabitants of the town and district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had
given good security. Of late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more
irresponsible, more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence, used to begin
one thing and go on with another, as though he were letting himself go
altogether. He was more and more frequently drunk. And, if it had not been for
the same servant Grigory, who by that time had aged considerably too, and used
to look after him sometimes almost like a tutor, Fyodor Pavlovitch might have
got into terrible scrapes. Alyosha's arrival seemed to affect even his moral
side, as though something had awakened in this prematurely old man which had
long been dead in his soul.
"Do you know," he used often to say,
looking at Alyosha, "that you are like her, 'the crazy woman'"- that
was what he used to call his dead wife, Alyosha's mother. Grigory it was who pointed
out the "crazy woman's" grave to Alyosha. He took him to our town cemetery
and showed him in a remote corner a cast-iron tombstone, cheap but decently
kept, on which were inscribed the name and age of the deceased and the date of
her death, and below a four-lined verse, such as are commonly used on
old-fashioned middle-class tombs. To Alyosha's amazement this tomb turned out
to be Grigory's doing. He had put it up on the poor "crazy woman's"
grave at his own expense, after Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom
he had often pestered about the grave, had gone to Odessa, abandoning the grave
and all his memories. Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of his
mother's grave. He only listened to Grigory's minute and solemn account of the
erection of the tomb; he stood with bowed head and walked away without uttering
a word. It was perhaps a year before he visited the cemetery again. But this
little episode was not without an influence upon Fyodor Pavlovitch-and a very
original one. He suddenly took a thousand roubles to our monastery to pay for requiems
for the soul of his wife; but not for the second, Alyosha's mother, the "crazy
woman," but for the first, Adelaida Ivanovna, who used to thrash him. In
the evening of the same day he got drunk and abused the monks to Alyosha. He
himself was far from being religious; he had probably never put a penny candle
before the image of a saint. Strange impulses of sudden feeling and sudden thought are common in such types.
I have mentioned already that he looked bloated.
His countenance at this time bore traces of something that testified
unmistakably to the life he had led. Besides the long fleshy bags under his
little, always insolent, suspicious, and ironical eyes; besides the multitude
of deep wrinkles in his little fat face, the Adam's apple hung below his sharp
chin like a great, fleshy goitre, which gave him a peculiar, repulsive, sensual
appearance; add to that a long rapacious mouth with full lips, between which
could be seen little stumps of black decayed teeth. He slobbered every time he
began to speak. He was fond indeed of making fun of his own face, though, I
believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used particularly to point to his nose,
which was not very large, but very delicate and conspicuously aquiline. "A
regular Roman nose," he used to say, "with my goitre I've quite the
countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period." He
seemed proud of it.
Not long after visiting his mother's grave Alyosha
suddenly announced that he wanted to enter the monastery, and that the monks
were willing to receive him as a novice. He explained that this was his strong
desire, and that he was solemnly asking his consent as his father. The old man
knew that the elder Zossima, who was living in the monastery hermitage, had
made a special impression upon his "gentle boy."
"That is the most honest monk among them, of course,"
he observed, after listening in thoughtful silence to Alyosha, and seeming
scarcely surprised at his request. "H'm!... So that's where you want to
be, my gentle boy?"
He was half drunk, and suddenly he grinned his slow
half-drunken grin, which was not without a certain cunning and tipsy slyness.
"H'm!... I had a presentiment that you would end in something like this.
Would you believe it? You were making straight for it. Well, to be sure you
have your own two thousand. That's a dowry for you. And I'll never desert you, my
angel. And I'll pay what's wanted for you there, if they ask for it. But, of
course, if they don't ask, why should we worry them? What do you say? You know,
you spend money like a canary, two grains a week. H'm!... Do you know that near
one monastery there's a place outside the town where every baby knows there are
none but 'the monks' wives' living, as they are called. Thirty women, I
believe. I have been there myself. You know, it's interesting in its way, of
course, as a variety. The worst of it is it's awfully Russian. There are no
French women there. Of course, they could get them fast enough, they have
plenty of money. If they get to hear of it they'll come along. Well, there's
nothing of that sort here, no 'monks' wives,' and two hundred monks. They're
honest. They keep the fasts. I admit it.... H'm.... So you want to be a monk?
And do you know I'm sorry to lose you, Alyosha; would you believe it, I've
really grown fond of you? Well, it's a good opportunity. You'll pray for us sinners;
we have sinned too much here. I've always been thinking who would pray for me,
and whether there's anyone in the world to do it. My dear boy, I'm awfully
stupid about that. You wouldn't believe it. Awfully. You see, however stupid I
am about it, I keep thinking, I keep thinking from time to time, of course, not
all the while. It's impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me
down to hell with their hooks when I die. Then I wonder—hooks? Where would they
get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry
there of some sort? The monks in the monastery probably believe that there's a
ceiling in hell, for instance. Now I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a
ceiling. It makes it more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is.
And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But, do
you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? If there's no ceiling
there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely
again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't
drag me down what justice is there in the world? Il faudrait les inventer,*
those hooks, on purpose for me alone, for, if you only knew, Alyosha, what a
black-guard I am."
"But there are no hooks there," said
Alyosha, looking gently and seriously at his father.
"Yes, yes, only the shadows of hooks. I know,
I know. That's how a Frenchman described hell: 'J'ai vu l'ombre d'un cocher qui
avec l'ombre d'une brosse frottait l'ombre d'une carrosse.'*How do you know
there are no hooks, darling? When you've lived with the monks you'll sing a
different tune. But go and get at the truth there, and then come and tell me.
Anywayit's easier going to the other world if one knows what there is there.
Besides, it will be more seemly for you with the monks than here with me, with
a drunken old man and young harlots... though you're like an angel, nothing
touches you. And I dare say nothing will touch you there. That's why I let you
go, because I hope for that. You've got all your wits about you. You will burn
and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. And I will wait
for you. I feel that you're the only creature in the world who has not
condemned me. My dear boy, I feel it, you know. I can't help feeling it."
And he even began blubbering. He was sentimental.
He was wicked and sentimental.
* It would be neccessary to
invent them.
* I've seen the shadow of a coachman
rubbing the shadow of a coach with the shadow of a brush.
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