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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781420940572 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Digireads.com |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2011 |
| Pages: | 98 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.23(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
At length Ordynov had to make up his mind to change his lodgings, since his landlady — the poor widow of a civil service official — unexpectedly found herself obliged to leave St. Petersburg, and to repair to her parents' house in the country without waiting for the first day of the month — the day when her tenancy was to expire. As the young man had hitherto had every expectation of completing his sub-tenancy with her, he was a good deal put out at this sudden eviction from his den. Besides, he was poor, and lodgings were dear. So, the day before his landlady left, he took his cap, and set forth into the back streets of the capital. As he went along he examined every bill of rooms to let which he saw affixed to a door; always choosing, for his purpose, the most dilapidated, the largest, and the most crowded of buildings, as places where he had the best chance of encountering not only such a room as he wanted, but also tenants who were as poor as himself.
Although for a time he held strictly to his quest, certain new and strange feelings gradually began to steal over him. At first in an absent-minded sort of way, then with some attention, and, lastly, with great curiosity he set himself to take note of his surroundings. The crowds, the din and life of the streets, the bustle and movement around him, the many unfamiliar sights which he beheld, his unfamiliar position — all this petty material of a daily existence which merely wearies the active, preoccupied habitué of St. Petersburg in a strenuous and constant, but vain, struggle for rest and quiet in the home which he has won by labour or otherwise — all this prosaic tedium and banalité evoked in Ordynov's breast, rather, a sensation of calm, bright cheerfulness. His pale cheeks took on a faint tinge of colour, and his eyes shone with new hope as he greedily inhaled deep draughts of the chill, fresh air. Somehow he seemed to himself extraordinarily light.
The life he had hitherto led had been a quiet, absolutely solitary one. Three years ago, on taking a university degree and becoming practically his own master, he had been summoned to the house of an old man whom hitherto he had known only by name. There he had waited until at length the liveried servant had condescended to announce his presence; after which he had entered a lofty, dimly-lighted drawing-room which was almost bare of furniture — a room of the depressing type which is still to be met with in old mansions which stand as survivals from the epoch of great families and seigniorial houses. In this room he had found himself confronted by a much-bemedalled, grey-haired dotard — the friend and colleague of Ordynov's father, and Ordynov's guardian — who had handed to his ward what seemed to the latter a very small sum, as representing a legacy derived from some property which had just been sold under the hammer, to liquidate a debt incident upon his grandfather's estate. Ordynov had received the money with indifference, taken his first and last leave of his guardian, and departed. The evening had been a cold, misty one in autumn, and Ordynov had felt in a meditative mood, for a sort of unconscious depression had been chafing his heart. Also, his eyes had been burning with fever, and every moment he could feel hot and cold shivers running down his body. He had calculated that, with the sum just received, he could subsist for two, for three, or, if he stinted himself carefully, even for four years. But darkness was now coming on, and rain was falling, so he had hired the first room which he had come across, and within an hour had moved his effects into it. There he had shut himself up as in a monastery where men renounced the world; and before two years were over he had become, to all intents and purposes, a savage.
Yes, he became a savage unawares. Of the fact that there might be another existence — an existence full of sound and fury, and constantly seething and changing — the existence which eternally appeals to a man and, sooner or later, absorbs him, since it will take no denial — he had not an inkling. True, it was not that he had never heard of it; it was, rather, that he had never himself known it, and had never sought such knowledge. From infancy upwards he had been sunk in a state of mental isolation which had gradually become confirmed through the fact of its being swallowed up by the deepest and most insatiable of all passions; by the passion which exhausts the vital forces without according such beings as Ordynov any foothold in the sphere of practical, everyday, strenuous activity. That passion was love of learning. Like a slow poison it was corroding his youth, destroying his capacity for sleep, and injuring his appetite both for healthy sustenance and for the fresh air which occasionally penetrated to his narrow retreat. Yet his state of morbid exaltation had never allowed of his noticing these things. He was young, and his wants were modest. Indeed, his passion for books had already rendered him an infant as regards any fitting of him for competition with his peers whenever it should become necessary for him to win a place in their ranks. In the hands of its more skilful devotees science is so much capital; whereas Ordynov's scientific devotion was a weapon which he was turning against himself.
Moreover, this devotion of his was an unconscious abstraction rather than a logically thought-out means for the acquisition of knowledge and culture; and the same peculiarity had marked every other pursuit — even the most petty — in which he had engaged. From his earliest days he had had a reputation for singularity, as being a boy between whom and his comrades there was nothing in common. Parents he had never known, and his strange, retiring nature, had earned for him, at school, much bad treatment and brutality. Consequently, thrown back upon himself, he had come to be shy, morose, and practically a world of his own. Yet in his solitary pursuits there had not, at first, been any system or ordered routine — everything had represented only the first raptures, the first enthusiasms, the first fever of an artist; but now he had created for himself a system which had grown with the years until in his soul it had come to establish a vague, a dim, yet a perfectly comfortable, form of ideas which were gradually undergoing incarnation into such a new and brilliant shape as his soul at once yearned for and found a burden. Already he was faintly conscious of the originality of this form — of its truth and of its power to stand alone. It was a creation which corresponded to his strength; it was one which was gradually materialising; it was one which was ever gathering unto itself new vigour. But the term of its incarnation and final fulfilment was yet a long way off — perhaps a very long way off — perhaps altogether beyond reach!
So this afternoon he walked the streets like a stranger — like an ascetic who has left his dumb solitude for the din and bustle of a town. Everything seemed to him novel and unfamiliar. Yet so unused was he to this world which boiled and seethed around him that he had no room even for astonishment at his own sensations. He had ceased now to feel ill at ease, but, on the contrary, was filled with a joy, an intoxication, which can be compared only to that of a starving man who has just been given meat and drink. Was it not curious that so trivial a turn of fortune as a change of lodgings should be able thus to agitate and bewilder an habitué of St. Petersburg like Ordynov? The truth is that he had hardly ever before been called upon to go out on a business errand.
With increasing delight he pursued his way through the streets; looking at everything in a critical way, and, faithful to his mental habit, reading the pictures which unrolled themselves before him in the same manner that a person reads between the lines of a book. Everything made an impression upon him, and not a single impression escaped him as, with thoughtful gaze, he scanned the faces of the passers-by, and also listened to any conversation which was going on around him, as though he wished to prove the conclusions at which, during the quiet meditations of his lonely nights, he had arrived. Frequently some new trifle would catch his attention, and give rise to a new idea; whereupon he would, for the first time in his life, feel vexed that he should have buried himself alive in his solitary cell. Everything here seemed to move faster. Here his pulse beat more quickly and vigorously; here his intellect, which solitude had but cramped, seemed to be whetted and cheered with its own intense, exultant activity, until it worked with swift precision and assurance. He would have liked to have plunged straight into all this strange life which, as yet, had been wholly unknown to him — or, rather, had been known to him only through his artistic sense. His heart beat with a gust of involuntary love and sympathy as eagerly he set himself to consider the passers-by. Yet suddenly he perceived that some of them looked anxious and absorbed! At this revelation his composure vanished, and the reality of things began to impress him with a sense of respect. He felt himself growing weary of the flood of new impressions which had come upon him, in much the same manner that a sick man, after walking a tentative step or two, suddenly falls to the ground — blinded by the glitter and sparkle and turmoil of life, stunned by the roar of human activity, and confused by the sounds emitted by the ever-changing, ever-seething crowd around him. By degrees Ordynov began to distrust both the tendencies and activities of his present life and his prospects for the future. A thought which particularly troubled him was the circumstance that always he had been alone in the world, without love or the prospect of love. For example, some few passers-by whom, early in his walk, he had tried to engage in conversation had turned from him with an air of brusquerie and estrangement (which, indeed, they had some reason to do); and instantly he had remembered that confidences of his had always been repelled in this way, and that throughout his boyhood persons had invariably avoided him as a youth of dogged, abstracted temperament. In short, he found himself struck with the fact that his sympathy had never known any method of self-disclosure than through ambiguous, painful efforts which were devoid of moral balance. Above all things it had been the constant sorrow of his youth to realise that he was unlike such other boys as were his equals in age; and now that he remembered this he made up his mind that always, and for ever, he would find himself avoided — find himself left to his own devices.
Insensibly he wandered into an outlying suburban district; where, having dined at a shabby restaurant, he resumed his perambulations. Behind him stretched long rows of grey and yellow walls, while, in front, decrepit shanties were beginning to take the place of the richer mansions, with, among them, towering buildings cheek by jowl with factories — buildings which were monstrous, blackened, reddish in colour, and topped by tall chimneys. Here the prospect was empty and desolate; everything, to Ordynov's eye, looked sullen and unfriendly under the approach of night. Traversing a long alley-way, he issued into a square which encompassed a church.
Hardly knowing what he was doing, he entered the sacred edifice. A service had just come to an end, and the building was practically empty, save for two old women who were still kneeling near the entrance, and the verger (a little old man) who was engaged in extinguishing the candles. The slanting rays of the sun were throwing great waves of colour through the narrow windows of the dome, and flooding one of the transepts with a sea of light as they slowly ebbed; while the shadows, growing darker and darker as they massed themselves under the arches, were causing the gilt on the sacred images to glitter the more brightly in the intermittent, reddish gleam of lamps and candles. A prey to painful emotions and a sort of crushed feeling, Ordynov seated himself against the wall in one of the darkest corners of the church, and for a moment sank into oblivion. Presently he was recalled to himself by the sound of two persons entering the building with dull, measured footsteps. Looking up, he felt an indefinable curiosity possess him. The newcomers were an old man and a girl. The former — a man who, though tall, vigorous, and upright, was sadly wasted and unhealthily pale — might have been a merchant from some remote province. Clad in a long coat of black fur which, unfastened, showed a tunic neatly buttoned from chin to waist, he had his bare neck swathed in a scarlet muffler, and in his hand a fur cap. A long grey beard covered his breast, and from under menacing, bushy eyebrows his glance shone with a feverish light and a sort of slow, yet haughty and penetrating, air. As for the girl, she might have been about twenty. Marvellously beautiful, and dressed in a jacket of some rich, dark, glossy fur, with a white satin scarf tied over her head and knotted under her chin, she walked with her eyes cast down and a sort of meditative gravity on her face which imparted to the tender, gentle lines of her childlike countenance a sort of clear-cut, yet mournful, air. Somehow to Ordynov there seemed something strange in the aspect of this couple.
When half-way up the aisle, the old man halted, and made the sign of the cross towards every side of him, although the church was now empty. His companion did the same. Then he took her by the hand, and led her towards the statue of the Virgin, the Lady Patroness of the church. The image stood near the altar, and its ornaments of precious stones and brilliant gold were glittering with a dazzling sheen. The verger greeted the stranger with a respectful bow, and was accorded, in return, a slight acknowledgment of his salute; after which the young girl fell upon her knees before the statue, and, the old man having taken a church napkin and covered her head with it, a sound of deep sobbing became audible throughout the building.
So fascinated was Ordynov by the solemnity of the scene that he awaited the end of it with impatience. After a moment or two the girl raised her head, and her beautiful face again shone clear under the light of the lamps. Ordynov trembled, and advanced a step or two, but she had now taken the old man's arm, and was turning with him to leave the church. Hot tears were still welling from her dark-blue eyes (the long, pendant lashes of which stood out clearly against the creamy whiteness of her complexion), and running over her pale cheeks. True, there seemed to be a smile on her lips, but her face bore traces of a sort of childish, mysterious fear as, trembling with emotion, she clung confidingly to the old man's arm.
Greatly agitated, and filled with a pleasurable sensation which he could not repress, Ordynov hastened after the couple, and overtook them on the church plaza. The old man turned towards him with a meaning scowl, and the girl too threw him a glance, but only an incurious one which clearly showed that her mind was occupied with something else. For some reason which he could not account for Ordynov still continued to follow the couple — though at a distance, and under cover of the fast-gathering twilight. Turning into a long, dirty street near the fortifications, in the artisan quarter — a crowded street full of lodging-houses and corn-chandlers' establishments — they presently debouched into a narrow alley-way between two blank walls, and continued onwards until before them there rose the high, blackened walls of a four-storeyed building, the gates of which fronted upon a second long and populous street. As the three pedestrians approached this building the old man again turned round, and fixed Ordynov with an impatient stare. The young man halted, and stood rooted to the spot, for even to himself his impulse seemed a strange one. After giving him another look, as though to make sure that the silent menace had had its effect, the old man entered, with the young girl, the courtyard of the building, while Ordynov hastened to return homewards.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Landlady"
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