Dream Tales and Prose Poems | Page 2

had no idea of entering the government
service. He was shy with his fellow-students, made friends with
scarcely any one, especially held aloof from women, and lived in great
solitude, buried in books. He held aloof from women, though he had a
heart of the tenderest, and was fascinated by beauty.... He had even
obtained a sumptuous English keepsake, and (oh shame!) gloated
adoringly over its 'elegantly engraved' representations of the various
ravishing Gulnaras and Medoras.... But his innate modesty always kept
him in check. In the house he used to work in what had been his father's
study, it was also his bedroom, and his bed was the very one in which
his father had breathed his last.
The mainstay of his whole existence, his unfailing friend and
companion, was his aunt Platosha, with whom he exchanged barely a
dozen words in the day, but without whom he could not stir hand or
foot. She was a long-faced, long-toothed creature, with pale eyes, and a
pale face, with an invariable expression, half of dejection, half of
anxious dismay. For ever garbed in a grey dress and a grey shawl, she
wandered about the house like a spirit, with noiseless steps, sighed,
murmured prayers--especially one favourite one, consisting of three
words only, 'Lord, succour us!'--and looked after the house with much
good sense, taking care of every halfpenny, and buying everything
herself. Her nephew she adored; she was in a perpetual fidget over his
health--afraid of everything--not for herself but for him; and directly
she fancied the slightest thing wrong, she would steal in softly, and set
a cup of herb tea on his writing-table, or stroke him on the spine with
her hands, soft as wadding. Yakov was not annoyed by these
attentions--though the herb tea he left untouched--he merely nodded his
head approvingly. However, his health was really nothing to boast of.
He was very impressionable, nervous, fanciful, suffered from
palpitations of the heart, and sometimes from asthma; like his father, he
believed that there are in nature and in the soul of man, mysteries
which may sometimes be divined, but to which one can never penetrate;
he believed in the existence of certain powers and influences,
sometimes beneficent, but more often malignant,... and he believed too

in science, in its dignity and importance. Of late he had taken a great
fancy to photography. The smell of the chemicals used in this pursuit
was a source of great uneasiness to his old aunt--not on her own
account again, but on Yasha's, on account of his chest; but for all the
softness of his temper, there was not a little obstinacy in his
composition, and he persisted in his favourite pursuit. Platosha gave in,
and only sighed more than ever, and murmured, 'Lord, succour us!'
whenever she saw his fingers stained with iodine.
Yakov, as we have already related, had held aloof from his
fellow-students; with one of them he had, however, become fairly
intimate, and saw him frequently, even after the fellow-student had left
the university and entered the service, in a position involving little
responsibility. He had, in his own words, got on to the building of the
Church of our Saviour, though, of course, he knew nothing whatever of
architecture. Strange to say, this one solitary friend of Aratov's, by
name Kupfer, a German, so far Russianised that he did not know one
word of German, and even fell foul of 'the Germans,' this friend had
apparently nothing in common with him. He was a black-haired,
red-cheeked young man, very jovial, talkative, and devoted to the
feminine society Aratov so assiduously avoided. It is true Kupfer both
lunched and dined with him pretty often, and even, being a man of
small means, used to borrow trifling sums of him; but this was not what
induced the free and easy German to frequent the humble little house in
Shabolovka so diligently. The spiritual purity, the idealism of Yakov
pleased him, possibly as a contrast to what he was seeing and meeting
every day; or possibly this very attachment to the youthful idealist
betrayed him of German blood after all. Yakov liked Kupfer's
simple-hearted frankness; and besides that, his accounts of the theatres,
concerts, and balls, where he was always in attendance--of the
unknown world altogether, into which Yakov could not make up his
mind to enter--secretly interested and even excited the young hermit,
without, however, arousing any desire to learn all this by his own
experience. And Platosha made Kupfer welcome; it is true she thought
him at times excessively unceremonious, but instinctively perceiving
and realising that he was sincerely attached to her precious Yasha, she
not only put up with the noisy guest, but felt kindly towards him.

II
At the time with which our story is concerned,