Youth | Page 5

consoling voice,
which in later days, in sorrowful days when my soul yielded silently to
the sway of life's falseness and depravity, so often raised a sudden, bold
protest against all iniquity, as well as mercilessly exposed the past,
commanded, nay, compelled, me to love only the pure vista of the
present, and promised me all that was fair and happy in the future! O
good and consoling voice! Surely the day will never come when you

are silent?
IV
OUR FAMILY CIRCLE
PAPA was seldom at home that spring. Yet, whenever he was so, he
seemed extraordinarily cheerful as he either strummed his favourite
pieces on the piano or looked roguishly at us and made jokes about us
all, not excluding even Mimi. For instance, he would say that the
Tsarevitch himself had seen Mimi at the rink, and fallen so much in
love with her that he had presented a petition to the Synod for divorce;
or else that I had been granted an appointment as secretary to the
Austrian ambassador-- a piece of news which he imparted to us with a
perfectly grave face. Next, he would frighten Katenka with some
spiders (of which she was very much afraid), engage in an animated
conversation with our friends Dubkoff and Nechludoff, and tell us and
our guests, over and over again, his plans for the year. Although these
plans changed almost from day to day, and were for ever contradicting
one another, they seemed so attractive that we were always glad to
listen to them, and Lubotshka, in particular, would glue her eyes to his
face, so as not to lose a single word. One day his plan would be that he
should leave my brother and myself at the University, and go and live
with Lubotshka in Italy for two years. Next, the plan would be that he
should buy an estate on the south coast of the Crimea, and take us for
an annual visit there; next, that we should migrate en masse to St.
Petersburg; and so forth. Yet, in addition to this unusual cheerfulness of
his, another change had come over him of late--a change which greatly
surprised me. This was that he had had some fashionable clothes
made--an olive- coloured frockcoat, smart trousers with straps at the
sides, and a long wadded greatcoat which fitted him to perfection.
Often, too, there was a delightful smell of scent about him when he
came home from a party--more especially when he had been to see a
lady of whom Mimi never spoke but with a sigh and a face that seemed
to say: "Poor orphans! How dreadful! It is a good thing that SHE is
gone now!" and so on, and so on. From Nicola (for Papa never spoke to
us of his gambling) I had learnt that he (Papa) had been very fortunate

in play that winter, and so had won an extraordinary amount of money,
all of which he had placed in the bank after vowing that he would play
no more that spring. Evidently, it was his fear of being unable to resist
again doing so that was rendering him anxious to leave for the country
as soon as possible. Indeed, he ended by deciding not to wait until I had
entered the University, but to take the girls to Petrovskoe immediately
after Easter, and to leave Woloda and myself to follow them at a later
season.
All that winter, until the opening of spring, Woloda had been
inseparable from Dubkoff, while at the same time the pair of them had
cooled greatly towards Dimitri. Their chief amusements (so I gathered
from conversations overheard) were continual drinking of champagne,
sledge-driving past the windows of a lady with whom both of them
appeared to be in love, and dancing with her--not at children's parties,
either, but at real balls! It was this last fact which, despite our love for
one another, placed a vast gulf between Woloda and myself. We felt
that the distance between a boy still taking lessons under a tutor and a
man who danced at real, grown-up balls was too great to allow of their
exchanging mutual ideas. Katenka, too, seemed grown-up now, and
read innumerable novels; so that the idea that she would some day be
getting married no longer seemed to me a joke. Yet, though she and
Woloda were thus grown-up, they never made friends with one another,
but, on the contrary, seemed to cherish a mutual contempt. In general,
when Katenka was at home alone, nothing but novels amused her, and
they but slightly; but as soon as ever a visitor of the opposite sex called,
she at once grew lively and amiable, and used her eyes for saying
things which I could not then understand. It