‘Even if I did hurt myself, nobody would have noticed. That’s for certain.’
‘What’s wrong, then?’
‘Let me be! Remember, don’t remember ... What business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me alone!’ he said, not to the tutor now, but to the whole world.
XX
Stepan Arkadyich, as always, did not idle away his time in Petersburg. In Petersburg, besides the business of his sister’s divorce and the post, he had, as always, to refresh himself, as he put it, after the stuffiness of Moscow.
Moscow, in spite of its
Wife? ... Only that day he had been talking with Prince Chechensky. Prince Chechensky had a wife and family - grown-up boys serving as pages - and there was another illegitimate family, in which there were also children. Though the first family was good as well, Prince Chechensky felt happier in the second family. And he had brought his eldest son into the second family, and kept telling Stepan Arkadyich that he found it useful for the boy’s development. What would they have said to that in Moscow?
Children? In Petersburg children did not hinder their father’s life. Children were brought up in institutions, and there existed nothing like that wild idea spreading about Moscow - as with Lvov, for instance - that children should get all the luxuries of life and parents nothing but toil and care. Here they understood that a man is obliged to live for himself, as an educated person ought to live.
Service? Here the service was also not that persistent, unrewarded drudgery that it was in Moscow; here there was interest in it. An encounter, a favour, an apt word, an ability to act out various jokes - and a man’s career was suddenly made, as with Briantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyich had met yesterday and who was now a leading dignitary. Such service had some interest in it.
But the Petersburg view of money matters had an especially soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyich. Bartniansky, who had run through at least fifty thousand, judging by his
In a conversation before dinner, Stepan Arkadyich had said to Bartniansky :
‘It seems to me that you’re close to Mordvinsky; you might do me a favour and kindly put in a word for me. There’s a post I’d like to get. Member of the Agency ...’
‘Well, I won’t remember it anyway ... Only who wants to get into all these railway affairs with the Jews? ... As you wish, but all the same it’s vile!’
Stepan Arkadyich did not tell him that it was a living matter; Bartniansky would not have understood it.
‘I need money, I have nothing to live on.’
‘You do live, though?’
‘I live, but in debt.’
‘Really? How deep?’ Bartniansky said with sympathy.
‘Very deep - about twenty thousand.’
Bartniansky burst into merry laughter.
‘Oh, lucky man!’ he said. ‘I owe a million and a half and have nothing, and, as you see, I can still live.’
And Stepan Arkadyich could see that it was true not only in words but in reality. Zhivakhov had debts of three hundred thousand and not a kopeck to his name, and yet he lived, and how! The requiem had long been sung for Count Krivtsov, yet he kept two women. Petrovsky ran through five million and lived the same as ever, and was even a financial director and received a salary of twenty thousand. But, besides that, Petersburg had a physically pleasant effect on Stepan Arkadyich. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes looked at his grey hair, fell asleep after dinner, stretched, climbed the stairs slowly, breathing heavily, became bored in the company of young women, did not dance at balls. In Petersburg he always felt he had shaken off ten years.
He experienced in Petersburg the same thing that he had been told only yesterday by the sixty-year-old prince Pyotr Oblonsky, just returned from abroad.
