III. Второй брак и вторые дети

This second marriage lasted some eight years.

He took this second wife of his, also a very young woman, Sofya Ivanovna, from another province, into which he had traveled on some petty contracting business, in partnership with a little Jew.

Though Fyodor Pavlovitch caroused, and drank, and lived riotously, he never once left off seeing to the placing of his capital, and he always managed his little affairs successfully, if, of course, almost always somewhat shabbily.

Sofya Ivanovna came of the "little orphans," without kin from childhood, the daughter of some obscure deacon, and had grown up in the wealthy house of her benefactress, governess, and tormentor — a distinguished old general's widow, the widow of General Vorohov.

I do not know the particulars, but I have only heard that the ward — a meek, gentle, and uncomplaining girl — was once taken down from a noose she had hung on a nail in the storeroom, so unbearable had she found the willfulness and the everlasting reproaches of this old woman, who seemed not to be malicious but was simply the most insufferable petty tyrant out of sheer idleness.

Fyodor Pavlovitch offered his hand; inquiries were made about him and he was sent packing, and so once again, just as in his first marriage, he proposed to the little orphan that she elope with him.

It may very, very well be that she would not have gone with him for anything on earth, had she learned a little more about him in good time.

But the affair was in another province; and besides, what could a girl of sixteen understand, except that it was better to throw herself into the river than to stay on with her benefactress?

And so the poor thing exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor.

Fyodor Pavlovitch took not a kopeck this time, for the general's widow flew into a rage, gave nothing, and on top of that cursed them both; but he had not reckoned on getting anything this time, and was tempted only by the remarkable beauty of the innocent girl and, above all, by her innocent air, which struck him — a sensualist who, until then, had been a depraved connoisseur of nothing but coarse female beauty.

"Those innocent little eyes slashed my soul that day like a razor," he used to say afterward, snickering nastily in his own fashion.

In a debauched man, however, even this could have been no more than a sensual attraction.

Having taken no recompense, Fyodor Pavlovitch stood on no ceremony with his wife, and, taking advantage of the fact that she was, so to speak, "in the wrong" before him and that he had "all but taken her down from the noose," and taking advantage, besides, of her phenomenal meekness and submissiveness, he trampled underfoot even the most ordinary decencies of married life.

Disreputable women would gather in the house, right there in the wife's presence, and orgies were got up.

As a characteristic touch, I will report that the servant Grigory — a gloomy, stupid, and obstinate moralizer who had detested the former mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna — this time took the side of the new mistress, defending her and quarreling on her behalf with Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner all but impermissible in a servant, and on one occasion even broke up an orgy and drove out by force all the disorderly women who had come.

In time there developed in the unhappy young woman — terrified from her earliest childhood — a sort of nervous female ailment, met with most often among the common folk, among peasant women, who for this affliction are called klikushi.

From this ailment, with its dreadful hysterical fits, the sick woman would at times even lose her reason.

She bore Fyodor Pavlovitch two sons, however — Ivan and Alexey — the first in the first year of the marriage, the second three years later.

When she died, the boy Alexey was in his fourth year, and, strange as it is, I know that he remembered his mother afterward for the rest of his life — as though through a dream, of course.

After her death almost exactly the same thing befell both boys as had befallen the first, Mitya: they were utterly forgotten and abandoned by their father, and ended up with the same Grigory, and likewise in his cottage.

It was in the cottage that they were found by the old tyrant, the general's widow — the benefactress and governess of their mother.

She was still living, and all that time, the whole eight years, she had been unable to forget the injury done to her.

Of her "Sofya's" manner of life she had, all those eight years, the most exact intelligence, gathered on the sly, and, hearing how ill she was and what abominations surrounded her, she remarked aloud to her hangers-on, two or three times: "It serves her right; God has sent it to her for her ingratitude."

Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna's death the general's widow suddenly appeared in our town in person, going straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch's lodging, and altogether spent no more than half an hour in the little town — but she accomplished a great deal.

It was the evening hour then.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had not set eyes on in all those eight years, came out to her tipsy.

It is told that, the moment she laid eyes on him, without any explanation whatsoever, she dealt him two sound, ringing slaps on the face and yanked him three times by the forelock, top to bottom, and then, without adding a single word, made straight for the cottage to the two boys.

Noticing at the first glance that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she at once gave another slap to Grigory himself and announced to him that she was carrying off both children to her own home, then led them out just as they were, wrapped them in a plaid rug, set them in a carriage, and bore them away to her own town.

Grigory bore that slap like a devoted serf, did not utter a single rude word, and when he saw the old lady to her carriage he bowed to her from the waist and pronounced impressively that God would "repay her for the orphans."

"You're a blockhead all the same!" the general's widow shouted at him as she drove off.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, having weighed the whole matter, decided it was a good thing, and afterward did not refuse on a single point his formal consent regarding the children's upbringing with the general's widow.

As for the slaps he had received, he himself went around telling the whole town about them.

It so happened that the general's widow too died soon afterward, having, however, stipulated in her will a thousand rubles for each of the two little ones, "for their education, and that all this money be spent on them without fail, but in such a way that it last clear up to their coming of age, since such a handout is more than enough for children of this sort — and if anyone wishes otherwise, let him loosen his own purse," and so on, and so forth.

I did not read the will myself, but I have heard that there really was something strange of this kind in it, expressed in too peculiar a manner.

The chief heir of the old woman turned out, however, to be an honest man, the provincial Marshal of the Nobility of that province, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov.

Having corresponded with Fyodor Pavlovitch and grasped at once that there was no getting money out of him for the upbringing of his own children (though the man never refused outright, but in such cases always temporized, sometimes even gushing with sentiment), he took a personal interest in the orphans and grew especially fond of the younger of the two, Alexey, so that the boy even grew up for a long while in his household.

This I beg the reader to note from the very start.

And if to anyone the young men owed their upbringing and education for the whole of their lives, it was precisely to this Yefim Petrovitch — a most noble and humane man, of the kind one rarely meets.

He kept intact for the little ones their thousand rubles apiece, left by the general's widow, so that by the time they came of age each sum had grown with interest to two thousand; and he educated them at his own expense, spending, of course, far more than a thousand on each.

Into a detailed account of their childhood and youth I will again not enter for now, but will indicate only the most essential circumstances.

Of the elder, Ivan, however, I will report only this: that he grew up a somewhat morose lad, closed within himself, far from timid, but seemingly already from the age of ten penetrating to the fact that they were, after all, growing up in another family's home, on another's charity, and that they had a father of some sort it was shameful even to speak of, and so on, and so forth.

This boy very soon, almost in infancy (so it was related, at least), began to display certain extraordinary and brilliant aptitudes for learning.

I do not know exactly, but somehow it came about that he parted from Yefim Petrovitch's family at scarcely thirteen, going over to one of the Moscow gymnasiums and boarding with some experienced and, at that time, celebrated pedagogue, a friend of Yefim Petrovitch's from childhood.

Ivan himself related afterward that the whole thing came about, so to speak, out of Yefim Petrovitch's "ardor for good works," the man having been carried away by the idea that a boy of genius must also be brought up by a tutor of genius.

However, neither Yefim Petrovitch nor the tutor of genius was any longer among the living when the young man, having finished the gymnasium, entered the university.

Since Yefim Petrovitch had managed things poorly, and the receipt of the children's own money bequeathed by the tyrannical general's widow — grown with interest from a thousand to two — was held up by various formalities and delays utterly unavoidable with us, the young man had a very hard time of it in his first two years at the university, since he was compelled all that while to feed and keep himself, and at the same time to study.