بخش 05 - فصل 02

CHAPTER TWO

IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to explain exactly what could have put the idea of that senseless dinner into Katerina Ivanovna’s disordered brain. Nearly ten of the twenty rubles which Raskolnikov gave for Marmeladov’s funeral were wasted on it. Perhaps Katerina Ivanovna felt obliged to honor the memory of her late husband “suitably,” so that all the tenants, Amalia Ivanovna in particular, might know “that he was in no way their inferior, and perhaps very much their superior,” and that no-one had the right “to turn up his nose at him.” Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar “poor man’s pride,” which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional social ceremony, simply in order to do it “like other people,” and not to “be looked down upon.” It is very probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at the very moment when she seemed to be abandoned by everyone, to show those “wretched contemptible lodgers” that she knew “how to do things, how to entertain” and that she had been brought up “in a genteel, she might almost say aristocratic colonel’s family” and had not been meant for sweeping floors and washing the children’s rags at night. Even the poorest and most broken-spirited people are sometimes liable to these spasms of pride and vanity which take the form of an irresistible nervous craving. And Katerina Ivanovna was not broken-spirited; she might have been killed by the circumstances in which she found herself, but her spirit could not have been broken, that is, she could not have been intimidated, her will could not be crushed. Moreover, Sonia had said with good reason that her mind was unhinged. No-one could call her insane, but for a year now she had been so harassed that her mind might well be overstrained. The later stages of tuberculosis are apt, doctors tell us, to affect the intellect.

There was not a large selection of wines, nor was there Madeira; but wine there was nevertheless. There was vodka, rum and Lisbon wine, all of the poorest quality but in sufficient quantity. Besides the traditional rice and honey, there were three or four dishes, one of which consisted of pancakes, all prepared in Amalia Ivanovna’s kitchen. Two samovars were boiling in order that tea and punch might be offered after dinner. Katerina Ivanovna had herself seen to purchasing the provisions, with the help of one of the lodgers, an unfortunate little Pole who had somehow been stranded at Madame Lippewechsel’s. He promptly put himself at Katerina Ivanovna’s disposal and had been running around all day as fast as his legs could carry him, and was very anxious that everyone should be aware of it. For every minor problem he ran to Katerina Ivanovna, even hunting her out at the market, at every instant called her “Pani.” She was thoroughly sick of him before the end of it, though she had declared at first that she could not have got on without this “serviceable and magnanimous man.” It was one of Katerina Ivanovna’s characteristics to paint everyone she met in the most glowing colors. Her praises were so exaggerated as to be embarrassing on occasion; she would invent various circumstances to the credit of her new acquaintance and quite genuinely believe in their reality. Then all of a sudden she would be disillusioned and would rudely and contemptuously repulse the person she had been literally adoring only a few hours previously. She had a naturally merry, lively and peace-loving disposition, but due to her continual failures and misfortunes she had come to desire so keenly that everyone should live in peace and joy and should not dare to break the peace that the slightest problem, the smallest disaster reduced her almost to a frenzy, and she would pass in an instant from the brightest hopes and fancies to cursing her fate and raving and knocking her head against the wall.

Amalia Ivanovna, too, suddenly acquired extraordinary importance in Katerina Ivanovna’s eyes and was treated by her with extraordinary respect, probably only because Amalia Ivanovna had thrown herself heart and soul into the preparations. She had undertaken to lay the table, to provide the linen, crockery, etc., and to cook the dishes in her kitchen, and Katerina Ivanovna had left it all in her hands and gone off to the cemetery. Everything had been well done. Even the tablecloth was nearly clean; the crockery, knives, forks and glasses had been lent by different lodgers and were naturally of all shapes and patterns, but the table was properly laid at the time fixed, and Amalia Ivanovna, feeling she had done her work well, had put on a black silk dress and a cap with new mourning ribbons and met the returning party with some pride. This pride, though justifiable, displeased Katerina Ivanovna for some reason: “as though the table could not have been laid except by Amalia Ivanovna!” She disliked the cap with its new ribbons, too. “Could she be so dismissive, the stupid German, because she was the mistress of the house and had agreed as a favor to help her poor tenants! As a favor! Imagine! Katerina Ivanovna’s father, who had been a colonel and almost a governor, had sometimes had the table set for forty people, and anyone like Amalia Ivanovna, or rather Ludwigovna, would not have been allowed into the kitchen.” Katerina Ivanovna, however, put off expressing her feelings for the time being and contented herself with treating her coldly, though she decided inwardly that she would certainly have to put Amalia Ivanovna down and set her in her place, for goodness only knew how highly she thought of herself. Katerina Ivanovna was irritated too by the fact that hardly any of the tenants whom she had invited had come to the funeral, except the Pole who had just managed to run into the cemetery, while to the memorial dinner the poorest and most insignificant of them had turned up, the wretched creatures, many of them not quite sober. The older and more respectable ones among them stayed away, as if by common consent. Peter Petrovich Luzhin, for instance, who could be described as the most respectable of all the tenants, did not appear, though Katerina Ivanovna had the evening before told the whole world, that is Amalia Ivanovna, Polenka, Sonia and the Pole, that he was the most generous, noble-hearted man with a large property and vast connections, who had been a friend of her first husband’s, and a guest in her father’s house, and that he had promised to use all his influence to secure her a considerable pension. It must be noted that when Katerina Ivanovna praised anyone’s connections and fortune, it was without any ulterior motive, entirely disinterestedly, for the mere pleasure of increasing the importance of the person praised. Probably “taking his cue” from Luzhin, “that contemptible wretch Lebeziatnikov had not turned up either. Why did he think so highly of himself? He was only invited out of kindness and because he was sharing the same room with Peter Petrovich and was a friend of his: it would have been awkward not to invite him.” Among those who failed to appear were “the genteel lady and her old-maidish daughter,” who had only been lodgers in the house for the last fortnight, but had several times complained of the noise and uproar in Katerina Ivanovna’s room, especially when Marmeladov had come back drunk. Katerina Ivanovna heard this from Amalia Ivanovna who, quarrelling with Katerina Ivanovna, and threatening to turn the whole family out of doors, had shouted at her that they “were not worth the foot” of the honorable lodgers whom they were disturbing. Katerina Ivanovna determined now to invite this lady and her daughter, “whose foot she was not worth,” and who had turned away haughtily when she met them casually, so that they might know that “she was more noble in her thoughts and feelings and did not harbor malice,” and might see that she was not accustomed to her way of living. She had proposed to make this clear to them at dinner with allusions to her late father’s governorship, and also at the same time to hint that it was extremely stupid of them to turn away on meeting her. The fat colonel-major (he was really a discharged officer of low rank) was also absent, but it appeared that he had “not been himself ” for the last two days. The party consisted of the Pole, a wretched looking clerk with a spotty face and a greasy coat, who had not a word to say for himself and smelt abominably, and a deaf and almost blind old man who had once been in the post office and who had been maintained by someone at Amalia Ivanovna’s for as long as anyone could remember.

A retired clerk of the commissariat department came, too; he was drunk, had a loud and extremely indecent laugh and, just imagine—he came without a waistcoat! One of the visitors sat straight down at the table without even greeting Katerina Ivanovna. Finally, one person with no suit on appeared in his dressing gown, but this was too much, and the efforts of Amalia Ivanovna and the Pole succeeded in removing him. The Pole brought with him, however, two other Poles who did not live at Amalia Ivanovna’s and whom no-one had seen here before. All this irritated Katerina Ivanovna intensely. “For whom had they made all these preparations then?” To make room for the visitors the children had not even had places laid for them at the table; but the two little ones were sitting on a bench in the furthest corner with their dinner laid on a box, while Polenka, as the biggest girl, had to look after them, feed them, and keep their noses wiped like well-bred children’s.

Katerina Ivanovna, in fact, could hardly help meeting her guests with increased dignity, and even arrogance. She stared at some of them with particular severity, and loftily invited them to take their seats. Rushing to the conclusion that Amalia Ivanovna must be responsible for those who were absent, she began treating her with extreme indifference, which the latter promptly observed and resented. Such a beginning was not a good omen for the end. All were seated at last.

Raskolnikov came in almost at the moment of their return from the cemetery. Katerina Ivanovna was greatly delighted to see him, firstly, because he was the one “educated visitor, and, as everyone knew, was to take a professorship at the university in two years’ time,” and secondly because he immediately and respectfully apologized for the fact that he had been unable to be present at the funeral. She absolutely pounced on him, and made him sit at her left (Amalia Ivanovna was at her right). Despite her continual anxiety that the dishes should be passed round correctly and that everyone should taste them, in spite of the agonizing cough which interrupted her every minute and seemed to have grown worse during the last few days, she hastened to pour out in a half whisper to Raskolnikov all her suppressed feelings and her just indignation at the failure of the dinner, interspersing her remarks with lively and uncontrollable laughter at the expense of her visitors and especially of her landlady.

“It’s all that cuckoo’s fault! You know who I mean? Her, her!” Katerina Ivanovna nodded towards the landlady. “Look at her, she’s making round eyes, she feels that we are talking about her and can’t understand. Foo, the owl! Ha-ha! (Cough-cough-cough.) And what does she put on that cap for? (Cough-cough-cough.) Have you noticed that she wants everyone to consider that she is patronizing me and doing me an honor by being here? I asked her like a sensible woman to invite people, especially people who knew my late husband, and look at the set of fools she has brought! The sweeps! Look at that one with the spotty face. And those wretched Poles, ha-ha-ha! (Cough-cough-cough.) Not one of them has ever poked his nose in here, I’ve never set eyes on them. What have they come here for, I ask you? There they sit in a row. Hey, Pan!” she cried suddenly to one of them, “have you tasted the pancakes? Take some more! Have some beer! Won’t you have some vodka? Look, he’s jumping up and making his bows, they must be absolutely starved, poor people. Never mind, let them eat! They don’t make a noise, anyway, though I’m really afraid for our landlady’s silver spoons . . . Amalia Ivanovna!” she addressed her suddenly, almost aloud, “if your spoons should happen to be stolen, I won’t be responsible, I warn you! Ha-ha-ha!” She laughed turning to Raskolnikov, and again nodding towards the landlady, very pleased with her attack. “She didn’t understand, she didn’t understand again! Look how she sits with her mouth open! An owl, a real owl! An owl in new ribbons, ha-ha-ha!” Here her laugh turned again to an insufferable fit of coughing that lasted five minutes. Drops of perspiration stood out on her forehead and her handkerchief was stained with blood. She showed Raskolnikov the blood in silence, and as soon as she could get her breath began whispering to him again with extreme animation and a hectic flush on her cheeks.

“Do you know, I gave her the most delicate instructions, so to speak, for inviting that lady and her daughter, you understand who I am talking about? It needed the utmost delicacy, the greatest nicety, but she has managed things so that that fool, that conceited baggage, that provincial nonentity, simply because she is the widow of a major, and has come to try and get a pension and fray out her skirts in the government offices, because at fifty she paints her face (everybody knows it) . . . a creature like that did not think fit to come, and has not even answered the invitation, which the most ordinary good manners required! I can’t understand why Peter Petrovich has not come! But where’s Sonia? Where has she gone? Ah, there she is at last! What is it, Sonia, where have you been? It’s odd that even at your father’s funeral you should be so unpunctual. Rodion Romanovich, make room for her beside you. That’s your place, Sonia . . . take what you like. Have some of the cold entrée with the jelly, that’s the best. They’ll bring the pancakes in a few minutes. Have they given the children some? Polenka, have you got everything? (Cough-cough-cough.) That’s all right. Be a good girl, Lida, and, Kolia, don’t fidget with your feet; sit like a little gentleman. What are you saying, Sonia?” Sonia hurriedly gave her Peter Petrovich’s apologies, trying to speak loud enough for everyone to hear and carefully choosing the most respectful phrases which she attributed to Peter Petrovich. She added that Peter Petrovich had particularly told her to say that, as soon as he possibly could, he would come immediately to discuss business alone with her and to consider what could be done for her, etc., etc.

Sonia knew that this would comfort Katerina Ivanovna, flatter her and satisfy her pride. She sat down beside Raskolnikov; she made him a hurried bow, glancing curiously at him. But for the rest of the time she seemed to avoid looking at him or speaking to him. She seemed absent-minded, though she kept looking at Katerina Ivanovna, trying to please her. Neither she nor Katerina Ivanovna had been able to get mourning clothes; Sonia was wearing dark brown, and Katerina Ivanovna was in her only dress, a dark striped cotton one.

The message from Peter Petrovich was very successful. Listening to Sonia with dignity, Katerina Ivanovna inquired with equal dignity how Peter Petrovich was, then at once whispered almost aloud to Raskolnikov that it certainly would have been strange for a man of Peter Petrovich’s position and standing to find himself in such “extraordinary company,” in spite of his devotion to her family and his old friendship with her father.

“That’s why I am so grateful to you, Rodion Romanovich, that you have not disdained my hospitality, even in such surroundings,” she added almost aloud. “But I am sure that it was only your special affection for my poor husband that has made you keep your promise.”

Then once more with pride and dignity she scanned her visitors, and suddenly inquired aloud across the table of the deaf man: “wouldn’t he have some more meat, and had he been given some wine?” The old man did not answer and for a long time could not understand what he was asked, though his neighbors amused themselves by poking and shaking him. He simply gazed about him with his mouth open, which only increased the general amusement.

“What an imbecile! Look, look! Why was he brought? But as for Peter Petrovich, I always had confidence in him,” Katerina Ivanovna continued, “and, of course, he is not like . . . ” with an extremely stern face she addressed Amalia Ivanovna so sharply and loudly that the latter was entirely disconcerted, “not like your dressed up floozies who my father would not have taken as cooks into his kitchen. My late husband would have done them the honor of taking them in if he had invited them in the goodness of his heart.”

“Yes, he was fond of drink, he was fond of it, he did drink!” shouted the commissariat clerk, gulping down his twelfth glass of vodka.

“My late husband certainly had that weakness, and everyone knows it,” Katerina Ivanovna attacked him at once, “but he was a kind and honorable man, who loved and respected his family. The worst of it was that his good nature made him trust all sorts of disreputable people, and he drank with people who were not worth the sole of his shoe. Would you believe it, Rodion Romanovich, they found a gin gerbread cockerel in his pocket; he was dead drunk, but he did not forget the children!”

“A cockerel? Did you say a cockerel?” shouted the commissariat clerk.

Katerina Ivanovna did not vouchsafe a reply. She sighed, lost in thought.

“No doubt you think, like everyone, that I was too severe with him,” she went on, addressing Raskolnikov. “But that’s not true! He respected me, he respected me very much! He was a kind-hearted man! And how sorry I was for him sometimes! He would sit in a corner and look at me, I used to feel so sorry for him, I used to want to be kind to him and then I would think to myself: ‘Be kind to him and he will drink again,’ it was only through severity that you could keep him within bounds.”

“Yes, he used to get his hair pulled pretty often,” roared the commissariat clerk again, swallowing another glass of vodka.

“Some fools would be the better for a real beating, as well as having their hair pulled. I am not talking about my late husband now!” Katerina Ivanovna snapped at him.

The flush on her cheeks grew more and more marked, her chest heaved. In another minute she would have been ready to make a scene. Many of the visitors were sniggering, evidently delighted. They began poking the commissariat clerk and whispering something to him. They were evidently trying to egg him on.

“Allow me to ask what are you referring to,” began the clerk, “that is to say, whose . . . about whom . . . did you say just now . . . But I don’t care! That’s nonsense! Widow! I forgive you . . . Pass!”

And he took another drink of vodka.

Raskolnikov sat in silence, listening with disgust. He only ate out of politeness, just tasting the food that Katerina Ivanovna was continually putting on his plate, to avoid hurting her feelings. He watched Sonia intently. But Sonia became more and more anxious and distressed; she, too, foresaw that the dinner would not end peaceably, and saw with terror Katerina Ivanovna’s growing irritation. She knew that she, Sonia, was the chief reason for the “genteel” ladies’ contemptuous treatment of Katerina Ivanovna’s invitation. She had heard from Amalia Ivanovna that the mother was positively offended at the invitation and had asked the question: “How could she let her daughter sit down beside that young person?” Sonia had a feeling that Katerina Ivanovna had already heard this and an insult to Sonia meant more to Katerina Ivanovna than an insult to herself, her children, or her father. Sonia knew that Katerina Ivanovna would not be satisfied now, “till she had shown those floozies that they were both . . . ” To make matters worse someone passed Sonia, from the other end of the table, a plate with two hearts pierced with an arrow, cut out of black bread. Katerina Ivanovna flushed crimson and at once said aloud across the table that the man who sent it was “a drunken ass!” Amalia Ivanovna was foreseeing that something would go wrong, and at the same time she was deeply wounded by Katerina Ivanovna’s dismissiveness, so to restore the good mood at the party and raise herself in their esteem she began, entirely at random, to tell a story about an acquaintance of hers, “Karl from the chemist’s”, who was driving one night in a cab, and that “the cabman wanted him to kill, and Karl very much begged him not to kill, and wept and clasped hands, and frightened and from fear pierced his heart.” Though Katerina Ivanovna smiled, she observed at once that Amalia Ivanovna ought not to tell anecdotes in Russian; the latter was even more offended, and she retorted that her “Vater aus Berlin was a very important man, and always went with his hands in pockets.” Katerina Ivanovna could not restrain herself and laughed so much that Amalia Ivanovna lost patience and could scarcely control herself.

“Listen to the owl!” Katerina Ivanovna whispered at once, her good-humor almost restored, “she meant to say he kept his hands in his pockets, but she said he put his hands in people’s pockets. (Cough-cough.) And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovich, that all these Petersburg foreigners, the Germans especially, are all stupider than we are! Can you fancy anyone of us telling how ‘Karl from the chemist’s pierced his heart from fear’ and that the idiot instead of punishing the cabman, ‘clasped his hands and wept, and much begged.’ Ah, the fool! And you know she thinks it’s very touching and does not suspect how stupid she is! The way I see it, that drunken commissariat clerk is a great deal cleverer, anyway one can see that he has addled his brains with drink, but you know, these foreigners are always so well behaved and serious . . . Look how she sits glaring! She is angry, ha-ha! (Cough-cough-cough.)” Regaining her temper, Katerina Ivanovna began to tell Raskolnikov that when she had obtained her pension, she intended to open a school for gentlemen’s daughters in her native town, T____. This was the first time she had spoken to him about the project, and she launched out into the most alluring details. It suddenly appeared that Katerina Ivanovna had in her hands the same certificate of honour which Marmeladov had told Raskolnikov about in the tavern, when he told him that Katerina Ivanovna, his wife, had danced the shawl dance before the governor and other important people when she left school. This certificate of honour was obviously intended now to prove Katerina Ivanovna’s right to open a boarding-school; but she had armed herself with it chiefly with the purpose of overwhelming “those two stuck-up floozies” if they came to the dinner, and proving incontestably that Katerina Ivanovna was of the most noble, “she might even say aristocratic family, a colonel’s daughter and was far superior to certain adventuresses who have been so much to the fore recently.” The certificate of honor immediately passed into the hands of the drunken guests, and Katerina Ivanovna did not try to retain it, for it actually contained the statement en toutes lettres48 that her father was a major, and also a companion of an order, so that she really was almost the daughter of a colonel.

Warming up, Katerina Ivanovna proceeded to enlarge on the peaceful and happy life they would lead in T__, on the gymnasium teachers whom she would engage to give lessons in her boarding-school, one a highly respectable old Frenchman called Mangot, who had taught Katerina Ivanovna herself in the old days and was still living in T, and would no doubt teach in her school on moderate terms. Next she spoke of Sonia who would go with her to T__ and help her in all her plans. At this someone at the further end of the table suddenly chuckled.

Though Katerina Ivanovna tried to appear to be disdainfully unaware of it, she raised her voice and began at once speaking with conviction of Sonia’s undoubted ability to assist her, of “her gentleness, patience, devotion, generosity and good education,” tapping Sonia on the cheek and kissing her warmly twice. Sonia flushed crimson, and Katerina Ivanovna suddenly burst into tears, immediately observing that she was “nervous and silly, that she was too upset, that it was time to finish, and as the dinner was over, it was time to hand round the tea.”

At that moment, Amalia Ivanovna, deeply aggrieved that she had played no part in the conversation and that no-one was listening to her, made one last effort, and with secret misgivings ventured on an extremely deep and weighty observation, that “in the future boarding-school she would have to pay particular attention to die Wasche, and that there certainly must be a good Dame to look after the linen, and secondly that the young ladies must not novels at night read.”

Katerina Ivanovna, who was certainly upset and very tired, as well as heartily sick of the dinner, at once cut short Amalia Ivanovna, saying “she knew nothing about it and was talking nonsense, that it was the business of the laundry maid, and not of the directress of a high-class boarding-school to look after die Wasche, and as for novel reading, that was simply rude, and she begged her to be silent.” Amalia Ivanovna was enraged and observed that she only “meant her good,” and that “she had meant her very good,” and that “it was long since she had paid her gold for the lodgings.”

Katerina Ivanovna at once put her down, saying that it was a lie to say she wished her good, because only yesterday, when her dead husband was lying on the table, she had bothered her about the lodgings. To this Amalia Ivanovna very appropriately retorted that she had invited those ladies, but “those ladies had not come, because those ladies are ladies and cannot come to a lady who is not a lady.” Katerina Ivanovna at once pointed out to her, that as she was a slut she could not judge what made one really a lady. Amalia Ivanovna at once declared that her “Vater aus Berlin was a very, very important man, and both hands in pockets went, and always used to say: poof! poof!” and she leapt up from the table to represent her father, sticking her hands in her pockets, puffing her cheeks, and uttering vague sounds resembling “poof! poof!” amid loud laughter from all the lodgers, who deliberately encouraged Amalia Ivanovna, hoping for a fight.

But this was too much for Katerina Ivanovna, and she at once declared, so all could hear, that Amalia Ivanovna probably never had a father, but was just a drunken Petersburg Finn, and had certainly once been a cook and probably something worse. Amalia Ivanovna turned red as a lobster and squealed that perhaps Katerina Ivanovna never had a father, “but she had a Vater aus Berlin and that he wore a long coat and always said poof-poof-poof!”

Katerina Ivanovna observed contemptuously that everyone knew who her family was and that on that very certificate of honour it was stated in print that her father was a colonel, while Amalia Ivanovna’s father—if she really had one—was probably some Finnish milkman, but that probably she never had a father at all, since it was still uncertain whether her name was Amalia Ivanovna or Amalia Ludwigovna.

At this Amalia Ivanovna, lashed to fury, struck the table with her fist, and shrieked that she was Amalia Ivanovna, and not Ludwigovna, “that her Vater was named Johann and that he was a burgomeister, and that Katerina Ivanovna’s Vater was quite never a burgomeister.” Katerina Ivanovna rose from her chair, and with a stern and apparently calm voice (though she was pale and her chest was heaving) observed that “if she dared for one moment to set her contemptible wretch of a father on a level with her papa, she, Katerina Ivanovna, would tear her cap off her head and trample it under foot.” Amalia Ivanovna ran about the room, shouting at the top of her voice, that she was mistress of the house and that Katerina Ivanovna should leave the lodgings that minute; then she rushed for some reason to collect the silver spoons from the table. There was a great outcry and uproar, the children began crying. Sonia ran to restrain Katerina Ivanovna, but when Amalia Ivanovna shouted something about “the yellow ticket,” Katerina Ivanovna pushed Sonia away, and rushed at the landlady to carry out her threat.

At that minute the door opened, and Peter Petrovich Luzhin appeared on the threshold. He stood scanning the party with severe and vigilant eyes. Katerina Ivanovna rushed towards him.