So,

having reproached me for my name and title, she goes away at last.
Thus begins my day. It does not improve.
When I have drunk my tea, Liza comes in, in a fur-coat and hat, with her
music, ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two. She looks younger.
She is pretty, rather like my wife when she was young. She kisses me tenderly
on my forehead and my hand.
"Good morning, Papa. Quite well?"
As a child she adored ice-cream, and I often had to take her to a
confectioner's. Ice-cream was her standard of beauty. If she wanted to praise
me, she used to say: "Papa, you are ice-creamy." One finger she called the
pistachio, the other the cream, the third the raspberry finger and so on. And
when she came to say good morning, I used to lift her on to my knees and kiss
her fingers, and say:
"The cream one, the pistachio one, the lemon one."
And now from force of habit I kiss Liza's fingers and murmur:
"Pistachio one, cream one, lemon one." But it does not sound the same. I
am cold like the ice-cream and I feel ashamed. When my daughter comes in
and touches my forehead with her lips I shudder as though a bee had stung my
forehead, I smile constrainedly and turn away my face. Since my insomnia
began a question has been driving like a nail into my brain. My daughter
continually sees how terribly I, an old man, blush because I owe the servant
his wages; she sees how often the worry of small debts forces me to leave my
work and to pace the room from corner to corner for hours, thinking; but why
hasn't she, even once, come to me without telling her mother and whispered:
"Father, here's my watch, bracelets, earrings, dresses.... Pawn them all.... You
need money"? Why, seeing how I and her mother try to hide our poverty, out
of false pride—why does she not deny herself the luxury of music lessons? I
would not accept the watch, the bracelets, or her sacrifices—God forbid!—I
do not want that.
Which reminds me of my son, the Warsaw officer. He is a clever, honest,
and sober fellow. But that doesn't mean very much. If I had an old father, and I
knew that there were moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I think I
would give up my commission to someone else and hire myself out as a
navvy. These thoughts of the children poison me. What good are they? Only a
mean and irritable person Can take refuge in thinking evil of ordinary people
because they are not heroes. But enough of that.
At a quarter to ten I have to go and lecture to my dear boys. I dress myself
and walk the road I have known these thirty years. For me it has a history of
its own. Here is a big grey building with a chemist's shop beneath. A tiny
house once stood there, and it was a beer-shop. In this beer-shop I thought out
my thesis, and wrote my first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil on a
scrap of paper that began "Historia Morbi." Here is a grocer's shop. It used to
belong to a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, and later on to a fat
woman who loved students "because every one of them had a mother." Now a
red-headed merchant sits there, a very nonchalant man, who drinks tea from a
copper tea-pot. And here are the gloomy gates of the University that have not
been repaired for years; a weary porter in a sheepskin coat, a broom, heaps of
snow ... Such gates cannot produce a good impression on a boy who comes
fresh from the provinces and imagines that the temple of science is really a
temple. Certainly, in the history of Russian pessimism, the age of university
buildings, the dreariness of the corridors, the smoke-stains on the walls, the
meagre light, the dismal appearance of the stairs, the clothes-pegs and the
benches, hold one of the foremost places in the series of predisposing causes.
Here is our garden. It does not seem to have grown any better or any worse
since I was a student. I do not like it. It would be much more sensible if tall
pine-trees and fine oaks grew there instead of consumptive lime-trees, yellow
acacias and thin clipped lilac. The student's mood is created mainly by every
one of the surroundings in which he studies; therefore he must see everywhere
before him only what is great and strong and exquisite. Heaven preserve him
from starveling trees, broken windows, and drab walls and doors covered with
tom oilcloth.
As I approach my main staircase the door is open wide. I am met by my
old friend, of the same age and name as I, Nicolas the porter. He grunts as he
lets me in:
"It's frosty, Your Excellency."
Or if my coat is wet:
"It's raining a bit, Your Excellency."
Then he runs in front of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the
study he carefully takes off my coat and at the same time manages to tell me
some university news. Because of the close acquaintance that exists between
all the University porters and keepers, he knows all that happens in the four
faculties, in the registry, in the chancellor's cabinet, and the library. He knows
everything. When, for instance, the resignation of the rector or dean is under
discussion, I hear him talking to the junior porters, naming candidates and
explaining offhand that so and so will not be approved by the Minister, so and
so will himself refuse the honour; then he plunges into fantastic details of
some mysterious papers received in the registry, of a secret conversation
which appears to have taken place between the Minister and the curator, and
so on. These details apart, he is almost always right. The impressions he forms
of each candidate are original, but also true. If you want to know who read his
thesis, joined the staff, resigned or died in a particular year, then you must
seek the assistance of this veteran's colossal memory. He will not only name
you the year, month, and day, but give you the accompanying details of this or
any other event. Such memory is the privilege of love.
He is the guardian of the university traditions. From the porters before him
he inherited many legends of the life of the university. He added to this wealth
much of his own and if you like he will tell you many stories, long or short.
He can tell you of extraordinary savants who knew everything, of remarkable
scholars who did not sleep for weeks on end, of numberless martyrs to
science; good triumphs over evil with him. The weak always conquer the
strong, the wise man the fool, the modest the proud, the young the old. There
is no need to take all these legends and stories for sterling; but filter them, and
you will find what you want in your filter, a noble tradition and the names of
true heroes acknowledged by all.
In our society all the information about the learned world consists entirely
of anecdotes of the extraordinary absent-mindedness of old professors, and of
a handful of jokes, which are ascribed to Guber or to myself or to Baboukhin.
But this is too little for an educated society. If it loved science, savants and
students as Nicolas loves them, it would long ago have had a literature of
whole epics, stories, and biographies. But unfortunately this is yet to be.
The news told, Nicolas looks stem and we begin to talk business. If an
outsider were then to hear how freely Nicolas uses the jargon, he would be
inclined to think that he was a scholar, posing as a soldier. By the way, the
rumours of the university-porter's erudition are very exaggerated. It is true that
Nicolas knows more than a hundred Latin tags, can put a skeleton together and
on occasion make a preparation, can make the students laugh with a long
learned quotation, but the simple theory of the circulation of the blood is as
dark to him now as it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my room, bent low over a book or a preparation, sits my
dissector, Peter Ignatievich. He is a hardworking, modest man of thirty-five
without any gifts, already bald and with a big belly. He works from morning to
night, reads tremendously and remembers everything he has read. In this
respect he is not merely an excellent man, but a man of gold; but in all others
he is a cart-horse, or if you like a learned blockhead. The characteristic traits
of a cart-horse which distinguish him from a creature of talent are these. His
outlook is narrow, absolutely bounded by his specialism. Apart from his own
subject he is as naive as a child. I remember once entering the room and
saying:
"Think what bad luck! They say, Skobielev is dead."