§7
That our way of life may be thoroughly understood, I shall describe a whole day from the beginning. They were all alike, and this very monotony was the most killing part of it all. Our life went on like an English clock with the regulator put back—with a slow and steady movement and a loud tick for each second.
At ten in the morning, the valet who sat in the room next the bedroom, informed Vyéra Artamónovna, formerly my nurse, that the master was getting up; and she went off to prepare coffee, which my father drank alone in his study. The house now assumed a different aspect: the servants began to clean the rooms or at least to make a pretence of doing something. The servants’ hall, empty till then, began to fill up; and even Macbeth, the big Newfoundland dog, sat down before the stove and stared unwinkingly at the fire.
Over his coffee my father read the Moscow Gazette and the Journal de St. Petersburg. It may be worth mentioning that the newspapers were warmed to save his hands from contact with the damp sheets, and that he read the political news in the French version, finding it clearer than the Russian. For some time he took in the Hamburg Gazette, but could not pardon the Germans for using German print; he often pointed out to me the difference between French and German type, and said that the curly tails of the Gothic letters tried his eyes. Then he ordered the Journal de Francfort for a time, but finally contented himself with the native product.
When he had read the newspaper, he noticed for the first time the presence of Sonnenberg in the room. When Niko reached the age of fifteen, Sonnenberg professed to start a shop; but having nothing to sell and no customers, he gave it up, when he had spent such savings as he had in this useful form of commerce; yet he still called himself “a commercial agent.” He was then much over forty, and at that pleasant age he lived like the fowls of the air or a boy of fourteen; he never knew to-day where he would sleep or how he would secure a dinner to-morrow. He enjoyed my father’s favour to a certain extent: what that amounted to, we shall see presently.