Tolstoi I knew personally, just at the time when he lost his daughter, Sara, a remarkable girl with a high poetic gift. He was old then; but one look at his athletic figure, his flashing eyes, and the grey curls that clustered on his forehead, was enough to show how great was his natural strength and activity. But he had developed only stormy passions and vicious propensities. And this is not surprising: in Russia all that is vicious is allowed to grow for long unchecked, while men are sent to a fortress or to Siberia at the first sign of a humane passion. For twenty years Tolstoi rioted and gambled, used his fists to mutilate his enemies, and reduced whole families to beggary, till at last he was banished to Siberia. He made his way through Kamchatka to America and, while there, obtained permission to return to Russia. The Tsar pardoned him, and he resumed his old life the very day after his return. He married a gipsy woman, a famous singer who belonged to a gipsy tribe at Moscow, and turned his house into a gambling-hell. His nights were spent at the card-table, and all his time in excesses; wild scenes of cupidity and intoxication went on round the cradle of his daughter. It is said that he once ordered his wife to stand on the table, and sent a bullet through the heel of her shoe, in order to prove the accuracy of his aim.
His last exploit very nearly sent him back to Siberia. He contrived to entrap in his house at Moscow a tradesman against whom he had an old grudge, bound him hand and foot, and pulled out one of his teeth. It is hardly credible that this should have happened only ten or twelve years ago. The man lodged a complaint. But Tolstoi bribed the police and the judges, and the victim was lodged in prison for false witness. It happened that a well-known man of letters was then serving on the prison committee and took up the affair, on learning the facts from the tradesman. Tolstoi was seriously alarmed; it was clear that he was likely to be condemned. But anything is possible in Russia. Count Orlóv sent secret instructions that the affair must be hushed up, to deprive the lower classes of a direct triumph over the aristocracy, and he also advised that the man of letters should be removed from the committee. This is almost more incredible than the incident of the tooth. But I was in Moscow then myself and well acquainted with the imprudent man of letters. But I must go back to Vyatka.
§10
The office there was incomparably worse than my prison. The actual work was not hard; but the mephitic atmosphere—the place was like a second Grotto del Cane[[94]]—and the monstrous and absurd waste of time made the life unbearable. Alenitsin did not treat me badly. He was even more polite than I expected; having been educated at the grammar school of Kazán, he had some respect for a graduate of Moscow University.
[94]. The grotto near Naples where dogs were held over the sulphurous vapour till they became insensible.
Twenty clerks were employed in the office. The majority of them were entirely destitute of either intellectual culture or moral sense, sons of clerks, who had learned from their cradles to look upon the public service as a means of livelihood and the cultivators of the land as the source of their income. They sold official papers, pocketed small sums whenever they could get them, broke their word for a glass of spirits, and stuck at nothing, however base and ignominious. My own valet stopped playing billiards at the public rooms, because, as he said, the officials cheated shamefully and he could not give them a lesson because of their rank in society.
With these men, whose position alone made them safe from my servant’s fists, I had to sit every day from nine till two and again from five till eight.
Alenitsin was head of the whole office, and the desk at which I sat had a chief also, not a bad-hearted man, but drunken and illiterate. There were four other clerks at my desk; and I had to be on speaking terms with them, and with all the rest as well. Apart from the fact that these people would sooner or later have paid me out for any airs of exclusiveness, it is simply impossible not to get to know people in whose company you spend several hours every day. It must also be remembered how people in the country hang on to a stranger, especially if he comes from the capital, and still more if he has been mixed up in some exciting scandal.
When I had tugged at the oar all day in this galley, I used sometimes to go home quite stupefied and fall on my sofa, worn out and humiliated, and incapable of any work or occupation. I heartily regretted my prison cell with its foul air and black beetles, its locked door and turnkey behind the lock. There I was free and did what I liked without interference; there I enjoyed dead silence and unbroken leisure; I had exchanged these for trivial talk, dirty companions, low ideas, and coarse feelings. When I remembered that I must go back there in the afternoon, and back again to-morrow, I sometimes fell into such fits of rage and despair that I drank wine and spirits for consolation.
Nor was that all. One of my desk-fellows would perhaps look in, for want of something to do; and there he would sit and chatter till the appointed hour recalled us to the office.