“You’re quite right,” said Vyéra Artamónovna; “but she’s tied hand and foot by someone”—and she would point her knitting-needles at me. “She can’t take him with her, and to leave him here alone in a house like ours would be too much even for one not his mother.”
Children in general find out more than people think. They are easily put off, and forget for a time, but they persist in returning to the subject, especially if it is mysterious or alarming; and by their questions they get at the truth with surprising perseverance and ingenuity.
Once my curiosity was aroused, I soon learned all the details of my parents’ marriage—how my mother made up her mind to elope, how she was concealed in the Russian embassy at Cassel by my uncle’s connivance, and then crossed the frontier disguised as a boy; and all this I found out without asking a single question.
The first result of these discoveries was to lessen my attachment to my father, owing to the disputes of which I have spoken already. I had witnessed them before, but had taken them as a matter of course. The whole household, not excluding the Senator, were afraid of my father, and he spared no one his reproofs; and I was so accustomed to this, that I saw nothing strange in these quarrels with my mother. But now I began to take a different view of the matter, and the thought that I was to some extent responsible threw a dark shadow sometimes over my childhood.
A second thought which took root in my mind at that time was this—that I was much less dependent on my father than most children are on their parents; and this independence, though it existed only in my own imagination, gave me pleasure.
§2
Two or three years after this, two old brother-officers of my father’s were at our house one evening—General Essen, the Governor of Orenburg, and General Bakhmétyev, who lost a leg at Borodino and was later Lieutenant-Governor of Bessarabia. My room was next the drawing-room where they were sitting. My father happened to mention that he had been speaking to Prince Yusúpov with regard to my future; he wished me to enter the Civil Service. “There’s no time to lose,” he added; “as you know, he must serve a long time before he gets any decent post.”
“It is a strange notion of yours,” said Essen good-humouredly, “to turn the boy into a clerk. Leave it to me; let me enroll him in the Ural Cossacks; he will soon get his commission, which is the main thing, and then he can forge ahead like the rest of us.”
But my father would not agree: he said that everything military was distasteful to him, that he hoped in time to get me a diplomatic post in some warm climate, where he would go himself to end his days.
Bakhmétyev had taken little part in the conversation; but now he got up on his crutches and said: