A Desperate Character and Other Stories

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

It was no easy matter to make all this plain to her ... but at last she understood my arguments; she understood, too, that I was not prompted by egoistic feeling, when I showed her the uselessness of all efforts. ‘But tell me, Musa Pavlovna,’ I began, when she sank at last into a chair (till then she had been standing up, as though on the point of setting off at once to the aid of Baburin), ‘how Paramon Semyonitch, at his age, comes to be mixed up in such an affair? I feel sure that there are none but young people implicated in it, like the one who came in yesterday to warn you....’

‘Those young people are our friends!’ cried Musa, and her eyes flashed and darted as of old. Something strong, irrepressible, seemed, as it were, to rise up from the bottom of her soul, ... and I suddenly recalled the expression ‘a new type,’ which Tarhov had once used of her. ‘Years are of no consequence when it is a matter of political principles!’ Musa laid a special stress on these last two words. One might fancy that in all her sorrow it was not unpleasing to her to show herself before me in this new, unlooked-for character—in the character of a cultivated and mature woman, fit wife of a republican! ... ‘Some old men are younger than some young ones,’ she pursued, ‘more capable of sacrifice.... But that’s not the point.’

‘I think, Musa Pavlovna,’ I observed, ‘that you are exaggerating a little. Knowing the character of Paramon Semyonitch, I should have felt sure beforehand that he would sympathise with every ... sincere impulse; but, on the other hand, I have always regarded him as a man of sense.... Surely he cannot fail to realise all the impracticability, all the absurdity of conspiracies in Russia? In his position, in his calling ...’

‘Oh, of course,’ Musa interrupted, with bitterness in her voice, ‘he is a working man; and in Russia it is only permissible for noblemen to take part in conspiracies, ... as, for instance, in that of the fourteenth of December, ... that’s what you meant to say.’

‘In that case, what do you complain of now?’ almost broke from my lips, ... but I restrained myself. ‘Do you consider that the result of the fourteenth of December was such as to encourage other such attempts?’ I said aloud.

Musa frowned. ‘It is no good talking to you about it,’ was what I read in her downcast face.

‘Is Paramon Semyonitch very seriously compromised?’ I ventured to ask her. Musa made no reply.... A hungry, savage mewing was heard from the attic.

Musa started. ‘Ah, it is a good thing Nikander Vavilitch did not see all this!’ she moaned almost despairingly. ‘He did not see how violently in the night they seized his benefactor, our benefactor—maybe, the best and truest man in the whole world,—he did not see how they treated that noble man at his age, how rudely they addressed him, ... how they threatened him, and the threats they used to him!—only because he was a working man! That young officer, too, was no doubt just such an unprincipled, heartless wretch as I have known in my life....’

Musa’s voice broke. She was quivering all over like a leaf.

Her long-suppressed indignation broke out at last; old memories stirred up, brought to the surface by the general tumult of her soul, showed themselves alive within her.... But the conviction I carried off at that moment was that the ‘new type’ was still the same, still the same passionate, impulsive nature.... Only the impulses by which Musa was carried away were not the same as in the days of her youth. What on my first visit I had taken for resignation, for meekness, and what really was so—the subdued, lustreless glance, the cold voice, the quietness and simplicity—all that had significance only in relation to the past, to what would never return....