Such scenes repeated themselves day in, day out, without change. Every detail of the pitiful family chronicle was speedily exhausted, but it still held the minds of the two riveted. Every episode of the past lacerated some wound in their hearts, and they felt a bitter delight in constantly evoking, scrutinizing and exaggerating painful memories. Neither the past nor the present contained any moral mainstay on which Anninka could lean. Nothing but sordid stinginess on one side, and mental vacuity on the other. Her youthful heart had thirsted for warmth and love, but had received a stone instead of bread, blows instead of instruction. By the irony of fate, the cruel school in which she had been taught implanted in her not an austere attitude toward life, but a passionate yearning to partake of its sweet poisons. Youth had wrought the miracle of oblivion, it kept her heart from hardening and the germs of hatred from developing. Youth had made her drunk with the thirst for life. That was why a turbulent, furtive debauchery had held her in its sway for several years, and had pushed Golovliovo into the background. Now, when the end was drawing close, her heart began to ache. Now for the first time did Anninka grasp the significance of her past and begin to hate it truly.
The drinking lasted far into the night, and had it not been for the drunken confusion of both thoughts and words, it might have resulted in something frightful. But if alcohol opened the well-springs of pain in these shattered hearts, it also appeased them. The further the night advanced, the more incoherent became their talk and the more impotent their hatred. Toward the end of the debauch, the aching disappeared and their surroundings vanished from their eyes, supplanted by a shining void. They faltered, their eyes closed, they grew muscle-bound. Uncle and niece would then rise from their places and retire to their rooms with tottering steps.
Of course, these night adventures could not remain a secret. Before long the notion of crime became associated with them in the minds of the servants. Life abandoned the vast Golovliovo manor-house. Nothing stirred even in the morning. Uncle and niece rose late and till the midday meal Anninka's racking cough, accompanied by curses, rang from one end of the house to the other. Yudushka listened to the harrowing sounds in terror and a vague presentiment of his own impending doom stirred in him.
It seemed that all the Golovliovo victims were now creeping from out of the nooks and crannies of the deserted house. Gray apparitions stirred everywhere. Here was old Vladimir Mikhailovich, in his white nightcap, making wry faces and citing Barkov; here was Simple Simon and Pavel the Sneak; here were Lubinka and the last offshoots of the Golovliovo stock, Volodya and Petka. All were drunk, lustful, weary and bleeding. And over all these ghosts there brooded a living phantom, Porfiry Vladimirych Golovliov, the last representative of the decadent family.
CHAPTER V
The continual reverting to the past and its victims was bound to have its effect on Yudushka. The natural outcome—was it fear?—No, rather the awakening of conscience. He discovered he had a conscience, and oblivion and contempt, although blunting its sensitiveness, could not destroy it.
The awakening of a torpid conscience is usually fraught with pain. It brings no peace, holds no promise of a new life, but merely tortures, endlessly and fruitlessly. Man sees himself immured in a narrow prison, a helpless victim of the agonies of repentance, with no hope of ever returning to life. And he perceives no other way of allaying his gnawing pain than to break his head against the stony walls of the prison cell.
Never in the course of his long, useless life had it occurred to Yudushka that dire tragedies were interwoven with his existence. He had lived peacefully and calmly, with a constant prayer on his lips, and the thought had been far from him that this manner of life had caused so much sorrow. Least of all could he imagine that he himself had been the source of these tragedies. Suddenly the terrible truth was revealed to his conscience, but all too late—too late for him to make amends for the crimes of his life. He was unsociable, old, with one foot in the grave, and there was not a single human being who approached him with loving pity. Why was he alone? Why did he see nothing but indifference and hatred around him? Why was it that everything he touched had perished? This estate of Golovliovo was once so full, a human nest. How had it happened that now there was not a trace, not a feather left? Of the fledgelings nursed there his niece was the only one that remained alive, and she had come back only to sneer at him and deal him his deathblow. Even Yevpraksia, simple as she was, hated him. She lived at Golovliovo because Porfiry sent her father, the sacristan, provisions every month, but undoubtedly she hated him. He had made her unhappy, too, by robbing her of her child. What was the outcome of his existence? Wherefore had he lied, babbled, persecuted, hoarded? Who would inherit his wealth? Who was to enjoy the fruits of his life? Who?
I repeat, his conscience had awakened. Yudushka waited for the evening with feverish impatience not only in order to get bestially drunk, but also to drown his conscience. He hated the "dissolute wench," who lacerated his wounds with such cold cynicism, yet he was drawn to her irresistibly, as if there was still something to be said between them and some wounds to be torn open. Every evening he made Anninka retell the story of Lubinka's death, and every evening the idea of self-destruction became riper in his mind. At first, the idea occurred to him casually. But as his iniquities became more apparent to him, it sank deeper and deeper into his being and soon was the sole shining spot in all the gloom he saw ahead of him.