This was the only time I remember seeing my step-father smile quietly.
But the young mistress let her spoon fall on the table in her agitation, and cried to her husband:
“Aren’t you ashamed to talk so disgustingly before me?”
Sometimes my stepfather came to me in the dark vestibule, where I slept under the stairs which led to fhe attic, and where, sitting on the stairs by the window, I used to read.
“Reading?” he would say, blowing out smoke. There came a hissing sound from his chest like the hissing of a fire-stick. “What is the book?”
I showed it to him.
“Ah,” he said, glancing at the title, “I think I have read it.
Will you smoke?”
We smoked, looking out of the window onto the dirty yard. He said:
“It is a great pity that you cannot study; it seems to me that you have ability.”
“I am studying; I read.”
“That is not enough; you need a school; a system.”
I felt inclined to say to him:
“You had the advantages of both school and system, my fine fellow, and what is the result?”
But he added, as if he had read my thoughts:
“Given the proper disposition, a school is a good educator.
Only very well educated people make any mark in life.”
But once he counseled me:
“You would be far better away from here. I see no sense or advantage to you in staying.”
“I like the work.”
“Ah — what do you find to like?”
“I find it interesting to work with them.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
But one day he said:
“What trash they are in the main, our employers — trash!”
When I remembered how and when my mother had uttered that word, I involuntarily drew back from him. He asked, smiling:
“Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, they are; I can see that.”
“But I like the master, anyhow.”
“Yes, you are right; he is a worthy man, but strange.”
I should have liked to talk with him about books, but it was plain that he did not care for them, and one day he advised me:
“Don’t be led away; everything is very much embellished in books, distorted one way or another.
Most writers of books are people like our master, small people.”
Such judgments seemed very daring to me, and quite corrupted me.
On the same occasion he asked me:
“Have you read any of Goncharov’s works?”
“ The Frigate Palada.’ ”
“That’s a dull book.
But really, Goncharov is the cleverest writer in Russia.
I advise you to read his novel,
‘Oblomov.’
That is by far the truest and most daring book he wrote; in fact, it is the best book in Russian literature.”
Of Dickens’ works he said:
“They are rubbish, I assure you.
But there is a most interesting thing running in the ‘Nova Vremya/ — The Temptation of St. Anthony.’ You read it?
Apparently you like all that pertains to the church, and ‘The Temptation’ ought to be a profitable subject for you.”
He brought me a bundle of papers containing the serial, and I read Flaubert’s learned work. It reminded me of the innumerable lives of holy men, scraps of history told by the valuers, but it made no very deep impression on me. I much preferred the “Memoirs of Upilio Faimali, Tamer of Wild Beasts,” which was printed alongside of it.
When I acknowledged this fact to my stepfather, he remarked coolly:
“That means that you are still too young to read such things!