all through dinner. Liza laughs spasmodically
and screws up her eyes. I watch them both, and
it is only now at dinner that it becomes absolutely
evident to me that the inner life of these two has
slipped away out of my ken. I have a feeling
as though I had once lived at home with a real wife
and children and that now I am dining with visitors,
in the house of a sham wife who is not the real one,
and am looking at a Liza who is not the real Liza.
A startling change has taken place in both of them;
I have missed the long process by which that change
was effected, and it is no wonder that I can make
nothing of it. Why did that change take place?
I don’t know. Perhaps the whole trouble
is that God has not given my wife and daughter the
same strength of character as me. From childhood
I have been accustomed to resisting external influences,
and have steeled myself pretty thoroughly. Such
catastrophes in life as fame, the rank of a general,
the transition from comfort to living beyond our means,
acquaintance with celebrities,
etc., have scarcely
affected me, and I have remained intact and unashamed;
but on my wife and Liza, who have not been through
the same hardening process and are weak, all this has
fallen like an avalanche of snow, overwhelming them.
Gnekker and the young ladies talk of fugues, of counterpoint,
of singers and pianists, of Bach and Brahms, while
my wife, afraid of their suspecting her of ignorance
of music, smiles to them sympathetically and mutters:
“That’s exquisite... really! You
don’t say so!...” Gnekker eats with
solid dignity, jests with solid dignity, and condescendingly
listens to the remarks of the young ladies. From
time to time he is moved to speak in bad French, and
then, for some reason or other, he thinks it necessary
to address me as
"Votre Excellence."
And I am glum. Evidently I am a constraint to
them and they are a constraint to me. I have
never in my earlier days had a close knowledge of
class antagonism, but now I am tormented by something
of that sort. I am on the lookout for nothing
but bad qualities in Gnekker; I quickly find them,
and am fretted at the thought that a man not of my
circle is sitting here as my daughter’s suitor.
His presence has a bad influence on me in other ways,
too. As a rule, when I am alone or in the society
of people I like, never think of my own achievements,
or, if I do recall them, they seem to me as trivial
as though I had only completed my studies yesterday;
but in the presence of people like Gnekker my achievements
in science seem to be a lofty mountain the top of which
vanishes into the clouds, while at its foot Gnekkers
are running about scarcely visible to the naked eye.
After dinner I go into my study and there smoke my
pipe, the only one in the whole day, the sole relic
of my old bad habit of smoking from morning till night.
While I am smoking my wife comes in and sits down
to talk to me. Just as in the morning, I know
beforehand what our conversation is going to be about.