As they were talking before dinner, Stepan Arkadyevitch said to
Bartnyansky: "You're friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might do me a
favor: say a word to him, please, for me. There's an appointment
I should like to get--secretary of the agency..."
"Oh, I shan't remember all that, if you tell it to me.... But
what possesses you to have to do with railways and Jews?... Take
it as you will, it's a low business."
Stepan Arkadyevitch did not say to Bartnyansky that it was a
"growing thing"--Bartnyansky would not have understood that.
"I want the money, I've nothing to live on."
"You're living, aren't you?"
"Yes, but in debt."
"Are you, though? Heavily?" said Bartnyansky sympathetically.
"Very heavily: twenty thousand."
Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter.
"Oh, lucky fellow!" said he. "My debts mount up to a million and
a half, and I've nothing, and still I can live, as you see!"
And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this view not in
words only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed three hundred
thousand, and hadn't a farthing to bless himself with, and he
lived, and in style too! Count Krivtsov was considered a
hopeless case by everyone, and yet he kept two mistresses.
Petrovsky had run through five millions, and still lived in just
the same style, and was even a manager in the financial
department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides this,
Petersburg had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan
Arkadyevitch. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found
a gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner, stretched,
walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the
society of young women, and did not dance at balls. In
Petersburg he always felt ten years younger.
His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had been described
to him on the previous day by Prince Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of
sixty, who had just come back from abroad: "We don't know the way to live here," said Pyotr Oblonsky. "I
spent the summer in Baden, and you wouldn't believe it, I felt
quite a young man. At a glimpse of a pretty woman, my
thoughts.... One dines and drinks a glass of wine, and feels
strong and ready for anything. I came home to Russia--had to see
my wife, and, what's more, go to my country place; and there,
you'd hardly believe it, in a fortnight I'd got into a dressing
gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn't say I had no
thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old gentleman.
There was nothing left for me but to think of my eternal
salvation. I went off to Paris--I was as right as could be at
once."