A Sportsman's Sketches Volume Ii Part 10

'Why, the sound of your voice is enough; you answer me so carelessly....

But I'm not at all what you suppose....'

'Allow me....'

'No, you allow me. In the first place, I speak French as well as you, and German even better; secondly, I have spent three years abroad--in Berlin alone I lived eight months. I've studied Hegel, honoured sir; I know Goethe by heart: add to that, I was a long while in love with a German professor's daughter, and was married at home to a consumptive lady, who was bald, but a remarkable personality. So I'm a bird of your feather; I'm not a barbarian of the steppes, as you imagine.... I too have been bitten by reflection, and there's nothing obvious about me.'

I raised my head and looked with redoubled attention at the queer fellow. By the dim light of the night-lamp I could hardly distinguish his features.

'There, you're looking at me now,' he went on, setting his night-cap straight, 'and probably you're asking yourself, "How is it I didn't notice him to-day?" I'll tell you why you didn't notice me: because I didn't raise my voice; because I get behind other people, hang about doorways, and talk to no one; because, when the butler pa.s.ses me with a tray, he raises his elbow to the level of my shoulder.... And how is it all that comes about? From two causes: first, I'm poor; and secondly, I've grown humble.... Tell the truth, you didn't notice me, did you?'

'Certainly, I've not had the pleasure....'

'There, there,' he interrupted me, 'I knew that.'

He raised himself and folded his arms; the long shadow of his cap was bent from the wall to the ceiling.

'And confess, now,' he added, with a sudden sideway glance at me; 'I must strike you as a queer fellow, an original, as they say, or possibly as something worse: perhaps you think I affect to be original!'

'I must repeat again that I don't know you....'

He looked down an instant.

'Why have I begun talking so unexpectedly to you, a man utterly a stranger?--the Lord, the Lord only knows!' (He sighed.) 'Not through the natural affinity of our souls! Both you and I are respectable people, that's to say, egoists: neither of us has the least concern with the other; isn't it so? But we are neither of us sleepy... so why not chat?

I'm in the mood, and that's rare with me. I'm shy, do you see? and not shy because I'm a provincial, of no rank and poor, but because I'm a fearfully vain person. But at times, under favourable circ.u.mstances, occasions which I could not, however, particularise nor foresee, my shyness vanishes completely, as at this moment, for instance. At this moment you might set me face to face with the Grand Lama, and I'd ask him for a pinch of snuff. But perhaps you want to go to sleep?'

'Quite the contrary,' I hastened to respond; 'it is a pleasure for me to talk to you.'

'That is, I amuse you, you mean to say.... All the better.... And so, I tell you, they call me here an original; that's what they call me when my name is casually mentioned, among other gossip. No one is much concerned about my fate.... They think it wounds me.... Oh, good Lord!

if they only knew... it's just what's my ruin, that there is absolutely nothing original in me--nothing, except such freaks as, for instance, my conversation at this moment with you; but such freaks are not worth a bra.s.s farthing. That's the cheapest and lowest sort of originality.'

He turned facing me, and waved his hands.

'Honoured sir!' he cried, 'I am of the opinion that life on earth's only worth living, as a rule, for original people; it's only they who have a right to live. _Man verre n'est pas grand, maisje bois dans mon verre,_ said someone. Do you see,' he added in an undertone, 'how well I p.r.o.nounce French? What is it to one if one's a capacious brain, and understands everything, and knows a lot, and keeps pace with the age, if one's nothing of one's own, of oneself! One more storehouse for hackneyed commonplaces in the world; and what good does that do to anyone? No, better be stupid even, but in one's own way! One should have a flavour of one's own, one's individual flavour; that's the thing! And don't suppose that I am very exacting as to that flavour.... G.o.d forbid!

There are no end of original people of the sort I mean: look where you will--there's an original: every live man is an original; but I am not to be reckoned among them!'

'And yet,' he went on, after a brief silence, 'in my youth what expectations I aroused! What a high opinion I cherished of my own individuality before I went abroad, and even, at first, after my return!

Well, abroad I kept my ears open, held aloof from everyone, as befits a man like me, who is always seeing through things by himself, and at the end has not understood the A B C!'

'An original, an original!' he hurried on, shaking his head reproachfully....' They call me an original.... In reality, it turns out that there's not a man in the world less original than your humble servant. I must have been born even in imitation of someone else.... Oh, dear! It seems I am living, too, in imitation of the various authors studied by me; in the sweat of my brow I live: and I've studied, and fallen in love, and married, in fact, as it were, not through my own will--as it were, fulfilling some sort of duty, or sort of fate--who's to make it out?'

He tore the nightcap off his head and flung it on the bed.

'Would you like me to tell you the story of my life?' he asked me in an abrupt voice; 'or, rather, a few incidents of my life?'

'Please do me the favour.'

'Or, no, I'd better tell you how I got married. You see marriage is an important thing, the touchstone that tests the whole man: in it, as in a gla.s.s, is reflected.... But that sounds too hackneyed.... If you'll allow me, I'll take a pinch of snuff.'

He pulled a snuff-box from under his pillow, opened it, and began again, waving the open snuff-box about.

'Put yourself, honoured sir, in my place.... Judge for yourself, what, now what, tell me as a favour: what benefit could I derive from the encyclopaedia of Hegel? What is there in common, tell me, between that encyclopaedia and Russian life? and how would you advise me to apply it to our life, and not it, the encyclopaedia only, but German philosophy in general.... I will say more--science itself?'

He gave a bound on the bed and muttered to himself, gnashing his teeth angrily.

'Ah, that's it, that's it!... Then why did you go trailing off abroad?

Why didn't you stay at home and study the life surrounding you on the spot? You might have found out its needs and its future, and have come to a clear comprehension of your vocation, so to say.... But, upon my word,' he went on, changing his tone again as though timidly justifying himself, 'where is one to study what no sage has yet inscribed in any book? I should have been glad indeed to take lessons of her--of Russian life, I mean--but she's dumb, the poor dear. You must take her as she is; but that's beyond my power: you must give me the inference; you must present me with a conclusion. Here you have a conclusion too: listen to our wise men of Moscow--they're a set of nightingales worth listening to, aren't they? Yes, that's the pity of it, that they pipe away like Kursk nightingales, instead of talking as the people talk.... Well, I thought, and thought--"Science, to be sure," I thought, "is everywhere the same, and truth is the same"--so I was up and off, in G.o.d's name, to foreign parts, to the heathen.... What would you have? I was infatuated with youth and conceit; I didn't want, you know, to get fat before my time, though they say it's healthy. Though, indeed, if nature doesn't put the flesh on your bones, you won't see much fat on your body!'

'But I fancy,' he added, after a moment's thought, 'I promised to tell you how I got married--listen. First, I must tell you that my wife is no longer living; secondly... secondly, I see I must give you some account of my youth, or else you won't be able to make anything out of it....

But don't you want to go to sleep?'

'No, I'm not sleepy.'

'That's good news. Hark!... how vulgarly Mr. Kantagryuhin is snoring in the next room! I was the son of parents of small property--I say parents, because, according to tradition, I had once had a father as well as a mother, I don't remember him: he was a narrow-minded man, I've been told, with a big nose, freckles, and red hair; he used to take snuff on one side of his nose only; his portrait used to hang in my mother's bedroom, and very hideous he was in a red uniform with a black collar up to his ears. They used to take me to be whipped before him, and my mother used always on such occasions to point to him, saying, "He would give it to you much more if he were here." You can imagine what an encouraging effect that had on me. I had no brother nor sister--that's to say, speaking accurately, I had once had a brother knocking about, with the English disease in his neck, but he soon died.... And why ever, one wonders, should the English disease make its way to the Shtchigri district of the province of Kursk? But that's neither here nor there. My mother undertook my education with all the vigorous zeal of a country lady of the steppes: she undertook it from the solemn day of my birth till the time when my sixteenth year had come.... You are following my story?'

'Yes, please go on.'

'All right. Well, when I was sixteen, my mother promptly dismissed my teacher of French, a German, Filipovitch, from the Greek settlement of Nyezhin. She conducted me to Moscow, put down my name for the university, and gave up her soul to the Almighty, leaving me in the hands of my uncle, the attorney Koltun-Babur, one of a sort well-known not only in the Shtchigri district. My uncle, the attorney Koltun-Babur, plundered me to the last half-penny, after the custom of guardians....

But again that's neither here nor there. I entered the university--I must do so much justice to my mother--rather well grounded; but my lack of originality was even then apparent. My childhood was in no way distinguished from the childhood of other boys; I grew up just as languidly and dully--much as if I were under a feather-bed--just as early I began repeating poetry by heart and moping under the pretence of a dreamy inclination... for what?--why, for the beautiful... and so on. In the university I went on in the same way; I promptly got into a "circle." Times were different then.... But you don't know, perhaps, what sort of thing a student's "circle" is? I remember Schiller said somewhere:

_Gefaehrlich ist's den Leu zu wecken Und schrecklich ist des Tigers Zahn, Doch das schrecklichste der Schrecken Das ist der Mensch in seinem Wahn!_

He didn't mean that, I can a.s.sure you; he meant to say: _Das ist ein_ circle _in der Stadt Moskau_!'

'But what do you find so awful in the circle?' I asked.

My neighbour s.n.a.t.c.hed his cap and pulled it down on to his nose.

'What do I find so awful?' he shouted. 'Why, this: the circle is the destruction of all independent development; the circle is a hideous subst.i.tute for society, woman, life; the circle... oh, wait a bit, I'll tell you what a circle is! A circle is a slothful, dull living side by side in common, to which is attached a serious significance and a show of rational activity; the circle replaces conversation by debate, trains you in fruitless discussion, draws you away from solitary, useful labour, develops in you the itch for authorship--deprives you, in fact, of all freshness and virgin vigour of soul. The circle--why, it's vulgarity and boredom under the name of brotherhood and friendship! a concatenation of misunderstandings and cavillings under the pretence of openness and sympathy: in the circle--thanks to the right of every friend, at all hours and seasons, to poke his unwashed fingers into the very inmost soul of his comrade--no one has a single spot in his soul pure and undefiled; in the circle they fall down before the shallow, vain, smart talker and the premature wise-acre, and worship the rhymester with no poetic gift, but full of "subtle" ideas; in the circle young lads of seventeen talk glibly and learnedly of women and of love, while in the presence of women they are dumb or talk to them like a book--and what do they talk about? The circle is the hot-bed of glib fluency; in the circle they spy on one another like so many police officials.... Oh, circle! thou'rt not a circle, but an enchanted ring, which has been the ruin of many a decent fellow!'

'Come, you're exaggerating, allow me to observe,' I broke in.

My neighbour looked at me in silence.

'Perhaps, G.o.d knows, perhaps. But, you see, there's only one pleasure left your humble servant, and that's exaggeration--well, that was the way I spent four years in Moscow. I can't tell you, my dear sir, how quickly, how fearfully quickly, that time pa.s.sed; it's positively painful and vexatious to remember. Some mornings one gets up, and it's like sliding downhill on little sledges.... Before one can look round, one's flown to the bottom; it's evening already, and already the sleepy servant is pulling on one's coat; one dresses, and trails off to a friend, and may be smokes a pipe, drinks weak tea in gla.s.ses, and discusses German philosophy, love, the eternal sunshine of the spirit, and other far-fetched topics. But even there I met original, independent people: however some men stultify themselves and warp themselves out of shape, still nature a.s.serts itself; I alone, poor wretch, moulded myself like soft wax, and my pitiful little nature never made the faintest resistance! Meantime I had reached my twenty-first year. I came into possession of my inheritance, or, more correctly speaking, that part of my inheritance which my guardian had thought fit to leave me, gave a freed house-serf Va.s.sily Kudryashev a warranty to superintend all my patrimony, and set off abroad to Berlin. I was abroad, as I have already had the pleasure of telling you, three years. Well. There too, abroad too, I remained the same unoriginal creature. In the first place, I need not say that of Europe, of European life, I really learnt nothing. I listened to German professors and read German books on their birthplace: that was all the difference. I led as solitary a life as any monk; I got on good terms with a retired lieutenant, weighed down, like myself, by a thirst for knowledge but always dull of comprehension, and not gifted with a flow of words; I made friends with slow-witted families from Penza and other agricultural provinces, hung about _cafes_, read the papers, in the evening went to the theatre. With the natives I a.s.sociated very little; I talked to them with constraint, and never had one of them to see me at my own place, except two or three intrusive fellows of Jewish extraction, who were constantly running in upon me and borrowing money--thanks to _der Russe's_ gullibility. A strange freak of chance brought me at last to the house of one of my professors.

It was like this: I came to him to enter my name for a course of lectures, and he, all of a sudden, invited me to an evening party at his house. This professor had two daughters, of twenty-seven, such stumpy little things--G.o.d bless them!--with such majestic noses, frizzed curls and pale-blue eyes, and red hands with white nails. One was called Linchen and the other Minchen. I began to go to the professor's. I ought to tell you that the professor was not exactly stupid, but seemed, as it were, dazed: in his professorial desk he spoke fairly consecutively, but at home he lisped, and always had his spectacles on his forehead--he was a very learned man, though. Well, suddenly it seemed to me that I was in love with Linchen, and for six whole months this impression remained. I talked to her, it's true, very little--it was more that I looked at her; but I used to read various touching pa.s.sages aloud to her, to press her hand on the sly, and to dream beside her in the evenings, gazing persistently at the moon, or else simply up aloft. Besides, she made such delicious coffee! One asks oneself--what more could one desire?

Only one thing troubled me: at the very moments of ineffable bliss, as it's called, I always had a sort of sinking in the pit of the stomach, and a cold shudder ran down my back. At last I could not stand such happiness, and ran away. Two whole years after that I was abroad: I went to Italy, stood before the Transfiguration in Rome, and before the Venus in Florence, and suddenly fell into exaggerated raptures, as though an attack of delirium had come upon me; in the evenings I wrote verses, began a diary; in fact, there too I behaved just like everyone else. And just mark how easy it is to be original! I take no interest, for instance, in painting and sculpture.... But simply saying so aloud...

no, it was impossible! I must needs take a cicerone, and run to gaze at the frescoes.'...

He looked down again, and again pulled off his nightcap.

'Well, I came back to my own country at last,' he went on in a weary voice. 'I went to Moscow. In Moscow a marvellous transformation took place in me. Abroad I was mostly silent, but now suddenly I began to talk with unexpected smartness, and at the same time I began to conceive all sorts of ideas of myself. There were kindly disposed persons to be found, to whom I seemed all but a genius; ladies listened sympathetically to my diatribes; but I was not able to keep on the summit of my glory. One fine morning a slander sprang up about me (who had originated it, I don't know; it must have been some old maid of the male s.e.x--there are any number of such old maids in Moscow); it sprang up and began to throw off outshoots and tendrils like a strawberry plant. I was abashed, tried to get out of it, to break through its clinging toils--that was no good.... I went away. Well, in that too I showed that I was an absurd person; I ought to have calmly waited for the storm to blow over, just as one waits for the end of nettle-rash, and the same kindly-disposed persons would have opened their arms to me again, the same ladies would have smiled approvingly again at my remarks.... But what's wrong is just that I'm not an original person.

Conscientious scruples, please to observe, had been stirred up in me; I was somehow ashamed of talk, talk without ceasing, nothing but talk--yesterday in Arbat, to-day in Truba, to-morrow in Sivtsevy-Vrazhky, and all about the same thing.... But if that is what people want of me? Look at the really successful men in that line: they don't ask its use; on the contrary, it's all they need; some will keep their tongues wagging twenty years together, and always in one direction.... That's what comes of self-confidence and conceit! I had that too, conceit--indeed, even now it's not altogether stifled.... But what was wrong was that--I say again, I'm not an original person--I stopped midway: nature ought to have given me far more conceit or none at all. But at first I felt the change a very hard one; moreover, my stay abroad too had utterly drained my resources, while I was not disposed to marry a merchant's daughter, young, but flabby as a jelly, so I retired to my country place. I fancy,' added my neighbour, with another glance sideways at me, 'I may pa.s.s over in silence the first impressions of country life, references to the beauty of nature, the gentle charm of solitude, etc.'

'You can, indeed,' I put in.

'All the more,' he continued, 'as all that's nonsense; at least, as far as I'm concerned. I was as bored in the country as a puppy locked up, though I will own that on my journey home, when I pa.s.sed through the familiar birchwood in spring for the first time, my head was in a whirl and my heart beat with a vague, sweet expectation. But these vague expectations, as you're well aware, never come to pa.s.s; on the other hand, very different things do come to pa.s.s, which you don't at all expect, such as cattle disease, arrears, sales by auction, and so on, and so on. I managed to make a shift from day to day with the aid of my agent, Yakov, who replaced the former superintendent, and turned out in the course of time to be as great, if not a greater robber, and over and above that poisoned my existence by the smell of his tarred boots; suddenly one day I remembered a family I knew in the neighbourhood, consisting of the widow of a retired colonel and her two daughters, ordered out my droshky, and set off to see them. That day must always be a memorable one for me; six months later I was married to the retired colonel's second daughter!...'