When Lavretsky reached home, he was met at the door of the drawing-room
by a tall, thin man, in a thread-bare blue coat, with a wrinkled, but
lively face, with disheveled grey whiskers, a long straight nose, and
small fiery eyes. This was Mihalevitch, who had been his friend at the
university. Lavretsky did not at first recognise him, but embraced him
warmly directly he told his name.
They had not met since their Moscow days. Torrents of exclamations and
questions followed; long-buried recollections were brought to light.
Hurriedly smoking pipe after pipe, tossing off tea at a gulp, and
gesticulating with his long hands, Mihalevitch related his adventures
to Lavretsky; there was nothing very inspiriting in them, he could not
boast of success in his undertakings--but he was constantly laughing a
hoarse, nervous laugh. A month previously he had received a position in
the private counting-house of a spirit-tax contractor, two hundred and
fifty miles from the town of O-----, and hearing of Lavretsky returned
from abroad he had turned out of his way so as to see his old friend.
Mihalevitch talked as impetuously as in his youth; made as much
noise and was as effervescent as of old. Lavretsky was about to acquaint
him with his new position, but Mihalevitch interrupted him, muttering
hurriedly, “I have heard, my dear fellow, I have heard--who could
have anticipated it?” and at once turned the conversation upon general
subjects.
“I must set off to-morrow, my dear fellow,” he observed; “to-day if you
will excuse it, we will sit up late. I want above all to know what you
are like, what are your views and convictions, what you have become,
what life has taught you.” (Mihalevitch still preserved the phraseology
of 1830.) “As for me, I have changed in much; the waves of life
have broken over my breast--who was it said that?--though in what is
important, essential I have not changed; I believe as of old in the
good, the true: but I do not only believe--I have faith now, yes, I have
faith, faith. Listen, you know I write verses; there is no poetry in
them, but there is truth. I will read you aloud my last poem; I have
expressed my truest convictions in it. Listen.” Mihalevitch fell to
reading his poem: it was rather long, and ended with the following
lines:
“I gave myself to new feelings with all my heart,
And my soul became as a child’s!
And I have burnt all I adored
And now adore all that I burnt.”
As he uttered the two last lines, Mihalevitch all but shed tears; a
slight spasm--the sign of deep emotion--passed over his wide mouth, his
ugly face lighted up. Lavretsky listened, and listened to him--and
the spirit of antagonism was aroused in him; he was irritated by
the ever-ready enthusiasm of the Moscow student, perpetually at
boiling-point. Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed a heated argument
had broken out between them, one of these endless arguments, of which
only Russians are capable. After a separation of many years spent in two
different worlds, with no clear understanding of the other’s ideas or
even of their own, catching at words and replying only in words, they
disputed about the most abstract subjects, and they disputed as
though it were a matter of life and death for both: they shouted and
vociferated so that every one in the house was startled, and poor
Lemm, who had locked himself up in his room directly after Mihalevitch
arrived, was bewildered, and began even to feel vaguely alarmed.
“What are you after all? a pessimist?” cried Mihalevitch at one o’clock
in the night.
“Are pessimists usually like this?” replied Lavretsky. “They are usually
all pale and sickly--would you like me to lift you with one hand?”
“Well, if you are not a pessimist you are a scepteec, that’s still
worse.” Mihalevitch’s talk had a strong flavour of his mother-country,
Little Russia. “And what right have you to be a scepteec? You have had
ill-luck in life, let us admit; that was not your fault; you were born
with a passionate loving heart, and you were unnaturally kept out of the
society of women: the first woman you came across was bound to deceive
you.”
“She deceived you too,” observed Lavretsky grimly.
“Granted, granted; I was the tool of destiny in it--what nonsense I
talk, though--there is no such thing as destiny; it is an old habit of
expressing things inexactly. But what does that prove?”
“It proves this, that they distorted me from my childhood.”
“Well, it’s for you to straighten yourself! What’s the good of being
a man, a male animal? And however that may be, is it possible, is it
permissible, to reduce a personal, so to speak, fact to a general law,
to an infallible principle?”
“How a principle?” interrupted Lavretsky; “I don’t admit--”
“No, it is your principle, your principle,” Mihalevitch interrupted in
his turn.
“You are an egoist, that’s what it is!” he was thundering an hour later:
“you wanted personal happiness, you wanted enjoyment in life, you wanted
to live only for yourself.”
“What do you mean by personal happiness?”
“And everything deceived you; everything crumbled away under your feet.”
“What do you mean by personal happiness, I ask you?”
“And it was bound to crumble away. Either you sought support where it
could not be found, or you built your house on shifting sands, or--”
“Speak more plainly, or I can’t understand you.”
“Or--you may laugh if you like--or you had no faith, no warmth of heart;
intellect, nothing but one farthing’s worth of intellect... you are
simply a pitiful, antiquated Voltairean, that’s what you are!”
“I’m a Voltairean?”
“Yes, like your father, and you yourself do not suspect it.”
“After that,” exclaimed Lavretsky, “I have the right to call you a
fanatic.”
“Alas!” replied Mihalevitch with a contrite air, “I have not so far
deserved such an exalted title, unhappily.”
“I have found out now what to call you,” cried the same Mihalevitch, at
three o’clock in the morning. “You are not a sceptic, nor a pessimist,
nor a Voltairean, you are a loafer, and you are a vicious loafer, a
conscious loafer, not a simple loafer. Simple loafers lie on the stove
and do nothing because they don’t know how to do anything; they don’t
think about anything either, but you are a man of ideas--and yet you lie
on the stove; you could do something--and you do nothing; you lie idle
with a full stomach and look down from above and say, ‘It’s best to lie
idle like this, because whatever people do, is all rubbish, leading to
nothing.’”
“And from what do you infer that I lie idle?” Lavretsky protested
stoutly. “Why do you attribute such ideas to me?”
“And, besides that, you are all, all the tribe of you,” continued
Mihalevitch, “cultivated loafers. You know which leg the German limps
on, you know what’s amiss with the English and the French, and your
pitiful culture goes to make it worse, your shameful idleness, your
abominable inactivity is justified by it. Some are even proud of it:
‘I’m such a clever fellow,’ they say, ‘I do nothing, while these fools
are in a fuss.’ Yes! and there are fine gentlemen among us--though
I don’t say this as to you--who reduce their whole life to a kind of
stupor of boredom, get used to it, live in it, like--like a mushroom
in white sauce,” Mihalevitch added hastily, and he laughed at his own
comparison. “Oh! this stupor of boredom is the ruin of Russians. Ours is
the age for work, and the sickening loafer”...
“But what is all this abuse about?” Lavretsky clamoured in his turn.
“Work--doing--you’d better say what is to be done, instead of abusing
me, Desmosthenes of Poltava!”
“There, what a thing to ask! I can’t tell you that brother; that every
one ought to know for himself,” retorted the Desmosthenes ironically.
“A landowner, a nobleman, and not know what to do? You have no faith, or
else you would know; no faith--and no intuition.”
“Let me at least have time to breathe; you don’t let me have time to
look round,” Lavretsky besought him.
“Not a minute, nor a second!” retorted Mihalevitch with an imperious
wave of the hand. “Not one second: death does not delay, and life ought
not to delay.”
“And what a time, what a place for men to think of loafing!” he cried
at four o’clock, in a voice, however, which showed signs of sleepiness;
“among us! now! in Russia where every separate individual has a duty
resting upon him, a solemn responsibility to God, to the people,
to himself. We are sleeping, and the time is slipping away; we are
sleeping.”....
“Permit me to observe,” remarked Lavretsky, “that we are not sleeping at
present but rather preventing others from sleeping. We are straining
our throats like the cocks--listen! there is one crowing for the third
time.”
This sally made Mihalevitch laugh, and calmed him down. “Good-bye till
to-morrow,” he said with a smile, and thrust his pipe into his pouch.
“Till to-morrow,” repeated Lavretsky. But the friends talked for more
than an hour longer. Their voices were no longer raised, however, and their
talk was quiet, sad, friendly talk.
Mihalevitch set off the next day, in spite of all Lavretsky’s efforts
to keep him. Fedor Ivanitch did not succeed in persuading him to remain;
but he talked to him to his heart’s content. Mihalevitch, it appeared,
had not a penny to bless himself with. Lavretsky had noticed with pain
the evening before all the tokens and habits of years of poverty; his
boots were shabby, a button was off on the back of his coat, on his
arrival, he had not even thought of asking to wash, and at supper he ate
like a shark, tearing his meat in his fingers, and crunching the bones
with his strong black teeth. It appeared, too, that he had made
nothing out of his employment, that he now rested all his hopes on the
contractor who was taking him solely in order to have an “educated man”
in his office.
For all that Mihalevitch was not discouraged, but as idealist or cynic,
lived on a crust of bread, sincerely rejoicing or grieving over the
destinies of humanity, and his own vocation, and troubling himself very
little as to how to escape dying of hunger. Mihalevitch was not married:
but had been in love times beyond number, and had written poems to all
the objects of his adoration; he sang with especial fervour the praises
of a mysterious black-tressed “noble Polish lady.” There were rumours,
it is true, that this “noble Polish lady” was a simple Jewess, very
well known to a good many cavalry officers--but, after all, what do you
think--does it really make any difference?
With Lemm, Mihalevitch did not get on; his noisy talk and brusque
manners scared the German, who was unused to such behaviour. One poor
devil detects another by instinct at once, but in old age he rarely gets
on with him, and that is hardly astonishing, he has nothing to share
with him, not even hopes.
Before setting off, Mihalevitch had another long discussion with
Lavretsky, foretold his ruin, if he did not see the error of his ways,
exhorted him to devote himself seriously to the welfare of his peasants,
and pointed to himself as an example, saying that he had been purified
in the furnace of suffering; and in the same breath called himself
several times a happy man, comparing himself with the fowl of the air
and the lily of the field.
“A black lily, any way,” observed Lavretsky.
“Ah, brother, don’t be a snob!” retorted Mihalevitch, good-naturedly,
“but thank God rather there is pure plebeian blood in your veins too.
But I see that you want some pure, heavenly creature to draw you out of
your apathy.”
“Thanks, brother,” remarked Lavretsky. “I have had quite enough of those
heavenly creatures.”
“Silence, ceeneec!” cried Mihalevitch.
“Cynic,” Lavretsky corrected him.
“Ceeneec, just so,” repeated Mihalevitch unabashed.
Even when he had taken his seat in the carriage, to which his flat,
yellow, strangely light trunk was carried, he still talked; muffled in a
kind of Spanish cloak with a collar, brown with age, and a clasp of two
lion’s paws; he went on developing his views on the destiny of Russia,
and waving his swarthy hand in the air, as though he were sowing the
seeds of her future prosperity. The horses started at last.
“Remember my three last words,” he cried, thrusting his whole body out
of the carriage and balancing so, “Religion, progress, humanity!...
Farewell.”
His head, with a foraging cap pulled down over his eyes, disappeared.
Lavretsky was left standing alone on the steps, and he gazed steadily
into the distance along the road till the carriage disappeared out of
sight. “Perhaps he is right, after all,” he thought as he went back into
the house; “perhaps I am a loafer.” Many of Mihalevitch’s words had sunk
irresistibly into his heart, though he had disputed and disagreed with
him. If a man only has a good heart, no one can resist him.