"Well, and in all justice,"--he continued, to develop the psychology
of authors,--"they ought to be distinguished for that. Isn't that
so? Because they understand more than others, and point out divers
disorders to others. Now take me, for instance, what am I? A
barefooted, naked tramp,... a drunkard and a crack-brained fellow.
There is no justification for my life. Why do I live on the earth, and
to whom on earth is my life of any use, if you stop to consider it? I
have no home of my own, no wife, no children--and I don't even feel
the want of any. I live and grieve.... What about? I don't know. It's
somewhat as though my mother had brought me into the world without
something which all other people possess ... something which is more
necessary than anything else to a man. I have no inward guide to my
path ... do you understand? How shall I express it? I haven't got the
right sort of spark ... or force, or whatever it is, in my soul. Well,
some piece or other has been left out of me--and that's all there is to
it! You understand? So I live along, and search for that missing piece,
and 'grieve for it, but what it is--is more than I know myself...."
"Why do you say this?" I asked.
He gazed at me, holding his hand to his head the while, and a powerful
effort was written on his face--the labor of a thought which is seeking
for itself a form.
"Why? Because--of the disorder of life.... That is to say ... here am
I living on, we'll say, and there's no place for me to go ... nothing
that I can hang on to ... and such a life is confusion."
"Well, and what comes next?" I pursued my inquiries as to the
connection between him and authors, which was incomprehensible to me.
"What next?... That's what I can't tell you.... But this is what I
think, that if some writer would cast an eye on me, then ... he might
be able to explain my life to me ... couldn't he? What do you think
about it?"
I thought I was capable myself of explaining his life to him, and
immediately set about this task, which, in my opinion, was easy and
clear. I began to discourse about conditions and surroundings, about
inequality in general, about people who are the victims of life, and
people who are life's priests.
Konováloff listened attentively. He sat opposite me, with his cheek
resting on his hand, and his large blue eyes widely opened, thoughtful
and intelligent, gradually clouded over, as with a thin mist, while
the folds lay more sharply across his forehead, and he seemed to be
holding his breath, all absorbed as he was in his desire to comprehend
my remarks.
All this was very flattering to me. With fervor I depicted to him his
life, and demonstrated to him, that he was not to blame for being what
he was; that is to say, that he, as a fact, was perfectly logical and
quite regularly founded on a long series of premises from the distant
past. He was the mournful victim of conditions, a being equal in
rights with all men, by his very nature, and reduced by a long line of
historical injustices to the degree of a social cipher. I wound up my
explanation with the remark, which I had already made several times:
"You have nothing to blame yourself for.... You have been wronged...."
He maintained silence, never taking his eyes from me; I beheld a
brilliant, kindly smile dawn in them, and waited, with impatience, to
see how he would reply to my speech.
The smile played over his lips, now he laughed affectionately, and
reaching toward me with a soft, feminine movement, he laid his hand on
my shoulder.
"How easily you talk about all that, brother! Only, whence comes your
knowledge of all these matters? Is it all from books? But you have read
a great lot of them, evidently--of books! Ekh, if I could only read
as many! But the chief point is--that you speak very compassionately.
This is the first time I have ever heard such a speech. It's wonderful!
Everybody accuses his neighbor of his bad luck, but you accuse life,
the whole order of things.
"According to you it appears that a man is not to blame, himself, for
anything whatever, but it is written in his fate that he is to be a
tramp--well, and so he is a tramp, and it's very queer about prisoners,
too: they steal because they have no work, but must eat.... How
pitiful all that is, according to your showing! You have a weak heart,
evidently!"
"Wait a bit!"--said I, "do you agree with me? Have I spoken truly?"
"You know best whether it is true or not--you can read and write.... It
is true, I suppose, if you apply it to others.... But as for me...."
"What then?"
"Well, I'm a special article.... Who's to blame if I drink? Pávelka, my
brother, doesn't drink,--he has a bakery of his own in Perm. But here
am I--I'm as good a workman as he is--but I'm a vagrant and a drunkard,
and I have no longer any standing or position in life ... Yet we are
the children of one mother. He is younger than I am. So it would appear
that there is something wrong about me.... That means, that I was
not born as a man should be born. You say yourself, that all men are
equals: a man is born, he lives out his appointed time, then he dies!
But I'm on a separate path.... And I'm not the only one--there are a
lot of us like that. We must be peculiar people, and don't fit into any
rule. We need a special account ... and special laws ... very strict
laws,--to exterminate us out of life! For we are of no use, and we
take up room in it, and stand in the way of other folks.... Who is to
blame for us?--We are, ourselves--before ourselves and before life....
Because we have no desire to live, and we have no feeling toward
ourselves.... Our mothers begot us in an unlucky hour--that's where the
trouble lies...."
I was overwhelmed by this unexpected confutation of my deductions....
He--that big man with the clear eyes of a child--set himself apart
from life in the ranks of the men who are useless in it, and therefore
subject to extermination, with so light a spirit, with such laughing
sadness, that I was positively stunned by his self-abasement, which I
had never, up to that moment, beheld in any member of the barefoot
brigade, who, as a whole, are beings torn loose from everything,
hostile to everything, and ready to try the force of their exasperated
scepticism on everyone.... I had encountered only men who threw
the blame on everything and complained of everything, persistently
thrusting themselves aside from the series of obvious facts which
obstinately confuted their personal infallibility, and who always
cast the responsibility of their bad luck on taciturn Fate, on wicked
people.... Konováloff did not blame Fate, and uttered not one word
about people. He alone was to blame for all the disorder of his
individual life, and the more persistently I endeavored to prove to
him that he was "the victim of circumstances and conditions," the more
persistently did he argue with me as to his own guilt toward himself
and toward life for his mournful lot.... This was original, and it
enraged me. But he experienced satisfaction in scourging himself; it
was with satisfaction and nothing else that his eyes beamed, when he
shouted at me, in a ringing baritone voice:
"Every man is the master of himself, and no one is to blame if I am a
scoundrel!"
In the mouth of an educated man, such remarks would not have surprised
me, for there is no ulcer which cannot be found in the tangled and
complicated psychical organism called "the intelligent man." But from
the lips of a tramp, although he was an intelligent man, amid the
scorned of fate, the naked, hungry and vicious creatures half men,
half beasts, who fill the filthy dens of the towns,--from the lips
of a tramp it was strange to hear these remarks. I was forced to the
conclusion that Konováloff really was--a special article,--but I did
not wish to admit it.
From the inner point of view, Konováloff was a typical representative,
down to the most petty detail, of the "golden horde";[6] but, alas!
the longer I inspected him, the more convinced did I become that I had
to deal with a variety which infringed upon my idea as to people who
ought, long ago, to have been accounted a class, and who thoroughly
merit attention, as hungering and thirsting in a powerful degree, as
very malicious and far from stupid....
[6] An organised band of high-grade thieves.--Translator.
Our dispute waxed hotter and hotter.
"But just wait," I shouted; "how can a man stand steady on his feet if
divers obscure powers press upon him from all sides?"
"Lean the harder!" cried my opponent loudly, growing warm, and flashing
his eyes.
"Yes, but what is one to lean against?"
"Find a point of support for yourself, and lean on it!"
"And why haven't you done that?"
"Why, don't I tell you, you queer man, that I myself am to blame for
my own life!... I didn't find my point of support! I'm seeking it, I'm
pining for it--but I can't find it!"
But we were obliged to look after the bread, so we set to work, each
continuing to demonstrate to the other the truth of his views. As a
matter of course, neither of us proved anything, and when we had
finished attending to the oven, we lay down to sleep.
Konováloff stretched himself out on the floor of the bakery, and soon
fell asleep. I lay on the sacks of flour, and looked down from above
upon his powerful, bearded figure, stretched out, in the fashion of an
epic hero, on a mat which had been thrown down near the bin. There was
an odor of hot bread, of fermented dough, of carbonic acid gas.... The
day dawned, and the gray sky peeped through the panes of the windows,
which were draped in shrouds of flour-dust. A peasant's cart rumbled
past, and the shepherd blew his horn to assemble his flock.
Konováloff snored. I watched his broad breast rise and fall, and
thought over various methods of converting him, as speedily as
possible, to my belief, but could hit upon nothing suitable, and fell
asleep.
In the morning, he and I rose, set the dough to rise, washed ourselves
and sat down on the bin to drink tea.
"Say, have you got a little book?" inquired Konováloff.
"Yes."
"Will you read it to me?"
"All right."
"That's good! Do you know what? I'll live here a month, I'll get some
money from the boss, and I'll give you half of it!"
"What for?"
"Buy some little books.... Buy some for yourself, after your own taste,
and buy me some ... about a couple. I want some about the peasants.
After the fashion of Pilá and Sysóika.... And let them be written
pathetically, you know, not to make fun of folks.... There are some
which are downright trash! Panfilka and Filátka--even with a picture in
the front--nonsense. Bureaucrats, various tales. I don't like all that
sort of thing. I didn't know there were any like that one you have."
"Do you want one about Sténka Rázin?"
"About Sténka?... Is it good?"
"Very good."
"Fetch it along!"
And soon I was reading aloud to him N. Kostomároff's "The Revolt of
Sténka Rázin" At first, this talented monograph, which is almost an
epic poem, did not please my bearded hearer.
"Why aren't there any conversations in it?" he asked, peeping into the
book. And when I explained the reason, he went so far as to yawn, and
tried to hide the yawn, but did not succeed, and he said to me, in a
confused and guilty way:
"Read away ... never mind. I didn't mean to...."
I was pleased with his delicate tact, and pretended not to have
observed anything, and that I did not, in the least, understand what he
was talking about.
But in proportion as the historian depicted, with his artistic brush,
the figure of Stepán Timoféevitch, and "the Prince of the Vólga
Volunteers" started out from the pages of the book, Konováloff became
transformed. In the beginning somewhat bored and indifferent, with
eyes veiled in indolent dreaminess,--he gradually and by degrees
imperceptible to me, presented himself to me in an astonishing, new
form. As he sat on the bin opposite me, clasping his knees in his arms,
and with his head laid upon them in such a way that his beard hid his
legs, he stared at me with greedy, strangely burning eyes from beneath
his sternly knit brows. There was not left in him a single trace of
that childlike ingenuousness which had always so surprised me in him,
and all that simplicity and feminine softness, which accorded so well
with his kindly blue eyes, were now darkened and dried up,... had
vanished somewhere. Something lion-like, fiery was contained in his
muscular figure, thus curled up in a ball. I stopped reading and gazed
at him.
"Read away,"--he said softly but impressively.
"What ails you?"
"Read!" he repeated, and there was an accent of irritation as well as
of entreaty in his tone.
I continued, casting an occasional glance at him, and noting that he
was becoming more and more inflamed. Something emanated from him which
excited and intoxicated me--a sort of glowing mist. The book, also,
exerted its influence.... And thus it was in a state of nervous tremor,
full of foreboding of something unusual, that I reached the point where
Sténka was captured.
"They captured him!" roared Konováloff.
Pain, affront, wrath, readiness to rescue Sténka resounded in his
mighty exclamation.
The sweat started out on his brow, and his eyes widened strangely. He
sprang from the bin, tall, excited, halted in front of me, laid his
hand on my shoulder, and said loudly and hastily:
"Wait! Don't read!... Tell me, what's coming next? No, stop, don't
speak! Do they execute him? Hey? Read quick, Maxím!"
One might have thought that Konováloff instead of Frólka was Rázin's
own brother. It seemed as though certain bonds of blood, unbroken and
uncongealed for the space of three centuries, united this tramp with
Sténka, and the tramp, with the full strength of his lively, mighty
body, with all the passion of his soul which was pining without "a
point of support," felt the anguish and wrath of the free falcon who
had been captured more than three hundred years before.
"Do go on reading, for Christ's sake!"
I read on, aroused and deeply moved, conscious that my heart was
beating hard, and in company with Konováloff, living over again
Sténka's anguish. And thus we came to the tortures.
Konováloff gnashed his teeth, and his blue eyes blazed like live coals.
He leaned over me from behind, and did not take his eyes from the book,
any more than I did. His breath buzzed above my ears, and blew my hair
into my eyes. I shook my head to put it out of the way. Konováloff
noticed this, and laid his heavy palm on my head.
"'Then Rázin gnashed his teeth so hard, that he spat them out on the
floor, along with the blood....'"
"Enough!--Go to the devil!" shouted Konováloff, and snatching the book
from my hand, he flung it on the floor with all his might, and dropped
down after it.
He wept, and, as he was ashamed of his tears, he bellowed in a queer
way, in order to keep from sobbing. He hid his head on his knees, and
cried, wiping his eyes on his dirty ticking trousers.
I sat in front of him, on the bin, and did not know what to say to
console him.
"Maxím!" said Konováloff, as he sat on the floor. "It's awful! Pilá ...
Sysóika. And now Sténka ... isn't it? What a fate!... And how he spit
out his teeth!... didn't he?"
And he trembled all over with emotion.
He was particularly impressed with the teeth which Sténka spit out, and
he kept referring to them, twitching his shoulders with pain as he did
so.
Both of us were like drunken men under the influence of the harsh and
poignant picture of the torture thus presented to us.
"Read it to me again, do you hear?" Konováloff entreated, picking up
the book from the floor, and handing it to me.--"And, see here now,
show me the place where it tells about the teeth?"