At times he gives one the impression of having just arrived from some
distant country, where people think and feel differently and their
relations and language are different. He sits in a corner tired and
grey, as though the dust of another earth were on him, and he looks
attentively at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a dumb man.
Yesterday, before dinner, he came into the drawing-room, just like
that, his thoughts far away. He sat down on the sofa, and, after a
moment's silence, suddenly said, swaying his body a little, rubbing the
palm of his hand on his knee, and wrinkling up his face:
"Still that is not all--not all."
Someone, always stolidly stupid as a flat-iron, asked: "What do you
say?"
He looked at him fixedly, and then, bending forward and looking on the
terrace where I was sitting with Doctor Nikitin and Yelpatievsky, he
said: "What are you talking about?"
"Plehve."
"Plehve ... Plehve ...," he repeated musingly after a pause, as though
he heard the name for the first time. Then he shook himself like a
bird, and said, with a faint smile:
"To-day from early morning I have had a silly thing running in my
head; someone once told me that he saw the following epitaph in a
cemetery:
'Beneath this stone there rests Ivan Yegoriev;
A tanner by trade, he always wetted hides.
His work was honest, his heart good, but, behold,
He passed away, leaving his business to his wife.
He was not yet old and might still have done a lot of work.
But God took him away to the life of paradise on the night
Friday to Saturday in Passion week ...'
and something like that...." He was silent, and then, nodding his
head and smiling faintly, added: "In human stupidity when it is not
malicious, there is something very touching, even beautiful.... There
always is."
They called us to come to dinner.