the house and walked about the streets in the company of the new cane I
had bought. Or I would want to go for a walk or a drive with my
fiancée, would go round and find her already standing in the hall with
her mother, dressed to go out and playing with her parasol.
"Oh, we are going to the Arcade," she would say. "We have got to buy
some more cashmere and change the hat."
My outing is knocked on the head. I join the ladies and go with them to
the Arcade. It is revoltingly dull to listen to women shopping, haggling
and trying to outdo the sharp shopman. I felt ashamed when Sasha, after
turning over masses of material and knocking down the prices to a
minimum, walked out of the shop without buying anything, or else told
the shopman to cut her some half rouble's worth.
When they came out of the shop, Sasha and her mamma with scared and
worried faces would discuss at length having made a mistake, having
bought the wrong thing, the flowers in the chintz being too dark, and so
on.
Yes, it is a bore to be engaged! I'm glad it's over.
Now I am married. It is evening. I am sitting in my study reading.
Behind me on the sofa Sasha is sitting munching something noisily. I
want a glass of beer.
"Sasha, look for the corkscrew. . . ." I say. "It's lying about
somewhere."
Sasha leaps up, rummages in a disorderly way among two or three heaps of
papers, drops the matches, and without finding the corkscrew, sits down
in silence. . . . Five minutes pass--ten. . . I begin to be fretted both
by thirst and vexation.
"Sasha, do look for the corkscrew," I say.
Sasha leaps up again and rummages among the papers near me. Her munching
and rustling of the papers affects me like the sound of sharpening
knives against each other. . . . I get up and begin looking for the
corkscrew myself. At last it is found and the beer is uncorked. Sasha
remains by the table and begins telling me something at great length.
"You'd better read something, Sasha," I say.
She takes up a book, sits down facing me and begins moving her lips . .
. . I look at her little forehead, moving lips, and sink into thought.
"She is getting on for twenty. . . ." I reflect. "If one takes a boy of
the educated class and of that age and compares them, what a difference!
The boy would have knowledge and convictions and some intelligence."
But I forgive that difference just as the low forehead and moving lips
are forgiven. I remember in my old Lovelace days I have cast off women
for a stain on their stockings, or for one foolish word, or for not
cleaning their teeth, and now I forgive everything: the munching, the
muddling about after the corkscrew, the slovenliness, the long talking
about nothing that matters; I forgive it all almost unconsciously, with
no effort of will, as though Sasha's mistakes were my mistakes, and many
things which would have made me wince in old days move me to tenderness
and even rapture. The explanation of this forgiveness of everything lies
in my love for Sasha, but what is the explanation of the love itself, I
really don't know.
LIGHTS
THE dog was barking excitedly outside. And Ananyev the engineer, his
assistant called Von Schtenberg, and I went out of the hut to see at
whom it was barking. I was the visitor, and might have remained indoors,
but I must confess my head was a little dizzy from the wine I had drunk,
and I was glad to get a breath of fresh air.
"There is nobody here," said Ananyev when we went out. "Why are you
telling stories, Azorka? You fool!"
There was not a soul in sight.
"The fool," Azorka, a black house-dog, probably conscious of his guilt
in barking for nothing and anxious to propitiate us, approached us,
diffidently wagging his tail. The engineer bent down and touched him
between his ears.
"Why are you barking for nothing, creature?" he said in the tone in
which good-natured people talk to children and dogs. "Have you had a bad
dream or what? Here, doctor, let me commend to your attention," he said,
turning to me, "a wonderfully nervous subject! Would you believe it, he
can't endure solitude--he is always having terrible dreams and suffering
from nightmares; and when you shout at him he has something like an
attack of hysterics."
"Yes, a dog of refined feelings," the student chimed in.
Azorka must have understood that the conversation was concerning him. He
turned his head upwards and grinned plaintively, as though to say, "Yes,
at times I suffer unbearably, but please excuse it!"
It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing to the
fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional surroundings,
as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to me gloomy,
inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality. I was on a railway line
which was still in process of construction. The high, half-finished
embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-
barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which
the workmen lived--all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness,
gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos.
There was so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow
strange in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth
to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph posts.
Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to belong to a
different world. It was still, and the only sound came from the
telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere very high above
our heads.
We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down upon the
earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted
into the darkness of the night, a dim light was twinkling. Beyond it
gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away
two red eyes glowed side by side--probably the windows of some hut--and a
long series of such lights, growing continually closer and dimmer,
stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a
semicircle to the left and disappeared in the darkness of the distance.
The lights were motionless. There seemed to be something in common
between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of
the telegraph wire. It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried
under the embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew
of it.
"How glorious, O Lord!" sighed Ananyev; "such space and beauty that one
can't tear oneself away! And what an embankment! It's not an embankment,
my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It's costing millions. . . ."
Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was costing
millions, intoxicated by the wine and his sentimental mood, the engineer
slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in a jocose tone:
"Well, Mihail Mihailitch, lost in reveries? No doubt it is pleasant to
look at the work of one's own hands, eh? Last year this very spot was
bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look: life . . .
civilisation. . . And how splendid it all is, upon my soul! You and I
are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another century or
two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital, and things
will begin to move! Eh!"
The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets, and
did not take his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to the
engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which one
does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged silence he turned
to me and said quietly:
"Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think of
something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something like
the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as though some
people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were waiting for
morning to fight with Saul or David. All that is wanting to complete the
illusion is the blare of trumpets and sentries calling to one another in
some Ethiopian language."
And, as though of design, the wind fluttered over the line and brought a
sound like the clank of weapons. A silence followed. I don't know what
the engineer and the student were thinking of, but it seemed to me
already that I actually saw before me something long dead and even heard
the sentry talking in an unknown tongue. My imagination hastened to
picture the tents, the strange people, their clothes, their armour.
"Yes," muttered the student pensively, "once Philistines and Amalekites
were living in this world, making wars, playing their part, and now no
trace of them remains. So it will be with us. Now we are making a
railway, are standing here philosophising, but two thousand years will
pass--and of this embankment and of all those men, asleep after their
hard work, not one grain of dust will remain. In reality, it's awful!"
"You must drop those thoughts . . ." said the engineer gravely and
admonishingly.
"Why?"
"Because. . . . Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for the
beginning of it. You are too young for them."
"Why so?" repeated the student.
"All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and the
aimlessness of life, of the inevitability of death, of the shadows of
the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell you, my dear
fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come as the product of
years of inner travail, and are won by suffering and really are
intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the threshold of real life
they are simply a calamity! A calamity!" Ananyev repeated with a wave of
his hand. "To my mind it is better at your age to have no head on your
shoulders at all than to think on these lines. I am speaking seriously,
Baron. And I have been meaning to speak to you about it for a long time,
for I noticed from the very first day of our acquaintance your
partiality for these damnable ideas!"
"Good gracious, why are they damnable?" the student asked with a smile,
and from his voice and his face I could see that he asked the question
from simple politeness, and that the discussion raised by the engineer
did not interest him in the least.
I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was dreaming that immediately after
our walk we should wish each other good-night and go to bed, but my
dream was not quickly realised. When we had returned to the hut the
engineer put away the empty bottles and took out of a large wicker
hamper two full ones, and uncorking them, sat down to his work-table
with the evident intention of going on drinking, talking, and working.
Sipping a little from his glass, he made pencil notes on some plans and
went on pointing out to the student that the latter's way of thinking
was not what it should be. The student sat beside him checking accounts
and saying nothing. He, like me, had no inclination to speak or to
listen. That I might not interfere with their work, I sat away from the
table on the engineer's crooked-legged travelling bedstead, feeling
bored and expecting every moment that they would suggest I should go to
bed. It was going on for one o'clock.
Having nothing to do, I watched my new acquaintances. I had never seen
Ananyev or the student before. I had only made their acquaintance on the
night I have described. Late in the evening I was returning on horseback
from a fair to the house of a landowner with whom I was staying, had got
on the wrong road in the dark and lost my way. Going round and round by
the railway line and seeing how dark the night was becoming, I thought
of the "barefoot railway roughs," who lie in wait for travellers on foot
and on horseback, was frightened, and knocked at the first hut I came
to. There I was cordially received by Ananyev and the student. As is
usually the case with strangers casually brought together, we quickly
became acquainted, grew friendly and at first over the tea and afterward
over the wine, began to feel as though we had known each other for
years. At the end of an hour or so, I knew who they were and how fate
had brought them from town to the far-away steppe; and they knew who I
was, what my occupation and my way of thinking.
Nikolay Anastasyevitch Ananyev, the engineer, was a broad-shouldered,
thick-set man, and, judging from his appearance, he had, like Othello,
begun the "descent into the vale of years," and was growing rather too
stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making women mean when
they speak of "a man in the prime of his age," that is, he was neither
young nor old, was fond of good fare, good liquor, and praising the
past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly when he was asleep,
and in his manner with those surrounding him displayed that calm
imperturbable good humour which is always acquired by decent people by
the time they have reached the grade of a staff officer and begun to
grow stout. His hair and beard were far from being grey, but already,
with a condescension of which he was unconscious, he addressed young men
as "my dear boy" and felt himself entitled to lecture them good-
humouredly about their way of thinking. His movements and his voice were
calm, smooth, and self-confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly
well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road,
that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His
sunburnt, thick-nosed face and muscular neck seemed to say: "I am well
fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you
young people too, will be well-fed, healthy, and satisfied with
yourselves. . . ." He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry
and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots. From certain
trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his
embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was able to guess that
he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife.
Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was a
young man of about three or four and twenty. Only his fair hair and
scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity in his
features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the Baltic
provinces; everything else--his name, Mihail Mihailovitch, his religion,
his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his face were purely
Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and high boots, with his
round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his sunburnt face, he did not
look like a student or a Baron, but like an ordinary Russian workman.
His words and gestures were few, he drank reluctantly without relish,
checked the accounts mechanically, and seemed all the while to be
thinking of something else. His movements and voice were calm, and
smooth too, but his calmness was of a different kind from the
engineer's. His sunburnt, slightly ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which
looked up from under his brows, and his whole figure were expressive of
spiritual stagnatio--mental sloth. He looked as though it did not matter
to him in the least whether the light were burning before him or not,
whether the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was
checking were correct or not. . . . And on his intelligent, calm face I
read: "I don't see so far any good in definite work, a secure living,
and a settled outlook. It's all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I am
sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to Petersburg,
then in the spring here again. . . . What sense there is in all that I
don't know, and no one knows. . . . And so it's no use talking about it.
. . ."
He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending
indifference with which cadets in the senior classes listen to an
effusive and good-natured old attendant. It seemed as though there were
nothing new to him in what the engineer said, and that if he had not
himself been too lazy to talk, he would have said something newer and
cleverer. Meanwhile Ananyev would not desist. He had by now laid aside
his good-humoured, jocose tone and spoke seriously, even with a fervour
which was quite out of keeping with his expression of calmness.
Apparently he had no distaste for abstract subjects, was fond of them,
indeed, but had neither skill nor practice in the handling of them. And
this lack of practice was so pronounced in his talk that I did not
always grasp his meaning at once.
"I hate those ideas with all my heart!" he said, "I was infected by them
myself in my youth, I have not quite got rid of them even now, and I
tell you--perhaps because I am stupid and such thoughts were not the
right food for my mind--they did me nothing but harm. That's easy to
understand! Thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of the insignificance
and transitoriness of the visible world, Solomon's 'vanity of vanities'
have been, and are to this day, the highest and final stage in the realm
of thought. The thinker reaches that stage and--comes to a halt! There is
nowhere further to go. The activity of the normal brain is completed
with this, and that is natural and in the order of things. Our
misfortune is that we begin thinking at that end. What normal people end
with we begin with. From the first start, as soon as the brain begins
working independently, we mount to the very topmost, final step and
refuse to know anything about the steps below."
"What harm is there in that?" said the student.
"But you must understand that it's abnormal," shouted Ananyev, looking
at him almost wrathfully. "If we find means of mounting to the topmost
step without the help of the lower ones, then the whole long ladder,
that is the whole of life, with its colours, sounds, and thoughts, loses
all meaning for us. That at your age such reflections are harmful and
absurd, you can see from every step of your rational independent life.
Let us suppose you sit down this minute to read Darwin or Shakespeare,
you have scarcely read a page before the poison shows itself; and your
long life, and Shakespeare, and Darwin, seem to you nonsense, absurdity,
because you know you will die, that Shakespeare and Darwin have died
too, that their thoughts have not saved them, nor the earth, nor you,
and that if life is deprived of meaning in that way, all science,
poetry, and exalted thoughts seem only useless diversions, the idle
playthings of grown up people; and you leave off reading at the second
page. Now, let us suppose that people come to you as an intelligent man
and ask your opinion about war, for instance: whether it is desirable,
whether it is morally justifiable or not. In answer to that terrible
question you merely shrug your shoulders and confine yourself to some
commonplace, because for you, with your way of thinking, it makes
absolutely no difference whether hundreds of thousands of people die a
violent death, or a natural one: the results are the same--ashes and
oblivion. You and I are building a railway line. What's the use, one may
ask, of our worrying our heads, inventing, rising above the hackneyed
thing, feeling for the workmen, stealing or not stealing, when we know
that this railway line will turn to dust within two thousand years, and
so on, and so on. . . . You must admit that with such a disastrous way
of looking at things there can be no progress, no science, no art, nor
even thought itself. We fancy that we are cleverer than the crowd, and
than Shakespeare. In reality our thinking leads to nothing because we
have no inclination to go down to the lower steps and there is nowhere
higher to go, so our brain stands at the freezing point--neither up nor
down; I was in bondage to these ideas for six years, and by all that is
holy, I never read a sensible book all that time, did not gain a
ha'porth of wisdom, and did not raise my moral standard an inch. Was not
that disastrous? Moreover, besides being corrupted ourselves, we bring
poison into the lives of those surrounding us. It would be all right if,
with our pessimism, we renounced life, went to live in a cave, or made
haste to die, but, as it is, in obedience to the universal law, we live,
feel, love women, bring up children, construct railways!"
"Our thoughts make no one hot or cold," the student said reluctantly.
"Ah! there you are again!--do stop it! You have not yet had a good sniff
at life. But when you have lived as long as I have you will know a thing
or two! Our theory of life is not so innocent as you suppose. In
practical life, in contact with human beings, it leads to nothing but
horrors and follies. It has been my lot to pass through experiences
which I would not wish a wicked Tatar to endure."
"For instance?" I asked.
"For instance?" repeated the engineer.
He thought a minute, smiled and said:
"For instance, take this example. More correctly, it is not an example,
but a regular drama, with a plot and a dénouement. An excellent lesson!
Ah, what a lesson!"
He poured out wine for himself and us, emptied his glass, stroked his
broad chest with his open hands, and went on, addressing himself more to
me than to the student.
"It was in the year 187--, soon after the war, and when I had just left
the University. I was going to the Caucasus, and on the way stopped for
five days in the seaside town of N. I must tell you that I was born and
grew up in that town, and so there is nothing odd in my thinking N.
extraordinarily snug, cosy, and beautiful, though for a man from
Petersburg or Moscow, life in it would be as dreary and comfortless as
in any Tchuhloma or Kashira. With melancholy I passed by the high school
where I had been a pupil; with melancholy I walked about the very
familiar park, I made a melancholy attempt to get a nearer look at
people I had not seen for a long time--all with the same melancholy.
"Among other things, I drove out one evening to the so-called
Quarantine. It was a small mangy copse in which, at some forgotten time
of plague, there really had been a quarantine station, and which was now
the resort of summer visitors. It was a drive of three miles from the
town along a good soft road. As one drove along one saw on the left the
blue sea, on the right the unending gloomy steppe; there was plenty of
air to breathe, and wide views for the eyes to rest on. The copse itself
lay on the seashore. Dismissing my cabman, I went in at the familiar
gates and first turned along an avenue leading to a little stone summer-
house which I had been fond of in my childhood. In my opinion that
round, heavy summer-house on its clumsy columns, which combined the
romantic charm of an old tomb with the ungainliness of a Sobakevitch,*
was the most poetical nook in the whole town. It stood at the edge above
the cliff, and from it there was a splendid view of the sea.
*A character in Gogol's Dead Souls.--Translator's Note.
"I sat down on the seat, and, bending over the parapet, looked down. A
path ran from the summer-house along the steep, almost overhanging
cliff, between the lumps of clay and tussocks of burdock. Where it
ended, far below on the sandy shore, low waves were languidly foaming
and softly purring. The sea was as majestic, as infinite, and as
forbidding as seven years before when I left the high school and went
from my native town to the capital; in the distance there was a dark
streak of smoke--a steamer was passing--and except for this hardly visible
and motionless streak and the sea-swallows that flitted over the water,
there was nothing to give life to the monotonous view of sea and sky. To
right and left of the summer-house stretched uneven clay cliffs.
"You know that when a man in a melancholy mood is left tête-à-tête
with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is
always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he
will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil
and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And
that, I suppose, is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-
house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with penknives. I
remember as though it were to-day; looking at the parapet I read: 'Ivan
Korolkov, May 16, 1876.' Beside Korolkov some local dreamer had
scribbled freely, adding:
"'He stood on the desolate ocean's strand, While his soul was filled
with imaginings grand.'