But on the following day he returned.
Ivan Michailovitch told him the story of his life. He offered him a
simple hospitality, made tea, and even had the room heated. He spoke
rather disconnectedly, with half-closed eyes and a morbid, suffering
smile. Now he would relate episodes of his youth, now of his later
years. The burden was always the same: oppression, need, persecution,
suffering--suffering without measure. Wherever one went, one saw
crushed hearts, happiness stamped out, and personalities destroyed.
His parents had gone under in poverty, his brothers and sisters had
drifted away and were lost, his friends had fallen in wars or died in
exile. It was a life without centre or light or hope--a world of hate
and malevolence, cruelty and darkness.
Christian sat there and listened until late into the night.
Next they met in a coffee house, an ugly place which Christian would
once not have endured, and sat until far into the night. Often they
sat in silence; and this silence tormented Christian, and kept him in
a state of unbearable tension. But his expression was a gentle one.
They took walks along the river, or through the streets and parks in
the snow. Ivan Michailovitch spoke of Pushkin and Byelinsky, of Bakunin
and Herzen, of Alexander I and the legend of his translation to heaven,
and of the peasants--the poor, dark folk. He spoke of the innumerable
martyrs of forgotten names, men and women whose actions and sufferings
beat at the heart of mankind, and whose blood, as he said, was the red
dawn of the sunrise of a new and other age.
So Christian kept disappearing from his home, and no one knew where he
went.
Once Ivan Michailovitch said: “I am told that a workingman made a
murderous assault on your father. The man was condemned to seven years
in the penitentiary yesterday.”
“Yes, it is true,” Christian replied. “What was his name? I have
forgotten it.”
It turned out that the man’s name was neither Schmidt nor Müller,
but Roderick Kroll. Ivan Michailovitch knew it. “There’s a wife and
five little children left in extreme distress,” he said. “Have you
ever tried for a moment to grasp imaginatively what that means--real
distress? Is your imagination powerful enough to realize it? Have you
ever seen the countenance of a human being that suffered hunger? There
is this woman. She bore five children, and loves these children just as
your mother loves hers. Very well. The drawers are empty, the hearth
is cold, the bedding is in pawn, their clothes and shoes are in rags.
These children are human, each one, just as you and I are. They have
the same instinctive expectation of content, bread, quiet sleep, and
pure air, that you have or Herr von Crammon or countless others, who
never realize reflectively that all these things are theirs. Very well.
Now the world does not only feign to know nothing of all this, not only
resents being reminded of it, but actually demands of these beings that
they are to be silent, that they accept and endure hunger, nakedness,
cold, disease, the theft of their natural rights, and the insolent
injustice of it all, as something quite natural and inevitable. Have
you ever thought about that?”
“It seems to me,” Christian replied, softly, “that I have never thought
at all.”
“This man,” Ivan Michailovitch continued, “this Roderick Kroll, so
far as I have been able to learn, was systematically exasperated to
the very quick. He was an enthusiastic socialist, but somewhat of an
annoyance even to his own party on account of his extreme views and
his violent propaganda. The masters dug the ground from under his
feet. They embittered him by the constant sting of small intrigues,
and drove him to despair. The intention was to render him harmless and
to force him to silence. But tell me this: is there an extreme on the
side of the oppressed that is so unfair, so insolent, so damnable as
the extreme on the other side--the arrogance, luxury, revelling, the
hardness of heart, and the insensate extravagance of every day and
every hour? You did not even know the name of that man!”
Christian stood still. The wind blew the snow into his face, and wet
his forehead and cheeks. “What shall I do, Ivan Michailovitch?” he
asked, slowly.
Ivan Michailovitch stopped too. “What shall I do?” he cried. “That
is what they all ask. That is what Prince Jakovlev Grusin asked, one
of our chief magnates and marshal of the nobility in the province of
Novgorod. After he had starved his peasants, plundered his tenants,
sent his officials to Siberia, violated girls, seduced women, driven
his own sons to despair, spent his life in gluttony, drunkenness, and
whoring, and heaped crime upon crime--he went into a monastery in the
seventy-fourth year of his age, and day after day kneeled in his cell
and cried: ‘What shall I do? My Lord and Saviour, what shall I do?’ And
no one, naturally, had an answer for him. I have heard the question
asked softly by another, whose soul was clean and white. He was going
to his death, and his age was seventeen. Nine men with their rifles
stood by the trench of the fortress. He approached, reeling a little,
and his guiltless soul asked: ‘Father in Heaven, what shall I do? What
shall I do?’”
Ivan Michailovitch walked on, and Christian followed him. “And we poor
men, we terribly poor men,” Ivan Becker said, “what shall _we_ do?”