“But let me introduce my best friend,” began Lupikhin suddenly, in a sharp voice, seizing the sugary gentleman by the arm. “Don’t resist, Kiril Selifanich,” he added. “We’re not going to eat you. Yes,” he continued, while the embarrassed Kiril bowed as awkwardly as if his stomach was falling off, “let me introduce this remarkable gentleman. He enjoyed excellent health until the age of fifty, then suddenly had the idea of treating his eyes, as a result of which he lost one of them. Since then he has been treating his peasants—with the same fortunate results. And they of course are more devoted to him than ever.”
“There he goes,” murmured Kiril Selifanich, and burst out laughing.
“Carry on, my friend, just carry on,” repeated Lupikhin. “I’m awfully afraid you may be appointed a justice—you certainly will be, just you see. Well, of course, all the thinking will be done for you by the jurymen; but, even so, one’s got to be able to express a thought, even when it is someone else’s. Suppose the Governor calls—and asks why the judge is stammering; well, suppose they say, ‘It’s a case of paralysis.’ ‘Well, bleed him, then,’ the Governor will say. But in your position it is unseemly, you’re bound to agree.”
The sweet-looking gentleman was simply rocking.
“Just look at him laughing,” Lupikhin continued, with a vindictive glance at the quivering belly of Kiril Selifanich. “And why shouldn’t he,” he added, turning to me; “he’s well-fed, healthy, no children, peasants unmortgaged—under treatment from him, what’s more—and a wife who’s half-cracked.” Kiril turned slightly away as though he hadn’t quite heard, and went on guffawing away as before. “I’m laughing too, although my wife ran away with a surveyor.” He showed his teeth. “Didn’t you know? Of course, of course. She just went and ran off and left me a letter saying: ‘Dear Pyotr Petrovich, Forgive me; carried away by passion, I am departing with the friend of my heart.’ And the surveyor only got her by not cutting his nails and wearing tight-fitting trousers. You’re surprised? There’s an outspoken fellow, you’re thinking. Good heavens, yes! We steppe-folk always tell God’s own truth. But let’s go away over here. . . . Why should we stand beside this judge-to-be?”
He took my arm and we went over to a window.
“I pass hereabouts as a wit,” he told me in the course of conversation, “but don’t you believe it, I’m just an ill-natured fellow roaring aloud; that’s why I’m so free and easy about it. And why should I stand on ceremony, if it comes to that? I don’t care a farthing for anyone’s opinion; I’ve no axe to grind; I’m an ill-natured fellow—and what of it? At least an ill-natured fellow stands in no need of wit. But you’ll never believe how refreshing it is . . . Well, for instance, take our host! What makes him run, I ask you—and keep on glancing at the time, smiling, sweating, looking important, and starving us to death? What is there so wonderful about a Personage? Look, he’s started running again—tripped up, too, just look.”
And Lupikhin laughed wheezily.
“The only pity of it is, there are no ladies,” he continued with a deep sigh. “It’s a bachelor dinner—but it’s the other sort that does good to fellows like us. Look, look,” he exclaimed suddenly, “here comes Prince Kozelsky—that tall man there, with a beard and yellow gloves. You can see at once that he’s lived abroad . . . he always arrives late like this. I can tell you, he’s stupid enough for a pair of merchant’s horses; but you may have noticed how condescendingly he talks to the rest of us, how magnanimously he deigns to smile at the civilities of our famished mothers and daughters! . . . And at times he tries to be witty, too, though he only comes here on visits—and how witty! It’s exactly like sawing with a blunt knife at a piece of twine. He can’t stand me . . . I shall go and say how do you do to him.”
And Lupikhin ran off to meet the prince.
“Here comes my special enemy,” he said, suddenly returning to me: “you see that fat fellow, with a brown face and a bristly head—the one who’s squeezing his cap, and creeping along the wall, and looking out in all directions like a wolf? I sold him, for four hundred rubles, a horse that was worth a thousand, and that dumb animal now has every right to despise me; and yet he’s so bereft of all power of thought, especially in the morning, until he’s had his tea, or immediately after dinner, that you could say to him ‘Good day’ and he’ll answer ‘What for?’ And here comes the Excellency,” continued Lupikhin: “the retired, ruined Excellency. He’s got a sugar-beet daughter and a scrofulous factory . . . I’m sorry, I got it wrong . . . well, anyway, you understand. Oh! The architect’s turned up, too! He’s a German, but he’s got whiskers and doesn’t know his job. Very unusual! . . . But indeed, what’s the use of his knowing his job? All he needs do is take bribes, and run up more columns and pillars for the pillars of our nobility!”
Lupikhin chuckled again . . . But suddenly a tremulous excitement spread through the whole house. The great Personage had arrived. Our host fairly rushed into the hall. After him pressed a few faithful domestics and some assiduous guests. The roar of talk turned to a soft, pleasant buzz, like the springtime humming of bees in their native hives. Only that irrepressible wasp, Lupikhin, and that magnificent drone, Kozelsky, failed to lower their voices . . . And now, at last, the queen bee, the great Personage, came in. Hearts went out to meet him, seated bodies arose; even the gentleman who had bought Lupikhin’s horse cheap, even he pressed his chin into his breast. The Personage kept his dignity admirably; with a backward movement of his head, as if bowing, he pronounced a few words of approbation, each one of which began with the letter “a” pronounced drawlingly through the nose; he looked at Prince Kozelsky’s beard as angrily as if he wanted to eat him, and gave the ruined Excellency with the factory and the daughter the index finger of his left hand. After a few minutes, during which the Personage managed to observe twice that he was very glad not to be late for dinner, the whole company made its way to the dining-room, the bigwigs leading.
Need I tell the reader how the great Personage was given the place of honor between the Excellency and the Marshal of Nobility of the Province, a man with a frank, dignified expression, completely in keeping with his starched shirt-front, immense waistcoat, and round snuff-box full of French snuff; how the host fussed, ran about, worried, pressed his guests to fall to, smiled at the great Personage’s back as he passed, and, standing in a corner like a schoolboy, hurriedly gulped down a plate of soup or a morsel of beef; how the butler handed round a fish a yard long with a bouquet in its mouth; how liveried, severe-looking footmen gloomily plied each gentleman, now with Malaga, now with dry Madeira; how almost all the gentlemen, especially those of a certain age, as if in reluctant obedience to a sense of duty, drank down glass after glass, and how at last the champagne bottles popped and the toasts began coming out: this is probably all too familiar to the reader. But I was especially struck with a story told by the great Personage himself in the midst of a general, joyful silence. Someone, acquainted with modern literature, I think it was the ruined Excellency, had referred to the influence of women in general and in particular their influence on young men. “Yes, yes,” rejoined the Personage. “That’s true; young men must be kept under strict obedience to orders, or else they go off their heads at the sight of a skirt.” A smile of childish hilarity darted over the faces of all the guests; one gentleman even had a look of gratitude in his eye. “Because young men are fools.” Probably to sound important, the great Personage now and then altered the normal accentuation of his syllables. “Take my own son Ivan,” he continued; “the fool’s only just twenty, and suddenly he says to me: ‘Please, father, I want to get married!’ I tell him he’s a fool, he must see some service first . . . Well, there were tears of despair . . . But I made him. . . .” These last words the Personage pronounced with his stomach rather than with his lips; he paused, and looked majestically at his neighbor, the Excellency, meanwhile raising his brows far higher than one could have thought possible. His Excellency leaned his head amiably to one side and blinked wit
h extraordinary speed, while still gazing at the Personage. “So now,” began the Personage again, “he writes to me saying, ‘Thank you, father, for teaching me such a good lesson.’ . . . That’s how one ought to treat them.” All the guests, needless to say, were in full agreement with the narrator, and seemed to gain in animation from the pleasure and instruction they had received. . . . After dinner the whole company rose and moved to the drawing-room with a noise that was loud, but all the same correct, and seemingly designed expressly for this particular occasion. . . . They sat down to cards.
Somehow or other I got through the evening and, after telling my coachman to harness my carriage at five o’clock the next morning, I retired to sleep. But I was fated that day to make a most remarkable new acquaintance.
Owing to the number of guests who had turned up, no one was able to sleep alone. In the small, greenish, dampish room to which Alexander Mikhailich’s butler conducted me, I found another guest, already fully undressed. At the sight of me he darted nimbly under the blanket, covered himself with it right up to his nose, fidgeted a bit on the yielding feather-bed, and lay still, looking sharply out from below the round brim of a paper night-cap. I went over to the other bed (there were only two of them in the room), undressed, and lay down between the damp sheets. My neighbor turned over in bed . . . I wished him good night.
Half an hour went by. Try as I might, I could not get to sleep. . . . One vague, useless thought after another went past in endless file, with the stubborn monotony of buckets on a dredging machine.
“Can’t you sleep?” said my neighbor.
“I can’t, as you see,” I answered. “Nor you either?”
“I never feel sleepy.”
“How so?”
“It’s like this. I fall asleep without knowing how; I lie and lie, and then I go to sleep.”
“Then why d’you go to bed before you feel sleepy?”
“What else d’you expect me to do?”
I didn’t answer my neighbor’s question.
“I’m surprised,” he went on, after a slight pause, “that there are no fleas here. Wherever d’you think they’ve got to?”
“You speak as if you missed them,” I remarked.
“No, I don’t miss them, but I like due sequence in all things.”
I say, I thought to myself, what words he uses! My neighbor was silent again.
“Would you like to have a bet with me?” he said suddenly, in a rather loud voice.
“About what?”
My neighbor was beginning to entertain me.
“H’m, about what? I’ll tell you about what. I’ll bet that you take me for a fool.”
“For goodness’ sake,” I murmured in amazement.
“For a boor, a wild man from the steppes . . . Admit it . . .”
“I haven’t the pleasure of knowing you,” I rejoined. . . . “How you can have concluded . . .”
“How! Why, by the very sound of your voice: you answer me so casually. . . . But I’m not at all what you think . . .”
“If you please . . .”
“No, if you please. In the first place, I speak French no worse than you, and German even better than you; secondly, I have lived abroad for three years; in Berlin alone I spent eight months. I have made a thorough study of Hegel, my dear sir, and I know Goethe by heart; and into the bargain I was for a long time in love with the daughter of a German professor, and got married, at home, to a consumptive young lady, a bald but very remarkable person. So I’m a bird of the same feather as yourself; I’m no bumpkin from the steppes, as you suppose. . . . I too am a prey to reflection, and there’s nothing spontaneous about me at all.”
I raised my head and gazed at the strange fellow with redoubled attention. In the dim glow of the night-light I could hardly make out his features.
“You see, now you’re looking at me,” he continued, straightening his night-cap, “and you’re probably wondering how it was that you never noticed me this evening. I’ll tell you why not; because I never raise my voice; because I hide behind other people, stand behind doors, speak to nobody; because a butler with a tray, going past me, raises his elbow beforehand to the level of my chest. And why docs all this happen? For two reasons: first, I’m poor, and secondly . . . I’ve resigned myself . . . Tell me the truth, you didn’t notice me.”
“I certainly had not the pleasure . . .”
“There you are, there you are,” he interrupted me. “I knew it.” He lifted himself slightly and folded his arms; the long shadow of his night-cap twisted its way from the wall up to the ceiling.
“But admit it,” he added, with a sudden sidelong look at me. “I must strike you as a very odd fellow, as what they call an original, or perhaps, if you like, something even worse: perhaps you think that I’m just pretending to be odd?”
“I must repeat to you again, that I don’t know you . . .”
He looked down for a moment.
“Why I’ve so unexpectedly got into conversation with a complete stranger like yourself—the Lord alone knows!” He sighed. “Not because of any affinity between our souls! You and I are both decent people, that’s to say, egoists: you haven’t the slightest concern with me, nor I with you; isn’t that so? But we can neither of us get to sleep . . . so why not talk? I’m in good form, too, which seldom happens to me. I’m shy, you see, not shy in the sense of being an insignificant wretch of a provincial, but in the sense of being a man of intense self-esteem. But sometimes, under the influence of favorable circumstances, of events which I’m not in a position to determine or foresee, my shyness vanishes completely, as now for instance. Now you could put me face to face with the Dalai Llama—and I would just ask him for a pinch of snuff. But perhaps you want to go to sleep?”
“On the contrary,” I rejoined hurriedly, “I’m enjoying our conversation very much.”
“That is, I am amusing you, you mean . . . So much the better . . . And so, I must inform you, I’m described hereabouts as an original, described, that is, by those who happen, in the midst of other trifles, to mention my name: ‘For no one feels greatly concerned with my estate.’ They want to hurt me . . . Oh, my God, if they only knew . . . Why, in fact, I’m dying just because there’s absolutely nothing original about me, nothing but such pranks as, for example, my present conversation with you; pranks that are not worth a brass farthing. It’s the cheapest and basest form of originality.”
He turned his face towards me and threw up his hands.
“My dear sir,” he exclaimed, “my opinion is that only originals are fit to live on earth: only they have the right to live. Mon verre n’est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre, as someone said. You see,” he added in a low voice, “how pure my French pronunciation is. What does it matter to me that someone has a high, capacious brow, understands everything, knows a lot, keeps up with the times—if he’s got absolutely nothing individual and peculiar to himself? If there’s one more storage-place for platitudes in the world—who gets any satisfaction out of that? No, be as stupid as you like, but in your own way! Have your own smell, your individual smell, that’s the answer! And don’t think that I expect a great deal from this smell . . . Quite the contrary! There are any number of such originals; look where you will, you’ll see one; every man alive is an original, and yet I don’t happen to be one of them!
“But all the same,” he continued after a pause, “in my young days, what expectations I aroused! What a high opinion I cherished of myself, before I left to go abroad, and immediately after my return! Well, abroad I kept my ears pricked, I went my own way, as befits those of us who know a thing or two, but finally realize that they don’t even know as far as the letter ‘A’.
“Original, original!” he repeated, reproachfully shaking his head. “They call me an original . . . but in practice it seems that in the whole world there’s no man less original than your very humble servant. I must have been born imitating someone else . . . My God! I even live in imitation of various favorite a
uthors of mine. I live by the sweat of my brow. I studied, fell in love, eventually got married, all as it were against my own will, but carrying out a duty or a lesson—goodness knows what!”
He tore his night-cap from his head and threw it down on the bed.
“Would you like me to tell you about my life?” he asked me abruptly. “Or rather certain features of my life?”
“Please do.”
“Or no; I’d do better to tell you how I got married. You see, marriage is the principal thing, the touchstone of the whole man; it reflects like a mirror. . . . No, that comparison is too hackneyed. . . . Forgive me, I must take a pinch of snuff.”
He took out a snuff-box from under his pillow, opened it, and began speaking again, waving the open snuff-box.
“Now, my dear sir, put yourself in my shoes. Just tell me, I ask you, what good could I have derived from Hegel’s Encyclopædia? Just tell me, what is there in common between this Encyclopædia and life in Russia? How can one be expected to apply it to our existence, not the Encyclopædia only, but German philosophy in general, or rather German science?”
He started up in bed and began muttering under his breath, his teeth fiercely clenched.
“So that’s how it is, is it? . . . Then why did you go trailing off abroad, why didn’t you stay at home and study the life of your environment on the spot? You would have learned to know its needs and its future, and you would also have seen more clearly what your own calling was to be . . . But, for goodness’ sake,” he went on, with another change of tone, as if in timid self-justification, “how can the likes of us be expected to learn what no genius has yet written in any book! I should have been delighted to take lessons from the Russian way of life—but it keeps mum, the old dear, ‘Just take me as I am,’ it says; but I can’t manage that; I need the upshot of it, the conclusion. . . . ‘Conclusion!’ it says. ‘Here’s the conclusion for you: listen to our learned Muscovites—aren’t they “nightingales”?’ Yes, there’s the trouble, that they sing like nightingales from Kursk and don’t talk as the people do . . . So I thought to myself: after all, science is the same everywhere and truth’s the same too—and so I went off with God’s blessing and landed in a strange country, among the heretics . . . What can you expect? I was carried away by youth and pride. I didn’t want to run to fat before my time, although it’s supposed to be quite healthy to do so. And anyway, if Nature gave you no flesh, how can you expect your body to run to fat?
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