Part 7

So I settled down in the town of Saransk, and there settled down along with me the young wife of a young Permiak of the mercantile persuasion. She was a determined character and dearly loved my art. So there we were together. We had no money, neither had we any acquaintances. Moreover, I was weary of her. She also, from sheer ennui, began to din it into me that I did not love her. At first I endured it patiently, but after a bit I could stand it no longer: "Be off," I cried! "leave me! go to the devil!" That is exactly what I said to her. She caught up a revolver and fired it at me. The bullet lodged in my left shoulder--a little lower and I should have been in Paradise long ago. Anyhow, down I fell. But she was frightened, and in her terror leaped into a well.

And there she soddened to death.

Me they conducted to the hospital. Well, there of course ladies appeared upon the scene They revolved around me till I was able to stand on my legs again, and when I could do that I got the billet of secretary to the local police-station. Well, say what you will--to be associated with the police is more convenient than to be under police supervision. So there I lived for two or three months.

It was in those days, for the first time in my life, that I had an attack of crushing, overwhelming ennui, that most horrible of all sensations to which humanity is liable.... Everything around you ceases to be of interest, and you desire something new. You cast about hither and thither, you seek and seek, you find something, you seize it, and immediately you discover it is not what you wanted. You feel yourself led captive by something dark, you feel yourself fettered within, you feel yourself incapable of living in the world with yourself, and yet this world is more necessary to a man than everything else. A wretched condition of things!

And it brought me at last to such a pass that I married. Such a step in a man of my character is only possible in case of anguish or drunkard's head-ache.

My wife was the daughter of a priest, who lived with her mother--her father was dead--and had the free disposition of her property. She had her own house, you might even say mansion, and she had money besides. She was a handsome girl, no fool, and of a lively disposition, but she was very fond of reading books, and this had a very bad effect both upon me and her. She was constantly fishing for rules of life in all sorts of little books, and whenever she got what she wanted, she immediately proceeded to apply k personally to us both. Now, from my tenderest years morality was a thing I never could endure.... At first I laughed at my wife, but afterwards it became tiresome to listen to her. I saw that she always made a great show of ideas extracted from various little books, and bookish lore is about as suitable for a woman as his master's cast-off costume is for a lackey. We began to quarrel.... Then I made the acquaintance of a certain priest--there was one of that sort there--a rogue who could play the guitar and sing, dance the _trepak_[2] to admiration, and take his skinful like a man. To my mind he was the best fellow in the town, because one could always live a jolly life in his company, and she--that is my wife--was always running him down, and always tried to drag me into the company of the Scribes and Pharisees who surrounded her. For in the evenings all the serious and best people in the town, as she called them, used to assemble at her house; and serious enough they all were, as serious, to my mind, as gallows-birds.... I also loved reading in those days, but I never used to trouble myself about what I read, and I don't understand why people should. But they--I mean my wife and those who were with her--whenever they had read through a book, immediately became as restless as if they had hundreds of prickles beneath their skin. Now, I look upon it like this. Here's a book. Very well! An interesting book. So much the better. But every book has been written by a man, and a man cannot leap higher than his own head. All books are written with one object: they want to prove that good is good and bad is bad, and it's all one whether you have read a hundred of them or a thousand. My wife discussed her little books by the dozen, so that I began to tell her straight out that I should have had a better time of it if I had married the parson instead of her. It was only the parson who saved me from boredom, and but for him I should have bolted from my wife there and then. As soon as the Pharisees called upon her--off I went to the parson. In this way I lived through a year and a half. From sheer boredom I helped the parson in the church services. At one time I read the epistles, at another I stood in the choir and sang:

"From my youth up many passions have fought against me."

[2] A boisterous national dance of Russia.

I went through a good deal in those days, and I shall be justified for many things at the Last Day for this endurance. But now my parson was joined by a young kinswoman, and this woman came to him first because he was a widower, and in the second place because his swine had eaten him, _i.e.,_ had not eaten him entirely, but spoilt the look of him. He had, you must know, fallen down drunk in the yard and gone to sleep, and the swine had come into the courtyard and nibbled away at his ears, cheeks, and neck. It is notorious that swine eat all sorts of garbage. This diminution of his person threw my parson into a fever, and caused him to summon his kinswoman that she might cherish him and I might cherish her. Well, she and I set about the business very zealously, and with great success. But my wife found out how the land lay--found out I say, and at last it came to a quarrel. What was I to do? I gave her as good as I got. Then she said to me: "Leave my house!" Well, I thought the matter well over, and I quietly went away--right away from the town. Thus the bonds of my marriage were unloosed. If my consort is still alive she certainly regards me as happily dead to her. I have never felt the slightest desire to see her again. I also think that it is well for her to forget me. May she live in peace! Greatly did she bore me in those days.

So now behold me a free man again, living in the town of Penza! I came to loggerheads with the police; no place could be found for me here or there--no place anywhere in fact. At last I became a psalmsinger in the church. I took up the office and sang and read. In the church I had again a "public" before me, and again a loathing of it arose within me. I was a miserable labourer in a dependent position. It was horrible to me. But a merchant's wife was my salvation. She was a stout, God-fearing woman, and had a very dull time of it. And she goes and gets enamoured of me by way of spiritual edification. So I got into the habit of going to see her, and she fed me. Her husband lived at home and was a little dotty, so she had to manage the whole plaguy business. I went to her very courteously, and I said to her: "It is hard for me to be paying visits here, Sekleteya Kirillovna, precious hard," I said; "why don't you make me your assistant?" She made some bones about it at first, and said I was much mistaken, but at last she took me as her manager. And now I had a good time of it, but the town itself was a filthy hole. There was no theatre, no decent hotel, no interesting people. Of course I was bored to death, and in the midst of my boredom I wrote a letter to my uncle. During my five years' absence from Petersburg I had, of course, become very knowing. So I wrote now requesting forgiveness for all that I had done, promised never to do anything like it any more, and asked, among other things, whether it was not possible for me to live at Petersburg. My uncle wrote it was possible, but I must be careful. Then I broke with the merchant's wife.

You must know that she was stupid, fat, stodgy, and ugly. I had had mistresses of great repute, elegant and sensible gossips every one of them. Very well! Yet with all my other mistresses I had parted scurvily; either I had driven them away with wrath and contumely, or they had played me some nasty trick or other. But this Sekleteya had inspired me with respect by reason of her very simplicity.

"Farewell," I said to her; "farewell, my dearly-beloved! God grant thee prosperity!"

"And does it not pain thee to part with me?" said she.

"What!" I cried, "how can I help being pained at parting with one so beautiful and wise?"

"I would never have parted from thee," said she, "but I suppose it must be so, nevertheless I will always remember thee. Well, now, thou art a free bird again, and canst fly away whithersoever thou desirest," and she burst into tears.

"Forgive me, Sekleteya, I beg," said I.

"What!" she cried, "I owe thee thanks, not forgiveness."

"Thanks?" I asked, "how and for what?"

"I'll tell thee. Thou art this sort of man. Thou wouldst think nothing of casting me adrift in the wide world, I put myself wholly into thy hands, and thou mightest have robbed me as thou didst like, and I would not have prevented thee--and all this thou knewest. But thou hast repaid confidence with confidence, and I know how much of mine thou hast consumed in these days--about four thousand in all. Another in thy place," she said, "would have gobbled up the whole pot and emptied the saucer on the hearth as well."

That's what she said. Well, she was a kind-hearted old thing, that I will say.

I gave her a parting kiss, and with a light heart and five thousand roubles in my pocket--no doubt she had taken these also into consideration--I appeared at St. Petersburg. I lived like a baron, went to the theatre, made acquaintances, sometimes from sheer ennui played on the boards, but I played much more frequently at cards. Cards are a capital occupation. You sit down at a table, and in the course of a single night you die and rise again ten times over. It is exciting to know that within the next few moments your last roubles may dribble away, and you yourself may step down into the street a beggar, with nothing but suicide or highway robbery before you. It is also good to know that your neighbour or partner has, with reference to _his_ last rouble, exactly the same ticklish and cruelly poignant sensation as you yourself have had not so very long before him. To see red and pale excited faces, tremulous with the terror of being beaten and with the greed of gain, to look at them and win their cards away, one after the other--ah! how strangely that excites the nerves and the blood!... You win a card--and it is just as if you stole away from the man's heart a bit of warm flesh with the nerves and blood.... That's being happy if you like! This constant risk of falling is the finest thing in life, and the finest thought in life was well expressed by the poet:

"Fierce contest is a rapturous bliss, E'en on the marge of the abyss."

Yes, there is rapture in it, and, in general, it is only possible to feel happy when you are risking something. The more risk--the larger and fuller the life. Have you ever happened to starve? It has been my luck not to eat anything for twice twenty-four hours at a stretch.... And look you, when the belly begins to prey upon itself, when you feel your vitals drying up and dying with hunger--then, for the sake of a bit of bread, you are ready to kill a man, a child; you are ready for anything, and this capacity for crime has its own peculiar poetry, it is a very precious sensation, and, having once experienced it, you have a great respect for yourself.

However, let us continue our varied story. As it is, it is spinning itself out as long as a funeral procession, in which I occupy the place of the dear departed. Ugh! what foolish comparisons do crowd into my head. Yet it is true, I suppose, though it is none the wiser, after all, for being that. Apropos, Mr. Balzac has a very true and timely expression--"It is as stupid as a fact." Stupid? Well, let it pass. What do I care about the difference between stupid and wise? Well, as I was saying, I lived at St. Petersburg. It was a good sort of town, but it would be as good again if one half of its inhabitants were drowned in that tiresome sea which is always flop-flopping around it. I lived a merry, easy life at St Petersburg for two or three years, under the protection of a lady who had taken a great fancy to me; but then, in order to oblige a friend, I seriously offended the police, and they asked me whither I would like to go out of St. Petersburg. I suggested Tsarskoe-Selo. "No," they said, "you must go further." At last we effected a compromise, and Tula was fixed upon. "Very well, let it be Tula then," said they. "You may go even further," they said, "if you like, but you must not appear here till three years have expired. Your documents we will keep by us in the meantime as a memento of you, and permit us to offer you in exchange a transit certificate to Tula. Try within four-and-twenty hours to take your flight from hence." Well, thought I, what am I to do now? One must obey one's superiors, how can one help doing so?

Well, there I was. I sold all my property to my landlady for a mere song, and posted off to my protectress. She had given orders that I was not to be admitted, the minx! I then went on to two or three others of my acquaintances--they met me as if I were a leper. I spat upon them all, and repaired to a holy place I knew of, there to spend the last hours of my life at Petersburg. At six o'clock in the morning I issued from thence without a farthing in my pocket--I had played at cards and was stony broke! So thoroughly had a high official cleared me out that I was even lost in admiration at his talent, without feeling the least humiliation at having been beaten. What was I to do next? I went, why I know not, to the Moscow Station, entered and mingled with the crowd. I saw the train to Moscow come in. I got into a carriage and sat down. We passed two or three stations, and then they drove me out in triumph. They wanted to report me, asked who I was; but when I showed them my testimonial they left me in peace. "Go on further," said they, and I went. Ten versts I traversed, I grew tired, and felt that I must have something to eat. There was a sentry-box, belonging to a sentry of a line regiment. I went up to him: "Give me a bit of bread, dear little friend," I said. He looked at me. He gave me not only bread but a large cup of milk. I passed the night with him, for the first time in my life in vagabond fashion, in the open air, on straw, in the field behind the sentry-box. I awoke next day, the sun was shining, the air like champagne, green things all round, and the birds singing. I took some more bread from the sentry and went on further.

You should understand that in a vagabond life there is something that draws you on and on, something that quite swallows you up. It is pleasant to feel yourself free from obligations, free from the various little fetters tying down your existence when you live among men; free from all those bagatelles obstructing your life to such an extent that it ceases to be a satisfaction, and becomes a weary burden--a heavy basket-like burden in the nature of an obligation to dress becomingly, to speak becomingly, and do everything according to an accepted form and not as you would have it On meeting an acquaintance, for instance, you must use the accepted formula and say: How do you do?--instead of: Be d----d! as you would sometimes like to say.

In general--if I may speak the truth freely--these foolishly-ceremonious usages are such as to turn the mutual relations of respectable citizens into a wearisome comedy. Nay, even into a base comedy, for nobody ever calls anybody a fool or a villain to his face--or if it be done sometimes it is only in an access of that sincerity which we call anger.

Now the vagabond position is clean outside all these tinsel trappings. The very circumstance that you renounce all the earlier conveniences of life without regret, and can exist without them, gives you a pleasant sense of elevation in your own eyes. You take up an unreservedly indulgent attitude towards yourself--though for the matter of that I for one have never been severe towards myself. T have never taken myself to task, the teeth of my conscience have never gnawed me, nor have I ever been scratched by the claws of my reason. You must know that very early, and as if insensibly, I appropriated the most simple and sensible of philosophies: however you may live you must die all the same. Why then come to loggerheads with yourself--why drag yourself by the tail to the left when your nature with all her might pricks you on to the right? Pah! I cannot endure people who are always rending themselves in twain. Why do they strive and strive? Supposing I were to talk to some of these monstrosities, this is what I should ask them: "Why do you go on like this? Why do you make such a fuss?" "I am striving after self-perfection," he would say. "But what for?--what on earth for?" "Because human perfection is the sense of life." "Well, I don't understand that at all. Now if you talk about the perfection of a tree, the sense of your words would be quite clear to me. Its perfection is to be measured by its utility; you may use it for making cart shafts or coffins, or anything else useful to man. Very well! But your striving after perfection is entirely your own affair. But tell me, why do you come to me and try to convert me to your faith?" "Because," he would say, "you are a beast, and don't seek out the sense of life." "But I have _found_ it if I am a brute, and the consciousness of my brutality does not overwhelm me." "You lie," he would say; "if you are conscious of it you ought to try to improve." "Improve? How? Here I am, you see, living my own life in the world; my mind and my feelings are at one with each other, and word and deed are in perfect harmony." "That," he would say, "is vileness and cynicism." And so the whole lot of them would argue of course. I feel that they are liars and fools--I feel that, I say, and I cannot but despise them. For indeed--I know what people are--if everything which is mean, dirty, and evil to-day, were to be declared by you to-morrow upright, pure, and good--all these snouts, without any effort of their own, would to-morrow be upright, pure, and good. One thing only would be necessary--the cowardice to annihilate self within themselves. That's how it is.

That's putting it strong, you'll say. Bosh! It _is_ so. Let it be strongly put, it's none the less right for all that Look now! I'll put it like this: Serve God or the Devil, but don't serve God and the Devil. A good rascal is always better than a shoddy honest man. There's black and there's white, but mix them and you only get a dirty smudge. In all my life I have only met with shoddy honest folks--the sort you know whose honesty is piecemeal, as it were, just as if they had picked it up beneath windows as beggars gather crumbs. This sort of honesty is parti-coloured, badly stuck together, as if with pegs; it is the bookish honesty, which is learnt by repetition, and serves men in much the same way as their best trousers, which are trotted out on state occasions. And, in general, the best part of good people is made up for Sunday use; they keep it not in them but by them, for show, to take a rise out of each other.... I _have_ met with people naturally good, but they are rarely to be met with, and only among simple folks outside the walls of towns. You feel at once that these really _are_ good. And you see that they are born good. Yes.

But be that as it may. Deuce take the whole lot of them, good or bad. What's Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba!

I am well aware that I am relating to you the facts of my life briefly and superficially, and that it will be difficult for you to understand the why and the wherefore, but that's my affair. It's not the facts but the inclinations that are of importance. Facts are rot and rubbish. I can make all sorts of facts if I like. For instance, I can take this knife and stick it in your throat. That would be a fact of the first order. Or if I were to stick myself with it that also would be a fact, and in general you may make all sorts of facts according to inclination. Inclinations--there you have the whole thing. Inclinations produce facts, and they create ideas--and ideals. And you know what ideals are--eh? Ideals are simply crutches, expressly invented for the period when man has become a wretched brute, obliged to walk on his hind paws only. On raising his head from the grey earth he sees above him the blue sky, and is dazzled by the splendour of its brightness. Then, in his stupidity, he says to himself: I will reach it. And thenceforth he hobbles about the earth on these crutches, holding himself upright on his hind paws with their assistance to this very day.

Pray don't imagine that I also am climbing up to Heaven--I have never experienced any such desire--I only say it because it sounds well.

But I have let my story get knotted and tangled again. However, it doesn't matter. It is only in romances that the skein of events revolves regularly; but our life is an irregular, clueless jumble. Why do they pay money for romances while I grow old in vain? The Devil only knows.

Well, let's get on.... This wandering life pleased me--pleased me all the more because I soon discovered a means of subsistence. Once, as I was on the trot, I perceived coming towards me--a Manor House stood forth picturesquely in the distance--three highly genteel figures, a man and two ladies. The man already had some grey in his beard, and looked very genteel about the eyes; the faces of the ladies were somewhat pinched, but they also were highly genteel. I put on the mug of a martyr, drew up level with them, and begged for a night's lodging at the Manor House. They looked at one another, and deliberated a long time among themselves as if it were a matter of great importance. I bowed politely, thanked them, and went on without making too much haste. But they turned back and came after me. We entered into conversation. Who was I, whence did I come, what was I about? They were of a human temperament--liberal views, and their very questions suggested such answers to me that by the time we had reached the Manor House I had lied to them--the Devil only knows how much! I had been a student, I had taught the people, my soul was held captive to all manner of ideas, etc., etc. And all this simply because they themselves would have it so. All I did was not to stand in the way of their taking me for what they wanted to take me for. When I began to reflect how hard the part would be that they wanted me to play, I was not a little out of conceit with myself, I can tell you. But after dinner I quite understood that it was for my own interest to play this part, for they ate with a truly divine taste. They ate with feeling, ate like civilised people. After the meal they conducted me to a little apartment, the man provided me with trousers and other requisites--and, speaking generally, they treated me humanely. Well, and I, in return, loosed the reins of my imagination for their behoof.

Queen of Heaven, how I lied! Talk of Khlestakov![3] Khlestakov was an idiot! I lied without ever losing the consciousness that I _was_ lying, although it was my delight to lie my utmost. I lied to such an extent that even the Black Sea would have turned red if it could have heard my lying. These good people listened to me with delight--listened to me and fed me, and looked after me as if I had been a sick child of their own family. And I in return made up all sorts of things for them. Now it was that I profited by all the good little books I had ever read, and by the learned disputations of my wife's Scribes and Pharisees.