Sketches from a Hunter's Album (35 page)

Someone – it may have been the penniless general, a man acquainted with the latest literary trends – remarked on the influence of women in general and particularly their influence on young men. ‘Yes, indeed,' said the dignitary in amplification, ‘that is true. But young men should be kept under the strictest control, otherwise they tend to go out of their minds over any and every kind of skirt.' (Childishly happy smiles sped across the faces of all the guests; one landowner's expression even lit up with gratitude.) ‘
Bee
-cause young men are stupid.' (The dignitary, probably for the sake of grandness, sometimes altered the accepted accentuation of words.) ‘Take, for example, my son Ivan,' he continued. ‘The fool's only just twenty, but he comes to me suddenly and says: “Permit me, sir, to get married.” I tell him: “You're a fool, do your service first…” Well, of course, despair, tears… But in my view that's it…' (The dignitary pronounced the words ‘that's it' more with his stomach than his lips; he paused and directed a majestic glance at his neighbour, the general, at the same time raising his brows quite unexpectedly high. The civil-service general inclined his head pleasantly a little on one side and with extraordinary rapidity blinked one eye, which was turned towards the dignitary.) ‘And now what d'you think,' the dignitary started up again, ‘now he himself writes to me and says: “Thank you, sir, for teaching me not to be so foolish.” That's how one ought to handle such matters.' All the guests, needless to say, were in full agreement with the speaker and apparently grew quite enlivened at receiving such pleasure and such injunctions. After dinner the entire company rose and moved into the drawing-room with a great deal more noisiness, though it was still within the bounds of decency and on this occasion literally justified. They all sat down to cards.

Somehow or other I passed the time until it was evening and, having ordered my driver to have my carriage ready for five o'clock the next morning, I retired to bed. But during the course of that same day it still remained for me to make the acquaintance of a certain remarkable person.

Owing to the number of guests no one slept in a room by himself. The small, greenish, dampish room, to which my host's butler led me, was already occupied by another guest, who had already undressed completely. Seeing me, he swiftly plunged under the counterpane, with which he covered himself right up to his nose, twisted and turned a little on the crumbling feather mattress and grew still, looking sharply up from beneath the rounded rim of his cotton nightcap. I went up to the other bed (there were only two of them in the room), undressed and lay down between the damp sheets. My neighbour began turning over in his bed. I wished him good night.

Half an hour passed. Despite all my efforts, I was quite unable to get to sleep: an endless succession of vague, unnecessary thoughts dragged one after another persistently and monotonously through my mind just like the buckets of a water-lifting machine.

‘It seems you're not asleep?' my neighbour said.

‘As you see,' I answered. ‘And you're also wakeful?'

‘I'm always wakeful.'

‘How is that?'

‘That's how it is. I go to sleep without knowing why; I lie and lie and then I'm asleep.'

‘Why, then, do you get into bed before you feel like sleeping?'

‘What do you suggest I should do?'

I did not reply to my neighbour's question.

‘It surprises me,' he continued after a short silence, ‘that there are no fleas here. Where, one wonders, have they got to?'

‘You sound as if you regret not having them,' I remarked.

‘No, I don't regret not having them; but I do like things to be consistent.'

Listen to the words he's using, I thought.

My neighbour again grew silent.

‘Would you like to make a bet with me?' he suddenly asked fairly loudly.

‘About what?' My neighbour was beginning to amuse me.

‘Hmm… about what? About this: I feel sure that you take me for a fool.'

‘If you please…' I mumbled in surprise.

‘For a country bumpkin, an ignoramus… Admit it.'

‘I do not have the pleasure of knowing you,' I protested. ‘How can you deduce…'

‘How! I can deduce from the very sound of your voice: you've been answering me so casually… But I'm not at all what you think.'

‘Allow me…'

‘No,
you
allow me. In the first place, I speak French no worse than you, and German even better. In the second place, I spent three years abroad: in Berlin alone I lived about eight months. I have studied Hegel, my good sir, and I know Goethe by heart. What is more, I was for quite a while in love with the daughter of a German professor and then, back here, I got married to a consumptive lady – a bald-headed but very remarkable individual. It would seem, then, that I'm of the same breed as you. I'm not a country bumpkin, as you suppose… I'm also consumed by introspection and there's nothing straightforward about me whatever.'

I raised my head and looked with redoubled interest at this odd fellow. In the faint illumination of the night-light I could scarcely make out his features.

‘There you are now, you're looking at me,' he continued, adjusting his nightcap, ‘and no doubt you're asking yourself: how is it that I didn't notice him today? I'll tell you why you didn't notice me – because I do not raise my voice; because I hide behind others, standing behind doors, talking with no one; because when the butler passes me with a tray he raises his elbow beforehand to the level of my chest… And why do all these things happen? For two reasons: firstly, I am poor, and secondly, I have become reconciled… Tell me the truth, you didn't notice me, did you?'

‘I really did not have the pleasure…'

‘Oh, sure, sure,' he interrupted me, ‘I knew it.'

He raised himself a little and folded his arms; the long shadow of his nightcap bent round from the wall to the ceiling.

‘But admit it,' he added, suddenly glancing sideways at me, ‘I must seem to you to be an extremely odd fellow, an original character, as they say, or perhaps something even worse, let's suppose: perhaps you think I'm trying to make myself out to be an eccentric?'

‘Again I must repeat to you that I don't know you…'

He lowered his head for an instant.

‘Why I should've started saying these things quite out of the blue to you, someone I don't know at all – the Lord, the Lord alone knows!' (He sighed.) ‘It's not due to any kinship of souls! Both you and I, we're both respectable people – we're egoists, that's to say. My business is not the slightest concern of yours, nor yours of mine, isn't that so? Yet neither of us can get to sleep… So why not talk a little? I'm in my stride now, which doesn't happen to me often. I'm shy, you see, but not shy on the strength of being a provincial, a person of no rank or a pauper, but on the strength of the fact that I'm an awfully conceited fellow. But sometimes, under the influence of favourable circumstances and eventualities, which, by the way, I'm in no condition either to define or foresee, my shyness vanishes completely, as now, for instance. Set me face to face now with, say, the Dalai Lama himself and I'd ask even him for a pinch of snuff. But perhaps you'd like to go to sleep?'

‘On the contrary,' I protested in haste, ‘I find it very pleasant conversing with you.'

‘That is, I entertain you, you mean… So much the better. Well, then, sir, I'll tell you that in these parts people do me the honour of calling me original – those people, that's to say, who may casually happen to let fall my name along with the rest of the rubbish they talk. “With my fate is no one very much concerned…”
²
They aim to hurt my pride. Oh, my God! If they only did but know that I'm perishing precisely because there's absolutely nothing original about me whatever, nothing except such childish pranks, for instance, as my present conversation with you; but such pranks aren't worth a jot. They're the cheapest and most despicable form of originality.'

He turned to face me and threw wide his arms.

‘My dear sir!' he exclaimed. ‘I am of the opinion that life on this earth is intended, generally speaking, for original people; only they have the right to live.
Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre
,
³
someone once said. You see, don't you,' he added in a low voice, ‘what pure French pronunciation I have? What's it to me if your head's leonine and roomy and you understand everything, know a great deal, keep up with the times, but you've got nothing at all that's uniquely your own, uniquely special, uniquely personal! You'll be just one more lumber-room of commonplaces with which to clutter up the world – and what sort of enjoyment is to be derived
from that? No, at least be stupid, but stupid in your own way! At least have your own smell, some personal smell! And don't think my demands as regards this smell are formidable… God forbid! There's a bottomless pit of such kinds of original people: wherever you look you'll find one; every man alive's an original person in that sense – except that I haven't happened to be one of them!'

‘Nevertheless, though,' he continued, after a short pause, ‘what expectations I aroused in my youth! What an exalted opinion I had of my own person before going abroad and immediately after my return! Abroad, of course, I kept my ears pinned back, made my own way in the world, just as people of our sort should – people who know it all, see the point of everything, but, in the end, when you look at them you realize they haven't learned the first blessed thing!'

‘Original, original!' he elaborated, giving a reproachful shake of the head. ‘They call me original, but it turns out in fact that there's no one on earth less original than your most humble servant. I most likely was born in imitation of someone else… Yes, by God! I live my life as well in imitation of a few authors whom I've studied, living by the sweat of my brow: I've done my bit of studying and falling in love and, at last, getting married, not as it were of my own free will, but just as if I was performing some duty, doing some lesson – who knows which it was?'

He tore his nightcap from his head and flung it down on the bed.

‘If you like, I'll tell you the story of my life,' he asked me in an abrupt tone of voice, ‘or, better, a few features of my life?'

‘Do me that honour.'

‘Or, no, I'd better tell you how I got married. After all, marriage is a serious affair, the touchstone of the whole man; in it is reflected, as in a mirror… no, that analogy's too banal. If you don't mind, I'll take a pinch of snuff.'

He extracted a snuff-box from beneath his pillow, opened it and began talking again while waving the opened snuff-box in the air.

‘My good sir, you should appreciate my position. Judge for yourself what – what, if you'll be so kind – what good I might derive from the encyclopedia of Hegel?
⁴
What is there in common, will you tell me, between this encyclopedia and Russian life? And how would you want it applied to our circumstances – and not only
it alone, the encyclopedia, but in general German philosophy – and more than that – German science?'

He jumped up and down on his bed and began muttering in a low voice, gritting his teeth maliciously:

‘So that's how it is, that's how it is! So why on earth did you drag yourself abroad? Why didn't you sit at home and study the life around you on the spot? You would then have recognized its needs and future potential, and so far as your vocation, so to speak, was concerned you'd have been able to reach a clear understanding… Yet, if you'll allow me,' he continued, again altering his tone of voice as if justifying himself and succumbing to shyness, ‘where can people of our sort learn to study something that not a single scholar has yet set down in a book? I would have been glad to take lessons from it – from Russian life, that is; but the trouble is, the poor darling thing doesn't say a word in explanation. “Take me as I am,” it seems to say. But that's beyond my powers. It ought to give me something to go on, offer me something conclusive. “Something conclusive?” they ask; “here's something conclusive: Lend your ear to our Moscow sages,
⁵
don't they sing as sweetly as nightingales?” But that's just the trouble: they whistle away like Kursk nightingales and don't talk like human beings… So I gave the matter a good deal of thought and came to the conclusion that science was apparently the same the world over, just as truth was, and took the plunge by setting out, with God's help, for foreign lands to live among heathens… What more d'you want me to say in justification? Youth and arrogance got the better of me. I didn't want, you know, to develop a premature middle-aged spread, although they say it's worth it. What's more, if nature hasn't given you much flesh on your bones to start with, you won't get much fat on your body no matter what happens!'

‘However,' he added, after a moment's thought, ‘I promised to tell you, it seems, how my marriage came about. Listen now. In the first place, I should tell you that my wife is no longer among the living, and in the second place… in the second place I see that I will have to tell you about my boyhood, otherwise you won't understand anything… Surely you want to get to sleep?'

‘No, not at all.'

‘Excellent. Just listen to it, though – there's Mister Kantagryukhin
snoring in the next room like a postillion! I was born of poor parents – I say parents because legend has it that, besides a mother, I also had a father. I don't remember him. They say he was rather dim-witted, with a large nose and freckles, light-brown hair and a habit of taking in snuff through one nostril; there was a portrait of him hanging in my mother's bedroom, in a red uniform with a black collar standing up to the ears – extraordinarily ugly. I used to be taken past it whenever I was being led in for a beating, and my mama, under such circumstances, would always point to it and declare: “He wouldn't treat you so lightly.” You can imagine what an encouraging effect that had on me! I had neither brothers nor sisters – that's to say, if the truth be told, there was a little brother bedridden with rickets of the neck and he soon died… And why, d'you think, should the English disease of rickets find its way into the Shchigrovsky district of Kursk Province? But that's beside the point. My mama undertook my education with all the headstrong ardour of a
grande dame
of the steppes; she undertook it right from the magnificent day of my birth until the moment I reached sixteen years of age… Are you following what I'm saying?'