World with his actual eyes, when his mutinoussailors wanted to tack about, and return to Europe! What did the NewWorld matter after all? Columbus had hardly seen it when he died, andin reality he was entirely ignorant of what he had discovered. Theimportant thing is life--life and nothing else! What is any ‘discovery’whatever compared with the incessant, eternal discovery of life?
“But what is the use of talking? I’m afraid all this is so commonplacethat my confession will be taken for a schoolboy exercise--the work ofsome ambitious lad writing in the hope of his work ‘seeing the light’;or perhaps my readers will say that ‘I had perhaps something to say, butdid not know how to express it.’
“Let me add to this that in every idea emanating from genius, or even inevery serious human idea--born in the human brain--there always remainssomething--some sediment--which cannot be expressed to others, thoughone wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. Thereis always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from yourbrain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever,and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the veryessence of your idea to a single living soul.
“So that if I cannot now impart all that has tormented me for the lastsix months, at all events you will understand that, having reached my‘last convictions,’ I must have paid a very dear price for them. Thatis what I wished, for reasons of my own, to make a point of in this my‘Explanation.’
“But let me resume.”
VI.
“I will not deceive you. ‘Reality’ got me so entrapped in its meshes nowand again during the past six months, that I forgot my ‘sentence’ (orperhaps I did not wish to think of it), and actually busied myself withaffairs.
“A word as to my circumstances. When, eight months since, I becamevery ill, I threw up all my old connections and dropped all my oldcompanions. As I was always a gloomy, morose sort of individual, myfriends easily forgot me; of course, they would have forgotten me allthe same, without that excuse. My position at home was solitary enough.Five months ago I separated myself entirely from the family, and no onedared enter my room except at stated times, to clean and tidy it, and soon, and to bring me my meals. My mother dared not disobey me; she keptthe children quiet, for my sake, and beat them if they dared to make anynoise and disturb me. I so often complained of them that I should thinkthey must be very fond, indeed, of me by this time. I think I must havetormented ‘my faithful Colia’ (as I called him) a good deal too. Hetormented me of late; I could see that he always bore my tempers asthough he had determined to ‘spare the poor invalid.’ This annoyedme, naturally. He seemed to have taken it into his head to imitate theprince in Christian meekness! Surikoff, who lived above us, annoyed me,too. He was so miserably poor, and I used to prove to him that he had noone to blame but himself for his poverty. I used to be so angry that Ithink I frightened him eventually, for he stopped coming to see me. Hewas a most meek and humble fellow, was Surikoff. (N.B.--They say thatmeekness is a great power. I must ask the prince about this, for theexpression is his.) But I remember one day in March, when I went up tohis lodgings to see whether it was true that one of his children hadbeen starved and frozen to death, I began to hold forth to him abouthis poverty being his own fault, and, in the course of my remarks, Iaccidentally smiled at the corpse of his child. Well, the poor wretch’slips began to tremble, and he caught me by the shoulder, and pushed meto the door. ‘Go out,’ he said, in a whisper. I went out, of course, andI declare I _liked_ it. I liked it at the very moment when I wasturned out. But his words filled me with a strange sort of feeling ofdisdainful pity for him whenever I thought of them--a feeling whichI did not in the least desire to entertain. At the very moment of theinsult (for I admit that I did insult him, though I did not mean to),this man could not lose his temper. His lips had trembled, but I swearit was not with rage. He had taken me by the arm, and said, ‘Go out,’without the least anger. There was dignity, a great deal of dignity,about him, and it was so inconsistent with the look of him that, Iassure you, it was quite comical. But there was no anger. Perhaps hemerely began to despise me at that moment.
“Since that time he has always taken off his hat to me on the stairs,whenever I met him, which is a thing he never did before; but he alwaysgets away from me as quickly as he can, as though he felt confused. Ifhe did despise me, he despised me ‘meekly,’ after his own fashion.
“I dare say he only took his hat off out of fear, as it were, to the sonof his creditor; for he always owed my mother money. I thought of havingan explanation with him, but I knew that if I did, he would begin toapologize in a minute or two, so I decided to let him alone.
“Just about that time, that is, the middle of March, I suddenly feltvery much better; this continued for a couple of weeks. I used to goout at dusk. I like the dusk, especially in March, when the night frostbegins to harden the day’s puddles, and the gas is burning.
“Well, one night in the Shestilavochnaya, a man passed me with a paperparcel under his arm. I did not take stock of him very carefully, but heseemed to be dressed in some shabby summer dust-coat, much too light forthe season. When he was opposite the lamp-post, some ten yards away, Iobserved something fall out of his pocket. I hurried forward to pick itup, just in time, for an old wretch in a long kaftan rushed up too.He did not dispute the matter, but glanced at what was in my hand anddisappeared.
“It was a large old-fashioned pocket-book, stuffed full; but I guessed,at a glance, that it had anything in the world inside it, except money.
“The owner was now some forty yards ahead of me, and was very soon lostin the crowd. I ran after him, and began calling out; but as I knewnothing to say excepting ‘hey!’ he did not turn round. Suddenly heturned into the gate of a house to the left; and when I darted in afterhim, the gateway was so dark that I could see nothing whatever. It wasone of those large houses built in small tenements, of which there musthave been at least a hundred.
“When I entered the yard I thought I saw a man going along on the farside of it; but it was so dark I could not make out his figure.
“I crossed to that corner and found a dirty dark staircase. I heard aman mounting up above me, some way higher than I was, and thinking Ishould catch him before his door would be opened to him, I rushed afterhim. I heard a door open and shut on the fifth storey, as I pantedalong; the stairs were narrow, and the steps innumerable, but at last Ireached the door I thought the right one. Some moments passed before Ifound the bell and got it to ring.
“An old peasant woman opened the door; she was busy lighting the‘samovar’ in a tiny kitchen. She listened silently to my questions, didnot understand a word, of course, and opened another door leading intoa little bit of a room, low and scarcely furnished at all, but witha large, wide bed in it, hung with curtains. On this bed lay oneTerentich, as the woman called him, drunk, it appeared to me. On thetable was an end of candle in an iron candlestick, and a half-bottle ofvodka, nearly finished. Terentich muttered something to me, and signedtowards the next room. The old woman had disappeared, so there wasnothing for me to do but to open the door indicated. I did so, andentered the next room.
“This was still smaller than the other, so cramped that I could scarcelyturn round; a narrow single bed at one side took up nearly all the room.Besides the bed there were only three common chairs, and a wretched oldkitchen-table standing before a small sofa. One could hardly squeezethrough between the table and the bed.
“On the table, as in the other room, burned a tallow candle-end in aniron candlestick; and on the bed there whined a baby of scarcely threeweeks old. A pale-looking woman was dressing the child, probably themother; she looked as though she had not as yet got over the trouble ofchildbirth, she seemed so weak and was so carelessly dressed. Anotherchild, a little girl of about three years old, lay on the sofa, coveredover with what looked like a man’s old dress-coat.
“At the table stood a man in his shirt sleeves; he had thrown off hiscoat; it lay upon the bed; and he was un
folding a blue paper parcel inwhich were a couple of pounds of bread, and some little sausages.
“On the table along with these things were a few old bits of blackbread, and some tea in a pot. From under the bed there protruded anopen portmanteau full of bundles of rags. In a word, the confusion anduntidiness of the room were indescribable.
“It appeared to me, at the first glance, that both the man and the womanwere respectable people, but brought to that pitch of poverty whereuntidiness seems to get the better of every effort to cope with it, tillat last they take a sort of bitter satisfaction in it. When I enteredthe room, the man, who had entered but a moment before me, and was stillunpacking his parcels, was saying something to his wife in an excitedmanner. The news was apparently bad, as usual, for the woman beganwhimpering. The man’s face seemed to me to be refined and even pleasant.He was dark-complexioned, and about twenty-eight years of age; he woreblack whiskers, and his lip and chin were shaved. He looked morose, butwith a sort of pride of expression. A