XXIX
An Extraordinary Man
Three hours after Kirsánof left, Viéra Pavlovna came to her senses, and almost her very first thought was, that it was impossible to leave the shop in such a way. Yes; though Viéra Pavlovna loved to assure herself that the shop was getting along by itself, yet in reality she knew that she is only flattering herself with this thought, and, as a matter of fact, the shop needed a director, else it would go astray. However, the business was now very well established, and it took but very little trouble to direct it. Mrs. Mertsálova had two children; but she might spare an hour, or an hour and a half, every day, or not even every day. She surely would not refuse, for already she has a great deal to do with the shop. Viéra Pavlovna began to look over her things, preparatory to the sale of them, and she herself sent Masha first to Mrs. Mertsálova, to ask her to come, and then to the old woman who deals in secondhand clothes and other things of every sort, Rachel, one of the most businesslike of Jewesses, and a very good friend of Viéra Pavlovna’s, towards whom Rachel had proved herself absolutely honest, as almost all the small retail dealers among the Hebrews are, whether men or women, when they have to do with respectable people. Rachel and Masha had to stop at their city apartment to collect the remainder of the clothes and things, and on their way to stop at the furrier’s, where Viéra Pavlovna’s shubas were stored away for the summer, and then to come back to their summer dacha with the whole collection, so that Rachel might put a valuation on the things, and buy them all at once.
After Masha left the gate, she was met by Rakhmétof, who had been prowling for half an hour around the dacha.
“Are you going away, Masha? For long?”
“Yes; probably I shan’t get back before late this evening; I have a great deal to attend to.”
“Is Viéra Pavlovna all alone by herself?”
“She is alone.”
“Then I will step in and stay with her, in your place, in case I can do anything to help her.”
“If you only would; and I tremble on her account. And I forgot entirely, Mr. Rakhmétof; call some of the neighbors. There is a cook and a nurse-girl, friends of mine, to get dinner; for she has not had anything to eat yet.”
“All right! I have not had any dinner myself. We’ll help ourselves. Have you had your dinner?”
“Yes; Viéra Pavlovna would not let me go without it.”
“Well, that’s good. I imagined she would have forgotten this on account of her own trouble.”
Except Masha, and those who were her equals or superiors in the simplicity of soul and dress, all people were rather afraid of Rakhmétof. Lopukhóf and Kirsánof, and all those who feared nobody and nothing, felt in his presence, at times, some trepidation. Towards Viéra Pavlovna he was very distant. She found him very tiresome. He never sought her society. But Masha liked him, though he was less sociable and polite to her than were any other of their visitors.
“I came without being invited, Viéra Pavlovna,” he began. “But I have seen Aleksandr Matvéitch, and I know all, and so I came to the conclusion that I might be useful to you in some way; and I am going to spend the evening here.”
His services might have been very useful, even now, to help Viéra Pavlovna in undoing the things. Anyone in Rakhmétof’s place would have been asked to do it, or would have offered his services. But he did not offer, and he was not asked. Viéra Pavlovna only pressed his hand, and, with sincere feeling said that she was very grateful to him for his attention.
“I shall remain in the library,” he said. “If anything is needed, call me, and if anybody comes, I will open the door. Don’t you trouble yourself.”
With these words he went into the library; took from his pocket a big piece of ham and a hunk of black rye bread—all of which must have weighed four pounds; he sat down and ate it to the last crumb, striving to chew it all very fine; he drank half a pitcher of water; then he went to the bookshelves and began to pick out something to read. “I know that; not original, not original, not original, not original.” This criticism, “not original,” referred to such books as Macaulay, Guizot, Thiers, Ranke, Gervinus.
“Ah! but here’s something good!”
This he said, after reading on the back of several huge tomes, Complete Works of Newton. He began hastily to turn over the pages; finally he found what he was looking for, and with a lovely smile cried: “Here it is, here it is!—Observations on the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. Yes, this side of knowledge has, till now, remained with me without any real foundation. Newton wrote this commentary when he was old, when he was half sane and half crazy. It is the classical fountain when one is on the question of the mixture of sense and insanity. Here is a question of worldwide historical interest; this mixture which is in almost all occurrences, in almost all books, and in almost all brains. But here it must be in a model form: in the first place, the most ingenious and normal brain that ever was known; in the second place, the acknowledged, undisputed insanity which was superinduced upon this brain. And so the book is capital in its way. The most obscure features of the general phenomenon must appear here more distinctly than anywhere else, and no one can have the least doubt that here you find these very features of this phenomenon, to which the features of the mixture of sanity and insanity are related. The book is worth studying.”
With great energy he began to read the book, which for the last century had been scarcely read, except by those who wanted to set it right. For anyone else to read it, except Rakhmétof, would be equivalent to eating sand or sawdust. But it was to his taste.
Such people as Rakhmétof are rare. So far in my life I have met with only eight examples of this species (and that number includes two women). They have no interrelation, except in one feature. Among them were people soft and severe, people melancholy and gay, energetic people and phlegmatic people, sentimental people (one of them had a severe face, sarcastic even to impudence; another one, with a wooden face, quiet and indifferent to everything; they both shed tears before me several times, like hysterical women, and not on their own account, but during talks on different topics. While by themselves, I am sure they wept often), and people who never, under any circumstances, lost their self-possession. There was no resemblance between them in any respect, with the exception of the one feature, but that feature, in itself, joined them into one species, and separated them from the rest of humanity. I used to laugh at those with whom I have been intimately acquainted, when I was alone with them. They would either get angry or not, but they would also join in the laugh. And, really, there was so much that was amusing about them—the main characteristic was amusing—for this very reason, that they were people of a different species, I love to laugh at such people.
The one whom I met in the circle of Lopukhóf and Kirsánof, and about whom I am going to speak here, serves as a living proof that a reserve clause is necessary in the arguments between Lopukhóf and Mertsálof about the peculiarities of the soil in Viéra Pavlovna’s second dream. Such a reserve clause is necessary to this effect, that no matter how bad the soil may be, it may have some very tiny portions which will produce healthy grain. The genealogies of the principal characters of my narrative, Viéra Pavlovna, Kirsánof, and Lopukhóf, to tell the truth, do not go back further than their grandfathers and grandmothers, and possibly by some tremendous straining, you may get back still further to some kind of great-grandmother; the great-grandfather is hidden by the darkness of oblivion; all that is known of him is probably that he was the husband of the great-grandmother, and that his name was Kirill, because the grandfather was Kirilluitch.
Rakhmétof belonged to a family which has been known since the thirteenth century; that is, it is one of the most ancient, not only in Russia, but anywhere in Europe. In the number of the Tartar prisoners, tribal chiefs who were massacred in Tver, according to the words of the chroniclers, on account of their intention of converting the people to Mohammedanism (an intention which they probably did not have), but simply out of brutality, was a certain Rakhmet. The young son of this Rakhmet by a Russian wife, who was the niece of a nobleman of Tver—that is, the oberhōf-marshal or field-marshal—whom Rakhmet married by force, was saved on his mother’s account, and he was baptized Mikhaïl instead of Latuif. From this Latuif-Mikhaïl Rakhmétovitch sprang a good many Rakhmétofs. In Tver they were boyars; in Moscow they were crown-officers; in Petersburg, during the last century, they were generals-in-chief; of course not all of them: the family branched out very widely, so that there would not have been enough positions of general-in-chief to give them all. Our Rakhmétof’s great-great-grandfather was a friend of Ivan Ivanovitch Shuválof’s, and he put him on his feet again after his failure, which was caused by his friendship for Muennich.
His great-grandfather was a contemporary of Rumiantsof; he served till he reached the rank of general-in-chief, and he was killed at the battle near Novo. His grandfather escorted Alexander to Tilsit, and would have risen higher than any of them, but he early ruined his career by his friendship with Speransky. His father served without any success, and without any failures; at the age of forty he resigned with the rank of general-lieutenant, and made his home at one of his estates which were scattered about over the sources of the Medvyedítsa River. The estates were, however, not very large, all in all, probably about two thousand five hundred souls (serfs), and during the leisure which came to him in his country retirement, he had eight children; our Rakhmétof was the next to the youngest; he had one younger sister, and consequently our Rakhmétof did not have a large estate; he received about four hundred souls, and seven thousand desyatins of land. How he managed with his serfs, and his five thousand five hundred desyatins of land is not known to anybody, nor was it known that he kept for himself one thousand five hundred desyatins, and, moreover, generally it was not known, as long as he lived among us, that he was a proprietor, or that the land retained for himself gave him about three thousand rubles income. This we learned afterwards, but at that time we supposed, of course, that he was of the same family as those Rakhmétofs, many of whom were rich proprietors, and who, together bearing the same name, possessed about seventy-five thousand souls around the sources of the Medvyedítsa, Khoper, Sura, and Tsna rivers, who forever were the district marshals of those places, and one or the other of them is constantly the marshal of one or the other of the governmental cities through which run their feudatory rivers. And we knew that our friend Rakhmétof used to spend four hundred rubles a year; for a student of that time that was not very bad, but for a proprietor from among the Rakhmétofs it was too little; and so every one of us, though we cared really very little for such investigations, decided for himself, without making any inquiries, that our Rakhmétof must be from some impoverished or estateless branch of the Rakhmétofs, maybe the son of some kind of a governmental officer, who left his children a small fortune; but we did not bother ourselves about these things.
Now he was twenty-two years old, and he had been a student since he was sixteen; but for nearly three years he had given up the University. He left the second class, went to his estate, took charge of it, after defeating his guardian’s resistance, and winning the anathemas of his brothers, and succeeding in making his sister’s husbands forbid them to mention his name; then he wandered all over Russia in different guises, both by land and by water, and by one or the other, in a common and an uncommon way; for instance, by foot, and on rafts, and in slow boats; he had a good many adventures, which he brought upon himself. Among other things that he did, he sent two men to the University of Kazan, and five to the University of Moscow; these were his stipendiaries; but to Petersburg, where he, himself, intended to live, he had no students at his expense, and therefore no one of us knew that, instead of four hundred, he had three thousand rubles income. This became known only later on, but all we knew was that he often disappeared for some time, and two years before the time that he is sitting in Kirsánof’s library, with Newton’s Commentaries on the Apocalypse, he returned to Petersburg, entered the philological faculty; before he had been in the department of natural science, and that’s all.
But if none of Rakhmétof’s Petersburg acquaintances were aware of his family and pecuniary standing, yet all who knew him knew him by two nicknames. One of them we have already used in this story—“the rigorist”; he accepted it with his usual easy smile of gloomy satisfaction. But when he was called Nikitushka or Lomof, or by the full name, Nikitushka Lomof, he smiled broadly and sweetly, and he had just reason for it, because he was not endowed by nature, but gained by the firmness of his will, the right to this name which is so famous among millions of men. But it thunders with its fame only in a district of a hundred versts in width, running through eight provinces; but to the readers living in the rest of Russia it is necessary to explain what this name meant. Nikitushka Lomof was a river-boatman, who went up and down the Volga twenty years or fifteen years ago; he was a giant of herculean strength; he was more than twenty-six feet high; he was so broad across his chest and shoulders that he weighed fifteen poods (600 pounds avoirdupois). Though he was such a heavy man, he was not stout. To illustrate his strength it is necessary to give only one illustration: he used to receive the wages of four men. Whenever his vessel came to a city and he went to market, or, as it is called in the Volga dialect, the bazaar, the boys were heard in the most distant corners of the streets, shouting: “Here comes Nikitushka Lomof! here comes Nikitushka Lomof!” and everybody ran into the street which led from the wharf to the bazaar, and crowds of people used to pour out after their favorite hero.
Rakhmétof, from the age of sixteen, when he first came to Petersburg, was, as regards strength, an ordinary lad of rather tall stature, rather strong, but by no means remarkable for his strength; certainly two out of ten of his comrades would have got the better of him. But when he was going on to seventeen, it occurred to him that it would be a good thing to acquire physical riches, and he began to work over himself: he energetically practised gymnastics. This was good; but gymnastics only perfect the material, and it is necessary to have a material basis; and so for a time, which was twice as long as he spent on his gymnastics, he used to work every day for several hours as a common laborer, where physical strength was required. He lugged water, he carried wood, chopped wood, sawed trees, cut stone, dug earth, hammered iron; he passed through a good many occupations, and he frequently changed them, because with every new work, with every change, some of his muscles would get a new development. He underwent the diet of a boxer. He began to nurse himself, in the full sense of the word, with the special things which had the reputation of strengthening the body—beefsteaks, almost raw, more often than anything else; and since that time he always lived in such a way. In a year after he began such a regime, he started off on his wanderings, and here he had still better opportunities to develop his physical strength. He became a plowman, a carpenter, a ferryman, and a workingman—a laborer in every kind of healthy occupation whatever. Once he went the whole length of the Volga, from Dubovka to Ruibinsk, in the capacity of a burlak. To tell the master of the boat and the other burlaks that he wanted to join them would have been regarded as absurd, and he might not have been accepted. So he simply engaged passage as a traveller, and after making friends with the crew, he began to help tow the boat; and at the end of a week he put on the regular harness, as though he had been a genuine laborer. They quickly noticed how powerfully he was towing the boat; they began to put his strength to the test. He out-towed three, even four, of the strongest of his mates. At that time he was twenty years old, and his mates on the boat christened him Nikitushka Lomof, after the memory of the hero, who at this time had left the stage. In the following summer he was travelling in a steamer. One of the second-class passengers who crowded the steamer’s deck proved to be one of his last year’s co-workers on the towpath; and in this way his companions, who were students, learned that he must be nicknamed Nikitushka Lomof. In fact, he acquired and, without sparing any time, he kept up his mighty strength. “This is necessary,” he used to say; “it gives you respect and love among the common people. This is useful, and it may come handy sometime.”
This entered his mind when he was halfway through his sixteenth year, because from that time his peculiarities began to develop themselves. At sixteen he came to Petersburg, as a commonplace, good-natured graduate of the gymnasium, a commonplace, kind, and honest youth, and he spent three or four months in an ordinary way, as all new students do. But he began to learn that there were among the students some very clever heads, who had different ideas from the rest, and he learned the names of half a dozen such students. At that time there were only a few; they interested him, and he began to try to make their acquaintance. He happened to get acquainted with Kirsánof, and from this time dated his regeneration into an extraordinary man, the future Nikitushka Lomof and the rigorist. He listened eagerly to Kirsánof the first evening. He wept; he interrupted him with exclamations of curses against all that was to vanish, and blessings on all that must live. “What books shall I begin to read?” Kirsánof directed him. On the next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, he was walking down the Nevsky, from the Admiralty to the Police Bridge, wondering which German or French bookstore would be the first to open. He took what he wanted, and read steadily for more than seventy-two hours in succession—from eleven o’clock on Thursday morning till nine o’clock Sunday evening—eighty-two hours. The first two nights he did not sleep at all. On the third he drank eight cups of the strongest coffee; but on the fourth night coffee refused to support his strength. He fell down on the floor, and slept for fifteen hours. At the end of a week he came to Kirsánof, asked what books further he should read, and some explanations. They became friends; and through him he afterwards met the Lopukhófs. In six months, though he was only seventeen, while they were each one and twenty, they didn’t look upon him as only a young fellow compared to themselves; and he had indeed become an extraordinary man.
What earnest was there in his past life for such a course? Not a very great one, but still there was something. His father was a man of despotic character, very clever, educated, and an ultraconservative, in the very same way as Marya Alekséyevna was ultraconservative; but he was honest. It was hard for him, of course. But that would not have made any difference to Rakhmétof. But his mother, a woman of very delicate nature, suffered much from her husband’s severity; and his whole life was bounded by the village. And this, too, would not have made any difference; there was another thing. It happened that, when he was fifteen, he fell in love with one of his father’s mistresses. Trouble ensued, which was, of course, trying to her. He pitied a woman who had suffered a great deal on his account. Thoughts began to stir in him, and Kirsánof stood in the same relation to him as Lopukhóf had stood to Viéra Pavlovna. There was an earnest in his past life; but in becoming such an extraordinary man the principal element is nature. For some time before he left the university and went back to his estate, and afterwards, while wandering over Russia, he adopted original principles in his material, moral, and intellectual life; and after he returned, they had been crystallized into a complete system, to which he unflinchingly adhered. He said to himself, “I am not going to drink a drop of wine; I shall not touch a woman.” Yet his nature was passionate.
“What is the need? There is no good of going to such extremes.”
“It is necessary. We ask, demand, for all people the full enjoyment of life. We must bear witness with our own lives, that we are demanding this, not for the gratification of our personal passions, not for ourselves personally, but for humanity in general, that we speak only in accordance with principle and not from preference, according to conviction and not individual necessity.”
Consequently, he began to lead a very severe and ascetic style of life. To become a Nikitushka Lomof, and keep up the character, he had to eat meat, a great deal of meat, and he ate a great deal. But he grudged every kopek that he spent on anything else but meat. He gave orders to his landlady to buy the very best meat that was to be had, and have the very best pieces for him; but all else that he ate at home was of the cheapest description. He gave up white bread and ate only black bread at his table. For weeks at a time he never had a piece of sugar in his mouth; for months at a time he never tasted fruit, or veal, or chicken. With his own money he never bought anything of the kind. “I have no right to spend money for luxuries which I can easily get along without.” Yet he was brought up at a table where luxury reigned, and his taste was refined, as was seen by his remarks on dishes, when he used to dine at the table of others. He enjoyed a good many of the dishes of which he did not partake at his own table, but some dishes he would not eat at the table of a stranger. The cause for the distinction was a solid one: “What the common people eat now and then, I, also, may eat occasionally; but whatever is not in the reach of the common people, I, too, must not eat. This I must do, so as to appreciate how wretched the lives of the people are in comparison with mine.”
Therefore, if fruits were served, he actually ate apples, but he absolutely refused apricots; oranges he would eat in Petersburg, but he would not touch them in the provinces. Don’t you see, in Petersburg the people sometimes eat them, but never in the provinces. Pies he used to eat, “because a good pirog is not worse than a pie, and pie-crust is familiar to the common people”; but he never ate sardines. He used to dress very poorly, though at one time he liked finery; and in all other respects he led the life of a Spartan; for example, he never allowed a mattress, and he slept on a bag of straw, not even allowing it to be doubled.
He had one spot on his conscience—he did not give up smoking. “I cannot think without a cigar. If that is really so, then I am right; but maybe it is from weakness of will power.” And he would not smoke bad cigars, for he was brought up amid aristocratic surroundings. Out of his four hundred roubles of income, he used to spend one hundred and fifty on cigars. “It is a detestable weakness,” as he used to express himself. And only this weakness afforded some possibility of getting the best of him. If he went too far with his reproaches of others, the one whom he reproached would say to him, “Yes, but perfection is impossible—even you smoke.” Then Rakhmétof would break out into reproaches of double strength; but the greater part he would pour out on his own head, the other would get the smaller share of them, though he would not be forgotten.
He succeeded in accomplishing a great deal, because in disposing of his time he put exactly as firm restrictions on himself as in material things. Not a quarter of an hour a month was lost in recreation; he did not take rest. “My occupations are various; change from one occupation to another is sufficient rest.” He did not join the circle of his friends, whose headquarters were at Kirsánof’s or the Lopukhófs’, more frequently than was necessary to keep him in close relations with this circle. “This is necessary; everyday occurrences prove the advantage of having close connection with some circle of men; it is necessary to have in your power open resources for various references.” With the exception of the meetings with this circle, he never called on anybody, except on business, and he never stayed five minutes longer than was necessary for his business; and he never allowed anybody to stay with him, except on the same conditions. Without beating around the bush he would say to the caller, “We have talked about this business; now you will allow me to take up other things, because my time is valuable.”
During the first months of his regeneration, he used to spend almost all his time reading; but this lasted only a little more than six months. When he saw that he had acquired a systematic style of thought in the spirit whose principles he found to be correct, he said to himself: “Reading is now a secondary matter: from this time forth I am ready for life;” and he began to give to reading only the time which was free from other occupations, and such time was very little. Notwithstanding this fact, he extended the circle of his knowledge with wonderful rapidity; now that he is twenty-two years old, he is a man of remarkably solid learning. This was because he had made a rule also in this regard: luxury and pleasure there should be none; only what is needful. And what is needful? He used to say: “On every subject there are very few first-rate works; all that you can find fuller and clearer in these few, in all the rest is repeated, spoiled, ruined. It is necessary to read only them, and all other reading is only an idle waste of time. Let us take Russian belles lettres. I say: I shall read Gogol before anything else. In the thousand and one other stories I see, from half a dozen lines on half a dozen different pages, that they contain nothing else but Gogol spoiled; why should I read them, then? The same thing in science; in science this limit is still more striking. If I have read Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill, I know the alpha and the omega of their theories, and I have no need of reading hundreds of other political economists, no matter how famous they may be: by half a dozen lines on half a dozen pages I see that I shall not find one single fresh thought which belongs to them; they are all borrowed and mutilated. I read only spontaneous works, and only to such a degree as to appreciate their spontaneity.” Therefore, it was impossible to make him read Macaulay; after spending a quarter of an hour on different pages, he decided: I know all the originals from which this matter is taken. He read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair with delight, and he began to read Pendennis, but he gave it up when he reached the twentieth page. “All this is said in Vanity Fair; apparently there will be nothing more, and so there is no need of reading it. Every book that I read in such a way spares me the necessity of reading hundreds of books,” he used to say.
Gymnastics, work that served to increase his strength and reading—these were Rakhmétof’s personal occupations; but after he returned to Petersburg, they took only the fourth part of his time; the rest of his time he spent in helping others, or in things that did not belong to anyone in particular, constantly observing the same rule as in reading: not to waste any time on secondary matters and with secondary people, but to occupy himself only with things of essential importance, from which the secondary things and secondary people are influenced, without his interference. For instance, outside of his circle, he used to get acquainted only with people who had influence over others. Whoever was not an authority for several other people could not even begin a conversation with him; he used to say, “I beg you to excuse me,” and go away. But in the same way it was impossible for anyone with whom he had a desire to become acquainted to avoid him in anywise. He simply used to come to you and say whatever he had to say, with such an introduction as this: “I want to be acquainted with you; it is necessary. If you have no time now, appoint another time.” To your trifling business he never paid the least heed, no matter if you were his closest friend, and begged him to help you out of your embarrassment. “I have no time,” he would say, and go away. But in important business he used to take a share, when it was necessary, as he expressed it, though no one may have asked his aid. “I must,” he used to say. What things he used to say and do on such occasions is beyond comprehension.
Here, for example, is my own experience with him. I was then not very young; I was living comfortably, and therefore oftentimes five or six young people from my province used to visit me. Consequently, I was a valuable man for his purposes; these young people were attached to me, because they saw that I had an attachment for them; in this manner he heard my name. And I, when I had met him for the first time, at Kirsánof’s, had never known anything about him; this was soon after his return from his wanderings. He came in after I did; I was the only one in the company whom he did not know. When he entered, he took Kirsánof aside, and indicating me with his eyes, said several words. Kirsánof answered him briefly, and they separated. In a minute Rakhmétof was sitting directly in front of me, with only a small table which stood by the sofa dividing us, and from this distance, which was only an arshín and a half, he began to study my face with all his might. I was vexed; he examined me without any ceremony, as though I were not a man, but a picture: I grew angry. It was none of his business. After looking at me for two or three minutes, he said to me: “Mr. N., I must get acquainted with you; I know you, but you don’t know me. Ask about me of the khozyáïn, and anybody else whom you particularly trust, in this company.” Having said this, he got up and went into the other room.
“Who is that crank?”
“That is Rakhmétof; he wants you to ask whether he can be trusted—without hesitation; and whether he deserves attention—he is more important than all the rest of us here taken together,” said Kirsánof, and others corroborated it.
In about five minutes he returned to the room where we were all sitting. He did not say anything to me, and he spoke very little to the others. The conversation was not scientific and not important.
“Ah! it is already ten o’clock!” he exclaimed, after some little time. “At ten o’clock I have an engagement at such and such a place.—Mr. N.,” he said, turning to me. “I have a few words that I want to say to you. When I took the khozyáïn aside to ask him who you were, I pointed you out with my eyes, so that you must have seen that I was asking who you were; consequently, it would be useless not to make signs which would be natural at asking such a question. When will you be at home, so that I may call on you?”
I did not like new acquaintances at that time, and this imposition did not please me at all.
“I am only at home when I am asleep; I am out all day,” I said.
“But you sleep at home? What time do you go to bed?”
“Very late.”
“For example?”
“Two or three o’clock.”
“That makes no difference to me; name your time.”
“If it’s absolutely necessary, I will set tomorrow, at half-past four in the morning.”
“Of course I might take your words to be insulting and ridiculous; but maybe it is true that you have your own reasons, which, very likely, deserve approval. At all events, I shall call upon you tomorrow morning at half-past four.”
“No; if you are so bent upon it, you may come a little later. I will be home all the morning till twelve o’clock.”
“All right; I’ll be there at ten o’clock. Will you be alone?”
“Yes.”
“Very good.”
He came; and without any beating around the bush, went straight at the matter, on account of which he felt it necessary to get acquainted with me. We talked for half an hour. What the subject was, makes no difference; suffice it to say, that he declared that such and such a thing must be done. I said, “No”; he said, “You must do it”; I said, “Not at all.” In half an hour he said:—
“It is evidently useless to talk about this matter longer. Are you convinced that I am a man who deserves full trust?”
“Yes; I was told so by all, and now I see for myself.”
“And after all, do you still stick to your decision?”
“I do.”
“Do you know what conclusion one can draw from this?—that you are either a liar or a villain.”
What do you think of that? What would have been necessary to do to anybody else who said such words? Challenge him to a duel? But he speaks in such a tone, without any personal feeling, like a historian, who judges coolly, and with no intention of offending, but for the sake of truth; and he is so strange, that it would be ridiculous to take offence, and all I could do was to laugh. “But that is one and the same thing,” I said.
“In this case it is not one and the same thing.”
“Nu, but maybe I am both at once.”
“In this case, to be both is impossible, but one of the two things, surely: either you are thinking and acting not as you speak, and in such a case you are a liar; or, you are thinking and acting as you speak, in which case you must be a villain; one or the other must be so. I take it for granted that it is the first hypothesis.”
“Think as you please,” I said, still laughing.
“Goodbye. At all events, understand that I still preserve my trust in you, and I will be ready to renew our conversation whenever you please.”
With all the roughness of his behavior, Rakhmétof was entirely right; both in the very fact that he began as he did, because he first learned thoroughly about me, and only then undertook this business with me; and that he ended the conversation as he did. I really did not tell him what I thought, and he really was right in calling me a liar; and this could not be offensive at all; it was even flattering to me, “in the present case,” according to his expression, because there was such a case, and because he could preserve his former confidence in me, and possibly even respect.
Yes, with all the savageness of his manners, everybody remained satisfied that Rakhmétof acted as he did, because it was the most simple and commonsense way of acting; and the terrible extremes to which he went, and his horrible reproaches, he spoke in such a way, that no person of common sense could be offended with them; and with all his phenomenal roughnesses, he was at heart very gentle. His preliminary talk was always of this stamp. Every embarrassing explanation he began thus:—
“You know very well that I speak without any personal feeling. If my words prove to be disagreeable, I beg you to excuse them; but I find that there is no need of getting offended when anything is kindly meant, absolutely, without intention of offending, but from necessity. However, as soon as it shall seem to you useless to listen to my words, I will stop; my rule is, to offer my opinion everywhere and always, whenever I am impelled; but never to impose it upon anyone.”
And actually he did not impose it; it was impossible to save one’s self from him expressing his opinion, if he found it necessary, but only so far that you might understand his view of it; but he did it in two or three words, and then he would add: “Now you know what the tenor of my conversation would be; do you find it useful to have such a talk?” If you said “No,” he bowed and went off.
This was the way that he spoke and managed his affairs, and he had a great many things to attend to, and none of them were matters that concerned him personally; he had no personal business, as everybody knew; but what affairs he attended to, no one in the circle knew. It could only be seen that he had a great deal of bother. He was at home very little; he was always on the go; he was always travelling, but for the most part he walked. But there were always people calling upon him; either the same people, or new ones. And on this account, he made it a rule to be always at home between two and three; at this time he talked with them and had his dinner. But very often he would not be at home for several days; then in his place, one of his friends who was devoted to him soul and body, would be at his rooms and receive callers, silent as the grave.
Two years after this glimpse of him in Kirsánof’s library with Newton’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, he left Petersburg, telling Kirsánof, and one or two of his most intimate friends, that he had nothing more to do there, that he has done all that he could, that he may be able to do more after three years, that these three years are free now, that he is thinking of availing himself of them, according as it may seem necessary for his future activity. We learned afterwards that he left for his former estate, sold the land which he had reserved, getting thirty-five thousand rubles for it, went to Kazan and Moscow, gave five thousand rubles or so to his stipendiaries, so that they might graduate, and that was all that we knew about him. Where he went after leaving Moscow is not known. After several months passed without any tidings from him, those who knew something more about him than all the rest knew ceased to hide things, about which, by his request, they had kept silent so long as he was among us. Then our little circle learned that he had stipendiaries, and also learned the larger part of his personal doings, which I have already told. We learned a great deal about his adventures, which, however, did not explain everything; in fact, explained nothing at all, but only made Rakhmétof a still more mysterious person for the whole circle; adventures, which, by their strangeness, surprised us, or entirely contradicted the opinion, which the circle entertained of him as a man who was entirely hard-hearted as far as personal feeling went; one who had not, if I may use the expression, a personal heart, beating with the sensation of personal life. To relate all of these adventures would not be in place here; I shall only quote two of them of two different kinds: one of a savage order; the other of a stamp which contradicted the former ideas entertained by the circle in his regard. I will select these histories from those told by Kirsánof.
About a year before he left Petersburg for the second, and probably the last, time, Rakhmétof said to Kirsánof, “Give me a good quantity of plaster for curing wounds from sharp weapons.” Kirsánof gave him a big jar, supposing that Rakhmétof wanted to take this medicament to some society of carpenters or other laborers, who are frequently subjected to cuts. On the next morning, Rakhmétof’s landlady came in great alarm to Kirsánof: “Bátiushka! doctor, I don’t know what has happened to my tenant; he has not been out of his room for a long time; he has locked the door; I peeked through the crack; he was lying all in blood. I began to scream, and he says to me, says he, ‘It’s nothing, Agrafyéna Antonovna.’ What does he mean by nothing? Save him bátiushka, doctor; I’m afraid it’s suicide: he is so unmerciful to himself!”
Kirsánof ran in all haste. Rakhmétof opened the door with a melancholy broad smile; the caller saw the thing from which not Agrafyéna Antonovna alone might have been frightened; the back and shoulders of his underclothes (he was dressed only in his underclothes) were soaked with blood; there was blood on the bed; the straw bed on which he slept was also covered with blood; in the straw were thousands of little nails with heads down and points up; they penetrated out from the bag almost an inch: Rakhmétof had been lying on them all night long.
“For heaven’s sake, what is the matter, Rakhmétof?” cried Kirsánof, in horror.
“It is a trial; it is necessary; it’s incredible, of course; however, it is necessary. I see that I can stand it.”
Besides what Kirsánof saw, it may be judged from this that the khozyáïka also could relate a great many interesting things about Rakhmétof; but in her capacity of a simple-hearted and simply-dressed old woman, she was out of her wits in regard to him, and, of course, it was impossible to learn anything from her. This time she ran off to get Kirsánof only because Rakhmétof allowed her to do so to calm her. She wept so bitterly, thinking that he was going to commit suicide.
Two months after that was the end of May. Rakhmétof was away for a week or more, but at that time nobody noticed it, because it was a common occurrence for him to vanish in that way. Now Kirsánof told the following story of the way Rakhmétof spent those days. They constituted an erotic episode in Rakhmétof’s life. Love arose from an occurrence which was worthy of Nikitushka Lomof. Rakhmétof was going from the first Pargalof into town, lost in thoughts, and looking at the ground in his usual way. He was near the Forestry Institute; he was awakened from his thoughts by the desperate shrieks of a woman; he looked up: a horse attached to a sharaban, in which a lady was riding, was running away. The lady, herself, was driving, but she could not control him; the reins were trailing on the ground, and the horse was within two steps of Rakhmétof. He threw himself in the midst of the way, but the horse was already past him; he had no time to catch the reins; he had only time to catch the hind axle of the sharaban; he brought it to a stop, but it threw him down. A crowd gathered, helped the lady out of the sharaban, and lifted Rakhmétof to his feet. His chest was somewhat bruised, but the worst was that the wheel had torn out a large piece of flesh from his leg. The lady came to herself, and ordered him taken to her dacha, which was within half a verst. He consented because he felt weak from loss of blood, but he asked that Kirsánof should be sent for without fail, and no other doctor. Kirsánof found that the bruises on his chest were not serious, but Rakhmétof was weak from loss of blood. He lay there for ten days. The rescued lady, of course, took care of him herself. He could not do anything else in his weak condition, and so he talked with her—all the same the time would be wasted—he talked with her, and became quite friendly with her. The lady was a widow of nineteen; she was not poor, and, generally speaking, she was in an absolutely independent position, an intellectual and respectable woman. Rakhmétof’s fiery speeches, of course not on the subject of love, charmed her. “I see him in my dreams surrounded by a halo,” she said to Kirsánof. Rakhmétof also fell in love with her. She, judging by his dress, and by everything else, supposed that he was a man who had absolutely nothing, and therefore she was the first to confess her love, and she offered to marry him, when on the eleventh day he got up and said that he was able to go home.
“I have been more frank with you than with others. You see, such people as I have no right to unite the fate of anyone else with their own.”
“Yes, that is true,” she said; “you have no right to marry. But till the time when you must renounce me, love me.”
“No, I cannot accept that,” he said. “I must suppress love in my heart; to love you would tie my hands. Even as it is, they cannot be free so soon, for they are already tied. But I shall untie them; I must not love.”
What became of the lady? A crisis must have come into her life. In all probability she also became an extraordinary person. I wanted to find out about it, but I cannot. Kirsánof did not tell me her name, and he himself did not know what became of her. Rakhmétof asked him not to see her and not to inquire about her. “If I supposed that you knew anything about her, I could not refrain from asking, and that would not do.”
After hearing this story, all remembered that for a month or two afterwards, and maybe more, Rakhmétof was more melancholy than usual, did not get angry with himself, no matter how his “eyes were pinched” by his low weakness—that is, for cigars—and did not smile sweetly and broadly when he was flattered with the name of Nikitushka Lomof. And I recollected also more, that summer, three or four times in conversations with me (some time after our first conversation he began to be fond of me, because I laughed at him), when I was alone with him, and in reply to my rallying him, would utter such words as these: “Yes, pity me; you are right. I myself am not an abstract idea; I am a man who would like to love. Nu, it is nothing though; it will pass,” he would add. And in reality he got over it. Only once, after I had roused his spirits by some of my ridiculous speeches, even in the late fall, he still uttered these words.
The sapient reader, maybe, will guess from this that I know more about Rakhmétof than I am telling him. It may be; I do not dare to contradict him, because he is so sapient. But if I do not know, there are a good many other things that I know which thou, sapient reader, will not know, as long as thou shalt live. But there is one thing that I really do not know. I do not know this: where Rakhmétof is now, and what he is doing, or whether I shall ever see him again. I have no other information or conjectures, beyond what all of his acquaintances have. When three or four months had passed since his disappearance from Moscow, and there was no tidings at all about him, we all supposed that he went travelling over Europe. This conjecture apparently was true. At least, it was confirmed by the following circumstance. In a year after Rakhmétof disappeared, one of Kirsánof’s acquaintances met, on a car between Vienna and Munich, a young Russian, who said that he had travelled all over the Slavonic lands. Everywhere he had made friends among all classes; and in every country he had stayed long enough to learn the ideas, habits, style of life, the local customs of self-government, the different degrees of welfare among all the classes of the population; and for this purpose he had lived in the cities and towns, and had gone on foot from one village to another. Then afterwards, in the same way, he had studied the Romanians and Hungarians. He had travelled over Northern Germany; from there he had again made his way on foot to the South, in the German provinces of Austria. Now he was going to Bavaria, and from there to Switzerland, through Württemberg and Baden to France, which he intended to travel and walk through in the same way. From there, with the same purpose in view, he was going to England; and he intended to spend a year in this way. If any time should be left from this year, he would see the Spaniards and Italians. But if no time were left, then be it so, because this is “not so necessary”; but the other lands are necessary. “Why?” “For study.”
And after a year it would be “necessary” for him to be, at all events, in the States of North America, to study, which was more “necessary” for him than any other land, and there he was going to stay a long time; maybe for more than a year, and maybe forever, if he should find anything to do there. But it was more probable that in three years he would return to Russia, because in Russia, if not now, still by that time, it will be “necessary” for him to be there.
All this seemed very much like Rakhmétof, especially the word “necessary,” which was left in the narrator’s memory. His age, his voice, his features, as far as the narrator could remember, of the traveller, also pointed to Rakhmétof; but the narrator did not pay much attention at that time to his travelling companion, who, moreover, was not with him very long, not more than two hours. He entered the train at some little town, and he got out at some village; therefore the narrator could describe his appearance only in too general terms, and there was no full certainty possible; but in all probability it was Rakhmétof. Yet who can tell? Maybe it was not he.
There was still another rumor, that a young Russian, once a proprietor, appeared before one of the greatest European philosophers of the nineteenth century, the father of a new philosophy, a German. “I have thirty thousand thalers; all I need is five thousand. The balance I beg of you to accept from me.” (The philosopher was living very wretchedly.) “Why?” “To publish your works.” The philosopher naturally did not accept the offer; but the Russian was said to have left the money with a banker in the philosopher’s name, and to have written him thus: “Use this money as you please. Throw it into the river, if you want, but you can’t return it to me; you can’t find me.” And it is said that even now this money is at the banker’s. If this rumor is true, then there is no doubt that it was Rakhmétof who appeared before the philosopher.
Such was the gentleman who was sitting in Kirsánof’s library.
Yes, this gentleman is an extraordinary man, an example of a very rare species. I do not describe this example of a very rare species, with all this detail, for the sake of teaching thee, O sapient reader, how to treat people of this kind politely, for that is out of thy province. It is not likely that thou wilt see any such people; thy eyes, sapient reader, are not constituted so as to see such people; they are invisible to thee; only honest and courageous eyes see them; but the description of this man will serve thee, so thou canst know by hearsay what people there are in the world. For what purpose this description serves my lady readers and simple-hearted readers, they best know by themselves.
Yes, ridiculous people like Rakhmétof are very amusing. I say this for their own benefit, that they are ridiculous, because I feel pity for them. I say to those noble people who are fascinated by them, Don’t follow their example. I say this because the path over which they call you to follow is barren of personal happiness. But noble people do not listen to me. They say, “No, it is not barren, it is very rich; though it may be barren in some places, yet these places are not long; we shall have strength enough to pass these places, and we shall come to places which are rich with endless happiness.” So thou seest, sapient reader, that it is not for thy sake, but for the other part of the public, that I have said that such people as Rakhmétof are ridiculous. To thee, O sapient reader, I will declare that they are not bad people; otherwise, thou very likely wilt not understand for thyself. No, they are not bad people. There are few of them, but through them flourishes the life of all; without them life would become dead and putrid; there are few of them, but they help all people to breathe; without them people would suffocate. The mass of honest and kind people is great, but people like these are few; but they are in the midst, like theine in tea, like the bouquet in fine wine; from them come their strength and fragrance; it is the flower of the best people; they are the motive powers of motive powers, they are the salt of the salt of the earth.